Injury from improper load management vs poor form

Other Discussions Miscellaneous
1

I wasn’t sure of the best place to post this, but the miscellaneous forum seemed like a safe bet. I’ve heard the BBM crew claim a few times that studies have shown poor load management leads to increased risk of injury, but that “poor form” doesn’t result in higher incidences of injury (or something along these lines, don’t want to misquote). I thought this was really interesting, and could help explain why strongmen handle movements with things like atlas stones fine, despite the spine being in a “compromised” position. However, poor form leading to injury is almost universally accepted in the general fitness community.

All that to say, I’m inclined to trust the BBM crew since they’re well qualified to read and interpret peer reviewed literature, but I know that if I ever bring something like this up someone will want to see a source. Does anyone know the journal articles that illustrated these results? I’m more interested in the study(ies) showing poor form didn’t lead to increased risk of injuries, since it’s still pretty intuitive that poor load management would lead to injuries, independent of form.

Thanks for any help!

2

This has been discussed extensively on the forum in old threads, so I’d recommend searching around first.

The heart of the argument is this:

  1. We do have good evidence with respect to load management and injury risk (which have been cited throughout this forum and in our podcast)

  2. We don’t have compelling evidence regarding “poor form” (despite everyone just assuming it to be true based on “logical analysis”, which has a number of issues) … primarily because there is no clear, well-defined, and accepted definition of “poor form”, and we have ample observational evidence of apparent “exceptions” where people suffer pain and injury despite “good” form, and people with supposed “poor” form who do just fine.

So, where should we be focusing our energy with respect to pain and injury? We are arguing that we should focus more on the things that we do have strong evidence for, rather than the things we don’t.

3

Thanks for the quick reply! Framing it that way, as a lack of evidence, makes a lot of sense. I’ll spend some time browsing some older threads to see what was discussed, but that already helps a ton.