4 Exercise Myths Hurting Your Fitness Progress
With the summer coming to a close and the fall looming on the horizon, it’s time to reflect on just how much you either love or hate your body. If your beach and pool physique was less than stellar, the year’s end will only make it that much a harder to improve on what is already a catastrophe. Beyond your normal grind and struggles to stay fit, there may be some things that you’re doing that are working against your efforts. What are they? How can you decipher what’s trly good for you? Who will help you?
Easy – It’s me. the FatDoc. Today, I am running my mouth and spitting out the facts on exercise and fitness myths that may be making you and/or keeping fat on you.
The first exercise myth I’m tackling is: Doing crunches or working on an “ab machine” will get rid of belly fat.
Don’t we wish it was that easy? Think about it. Everyone would be walking around with a six pack if that were true. Unfortunately, the people sporting six-pack abs are a small minority. Don’t believe me? Look around at the people in your house, neighborhood or even who you work with at your job. How many of them are sporting a washboard stomach.
So don’t believe everything you hear on those late-night infomercials! While an ab-crunching device or simple crunches might “help strengthen the muscles around your midsection and improve your posture,” being able to “see” your abdominal muscles has to do with your overall percentage of body fat. If you don’t lose the belly fat, he says, you won’t see the ab muscles. Leaning out is the best strategy to getting it done. Continuing to focus on exercise without eating properly will condemn you to a ‘kegger’ stomach rather than the coveted 6-8 pack.
Next one: Swimming is a great weight loss activity. Yeah, it is. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to drown the fat from your body by lapping the pool.
Yes, while swimming is great for increasing lung capacity, endurance, coordination, muscle control, increasing muscle tone, and even helping release some unwanted stress, unless you are swimming for hours a day, it may not help you lose much weight at all.
The reason why? Buoyancy. This property of water supports your body, and allows you to not work as hard as if you were on land. So, you are actually getting less out of a workout that you may assume. If you compare the work output of the average swimmer versus the average walker/runner, most likely the land-goer is expending much more energy. Let’s face it: who wants to risk drowning by passing out when working too hard.
The best practice is to track your caloric output when you run versus swimming, along with your heart rate and compare the two. If you are burning more in the pool, great. But if not, you may need to increase simple things like the speed at which you swim laps and the various strokes you use. Doggy-paddling just isn’t going to cut it folks.
Three: If you’re not working up a sweat, you’re not working hard enough.
Both True and False. Simply put, sweating is not necessarily an indicator of exertion or effort. In actuality, sweating is your body’s way of cooling itself. We aren’t fortunate enough to regulate our body temperature by panting like our K-9 friends. We have to use the water to remove heat through evaporation.
And yes, while you are putting forth some effort in your workout, you happen to sweat, don’t be fooled. There are much more important measurable that hint at how hard you are working. Things such as heart rate, respiratory rate, caloric output and blood pressure changes (anything higher than 20 mm HG is too much). You don’t have to soak your clothing to get results. And let’s face it: some people just don’t sweat that much. So it’s possible to burn a significant number of calories without breaking a sweat: Try taking a walk or doing some light weight training.
Lastly: Fasting will help me lose weight quicker.
WRONG!!!!
Your biggest weigh loss will come during sleep, if you raise your metabolism. It’s all about energy expenditures.
If you expend a lot of energy, your body knows that it needs more of it. Most energy systems of the body (if not all) are time dependent – more time, more energy released. When you are awake, you’ll tap into CP, ATP, or even glucose driven systems. So your brain anticipates what activity is about to be called upon and communicates to your body in a lot of the above-mentioned fancy jargon that simply says, “I don’t have a lot of time, I need to burn quickly.” So your body responds and acts accordingly.
So that’s it for tonight gang. Hope you learned something new. Big take away: there’s no easier way to maintain good health than to live smarter. Educating yourself before starting any program will help you maximize your results. Take care and look for my new health book FAT FREE FOR LIFE: 13 PRINCIPLES OF GUARANTEED WEIGHT LOSS AND ULTIMATE HEALTH FROM CHARISMA HOUSE ON JANUARY 6, 2016.
