When it comes to weight training, more than anything else, proper form is the most important thing. If you’re holding the weights wrong, pushing or pulling them with the wrong technique, or overloading your joints or leaning forward or back too far, this is a recipe for disaster.
It is very important that you start out doing your moves as slowly as you can, while ensuring that your body is in the correct posture and that your technique is correct through the entire move. It’s only once you’ve sorted out your form that you should do your reps faster or add more weight. With this in mind, I’ve put together three excellent videos that take you through the importance of good form and how you can achieve it.
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This one’s a basic guide to proper form, whether you’re lifting weights or not. Fitness trainer Heather Robinson takes you through all the common mistakes that people make when they perform the basic exercise moves. This includes the squat, the deadlift, lunges, push ups and other building blocks of fitness moves. She then shows the correct way to do them and lists out the reasons why this is important. It’s a great primer if you’re just starting out on your fitness quest.
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There’s a good reason why people focus on getting a good arm workout, especially the biceps. Functionally speaking, strong biceps are a boon because you’re using your hands all the time through the day. Then there is aesthetics. After all, muscular, toned arms look great no matter what. And yet, strength and flexibility will be impossible to achieve if you’re doing your moves with the wrong form. Fitness trainer Jeremy Eicher takes you through the basic arm workouts, and points out the common mistakes that people make and how you can fix them.
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Mike Matthews is a writer of best-selling books on fitness and also hosts a very popular podcast on fitness and workouts. In this video, which is actually an episode of his podcast Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews, he goes through one very important aspect of weight training: how to breathe properly. Breathing correctly isn’t something a lot of people pay attention to in the gym, but, as Matthew says in the video, this is something you should be very careful about if you want to get the most out of your workout.
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