Is Your Form Going to Sh*t?

Ever have this happen? You seem to be making progress, adding weight to the bar with each workout. At first, you had perfect form, full range of motion, and felt in control of the weight. As you began to add more and more weight, you started to get sloppy. You stopped thinking about form and started to rush your sets. Moving the weight became more important than how well you moved the weight. Range of motion becomes shorter and shorter, and form becomes sloppier and sloppier, until you look ridiculous. You’re not impressing anyone at this point. You’re cheating yourself and asking to get hurt. You are going to have to do something you don’t want to do: use a lighter weight, slow down, work on range of motion, and build back up. I know that’s not sexy or exciting, but this is how you develop kinesthetic awareness and motor control. Even if you’ve been diligent about maintaining good form, as you progress to heavier and heavier weight, some form creep is inevitable. Sometimes you’ll need to swallow your pride and back the weight way down so you can really pay attention to where you may be going wrong. Spending some time with lighter weights and going slow allows you to figure out if there is a pronounced strength asymmetry or a painful part of the movement that you are masking by rushing your sets. If so, it may help to devote some of your energy into fixing the imbalance through unilateral exercises and spending more time in uncomfortable parts of the movement using lighter loads. Hope that helps.