It takes a lot of dedication, discipline and hard work to get into shape. But sometimes little mistakes you make unknowingly when exercising can ruin all your efforts and even cause serious injuries.
1. Lunges
Lungs are an excellent exercise of resistance that strengthens your lower body, including the quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes and calves. But while you do this seemingly simple exercise, you can make several mistakes.
Mistakes:
- While lunges help improve the balance of your body, they are not exercises that balance. People often try to place one foot in a straight line right in front of the other while doing them, as if walking on a tight rope, and that’s incorrect. For each lung, you must split your feet a little less than the hip-width.
- The mistake people sometimes make is that while lunging they take small steps. If your feet are too close together, they’re going to form a triangular shape between your legs, and that’s not what you want. Ideally, if you’re in a lung position, the space between the legs should form a rectangle.
- Your knee shouldn’t touch the ground every time you lunge. If it does sometimes, it’s perfectly fine, but if that’s how you do it every time, you need to change your ways. Not only can this activity hurt your knees, but it also removes the pressure from your arms.
2. Dips on parallel bars
If you want to work with your biceps, legs, chest, shoulders, and abs, dips should be on your fitness list on parallel bars. But doing them wrongly can ruin your hard work.
Mistakes:
- People often do partial reps because they don’t have enough strength to go down completely in their triceps and then come up again. That should never happen. If you don’t have the strength of a tricep, do exercises to raise it before attempting to dip on a parallel bar.
- While doing this exercise, many people also go too far, which is not recommended. If you go down with the ground, you’re going to put too much pressure on your shoulders.
- Many people try to keep their upper body vertical as they do these dips as well. Even if you’re trying to focus on your triceps, you’re going to be much better off sitting with your chest in front of your hips during this exercise at least slightly forward.
3. Dumbbell and barbell chest presses
For strength building, chest pressing exercises are good and very successful in strengthening chest muscles. But they can cause injury if they’re wrong.
Mistakes:
- Most fitness enthusiasts make the mistake of holding the elbows very close to each other. By doing this, you move the pressure away from your neck and to the front of your shoulder and your triceps.
- Flaring the elbows out too far is another mistake. You will put a lot of unnecessary pressure on your shoulders and rotator cuffs if your elbows are stretched out too far.
- You shouldn’t curl your back too much while doing these presses. Simply bring back your shoulder blades and hold a normal lumbar curve in your spine— no more, no less.
- Keep in mind that the weight should never stop directly above or below your shoulders. The weight should always be aligned with your shoulders at the start of the motion.
