13 Common Training Mistakes

13 may be an unlucky number for some, but it so happens to be the same number of common training mistakes often made, when adding strength and conditioning to your routine. There are endless mistakes made by strength coaches/ head coaches/personal trainers/sports coaches on a daily basis but here are some of the biggest ones and some ways to iron them out:

1) Excessive Endurance Training
Nearly every athlete I work with runs themselves into the ground on a daily basis. Overly long warm-ups coupled with runs for punishment. This is counterproductive and is usually done because the coaches don’t have the necessary understanding of the body’s different energy systems and how to train them properly. Most sports require speed. Speed can only be improved through proper training of the nervous system and by avoiding excessive endurance work. Too much distance work can convert fast twitch muscle fibres into slow twitch fibres and can actually decrease an athlete's speed over time.

Unfortunately I've seen this happen more times than I care to remember and have watched potentially great athletes have their careers ruined by improper training techniques. If coaches kept in mind the requirements of the sport they are preparing their athletes for, maybe this would not be such a problem. Most of the time a coaches/athletes does not have a degree in anatomy or physiology or even a general understanding of either. The coach is required to know the sport inside and out but is rarely an expert in energy system training. If head coaches could check their egos and let a qualified speed and conditioning coach handle this aspect of training they just might be producing better and smarter athletes.

2) Overtraining
Most coaches/trainers/practitioners have an old school military attitude of "more is better," and usually end up overtraining. Spending more than an hour in the weight room is a classic mistake. Performing extra sprints at the end of practice as a form or punishment is another one. By forcing the athletes to run in such a fatigued state, you increase their risk of injury and teach them to adopt improper sprint technique. Skill and conditioning training should be separate.

3) Improper Sprint Training
Anyone who understands how the body works knows that to improve speed you must target the central nervous system (CNS). Proper neural training requires the appropriate amount of recovery time between sprints. The CNS takes five to six times longer than the muscles to recover, a fact which seem to escape most coaches. Running ten x forty yard sprints with a fifteen second rest is not speed training, it is time wasting and nauseating. The frequency of high intensity speed training is also too great. Most athletes are forced to perform maximal sprints every day of the week. The great Olympic sprint coach, Charlie Francis, has his athletes perform no more than three max effort sprint days per week and finds anything more than that to be detrimental in speed development. 

4) Too Many Reps In The Weight Room
Most of the weight training programs I see focus on sets of 10-15 reps, even for Olympic/power lifts.  With all of the other endurance work that serious traceur's/freerunner's usually do, the last thing you want to do is turn the time in the weight room into another endurance session. Focus on strength and speed which is best accomplished by using multiple sets of 1-6 reps and heavy weight.

5) Doing The Wrong Exercises
Triceps kickbacks, leg extensions, and pec deck flyes are all exercises that I have actually seen even athletes at the elite level use. These exercises are completely useless for any athlete. Strength is built using basic compound movements and heavy weight. Focus on squats, deadlifts, bench presses, military presses, rows, dips, pull-ups and chins and throw out the machines and isolation movements. 

6) Improper exercise form
Even if you utilize the proper rep scheme, and train heavy on the compound exercises listed above it is all a waste if your exercise form is horrendous. In the commercial and private weight rooms I’ve been in, I’ve seen people bench press with their asses a foot and a half off the bench and have seen more varieties of a squats/deadlifts/pull-ups/dumbbell bench press/rows than I ever knew existed.

7) Doing Conditioning Work Before Weight Training
The point of lifting weights is to get stronger. To do so you should be as fresh as possible upon entering the weight room so you can train at your maximal capacity. Running and doing conditioning drills immediately before lifting drains your glycogen stores and saps your energy, leaving you weak and unmotivated, not exactly the way you want to feel before a long session. Completing an exhausting two hour practice and then going straight to the weight room for some heavy squats is also a great way to get injured.

8) Everybody Following The Same Workout
You would be amazed at how many people use the exact same workout despite differences is strength, training age and leverages.  Even though all Parkour/Freerun practitioners share a common need for improved strength, the needs for each person can sometimes be very different and the training programs should reflect that. When it really gets to be appalling is when the weights to be used on a certain exercise are already written in ahead of time. Some workout sheets will say something like: Bench Press- 3 sets x 10 reps x100kg. So the 65kg beginner who has never lifted before and the 100kg experienced athlete who spent his life in the gym are supposed to do the same exact weight?

9) Never Changing The Workout
Too many people use the same workout month after month and year after year.  I’ve seen training programs other trainers use and I have had athletes bring me their old programs. A lot of the time it was the exact same three-day-a-week workout, fifty two weeks a year! Talk about boredom and burn out. I would go absolutely insane if I did the same workout for more than a few weeks straight, never mind for years. If you are getting paid to write workouts for a team of athletes, the least you could do is put a little thought into them and add some variety.

10) Following Someone Else’s Training
I see this a lot in parkour and martial arts communities. Because your coach/guru/peer trains a certain way doesn’t mean you have too. You might not have the same build, training experience, age or diet. Find what works for you.

11) Not Squatting
The squat is probably the exercise I hear the most nonsense about. “don’t squat below 90 degrees” is the big misconception here.  It's one of those "well known facts" which is mysteriously unsupported in any research.  According to this myth, full squats (a squat in which the knee joint is taken through a full range of motion, so that at the bottom the hamstrings make contact with the calves) are inherently dangerous, particularly to the knee joint.

Studies of Olympic weightlifters and power lifters, both of whom squat with heavy loads, show no increased risk of knee damage in either population. Olympic lifters, in particular, regularly drop to full depth under hundreds of pounds, perhaps as often a hundred times a week or more, for years, and yet their knees are healthier than those of people such as skiers, jumpers, or runners. No study, short or long term, has ever shown an increase in knee laxity from deep squatting.

The essential fact here is that no matter how deep you go, you must not lose the natural curve of your lumbar spine. You need to maintain your normal spinal curve to keep your back safe.

The onset of lower back rounding defines a lower limit for safe squatting when heavy weights are used, and you should stop above this point. Most people can develop the necessary mobility to back squat to parallel, slightly below parallel, or even lower in some cases if enough work is put in to do so.

12) Listening To Every Tom Dick And Harry
Misinformation, its everywhere, in the gym, the streets and on the internet.

Craig Rasmussen powerlifter and CSCS trainer put it best when he said “There's a unique conceit among many weight trainees (and fitness enthusiasts), a weird mix of ignorance and pride that makes them think they can manage just fine without a coach (everyone needs a coach). Perhaps they're too proud to admit they need coaching (everyone needs a coach), or they think they're being adequately coached by their buddies and training partners (everyone needs a coach).”

Even now I have coaches I train with on occasion, to cross reference with, compare notes and I’m never too proud to try something different. The Bruce Lee adage “absorb what is useful, reject what is not” springs to mind.

13) No Critical Thinking
The way I and I’m sure other critical thinking coaches who train athletes, is evolving all the time. While the core of what I do hasn’t changed much in 4 years, because of fundamental truths (aka "lifting heavy will make you stronger"), the accessory work I do, nutritional interventions, recovery work etc keeps changing and improving as new research comes to light. What I’m doing in 10 years may be totally different because something bigger and better may be just around the corner.

The Sports Science area's teaching and learning philosophy is focused on developing independent critical thinkers who have the knowledge and the skills to work in the fitness, health and sport industries. The emphasis is on students applying the theoretical and conceptual bases for physical activity to the real world. Some conversely seemingly don't make that real world jump and are so bound up in theory and idea's that they haven’t taken the time to test them. Thusly not deciding to implement or discard them.

Good teachers cultivate critical thinking, some example questions you should be asking are:

• What is the source of your information?
• What is the source of information in the report?
• What assumption has led you to that conclusion?
• Suppose you are wrong. What are the implications?
• Why did you make that inference? Is another one more consistent with the data?
• Why is this issue significant?
• How do I know that what you are saying is true?

Conclusion
I have made some of these mistakes in the past myself, but benefiting from my mistakes and the mistakes of others means that we never need make them again. Training under people who knew far more about training than I did and asking lots of questions, set me on the right path to developing critical thinking and a willingness to learn. Learning is half the battle in training the rest is perseverance, effort and consistency.

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