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10 Common Gym Exercises And How to Do Them Wrong
If you're the kind of regular gym visitor who really likes hanging out in the gym, but would really rather not see any physique or strength increases, today you're in luck.We spend A LOT of time in gyms and we see all kinds of people doing all kinds of wrong things, ensuring that their workout efforts are mostly in vain. And today we want to share some of their secrets.Ready? Here we go. 1. Standing Barbell Curl:Use your back and elbows to gain leverage. Seriously, watch some guys do standing curls and you'd think they're dancing the limbo. They're cocking their hips forward to get the bar moving and then quickly shifting their elbows directly under the bar to gain even more leverage. It's like they're trying to pass beneath the bar rather than lift it. And their biceps are strictly along for the ride. This is a good way to get little benefit from the exercise and maybe throw out your back.How to Do It Right: First of all (and this will be a recurring point), if you can't do the exercise correctly, you're trying to lift too much weight. Take some plates off the bar, Tarzan. Okay, now keep your hips stationary and your elbows firmly entrenched at your sides as you lift the bar. Make sure your back is straight. Lift the bar slowly. Picture a clock. If the bar starts at 9 o'clock, lift it to about 11 o'clock. You want to keep tension on the bicep. If you lift it all the way to 12 o'clock, you're resting at the top. Now lower the bar just as slowly. Don't lower it beyond 9 o'clock or the weight gets unsupported and you again risk injury. 2. Squats:End your squat high then harness momentum by bouncing out of it. Squats are the great equalizer. There's nothing as humbling as loading up the leg press machine with stacks of plates and then struggling with two 45-lb plates in the squat rack. Squats are also the source of great contention among gym rats. Many will tell you that parallel squats are bad for your knees, but we're here to tell you the opposite. If you end your squats too high (i.e. with your thighs not reaching parallel) the force of the barbell never transfers to your hips, meaning your knees are doing all the work.How to Do It Right: No one is impressed by the number of plates on the bar if you're doing quarter reps. Control the weight, move slow and easy. Going to parallel is not only safer on your knee joints, it engages more muscle fibers in your quads, hamstrings and glutes. Reach the bottom, pause, and rise up slowly. Employing a bounce at the bottom for momentum will, again, risk injury to your knees and your back as well. 3. Flat-Bench Dumbbell Flye: Tap the weights together at the top of each rep. Satisfying, isn't it? That little ding as you bring the dumbbells together over your head? Maybe it's because each time you do it, you're resting. You're removing the stress from your pectorals, allowing your chest to rest at the top instead of getting a maximal contraction. How to Do It Right: We're taught to quantify our workouts in terms of reps, but the real metric that matters is time under tension. With flyes, you need to raise the dumbbells to the equivalent of 11 o'clock and one o'clock, pause where you can still feel the effort in your pecs, and then lower them. Here again, don't overdo the depth on the negative end to a point where the weights are poorly supported, which opens the door to injury. 4. Bench Press:Arch your back and move your legs a lot. You would think, with all the attention people pay to bench presses, they'd do them with better form. But no, the mistakes are legion. As that last killer rep approaches, you see the butt rise up off the bench and the feet start moving. That guy's really working, right? Maybe, but none of that stuff is helping. In fact, he's wasting power and squandering leverage.How to Do It Right: When you prepare to bench press, drive your feet into the ground just like you would before a squat or deadlift. Anchor your glutes to the bench. Keep them like that and you’ll tighten your lower body while boosting stability and strength. While we're on the subject, keep your elbows close to your ribs as you press the weight up. This reduces the pressure on your shoulders and puts the load on your chest and triceps. 5. Dumbbell Lateral Raise: Swing the dumbbells all the way down in front of your hips and rock them back up. Lateral raises are meant to work a relatively small area, the middle deltoid head. So if you're hoisting 45-pound dumbbells, chances are you're cheating on your raises. Bringing the dumbbells all the way down to your sides between each repetition allows your muscles to rest at the bottom. If you bring the dumbbells down in front of your hips until they touch one another, you're extending further into the range where the middle delt isn't activated, and you're probably shifting your hips forward on the ascent to add some momentum to your raise.How to Do It Right: First of all, choose a more realistic weight and bring the dumbbells down to your sides. Hold them about six inches away from your sides, and then, without swaying or moving your body to help, lift the dumbbell out and up, only using your deltoid muscle to power the move. Bring the weights slowly and deliberately back down to your hips. 6. Bent-Over Dumbbell Row: Bring the dumbbell up by simply bending your elbow. Terrific! You've turned a shoulder exercise into a bicep exercise. Think about the action of your back muscles during a row. If they're stationary, if you can't feel tension in them, you're not working them. If you're bringing the dumbbell up to your flank by simply bending your elbow, you're basically calling on your biceps to do the majority of the work. Now, think about what happens to your back muscles when you shift your shoulders back and shoulder blades inward. That contraction is what you want. How to Do It Right: To engage your back in the exercise, you need to make sure your shoulder is moving along with your elbows. Establish this mind-muscle connection by visualizing your back muscles engaging on each repetition of a row, gliding inward toward your spine. Imagine you're trying to pinch a pencil between your shoulder blades. Once you start doing rows correctly, you'll soon be increasing the weight you can handle, while increasing the size of your lats and rhomboids. 7. Seated Cable Row: Lean forward and backward through each rep. You watch some people do cable rows and it looks like they're rowing sprints for Yale varsity crew. They're leaning as far forward as they can, then leaning excessively back the other way as they pull the handle toward their abdomen. You're not trying to beat Princeton. You're not trying to work your lower back and legs, either. The point of the seated cable row is to build strength and size in your upper back.How to Do It Right: To activate your upper back, you want to control the movement, staying upright throughout. As you bring the handle toward you, flex your upper back, which will pull back your shoulders. As you lower the weight, don't allow your upper body to follow the handle forward. Just let your shoulder blades shift outward and your elbows straighten. You should feel the tension in your lats, your rhomboids and to a lesser extent in your lower trapezius. 8. Dumbbell Lunge: Get your knee way out past your toes in the bottom position. You know you're working hard if you're getting super deep into each lunge and pushing your knee way out ahead of you. Right? Well, no. Actually you're taking too short a step forward into your lunge and then compensating by listing forward in an unsupported position. Along the way, you're subjecting your front knee to needless shearing forces and strain. Lunges are an excellent body-weight bearing exercise that emphasizes balance and posture, but not so much if you're in an ungainly position that you keep falling out of.How to Do It Right: Make sure you step out deeply enough and that you keep your hips shifted back. At the bottom of a lunge, your front knee should be in a 90-degree angle, and your back knee should be elevated an inch or two off of the floor. You should feel this in your quads, hamstrings and glutes. 9. Triceps Cable Press-Down: Lean over the bar as you push it down. Triceps cable press-downs are not a bodyweight bearing exercise. This is one we see all the time. People ambitiously popping the pin in under a huge stack of plates and then bearing down on the handle with all their weight. If you're leaning forward and shifting your shoulders over the handle as you finish each repetition, you're not letting your triceps take on the bulk of the workload. How to Do It Right: This is one exercise in which having access to a mirror really helps. You may think you're keeping your elbows motionless, but chances are they're revolving in little circles as you try to gain leverage. Lock your elbows in place at your sides and try to keep your spine as vertical as possible to isolate the tension on your tri's. 10. Seated Barbell Press: Slide forward so your lower back isn't in contact with the pad. This is a very common cheat. The seated barbell vertical press (or military press) is a high-volume exercise that isolates a small muscle group. Your delts. By sliding your lower back away from the pad behind you, you're trying to get leverage over the weight by engaging your upper pecs, essentially turning a vertical seated press into an incline press. Whenever you see some guy doing vertical presses with super-heavy dumbbells, this cheat is probably in play. How to Do It Right: Simple. Use lighter weights and keep your back pressed tight to the vertical seatback behind you. You'll start building those bowling ball delts you're seeking and your lower back -- no longer unsupported and subject to the risk of strain -- will thank you.The articles featured herein are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice. Specific medical advice should only be obtained from a licensed health care professional. No liability is assumed by ProSource for any information herein.
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KNOW Your BCAAs, GROW Like Never Before
If you follow enough workout warriors on social media, you’re probably familiar with a common genre — the video clip of someone customizing their own pre- or post-workout supplement formula. Some of these efforts are misguided, but others are genuinely enlightened, particularly when it comes to pre-workout formulations.In these short clips, you might see a suitably well-trained individual creating their own pre-workout formula from scratch or starting with a standard-issue pre-workout and augmenting it with extra ingredients, such as arginine-AKG, creatine monohydrate, beta alanine, glutamine, and/or BCAAs.There's a good reason for this. While many people believe that garden-variety pre-workout formulas contain all the necessary ingredients to support both training performance and recovery, the truth is a little more complex. Manufacturers will often tout a lengthy laundry list of ingredients in their pre-workout formulas, but then microdose these ingredients so meagerly that they offer no real performance benefit. Or they will simply omit some highly useful co-factors entirely. In fact, some of the category's biggest sellers contain little more than stimulant content in various forms. (For a true all-in-one pre-workout formula that contains individual performance co-factors in science-based dosages sufficient to facilitate enhanced power, endurance and intensity, look no further than BioQuest's Fusion Force.)One particular under-supplied ingredient in most pre-workout formulas is branched-chain amino acids or BCAAs. This is unfortunate because BCAAs not only provide a ready source of fuel your muscles can tap into to postpone fatigue and maintain work output, they also help support muscle recovery after high-intensity training. Powering Productivity Before, During and After Your WorkoutBCAAs -- the branched-chain amino acids leucine, isoleucine and valine -- are considered essential because, unlike non-essential amino acids, your body cannot make them. You need to get them from your diet. They are also unique in that they are metabolized directly by muscle tissue during high-impact exercise. Of the three BCAAs, leucine offers the most performance and recovery benefit.When you begin to exercise, your muscles tap into muscle glycogen (a stored form of carbohydrates) for fuel, but this stored energy doesn't last very long. When these are diminished, your muscles will turn to blood glucose to keep going. (This is where isoleucine and valine, which help support blood sugar levels, both play an important role.) Blood glucose is derived from carbohydrates, fat, and protein. Carbohydrates and fats fuel the majority of your energy needs at the outset of exercise, but as your exercise interval lengthens, your body will scavenge proteins from existing muscle tissue. BCAAs make up a great proportion of the total amino acid content in skeletal muscle and are readily catabolized during exercise. Indeed, BCAAs may provide as much as 20% of your body's energy needs in the course of your workout.When your high-intensity workout is completed, you've inflicted considerable damage to muscle tissue. This damage must be repaired and your body will endeavor to add more muscle mass to survive future bouts of exercise-induced stress. The availability of leucine is absolutely crucial during this post-exercise juncture, as it is the trigger for the protein synthesis that is the engine for muscle recovery and growth.Clearly then, BCAA supplementation -- especially leucine -- would appear to offer valuable benefits for highly active people. Science supports this notion. In a study published in the journal BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine in 2017, researchers sought to evaluate the effect of a 12-week leucine-rich amino acid supplementation in combination with moderate training. In the study, 48 healthy subjects exercised for 30 minutes three times per week and received either a leucine-rich amino acid supplementation or a placebo. Before and after supplementation, subjects performed an exhaustive eccentric exercise protocol. Maximal concentric strength and safety assessments were performed before exercise and after 3, 24, 48 and 72 hours.The researchers found that the supplementation with leucine resulted in reduced loss of strength at zero and 3 hours after downhill walking compared with the placebo. They concluded that the "principle findings show that leucine-rich amino acid supplementation can counteract the negative effects of eccentric exercise. The treatment resulted in a reduction of exercise-induced strength loss." (1 Reule CA, et al)BCAAs also offer a prominent benefit in the form of post-workout recovery. In another study, published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, highly trained resistance athletes were provided 20 grams of BCAAs per day for seven days before and four days after completing a damaging bout of exercise. The ratio of the provided BCAAs was 2:1:1 (leucine: isoleucine: valine).A number of variables were measured including changes in force production, markers of muscle damage in the blood, muscle soreness, vertical jump performance, and thigh and calf circumference. The damage bout caused significant changes in nearly all variables. In particular, changes in creatine kinase (a marker of damage found in the blood) were significantly improved when BCAAs were ingested when compared to placebo. In addition, the recovery of the ability to produce maximal force was also improved to a greater extent in the BCAA group. The authors of the study concluded that providing BCAAs before and after damaging exercise can reduce the recovery time. (2 Howatson, Hoad et al.) Supplementing with BCAAsWhen adding BCAAs to your supplement regimen, sufficient dosing is critically important. As we've said, most pre-workout formulas simply don't supply BCAAs in amounts that provide performance or recovery benefits. The solution to this problem is simple. Just add additional BCAAs to your pre-workout drink taken 30 to 45 minutes before training and then add some more to the water bottle or shake cup you take out onto the gym floor with you.Of course, proper sourcing of precious BCAAs is also important. ProSource has always led the way when it comes to ingredient purity, potency and power, and that is true for BCAAs as well.ProSource's Mega BCAA, available in both powder and capsule formats, contains vastly superior, premium-grade aminos, provided in the preferred ratio of 2:1:1 leucine, isoleucine and valine. And it provides them in an 8-gram per serving dosage designed to fully energize, protect and build muscle tissue. Like all ProSource sports nutrition supplements, Mega BCAA Powder and Capsules are made with the absolute highest quality ingredients available industry-wide to ensure maximum purity, potency and results!Scientific References1 Reule CA, Scholz C, Schoen C, et al. Reduced muscular fatigue after a 12-week leucine-rich amino acid supplementation combined with moderate training in elderly: a randomised, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial. BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine 2017.2 Howatson, G., M. Hoad, et al. (2012). "Exercise-induced muscle damage is reduced in resistance-trained males by branched chain amino acids: a randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled study." J Int Soc Sports Nutr 9(1): 20.Use as directed with a sensible nutrition and exercise program. Read and follow all product label instructions and warnings thoroughly before use. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.The articles featured herein are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice. Specific medical advice should only be obtained from a licensed health care professional. No liability is assumed by ProSource for any information herein.
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