That could also be interference for those correct right absolutely so it's just it's like anything else right there's a sweet spot where stuff is beneficial and then outside of that it's not so let's go all the way back to Ian's question at the beginning we were talking about okay where are you going to drive the pan position for a chop it's like well what are you trying to achieve it's like if I want to hang on to relative motion I got to put it in a specific place I have to have the appropriate magnitude of force because high magnitude in the right place might still steal some relative motion if I move it to the outside I'm definitely giving up relative motions under those circumstances so again it's like take an exercise that might work in one situation with one set of constraints take the exact same exercise by name it's not the same exercise if you put more weight on the bar and then that changes the response I am totally cool with the experimentation under this circumstance because your reasoning is useful right it's just a matter of the execution now and refining it narrows can go the helical angle would be this way on the narrow it's going to be this way on the wide do you see that?

But they're all ER measures, so they're all ER, right? I had to create an expansion to get into that position. Now take your right hand and put it in your left front pocket. You went across and put it in the opposite pocket. You can put the other arm down. We're just talking about the right arm. Right hand in your left pocket. What position is that arm in?

It's not extra. It's just part of the sequential layering of superficial strategies on top of the axial skeleton. There's a typical representation of the archetypes. I think you understand that. What you have to understand is that the superficial strategies are going to appear in a relative specific sequence of events based on where your center of gravity is over your feet. When you see posterior lower compression, so your early flexion measures, if you look at the chessboard, the early flexion measures are very limited. So your hip flexion is limited, your straight leg raise is limited. So right away you go, 'uh-oh, we got a posterior lower compressive strategy.' If you have a posterior lower compressive strategy, you have all the other superficial strategies in play already because the last one to get layered on is posterior lower. So that's what I want you to understand about this. Your assumption, so in your email, your assumption that this chessboard represents a right oblique representation is correct. So this is somebody that's tipping on a much more oblique axis as they are turning. And that would be represented by your ER measures. So when you see the deficit of ER on the right side, greater than the left side, you can make the assumption that you're on the right oblique. When you see the limitation of straight leg raise and early hip flexion, that means you're pushed forward. Tipped on the right oblique first. Tipped on the right oblique first and then got pushed farther forward. So the center of gravity is way over to the right and way forward.

Well, if you didn't want it to give way underneath you, you can stand on the basketball.

According to the UTC.

But every time you intervene in your situation, so we're talking about a rehab setting here just to be clear because it's like you don't want to test your gym clients after every exercise that they do, right? Because some of those exercises are intentionally designed to take away motion. But in our situation, every time you intervene, you got to check a KPI. Otherwise you don't know if you're successful. So if you did three activities, let's just say you did three activities and nothing changed, you just wasted that amount of time. And so again, all you just have to have is just one key measurement that makes sense to you that will tell you that the strategy is changing. And that will be your God.

In the last few calls, we've been talking about relationships between elbow position, knee position, and how the body will transition progressively from one shape to another. I was wondering if you've noticed any patterns in terms of back rounding in general when it comes to a deadlift because you'll have some athletes that round their lower back when they try to bend over to get a position, and then I've noticed some other athletes, especially narrow-hip athletes, when they bend over they tend to have like a big hump over the thoracic area, the T-spine area. And so I'm just wondering if there's a progression towards late extension that leads to different representations of back rounding when it comes to setting up for a deadlift.

Yes.

Okay. So when you see the foot responding, okay, where they're starting to pick up the medial border of the foot, that is way out there.

Yeah.

So it just comes down to needs and then strategies. It's like, what am I trying to achieve?

Here's what I would suggest. Use the foot contacts on the wall to drive that representation. Rather than saying right side heavy, I would say make sure you hang on to those right foot contacts. Here's why. If I use a compensatory strategy on the left side to try to create the right posterior expansion, the minute I lose that right foot contact, I am just orienting everything in that direction. What I want to do is I want to create a turn inside of that foot contact. So the medial foot on the wall, I want to make sure I hang onto that and I want to hang onto that because if I roll to the outside, I no longer have the ability to create the right posterior expansion. So I would emphasize the foot contact more so than the heaviness under this circumstance.

Right.

Okay, so that would be a restriction of internal rotation of the shoulder if the scapula is pushed down. Do this for me. Put your arm up in like a 90 degree angle there. There you go, perfect. Now, don't change the shoulder orientation, just bend backwards. Did your hand go back too?

So I understand. No, but you're looking at a situation where somebody's pushed so far forward, right? They're trying to put the brakes on. Right. So they're using whatever they can. They're on the outside edges of their feet. So they, they look like they're in a supinated representation. They have what would be referred to as a varus knee, which is just external rotation coming down through the system because they're so compressed anterior to posterior they have to orient so hard into external rotation, right? So they're oriented into external rotation. All right. And then again, it's like your job is to try to create the expansion or like I said, you move them into a position where they do have a window of adaptability to alleviate pain. These are tough, these are tough because you're battling a constraint. It's just like somebody that comes in with like an altered joint because of arthritis. It's like, okay, I have a limited number of strategies in that joint because I don't have normal synovial behavior. What do I do to alleviate the load on that? Okay, I can move you in this direction, alleviate the load and give you less symptoms, but I might be creating another situation that ultimately results in another loss of adaptability. These are tough because again, it's like people come to you. They don't come to you to say they say Victor, I need, I need full relative motions. They don't say that. He'd go, dang it, and my knee hurts.

Yeah. No, that's super helpful.

Okay. Are they supposed to maintain relative motions at high force? No. Okay. Did you give somebody something high force that would take away relative motion?

It's like a non-nitrogen fluid then.

Let me ask you this in a pitcher like that, who clearly has more focal loads on tissues. Would it behoove like a front office to use a picture like that in more of like a reliever setting where the workload maybe is a little bit less versus a starting pitcher?

To make it hard. I can tell you stuff. I can tell you stuff that you just go, eh. But if I challenge you to look from another perspective or, like I said, capture another piece of information, then it helps you, right? It's not about, again, just spitting out stuff on a piece of paper. Anybody can do that.

There's a chance that you just, by traditional representation, is that you flexed the thorax. You did not expand it posteriorly. If I bend the spine forward, that is not necessarily expansion.

So basically you're not necessarily creating space, you're maintaining space for that internal rotation to kind of

But the rules are the same, right? So as long as you understand the two extremes, it's kind of like looking at a wide ISA archetype and a narrow ISA archetype—those are the two extremes. Everybody's in between there, right? And every once in a while, you're going to get those really outlier people who are way out on one side. It makes it slam dunk easy: 'Oh, this is going to be, you know, you get one of those people with the gigantically wide ISAs that can't close it at all.' And you go, 'Okay, I know exactly what to do here.' Then you go to the other extreme and get the person who walks in and you can get your thumbs between their ribs. But again, that's all we're looking at here: defense against a force. That's what it is—it's a force being driven against you at all times.

Yeah, a normal band set up. So in that case, you're starting stiffer and then it's gradually decreasing. Right. Okay. So, which is like an instantaneous change.

So I slingshot that stuff up in the air. So what that teaches them is how to accelerate their body and then to unweight themselves internally. So the guts will follow. There's a slight delay. That creates my little yield and it throws them up. And again, it just teaches them how to get their guts off of that pelvic outlet. And that's what's going to improve their ability to reposition their feet more quickly. Potentially, it increases their ability to jump higher. But again, because of the physical structure, they're always going to have some sort of limitation in that regard. What we're trying to do is just give them a little bit more of a mechanical advantage under those circumstances. And then there's ways that we can progress this. You start with a really thick band, you go to a medium band, you go to a thin band, and that's just the reverse engineering of progressive resistance. So instead of putting more weight on the bar, we'll just reduce the amount of assistance. And so this is how they're going to get carried over to when they're just trying to manage their own body weight. And again, under these circumstances, if you have somebody that's relying on that strategy, if we have to go to that strategy, chances are their genetic potential for vertical jumping and high-speed activities is probably not in their future, but what we can do is teach them how to position themselves more effectively. So, you know, if you've got a guy that has like a, you know, an eight inch vertical jump, but if he can reposition his feet faster, now he's going to be in a greater position to be a position player on a basketball court, or he's going to know how to get himself in position for a rebound more effectively, right? You see where I'm getting? We're trying to do is we're trying to take what your potential represents. Here's how I can manipulate this to the best degree possible. It would be very rare that you could take somebody that has a physical structure that only allows a couple inches of vertical jump into a 30 inch vertical jumper, right? It just doesn't happen. The physical structure is not there. But we can take what they have, we can enhance the elements that we can. And this is where the elastic resistance really, for me, I like to play on this vertical element a whole lot more than I do on the horizontal. Because moving into that elastic resistance does not enhance your ability to accelerate. What we can also do though on the horizontal is pull people more aggressively into a cut. I really like that for the people that have a lot of trouble, you know, dampening those forces. So we'll do that quite a bit in regards to like a preload for somebody that is coming out of a cut.

There are certain times when you're trying to figure something out and you literally make up an exercise on the spot. So those are the moments, and then it works. And then it's like, way to go me, right? You know, it's like, one of those, but, but see that, but that is the reason that you have to approach this from a principle based perspective.

When we talk about creating a space, I didn't indicate where that space had to arise. So any strategy that creates movement into an expanded ER field can be used. For example, if I can create an expansive strategy that moves me away from the ground, I can utilize that to create more internal rotation. This may not always be the best or most efficient strategy if using traditional joint measures as a guide, as I may not get external rotation back based on those measures, but I can still measure a higher degree of internal rotation. So I can redistribute internal rotation. Let me give you an example: lumbar flexion is an external rotation measure that people don't always recognize. If I provide a strategy that increases lumbar flexion, I can then measure more internal rotation against that. While not necessarily the best choice under most circumstances if the goal is to restore relative motions, it does happen. Some folks select activities with the intention of increasing the ER field at the hip joint, but when they measure, they don't gain extra rotation at the hip based on traditional measures. They do gain internal rotation. How is that possible? They've redistributed the internal rotation across whatever ER field they created, or magnified an area of ER compensatory activity relative to normal joint motions, using that as their ER field against which they're measuring IR. Using the pelvis and lumbar spine as an easier example: if I want to expand the ER field of relative motion within the pelvis, I need a counter-neutrated sacrum and an ERd ileum. That would provide extra rotation with the potential to superimpose internal rotation on top. But what if I don't change the relative position within the pelvis but gain lumbar flexion? That's more ER. If I move the hip through internal and external rotation with the lumbar spine flexed, that's ER. As I move into IR, what if the lumbar spine moves into traditional extension as the hip moves into IR, making it look like the hip has more IR? This is how compensatory strategies provide elements of movement. The spine is always moving when you're moving the hip joint—it's just a matter of degree and influence. This is what makes some measures 'dirty' and why we must use our iterations and compare shoulder and hip measures to clarify what we're actually measuring. Those instances where someone has 80 degrees of hip external rotation? That's the pelvis rolling on the table while the lumbar spine turns with the measure. That's how those values are created. I can also create a position oriented into external rotation that allows capturing more internal rotation, again redistributing internal rotation somewhere within the system to access it.

Okay, and my guess is that if you're playing at any level, you've practiced a bit. Am I correct? Yes, okay, so we have a really strong training influence. Just like anybody who would spend too much time in the gym relative to what they need to do for their sport, you have a certain physical influence that's going to be what we would call interference.

Perfect.

Quite possibly. So again, you have to look at having some form of key performance indicator that you're going to measure again. You do your intervention and then re-measure and say, okay, what happened under those circumstances? This is how training should be because it's incredibly complex. There are things going on in training that we have no idea about. I am convinced of this. We have no idea. We don't even know what's taking place. But we have observations we can use to say, okay, that was a good thing or that wasn't such a good thing. And what we want to do over time is do a whole lot more good things and a whole lot less of the stuff that doesn't either seem to matter or creates a negative consequence. Everybody thinks there's like a cookbook: you do this, you do this, you do this, and then good things happen. But no, you can do that. You put everybody on the right-handed pitcher program. It's like, okay, three or four guys are going to do really well. Three or four guys are not going to do well at all, and then everybody kind of falls in the middle. We accept favorable change for the best, favorable change. And I respectfully disagree about that too.