Avoiding these common training mistakes will keep you injury free and on the road !
1. Lunges
Lunges are an excellent resistance exercise that strengthen your lower body, including your quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, and calves. But you can make several mistakes while doing this seemingly simple exercise.
Mistakes:
● Although lunges help improve your body’s balance, they are not balancing exercises. While doing them people often try to put one foot right in front of the other in a straight line, as if walking on a tight rope, and that’s wrong. You should place your feet a little less than hip-width apart for every lunge.
● Another mistake people often make is that they take small steps while lunging. If your feet are too close together, they will form a triangle-like shape between your legs and this is not what you want. Ideally, the space between the legs when you are in a lunge position should form a rectangle.
● Every time you lunge, your knee should not touch the ground. It’s perfectly fine if it sometimes does, but if this is how you do it every time, then you have to change your ways. This practice can not only harm your knees, but it also takes the tension off of your legs.
2. Dumbbell and barbell chest presses
Chest press exercises are great for strength building and are very effective when developing chest muscles. But if they’re done wrong, they can cause injury.
Mistakes:
● Keeping the elbows very close to each other is something that many gym enthusiasts make the mistake of doing. By doing this, you are shifting the tension away from your chest and toward your triceps and the front of your shoulder.
● Another mistake is to flare your elbows out too far. When your elbows are flared out too far you’ll be putting a lot of unnecessary pressure on your shoulders and rotator cuffs.
● While doing these presses, you should also not curve your back too much. You just need to bring your shoulder blades back and maintain a natural lumbar curve in your spine — no more, no less.
● Also, remember that the weight should never end up directly above or below your shoulders. At the end of the movement, the weight should always be in line with your shoulders.
3. Cable flys
Cable flys are used to strengthen the pushing muscles of the body, including the chest, triceps, and shoulders. If you are looking to beef up your chest muscle mass then your exercising regime has to include this exercise.
Mistakes:
● People often tend to bring their arms too far back and therefore increase the risk of hyperextending and injuring the shoulder. When lowering the weight, you should stop in line with your chest.
● A very common beginner’s mistake is to perform the exercise with the elbows locked. This puts a lot of stress on the elbows and also decreases the amount of tension that should be placed on the chest.
4. Bent over barbell row
Bent over barbell rows are an excellent weight training exercise that target a variety of back muscles depending on which of its many forms you chose to perform. This exercise is effective for both increasing strength and increasing size.
Mistakes:
● A very common mistake while doing this exercise is to bend the spine outward. Instead, you should push your shoulder blades back and fold your spine down to maintain the natural lumbar curve.
● Another common mistake that people commit is pulling the barbell up using your hands, when instead you should be using your elbows to pull the weight up.
5. Cable tricep extensions
The cable tricep extension exercise works the tricep muscles by extending your arms in front of you. This exercise is excellent if you want to have sculpted triceps. But doing it wrongly can waste a lot of your effort and can also cause injury.
Mistakes:
● Often while performing this exercise people do not lock their elbows in place, because of this they end up engaging their lats, which makes this exercise a lot less effective for the triceps.
● Another mistake we often see is when people keep their body upright during this exercise. Instead, you should bend slightly forward to get the full range of motion so that your triceps get properly worked out.
