Call me a liar if you have never had a fitness goal to “tone up” or “lean out”. Go ahead, tell me you haven’t. 99 out of 100 of you have labeled this your goal at some point.
We do No Sweat Intros for every new person that comes to Wreck Room and have been doing so for 2.5 years. We want to know everyone’s story and what their goals are before joining any program. Over the years we keep hearing the same goal over and over and over and over. It can be explained in many ways but we always come back to the same point. “I just want to tone up or lean out”.
For the longest time we measured this a few different ways. 1) Use a measuring tape on different body parts to gauge progress. The only downside to this is you must measure the exact same spot every time which leaves a lot of room for error. 2) Take before and after pictures. This is great and will give us a pass/fail result but no idea how much or how little. 3) Stepping on the scale. We know this isn’t a great measuring tool for “toning up” or “leaning out” because as fat turns into muscle the scale may not move. Let me guess: you get on the scale every morning right after you wake up and hope to see a new result? Now the scale is playing head games with you.
What if we measure and quantify how much you have toned up. The results would be black and white. We did tone up or we didn’t tone up. Even better is we can determine how much we did.
Look at the picture at the top of this page. You see three charts. Body weight, muscle mass weight, and body fat mass weight. These are the numbers we want to see move. To tone we need to lift some weights. Nothing heavy but something nonetheless. If we are successful with toning we would see the SMM (skeletal muscle mass) increase as the Body Fat Mass decrease. Turning fat into muscle is what we call Exchanging Weight. Over time we look at the history and see our success.
We can finally put a number on toning. If this happens to be one of your goals come in and let us help. This is fantastic knowledge you can have on your fitness journey.