By Tom Bonanti
Besides being fun and essential to your health, there is a science to working out. With some planning, a little skill and concentration – and some good old fashioned sweat – you can get one hell of a great workout in less than an hour. The trouble is that most guys fall into ruts by wasting time. Try leaving your cell phone and iPad in the car. Conduct business and chart your social calendar when you get back there. Stay focused on what you wish to accomplish during your workout and try to ignore other distracting stimuli. Save the gossip for the juice bar or the water cooler at work. You can cruise the parking lot, steam room and internet after you’ve performed your sets in the gym.
There are also other ways to waste time in the gym. Certain commonly used exercises and techniques are ineffective and just plain unsafe. Here is my list of some time-consuming mistakes and bad habits to avoid in the gym. Let me share just a few of them and save you not only time, but also injury as well.
- Jerking heavy weights on the leg extension machine in an attempt to blast your quadriceps (the muscles on the front of your thighs) is a recipe for a knee disaster. Besides straining knee ligaments, this exercise can over-develop your quads causing your hamstrings (the muscles on the backs of your thighs) to become excessively tight and inflexible. Tight hams in turn can cause low back pain and contribute to injuries. Avoid all this lower body “drama” by sticking with squats, presses, and lunges.
- I’ve said this before: Any exercise where you push or pull a bar that’s positioned behind the neck can damage the rotator cuff muscles that attach your humerus (arm) to your scapula (shoulder). Once you strain or sprain these muscles, you can expect a royal pain in your neck or back. When you do wide grip lat pull downs or barbell or dumbbell shoulder presses, sit up straight, point your chest outward and pull or press the weight in front of you.
- Doing cardio can be a boring waste of time, especially if you set your cardio machine too slow each and every workout. Actually varying your pace and intensity during your hour or so of cardio is a more successful fat-loss strategy. The best way to burn calories is by mixing fast and slow speeds.
This is also the best way to address the body’s different energy systems and muscle groups.
- Sit-ups are as useless and ineffective as a high school phys. ed. teacher. Locking your feet under a rack or bench and rolling up on your lower back as you pull for dear life on your seven cervical vertebrae will only give you a sore back. Instead, you must do crunches. Keep your feet flat on the floor or slightly elevate your legs over an exercise ball to stabilize your hips. Extend your arms and crunch your torso, bringing your elbows to your knees. You can feel the burning in your abs already!
- When you go to the gym, your main goal is to lift weights, so for goodness sake, use a weight that’s heavy enough so that your muscles feel worked by the end of a set of eight to 12 reps. Pyramid your weights up with each set, but be careful to maintain good form with each rep.
For more tips on how to maximize your time in the gym, please contact TrainerTomB@aol.com
Tom Bonanti is a certified personal trainer and owner of Pump’n Inc gym at 1271 NE 9th Ave., Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Email: TrainerTomB@aol.com Facebook: TrainerTomB. www.pumpnincgym.com