How long does the average person take to perfect technique? The average person doesn’t perfect technique because they don’t know how to practice perfectly. They merely “train.”
Society has taken “Nobody’s Perfect” to the detrimental extreme. They misapply it to state you cannot perform an exercise perfectly. Media and marketing specialists want you to believe this because if you train imperfectly you rarely get sustainable (injury-free) results. And they believe in their statistics which imply that, “people who are unsuccessful in their fitness results purchase more sum total products than those who are successful.”
If you cannot demonstrate a technique perfectly, don’t train it. If that offends your ego to imply that your technique is imperfect, then you should take a candid account of your current condition: your results, their sustainability, your pains and injuries and their frequency.
It’s very difficult but not impossible to train with perfect technique. On a scale of 1 to 10, you should prevent your training from dropping beneath a technique level of 8 (“very good technique”), because you adapt to technique, not to effort alone, and you become “shaped” by the function (and dysfunction) of your form in an exercise. However, perfect training is something we all strive for but infrequently achieve. (Perfect reps are awesome though, aren’t they?)
Even if you have very good technique (let’s say you train with an 😎, you still collect a “2” on each repetition of an unknown and unwanted deviation from proper form. Those “terrible 2s” must be compensated for, or even a person who trains with very good technique eventually accumulates enough of them to get injured.
Most people train with a 5 in form: so-so technique, half good – half bad. In other words, 50% of their training is working against the 50% that’s working for them… and that cancels out to a sum zero in injury-free, functional development.
When you can demo a technique perfectly, and then you train it, the day after that heavy, intense day, you might not be able to perform it perfectly. That’s because you’re recovering. Finish recovering – compensate for the adaptive process – and then test your technique. When you can practice it perfectly, then you may be ready to load it.
Training a technique means that you’re using intensity to challenge the technique – to rattle the bolts that it holds together. But “in the shop” your chassis better be perfectly engineered. It should be optimal before it hits the track. If you cannot demonstrate a technique perfectly, don’t load it with intensity, or you will blow a gasket.
A professional will never pick up a weight without perfect form. That’s how they lasted long enough to become a professional. Practice like a professional. A great coach can teach you perfect technique. In fact, if they can’t, they’re incompetent, dangerous and negligent.
Nobody’s perfect, but you CAN perfect your practice of a technique optimal to your physiology. Perfect it. Then, train it. If that’s too much for your ego, please step away from the weight.
Practice perfectly before you train imperfectly.
Very Respectfully,
Scott B. Sonnon
TACFIT Co-Founder
