Top 3 Fitness Pseudoscience Claims
I Had the Best Time Recording Our Latest Podcast Episode, Ep 005: Post Workout Gainz
If you haven’t listened to it yet, please do so, Zach put out some incredibly helpful info in that one. You can find the episode on Spotify through this link:
By the end of the episode I was in literal tears, it was the funniest pod I’ve done in awhile. I’m not sure about you, but the stuff that really gets me going is fitness pseudoscience, it’s everywhere. If you’re looking at the stuff from the general population POV it can be horribly confusing, on my point of view it can either be absolutely hilarious or infuriating, there’s really no in between. That’s what got me so bad in our last episode, we were going through all of this super good post workout nutrition content and the common pseudoscience claims just kept coming up in conversation, they’re everywhere!
If you find yourself pretty regularly confused by conflicting health & fitness information, don’t feel bad, it’s actually really common. I was the same way for a long time, it’s only as I have committed almost a decade of my life to learning as much as I can about fitness that I started to easily debunk these things. I thought it would be fun for me, helpful for you to go over my top 5 favorite false claims. They could be super common ones or ones that I just find hilarious, let’s get into it.
1 - Weight Training Makes You Bulky
I cannot begin to explain how many times I have either heard this claim from someone who doesn’t know too much about fitness or was asked by a client about how to avoid getting bulky from weight training.
LISTEN
I have been trying to get bulky for the better part of my life, and I’m still not anywhere close to being there. TRUST ME, no one slips and falls into a pile of muscle.
This one really makes me laugh and incredibly angry all at the same time. Mostly because it is such an archaic view of weight training that just doesn’t seem to kick the bucket. The reality of it all is that resistance training is actually the best way for someone to improve their overall body composition.
Generally, men are designed to look manly, and women and designed to look womanly. Men that don’t weight train don’t end up looking more lady-like. I have never heard of any situation where some sad, fat-balding 50 year old dude was laughed at for looking like a chick because he neglected training legs hard for the better part of three decades. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Obviously this concern is almost solely brought up by women, but I use the opposite scenario to help prove how silly this really is. Resistance training helps build up your aesthetically pleasing features. On top of that, you can decide what to focus most of your training on. In no way will you ever wake up and realize that all of your hard work in the gym and the kitchen has left you with a bulky, unappealing body.
2 - Cardio is the Best Way to Burn Fat
This is a good one, and I would bet that the majority of the readers would be surprised to see this claim on my list. The thing is, cardio isn’t the best way to burn fat, and I wouldn’t even consider it to be a good one. I know this is a pretty big claim, let me explain.
Cardio is generally a high-demanding exercise. Of course, there are tons of variables that can play out in regards to that statement, but overall, regular, repetitive movement over extended periods of time can cause overuse injuries. Running has something like a 50% injury rate for individuals who consider themselves regular runners per year. (sciencedirect.com) A similar statistic would consider bodybuilding to be less than 1% of an injury rate per year. Injuries hinder exercise, making calorie burn and overall, fat burn harder.
High risk of injury isn’t my only claim, though. We could get into the newer arguments regarding “metabolic fatigue” with extended high activity levels, but instead we could just take the easy route and point out the benefits of the competition, resistance training. Why is it that people with more muscle mass seem to eat so much more food? It’s because of the extra mass. When I work with clients I try and encourage them to consider “building” the body they want instead of burning down the body they don’t want. The more muscle mass we have on our frame, the more calories we burn sustaining it. To boot, it’s good-looking.
If I do advocate for added cardio to help burn more calories in a client’s program, I offer up steady state cardio. Steady state cardio is not nearly as demanding on the body and allows us to simply burn an extra 200-500 calories a day by adding more steps into our routine.
The best case scenario? A well-developed individual who has lean, form-fitting muscle and adds in a little steady state cardio periodically to lose a couple of lbs.
3 - Soreness is the Best Indicator for a Great Workout
This one is a pretty common misconception. Even worse, it’s commonly pushed and reinforced by bad coaches and trainers to be the paragon of a good training session.
Soreness IS NOT the end all, be all for performance and progression. Check out this insert from a great article explaining what training soreness actually is, The Truth about Soreness, written by world renowned trainer and strength coach Christian Thibaudeau:
Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) is generally seen as local pain in a trained muscle resulting from inflicted muscle damage during your lifting session.
DOMS occurs 12-72 hours after training, depending on the individual. Along with the discomfort comes associated swelling (the muscle almost looks pumped), stiffness in the affected joints and a possible loss of strength and extensibility – thus reduction in mobility – of the muscle.
In other words, the generally accepted theory is that when you weight train you cause micro-trauma to the target muscles, which is essentially an injury and thus results in inflammation and pain/tenderness. Methods that can cause the most muscle trauma – accentuated eccentrics, shock absorption, handling very challenging loads for several attempts – will lead to the most soreness.
Now that we understand what soreness actually is, incredibly tough training, especially in under or deconditioned individuals, can result in incredible soreness. This does not indicate more gains caused from the actual stimulator (the training). The best way to understand this is by representing training intensity with muscle soreness connected to actual gains made from a training session.
On the “Y” potion of the graph represents potential gains made off of a training session where the “X” represents training stimulus resulting in muscle soreness. As we train harder, longer, and produce more muscle fatigue and eventually soreness, we can understand that we are actually benefiting less from the training session.
This happens because it takes longer to recover from the session, meaning we cannot train the same muscle groups for a longer period of time after the session, it can produce inconsistent training because of pain or delayed soreness, can result in actual injury, and can simply just result in less ideal total stimulus to a muscle.
The best way to indicate a proper stimulus achieved in a training session? Generally, I suggest that we want to “feel” the workout a day or two after the training session without making life more difficult. When we begin to reach the, “I can’t get off the toilet,” level of soreness we know that we are pushing the less advantageous side of the bell curve.
Well that’s the end of this one, friends.
I hope you got something out of it, and if you did please share it with a friend because it helps us grow.
If you’re looking to improve your post-workout routine and recovery, I personally use and support 1st Phorm’s Phormula-1 and Ignition stack. You can use the QR code to purchase straight from their website and help support our business at the same time.
As always give us a shout if you are interested in working with us at our gym or remotely as an online training client by emailing p10gym@p10nation.com
Andrew Happel