3 Tricks To Get More Out Of Your Training Video
As I was growing up, I found that I really loved drawing. Some of my earliest memories are sitting with my dad and having him work with me on my doodles. I really found that I enjoyed drawing superheroes, so a lot of our discussions were about the form and proportions of the muscle bound characters I was drawing.
Whenever a character was doing anything besides looking straight at me in the drawing, I had trouble figuring out where the muscles were supposed to connect. I remember expressing these frustrations to my parents, and soon thereafter getting my first anatomy books to help. The result was that I could list off most of the major muscle groups of the body and tell you what they did, all before I was headed off to Junior High School.
It only took a couple of years before football, wrestling, and weight training took over as my biggest passion, but I found that I never really lost that eye for detail. As I started lifting in different weight rooms and getting exposed to different athletes, I was always looking at their technique and form the way that my dad and I did as a kid with my sketch book.
Now I’ve been training for over 16 years. I’ve trained with hundreds of athletes and seen thousands of reps, and I’m still scrutinizing each one. Nowadays watching training videos and helping people find the issues in their technique is one of the best things about my job.
In this article, I wanted to share with you a few of the techniques that I use when I’m watching my athletes’ training videos so that you can use them to help evaluate your own videos. Obvious things stand out to everyone but these techniques help me catch the more subtle technical faults and get a jump on issues before they manifest into imbalances and injuries.
Stick Figures
When you start learning to draw characters, you always start with a stick figure. Using a combination of lines and spheres you outline the body that you plan to draw to make sure that the arms, legs and torso are all proportional and positioned correctly.
If you’re going to draw a picture of something that already exists, like a picture of an athlete or something, you need to be able to see the stick figure in the subject. Doodling over these pictures with tracing paper was something I’d do all the time as practice.
You develop the ability to see those sticks and spheres in real time as you watch an athlete perform. This helps you to evaluate their limb lengths and the leverages that they create. It also lets you analyze imbalances and other issues related to positioning.
Take these three lifters as an example:
If you really focus in on the joints and the lines of the bones that attach them, you can start see them like an x-ray and pop the stick figure out from the photo. Here are the same photos with a stick figure drawn over the top of the athletes.
Now this can give you an idea of what we’re getting at, but to really be able to see things, you’ll want to try to extrapolate the stick figure from the image. If we take the actual photos out of the photos, we’re left with just the stick figures like this:
With this image, we can actually start to see some things about our athletes. One of the things that sticks out to me is that the athlete on the left has a pretty short torso. The torso, torso, and tibia are all about the same length. This is going to have implications for their training program and will help us make decisions about the exercises he uses.
Negative Space
When you’re drawing a picture, the subject of the picture is the positive space and the space around it is the negative space. A lot of times it’s hard to tell what is going wrong in your picture by only analyzing the positive space, but when you look at the negative space it all becomes apparent.
The same goes for watching athletes train. If you can take your eyes off the athlete specifically and watch the space around them grow and shrink as they move, some imbalances that were otherwise tough to see can start to stick out.
Take a look at these lifters:
Just looking at the lifter alone, everything might appear to be in perfect order. Only when we start to doodle on the photo to really outline the negative space do we see that there are some asymmetries in both athletes’ torsos:
Looking at the negative space you can see that the athlete on the left is getting more elevation of his left scapula than he is on the right. The athlete on the right is getting more elevation in his left scapula than he is on his right.
These observations alone may not answer our questions, but combined with training tape from other movements and their reflections on how movements have felt, we can make better decisions about the exercises and mobility work that we prescribe.
The negative space trick is most useful in situations where the athlete is performing a compound movement that should be symmetrical. It can help to catch things like hip shift in the squat, or imbalance in positioning in a front rack.
Visual Landmarks
Another trick that I learned in my art classes was using objects in the photo that weren’t the subject to help me get the proportions right. There might be a key object in the background that you can use to make sure that your character’s leg is the right length, or maybe there’s something in the foreground that you can use to make sure the head is the right shape.
Whatever it happens to be, using the entire picture to your advantage is extremely helpful when you’re trying to make something look as much like a perfect copy as you can.
When it comes to reviewing film from athletes, I find myself referencing different objects or fixed lines in the video to use as a guide to evaluate technique. For this trick, I’m going to use myself as an example. Check out this picture of me competing at the Rainier Classic in 2021:
Using the window of the truck as a reference, you can tell that the axle isn’t level with the ground. That has to mean that somewhere in the system there is an unbalance. In addition, using the lines of the matting on the floor, you can see that the feet aren’t straight with the mat.
This image is taken out of context of the lift, but using this trick I could tell that I was actually twisting as I hit my dip/drive on the push jerk. I also found that my right scap was slightly depressed relative to my right.
Again, this doesn’t necessarily answer any huge questions, but it can help add to the overall picture. Using this information I knew where I needed work as I moved on to my next competition.
Conclusion
Using these three tricks, you should be able to make better use of your own training footage. Even if you have a coach review your film, practicing these skills can make video review between sets more impactful to the overall session. You might also be able to make more sense of the cues that your coach is giving you.
Reviewing athlete films is a passion of mine. If you think I might be able to glean something from your training video that you haven’t already found, please feel free to tag me and let me know!
Until then, I hope this helps you get better in the weight room even faster.
Go Team!
Coach Bogard.