Okay. What direction does the lumbar spine move?

Right.

So, sliders are like an arm going through a sleeve. You put your arm in the sleeve of your coat and your arm slides through the sleeve. A tensioner is when you pull on both ends of the nerve to improve its tolerance to tension. Tensioners come later in the game. After nerves get sensitized, you need to get them used to being under tension again because nerves are always under tension. For example, you're sitting on your nerves right now and they're perfectly fine with it, but if they're sensitized, they may not like it. So, you have sliders and tensioners. I'm regurgitating stuff from Butler and Shacklock: nerves like three things—they like movement, they like space, and they like blood flow. If anything compromises those, the nerve can respond unfavorably. For instance, with concentrically oriented muscle activity, what happens to blood flow and nerve excursions? This doesn't change how I reacquire positions and movement, but I can use neurodynamic testing to determine where concentric orientation has the greatest influence on symptoms. For example, if someone reports numbness and tingling in three fingers with nighttime pain, I can identify the affected nerve.

Got it. Oh, yeah. Just be careful of the consequences. All right.

So the person was asking if they have their knees out, where are they getting the internal rotation? And you were talking about the femur getting internal rotation when the knees are out because you're compressed anterior to posterior. And I was trying to figure out, how is that represented in the upper body? So like when you're pressing overhead or when you're bench pressing, like 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, like for example in a bench press. But if you take a narrow grip, since you're, I feel, where are you getting internal rotation? How is what we see at the squat transferred into bench pressing or overhead pressing between narrow and wide grips?

Yes, so it's very, very end range. And then the foot comes up as well and sort of everything just goes out to the side.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's cool.

It's not real. That's one thing you want to make sure. Does this help you though? Does this help you see this representation of the transitions and then why you start to see the compensatory strategies layered on? So don't consider the split-squat gate per se, but there are elements that are similar and then there are, because of context, there are limitations in how much of the excursion that you'll see. That's the thing that I think that might be a little point of confusion for you is to not see this exactly the same.

Okay. And you've got more than one picture, correct?

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

Yeah, gotcha.

So you're creating expansion posteriorly. You get legitimate external rotation here versus the bony adaptation. If I don't need to twist this so much, I don't have the musculature that's twisting it into external rotation, so that releases some of its tension. Then I get a better representation of the proximal humerus. I don't have to use the compensatory strategy at the elbow, and I'm driving the orientation from hand to the elbow and then sew on twist.

He was limited internal rotation on the right and more internal rotation on the left.

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.

Okay, yes, yes, yes.

But yeah, I found your videos and after finding them, I kind of lost all motivation.

And that would probably be the biggest mistake in examples where we're looking at what appears to be happening versus what is actually happening is that we're looking distally rather than looking at where is the rib cage? Where is the pelvis?

Okay, so eliminate interference real quick. I know you got to go probably. Like the another thing I struggle with is if she's doing, let's say very low threshold activities that still might cause discomfort, let's say a bilateral squat, she still feels something in her knee. Like, is that something? I know this is so context specific, but in talking about the general rule of thumb and interference and all that stuff, like, hey, breathe through that, like we need to work through this discomfort versus like, okay, I'm just going to stay away from it.

I don't think it made us realize anything. I think it exposed us. It just let us see for ourselves what we really are. So hopefully we learned from it. Young man, I hate to cut you off, but I got to go.

Okay, so again, it's meters per second, right? So there's your time, okay? The space is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. So the amount of time, the amount of time that is available for movement is smaller and smaller and smaller. So it, I'm literally closing the space where I can actually move. So at max P, when I'm pushing maximally into the ground and the ground is pushing up maximally into me.

You should not lose medial heel contact in that circumstance. If you lose medial heel contact, you're going to roll into external rotation, and the pelvis is not going to be able to create the internal rotation. So the pelvis won't be able to come back around towards that lead leg. It's going to roll this way, and then you're going to have to create a compensatory strategy. So you're going to go up, and it's going to roll to the outside. So again, now you're talking about taking a long way around. You won't be able to go through because you won't be able to superimpose internal rotation on top of the external rotation. You're using a compensatory strategy to create an orientation of a turn, not a turn.

Makes sense.

How much time do we have? We had a ton.

And so we want to think about calming her system to try to access this gentle movement without the superficial strategies. So I start with these really gentle movements, and I've done this with professional athletes and it might take 20 minutes in some cases to really make an impact. That seems like a really long time, not something you probably want to do during a training session, but this is homework. So you spend enough time showing her how to do this. So she's lying on her side with her hips at 90 degrees, and you put a hand on her shoulder and on her hip and you show her how to oscillate through 20-30 degrees of a roll. So she rolls back off of her side, rolls up to her side, and then rolls forward just a little bit at a time, making everything heavy and lazy. What you're trying to do is get her to sense what it feels like to move with less muscle activity because everything that she's doing is very tensed up and superficial. Use nasal breathing, quiet and relaxed. You never want to give somebody like this a strong exhale strategy because that's what she lives in, and it will reinforce it and become interference again. Once you get the initial changes, she'll be able to tell you when she takes a breath in because you won't see the neck strategy she was using before. You can use that to your advantage and say, 'Take a breath in.' You'll see the chest rise and fall, you'll see the belly expand as she breathes in, which gives you a normal breath in, but you won't see the neck strategy. Then you know you've got her in the right place. Once you do that, you can start giving her full excursion rolls where she starts on her back. Did you see my video where I talked about the rolling, like leading with your arm, leading with your leg to create this? So she's going to be a lower extremity lead type of roller first because that's going to create the posterior expansion as she rolls. So you're going to lead with legs first. Then eventually you can teach her how to roll with her arm, and then eventually it becomes an arm bar with a kettlebell arm bar, which I just love.

You have to get to know how these people respond. You do an intervention. You make small changes over time. So when you're updating a training program, each training program should look similar to the previous one with the smallest changes necessary to maintain progress. And that's how you know what the influence is going to be. Again, we would never do this, but let's just say you gave them 10 exercises on the first program and then the next program you give them 10 totally different exercises. How are you going to know? You're not going to know what was creating the effect, right? So that's why we work in short intervals, let's call them sprints. What we do is like a two-week sprint where we're trying to raise something, and then we monitor our key performance indicators. Then we have some form of embedded test, like you mentioned with vertical jump, you could do that under certain circumstances. Maybe it's how he throws—baseball is huge right now. So I have kids that are throwing off the mound for their high school season. They come in every two weeks and I'll ask, 'How'd you throw?' That means, 'How'd you throw off the mound?' We check their velocity, we check their spin, and all the parameters we can track for baseball pitchers. We're constantly monitoring those things. That's how we plug and check activities, tweak them, and get to know the kid over time. For example, I have a kid who's going to pitch for Northwestern. I've known him for four years, so I know what to expect. He's an easy one to work with. But again, it took me a long time to understand him, just like with any other athlete. That's how you do it: based on time, experience, and trial and error. But you make small changes, not huge ones, because when you make massive changes in programming, you really don't know what's influencing the outcome. You have to take responsibility for that. When you make a big change and don't understand what influenced the result, that's our fault. This is hard. People think it's easy, but it's not. You're dealing with complex humans.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, how are we doing for time? What will we do next?

So you would want them to keep their head on a pillow, essentially.

Right.

No. Okay. You got two options.

So you can put force into the ground.