Post a form check on Facebook or Instagram, and you’ll get a variety of feedback. Let’s say you squat and you have a bit of knee cave going on. The advice you’ll get will be along the lines of “your knees are coming in” or “push your knees out”. This might sound helpful to a novice lifter who may be unaware it’s a bad thing, but to me it presents a problem: people tend to focus on the outputs of technique, rather than the inputs.

To illustrate imagine you were trying to drop weight to get down to your weight class for competition. Not knowing the best way to go about it, you ask for advice on social media. Imagine if the majority of advice was along the lines of “Your weight is too high, it should be under …kg”, or “You need to make the numbers on the scale lower”.

#bulkingnotsulking

Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? There’s no mention of any kind of modification to the input, only that the output should be different. Unfortunately, it’s a commonly seen process with online form checking; advice is centred on the outputs and not the inputs.

Let’s take the example of hip height in the deadlift. A common error I’ve seen a lot of recently is that as soon as the lifter breaks the bar off the floor, their hips shoot up and then they begin the pull in earnest. Some back rounding may accompany this, with the bar drifting forward, or the lifter gets into a bad position for the lockout and hitches the lift.

I’m guilty of it here – notice how I get into a good position with my setup then ruin it by sitting back too much, so my hips immediately shoot up to get me into a better position by putting my shoulders back over the bar.

As a response to this technique error you’ll then quite often see the lifter advised to start with their hips higher. Simple? Not quite.

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” – Albert Einstein

The problem with only addressing the output is that it oversimplifies things and could still allow plenty of other aspects of the lift to go wrong.

With the scenario mentioned, if the lifter is able to drop their hips too low, it’s likely they’ve started too far away from the bar. Only addressing the hip height here will mean once they break the floor the bar still has to come back towards them and the other errors mentioned are still present, still there to reduce potential performance or even possibly increase the chance of injury. Lifts have layers, like onions. Or Shreks. We need to peel the layers back to the central problem (i.e setting up too far from the bar or pushing the bar away with the shins when setting up, compared to hip height).

If the lifter starts the appropriate distance from the bar, hinges at the hip properly before grabbing the bar and then maintains neutral spine positioning whilst bringing the shins forward to the bar and keeps the scapula over the bar, then the hips will end up in the right position – it’s an output of getting all those inputs right.

So next time you’re assessing your lifts for technique errors, remember that technical errors are like Shreks.

Swole and Shreksy

They have layers you need to peel back so you can figure out the proper inputs. And if you’d like to fast track that process why not get in touch and book in for a consultation?