Many people visit fitness centers today, and fortunately, this type of sport is 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 ourselves 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, many people who visit fitness centers today, few of the regular recreational exercisers actually train. A visit to the fitness center is not enough. If you do not have knowledge of the basic principles of effective training, at best you are depriving yourself of any results, at worst it can cause you injuries and health problems. If you don't care about the proper practice of sports, the slogan may apply: Sports leads to permanent disability. Therefore, regular training can improve the quality of life, but also worsen it. It doesn't matter that you don't notice the consequences of improperly conducted training immediately after the first poorly trained series, you don't have to notice it even after a month or two. And so you happily continue until indicators of long-term dysfunction start to point to a problem, whether other health and aesthetic complications appear: back pain, knee pain, ... or a prominent trapezius, which, especially in women, does not look attractive at all. At best, 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, distract you from your goal, or even put you at risk:
- 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 on 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 exactly how to target what you want to target.
- lack of concentration, distraction during training - this includes everything possible, such as constantly running away to the mobile phone, "chatting" or typing a message while doing the exercise (I have also encountered this before). .. You often artificially and unnecessarily prolong your breaks by doing so, and also prolong your training. And I'm not even talking about having a conversation while exercising. You've heard of the so-called mind-muscle connection, it's a necessary factor for effective training. If you are distracted, for example, by the above-mentioned circumstances, you are depriving yourself of one of the important pillars responsible for your performance and thus the results themselves.
- quantity at the expense of quality – a lot of exercises, perhaps even in a meaningless order, changing machines and exercise aids without deeper thinking and without a plan at all, an unnecessarily large volume of training, insufficient breaks, chaos and more chaos. .. Moreover, I will just repeat: A plan in which you try to systematically improve is the way, 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 am not alienating, should definitely not form a huge part. I know that core and complex exercises are the ones that require more energy, time, concentration, strength and power and many people avoid them. However, this is a concrete example of the fact that the simpler solutions are rarely the more effective and reasonable ones. And which exercises are effective? For example, we are talking about various squats, deadlifts, lunges, pull-ups...
- excessive load, insufficient range - Your ego will grow if you load more than you can realistically (and mainly technically correctly) handle, but it is already harder for the muscle... Not to mention the various risks that are at stake in such executions. On the other hand, we also encounter the opposite.
- insufficient load, minimal or no progressive load - you cannot expect your results to move in the desired direction if your efforts are not moving adequately and you are still using the same large weights as you were a year ago.
- regeneration – a 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 by itself (we will also cover nutrition within the articles). You can have a well-planned training, take care of all the important pillars, but if it is not supported by good and appropriate nutrition, it will be very difficult to achieve the desired results. But that's for longer and another time...
If you've already decided to take the plunge, you're serious about it, you're ready to invest your time, energy, money and you REALLY want results, then you need to know that going to the gym is unfortunately not enough. .. You really need to make an adequate effort, have a plan, a system, a goal, push your limits and, last but not least, master the right technique.
If you lack knowledge in this area, then copying other people in the gym and watching random videos on YouTube or training videos on Instagram 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 must point out that investing time in finding someone really competent pays off.
