Get Fit Lab - For Your Health and Fitness

The extent to which exercise helps has caused some myths to become fact. Here we’ll try to separate some of the facts from fiction.

Myth: Weight Loss is Caused by Exercising

Exercise alone cannot cause weight loss – especially if you are not monitoring what you eat.

Weight loss is simple math. In order to lose a pound of fat, you need to consume fewer calories than you use. As long as there is more going out than is coming into your body, then you will lose weight.

Exercise can help you lose weight but it can be harder to lose weight with exercise than diet. It takes moments to consume 400 calories but an hour to burn it. Your choices to lose weight are to reduce your food intake by 500 calories a day, exercise to burn an additional 500 calories, or use a combination of diet and exercise to reduce overall calories by 500.

Myth: After Exercising the Effects of Exercise Keep Going and Our Body Continues to Burn Calories at a Faster Rate

While you exercise you burn calories, but afterward your ability to burn calories is no more than if you were sedentary.

A new report, published in the journal Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews, concluded that people’s ability to continue to burn fat over the next 24 hours after exercising is not increased. Many health and fitness experts have found these results shocking.

Further research needs to be performed to confirm these findings. For instance, in the study participants cycled for under an hour burning up to 400 calories. So, there is a possibility that longer, harder or different types of exercise could lead to a post-workout fat burn.

Myth: Weight Training Dramatically Increases Your Metabolism

The evidence, from the study above, shows that weight training, by adding muscle, does not boost your metabolism as much as widely believed.

It is true that a pound of muscle burns more calories than a pound of fat. The range is approximately 7-10 calories a day versus 2 calories. However, most people do not gain enough muscle mass to make much of a difference.

Myth: Everyone Needs the Same Amount of Exercise

The US government revised their guidelines in 2008 stating that people “vary a great deal in how much physical activity they need to achieve and maintain a healthy weight. Some need more physical activity than others to maintain a healthy body weight, to lose weight or to keep weight off once it has been lost.”

The best advice is to use the daily guidelines as an estimate of what you should do to achieve your goals. Monitor your progress and adjust your program depending on your results.

Gradually increasing your intensity will also help. For instance, running burns more calories and is a higher intensity exercise than walking. The good news is that the more fit you become the harder you can work out. So, during the same amount of time, you can burn more calories.