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Women Who Want Toned Legs - Mix Weights & Cardio

To get toned firm legs you must mix weight training with cardio

Women out there are always talking about getting thinner, toned, firm, sexy legs. They try all sorts of diets and workouts but never seem to get the results they want. Perhaps the fear of weight training is holding them back?

Weight training is essential for toned legs

For some reason women are afraid of weight training. I talk about it a lot here at Real Women’s Fitness; they seem to think that after one session of weight training they are going to have huge bulky legs like Arnie. Well, this isn’t the case. It isn’t going to happen.

Weight training is the best way to change your body. Stimulating muscle growth not only makes you look more defined and toned but the added muscle actually burns fat. That is how it works. The more muscle you have the faster your metabolism will be and the less calories you will convert into fat.

Weight training also boost your metabolism for the whole day that you weight train. This is one of the best ways to burn fat and keep a toned appearance.

Why mix cardio and weights?

Mixing cardio and weights is so important if you want to change the shape of your legs. It is especially important if you want to tone them and make them more defined.

We have to look at the basics:

Firstly, losing weight is the only way you will look toned. If you have a nice shaped body with good muscle composition it doesn’t really matter if you have a layer of fat covering them. So first you should look to losing some fat through high intensity cardio.

Secondly, you need to add some muscle. This changes the shape of your body’s muscles as well as helping to burn some fat.

Mixing the two together is a powerful combination that will result in excellent all-round fitness as well as weight loss and toned legs. It is a little bit like the two wheels of a bike. You can get somewhere on a uni-cycle but it is much faster on a two wheeler!

How should I weight train for toned legs?

If you want to tone your legs you have to forget about all that rubbish on the internet that tells you to opt for higher reps. I went on a few women’s websites today (who will remain nameless) and so many of them are telling women to use higher reps if they want to tone their legs.

Their logic is this: If you don’t want to build big muscles you should use high reps and a low weight so that whatever muscle you have gets toned.

This is absolute crap and has no basis in fact at all. Doing lots of reps with a low weight will not tone the muscles. The only way you can tone muscles is to lose the fat on top of them. And lots of reps on the bench press is not going to do that! The reason we weight train is to stimulate muscles growth to accelerate our fitness levels and then our weight loss. To do this we need heavy weight.

If you lift a pencil 1000 times you will not make any progress. If you lift a 10 kilo dumbbell 20 times you will make some progress. The body needs to be stimulted and challenged to grow and as such you need to keep lifting heavier and heavier weights.

But won’t heavy weights make me big?

No! They won’t. This is especially true if you are doing a lot of cardio. It is very hard to put on muscle mass while you are doing cardio. It is also hard to put on muscle mass if you have the female genetic make-up. Women aren’t built for it.

If, however, you do want to put on muscle you need to increase your protein a lot and perhaps look into getting a personal trainer that can take you to the big-time. Adding huge muscle mass is hard for women and requires a lot of work.

Conclusion
If you want to tone your legs I strongly recommend you give weight training a try. Add it into your current program of cardio and you will see the difference within a few weeks. It is a much more powerful way to get the toned legs you want.

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