6 Exercise Mistakes to Avoid When You Are Trying to Lose Weight

If this is your first attempt to lose weight or if you've been spinning your wheels stuck at the same weight, you might be making mistakes in your workout routine.

While a calorie deficit is essential to losing weight, improper exercise selection, among other factors, can curb your progress.

---

Exercise mistakes to avoid when trying to lose weight

Here's a look at six of them:

1) Too much cardio

Let's get one thing straight: Regular cardio done for 30-60 minutes is an excellent way to improve cardiovascular health and stamina while staving off diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and stroke.

However, there's such a thing as too much cardio. Performing excess cardio can lead to muscle loss and increased inflammation, which can slow down metabolism, increase cortisol levels, and reduce fat burn. That also creates frequent hunger pangs, which can lead to binge-eating.

Here are some warning signs that you need to scale back your cardio:

• You're constantly fatigued.
• You're sore all the time.
• Weight loss has slowed down, even with proper calorie tracking.
• Strength training sessions become more difficult.
• Resting heart rate remains higher on waking up.

---

2) Not doing strength training

Strength training is the best way to gain lean muscle mass. Gaining muscle can increase metabolism, improve nutrient partitoning, and maintain bone health.

All you need is three full body workouts a week focused on compound exercises. If you're a beginner to weightlifting, here's a detailed guide on optimizing your results.

---

3) Under recovery

Overtraining, inadequate sleep, and low protein intake can slow the muscle recovery process. The actual fat burning and muscle building process occurs with proper rest and recovery.

If you're not giving your body enough time to rebuild itself after strenuous exercise, you will struggle to lose weight and gain muscle.

---

4) Favoring steady state cardio over HIIT

HIIT (high intensity interval training) has a wide variety of benefits, such as:

• Burns more calories in a shorter period.
• Supports muscle growth.
• Temporarily boosts metabolism that helps you lose weight at a faster rate.
• Stimulates HGH (Human Growth Hormone) production.
• Reduces blood pressure and heart rate.
• Improves blood sugar profile.

Steady state cardio like jogging and walking can help you lose weight. However, it causes metabolic adaptations with time that reduce calorie burn and fat loss. Instead, switch to interval training to lose weight at a faster rate.

---

5) Improper exercise selection

You have likely seen people who have spent years at the gym with minimal changes to their physique. That's due to the inclusion of inferior training techniques and exercises in their diet.

Your workout routine should focus on full body movements like deadlifts, presses, squats, rows, pull-ups, and weighted carries. Don't forget to add in bodyweight workouts as well to improve motor coordination and tendon strength.

---

6) No exercise variety or progressive overload

Twelve weeks is the recommended period to follow any workout programme. After that, the body starts adapting to the stimulus and produces diminished results.

That does not mean you need to overcomplicate things. For eg, if you've been doing the bench press for a while, switch to the dumbbell version instead. The same goes with adjusting your rep ranges. If you’ve primarily been doing powerlifting-type training and staying within 3-5 reps, you will greatly benefit from having higher-rep training phases.

Make sure to perform enough variations to strengthen the accessory muscles as well. That will help you break plateaus and progress further. For example, if you're struggling to improve your bench press numbers, focus on strengthening your triceps by performing extensions, pushdowns, and close-grip bench presses.

---

Takeaway

If you want to lose weight consistently, you need to make sure your exercise plan is on point. Improper workout routines, exercise selection, and under-recovery can hinder weight loss and cause loss of motivation. Follow the aforementioned tips to overcome this roadblock, and get in the best shape of your life.