Top Five Mistakes Most Men and Women Make In Designing Workout Routines – Part Three

By Lee A. Mancini, MD, CSCS, CSN

I hope that by now you have been putting my suggestions to use in your training routines. Here are another two tips, one for men and one for women, to help your progress in the gym.

Tip Number Three For Men:Neglecting the lower body. Just as the bench press gets too much priority in most male athletes’ programs, leg training usually gets forgotten or even skipped. One of my best friends used to train chest and triceps on Day One, back and biceps on Day Two, legs on Day Three, rested on the next day, and then repeated the same cycle. If he ever had to miss a lifting day, he would simply skip over his leg training day. While leg training isn’t as glamorous as training biceps by curling or your chest by benching, it is vitally important for athletic success. What most men don’t realize is that studies have shown that adding strength to your lower body, translates into strength gains for their upper body as well. If you want to increase your bench press, you need to squat as well.

Tip Number Three For Women: Relying too much on weight machines instead of free weights in their programs. Let me first say that you should be proud of yourself if you are a woman who is doing any sort of strength training program on a regular basis. Also, I believe that universal and other types of weight machines are not evil, and I do use them for many of my clients’ programs when appropriate. However, free weights, dumbbells in particular, offer numerous advantages over weight machines and even barbell free weights. Free weight exercises force you to use your small accessory and stabilizer muscles to help balance the weights for you in three-dimensional space. This creates several benefits; it forces you to work harder, it makes you burn more calories, and it aids in injury prevention since you are working those smaller muscles that are neglected by weight machines. Dumbbell exercises are also great because you don’t always need to have a spotter when you train.

I hope that you have gotten two more pearls of information to apply to your training programs.

Note:  Lee A. Mancini graduated from Harvard as a two-sport athlete with honors in biology. Board certified in sports medicine and family practice, he works at the Family Health Center and UMass Sports Medicine Center in Worcester . He trains select clients as a certified strength and conditioning specialist and sports nutritionist. If you are interested in hiring him to design an individualized program, click here for our paid consultation services.