Five More Fitness Myths

(Find the First Five Fitness Myths HERE)

Eating after 8pm makes you fat.

While eating at anytime can make you fat if you are eating the wrong types of foods, eating later in the evening won’t necessarily pack on the pounds. Although your body likes to run according to circadian rhythms and naturally slows down its metabolism at night, you still need nutrients. This is because after you go to sleep you are essentially fasting for anywhere from 6-10 hours until you wake up and have breakfast. You can actually add two hours or more to this fasting period if you have dinner long before you go to sleep. What does this mean? Although eating late at night may cause you to store some nutrients as fat, if you don’t eat at all between dinner and breakfast, your body will go into starvation mode and store almost everything you have eaten in the evening as fat during your sleep. How do you get around this? Try to eat six meals a day, one of them being after dinner just prior to turning in for the night. As long as this meal is balanced as far as its carbohydrate, protein, and fat content and you have worked out, the nutrients and calories will go towards building muscle and restoring the body while you sleep.

Working out more often will get you fit faster.

While this idea sounds logical in theory, it’s really antithetical to what you should follow. While more is often better, in this case, the rule of thumb is to proceed with caution. If you work out more frequently then your body can handle, you run the risk of overtraining and reaching the point of diminishing gains. Most of the time you can work out harder and more often as you progress and improve your abilities in the gym or wherever you work out. For each person, there is a different level of intensity and frequency with which they can workout. This level depends on their workout history, diet, and a few other factors. The main idea here: find your limits by working out at a comfortable level and slowly over time challenging yourself more. In the end you will benefit from taking it slow in the beginning. You will be less likely to hit plateaus in your routine which can be like brick walls impeding your progress. You’ll also be less likely to injure yourself.

You burn more calories working out on an empty stomach.

Although you may have heard this tall tale, it is entirely false. Working out, whether you have eaten or not will burn the same number of calories. Working out on an empty stomach forces your body to burn whatever small amounts of glucose that are stored in your muscles first and fat second. A close third is muscle tissue. The fact that you run the risk of burning precious muscle and also crashing half way through your workout should be enough motivation to fuel up with a healthy meal or snack prior to hitting the gym.

If you don’t workout, muscle will turn to fat.

This is false. Muscle and fat are two entirely different tissues and one cannot be turned into the other. It is true however, that over time unused muscles will atrophy or get smaller. In doing this they lose tone or defintion which makes them look flabby or fat. Also, if you were previously eating more calories to support energy expenditure from exercising, then stopped exercising but kept consuming many calories, more of this energy will be stored as fat.

You must exercise for at least 30 minutes to reap benefits.

Although 30 minutes often seems like the magic number that is thrown around regarding workouts, whether you are doing cardio or weights anything is better than nothing. Even limited activities such as walking or gardening for ten minutes can help lower blood pressure and cholesterol. In fact, people who have never worked out should start with activities that are familiar to them but require physical movement such as walking or doing chores. From there, they can progress to the gym and start with 10 minutes of one type of activity. This time can be increased later on or even multiple very short sessions can be crammed into the day if there is time. If your goal is weight loss however, you should attempt to increase over time the amount of time you spend working out during each session.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 19th, 2010 at 12:13 am and is filed under Fitness, Health & Wellness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.