Fitness Form Basics: skills checklist

Fitness Form Basics: 15 skills, each with steps, a quiz and a printable checklist, covering form cues for the basic lifts and moves: warm-up, push-up, plank, lunge, row, press, bench, pull-up, swing and carry.

Most people who get hurt starting to exercise are not doing anything exotic. They skip the warm-up, pick a weight because someone else used it, let the hips sag in a push-up, lean back to finish a press, or bench alone with nothing to catch the bar. Good form is a short list of cues per movement, and nobody hands you the list.

This category is that list, one movement at a time: warming up, the push-up, the plank, the lunge, the glute bridge, the dumbbell row, the overhead press, the bench press with safety arms or a spotter, the pull-up and how to build toward one, the kettlebell swing, running form, the farmer's carry, setting up a gym machine for your body and choosing a starting weight. It ends with the most useful skill of all: telling ordinary soreness from an injury.

These pages give form cues only. There are no workout programs, no supplements and no diet advice here, and nothing replaces a clinician's say-so if you have a heart condition, an injury or doubts about exercising. Chest pain during exercise is always an emergency: call 911 in the US.