When it comes to losing fat, and even gaining muscle, people tend to look immediately to the media for the ‘newest product’ to hit the market that will help them shed those extra kilos. They look for a quick and easy way to get it done in the shortest amount of time, with the least amount of effort possible.

The problem with this, is that the media and companies market their products, making these outrageous claims which the majority of people fall so easily for. This just perpetuates the stereotypes and makes it harder and harder for the public to know the ‘truth.’

Hopefully after reading this, you should be a bit more enlightened with regards to these 4 common fitness myths which many people are not aware of.

1. The magic formula exists

“The secret to success is… no secret. It’s called work your ass off and find a way to add more value to peoples lives than anyone else does!” ~ Anthony Robbins

There is no magic formula. There is no quick and easy way to get what you want. Sure some people manage to develop some aspects quicker than others, but remember we all have our own strengths and we shouldn’t compare our progress to other peoples. Just ensure you are getting better and better each day. It’s YOU versus YOU. At the end of the day it’s all about trying, and putting in the effort on a consistent basis and never giving up when it gets tough.

 2. The one perfect diet/training programme

Too often people read magazines and articles and want to see the exact training programmes and diets of some of the big named athletes in the hope that if they follow those programmes to the T, they will work for them just as they have worked for those athletes. Unfortunately there is no, one perfect diet or training programme. If there was we could all just follow Phil Heath’s gym routine and diet and we would all be huge.

Each person is different in every aspect, from the way each one of us looks, to the way we each react to certain exercises and foods. So what’s the answer? There is no straight cut answer.

There are basic principles which everyone can follow when it comes to exercises and eating right, but for the most part you have to figure out, through experimentation, what works best for you. Your diet and training programme needs to be specifically tailored for your body and your goals.

The easiest example to take into account is your weight. If you weigh, let’s say 70 kilogrammes, you cannot just suddenly start eating the amounts of food that a 100 kg bodybuilder eats and expect the same results as him. Well you can but you would most likely end up gaining a lot of extra fat. So keep this in mind when putting together an eating plan or gym routine for yourself.

3. Muscle can turn into fat

Let’s get something straight. Fat and muscle are 2 independent tissues. Fat is fat and muscle is muscle. One cannot turn into the other. So many people tend to see big bodybuilders and immediately make the comment “Oh no, when he gets old all that muscle is going to turn into fat, so he better be careful becoming so muscular.” Building and losing muscle are both individual processes, just as is gaining and losing fat.

So for instance, you can build/maintain muscle and lose fat, or you can slowly continue to build muscle while keeping your fat level the same. The point to see here is that each is an individual process which you have to enable and force your body to do, by adjusting your training and diet to suit the process that you want to take place.

So the reason why some bodybuilders become fat when they are old is most commonly due to them stopping their training, or their training intensity drops significantly. The result is that they start to lose some of their muscle mass, and they then start to gain some body fat since they are not training enough to burn through the amount of calories which they ingest over a period of time.

4. Spot reduction is easy

Spot reduction is the ability to lose fat in a precise area or part of one’s body by doing muscle specific exercises for the targeted area. So for example, many women say they want a flatter tummy, and immediately they want to do endless amounts of sit ups and crunches in the hope of shedding that belly fat. Unfortunately that does very little in losing that unwanted fat.

What needs to be understood, is that when you perform those exercises (e.g. sit ups for abs, or even bicep curls for biceps) you are working that specific MUSCLE. You cannot ‘exercise fat.’ So what you are doing is actually working and ultimately strengthening and building your targeted muscle.

To lose fat you need to control your diet and your calorie expenditure so that you burn off more calories than you take in. So in your quest of burning off that belly fat, those sit ups and crunches are not burning that many calories to really make such an impact to lose that fat. Losing fat needs to be seen as an overall progression. What this means is, you cannot really pinpoint on your body where you want to lose fat from. You have to gradually reduce your calories and increase your energy expenditure in order to burn off those excess calories. And in turn your genetic make up will mostly determine where you lose fat first and in what order you continue to lose from.

The upside is that, you can enhance your shape and develop your muscles in the process by weight training your specific muscles.

As Arnold Schwarzenegger said, “Barbells are the tools in which we use to train and sculpt our bodies.”

The post 4 Of The Most Common Fitness And Training Myths, Debunked! appeared first on FitNish.com.

When starting out with anything in life, we never truly know exactly what we are doing, but as time goes on we adapt and start to learn and get better and better at it. Practice does make perfect after all. This same thing applies with training.

A lot of young guys join a gym wanting to grow big and muscular but have no clue what exactly to do to achieve this. There is a lot more to it than just getting yourself to the gym each day and doing a few exercises.

Here we highlight a few of the common mistakes new guys and girls seem to make when starting out on their ‘get fit’ journey. This in turn should help you avoid these pit falls and hopefully save you a lot of time and get you on the right track quicker.

Training too often

Many guys starting out are not aware of the fact that your muscles, just like your body and mind, need rest in order to grow and recuperate. You need to train them hard in the gym and then allow them to recover and grow by giving them some time to rest. So be sure to give yourself at least one to two days off from weight training a week.

Mimicking professional bodybuilders training programmes

I have fallen in to this trap many times. You read one of these famous fitness magazines, and find Arnold Schwarzenegger’s (or some other big bodybuilder’s) training routine, and immediately think, if you follow it you will transform your body into his. You need to understand that he has adapted his training programme to suit his needs. For example he knows what he needs to improve on in his body, what his diet is, how much recovery he needs and what his goals are, and thus designs his workout to compliment his specific requirements. Thus most of his requirements will be different to yours, and chances are he will be taking some form of supplementation or anabolic steroids which will help him recover much quicker than you can. Although, there are certain principles which you can take away from his routine and apply to yours. For example you can discover new exercises, see how he groups his body parts, what rep ranges he uses etc.

Having too high expectations

I would say this is the most common oversight. You start training and expect to see dramatic changes within weeks or even days. This is quite a process and it WILL take time. It’s something you just have to come to terms with and accept in order for you to progress and be consistent. Granted most people new to training and working out will see some good changes relatively quickly after beginning, but after some time the changes will start to slow down. It is then when you need to understand you are in it for the long term and you really need to stay motivated and not lose heart, as it is all about being constant and consistent.

Not eating right

This is another major mistake which I’m sure the majority of people starting out make. It is easy to think that in order to gain or lose weight all you have to do is get in the gym and push around some weights. Especially when you see all these huge ripped guys working out in the gym. What you do not see is them going home and eating tons of the right food in order to help them recover. Food is fuel for your body. Just as a car needs the right kind of fuel to run, and to run efficiently, so too does your body. So there is a need to do some research into foods, and the macronutrients of certain foods which will be most beneficial to you; otherwise you can end up wasting a lot of your time training and training seeing small improvements, when all you needed to do was adjust your diet. Have a look through our nutrition section on the website as there are many articles about what are the right foods to eat.

Expecting a certain diet to work for you

This is similar to the second point above. In the same way as people copy professional bodybuilder’s workout routines, people tend to copy their diets as well. We need to understand that every one of us is different in some way. We have different heights, weights, body fat levels etc. So therefore each of us will have different needs when it comes to our own diet. For example a guy who weighs 100kg with a body fat of 12% will most likely require a lot more calories to maintain his weight than say a guy who weighs 70kg with a body fat of 12%. Again there are certain principles which you can take away from their diets, such as what foods to eat, certain meal ideas, discovering new meals, how to group your foods, when to eat certain things etc. I guess you could copy someone’s diet, but you would need to decrease or increase the portion sizes to suit the amount of calories which YOU need. But with everything you need to find what works best for YOU. A lot of people these days can easily lose weight by keeping their diet the same, but just cutting out a few things like sugar, sweets, flour, soft drinks, alcohol etc.

Falling prey to marketing gimmicks and before and after advertising pictures

In today’s world everything is about making money, whether something works or not. It’s a very sad thing. As long as you can convince someone to buy your product you can make money. A lot of companies, even supplement companies, advertise with these before and after pictures of people who have allegedly used their product and transformed their body within a month or within weeks. So when you see that a part of your mind can’t help but think, “dammm if they can do that so quickly so then so can I, and surely it must work.” What you don’t know is that most of those pictures have been taken on the same day, the before AND the after pictures. Once the photo is on their computer they can manipulate it as they please, adding in a six pack here, and a bicep there, and subtracting some cellulite from here and there. The message which we all need to hear so often is that IT DOES TAKE TIME. You have to be patient and stick with it by remaining consistent to ensure changes and even to maintain those changes.

So there you have it, please be sure to do your homework before you decide to do anything, as it can save you heaps and heaps of time.

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