081 | 3 Mistakes You’re Making In Your Strength Training The FITSPRO Podcast

Today we get to bro out a bit. To talk shop in the gym. Covering the mistakes people could be making.







I often find that people could get way more from their training than they do with a few simple changes to their time in the gym.







That is literally why I created fitdesignbyannie years ago. Between going to school for fitness training and then exercise and sport science, I would go to the gym and watch women attempt to lift weights.







In watching them, I would think to myself, I presumably know what they want, but they’re not going to get it by training the way they are. The way I was observing them at LA fitness.







While it’s now five years later from starting fitdesignbyannie, the same mistakes still exist.







And that brings us to today’s episode on the biggest mistakes you’re making in the gym.







Context is important. So let us make clear that I am referring to strength and hypertrophy based training. This is for women looking to gain muscle and strength. Let us also make clear that if you want to look “toned,” you are in this group of humans. Being toned is literally the appearance of having muscle tone at rest. Which you can’t do without the presence of muscles. The more common issue is the layers of fat over the top of said muscles that can prevent you from looking toned or instead looking “bulky.” That’s all a topic for another time.







Let’s get into mistake #1







* Training for strength but not using long enough rest periods







What I mean is that you’re using a challenging weight, 75% + of your 1RM and/or RPE (rate of previewed exertion) of 8-9 but you’re only resting for 30 seconds or so. The body and it’s systems take time to recover between sets.







You want it to recover if you’re wanting muscle growth or strength gains.







I guess we need to note what is actually needed in order to experience hypertrophy (muscle growth). Aka what has to happen to get your GAINS.







You need three components - mechanical tension (this is the loading of the musculoskeletal system), muscle damage (micro tears in your muscle fibers from the work being done) and metabolic stress (this is your glycogen and ATP depletion comes in).







At the very basic level, we need these three things to make gains. And then of course you need to be able to recover from your training, and eat enough macronutrients to elicit muscle growth.







But we’ll stick to what happens inside the gym.







So mistake #1 is essentially that you are causing the mechanical stress and likely the muscle damage but you may not be optimizing the metabolic damage. Or better put you could be getting more out of your metabolic systems if you took a full 90 seconds all the way to three minutes of rest between sets.







The two main energy systems used in the strength and hypertrophy type of training I’m suggesting will be your phosphagen and Glycolytic systems.







It’s important to note that our systems, just like our three types of muscle fibers are not robots. You’re not only using ONE system or ONE type of muscle fiber in these stages. But the body will recruit or depend more heavily on one system or type of muscle fiber over another. And there are natural progressions with factors like time, exertion and intensity.







The energy provided to our muscles in order to contract is something called adenosine triphosphate or ATP. This is how we power our muscles. And it is produced via the phosphagen system. Yay science. When the ATP is used, he loses a phosphate and becomes Adenosine diphosphate or ADP.