There are so many myths about weightlifting floating around out there. I believed so many of them for years and they kept me from trying it. I don’t want that to happen to you, so today I am dispelling five myths about weightlifting. These are:
- Weightlifting makes you bulky.
- Spot training or targeting specific areas.
- You must work out every day to get results.
- You must work out for hours to get results.
- You can’t get good results unless you go to the gym.
As I’ve shared in previous posts, I started dieting and exercising at 14. For the first seven years all I did was cardio. This was in part because I thought that was the best way to burn fat, and I thought the more I did, the better the results. In addition to my cardio, I would also do ab workouts, because I thought doing crunches and ab exercises was how you get a flat tummy. I never considered weightlifting, because I didn’t think it would help me. I thought it would bulk me up and I wanted to get smaller. Fortunately, by the time I’d reached my early twenties, I started to learn about the benefits of weightlifting. I started lifting weights about 23 years ago or so. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that most of the things I thought were true about weightlifting are actually myths. Now there are many myths about weightlifting, but today I want to focus on the five I hear often.
- Weightlifting makes you bulky.
This myth has been floating around for a long time. I am not sure how it even got started because, generally weightlifting does not bulk you up. Quite the contrary, it make you smaller, coupled with good nutrition. Despite this myth continuing to float around you have to make a very deliberate effort to bulk up or gain muscle mass. Similar to losing fat, it comes down to diet.
Muscle is more dense than fat, so unless you are gaining muscle without simultaneously losing fat you aren’t going to bulk up. Body fat takes up more space on the body than muscle, so as you lift weights and follow good nutrition you will get smaller as the muscle you build will replace the fat, and because the muscle takes up less space, you shrink. - Spot training or targeting specific areas.
As I mentioned earlier, I used to believe that I could crunch my way to the abs I wanted. It didn’t help that, at least at the time, there were all sorts of workout videos floating around promising six-pack abs in six weeks. There were 5-minute abs workouts and 7-minute abs workouts. Unfortunately, this is not how it works, you cannot spot train or target just one area of the body and get good results. You must work the whole body, to get results. If you think about it, it makes sense; how silly would it look if you had six-pack abs and none of the rest of your body was toned or fit? - You must work out every day to get results.
After I started weightlifting, I developed this fear that if I missed a day, I’d lose progress or gain weight. Much of this was due to my unhealthy relationship with exercise at the time. I learned the hard way that not only is this not true, it’s a bad idea to overtrain. It can lead to injuries that will force you to take a break. However, risk of injury isn’t the only factor; you will actually get better results if you include rest days in your routine.
When you lift weights, you’re basically tearing the muscle fibers being worked. This causes the body to repair those areas, building new muscle fibers; this is basically how your muscles grow. When you include rest days as well as design your workouts so you aren’t working the same muscle groups back to back, you give your body the time it needs to fully repair and build muscle. So, you get better results by including rest days, not working out every day. - You must work out for hours to get results.
This is another one I believed for a long time. I had this idea that more is better. It is not, at least not with weightlifting. There is a fine line, where if you workout for too long you actually counter your efforts. Plus, it’s unnecessary to workout for hours. A good weightlifting workout should be anywhere between 20 and 40 minutes. It just depends on what you’re doing and your overall workout schedule. - You can’t get good results unless you go to the gym.
A lot of folks think you need to go to a gym to lift weights or do strength training. I think one reason for this is the belief that you need a lot of fancy equipment to get good results, or that without machines and tons of different weights you can’t get good results. I ran into this the first time I decided to stop going to the gym. I was terrified I would lose progress. Fortunately, I found this is not the case.
You can get great results with little to no special equipment at home. There were many years, I did home workouts just using two sets of dumbbells. During COVID lockdowns, I got a set of resistance bands and tubes, that I was able to continue doing most of the same exercises I had been doing at the gym with. Other times, like when traveling for example, I have done body weight workouts. It is simply not true that you have to go to a gym to get good results with weightlifting or strength training.
I hope I have busted some of the myths about weightlifting for you that may have been keeping you from weightlifting. Check out Five Non-Scale Related Benefits of Exercise to learn about the benefits of weightlifting as well.
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