Chapter 6
Do It Right: Avoid These Exercise Mistakes
I want you to really enjoy your workouts. If you don’t, there’s a chance you may make a mistake. To help you identify exercise mistakes and avoid them in the future, I’d like to provide some preventative guidance. Following it will help ensure that you don’t harm yourself through your exercise program. Here are the seven most common exercise mistakes I have observed from my many years of exercise training and teaching.
1. Overtraining: In their passion to achieve their fitness goals, some people try too hard. Enthusiasm is a wonderful thing, but taxing your body too much will not get you any closer to your goals. Possible signs of overtraining include injury, weight loss, mental dullness, disturbed digestion, loss of appetite, early exhaustion during a workout, fatigue during the day, and elevated heart rate (usually five to ten beats faster) upon awakening in the morning. If you experience any of these signs of overtraining, you may need to ease the intensity of your workouts and the duration of your total exercise time. Also, I realize that in order to achieve your desired health and weight management goals you may decide to limit your caloric intake while embarking on your HIIT training program. If so, make sure you maintain a healthy balance of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins in your three daily primary meals (and snacks).
2. Poor exercise technique. Good technique in exercise means a person is doing an exercise that maximizes correct movement, and also minimizes the chances of injury. With good exercise movement technique, the body works together as a unit, rather than as a stockpile of parts.
Poor technique is most likely to occur during the latter stages of a workout, when fatigue is starting to set in. This may put excessive pressure on your joints or muscles, thereby contributing to an injury. A good example of this is tennis elbow, which is often caused by having poor backhand technique. Another example is misusing a treadmill: holding onto the safety bars while running can negatively affect your posture and lead to knee, hip, shoulder, and back discomfort. When I teach someone a movement, I always encourage them to focus on its correct execution. The benefits of this attentive focus will carry over to your daily activities, such as lifting groceries, climbing stairs, rising from a chair, or running to catch a train or bus. So make a point to always emphasize quality in your workout movements and watch your daily activities improve too.
3. Improper equipment. The exercise clothes you wear, the shoes on your feet, the surface you are training on, and the equipment you are using can all improve or impair your performance. For those of you exercising at home, make sure you have plenty of space and ventilation for your exercise equipment and for you. Also, be aware of any safety concerns with the equipment you are using. For instance, treadmills are often identified as potentially dangerous pieces of fitness equipment. While the treadmill is in operation, its belt is constantly moving, and quite quickly. A fall can lead to abrasions, broken bones or sprained joints. That said, one of the leading contributors to treadmill injuries is simply inattention, so if you say focused you will minimize any risk of injury. The treadmill is not the place to check your phone, text, or conduct any activity other than walking or running.
4. Insufficient warm-up: Too often, the main workout is started without proper warm-up or after a quick, insufficient warm-up. An appropriate warm-up progressively prepares your muscles, nerves, heart, and lungs for the challenging workout to follow. It also activates your mobility, coordination, and balance, getting you ready for the dynamic movements in the workout. Note that the most effective warm-ups are tailored to the specific movements you will be doing during your main workout, since this prepares the muscles that will be used. So, if you will be biking during your HIIT workout, the best warm-up will be a bike warm-up. If you are rowing during your HIIT workout, then go ahead and row for your warm-up. Most warm-ups should start at a relatively light intensity and progress for 5 to 7 minutes.
5. Exercises that are too bouncy and fast. Movements that are too fast and bouncy stimulate opposing muscle groups to contract and hinder each movement. You want some of your movements to be dynamic, particularly during HIIT workouts—but not to the point where you are stressing your joints. I tell clients that movement speeds regularly vary in exercise. That is normal. However, focus more on moving with a controlled effort than the speed of your movement. That’s the key!
6. Inadequate cooldown. After your HIIT workout, it’s time to do your cooldown. The cooldown is a progressive slowing of your exercise movements, and it helps to gradually lower your heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure toward pre-exercise levels. A successful cooldown helps to avoid fainting or dizziness, which can happen when blood remains in the large muscles of the legs. You want to keep the major muscles working slowly during the cooldown. The cooldown promotes blood flow back to the heart, where it is sent to the lungs to be loaded with fresh oxygen, and then sent to all of your body’s major organs. At the end of your HIIT workouts perform a 3–5 minute cooldown, such as easy walking at a light intensity.
6. Repeating the same exact workout. Many people find a workout they enjoy and just keep doing it. However, in order to improve your health and fitness level, you need to continually challenge your body by doing a different workout, changing the intensity of your workout, or changing some components of your workouts. One of the problems with doing the same exact workout all the time is that your body adapts so readily it expends fewer and fewer calories to complete the workout; in science we say this increases your metabolic efficiency. But worry not—there are plenty of HIIT workouts in this book. I encourage you to enjoy them all!
7. Exercising when you are ill. Oftentimes, people who are serious about training may attempt to “exercise through” an illness (like a cold or flu), only to prolong their symptoms or cause a recurrence. This may further delay your return to exercising at an optimum level. It’s always best to check in with your health practitioner to discuss and resolve any health issues you might have.
Chapter 7
Time for Your Heart Health Pre-Check
I’d like to introduce you to the heart health pre-check. This is a special health assessment to determine your risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD), the leading cause of death for women and men throughout the United States and the world. To assess your own CVD risk, I encourage you—again!—to contact your health practitioner, always a good idea before embarking on any program of strenuous exercise. Your practitioner will be able to give you the information you need to complete your heart health pre-check. But first, let’s explore a little more about cardiovascular disease.
Cardiovascular disease is a term that encompasses diseases of the heart and blood vessels, coronary artery disease, heart attack, and stroke. A 2017 report by the American Heart Association found that CVD accounted for 801,000 deaths in the United States in the previous year. That means one in every three deaths in the US is due to CVD—a sobering statistic. As a result, identifying risk factors for CVD is vital to avoiding heart problems. A risk factor is anything that makes someone susceptible to a condition or illness; thus, a positive CVD risk factor is something that promotes CVD. A negative CVD risk factor is something that negates a positive CVD risk factor. (Contrary to what its name implies, a negative risk factor offers a health advantage.) This will be easier to understand as we go over the risk factors below.
Below is your heart health pre-check of positive CVD risk factors. Go over this with your health practitioner to better determine if you have any of these risk factors.
1. Family history of heart attack. This would be a heart attack or sudden death before fifty-five years of age in your father (or male first-degree relative, which means your parents, offspring, or siblings) or before sixty-five years of age in your mother (or female first-degree relative).
2. Cigarette smoking. Are you a current smoker or did you just quit within the last 6 months? If yes, this is a positive risk factor.
3. High blood pressure. Is your systolic blood pressure ≥130 mmHg and/or is your diastolic blood pressure ≥80 mmHg? And if so, has this been confirmed on two separate occasions? Or, are you taking