Woman and Weights: Santa Monica Fitness Instructors Debunk 8 Myths That Could Be Keeping You From Your Goals, PART 2

Welcome to the second installment of our four-part article series on the myths surrounding women and weights. Previously, in Part 1, we spoke to some experienced Santa Monica Fitness instructors about two pervasive myths:

1.      Weight lifting builds bulk and leaves you looking more masculine: Incorrect. Women don’t produce enough testosterone to resemble men from the kind of weights offered by circuit training classes.

2.      Weight lifting can increase breast size: We wish! Breasts are composed of fatty tissue, so working out your upper body doesn’t have any bearing on their size.

Let’s take a look at some more myths:

 

Women and Weight Lifting Myth # 3: It Leaves You Stiff and Inflexible

Sure, you might wake up the morning after a good circuit training session feeling stiff and a little creaky, but it’s a positive sign that you are using muscles that haven’t been challenged in a long time. Weight lifting won’t make your muscles less flexible. The crux of the issue, explains one gym instructor in Santa Monica, is:

“If you’re exercising and weight training is leaving you stiff, then you aren’t training correctly. By performing those weight lifting exercises correctly and by running through the movements as shown to you by your instructor, you will actually increase the flexibility of your muscles and tendons. You must also never forget to warm up before training with weights, and you should stretch afterwards as well.”

Women and Weight Lifting Myth # 4: You Run the Risk of Turning Muscle in to Fat Should You Ever Stop

 

Fat and muscle tissue are two completely different things. You can’t “turn” muscle into fat and you can’t “turn” fat into muscle. It’s biologically impossible. What you can do is build muscle mass and lose body fat through the cardio and resistance (weight) stations in Circuit Training. The end result is that fat melts away to reveal harder, stronger and larger muscles. The opposite can also happen if you don’t exercise regularly enough: your muscles can slowly atrophy and decrease in bulk and you can put on body fat. But one kind of tissue cannot become the other.

Why then do older body-builders tend to look so porky and barrel-chested?

Some body builders who quit the profession also quit the training that comes along with it and instead of protein shakes, they eat unhealthy, fatty foods. The result is that they increase their body fat percentage. This fat layers itself over their bulky muscles making them look huge and caught in the no-man’s land between fat and muscle-bound. This also gives the illusion that their muscle is turning to fat, when in fact they are just putting on fat and losing muscle bulk.

Stay Tuned for Part 3, Coming Next Week!

We’ll be exploring the following myths:

# 5: Weight training allows you to eat anything you want and not get fat.

# 6: Women only really need cardiovascular exercise to stay fit and maintain a healthy body weight.