By Cameron McGarr

There are several things you can do to waste your efforts in the gym. Most of us do not like to gamble with our workouts but it is possible to crap out with any of these seven possible workout wasting habits. However, if you know how to avoid the pitfalls you will not be rolling the dice with your fitness goals.

The most common workout wasting habit is poor pre and post workout nutrition. Luckily it is also the easiest to fix. All you need to do is make sure you have eaten within one hour pre workout. If you have trouble eating close to your workouts just drink a protein shake before you begin your warm up. It is important to bring your post workout nutrition up to speed as well. Again just drink a shake within 10 minutes of your final set and eat a meal roughly 45 minutes after your workout. This is so important yet it is still commonly overlooked.

The next common screw up is recovery. This follows nutrition on the scale of importance only because pre and post workout nutrition directly influence recovery. It is often said that a workout is only as good as you can recover from. In other words if you continually go back to the gym without allowing your body to recover, you are only working against yourself. When you workout you break down muscle tissue, making you weaker. Your body responds by adapting and rebuilding stronger than it was before, this way the next time you can handle the stress. If you do not allow the rebuilding process you only continue the weakening cycle. No matter what your goal this does not help.

Still moving in the same direction we come to fatigue seeking workouts. It is not necessary to kill yourself in the gym. No need to do three sets when you are worn out after two. This will only keep you out of the gym longer waiting to recover, because as we know, working out again before we have fully recovered does not help. Instead manage the fatigue. As we say, "train smart." One way to manage fatigue is to not allow your workouts to go over 60 minutes. Right around 60 minutes there is a shift in hormone levels. There is no need to go into what exactly happens, however, it is important to know that this shift works against you in terms of fat loss or muscle gain.

The next bad habit is a little trickier than the others. Every time you go to the gym you need to up the intensity. This is tricky because we do not want to seek fatigue, yet we do need to make every workout harder. The reason for this is obvious because we have already established that your body has adapted and is stronger because of the last workout. Another saying is that your body looks the way it does because of what you can already do. So the same loading parameters will not do the job anymore. We do not always need to increase the weight, we can also change the tempo or drop the rest periods. All these can up the intensity.

Improper supplementation is another common waste of time. This unfortunately means you could be wasting money as well as effort. More often than not the supplements on the market do not even do what they claim to do. Either there is not enough of the proper supplement in the product or it simply does not work anyway. One good rule of thumb is if a product has been on the market longer than 18 months, there is a very good chance it works and probably works well (creatine is a good example). There are a lot of fad supplements that do not last. That is because they just do not work.

The last thing to remember is to have a plan when you go to the gym. You will save time and get better results if you know what your goals are and how you are going to achieve them.

Following these seven easy tweaks to your fitness plan should put you well on you way to looking like Arnold or a Victoria's Secret model.