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 Reviews