Yeah, you're just taking advantage of the gravity.

All right. So either way on the heels of that, I have a connective tissue question as well. Okay. So I was hoping you could use the example of a kettlebell drop clean where you just drop down and catch it at the bottom. And so I just wanted to talk through like the muscle versus connective tissue representations as that happens.

Yeah.

Yeah, and they want to say that.

Box squat, yeah. So you put her on a high box squat. Okay. So you put her on a high box squat. She loads onto the box. That's going to get you a yielding action. You start her in a high box squat above that middle representation because chances are the middle is going to be the hardest part for her to capture, isn't it?

Yeah. So this is going to, so when you start to push really hard on that spot right there, that's going to move the hand towards a more max P moment.

And 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. 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 enter 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 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.

So we started, when he was post-season, we started with a zirker, he was elevated, and he was fine. Then we moved into a heavier loaded, but then we went on the ground and we did a high hex bar. So he was still his arms were low to the ground. He was good. But when we started loading a little bit more weight, then it became a problem. But the weight is not the problem. He moves it very fast. He moves the weight very well. And in the moment, in the gym, there's no problem. I don't feel anything a day after, two days after. It's like, oh, I'm tight. So it's like, I haven't been wanting to front squad him or back squad him or anything like that, because I just don't feel like that's going to be beneficial because it seems like he has the strength and power. It just doesn't seem to be put together.

OK, so let's just design the perfect offensive lineman for a second. Big wide dude. Flat as a pancake, front to back. So that takes away his turns. Now here's the thing that's going to happen here. Okay. So I want a big strong guy. I want a guy that produces a lot of force. And so, so these are the guys where you go, okay, we're going to bench press you and we're going to back squat you and all that cool stuff.

Yeah, that's fine. Yeah.

Yes. Yes. And I do something that takes me from this position to that. So I'm just moving from the inhale to the exhale.

May be helpful, but let's understand what the potential consequences are here. Good morning. Happy Wednesday. I have neuro coffee in hand and it is perfect. All right, well it is Wednesday. That means that tomorrow morning, 6 a.m. Coffee and Coaches conference call as usual. Always great calls, great questions, lots of fun. Please join us. The link will be on my professional Facebook page just prior to the call at 6 a.m. So I'll see you then. All right, digging into today's Q&A. This is with Jordan. Jordan has a great question. We talk about influencing foot mechanics a lot of times by placing arches in shoes or orthotics and a lot of these strategies are to influence the rate at which certain things happen. So when we talk about our propulsive phase of the foot, you know, we've got our heel rocker, we have our ankle rocker, and then we've got the toe rocker. And the timing of each of those is influential as far as what the output's going to be in regards to how we demonstrate intramotations and extramotations. This conversation had to do with actually putting a lateral wedge underneath the calcaneus to accelerate the ability to get the medial calcaneus to the ground. Sometimes can be very useful, but there's always secondary consequences to everything that you're going to do under these circumstances. And so the thing that I want you to recognize here is that if you can understand those secondary consequences, then we can be a little more judicious as to how we're going to apply these things, whether we're going to use them for extended periods of time and how do we determine how long or when we're going to actually use them. So Jordan asked a great question here. I think it's going to be very helpful for a lot of people, especially in regards to foot mechanics and wears and wins. Okay. So if you'd like to participate in a 15 minute consultation, please go to askbillhartman at gmail.com, askbillhartman at gmail.com, and put 15 minute consultation in the subject line so I don't delete it. We'll arrange that at our mutual convenience. I will see you tomorrow morning, 6 a.m. for the coffee and coaches conference call. Everybody have an outstanding day. I'll see you later.

Thanks a lot.

That's, yeah. So that's literally what an injury is. Right. When we see destruction of tissues, you have taken a tissue to its limit. Right. So it's beyond the plastic element of those tissues, right? And so that's where you get tissue destruction because you've just reached its capabilities, right? It's still going to load those tissues, but what you're teaching them through the process as they regain fitness and come back to play is you're teaching them how to distribute those loads. Whereas prior to that, they created focal loads, right? Yep. Yeah, this is why your KPIs become important as you train people, right? You have to determine like which ones are representative of their best performance. And then you have to say, okay, if I let this thing run rampant, what's going to happen? That's why you start to see focal stresses show up. And, you know, with the discrete activities, it's a little bit easier. right? Because they come in and they point to stuff, right? They go, hurts right there kind of a thing. It's a little bit easier to identify where they're putting the focal stress.

You're going to love this, my friend. Put your right arm up overhead. What is your strategy to keep that weight up overhead? Would it be to close the right side down or to keep the right side open? Side bend to the right with your arm overhead. What just happened to you if you had a weight over your head?

Right.

Let's do it.

Yeah. They're out of room. They're out of room. So let's just say that you can't expand posteriorly. Knowing full well that to initiate the squat and move through an external rotation bias or to hit the bottom of the squat, which is an external rotation bias, you can't do that. So I'm initiating the squat more towards my internal rotation bias. Right. And so it's going to look, for lack of a better explanation, hinge. It's going to look more like my deadlift than it is an Olympic weightlifter sitting down at the bottom of his squat, right? Because that, and again, it could be physical structure. It could be the training strategies that you've been using that don't allow a shape change to occur that allows you to access that motion. So again, you can diagnose—I've been doing this a lot lately, I gotta stop that—so you can diagnose a squat or what people can and can't do based on that shape as they move through the squat. So when I see somebody that's got this really, really hingey squat, they've got what would be termed a really strong lordosis as they're trying to squat. That's a pelvis that is compressed on the backside and anteriorly oriented. Very, very useful, very useful for producing force, very useful for stopping motion from occurring. So again, let's use Joseph's powerlifter as an example. So as they try to squat, they don't want to squat too deep. They want to stop the motion at a very specific point where they just get far enough down towards the ground where they get a pass from the judge. Where they pass their lift, so they get their white lights so they can say, oh, it was a good squat or it was not a good squat. And so then that becomes useful under those circumstances, but it doesn't make it better than something else. It just means that it is a variation. So when you see someone's knees deviate early in a squat, what they're doing is they're moving their knees apart because at that point in time, the shape of their body does not allow them to access external rotation straight ahead because it's out here. External rotation is out there. That's where they find it based on their physical structure or based on the context of the lift or the performance of the movement. That's why external rotation is a space that is around you based on the shape of your body. Cause I can turn my head a little bit and it looks like I'm going straight ahead. I can make sure my feet are going in that same direction as my face, but everything else is facing this way.

Yeah.

You had me at Karate Kid, Bill.

And so when you're measuring hip ER, like first of all, he's a wide ISA. So right away, you're thinking I should have a deficit in hip ER. He doesn't have a deficit in hip ER, which means that you've got a lot of stuff that's moving together. Okay, so you've got a compensatory strategy with the pelvis. The pelvis is a single unit. So jam them together, lock them and then lock the lumbar spine. So he's probably rotating there. So he's probably rotating there when you're measuring hip ER. So you're right. It's like all he's got is a sacrum that's just getting compressed between the two ilia at this point. Right? So the pressure just builds, builds and builds. Right? He pushes forward, forward, forward. Right? So now you got to start thinking it's like, okay, where can I make space? Can't use lumbar spine compensatory strategies. Not moving the sacrum at all. Right? So you're going to have to create some form of AP expansion. Right? So he's a side lunge guy. He's going to be a guy that you can usually get a lot of manual therapy on to get the rib cage to move, to get the pelvis to move.

So the upper back, the dorsal rostral expansion, the posterior lower expansion, moving the sacrum into its counter-neutated position. So that's an early propulsive representation. So if you go back through my videos that talk about early propulsion and capturing those positions, those are going to be the activities that you're going to want to emphasize first. Then you're going to go with right side leading activities. So this will be your right foot forward split squats. Okay. You're right. Your right arm, like the cable activities where the right arms going forward. Right. So those types of activities are what you're going to want to emphasize.

They tell you what's going on by their descriptions. But see, nobody ever told you why you have to ask these questions because the representative model was like, oh, you have bursitis, right? And then the doctor pokes on their hip and they go, oh, that's kind of sensitive because they've been standing that way too. So do you think there's any pressure laterally into the soft tissue structures of the hip when your AP compressed on one side expanded on the other? Yeah. There's continuous tension there.

Yeah, that's when people begin to lose relative motion of joints, right?

One of the more useful things about your way of thinking in my estimation is the idea that we're really only moving in one plane and that when we say flexion, extension, adduction, abduction, we're really just describing what it looks like rather than making an accurate statement about the motion of the body. Correct. So internal and external rotation, according to the textbook definition, is either towards, so internal or away, external from midline. And as far as I can tell, the way you use the terms is the same, except for you're just accounting for more of the axial skeletal sort of mechanics and dynamics and not just focusing on what's happening at the appendicular skeleton. So it seems that you're using the term the same way, but you're just accounting for more variables. And so my first mini question is, is that correct that you're still using towards and away from midline as the definition?

There was something about scoliosis, right?

No, I'm a coach.

Right.

Absolutely. I'll be there. Take care.

Okay. So, change the goal. You have to let her know that you care, whether it hurts or not, but you have to redirect her attention towards the process. Because if the only thing she foresees in the future is absolute resolution of this, then she can't appreciate the process and maybe she doesn't invest in it. It's like, 'Zach, give me this exercise, but it still hurts today.' It's like, 'Did you recapture external rotation?' Let's say we're chasing external rotation in the hip, right? 'Did you recapture external rotation in the hip?' You have to show her. When you do this exercise correctly, we capture this. And that's part of this process. This has to come first. Before anything's going to feel better, I need to make sure that you can do this. Now she's redirecting. She's saying, 'Okay, Zach's got me on point. I have to recapture this. This is where my investment goes.' So right now, the goal is not the resolution of the pain. The goal is to recapture this so I can eventually resolve the pain.