Carrying a Weight Plate Too Casually

We often listen to exercisers gripe that their backs hurt after they perform the bench press. Yet when we go to check out their technique, it looks impeccable. We’re baffled — until these people pop off the bench, slide the weight plates off the bar, and put them back on the weight tree. Ah ha! Mystery solved. It’s not the bench press or any other exercise that’s giving them an aching back; the way exercisers carry around those big, heavy weight plates is the culprit.

Carrying a weight plate the wrong way
Sometimes we see people carrying weight plates around the gym floor as if the plates were super-size Frisbees. Other lifters tuck plates under their arms as if they’re clutching a purse. Or they hold the plate on the edge of their fingertips with a straight arm and locked elbow, as if they’re carrying a bowling ball Carrying around a lot of weight with one hand tied behind your back may be the ultimate display of macho, but even if you’re a big, strapping fellow, this sort of behavior puts your body in a terribly unbalanced position because you’re adding all the weight only on one side of your body. Your elbows and shoulders bear more of the burden than they’re designed to handle. See photo A.

Carrying a weight plate the right way
Hold the plate close to your chest with both hands. Stand as close as you can to the bar, line up the hole in the plate with the bar, and then slide the plate on. Don’t just extend your arms out straight and toss the plate as if you’re performing some sort of ring-tossing circus act. When you pick up a plate off the floor or from a low rung on a weight tree, bend your knees as if you’re doing a squat, bring the weight in close to your chest, and stand up using your leg muscles, not your lower back. All this advice goes for lighter weights, too. See photo B.

Sitting Up Improperly from a Weight Bench

Liz was spotting a woman who was performing a textbook-perfect set of the dumbbell chest fly. The set was truly a thing of beauty —until right after her final repetition. Suddenly she extended her arms straight out, lowered the weights toward the floor, opened her hands, and let the weights roll off her palms. She then jerked herself upright and popped up off the bench. Overall, she managed to make about a half dozen mistakes on movements that weren’t even part of the actual exercise. Realize that you can’t let your guard down until you’ve safely gotten yourself out of the exercise position.

Sitting up the wrong way
In this blog, many exercises that you perform while lying on your back on the floor or on a weight bench are shown. When you sit up after doing these exercises, don’t jerk straight back up into a sitting position, especially if you’re holding weights. When you get up suddenly, you can adversely impact your blood pressure and experience a moment of dizziness. You want to avoid any type of sudden or jerky movement when you’re holding weight because the weight can create momentum and cause you to lose control over your movements.
Another no-no: bringing your arms straight out to the sides and dropping the weights, or twisting to either side to drop a weight. See photo A. You never want to drop weights. You always want to put weights down slowly and with control to avoid hurting yourself and others

Sitting up the right way
To protect your lower back when you get up off the floor, roll to the side and then use both arms to push up into a sitting position. Or you can hug one knee into your chest and gently rock yourself up. After performing an exercise involving dumbbells, such as the chest fly, bring the weights down into your chest, and then roll up. (When you begin the exercise, do the opposite: Bring the weights into your chest and rock yourself back on the bench.) See photo B.

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.