Have you ever seen a rocket takeoff? I have. So it's at a dead stop. Massive explosion at the bottom of the rocket. What happens?

Yeah, if no one else did, I'll fill the time. So trap bar versus a squat. So I'm thinking about one of our female teams here. If you were to line them up and pick out the narrowest and tiniest of narrows, most of them have some back pain complaint, and their program is pretty trap bar heavy. I believe I have you on record, but I won't hold you to it, that you'd almost never trap a narrow with the fear of prolonging that middle propulsive phase too much. I was just trying to think about, we can obviously squat narrows without necessarily prolonging that middle propulsive phase too much if done correctly, but I'm trying to think about truly what is the difference? Obviously I know what the trap bar is—I'm starting from the floor. With the squat, I have some tension coming down before I come up, but I was hoping you could hash that out. If I were to look at it purely from a joint angle standpoint, it probably gets someone to hit pretty similar positions. If you look from the bottom up, but I'm trying to figure out what's truly differentiating the squat and what can I manipulate to make that a more acceptable and better exercise for these narrows.

Okay. Have you ever seen a rocket takeoff? I have. Okay. So it's at a dead stop. Right? Massive explosion at the bottom of the rocket. What happens? Nothing happens. It doesn't go anywhere until the force going out of the rocket overcomes the inertia. There's your difference between pulling something off the floor and starting a squat at the top and going down. So as I go down, I am moving into a position of earlier propulsion. Am I not?

It slowly starts to speed up.

Nothing happens. It doesn't go anywhere until the force going out of the rocket overcomes the inertia. There's your difference between pulling something off the floor and starting a squat at the top and going down. So as I go down, I am moving into a position of earlier propulsion. Am I not? And therefore I have connective tissue behavior that is storing energy that will allow me to turn and go in the other direction as I release that connective tissue behavior to produce the energy upward, right?

You are.

And therefore I have connective tissue behavior that is storing energy that will allow me to turn and go in the other direction as I release that connective tissue behavior to produce the energy upward, right?

So if we were to do like a pause squat variation and narrow would almost do the same thing as a trap bar.

Love what you're thinking because if I sit down on a box, I yield a lot and I'm going to dissipate some of that energy depending on how long I'm on the box. So if I did like a five count stop on a box, it's going to be a lot like pulling weight off the floor. It's giving up the energy storage in the connective tissue.

So just like if I wanted to say it like simply and attribute to one thing, the connective tissue behavior aspect is the big differentiator of why the narrow stance does that a little bit more effectively.

Think about energy going upwards. Okay. So how do you put, how do you put tension, overcoming tension on connective tissues that were static prior to the pull? That means I have to go even harder to create the tension on the connective tissues to allow that because I don't have the expanded representation and then the compressed representation. I have to literally produce that within the structure itself. It's like, I have to actively contract a muscle to pull the connective tissues into an energy storing and then release it all at once. It's much more effortful to do so. And you can feel it. All you gotta do is pull something off the floor and do a squat. You go, oh, the squat was just much easier because you could store and release. It's this natural expansion compression, right? Now, if I have to increase the degree of effort to overcome the inertia and I'm a narrow ISA, okay. In what direction am I squeezing and pushing pressure inward? Ian, feel free to share downward, downward. I have to put pressure down against it so I can put pressure up against it. So I'm squeezing. So if the pressure downward is great, I am sticking that person into the ground for a longer period of time than I would prefer. That's the problem. So maybe their deadlift numbers go up, but the duration that is required for them to apply the force to actually make the weight room numbers go up, increases the duration of their application of force into the ground. I've just made somebody slower, right? Because I took them outside of where they apply internal rotation to the greatest degree in the shortest period of time. So it doesn't mean that you would never trap bar deadlift in a narrow stance. It just means you better pay attention to what you're doing and the desired outcome. If it's just chasing weight room numbers and you have no other performance measure to worry about, to your heart's content. But now think about some positioning, think about timing, right? Modulate the load to where they can lift in a reasonable timeframe, right? And you say, I'm keeping you on a time constraint, right? You ever do a top-down deadlift? Yes. Yeah. So you take them out of the rack, like you put the bar in the rack, you take them out of the rack, they start to deadlift from the top, they go down and they come back up. So it looks more like a squat type of behavior. Yeah. Right?

But you keep on thinking. Go ahead.

Well, you keep on time constraint. So you say, you always have to lift within this time frame. This would be where a gadget that might be helpful. It's like a gym aware kind of a thing where it's giving you a velocity, but it's tracking the time. It's like, I always want you to lift within this window of time. We can increase the load as much as we can, as long as you don't exceed that time.

Let's just say how are you determining that time?

Uh, performance. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's the time that's passed out over months and months and months. So you can make a guess.

So if you have a vertical jump, and if you can do it on a force plate or a jump mat or something like that, where you have ground contact time—how long are they pushing into the ground? And you find the sweet spot where they get the best performance with the shortest duration of time. And then that becomes your KPI.

So my question is about something expanding, like the general nature of something expanding. In my head, I always think of that as a narrow ISA person whose nature is they're trying to do this, but we have to do something to counteract that to remain a closed container. We have to try to actively compress ourselves so that we don't just get ripped apart.

Yeah. You get spaghettified, I believe is the appropriate term. Like if you were really close to a black hole, you would be spaghettified.

So what it wouldn't be like at this situation. All right. So the gradient of gravity would be denser. Like if you were laying flat and your feet were closer to the black hole, your feet would get elongated first. It's like watching Wiley Coyote on Bugs Bunny Roadrunner when they chop off the cliff and his body goes down, his neck gets really long, but his head stays and then it snaps down. They'd be like that. For those of you that.

So the gradient of gravity would be denser. Like if you were laying flat and your feet were closer to the black hole, your feet would get elongated first. It's like watching Wiley Coyote on Bugs Bunny Roadrunner when they chop off the cliff and his body goes down, his neck gets really long, but his head stays and then it snaps down. They'd be like that.

And that's sort of like what happens with the neural tension, right? Like it's almost like the nerve move towards the black hole. So like in that case, so if that would be sort of the starting conditions is like, why is there being compressed and they are trying to not be a flanking situation just into oblivion being squished in. So if we're like, but if we're looking at like just from today's call, like their situations were, I mean, I don't know if Zach's patient, I guess it seemed like she would have been on the wide spectrum, but she was her, that when she ended up using for a, what looked like at the foot or in the lower leg is it looks like she was using like a compressive and even further compressive force into the ground. And just the opposite with Greg's where she's like more of a narrow pylon, but she's actually trying to further rip herself off from the ground. So I guess maybe this is a question, but it's like, and maybe I'm trying to oversimplify this too much. Like, how did somebody that's nationally trying to be compressed end up using a strategy where they're further compressing?

Okay, so if I jump on your back. What is your response? You have two options. Okay. You collapse under my load, right?

Yeah.

All right. What is your response? You have two options. Okay. You collapse under my load, right?

Yeah.

Or you push back against me.

Yeah.

Okay. So are you lifting up or are you pushing into the ground?

Let's say I'm pushing into the ground. So what is pushing into the ground look like? ER IR? So shouldn't I have an IR representation? Yes. So where would the IR show up? It's where you have access to it.