Filming Yourself and Why It's Humbling
we've spent three lessons on the squat now, and you've been doing all of it without a mirror, without a coach standing over you, and without any real way to check yourself except how it feels. this lesson is about closing that gap. we're going to talk about filming yourself, which sounds simple and is simple, but the first time you do it, it tends to knock you down a peg. in a useful way.
the feel-versus-look problem
here's the thing nobody tells you when you start training on your own in a garage or a living room. what a movement feels like and what it actually looks like can be two completely different things.
you can feel like your back is straight and have it be rounded like a question mark. you can feel like your knees are tracking fine and have them caving in toward each other. your body is not a reliable narrator when you're new to this, and it's not because you're doing anything wrong on purpose. it's just that you've never had to pay attention to your own squat before. most of us haven't.
so before i had anyone tell me what my form looked like, i decided to tell myself. that meant filming it.
anecdote: the deadlift video
when i was first teaching myself the deadlift, i watched a form video probably fifteen times before i tried it. i felt ready. i felt like i had it memorized — hips back, chest up, bar close to the shins, the whole thing.
then i propped my phone up against a paint can in the garage, hit record, pulled the weight, and watched it back.
i looked nothing like i felt. my back was rounded in a way i had absolutely no sense of while it was happening. in my head i was tall and tight through the spine. on the video i looked like i was trying to fold in half. it wasn't dangerous, the weight was light, but it was a real wake-up call about how far off my internal sense of my own body was from what was actually going on.
i've recommended filming yourself to nearly everyone i've talked to about this since. it closes that gap faster than anything else i know of, including someone standing there correcting you in real time. because when a person tells you "your back rounded," you can sort of argue with it in your head. when you watch it happen on your own phone, there's no arguing with it.
how to actually do this at home
you don't need anything fancy. your phone, propped against something stable — a laundry basket, a stack of books, whatever's around — angled so it catches you from the side. side angle matters most for the squat, because that's where you can actually see your back angle, your knee position, and whether your heels are lifting.
a few practical notes:
- film from the side, not straight on. straight-on video hides almost everything you actually need to see for a squat.
- do three or four reps, not one. the first rep is sometimes your most careful and least honest. by the third or fourth you're moving the way you actually move.
- watch it back before you do another set. don't just collect footage and never look at it. that defeats the purpose.
- watch for the same things we've talked about — knees tracking over your feet, hips going back before they go down, your back staying in a reasonably neutral position rather than rounding.
- don't watch it looking for perfection. you're checking for one specific thing at a time, same as i'd correct one thing at a time in class. if your knees look fine but your back is rounding, that's your one thing to work on this week. don't try to fix everything you see at once.
a word on the discomfort
i'll be honest, most people don't love watching video of themselves. that's normal. it's not about how you look, it's about how you move, and it takes a session or two before you can watch it that way instead of just cringing at the whole thing. give yourself that adjustment period. no worries at all if the first watch is mostly you noticing your posture or your outfit or whatever — that wears off, and then you actually start seeing the squat.
for what it's worth, this is also why i don't put a lot of stock in soreness as a measure of whether something worked. soreness tells you very little. video tells you quite a bit. one is a feeling, the other is evidence.
before next time
if you've got a phone with a camera, which is nearly everyone at this point, try filming one set of your goblet squat before our next session. you don't have to show anybody. just watch it once yourself and see if anything surprises you.