Fitness Myth Busters
with owner of FSP Irvine
It’s always interesting to see and hear all the new concepts, fads and diets that are supposed to help you accomplish all of your wildest dreams. Specifically, when it comes to health and fitness in extremely short periods of time, this is merely great marketing playing on your insecurities. Fitness myth busters.
If you’re getting started on your fitness journey, there are several key ideas to keep in mind. For one, you can’t gain weight overnight, nor can you lose weight overnight. If anyone tells you differently, they are proposing you do something that is going to hurt your body and health. Diets, pills, extreme weight loss supplements, and new exercise programs are all doing the same thing. They are changing what you eat, how much you eat and/or tricking you and your body for a short-term accomplishment. Secondly, things won’t stay that way. As soon as you go back to your life as before, you’re going to put all that weight, plus more, back on. Thirdly, you may also have damaged your internal systems.
The overall goals should be changing your nutrition, exercise routine and lifestyle permanently so that you’re losing 1-2 pounds per week. It’s about getting healthier in a sustainable way; how you change your life for the better to have real and lasting results. With constant innovations in technology, and virtually everything at our fingertips, we’ve become accustomed to immediate results and gratification. And we tend to lose sight of how long things should take in the real world; including what it really takes in terms of caring for our body and health.
This brings us to the top 5 fitness myth busters:
1: You can lose large amounts of weight and fat very quickly, without worrying about it coming back.
No. This is a trick. It means you’ll have to make some extreme changes that will only last for the duration of the proposed program or diet. When it’s over and you continue to make those extreme changes to your lifestyle, only then are you more likely to keep most of the weight off and later lose whatever you put back on, as well.
2: You only need to work out for 15-20 minutes a day.
False. Again, it goes back to nutrition for any successful program. Every person that tells you they only workout 20 minutes a day and are in the top 1-2% of most fit people is lying to you to sell themselves, their products and services. I hear it all the time and see those same people doing 2-3 workouts a day in excess of 1 to 2 hours each session.
3: Cardio is the way to go if you want to lean up and lose weight.
Wrong. This has been proven over and over again to be untrue. You need weight training to build muscle so you can boost your metabolism to be lean, tone, fit and in shape. Cardio is great for burning the calories you consumed that day and that’s about it; unless you’re doing over an hour of cardio work, each time.
4: You can’t get a good workout in with just your body weight.
Incorrect. I will tell you, from all my years of training and working out, with sports all the way through the professional ranks, this is not true by any standard. In fact, body-weight exercises/workouts are typically the harder of the two that I have both performed and assigned in my life. Body weight is still weight and is very handy. This is especially true if you have a wide variety of different exercises that are full-body movements aimed at hitting your major muscle groups.
5: Daily life chores and tasks are exercises.
Not completely. Doing yard work, household chores or anything physical, your heart rate only increases depending on how strenuous the tasks are. There are lots of life-related tasks that are physical work and exercise. However, doing it once-a-week won’t cut it in terms of seeing benefits. If you do a hard day of house or yard work, feel free to call your daily exercises completed. If it wasn’t that long or strenuous, maybe throw in some body-weight exercises and call it a day.
It’s extremely important to start by fully understanding the above. From there, we can start talking about life-long, positive and healthy changes that will make you feel better to enjoy a quality life over a longer period of time. We will begin to make some real progress by getting back to the basics, which are also scientifically proven.