Many sports are organized in such a fashion that mandates formal mastery of some skill before advancing to the next level. With Tae Kwon Do, you start out with the white belt, then you progress to yellow belt, and so on and so forth until you finally obtain elite black belt status. Gymnastics works in a similar fashion: once level 5 is reached, the athlete is required to meet a minimum score before moving forward and eventually becoming an elite gymnast. There are strict rules to adhere to and milestones that must be achieved. With general gym training, however, such rules do not exist.

Trap bar deadlift, then sumo, then conventional.
Goblet squat, then front, then back.
Crawl, then walk, then run.

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Today’s piece is the first of its kind on this site. As many of you are aware, I’ve been spending this summer working as a coaching intern at Cressey Performance in Hudson, Massachusetts. So far it’s been a wild ride – I’m learning a ton, having fun, and pretty much bathing in awesome 24/7 what with all the incredible people here. I am one of six interns, and we’ve all become close pretty quickly. The idea came to me sometime last week to have a collaboration post with each of the six of us contributing and offering a different angle. We eventually agreed to write on overlooked training mistakes that most of the active population is likely to make when in the gym setting.

Here’s our final product. Let us know what you think!

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