4 common training mistakes holding you back from results

There’s so much information out there about what you “should” and “shouldn’t” do with your nutrition and fitness, so you can achieve the results you’re striving for. It can be difficult to understand what’s benefiting your health, and what is actually causing more harm than good.

So let’s dive into some of the most common fitness mistakes we see people make, which can compromise their ability to see results and enjoy their health journey!

1. Going all in on cardio.

For best results, combining strength and resistance training with your cardio workouts is a MUST!

While cardio is great for burning excess fat and boosting your metabolism, strength training is critical for sculpting and toning your muscles, further supporting your metabolism, and enhancing your core strength, stability and performance throughout all your training sessions. Bascially, they both have a huge number of complementary benefits, and to maximise your results, both should be foundational parts of your fitness routine.

The truth is, for optimal results, cardio won’t cut it. If you’re sprinting every day, you’re putting immense stress on your body and joints. Plus, your body will get used to running pretty quickly, meaning your results will plateau - fast.

By changing up your training types and challenging your muscles in a variety of ways, you’ll get the most bang for your buck, and achieve the best results from each workout! This is why our HIIT Circuits are structured to include both cardio and resistance exercises every day - to help you achieve the results you’re working for!

2. Pushing through injuries.

Injuries happen, both in the gym and in the outside world. And when they do, so many of us decide to put on a brave face and continue going about life as we were… including training as normal!

This can be a big mistake - if you don’t give injuries time to heal and repair properly, chances are you’ll make them worse and worse, until you have to take far more time off your workouts than you otherwise would have.

Training through an injury results in compromised performance, and a whole lot of pain. So give your body a break when it needs one, and let yourself recovery if you’re injured!

3. Never increasing your weights/reps.

A surprising number of people go to the gym for years, and never increase their weights or reps during this time.

This is a huge mistake if you’re aiming for results!

Over time, your body adapts to stressors and load, and gets stronger - meaning if you start squatting a weight of 10 kgs, after a few months this feels like easy work for those glutes. You stop seeing the same benefits and results, and it becomes more like going through the motions each time you do the exercise.

If you’re not slowly working your way up to higher weights or a greater number of reps in your workouts, it’s time to start setting yourself some new goals and challenges! This is the key to avoiding the dreaded workout plateau, so you can keep seeing and feeling the results you’re working for!

4. Focusing on the numbers.

With the explosion in smartwatches and fitness trackers, it’s no wonder we’re all obsessed with tracking our workouts, analysing how many calories we’ve burned and how long we spend in the gym. Many of us even love to make it a competition with our friends!

But this isn’t the way to achieve results…

The truth is, your workouts are about SO much more than burning as many calories as you can, and this can actually be a very misleading way of judging a session as “good” or “bad”.

For example, a 45-minute HIIT session will often burn a tonne more calories than a steady 45-minute jog, demonstrating that time spent in the gym isn’t synonymous with the most effective workout.

And similarly, while you might burn more calories in a cardio session than a weights session, after weight training you continue torching calories throughout the day, meaning the overall effect could well be that you burn more after resistance training than after cardio!

As you can see, the numbers we’ve learned to judge our workouts by are misleading. They often make us feel bad about ourselves - for no good reason at all!

If you want to assess the effectiveness of a workout, consider how it makes you FEEL! This is why we combine resistance and cardio exercises in our Signature HIIT Circuits, so you can achieve maximum burn, optimise your results, and feel fantastic every. single. Time.

Book in for your next session now!
Know a friend who is making these mistakes? Share this info with them! Even better, bring them along to a Symetrie session so they can feel the difference - they can try unlimited classes for 2 weeks for just $59 with our Intro Offer!