WORKOUT ADVICE

Starting Back At The Gym? Avoid These 4 Mistakes And You’ll Do Great

See #2: Choosing exercises for the wrong reasons

For the record I’ve made all the following mistakes, and plenty more, over my 30 years of working out.

I’m just fortunate to have stuck with things despite messing up left, right and center, learning lessons the hard way, so I’ve stayed in shape well into my 40s, and coach others to do likewise.

And making mistakes is the best way to learn a lesson.

But just as it’s hard to watch my teenage kids running head-first towards Dumb-Mistake-Ville without speaking up, I would love for you to not make all the same mistakes I did.

And I really hope you follow my advice more than my bloody kids do ;-)

So here’s 4 things to avoid doing (too often anyway…) to make your new gym habit ‘stick’, so you can make progress quickly, get in great shape and stay that way as you get older.

#1 Having No Plan or An Elaborate Plan — Both Suck

There are two ends of the Workout Plan Spectrum we need to avoid:

• rocking up at the gym with no clue what you’re going to do, because you’re going to see what you’re in the mood for, and what equipment is available; or
• having a plan of specific exercises, in a specific order that must be adhered to, with exact rest periods you must stick to.

The No-Plan option is obviously crap, because you’ll just go through the motions, doing random stuff and making zero progress, so you’ll stop going.

But the second option possibly seems like the IDEAL thing you should be aiming for? The thing is, unless you train in your own private gym it’s just not feasible, because… Other People Exist.

They’ll be using the weights/machine/bench you need, but you have this elaborate plan you must stick to, so now you’re stuck, flustered and giving the stink-eye to a poor old guy who’s holding ‘your’ dumbbells.

The solution is to have a basic plan that has some built-in wiggle room.

1. Take 4 movements, Upper Body Pull, Lower Body Pull, Upper Body Push, Lower Body Push.
2. Have 3 exercises you know for each movement, e.g. Upper Body Push — Incline Bench Press, Dumbbell Shoulder Press, Seated Bench Press.
3. Pick one exercise for each movement in each workout — ONE of your three options will always be available.
4. Throw in some arms exercises, abdominal work, and short bursts of cardio at the end for all round fitness and aesthetics.

**My free MomBod and DadBod Overhaul programs are based on this approach too**

#2 Choosing Exercises For The Wrong Reasons

Hip Adductor and Abductor machines, the Abdominal Crunch machine, and that weird twisty machine for your love handles — what do they all have in common?

They all target areas where we carry excess body fat.

So there’s the temptation to use these machines in the hope that feeling a burn in your wobbly areas will magically melt away the fat.

It would be awesome if fat loss worked that way. But:

• you never see a guy with a six pack but a double chin, and
• you never see a woman with super-toned arms but chafing thighs.

We lose fat from all over our bodies, in an annoyingly random order, regardless of what body part we exercise.

So choose exercises that work multiple body parts at the same time, as opposed to isolation exercises on machines for inner thighs, outer thighs, glutes, abdominals, etc.

That way you’ll get the most out of your workouts in the shortest amount of time.

#3 Going Through The Motions

Let’s say you now have your ‘Basic Plan including Wiggle Room’ as we covered in #1.

Great, you’ve maybe 20ish sets of exercise to get through now, so let’s get cracking…

The danger at this point is you have a target to get through these 20 sets ASAP. You want to tick off each one as you go along, so you can get the hell out of this gym and these sweaty other people (who keep stealing the equipment you want!).

You bang out 3 sets of Straight Leg Deadlifts. What exercise is next? Well, hold on a sec…

• Did you feel those deadlifts in your hamstrings and glutes?
• Was there the fabled Mind Muscle Connection?
• Did you do a rep or two more, or a couple of pounds/KGs heavier than last time?

Each exercise in turn needs to be its own Mini Project before you move on to the next exercise. You are seeking out some short-term, intense tension in the target area, adjusting your grip/stance/tempo to make that happen if necessary.

And you also need to be tracking how you did last time, so you can beat your High Score and make progress from week to week.

Your 20ish sets are a journey, not a destination ;-)

#4 Avoiding Hard Stuff

All progress takes place outside the comfort zone — Michael John Bobak

I once followed an Old School program called Super Squats. It involved 3 Full Body Workouts per week where halfway through you did ONE set of 20 squats, with the weight you would normally squat for 10 reps.

Good Lord those last 10 reps were brutal. That one set took about 2 minutes, because I had to stand there for 10 seconds between reps trying to get my breath back and regain some feeling in my lower body.

I had to lie on the floor for a few minutes afterwards, mainly asking myself why the hell I was doing this to myself.

But my legs grew like crazy, with only 3 sets of squats per week.

3 brutally hard sets, on a program that made me dread workouts, but it proves a point:

Some hard work beats lots of easy work.

I do not recommend you try the Super Squats program just yet (if ever!), but as we covered in #3, you’re working out to push your body outside its comfort zone, not to just tick off exercises, sets and reps.

3 sets of 12 squats as your Lower Body Push exercise, where the last couple of reps feel horrible, is a better use of your time than:

• 3 easy sets on the Leg Press
• 3 easy sets on the Leg Extension
• 3 sets on the Hip Adductor (easy or hard!)
• 3 sets on some weird Glute Kickback machine

As I wrote about in this article about High Intensity Workouts, we don’t need to necessarily force ourselves to follow a program that’s brutal from start to finish…

but we DO need to do hard work, uncomfortable exercises to see some progress from our workout endeavours, which will ultimately help us keep on going!

Please Get Started But Remember…

• Have a plan but build in wiggle room.
• Make every minute and rep count, then get the hell out and live your life.
• Some hard work is better than lots and lots of easy work.

And don’t take it all so seriously ;-)

As a fitness & lifestyle coach to the over-40s, I have a great, doable, FREE gym workout plan for guys 40+ here, and for women 40+ right here, to build strength, fitness and great-lookin’ arms and legs in around two hours per week.

And if you feel your body, mindset and lifestyle need a ‘reset’ before you begin any workout plan, check out my 40+ Reset course here.