Riddle me this.
The question was inspired by today’s riff, courtesy of the social media feed:
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A lot of 160lb ‘experts’ in my ear telling me this form is wrong. Look at the screen. Look at the scale. Then look at your ‘evidence-based’ program. If my form is wrong, then being right looks like a disaster. I’d rather be a successful accident than a textbook failure. And don’t worry, I did the ‘perfect form’ reps you’re looking for – they’re called warm-up sets. But warm-ups don’t get you to 285lbs of LEAN MASS 🔥
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I endorse most of this angry rant. It reminds me of the old days when I used to be jakt and angry at people online.
The form-specialists were the most annoying of all of them.
I don’t know if the guy in the video doing chest-supported t-bar rows was really 285 pounds of LEAN MASS 🔥 but he was doing okay in the fizeek department.
My official opinion on the “good form/bad form” debate:
It’s a meaningless question.
There’s a time and a place to load up serious poundage and swing it around ugly.
There’s other situations where that is a terrible idea.
A big swole fulla can get a pass for sloppiness on rows.
That might not be true for a “back squat” loaded up to six plates to move them a strong three inches. Which used to be an all-too-common “squat workout” [sic].
Maybe still is, for all I know.
It reminded me of all those “form check” videos that were all the rage 10 or 15 years ago.
Form can be checked, live and in person, by a coach who knows how to give cues in real time.
Skill learning needs rapid, ideally immediate, feedback.
The tighter the loop between the error and the cue, the more effective.
Feedback’s value decays rapidly the longer the delay between the mistake and the correction.
By the time you edit your squat video, post it to the Yoo-Toob, and get your “helpful tips” from the chest-pounding fools on reddit, the tight loop between action and response is D.O.A.
The best you can hope for is to remember a cue for the next workout. Maybe that’s better than nothing, but not by much.
Free advice is worth every penny paid for it.
I never saw much value in reviewing form for clients. I like to see a few test vidyas to make sure that there are no egregious errors. Gross and obvious mistakes can be labeled, named, and given corrective tips, absolutely.
I’ve worked with people who had no idea how to even place the bar on their backs, which is more common than you might think. (There’s a reason those cushy “bar pads” are all over the place.)
Ditto for folks that don’t realize how to physically move into a squat position, barbell or no barbell.
That kind of error is, I repeat, both obvious and relatively easy to fix by calling it out.
It’s the smaller things that are harder to catch and correct. One or both knees drifting inward when coming out of the bottom is a common example.
Beyond that, I don’t see much value from picking the nits of form.
Human biomechanics are so individual that you the idea of a “perfect form” is laughable on the face of it. There’s a few very tall women at my gym, ranging from 6′ to a few who have to clear 6’5. Due to both their height and girl-hips, their form on a squat will look nothing like mine. (They might not even benefit from squatting as a main exercise.)
None of us will have the form of Ed Coan in his prime.
And so forth.
Good form is a blend of the ideal, plus working with what you got.
You can do an exercise badly, no doubt. But once you clean up the major errors, there’s a lot of free play to make it work.
For many (not all, but many) exercises, I’d rather focus on progression than perfection of form. Iron out the major flaws and the rest takes care of itself. Obsession with form is a case of majoring in the minors. There is very little return on investment.
The major errors, by the way, most often have to do with cutting range of motion, using an inappropriate tempo, and using too damn much weight (which feeds the first two).
There’s you a tip to meditate on for this week.
For more sage wisdom from Dr. Matt, you can send me questions if you’re on my email list or in the group.
Matt Perryman