Absolutely, which is why, in a rehab setting when you have people that don't have great movement experiences or need to ensure focal local representation, we would start with a static activity because it's less complex for them to manage. There's already enough to think about—like ground contacts, breathing positions, muscle activity, etc. Static exercises are very complex even in their static form, and making them dynamic could be even harder. So, while I prefer dynamic activity because that's how people tend to move, when initiating this, we might need to use static exercises. It then behooves you to understand the difference between the two in terms of what adaptation you're trying to influence most—what gives the biggest bang for your buck. Are you working with an NBA basketball player or a mother of three who was a cheerleader in high school but hasn't exercised in 20 years?

The heel is not going to let them go back, is it? It's going to keep their center of mass forward towards the plantar aspect of the foot. So like I said, all it's going to do is raise the heel towards the ischial tuberosity. You're not going to get a decompression on that side. You're just going to squeeze it closer together.

Yes. But if you look at it this way, right side, left side. I have to push down more on the left side. I have to let the IR come on the right side. There's the turn. See it?

So, now that just totally changed how I'm looking at the foot. So then once you get to like max P, right? Because there is no motion. It stops there. And then connective tissue behavior is at its maximum. Then I go like that. So we can get all these like, pull the rubber band back and stretch it, okay?

Let's talk about this for a second. Narrow ISA, lots of AP compression, which means that they're going to squeeze the thorax. Pressure is going to go down. That's going to stick them in the bottom, so to speak. So they have a lot of difficulty with overcoming. If you work on some inversion, you might be able to get the outlet to push up a little bit stronger. If you do some of the static overcoming squats through the middle range to teach them to push up with the outlet a little bit more aggressively, then maybe they can come back up through the sticking point a little bit more effectively. You see the game? Get them some space and then teach them how to pressurize upward versus the downward element.

Outstanding.

Give me a minute.

OK. No worries. Do you remember off the top of your head what her hip ER measures are?

Okay.

Welcome to the discussion, because that's why you choose those activities over something else. So if we want Paul to access relative motion of hip IR as a narrow ISA, his knee better be bending.

Yeah, I am too. But, again, it's like wear and tear; you know, she's already starting to feel it. And chances are if she's feeling it at the base of the sacrum, the beginning of the lumbar spine, the knee is next.

Yep, absolutely.

And if I had a bone in the pelvis that was a paddle, what bone would be the paddle?

Cool.

So one's Tibial Femoral ER, one's Tibial Femoral IR. You understand that, right?

Oh, are you reading my stuff?

Brilliant. Nice work.

But that's why we use pressure and not pull because the response is going to be different. So if you pull on connective tissues, the muscles tend to want to tense up and protect you. Right. So if you create pressure, then there tends to be this expansive quality associated with that because it promotes more eccentric orientation. So if somebody was doing a massage on you, okay, they're doing effleurage. So they're using pressure to influence a favorable response in regards to muscle activity. They're trying to tune down muscle activity with pressure. If you wanted to ramp it up, you would yank on something. Yeah. Thus the failure of static stretching in regards to changing joint orientation.

But the difference between you, so the fact that she's okay in a bilateral squat. So the way that the internal rotation comes up through the extremity, it goes straight up through the extremity to the hip and then towards the middle of the pelvis. So it goes up like this and then towards each other with a bilateral symmetrical activity. In a split stance, it actually goes right towards the pelvis. So there is a slight difference in the directionality of the internal rotation that comes from the ground up. So again, I'm leaning towards the fact that when she's in a split stance that she's not able to make the shape change from external rotation to internal rotation proximally. And like I said, it's coming down from the pelvis through the femur. So you probably want to look proximally first. And then again, make sure that you have all of your foot contacts as well.

Yeah, I guess my thought on that is that so obviously you need to run the experiment. You may not know ahead of time, but not like looking at it in retrospect, trying to figure out like why potentially did the band work better for that one person versus lightening the load for the other? Like, is there a reason that we can come up with where we saw the same visual of the hip shooting back, but the band helped this one person versus lightening the weight helped the other person?

So we'll do just sitting down into a deep squat.

Yeah, absolutely. Especially that moment right before the second pull. You get somebody that, you know this and you're gonna know exactly who I'm talking about. They get to the second pull and you could drive a small vehicle between their knees because they're turned out so much. You know what I'm talking about? It's like, that doesn't mean that they're not good lifters as far as the result is concerned, it's just that when you talk about their execution, it's like the people that are really exaggerated into that ER representation, if you want to impact their second pull capabilities and their IR force, that would be the time to use the reverse hyper versus the back extension because they're not capturing the early IR position before. So then again, it's like right before the pull because the second pull is proximal to distal, the position for them to get into it is early internal rotation.

You mean other than the meniscus tear in the back pain? She doesn't have any history?

Yes.

Exactly. It's like a bad strategy. You just compressed them extensively, so you did not get the requisite expansion that you were hoping for. It's a leading resistance. You're giving them resistance to produce a desired outcome. You overshot—either you gave them too much or they never had access to that space in the first place. It was just a bad choice under that circumstance. Again, you get to be the good coach and make that decision. But all you're talking about is this concept that goes back to PNF in the 1940s: leading resistance. We're not using resistance to create an overload of high force production; we're just trying to give them a sensation to guide the behavior to produce the outcome. Too much load under any circumstance is like we were talking about at the beginning of the call—you're just slowly going to take away space. Sensory-wise, you're just numbing them. Instead of having this small influence of muscle activity, they have to use too much muscle activity. Now I don't create spaces; I don't create a compression and an expansion which would allow movement. The key element when we talk about compressed space and expansion is that the gradient between the two provides the movement. Take a water balloon: squeeze one end, and the other end gets fat—that's movement in that direction. But if you have so much pressure that there's no gradient, there's no movement. Then you hear it because they can't breathe or you hear the right, which is indicative of exhalation. Conceptually, I think you understand it. You just need to look at your repertoire of activities and ask: what else could I do under this circumstance? What other position can you use? Have you ever put anybody in quadruped? Have you ever seen anybody fail miserably at that?

So you're sitting, correct?

Yeah.

Don't cross over.

OK. How well do they walk?

Yeah, so think about this for a second. Let's use the backward roll as an example. Somebody's trying to walk on a foot that has clawed toes. That means their center of gravity is staying too far back. They're trying to lift up and over, and so they have to pull things closer together. How well do you think they're going to roll up and over that foot in a true late representation? It's not going to be very good because you're creating a massive amount of stiffness in the foot. All the connective tissues on the plantar aspect of the foot are going to be in an overcoming representation and they're going to be very stiff. People always complain about how they love it when you rub their feet because it alleviates some of that stiffness they feel while trying to walk across the ground. Now, here's what I want you to do: Land your back. Do a backward roll with a shrug and tell me how great that feels. What's going to happen is you're going to start to roll back, break your hips off the ground, and your hips are going to go right back down onto the floor because you've got the shrug and the clawed toes that are pushing you back into the ground.