How to Form a Foundation of Strength: Practice Quality Movement
Everyone can benefit from getting stronger. Building strength can help you move better, make daily activities easier, and give you a sense of self-confidence.
You can do many different exercises to improve your strength, but if you want those exercises to be safe and effective, you need to learn to do them with good form and practice quality movement.
What is “Good Form”?
Good form means using the target muscles to perform a movement under control and through a full (pain free) range of motion.
For example, if you’re doing a squat, you’re targeting your quads, hamstrings, and glutes. In a good form squat, you slowly lower yourself until your thighs are at least parallel with the floor, making sure you're stable on your feet. You don’t drop down to the bottom position without control. You also don't do half squats where you only lower yourself a couple of inches.
Being able to do the full movement with good form prevents injury. It also builds confidence (which is important for motivation), and forms a foundation that you can build on as you become a more advanced exerciser.
Unfortunately, not enough programs make good exercise form a priority. Learning quality movement and good form for each exercise does takes time, patience, and persistence, but skipping this important step will greatly limit the benefits you can get from your training.
Not quality movement…
Even many experienced lifters would benefit from taking a step back and really mastering quality movement.
An important mindset shift that will help you get the most out of your strength training is to think of strength as a skill and train for it like you would any other physical skill: with frequent, quality practice.
Your Brain and Nervous System are Responsible For More Of Your Strength Than You Might Think
Let’s say you sign up to participate in a study about strength training. You do supervised, expertly designed workouts in a research lab. Once a week they test your strength and use imaging technology to measure the exact size of your muscles.
In the first few sessions your strength increases, but the tests aren’t showing any changes in your muscles.
In fact, it’s not until about a month into your training program that your muscles start to grow, even though you’ve been increasing your strength from the beginning. Even after two months of hard training, your muscles grow only enough to explain about 40% of your strength gains.
This is what happens in study after study of how resistance training affects strength and muscle growth (Gabriel et al., 2006).
How does that work? If strength isn’t only related to muscle size, how else do you get stronger?
You might be surprised to learn that strength gains, especially early on, happen mostly in your brain and nervous system.
The Science of Strength
Every time you move, electrical signals that start in your brain are sent through your nerves to your muscles. These signals tell specific muscles exactly when and how hard to contract. They also tell other muscles to relax so they don’t get in the way.
Those signals have to be coordinated in just the right way for you to complete a movement or exercise. It’s an incredibly complex and intricate process, and it takes a lot of time and practice to get it right.
Usually, your brain can get close enough to at least finish the movement. For a bench press, for example, you can always coordinate your muscles enough to push the bar off your chest.
But at first you won’t be able to push much weight, and the exercise will feel pretty difficult because your brain isn’t coordinating it efficiently. You’re wasting effort and energy because the movement pattern isn’t ideal.
Let’s think about an analogy to describe this a little better.
Think of a piece of wood with a track or “groove” running through it, the kind that a marble would be able to roll down. That groove connects your brain on one end and your muscles on the other. Nerve signals are sent down the groove to tell the muscles what to do.
To do the exercise properly and to work the target muscles correctly, that groove should be the most efficient path from your brain to your muscles. When you first start doing an exercise, that path isn’t developed yet. The signals from your brain go all over the place, eventually getting to the right muscles.
As you practice, though, your brain starts to figure out the best pathway and digs out the groove. Once that happens, nerve signals can always follow that same efficient path when you want to do that movement. Each exercise or movement has its own groove.
As you keep practicing the exercise, that groove gets carved out deeper and deeper. That allows stronger, faster, and more coordinated signals to get to the muscles, and you get better at doing the exercise. This is called “ingraining” the movement pattern.
When you practice any skill, whether it’s juggling, doing a handstand, playing guitar, riding a bike, balancing on one foot, kicking a ball, whistling, or even everyday movements like driving, getting a key into a lock, or chopping vegetables, the exact same “ingraining” process happens.
Strength is a skill, and you should practice it the way you would any other skill.
Why is This Important?
Ok, so your brain and nervous system are heavily involved in strength training. Why should that matter to you? After all, you’re probably not interested in training your nervous system. You want to get stronger and build some muscle, right?
The most important thing to understand here is that physical results depend on quality movement. If you’re not doing your exercises correctly, you won’t get the results you want.
Build a Foundation of Strength by Practicing These Basic Movements:
There are a lot of exercises to choose from, but some are more effective than others for building a foundation of strength and good movement patterns.
If you want to get stronger, I recommend that you learn how to perform each of these basic bodyweight movements with good form:
Horizontal Row (or Pull Up if you’re ready for it)
Those movements form the foundation for many other exercises as well as movements you do on a regular basis.
Learning to perform them correctly will improve your motor control, coordination, and balance, give your muscles the stress they need to grow, and set you up to perform more advanced exercises.
Whenever you are performing these (or any other) exercises, remember to take your time, focus on the muscles you’re targeting, move slowly and deliberately, and complete each exercise by moving through a full range of motion.
Start Easy and Progress Gradually.
Your body learns how to do a push up the same way you learn how to tie your shoes, by making and strengthening the connections between your brain and your muscles. The difference with push ups (and any other exercise), is that your strength is a limiting factor.
In other words, even if your movement patterns are well-developed, you still might not be able to do push ups well because your muscles aren’t strong enough yet. But you need to practice quality push ups to make them stronger… So how do you do that?
You start with an easy version of the exercise. If you’re not strong enough to do standard push ups with good form yet, start with incline push ups. Get in a normal push up position, with your hands on an elevated bench, step, or countertop. That reduces the amount of your bodyweight that your chest, shoulders, and triceps have to move.
Pick a height at which it's easy enough for you to perform the full range of motion under control. Practice getting the movement pattern right first. Then gradually increase the difficulty by decreasing the height of the bench or moving to the back of a couch, then to a chair, then to an ottoman, etc. until you’re doing full push ups from the floor.
You’ve probably used this strategy before. Think about how you learned to ride a bike or swim: you used training wheels or floaties to make it easier until you learned how to do the full skill on its own. This is the same concept.
Stay Away from Muscle Failure.
Muscle failure is when your muscles are too fatigued to finish a rep, even with your maximal effort. You push as hard as you possibly can, but the weight just refuses to budge.
For most people, especially new lifters, movement quality and good form usually go out the window as fatigue sets in.
Every repetition is a chance to reinforce a quality movement pattern. If you end up performing your last rep or two with bad form because your muscles are getting close to failure, that’s two reps in which you haven’t reinforced the proper movement pattern. In fact, you’ve reinforced a bad pattern.
Once you get better at the movement, you’ll be able to preserve your form even as your muscles become fatigued. Then, you'll be able to push closer to your muscular limits.
Keep It Simple.
Avoid overcomplicating your exercises. For the same reason that you should stay away from muscle failure, you should also work on the basic movements.
I see this in the gym a lot. Someone who can’t do a solid bodyweight squat tries to add weight, or combine a squat with a bicep curl, or squat while standing on a bosu ball. They end up using terrible form and only doing a portion of the full movement.
Think of that groove analogy again, and imagine a marble rolling down the track. If the track is shallow (because the movement pattern hasn’t been ingrained enough yet), the marble could easily pop out.
That’s what happens when your movement pattern isn’t solid yet and you get fatigued, or distracted, or you try an advanced or complicated version of the exercise before you’re ready. Your form will suffer, you won’t give your muscles the stress they need for growth, and you could hurt yourself.
There is a time and place for some advanced exercises, but it’s only once you have solid movement skills and have perfected your form on the basic exercises.
Practice, Practice, Practice.
You need to practice your main movements often to build good movement patterns. You should be performing your main exercises at least 1-2 times per week.
Some programs recommend changing your exercises frequently, citing “muscle confusion” or some other nonsense fitness jargon.
That’s a mistake, especially when you’re a beginner. Each movement requires a specific pattern. It takes at least several weeks of consistent practice for your nervous system to fully develop that pattern.
If you change your exercises all the time, you’ll never learn the proper pattern to perform any of them efficiently.
It would be like trying to learn the guitar by practicing guitar one day, then practicing the banjo the next day, then the bass, then the ukulele. Those instruments might be similar, but is that the best way to get better at the guitar?
If you want to fast track your progress, practice 1-3 repetitions of an easy movement variation several times per day. Since you’ll be doing a high volume of repetitions this way, make sure you remember to stay far away from muscle failure and emphasize quality in each rep.
It only takes a couple of minutes at a time, and it allows you to provide your nervous system with very frequent, high quality practice so it can carve out that movement pattern quickly.
Start thinking of your workouts as practicing skills. You’ll move better, gain confidence, and build a solid foundation of strength. Soon you’ll be able to safely and effectively advance beyond the basics, and be well on your way to getting the many benefits of exercise!
If You Need Help
Here's my FREE Guide to Strength Training eBook which teaches you how to put together your own strength training program.