Get Ready!!!

FOREMOST Non-Fat Milk is available in

ANY smoothie at Gold's Gym.

Now until the end of SEptember you can save $.50 off ANY Smoothie if you use FOREMOST Non-Fat Milk!

Female Gym Misconceptions DeBunked

“I just want to lose fat around my stomach and nowhere else.” “I just want to tone my inner thighs.” “Lifting weights is just going to turn me into a man!” I have heard these statements from women about 3,000 times. Those 3 desires have one thing in common; they are pretty much impossible.

Let’s start off with the theory of burning fat or toning a certain area of the body. Toning involves two constituents: adipose tissue (the subcutaneous body fat) and muscle tissue. In order to appear more toned, a reduction in body fat and increase in muscle mass will have to occur.

The human body does not allow spot reducing, which would include losing fat exclusively in the abdominal area. If you were to lose weight, it would occur all over your entire body. Unfortunately, body fat is not necessarily reduced evenly.

People often have trouble areas where the fat is last to go. Women especially find this to be their stomach, legs or arms. There is not much that can be done about this aside from continuing to lean out. This is why a health club membership at a Boston gym could be so beneficial.

A reduction in body fat occurs when a person is in a caloric deficit. This occurs with two variables: decreasing the amount of calories you consume, increasing the amount of exercise you participate in, or doing both. Resistance training is used to help build and maintain muscle tissue, while cardiovascular training is a tool used to help achieve a caloric deficit. This cardiovascular training could include a spinning class or yoga studio.

Here is a statement that many of you probably do not want to believe: There is no exercise out there that is going to burn fat off of your body in a specific area! No resistance training exercise will help tone or reduce fat on top of any muscle in your body. It is a reduction of calories and an increase in exercise that will take care of that.

There is a very big misconception regarding that “burn” you feel after performing many repetitions during an exercise. Some people actually believe that is the fat melting off the body right before our very eyes! That burn is actually caused by lactic acid, which is used by your muscles to form adenosine triphosphate (ATP) for immediate energy.

I often see a female lying on the ground at the gym performing sets of 100 crunches. She probably assumes that burning sensation is actually helping her “toning her stomach”. If you are performing a set of 100 repetitions on any exercise, don’t you think it is time to move on to something a little harder?

The theory that lifting weights will cause a woman to appear bulky and manly is completely false. I used resistance training to bring my body weight up 60 pounds over the course of about five years.

I must say that the actual weight training was the easy part. The difficult part included eating like a horse, because a calorie surplus is needed to gain muscle mass. I often gagged during some meals as I was pretty much force-feeding myself like a mother would to a small child eating their vegetables.

Now, I am pretty sure that most women do not force feed themselves by mistake. Extreme muscle mass gains are not something that occurs out of the blue. You have to really want it for it to happen. It is pretty safe to say that muscle gain is much, much harder than fat loss for most people.

Another little fact that most women forget is testosterone. Testosterone is a very anabolic hormone found in the human body, males and females, which is very important for gains in muscle mass. Men usually have about ten times more testosterone than women.

Even if a woman were to put the time into eating a crazy amount, it would still be about ten times harder to look like a man. It sounds like it is fairly difficult for a woman to gain an incredible amount of muscle mass and be mistaken for a man, doesn’t it?

September Smoothie of the Month

Raspberry's are IN at Gold's Gym for the month of September.





Come try our Smoothie of the Month:

Banana Raspberry for only $4.00!