4 Exercises Personal Trainers Often Use — And Why They Shouldn’t

Several exercises often used by personal trainers can irritate joints, create imbalances, and sap strength gains. Scary, but true. These exercises, while easy to teach and use during a training session, aren’t effective for the client. This article reveals four not-so-good exercises popular among personal trainers, why they shouldn’t be used often, and great alternatives.

No exercise is bad by itself, however — it’s the application that makes it bad. While I don’t dislike these exercises, many trainees just aren’t ready for them and would benefit from something else.

Without further adieu:

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The Exercises

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Walking Lunges with Weights

Why we give it:

It’s a dynamic single-leg exercise that works your lower body hard. It requires balance, coordination, and decent mobility to perform correctly.

Why we shouldn’t:

Oftentimes, trainees can’t lunge well — it’s usually some combination of poor balance and range-of-motion. Worse, of all lunge types, the walking lunge causes the most knee strain. Because you’re moving forward, your leg must slow the momentum and weight of your body (and dumbbells). And which joint gets punished most?

Your knees.

I don’t even do this exercise. I like my knees. There are too many other single-leg exercises that are safer. It’s also a lazy way to train a client: pick up dumbbells and walk.

Alternatives:

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• Split Squat
• Reverse Lunge
• Bulgarian Split Squat

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Leg Press

Why we give it:

It’s a leg exercise where we can easily load weights. Lie down and push.

Why we shouldn’t:

Too often, we give clients the leg press when they can’t squat. It’s like sacrificing natural movement patterns for the short-term allure of strength. Also, nothing in life remotely mimics lying down and pushing something away from us with our legs. (Unless you plan on getting stuck under a car or something.)

Worse, the posture at the bottom position isn’t pretty. Just rotate the original picture: round lower back, excessive torso lean, failure to break parallel — imagine asking our clients to squat like that.

Focus on the squat first.

Alternatives:

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• Any squat variation, really

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Kneeling Pushups

Why we give it:

It’s a pushup variation for trainees who can’t do a pushup from the floor.

Why we shouldn’t:

It reduces core activation. Instead of stabilizing the entire body and staying rigid, kneeling pushups cut the length of your body and decrease ab work. Yet that’s one of the reasons why pushups are so great: core stability along with upper body strength and shoulder stability.

Alternatives:

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• Smith Machine Pushups



• TRX Pushups

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Smith Machine Squats

Why we give it:

It’s a leg exercise that mimics squatting. Kinda.

Why we shouldn’t:

The clients will move in an unnatural way because the smith machine has a fixed, 2-D bar path — there’s no way to twist or move forward or backward. Thus, they don’t get to stabilize the weight and control their movement.

Worse, people often put their feet too far forward from their body resulting in a weird bottom position (see picture above).

There’s also little potential with the smith machine squat — expect to squat less weight with a barbell. With the barbell squat, the technique is different too. The better program would develop the bodyweight squat first, then add weight.

Alternatives:

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• A real squat

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And there they are! What are other popular exercises personal trainers use that aren’t effective? Does your personal trainer use these? Want more alternatives? Leave a comment, “Like” it, hit me up on Twitter, or add me on Facebook.

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