WELLNESS IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Improving Your Technique with Video
Want to get stronger? Then you need to focus on developing your skills at least as much as you focus on lifting more weight. Improving skill is the best way to increase strength during movements such as hitting a tennis ball or baseball, performing a bench press, driving a golf ball, skiing down a slope, or carrying a bag of groceries up a flight of stairs. In the world of weight training, skill means lifting weights with proper form; the better your form, the better your results.
The brain develops precise neural pathways as you learn a skill. As you improve, the pathways conduct nervous impulses faster and more precisely until the movement almost becomes reflexive. The best way to learn a skill is through focused practice that involves identifying mistakes, correcting them, and practicing the refined movement many times. However, simply practicing the skill is not enough if you want to improve and perform more powerful movements. You must perform the movements correctly instead of practicing mistakes or poor form over and over again.
WELLNESS IN THE DIGITAL AGE Photo Gallery
Here’s where technology can help. Watch videos of people performing weight training movements correctly. You may be able to borrow videos from your instructor, purchase low-cost training videos through magazines and sporting goods stores, or find them on the Internet. If you watch training videos online, however, make sure they were produced by an authoritative source on weight training. Otherwise, you may be learning someone else’s mistakes.
Film your movements using a phone camera or inexpensive video camera. Compare your movements with those of a more skilled person performing them correctly. Make a note of movement patterns that need work and try to change your technique to make it more mechanically correct.
Share your videos with your instructor or a certified personal trainer, who can help you identify poor form and teach you ways to correct your form.
Smart phone apps such as Coaches’ Eye, Ubersense, and Dartfish allow you to analyze movements in slow motion, compare movements side by side, and share your videos with others. for overtraining is rest; add more days of recovery between workouts. With extra rest, chances are you’ll be refreshed and ready to train again. Adding variety to your program, as discussed later in the chapter, can also help you avoid overtraining with resistance exercise. Type or Mode of Exercise For overall fitness, you need to include exercises for your neck, upper back, shoulders, arms, chest, abdomen, lower back, thighs, buttocks, and calves about 8-10 exercises in all. If you are also training for a particular sport, include exercises to strengthen the muscles important for optimal performance and the muscles most likely to be injured. Weight training exercises for general fitness are presented later in this chapter, on pp. 110-123. It is important to balance exercises between antagonistic muscle groups. When a muscle contracts, the opposing muscle must relax. Whenever you do an exercise that moves a joint in one direction, also select an exercise that works the joint in the opposite direction. For example, if you do knee extensions to develop the muscles on the front of your thighs, also do leg curls to develop the antagonistic muscles on the back of your thighs.
The order of exercises can also be important. Do exercises for large-muscle groups or for more than one joint before you do exercises that use small-muscle groups or single joints. This allows for more effective overload of the larger, more powerful muscle groups. Small-muscle groups fatigue more easily than larger ones, and small-muscle fatigue limits your capacity to overload large-muscle groups. For example, lateral raises, which work the shoulder muscles, should be performed after bench presses, which work the chest and arms in addition to the shoulders. If you fatigue your shoulder muscles by doing lateral raises first, you won’t be able to lift as much weight and effectively fatigue all the key muscle groups used during the bench press.
Also, order exercises so you work opposing muscle groups in sequence, one after the other. For example, follow biceps curls, which work the biceps, with triceps extensions, which exercise the triceps the antagonistic muscle to the biceps.
