Mistakes you’ve been seen making at the gym.

Very recently, a trainer mate of mine watched me perform a dead lift at the gym only to tell me how terrible my form was.

It was quite mortifying, if I’m honest. The whole ordeal turned out to be an exercise in humility instead of my butt muscles. And because I hate to make the same mistake twice (unless he owns his own house-unhhh), I became very keen to know more about the kinds of mistakes trainers see while they’re at the office.

So I approached our boy, Dinny Morris Fitness, a trainer at the infamous Fitness First Kings Cross, and forced him to talk to me about it. 

If you don’t know him, Dinny Morris Fitness has been instrumental is improving the shape and tone of a great many torsos on the Grindr grid in Sydney. At any time of the day, you’ll see him pushing some hunky dude to his limits – and that’s why he gets results. Because he’s a pusher. He likes to push people. 

The first thing he and I talked about is poor technique. He said because people spend so much time working at a desk, they’re likely to develop a few bio-mechanical issues (bad posture and whatnot.) And what people don’t realise is that their bio-mechanics affect their technique, which affects the quality of their work out. Dinny says, “when your body moves better, you use a greater range of motion for each exercise. And if you’re using more of the muscle, you’ll grow more of the muscle – and that gets you greater results!”

And how does one address this? Stretch, mate. Haven’t you ever noticed that all the really big dudes at the gym never forget to stretch?

Dinny gets his clients to perform human movement exercises like a body-weight squat, lunge and row to help break down their patterns of movement. Then, he can implement remedial stretches or exercises that are going to help remedy any problems.

The second massive mistake we’re making at the gym is quite obvious: “people spend way too much time on their phones… Like, way too much.”

What makes this point rather interesting is that Dinny is at that gym almost every day, and he’s been there for years. That makes him a human time lapse camera; he notices the people who are on their phones a lot, and he’s notices whether they’re achieving results or not.

He and I concede that people could be consulting their work out plans, or dealing with unavoidable work junk. But it’s a little more likely that people are scrolling or texting. So, if you can’t leave your phone in a locker because you need it for work or music, it’s important to be mindful that it can distract you from your work out – and that’s not ideal.

The final thing we need to be better at is the intensity of our work outs.

Dinny has observed that not enough of us are breaking a sweat, which means we’re probably not working out super intensely/effectively. And the way to gauge that is by your shortness of breath, which is called, “Excess Post Oxygen Consumption.”

Explained simply, this means if a person reaches a state of shortness of breath, the body freaks out and responds by releasing a fuck load of growth hormones so it’s more resilient next time. Not dissimilar to how STIs become resistant to treatment over time. Soooo… lay off the apps and the chats and the perving, and get back to the work out.

So there you have it. I’m quite glad I decided to ask because these little bits of info will hopefully help us/me have a more effective work out, which will hopefully lead to the torso pic we deserve.

Slide into Dinny Morris Fitness’ DMs today for more info, or to ask him out.