4 EXERCISES YOU SHOULD IMPROVE
4 EXERCISES YOU SHOULD IMPROVE
In this article I will discuss several typical mistakes made in gyms that slow or even stop progress. If you are doing any of the aforementioned and you notice that your progress is not progressing as it should, I recommend that you take them into consideration, modify your routine and see if things improve. I tell you from experience (having made these mistakes) that things will probably get better.
MUST BE LIFTED EACH TIME MORE.
Indeed, that is not a mistake in itself because you have to gain strength as the main objective, whether doing more reps, more sets or putting more weight on the bar. The mistake comes in prioritizing that at the cost of performing the exercise poorly. Many people enter a loop basically because of ego, in which they load the bar more and more but they do the exercise more and more with their ass. That has several ramifications:
- Even if you lift more weight, each time you move it with more muscles that should not be involved in the exercise.
Are you familiar with those bicep curls that look like more lumbar extensions than anything else?
Well, there, even if you are lifting a lot of weight, the biceps is probably receiving much less stimulation since you will be cutting the range of travel and stronger muscles will be taking the main role to execute the exercise. Bad and bad on both sides.
- Performing the technique wrong is an ideal recipe for injury. I tell you from experience. For getting cool on the bench press I blew my shoulder and was out of the game for 3 months. For wanting to put more weight than he could safely perform and doing the technique wrong. It is something very common, so please do not compromise the technique to lift more kilos. It has a very bad prognosis. Then come the crying, believe me.
- There are people who instead of making the technique worse as the weight rises, what they do is cut the range of travel drastically. It is not uncommon to see guys in the squat rack carrying 4 discs of 20 per side with hipbelt, knee bandages and all the paraphernalia to end up squatting with 15cm of travel. Or put too much weight on the bench press and end up moving the bar 3cm. This is not called a bench press. It's called Triceps Blocks. And it is another exercise.
That is, you have to gain strength. Of course. But always keep in mind the muscles you want to train / stimulate and always learn the correct technique before anything else. And never compromise it for your ego.
Remember the article in which he talked about mistakes in different exercises and how each one of them started: Leave the ego out of the room.
TOO MUCH VOLUME
The reality is that there is a maximum volume amount that we can efficiently recover from, and that amount varies from person to person. The more advanced you are, the more volume you are able to tolerate and the more volume you need to keep progressing.
On the contrary, the more newbie you are, the less you need. The problem is that many of these newbies enter the gym trying to follow the routine of X bodybuilder or Y trainer and they go face to face with reality. They do too much work, they don't bounce back, they can't keep up, and they literally end up being shit.
It should be noted that rest and food help us to be able to tolerate more volume and recover better. Of course. Having these variables controlled (and stress reduction as well) is essential because otherwise we will never be able to have a clear idea of the maximum volume that we can handle individually and accurately.
But up to a point.
There comes a point where more is not better.
There comes a point where we are no longer stimulating, we are annihilating.
There comes a point where it is redundant and we cannot assimilate it.
It is not uncommon to see newbies walk into a room and do something like:
Flat
press 4 sets
Incline press 4 sets Decline press 4 sets
Dumbbell raises 3 sets
Pulley raises 3 sets
Peck Deck 3 sets
Push-ups 2 sets to failure
It is too much volume. It doesn't take that much, seriously.
Most people who do this after 2 years remain the same. Because it is not sustainable. Of course, for 7 days they have sores that die. And the reality is that shoelaces are not a good indicator of progress. I give you an example to make it very clear:
If you go to the beach to sunbathe when the good weather starts and you are whiter than a nun's tit, it is obvious to think that you need very little sun exposure to tan effectively and that it is very easy to get burned if you spend a while already that you do not tolerate a lot of sun time.
However, each time you tan more, you tolerate more exposure time and, most importantly, you need more exposure time to keep tanning. Therefore, you will have to increase the exposure time little by little. If when summer starts you need 20 minutes, now those 20 minutes don't even affect you. What's more, if you continue to take only 20 minutes in the sun a day, you will probably lose your tan.
What is absurd is going to the beach when you tolerate 40 minutes of sun without burning yourself, spending 4 hours, hitting an impressive burn on your skin and also boasting about that burn, which will probably leave you unable to go to the beach for 1 week or it even creates a major skin injury.
This is equivalent to someone novice who walks into a training room and goes all freaked out with the "no pain no gain" and with the Chuache routine, he trains until failure with a volume that he is not capable of assimilating for a joke and when He comes home with soreness that prevents him from training properly or even moving normally for 9 days.
I repeat, shoelaces are not a good indicator. Do not train looking for shoelaces as the main objective.
The question would then be… How much volume is adequate?
Well, it depends on many factors, especially if we are well fed and well rested, and how long we have been training. Generally, 12-25 sets per week per large muscle group is usually sufficient for most intermediates. Something less for novices, something more for advanced.
If that seems little to you, you can always add more exercises, but I would highly recommend you start being conservative. Start with a volume that you can handle and gradually increase it if you see fit and if you notice that you are recovering properly.
We have already seen that technique must be prioritized. We have also seen that the total volume is something to take into account and that you should not go overboard. We go with the third mistake that is made very often and that is closely linked to the second.
TRAINING FREQUENCY .
And this is mainly due to two factors:
PROTEIN SYNTHESIS (SP)
When you train a muscle the SP in it rises. This fact, assuming good nutrition and a good rest, consequently makes the muscle grow. However, this SP lasts for a fairly limited time.
It is true that in novices it lasts up to 72 hours approx, but in most people we can say that 36-48 hours is a fairly accepted time. That is, if we train the pectoral on Monday, on Wednesday it will almost certainly no longer be growing. Leaving so much time between workouts is not the most practical because you have many hours in between that the trained muscle remains on standby.
This line of thinking is supported by recent studies that find that 2x a week has better results than 1x a week.
The conclusions of the study are interesting, which say that it is not yet known whether training 3x a week is superior. It probably is, although there is no evidence on this yet.
MAXIMUM TOLERABLE VOLUME
Earlier we talked about volume being the variable that probably matters the most.
And it is true. But a higher frequency indirectly increases the volume.
Let me explain: In the previous "error" I said that between 12-25 sets was an optimal volume for most intermediates. Certain.
But doing 25 pectoral sets in a single day is not the same as doing them in 2 or 3 workouts. Doing 8 sets per workout is much more productive than 25 in the same session since the more sets you do, the more fatigued the muscle will be and the less weight it can pull overall.
If you do 4 exercises of 4 sets each, I bet you what you want that the last 2 exercises will throw more weight if you do them in a different session than if you do them after 2 previous exercises. It is drawer. There you are increasing the total tonnage you have lifted, still matching the total sets and total repetitions.
That means greater total volume, greater volume that you tolerate and assimilate (I have already told you that annihilating the muscle as if there were no tomorrow is not the best option), better recovery, less soreness and longer that the muscle is with elevated SP. .
In general, all advantages.
Not that everyone should train more often. I do not say that. But I sincerely believe that the vast majority of people would benefit from doing so.
MUSCLE FAILURE
Objectively training to failure consistently is not the most appropriate, and let me explain:
1) Reaching failure makes it very difficult for the body and the CNS to recover, so the same volume led to failure will require more recovery time since the accumulated fatigue will be exponentially greater. Especially if we reach failure in multi-joint exercises that mobilize a lot of muscle mass
2) The closer to failure you train, the easier it is to injure yourself and the more the risk of misperforming the technique increases because we cannot lift the weight. Remember the first entry: technique must be prioritized.
3) At the profit level we know that it is not necessary to reach failure systematically and that leaving 1-3 repetitions in the chamber produces similar results. And that more advanced workouts like "drop sets" are not a panacea either .
I know that there are many people who always like to train to failure and that if they do not do it, they notice that the training has not been productive and they have a hard time. Ok, I get it because I've been there too. This is not about "you're doing it wrong if you train to failure." I say that it is a mistake because objectively there are better ways to proceed, but that everyone can do what they prefer. The bug is a tool, and as such it should be used.
Always training to failure is thinking about the training you do and nothing else. Thinking about leaving 1-2 reps in the bedroom is thinking about progress in a somewhat longer block of time, and I think that is where success lies at the end of the day. In the same way that in a race you are not sprinting all the time and there are phases that increase the pace and others that reduce it, training should be considered in the same way.
Going 100% is ALWAYS an unrealistic way of dealing with it, and the pity is that if you think like that, it is extremely easy to be called lazy, not very dedicated, that you do not like to train hard or that you are not capable of the necessary work. . And this is very far from the truth, unfortunately.
DO NOT STRUCTURE THE TRAINING
Finally, one of the great mistakes made by the vast majority of people who train in a gym is not planning and structuring their routines properly.
We know that to optimize hypertrophy we need 3 factors:
- Mechanical stress
- Muscle damage
- Metabolic stress
And to achieve this we have to carry out a routine that is well structured and that takes into account several factors mentioned above, such as:
- Total training volume
- Training frequency
- The rep ranges we use
- The periodization we use in the routine as the weeks go by
- The tempo of the exercises
- The very choice of exercises
- Rest time
- etc….
In this way we can maximize progress and not go to the gym without an action plan (like the vast majority) and without having an idea of what we have to do. I have said it many times before, but if we do not progress in the gym we are not growing. As simple as that.
If you now lift 80kg on the bench press for 5 reps and in 2 years you continue to lift the same… .your chest, triceps and delts will not have grown. Progress is key, and to progress you have to structure your workouts. Therefore, I would strongly recommend that instead of going to the gym to do what you want that day or to crush the muscle that you play without rhyme or reason, you look for a routine that seeks progress as the highest priority.
If not, you will be like those people who have been training for 5 years without progressing at all and end up leaving because they do not see results due to their "bad genetics".
Well, here are 5 of the mistakes that I see the most in training rooms. I hope it has served you.
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