First, theres no such thing as "toning", thats just some annoying little word personal trainers started using to advertise to people who dont know any better. There are really only 3 things you can do in regards to body composition: gain fat or muscle, lose fat or muscle, or maintain fat and muscle. Being "toned" just means having a lower bodyfat %. Which brings me to the reason you never see results: you dont pay any attention to your diet. Having nice arms is a result of the right combination of muscle and fat. Muscle will come from doing the right exercises while eating more calories then your body burns in a day, while trimming away excess fat will come from eating less then your body needs in a day. Obviously, you can only do one of these things at a time. Expect to get a little rounder around the midsection in the process of adding muscle, but always with the knowledge that this is all necessary and temporary until you achieve a solid level of muscle. Then you cut down and if all goes well, there are those perfect arms. The right exercise for you is going to depend on what kind of equipment you have access to, if you have access to free weights, then overhead presses, rows, bench presses and face pulls will be your friends. Isolation work might be helpfull, but youll probably find those exercises to be enough, at least at first. If no freeweights (and you should actually still be doing these either way) chins ups (with palms facing towards you, palms away omits alot of bicep involvement), dips, push-ups, and inverted rows (google) should be okay.
Another thing, you say :
"I have a treadmill in my house for cardio or I can jog around my neighborhood, but I have nothing that is effective for arms."
Which seems to imply that jogging is effective for something. This is wrong, and i hope to god your intention isnt to "tone" your legs either, cause i dont think id be able to handle that. The fact is, long slow distance training is a really crappy way of improving cardiovascular work capacity, or v02 max. You could easily accomplish more in 20 min of high intensity interval training then you could in 1 hour of long slow distance training. So with that in mind i would say HIIT all the way. HIIT can be different things, like sprint intervals (all out effort for 1 min, rest 2 repeat = 1 set) or bodyweight/barbell complexes (5 pull ups 10 push ups 15 squats as many round in 20 min), anything involving an intense effort and then a short rest /repeat.
"the ability to target muscles very specifically with free weights will allow you to exercise a lot of control over how your arms will shape up, so i'd go for some dumbbells myself "
Seemingly, seemingly, to the untrained eye. But isolation exercises arent very taxing to the CNS, and so the endocrine response is much more blunted then it would be if you were doing pull ups for biceps, or presses for triceps, because they involve much more of the body. If your saying isolations will promote symmetry, well, complete elbow flexion is complete elbow flexion, and the degree of contraction doesnt really differ enough between a pull up and a curl to make a difference to a newbie.
