Good morning. I'm doing well. My question of the day is more personal and relates to the past couple of weeks. While sleeping well and performing exercises and cross-connects, I woke up with extremely limited left side bending of my head, resembling a closing facet restriction. I've worked on improving it and am about 80-85% better, as I could barely turn my head left and couldn't side bend left at all. This recurred after driving to Tennessee and back. I'd like to examine the cervical mechanics of facet opening and closing, how that relates to your model, and how muscle energy techniques (METs) connect to your model.

Or are my shoes barefoot or do I always have flat feet? Would you recommend that I have elevated shoes and also like this thing?

Maybe we could expand a bit more on obliques and what makes it a more ER or IR space. I'm conceptually trying to think it's like sidelying, having a kid with seated, but I guess this is a bit of a rough around the edges representation.

So I kind of asked this, or I mentioned it last call, but my right big toe won't stay down in squats. And I've noticed that it really, I don't even toe off that foot when I walk. So I'm trying to figure out where to start.

My question is more in regards to fake chops and lateral lunges and connective tissue. When I think about connective tissues and I'm doing a really quick movement, I think of stiffness. But you talked about utilizing that motion and utilizing that stiffness for the guts to go into that space. But when I think of the Achilles, when I do a quick lunge, it gets stiff, but I'm not getting that same connective tissue behavior I'm thinking of when I'm utilizing the guts to create expansion or stretch. What is the difference? I don't understand how you're getting the guts to go into that space when you're creating stiffness with a fake chop.

So when there are moves, four on the left first, and then they go left to right.

I recall one time where you made a comment about the fact that some people, like let's say someone that is very compressed, that is very hard into the ground, that is kind of close to end game, they have a hard time to like actually just, we need to unweight them just because they cannot get good feedback from their feet. And I kind of kept thinking about that. And I kept thinking also like just, by contrast of trying to train trying to have someone like be very keenly aware of nuance in a reset in a commercial gym where beside that there's like three dudes grunting and dropping bars and and there's like some Bon Jovi playing for no reason and as long as it's living on a prayer we're okay. It was not, they play, they don't play that song for some reason. But anyway, my point being like, I'm trying to think how can I, how can I get like some, some time expansion, if that makes sense? Like in the sense, I'll, like I kept thinking about you, you, if my memory is correct, the reason why the purple room was purple is because it was appeasing. And the same manner that like, I'm pretty sure you're very deliberate with the tone of your voice when you explain something with someone. And yeah, exactly. Cause, but so I'm trying to think like, how can I, how can I bring that into my coaching? Cause my environment doesn't allow my clients to be very, uh, very aware of their body, like feeling a first method on the wall in the middle of like this kind of crowded place where people are dropping weights and whatnot. So this is where I'm trying to like, how can I make more space in the moment where they are doing their reset? so that they are able to gain a more granular experience of what they are actually doing. Because often the time I put them in the right position, I'm like, can you feel this? And it's like super gross movement pattern where it's like, yeah, no, I'm not recapturing it.

I went through your videos of the 13 exercises for mid propulsion with the athlete. I would like to go through the terminology when you were doing the staggered stance, a fake chop with the medicine ball. I cannot visualize the dampen yield versus just the yield. I would like to go through that. Is it because as I see it, if I fake chop and not throw the ball, I would have to yield more than if I release the ball? Would that be because the weight has come? Because I have to stop the force.

So again we've got internal rotation on both sides that we have to be able to successfully acquire. Bird dog no exception. We've got a bent hip on one side, which is the support knee. That's going to be our early representation of internal rotation. We've got the extended, or I hate saying that, the extended hip on the left side is also internally rotated. That's our late representation. So again, early and late, always represented in these activities. The advantage here is knowing that we need to acquire all of these internal rotations, we can now use these exercises as the assessment as to whether these people can actually acquire it. So what we're going to see is the most common compensations that we'll have for substitutions for internal rotation. Typically, we're going to see some anterior orientation. If we can't acquire the internal rotation, then we're also going to see the ER compensatory strategy. In the side bridge, you're going to see the anterior orientation. It's much easier to see this from the side view where you can see the anterior orientation. And then from the front, you're going to see the external rotation of the hips. So this is the inability to keep the knees together as you're moving up into this side bridge position. In the curl up, same kind of a thing. We're going to see an anterior orientation. With the McGill curl up, you're placing the hands in the small of the low back, and if we're using the anterior orientation as the substitution for internal rotation, what you're going to have is you're going to have an excess space there. So chances are you won't be able to make hand contact with the lower back under most situations without having to bear down, which is what you don't want to do as a substitution for this anterior orientation, not the good substitution for that. You'll also see the external rotation of the hip. Primarily you're going to see this in the extended extremity mainly because you're going to actually turn the entire pelvis into ER on both sides, but you're going to be able to maintain the ground contact using a compensatory strategy on that right foot. So it's going to seem like you've got the internal rotation on one side but you can't capture on the other. When the reality is you're most likely on both sides. And then if we go into the bird dog it's very easy to see the anterior orientation again much like the side bridge. You'll see that anterior orientation from the side view and then you'll see the external rotation of the hip. If you stand posteriorly you'll see the rotation of the hip and again this is external rotation on both sides even though it's going to be more pronounced on the unsupported hip, if you will.

So to go back, we just want to know about every range of motion available, from end range to whatever, like maybe the five miles down here you go.

First question ever.

Is there any other contact I want to maintain more towards the thumb side?

Hey Bill, can I just ask how could you differentiate between the right and wrong heel to butt knee flexion if they weren't okay?

I'm observing in that distal humerus. What do you see? Do you see the proximal humerus twisted in the way you would see a Varus oriented, the cowboy orientation?

No, that's your question. Go ahead.

So first question is about getting an idea of where he is in space. Some of the most limited measures I've taken to date are about five to 10 degrees of hip internal rotation bilaterally. The right shoulder was five degrees of internal rotation. Even his external rotation was less than 80 degrees on either shoulder. The hip external rotations were up around 50 on the right and 40 on the left. Shoulder flexion was below 50, at 45 on both sides. The first question that came to mind is that as a narrow, he would go forward on the left first and then start to head right, with the right side getting pulled down. I feel like I've seen you have his feet in the picture. I don't have his feet.

Alright, so I'm just curious on your operation on when somebody has gained, let's say, hip internal rotation. How do you, in general, go about superimposing force production on that newly acquired range of motion? I can't imagine that just because they have the range of motion that they'll use it appropriately, not sure. So I just want to hear you clear that up.

My question is regarding the ulnar nerve hypermobility. I just have a client that has a problem with the ulnar nerve, especially the sensation in the hand. So I just wanted to run my thought process by you just so if I understand the whole thing correctly.

Okay, so the hook line version is typically used when we need to put you in a position that's available to you. If you have any degree of anterior orientation from your weightlifting background, you'll have a certain degree of anterior orientation that limits how much hip internal rotation you can have. You need enough internal rotation to put your foot on the wall, which is an extended representation. It's still an early propulsive representation but much closer to middle. If you don't have enough, we use the hook line version because that's a space you now have available. It's an earlier representation of the extremity all the way up. If you took the long leg version and stood it up, then took the hook line version and stood it up, you'd see more bend in your hip. That would be the most significant difference between the two. It mostly has to do with where you have space available to you. We start a lot of people in a hook lying position because they just don't have the range of motion available. We capture that range of motion by giving you an early representation, so you can start to superimpose more internal rotation on top of your externally rotated representation. In many cases, we can take that hook line position first to get the range of motion and then go right into the supine cross connect with the foot on the wall. It just depends on how much internal rotation you have available.

Okay. Header gut.

So, a 14-15 year old high school girl presented to me with bilateral hip, knee, and foot pain. I have a picture where it won't show her face.

Hi Bill. Greetings. I was looking at your video on toe touch on IFast, which really blew my mind, like, just thinking about it now for a week straight and trying to figure it out. I was thinking about when someone's bending their knees in a squat versus just getting that posterior weight shift.

I'm still trying to understand the lateral limb representation from an arm bar perspective. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about arm bars and how we can gain movement options from them. Now I want to know what the equivalent would be for the hip, if that makes sense. I'm trying to figure out how I can have someone start from parallel and then allow motion at the hip to regain either internal or external rotation. I'm not sure if there's something there. I was wondering if I should learn to properly coach and choose a roll and go back to inside lying, or if there's an actual way to perform an arm bar-like movement. I can envision how it could be done in a closed chain environment, where the pelvis is on top of the femur. I would like to see if there's a solution where we can do it the other way around so that gravity is less of an enemy.

Go ahead. So I've run into a lot of particularly females in clinics so far with a lot of upper trap tension, neck tension that goes along with that, and they seem their shape of their thorax seems to be this wide shoulder, flat t-spine kind of a archetype, so to speak. I interpret that as dorsal rostral compression, but I just wanted to hear any of your thoughts of other things to consider. Of course, restoring dynamic ISA would be, I would assume, step one, but yeah, I just want to be here.

It's really good for visualizing. So that was cool. Would you see the same thing, but opposite if somebody's knees were caving in?

So with these endgame narrows as well, I've been doing a lot of manual work because they're difficult to expand due to pre-existing thoracic bends. Looking at cases with significant compensations—people who see a physical therapist for the first time in 30 years, having had pain since their 20s and now being in their 50s—I sometimes find spinous processes sticking out in the mid-cervical region. It appears there's a bend in both the lumbar and cervical spine, which typically occurs together. The representation is somewhat similar on both sides. If I imagine a bent spine, this would be a compensation for external rotation (ER), representing a false expansion back. For whatever reason, this segment seems to be the stiffest. You cannot move it. No anterior-posterior pressure, side-to-side mobilization, or translations produce movement. It just doesn't move at all. I was wondering why that is, considering it's a compensatory ER strategy, which should allow some movement due to the expansion element inherent in such a strategy.

Hi Bill. Greetings. First I just wanted to ask you because I have a hard time visualizing when you have an anterior rotation in a narrow ISA. What drives the orientation in a narrow ISA? Yeah, just the sequence that drives the pelvis into this. I'm just figuring out that since a narrow ISA starts with anterior compression. And it's also happening at the pubis. If that is pulling the pubis down and everything starts rolling, is there? Oh, I got you. Can we do a demonstration? Yeah. Okay. Take your fingertips. Take your fingertips and put them on your sternum. Okay. So what I want you to do is I want you to push your sternum in. Okay. And then I want you to squeeze your shoulder blades together, but don't let your sternum pop back out. Did you feel yourself go forward?

Hi, sir.

So Bill, how do you approach major life decisions like weighing the pros and cons, calculated risk? How do you do it?

Hey, Bill. I have a squatting question. You know how we were working on that anterior to posterior expansion over the weekend? So sometimes I get people who can't rack the bar the way I do, like with a full grip and whatnot. So I was thinking about a potential workaround. And I was wondering if I was correct in thinking this way. So one of the things I could do with somebody is take a safety bar, like a safety bar squat, the one with the handles that come forward. It's like a big pad that sits on you. Because sometimes they can't get their elbows up or get that grip. With the safety bar they have that they're a little bit more supinated instead of pronated. So that can open up the space, but also the pressure of the bar goes over the scapula and the clavicle because the whole thing just sits on you rather than just sit on the front. I was wondering, does that pressure of the bar, as it pushes you down, would that expand you anterior to posterior? Would that kind of open you up that way just through the force of it and get you to breathe for people who feel really compressed and they can't even get up here? So then, I don't know, I was thinking if that would be a solution. If that could work.