To achieve your goals, you want to be avoiding as many mistakes as possible when creating your program and putting it into practice. The thing is, we all make mistakes and a lot of what you learn will be trial and error. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be educated by what you read online and minimise the amount of mistakes you might have made if you had just wandered into the gym aimlessly and started training.
What I have compiled below are some of the mistakes I know I made when I first started training and also some of the most common ones, I think I see in the gym. Remember, mistakes are fine to make as long as you learn from them. So, if you are sat there thinking you do quite a lot of these, don’t worry, just act upon it. Let’s see what we have.
Using a tempo that doesn’t suit your goals
Maybe you know about the importance of tempo in training, maybe you don’t. If you don’t, then your training is about to get a whole lot different, but with a whole new level of gains. Tempo is the speed at which you perform your reps and it has a massive outcome on the way you will perform and look. If you goal is to build as much muscle as possible, the tempo needs to be slow and the eccentric controlled. Aim for around 4-6 seconds per rep and use higher reps of 10 or more to really see the benefit. If you want to build strength and power, move the weight as fast as possible. Start to think of the term time under tension. The more time your muscles are under tension, the better set up they are for growth. This doesn’t mean you should be doing sets at a light weight that last 2 minutes. The set still needs to be difficult, heavy and have you hitting failure, or near to for 10-15 reps.
Choosing exercises that you can’t progress on
This is true for both building muscle and getting stronger. Every time you choose an exercise you should be asking yourself why? What muscles is this going to help strengthen or grow? How will this machine compliment my physique? Can I recover from it? Does it suit my mechanics? (not all machines will). If you can’t get stronger on an exercise over time then you aren’t going to get bigger or stronger, its as simple as that. For that reason, it's imperative that you choose exercises that you can progress on overtime. The longer the better.
Not logging what you do
Probably the number one thing I tell everyone who isn’t making progress, along with are you eating enough. This ties in well with the point above. How are you meant to know that you are progressing if you don’t know what you lifted on an exercise the week before? Cue the ‘I don’t need a book to remember’. Yes, you probably do. I get that you might be able to remember a few exercises and what weight you had on, but I highly doubt you remember the exact weight, number of sets and reps you got for every exercise last week. Or even the order in which you did the exercises, which does factor into how strong you are on a given exercise. Try tracking your workouts, I promise you will see an improvement.
Doing what you like, instead of what’s hard
Its human nature to gravitate towards what we like doing and shying away from what’s hard. You know what I’m going to say though, the hard stuff makes you grow. Ask yourself what your weakest body part is. Now be honest with yourself, do you train it hard enough? Its likely your favourite body part to train is also one of your most developed. Training body parts and exercises you don’t like isn’t fun, I get that. But do you know what else isn’t fun? Having an imbalanced physique that can take years to improve due to not doing that hard stuff. The earlier you start to set this right, the better.
