You’ve probably seen many people in the gym doing things wrong. You may even be guilty of that yourself. Here are 5 of the most common gym mistakes. Learn from your mistakes so that you can improve the next time you step foot in the gym.
Gym Mistake #1 – Too much socializing: You probably see many people using their phones at the gym or casually reading a book between sets. You may do this yourself. Quit the chit chat and get down to business. Every minute you spend wasting at the gym talking can be spent on burning more calories and stimulating more of your muscles to grow.
Gym Mistake #2 – Improper exercise technique: When you don’t know how to perform an exercise properly, you can easily confuse mechanical inefficiency with caloric burn. Remember, exercise science has evolved tremendously in the past few decades, and so have exercise machines. So make sure you are using a personal trainer, using a step-by-step workout program, or do some more reading to really educate yourself on how to go about exercise correctly.
Gym Mistake #3 – Not changing your routine: Your body adapts quicker than you think. When you do the same workout over and over again, the body has no reason to change. At first, you may see muscle growth and/or fat loss. However, eventually you’ll get to a point of diminishing returns. You also need to get away from the machines and routines that you feel most comfortable with because those are the exercises you are likely to keep doing and adapt to.
Gym Mistake #4 – Not doing the right exercises: You need to mainly focus on compound workouts. A compound exercise is defined as any exercise that engages two or more different joints to fully stimulate entire muscle groups and, indeed, multiple muscles. Such examples include squats, deadlifts, presses, etc. These exercises require the most amount of work, which will increase more natural testosterone, human growth hormone, and fat-burning hormones. For instance, squats not only work every muscle group of your legs, but also your core, lower back, and traps amongst dozens of other tiny muscles. This is going to stimulate the most muscle and burn the most calories. Compound movements also stimulate more hormonal release, which is vital to muscle growth and fat loss. Isolation exercises are good to sculpt the muscles and add aesthetics but they won’t maximize your results like doing compound exercises.
Gym Mistake #5 – Not enough intensity: As I just stated above, compound exercises are more intense than doing something like isolation exercises. That alone is a reason to perform them. The higher the intensity usually means the better the results. For example, you probably see the so-called “fat-burning zone” on your cardio machine. That training intensity isn’t very high — usually 65%-70% of your heart rate. Research, however, has shown that the higher the intensity, the more calories you burn both during exercise and even long after your workout is over. This is due to the “after-burn” effect.
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