Dangerous technique: Buzzword or real thing?

Is the term, ‘dangerous’ as it applies to the weight room and exercise, a buzzword or a real thing? Well, I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Is anything really that dangerous? How common are injuries in weight training?

Sports Injury Rates (1994 Hammill) – Weight training (bodybuilding): less than 1 per 1000 hours of participation. (It has gone up some since 1994)

(2015 BMJ- Injuries in Weightlifting and Powerlifting) – OLY Weightlifting: 2.4-3.3 per 1000 hours of participation. Powerlifting: 1.0-4.4 per 1000 hours of participation.

Of course, this is epidemiology, but you might see that injury in weight training is far less than what you may of thought. For clarification, 1 per 1000 hours is about 1 injury per 4 years if you lifted 5 days a week for about an hour at a time. And keep in mind that ‘injury’ is a tough word to define. For the most part though, injury would essentially be any relatively painful sensation that kept you from operating that body part or muscle group(s) at repeat performance for more than a week. Severity could be a wide range. An injury could be anywhere from a low-grade deltoid strain, that kept you from bench pressing for a week or two- to a torn bicep. This is important to note because I would argue that most injuries that typically occur in the average weight room are not those of the latter.

However, most of the time when exercises are being referred to as ‘dangerous’, or being performed with ‘dangerous technique’, its often a dramatic over-reaction or exaggeration. Not always- but often. I’m a stickler when it comes to technique I’ll admit, but for practical reasons. Once your technique deviates too far from optimal or even ideal technique- what are you even doing? Are you still actually working the intended muscle group(s) as intended? If you’re not skilled enough at squatting to actually squat somewhat properly, why not just do a different exercise? I think it can be a waste of time and maybe due to misdirection but it’s more than likely not dangerous in the sense that any moment within the next 2-3 dozen reps you’re going to experience an injury. Again, this isn’t always the case- I see exceptions to the rule all the time. But the occurrence of injury is a complex thing and the human body just isn’t that fragile.

The honest truth is that there is a substantial correlation between someone’s ability to perform a movement with relatively good technique and how experienced they are. Moreover, there is a high correlation between how experienced someone is and how relatively strong they are. I’d speculate, that if an amount of weight that could cause injury in an instance was being lifted- the person lifting it would have to have a significant level of skill and technique in that movement by definition; or else they wouldn’t have gotten that strong at that exercise. Most of the time when I see someone miss-performing an exercise, it’s rarely with an amount of weight that would actually cause injury in an instance. However, over time or as they get stronger, refining their technique is imperative. If they don’t, injury will inevitably occur whether it takes months or years to happen. But this doesn’t mean that in that moment, they are doing something dangerous.

A further consideration is that injury in the realm of bodybuilding or recreational weight training, doesn’t often ‘just happen’. There is usually ample amount of time before hand (sometimes over the course of months) to have noticed littler pains and impingements. Plenty of time for someone to stop doing what they’re doing and figure out what’s causing their knee or elbow or shoulder, etc., to hurt.

So why is the adjective “dangerous” so often used to describe something. Because it emits authority. When someone is telling us something is dangerous, we listen. In the space of YouTube, Instagram, what have you- people are constantly fighting for others’ attention. And when they have your attention, it’s not for very long. More often than not when someone says not to do something because it’s dangerous- what they mean is that it’s a more technically driven movement than you realize and if you undergo a couple hundred or thousand repetitions without proper technique, injury of some kind will occur. Which could all be avoided if you just did a different exercise in the first place that does the exact same thing but requires much less technique demands or applies less detrimental stress to connective tissue.

Now, don’t let this be a defense case for bad technique. Good technique is necessary for a multitude of different reasons, and bad technique should be addressed. However, the person preaching to you that you are doing something dangerous and that you need to listen to him/her or else you’re going to hurt yourself in the weight room, is more than likely being very over-dramatic. And while you do need to address your technique or else injury is likely to eventually occur- it’s probably not going to happen today. Like I said, the answer is somewhere in the middle.