There are a lot of “myths” we hear from clients at our Dunedin FL gym when it comes to fitness. These myths can be used as excuses to avoid exercising, choose the wrong type of exercise for your goals, or waste a lot of time exercising too much. If you’re thinking about starting an exercise program in Dunedin, Clearwater, Palm Harbor, Safety Harbor, or Oldsmar, sift through these myths first so you don’t get trapped choosing the wrong program. Understanding what actually works can help you avoid choosing a program that wastes your time, effort, or energy.
Commonly Believed Fitness Myths
Fitness Myth #1. I can’t workout yet because I have an injury
Most fitness myths start with a small grain of truth. If you have an injury, performing the wrong form of injury can be dangerous. Many programs incur a risk that isn’t worth the reward. This fear of making an injury worse or re-injury might prevent you from getting in better shape. You will tell yourself that you just need to heal first, rehab first, or get your strength back before working out.
The truth is that the right fitness program will not only be able to work around any injury, but can also improve your recovery time from an injury.
Imagine that you have an injured shoulder. That injury doesn’t affect your other arm, torso, or legs. All of these body parts can still be exercised to help you begin gaining strength, building muscle, or burning calories to improve your body composition. Check out this blog if you want to know how to workout around your hand injury.
If you wait to start exercising for months while your shoulder heals and has gained functional strength back, those are months where you aren’t getting better. As a matter of fact, you aren’t even staying the same. You are getting worse over these months. The body naturally loses muscle and strength over time without any form of strength training. The longer you wait to start, the further behind you may be.
The waiting game also delays the amount of time that it takes to heal. When you think of recovering from an injury, you probably think of physical therapy. Broken down into its simplest form, physical therapy is just movement. That movement helps recover, gain back range of motion, flexibility, and strength. Strength training is no different. It will help an injury recover faster in a few ways.
If you have an injury to the right shoulder, exercising your left shoulder will actually help the right shoulder recover and maintain strength better than if you avoid exercising altogether. This is due to a phenomenon called cross-limb education. The injured limb that you aren’t training experiences improvements in muscle strength and coordination despite not performing exercises.
The benefits happen because of neural adaptations occurring in the brain. While the brain will send signals to repair and build muscles and strength in the trained side of the body, it will also send those same signals to the untrained side of the body.
Performing light work to the injured side of the body will also help when done correctly. Contracting muscles will improve local blood flow. With that increased blood flow, healing agents traveling in the blood arrive in greater numbers, and inflammatory agents get flushed out of the injured area. This will speed up your recovery timeline compared to staying sedentary. Movement truly is medicine.
Fitness Myth #2. I need to do 5 forms of exercise for each fitness goal
The 5 components for physical fitness are cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, body composition, flexibility, and muscular endurance. A common fitness myth is that you need a different workout program for each component. You need to do yoga for flexibility, strength training for muscular strength, or running for cardio health.
One workout can’t improve all components of physical fitness. Right? Wrong.
Sure, if your goal is just to be able to run a marathon, then you have to train by running. Nothing else will help you reach your goal more than that. However, you’re not doing much to get stronger or more flexible this way.
Or if your one goal is to become more flexible, then stretching or doing yoga will be the best way to spend your time. Again, you’ll miss out on the other components of health.
But, if your goal is getting healthier, improving all 5 components of physical fitness, and spending the least amount of time to do it, then strength training is your best answer.
Muscular strength is the obvious benefit that I don’t need to convince you of. It’s the other components that you will feel great improvement in that aren’t as often recognized as results of strength training.
When you are improving how many repetitions that you can perform on an exercise, it isn’t just strength improvements that allow you to do so. Muscular endurance is the other factor. If you were once only capable of doing 10 repetitions on an exercise with 50 pounds, and after training for a month you are now able to perform 15 repetitions, your muscular endurance has improved.
Whenever you are huffing and puffing, you are improving your cardiovascular health. Your heart and lungs are working harder, and your body will adapt to improve your heart and lung health. When you perform High Intensity SAFE Strength Training with us, you are working out for 25 minutes with little time wasted resting. You feel your heart rate going up, and you feel your lungs working to provide oxygen to your fatigued muscles.
Typical cardio exercises are not the only things that improve your cardio health. Interestingly, a typical cardio exercise will only challenge muscles in one part of the body. Running is only taxing your legs and requiring oxygen for the work that they are performing. Our strength training routines will target your entire body and require your cardiovascular system to work hard to support blood flow and oxygen to the whole body.
Flexibility is also improved through strength training. Working out in a full range of motion on an exercise improves the ability of your joints to move through a greater range of motion. Doing so through strength training also provides a key, often overlooked, benefit. The strength to support that range of motion.
What is the point of being more flexible without the strength to support it? You want to become injury resistant when asking your body to move into all positions. Having flexibility without strength just means you will be able to move more, but you won’t be at less risk of injury in those positions. You need strength to get in those positions while staying injury-free.
Body composition is just a ratio of having more muscle and less fat on your body. Strength training is typically only thought of as building muscle. When you think of losing fat, you are probably leaning towards the thought of needing cardio to burn fat. If only given one option to burn fat, I would choose strength training over cardio every time.
When performing cardio, you are burning calories. When you burn more calories than you consume in your diet, you will lose fat. Either from the body taking calories out of stored fat, or from your body losing muscle since muscle requires calories to maintain. When performing cardio, you aren’t preserving your muscle from being broken down as well as you would via strength training. You also aren’t burning as many calories when you finish your cardio workout as you would after your finish your strength training workout.
After strength training, your body needs to work to repair, rebuild, and build new muscle tissue. From the moment you stop your workout, including and especially when you are sleeping, your metabolism is increased. Your body is spending calories to repair that muscle, and after expending all the extra calories that you’ve eaten, those calories are more likely to come from stored fat compared to muscle. If you have only 30 minutes to spare, and you have to choose between cardio and strength training to burn fat, choose the option that will get you more bang for your buck. Strength training.
Even with the perfect workout routine, your results are determined by your habits outside of the gym. The 4 keys to optimal health are to train right, eat right, rest right, and manage your stress right. It takes a balance of all 4 to get your optimal health. If you are working out, but don’t have the results you are striving for, you may just need to tweak your habits outside of the gym. We have a series of tips to help you get on track with your goals without overcomplicating things.
Fitness Myth #3. I don’t have enough time to get in shape
When injury is a nonfactor, time is the most common road block for those looking to improve their health. You may think, I don’t have an hour free every day of my life to spend getting in shape, so why bother? You see others committing half their life to exercising and that just isn’t viable. You can’t quit your job, abandon your responsibilities, or have someone else take care of your kids just to exercise relentlessly every day.
The truth is, you don’t have to.
There are many ways to get in better shape, but some require a lot less time commitment. The secret to getting better results in less time is intensity. We define intensity as the percentage of effort given in a single exercise. The more intensity you give, the less time is required to get results. Vice versa is also true. With less intensity, more time is mandatory.
Let’s say your goal is to burn 200 calories. Trying to achieve this by casually walking may take 45 minutes. Hiking at a relatively easy pace can achieve the same goal in 25 minutes. Or running may burn those 200 calories in 20 minutes.
The same idea can be applied to working out. Doing 3 sets of 10 repetitions with rest in between each set may take 7 minutes to complete an exercise. That is a lot of wasted time to get the benefit of that single exercise. The overwhelming majority of the benefits from working out come when the exercise gets difficult on that third set when you’re fatigued on reps 8, 9, and 10. All of the repetitions and time spent before that are just building up to finally reap those benefits.
Compare that to doing a single set of the exercise, not until you complete 10 repetitions, but until you’ve performed as many as you possibly can. You reach that point of fatigue without multiple sets, and without spending time in the gym just sitting around on your phone resting. This wasted time can be eliminated while getting to the exact same finish line.
At Rock Solid Fitness, our program eliminates all the unproductive time in the gym. 25 minutes is all the time needed to stimulate results throughout a full body workout. That’s why our members come to workout with us in Dunedin from all over Clearwater, Palm Harbor, Safety Harbor, and Oldsmar. The amount of time saved to improve their health is unmatched.
Fitness Myth #4. I can’t workout hard because I’m not in shape
You may have just read the last section and immediately had doubts after reading the word intensity. You’re thinking, I’m not an athlete, or I haven’t worked out before, so there’s no way I can workout intensely. This is a common fear, but with the right approach, it can often be addressed.
Intensity is often mistakenly associated with risk.
You may think of working out more intensely as having to use too heavy of weights, or as having more injury risk because you’re being asked to push yourself too hard. Sadly, many personal training programs, boot camps, or fitness classes have caused these concerns. But this is not the case with our High Intensity SAFE Strength Training program.
The weight required to workout intensely to stimulate results will never have to be too heavy to handle. We focus on slow, controlled movements, with perfect form to protect the joints. This focus enables you to stimulate your muscles correctly without too much resistance, and without fear of injury from having to lift something too heavy for you.
Pushing yourself to your limits with this form will not cause injury either. As you perform an exercise, your muscles start off cold. As you perform more repetitions with good form, your muscles are warming up, your joints are lubricating, and your risk of injury is going down. As you reach those challenging repetitions towards the end of the set, the repetitions are becoming safer despite them becoming harder.
Whether you are working out for the first time, or you have years of experience, you are able to safely push yourself to your limits. The only difference is what your limits are. When you are first starting out, you won’t be as strong or capable of doing as much. Your workouts will reflect that. As you get stronger, your limits increase, and what is required to improve becomes greater. In our HIST training, everyone will be appropriately met at what their current capabilities are.
Fitness Myth #5. I need to workout every day.
What if you could improve your body while doing nothing? Or even while sleeping? The truth is that you can and you are, given that you’ve done your strength training routine. Working out is the stimulus to make your body change. The change itself is happening while you rest.
The working out that you are doing is actually catabolic, meaning that you are breaking down your muscle. The building up of your muscle is happening after the work is over. For days after breaking down your muscles, your body is working in the background to repair them and build them back up. Without the proper rest, and the proper nutrition, you aren’t giving your body the right environment to thrive.
Plenty of people do build great bodies while working out every day. There is no denying that. But the question to ask is, is that necessary? Is that required? Could they get the same results in less time? The answers to those questions are no it isn’t necessary, and yes they could save time and still get the same results.
Our recommendation for strength training is to workout twice per week with high intensity. That is all it takes to stimulate the muscles to grow and the body to adapt. During the rest of the week, you should be able to spend doing what you love, with who you love. Stay active and eat well, but within reason and without it being the greatest focus in your life. There is too much else that deserves your attention in life.
If you are interested in breaking the myths and building your healthiest self to stay functionally strong for longevity, come in for a free training session with us. We proudly serve members from Dunedin, Clearwater, Palm Harbor, Safety Harbor, and Oldsmar.
