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

By Lee A. Mancini, MD, CSCS, CSN

Having trained hundreds of clients over the years, as well as having examined injured patients in the UMass Sports Medicine Center, I have gained a vast amount of expertise with regards to training program design. In this five part series I would like to share the top five mistakes men and women make in the gym. In each article I will be sharing one mistake men make and one mistake women make.

Tip Number One For Men: Over-emphasizing the bench press. The first question that I always hear from one male weight lifter to another is the following, “So how much do you bench?” The bench press is an excellent exercise for building strength and power, but most male athletes include too many pressing movement variations in their workouts, such as incline and decline presses. Also most male athletes bench the first day of the week and always the first exercise of a training session. Monday in most gyms means male bench day! By constantly benching first in a session and first in the week, these men are creating a strength imbalance between their chest and their back and rotator cuff muscles. Over the course of many training sessions and years this will definitely lead to shoulder and rotator cuff problems.

Tip Number One For Women: Not including weight training in their fitness routine. Most women have the incorrect notion that lifting weights will cause then to bulk up like a Patriot’s offensive lineman. This is one of the biggest fallacies that I hear over and over when training women. First of all, to add a significant amount of muscle mass to one’s body requires an increase in calories consumed. This is why training and nutrition are so interconnected. Secondly, women have 1/20 the testosterone level of men. Testosterone is an anabolic hormone, meaning that one of its effects is to create tissue growth, and in the case of strength training, this means muscle tissue. Lastly, most women have the pictures of androgenous female bodybuilders etched in their minds from the covers of popular fitness magazines, and fear turning into those pictures and losing their femininity. Rest assured that most of these professional bodybuilders are taking a tremendous amount of anabolic steroids and male hormones. Most amateur or natural female bodybuilders have healthy athlete physiques. So please do not fear strength training.

That’s it for this week. Look for more tips in the coming weeks.

Send any questions or ideas for topics of future interest to questions@DoctorOfFitness.com.

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.