The Most Common Gym Mistakes Made By Beginners

No one wants to be the new guy, but we all start somewhere. Looking back at my first few years at the gym, I was lucky enough not to do too many stupid things. Nowadays with the vast amount of free information on the internet, you’ll never have to go into a new endeavor completely blind.

If you’ve stumbled upon this then you may be new to the gym and want to make sure you do things right. Working out doesn’t have to be complicated, but there are a few things to know when starting a training routine for the first time.

1. Too Much Too Soon

Just because you can handle the workload doesn’t mean you should take it on.  I rarely have a client completely new to lifting work out more than three days a week.  The idea is to maximize progress doing as little as possible.  This leaves reasonable room to add workouts, thus eliminating the potential of a plateau.  If you have someone working out five days a week right off the bat, what happens when they hit a sticking point a few months down the road?  You’re going to have a novice working out six days a week?  Doing two-a-days?  You have to be patient.

Dieting works the same way.  If you’re a female jumping right into a 1,200 calorie diet, what happens when the weight stops dropping?  Are you really going to compromise your health by eating 1,000 calories or less per day?  On the other hand, if you were able to exhibit patience and lose a little bit of weight eating 1,800 calories then that leaves so much more wiggle room to adjust.  You don’t have to dive into the deep end right off the bat.

2. Too Many Isolation Exercises

I take pride in making every workout different for my clients.  But after awhile I felt I was getting a little too cute and ‘machine happy.’  Compound movements are hard.  Compound movements work.  Exercise is a stress, and the gains you make are the adaptation to that stress.  You can only stress the body so much with isolation movements.  Don’t be the person doing set after set of hammer curls that can’t do a pullup.  It’s not efficient and quite frankly it’s embarrassing.  Learn the hard stuff first, you’ll be a better person and accomplish more in the long run.

3. Disregarding Core Exercises

I’m basing this entirely on observation, but I would say the most common gym injuries are lower back and shoulder injuries.  It’s so hard to put into words how vital core strength is.  It affects your posture, balance, and overall strength.  Many people don’t realize that your core isn’t just your abdominals, it’s your obliques and lower back as well.  Do your core exercises first, not last.  If you wait until the end of your workout you won’t give them the respect they deserve.  It’s also a nice way to warm up and prepare your body for the workout itself as well.  Piggybacking off of point #2, many compound movements engage the core in addition to the target muscles.

Strengthening your core is a great preventative method to guard against injuries. You don’t want to be one of those guys wearing a weightlifting belt for every exercise because they never took the time to establish core strength.

4. High Expectations

How many people at your gym truly have exceptional physiques?  Three or four?  Less?  I’m not talking about angled, filtered, amazingly lit Instagram celebrity photos.  Real human beings in the flesh.  In my opinion every gym has no more than a handful of awe inspiring bodies.  So what makes you think you’ll look the same in a few months?

This isn’t a lecture, it’s just reality.  The ‘it’s not a sprint it’s a marathon’ cliche is true.  Building strength or a quality physique is a skill unlike any other.  If you want to be great at playing guitar or painting, you can practice for unlimited hours.  The body, on the other hand, has it’s limits.  You have a short window each day to maximize your workout.  It’s one of the few things where more ‘practice’ can be counterproductive (see point #1).

5. Not Having a Specific Goal

I want to lose weight.  I want to build muscle.  If this is your goal you’re screwed.  You need to be as specific as possible or else it is impossible to determine if you are making progress.  I want to lose 20lbs of body fat in six months.  With that you have a specific target and time frame.  Now you can make adjustments along the way because there is no ambiguity to your goal.  Think this is obvious?  Next time, ask some of your gym buddies what their goal is and see how many reply with one of the first two statements in this paragraph.

If you want to “get huge”, how will you know when you’re there?