💪🏼Tone: give greater strength or firmness to the body or muscle.

Let’s clear this up.

In order to achieve this “tone“ you speak of one must in fact build muscle. In order to achieve a “toned look“ one must lose fat.

This is where the difference between fat loss through solely nutrition versus fat loss through exercise and nutrition become important.

Unless you already have a solid muscular base, losing fat solely through nutrition will often result in muscle loss as well as fat loss and generally leaves people calling me to help them create a stronger looking physique.

If you want to “tone“ then you must either build muscle first then lose fat, or you must do a “recomposition“ which is building muscle while losing fat.

Recomp is done by eating at maintenance while doing a strength-based training program.

Which method you choose depends on your goals, your timeline and your preference.

Building muscle first is some thing I would really only recommend to someone who:
1. Doesn’t have more than 20 pounds to lose
2. Wants to compete (in anything really)

Recomp is what I recommend for most clients. This will take longer to build muscle mass, but for the general population of women that I work with they prefer the faster visible change and as we know, aren’t wanting to get “bulky“ so the muscle building component isn’t as important to them.

It’s kind of a happy medium between what I want for them and what they want.

So my hope here, is to start changing the verbiage used when talking about our goals. Instead of saying “I just want to tone” let’s start saying “I’d like to lose some fat, but also build some muscle.”

With the understanding that building muscle to a point that you feel uncomfortable with your body will likely take years of really consistent and hard ass work so that’s not really a concern of yours yet as you’re just looking to start building some healthy habits and a fitness routine that you can stick to.😉

We all start somewhere – I used to think fasted cardio burned more fat (spoiler: it doesn’t).

What’s something you misunderstood when starting fitness? How have you changed what you do because of it?? I’d love to hear!