Yeah.

Yes, so you see, it's like, yes, it may be helpful, but let's understand what the potential consequences are here, right? Don't blindly say, this is better. Say, this is what's going to happen. Maybe it's a good thing. Get it?

So if I brought their squat in, their knees are gonna go out. So if you think you've ever seen that with somebody trying to do a closed grip bench press where they can't keep their elbows in, they push it out or they turn their hands out. This would be like somebody that toes out as a substitution. So you're going to kind of see the same orientations on the bar that you would see with the feet on the ground. If somebody does have the capacity to hold their arms in a straight line and they still don't have access to that space, now you're going to start to see a proximal representation where you're going to see somebody that looks like they're elevating the scaps. So there's your substitution for the internal rotation. That's an internal rotation representation because what they did is they elevated up and out this way to create the ER and then the IR is through the spine. Because a shrug is just an internal rotation. If I shrug on both sides, I'm internally rotated on both sides and I'm just shoving them forward. So again, that's how they apply force into the bar. So under each circumstance, it's going to be a very similar representation to what you would see in a squat.

Right. Yes. Yes.

So when I say, just breathe quietly through your nose. When I want somebody to not use any force with breathing, I don't want to hear them breathe. It's like, don't force it. Don't think about it too much. Just make sure that you're breathing in and out through your nose. Then it becomes a process of refinement. I don't expect them to be perfect from the get go. It's just a matter of monitoring. If you see somebody that is maybe breathing too quickly or you see accessory muscle activity in their neck or something along those lines, then it's just a matter of cues and coaching. It's like, hey, just slow that down a little bit. Easy, heavy, be a little bit lazier, that kind of thing. So again, you sort of set the premise of I just want this to be quiet. And if you have the capacity to do so, demonstrate.

Yeah, it does. Because when you're trying to produce maximum force, you don't want movement.

Depends. You don't know.

So right foot on wall, cross connects.

Yes.

Right.

You're going to guess no. Okay, so think about the orientation. What should have dropped off is hip IR on the left side, right? That's typically what you're going to see from a process standpoint. So I will give you a hint, Zach. It's probably not coming from the hip. Okay, so where's it coming from?

Greetings, sir. Are you on your second round of coffee today, sir?

Okay. It's like an overhead press. It's like a, it's a position that you would use to get into an overhead press, which is internal rotation up there, isn't it?

Yeah, you have a minute and four seconds, three seconds, two seconds. Go, Jack, go.

We had about 20 seconds.

You know, I don't want you to stick with your rules, stick with your compression and expansion rules. Use your key KPIs to guide you. Teach her how to understand this. That way she doesn't feel unusual when everybody else is doing this activity, because she's going to have to modify it to some degree. And technically speaking, you can do that with any group of athletes that you work with.

There is a moment in time where the foot that's on the ground is applying its maximum force for that circumstance, for that context. So it's not the maximum force that they can apply, it just has to be the maximum force in that circumstance. And that is a compressive strategy. As I move towards that, if I'm at the two ends of gait, right? So I'm stepping forward over this foot and I'm about ready to leave this foot. That's the extreme. As I move my center of gravity over the one and they get closer and closer to being in the middle, that middle propulsive strategy, which is internal rotation, which is high force into the ground. So my force into the ground is less, and it gets more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more. Then it's max, and then it's less, and then it's less, and then it's less, and then it's less. So at this point, at the transition where I am applying the greatest force into the ground, that's where I'm going to restrict the greatest amount of relative motion. That's where I'm most likely to reduce my ability to breathe under those circumstances. And it's going to be context dependent. Every movement that you perform has that built in because at some point in time, assuming I'm influencing the ground, and the ground is influencing me, I'm always going to have a point of maximum propulsion. This includes, if I'm just rolling across the ground, there is a point where I'm putting maximum force into the ground. If I'm walking across the ground, there's a point where I'm putting the maximum force for that context on the ground. If I'm doing a split squat, it's the same thing. If I'm doing a squat, it's the same thing. If I'm jumping off the ground, it's the same thing. If I'm landing on the ground, it's the same thing. There has to be a point where I'm applying that force. The question is, am I capable of releasing that strategy when I need to? Or am I carrying it around all the time because the relative load for me, as an individual, is always very high? These are the people that are walking around with compressive strategies that become interference. And under many of those circumstances, these are the people that experience discomfort because they're not changeable enough.

Based on that kind of thinking, are there similarities in, so I've got to say like a picture, pictures, there's a similarity in their structure that allows them to do that.

I have a client with anterior ankle pain who is a wide ISA and totally compressed. During a toe touch, there's almost no posterior lift with the rib cage, and he's pushed forward—almost in that toe-off position all day. His feet are externally rotated, and his shins are externally rotated. We've been using cable chops, lateral lunges onto a ramp, and similar exercises to develop a yielding strategy more on the right side because that's where the pain is. I've noticed increased ankle pain as we increase sprint volume and intensity.

Because of the extreme force output demands of powerlifting, the better you get at lifting heavy things, the more likely you are to lose your adaptability because you're taking all of your adaptability and filtering it into one thing: absolute force production. So it is inevitable in most circumstances. There may be some outlier exceptions of guys that can still lift gigantic heavy weights and still move enough. But ultimately your goal is to reduce that adaptability because it improves the efficiency in their performance of the sport. The more shoulder rotation I have available to me, the more shoulder rotation I have to control and then lift the weight. If I give up that movement, I don't have to try to control it. Now I can put more effort and energy into the lift itself. So let's say if I have 100 units of energy that I can put into a bench press, one guy has to control more range of motion. So he has to take 30 units of that 100 to control the shoulder and then he puts 70 into the bar. Another guy only has to control with 15 units of energy to control shoulder motion because he doesn't have as much, and then he can put 85 into the bar, right? So potentially more force capability by individual. So ultimately you're going to lose stuff. So here's what this means, Ben: to keep someone comfortable, I'm not saying healthy—okay, because we're dealing with some wear and tear on the system. So anything that we do that preserves adaptability can be interference to the performance. And that's kind of what you're asking me: how do I not interfere and keep these people comfortable? And I would have to say that at some point in time, you might not be able to, depending on what their choices are. Like they get to make those decisions as to how far they want to take this kind of thing. The way that you try to manage this is you insert a certain amount of non bilateral symmetrical activities that would produce turning capability. So that's what we're talking about—maintaining the ability to turn is what maintains the adaptability of the system because our physical structure is designed to produce those turns. A squat and a bench press and a deadlift are specifically designed not to turn. The better I get at not turning, the better I get at the lifts, but I also sacrifice adaptability because my adaptability is within the turning.

So this is the value of orientation. So I can bend you and create an orientation that provides me external rotation. So it's not extra rotation by relative motions that we would want, right? So when we talk about comfortable movement and pain-free movement, that's typically associated with sufficient relative motion that we have a distribution of force, we have a distribution of tensions and things like that, that you don't feel it, okay? So when you're in that orientation of the bench press, why do you arch in the bench press?

Does that make sense?

All right, camera is running, timer is running, what can I do for you, sir? All right, so a few weeks ago, you had talked on another video about internal rotation being a performance indicator, IR for performance versus ER for velocity. My question is, how are they different? And I think the representation I have in my mind is, if you think about maximal velocity sprinting, I think of extension, I think of IR. And that's kind of the metric you would use for that. So how does velocity differentiate or how does it compare? OK.

The answer to that question is it depends. Those things can progress to the point where they're not very changeable other than with surgical intervention. Within a certain range, it depends on how much change there's been; you can make changes because some of these orientations are just bony, and bones do move and change shape. I'll have certain types of feet that come in where people say, 'I've had this foot for a long time,' but they've got enough adaptability. You have to provide the right influence to what you're looking at to understand what you're seeing. Bunions evolve from internal rotation of the first ray of the foot, creating a twist at the MTP joint. Oftentimes you'll see the same twist at the knee or pelvis. You won't make a change if you only concentrate on one part of the body; you have to consider all those top-down influences. So make sure you're capturing your foot cues. If you have a situation with a low arch, you'll need to provide an arch—maybe through shoe selection, orthotics, or if you have an athletic trainer, they can do some taping to test it, which is a great way to determine if you need a foot change. It will depend on the actual representation you're looking at, but in most cases, you're dealing with someone trying to drive internal rotation very aggressively, meaning they're missing it somewhere else. So you need to capture external rotation to create more space for internal rotation and then remove it so the foot doesn't have to be the compensation strategy. We go back to the beginning of this conversation: where do you capture that first? I think you take these people back to the early propulsive strategy, and again, maybe make a shoe modification or orthotic situation along with that—that's where you'll start.

See it?

So you need to make some space first. You have to have posterior lower expansion to get through early shoulder flexion or you're going to hit internal rotation too soon. So again, I need to make space and then I can create internal rotation on top of it. So what happens when you have posterior lower compression is that as soon as they start to elevate the arm in what would be considered traditional flexion, they're moving into an internal rotation position. Then they run out of internal rotation very, very quickly, and now you have a limitation in what appears to be shoulder flexion. That's right. So you need to have a better starting position. So I have to have that posterior lower expansion first, transition through internal rotation. Again, it's a gradient. They're both there all the time. But if you start from a position that's biased toward internal rotation, you're going to be losing internal rotation very, very quickly because there's not enough space because I don't have enough external rotation to create the internal rotation. So if I take external rotation, if external rotation is this big, and then I have all the internal rotation in between, if external rotation is this big, that's all the internal rotation I'm gonna have too. Does that make sense? So you've gotta create the anterior-posterior expansion. So again, this person is going to be limited to unilateral activities. Keep them below shoulder level. There's a lot of things you can do under those circumstances, right? Create the expansion and then just use your test-retest. Nothing simple that doesn't hurt. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Make sure they do a little bit of homework for you. Give them like one activity to do at home and say, 'You know what? I need you to do this every day.'

No.

The parachute that is correct. Absolutely.

Yeah, so I'm thinking pretty active on Twitter. I don't know if you saw the post about the deconditioned athletes that were coming back from quarantine and just like, you know, some of them are just so out of shape that they have to, they can't start anywhere near where they were before.

So if I'm leaving the ground, that is a reducing representation of IR representation of ER. So the hardest thing is, when we went through school, they said that on the cadaver straight up is zero and everything outside is ER and everything outside is IR. And it doesn't work that way because ER and IR are always both there. But I have to position myself in ER. I have to push down with IR. And that's what creates a lot of confusion, because people say, well, no, this is IR relative. No, it's not. It's like everything has to be biased towards this ER, and then there's elements, a progressive element of interaction. So for instance, if we were just talking about your foot in that same representation that you were standing in, your foot has a lot more IR on it than your hip does. That's right. Until you start moving more weight into the ground as your center of gravity translates in whatever direction is forward.