What We Lose When We Only Lift With Perfect Form

We’ve had this question come up quite a bit lately, and the answer has a bit more nuance than social media usually allows for.

First off, we’re mostly outside, and the barbell doesn’t really like being outside.

If you’re in a gym and a barbell is what you have to express strength, great. They’re a useful tool, you can easily add or decrease weight, and they pack away nicely. Barbell training is a skill that rewards precision, consistency, and control. Anyone who’s spent time learning how to squat, clean, push press or snatch well knows how much timing, coordination, and awareness are involved.

But we lose so many opportunities to build strength in practical ways when the object we use is so perfectly proportioned. The skill of barbell lifting is highly specific, it’s designed for measurable progression and competition, not the unevenness of real life. You get very good at lifting a specific object, in a specific way.

That doesn’t make it less valuable, it’s just one slice of the strength spectrum. The barbell teaches discipline, focus and repetition, but if that’s the only place you ever practice strength, it can narrow your experience. I’ve been surprised how little barbell strength carries over to helping your friends move furniture or appliances.

When you move away from it, you quickly realise how much of our collective knowledge about lifting comes from the gym. The cues, the rules, even what we picture when we say “good form,” most of it was shaped by that single tool.

Many of the “rules of movement” we take for granted are really conventions borrowed from specific sports or lifting traditions, some aesthetic, some about performance or safety or competitive strategy in those environments. Outside that context, they don’t always make sense.

We were quoted in a recent article for Breathe Magazine. It was nice to be included, but also a bit frustrating, as the piece leaned heavily on advice from a GP and personal trainer that, while familiar, now feels outdated or overly simplistic.

There’s growing evidence showing that injuries often don’t come from using your back “wrongly,” but from the body not being prepared for a given position or challenge. For example, Dr Deepali Misra-Sharp’s comment that “one of the most common mistakes is bending from the waist instead of using the knees” reflects this older narrative. It frames movement in terms of “right” and “wrong” techniques, which can increase fear rather than build confidence. (Even the concept of using ones’ ‘waist’ feels like a term from a past era.)

It’s not that science says these rules are false, it’s that science is a process, and our understanding keeps evolving. Many of these movement “rules” were never about universal human biomechanics; they were about particular sports or lifting contexts or filling out risk analyses Or sometimes they were broad generalisations drawn from poorly designed or very short term studies. And of course, for some people, because of pain, injury history, or mobility limits, certain positions genuinely won’t feel good or be appropriate. But that’s not the same thing as calling them wrong. (I might say they’re a bad match for a given person, based on their current capacities.)

In the real world, every lift looks different. The objects you’re picking up vary in shape and size, the ground is uneven, and your body proportions rarely match the textbook diagrams online. Even your “why” changes your form, compare the set-up for a deadlift with an Olympic clean and you’ll see that “perfect form” is relative. (Both lifts are tools for picking up a heavy barbell, one to the hips, one to a front rack position. Hip height, trunk position, grip, and muscle sequences are very different even if they’re superficially similar.)

To assume there’s only one right way to lift is absurd. It’s the same kind of thinking that once claimed women shouldn’t ride bicycles because it might over-excite their nervous systems. That was genuinely a thing...

If you train yourself only inside the narrow rules of a gym, you might find yourself underprepared when life throws you something messy or unpredictable. Injuries often happen not because we moved “incorrectly,” but because our bodies are unused to variability.

You didn’t hurt your back moving that box at work because you lifted it wrong, you hurt yourself because most of us are under-trained for the awkward, asymmetrical, real-world movements life demands. By gradual exposure to similar positions and forces over a few months, the same person who would have hurt their back lifting that awkward box in the office, would probably be able to heave it up to the shoulders and carry it with very low risk. It’s the novelty of the stress meeting the edges of ones’ capacities that are often the cause of acute lifting injuries.

There aren’t really right or wrong positions, just strong and less-strong ones or adapted and unadapted. Nobody’s suggesting you should lift heavy loads with a rounded spine or hastily jerk your way through a movement. But it’s unrealistic, and unhelpful, to pretend your body should never express strength in certain positions it’s naturally capable of moving through given appropriate exposure and preparedness.

The rise of so-called functional fitness, often associated today with CrossFit, Hyrox, and similar trends, has its roots in older training ideas. The term originally referred to training that supported everyday capability: balance, coordination, and the ability to move well in varied environments. But when applied to sport or competition,  the movements had to be standardised. In codifying movement, much of the original function was lost or decontextualised. What started as a broad approach to adaptable strength became a relatviely narrow set of exercises optimised for scoring. That doesn’t make these systems bad; they’re great for building community and specific strength. But they’re confined by their rules, and real life requires much more adaptability and resilience than can be learned in these spaces.

Lastly, a word on tools. Strongman sandbags or other odd objects are cheap, almost impossible to break, and promote all sorts of movement opportunities you’d never think of with a barbell. They shift, sag, and surprise you, which is exactly what makes them so good for building real-world strength and adaptability. The cost of kitting out a well appointed, professional-style gym can easily run into the tens of thousands of pounds. This is a serious barrier we should consider when trying to promote strength training. By showing people that they can often enjoy superior returns on investment from a few sandbags, we can begin to make strength-based physical activity more accessible to the people who’d most benefit from it.