I advocate that everyone trains with their form as close to perfect as possible…but also realizing that no one is perfect. I have had this discussion a number of times with different coaches…the “acceptable” movement varies wildly from one person to another. I am obviously very conservative as I have seen plenty of bad injuries from seemingly trivial movements (like bending over to pick up the soap!)

Because no one is perfect, the risk of injury goes up…the further you stray from perfection, the higher the likelihood you have of injury…

So train hard, train safely and work on your weaknesses.

So we are doing 10 strict pull ups. Any deviation from perfect, arching of the back, poking of the chin, twisting, etc would be a no-rep. So you try and you do 7 and on your 8th you no-rep (it was a bad one). You rest, do another good one but then you go for the 10th but again, it isn’t a good rep. So you call the end of your set there…by my count, you have 8 good reps, 2 no-reps. That is 80%. The 2 tries count as far as I am concerned from a physio because they involved effort. I would record 8 good reps and 2 failed reps.

I think the above scenario is a realistic one – have a go or two at getting those struggle street reps out. But if you can’t do it properly, then end it there for safety’s sake and scale the rest of them.

That is how i got to the “80% of the time” figure…

Training and competition are different – within reason, do what you need to in comp but if you are doing more bad-form reps than good, you are at serious risk of some sort of injury

You know when you break a PB like your 1RM snatch? You know it was ugly – your knees buckled a bit, you were off balance in the hole, you struggled to stand it up but you got there…that feeling of achievement is AWESOME right? Mentally, now you know you can lift that weight and you are likely to be able to do it again really soon. But it was what I call “an ugly PB”… if we talk long enough, you will hear me talk of my 1RM’s as ugly or good. My squat clean 1RM is 190lbs (I was at Crossfit Active on a course at the time – bloody pounds!) Anyway, it was a pretty good lift. Some wobbling but fairly clean. I recently did 2 hang squat cleans at 82.5kg – they were clean too… I tend to bail out of lifts if they get ugly. I could probably fight more but it don’t see the point…I need to be able to work as a physio, not lift 2.5kg more. I got a strict ring dip out months ago but it was UGLY. So ugly that my shoulder motor control is still not quite right (it would help if i did more rehab on it!!) So, I don’t do ugly anymore!