Why We Don't Use Mirrors to Evaluate Our Own Lifts

[I_iz_a_fatass]

What about those of us who don't have access to coaching? I use a mirror as a reference to gauge whether or not certain things are happening with my squat, and then try to remember how those things felt, physically, when they are correct. I suppose the danger with this is that a coach is always going to be more knowledgable about what the movement should look like than yourself, but for small things like making sure the knees are set, or figuring out what proper depth feels like (using the SS book as a guide, of course), it has been a useful tool for me. I'll glance at the mirror a couple times during my warm ups, then go off of feel with my work sets.

I video all ID lifts and watch the raw video within a minute of completing the set. After the session I upload to an unlisted YouTube channel, trim and brighten the video and watch it at half speed a few times.

This, combined with my notebook - which includes things I felt wrong and right with a set or single rep - keep me on form.

[Michael Wolf]

I video all ID lifts and watch the raw video within a minute of completing the set. After the session I upload to an unlisted YouTube channel, trim and brighten the video and watch it at half speed a few times.

This, combined with my notebook - which includes things I felt wrong and right with a set or single rep - keep me on form.

franc, I highly recommend this approach over a mirror. I think the very few cases where a mirror could be useful are also predicated on either having a coach show you, or being knowledgeable (or nearly so) enough to be a coach yourself. Otherwise you'll almost certainly fuck it up.

[tfranc]

I hear ya man. Someone was agitating for a Twin Cities seminar not too long ago in Rip's Q&A I think. Was that you? Midwest stuff hasn't been nearly as popular as coastal and southern seminars in terms of attendance, but we will be in St. Louis in a few months.

Haha, yes, it was. Everyone here is too polite to ask for what they need. Huh, that's so interesting, I wonder why. Even when you guys hit up Chicago? St. Louis.. I check my calendar.

I video all ID lifts and watch the raw video within a minute of completing the set. After the session I upload to an unlisted YouTube channel, trim and brighten the video and watch it at half speed a few times. This, combined with my notebook - which includes things I felt wrong and right with a set or single rep - keep me on form.

franc, I highly recommend this approach over a mirror. I think the very few cases where a mirror could be useful are also predicated on either having a coach show you, or being knowledgeable (or nearly so) enough to be a coach yourself. Otherwise you'll almost certainly fuck it up.

You guys are so right, thank you so much. I tried this last session and it was amazing. I've squatted facing a mirror for the longest time, but I always thought I had trained myself well to ignore my reflection (yeah, right) and look at the reflection of the floor. You were totally right about information overload. I never realized how much I was paying attention to what my squat looked like and not enough to what it felt like. I always felt like I could never "find my groove" with the squat, but now I think it's because I've never let myself just learn the damn thing and instead paid attention to my reflection, never letting myself just get comfortable with a consistent movement - always making micro-adjustments.

I moved the hooks to the other side of the rack and all these issues I've been having recently - staying over the middle of the foot, keeping my head down, keeping my knees out, hitting a consistent depth, even chronic hip pain, all immediately went away and the videos showed it. I feel dumb for not just doing it sooner. To non-believers - If you can do all the other lifts without a mirror, then you can squat without one too. Not only can you, but you will be a better squatter.

[MattBraunstein]

I agree with not using mirrors. With any type of movement pattern, I've found the best solutions are one's that give some sort of objective physical feedback. A perfect example would be TUBOW. It's something that you don't have to think about and will immediately tell you if your knees are sliding forward. Trying to do something like this by looking in a mirror is impossible. The hardest part is usually comjng up with something like this.

[risepmj]

I've trained and worked at Oly WLgym for 9years.I've seen and observed conutless examples of that like WLers is out of the balance and couldn't catch when snatching in front of the mirror but that WLers had a better balance and a performance without a mirror,even they had a PR.It was seems like to me they don't analyze what is works better and what is works less.I was tired to see that habits but now i gave up.Do my own business.

[Michael Wolf]

You guys are so right, thank you so much. I tried this last session and it was amazing. I've squatted facing a mirror for the longest time, but I always thought I had trained myself well to ignore my reflection (yeah, right) and look at the reflection of the floor. You were totally right about information overload. I never realized how much I was paying attention to what my squat looked like and not enough to what it felt like. I always felt like I could never "find my groove" with the squat, but now I think it's because I've never let myself just learn the damn thing and instead paid attention to my reflection, never letting myself just get comfortable with a consistent movement - always making micro-adjustments.

I moved the hooks to the other side of the rack and all these issues I've been having recently - staying over the middle of the foot, keeping my head down, keeping my knees out, hitting a consistent depth, even chronic hip pain, all immediately went away and the videos showed it. I feel dumb for not just doing it sooner. To non-believers - If you can do all the other lifts without a mirror, then you can squat without one too. Not only can you, but you will be a better squatter.

You're welcome, Franc.

I've trained and worked at Oly WLgym for 9years.I've seen and observed conutless examples of that like WLers is out of the balance and couldn't catch when snatching in front of the mirror but that WLers had a better balance and a performance without a mirror,even they had a PR.It was seems like to me they don't analyze what is works better and what is works less.I was tired to see that habits but now i gave up.Do my own business.

So what you're saying is that, like almost every other human being, weightlifters are not always purely rational, machine like beings only focused on absolute efficiency, and sometimes replace rational self interest with things like feelings and ego, which they value as well? I agree completely.

[Rob Thomson]

"By trying to imitate the real world that has already changed before our imitation can be constructed, we end up falsifying the real world." By the time you see what happened, process it, and are in a position to change/react to it, it's already too late and you're in a different part of the movement, for which your correction is no longer relevant and may even be counterproductive.

I think the other reasons you stated are far better than this one, primarily because sound travels much more slowly than light. So, if my visual perception from the mirror is too slow to be relevant, a coach's oral cue is even slower and therefore less relevant.

I'm not arguing that mirrors > coaches, just that the quoted logic is fallacious. There are plenty of reasons coaches are awesome and mirrors suck, but speed of perception is not one of them.

For example, if my coach is standing 3 feet away, and there is a mirror 3 feet in front of me, it will take 6 nanoseconds for me to perceive my reflection, not accounting for the time it takes my brain to process the information. It will take my coach 3 nanoseconds to perceive my fault, a second or two to verbally cue me, and 3 million nanoseconds (3 milliseconds) for his cue to reach my ears. Give or take.

[Michael Wolf]

I think the other reasons you stated are far better than this one, primarily because sound travels much more slowly than light. So, if my visual perception from the mirror is too slow to be relevant, a coach's oral cue is even slower and therefore less relevant.

I'm not arguing that mirrors > coaches, just that the quoted logic is fallacious. There are plenty of reasons coaches are awesome and mirrors suck, but speed of perception is not one of them.

For example, if my coach is standing 3 feet away, and there is a mirror 3 feet in front of me, it will take 6 nanoseconds for me to perceive my reflection, not accounting for the time it takes my brain to process the information. It will take my coach 3 nanoseconds to perceive my fault, a second or two to verbally cue me, and 3 million nanoseconds (3 milliseconds) for his cue to reach my ears. Give or take.

While I am no expert in the neuroscience here, I have a ton of experience lifting in front of mirrors, lifting without mirrors and with coaching, coaching with mirrors, and coaching without mirrors. I think the bolded part that you dismissed is very important. A cue, by definition, can be reacted to. That is not at all the case with a lifter, under a heavy load trying to deal with all of the things that go along with it, trying to figure out what is wrong based on a one-dimensional mirror view, come up with a cue for herself, and then react to that cue.

It is of course also true that, while a cue can be given during any the 4 strength lifts (due to their slower nature than the olympic lifts, which can really only be cued beforehand), much (probably most) of the cueing is done between reps, based on the coach's uninhibited ability to see how closely the lifter was conforming to the model. A lifter who attempts to do this herself, based on having a mirror in front or to the side, will not have that same uninhibited vision due to the combination of less ideal angles as well as our human limitations on focus - feeling where we are in space at the same time as looking in a mirror to try to see what's going on has never, in my thousands of hours of experience observing that in globo gym days of yore, actually worked.

[Charlie Davies]

Over 6 feet, light reaches you 6 milliseconds faster, this advantage is not large enough to matter.

Human reaction time to auditory cues is about 160 milliseconds.
Human reaction time to visual cues is longer, 190 milliseconds.
Source: Mental chronometry - Wikipedia

But this is probably irrelevant too -- the constraint is in recognizing the problem and choosing a cue in time.

I can usually spot my form flaws and devise a plan for fixing them upon reviewing the video 2-3 times after a lift. Which is why I'm not a coach.

[Culican]

I think the other reasons you stated are far better than this one, primarily because sound travels much more slowly than light. So, if my visual perception from the mirror is too slow to be relevant, a coach's oral cue is even slower and therefore less relevant.

I'm not arguing that mirrors > coaches, just that the quoted logic is fallacious. There are plenty of reasons coaches are awesome and mirrors suck, but speed of perception is not one of them.

For example, if my coach is standing 3 feet away, and there is a mirror 3 feet in front of me, it will take 6 nanoseconds for me to perceive my reflection, not accounting for the time it takes my brain to process the information. It will take my coach 3 nanoseconds to perceive my fault, a second or two to verbally cue me, and 3 million nanoseconds (3 milliseconds) for his cue to reach my ears. Give or take.

This was addressed in a show on PBS I saw about vision (sorry it was a few years ago, can't remember the name). They posed the question, "Why are starting guns used instead of starting lights if sound travels more slowly than light?' The answer given was that the auditory system is much quicker in the brain. Your eye is not a camera. Most of what you see is formed in your brain, not in your eye, and this process is relatively slow. Supposedly the gun vs light scenarios have been tested and runners are always quicker to respond to a starting gun than to a starting light.