BAD ADVICE
“Go big or go home.”
“There’s this idea that you have to train to failure to trigger growth,” says certified athletic trainer Mike Boyle. “But ‘go big or go home’ is a prescription for injury, not an effective training strategy.” The truth is precisely the opposite: the key to success in the weight room is to make consistent, incremental gains that ultimately add up to the body you want.
BETTER MOVE
Train to technical failure. “You want to do as many reps as you can with perfect form,” says Boyle. “Once you can’t do a perfect rep, the set is over.” Period. When you can complete your goal reps for every set – three sets of 10, for example – you’re ready to move up in weight. “Throw another couple of kilos on the bar or grab the next heaviest pair of dumbbells,” says Boyle. “It might not sound like much, but even if you only go up 2.5kg every two weeks, you’ll still add 65kg to your lift after a year.”
BAD ADVICE
“Push through the pain.”
A little bit of soreness isn’t a bad thing. It just means you’ve pushed your body harder than usual, causing microtears in muscles that ultimately lead to gains in size and strength. “But there’s a big difference between soreness and pain, and ignoring pain is a ticket to the disabled list,” says Boyle. “I regularly ask my clients, ‘Does the exercise make any of your joints hurt?’ I don’t care if the pain diminishes after they warm up – if they answer yes, that’s the end of the exercise.”
BETTER MOVE
Find a pain-free alternative that works the same muscles. “Just because the barbell bench press causes you shoulder pain doesn’t mean you have to stop working your chest,” says Boyle. “Try using dumbbells, do incline presses or switch to push-ups.” Changing your grip, angle or movement pattern alters the load and positioning of your joints, allowing you to build muscle without breaking your body.
BAD ADVICE
“Protect your spine with crunches and sit-ups.”
There’s no denying that crunches and sit-ups can help you sculpt a six-pack, but they come with an inherent flaw: repeated spinal flexion, which can increase your risk of developing a back problem and aggravate existing damage. Bottom line: by recommending crunches and sit-ups, some trainers facilitate the very injuries they’re trying to prevent, says certified strength and conditioning specialist Tony Gentilcore.
BETTER MOVE
Do stability exercises. “Stability, or resisting unwanted motion, is the true function of your core, and exercises that reinforce that function protect your spine,” says Gentilcore. Try the Swiss-ball rollout: sit on your knees in front of a Swiss ball and place your forearms and fists on the ball. Slowly roll the ball forward, straightening your arms and extending your body as far as you can without allowing your lower back to “collapse”. Use your abdominal muscles to pull the ball back to the starting position.
BAD ADVICE
“Don’t rest between sets.”
This misguided mantra is the call to arms of many extreme-fitness programs, and it can be disastrous. The reason: lifting heavy weights recruits fast-twitch muscle fibres, which generate more force but also fatigue faster. If muscles don’t have enough time to recover between sets, you won’t be able to train them fully, slowing your gains and increasing your injury risk. “Making somebody tired is easy,” says certified strength and conditioning specialist Sal Marinello. “But there’s a difference between tiring someone out and improving their condition.”
BETTER MOVE
“Understand that a 45-second break is a 45-second break,” says certified strength and conditioning specialist Jonathan Goodman, founder of the Personal Trainer Development Centre, an online resource for personal trainers. As a general rule, the lower your reps and the heavier the weight, the longer you should rest a muscle group before working it again. If you’re doing sets of 1-3 reps, rest for 3-5 minutes. For sets of 4-7 reps, rest for 2-3 minutes. For 8-12 reps, rest for 1-2 minutes. Rest no more than a minute for any number of reps above 12. That doesn’t mean you can’t work opposing muscle groups, like quads and hamstrings, back-to-back.
BAD ADVICE
“Let’s see how many deadlifts you can do in 60 seconds.”
“We’re starting to see a lot of people getting thrown into an extreme group workout with little instruction, and then doing high reps of very technical lifts as fast as they can,” says certified strength and conditioning specialist Chris Bathke. “Even athletes don’t do that.” When speed is your main focus, you lose sight of form, and that can lead to injury – especially if you’re doing heavy Olympic lifts or powerlifting moves like cleans, snatches and deadlifts. “I’ve asked people to show me an exercise that in a previous workout they repeated for time,” says physiotherapist and certified strength and conditioning specialist Tyler Smith, a member of the elite athletic development society known as GAIN. “They’ll demonstrate a horrible squat, and they did 30 of them.”
BETTER MOVE
Focus on form and start with body-weight versions of exercises until you master them. In big lifts, it’s critical that you brace your core and maintain a slightly arched or flat back. If you don’t, your spine can pay the price.
BAD ADVICE
“Add plyometrics to your routine.”
High-impact plyometric exercises, such as box jumps (leaping on and off a box or bench) and depth jumps (stepping off a bench and then springing off the floor and landing on a platform) are favourites of many personal trainers trying to help clients build explosive speed and a killer jump shot. But these drills can also hammer your joints – especially if you’re heavier than you should be.
“I once had a client who was 20-25kg overweight come in complaining of knee pain,” says certified strength and conditioning specialist Mike Robertson. “The reason was that the previous trainer had this person doing jumps – something most fit people shouldn’t even do.”
BETTER MOVE
If you’re already fit, jump onto a 30-50cm box with both feet, then step off one foot at a time. That gives you the explosive benefits of the exercise without destroying your knees. Better still – especially if you’re carrying extra weight – swap jumps for less jarring exercises that use similar movement patterns. “The kettlebell swing is a perfect substitute,” says Robertson. “It trains the same
hip-hinge pattern without the high-impact consequences.”
