7 Fitness Habits You Need To Break Today
Human nature pushes us to figure out the easiest way of doing a task. We form routines around them that make us work in an “overdrive” mode. Fitness habits are no different. Many people try to find the easiest way of milking the fitness cow as soon as they step inside a gym.
You might even have come across a quote that is widely attributed to Bill Gates:
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
Sadly, this hack will not get you anywhere in the gym.
Pain, exhaustion, and sweat are a few indicators that tell you if you’re doing the right things in the gym. When most people join a gym, they follow their friendly neighborhood gym bro’s advice without questioning the status quo.
A pro fitness athlete would tell you that gym bros aren’t the best place to get your advice from. Performing hundreds of repetitions of the wrong advice can reinforce habits that will take a lot of time to fix. Luckily, habits can change, whether the habit is biting your nails or decrying your genetics when you can’t seem to make any gains.
Worst Fitness Habits That You Need To Fix
1. Believing Everything You Hear
Almost every person who has ever stepped foot inside a gym forms strong opinions about lifting weights. Before handing out fitness advice, some people even discount the fact that they have only been to a gym once in their life.
And then there are people on the other end of the spectrum who take advice from just about anyone. The latter group of people becomes soft targets for the gym bros.
Interestingly, most of the advice that does the rounds in the fitness circles is nothing more than folklore. Some of the most common fitness myths are:
a) Working out on an empty stomach will help burn fat.
Research has found that while training in a fasted state could burn more calories from fat, it could also cause the body to break down muscle tissues to burn protein as fuel.
b) Women will get bulky if they lift weights.
This is one myth that refuses to die even after several studies have proven that women don’t produce enough testosterone to build as much muscle mass as their male counterparts.
2. Over Keen
Every gym has a group of people who are too eager to achieve their dream physique. For them, the amount of time they spend in the iron paradise is directly proportional to the gains they can make in a single day.
Switching programs too often, trying new advanced training principles, and making unhealthy changes to their diet program to speed up their transformation are trademarks of impatient lifters. If you make drastic changes to your lifestyle in the first week of joining a gym, you are setting yourself up for failure. Your goal should be to slowly build fitness habits that will help you successfully implement lifestyle changes.
3. Zero Accountability
Fitness is turning from an individual’s sport into a team sport. Most people fail in their transformation journey because they are not accountable to anyone. Failing in secrecy makes no difference as there are no consequences because no one will know any different.
Gone are the days when people used to work in dark and gloomy gyms.
The rise of Instagram and YouTube has made sharing transformation progress cool. By sharing your fitness online, you’ll not only be keeping yourself accountable, but you might also inspire others to join you.
Even if you don’t want to share your goals and progress online, you should share them with your friends and family so that you’re at least answerable to someone. It might feel like a small ask, but the psychological benefits of this approach alone will pay dividends in the long run.
4. Skipping Warm-Ups
Many people reach for the dumbbells as soon as they step inside a weight room. They consider warming up a waste of time and prefer lifting lighter weights for the first couple of sets as an alternative warm-up.
Although you might be saving 10-15 minutes by skipping the warm-up, dodging the pre-workout warm-up increases the chances of an injury during an intense workout. A warm-up routine should either consist of 5-10 minutes of cardio or some form of dynamic stretching.
5. No Game Plan
If you don’t have a detailed plan of how you’re going to achieve your dream physique, your odds of failing are relatively high. Vague goals like “I want to get fit”, “I want to lose weight”, or “I want to put on muscle mass” do not cut it.
You need to set a timeline for yourself. The next step after designing a transformation program is to devise a tracking and feedback mechanism. You should have weekly reviews to assess your progress and make necessary changes if and when needed.
A solid game plan has the following things built in:
- Tweaking training and nutrition programs when the effort to reward proportion turns unfavorable. If you’re getting too comfortable with your training routine, it’s a sign you need to switch things up.
- Staying away from vanilla training programs. Don’t bother following what is working for other people because everyone’s body is different and what might be working for them might not do the trick for you.
- Plan all your workouts in advance. Everything from the exercises you will be doing, weights you will be lifting to the clothes you will be wearing should be dialed in.
- Know your limits. You don’t want to spread yourself too thin by trying to do more than you’re capable of.
6. Not Using Gear
No, not that gear. Please put the syringes away.
Most people leave gains on the table by not using lifting accessories. Accessories like weightlifting belts, straps, wrist wraps can take your workouts to the next level.
Not only do the training accessories help in better recruitment of the muscles, but they also reduce the probability of injuries when working with heavier weights. Leave lifting raw to the powerlifting pros and speed up your transformation by using lifting accessories.
7. Recovery? What’s That?
No matter how hard you work in the gym, you will not see results until you give your muscles ample time to recover after your workouts. Remember: you break down muscle tissues in the gym. They grow back bigger and stronger when you’re following a good nutrition and recovery program.
You should be sleeping anywhere between 7-8 hours every night for optimal recovery. Some fitness habits to speed up recovery include:
- Drinking at least a gallon of water every day.
- Eating a high-protein post-workout snack.
- Cooling-down after workouts.
- Self-myofascial release.
- Cold showers.
Are you a victim to any of these bad fitness habits? Let us know in the comments below. Also, be sure to follow Generation Iron on Facebook and Twitter.