High-intensity, low-volume lifting routines may be great for building muscle, but not for becoming tone. To read more about building your muscles and training to look buff and built, read the article, High Intensity Workouts Are The Way. However, if you are not looking to “get big” or show off your massive “guns,” then high weights with low repetitions is not the way to go.

If you want to tone your muscles and still be strong, then the workout that you want to focus on is using low weights with more reps and sets. Now I do not mean extremely low weights, but enough so that you do not damage your muscles while you are working out. Why do you not want to damage your muscles? Well, if you use enough weight during your workout, the muscles may get damaged. After the damaged muscle rests enough for a full recovery, the muscle ideally will become stronger and bigger. That is why people whose goal is to gain as much muscle mass as possible lift heavy weights while doing short sets.

The key to muscle tone is not to use as much weight, but instead, work out more often. Lifting the benching bar up once and then bringing it back up is one rep and then 10 reps make up one set. When you are trying to tone muscle, it is important to do a lot of sets (3-4) of each exercise. The low weight “reps” create harder contractions, and harder contractions will lead to toner muscles.

When working out, you must make sure that you do not exercise the same body parts every day. Your body needs the rest!