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9 workout fables you should quickly forget

Sweating is good for you, you need protein shakes for muscle recovery and you should always drink during exercise. Read here the 9 myths about your workout that you have always believed and that you should soon forget.

1. The more you sweat, the harder you exercise

Once your body temperature rises, your body switches to 'cooling mode' by means of sweat. Fitness and fluid balance also play a role in this. If you are fit, your body temperature will not rise so quickly:your condition is then good enough to handle the workout, so you won't sweat a lot. While someone else will sweat a lot during the same exercise in no time. But it can also be done the other way around:a good sweat production can mean that you are in better condition. Someone who exercises regularly often has more active sweat glands than those who never exercise. And then it differs per person who sweats harder. Your genes, your gender, your weight:it all plays a role in how much you perspire during your workout.

2. A cardio machine measures exactly how many calories you burn

It seems ideal:after half an hour on the treadmill you can read exactly how many calories you have burned on your screen. Unfortunately, these numbers are never quite right. Most cardio machines only calculate your activity, while more factors play a role in your calorie burn, such as your age, gender, height and fat percentage. Researchers from the University of California have investigated how many calories fitness machines are wrong on average. They discovered that the treadmill is on average 13 percent too high, a bicycle 7 percent and the cross trainer no less than 42 percent. Rewarding yourself with a piece of cake after exercise was already not a good idea, but now even less so. There is a good chance that you will eat more calories than you have just burned.

3. A protein shake after your workout is necessary for muscle recovery

Proteins are indispensable to keep your muscles, organs, nervous system and blood healthy. During exercise, a small amount of muscle damage occurs, which you repair by eating proteins – which the body converts into amino acids. But as long as you don't train like a bodybuilder and lifting weights for hours is a protein shake not necessary after exercise. At least, not if you get enough protein from your daily diet. Do you eat vegetables, chicken, fish and/or eggs every day? Then the protein powder can stay in the cupboard. Make sure that twenty percent of your diet contains proteins, then you're good. For example, use the MyFitnessPal app to keep track of what you eat per day, so that you can see exactly how much protein you are getting. Do you eat vegan and do you miss proteins from animal products? Then a protein shake can be useful to absorb enough proteins after exercise.

4. You should always drink during a workout

If you exercise for an hour, it is not necessary to drink water in between. That's how it works:does your body structurally get enough fluids and you drink it during your workout also a large glass of water, then you pee that out again on average an hour later. If you are dehydrated, it will take much longer and you cannot achieve that with a bottle of water during an hour of training. It is best to drink about one and a half to two liters of water every day, so that your moisture level is always up to standard, even before a training session. Of course you can have a drink while exercising if you like. And if your workout lasts longer than two hours, it's smart to drink in between anyway.

5. Exercising on an empty stomach increases your combustion

Do you ever go for a run without having breakfast because you think you activate your fat burning more? Real scientific evidence is lacking:a study by the University of Leuven, for example, showed no differences in fat burning between the fasting group and the non-fasting group during exercise † In addition, your body automatically compensates for the higher fat burning through your carbohydrate burning on a lower burner, so that you burn carbohydrates more slowly and you do not yet get rid of those sugars. So next time, feel free to eat a banana first. Do you want to lose weight? Then simply make sure you burn more calories than you eat.

9 workout fables you should quickly forget

6. Exercising every day makes you super fit

More sports isn't always better. Top athletes can lift weights every day and engage in cardio training do without getting injured. But as a regular athlete, you're asking too much of yourself when you train every day, because you often don't give your body enough time to recover. In addition, a high heart rate every day can cause restlessness and poor sleep. Too much fitness training even leads to an increased level of cortisol in your blood. This stress hormone releases doses of sugar (energy) into your body. Those sugars in your blood prevent body fat from being burned, because fat is only burned when sugars are gone. And if cortisol keeps releasing new sugars, you are actually exercising for nothing.

7. Crunches give you a six pack

That would be nice! Unfortunately:it is impossible to burn fat locally. A crunch costs little energy, so you hardly burn any fat with it. To bold to burn it is better to do a full body workout to do. Only when you have burned enough fat do your abs show themselves. You can make your abdominal muscles stronger with crunches, but this does not mean that they also become visible immediately. As a woman you have it more difficult than as a man, because your body wants to protect your reproductive organs with a layer of fat on your stomach. And if you don't have the right genes (read:no round abs), that washboard will not come even with a very low fat percentage.

9 workout fables you should quickly forget

8. By training at a low intensity you will lose weight

Cardio training can be a real calorie killer to be. But how many calories you burn depends on your body weight and exercise intensity. Contrary to popular belief, you do not burn the most calories by training at a low intensity, but by exercising intensively. Your afterburning will then take longer. Your muscles need more time to recover, so you burn more calories. And not unimportant:by training intensively, you become fitter and stronger than when you walk slowly. Does low-intensity training make no sense at all if you want to lose weight? Yes, it is easier for many people to keep up and therefore always better than not exercising at all.

9. Strength training does not help you lose weight

Returns the scale after a strength training that you are heavier than before? That could be right. But that doesn't mean you've gotten fatter. Fat cannot turn into muscle, as is sometimes claimed. Muscles and fat are made of a completely different substance and cannot replace each other. What does happen when you do strength training:the percentage of fat in your body decreases and the percentage of muscle tissue is increased. So you may weigh a bit more on the scale, but you will also notice that your clothes are looser, that your arms swab less and that your buttocks become firmer. Strength training does make you slimmer and tighter.

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