So for an example of what you're talking about, would an example be, because I'm pretty sure I've seen this before, where someone has a wide stance and they lose internal rotation and yet they have external rotation, and you look at a lot of their other measures and you're like, this doesn't really make sense. And then that would be kind of like that.

That's fair, yeah.

IR.

So I would say maybe relative to peers.

So the lead side is in a late propulsive strategy.

You're going to have to narrow your approach here just a little bit to something that is going to be useful because you don't have time.

Again, I try to distinguish, like we need some way to distinguish between the two representations because the implication that anytime my arm goes forward as a press is a little misleading, like what is the relative load and how hard is it? So if you're trying to restore movement on somebody with max effort loads, good luck. Right, because it can't happen, because at some point in time I have to, I have to, even if I'm not on the loaded side, look, Grace, you're back, air quotes. So even on the unloaded side, if the threshold of effort is high enough, I will compress. If we're talking about a major league pitcher throwing a baseball, at the point of maximum efforts, they compress both sides of their body, not just the baseball side, because they have to stop. movement, right? So the higher the force production, the less movement is, physically possible. Right.

Yeah.

Your potential would be higher, right? Like in a supinated foot. To then compress? Isn't EIR happens in an ER space? So if you start supernatally.

You always say that to access internal rotation, you need external rotation, but if you compress a lot, you lose the external rotation bias and you get internal rotation. So how do you move under loads? If you lose that, if you need it to access this, like if I want to squat heavy, I still need external rotation, right? But if I load, I will lose my external rotation. So do you think that automatically when you want to do heavy things, you have to get substitutions? And you can't get, I don't know how if I express myself well.

Okay, it's the Nicki show, go ahead.

Yeah.

No, it's like, here's what we did over time and this is what worked. It's like you're seeing the historical information. It didn't actually exist. They wrote down what they did. They didn't plan the program and then execute it. They just said, what are you doing today? Okay, I'm going to write that down. And then they printed it and everybody goes, oh, this is what a program looks like. And so then they literally duplicate that program and they go, I don't know, we didn't get a very good outcome. When the reality is they weren't guided by principles. They were trying to follow the cookbook. But you're seeing historical information. It doesn't matter what you want to take away from that stuff is what guiding principles did they use to execute this, right? Rather than this is how you program. Because if I wrote a programming book, it would be a very short book. It would probably have like three statements. It would be like, what do you want to do? Do something. Did you do that? There you go.

Well, some people are okay, so we have some physical structure stuff that makes you a little bit better at turning than other people. You have superficial strategies that will take your capacity to turn away from you. So sometimes that's intentional with training, and sometimes that's an accidental byproduct of structure or training. And again, some people are just going to have an easier time managing these strategies. So the people that come to see me, for instance, typically have pain-related issues or performance-related issues where they have interference. They're dealing with forces that they have to manage, and their strategy is less effective than they would like it to be. Again, all you're looking at is people that can manage it better than others, so they turn well, and then the people that don't turn as well have problems. Again, it might be an oversimplification for you, but that's the reality. And again, that's why some of these turning tests, like if you ever do a seated rotation with a patient or a client and then you do your intervention and then you do your retest and it gets better, so what happened? Well, you just gave them more capability to manage all of these forces, and so now they can control the turns much more effectively. Some people just have it, some people don't. You know, if you, I always make reference to the normal curve, like a bell-shaped curve. I don't see average. I never see average people because average people just don't have problems. So why do we expect anybody else to have the same adaptability? Why do we put all of these people into a category and say, this is better, this is worse, because there's going to be some people that are adaptable to it and some people that can't? And then they look at the people that can't and say, well, this is the rule then. So we were born to run on grass because primitive man ran on grass—primitive man ran on grass because they didn't have asphalt and they didn't have Nike Free and all sorts of stuff like that, right? So let's not romanticize primitive man all that much because it's not that sexy, because think about all the smells and stuff that they had to live through. So what we're actually having a discussion about is who's adaptable and who's not. So if you're going to have to run on asphalt, guess what? You might not be the person that can run on asphalt. Maybe your system just doesn't tolerate it. Maybe you haven't learned an appropriate strategy. Maybe you haven't trained well enough to be able to tolerate it. Maybe you did something stupid and you raised your training output too fast.

You know I have a list of words, right? Are you unfamiliar with that? There's a few people on the call that have been around me long enough. They kind of know where all the bad words are. So Damien here is having trouble with this sticking point in his squat. He wants to know why it happens. Good morning. Happy Friday. I have a coffee in hand and it is perfect. Okay. Wow. So it's kind of an unusual Friday. It is a holiday for some and just a normal Friday for some. So if you're celebrating, enjoy yourself. And if you're not celebrating, have a great Friday so far. Okay. Yesterday's Coffee and Coaches Conference call was great. We had a great time. We went two hours. It felt like 10 minutes. We covered a lot of ground on a lot of topics, but it was very, very squat heavy. And we talked about a lot of aspects of the squat, especially the interaction of internal and external rotation and pressure management and such. And so I wanted to throw this segment up for you. Because anyway, at some point in time, you're gonna have to watch something today. Might as well watch this and actually learn something by accident, perhaps. But regardless, enjoy the segment. Have a great Friday, and I will see you next week. Right. Under a normal circumstance, again, we're making this comparison to an ideal. We would want to be able to externally rotate again to access that space. But if you move your feet apart, if you point your toes out and your knees follow and you're capturing depth, the femur is rotating inward. Okay. And there's good reasons for that because of the way that intramotation influences the position and the shape of the pelvis also influences how much pressure you create inside your body. So if I release the pressure inside my body in a deep squat and I have a barbell on my chest, it's highly unlikely that I'd be able to stand up with it if I release too much. So I have to maintain internal rotation with this force into the ground so I can keep pushing up, so I can maintain high levels of pressure inside my body so I can eventually push back up. Because if I can't produce pressure upward, I don't go upward. I stay down. Right? So again, we're tuning, that's why I say this, internal extra rotation is happening at the same time. We're tuning how much ER we need to get depth and how much IR we need to keep force going up. That's why there's no black and white. You can't say, oh, this is ER and this is IR because they work together. They don't work in opposition. They're not opposites, right? They're always there at the same time. It's just to what degree?

Yeah.

I tend to go with the one that has the most carryover, the one that's the most similar.

Okay. Right. So, let's think about this for a second. Under normal circumstances, I have to be able to push up against gravity coming up out of the squat, which requires that I'm capable of producing enough internal pressure to overcome all of the forces involved. I have internal forces that are created inside of me that help me actually get into the squat. If I eccentrically orient the pelvic outlet, the musculature there has to essentially orient for me to go in the downward direction; otherwise, you can't go down. Now I'm going to superimpose—let's just say I put 400 pounds on your shoulders as well. Now I have that additional force downward, which means that I have to squeeze myself even tighter. So, intrathoracic pressure and intra-abdominal pressure to create this incompressible body so I can push up against the load. But as I squeeze myself, I also push the pelvic diaphragm down even harder because I am compressing the amount of space that I have available. Take any water balloon, smush it between your hands, and pay attention to the part that's at the bottom—that's what you're creating as you go down into the squat because I'm going in that direction. I have to have expansion in the downward direction or you cannot go there; it's virtually impossible. If I push that down and expand in that direction to go in that direction, if I want to go back up, I have to be able to push that back up. The pelvic outlet musculature that has descended or expanded or eccentrically oriented in the downward direction has to now become concentric and it has to be able to push upward. What if I can't do that? You have a couple of options: you push up as far as you can, you stop, you don't go anywhere. I try to push up, I can't, and I keep going down. Or I kick my butt back, unweight the pelvic diaphragm by creating posterior outlet expansion. It allows me to move backwards a little bit, unweight the anterior pelvic diaphragm, and now I can lift it up against lesser downward force. I'm just redirecting the expansion so I can lift up with the anterior pelvic diaphragm, but my butt has to go back to do that because it's going to follow the direction of the expansion. Do you understand?

Then as this movement reverses, the foot pronates into IR but the pelvis and hips ER. Is that correct, or am I missing something? Well, this is actually really interesting. It's a pretty good question because it doesn't appear to be as clear and clean as we would like, but principles hold in regards to the inner effects of movement and as well as our transitions from inhale to exhale to inhale to ER to IR to ER states. And so let's break this down into some pieces. We'll talk about the theoretical representation first. So we have some frame of reference to work from. We'll talk about the hinge part first. And so when we talk about the difference between a hinge and a squat, if we're going to use that terminology, our hinge assumes we have full excursion of breathing available to us before we initiate the forward bend into the hinge. But the hinge is going to bias us towards a nutated position of the sacrum. And what this allows is for the pelvis to move posteriorly as we bend forward. Because otherwise, if we didn't counterbalance, we'd just face plant. So we need to have some element of posterior expansion. So we get that in that posterior lower aspect of the pelvis. This is going to move the acetabulum towards an IR position. So we get an IR position at the hip. And then if we look on down the extremity, we're going to look at the knee. The knee's going to have to unlock. So the knee's going to have to bend, and that's going to move towards internal rotation as well. So we'll have a tibia that's internally rotating on the femur, which would be the position that we need for normal knee flexion. And then if we go on down to the foot, what we'll see is we'll see a foot that will move from its initial inhaled position, which would be ER supination. It'll move towards pronation. And that's gonna happen somewhere in that general vicinity of about 90 degrees of the traditionally measured hip flexion in the imaginary sagal plane. And then obviously to come out of that, we would just simply reverse gears. So we're going to move from our IR position back to our ER position. Now that's theoretical. So let's talk about reality because the way that these things get performed in the gym tends to not be so clean.

Yeah.

No.

Oh, yeah.

I think that the answer is that if there's a question mark in your head, you flip a coin in your head and you go, that's closer to this or that's closer to that. And that's just your, it's just a starting point. Literally, it's just a starting point. It's like, I measure it once. I don't re-measure, right? Because it doesn't matter. I just want it to move. More than anything else, I want it to move. And then it's represented in the extremity motion. You know? Because it's just a baseline structure. It's not an answer to every question. I think the novelty gets people excited and they go, what about this one? What about this one? What about this one? It's like, no, just measure, do, and process.

Because of the position of load and the strategy to hold bar position, you're going to increase a compressive strategy in the upper thorax that's going to drive pressure downward. So the first question that you want to ask is why is this person accelerating towards the ground in the first place?

Just like, whether you're going from like a narrow to a wide or like a positional change. Yes. So like, does the collarbone and the superior border of the scapula form some sort of angle? Or is that like, is that a thing or no?

So butt's up in the air, head's down. Okay, he's wide, flip him over on the other side, first and foremost, okay? Because you're dumping his guts into a position of the diaphragm that's not going to allow you to flip flop this space, okay? But he still may not be able to breathe in that circumstance, just an FYI if he is really compressed. So this is one of these really neat little things about the iterative effects of squishing a pile and squishing a thorax and then squishing a skull. So if you look at, get a cross-section of a pharynx, okay? So you can see where the tube goes, so to speak, posteriorly. And so if you're compressed AP, the pharynx is going to be narrowed, A to P. So in certain positions, just the position alone is going to cause the mandible to retreat and the tongue comes with the mandible. And so that immediately narrows that space. If he's got like a soft palate that is also interfering. So you've got some musculature that's attached there as well. And so if that area collapses or is just narrow to such a degree, you can't breathe through your nose. So people will talk to you like they're stuffy. Right, so you're going to have to actually you're going to be a little bit more creative you're not going to be able to put them in those position. Right, but you can still. Maybe use like an like a low oblique position we're going to prop down an elbow. Okay, that's still sideline. So you still, you still get some advantage there. And then he's a little bit more upright. And so you'll be able to get, get some, some airway opening.

You just warmed my heart. So here you go. You ready? The summer before physical therapy school, I took an acting class because I am horrible in interpersonal situations. I basically threw myself to the lions. You have to do improv, and I had to. I've actually been paid three times to be an actor. But it's not a bad idea just because of that. It's just a matter of getting comfortable with the discomfort. Have you ever done anything like that before?

With the split squat, we can take this foot and tibia through the entire propulsive phase. However, people are biased at one end of the propulsive spectrum—either early or late. I can manipulate the split squat to recapture the opposing strategy or the one they may be deficient in. The key advantage is that the front foot is never fully loaded. Research shows that in a standard split squat with both feet on the ground, the weight distribution is slightly forward, with about 55% on the front foot and 45% on the rear. Elevating the rear foot on a bench can shift this to about 85% maximum front foot load, but the load fluctuates throughout the movement. This allows me to gradually introduce load through the front foot while achieving the goal of moving the tibia through its full excursion. If the front foot is elevated on a box, the load shifts even more posteriorly, moving the center of gravity backward. Both heel elevation and full foot elevation bias the foot toward an early propulsive phase, but the difference lies in how much load is placed on the front foot and how much tibial excursion occurs. With heel elevation, the bias toward an early propulsive strategy prevents reaching the end position of propulsion.

It's simple. It's not easy. The rule is very, very simple. The rule is you can only have two strategies for movement. That's it. There's only two. I can make something bigger or I can make something smaller. And based on that shape change, I produce a shape that moves me through space. That's it.

Okay. Does that make sense?