You want results…NOW!

Who doesn’t, right? We live in a day and age where we can get just about anything exceptionally quickly. Gourmet coffees, vegan meals on the go, and the same is true with our workouts. In the past, people focused on the basics of healthful body movements such as pushups, jumping jacks, jumping rope, but now, people are blasting through workouts like their life depended on it and wind up looking like they have been cast in the next superhero movie as a result. This is the way to do it if you really want to get in shape…or is it?

While there are certainly arguments for going FAST during a workout (such as when performing High Intensity Interval Training the fact is, focusing on FORM is by far a more important goal in each and every movement you perform. This almost always includes going slow, at least at first.

Here are just a few reasons as to why focusing on form and slowing down your exercises makes sense and it will likely yield better results in the long run:

1. To go fast safely, you NEED to start slow

   Even if your goal is to ramp up some of your movements to breakneck speed, if you aren’t performing them correctly, you may be racing towards a whole lot of nothing. Fast exercises don’t necessarily produce results, ones that are done CORRECTLY do. Start each movement by learning how to do it as perfectly as you can. This means start slowly…watch your form, have someone else watch your form, make any corrections necessary, and only when you feel confident that your performance is correct, then begin to speed up your reps.

2. If you get injured, your speed becomes ZERO

   A huge reason people get hurt when exercising is that they are going too fast. CrossFit, for instance, can be a fantastic full-body workout that burns fat and builds muscle, but the moves can be technical as well as dangerous. If you speed through Olympic lifts without first having learned proper form, you are liable to injure yourself and possibly severely. If you are spending your time recovering from an injury, you are making zero progress towards your goals. Slow down and focus on form until you can perform the exercises with precision. Moving more slowly towards your goals is a heck of a lot faster than not moving at all towards them.

3. Proper form will uncover your weaknesses

   Another excellent (and logical) reason to focus on form over speed is to help uncover weaknesses or imbalances in your body. When you are moving too quickly, you may gloss over underlying issues that could lead to later injuries or increase existing ones that will heed your progress. Maybe your right knee bends a little more inward when performing a thruster, or your ankles rolls a bit when doing squats. Each of these areas can be diagnosed when form is the focus, and not speed. As you uncover these weaknesses, there may be other, more incremental movements that you need to add to your workout to help correct them. While many of us want to just BLAST through the exercise to finish strong, taking to uncover even tiny areas of weakness will likely lead to much more significant gains towards our goals in the long run.

Focusing on form may seem dull. You may feel like you are standing still while everyone around you is moving at 100 miles per hour. But, focusing on form, is smart, healthy, and the most dependable path to long term, injury-free exercise. Are you really serious about reaching your fitness goals? Then put the word FORM at the top of each one of your workouts.