I was just thinking about the importance of sleep. We definitely talk about the importance of sleep for athletes and people on weight loss, but have you experienced patients or clients in rehab recovering better with more sleep or less sleep? Is that something you even talk about?

Sure.

Bill, I have a question for you. I have an answer, hopefully. We've been talking a lot about feet internally around here. Just some observations we've noticed and even let you Google, you Google some athletes feet and you see a lot of the most athletic NBA ballers, they have very, very flat feet. Toe valve is bilaterally collapsed arch. Just the whole nine.

No, that does help. I made that mistake this year. I know how to.

Yeah, elementary level, but middle school, high school, it's pretty much.

So are you forcing her to do something she doesn't want to do?

Yes, and so I don't, you know, I think that if you look at then all these, so for me, it was just a couple of interesting questions. Like my blood pressure is like, my systolic blood pressure is like 110, 114, which I would generally have to consider good. And now I'm like, I mean, it's not so good. And so then I'm thinking all the levers that you can pull to lower blood pressure. Exercise being one of them from an ability to the not Bill Hartman version, pump blood, more blood per stroke, right? So create more elastic vasculature would be kind of the other piece. And, you know, then there're kind of some nutrition, some different nutrition things. But, you know, I think that, unfortunately, exercise is like complicated to study because you start dealing with population, intensity, duration, mode, you know, all those different variables, then all of a sudden it's like how could you even figure something out to say, here's a good prescriptive approach?

Can you say the name of those books that you showed us again?

Josh and I'm going to paraphrase Josh's question a little bit because some of it was directed towards a couple of things about his own Representation, but he brings up a really good point that I wanted to make. Josh mentions when in situations where you're doing a lot of side plank, suitcase carries, deadlifts, heels elevated squats, and lateral split squats for people with wide infrastructural angles. The question is, is adding load to these activities beneficial or is it counterproductive? And so here's the answer to that. It's a big fat maybe because it depends on what your intention is. But under most circumstances, when you're trying to capture a position, so we're trying to reacquire relative motion between segments, if I increase the load to a significant degree, what I end up doing is recruiting a great deal of superficial musculature, which increases my compressive strategy. It may drive me towards breath holding. And so those strategies constrain segments together. Now, that's not always a bad thing, because I can also create an emphasis in certain cases. So let's just pick on the Camperini deadlift for a second, where if I increase the load on the Camperini deadlift, I will actually increase the constraints at the ankle of the foot and the knee, but I may be able to access a little bit more hip motion under those circumstances. And if that's my goal, then adding load under those circumstances may actually help me to be successful. However, if I'm trying to recapture relative motions at the ankle, and the knee to a certain degree, then again, promoting the superficial musculature, promoting a breath hold, and creating a propulsive strategy may actually be detrimental for me to recapture that relative motion. So you can't say yes and you can't say no, but if we had to throw in a general recommendation, it's like increasing load when you're trying to recapture relative positions is usually not the best case scenario. So let me give you another example. So if we were doing say a cable chop versus a cable lift, so one of the distinguishing characteristics between the two is that a cable chop actually reduces the gravitational load on the human being because the resistance is pulling me upward. So as I pull down, even though I'm creating a compressive strategy to pull the weight down and cheerfully on the backside, I actually have the capacity to expand. Whereas if I was doing a cable lift and I'm lifting upward, that's more of a propulsive strategy, which is going to create a lot of superficial musculature. And again, it promotes the overcoming, breath holding type strategies that actually may reduce my relative motions. So again, Josh, I think this is a really, really great question that when in doubt, the answer is determine what your needs are through a test, you intervene, and then you retest to see if you're actually accomplishing what you intended to accomplish. But as a general rule, the greater the load, the greater the compressive strategy, the greater the breath hold, et cetera, you're going to actually reduce and constrain segments. And if that's your goal to reduce more force, then more power to you. If you're trying to recapture ranges of motion, then your ability to breathe through an activity will allow you to capture those relative motions that tend to restore ranges of motion, comfort, et cetera.

So first of all, you need to know who you're talking to. The rule is you meet them at their story and ask them questions like, 'How do you think it happens?' Then you can find out more about how they're thinking. I understand the whole lever-and-pulley thing because it looks that way. But then you encounter problems when you recognize that if we're levers and pulleys, there must be fulcrums. But there are no fulcrums—joints don't actually touch; there's fluid between them. If joints don't touch, there can't be a fulcrum. If there are no fulcrums, there are no levers. If there are no levers, how do you move? That leads to the conversation. Again, it's not about being insulting or saying I'm smarter; it's just a matter of saying, 'I understand that perspective, but I don't agree with it for this reason.' You just have to provide reasoning. I'm all for being skeptical; I try to be as skeptical as I can. My greatest battle is fighting my own biases. I'm aware they exist, but I'm human, so it's difficult to overcome them. You have those conversations with yourself too, though it's easier in your own head than with someone else. You have to meet them wherever they are, and the easiest thing is to ask questions with great kindness. There's nothing wrong with offering your perspective: 'My perspective is this because...' You also don't have to pretend certainty. It's fine to say, 'I'm not really sure how to answer that, but...' followed by your reasoning. I have no qualms about being wrong—I'm sure some of what I express is wrong, but right now it makes sense to me and is useful in my decision making. When bumping into someone skeptical, applaud them. Being skeptical is part of being a critical thinker; that's what I'm doing when I talk. I'm not taking anything at face value. You tell me something happens, and I think, 'Okay, but I have reasons to believe otherwise.' It's about gathering more information and integrating it into one large model. It doesn't matter where you start—there's no right or wrong.

One of the two extensions and stuff like that. So like I said, just took everything that we've done statically, positionally, and then superimposed the breathing on top of that. So exhale on exertions, inhale on recoveries. And again, it's not about anything special per se. It's just doing the right thing at the right time versus making these blind assumptions that everybody's going to have the same needs. And like I said, Terry being so compliant, he's like the dream client that anything you ask him to do, he'll do.

It's a big maybe. So that's why you have to do the test because the confounding variable is whether I have an eccentrically oriented abductor pollicis longus. Under those circumstances, that muscle right there—if it is eccentrically oriented—what you'll get is the differential between the hand and the forearm. So if I have to drive pronation harder, I will drive the opponents harder to push the thumb this way. And so the forearm stops pronating, but the hand can't keep going. So that's an eccentrically oriented abductor pollicis longus. What will happen is where you should not have ulnar deviation. So when the forearm is pronated, I should not have ulnar deviation. It should be blocked because as the forearm pronates, the radius actually moves relatively in that direction, which appears to move ulnarly, positioning the wrist into radial deviation. So I should have a block to ulnar deviation. I should have a block to extension. However, if I drive opponents hard enough to create even more pronation, the hand will twist relative to the forearm. Now, that is eccentrically oriented, and you do have ulnar deviation. So now you know what you need to reorient to recapture normal wrist behaviors, because if that stays eccentrically oriented, then I have all sorts of mobility where I shouldn't. You'll see a lot of lateral wrist pain during pronated activities. But if I try to drive extension, they load the medial or the radial side of the wrist. So you get radial wrist pain on that side, like if I'm doing a pushup or a press—they hurt right there. And that's how you know it's a twist. When you don't have the eccentrically oriented abductor pollicis longus, you get pain right over the lunate, dead center. So you can actually kind of distinguish whether I have a twist in the hand or if it's just the pronation that's the problem. And that's how you distinguish between the two.

So if I measure a straight leg raise test, and let's just say that Alfred has about 70 to 80 degrees here, and I raise this leg, and I get 70 to 80 degrees here. If my assumption is that he's somehow magically laying on the table in this perfectly even dead guy anatomical position, I would have to say that, well, both hips are showing me the exact same measure. So my assumption is that orientation positions and muscle activity are equal on both sides. However, I can't make that assumption because I can't rely on that one singular test. One is a representation of position. So all I would have to do is tilt his pelvis on an oblique axis, and I've changed the initial conditions. I've reoriented both of the acetabulum; both of the hip sockets have changed position. Now when I raise up this leg to 70 degrees, I have a totally different orientation of the hip than I have on this side to get the 70 to 80 degrees. So if this hip is already beginning in a more flexed position because the orientation of the pelvis started in hip flexion, and they end in the same place, I actually have more hip flexion on this side than I had on this side. So to make the assumption that both sides are equal, my intervention may fail simply because my interpretation was wrong to begin with. So I have to take into consideration these initial conditions. How do you do this? Well, that's why we measure all the other movements and then we create a three-dimensional or four-dimensional picture in our head as to what the orientation of the body is in space. Then we can be a little bit more secure in our decision-making in regard to the interventions that we'll choose, because we've narrowed the probabilities of what's actually going on. We can't have a faulty assumption that everybody's starting from this ideal position like we learned in school, because that really doesn't exist. And again, take into consideration the initial starting conditions and the representation of the end conditions, and that's going to allow you to determine where things are in space, narrow down your probabilities, and your interventions will be much more successful.

I have thought about that too. I have a client who travels all the time, usually internationally, and has not been doing any travel as a result lately.

I fail every day, but when I fail, I don't look at it as the negative. I just look at it as another piece of information. It's like, 'Oh, so the next time I see that and I do this, I have to expect this as one of the probabilities.' And then, if I do an intervention, let's just say that I had 10 similar situations and seven out of those 10, I was considering myself successful because I got the result that I want, and then 30% I didn't. I have to respect that 30%, but now I'm weighing it. And I'm like saying, 'Okay, most of the time when I do this, this is actually a good choice. So I'm going to do this.' That's how you make the good decision. It's a process. So you might not get the outcome that you wanted, but it was the right thing to do. Because if you start patting yourself on the back when you're successful and then you start beating yourself up when you're not, either one is helpful? No, right? And then you're still left with whatever outcome that you had. So you just make the next logical step. You use your decision-making process, and that evolves over time as well. So you get better at making decisions because you develop the process of making the decision, but you're still going to have variable outcomes because you're dealing with complexity. There's multiple answers to every question in a complex situation. This is a really deep conversation for a Thursday morning, fellas. Good morning. Happy Friday. I have Neurokinetic Therapy in hand. And yes, it is perfect. Okay, a busy Friday. Very excited. Lots of things to do today. Lots of people to talk to, which is always exciting. So yeah, this whole situation has just provided opportunities galore. So I'm trying to take full advantage of it. Anyway, and I hope you guys are too, getting some good work done, maybe getting some studying done, maybe working on some relationships perhaps that you haven't been able to do. So please take advantage of this opportunity. I got a message from Charlie Reed. Charlie is an amazing coach. I suggest you look him up. I think he is at CharlieReedFitness.com, so go check him out. He's also an amazing guitar player, but that's beside the point. I'm just jealous about that part. But Charlie sent me a message this morning and hit on a topic that I'm very fond of. And I think that everybody works from some sort of model, but I think that clarifying that model on a regular basis is really important. And so one of the ways that you want to do that is by literally drawing out your model. So you can actually visualize it, see it, and identify where you might have weaknesses or gaps or where you need to develop an aspect of it.

What are you doing yourself to organize this for yourself so you can test-retest and understand physics? What are you doing to capture this information? Are you just a note-taker? Are you using some kind of system or app? What are you doing for those that don't understand the best way for them to go about capturing information?

Yeah. So same thing. Four for four breaths is generally what we can do. And we won't always go to that unless we think someone can handle like the grip component of that. Sometimes that's the limiting factor.

Yes.

And I think maybe you keep the heels elevated squat thing or you do your toe touch. But I would video it from several angles and say, OK, where am I in this squat? So just getting your hips below parallel may not be representative of what you're wanting in regards to maintaining some measure of better variability. Gotcha. And then, let me offer you this. So you've always been this hypertrophy dude, ever since I've done you. So you carry around a lot of muscle mass to begin with. So right away, you know you've got a strong concentric strategy that's a byproduct of that. And so one of the ways that you're going to need to capture eccentric orientation. So eccentric orientation is what allows you to move. Concentric orientation will take away your movement, but allow force production. is that you might need to integrate some loaded eccentric orientation activity. So like bringing back some old school bodybuilding stuff like a dumbbell fly, and not with the intent of increasing load, but making sure that you can move through an excursion and then breathe through it allows you to recapture eccentric orientation. So simple things like getting yourself into a split squat position and doing that low isohole. Like I said, the end of it.

Okay, but with a narrow, that would be a pulse of IR, I'd want, again, versus a wide, where I have a longer IR, correct?

Yeah. And she'll say like, even as we were doing something like just the slower and more controlled drills last time. So her tendency, like when she comes in with like a little bit of a flare up, like she's just very tiny, narrow. And then like her measures, like she'll have like 67 degrees of beer on the right hip and like two. So she just gets shoved way over. Well, like she can feel it where like she just knows she has a harder time going into the left side. So I feel like she's getting shot. She can't get out of the cut on the right. You can't get into the cut on the left.

Not a very good one, I guess.

Do you have a pelvis in front of you?

In lady R, you want the scapula to be ER.

One measure will assure that I have access to the position. I am straight down. It's interrotation straight down into the ground without compensation.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've definitely held people's ribs down on one side or both sides or whatever. So in regards to the other situation where they're not too expanded, too much yield anteriorly, but they do have some sort of restriction, would that be, would that potentially be a situation where you'd have to do something more manual? And so in this circumstance, you probably end up in the opposite scenario where they'd have some sort of bend creating, I don't know if you'd even call it. to your expansion, but yeah.

Was trying to get like the right, the right tension set. Right.

Yes, because it's a compressed representation, right? And the concern that I have is that I don't want to take the fibers of the gluteus medius that go straight up from the trochanter and then take everything that's anterior. So all of those fibers would be concentrically oriented. Under that circumstance, there would be a downward compression on the femur that would bend the neck towards a 90-degree angle. That would be a representation where there's actually no movement in the hip joint itself. It's very compressed, with a lot of tension and not a lot of wiggle room. If I take that representation and mobilize it into internal rotation, it would be emphasizing the current strategy. The anterior gluteus medius would already be concentrically oriented, and I would push the trochanter into that same position, potentially doing nothing and gaining nothing. However, if I can recapture the external rotation representation, I now have an external rotation representation. When I mobilize it in that direction, I won't necessarily pick up the compensatory strategy and I will start to produce relative motion at the hip joint. The difference is the starting point of the mobilization. Do I want to start in a compensatory strategy and drive harder into it? Or do I want to start where I have greater relative motion? Then I can start to influence the synovial joint that I'm actually mobilizing because the first synovial joint I tried to mobilize didn't have any relative motion available. It was already in a compressed representation with no movement available.

Okay. But I mean, see where my hands, they disappeared from the screen. They were way out there where her space was. So you put her feet that far apart. Not a beach ball. You put a beach ball between your knees and you put her feet way out here.

So you can use his squat as a tell. Let's just say he was doing a box squat. Where do you think he would start with his foot position?