3 Myth’s About Lifting Weights
Don’t believe everything you read or watch…especially around health and fitness!
There’s no shortage of information these days, ranging from fixes for your pain and training tips to nutrition tips. This is GREAT overall because you’re able to learn about most things you want to do. However, this can be really impactful on your health in a negative way as well if you’re seeing the wrong information. This is where we try to help provide impact on you. We try to convey information in a really easy to understand format and in a way that will positively impact your health. In the weight training realm there is no shortage of bad information that could potentially impact you in a negative way. Our goal with this blog is to shed some light on some common myths related to lifting weights that have the potential to harm you and show you how to spin these into a mindset that can help you positively.
At the end of the blog, there’s also a completely FREE downloadable PDF with 3 strength tips that we created for you.
Myth #1 - There are inherently dangerous movements
This is such a common theme in a lot of online content that while possible well meaning, lacks nuance and can potentially harm your ability to progress long-term. There are many movements suggested to be ‘dangerous’ such as rounding your lower back or ‘buttwink’, positions of ‘impingement’ such as exercises like upright rows, or movements like ‘pronation of your foot’ and the list goes on. This is harmful for you because all of these movements are normal and quite frankly…difficult or maybe even impossible to avoid. What we see often is that people start to limit more and more the types of exercises they will do and quickly they don’t have many options left! There’s a common theme you’ll see with lot’s of these myths and that’s that injuries and pain are multifactorial and a lot of content that is overly absolute in nature like this leave out much of the nuance. For example, if we take buttwink as an example.
If someone gets low back pain after doing a movement with ‘buttwink' or ‘rounding of the lower back’…is this the reason for the pain?
OR
Is it because they didn’t sleep well last night, they ramped up the loading on their low back in the past month, they’ve been stressed at work, and this is a new movement for them?
AND
What about all the people that do the movement and didn’t get injured? OR what about all the people that get injured with quote on quote ‘safe exercises’….you can see where these statements fall apart when put into logic court. Don’t fall into the trap!
This is a good movement
This is also a good movement
Myth #2 - You need perfect technique before lifting heavier
This is very similar to myth number 2 but a little different in terms of its premise. Many people believe that they shouldn’t add more weight UNTIL they have perfect technique. A common quote in this realm is ‘don’t add load onto dysfunction’. We’d argue that this statement is flawed. It’s sort of like saying ‘don’t throw a baseball until you have perfect throwing technique’. Yes, learning technique is helpful BUT the doing is the learning. You need to train yourself gradually in a progressive manner in order for your brain and body to learn and make adjustments to the technique. As long as you’re doing this gradually, then having slightly off technique shouldn’t be a problem and will actually be the very thing that stimulates change in your technique. Lifting bodyweight and lifting with weight added are much different in terms of how you need to organize your movement. The bottom line is, lifting weights heavier and heavier over time is the practice you need in order to lift heavier and get stronger. So don’t limit your progress because you don’t have perfect technique! You SHOULDN’T have perfect technique if you’re a beginner or you’re just learning a new movement, just like you wouldn’t expect to have a perfect jump shot when you’ve never played basketball.
Myth #3 - You need special exercises to get really strong
A very special exercise…3 in 1!
There are SO many exercise guru’s out there promoting their own special brand of exercise, with endless options of overly complicated movements with claims that they have the secret sauce to training. However, the truth is that we already know what works with proven exercise principles such as progressive overload, variation, and intensity. These just aren’t as appealing because they require time and valuing the simplicity in their nature. The problem with the special exercises is that they encourage seeking the one hidden thing that’s going to help with your training and takes you away from what truly works for your strength and health. You can’t escape physiology and the bottom line is time, consistency, and good basic programming with exercises like squats, lunges, shoulder press, pull ups, rows, cleans, step ups, etc progressed slowly over time and varied slightly over time WILL be your best bet in seeing results. We’ve got DECADES of data on this and although there is new knowledge in the performance realm coming out, the basic principles of training still hold true. Sometimes, there are specific things to you as an individual that you might need a little extra attention towards. For example, if you struggle with squats because of a history of hip pain and limited hip mobility, then this might benefit from extra help to troubleshoot how to improve this. However, this is in service of building you towards being able to gain more benefit from squatting - an exercise that has been done since the dawn of time.
In Summary
Don’t be afraid of movements
Don’t worry about having perfect technique prior to adding some load (within reason, this should be pretty intuitive - goldilocks!)
Focus on the basics and having good programming….consistency trumps all!