Today, I’m going to share with you four common misconceptions about training.
Misconceptions that, if acted upon, will, at best, severely hinder your progress and, at worst, cause you serious harm.
We begin:
1) Training must be hard
The guys you see on social media with great physiques destroying themselves with hardcore workouts are doing it for views, likes, and comments.
Their actual training – the stuff that builds those physiques – is much more sedate.
Indeed, in my decade-and-a-half of lifting, the only people I’ve ever seen get results consistently are those who train sensibly. Put simply, they lift modest weights with a modest amount of effort over and over again for years enjoying incremental gains in muscle and strength as they go.
And the guys who try to emulate the things they see on the internet?
If they’re not taking an extended layoff because they hurt themselves badly, they’re forever complaining about pain in their knees, shoulders, hips, and/or back.
2) Training must be long
This point is closely related to the previous one but distinct enough for me to talk about it separately.
Long workouts are, often, pointless and, potentially, counterproductive.
Sure, it feels good to say you’ve done a 2-hour workout in the gym – but how much of that time was spent training?
Less than half, most likely, with the remainder being wasted doomscrolling through pictures of e-harlots or watching motivational videos, which you justify as a “rest period”.
Yes, you need to rest in between sets, but do you need to take 3 – 5 minutes or more to recover from some biceps curls?
Unlikely.
The other problem with this misconception is guys use it as a reason not to train:
“Oh, I’m mega busy today so I don’t have time to go to the gym because I have to train for 2 hours or there’s no point”.
Baloney, and you know it – but it is a convenient excuse.
3) Training must be complicated
Another thing I see a lot of guys do that they shouldn’t is overcomplicate their training.
Overcomplication comes in two guises.
Firstly and most commonly, they do eleventy-billion exercises which inevitably results in a lot of redundancy. To wit, do you really need to do bench press, incline press, decline press, then the same with flyes, then cable crossovers, and, maybe, some dips to finish?
Probably not.
The second and less common way guys overcomplicate their training is with exceptionally convoluted training programmes. A lot of these are based upon methodologies favoured by elite weightlifters and powerlifters, and, while effective for those groups, they’re of little to no benefit for Joe Average who just wants to look better for his missus and be healthier for his kids.
If anything, they’ll cause him to burn out (because he can’t handle the high intensity, frequency, density, and volume) or simply lose track and fall off the wagon (because these programmes are written for people for whom training is their job).
4) Training must be entertaining
This one never fails to lose me friends.
Many men see training as a hobby.
Therefore, they believe that, as it’s their hobby and they’re doing it in their precious free time, it has to be fun.
And if it’s not fun, they don’t want to do it.
So, they only ever do what they perceive as “new” and “exciting”, which inevitably results in them ping-ponging around – training hard, sure – but making no progress whatsoever.
If this is you, you’ve got to start looking at training like you would a second job.
It’s not going to be fun all or even most of the time. There will be days you enjoy it and days you don’t, but, just like your real job, you show up anyway and do what needs to be done irrespective of how you feel about it.
OK, those are the four misconceptions.
If you’re struggling to get results, you’re almost certainly guilty of believing at least one of them.
Whether you want to do anything about it is your decision.
But, look, if you’re fed up with spinning your wheels in the gym and feeling like you’re not the man your family deserves because you’re out of shape, I’ll teach you how to sort it out once and for all.
Details below:
www.philtyreman.co.uk/information
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman