5 Mistakes Made With Strength Training

5 Mistakes Made With Strength Training

by: Josh Proch, CSCS

#1. Never using single arm and single leg movements. While bilateral movements, like squats, deadlifts and barbell presses, are great exercises. You greatly diminish your results by never training single arm and single leg movements. Also, many of our day to day activities happen in a single arm/single leg pattern.

#2. Your strength training looks like cardio. Strength training when done right requires rest periods between sets. Moving from exercise to exercise in order to keep heart rate up is not strength training. It’s cardio…with weights. While circuit and interval training has its place and is a great compliment to strength training, it is not the same. Resting between sets allows you to lift heavier weight and will produce better results.

#3. Your core training only consists of crunches. A better way to train the core is through exercises that target the cores main function of stabilizing the spine, resisting rotation and extension of the spine, and stabilizing with limb movement. A few example are planks, plank with arm reach, pallof presses, and dead bugs to name just a few.

#4. Not taking a recovery week. Every 12-16 weeks it is good to take a full week off from exercise. This allows your body to fully recover, avoid mental fatigue from training, and avoid overuse injuries.

#5. Not using the benefit of Neuromuscular Excitation training. This is the process of waking up the bodies neuromuscular system and getting everything turned on so that you can lift more and can be more explosive. We like to cover this at the end of our warm up in what we call our “Jump, Throw, Carry” circuit. This would look something like 3 squat jumps, 5 med ball chest throws, and a farmers carry for 2 rounds.

There you have five of the common mistakes we see being made with strength training. If you’ve been making one these mistakes change it up and see your results improve.

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