Don’t Believe These Popular Fitness Myths in 2024
It’s a new year and a great time to reboot your fitness journey. Perhaps you have a new meal plan or gym membership that you’re just starting to use; or maybe this is the year you’ll really start working towards a new fitness goal. But before you jump too deep, promise me one thing: promise me that you will avoid these pitfalls that fitness influencers have set for you.
Don’t worry about the timing of anything.
Once you set up your daily routine, you will have many questions. Beginners often hear that there are guidelines for how far apart you should exercise or eat, and it’s good to keep those guidelines in mind… if they help you. But ultimately your priorities should be:
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Do you do it at all (train or don’t train)
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How many activities do you do (working out three times a week is probably better than once)
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And only then should you worry about the exact timing.
For example, let’s say you plan to go to the gym on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but Monday was a holiday and the gym was closed. So you travel on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday and then only have one day off to rest? Or do you skip Monday to focus on training on Wednesday and Friday? Or, if you’ve already missed Monday and Tuesday, should you try to squeeze three workouts into a shortened week before taking the weekend off?
These are all correct answers . I promise. The big picture matters more than the details of what exercises you did on what day. If you can, do three workouts this week. The exact days don’t matter.
Some other timing aspects you can relax about:
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Rest days between training days: On a day-to-day level, they don’t make much difference . Monday/Tuesday/Friday is as good as Monday/Wednesday/Friday. Your biceps won’t burn if you use them two days in a row.
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Post-workout meal or protein timing. If you can, it’s good to eat soon after your workout, but if you miss the so-called anabolic window, you’ll be fine .
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Doing cardio before strength training or vice versa : whichever comes second, the result will be a little worse, since you will be a little tired. But you’re still signaling your body to build muscle and adapt your cardiovascular system, no matter what order you do your workouts. Whatever the priority is, it should come first, but don’t worry if you can’t do what you need to do. preferred method .
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Time between two workouts on the same day . If you can’t separate the two workouts on different days, it’s best to separate them by at least six hours. But this is a directive, not a law. If you can only train at 8am and noon, then train at 8am and noon. (Just do yourself a favor and eat a good carb breakfast after your morning workout .)
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Which body part do you train on which day : In a “split” workout, you can train chest and triceps on Monday, back and biceps on Tuesday, and so on. If you think you’d prefer a different order, try it and see if you like it. Remember that doing leg day is more important than leg day itself .
Don’t throw out an entire exercise or food group because an expert told you to.
Regardless of where you get your information, you must remember that the source is almost always the information business first and the coach second. That YouTuber, TikToker, book author, or whatever, knows they need to grab you with a shocking new fact and promise that they have all the answers.
Some of them are, shall we say, a little dramatic in their statements. This means that they often position themselves as experts, telling you that everything you did before was wrong and encouraging you to abandon everything you know and follow them to find a new way of doing things.
But that’s not how fitness works. There are so many different ways to get stronger, lose weight, reduce your risk of heart disease, or whatever your goal may be. Your old habits were not the cause of all your problems. To give some counterpoints to the myths circulating these days:
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Lifting weights isn’t bad for you : Strength training is good for building strength and increasing or maintaining muscle mass, both of which benefit your overall health .
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Deadlifting isn’t particularly dangerous : picking things up off the ground is a normal human activity, and available injury statistics don’t highlight it as something to avoid.
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High-intensity cardio doesn’t wreak havoc on a woman’s (or anyone’s) metabolism : If you used to feel like you needed to do a ton of HIIT to burn more calories, good news: you don’t! But HIIT is great in small doses, and we could all probably use a combination of steady-state cardio and harder interval training .
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No one has found the one true way to strength train : it’s not a super slow approach , it’s not going to failure , and it’s not some trend that someone will invent or revive tomorrow. There are many good ways to get stronger, as you can tell by the fact that everyone has their own idea of how to do it.
Don’t expect all experts to agree
In the world of fitness, there are different goals, approaches and opinions, just as in the world of food there are different cuisines and different recipes. If a runner tells you to lift weights after running, and a weightlifter tells you to lift weights before you even think about doing any endurance exercise, who is right? They both play their own sport. Even in a sport like powerlifting, coaches disagree on the best training methods. If you are interested in this sport, choose someone you trust and train the way they think is best. (There’s a lot to be said for joining a club or hiring a coach.)
But if you’re working out just for fun, health, and maybe a little vanity, you don’t have to follow every piece of advice and resolve disagreements between experts in different fields all the time. Don’t expect everything to be compatible, just choose an approach that will take you in the right direction.
Don’t chase suffering
The most important thing beginners need to know about fitness is that exercise should feel like work, but not like torture.
Not a single athlete or ordinary healthy person on the street completely hates his life during every training session. They mix easy and hard days, and even their hard days are softened a little by all-out efforts. A runner may collapse from exhaustion at the end of a race, but he does not do this at the end of every training run. Making fitness a part of your life doesn’t mean living in misery —no matter how many images of people sweating and panting you see in advertising or on social media.