All about Safety in the Gym
(Fundamentals)
Being safe is generally beneficial, as it reduces the risks of accidents and injuries for athletes. This means that your training schedule is less likely to be interrupted, and your performance levels over time will be greater. However, if you play it too safe and never take any risks, you cannot push yourself beyond certain limits, and this can mean you never realize your true athletic potential.
There are several ways to mitigate the risks of physical injury or burnout resulting from overtraining.
Study the technique carefully and do not add too much weight until you are confident you have it 100% right. Think about what you eat, get better sleep, and avoid training with idiots or ‘poseurs’. Avoid performance-enhancing drugs, expensive powders, and potions. A little caution early on (proper planning) will inevitably lead you to accelerated performance later. Be patient!
Many young people today seem to want everything immediately (or, preferably, yesterday) and do not understand why they must put in a lot of effort to achieve it. Learn to take pride in your single-minded pursuit of excellence!
The most important thing is to study the correct form of each exercise and enlist the help of someone with more experience, such as a personal trainer, if you can afford one.
Many people are using public gyms these days who think their way is the best — or only — way, and they are happy to teach you how. But how do you know if they are showing you the right way or the wrong way? It is a fact of life that many gym people have very sensitive egos and do not like to be corrected or told they are wrong. If you want to learn and progress athletically (with safety), you should know how to identify such individuals. You can easily do this by checking online to see if what they have told you is correct. If you have doubts, you can ask others.
Learn to figure it out for yourself, and always take pride in doing your exercises as close to perfection as possible, with all due regard for safety.
As one of my young gym students once said, “There seem to be many ‘blah blah people’ out there talking nonsense but rarely doing anything vaguely impressive.
I always tell my students (whatever their age or experience) to NOT cheat EVER, and I warn them that any performance-enhancing drug is just another way of cheating or cutting corners. And of course, there are health and safety risks associated with all forms of cheating. Trust me – back in my day, all of these temptations existed in and around public gyms, but I always shunned them because it wasn’t my goal to be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger.
My dream was to run faster and faster and further and further. And through competition and a rare personal drive to better myself, I had discovered at quite a young age that I did not need steroids or expensive food supplements to become good at sports – I just needed to put in some consistent hard work and effort, and ask as many questions of as many people as I could.
I can promise you that for every successful athlete or bodybuilder who reaches the heights of success, hundreds of others end up damaging their bodies or minds by injecting ‘the gear’ and becoming over-reliant on artificial means to achieve their goals.
DON’T DO IT. Err on the side of caution and say no to the easy way out. Be proud. Be natural. If you have to turn all those corners yourself as a young person, without cutting corners, then you will gain enormous knowledge which cheaters never attain.
For many people, Health and Safety can be a dreadfully boring thing to talk about, but if you plan to be spending lots of your time in a gym, then it makes total sense to devote a little time to studying how to stay safe and how to avoid accidents. Gyms can be hazardous places! People can be highly unpredictable and unreliable when sharing a public space with them. Here are a couple of good background pages. You don’t need to study it at PHD level! 99% of Health and Safety principles are just plain common sense after all.
Some useful (external) links for more information on exercise safety