Below are what I consider to be the Top 10 Myths you hear everyday from guys in the gym giving advice on weightlifting:

1. You can get as big as a pro bodybuilder without taking steroids; it just takes longer. – Despite what many of the magazines say, all professional bodybuilders use either steroids or steroids in combination with other growth-enhancing drugs.
2. In order to get really big, you have to eat a super-high- calorie diet. – Well, that’s true; you’ll get really big if you eat a super high-calorie diet, but you’ll look like the Michelin Man’s fraternal twin. However, if you want to get big, lean-tissue wise, then super-high-calorie diets are probably not for you unless you are one of those very few people withmetabolicrates so fast you can burn off these calories instead of depositing them as fat.
3. If you eat a low-fat diet, it doesn’t matter how many calories you take in, you won’t gain any fat. – The bottom line is, if you exceed your energy requirements, you’ll gradually get fatter and fatter. It’s true that eating a diet rich in fat will pack on the pounds quicker for a variety of reasons, the most significant being that a gram of fat has nine calories as opposed to the four calories per gram that carbohydrates and proteins carry.
4. The more you work out, the more you’ll grow. – No, no no. This is one of the most damaging myths that ever reared its ugly head. 95% of the pros will tell you that the biggest bodybuilding mistake they ever made was to over-train–and this happened even when they were taking steroids.
5. The longer you work out, the better. It just isn’t necessary to do 20-30 sets for a body part, or even 10 sets like many ‘experts’ would have you believe. In fact, research has shown that it’s possible to completely fatigue a muscle in one set, provided that that set taxes a muscle completely.
6. You don’t have to be strong to be big. – For a variety of reasons, people, even those with an equal amount of muscle mass, vary in strength enormously. It might have something to do with fast-twitch/slow-twitch muscle ratios, or it might have something to do with the efficiency of nerve pathways or even limb length and the resultant torque. But it is still a relative term. To get bigger muscles, you have to lift heavier weight, and you,not the guy next door, have to become stronger — stronger than you were.
7. The training programmes that work best for pro bodybuilders are best for everyone. – You see it happen every day in gyms across the country. Some bodybuilding neophyte will walk up to a guy who looks like he’s an escaped attraction from Jurassic Park and ask him how he trains. The biggest guy in the gym likely got that way from either taking a tremendous amount of drugs and/or by being genetically pre- dispositioned to get big. Follow a horse home and you’ll find horse parents. The guy in your gym who is best bodybuilder is the guy who has made the most progress and done the most to his physique using natural techniques. He may still be a pencil neck, but he may have put on 40 pounds [19kg] of lean body mass to get where he is, and that, in all probability, took some know-how. That person probably doesn’t overtrain, keeps his sets down to a minimum, and uses great form and concentration on the eccentric (negative) portion of each exercise repetition.
8. You can’t build muscle on a sub-maintenance calorie intake diet. – It may be a little harder, and it may require a little bit more know-how and a little bit more conscientious effort, but it can be done. The fact is, the obese state in humans and animals is not universally correlated with absolute levels of caloric intake and neither is the accrual of lean body mass. The ability to realize changes in lean/fat ratios is regulated by components of the automatic nervous system working in concert with several endocrine hormones; this is called nutrient partitioning.
9. You can’t grow if you only work each body part once a week. – If you work out — work out intensely– then it can take 5- 10 days for the muscles to heal. Although the following should be taken with a grain of salt when determining your own exercise frequency, a study in the May 1993 issue of the Journal of Physiology revealed it can take weeks for muscles to recuperate from an intense workout. The study involved a group of men and women who had worked their forearms to the max. All of the subjects said they were sore two days after exercising, and the soreness was gone by the seventh day, and the swelling was gone by the ninth day. After six weeks, the subjects had only gained back half the strength they had before the original exercise! By no means am I advocating that you wait two months between workouts, but I am trying to prove the point that it takes muscles longer to heal than what you might have previously thought. For some people, especially natural bodybuilders, waiting a week between body part workouts might be just what the doctor ordered for size and strength gains!
10. You can’t make gains if. you only train with weights three days a week. – Although you probably couldn’t find a single steroid- assisted athlete who trains only three days a week, there’s absolutely no reason why a three-day-a-week routine couldn’t work for many natural athletes. As long as your routine attacked the whole body and you worked to failure on each set, you could easily experience great gains on this sort of routine. However, you need to pay even more attention to your diet if you only train three days a week, especially if your job involves little or no physical activity, and you like to spend your idle time eating. Ignore those who say three- day-a-week bodybuilders are only ‘recreational lifters’. Think quality and not quantity.

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