A common saying amongst people who weight train is “form over weight”. This means that your form, or how you perform an exercise, is more important than how much weight you lift.
I’ve learned myself that this is one-hundred percent true, and for many reasons. It’s important to know that perfecting your form on every exercise is an essential to your safety and development in the gym.
Regardless of how heavy you lift, if you have bad form, you’re far less likely to grow and achieve your goals; your progress will be much slower, if you have any progress at all.
How do you know if your form is bad?
One of the biggest give aways that you have bad form is that the movement is painful. Outside of the burn and little pain you feel when you’re lifting, you shouldn’t feel any other pain when working out. Especially not in surrounding joints or tendons.
Over time, you’ll get to know more of what kind of pain to lookout for but it’s important to never ignore the pain. You shouldn’t try to push through it or anything; you don’t want to make the mistake of causing permanent damage.
Instead you should stop the exercise, lower the weight, and make improvements to your form before you continue with the workout.
Let’s get into why it’s important to have good form in the gym.
Bad form can result in injuries
Having bad form means that you’re performing an exercise incorrectly. This can come from not targeting the intended muscles during an exercise or your body moving incorrectly.
Having bad form when you’re performing a specific movement can put extra stress on surrounding areas such as muscles, bones, joints, tendons, and ligaments. This puts these surrounding areas at a huge risk for injury.
The stress put onto these other parts of the body can be unexpected and unnatural and can lead to fractures, strains, and other injuries.
What might be causing bad form?
Bad form typically comes from trying to lift a weight that is too heavy for your body.
Yes, you should be lifting heavy to grow but it’s important to know your limits and not be compromising your form too much, if at all, with the heavier weights you lift.
One of the things I like to do to make sure I have good form is when I’m trying an exercise I’ve never done before, I’ll start with the lowest weight possible.
I start by focusing on only feeling the contraction in the specific muscle I know the exercise should be targeting. Then, once I get the form down after awhile then I up the weight.
Another thing I do to make sure I have good form is always do one or two warm-up sets. These sets I start off with a very low weight and again focus on the contraction of the muscles.
Once my muscles are warmed up I switch to a weight where I can replicate the same, perfect form but at a higher weight.
Having good form will increase muscle growth
The reason perfect form exists is because this is the optimal way to target the muscle you are working on during an exercise.
When I focus solely on my form during an exercise, I notice this gives me a much better work out.
I focus on having slow and controlled movements rather than just throwing heavy weight around. Remember, you are training with a purpose and that purpose is to get the most out of every exercise.
Having proper form allows you to keep tension on your muscles during the entire repetition. The more tension on your muscle, the more growth.
Since I started really focusing on perfecting my form, I have noticed I am performing much better.
There’s a time when you have to realize that you need to put your ego aside, lower the weight, and focus on your form.
Better range of motion
With better form, you will have a better range of motion because your muscles are moving how they’re supposed to be moving.
Your joints, muscles, and tendons will all move smoothly and in unison, taking the path they are meant to take.
This will allow your muscles to stretch to their full potential, again allowing for a better stretch and more muscle gains.
Increased efficiency
Because you are training correctly, you can do less and get out more.
You will target your muscles better and can see the same amount of progress from doing two sets correctly as you would from doing four sets incorrectly, assuming you are training correctly.
Training correctly is simple, you just have to learn to train intensely with proper form. These are the three rules I live by to grow in the gym which go along with that.
It’s extremely important to have good form when you are weightlifting. This will ensure you are reaching your maximum potential and getting the most out of your training sessions, while also avoiding injury.