Rachel Hart does the lunge, while being supervised by personal trainer 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.