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Weight training comes with a host of benefits – increasing muscle mass, protecting you from metabolic diseases, improving cardiovascular health and strengthening your bones. But only if you’re exercising correctly.

It’s easy to wince at people in the gym, awkwardly lifting heavy weights in unorthodox (and painful-looking) ways, but subtle mistakes that are harder to spot can hinder the effectiveness of your workout as well.

If you’ve been training without making progress, are feeling aches and pains or want to make certain that your workout is worth the effort, it might be time to check in on whether you’re making common blunders that expert personal trainers see all the time.

Prioritising weight over form

“A lot of people focus on how much weight they can lift rather than how well they’re actually moving it,” says celebrity trainer and PT Aimee Long. “When the load is too heavy, form usually breaks down, the wrong muscles take over, and the risk of injury goes up.”

How to know whether the weights are too heavy? “If you can’t control the lowering part of the movement, keep good posture, or move through the full range, you’re compromising,” she explains. “Lower the weight to something you can control properly with good technique, steady tempo, and full range of motion. You will get much better results and be far less likely to get injured.”

Not lifting heavy enough

At the same time, you do need to be lifting heavy enough weights to make progress. “For muscles to grow, the weight needs to be challenging enough that you only have a couple of reps left ‘in reserve’,” Long notes. That means you could only manage one or two more reps with good form before needing to stop. “Many people stop their sets too soon because it starts to feel uncomfortable, not because they reach close to failure, which is where the muscle will effectively break down and re-grow,” she adds.

Balancing weight and technique is hard, so beginners should focus on perfecting the movement pattern before loading up. “Then, get comfortable using weights that feel tough while maintaining that form,” says Long.

Not progressing properly

You need to increase the intensity of your training regularly – or sacrifice progress. “People often repeat the same sessions, load and demand for months,” says PT Luke Worthington, who specialises in physical preparation for TV and film.

If you’re guilty of putting the same plates onto the barbell week after week, or reaching for the same pair of dumbbells to curl and press, you’re likely just maintaining, rather than building.

“Instead, you need to systematically increase demand over time,” explains Worthington. The most obvious way to do that is by slowly increasing the weight, which could be as little as adding 0.5kg at a time.

“You can also increase the number of sets or reps, range of motion or tempo,” he says. “If none of those variables are progressing, the body has no reason to adapt.”

Wearing the wrong trainers

What you wear to the gym matters more than you’d think, particularly when it comes to footwear. “I have lost count of the number of times I’ve seen people squatting next to me in the gym wearing running trainers with a huge stack height and a curved sole. This isn’t the foundation you need for strength training,” says PT Nancy Best, founder of Ladies Who Crunch.

“When lifting weights, you need adequate support for your ankles, without overly cushioning your arches, and you need to ensure that you’re able to grip the ground properly for compound movements like squats and deadlifts.” She advises swapping your cushioned trainers for Nike Metcons (£129.99) or even Converse (from £39.99) for a flat, stable surface.

Not timing rest periods

You’ve likely put your weight down, picked up your phone, and then wasted five minutes scrolling before returning to your set. “This is a big mistake, as we need to maintain some stress in the muscle when we return to the lift to ensure we’re breaking down the tissue,” says Best. “Similarly, being in such a rush that you don’t give yourself any recovery between rounds means technique slips and you end up getting injured. Timing rest is really important to keep your body sharp and progressing, without overloading your central nervous system.”

While rest break timing depends on the type of workout you’re doing (heavier sets require longer breaks to recoup), her general advice is to take about 90 seconds of focused downtime before picking your weight back up.

Neglecting recovery 

The effectiveness of your workout isn’t made or broken in the gym. “Progress does not happen during the workout itself; it happens afterwards when your body repairs and rebuilds. Poor sleep, not eating enough calories or protein, or training the same muscles hard every single day can hinder that recovery and leave you constantly exhausted,” says Long.

Longer sleep is linked with improved levels of growth hormone release, better tissue repair, reduced pain sensitivity and improved signs of muscle building, according to a review from the Journal of Scientific Medicine in Sport. And protein and nutrient requirements also increase in those who train – while the recommended daily intake of protein is 0.8g per kilogram of bodyweight, the International Society of Sports Nutrition recommends that anyone doing regular exercise eat closer to 1.4-2.0g per kilogram per day (that’s an increase from 56g of protein to 98-140g).

Recovery and training are also a two-way street – studies show that poor sleep reduces exercise performance by nearly 8 per cent. “When you are well recovered, you can train harder, improve faster, and stay consistent without burning out,” adds Long.

Not choosing the right exercises

An effective programme is built around exercise variety – a good mix of movements that target all the muscles in the body. Often, people overcomplicate this, choosing exercises that look good online but are too complicated to perform, or follow programmes that neglect certain muscles.

“Its my firm belief that there are no ‘bad’ exercises; however, if exercises don’t match your needs, it isn’t doing what we hope it would do,” says Worthington. “The right exercises are the ones that allow consistent progression without creating setbacks.”

While everyone will need to focus on their individual areas of weakness, a good formula involves using push/pull programming. Ensure your training includes each movement for the upper and lower body, for instance upper body push (usually targeting the shoulders or chest, like overhead press or push-ups), upper body pull (typically working the back, like pull ups or pull downs), lower body push (involving bending the knee, as with squats or leg press) and lower body pull (patterns that involve hinging at the waist, like deadlifts and glute bridges).