When to film your lifts and when to put your effing phone away...

As someone who coaches remotely as well as in-person (usually) I know the value of video’s for getting feedback and seeing progress. There are some great features and even apps (more later) that can help a coach and lifter see things that were missed at a first glance. But whether you’re a coach or a lifter or both, there are times when worrying about your filming angle and whether the lighting is ok should be the farthest things from your mind.

Coaches

Learning to see things in real time, learning what rhythm and sounds go along with a ‘good’ lift is hugely important - invaluable even in your development as a coach. It’s my opinion (as well as something I’ve been told by other more experienced coaches) that you can’t learn this skill through a lens.

Personally I also find constantly using my phone for every lift is rude and distracting. When coaching I’d rather be seeing things going on in real time.

Spending hours watching weightlifting in real life with real people is what creates and builds what is known as a ‘coaches eye’. I feel like my coaches eye is relatively good, supported by the fact most if not all the people I coach got or are getting better technically. That isn’t to say that I don’t still need much more experience to be great. I do and I will.

Lifters

Many athletes, in a well meaning attempt to self-correct and learn for themselves end up filming every single lift they do. The problem this creates is the feedback loop gets clogged and dragged out. Pre smart phones how did people get better?

Learning by feel and the feedback from the bar, the ground and the even the sounds of weightlifting can get a bit lost if you’re spending the time you should be thinking, feeling and processing the set going over and watching it, editing it… posting it etc. It also detracts from the club environment whereby instead of watching and supporting team mates you become too self-absorbed and distracted.

If you’re training alone and trying to fix a specific element on a lift I think filming yourself and watching lifts back in the moment can be useful. Just don’t forget that the retrospective knowledge of whether you made the correction HAS TO BE translated into feeling the correction.

Working only remotely during periods of lockdown has created a bit of an over-reliance on video and the associated slow-mo/rewind coaching culture and this has both pro’s and cons. I’ve personally gone through periods of filming everything to periods of filming nothing. Now my approach is to film only PB attempts or lifts where I know something is off but not yet sure what.

In slow-motion you can see more, more easily. The downside being you can see even minute technical errors and become fixated on the wrong things. If you aren’t a coach or don’t have much experience what is the value of knowing something was wrong if you also don’t know how to fix it?

So what are you looking for?

Apps such as Iron Path or WL Analysis track bar path and help you to see the result of an error in body position or timing. Obviously you would need to know both what the error is and therefore why you see the effect on bar path as well as what to do on the next rep differently.

A lot of the time I just use WhatsApp as you can screenshot, draw lines or arrows and highlight the errors that way. This then goes hand in hand with cues or programme changes to fix said errors.

The screen recording function on iPhone’s is also really handy as you can then view the video you’ve got or been sent, rewind it / pause and really hammer home both the error and the result.

Remote technical coaching whether done live via FaceTime or via retrospective video feedback is proving really useful and valuable during this pandemic. Just be careful it’s not a distraction rather than a helpful tool.