Exercise
Myths
As with anything else, there is a right way to workout and a
wrong way. Do things right, and you will burn a lot of body
fat, add lean muscle tissue, and reduce the chances of injury.
Do things the wrong way and you will spend hours of your time
doing ineffective workouts which may never have any impact on
the way you look and feel.
The truth is that many people fail to get the kind of
results they're looking for simply because they have been
misinformed as to the right way of exercising. Not only
that, there are some commom misconceptions which are causing
people to exercise in the wrong way. By the time you finish
reading this page, you will know what they are.
Exercise Myth #1 - Spot Reduction
In my mind this is the biggest exercise myth of them all,
and one which is hard to convince people of simply because it
seems to be so logical.
It's the fat spot reduction myth which basically says that
if you want to lose fat from a certain body part, your
abs, for instance, then you need to do specific exercises which
target that body part. When you do that, you will burn off belly fat
first and foremost.
In theory it seems very logical, and I wish it were the
case, but it isn't. The truth is that you can't spot reduce fat
from a specific body part. Our body simply doesn't burn fat
that way. What does happen is that we burn fat from all over
our body or not at all.
Of course, some people tend to accumulate fat in their
abdominal area, and other people do the same in other areas of
their body. That's genetics at work. We also burn fat from
different areas of our body according to our genetics.
Since you can't change your genes, you need to accept that spot
reduction doesn't work and focus on doing workouts which burn
body fat in general.
Exercise Myth #2 - You can turn fat into
muscle
This is one of the oldest myths and it's also one of
the strangest in my opinion.
Turning fat into muscle is like believing that lead can be
turned to gold as people used to believe centuries ago.
It can't be done for the simple reason that fat and muscle
are 2 totally different tissues. They have little to do with
one another. They either form on their own or disappear on
their own.
You lose fat and gain muscle irrespective of one another. Of
course, the more muscle tissue you have the greater your
metabolism is and the easier it is for you to reduce fat.
Exercise Myth #3 - The More Cardio The
Better
I happen to love doing cardio. My favorite cardio workout is
running. However, cardiovascular activities are vastly
overrated as fat burning exercises. They're great for the
cardiovascular system, obviously and they have their share in
the weight loss process. But doing only cardio without strength
training is like walking with shackles. Your progress will be
that much slower.
Furthermore, most people do cardio in the wrong way. For
years, we've been taught that as far as cardio is concerned,
the longer you do it the better. Therefore, you see
people in gyms running or using the elliptical for 45-60 at a
time. Sometimes even longer. And they hardly change their pace
throughout their workout.
If you too do cardio in the long and monotonous way, you
shouldn't feel bad. I did cardio that way for years. But you
can achieve far better fat burning results by doing
interval cardio workouts instead of long duration monotonous
ones.
Interval cardio or aerobic workouts are done by changing the
pace every few minutes. You can be running very fast for 2
minutes, then slow down to a slow jog, then once more speed
things up for a few minutes, slow down to a fast walk and so
on.
The benefit of interval cardio workouts is that you
work your heart and lungs through a variety of intensity
levels. Furthermore, you constantly keep your body off balance
so that you're exerting it more in a much shorter time than it
would have taken had you done long duration steady cardio.
The main thing to remember is that your workouts need to be
intensive rather than long. There's no point wasting time at
the gym. You need be burning fat every second that you're
there. By doing intensive cardio workouts, you can easily cut
down your cardio time by half and get even better results.
A great program which teaches how to burn fat fast with
interval cardio is the Turbulence
Training Program.
You can read a detailed review of it here: Turbulence Training
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