5 Common Workout Mistakes

Embarking on a regular exercise program is highly beneficial for your overall health and well-being. It boosts your energy levels, enables you to participate in daily activities with greater ease, and reduces the likelihood of developing various health conditions, including heart disease and diabetes.

To make the most of your exercise routine, it is crucial to identify your goals and create a plan to achieve them. Although any physical activity is better than none, it is essential to ensure that your workout is effective. Otherwise, you may not experience the benefits of exercise and feel discouraged, or even worse, risk injuring yourself.

Here are a few common fitness mistakes and how to avoid them!

1. Going too hard, too soon. 

There is a tendency to ‘dive in’ with an all-or-nothing mindset and push ourselves too hard too soon from the beginning. Like the time I woke up and decided to give a 5k run a go (having never run before)! 

At best this makes us sore, tired and overwhelmed, and is generally really ineffective meaning little to no meaningful results. At worst, this can lead to injury meaning a full stop to our activities.

What to do? Start out gradually, listen to your body, really think about what you want to achieve and see this as a long-term process done over time, not a quick fix. Getting fitter and healthier is a process, not a destination.

2. Repeating the same workouts. I regularly see the same people, on the same days, on the same machines, lifting the same weights, and guess what, they look the same as well. 

When you first start working out, you start to see some results quickly, then you think more is more, and the results stop. You get frustrated, and do even more, burn out, get bored and give up. 

Progressive overload is the key to continuing results, and there are so many ways to achieve this. A personal trainer, like myself, can easily help you come up with a plan which meets your goals, to keep you progressively moving forward and seeing results.

3. Just doing cardio – just doing spin – just doing endless stair-master sessions.

Often we think the key to weight loss or fat reduction is cardio, that’s the main goal, so we hit the cardio hard! Don’t get me wrong, I love a spin class, I don’t mind a bit of time on the stair-master either, but as part of a well-balanced exercise training plan.

Strength training is critical to achieving almost all fitness goals. It's not just for building strong muscles but also for preserving muscle tone. Resistance exercise and weightlifting increase strength and elasticity while also building strong connective tissues (think ligaments and tendons). From a biomechanical perspective, strength training will help ensure you’re able to perform daily activities well, and also preserve these into older age. As a bonus strength training also increases your metabolism, so it’s an excellent way to rid yourself of excess body fat. 

Scared of getting ‘bulky’? Honestly, you won’t get ‘big’ unless this is your goal, and building large muscles is incredibly hard, especially for ladies, so no risk of that happening without meticulous planning specifically for that goal.

4. Not resting enough, I am talking about both sleep and rest days. 

If you don’t get enough sleep and rest, you are more prone to fatigue, and injury and you are going to take longer and longer to recover. When you can no longer recover between sessions, this is when you burn out. 

Muscles are not built in the gym, you stress them in the gym, and then they get stronger, recover, grow and build when you are resting ready for next time. 

Sleep – fundamental, aim for 6 – 7 hours of sleep each day to really be at your best when you are training. 

Rest – you should never be working the same muscles day after day. If you are doing 2 gym sessions a week spaced out, then full-body sessions are fine, but once you start going 3 or more times a week, you need to break up your sessions a bit more.

Training splits – these are ways of splitting up your body parts, so you can train more often, and do more volume of training per muscle group, while still allowing plenty of rest and recovery. So you might have a heavy leg day, then the next day, while your legs are recovering you are working your upper body. The more days of the week you train, the more you split up the body. 

This is something I really recommend getting help with, once you want to start training more than a couple of days a week, getting a personal trainer to help you plan out your sessions to ensure you are getting the right rest and recovery time between sessions will improve your progress no-end!

5. Ignoring Nutrition

If you have a health and fitness goal, ignoring nutrition is a major mistake. It is so easy to undo all that time in the gym with a poor diet.

Planning healthy meals to complement your training is an absolute must! 

Luckily I give all my clients access to my basic nutrition guide, and then provide additional support and guidance as needed.