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The Honest Truth about Cheating

The right way to use this powerful training method

Usually when you think of cheating in exercise programs, it’s about people not pushing themselves to handle progressively heavier weights, not reaching for that last rep or perhaps even skipping out on that last set of calf raises. Yes, those certainly are forms of cheating, and they’re considered bad because, as the saying goes, “You’re only cheating yourself.” But there are other forms of cheating, some just as bad and others that are actually good.

Let’s start by talking about technique. In Olympic lifting, the Russians have always promoted the idea of working on technique when you are weak. As such, the early phases of a lifter’s career have always been spent on perfecting technique with the classical lifts of the snatch and clean and jerk before working on strength exercises. What the Russians found is that if a lifter’s technique is good, improvements in strength exercises such as squats have a much better carryover to the lifts. Thus, adding 100 pounds to a back squat might represent a 50-pound improvement in the snatch to an athlete with good technique, but only half that to a lifter with poor technique. Further, if technique is poor, the risk of injury is higher.

My point is that before you consider any cheating methods, perfect your technique in the basic movements first. Unfortunately, for some lifts you need to have someone knowledgeable watch you – and that might mean investing in a personal trainer or strength coach who knows what they are doing. Also, if your technique is not good, it could be a result of an imbalance or flexibility issue that needs to be addressed. Often, this entails doing some isolation-type of exercises to fix the imbalance, or focusing on specific stretches. This is an important point that I cannot stress enough.

One of the first priorities for any trainee, whether it’s for bodybuilding or strength training for a sport, is to ensure that the muscles are in balance. Having muscles that are in balance helps ensure the performance of perfect technique and, ultimately, performance. For example, on May 15, 1998, Jim McKenzie, who was playing for the Phoenix Coyotes at the time he was my client, could bench press 280 pounds with a 14-inch grip and could perform only three reps with eight pounds in a single-arm external rotation. Remember those numbers.

For the next 12 weeks we did not bench press, but we improved his result in the single-arm external rotation to 35 pounds for eight reps. Even though he had not bench pressed, he did 331 pounds in the close-grip bench – a 51-pound improvement! Because at that time he had just been traded to the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, I put him on a three-week bench press specialization program – and on September 10, 1998, he did a 14-inch, close-grip bench press with 380 pounds!

While these results are extraordinary, they are not unusual. This is why the concept of “structural imbalance training” receives so much focus in the first two levels of my PICP classes, with Level 1 addressing upper body imbalances and Level 2 addressing lower body imbalances.

A Closer Look at Reps and Sets
One training principle that I did not come up with but I subscribe to is called the “Technical Limit Principle.” What this principle says is that to get a specific training effect from a specific exercise, the first and last rep of any set should be identical in terms of the bar pathway. Certainly the speed of movement will not be identical due to fatigue, but the movement pattern needs to be the same.

Interestingly, in weightlifting the fastest lifts are not the world records, but usually the first and second attempts with lighter weights because maximal weights slow down the bar speed. As such, if a lifter has a high back squat but the two competitive lifts are relatively weak, a coach would have them focus on lifts of 70 to 90 percent of the max to increase lifting speed. But let’s get away from the medal podium in weightlifting and talk about Johnny Lunch Pail.

If an athlete cannot adhere to the technical limit principle, the trainee should stop the exercise and use lighter weights until their technique improves. Often when I visit gyms across the world, I see Johnny Lunch Pails who have no consistency in their exercise technique. For example, when such a guy performs the bench press, his first rep is lowered two inches above his nipple, the next rep touches his nipple, and the next touches the bottom of his sternum – in other words, the barbell is going all over the place. So although Johnny will record in his training diary that he did 12 reps at X weight, if you look at it realistically, there were almost 12 different exercises throughout that same set. The lesson here is that regardless of what level you are at strengthwise, when you come out of that groove, you should record only those reps that were in that groove.

One example of the importance of perfect technique is the performance of the pull-up. Athletes often try to use lat pulldowns and pull-up trainers to try to improve their results in pull-ups, but they are often frustrated because there is little carryover to this exercise. The reason is that with a pulldown, you move the bar around the body; whereas in the pull-up, you are moving your body around the bar. Likewise, with a pull-up trainer you are locked into a fixed movement pattern that does not closely match the movement of a conventional pull-up. Further, with these machine exercises, the muscles of the trunk that are strongly contracted to stabilize the body during the pull-up do not have to work hard because the trunk is held rigid by the machines. In fact, I understand there is research to suggest that the rectus abdominus contracts harder during a pull-up than during a sit-up.

One question I get asked is if the weight is so heavy on an exercise that you can’t complete it without raising your hips, should you raise your hips to finish out that last rep. Well, if it’s Friday night and you’re alone in the gym, then you probably need to raise your hips so they don’t find you on Monday with the barbell crushing your windpipe! Seriously, completing a bench press by raising your hips may allow you to complete another rep or two, but then you’re changing the technique of the exercise, so it’s not doing you any good. And in the case of the deadlift, cheating by rounding the lower back may enable the athlete to lift more weight (by shortening the level arm), but such rounding places the discs at a high risk of injury.

You should also consider that inconsistency in technique is also really hard on the joints because it’s not a controlled pathway, and it doesn’t make for rapid gains – the body doesn’t know what to adapt to because you’re changing the motor learning recruitment pattern on every rep! This is one reason I don’t like the “boot camp” types of workout that change the loading parameters every workout – the body doesn’t have enough time to adapt to a specific training protocol. (In the General Adaptation Syndrome model developed by Hans Selye, such training would suggest that you would always be in the Alarm phase, never progressing to the Resistance phase and subsequent Supercompensation phase, which creates the greatest gains).

Finally, cheating can develop a false sense of where you are from a structural balance perspective and will interfere with your ability to develop sound training programs. If you perform a cheat curl, you may get the impression that your biceps are stronger than they are. When I do structural balance testing, I use a Seated Scott EZ Bar Curl to assess biceps strength as the upper arm is anchored. This provides me the data I need to determine the structural balance of a client.

Having examined how not to cheat, let’s talk about how to cheat – for good reasons.

Guilt-Free Cheating
One positive application of cheating is that it can enable you to perform a specific type of training protocol. For example, cheating can enable you to bypass the concentric range of many exercises completely and focus on an eccentric contraction. For example, you can power clean a weight and then lower the weight slowly to perform a reverse curl. This is fine, but you need to record this set as an eccentric reverse curl, not a reverse curl.

Cheating movements can be used to prolong the time under tension of an exercise. For example, perform strict military presses for as many reps as possible. Then help yourself through the sticking point with a slight knee kick. Then perform a push jerk (which by jumping your feet out to the sides enables you to lift more weight) and then perform eccentric military presses. This gives you a combination of concentric failure, forced reps, and then negative emphasis – much more bang for your buck!

Speaking of forced reps, that’s another way to extend a set. For example, when Tom Platz performed leg extensions after reaching concentric failure, he would have a training partner assist him to knock out a few additional reps. These would be followed by a few eccentric reps, with the training partner helping to lift the weight to the lockout position.

Probably the ultimate book on how to cheat properly is Jerry Telle’s intriguing book Beyond 2001. Telle, an expert on strength curves, promoted some fascinating theories on how pulleys and cams should be manipulated to accommodate strength curves. (One reason I outfitted the gym in the Poliquin Strength Institute with Atlantis equipment is that Atlantis has done the best job in matching strength curves.) Telle had some interesting theories on prolonging time under tension by changing body position or the way an exercise is performed. For example, during dumbbell flyes, when trainees reach concentric failure, they could prolong the set by gradually increasing the bend in their arms.

As you can see, the issue of whether or not to use cheating methods is not a simple question that can be answered “Yes” or “No.” The best answer is that cheating can have a place in an experienced trainee’s workout, but you have to take an honest approach to its application.