Toning Tables

What to expect

After just a few short weeks of regular visits, you will firm up sagging muscles, increase your flexibility, tighten skin, and relieve tension. Best of all, you will begin to reduce cellulite and lose inches.

You'll experience fast results with no muscle strain, sweating, or fatigue. You will begin to notice the many benefits of improved circulation. The Toning System uses 8 motorised machines that combine isotonic and isometric exercises.

Isotonics: a system of exercise in which the muscle group is elongated while the limb is moving so that a long lean muscle shape is achieved and flexibility is increased.
Isometrics: a system of exercises in which opposing muscles are contracted so that there is little shortening but great increase in tone of muscle fibres involved.

No pain, no gain?

No pain, no gain does not lead to fat loss! Muscle burn indicates glucose expenditure, not fat expenditure. So, if you've got fat thighs and your pushing yourself to do 200 leg lifts, thinking, " oh, boy, I must really be burning up my fat!" you're wrong! You're just going to end up with big, strong, and fat legs.

Any time a small muscle is made to lift a heavy weight, especially if several repetitions are required, a sharp burning pain is felt in the muscle. The pain is caused by lactic acid, which indicates that the exercise is anaerobic, meaning without oxygen. When you weight lift, the muscle tissue swells, causing pressure on the blood vessels around it. The flow of blood to the muscle is lessened, and therefore less oxygen is supplied. When oxygen is limited, muscle metabolism is hindered, glucose is only partially metabolised, and lactic acid is produced. The build-up of lactic acid in a muscle is painful but temporary. When the exercise ceases, blood rushes in and the pain goes away.

If you think about it, you'll realise that many callisthenic exercises are really a form of weight lifting. A sit-up uses the upper body as a weight instead of iron plates. Push-ups also make use of upper-body weight instead of barbells or dumbbells. As I mention various exercises, notice the ratio of amount of weight used. Sit-ups use a relatively small amount of muscle for the weight lifted so that abdominal fatigue occurs quickly and lactic acid is produced quickly. Side leg lifts are done with the abductor muscle, which is only a small fraction of the muscle on the thigh. People are often fooled by this exercise, believing that the entire thigh muscle is doing the work. The abductor is quite small, and the leg may be quite large. Leg lifts produce lactic acid in the abductor quickly.

The expression "weight lifting" means lifting a heavy weight with a small muscle; it means quick fatigue and soreness; and it means lactic acid. The definition does not extend to the use of two-and four-pound weights. Even carrying seventy pounds in a backpack doesn't produce lactic acid and isn't called weight lifting. For the sake of clarity, "weight lifting" is defined only as

heavy weight
anaerobic
lactic acid producing

exercise that enhances the size and hardness of muscle but does not burn fat. If you want to build muscle bulk, you need to work hard but if you want to lose fat, go easy.

Slow exercise burns off more fat than intense exercise

We used to assume that after intense exercise, we would lose fat as the body converted it into sugar to replace what was just lost. But research has shown that humans don't have the internal chemistry to convert fat into sugar. Fat doesn't break down to replace glucose. In fact, we can't convert fat into anything. The shocking conclusion is that fat is lost only by burning it in the muscle during moderate to slow exercise. When we exercise very hard, anaerobically, we just burn sugar and hardly any fat at all.

Change in muscle shape

Most people expect a dramatic weight loss when they embark on an exercise program. Well, unless you're quite a lot over fat, there will be little if any reduction in your total weight. What does change is your shape.

Let's look at what happens to muscle when it isn't exercised. All of us start with muscles that are long and lean with very little fat. Then as we become older, intramuscular fat slowly invades the muscle. The shape of the muscle itself becomes short and squat. The muscle eventually becomes so saturated with fat that it can't hold any more and then the fat begins to accumulate outside the muscle. When you diet, you lose fat from under the skin, outside the muscle. Your diet has little effect on the fat inside the muscle and nothing happens to the muscle shape. It's still short and squat. But you can exercise the intramuscular fat away and the muscle will go back to its original long, lean shape.

It's the subcutaneous fat under the skin that one can see, pinch and weigh. Obviously, loss of subcutaneous fat will result in change of body size. But usually the person's shape merely seems to be a smaller version of what it was before the loss. You go from a big pear to a little pear. It's the intramuscular fat that changes the body shape. The definition and firmness are due to exercised muscles, not loss of subcutaneous fat. As you are exercising, keep saying to yourself, "my muscles are getting long and lean."

Staying slim

Exercise alters muscle metabolism in such a way that fit people can eat more without making more fat. Fit muscles have special enzymes that enables it to burn up tremendous amounts of calories in short periods.

Let's put together three important facts about muscle. First, muscle uses many calories because movement is more calorie-demanding than any other body function. Second, muscle uses many calories because between 30 and 50 percent of the body is composed of muscle. Combine the first two factors and you can see that of all the calories burned in the body, 90 percent are burned by muscle, even if you are sedentary. When we add the third fact, that specialised enzymes, existing only in muscle, can increase calorie burning by fifty-fold during exercise, the 90 percent figure becomes obvious. Clearly, if you want to get rid of calories, you should look to the quality of your muscle.