THE 5 WORST EXERCISES

If you’re trying to make the most of limited gym time, the last thing you want to do is waste effort on exercises that aren’t effective or even potentially dangerous. Here is the list of my top 5:

1. Lat pull-down behind the head. This exercise is done sitting on a machine with a weighted, cabled bar overhead. You reach for the bar, then pull it down behind your head and neck.
So many things can go wrong with this exercise.
Alignment is number one: Only people with very mobile shoulder joints can keep their spines straight enough to do this exercise properly.
Most people’s shoulders aren’t that flexible. So the move can lead to shoulder impingement or worse, a tear in the rotator cuff.
A safer alternative: On the pull-down machine, lean back a few degrees, use a narrower grip, and bring the bar down in front of your body to the breastbone, pulling shoulder blades down and together. Contract your abdominals to stabilize the body, and avoid using momentum to swing the bar up and down.
2. Squats on the Smith machine. This is a squat you do standing at a machine that has a barbell on a sliding track. The barbell rests on your shoulders, behind your head.
In a true squat — done as you hold a barbell at your shoulders — the bar doesn’t go straight up and down as it does with the Smith machine. Looking from the side, the bar has some sway with the natural action of your body.
On the machine, the bar doesn’t give, so it forces the body into poor biomechanical positions. People also tend to put their feet further in front of their bodies when doing squats on the machine, which adds to the problem.
Considering that today’s adult population is wrought with knee and back problems, the last thing you want to do is an exercise that might aggravate weakness and injury
3. Using bad form on cardio machines. Walk into any gym and you’ll see some people sweating through their treadmill, elliptical, or stair-climber workouts with their bodies hunched over and a death grip on the handrails.
Ever see people put a really huge incline (or high resistance) on the machine and then grab on? This is totally contraindicated.
If you can’t run or walk with your hands off, you shouldn’t do it.
Exercising in a hunched-over position can keep you from breathing deeply, and that the improper alignment of your spine will make the workout more jarring to your shoulders and elbows.
Use a natural gait and don’t hold the handrails because it breaks the natural biomechanics of the body. We don’t go through life holding on to something.
4. Always lifting with a weight belt. Bodybuilders have long used these belts to provide low back and abdominal support when lifting heavy weights. But now they seem to be standard equipment even for many occasional weightlifters.
Too many people wear weight belts too often they should only be used when you’re getting 85% to 90% of your one-repetition maximum [for example, squatting with 300 pounds of weight if you're a man]. Most of us are not working at that level.
Unless you have a back injury or another medical reason to use the belt the level at which the average person works doesn’t require a weight belt. And it can do more harm than good.
When the belt is on, you’re not allowing your normal core muscles to get strengthened. If you get used to having that belt, you go into everyday life and try to lift groceries or pick the baby up out of the car seat and you can’t do it. You’ll never learn how to use your natural belt, your core, the abs, obliques, and spinal erectors.
5. Exercises done with the goal of spot reduction. People who do strengthening and toning exercises in an effort to trim fat from a certain area – thighs, hips, stomach, or arms – have the wrong idea. While these exercises can help firm muscles, if the targeted area still carries an extra layer of fat, it won’t look much different.
Fat loss cannot be isolated to one area, but is distributed evenly throughout the body. So you’ll lose a millimeter of fat from your chin whenever you lose a millimeter of fat from your torso. Doing 1,000 crunches won’t take more fat off your abdominals.
Cardiovascular exercise is the biggest calorie burner, but resistance training is a big part of the equation if you want to burn fat.
Building more muscle mass slowly increases your resting metabolic rate, which means you will burn more calories during the hours of the day that you’re not active.