My trainer wants me to lift the 7kg dumbbells, which I can. But I only want to train with 3kg weights because I don’t want to become a bulky woman; I want to tone. How should I approach this with her?
I think you should buy your trainer a Bell’s because she is right and has your best interests at heart. Then you should consider whether training with a specialist coach is the right option for you if you refuse to take advice because you know better.
If you can lift the 7kg weights, and your trainer knows this, then using the 3kg ones is fairly pointless unless you are training close to failure every time. You have evoked two of the biggest myths in the world of training.
The first is that lifting light weights for high reps “tones” muscles. It was the first thing I learnt decades ago, and I am better off for unlearning it. It is a lie. Toning a muscle, or body, is a combination of muscle growth or maintenance and fat loss. It’s not a magic process unlocked by the number stuck on the side of a dumbbell combined with another magic number of repetitions.
The myth that a woman who challenges herself with heavier weights will become big and bulky is probably a result of outdated stereotypes, a misunderstanding of physiology and a naive ignorance of the types of drugs highly muscular female bodybuilders use. Women have 10-20 times less testosterone than men, and this means that without hormonal assistance, the ceiling of actual muscle growth is significantly lower than men.
I’d bet my house that if you trained heavier and ate properly, you would — wait for it — become smaller overall and achieve the toned body you are after. Muscle is denser than fat. In other words, it takes up less space. If you dropped 3kg of fat and gained 500g of muscle over a period of time, you’d be far closer to your “tighter”, more defined goal than you are now.
Let’s unpack this step by step. Muscle tone is, quite simply, the state of tension in muscles even when they are at rest. So muscle tone is about the function of your muscles and nothing to do with fitness lingo that does little more than muddy the waters.
When referring to “toning”, people are actually talking about muscle preservation or hypertrophy (growth) and fat loss, which, if sufficient, reveals more definition of the muscle. Many studies and anecdotal experience point to progressive overload as the best way to gain muscle. Usually this type of training is done with lower reps — usually between eight and 12 reps, but sometimes as low as five or six, with a challenging weight. The weight used in this type of training is usually somewhere around 70% to 85% of your one rep max: the amount of weight you can lift for one repetition.
Training with heavier weights is not the only way to gain muscle. Numerous studies have also shown that you can gain muscle with lighter weights for higher reps. However, in these instances you need to train close to failure or all the way to failure. Many bodybuilders prefer to train with lighter weights, but they include a lot of volume and intensity to trigger the muscle growth they want.
While training with heavier weights is more effective — because it increases strength (with a whole host of benefits) as well as muscle — lower weights can also induce muscle growth. The key, though, is that the lower weights at higher reps are not uniquely, or magically, better for “toning”.
That’s one side of the coin. The other is diet. If you pair sufficiently heavy training or sufficiently intense training with lighter weights, with a good clean diet that is high in protein and at caloric maintenance levels or just below, you can start losing fat. The gym bros call it cutting. The protein is high to try to “preserve” or gain lean muscle while eating this way.
Gaining muscle while eating like this is the holy grail and very difficult, so it is ridiculous to worry about becoming big and bulky — over and above your “muscle-limiting” female physiology. It is possible to become big and bulky, but that’s done with pizza, not 7kg dumbbells.
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