“Hi Eric I am calling to ask about joining your fitness bootcamp to help me prepare for my wedding.”

“Sounds great.”

“Now I know this is going to sound weird and to be honest I am a bit embarrassed by this. I work part time as a personal trainer and I know I should be lifting weights but every time I do I get bulky. I know a lot of women are afraid of getting bulky but shouldn’t be but I really do and I don’t want to look that way on my wedding day.”

“When you lift do you lift between 8 and 15 reps like a body builder to try to ‘tone’ your muscle?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah you have been bulking up because you were lifting in the sarcoplasmic hypertrophy rep ranges. You see when you train like a bodybuilder you risk putting on more meat because that’s what those rep ranges are do. What I train you for is a mixture of neurological changes and myofibrillar hypertrophy. Neurological changes don’t really effect the size of the muscle and myofibrillar hypertrophy tends to be not quite as big but much more dense then sarcoplamsic hypertrophy does.”

Hypertrophy in non geek speak means muscle growth.

“Ok I trust your judgement.”

I don’t know if that was the specifics of the conversation I had with my new client to be last summer because at the time I was driving and the place where I was had a whole lot of hills, turns and stop signs and I drive a manual transmission and didn’t have my bluetooth headset in place. At the time I was also a little bit nervous since she was a personal trainer. I was worried she might try to tell people she learned how to train with a kettlebell and become a competitor to me. I was worried she might be just like this guy.
She ended up becoming one of my favorite clients to work with.

That worry maybe lasted 5 mins tops. What I had here was a coach that wanted to learn a different way of doing things and most importantly we had a deadline. She was due to get married in 3 or 4 months (I can’t remember which) and she wanted to lose dress sizes and look great in her dress ASAP. She did a very brilliant thing by taking me on to help her out.

Why?

Because she let me do the worrying about what rep ranges she should be training in (one of the values of having a coach). The only thing she needed to do is trust me and do what I instructed. Now what the heck does this have to do with the rep ranges for bulking and toning? Well I spend a lot of time saying the same old things to women about them not having the necessary hormones for building a ton of muscle and you don’t get that way over night and very few women happen to be the genetic outliers for that and they need to lift heavy to tone up and yada yada yada. What I had here was someone that really did have that problem and needed to work around it and become the perfect example of what I have been saying all along. Well if you don’t know about the different rep ranges read on reader.

You may not always agree with the things I say and that’s ok, (my wife rarely does). I’m sure you’ll agree with me that the human body is an amazing adaptive mechanism. Whatever your stressor is your body can find a way to try to become more efficient at it. Let’s take a look at movement and what happens that can cause your body to adapt and which adaptations will occur and why.

Whenever you try to move, what happens is your brain sends a command through your nervous system to tell your muscle to contract and when that muscle contracts it pulls on a tendon which pulls on your bone and causes movement. Now as you perform this movement your body wants to become better at it so you can either move more weight, perform more reps or whatever. Your body also wants to do the easiest possible thing.

So when you lift a heavy weight for just a few reps the nueral changes which tend to come fastest (yes strength can be built over night) and even within the session (hence the use of feeler sets) are the first to take place. You see most people only are able to activate a small portion of their muscle fibers. Elite athletes can contract more of them and sometimes when you flip the crazy switch that’s when you hear about those Reader’s Digest story’s about ladies lifting cars off of their loved ones. That’s one way.

Now one definition of muscle tone is that it is a nuerological phenomena where muscle fibers are in a half contracted state however this is mostly found in the postural muscles (otherwise we would just collapse). You develop this by practicing movement while minimizing fatigue. However what most people refer to as “toning” in my opinion is a specific type of hypertrophy.

Another way for adaptation to occur is for the muscle fibers themselves to build up the sarcomeres (the myofibrils make up the sarcomeres). This is growth of actual muscle fibers. They are able to produce greater amounts of tension and takes on a dense appearance. Bodybuilders also try to develop this to give their muscles a harder appearance (because of a higher density). This is what I believe most people would mean by the term “toning”.

Then there is sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. The sarcoplasm is like a goo that lies around and between the fibers but doesn’t carry with it contractile strength (the ability to produce tension). What it does carry is energy that would be used in the absence of oxygen to be able to make the muscle contract more times. This tends to take on a “puffy” appearance (not toning) and also produces the most bulk since fluid has a higher volume then a solid. The puffy appearance is because you have essentially filled up your muscle with a liquid instead of a solid which is less dense.

The growth in structure is an adaptation to the functional demands placed on the given system, where adaptation occurs at a molecular level within the genetic structure of the cells. Supertraining Mel Siff

Ok so back to the whole your body adapting thing. Different rep ranges ask for your body to become better at certain things. Here are multiple possible outcomes.
1) Your brain figures out how to contract more muscle fibers.
2) Your muscle fiber itself needs to become stronger in order to minimize future muscle damage and develop more tension.
3) Your body knows that it is probably going to be have to able to do something repetitively and stores more fuel around the muscle fiber to be able to contract more times without getting exhausted.
4) Your body is able to contract it’s muscle fibers many times but at such a low intensity that it can use oxygen to fuel the process (aerobics).

Number 2 would be what most people are after when they say “toning”. The only way to do this would be to lift a heavy weight for a handful of reps. It lies somewhere between 3 and 6 reps with a heavy weight. If you aren’t using a heavy weight the only thing you are doing is kidding yourself.

Number 3 and 4 is what most people try to do to accomplish number 2 but as you can see it would be the opposite because of what those adaptations are actually for. I’ll be honest I have no idea where these myths originated but it has been fueled by all the unscrupulous marketers that keep this myth running strong. My client luckily trusted me and got great results.

Now even though we sometimes used higher reps as dictated in Kettlebell Burn it didn’t overload the muscle to the point of adding unneeded bulk. That fat loss program was meant to deplete some of the fuel that could end up being stored as fat.

Yeah so anyways I hope you understand why low reps with heavy weight are much better for toning muscle then high reps are by looking at what happens under the surface. I also urge you to check out how “toned” the bride that was in my NJ fitness bootcamp is. She trusted me, lifted heavy (as more women should, and looked spectacular on her wedding day. Nuff said.

I am a fitness professional residing in Hopatcong, NJ, who is dedicated to making myself and my clients as strong as (or stronger than) they look and to look beyond sexy. I help my clients drop body fat quickly, gain strength quickly and I use kettlebells as my main tool and the RKC system as my main methodology. I am a personal trainer with small group personal training and fitness bootcamps in Morris and Sussex County NJ. This fitness blog is where I have become known as a straight shooter with a unique writing style and I have been known to force companies to take videos down where they teach unsafe and ineffective technique with just a couple written words. It has become an inside joke started by a guy that bends steel bars into bonsai tree shaped decorations with his hands, that I don’t wear shirts but that is mainly because I have built up my physique along the lines of a Greek statue and exhibit it proudly.