5 Training Mistakes Everyone Makes When They Start Lifting

okay what is going on everyone that's why in this video what I want to do is share the top 5 training myths that most beginners seem to fall for I've personally fallen for all five of these early on in my training career and now I've been training seriously for 13 years and it's during those first few years of lifting that you're most primed to make the best gains you'll ever make so you really want to capitalize on that newbie period that's what I'm gonna do is overlay some clips here from my latest full-body workout as

I go through the myths and before we get started I do want to thank Squarespace for sponsoring this video it'll have a little bit more about that at the end so the first training myth I want to cover is the idea that high reps are better for toning and low reps are better for bulking up now both of these ideas aren't really true first of all the term toning is one of those buzzwords without any real science base I think what most people mean when they say toning is basically losing fat so the underlying muscle

can show through better the losing fat part is actually really simple according to the best research we have losing fat is just a matter of putting yourself in a caloric deficit and eating enough protein and the building muscle part is pretty straightforward as well you simply need to apply a progressive tension stimulus to the muscle by getting better at lifting weights over time but I think the basic idea is that people think by doing more reps you'll burn more calories and as a result lose more fat especially from the body part that you're training but

there are at least three studies showing that body fat spot reduction isn't possible and according to a recent issue of the mass research review a typical weight training session only burns about 75 to 300 calories anyway and even if you could increase that number by doing more reps the rate of energy expenditure will never hold a candle to traditional cardio 150 pound person would burn about the same calories in a 10 to 15-minute jog as a 1-hour workout with weights so in my opinion I wouldn't think of using weight training as a fat loss tool

at all I'd recommend fine-tuning your diet and cardio to set up an appropriate caloric deficit while using weight training to take care of the muscle building process now the other side of this coin is that low reps are supposedly going to be better for gaining mass and as it turns out this really isn't true either we know from research that high reps and low reps are both effective at building muscle as long as you're taking sets to or close to failure take this 2015 study on low versus high load training for example one group did

25 to 35 reps per set and the other group didn't want moderate reps in the 8 to 12 zone both groups use a typical 3 day per week full-body training routine and after eight weeks ultrasound showed that both groups saw the same muscle growth and I love this graph from stronger by science where you can see that most people think a more moderate 8 to 12 reps own is better for building pure size resin reality all rep ranges can be effective for this still I think there is a practical hypertrophy zone somewhere around 6 to

15 reps this is because even though reps above 15 can still cause the same growth they're also very taxing on recovery for no extra benefit and by the same token reps lower than 6 tend to run an extra risk of injury from heavier loading so while in theory there isn't anything magical about the 6 to 15 rep range in practice it is the most reasonable and you should spend most of your time working in this rep range just occasionally dipping below it or above it but hopefully by now it's clear that there is no reason

to think that doing higher reps is gonna help with toning or doing lower reps is gonna help with bulking all rep ranges build muscle and no rep ranges are particularly good at burning fat okay so the next myth pretty much everyone falls for is that you should only train one body part per workout early on most people are encouraged to follow a split something like this one where you hit chest on Monday back on Tuesday Wednesday is leg day Thursday is shoulders and abs and then arms on Friday and then you have a rest day

on the weekends and this is the split that I followed when I first got started and I think the idea behind it is that you want to split up your training so you can really just destroy one muscle per workout and then give it a full week to recover and grow but as it turns out research shows that a full week between workouts is way more time than you actually need and there might be an upper limit to how much of benefit you can get from just killing one muscle in a single workout in the

scientific literature this has been proposed as a per workout upper threshold for volume so rather than absolutely destroying your chest on Monday with 12 sets you'd be better off splitting up those twelve sets across two workouts so for example using a push-pull leg split you'd hit six sets of chests on the first push day and then the other six sets on the second push day and you can check out my push-pull legs science applied series for more examples on that also the entire point of training isn't to beat the muscle to a pulp it's to

stimulate muscle protein synthesis and make the muscle more sensitive to amino acids this is what actually triggers the muscle to grow as you can see in this figure from Damas and colleagues when you train at time zero muscle protein synthesis spikes up for around 24 hours after training but then goes up back down probably going back to or near baseline around 48 to 72 hours after lifting so this means that after just two or three days you're not really getting anything from that chest workout anymore and you'd be better off hitting chest again in a

couple days now in more advanced trainees this response operates on an even shorter timescale so after just ten hours or so muscle protein synthesis starts to go back down and within a day or two it's back to near baseline levels again so this might offer some theoretical basis for a high frequency full body training routine in more advanced lifters now I think it's important to say that I don't think that so-called bro splits are totally useless I personally managed to build a ton of muscle myself using a body part split for at least three or

four years when I first got started with lifting and I know several top natural bodybuilders who still use a bro split so it clearly can and does work and I've been saying this for a while four years ago I uploaded a video explaining why I think bro splits aren't actually as bad as people make them out to be and interestingly enough this year a new systematic review and meta-analysis looking at 25 studies concluded that training frequency actually doesn't significantly impact muscle hypertrophy when volume is equated and this goes along with what I've been saying all

along the best training split is the one that allows you to get in an adequate amount of volume per week while distributing your working sets throughout the week in a way that allows you to recover and perform optimally and I would say the main reason that the bro split isn't the best apart from all that theoretical stuff is that cramming all those sets in one workout isn't going to maximize your performance on those sets later in the workout you're going to be more tired and you won't be able to move as much weight as if

you had just split that workload up across two or three workouts throughout the week also in the real world hitting each body part more once a week is usually going to lead to more weekly training volume anyway which tends to cause more hypertrophy so it isn't so much that bro splits are terrible and you'll never make gains on them it's just that they probably aren't the smartest way to set up your training routine and from a practical perspective our most likely gonna end up leaving some gains on the table and this is why and my

fundamentals hypertrophy programs which is designed for beginners I included three different splits a full body program and upper/lower program and a modified body part split all of which are very effective so the third myth is the idea that you need to get sore in order for a workout to be effective and I just don't think this is true at all soreness is the result of a novel stimulus not necessarily an effective stimulus so for example if I were to go run a marathon after recording this video I'd probably be very sore the next day but

that doesn't mean I would have built any new muscle because there'd be no tensile stimulus for growth or for some reason I decided to start stabbing myself in the leg repeatedly I'd be significantly more sore than after a well-designed leg day but the leg day would definitely cause more muscle growth and in some ways I would say soreness can actually be a negative thing for muscle growth as it can interfere with performance for example I just finished my upper/lower program where I hit my upper body every two days now if I annihilated my back on

day one and was still really sore on day three that would undoubtedly interfere with my ability to perform my best on that second upper body day which is what really matters for progress with that said I will say that soreness can be a decent indicator that you actually hit the muscle if you were trying to hit for example if you're new to doing hip thrusts and the next day you only feel soreness in your lower back and hamstrings that's an indication that you perform the exercise incorrectly and that you didn't actually target your glutes properly

now but still assuming you're using proper form progressively overloading and choosing exercises that actually target the muscles you're trying to grow I'm not really convinced that getting sore really tells you much of anything useful so rather than relying on soreness as a gauge of a good workout I think you should instead look to your workout log did you lift more weight this workout and the last workout did you do more reps than the previous workout did you improve your form in some small way three more focused during the training session I would say these metrics

are far more valuable than just how much your muscles hurt the next day okay the next myth that pretty much every beginner falls for is that muscle confusion is really important for shocking the muscle to grow I discussed this in more length in a recent research summary video that I posted last week so I'm not going to go into too much detail here the long story short is that research tells us that it really doesn't matter if you're constantly switching up variables from week to week because progressive tension is the main thing driving growth actually

I would say that if you're constantly switching things up it can actually stunt your progress because there's no intentionality to your progression let's say one week you're doing lat pull-downs next week you're doing Hammer Strength machines with lots of drop sets the next week you're doing weighted heavy pull-ups by constantly switching things up it becomes so much more difficult to actually progressively overload on each individual exercise this is why for beginners I actually recommend the exact opposite approach you want to keep the core of your training routine exactly the same from week to week this

way you're gonna master form while getting stronger on those movements this is gonna cause the muscle to grow so much better than constantly switching things up well now with that said your training doesn't need to be boring you can't have some exercises that you swap in and out and you can be more flexible with those and you're welcome to change the reps and even add in some drop sets or whatever else but I would say that having at least one or two main heavy movements per day that you stick to get better at and get

stronger with is smart for example on a pull day including a pull-up and a pen delay row each and every workout for at least eight weeks is gonna ensure that each and every workout you're improving something on these two movements whether that be weight technique mind muscle connection or some other form of progression okay so the fifth myth we're gonna cover here is no pain no gain which basically means if you're not killing yourself in the gym and taking every set to failure and the muscle just isn't gonna grow and this of course isn't true

now it is very important that you apply an appropriate level of effort in the gym but as I explained in my video on effective reps based on the data that we have muscle growth is very similar between a set taken all the way to failure in a set that leaves one or two reps in the tank and since taking sets to failure especially on heavy compound exercises can cause more fatigue increase injury risk breakdown and reduce the volume that you can do later in the workout I generally recommend reserving sets taken to failure for the

last set of an isolation exercise while leaving one to three reps in the tank for everything else and if you guys want more detail on that I definitely recommend checking out my full video on effective reps which I'll link down below so for all other information I want to direct you guys to my fundamentals video series here on the channel which covers all the basics you need to know as a new lifter and if you're looking to make all this stuff more actionable in the gym I definitely recommend checking out my fundamentals hypertrophy program which

was designed for people in their first few years of training and before we go I want to thank Squarespace for sponsoring this video Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform that have been using to run Jeff nipper calm since 2014 I think and they make it really easy to redesign my website feature a new program whenever I have a new one ready for launch and even set up affiliate links and other tabs for content and Squarespace has really aesthetic designer custom templates and 24/7 customer space for showing your support on the channel thank you guys so

much for watching don't forget to leave me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you guys all here in the next one [Music]