The Most Common Mistake When Lifting Weights
You may already know that lean muscle mass requires calories and this means the more muscle someone has the more calories they will naturally burn throughout the day. This helps if you are utilizing a diet that involves counting calories for weight loss. What you may not know, is that weight lifting has a number of other benefits including lowering body fat, improving cholesterol levels, increasing flexibility, strengthening bones and joints and improving cardiovascular capacity. With such fantastic benefits, it is surprising that not more people who are looking to gain muscle and lose fat utilize it properly.
The most common mistake for beginners is using adding too much weight too fast.
Many trainees rush to the gym and put on as much weight as they can bounce up and down. This is either an ego thing (“I the strongest because can I lift all this weight”) or a belief that the more weight they have on the bar the more muscle they will grow. It is very naive to think both of these things. The amount of muscle growth that occurs is due to how much the muscle is fatigued and muscle fatigue is not as linked to the amount on the bar as many people think. Bouncing large amounts of weight isn’t fatiguing the muscle effectively – it is throwing an object and using its momentum to create the illusion that the trainee is actually using muscle force throughout the entire to movement to shift the bar.
What many trainees do not realise is that there will be other individuals who lift lighter weights and will be stronger and have more muscle mass than them. This is because these individuals lift the weights slowly and in correct form, ensuring that the muscles do all the work throughout the entire movement and fatiguing them effectively. Lifting weights this way can also lead to fewer injuries because there is less ballistic force being applied to the body.
For most exercises you should spend 3 seconds on the positive phase (with the bench press, this is where you push the bar away from your chest) and 6 seconds on the negative phase (with the bench press, this is where you lower the bar to your chest). This is because humans are stronger on the negative phase than they are on the positive phase, and you need to slow the movement down in order to fatigue the muscle.
Finally, trainees first need to learn correct exercise form and then keep this form as they slowly add weight. Slowly means only as fast as they can maintain correct form and using a cadence of 3 second and 6 seconds as mentioned above. Going any faster is a fast track to injury.