10 Weight-Lifting Mistakes Limiting Your Gains and Causing Injury

Lifting weights is as good for your physical health as blocking your narcissistic ex on Instagram is for your emotional health. Which is to say: very! Plus, it can help almost anyone reach their fitness goals, says Mia Nikolajev, CSCS, a powerlifter and strength and conditioning coach.

"Whether you want to gain weight, lose weight, bulk up, tone up, become more powerful or stronger, strength training can help you get there," she tells LIVESTRONG.com.

Beyond that, there's also the bone- and heart-strengthening perks — and more! For instance, you're burning calories ‌during‌ any workout you do, but you also burn a ton of calories ‌after‌ a strength-training session, thanks to something called the afterburn effect or excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC).

"This is where your muscles are recovering and your body is repairing your muscles, ultimately building those muscles up and burning more calories after the workout," Dylan Davies, CEO of Lift Society in Los Angeles tells LIVESTRONG.com. "As you're building more muscle, your resting metabolic rate is increasing so you're burning more calories at rest."

The thing is, to actually reap all these benefits you can't be making common weight-lifting mistakes, like lifting the same weight every day or skipping mobility work. Read on to understand why those — and eight other lifting mistakes — stall strength gains and may even sideline you with an injury.

"The only way to continuously get stronger is to continuously challenge your muscles," says New-York based certified strength and conditioning specialist Kristian Flores. (This is known as the progressive overload principle).

But lifting the exact same weight in the exact same rep scheme is the exact opposite of that. "Once your body has made the adaptations a weight can elicit, you need to change your workout," he says. Fail to do so, and you shift from boosting your fitness level to simply maintaining it.

Progressive overload is the most effective way to get stronger and add lean tissue, according to Davies. When you're training in progressive overload, you're continuously adding weight, which ultimately encourages you to get stronger.

"The more you can raise your resting metabolic rate, the more results you're going to have long- term, so having that lean tissue on your body is extremely beneficial," Davies says.

Another benefit to progressive overload is that you can put the focus on training, not just exercise. If you track your lifts, it becomes less of a workout and more of a program with a specific goal you're working toward.

One of the more dangerous mistakes exercise physiologist Pete McCall, CSCS, host of the All About Fitness Podcast, sees new lifters make is not only lifting the same weight every day but lifting the same ‌heavy‌ weight every time. More specifically, lifting the heavy weight just once.

Similar to a PB (personal best) or PR (personal record), a one-rep max is a weight you can only lift for a single repetition. A true one-rep max is extremely exhausting and requires that every single fiber in your muscle works together to help you complete the movement, McCall says. The result? Greater muscle-breakdown than lifting at a ‌lower‌ weight.

"Whether you do it every day or once a week, regularly building to a one-rep max dangerously overloads your muscles, he says. Beyond being less effective than a progressive overload approach, it's actually dangerous. "Your risk of injuring yourself is so high if you're doing a one-rep max every day you hit the gym," he says.

Davies advises not maxing out more than once every three months. And after you do perform your one-rep max in a workout?

"Take a de-load week where you're scaling back on weight, increasing reps and allowing your body that time to recover," she says. "If you're overtraining, you're not going to see the results because your body doesn't have that recovery time."

How much rest you should get between sets is directly correlated with what your fitness goal is. Unfortunately, according to Nikolajev, "generally, beginners who want to increase strength rest too little while those who want to put on volume rest too much."

Meaning, people's goals and rest periods aren't often aligned. At best, this stalls progress. And for strength seekers, at worse, this can result in injury, because it means they're lifting heavy or moderate weight while overly fatigued, she says.

Trying to hash out whether barbells or dumbbells are better for you is impossible — the two modes offer different but equally important benefits, McCall says.

The barbell allows you to lift more weight, which results in increased muscle mass and strength, he says. While dumbbells "engage far more stabilizing muscles and require more core activation for stability." Dumbbells also work your muscles through a greater range of motion due to the limited, more fixed path of the barbell.

Another benefit to dumbbells is that they're great for doing single-arm or single-leg movements, Davies points out.

To better understand, consider the push press. You may be able to push press 150 pounds with a barbell. But because of the extra oomph of coordination and core activation required to move each side independently, you likely won't be able to push two 75-pound dumbbells (for a total of 150 pounds) overhead.

According to McCall, typically folks can only lift about 30 to 40 percent of their barbell weight with dumbbells, not 50 percent. But while you won't push as much weight with dumbbells, you ‌will‌ strengthen the muscles in the supporting role to a greater degree.

"There is absolutely no reason to be at the gym for two hours if you don't work there," says McCall.

In fact, hanging out in the weight room for hours at a time is actually self-sabotage if your goal is to build strength. "You don't want to work out so long that you turn your strength workout into an endurance workout," he says.

Mobility means the healthy, pain-free movement of a joint through its full range of motion. While it's essential for everyday movement, optimal mobility also improves your workouts.

For example, you need hip, knee and ankle mobility to break parallel in your back squat and shoulder and thoracic spine mobility to "get your head through the window" at the top of a push press.

"Sub-par mobility often results in compensation," McCall says. In the case of both the squat and push press, that means undue stress on your lower back and spine. Long term, he says, poor mobility will lead to overuse injuries like shoulder or wrist impingement.

Tough love time: No matter your fitness goals, not getting enough sleep will undermine all the work you did at the gym. "Sleep is when your body repairs and rebuilds the muscles you workout at the gym," McCall says.

According to a February 2014 study in the ‌Journal of Molecular Endocrinology‌, that's because sleeping is when your body produces the main hormone involved in muscle recovery: human growth hormone.

If you hold your breath while you lift, you deny your muscles the oxygen they need to function properly, physical therapist Grayson Wickham, DPT, CSCS, founder of Movement Vault, tells LIVESTRONG.com.

"Holding your breath can also make you lightheaded, sometimes to the point of passing out," he says. That, obviously, is a ‌huge‌ safety issue when it comes to throwing around heavy dumbbells in the weight room.

Unfortunately, according to Wickham, many lifters hold their breath during lifts when they attempt to brace their core.

"Bracing is the act of creating intra-abdominal pressure to create a stable mid-section, which allows you to move safely," he says. It's an essential part of lifting, but you need to do it correctly.

No matter if you're gunning for one-rep max deadlift or a 10-minute burpee and pull-up AMRAP, form matters. "Once the quality of our movement goes down, the risk of injury goes up," Wickham says.

Good form, he explains, is defined as position that optimizes the health of your connective tissues while you move. Suboptimal form puts your connective tissues in less healthy positions. "Likely, an injury won't happen the very first time your form falters, but it increases your risk of overuse injury in the long term."

Let's consider the barbell back squat. When you descend into the bottom of the squat, you're supposed to keep your midline tight and your chest up. If you let your core go soft or your chest droops, your lower back will round. Can this result in immediate disc herniation? It could.

More likely, though, Wickham says the disc would shift over time or the muscles in your lower back would gradually pull on your surrounding connective tissues, resulting in hip or knee tightness and pain.

"If you're doing an exercise incorrectly, you're also not actually training the muscles that exercise is intended to strengthen," he says. Return to the back squat example: Those form errors reduce the amount of work the core is doing, and thus reduces the move's core-strengthening benefits.

Tempo is the slowing down of a movement while still working through its complete range of motion. Typically when using tempo, you slow down on the lowering phase of the exercise. Davies says the key to tempo is to move slowly and with control.

Using tempo is beneficial for everyone, but it's extremely helpful for people with injuries. "For people with injuries who can't go super heavy, applying tempo is a great way to put the muscles under more stress, which ultimately builds more muscle," Davies says.

Tempo also encourages your mind-muscle connection because you're really thinking about what you're doing, and that connection will help you engage the muscles properly, she says.