These 5 Tips About Weight Lifting Technique Are Going To Change Your Results Forever

I remember a story from somewhere in which a lady was listening to a master pianist and after he finished playing she said something along these lines to him:

“I would give anything to play like you.”

The pianist looked at her and responded:

“No, you wouldn’t. The fact that you still don’t even play the piano is telling me that you were never serious. You just like the idea of knowing how to play well but you’re not really willing to do the work to actually play.”

Harsh right? Also, very true…

I probably butchered this little “story” to death but I think that I illustrated pretty well what I’m trying to say here and now I’m going to explain how this relates to your lifting technique.

Good Technique vs Inefficient Technique = Hammer vs Axe

One other good metaphor to what we’re going to talk about here is about trying to cut wood with the hammer vs with the sharp ax.

While you actually can cut wood with the hammer (if you’re stubborn enough) it would take a lot longer and it would be a lot more inefficient than if it would with a cutting ax.

Same goes with lifting technique.

Yes, you will see some results if you didn’t really focus on improving your technique but you would definitively see drastic changes if you started seriously working on your technique.

We’ll cover 5 tips that will help you look at lifting technique in a new light and hopefully make you pay more attention to it.

1) Technique is More Important Than You Think

Average gym goer thinks of technique as something that’s kinda important and sometimes also agrees that you have to have a good technique but at the same time he doesn’t really have proper and consistent technique.

They understand intellectually the importance of technique but they never really applied it in the real world.

When the weight gets a little heavy, their technique usually falls apart.

When they get closer to failure, they start using more and more momentum without even realizing it. This is a bad habit.

Reps that are closer to failure are the most important reps and it’s crucial that your technique doesn’t deviate while you do those last few reps.

I want to point out that I don’t think that all people don’t pay enough attention to technique just because they’re ego lifters.

I think that some people just don’t really understand the importance of proper technique and how it really affects their progress.

(I’m not talking here about half reps. I think that all of us here are better than that.)

That is the only reason why they don’t pay much attention to it. They simply don’t really understand intellectually why you need to pay so much attention to your technique.

They think that if it’s good enough that’s good enough.

In their eyes technique is kinda important just so you don’t injure yourself and so far they didn’t have any serious injuries so naturally they conclude that their technique is “good enough”.

Which is only partly true.

Technique affects your progress in so many different ways. The most important reason why you need to pay attention to your technique is so that you can track your results properly.

If your technique continually deviates when things get heavy that will mess up your training log because you will think that you’re making progress while you’re just in a way “cheating” the log book to do more reps or lift more weight.

Now that we know that technique is more important than you previously thought we need to cover what “good technique” really is.

2) Proper Technique ISN’T “Perfect” Technique

When we say “you need to work on your technique” people usually have some vague idea of “the perfect technique”, this is especially the case for the squat (a lot of people get REALLY emotional about the squat), and they think that you need to “reach” that perfect technique and then, and only then, will you be worthy of gains.

Which is total nonsense.

There isn’t such a thing as a perfect technique.

The simple reason for that is that we’re all built differently and therefore we can’t all have the same technique.

Just take a look at any powerlifting competition… From person to person every squat is different.

If you have long femurs trust me when I say, your squat is going to look a lot different than for somebody who has short femurs and legs.

Same goes for any other lift.

After we cover just the bone lengths and how they affect your technique, people who like to promote the idea of “perfect” technique forget that we humans also have different types of joints, muscle and ligament attachments, different muscle lengths etc.

Because of this reason it’s pretty much impossible to have “standardized” technique for all lifters and if someone is trying to say that you have to squat in a certain way they probably don’t know what they’re talking about or they’re just trying to sell you something.

This doesn’t mean that you can squat however you want but it simply means that you can stop chasing the perfect technique because it doesn’t exist.

What I try to teach people is that you need to FIND your technique, not to LEARN it. There is a huge difference but we’re not going to talk about the process of how you actually do that here because I don’t want this article to be a mini book.

Here is a little sample of what Mike Tuchscherer thinks about this topic. He calls this process a self organizing technique.

• Feel free to check his thoughts on this subject.

Oh yea, did I mention that he is a IPF world champion and that his team RTS (Reactive Training Systems) is currently coaching multiple IPF world champions.

Just a thought.

3) Proper Technique is a Complex Topic

I have another theory of why people neglect the subject of technique. You see, people tend to like mysticism.

For example; If I told you that you only need to “eat less and move more to lose weight” that statement wouldn’t sound much attractive but if I told you that there are “two secret ingredients to a successful weight loss” maybe then I would get your attention.

The same goes for the technique. Working on your technique doesn’t sound mystical so people usually assume that it’s not that important.

Unfortunately, most people think like this without realizing how much it affects their results.

I’m not judging here. I also do this for some other things in life.

It’s just the way we as humans are wired. We mistakenly think that if it sounds “too simple” it probably doesn’t work.

When you say to people that they have to pay more attention to technique what they really hear you say is “technique is important” and the response in their mind is simply “I know that already, tell me something that I don’t know“. They misjudge the importance just because it sounds too simple.

What they don’t realize is that technique is actually such a complex topic that I could literally write a whole book just about the technique. (maybe I will)

The mistake that people make is that they look at technique as something that is dull and boring and as something that doesn’t affect their results that much.

They know that having a good technique is important but not for them. Their technique is already good enough.

It must be something else that I’m doing wrong my technique is already good enough.

random forever-intermediate lifter

This error in judgement is probably one of the critical errors that they make when they’re trying to build muscle or gain strength.

People would be shocked if they realized how technique can affect their volume, frequency, intensity and recovery.

This is precisely the reason why they don’t want to bother themselves too much about the technique. They know that it’s important, but they don’t really think that it’s something THEY need to work on.

This is a key point here and the reason why I’m repeating it here in this article.

You ALWAYS need to work on your technique!

The Three Main Reasons Why You Need To Work On Your Technique:

The first reason why you need to continuously work on your technique is to try to be as efficient as you can. Whether your goal is to lift the most weight possible or whether you want to build as much muscle as possible.

This is hammer vs axe story.

You will improve your results drastically with better technique

The second reason is that while you develop as a lifter you continually gain more kinesthetic awareness and with this advanced awareness, you gain more insight of where you can further improve your technique to reach your goals. This process goes on forever as long as you keep on lifting.

Changes become smaller and smaller through time as you get better and better to a point where changes aren’t even visible to a naked eye, they can only be perceived by the lifter as a “feeling”.

The third reason is that as you develop as a lifter after years of training you’re strengthening different parts of your body and adding mass to the areas that were at some point weak points.

With this new strength and muscle you can further adjust your technique to be continually more and more efficient and more complete as a lifter.

This process never really ends. It’s a continual process that ends when you stop lifting.

You can see this fact in the real world if you pick any lifter and see how their technique looked like in the beginning of their career and how it looked like when they were at their peak in their career.

4) How Lifting Technique Affects Progress – Faking Progress

We as lifters measure progress either by doing more reps with the same weight or by lifting more weight with the same number of reps. This is the only objective way of measuring progress other than measuring your muscles with the tape, especially when you’ve been lifting for a long period of time.

This is because after the first year or two our progress slows down to a point at which it’s really hard to see the results from month to month just by looking at the mirror.

When you have a good and consistent technique you can be objective and precise about your progress.

If your technique continually deviates from workout to workout you can’t really tell if you have progressed or if you’ve just used more momentum to “fake” progress.

People tend to do this when they’re too eager to progress. This is counterproductive because you’re trying to treat the symptom and not the cause.

The way you objectively know how you progressed is by either doing more reps or lifting more weight while maintaining the same number of reps.

There are essentially two ways of measuring progress:

• Progress by rep increase 100 x 10 reps, after 2 weeks 100 x 12 reps.
• Progress by weight increase 100 x 10 reps, after 2 weeks 102.5 x 10 reps.

If you did something similar to this you know you have progressed only if your technique stayed the same.

You can in a way “fake” this progress and fool yourself into believing that you did more than you actually did if you cheated on some reps and let your technique deviate too much.

“Cheating” Can Slow Down Your Progress

Let’s say that you did 10 x 100lbs with proper form in one workout and the next workout you do 13 x 100lbs but you used more momentum.

Is this progress or did you just lifted the weight with different technique?

If you altered your technique to do more reps that means that you did not progress, that means that you used different muscles to lift the weight up.

Two things happen when you do this too often. You hit a plateau too soon because you’re trying to progress too quickly and you increase the risk of injury dramatically.

You also develop bad lifting habits.

When you’re altering the technique to do more reps you’re literally lifting more than your muscles and your joints can handle, that’s why you’re instinctively using momentum because at that point, your muscles are already failed and now they’re just trying to “survive” while your joints are taking a beating.

This is precisely why your technique has to be consistent throughout the whole training mesocycle.

If you’re changing the technique too often you can’t tell what’s going on in the bigger picture because your technique isn’t consistent.

If something happens (good or bad) you want to know if that was a result of changing the program or the technique.

You can also make isolated technique changes but then you have to keep your program constant.

You don’t want to change too many things at once because you want to distinguish what is really working for you.

If we want to test something we can’t change 10 things at once because if we do that we can’t possibly know in what way any of this 10 things affected our training.

Your testing, whether it be on technique or on your programming needs to be isolated so that you’re certain if a particular change that you have been testing really works or not.

The reason why you don’t want to completely change your technique at once is because some technique changes don’t feel natural for a few workouts until we get adjusted to them.

Sometimes, a little technique change can feel weird but it turns out to be really beneficial.

Don’t Adjust The Technique To Lift More Weight, Adjust The Weight To Fit The Technique

One last thing I want to mention here is the issue of ego lifting.

Just because lifting more weight or doing more reps means that you’re progressing, that doesn’t mean that this is the only thing you need to pursue.

Just because you lifted more weight in the same rep range doesn’t always correlate with muscle building. It probably means something did happened but sometimes, what really happened is that you just become more efficient in the particular lift that you progressed in.

This is called neural efficiency, or…. strength. Kinda…

Sometimes, you may get stronger in a short period of time just because you have become more neurally efficient in the lift.

This almost always happen when you introduce a new exercise in your program.

For the first few weeks you suck at it but then you get this rapid spike in strength.

This is because you just got neurally efficient.

This is one of the reasons why strength and muscle mass are not 1:1 correlated.

You may get bigger without getting stronger, and you can get stronger without getting bigger.

So there isn’t really any point of purposely trying to force doing more reps because just because you did more reps in one workout doesn’t really mean anything. One workout in itself doesn’t make your muscles grow, the whole combination of workouts, nutrition, sleep lifestyle does it.

Sometimes you can do more reps just because you ate a little bit more the day before, you have recovered well, you didn’t have any stress recently etc.

So, technique is still #1 whatever you do.

Your Technique Does The Talking

Focus on your technique, don’t cheat, let your technique dictate what weight you’re lifting.

So if you see that your technique starts deviating too much, that means that probably you’re lifting too much weight for that rep range.

So if you wanted to do 6 reps, and the last rep was very different from the first 5 reps, that means that you actually hit technical failure on the rep 5, and you just wanted to do 6 reps so you basically went balls out on the rep 6 and got the ugly rep.

This last rep didn’t do anything for you (regardless of what high intensity crowd are telling you) and it just increased the risk of injury dramatically.

If you’re doing that every workout trust me, injury is around the corner.

So in this scenario, you actually needed to do 3-4 reps with this weight.

Why 3-4 if you could do 5 with good form?

Well, because you always want to leave a minimum of 1 rep in the tank, and most of the time you actually need to leave 1-4 reps in the tank.

Don’t be an ego lifter.

Don’t let your technique deviate near the end of the set.

Your technique dictates how many reps you can do with certain weight.

Train smart.