Ever taken a look around your gym to see what the people around you are doing?

Do you question if the workout they do will help you reach your own physical goals faster?

Those are a small number of questions to ponder as you keep reading this, but the fact of the matter is there is almost always a 'better ' lift to do than most of the lifts that you see folks performing at your gymnasium.

For instance, today a couple in my gymnasium took it on themselves to do a variety of exercises working their body from head to toes, or that's what they believed.

Their workout commenced with some dumbbell shoulder shrugs. That exercise targets the trapezius muscles that, if large enough, might make you appear as if you've got no neck.

On the surface of things that would appear to be a handy exercise to do, but if you dig a bit deeper you'll find that exercise does little in the way of helping you burn even the most minute of calories.

Let us look at it mathematically. The amount of work done is the same as the force times the distance that you are moving that force and the amount of times that you are moving that force. For example, if you were to use 30-pound dumbbells you could move that weight a total of three inches maximum. The trapezius muscles are not that big so do not have the range that the bigger muscle groups do.

So that 30-pound weight moved 3 inches, 10 times, gives us a considerable number of nine hundred. The unit of measure at this point is irrelevant.

Now lets take a look at an alternative exercise, the military press. This exercise is done with an Olympic bar pressing it from about your chin all of the way above your head till your arms about fully extended.

For this exercise we only employed the weight of the bar which is 45-pounds. If you make the motion as if you were performing the exercise you might notice that the distance that bar is going to go is around 24 inches or more dependent on your size, and that was done for a sum total of ten repetitions. So 45-pounds, times 24-inches, times 10 repetitions gives us a number of 10,800- again the unit of measure is unimportant. It only becomes applicable if we were to calculate that number into calories burned.

On the surface, doing the military press was 12 times better than doing a dumbbell shrug, and that was with only the 45-pound bar.

This is one example of a method to see if you're getting the most out of your workout . Many people are oblivious to a few of the exercises that they opt to do and just do anything that is evoked. You only have so much energy when you hit the gymnasium floor, make it count and put it toward exercises which will give you the bang for you buck.