> It doesn't seem like it should matter where you look when doing something unrelated to your eyeballs, such as making a salad, or riding a bike. After all, the eyes move independent of the rest of the body, right? So why is it relevant where we look when lifting a weight, if all the other parts of the body are moving properly?
Prompts to “look straight ahead” and such in a gym context are usually so you maintain the correct position of your neck and avoid injury.
Anyone reading the above comment, that is terrible information. Proper form relates to how you can avoid blowing out your back or knees or other things that are important to you as a human when weight lifting. Mechanically there are ways to put less stress on body parts when doing various lifts. At the most basic level, the ways that put less bad stress and increase also increase your ability to life more weight is what is meant by proper form, not whatever this person is trying to communicate.
There is "good form" in the sense of going through motions that work well with body mechanics.
There isn't absolute consensus on the nuances. E.g. it's common advice to lift loads with your back straight and bending your knees but as said a deadlift isn't performed that way and you can lift very heavy weights with your back bent. You'll have one sport scientist say you should have your elbows at a certain angle when you do a bench barbell press and another say it's fine to have them at another angle.
Often form is modified to fit individuals.
You should learn the outline of how a given exercise is performed and some points are important but some advice on "proper" form can be dated/wrong/adjusted from person to person. You also need to start with a small enough weight/resistance to get a feel for what works for you (and see if it agrees with your body). I think a lot of injuries are related to trying to do too much too soon, not necessarily purely to bad form.
> There is "good form" in the sense of going through motions that work well with body mechanics.
This is largely what I was trying to communicate.
I agree with what you've said, especially the variance person to person. I was trying to caution towards the passerby who might read this without much lifting experience to actually appreciate that nuance or have the strength and stability built up already and then they just go and hurt themselves.
I get where you’re coming from, but I think there’s a much bigger risk the other way.
All of this focus on “perfect” form makes the gym incredibly intimidating.
I’m not accusing you of saying this, but often we give people the impression that if they try to deadlift and their back rounds a bit or they squat and their knees cave in that their discs are going to go shooting out of their spine and their knees will be forever ruined. Then people don’t lift…
Injury rates for lifting are incredibly low. Much lower than any other sport. And the long term health effects are huge!
Yes, for whatever reason people are quick to point out the risks of weight lifting even though it has one of the lowest injury rate of all sports [1]. Typically people that don't even lift regularly. In contrast, no one bats an eye if you tell them you like skiing and have a few drinks at the hut before your last downhill ski run for the day.
Exactly! Lifting is very safe and has an incredible cost-benefit ratio.
The conversation around form is especially frustrating since it’s never data driven and really just scares people away from the gym. And by telling people that they must use “perfect” form (whatever that is…) or they’ll get seriously injured, we’re actually priming them to overly fixate on any little tweak they might feel while lifting and actually _increasing_ their risk of feeling pain.
Anecdotally, if form actually mattered so much for injury risk then there’s no way lifting would have such a low injury rate. Go into any gym and you’ll see all kinds of “incorrect” form, yet there aren’t discs shooting out of backs and knees exploding all over the place.
What really matters for injury risk is load and fatigue management, and we have great evidence for that. [1]
Proper form is very real. We all share the same anatomy and the levers that are your arms perform the same way. A weight lifter might not arch their back compared to a power lifter when doing a bench press, but each setup is fine. A sumo or conventional deadlift are both fine, but bending your back to lift weight weight vs using your legs is improper. They’re not arbitrary patterns either, they target specific muscles because of the human body’s anatomy. You also don’t just randomly pick a different amount of weight…
> We all share the same anatomy and the levers that are your arms perform the same way.
No, there's a huge amount of difference between individuals. Anatomical differences, differences in experience, differences is response to training stimulus, differences in pain perception, etc.
> but bending your back to lift weight weight vs using your legs is improper
Strongly disagree. See any strongman lifting atlas stones [1]. See stiff leg deadlifts.
You deadlift through your hips into your back. It's a standing motion. If you're deadlifting heavy weight exclusively through your back rounded or not you will injure yourself.
A flexed-back posture is associated with increased strength and efficiency of the back muscles compared to a lordotic posture. These findings further question the manual handling advice to lift with a lordotic lumbar spine.
I take it back! It might be okay to lift through your back after all, go nuts!
It’s slightly mechanically advantageous but probably not safer. Unless you’re a powerlifter where the weight actually matters I think the general advice to maintain a neutral back is better.
I'm not arguing rounded or not. I'm arguing that only lifting from the back will result in injury, you can keep your back straight or rounded. Intuitively, using your back as a lever with heavy weight, without using other elements of your core to support the lift increases the risk for hyperextension and then injury.
I'm happy to entertain evidence to the contrary.
I will say from my experience deadlifting above 300lbs you would not be doing yourself any favors only lifting from the back.
I just watched an atlas stone video and you can clearly see involvement of the whole core, they are not simply levering the stone up.
I agree that on a deadlift you should use your core. You’ll engage your whole posterior chain. I don’t think the barbell would leave the floor otherwise!
But in general, there isn’t a lot of evidence that “bad” form (again, very hard to define that) is correlated to injury risk.
Okay great, for what its worth this is your comment that made me jump in:
> How else would you deadlift? Your back is a lever.
Also watch strongmen lift atlas stones. It’s all in the back, and a rounded back at that.
Can you see how I got to the thought that you might be advocating for not properly engaging the entire posterior chain and in effect attempting to muscle up the weight relying mostly on the back like a stiff leg deadlift? It seemed like a potentially dangerous position to be suggesting and would put a lot more stress on the lower spine for dubious gain imo. I gather from your response though, that you had something more sensible in mind when posting that.
To your second point, corelated injury from overall load and fatigue does make sense to me and I think for experienced lifters they are able to make the call on form and what works for their body, I was primarily concerned with the non experienced passerby. I still think you're likely putting more stress on certain parts of your body than you need with certain technique, but that's a personal call.
> I got to the thought that you might be advocating for not properly engaging the entire posterior chain and in effect attempting to muscle up the weight relying mostly on the back like a stiff leg deadlift?
I’m not advocating for it, but I also don’t think stiff leg deadlifts are dangerous at all! Again, it’s about fatigue management. If you’ve never done stiff leg deadlifts, then yeah trying to do a maximal effort stiff leg deadlift is probably not smart. But if you’ve never bench pressed then trying to do a maximal effort bench press isn’t smart either, if you’ve never run before then don’t sprint a 5k, etc…
> I was primarily concerned with the non experienced passerby.
I get where you’re coming from, but the most important thing for someone one doesn’t currently strength train is that they start strength training. Full stop. The benefits massively outweigh the costs.
Again, I’m not trying to put words in your mouth because I don’t think you mean this, but if we aren’t careful and give people the impression that they “should go to the gym but must be careful to use perfect form or they’ll get seriously injured” (not supported by the evidence) then most people frankly won’t lift. And not strength training is way more risky.
Watching athletes maximally exert at a competition setting is not the best way to learn to lift. Nearly every athlete will bend their own rules on proper form to eke out a performance boost in competitions.
> “Proper” form is basically impossible to define. It’s all just moving arbitrary amounts of weight through space in arbitrary patterns.
False dichotomy. Yes, every person's form will be a little different. Even every individual lift.l will be different because we exist in analog meatspace.
But, while there isn't just one right way, that doesn't mean there isn't a wrong way. Do it the wrong way, and you do hurt yourself.
The lesson here is the other way around: you go where you look. The author's own bike example says that and it's a standard lesson in driving school (hence "eyes on the road"). You do it while lifting bc when you look straight ahead you adopt what turns out to be the right posture for lifting (it's symmetrical and "straight" so that your lift will be symmetrical too).
This property was used amusingly in Neal Stephenson's novel "Zodiac": since drivers steer where they look, wearing bright, high-viz clothing while cycling increases the chance you will be hit by a car. Thus the only way to cycle safely in Boston is to use the "ninja approach to biking": no reflectors, paint everything black (no shiny rims, crank, etc), wear only black clothes, and no helmet so you can hear danger approaching.
> and no helmet so you can hear danger approaching
This part was from Snow Crash, and was a bit of wisdom from Uncle Enzo about Vietnam. Zodiac had nothing to say about bike helmets - which, it should be obvious, don't block your ears at all.
Please wear a helmet when riding your bicycle.
But feel free to assume that every car on the road is out to kill you. Some of them are.
Author here. Thanks for reading! The idea was to show that if we are intentional about what we look at, it can optimize our lives.
Even outside of the context of sports, sometimes we can knock out 1.5 goals instead of 1 goal just by focusing on the 1 but in a slightly different way than if we didn’t know about goal 2.
Not sure about the "life lesson" here, but it's definitely a good tip for surfing. You will tend to go where you look. So, if you're trying not to hit somebody paddling, don't look at them! And if you want to do a cutback or something, step 1 is look where you want to go.
Same principle for mountain biking. If you focus on the tree on the left and try to avoid it you end up clipping the tree on the right. You should be "aware" of the obstacles but you look ahead and focus on following the easiest line.
I like this a lot. My dad had told me something similar at a kart race when we were at a much bigger track - he wanted me to look all the way to the turn instead of just in front of me. I've used that since as it is so easy to waste time over correcting along the way when you aim wrong.
This seems like “choose the straight line from point A to point B”. A lot of things in life and work are uncertain. In reality, we often lose our way, and learn valuable things in the process.
The personal trainer type to me sounds a bit like a regimented-thinking military type. Every marine, or soldier of any kind is taught and tries to live the “look straight ahead” way.
If it’s another way of saying “focus harder on the task at hand” - thats surely relevant… that is a kind of a limited scope dictum. But surely critical to effectiveness.
> The personal trainer type to me sounds a bit like a regimented-thinking military type. Every marine, or soldier of any kind is taught and tries to live the “look straight ahead” way.
nah, it's because looking straight ahead (or, when doing squats, slightly vertically above straight ahead) keeps the neck and upper back arched and supportive. looking down rounds it over.
How we perceive the world and how we act in it are intertwined in ways we are only beginning to understand, upending centuries of philosophical assumptions about human cognition.
Matt Crawford discusses this theme at length in "The World Beyond your Head" which I highly recommend:
> This brings up another uncanny fact about motorcycle steering: the bike goes wherever your gaze is focused. Most important, if your eyes lock on some hazard in the road, you will surely hit it. This is not a superstitious motorcyclist’s version of Murphy’s Law; it is a reliable fact, and it reveals something deep about the “intentionality” of our prereflective sensorimotor negotiation of the world. Inhabiting the kind of bodies that we do, our gaze and our locomotion are connected in ways that work for us, and we don’t have to think about it. But this accomplished integration becomes a liability when riding a motorcycle, and must be deliberately short-circuited. You have to learn to unlock your eyes as quickly as possible from every hazard, and instead look where you want to go.
That isn’t always clear though. If you rewind 5 years, the answer to that question would probably be something like self driving cars. 3 years ago it might have been crypto. Now it’s AI. But you can’t build a company by hype, as it won’t last. You need to make an actual bet on what the priorities will be in the future.
You go where you look. If you keep staring at the tree you're trying to avoid, you'll hit it. I feel like this is what happened to the US in 2016: we kept staring at Trump and couldn't figure out what else to look at.
Someone will have to pick up the pieces later. It may be you, or it may be someone whose desired heading corresponds to those other things. If we are talking about value creation, we have to acknowledge there will be externalities we create while creating value. Those will sometimes be good (more opportunity) and sometimes be bad (crappy projects). The hope is that there is more good than bad, otherwise we have a failing startup on our hands.
Prompts to “look straight ahead” and such in a gym context are usually so you maintain the correct position of your neck and avoid injury.