Common Gym Mistakes and Simple Solutions to them - Part 7

7. Inappropriate Exercise Selection

Firstly, the most common cause of poor exercise selection is the misguided belief that our bodies burn fat from the area of the muscle we use.  This is incorrect so training your triceps is not going to get rid of your bingo wings, sorry.

I have already touched on the over use of isolation exercises, but I am going to say it again. If you are trying to loose weight do you really think that seated bicep curls are going to burn through loads of calories?  Biceps are a tiny muscle, even if you are a top body builder like Phil Heath, and burn few calories and hardly tax the heart and lungs. Your legs are the biggest muscles so squats, lunges, jumps are going to burn calories for fun.

Training for a cross country run on a treadmill is not going to prepare your body for the undulating multi-surface terrain you are going to encounter during the race. The odd treadmill session is fine and productive but you need to get outside and train in similar conditions to the race, regularly.

If you are trying to make your core stronger, then doing 3 sets of 100 crunches is not going to help as that is a cardio workout, not strength (See Part 3). Plus that only really trains one muscle so what about the others? Train the entire core hard, twice a week for no more than 15 mins a session.  Use this for guidance:

http://www.nsca.com/education/articles/core-training-evidence-translating-to-better-performance-and-injury-prevention/

If you play hockey every Saturday there is little point in doing any cardio where you maintain constant speed as that does not mimic your sport. Intervals, Fartlek’s, 10-15m sprints and agility is far more specific along with a basic strength and conditioning program.

Do not miss any part of your body out in your training programme. You are only as strong as your weakest part. Typically guys don’t train legs and girls don’t train arms but most people miss something out. Train the entire body within every 7 days. The easiest way to do this is to do exercises that recruit the most muscles in one go such as squats, deadlifts and presses (chest/bench, overhead) and pulls (barbell rows, lat pull-downs).  Some people consider exercises such as these as ‘only for bodybuilders’ but they are far from it and fundamental exercises that have worked for generations for all.

Often the exercise you want to do the least is the one you need to do the most. Too often people skip the difficult exercise to do more of the easier exercises.


Doing something easy lots of times is not the same as doing something difficult once.

It is rarely wise to copy a workout from the internet, a book or magazine as the author is unlikely to have written the programme for you. Most workouts in magazines are poor, gimmicky and written to fill magazine pages rather than to have helped someone.  Choose exercises that are suitable to your specific goals.

Common Gym Mistakes and Simple Solutions to them - Part 10

10. Logging

Log everything, the more you log the better. Top body builders are all completely and utterly OCD and will log everything. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of them log their toilet output!

For most gym goers keep it simple and log the weights you lifted, the reps, the rest, how easy/hard it felt, warm-up activity, cool down, cardio (distance, pace, speed), heart rate, weight, body fat, calories, macros (macronutrients consumed in %) and so on. Top body builders take regular photos of themselves doing their poses too, how vain!  However, there is nothing to stop you taking some before, after and during photos to keep you motivated and on track.

Then when, for example, 6 weeks into your plan, armed with your log you have scientific and objective proof of your whether or not your program works. Have you gained strength, lost weight, lost fat, improved cardio vascular fitness etc? Your log should tell you in black and white, a factual record.  Without this all you can do is guess and this is where so many people go wrong.

Do not under estimate how important logging is.

Common Gym Mistakes and Simple Solutions to them - Part 9

9. Goal Setting

People who set goals are more likely to reach those goals. You need to put some sort of measurable quantity to what you are trying to achieve. ie

I want to be able to run 2km in less than 15 mins.

I want to be able to squat 50 kg.

I want to reduce my body fat by 3%.

Then set a time limit for this such as 6 weeks.  Every time you reach a goal then set another goal and continue pushing yourself on.

It is no good simply thinking ‘I feel fitter’ my clothes ‘feel looser’ as that is subjective, and training should be objective.

Even if you have no great desire to achieve something, i.e. take part in Race for Life, it is still effective to train based on goals.  What you could do is spend 8 weeks on cardio goals, then 8 weeks on body composition goals and then 8 weeks on strength goals.  Then repeat.

This is important so I will say it again: Experience shows people that set goals achieve more from their training than those who do not set goals.

How to test your body fat?  Use one of these

Bodyfat Monitor

Common Gym Mistakes and Simple Solutions to them - Part 8

8. Poor Technique

If it were as simple as lift some weights and do some cardio then everyone in the gym would look like Arnold Schwarzenegger or JessEnnis-Hill.  Sadly, in most gyms 99.9% of people do not look anything like the superstars of sport and fitness and that is mostly down to poor technique.

Simply, if you do not perform the exercise correctly you will not get the correct results and risk injury. Key to this is the need to be in control of the weight at all times, so that means you can only use momentum to help in Olympic/dynamic lifts (rarely seen outside specialist gyms).  The positioning of hips, knees, feet, the back, elbows, palms and so on all play an important part in determining whether you are targeting the correct muscle(s) or not. In this video Pro-Bodybuilder Ben Pakulski shows how the little differences affect tricep isolation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3AbFlyLYOA

In general it is best to work each exercise through the entire range of motion in order to work each muscle(s) fully. Half squatting, for example, is likely to make you quad dominant and ignore the glutes (bum) and hamstrings muscles. Another is rounding your back during any exercise as this is a fast way to injury, and will decrease the performance of the upper back muscles for upper back exercises (Rows, lat pulls).

This is an area where knowledge of human anatomy becomes really useful as once you understand how a muscle, or movement works you will understand the little, but vital differences, to technique that matters.  Taking a bit of time to learn how some of the main muscles work will pay dividends in improved training performance and therefore results and simple apps can be purchased for a couple of pounds if you have a smart phone or tablet.

However, if you can maintain perfect form throughout every set and rep, you are not lifting enough weight. It should take effort to maintain form for all, but the last 2-3 reps of each set as by then your muscles will be fatigued. If you have to use poor form more than that (ie all but first 2-3 reps), then the solution is simple, reduce the weight you are lifting.

Proper Purposeful Practice Prevents P!ss Poor Performance

Proper Purposeful Practice Prevents P!ss Poor Performance

Before I get started let us first define what Purposeful Practice is. In the book Bounce former British Number-one table tennis player Mathew Syed defines Purposeful Practice as

“….practice sessions of aspiring champions have a specific and never-changing purpose: progress. Every second of every minute of every hour, the goal is to extend one’s mind and ones body, to push oneself beyond the outer limits of one’s capacities, to engage so deeply in the task that one leaves the training session literally a changed person”.

The best athletes in the world practice, people that are already the best at their games practice. Tennis players practice every shot despite playing games regularly; cricketers bat and/or bowl in the nets despite playing regularly and Grand Prix drivers accumulate hundreds of laps in simulators and practice laps of circuits they have won at before. Why? To be the best they possibly can.

Should people training in the gym be any different to this? Does the fact that many gym goers do not compete in any sport also mean they should not take part in purposeful practice? I believe it should not, purposeful practice is vital for all and the mark of champions. Why should we not all train like champions?

Most people understand the benefits of a warm-up, or ‘pulse raiser’ as it is sometimes known. This is purely to get the blood flowing, the joints warm and the heart raised. You should then stretch the relevant muscles. Stretching alone is not purposeful practice, but if we only stretch the muscle just beyond the Range of Motion (ROM) we intend to use it is.  Why stretch your hamstrings so much you can put your head against your knee if you will not be doing any exercise that replicate that ROM?

Next, your chance to extend the warm up and practice purposefully simultaneously. Lets assume your first exercise of the day is the squat. Your first task should be to mobilise the hips in a manor that is similar to how they will move in the squat. Many people make a basic, but important mistake here by doing things like lunges or bodyweight squats that do not mimic how they will later squat. The Mobility WOD website is full of different mobility exercises for the whole body and something like this would be far more purposeful:

http://www.mobilitywod.com/2010/09/episode-40-usaw-oly-prep-some-new-hip-love-psoascalves/

Mobility should be quick, 60-90 seconds as you are in the gym to exercise.

The next stage is another that is frequently skipped. You first should squat with an empty bar, not a loaded bar (20kg). The empty bar allows you to get your feet, hip, bar and depth prefect before you add weight. If you can’t do a perfect squat with an empty bar there is little, or no, chance you can do it with a loaded bar. Every aspect of the warm up squats should be exactly as you will perform the squat with a fully loaded bar. You should do at least one set of 10, perhaps 2 sets if you make any adjustments. From then on you load that bar in blocks up to the desired weight. Again, each warm up set is purposeful practice, which will drill the technique into you and set motor patterns.

Far too many people go from straight a weight that is approx. 60-70% of their maximum, then straight to 90-95% and then onto max effort and never perform a single squat with good form in the entire session. Yes, you may progress doing this but it is only a matter of time until injury and/or a plateau that will take weeks/months to overcome.

If you have worked up to then attempted a max effort it is likely your form will not be perfect as you are at your limits (if you can max effort squat with perfect form your are simply not max efforting!). It is then often wise to drop the weight by approx 30% and perform a set of 6-8 more squats with perfect form in order reset the motor patterns back to best and add some volume for muscle building.  If the last thing you body remembers form the last session is bad form, it is likely to start the next session with bad form.  The Central Nervous System remembers these things.

The system described above should be used for all the compound lifts, squats, deadlifts, bench press and overhead press.

It does not have to end there as with the compound lifts sooner or later we will all have times when our form goes to pot and we struggle. That is when you should come into the gym with the sole purpose to practice that lift. Warm-up, mobilise for as long as it takes then practice the relevant lift with lighter weights and re-drill that form into your mind. Do not get tempted to go heavy, your purpose is to practice not to max effort.

Practice makes perfect.