The Problem With ‘Form’
**Preface**:
This post is going to present a series of ideas on how to approach ‘form’ as a concept in lifting and it’s
application. These ideas represent opinions on the subject that I have built over almost a decade of
lifting [heavy things](https://www.instagram.com/tv/CWN6v-0gSv-/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link)
with [form](https://youtu.be/8E-iMybhQUo) that has been called
[questionable](https://www.instagram.com/tv/CWvYzWQgGzL/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link),
going so far as to even win a [World Championship](
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CW_MAuRJ0YT/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link) in lifting unusually
and in an excessive manner. That said almost everything I am going to talk about here is
theoretical/conceptual, and it is opinion. I am not presenting facts, nor am I suggesting that anything
here should become a fact. The goal is to present a viewpoint that is outside of the common
understanding of form, with the hopes that you, the reader, will refine your own views on the topic. If
you are convinced and agree with everything I say great, if you agree with some and move your
views to something in between cool, if you think about what I am saying here and reject all of it that
is okay too. The only thing I want here is to make you think more deeply about something that most
people just write off as a simple and obvious topic.
I know that many people feel strongly about the importance of form when lifting, so I ask you to please
read what I am writing and give the ideas presented a fair shake before running to the comment section
to tell me how wrong I am. I intend to write this in a manner that it can be understood and processed by
anyone, I will not be including complex anatomical jargon or links to dense studies that most people are
not equipped to work with, and I will do my best to explain every term I am using and explain any
relevant background information. That said if I am unclear in anything please feel free to ask for
clarification.
Like I did in my last post, I am going to give a short breakdown of what I will be writing about then I will
get into it.
**What Form is, and how it differs from Technique**: The first section will define ‘Form’, its counterpart
‘Technique’, and explain the differences. This is an important distinction to make both in terms of the
rest of the post, and in thinking about ‘Form’ in general.
**Why there is no such thing as ‘Perfect Form’**: The second section will look at why there is no such
thing as a universal form/technique, and why individual variables, training purpose, and other factors
can all influence the form/technique used.
**Form and Injury**: The third section will cover the relationship between form and injury risk, and
present an argument for thinking about injury risk as a function of load, not form.
**Practical DOs and DON’Ts**: The final section will tie the previous ideas together into some applicable
DO’s and DON’Ts.
With that out of the way lets get into the meat of the post.
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**What is Form, and what is Technique?**:
The very first thing we need to do to discuss form is define what it is and is not. Form, by formal, general
definition, is ‘the *visible* shape or configuration of something’. This definition applies to form in the
context of lifting as well. Form is the *visible appearance of a lift, as seen by an outside observer*. This
seems obvious, but this definition is important when separating form from technique.
Technique, conversely, encompasses everything you do, consciously or unconsciously, when executing a
lift. Every action you take, whether you think about it or not, to move a weight from point A to point B is
part of technique. Technique is what you should be pushing to refine and improve on. Improved
technique is ultimate goal, not improved *form*.
So how does technique differ from form? The distinction sits in the ‘visible’ part of the definition.
**Form is the external, visual, manifestation of technique.** Now I am well aware that this *sounds*
like a pedantic distinction without merit but I think that it is very important. You cannot see every part
of technique. You cannot actually see the interplay between muscle groups or the activation of each
individual fiber, you cannot see the thought processes that go into activating the these muscles, you
cannot see resulting forces on the weight and every bone, muscle, and joint in the body. What you
*can* see is the results of those things in the way they move the body and the weight, and that is ‘form’.
With form you can only *approximate* what is going on in terms of technique.
Form is one of the few tools available to look at someone’s technique as an outside observer, but it’s
limitation’s must be understood and respected. You must understand that when reviewing form you are
observing a portion of the *results* from a set of actions, and then you are extrapolating what actions
must have occurred to create those results. Form can never give a perfect insight into someone’s
technique. With enough viewpoints and the right experience to interpret them you can get a pretty solid
understanding of the technique involved but it’s still ultimately an indirect assay and thus imperfect.
It is even more difficult to work with form in most practical settings. Unless the lifter is wearing
extremely tight clothing, or no clothing at all, visual information is going to be obscured by clothing
hanging in the way. Unless you are walking in circles around the lifter, viewing multiple sets from every
angle you are not getting a full 360-degree view of the lift. Online it is even worse, you are getting a
single (usually questionable) angle with which to view the lift in the form of a video. Not only is there an
inherent disconnect between visual form and physical technique, but you are often working with an
incomplete visual. This makes the final approximation even worse.
Before moving on I want to look at a practical example to really hammer the point in:
Picture someone deadlifting, who has some back rounding under their loose gym shirt. You can see the
‘form’ (a back that is rounded to some degree) but what can you say about the technique? Are they a
beginner who is struggling to maintain a braced position and is being bent over by the weight? Or are
they more experienced, purposefully maintaining that torso position while fully braced in order to
effectively start from a higher position? One form, two potential technical causes. One is ineffective and
should probably be corrected if the lifter wants to move more weight, the other is fine. You can use
other clues to help inform that decision: how much is the lifter pulling? Do they have a level of
musculature that suggests they are experienced? Is the back static or actively rounding? With this
context you can make a solid assumption about technique, but the form of ‘rounded back’ does not
inherently tell you what their technique is, nor if it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
__________________________________________________________________________
**The Problem with ‘Perfect Form’**:
I am going to start by outright saying that perfect form does not exist. It cannot be achieved, it should
not be a goal, and you should never try to impose it on yourself or another lifter. There are multiple
reasons why this is true, and I will break them down in this section.
***Form is not a goal***: The first point ties into the something I mentioned in the last section, and that
is that *technique* should be where your focus lies, not the resulting form. With some exceptions for
when form dictates what a lift is, or it’s competitive standards, the way your lift looks does not matter in
the slightest. Yes, a competition squat in powerlifting needs to include your hip crease dipping below
your knee line, but how the rest of the lift looks Does Not Matter. Effective technique does generally
result in a certain spectrum of visual forms but outliers exist and putting the effort into making a lift look
a certain way is getting the technique-form relationship backwards. **You should be trying form
changes to see if they improves your technique, not changing your technique to see if it makes your
form look better. **. Form is one tool for communicating and implementing technical changes, but that
is it, it is not something that you should change your technique for because it has inherent value. If form
is not something that you are trying to directly achieve there can be no reason to try and ‘perfect’ it.
One could argue that *technique* could be perfected, but I would disagree there too.
***We are not made equal***: Human anatomy has a high degree of variance. We are not built equally
so it stands to reason that we should not lift equally either. Telling a 6’5’’ lifter with long limbs to
perform a squat in the exact same manner as a 5’2’’ lifter with very short limbs is ridiculous. Limb to
torso proportions, femur to total leg proportion, muscle insertions and origins (where a muscle is
attached to bone), joint angles, and uncountable other variables all impact the specifics of a lifters most
effective squat technique. In addition to the anatomy one is born with past injuries, personal
preference, equipment choice, and other non-anatomical variables will further impact the specifics of a
lifter’s technique. No two people should be lifting the exact same way, so there cannot be a universal
‘perfect’ technique.
***How you should perform a lift depends on your goals***: Because we are all different, there is no
universally perfect technique for a given movement, but *even an individual does not have a singular,
personal, perfect technique*. A lifter can use the same general movement pattern for multiple
purposes, and what those purposes are is going to impact the technique used. A bench press performed
to move the most weight possible is not going to be performed in the same way as a bench press
performed focused on building up the chest, or a bench press performed to develop a certain aspect of
the technical execution. Which of these is the ‘right’ technique, which is ‘perfect’? None of them are. I
guess you could go further and say that each goal for each individual has its own ‘perfect technique’ but
at a certain point you are really going past the concept of ‘perfect’ by providing a rationale to call
anything perfect.
*We are not machines*: We are incapable of executing a lift in the exact same manner over and over
again. Even if there was a ‘perfect’ we could not reliably achieve it. It would be a fruitless endeavor to
chase it. Instead we should look at what is a good, or even acceptable, *range* for our lifts. Deviation
from the ideal is fine, technique that is just shy of the best still works just fine. Taking this approach not
only gives a much more reasonable standard for your reps, but acknowledges that you are imperfect,
that you will be fatigued sometimes, that your mind will wander a bit on some sets, and that you will
phone it in sometimes. All of that is completely fine provided you stay within the acceptable range for
technical execution, and program with that range in mind. Perfect is the enemy of good enough, so
choose good enough. Time spent working hard with technique that is good enough will build more
strength, size and experience than spending that same time trying to calculate or reach your notion of
perfection.
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**Form and Injury**:
I’m going to start this section with another bold statement: no technique, or form, is inherently more
dangerous or more liable to injure you than any other. I know this flies in the face of a lot of common
opinion on the topic I request that you stick with me for a second. Injury in lifting can, outside of freak
accidents or other odd cases, generally be attributed to improper load management, not improper
‘form’.
Load refers to how much you are lifting, for any given rep or over time. Load management is the
process of choosing appropriate weights for your sets, both long and short term. Any movement, with
any technique, has a threshold for how much you can effectively lift with it, and exceeding that
threshold results in an increased risk of injury. This failure to manage load can be acute, loading up more
than you can effectively move for a single rep, or chronic, performing too many reps at a given load over
a period of time without allowing time for sufficient recovery. These two are not completely
independent, you can be pushing your long term load management a bit too far and open yourself up to
an acute event that would not have been as issue if you had been more rested for example. The
threshold is also not static, as mentioned above you have a ‘range’ of technique and you have a
corresponding range of load thresholds, depending on how on the ball you are for any given rep/set.
Now how does this tie into technique and form? Technique, and the resulting form, that is generally
considered to be ‘dangerous’ is just less effective, and thus has a lower load threshold. Lets go back to
the example of a deadlift with back rounding, in this case born of an inability to properly brace the torso
and not a conscious decision to get better positioning. This is something that is generally considered
dangerous, with the implication that lifting like this will injure you. That’s false. It’s not an inherently
dangerous movement pattern, its just ineffective and you cannot lift very much with it before you cross
the load management threshold to increase injury risk. If you don’t believe that lets do a quick mental
exercise. Could you safely deadlift a pool noodle with an unbraced back? How about a 1 inch steel pipe?
An unloaded barbell? 135lbs? You had to have answered yes to at least the pool noodle question, and
probably some of the others. You already accept that you can safely pick up a trivial weight with this
‘dangerous’ form, so you accept that the variable responsible for injury is the weight used, not the
technique. Obviously you should try to use the more effective technique, so you can safely lift more
weight, but you are not going to have an excessive risk of hurting yourself using *any* technique,
provided you lift within your ability for that movement.
Now why does this matter? Isn’t it just pedantry? No. Understanding the actual cause of injury in this
situation teaches several important lessons that can and should impact your training decisions:
*You need to manage your load*: Even with the best technique you can muster you are still at risk of
injury if you lift too much. Good technique and form will not protect you against injury if you are
pushing excessive loads and volume. This is usually obvious from the acute standpoint, it is pretty
intuitive that trying to lift a lot more than you are capable of is going to chance an injury. The problem of
chronic load management is less obvious. You can lift sub-maximally, with solid technique, and still open
yourself to injury if you are trying to hit too many hard sets a session/week/month/other time period.
Your body gets fatigued with every rep and that lowers its performance. You can’t hit your 1RM over
and over again, and you probably can’t go balls to the wall on your sets in some movement 3x a week
for months on end. Good programs will manage this but a lot of lifters, even experienced individuals,
will push themselves too hard. It’s very tempting to keep up momentum when you are setting back to
back PRs for example, but that is not a sustainable trajectory, even with your best ‘form’.
*You are probably not going injure yourself just because your technique is lacking*: The second
important thing to realize from this injury model is that *any* movement can be performed with
reasonable expectation of safety if you manage your load properly. I see a lot of beginners that are
paralyzed by a fear of progression with sub-optimal ‘form’. They believe that they will sustain a severe
injury out of nowhere at some point if they do not correct how they lift. While freak incidents can occur,
this is not a reasonable fear. Even if your technique is sub-par, if you gradually add weight in a
responsible manner you can keep progressing even terrible and inefficient form safely. I believe that this
is a good thing in most scenarios. You are going to be more likely to adapt your technique and discover
more efficient movement patterns if you are pushing yourself. Your body does not ‘want’ to move the
weight in an inefficient manner, if you keep making it lift weights it will slowly find a better way to do it.
You will change some little thing on each set and eventually something will click and you will find the
weight moving better. If you refuse to keep slowly progressing weight out of fear of your imperfect
technique you will not experience this stimulus to adapt.
*Most serious injuries do not come without warning signs*: Of the two kinds of load management error,
chronic and acute, chronic is going to be much more prevalent if you are lifting even remotely
responsibly. When you have a chronic load management issue you are not going to be feeling great then
suddenly develop an injury. It is a gradual process that almost always comes with some warning signs. If
you are lifting too much with your bent back deadlifts, to go back to the last example, you are unlikely to
suddenly develop a major lower back injury, you will experience discomfort, additional strain while
lifting, or some other precursor before the injury occurs. You can use these warning signs to take proper
steps to manage the issue. Accepting that you have these warning signs should open up what you are
willing to try. If you are unsure about a technical change, or if something needs to be changed, you can
keep working with it if nothing feels off.
That said, you cannot always see a large injury coming, there is some inherent risk in pushing yourself
with any technique. You can’t always see mild or moderate injuries/pain coming, as they can be the
warning sign that something bigger might be on the way. You also may not be able to directly assess
what is causing your pain in every scenario, sometimes the cause is unclear or unintuitive. You should
not be paralyzed by the fear or injury or let it hold you back, but be cognizant it can happen, and that it
probably will if you push yourself hard for long enough. You need to strike a middle ground between
excessive fear of injury and complete disregard. Despite this, lifting is still one of the safest form of
physical exercise in terms of incidence of injury/time spent, so keep that in mind.
*You can train anything*: Outside of accusations that certain ‘form’ is dangerous on common
movement I see a lot of people fully writing off all kinds of movement patterns as inherently dangerous,
such as behind the neck presses or pulls. They are not. You can train *anything* with a reasonable
expectation of safety provided you start at an appropriate weight and build your way up at an
acceptable rate. You might discover at a low weight that a movement does not agree with you, or you
might not hit a wall and find that you can build up to heavy weights in these atypical movements. Either
way it’s *safe* to explore these movements if you do it properly, because *the technique and form are
not inherently dangerous*. Just remember that you have little idea of your threshold with a new
movement or technique, so start with conservative loads.
*If it works, it works*: The final point I want to make is particularly aimed at newer lifters that are
watching advanced lifters with unusual execution. I see a lot of people with no appreciable experience
telling people lifting very serious weights that they are doing it wrong and are going to injure
themselves. This is extremely misguided, and arrogant in my opinion. If someone has cultivated their
personal technique to the point where they can lift such an impressive amount of weight do you not
think that they have worked out a technique that is compatible with their body? Do you think they
accidently managed to lift a weight that less than 1% of lifters could manage by doing everything
incorrectly? No, if it works for them it works for them. Their load threshold with that odd technique is
high enough to manage the weight, and probably higher than their threshold for a more conventional
technique. It probably won’t work well for most people, but it works fine for them. They are not going to
hurt *themselves* just because you would hurt *yourself* using a comparable technique. You are
different people, with different bodies. To expand this idea, if you find yourself effectively and
comfortably moving weight with a technique that is unusual, and ineffective for most other people,
don’t try to change it just because it is not normal. It’s working for you, keep exploring it until it does not
work for you then change whatever is not working at that point. Don’t try to fix something that is
already working.
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**Putting it all Together, Do’s and Don’ts**:
This last section is going to bring all the ideas covered in the previous sections into some actionable Do’s
and Don’ts when it comes to using ‘form’ to influence your training decisions and the advice you give to
others.
***DO use form as a source of potential changes for your technique***: I want to start this section by
stating that form *does* have a place in making technical changes to your lift. It is very hard, if not
impossible, to describe how you should change your lifting technique without framing it as form change.
‘Bring your stance closer’, ‘Try to start with your hips higher’, ‘Break at the hips before the knees’,
‘Touch lower on your chest’ are all examples of form advice that can produce beneficial change in a
lifters technique. The SUPER IMPORTANT CAVEAT to this advice is that it is not absolute, everyone is
going to lift a little, or a lot, differently.
Not all lifters will use the most common stances for their lifts, not all lifters should be touching a bench
press down at the same spot. It is definetely worth it for newer lifters and those experiencing a plateau
in progress to explore this kind of advice, provided it’s coming from an experienced source. But if it does
not improve your lift after you have given yourself time to adapt to it you should ditch it. There are no
universal truths when it comes to form, and advice is only good and ‘correct’ if it is helpful.
***DON’T cram yourself into a box and chase an idealized ‘form’***: I’ve said it already, but I really
want to stress that form is a *means to an end*, not a goal in of itself. The point of trying to produce a
specific form is to cultivate better *technique*. Chasing a specific form, and changing your technique to
reach that, is backwards and counterproductive. If a change makes a lift look nicer, but you lift less
effectively, or with more discomfort, then it is a bad change. If you find yourself comfortably (or at least
a comfortably as heavy lifting gets) lifting more weight with a technique that produces an unusual form
then go with it. Looking pretty while lifting is not the goal, at least it is not the goal of strong people.
***DO frame your form advice as a suggestion, and know when not to give it***: Form policing is a
cancer in the lifting community, it really is. It just keeps spreading and it strangles out the healthy,
strong viewpoints on technique. You cannot know everything about a person’s lift just from watching a
video of it, or from watching it in person for that matter. For that reason you really should structure
your advice as *suggestions*, not absolute rules. The goal is to get the trainee to try something
differently in the hopes that they discover a technical change that helps them. It’s a tool for guidance.
When you tell a new lifter that they MUST lift in a specific way you stifle that discovery and inhibit their
ability to find the technique that works best for them.
Form policing also presents as people giving unsolicited and ineffective advice to experienced lifters.
Everyone has room to improve, and almost every experienced lifter realizes this and strives for it. But
someone watching a video of their lift and parroting generic beginner form advice is not helping them.
It’s not helping anyone. It’s arrogant and condescending.
I have tried to write this entire post in a non-combative and tone, I really do want people that might not
be initially accepting of these ideas to at least give them a chance and have tried to avoid putting people
on the defensive for that reason. But we are nearing the end and I need to indulge a little bit on this one
point and say that if you are form policing you need to shut the fuck up.
***DON’T cling to form standards past the beginners stage***: This is a bit of an expansion on the point
about chasing idealized form above. The general form advice that is given to beginners absolutely has a
place. A beginner has no technique on which to build and the only way to really create that initial
technique is to present a general form that they should try to imitate. This helps them stumble through
their first reps and sets in a relatively safe and moderately effective manner. But these generic beginner
form guidelines are *training wheels*. They are an excellent tool for initial teaching but at some point
you need to remove them and learn to ride the bike. No one has ever won a Tour De France with
training wheels. Don’t cling to them too hard once you have that initial technique down and certainly
don’t force them onto more experienced others.
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**Wrapping Up:**
If you have read up this point I thank you and give you leave to go to the comments and tell me why you
think I am stupid. I probably won’t agree with you but reading this far means you have put in at least the
bare minimum of consideration on the topic so have at it. You can and also should feel free to comment
if you have questions or need clarification, I will do my best to answer every reasonable question.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope that you have taken something away here, even if
you don’t fully agree with my opinions on the matter. And additional thanks to those that gave feedback
on the initial drafts of this post to help make things clearer or add nuance to some of the initially one
dimensional points.