5 Gym Mistakes That Are Potentially Sabotaging Your Fat Loss!!!

Is it possible that spending to much time in the gym is actually making you fatter? Here are the 5 biggest gym mistakes that are sabotaging your fat loss and making you gain body fat. Find out what these rookie workout mistakes are so you can avoid them at ALL costs!

Today’s article is all about the five biggest mistakes that you could be making at the gym that are potentially sabotaging your fat loss and making you fatter.  That’s right fatter.

By:  Tim Ernst – Founder of Body Blitz Max, 180 Muscle and Barbell/Dumbbell Ripped Muscle Complexes

It’s totally possible to spend a couple hours every week at the gym and make no progress at all.

That’s why it’s very important to be doing the right things and that’s what I’m going to try and explain in this article.

I’m going to help you understand and avoid the biggest gym mistakes that cause most people to sabotage their  fat loss workouts.

By far the number one biggest mistake is focusing too much on cardio and not enough on weight training.

Mistake #1 – To Much Cardio

Most people are under the impression that cardio is the best workout for fat loss, but that is pretty far from the truth.

When you compare a cardio workout to a weight training workout at face value it looks like the cardio workout is actually burning more calories.

However, when we compare the total fat burning effects of a cardio workout versus a weight training workout over the course of 3 days, weight training has a significant advantage over cardio.

You might have heard of something referred to as the afterburn effect, which simply means that your body continues working to repair your broken down muscles and return to homeostasis.

Of course it does take time for your body to return to normal after a cardio workout, but after some challenging weight lifting it’s going to take a lot longer and a lot more calories to fully recover.

The idea that weight training is for building muscle and cardio is for burning fat is completely wrong and it’s a myth that you should just forget about.

If you want to speed up fat loss you can definitely do both weight training and Cardio.

If you’re doing it in the same workout do your cardio after you do your weight training session.

This way you have maximum energy for all your heavy lifts and you’ll also deplete all your glycogen stores so you could burn primarily fat during your cardio workout.  You could also split the two and do it on separate days.

However,  if you have to choose between cardio and weight training I would a hundred percent go with the weight training.

Mistake #2 – Not Training With High Intensity

The second huge mistake that people make is not training at a high intensity.

When I say hi intensity everyone thinks of high intensity interval training or HIIT, but that’s not what I’m talking about at all.

High intensity interval training is just one way that you can perform your workouts at a high intensity.

HITT type of training is where you’re doing exercises back to back with very little rest periods while still usually using a moderate weight load.

It’s no secret that high intensity interval training will help you burn fat, but there are a lot of different ways that you can create a higher intensity workout with weights.

For example power-lifters have a very long after-burn effect after their workouts even though to a bystander it might look like they’re resting more than their actually working out.

In fact, a power-lifting workout looks almost exactly the opposite of a hitt workout. So how did they provide a similar effect?

Well there’s a couple different ways you can affect the intensity of your workout.

You can stack back-to-back sets reps and cut down rest time to increase the volume of your workout or you can just increase the weight load.

Again this is a situation where I really like the idea of doing both.

You should be doing heavy weight training days where you’re focused a lot more on giving yourself an adequate amount of rest time to perform heavy lifts and you should also have weight training days where you’re focused a lot more on volume through sets reps and low rest time.

The major mistake that I see people making in regard to intensity is just simply taking it too easy at the gym.

This actually brings me right to the third mistake,  you’re afraid of discomfort.

Mistake #3 – No Pain No Gain

You get out of breath, you take a break or the weight starts getting heavy and before you come anywhere close to failure you rack it.

There’s a little something that if you’re seriously chasing after results, your gonna have to chase what’s known as Progressive overload.

Results don’t come without Progressive overload. Let’s break down what these two words mean.

Progressive is defined as proceeding step by step and my favorite synonyms for this word are increasing, growing, and developing.  Overload is defined as an excess load or amount.

So Progressive overload is constantly trying to increase the load or the amount.

When I put it this way it might sound like I’m just saying to always up your weight and yes you can do that but that’s just one way to do it.

The bottom line is to always challenge yourself.  If you want to see any kind of real results you have to push yourself outside of your comfort zone.  This is very important.

Mistake #4 – Not Switching Up Your Workouts

This once again brings us to the next mistake which is not switching up your work out.

Your body will adapt to pretty much whatever you throw at it especially with enough time and practice.

The key is to always challenge yourself and unfortunately when you do the same work out again and again you stop challenging yourself.

Once your body’s fully adapted to the work out your results will diminish more and more every time.

The flip side of that is if you’re changing up your work out every single time you come to the gym and never repeat a workout that’s not good either.

The reason for this is because you never give yourself a chance to adapt to the actual exercises and progressively over load them, meaning you don’t give yourself the chance to master that workout and make those exercises harder which is a necessary step in order to have progress.

I recommend that you do every workout plan for roughly four weeks.  Four weeks tends to be the sweet spot in order to not adapt so much to your work out to where they become easy and repetitive while still getting enough time to make strength and performance adaptions.

So every four weeks you should be doing a new workout plan and I don’t only mean in regard to weight training.

If you are throwing in cardio into your workout plan, you should try to switch that up and try to progressively overloaded as well,

You have a lot of different options such as jogging on the treadmill, stair stepper, walking on an incline and the list goes on and on.

Try to improve at one form of cardio over the course of a month (so for weeks) and then switch it into another form of cardio.  Always challenge yourself.

Before you set up your workout plan you’re definitely going to want to take a note of this final mistake that I see people making all the time.

That mistake is using way too many machines and not enough free weight.

Mistake #5 – Machines vs. Free Weights

What’s Next?

Now that you know what mistakes to stop making, there are 6 more mistakes that you could be making while trying to flatten your belly for six pack abs.

Some six pack abs workouts can be so counter productive that they can actually hurt your progress.

In the article below,  we’re going to talk about the five biggest ab workout mistakes that are absolutely KILLING your six pack abs and any chances of you ever seeing them.