Most Common Mistakes In the Gym
If you’re like most beginners, you make a million mistakes when it comes to exercise and lifting weights. If you're new to training and haven’t had enough time to learn right from wrong, this article is for you. It will help to accelerate your progress and skip some of the most common mistakes people make in the gym. If you’re an experienced lifter, you may still learn something from this article but it might also be nostalgic to think back to a time when you made these same mistakes too. Either way, I hope you enjoy this article and learn a something useful too.
No Warm Up
Number one biggest mistake in the gym is the number one thing you should do every time you workout, which is to warm up. I know a lot of our younger readers will shake this one off and probably even skip over it but this is not just an old man's mistake. Warming up is a key component to making long term progress. There are many different ways to perform a proper warm up and maybe that warm up changes on a day by day basis based on what you are training for the day. However, a few solid principles should remain the same:
Increase blood flow, especially to the agonist and antagonist muscle groups being used during training
Increase range of motion of joints used during training
Increase body temperature
Excite and activate the nervous system
Proper increases in weight used during exercises, especially during the first exercise of the day
All of these components can be accomplished in a variety of ways such as a dynamic warm up routine or something more like “Wenning Warm ups” which is popularized by Matt Wenning. Your warm up should prepare you to workout, not fatigue you so get blood flow quickly and efficiently, but do not allow the warm up to last longer than your warm up. A proper warm up will help to prevent injury and by preventing injury, you will be able to continue to make progress in the gym over time. I
2. Lift too Heavy too Often
This mistake is probably the most damaging mistake in many ways to a lifter's progress. I have taught high school students the basics of weight training for many years now and when given the opportunity, the majority of the time all they want to do is max out and oftentimes they can’t even complete a rep with the weight they put on the bar. Now remember, there’s plenty of research that shows a novice lifter can do just about anything and make progress for about six or so months, we call this the newbie gainz. This phenomenon may mislead novice lifters to believe that this style of lifting will translate into great progress for years and years but it doesn’t. Lifting too heavy too often doesn’t allow an individual to get enough volume to make significant progress over time (remember, volume = weight x sets x reps). Additionally, because the weight is so heavy, it reduces the number of reps performed which translates to less practice of the movement, reducing the chances to work on technique. Lastly, and most importantly, lifting too heavy, too often drastically increases the risk of injury. There is an old saying, which long time lifters know to be true and it goes like this, “Those who lift the longest, get the strongest.” This doesn’t mean if you can stay in the gym for 24 hours straight you’ll become built like a bull, this means that if you can train for years and years with limited injury, you will be able to make significant progress. However, if injury for any reason prevents you from training, you won’t be able to make progress.
3. Worry about what Others Think
When you worry about what others think of what you're doing, you are focusing less on what you should actually be doing. Weight training is a very intuitive thing. What works for some people may not work as well for you. There is no one “right” way to do things, there are many methods to achieve the same result. Finding what works for you requires you to be confident enough to experiment and try different methods of training or different exercises. Many people never try these different concepts or pay close enough attention to what signals their body is giving them to make real progress. One of the most common things a person worries about is what others will think of them if they use lighter weight than they think they should on a particular exercise. In order for YOU to make the most progress for you, you need to do what your body needs. Trust me, most people don’t care what you’re doing.
4. Poor Programming
This mistake goes hand in hand with mistake number two, lifting too heavy too often. Lifting too heavy too often is not the only programming mistake a person can make though. There’s many programming mistakes that are fairly common which include:
The order which exercises performed
Exercise selection for the desired goals
Lack of specific goals
Training exercises or muscle groups too often or too infrequent
Improper rest times, reps, and sets
Lack of progression from week to week
There are many more mistakes a person could make with their programming but these are some of the most common mistakes. Poor programming will lead to poor results and potentially injury as well. Find a program or pay for a program from someone you trust and that will accelerate your progress 10-fold.
5. Poor Technique
Proper technique is important for so many reasons. Some of the most notable ones are injury prevention, maximizing performance, and achieving desired results. Most injuries in the weight room can be attributed to incorrect technique which could cause immediate injury such as herniated discs or torn ligaments or could cause overuse injuries, all of which prevent training. In the long term, poor technique also prevents an individual from maximizing performance which can be detrimental if you are attempting to compete in some type of strength sport such as strongman, Olympic Weightlifting, powerlifting, and/or CrossFit. If your goal is more so aesthetics, poor technique could result in less activation of the specific muscle that you are attempting to train which leads to poor results. I always recommend using light weights on new exercises or exercises that you need to relearn until you have acquired the correct motor patterns for that movement. Once you understand how to properly move your body for that exercise, you will experience rapid growth in your performance compared to improper technique because you are using the muscles as intended for the movement and performing the movement the most efficient way possible. Improper technique limits the capabilities of an individual and puts an artificial ceiling on performance.
6. Program Hopping
Once you have a proper program, stick with it. Your program should fit your goals, time available to train (minutes/hours and days per week), your current capabilities, and equipment available to you. If you choose a program that isn’t realistic for you to complete for any of the above reasons or other reasons unmentioned, you won’t be successful. This issue is most similar to the child who gets a new toy, plays with it for a few days or weeks but then sees a newer, shiner toy in the store and wants to play with that instead. In the case of a toy, who cares (except your parents bank account to constantly be buying new gadgets) but in the case of training programs it matters a lot if you want to make progress. Too many people try something for a couple weeks, then see the new, shinier program and want to start one instead. This cycle has a tendency of repeating itself over and over again and when it does, you never actually complete a program. A proper program should start off with the first few weeks a little easier and progress to more difficult training as the weeks advance. In most cases, it should also be somewhere between 6-12 weeks long. If you are constantly program hopping, you never experience those difficult weeks at the end of your program which is where you make most of your progress. You also never have the chance to build off the success of one program and move into the next. There is more to completing just one program, your goal should be to complete program, after program, after program where the program builds off one another to allow you to make continual progress.
There’s also something to be said for finishing what you start. I believe it translates to a stronger will to succeed in other endeavors in the future. Perseverance is a quality that is earned
7. Lack of Hard Work
Lastly, hard work. As Marc Lobliner of Tigerfitness says, Nothing works unless you do. I couldn’t have said it better myself. No matter what you do or how you do it, if you put in the work you will see results. The problem is, there are a lot of people who rather have full conversations or check their social media in the gym rather than train their ass off. Here’s my friendly advice: put down the phone, pick up the intensity, and do what needs to be done to achieve your goals.
My goal with these articles is to entertain you and give you information to help you make progress in the gym. Take this advice as you see fit. I know most people, myself included, have made all of these mistakes at some point. Remember, it’s not perfection that you seek, it’s progress. If you can take this information and avoid many of these training pitfalls, you can save yourself years on your learning curve. Good luck. Stay strong, get strong.
