Women: Reducing triceps and chest area

The only way to spot reduce fat is surgery.

Fat loss is a systemic process and you will usually lose fat in places in the reverse order you gained it. If you gained it on your arms first, you will lose it there fast.

You can try "toning" until the cows come home, but you are better off hitting a treadmill and dieting and reducing systemic fat. Toning is a marketing term for revealing more muscle by fat loss so that you can see definition, and the fitness industry has spun this term into a gadget and group exercise class sales pitch. Think of it this way, you can tone the crap out of the muscle under the fat, but you will not see the results as the fat is still hiding it.

Under arm flab is a trouble spot for women, especially as they hit middle age and beyond.

Toning is a marketing term for revealing more muscle by fat loss so that you can see definition, and the fitness industry has spun this term into a gadget and group exercise class sales pitch.

You worded this (and the rest of your comment) perfectly. Thank you!

Weight lifting session 3 * a week and high intensity cardio twice a week. Also a well balanced diet low in sugar and fat. I would recommend Chalean Extreme.

I had the same problem when I lost weight a few years ago - my arms were still looking horrible. When I got past a certain weight, they all of a sudden looked fabulous and I couldn't buy enough tank tops!

The only exercise I did for them were pushups! The rest of it was just weight loss...

For those who say they can't do pushups, try doing them against a wall. Stand a couple of feet from the wall, feet apart to shoulder length and push up that way. I CAN do them that way and I think it is really helping my 53 yr old bat wings.

It's not all doom and gloom though, and I 'd hesitate to ecommend surgery except as a last resort.

Plenty of triceps exercise, with weights (extensions, kick bakcs, narrow press ups, dips....) and after a few months (combined with a good diet) and you should see some results.

But wouldn't that make me more mascular?

You can always stop doing them when your arms are the way you want them. You will not suddenly wake up with man arms It would take a lady years of devoted effort to get big manly arms. Testosterone for muscle size in ladies is about 30 times less effective then in a man, and it takes men a long time to build big arms.

You can try "toning" until the cows come home, but you are better off hitting a treadmill and dieting and reducing systemic fat. Toning is a marketing term for revealing more muscle by fat loss so that you can see definition, and the fitness industry has spun this term into a gadget and group exercise class sales pitch. Think of it this way, you can tone the crap out of the muscle under the fat, but you will not see the results as the fat is still hiding it.

Actually, toning burns fat.. because muscle burns more calories then fat. So instead of killing herself on a treadmill, she can lift weights 2-3 times a week, and see more fat loss (and definition) then she would be by doing the treadmill alone.

Doing the treadmill alone is going to make her skinny fat because muscle and fat will be consumed by the body. If she does weights, she will preserve some of that muscle tone and thus look smaller/slimmer.

What most people consider toning, based on the marketing hype, is shaping and defining the muscle without increasing its size.

-Myth buster - You cannot reshape a muscle

As well - if she is toning, in the marketing sense, she is not gaining muscle size but just changing its shape and "defining" it, and therefor not getting the calorie eating benefit

Our muscles, all of us, are already incredibly well defined and come "toned' already. We just have to reveal them, they are hidden by body fat, we can make the bigger if we make bigger muscles a training goal, but you never have to "tone" them. Our designer did that work already.

You are right though, weight lifting + cardio is far far better then cardio alone. My advice was to prove a point. Toning, endless reps of some exercise that isolates some small muscle group, is pretty much a waste of time.

There is a reason the most toned athletes on earth do not spend any time toning.