7 Beginner Workout Mistakes You MUST Avoid!!

Beginner workout mistakes aren’t always so easy to avoid. Often times, it is the beginner that makes the most workout slip ups because they just don’t have the knowledge of what things to avoid, and it winds up costing them muscle gains. If you want to build muscle and want to be sure that you avoid

What’s up, guys, Jeff Cavaliere, athleanx. com. So, I remember 30 years ago, the very first time I picked up a weight, I actually hated it. I did not want to lift weights whatsoever. I wanted to look bigger, I even dressed the part to  look bigger.

Yes, that’s actually me. But I didn’t want to put the work in to get there. Thankfully,  I learned how to love the process and I’m going to make sure you do today because I’m going to show  you the seven biggest mistakes that beginners make that oftentimes gets them off track before they  even get started. If you follow these pieces of advice, we’re going to make sure that you don’t  trip up the same way I did. With that being said, guys, let’s start breaking them down one by  one.

So right off the bat, I don’t want to break anybody’s heart, but I’ve got to give you  the truth here, you see you can’t get around, and I mean literally get around nutrition. And I’m  talking about either overeating the wrong foods or undereating the right foods. There is no  magic exercise plan, there’s no great ab routine, none of those things will overcome the fact that  you’re not eating properly. So, let’s say you’re a guy that’s overweight right now and you decide  to lift weights. Yes, you’re going to be bigger, but you’re going to be a bigger fat guy.

Or let’s say you’re a skinny guy who doesn’t eat nearly enough and you lift some weights, yeah, you  might get some results, but they won’t be anywhere near what you could get if you actually supported  your efforts and your training in the gym with proper nutrition. Think of it this way, guys, i’s  the perfect two-man team, you have to have both of them working towards that end, goal nutrition and  training if you want to look your best. Mistake number two is actually picking up the weights too  soon. You see if you don’t learn how to command your own body and space then are probably going  to look a bit ugly when you grab the weights. And that’s because you haven’t learned proper  joint stability in any of your exercises.

So, what I’m asking you to do is rewind it a little  bit, start in the beginning and learn how to master the basic body weight movements like a push  up and like a pull up. And when you do, you’ll see that your task gets infinitely easier when you  actually go back to pick up the weights. And don’t be discouraged here, guys the body weight training  is not going away forever. As a matter of fact, it’s going to come back and compliment the perfect  training routine because that’s where some of the most difficult calisthenic exercises can be  performed. But not before you learn how to build that base of strength and stability with  the proper execution of the basic movements.

So, let’s stay on that idea here for a  second for mistake number three, and that is you’re forgetting to address your mobility and  flexibility issues early. You see, before you make or even as you make that transition to  the weights, if you’re not looking yourself in the mirror and I mean literally looking at  yourself and seeing all the posture of flaws and mobility issues that you have in addressing  them, that you’re setting yourself up for long term failure. Look, there are people out there  that will tell you you can work through these things if you just pick up the weights and start  working on perfecting your mechanics. But what I’m telling you is you’re actually going to work  them in to improper mechanics and make it a hell of a lot harder to correct these things down the  road once you’ve built your strength around these imperfections. If you get them out of the way  early, guys, you’re going to be able to build a better foundation free from the cracks that are  going to ultimately take you down in the long run.

Beginner mistake number four is forgetting to  lose the “routine” part of your workout routine. What I mean is once you’ve adopted a habit of  training, then you want to try to get out of the “routine” of training as quickly as possible. Look, does this seem familiar to you? You kind of knock out the same amount of pushups every time  you do them and you move on. And you knock out the same amount of sit ups and then you move on.

Or maybe the same amount of air squats and you move on. There’s no challenge in that, guys. And  in order to change yourself beyond that beginner newbie phase, you’re going to need to challenge  yourself. And that’s where you need to incorporate a new exercise, a new stress of the exercise,  make it difficult in some way, shape or form. Add weight to the exercise and once you start to learn  how to properly overload, then the changes will continue to come.

But if you just get comfortable  in that “routine” of doing the same thing over and over again, which a lot of beginners will,  you’ll lose not only the enthusiasm for training, but the gains that come along with it. Mistake  number five for beginners is taking rep counts too seriously. Now, look, I create programs and  I know how effective programs can be for guiding someone from point A to point Z. But what happens  with beginners oftentimes is they’re so focused on counting their reps that they stop making the  reps count. What I mean by that is it affects you in two different ways.

Let’s say you’re doing  a set here and you know that you’re supposed to get ten repetitions on the first two they’re  actually harder than what you thought they were going to be. You might decide to sort of back off  a little bit and just quick wrap yourself through three, four, five, six and seven only to rejoin  the effective reps again to get to your magic number of ten. Well, guess what? You’ve wasted  half of the set and the effort there just isn’t good enough to take you to that next level. On  the other hand, if you’re so fixated on getting to that number and you’re going to do so, come hell  or high water, even if it means sacrificing not just your form, but your safety in the process,  that’s never going to be a recommendation that I’m going to tell you you should do.

You need to  be able to do the reps that can as effectively as you can and get rewarded for doing that. Skipping around and playing with the numbers just to get to that number is never going to  be the most effective way to get you gains. Building off of some of the early mistakes,  mistake number six requires that you learn what failure looks like and more importantly,  feels like. You see a lot of beginners don’t really ever grasp what this is, and it holds them  back from making significant progress. If you just move through your sets without any real discomfort  and looking like you’re maybe on a Sunday drive as opposed to training to build muscle, you’re likely  never going to be satisfied with the results you get.

You have to push your body to the point of  challenge in order to create that change. So, when I mentioned failure and recommend failure to even  beginners, I’m trying to get you to understand what it feels like on a given set. You want to  be able to push and each repetition becomes more and more difficult. However, when you reach a  point of form failure, we’re done. We don’t want to sacrifice our safety in the process of trying  to get out that other rep.

We talked about that. But you do have to be able to push and grind your  way through repetition. And don’t get caught up in some of the new phrases like RPE and other  methods of measuring your exertion levels because you probably don’t have a good enough appreciation  for what that even means. To you a 7. 5 versus an 8 will mean no difference because you don’t  truly know what it means to take yourself to