You understand that, right?

Yeah.

So if I'm trying to find a representation of something that falls into a middle representation, it would behoove me to understand what the two extremes are. If you don't know where the ends are, you have no idea where middle is. Most people haven't attended to that sensation before, and it's so powerful in regards to what we do when we're trying to restore movement or produce force that it gives them an understanding as to where they need to be able to find those contacts. If they can understand what the extremes are, then they know where middle is. That's why I do that. Because in most cases, they're living at one of the two extremes. They're either way over on the medial foot contact or they're way to the outside of the lateral foot contact, and that's what they think middle is. You're just giving them a sensation. Then you get to make the associations with the muscle activity that goes up from the foot. When you're messing around with foot contacts, they ask how they're supposed to find that themselves. I then ask if they felt the muscles up into their leg turn on in a certain sequence. They say yes, and I tell them that's how they know they got the foot right, because everything above the foot they start to sense. It's just about drawing attention to some internal stuff so that they learn to find it themselves, which leads to better carryover because people start to find that stuff on their own automatically, which is what you want. You don't want to be four months into a training program and still be saying okay, let's find that. Sometimes you have to show them something new again, but the point is people are pretty smart and will figure this stuff out. Give them an opportunity to feel the extremes. It's like when you do rolling for the first time with somebody and they feel like they've rolled around on the ground before, but they've never attended to what it feels like. You have to take them through an excursion. You just say okay, do you feel that one spot about halfway through? That's where I want you to land.

So in this case, you would always cue the position of the pelvis, not the push from the hand.

No, I'm being shocked. Oh, okay.

Yeah.

All right. Yeah. With people, I want to do this manipulation and they get a medial knee pain.

And so I went to college, and that was my thought process. I started studying economics and got a B in economics. I had to take some other courses at the same time that were all science courses, and I got A's. The moral of the story is that I thought that was what I wanted to do, and had I pursued that path, I would have been miserable because it wasn't involved in my strengths. The science classes allowed me to see where I was strongest, which helped direct me toward something that I would be good at first and foremost. The step you want to follow first is to follow your strengths. It doesn't matter what you think you want to do; it's about what you're good at. So if you say, 'I want to work my way up in the fitness industry,' ask yourself, is that what you're good at? If you're not, don't waste your time. Redirect yourself and figure out what you're really good at. Maybe you're a great guitar player and should be a musician, or maybe you're a great carpenter and that's what you should do. The mistake people make right off the bat is choosing something they enjoy. They say, 'I like to go work out, great.' Running a business in the fitness industry or being a fitness professional is not the same as liking to work out. That's a big mistake people make because they enjoy it. They think, 'I could just show people how to do this and it'll be great,' but then they find out it's not fun for them. It's fun to work out, but it's not fun to try to get other people to work out. Whatever path you choose, it will be your path, not my path. The path you want to take first and foremost is one that emphasizes your strengths.

No, you can't move backwards. You can't move backwards unless you, oh, so you do it in a time machine. So that way you can.

No. You are so close. Because the muscles compress the sternum down. You compress the sternum back so there's no space there anymore. So I can't access that because I'm actively compressing my sternum. Now take your arm, passively pull it across your chest and you can put your arm against your chest unless you're me. Right? because I didn't actively compress my chest, so the space, I can access that space passively, because I can change the shape enough now, because I didn't compress it, okay? If I'm laying on my side and my legs drop together passively, I might be perfectly fine with that, unless you start to move actively. Then maybe we need to think about a different process. You see I'm getting that? Here's the cool thing, here's the cool thing. You lay somebody down on their side. You just reoriented gravity. You just changed their physical shape. So you actually gave them AP expansion just by laying them on their side. You may have given them the space that just allows them to lay their legs on top of each other, but maybe you didn't. It depends on who we're talking about. Sometimes you get to put stuff between their legs. Why do people like to sleep with pillows between their knees, Alex? because some people, even when they lay on their side, they can't compress, they can't bring their legs together because they don't have that space there. So they take a pillow, they put it between their knees and they sleep them like babies because now they're actually in a space that's comfortable. And these are probably the people where they lie on the side and they turn and their knee just like pulls up with them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

I feel like I have caveman questions. How do you list something?

So a world of five weeks in, this is our, with me, it's the third visit. So she has a real gnarly limp going on. So this last time that I saw her, she's having less pain. She's having a lot less pain than the first time, but the limp is still there. So the very first time she came in, the way that it looks is she's kind of leaning her trunk to the right. Her left hip is hiking up and kind of circumducting around. And so I put her on the table to take some measurements. And what I found was actually, so both Ober's test was positive, but it had actually less hip adduction on the right side. So the right side was actually felt stiffer being measured. Then, but at 90 degrees, the right hip had a little more IR. So 15 degrees of IR. The left had less IR, about 10 or so. Then on the right side, it had about 45 degrees of ER, which was less than the 60 on the left. The left had more ER. And straight leg raise was on the right side about 60 degrees and on the left about 65. And so we worked on bringing her back first. We did some 90, 90 things. And then on the next session, we did some chopping.

Good to talk to you. I have to go.

Shorter ground contact, lower jump. All right.

Yeah, so as they try to descend, they're going to literally stop. And then they're going to allow them to kind of keep going a little bit. And so that's why you'll see that turn. Because again, they still have to make space to move into. That's what you're seeing.

Yeah. Like I'm not pulling you. I'm not, you know, you're not moving forward under that circumstance. I'm tipping. That's tipping the pelvis backwards, right? So the pelvis doesn't tilt backwards under that circumstance. You're just sliding more forward, right? So the anti orientation has already taken place. Like as soon as you start to get the sacrum, the base of the sacrum starts to get compressed, as soon as the DR starts to get compressed, you're going forward. You are moving into an anti-orientation. Don't let the visual screw you up.

Okay. Yeah.

Okay. So I think it's starting to click what you're talking about with a wide ISA by structure. It's almost like they have space backwards and so they push forward against it. That basically just means that at rest—in that standing position, let's say—there's all of this room posteriorly for the sacrum to travel back if it were to, relative to the nomines.

Okay.

So it's a deeper or lower center of gravity in that chop to capture what you're talking about. Yeah. I want that to happen, which means that that's DR expansion. See the medial border moving posterior, there's my delay, right? But to do that, sub scapularis has to be able to eccentrically orient and if it doesn't, you ain't gonna get ER.

Okay.

I'm an offensive lineman. I don't have that kind of time. I have to do it in a very, very narrow window of time and I have to be able to do it over and over and over again.

You don't necessarily need those numbers in tingling.

Not through the grounded toe. If you push through the grounded toe, what's gonna happen is they'll complain about the massive cramp they just got in their hamstring. You're not gonna pick up the internal rotation you need to create the early flexion. You want to hang on to some internal rotation as you're pushing into the table. If you don't, then you get too much of an external rotation representation and you drive them so far into extension that you actually just kind of screw up the activity. That's why you gotta maintain the medial foot contact, heavier towards the heel than the toe. It'll help you maintain. So the thing you always want to remember is when they're laying on the table, they're in neutral, and you're moving them away from neutral. You got to make sure you're hanging onto some measure of the internal rotation, which is the medial foot contact.

So we need the sternum, the palm panel, and that thoracic movement to expand so that you can get into those spaces. With an external load, you're going to be compressing to press that upward. So again, this is where you're going to see, so even though the grip is narrow, you're still going to see the elbows moving away from midline as they move through the spaces where they would be most compressed. So the upper thorax is going to get compressed in a heavy overhead press under all circumstances. Nobody's going to get to that space with full relative motion of ER. So you're never going to have full anterior posterior expansion. You're always going to see some deviation away from midline. Don't pay attention to the hands. Look at everything else as they're moving it through space. And then they're going to be able to straighten the elbow. But again, you're going to get the internal rotation at the top under almost every circumstance because they have to move into an ER space. That ER space moves away from midline under all circumstances under load. Okay, just a matter of degree as to how difficult it is and then what other strategies can they use systemically. So if you were doing like a one arm overhead press, there's a whole lot of stuff that can go on there. There's a lot of turning that can take place. You can orient yourself away from that press to get the arm overhead. When you're fixing it on the barbell, you're only allowing the turns to go A to P. But again, nobody's going to be able to press overhead in ER because you just don't have enough force to do it.

OK. So what if I twist a tibia into ER proximally? What muscles did I move into an eccentrically oriented position?

If I want to make it that complex, like I can do that. I can do this. Sometimes it's not that necessary, especially after the first few sets or first few sessions when somebody gets a good grasp on it. Then you don't need to worry about it. I tend to only use the really quiet nasal breathing stuff in the laziest of activities. So if they are upright and on their feet, that's not the time to be lazy.