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.
