Three Common Exercise Myths Debunked

Today I cover three common exercise myths

1, Doing yoga or pilates will give me long, lean muscles

This statement is as nonsensical as saying that jumping off a cliff is going to make you sprout feathers.

1, Length

How long your muscles may look largely depends on your genetics.. Some people have muscles with long muscle bellies that insert all the way into the joint and others have short muscle bellies with a longer tendon. Added to this the length of your limbs goes a long way to governing if your muscles look ‘long’.

Now i’m a bit proponent of training exercises with a full range of motion in order to provide optimal stimulus however this isn’t going to magically make them look longer.

2, Lean

How lean your muscles look is dependant on how low your body fat is If you create a calorie deficit whilst doing any form of exercise over time you will start to look leaner. Yoga or Pilates do no contain some sort of magic formula to help this aside maybe help you to create a calorie deficit.

2, Doing more cardio is the best way to burn off your love handles

To put it simply, to ‘burn’ off your love handles you need you create a calorie deficit.This deficit must then be maintained for a sufficient time period in order to see changes.

Now this can certainly be done but adding extra activity however the amount of calories you burn through exercise is much less than most people think, in fact it’s a woefully inefficient approach.

For example; a Mars Bar contains 260 calories, which would take 2-3 minutes at most to eat. Burning 260 calories would take you around 25 minutes on a bike or elliptical trainer.

Now i’m not anti cardio and some i’m important for health benefits however the point I’m trying to make is that its much more efficient to create a calorie deficit through changes to your eating than it is by adding extra cardio for the goal of burning calories.

If you generally want to have a higher daily overall energy its better to incorporate little habits such as walking more, taking the stairs, using a stand up desk etc.

One method to make an impact on the number of calories you are intaking if you still want to snack is to make better choices and replace your usual foods with lower calorie alternatives.

A pumpkin spiced latte (308 calories) on the way to work every morning can be replaced with a black coffee or coffee with skimmed milk (10-20 calories with skimmed milk). The donut (200-400 calories on average) or muffin (395 calories) at the office every afternoon can be replaced with have a protein yogurt (140 calories).

The bottom line is you must align your eating behaviours to fit your goals, you must take ownership.

3, Strength training will make a woman ‘bulky’

Even in 2019 this is a commonly held perception that if a woman does strength training that they will suddenly wake up looking like a bodybuilder. There are two main reasons why this doesn’t happen-

1, Lower Testosterone Levels - Testosterone is responsible for much of the growth of muscle mass in the body.

There is a study that compared three groups of men: one group who trained, one group who trained while supplementing with exogenous testosterone and one group who supplemented exogenous testosterone but didn’t train. At the end of the study the group who took the exogenous testosterone but DIDN’T train gained MORE muscle mass than the group that trained without supplemental testosterone!

Women typically have on average 20 times less testosterone than men (Female range is 6 - 86 ng/dl, Male 270 - 1100 ng/dl) meaning that the potential for growing muscle mass is significantly reduced.

Testosterone is the reason why you saw the East German female olympic team in the 70’s & 80’s take a turn to look decidedly more masculine and suddenly break multiple world records.

2, Less Muscle fibres with potential for large growth - Woman have more slower type-I and -IIA fibres in females compared with males that parallels the lower contractile velocity in females compared with male.

A caveat to this is women who are at the very top level of athletics & sports. This really isn’t a good demography to compare yourself to. These women by nature of selection to excel in their sports are probably gifted with higher than average testosterone levels & number of fast twitch muscle fibres and thus their bodies do have more growth potential. A good book further on this subject is The Sports Gene.

For the average woman this is not something to worry about. Now it’s not to say that you won’t gain any muscle mass, and in order to achieve a ‘defined’ look you definitely have to add some muscle to give your body ‘shape’.

When commencing strength training initially your scale weight may actually increase, however trust the process and keep going. Provided you are creating a calorie deficit your levels of body fat will over time reduce. Muscle is denser and thus takes up less space than fat so even if you ended up the same weight if you had more muscle and less fat you’d be smaller in your clothes. It’s about what you are composed of, not what you weigh.

If you liked this article get in touch and i’ll be happy to post some further articles debunking common fitness myths.