8 Strength Training Myths Debunked
There is no industry that contradicts itself more than the health and fitness industry. The endless amount of information spewed onto the internet and across social media daily is confusing and misleading, to say the least. It’s no wonder people put off starting their fitness journey.
Building physical health, strength, and fitness is a topic too important to ignore. It’s the key to maintaining a balanced life and increasing your quality of life no matter your age. The fear of “doing it wrong” isn’t something that should hold you back.
So, let’s set the record straight.
We’ve been conditioned to think a certain way about fitness, fat loss, body composition, and muscle gain. None of which has been productive in ACTUALLY helping educate people on how they can help themselves get to where they want to be.
In this piece, we’re outlining the 8 biggest myths we’ve come across in our combined 15 years of experience in the health and fitness industry.
1. MYTH: Lifting heavy makes you bulky.
Perhaps the era of juiced-up bodybuilders created this idea that lifting makes you massive. Perhaps it’s the image the media has portrayed over the decades of extremely muscular individuals frequenting the gym—and no one else. Stereotypes have played an unfortunate role in creating this limiting belief which has prevented so many people from starting their fitness and training journey. The illusion that picking up a single dumbbell is going to make you balloon into the next Mr. Olympia couldn’t be farther from the truth.
The truth is it requires a lot more to create such drastic physical changes to your body.
The amount of work and time required to see ANY sort of increase in muscular density is beyond what most average gym-goers can even begin to understand. This isn’t to discourage anyone that has a goal of putting on lean mass and building a more aesthetic physique. What people need to be more educated about is how long it truly takes to add lean mass to one’s frame. Not to mention all the intricacies of genetics, diet, height, sex, current body composition, supplementation, training frequency, training split, recovery, etc.
What most people fail to understand is that putting on muscle looks different for everyone. If someone has the desire to train their body to look a certain way, there’s much more that goes into it than just picking up any weight in sight.
2. MYTH: Cardio is the only thing to help you build your dream physique.
This one goes hand in hand with our previous point above. Chasing to attain a certain physical aesthetic requires very specific training tailored to how you want to shape your body. Whether you’re running, lifting, doing yoga, swimming, doing HIIT classes, or pilates—your body will look completely different than someone else’s that follows the same regime as you do. Depending on what you’re wanting to shape your body into, solely doing hours of cardio probably won’t cut it. More often than not, the best combination that works for most average gym-goers looking to have a little less body fat and look a little leaner is a combo of strength and conditioning.
The idea that your training needs to FEEL hard and ridiculously challenging to see any changes to your body is an outdated belief. It’s preventing you from truly seeing the results you want. The concept of “burning fat” and “melting fat through sweat” is physiologically incorrect on so many levels I’m convinced this was a marketing tactic adopted decades ago to prey on the insecurities of others.
If you have the goal of being leaner and having a little more muscular definition, you do NOT need to beat yourself to a pulp with endless hours on the elliptical or treadmill.
3. MYTH: Taking rest days or rest weeks will make you lose your progress.
Adapting from training is sort of like planting seeds for a tree. Giving it too much water or too much sun won’t let it flourish into what it can truly become. Giving it just enough of both with time to let it all absorb will make it grow into its truest potential. It can withstand periods of time without water or sunlight when maybe it could have used it but making sure it doesn’t go too long without it is the key.
The same goes for your training.
Dosing your fitness is necessary to see any sort of progress. Having moments in time when you push the pace and ask a lot of your body can be beneficial! But after times of heightened stress, periods of rest are required to avoid burnout. Stress + Rest = Growth. There’s a reason why competitors and athletes will have off-seasons after a long prep gearing up towards a certain meet, competition, race, or game. Your training is no different. Periodizing it in a manner that allows you to have sessions designed to test you, some would be designed as maintenance work and some days are to let you fully rest your body in order to recharge for the next session.
Rest is absolutely necessary for progress to happen. Besides, doesn’t it feel better when you head into a training session knowing well that you’ve got some much gas in the tank that you’re going to crush it?
Author’s Note: I started running with the goal of looking like these CrossFit girls I used to see on Instagram. I’d run a minimum of 10km a day for weeks on end and I was doing 2 CrossFit classes a day. I didn’t really understand what overtraining felt like but now knowing that I do, I was definitely burning the candle at both ends. When our bodies are overworked for such a long period of time, they tend to go into survival mode. Cortisol is heightened at all times which doesn’t help the regulation of inflammation. The part of our brain that manages our stress responses gets dysregulated and we tend to feel like we have no control over our emotional or mental state. I was so tired and even a good night of sleep couldn’t fix the state I was in. Once I took a step back and incorporated rest days into my regime, I started seeing crazy changes in my performance, energy levels, physique and my mood overall! Giving yourself permission to rest is sometimes exactly what’s needed to help you see some changes.
4. MYTH: Soreness is an indicator of progress.
I might break a few hearts on this one here… As much as soreness feels like something is happening physiologically, the only thing it indicates is that your body is registering muscular damage from “trauma” to the area.
There are a few things that happen to your body during this period of Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS). Loss of muscle function, decrease in force production in the muscle, stiffness, and swelling, increase of muscle proteins to indicate muscular damage—symptoms that can last anywhere from 5-7 days post-training. Trained and untrained individuals may experience DOMS on a variety of occasions but it’s still unclear as to what causes DOMS to occur and why.
What’s been outlined in this particular study is that we know DOMS has nothing to do with muscle growth and is not a measure of your progress.
If you’re chasing that feeling of not being able to sit on the toilet the next day or barely being able to lift your arms, you might be going about tracking your progress incorrectly. The best way to focus on your progress would be to notice how often you get sore from a workout and how quickly you’re able to recover from said training. The less often you experience this post-training soreness, the more likely you’re conditioning your body to this demand which can indicate a high likelihood that your fitness is improving.
If you’re interested in reading more about the DOMS phenomenon, Dr. Layne Norton wrote a superb piece that covers everything you’d want to know about it. Find it here.
5. MYTH: If you don’t sweat, you’re not working hard enough.
Just as everyone experiences different levels of DOMS, not everyone’s sweat is the same. The mechanism of sweating goes beyond whether or not your workout was “effective” enough. Our sweat is primarily water but also contains sodium, magnesium, potassium, chloride, and calcium. The volume of sweat you produce and the amount of electrolytes you lose in your sweat depends on many different factors. Your fitness level, age, health status, muscle mass to fat mass ratio, and the size of your body all play a role in how much sweat you can produce aside from environmental influences. Of course, once you add in factors such as temperature, humidity, the intensity of exercise, and pre-exercise food and drink consumption, this can impact how much you’ll end up sweating and the loss of electrolytes.
Sweating is a physiological mechanism to help your body temperature cool down. So, think about a time when you were sweating profusely and consider the combination of all of the above. It was most likely at a time that your body was in much need of cooling down and perhaps had nothing to do with the intensity of your training (ie. sauna session, hiking up a mountain on a hot summer’s day).
Sweating is extremely important to maintain proper health and core temperature regulation. However, relying on it as a measure of a workout being effective or “good enough” is counterintuitive.
6. MYTH: Bad genetics are the reason you can’t build muscle or lose weight.
People love to blame what’s out of their control. When someone blames their genetics, it’s often because they’ve fallen into the comparison trap. How do you know you’ve got bad genetics? What do bad genetics even look like? Of course, not everyone can be blessed with a certain height or limb length that maybe favours sports such as gymnastics, basketball, or swimming. What is possible for every single human being is exhausting their potential by putting their all into whatever it is they do. Blaming genetics for having a harder time building muscle means you haven’t cracked the code to find what works best for YOUR body. The same goes for dropping your body fat. Feeding your body with enough fuel to perform during the day, training at a high enough intensity, and implementing recovery protocols to allow your body to adapt to the training you do are all great things to keep top of mind.
The biggest one that tends to be overlooked is TIME.
It takes time to get where you want to be. Having enough patience to see your hard work pay off is the key to really seeing where your efforts can take you. The less you focus on the outcome and more on the process, one day you’ll look up and notice you’ve arrived. Let time do its job and focus on your effort.
Author’s Note: If you’re curious to know more about your unique genetic makeup, working with a naturopath to run specialized tests could give you more insight as to what your body responds to best and maybe what its lacking. Asking them for a comprehensive blood panel test including sex hormones, waking cortisol, fasting blood glucose, insulin sensitivity, thyroid function, red/white blood cell count, and iron levels is a great place to start.
7. MYTH: Isolation exercises can target fat-burning in that specific body part.
Another great example of how decade-old marketing tactics have turned into what most believe to be the truth behind fitness and strength training. There’s no program or magic exercise to get rid of “stubborn belly fat” and only doing cable kickbacks certainly won’t give you a “toned booty”. If you start working on your diet and training regime, you will probably start to lean out EVERYWHERE. However, some areas may seem to get leaner at a faster rate. This indicates that you may have been carrying less fat mass in those areas to begin with.
For example, *most* women tend to carry a higher body fat percentage around their hips and thighs. This is a very common occurrence in females and is quite healthy to have enough fat mass in their midsection to promote a healthy balance of hormones to support their menstrual cycle (that is considering they are not pre or post-menopausal). Therefore, when beginning a body recomposition phase, some may find their upper body may become leaner at a faster rate than their lower body.
If you desire a slightly different body composition, working on your diet and a balanced training regime is the best place to start. Over time, implementing more upper-body or lower-body targetted exercises to help build more mass in certain areas to achieve a certain aesthetic can positively contribute to the result you’re looking to get.
8. MYTH: The longer your training session is, the better your results will be.
“Quality over quantity” pretty much sums up how you should be approaching your training and everything to do with it. More isn’t always better but you also need to do enough to see some sort of change.
If your body can physically handle the workload, sure, you might see some pretty gnarly progress. The part about training that’s often overlooked is how mental engagement plays a huge role in the quality of your training. Are you mindfully performing every rep as best as you possibly can? Or are you just doing “junk volume” to say you’ve done as much as possible? The return on mindfully executing a solid training session will provide you with benefits beyond just riding the high of post-exercise endorphins. Focusing on the quality of your training can build a stronger mind-muscle connection, builds movement literacy (how well do you move?), strengthens pathways between motor neurons which can improve your force production long-term, and it also ensures you’re doing what your body needs—not what your ego thinks it needs.
If you can fit quality work into 45 minutes, one hour, or 3 hours—the duration is irrelevant to how productive your session was.
Every rep prescribed counts towards the bigger picture. Making sure you focus on how well you execute everything is the best way to approach each workout in the gym.
In summary…
A lot of myths we still hear as coaches today stem from outdated beliefs that truly have no place in the realm of fitness. If you are like 99% of people that start their fitness journey, you probably want to look good, feel good, feel fit, be strong, or a combination of all of the above. If a claim seems outrageous or perhaps a little unrealistic, it probably is.
When it comes to creating lasting change, here’s our motto:
If your actions are repeatable on a daily basis with wiggle room for life to happen, you’re on the right track. Becoming fitter is a lot simpler than what we’ve been led to believe.