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In this day in age where obesity and diabetes run rampant through our society, the focus lies on carbohydrates and protein. Carbohydrate control is very important to maintain a healthy body. Sugar, a form of carbohydrate, is known to raise insulin levels and depress your immune system. The diet gurus and others who wish to profit off of the latest fitness fads, vilify carbohydrates. They lump them into one big category and tell you carbs are bad and to eat more protein. However this couldn’t be further from the truth.

There are many mistakes people make when working out. People who are new to exercise don’t know what to do and those who have been working out for years are stuck in their ways. Here are the 3 most common mistakes you don’t know you’re making:

1. Using light weights to “tone up”

If only I had a dollar for each time I heard this. Most people in America right now will tell you that their dominant fitness goal is to lose weight and “tone up”. Exercise physiologists and personal training purists cringe at hearing the word “toning” when used to describe a leaner physique. The scientific definition of muscle tone is the continual and passive partial contraction of the muscle in a relaxed state. It is an involuntary action that has nothing to do with how your body looks.

Although some old fitness fictions, such as “no pain, no gain” and “spot reducing” are fading fast, plenty of popular exercise misconceptions still exist. Here are some of the most common exercise myths as well as the not-so-common facts based on current exercise research.

Exercise Myth 1. You Will Burn More Fat If You Exercise Longer at a Lower Intensity. The most important focus in exercise and fat weight control is not the percentage of exercise energy coming from fat but the total energy cost, or how many calories are burned during the activity. The faster you walk, step or run, for example, the more calories you use per minute. However, high-intensity exercise is difficult to sustain if you are just beginning or returning to exercise, so you may not exercise very long at this level. It is safer, and more practical, to start out at a lower intensity and work your way up gradually.

Without looking at a calendar or feeling the weather outside, I can walk into any gym into the country and tell you what time of the year it is. Right now at any Bally, Gold, 24 Hour Fitness, etc there is about a 20 minute wait for the cardio machines and the free weight area is just as bad. People who you haven’t seen since last March have suddenly reappeared in the gym and it’s a lot of them. Fortunately you do not have to suffer with everyone else due to the affordability of many new fitness products. A lot of space isn’t needed and you won’t even need a bench….yet. Without further adieu here is the list:

I covered creating a vision for your future in an earlier work, “What’s your Vision“, and today I’ll introduce a concept that I’ve found to be very helpful. When you ask any successful person their primary reasons for success, the three most likely answers are persistence, confidence, and goal setting. There is a multitude of literature on goal setting and later I’ll list some of the ones that I’ve found helpful. However, I want to take the idea of goal setting and go one step further. Instead of being a goal setter, focus on becoming a goal getter. Setting goals is a great starting point but a horrible finishing one. How many times have we planned to do something, didn’t take action, and failed to hit our target? Too many to count right? It’s not enough to just visualize what you want, you have to go out there and get it!