Thursday, March 25, 2021

'Toning up Flabby Arms' requires some 'Anabolism' :

'Toning up Flabby Arms' requires some 'Anabolism'
The reasons behind any area of the body that was once firm and taut becoming soft and flabby are two-fold: a loss of muscle and a gain in fat. Muscle atrophies as we age if we don't actively build it. Body fat accumulates with age if we don't adjust eating habits and activity to accommodate a slower metabolism. The combination of these two things, along with slightly looser skin, accounts for what we often refer to as "flabbiness."

What's frequently underemphasized as a cause of 'arm flab', or any bodily flab for that matter, is catabolism (tissue breakdown) of the underlying muscle. The muscle has atrophied with age. For this reason, the effect of "toning up" often requires bodybuilding gains; the muscle only appearing "toned" when lost tissue has been regained.


Unfortunately, many people (women in particular) mistakenly believe that muscular gains will make them appear "bulky" or masculine. If this were true - if weight training could cause bodybuilders (male and female) to "accidentally" gain too much muscle, you wouldn't see tens of thousands of them risking their long-term health with the use of steroids and other bodybuilding drugs. Believe me - I'm certain that competitive bodybuilders dream that the human body would at least be slightly capable of an inadvertent gain of too much muscle. That would put an end to a lot of risky behavior.

This is something you won't hear in many other corners; "toning up" a body part often requires a certain degree of "building" that body part. In other words, technically speaking, there's really no such thing as "toning" a muscle; you either successfully rebuild it or you don't. If you aren't successful in rebuilding it, your flabbiness will return to the area as quickly as it takes for the tight feeling provided by your last exercise session to dissipate. This is why advice containing a regimen of calisthenics (pushups and bodyweight dips) in order to 'tone up flabby upper arms' leaves many adherents with dissatisfying results over the long-run; those exercises don't provide enough 'anabolism' to overcome the insidious onslaught of age-related catabolism.

So, 'toning up underarm flab' will usually require building a bit of triceps muscle.


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