Getting results in the gym takes time. It requires patience and persistence to continue training despite not seeing immediate gains. However, if you’ve consistently been going to the gym for an extended period of time now, and still haven’t been seeing much progress, you should also make sure you’re not doing anything that could be drastically slowing down your progression. In this post, I want to address some mistakes in the gym that I commonly see and what to do instead to make the most out of your workouts and start seeing that much-desired improvement.
Skipping Your Warmup
Warming up with dynamic stretches and light exercises are crucial yet often overlooked parts of working out. You may be tempted to walk into the gym and immediately start your workout, but the first thing you should always do is take a few minutes to properly prepare your body for exercise.
First, this increases your blood flow, as well as your body temperature, which helps prepare your muscles for working out. Especially if you’re not already in an active state, such as if you were to go to the gym after waking up or being at work all day, energizing and activating your muscles at the start of your workout allows them to handle more exertion.
This means you’ll be able to lift heavier weights, do more reps, and in turn experience greater overall muscle hypertrophy. Over time, this will translate to faster muscle development.
Getting warmed up also helps with flexibility. When you’re at a resting state, your muscles can be somewhat tight, and you tend to be somewhat limited in your range of motion. However, doing some dynamic stretching before performing your sets loosens your body so it can be more flexible, allowing you to perform exercises with a greater range of motion. This means you’ll experience more muscle activation, leading to more effective muscle growth.
Lastly, it’s critical to start every workout session by warming your muscles because doing so reduces the risk of injury during a workout. If you try to lift heavy weights before your muscles are loosened, they may not be prepared to withstand the load; this could lead to an overworking and tearing of the muscles.
Though it may seem trivial, starting off with just a few minutes to get your body in the right state to train is vital to an effective and safe workout. If you want some more in-depth tips for creating an effective warmup routine, check out my post How to Warm Up for a Workout to Maximize Your Gains.
Sacrificing Form for Weight
Many people who work out may be driven by the amount of weight they can lift. They may think the amount of weight they can lift is the sole indicator of how strong they are, and how much progress they’ve made. As a result, they try to jump to higher weights as quickly as possible, instead of focusing on perfecting their form and technique.
In reality, performing an exercise with correct form is much more important for building strength and muscle, and you shouldn’t try to increase weight if that entails sacrificing technique.
Exercises are designed to be performed in specific ways in order to target specific parts of the body, so focusing on having good form is how you can ensure you’re effectively exerting those intended muscles. Otherwise, if your form is sloppy, you won’t be working out each muscle as effectively as you can no matter how heavy of a weight you lift; in fact, you could simply be wasting time and energy.
I can’t count how many times I’ve seen people at the gym perform bicep curls with terrible form. Bicep curls are supposed to isolate the biceps, but when you’re essentially hurling the dumbbell into the air with your entire upper body, you end up engaging your back, shoulder, and even momentum to such a degree that your bicep is hardly being activated at all. Sure, these people can “curl” huge dumbbells, but the reality is that the exercise is doing them almost no good in terms of actually growing their biceps.
Finally, as is the case with stretching, having correct form not only gets you better results, it’s also critical for safety. Performing workouts with incorrect technique may cause you to strain your body in unintended ways that could lead to severe injuries. Especially with areas like the back, shoulders, and legs, not paying close attention to form could lead to serious setbacks and long-term complications.
Ignoring the Importance of Diet
As important as exercise is to achieving your fitness goals, it’s only part of the solution. What people sometimes might not realize is that diet is also incredibly important for both losing fat and gaining muscle.
To be fair, I’m sure most people understand that eating healthy is a big part of being healthy. Most people who work out to lose weight will try to improve their diets to some degree, like having a salad with their dinner. However, at least when it comes to effective weight loss, how much you eat in a day is actually more important than what you eat.
Ultimately, your weight fluctuates based on the difference between how many calories you intake and how many calories you burn. When you burn more calories than you ingest, you’re at a caloric deficit, which helps you lose weight. On the other hand, when you eat more calories than you burn, you’re at a caloric surplus, which makes you gain weight. Therefore, the key to successfully losing weight is to consistently be at a caloric deficit.
Monitoring your diet is also extremely important for building muscle. If you’re looking to optimize muscle growth, you need to make sure you’re taking in enough protein every day, as protein is what your muscles use for recovery and synthesis. As a general rule, to go along with intense strength training, you should aim to have between 0.7-1 gram of protein per pound of body weight every day. For example, this equates to between 100-150 grams of protein for a 150-pound person.
Eating Right Before a Workout
Along with watching what you eat and how much you’re eating at every meal, it’s also important to keep in mind when you eat your meals. You shouldn’t eat right before exercising. If you try to exercise right after eating a full meal, you may experience uncomfortable side effects such as cramping, nausea, and bloating.
In addition, for strength training, you won’t be able to reach your peak performance right after eating. Since your body will be prioritizing digestion, you may begin to experience a “food coma” and feel tired during your workout. Instead, if you wait a bit after eating, you’ll have more energy since your body will have started to process the food you just ate to use it as fuel for your workout.
Therefore, it’s recommended that you wait at least 1-2 hours after eating before working out, but this also depends on the size of the meal. You’ll only need to wait closer to an hour for a light meal, but will want to wait at least a couple hours if you’ve just had a large dinner.
A Constant Learning Process
When you’re just starting out at the gym, you might not think that mistakes like these are holding you back. In the beginning, if you’re working out consistently, you’ll probably still make decent progress within a short period of time just from being more active on a regular basis, even if you’re not very methodical in your approach.
However, once you’ve been working out for a while, and your body gets accustomed to frequent exercise, simply staying active will no longer be sufficient to continue improving towards your goals.
In reality, there are lots of factors involved in achieving steady weight loss and muscle growth, so you’ll have to be more deliberate and strategic about your fitness. By following the recommended guidelines above, you’ll be able to avoid some of the biggest fundamental mistakes that lead to plateauing among beginners.
If all of these points are already familiar to you, and you really want to take your transformation to the next level, I’ve written another post that goes over specific training mistakes to avoid if you want to build muscle as effectively as possible.
