Back to Basics:
How to Tone the Muscles
Contributed by Evamarie Pilipuf
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Let's
be honest: while most of us recognize the importance of
strength training for health and fitness purposes, darn it, we also want to
look our best! There's nothing like a well-toned physique to showcase a
person's hard work and fitness achievements, and nothing like solid results to
keep a person motivated to stick with their exercise program. Yet,
whether your primary reason for working out is for health or vanity, it can be
outright daunting to weed through the gazillion sources of information on the
subject of muscle toning. Hopefully, this article will help ease the
confusion.
First, what makes a muscle
"toned"?
Let’s start with the basics of
how a muscle works. A muscle must contract in order to produce movement.
Simple enough, we al l
know that. What makes a muscle “toned,” however, is the result of the need
for more power, more strength, and/or more speed. When the body senses this
need, it adds to the muscle’s overall mass….i.e., the muscle grows. So, to
make a muscle appear more “toned,” it must grow. To make the muscle grow, you
have to send that signal to the body that such growth is needed. The way you
send that signal is through fatiguing the muscle.
Fatigue: In this case, a good thing!
Muscle fatigue occurs when
your muscle can no longer perform a given activity. In the case of yoga, it’s
that point at which you can no longer hold a given pose with proper form. In
the case of performing exercises, such as abdominal crunches or free weight
exercises, it’s when you cannot perform another repetition of the movement with
absolutely proper form. To effectively tone the muscle, this fatigue should
occur within 20 repetitions of any given movement. In other words, 10 slow,
flawlessly executed abdominal crunches are far better than 500 “bouncing”
crunches.
What activities are best
for muscle tone?
So what’s the best way to go
about improving your muscle tone from where you’re at right now? The answer
is, unfortunately, complex, as many factors play a role in determining this.
But the most optimal approach would be a combination of several forms of
strength training, such as certain yoga poses, free weight exercises, and
stability ball movements. Don’t have time for all of these? Don’t despair,
you can still make great strides by concentrating on just one. The key is to
learn proper technique, and concentrate on the muscles being worked. As you
breathe, focus on squeezing the appropriate muscles to give your best effort at
fatiguing them. If you feel a substantial fatigue (read: not pain or
discomfort) at the end of a given yoga pose, it is likely the pose created
sufficient stimulus to create muscle growth. The other needed ingredient is
patience; it takes a minimum of six to twelve weeks to see substantial changes
in muscle shape and size.
Transform your body now!
The bottom line: Toning the
muscles is a long and challenging journey. While it takes a great deal of
effort and commitment to consistency, you absolutely can and will see changes
in your strength and physique with the right training. It truly is never too
late to change your body!
-ep
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