There's No Such Thing As “Tone”

The word tone is misused in gyms all over the world. Toning is a musical term or can describe the way certain parts of speech sound. The only toning there is in the fitness arena refers to a state of contraction in the muscle. But everyone seems to be using it to mean getting definition or getting “cut”, which is a fallacy.

The idea of toning that so many gym goers seem to have is really a myth. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you can’t just make a muscle “look pretty”.

Have you ever heard this?

“I don’t really need to lose a lot of weight, I just want to tone up.”
Chances are you have said this or you have heard this at some point in your life. But it’s time to put an end to the myth.

Let’s start by saying this; the number one determiner of how your body is structured is genetics. If there are a lot of cut and muscular framed people in your family, chances are you are going to be this way too. If there are a lot of thin-shouldered and lengthy people in your family, chances are you are going to be this way too. The same goes for any kind of body type really, and of course there are exceptions to every rule.

However, an overweight person may want to lose weight and become “cut”, so they will go into the weight room and do a high rep, light weight routine, thinking this is the way to look “cut”.

The idea of “physique specific training” is another myth. You can lift heavy weight and do lower reps to get stronger, and you can lift light weight and do higher reps to become more conditioned. But lifting either way so you will “look” a certain way is just not the way it works. It is genetics that determine your physique, and sure, you are going to get larger if you develop more muscle, and you may see a cut or two that you didn’t see before. But you can’t change from one body type to another.
Yet some claim that women should follow a light weight-high rep routine to “tone”, shape, and sculpt. While there are few women that will have the potential to develop relatively large muscles, most don’t. This is due to the fact that women have lower levels of testosterone, higher percentage of body fat, and shorter muscle bellies. A woman’s bicep muscle is exactly the same as a man’s. So women should strength train the same way as men do.

Ultimately, you can gain and lose muscle mass, you can gain and lose fat, but you cannot “tone” a muscle to make it look pretty. The “tone” that people are referring to will not come unless you lose body fat, yet even then, if your genetics have not preset this for your body, it may not happen at all.

All of us have a tendency to develop a certain kind of physique. Whether we use light weight/high reps or heavy weight/low reps, we will always be prone to develop the physiques that our genes have preset for us. Our muscles cannot be stimulated to become “cut” or “bulked”. They either experience hypertrophy or atrophy. There certainly are proper and improper ways to train but there isn’t a physique-specific way to train.
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