2. Leave your ego at the door.
Despite that gut feeling in your belly to lift heavy weights, don’t lift heavy until your form is good. Don't worry--no one cares how much weight you lift. No one is writing down how heavy your dumbbells are today. And no one cares how much weight you can lift just like few are impressed if at all by the amount of weight. The sooner you realize this, the better.
Having good form and control is far more impressive than uncontrolled jerking and grunting. Your form is good when you are able to fully contract a muscle just by thinking about it and moving the related joints. You don't even need weights or resistance to do this. You could do it right now in your chair, with your left biceps or your right biceps.
--(biceps is always plural, never "bicep" The same goes for triceps, quadriceps)
If you have been doing the same exercises over and over without results, then:
INFERENCE #1 (again): You have been lifting weights that are too heavy and this is what you've always done. You have not developed good form because the weights have always been too heavy for you to learn good form correctly.
There are plenty of resources on the internet that describe the exercises and how to do them correctly. The Men's Health website is a useful (free) resource, I have found, and contains entire workouts and good articles.
Besides this, enough info about enough weight training exercises can be printed out onto a couple of sheets of paper. Body for Life has one for free on their website--it fits on a single page.
The connection between your mind and your muscles comes FIRST.
Every movement of the body (muscles) originates in the brain. Develop the ability to think of a muscle and contract it at will. Pull the pin out of the stack and start at the bottom, at the lowest weight. Remember, no one cares. And even if someone were so obsessed with numbers to say something or snicker...so what. You are not spending your time at the gym to evaluate others. No one else worth knowing is, either.
I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations and you're not in this world to live up to mine.
-Bruce Lee
Machines are for everybody; not just for 'wimps and women.' Machines are mechanically designed to isolate and target muscles that you want to develop, when the exercises are done properly. Think of them now as "muscle-contraction learning devices." They are designed to produce results better than you would get with the same poundage as free-weights. What does this mean?
Consider two novice bodybuilders with about the same body type and potential and currently at about the same strength, overall. Identical twins would be a good way to demonstrate this. Anyway, put one twin on machines only. Put the other twin on free weights only. After the same amount of time lifting, and eating the same daily menu, and the same amount of rest, which twin will have gained better results? The one on the machines.
Start with low weight then work up gradually. At one point, I had to essentially relearn every exercise with low weights, to get closer to what is good form. Why? I had always assumed my form was 'fine.' Guess what? Everyone does! Compare this to posture. Everyone also assumes (unspokenly) that they have good or correct posture, but not everyone does.
A common posture problem that will prevent proper form in upper body exercises (Upper Crossed Syndrome) and how to tell if you have it
How to fix the problem
Other common postural deficiencies
I learned that one cannot bypass learning each and every exercise with good form and with low weight, even if it is troubling to the ego or one's competitiveness. But do it once then you can move upward. Think of and appreciate the journey not the "destination."
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