Thread: Is this true?? about gaining muscles and toning muscles?

"Tone" is a bit of a wrong word.

There are two kinds of muscle fibers, slow and fast twitch. The slow fibers are good at endurance, the fast ones are good for short-term high demand, like lifting heavy things a few times.

People who are "toned" have lots of slow twitch muscle mass, and little fat. So if you want to look "toned", do high repetition exercises.

If you want a bugger butt, do BOTH heavy/low rep and lighter/high rep exercises (just not on the same day) to stimulate both kinds of muscle to grow. Heavy squats and 'butt bridges', and lots of lunges and cable kickbacks. For fat loss, walk on a treadmill on a high incline (uphill) but stay off your toes or you'll wind up with massive calves.

You can't tone a muscle. Everybody has amazingly "toned" muscles but most people are just fat so you can't see them. Fat loss is a product of good diet and nutrition, and to a lesser extent your training.

On a basic level to get bigger you need to eat more calories than you need to maintain, and the lose weight you need to eat less. The actual exercise modalities you use aren't terribly important.

In fact it's usually the opposite to what people think. To stimulate hypertrophy (muscle growth) a decent amount of training volume is important so you'll usually do multiple sets of around 10 reps. When you want to lose fat the very nature of being in a caloric deficit means you have less recovery resources to repair so higher volume is usually not the way to go because it causes a lot of microtrauma - in this case lower reps can actually help maintain the muscle you have and promote fat loss.

Using lower reps for strength work is good for hypertrophy too, because it generally stimulates more myofibrillar hypertrophy whereas volume work stimulates sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.

There is absolutely no evidence for high rep toning, and nor can you reduce the fat on one isolated area of your body. If you're looking to lose fat (or gain muscle) you'll need to commit to one goal and alter your diet accordingly using the information in IM's diet section.

Nice one gaz that's good info in a nutshell!


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There is no such thing as "toning" muscle. You can only increase or decrease the size of your muscle and you cannot change its shape or tone. Toning as they call it can only be done through diet and not your rep range intervals.

Originally Posted by Gazhole

You can't tone a muscle. Everybody has amazingly "toned" muscles but most people are just fat so you can't see them. Fat loss is a product of good diet and nutrition, and to a lesser extent your training.

On a basic level to get bigger you need to eat more calories than you need to maintain, and the lose weight you need to eat less. The actual exercise modalities you use aren't terribly important.

In fact it's usually the opposite to what people think. To stimulate hypertrophy (muscle growth) a decent amount of training volume is important so you'll usually do multiple sets of around 10 reps. When you want to lose fat the very nature of being in a caloric deficit means you have less recovery resources to repair so higher volume is usually not the way to go because it causes a lot of microtrauma - in this case lower reps can actually help maintain the muscle you have and promote fat loss.

Using lower reps for strength work is good for hypertrophy too, because it generally stimulates more myofibrillar hypertrophy whereas volume work stimulates sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.

There is absolutely no evidence for high rep toning, and nor can you reduce the fat on one isolated area of your body. If you're looking to lose fat (or gain muscle) you'll need to commit to one goal and alter your diet accordingly using the information in IM's diet section.

This. Being "toned" is having a bit of muscle but also having low fat so you can see it.

Hypertrophy (aka size) has a nexus with strength training, the stronger you get and the heavier you push the bigger your going to get

The most efficient way to gain muscle is to select a weight that will cause failure under 10 reps

Acute change in muscle size (aka pump) will eventually stimulate a chronic (aka permanent) increase in muscle size

Muscle density is an issue of into muscular fat, get rid of the fat get harder muscle