Mistakes in the gym can happen and risk of injury is never 0%. Everyone has seen a gym fail at this point. They are funny when they aren’t serious, and gruesome when they are. It’s not surprising that injuries occur during workouts, as the only way to get better is to lift heavier, go faster, or do more. This isn’t the wrong approach, but when you combine overload, which is necessary for progression, with impatience, ego, or miseducation, you get injuries.

Proper technique should be the goal of all beginners to exercise. This will decrease injury risk long term. Being injury free is important because we want to workout for our whole lives to stay healthy, and do everything we do outside of the gym too. Drilling the technique of exercises at a low intensity is a good way to start out. Once you’ve got the technique to a point and you can perform the exercise consistently well, you can start adding intensity. This doesn’t mean you’ll never have technique breakdowns, because you will. When that happens, take the time to fix your technique at the intensity where the breakdown occurred.

Two big mistakes people make when trying to get more fit is;

  1. Adding intensity too quickly: You’ll see this mostly with heavy lifting or high intensity circuit training. Going heavier or faster is necessary to get better at these things, but for the average person, allowing major form breakdown probably isn’t worth the risk. Try taking your intensity to your form’s threshold (when you feel it deviate) and improve form there, then add intensity and repeat.
  2. Never increasing intensity: You’ll see sometimes that people are too scared of getting injured so they only do light weights or go slow during workouts so their form is completely perfect with no deviation at all. This is very safe but if you aren’t increasing intensity, you won’t get better because overload is needed to become more fit. Your body is probably not as fragile as you think. You can handle some form deviation, then improve it at the new higher intensity.

The takeaway is that having a solid base of good exercise technique will keep you as safe as possible during workouts, while progressing intensity will challenge you to maintain and improve your technique. Layering, improving technique and increasing intensity repeatedly over time will keep you as safe as possible in the gym, and get you fit for a long time to come.