5 Mistakes you are making in the gym

The following is taken from my weekly newsletter that you can subscribe to by clicking HERE

1-6 Reps - Absolute Strength in the Gym

8-15 - Hypertrophy (Muscle Size)

15 plus reps - Endurance

7 reps… zero gains?

The above is more of a rule of thumb rather than an absolute. Can you get stronger by doing 15-plus reps of an exercise? Absolutely!
Will three reps help with muscle size and endurance? Yes it will

And if you are a newbie to the gym, the great news is that all of this will happen quickly… at first

Newbie gains are a thing when it comes to the gym.

And as much as we Personal Trainers don’t want to admit it, it is a major reason you initially feel better when you change gym/coach… initially!

But after that first month to 6 weeks, you will begin to flatline again (for new people, it could be longer), and it feels hard to keep progress up. With it being 6-7 weeks since the start of the year, this could be happening to you, so lets go through the 5 reasons why you have stopped making progress in the gym:

1. You haven’t varied your reps

You may have stuck to the 8-10 reps for every exercise, and now you feel like you are not getting as strong or fit as you did in the first few weeks.

And that’s normal, strength gains are not linear. Otherwise, there would be no end to what you can lift. But vary up the reps scheme a little bit. Using the reps scheme at the start of this newsletter as a rule of thumb, for now, do your bigger exercises (squats, deadlifts and bench) at 4-8 reps, and your accessory exercises (like your shoulder presses, rows, single leg work) at 8-15 and then up to 30 reps on arm exercises.

2. You’re rushing through the exercises

Slow down! You’re going too fast and not controlling the weights on the way down. You’re letting gravity do the work instead of your muscles and wasting time that they could be working. Bring a tempo into your bigger lifts. 2-3 seconds of lowering the weights. If you can’t control the weight on the way down and up, it is too heavy for you.

3. You’re doing your favourite exercises instead of a full-body programme

18 year old Seán, listen up. You don’t need to be doing bench and bicep curls all the time. Get a mix of everything in (either in one day or spread it out over two, depending on how many times you can realistically hit the gym)

Make sure that, over the course of the week, you are doing an exercise that is a:

Push
Pull
Squat
Lunge
Hinge (RDL or Deadlift variation)
Bicep Curl

I may have let my ego add in one of those exercises

4. You don’t have a plan

What are you training for? What are your goals? You will get random results if you are just in the gym doing random exercises.

5. You don’t know what your fail point is, so you are not working hard enough

Or Bonus: You are testing strength every session rather than getting stronger

These last two points are 50-50 in what I see in the gym. You either have the person who doesn’t know they can lift more or the person who fails and gets crushed under the weights every time.

You should only occasionally fail an exercise (as long as you have accounted for safety or have a spotter). And the reason I say that is because you should always do an exercise and feel like you could have gotten at least one more. But you won’t quite know that until you have pushed to your limit. For some, when they think they can push more, and I get them to do another rep or two, they can usually bang out 3-4 more reps. And my voice is not that motivating.

And the bonus of the bonus:

Stay patient, and enjoy the process.

And our guest on this week’s episode of the Any Given Runday Podcast is the personification of that!

ANY GIVEN RUNDAY PODCAST

With this episode being released a little over 24 hours ago, it is already shaping up to be one of our biggest episodes ever!

This week on the Any Given Runday Podcast, we chat with Caroline Hassett (@ahousebythetrees on Instagram), who takes us through her running journey that went from a 3:54 Dublin Marathon in 2017 to multiple sub 3-hour marathons in 2023, all while juggling busy family life as a mother of 4.

If you’ve ever had the goal of running a sub-3 hour marathon, this is definitely the podcast episode for you as Caroline talks about how she was patient with her running, starting with just easy runs for her first marathon and then how she progressed her training over the last few years to achieve a sub 3 hour marathon in Berlin and to follow that up with another sub 3 hour marathon the next month in Dublin.

You can listen to this week’s episode on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5gbotm9FuLo7VimtLrjefq?si=rR_xFYgkQaaNbDdDxCxSQw

Apple Podcasts:
https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/caroline-hassett-building-up-to-a-sub-3-hour/id1493778874?i=1000645821483

or wherever you get your podcasts from

#AnyGivenRunday
You can also follow our podcast page on Instagram: @AnyGivenRundayPodcast

50K Donadea Race

I didn’t get a chance to come up with a newsletter last week. It would have been football-filled anyway, and NOBODY would have liked to have read that!

But there was some good that came out of Superbowl weekend. I survived my 50k race and managed to do it in under 5 hours.

Click HERE to watch the finish.

One of the main questions I got asked was how sore I was. Yes, it was a very tough race, one I doubted myself on finishing in time for on many occasions over the 5 hours.

But I was not as sore as I was doing a marathon, and the reason was that I never hit ‘The Wall’

With the laps, it was easier to structure my nutrition and take a quick 30 second break every 3.7km lap.

Yes, I may have gotten in a little faster if I didn’t break. But, then again, I may have hit a wall and not finished at all.

It’s not the distance that kills, nor the time (although eventually, they do catch up); it’s the pace.

So, when running, slow down the majority of your runs. When you finish, you should feel like you could have run further. This means you’re more than likely to get back out running sooner and get fitter more quickly.

If there are any questions you would like me to answer in this newsletter, send me an email at sean@coachseanc.com