What is "toning" ?
The term "toning" is often used ambiguously in fitness, sometimes as a synonym for being thin or a ploy to sell workouts.
In reality, toning involves increasing muscle size (hypertrophy) and improving muscle use (neuromuscular adaptations), which also makes you stronger.
Visible changes like muscle definition result from resistance training to build muscle and eating in a calorie deficit to lose fat.
Getting stronger and getting bigger happen together: You can try to favor one over the other, but training for strength will get you bigger muscles as a side effect, and training for bigger muscles is pretty much impossible without also getting stronger.
When we look at the visible changes we can make to our bodies through exercise, there are really only two things we can control:
- We can make specific muscles bigger with resistance training (such as lifting weights)
- We can eat fewer calories than we burn, while also resistance training to preserve muscle; this causes us to lose fat all over our bodies.
Note that you can target which muscles you want to get bigger, but there's no way to lose fat on a specific body part. Fat distribution isn't really under our control, which is why you can't exercise your way to a flat tummy, or slim your thighs, or anything like that.
You can work your muscles to make them bigger, and eat in a calorie deficit to make your whole body smaller, and see what happens.
You can't build "long, lean muscles" specifically.
Lean just means without fat, so if you want to look lean, you're looking at fat loss.
And the length of a muscle isn't something you can control: It's attached to your bones.
How would it get longer?
Sometimes people mean that they want their muscles not to look rounded or not to have a peak in their bicep, but that's not really under our control either. Your attachment points and the length of your tendons versus the contractile portion of the muscles are just things you're born with.
"Toning" exercises to avoid:
If you're determined to get "toned," the muscular training you need to do is no different than what a person would do to get jacked. The difference is that getting jacked involves a lot of food (that muscle has to come from somewhere and a lot of time. Even if you spend all your time in the gym, you won't come out looking like the Hulk at the end of the year.
HIIT workouts: True HIlT workouts improve your aerobic capacity (making you a faster runner, for example) but they don't have any special advantage in calorie burning or muscle building.
Circuit training: Doing a series of different exercises with little to no rest, and then repeating that series, is called circuit training. It's a mix of strength training and cardio, which makes it a good choice if you don't have time to do two separate workouts.You'll probably get better results if you separate the strength and cardio components
High-rep exercises without weights or with light weights: A lot of booty band and ankle weight workouts fall into this category. If they feel hard enough to count as strength training, great! But most are not, especially once you're not a beginner anymore. At that point, they're just training endurance without actually building muscle.
CONCLUSION:
To achieve a toned look, focus on proper strength training and a balanced diet rather than trendy "toning" workouts. Any rep range up to about 15 can build muscle, and you should lift weights that are challenging for you.
High-rep, light-weight exercises mainly improve endurance rather than muscle building. Avoid falling for marketing tactics that promise toning without proper strength training.
Remember, there's no magical "toning" rep range or need for smaller weights. Lift weights that challenge you and focus on overall strength training for the best results.
