Beginners at the gym - 5 common mistakes!

It takes some time to really get into strength training at a gym, and there are many traps you can fall into as a beginner.

1. Without aim and meaning

When you are completely new to strength training, it can also be difficult to imagine what kind of goals you actually have with training. If you go to the gym without an overall goal, it will quickly become demotivating, and the training sessions will not be of good quality either, because it is difficult to be consistent when you have no direction with what you are doing.

2. Gets hung up on the details

If you have no experience with strength training or knowledge of exercise theory, it can be difficult to know how to do it correctly. Very often you see untrained people spending an extremely large amount of time on, for example, training biceps, triceps, stomach, calves or forearms.

As a beginner, you will develop these muscle groups just as well by sticking to larger exercises that involve both the small muscle groups at the same time as the large ones.

3. Too light weights

It can be uncomfortable to push yourself to the max, and beginners have not trained this ability. They often think that it is sufficient to do the movement in the exercise a certain number of times, and that it is the number of repetitions and not the effort that matters.

If you want to get stronger or gain bigger muscles, however, you have to put on weight, and you have to put on more and more weight as you get stronger.

4. Do too much

The wonderful thing about being a beginner in strength training is that you get an absolutely incredible progression at the start. You will never get this amazing development curve again, unless you stay completely away from training for a long period of time.

Therefore, even beginners get away with doing much less than well-trained, and still get extremely good progression in the development of both strength and muscle mass. Stick to training two to three good sessions a week, you don't need more than that for now.

5. Is not consistent

For the beginner, the training is not yet a habit, and you have not yet fully experienced the good feeling that comes in the wake of the raw training sessions. Therefore, it can be difficult to get to training often enough to notice or see results from what you do.

And not seeing results can also be demotivating. Therefore, it is important not to give up, but to attend the planned sessions over a longer period of time, at least a couple of months, both to get results and to practice the fact that training has become a routine.