As a personal trainer and coach in Liverpool Street, I pride myself on a high success rate with my clients. I have high number of positive testimonials, and my clients regularly reach their goals. But as any trainer will tell you, we still make fitness mistakes when it comes to our own training.
Personal trainers are only human, and we’re still prone to the pitfalls that plague many of our clients. Hopefully, sharing these mistakes will remind you to avoid them.
If you want to have better workouts, it’s important to perform a workout review. As the name would suggest, a workout review is when you look back at your training session and think about what you could have improved.
This is important if you’re a gym novice, but it’s also crucial if you’re experienced in the gym. When you’ve been training for a while, it’s even easier to get complacent!
While it’s important not to be paralysed by the need to make every part of your workout perfect, it is important to fine-tune things over time. Remember that we’re all constantly growing and evolving; that’s what the gym is all about.
Even Trainers Perform Workout Reviews
Even as a strength coach with over a decade of experience, I’m continuously thinking of ways that my training sessions could have been more efficient or effective. In each personal training session that I deliver, I only have a set period of time to provide the best stimulus for my client.
That makes it crucial that I cut out anything from the workout that isn’t moving them towards their training goals.
Floor exercises are a great way to challenge the core, shoulders, and hips. They can also be a great way to build tolerance for loading the wrists. This makes floor exercises a great option for a wide range of goals; whether you’re training to get up off the floor after a fall, get better at yoga, or try your hand at gymnastics. These exercises also featured heavily in my guide to surviving the zombie apocalypse!
By Logan Weaver on Unsplash
Some of these exercises, such as pushups and deadbugs, have been covered in great depth already. This post is aimed at building up the variety of exercises at your disposal. If you find a particular exercise here quite challenging, you can perform it on it’s own with a focus on truly mastering the technique. Alternatively, you can use these exercises in supersets and circuits as they tend to raise the heart rate.
They also force you to use the hips, trunk, and shoulders in tandem to maintain your position. Because you’re not laying on your back, these exercises also allow the shoulder blades to move freely. For these reasons, many strength coaches use them in blocks of general preparation work with their athletes.
If you want to skip the detail and just get an overview of the exercises, you can head over to this video.
Having a strong lower back always ranks somewhere on people’s list of gym goals. It may not be as important as their holiday or marathon goals, but lower back strength always comes up eventually.
Often, a new client mentions that their back occasionally feels weak, sore or tired. While back pain can be nuanced, there are simple steps we can take that can make a difference.
What a Strong Lower Back Could Mean for You
A strong lower back doesn’t just affect your gym workouts. It can affect your work, social life, leisure activities, and so much more. If you’ve ever lacked confidence in your back strength, then you can probably remember a time it held you back.
When I started training in kickboxing and weightlifting I was often disrupted by a sore lower back. I had my share of back injuries, and learned a lot of lessons about how to move and train properly.
This post won’t dive into specific back issues, but it will discuss some of the methods that have helped me and my clients feel better about our lower back strength.
If you’ve been training in gyms for a while, you might have seen a few people wearing weightlifting shoes. You’ll recognise them by their funky design and the fact they have a solid, wedge-like heel.
These heeled shoes are popular amongst Olympic weightlifters, powerlifters, Crossfitters, and other strength-focussed gym-goers.
With the increased popularity of these training methods in mainstream gyms, these shoes are becoming increasingly common. So much so that you might be tempted to buy your own! In this guide I’ll break down whether you should get your own weightlifting shoes, and when to use them.
It’s not always easy to find a personal trainer you match well with, but that shouldn’t stop you from getting fitness results.
Having a personal trainer is proven to improve training consistency and help you reach your fitness goals (for more on that, you should see what my past and current clients had to say about their training experience).
You may not be able to completely replace a professional personal trainer, but there are a number of PT habits you can copy to boost your own gym performance and results.
Just before the COVID lockdowns started, I weighed around 90kg and was 5 weeks out from a kickboxing fight. I really felt like I was in the best condition of my life in terms of strength, fitness, and health.
At the end of the last lockdown I weighed 107kg, was exhausted after 30 minutes of shadowboxing, and my calves/knees hurt just walking to work. I was keen on getting back to the gym, but also a little daunted by the challenge.
By Danielle Cerullo on Unsplash
I don’t tell this story often because I don’t want it to sound like some kind of horror story. I believe it’s totally normal for your relationship with fitness to change during a significant life event. Nonetheless I think this story holds some useful lessons for anyone thinking of going back to the gym after a long time off.
As a personal trainer, I always meet people looking to improve their bodyweight exercises. While a lot of people are working on getting their first pullup or pushup, the work is far from over once you reach that milestone – it’s time to make your bodyweight exercises harder.
By Ayo Ogunseinde on Unsplash
The post is for those of you looking to progress your bodyweight exercises to the next level. If this is you, well done! We focus so much on getting our first reps on these exercises, that it’s common to be unsure of what comes after that milestone. I often meet people who have been stuck doing the same number of reps on pushups and pullups for over a year, without being sure how to progress these bodyweight exercises.
To make further progress, we need to introduce some progressive overload into your bodyweight training. This essentially means making your bodyweight exercises harder. There are lots of options at your disposal to make bodyweight exercises harder, including:
Changing the tempo (speed) of the movement;
Adding pauses;
Altering the training parameters (sets, reps, rest periods, etc.)
However, I don’t want to focus on any of that. To keep things simple, I’m going to focus on one of the most straightforward ways of progressing pushups and pullups: adding weight. This may seem simple in theory, but I still see plenty of people making it more complicated than it needs to be. I’m hoping this post will work as a resource for you to add weight in the safest, simplest ways possible.
All across the fitness industry, you will hear the words "no excuses" shouted from the rooftops. You'll see these two famous words written everywhere from a personal trainer's topless selfie…
It’s possible for your training programme to be spread too thinly between opposing training goals (like trying to improve strength, gain muscle, and improve running all in one programme).
Alternatively, your training may be focussed, but your approach might be too broad. For example, you’re solely working on your strength (one focus), but you’re trying to squat and deadlift heavy within the same week which can be hard to maintain long-term. You could also be trying to fit movements like deadlifts and pullups together which compete by adding extra fatigue to your grip or other supporting muscle groups.
By Jesper Aggergaard on Unsplash
There will be clear signs if your training programme is spread too thinly in these ways – and soreness is only one of them. Here are some others.
