ARTICLE: Common Training Mistakes

Common Training Mistakes

This article will cover some of the most common mistakes that people make in the gym. Some of you may not be making any of these mistakes, but it is highly likely that most of you are doing at least one of the following. With that said, let’s get on with the learning!

Mistake 1: Working the ‘mirror muscles’

Here’s a quick attempt at being physic. I bet you when you started training you did bench press, curls and sit-ups, maybe 3-4 times a week for 3 sets of 10 each. If you did, you’re not alone! People, especially men, seem to only want to improve what they can see in the mirror. Back and legs get forgotten, chest, shoulders and biceps are where it’s at. And not forgetting the abs (for which sit-ups are the only exercise!)

The problem with this approach is not only that it makes you look ridiculous, it actually makes you potentially weaker! As you do more and more bench pressing, the pectoral muscles will gradually shorten. Due to this, the shoulders will get rolled forward, stretching the muscles in the back. The lengthening of these muscles gives them less leverage, and combined with a lack of training, they get very weak. This puts your shoulder in a bad position and increases the chance of injury. If we add in the supposition that the person is working the upper traps (shrugs etc.), the same sort of problem occurs on a vertical plane, with the shoulders elevating towards the ears and the mid back muscles becoming lengthened and weak.

Now, if we suppose this person is going to do a bench press, or even worse throw a punch, we have a problem. As some of you may know, there are all sorts of feedback mechanisms within the body that protect you from hurting yourself. One of these is that your body will not want you to perform an action it cannot control. Related to our example, the body will not want you to throw a punch with more force than the muscles responsible for decelerating the arm can produce, therefore if the back/rotator cuff muscles are weak the pressing/punching muscles will be inhibited. The answer is to have a balance in your programming. Remember, if you are a fighter who throws punches a lot, you will need even more shoulder retraction/depression and rotator cuff work than a normal weight trainer to keep a balance around the joint.

Mistake 2: Sit-ups for the abs

There has been a lot written about ab training, with various wildly differing opinions on almost everything! One thing most people agree on however, is that sit-ups are potentially dangerous, and due to there being much better ways to train the abs, the risk: benefit ratio is not too appealing.

The short story on the problem with sit-ups is as follows. The rectus abdominis (the 6 pack muscle), is what people are usually trying to work. This muscle is responsible for trunk flexion (amongst other things). Trunk flexion is one of the best ways to injure your back, as it puts great pressure on the disks in the lower back, which can eventually go ‘pop’, leaving you with the famous ‘slipped disk’. The other problem is that most of a sit-up’s movement is hip flexion. Some of the hip flexors attach to the lower back from the inside, pulling on the spine for leverage. If you add the fact that the start of a sit-up is generally a jerky movement, throwing the shoulders forward, you have a lot of stress on the lower back for very little actual training effect on the abs!

Better approaches to train the rectus abdominis are crunches (you will be surprised how little motion is actually possible when just using the abs), and even better training the entire torso for stability using exercises such as bridges/planks, overhead squats, Turkish get-ups and the like.

Mistake 3: Training like a bodybuilder

Are you a fighter? Stop training like a bodybuilder? Powerlifter? Then stop training like a bodybuilder? Rugby player? Stop training like a bodybuilder! Although this is a very common occurrence, hearing phrases like ‘chest day’ coming from sportsmen still amazes me! There are many reasons that bodybuilding style training is not ideal for anyone apart from those whose only goal is maximum muscle size.

When you are training for a sporting performance, you will be using complicated movement patterns, using muscles all over the body. For instance in a sprint, one glute/hamstring will be contracting hard, while the opposite leg’s hip flexors will be contracting. The torso will need to stay rigid and the arms will drive through to increase force and balance. This will all happen in a dynamic manner. Now, where do you think that training on a pec deck comes into this? How about a leg extension? The obvious answer is those movements are not remotely similar and therefore will have very little carryover to a sporting endeavour. Better exercises could be a squat or deadlift, where the whole body is working together either stabilising or performing the movement, or even better, lunge and single leg variations. A standing press would be a better choice of exercise for a fighter than a chest fly for similar reasons.


Another reason bodybuilding training is a bad idea is that the reps and rep speed are often vastly different to the ideal training stimulus. If we assume bodybuilding training to be sets of around 10 reps, taking enough rest to recover and repeating, all with a controlled tempo, this is not ideal for the sportsman. The reps are too high to stimulate good strength gains, but too low to improve muscular endurance. The rest periods are too short to enable maximum effort to be put in, but too long to work on lactic acid threshold. The rep speed is controlled, not explosive like many sporting movements.

The 2 most important things that will enable you to improve performance that can be trained in the weight room are: getting stronger and getting faster. This should be the goal of most gym based workouts.

Mistake 4: Using straps to hold weights

Lots of people use straps in the gym to hold onto the bar for deadlifts, shrugs and the like. Using straps will give you more problems in the long term, as your grip will get even further behind your pulling strength, meaning you will end up having to do a lot of work to get it back up to speed. If you are having problems with your grip, work on it! The easiest thing to do is load up a bar and just stand with it, although there are different types of grip this is the easiest to train and will give the most carryover to gym needs. If you are a fighter, rugby player, or anyone that needs very good grip strength it will pay to devote specific time to training your grip, and avoiding doing so is the worst thing you can do! Chin-ups on a towel and thick bar training are some examples of things that you could add to your arsenal to increase your grip, which should allow you to perform better in your sport.

Mistake 5: Not warming up correctly

In recent years, a lot of research has been done into how to warm up correctly for sport. Those who are following the research will know that the old warm-up of jogging for a bit then static stretching is not only an incomplete preparation for performing strenuous activity, it can actually decrease performance!

A good complete warm-up regime will include the following:
• Increasing the core temperature of the body
• Increasing the local temperature within the muscles
• Mobilising all joints
• Activating any inhibited muscles
• Stretching any tight muscles

The best way to do this is to do something known as ‘movement prep’, which is generally a series of exercises with bodyweight which gets progressively more intense until the

body is prepared for action. It is difficult to go into too much detail in an article like this with no illustration, but examples of things that may be included in a well-planned warm-up would be:
• Shoulder, hip and spine mobility work
• Glute activation work
• Series of different lunge stretches
• Over/under drills
• Skip variations
• Etc.

If you would like more information on a correct warm-up, there are lots of products out there, amongst which the best are the DVDs ‘The Parisi Warm-up’ ‘Magnificent Mobility’ and ‘Inside Out’.

Mistake 6: Neglecting the glutes

You may have heard that the glutes are the biggest muscles in the human body. Coincidentally, they are also one of the most useful. Unfortunately, they are also inactive or inhibited in a very large amount of people!

The glutes are the ‘power centre’ of the body, located directly in the centre of gravity and should be used in most movements. If you perform a deadlift, good morning, lunge, squat etc, the glutes should be one of the prime movers. Also, as I hinted at earlier, the glutes are a major contributor to motion i.e. running and jumping. However, if you have never got soreness in the glutes after a workout, there is a good chance something is wrong.

The first reason for this is simply bad training. Lots of people like to use machines to train their legs, and will do a leg extension and hamstring curl for instance, totally forgetting about the glutes. Even some who perform squats will limit the amount of work the glutes have to do by not squatting to a sufficient depth, which puts more load onto the quads. The simple answer to this problem is to perform some of the exercises I listed earlier. If you are doing these movements and are sure you are performing them correctly and still not getting any soreness in the glutes, but regularly get hamstring and quad soreness, there may be another problem involved.

The other common problem with the glutes is they become inactive. This happens when poor posture, tight muscles and bad movement patterns combine to ‘shut down’ the muscles, and other muscles take over. Mike Boyle, Stuart McGill and many others wiser than me have said that a lack of glute function (amongst other reasons) is a major contributor to most back injuries. Think about this: if you perform a deadlift, the major muscles working are the hamstrings, glutes and lower back. If the glutes are not firing correctly, the other muscles take more load. The end result of this is usually a rounding of

the lower back, which can cause a multitude of injuries to this area, or a pull/tear of a hamstring. A good sign that this may be happening to you is if you often get stuck trying to ‘lock out’ or finish a deadlift. Ways to correct this are to re-educate the correct movement patterns (hence the glute activation work in our well-planned warm-up), work to improve posture and most importantly stretch the hip flexors. When the hip flexors are overly tight, a process called ‘reciprocal inhibition’ prevents the glutes from working at their full capacity. Therefore, stretch the hips and activate the glutes before activity to maximise your potential performance!

I hope this article has helped some of you realise some mistakes in your training, and give some ideas on how to correct them. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg, but if you aren’t making any of the mistakes listed in this article, you are ahead of the majority of people that are training in your local gym!