If you have started weight training, let me tell you that you have made an excellent choice for a healthy and fit life. Weight training is a great tool for strengthening your bones, muscles, and tissues. There are different myths about weight training:
- if you quit weight training, your muscles will turn into fat
That is a very illogical statement, as muscles and fats are made of entirely different tissues. The only way you will gain excess fat is by overeating.
- Women become muscular and start looking like bodybuilders if they weight train
Does it even make sense? There is a hormone called Testosterone, which is a male hormone that promotes muscular growth. Women have a low testosterone level biologically. So the only thing women will get if they weight train is fitness, not an absurd amount of muscles.
- Weight training is harmful to joint health
Actually, it is the opposite. It strengthens your joints. It causes joint problems only when you try to ego lift, simply lifting a much heavier weight than you are capable of.
You will hear many myths like this. My advice is not to start believing anything; simply research, and you will find out that almost all the myths are false.
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Problems that occur during weight training
Lifting weights can be fun as you test your strength and see it progress over time. However, there are some problems that every beginner faces when they start it. I am sharing my own experience with you. The issues that I faced:
Not feeling the targeted muscle
When we exercise with weights, the intent is to activate one or more muscles to make the movement happen. For example, when you do biceps curls, the goal is to engage the biceps muscle in the movement. However, if your form or posture is incorrect, then that might engage other muscles more than the intended muscle.
When I started, I faced that problem while doing chest exercises. I did not even feel that my chest got worked. The next day, I used to feel soreness on my shoulders. The chest soreness or pump was nonexistent for me. After two or three weeks, I decided to do something about it, as I was not enjoying chest training at all.
I recorded myself while doing chest exercises and checked where my flaws were. I found out I was not retracting my shoulder blades or, in simple terms, not arching my back while doing chest exercises. That is why most of the loads were carried out by my shoulders rather than the chest.
If you face a similar problem, you can do the same thing by recording yourself or asking the trainer or a friend who knows about exercise to observe you while you do the exercise and ask for recommendations.
Unstructured Training Plan
It is really important to have a plan structured to measure your progression. Many people just go to the gym and do whatever exercise they feel like or do a workout based on which machine is free. That is a terrible idea. You need to have a structured plan to tell you which day you will do which exercises and what the exercise order will be.
I followed a plan from the beginning, but the problem was that it was not optimal. I used to follow a bro split, in which you train one muscle group each day. I trained for six days a week and trained six different muscles at that time.
The bro split is not a very good training split as:
- You need to train a muscle at least twice a week, which cannot be done in bro split.
- Some muscle groups do not need a whole dedicated day to train. Like the biceps, they are small muscles that do not need an entire training day. It will be not proper utilization of time.
- The chance of doing overtraining is significantly higher.
After that, I switched to a hybrid workout routine, training two muscle groups in one session. At present, I am following a four-day full-body workout split.
A structured plan helps you keep your training in check. If you give it structure, then you can tweak it a little here and there to adjust to your goals, but if you do exercise at random, you will not be able to find out where you are lacking and how to overcome it. Also, it helps you avoid mistakes like training two large muscle groups in the same session.
You can check “What Workout Split Should You Follow” to find the best split.
Soreness
Soreness indicates that the targeted muscle has been trained, but it is not absolute. After a while, your body gets accustomed to soreness, and you do not feel soreness for some muscles, but that does not mean that your muscles are not getting trained.
I do not feel sore even after a good-intensity biceps session. If I squeeze tightly, I feel sore a bit, but that is nothing compared to the other muscles. Does that mean my biceps are not getting trained?
It is getting trained, but it is quite common not to feel soreness for every muscle. So, if you do not feel soreness for every muscle, then you do not need to worry if your training and intensity are correct.
Sometimes, beginners over-train their muscles to chase soreness, which is counterproductive. It makes your next session suffer, as you cannot train effectively because you will not recover from the soreness of the previous session.
Fast Progression
Making some progress takes some time. It would help if you made your expectations clear. You simply cannot progress each day, and this goes for both weight gain/loss and increasing strength.
Usually, it takes one or two weeks or sometimes longer to see any progression. You cannot expect to lose weight every day.
When I was losing weight, I lost the first 5 kg pretty easily, as it was my water and glycogen storage weight. I was 110 kg, and when I reached 92 kg, I hit a plateau, where I was not able to go lower than that for more than 3 weeks. I broke that plateau by lowering my calorie intake slightly. Please emphasize the slight; I dropped my calories by 100/200.
I am telling you that because when someone hits a plateau, there are two things very common to see:
- Start doing a crash diet
- Increase the amount of training to a great extent.
You should not make mistakes like that, as it will make you suffer and want to quit.
Ego Lifting
The infamous ego lifting is very lucrative, but you must avoid it. There is a famous gym quote: “Keep your ego outside the gym door.” I follow this quote completely.
Almost everyone is guilty of ego-lifting. You will see people next to you lifting 2X or 3X the weight you are lifting, and they have good physiques, which will make you wonder if it takes heavy lifting to get to that level. Just remember that your day 10 is very different from someone’s day 1000. They grinded through the days to make that progress.
I was also a victim of ego lifting, and I can tell you that once you get into it, it is very hard to turn back. In my initial days, I was doing lat pulldowns with 70 KGs, with excessive swinging and momentum. I knew I was not maintaining the correct form, but putting the pin to lower weights felt very hard. It took me almost one month to get out of the phase and let my ego aside to lower the weight in the exercise.
Your goal is to be fit and healthy, which is the opposite of ego lifting, which can cause injury.
These are the main problems I used to face when I started lifting weights. Do you find this article helpful? Let me know in the comments about the problems you face while weight training.