If you’re a weightlifting enthusiast, practicing proper form during your workouts is critical. Proper lifting form not only helps you avoid injuries, but it can also help you skyrocket your training results. Curious about how lifting correctly can improve your workouts? Take a look below for the full rundown.
Muscle Health
Training with the proper form establishes a firm foundation for a healthy, functional musculoskeletal system. When you consistently lift using the proper form, over time, you essentially teach your muscles to adopt healthy movement patterns, which keeps them functional. Muscle memory, the phenomenon that allows your body to recall how to perform specific movements, becomes stronger with proper form. Continually training with the proper technique helps your brain develop stronger connections with your muscles, which allows for efficient, functional movement patterns that promote long-term muscle health.
Physique Growth
To build an impressive physique, you must begin with a strong foundation. Lifting with the proper form builds that foundation by teaching your brain and muscles the established movement patterns that generate the most significant results. To pack on quality, dense muscle tissue, you must ensure that you’re taking your muscles through the full range of motion — both the concentric and eccentric segment of each movement. Training in this manner not only recruits a greater number of muscle fibers but also keeps each muscle under tension for a longer period of time, which stimulates increased muscle growth.
Injury Prevention
A workout injury could result in chronic pain, which dominates your life. In severe cases, injury pain can prevent you from lifting weights altogether. Unfortunately, far too many workout injuries are caused by poor lifting technique, so if you hope to continue your exercise habit long term, proper form is key.
Using proper form helps protect your body from injury because established lifting techniques are designed to keep your body in its safest and most effective range of motion. When you force your body to function outside of its safe biomechanical range, you put excessive strain on your musculoskeletal system. Combine that strain with the additional load from the weights you lift, and you can easily put your musculoskeletal system under undue tension that causes an injury.
Strength Improvement
If you’re working out to become stronger, the best way to do it is to practice proper form. Established lifting techniques are designed to achieve maximal muscle fiber recruitment, which encourages not only growth but also strength. Strength is the product of repeatedly placing your muscles under enough tension to stimulate growth, and that tension is a product of proper form. Moreover, each movement is designed to recruit and strengthen a specific muscle group.
However, without proper form, there’s no guarantee you’re targeting or strengthening the correct muscles. If you’re looking to build a strong, healthy, impressive physique, proper form is critical. Not only will it help you achieve far greater results in less time, but it will also help you avoid potentially debilitating injuries that can significantly impact your progress.