First, I’d like to say that if you’re hitting the gym on a regular basis, I will applaud you harder than I applaud LeBron. And that’s a lot. Building the habit of making time for the gym each week is challenging as you get into your adult life.
If you are going to the gym consistently, or if you tried it out and fell off because you didn’t notice results, these six workouts mistakes may be what is holding you back from becoming stronger, looking better, and feeling your best.
Mistake #1: Not Having A Plan Of Attack
This is the biggest mistake. If you're not sure what you're going to do when you step in the gym, you: won't make much progress, won't actually do a full workout, won't feel confident in what you're doing, and ultimately won't stick with it.
If there isn’t a plan in place when you step into the gym, it’s very easy to take 15 minutes trying to figure out where to start and then another 5 minutes between each exercise determining what to do next.
Think about trying to do your job if you didn’t have a plan in place for the day, week, or month.
For an example, my dad is a sports writer. With sports, you can’t plan what stories you’re going to write nine months in advance because certain teams may be significantly better/worse than anticipated, a certain player may have a fantastic game, or a coach may take a new job.
It is a little bit more of a reactive job. However, each week, he plans out what stories are going to go into the paper each day of the week. Sometimes, he has to leave space to allow for some flexibility. But that’s okay, there’s still a general plan in place.
Having a plan of action is necessary to stick with anything and make progress. Working out is no different.
Solution
Figure out a plan that fits your goals, your gym experience level, and your lifestyle.
If you want to generally get in better shape, then a three day per week plan where you’re doing full body workouts, hitting one exercise for each body part, along with some cardio, sounds great.
If you want to put on a decent amount of muscle and strength, then try doing a five day per week program where you are hit each muscle group multiple times per week.
After you know what you want to accomplish, look up or figure out what exercises to do. You can do a search on YouTube or Google and find endless results. From there, you can craft your specific plan.
Mistake #2: Trying to Emulate Pro Athletes
Social media is fantastic. I love it. Without social media, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.
However, through social media, everyone ends up seeing snippets of professional athletes’ workouts. Like the portion of the workout where LeBron is doing dumbbell curls while balancing, on his knees, on a giant, bouncy exercise ball.
Whatever LeBron is doing is clearly working for him. But for 99.99 percent of humans, you should not be doing that.
Just because you see LeBron, Tom Brady, or Serena Williams doing a certain exercise, doesn't mean you should do it. They're training for their specific sport. Most of us are training to simply look and feel better. Also, most athletes have the basics mastered, thus they begin incorporating more challenging exercises.
Solution:
First, train for what your goals are. If your goal is to look better by gaining muscle and losing fat, LeBron’s workout isn’t going to be the most effective thing for you to do.
If your goals are sport specific, then you still need to start with the basics. Master basic movements and slowly implement new aspects to it.
Mistake #3: Changing Up Your Routine Too Often
Okay, you know the old saying “You need to change up your routine every workout so that you can confuse your body and see more progress?”
Yeah, that’s stupid.
When you completely change up your routine each week, you don’t give yourself a chance to actually make progress with a certain exercise or workout.
This would be the equivalent of trying to start a business but each day you’re operating the business, you try a new marketing strategy. You want to attract more clients but you by advertising in a new way, to a new clientele every day, you would likely get zero new business.
Changing up your routine too often will make it extremely hard to actually see progress because you’re not getting better at any certain movement or exercise..
Solution:
Stick to one program, or least a handful of movements for a significant amount of Executing and improving on a handful of movements for 8 weeks or more will be the most beneficial. The other exercises you do after your main focus can switch around a little bit more frequently to keep it exciting.
Mistake #4: Only Doing One Type of Rep Range
While you should focus on mastering a few movements at a time, the amount of reps you do for different exercises should vary. At least a little bit.
I’ve seen a lot of different ‘sample workouts’ on Instagram/Pinterest/Around the block, where the entire workout is: 3 sets of 10 reps or 4 sets of 12 reps.
There are certain exercises, along with the order of the exercise (beginning or end of the workout), where certain rep ranges are better than others. If you're doing 12 reps (arbitrary number) for your entire workout, it's not the best strategy.
Solution:
There’s a rule of thumb when it comes to rep ranges that is efficient for most humans: Perform higher weight, lower reps in the beginning of your workout and higher reps, lower weight towards the end.
This allows you to have the most energy for movements you want you to improve and get stronger with (discussed in Mistake #3), while allowing you to mix in higher rep ranges at the end when you will need to be using lighter weight because you are more fatigued.
Mistake #5: Always Testing Your 1 Rep Max
Obviously, with lifting/strength training, the goal is to gradually get stronger. Unfortunately, some gym-goes want to prove to themselves, their friends (that don’t REALLY care), and boost their ego by improving the maximum amount they can lift.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s insanely cool and fulfilling to be able to do something you’ve never accomplished before. Especially lifting a really heavy weight. That’s amazing.
However, on a day-to-day/week-to-week basis, you want to build your strength, not test it.
If you're testing your strength every week, your strength won't be increasing too much.
Solution:
Have a plan in place. Work on building your strength with a specific movement for many weeks at a time. Let’s say you build, build, build for 8 weeks, then you max out. That’s a lot better strategy, where you will actually see some progress, instead of throwing on your previous one rep max and adding 5lbs to start every workout.
Mistake #6: Not Working Out After A "Bad Day" of Eating
I’m putting you in the game. You’re LeBron in the fourth quarter of Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals.
You just missed your last three shots which would have gave you the lead and would probably help you win the NBA championship.
Instead of getting down on yourself (you being LeBron – cool, right?), on one of those missed shots, you sprint back on defense and block a shot which helps your team win the game. Just because you sucked on offense didn’t mean you completely gave up on defense.
Also, congrats. You just won the NBA Championship. Cleveland, this is for you.
There are two sides of basketball – offense and defense. When you suck on offense, you can step it up on defense and still do some good things to help. Or at least mitigate your lackluster offense.
Diet and exercise are the same way.
Even if you ate terribly (we've all been there), the calories you're burning during the workout will balance out the excess food a little bit.
Also, the extra energy from those extra calories might just help you hit a new PR in the gym.
Just because you had a bad day or two of eating, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work out.
Solution:
I want you to know that it’s acceptable to not be 100% on your game with nutrition at all times. Also know that by working out after a “bad day of eating”, you are helping yourself tremendously.
If you have a day of eating 5 pieces of pizza, 4 pieces of cake, and a large order of fries anddddd also skip out on your workout, you’re taking multiple steps backwards instead of just one.
Obviously, you can get back on track at any time. However, try to make it a rule for yourself that if you have a day where you go overboard with too much “fun food”, you get a workout in.
You will feel better now and thank yourself in the future.