The proper way to breathe during a lifting exercise is to exhale during the work push phase and to inhale during the recovery rest phase. In the leg-press exercise, for example, inhale just before you exert force with your feet on the platform.

As you exert the force and push the weight of the platform, exhale. For healthy people with no heart or blood pressure conditions, a modified version of the Valsalva maneuver is a safe and effective way to lift heavy loads.

This maneuver involves holding your breath against a closed windpipe and exerting pressure. This procedure was named for Valsalva, a 17th-century physician who studied the human ear and esophagus.

Let's apply the modified Valsalva maneuver to the squat exercise. Once you have the bar on your back, expand your chest with your head and neck in a neutral position. Take a deep breath down into your belly and then begin to descend with the weight.

Hold your breath through the bottom of your descent and then begin to breathe out after you push through the sticking point of the lift on the ascent. The intra-abdominal pressure that is built by holding in your breath helps support your spine while holding the heavy load.

Note that if you have high blood pressure or any heart conditions, you should talk with your physician before attempting any weight-training program, and you should not use the modified Valsalva method. Previous Next. Call Us Hours Mon-Fri 7am - 5pm CST. Contact Us Get in touch with our team.

FAQs Frequently asked questions. Home Excerpts Proper Form and Technique. Proper Form and Technique Throughout the exercise section of this book you will notice instructions that relate to posture, specific joint movements such as extending, flexing, and descending , foot placement, tempo, and breathing.

Posture and Joint Movements Maintain good posture, especially in the spinal region, when you squat, lunge, or step. Foot Placement Foot placement is addressed in almost every lower-body exercise in this book because where you place your feet on the floor or on the machine will functionally change the exercise.

These individuals will always have a degree or certification in special training and often years of experience in the field. ACE Fitness. Mayo Clinic. Benefits include: · Reduce risks for injury including muscle tears, joint damage, sprains and strains.

Consistency will help: · To further master form and increase ability to maximize each exercise. The truth is, good form is difficult to pin down, since the definition changes based on the particular exercise in question, as well as the particular person performing the exercise.

Yet there are certain characteristics that apply to every type of movement and every person. When you move with good form, your body works together as a unit, rather than as a collection of parts. Proper technique is a combination of body stability and mobility in the respective appropriate areas.

Another indicator of good form is the ability to pause with control at any point within the performance of the movement. Rather than moving with momentum, you move with control , and this is both evidence and a benefit of proper technique.

Moving with the intention of control funnels the stresses to the appropriate areas of the body rather than to regions prone to break down and injury. Often, an untrained observer can tell if someone is performing an exercise with better technique than someone else. The body angles and steady execution are simply pleasing to the eye.

Take, for instance, the squat exercise. There are many opinions on how the squat should be performed:. Any good coach will be able to correct safety errors, while allowing variation for different cases.

Access to cheap and easy video recording is both the best and worst thing to happen to improving form in physical training. But perhaps you were told that your hands need to be precisely shoulder width apart, or some other specific distance.

Instead, use safety and efficiency as your guides.

I mentioned alignment and this is also critical. Resistance training is effective because it forces your muscles to perform work. With free weights, this is done by gravity, so proper form is almost always with respect to the ground. You typically want to align all of your major joints in the horizontal or vertical plane, so that gravity is applying the most tension to your muscles.

As a few examples, consider the bench press. For a regular bench press grip, proper joint alignment is key. Grasp the bar and lower it towards your chest without touching.

Either using a mirror or with a partner, lower the bar until your elbows are at the same level as your shoulders elbow joint to shoulder joint alignment.

At this point, your upper arms should be parallel to the floor. To invoke the standard grip, simply make sure that your wrists are over your elbows elbow to wrist alignment. When this is the case, your arms will form a right angle with your forearms perpendicular to the floor pictured below.

You'll find that this grip is slightly wider than shoulder width and that the bar is slightly above your chest unless Dave Draper is reading this.

This is a great starting point to explore the exercise. When you pull your hands closer together, your forearms are now angled. This also forces your elbow joint to perform more work, so the triceps become more involved close grip bench press.

This time, the elbow joint is open. In this weak position, much of the tension is transferred to your shoulder joint. This can cause a slight rotation of your shoulder and promote rotator cuff injury! As another example, consider a barbell curl. We can analyze the start position of the curl from the perspective of proper joint alignment.

If your elbows are in front of your shoulders, then you are forcing the anterior deltoids to perform the work and shifting tension from the biceps to the shoulder. By keeping the elbows pulled back elbow to shoulder alignment - elbows remain beneath the shoulders you ensure that your biceps performs the majority of work.

Keep your elbows close to your sides and grasp the barbell at this same width wrist to elbow alignment. Now, if you move your hands closer together, you will place tension on your wrists and shift tension to the inside of your biceps.

Your upper arm is actually several muscles working together, and this shifts the workload to different upper arm muscles. By taking a wider grip, you again lose elbow to wrist alignment and shift tension away from the primary major biceps muscle to other muscles.

Obviously, working a variety of grips can help work the entire upper arm without favoring any particular muscle. The correct form is shown below. Joint alignment is also critical when considering range of motion. In the example with the chest press, if your primary goal is to work your chest muscles, you can stop at the shoulder-elbow alignment - in other words, your upper arms do not need to go below parallel.

Does this mean that going below parallel is wrong? Not only is it necessary in bench-pressing competitions and if you don't work that range of motion, you won't get stronger but when you move below parallel, tension shifts to your triceps, so this a great way to work them as well.

This knowledge can be useful when designing your program. If you are doing a lot of triceps work maybe you are specifically working on your upper arms then you might consider limiting the range of motion for your chest press to allow more triceps recovery.

On the other hand, if you are performing a balanced routine or even targeting the chest, performing a full range of motion will work more muscles and burn more calories.

Keep in mind, too, that once you go below parallel with your upper arms, your shoulders begin to rotate. This can impinge the rotator cuff and cause serious injury. The way to avoid this is to perform rotator cuff "control drills" and plenty of shoulder stretches, and to make sure your shoulders are strong enough to support the torque generated by a bench press.

Calculate this for yourself on my Shoulder Joint article. If not, prioritize your shoulders and avoid near-max lifts with the chest press until your shoulders are back on track! Sometimes joint alignment isn't completely obvious. Consider your shoulder joint. Your body is designed for your arms to hang naturally by your sides elbow to shoulder alignment with the elbows slightly outside of the shoulder joint.

When you are performing a shoulder press, the mid-point is when your elbows are at the same height as your shoulders. Having your wrists directly over your elbows so that the arms form a right angle, shown below is a great reference grip for this and also pull-ups - anything outside of that should be considered "wide grip" and anything inside of that should be considered "narrow grip".

Take for example the simple act of riding a bike. It also means fatiguing quicker. You start to slow down and going that extra mile seems impossible. Or take, for example, your running stride.

Furthermore, you could be setting yourself up for pain and injury. Lifting weights is another time where your performance will severely suffer if you have improper technique. Studies show that being able to utilize the full range of motion during exercise means increasing the potential for strength.

Furthermore, other studies indicate that having proper mobility leads to higher performance, better training results, increase in muscle size and strength, and decrease in fat. Biomechanics and kinesiology are the sciences behind proper movement and exercise.

Both physical therapists and most athletic trainers are trained in the area. They are certified experts when it comes to moving properly. However, the solution is not as complicated or risky as surgery. In fact, in most cases, pain is caused not by a medical condition.

In many cases where pain is a factor, there are also problems with form, technique, movement, and alignment.

Luckily, learning proper technique and form is now more accessible than ever, through reading articles online or hiring a personal trainer to assist you. Our body is highly adaptive to resistance, pressure, and tension, and once it learns a particular way to move, it sticks to it.

Constantly correcting your form and technique is just as important as showing up for your workouts. Incorrect form and technique might lead to spinal, muscular, and neurological problems. Even incorrect crunches are more than enough to give you chronic pain all your life.

Rounding your back during the Deadlift pressures the spinal discs and might lead to their herniation. Or the improper stance and positioning of the feet might lead to knee problems. Working out in the wrong form and technique will lead to muscle and joint compensation.

Looking shredded is not always a sign of strength and athleticism. By training with a half range of motion, and not trying different techniques, we leave weak muscles and joints to suffer the consequences. If you have constant sores or tightness in just a muscle, it often means that it is compensating for weaker ones.

For example, feeling pain in the clavicula when performing triceps dips is another compensation that we need to correct. Proper form and technique will help you progress faster. Proper form ensures that your body is stressed properly, and so it will respond to the resistance and grow from it.

After learning the proper motor mobility, you will be able to feel the muscles working and how your body responds healthily and enjoyably to resistance and mobility. Body alignment starts from the ground up.

Your feet should be able to absorb all the force and not compensate it in your knees or ankles. Moreover, if you suffer to keep your stance stable, this is a sign you have to lower the lifted weight.

The proper technique to walk is from heel to toe. This way your heel hits the ground first, absorbing most of the shock. Second, keep the foot arch intact by evenly distributing the force to your heel and feet ball.