Basically, when we start adding a strategic resistance, so all the strategic resistances is an added constraint to promote a specific behavior. And so to give you a for instance, so if I hold a load in front of me, that load will displace the center of gravity in the direction of the load because I'm adding systemic load. So the distribution of mass is different. And so then that promotes a behavior for me to manage the center of gravity. If the weight would pull me forward, my response would be to create an expansion posteriorly, which changes my physical shape and allows me to manage the center of gravity inside of my base of support. But it also gives me access to different shapes in doing so, which is one of the reasons why and probably many of people, many of the people, all six of the people that listen to this have done like a ramp elevated goblet squat and they notice right away that, oh, I can achieve a greater depth in this representation than I could if I had even done the same thing flat-footed or if I had a bar on my back or whatever. And so what we're talking about here is is what it would take to access a shape, which is essentially what we're talking about. If we make reference to the deepest possible squat, the only rule is I have to be able to acquire the right shape to do so. All deep squats may not be achieved in the exact same manner, but they would follow a similar rule of, OK, I need enough extra rotation space to achieve the desired shape and then I have to superimpose enough internal rotation to slow my descent because the bottom of the squat, that's essentially what it is. You're projecting forward, but you're actually slowing the system down in that circumstance and all you have to do to get a sense of this is Let's just say that you could achieve this amazing deep squat. Your lower extremities are actually positioned in front of the axial skeleton. So that becomes this anterior constraint to the forward progression of the body as you would descend the center of gravity into the squat. And so really what we're talking about is an acquisition of A shape. But that's also why you'll see any number of additional strategies that people will use to achieve some measure of depth or the inability to access a certain depth. You'll see if I reach forward and I can deep squat and you take the reach away from a lot of people, they'll essentially fall backwards because you've actually taken away the mass displacement just like we talked about if we were holding it in a goblet position. So ultimately what we're looking at here is the ability to descend the center of gravity and acquire a very specific shape change to allow that dissension to occur.

I'm Bill Hartman. This is the podcast to challenge you to ask better questions to look beyond traditional models of thinking and arrive at better health and fitness solutions.

So Bill wrote an article on the UHP network this week about strategic resistance and the squat. It's in the UHP plus area. You can access it with the free three-day trial if you would like. There's a lot of great stuff going on in there. We just finished and started the anatomy 101 course, which is free. So if you want to get in there, it's a nice little roadmap anatomy course that talks about the traditional perspective on anatomy and gives some perspective through the UHPC lens. So you can check that out for free. There's a free assessment course coming soon. So you want to get on the UHP network to get that. But yeah, this strategic resistance in the squat article. People understanding that there isn't this sort of straight progression of how to squat. There isn't one way to squat. When you talk about proper form of a squat, it's really more idiosyncratic and based on the person's structure and where they currently are at within their center of gravity and base of support. Maybe talk first about what inspired you to write this article and the theme of the article, and then we can go off of that.

Basically, when we start adding strategic resistance, it's an added constraint to promote a specific behavior. For instance, if I hold a load in front of me, that load will displace the center of gravity in the direction of the load because I'm adding systemic load, changing the distribution of mass. This promotes a behavior to manage the center of gravity. If the weight pulls me forward, my response is to create expansion posteriorly, changing my physical shape to manage the center of gravity within my base of support. This also gives access to different shapes. That's why many people who do an elevated ramp goblet squat notice they can achieve greater depth than they could flat-footed or with a bar on their back. What we're talking about is what it takes to access a shape. If we reference the deepest possible squat, the only rule is I must acquire the right shape to do so. All deep squats may not be achieved in the exact same manner, but they follow a similar rule: I need enough extra rotation space to achieve the desired shape, then I must superimpose enough internal rotation to slow my descent. At the bottom of the squat, you're projecting forward while essentially slowing the system down. To understand this, imagine you could achieve this amazing deep squat—your lower extremities are positioned in front of the axial skeleton. This creates an anterior constraint to forward progression as you descend the center of gravity into the squat. Ultimately, we're talking about acquiring a shape, which is why you see additional strategies people use to achieve depth or their inability to access certain depth. If I reach forward and deep squat, then remove the reach, many people fall backward because you've removed the mass displacement, just like when holding a load in a goblet position. Ultimately, what we're looking at is the ability to descend the center of gravity and acquire a very specific shape change to allow that descent to occur.

Right, through the squatting movement and the movement of squatting. So the thing I want to kind of circle back to since the title of the episode and what we talked about right in the beginning, if a squat is not a pattern, if we don't move in patterns, if there isn't certain movement patterns that are set for each type of movement, like stepping up and downstairs or descending and ascending in a squat or doing a push-up or holding a plank or whatever, movement patterns you're valuing, what is wrong about that perspective or what's misinformed about that perspective? And then what do we need people to view squatting as in the context of what we're going to talk about for the rest of the episode?

And again, let's use the deep squat as a frame of reference to achieve that position. The system has to be able to move forward slowly. So I have, and ultimately at the bottom, like wherever you stop, you have essentially arrested the forward movement of the center of gravity, but it is the lowest position of the center of gravity with your feet on the ground, basically. And so that's what we're talking about. We're talking about the ability to descend the center of gravity in a forward direction with the capacity to manage that center of gravity without going forward. So give you another example. Somebody descends into a deep squat and they have to lift their heels to do so. So now they're resting on forefoot. That is the system trying to continue to go forward. So essentially what you don't have under that circumstance is the capacity to create the posterior expansion, which actually slows the center of gravity. And so then you're using a compensatory strategy, which is the active heel elevation in that circumstance to create a compensatory strategy. Essentially what it is is compensatory expansion to allow that system to slow down and then come to rest on the forefoot versus, say, the entire foot in that circumstance.

And so pattern, calling something a pattern is a little too structural reductionist. I believe it's a little too reductionist just in general. It's thinking that there is some type of puzzle piece that fits into another puzzle piece and there's gears and levers and pulleys that make all these static positions happen sequentially. It's not really how movement works. Movement's more of this sort of behavioral emergent representation of how we manage center of gravity and pressure through time, through space and time. So it's really important.

I would look at it as rather than looking at it as an absolute, it's like everybody should be able to, right? Instead of that, it's like, how do you do something?

Yes.

Instead of that, it's like, how do you do something?

And also, more importantly, what are the reasons why maybe you cannot and maybe you never will be able to? There are some people—Bill has fake hips. Bill made a lot of bad decisions when he was younger, and he decided that he needed to be able to do a certain type of squatting or a certain type of lifting to be as big and brawny as possible.

And it worked.

Muscle bound, muscle bound bill.

It worked with consequences. Yes.

If you look hard enough on the UHP network, you could probably find some pictures of Bill's body building bod. How's that for alliteration? Anyways, so. What I'm trying to get at is Bill could never, even though Bill is a wide structural archetype, so getting to the depth of a deep squat is probably never really in the cards for him structurally.

Well, not without a sufficient load to force the position.

And on top of that, you now have fake hip joints. Yes, because of that. So I would expect even more of a constraint to getting into that position.

Yes.

But going to someone that values and says the squatting pattern is something everyone needs to be able to do, and I need everyone to be able to go to full depth squat, whatever you want to call it, you're either going to have to build up the floor under their heels or have them hold the weight or just jam them into the position and ask for some sort of compensation. I guess what we can try to impart over this podcast or maybe a series of podcasts talking about squatting is understanding the difference between what someone is able to do within their own structure and configuration versus what you try to impose on everybody as this general rule of thumb or the requirement for human beings to be able to squat all the way to depth.

Yeah. Well, you know, if you look across the spectrum at Olympic weight lifters and look at the bottom of a snatch or clean, you will see any number of strategies to acquire the deepest possible position. You're going to see different stance widths, different torsions through bony structure, and different spinal positions. There will be some people predisposed to having what we would consider ideal representations of a snatcher or clean and jerk. It's not that they can't execute the movement, but they have to do it in a different way because of their physical structure. As I said, it's not a matter of them should be able to; it's like how do they perform that? Because to get under a bar in an Olympic lift, you need to descend your center of gravity since the bar doesn't go that far. During the second pull, you have to get under the bar. The question becomes: how do you acquire that position of the center of gravity? That allows us to ask better questions and then resolve the reasoning behind why one person uses this strategy versus another who does essentially the same activity but acquires the position in a much different way.

Right. So one of the main precursors to squatting well within your individual constraints would be being able to have a center of gravity that's within the base of support and you can manage within, you can keep it within your base of support as you move.

Well, that would be ideal, but so when we see things, so here's some of the, like a traditional perspective, you say, oh, this guy has a right shift when he squats, this guy has that left shift when he squats, or this guy has like a torsion. So what they're actually showing you is the representation of how the system is behaving to provide a solution to the problem, the problem being is like, okay, so I have to descend my center of gravity. How am I going to do this? And so that could be any number of turns and twists to get there because once again, I have to create a space. So this would be creating external rotation. And if I don't have access to relative motion external rotation, I'm going to have to create a substitution for that. So I'll have to use a compensatory strategy to create more space to descend. Well, if that space is more on one side than the other, that's where we're going to start to see some of these grossly asymmetrical representations of a squat. They're just following the direction of the space that they have access to to allow the center of gravity to descend. I might be able to do that more on one side than the other. And so the people that appear to have these beautiful symmetrical deep squats are better at resolving these rotational solutions. So let's just say that I could descend on the right and I can't descend on the left. It's like, well, that's going to promote this movement towards that space. If I have the capacity to resolve the compressive strategy that would limit the depth and have the capacity to project the other side, I can provide a rotational solution that allows the squat to remain in an apparent symmetry as I descend.

Understanding, I guess we can talk about sort of understanding what's happening in the squat. And typically, if we're going to break propulsion into three phases, obviously there's transition elements to this. We can talk about early, middle and late. And in the case of a squat, I think what can be confusing to a lot of people is there's an assumption that the top of the squat would be like an early propulsion type of place or position, but it is not.

No, a squat is a bottom-up activity. It just so happens that we're humans, we walk around standing up, right? And so, so then the assumption is, is that the beginning of the squat is at the top and the actual representation of early propulsion, which is the super superposition of internal rotation on external rotation in the center of gravity behind the ground contact. So we've sort of defined that a little bit already. And so what we want to do is we want to look at this as a bottom-up activity, where we would have early represented at the very bottom. We have to access the greater degree of downforce to actually stand back up. And then as we initiate the squat. So this is what's important. You're not standing in late propulsion. It's when you initiate the squat, that's where the late propulsive representation is actually represented because you have to project forward to start the descent. I have to be moving from a late position into an early position to access the bottom of the squat. So it would go, bottom would be early, my projection upward would be middle. And then as I initiate the squat, that would be our late representation.

Right. And then walking, the thing that confuses people is trying to compare squatting to walking and thinking that since it's upright, walking is upright that early at the top. So hopefully that kind of helps people understand.

We can connect that really quick if you want.

Well, I mean, I wanted to make just one point about how what you had mentioned, developmentally, we roll around on the ground, we crawl around the ground, and then we support ourselves in a low position and then stand up. So that's very coherent with how we develop. It's not that Bill is making anything up here. This is how the human being learns to move anyway. So it is coherent to say that the bio squat is early propulsion, then middle, and then late.

We could use another example. So if you did a standing broad jump, so two legs, landing on two legs, and give it some effort so you get a representation of this. Well, you project the center of gravity up and forward from the initiation of the jump, and that is your late propulsive representation. As you land, you're going to land with your center of gravity behind your foot contact, and then as you land, you're going to control the descent forward. And so you're controlling this intergravity in that circumstance. So we can look at the swap the same way as we would as a broad jump but without the jumping portion of it. So it's initiated the same way as the standing broad jumps. It's initiated in late propulsion and that would descend into the early representation. And so this is the same premise as taking a step forward. So as I take a step forward and I land and I start to superimpose, internal rotation on the external rotated position. I'm slowing the center of gravity down. I'm not stopping it. I'm just slowing it down. And the center of gravity actually descends because I'm starting to superimpose the internal rotation. So it holds in regards to its representation of the phases of propulsion.

And a lot of these, I think, in place exercises, people sort of understand them as just controlling forward motion. And your ability to sort of contain forward motion, I think, is a good way to think about it. And understanding also that having an appreciation for the fact that there is only forward motion, we have a system that's only designed to do that. This is a big one. This is a hard one for people to wrap their heads around. It's tough. Yeah, I know. I think people, examples that came to mind when I had a hard time reconciling this were like a reverse lunge or a deadlift where you're thinking, 'Oh, well, I'm moving in reverse or my hips are moving back.' But just think about, think about the, there's like a green dot that's in your center of gravity, right? And that's where your center of gravity is. Where does the green dot always move as you change levels with any activity? It always moves forward. So it's, that's the, there is no arguing this. The only way the green dot ever moves backwards is if I push you as hard as I can, and you fly backwards and do like a backflip.

Or you have to create a very undesirable compensatory strategy.