You just need some way to track. So your KPI for him may be that like, what is his counter movement jump? And then what is this differential between the counter movement and the whole jump? And that will tell you where you are in this process. But you're going over time.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Right. So they're using whatever they can. They're on the outside edges of their feet. So they look like they're in a supinated representation. They have what would be referred to as a valgus 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. So they're oriented into external rotation. 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.

Yeah. So here you go. Let's just go through. Okay, so you have anything that's in a wide stagger. That kind of looks like a sled drag when you think about it, right? Sideway step ups. He can step up to the side or at a very steep angle. You've got, like I said, the chop, cable chops, high-low cable presses, arm bars, rolls. I mean, so you've got a lot of stuff available to you here. Just respect where his available motion is with the understanding that you're trying to expand him anterior to posterior. So you can increase the amount of turns and then you can start to access that stuff that's straight ahead.

So, if prescribing a high force activity, that would make sense. But what if it's more on like the lower load side of things?

How are you?

Kind of.

That's again that's a really tough call because I think you have to kind of rely on the consistency of behaviors that you're going to identify. I think that you're again you have a very powerful influence here when it comes to decisions like that because you're the one that spends the time with them. You're the one that gets to know them whereas the front office is taking this you know this 20,000 foot view of the team and they're saying okay what fits best under these circumstances? And so you get to have that conversation with those people and you say you know so and so is doing really really well under these circumstances. And again it's like if you have enough data over time and you can again our predictions are lousy. Let's not worry about those. But we do have tendencies that we can say hey you know under these circumstances he did really really well. That might be a consideration OK.

Yeah, and I think that's the key to what you said that the perspective that brought it all together was the application of the scientific process instead of looking externally towards information in books or just applying that and using your own process to answer the question as opposed to saying that maybe there's a definitive answer in a book that I can get to answer my exact question, whereas that might not be the case. And that's what I feel like.

Yeah. OK. What is before it? So I measured his ER, it was like maybe like 20 degrees, 30 degrees, pretty horrendous. Yeah. And then so I just did, he was laying supine, took his right arm traction to kind of like AB induction of the scapula, turned his head towards me and get some big breaths. And then his ER just dropped like 90 degrees. Yeah, and then we worked on some more respiration. Ribcage looked a little bit more, like I said, actually tilted or flat on the lower post to your part and his ER got worse again. And that's, I was like, okay, well, might as well start here, I think. Cause I think I've heard you say before, like that's kind of the first, like reorient first and then work on the expansion.

If I am compressing the base of the sacrum forward as I descend into the deepest part of a squat, there is no way for me to descend that diaphragm to allow that to occur. Okay. Because of the anti-orientation. It's just can't happen. So I have to have, I have to, I have to reduce the concentric orientation of the, of that IR, IR ring musculature.

Gotcha. I guess my follow-up to that is like, let's say if in terms of the flattered turning with the left going forward versus the oblique going over to the side, how would maybe my early interventions? What can you do without it?

Right. Okay. So, here's going to be the difference. The longer I stretch the band, this is a change in acceleration. If I'm at the top of a squat and the band is pulling downward, at the very top of the squat, acceleration is actually increasing, but it's a negative acceleration. Acceleration is described as positive or negative. So what people call deceleration is actually just acceleration in the opposing direction. So acceleration is increasing in a negative manner, which means that velocity is dropping at the top. As I go down in the squat and the band is compressing, velocity increases as I go down. I can actually go down faster than the guts on the inside if I can do it faster. As I accelerate my way downward and the guts are floating, then they come down and land on the bottom of the pelvis at the bottom of the squat where I actually have to come to a stop. And then they hit, they land on the guts. Depending on how fast that entire system takes place determines what the behavior will be as I hit the bottom of the squat. It's like, do I distribute this load through the connected tissues? So I expand, I yield, and then that helps me to snap myself back up. Or is the tension so high that I hit and it becomes very, very stiff? Again, there's a sweet spot. This is why you'll see people, when they're squatting with band resistance, the weight on the bar tends to be well below what they would lift for a maximum load. The better the power lifter, the lower the bar weight tends to be with a band-resisted squat because they're trying to create the yielding action. They're trying to emphasize the yielding action at the bottom of the squat so they can absorb the energy and use that to make the turnaround, kind of like we were talking about with the weight releaser, so they can create a faster impulse upward.

So we'll load them a little bit more aggressively into the cut and then take the resistance away as they move out of the cut. And so again, it teaches them how to hold position, how to decelerate those forces into the cut so we can teach them the dampen or we can teach them the return. So under those circumstances, I really like the elastic resistance there.

Yeah. Yeah. What's that? That's how you figure this stuff out.

Okay, I think I'm, yeah.

Yes.

Got it. So left shoulder flexion is at 30 degrees, and right shoulder flexion is at 30 degrees. Her shoulder internal rotation is 70 on the left and 60 on the right. Then shoulder external rotation, though it's pretty symmetrical, is about 115 degrees on both left and right. At the hip, hip flexion on the left was a bit more than the right. About 100 on the left and 95 on the right.

Maybe. I got one specific question I think you can answer. Should a super compressed pitcher need to yield or a young athlete who maybe doesn't manage gravity well, but they also need to add muscle mass and add size to produce better force production because they're still underpowered?

Okay. So you're turning the sacrum towards the front leg.

I have 45 minutes to an hour, yes.

If we imply a press, our intention is high force production, which implies that I'm going to create a rather significant compressive strategy. If you think about it, if you were sitting up like a bilateral symmetrical kind of press, you would want to be as fixed as possible, as stable as possible, which implies that you're going to squeeze. So if I'm pressing on my back in a supine position, I'm going to press my scaps into whatever surface I'm on. I'm going to try to compress dorsal rostral. The load if I'm pressing is going to compress me anteriorly, so I'm going to minimize turn. Even if I do that with one arm, if I up the load sufficiently, I will still compress.

I could see the line of force, like when you're holding your hands out in front and the pole is going to the right, almost mimicking gravity and forcing you to go left and pushing you out of the right side, similar to how you would use the ground to help push up and expand the top. When using a Pallof press and it's pulling you to the right, do you normally use it to pull further to the right or pull you out of the right to the left?

When thinking about mechanisms of change and restoring relative motion, there seems to be a point where you lose the improvement in relative motion and you begin to drive compensatory actions to increase force production, such as when somebody starts wincing and holding their breath. My question pertains more to the mechanism of change and how you know the stimulus you're providing is doing what it's supposed to be doing.

You probably lose it in front.

Oh, Nikki, you don't want to go there.

If we look at this from the shape change perspective, it's like, how do I make that impact? What is the deficit, which you can sort of identify when you think about it? It's just like working with a narrow ISA person that can't create the constant orientation when they jump off a box and their knees kind of go together. You're going to see similar behaviors with, like I said, squats and step ups and having them trying to get it a half kneeling is typically uncomfortable for them. Because again, they can't create the exhale position of the pelvis, which gives them the IR to comfortably be in a half kneeling position. So you'll get all sorts of like knee pain and hip impingement symptoms and things like that. So just looking at it from the shape change perspective usually buys you a lot of real estate in regards to recovery. The inlet is the inlet. The inlet has to close to create the exhaled position of the pelvis.

If you get to the end of 12 weeks and it didn't happen, guess what? Wrong program. And now what they do, and the reason that you have, like this is what I mean, I don't know, this is like an iPhone 4 or something like that, but there's like a gazillion iPhones now. It's like they just slowly reintroduce new technologies, right? And so, they create this minimum viable product of whatever it is that they're trying to develop, and then they just slowly improve it over time. That's what training is. So what we need to do is we need to write programs the same way that they write software. It's like, okay, how much improvement can you make in two weeks that accomplishes the goal? Did it work? Cool. Okay, we'll keep going in that direction. And then we see improvement. And then at some point in time, you're going to hit an impasse where it's not going to change. It's like, okay, there's where you make the next tweak in the program. So it's like this continuous improvement over time versus trying to project out, which you can't do for any human being on the planet. You can't project anything 12 weeks out. You have no idea.

I think I do, but maybe not.

Yeah. They're out of room. So here you go. Let's just say that you can't expand posteriorly. Knowing full well that to initiate the squat and move through external rotation bias or to hit the bottom of the squat, which is an external rotation bias, and I can't do that. So I'm initiating the squat more towards my internal rotation bias. And so it's gonna look, for lack of a better explanation, hingey. It's gonna look more like my deadlift than it is my Olympic weightlifter sitting down at the bottom of his squat, right? Because that, and again, it could be physical structure. It could be the training strategies that you've been using that don't allow a shape change to occur that allows you to access that motion. So again, you can diagnose what people can and can't do based on that shape as they move through the squat. When I see somebody that's got this really, really hingy squat, they've got what would be termed a really strong lordosis as they're trying to squat. That's a pelvis that is compressed on the backside and anteriorly oriented. Very, very useful for producing force, very useful for stopping motion from occurring. So again, let's use a powerlifter as an example. As they try to squat, they don't want to squat too deep. They want to stop the motion at a very specific point where they just get far enough down towards the ground where they pass the judge. Where they pass their lift, so they get their white lights so they can say, oh, it was a good squat or it was not a good squat. And so then that becomes useful under those circumstances, but it doesn't make it better than something else. It just means that it is a variation. When you see someone's knees deviate early in a squat, people say, 'you're externally rotating.' What they're doing is they're moving their knees apart because at that point in time, the shape of their body does not allow them to access external rotation straight ahead because it's out here. External rotation is out there. That's where they find it based on their physical structure or based on the context of the lift or the performance of the movement. That's why external rotation is a space that is around you based on the shape of your body.