Three Common Strength Training Mistakes

Stretching to warm up at the beginning of your workout

Why it’s a mistake: It’s important to prepare the muscles, joints and connective tissue before a strength training session. But stretching the muscles while the muscles are still cold can lead to the exact thing you’re trying to avoid – injury.

What you should do instead: Light, progressive cardio warm-up

Why this is better: The most important things to accomplish during your warm-up are raising your body’s core temperature, increasing the elasticity of the muscle tendon chain and giving your body a chance to secrete lubrication into the activated joints for each exercise.

The best way to do this is with a gradually accelerating cardio, or aerobic, activity that minimizes stress on the joints with broad, sweeping, full-body movements. Using the elliptical trainer with arm extensions and riding the stationary bike while adding upper body movements do this well.

Minimizing impact is a key goal during this phase. While it’s not critical to break a sweat, you should feel warmer and have increased mobility around the joint before loading the targeted muscles around it. Aerobic work does this. Stretching doesn’t. So save the stretch until after the exercise, after the workout, or both.

Following an unbalanced program

Why it’s a mistake: It’s rare that an exerciser enters the gym without pre-existing strength and range-of-motion imbalances. A tight chest, front shoulder and biceps chain is common for those who spend a good deal of time at a computer, in a car or at a desk. This condition can lead to shoulder injuries and postural problems that lead to low back pain.

Unless corrected, most people will work to their current capacity for each muscle group, perpetuating those imbalances. Some will even focus more on their stronger, shorter muscles, worsening the condition. The big guys in the gyms who focus mostly on the “showcase” muscles like chest and biceps are a perfect example. That crab-like posture isn’t just unattractive, it’s unhealthy.

What you should do instead: Using comparable loads and volume (repetitions and sets) for antagonistic muscles, or muscles that perform opposing functions, is the recipe for correcting this problem. The main pairs that should posses similar strength and range of motion are upper back and chest, front and rear shoulders, and biceps and triceps.

Why this is better: Dancers, gymnasts, surfers and rock climbers, among others, tend to display balanced muscle pairs. It’s also no coincidence that, given the demands of their respective sports, they get very few injuries and even fewer severe ones. Symmetry and balanced strength and range of motion are the reasons.

Lifting too heavy or too light

Why it’s a mistake: Whether you are a woman who is using two-pound dumbbells to strengthen your arms because you’re nervous about getting “muscle-bound”or a man who bench presses a one-rep max in the neighborhood of 300 pounds, it’s unlikely that you’re using resistance training to best serve your needs.

Using weights that never come close to exhausting the targeted muscle is basically a waste of time. Lifting much heavier weight than you can control with explosive force that overloads the joints repeatedly can, and often does, lead to serious, permanent and completely avoidable injuries.

What you should do instead: Choose loads for each exercise that will allow you to control the weight through eight to 12 repetitions for one to three sets per exercise. This complies with the American College of Sports Medicine’s recommendations for most exercisers.

Why this is better: Using this guideline for choosing the right resistance level, you’ll minimize injuries while pushing the muscles just hard enough to gradually increase, or at least maintain, gains already achieved for muscle power and endurance.