We often get asked by clients ‘am I doing this properly’ or they’ll express their concern about not being able to do an exercise correctly when unsupervised.
It can be hard to know if you are doing your exercises properly without a coach being there to correct you but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. So hopefully today we can provide you with a few quick tips that will help you do your exercises the right way and be more confident in the gym.
- Go Slow – Going slowly is one of the biggest and first tips we recommend implementing. Going slow helps you be more stable, control the movement, and will also help you identify what and where you are working.
- What & Where – It’s important to understand what area of the body each exercise is working and where you should be feeling it. If you’re not feeling it where you should be, you’ll need to change what you’re doing.
- Full ROM – ROM stands for Range of Motion which is how far you can move apart (joint/muscle) of your body. Such as going all the way down and up again on a pushup; opposed to only going half of the way down.
Now on top of these 3 tips, the most important part is consistent practice and repetition. It’s an obvious one but practicing will help you master each exercise in your program so you don’t have to doubt yourself. It doesn’t happen overnight and what you’ll find is you could always improve in your technique. That’s the beauty of training and exercise, it doesn’t matter how good you get, you can always improve.
Something else to also consider is that If you can’t implement the 3 tips above to your exercises it means you need to regress to an easier one. If you can’t go slow, feel it where you should be, and complete the exercise over it’s full ROM then it’s too difficult and you need to make it easy so you can do the above.
If you would like help taking the first step to learning how to do exercises correctly then please reach out. We’d love to help and get involved in your training.
Nathan Spring
