Common Workout Mistakes

1. Not recording your workouts – We need to see improvement and we need to be able to set goals.  If you don’t have your numbers in black and white, it’s hard to see progression and continue to push yourself.

2. Overworking yourself – You don’t need to push yourself every rep of every exercise.  This will have you lagging by the last half of your workout.

3. Your ego gets in the way of your lifting – We’ve talked about this before.  You can’t get through an exercise without breaking the proper range of motion or you’re constantly compromising your form.  Proper form can’t be stressed enough.  You need to build your base from a good foundation.

4. You don’t mix and match your workouts – This is where plateaus are made.  By altering your sets, reps, exercises, weights, and time frames you can constantly keep your muscles guessing and therefore growing.  This is a very simple explanation of one of the single most important aspect of advanced workouts.

5. You play to your strengths – It’s easy to want to do what you do best, but building better all around strength comes from attacking your weaknesses.

SXC.hu

Post from: EveryJoe

Common Mistakes In The Gym

Look but don’t touch.
Touch, but don’t taste.
Taste, don’t swallow.

         –Al Pacino, The Devil’s Advocate

While this is one of my favorite quotes of all time, it fits perfectly into my next so-called rant and funny story. Windowsitpro.com had a great story about a university web site going down because someone took the X-box out of the room. (I do hope you’ll check it out for a quick laugh.) Now, while I don’t condone installing your favorite flavor of Linux onto an X-box and then using it as a server in your server room, I do love the idea of making sure you know what you’re touching, when you’re touching it.

See, there are very few times that something is placed in the server room without reason. The HVAC unit is there to keep your temperature down, the fire suppression system is there to keep fire from destroying your environment and servers are there to serve you data. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t sure what a server is or what it does — know this, it’s important. That should be the same for any other equipment you may come across.

I will be the first to admit that sometimes I put things in the server room to simply keep people away from them. My lunch (because the fridge is so far away) and my spiffy new equipment that I’m testing are two things that come to mind and just as above, they should not be removed by you or anyone else without the consent of the guy or gal that’s in charge. This guy made an honest mistake and I’m sure he will never make it again. Heed his mistake and don’t touch, even if it is shiny.

Post from: EveryJoe

Look but don’t touch — The art of not unplugging

Don’t lie to me when you need help with your computer. I don’t judge you if your PC messes up, these things happen but don’t think to lie your way out of it. I need to know what you were doing when the problems happened. If you spilled a coke on your laptop tell me, we all make mistakes.

Now, we have all come across the issue of lying about silly things — more often than not it was back when we were still in diapers but there is an upward trend of telling little white lies about mishaps happening at the work place. Take for example, a Blackberry administrator and his lovely end-user.

One day, Miss I love my Blackberry and would never do anything to harm it (Ilmyb for short), comes up and exclaims that her device stopped working last night. Being the smart IT person that this gentleman was, he examined the device, took the battery out and noticed that it was a bit damp inside. This was a tip off that the device most likely did not just “stop working”, something happened to it.

Fast forward 5 minutes later, the conversation turns to Miss Ilmyb saying, “the device may have become a little wet but that was not when it stopped working.” Feeling a bit underwhelmed, the IT guy took the device and decided to take a look at it later. To his surprise, the inside of the device was covered in orange juice. After cleaning the entire device out with alcohol and sealing it back together (which voids the warranty), VOILA, it worked. Miss Ilmyb finally fessed up to her child spilling orange juice all over the table and it may have gotten into the device.

In the end, the truth came out and the only thing that came out of this was an untrustworthy relationship between the nice ‘ol IT guy and the lady for the next time an issue came up. So please, be kind and be honest. The problems get fixed much faster and we all thank you for it.

Post from: EveryJoe

Lying never got you anywhere