As I’ve stressed in many of my other posts, proper weightlifting form is a key factor in determining the efficacy of your workouts and how much muscle growth you’re able to achieve. If you’re not using safe and effective lifting technique, you’ll likely end up wasting a lot of time training inefficiently or suffering an injury that’ll severely set you back.
Therefore, when learning a new exercise, it’s incredibly important that you first learn and get comfortable with the correct form before you worry about increasing the weight and training to failure. Every exercise comes with its own specific set of guidelines around good technique, but there are some aspects of proper weightlifting form that tend to be recurring themes.
In this post, I want to give an overview of some of the major recurring points that you should generally always keep in mind when working out. This way, you’ll always have a solid foundation to build on when learning a new exercise.
1. Engage Your Core
With pretty much any exercise you perform, one thing you should always do is engage your core. To clarify, the core isn’t to be confused with the abs. Although the abs are a part of the core, the core encompasses many more muscles in the midsection of the body. Engaging the core is more about tightening your midsection rather than simply flexing your abs.
This is necessary when working out because engaging the core helps to stabilize the body and support the weight you’re lifting, which reduces the strain on more vulnerable parts of your body such as the back.
2. Keep Your Back Firm
On the topic of the back, remember to keep your back firm when lifting weights. This is a useful tip for all exercises you do, but it’s especially important when you’re performing compound movements with heavy weights. The back is particularly prone to sustaining serious injuries, so it’s critical to keep your back supported at all times.
Supporting your back doesn’t necessarily mean making it super stiff. For example, when benching, as long as your back is firmly supporting your body on the bench, it doesn’t need to be heavily arched. However, your back also shouldn’t be completed relaxed. There should always be some amount of tension so that for movements like deadlifts, bent-over rows and even just picking up a heavy weight, your back should never be rounded as that can easily lead to injury.
3. Maintain Your Balance
Whenever you’re about to perform an exercise, before picking up any weights and doing any reps, make sure that you’re in a sturdy and balanced position so you don’t stumble or fall over during your set. This isn’t only for when you’re standing. Even when you’re sitting or lying down, though you might not necessarily need to have your feet firmly planted, you still need to be in a stable position so you don’t sway excessively during the exercise.
In reality, maintaining your balance at all times is important not just for safety, but also for optimizing your workout: you can’t support and stabilize weights if you can’t even hold yourself steady.
4. Don’t Let Your Traps Take Over
A common mistake among beginners is letting the traps take over during upper body exercises. While squeezing the traps and shrugging can make the exercise easier to do, the issue is that this takes the focus away from the target muscle, since the traps are now doing the bulk of the lifting.
This can actually be a huge detriment to muscle development. For example, it can often be a big reason why some people don’t see much shoulder growth from doing lateral raises, even though lateral raises are commonly regarded as being very effective for building shoulder muscles.
Unless you’re specifically trying to work out your traps, you have to be very conscious of this and resist the urge to raise your traps when you start to fatigue. Keeping the tension in the muscle you’re targeting is the only way it’ll get stronger.
5. Don’t Rely on Momentum
I can’t stress this point enough, because I see it so often. When a weight is too heavy, some people have a tendency to swing weights in order to generate enough momentum to lift them rather than solely relying on their strength. This is particularly common for exercises like bicep curls.
Another way people generate momentum is by involving larger muscle groups when they should be isolating specific muscles. For example, people might swing their entire upper body when doing seated rows and lat pulldowns instead of pulling primarily with specific parts of the back.
Ironically, rows and pulldowns are both examples of exercises in which a little momentum can be good; however, momentum should never be the main force you rely on to perform an exercise. Using momentum means your muscles end up doing very little of the lifting, so although it seems like you’re working out, your muscles don’t receive nearly enough activation to achieve hypertrophy.
6. Remember to Breathe
The last point I want to address is that you should always remember to breathe while working out. People sometimes end up holding their breath while doing their sets, but whether this is intentional or not, it should certainly be avoided. Your muscles actually need more oxygen when you work out, so it’s necessary to sustain your breathing in order to reduce fatigue and maximize your strength.
Furthermore, it’s worth noting that how you breathe during exercise matters as well. To supply the body with a steady stream of oxygen, your breaths should be long and consistent, rather than short, rapid, and irregular. Generally speaking, the best way to achieve this is by exhaling when your muscles exert force, then inhaling as you return to the starting position of the exercise.
Strong Foundations Lead to Success
For the most part, these are all pretty standard practices when it comes to proper weightlifting form. I’d recommend committing them to habit because unless explicitly instructed otherwise, you should be implementing them whenever you’re doing strength training.
That being said, there’s a lot more to learn when it comes to workout technique. As I discussed in the beginning, every exercise has its own technique that you really need to take the time to familiarize yourself with. It’s not the most exciting part of working out, but it’s vital to your long-term success in the gym.
