8 Mistakes to Avoid While Getting Stronger
Follow these to get stronger for the long term
By
July 5, 2025
Getting stronger can be a transformative experience for people. People are beginning to understand the impact that increased strength can have on their quality and span of their life. Unfortunately many people are like me and make many mistakes in their pursuit of strength once they get a small taste of it. These mistakes add up over time and the costs are high. Stalled progress, frustration, and injury all have increased risks when we get ahead of ourselves. These rules apply to everyone regardless of age, goals, or training experience. I’ve seen people at every level make these mistakes and pay the price. I’ve also seen people at every level avoid these traps and have more success than anyone thought was possible. While most of these likely seem obvious to the people reading this article, most of us have fallen victim at some point. If you’ve trained in a hyper competitive environment like Westside Barbell, I guarantee you’ve broken one to all of these at some point.
Training to failure worked really well for me when I was 19 years old following Doggcrapp (DC) training. As I become older and stronger, there is a strong tipping point with this. This isn’t an out to train easy all the time, but if you feel the need to go to the point where you miss a rep on your main lift each workout you’ll have to accept that you’re losing pounds on your lifts each time. The older and stronger you get the more it takes to recover from missed lifts. If you’re competing leave potential misses for the platform and not your workouts. If you feel the need to train failure, use it on smaller exercises that have much lower risks when being trained in fatigue. This could work well with band pushdowns, most shoulder side and front raises etc.
There’s no doubt the max effort method will get you crazy strong. Learning to put all your effort into one rep is a skill that is essential for competing. Refusing to have an easier training day or select variations of main lifts to hit another PR on your favorite lift is a win now/lose later game. This also happens when people program their Dynamic Effort training. Most of the times, the people we worked with had much better success with lower dynamic weights than heavier. This allowed them to get better quality reps and build good habits, keep their rest periods appropriate, and not overtrain for the next session. Most people get into strength sports for the love of lifting heavy weights, but it’s the speed and technical mastery that moves the heavy weights.
Maybe the best thing Lou preached to us was to hit a PR and move on with the training session. I saw some people ignore his advice and have success in the training session. I saw others ignore his advice and tear biceps and hamstrings and ruin a great training cycle. Get your 5lb PR and move on. As you gain experience, these PRs become more difficult to achieve and it becomes a valuable asset to learn how to create wins all the time in your training. Instead of a new deadlift PR, maybe you do more glute ham raises in total for the session or add two reps on each set of dumbbell rows. This helps increase training capacity and makes training a positive experience each time. You won’t post on social media about the excitement of adding a few reps on your tricep extensions, but over time your bench press will thank you.
The best lifters and even recreational lifters that have long term success are the ones that learn to auto regulate their training. This is where I fear online training/coaching falls short. Just because there is a plan on paper, doesn’t mean you always have to follow it. The best know in their warm ups when something feels off and they adjust. I’ve had speed days that turned into PRs and max effort days that turned into doing hypers and sled drags. You have to know when it’s your day and when you’re flirting with disaster. Over time as you advance you still have to learn to auto regulate and be your own best coach. For higher level athletes, giving ranges can be beneficial because it takes stress away from hitting a certain number in training. As you get away from working with strength athletes this becomes more important as training is simply the means to benefit the skill of their sport or life.
To get strong, you have to learn to deal with some discomfort. Especially if you’re using supportive equipment. You also have to learn the difference in discomfort, soreness and pain. You can train around some issues, but if your solution is to go heavier on a reduced range of motion or add another piece of supportive equipment you have to be willing to accept the increased potential of injury. Dan John said it best when he said pain is your body trying to tell you something is wrong, you just have to listen. During the shut down I remember watching lifters train in visible pain. There were no meets in sight (more than we even realized at the time) and this could have been a time to address nagging issues and train something other than competitive barbell lifts.
Pre workout, pump music, motivational videos, smelling salts, and an energy drink for a workout. Then wonder why we’re exhausted by the time we actually get to our work sets in a training session. Your body only needs so much arousal at a specific time. This varies from person to person and introvert to extrovert, but no one needs it all day. You can always see at meets who will have a shitty day when they’re hitting ammonia caps in the warm up room listening to their own music for their second to last warm up. Find the way that works for you, but trying to replicate Chuck Vogelpohl wearing the fire beanie will likely not work for you.
While I’m a big believer that most people need more practice with the basics, there also has to be a time where things change. This can be different bars, sets and reps, rest periods, or simply periods of no barbells and just doing a ton of work. Change is scary but what happens when you never change is much scarier. While no one would do 3 sets of 10 reps forever, many people will find themselves doing a 1 rep max on the same few lifts for years. Everything works for a while, but nothing works forever. I remember we used bands to squat for around four months straight. My squat took off big time from doing this. I kept using the bands and had a negative effect when I went to my next meet because I forgot how it felt to squat without 300+lbs of band tension grounding me.
You base your training weights based on what you’ve done, not what you want to do. Dave Hoff gave me an idea after I squatted 900lbs that I couldn’t quite grasp at the time. Take about 10% off your recent meet PR and work to master that weight. There’s a big difference in what you can do in the environment of a competition and training on a normal Friday when you feel like crap. In my case, I needed to master 900lbs, not hope for 950lbs. In this example I should have based my training weights off of approximately an 810lb Squat. This is much different than basing your training percentages of a hopeful number like 950lbs.
In reading this list, these might seem obvious but we’ve all made these mistakes and seen lifters from the novice level up to the best of the best make some of these mistakes. It took me a long time to understand while watching Josh Gutridge stop someone from taking another lift after they would do well or maybe stop their session all together after a few exercises. He was able to understand when someone had reached a new level of capacity they hadn’t experienced before and was already planning their recovery. This takes a lot of time, experience, and honesty. We all want to get a little stronger and build a little more muscle, but if we can remove ourselves from being the biggest roadblock in the journey we will get there much sooner.
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