The Importance of Proper Weight Lifting Form

I’m sure you have heard it before. You should bench with proper form. The same can be said with every bodybuilding exercise. Why is training with good weight lifting form important? As you would already know, lifting with heavy weights is necessary to maximize muscle growth. The problem is the heavier you lift the harder it is to maintain proper technique with any exercise.

Just because you are lifting the weight, does not mean you are working the intended muscle, so you may not be concentrating maximum effort on the specific muscles you want to develop. There is no point in training heavy if you will have sloppy form. It makes more sense to use lighter weights and have a more efficient and productive workout, instead of being too eager to lift heavy. If you pay no attention to good exercise form, you will get hurt sooner or later despite the best warm up set you will ever do.

There are various factors which play an important role in lifting weights with proper form. In other articles I will discuss how to do specific muscle building exercise with proper form, but for this article I want to focus on a more general overview of what you need to pay attention to with every lift.

Controlling the movement

There are many aspects of training with proper form, but the most common is to not change the normal path your body has to move in an exercise or in other words: Know how to do an exercise properly! There is normally a most ‘natural’ way your joints and bones have to go along, and for every exercise its different. If you start cheating, there can be stress on tendons, joints or the spinal column that is not healthy. For example, arching your back when performing a bench press is bad. There can be some benefits in cheating, but definitely not for beginners.

Range of motion

According to latest research, muscles get stronger exactly in those movement angles in which they get trained with high intensity. In other words, if you don’t go through the whole range of motion of an exercise, you don’t reach all fibers/portions of the muscle. This is actually the main reason, why strength training has to do with motion and not just with tension in an isokinetic manner. A repetition has the function of setting a brief, high tension in every angle. You can think of it like make the fibers ‘play’ one after another while contracting your muscle.

But there are some limitations to the rule ‘whole range of motion’: First of all the results from the lower back studies can’t just be applied to simpler muscles, since ‘lower back’ means dozens of muscle units contained in the erector spinae. Simpler muscles like say biceps brachi sometimes don’t only get stronger in the angles they get trained. The second limitation of ‘full range of motion’ is for danger of injuries, because there are many exercises where its rather dangerous to fully stretch a muscle under load.

Speed of motion

The slower you contract a muscle, the more tension can be developed in that there are more contractile units in the muscle that get connected. And more tension and stress on the fibers means better results. But the main reason why I strongly suggest slow movements in bodybuilding is your safety. If you train fast it allows you to lift more weight because you accelerate the weight in angles that are relatively easy and let the impulse of the weight do the work in the heavy angles (momentum). You train with more weight than you actually could and should. The acceleration forces that occur when training with fast movements multiply the amount of weight for your joints and tendons up to factors of 2 or more! Many injuries come from explosive lifts.

What does lifting with a slow speed of motion mean? Here is a rule of thumb for lifting weights slowly:

2-4 seconds for the positive movement phase (lift)
1-2 seconds in full contraction
4 seconds for the negative movement phase (lowering)

What I want to talk about most is the negative phase of the exercise. Why should the negative phase be slow? The intramuscular friction brakes the movement while lowering a weight. This is the reason why you can lower pretty much more weight than what you can lift. In doing the negative phase of a repetition very slowly you try to emphasize the tension during this phase.

by David on August 22, 2009 · 1 comment

Filed under Exercises & Workouts

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