Looking over my blogs, I’ve written plenty on mindset and planning when it comes to weight loss, muscle gain and fitness improvement. So right now, I really feel like writing up five quick and practical exercise tips that you can incorporate into your next workout.
My first problem is in deciding where to begin. There are so many “tips” that I can think of when it comes to enhancing an exercise routine. But the three I am going to write about are some of the more common area’s that could use improvement in a generalised exercise regime.
Exercise Tip #1: Don’t hold your feet down for an abdominal exercise
If you are performing abdominal work, don’t place your feet under something, or have someone standing on your toes. What this does is shifts the overload from the abdominals to the hip flexors.
In order to target the rectus abdominal muscles (the 6-pack), you need to move your spine from a straight line, into a curved line. Technically speaking, you want to go from a neutral spine into spinal flexion. This is what the rectus abdominus is responsible for. Sit-ups, where you stay in a neutral spine yet move from horizontal to vertical, is not moving your spine into a state of flexion.
Exercise Tip #2: On the bench press, lower the bar right down to the chest
Whilst this tip isn’t good for the ego (you can lift more by not bringing the bar down as far), it is highly effective for accomplishing a good stretch through the pec muscles. You can therefore move from a great stretch, through to a full contraction, by executing an full range of motion on this exercise.
The basic premise of “generalised” weight training is to move the muscle from a stretch to a contraction. Of course, there are more advanced and specific training methodologies whereby you may only obtain a fraction of a stretch on the eccentric phase. However, especially for the beginner, I believe that it is imperative to practice good, standardised technique before getting too fancy with execution.
Exercise Tip #3: Keep those elbows relatively still on bicep curls
This is a very common mistake amongst beginners performing one of the most popular exercises – bicep curls (in it’s many variations). By flaring your elbows out, or by moving your elbows forward, you take a lot of the load off the bicep and move it onto the shoulder. Take a look in the mirror next time you perform this exercise to analyse your technique and see if you are hitting the biceps effectively.
The bicep muscles are very small relative to other major muscle groups within the human body. So, don’t expect to be lifting massive amounts of weight on this exercise. As soon as you reduce that upper arm movement, you will probably have to lower the weight due to the increased reliance on the bicep muscles.
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