5 Muscle Toning Myths That We’ve All Fallen For

There’s a lot of misconceptions about losing body fat and muscle toning. The biggest burner of calories in your life is your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). You can expect to burn between 1600 to 1800 calories a day if you’re a man, 300 calories fewer if you’re a woman, just from your BMR.

The best way to increase this number? Build muscle. Increasing your body’s muscle mass by just 5 pounds will increase your BMR by about 400 to 600 kcal per day. That’s a massive increase. If you take your body fat percentage down and the amount of muscle in your body up, you’ll naturally burn fat. It’s just what your body will do.

Muscle toning workouts are often flooded with a lot of conflicting advice. While conflicting advice can sometimes have two right answers, very often the advice that’s given is just plain wrong. Let’s look at 5 common muscle toning myths.

5 Muscle Toning Myths That We’ve All Fallen For

Myth #1: Muscle Toning Workouts For Females Will Make Them Bulky

Strength training and weight lifting does build muscle and muscle burns more calories than fat. So building muscle actually will help you lose weight and when you increase muscle tone definition you’ll have a more attractive look. Doing weight lifting 2 to 3 times per week is ideal and women won’t build up bulky male-looking muscles. Men’s bodies develop that way due to the testosterone hormone, which is very low in women. Also male body builders have a very specific training regime and diet.

The more muscle you have to contract, the more calories you burn. So, if you have a large percentage of muscle mass in your body, you end up burning more calories when you engage in any form of physical activity than someone with low muscle percentage. And the good news is that you don’t have to do a bunch of heavy-duty weight lifting to get the benefit. If you use some lightweight dumbbells or a medicine ball, you’ll gain extra muscle.

Myth #2: Eat More If You Want to Build Muscle

Another common myth is that if you’re skinny and want to gain muscle, you need to consume a lot of calories. Unfortunately, this is more likely to get you fat than get you more muscle. Yes, if you want to gain muscle mass you do need to eat a few more calories than you’re burning. But you don’t need to consume 2,000 more calories than you’ve been eating in the past. Eat more food, but don’t stuff your body with calories. It’s not healthy and won’t help get you where you want to go.

Free Download: 10 Muscle Toning Mistakes Women Make

Myth #3: You Should Tense Your Abs When Lifting Weights

This common myth claims that tensing up your abs when you’re lifting weights will help give your spine more support, thereby reducing the likelihood of injury. It comes from a research study that showed that people who had back pain tended to have lax abdominal muscles. They concluded that by tensing up the ab muscles, back support was increased which reduced back pain.

This story spread among the weight lifting community and has come to be accepted as fact today. Unfortunately, it’s just plain wrong. In reality, your body naturally knows what to do when it’s lifting heavy objects. Yes, you do need to tense up your abs – but your body does that automatically already. If you tense up your abs even more manually, you can throw off the whole system and actually increase your chances of injury.

Myth #4: The Trick Is to Eat a Lot of Protein

Yes, eating a lot of protein is crucial. However, just increasing the amount of protein you eat isn’t going to cut it. In order to really make a difference in your muscles, you need to have the right kinds of proteins. You also need to have the right combination of proteins; and you need to eat other foods that support that protein intake. Yes, increasing proteins is important – but it’s not the magic pill.

 Myth #5: The Path To Losing Fat is Not Eating Fat

A lot of people who decide to start building muscles think that they need to cut all fats out of their diet. Unfortunately, this is actually harmful rather than helpful. Your body needs fats in order to operate properly. Yes, you should definitely get rid of trans fats and oily foods. But it’s important to keep consuming healthy fats so your body has the resources it needs to work properly. You can actually lose more fat by eating enough of the right kinds of fat than if you tried to cut out all fats from your diet.

Free Report:  10  Muscle Toning Mistakes Women Make

No matter what your gender is, you should embrace the weights and add strength training into your workout routine. You don’t even have to use weights in order to tone your body. Strength training for women is an important part of an effective exercise routine. However,  there are a  variety of common mistakes that make the job of muscle toning much harder than it needs to be. Download my free report, 10 Muscle Toning Mistakes Women Make  to help you get the best results from your toning or bulking workout.