Progress Not Perfection
Morena all. A relatively quick one today, because Carl is in Auckland at the Exercise NZ conference and Megan is volunteering at the WCPA Cup! Enjoy!
I walked into the gym this week and said to Carl, “Hi. I need to lift heavy. I need to remind my body what it’s capable of.”
Cute that I blamed it on my body, as though it isn’t actually my brain that needs the reminder.
Carl caught the vibe immediately. “Deads? Deads.”
Deadlifts tend to freak people out a bit. They’re the lift with the reputation of “don’t do them, they’ll ruin your back,” and the one where every muscle in your body has to work together to haul a weight off the floor. My boyfriend refers to my lifting as “putting things down and picking it up again. Technically true, but underestimates the complications. Deadlifts look simple. They are not.
Everything matters. A tiny adjustment to stance can turn the lift from chill to impossible. They test grip, hip mobility, and put pressure on the nervous system to coordinate all of that. Biomechanics are fun!
So, we warmed up, then loaded 60kg. It moved easily. Halfway through the first rep, Carl reminded me to start with my routine. (I tend to skip everything except foot placement; too much pre-lift ritual gets me in my head about the number on the plates.)
“How’s my form?” I asked. “Good,” he said. “Why, did something feel off?”
It felt like I was squatting my deadlift — which every fitness influencer on earth will tell you is the worst possible thing you can do.
“That’s how your deadlift always looks,” Carl shrugged. “And we don’t need a stiff-legged deadlift anyway.”
We worked up to 90kg — nowhere near my max, but pretty spicy right now. On the second rep, my back piped up. Not pain, not even a twinge — just a reminder that the whole reason I do the routine is to make sure I am looking after my back.
People sometimes ask me for deadlift or RDL form tips. I always say two things: I’m not a coach, and I don’t know your body. And then I wax lyrical about hip hinges.
My deadlift looks different to Carl’s. Different from the influencers. Different from yours. Because it’s mine — shaped by my hamstring length, my glute strength, and the thickness of the calluses on my hands.
Social media worships “perfect form.” Scroll any woman lifting and you’ll see the inevitable chorus of men telling her what’s wrong with her technique. But form doesn’t look the same on every body. It can’t. The point is whether it feels right — whether it loads the right tissues, whether it’s safe, whether it lets you build strength instead of ego that leads to injury.
That feeling comes from reps. Through RDLs that you can actually feel in your glutes instead of your lower back. Through trap-bar pulls. Through b-stance and single-leg variations. Through finding the cue that makes a hip hinge make sense instead of just bending forward.
Every once in a while I catch some snark about posting lifts on Instagram, the inference being I am only filming at the gym for that. The opposite is true - Insta is a byproduct of filming my lifts so I can look at the form. Was my back straight, were my knees over my toes, did I pause for long enough? I look at them so I can improve them.
(Well, that and so I can make compilations of snapping off my belt after a heavy squat - those ones are defs just for Instagram.)
You learn your hinge pattern the same way you learn everything else: slowly, repeatedly, with attention and intention. And then you know it so well that, when the bar gets heavy, your body knows exactly what to do.
Lifting 100kg from the ground feels amazing. Doing it for reps feels even better. Especially when the only thing that aches is the part that’s meant to.
Lifting isn’t about perfection. It’s about progression. As in life and all that.
Carl here - This is a really important topic, and one I’ve reshaped over the years through both experience and emerging research. I used to believe that when you lunge your knee should never pass your toes, or that during a shoulder press your shoulders must stay locked “down and back.”
Then I started asking myself: does that actually match how we move in real life? Try running uphill while keeping your knees behind your toes. Or reaching for the top cupboard without letting your shoulder elevate. It just doesn’t happen.
Now, I’m not saying form isn’t important, it is, but we also need to apply some common sense and a more balanced approach that includes the latest injury research. The growing body of research suggests that technique alone isn’t the main driver of injury.
Instead, the biggest predictor is usually poor load management: doing too much too fast, trying a new variation without adequate conditioning, or making sudden spikes in volume or intensity. Multiple reviews now highlight that rapid increases in load are consistently associated with higher injury risk, whereas people who build capacity gradually tolerate more load with fewer issues.
Therefore, “imperfect” form doesn’t automatically mean danger. Take elite Olympic lifters, some of the strongest people on the planet. It’s common to see a bit of knee valgus (knees in) or knees passing toes at the bottom of a heavy lift. Yet they stay healthy because their capacity matches the load. When we did our powerlifting competition recently, I saw a huge amount of really strong, pain free lifters lifting their max efforts with banana backs!
So instead of obsessing over rigid, universal form rules, a more useful approach is: Move well enough for your body, build strength progressively, manage load sensibly, and allow time for adaptation. Technique matters, but it matters most when combined with appropriate loading, conditioning, and progression.