Can You Really Tone Your Body?

Today, a question dedicated to muscle tone and how to get it.

Q. I’d like to find out how to tone my stomach without converting excess fat into bulky muscle.

A. Don’t get worried about turning excess fat into bulky muscle mass. Contrary to popular belief, you can’t turn muscle mass into fat, or fat into muscle.

When the majority mention that they want to know how to tone up what they actually mean is they want to lose weight and replace it with a little muscle.

Think it over. What’s a more toned physique, if it’s not one with less fat, and more muscle?

The simplest way to sculpt any part of the body – whether it’s your waist, your biceps and triceps, or maybe your chest – would be to adhere to a proper programme of strength training and cardiovascular exercise.

I realize that many ladies panic when they’re informed that they’re going to add muscle. Truth is, the quantity of muscle you’ll put on, especially if you’re following a restricted-calorie eating plan, is significantly lower than you might think.

It takes years of effort and an almost fanatical obsession with diet and exercise to produce the type of muscle bound female bodies you might have seen in the magazines.

In one research project, thirty-two women were assigned to one of 3 training programs – a free-weights program, a Nautilus equipment program, or a Soloflex machine program.

Even though the ladies built strength, there was no alternation in the size of the thighs or arms. Average stomach size actually dropped. In other words, instead of “bulking up,” the ladies actually got leaner.

Fat is much less dense when compared with muscle tissue, and weighs about 0.9 grams per cubic centimeter (compared to 1.07 grams for muscle). This simply means that one pound of muscle will take up much less space than a single pound of fat.

Research shows that if you stick to a low-calorie diet for 12 weeks, approximately 7 from every 10 pounds which you lose will come from fat. Mix cardiovascular exercise with a low-calorie diet, and eight of every 10 pounds you lose will come from fat. But, with a combination of strength training, aerobic exercise, and a low-calorie diet, you may expect virtually all of the excess weight you shed to be derived from body fat.

One good reason strength training is so effective at helping you reduce body fat is it raises your rate of metabolism for approximately 48 hours following a workout. What’s more, muscle tissue is a more active tissue than fat. People with more muscle generally have an increased metabolism. What this means is they use up more calories and a lot more fat – even when they aren’t at the gym.

What about diet?

To tone up, the most important nutrient is protein.

Unless you get ample protein in your daily diet, then your body will start using its own protein sources for energy. And guess where your body gets the protein from? It starts eating away at your muscle tissue – slowing down your metabolism, causing you to be weaker and decreasing muscle tone.

Diets higher in protein and lower in carbohydrate also generate better weight loss. How? They deliver the results due to the fact protein raises your metabolism (so you burn more calories) and helps to keep you feeling satisfied for a longer time (therefore you eat less).

If you don’t get adequate protein every day, you’ll rapidly lose strength, become less strong plus your metabolism will slow.