Given the fact that most people sit at a desk all day, a proper warm up is essential for optimising gym performance and safety. Jumping on a bike or treadmill for 5-10 minutes is not the best warm up, and you’re leaving a lot on the table if that’s your go-to.
A proper warm up should aim to:
Mobilise your ‘tight’ areas like hips, thoracic spine, shoulders, ankles
Activate important and often inhibited muscles like glutes (your butt)
Increase core temperature
Excite the nervous and hormonal systems.
While this deserves an article all to itself, running through a more dynamic sequence of various movements (almost think like a yoga flow) along with some foam rolling and dynamic stretches will better prepare your body for a great session and help you maintain your movement quality.
This is one of the biggest issues in gyms everywhere. More often than not, people are doing their exercises with bad technique, increasing risk of injury and long-term niggles, aches and pains.
Your average person buys a gym membership and is often left to their own devices to figure out what to do on their own. Pair that with modern-day desk posture and its accompanying muscle imbalances, and you have a recipe for disaster. Seek out some help and learn proper training technique if you think you’re in this boat. You’ll reap the rewards forever.
Related to the previous point, going too heavy, too soon, is a common mistake. Men are generally the biggest offenders here. Call it ego, an inflated sense of capabilities, or the desire to impress the ladies, but all too often this is what you’ll see if you walk into any public gym.
Lightening the loads is one easy way to tidy up a lot of training technique straight away, and will save a lot of injuries (and forced time off training as a result). When you enter the gym, leave your ego at the door, start light, practice the proper form and gradually progress the weight.
This might seem a contradictory point to the previous one, but they’re both common mistakes. It’s time to pick on the ladies here (and some of the guys too, actually).
The whole point of strength training is to lift a load that is challenging in order to create stress on the body. The body adapts to this stress over time, in the form of increased strength, bigger or more toned muscles, improved work capacity etc.
Assuming form is acceptable, then it’s important to progressively increase your weights to keep getting results. If you keep lifting the same weight week in, week out, your body won’t change.
Another point which deserves its own article. Incorrect or dysfunctional breathing is a common issue for many people in these modern day, highly stressful times. Instead of ‘belly’ breathing using our diaphragm, many people develop shallow chest breathing and mouth breathing. Mouth breathing means you’re inhaling through the mouth instead of through the nose.
Incorrect breathing can lead to increased stress, blood pressure, anxiety, muscular tightness, compromised cardiovascular output and it will hinder your ability to train hard and lose body fat. When exercising and getting your heart rate up, focus on inhaling through the nose (your belly should inflate as you do so) and exhaling through your mouth.
It’s common to see people show up to the gym and just randomly hop from one machine to the next, or pick an arbitrary sequence of exercises with no rhyme or reason. Exercises are tools that can help us achieve a goal, so it’s important we choose the right tool for the job. Bicep curls should not take up half of your training session.
Focus instead on compound strength exercises, these are exercises which use multiple muscle groups at the same time, think of them as BIG movements. Squats, deadlifts, push ups, lunges, chip ups, rows and variations of these exercises should be the staple of your strength training workouts.
These exercises give you the biggest bang for your buck and will give the best results. Save all the smaller isolation exercises for the end, or many time-poor people could even scrap them altogether and replace them with these bigger lifts.