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5 lifting lessons you can avoid to learn the hard way

Posted by Pascal Landshoeft

Apr 25, 2017 10:00:00 AM

5 lifting lessons you can avoid to learn the hard way

In the free weight section of the room, you can either learn everything yourself and waste a tonne of time or read these five pieces of wisdom I learned after spending ten years in the gym on and off training for strength and martial arts.

 

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Use Safety pins

Safety pins are your friends for the squat and bench press. You can usually use them for free in any gym and they take a minute to be set up. They protect you from being decapitated, folded in half, breaking your spine, ripping off your Achilles tendon, getting knocked out, losing your teeth and other rather unfortunate events which will drive your insurance policy up. Use them to avoid pain.

Go to a gym with more than one power rack

A gym with 200 treadmills and one power rack is a great place to go when you want to run inside in the same spot for hours. If you want to build muscle and have a life make sure that you attend this gym during school time. Otherwise hone your skills in useful techniques like phone hacking, building a scary physique or shamelessly farting near groups of unknown people. I opted to go to a gym where the number of available power racks exceeds the average number of people who want to squat heavy to be at work in time in the morning.

Work on your mobility

If you intend to be able to move a certain amount of weight in the same direction all the time, every time works for 80% of 100% of the time that is more than most people reach for and I applaud you for that. Still, you also might like to be able to do breath-taking everyday activities such as brushing your teeth, taking a shit, pick up your phone from the ground, getting out of your car, take off your t-shirt, and jumping higher than two inches without breaking a sweat. It is unfortunate to realise after a decade of hard training in the weight room that these activities will lead you to sweat like a pig because you neglected your mobility. Take proactive measures in time by stretching.  

Use water instead of Supplement shakes

Supplement shakes are a lot tastier than water. Therefore, they also cost a lot more than water and probably have things in them that make them taste nicer. Supplements are also only needed if you train harder than your body can sustain. If you don’t train like an insane person, you do not have to put stuff in your body like an insane person. The food industry usually uses certain forms of sugar with fancy names or chemicals which make your cells mutate to achieve this better taste in a repeatable, cheap way until a regulation points out that this potentially makes people more likely to die. If you want to decrease your risk of likelihood to die for free drink water instead of supplements and eat a lot of unprocessed meat.

 One repetition maximum

In physics, you learned that mass and speed have something to do with how much force you need to move or stop a certain object. Your teacher might also have pointed the law of diminishing returns to you at some stage. Once you combine these two with a bit of anatomy and what it takes to break a bone or rip a tendon and sprinkle some economic basics of risk assessment on top you know why you generally should stay away from your actual one repetition maximum and base all your calculations of 90% of that. You should think “Hospital” when you expose your own system to the risk of failing at 105% of capability.

Further reading

On the deadlift

On the squat


On the bench press

 

Topics: Lift stronger