We have all seen the people at the gym trying to lift heavier every week, straining at the weights, veins popping, eyes bulging, and they never seem to make any progress.
Then there are the people that walk in, do their warm up, and make their workouts look as smooth as silk, and they’re done in half the time. How does that even happen?
I’m going to explain the right way to make sure you are progressing with what you are lifting, getting stronger each week, reducing the risk of injuries and ensuring you have that steady progress graph that you can feel a little smug about the next time you walk past someone heaving their way through their session.
There are FOUR key elements to safe lifting, and following these will help you prevent injury, but also ensure you are making gains faster than your gym buddies!
The first is to ensure you have the right POSTURE for your exercise. That means to have your body in the right ‘shape’ to perform that exercise. This may mean for some of you that you have to take a step back from the advances you thought you’d made to ensure you have the right building blocks to work with. A deadlift with poor starting posture will be ok for a while, until you stop making progress or your back is sore every week and you stop altogether. So go back and get it checked, use a mirror or invest in a quality coach to help you get the right starting points
Are we ready to add lots of weight yet? No, we’re not. Sit down, buckle up and be patient, we’re getting there!
Second point is to ensure that your RANGE OF MOTION is ok. Being able to squat to thighs parallel is going to get you better results with 20kgs on the bar, than a squat with 40kgs on the bar that only gets to a third of the depth. Your muscles just won’t be working through the full range of their potential motion that they could, and you’ll be missing out on lots of the benefits.
Point three is to ensure that your STABILITY is on point. There are lots of people who can get the weight off the floor in a deadlift, and they DO get through the range of motion, but they look like a wobbly tower all the way up and down, as they haven’t got their cues right on which muscles to switch on before they start. It’s no good switching them on half way through a lift and hoping you’ll end up in the right spot, that’s just guessing. It’s a bit like being a Formula One driver and starting the race with your foot flat on the throttle and waiting for the car to get to 300kmh before putting hands on the steering wheel. You have to make sure you’re ‘driving’ the exercise, not the exercise telling you how it’s going to work!
The final point is LOAD, and this is where most young bucks get it wrong. They go for the heavy load five minutes after they have started training and even though they may get lucky and get a few weeks in before they get injured or stop being able to lift heavier, ultimately they need to have progressed through POSTURE, STABILITY, RANGE OF MOTION before they even consider the load.
At U Can 2 Weight Loss & Fitness, quite often the progression in our PT programs for strength may only see a 2-3 kg increase in weight lifted over the course of a week or two, with maybe only an extra rep or set in there. Slowly does it, consolidate your gains each training session and build on what your body is learning how to do.
And THAT is how you learn to lift heavy!