Don’t let these common muscle myths hamper your training:
Myth: Weight training will make you bulky
Reality: Even if you train regularly and push yourself to your limit, you won’t suddenly sprout huge muscles. Training properly will increase your muscle size, but this happens over time. If you don’t want your workouts to have a muscle-building effect, you need to adjust key variables, such as how many reps you perform, so they have more of either a strength or endurance effect than a muscle gain one.
Myth: Endless crunches will give you a six-pack
Reality: Doing crunches will strengthen and define your abs but it will do little to remove any body fat that’s hiding them. You can’t lose fat from any one part of your body so, if you want to shift your spare tyre, eat healthily and perform exercises that burn lots of calories. Crunches burn comparatively few calories, so they’re not good for getting rid of your gut. And doing hundreds of any exercise is an inefficient way of training because if you can do that many reps the movement isn’t challenging enough to stimulate new muscle growth.
Myth: Running is better for fat loss than lifting weights
Reality: Intense weights sessions will burn plenty of calories and have a fat-loss effect. High-intensity circuits give you an aerobic workout, which improves your heart and lung function, as well as strengthening muscles. Running is good for developing your heart and lungs but won’t build much muscle.
Myth: It’s safer to lift weights slowly
Reality: In rehabilitation, patients are told to perform exercises at a slow tempo to retrain their bodies to execute movement smoothly, a tactic that has crept into gyms. But as long as you’re always in control of the lifting and lowering phases of an exercise you won’t set yourself up for an injury. Indeed, performing reps with speed trains the muscles to react quickly in unexpected, real-world situations, which is how you really protect yourself from injury. It also activates more muscle fibres, leading to greater gains.
Myth: Machines are safer than free weights
Reality: The makers of weights machines advertise that their equipment isolates target muscles and prevents injury by eliminating room for error. But the restrictive movements of machines might actually ncrease the risk of injury. Machines are fixed and rigid and therefore limit natural movement, whereas when you use free weights your body naturally makes adjustments throughout the exercise’s range of motion according to your strength level, speed of movement, and proficiency.
Myth: More training means more muscle
Reality: Muscle growth happens while you’re recovering, not while you’re working out. If you don’t leave enough time between sessions, you won’t let your muscles complete the repair process that makes them bigger and stronger.