You come to the gym you're pumped you motivated you grab that barbell bend your knees get all ready everything tightens up and all the sudden you feel a stabbing pain in your lower back. Now you're hurt and it could take you weeks or even months to recover. Which means your exercise goals are now on the back burner once again. Or you can avoid this whole scenario by watching today's video where I'm going to discuss the five biggest exercise mistakes that Ive seen day in and day out while training people over the last ten years. Let's Jump Right In with the first biggest mistake and that's lifting things off the ground with a curved back. Back injuries are one of the number one injuries that people experience from exercise. Your back has a natural curve that you must maintain whenever you're exercising and whenever your lifting weights or anything for that matter off the ground. However usually when people lift things from the ground they curve their back the opposite way almost like they're doing a standing crunch. Their shoulders drop their chest comes forward and compresses into their abdomen and their back is left looking all slouched over. As they hold that barbell in that position for deadlifts or for Rows for for whatever the chance of injury to the lower back is very high because all the pressure is transferring to those lower vertebraes. Here are the instructions I always give my clients to avoid this problem. Big butt and big chest. What I mean is before you come down to lift the weight off the ground stick your butt out almost like you're really trying to get it noticed. At the same time stick your chest out in an exaggerated way that's what I mean when I say big chest and big butt. Then been down and grab the weight from that position. That Arc that you create by sticking your chest out and sticking your butt out you wanted mean teen that throughout the entire exercise so the whole time you want to try to see your chest in the mirror. By maintaining this natural lumbar curve you're going to avoid injuries whenever doing a bent over exercise. Next big mistake is with squats I don't even care if you don't like doing squats as an exercise which you should but everybody squats at least once a day so you should learn to do it right to avoid injuries. The number one mistake people make when lowering themselves for a squat is they come up on their toes and their knees go way past their tow line. Usually this is because people try to keep their back perfectly straight during the squat they think that's correct form when it's not. If you were to ask any one of these people to sit down in a chair they would never sit down the same way that they incorrectly do their squats they would do a perfect squat into the chair. So whenever you squat sit back on your heels you'll know that you're doing the squat right if you're able to tap your toes up and down while performing a squat. You want to sit back on your heels and sit your butt back while keeping your chest up facing the mirror with your back maintaining that natural curve that we were talking about earlier. Again stick your butt out stick your chest out sit back on your heels and sit back. It's totally fine to bend the lower back a little bit as your balancing for a squat in fact it's part of the movement just make sure you maintain that big chest. Now like I said earlier a really easy way to start performing squats correctly is by starting with a chair or bench behind your butt and literally I just want you to sit down and stand up, don't think squat down and stand up because then you'll do it wrong literally sit down on the chair and stand up it'll teach you how to do a squat correctly. Moving on we have chest presses whether it be dumbbell or barbell people are making mistakes. the major mistake that I see especially beginners making with the chest press is not flaring the elbows out. When you come down for your chest press your elbow should be at a 45 degree angle from your body. You don't want them flared too far out cuz that's going to put extra unnecessary pressure on your shoulder. And you don't want them squeezed too tight to your body. Usually the mistake that beginners make is the ladder they squeeze their elbows too tight to their body and they end up doing a chest press that doesn't really involve their chest much at all period instead they're mostly using the front part of their shoulder the anterior deltoid and their triceps. Usually this bad form goes hand-in-hand with wrists that are hyper-extended.