If you want to be at the peak of health, you need to be armed with the right knowledge about your body and how to take care of it.

Knowledge is power right?! Here are some health and fitness concepts not many people fully understand, but you ought to know about your health and fitness.

5 Facts You Probably Never Knew About Health

Exercising only certain parts of your body won’t reduce fat there

Many people lift weights in hopes of trimming just their arms or legs. This will not work. There are no exercises meant to slim down specific body parts only. You need to work out various muscles and this will lose fat equally over the entire body.

Muscles will keep burning calories even when you’re at rest and recovering

Cardio exercises are effective for burning the calories and fat in your body. However, if you want to significantly increase the amount of calories you burn, you need to build some muscle. Surprisingly, these muscles will continue burning the calories in your body even when you’re taking a break and resting.

Strength training will not add necessarily add bulk to the female body

A lot of women shun weight training exercises for fear of adding bulk and excess muscle in their bodies. However, this is not likely to happen. Muscle growth requires the right combination of hormones, diet and repetition and simply, most women don’t have the right combination to ever have to worry about bulking up.

Performing plenty of crunches is not what gives you a well-toned midsection

Crunches alone are not able to shrink your midsection, no matter how many times you do them. They’re an excellent part of your overall routine but they should not be the only exercise you do. Instead, use different exercises for different parts of the body together with cardio workouts, and watch your diet and portions as well. It’s all about balance!

Fat and muscles actually have the same weight

In some cases, looking at the weighing scale alone may be misleading. Since fat and muscles weigh the same, if you’re exercising regularly, you will still be likely to lose fat and gain muscle even if you don’t see any noticeable changes when you weigh yourself. It’s best to look at your vital statistics, not just the scale, and measure your body mass index, too.