Everything in life requires learning and weight training at the gym is no exception. But to learn you have to be willing and receptive and that does not always happen since there are people in this field who have been training for many years and continue to make many of the mistakes that we will see here today.
In this article We explain five mistakes that are usually made in the gym when we do weights.
How to choose YOUR GYM well
Not keeping any control of what we do
“What is not measured can not be improved”. It is not the first time that at Vitónica we have talked about the importance of keeping a training diary.
Training is much more than a succession of routines with different exercises that take place over time.
Training is a science and requires the manipulation of many variables in the short, medium and long term. For this reason, a training diary can help us to know what we have done and what we are doing and based on that, make decisions to know what we will do next.
Not having a defined goal
Without goals there is no movement, there is no progress.
When you start doing anything in your life you have to set goals for yourself, either at work or in this case at the gym.
Many people arrive at the gym with the refrain of “no, I don’t want to get too big either” or “no, if I just do a little maintenance…”.
These are often the same people who fail to improve in the gym because they are giving up before they even start. and his ambition is non-existent.
If you don’t want to get too big, don’t worry, it’s not going to happen. Do you just want to keep? The fact that? If you do not have any physical condition.
If you don’t want to get too big, don’t worry, it’s not going to happen. Do you just want to keep? The fact that? If you do not have any physical condition.
In short, if you join the gym it is because somewhere in your being you are looking for something, a change, a better quality of life, self-esteem, self-confidence, whatever. Establish a strategy of how you are going to do things and in what time. Start first with simple short-term goals and from there go establishing the medium and long term.
Move the weights from point A to point B
There is a capacity called proprioception that allows us to know how our body is located in space. This proprioception is important to perform exercises well in terms of safety, injury prevention, and above all, performance.
We should not just move the weights from point A to point B, we should try to do the movement using our muscles and joints in the most efficient way possible and in the way they have been designed. Do a little research and understand what functions the pectoral, dorsal, hamstrings, quadriceps or even the deltoids develop. Knowing what they do, you will better understand the movements and the different exercises and you will know how to get more out of them.
All this, in short, will translate into higher quality stimuli.
Do not give importance to the rest between series
The sensations we have when we train are important since they can give us clues to the degree of effort we are reaching and this effort is closely related to the magnitude of the stimulus we are enduring.
However, we must know how to calibrate and understand this effort because it is not the same to make an effort during a series when we enjoy full performance to strive in a series when we have rested little before it.
By this we mean that the rests between series are important and that they must guarantee the maximum possible performance in the subsequent series. We cannot avoid accumulated fatigue, but we can delay it by taking long enough breaks between sets. The ideal is between two and three minutes.
It is a mistake to rest little and look for a feeling of congestion in the muscles. This is a “nice” feeling but getting it from little rest will limit your performance and gains.
Not having a workout to follow
This point is closely related to not having goals and not having a record of what we do.
It may surprise you, but there are many people who go to the gym with a vague idea of what they have to do every day, not because they are beginners and do not know the basics. but because he improvises as he goes.
These types of people only have a small outline in their head of how they are going to structure the different muscle groups throughout the week and from there they do one or another exercise for that muscle group when it is time. There are times that they may have more or less criteria when selecting exercises, but other times they simply review all the machines in the gym that they know about that muscle group.
In the short term this can give you some results, but in the medium and long term it will only get you to go around in the same place. You need a training program to follow, with its structure, exercises, sets, repetitions, RPE and rest times.
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