most common mistakes you see in the gym

Patsy167

What are some of the most common mistakes you see in the gym?

Of course everyone is focused on their own improvement and nobody is perfect but thought this might be an interesting discussion.

Black Sheep

From a weight training point of view:-

Although at times I will see someone using too much weight in a given movement, to the point that their ability to execute the movement is fundamentally compromised, I think more commonly I see people who are just not ever training with enough intensity or effort to actually illicit any adaption. Whatever the goal, if you are always lifting sub maximally, then even with significant volume, very little will happen.

To actually make progress in the gym requires intelligent programming and effort. A lot of people will lift the same weights, year in, year out, or make a certain amount of progress and then - when their training is derailed or they go off to do something else - they backslide and are back to square one, and the pattern repeats itself. I know quite a lot of guys who are really "into" training, but their numbers never really develop into what they could be. Sometimes the issue is programming, but more often it's not, it's that they're not making themselves uncomfortable in any way in their training.

I'm not putting myself on a pedestal here, I wasted my 20s program-hopping and because I didn't understand what was required to break certain plateaus.

I know a lot of people might say "well, I'm just lifting for general health"/, but I've never totally bought into the idea that that means it's OK to be incredibly inefficient in their use of time in the gym for years on end. I know adult men who have been lifting for 20+ years and they only ever seem to squat between 100 and 130kg for 5, no matter how many programmes they run, year in year out, and when I think of the hundreds of thousands of gym hours spent, I am agog. I know they are enjoying themselves, but you could enjoy yourself and make progress.

GalwayMan74

Swinging weights instead of lifting them.

Esse85

People doing their own thing and never grasping the basics.

Cill94

Outside of being consistent, I think the biggest problem is people have no defined goals and therefore no plan to achieve them. Once you have a goal and do even a tiny bit of research, it's not hard to find some halfway sensible training info. Most people go into the gym and just f*ck around hoping magically things will happen.

I think many of thepoints mentioned above are absolutely true i.e pushing too hard/not enough, not focusing on the basics, etc. But to me, these are a symptom of having no specific goals, and as a result no plan to work off.

cuttingtimber22

People who have had pints the night before. Do some squats and Jesus Christ …. Some farts let go.

keithb93

I fall into this category, been lifting for 10 years inconsistently and I have never broken the 120kg squat. Do you have any advice on what needs to be done to actually make proper progress? I’m finally at an age (29) where I’m not going to the pub every weekend which killed my gains in the gym for years.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119018369#Comment_119018369

Add volume and make sure you're eating enough. Mate of mine went years barely making gains, he thought a 2-spud dinner and a frozen pizza was eating a lot in a day.🤣

Biggest mistakes in gyms? Well most common would seem to be people not minding their own business really. Those guys you see there most days not "exerting" are mostly happy enough with results, and compared to the lads I knew who got into powerlifting probably spend a higher percentage of their time in the shape they want to be in and more mobile as well. For most people if they can get towards their 40s without much of a belly and they feel good day-to-day then they're getting exactly what they want from the gym.

Black Sheep

Without having more information it’s hard to say, adding more volume is not necessarily a good shout.

For people who are running a linear progression, and adding weight to the bar regularly until they reach the weight they plateau at, they are already increasingly fatigued and adding volume would be counterproductive .. Why I prefer 3x5 over 5x5 for novices incidentally. It’s why sometimes a deload and working back up can help in pushing through a sticking point.

If we knew bodyweight, training history and a bit of detail about current volume and training frequency it would be easier to make a helpful suggestion.

If you’ve genuinely stalled a way to push on can be to reduce volume and try to just carry on with a heavy top set and some back offs. Then when you really are done THEN might be the time to reset and move on to a new programme that might add some higher volume.

Another option would be to ID if you have a weak point and address that with supplementary movements to fix it.

Agree that making sure your calorie intake and macros reflect goals as well though.

Last suggestion is to really check you are going for it. At that weight where you plateaued, how much is mental. If someone was going to give you 1000 quid if you made it, would you?

Esse85

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119018369#Comment_119018369

Absolutely impossible to say with such vagueness.

Could be a 100 different solutions to your problem but knowing so little about you, it would be highly inaccurate to diagnose the issue such as make sure your eating enough or add more volume. What if you do that already for example?

Based on the limited details provided, if I were you and you haven't already done so, I would book a couple of sessions in with a strength coach. Talk them through your workout routine, eating habits, what you've done to improve squats, whether you do stretches and mobility work, get them to critique your technique, show them the footwear if any, you squat in. You could be better suited to a high/low bar position.

Asking for solutions to a complex problem on an internet forum will likely not increase that squat any time soon.

silverharp

probably minor in the scheme of things but one I see a lot is people squatting and lifting their heels, I was so tempted to mention a simple fix on a couple of occasions but thought better of it.

JayRoc

In terms of purely technical stuff, the two most common things I see:

-Kettlebell swings being butchered (squat/front raise rather than hinge).

-People not bracing properly on squats, and jamming their head up/hyperextending their spine rather than staying neutral.

And just as a general observation, maybe it's the gyms I'm using at the moment, but nobody seems to go overhead anymore?!

John_Rambo

Those gym fail videos on YouTube are hilarious, not the clips of people genuinely working out and falling or hurting themselves, but the ones of people repurposing equipment for their own ingenious, new, never seen before exercise that looks like it will result in an wheelchair.

Black Sheep

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119022384#Comment_119022384

Yes, agree on the KB swing. I can only assume there are industry trainers training new trainers out there who genuinely believe it is a squat pattern rather than a hinge, and are propagating this way of doing it.

It’s a deceptively hard movement to do really well. I know not everyone will agree it’s the gold standard, but the for me the Pavel Tsatsouline hard-style swing is the best, and it has so much going on, and not that many people do all of it. It’s a crazy movement, requiring you to having timing to arrest the swing at the top of the movement and fire it back down, it’s nearly like a ping pong game where you should be accelerating the bell up and down.

But even if not doing that, at least do it as a hinge.

As for going overhead… I’m tempted to put it down to an epidemic of banjaxed shoulders, but maybe that’s just me and the crowd I hang around with :) For a while there I did see people pressing and push pressing, particularly when CrossFit was huge, but now it’s more common just to see seated DB pressing at most.

silverharp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119023042#Comment_119023042

what do you think is causing these people shoulder injuries? going too heavy? over training? or unbalanced workouts? "all the above"

Black Sheep

I was joking a bit, I don’t know if there are more shoulder issues now than in the past. I have an issue at the moment so it’s on my mind.

Shoulders are complex and people experience symptoms related to them in different ways and for different reasons, but excessive loading and bad mechanics are a good bet if you want to cause one.

Cill94

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119018369#Comment_119018369

Start with training consistently. Always flip the big stones first.

Sunrise_Sunset

Overusing booty bands

j@utis

You can spot beginner from this pattern - treadmill or elliptical followed by some bicep curls and crunches, I'm talking about women. They're so wrong in hoping that that is gonna help them to get body they want. Also women but you can't see this one, but once they put their foot in the gym, they cut their calories to severe deficit straight away too (I see that a lot on facebook groups), their "progress" is very short lived because it's simply unsustainable.

The other one is copied Instagram workouts: some crazy sh1t combo of 10 arm and leg exercises in one, with like 4kg in each hand, might be okay-ish for bicep curls but squatting those 8kg, cmon.

Patsy167

I've heard quite a few people lately use time spent in the gym as their measure of effort. The only aim is to spend an hour in the gym even if that's 50 mins of scrolling on their phone. They'd be better served going in with a definite plan on sets, reps, and measuring rest times.