So you’ve started your fitness journey with full dedication but aren’t making progress with your workouts? Chances are you’re doing something wrong. Because achieving muscle growth adheres to strict rules regarding training, nutrition, and recovery, we want to give you some fitness tips on the most common training mistakes. Read these fitness tips carefully and assess for yourself which mistake you’re making, then incorporate the corresponding training tip. Good luck!
Training Mistakes
Assess which training mistakes in the top 10 may apply to your personal situation. If you come across any of the 10 training mistakes that may apply to your situation, use the corresponding fitness tips to make progress again. Do you have a question or want tips that are not in this top 10? Leave them in the comments of this post.
No Compound Exercises
A common mistake among beginners is starting with isolation exercises and neglecting compound exercises. Compound exercises, also known as compound movements, (also called basic exercises) such as bench press, squat, deadlift, engage multiple muscle groups and activate most muscle fibers. These exercises help you, especially in the beginning, to develop strength and muscle mass. Additionally, these exercises help strengthen your core. This means that with these exercises, you’re effectively training your abdominal muscles. With isolation exercises, you can focus on increasing specific muscle groups, if they lag behind. Not doing compound exercises is the most common training mistake.
Incorrect Exercise Order
Because you have a limited supply of energy during your workout, you need to distribute it wisely. Therefore, you should do the large compound exercises first. These compound exercises require the most energy, but because they engage the most muscle fibers and often train multiple muscle groups, you should perform them first. After doing the compound exercises, the smaller muscle groups are often warmed up, and you can focus on these smaller muscle groups through isolation exercises. It should be noted that you cannot train the large muscle groups such as chest muscles, back muscles, and legs maximally if you have trained the smaller muscle groups first. So, if you want to train your chest muscles but have trained your triceps first with triceps extensions, you can never bench press maximally.
Insufficient Protein
A training mistake we often see, which is actually a nutritional mistake, is consuming insufficient protein. Often, people train heavily, but besides training, nutrition is essential when you want to grow. Your body responds to the training stimulus of your workouts and needs nutrients to grow your muscles. If you don’t have enough or any of these nutrients in your body, your muscles can never recover and grow optimally. Therefore, consuming proteins is a must if you want to grow. Do you have too little time or do you not meet your daily protein requirements? Then you can supplement this with protein shakes.
Training with Fitness Machines
When you train with fitness machines, you are limited in the movements you make during the execution of an exercise compared to when you train the same muscle group with free weights. Free weights do not fixate your movement pattern, so you need to provide additional stability yourself. This means more muscles work with the exercise. When you perform the same exercise on a fitness machine, a large part of this fixation is provided by the machine itself. This allows you to focus entirely on pushing away the weight, but the coordination is also taken over from you. Therefore, it is recommended to train more with free weights and less with fitness machines.
Incorrect Execution
The biggest mistake you can make in strength training or fitness is executing the exercise incorrectly. This not only means you’re training the muscles incorrectly or incompletely but can also lead to unpleasant injuries. This is often seen in young men who train in groups and want to prove themselves by taking the heaviest weight. The basis of fitness is to train muscles, not movements. In addition, the intensity of the exercises can be easily increased by considering the Muscle Time under Tension. Therefore, this is our number 1 Fitness Tip: perform the exercise slowly, correctly, and completely, and keep the weight challenging but not excessive.
Training Favorite Muscle Groups
Every person is different, as is our development and preference for muscle groups. One athlete may have a strong back, while another may have stronger chest muscles. We all tend to train the muscles we are strongest in. After all, that gives the greatest satisfaction. But this can never build a balanced physique, and muscle groups grow disproportionately compared to others. A well-known bodybuilder chose to confront himself daily with his least favorite muscle groups. This bodybuilder cut the legs off his pants so that he saw every day how his calf muscles lagged behind the rest of his body. This bodybuilder’s name: Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Not Training with Purpose
When you start something, you often do it without a goal. After all, without a goal, any path you take is either the right one or the wrong one. If you don’t train with purpose, it’s also not very challenging. You don’t measure your progress, and you don’t keep track of how far you are from your goal. In some cases, it can even set you back further because you’re doing different, often wrong, things simultaneously. Therefore, set yourself a goal. Make it SMART: specific, measurable, acceptable, results-oriented, and time-bound. Measure your baseline values, such as your body fat percentage, weight, BMI, and strength. And keep track of how these progress as you adjust your training and nutrition accordingly.
Training the Same Way for Too Long
The human body is a smart mechanism and is constantly seeking balance, called homeostasis. When you follow the same schedule for 8 to 12 weeks, it’s likely that while initially, you challenged your body, it has become accustomed to it. Additionally, it’s probable that your schedule targets certain muscle groups more than others. Therefore, it’s important to switch schedules every 8 to 12 weeks. Again, the schedule should be tailored to a goal.
Not Periodizing
When you’ve been training heavily for a year and keeping the intensity of your workouts high, it’s necessary to include periods of less intense training. This is called periodization, which actually involves dividing the year. If you don’t do this, the risk of overtraining is very high, and the chance of less optimal results. Muscles grow during rest and therefore need time to recover from activities.
Poor Nutrition
Just as insufficient rest can lead to limited results, so too can insufficient and poor nutrition. For you, this means: lots of carbohydrates for energy provision and lots of proteins for recovery and muscle growth. Additionally, do not underestimate the importance of unsaturated fats, as these have a good effect on testosterone production.
These are our fitness tips and top 10 training mistakes. If you want more tips, ask for them in the comments below!
