Myth: Muscle can turn to fat and fat turn to muscles!

Fact: I often hear people especially girls telling me that they have stopped working out and their muscles have turned to fats. But this isn’t the case because muscle and fat tissues are entirely two very different thing, therefore they can never transform from one form to another. It’s the equivalent of saying you can turn water into wine or into gold (I wish).

What really happens when you stop exercising is that your muscle mass declines (drastically especially after 2 weeks). And how you gain fat tissue is when you eat more calories than you burn off, which is much easier to do when you’re not exercising. And likewise, when you up your weight training routine, you’ll add lean tissue and might start burning excess body fat, but your fat didn’t turn into muscle. Your muscle mass got tighter.

What’s another  more maddening thing, though, is when girls say, “Oh my god. I don’t want to lift weights, I’ll look like a mad.” This isn’t even true at all: Lifting heavy weights will not necessarily make you bigger; strength does not automatically equal huge muscles, because that’s just not how muscles work.

Enough, stop, please.

What Really Happen When You Lift Weights

Simply put, it’s nearly impossible for a woman to develop huge, rippling muscles merely by adding heavier weights to her routine. One reason is hormones: Women produce 10 to 20 times less testosterone (the hormone that cause men to bulk way faster than women ever will),  says Jacque Crockford, an exercise physiologist with the American Council on Exercise.

‘Muscles are made up of protein fibers and surrounding tissues. To get stronger, you need to increase the size and thickness of those fibers — a process technically called myofibrillar hypertrophy, which allows your muscles to exert more force and be able to lift, push, or pull heavier loads’.

There are two types of muscle fibers: Type 1 and Type 2, also known as slow-twitch and fast-twitch. “Type 2 muscles tend to be larger, whereas Type 1 fibers are smaller and less defined,” Crawford says. Men tend to have a higher concentration of Type 2 muscles than women, which may cause a slight difference in how big their muscles can grow.

That said, some women will naturally have an easier time building muscle than others, depending on their own genetic makeup of Type 2 and Type 1 fibers, Crockford says. But these results won’t happen overnight, and they won’t necessarily come across as bigger — just tighter and more defined.

All in all, don’t be afraid to challenge yourself next time you are at the gym.You do you boo and you might already be a lot stronger than you think.