While it is great to celebrate your own uniqueness and sense of individuality, there are certain commonalities between people which cannot be ignored. This is certainly true when it comes to working out and the world of health and fitness. Regardless of your age, sex, fitness level, or goals, there are certainly common, classic exercise errors that cannot be ignored. Whatever experience you have, are you sure you’re not making the same mistakes that so many other people make when it comes to keeping fit?

Whether it’s inexperience, getting into bad habits or following other people’s misconceptions as if they are the truth, there are often flaws in fitness plans. If you’re making any of these then you might not be getting the results that you envisage. This could either turn you off exercise because you’re not getting the results you want, or create injuries from throwing your energy into the wrong direction, in the wrong way. Here are the five exercise errors:

1. Not knowing your fitness status: You don’t need to be a pro-athlete to take your fitness seriously and have a fitness strategy in place. Before you get going after a break from working out, or if you are starting a new style of training, you might want to assess your fitness levels to spot your strengths and weaknesses. Why guess when you can get help from a fitness expert in reviewing your fitness status.
2. Leading a non-active life: You might be great at sticking to a workout but this could defeat the object if the rest of the time your lifestyle resembled that of a sloth. Add activities into your daily routine, and don’t just see exercise as not simply a fitness center based activity, otherwise you’re making work for yourself and you won’t necessarily see the results you expect.
3. Beginners who blast off: So many people start a fitness regime with so much enthusiasm and it’s impressive. However, by blasting off with too much power you are making a classic mistake. This is a sure fire way to either burn out, set a level of gusto you struggle to keep up with, or cause aches, pains and injuries by overdoing it. Too much too soon never rang so true!
4. Not checking equipment: You’ve just seen somebody move off a piece of equipment who doesn’t resemble you in terms of physical appearance, such as size, height or weight. Not only that but you’re both aiming for different fitness goals and are at a different competence and fitness level. Why wouldn’t you check and adjust equipment so that it fits you rather than some random person who is nothing like you? Only if you want a quick route to injury and failing in your fitness mission.
5. Not warming up: The recent thinking on warming up is that movements are far better than static stretches. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest that these one-position stretches might work against you achieving your exercise benefits too. To avoid injury, as well as sprains and strains you need to get blood flowing to muscles with oxygen reaching them too. You might feel warm before you exercise but don’t mistake this for your muscles being warm enough to be exercised effectively. Even if you don’t have lots of workout time, give your body 5-10 minutes of warmup exercises.

Do you see people around you making exercise errors? Or have you made mistakes when it comes to your own fitness? Share your thoughts with us and look out for Part 2 where we reveal five more mistakes many people make!