See?

Yeah.

So I've, when I've laid him on his back in an attempt to allow gravity to pull him down and allow, because he's got hip contracture, knee contracture. His knees are like six inches off the table. I would just kind of like wiggle his knee to slowly get it to elongate in the hip and the knee, stretch it out.

Now, it's not that gravity's not pushing down on everybody. Everybody loses that battle to gravity.

Okay. There are a couple of ways that you can conceptualize this that may help. So we'll just kind of cover some bases. Physical structure is going to determine a lot of this. We've talked about this before. When we talk about capturing right-sided foot cues on a narrow ISA individual, that's because of the physical shape of their skeleton. They are going to move in a very specific direction when you capture those foot cues because of their physical structure. So it's where their center of gravity lies. It's where their shape will take them because literally it's just that—it's the structure. So when I capture right foot cues on a narrow ISA individual, they move in a very specific direction. They don't go backwards; they go sideways more. The center of gravity is moving towards a center point, but they're going to move more right to left. It's just their physical structure. You don't have to overthink this. On a wide ISA individual, their physical structure is different. Literally, their center of gravity shifts differently. Their physical shape is different. So when you capture right foot cues on a wide ISA individual, they tend to move back on the right-hand side. That's step one. But that doesn't mean the physical structure changes between step one and step two. When you're talking about taking wide ISA individuals, they have to actually make a physical turn from right to left, and that would require a certain shift of the center of gravity on the foot from forefoot to rear foot.

Oh, there's a difference in wide and narrow in regards to the sequence of events as to how they, like, so if you have all compensatory strategies that are superimposed on the axial skeleton, the end representations will be very similar because they're going to lose all of their peripheral ranges of motion. So all of their ERs and IRs will be in deficit, right? Yeah. So that's an easy one.

I think what you said is accurate. Can I simplify that?

You understand?

Yes, you do. Yes, you do. But understand this. Focus on principle. It's like understanding the relationships of where things are. If you're going to mobilize a tibia into an early relative representation, it behooves you to have a pelvis that's in the same position. Because chances are, you'll get a change at the knee, but it won't stick because you never have the distribution. I want this stuff to match. That's why early, middle, and late matter, because everything's going to fall into one of those representations. Whether you're talking about a mobilization or an exercise or a position, it's all the same stuff. But that's the advantage of understanding the difference. And when I say difference, I'm talking about the early, middle and late differences, but then understanding that everything's the same. Mobilization can be middle, early or late. An exercise can be early, middle or late. Do a late representation when you wanted an early, you screw up.

Yeah. You see it. Yeah. Just way open.

Yeah, like, think about it's like, whether you're in Brazil or Spain, I'm thinking that you're probably doing okay. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So just make sure you can speak. I'm almost done.

Okay, perfect word. You literally took the word right out of my mouth. Potentially, yes. Here's the problem. You have somebody that's lying on a table, and the degree of their twist—so think about this. Take somebody who is really twisted and turned and bent with compensations at the wazoo. They lie on the table and they're still in that position. Can you see how, for example, if I get someone who is on a right oblique and they stand, it's such a strong representation that they are lying on the table in a right oblique. Now, take that right oblique—it's very easy to identify. But this time they fall back to the table. If they stay in the right oblique, the right side of the pelvis looks like it is more forward, representing a loss of extension on that side. If they fall back, the left side is going to look like it's more forward based on traditional representations. This is the problem with motion palpation tests because they are inconsistent—you don't know what representation the person has lying on the table. Are they staying in this orientation, or are they falling back against the table because of the direction of gravity and the surface?

Okay. You're just talking about if you're just talking about pelvis and lower extremity, then I'm with you. But again, if you're going to run tonight, if you don't flip flop the upper extremities with the lower extremity, then you're going to create a max B. You're going to create that which is not relative motion.

Good morning. Happy Friday. I have neural coffee in hand, and it is perfect. This is supposed to be the rest of my recovery weekend, but I have a busy Friday ahead with interviews and a Q&A session. This is with Alex, who is part of a private Facebook group for people who have attended my intensive. I had posted a video of myself performing a sacral mobilization that produced a late representation at the right sacral base. One of my team members was set up on the table in a late representation on that side. I noted that this position is also used in quadruped when taking a step forward. Alex's question was how this representation actually appears in the quadruped position, since it looks different when lying down. The key is recognizing that during every propulsive activity, there are moments when you'll have late, middle, and early representations. You need to conceptualize that you're moving the axial skeleton through space, and these are the moments to examine when the thorax and pelvis are performing identical movements simultaneously. This mobilization is designed to highlight that. I'll show you the video Alex referenced and demonstrate the quadruped gate, with Alex kindly volunteering. You can see how the pillows create a new frame of reference for the axial skeleton's orientation. I'm magnifying pressure on the right sacral base to emphasize the left turn, creating a late representation on the right side to turn the client left.

Say it in. Me twist. Yeah. Okay. So, you have a distal femur that is twisting into internal rotation and a proximal tibia that is still in too much external rotation, okay? So let's think about the mechanism of injury here, okay? How do you partially tear an ACL? Like what position would I be in to partially tear the ACL? Yeah, so that orientation still exists. Okay, if he's got a partial tear, then his sensation may be such that he's still trying to use a late representation in the knee. Which means that if you put him in an earlier representation so if I have him hold something in front and he goes down into a squat. Okay. That's an earlier representation. Then if I put his back against the wall, and he's pushing himself up and down. So he tries to use a late representation. He gets uncomfortable. You keep him in early representation and he's seemingly fine. Okay. If you can compress his heel to his butt in supine, that's how you're measuring the knee.

So if you have one or the other, that's where you're going to run into problems. Typically you're going to have too much ER represented. This is a middle propulsive representation straight into the ground. So this is a late IR representation is what you're trying to recapture because that's where your force is going to be produced. Again, people run into trouble. They run into knee issues when they're trying to produce the downforce with this ER representation of the knee.

There you go. So Dale's going to be listening closely now. All right. So your vertical axis is now more perpendicular to your helical orientation. So your helical axis is more horizontal than it is vertical. So again, you're going to have to stop internal forces. So I've got to push myself into a position where I can do so. And so instead of the left side coming straight forward and you're going to bear weight on the ball of your left foot, so on the left met heads, what you're going to do is you're going to turn on a helical axis which is going to drop your center of gravity towards the inside edge of the right heel.

Yep.

For the acquisition of that position, we're talking about the low oblique sit as the representation. So I'm going to use the ground to create the position. If my foot's in front of me, that's the earlier representation of internal rotation coming up from the ground. That's going to help me acquire the position of the pelvis that I need to then redirect the force down into the ground. So if you were going to try to organize this in some manner, and you had somebody that was having issues with force production or they were uncomfortable when they apply force to the ground because they're too ER, then I need to start thinking about doing something with the side that I'm trying to affect. I'm going to put that into the lead foot representation so I can start to superimpose internal rotation from the ground up. That's going to give me the internal rotation towards the pelvis. I get the shape change that I want, then I learn to teach them to redirect from the top down, which is what you saw in the first two exercises of the 13 exercise sequence. One was the early capture of internal rotation, and then I immediately switched it over to create the down force. So one force was coming this way on the first exercise, the second exercise I was pushing down into the ground.

Well, next thing Dale, Dale knows on Dale, you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah.

Then you need a different strategy because what you're doing is you're getting an orientation. It's the, it's the orientation that's creating the problem.

I've got a question that probably is a fundamental question that relates to fascia in respect to connective tissue. I'm trying to take a bit of a dive into fascia and understand that, and I'm having a good deal of difficulty trying to figure out how that works in respect to muscle actions and how that interplay looks like. The main difficulty I'm having with it is that the network of fascia, as opposed to a muscle where we can see an origin and insertion and a clear line of pull, fascia because it fixes in so many different places and across different parts of the structure, becomes really difficult to figure out when you're moving in a particular direction what's pulling where and what's countering that. The main difficulty I'm having is that looking at it from a fluid volume shift like we do with muscle, where we compress fluid and can reduce compression and expand it, if we're taking that same principle with fascia, which is also hydrated, I have difficulty with the elastic band representation of connective tissue. How does that play out with fluid dynamics? How does that work, because when we're pulling on it and it's creating tension by pulling against the structure, there has to be a pull in another direction which causes it to return, or is it because it's not compressible? I'm trying to get that around my mind, whereas a muscle expands and contracts so we can see that as far as pressure is concerned, but I have difficulty with the almost one-way notion of we get expansion, we come back to a midpoint, but then what happens after that? We have another bit of fascia that pulls past that and moves to the next point along the line. Does that make sense?

Is it the SI belt?

Okay.

So we have to apply energy. The ball rests without any energy applied to it. We must apply energy to it, moving energy from one place to another. This energy transfer promotes the shape change that allows us to see the club move through space and make contact with the ball—that's the application of energy to the ball. Once the ball is struck, it will go wherever it goes. Therefore, we must create the necessary shape change: taking energy, moving it in one direction, turning it around, and making it go in the other direction. This is similar to any other form of propulsion. A golf swing is propulsion, following the exact same rules.

Okay, can we just call it a compressed thorax?

OK, we have to have a frame of reference to make a comparison. There are two ways that I can increase entropy. One would be performance-related. I'm trying to produce a very specific outcome, which would reduce adaptability. It would create a bias of reinforcing to balancing loops. There has to be a reduction in adaptability to produce a performance. I can't have a balance of everything. So again, I have inputs and I have outputs. You see over here? So this is where I enter the system. I enter the system here, there's my baseline right there. Then this is like sleep, meditation, stored energy, repair and adapt, emotional loading and stress, and nutrition is the biggie one in the middle. Some of them are balancing and some of them are reinforcing. At the other end, so up here, this is performance. So this is where the entropy is greater than zero, and that produces a performance. It's a narrowing of the possible outputs to allow something to occur that we like, but it's still a narrowing of what is available.

Got it. You notice I don't talk about motor learning very much.

Right. Okay.