6 Common Female Fitness Myths Exposed

With all the advice flying around on the internet when it comes to fitness, it’s easy to get confused and feel like it’s useless to try to figure out the truth.

After all, if everyone’s saying something different, and sometimes the advice is conflicting with each other, someone’s got to be wrong.

That’s why there are so many myths and misconceptions about fitness out there. People read something and parrot back exactly what they read, without actually checking to see if it’s true or not.

1. If You Lift Heavy Weights You’ll Start To Look Manly

This is one of the most common ones out there. The thinking goes that weight lifting builds muscles, and lots of muscles on a woman look manly, therefore weightlifting makes women look manly, right?

Wrong.

The thing that’s actually responsible for overdeveloped muscles is the natural hormone testosterone. And as we all know, men produce testosterone naturally in their bodies in much greater quantities than women do. In fact, women have a tiny fraction of the amount of testosterone that men have.

So what does that mean?

It means that even if you’re a serious female weightlifter, you’re still not going to look like a bulky male bodybuilder. Unless you’re actually injecting synthetic testosterone into your body, you’re not going to look manly.

Here’s why you might be working out and still not losing weight.

2. After You Stop Working Out, Your Muscles Turn Into Fat

To dispute this statement, all we have to do is look at the laws of physics. It’s not just wrong, it’s flat out impossible.

When you’re on a good workout plan (that is, you’re strength training, and getting the proper amount of nutrition and rest), your muscles will grow in size. This is called hypertrophy.

But when you stop working out, your muscles don’t “turn into fat”, they shrink in size – in other words, they atrophy. Your muscle cells don’t become fat cells, they simply shrink.

When you slack off on your fitness plan and start eating poorly, the parts of your body that were once firm muscle might feel flabby and fatty instead. That’s not because the muscle turned to fat, far from it. It’s because the muscle shrank, and your body stored the excess fat over it.

3. For A Butt That Pops, Train Your Legs Everyday

If we’re talking about ideal weight training habits, this is what works: training one area of your body hard, and then resting it for between 48 and 72 hours to give it time to recover.

To understand why this is most effective, we need to look at what training actually does to your muscle. See, in the gym, you’re not actually making your muscles bigger. What you’re doing is stimulating your muscles to grow.

Then, over the next 48 to 72 hours, your muscles will grow while you’re resting, as a result of that stimulus. So if you cut your resting period short, you’re going to inhibit your muscles’ growth, not boost it.

6 reasons your body isn’t burning fat (even though it should be).

4. Eating Too Much Protein Is Bad For You

Nope. This one is wrong again.

Protein is literally what your body uses to build muscle. It’s the building block, so to speak. When your body ingests protein, it breaks it down into amino acids, which are crucial to your body’s critical functions.

That’s why it’s so important to get enough protein, especially after a workout. If you don’t get enough protein, you artificially limit your muscle growth.

The easiest way to figure out if you’re getting enough protein is a simple formula – you should be eating one gram of protein for every pound you weigh. If you weigh 130 pounds, you should be eating 130g of protein per day.

5. You’ll Get Fat If You Eat More Than 3 Meals Per Day

You know what’s not relevant to whether you’re gaining or losing weight during the day? The number of meals you eat.

Heck, you could eat a grain of rice per meal and have 10,000 meals over the course of the day, and you still wouldn’t gain weight (well, you probably would).

The much more important measure of whether you’re going to gain weight or not is in what you’re eating, not when you’re eating it. More specifically, you should be looking at the number of calories you’re consuming, not the number of meals you’re having.

Here’s how to work out early in the morning.

6. Supplements Only Work For Men

Let’s get this out of the way first off – if you’re eating right and getting all the right nutrients, you probably don’t even need to take supplements.

But if you’re not (and most of us aren’t), then supplements can be a great way to make sure your body is getting everything it needs to be as healthy as possible.

Try taking a multivitamin to cover all your vitamin and mineral bases, and fish oil to make sure you’re getting the fatty acids you need.

Supplements don’t just work for men, they work for everyone, because they’re giving you the nutrients your body needs, which you might not be eating every day. That’s what’s going to keep your body strong.

The Biggest Female Fitness Myths To Avoid

1. If You Lift Heavy Weights You’ll Start To Look Manly
2. After You Stop Working Out, Your Muscles Turn Into Fat
3. For A Butt That Pops, Train Your Legs Everyday
4. Eating Too Much Protein Is Bad For You
5. You’ll Get Fat If You Eat More Than 3 Meals Per Day
6. Supplements Only Work For Men

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