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Big Gym Training Mistakes You Can Easily Avoid

Training in a gym in an improper way can easily lead to pain, niggles, injury, and several completely avoidable problems. Unfortunately, most gyms around the world do not employ highly qualified personal trainers that help clients to train properly. This can easily lead to some huge problems.

If you want to get the best possible workout, everything starts with knowledge. And a big part of training right is knowing what you should avoid. This is why you always have to be aware of the following huge gym training mistakes you can avoid right now.

Improper Warm Up

Warming up is one of the most important parts of working out, regardless of where you do it. Most people sit at desks most of their days. As a result, muscles are naturally not ready for being exposed to the strain associated with working out at the gym.

Contrary to popular belief, it is not enough to use the treadmill for 10 minutes to warm up. You need to do so much more. The best warm up always needs to:

  • Mobilize the body’s tight areas. This includes your ankles, shoulders, spine, and hips.
  • Activate the muscles you usually do not use. For instance, most people do not warm up their glutes, which can easily lead to strains.
  • Increase the body’s core temperature.
  • Excite your hormonal and nervous systems.

Obviously, there is a lot to be said about properly warming up. However, a great way to do this is to use routines that focus on dynamic movements and dynamic stretches. Think about increasing mobility while you warm up even those small muscles most people do not even know exist.

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Bad Technique

Before you lift anything that is even remotely heavy, you need to master the movement. Improper technique is one of the worst gym workout mistakes. It is practically impossible not to go to a gym and see someone that uses a bad technique. This drastically increases the risk of ending up injured.

The lack of good trainers we talked about above is a big reason why bad technique is so common. Most people just go to the gym and start using the equipment how they saw on the internet or how someone else used it.

Keep in mind that most people these days have muscle imbalances. Combine this with a bad daily posture and a lack of understanding of proper workout techniques and you are faced with a recipe for disaster.

The best thing you can do is start with low weights and look for help so you can learn the proper training technique.

Heavy Lifting When You Are Not Ready For It

One of the easiest ways to get injured is to lift too heavy and do it too soon. In most cases, this is a mistake that men make in an attempt to show off. It is often because of ego and a sense of personal capabilities that is just inflated and wrong. Some even do it as they try to impress women, although something like this rarely works in a gym environment.

Unless you completely mastered the technique of a specific exercise and you know your limits, you should never use very heavy weights. Also, when you go to the gym, your ego has to stay out. You need to start light, then practice form, and gradually increase weight.

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Extra Thing To Remember: The opposite can also be a problem. Lifting too light for way too long means your body gets used to it and will not continue growing, improving. When form is good, you should consider progressively increasing weights. When you stay at the same weight, the body does not change.

Bad Breathing

There is so much to be said about how important breathing is in working out. However, we will keep it short since we focus just on the common mistakes people make during gym workouts.

The big problem is that instead of using the diaphragm, most people breathe through their mouths and chests. Basically, mouth breathing means you inhale through your mouth, not through your nose.

When you breathe incorrectly, some problems appear, like increased anxiety, blood pressure, compromised cardiovascular output, increased stress, and not being able to train very hard.

As you get the heart rate up, you need to focus on nose inhaling and mouth exhaling.

Choosing The Wrong Exercises

So many people that buy a gym membership simply show up and them use one machine after the another. They often just choose a random sequence of unrelated exercises.

Remember that the exercises you choose are the tools that help you to achieve your goal. You thus need to choose the correct tools. It is a very bad idea to have an exercise like bicep curls taking up most of the training session. This is much more common than many believe as several machines have the exact same effect on the body and target the same muscle in very similar ways.

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As a beginner, the most important thing when you go to the gym is to use compound strength exercises. They are the exercises that are using several muscle groups during every single rep. Examples of compound strength exercises include squats, push ups, deadlifts, rows, and lunges.

Choosing large exercises with big movements is very important. In fact, these are the exercise that most experienced athletes keep doing because of how effective and beneficial they are. Isolation exercises should make up a little part of the workout. Some athletes do not even use them, ever.

Not Putting In The Effort

Last but certainly not least, if you do not work hard, you will not get results. You should find yourself breathing heavily, being a little uncomfortable, and sweating when you are at the gym. If this is not the case, you will most likely not get the results you want.

The big problem is that working out hard is not natural for most people. We are used to staying at a desk for several hours every day and we take our cars to move around. Then, when we go to the gym, it is not natural to feel so much physical stress. The bottom line is that, although you do not need to exaggerate and feint working out, you do need to work hard. Without hard work and effort, the benefits of going to the gym simply do not appear.