7 Worst Fitness Advice You’ve Heard
(That’s total B*LLSH*T!)
“Follow this trick to lose 10kg in 2 weeks”
‘I read it on the internet so it must be true…’
Is it though?
We fitness professionals get our daily dose of laughter from reading the headlines of social media/WhatsApp health and fitness posts. It used to be from the cover of fitness magazines in the old days, how times have changed.
But something never changes – b*llsh*t fitness tips.
Realizing that people still fall for the same “too good to be true” advice – your run of the mill fitness influencer decides to reuse the same BS, not because they believe in recycling.
Can’t say we’re surprised. There are people hopping on one leg back into minefields with better pattern recognition than that.
There is some fitness advice out there that you just shouldn’t follow, no matter how many people said it or where you read it (except here, obviously).
So beware when you hear claims like these:
“Get abs in 2 weeks with this 10 minute effortless workout!”
“Your lazy a** will love it as we won’t be breaking a sweat, so you don’t have to worry about your makeup melting and not looking good. Sweating is for suckers.” – Fitness B*llsh*t Translator
How about getting rich in 2 weeks by working just 10 minutes a day? (You can indeed make enough money to last your whole life, provided you die next Monday)
Now do you realize how absurd these “shortcuts” are?
You obviously didn’t gain all that weight in 2 weeks, you likely won’t be losing them in just 2 weeks either.
Too much work for you? That’s fine! Get yourself an electric stimulator – it’s like an electrocution chair for your stomach. Nothing could go wrong there, or could it? Or these “weight loss belly wraps”. That’s right, magically, your fat will disappear into thin air. And reappear again. Just like magic!
How we all wish we could live a life of pleasure and bliss, free of pain, worry, or physical discomfort. But this is where a little bit of that “no pain, no gain” spirit would do you a whole lot of good.
“The number on the scale is the only measure of progress”
“I’ll still love you just the weigh you are” *wink*
In fact, take a minute to really understand this diagram below. The scale thinks that both the persons below are the same.
Same same but different?
As you can probably already tell, you can be 80kg of lean, mean machine or 80kg of blubber. And the weighing scale wouldn’t know the difference.
Let’s take an example, one of our trainers, Khor sits around 75kg bodyweight with a BMI of 26, which categorizes him as “overweight”…
Slim chance of Mr.Khor getting into The Biggest Loser, eh?
Changes in muscle mass and body fat percentage, also known as body composition, aren’t accounted for on weight scales.
So, you might weigh more, but you may have a lower body fat percentage and be packing more muscles. On the other hand, you could lose a lot of weight in the form of muscle mass and water weight, which you don’t want!
Here’s why:
FAT LOSS
- Improved Fitness
- Reduced Stress on Heart
- Peak Performance
- Delayed Aging
- Reduced Risk for Diseases
- Fat Percentage Decreases
- Increased Metabolism
WEIGHT LOSS
- Decreased Fitness
- Decreased Strength
- Poor Performance
- Early Aging
- Dehydration
- Reduced Metabolism
- Organs Shrink
If anything, body weight is a rather unimportant metric. Just like how redundant your zodiac sign and a particular *cough* body part measurement is in a job evaluation.
“I don’t want to lift heavy because I’m scared I might get too big”
“I don’t want to get too big” is something you should tell your waiter.
How about I tell you I don’t drive cars because I’m afraid I might become a professional racer?
Or I don’t want to work hard because I’m afraid I will get too rich?
Also, if ladies have to avoid free weights and strength training like the COVID-19? Does this also include things like groceries, the laundry, a backpack, your children, a laptop, etc?
On second thought, just stay away from lifting anything against gravity all together – that’s just too unsophisticated for a lady anyway.
Growing muscle is sooo easy, lift something heavy and the next day you’ll be too bulky to roll out of bed? Hmm, wonder why we still have a job as personal trainers and the health and fitness industry still exists?
There’s your answer, thank you.
“Muscle confusion is key to getting in shape so you must always switch up your exercise”
Change your workout every five hours. This way your muscles stay confused and have no clue WTF is going on. If you can’t convince your muscles to grow, confuse them!
Uh, NO. Muscles are not people, so they don’t get bored! People are the ones that get bored and confused.
However, if you’re squatting the same weight, with the same number of reps and sets every time, for weeks and months on end, then of course your muscles and fitness level will remain the same.
Guess what, all you need to do to fix that is to lift more weight and/or increase the repetitions and sets done. To your muscles, this is challenging and exciting enough.
Your muscles are not the social media, you don’t need to do a completely new and different workout every time to shock/entertain your jaded muscles.
If you do that, you’re the one who’s confused, not your muscles.
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”- Bruce Lee
“Exercising on an empty stomach burns more calories”
Yes you do burn more fats than carbs when you’re exercising on an empty stomach.
But your body also stores more fat, while burning more carbs and less of fat after that.
And you DON’T burn more calories. Rather, you may burn less because you’ll just tire out faster on an empty stomach.
At the end of the day, the amount of fat that is stored or burned will depend on your energy balance (fat gain if surplus of calorie; fat loss if deficit of calorie).
Don’t believe us? In a study for the Journal of the International Society of Sports Medicine, twenty females were divided into 2 group – one group (fed) was given a shake before performing cardio, while the other (fasted) would wait to consume the shake post-workout. They were prescribed the same calorie-restricted diet.
And voila, no differences in results found between the 2 groups!
In the age of the internet, people would rather act like witches from the dark ages talking about super-ultra magic fat loss and grain-melted-organic-detox mumbo jumbo than to obey the First Law of Thermodynamics.
Thermodynamics and nutrition are things everyone can learn about for free on the Internet, but sadly that stuff is a lot less fun to listen or read about than the honey-glazed nonsense from your IG booty/6pax model.
“No Pain, No Gain”
If pain builds muscle, does that mean getting run over by a bus would turn you into the next Mr. Olympia? That’s totally not the case isn’t it? Exactly because pain is your body’s way of telling you it’s injured.
Excruciating, stabbing pain in muscles and/or joints? Not good at all!
Soreness in muscles after or during a workout? Perfectly normal and to be expected.
So, for the guys, I know at this point working out for you is just masochistic exhibitionism, but no girl ever cares about how much you can lift. Only other guys *wink*
And girls, you can’t “walk it off” that knee pain with stretches, massages, or ointments. Fix the problem, not the symptom.
“Sit ups and ab exercises give you visible abs”
Yes and no. But for the most part, still a NO.
Simply crank out a few sit ups while eating cakes and burgers and that stubborn belly fat would just melt away?
Have you seen someone with rippling 6 pack abs while all the rest of them look like your average The Biggest Loser participant?
That’s how your average video game character looks anyway, and video games cause violence, so it must be true?
Other than a healthy, calorie-restricted diet combined with a proper exercise regimen, nothing short of liposuction will give you visible 6 pack abs (even that will be short lived if your habits don’t change, which has been shown to be the case with most liposuction).
BUT WAIT! There’s more!
Honorable Mentions
- “Yoga gives you long, lean muscles/ Yoga makes you slim and slender”
- “You must stay in the fat burning zone or your workout is useless”
- “Women must train high repetitions with light weights”
- “Cardio is the best way to lose weight”
- “Machines are better than free weights”
- “Squats are bad for your knees”
- “Eating late at night makes you fat”
- “I want to look like him/her, so I must buy their program and eat exactly what they eat”
There you have it folks, all of the worst fitness advice that’s total BS. We know it’s not easy to filter out the truth from a sea of unscrupulous snake-oil salesmen and fitness “influencers”.
To put it simply, you should do your own research and get your information from actual studies, not from IG influencers and certainly not from “Karen’s” whatsapp messages.
Everyone has an opinion on what works, but feelings and thoughts do not refute science!
Effective and correct science-based methods that fitness professionals use are ever evolving. Which is why it’s of the utmost importance to train at a facility or with a personal trainer that has valid credentials and is current with the sciences.
