Top 6 Beginner Workout Mistakes!

Beginner workouts are incredibly important since they set the foundation for all gains to come. In this video, I’m going to go over the biggest beginner workout mistakes that people make that undercut their ability to see the best results that they can get in the long run. I will cover everything

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today we’re going to talk all about beginners and that means – welcome, Jesse. JESSE: You took me out of hiding?

JEFF: Well, now you’ve got a Seamus shirt on, so… JESSE: The things I do for you here. JEFF: Way to bust right back into the ATHLEANX video. I love Seamus. Seamus, he’s rocking your shirt.

Today we’re talking about the six biggest mistakes that beginners make. I think it’s very, very common. I think there are mistakes that a lot of us make, or I wouldn’t be covering them in this video. I do think we all continue to learn. So, though you may not think of yourself as a beginner, there’s always something you can learn.

We’ve got guys who have been training for 50 years who watch this channel, who I hope are saying “Gosh, I learned something new today”, or even in this video I hope, too. JESSE: Yeah. JEFF: With that being said, let’s knock them out one by one. The biggest mistakes that beginners make that we can now start to change. You learn a lot of things by training with full range of motion.

I’m talking about on your big, compound lifts. Your basic lifts. We’ll get into that in a second, too. The necessity of those. But you actually learn how to become more coordinated.

You weren’t the most coordinated person the first time you came into the gym. JESSE: No. Even as an athlete. JEFF: I was going to say, the fact is, you can go out and play your sport and be pretty decent at it in the process but get in the weight room and it’s a new skill. JESSE: Yeah.

JEFF: So, you get on the bench-press bar and the bar starts going like this. Or, God forbid, you grab a couple of dumbbells and the dumbbells start wavering. JESSE: Yeah. JEFF: I saw it, right? It’s not pretty, but we all do it.

I did it myself as well. One of the things that happens by training through full range of motion is, you learn how to integrate multiples muscle groups. The ones that are all responsible for performing those compound lifts, to get them to execute the movement properly. You do that through more and more strength as you build it up, and coordination. So, full range of motion is great for that.

Now, let’s say you have an injury. I’m a proponent for using abbreviated range of motions sometimes to get around, and train around an injury without having to forego training entirely. JESSE: Right. JEFF: But if you’re a beginner, you shouldn’t be injured yet. I stress that.

That’s one of the main things I’m going to cover here, as we build down through this video. Beginners should be looking to fortify their bodies and build a really strong base that is also fortified against injury. You don’t want to ignore the big lifts. I’ve talked about this concept before called ‘exerphobia’. Specific exercises can sometimes generate more fear – especially for a beginner – than others.

Let’s talk about some of them. The squat. JESSE: Yeah. JEFF: The deadlift. JESSE: Mm-hmm.

JEFF: The bench-press. JESSE: Yep. JEFF: Why? JESSE: Because, when you go to the gym you expect to be – you expect to have a ton of plates on there and you think everyone will be looking at you like “Oh, that kid’s benching 95? ” JEFF: That’s a reality into being self-conscious.

JESSE: Yeah. JEFF: But I can tell you, from a physiological standpoint, you’ve got the most weight on the bar during those exercises. Which is why we need to do them, because they build that foundation. I’ve stressed it here many, many times before. The foundation of your strength training and building should be around those exercises because they’re compound movements, they utilize multiple joints, multiple muscle groups that are all contributing to the overall strength of the lift.

Meaning, they have the highest capacity for being loaded. JESSE: Mm-hmm. JEFF: So that’s great, but through your fear – and some of the guys that are watching this – I know the reality of it, guys. Even when I was in college I used to have a fear of going to the weight room and attacking any of the big, compound lifts because the guys around me were using a lot more weight than I was. You don’t want to look substandard, or you don’t want to look insufficient when it comes to those lifts.

So, a lot of times you might think “Oh, this guy’s skipping them altogether. ” That’s a big, big, big mistake. What you want to do is make sure you’re doing those exercises, and you load them up properly with weight than you can handle. That leads us to error number three. Using weights that you cannot command.

Have you done that? JESSE: Yeah. JEFF: Really? Yeah, I’ve seen him do it. Using weights that you cannot command.

The issue with this is, it’s not about – it’s not a race for a certain number, guys. I know we have strength standards and people like to apply them, but it’s not a race to achieve a certain number at the expense of building foundational strength, and what I call ‘true strength’. You can compensate your ass all the way to the end of the day where you build up a number, but you’re compensating in doing so. JESSE: Yeah. JEFF: And I can tell you this, when this kid came to me – can we recreate at least a little bit of what you looked like, posturally, when you came to me?

That’s not even half as bad as what it actually was. Jesse was kind of a mess, right? JESSE: Yeah. JEFF: He was a mess. Putting him under the bar in that condition is an irresponsible coach.

You wouldn’t do that to someone like that because his skeletal frame couldn’t even handle the weight that I was trying to apply to his body. And it could be a low-level weight. What he had to do, first and foremost, was learn how to retrain his body to be better equipped to handle anything, let alone excessive weights. JESSE: Yeah. JEFF: So, what you have to do is build that base.

We spent some time on trying to correct you. And again, it’s worked for you. You have made a dramatic change, in terms of how your posture is. JESSE: I’d like to think so. JEFF: You have.

You’ve added some significant muscle on top of that, too. But if I had let you jump in, and just start piling weights on top of that, while I may see those numbers go up, and you might see those numbers go up yourself; realize that it’s going to come back and bite you. Every, single time it’s going to come back and bite you because you built up a whole hell of a lot of this compensation, and compensatory strength along the way that would be lying about where your true strength is. So, utilize the weights that you can command and take away some of that fear, in terms of attacking those big lifts because you know they’re necessary. Now, we’ve also covered this topic.

This is the fourth big mistake. That is relying solely on the big lifts. You cannot rely solely on the big lifts for many, many, many, many, many reasons, guys. As someone that trains athletes and actually is out there training athletes I’ll tell you this: relying solely on the big lifts at the expense of worrying about some of these other things, like we’ve talked about with posture. But beyond that, on multiple planes- JESSE: Yeah.

J: The big lifts themselves – the bench-press, the squat, and the deadlift – are simply sagittal plane movements. If you want to be effective as a human being – not just an athlete – you’d better be able to learn how to move in the frontal plane – which is side to side – and move in the transverse plane, too. We do that all the time. For you, as an athlete, of course it’s incredibly, incredibly important to do that. JESSE: Yeah.

On the lacrosse field I’m not in one spot. I’m moving side to side, forward and back, and pivoting all the time. JEFF: And allowing o