iStockphoto / torwai
The fitness industry is worth billions of dollars – and it’s a great source of money for fitness professionals. Personal trainers cost a fortune for their wisdom and advice, even if their advice is wrong – and you can save money and improve your fitness by keeping an eye out for these 5 fitness conspiracies.
1. Cardio actually burns calories
If you want to lose weight, virtually every personal trainer recommends jumping on the treadmill. They’ll help you work up a sweat for over 5 hours of extensive cross-training, handbike and step exercises, and you’ll burn an incredibly impressive … 3 calories.
Ok … exaggeration aside, a full hour of light cardio can only burn 300 kcal – that’s less than the Snickers bar.
The choice is yours – you could spend hundreds of dollars on an expensive personal trainer and work out for a sweaty, boring hour; or you could save money and pass the Snickers on.
Cardio is surprisingly inefficient at burning fat unless you’re doing it with all your might – and any fitness professional who tells you otherwise is likely to want your money.
2. Exertion will ruin your profits
Exercising is a popular technique used by the fitness professional. It’s a simple concept – we tire a muscle with isolation exercises, then hammer it in a heavy compound exercise. This allows us to really strain the muscle and get INCREDIBLE PROFITS!
Unfortunately wrong again.
Imagine working out shoulders in the gym. If we want to raise our medial deltas, we can first tire them out with side lifts and then shoulder presses.
- We hammer the side lifts until we can barely raise our arms – in other words, we’ve exhausted the medial deltas.
- We’ll then switch to the press. Pressing requires the involvement of the medial deltas, the anterior deltas, and the posterior deltas. For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that each muscle group contributes 1/3 of the energy needed to press the barbell.
- We’ve already exhausted the medial deltoids, so we’ve reduced the amount of work they can do. If we assume that the medial deltas are only half as strong as they are “fresh” due to pre-exhaustion, they now contribute 1/6 of the energy that is required for the lift.
Instead of overwhelming your training and forcing additional muscle growth from the target muscle, your pre-exhausted muscle is now doing less work than normal.
Rather than increasing your gains, pre-exhaustion is more likely to decrease your gains and prevent your target muscles from working properly during compound exercises.
3. There are no “toned” muscles
If you go to the gym and find a fitness professional and ask them to help you tone your muscles, you will spend the next 3 hours of your life doing hundreds of weird (but surprisingly simple) exercises.
These toning exercises are the heart and soul of a personal trainer’s repertoire – and they are all utter crap.
There are no well-trained muscles. “Toned muscle” refers to muscles that are visible and well-defined, and we can achieve this through two mechanisms:
- Enlargement of our muscles through progressive overload and strength training.
- Lose body fat through diet and exercise.
Muscle building exercises are inefficient at building muscle and burning calories. When you want muscles to be seen, skip the expensive “tinting plans”, hit weights, and tackle your diet.
4. You can definitely win without pain
“No Pain, No Gain” is the slogan used by fitness professionals around the world. They use it as an excuse to dominate their clients, push them to the limit, and hilariously passing them all over the gym on occasion – but it’s okay because it helps you make a profit, right?
Post-workout pain is usually caused by DOMS – Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness. It’s the body’s response to the inflammation caused by exercise, and doesn’t play a role in building muscle.
DOMS is triggered by unusually high-intensity exercise – a strain that your body is not used to. If you work your legs once a week, you likely suffer from DOMS – but increase that workload to 2 or 3 times a week and DOMS will actually decrease.
There is no association between the pain of DOMS and muscle gain, and high volume workouts will produce incredible gains – without DOMS.
5. Bodyweight exercises do not build muscle
If you’ve ever worked out with a fitness trainer or fitness professional, you’ve likely spent entire workouts doing bodyweight exercises – pull-ups, push-ups, abdominal crunches, and even squats.
You’ve probably been told that they’re great for toning (popped!) Muscles and even adding bulk. You were told wrong.
Building muscle requires progressive overload. Demanding exercises put stress on the muscles and cause them to adapt, creating new muscle fibers in response to the training stimulus.
As you get stronger, you need to increase the training stress to maintain this adjustment, usually by increasing the resistance (weight) with each exercise. Bodyweight exercises start with a challenge – but as your body adapts, they get easier and easier, and your body soon stops building muscle.
Since the weight of each exercise is constant, you might think that increasing the number of repetitions performed would trigger adaptive growth.
Unfortunately wrong again. At some point, your body switches from anaerobic muscle fibers to aerobic – and you begin to improve muscle endurance, not muscle strength. In other words, doing a thousand crunches is perfect for training your body to do a thousand crunches. But will it build muscle? No
