Myths Vs Facts About Exercise One Needs To Know

Sometimes in life, even when we know things better, we often; fall prey to inaccurate or misleading information. We are referring precisely to the commonly-held misbeliefs about exercise. A lot of commonly held myths about exercise just aren’t backed by scientific evidence. People believe the wrong stuff simply because of a lack right information or because they can’t erase their long term held wrong beliefs.

Myths are deeply rooted in people’s minds because negative information gets perpetuated through telling and retelling while the truth remains obscure.

 

In this blog, we’ll try to make facts on exercise deepen and myths fade…

 

MYTH 1 – YOU CAN EAT ANYTHING BECAUSE YOU WORKOUT

If you believe that you spend hours at the gym, so there is no harm in eating whatever you like, you’re wrong. First of all, you don’t workout to eat whatever you want! You workout to get fit. Right or not? Do you expect your car to run on cheap fuel? If you are saying ‘NO’, then the answer to the next question is also ‘NO’. Can you expect your body to perform with the junky fuel? Lengthy workouts don’t entitle you to eat whatever you like. Take, for example, you are training to lose weight, then you must watch out for the calories you are logging and burning daily. Your daily workouts no doubt help burn calories but do not help get rid of the damage done by a less-than-healthy diet. Fast food, processed food, fried foods, and cola provide your body with little to no nutritional value. Such foods neither contribute to muscle building, not for weight loss, they instead make you put on weight. Exercise will increase your appetite, this doesn’t mean you should fall into the pit of binge eating.

When it comes to fitness, exercise and nutrition complement each other (in fact, it is 80% nutrition and 20% workout). Don’t treat exercise as a replacement for a bad diet. You can’t out-exercise a bad diet!

 

MYTH 2 - CARDIO WORKOUTS ARE THE BEST FOR WEIGHT LOSS

Cardio exercises, also known as aerobic exercises get your heart rate up, improve stamina, stability, increase muscle endurance and benefit overall health. Cardio workouts do support your weight loss efforts too, it helps you lose body mass, but don’t forget, when you lose body mass, you are also losing muscle mass. Relying only on cardio workouts is not an effective approach when trying to lose weight. When you practice strength training, you’ll build more muscles, the more muscles you have the higher your metabolism will be. For effective weight loss, your metabolism rates should be higher.

                                                                                              

With cardio workouts, you burn calories only when performing the exercise. Strength training will both help build muscle mass and protect from muscle loss. If you want to torch calories all day long (even when you are resting), do the strength training first followed by cardio workouts.

 

MYTH 3 - STRENGTH TRAINING MAKES YOU BULK UP

This is perhaps one fitness myth that won’t die! Probably the fitness gurus, have come up with the terms ‘toned’ and ‘lean’ to instill courage among women about weight lifting yet the fear remains. First of all, women don’t have the same hormone profile as men, women have low testosterone). To become bulky, one needs to consume a lot of calories, more protein, and have good testosterone levels along with weight lifting. Most people classified as bulky eat a lot of calories alongside strength training which results in a higher body fat percentage and gets them bulky. When you don’t strength train, you’ll lose muscle mass which results in a sluggish metabolism and makes you burn fewer calories at rest.

 

Weight lifting will promote muscle hypertrophy but will not lead to a bulky- looking physique. Weight lifting can help lose fat, and achieve a toned physique. Lifting weight can build muscle, prevent muscle loss, help build bone density and increase the rate at which your body burns calories to keep you at a healthy weight.

 

MYTH 4 – SWEATING MORE MEANS BETTER PERFORMANCE & FAT LOSS

Do you think higher sweat rates mean a better workout and a greater fat loss? During your workouts, a large amount of heat is produced by the contracting muscles as a byproduct of metabolism. Sweat is a natural phenomenon which plays a critical role in the thermoregulation of the body. For those who wear encapsulating gym clothing, body core temperature rises sharply with exercise-heat stress. If you think you and your gym partner do the same workouts but he sweats more than you, you must understand the logic behind sweating. People with more body mass (fat people) sweat more because they have to expend more energy to move their body and they have more body mass that needs cooling. Those who are fitter sweat more because their body is more efficient at cooling down.

 

It’s irrelevant to judge your workout intensity in terms of how much you sweat. Sweat rate should not be considered a parameter to gauge the workout capacity. If two people have the same bodyweight, and one sweat more than the other, their sweat rates will be mostly based on their muscle mass. Sweat rates depend on muscle mass, body size, genetics, temperature, hydration level, gender, age, and fitness levels.

 

MYTH 5 – WORKOUTS MEAN SPENDING HOURS AT THE GYM & LENGTHY WORKOUTS MEAN BETTER WORKOUT

Have you heard of the phrase, something is better than nothing? This is applicable to workouts as well. When it comes to fitness, doing some activity is better than none at all. As per World Health Organization, you must get at least 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise five times a week. The more hours of sedentary being will increase your risk of metabolic problems. If you think you need to spend hours at the gym for efficient workouts, you must change your opinion. Doing HIIT workouts for 30 minutes can be more effective than doing moderate cardio for two hours at the gym. Even brief workouts offer benefits. If you can’t fit in one hour or even half an hour of workouts in a day, you can try squeezing in 10 minutes of simple walk, pushups, rope workouts, climb up stairs. Also, going to gym isn’t the only option for getting good workouts. You can get the benefits of exercise even by working out at home. Benefits of regular exercise include everything from upping your energy levels, burning excess calories, better sleep.

 

The time you spend at the gym is not what matters always, what matters more is the quality of your workout. Working out for too long can be counterproductive as it will increase the production of cortisol, the catabolic hormone that destroys muscle protein. If you want to achieve specific fitness goals like weight loss, muscle building, then you may need to exercise more. What’s more important is to make exercise a part of your daily routine, it doesn’t matter even if your workouts last only for 10 minutes.

 

Don’t be armed with bad information, after all they are not backed by science…

We hope the article has equipped you with enough knowledge to debunk the myths…