Technique, How Much Does it Actually Matter?

Does it matter? It can, just probably not for the reasons you’d think.

Almost everyone wants to know about technique, am I doing it right? And fair enough. Typically, this is for one of two reasons, they are either worried about injury, or they are under the impression that technique is the reason their lift isn’t progressing.

Firstly, should you be worried about technique leading to injury? The likelihood of a particular kind of movement in and of itself being a strong predictor of future injury is low [1-3]. On average, the rate of injury for resistance training is low, about 2-4 per 1000 participation hours, with some studies showing less than that, and even fewer showing an increase [4]. This makes it safer than playing sports. To be clear, I am not presenting that as a choice, you wouldn’t discourage people from playing sports, but simply to point out that resistance training is safe. You will see examples of this around your gym and in life in general, lifts that you could only describe as a car crash, bits going everywhere, yet they are fine. We can move in all manner of weird and wonderful ways, and with sensible programming you will simply adapt. Injury and pain are multi-factorial processes and can involve a bunch of different inputs. If someone were having an uncomfortable experience with training one way to trouble shoot this is to look at load management. what does that look like? ramping up volume to fast, ramping up intensity to fast, regularly setting intensity to high, getting to your work sets to quickly, these are all examples of less-than-ideal load management. If I was set with the task of injuring someone here’s how I would go about it. I would have them not warm up, get them to their working sets way to fast, overcook the intensity, be constantly changing the lifts, rinse and repeat. Note that I did not say move in a bad way. It’s important to get this point across or you’re going to wind up chasing ghosts instead of solving problems. For a more in-depth look at this I would recommend Pain in Training: What do? By Dr Austin Baraki [5].

So, then what about technique being responsible for a lift not progressing. Now, you could make the argument that ‘interesting’ technique leads to a lift feeling harder, which would result in you going off programme from an intensity standpoint. However, I don’t think there’s a very convincing argument here, as you can make a lift harder than it needs to be, but if your programming has sensible load management then that dose of stress should still be appropriate for the trainee. It would just be with the ‘interesting’ technique. If the lift was performed in a way that we would argue is more efficient, then you may be able to get a little more weight on the bar, but the dose of stress would still be the same. if a lift is not progressing programming is where you should be looking. It is very unlikely to be because you’re doing the lift wrong, it’s far more likely going to be because the programming isn’t set up in a way that would encourage progression of a given lift. Find a good coach who can help you with this.

So then does technique matter at all? As mentioned above, the only meaningful conversation we can have around technique is on efficiency. I will qualify efficiency by saying that physics likes to move things up and down in straight lines unless interrupted, the path of least resistance. What we would refer to as efficient lifting tends to follow this path. Of course, there are exceptions to moving weight in a straight line, such as the bench press however, the premise of the path of least resistance remains the same. If a lift is moved in a way that we would refer to as efficient, then we could argue that this lends itself to the goal of attempting to move a heavier load relative to a given individuals ability at a given time. So, what if the lift is less efficient? Well, it’s still not bad. If the lift is not following a path of least resistance, then we could argue that the trainee is becoming more resilient in more ranges of motion, and that sounds pretty good to me. The point of teaching technique is competence, and confidence, not technical perfection. We want to get as many people lifting weights as possible, so pushing an idea that movement can be dangerous when we have no good evidence to support this, would be doing a disservice to people.

Here’s a tip you can apply training. Where applicable, try to stay balanced in the middle of your foot. The balance point of any bipedal animal (that’s us) is the midfoot. This will give you a more stable platform to lift from. The major takeaway I would like to leave you with here, is don’t be afraid of movement. There is no such thing as wrong or bad movement. So, go and find something to pick up and move with, be careful though, you might just get stronger.

1. Laird, R.A., et al., Comparing lumbo-pelvic kinematics in people with and without back pain: a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Musculoskelet Disord, 2014. 15: p. 229.

2. Saraceni, N., et al., To Flex or Not to Flex? Is There a Relationship Between Lumbar Spine Flexion During Lifting and Low Back Pain? A Systematic Review With Meta-analysis. J Orthop Sports Phys Ther, 2020. 50(3): p. 121-130.

3. Hogan, C., et al., Scapular Dyskinesis Is Not an Isolated Risk Factor for Shoulder Injury in Athletes: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Am J Sports Med, 2021. 49(10): p. 2843-2853.

4. Justin W L Keogh, P.W.W., The Epidemiology of Injuries Across the Weight-Training Sports, in SpringerLink. 2016.

5. Baraki, A., Pain in training: What do? 2019.