Common Fitness Myths & Realities

The fitness industry is sadly full of misconceptions and misinformation. Some of these things are what used to be believed to be true, has since been proven false but the general public have not caught onto yet. Others are information that the corporate giants help proliferate so that the public will buy whatever products they happen to be selling. In both cases, convincing the majority otherwise is very difficult. Here we examine some of the mis-truths out there in the fitness industry:

Training

Myth: Aerobics are the best way to lose weight and get in shape.

Truth: Aerobics are a poor way of improving your physique. On their own they will do very little to improve body fat levels or muscle tone. Go by any aerobics class in the world then do so again a year later and you’ll see that half of the class will have dropped out and those remaining from the start still look exactly the same. That’s not to say that aerobics are useless, they can improve your cardiovascular health considerably, they’re just not a good way to improve your body. So why do so many people still do so much aerobics and why do the health clubs still run so many classes? Simple - it makes the fitness industry millions of pounds, that’s why. Get 50 - 100 people in one room at a time, charge £3 a time, pay a 17 year old school leaver with minimum fitness qualifications £5 to get them to bounce around for an hour and you’ve made up to £300 for virtually nothing. The fitness industry knows aerobics are poor for shaping the body, but it’s too good a money spinner to stop.

Myth: So long as I diet, I don’t need to train to lose fat.

Truth: If you lose weight by diet alone, you will lose weight, but most of it won’t be fat. At most 20-40% might be fat, but for the most part you will actually lose lean body weight. If you lose lean tissue then your body weight will drop but your fat weight will stay the same so your percentage of body fat will actually rise. This means you actually get technically ‘fatter’.

Myth: Cardiovascular exercise is the only way to burn body fat.

Truth: Perhaps the best way to burn body fat is actually training with weights. Training with weights can burn 700 calories in an hour if done properly and will help tone and build your muscles. This is not the only way that lifting weights burns calories and hence burns fat. Muscle requires more calories to survive than fat does. If you put on one pound of muscle, that pound will burn an extra 40 calories a day to survive. That’s 40 more calories a day without even exercising! So you’re burning extra fat while doing nothing! Over a year that pound of muscle will burn an additional 14600 calories a year. It takes 3500 calories to burn a pound of fat, so by gaining a pound of muscle you will burn an extra four pounds of fat a year – doing nothing! Good deal don’t you think? One pound of muscle isn’t very much at all. Imagine how much more fat you will burn with five pounds of extra muscle - ten pounds - more! That’s more fat than you’d burn sitting on a stationary bicycle for hours on end. And remember those calories counters on cardio equipment? Rubbish! Divide that figure they show by four and you’re getting close- those counters measure mechanical calories not the thermal calories the body uses!

Myth: If women lift weights they get big, muscular and masculine.

Truth: Women do not have enough of the male steroid – testosterone – in their bodies naturally to grow big muscles. This myth comes from seeing female bodybuilders who take steroids and become masculine. If normal, non steroid taking, women lift weights as prescribed in a good exercise program they will tone and firm their muscles, become leaner and actually look more feminine.

Myth: Weight training workouts are long, boring and tortuous.

Truth: Any workout is what you make of it. If you put your heart into it and perform the exercises correctly and within your ability then weight training can be very enjoyable. Weight training sessions don’t need to be long. In fact they are better if kept to 45 minutes or less. For many people two or three 30 to 45 minute sessions a week will work wonders.

Myth: If I want to train, I need to go to an expensive, health club chain.

Truth: Many smaller gyms offer just as good a training experience as large health clubs, but for more reasonable prices and without minimum term contracts

Myth: If I want personal training or a fitness program, I need to go to a big health club because they have the best instructors.

Truth: In reality, the larger health clubs actually tend to have the least qualified instructors. Becoming an instructor is very easy these days, with the abundance of ‘cash cow’ weekend courses where anyone who can afford the course gets the qualification. These raw, inexperienced instructors are very attractive to chain health clubs, because they will work for lower wages. Independent gyms and fitness centres, on the other hand, are generally run by people who have years of experience, take great pride in what they do and the results they achieve. Ever been to a big health club chain and got a program using exclusively machines? That’s because many of their instructors don’t know how to safely perform free weight exercises. Plus there is less risk of injury on machines and by keeping you to these they lower their risk of facing insurance claims. Having worked for probably the most well known chain in England, I can tell you that the programs they give to members vary very little from one to another. How can this be right? How can you give the same program to a twenty year old male and a forty five year old female? Believe me, I’ve seen it done. I used to work with instructors who never used barbells or dumbbells so never included them in the programs they wrote. Bear in mind that this was at one of the best clubs of this particular chain as well!

Myth: Professional bodybuilders make the best trainers and if I follow their routines in the magazines I’ll get the same physique as them.

Truth: Professional bodybuilders are uniquely gifted individuals whose genetic distribution of muscle fibres are greatly superior to the average person and is usually improved even further by chemical assistance. What works for them, more often than not won’t work for normal people. In reality they can often make the worse trainers because they don’t know how to effectively train normal people who have an average amount of muscle fibres and normal recovery rates and don’t take steroids.

Myth: Only beginners need personal training.

Truth: Even personal trainers need personal training! A good personal trainer can correct mistakes that you can’t see, help you train more intensely and effectively, suggest alterations and routines that you wouldn’t think of, and give you impartial views on your progress. Have you been training with weights for a long time but have hit a rut? Have you tried periodization? It consists of a several training periods put together, that work the muscles using different techniques (power, endurance, circuits, bodybuilding) to shock the muscles into further growth. Been exercising for years but can’t shift those last few inches? Been doing hundreds of situps? Forget them and learn the most effective way of training the stomach and why being able to see your six pack has very little to do with the training itself and more to do with nutrition.

Nutrition

Myth: If I starve myself I’ll lose weight and get lean.

Truth: If you starve yourself you’ll lose a little weight to begin with, but since it’ll all be muscle you’ll actually have a slightly higher body fat percentage. Then your metabolism will drop drastically and when you resume normal eating you’ll put on a large amount of fat.

Myth: I need to eat less often to get slim.

Truth: You need to eat MORE often to get slim. Eating more often will raise your metabolic rate so you’ll burn more calories all day long. The western way of eating two or three large meals a day is not a healthy way to live. Look at animals – the ones who eat only a few large meals a day are generally fat (e.g. pigs) whilst those that graze are lean (e.g. horses). By cutting your meal sizes in two, but eating twice as often (five or six small meals a day) you use your calories much more effectively and less will be stored as fat. The body can only process so much of what you eat at any one time. Anything over this is stored as fat, that’s why you should eat little and often.

Myth: To lose fat I need to go to a slimming club or fat loss clinic.

Truth: The only pounds you’ll lose permanently from these places are those from your wallet. A few years ago, in America, the four main fat loss clubs were criminally indicted by congress and charged with unfair practices. The same thing should happen over here, but our legal system isn’t strong enough to tackle these kinds of issues. Slimming clubs make their money by getting members and making them keep coming back. They turn their members into what is called yo-yo dieters, by putting them on crash diets that they can only manage for a few weeks. After this few weeks they resume normal eating and end up back where they started or often worse. During the congress trial, the following example was used: A man went to one of the indicted clubs weighing 200lbs with 30% bodyfat. This means he only weighed 140lbs (ten stones) without his fat. After following the club’s program he lost 30lbs in six weeks. Not bad you may think, but his bodyfat remained at 30% so he now only has 119lbs of lean weight. In other words he may have lost 9lbs of fat but he lost 21lbs of muscle and remained just as unhealthy. After finishing the six weeks he returned to normal eating and before he knew it he was back up to his old weight but now with 35% of body fat. So the end results was that for over $400 he had lost ten pounds of muscle and gained ten pounds of fat. Slimming clubs and fat loss clinics are not smart places to go to get in shape.

Myth: My meals should all be of equal size.

Truth: When you eat a meal, first think about what you are going to do in the next few hours. If you’re about to have a nap then you only need a small number of calories. If you’re going to the gym you may need as many as 800 or more. Consider what would happen if you did the opposite. If you ate 800 calories then slept, you’d use up to around 300 then store the rest as fat. If you ate 100 calories then went to the gym and burnt up 700 calories, then your body would use the 100 from food then would have to break up 600 from your body (most likely from your muscles). Each meal should correlate with what your activity levels will be for the next few hours wherever possible.

Supplements

Myth: All health supplements do exactly what they say on the can.

Truth: A number of supplements are ineffective and some are plain scams. Many supplements claim that they have been proved to be stronger than the steroid dianabol. These claims always reference one freak study on dianabol that resulted in no muscle gains in its’ subjects. It neglects to mention the many other studies that show steroids work extremely well, but suddenly every new supplement is using this one study to claim that it is stronger than steroids. Nothing is ever stronger than steroids, but they are both illegal and dangerous. When reading articles on supplements always consider the source of the material and what’s in it for them for you to believe what they are saying. Remember a few years ago there was a load of people saying how great soya protein was? Do you think it might have had something to do with a whey protein shortage at that time?

Myth: All supplements are useless.

Truth: Many supplements work very well. So long as you choose a good manufacturer you can get some great products. Whey proteins, weight gainers, meal replacements, fat burners and multivitamins are the safest bets, but there are many other innovative products that work.

Myth: Women don’t need supplements, only bodybuilders use them.

Truth: Women absolutely need or could use supplements. Meal replacement powders and bars in particular can make life so much easier. If you’re going to follow our advice of six meals a day, it’s much easier to fill your quota by using meal replacements for two of the meals. The ones made by sports supplement companies are considerably better and more nutritious than those made by fat loss companies. Getting all of the vitamins and minerals you need can be difficult sometimes; supplements can help you out with that. There are also several excellent fat burners in our store that can aid your physique goals also.

June 22nd, 2007