So they have to sustain a high output for a short period of time and then do that repeatedly. So worst-case scenario, a two-minute drill where you're trying to run plays back to back to back as quickly as possible in a very short period of time. So they need to be trained to produce high levels of force for four to six seconds, then do it again and again and again. So their typical constraint would be six seconds off. I don't know, was it 25 seconds in college? And then 35 seconds in the pros. So you have that type of interval that you have to be able to consistently produce high levels of performance. And again, the exception to the rule would be a two-minute drill where they don't have full recoveries and they need to be trained for that as well.

Radial.

You have to understand what the consequences are because jamming somebody's—you have to be really, really careful. We know where the ERs are. We know where the IRs are supposed to be. If I put an arch into a shoe regarding the translation of the tibia, what happens to the tibia? If I put a lateral wedge in a shoe, what did you just accelerate?

Okay, so now we have to talk about what spaces do you have available to you when you're performing the activity, right? So when we talk about somebody that is moving the legs away from midline, the reason that they're doing that is because they don't have a space in front of them. And so they have to orient outward to get into a space that allows them to move and still allows them to apply pressure to the ground. That kind of makes sense. So what's the difference between a squat here and a squat there is where I have that space. So if I'm trying to move my grip inward, so if I'm doing a press on a bar, are we talking about like a flat press?

We were just talking about that with Misha.

Yeah. Very.

So to summarize, number one: if you're doing a split squat or anything where you're loaded and you're compressing, you're creating compression, you're going to be somewhere in the middle—truly early learning.

Yes.

So now I have like 20 degrees of left hip internal rotation and my external rotations are pretty good on each side, probably like high fifties, maybe even like sixties each. But my right hip internal rotation is still pinchy and not good. I'm trying to understand conceptually what's going on with me because I see a lot of me with the population that I work with, because I gravitate towards working with lifters and my lifters who are really strong tend to be wider and tend to present like me.

So you might be able to determine that through examination and then interventions as to what changes take place. And you go, oh, when we make this change, the symptom gets better. So I can't give you an exact response on that because I don't know which was the culprit, so to speak, as to, okay, are we dealing with somebody that has way too much stiffness in the connective tissues and they no longer have adaptability? Or do I have somebody that is at end-range yielding and they no longer have adaptability? Or do I have both?

can just have them lay on the side and kind of just like turning a bit and maybe add weight on them.

So then in the other case, you're just twisting the towel inward, basically.

Okay.

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 am I 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 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. So bilateral symmetrical exercises are well designed to increase my ability to produce a compressive strategy, which allows me to increase my peak forces at the right time. Hypertrophy is a byproduct of that. Hypertrophy by itself, again, to develop any significant amount of hypertrophy, there's going to be some compressive strategies associated, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's interference. So again, the way that we figure this stuff out, Andrew, is that we train people, and so we actually have to do things and we determine what is the best course of action, and so we have to have some form of key performance indicator that is going to allow us to determine whether we're on the right path or not. So if I'm trying to improve someone's acceleration, so let's say that I'm measuring their acceleration through a 10-meter sprint from a standing start, I take them into the gym, I train them, I bring them back, and I retest that 10-meter sprint. And if that continues to improve, then my strategy in the weight room is good. And so if I'm using bilateral symmetrical activities to do that, great. But at some point in time, and maybe it happens and maybe it doesn't, at some point in time, it can become interference. The only way that you can tell whether this is going to happen is as you train them. And again, this is why we monitor key performance indicators. So if I increase force production, if I reduce my external rotation field, but I don't need that range of motion to perform my activity, then again, I'm not creating interference. So all of these activities are great activities. We use them all the time. We have to buy bigger trap bars because we have people that can pull so much weight that we don't have enough room to put the weights on. And so again, these are not bad things. Bilateral symmetrical activities are very, very useful at certain times for certain people in certain circumstances. What you have to do is you have to understand that this is always an N equals one experiment and we're talking about an individual here and then their response to training. So again, we've always got the expansion, compression, expansion on the table as a representation of movement. We superimpose force production on top of that to determine what is going to be the best course of action under a specific context. We don't know exactly where they are. We don't know how changeable they are. We don't know to what degree we need to make a change to get the influence that we want. So this becomes the experiment, but as long as you're following the principles, that's where you're safest in doing your work.

Yes, I am.

I'm sorry, that's not what I'm trying to do.

They're looking through a very narrow lens. Let me take you back because I know you'll remember this. Remember when I made you stand up on one of the coffee and coaches conference calls and we did a hip thingy where I had to turn your hip inward and outward, and you turned it far enough that you felt your spine start to turn too. That's always happening; just to what degree. So again, we have to start looking at this more systemically. We have to understand what the relationships are rather than defaulting into this looks like this, the straight plane thing. And if it looks like this and I turn you this way, then I am measuring ER, IR, whatever it is, when the reality is, it's like, you gotta think about how did you even get into that position? What movement took place that put you in that space. See the difference?

I'm not a big fan of working through discomfort. And again, like most of us have been athletes and we kind of recognize the fact that oh yeah, we're always going to feel something that's uncomfortable. We kind of get into it. And then we want to try, we don't want to transfer that attitude to a situation where we're trying to recapture things, because that again, just when it makes us better at feeling crappy and then we're potentially affecting one of the constraints, which we don't want that kind of a change. So I would encourage you not to do that, but think about something here for a second. We have a turning situation. So she's got a series of turns that affect her ability to move in certain directions at certain times. So if you can identify her typical orientation, then maybe it's something like okay if I would put her in a symmetrical position, she can't turn enough to offset some of her genetically represented turns. So maybe her bilateral squat becomes a staggered stance, because it induces a little bit more turning capability for her and now I don't have that problem anymore. Like I said, and then knowing full well that performance is probably gonna push her in a certain direction where she has been successful, and then you're just managing. So again, I think like I said, in fact, I know you kind of got this one, it's just a matter of trusting your judgments and then recognizing the fact that okay, I can't treat her like I do somebody that doesn't have this strong representation. Right. And so maybe she never gets into this symmetrical position. Maybe she doesn't ever get to do a barbell RDL like everybody else does. You know what I mean? Because that's just not hers. One, it's not in her wheelhouse. It's not her superpower. It doesn't help her. And it only pushes her towards the direction that all of her performance is probably going to push her towards. And then your job is not to try to necessarily enhance a superpower. It is to help her manage her superpowers.

OK, have a great day. Thank you, sir. Have a great day.

And there's no space.

Yes. So one last question before you go on—very quick. During that phase, right when the back foot is here in early propulsion, just before the front foot hits down. Understood. You want the front foot to supinate again, like it becomes like this, right? Do you want the front foot to supinate again?

All right, brother. I got to run to the next call. Good to see you. Your time is always valuable. I'm in. Have a great day. You too. Yeah. If there's no gradient, there's no movement. But if the gradient's too big, bigger reduction in force output. You see it? So powerlifting is like, how small can I make this gradient? Still get enough movement, right? That I can still produce my maximum force. Good morning. Happy Wednesday. I have no coffee in hand and it is perfect. All right. Well, today is Wednesday, and that means that tomorrow is Thursday and we will have the usual Coffee and Coaches Conference call at 6 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. The link to that will be on my professional Facebook page at Bill Hartman, PT. If you would like to join us, the groups have been stellar. The questions have been awesome. We've been going long because they're so much fun. So please join us for that. If you would like to participate in a 15-minute consultation, please go to askbillhartman at gmail.com, put in the subject line 15-minute consultation so I do not delete it by accident, and we'll try to get those set up for you as well. Okay, digging into today's Q&A. Wednesdays were always a little tight, so we gotta go right into this. This is another Q&A that I did with Ben. Ben had a very popular call, I think it was last week, actually, in regards to powerlifting. And so we sort of continued our little process, sticking with the topic of powerlifting. We talked a lot about what adaptations that we're actually expecting under the circumstances of increasing force production or gym strength, however you wanna look at that. And so we talked about those, and then we talked about the potential secondary consequences that are associated with that. How we may lose motion, how that actually might be beneficial. And then what do we really consider these normative measures? Are there such things as norms? So this is a really good call. I think we went like 20, 23 minutes or so. So make sure you watch the whole thing through. If you don't want to watch it here, it'll be up on YouTube later. So please go to YouTube and subscribe. Excuse me. Please subscribe on YouTube. And then I will see you guys tomorrow morning at six AM on the coffees coffee and coaches conference call. I'll see you guys later. Camera is rolling. Clock has started. Hey, Ben, you have the coveted last spot of the day.

Your last call of the day, dude.

And then maybe eventually you don't have to give her that kind of a stuff, but you just keep the arm bars in the program in some way, shape or form, whether it be in her early stage, like her warmups or her readiness or however you perceive that. where you put it near the end of the program so that anything that does kind of crank her up during her exercise program, you sort of calm her jets at the end by giving her something as supplementary that's turning related, okay? Other activities that you want to think about when you're doing the training session. So she's kind of squeezing herself against gravity. And so you want to look at activities that would lighten her. Okay. So anything where she's pulling resistance downward actually lifts her up off the ground. So it makes it easier for her to capture the expansion strategies. So when we talk about yielding, that's the connective tissues allowing the expansion to occur. So if we were to do like a staggered stance chopping activity, your half kneeling chops, all of those activities eventually become these turns that, and again, you break her into it gradually. You start like, if her feet are parallel, You start in a little bit of stagger, you get a bigger stagger, you get a wider stagger, you get a bigger stagger, and then eventually she's doing split squats.

Was that helpful? Yeah, that was super helpful. And just if you don't mind me clarifying real quick that point about like you'll try different things or sorry with the picture like, you know, we're moving in the right direction in one indicator, but we're also losing a very important indicator. So are you constantly weighing that, that option of like, what am I going to get out of this? And what could I potentially lose out of this? And kind of like, these are the things I'm going to be constantly pulling from.

We'll see. We'll see in half a minute to get something quick.

Well, yeah, but don't let the head turn. Don't let the head turn, right? So if the pillow is here, I'm doing this. I'm not doing that.

And so again, there's going to be a need to build some variety in some way, shape, or form, but again, it's not about driving them harder and harder and harder into a position.

You just got away by one way then.

So I can capture a position of internal rotation, right? Then I can put force into the ground. If I try to put force into the ground in an ER position, I have a sprained ankle, right? So, think about what you're asking me. So we step into it. There's certainly delay when I first make my initial contact. So I make my initial contact with the ground to decelerate, change direction, or whatever it might be. Same process that I was just talking about, about creating the delay strategy. So I will be in an early propulsive strategy. However, if I'm going to come to a stop, the amount of force that I have to apply to the ground is radically different from me just stepping over with the other foot and continuing to walk, which means that now I'm going to, so remember when I flip flop the mechanics from standing bipedal to quadruped? So now I just flip flop my mechanics because I'm bending the hip more. I'm lowering my center of gravity like a squat. And now I gotta produce more force into the ground in internal rotation. So not only did I have to initiate the delay with an early propulsive strategy, I gotta get to mid max propulsion to stop, which is max IR into the ground, right? So my foot position is gonna be different. I'm gonna have a, I'm gonna get all the way to max P probably, right? And so does that make sense? Yeah. OK, so where's the parent? So if I'm lowering my center of gravity, if I'm going to cut, change direction, or just pure deceleration into the ground, where's the parachute now? So in early propulsion, I have a counter-nutated sacrum on an ER at ilium, right? That's where the parachute is. That's where I slow down. That's the expansion. As I lower my center of gravity and try to come to a complete stop and jam force into the ground, where's the parachute now?