TONED
TONED
WHAT IT IS & How You Get It
We've all heard the expression,"I want to get toned". Sometimes it's followed up or preceded by "I don't want to get bulky".
So, what the heck does it mean and how do you achieve a "toned" look? Toned = visible muscle in the absence of fat. In other words, you have a developed muscle (it has some size) and it is visible because it is not hidden by fat.
That's really it. So how do you get it? Step 1: Train your muscles with heavy weights. Heavy means heavy relative to your strength. 100lbs might be a heavy squat to you and 300lbs might be a heavy squat to someone else. The point is that you need to be stressing your muscles to force them to grow.
Our online programming clients get a mixture of progressively harder compound strength lifts (the squat, the deadlift, the bench press and the strict press) along with a healthy dose of higher rep isolation exercises. But the key is that these must all be trained with increasingly heavier weights. *You will not get toned doing 100 of anything with 5lb dumbbells.
Now that we've got what we need to do in the gym taken care of let's talk about the other side of the equation. Like we talked about last week in our post on protein, Step 2 involves feeding our muscles in order for them to recover and grow. Eating sufficient protein (about 1g per pound of body weight per day) will give your muscles what they need to show up for the party.
The final piece of the puzzle, step 3, will let us see these newly formed and fed muscles. We're going to need to burn off some fat to make that happen. The weight lifting you'll be doing is fantastic for burning fat. We program just enough cardio for our clients to maximize fat loss also, but the real magic only happens when we eat less calories than we burn. We're going to have to slowly eat at a caloric deficit so our bodies will attack our fat stores for energy. It's not a fast process but it works, and once you see the results, you'll fall in love with the process.
Start now and see for yourself!