How to Row Properly?

If you sit hunched over in a chair most of the day, you’re a good candidate for goofing up the seated cable row.

Rowing the wrong way
One common mistake found in rowing is rounding your back or allowing your shoulders and neck to droop forward. This slumped posture puts your neck and lower back in a pressure cooker. Another problem: leaning way back like someone involved in a game of tug of war. See photo A. Rowing with poor posture reinforces bad postural habits. Rather than becoming more fit, you’re risking back injury and practicing bad posture. What you train is what you get, according to specificity of training. Train with good posture to develop good posture.

Rowing the right way
Sit up tall with your abdominals pulled in. Your upper body, from the top of your head to your belly button, should be perpendicular to the floor. Bend your knees as much as you need to in order to maintain this posture. Allow your arms to stretch fully out in front of you without losing that perpendicular posture. Then when you pull the bar toward your chest, sit up even taller and bring your hands into your body, just below your chest. Squeeze your shoulder blades together as you pull, and drive your elbows straight back behind you. See photo B.

How to Use leg curl machine properly?

The leg curl, is the most popular hamstring (rear thigh) exercise; unfortunately, performing this exercise incorrectly is also quite popular. In general, you don’t want to allow your butt to stick up in the air as you exercise (with the exception of the downward-facing dog exercise in yoga). When you’re doing an exercise such as the push-up or plank, if your butt is in the air, it means that you’re relying more on your legs instead of your abdominals to stabilize your torso. In the case of certain machine exercises, sticking your butt up in the air means you’re not isolating the correct muscle group.

Using the leg curl machine the wrong way
Watch people use the leg curl machine and you’ll see that as they kick their legs toward their butt, their hips lift off the support pad, and their butt sticks up about 2 inches. This mistake is subtle, but it’s a sneaky way of taking work away from your hamstrings and transferring the effort to your hip muscles, allowing the hamstrings to avoid doing the work that they need to do to get stronger. See photo A

Using the leg curl machine the right way
To prevent your hips from popping off the pad, raise your upper thighs just a hair off the pad before you bend your knees for the kick upward. In this position, you feel your hamstrings working a lot harder. See photo B

How to Pull down a bar properly?

Pulling a bar down to your chest isn’t as simple as it may appear. To give your back muscles a workout and to protect yourself from injury, you need to make sure that the bar travels in a specific path.

Pulling down a bar the right way
Here are tips for performing a perfect lat pulldown. Choose a weight that’s challenging but not so heavy that you feel like you’re dangling off the end of a helicopter ladder. Sit down — taking the bar with you — and wedge your thighs under the thigh bar. Now lean just a few inches backward and keep your abdominal muscles pulled in to support your lower back. Pull the bar toward the top of your chest, lifting your chest to meet the bar. Take your time so that the bar remains level throughout the movement. Don’t sway back and forth: Rock and roll is dead here. When you’ve completed your set, stand up and gently deposit the bar back where it belongs. If you open your hands and let the weight plates come crashing down, you’ll startle everyone else in the weight room and you may damage the equipment. The exercise isn’t finished until you’ve completely lowered the weight stack with control. See photo B.

Pulling down a bar the wrong way
One common mistake — a mistake that places your shoulder joint and muscles in jeopardy — is pulling the bar straight down toward your lap rather than toward your chest. A second error occurs when you pull the bar down unevenly — one end of the bar may be 6 inches lower than the other. But perhaps our biggest pet peeve is leaning way back as you pull the bar down and then rocking forward as the bar travels upward. Generating this type of momentum helps you move a lot of weight, because you’re using your body weight instead of your muscles to help you pull down the bar. Because you’re not using your muscles to move the bar, this “trick” doesn’t improve your back strength. See photo A.

How to Lower Your Arms Properly?

We hate to pick on chest exercises again, but they’re often the victims of multiple mistakes.

Lowering your arms the wrong way
When doing chest exercises, some people drop their elbows so low that they practically touch the floor. The resulting stretch in your chest muscles may feel good, but at this point, your chest muscles and your shoulder ligaments are in danger of snapping, much like a rubber band that’s pulled too far. Also, when you lower your arms too far, you shove the head of your big arm bone — the humerus — way up into your shoulder socket. The rotator cuff muscles and nearby ligaments and tendons must twist themselves in unspeakable ways to accommodate this unnatural position. You may not feel pain immediately, but sooner or later, all this twisting may catch up to you and result in shoulder pain and injury to your shoulder joints. See photo A.

Lowering your arms the right way
When you perform the dumbbell chest press, bench press, or chest fly, stop lowering your arms when your elbows are slightly below chest level. Depending on the build of your body, the bar may touch your chest on the bench press. See photo B.

How to Arch Your Back?

In general, you don’t want to over arch your lower back during any strength training exercise. Your lower back already has a natural curve. Over-arching creates tremendous pressure to the discs in the lower back and creates a high risk of injury. In particular, you don’t want to arch your back when you do the bench press. Note that when you do a back extension exercise, the curvature of the back should be distributed along the entire length of your spine rather than focused in the lower back.

Bench-pressing the wrong way
Some weight lifters think that anything they do to pile on poundage — including arching their back and squirming around — is fair game. In reality, how much weight you hoist above your chest isn’t necessarily related to how strong your chest muscles are. When you arch your back, you simply increase your mechanical advantage (and your injury risk); more muscles pitch in to move the bar upward. We know one guy who convinced himself that arching was an essential part of the bench press. We produced several anatomy textbooks before we convinced him that we hadn’t fabricated this bit of information.

Bench-pressing the right way
Keep your back in contact with the bench throughout the exercise. You don’t need to force your back into an unnaturally flat position — it’s okay to have a small, natural arch under your lower back. If you can’t plant your feet flat on the floor because the bench is too high, place your feet on the bench.

Squatting mistakes

The squat strengthens virtually every muscle in your lower body: your butt, front thighs, rear thighs, and lower back. The squat even improves your sense of balance. That’s good for a move that essentially mimics getting in and out of a chair. But if you don’t do this exercise correctly — and many people don’t — you’re asking for an injury.

Squatting incorrectly
We know one guy who spread his legs practically into the splits and lowered his butt all the way to the floor when squatting. Then he’d pop back up into a standing position so forcefully that he was close to being airborne. After a few months, this guy began showing up at the gym with ace bandages wrapped around his knees. Small wonder! When you do squats with such incorrect form, it’s easy to injure your knees. Another common error is leaning too far forward and letting your knees shoot out past your toes. Two other problems: dropping your knees inward or letting them bow to the outside. These mistakes put incredible pressure on the delicate tendons, ligaments, and cartilage that hold the knee in place and lead to knee injuries. See photo A of Figure.

Squatting properly
Start with your feet hip-width apart and point your toes straight ahead or angled slightly outward — whichever foot position is more comfortable and allows your knees to travel over your feet. As you squat down, your knees should travel in a straight line, in the direction that your toes are pointed. Never squat so low that your thighs are lower than parallel to the ground. When you stand up, press through your heels, and finish with your legs straight but relaxed. Snapping your knees places pressure on your knees and sends your lower back into an extreme arch. See photo B of Figure. Practice doing the squat sideways in front of a mirror so you can see your form by turning your head. Alternatively, you can ask a friend or spotting partner to watch and correct you, or work with a personal trainer. Don’t add weight to your squat until you’re positive that you can do the movement properly. Always check and make sure that your knees travel in the same direction as your toes.

Cheating Your Abs

To listen to abdominal gadget infomercials, you’d think that performing an abdominal crunch correctly without some sort of machinery was impossible. The truth: You’re perfectly capable of crunching correctly without any equipment. But first, you must realize the common mistakes of the crunch to know how to do the exercise properly.

Crunching incorrectly
Many people complain that crunches cause neck pain. They do — but only if you yank your head and neck instead of lifting your torso by the power of your abdominals. Another mistake is lifting your torso straight off the floor, rather than curling it upward. How do you know whether you’re curling or just lifting? Do the basic crunch and freeze at the top of the movement. Your torso should be in a slightly rounded, almost Cshaped position. A third crunch error: forgetting to breathe.

Crunching properly
To avoid jerking your neck, place your fingertips and thumbs behind your head and don’t lace your fingers together. Hold your elbows out wide and keep your shoulders relaxed. Your arm placement is correct if you can barely see the points of your elbows out of the corners of your eyes. As you curl up, keep your head, neck, and arms frozen in position. When you curl the right way, your head, neck, and lower back feel nearly weightless. Finally, breathe correctly. As you lift your torso, exhale forcefully through your mouth; as you lower, inhale through your nose.

Active Isolated (AI) Stretching

What it is: Active isolated (AI) stretching involves tightening the muscle opposite to the one that you’re planning to stretch and then stretching the target muscle for two seconds. You repeat this process 8 to 12 times before going on to the next stretch. By stretching for such a brief period of time, you don’t give the muscle enough time to trigger its stretch reflex. What’s the purpose of tightening the muscle opposite the one you’re stretching?
When a muscle tightens, the opposing muscle has no choice but to relax. Although Active isolated stretching has been around since the 1950s, it’s just now gaining popularity — largely through the efforts of father-and-son physiologist team Phil and Jim Wharton, authors of The Whartons’ Book of Stretching (Times Books). Many sports teams and elite athletes, including one of the world’s fastest humans — sprinter and Olympic gold medalist, Michael Johnson — also favor the AI method. Researchers are currently studying this method and may soon offer more insight into its benefits.
AI stretching has its advantages:

• Many AI stretching exercises do a good job of isolating one muscle group at a time. For example, with an AI stretch, you can stretch the hamstrings without involving the lower back and hip muscles.
• If you’re particularly weak in one area or are rehabilitating a muscle from injury, the tightening may help strengthen that muscle.
• Many people find AI stretches less painful than traditional stretches.

This method of stretching also has disadvantages:

• The technique is harder to master than traditional stretching, and some of the positions are difficult to get into.
• AI stretching is time consuming. You need about 20 minutes to stretch your entire body, whereas you can do an adequate traditional stretch routine in 5 to 10 minutes.

Sample AI Stretch (see Figure): This move stretches your calf muscles.
Hold one end of a belt or towel in each hand. Sit on the floor, and lift your left leg a few inches off the floor, positioning your right leg in the most comfortable position. Loop the center of the belt around the instep of your left foot. Point your toes away from you to tighten your calf muscles and then pull your toes back to stretch your calf muscles. Hold the position for two seconds. Repeat 8 to 12 times and then stretch your right calf.

Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF)

What it is: The term Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation sounds like some high-tech, life-saving medical procedure used by doctors on “ER,” but really, it’s a simple method of stretching. You get into a stretch position, tighten a muscle for about 6 seconds, allow it to relax, and then hold a static stretch for 10 to 30 seconds. In theory, when the muscle is stimulated by contracting, more of the muscle fibers are triggered to relax. Some PNF stretches work best with the assistance of another person; others you can perform yourself. The best way to be taught PNF stretches is from a trainer who is familiar with the technique.
Check out these pros to PNF stretching:

• Many studies, including some referenced by the ACSM, show that PNF stretching is a good way to increase your flexibility.
• The tightening part helps strengthen the muscle being stretched. This is especially true if the muscle is injured and you can’t do the bending and straightening necessary to perform strength-training exercises.
• Some studies have found that PNF stretching increases blood flow into joints and muscles, especially if they’ve experienced a recent injury.
• PNF teaches you about your muscles. If you’re doing a PNF hamstring stretch, you need to know where your hamstring is and how it feels to tighten this muscle. This knowledge also comes in handy when you perform weight training exercises.

The cons of this type of stretching are

• Many people find PNF stretching uncomfortable or even painful.
• You need extra motivation to tighten a muscle as hard as you can for six seconds. Not everyone has the strength or the patience for this.
• If you do PNF stretches with a partner, your buddy may be overenthusiastic and try to force the stretch beyond your capabilities, and then snap! Pay attention so that this doesn’t happen.
• Avoid PNF stretches if you have high blood pressure, because the stretches may result in sharp, sudden increases in blood pressure.

Sample PNF Stretch (see Figure): This PNF stretch loosens up your hamstrings. Lie on your back with your left knee bent and left foot flat on the floor. Have your partner kneel on one knee in front of your feet. Raise your right leg, and place the back of your heel on top of your partner’s shoulder. Have your partner place one hand on your thigh, just above your knee, and the other hand on top of your shin. Forcefully press your heel down into your partner’s shoulder, and concentrate on tightening your hamstring as much as possible for six seconds.

Relax the muscle, and have your partner gently push your leg up and back without allowing the knee to bend. Hold the stretch for 10 to 30 seconds and repeat the stretch four times. Switch legs. To do the previous stretch without a partner, wrap a towel or stretching strap around your ankle or the back of your calf, and then pull your leg toward you as you tighten your hamstring and press it downward.

Stretching with Assistance

What it is: Assisted stretching is a traditional-type stretch that requires a partner. Your partner helps you into position and then gently helps you stretch further than you can by yourself. As with traditional, or static, stretching, you hold the position for 10 to 30 seconds without bouncing. The best way to figure out how to perform assisted stretches is from an experienced fitness trainer. While the ACSM’s guidelines don’t offer strategies for this type of stretching, the organization does reference it as promising and possibly effective.
The pros of assisted stretching are as follows:

• Having someone else do a lot of the work for you is relaxing. This technique is particularly valuable for a tight muscle that you have trouble stretching yourself.
• If have trouble mastering some of the common stretching positions, assisted stretching helps you understand the techniques while you develop enough flexibility to do them more comfortably on your own.
• A partner tends to push you a bit further than you can push yourself. Assisted stretching also comes with its cons:
• If you don’t have a partner, you’re out of luck (although some assisted stretches can be mimicked by using a towel or stretching strap).
• If your partner overstretches you, you may end up injured.
• Assisted stretching requires less muscle awareness than the other techniques, so you may not gain much from doing it.

Sample assisted stretch : This stretch focuses on your lower back and butt. Lie on the floor with your partner standing in front of your feet; relax your arms at your sides, and keep your head on the floor. Lift your legs, and bend your knees into your chest. Have your partner place her palms on your thighs and gently press down and in so your knees move even closer to your chest. As you hold this position, you should feel the stretch spread from your butt into your lower back.

Celebrating Traditions: Traditional Stretching

What it is: You hold each stretch for 10 to 30 seconds without bouncing. (Traditional stretching, also called static stretching, holds your body still.) As you hold the position, you feel a pull that spreads up and down the length of the muscle. Traditional stretching is the method performed at the end of many exercise classes and in exercise videos. While it may not achieve as much increase in flexibility as some of the other methods, it’s very safe, easy to understand, and has a low risk of injury.
Traditional stretching has some definite advantages:

• Almost anyone can perform some static stretches; you can easily modify the position to suit your level of flexibility.
• Many people find this method of stretching a good way to relax and to cool down after a workout.
• If you perform traditional stretches at least three days a week, you’ll probably notice an increase in flexibility after a few weeks.

On the other hand, some cons coincide with traditional stretching:

• If you’re inflexible, this type of stretching may be far from relaxing. In fact, it may be so uncomfortable that you end up skipping your stretches altogether.
• Separating one muscle group from another with traditional stretches is difficult; you often are forced to stretch several different muscle groups at once. This situation is a problem if one of the muscles being stretched is tighter than the others.

Contrary to popular belief, you should never perform traditional stretching before you warm up. Stretching in and of itself doesn’t constitute a warm-up. See the sidebar, “Stretching guidelines,” to find out what constitutes a proper warm-up.
If you’re a stretching neophyte, start with 10 seconds of stretching and gradually work your way up to a full 30 seconds. Don’t bounce. Jerky movements may actually make you tighter. Get in the proper stretching position slowly and smoothly and then stay there. After you’ve held the stretch for a few seconds, slowly stretch a bit further.
Hold each of the following positions for 10 to 30 seconds.

• Quadriceps (front thigh): Lie on your left side with your legs out straight and your head resting on your outstretched arm. Bend your right knee so your heel is close to your butt, and grab your ankle or toes with your right hand. Pull your heel back and toward your butt, taking care to keep your hips stacked directly on top of one another. Try to keep your knees together, not separated. Don’t arch your back or allow your butt to stick out. Use the image of trying to press your pocket forward and flat. After you stretch your right quadriceps, turn over (to lie on your right side) and stretch your left.
• Hamstrings (rear thigh): Lie on your back with your left knee bent and your left foot flat on the floor. Straighten your right leg out in front of you along the floor, and flex your toes toward yourself. Slowly raise your right leg off the floor as high as you can without allowing your back or butt to lift up. As you hold this position, you feel a stretch through the back of your thigh. Clasp your hands around your thigh above your knee or use a stretching strap with loops to help raise your leg. (Using your hands or a stretching strap to help is an especially good idea if you’re not very flexible.) Lower your leg slowly and repeat the stretch with your left leg. Before you hold the stretch, you can use the strap to lower and lift your leg and explore your active range of motion. Be sure to relax your thighs and use the strap for support to maximize your stretch
• The pretzel stretch (butt, lower back, and outer thigh): Lie on your back and bend your knees. Lift your legs up so that your knees are directly over your hips and your calves are parallel to the floor. Cross your left ankle over the front of your right thigh. Clasp both hands around the back of your right thigh and pull back with gentle, steady pressure. Keep your butt in contact with the floor. Don’t round hips up and off the floor. As you hold this position, you should feel the stretch spread through your left buttock and outer hip and through the center of your lower back. Repeat this stretch with your right ankle over the front of your left thigh.
• Reach up (entire upper body and lower back): Sit up tall either cross-legged on the floor or in a chair. Make a loose fist with your hands, and raise your arms directly over your shoulders. Lengthen your right arm upward, as if you’re trying to touch an object above you that’s just out of reach. Hold this position for two to four slow counts. Without relaxing your right arm, stretch your left arm upward. Sit up tall and keep your shoulders relaxed as you alternate stretching each arm upward five times. Try to reach a little higher each time — without hunching your shoulders up to your ears. You should feel this stretch throughout the length of your spine, in the “wings” of your upper back, and in your shoulders and arms.
• Hand clasp (chest, shoulders, and arms): Sit up tall either on a chair or cross-legged on the floor. Lean a few inches forward from your hips and clasp your hands behind your back. Drop your shoulders and shoulder blades downward as you lengthen your arms out behind you. You should feel the stretch across the top of your chest, in your shoulders, and along the length of your arms. If you don’t have enough flexibility to clasp your hands together, hold an end of a towel in each hand.