How to Get Toned After 40 Without Getting Bulky

Nikkiey: Toned is not a training style, it's a result, and that result comes from two things. Your muscles need to be challenged at a level that creates enough stimulus to adapt and to grow over time. So these cute little pink five-pound dumbbells, for most women past the beginner stage, are not creating that stimulus.

What's going on, everyone? Hey, you guys. Welcome back to another episode of The WarriorBabe Show. Or, if this is your first episode, welcome to the show with your host, Nikkiey Stott. On these episodes, we talk about mindset, methodologies, and tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong, and feel insanely confident.

You guys know that I've probably talked about this previously, and I've especially let y'all know my feelings toward this word. I'm not a big fan of how this word gets used, and I know that a lot of women identify this word with their fitness journey. Sometimes I feel like this word can keep women stuck, or it can steer them toward the wrong approach on their fitness journey. It might also make them wary or nervous or unsure about the right approach to take or the results they're really after with their body composition.

So by all that, y'all know what the word is, right? The word is toned. "I want to get toned. I don't want to get too bulky," is what women say. "I just want to tone up. I want to lean and tone. I don't want big muscles." I've heard it thousands and thousands of times. And every single time I hear it, I want to have a direct, straight conversation about this. Because what women think toning requires and what toning actually requires are two completely different things. And the gap between those two things is exactly where results go to die.

So today, I'm blowing this up. We're going to talk about this word, what it actually means, what it actually takes, and why most women are doing the complete opposite of what would get them where they want to go. So let's just dive into it.

Let's start with what I feel is one of the most important things to address: the actual definition. Because toned is not a fitness term. It's not a scientific term. It's a marketing term that the fitness and wellness industry invented to sell women on a version of training that feels safe and acceptable and not too intimidating.

But biologically, what does a toned body actually look like? What is physically happening in the body that makes it appear to be toned? The answer is that there are two things, and there are only two things.

Number one is muscle, period. There is muscle present under the skin. Developed, defined muscle that has shape and density. When people look at arms, you can see the curve of a shoulder. You can see the definition of the arm. You can see the line of your quad, the shape of a glute, right? That's visual definition that comes from muscle existing there.

Number two is having low enough body fat that the muscle is visible. It doesn't matter how much muscle you have. If there's a significant layer of fat sitting on top of it, you won't be able to see the muscle definition, right? Toned is muscle plus the leanness for that muscle to show through.

So one, it's having developed, defined muscle that has shape and density. And number two, it's a low enough body fat percentage that the muscle is able to be seen, to be visible, to show through, right? That's it. That's the entire equation. Muscle plus leanness. Nothing more, nothing less.

Which means, and this is where it gets very, very important, there's no such thing as toning a muscle as a separate activity from building it. You cannot tone a muscle that isn't there. You cannot firm up something that doesn't exist. A muscle either grows, it maintains, or it shrinks. Those are the only three options available to it.

So when someone says that they want to tone their arms, what they're actually describing, whether they know it or not, is wanting to build the muscles in their arms and reduce the body fat covering them enough that those muscles become visible. That is body recomposition. That is changing your body composition. That's what toning is. And the approach required to actually achieve it is radically different from what most women are actually doing.

The approach I see over and over again from women who want to tone up, I want to walk through carefully. I don't want to make anybody feel guilty or shame anyone. But I think understanding exactly why it doesn't work is what finally makes the right approach click.

The typical, quote-unquote, toning program looks something like this. Lots of cardio: treadmill, elliptical, cycling, high volume, and doing that daily. The logic being that cardio burns calories, burning calories reduces fat, and reducing fat will reveal tone. Light weights with high reps: these five-pound dumbbells, the resistance bands, lots of repetitions of relatively easy exercises. The logic behind that is that light weights create long, lean muscles without bulk, and heavy weights make you big. The other thing I see is significant calorie restriction. Here I am again talking about this. Eating as little as possible to lose weight as fast as possible, because smaller equals more toned, right?

This is what women think, and again, I'm not trying to guilt or shame you. It's just what's been out there in the industry. For somebody who's not a professional, who's just trying to achieve a goal and seeking information, this is what women unfortunately get roped into believing is the way to get toned. Lots of cardio, light weights and high reps, and significant calorie restriction. What I want to do is walk through why each of these pieces works against the actual goal.

So, the cardio problem. Cardio burns calories. Yes, that is true. But cardio does not build muscle. And we just established that muscle is half of the toning equation, right? No amount of cardio is going to create the shape, the definition, the curves that women describe when they say they want to look toned. Now, cardio can help with the fat loss side of things, don't get me wrong. But fat loss without muscle building doesn't produce a toned body. It just produces a smaller version of the same body. Less of what you had before, not a different shape, right? You hear the term skinny fat often.

This is where I was at the beginning of my journey. I signed up for half marathon after half marathon after half marathon, because I fell into the trap too, thinking this was the way to get toned. This was the way to get the body I'd been wanting forever: do cardio. And again, I don't want to put down cardio. It is so important, especially for your heart muscle. And it can help on the fat loss side of things. But you can't have fat loss without building muscle and get toned, and cardio doesn't build muscle.

Now, the light weights problem. This is one of the biggest myths for women in the fitness space, I feel. I also see a lot of women who just go through the motions when they're in the gym. Light weights with high reps do not produce meaningful muscle development. Let me just say that point blank, period. Not because effort doesn't matter here, but because muscle growth requires progressive overload. Your muscles need to be challenged at a level that creates enough stimulus to adapt and to grow over time. So these cute little pink five-pound dumbbells, for most women past the beginner stage, are not creating that stimulus.

Now, if you need them because you're just starting out, don't get me wrong, use those. But past a couple months of using them, you're not creating the stimulus the muscle needs, that challenge, in order to grow. At that point the muscles are not being asked to do anything they can't already do. So they don't grow. So the toning you're working toward never materializes. It never turns into anything. You just stay where you are, stuck, like I said at the beginning of the podcast.

And then there's the, quote-unquote, "heavy weights make women bulky" fear. I just want to put this to rest. Building significant muscle mass as a woman is genuinely hard to do. It requires years of consistent, progressive, heavy training, plus eating in a calorie surplus. It doesn't just happen accidentally. And it doesn't just happen by picking up a pair of dumbbells or being underneath a barbell or being on a machine. It doesn't happen just because you did those things.

The women you see in the fitness space who have a significant amount of muscle mass have worked for it. For me, it's 11 years and counting, you guys. I worked extremely hard, intentionally, for years to build it. And yeah, if I'm at the gym and I got a pump and I'm taking a selfie and putting it on social media, right? But in my day-to-day, I just have nice toned arms. They look fit, okay? You won't stumble into being bulky by accident.

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And then the severe calorie restriction problem. You guys know this, right? If you've been listening to this podcast for upwards of 350-plus episodes, I've harped on this. When you restrict calories aggressively without prioritizing protein and strength training, your body loses both muscle and fat. We talked about that in one of the most recent episodes, the metabolism repair episode. Your body doesn't selectively burn fat when you under-eat. It burns whatever is available, which includes muscle. So you're getting smaller, but you're losing the very thing, muscle, that would give your body the shape and definition that you want.

To piggyback off what I said a couple minutes ago, this is the exact pattern that produces a skinny fat outcome. The scale goes down. The body doesn't look the way you hoped, because there isn't enough muscle underneath to create definition that shows through. And what muscle there was has been partially lost to the deficit, to the restrictive calories you've been eating on a daily basis.

So in other words, the standard toning approach actively works against building muscle. It actively accelerates muscle loss, and it produces a body that is smaller and lighter, but not actually more toned. It is the opposite of what's required. And we just squashed that.

So what actually works? What actually gets you there? If toning equals muscle plus leanness, then the approach has to address both, right? Either simultaneously or in phases, depending on where you're starting from.

Side one of the equation is building muscle. This requires strength training, period. Real strength training with progressive overload, progressively increasing into heavier weights, doing compound movements like the squat, the deadlift, shoulder press, chest press. And with enough volume to create a genuine stimulus for growth, right? You can't just go through the motions when you are in the gym, and you can't just do 10 reps making it look like a breeze.

Going back to compound movements, those being squats, deadlifts, hip hinges, rows, presses, lunges, those movements recruit large muscle groups. That creates the most significant training stimulus and builds the kind of functional, visible muscle that actually changes the shape of the body.

Then, in conjunction with compound exercises, you do isolation exercises like curls, leg extensions, lateral raises, front raises, incline press. Those have a place, but they're finishing the work. They're not the foundation. Compound movements are the foundation. You'll find me doing three, maybe four if I'm feeling it, compound movements, or at least one or two, in a day. And I finish off my workout with isolation exercises. Or sometimes I'll flip the training and do isolation exercises at the beginning to fatigue the little muscles, so the big muscles come into play at the end and they're under more stimulus, under more tension.

And then progressive overload is an absolute non-negotiable. Your muscles grow in response to being challenged beyond what they can currently do, which means the weight you lift needs to increase over time. Not every session, but consistently.

I was actually just talking about this because I did a morning vlog a couple of weeks ago. You guys can find it on YouTube, I'm sure, if it's live at this point. I was doing shoulder press and I had to decrease my weight because I couldn't finish the set with good form. The last couple of reps were so sloppy that I was overcompensating with other muscle groups. So I said in the video, look, yes, you want to increase your weights. But sometimes the increase is going to look the same as it does when you're losing weight on the scale. It's not a linear path straight down. You're going to have the line going down, going up, fluctuating a little bit. There are these little small hills, but overall it's still going in a downward trend.

That's the same with your strength on the flip side. With progressive overload, you're still focusing on increasing your weights maybe every few weeks. And maybe there's going to be one session in that week where you have to revert back to where you were a week prior. And that's okay. You're going to be going uphill, and there are going to be little dips here and there. But overall, the trend is still going upward with your progressive overload. Your strength is still increasing, right? So it's the same thing. It's not perfect, but it's consistent.

But if you're lifting the same weight you lifted six months ago, your muscles have no reason to grow. They've already adapted to that stimulus. So you have to keep asking more of them. You have to keep challenging them.

And then you also have to have adequate training frequency. For most women, training each muscle group two times per week produces the best results for muscle development. That typically means a three to four day per week training program. You don't have to be in there six or seven days a week. That's just too much. At that point, it's also kind of counterproductive to the results, because you're overtraining. It doesn't have to be two-hour sessions. It can just be an hour-long session. And then if you're doing your steps, get your steps in afterwards or throughout the day, whatever your programmed cardio is supposed to be. But cardio is a tool for your fat loss. Strength training is what's going to get you there and get you toned.

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So, getting you to the end result of being toned. Side two of the equation is reducing body fat, right? This is where nutrition comes into play, specifically a moderate, not a huge, deficit supported by a high protein intake.

The deficit doesn't need to be aggressive. Aggressive deficits accelerate muscle loss. They tank your energy. They impair your training performance. They drive metabolic adaptation pretty quickly. If you focus on somewhere in the range of a 300 to 500 calorie deficit below your maintenance, that will allow for fat loss while giving your body enough fuel to maintain and even build muscle, if your training stimulus is sufficient and your protein intake is high.

And protein has to be high. We've talked about this before and I'll keep saying it. Protein is what protects your muscle during a deficit. It is what allows body recomposition to actually happen. Most women should be eating upwards of 0.8 to 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight every single day. And that protein target is not optional. It is the thing that literally determines whether you lose fat and maintain muscle, or you lose fat and muscle together.

So what does this actually look like in, say, a week? Three or four, I would say four, strength training sessions built around compound lifts while you're progressively increasing your weights. This is where keeping a log of your weights is really good, because you'll notice your weight going up over a three-week span. It doesn't necessarily go up week by week. It may, depending on what muscle group you're doing, but you'll notice over maybe two to three weeks that you're increasing your weight. You hit your protein target every day. You have a moderate deficit, not a crash diet. And then, like I said, cardio is used as a tool for health and additional calorie burn, but not as a primary fat loss strategy.

And you do it consistently over weeks and months, because changing your body composition is not a four-week result. It is a long-term game. Doing what I just said consistently over weeks and months is where you will see the changes happen. It is not going to happen in the first month. So I just want you to know that, accept it, and allow those expectations to be set.

Okay, here's where I want to get real with you guys. The strategy we just talked about is one thing, but there's a mindset piece underneath all of this that I think is the real reason women keep going back to the wrong approach, even when they know better.

The toning approach, the cardio, the light weights, the restriction, feels safer. It feels more controlled. It feels like less risk. Lifting heavy feels scary: what if I get too big? Eating more protein feels like, well, I'm eating more. And you can feel fuller. You're not always hungry when you first start eating more protein. Then the question is, what if I gain weight? And people will notice some type of weight gain in the first months of their journey. This is why the toning approach I talked about feels safer. Or eating in a moderate deficit instead of a crash diet feels slower to people: what if it takes forever? I want results, like, yesterday.

And underneath all of these fears is a deeper one. The fear of a body that is stronger, bigger, more present, more known when you walk into the room. We've been conditioned as women for a very long time to want to be smaller, to shrink, to take up less room. And a training approach designed to build muscle asks you to do the exact opposite of that.

So I want to say this directly, because I think ignoring it is why so many women intellectually understand what they need to do and still can't bring themselves to do it. Building muscle is not the same thing as getting big. A strong body is not a big body.

The women I work with who have committed to real strength training, who have picked up heavier weights, who have fueled their training with adequate food, who have stopped running from the weight room, who ditched the endless cardio, who ditched the quote-unquote toning approach that's out there, look more like what they described when they said they wanted to be toned than they ever did on a cardio machine and five-pound dumbbell program.

So the word you've been using, toned, actually describes a strong body. And a strong body requires you to train like you're building something, not like you're trying to get smaller and skinnier and disappear. That mindset shift is the work. And let me tell you, that mindset shift is work worth doing.

So, bottom line on everything we covered today: toned is not a training style. It's a result. And that result comes from two things: muscle and leanness.

Building that muscle requires progressive strength training, with you challenging the weights. The last two to three reps of every one of your sets should be challenging. It should be hard to push that weight up. You should be making not-fun faces. You should be uncomfortable. And then achieving that leanness requires being in a moderate calorie deficit with a high protein intake.

I get this question all the time: well, isn't a high protein intake just going to be stored as fat if I'm eating too much? No. Not if you are training the way you need to train to get the body we're talking about in this episode. It's being utilized during your strength training sessions. Because what do you guys know? Protein is the building block macro for your muscles. So in training, post-training and recovery, protein is being used and utilized. You're not going to store it as fat.

And that is what produces the body women describe when they say they want to be toned. The approach most women are actually using, the high cardio, the light weights, the aggressive restriction, builds no new muscle. It often attacks existing muscle. And it just makes you a smaller, skinnier version of yourself. It's the opposite of what's required.

So the shift is simple to understand and genuinely challenging to make. I get that, because it requires letting go of a smaller-is-better framework and replacing it with stronger is better. But I promise you, every single woman who's made that shift and committed to it has told me the same thing: she wishes she had done it sooner.

So my challenge to you guys: pick up the heavier weight at your next workout. Focus on hitting your protein target. Add one or two compound lifts into your training each time. Just start there. And if you're already doing that, keep going.

And if you want to be a part of WarriorBabe, if you're not yet in the VIP, our coaching program where you can work with a one-on-one coach, get into our free community. It's free. It's full of women making this exact same shift, showing up for each other. They're building something they're genuinely proud of, doing it the right way. Not the toning approach way, but what's actually required of you to get toned. All right? It's completely free. The link is in the show notes below.

And if this episode resonates with you, I just ask that you share it with somebody else who has been in the cardio and light weight cycle and doesn't see the results they want. This might be exactly what they need to hear. All right? Love you guys, and I'll see you in the next episode. Peace out.

Hey, really quick, before you go, I have one small favor to ask. If this episode brought you value or sparked something in you, take just a moment to hit that review button. Your rating and review make all the difference, helping more women discover the tools they need to transform their fitness and their confidence. It takes less than a minute, but it can change the path of someone else's journey. Thank you so much for leaving that review. I appreciate you so much. Thank you.