LISTEN ON APPLE | LISTEN ON SPOTIFY | LISTEN ON STITCHER
LISTEN ON AMAZON | LISTEN ON GOOGLE
9 Reasons Why Barbell Training Technique Matters | Build Optimal Performance & Reduce Your Risk of Injuries
As one of the most talked about topics in powerlifting, everyone always wonders and debates about barbell training technique.
Does barbell technique really matter or is it something we don’t really need to worry about for “injury prevention” in powerlifting?
For Dr. Rori and Dr. Alyssa, powerlifting and barbell training technique is VERY important, but not in the way you may think.
Lifting with safe, efficient, and repeatable mechanics ensures that you have optimal performance under the bar, avoid form breakdown, and reduce your risk of injuries.
Maintaining technique is an important and ongoing process, too. Form creep happens to the best of lifters, a phenomenon in which form gradually deviates from optimal over a period of time.
Rori and Alyssa break down the 9 elements of safe & effective barbell techniques, the importance of having a barbell lifting movement model, how to maintain good technique under heavy loads, and how all of these things fit into the PRS Sustainable Training Method by satisfying the four core PRS goals:
Maximize strength and muscular development
Reduce injury risk
Optimize goal attainment
Instill longevity in lifting and lift
Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC, SSC: [00:00:26] Welcome to Episode Four of the Progressive Rehab & Strength Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Rori Alter head clinical coach here at Progressive Rehab & Strength, and my co-host here with me today is Dr. Alyssa Haveson, also a PRS clinical coach.
And today, we will be talking about a topic that we are both extremely passionate about: the importance of lifting techniques for optimal performance and injury risk reduction.
And I'm extremely passionate about technique because of my background in dance, and I'm a perfectionist. So human movement, the expression of human movement and emotion through movement, is really important to me. Being precise and beautiful. I always want things to look beautiful.
But that is not why technique is necessarily important.
Technique is important to optimize:
-->your goal attainment
-->your strength and muscular development
-->your injury risk reduction
We're going to define a lot of things in today's talk. We're also going to talk about how we can modify technique to achieve certain goals and the important things for injury risk reduction.
And we want to bring in a community question or a topic from one of our followers in our Secret Society of Barbell Mastery. He submitted a question for us, and his question goes as follows:
"A friend who also competes in local meets told me that every single time he's gotten injured during training, he was lifting relatively low weights, which surprises me a lot. Is this actually more common than people think?"
And it is actually more common than people think. A lot of the time we're evaluating new athletes for injuries that they're coming to us for, we get a full history, and we say, okay, what do your warm-ups look like? When did the injury happen, etc., etc? And we often find that injuries happen in the warm-up phase of training. So we'll dive into why that might happen at the end of today's podcast.
So in this podcast episode:
We'll talk about the importance of barbell lifting technique and how much it plays into injury and performance.
We will answer the question, "Does technique really matter?"
We'll also answer the question of how long you should try something before you decide it's not right for you? How long should you try to conform to a particular technique, position, stance, etc., before you say, "You know what, this is not optimal for me, it's not working for me, and how might I deviate from what is expected or considered normal or good or optimal?"
Before we dive into the talk for today and the talk about technique, we do need to define a couple of things.
What are barbell training technique, technique breakdown, and form creep?
1) What technique is as it pertains to barbell training?
Dr. Alyssa Haveson, PT, PRSCC, CSCS: [00:04:05] So your technique is how you are performing the particular lift. So when you start to train, squat, bench, deadlift, overhead, press, whatever lift you're training, you probably saw a model of how that lift should be performed.
Most people base their technique on a lifting model. And your technique includes:
the intricacies of how you perform the lift
exactly where your feet are
precisely how you're moving
reproducibility from rep to rep
It doesn't have to be precisely what that model says it needs to be because you are your own person. You have your own build, and your leverages will be different than the person standing next to you. So your technique should be optimized for your body so that you're moving in the most efficient manner possible and moving the bar as efficiently as possible.
Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC, SSC: [00:05:05]
Technique is how you are positioning yourself with the barbell and how you are executing the movement.
If you are utilizing good technique, that means that you are consistent with:
your execution
your placement of the bar
how you're moving with the barbell.
The body barbell system is moving every single rep. So they all look the same depending on the intensity and how easy something is. Of course, things will start to look slightly different as the intensity rises. But for the most part, given the right situation, your technique should look exactly the same from rep to rep.
Technique is how you and the barbell interact consistently from rep to rep.
2) What Is Technique Breakdown?
Dr. Alyssa Haveson, PT, PRSCC, CSCS: [00:06:08] There are issues we can run into with the technique. And you mentioned that sometimes technique starts to look different as the weight gets heavier, which can be expected. But we also want to monitor that.
So when we talk about technique breakdown, we see a real significant change. And it doesn't have to be that significant, but there is a margin for error as the weight gets heavier.
But technique breakdown is where we're seeing a change in technique happening at heavier loads, situations where you're more fatigued. So at the end of a high rep set.
Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC, SSC: [00:06:46] So I want to briefly interrupt and discuss technique breakdown a little more clearly.
We can see technique start to break down as intensity rises, but the definition I like to use for technique breakdown is a change in position under a moving load.
Factors that affect technique breakdown are:
intensity
fatigue
volume
concentration.
I would say concentration can also have a significant influence on technique breakdown. There will be a small margin for error like Alyssa was talking about. We can allow for a little bit of form breakdown. We'll see that happen as the intensity rises.
But how much we want to allow to happen is where we kind of get into that injury risk reduction and sustainability mindset where if we allow a significant amount of form breakdown in terms of exactly how much we're seeing in the moment versus how much is accumulating over the course of sets and reps and training session, that's where we can start to see injuries occur, right?
So we want to do what we can to minimize form breakdown. However, we can develop bad habits from that as well. And that kind of pulls into the next technique component, which we call form creep.
3) What is Form Creep?
The more regularly we allow form to break down within our training sessions, the more our technique changes over time. So this ties into our next topic or element of technique, which is form creep.
Form creep is the accumulated unintentional change in your technique over time that you don't even realize is happening.
So this might be asynchronous joint movement, a change in your bar path, or a suboptimal bar path appearing over time.
And for us to understand our elements of efficient, optimal, and safe technique, we must understand:
a) What your goals are
b) What your movement model is
c) What are the reasons and rationales behind why your movement model is the way that it is.
So it's one thing to say:
"Well, so-and-so does it this way, and they're strong, so I'm going to do it that way."
Or, "this person told me to do it this way, so I will do it that way."
We have to understand our goals. What biomechanics of barbell training allows us to optimize our goals, right?
So we have some general goals that Progressive Rehab & Strength that we use. We've talked about them in our previous podcasts. These four core goals guide our decision-making process when it comes to:
programming
technique, technique breakdown, and form creep
how we're going to address that and how much we're going to weight technique.
So if you're new here and you haven't listened to our podcast yet, and you don't know the PRS four core goals, the four core goals that drive our decision-making when it comes to programming and technique are
1) to maximize strength and muscular development
2) reduce injury risk
3) optimize goal attainment
4) instill longevity and lifting in life.
Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC, SSC: [00:10:44] When we consider those four core goals, we look at what physical and biomechanical elements of movement we need in our technique and movement model to have safe, efficient, optimal movement for that individual. And it's going to help us make those decisions.
So for us to understand what elements of optimal technique and safe technique are, we have to have some rules or criteria that we're judging our technique and our movement off of.
In the PRS Sustainable Training Method, we have nine elements of safe and effective barbell training regardless of how you execute the movement. So I don't care what technique or movement model you're using. We apply these nine elements of safe and effective barbell training to the movement you're doing with the technique you're using to say, is this effective, efficient, optimal, and safe? And we separate these criteria into two groups. Essentially, we want to look at how you are balanced, how you and the barbell are balanced, and how you transfer force from your muscles to moving the barbell?