You may have heard people say “your technique has to be perfect or you are doing it wrong”, hands up I have been that coach.
“Get your chest here, hands in an inch, squeeze this, arch that.”
While I try to get a client to squat like the YouTube videos I have been watching of Olympic lifters. I consider myself a pretty good coach but after all this coaching I just can’t get the squat to look how it did on the videos, it doesn’t look perfect.
I’m still a stickler for doing an exercise correct but my views are much more relaxed.
Experience has since taught me to view this idea of ‘perfect technique’ a lot differently, that perfect technique doesn’t exist, but exercise principles do.
Every person is different, so how can we expect the same picture-perfect technique from everyone?
We can’t, it is impossible, differences in body types, joint anatomy and mobility restrictions, are going to dictate how an exercise may look.
How an exercise should look is not so black/white but there are fundamental points for every exercise, that need to be in place to perform an exercise in proper technique.
Let’s take one of the most poorly performed exercises in the training world, the deadlift.
I would hope that we can all agree that consistently lifting from an excessively rounded back is going to increase your risk of injury.
On coaching the conventional deadlift I am looking for 6 key points from the starting position, all of which when put together may look slightly different from person to person but the fundamentals remain.
“Same, same but different.”
1. Bar over the mid foot, think covering the bow in your laces.
2. Stance, ask the person to jump on the spot a few times, there is your stance.
3. Grip set just outside of the legs.
4. Hips positioned so there is a ‘flat’ back.
5. Front of the shoulders slightly over the bar.
6. Chest lifted up.
Even some of these cues are not set in stone and there will be exceptions, just watch some of the big strongmen deadlift like Eddie Hall or Brian Shaw. Due to these guys being so big you will notice them take a wider grip & stance, they also tend to have the hips a bit lower than ‘textbook’ deadlifting.
There is no such thing as perfect form, we need to respect individual differences, find the technique that suits your body while sticking to the fundamental principles of the movement.
Do you have a view on this, I would be intrigued to hear it…
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