Marketing Words To Be Aware Of

The fitness industry has a lot of words out there that companies throw around because they sound good and help them sell a lot of products. Companies use them to make their products sound better, seem like its going to change everything about you and give you a feeling youve never had. However, many of these words are just marketing ploys to be able to up the price of a product or service and tricking the consumer into paying that increased price. Im going to give you the run down on some of the more popular words to watch out for.

1. Toning- This word is used by everybody. Every woman wants that "toned" look. But "toned" isnt an actual muscle condition. Your muscles dont get toned when you workout. The look that it refers to is the combined effect of fat loss and muscle hypertrophy(increase in muscle size). These two biological actions combine to give you the look that many women want. So the next time someone tells you a machine will tone your muscles, or give you a toned look, or if a trainer ever tells you they will get your muscles toned up, just walk away. Please.
2. Muscle Confusion- Muscle confusion is the TV name for one of the basic principles in the training world. Its called the General Adaptation Syndrome. The GAS has 3 stages which are Alarm, Super compensation, and Exhaustion.In the Exhaustion phase, your body starts to fatigue, become sore because it is either overworked or the workouts have become stale with no new stimulus to engage the supercompensation phase. Muscle Confusion says that it changes the program so your muscles dont get used to the training and you stop gaining or losing like you were. This is just turning the last phase of the GAS into a really cool and fancy sounding word meaning VARIATION. As long as you keep changing your workouts and switching things up then you are keeping variety in your workouts and your not paying lots extra for a fancy program with a cool name. The easiest trick to use to keep variation in your workouts without having to change your workouts every few weeks is to add one more workout then days a week you train. So if you workout 3 days a week, then have 4 workouts ready. So week one you perform workouts 1,2,3. In week 2 you would do 4,1,2. You would continue this for weeks and it would take until week 5 before you did the same 3 workouts in one week. 
3. Pump- The muscle "Pump" is considered the feeling when your muscles feel swollen and have a pumped up look and feel to them. This is what happens during an intense workout and is not given because of a supplement like many of them advertise they do. The feeling of a pump comes from increased blood flow and inflammation due to the breakdown of the muscle that was just performed. Most supplements that claim to give you this feeling do so by hopping you up on stimulants so you get a feel like you have so much energy but its just the added caffeine. Any intense workout can give you a "pump" and you dont need a supplement to do it.

Summing it Up
Be cautious when you find a new craze or fad or word out there. Most of them are just put on products and services to increase the price and entice buyers. Be careful and do your research before buying products.