I actually disagree with that adivice.
Why tell a woman it's hard for her to get bigger (which it is) and then tell her she has to do 25 reps per set? Likewise although cardio may trim you down it won't make your muscles harder only more visible.
If by "toned" you mean visible muscles then by all means do some type of cardio. But there is no pysiological difference between the way a woman's muscles work and a man's. Men don't do 25 reps so why in the world should a woman.
If by "toned" you mean "tonus" or hardness (and you said toned and hard) then lower reps are actually what produces a harder seeming muscle. High reps to tone up is a big old myth that everyone tells women. I have heard women say the higher reps make there muscles "harder" but I tend to thing it's the blood pump doing that temporarily.
We have a Women's Forum now and I think you should read some of the articles that have been posted there. If you tend to be stiff then you should stretch after all your weitht workouts as Lafit suggested. Especially concentrating on those parts that are tightest. The muscles do "shorten" when you work them and some people's have more of a tendency than others to sort of heal that way as if they don't "remember" there proper length. Stretching will take care of this. If you are used to a pump the stretching will reduce it but THAT is OK cuz the pump doesn't matter and as mentioned the stretching will help recovery.
*Edit*
Originally Posted by
J. Berardi
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).
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When you see someone who's muslces seem to "ripple" during the slightest everyday movement that is part of that neurogenc tone he is speaking of.
