I love what you just said because that's been like the thorn in my side for three decades of trying to understand when people say, oh, you have an anterior pelvic tilt. And they go, and I go, wait a minute, are you talking about the pelvis as a whole? Are you talking about that? And then going forward, are you talking about that? And going forward, it's like, it's very unclear when people just throw out a ballpark term like that because it doesn't really add to the clarity of the problem. Because then if everybody has an anterior pelvic tilt, but I started from two potentially extreme representations, it's like, what all the stuff that went into that, right? It's like, it doesn't help me with the solution because my narrow is gonna be a little bit different than my wide, isn't it?

What's happening in her spine?

And if I chop outside and capture my medial contacts, would that promote more yielding on the posterior or no?

You think that's hip motion? No. What is it? What's moving when you do that? How do you get a, like literally how do you get somebody's thigh to compress against their chest? Because in school, they told you that the hip joint has 120 degrees of traditional flexion, right?

Right. So it's kind of like the videos I sent you, there's kind of hit, relax, hit, relax, you know, and some of that. And some of the sled activities they were doing. I guess.

So you're doing sliders or tensioners? So you have to say it like that because that's David Butler. He talks about sliders and tensioners. So which one are you doing?

Yeah.

Morning, Bill. I was watching one of your videos the other day about knees out in squatting. The person was asking if they have their knees out, where are they getting the internal rotation? You were talking about the femur getting internal rotation when the knees are out because of anterior-to-posterior compression. I was trying to figure out how that is represented in the upper body. So, when you're pressing overhead or when you're bench pressing, what's the difference between a narrow grip and a wider grip? I can see when you use a wider grip that you're going to get more internal rotation through the humerus. For example, in a bench press, but if you take a narrow grip, since you're compressed, where are you getting the internal rotation? How is what we see in the squat transferred into bench pressing or overhead pressing between narrow and wide grips?

I wanted to ask you a few weeks ago you were trying to help me understand the rotation that happens through the tibia as an end-range compensation when things start to externally rotate on the whole left side. You mentioned that as the person puts weight through the inside of the tibia, the motion stops there, but it keeps externally rotating on the outside of the tibia and through the fibula. At least something where the proximal tibia externally rotates, but now you mentioned something about a gray sort of movement in between the parts of the bone where the medial part would actually sort of stop and then the lateral part still keeps externally rotating. I might have gotten it wrong, so I just wanted to ask you about where we are in movement here to give me a bit more context. So that's basically when you have posterior lower compression, you get the sort of very late representation of the ilium when the knee is already starting to turn outwards.

Right, because in these athletes with that kind of representation, I notice sometimes they'll have left knee pain. Like when they do, like they can do jerks, but they can't do splits, like deep split squats, because that forward translation on the left foot is sensitive.

The more replacement parts I get, Larry, the longer I live.

Okay. So how many measures do you have? How many data points do you have for comparison purposes?

So that's going to square you. It's not going to get you left, but it's going to get you going in that direction for sure.

Hmm.

Okay. So he's driving more external rotation within the arm. Okay. He's turning it outward more. That's what you're getting. Okay. So he's twisting the bone outward more. He needs more space. Right. So he's getting more and more compressed. So he needs more space out here. And then he has to turn inward. Right. To push. Imagine starting a twist. So it's like twisting the towel like we talk about. So if I got a little twist here, I won't see the twist at the elbow, but if I do this and then the whole arm just keeps turning outward and outward and outward, I think that's what you're talking about.

Pleasure to meet you, sir. Thank you so much. Have a nice day. If by adding my ability to produce force requires that I increase the amount of time that I utilize that, so now I've extended this period where I'm producing force and I actually slowed down, where I actually reduced my velocity, where I needed velocity, I have now created interference. Good morning. Happy Wednesday. I have no coffee in hand and It is perfect. All right. Wednesday, another day closer to Intensive 12. That starts tomorrow evening. But before that, we have the Coffee and Coaches Conference call as usual at 6 a.m. Thursday morning. Please join us. The link will be on my professional Facebook page. Those calls have been great. Don't miss out. All right, digging into today's Q&A. This one came off my YouTube channel. It's a little bit of a stream of consciousness, kind of a question that has many parts to it. So I'm going to knock these out really quickly. And then I'm actually going to take you to a video that we did not too long ago, maybe six months ago, that's going to answer part of the question that, like I said, came through YouTube. This comes from ex-fizz. and he asked, I'm assuming it's a he, sorry, when you program athletic performance enhancement programs do you include bench press or do you emphasize connective tissue response or emphasize concentric strength training where one is oriented more eccentrically vice versa or a combination? Okay, so now all these are equivalents, so let's just kind of knock them out piece by piece. Do I include bench press and performance enhancement programs? Yes, if it's warranted. So if we're looking for high force production, if we're looking for increasing concentric output, hypertrophy programs, et cetera, yes, we're gonna program that in there. As long again, is it doesn't steal anything that's important. So we're talking about dynamic athletes, there may be periods during the year where we're gonna use the bench press as a useful activity and then there's other times a year where it might be interference. Okay. Do we emphasize connected tissue response? Yes, always, always, always because it is always in play and so we have to take those things into consideration and especially when we're talking about dynamic athletes that utilize their connected tissues a little bit differently than a pure strength athlete, we have to take that into consideration. Do we emphasize concentric strength training where one is more eccentrically oriented? That's a very specific case. So in cases where eccentric orientation lends itself to gaining increases in movement capabilities, then we don't want to interfere with that if it's needed. But all strength training is concentrically driven. And so we have to take that into consideration as well. That goes against a traditional view. I understand that. but I do have reasons for that and that's going to be answered on another Q&A at some point in time. How much emphasis would there be on force and compressive strategies? So that's again an individualized concern depending on what the desired outcome is. So if somebody is going to benefit from force production that's something that we do by training over time. We identify the needs and we train them and then we see if we can raise that force production and if it enhances performance and under those circumstances yes we talk about that. Because we're increasing force most likely we're training compressive strategies because that's one of the the components of increased force is to increase our compressive capabilities. Exviz continues, he says, Matt Wenning says, everyone is weak and a 500 pound deadlift isn't really that heavy. I would totally agree with that, that Matt Wenning would say that 500 pounds is not very heavy. Arguably, arguably, One of if not the strongest people in our entire solar system. So him making that statement, I'm totally with you on that. You have mentioned that heavy lifting can become interference. When would you say that happens? I'm actually going to cut away to a video that answers that question very, very specifically for you. So sit tight. And finally, X-Vis says, do you like the 2.5 times body weight squat for starting strength? I think, again, it's going to depend on who we're talking about. If we're talking about a competitive strength athlete, so powerlifter, weightlifter, etc., maybe some of your heavy throwers and such, they're going to be able to approach a number like that. But for the normal human being, for the typical dynamic athlete, I don't think you're going to see too many two and a half times body weight squats going on there. It is a very rare occasion. That's not that there's people that can't do it. It's just that it's very rare and many times not necessary and potentially, sorry about that, and potentially becomes interference. So, with that in mind, let me just remind you that if you would like to participate in a 15-minute consultation, please go to askbillhartman at gmail.com, askbillhartman at gmail.com, and we will arrange that at our mutual convenience. Don't forget, go to the YouTube channel, just like XFIZ did, and check out all the videos there, and make sure you subscribe to that. Okay, we're gonna cut away to a video that we did about six months ago. that where we are talking about performance training and how internal and external rotation interact and how we may actually be creating interference with our programming. And so we'll cut away to that. Everybody have an outstanding Wednesday. I will see you tomorrow at 6 a.m. on the coffee and Coaches Conference. We're going to dig into a Q&A. It's going to be a combination of of two questions. Try to make it useful. Some of this is going to be theoretical, so it might be interesting to some of you. And then the rest of you, you just turn it off. It's okay. I'm only expecting about five or six views on this one. So we're going to dig into some theoretical first. And this comes from Ryan. Ryan says, You said that the ability to expand and compress and expand again is a universal principle. Can you give a handful of examples in the human body outside of gait or shoulder and hip range motion? And also, can you name some examples in the natural world and the universe? I warned you. Okay. This is actually a fun question for me because I do like to kind of talk about some of this stuff. But Ryan, one of the things you have to recognize is that everything about you is a compression and expansion. So let's just look at your heart. And I think everybody has a representation in their head when they're looking at a heart beating. They understand that blood flows into the heart, it expands, it compresses, and then the blood flows out. And by the way, the heart doesn't pump it out. That's a different story. But everything inside of you is going to be based on compression expansion. So the peristalsis that moves the lunch through your gut is compression expansion. If we look at something local, like muscular contraction so if I concentrically oriented muscle there's actually a higher pressure within that muscle so the intra muscular pressure is higher as we reduce the concentric orientation we have a reduction in in pressure there as well so again we always have compression expansion taking place somewhere at some time. We're also going to see this as global strategies. So every movement that you have is going to have some peak moment of force output, which will be representative of the compressive strategy to what degree is then dependent on what you're doing. If you're drinking a glass of water, it's not going to be your maximum peak force that you could produce, but there is going to be a peak in that moment in time. If I'm doing a vertical job, it's a little bit easier to see that representation of that peak moment. So again, so every sporting movement is going to have this expansion to compression, to expansion representation. If we're talking about a high jump, the moment that the high jumper plants his foot into the ground, there's gonna be a peak resultant, and then as he leaves the ground, he's gonna re-expand. Sprinter, same thing, hitting the ground, compression to expansion. If I'm throwing a baseball, there's a moment in time where everything squeezes tight. Time stops and I produce this maximum output of force. It's just very, very brief and so we don't see these things because our eyes just can't stop time to recognize that. But we can see these things. We can measure these things in force plates and we can watch it on video and such. So Ryan, everything becomes this compression to expansion to compression. If we look at the universal principles, if you will, we can get really off the deep end here. And we can say that, okay, spacetime has a very specific shape that looks like that. And that's called a light cone because light behaves the same way, time behaves the same way, space, the influence of gravity, et cetera, all play into this sort of expansion, compression, expansion. If you were, if you're theoretically near a black hole, you would probably recognize this shape as well. So again, this is all theoretical physics stuff, which is way above my pay grade. But anyway, it makes us a nice representation when we talk about our external rotation and internal rotation representations of how we move. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to expand that point where I have the meeting of the two cones a little bit so I can show you where this internal rotation moment is. And now we can start to influence this. So now we're going to go to Andrew's question. So Andrew says, For someone who's looking to optimize performance or hypertrophy, you say that there's often a trade-off that occurs between muscle hypertrophy and general movement capabilities given the compression that is created with muscle hypertrophy. However, I know you use bilateral squats. I'm sure there's symmetrical exercise in your programs is the advantage of bilateral movements simply that they're easier to standardize and teach allowing for quicker learning and more accurate tracking or I'm missing something. Okay. So when we're using bilateral symmetrical activities, which are higher load, higher force capabilities, our goal is to increase that moment in time where we can produce force. And so as we add weight to the bar, as we're using these bigger movements, our goal is to teach ourselves to achieve that element of maximum force output, maximum compression. And as long as we're increasing our force and it doesn't interfere with anything else, then we've got a very, very useful strategy for training here. The byproduct of this though is I'm increasing compression which slows down time so it increases the duration that I am in this internally rotated force producing position and so if by adding my ability to produce force requires I have now created interference and so that's when force production and I extended the duration of the amount of force that I was trying to put out. I actually slowed down the club head because what I want is I want that peak to be recognized at a very, very brief moment in time that allows the highest possible force production.

Is it, am I getting my cervical motion?

It's okay. It's your foundation. Always remember that it's a foundation that you build upon. It's an analogy for you to make comparisons with. So there's value there. There's value, but just understand that there's more than one filter.

Right.

Yeah. I know these are tough because they look different visually. Like you see things and you go, man, I don't know, but the reality is I think you do know it's just a matter of saying, okay, what's the rule? Expansion versus compression. I've got two options. Where is she biased? Where can I make a change? Where can I intervene? And then just try to be as consistent as you can. And then eliminate interference, right? And then enhance what you can enhance.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

That's an increase in acceleration. And so, I will see that as I have my biggest space, my biggest expansion is where the velocity is demonstrated to be greatest.

Yeah, correct.

Yeah, it's still like a preparatory activity.

Yeah. Embarrassing.

The minute you put it on her side, gravity pushes down, and the side of her that is closest to the ground gets compressed into the ground. This creates a spread anterior to posterior. There's good research on this: laying somebody on their side makes them bigger front to back. That's advantageous. Now she's going to be flattened out front to back, so she has a lot of muscle activity on the front and back, but nothing on the sides to squeeze her in, which is why we want to put her on her side. We start with gentle, non-full rolls—just getting her to start rolling forward and back through a small excursion on her side in the most relaxed manner possible. You put her on her side, support her head on whatever you have, and ensure the head, neck, and axial skeleton are in a straight line so she rolls around her long axis. We're talking about small excursions: this is lazy, slow, and boring. I'd put it on the level of being meditative. If you promote it that way, it becomes useful to many people, because she's likely carrying anxiety associated with what's happened over the last year and has to be concerned about her husband. This will be demonstrated physically. We want to calm her system to access this gentle movement without superficial strategies. I start with these, even with professional athletes, and it might take 20 minutes to make an impact. That seems long, not something to do during a training session, but this is homework. You spend enough time showing her how to do it. If you put her on the ground in a side-lying position with arms and hips at 90 degrees, lazy, and put a hand on her shoulder and hip, you show her how to oscillate through 20-30 degrees of a roll—rolling back off her side, up to her side, and forward a little at a time, making everything heavy and lazy. You're trying to get her to sense what it feels like to move with less muscle activity because everything she does is tensed up and superficial. Use quiet, relaxed nasal breathing—never give her a strong exhale strategy because that's what she lives in, and it will reinforce her current patterns. Once you get initial changes, she'll tell you when she takes a breath in because you won't see the neck strategy she used before. Use that to your advantage: tell her to take a breath in, and you'll see the chest rise and fall, the belly expand as she breathes in—normal breathing without the neck strategy. Then you know you have her in the right place. After that, you can give her full excursion rolls: she starts on her back and leads with her leg to create posterior expansion, eventually teaching her to roll with her arm and progress to an arm bar with a kettlebell. Keep arm bars in her program, maybe in warm-ups or readiness, or at the end to calm her system after exercise if things crank her up. Other activities: she's squeezing herself against gravity, so you want things that lighten her. Anything where she pulls resistance downward lifts her off the ground, making it easier to capture expansion strategies. When we talk about yielding, it's the connective tissues allowing expansion. If we do a staggered stance chop or half kneeling chops, those become turns—break her into it gradually: start with parallel feet, a small stagger, then bigger and wider stances, eventually moving to split squats.

Yeah, no, that helps a lot. And like I said in the email, I figured there's always going to be a degree of we're going to try this, we're going to see what happens and we're going to move forward. That actually brings up another question that you can go mind. So in one of these other talks that you've done that I saw on Instagram, you were talking to someone who had said for instance, if I want to increase velocity of this baseball pitcher, then I'm going to try to build muscle for them just in that situation. And your question then was like well how do you know that that intervention is getting that result and there's not something else going on? Um so kind of like your process on that because it's like if we take someone through a training session and we get the results we want but if we did multiple things it's like well how do I know that you know um I'll just give you an example. I worked with a kid who was very narrow ISA. All of his inhalation measures, great. Exhalation measures, nonexistent. So we did a lot of very, very skinny. So we did a lot of hypertrophy work, but we also tried to give him that dynamic ISA and increase those exhalation based measures. So I'm like as vertical went up You know I'm like this like he wanted but I'm like did he just need some muscle? Or did he need to create those strategies and have access to those strategies in order to get higher? And it's kind of like how do we decipher these things?

That's the job most of the time.

Oh, okay.

And I guess my question with this one in particular is, in terms of obesity and working with clients in that realm, what kind of activities would you choose to get them to be able to leverage external obliques to close the ISA, or if you can, or if it's more a matter of getting that weight loss. And I noticed too, when somebody has lost a bunch of weight, that it's still very difficult to get that ISA to close, to leverage your abs and hamstrings and things properly. I didn't know if you have any strategies for that as well.