As we were discussing about fitness at the ALW premises casually over coffee, we came to know some seriously funny myths women have about fitness and particularly weight trainings. Since ALW is a pro-fitness team, it was important that our women overcame a few mental hurdles while following their regular fitness regime.

A lot of women in India think that if they go for dumbbell presses or stiff-legged deadlifts etc, their body would become stiff. This is a false conception. On the contrary, these exercises increase flexibility. If you perform these exercises appropriately, your stretching capabilities increase.

Quite a few of our female team mates were scared of muscle training or weight lifting because they thought these exercises would make them masculine. This is probably the stupidest and the biggest myth of fitness training regime. The reason why most Indian women think so is because of a few athletic trainers who usually take a lot of pills to achieve that masculine body. A trainee can opt out of these pills and can continue doing the basic push-ups and lighter exercises to burn fat and keep the body fit.

The list of myths, as it turned out, seemed endless. That also helped us see the commonest myth of all the women here in India. They think if they stop weight training for a few weeks or for a certain time, the muscle would turn into fat. This is not even scientific. Most weight trainers or health experts would help you understand that muscle and fat are two different tissues altogether. They cannot be compared and one cannot replace the other. The only possible connection is when someone stops the training as well as the recommended diet together. The result is that lack of training leads to muscle inactivity and thus loss of muscle while carelessness with the diet leads to fat production. Get it?

Yet I am really glad for one thing that ALW team is still quite realistic about the effects of exercises. They don’t believe in the myth that if they exercise daily, they can eat anything that they want. A lot of women in India are crazy after flat abs and can go to any extent of owning them. Yet most of the times they think that since they are exercising to check their abs’ fitness, they can still eat cookies or heavy calorie meals. How wrong! Lets understand this better. Fat is the extra energy that you failed to consume in your body. While that extra fat needs to be burnt, you still cannot afford to add more in your body. It is often difficult to determine exactly how much your body metabolism allows the consumption and intake of energy, hence difficult to control if your exercise is really making up for the unused energy.

In that case, women may ask, so why exercise? Well that’s simply because despite your body’s inherent capacity to fuel basal metabolism, it still can take more than it can consume resulting in fat. And so you still need to exercise and burn fat.

So women, stop offering excuses and get to work and keep fit. Also don’t believe every word on fitness that you hear from here and there. Not even us. Go ahead, cross check it and then believe us. Happy exercising!