Common misconceptions in the world of fitness
Whether you want to tone up, slim down, or boost your mood, you’ve likely taken a stab at tweaking your fitness routine. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of fitness advice out there that won’t help you meet your goals and could actually do more harm than good. Here we bust the most common fitness misconceptions.
Static Stretching Before A Workout Is A Good Warm Up
Static stretches used as a warm up has been drilled into us since primary school. But it’s actually a counter-intuitive move. Static stretching can actually tire out a muscle rather than warming it up and will lead to a small drop in performance rather than an improvement.
Most people stretch before a workout so that they can avoid injury or reduce post exercise stiffness, but static stretching beforehand will have no positive effect on either of these. It may even increase the chance of injury. Instead of static stretching you might want to consider dynamic stretching, some light cardio, or adding some practice sets to your routine.
Not feeling sore means you didn’t get a good workout
Muscle soreness comes from micro tears in muscle, mostly from new exercise or stimulus. You will usually feel a lot of muscle soreness when starting a new programme or exercise regime as your body is pushed beyond what it is used to. These micro tears are necessary for your muscles to grow but require adequate rest and nutrition for your body to repair and re-build your muscle fibres.
The stronger you get and the more your body adjusts to the new stimulus, the less soreness you will experience so that’s not to say you didn’t get a good workout. You shouldn’t be feeling sore after every workout and you certainly shouldn’t feel pain. There’s a fine line between challenging yourself and hurting yourself so make sure to find that right balance.
Cardio is the number one way to lose weight
If your goal is weight loss it’s important to remember that you will likely not only be burning fat but losing muscle mass too. By including weight training into your routine alongside cardiovascular activities you can help to offset the rate of muscle mass loss. Your muscle mass can influence your metabolic rate, which influences how many calories you naturally burn at rest. Therefore, although cardio does appear superior over weight training in regard to initial calories burnt, weight training has been shown to increase the calories burnt after an initial exercise period. Furthermore, weight training also provides lots of other health benefits that you may not get from cardiovascular exercise, such as improving strength and bone density.
You must train body parts separately
Exclusively doing single body-part training is for those who are only interested in looking good and are not interested in functionality or performance. Isolation and single-joint exercises don’t maximize functional strength and may not even be the best strategy for building muscle in the long run. Even if your goal is hypertrophy alone, training muscle groups two to three times per week could be more beneficial than one exhaustive day per body part. If you want muscle that looks great and works for you, include multi-joint, compound moves like squats, deadlifts, lunges, pull-ups, presses and carries in your routine.
Weight training makes women big and bulky
Weight training can make you bulk up if you have the XY chromosome and it’s your distinct intention to build huge muscles. Even then, it’s no easy feat to gain muscle. It takes time and effort, a carefully compiled scientific training program and finely tuned nutritional strategies.
Sit ups and planks will get rid of your belly
There's no such thing as spot reducing or burning fat off a particular body part. It’s physiologically impossible. When you lose body fat, it comes off the body in a predetermined genetic pattern similar to how you gain the fat, except in a reverse order. When your body is in fat-burning mode, fat comes from all over the place - your arms, calves, thighs, abdominals, face, forearms, etc. Spot toning, on the other hand, does work, and resistance exercises will strengthen the targeted muscles.
The best method for reducing overall body fat is the age-old tried and tested combination of cardiovascular training, resistance training and limiting your calorie intake. Results come from doing these three things with persistence and consistency.
What we can take from this
The fitness industry is becoming more and more popular due to how accessible it's been made. Now we can access workouts through social media, fitness applications and youtube videos, meaning that there is more and more information out there regarding diet and fitness. Not all of the information unfortunately is accurate and these myths have always and will likely always be circulating throughout the industry. The best we can do is to read various contrasting articles to widen our knowledge or consult with professionals, in order to meet the targets you've set for yourself successfully.
