When we enter the gym, we see scenes no less than curious or funny of users on machines exercising in the strongest possible way, as well as performing free weight exercises on the edge of danger. Surely we all know what I am talking about and this is due to the lack of technique in the execution of the exercises.
In this article, I intend to educate coaches and users, both in elite sports and not, of the importance of technique in general and within the gym in particular.
Let’s start at the beginning, that first day that you go to the gym and you don’t know how to do any exercise. This type of user should ask the installation monitor for help to learn how the movements are executed. You get pissed off seeing that people who apparently are thinner, who see them less strong, lift more weight than you, and you wonder why. It is easy to explain, it is all due to technique. As soon as you start learning the exercise technique, you will see how you begin to lift more weight and perform the movements with more ease in a relatively short period of time. Do not despair, bodybuilding exercises involve a long progression in time, but it is important that from the beginning you learn the technique well and do not hesitate to ask how each thing is done and how the machines are used.
In the technique, a progression has to be carried out starting with familiarization and learning until finishing in the control and excellence of it.
Two concepts that are linked to the technique are effectiveness and efficiency:
- Efficiency: Unrelated to cost and focused only on the level and quality of the result, regardless of the cost that it may carry.
- Efficiency: In a motor task it is the relationship between the level of the result achieved and the cost of the activity used to obtain it.
In elite sport, learning is aimed at efficiency and after achieving it, new gestures or resources are introduced. In the gym at the user level, we must first achieve the effectiveness of the movement, so that in the long run we can perform efficient movements.
For us to understand, we have as an example fighting sports, where at the beginning you suffer a lot of wear and tear and do all the movements in such a way that you use all the strength. After a while, you begin to know the techniques (both standing and on the ground) and you do not get so tired and with less effort, you are able to do better-executed movements with great strength.
I don’t want to say that by performing an exercise very well technically we will lift the weight we want, but it will greatly influence it.
Afterward, we find exercises such as the clean or snatch, which are used in the training of any sport and constitute weightlifting tests, where technique is the key to the exercise. They involve great complexity and difficult learning, where strength, although important, the technique is more so. You can see the technical explanation of the loaded one here to get an idea of what I’m talking about.
The effects of the technique control can be summarized in two mainly:
Higher quality in repetitions: Each repetition is important and having a good technical quality will mean that we take better advantage of the exercises and cause a greater effect, we will improve our performance and we will get more out of the sessions.
Injury prevention: The better we perform the repetitions, the less chance we will have of injury since a correct execution within the adequate joint range will mean less risk of reaching rupture limits in muscles, tendons, and joints and we will reduce overloads in areas that should not get involved. Especially where we are going to notice it is in back pain.
Another topic that should be discussed is the different methods of learning the technique in sports gestures, such as the shot in volleyball, the entry to the basket in basketball, and the hitting in football, but I will talk about this in another article at length.
I hope I have conveyed to you the importance of the correct execution of the exercises, we have to become aware that these directly influence our performance and the possibilities of suffering an injury.
