1. Exercise burns lots of calories
You hear this all the time. As soon as someone talks about weight loss intentions, they immediately mention how they need to work out more. Most people assume their weight gain is primarily due to lack of exercise, and they believe they will lose weight by simply increasing activity. But, the truth of the matter is, like weight gain, weight loss is mainly a diet issue.
To lose weight, a person must either expend more calories than they consume or consume fewer calories than they expend. You either increase the output or decrease the input of calories.
A pound of fat is equal to about 3,500 calories. This number is the same for everyone, regardless of weight. However, a common myth is that if you want to lose one pound per week, for instance, you need to eat 3,500 calories less than you usually do each week—or 500 calories less per day. If you want to lose a pound of weight through exercise, you need to burn the same amount of extra calories, i.e., 3500 calories in a week or 500 calories a day.
Most people overestimate the number of calories they expend while exercising. For example, in a 30-minute workout, the average person uses between 250 and 350 calories. Therefore, you can see it takes a lot of exercise to burn a lot of calories.
Weight loss focuses on burning excess fat stored in the body, which is easier to gain than lose. Although exercise is a significant component in the weight loss process, exercising alone cannot get the job done.
Therefore, to be effective, combining diet modification with exercise is crucial. A reliable way to achieve the goal of weight loss should include changes in dietary habits, such as time-restricted eating, eating smaller portions, and reducing carbs and sugars, along with developing a more active lifestyle and a regular exercise routine.
2. A good workout means sweating a lot
How much you sweat during a workout does not necessarily correlate with the number of calories you burn.
Sweating is the body's physiological mechanism to regulate its temperature. It depends on many factors, such as gender, age, and ambient temperature and humidity.
Overweight people tend to sweat more as their bodies generate more heat during exercise. Interestingly, fit people also tend to sweat more and sooner during a workout than those who are less fit. As your fitness level improves, your body's heat-regulating system becomes more efficient.
Therefore, the intensity of sweating does not provide a realistic estimate of the number of calories burned during a workout. Some people sweat buckets just from the warm-up, while others don't sweat at all, even during the more intense parts of the workout, so there is no need to sweat about it.
3. A good workout means I should feel sore and tired
Though many people believe that you need to feel sore after a good workout, this is not the case. Muscle soreness does not correlate with muscle growth and improving fitness.
Muscle soreness is nothing more than a sign that you did something your body wasn't used to or performed an exercise that just so happened to trigger more soreness than others. Being sore and stiff is not a sign that you had a good workout. Likewise, the fact you're not sore doesn't mean you had a poor workout.
When it comes to feeling tired after a workout, one should feel overall tiredness in the muscle group trained or a level of fatigue after aerobic activity. However, you should not feel exhausted to the point where you cannot perform other daily activities, such as working and completing household duties.
When a beginner starts an exercise program or begins frequent physical activity, the level of soreness will generally be higher in the first few weeks. However, the intensity of the soreness will decrease with time; the same is said for energy levels and the feeling of exhaustion. The first few workouts are tough, but the body adapts. Gradually, you should feel more energetic than tired.
4. When it comes to exercise, more is better
About an hour is the ideal duration when it comes to working out. During this time, you can warm up, complete your main workout, and cool down. Furthermore, an hour is enough to gain health benefits, such as burning fat or building muscle, without putting your body at risk of injury. You may want to train for as little as thirty minutes, provided your workouts are of higher intensity, such as high-intensity interval training (HIIT).
Overtraining means training too long or too hard without proper recovery. By overtraining, your body reaches a state of fatigue and burnout caused by vigorous exercise without sufficient rest. This condition will result in chronic fatigue, muscle soreness, lack of energy, limited progress, irritability, and exhaustion.
The adverse effects of overtraining put your body at a high risk of injury. Even hardcore exercise enthusiasts can be injured if they unduly stress their bodies.
Don't get carried away with the slogan 'no pain, no gain' when it comes to exercise. Instead, adjust your training if you feel any excessive discomfort or pain. This will prevent injuries and ensures your exercise continues to be an enjoyable and lasting experience.
5. My decreased fitness is due to old age; exercise won't help me
Although exercise is vital no matter your age, it is even more important for older individuals. A decline in activity, often associated with the aging process, leads to weight gain and general unfitness. In addition, the increasing unfitness hastens our aging process, making us look and feel even older.
Scientific studies show that regular exercise inhibits or reverses the aging process in several ways. First, it is a very effective way of preserving muscle mass and bone density. It helps keep us mentally sharp as we age. Interestingly, exercise slows down aging at the cellular level by maintaining telomere length and mitochondrial stability, which sustains our youthful energy and looks.
On the contrary, if we let ourselves go and get used to a lifestyle of limited physical activity, it begins a cascade of adverse physiological changes in our bodies. Eventually, these changes increase the risk of many conditions, such as diabetes, heart, lung, and joint disorders. Being frail and unhappy, every day, we complain of aches and pains and the plight of old age, and the negative cycle continues.
Therefore, to reiterate, our diminished fitness level often is not due to aging, but rather a decision (conscious or not) to be less physically active when getting old. Our resultant sedentary lifestyle then leads to various allegedly age-related physical decrements impeding us from the beneficial effects of exercise, including vigor and the positive attitude of youth.
Given there are no precluding ailments, it is possible that by following a regular and tolerable exercise program, we can maintain our health and fitness in our advancing age, keeping us more youthful both physically and psychologically.
Hutchinson, Alex. Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights, Fitness Myths, Training Truths, and Other Surprising Discoveries from Science. New York: HarperCollins, 2011.
Smith, JohnEric W., Marissa L. Bello, and Ffion G. Price. 2021. "A Case-Series Observation of Sweat Rate Variability in Endurance-Trained Athletes" Nutrients 13, no. 6: 1807. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu13061807
O'Keefe JH, O'Keefe EL, Lavie CJ. The Goldilocks Zone for Exercise: Not Too Little, Not Too Much. Mo Med. 2018;115(2):98-105.
The University of Birmingham. "A lifetime of regular exercise slows down aging, study finds." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 8 March 2018. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180308143123.htm>.
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