Fitness Funda Of The Week By K11 Academy of Fitness Sciences
How To Get That ‘Toned’ Look
Women come to the gym to ‘tone up’ – they desire the fresh look of firmness. They believe that body weight floor exercises will give them what they want. Many women will not and are often not encouraged to lift beyond 5 or 10 pounds. Floor exercises can neither spot reduce fat, nor ‘tone up’ legs or hands. At best, these promote mobility around the joints.
Often overheard in gym locker rooms are comments like, “I don’t want to take protein supplements, so I am not into weight training” or “Weight training doesn’t suit my body – at least cardio allows me to sweat!”
The much aspired toned or firm look is easily achieved when the quality of resistance training is challenging. The weight of the resistance used should limit the set to 9 or 10 repetitions. Just a couple of months into this type of training (also known as High Intensity Weight Training), a shift occurs. The body begins to transform – it begins to shed fat; the limbs appear tauter; contours are seen in the body. Getting rid of body fat has wonderful consequences – the main one being that it reveals the beautiful shape of your muscles… the way nature intended.
With the width of the body shrinking, size of clothes begins to drop; you also fit into clothes that you either gave up hope on ever fitting into or secretly aspired to wear. You begin to feel lighter – mentally and physically! And there is a new found confidence and energy around you that can be highly contagious!!
Along with this pleasing exterior – there are changes in the interior as well. Especially for women – the bones and muscles of the back get a lot stronger. Bone and muscle health improve and this is the greatest insurance against age-related and bone-related problems and back pain.
The goal in training is to get strong and stronger. Lift weights to build strength. You get back SO MUCH more as a spinoff – a young, healthy, lean, tight body which is TONED. By avoiding weight training, a woman can hardly achieve what she originally set out to get – TONE. And sadly, she also throws away all the above carryovers of good resistance workouts.
