I’ve spend a lot of time at the gym over the last few years and I’ve
noticed a few things that people do frequently that hinder their
progress. The follow are 8 of the simplest to fix:
1) Lifting the weight not lifting the lift. I have no problem with
power lifters using whatever means necessary to get the weight up, their
sport is lifting as much weight as possible and there is a special
technique to it, one that is very different from a fitness or body
building lift. But this type of lifting isn’t the most effective way to
get fit or grow muscle. In fact, they do whatever they can to make
lifting that weight as easy as possible, the opposite of what body
builders and fitness participants should be doing. If you are working a
leg exercise and your shoulders are hurting, take some weight off so you
are able to feel the effort in your legs.
2) Not working out very hard. Intensity is key to getting quick
results at the gym. It’s fine to be social while you’re there, just try
your best to keep your heart rate and effort up. If you do more talking
than lifting, consider finding somewhere else to hang out.
3) Avoiding power lifting movements. Power lifting moves are great
for teaching you how to control your nervous system and coordinate the
impulses needed to fire almost all of the muscle fibers in a muscle. In
fact, you’re not likely to be able to learn this any other way. Lots of
practice can teach you how to fire them but going down that avenue is
going to take years vs. months. It is irrelevant that their isn’t a
direct carryover from power cleans to pull-ups, because the portion of
the brain that controls and coordinates high levels of muscle
recruitment is going to develop from power cleans which is going to make
pull-ups easier.
4) Working a very short portion of a lifts range of motion. Unless
you have an injury, warm-up well and perform the entire range of motion
with EVERY lift; I’ll give you a shorter range on the last unspotted rep
of a heavy set, but that’s it. Lowering 80 pound dumbbells to elbows at
90 degrees and pressing them up again is exactly 50% of a rep. Would
you come 50% of the way to the gym for your workout? I’ve seen people
“press” 225 of 5 reps like this – you can tell who these people are
because their chests are tight and their shoulders are rounded forward
when they walk through the gym looking to see who saw them perform their
killer set. The other great example of this behaviour is the 1/8th leg
press when the person loads the machine with every plate in the gym and
moves it 3 inches. At least in this case, if they load and unload the
machine themselves, they are getting a decent workout.
5) Coming to the gym instead of getting another hobby. There is a
limit to how much you can workout and still continue to grow. You’ll
continue to burn calories the more you work, but there is a finite
amount of micro-damage that you can do to your body before you start
running into problems or stop being able to lift with enough intensity
to do any damage. You’ve done way too much a few set BEFORE this point.
While you will keep growing, you’ll not be growing as fast as you could
be had you performed just enough work.
6) Not having any goals, long, short or immediate. Sometimes when I
ask people what they are hoping to achieve by being at the gym they know
right away and tell me, I want to lose some weight and build some
muscle, I want to look good at the cottage this summer, I like the way
it feels when or after I workout,… But a lot of the time, people don’t
know why they are there. They’re doing the same exercises the same way
and with the same weight that they always do and getting exactly the
same thing out of it as they always do. When your sole reason for being
there inertia, it maybe time to talk to a trainer about some goals.
7) Not trying anything new. Most people hate telling me what their
favorite exercise is that they started doing in the last 6 weeks. For me
it would be overhead barbell shrugs. The 6 weeks before that it would
have been single arm corner barbell press and before that it would have
been the agility ladder. Wide grip dead lifts on a step, glut-ham
raises, front squats and, for a time, upper-pec cable crossovers would
have been mentioned. The workouts I do now have some of the same core
compound exercises as the ones I did a year ago, but a lot of the other
exercises have been replaced with new ones. My strength on most lifts
has improved marginally in that year but given that there are about 15
or 20 new lifts included in that, I believe I have progressed.
Irrelevant of the numbers, my body looks better than it did a year ago
because the new movements have added mass in places that were not
getting worked before.
8) Never thinking about why you are doing what you are doing. I don’t
mean goals here, I mean things like not questioning the wisdom of why
you don’t go all the way to the ground with squats, why fat makes you
fat, why you will never grow on a reduced or low carbohydrate diet, why
machines are not as good as free weights or why doing cardio will stop
you from growing. There are 1000’s of these pieces of wisdom out there
that have been repeated so much that they are now assumed to be facts.
Just question yourself every now and then to determine why your are
doing what you are doing