Many people visit fitness centers today, and this type of sport is fortunately much more popular than ever before. Why fortunately? Strength training has many benefits (we can discuss them in more detail in one of the future articles) and it would be a shame to deprive yourself of them.
In today's article, I want to focus on frequent mistakes during training, I will try to summarize them in points and look at this issue from a different angle.
Namely, of the many people who visit the fitness center today, few of the regular recreational exercisers actually train. Visiting the fitness center is not enough. If you don't have knowledge about the basic principles of effective training, at best you're depriving yourself of any results, at worst it can cause you injuries and health problems. If you do not take care to practice the sport correctly, the motto may apply: Sport leads to permanent disability. Therefore, regular training can improve the quality of life, but also make it worse. The fact that you don't notice the consequences of improperly conducted training immediately after the first badly trained series doesn't play a role either, you don't even have to notice it after a month or two. And so you continue cheerily until the indicators of long-term malfunctioning begin to draw attention to the problem, whether other health and aesthetic complications arise: back pain, knee pain, ... or a protruding trapeze, which, especially on women, does not look attractive at all. In the best case, after half a year you will realize that you are exactly where you were without any progress.
Let's take a closer look at (in my opinion) some of the most common training mistakes that can hold you back, divert you from your goal, or even pose risks:
- incorrect technique – the fact that the correct execution of the exercises should be self-evident I do not need to develop further. Individual exercises, especially complex ones, are difficult to perform. Watching them from the video is usually not enough. The correct execution of the exercise must be properly explained and demonstrated, and it usually takes a lot of practice to automate such movement patterns, understand the essence, and know how to target exactly what you want to target.
- lack of concentration, and distraction during training – this includes everything possible, such as constantly running away to the mobile phone, "chatting", or writing a message on the machine while performing the exercise (I've also seen this before),... This often artificially and unnecessarily prolongs the breaks, you are prolonging your training. And I am not even mentioning conducting a conversation while doing the exercise. Have you heard about the so-called mind-muscle connection, it is an essential factor of effective training. If you are distracted by, for example, the above-mentioned circumstances, you are depriving yourself of one of the important pillars responsible for the performance you deliver and thus, the results themselves.
- quantity at the expense of quality – lots of exercises, possibly even in a meaningless order, changing machines and exercise tools without any deeper consideration and without a plan at all, an unnecessarily large training volume, insufficient breaks, chaos, and yet another chaos... In addition, I'll just repeat: A plan in which you try to systematically improve is a path, and less is many times more.
- no complex, basic (and more effective) exercises – too many isolated exercises, exercises on machines, or (especially for women) various "jokes" with rubber bands, which I note that I do not alienate, should definitely not form a huge part of the training. I know, the basic and complex exercises are the ones that require more energy, time, concentration, strength, and performance, and many people avoid them. However, this is a concrete example that the easier solutions are rarely the more effective and reasonable ones. And which exercises are effective? We are talking, for example, about various squats, deadlifts, lunges, and pull-ups,...
- excessive load, insufficient range – your ego will grow if you load more than realistically (and especially technically correct) you can handle, but for the muscle, it is already harder... Not to mention the various risks that are at stake with such an approach. On the other hand, we also encounter the opposite.
- insufficient load, minimal or no progressive load – you cannot expect your result to move in the desired direction if your effort is not moving adequately and you are still using the same size dumbbells as a year ago.
- regeneration – very underestimated factor, but without regular regeneration, sufficient sleep, rest days,... you won't get any further. People often give this factor much less weight than it actually has.
- nutrition – this is already a chapter in itself (we will also deal with nutrition within the articles). You can have a well-planned training, and pay attention to all the important pillars, but if it is not supported by good and suitable nutrition, it will be very difficult to achieve the desired results. But that's for longer and another time...
If you have already decided to really jump into it, you are serious about it, you are ready to invest your time, energy, money and you REALLY want results, then you need to know that going to the fitness center is unfortunately not enough... There is a real need to make adequate efforts, have a plan, a system, a goal, push your limits and, last but not least, master the correct technique.
If you lack knowledge in this area, then copying other people in the gym, and following random YouTube videos or Instagram training videos is definitely not the best idea. Deciding to find the right person to guide you is the best thing you can do. And here I have to point out that investing time in finding someone really competent is worth it.
