Stop Throwing Your Weights Around!
I don’t know how many of you are familiar with dumbbells and weights being thrown around by people in the gym: bashing them on the floor and slamming them together. It’s a way to prove to everyone how much weight they are lifting, a way to release anger and quite obviously to me it’s a way to show everyone that they are just not strong enough to control the weights correctly.
My Opinion
I believe that if you can’t control the weight properly when returning them to the floor then you have picked a weight that is far too heavy for you. I do agree that, for example, the dumbbell chest press is a much stronger movement than say the bicep curl and so you will choose a heavier weight for some exercises than others and therefore it will be difficult to place the weights down carefully after completing your chest press burn out. However if you are that strong on your chest and that weak on your arms then there is a strength imbalance between the muscle groups or a co-ordination imbalance, either of which means that you could be heading for an injury.
What is Co-ordination Imbalance?
This is where you have practised all the main movements of exercise on separate areas of your body, but have failed to include any functional exercise that allows your body to work together as a whole. This means that you could be very strong at the chest press and very strong at bicep curls but when it comes to linking them together to place the weights down you just can’t do it because you have never linked them together in a movement or exercise.
What to do?
Well, if you want to avoid an injury then there are a couple of ways to avoid this slamming down of weights. The first is to make sure you have someone to spot you, a gym partner or someone who works at the gym that can help pass and take the weights from you at the start and at the end of the exercise. This will prevent you throwing the weights down and potentially causing an injury.
The second way to avoid this is to reduce the weight you are lifting and practise lowering it down slowly after completing the chest press. Make sure that the weight you pick is one that you can handle on a bicep curl.
Finally it is important to realise that maybe your chest muscle is much stronger than your other muscles and it is time to change the focus of your training to help the other muscles catch up. This imbalance doesn’t only lead to injury but it gives the physique an unnatural lopsidedness that can look odd (and we don’t want people staring, do we? – Beeble).
Summary
Your body needs to work together as a whole; the gym’s unnatural way of isolating muscles in an exercise never replicates movements we have to do outside of the gym environment. By being able to control the weights you use not only during the exercise, but also before and after the exercise, you will be using the body as a complete machine and training the smaller muscles to integrate with the larger muscles and work together as a team, just like God intended.
Enjoy your training but train sensibly, safely and treat your body as a whole.
