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The Dr. Shannon Show
Fitness Rewired Capsule #4: Toning, Sculpting, and Long Lean Muscle - What's Real?
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Before we get into today's episode, if
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you want to actually improve your body composition and are sick of random workouts that just wear you down and burn you out, that's exactly why I built evlo. EVLO is science back strength training designed to help you build muscle, improve body composition and feel better in your body without beating yourself up or living in the gym.
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You can try evolo now for two
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weeks free if you visit evolofitness.com welcome
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to Fitness Rewired on the Dr. Shannon Show. A nine episode capsule designed to close the gap between fitness culture and exercise science so you can see higher return on your effort and finally feel like you're doing enough. Many fitness beliefs come from marketing and tradition and don't align with current evidence. When you learn the truth, you can rewire your thoughts around fitness. That shift leads to higher quality actions, better results and health you can actually sustain. I'm your host, Shannon Richie. Welcome to the show. Welcome back. Today I've got a big episode for you and this is an important one. We're talking about some of these ideas in the fitness culture that are especially marketed towards women. Toning, sculpting, long lean muscles. These are all marketing phrases that we're familiar with and they are not only misleading, but they come with an opportunity cost because they appeal to women's desire to be lean with muscle definition. They distract women from doing what actually creates that result when which is proper resistance training and diet. But often these workouts aren't even loading the body enough to properly maintain muscle, let alone build it. They're also not significantly causing fat loss. So to be brutally honest, it's wasting your time when you could be doing resistance training workouts and or cardio that is having a much more meaningful impact on your body. Now, am I saying avoid the workouts you love? Absolutely not. Am I trying to discourage someone from moving in the only type of way they will move and stay consistent with? Absolutely not. This is more to educate the consumer so you can understand how the body changes and make decisions about how you choose to move, not based on the result that you're promised from misleading marketing. And I know I'm being blunt and seeming negative here, but I really am so sick of seeing these workouts that over promise to lengthen and tone you and burn fat when they really aren't doing much of that at all for your body. So today I want to explain what these workouts are are doing in your body, why these terms are misleading from a physiological standpoint and why the influencers promoting them often look, quote unquote toned. And most importantly, what actually creates that aesthetic in real life? Toning is not a term you'll find in the academic literature. It was made up by the fitness industry and is now globally understood as meaning low enough body percent fat to see visible muscle. I I talked about this in episode one of this capsule, but in case you missed it, some brief history that sheds light into why we have such deep seated beliefs around toning. In the 1980s, when women began lifting weights more frequently and female bodybuilding became visible in the mainstream media, many women became afraid that lifting would automatically make them overly muscular. The fitness industry responded by softening the language around strength training. So so instead of talking about muscle growth, programs promised toning, which sounded softer and more feminine. But physiologically, there's no separate toning process. Muscles can do two things. They can either grow or shrink. What people call toned is simply muscle becoming more visible because you have enough muscle mass and a low enough layer of body fat on top of it. That's it. There is not a special type of muscle created by special workouts. So when someone says they want to look toned, what they're really describing is body recomposition. Building or maintaining muscle while gradually reducing body fat so the shape of that muscle becomes more visible. And I did an entire podcast capsule all about the science of body recomposition, if you want to check that out. These same quote unquote toning messages may also use other verbiage like long lean muscle, which is also marketing speak that is not real. This phrase grew out of the aerobics boom and later Pilates and barre inspired workout trends. Programs began promising bodies that looked like dancers, so elongated, slim, graceful, implying that certain workouts could physically lengthen muscles and make you look long and lean. But muscle length is determined by bones and attachment points. Exercise cannot change that. Exercise doesn't lengthen muscle. Training can improve posture, coordination and nutrition can improve body fat levels, which may make someone appear taller or sleeker. But muscles themselves do not become longer or leaner. A muscle fiber either hypertrophies, so it grows or it atrophies or it shrinks. The phrase long lean muscle stuck because it aligned with cultural beauty standards and reduced fear around strength training, not because it reflected physiology. So this brings up an important question. If these type of workouts don't create a unique type of muscle, why do dancers and bar instructors and many Pilates teachers look so, quote unquote toned? The answer is selection, training history and energy balance, not a special Exercise effect. Professional dancers are often selected for certain genetic traits like limb proportions and naturally low body fat distribution. Many of them may be trained intensely from a young age and accumulated extremely high movement volumes through rehearsals lasting hours per day. So the aesthetic that people associate with these methods is real, but it comes from overall body composition, long term activity levels, and genetics of those who were drawn to that type of movement in the first place because they were good at it, not because muscles being lengthened or uniquely sculpted is a thing from their workouts. And just to be clear, Pilates and bar are not bad forms of exercise. And at this point, there are so many different forms of Pilates and bar. So it's hard to put this umbrella around whether or not they're effective. But they can certainly improve stability, coordination and movement quality. The problem is that when they're marketed as superior for body composition, because they are not, the final term that I see is a red flag is sculpting. So the word sculpt entered the fitness marketing in the 80s and 90s when exercise brands borrowed language from art to make strength training feel less intimidating. So the idea was that workouts could mold your body like a sculptor molds clay. But the body doesn't work that way. You cannot selectively sculpt muscle shape. Muscle distribution is largely genetic. Training can either increase that muscle or decrease that muscle size. And how much muscle you see is depends on your body fat percentage. The final shape people see is the interaction between their muscle mass and their fat mass. So sculpting is just as misleading as toning and long lean muscle. I personally think we should all just start calling it what it is. Either build muscle or don't build muscle and use nutrition to lose fat or don't. And the irony is that most of these toning and sculpting workouts don't even build significant amounts of muscle because they aren't following the principles of hypertrophy. Some of them absolutely can be, but many of them aren't, even if they're using weights, because they are not training anywhere close to failure, they're doing really long sets. So sets that are taken much further than 30 reps. So doing, you know, 50, 100, 200 reps, or holding exercises for minutes and minutes on end, that type of exercise will feel really hard. You're. Your muscles will burn, which we'll talk about here in just a second, you might even shake, which we'll also talk about. But that is not the stimulus required for muscle growth. The stimulus required for muscle growth is Taking a lift close to failure in 30 reps or less. So I alluded to the burn, and you might feel a burn or a shake, or your muscles might feel tired. What is that doing? Is that actually creating muscle growth? So that burning sensation during high rep or sustained exercise comes from metabolic byproducts accumulating when muscles need energy faster than oxygen can be delivered. This is called metabolic stress. So hydrogen ions build up, the environment becomes more acidic, and sensory nerves signal discomfort. Metabolic stress is uncomfortable, but it's not burning fat and it's not muscle damage. And it's not proof that a workout is effective. It simply means the muscle is experiencing an energy challenge. Muscle growth happens again through mechanical tension when force placed on the muscle fibers is high enough. When a muscle produces high force under load, Structures inside the fiber sense deformation and activate signaling pathways like mtor, which initiate muscle protein synthesis. In simple terms, tension tells your body, we need stronger tissue here. But it has to be high enough tension, not just the burn. So the burn is potentially correlated with muscle growth, but it doesn't cause muscle growth. So what is the burn doing for you physically? As fatigue builds, smaller muscle fibers tire, and your nervous system recruits additional fibers to keep that movement going. This is why you might start shaking. That shake is your brain rapidly switching motor units on and off to maintain that force. But recruitment alone in the shake alone is not enough to visibly change the shape or size or fat around that area. Those fibers must experience sufficient tension to trigger growth. If the load is very light, the fibers might activate and they might shake, and they might burn, but they might not ever experience enough force to justify that adaptation and trigger the mtor pathway that produces more muscle growth. This is why you can feel an intense burn without meaningful muscle change. Your body adapts to force, not to discomfort. The burn is not bad or wrong, but it just isn't creating much structural change in your body. But what is it doing? It it can improve muscular endurance, it can improve efficiency to movement, meaning your body can use less energy to complete the movement. It means you might be able to better tolerate sustained contractions. So as you hold your arms out to the side for three minutes, you get better at holding your arms out to the side for three minutes, if that makes sense. So you get better at what you're doing, but that doesn't necessarily translate into body composition changes. I'm feeling like a little bit of a broken record, But I'm just seeing this all over social media, so I wanna make sure it's abundantly clear. So are These Bernie workouts a waste of time? No. If it is the only type of workout that feels good, if it's the only type of workout that you will stay consistent with, if it doesn't negatively influence your recovery, if you have the time, if it gives you joy, but you're well aware that doing this type of workout doesn't necessarily improve physical appearance, I would say yes, they are a waste of time if they are taking the place of a workout that has bigger impacts on your health, like proper resistance training or proper dose cardio. And, uh, yes, they're a waste of time if they are influencing your ability to recover from your strength training sessions, causing a lot of soreness or decreased performance in your next workout. Yes, if you deep down are doing them because you want to spot treat fat or tone or look like the instructor teaching them. So I think it just depends on the context if you are well aware of what they are and aren't doing for your body. I think choosing them is absolutely not a bad thing. It just depends on why you're doing it. I want to finish by talking about something that I'm seeing a lot on TikTok especially. It's that people went from doing hiit and lifting to Pilates and walking. And with that switch, they then look more toned and lean and sculpted or whatever the term is. Snatched. I see a lot. So I'm seeing this everywhere. And it's so misleading to the consumer. But I want to explain why this can sometimes happen. So this happens because maybe someone is building muscle with their prior routine. They're doing hit and lifting, and they might be building muscle, but they also might be in a calorie surplus, maybe from hunger cues being high, from doing too much exercise. So they have accumulated both muscle and fat. It's easy to think, oh, I burned a lot of calories in my really hard workout. I earned this food. But as I talked about in the calorie burn episode, calorie burn is likely much lower than we anticipate from exercise. So that person may be unknowingly eating in a surplus. They also may be inflamed from over exercise with lots of lifting and lots of of hit and not enough recovery. So what they do is they switch to something lower intensity. This all of a sudden allows them to recover. So inflammation drops, and that alone might allow them to see the existing muscle that they've built. Their body may feel less stressed overall. Maybe hunger cues drop a little bit so they could lose some body fat. And as inflammation drops and as body Fat drops, they can see the existing muscle that they built from their prior workouts. So it's not necessarily Pilates and walking that was sculpting them and was the magic ticket. It's just that it exposes what they already have. But the problem is, even to maintain muscle, like I said, you have to train it close to failure in under 30 reps, which often Pilates doesn't do. It can, but often it doesn't. So what will happen to this person is they'll slowly start to lose muscle, shifting their body composition, and over time, they'll start to lose that quote, unquote toned look and have to be in a bigger nutrition deficit as they have lost lean mass. So the answer, in my opinion, is neither of those. The answer is moderate amounts of strength training, moderate amounts of cardio so that you can recover. You're not overdoing it, but you're doing enough to trigger muscle growth and you're staying active enough to improve your total daily energy expenditure. And then if that toned look quote unquote is your goal, you want to eat in a slight deficit to lose fat. All of that will give you that quote unquote toned look without feeling so depleted and under fueled and yo yoing between fitness programs. So I'll leave you with a simple tool that I talked about in the last episode, and that's how to know if you are limited by true muscular failure or if you're limited by fatigue, including a burn or a shake. So do what we call the rest test. And we came up with this rest test because it's a really simple way to tell if you have recruited a high percentage of the muscle to induce muscle growth. So here's how you do it. So you do as many reps as you can. Let's say you do 15 reps, and on your 15th rep, you're like, I don't think I could do any more reps, or maybe I could only do two more reps and then I'm at total failure. Drop the weight, shake it out for five seconds, and then try to do more reps. If you could continue doing more reps, if you could continue doing maybe three or more reps, you were fatigued, you were not at true failure. So it just means go up in weight next time. This works because type 2 muscle fibers, your bigger muscle fibers that we lose as we age, typically need longer than a few seconds to recover. So if you truly reached those muscle fibers, you wouldn't be able to continue with this set after taking a really short break. So, just to summarize all of this, terms like tone and sculpt and lengthen long, lean muscles didn't come from science. It came from decades of marketing designed to make exercise feel more approachable and aesthetically appealing. The look people want is real. That toning look is real. I don't think there's anything wrong with the aesthetic goal, but the explanation has been wrong. That toned aesthetic comes from two things. It comes from building muscle or preserving muscle and losing body fat. To achieve that, it's moderately dosed strength training, moderately dosed cardio, and a slight calorie deficit from food. That's it. You don't need special toning workouts. You don't need to chase the burn, and you don't need to feel destroyed after every session. My hope is that, again, I don't want to feel negative with this information. It's more that when you understand how your body changes and adapts, you feel more empowered to do things that are leading you closer to your goals. So tomorrow we're talking about if you have to lift heavy to build muscle, something that many of you are confused about right now and understandably so. We will break it all down tomorrow. See you then.