When Lifting Heavy…is BAD!! (Common Mistake)

Lifting heavy weights is one of the most important things you can do as you build the foundation of your strength and start out as a beginner lifter. That said, if you don’t do this right you are setting yourself up for a harder road ahead in getting your body to respond to your training. In this

What’s up, guys?! Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today I have a very, very important video. This video covers, what I feel, is one of the biggest mistakes that we make as lifters, especially beginner lifters in those formative years.

When we first start to touch the weights, and it also continues to happen, and it gets worse the more advanced we become. So it really does affect all of us. And that is,we’re kind of screwing up on our infatuation with heavy weights. So what I mean by that is … if you look back, I played football in high school, and a lot of athletes that played any sport was told to focus on the amount of weight that they lifted.

That was somehow a way to measure your readiness to play. So there were two athletes that were athletically on the same level, the guy that was stronger, who could lift more weights, was usually going to be given the opportunity to play over the other guy. So I remember just adding weight, and having an infatuation with adding weight to the bar, as fast as I could, on the squat, on the bench-press, and what happened is as I added weight rapidly in a squat, let’s say, my form went the other direction. So I was only worried about adding more, and more weight. So even though the weights that I was lifting would suggest that I was a more intermediate, or advanced lifter, my form would suggest that I was nothing more than a freaking novice.

And if you build your foundation on that same fallacy, if you’re lying to yourself that you really think you’re lifting more than you are … because you’re tricking yourself with bad form, and cheating techniques, and everything else … I promise you, you’re not going to get the results that you want. So here’s what we need to do: if we took a big exercise like the squat it may require you taking a few steps back, or regressing to progress. If we took a squat and we focused on where we shift the load in here, I could tell you what I did for the most part.

With my bad knees I was sitting here loading up these tendons here in my knees. Loading them up. They were basically meant to handle a lot of weight, but that doesn’t mean that they could actually do that safely. So I was kind of crippled with bad patellar tendonitis because I relied so much on that instead of actually loading up the quads on the exercise. So if I have the quads working here, and they were what was supporting me as I went down, into the squat, now I actually have an opportunity to build bigger quads, and stronger quads, not relying on tendon strength.

So when we take the exercise like the squat we may have to drop the weight we’re using in order to focus on getting the results we want. So how do we do that? Strip it back. Strip it back, maybe even to bodyweight first, and if you can command a bodyweight squat with good form, and get all the way down, to parallel, and be able to hold that, and command that; then you start adding weight to the bar. So here, if I were to go down I don’t want o just be able to get down in the position, I want to be able to hold the position.

So I get down to the bottom, all the way here, I have a squat, I could come out of the hole, and up, and out of it. I go back down again, here, all the way down, parallel. I can hold it, I can come out of the hole, and I can come up again. We want to ingrain that, and use that as our metric of knowing that we can actually command that weight, and only if I can continue to demonstrate the proper form, should I be allowed to add weight. And I know that sounds like a basic concept, but it’s all but basic.

If you take a stroll around the gym you see people that are bastardizing this concept all day long. They just want to be obsessed with the weight knowing that the weight is ultimately going to be how they’re judged. But really, your results are going to be judged by how much weight you can direct into the muscles you’re trying to work. So here are a couple other things: when you add strength to a dysfunctional pattern, you’re not doing yourself any favors. You’re getting stronger at bad motor patterns, and that is a really hard habit to break.

So I told you guys, as you get to be more advanced, this is a lot more of a burst to your ego. Not a boost, an ego burst because you have to accept the fact that you might have to step back, a long way to get to the true weight that you can actually handle in good form, and then work yourself back up. But I promise you, it’s going to be the most useful advice you’re ever going to get. One more thing I’ll add to that. If you’re that bothered by the fact that your 300lb squat just went down to 205 and you want to still feel like you’re not getting enough heavy work; I can show you what to do.

Go do a Bulgarian split squat. Do an exercise that is better at hiding some of your form flaws, and your mechanical flaws that allows you to add the weight. So, because the Bulgarian split squat is a single leg exercise that allows you to stay a lot more upright … let’s say I had a bad ability to extend through my thoracic spine and that killed my squat, I wouldn’t have that issue on that exercise. And there’s nothing stopping me from grabbing a pair of 100s in each hand …

if you can hold them and load the shit out of that exercise and still get a good overload and a strength effect from it. So you don’t have to forego all of your heavy training in order to continue to progress on these basic, compound lists that you’ve sped through too quickly in your formative years, and when you were developing your strength in the first place. Regress to progress. All right, guys. I hope you found that helpful.

Again, it’s very, very truthful information and it’s not something you ever want to ignore. If you’re looking for a program that teaches you how to do the exercises right because it matters … it literally will set the foundation for all of your gains to come from here, on out … head to ATHLEANX. com and get our ATHLEANX training program.

You can use the link below this video to find the program that’s best aligned with your current goals. In the meantime, if you’ve found the video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up below. Let me know what else you want me to cover and I’ll do my best to do that here for you in the days, and weeks ahead. All right, guys. See you.