Toning Muscle with Home Gym Equipment: A New Year's Resolution
A popular New Year's Resolution is to reduce fat and develop muscle mass, which is termed 'toning'. Optimising your training will play a crucial role in achieving a toned physique, along with your nutrition. Having the equipment available at home allows you to train optimally, significantly helping you achieve your New Year's Resolution. This will also encourage consistent training habits as you won't have to deal with the New Year hecticness of commercial gyms, meaning there is no more waiting around for equipment, and you can be efficient with your training.
What Does Muscle Toning Really Mean?
Muscle toning aims to develop muscle mass whilst reducing body fat. This makes your musculature more visible, creating a sculpted look. A common misconception when people are starting to tone is to start lifting lighter weights. However, this is not entirely the case. Your goals may have slightly shifted from lifting a ton of weight to now wanting to tone up. But the physiological processes of resistance training remain similar. Additionally, if you are new to training and desire a toned look, it is essential to build muscle to achieve your New Year's resolution; thus, light loads are not going to be optimal.
Indeed, hypertrophy and strength training do differ slightly, regarding the loads lifted and reps completed. According to the American College of Sports Medicine, for hypertrophy (muscle mass increase), you should lift around 60% of your 1-repetition maximum for 6-12 repetitions, with 1-2 minutes rest between. By doing so, you will place sufficient mechanical stimuli on your muscles to induce adaptations in muscle size. Furthermore, resistance training has been reported to increase resting metabolic rate by approximately 7%, with corresponding increases in fat loss (Source). Therefore, if you include a balanced diet and increased cardio, you would see significant reductions in body fat.
Best Home Gym Equipment to Achieve your New Year's Resolution
To reiterate, strength training plays an essential role in toning muscle. So you need to have the equipment available to complete strength training. Here are some top recommendations:
Adjustable dumbbell & kettlebell sets
Adjustable dumbbell & kettlebell sets will provide options for full-body strength training to build a strong base. The adjustable nature of this equipment allows you to progressively overload. This is a key training principle to increase strength and hypertrophy. Additionally, you can adjust the weight to match the required load for each movement, maximising your gains during every exercise. Considering that kettlebell training often involves fast-paced movements and can be easily incorporated into circuit training, kettlebell training effectively increases calorie expenditure. This will help significantly when trying to cut fat.
Weight bench
You may be wondering why we have included a bench in this blog. Incorporating a bench within your home gym will open up an array of exercises that you can complete. Importantly, it allows you to lift weights safely and effectively. Additionally, you can perform multiple core exercises that are essential for achieving a toned physique, such as leg raises, Copenhagen side planks, flutter kicks, and straight-leg crunches. There are also a ton of lower and upper limb exercises you can complete when incorporating a bench within your home gym. For example, Bulgarian split squats, hip thrusts, step-ups, bench press, shoulder press, bent over row, etc.
Resistance bands
Resistance bands add resistance to movements to increase the stimuli imposed on the body, effectively making the exercise harder, to induce adaptation. The benefits of resistance bands include their extreme versatility, aid in muscular development & strength, assist with injury recovery, and are affordable. Once you purchase a set of resistance bands, you won't need to upgrade or regularly replace them.
Weighted vest
Weighted vests are used to add external mechanical stimuli to body weight movements. They are also extremely versatile and can be used during resistance and aerobic exercise. Given that mechanical stimuli are a primary mediator for subsequent muscle growth and strength (Source), weighted vests do a great job in helping you tone up. Additionally, as you will likely need to incorporate cardio into your routine to lose weight and get lean, adding a weighted vest to your walking and/or running will increase calorie burn, while also enhancing strength, muscle size, and improving bone health.
How to Train for Muscle Tone Using Home Equipment
Progressive overload
Progressive overload is a key training principle within any successful exercise programme. Simply put, it refers to progressively increasing exercise intensity to drive further adaptations. You can do this in multiple ways, such as by increasing external load (i.e., resistance), repetitions, sets, training frequency or by slowing lifting tempo to have longer times under tension. Your body and muscles adapt to this progressive stimulus to deal with the environmental stress of the activity. Therefore, if you don't progressively add stimuli, your body will stop adapting, stunting muscle growth and strength.
Exercise tips
Compound movements will significantly aid you in your goal to tone muscle. These lifts include multi-joint movements, such as bench press, shoulder press, squats, deadlifts, bent over row, pull-ups, etc. The multi-joint nature of these movements engages an array of musculature to force adaptations across a range of musculature. Once you have these down and incorporated them into your programmes, you can then add your accessory movements to build specific muscularure that you want to focus on.
Nutrition
Optimising your nutrition plan will also help you achieve your New Year’s resolution and get toned. One of the main components of your nutrition is to include plenty of protein. A good rule of thumb is to have around 2 grams of protein per your body weight. You should separate these across multiple meals to aid protein synthesis (a biological process that builds proteins that make up muscle).
For example, if you are 80 kg, 2 x 80 = 160 g protein per day.
Additionally, calorie intake is very important to aid in toning. Typically, you start trying to tone once you have built a strong base. If you are in your bulk phase (i.e., increasing muscle size before cutting weight), then you should increase calorie intake above your resting metabolic rate. This refers to the amount of calories burned at rest on a day-to-day basis. For instance, men typically have a resting metabolic rate of around 1,800 calories, whereas women have around 1,500. So to build strength, you would exceed these calories. However, for a cut, to tone, you want to intake less than your resting metabolic rate, thus for men you should intake < 1,800 calories and for women you should intake < 1500 calories. Remember, though, these are the calories expended without any day-to-day activities or exercise. Therefore, you should be considerate of the amount of active calories you burn, as only intaking < 1,800 or <1,500 per day, along with burning an extra 1,000 calories, could leave you in a significant calorie deficit and cause you to lose muscle mass and feel extremely fatigued.
Conclusion
Muscle toning requires a balanced structure between resistance training, aerobic exercise and a nutrition plan. You need to understand that this is not a quick fix, and you won't become toned overnight. It will take a large amount of consistency and determination. This is exactly why home gym equipment is ideal. You are able to remove obstacles, such as travelling to the gym or waiting for others to be done with the equipment you need. You will be able to develop a routine with your new home gym equipment, which will reinforce healthy habits to help you achieve your New Year's resolution. If you go for the versatile pieces of equipment we discussed in this blog, you will be set to achieve your goals.
This New Year, focus on building strength, consistency and confidence with home gym equipment designed to help you tone muscle effectively.
