Extension Fitness Movement Standards
A key part of using strength training to advance your health, fitness, functional capability and sport/exercise performance, is moving safely and with good form.
Good, controlled technique helps you lift more weight in the long run.
And doing strength training in a safe manner helps you to avoid injury. Avoiding injury makes training more fun (which is HUGE for long term adherence to a program).
Plus, there’s nothing which interrupts consistent training like injuries and illness. Consistency is key to results - whether that’s weight loss, strength gain, or unlocking better physical capability or sports performance.
Here are the movement principles and standards we implement at Extension Fitness.
Prepare Yourself
You can’t jump straight into hard training. Take 5 minutes to build up some heat in your body and then do some dynamic warm up exercises to stretch out any tight areas which may restrict your motion. As we age, mobility/flexibility becomes more important.
Stop If You’re In Pain Or Apprehensive
If you experience pain during an exercise, stop the set. On rare occasions you’ll need to stop your session entirely. Usually, you can continue on with some modifications (taking a rest, reducing the load, emphasising greater control, or moving to your next exercise).
It is good to emulate the practices of elite athletes - who know how to pull the pin on a session, or who don’t engage in “ego lifting”. They understand getting injured is not worth it. It will undermine performance.
Sometimes, a sense of unusually elevated fear, apprehension or lost confidence can be a sign injury risk is elevated. If you feel these emotions, stop the set.
Move With Control
Each rep during strength training should be controlled. Only move at a speed you can handle.
Things to emphasise:
Control the lowering phase
Keep the weight moving up and down over your base of support
Stabilise yourself effectively (your coach can guide you on this)
Things to avoid:
Jerking the weight
Using “cheating” strategies like swinging to generate momentum (as opposed to muscle power)
Persisting in a set even when your technique is falling apart because you still feel your muscles can give more effort
Persisting in a set when you can’t stabilise yourself effectively any longer (for example, stop doing those lunges or step ups if you’re wobbling a lot OR stop doing those bench presses if you can’t maintain a “big chest” position any more)
Follow A Sensible Load Progression
The lion’s share of injuries in the gym are sustained by people doing too much too soon. At any given stage, you shouldn’t jump up your training load by too much. And you shouldn’t make too many drastic changes to other variables (like rest intervals, or number of sessions per week). Your body needs time to adapt.
It is hard to give a hard and fast rule, seeing as everyone is different, but a good rule of thumb is to not increase the weight you’re lifting by more than 10% per session. This is for someone new to lifting. The more experienced you are, and the closer you get to exhausting your genetic potential, the less you can increase your load by. 10% can be right for a beginner but it will be way too much of an increase for an experienced lifter.
Observe The Rest Periods Prescribed
One of the counterintuitive things about weight training is that you need to take some rest.
In a personal training setting, it can be hard for trainers to enforce this. There can be a sense on the part of the client or the trainer that resting is a waste of time - and of the client’s money.
But insufficient rest is one of the key drivers of extreme soreness or injury from strength training.
Your trainer will ensure you’re taking enough rest. If it feels excessive to you, please tell them and they can incorporate some other activity into your rest breaks - like some flexibility work.
Use A Consistent Range Of Motion (ROM)
Each rep in a set should be more-or-less the same.
A bit of variation is quite natural, especially in more complicated movements with free weights or which have a large balance component. But as much as you can, lower and raise the weight to a set level each rep.
The standard is to work through a large range of motion - as large as you can without pain and with good control.
There can be good reasons to limit ROM, for example in a sports specific exercise.
But generally, maximising the ROM is beneficial.
Standardising each rep is the ideal.
As you get tired, you may want to shorten the ROM. If that’s happening, and you can’t achieve a consistent ROM, stop the set.
If Your Coach/Trainer Tells You To Stop, Please Do So
We may not always be able to explain why, but cumulative experience gives us a reasonably good sense as to when someone is skating on thin ice.
Adhere To The Cardio Intensity Prescribed
Another way you can do yourself an injury - or just overcook your engine - is by going too hard in your cardio exercise.
Pacing yourself is a bit of an art. You learn from experience.
Generally, people go out too hard too soon, bringing on board too much fatigue.
There are different ways to prescribe intensity in cardio (heart rate, subjective perception of effort, pace and power).
Do your best to adhere to your coach’s instructions - in person or on your program.
But please remember: you have the freedom to back off or stop if you feel unwell or unusually sore.
When building up your cardiorespiratory fitness, a great strategy is to find what you CAN do safely, then work on building it up over weeks, months and years.