Oh, thank you, sir. I appreciate that.

Obviously.

That's up to you. All right. Okay, so we can do this. If you just come a hair closer to your camera, this is gonna work out great. So we're gonna use your right foot, okay? So your right foot's on the ground, correct?

Yes. So yeah, yeah. I know what you're doing.

793. 793?

Does that make sense?

Yeah. Okay.

So since she has more feet towards pronation, could I help her with the band technique that you described a few calls ago to Zach, where you started the ladder on my ankle and go over the calcaneus up to the tibia?

Yeah. You get a tall slender person. You get a short stocky person. Who's the better bench presser?

Well, variability can be predictable or unpredictable based on your prior knowledge.

So hang on, hang on.

When you're saying late versus early reaches, that's strictly how far up or down my shoulder is.

Yeah, I just wanted to ask when the scapula is in this presentation, the way that it's pressing against the thorax is with the lateral border, or no.

You're going to take your left arm. You're going to reach up underneath their left arm and you're going to put your left hand on the front of their shoulder girdle. You're going to put your right hand on the back of their shoulder.

Where does he have space, my friend?

I wanted to talk about something that you mentioned just earlier on the call in terms of working the opposite from when somebody like when you see how they got there you're just going in the opposite direction to get them back.

I wouldn't put her in, I'm not talking split stance. I'm literally just talking standing up. You might need to help her control her rear foot. Literally, one piece of tape in the right place can help her. Do you have Luca tape? Yes. Okay, perfect. So you literally create sort of like a stirrup on the heel. Right, you go from lateral malleolus, just underneath the lateral malleolus, you're gonna grab the lateral aspect of the calcinius, and you're gonna bring it back underneath her, and then you tape about halfway up the inside of the foot to the tibia. Okay, does that make sense? So you're gonna create a stirrup, like it looked like a J. How high am I going on the medial side? You gotta get it far enough up on the tibia, so it's not on the IR portion of the tibia. You understand? No. So if you give her the calcaneal representation into the floor, you have now reduced her ability to produce the compensatory strategy from the top down. So think about a lead foot in the split squat. You just gave her a better shot at an early representation.

I might spend 10 minutes setting up an exercise because I want to get it right. And I don't want to have to tell them to do things. Cues: listen to the airflow coming in and out. You can tell their head and neck position by the pitch of the airflow—low pitch means chin is down, high pitch means chin is up. When you hear them, they breathe in and they try to breathe out and they go like that. And as they exhale, guess what? Compressive strategy, acceleration strategy all day every day. Little things like this are just gold because they help you with your queuing and they let you know what this person is trying to do.

If I'm understanding you, yes, I think you're correct.

If you don't have the expansion to start with, you don't have any access to the range of motion. If I'm already compressed, guess what? No access to internal rotation.

Cause you kind of pre stiffen everything else.

Okay.

Good morning. Happy Thursday. I have neural copy in hand and it is perfect. Man, that's really, this is really good today.

So, okay. I want you to shift your center of gravity. Take a little bit of weight off your left foot while keeping it grounded, maintaining medial foot contact on the left side. From there, take your right back pocket and shove it forward. Now you're going to push both hips into an external rotation orientation at the same time. Now your weight is on your first met head on the right side.

Well, and again, it's like a structural bias is going to provide different strategies. You know, if we looked at the extremes of the archetypes, and let's just say that you have a, you mentioned eighth graders, so we're going to use eighth graders. So you have an eighth grader that is definitely structured towards a wide bias, and you have another that is the slender, you know, narrow ISA. It's like, people say, well, could both those kids have the same vertical jump? Absolutely. Could both those kids have the same flying 10? Absolutely. It's like how they get there, however, because their starting points are different, how they're going to get there is going to be a different strategy entirely. And then like I said before, it's like the question mark then for you, and this is where you get to be the good coach. You get to say, I want you to be able to move in that direction that quickly, but I'm just going to give you enough of this other stuff to make sure that it doesn't affect you later on, right? It would be great if everybody could play three different sports and was good at three different sports, but I don't think it really works that way. I think the kids gravitate towards what they love because they're kids and they also find out maybe they're really good at something.

Come on, Ian, help me out. Huh? Box squat.

I just wanted to clarify you were saying Jordan when he had his hand out. Is the main contact point during a push-up the heel of your hand? I'm just trying to think like during a max moment during a push-up. You'd be pushing more towards the inside edge. Like this feels like the inside edge during a push-up. But then I started thinking. In an anatomical position, this is actually like a medial edge. And so when I just in my room here pushed, and I swear it was exactly what my left elbow needed. I was like, holy shit, that made such a difference when I just put the pressure through there. And you said that brings the scapula forward, right?

Thank you. Good morning, happy Friday. I have neuro coffee in hand and it is perfect. So obviously we're in the purple room today. I needed the help from Alfred here. We're going to talk about what it takes to acquire the rack position in the front squat. I got a question from Derek who's having some trouble. He's not sure what strategies to use to help him improve his front rack for the front squat. So we're going to talk about how we get there, what it's actually going to take, what some of the limitations are, and then some demonstrations of some activities that are going to help you improve your capability to achieve the rack position in the front squat. One of the things that we have to appreciate about getting into this front rack position for a front squat is that we have to move the shoulder through an excursion of range of motion to even acquire this position. So if you recall this lower part of traditional shoulder reflection is actually an external rotation bias and then we have to bias ourselves towards internal rotation. So if I have a limitation in either position I'm going to have a limitation on my ability to acquire my front rack position in the front squat or power clean. If I have a posterior lower compression on the backside of this rib cage, it's going to limit my ability to acquire the external rotation bias as I start to elevate my arm. What it's going to do, it's going to move me towards an internal rotation bias too soon because the scapula is going to start to move. It's going to start to compress against the backside of the rib cage. And then by the time I try to get into my internal rotation bias, I've already exhausted all my internal rotation. So now it's almost impossible for me to comfortably acquire the rack position in the front squat. If I do have posterior expansion and I can get through this external rotation bias without difficulty, but I don't have an up pump handle capability or an expansion in the anterior upper rib cage, I'll never have enough internal rotation in the shoulder to acquire the rack position in the front squat comfortably. So those folks that think that external rotation is the limitation in holding the front rack position, are only partially correct because it's the early limitation of external rotation that is a limiting factor. But it could be an internal rotation problem or an external rotation problem that ultimately limits my ability to acquire and utilize the front rack position comfortably. If you lack the up pump handle in the front, meaning you don't have enough internal rotation, what you're going to probably see is you're going to start to see the elbow flair laterally. So this is somewhat trying to reacquire some external rotation so you have more internal rotation available to you to actually acquire and utilize the rack position. So the inability to keep the upper back expanded not only restricts my ability to hold my position, but it's also going to make it very difficult to increase the load of my front squat. So now when we think about activities that we want to utilize to reinforce our ability to expand in the appropriate areas to acquire the rack position, we want to think about, okay, what expands the posterior lower? What can give me the up pump handle? What can give me that yielding strategy in the upper back? So there's a lot of activities that actually reinforce all of these aspects of this expansion all at the same time. So this is where bear crawls really come into play. Because of the orientation of the body, I'm going to emphasize that lower posterior expansion of the rib cage. I'll immediately get the yielding strategy in the upper back. And because of the shoulder girdle position as I'm going through the propulsive phase of quadruped, I'm also going to create the up pump handle position. Plate squats are a great way to reinforce this early propulsive strategy that we're going to utilize in the front squat as well. The heel's elevated position puts the ankle on the early propulsive phase. It's going to create a posterior expansion in the pelvis as well as that posterior expansion in the upper back. If we need to do something that's a little bit more rehab-ish or we're having trouble acquiring the position to begin with, we want to do something that's a little bit simpler. So we're going to start in maybe a child's pose, which is actually the bottom position of the front squat. We'll move into an inverted position which is going to enhance our airflow and allow us to increase our ability to expand through the upper thorax. We're going to bring that pump handle up and expand the posterior upper back. To challenge us a little bit more then, we're going to bring you back to upright and we're going to do something like a backward sled drag which is also going to place the foot in an early propulsive strategy and teaches to expand the upper back against some resistance. So there's a lot of activities that we can utilize rather than trying to rely on some ineffective form of stretching which might give you some some sort of temporary impact in your ability to acquire the rack position but ultimately you have to re-teach yourself to expand in the appropriate areas to move the shoulder through its full excursion to get to the rack position. Now worst case scenario is we still have to train. So what are you going to be your substitutions? So right away, we elevate the heels, we get posterior expansion. So maybe that's going to be sufficient for you to acquire a better rack position and a more effective front squat. If you can't acquire the position for the shoulder, a really common substitution is to take some lifting straps, wrap them around the bar, and that's going to allow you to at least get the shoulder into a position where we can actually support the bar across the shoulders. But keep in mind, I still need to get that anterior posterior expansion in the thorax, so I have a place to rest that weight. So the expansion of the thorax provides us the shelf that we're going to ultimately use to hold the rack position. Derek, hopefully that gives you some strategies and some ideas that you can utilize to improve your own front squat. If you have any questions, send them to askbillhartman at gmail.com. I will see you guys next week. That force that is produced has to be accounted for because number one, it allows you to do amazing things like walk on two legs, throw a baseball at 95 miles an hour, jump really, really high. Good morning. Happy Tuesday. I have neuro coffee in hand and it is perfect. All right. Man, busy crazy Tuesday, intense 13 week. So we got to kind of cut to the chase. So here's the good news. I did the Upside Strength podcast a while back with Sean Seal. And the whole thing is finally posted up on YouTube and on their podcasting channel. And so again, thank you Sean for your interest in what I do. But this will give everybody a chance to see the whole thing. So the links are here. If you're watching this on Instagram, they are in my bio. You can go to the bio, click on the link, and it will take you to the YouTube or to the podcast channel. So please take advantage of that. If you would like to participate in a live Q&A, please go to askbillhartmanedgemail.com, askbillhartmanedgemail.com, and we will arrange that at our mutual convenience. Don't forget to put 15 minute consultation in the subject line, so I don't delete it. So I'm going to cut away. We're going to do about five minutes of this podcast that it was shown. This is in regards to internal dynamics. So gut movement is actually a pretty major influencer as far as how we move. So we can actually take advantage of these forces. It's one of those things that allows us to do cool things like walking on two legs that no other animal really does as well as we do. And then it's also can be detrimental in regards to some of the things we see during really high force, high speed movement. So again, this is a little bit of intro to that. The discussion is much larger on the podcast. So please go there and watch the whole thing. Have an outstanding Tuesday and I'll see you tomorrow.

You're asking a question with a maybe answer. My first question to you is if you have an exercise that negatively affects him for a number of days after the fact, I would say that that's my first concern is like, okay, number one, maybe you do need to take it out or number two, you need to give him a different activity where that doesn't happen and you're still benefiting from the forced production capabilities of the bilateral symmetrical activity. So is it like, is he back squatting? Is he front squatting? Does it matter which one?

OK. Well, one thing he invented was a little handle you kind of have—it has some bars that come up like this and you hold it like that—but it has attachments on the outside that are basically trying to pull the guy while he resists. So one of the things he said is that two things are relevant to positional faults: one, he said that if they get stood up or extended, they basically lose. So he said, so I don't know if I need to be doing more core work or whatever. No. So I knew that you wouldn't think that's the problem—that's the problem. The other thing he said is that when they get pushed—when they get that initial contact and they're being pushed backwards—they will take a step back with their right leg, right? And that's another thing where he said that if they can't hold, if their knee goes out, if they get into valgus, right? That they've also lost. So meaning, the way I look at it is they've lost the inside of their foot, big toe, first metatarsal heel. Is that correct?