Good morning. Happy Monday. I have neuro coffee in hand and it is perfect. Coming up a very solid weekend, ready to dig into a very busy work week. We're going to go straight into these Q&A. This is with Dale. Dale's a very accomplished powerlifter, close to 800 pound squat. We were talking about how to utilize the box squat in his favor to perhaps evolve some qualities that he may have given up in return to be able to squat 800 pounds. One of the reasons we really like the box squat is because it is so versatile. We can use it for pubic outlet issues. We can use it for managing internal forces. It's a very useful activity for those larger human beings that you typically wouldn't want to do bouncy, bouncy kind of things with, but still get the effect on the connective tissues. Again, very useful. We break this down with Dale as to what he may want to utilize in his box squat. Since he is so accomplished, but he is getting a little bit older, kind of like yours truly. Very helpful Dale. Thank you for being there. Thank you for asking your question. If you'd like to participate in a 15 minute consultation, please go to askbillhartman at gmail.com. Please put 15 minute consultation in the subject line so I don't delete it. Please include your question in the email. We will arrange that at our mutual convenience. Everybody have an outstanding Monday and I will see you tomorrow. Is this your first question ever?

First question ever.

Oh man, everybody hold on.

I've watched a couple of your videos on box flooding. That's something I've been doing since the 70s. So I've had a lot of experience doing them. Never really understood some of the things that I've seen up until I saw your model. And I realized that, yes, there are a lot of caveats to teach your architect type, whether it's wide or narrow, right? Yes. My understanding from what I'm, if I'm understanding this right, me being a wide, I'm going to be more concentrically oriented.

Okay.

And I realized that, yes, there are a lot of caveats to teach your arch type, whether it's wide or narrow, right? Yes. My understanding from what I'm, if I'm understanding this right, me being a wide, I'm going to be more concentrically oriented. Yes sir.

Yes sir.

Is the best strategy for me at that point, or let's say for athletes that have a good range already, right? To barely touch the box and come up or to sit and try to yield more.

Okay, so we have to decide what the intention is. And when I say that, the intention would be based on what is the limiting factor for you, okay? Under most circumstances, most circumstances, because you carry more concentric orientation, because of the shape of your pelvis being biased towards exhalation, which means that the pelvic outlet, the anterior outlet, so the bottom of the pelvis pushes up really, really well. And your connected tissue behavior would be biased towards overcoming under most circumstances. To make you more overcoming probably won't help. Okay. And again, not knowing you, I would say probably, okay. So this is why, you got a powerlifting background, Dale?

Yes. Yeah, powerlifting, yeah.

I figured when you, when you said 70s and box squats, I figured, right?

Yes, I trained on a half field.

Oh, you did?

Yeah, Dr. Squat, yeah.

Okay. Yeah, no, I know who it was, dude. Still, still the best, like the Hawaiian record breakers meet where he did the 2014. In less than two seconds. That's amazing. And it was deep. It was deep. Arguably still the best squat that's ever been performed in history. Okay. So let's go back to the squat thing. Okay. Um, okay. So. Again, because of your concentric bias, because of your extensive nature of training, you're going to have a great deal more of connective tissue stiffness through adaptation, like I said, and training, and then structural bias. And so for you to be able to utilize the energy that is stored in releasing connective tissues in most cases, you're probably going to be using strategies that would create the yield, which means that you need to deload to the box. Now there's a bunch of ways to tweak that as well. So you've seen like the, they put like the couch foam top of the box. Okay. So what the couch foam does is it prolongs the duration of the deceleration, which again adds more yield action to the exercise versus just sitting down in the box and expanding on the box. And so again, there's a whole bunch of strategies that you're utilizing here. But generally speaking, you're gonna be a guy that has to deload to the box because you need to create a yield somewhere typically where that's gonna be for you. It's like you're gonna use your skeleton a fair amount, right? And then the deload to the box is gonna, depending on how long you're there and loads and such, it's gonna determine like how you're gonna distribute that yield through the other connective tissues. Because if you were touching go, you would not yield very long at all. Therefore the amount of energy that you would store in your connected tissues would be reduced. Okay?

Yeah, I had the video on my phone.

In less than two seconds. That's amazing. And it was deep. It was deep. Arguably still the best squat that's ever been performed in history. Okay. So let's go back to the squat thing. Okay. Um, okay. So. Again, because of your concentric bias, because of your extensive nature of training, you're going to have a great deal more of connective tissue stiffness through adaptation, like I said, and training, and then structural bias. And so for you to be able to utilize the energy that is stored in releasing connective tissues in most cases, you're probably going to be using strategies that would create the yield, which means that you need to deload to the box. Now there's a bunch of ways to tweak that as well. So you've seen like the, they put like the couch foam top of the box. Okay. So what the couch foam does is it prolongs the duration of the deceleration, which again adds more yield action to the exercise versus just sitting down in the box and expanding on the box. And so again, there's a whole bunch of strategies that you're utilizing here. But generally speaking, you're gonna be a guy that has to deload to the box because you need to create a yield somewhere typically where that's gonna be for you. It's like you're gonna use your skeleton a fair amount, right? And then the deload to the box is gonna, depending on how long you're there and loads and such, it's gonna determine like how you're gonna distribute that yield through the other connective tissues. Because if you were touching go, you would not yield very long at all. Therefore the amount of energy that you would store in your connected tissues would be reduced. Okay?

Okay.

So if you were training for a competition, you need to transition into the touching go because that's what you're going to end up doing in competition. You teach yourself to store and release more energy. And then you try to teach yourself to do that in a shorter period of time. So the time that you're on the box is a certain length of time. And then eventually you want your connective tissues to be able to store and release energy a little bit faster. This is going to change the duration that you're spending on the box. And then you're going to slowly take away the box. So you get the amount of yield and overcome that you can produce, again, because there's no boxing competition, obviously.

Right. So as a follow up, one of the things I noticed in the videos was where they came down to the box and then leaned back. You have to de-load. You have to put pressure down. OK. That was just something we'd never done. And I saw that and I was going to agree. We'd always stayed away from any type of momentum for what we were trying to accomplish. I was trying to understand that point. What you're seeing is the load of weight onto the box to create the yield.

You have to de-load. You have to put pressure down.

OK. That was just something we'd never done. And I saw that and I was going to agree. We'd always stayed away from any type of momentum for what we were trying to accomplish. I was trying to understand that point.

What you're seeing is the load of weight onto the box to create the yield. Okay. Good morning. Happy Tuesday. It is perfect. All right. Crazy busy Tuesday. We're going to dig straight into today's Q&A. This question is with Alec. And Alec's question led us in a really cool direction in regards to talking about how we take measures and how we perceive measures. And one of the things we always talk about is dirty measures, which means that there's a lot of movement that's taking place within our measures. And so if we were measuring someone's hip, for instance, the thing we have to recognize is that it's not just the hip joint as it's implied. As we are often taught in school. And so what we have to recognize is that we're not just measuring a hip joint even though we would call it something, so we would refer to as hip external rotation. We're not just measuring the hip joint itself. We have to take into consideration the ilium position. We have to consider the sacral relationship to the ilium. We have to consider the spinal rotation. And this is why the discussion went towards how we use language in our discussions as well. So for instance in this discussion, the word full was used, which implies that we have some sort of normal measure. And what we have to recognize right away is that what we're measuring is idiosyncratic measurements, so these are measurements that are very specific to the individual. And we make comparisons to average. That's what's in the textbook. The textbooks are average. They're not normal because the minute we start calling something normal then we imply that all of the contributors to that motion are intact, whereas in many cases, especially when we're first laying out our chessboard, which is basically just your grid of your total measurements. When we're first laying that out, we have to look at the relationships to determine what's actually happening. So even though we have a measure that appears to be equivalent to what would be considered the textbook average, we can't necessarily say that it is normal or that it is full, because then we're more likely to make a misjudgment and then intervene inappropriately. And so then our outcomes are sacrificed under those circumstances. So Alec, thank you so much for leading us in this discussion because I think it's going to be useful for a lot of people. If you'd like to participate in a 15 minute consultation, please go to askbillhartman at gmail.com. Please put 15 minute consultation in the subject line so we don't delete it and also include your question in the email. We will arrange that at our mutual convenience. Everybody have an outstanding Tuesday and I'll see you tomorrow.

Oh yeah.

I'm going to weigh in on that. So I think when I was previously considering range of motion, I was thinking of, let's say, if hip internal and external rotation were at 90 degrees as like a hallway, and I was gradually making each end of that hallway longer, as if I were literally creating more space or just repositioning the position where the limitation exists. Now I'm starting to think of it more as changing how much the platform moves side to side in a video game—if that makes sense. It's about how much we can move, or if it's like an elastic that can be pulled further and further in one direction and then the other. I'm just trying to figure out how much of a fixed thing it is versus how much it's adaptable. As I'm trying to understand, I'm wondering if that's what you mean when you say when we take measures, I'm not just measuring a hip, I'm measuring like the spine, I'm measuring other stuff. It's about how much the whole system can allow movement toward that direction, and it's more about capabilities than about an architectural—what I want to say is a physical fact that is present at all times.

Well, if we look at it as just a change in shape. So as I twist a hip.

Yeah. Okay.

So as I twist a hip into ER or IR. If you could see the tension lines in all of the tissues. So if I'm twisting a hip into ER, with the hip at 90 degrees relative to the table, I twist the hip in that outward direction and you should be able to see the tension lines pulling from the right shoulder towards the left hip. You would see it coming from the other side of the pelvis towards the left hip. You would see it coming down the left side to wrap underneath and around. So you could see, like again, you're seeing this whole, the whole system is creating this tension. That's what you're measuring. You're measuring this entire system's ability to allow the tissues to move through the excursion. Rather than just looking at this, oh, I'm moving the hip joint. Well, yeah, you are, hopefully, if that's the goal. But you gotta see that everything else is contributing to this. And then the degree to which everything can contribute determines what the movement outcome would be. So if you take your hand like this, bring your thumb into a little bit of opposition and then grab the skin right there, pinch it. Now don't let go of the skin and then try to open your hand up. It's restricted.

Yeah.

As I twist a hip into ER or IR, if you could see the tension lines in all of the tissues. When I'm twisting a hip into ER with the hip at 90 degrees relative to the table, outward direction, you should be able to see the tension lines pulling from the right shoulder towards the left hip. You would see it coming from the other side of the pelvis towards the left hip. You would see it coming down the left side to wrap underneath and around. You're seeing the whole system creating this tension, which is what you're measuring. You're measuring the entire system's ability to allow the tissues to move through excursion. Rather than just looking at the hip joint movement, you have to see that everything else is contributing. The degree to which everything can contribute determines the movement outcome. If you take your hand, bring your thumb into opposition, and grab the skin like this, pinching it, and then don't let go of the skin while trying to open your hand up, it's restricted.