Nov 11
28
5 Health & Fitness Myths
Myth # 1
Only Do Cardio If You Want To Get Lean
Only doing cardio is excellent…if you want to be skinny fat! What’s “skinny fat”? A person who is skinny fat looks slim, but they have no muscle tone and are soft and squishy to touch, like a marshmallow.
Focusing on long cardio sessions whether they are on a treadmill, elliptical machine or running outdoors will cause you to lose weight. But if this is your only form of exercise you will be losing fat and muscle. You will end up looking like a smaller version of yourself now, but be soft and squishy. Especially if you’re not eating properly.
To avoid this you want to include some form of resistance training to help build lean muscle and focus on higher intensity, this way your training becomes strength-cardio. Building nice lean muscle while burning fat at the same time. Circuit training is an excellent example.
Myth # 2
Eating Fat Makes You Fat
No, eating too much fat, good or bad, makes you fat. Eating too much carbohydrate will also make you gain fat. You know what else will make you fat? Eating too much protein. That’s right, even precious protein needed for building and maintaining firm lean muscles and a healthy youthful face!
The point is eating too much will make you fat, regardless of whether it’s a healthy food or an unhealthy food. If you are taking in more than you are using you will gain weight. This can be in the form of muscle if you’re doing some form of resistance training and aiming to add muscle, or it can be fat if you are sedentary.
Myth # 3
You Can Sculpt Your Muscles
This one is actually true. The common understanding is that the sculpted look people covet is lean muscle with low body fat. This makes it easier to see the shape of the muscle. This is basically correct, but the less known part of this look has to do with ‘muscle density’. How firm your muscles are depends on how strong they are. Ladies, don’t freak out, ’strong’ muscles don’t necessarily mean ‘big’ muscles – think Jessica Beil.
To achieve this look you need to choose activities that condition your muscles while making you stronger and burning fat, such as resistance training and high intensity interval training (HIIT). The resistance training will make the muscles firm while the HIIT will torch unwanted excess fat, resulting in that desirable firm, sculpted look rather than the flat or deflated look often seen on people who do mostly cardio. You also need to be following a good nutritional plan and eating adequate protein, roughly 1 gram per pound of lean body mass.
Myth # 4
You Can Eat What You Like As Long As You Exercise
Noooope! If you’re trying to drop some lbs or burn unwanted fat, exercising and proper nutrition is essential. When weight loss is the goal you need to avoid junk food as it contains high calories with very little nutritional value and you can very easily take in 100’s of extra calories than you have burned. If you do a tough workout and then stop by the drive-thru on the way home or gorge on pizza and ice cream to “refuel”, you’re not going to see any significant positive results.
Myth # 5
It Doesn’t Matter What You Eat As Long As Long As It Adds Up To The Same Number Of Calories
Again, nooooope! Calorie quality is just as important as calorie quantity, meaning your calories need to come from good quality healthy foods, not processed junk food. 500 calories from broccoli, salmon or blueberries is not the same as 500 calories from cola or Oreo cookies. Why? Wild salmon, blueberries and broccoli = lean. Cola and Oreos = skinny fat!
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