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It’s great that the gym has opened. You buy new shoes. You receive a membership. On day one, you’re all fired up, with great ideas. After a few months, maybe the first three, something goes wrong. Progress stalls. An injury appears. Motivation disappears. By month four, you are one of the many Sri Lankans who silently quit without anyone knowing.
This need not be your fate. Nearly all beginning players make the same 5 mistakes and they are all easy to correct once you know what to look for.
Mistake 1: Learning the sport without a foundation!
If you enter any gym in Colombo, you will see the same picture! A brand-new member observing someone with 3 years of training experience and then attempting to replicate that training.
The problem is, advanced routines are designed to work with advanced bodies. After 3 years of training, one has gained the muscle coordination, joint strength, and movement patterns to perform complex exercises at heavy weights safely. A novice who tries the same is putting a great deal of stress on an immature body.
It’s a straightforward solution that calls for a humble spirit. Keep it simple. Squats, push-ups, lunges, rows, and planks. Learn and master these movements with body weight or light weights before loading them up. You should be learning how to move properly in the first month, and not how much you can lift. A well-trained gym instructor can teach you a few simple movement patterns in two or three sessions, which will ultimately keep you injury-free for many years.
Mistake 2 is the only one that is easy to avoid
It is commonplace knowledge in Sri Lankan gyms, and a running joke – but it is not a funny joke.
In Sri Lanka, the majority of beginners in the gym concentrate only on upper body workouts. Chest, arms, shoulders. The legs are briefly mentioned in print, and then are unceremoniously left out of the programme. After three months, the result is an out-of-balance body that doesn’t function as it should.
The biggest muscles in your body are in your legs: the quadriceps, the hamstrings and the glutes. They create more growth hormone and testosterone than any upper body training exercise. Don’t only get an unusual body shape by skipping; skipping slows down your progress in all parts of your body.
Exercise your legs at least twice a week. The building blocks are squats, deadlifts, lunges and leg presses. They are mandatory. They are the exercises that create the hormonal environment that your whole body requires to grow.
Mistake 3: Don’t eat the same way you did before you joined your gym
Many beginner Sri Lankans train hard for 3 months and don’t make a lot of progress. They blame the gym. They point to their genes. They seldom realize that the issue is what they don’t eat, or rather what they eat. An increase in muscle mass and decrease in fat gain both call for a certain amount of nutrition support. The majority of beginners greatly underestimate their protein requirements. Exercise causes the breakdown of your muscles. It is protein that makes them new again. As long as you train hard, your muscles can’t recover and grow without adequate protein.
The basic rule is 1.6 to 2 grams of protein for each kilogram of body weight each day for a person who works out regularly. That’s 112 to 140 grams of protein per day for a 70kg Sri Lankan man. Most people who consume a typical Sri Lankan diet are getting 50 to 70 grams a day. The difference is big.
Eat proteins at each meal. Two eggs for breakfast. Fish for lunch. Eating dhal and chicken at dinnertime. Some roasted gram as a snack. Over time, these little increments add up to a lot.
Mistake 4: Train Every Day Without Any Rest
The culture of gyms in Sri Lanka is firmly rooted in the notion that more is better. More days. More sets. More hours. It is easier to see how many days of training are required if someone trains seven days a week, rather than four days a week and rests three days.
This belief is wrong. And it’s gradually destroying the results of hundreds of gym-goers in Sri Lanka.
Muscle building takes place off the bench. This occurs during recovery, when your body is repairing the damage that training has inflicted on your body at the microscopic level. Training without allowing your muscles time to recover will impede the repair process. You accumulate fatigue. Your strength actually decreases. The likelihood of harming yourself is greatly heightened.
Most beginners will benefit from 3 to 4 training days a week. Other days: Walk, stretch, sleep well and eat properly. If you are missing time in the gym, it is not a waste of time; it’s when you actually generate the results that you are working towards.
Mistake 5: Giving up when results don’t show up right away
This is the worst of all and the most prevalent error.
Sri Lankan beginners are expecting to see results after 4-6 weeks. If they don’t notice the drastic change in the mirror, then they think the gym isn’t helping them, and they stop attending.
The truth is that the first 6-8 weeks of training give you changes that you can’t see in the mirror! Your nervous system is becoming more efficient at activating muscles. Your joints and tendons are getting stronger. You are getting fitter regarding your cardiovascular system. These are true, substantive changes, but invisible.
Most people will notice changes in their bodies between weeks 8 and 12. It takes 6 to 12 months of dedicated effort to make significant transformations. Anybody who says they don’t is playing the wrong game.
Be committed for three months and you will see the results. Make pictures every four weeks, not every day. Have faith in the process even though you don’t see it yet.
The Bottom Line
All beginners make mistakes. The ones who get it done are the ones who catch the mistakes early, fix them and continue to show up.
Start with basics. Train your legs. Eat more protein. Rest properly. And allow it some real time before you determine if it is effective or not.
“The gym isn’t going to celebrate the person who starts at an apex. It gives the person who keeps trying even though he or she made every mistake and learned from it.”
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