SPEAKER_04 4:29–7:23
The Olympics are one of the greatest representations of the influence of physical structure. You take the best high jumper and have him stand next to the best shot putter—totally different worlds. Both human, both with the same body parts, but different physical structures. Therefore, the way they apply forces into the ground are going to be different. The outcomes are obviously going to be different, their connective tissue behaviors are going to be different, and so you have to account for this. It's like, 'I've got a high jumper who needs a tremendous amount of internal rotation into the ground over a very short period of time, but he needs to access that internal rotation slightly in front of his center of gravity.' Now take the center of gravity of the shot putter: he's going to use a lot more orientation to apply that force into the ground because he's got a longer period of time to apply that force to the ground. His force needs to be a lot—his peak force is going to be very, very high. You see the differences when you say, 'How do you progress somebody?' You know, with a black and white answer, Bill. Unfortunately, it's rarely that. But it is principle-based. You just have to recognize what the principles are. Again, this is why the generic program concept doesn't work—you apply the same program to two different people, why do you get two different outcomes? Because the starting conditions were different, and therefore the outcomes will be different. That's the thing you have to recognize. So you fall back on basic principles. We can use the two extremes: what kind of an archetype are we looking at? What kind of configuration do they have in the relationships between the thorax and the pelvis in regards to circumference? Because that determines how easily they're able to move their center of gravity upward and downward. It's going to tell you how long they spend on the ground, how big their medio-lateral propulsive representation is. A wide ISA individual has a much broader duration and physical space to apply forces to the ground, whereas a narrow individual does not. That's why when you see tall, slender folks come into the clinic with painful situations, they're trying to apply forces into the ground in an external rotation representation because they spend more time in that space—because their physical structure says, 'Guess what, you're going to spend more time in that space no matter what you do.' And so that becomes the difficulty.
physical structureforce applicationanthropometricsbiomechanicstraining principles