Weight lifting is just as good for your physical health as blocking your ex on Instagram is for your emotional health. That is to say: a lot! Plus, it can help just about anyone reach their fitness goals. Whether you want to gain weight, lose weight, bulk up, tone up, get more powerful or stronger, strength training can help you achieve it. Beyond that, there are also the benefits to strengthen the bones and the heart.
The thing is, to get those benefits, you can't be making common weightlifting mistakes, like lifting the same weight every day or skipping mobility work.
Common mistakes in weight lifting
You always use the same weight
The only way to continually get stronger is to continually challenge your muscles. This is known as the progressive overload principle.
But lifting the exact same weight on the same rep scheme is the exact opposite of that. Once your body has made the adaptations that a weight can cause, you need to change your training. If you don't, you will go from increasing your fitness level to simply maintaining it.
Assuming you want to do more than just maintain muscle mass, put the principle of progressive overload into practice. The absolute best way to do this is to hire a certified trainer who can design a strength program that supports your goals.
Weight training without using a routine that incorporates the core progressive overload program is like trying to cook like a master chef without a recipe. I mean, you are doomed to fail.
You always try to get a max of one rep
One of the most dangerous mistakes is that beginning lifters not only lift the same weight every day, but they lift the same weight every day. Specifically, they lift the heavy weight only once.
Similar to a personal best, the one rep max is a weight that you can only lift in a single rep. A true one-rep max is extremely strenuous and requires every fiber in your muscle to work together to help you complete the movement. The result is greater muscle breakdown than lifting with a lower weight.
Whether you do it every day or once a week, regularly developing one rep max dangerously overloads your muscles. Beyond being less effective than a progressive overload approach, it is actually dangerous. The risk of injury is very great if you are doing a maximum of one repetition every day that you go to the gym.
It helps to develop and know your one rep max. In fact, most training programs will ask you to test your one rep max on the first day and then prescribe different percentages of that weight in the following weeks.
You shouldn't test your one-rep max more than every six to ten weeks.
To find out what to do during your weightlifting sessions between test day, your best bet is to hire a trainer who can design a program based on your specific strength goals.
You rest too much or too little between sets
The amount of rest you should take between sets is directly related to your fitness goal. Unfortunately, beginners who want to increase strength get too little rest while those who want to increase volume get too much rest.
That is, your goals and rest periods are not aligned. At best, this slows progress. And for those seeking strength, in the worst case scenario, this can result in injury as it means that they are lifting a heavy or moderate weight while being overly fatigued.
It's best to set your timer and stick to suggested rest intervals, even when you really want to keep an eye on your Instagram.
If your goal is muscle hypertrophy (i.e., size gain), you should rest for 60 to 90 seconds between sets. Although if your goal is to increase strength and power , you should rest for 2 to 5 minutes between sets.
And to increase muscular endurance you should rest less than 30 seconds per set.
Favor one weight material over another
Trying to determine whether barbells or dumbbells are better for you is impossible – the two modes offer different but equally important benefits.
The bar allows you to lift more weight, resulting in greater muscle mass and strength. Whereas dumbbells engage much more stabilizing muscles and require more core activation for stability. Weights also exercise your muscles through a greater range of motion due to the limited and more fixed travel of the bar.
Typically people can only lift 30 to 40 percent of the weight of their dumbbell bar, not 50 percent. But while you won't be pushing as much weight with dumbbells, you will strengthen the muscles in the supporting role to a greater extent.
It doesn't really matter how the two types of materials are interleaved, as long as you do.
You stay too long in the gym
There is absolutely no reason to be in the gym for two hours if you don't work there.
In fact, spending hours in the weight room for hours at a time is self-sabotaging if your goal is to build strength. You don't want to exercise so much that you turn your strength training into resistance training.
Get in and out quickly! At most, try to put in 45 to 60 minutes (after you've warmed up properly) weight training, and make it count. This is the underlying principle that structures a CrossFit class, so another option is to join your local box.
You skip mobility work
Mobility means healthy and painless movement of a joint through its full range of motion. Although essential for daily movement, optimal mobility also enhances your workouts.
For example, you need mobility of the hips, knees and ankles to break parallel in the back squat and mobility of the shoulders and thoracic spine to pass your head in front of the bar at the top of a push press.
Below average mobility usually results in compensation. In the case of squats and push presses, that means undue stress on the lower back and spine. In the long term, poor mobility will lead to overuse injuries , such as impingement of the shoulder or wrist.
In an ideal world, you should do a little mobility work every day. For example, do a few sets of thoracic spine rotations, cat-cow, shoulder transfers, and runner strides every morning when you first wake up.
Skimps at rest
Regardless of your fitness goals, not getting enough sleep will undermine all the work you did in the gym. Sleep is when your body repairs and rebuilds the muscles that you exercise in the gym.
According to a February 2014 study published in the Journal of Molecular Endocrinology, that's because sleep is when your body produces the main hormone involved in muscle recovery: human growth hormone.
Try to get 7-9 hours of sleep a night. And when you know you won't be able to do that many hours, plan accordingly. If you plan on spending the entire night at a Beyonce concert, don't push yourself in the gym. Stick to something low intensity and avoid lifting heavy objects during the days when you can get enough sleep to recover.
