3 Biggest Mistakes Beginners Make at the Gym: AVOID THESE

Introduction

Starting a fitness journey can be challenging but staying on is the toughest part. As a beginner, you will have many people telling you what to do and what not to do, but it is also your responsibility to do your research because it is your body. My responsibility is to ensure that your research, comes to an end when you read this blog.

In this blog, we will delve into the 3 biggest mistakes beginners make at the gym. It will save you lots of time and effort in the gym and get you better results.

Who is a beginner?

A beginner is someone under a year of training who is not fully comfortable performing all the exercises, doesn’t understand proper form exactly, and is still in his “newbie gains” phase where he can make gains faster.

1. Too Long Session Length and Frequency

Session Length: A beginner doesn’t need to train for more than an hour in one session. Many people start with two-hour sessions because they want to do everything. If you try to do 50 different exercises, it’s just information overload, your brain can’t process it.

45 minutes to an hour of a relatively tough workout is more than enough. When you’re an intermediate or an advanced lifter, that’s when you’ll need to spend more time in the gym.

Session Frequency: Beginners burn out like crazy by training many sessions per week. On the other hand, their stimulus sensitivity is so high that they can do two sessions of whole-body workouts per week and get great results.

Why would you train more than is necessary to get the best results with the only upside being the risk of burnout? 4 sessions or less per week is a good place to start for many beginners. Your main focus should be on lifting the weights correctly.

2. Inconsistency

“Consistency is what transforms Average into Excellence”

Inconsistency is probably the biggest and most common beginner mistake. Beginners are terrible at consistency and if they skip a whole week of training here and there, the results are going to be much tougher to come by.

You can’t build a skyscraper without physically being there to build it. You have to be there consistently over and over again.

There are 2 types of beginners:

1. Who gives up very easily: They go to the gym and do their workout, come home and look in the mirror and see nothing. The same happens the next day and they are like “Bro I haven’t got any bigger this month, it’s pointless” and they quit.
2. Who sticks to the routine: They are the people who believe that this is the right course of action and they stick to it and commit themselves. They might screw it up once in a while, or skip a day or two but they remain consistent and eventually start seeing results.

Muscle building is a slow process and will become slower as you progress, so, you won’t see any visual changes every day, and because it’s not visible some people assume they are not making any progress which is not true.

Maintaining consistency involves establishing a regular workout routine, setting realistic goals, seeking guidance from knowledgeable sources, and staying motivated.

3. Avoiding the hard stuff

Most beginners make the mistake of avoiding hard stuff like compound movements. In the beginning free weights are better than machines. These moves build the fundamental technique, which will help you on every other machine.

If you want to learn how to do a leg press, an arm press, or a vertical and horizontal pull. These fundamental movement patterns, which are replicated in some form or another in every other machine exercise, are best taught in a free-weight environment using barbells and dumbbells.

If you can competently master the compound heavy basics, you are a master of those and all of the machines you want to use very shortly.

One of the wonderful things about the hard stuff like Squats, Deadlifts, Bench presses, Overhead presses, and Barbell curls, the stuff that requires maintaining balance and posture in a rigid core under heavy load is that it hardens up beginners so that they don’t get hurt doing other stuff later.

It’s important to challenge the lower back so that it gets strong and you don’t face lower back issues in future.

If you start with machines only and never get the exposure to compound heavy basics that require you to brace under load, be stable and strong and build overall resilience in the gym, you’re going to be fragile and possibly face injury issues in the future. So, don’t avoid the hard stuff.

Conclusion

You can set yourself up for success by addressing the three key mistakes mentioned: overextending session time and frequency, inconsistency in training, and avoiding hard stuff.

The whole point of starting a fitness journey is to create the best version of yourself. It’s about concerning yourself less with what others are doing and more with what you are doing to achieve your goals.

Fitness is not a sprint, but a marathon. Take satisfaction in gradual progress and remember that the journey to strength is as important as the destination.

Thank you for reading! Comment below with your thoughts and suggestions.

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