So let's get a general idea of what we're talking about. The average human being can probably get airborne for about half a second. Those athletes that we see on TV that do amazing things can do that for a lot longer. So for instance, I believe it was Michael Jordan that was like 0.92 seconds. So it's almost twice as long as the average human being, which again makes them kind of stellar at what they do. So not only do we have to be able to get these guts airborne, but we've got a timing issue to execute this because if we don't observe the time constraint, we number one we can't take advantage of the energy storage and release element of this and therefore we're not going to get off the ground. So if we go too fast in our descent, we don't give ourselves enough time to yield. So the connective tissues will behave too stiff. We get less energy in the yielding action. We have less energy storage, and therefore less energy release, and the jump is lower. If we go too slow or we take too long of a duration, the yielding action is actually going to get dampened. We release the energy at the bottom of the jump. And then once again, we can't jump very high. And so there is an element of skill here. But we can actually train this in the training hall to a certain degree now.

So let's get a general idea of what we're talking about. The average human being can probably get airborne for about half a second. Those athletes we see on TV that do amazing things can do that for a lot longer. For instance, I believe it was Michael Jordan who was around 0.92 seconds. That's almost twice as long as the average human being, which again makes them stellar at what they do. So not only do we have to be able to get these guts airborne, but we've also got a timing issue to execute this because if we don't observe the time constraint, we can't take advantage of the energy storage and release element of this and therefore we're not going to get off the ground. If we go too fast in our descent, we don't give ourselves enough time to yield. The connective tissues will behave too stiff, we get less energy in the yielding action, we have less energy storage, and therefore less energy release, and the jump is lower. If we go too slow or we take too long of a duration, the yielding action is actually going to get dampened; we release the energy at the bottom of the jump. And then once again, we can't jump very high. There is an element of skill here, but we can actually train this in the training hall to a certain degree. Let's look at the narrow ISA archetype and see what they're not so good at under these circumstances. Number one, we've got an eccentric orientation bias of the anterior pelvic outlet, which means that we're going to be better at going downward, so better at descending than actually stopping and ascending. We have a tendency to prolong the descent and we get that dampening effect. You'll often see in the descent that you'll see internal rotation of the hips as the knees sort of approximate. You'll see increased knee flexion under these circumstances because we've got the center of gravity somewhat forward due to the descent of the anterior outlet. And so they're also going to bring their knees inward in an attempt to try to stop that descent. When they pull in like that, they're trying to actually pull the anterior outlet open and concentrically orient it. But again, structurally, not quite as good. So we have a problems list here that we want to attack. Strategy number one is to control the outlet. I think you're already on point with this, Ryan, by using the box squat. The box squat creates a constraint that prevents the anterior outlet from descending farther. We can also sit back onto the box, which gives us a little bit of a mechanical advantage in regards to unloading some of the anterior outlet so we can actually capture some of that concentric orientation.

What I would do though, Ryan, is I would also add in a static concentric yielding squat. And so in this position, you're going to teach them how to hold these positions without the box so they're going to teach them to stop the descent themselves. The box squat can definitely train it; there's no question about that. But I think you're right that at some point in time, you're going to want to remove this box and teach them how to control this thing now. We want to go with a concentric yielding squat because we don't want to take the yielding element out of this because we're going to need that for the energy storage and release. If we went with an overcoming concentric static, we would certainly get the concentric orientation, and there might be a reason to do that periodically, but we're not going to get the connective tissue behaviors that we want, which is the yielding action. So now strategy two, let's talk about that emphasis. By sitting down on the box, the guts are going to land on the outlet. We're going to get some yielding action in regards to the pelvic outlet. We're also going to get the yielding action through the skeleton, because as we unload the body onto the box, all the connective tissues are going to expand and store energy. If you start with the reverse band, kind of like you mentioned, I think that's a great idea. Because what that does is it actually slows the descent of the guts. So the guts will fall at whatever rate they will, based on gravity. But we can slow it down by sort of manipulating the force with the reverse band. But we still get the unload on the box. We still get the yield; it's just not as magnified. So this is just like our progressive resistance. So in this case, we're taking some of this loading strategy away and superimpose it back onto them. So eventually, we're going to start to take that band away. But what we don't want to do is increase the delay on the box. So if you've got somebody that you've taken the band away, you want to make sure that the impulse off the box is still as quick as possible. Because the longer they're on the box, remember, we got a timing issue with this vertical jump. We don't want to dampen the energy that we're storing in the yielding action; we want to make sure that we can release it. So now strategy three becomes working on this time constraint. So the seated box jump is a great way to do this because what we're doing is we're training this outlet to remain in the appropriate position based on the box squatting that we've done before. The extremity behavior is going to be very, very similar, so we're going to control how much eccentric orientation that we're getting in the extremities. We're going to maintain our yielding action, but I would say you start with the higher box, and you work on controlling the descent of the pelvic diaphragm, and then you slowly lower the box as much as is required to maximize the vertical jump. Strategy four: now we want to really magnify this time constraint to a significant degree, and so this is where we're going to use something that's going to be much more impulsive. So we're going to use something like a kettlebell squat clean or we're going to use an oscillatory impulse type of squat to really, really narrow this time constraint because we've already trained the position of the pelvic outlets. So we've got our concentric orientation. We want to make sure we maintain our yielding action. Now we want to just cut the amount of time that it takes to make this turnaround so we can maximize the return on investment as far as the yielding action and the release of energy to maximize the vertical jump.

We're going to maintain our yielding action, but I would say you start with a higher box and work on controlling the descent of the pelvic diaphragm. Then slowly lower the box as much as is required to maximize the vertical jump. Now strategy number four. We want to really magnify this time constraint to a significant degree. So we're going to use something that's going to be much more impulsive. So we're going to use something like a kettlebell squat clean or we're going to use an oscillatory impulse type of squat to really narrow this time constraint. Because we've already trained the position of the pelvic outlets, we've got our concentric orientation. We want to make sure we maintain our yielding action. Now we want to just cut the amount of time that it takes to make the turnaround so we can maximize the return on investment as far as the yielding action and the release of energy to maximize the vertical jump.

So I'm very consistent with how I execute and have probably improved in the last 10 years, even more so because I paid a lot closer attention to how I do certain things. And we can talk about that at a later date, but there's like a shoulder flexion video on YouTube that might be of use to you in regards to how we have to control some of the things that we actually can control as we measure. But in general, let's just respect the fact that there's stuff going on underneath our measures. Now, when we see something that appears to be magnified, so when we talked about the hip extra rotation video, a lot of that stuff gets blamed on laxity. Like people say, oh, you have overstretched ligaments, et cetera, and this is why we see these crazy measures. Well, that's just the failure of the structural reductionist model, not respecting the fact that there is shape change in the axial skeleton. There's reorientation of the sockets and that promotes changes in the way that the measurements arise. So we have multiple influences. We've got a position, we've got connective tissue orientations, we've got muscle orientations that all influence these outcomes and this crazy internal rotation measure is one of those as well. And so what you'll end up seeing, so if we looked at the average measure, remember we don't talk about norms, we talk about averages, we look at an average measure of hip interrotation depending on what textbook you look at, it's going to be somewhere around 40 degrees. But then you've got that patient that walks in and you throw them on the table and you're measuring and they go, oh my gosh, they have 60 degrees of hip interrotation and you go, oh my goodness, that hip capsule is lax and it's usually not. 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 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 enominant, 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. 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. 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 extra rotation associated with the anterior orientation. So your expectation is that the same side shoulder would have a loss of extra rotation, but that rarely shows up in this circumstance. Because of the extreme orientation, because of the traditional extension and intra-rotation of 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 extra rotation measures in traditional extra 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.

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. 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. 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 extra rotation associated with the anterior orientation. So your expectation is that the same side shoulder would have a loss of extra rotation, but that rarely shows up in this circumstance. Because of the extreme orientation, because of the traditional extension and intra-rotation of 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 extra rotation measures in traditional extra 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 askbillharmonedgmail.com, askbillharmonedgmail.com, and I will see you guys. So on Monday we talked about how to improve a vertical jump for someone with a narrow infersternal angle. Now let's talk about the wide infersternal angles.

I mean, there's still people that jump very, very high using this technique. But if we want to try to improve it, then we want to try to get a better decent in this public outlet. So we need to capture a little bit more emotion. So we have more time to create the yielding action. And so that's going to be our step number one. Again, let's go back to the tissue behaviors. The second thing we have to think about is they just don't have a yielding action available to them. So the degree of the exhalation bias, concentric orientation, and then if we superimposed any prolonged amount of heavy strength training on top of this, we have increased tissue stiffness. So the tissue behavior is biased towards an overcoming action. And so that tissue is much more difficult to deform. And so we don't get the yielding action that we want there. Especially when we talk about the internal mechanics, we want to make sure that we can get the guts to push down on that pelvic outlet and create sort of this trample-leaning of these internal forces. But because the internal pressure's in a wide, inferestional angle, tends to be very, very high and very, very consistent, we don't have any gradient. And so the guts just tend to sit on top of that pelvic outlet and keep it continuously loaded. So again, we have a tissue stiffness problem. And then number three would be the time constraint. Like I mentioned before, it's like we need enough time in the counter movement to load and create the yielding action and then create the release of that yielding action, which is the release of energy that allows us to jump.

So what we're going to do here, where we use the reverse band to slow the descent of the guts in the narrow ISA situation, what we want to do now is we want to accelerate them. So we need to create a gradient internally that allows the guts to travel downward at a faster rate. So when it does hit the pelvic outlet, we have enough force to produce the yielding action in the connective tissues internally. And so again, so we're going to use the banded squad under these circumstances. So what you want to understand here is that we're actually increasing the time of the load. So the duration that the load initiates to the end of the loading actually increases internally. And so what we get is this expansion of the connector tissue. So this is the yielding action that I talk about. Whereas if we did something that was really, really heavy and we have this instantaneous load internally where we maintain maximum pressure throughout the lift, now we don't have this pressure gradient. We don't have any duration of loading, and that's instantaneous, and that's what makes the tissues stiffer. This is why maximal strength training can actually become interference when we're trying to create an increase in vertical jump, which requires this yielding action.

And we're going to start with lower amplitude because we have to precondition the body for this. The lower amplitude allows us to get repeat exposures. It's almost like if you had to blow up a balloon, you're going to stretch the balloon a little bit first. And so we're going to teach the connective tissues to store and release, store and release, store and release. Then what we do is we slowly expand the duration of that loading through the repeated jumps. We might use something like an oscillatory squat like we did with the Narrows. We can do that. This will eventually become something that might look like a jump squat. The point is we're only limited by our creativity under these circumstances. But the idea is to slowly increase the amplitude of these jumps. So we start with low hurdles. What we may end up with is something that is a much higher hurdle that we're trying to clear under those circumstances. If you've spent any time on the internet looking at jumping activities, you've probably come across Werner Gunther's old videos. He was a shot putter and does some amazing plyometric activities, which they're just fun to watch, but it's just a representation of what is possible. It's not something we would start with. We need to, again, precondition these people towards these activities. Eventually what we can do is maybe we can restore some of that yielding action and improve the vertical jump. So for all of you folks out there that were interested in the wide ISA vertical jump strategies, I hope this was helpful. If not, then just feel free to ask me a question at askbillhartman at gmail.com, askbillhartman at gmail.com. And I will see you guys tomorrow morning at the Coffee and Coaches Conference Call, 6 a.m. Thursday. Good morning. Happy Thursday. I have neuro coffee in hand and It is perfect.

Hey, Bill. I was wondering, I saw you posted on the forum something about looking at the toes to get a sense of whether somebody is end-game wide or no. Can you elaborate on that? So what do we see in the toes between these two representations?

All right. So you have to think about some of the toe muscles. So you've got long flexors underneath the foot. And then you've got these short extensors on top of the foot. So if I was going to make a claw like that, that would be concentric orientation here, concentric orientation there, right? But they're different. So these are the long flexors here, short extensors there. You see it? So the muscles on the bottom of the foot are concentrically oriented. The muscles on top of the foot are concentrically oriented. You see that? So that means I have compression on the bottom of the foot and I have compression on top of the foot. Just like if I had compression on the front side of the body and compression on the backside of the body. So if I was squeezing you front to back, let's just say that you're an end game compensatory strategy, exhalation, everything is squeezing the bejesus out of you. This is what the foot would look like. So this is a foot that is trying to get to the end. They're trying to get to late propulsion, but the center of gravity is still back far enough that the heel stays on the ground. So normally in a late propulsive strategy, the heel would be off the ground and you would be up on the forefoot. Does that make sense? Okay. But if my heel stays down, the muscles that would lift the heel up can't lift the heel up because it's too heavy. So they grab the toes, which are lighter, and they pull the toes back. That's what you're looking at. So this is an easy way to say, literally, let me see your bare feet and they're standing up and you see toes that look like this on the ground, late propulsion.

A single arm supine press. I thought it was producing a turn, but it's not, right? Because your back's on the ground.

So this is going to be one of those things, right? If we imply a press, our intention is high force production. High force production implies that I'm going to create a rather significant compressive strategy. If you think about it, if you were sitting up like a bilateral symmetrical kind of press, you would want to be as fixed as possible and as stable as possible, which would imply that you're going to squeeze. So if I'm pressing on my back and in a supine position, I'm going to press my scaps into whatever surface that I'm on. I'm going to try to compress dorsal rostral. The load if I'm pressing is going to compress me anteriorly, and so I'm going to minimize turn. Even if I do that with one arm, if I up the load sufficiently, I will still compress.

Okay. All right.

If we imply a press, our intention is high force production, which implies that I'm going to create a rather significant compressive strategy. If you think about it, if you were sitting up like a bilateral symmetrical kind of press, you would want to be as fixed as possible, as stable as possible, which implies that you're going to squeeze. So if I'm pressing on my back in a supine position, I'm going to press my scaps into whatever surface I'm on. I'm going to try to compress dorsal rostral. The load if I'm pressing is going to compress me anteriorly, so I'm going to minimize turn. Even if I do that with one arm, if I up the load sufficiently, I will still compress.

because I was thinking of the lateral rolling and stuff like that. And yeah, so I try to incorporate like if I reach and press and not heavy.

Hang on, let's not create a confusion of terms here. So when you say reach and press, you've created an element of confusion in terminology. If I'm using one arm and I'm driving the scapula away from the surface—where I literally push the scapula into the thorax to create the turn—now I'm implying more of a reaching activity, which will create a turn. But it's also going to reduce force production. That's one of the ways we distinguish the turning capabilities as far as an activity we would select in the gym is: if we're trying to create a turn, we want it to be more of a reach-oriented activity, meaning I'm going to try to advance that side of the axial skeleton. Whereas if I'm pressing, I am not advancing the axial skeleton. You see the difference?

So the two terms, okay, I see, I see.

Again, I try to distinguish, like we need some way to distinguish between the two representations because the implication that anytime my arm goes forward as a press is a little misleading, like what is the relative load and how hard is it? So if you're trying to restore movement on somebody with max effort loads, good luck. Right, because it can't happen, because at some point in time I have to, I have to, even if I'm not on the loaded side, look, Grace, you're back, air quotes. So even on the unloaded side, if the threshold of effort is high enough, I will compress. If we're talking about a major league pitcher throwing a baseball, at the point of maximum efforts, they compress both sides of their body, not just the baseball side, because they have to stop. movement, right? So the higher the force production, the less movement is, physically possible. Right.

So I have a question that relates to front foot elevated split squat versus rear foot elevated split squat. When would be an appropriate moment to use the rear foot elevated split squat? Could you describe an instance or a client presentation for a rear foot elevated split squat and why you choose that?

Yeah. OK. So let's talk about a split squat in general first. OK. The typical weight distribution. And so there is a study that you can find on the split squat as to the weight distribution on the feet. And again, take it with a grain of salt because you can manipulate it, okay? But we're gonna speak generally. Typically what you're gonna get as far as a distribution goes is a slightly higher load on the front foot than the back foot. And so if we're gonna talk percentages, we're gonna say for the sake of discussion, it's 55% on the front foot, 45% on the back foot, okay? So it's not even, it's just a little bit of bias towards the front foot. Got it? Got it, okay. So if I pick up the back foot, And again, I think my numbers are accurate, but don't quote me here until you read the study yourself. I think that the highest load that they got on the front foot by elevating the rear foot on a bench, so like the classical bulk air in split squat level, right? I think it was like 85 front foot, 25 back foot. And so by flip-flopping the foot orientation, you're just manipulating force. You're manipulating the load that is required to overcome, okay? So when I throw the front foot up, my intention is to reduce the load on the front leg. Okay, why would I wanna do that? Because what I may have is a behavior in regards to that front foot that I do not want or I'm having trouble managing. So case in point, I have somebody that I'm trying to take from early propulsion. So I've been doing heels elevated stuff and I've got this nice posterior expansion now and now I want to transition them through middle with an element of tibial control. So if I need to reduce the forces on the front foot to teach them how to manage the tibia over the foot. So you've heard me talk about how that foot translates over or the tibia translates over the foot and how the arch influences how fast that tibia travels over the foot. If I need more control, I want to take the weight away the load on the front foot so I can teach them how to translate the tibia over with an element of control so they don't accelerate too far. So they don't hit the max P2 too soon, right? So I'm teaching them a control element. So that's a flat foot, front foot elevated split squat. So I would use that as I'm reintroducing this middle propulsive phase. All right. Now, so let's think about how would you intensify that process? So I got a guy that's got great control now with the front foot elevated.

What would be the next thing to do to make it just a little bit harder, but maintain the same circumstance of controlling tibial translation? I'm asking you a question.

Dropping that front foot a little bit.

Yeah. So we put it on the floor. So instead of putting on a six inch box, now it's on the floor. So what did I do? I just put greater load through the front foot. Now he's got to manage that. So it's just like putting weight on the bar. It's just another way to create a progression in the exercise itself.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah. So it's very simple when you look at it that way, you go, oh, well, that makes total sense now, right? And then you've got any number of variations on a theme as to what you can do in regards to the movement velocity, load. I can throw my offsets on there so I can capture a lot of things and manipulate this one activity in many different ways to accomplish many different tasks. And I can create these little micro progressions where, yeah, it's the same activity, but today it's just going to be a little bit harder than it was last time. So I have a joint lever question and I'm going to give away some free stuff. Good morning. Happy Friday. I have no coffee in hand and it is perfect. Man, hadn't had this in a week. Truly missed it. That's a good batch, Dr. Mike. Way to go. So Friday, just got back from vacation. Need a massive catch up day. The one drawback from going on vacation is the accumulation of stuff while you're gone. So the Q&A email box is full. And we'll get to those things as we can over the next week or so. I do have some housekeeping stuff and then we'll get to a joint lever question here in just a second. While I was on vacation, I thought, well, how's another way that we could take this transaction thing off the table and help some more people? And so here's what we're going to do. So pay attention. I'm going to do a series of free 15 minute consultations. So here's what you're going to have to do. You've got to go to the Ask Bill Hartman at gmail.com email. In the subject line, put free 15 minute consultation request. If you put anything else in the subject line, I will delete it. Free 15-minute consultation request. So here's how it's going to work. You get to ask me anything that you want in that 15 minutes. We're going to record the whole thing on Zoom because chances are, if you've got a specific question, someone else does too. So we'll be able to help other people with this. At the end of the week or so, when we get around to the Coffee and Coaches Conference call on Thursday mornings, I'm going to have those fine folks do a little bit of voting and they'll vote on the best question of the week. And if you get picked as the best question person, here you go. You get the t-shirt hoodie, and one of those, you get a hat too. So a little incentive, I don't know how big an incentive that is. For some, maybe a lot. For some, maybe very little. Doesn't really matter to me. This is what we're going to do. So like I said, we'll be able to help a lot of other people and we'll be able to get your questions answered as well. So again, one more time, subject line, free 15 minute consultation request at askbillhartman@gmail.com. Okay. So let's dig into a little bit of a Q&A question to wrap up the week for you guys leading into a great weekend. And this comes from Patrick. And Patrick says, hi, Bill. Hi, Patrick. He goes, is looking at joint levers totally, is looking at joints as levers totally useless? And I would say, Patrick, that I don't look at joints as levers for various reasons that we'll get into, but there may be some use in some of this two-dimensional representation that we typically use by Euclidean geometry. So they break things into the imaginary planes, and they try to calculate forces, and they look at joints as levers. There may be some good reasoning for that, because what it does allow us to do is potentially identify where we might be seeing loads or stressors being applied in certain aspects of movement, which might be helpful to determine causation of damage, pain, injuries, however you want to look at this thing. But from the reality standpoint, the reason that I don't like to look at joints as levers is because we need one specific thing for a lever system and that is a fulcrum. To quote Archimedes, it's like give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. So without the fulcrum, you don't really have a good lever system. The problem with the fulcrum in a joint is that we have friction and we have heat. And both of those are going to be destructive to the hyaline cartilage at the ends of the bones. As durable as it may seem, it is still delicate in regards to its ability to wear away. The other aspect of it that we haven't talked about, I don't think before, is that this friction would actually slow down joint movement, which would make movement very, very difficult. So if we think about normal walking, the hip joint's going to move at about 200 degrees per second. If we look at throwing a baseball, it's about 7,000 to 9,000 degrees per second. And so if you want to get an idea how fast that is, swing your arm around in a circle 20 times in one second, and that's how fast Major League baseball pitchers' arm is moving. And so if we did have joint levers and we did have fulcrums and we did have that friction, I don't think we'd be able to produce these movements. And they would be incredibly destructive all at the same time. So rather than me digging deeper into this, what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut away. We're going to go to a video that I did previously where I was talking about why bones don't touch and why the joints aren't levers. Because I think it would be a good video for you to reference Patrick. So for the rest of you, have a great weekend. Have a terrific Friday. I will see you guys next week. We'll be digging into some Q&As and hopefully we'll get a few of these free 15 minute Zoom calls scheduled over the weekend. And we'll present some of those for you next week. Everybody have a great weekend. I'll see you later.

So like I said, we'll be able to help a lot of other people and we'll be able to get your questions answered as well. So again, one more time, subject line, free 15 minute consultation request at askbillharmonageemail.com. Okay. So let's dig into a little bit of a Q&A question to wrap up the week for you guys leading into a great weekend. And this comes from Patrick. And Patrick says, hi, Bill. Hi, Patrick. He goes, is looking at joint levers totally, is looking at joints as levers totally useless? And I would say, Patrick, that I don't look at joints as levers for various reasons that we'll get into, but there may be some use in some of this two-dimensional representation that we typically use by Euclidean geometry. So they break things into the imaginary planes, and they try to calculate forces, and they look at joints as levers. There may be some good reasoning for that, because what it does allow us to do is potentially identify where we might be seeing loads or stressors being applied in certain aspects of movement, which might be helpful to determine causation of damage, pain, injuries, however you want to look at this thing. But from the reality standpoint, the reason that I don't like to look at joints as levers is because we need one specific thing for a lever system and that is a fulcrum. To coat our comedies, it's like give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. So without the fulcrum, you don't really have a good lever system. The problem with the fulcrum in a joint is that we have friction and we have heat. And both of those are going to be destructive to the hyaline cartilage at the ends of the bones. As durable as it may seem, it is still delicate in regards to its ability to wear away. The other aspect of it that we haven't talked about, I don't think before, is that this friction would actually slow down joint movement, which would make movement very, very difficult. So if we think about normal walking, the hip joint's gonna move at about 200 degrees per second. If we look at throwing a baseball, it's about 7,000 to 9,000 degrees per second. And so if you want to get an idea how fast that is, swing your arm around in a circle 20 times in one second, and that's how fast Major league baseball pitchers arm is moving. And so if we did have joint levers and we did have fulcrums and we did have that friction, I don't think we'd be able to produce these movements. And they would be incredibly destructive all at the same time. So rather than me digging deeper into this, what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut away. We're going to go to a video that I did previously where I was talking about why bones don't touch and why the joints aren't levers. Because I think it would be a good video for you to reference Patrick. So for the rest of you, have a great weekend. Have a terrific Friday. I will see you guys next week. We'll be digging into some Q&As and hopefully we'll get a few of these free 15 minute Zoom calls scheduled over the weekend. And we'll present some of those for you next week. Everybody have a great weekend. I'll see you later.

We're going to go to a video that I did previously where I was talking about why bones don't touch and why the joints aren't levers. Because I think it would be a good video for you to reference Patrick. So for the rest of you, have a great weekend. Have a terrific Friday. I will see you guys next week. We'll be digging into some Q&As and hopefully we'll get a few of these free 15 minute Zoom calls scheduled over the weekend. And we'll present some of those for you next week. Everybody have a great weekend. I'll see you later. But we're going to cover a lot of the mechanical aspects that I think are in play and are important to me in regard to how I perceive these things through my model. First things first, Johnny, we're going to invert your problem a little bit and we're going to say why is it bad if bones touch? So the bones touching thing probably comes from using dead guy anatomy as a model. So dead guys actually do have levers. And so to have a lever you have to have a fulcrum and so the bones touch on dead guys because they're dry and so they look like levers and so then in school they teach you that oh your joints move just like levers. The reality is in a living breathing human and the fact that we're full of water and we've got synovial fluid in our joints we don't have fulcrums. If we had a fulcrum there would be a lot of pressure and heat that would be released every time we moved and we would destroy our joints in no time. And so we don't want fulcrums in our joints. In fact, if you do have a fulcrum in your joint, you're probably talking to the orthopedic surgeon right now. So now what we have to understand is that we have to have mechanisms that keep these bones from touching.

So if I had an orientation of fibers as such that if I loaded them at a higher rate, I can make them really, really stiff. And so we actually have that. So when we look at the fascia that surrounds everything. So we talk about the periosteum. We talk about the fascia that surrounds all of the ligament structure and all of the structures around the knee. So the knee is very busy when you look at it from a connective tissue standpoint. And so what happens is when we load that joint, those viscoelastic tissues behave very, very similar to my silly putty. They get very, very stiff and they create this rigidity around the knee and that actually pushes the bones apart. So now we have a mechanical protective mechanism that helps us keep those bones apart. So that's very, very useful. It's a little counterintuitive, too, by the way, when you think about it. It's like you think of these are like tension elements and stretchy stuff. They become very, very stiff, so keep that in mind. Now, let's go to inside the knee joint. So the knee is filled with water, basically. It's synovial fluid, so it's water with some protein stuff that floats around. Well, water is this really, really unique substance that is cooler than you can imagine. And so water behaves differently, just like our viscoelastic tissues behave differently under different forces, water behaves differently depending on what substance it's next to. And so we have hyaline cartilage that lines the joint. If we talk about the knee, so at the end of the femur we have hyaline cartilage. On the tibia we have hyaline cartilage. And so when the water is right next to it, it promotes the separation of the water into positively and negatively charged water. So the negative charged water is right along the hyaline cartilage on both sides. And then the positively charged water is going right through the middle of the knee. So if you took the north end of two magnets and try to push them together, you can feel the repulsion between the two magnets. So this positively charged water is constantly trying to push its positive charges apart. And so now we've got this electromagnetic force that is now pushing the knee apart. So now we have an electromagnetic effect to create this separation. And so there's a school study from 1980 from Teriyama. It's Japanese. And they took fresh cadaver knees with intact synovial joints and they applied downward pressure through the joint about 220 pounds into the knee joint and they compressed and then it hit sort of like a maximum position but the bones didn't touch. They got really, really close together but they did not touch. And so right away, even in a joint that's not living but it's intact and we have all the structures available to us, it still behaves similarly so it keeps the bones apart.