Anything that would reproduce those mechanics is the same.

You have to have anterior expansion available to create internal rotation. So if you were compressed anteriorly, you would not have any internal rotation available to you in regard to extremity motion. Let's use the shoulder as an example. If your sternum was compressed downward, you would not have internal rotation available to you. Here's how it works, and I think this is going to answer your question. So let's say you have a legitimate up pump handle, meaning normal expansion anteriorly. As you perform internal rotation, what is actually happening is you are creating the compression by the rotation, and the pump handle is actually going down as you perform the range of motion. Think about twisting a towel—when you twist a towel, it starts expanded and the more you twist it, the tighter the towel gets. Imagine picking up your arm and that being the twisted towel. You're twisting the arm into internal rotation. You have to start with the expanded representation because as you twist, that expansion disappears. That's where the range of motion stops—when you hit the point of compression.

So if you're trying to drive the yield through the axial skeleton, that's where you might go with the higher load because higher magnitude causes you to kind of pre stiffen everything else.

And then like, so like spending time in inversion would be beneficial. Yes. And then so how about like, so when we do like manual therapy, so we have like usually like 90 minutes sessions, what I could do is like either, like if I would have a table that kind of like cracks in the middle, I could have them a little bit like tilted down versus lift their hip up a little bit just so they get a little bit throughout like an hour a day or whatever. Yeah.

I would look at it more from the perspective of like if you were putting somebody, they were standing and you had them put one foot up on a step the downside foot that's still in the ground would have, you would have greater control of the front of the hip. Does that make sense? Because the knee is almost straight. And so there would be less rotation available at the knee, but I have a lot of rotation at the hip. So now I'm influencing the foot and the hip in that circumstance. So I set that up. So I do some kind of activity there first, then I go after like the half kneeling split squats. Then I have more access to knee. Do you see the difference? So there's a little bit of sequencing that comes into play that's helpful. And that doesn't mean you can't knock it out of the park with one exercise. which you can like, you can go right to a split stance activity. Manuel, if you got somebody that's got great control and you're, you're the best coach of the day kind of a thing, you can knock it out of the park with one activity, right? You just got to make sure that number one, you can see what you need to see and they understand what you want them to do. And then there's other times where maybe you don't have that level of communication and maybe it's a, It's a Wednesday instead of a Thursday and you come in and you're a little, you know, you're a little off, right? And then maybe you need two exercises.

Oh, stand up. So, what I want you to do is we're just going to shift your center of gravity. Take a little bit of weight off of your left foot, keep your left foot grounded so you're in medial foot contact on the left side. From there, take your right back pocket and shove it forward. You start to feel the weight go onto the, no, I didn't say turn to the left. I just said go forward. So you're going to have to push both hips into an ER orientation at the same time. Now your weight is on your first met head on the right side. Am I correct?

But you are the other sport. See, that's the thing, dude. It's like, that's one of the things. And I think it was tight tarot that sort of made this point when he was working for us. He gave me credit for it because I thought it was just a brilliant statement. He said, we don't worry about the kids playing the other sport. If they want to do that, that's great. We encourage that. But if they're not going to, we're the other sport. So it's our job to sort of give them the other things that sport would naturally take away if we think that there's value in the maintenance of those capabilities. And I think in most cases for a 13-year-old athlete, it would behoove us to make sure that we build in buffers against what they are already demonstrating to be their superpowers. There are certain things that stand out in certain kids, and it's like, man, we want to hang on to that. It's going to be something good and useful, but if we give it too much now, we're going to take away something that might protect them later on.

Yeah, I'm lost.

So I'm going to take you where you love to be, and then a little bit farther so you can feel the subtalar joint motion, but I don't want it to come through the hip. So I'm just going to put my hand on your knee and I'm going to roll you out. So I still got my wrench on the talus. I'm grabbing the talus. I'm just going to roll it out. So I push, my thumb is pushing you into the ER representation of the talus. And then I'm going to roll you back in. I'm going to take you past where I want you to go because all I'm trying to teach you is the excursion, because I don't want maximum pressure on the medial border of your foot. I want the optimal pressure. So I roll you out. I roll you in. I roll you out. I roll you in, and then I'm going to say, now, when I roll you back in, why don't you tell me when you start to feel that inside the heel and the first metatarsal. Okay. And then I'm going to load it. I'm going to say, are you a little heel heavy there? Yeah. Awesome. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Hold that for me. Okay. If I push down, you still feel a heel heavy. That's going to be that's going to move the hand towards a more maxP moment.

This also determines what type of activities you're going to choose because the time constraint will matter. The behavior—how stiff you need to tune the connective tissue. Again, I'll give Austin Aldrich the credit for coming up with that term and concept, where you need that connective tissue to be just appropriately stiff and appropriately elastic to get the right behavior based on the amount of time you have available. If you were training a high jumper, the ground contact is a little bit longer than a sprinter. So you might choose a little bit different activities. If you were training a basketball player compared to the sprinter, you would have more time on the ground to produce force, wouldn't you? So then it starts to help you select which activities are going to be more appropriate. Whereas the sprinter, you have to bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump across the ground; the basketball player is like, bump, bump, bump, see? Again, you can combine these activities. You'll see all sorts of different contrasts applied within the workout, but you can separate them out into phases depending on the individual, depending on their responses. All right, so there's a lot of ways to organize it, but understanding the principle is what's most important.

Yes, I can. All right, awesome. 400-meter hurdler. He's very good at what he does and he's been doing it for a long time. So I can't get him. I mean, he has a big anterior tilt and then loss of something, but he still performs very well. The biggest problem that I have is when he goes to the gym and when we do bilateral symmetrical exercises, like squatting, his lower back tightens up for about two or three days. So in my view, it's like, well, they have indoors coming in December, end of December, January. I don't want to waste time coaching a squat or some type of lift for him to be able to orient his abdomen correctly and make sure he doesn't overdo it. So I was like, well, the same kind of question as Manuel. Can I just take off the bilateral symmetrical and just leave them with things like step ups and lunges and things that are unilateral and single-legged? I don't think that at his level I would need to put too much volume on him with bilateral symmetrical, but I don't know what you think about that.

Okay, so I kind of talked to you a little bit on the emails, but I was talking to a friend of mine and we got into conversation of your model or some of the things like that. And then he told me that he trains offensive tackles, in particular offensive tackles from every level from the NFL. He's working with several guys in the NFL right now, college and even younger. And so I mentioned to him the video that you had done with, can't think of her name, but any event she works with pro pitchers. And y'all were kind of going through some of the faults that she was seeing and you were kind of explaining in your model what she was seeing, that hop that they were, you broke it down, right? So I was telling him that and I said, well, he goes, well, I'd really like to be able to kind of get an idea of what maybe the faults that I'm seeing are positional and deficiencies. And so I talked to him again last night and I said, just can you give me a few faults that you see or positional errors that you see? And one of the things he said was, well, the first thing he said is what he said, it's like the guy, because I seen him in your video, there was a video that you just briefly touched on, big people like offensive linemen, right? You don't want them turned. You don't want them right. Yeah. So you're going to have to balance that with also giving them enough cushion or enough external rotation to be able to have this space, you know, to be more durable, I suppose to have more relative motion. And you can correct me on that.

Okay.

Yeah.

I see, I see, I see. That makes a ton of sense. Yeah, that actually clears up a lot. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Very good.

So you have to have internal rotation superimposed on the lead foot, right? Yeah. So that's your medial foot contacts. So we're talking about the same thing, right? It comes back to see it. So you need the early represent. So how do I transfer the energy from the ground of the lead foot to the ball? I have to actually rotate to stop that foot. Assuming I'm going to have the relative motions available to do this, right? Like I said, you'll find a way to stop. But this might turn into a compensatory strategy where they jam their big toe into the ground to make the stop. Now, the big toe normally is the stop, but it's usually a distributed load, not a focal load on the big toe, right? So then they go up and over. You can see this on javelin throwers too, where their last stride will be a little short. Their center of gravity gets up and over their foot too fast, and then they try to push their big toe down into the ground to create the stop. Then they fault, they step over the line because they're going too fast and too far forward. So again, you're still looking at capturing medial foot contacts to superimpose the IR. Because that's your early representation. That slows the left side down so that you do translate the energy up into the ball.

I think the last piece to this is reconciling, especially in a rehab setting where you see a lot of ACLs—connective tissue injuries that often occur during change of direction movements. There needs to be the capacity to yield because if everything is too stiff, that stiffness might get transmitted to tissues you don't want it to. But at the same time, in high-speed changes of direction, performance is associated with the ability to stay stiff and move in and out of cuts quickly. So the goal is to not diminish athletic ability. By allowing some degree of relative motion, we're trying to distribute the stiff response over more joints. If they're not already stiff, they have room to become stiff everywhere, rather than needing focal stiffness where issues might arise. Is that a safe statement?

Okay, so right-waiters instead of the right front rack.

It's impossible to hit the end ranges. So just think about like, if this is the full excursion. So over here is early, over here is late, in here as middle. As soon as I put you under load. Good morning. Happy Tuesday. I have no coffee in hand and it is perfect. All right, kind of wacky Tuesday. Got to make a hard pivot here, so we're going to dig straight into today's Q&A. And this is with Larry, an IFAST U member. If you're not signed up for IFAST University, please go to ifastuniversity.com. Get yourself signed up so you can participate in the ongoing discussion and as well as our bi-weekly Q&As and other great content. Anyway, Larry's questions are actually going to be really helpful for a lot of people because I think they clarify some things in regards to the propulsive foot representations and how to identify those. And then we kind of slid seamlessly into some compensatory strategies and how to identify those in elements of, say, a split squat, and especially when we're adding load, what actually happens to the propulsive phase. So again, very useful, I think, for a lot of people in regards to their understanding of how we're going to influence our programming and exercise selection based on where we want to put people in this propulsive phase. So thank you Larry for the question. If you'd like to participate in a 15 minute consultation, please go to askbillhartman at gmail.com, put 15 minute consultation in the subject line, and we'll arrange that at our mutual convenience. Everybody have an outstanding Tuesday. I will see you all tomorrow. All right Larry, what is your question?

What was your philosophy when he first started and how has it changed?

Bill, can I ask a question on that?

It honestly really depends on what our purpose is. I have my little purple room where I'll see people that, and typically they're coming to me with a problem typically associated with pain. And in those cases, we'll do complex movements as we always do. So we'll, where the whole body's involved. So like toe touches and squats and split squats and things like that, right? So we determine what it looks like, how they're moving in space. What can they access? What can they not access? So we have a comparator. So complex movements make great comparators because they do involve the whole body. If necessary, you put them on the table and then you try to measure things in relative isolation, which is never possible. The whole body is involved in every movement. So if I'm measuring a hip internal and external rotation, the entire body is moving as I am creating that. But what I'm trying to discern is, do they have relative motions available to them that may allow them to distribute loads and forces? So again, with pain, in a lot of cases, we have a reduction in the adaptability. And so most people don't distribute load and force well, and therefore they load structure or an area where there could be increased pressures, reduced circulation, and any number of things that would contribute to a pain experience.

Yeah, right. Yeah, it's too fast. Yeah, too fast. Yes.

I don't know. Was that gold? That was gold. I think I was rolling. I wasn't even thinking. I was just like... It's like a dad moment.

The entire pelvis rolling.

Understood.

Right.

Absolutely. Yeah, you can't produce force when you have many body parts that are moving simultaneously because what that does is it distributes the force throughout. So again, especially in sport where we see very forceful activities or high velocity activities that follow this high force production, you'll have these moments in time where the body segments move as a single segment and that's the only way that you can produce force.

So well, you know, you just have to drink a few beers and then, you know, pretty much solve the world's problems. Right? All right, man. I got to cut off.

Yes, sir. How are you doing?