6 Things Beginners Believe About Fitness
Often beginners make the decision of getting fitter a lot harder than it needs to be. Not to mention they also make it way more expensive than necessary. Let’s look at six misconceptions about fitness too many people believe in.
1. You Need Equipment To Get Fit
Home workout stations, weights, stationary bikes, ellipticals – you name it. It’s almost as we have been conditioned into believing that the act of getting fit requires, well, stuff. Try Wolf’s basically equipment-free vacation workout and tell me how exhausted you were afterwards.
2. You Need To Have A Lot Of Time
Working out is only a substitute for doing the things we used to do, before cars, elevators, remote controls, telephones and all the rest spared us the trouble. You can get a lot of fitness done while doing the stuff you do anyway.
3. You Need A Gym To Work Out
Related to #1: your body doesn’t care where it gets its workouts. It is happy to move wherever you do it and gets stronger from working against whatever you use, even if it’s a water bottle filled with sand.
4. You Need Supplements
Protein powders, multivitamins, post-workout shakes, energy packs – one wonders how mankind ever survived this long without all these little helpers. All you need is a balanced diet and if you don’t have any deficiencies, you are getting it.
5. You Need To Exercise Often To Benefit
No, actually you already benefit if you just walked 15 minutes per day. Of course, you will reap bigger effects the more you do, but you certainly aren’t required to become Olympics material just to become a bit healther.
6. You Don’t Need Exercise If You Are Thin
Being thin doesn’t equal being healthy. It is not as bad as being overweight, but a thin inactive person can actually be less healthy than a slightly overweight person that exercises.
Picture courtesy of Jorge Mejía Peralta.
2 Comments
Yes, I agree with #6 especially. People often define their health goals as a simple dichotomy between overweight/thin. Exercise can assist with that goal, but the main framework for progress should be improving yourself. i.e. Push up/Pull up limit? Time to run a 5k? Endurance level – or simply put, how long can you last having to perform a vigorous activity/can your body work under pressure? Those are things that make life more enjoyable/exciting, too.
In other sports as well, there is a specific skill to develop (being able to swim efficiently, coordination for tennis, ice skating, etc., many of which cross over to other sports/areas of life) – when you think of it that way, the road before a “thin” person’s fitness goal becomes both elongated and branched.
Fraser:
good point on #6.