So, let's talk about what the orientation is that we're typically seeing under these circumstances and then we can kind of, as you asked for, we will unpack this to a degree. If I'm looking at the orientation of the acetabulum and if I look at the ligament to structure of the hip has this cool little spiral kind of an orientation to it. And so the orientation in itself is if I try to turn this thing into internal rotation, it creates a constraint because it's already twisted in that direction to a certain degree. So this is one of the dirty little secrets about lower extremities. is they're already twisted into internal rotation. That's why the dorsum of your foot is on top when it should be on the bottom. And so this is the twist. So if I try to twist this farther, I hit the constraint. But if I look at orientation of this anomaly, I can actually put this in a position where I actually untwist the orientation of the hip. And all I have to do is move it up and over top of the femur. So this is going to be an anterior orientation. So I will have traditional extension of the lumbar spine on the side where you get the magnified measure. And so that's going to take this pelvis forward and over top of the femur. And if I take it far enough, I'm going to start to pick up internal rotation because essentially what I'm doing is I'm untwisting the capsule and then I take my measurement and then that picks up all that laxity. It's not laxity. It's just slack in the capsule created by position. I take that up and then I hit the constraint somewhere about 60 because I'm using a dead guy zero position. So a nice representation that I can use is sort of this ringing out the towel concept. So if I look at the twisted towel as if this was the ligamentous structure of the hip, when I'm moving my intro rotation it's already twisted and so there's my constraint to intro rotation. But if I reorient the pelvis where it's over top of the femur and I actually start to untwist the towel first, then I have all of this slack that I can take up in the hip capsule, which is going to give me my magnified internal rotation. So remember that I have other internal rotation measures to compare against to make sure that I am dealing with this orientation problem. So for instance, if I lack hip traditional hip extension or ADduction. So traditional hip extension and adduction are internal rotation measures. So if I have a deficit in either one of those, then I know that my magnified internal rotation measure is most likely associated with this orientation. I also have my iterations to compare against as well.

So, let's talk about what the orientation is that we're typically seeing under these circumstances and then we can kind of, as you asked for, we will unpack this to a degree. If I'm looking at the orientation of the acetabulum and if I look at the ligament to structure of the hip has this cool little spiral kind of an orientation to it. And so the orientation in itself is if I try to turn this thing into internal rotation, it creates a constraint because it's already twisted in that direction to a certain degree. So this is one of the dirty little secrets about lower extremities. is they're already twisted into internal rotation. That's why the dorsum of your foot is on top when it should be on the bottom. And so this is the twist. So if I try to twist this farther, I hit the constraint. But if I look at orientation of this anomaly, I can actually put this in a position where I actually untwist the orientation of the hip. And all I have to do is move it up and over top of that femur. So this is going to be an anterior orientation. So I will have traditional extension of the lumbar spine on the side where you get the magnified measure. And so that's going to take this pelvis forward and over top of the femur. And if I take it far enough, I'm going to start to pick up internal rotation because essentially what I'm doing is I'm untwisting the capsule and then I take my measurement and then that picks up all that laxity. It's not laxity. It's just slack in the capsule created by position. I take that up and then I hit the constraint somewhere about 60 because I'm using a dead guy zero position. So a nice representation that I can use is sort of this ringing out the towel concept. So if I look at the twisted towel as if this was the ligamentous structure of the hip, when I'm moving my intro rotation it's already twisted and so there's my constraint to intro rotation. But if I reorient the pelvis where it's over top of the femur and I actually start to untwist the towel first, then I have all of this slack that I can take up in the hip capsule, which is going to give me my magnified internal rotation. Remember that I have other internal rotation measures to compare against to make sure that I am dealing with this orientation problem. So for instance, if I lack hip traditional hip extension or ADduction. So traditional hip extension and adduction are internal rotation measures. So if I have a deficit in either one of those, then I know that my magnified internal rotation measure is most likely associated with this orientation. I also have my iterations to compare against as well.

But here's the problem that you're going to run into when you see somebody with this magnified hip internal rotation. Chances are when you lay them on the table, what you would typically see is a loss of hip external rotation associated with the anterior orientation. So your expectation is that the same side shoulder would have a loss of external rotation, but that rarely shows up in this circumstance. Because of the extreme orientation, because of the traditional extension and internal rotation of the lumbar spine, what happens is I get a thorax that would normally be tilted forward, but it falls backwards on the table. This actually magnifies the external rotation measures in traditional external rotation and flexion. So it can be a little bit confusing if you don't have the awareness that the thorax can actually move as you lay them down on the table. So keep that in mind when you're making your comparisons of same side hip to same side shoulder. So Brian in a nutshell, your strategy is to create the reorientation under these circumstances and not go to blaming laxity. Unless you have some scenario where it's going to be very, very clear that they have some form of condition that would actually promote this laxity. Use your comparative measures. Understand that all your measurements are dirty, and we have to account for the position on the table. Ryan, I hope that answers your question for you. If it doesn't, please ask another question at askbillharmanngmail.com, and I will see you guys. So we can't look at this guy as an average human being because he is not. The gods, as they say in the movie, turned his arm into a thunderbolt.

Good morning. Happy Tuesday. I have no coffee in hand and

It is perfect. I hope everyone had a successful Memorial Day weekend and you celebrated appropriately and remembered the heroes as we should. Digging into today's Q&A. We had a busy week. We had to dig right into this. Had a great Q&A with Jen. Jen works with professional baseball pitchers. Big concern there is how do we manage relative motions in regards to force production. How much do we need to restore? This is a really important point that we made during the conversation: we have to look at these people as n equals one because while there are certain things that all pitchers have to do, they will achieve their outcomes very specifically to their idiosyncratic structure and ranges of motion. This was a big concept that we talked about. We also talked about key performance indicators and then how we look at the different ways that they do produce internal and external rotation. Again, it's very idiosyncratic. Great conversation with Jen. Thank you so much for your participation there. If you would like to participate in a 15 minute consultation, go to askbillhartman at gmail.com and put 15 minute consultation in the subject line so we don't delete it. We will arrange that at our mutual convenience. Don't forget to go to the YouTube page and subscribe there as well so you can go back and look at all of these videos that go way back a couple of years now. All right, so gotta run, busy Tuesday. You guys have a great day. I'll see you tomorrow. The clock has started, Jen. What is your question?

Great. So yeah, my question comes to, you know, when it comes to performance and generating force, How do you determine when restoring some level of relative motion is beneficial versus not? Does it depend on the sport, right? Like a powerlifter versus, you know, baseball athlete. Does it depend on the individual? Obviously KPI. And maybe to give you a little more context, I work primarily with pitchers. And so this one particular pitcher, he's in the major leagues, quite efficient at what he does. He serves 98, but not considered a good mover from a traditional sense. He appears to be at end game, straight-legged at 40 degrees bilaterally, hip flexion at 80, hip IR 5, and if I'm being generous bilaterally, hip ER at about 40. In the past, he's dealt with some low back tightness, no kidding, bicycle tendinopathy. I'm wondering if I'm right here in my thinking, like he's clearly minimized these relative motions to be able to generate a lot of force, but by doing so, has created a great deal of focal loads at these tissues. It also doesn't seem very efficient in that he's a very linear in his delivery versus rotational.

Is he really tall? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So he should, so he should, he should appear to be more linear in his delivery because he's got more rotational capability than somebody that's wider. He's still turning, he's still turning, he turns. So, here's the thing: when you have a taller, narrower human being, their turn is much tighter. So they're delivery is definitely more straight line. Is he a left-hander?

No, he's right.

Okay, okay, good, because lefties are a little odd, but not terribly. But just in generally speaking, it's like you're gonna see this more straight line delivery in many of those cases. And so then you think about what is going to be the strategy to keep that turn as tight as possible so it is as straight a line as possible as he's delivering going to home play. When you define somebody as not a good mover that throws 98 miles an hour in the major leagues. I don't know that that's an appropriate way to express that because he's doing exactly what he is being paid to do right. So, so, so what we're talking about is specificity, and then we're looking at his strategy to achieve the desired outcome. I'll let you know a little dirty little secret. If you were to measure her, I have no doubt in my mind, never measured her, but I've measured enough gymnasts to know that they're not always great movies either. They're very, very good at certain things that make them stand out in their sport, right? But when we compare them to averages, they fall way off the chart. So we can't look at this guy as an average human being because he is not. The gods, as they say in the movie, the gods turned his arm into a thunderbolt, right? And so we have to look at him as an individual. So you're absolutely right. N equals one is in play, right? KPI is absolutely. But here's the thing that a lot of people don't recognize is that when we're talking about performance, and again, we're talking about something that's really, really specific here, is his KPI is going to be different than someone else's. His ability to generate force is going to be a little bit different from someone else's. There's a lot of things that are the same when we're talking about pitchers. But we have to treat them as individuals because you just don't know. And so you got a guy that really knows how to reduce relative motion, which makes him a high force producer. And he's got to do it over the smallest increment of time possible. Another thing to keep in mind is you're using normal average comparison table tests. That doesn't mean that he doesn't produce internal rotation and that doesn't mean that he doesn't produce external rotation. It just means he doesn't produce it in the place that you're used to measuring based on averages. Okay, so chances are when you look at it, it's like he's got hardly any hip interrotation. Awesome. He's still jamming force into the ground. This is why I define interrotation as a downward force because that's where it goes, right? So he's got a way, and you'll know better than I will because you've measured him directly. He's got a way to produce that force into the ground.

He does it very, very quickly. And then he also has a way to produce the ER. Your concern is where he is doing this. You've already expressed that. Is he doing it with his tissues? Most likely he is. And then it's your job to say, okay, this is where I think we're okay. Here's where I think I need to step in. The only way you're ever going to know is to train him because you just have to get to know this person. While there are physiologically certain elements within a baseball pitch that have to occur, his physical structure is going to determine how he does it. And that's why we all don't get to throw 98 miles an hour in the major leagues—because he's different. He found what he was good at. He found a way to do it. And then your job, no pressure here, is to make sure his superpower doesn't come back to destroy him because it will. He's had a couple of things going on where he says, okay, the low back gets tight, you get the biceps load. So when you get the biceps load, you know you've got a deceleration issue. You have to figure out how he does these things. You know he's going to have max propulsion. It has to be there. You know he's going to have to demonstrate extra rotation somewhere because that kind of velocity does not show up in internal rotation. There's a powerlifter with sustained propulsion where there's no time constraint. It'll be identified very easily. But in his case, you're probably just going to have to look at high-speed videos and say, okay, here's where this is happening. This is where I need to monitor. That's going to guide you in your process.

So looking at, he gets quite a significant anterior pelvic orientation. So that's probably his downward force and potentially where some of the low back discomfort may be coming from.

Right. So he hits the ground, but there's lead foot. Yeah. And that's where the early to max propulsion is going to come from, right? Right. So that energy travels up through him. And then you get to decide it's like, okay, how much of this are we allowing, right? Because you stay in email. It's like, if you restore too much relative motion, do you destroy the superpowers? Absolutely. That's entirely possible. Yeah, now it all and it's going to depend, so he's on a he's a major league pitcher so he's on a five day rotation, yeah about yeah yeah so the tip is on a five day okay um and so what you're going to find is here's what I would do is I would measure the bejesus out of them throughout that five day cycle because it's going to give you clues as to where and when you need to intervene to sort of give him a little bit more relative motion and then expect it to disappear as he reaches the point where he's going to perform at his maximum capabilities. And so what you're gonna see is you're gonna see this little cycle appear as to, okay. And you've measured these guys after they throw, I'm assuming, right? So you know how everything just kind of disappears.

Absolutely, yeah. It makes me feel like they're not making any progress with people, but at the same time, you're giving them maybe a little bit, but then they're using what they need and going back. But so there's this give and take and the fine line of what that is.

Absolutely. So now what you can do, like I said, you measure these guys over time and then you sort of get to know them. You say, OK, so whether he's a starter, whether he's not, I'm going to treat him like a star. So let's just say he throws 100 pitches, six innings, something along those lines. And then you have this expectation of what you should see in your table tests. And then you say, OK, I'm going to give you back a bunch today to promote the recovery, you know, that process so we can get that started. But what I'm going to say is like on day two, it's going to be this on day three, it's going to be this on day four, it's going to be this on day five. I'm going to know that you're going to be prepared. It would be like when you work with sprinters, they don't have a lot of interromotation either because their ground contact time is so brief. It's like, well, think about a baseball pitch. So you're like seven to 9000 degrees per second of arm speed. Right. That's faster than sprinters, right. And so this is a really, really, really kind of a fast thing. So the amount of interrotation that they end up with is very, very little. So if I had a sprinter that showed up one day and they have like 40 degrees of internal rotation, I started to get worried because it's like, this guy's not ready to run his best race because that's a lot of, that's going to be a lot of energy that's going to be distributed to managing position. Whereas, you know, it's like, you know, you take your picture and you say, you know, maybe I don't want full internal rotation on game day. Right. But, but by looking at him over a long enough period of time, I can say that, okay, we're in this range where I think you're going to do really, really well. Right. Don't tell him because you're, But again, but you'll know. So you'll know what to monitor and when. And then if you do see some sort of deficit and performance that shows up because it always happens, right? There's so many things that are unpredictable during the execution of the game itself. It's like, but when you see certain things start to show up and then you can, you can like stick your nose in you go, Hey, you might want to monitor the next 10 pitches here. And if it doesn't start to come back, you probably want to think about, you know, pulling this guy or you say he's doing great. Everything is exactly where we want to let him go kind of thing. And then you, then you provide a really useful and powerful influence.

Let me ask you this in a pitcher like that, who clearly has more focal loads on tissues. Would it behoove like a front office to use a picture like that in more of like a reliever setting where the workload maybe is a little bit less versus a starting pitcher?

That's again that's a really tough call because I think you have to kind of rely on the consistency of behaviors that you're going to identify. I think that you're again you have a very powerful influence here when it comes to decisions like that because you're the one that spends the time with them. You're the one that gets to know them whereas the front office is taking this you know this 20,000 foot view of the team and they're saying okay what fits best under these circumstances? And so you get to have that conversation with those people and you say you know so and so is doing really really well under these circumstances. And again it's like if you have enough data over time and you can again our predictions are lousy. Let's not worry about those. But we do have tendencies that we can say hey you know under these circumstances he did really really well. That might be a consideration OK.

And then what about a picture that's still in the developmental process? He's in our minor league system and maybe presents in a similar fashion. Could we potentially try and give him more relative motions? He's a longer runway to maybe then utilize those new motions, learn a new delivery, and thoughts there.

And then maybe you extend a career. Absolutely. But again, the process, I always look at this as this process that doesn't change because we're still gonna do the same thing. We're still gonna accumulate data. We're still gonna look for the KPIs, right? And he's gonna eventually show us what his needs are. But you're right, you do have developmental time here. So your experiment is a lot, you have a much broader time for safe to fail experiments here. Where you can just say, okay, let's put him in this situation, let's give him this, and then let's just see how he performs. Because what you might do is unlock something that's really, really important. So I work with a lot of guys out in Arizona, and they work with a lot of baseball guys too. And then you give these guys a little bit of something, and then they tap into two, three miles per hour, which gets them a better look. And or you buy them more pitches per appearance? Holy cow. It's like little things like that. When you're in those developmental stages, really powerful. Because like I said, you do have the time.

OK. Very, very helpful. Very helpful.

Well, I think you're already on it. I think you kind of knew the answers before we started talking. You just needed somebody else to say, yeah, you're on point.

No, absolutely.

I don't doubt you for that. I don't doubt you.

I appreciate that. How are we doing on time?

We're good. Keep going.

Okay. All right. So as far as strategies for this particular player, I've utilized rolling patterns, lazy bear positions, and so on and so forth. It kept it within, you know, that sort of easier activities for him. I tried to sprinkle that in through his lifts as well, using it as a recovery strategy versus adding more load to the system.

Correct. He's already a compressor. So this is going to turn into one of these conversations about, oh, he just needs to get stronger kind of thing?

No, yeah, okay.

I think his force production is not your greatest concern right now. I think that, again, looking at his numbers, he's already great at that. I mean, is it worth trying to chase higher force production for somebody that already throws? He's probably top 1% velocity already in the major league. It's like, OK, what is the advantage there? It's like, did you just steal 20 pitches from his next appearance? Or did you buy him a faster recovery and then getting ready for the next game? Again, that's your experiment. But I would say that when you got this guy in the weight room, I think the strategy is to make sure you don't take away something. Right. And then just make sure that he has everything that he needs. And your data is going to tell you. It's like, what are his numbers? When does he look the best? You know, you compare his bull pens. And then like I said, you just track him over time. And he'll start to show you what he needs to do.

Absolutely. Excellent. Well, I appreciate your time. I'll say very welcome.

It's always fun to talk about this stuff.