The summer before physical therapy school, I took an acting class. I was horrible in interpersonal situations, so I basically threw myself to the lions. You have to do improv, and I actually had to do it. I've been paid three times to be an actor, but that's not why it's a good idea. The point is getting comfortable with the discomfort of interacting with people. I don't believe in lying to people or faking anything—it's just about tolerating discomfort. Have you ever done anything like that before?

It's simple. It's not easy. The rule is very, very simple. The rule is you can only have two strategies for movement. That's it. There's only two. I can make something bigger or I can make something smaller. And based on that shape change, I produce a shape that moves me through space. That's it.

So the way that I perceive those exercises is not relative to the humeral motion, but what's happening between the humerus and the scapula. So if you're doing the traditional external rotation kind of thing, or as you describe the isometric in that lower 60 degree range, as you promote the extra rotation at the humerus and scapula, the scapula are going to turn. So it's not the humerus that would be necessarily turning, but the scapula would turn and create space between the two scapula. And so that would allow that posterior expansion to occur.

Yo, yeah, we're doing real well with that. He's had a schedule.

Right.

I'm trying to continually learn and visualize the obliquities that you just described and also what not regarding the ilium or you have an orientation where both are internally rotated, externally rotated, or even tilted or twisted. Because you can have all those. That's where it gets really hard.

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, the most athletic NBA ballers, they have very, very flat feet. Toe valve is bilaterally collapsed arch. Just the whole nine. They also, we see the large complete opposite spectrum, the very high arch as cave is very rigid foot. We started to notice, again, observing those that tend to be very, very flat collapse feet also tend to have a lot of bounce and are considered like your high flyers or dunkers. And then some of the rigid ones we've seen are just kind of stuck in the mud a little bit.

I like that. Okay.

I mean, it's a lunch, but yeah.

Okay.

Right.

Okay. Who's it by?

Generally speaking, yes. I'm not a heat. We got to do something really important here. I didn't have the case. Generally speaking, you have the right idea. Now, we don't want to think about this as just a pure protraction, which would not be representative of a position of the scapula for breathing purposes. The scapula moves through this four-dimensional movement as you move airflow. Depending on what position you're in with your extremity, it's going to determine what strategy you're going to be using in the dorsal rostral area to create expansion. So if we want the dorsal rostral to expand, I can put the scapula into a position of inhalation or I could put it in a position of exhalation and yielding. The two strategies are not the same, but they both create expansion under different circumstances. We have to consider the desired outcome. Randomly wanting dorsal rostral expansion is all fine and wonderful, but we typically want to have a purpose to it. If there is an extremity motion that we're trying to recapture, that expansion becomes very important. Anytime that we have an external rotation limitation, the dorsal rostral area tends to be compressed, right? So it's the dented fender, if you will. And that limits external rotation because it changes the orientation of the scapula relative to the humerus, which changes the constant of the eccentric orientation of the musculature around the shoulder. And then it creates that external rotation limitation. Again, depending on the desired outcome, we determine by extremity position what type of expansion we're going to get, whether we actually move muscles into an orientation, whether they're eccentrically oriented, whether they're at length, or whether they're concentrically oriented, creating a compressive strategy. Or we want that to yield and allow that to expand while those muscles are still concentrically oriented. We have to make a decision as to what the intent is. There's our purposeful, right? It just depends on what the needs are.

That is correct, sir.

Yeah. OK. And so he generally has had some problems. We've run into some resistance getting results in certain areas.

So let's borrow information from quadruped research. When you look at the way quadrupeds bear weight in single leg stance versus double leg stance, you'll see the compressive strategies we discuss with wide ISAs appearing there. In double leg stance, both sides show compression. When they go to single leg stance, the support leg still shows the compressive strategy, but we get expansion on the opposing side. That's why we generally recommend that wide ISAs avoid bilateral symmetrical exercises because they reinforce compressive strategies. The first rule of decision making is to eliminate interference, so we take anything symmetrical off the table. Now, for unilateral activities, we have many choices. The concern is reinforcing the ability to turn, which requires handling both compressive and expansion strategies. For example, a one-arm dumbbell floor press where both shoulders compress into the floor still uses a bilateral symmetrical strategy. Instead, we want a reaching type press. For pulling activities, we want to maintain posterior expansion on the pulling side, which can be induced with staggered or asymmetrical stances. Reggie, if you look at my videos, I did a glute bridge alternating press and an asymmetrical push-up with an offset hand position. These create turning strategies. Side support positions are also very useful for wide ISAs as they create compression on one side and expansion on the other. Side bridges, T-push-up variations, and arm bars that roll into the sideline position create anterior or posterior expansion, unilateral compression, and unilateral expansion.

Sorry, I feel a little young for pen and paper.

But then we followed that up with the reverse crunch where she's holding a kettlebell behind her head and she was rolling up into a crunch holding her hips above her shoulders for a breath and then slowly controlling it back down. And I think that might have been the most powerful thing that we did.

Yes.

Right. But again, looking at this from a length-sending perspective. So making sure you're hitting some of those end ranges. So again, you think about the anterior compression associated with having big strong pecs is like, okay, let's take those to the length and make sure that as I'm holding this position, I can breathe through that position. And that assures that I've got a skeleton that will move underneath that muscle tension and you'll be surprised. So old school pullovers, but without the compressive strategy on the backside. So you don't want to maintain the arch, right. So maybe you do those inverted. So you do them on a decline, right. So you're, yeah, so you invert the airflow. And so that keeps the upper part of the chest expanded as you're doing it. And so things like that come in really, really handy, but like I said, the split stance stuff, the flies, the pullovers, anything that expands those areas that get compressed over time is a wonderful thing. Like you take your inverted row and just do a hang in the stretch position and just hang out there and just allow that stuff to re-expand after you've compressed it.

In that scenario, you create a case where you have to start using orientations to create a term.

Yeah.

Bucket handle ribs are moving outward and also upward ever so slightly.

Excellent. Okay. If I bring the Ilium closer to the femur, can you appreciate the fact that there's a change in muscle orientation?

Can you appreciate that in the hills away from the?

So is that IR? No. It is IR. It's just compensatory IR. What we want is relative motion, internal rotation of the hip, pushing straight down into the ground.

What was I going to say?

Yeah. If it sounds like the golf waggle, like when a golfer goes to put their club down and then they do the sort of wiggle their hands back and forth.

Because the anterior glute medius would already be concentrically oriented. And I'm going to push the trochanter into that same position and potentially do nothing, gain nothing. However, if I can recapture the ERD representation, I now have an ERD representation. I mobilize it in that direction. I won't necessarily pick up the compensatory strategy and I will start to produce the relative motion at the hip joint. You see the difference? It's the representation of where you're starting that mobilization. It's like, do I want to start it in a compensatory strategy and drive harder into it? Or do I want to start where I have greater relative motion? And then I can start to influence the synovial joint that I'm actually mobilizing because the first synovial joint that was trying to mobilize didn't have any relative motion available to it. Like it was already in a compressed representation. There's no movement available.

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.