Personal Trainer Daniel Laurence breaks down some common gym myths…
WHY NO WHEY?
It’s everywhere you look in a gym: muscle guys, thin guys all gulping down Whey Protein, your body waiting for it the second you finish your gym session, so it can be rushed to your muscles and make you double in size.
Whey protein has had a fantastic PR team making sure everyone thinks that it’s a critical part of your gym training. People compare proteins mainly on taste with no real understanding that it’s a by product of the cheese industry – something that would normally be put in the bin, but which has been repackaged with flashy labels, complicated terms and a hefty price tag which must mean it works.
What few people understand is that if during the processing of the Whey it isn’t conducted below 50 degrees Celsius, the protein has been denatured and is essentially made useless to you and your aim of a muscular toned body. You’re simply gobbling down hundreds of calories and strange ingredients with little to no impact on the growth of your muscles.
What you should be doing if you want to grow muscles is pretty simple. When you finish your gym session have a handful of Haribo or similar sweets or something similar, and within a few hours of the gym consume 2 pints of organic semi skimmed milk. The sweets will create an insulin spike and that insulin will drive protein already in your blood stream into your cells and help them grow. The organic semi skimmed milk contains not only the fat you need to absorb protein and the protein itself but also other things like CLA. It must be organic milk because it contains massive quantities of other nutrients your body needs to recover from a gym session.
KISS GOODBYE TO CARDIO
Most people that want to loose weight hit the running machine or the cross trainer. The majority of us do cardio because of a false belief that this is the best way to burn calories and lose that excess fat. Unfortunately, it’s not. All that time and effort has been directed at the wrong part of the gym.
If your goal is to tone up and burn fat then it makes sense that you want to burn as many calories as possible, as quickly as possible, and preferably keep burning them even once you’ve left the gym.
It’s important to understand therefore the two main ways your body burns calories – one extremely efficiently and one extremely inefficiently. Doing cardio uses your body’s efficient calorie burning system – called your aerobic energy system, which you are already using right now when you breathe in and out. What you really want to use is a system which is currently massively inefficient, and which if you use properly, will burn far more calories.
This is your lactate system. This system will only work for up to 2 minutes before your body naturally switches to your cardio system. It also needs 2 minutes rest once it has been used before it can be used again. So, using free weights whereby you do 12 repetitions of an exercise and then rest for 2 minutes will predominantly use your lactate system, and hence burn far more calories and help you burn that fat that you’ve always wanted to get rid of.
