Originally Posted by
Michael Wolf
One of the main reasons not to use/look at a mirror while performing a lift can be summed up by what Václav Havel once wrote to the general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in a totally different context: "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. To get good at a movement, you must learn to feel what your body is doing in space. This can be done via coach's feedback during and after the set, and/or correlating what you felt with watching yourself in a video after the set and making necessary adjustments. A mirror could theoretically be used to feel out a static position, but this embeds the habit of relying on the mirror instead of learning to feel where your body is in space, which is ultimately what you need to do.