It’s time to sit back and reflect on your journey so far since you started lifting weights. The fact that you started gymnastics is already very good, but perhaps your overzealousness led you to some mistakes, and these, in turn, to some bad practices. So weigh in on the following bad gym habits you may have adopted and see what you can do when you hit the weights again.
Bad habit #1: No warm-up
You rush into the gym, throw a towel on the bench and load the bar with 2 pairs of 20kg on each side, lie down and start hitting. If your tendons could talk they would surely curse you at that moment.
It’s nice that you get excited about training and don’t want to waste time. We applaud it. But without any warm-up, we see you in a few years not being able to lift even 5 kilos because of the pain in the shoulders, elbows, and wrists.
Although we have talked in other articles about the importance of warming up, it is good to repeat the reasons because it is one of the worst bad habits in the gym:
- First, for the blood circulation of the area you want to exercise. The muscles to be worked need adequate blood flow in order to be at peak performance.
- Second, your joints need to be activated to provide sufficient synovial fluid so they can function effectively.
- Third, you need to establish what in the bodybuilding world we call a “mind-muscle connection” so that your muscles “feel” each repetition and you don’t lift on your knees. All of the above takes time. They don’t happen automatically.
Bad Habit #2: No preparation
When we say preparation we mean the spiritual kind of it. How many times have you entered the gym with your mind on work or the obligations you have next? And without realizing it, your mind is removed, and you lose the necessary concentration as a result of which the training turns out to be procedural, almost mechanical.
Also read: 10 MOST COMMON MISTAKES IN THE GYM
We know, easier said than done. But no matter how stressful your day is, try to leave it outside the door of the gym. For this 1 – 1 and a half hour that you will be inside the space, it is you and the weights.
Bad Habit #3: No schedule
It’s not necessarily wrong to train on instinct if you want to change your routine for a while. But you can’t rely on this alone if you want to see real results in your body. You need to have an idea of the sets you have done during the week, the muscle groups you have to work on, and any areas of your body you want to improve.
A schedule doesn’t just help you know what you have to do each day. It is a plan of control of your progress that you always refer to when you want to see where you are each time and if you should increase your efforts towards achieving your goals. Unless you have no goal, in which case pass…
Bad habit #4: Wrong weight
Let’s say you hold 20kg to do biceps. It’s quite heavy, but you’re in great shape today and you lift the load with the perfect form with almost no effort. Veins are thrown, and the swelling is in God. Great feeling right? You immediately download it to do the same stupid repetition again. Congratulations, you just missed half the exercise.
It’s never how much you lift but how you lift it. If you can’t put them down as easily as you picked them up, then these pounds are not for you. Save your links and choose a slightly lighter weight. You are not in any competition, you are exercising.
Bad Habit #5: You don’t listen
Have you ever felt a strange twinge in your shoulder or knee while working out? Arms hurt from the day before but decided to do biceps today. If your body is trying to tell you something, listen to it.
The pain may have gone that day but the body remembers and the strains are cumulative. This means that if you repeatedly ignore the messages you receive from your body, there will come a day when the pain becomes chronic and prevents you from doing the exercises you love and lifting the weights you want. Then say goodbye to losing muscle…
Bonus: You do all the same things
You’re stuck on a schedule. You have found the exercises you like or are comfortable doing. In kilos that you don’t call small, but they don’t weigh you down. In repetitions, you stopped counting because you learned them by heart. If the picture above matches your last year at the gym, it’s probably bogged down and you’re definitely not seeing any progress in your body.
It’s less of a bad gym habit than a bad practice. And it’s the worst because stagnation gets you nowhere. If it applies to you then it’s time to sit down and redefine your goals.
You definitely go to the gym to do something for your body, something for your health in general. But what is this? Think how a completely different approach to your training routine would make you feel. Maybe another activity outside of the gym for a while would fill you up more?
