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What are the Worst Exercises in the Gym? Ask a PT

In our last blog post, we discussed multiple (five) topics, and I had a lot of fun with that! This week, we’re asking, “What are the worst exercises in the gym?”

What Are the Worst Exercises in the Gym?

Question: As a personal trainer, you must have seen a load of bad exercises in the gym. But what was the worst? 

Answer: What makes an exercise bad? In my opinion, there are a number of factors. These are:

• Injury risk
• Technique
• Appropriateness
• Consideration
• Misuse

Injury Risk

Does performing this exercise increase your chances of injury? Technically, all exercises increase your injury risk; it is riskier to do anything than nothing. But some exercises are riskier than others, and some exercises are riskier than they are beneficial.

We talked about this more in my post about the risk/reward ratio. Basically, you want an exercise that is more rewarding than it is risky. If an exercise is more likely to injure you than benefit you, that’s a bad exercise.

Technique

You could be performing the most beneficial and safe exercise possible, but if your technique is bad, that exercise is now a bad exercise.

A heavy bench press with a hook grip and no spotter? That’s a bad exercise, because you could kill yourself. A deadlift with a rounded lower back? That’s a bad exercise, because you could cripple yourself.

Appropriateness

Is the exercise appropriate for you? This question is something that bad personal trainers never ask themselves before creating a program.

“My client will benefit from learning Olympic lifts because they are really cool. Sure, she’s a 50-year-old woman with no training experience and suffers from sciatica. What could go wrong?”

The other side of this would be people who perform exercises that just aren’t necessary given the circumstances. If you need to lose 40kg because your doctor is worried about your heart, then seated calf raises are not a good use of your time.

Consideration

I love barbell deadlifts; I think they are one of the best exercises that you can perform, and that almost everyone can benefit from learning them. But, at 6pm on a Monday, when the gym is at its busiest, are deadlifts a good exercise to perform?

No, because they take up a lot of space, and people can easily trip over the bar without seeing it.

I cannot tell you how many times I saw this happen while personal training. I was sometimes guilty of it myself. I’m not saying that you should avoid deadlifts just because it’s busy, but I am saying that if it is busy, make sure that you are not in everyone’s way.

Misuse

This is similar to appropriateness, but there is a key difference. Some exercises provide very specific benefits, but are misused because the people using them don’t know this.

The best example is plyometrics (jump training), specifically the box jump. The purpose of the box jump is to increase your explosive power. It is very useful for increasing how high you can jump and how powerfully.

When performed correctly, it is an explosive exercise that requires a lot of rest between reps (not sets, REPS), and each rep is all about quality. You need to be explosive. But box jumps are fun and look cool, so they started to creep into regular gym use and became very popular with circuit training classes.

This is a big issue because you are misusing the exercise. It is being used purely as an aerobic workout, and quality is not important anymore. It’s now about quantity.

The best way I can describe this would be opening a £5000 bottle of vodka and pouring it into a litre bottle of Red Bull. Sure, vodka Red Bulls are nice, but why spend £5k on a bottle of vodka if you aren’t going to be able to taste it?

Why add in a plyometric exercise that has a high risk/reward ratio and use it as a form of cardio?

I hope this makes sense. I’m not saying that box jumps are the worst exercise. I’m just saying that performing a box jump in the wrong context makes it a bad exercise.

Worst Exercise = Bad Box Jumps in busy gyms, performed by people who don’t need to increase their explosive power.

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