Creating [form-check]?

Question

A community that I've been using to help me at the gym is Reddit's r/formcheck. It is a subreddit dedicated to novice/intermediate lifters posting form check videos and getting feedback.

I was thinking though, I really appreciate the help I've received from Fitness.SE, can I bring my form check videos here?

It seems this has been discussed before with a +8 on the question and a +6 on the only answer; I agree with this post. Personally, the best way to "[improve] your exercise performance or technique" is to get personalized feedback on your work.

The meta-question was asked 8 years ago. Since then, I can find 3 questions (search: "form-check" is:question) that have posted in this manner: Elbow Tension, Stronglifts Form Check, and Deadlift w/ Form Checks. The first post is a photo. The second post is more of what I think we could use. The third post could be but they've removed the videos.

My thoughts:

• A lot of beginners and intermediate level individuals could benefit from form checks;
• Form check style questions could drive more people to our site and generate more questions;
• Fitness.SE is currently set up in an OK fashion to implement form checks;
• Stack doesn't currently host video natively (requires another service, e.g. YouTube);
• Risk of videos getting deleted by users makes older questions obsolete?;
• How do you flag duplicate form checks? Does that even exist?;
• How do you make form check questions searchable?

Possible Actions:

I think we could start by creating a form-check tag.

Questions posted to form-check would be subject to some form-check criteria and requirements. Maybe these could be set out in meta-post? Things like camera angle/elevation/rotation, minimum intensity (?), required reps (?), uploading platform (?), and # of form checks per question.

form-check questions would need to be more than just a title and video. Maybe some sort of self-assessment in the body as well as questions and concerns.

What are the community's thoughts?

Answer 1

I would love to see form check requests as a steady surge of content for the site. There's nothing stopping people from doing it, but I think the lack thereof is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Without seeing it, people aren't getting the "oh, I can do that here?" revelation. I'm sure if it got started, it might catch on.

Developing a tag for it might be a way to go, but tags are more of an afterthought when writing a question, so I don't think its existence will be an automatic trigger for people to start posting videos.

On the topic of videos though, there is the extra step that we have to go via a third-party website for hosting. I don't really see StackExchange making the leap to video hosting, but the deal they have with imgur is a nice way to outsource it. There are probably similar deals to be made with certain video hosting websites. In such a case, YouTube is probably one of the least likely partners, but there are plenty of alternatives out there that are far better, in my opinion.

Answer 2

Per @Alec, I decided to get the ball rolling -- I could use some help anyways! We now have the first question tagged as a form-check: Bench Press Form Check. I think I might try to make a few more of these as I prep for my first power-lifting competition. I'd like to see this catch on and for more people to submit form-checks.

The tag now exists and could use some editing & creating: /tags/form-check/info. I've never edited a tag wiki before so I'd appreciate someone else laying out a skeleton, maybe? I've got some ideas (as listed in this meta post) to contribute.