In fitness and bodybuilding, there’s a lot of room for error. But if you remain dedicated and focused, you can minimise the mistakes and start seeing results. Below are some of the commonest mistakes made in the sport.

1. Skipping The Warm-up

If you go straight for the heavy weights without warming up, it will be downright miraculous if you don’t sustain an injury, usually sooner than later.

2. Not Enough Nutrition

Beginners and, surprisingly enough, even some more experienced trainers, often fail to understand the connection between nutrition and training. Post-workout recovery nutrition is too often totally ignored. Some beginners base this on a “normal food’s good enough for me” kind of attitude. And, well, yes you can get by on a normal balanced diet, but it is absolutely crucial to remember to eat properly and to make sure your body has enough available nutrition both before and after training.

3. Wrong Nutrition

A classic example of incorrect nutrition is the common misguided practice of filling up on bread before sleep. People then can’t understand why their sleep is restless and why they wake up starving hungry each morning. Some even get up in the middle of the night to stuff more bread. Bread on its own does not give the body enough protein to enable it to recover effectively from training. Not only does taking on masses of carbohydrate in the evening give you restless sleep, some breads, such as rye, also contain materials which activate the production of the kinds of hormones that keep you awake. Instead of taking on carbs in the evening, you need to be making sure your body has enough available protein during the night.

4. Training Too Light

Going to the gym and training at the gym are two different things. Reading a women’s mag while doing 200 rep sets on the leg spreader can hardly be considered a decent workout in terms of having any real effect on the muscles. There is a common misconception that you should never pump your sets to the limit, that you should bow-out within your “comfort zone”. People who train like this will, if they see any improvement at all, hit a brick wall in muscle development within their first six months.

5. Overtraining

There are a lot of highly active, sporty people out there who would, without a shadow of a doubt, be in seriously better condition if they would just cut half of their training out completely. These are “exercise bulimics”, and they train every day, and lots. We’re not talking about ‘incidental exercise’ enthusiasts here, these are people who will happily do to two aerobics sessions in a row and then hit the gym.