I used to spend hours and hours researching the exact form when lifting weights. Perfect form is important for many exercises, I followed this philosophy for over a year. However, it isn’t quite as necessary to do perfect form for everything.

Heavy exercises to target specific muscles and protect you from injury, require good form. Other exercises can be done with different form, depending on what you are training for.

Just from having a quick look on YouTube at the leading fitness channels (no names) it is quite obviously that many people train in different ways. Granted that most of it is the same stuff, but carried out with different techniques.

Lets take a bench press for example. Its a big compound exercise that involes multiple muscles. A full benchpress startes with locked arms, down to touch chest, and back to straight arms. Many lifters dont do that though. They tell you to never lock your arms out so that the chest pectorals are always engaged. The big lads at the gym who are repping 19 x 220lb even carry this pholosophy.

Some of the leading YouTube information site also talk about sleep. They say that sleep is extremely important. Whilst the most famous bodybuilder of all time, was only having 6 hours of sleep per night.

So who do you listen to? My answer is yourself. Always get a full range of motion and carry out the exercise that allows you to reach your goal, without injury.

For competition, use the right technique. For building mass, use other techniques.

Squatting is another exercise where it gets confusing. Some say ass to floor, whilst over say that your quads need to be parallel to floor or 90 degrees. What is right?

I’m lucky enough to have found a gym full of older lads that have the raw knoledge and experience to power train. some of them have been training for 50 years and have won many competitons. I will follow people who are there with me, guiding me. Rather than these magazines and flaunting websites.

Remember those electric abs workout things? The guy promoting that looked like a god… We know it’s not all true…

Don’t believe everything you read and watch…