Crackpots #52: Good Form (Patreon)

Hello friends,

Yung Chomsky here again. I’m taking a break from photography chat this month to get back to one of my other favorite subjects: exercise. I’m going to focus on resistance training since that’s what I know best, but you can probably apply these ideas to other modalities as well.

If you’ve ever thought about starting a workout routine, you’ve almost certainly come across admonitions about the importance of using “good form.” Improper form, we’re told, will lead to a lack of progress at best and serious injury at worst. Is that true? How much should we worry about correct form, really? And the most basic question of all: what exactly is good form, and how do we know that we’re doing it?

The most important thing to know about exercise form, and the place where so many people get off track, is that it is not an absolute, static, or fixed ideal, but a fluid and contingent one. The correct execution of a movement will vary based on the trainee’s anthropometry — i.e. their particular skeletal proportions — and their training goals. Therefore, correct form can’t be achieved by simply mimicking someone else, regardless of how proficient and impressive they may be. For any given movement, I think of good form as displaying three general qualities. Good form is:

Consistent

Effective

Non-injurious

Consistent

Consistency in the general sense is probably the single most important factor in determining the amount of progress someone makes in the gym (with effort being second). And in the more specific sense, being good at performing a movement means executing it the same way every time. The beginning of this video is a great example: it shows Kyle Kirvay squatting with loads ranging from 45 to 855 pounds. At the heaviest weight, his speed is slower and the intense effort is apparent, but the basic mechanics of the movement don’t change, which is the goal. One of the great things about strength training is the way it makes progress easy to measure. Seeing yourself make progress in real time is rewarding and motivating, and it’s also one of the most fundamental principles in strength training: progressive overload. I.e., we get stronger by performing the same movement over time while gradually increasing the load. But the “same movement” part can get slippery: as the weights get heavier and we push the limits of our capability, we will naturally tend to seek shortcuts. The most obvious one is reducing the range of motion of the exercise, e.g. by cutting off a squat at a shallower depth. Setting aside the question of how deep a squat ought to be — we’ll come back to that — what really matters is that you’re hitting the same depth every time.

For example, imagine you go to the gym on Monday and perform a set of 5 squats with 225 pounds, which is your strongest yet. Then you go back on Friday and do a set of 5 with 235 — or maybe you stuck with 225 lbs but this time you did 7 reps. That’s empirical evidence that you got stronger, right? Well, yes, but only if you performed the movement the same way. If you added weight or reps but your squats were 2 or 3 inches shallower, you didn’t necessarily get stronger; you made the movement harder in one dimension but easier in another. This is one reason that it’s tremendously useful, especially as a beginner, to either have a training buddy who knows what to watch for while you lift, or in lieu of that to get yourself on video. Videoing yourself in the gym is really not a big deal, just do it in a way that doesn’t take up too much space or impose on other people: prop your phone up on something and accept that people are going to walk in front of it sometimes. Personally, I think setting up a tripod is a too much, although I have seen that happening. Either way, while it’s certainly not a requirement, I think you’re really missing out if you’re not getting this kind of feedback during the learning process.

Apart from robbing yourself of progress and/or the ability to know for certain that you’re making it, performing a movement inconsistently also makes it impossible to compare yourself to other people. Now, should you compare yourself to other people? If you’re not a competitive athlete or interested in becoming one, probably not; better to compare against your past self. That said, I think it’s a natural impulse to want to know where you stand against others in your demographic, and we’re all gonna do it at some point. But if you’re not performing the movement to a common standard, the comparison is totally moot. I’m highly skeptical of impressive claims about squat or push-up numbers, for example, unless I’ve seen them performed, because those are very easy exercises to cheat while still believing you’re performing them properly.

Another slightly less obvious way you can cheat at a movement is by shifting the mechanics of the exercise so that it becomes easier, or plays more to your strengths. This is extremely difficult to avoid as fatigue sets in, and the ability to do so to as large an extent as possible is one of the major things separating an experienced lifter from a novice. The novice will unconsciously alter their mechanics when they start to feel tired and uncomfortable, allowing other muscles — stronger ones, or simply less fatigues ones — to assist the ones that they intend to train. Imagine, for example, someone performing an overhead press, where the barbell is lifted from the shoulders without assistance from the legs:

After several reps, the lifter’s shoulders and triceps start to get tired, so they begin bending their knees on each rep and using the lower body to transfer force to the barbell. This turns the press into a “push press.” There’s nothing wrong with push presses — it’s just a different exercise, and if you’re mixing push presses in with your strict presses, it’s going to be hard to keep track of your progress.

Effective

Good form means performing an exercise in such a way that it will be maximally effective in creating adaptations aligned with your training goals. That’s kind of a roundabout way of saying that your movements should suit you, and they should be done for a clear purpose. I mentioned anthropometry above; the important thing to understand is that “correct” form will look different depending on how you’re built. Here’s a great diagram from Pheasyque demonstrating this as it pertains to the deadlift:

If the longer-femured  lifter tried to mimic the shorter-femured one by lowering their hips further, they would get out of alignment and make the movement less efficient. This is a super common category of mistake, and can be applied to many different movements.

The second part of the question is whether and how the movement fits into your training objectives. For example — you go to the gym and do a bench press. Why are you doing that movement? Are you a competitive powerlifter who competes in the bench press? Are you a bodybuilder who bench presses to grow your chest and triceps? Are you a hockey player training to get stronger so you can be better at your sport? Or are you like most people, aiming more generally for the health and quality of life benefits of regular exercise? None of these answers are right or wrong, but they will inform the way you go about the exercise, and determine whether it’s truly necessary at all. Let’s briefly return to the question I posed above — how deep should you squat? In some contexts, the answer is easy: a powerlifter competes in the squat, so they need to squat to the depth defined by the rules of their lifting federation. (The most common standard is that the crease at the hip must be at least as low as the top of the knee.)

A weightlifter squats as one component of the clean or the snatch, and it’s to their advantage to squat as deeply as possible in order to handle heavier weights in those movements.

A bodybuilder is most likely squatting to train their quads, assuming they have the proportions, mobility, and technique necessary to achieve a quad-dominant squat (i.e. one with a more upright torso).

For the more general case, it makes sense to use as large a range of motion possible as can be achieved without losing tension in the trunk, which would be inefficient and less safe.

Non-injurious

I know this is a bit of an awkward phrasing, but I don’t want to use the word “safe,” because no physical activity that’s strenuous enough to induce significant physical changes will ever be 100% safe. (Having said that, weight training has a low injury rate overall, lower than running or team sports.) Part of being experienced in the gym is developing an understanding of how to push hard enough to spur progress, but not so hard that you cause injury. This is not medical advice, but if I had to generalize I’d say that more people fail to make progress because they don’t push hard enough than because they pushed too hard. But apart from level of effort, there’s a question of mechanics. As above, anatomical structure will come into play, in addition to injury history. In 17 years of lifting, I’ve only had one real injury — a SLAP tear which I had surgically repaired in 2019. Although my shoulder fully recovered, I know now to be careful with it. Hopefully not so careful that I don’t push myself, but careful enough that I stay relatively pain-free. My SLAP tear wasn’t an acute injury; it developed gradually over time via wear and tear. I don’t think it happened because I had bad form or pushed too hard; sometimes shit just happens. And some people have skeletal structures that make certain movements more difficult to perform without pain or injury. For example, the bones of the shoulder naturally occur in several variations:

This isn’t to say that you should try to book an x-ray and map out all of your anatomical variations in order to determine which exercises are safe for you. It’s just a reminder that these things have normal variations, and what one person can do isn’t necessarily what someone else can do safely. Discomfort should be pushed through in the gym, pain should not. Where exactly the line between the two lies is impossible to communicate, and can only be learned through experience. 

How much does it really matter?

On the one hand, the saying “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” is applicable here. Of course any exercise is better than none. You don’t want to get analysis paralysis, obsessing over perfect form to the point that you’re too afraid to work out at all, or too afraid to push your limits when you do. On the other hand, fitness is a lifelong journey. And if you’re going to do something for the rest of your life, why not try to do it well? Once you’re no longer a beginner, your rate of progress is going to slow down under even the most optimal conditions, and when you’ve been doing it as long as I have (17 years!) it’s an absolute crawl. So why not try to optimize what you can?

Now, this has all been very abstract and theoretical, so I want to leave with a few specific tips and observations about exercises I most often see being done poorly.

Push-ups

It’s very often that I see push-ups performed, and very seldom that I see them performed well. Done correctly, push-ups are quite difficult. Fitness FAQs has a really good article about common push-up mistakes complete with animations, so I won’t repeat all of his points. But the ones I typically see are sagging or piking at the hips, and the forward-neck posture, all of which serve to make the exercise easier by reducing the range of motion. I also agree with his advice that push-ups from the knees are not the best regression for people who aren’t yet strong enough to do a full push-up. Instead of doing push-ups from the knees and thereby removing the need to maintain alignment from head to toe, perform incline push-ups with a box, stairs, or a wall. The higher the hands relative to the feet, the less load there will be on the upper body. You can gradually lower the hands as you get stronger, until you’re able to do them flat.

Kettlebell swings

These began gaining popularity in the early 2000s, and became significantly more common with the rising popularity of CrossFit. They’re not a bad movement, although I think there are often better ways to achieve the ends that people use these for. The biggest mistake people make with these is doing them as a squat instead of as a hinge. You can find lots of images like this if you search for “squat vs hinge”:

The power in a kettlebell swing comes from the hips, just like it does in a clean or a snatch. As the image above indicates, the prime movers in a squat are the knee extensors (the quadriceps), while the prime movers in a hinge are the hip extensors (glutes and hamstrings). You’ll also see 

Overhead press

I rarely see this one being done at all. For most people, the bench press is the primary upper body lift, and the overhead press is totally ignored. And when it is done, it’s usually with such poor technique that heavy weights wouldn’t be possible. Here’s a diagram showing what the path of an efficient overhead press looks like:

The bar moves up in a straight line, remaining directly over the mid-foot the entire time. This is a common goal for all of the barbell lifts performed in a standing position, which Mark Rippetoe illustrates effectively and repeatedly in his book Starting Strength, in which the above diagram appears. The finishing point of the lift has the bar directly over the shoulder joint, meaning it’s positioned above the back of their head.

Where people usually go wrong is by pressing the bar out in front of their face, like in diagram B, rather than keeping it close, like in diagram A. This creates a larger moment arm between the weight and the shoulder joint, making the lift inefficient. You will never be able to access your full pressing potential with this kind of technique.

I could, of course, go on. But I think that's enough for today. In conclusion: be careful, but push hard. Try to get a little better every day. Being consistent and efficient will make you effective. Happy training,

YC