The first four weeks in a gym decide whether you become a member or a statistic. Almost everyone who stops does so before the end of the second month, and it is rarely because the training was too hard. It is because the training was aimed at the wrong thing. These are the five mistakes we correct most often on the floor at My Fitness, and every one of them is easy to fix once somebody points it out.
1. Loading the bar before owning the movement
Weight is the reward for a good position, not the way to find one. A squat that collapses at the bottom under 40 kg will collapse under 80 kg, only louder. Spend your first three or four sessions with an empty bar or a light dumbbell, film one set from the side, and compare it with what your trainer showed you. Nobody in the room is watching your working weight. Everybody notices a back that rounds under load.
2. Training only what you can see in the mirror
Chest, arms and abs get trained three times a week; the back, hamstrings and glutes get whatever is left over. The result is a body that looks trained from the front, aches across the shoulders, and cannot hinge at the hip. Set a simple rule: for every pressing set, one pulling set, and for every quad exercise, one hip hinge — Romanian deadlifts, hip thrusts, back extensions. It is the fastest correction available for the posture that a desk job builds.
3. Changing the programme every week
A new plan from social media every Monday guarantees that nothing is ever repeated long enough to improve. Progress comes from adding a little to the same lifts over time: two more kilos, one more rep, one cleaner set. Pick a programme, run it for eight weeks, and write down what you lifted. Our free beginner plans are built exactly this way, and the trainers who wrote them coach the same sessions in the gym.
4. Treating the warm-up as optional
Walking straight from a cold car into a heavy set is how shoulders and lower backs get hurt. Five minutes on the bike or rower, two minutes of hip and shoulder mobility, then two light ramp-up sets of the first exercise is enough. It costs you ten minutes and buys back every session you would have lost to a strain. On the days you feel stiff before you start, our yoga class on Monday and Wednesday evenings does the rest of the job.