See the thing about fitness magazines is they have this thing called a budget. The budget is to pay celebrities or people in the public eye to be on the cover. Because we all know they’ll sell more copies with Rihanna on the cover than say, Mary from down the road!

And when they get your attention with the celeb, they can then make crazy claims like “Flat abs in 2 weeks” or “Lose weight by eating {magic supplement} every day”

#1. Lifting weights makes you bulky

Everyone has a friend of a friend or distant relative who, the moment she touched a weight, got huge. Her shoulders were like boulders, her arms ripped from her sleeves and her boobs turned into bulging pecs!

This is the absolute #1 thing I find with girls I train. Without getting too sciency, women produce a tiny fraction of the hormone Testosterone that men produce. Testosterone is a key player in regulating muscle mass in relation to exercise. Without it there is no base to build muscle and the lack of a significant amount of it in the blood will not allow muscle to be built.

Unless you are taking anabolic steroids you will never get big and bulky. It just can’t happen naturally.

Jackie Perez certainly doesn’t fear weight training.. And I think it’s paying off for herWhat actually happens when girls lift weights is a lot less scary and actually quite exciting. Some of the benefits include:

• Burning more fat: With an increase in muscle mass, the energy expenditure (calories burned) is greater than that of a girl with less muscle.
• Stronger bones: This is particularly important as you get older. The older you get the less dense your bones become. Weight training has been shown time and time again to prevent this by increasing bone density combatting osteoporosis and osteopenia.
• Toned arms, legs and buns: The word “toned” gets thrown around a lot. Toned essentially means, the muscle is visible wothout a layer of fat covering it. The less fat you have the more “toned” you look. The fact that weight training burns a more calories and strips away the fat on top is enough to give you the toned look you’ve been searching for!

#2. Spot reduction

You want flat abs so you do some sit ups. It makes perfect sense on the surface, but here’s the kicker. Your body is smarter than that and doesn’t give a shit where you want to lose a few inches from. Fat loss occurs across your whole body. Not just from one area. You can of course lose the layer of fat from over your abs to make them appear flat but this will only come as your total body fat % drops.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but fat loss starts and ends in the kitchen.

Doing leg raises to sculpt your lower abs may cause you to feel the burn but in actual fact, what your feeling is you hip flexors, located under your rectus abdominus (abs) doing the work. The “lower abs” don’t actually exist. Promise!

#3. But what about cardio??

Cardio is short for cardiovascular activity. This is anything that makes your heart rate rise above it’s resting rate. For some reason, this has been classified as running or cycling. That’s all. That’s cardio right there.

Unfortunately for many, they never get to experience the searing, heart pumping out of your mouth feeling of a high rep set of squats, or a kettlebell circuit.

All of these things cause your heart rate to rise and stay elevated throughout the entire workout (and even after).

To the people who enjoy running, for any reason, by all means keep it up. But to the gals who hate it and think it’s the only way to get “cardio in”, there are hundreds of ways to get the heart pumping without pounding the pavement day after day.

#4. Muscle turns to fat when you stop training

This opposite is also held to be true. That fat turns to muscle.

Finally, the idea that muscle somehow magically turns to fat when you stop exercising. It’s like saying my wine will turn to water when I don’t drink it (obviously this is a bit of an exaggerated example, but they are two completely different things, just like muscle and fat).

What actually happens is, as you stop exercising you gain weight, which is stored as fat in your body. This coupled with the muscle fibers you built while training getting smaller is what may lead you to believe that your hard earned muscle is transforming before your very eyes!

So there you have it. I hope I’ve shed some light on things that you have had doubts about.

Cheers,
Sean.