Improving Your Athletic Form

Form and technique are essential elements of performing well and avoiding injury. It’s a common reason for why we seek out couches and trainers, to help us learn. Good?form is important for everything from using weights at the gym, running marathons, to doing yoga and playing sports.

Bad form is one of the biggest reasons we get injured. The body is made to move certain ways, trying to force into others leaves us susceptible to tearing, ripping, or breaking something. Now, with tech becoming one of our goto tools in our fight for good health and fitness, we find apps that are claiming to help us improve our form. Are they effective? The NY Times looks for an answer:

In general, these apps base their portrayals of good form on what the developers personally consider to be established coaching practices in the sport in question.

Unfortunately, from a scientific standpoint, the perfect form for almost any sporting technique remains elusive.

The problem with establishing one best way to move, Dr. Keogh said, is that if you look at successful professionals, many of them have very idiosyncratic techniques.

So for most activities, there is no single, quantifiable ?best? form, Dr. Keogh said, or every top performer would employ it.

Clearly this issue makes it difficult to be reliable. We’re each a unique person and as such what works for one person might not work for us. Then again, as tech and science improve, it’s unreasonable to think that we’ll have apps that can personally improve on our form alone. Check out the full post for all the details and reviews.