Monday, July 28, 2008

Fitness myth busted

Hello Everyone,
Here it is 2008 and we still are getting lied to by people and companies regarding basic facts about exercise and nutrition. One of my goals for this blog is to inform the public about these common myths regarding fitness and health and empower you to have the knowledge and willpower to make your body and health the best they can be.

One of the most common myths regarding exercise is that if you have a trouble spot on your body (meaning an area you store fat like the back of the arms, the thighs, or the stomach area) you need to do exercises for that area to get it to trim down. This myth is called "spot reduction" and it doesn't work. Your body stores fat in the adipose layer under the skin. Depending on who you are and how much fat you have, your body may store more fat in one area than another. Unfortunately, how your body burns fat from those areas is not controllable. Most often, it will use fat from areas where we have least fat first, and from the trouble areas last. This is because our bodies store fat for long term survival, so it will try to hold onto it for as long as it can. In any case, targeting one area of the body with extra exercises will only build up the muscle under the fat, while burning calories that may or may not help burn fat from the body. The thing is you have watch your diet and burn more calories than you consume, and do this for awhile before you will start to see fat deposits reduce. There is a long way, hard way to do this, and there is a shorter, easier way to do this. I'll let you know the difference in my next post.