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EricT · 01-16-2009, 06:10 AM

I agree. You need to rely on proprioception. The mirror can give you bad information and it divides your senses in a confusing way. Think about it, are we really meant to learn to move by watching ourselves move? Of course not.

I want to touch on this "form" thing. By the time you are aggressively loading the bar workout to workout if you still have form issues than it's too late. It doesn't matter how many times someone checks your form. Your body makes compensations to get the job done as the weight increases.

I also object to relying on guys at the gym to give you checks. Pick 10 trainees and .5 of them maybe know how to evaluate movement, etc. MOST trainees HAVE bad form. They THINK their form is great.

But it's more than "form". Form is just a mental checklist. If you have to think about what you are doing then you obviously haven't "learned" to do it. Your body learns movement and hones in movement by a number of pathways, almost none of which have to do with concious thought.

The learning to swim analogy is the best one I know. Compare two techniques for "teaching" someone to swim.

Teach them proper technique and build it up in a systematic way while addressing needs they might have such as core stability and maybe thoracic mobility. Then you end up with a SWIMMER.

OR there is the 'sink or swim' technique. You toss into the deep end and say 'now swim'. While they thrash around you give them some helpful pointers. Meanwhile they're in the midst of saving themselve from drowning. Either they do drown or they end up being able to tread water in a way that eventually gets them somewhere.

Later on, after "swimming" in the fashion they learned through sheer necessity they notice they suck at swimming. So they try to mimick what they see good swimmers do in a concious way. Which results in...even worse swimming. They've already honed in this inefficient way of moving through the water. The more they might have been the the water the more ingrained the movement is. Any attempt to alter this is very difficult because they are a FULL CUP.

You wanna fill a cup you need to empty it first. But it is extremely difficult to undo motor learning. So that unlearning the bad things in order to learn the good things takes a lot longer. And even once you've produced a competent swimmer they will NEVER be as proficient as they would have been had they been properly coached and brought along in the first place.

Lifting and any other type of movement is exactly the same.

You get in there, start a program, start loading the bar while "paying attention to form" and you are basically using the sink or swim movement.

Starting out extremely light can be a bit misleading when it comes to certain movements, also. Certainly with squats.

There is actually a reason why Rippetoe wants people to graduate past the empty bar as quickly as possible and begin the program with some weight on it.

It has to do with alignment. Alignment has to do with your COG (center of gravity). Assuming you have perfect alignment (almost nobody does) then you center of gravity is somewhere toward the center of you body just anterior to well..your ass bone.

Center of gravity refers to the point at which, if a force is applied equally downward, the body is in equilibrium. Whatever postion that may be there is a point where this equilibrium occurs.

What happens when you put a barbell on your shoulders is that you are moving the COG. The point around which equilibrium occurs changes. This is why where you place the bar can make such a huge difference.

But it stands to reason, that the weight on the bar has a large influence. Basically if the weight is too light then then the COG is not shifted as much. So, in other words, as you move your body, it does not have to make the same adjustments as it would if the bar were heavier.

So it seems quite the right thing to do to start with a weight that seems feather light and just add 5 or 10 lbs a workout. Intuition tells you that you are gradually acclimating to more weight.

The problem is that if it's too "easy" there is not much to adapt too. As you're loading this light bar very aggressively you are basically not doing enough to "overload" in every sense of that.

And I am not saying it's because you don't feel tired or sore. Nothing like that.

As Rippetoe would say, you used a weight that was too light to require proper form. That is part of it. You had so much wiggle room with the light weight you didn't really have to learn to handle weight. It just wasn't enough of a challenge to equilibrium to force any particular technique or movement pattern.

The other part of it is threshold. You go along workout by workout putting weight on the bar and then quite suddenly you reach this threshold range where the weight is challenging and here you are committed to pounding out a subscribed number of reps and sets with loads you are not prepared for in the way you think you are.

The body adapts the only way it can.

I can't go too much further but I recognize that many people are going to perceive excellent results in the short term. Until they reach ANOTHER threshold.

I submit that the load threshold and the injury threshold, working together is a reason we see sudden injuries in programs like this. EVERYONE comes to training with baggage.

Like Doo mentioned sitting at the computer and getting a sore back. Your whole life stuff like that results in either good or bad tissue changes. Mostly bad when you factor in sedentary lifestyles or exercise and sport that is TOO directed and specialized without proper foundation.

You start lifting Rippetoe style and you really have no idea what weight to start with. People can give you guidelines and all that but it's very subjective. You are getting badly confused feedback from your body while you're doing it.

You take that baggage and start lifting and you are setting up a scenario where you are just waiting to reach injury threshold where chronic small tissue change (damage) becomes acute injury. You add to the problem with faulty movement, etc. Then suddenly you throw in the final ingredient..the load threshold and you end up with what we have in this thread.

I'm not saying it's so very bad. I'm just saying there is a reason it happened that has everything to do with improper programming and not just "bad form".