Horrible Exercise Form
 

Let's talk horrible exercise form.

What exercises did you botch as a novice?

Which exercises were you royally messing up as a novice, and how long did it take before you learned that your form was incorrect or horrendous?

Just about everything.

Squats were atrocious, but the movement i was doing has lent itself to a better understanding of a powerlifting goodmorning. This has begun to get better over the past 6 months with big improvements in the past 4 weeks.

Bench: Arms flared to 90 degrees or more. Thank God I couldn't press more than 115 starting out. Still room for improvement, but now my shoulders are usually pretty good afterwards.

Deadlift: I really just didn't get it. My body didn't move that way. This is one of the rare cases where trap bar deadlifting saved my ass. It got me to understand the idea of reaching down without flexion in the spine. This is now my favorite it biggest lift. Note that all deadlifts these days are with a straight bar.

Honorable mention: Situps - sitting all the way up on a hard floor wrecked my tailbone after a few weeks. - Lunges helped a lot, previous injury to the area made me prone for irritation back there. (Fell out of a tree as a kid and cracked it)

Dis-honorable mention: When I first started in the gym, trainer had me squatting on a physio ball. We have since parted ways.

Squats...

Feet shoulder width, 1/4 depth and feet pointing forward, knees pointing in... On a smith machine, with a pussy pad :eek:

I realised it was wrong when i tried to do the same weight (45lb on each side) in a squat rack and got stapled :D

Carl.

Mine was bench. I didn't have a clue what I was doing, and beat the snot out of my shoulders for 20 years with flat backed, arms flared, shoulder-destroying nonsense.

Bench too....

It is only recently that I can bench without destroying my shoulders. I never used to arch my back, or keep my feet on the flor to be honest. i though i was 'isolating the pecs' more with only tip toes touching the floor, no leg drive and the small of my back firmly against the bench to use as 'much pec as possible'...

Carl.

Squats...no doubt.

I was doing quarter reps and thinking I was hitting the floor. My knees were way over my toes and my back was rounding horribly. I was an injury waiting to happen. When I finally had a chance to video myself and watch it, I didn't recognize the guy doing the squats; Surely that wasn't me :mad:

I was really lucky on squats. My mentor gave me a few pointers that kept me in the game.

Squats and bench primarily.

My squat form was feet at shoulder width, toes pointed straight forward, and used a pussy pad. I might have had half-depth at first.

Bench was 90 degrees shoulders out, back flat on the bench, no leg drive, no arched back, shoulders flat on the bench.

I'm just glad I wasn't benching very heavy back then or my shoulders would be wrecked.

took me like 2 months to learn the right squat form

my legs were way to close together(kinda like olympic stance)
and coming out of the hole i use to lean forward, almost injured myself for this.

luckily I had a really good coach to help me out and teach me proper form.

Benching was the worst. Squats also took me a couple months, but I got them down pretty fast in comparison.

Easiest by far was the deadlift, press, and barbell row.