5 Old Fitness Myths You'll Still Hear In Every Gym • Russ Howe PTI

Don’t believe everything you hear in the gym.

Here’s five of the most common fitness myths that’ve been making their way around gym floors for the last few decades

“Steroids Don’t Make Much Difference, Bro!”

People are protective of their results.

If we think that someone is about to undermine our efforts, sometimes this makes us say silly things.

With regards to steroids, this is why it doesn’t take long for a “you’ve still gotta put the work in” to become a “if anything you’ve gotta train even harder, otherwise it’ll all turn to fat”.

But in reality that’s not how any of this works.

Seriously, nobody is using steroids because they make it HARDER to gain muscle!

If you take a look below you’ll see the results of a 1996 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which looked at the muscle building effects of steroids on various groups of trainees. The biggest shock in these findings was not that the trainees who used steroids and hit the gym gained the most muscle (that’s to be expected) but rather that trainees who used steroids and did no exercise at all actually gained more muscle than natural trainees who hit the gym three times per week. (13, 14)

So much for “putting the work in”, huh?

“Easting Small Frequent Meals Speeds Up Your Metabolism”

Eating food causes a temporary increase to our metabolic rate, so some people believe that dividing your food into lots of small meals will increase fat loss by creating more of these metabolic spikes.

However, a 2013 study published in Obesity laid the smackdown on this theory.

Researchers controlled the calorie intake of participants while increasing their meal frequency from three meals per day to six meals per day, and showed that this did not increase fat loss, nor did it speed up the metabolism. (2)

Interestingly, they found that some people felt hungrier as a result of switching to smaller more frequent meals, lending credence to the theory that you should just follow a timetable that suits you.

This myth has been around forever (it’s so engrained in fitness folklore that I was even taught it during a gym instructor course in 2001!), and the confusion is not helped when people are given silly advice like this from “fitness influencers”:

does eating small frequent meals speed up your metabolism

Does lifting weights create the afterburn effect like HIIT?

“Gym Newbies Should Stick To Cardio At First”

Gym newbies are often told that they should focus on doing cardio at first, and then add weights further down the line.

I do not agree.

I’m not saying that cardio won’t help you lose weight, but rather that you don’t need to delay adding weight training to your routine. You see, studies show that a combination of both is superior, and more fun, which significantly improves your chance of being consistent in the long-term. (1)

A graph showing cardio vs weights vs both for weight loss results

“Early Morning Fasted Cardio Burns More Fat”

During the early 2000s, I regularly dragged my ass out of bed at Fuck O’ Clock in the morning to pound the treadmill.

I did this because fitness magazines (the best source of fitness information at the time) claimed that doing early morning fasted cardio burns more fat.

So imagine my delight (and simultaneous dismay at all those missed lie-ins) when I discovered they were dead wrong!

You see, the original theory behind this concept was that training in a fasted state would give the body no choice but to burn through stored fat for fuel during exercise, but we now have stacks of peer-reviewed research showing that this isn’t how it works at all. It turns out the body is a lot smarter than we gave it credit for, and if you perform your cardio in a fasted state it’ll balance the books by switching to burning carbohydrates for fuel later in the day, and vice versa. This basically means you can do cardio fasted/fed and even AM/PM and see largely the same results. Here’s more on this topic. (9, 10, 11, 12)

“You Gotta Eat Clean To Get Lean!”

I asked Dr. Layne Norton, PhD, to chime in on this one.

Here’s what he had to say:

“Clean eating is a meaningless fitness term which usually causes more harm than good.

Foods which are deemed to be healthy are classed as clean, and foods which are deemed to be unhealthy are dirty, but this simply doesn’t work, because something which would be considered clean for a bodybuilder might be dirty for a vegetarian, and something which a vegetarian considers clean would be unacceptable to a vegan, etc.

Plus, encouraging people to categorize foods as good and bad (or clean and dirty) ensures they’ll build an an unhealthy relationship with food. Research clearly shows that we do not need to fear or avoid any food, because fat storage ultimately comes down to total calorie intake, and there are a number of ways to control this, so you don’t need to live on chicken and rice!” (3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

– Dr. Layne Norton, PhD