There are a lot of skills that we work on here at Tribe MVMNT – from the basic body weight Squat to the complex Power Snatch. Every single movement that you perform is a skill of varying difficulty, and with each skill there is a certain level of technique that is required to safely and effectively perform the movement. Paying attention to how you move and perform while you train will tell you a lot about what you need to improve, which is incredibly important for physical health and longevity.
For example, in a body weight squat, you might hear the coaches say to you “Get lower”, “Knees out”, or “Keep the feet flat on the floor.” These are cues to remind you to perform a movement correctly. Sometimes you forget because you’re just not used to the movement, but sometimes you physically cannot do what the coaches tell you despite your efforts. So why is that part so important? It tells us that somewhere along the line, you have lost the ability to move naturally. If you want to continue to perform movements safely, get stronger and improve fitness, then it’s imperative that you address the basic movements and improve them.
When you look at any young child pick up something from the floor, you will notice that they squat down to pick it up – often with perfect form i.e. Feet flat, back straight, chest up, hips as low as possible, and still able to maintain balance. This is a basic movement pattern and motor skill that unfortunately most of us lose the ability to do during the course of our lifetime, if not trained regularly. As we grow older we stop playing sports, start sitting down a lot more and generally place ourselves in poor positions which our body adapts to.
We lose our ability to move normally as nature intended, and as a result our body becomes imbalanced. We overuse certain muscles, completely neglect others, and as a result experience pain in our muscles and joints that we just attribute to “getting old”, when in reality, we have just been moving incorrectly over a longer period of time.
If you are lifting weights with the incorrect form, and/or without addressing or paying attention to why it’s happening, you only reinforce that poor position by getting stronger in that poor position. It will then become much harder to unlearn the incorrect technique, and become that much more difficult to retrain the body to move correctly. This is why sometimes you will need to leave your ego at the door – it might feel great to lift some heavy weights even with sub par technique, but it won’t feel so great when you continually cannot get past a plateau because you haven’t mastered the basics, and it’ll feel even worse when you eventually injure yourself.
This applies to any movement that you are performing, no matter how simple or complex it is.
You have to earn the right to be able to continually lift heavier weights, and you only do this when you have proven that you can lift those heavy weights correctly.
So take the time to step back and concentrate on what you need to work on until your technique is crisp.
Remember, it’s not enough to just practice. Practice does not make perfect.
Perfect practice makes perfect.