Ep 168 – The Truth About Getting “Toned”

Giacomo:

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of vegan proteins muscles by Brussels Radio. My name is Giacomo.

Dani:

And I’m Dani.

Giacomo:

And this is episode 168.

Dani:

Hey, guys. Welcome back. We didn’t turn on the artificial lights today. We are using daylight, so that lighting might change, but here we are. This is pretty wild. We’re recording it the day before it goes live, which always stresses me out.

Giacomo:

But that’s what y’all said you wanted. You wanted these things not pre recorded. You wanted us to, like, be recording them right around the time you put them out. You found it more interesting, right?

Dani:

Yeah, I don’t know. 24 hours might be cutting it a little close for my liking.

Giacomo:

Why don’t we just do them live?

Dani:

Oh, my God. No, guys, you don’t want to hear the outtakes from these podcasts. I’m sure of that. Oyo yo. So it’s already. It’s Monday, and it’s already, like, a busy week. I don’t know how we’re gonna pull through, but it was a pretty good weekend. We had a birthday party here for my uncle, which was cool. Some extended family showed up with their kids. It was quite a full house we had here on Saturday.

Giacomo:

They were cute. They were looking at our. Wanting to desperately mess around in our gym, and they were like, we wanna have muscles like y’all. And it just. It was nice. It was fun. Cause you get. When you bring someone in and you work from home and you do all this stuff, you get to share that with them as well.

Dani:

Yeah. But then a baby was not being watched for a minute and skinned his foot pretty bad on the treadmill, so that was a little bit sad. But Giacomo didn’t come, so he’s not included in this. We all went to a trampoline park afterwards. That’s what my uncle, my 61 year old uncle wanted to do for his birthday, was for us all to go to a trampoline park.

And I thought it was just going to be trampolines, but there was a lot of other cool stuff there. These crazy obstacle courses that were actually pretty challenging. Like, I don’t know how they’re made for kids because kids couldn’t even reach them. Like, physically they couldn’t reach them. But I was super excited because one of them was this crazy kind of monkey bar ladder, but that ascended.

So, like, each monkey bar was significantly higher than the last one. So you were kind of climbing up via monkey bars, and then once you got more than halfway, the whole thing tipped. So then you were going down and had to go to these rings, and I made it pretty far on that, and I was really very, very pleased with myself. And now I totally want to go back and conquer the obstacle course.

Giacomo:

Is it an adult place as well? Is it a children place where adults can be?

Dani:

Yes, that’s it. It’s a children’s place where adults can be.

Giacomo:

So, like, if I were to go there by myself, that might not look right.

Dani:

Might be a little strange.

Giacomo:

Just a little bit. Darn it.

Dani:

But there is. There’s some pretty fun stuff there, I thought. And the kids obviously had a blast. And most importantly, my uncle had a blast.

Giacomo:

Are we going two weeks from now to check out a bodybuilding show? Why don’t we tell them about all that? I’m sorry. I love spirit of America. We’ve competed at the show, both of us. We’ve watched others compete, and we got a buddy of ours, Ben, who will be up there, and your client, Robin, is going to be up there. So this is going to be pretty exciting.

Dani:

Yeah. We have a lot of cool stuff going on right now.

Giacomo:

Oh, yeah.

Dani:

Yeah. We’re going down to Cape Cod for May 11 to watch this show.

Giacomo:

That’s that drive in theater.

Dani:

I don’t know what he’s talking about.

Giacomo:

Isn’t it a drive through theater halfway up Cape Cod that we went to once?

Dani:

I saw a double feature. I don’t remember.

Giacomo:

Anyways.

Dani:

Anyways, indeed. So I’m very excited to see Ben in his bodybuilding debut. Robin is a client of mine from way back, like, 2016 or 2017. She competed in bikini a bunch of times, and now she’s trying her hand at figure, so that’ll be interesting. She is a super, super inspiring athlete, and I’m really excited to be able to be there in person because I’m not always

able to be there in person for my clients shows, and I’m always kind of bummed when they’re competing, but it’s, like, all the way across country, but she’s gonna be here, so.

Giacomo:

And then Ben, this is his very first time competing, and he’s doing bodybuilding, and he has a whole series of competitions coming up, and then he’s going to level out a little bit and then compete with us as a plant built athlete at Mister America. So I’m super psyched to see what he looks like on stage, actually, and how that all shakes out.

Dani:

Look, he was just here. He literally just left, like, 30 minutes ago from our house, and we were doing some posing stuff in the gym downstairs, and he looks really, really good. Yeah.

Giacomo:

So totally. But that’s not what we’re talking about today.

Dani:

What are we talking about today, Giacomo?

Giacomo:

Well, this is a topic that we want to revisit, and my notes over here have, like, stains on them, and they’re, like, super old. But I had prepared for this a while ago, and I thought, why not we talk? Why not talk about it right now? It’s all about that crazy word that gets thrown out, and it’s mainly targeted towards women. It’s toned. It’s like, you ever hear the word toned and think about, like, a guy getting toned?

Dani:

Yeah, guys say it, too. I mean, guys do say it, but you’re right. It’s largely a word that ladies use because women don’t say, I want to get jacked, I want to get lean. I want to get shredded. I mean, some people do. Some women in our audience definitely do say that. But in general, no, people say, I want to. I want to tone my arms or I want to tone my legs or tone my abs.

Giacomo:

Yeah. What does tone mean to you when you hear that word? What do you think of when a client comes to you versus not what they’re like? How do I put this? You have your own prejudices against the word tone. You must. I mean, I definitely do. I don’t like it. But rather than shame someone that uses that word, and I’ve been doing this for a very long time as well.

In the. Even, like, before this, with the personal training industry, which I used to be involved in, I would hear the word toned, and rather than talk the person down, I would be like, all right, well, they want this. So what is it exactly? When you hear the word tone come out of your client’s mouth, what do you think they actually want?

Dani:

So what they want? What they, I guess, at least think that they want. That sounds so condescending. But hang on, let me get there. What they want is to be firm. Like, they want their body parts to be firm and have a nice shape. That’s what they are certain that they want. What that actually means is that they want to have muscle in the right places and be lean enough to see it. That is, like, the definition of toned.

Giacomo:

Right? And here’s where it starts to get fun. But before we go there, and there will be time for it, let’s go ahead and look at the origins. I did my homework here of the word toned.

Dani:

I did nothing for a change.

Giacomo:

So the word toned was birthed in the seventies in the aerobic jazzercise world in particular, it was coined in a 1982 Jane Fonda workout video.

Dani:

Jane Fonda. Listen, I love Jane Fonda. I think Jane Fonda is an amazing human being, just so we’re clear. So I will forgive her.

Giacomo:

Well, it’s one of those things also, where you’re trying to encourage women to get stronger and put on muscle and you’re trying to fight societal standards. And the way that, I mean, let’s face it, back in the seventies and eighties, were women encouraged to bodybuild, lift, put on muscle? No, it was quite the opposite. There were societal standards when it came to femininity, what was considered attractive, and women were straight up frowned in the gym.

All of it talked down when it came to them, when it came to lifting, bodybuilding, putting on muscles. So now you have this word that literally caused an entire gender to be afraid to get strong and to put muscle on. And when they weren’t, they were shamed for it. And this happened like this, like, way back.

And that’s why I asked, like, do you hear the word tone? And you think because, I mean, things have changed now, but, I mean, this still has, like, some deep, pretty nasty roots in terms of where the word came from and what it caused for an entire gender for, like, decades.

Dani:

I mean, I want to say that, like, toned in this context might have started then, but, like, doctors, like medical doctors, do refer to what they call muscle tone. Like, if someone has low muscle tone, which I’ve never totally understood, because to me, that just means they have low muscle mass. Right? That’s got to be what that means.

Giacomo:

Interesting.

Dani:

I’ve seen it in people’s charts. Maybe not anymore, but, like, historically, like, oh, one of the diagnoses is, like, low muscle tone that has just mean, low muscle mass, right?

Giacomo:

Yeah. Yeah.

Dani:

So to be toned, to me, I guess that would just mean to have muscle mass. But women, particularly back then, would hear muscle, and women didn’t want muscle. Like, that’s not what women were setting out to do. So they thought, like, when they heard the word muscle, that’s not what they wanted. But the look that they were desiring required muscle, whether they called it that or not.

Giacomo:

Exactly. And you even, like, think about, was there a female lead pumping iron? Remember that?

Dani:

Yeah, there was. It was pumping iron, too.

Giacomo:

And it was such a. It was like fringe kind of. Right? Like, it wasn’t as celebrated as.

Dani:

Was it pumping iron, too? Or am I thinking of generation iron, too?

Giacomo:

You might be thinking of generation iron, too, but I’m thinking of pumping iron where it wasn’t about Schwarzenegger and a male dice dominated gym culture where women were hyper sexualized. There was one where it was female dominated, and there’s a rise up.

Dani:

I actually don’t think I ever saw that one.

Giacomo:

Yeah. But it was, like, considered so cutting edge just to give some more context as far as to, like, how one side and one dimensional things were when it came to gym culture in general. I mean, women basically had to work to just be able to promote muscle building and changing their shape, which, ironically, is what you actually need to do to become toned.

Dani:

I would actually say that it’s really only in the last decade or maybe like, 15 years or so that. No, really, I would say the last decade that it’s become normalized, much more normalized for women to want to be building muscle, for women to say out of their mouths, like, I want to build muscle. And I particularly noticed this, like, before and after Covid. So I was actually talking to somebody in the gym the other day. So I have cat hair everywhere.

Giacomo:

It gets in my nose usually.

Dani:

I was actually talking to somebody at the gym yesterday, saying, before COVID when I went to that gym, there were so many times where I would be the only woman on the weight room floor, or maybe there would be, like, two of us. And now when I go there, there are not just a lot of women, but, like, a lot of really strong, fit women. Like, they are not showing up there to lift little pink dumbbells. They are doing some stuff. I saw a woman deadlift 405 pounds the other day.

Giacomo:

See? And when I was lifting, and I’m dating myself here, but the early two thousands and the late nineties, when I saw a woman barbell bench pressing or barbell back squatting. And it wasn’t just me. It was, in the best way possible, an eyesore, because they were the only one doing it. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I.

You’re lifting a set of wheels. 45s. For those of you who don’t already know, when I say wheels, I’m referring to literally 45 pound plates on an olympic barbell. And I remember, I never forgot the sight because it was such an anomaly. It was such, like, it was not the norm back then at all.

Dani:

I guess when it comes to the term toned, what people mean when they say it is they want to have muscle in the right places and they want to be lean enough to see it. That is all it means. Build muscle and lose some body fat. That is all the toned actually means.

Giacomo:

I did another, and I went back to, like, look at my notes again and just kind of crawled the web with some AI and whatnot to try to, like, figure out where I came from with this. It doesn’t really matter, but point, I think. I think when I was searching for, like, the male version of the word tone, do you know what I came up with? Nope. Buff.

Dani:

Okay.

Giacomo:

And it’s just interesting, right? Just to show, like, even. Even crawling the Internet, you could see that the words definitely were gendered for a very long time. But. Well, but on a different note, on a positive note, I did notice that it’s not. That it’s not really that way anymore.

Dani:

But they definitely have it kind of. It is in the ways. The ways that people train. Like, men are not obsessed with training their glutes. Women are not obsessed with training their chests. Like, there’s still differences, I would say. And, you know, that’s fine. Like, whatever, right? I don’t necessarily think that’s, like, a sexist thing, per se, but, yeah, you’re right.

I definitely think that it’s rooted in some. Some. Yeah, some misogyny, big time, I guess, for sure. I think back when I started doing this, if somebody said the word toned, I’d probably scoff at them. Way to tell me you don’t know what you’re talking about. Such a jerk. Such a. I mean, I didn’t mean to be, but it was just like, oh, it was just to me. When someone said that, I would just be like, oh, well, clearly you are uneducated and let me school you. And, you know, that was many, many,

many years ago, and I’ve since realize, like, that helps nobody to have that kind of attitude. I knew what they meant. I knew exactly what they meant. I didn’t need to be a dink about it. And now if somebody says it, I just know that they mean they want to build muscle and they want to lose body fat. The hard part is kind of convincing them that building muscle is an important part of the process to achieve the desired outcome that they want.

Giacomo:

How do you do that?

Dani:

I just simply explain it like that. Fat cannot just turn into muscle, which is what so many people think when you hear toned, like, oh, I just want to tone this up. You think you’re just turning this into something solid. Like, one tissue just turns into another kind of tissue. And that’s not how it works.

We can build and lose muscle. We can gain and lose fat, but you don’t turn one thing into another. So it’s two separate processes that have to happen and sometimes not simultaneously. So sometimes it has to be like two different phases to get that quote unquote toned look.

Giacomo:

And you have to be careful with the flow of the conversation, too, because when someone is and they don’t realize it’s scared to build muscle and scared to put on body weight to build muscle, you really have to pick and choose how you move to a conversation with that, with your clients. You don’t want to scare them off. And you also have to work through years of undoing in terms of, like, what they’re willing to do and what they want versus what they, meaning, like, what they need to do

versus what they think they need to do. It’s tough. It shouldn’t be like this. But again, like, there’s, like, some deep rooted stuff there. I mean, you still have female only sections of the gym, for example. And, you know, I guess, I suppose in one respect I could see how. And I don’t want to play devil’s out here because I don’t like it. But I could understand, like, the need for safety and the need for space.

Dani:

You know, like, oh, I totally know why there’s women’s only sections of the gym. Because women are afraid of being ogled.

Giacomo:

Right.

Dani:

While they’re lifting.

Giacomo:

But the part that I take particular issue with is, what do you see equipment wise?

Dani:

Well, usually less weight than the men have or the open floor or not.

Giacomo:

The same weights at all. Like, they don’t actually have barbells or dumbbells. And that just pisses me off. Like, that. I don’t. Like.

Dani:

Yeah, yeah, that’s true.

Giacomo:

Yeah.

Dani:

But I do understand why they exist.

Giacomo:

Exactly. It’s just a matter of, you know, it’s gotta be an equal playing field as far as, like, what women have access to while they’re, you know, getting, quote unquote, I’m getting salty toned. Oh, God.

Dani:

Well, I mean, I just, as a side note, well, I guess this could be speaking to me as well. Like, I think I’ve noticed that men are less ogly now. Like, they’re not ogling everybody in the gym. Five years ago they were. So either. Either men are actually ogling people less, or I am just not as ogle worthy as I used to be.

Giacomo:

I don’t think it’s that.

Dani:

I do actually think that that has changed. Like, yeah, I. Which is nice. It’s a nice change. I appreciate the change. Cause I used to get ready to fight people in the gym. Like, four other women. Like, I’d see dudes ogling other women at the gym, and I’d be like, giacomo go intimidate that guy.

Giacomo:

Yes.

Dani:

Remember?

Giacomo:

Yes. Yes, I do.

Dani:

Hey, is that guy bothering you? But, yeah, I just. I don’t know. I don’t really see that anymore, which is pretty cool. Hope. I hope it’s pretty cool and doesn’t mean something else.

Giacomo:

Yeah, I think some of the ego and. And the, like, the male territory in the gym is sort of, like, chilled a little bit, and. But maybe I’m wrong, because I just get into my own world, and I can’t possibly see everything that you experience because I’m busy lifting. But I don’t know. I mean, do you see, like, guys feeling like you’re, like, young men, I should say, or teenagers feeling, like, intimidated by you if you’re strong? Oh, like they like that used to. It still happens.

Dani:

Yes. What I’m talking about is, like, they’re not ogling in, like, a hey, baby kind of way anymore, which is great because that’s the creepiest part there is.

Giacomo:

There’s still, like, the weird competition idea.

Dani:

Yeah, a little bit.

Giacomo:

Should be stronger than you, but I think.

Dani:

I don’t think. I mean, I don’t know. Don’t. Don’t guys do that with each other a little bit, too? I don’t know. I have no idea. But, yeah, there are.

Giacomo:

I guess so.

Dani:

There are definitely still some men that if you’re lifting even close to what they’re lifting, they’re kind of a little bit freaked out by that. If you’re lifting more than what they’re lifting, sometimes they’re very unhappy about that. But, like, whatever. I don’t know. That doesn’t bother me as much as just being a creep. The faster somebody can get on board with the concept that they have to possibly go through those phases.

Cause a lot of people will really dig their heels in. They are certain that they are one of the small percentage of people that is in the position to both build muscle and lose fat at the same time, which is a small percentage of people that are in a position to be able to do that. But everybody’s convinced it’s them. And if they rather just went into a muscle building phase without freaking out every single time they gained an ounce, they would end up in the place they wanted to be.

Faster. It might, you know, it feels like taking a step back before you take a step forward visually. But ultimately, that is one of the most important parts because you can try to do it the other way around. You can lose weight. And for some people, like, just getting leaner, just getting leaner alone may actually improve their look aesthetically, but I think it’s still gonna fall short of what they hoped for as the end result.

Giacomo:

The whole thing is just tricky, because even though, and you’re right, we’re moving away from that idea that women can’t be muscular, women can’t train in the gym, et cetera, et cetera, it’s much more culturally accepted. It’s becoming the norm in gym culture, and when it comes to creating a certain shape and a certain look with your body.

But there’s still that. The confusion and the fear around it and all the years spent not focusing on training like that and eating in a certain way to build muscle. And you. You see it like, I don’t know. I see it with my clients. I see it with people who are looking to work with us. It’s. I would say it’s

honestly, way more than 50% of women who come my way are afraid to put on weight, afraid to do what it takes to put on muscle.

Like, they want it. Conceptually, they get it, but they fear doing what it takes to get there. It’s not that whole buy in thing with the client where it’s like, get them lean, and then they’ll get hooked and they’ll want to build the body they want. It’s not like that. It’s more than that. It’s the fact that they’re literally, they just want to.

I don’t want to say be smaller, but that’s what winds up happening when they don’t focus enough on muscle building and putting enough weight on to gain muscle. It’s a really hard sale. You don’t see that with men as much you do see it with men. It happens, but you don’t see it as much for sure.

Dani:

No, you don’t see it. Not everybody needs to gain weight to gain muscle. You know what I mean? Yeah, not everybody does. True, but I hear what you’re saying. But it’s like trying to convince somebody to put 70% of their paycheck in a high yield savings account, saying like, no, but it’s going to be more money if you do it this way. What’s another one?

Like a stock market? But the stock market can fail, so it’s a bad example. So I’m using a high yield savings account as an example, but, like, try to convince somebody to take 70% of their paycheck and put it in a high yield savings account, because it’s going to make them more money than it’s sitting in a regular bank account where they can touch it whenever they want, you’re gonna have a really hard time doing that, even if it’s factually true.

And I feel like it’s very similar with being like, no, you might see the scale go up before you see the scale go down. And in certain cases, you know, let’s say someone is like, you know, technically, like, thin, technically skinny when they come to us, but they say they want to get toned. They might just need to build muscle. They might not need to go through a leaning out phase at all.

They might just need to build muscle. In which case, the only way they’re going to get that quote unquote toned look is to gain weight. Like, there is no gain weight than lose weight. Like they might just need to gain weight. And that is also a very hard sell for people. But, like, there is no way around it. And, I mean, we see people spin their wheels in this particular place, sometimes for years, just refusing to see the scale going up, but also just crawling at a snail like pace

towards their goals and frustrated that they’re not getting there faster. Yeah, the answer is, don’t be afraid to build muscle. Like, that’s if you want to get toned, don’t be afraid to build muscle because that’s all that it really means to, is building muscle and having low enough body fat to be able to see it. All right, everybody, thank you so much for tuning into another episode of vegan proteins muscles by Brussels Radio.

Feel free to reach out to us on Facebook, Instagram, youtubeeganproteins, and musclesbybrussels. If you are interested in coaching, go to veganproteins.com comma, fill out a coaching application or you can just shoot us an email coacheganproteins.com and you will hear back from us very quickly. Once again, my name is Dani and Im Jackal and we will talk to you soon.

Giacomo:

He’s taking me for granted again.