Essential Weight Lifting Safety Tips
Make your training safe with these essential weight lifting safety tips. It might be the most important page at Real Weight Lifting!
Warm Up
A simple way to maximise weight lifting safety is to warm-up before your session. It’s a good idea to get the heart pumping and blood flowing before you begin your weight lifting. Five minutes on the exercise bike at a moderate pace is sufficient.
The goal is to get your muscles and joints warm and pliable to reduce the chance of tearing anything as you lift.
As for stretching, it’s been proven that stretching prior to lifting weights actually takes some of the tension out of the muscle – think about a spring before and after it’s been stretched – and as such you might find you’re able to lift less weight if you stretch first.
However, unless you’re a competitive lifter or strength athlete, it’s a good idea to do some light stretching before lifting weights. Stretch the relevant muscles before your session begins, holding the static stretches for 8-10 seconds each.
Avoid Failure
“Muscular failure” is defined as the point in a set where you have reached your physical limit, and have to exert all your strength and will to complete the last rep. Training to failure means you do repetitions up to the point where you couldn’t even begin to lift the bar for one more.
The vast majority of lifters really shouldn’t be training to failure anyway – whether you’re training for strength, size, or power, you’ll experience better gains by staying a couple of reps away from failure.
Aside from it’s negative effect on your gains, muscular failure is simply unsafe. Pushing yourself that far can be very dangerous – a lot can go wrong (think ligaments, tendons, blood vessels) when you’re that close to your physical limit. Training to failure is a surefire way to compromise your weight lifting safety.
Stay a couple of reps away from complete muscular failure, and you’ll stay safe.
Always use locks
Sounds simple, but sometimes, people get lazy. If the locks are on, weight doesn’t go flying everywhere should you drop a barbell or accidentally overload one side. Toes don’t like 45lb plates!
Train with ample space around you
Should something go wrong, especially with standing barbell movements like the military press, squat or snatch, you want ample space around you to offload the barbell.
In fact, something is more likely to go wrong if you’re squeezed in tightly next to gym members or furniture at home.
The reason is, when you’re focussed on avoiding your surroundings, you’re not focussed on applying yourself to the lift and using proper form.
So clear a space beforehand, and don’t be afraid to ask people to move in the gym – they’d much prefer that, than if you clipped them with a barbell as you lift – or something far worse. Weight lifting safety comes first.
Use proper form!
The importance of proper form really can not be stressed too heavily. The exercises listed on this website are all extremely safe if performed correctly.
Poor form is probably the number one cause of injuries in the weights room. Check out the correct form in the exercise section, and if you train in the gym, have a trainer watch your form and give you feedback.
Only increase the weight on a lift if you can maintain perfect form. For the majority of lifts, good form includes lifting the weight smoothly and under control – that means no extra jerking or swinging motions to get the weight up.
Good form in most exercises requires strength in the abs, lower back and hips. These are the “core” muscles that keep your body stabilised when performing physical activity.
If you find your form failing on some exercises before the muscles you’re targeting get a decent workout, it’s probably a core strength issue. In that case, you should look into developing that aspect of your fitness.