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Comment by leftnode | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, there's no such thing as muscle toning. Lower weight at higher reps won't do this. Muscles respond to resistance, and you need to consistently and constantly increase that resistance if you want to get larger/stronger.

This is why all of the abdominal infomercials you see are bogus.

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i think the more correct statement would be: there's no way to spot reduce fat. that's the reason most ab informercials are bogus. You'll see the abs if the overall body fat percentage is low.

When i say toning, i mean aerobic exercises to lower body fat and weight training to firm up muscles. maybe i put it incorrectly in the original post.

this is a nice read: http://www.exrx.net/WeightTraining/Myths.html

local fat reduction: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1463-1326.2006....

search for aminophylline.

the 1200 kCal diet for the study is very alarming in my opinion. That's quite a lot of deficit compared to one's BMR and coupled with exercise, the study was bound to be a success. this following post pretty much dismisses the validity of the experiment you just linked:

http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/02/miracle-thigh-cr...

Right. Muscles either grow, or don't grow. There's is no 'grow but only in a way that is toning and not actually growing bigger and stronger'. It's absurd how prevalent of a myth that is.

Not a simple as that. There is sarcoplasma volume and myofibril density. It depends on what your goal is.

But if you are training in the hypertrophy range and getting stronger, then you must be getting bigger.

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