How many times have you followed the recommendations of your friends, family and even training advisers and have not obtained the results you expected?
In the world of fitness there are as many myths as there are realities, many of them born of truths supposedly confirmed by large-scale scientific studies, which in reality end up being more than rumors based on pure rationalized logic.
What should we do then? Who should we listen to? Tune your ears the next time you get advice and identify these 7 supposed fitness realities that can do you more harm than good.
7 alleged fitness facts that can hurt you
1. Exercising is all that matters to get in shape
Losing weight is a multi-part process, and exercising is just one — extremely important, that cannot be denied — of it.
According to various studies in the field of nutritional medicine, diet is more important than exercise if you want to start losing weight. But this doesn’t mean you should start starving yourself just to not jog a bit or do a few squats. Unlike. Although a healthy and balanced diet is the first step, what will provide you with the body you want in the long term is precisely exercise.
Like any healthy process, it is composed of various parts that must maintain a balance between them.
2. You should only exercise in the early hours of the day
Get happy! Certainly working out in the morning is really beneficial, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy those extra minutes of sleep and get through your workout routines at night. Of course, according to some experts, exercising first thing in the morning helps accelerate weight loss and increases energy levels by making the body burn fat throughout the day.
Plus, getting more sunlight can play a role in weight loss and aligning your internal clock – your circadian rhythm – can give your metabolism a boost.
In the end, it’s all about your interests. You can sacrifice a few hours of sleep for a good sunbath or take advantage of them to charge your body for a training session at the end of the workday. Either way, both options work!
3. Keeping a food diary is the best way to record what you eat.
This is a double edged sword. Certainly, a diary is an excellent tool to keep track of our food intake. However, whenever we make an effort to be aware of what we eat and what we do not eat, and how active we are being, we tend to give ourselves more credit than we deserve.
When we do this, we make ourselves look like the hero of our own soap opera, overestimating physical activity and underestimating the amount of food consumed. As a result, we begin to believe that we have overworked and underwent.
4. You have to eliminate sugar and carbohydrates from your diet to lose weight
This is one of the most common problems with most of the hot fitness tips : they are purely temporary modalities.
Certainly, by eliminating carbohydrates and sugars from the diet , the decrease in body fat will be evident. However, with it, some of the muscle mass and energy with which we are used to functional may even go away. Why? Believe it or not, eating sugar and carbohydrates is not a fad. Our body needs them.
So, believe it or not, it is not about eliminating these two forms of food from your dishes. Find a healthy, natural, and purest source of these ingredients as possible. Everything is a question of strategy.
5. Women should not develop muscles, as they will look like men
In a recent survey by the Nautilus company team, only 13% of participants said they thought women couldn’t lift weights without turning into men.
Nowadays, every day it is more common to see how women are incorporated into high-impact muscular practices, and these, far from distancing them from their gender, highlight their feminine qualities.
It is perfectly healthy for everyone to lift weights. The ability to tone and mark muscles depends directly on the amount of testosterone we have, and women produce much less testosterone on average than men. So, if you are a woman, the chances of you turning into a mole are very small.
6. Running a marathon is the best alternative to get in shape
Running may not be your thing, that’s fine. And, luckily for you, it is not a determining requirement to get in shape. You can stop feeling guilty about not signing up for that marathon that everyone is talking about, as it turns out that you can get the same benefits of running long distances without even going over a kilometer.
Running fast and with intensity for just five minutes a day can bring you the same benefits as running for hours. In fact, people who run less than an hour a week – as long as they run for several minutes each day – get similar heart health benefits as those who run for more than three hours a week.
Plus, years of research suggest that short bursts of intense exercise can bring the same health benefits as long-duration workouts, as well as being more fun.
7. It is enough to exercise once or twice a week to maintain the figure
This annoying condition intervenes here: it all depends. What are you chasing? What are your goals?
If you have already achieved the figure you want or are in a satisfying physical condition, exercising once or twice a week will not benefit you too much . What is the minimum then? At least three times a week, and distributed equally among the seven days that make it up.
However, the best option is always, of course, to do at least one small exercise routine a day .
References
- Brodwin, Erin. 11 fitness ‘truths’ that are doing more harm than good. For Business Insider. [Revised January 2017].
