This is part of a dialogue with a friend/athlete:
(me): I think I noticed something on your deadlift competition videos but not clear enough... looks a little bit like an early knee extension, but I'm really not sure. I do need the other videos to organize my thoughts and provide some better suggestions
(her) With deadlifting over the last few months I've felt weak off the floor. Do you think that might explain the early knee extension? (…)
(me) Indeed, usually the early knee extension, for consistent technique lifters, is caused by a hard time with the lift-off. Sometimes a natural reaction for an unusually heavier weight.
I'll watch them again. The bench is hard to see, but the eccentric phase seems a bit fast (not sufficiently controlled). The controlled eccentric provides a better "arrangement" (of stabilizing structures) for a more powerful concentric phase. In the end, that power is what defines whether the lift will be successful or not: accelerating a body that has reached velocity = zero. Since you can't count on elastic energy, like with the squat, you really want your bench press super, super controlled.
(her) [lots of comments that I won’t paste here because they would reveal her identity – really smart comments]
(me) What I'd really love to see are videos with a light weight where you can execute the lift with full control of your technique, from the angles I mentioned. The more you videotape yourself, the more data we have about the movement, how consistent the execution is, where it changes if it does, etc. Of course, competition videos are important since that's where "it" happens. But what if the execution deviates from what you are doing in training? We need to know why, when, at which point to figure out what and how to fix it. Right?
[lots of stuff]
(her) You mean some old training videos? Or just the new ones?
(me) Old and new. It's all data.
Of course, with a good video we can use apps to analyze specific aspects of the lift – there are plenty out there. But video is data – any video, no matter how low resolution and messy. And one thing we need to improve performance is data about the lifter.
Data analysis.
Evidence-based.
If you are serious about anything in life, it’s best to get used to these expressions. We coined them a long time ago for a reason.
For evidence-based articles, click on "articles" on my author page:
