When Form DOESN’T Matter (WORKOUT REALITY CHECK!!)

Form definitely matters when working out, but are you getting too hung up on perfect form all while missing out on gains you could be seeing by not looking at it in isolation. In this video, I’m going to show you how what some might interpret as bad form, could be exactly what is needed in your wor

JEFF: You know I love having Jessie around the office. He brings a lot of energy, but he can get out of hand from time to time. So you’ve got to keep your eye on him. Jessie! Jessie!

Jessie! Jessie! JESSIE: What? What, what, what? JEFF: Dude.

That is disgusting! That’s gross. Seriously. Who taught you how to jump rope like that? With your elbows out to the side.

Get them in! Closer! Closer! Closer! JESSIE: Okay, okay.

JEFF: Tighten it up. There you go. There you go. nice job. Good job.

Good job. JESSIE: Thanks, bro. JEFF: Good job. JESSIE: I appreciate it. JEFF: Any time.

Anytime. I mean, the good thing is, he’s a really fast learner. So it makes my job a lot easier. What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.

com. You know I can’t allow that in my gym. That kind of form is miserable. Guys, you know that form matters to me. As a physical therapist I know how important form can be, especially when it comes to keeping you healthy.

I’m not the form police. You’ve got a lot of people that are out there that want to be part of the form police, and maybe they’re even justified. If they see stuff like, maybe, this – like the rocking horse pull down. You guys have seen this one before, right? Or maybe even the leaning tower.

This is actually what I like to call the vertical bench press. Or the “I might piss my pants” squat. Right here we’ve seen this. The quarter squat mixed with a little bit of “I think I’m going to urinate, I’ve got to make sure I hold it in. ” Or maybe even the wonderful hunchback when doing the one armed row.

This one’s a beauty. Or finally the one that I love the most: the fuck up. This is just “I’ve got to get my chin over that bar any which way I can and the pullup doesn’t really matter anymore to me. ” Guys, in any of these situations that is bad form and is getting you nowhere fast. However, I’m going to say this: I think our attention to form has gotten a lot skewed.

Not a little. A lot skewed. I want to explain that here, today. You see, if you look at form in a vacuum you’re always going to make the wrong decision. You’re always going to become one of those form cops that thinks that form means everything.

But if you stop and think about what the surrounding elements are you’re going to become a lot better at judging when proper form is actually getting you closer to your goal. So let’s talk about that. For instance, let’s say you have a temporary injury, a temporary situation that’s preventing you from doing an exercise in full range of motion. There’s a big difference between the form of an exercise and the range of motion of a good exercise, or a properly performed exercise. So if you take, for instance, the bench-press.

The bench press, the whole video on how to execute the bench press, if you haven’t seen it, watch it. I’ll include the link in the description down below. The bench press has a lot of different check points. One of them being: lower the bar down to your chest, keeping your shoulder blades down, and back. Don’t have your feet up in the air.

Have your feet down, in contact with the floor. However, if you can’t bench down to your chest because, let’s say you have a labrum issue right now, or a rotator cuff impingement, or biceps tendonitis. If you were to lower the range of motion – in other words, cut the range of motion by 1/3 and just go, and work in the top range – that is actually the prescription for how to start getting back to your full ability to do a properly performed bench press. Don’t abandon all the proper elements of the bench press that were covered in that video. Shorten the range of motion so that you can work within a pain free range – not to set any records in strength, as we’ll discuss in a second – but I’m saying, just allow yourself to work in a pain free range so you can start to increase that and get a little bit lower, and a little bit lower, and a little bit lower.

Before you know it you’re going to be benching back in full form again, and your shoulder is going to be healthy. The second thing is: a long term, chronic derangement. Something in your elbow – bone chips are really common. I did a video back a couple years ago with C. T.

Fletcher. He put me through the tricep gauntlet and there were some people bold enough to call out C. T. Fletcher, believe it or not. I don’t know who they are, but they were bold enough to call him out and say the guy had bad form.

“Jeff, you did great. You were doing good form. ” Guys, he’s got bone chips. Again, as a physical therapist I could tell you, he’s got bone chips in his elbow that literally prevent him from extending the final 15 to 20 degrees of his elbow. It ain’t happening.

You could take a sledgehammer and try to hit that elbow down and it’s not going anywhere. Should he abandon all elbow extension exercises? Therefore, don’t train your triceps? That’s not the answer. So what you have to do in those cases, you have to work with what you’ve got.

In that case, you abbreviate the range of motion, but you still go for the best form that you have available to you in those exercises. The next question that we have to look at is: are you just doing – abbreviating your form for ego purposes? For ego lifting. If you think that going to the top quarter of a bench-press because you can put on 380lbs and monkey fuck that bar up to the top there, making people think that you’re actually doing something – that’s right. I said that.

That is one term for when you guys abuse form. You’re not impressing anybody. As a matter of fact, you’re not even giving yourself any benefit because you’d be much better off dropping the weight, going all the way down, and executing the rep with a weight that you can handle. The same thing applies to that lat pull down. The same thing applies to that shoulder press.

And the same thing applies across the board because then you develop a much better mind-muscle connection, number one, and you’re pushing all of the focus onto the muscle you’re actually trying to build. Finally, again, talking about looking at these outside of a vacuum – looking at all the elements of you are training – what are you actually training for? What is the purpose of the exercise you’re performing? Here’s a cheat curl. You know I’m a big advocate of the cheat curl.

At the specific time, for a specific purpose this is, yes, a bastardization of the concentric portion of this exercise. But that’s not what I’m training. I’m not going for a perfect, concentric portion of this exercise. We’ve done that before, too. Where I’ve talked about not elevating your shoulder at all.

Using your front delt to lift the bar. But in this case, we’re working on overloading the eccentric portion of the lift. The end portion, the second half of the lift. In that case, I want to be able to probably get as much weight as I can up to the top, and then force the muscles to eccentrically control it on the way down. So this is a properly performed, good form rep of a cheat curl.

So you can’t look at form in a bubble. You have to start understanding what you’re training for, what the elements that might be that are playing into your ability to perform an exercise. Be it that you have chronic issues in your joints, or maybe just a short term injury, but at times doing an exercise in an abbreviated form with a slightly different alteration of what the normal people might say is right could actually be the very right thing for you. However, if you’re doing any of those damned things I showed you in the beginning, someone’s got to get you out of the gym. Fast.

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