Are you making one of these mistakes?
There are tons of ideas that get repeated so often that you may be tempted to accept them as true. Here are ten of them and the reasons why they’re wrong.
“No Days Off”
If you want faster results, you should train every day. Put another way: if some is good, more is better.
When you train properly, it’s challenging. The exercises you do will cause very minor damage to your muscles. If you’ve ever been sore for a couple days after a workout, you know what this is like.
But the results you’re looking for don’t happen just because you push hard in the gym. The results come after your training when you give your body sufficient nutrition and adequate time to recover.
The results can’t happen if you never rest. You must give your body the opportunity to adapt. Building strength and muscle takes place when you’re recovering.
Instead of training hard every day, balance your training and recovery time. You can work out hard 3-4 times per week. Use the other days for passive recovery (such as sleep or getting a massage) and for active recovery (such as a leisurely walk or light stretching). These encourage bloodflow to the muscles which will improve recovery and your results.
“No Pain, No Gain.”
This is the notion that you must push yourself in the gym so hard that you’re in crippling pain for days after.
Muscle soreness is not a sure sign that you had a great workout. It’s a sign that your body underwent some stress it’s not used to. If you are new to strength training, you will feel sore when you first start out. But if you’re feeling sore for days after every workout you’re doing something wrong.
The purpose of strength training is to stimulate muscle growth, not to annihilate the muscles. You don’t need to crush your quads in order to get stronger. Soreness is not a good proxy for a good workout. You could stand on your tiptoes for three straight hours and I’m pretty sure your calves would be singing the next day. That doesn’t mean it was a good workout.
Instead of measuring your soreness, measure your improvement from week to week on your exercises. Are you able to do more repetitions with the current resistance? Are you able to do the same repetitions with additional weight? Are the repetitions getting better in terms of quality (less wobbly, more controlled)? If these measures are improving over the weeks, that’s how you measure your progress.
Get Toned Using Light Weights and Higher Repetitions.
The idea here is that if you want toned muscles, you use light resistance and do many repetitions. The implication is that using heavier weights will make you bulky.
What we tend to think of as “toned” has less to do with the muscle itself and more to do with having very little body fat covering the muscle. A toned muscle is just a muscle that doesn’t have much fat on top.
If you feel you have more body fat covering your muscles, the issue isn’t really the muscle, is it? Nope, it’s the body fat.
If you want to get rid of body fat, doing light weights for higher repetitions is very inefficient.
First, let’s clear up something about the terms “light” and “heavy”. They’re both relative terms, not objective ones. What is light for you will be heavy for someone else. And what is heavy for you will be light for another person. Also, as you progress on your strength training, you’ll soon find what was once heavy for you becomes light.
“Higher repetitions” is also a subjective term. It’s also unclear. Does that mean 10 repetitions? Thirty repetitions? To be fair, there are some general guidelines you can use (1-5 repetitions, 6-10 repetitions, and 10+ repetitions). Working in these ranges can emphasize certain things, but it’s not a hard distinction. Training in the 1-5 rep range emphasizes power and strength, training in sets of 6-10 reps emphasizes strength and muscle growth (“hypertrophy”), while doing sets of more than 10 emphasizes strength endurance. It’s a continuum. There is no magic number of repetitions.
You can get toned doing 1-5 reps or doing 10+ reps. This is because strength training stimulates your body to build or maintain muscle. You work out primarily to build strength and build/maintain muscle.
If you want to reduce body fat, that is best accomplished through moderating how much food you eat. Eating in moderation (see article) consistently is the most efficient method to lose body fat. This is how you reveal your lean muscle.
Cardio Is Necessary For Fat Loss.
This myth tells you that in order to get lean you have to do a lot of repetitive cardio exercise like using the elliptical or stairclimber. In other words, you have to sweat off the body fat.
In order to shed body fat you need to burn more calories than you consume (this is called being in a calorie deficit). It’s also true that doing cardio burns calories. So the formula for losing fat should be do a lot of cardio to burn a lot calories, right?
Not so fast.
Even if both those statements above are true, is this the most efficient approach to get leaner?
Nope.
Is it easier to reduce your food intake by a couple hundred calories per day or to burn a couple hundred calories per day through cardio? It’s easier to limit food intake.
Cardio is an inefficient way to burn calories. The main reason for this is because your body adapts. The first time you try to run a mile, it’s probably pretty difficult. But each time you do it it gets easier. This is because your body adapts to that stimulus. In other words, it becomes more efficient. If your body is more efficient, you’re going to be burning fewer calories. In order to keep burning the same number of calories through exercise you have three options.
You can go faster. But you can’t go infinitely faster. At some point you will hit a limit on how fast you can go.
You can go farther. This will require more time. At some point you will reach a limit on how much time you can spend exercising.
You can switch modalities (instead of running, you can swim, for example). At some point you will exhaust the best options. You can try to run a mile using only your hands for instance, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Another big problem with this approach is it’s impossible to accurately track calories burned through exercise. Yes, I know the treadmill shows how many calories you burned, but it’s not accurate. Your smartwatch may be more accurate than the treadmill but it still won’t be precise. If you can’t tell accurately how many calories you’ve burned, how useful is it to use exercise primarily to burn calories?
Cardio is great for cardiovascular (heart and circulatory system) and for your lungs. Please, by all means, include some cardio in your daily activities. Many people really enjoy doing cardio. I am not here to discourage cardio. You should just know that relying primarily on cardio as a method to lose fat loss is inefficient.
Lifting Heavy Makes You Bulky.
This is the flip side of the “use light weights for many repetitions to get lean” myth. The thinking is that lifting heavy gives your muscles no choice but to swell to super hero size.
The truth is lifting heavy is an efficient way to get stronger and build muscle. But it’s important to understand that building muscle is a slow process. It’s not as if you do a few sets of squats one day, then you go to sleep and wake up the next day with giant quad muscles.
Building muscle is a very gradual process. It takes time. If your goal is to put on a little bit of muscle, that’s great. You are not going to accidentally overshoot and put on 40lbs. of muscle without realizing it.
It’s also imperative to keep in mind that heavy is a relative term. Heavy means heavy for you. In order to see results, you have to challenge yourself continually. Use resistance that is heavy enough to challenge you but not so heavy that you compromise your form while doing the repetitions.
The actual activity that makes you bulky is not lifting heavy. It’s consistently overeating. Your food intake has to be appropriate for your goals.
Every workout should be brutal.
Otherwise known as “no pain, no gain”, right? If your workout ends with you collapsed on the floor in a sweaty heap, that means it was a success, right? If you’re sore for days that means it was a great workout, right? Both wrong.
You have to keep your ultimate goal in mind. Is your goal to be wiped out every workout? Probably not. It’s very hard to stay motivated if you’re constantly sore from a previous workout.
That isn’t to say you’ll never be sore. Soreness is part of the acclimation process when your body is adjusting to you putting a new demand on it. When you begin a new training regimen, it puts stress on the body. The soreness is a response to the unfamiliar stress. As you grow more accustomed to the workouts, you will be less sore. But that doesn’t mean your workouts are any less effective.
Don’t rely on soreness to indicate if the workout was good or not. You can have a great workout and not have any soreness. You can have a terrible workout and be sore for days. Instead, look to data such as: did you do more repetitions this session than before? Were you able to use more weight on the bar? Were you more stable during the execution of the repetitions?
Also, one counterintuitive thing about training is that you want some workouts to actually be easy. Going hard all the time can be counterproductive if you don’t give your body a chance to recover. Occasionally an intentionally easy session will allow you to accomplish things like: practicing a particular movement, emphasizing form, just getting the blood flowing into the muscles.
Muscle confusion. Switch up workouts frequently.
In order to keep your body progressing, you must constantly be switching up your workouts.
I have to be honest, I can’t stand that this myth is so often repeated.
If you want to get good at something -anything- you have to practice. And if you’re constantly changing what you’re doing, how can you expect to be any good at it? Also, how will you know if your plan is working?
Maybe you’re thinking “but it’s boring to do the same workout forever”. No one is saying you have to do the same workout until the end of time. However, you should ask yourself whether you’re looking for entertainment or results. If it’s results that you want, the fastest way to get them is by getting very good at the fundamental movement patterns. That means doing squats, deadlifts, pulls, presses, and carries. It also means tracking your progress as you go. Over the weeks and months, you should be gradually increasing the amount of weight you’re lifting. This is how you build strength, build muscle, and thereby see results.
Switching up too frequently will undermine your progress for a couple reasons. You won’t get to practice the lifts often enough to get good at them. Lifts like squats or bench press may seem simple but they actually require coordination. This is why the first time you try them you’re wobbly under the bar. After a few sessions you’re way more stable. This is your brain learning to coordinate the motor pattern better. If you’re benching once or twice a week this will happen faster than if you’re only benching once or twice a month.
Another reason is it distracts your focus. Instead of concentrating on improving your form, you’ll be constantly trying to learn how to do the new lifts. While it’s exciting to try to learn new things all the time, it’s not the way you master things. Mastery happens when you take a few things and practice them repeatedly and intentionally.
Lastly, your muscles don’t get confused. They can’t. They can only do two things: contract and extend. That’s it.
If you want results, repeat the fundamental movements and get stronger at them. Don’t worry about novelty.
Body part splits are superior.
If you want to see progress, dedicate one day to obliterate each body part. An example of this approach might look like this: Monday, chest. Tuesday legs. Wednesday back and biceps. Thursday core. Friday shoulders and triceps.
The thinking is that you can really hammer each body part and give it just about a full week to recover before you crush it again.
Can this work? It can. It’s a method favored by experienced bodybuilders.
But if you’re just starting out, or even if you’re an intermediate lifter, it’s not the best approach to get what you want. Experienced bodybuilders are advanced and their training is designed to sculpt a physique muscle by muscle.
If you’re a regular person this just doesn’t apply to you. Your best approach is to focus on total body strength, rather than individual muscles. Rather than do a bunch of isolation exercises that work the muscles individually, it’s more efficient for most of your training to be doing compound exercises. Compound exercises use muscle groups simultaneously so they all get stronger together. Think of a pull-up. You use your lats, biceps, shoulders, even your forearms at the same time. They work together to get you strong and build muscle. Instead of doing an exercise for each body part, you can do a few exercises each workout and hit almost all the muscles.
Training like a specific athlete or celebrity will make your body look like theirs.
“See how [insert your favorite celebrity’s name] got ripped/jacked/insane results!” The implication is simple: if you do what they do, you’ll look like they do.
There’s nothing wrong with being motivated or inspired by someone, even if they’re a celebrity. Looking up to someone can be a good thing as long as you keep things in perspective.
First, genetics may not determine everything, but they determine a lot. This isn’t to discourage you, it’s just to help you understand that not everything is possible for everyone. And that’s okay. Some people are going to be naturally leaner than others. Other people will be able to pack on muscle more easily than others.
Second, your situation is different. You could do the same exact workout that your favorite celebrity supposedly does. But there’s no guarantee that that is actually their workout. You have no way of knowing. Also, they may have resources (trainers, nutritionists, personal chefs, massage therapists, doctors, etc.) that aren’t realistic for you.
It’s fine to admire a celebrity’s physique or to want to approach the kind of shape that they’re in. You can work towards it, just be realistic about it. You will never be them, you can only be you.
If you train to get strong in the basic lifts (squat, deadlift, push, pull, carry) while eating to support those performance and health goals, you’re going to love the way you look - even if you don’t look exactly like the celebrity on some magazine cover.
Finally, a good training program is built specifically for you. Your goals, your capabilities, your limitations/injuries etc. should all be taken into account. Following a celebrity’s purported program doesn’t consider any of those things. That’s why doing what they do isn’t going to get you the results you’re after.
Women and men should train totally differently.
This encompasses several myths and more misconceptions than I care to list here. But the underlying -and mistaken- idea seems to be this: If you give men and women the same exercises to do then the women’s physiques will resemble the men’s and vice versa.
Seems kind of silly when you read it, now doesn’t it?
I think this stems from fear. You don’t want to do the “wrong” exercise and end up accidentally looking far different than you intended, right?
If a woman does squats, deadlifts, presses, and pull-ups, you know what happens? She’ll build strength and lean muscle.
If a man does those same exercises, he’ll build strength and lean muscle.
There are hormonal and size differences that tend to play out between men and women. Men are generally larger and the relative abundance of testosterone (relative to the amount women have) means most men are capable of building more muscle and strength than most women.
However, if you want strong legs, the exercises you should do are the same, regardless of whether you’re a man or a woman. Squat, deadlift, and lunge if you want strong legs.
If you want toned arms and shoulders, you should press and pull whether you’re a man or a woman. Bench presses, shoulder presses, and rows are going to get you there.
If you want ripped abs, you should train your core and… eat an amount that supports a very lean body.
These are just some of the more common misconceptions out there. Hopefully this cleared up some confusion and will help you avoid some common training mistakes that are holding you back.
If you have any questions, I’m happy to answer. Just leave them below.
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