There are numerous myths when it comes to weight gain and loss, which are passed around as “gym talk” theory, or from uninformed fitness trainers who aren’t completely aware of how the body works. Myths are just conjecture, so taking unqualified advice leads to wasted time and frustration, if they’re blindly taken as truth.
So the advice is not to believe everything you hear when it comes to exercise and weight gain, this by doing your own research and due diligence yourself. It’s your body, so it becomes your responsibly to educate yourself on what really works or doesn’t, this for your body type and lifestyle.
There are simple basic principles which applies to the majority of weight and muscle gain rules, such as variable frequency of reps, progressive overload, and high intensity workouts. Beyond these, there are plenty of myths.
Low Reps Build Muscle High Reps Burn Fat
What’s needed is progressive overload to make muscles bigger, which means you need to perform more reps than you did the last time you did the same exercise.
If you happen to perform the same amount of reps during each workout, then nothing changes. If the weight doesn’t increase, then nothing improves, you won’t become stronger.
Muscle definition has two characteristics. To reduce body fat, you need to reduce calories. What high repetition exercises will do is burn calories. The best solution is low reps to build muscle, which elevates metabolism and burns more calories (less fat).
Vegetarians Can’t Build Muscle
Which isn’t true, as what strength training by supplementing with soy protein isolate, has proven is to increase and sustain body weight gain.
Studies show that athletic performance isn’t impaired when following a meat free diet, as those who consumed just soy protein isolate as a protein source, gained just as much lean muscle mass.
Strength Training Makes You Look Too Masculine
What you may not be interested in is bulking up from strength training. Packing on muscle is an extremely long hard and slow process. Strength-training also needs to be coupled with quality rest, which determines how much you’ll bulk up.
What bulking up muscle requires is consuming good food. What women also won’t do is produce enough testosterone, so they won’t grow muscles as fast as men will.
Eat Whatever You Want If You Work Out
What some believe is they have a free license to eat whatever they want because they workout. This is true if you don’t care how you look.
Just because you work out doesn’t mean it gives you an open menu to ingest as many calories as you want. Although you’ll burn more calories if you workout, what you still need is to balance your energy intake, with your energy expenditure.
Taking Time Off Is Detrimental
Taking time off damages your training efforts, isn’t true. What taking time off every eight to ten weeks between strength training cycles, does is refreshes you while healing all those small nagging injuries.
When taking off these layoffs you won’t lose muscle fiber, but just muscle volume. So any muscle bulk that’s lost, can be quickly gained back.
Eating Protein Builds Bigger Muscles
What building muscle mass involves are two things. Progressive overload to stimulate the muscles beyond their normal levels of resistance, and to consume more calories then you’re able to burn off.
With all the hype regarding high protein diets, this because what muscle is primarily made up of is protein, it becomes easy to believe that consuming protein is the best possible fuel for building muscle. What’s also needed are carbs.
Not Sore Enough After Workouts
Post workout soreness isn’t an indication of how intense or hard the exercise or strength training was. The more fit you are doing a certain activity, the less soreness that you’ll feel.
As soon as you alter an exercise such as using a heavier weight or more reps, may cause soreness because of the extra stress that you’re placing on that body part.
You Can’t Burn Fat From Resistance Training
Which is far from the truth. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue, which plays a role in increasing the metabolism. The faster the metabolism is, the quicker you can burn fat.
What cardio exercises does is enables you to burn calories while exercising, but what doing so also does, is little else for any type of fat loss afterwards.
Weight training encourages muscle growth, and the more lean muscle you have, the more fat that you’ll burn because of an increased and elevated metabolism.
No Pain No Gain
This is one persistent myth which continues to linger. What experiencing pain is your body signalling to you that something’s wrong. If you feel discomfort during a workout, then stop the activity and rest.
To develop muscle while increasing endurance, what you need is to have a slight level of discomfort, but that’s not considered to be actual pain.
Strength Training Doesn’t Work The Heart
This isn’t true as what strength training with short rest periods does is increases the heart rate, this at times well over a hundred beats per minute.
For instance, performing a set of squats will do is get your heart rate and your entire cardiovascular system racing, providing an excellent overall workout.
Can’t Gain Muscle While Losing Fat At The Same Time
This is also wrong, as there are only just a few select gifted people who has superior genetics, who are able to increase muscle size, while not putting on any body fat.
But for the average body type, what’s required when wanting to increase muscle mass to its full potential, is by cutting down their percentage of body fat, this to get the desired shape.