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There is a mistake that is very common with people working out at the gym. It's called the"showing off" bug. It happens when people lift not for strength or hypertrophy but rather just to impress the other people in the gym.Now honestly I guess if the only reason that you go to the gym is to show off then it's notsuch a big deal. But if you lift weights to increase your strength, improve sportsperformance or to get bigger then you need to avoid this problem.Why is it such a big deal? Because when people get overly concerned with the amount of weight that they are lifting they cheat on their form and take other measures to artificiallyinflate their stats. (And it doesn't have to be to impress others though that's the mainreason people do it)How do people do this? There are several common ways; first it's exceedingly common forpeople to cheat on their form when lifting. People doing squats rarely go all the way down toparallel, when doing other exercises it's common to use momentum to inflate liftingnumbers.Some people lift with muscles that shouldn't be involved in that particular lift. Like when yousee a guy doing barbell curls and throwing his whole body into lifting that weight.Another thing that's not always a bad thing, but it's over done by some people is not doinga enough reps. The correct number of reps is going to change according to what yourtraining purpose is and what lift you are performing. But one good example would besomeone that always performs just 1 or 2 reps well bench pressing. This allows you theopportunity to brag that you lifted more than your buddy, but the catch is that he wasperforming 8 reps.In fact rep numbers is something that can confuse people. You hear that you need to belifting 1.5X bodyweight or something like that, that's probably a 1 rep max (1RM) but youdo 8 reps at a time and think that you are supposed to be doing 1.5X bodyweight for 8 repsinstead of 1.Then there are people that wear so many wraps and belts that they don't train a largepercentage of their supporting muscles. Take a power lifter for example; they wear a powerlifting suit. This is fine for power lifting but if you are training for sports then you aren'tgoing to strengthen all of the supporting muscles that you need when running, jumping andmaking quick cuts.Some people even do the wrong lifts just to impress others. A good example of this wouldbe someone whose training regiment doesn't include bench pressing but who does it anyway just because all of his friends bench press and he wants to compare numbers with them.This becomes a problem when you either fail to perform a lift that is more important to yourtraining focus, or when you spend too much time in the gym. I try to keep my workoutsunder 60 minutes and I find that in order to get enough sets in that amount of time I haveto really watch how many lifts I do.If you get caught in this numbers game then not only can you cheat on your lifts and notgain the strength or mass that you want. But it can also affect you mentally. I have helped afew people set up vertical jump training routines and one thing that I sometimes told themwas "don't worry how much you can squat, just do it" I said this to people that wereconcerned because they didn't think that their squat was very good. These people weretraining to improve their vertical jump, basically if they did have a good squat already thenwhy were they still lifting to improve their vertical jump? Yea it doesn't feel good to step up
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