#127: 7 Things You Might Be Doing Wrong While Strength Training (which will hold you back!)

Full show notes here >>

Not seeing the results you want from strength training?

It might be something you're doing during your training session that's slowing down your progress in gaining strength and building muscle.

I’m sharing seven mistakes I see all the time, why they matter, and how to fix them:

1. Not resting long enough
2. Poor form
3. Not controlling the eccentric
4. Mini-rests between reps
5. Combining exercises
6. Not tracking
7. Lack of stability

If you’re lifting but not seeing visible changes, or want to get the most out of the time you're spending - these training tweaks could be the key.

Enjoy the show!

Resources mentioned: 

• Download the free strength training tracker > 
• Join my Learn to Lift program >
• Join the Lift-Off! Challenge waitlist >

Transcript

#127: Training mistakes holding you back

[00:00:00] Welcome to 40+ Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, your host, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach, helping women in midlife to get started. Strength training, to build muscle, lose fat, get more toned, stay strong. And age strong. And today is part two of a three part series and we are gonna be talking about training habits that might be holding you back.

So if you are working with weights, but you feel like I'm not really getting the results that I think I should be getting, then maybe one of these seven things is something you should be looking at and tweaking. And these seven things come from both my experience coaching women and checking a lot of form videos from my members, and also seeing the way that people are behaving at the gym.

I belong to three different gyms, or I train at three different gyms. [00:01:00] Two I belong to and one my boyfriend belongs to. So I get to see a lot of different ways that people are training and these aren't mistakes that only women make. Okay, so, so I wanna be clear, these are general mistakes that people make that definitely hold you back in your getting results.

Okay, so seven of these. The first one is not resting long enough or resting at all between sets. So the thing is that I know we have spent our lives doing exercise where we should be raising our heart rate. We wanna burn as many calories as we possibly can, and oh my God, it is like a culture shock when you start strength training because.

Your sports watch is going to tell you that you are burning like less than half the calories that you've been doing in your group fitness classes, and your heart rate is down there like lower [00:02:00] potentially than when you go for a walk, and it seems like. How can this be at all effective when you have those kinds of messages coming from your sports watch?

And the thing is that strength training is a totally different animal, and you've got to keep that in mind. . 

So resting is definitely part of the way of doing it correctly. And if you train in a weight room, and I know that so, so many women start at home, including in my programs, and the majority are training at home.

But if you were in a weight room, weight room or you stop by a weight room, you'll see that people are like sitting on the machines for most of the time. And that is because they are taking their rests between sets Now. Some of them are a little bit going very far in taking really long rests because that's cool on social media right now.

But for sure you should be taking like one to three minute recovery period [00:03:00] between sets before you do another set of the same exercise again. And that allows your body to recover so you can go hard again. So you don't wanna be jumping rope between sets or doing burpees or whatever, doing some kind of box jumping training.

You wanna just relax. And a lot of people sit on the equipment. I personally like to do some slow pacing back and forth 'cause I feel like. When I get on the equipment, then I'm like, it's go time. You know? So that's my signal to my body that now you're gonna work. And when I get away from the equipment.

It's my signal that, okay, now I'm not working and then I get kind of psyched up when I get back on the equipment and pick up the dumbbells again. So, but be sure to take that break between sets and of course, you know, some of you, and I definitely encourage it, do super setting. So that means that to save time.

You'll work, um, [00:04:00] exercises in pairs. Now, this is not combining exercises. This is working, doing them in pairs, and the best way to pair them is, uh, antagonist pairs, which means that there are two muscles that. Make opposite movements. So example, your biceps and your triceps. One of them bends your arm, the other one straightens your arm.

So when you're working on your biceps, your triceps are getting a break. When you're working on your triceps, your biceps are getting a break. So you can superset them and you can do the superset and then take the break. And then another way to super set is, for example, do an upper body exercise and a lower body exercise and take a break between the two of them.

But um, so lately I've been. Okay, doing super setting of shoulder presses and Bulgarian split squats, and I have to say, Bulgarian split squats get me out of breath so I'm not able to straight go into shoulder press from the Bulgarian [00:05:00] split squats. So I generally super set it. So I do the shoulder press first, then I do the Bulgarian, and then I take my.

Two to three minute break before I do the superset again. So with super sets, yes, you'll take a shorter break between the two exercises, but then once you've done the superset, take a proper break before doing the superset again. So just a little detail there.

And the second thing is that, and I see it so much, is that you would get poor form because you're trying to lift heavier. And I know this message, you know, you need to lift heavy, you need to progressively overload. And then you may start feeling pressure that, oh my God, I haven't like increased my weights in a long time.

I need to be increasing them at regular intervals. Or maybe when you first started out, you were able to increase weights quite quickly [00:06:00] because you were getting strong very quickly, and then that sort of started to slow down, that increase in strength and you're feeling like, oh my God, I should be increasing weights at the same rate as I was before.

No. So you will, gain strength, and be able to increase your weights at different rates at different points in your strength training career. And also, it can depend a lot on what exercise you're doing. It can depend on what's going on with the rest of your life. Are you recovering well?

Are you in a stressful time of life? So there are many reasons why, it's not just this linear progression, so please don't stress if you are not having this kind of linear progression.

And so what I see is that people want to lift heavier, they pick up the next set of weights, and then their form just goes to crap.

You know, they're either. Um, [00:07:00] they're using momentum to get the weights up or just in general? Oh, some of the bicep curls that I've been seeing lately are like, oh my God, take a video of yourself and you would, you would see it right away. So please, before you go up to the next weight, a really good. Little thing to do to help yourself is to take a video of yourself doing that exercise and just make sure that your form is holding together.

And I think that a good way of thinking about it is that your first rep and your last rep, the form should look the same. Your last rep may be slower, right? Because you're getting closer to failure. You'll have that involuntary slowdown. The form should look the same. So I always love to use the bicep curls.

Well, let's use, let's use a, a split squat as an example. So you should be going down just as far as you were before, right? It shouldn't [00:08:00] be that, oh, you know, it's this tiny curtsy on the last rep. No, the first rep should go down full range of motion, and the last rep should go down full range of motion.

And if you're able to do that great form for your whole set. So if your rep range is, let's say it's um, eight to 12, so you're able to do 12 reps with good form in all three of your sets or two of your sets, whatever it is, your set number is. And you're able to do that for two training sessions in a row, then I think that is a really good rule of thumb that you're probably ready to go up in weights.

Okay. But please. Be careful of the form and don't let it, you know, fall apart. You're not doing yourself any favors. You know your muscles. They don't know that, hey, Lin's lifting, you know, 15 kilos. What your muscle [00:09:00] knows is I'm feeling a lot of tension and if I am holding a 15 kilo. Weight or a 12 kilo weight.

And if you know, if I'm cheating by having my form go to crap, I'm not actually stimulating my muscle anymore. And in fact, by kind of wrecking the form, I may be stimulating that muscle less because. Exercise is just not being done correctly, and I may be opening myself up to an increased risk of injury.

So please watch the form. Don't be in too much of a rush to progressively overload. Do it as you get stronger. The point is just that you don't wanna be like working with the same weights week in, week out, month in, month out, because you're not gonna get any progress that way. But watch out for the form.

So mistake number three is not controlling the [00:10:00] eccentric. So the eccentric is when you are kind of letting the weight down. So if you imagine in your bicep curl. Your arms are straight. You do the curl, that's the concentric part of it. And then you've got, of course, straighten your arms again before you can do the next bicep curl.

So you don't wanna just let the weight, you know, control how fast your arms straightens. You don't wanna let gravity just pull it down. You wanna control it. But you don't need to make it a super, super slow eccentric. Some fitness influencers, you'll see it online that they'll be like, oh, you need to do really slow eccentrics.

No, you don't. You just need to control the eccentric so that you don't just let it go. Okay?

So the concentric should be the more explosive part of the motion, right? When you're doing the bicep curl and then the [00:11:00] eccentric, when you're straightening your arm, again, it is controlled. It can go a little bit slower. And by the way, the concentrate, even though it's quote unquote explosive part of the movement, it's not necessarily gonna be fast because as you lift heavy, like you just can't do it super fast.

And as I mentioned earlier, it will actually get slower. Your centric, um, mo part of the movement. When you get closer to failure, towards the end of your set, it will, you'll have the involuntary slowdown. Now very much related to this is number four mistake, which is to let the weights hit the weight stack.

So let's say you are doing, this is where I probably see it the most, where? Where people are doing leg extensions on the leg extension machine. And they straighten their [00:12:00] legs, and then they just kind of let the weights drop and down and then they do it again, and then they kind of let the weights drop.

No, you watch the weight stack as you're sitting there straightening your legs and watch the weights go up as your knees extend. And then as you start to let your legs bend again, the eccentric part of it. Then you watch the stack go back down and it can get very, very close, but it shouldn't touch the weight stack.

Then you go again, and then you let it slowly come down. I mean, it doesn't need to be too slow. It just needs to be controlled. If you get my point, same thing if you're doing lateral pull downs. You know, you pull down and then you let the weights, you know, you, you control the, your arms straightening back above your head, or, well, yeah, I guess they're above your [00:13:00] head, but not directly above your head.

Well, you know what I mean?

And the thing is that if you allow the weights to hit the weight stack, or like in number three where you're not controlling the eccentric and you, you kind of just let the weights fall and then you kind of regroup and do your next rep, you are breaking. Tension. This is a term coined by Chris Beardsley, who's one of the researchers on building Muscle.

And that disrupts me mechanical loading on your muscles. And so it kind of wastes part of the set, right? So the whole time you want to keep your muscle engaged, it's doing the eccentric, uh, I mean the concentric and then. The slow lowering then back, you know, the explosive and then the controlled lowering, and that's how you get the muscle to work.

All right. The fifth [00:14:00] mistake that I see people do with their strength training is combining exercises. And I'm so sad when I see this in the weight room 'cause I'm like, oh my God, you've made it all the way in here. You have all these machines that you're just. Bo, you've got cables, you've got free weights, you've got everything.

And then they come in there and they're doing these combo exercises. And so combo exercises are things where you are combining two exercises together. And I know you see them all over online and they're like, oh my God, these are so effective. And they save you so much time because you combine two things at once.

They're so not effective, and I don't think they save you time because they don't get you results. Okay? I mean, they'll get you a little bit of somewhere, but the problem is that each one of the movements is going to require a different amount of resistance to be able to really challenge yourself in that movement.

So for example, [00:15:00] if you're doing a combo exercise. Where you're doing a split squat. And then as you come up from the split squat, you know you've got your dumbbells, above your shoulders. And as you come up from the split squat, you do a shoulder press. Well, your legs are different kind of strength than your shoulders, so, so there it's going to be very different, like what the weight is that you need to challenge yourself in the split squat.

Now, of course, in the very, very beginning, the split squat, just body weight is going to be challenging, but it's not gonna be long be before. Your muscles start to develop, you start to be able to use those muscles so the neurological pathways go so that you are actually able to, to use those muscles, like engage those muscles and you will start to get stronger, stronger than your shoulders are.

And then your legs are going to be limited by the fact that your shoulders are [00:16:00] just small little muscles that are not gonna get as strong as fast and. In that combo exercise. There's also the problem of, as you come up from the split squat and you do the shoulder press, you are helping your shoulder muscles by giving them momentum, and so you're actually not training your shoulder muscles very effectively.

So basically, combo exercises just are kind of crap and. You should just separate the two exercises that will make it so much better. You can still do split squats, you can still do shoulder presses. Both of them are amazing exercises when they're done separately on their own and loaded appropriately for how strong you are on those two exercises.

And, and one of the ones that I see people do a lot also is they, they will do bicep curls going into shoulder presses and. There, your two muscle groups are closer in size and maybe at some [00:17:00] point they might even need the same dumbbells to do those two exercises, but they are not necessarily gonna develop at the same rate or develop to the same extent.

So if I think like my bicep curls, my shoulder presses. I use different dumbbells to challenge them. So if I were combining those two exercises, then I would not, you know, do as well, or I would not be able to challenge my body appropriately. And then I. The other part of that is that, okay, so if I do a bicep curl, I turn my arm, my hands, then I do a shoulder press.

Well, guess what? I'm kind of giving my biceps a break between the reps. So you end up with that same issue that you got when you, you know, let the weights rest on the weight stack is you are getting rid of that mechanical tension [00:18:00] for a little while. Actually, in this case, when you're doing a combo exercises, it's quite a while, so you're, you're just not having as effective of. Stimulus for your muscles, so uncombine those exercises. Please, please, please uncombine them. Do them separately. You will get so much stronger, faster that way.

 And this too has been studied by Chris Beardsley in 2021, where he found that hypertrophy. In other words, muscle growth is maximized when each muscle is trained close to failure. Individually and not diluted by shared movement patterns. So it's not only like make sense, it has been actually studied that when you combine exercises they become less effective than if you do them individually.

So let's follow the science and be more efficient with our training.

[00:19:00] All right, and number six of the things that may be holding you back in your strength training is that you're not tracking and. You may think like, oh, well I only do these few exercises and I remember which ones they are, and I remember what weight I'm at. But do you really remember how many reps you did last time and you know exactly what the weights were?

I mean, at least I sure don't, and it is really important to track. Then you can make sure that you are progressively overloading. You may think that, okay, last time I worked with 10 pound dumbbells to do my bicep curls, and you know, I got in about eight. And then you go in and you're like, okay, I can get about eight, and then maybe you got seven, maybe you got, you know, whatever, like.

You'll get somewhere in the ballpark, but you may actually be pedaling in place versus if you [00:20:00] saw on a piece of paper that, Hey, last time I didn't get just only just about eight, I got eight, nine, and nine. And then you see that and that immediately it sets up your mind to know that. Hey, I have been able to do 8, 9, 9, so this time if I'm gonna try to do a little bit more, I'm gonna try to do, I'm gonna aim for nine or 10 reps.

And when you set your mind up like that, you actually kind of raise the glass ceiling instead of just kind of thinking, oh, I'm gonna do this until I can't do it anymore. You know? And I mean, this has happened to me so often where I'm like, I'll, I'll be like set up with the weights, and then I look at how many did I do?

And I'm thinking to myself, oh, I can probably do about six of these. And I'm like, oh, uh, last time I did nine. And if I had gone into the set thinking, oh, I can probably do about six of these. Guess how many would've [00:21:00] done? I would've done about six of them. But since I could see that, hey, I've actually managed to get nine.

That just sets you up mentally. And this is partly a mental game, I mean like, like in a way all sports and physical performance is partly a mental game. And if you think about people breaking the four minute mile or whatever, it was like this mental. Block. Nobody had ever run that fast and nobody could do it.

Were humans even able to do that. And then once the first person could do it, then a whole bunch of other people were able to do it because the mental block got sort of released. And so the tracking. Keeps you ensuring that you are progressively overloading, so you can see it on paper that you are progressively overloading loading.

But it also helps you be more successful on a particular set because you know how many you've been able to do [00:22:00] in the past, so you know that, Hey, I can do that and now I'm gonna try to do a little bit more. It, it really makes a difference. Try it out. If you're not tracking, just try it for a few weeks.

You don't need to buy any expensive tracker. I actually, I have a tracker that, um, you can download for free. You can download it and use it online, or you can make a copy of it and use it in your own Google Drive or you can print it out and use it as a paper and pencil kind of exercise, but it really does make a difference.

So just test it out if you're not tracking it.

Okay. And finally number seven is unstable exercises. 

 Your body actually is much better at muscle recruitment when it is not worried about things like falling over. So the more stable aversion you can do of a particular exercise, the better that is. If your goal is to build strength [00:23:00] and muscle size, and I think the benefits of building strength and or building muscle and strength are fairly clear.

And if you missed my other episodes, I think there were one hundred and one oh one, which were on the benefits of strength training and of having more muscle on your body, then go back and listen to those. 'cause I mean, I think that is so key. To finding your why and why you wanna do this.

So things like doing stuff on Bosu bowls, doing one-legged RDL standing in the middle of the floor where you're having trouble balancing is going to take away from its effectiveness.

So I very much encourage you, you know, to do your balancing exercises separate from your strength training exercises. Again, when you combine those two things. Well, maybe your balance will be exercised very nicely in [00:24:00] that, but, but your strength training will suffer from being combined with being a, a balancing exercise.

So for me, like my balancing exercises, I do separately. I actually do it in my warmup, um, especially on lower body days. And also when I get dressed, I have a whole podcast episode on balance as well. So you can dig into that. But there are really good ways of maintaining your balance without having to necessarily go to like a yoga class or anything like that.

Um, anyway, digress. I. Let's go for the more stable positions, and this is why, for example, if you're doing a shoulder press, right, where you've got weights here, like above your shoulders and you're pressing them up, your body is more stable if you are sitting down than if you're standing up. Okay, because you don't have to worry about your core and all those things.

You can focus on your shoulder muscles, which you want to train, right? Then your shoulder and, and your tricep [00:25:00] muscles are getting worked there in a little bit of your upper chest and. Then if you sit down and you have a little bit of a backrest behind you, you have even more stability. So that's even better for your shoulder press.

Okay. And then for example, chest presses. I had one client who. When she sent me her form video, it turned out she was doing them on this huge exercise ball. I, I don't know where she had gotten the idea of doing it on the exercise ball. Maybe somebody had said that, Hey, if you do it on the exercise ball, you can work your core at the same time.

Okay. And we go into this like combo exercises. But the thing is that if your body's like trying to figure out how do I keep this ball still, then how, how much is it having time to really recruit your shoulder? I mean your chest muscles, like not much. So get yourself [00:26:00] onto a solid, like either a bench or the floor, and then work your chest for real.

Another example is split squads, and this is one that I start pretty much everybody off with. It's such a great exercise to strengthen your quads and your glutes. It's easy to do anywhere and you know, you can start progressing it just with body weight and getting, you know, more range of motion. So, but in the beginning it is challenging because of your balance and.

For sure. I, one of my first instructions with the split squats is, hold on, and it is not cheating whatsoever. What the holding on does is it allows your body to concentrate on working your glutes and your thighs and forget about your balance, right? You're not training balance when you're doing a split squat, you're training to get your legs [00:27:00] stronger, and it's gonna be more effective if your body isn't worried.

Okay, so, so really I hope that that this point has come across here in the examples. So you want to have stable exercises where you don't have to be worried about your balance. Balance work has its place for sure. Balance is important, but don't combine it with your strength training. Do it separately, or The only place where I would combine it is in your warmups.

Uh, I do it, um, to get my hips. Warmed up, I'll be standing and I'll stand on one foot and then raise the other leg. So I'm doing like a hip circle in the air and, um, you know, in the beginning I was holding onto something, then I stopped holding onto something and now I can do it even while I'm putting on my gloves and everything.

My balance has really improved over time, just with something as simple as that, that I do twice a week. Well, okay. Plus I do a few other things, like [00:28:00] I get dressed, standing up and this kind of thing, but like I don't do any balance exercises or balance workouts in particular. I. All right, so that was a little bit longer than I expected it to be.

It's like I write these lists, I'm like, oh, here are six things. I'll go through this in like two minutes. But no, I start to tell stories, but I hope you don't mind. But, so the training habits, they're holding you back to recap are not resting long enough or not resting at all between sets. Two is pour form as you start to lift heavier.

Do not increase your weights unless your form is really solid. Your first rep and your last rep should have as good a form as one another. 

Three. Control the eccentric. Don't just let that weight drop. Four is related to this. If you're working on machines or with cables, don't [00:29:00] let that weight hit the weight stack.

Keep the tension in your muscles between reps. 

Five. Stop combining exercises. Combo exercises are ineffective, inefficient. Don't believe the hype that, oh, you'll save time and it'll be so great. It's not. You'll get fewer results. You'll not get as strong. You'll not build the muscle, you'll not get as toned.

It's just not as good. And this is studied, not my opinion. And then not tracking. So please try out the tracking. Download my tracker. test it out yourself. It really makes a big difference in being able to be sure that you are progressively overloading. And then number seven. Mistake that I see people make is doing unstable exercises.

So they're [00:30:00] doing things where they're about to fall over, they're on a bosu ball, they're standing on one leg, all these kinds of things. Instead, get some stability and let your muscles work. Let your body focus on recruiting your muscle fibers rather than on stopping you from falling over. 

All right, so. For any of these things that you noticed that you might be doing wrong or that you could improve on, I would love to know. So drop me a note if there are any helpful tips here, or if you wanna hear more about any one of those topics, you can reach me on Instagram or even put a message through here on the podcast player.

I can't answer those messages. So if you wanna have a little chat, then Instagram is a better place. And with that, I will leave you till next time and wish you happy training.