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Quick Post: My Biggest Fitness Mistakes as a Personal Trainer

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.

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4 Tricks for Strength Training and Weight Loss

Many of my clients want to train for strength and weight loss simultaneously. Strength training has grown in popularity for its wide range of benefits, but for many people these benefits sit alongside the desire to become leaner.

I don’t talk about weight loss much as I think it is an over-emphasised aspect of getting fitter and healthier, but I think it’s worth discussing how to lose weight and get stronger at the same time as these are such common goals for the new clients I meet.

It can be challenging to get stronger and lose weight at the same time, although this depends on your approach to weight loss. These goals are not as closely aligned as strength training and muscle building, which I have discussed previously. Strength and weight loss do not have much in common in terms of the processes that occur in the body, and this means the steps we have to take in training are not complimentary.

Common mistakes when building strength and losing weight include:

Picture of a woman gripping a barbell and hinging over in a deadlift movement.
  • Pursuing overly restrictive diets that stifle recovery and do not provide adequate fuel for training.
  • Overemphasising high-intensity cardio that leaves less energy for strength training.
  • Thinking that weight training alone will burn enough calories to create a meaningful calorie deficit.

As with any attempt to address two goals at the same time, a delicate balance is needed. There are several options at your disposal.

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3 Tips to Build Strength and Muscle in One Programme

Many of my clients want to build strength and muscle at the same time. Strength training has grown in popularity for its wide range of benefits, but for many people this still doesn’t trump the appeal of changing their physique as well. It helps that building additional muscle tissue is also beneficial for everyone.

It helps that getting stronger and building muscle can be complimentary processes. This means that the two goals do not clash with each other as much as, say, getting stronger and losing weight.

That being said, gaining strength and muscle are not exactly the same process, as I have detailed with some analogies in the past. This means there is some potential for these training goals to clash if a programme isn’t balanced properly. Some common faults are:

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  • Too much hypertrophy work, which can lead to fatigue that hampers strength performance.
  • An overemphasis on strength work with long rest periods can take a lot of training time, leaving less time to work on volume.
  • Treating strength and muscle building training as completely separate blocks, which leads to too much time away from either adaptation.

Training to build strength and muscle at the same time is a delicate balance, and these tips will help you get it just right.

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4 Great Accessory Exercises for a Bigger Squat

Including the right squat accessory exercise can revolutionise your squat training. They can help you get a bigger squat whilst also broadening the focus of your training programme. They can also be used to vary your training if you’re getting bored!

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How to Choose the Right Squat Accessory Exercise

The right assistance exercise for your squat is one that allows you to continue training the squat pattern without detracting too much from your squat training by taking too much time or energy to perform. Depending on your programme, this might mean performing another variation of the squat or it might mean performing a completely distinct accessory exercise. Whichever you opt for, consistently completing your assistance exercises will reward you with a bigger squat long-term.

Image of me smiling and loading plates onto a barbell that is sitting in the squat rack.

The key to choosing the right assistance exercises for a bigger squat is to look at your weaknesses. If you’re constantly failing the squat in a particular part of the movement, you may wish to work on that position more. Feeling unbalanced in the squat? You may need to work on your weight distribution and technique. If you just want to add more volume to the legs without a tonne of extra systemic fatigue, you may opt for isolation exercises.

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How to Train Around Grip Strength Limitations

One of my favourite parts of training beginners is getting them strong enough that their grip strength becomes a limiting factor in compound lifts. This may seem like an odd boast, but let me explain.

As your skill, confidence and strength grows over the first couple of months of training, you will reach a point where the target muscle of an exercise can tolerate more work than your grip can. This is a great early milestone in training, but it can quickly become an obstacle.

When grip strength fails, people usually notice the following symptoms:

  • Unable to keep the hands closed around the bar/dumbbell;
  • Burning forearms;
  • Regularly needing to adjust the hands on the implement;
  • Unable to concentrate on the exercise for fear of dropping the bar/dumbbell.

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4-Question Workout Review for Better Workouts

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.

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One Mistake That’s Ruining Your Strength and Conditioning

Strength and conditioning has been a passion of mine for a long time. Since studying for my degree in strength and conditioning in 2011, I’ve helped people improve performance in skiing, kayaking, football, basketball, track sports, martial arts, and more.

Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that there’s a lack of good strength and conditioning guidance for anyone who isn’t already a professional athlete. There are plenty of cool strength and conditioning exercises on social media, but these are often lacking nuance. A lack of nuance can easily lead to training mistakes. One of the mistakes I see most often in strength and conditioning is in the way we apply the concept of training specificity.

While it makes sense for training to be specific to your chosen sport, many people pursue training specificity in ineffective or even detrimental ways.

Here are some of the common mistakes relating to training specificity, and how you can correct them.

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How to Plan Your Week for More Consistent Training

The weekly fitness plan is perhaps the most overlooked component in a consistent training routine. One of my top priorities with a new client is to get a sense of what an average week of their life looks like. Only once I understand that can I identify when they should train, how often, and what they should do.

I’ve created a step-by-step video describing how you can create your weekly fitness plan. You can watch this by scrolling to the bottom of the page now, or click this link. Just be sure to come back and finish the article for more reasons you should create your own weekly workout plan.

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Why Should You Write a Weekly Fitness Plan?

There are three main reasons why you should use your weekly plan to design your fitness routine. We’ll cover each one before we move on to the video guide.

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4 Reasons You Have Stubborn Muscle Groups

We all know the feeling of having stubborn muscle groups that don’t look the way we want them to. This is usually because that muscle group isn’t as big or defined as you would like to be, or it’s lacking strength.

After more than a decade of training people, I’ve run into countless variations of the stubborn muscle group. Calves, arms, butts, chests – you name a muscle group, I’ve helped someone who was disappointed with theirs.

A picture of Millhouse from the Simpsons as an adult, with the quote "Is it because of my small calves? They're the hardest place to add mass!"

I’ve identified 4 major causes of stubborn muscle groups. To be more precise, I’ve identified 4 behaviour categories that cause frustration with these areas of the body. Think of them as the zodiac signs of stubborn body parts. You might find that you identify with several of these, in which case you should work on addressing one at a time.

Let’s get to work on fixing these issues.

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