Collected Fitness Wisdom #22

Muscles cannot get longer by lifting weights, stretching, performing Pilates or yoga or through any other form of exercise. You can’t sculpt muscles – there’s also no such thing as "body sculpting" or "body shaping" – yet many gyms and personal trainers advertise that they offer this kind of training. Infomercials try to sell people products based on the erroneous premise that muscles can be sculpted or lengthened. Doing endless crunches won’t give anyone a six-pack and working on flexibility and balance won’t make muscles look – or be – longer.

~Sal Marinello


Don't make mountains out of molehills – if you build things up in your mind you'll get psyched out. I think this is the number one reason people never achieve their goals. They give up way before they start.

~Bedros Keuilian


Not many people realize this, but every crunch - or sit-up for that matter - you do places 3300 N (roughly 760 lbs) of compressive load on the lumbar spine. To use a great analogy given by Mike Boyle, it’s like taking a credit card and bending it back and forth - over, and over, and over, and over again. Soon, it’s going to break in half. That’s your spine every time you do a crunch or sit-up on a SWISS ball, Bender ball, or any other infomercial you see being advertised at two in the morning.

~Tony Gentlicore


Lately I’ve also noticed a "dark side" to interval training. Too many people think that if "some" interval training is good, then MORE must be better, right? And the answer of course is, "yes and no".

You only need to do 3 sessions of interval training per week, and the sessions just need to be short and focused on quality interval training. That’s how the fat loss interval training research studies are structured.

If you do 45 minutes of interval training, you are sacrificing quality for quantity, and that type of interval training is best left to marathon runners.

~Craig Ballantyne