The Healthy Post Natal Body Podcast
The Healthy Post Natal Body Podcast
Does "good form" really matter, and what does it actually mean?
This week I am talking about "good form".
You know the kinds of things you hear "When squatting your knees shouldn't go past your toes", "When doing a deadlift your back should never be rounding", "When doing a core exercise push your lower back into the floor" etc. etc.
Does it really matter that much? I argue that it's nowhere near as important as people make it out to be.
And I, of course, tell you what "good form" should actually look, and FEEL, like.
As always; HPNB still only has 5 billing cycles.
So this means that you not only get 3 months FREE access, no obligation!
BUT, if you decide you want to do the rest of the program, after only 5 months of paying $10/£8 a month you now get FREE LIFE TIME ACCESS! That's $50 max spend, in case you were wondering.
Though I'm not terribly active on Instagram and Facebook you can follow us there. I am however active on Threads so find me there!
And, of course, you can always find us on our YouTube channel if you like your podcast in video form :)
Visit healthypostnatalbody.com and get 3 months completely FREE access. No sales, no commitment, no BS.
Email peter@healthypostnatalbody.com if you have any questions, comments or want to suggest a guest/topic
Playing us out today; "Honest" by CJ Oliver
Hey, welcome to the Healthy Postnatal Body Podcast with your postnatal expert, peter Lap. That, as always, will be me. Today I'm talking form, I think. Does form really matter? And by form I mean things that you hear a lot, you know, during squats, make sure your toes point forward, make sure your knees don't go past your toes, make sure that when you do like flutter type exercises, when you're lying on your back, that your lower back presses into the floor, which is something you hear a lot in pilates classes and all that stuff. Does that really matter? Is that really the best way for everybody to get the most out of their exercise? I think probably not. So, so, without further ado, here we go. Hey, welcome to the Healthy Postnatal Body Podcast.
Peter:This is the episode for the 22nd of December 2024. And, like I said, this is a pre-Christmas program. Next week there isn't going to be one. I'm not doing it. I am not doing an end-of-year podcast. I might still do an end-of-year podcast, I'm not sure. I just thought I'd say that in an effort to give myself maybe a bit more time, maybe a bit of a break this week, because, you know, with Christmas coming up, there's a lot happening. A lot of people are training. We have a lot of plans still in the works. You have no idea, this rinkety dinkety podcast and this um and the healthy postnatal body website and all that sort of stuff, um take up significantly, significantly, significantly more time than you think they do. Um, you know, that's what happens when you give loads of free um free stuff, free programming for everybody, um, and all that sort of fun, free programming for everybody and all that sort of thing. You get a lot of signups, a lot of emails, a lot of questions, a lot of comments that I have to deal with and get back to, and sometimes it kind of doesn't leave a lot of room for everything for me, right, and on top of everything else, there's a lot happening. That's all I'm saying. There's a lot going on and I thought maybe I won't do a podcast next week, but who knows, maybe I will. You know, so, um, I probably will, because you know me and I can't. For some reason, I can't stop churning these things out. Um, loads of interviews scheduled in for um for january, february already, so I have a really interesting bunch of guests coming up. We're doing absolutely recovering, absolutely everything in the next couple of months. So that's going to be good.
Peter:Peter at HealthyPostNatalBodycom, if you yourself have any questions or comments or want to be a guest or know someone, if you have a subject you'd like me to discuss with somebody, I can you know. If I don't know anything about it, I can either find the information, or if I don't know much about it, I can either find the information or I can just get a guest to talk about it. Right, I know many, many people, but we're now almost 300 episodes into this thing and I'm well aware that every now and again we run out of steam, a little bit, run out of ideas. So all your suggestions are very, very helpful. So if you want to get in touch, please do all of suggestions. That's all I'm saying, peter at healthy postnatal bodycom.
Peter:So today I am talking about form and thus thus having good form really matter, and by good form, let me first clarify this before people start typing angry emails. By good form, I mean the form that you know everybody gets told what a squat is supposed to look like, right, that type of thing. You know. The whole, for most people will tell you no, your feet have to be shoulder width apart. They have to face forward. You have to squat as to ground right, so really as low as you can, your knees shouldn't go past your toes and all that sort of stuff, and it's the same with a lot of core work. You see this a lot in pilates classes and certain yoga classes, and I came across it this week with one of my clients who has been working with a physio where they do a lying flutter exercise. So basically, you're lying on your back and you move your legs quickly up and down, right, um, and she was told, press your lower back into the floor and and keep it there and that type of thing. You know, does that, does that really matter? There's a couple of different things happening here. Um, so I'll start with the, with the my what I always say everybody, everybody moves differently. Right, there are some things, that kind of transfer not transfer over well enough from one person to the next, but everybody moves slightly differently. So your squat is going to be different from my squat. Your good squat is different from my good squat. That is just the way it is.
Peter:I am six foot four-ish and, um, I can, I, I have long legs and if you, if you're shorter and you have short legs even relative to your body. I've, I have quite, uh, quite long legs compared to my upper body. I know, right, I'm very lucky and uh, that means I move differently from someone who has a longer upper body compared to compared to their legs. You just do, you can't. You can't really help that. Your balance is different, your build is different and therefore your movement will be slightly different.
Peter:And you used to hear this a lot. With squats, feet should be facing forward. My feet never face forward. It's remarkably uncomfortable for me and I cannot drop as low as I can if my feet face directly forward. So mine splay out a little bit, so my toes point out the way a little bit, not Charlie Chaplin style, but just a little bit. It makes it more comfortable for me to move. It makes it more comfortable for me to move, to drop through that like that 90 degree level and therefore I can really get my bum to the ground, even when I have 120, 140 kilos on my back Right.
Peter:So that brings me to the question that I think as I hit the shield in front of the microphone, apologies for that. That brings me to the question that I always tell my clients and members to ask what are you trying to get from the exercise? Right, there are a million different variations of squatting. Right, there are a million different variations of squatting, and if your goal is to work your legs as hard as you can and build your glutes and build your quads and all that sort of stuff, almost any shape will do that. Right, almost any form will do that, while some more effective than others. Yeah, sure, but you have to find the one that is most comfortable for you, that allows you to put the most load, the most strain, so to speak, on the muscle that you're trying to work. So say, you're doing squats for your quads, for the muscles at the front of your legs and all that sort of stuff. If you get the most from that by having your feet point out slightly because you can go deeper and you can put more weight on it and all that type of stuff, then that is completely fine.
Peter:In the same way that, you know, people used to say oh, whatever you do, your knees can't go past your toes when you squat, because you know apparently they'll explode, or something like that. Now, some people are very comfortable moving in that way and there's nothing wrong with that. If your knees can take it. They can take it. It is. There's an exercise called sissy squat and yes, that is indeed exactly how you pronounce it, and that is all about the knees going past the toes there. There is nothing inherently wrong with having your knees go past your toes when you squat. As long as all the other muscles that you're trying to work are working right, it only becomes a problem.
Peter:Form only really really matters when your body is moving in such a way and then if you have poor form, that is, moving in such a way that the muscles you're trying to work are not actually being worked. So, for instance, with a bicep curl that could be you move everything except your bicep. A lot of momentum and a lot of recruitment of your back and your shoulders are moving, your elbows are moving and there's very little action actually happening in the bicep. And it can happen in a squat as well that you can drop a little bit, but you can't really get back up comfortably with a decent weight and you're using almost every muscle. You're using your upper body more, almost, than you are using your lower body. You can't get past that 90 degree angle that you're really trying to hit right, or you can't get anywhere near that 90 degree angle, which is the case for a lot of people, I see.
Peter:And then form matters, because if you're trying to do an exercise and you can't work the muscles the way they should be worked or they should be working, then your form is out the window and then the exercise becomes counterproductive. Quite often you'll start to use the wrong muscles. You're kind of teaching the body how to work incorrectly, right, how to perform an exercise incorrectly, so to speak. And so if you, for instance, if you translate that as sticking to the squatting thing, if you translate that to say sitting down, some people I don't know if you've ever noticed this some people can't sit down on a sofa or a chair properly. They can't physically bring themselves to sit down, they fall down into it and they rock back up. There's a little bit of momentum happening because the muscles that they would be using if they were able to squat and get up properly, so to speak, without by using the right muscles, I'm just not strong enough or don't know how to. They physically just don't know how to do the movement, or or the muscles aren't strong enough to get them up Right. Um, and that is that then becomes a problem, right?
Peter:You see this a lot with older people. I train, uh, two older people who are well into their 80s One is 86 and the other is 88, coming up to 88. And we spend a lot of time on the squatting movement and the deadlifting movement. The whole hips are hinges type thing movement and the dead lifting movement, the whole hips are hinges type type thing. Because older people can be and and, and people that are, um, people that are pregnant, can have this as well, but you just, you kind of just fall down because you can't control yourself. You can't control it anymore because the, the, the muscles aren't strong enough to take the weight anymore. That's fundamentally what it is. So in older people it's weakness, and in pregnant women it tends to be just the sudden increase in weight that you're just not used to.
Peter:And other people are just terrible at what you call it, at sitting down properly. Right, they, they, they are. Their body is lazy, almost, um, not literally, I'm not saying these people are lazy, just saying that the body takes the easy way out and, and that is, it just falls onto stuff. Kids, teenagers, everybody knows a teenage boy that can't sit down properly. They just fall down everything. They flop, and they flop everywhere. Right, it is that that's the kind of thing.
Peter:Then it becomes an issue, because then you're just not using the right muscles for the exercise and that means you're not getting as much from the exercise as you should be getting from the exercise. So I always argue that form only matters to that point, to the point where are you still working the right muscles? If the question is, are you working the right muscles and are you safe, and the answer to those questions are yes, as in are you not going to get injured? And the answer to those questions is yes, then the form doesn't matter anymore. Slightly rounded back on the deadlift Fine, right, feet's playing out a little bit in squatting. Yeah, fine, if sumo squats a thing, then feet's playing out a little bit, it's not an issue, right?
Peter:You can't have it both ways. You can't say a squat has to be performed X, y, z and then have a million variations of squats and give them all fancy names and just say that yeah, but these are also all good. That means that a squat doesn't have to have strict form in that way. Right, if you do bicep curls and your elbow moves a little bit, so to speak, and then okay, that's fine as long as you're still using your biceps. If, however, you're just shifting your entire arm up and down and the the bicep isn't, there's very little actual movement at the elbow, so to speak, where the elbow opens or closes right. If there's less movement there, then you're not using the bicep as much anymore. Then it's an issue. Until that point, I don't care if you move things, move your shoulder a little bit, as long as you feel the squeeze in your bicep.
Peter:Sometimes we have to accept that the way we move is not necessarily the most efficient for the results we're trying to get. And if the result is trying to get bigger muscles right, then in an ideal world, on a bicep curl, you just want to squeeze the bicep as hard as possible, get the most contraction from the bicep, and sometimes that's easier done with really strict form and lighter weight. But if you still get stronger, bigger muscles, if your form is slightly wrong, so to speak and wrong is in air quotes there if your form is slightly off, you'll still get bigger biceps and stronger muscles, right. So it might not be the most efficient at getting bigger, stronger muscles, but it'll work. It's fine, it's not the end of the world, right? If it's safe and if it allows you to to shift slightly heavier weight and all that type of stuff, then then I am not opposed to it. That's all I'm saying.
Peter:And if your goal is just to shift loads of big, heavy weights, then it really doesn't matter, right? Because if your goal is, instead of lifting I don't know 20 kilos, lifting 30 kilos and this allows you to do that, okay, right, if that's what your goal is, if your goal is to be the best at lifting heavy things, so to speak for you, the best at lifting heavy things, then any way you get that weight off the ground in a safe manner is completely fine, as long as it's safe, right? If you know you're not going to do your backhand, then it doesn't matter whether you have a wide stance during a deadlift or an hour stance during a deadlift. It is completely irrelevant. If your goal is to do, I don't know, 100 kilogram deadlift or 200 kilogram deadlift or whatever your goal is right, then it doesn't matter how that weight comes off the ground, as long as you're doing it in a safe manner. Anybody else who tells you tells you that yeah, but you know your back was this here? Your back was not. Yeah, but if it's safe, it's safe. Your goal is lifting as much weight as you can, then it's completely fine. But power lifting meets, you're not going to see people go, yeah, but we're not going to count that weight because his back was rounded.
Peter:No, I've seen truly astonishingly poor form at some of these competitions, as in poor form air quote, poor form right At some of these competitions, but the weights that were being lifted were phenomenal, I mean. So who am I to then say, yeah, but you know what? That really isn't safe. Did you get injured? No, is it safe to do so? Yeah, okay, then who am I to say that's not how you should be doing it. Right, that's not how you should move. It's the same, as you know.
Peter:I know one or two golfers now. Everybody's golf swing is different. Is there an ideal way for a lot of people to move? Yes, certain things are basics, but everybody has a slightly different golf swing and I don't play myself, but I know what a decent golf swing looks like for people, from the starting position to the end position and for everybody that's slightly different, but you can tell whether someone's moving fluently or not. Fairly, you can tell people, you can see that fairly easily. Same with tennis players and all that. It's not that different, right? And you have to bear that in mind. Everybody moves in a slightly different way. So form, form, shmorm, right, that's as the old five-year-old me would say. And that kind of brings me to a lot of the core stuff that I see people do, a lot of the Pilates stuff.
Peter:I hear One of my clients has a knee injury from an accident nothing to do with me, just throwing that little caveat in there and the knee injury is soft tissue, soft fatty tissue damage around the knee and it's well outside my scope of practice. So she works with somebody else on this and that person had given her some exercises and one of them again exercise routine, and one of them is a lying flutter kicks, so you're really as Dinky snorts in the background, by the way, that is what that noise is. So she said okay, so she has a lie on her back and basically keep feet straight and move them up and down. If you look on the YouTube channel C-SIT Lying Flutters on the Healthy Postnatal Body website we have the C-SIT version of this, which I personally prefer, but teach the run.
Peter:There's nothing wrong with the exercise, but what this coach or physio, whatever had told her to do was press her lower back into the floor. And that is something that always drives me nuts, because the next question should be why am I pressing my lower back into the floor? Right, that's always always first. So she was told you can't have your hands under your bum, and I always say place your hands under your bum First thing I do, and then it was and squeeze your lower back into the floor. So, as you might be familiar with, there's a curve in your spine and it's quite important that there is one. Very few people have a completely straight spine, so there's a curve there in that bit, and if you're pressing that in, then that means everything else kind of comes out of position.
Peter:It's much easier to do if you have your hands under your bum. Then you lift your pelvis up a little bit under your bum, then you lift your pelvis up a little bit and that lower part of your back, that lower back, will automatically be on the floor, right? So when you look at the leg raises video on the YouTube channel, that is what all I can't remember who did the leg raises on the thing I think it was probably Catherine who did the hands under the bum and then automatically, because the angle of your pelvis changes, your lower back is on the floor. That is much more comfortable than forcing that down without changing that angle of the pelvis, and that's an unnatural way to move and I can't think for the life of me, I still can't think of why that would be the preferred way to do it.
Peter:And you hear this a lot in Pilates classes by instructors that haven't moved on yet, because it's something that they used to do like 20 years ago and people kind of stuck with it for air quotes, better core activation, and that is just not true. You're not activating your core more when you do that. You're just squeezing your lower back out of position and making everything else more uncomfortable. And if anything that detracts from working the muscle you want to be focusing on right if, if, during exercise, your goal is to work the muscles as best you can and that should be the goal, by the way, that should be the goal of any particular exercise right should be to work that particular muscle as best you can for you, then anything that detracts from that is kind of just making that slightly more difficult, and especially when you're looking at rehab training, which this is because this is part of our program. It's part of a program just for anyone listening, for anyone wondering because, like knee injury, why are you doing leg exercises? It's to do with keeping your legs straight and all that type of stuff. I've asked them about it and I get why. We've agreed, by the way, that she'll do that in a c-sit position going forward, because that's simply much more effective. But and it still accomplishes the same goal for a knee perspective, but for the core, it's much more effective.
Peter:Um, if, if you put the body in an angle at, at an angle where it's just not comfortable anymore, and you're fighting that without any good reason to fight that right, then what are we even doing? Right? You're doing the opposite of what you want to be doing. You want person to focus on using the right muscles, not on squeezing them back into the floor. That is uncomfortable and everything else is out of alignment. And all of a sudden, you're focusing on that and it means your core is activating less and all that type of stuff. No, just stop it. You're doing the exact opposite of what you want to do, of what you want to do, of what you want to accomplish.
Peter:You're putting a roadblock up just because you're stuck with this idea of this is the right way to perform this particular exercise, because somebody joseph pilates or whatever his name was was hung up on that. Yeah, that guy had a different spine than you did, so for him it might have been the best way to do a particular exercise. That doesn't mean it's the best way for you to do it, and that's kind of what the whole, the whole point is. You find the best way for you to do it, and nine out of 10 times it means placing your hands on your bum for something like this. That's what I'm saying as my glasses are smashed into the microphone. So that is my cue to to wrap this up, because that is how my day is going. Anyways, that's me done.
Peter:I hope you got something from this. Have a lovely, lovely, uh, christmas and all that type of stuff. 2024 is almost over. 2025 is almost here. Birds are in the air. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Right, you have a tremendous week, peter, at healthy postnatal buddycom. Right, here's a new bit of music. You take care. Bye. Now I'm trying to let you know the way I feel. I don't want to mistake this for something that isn't real. How am I supposed to know everything that's going on in your mind? Well, if you need to take it slow, there's no reason to hold it all inside. Can you be honest? Can you be honest? I want to be honest. I do, I do, I do. Can you be honest? I want to be honest. Can you be honest? I'm trying to let you, I'm trying to let you. Can you be honest? Can you be honest? I wanna be honest. I do, I do, I do. Can you be honest? I want to be honest? Can you be honest? I wanna be honest. So, can you be honest? I wanna be honest.