A word from Robert

I’m Robert Day, founder of the Office Gym Club, and I’ve been knocking around gyms for about 30 years now.

And over those years, I have heard a lot of nonsense.

I’ve probably believed a fair bit of it too. 

That's worth admitting, because most gym myths don't survive because everyone is stupid. They survive because we're all looking for answers.

Training can be frustrating. You make brilliant progress, then nothing. Something that worked for two years suddenly seems to stop working. Your mate changes one thing and grows like a weed. You change the same thing and develop a sore elbow.

So naturally we cherry-pick ideas. We listen to the big bloke. The coach. The latest study. The old-school bodybuilder. The new-school bodybuilder explaining why the old-school bodybuilder was wrong. And occasionally the chap stood in reception who really does seem extraordinarily confident about cortisol.

Underneath much of it, I think, is a bit of exasperation and that familiar question:

“Right then. Which way do I go next?”

That's why I wanted to revisit these 30 bodybuilding “lies”.

Not because I've finally arrived with The Answers. After 30 years, I'm probably less interested in absolute answers than I was after five.

And certainly not because I think Office Gym Cornwall members need bodybuilding explained to them. Quite the opposite. We're fortunate to have a gym full of clever, curious people, many of whom have trained for years and are perfectly capable of deciding what makes sense for themselves.

So take this in the spirit it's intended.

It's an affectionate rummage through some of the things we've all heard, repeated, tried, abandoned and occasionally rediscovered over the years.

Some are nonsense. Some contain a grain of truth. Some probably worked perfectly well for the person who told you about them. Some will get a side eye from the Office Gym crew. And some are good ideas that became silly only when somebody decided they had to apply to everybody.

Thirty years in, I still love training.

I still learn things.

I still change my mind. 

Lies - or: 30 things we’ve all heard in the gym that are worth another look

Bodybuilding has always been very good at producing rules.

Eat big to get big. Train harder. Never miss Monday chest. Chase the pump. Keep your rests short. Carbs are essential. Carbs are the enemy. Machines are rubbish. Free weights are king. And whatever the biggest bloke in the gym is doing must surely be worth copying.

Some of these ideas contain a perfectly respectable amount of truth.

Some were useful observations that got repeated so often all the qualifications disappeared.

And a few probably deserve to be put in the same cupboard as the plastic sweat suit and the vibraplate.

So this isn't an attempt to explain bodybuilding to people who've spent half their lives doing it. Think of it more as a rummage through the old gym folklore.

What still makes sense? What needs an asterisk? And what have we all quietly stopped believing anyway?

 

1. “You can get as big as a pro bodybuilder naturally. It just takes longer.”

We can probably deal with this without pretending anyone reading a bodybuilding article has just fallen off a turnip truck.

Elite professional bodybuilding is not simply natural bodybuilding continued for another ten years.

Genetics matter enormously. Training matters. Food and recovery matter. And at the highest levels of professional bodybuilding, performance-enhancing drugs have long been part of the landscape.

That doesn't make natural bodybuilding a consolation prize.

There is an enormous distance between the physique most of us started with and the physique we're capable of building.

Most lifters aren't really trying to become Mr Olympia anyway. They're trying to become noticeably bigger, leaner and stronger than the person who first walked nervously into a gym and spent ten minutes pretending to adjust a machine while watching how everybody else used it.

The useful lesson isn't, “You'll never look like a professional.”

It's:

Don't use an elite professional bodybuilder as the measuring stick for whether your own training is working.

 

2. “To get really big, you have to eat absolutely everything.”

Ah, the traditional bulk.

A magical period during which apparently anything becomes bodybuilding food provided there's some chicken somewhere on the plate.

There is obviously some logic here. Building tissue requires resources, and trying to gain appreciable muscle while permanently eating like you're three weeks out from a photoshoot isn't making the job particularly easy.

But somewhere along the way, “eat enough to support growth” became “the more calories you can physically consume, the more muscular you'll become.”

Sadly, the body has never signed that contract.

Once you're adequately fuelled for training, recovery and growth, considerably more food doesn't automatically mean considerably more muscle.

At some point you're simply becoming extremely good at gaining weight.

Anyone who has completed a heroic six-month bulk only to discover it requires an equally heroic diet afterwards will recognise the situation.

Eat to grow, certainly.

Just remember that getting bigger and getting more muscular aren't always exactly the same project.

 

3. “If it's low fat, it won't make you fat.”

This one belongs particularly to an era when supermarket shelves suddenly filled with foods proudly announcing they were 97% fat-free while containing enough sugar to grout a bathroom.

Most experienced gym-goers understand the bigger picture.

Dietary fat isn't a substance that spots your waistline from across the digestive system and immediately moves in. Equally, taking the fat out of something doesn't give the remaining calories diplomatic immunity.

Protein, carbohydrate and fat have different functions and affect appetite and metabolism differently. That's useful.

But over time, overall energy intake still matters.

The frustrating thing is that “eat appropriately for your goal” has never sold nearly as many magazines as declaring one entire nutrient either heroic or evil.

 

4. “The more you train, the more you grow.”

Every enthusiastic lifter has probably followed this logic at some point.

Training makes muscles grow.

Therefore more training makes muscles grow more.

Therefore training seven days a week should turn us into Ronnie Coleman by Christmas.

There is unfortunately a small administrative matter called recovery.

Training provides the stimulus. Recovering from it is part of the process too.

How much work you can productively handle depends on training age, volume, intensity, exercise choice, sleep, food, stress, genetics and whether your “rest day” somehow became six sets of arms because arms don't really count.

More isn't automatically worse either.

The trick is finding how much productive training you can recover from.

And that line has an annoying habit of moving.

5. “The longer the workout, the better the workout.”

There is something psychologically satisfying about emerging from the gym two hours later looking as though you've returned from active service.

It doesn't necessarily mean the workout was twice as productive.

Some people thrive on more volume. Others make excellent progress with considerably less. A beginner may need relatively little stimulus; an experienced lifter may benefit from more.

The stopwatch isn't keeping score.

A 45-minute session isn't automatically inadequate and a two-hour session isn't automatically junk.

If the work is productive, progression is happening and you're recovering from it, the session was long enough.

Everything after that may still be enjoyable.

Just don't confuse enjoying being in the gym with needing to be there.

6. “You don't have to get stronger to get bigger.”

This depends rather heavily on what we mean by “stronger.”

Nobody needs to become a competitive powerlifter to build an impressive physique, and two equally muscular people can have surprisingly different numbers on the bar.

Technique, leverages, exercise choice and neural efficiency all get involved.

But if six months ago you curled a weight for eight solid reps and today you're curling exactly the same weight for exactly the same eight reps with exactly the same effort, indefinitely repeating that arrangement probably isn't the world's most ambitious growth strategy.

Progressive overload doesn't mean adding a plate every Thursday until the laws of physics intervene.

More load, more reps, better control, greater range, better execution — there are several ways forward.

The important bit is forward.

7. “The programme used by a professional bodybuilder must be the best programme.”

This is wonderfully tempting.

Find enormous person.

Discover enormous person's routine.

Do enormous person's routine.

Become enormous.

Except the enormous person comes with genetics, training history, recovery capacity, lifestyle and possibly pharmaceutical assistance that weren't included in the reel you downloaded.

This doesn't make professional bodybuilders useless sources of information. Far from it. Decades spent training seriously can teach someone quite a lot.

But their programme answers the question:

“What works for them?”

Your job is to work out which bits also work for you.

Sometimes the most useful person to watch isn't the genetically astonishing athlete who grew when someone carried a barbell through the room.

It's the ordinary lifter who has spent ten years figuring out how to squeeze extraordinary results from fairly ordinary equipment.

8. “You can't build muscle unless you're eating above maintenance.”

This one deserves more nuance than the old bulk-or-cut binary allows.

Bodies are inconveniently complicated.

Muscle gain is generally easier when you're well fuelled, but changes in muscle and fat don't always happen in perfectly separate seasons.

Beginners know this particularly well. So do people returning after a layoff, and people carrying enough body fat to have some energy available while training productively.

For a highly trained, already lean bodybuilder trying to add substantial new tissue, things become less forgiving.

So can muscle be gained while body weight is falling?

Sometimes, yes.

Is that necessarily the easiest way for an advanced bodybuilder to maximise muscle gain?

That's a rather different question.

9. “Training a muscle only once a week can't work.”

Tell that to several generations of perfectly large bodybuilders.

Frequency is a way of organising training, not a moral position.

A muscle trained once a week with enough productive work may grow. The same weekly work split across two sessions may suit someone else better.

There are practical advantages to spreading volume around, particularly when the 14th set for a body part bears only a passing resemblance to the first.

But bodybuilding has produced impressive physiques using all sorts of frequencies.

The question isn't whether once a week is permitted.

It's whether your current setup lets you train hard enough, recover properly and progress. Life gets busy.

10. “Three days a week isn't serious bodybuilding.”

There is a peculiar tendency in gym culture to judge commitment by attendance.

Five days means dedicated.

Three days apparently means you also play badminton.

But three well-designed sessions can contain an awful lot of training.

For people with jobs, families and lives beyond the gym — outrageous though that concept may sound — three days can also be wonderfully sustainable.

Would every competitive bodybuilder choose it?

No.

Can you become dramatically stronger and more muscular training three times a week?

Of course.

Quality still counts even when quantity has the better Instagram presence.

11. “You should rest only 45 seconds between sets.”

Rest periods somehow became another test of character.

Still breathing normally after 45 seconds? Back under the bar, coward.

The problem is that rest serves the training.

If you're trying to perform another demanding set with meaningful load, sometimes you need a few minutes before you're genuinely ready to do it justice.

Other training may suit shorter rests perfectly well.

You don't get bonus hypertrophy points for beginning your next set while still negotiating with your lungs.

Rest long enough to perform the work you're actually there to perform.

12. “Fancy equipment produces better gains.”

Nothing excites a gym refurbishment quite like a machine that appears capable of launching a small satellite.

Some modern machines are superb.

Some old machines are superb.

And barbells and dumbbells remain stubbornly effective despite their disappointing lack of touchscreens.

The useful question isn't whether something is old-school or high-tech.

Does it fit you? Can you load it progressively? Can you train the target muscle hard and safely? Does it feel good enough that you'll actually keep using it?

If yes, congratulations.

You have discovered a good exercise.

It may even have cup holders.

13. “Weights make you big. Cardio makes you ripped.”

If only the body respected departmental boundaries this neatly.

Resistance training is extremely useful for building and retaining muscle. Cardio is extremely useful for cardiovascular fitness and can increase energy expenditure.

Neither one possesses a secret engraving tool that reveals abdominal muscles.

Getting lean is largely a matter of losing enough body fat while hanging onto as much muscle as possible.

Cardio can help with that.

Weights can help with that.

Food intake tends to have quite a lot to say about it as well.

You don't have to choose a tribe.

14. “You can completely reshape a muscle with the right isolation exercise.”

This one has sold a magnificent number of exercises.

Build a higher biceps peak!

Carve the inner chest!

Lengthen the muscle!

Create a completely different human anatomy by turning your wrist slightly!

Exercise selection absolutely can change which muscles — and to some extent which regions — receive more emphasis.

But your basic structure isn't sitting there waiting to be redesigned.

Muscle attachments, limb lengths and skeletal proportions have a large genetic component.

You can build what you've got spectacularly well.

You just can't order replacement architecture.

15. “A great pump means a great growth workout.”

We should be careful here, because the pump is one of bodybuilding's great pleasures and there is no need to ruin everything enjoyable.

Arnold famously had some colourful things to say about it.

And, to be fair, Arnold Schwarzenegger went on from bodybuilding to conquer Hollywood, build businesses and become Governor of California, so perhaps we don't need to patronise him because he enjoyed an arm pump.

A pump tells you that something is happening.

It does not provide a prize certificate guaranteeing hypertrophy.

You can get an outrageous pump from a very light exercise. You can also have an extremely productive strength session without looking as though your skin is about to split.

Enjoy the pump.

Photograph it if you must.

Just don't appoint it head of programming.

16. “Hundreds of sit-ups will reveal your abs.”

Your abdominal muscles may become extremely accomplished at sit-ups.

The layer covering them remains unimpressed.

You can strengthen and grow the abs, just as you can other muscles. But choosing where body fat disappears from first isn't generally one of the options available on the machine.

This is particularly annoying because everybody seems to possess one area that leaves the party last.

Train the abs because they're muscles worth training.

Lose fat through the broader process required to lose fat.

Eventually the two projects meet.

17. “Heavy squats and deadlifts will make you blocky.”

Your skeleton entered the conversation long before your deadlift did.

People have different pelvis widths, ribcages, limb lengths, muscle insertions and general proportions.

Heavy compound lifting can add substantial muscle.

What that added muscle looks like on your frame depends partly on the frame.

If you naturally have a thick waist and broad structure, avoiding deadlifts probably isn't going to transform you into Frank Zane.

Build the proportions you want where you can.

And perhaps make peace with the fact that bodybuilding has always been partly the art of making the most of the body you actually own.

18. “High reps make muscles hard and defined.”

The 15th repetition doesn't suddenly activate the definition fibres.

Higher-rep training can certainly build muscle. Lower and moderate rep ranges can build muscle too.

What makes a physique look “hard” or “cut” is a mixture of muscular development, body-fat level, glycogen, water and the genetically determined way all of that sits on your frame.

The old pre-contest ritual of immediately replacing every heavy set with endless light repetitions was probably giving the rep range more credit than it deserved.

Use different rep ranges because they offer useful ways to train.

Not because twelve reps build ordinary muscle and twenty magically start carving grooves into it.

19. “Instinctive training is the best way to train.”

Instinct is useful. But I reckon it's habit.

It also occasionally says, “You've had a long day. Why not skip legs and have a beer?”

Experienced lifters develop a good sense of their bodies. They know when something feels wrong, when an extra set is there for the taking and when today's heroic plan needs scaling back.

That's valuable.

But intuition works particularly well when it sits on top of some structure.

Have a plan.

Track enough to know whether it's working.

Then allow experience to make intelligent adjustments.

“Listening to your body” and “doing whatever you fancy” aren't quite the same thing.

20. “Women need completely different training from men.”

Muscle tissue doesn't suddenly require pink dumbbells.

If a man and woman have the same training goal, many of the basic principles that help them reach it are remarkably similar.

Where programmes differ is often in goals, preferences, individual biomechanics, recovery and which areas someone particularly wants to develop.

A woman who wants more glute development may sensibly devote more work there.

A man who wants more lat width may do likewise.

Neither decision requires us to invent separate laws of physiology.

Train the person in front of you.

That usually works better than training the stereotype.

21. “There are legal supplements that work just like steroids.”

If somebody had genuinely invented a completely safe, legal powder producing steroid-like muscle gain, you probably wouldn't first hear about it from a bloke typing ANABOLIC MATRIX in enormous red letters.

Supplements can absolutely be useful.

Protein powder is convenient. Creatine has earned its permanent place in gym cupboards. Caffeine pre-workout products work rather noticeably. Correcting a genuine nutritional deficiency matters.

But useful isn't the same as pharmacologically transformative.

Perhaps supplements suffered because the industry spent years promising magic when “modestly useful, convenient and reasonably priced” would actually have been a perfectly respectable sales pitch.

22. “A professional bodybuilding physique is the picture of perfect health.”

Bodybuilding and health overlap.

They aren't synonyms.

Regular resistance training, physical activity, decent nutrition and maintaining useful amounts of muscle can all sit very comfortably inside a healthy life.

Preparing an elite physique for a bodybuilding stage is something else.

The goal on contest day is not to demonstrate ideal all-round health. It's to present an extraordinary physique under extraordinary conditions.

Those are different objectives.

That doesn't make competitive bodybuilding foolish. Plenty of worthwhile pursuits involve temporarily prioritising performance over some abstract idea of perfect health.

It simply means we shouldn't confuse looking spectacular under stage lights with receiving a clean bill of health from your GP.

23. “Weight training makes you muscle-bound and inflexible.”

This one has remarkable staying power.

Resistance training performed through useful ranges of motion needn't turn anyone into a human action figure whose elbows no longer bend.

Plenty of strong people are highly mobile.

Plenty of people who've never touched a barbell struggle to touch their toes.

Muscle mass can obviously create practical limitations at extremes — there is only so much human being you can fit around a joint before geometry becomes involved — but ordinary resistance training and flexibility are perfectly capable of coexisting.

You may even find that getting stronger through a good range of motion makes you rather more capable within it.

Don't be an apologist for lifting by being bullied into extensive stretching routines either.

24. “Carb loading improves every kind of athletic performance.”

Carbohydrate is excellent fuel.

That doesn't mean every workout requires three days of pasta preparation as though you're about to cycle the Alps.

The usefulness of carbohydrate loading depends rather heavily on what you're actually doing.

Long endurance events place very different demands on glycogen stores from a 60-minute weights session.

For bodybuilders, carbohydrate intake can certainly influence training performance, glycogen, fullness and how a physique looks.

But “carbs are useful” and “therefore more carbs before everything” are not identical statements.

Context has once again spoiled a beautifully simple rule.

25. “Eat loads of sugar immediately before training for instant energy.”

Sometimes this works perfectly well.

Sometimes somebody drinks an enormous sugary concoction and spends half the workout wondering why they feel slightly peculiar.

Pre-workout nutrition is one of those areas where personal experience deserves a seat at the table.

What did you eat? How much? How long before training? How hard is the session? How does your stomach handle it?

Carbohydrate around training can be useful.

But you don't need to create a glucose emergency every time you plan to train shoulders.

If your current pre-workout meal gives you good energy and digestion, there is no medal for making it more complicated.

26. “CrossFit and HYROX are better than just going to the gym.”

Steady on.

CrossFit and HYROX can both be brilliant ways to train. They’re challenging, social, competitive and give you plenty of things to measure.

But they haven’t discovered the concept of progress.

Adding 10kg to your squat is progress. Doing eight reps with a weight you could previously manage for five is progress. Running the same distance faster is progress. Improving your technique, work capacity or range of motion is progress. So is simply being able to train consistently for six months when you’ve never managed that before.

CrossFit gives you WODs and benchmark scores. HYROX gives you times and splits. The gym gives you a logbook.

None has a monopoly on getting fitter.

What matters is having a goal, training in a way that supports it, and measuring enough of what you do to know whether it’s working.

Because progress needs to come from somewhere.

And, occasionally, that somewhere is a slightly battered notebook with “3 x 8” written in it.

27. “If you stop training, your muscle turns into fat.”

This remains one of the more charming bits of fitness folklore.

Muscle doesn't turn into fat.

If you stop training, muscle tissue can shrink because the body no longer has the same reason to maintain it.

If you simultaneously continue eating as though you're still training six days a week, you may also gain fat.

One tissue hasn't transformed into the other.

Two things have happened at roughly the same time.

The body is impressive, but it isn't performing alchemy.

28. “MCT oil gives you endless energy without making you fat.”

Every generation gets a food that has apparently discovered a loophole in human metabolism.

MCT oil had a particularly good run.

Medium-chain triglycerides are absorbed and metabolised somewhat differently from longer-chain fats, which makes them interesting. There is even some evidence that replacing other dietary fats with MCTs may have small effects on body weight.

But “replacing” is doing quite a lot of work in that sentence.

MCT oil is still fat. It still provides energy. Pouring it into coffee, shakes or meals on top of everything else doesn't cause those calories to disappear into another dimension.

And it shouldn't automatically be thought of as the heart-healthy choice either. Its effects on blood lipids depend partly on what it replaces, and compared with unsaturated fats it may be a worse choice for LDL cholesterol.

So MCT oil isn't metabolic magic. It's simply another dietary fat with some interesting properties.

Be particularly suspicious whenever a food is marketed as though arithmetic—or cardiovascular physiology—no longer applies to it.

29. “They look incredible on Instagram, so they must know what they’re talking about.”

Ah, the Instagram qualification. I train therefore I can coach.

To be fair, building an impressive physique usually requires a fair amount of effort.

It does not, unfortunately, confer an automatic degree in physiology.

The person on your screen may have trained intelligently for years. They may also have exceptional genetics, very favourable lighting, a pump, a filter, pharmaceutical assistance, or some combination of the above.

And they may genuinely know their stuff.

The point is that you can't tell which of those things is true from their abs.

This matters because social media has made appearance incredibly easy to confuse with expertise. Someone can look extraordinary while giving dreadful advice. Equally, an excellent coach doesn't need to look like they're six weeks out from a bodybuilding show to understand how to help you.

Judge coaches by the quality of their reasoning, their qualifications and experience, how they work with people, whether they recognise the limits of their expertise, and whether their advice actually makes sense for you.

A physique is evidence that somebody has a physique.

Everything after that requires a little more investigation.

30. “The best-built person in the gym must know the most about bodybuilding.”

And finally, perhaps the most enduring one.

We naturally assume visible results prove expertise.

Sometimes they do.

A superb physique may represent decades of intelligent training, careful observation and hard-earned knowledge.

But appearance alone can't tell you which part came from knowledge, which came from consistency, which came from genetics, which came from pharmacology and which came from simply loving training enough to do it for years.

Likewise, the most knowledgeable coach in the room may not be the biggest person in it.

The useful question isn't:

“Who looks best?”

It's:

“Who understands why this works, can explain it, and can help somebody other than themselves make progress?”

Those are different talents.

And the very best people in bodybuilding tend to understand the difference.

Perhaps the biggest bodybuilding myth of all - "Perfection"

Maybe bodybuilding's biggest recurring mistake is believing there must be one correct way to do it.

One perfect split.

One rep range.

One diet.

One exercise for every muscle.

One ideal training frequency.

One expert who has finally solved the whole thing.

After enough years under the bar, most lifters arrive somewhere rather less dramatic.

Train hard enough to create a reason to adapt.

Do enough work, but not so much that recovery becomes the entire hobby.

Eat appropriately for what you're trying to achieve.

Sleep.

Progress things when you can. Training is sometimes a mess.

Change things when they genuinely stop working rather than because somebody uploaded a new reel.

And keep enough enjoyment in the process that you're still doing it years from now.

Because for all bodybuilding's arguments, myths, miracle routines, forbidden foods and occasional magnificent nonsense, lifting weights is still a remarkably good way to spend part of your life.

And if you've been doing it long enough to have opinions about all 30 of these, you probably knew that already.