AW3 Tone – What Does It Do?

The fitness industry is rife with contradictory messaging. Everyone has something to sell and an opinion to back it up. This leads to confusion and misunderstanding for clients and technicians alike. In this piece, we are going to break down what the Tone does and does not do.

Toning is perhaps one of the most abused terms in fitness. While we are going to wade into any of the many debates, we can stick to some indisputable facts:

1. Fat loss can not be targeted to one area specifically over another endogenously.  Outside of external techniques such as surgery, laser, cavitation, RF etc., when a person loses fat via natural means, the fat will be lost all over the body, despite the type of exercises performed.

2. Toning can be defined as the ratio of muscle to fat in a given body part.

With these two facts in mind, we can go a little further to describe how toning can be achieved. Firstly we can increase the musculature of the target area, secondly, we can reduce overall body fat, or use external means to reduce body fat in the target area.

An important insight from this understanding is that if the target area has too much adipose tissue (fat), almost no amount of increase in muscle size can compensate to give a toned look. The clearest example of this is the midsection. Regardless of how big a person’s ab muscles may be if they are covered by too much fat, no abs will be seen – the midsection will not be toned.

The primary effect of the Tone machine is the contraction of muscle tissue. Muscle contraction leads to muscle growth (hypertrophy), and larger muscles lead to better definition (toning) in the target area as we have explained. With all this in mind, the proper applications for the machine should start to come to light.

This is however one more caveat: The closer the Tone paddle can be placed to the muscle, the stronger effect it will have – think of the paddle as a magnet, and the muscle as iron – the closer the magnet gets to the iron, the stronger the pull.

This means that a client with a significantly thick layer of adipose tissue between the muscle and the paddle will not receive the same effect as someone leaner.

But keep in mind that fat will need to be shed in order to take full benefit of the tone, that ought to be the primary focus in the meantime.

Before leaving you, we want to stress that in the female beauty space, muscle hypertrophy is almost completely neglected. Many of your clients will not be interested in resistance training (lifting weights) to build muscle, while they may make dietary interventions and other external fat reduction interventions, or even cardiovascular exercise, none of these will improve the muscle side of the toning equation. This can make the Tone machine an extremely effective tool because it can serve as the key missing ingredient for body definition.