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Franklin Antoian
Fitness Expert.
1 of SHAPE's Top 50 Personal Trainers
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Founder of iBodyFit

3 Ways To Hurt Yourself Working Out

Shared on 05/20/2018 @ 2:38pm by Franklin Antoian
Tags: Exercises | General health | Workouts

I see it often.
A new exerciser begins a workout program with the intention of finally get healthy, but instead, he or she does a dangerous exercise and ends up getting injured. Here's the Top 3 exercises you should avoid, especially if you are new to fitness.

#1 Carrying Weights While Walking

You've seen this before. Someone is walking or running while carrying dumbbells and attempting to perform some sort of arm exercise. I'm not exactly sure why people do this one, but I guess it's because they think it will burn extra calories.
The extra weight, even if it is just a few pounds, puts a tremendous amount of stress on your joints over the course of a long walk. While you may burn a few extra calories carrying around a dumbbell while you walk, you're more likely to hurt yourself by straining a tendon or ligament. This will put you out of commission for 4 - 12 weeks.

#2 Using the Treadmill for Anything but Running

Walking, jogging, running - all are perfect modes of exercises on the treadmill. Lately, the trend has been to job backwards or walk sideways while on the treadmill.

While waling/jogging/running backwards is a useful training tool, it is best performed outside, on grass. Have you even fallen on the treadmill and landed on th belt while it's running? No good.

#3 Using Too Much Weight

Everyone knows those guys (and sometimes girls) at the gym who load up the machines with a ton of weight, grunt, move the weights just a little bit, grunt again and repeat. There's 2 problems here:
1. Moving a lot of weight just a small amount uses only a small portion of your muscle fibers, which results in less gains.
2. Using an excess amount of weight puts extra stress on your joints, tendons and ligaments, which can easily result in an injury.

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