Absolutely. Well, so hands, hands are the same thing. Anytime you put somebody's hands in contact with the surface, you get feedback approximately. Right? So that's a big deal too. And that's a common error is not attending to where your hand contact is. So again, you have to, any time, this goes for any exercise, you have to decide what is my intent here and then how are we going to execute this? And then what am I willing to allow to happen? Right? If your goal is excursion, then you have to minimize the compensatory strategy. If your goal is force, you might have to maximize those, but also monitor, you know, all other key performance indicators to make sure that you're not creating an interference.

Well, yeah. See, okay. Watch the Olympics. You're talking about the athletes at the highest level that are highly specialized. And why did the figure skaters pick figure skating? Well, there was thousands of little girls that picked figure skating, but only three of them had the right body type that could take them far enough. If you look at the Olympic swimmers, they all look the same. Big giant hands, big giant feet, short legs, big long torsos with scapulae that are oriented into ER. That's how you get the shoulder motion. And so again, the configuration determines what you're going to be good at. That was my light bulb moment of the call. So let's break down the supine cross-connect. Good morning. Happy Friday. I have neural coffee in hand and it is perfect. All right. We are wrapping up a very solid week this week. Great call yesterday morning on the coffee and coach's call. My oldest friend showed up on the call. He's a baseball coach. We talked a little bit about baseball and some of the things that we saw the highlights from yesterday that was just a small clip of two hours. So hopefully you can join us next Thursday for that. We're going to wrap up the week with a little bit of a breakdown of the supine cross-connect. It's an exercise that I use quite a bit in the purple room. And then we translate that into a lot of activities out in the training hall and then as we're evolving people or progressing them into the high-speed dynamic activity. So it's a very useful foundational activity. I had a bunch of requests to actually break this down so this is how we're going to wrap up Friday. As far as who we're going to apply this to and when we're going to use this under specific circumstances, in many cases we're looking at somebody that is biased towards a later propulsive strategy. So we're going to get somebody with an anterior rotation. We're going to see loss of early hip flexion. You're probably going to see loss of both internal and external rotation. The anterior rotation is going to take away the external rotation. You're typically going to have an anterior compression that goes along with that. So we're going to see the loss of both ERs and IRs. And then you're definitely going to see a limited straight leg raise in most of these situations. So what we're going to try to do is we're going to try to recapture this early propulsive strategy which is an ER bias but we want to make sure that we're controlling the orientation of the pelvis so we have to control the position of the ischiotuberosity to get that posterior orientation relative to the anterior. It's an ER bias, but it's also where we're going to actually start to superimpose this intramutation on top of it. So we need a yielding action in the posterior aspect of the pelvis and the posterior aspect of the thorax. As you construct this exercise, you want to start from the foot upwards. So the wall becomes the ground under these circumstances. And so we have to get the foot contacts correct. Otherwise, we're not going to get the upstream activity that we want. So we want to make sure that we're capturing the first metatarsal head and the medial calcaneus on the wall. And so we've got the foot elevated off the surface. And what that does is it keeps the foot slightly in front of the pelvis, which would be our early propulsive positioning. But capturing the first metatarsal head and the medial calcaneus is important because that's that initial superposition of internal rotation on top of the external rotation bias. Then to hang onto those cues, we need that medial pressure on the foot. What people are going to try to do is they're going to try to internally rotate from the top down to try to capture this pressure on the wall. What it would encourage you to do is cue it through the ankle because what's going to happen if they try to drive it through internal rotation, you're going to get a little bit more knee flexion than you want. And then you're also going to get an anti-orientation pelvis. And so now we've just defeated the purpose of the exercise by letting them follow their compensatory strategy. The knee is going to be slightly bent under these circumstances because what I don't want to do is turn this into a knee extension activity per se because then it becomes all quad activity when I really want hip activity. So I'm going to try to drive this through the hip from the top down and then maintain that ankle position so I can maintain my foot cues. On the opposing side, we're going to bend the hip and the knee, but where I want you to target the direction of the knee is towards the nose. So we would need to bring this knee towards midline because what you're going to see typically are two compensatory strategies at the hip. So number one, they're going to try to ER the hip or they're going to move the hip into an EO orientation and then try to drive hip flexion, traditional hip flexion, which is actually going to be IR in this position. And so we want to avoid those two compensatory strategies because we're going to take advantage of this compensation by making a turn into the support leg. So if I drive the knee towards midline, what's going to happen is if I can hold that position, instead of the lower extremity moving away from midline, I'm actually going to turn the axial skeleton away from the flexed hip and knee. That's internal rotation on the other side. Because remember, I'm starting the superimposed internal rotation on this ER biased position on the support side. So again, we're taking advantage of the compensation. I'm going to push into the wall. Again, I want to control the ischial tuberosity. So I'm going to push into the wall. So you're going to feel a lot of activity in that support side hip. So if we wanted to pick on a muscle, we could say, well, you're going to feel a lot of glute max activity under those circumstances. Now I'm going to drive the opposite elbow towards the flexed hip and knee. And what this is going to do, it's going to create a space between the spine and the scapula. And so this is going to give us our yielding action in the upper thorax. From a breathing standpoint, we want to be able to breathe through this. So we're going to inhale, but we're going to think about bringing the knee and the elbow closer together on the inhale. And then my exhale strategy is going to be to push the wall away. So this constructs the entire exercise. Now, for some people, it's going to be very, very difficult to breathe. And so I would encourage you to capture the cues, but don't force the activity between the elbow and the knee because we do want to be able to move air. And so I want people to expand under these circumstances because most of the people that we're going to use this with are very, very compressed. And what we're going to find over time is as they gain this capacity to expand and compress, we're going to approximate that elbow in the knee much more effectively. You're going to get a stronger push in the wall. So let them evolve this exercise. Don't try to be perfect on the first try because you're going to capture a lot of good things as long as you maintain your contacts with the wall. So hopefully that gives you some ideas on how you're going to utilize this activity, how to break it down, how to teach it. If you have any questions, go to askbillharman at gmail.com, and I will see you guys next week.

So all you did was you created a substitution for their lack of extra rotation. So you turn the system outward, not relative motion. It's a compensatory strategy. And now they have an expanded field. So that's why I say it's a field. It's a space around you where extra rotation can exist. And then you can access the internal rotation that you need to lift the weight.

So on that note and kind of on the tail end of all of those, what do you think that, personally, like inside of you—not outside of your environment or not necessary to learning—but you personally, on the inside, made you successful or made you who you are now? Like, I know that you like you put out some of the answers, but what do you think that's like the three most successful traits in you? Like, is it? Yeah.

Spine that is facing the right and I've got an orientation of the pelvis that is turned strongly to the right and I take somebody into a hip flexion measure and they turn towards that hip flexion as I measure it I can get a magnification of my ER. So when I try to turn someone into extra rotation and the pelvis turns towards me what I'm going to get is this magnification of extra rotation. So this is where you're going to get a lot of these measures of 80 degrees, sometimes up to 90 degrees of hip ER, which is associated with the turn of the spine, even though the pelvis is anteriorly oriented. Firm what's going on on the table. So we have imprecision that we're dealing with, we have uncertainty that we're dealing with, but we do have checks and balances. So the checks and balances are looking at all of your external rotation measures. So remember that flexion, abduction and traditional extra rotation measures are all ER. I have to have all three of those go through, go to normal measurement to assure that I have normal expansion capabilities where I need expansion to get my ERs. If one of those is in deficit, then all three are going to be in deficit. So even though two might look like they're normal and one is in deficit, all three are in deficit. I just have a compensatory strategy that is allowing that measure to look like it is full on the table. I also have my iterations to fall back on so now I have the same side hip and the same side shoulder that I can compare to and I can assure that I'm measuring correctly. So this is how you start to refine your measurements and we take these dirty imprecise measurements and we make them more precise and allows us to intervene more effectively. You're still going to be wrong sometimes just accept that fact. Our goal is to get better at this stuff so we can narrow the probabilities and get more effective with the interventions that we choose and then gain success along the way. So now I'm going to show you a clip from yesterday's Coffee and Coaches conference call where Andrew helped us out and he actually went through a little bit of a demo where we can actually feel how the spine provides this compensatory strategy for internal and external rotation of the hip. So watch through that and then we'll be right back. So let's talk about the opposing extreme. Okay. People that rely on lumbar flexion for their ER show 80, 90 degrees of hip external rotation at 90 degrees where we would traditionally measure. So that's literally the exact opposite of what you're describing. So that's how you know you got rollback on the table. Like when you were measuring somebody, you bring them up to 90 degrees of traditional hip flexion and you're doing your ERIR and you go, wow, look at the ER on this guy. That's somebody that's got a spine that's actually turning towards you as you're measuring that hip ER. You will always have external rotation and internal rotation. It just might not be where you want it to be. So when we measure at the hips and things like that, and you see the extreme representation that like we're just talking about, that's usually coming from somewhere else that it's changing the orientation that allows the extreme to be demonstrated where you would traditionally measure. So that is something that you have to pay attention to. That's why orientation is so important to understand as to how it influences the measurement outcome. People blame things like laxity, Right? They say, oh, you have a lax whatever. And the reality is it's just on pointing the socket in a direction where those constraints that normally would restrict motion don't matter anymore. It's like untwisting a twisted tail. Right? And so it becomes loose, if you will.

There's a very simple answer to this. Very simple. Who do you work with?

So what you're asking me for is a cookbook. Right? Or you continue to take pieces and you struggle and then you learn how to put them together and then you master this and then you become the chef because then you can manipulate this at will rather than having, if I see this, then do that. Right? Then you only have one if-then. And then what are you going to do when that fails? Right? Seriously, what are you going to do? So let's go back to the Splitspot example. You see somebody lowering them down. You see that one hip that kind of stays up, and you go, oh, that's a lack of inhibition. Bill said, put their front foot up on a box. Cool. Uh-oh. That didn't work. Now what do I do? Because all you did was memorize an if and a then. You didn't recognize the principle.

It might be my first experiment because it looks just like I'm trying like, and it might work just fine. But what if I need another strategy?

Because that's what makes Instagram coaches, you know, is trying to identify the weak muscle or the source of it.

And that is traditionally considered this high propulsive foot with the force application came just prior to that. And so this is the demonstration of what happens after that force production. And so when we talk about a performance related foot, this is why we're going to see lower arches on a lot of these really, really high performance feet. So people look at these feet and they go, oh, these are really crappy feet because pronation has always been described as this accommodative foot position, which is not untrue. But the highest force production also happens in maximum pronation. So that's where our max propulsion is. So when we look at feet like this, it can be a little confusing as to why we would see these low arches. But what they're actually doing is it's a time saver that allows these athletes to get to maximum propulsion much faster than what we would consider our non-athletic population. So that's what they're representing. Now, we've got some subtle differences between these low arched feet as well that we can talk about. If we have someone that is closer to maximum propulsion than, say, another athlete, what you're typically going to see under these circumstances is you'll see, if we were to make a comparison in performance, we would see a better broad jump than vertical jump. So it doesn't mean they're bad vertical jumpers, it just means that as a representation of where they perform the best, they are better at horizontal projection because they are so much closer to maximum propulsion than another athlete would be. And so they'll have the quicker first step. They'll have great acceleration. But what you're going to measure, to throw them on the table, they're going to be biased more towards external rotation. So remember, as I break that foot, I get this concentric orientation that's going to move me quicker towards the ER. So what happens is they have a reduced yielding strategy, which again, that dampens their ability to produce a vertical jump, but it also improves their horizontal projection. They're going to have limited hip flexion. They'll probably have a limited straight leg raise, et cetera, that's associated with this extra rotation bias and a reduced yielding strategy. If I move you back just slightly from max propulsion, I have now just increased the amount of time that you have between where you are as a representation of your center of gravity and maximum propulsion. So in doing so now, I've actually increased the time that you have to produce a yielding strategy. These are the people that will have a better vertical jump than broad jump as a representation. But they're going to be a little bit slower in regards to change of direction. But they're going to have better top speed because their vertical projections are better. They're going to have slightly less external rotation bias. So they're going to have a little bit more of an internal rotation capability than, say, our guys that are better horizontal projectors. And so they'll have a little bit better hip flexion, a little bit better straight leg raise.

Right. And so then he starts topping out, right? So now no more progress. And then all you're going to get is you're going to get a stress related load that might turn into something bad. Right, because every time you compress in that strategy, what do you think the load's going to go because he's looking for internal rotation instead of distributing the internal rotation throughout his whole body. He's putting it in one big place. Right. Every what like the, the, the cute curve of that side bend and that hip shift. That's where the load's going. That's why we don't want to see that kind of stuff, because that's what's going to lead towards bad stuff. It's not just bad technique. It's focal load that can change things. And we don't want to constraint change, because those tend to be undesirable for many reasons.

If I jump, what I want you to do is I want you to tell me which activity loads the system faster between I'm going to jump off a 36 inch box onto the floor or I'm going to perform a 98% of my 1RM max effort squat. Which one loads faster?

Or even like strapping a band to a pull-up bar and unloading it, no?

Yeah, I go like that. OK. Gotcha. Yeah. But let me offer you this. So there are measures that are going to be associated with a narrowing of that angle. So think about what would happen to close it. So to move the clavicle back and the scapula forward, they're stuck in the way. So I have the upper rib cage, I have air volume, et cetera. And so for that angle to actually close, I have to have an anterior or posterior compressive strategy that is closing that angle. As it closes, it goes up. The human ribcage is somewhat conical. So basically the scap rides up, and the clavicle moves up and back. That angle gets closed. It gets very, very narrow. And so when you think about like upper dorsal rostral compression, you think about the manubrium being compressed down. So you're going to lose, if the clavicle moves back, you're going to lose internal rotation behind the body. And you're going to, and if the dorsal, upper dorsal rostral gets compressed, you're going to lose N range overhead reef. Good morning. Happy Friday. I have neural coffee in hand and it is perfect. Man, we had a great week. So let's wrap this up with a really cool Q&A. It addresses a situation that I'm very fond of talking about, which is the iterations between the pelvis and the thorax. And it comes from Ryan. And Ryan says, I've been interested chess board that I'd appreciate your insight on. The patient of interest has a wide ISA with bilateral upper dorsal rostral compression left greater than right. In a right anterior upper thorax compression, they also have a limitation in right forearm pronation. So remember that orientation because it's going to show up here in the next paragraph. Lower body appears to be iterative, so Ryan's on point already. So it's iterative to the presentation with bilateral hip ER limitations and a right hip IR limitation. They also have an early propulsive foot on the right that has difficulty dorsiflexing, pronating and everting. So this person comes to Ryan with a complaint of right lateral foot pain with an increased running volume. And if we come up with a solution, I really think that this foot thing is going to be addressed. But it's more important that we talk about what this representation really looks like and what's happening. And then we'll talk about some strategies to resolve it. So let's grab Paul this. Let's see what this thing looks like. Ryan mentioned that we've got dorsal rostral compression in the upper thorax. If we look at the iterations, dorsal rostral compression in the thorax will also be representative of this posterior upper compressive strategy in the pelvis. Now, it's compressed on both sides, but Ryan also mentioned that they have a greater loss of extra rotation on the left side versus the right. So we know the right side is leaning. So we got a little bit more of a compressive study that's pushing this left side forward, which means that everything's going to be turned to the right. Now, If we look at the upper thorax, he says I've got a right anterior thorax compression, which means that I'm going to lose some shoulder internal rotation on this side. And guess what? We have a loss of hip internal rotation on that right side too. So Ryan, you've got a little bit of an anterior compressive strategy going on here in this right pelvis as well. So again, we've got this great match. Now, let's talk about the forearm and the foot because this is really cool. So, Ryan was smart enough to check all the way down into the forum and the wrist to identify what he's actually looking at, which is an awesome thing to do. Remember, we're treating the whole person here. And so, he identified the fact that this person does not have normal pronation in that right upper extremity. And then he says, well, we got an early propulsive foot, too, so let's take a look at that. So, my early propulsive foot is an ER tibia. The tibia is behind the malleolus here. And I'm going to have a decent arch in the foot. So that's my early propulsive strategy in the foot, which means that I have a foot that's going to be biased towards extra rotation slash supination. And so they can't pronate the foot either. So we have this beautiful, beautiful iteration from all the way from the ground all the way up to the upper extremity, which means that if we really want to clean this thing up, we may have to go into the upper extremities. to make sure that we have a full restoration of movement capabilities throughout the axial skeleton and throughout the extremities so this person does not have a recurrence of this strategy during their running. What are we going to do? A couple of strategies. If you want to go manual, if you're a manual guy, you might want to use the right lower extremity manipulation that I show on YouTube to try to recapture that middle propulsive strategy from the foot on up. That's a nice little video for you to watch. When we talk about the upper extremity situation, we also have manipulations up there too. I would probably look at something that utilizes the radius at the elbow where you can drive pronation from distal to proximal through the wrist. We get a nice little manipulate at the elbow and that's going to drive shoulder internal rotation as well. But there's a number of strategies that you can do up there as well. We've got scap decompression that we could use. Also, I have a video of that on YouTube as well. That's going to get you that dorsal rostral expansion and get you the restoration of some of your external rotations. If you're a soft tissue guy, identify your concentric orientations and that's where you're going to want to spend your time reducing that. So if you've done all of that, Now we wanna think about, well, I need this person to actually learn how to manage this thing themselves. So when we teach them how to reduce this anterior orientation situation, so we're gonna use some form of hip extension. The question mark is, is how much hip flexion do you have available to work with under this situation? If you do not have 90 degrees, so if I don't have hip internal rotations, then chances are I don't have 90 degrees of hip flexion to work with. So I can't use anything in that range. So I might have to drop them down into hook lying. I might have to work on some posterior orientation activities. in the pelvis so I can work through an excursion of that hip that I do have available. Once I do that, I have to create a delay strategy on the left side. So we're going to do some form of hip shifting. We got to push back on that left side to create some yielding strategy on the left to create the delay of the propulsion because that's what's pushing everything forward. So what it's going to look like, it's going to look like that picture right there. If my technology is friendly today, you're going to see a picture of a before situation that's probably going to look a lot like Ryan's patient here. And then what we're going to do is we're going to teach them how to expand posteriorly on the left with the yielding strategy. And then it's going to look like that picture right there. So again, hopefully my technology is working and you've just seen a before and an after of this situation. Now, once you recover pelvic orientation, yielding strategy, now we got to flip flop our strategy. We got to get the right leg ahead of the left and push back into the left. We've got to train the right side through middle propulsion. So in a lot of situations what I'll do is I'll take people out of their shoes, get their foot on the ground so we can translate that tibia over the foot actively to start to drive through that middle propulsive phase. So those of you that are thinking heel rocker, ankle rocker, toe rocker, this is your ankle rocker as well. If you need to go into the upper extremity, you're going to want to try to drive something very, very similar in the upper extremity that we just talked about with the right lower extremity lead. But in this situation, it's going to become like a right oblique sit with the form and pronation. It's going to progress into some form of side plank in the gym. If we continue on into the gym, You might not be able to use 90 degrees right up the bat because if I put somebody in half kneeling, they can't recapture their internal rotation right away in an upright position because I've got an external rotation on both sides of the pelvis which tilts the pelvis on on a bit of an oblique axis. However, I can bring them up into a staggered stance situation and so now I can get my cable chops. I can do a high low cable press and I can work some backwards sled drags and so now I can be effective in the gym. I can maintain my posterior expansion, the yielding strategy on the backside. I can push off that right foot into into the backside, and now I have just reoriented everything and I'm maintaining all of my changes. So Ryan, I hope that gives you a few ideas on how to approach this so you can go manual. You gotta recapture the positions and then reinforce that stuff in the gym, but it's a great representation of the iterations. Thank you so much for the question. If you have any questions yourselves, ask billhartman at gmail.com. Ask billhartman at gmail.com. Have an outstanding weekend, and I will see you guys later.

Bill, I have a question about orthotics. So I've heard of people saying that you should not get your orthotics made if you're pretty dysfunctional. So if someone gets their orthotics made, they're just reinforcing what they have going on and they should try to correct it first.

As if you were trying to smell something, so the reason that turbulence increases when you sniff is because we actually want to smell; we want to get a sense of what the odor is, and the turbulent flow allows us to maintain the air in the airway where we do sense the smell. But when you think about aggressive activities like wrestling or weight training, we're probably using turbulent flow mechanics quite a bit. And so maybe you're a little bit more sensitive in that regard. And so you get that sense of nasal resistance. When you take your neck through flexion and extension, there's also a shape change that takes place in the pharynx. That's the airway behind the nasal passage, behind the oral passage and down into the throat. So there's sort of a sweet spot where that airway is open the most. And so if I go into an extreme range extension, I will end up compressing the airway as I bring my head through, and while I'm still extended, the airway is going to stay open. And then as I go into extreme flexion, I'm actually going to compress the airway. So again, it depends on your neck position that you're using as well. There's also a cranial shape change that we might need to consider here. Again, strong exhalation strategies, strong compressive strategies will actually alter the cranial shape into an exhalation position, which can reduce the anterior-posterior diameter of the cranium. And so maybe that narrows your nasopharynx and increases this turbulent airflow like we were talking about before. When we talk about the throat position, we talk a lot about the hyoid and the tongue because it's a great way to identify what strategy people are using in the neck. When we have an elevated hyoid position, the suprahyoid muscles are concentrically oriented. What this does is it pulls the mandible back, which brings the tongue along with it. Then we actually compress that oropharyngeal space. And again, this creates resistance to airflow. And so we always have these consequences that are associated with position. And some of them are actually results of training. So if you're doing a lot of neck training, you're using a lot of compressive strategy, you're increasing, most likely, a lot of concentric orientation above the hyoid. You're going to elevate that hyoid and then you're going to create an airway that compresses from this nice round airway to a nice flat anterior-posterior airway, which is great for resistance and stability, but probably not so great for breathing mechanics.

But again, it's like, every time you see an adaptation that you perceive as favorable, recognize the fact that something else had to change for that to occur too. And so if I direct resources towards an adaptation, that means that something else is sacrificed. And it might not be impactful at all. But then again, maybe it is. And so this is why, but again, this is why we always evaluate the human and not a body part or not a single representation or adaptation. We have to look at them as a whole all the time.

I haven't worked extensively with tennis players, though I have treated one who was older. I've seen my fair share of athletes in similar sports. While there are some obvious differences between these sports, the strategies are fundamentally the same. Anytime you're producing force into an implement, especially when using rotational force to generate power, there will be similarities in how and when that force is produced. The specifics differ with implements like tennis rackets versus golf clubs, but the underlying concepts remain the same. The challenge is that people's perception of what's happening differs significantly from the actual mechanics. When we see a racket moving quickly, we focus on that visible velocity, but that's not where maximum force is actually produced. Maximum force occurs earlier in the movement, just before the racket accelerates, which creates deception about how these athletes need to be trained to generate force.

Of course it does. But they got distracted by sharp shiny objects when they started to pull on the tendons and the distal stuff that doesn't weigh anything, right? it starts to bend and so then it gets misnamed. So instead of calling it something Latin that means, oh, it lifts your heel when you walk, they said, oh, it's a big toe bender.

This is actually really cool. Hang on. Let me get my foot. Here we go. I'm going to pin my screen because I want it to be big on video. Okay. Can everybody see my foot? Okay. So you have three feet to worry about. You have the early propulsive foot. So the early propulsive foot is what people would consider a supinated looking foot, right. So the tippy is behind the ankle. And I have the big arch. Okay. And then my big toe kind of wants to touch the ground, but it's probably not really good at touching the ground. I might have to plantar flex it a little bit to get it to the ground. So that's an early propulsive foot. Okay. So under these circumstances, I have a talus and a calcaneus that are moving together. As that heel breaks the ground, I am producing the maximum amount of force into the ground. Okay. Follow so far. So that's an important point. Then the tibia keeps going forward and it lifts up my heel and I go up over the foot. And that is again, no relative motion between the calcaneus and the talus. So supinated foot and that supinated foot are not the same. So late propulsive foot is not the same as an early propulsive foot, even though they've both been termed a supinated foot.

Well, for me, it's like they're all the same. Pain is just an output, a choice the body makes based on all the experiences, all the context, and all the internal information that has to be processed. It makes a decision and that is the output. Again, I literally think about all the potential influences that are inside of you every moment of every day. You're not controlling that; you might think you do.

The book Spark is John Ratey, I believe is the author. Anyway, they did a lot of research. And it was a school system in Chicago or outside of Chicago. Naperville, maybe. And they brought kids in that were having trouble with grades and such, and they brought them in and they gave them a special gym class and it was all about driving up their fitness levels. And they had significant improvement in their ability to raise their grades, especially within the first three hours of their exercise exposure. So they even narrowed it down that far. And so they're looking at like, okay, well, why is that? And then they look at the elements that are associated with exercise. So you have brain-derived neurotrophic factor. So that makes more neurons. And then you had vascular endothelial growth factor, which contributes to blood flow. And then fibroblast growth factor, which is again, another cellular growth factor for the brain. So, exercise would be like that would be the first thing I do would be movement based. And then the way you grade it is not like on some sort of generalized standard, you grade it to that person. So each individual has goals that they have to meet as an individual. Like, used to be like when we went to gym class, you had to show up so many times. And if you forgot your gym clothes on so many days, you got a reduced letter grade or something ridiculous like that. That's the standard. So you have to have a fitness standard of some sort, but it's got to be individualized. So that would be the foundation of everything because movement promotes creativity and then problem solving. So right away, you already have a kid that's primed for learning. And I think that's the first and foremost thing. I realize that there's some things that they have to learn beyond foundational foundational math. Foundational math, foundational sciences, things like that. I think you have to have those in there. But then I would say that you probably want to have something derived there, again, to promote creativity, and then life skills.

And so if you're a structural reductionist person and you believe in the imaginary planes, then you're going to look at this as a sagittal plane problem that is absolutely wrong. So what we need to recognize is that this is an internal rotation problem. So what hip extension really is, is the ability to internally rotate the hip as you pass your center of mass over the leg during gait or sprinting or during any other form of activity. Your inability to capture this internal rotation then results in a limitation of that joint excursion and then you have all sorts of compensatory strategies that get layered on top of that. And so that step one is to recognize that this is an internal rotation problem. Okay, how do you test it? You can test it in any number of ways. One, you can just look at your hip motion because the hip motion is going to tell you right away. So if I have a loss of total hip excursion, so the hip internal rotation combined is about 100 degrees. So if I have less than 100 degrees of hip ER and IR combined, you're probably going to have an internal rotation deficit, which means you're not going to have what would be termed hip extension. But you can test it in non-weight-bearing situations, like in sidelying. You can do a standing load propulsion test, which is what I teach at the Intensive, which is very, very useful. You can look at things in half kneeling and just kind of eyeball it. You can look at split stance and eyeball it. You can watch sprinting in slow-mo and you'll see the inability to extend the hips. So there's any number of ways that you can identify this. I think you do what you're most comfortable with. The thing that I kind of talk people out of or I try to is the Thomas test. I don't think it's a very good test. I think it's very difficult to control. I don't think it provides a lot of information unless you've got somebody with a ton of anterior orientation where they have like maybe like a minus 30 of what would be traditional hip extension deficit. Because then you can kind of identify those things because it doesn't really matter whether you control the test very well or not. You're going to see this massive deficit. But anytime that there's something that's close or you get somebody that's biased towards an inhalation bias, it's very difficult. It's a very difficult test to take any useful information away. So I talk to people out of that as much as I can. However, I would offer this that if you are questioning whether you have hip extension or not, you reach behind the back test.

Right. Yeah, so it'll be interesting to hear what you have to say about this, too, after you actually get to evaluate.

And after this, then you can start to superimpose some specificity on there so you can get something like Baxter has running stuff in it. This is more of like, you can actually see it says in sport. So it's got a little bit more specificity in there in regards to some of these things that we talk about. But again, I think they tend to look at great detail because I mean, it's a textbook about the foot, right? So all of the detail is just like, you know, kind of overwhelming at times.

I mean, just from my limited understanding of the stuff we learned in school, it would be mid-trap strength or deep neck flexors. But that's why I wanted to pick your brain on this a little bit because I realized that objectively I didn't have a solid baseline of what I wanted to check, since I couldn't replicate the symptoms.

You don't. You can't, right? So if there's no way to measure it, it doesn't mean that it doesn't influence your decision making. This is the part about being informed. Like when people talk about energy production and they want to talk about like the specifics of energy, the energy systems, which is really cool to understand. It's like that's in the background of your understanding. But when it comes to the application, what you have to do is you have to program for the outcome. So that's where like a field test. So something like a yo-yo test for a soccer player comes into play. It's like we equate performance in that test with some adaptation that is favorable for performance, right? And so that's kind of what we rely on. So it's just like us relying on movement as a representation of every system in the body, right? You have to say, okay, so if I produce this adaptation that because of my understanding of the sciences, I should be able to acquire some of this adaptability, well, how would it be represented in performance and then that's your field test. Right. So I would do like a six minute run or the 12 minute run for for aerobic capacity or the test or even a vertical jump or whatever. Right. We have to use a representation. So we have to use a model that allows us to determine whether we are promoting the adaptations that we're seeking, right? So you have to have some representation of it.

I'll be interested to see kind of how this whole learning thing goes for the kids as far as. Steve, do you have any input on that? Because I would be curious to see if the kids are actually adapting to this style of education and then maybe flourishing a little bit because of it.

What?

You're treating the person instead of the diagnosis and I think that that should be something that we have to consider across all clients. It's like just treat the person. See what they're presenting. They're telling you what their needs are if you can respect the measures and then just follow through on that.