/tone
You can make specific areas of your body toned and defined as opposed to big and bulky by lifting a light weight for high reps.
Want sculpted shoulders that look like scalloped seashells? Pick up a pastel-colored plastic-coated dumbbell and do lateral raises until your delts burn like you’ve angered a minor deity. Make your muscles burn so hard chlamydia seems like child’s play.
Do this for every major muscle group and you’ll look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club before next Tuesday… or so the story goes.
Unfortunately, if lifting a light weight for high reps was an effective way to increase muscle tone and definition, then childcare workers would have amazing bodies.
Because they’re constantly lifting babies. And bottles of wine. Light weights, you know?
Alas, childcare workers don’t have shrink-wrapped stomachs or biceps that resemble veiny baguettes. Unless being toned and defined is like time travel, where going forward at a suicide speed takes you backward in time. Maybe childcare workers are soft and squishy because they’re knock-dead toned and defined?
Until someone from the future tells me otherwise, I’m going with my gut on this: Lifting a light weight for high reps is dumber than daytime television for the same reason picking up babies doesn’t carve you into a Greek god (and just gives you Cheerios in your cleavage).
The best way to become more toned and defined?
Stop training for tone and definition.
Slap someone’s arm on a table and saw their biceps in half and you’ll see a big bone surrounded by muscle mass (steak) surrounded by body fat (mashed potatoes) surrounded by skin (plastic wrap). Your body composition is primarily a byproduct of these four variables. To change your appearance, you have to modify at least one of them.
Let’s knock out the obvious ones: bone and skin. Unless your master plan involves early-onset osteoporosis or skinning yourself alive, those are off the table. Which leaves us with the only two variables you can actually manipulate: The two remaining variables are muscle mass (steak) and body fat (mashed potatoes), and here’s where things get trickier than rocking a rhyme:
You can’t “tone” or “define” either of these attributes.
Muscles can either grow and get bigger, or they can shrink and get smaller. Nothing will make your muscles grow (or shrink) more toned and defined as opposed to less toned and defined. (Not even sarcoplasmic hypertrophy—story for another day.) In other words, you can’t tenderize your meat. Beating your meat a certain way won’t make it firmer. There are bigger muscles. There are smaller muscles. There are no lean, toned, or defined muscles.
Same goes for body fat, which is more accurately know as adipose. You can either accumulate more adipose and get squishier, or you can dissolve the adipose you have and get harder. That’s all you can do. There isn’t a special kind of adipose that will make you appear more or less toned and defined; any kind of adipose (visceral, subcutaneous, brown, whatever) will make you less toned and defined.
This begs the question:
If muscle mass and body fat can’t be toned or defined, how does one become toned and defined?
Appearing toned and defined is like Golden Corral’s business model: Quantity matters more than quality. You need a mediocre amount of muscle and a low amount of body fat. Miss the mark in either direction and your chances of looking toned and defined will sink faster than Squints in The Sandlot. (If you don’t appreciate that reference, we probably weren’t meant to be friends.)
Look at super-skinny runway models. They don’t have much adipose, which is good for tone and definition. Adipose is mushy, like mashed potatoes. If you lather a steak with mashed potatoes, you won’t be able to see the steak’s striations. Unfortunately, super-skinny runway models don’t have much muscle mass; they don’t have steaks. They have a few tissue-thin slices of salami stuck to their bones. There are no striations to see, so they look like conscious coat hangers. They’d look more toned and defined if they gained muscle.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are heavyweight powerlifters and off-season bodybuilders. (The legendary Doug Hepburn comes to mind.) They have a bunch of muscle mass, which is good for tone and definition. Big steaks are dense and detailed.
Unfortunately, heavyweight powerlifters and off-season bodybuilders also have a bunch of adipose; their muscles are covered in mountains of mashed potatoes. This suffocates the subtleties of the steak, so they look like swollen sausages. They’d look more toned and defined if they eliminated some adipose.
Between both extremes exists toned and defined bodies, like that of Brad Pitt in Fight Club and Brie Larson (who I only look at for research purposes). Their muscles are big enough to display detail, and their body fat levels are low enough to put the details on display.
Appearing toned and defined is a game of quantity more than quality: You need a big (enough) muscle and a low (enough) body fat percentage.
So if you aren’t as toned and defined as you like to be? You have two options. Lose fat. Or build muscle. Odds say you need to do both. For whatever reason, skinny-fat guys tend to overestimate how much muscle they have and underestimate how much fat they have. (I have something known as “personal experience” with this delusion.)
Of course, I could be wrong.
You might already have sizable steaks, which means you should focus more on fat loss. Or you might already have minimal mashed taters, which means you should focus on more muscle growth.
I don’t know.
But I do know this:
There are dead wasps inside of figs. (Seriously, look it up.)
I also know this:
Training for tone and definition won’t help you lose fat or build muscle.
When knuckleheads train for tone and definition they usually lift a light weight for high reps, trying to make their working muscles burn. In order for this kind of training to have an impact on tone and definition, it’d either have to contribute to fat loss or contribute to muscle growth.
It does neither.
I don’t care what the lady wearing yoga pants told you, lifting a light weight won’t trigger muscle growth no matter how many reps you do for the same reason tickling your skin with a feather won’t create a callus. The stress isn’t large enough to warrant adaptation. You need to put down your sister’s plastic-coated dumbbells and lift heavier things. The resistance you’re opposing should make you more “sticky” than “springy.”
Traditional “toning” training won’t really help with fat loss, either. Muscle burn is a byproduct of the lactic-anaerobic energy system, which uses glycogen within working muscle(s) to replenish energy. Glycogen is stored carbohydrates, not stored fat. In other words, when you feel the burn, you aren’t burning fat. Spot reduction isn’t real, in case you didn’t know.
And so, lifting a light weight for high reps is less effective than Goldeen in Super Smash Bros.
Increasing the size of a muscle and decreasing the amount of fat surrounding the same muscle (to a significant degree) with one single exercise of training technique is impossible. Becoming (more) toned and defined has been and always will be a two-part process. You have to grow your muscles with “sticky” resistance training. You have to decrease your body fat levels with an energy deficit. If you aren’t doing either of these things, then you aren’t gonna be tightening or firming or toning or defining much of anything (except your hatred for your body).