Top 5 Mistakes to Avoid in Your Fitness Journey

Woman dressed up in sport clothes injured her ankle while performing fitness activity.

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Five Key Missteps to Dodge on Your Path to Fitness Success

In order to get right on the track to betterment in your fitness journey, there are certain things to avoid as they could possibly become an obstacle in the progress.

Here in this blog, we have shifted our focus to 5 of the significant mistakes that could likely be the obstacles to why you’re not getting the progress you should get.

Ignoring Proper Form

The first issue is ignoring the proper form when lifting weights. Weight training is important for your overall fitness journey, but doing it wrong might harm you more than good. When you are getting started, it’s a common mistake that we tend to do more and more reps with heavy weights. This practice destroys the gains, and apart from that, you also get injuries.

So, what should be done to deal with this issue is learning the correct form in the first place. This could be done under a professional trainer’s guidelines with the proper knowledge. A professional will give you the appropriate information about the form, and if you train under that trainer, your mistakes will be pinpointed. You will know where exactly you are failing in form, and then you will correct your posture and form.

The thing with heavy weights is that at the start, your body is not very used to this kind of training; therefore, when you lift heavy, your body tends to absorb that in a way that disturbs the form and eases the muscle from the load. The body gives ease to the muscles by making such a form to shift the weight from the muscles and thus destroy the form in which the muscle has to bear the load to build strength. So, you must gradually increase the load by starting from lower to heavier weights.

Woman dressed up in red fitness clothes, performing deadlift with proper form

Neglecting Rest and Recovery

Neglecting rest and recovery is one major factor in not getting the required results. While you are ignoring rest and recovery, you are leading yourself to exhaustion and injury, and you will eventually lead to burnout.

Apart from these aspects, you will not get results in the fitness journey.to understand why it is so, you need to acquire knowledge of the science of how sleep and recovery help build muscles. When we do exhaustive heavy-weight training or any other sort of hard work, the muscles in our body develop tiny tears. And while you get to rest and recover, these muscles tear, heal, and the muscles get stronger.

Therefore, if you are ignoring rest, then you are not giving a chance to body muscles to heal, thus restricting their growth and only getting exhausted in the process.

So, if you are on a fitness journey, you must make a designed workload schedule and take a rest day between work schedules to help the body heal. Apart from that, you can try incorporating certain other relaxing activities in the daily schedule, like yoga, etc., to give your body the rest it needs.

More about best recovery tips you can read [here].

Imbalanced Training

Doing imbalanced training is another mistake that disturbs the gains in the fitness journey. Your progress seems to fade with this mistake. With imbalances in training, you get issues like reduced functional fitness as you are more focused on certain muscle groups and ignoring the others. So, in daily life, you have difficulties doing normal stuff.

Apart from that, there is also the risk of posture issues by doing imbalance training. And by posture issues, you get chronic pains in the entire body from neck to shoulder to lower back, which might get severe with prolonged exposure to these training sessions. With imbalance training, you also lack symmetry, which disturbs the aesthetical aspect of your body fitness.

So, to deal with these issues, you need to create a workout plan that has a balance of different training types. All of your muscles must be engaged in the workout daily or, most probably, on a weekly schedule.

You must have a thought-out plan to evenly divide the focus into cardio weight training and other strength-building and flexibility exercises. With these things in place, you can better make your body strong and fit and get to the progress you want in your fitness journey.

Explore the Advantages and Distinctions Between Cardio and Weight Training in Our In-Depth Comparison: [weights vs cardio]

Under or Overestimating Nutritional Needs

Both under and over-nutrition can damage your progress toward your fitness goals. With over-nutrition, you get to consume fewer calories, and hence, you will have more calories that need to be burnt, and thus, your body will not perform at its best. While on the other hand, you will experience weight loss as you consume less and then burn it all out. So, you will have low muscle growth and rapid weight loss.

Both of these conditions will hamper your muscle growth. To solve this problem, you can customize your diet plan. There are various resources available online where you can learn about the simple understanding of the carbs, fat, and protein percentages that you need in your diet daily. For muscles, a protein-rich diet is crucially important.

Therefore, your diet must have enough proteins to support your muscle growth and enough carbs and fats for energy to do daily activities and exercise.

If you have difficulty finding the right balance and the sources of these nutrients, you can opt for a personalized diet plan from a certified dietitian.

Discover the secrets to a tailored diet that suits your lifestyle in our comprehensive blog post on [Personalized Nutrition Plans].

A picture of fruits, representing healthy nutrition

Setting Unrealistic Goals

Another mistake is setting goals you know you can’t achieve. When starting out, we make the mistake of thinking wishfully and ignoring reality. So, we set unrealistic goals, and these goals hamper our growth as we get disappointed when a goal is not fulfilled, leading us to lose motivation overall.

The solution to this mistake lies in setting [SMART Goals]. The smart goals are specific, precise, and to the point, with fewer ifs and buts. These goals are measurable, and you can easily determine whether you achieved them. These are achievable and relevant to your cause. And finally, time is limited, so you procrastinate less and act more.

After making smart goals:

  • Break your goals into smaller ones each.

  • Achieve them daily.

  • Celebrate your success.

Picture of a tired animal, representing disappointment after not achieving desired goal.

Conclusion

In the journey of fitness and physical well-being, there are various mistakes that can distract you from your pathway. Five major mistakes are improper form in training, rest neglectance, imbalance in the training, improper nutrition, and unrealistic goals. Opting for solutions like going to a professional trainer, prioritizing rest, incorporating a balanced training schedule, a proper diet plan, and setting SMART goals can help eliminate these issues and get you on the way to success in the fitness journey.

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