12 Gym Exercises (YOU’RE DOING WRONG!)

Did you know that there are 12 gym exercises that you might be doing wrong? In this video, I am going to show you 6 gym exercises and 6 home exercises, the common mistakes that are made, and how to avoid them so you never do these wrong again or make any exercise mistakes when trying to build muscle

We’ve all seen those gym workout mistake videos  where the people in them are making some pretty bad mistakes and they’re pretty obvious. Well, what if you’re making some home or gym exercise mistakes still and there are a lot more  subtle. Would you even know? Well, in this video, I’m not going to only expose what those exercise  mistakes are, but show you how to fix them, and it starts right here with a basic home exercise  like the glute bridge. And with most exercises, obviously, you know where you’re trying to get  to, but how you get there matters.

You’ve been told get the full hip extension. But did you  know that the position of your pelvis matters? It does. If you’re doing this out of an anterior  pelvic tilt, meaning you’re dropping your hips down and tilting your hip bones forward, well,  guess what’s happening? Your low back is taking all the work because your glutes aren’t really  effectively doing their job out of an anterior pelvic tilt position.

Guess what happens when you  have a weak low back? You wind up injuring it. So, you want to make sure that you’re doing  this out of a posterior pelvic tilt, tucking your tail under. You can still get to that  full hip extension. But again, you’re doing it the right way and using the right muscles.

Look, when it comes to bicep training, yes, I know a thing or two about it, but even I was  making this mistake. See, the idea here, guys, is you don’t want to curl like this. Instead  curl like this. And there’s a big distinction. The amount of supination you’re getting matters a  lot because we know it’s one of the main functions of the biceps.

And if we just stop halfway or  keep our hands too narrow and never focus on turning the hands over, you’re going to limit  the gains that you could be seeing. And you’re undervaluing how important that is if you’ve  just been blatantly ignoring it all along. So, what you want to do is focus on getting  those pinkies to turn up and out almost fully flip them over. In other words, they’re  starting down at your thighs. I want them to be turned upwards as high as you can  towards the sky.

Then and only then will you be getting full supination and then and  only then we will be fully activating the biceps so that you can start to see the best  results possible. I promise you it works. Now, as often is the case when I demonstrate this  next exercise, people are shocked when I tell them that hand placement matters when you’re doing a  Bench Dip. I showed this on Live with Kelly and Ryan about how to properly place your hands on a  bench because it matters, and it matters a lot to the health of your shoulder. So, a bench dip done  without attention to where your hands are, are going to almost naturally drift forward.

Fingers  are going to want to grab the edge of the bench and point straight ahead. But what that does is it  throws that shoulder into that anterior capsule, causing some excess stress in the shoulder that  can lead to either discomfort or injury. So, the fix here is just simply to rotate your hands  out. And it is a very subtle but simple shift, and it gets you to do the exercise right. Because by doing this, I opened my shoulders up, I get them into more external rotation, it doesn’t  diminish anything that I have going on in my triceps.

As a matter of fact, I’d argue that  you get a better contraction than the triceps, but the fact is make sure you’re not continuing  to screw this up because you want to keep our shoulders healthy while we’re still  trying to build those triceps up. Mistake number four is not keeping the  chest and the pelvis linked throughout the exercise. Not only does this create a  more inefficient and less powerful squat, but it also leads directly to the squat mourning. We know how ugly this can be and it’s also quite bad for your back. You can avoid this, however,  by just simply thinking about the chest and the pelvis as one unit and moving them in space  at the same time.

It’s quite simple because these are pretty big moving targets and pretty  easy to control. It becomes most challenging at the bottom of the squat where there’s a  tendency to allow the hips to move first, thereby breaking that link between the two. However, if you do this and do it right, not only does this lead to, as I said, a more  efficient squat, but one with a straighter bar path. And a straight bar path is a good squat and  one you’re going to want to try to emulate every time you get onto the bar. So now let’s move to an  exercise where the flaw is a little less subtle, but no less problematic.

And we’re talking  about the Pullup. If you do your pullups with your knees crossed just like this, you’re  not doing the pull up as best you can because you’re inviting what I call energy leaks  into the exercise. An energy leak is just where you’re not creating an efficient  line of pull throughout the exercise. In other words, the transfer of power through  your hands to lift your body up over the bar is dissipated through the weakness in that laxity  that you created by just letting your legs dangle underneath you. If you do this, instead, and you  point your legs out in front of you, you create a much more efficient transfer of power through your  hands to lift your body up in space and again, you will actually get more out of the exercise  by doing it.

Don’t allow fatigue to allow those legs to start drifting back into that bent knee  position. Keep it this way and I promise it’s not just better execution, but better results. Next, we have a commonly mis performed kettlebell exercise that can also actually be done with a  dumbbell, we’re talking about the Swing. Now, here’s an example once again where our bodies  are looking for the easy way out. If you don’t have strong enough glutes, guess what, most of us  don’t, then we’re going to look for help somewhere else in our legs and this goes right to the quads.

So instead of hinging back like you should, you just sort of squat yourself down and bring those  quads into the fold. That being said, that’s not the only problem with the exercise. We oftentimes  focus on the movement of the kettlebells, and by doing so, you start focusing on lifting  it through space using your delts instead. You shouldn’t necessarily worry about how the  kettlebell moves through space, you just need to move through the proper hinging of the hips. I want to make sure I drop my ass backwards and then explode through and let the kettlebell drift  as.

It will with each subsequent correct rep that kettlebell will actually flow a little bit higher  each time. But you’re not actively trying to lift it, you’re just letting your body do what it  wants to do and that is work naturally. If you’re going to do Calf Raises, don’t do them  like this because your calves likely won’t grow. Look, we already have a hard enough time getting  them to grow as it is, but if you keep bouncing through every repetition, it ain’t going to  happen. And there’s a reason for it.

Anatomically, our Achilles tendon that the calf muscles  attach to are built for these ballistic bouncy type repetitions. If you want to actually  get the muscle itself to feel what you’re doing, then slow it down. And when you get to the bottom,  hold it for four seconds to take all of that ballistic stretch aspect of it out of the Achilles  tendon and force it to be felt by the muscle itself. When you get back up to the top, feel that  contraction for four seconds up there too. Again, these bouncy repetitions up and down aren’t  helping you out at all.

Focus on every contraction at the top and every elongation at the bottom a