Bri­an Chin Le­ung

Al­bert Ein­stein once said: "On­ly two things are in­fi­nite, the uni­verse and hu­man stu­pid­i­ty and I'm not sure about the for­mer." On this point, it is tru­ly amaz­ing how fool­ish and gullible peo­ple are when it comes to fol­low­ing out­ra­geous fit­ness ad­vice. To­day, we are go­ing to have a look at some fit­ness myths; if my an­swers seem a bit acer­bic, it is be­cause my pa­tience wears thin for peo­ple who ac­cept these myths as facts.

No pain, no gain–

This is tru­ly a dan­ger­ous state­ment and my counter to this is: To work with pain, you must be in­sane. There is a big dif­fer­ence from feel­ing a cer­tain de­gree of sore­ness a day or two af­ter work­ing out, and feel­ing pain while you are work­ing out. A fit­ness ac­tiv­i­ty should not hurt while you are do­ing it, and if it does then ei­ther your form is bad or you al­ready have an in­jury. If any train­er ad­vis­es you to "work through the pain," fire him im­me­di­ate­ly!

Strength train­ing makes you bulky–

This state­ment is usu­al­ly made by some women. The fact is that women don't have the amount of hor­mones nec­es­sary to build mas­sive amounts of mus­cle, un­less they re­sort to tak­ing an­a­bol­ic steroids. If you are a woman prac­tis­ing weight train­ing and you are steroid-free, you are not go­ing to look like a man–un­less you have tes­ti­cles, which is the main pro­duc­er of testos­terone.

Ab ma­chines and ab sit-ups will get rid of bel­ly fat –

Every day on ca­ble TV, there is a new ma­chine in­vent­ed that re­port­ed­ly gives you a six-pack in four weeks. How­ev­er, the fact re­mains that in or­der to see your six-pack, you first have to drop your over­all per­cent­age of body fat. You can't pick and choose ar­eas where you'd like to burn fat. What ma­chines and sit-ups do is to help you strength­en the mus­cles around your mid­sec­tion; but if you want your six-pack to show, start eat­ing cor­rect­ly and do reg­u­lar car­dio, which will as­sist in drop­ping over­all body fat.

You don't need carbs, cut all carbs from your di­et–

Again, this is al­so a se­ri­ous state­ment that can af­fect your good health over a long-term pe­ri­od. While it is a fact that with low-carb di­et­ing you see fast, dra­mat­ic re­sults on your waist­line; some peo­ple take this a step fur­ther by try­ing to elim­i­nate all carbs from their di­et. Fool­ish­ly try­ing to elim­i­nate all carbs from your di­et will prob­a­bly mean that you are go­ing to end up eat­ing more pro­tein. If you con­sume too much pro­tein, you run the risk of a nu­tri­ent im­bal­ance, kid­ney strain or de­hy­dra­tion. Rather than try­ing to elim­i­nate all carbs, you should be­come se­lec­tive in your carb in­take. You must de­vel­op the abil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy good carbs from bad carbs. To do this, you should re­search a food list­ing called the Glycemic In­dex.

�For­get sil­ly myths and stick to fit­ness facts.

Keep train­ing.