When you tone your muscles, you not only improve your appearance, but you also improve your abilities in sports and daily activities. From a health standpoint, strength-training improves flexibility, reduces blood pressure and lowers cholesterol levels, according to Georgia State University's Department of Kinesiology and Health. By taking a specific direction with exercise, you can make the most progress toning up all your body parts.
Target Areas
The body has more than 200 muscles. The goal with total body toning is to focus on the major muscles in the chest, shoulders, back, arms, butt, legs and stomach. These include the pectorals, deltoids, trapezius, latissimus dorsi, triceps, biceps, glutes, quadriceps, hamstrings, calves, rectus abdominis and obliques.
Choosing the Right Exercises
Being that you have multiple muscles to target, you need to plan when it comes to exercise selection. Isolation exercises for example, work only one muscle group at a time. Trying to tone all of your muscles with these is time-consuming. A better option is to base your workouts around compound exercises. These involve more than one joint and muscle working in unison. By working multiple muscles with each exercise, you will produce faster toning results. Bench presses, shoulder presses, back rows, dips, twist curls, squats, lunges and bicycle crunches work every major muscle in the body.
Proper Form
Toning your muscles is more involved than just doing exercises. You also must have proper form when doing these exercises otherwise you will risk injury and compromise your results. Momentum should never be used and you should always employ a full range of motion. Take bench presses for example. A common error is committed when an exerciser gains momentum by bouncing the bar off his chest. This will not only hurt if you do it with a lot of weight, but it will also deprive your muscles of needed work. Lower the bar slowly, let it touch your chest lightly and steadily push it back up until your arms are fully extended. Throughout this, and all other exercises, keep your abs tight to produce force and stabilize your spine. This is called bracing.
Circuit Training
You have multiple workout regimens to follow as far as toning your whole body goes, but your best bet is to do circuit training. This is performed by doing a series of exercises back to back with short rest breaks. By doing circuit training, you can easily tone each body part in one complete workout. This type of training also quickly elevates your heart rate, causing a favorable caloric expenditure. A good rule of thumb is to perform circuit training every other day or every two days to allow for recovery time.
Cardiovascular Exercise
Cardio should not be left out of the equation when it comes to your workouts. Achieving muscle tone means you have low body fat and your muscles are defined. Circuit training workouts will contribute to weight loss, but if you have a high amount of fat, you need to mix cardio into your program. This type of exercise is performed in a repetitive manner for an extended period and it burns fat efficiently. To stay with the total body concept, perform cardio that works your whole body like swimming, elliptical training, rowing, kickboxing or jumping rope.
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