Ben Longley has been a personal trainer for over a decade and has seen it all. Twice. Here are his top suggestions for avoiding gym-related injuries, aches, and pains.
8 common workout mistakes to avoid
1. No warmups
Given that most people spend their days sitting at a desk, a proper warm-up is critical for maximizing gym performance and safety. Jumping on a bike or treadmill for 5–10 minutes is not the best warm-up, and if that’s your go-to, you’re missing out on a lot.
A proper warm-up should seek to:
1. Mobilize ‘tight’ areas such as the hips, thoracic spine, shoulders, and ankles.
2. Activate key and frequently underutilized muscles such as the glutes (your buttocks).
3. Raise your core temperature.
4. The nervous and hormonal systems should be stimulated.
Jogging through a more dynamic sequence of diverse movements (almost like a yoga flow), as well as some foam rolling and dynamic stretches, can better prepare your body for a fantastic workout and help you retain your movement quality.
2. Wrong technique
This is one of the most serious problems in gyms around the world. People frequently perform their workouts incorrectly, increasing their risk of injury and long-term niggles, aches, and pains.
The average person purchases a gym membership and is frequently left to their own devices to figure out what to do. Combine it with modern-day desk posture and the resulting muscle imbalances, and you’ve got a prescription for disaster. If you believe you are in this situation, seek assistance and learn suitable training techniques. You will reap the benefits indefinitely.
3. Ego lifting
Going too heavy, too soon, is a common mistake. Men are often the worst offenders in this regard. Call it ego, an overestimation of one’s ability, or a desire to impress the ladies, but this is all too often what you’ll see if you stroll into any public gym.
Lightening the loads is an easy way to immediately improve a lot of training techniques and save a lot of injuries (and forced time off training as a result). Leave your ego at the door when you enter the gym, start small, practice perfect form, and gradually increase the weight.
4. Not enough weights
This may appear to be a contradiction to the prior point, yet they are both typical blunders.
The main goal of strength training is to lift a load in order to stress the body. The body adapts to stress over time, resulting in enhanced strength, larger or more toned muscles, increased work capacity, and so on.
Assuming your form is good, you should gradually raise your weight to maintain your results. Your body will not change if you continue to lift the same weight week after week.
5. Incorrect breathing technique
In these modern, extremely stressed times, many people suffer from incorrect or disordered breathing. Many people develop shallow chest breathing and mouth breathing instead of ‘belly’ breathing with their diaphragm. Mouth breathing refers to inhaling through the mouth rather than the nose.
Incorrect breathing can cause tension, high blood pressure, anxiety, muscular tightness, decreased cardiovascular output, and a reduction in your capacity to train hard and shed body fat. When exercising and raising your heart rate, concentrate on inhaling through your nose (your abdomen should inflate) and exhaling through your mouth.
6. Poor exercise selection
It’s not uncommon for folks to show up at the gym and just aimlessly hop from one machine to the next, or to choose an arbitrary series of exercises with no rhyme or reason. Exercises are tools that can assist us in achieving a goal, so it is critical that we select the appropriate instrument for the job.
Concentrate on compound strength exercises, which involve the simultaneous use of numerous muscular groups; think of them as big motions. Squats, deadlifts, push-ups, lunges, chin-ups, rows, and variants of these exercises should be a regular part of your strength training routine.
7. Not creating a create a smart and effective workout program
Exercise selection is critical, as is the order in which they are performed, for both safety and progress. Don’t begin your exercises by doing a lot of cardio or focusing on direct arm work like bicep curls.
Begin with the most complex exercises first, which are the most taxing and have a higher risk of injury (such as deadlifts and squats), and then progress to exercises that correspond to your goals.
Splitting your gym sessions into various body parts for separate days (e.g. arm days and leg days) is a popular program, but it’s not the most effective approach for the ordinary 9-5 desk jockey and family guy (or woman) to program.
Including all of the big lifts in a logical arrangement. Something along the lines of:
Exercise with two legs (deadlift or squat)
Pushing exercises (such as push-ups and bench presses)
Pulling exercises (such as rows or chin-ups)
A lunge
Another push
Another pull
Work on core stability
Cardio
There are several ways to create a smart and effective program that is tailored to your training frequency, history, and specific goals.
8. Putting less effort
This is relatively simple. It’s unlikely that you’ll obtain any substantial effects if you’re not heavily breathing, sweating, or uncomfortable in any manner. All of the amazing stuff happens outside of your comfort zone, so if this is not a natural thing for you, teach yourself to go there. Most people can tell if they’re working hard enough and putting in enough effort. You don’t have to kill yourself in the gym, but hard work is essential if you want to thrive in life.
