While exercise and the gym are inherently safe if you don’t overtrain, even if poor technique is used, using ‘poor’ technique can negatively affect the intended adaptation of an exercise. For instance, if your aim is to grow your quadriceps using back squats then corrective exercise constraints may be needed to optimise your technique, relative to your goal. To put this simply, you may need to use corrective exercise to improve technique or help increase ROM.

What is Corrective Exercise?

A corrective exercise could be anything that takes you from unintended movement to intended movement, in relation to your end goal. Often, when technique is sub-optimal, we may use verbal cues to try and better the exercise, for instance, ‘drive your knee past your toes’ or ‘keep the bar close to your legs’. But this doesn’t always work. Therefore, we may need to use greater physical measures to force ourselves to use the intended technique.

Top 3 Examples of Corrective Exercise

1 - Heel Raised High Barbell Back Squat

• Unrack a Barbell from a Squat Rack on your upper traps, squeezing your elbows down towards your bum to secure the weight.

• Place your heels onto a Squat Ramp, with your feet just outside shoulder width, facing sightly outwards, approximately 10 and 2 on a clockface.

• Take a deep breath and brace.

• Sit between your knees, driving your knees past your toes, until at your deepest squat position.

• Stand back up to complete rep.

The Squat Ramp helps force your knees over you toes, creating a forward shin angle, allowing you to sit deeply into a squat position, spreading the load between the muscles around the hip and the knees. Once you are comfortable with this technique, you can remove the ramp and look to replicate the same technique without.

2 - Toe Raised Romanian Deadlift

• With a barbell in your hands and your shoulder blades towards your bum, place your toes onto a squat ramp.

• Push your bum back to the wall behind you, brushing your legs with the barbell to keep it close.

• Once you cannot push your bum back any further, stand up, reversing the movement to complete the rep.

The toe raise helps to lock the lower legs in place to avoid the knees excessively travelling forward, therefore stopping the exercise turning into more of a squat and prioritising the hip musculature. Once you are comfortable with this technique, you can remove the ramp and look to replicate the same technique without.

3 - Plyo Box Side Lunge

• Stand with your feet roughly as wide as your wingspan, or slightly narrower, with a 12” Plyo Box placed just inside and behind your right leg.

• Keeping your left leg as straight as possible and your chest proud, sit down to the box.

• Stand back up, driving the floor away with your right leg to complete the movement.

• Repeat on the other side equally to complete a set.

The side lunge, also known as a lateral squat, is a very complex movement with people often struggling to push their hips back, while driving their knee out. Sitting down to the box in this set up helps to force the correct technique so you can laterally load your squat pattern and test your adductors at long muscle lengths.

Remember, exercise is very safe and the key to reducing injuries is not overtraining, so we should never be scared of exercises. However, if you are looking to target certain muscle groups, it is beneficial to use correct technique. So if you struggle, add these corrective exercises to your next session and watch your performance sky rocket! Still struggling? Make sure that you're not overtraining.

Written by guest author Ewan Hammond.

For more content, follow us on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and on our official Mirafit Facebook page.

Tags: Misc > Recovery