2. If you want to be lean, sexy, and hard, you should train HEAVY.
Yeah, I know what they told you, lighten the load and go for the burn... hogwash. To comprehend why this is indeed nonsense, we have to understand a few things about muscle tone in general. There are two types of muscle tone; myogenic and neurogenic. Don’t get thrown off by the sciency words; the first simply refers to your muscle tone at rest. It is affected by the density of your muscles; the greater the density of your muscles, the harder and firmer you will appear. Heavy training increases your myogenic tone through the hypertrophy (growth) of the contractile proteins myosin and actin (myosin and actin are by far the most dense components of skeletal muscle).
Training in higher rep ranges promotes more sarcoplasmic (fluid) hypertrophy, which in turn yields a "softer" pumped look. If you want to be hard, firm, tight, etc, the latter is certainly not the way to go. The second aspect of a muscles' tone is neurogenic tone, or the tone that is expressed when movements or contractions occur. Again, lower rep training comes out on top as training with heavy loads will increase the sensitivity of alpha and gamma motor neurons, thus increasing neurogenic tone when conducting even the simplest of movements (i.e. walking, extending your arm to point, etc).
Finally, as alluded to in point number one, training with heavy loads and low volume (sets x reps) is the best way to get hard and strong, but not big. Muscular hypertrophy is generally a response to a high volume work output; therefore, by keeping the sets and reps low with heavy training, you wont have to fear getting overly big (this really isn't even an issue due to the physiological reasons mentioned earlier).
Why then is it commonly recommended that women train with lighter loads? Well, there are a couple reasons. First, there is the typical stereotype that women are weak, fragile creatures who can't handle anything more than pushups on their knees and bicep curls with pink dumbbells. Try telling that to 123 lb Mary Jeffrey who bench presses a world record 275 lbs and you'll likely get smacked upside the head with a 45 lb plate. Give me a break. Secondly, the belief that high-rep training increases muscle tone is 100% myth.
Strength training guru and Muscle Media contributor Pavel Tsatsouline explains this quite nicely, "Your muscle fibers are like mouse traps... they go off by themselves, but need energy to be reset to contract again. A dead body is out of ATP, the energy compound that relaxes the muscles... A high rep workout exhausts ATP in your muscle and leads to temporary hardness... The only way to make such 'tone' last is by killing yourself." Hmmm, sounds like fun to me. Pavel goes on to note, "You better get on a first name basis with heavy dead[lift]s if you are after a hard butt!" This brings us to our third and final point.
Just one comment I haven`t seen covered yet do not work abs every day like any other muscle they need time to rest and recover.
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