Fitness Workouts: 3 Misconceptions You Need to Know about

So you’ve finally decided to put a check mark beside “Go to the gym” or some other version of it on your list of New Year’s resolutions from five years ago. Congratulations! Now that you’ve taken that all-important step, it’s important that you get the best out of your fitness workouts. Whatever your goals may be-- sweating it out with exercises to lose weight quickly or targeting fast abs with intensive ab workouts—let’s clear out these three misconceptions that you might have about fitness workouts.

#1: For truly effective fitness workouts, you need to spend money.

The equipment and inspiration (from being surrounded with buff bodies and people determined to have buff bodies) afforded by a gym can ensure—not guarantee-- success at achieving one’s fitness goals. I say can and not does because we all know that getting a gym membership does not guarantee success, and neither does home exercise equipment. There are many varieties of fitness workouts you can choose from that do not involve spending money. Outdoor activities like biking and running are perfect for outgoing people. Strength training and yard work are just a few of the many ways to workout at home. Decide on your fitness goals, know what exercises or activities to do and what is best to eat in order to achieve them, and download or modify some printable weight loss charts for guidance, and you’re good to go. At the end of the day, it’s your determination that will guarantee success, not expensive equipment.


#2: Fitness workouts are pointless if you don’t go on a diet where you eat as little as possible.
The fact is that when you eat too little in the effort to lose weight, your body considers this a threat to its survival and responds by storing more fat in order to survive. Also, once you decide that you can’t survive without food (surprise, surprise), you either start eating the usual amount of food or start eating more than you used to from having felt deprived of food during your period of ”insanity.” Either way, the body interprets this as a mere respite from the starvation and responds by storing even more fat than before in anticipation of another starve-fest. Now that’s when fitness workouts become pointless.

#3: The longer and harder you workout, the more muscles you gain.
The truth is that after some time, the body gets used to a workout routine and muscle growth reaches a plateau. At this point, your muscles will refuse to grow unless you introduce variation into your workouts. Also, training too long, too often, and too hard can actually cost you muscle mass. For instance, if you do mostly ab workouts every day, it won’t give your muscles time to heal, which they need in order to grow.

These are just some of the misconceptions people have about fitness workouts. There are many more, so don’t just take any workout-related advice that comes your way. Ask and learn. Making fitness workouts a part of your lifestyle is one of the best decisions you could ever make in your life, so it would pay to be as informed as possible.