Hey this is Ngo Okafor, 2-time Golden Gloves boxing champion,
celebrity trainer and owner of Iconoclast Fitness Center in New York City.
Today I'm going to share with you 5 bad pieces of advice that I've
heard on the gym floor over the years being a personal trainer.
Bad advice number 1, your metabolism slows down as you get older. This is terrible advice
because your metabolism does not slow down as you get older, you do. Most people
think that as you approach a certain age, or as you age period, your metabolism
starts to slow down, but what actually happens is we start to move less and be
less active as we get older. If you think about your life when you were younger
you move a lot more, you run around all over the place, but as you get older you
start to sit more, you sit more at your job, you drive everywhere and you're a
lot less active, but you consume the same amount of calories as you did when you
were younger so you're gonna gain weight. I suggest that you continue to stay
active. Move as much as you can. Try to match what you did when you were younger.
And you actually will continue to get in better shape.
Bad advice number 2, as long as you exercise, you will lose weight. This is
bad advice because even if you exercise and overeat, you will not lose weight.
You have to control your nutrition in addition to exercising in order to lose
weight. For example, you go out for dinner and you eat a bunch of pasta, fries, fried
food, steak. The food comes out to about 1,000 calories and you have a bunch
of drinks and that comes out and totals up to 1,000 calories also. Put that
together that's 2,000 calories in 1 meal. Then you say well I'm gonna walk it
off I'm gonna workout to burn off these calories. Most people burn anywhere from
400 to 500 calories. That's nowhere near the 2,000 calories they consumed in 1 meal.
I'm not talking about the rest of the meals and snacks consumed in that
1 day. So for you to burn calories and lose weight, you have to exercise but
more importantly you have to control your nutrition. You have to eat healthier,
eat less and this is the only way to lose weight. You cannot out train a bad diet.
Bad advice number 3, lifting heavy weights will bulk women up. This is a
piece of bad advice that I hear so much on the gym floor and it's not true.
If it were that easy to build bulky muscles, every guy that goes into the gym will be
Mr. Olympia. For a woman, it's actually a good thing to lift heavier weights
because you will build lean muscle, which will help you burn more calories because
your metabolism will be sped up and studies have shown that women who lift
heavier weights, have denser bones and this helps fight off early onset
osteoporosis, which is a situation where your bones get brittle and if you fall down,
your bones break. Bad advice number 4, you don't have to do abs. This is 1
piece of bad advice that I hear all the time in the gym. I have abs. I believe in
doing abs. A lot of trainers who give this advice are lazy and they don't want
to put in the work. Think about it like this, you see these trainers doing bicep
curls to build their bicep. They do tricep exercises. There are muscles in
your abdominal wall, so if you do ab exercises your abs will get stronger and
they will look better. People say don't do sit-ups. Every time you get out of bed
in the morning, you do a sit-up. So why should you not do sit-ups?
We're built and designed to do sit-ups. Doing sit-ups will actually strengthen
your core, strengthen your abs and help you get up much easier out of bed. And
it makes you look much better on the beach, so it's a win-win.
Bad advice number 5, there is an ideal body weight for your height. This is
terrible advice because this is false. Everybody is built differently, so you
have to take the bone structure into consideration bone density into
consideration. 2 people can be the same height and have 1 person have a
larger skeleton than the other person. The person that has the larger skeleton
even if both people have the same body fat composition, the person with heavier
and larger bones will weigh more. It does not make you weaker or less than.
You should be happy with how you look and how you feel because it's all about being healthy.
So there you have it. I just shared with you 5 bad pieces of advice that I've
heard on the gym floor over the years being a personal trainer. I will share
with you 1 good piece of advice and that is that everything starts with you
loving yourself. Fitness is a journey, fitness is a process and it's an
individual journey and process and you have to trust and believe in yourself
and believe that you will get to your fitness. It's not about what you saw on
Instagram or what image you saw on the street. It's about you and what makes you
happy and being healthy.