TOTAL LIFETIME FITNESS

Top Ten Strength Training Mistakes

September 12th, 2008 Posted by David Lemberg

Strength training looks easy. You go to the gym, you use dumbbells or machines or both, you move some weights around, and that’s it. In fact, there’s much more. Strength training isn’t rocket science, but there are very useful guidelines and principles to follow which will make all the difference in your gym experience.

The overall goals in strength training are to work smart, work strong, and work safe. In other words –

• Have a plan
• Do your best every time you train
• Make strength gains over time
• Avoid injuries as much as possible

Here are the Total Lifetime Fitness Top Ten Strength Training Mistakes [we'll cover the Top Ten Benefits in a forthcoming post] –

1. Lack of focus. Focus – paying attention to what you’re doing – is an absolute necessity when you’re lifting weights. Injuries happen when your mind is on other things. Focus take a lot of practice. There are many distractions in any fitness club, and many of these distractions are walking right past you when you’re struggling to do your last rep of a set. Your attention wanders and you’ve just strained your back or worse. Keep your focus!

2. Poor posture. Your mother told you to stand up straight and she was right. Poor posture – letting your stomach sag, slumping your shoulders, arching your lower back, and sticking your head out in front of your shoulders – causes ongoing stress in weight-bearing muscle groups. Adding additional weight by doing strength training can easily overload already-stressed muscles.

An easy way to correct poor posture is to make sure your ears are in line with your shoulders, your shoulders are in line with your hips, and your hips are in line with your knees and ankles.

3. Failure to maintain proper form. Form is everything. This is true in ballet, gymnastics, platform diving, sprinting, skiing, and most definitely in strength training. Proper form – supported by good posture – ensures that only the muscles that are supposed to be doing the work are actually doing the work. So, with proper form the right muscles are getting trained. You’re maximizing the value of your exercise time.

Without proper form, injuries often occur to muscles that weren’t supposed to be part of the exercise, such as back or neck muscles.

4. Failure to visualize the prime mover. Having a mental image of the muscle you’re training is your secret weapon while doing your sets and reps. Get an anatomy book [The Anatomy Coloring Book has been leading the field for more than 20 years] and spend an hour visualizing the major muscle groups. Visualizing the muscle that’s doing the work creates an even stronger link between your brain and that muscle. The neurologic connections are emphasized and your muscles get smarter – which means they get stronger FASTER.

5. Recruiting neck and back muscles. We’re not talking about big muscles like the latissimus dorsi, we’re talking about the long, thin muscles that connect various parts of your spine. These muscles are designed to move your spine around in three-dimensional space. They’re not really designed to bear too much weight.

So, sacrificing your form and gripping your neck and back muscles to do those last couple of reps – that’s not a good thing. Involving the long muscles of the spine often results in a painful injury.

6. Failure to support with strong abdominals. Your abdominal muscles are designed to support the weight of your torso. And, the key core muscle – the transversus abdominis – is your body’s natural weight belt. Forgetting to activate your abdominal muscles throws both the weight of your body and the weight you’re lifting onto the muscles of your lower back. Again, not a good thing. Recovery from a lower back injury could take more than a few weeks.

7. Working small muscles first. Training the chest engages the triceps – a much smaller muscle group – as a secondary mover and stabilizer. Training the back engages the biceps as a secondary mover and stabilizer. If in a training session you’ve exercised the smaller muscle first, it’s already in failure mode and can easily be injured when you attempt to train the bigger muscle. Make sure you’re exercising large muscle groups first. Serious and severe tendon injuries can result from making this mistake.

8. Trying to do too much too soon. Ideally, strength training is a long-term process. For many of us, it’s a lifelong activity. So, there’s no pressure to achieve quick results. In fact, quick results are not possible. Trying to “get big” in a couple of weeks can easily result in an unexpected trip to the hospital. Think long-term. Think slow, steady progress.

9. Failure to do a post-stretch. For years athletes stretched before a workout. More recently the concept of doing stretches AFTER a workout became popular. There was a lot of controversy, but all the results are in. Stretching AFTER a workout is best from the point of view of exercise physiology. Stretching after – when your muscles are warm from increased bloodflow – allows you to achieve maximum benefit. You muscles can achieve their greatest length when they’re warm. And, stretching after also prevents muscle tightening – you’ve worked your muscles and they’re temporarily shorter as a result. Stretching after exercising returns them to their normal length and just a little bit more. So you become more flexible over time by doing your stretches after your workout.

10. Failure to support strength training with cardiovascular exercise. Aerobic exercise and strength training go together like peanut butter and jelly. Each enhances the other. By doing both in your weekly training, your muscles become lean and long. You get really ripped.

Your heart gets stronger and more efficient by doing aerobic exercise, and your muscles receive greater amounts of blood when you do strength training. The result – you get stronger all over.

And, each component is necessary for your long-term health, fitness, and well-being.

Doing strength training smart, safe, and strong by avoiding these common mistakes will enable you to enjoy this wonderful, healthful, life-affirming activity for many years to come.

Technorati Tags: aerobic exercise, core exercise, Strength Training