I don't think there has ever been a more important or pressing time for the public to know the truth about certain aspects of this industry!
With the increase in popularity of quick fix, dime a dozen diet pills and fat burners available at the click of a button and the ever increasing correlation between such products and associated illnesses (not to mention deaths!) and Ireland fast becoming one of the fattest nations in Europe, it seems like time is of the essence.
Below are two must-have pieces of information that will help you make better informed decisions when navigating the health and fitness matrix that is this industry...
1) Diet pills/ fat burners DO NOT WORK!
Some will argue that they do work; in that they do what they say on the tin- if you're reading the cleverly worded blurb on the tin without your rose-tinted glasses on, however if you're like most of the rest of us we tend to have them firmly on when we want to believe something will benefit us.
Most of these products use things like caffeine and green tea extract (amoung others) to raise your temperature so that you burn a few more calories over a couple of hours-pointless and expensive! Some products that can be bought online are not approved by governing bodies and can have serious detrimental health implications- the most recent being a substance also used in the making of explosives that was used in an online diet pill because it marginally increased metabolic rate (calorie burning) causing the death of a young woman in the UK.
The fact is that if they don't damage you in some way these types of 'supplements' will only have a very small and insignificant effect on calorie expenditure in the grand scheme of things; they can hardly be worth the amount they cost (monetary and health cost) versus spending that same money on buying more, better quality food.
2) Soreness DOES NOT equal effectiveness!
Yeah we all feel like we've achieved something if we're sore with DOMs (muscle soreness) during the days following a training session, and in some cases it can be a good thing... but not always.
In this industry we hear this sort of thing all the time... "I trained the other day but I wasn't sore after so I mustn't have done it right"
This kind of thinking boils down to years of being led to believe that the marker of a good training session is crippling soreness in the following days. Or, being a good trainer is the ability to make someone sore (Just FYI, if you see a trainer for the first time and you're riddled with soreness from head to toe and can barely walk for the next week- run for the fucking hills!!... If you can!).
You don't have to come away from a training session feeling like you've been hit with a car for it to have been an effective session; it just doesn't work like that. In some cases i.e. the pursuit of muscular hypertrophy (growth), it might be necessary to use methods that purposely damage muscle tissue to elicit a growth response, which in turn will likely lead to soreness and swelling in the following days, however some may never experience soreness but still see equal amounts of growth.
So there you have it guys, two knowledge bombs to throw in the face of the next person who tries to pedal their garbage to ya.
