Read 36 times since Wednesday, January 18, 2012
If you want results you have to make good choices or you're wasting your time. Working as a Glasgow personal trainer the majority of people I have seen who design their own training plan make bad exercise selection choices. People who don't know how to design a quality training program tend to pick things they see others doing. This leads to a perpetuation of the following 5 exercises being done in gyms the length and breadth of Scotland. If you spend a lot of time on these exercises you are on the wrong track and heading for trouble.
Bicep curls are where ego and ignorance collide - sorry but it's true. Wanting big arms is ok as long as that is not all you want, but curls are not the fastest way to get them, they are the slowest. The fastest way is deadlift + pull ups. Biceps are small muscles, even huge biceps are small muscles and no amount of curls will release the growth hormones you need to build muscle.
Crunches are a terrible core exercise because it leads to strength imbalances around the spine, poor posture and back pain. They also won't do anything for your six pack. The lack of a six pack is because of excess abdominal fat, not insufficient abdominal muscle.
You are far better off training your core in conjunction with other movements, not in isolation. Grappler twist, plank row and weighted press ups are much better for your core than any kind of crunch.
If you do cable crossovers because you saw some huge bodybuilder in a magazine doing them for his chest there is something you should know. He built his chest using heavy dumbbell bench press and a boat load of steroids and that is how you should do it (minus the steroids!).
I could say the same things against side and/or front dumbbell raises I did for curls but instead I will make the point that just because you can move a joint in a particular way does not mean you should. Your shoulders, along with the elbow, are designed to pull, push and hold and throw things, that's it. To try to isolate a shoulder muscle is to try and break the shoulder so don't do it.
The last of the bad 5 is the leg extension. Extensions are terrible for the knees because there is no stabilizing activation of the hamstrings. This creates a shearing force that grinds the knee joint. The recurring theme emerging here is one of isolating muscles that you can see in the mirror. Basing your training around such exercises is a recipe for disaster. Iain Smith (MPhil/CSCS) owns Standout Gym, an independent warehouse gym in Glasgow, focusing on weight loss. He offers small group training as an affordable alternative to Glasgow personal training. Iain is a former international decathlete with 17 years coaching experience. www.standoutgym.com.
|
|
