Lifting Injuries, the Functional Gap and Threshold Training

This is session number 62 of the Performance Place Sports Care podcast. Mama says alligators are ornery because they got all them teeth and no toothbrush. Welcome to the Performance Place Sports Care podcast, where you can learn about sports injury theory, rehab, diagnosis, and how to understand the doctor lingo you didn't understand at your appointment. And now, your host, Dr. Sebastian Gonzales. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Performance Place Sports Care podcast. I'm Dr. Sebastian Gonzales. That clip was from Waterboy. Waterboy. God, I love Adam Sandler movies. Yeah. So anyways, Waterboy, if you haven't seen it yet, you really need to, especially if you're about my age. I don't know if the humor translates between generations, but I'm about 35. So yeah, watch Waterboy. It's so cool. Now, today, we're going to have on a great presenter. I saw his presentation at the Perform Better seminar in Long Beach this year, which is mainly for trainers to go learn more education or strength coaches. So it's put on by the NSCA, which is the National Strength and Conditioning Association. But he is actually a DC. He's a chiropractor who has spent a lot of time working with lifters as well as retraining movements. So he's actually an instructor for DNS, which is dynamic neuromuscular stabilization. And what I thought he'd be on here, or what type of value he would give you guys is give you a little bit of insight to how to actually train the body so we don't develop a bunch of compensation patterns and poor movements.

So the reason why this is going to be important to you guys is because a lot of times we see in clinic here, we see that people have these non-traumatic injuries from weightlifting, from running, from playing soccer. You know, there's, there's a lot of these sports that are, I mean, people almost think that it's like, why didn't have an injury? I didn't get hit. I didn't fall. You know, like why did my hamstring pop? Is that actually an injury? Why does my knee hurt? Why does my shoulder hurt from lifting? Things like this can be seen before they happen. And it's a long process, which makes it happen, which Dr. Rome's going to talk about today. So he practices in Dublin, Ohio. Currently, if you guys are around there, I'd strongly suggest you see him, but this is going to go in correlation to a article I wrote on bodybuilding.com, which there will be a link in the show notes for it, um, on functional capacity, functional gap and threshold training. Now we don't hit that concept until about 30 minutes into this podcast, but that's not to say you shouldn't listen to the first 30 minutes at all. In the first 30 minutes, we're kind of setting the parameters of understanding, um, for you guys to get this concept because it's something that's really not out there much. He actually created the idea from some of the concepts that he learned through clinical practice, but it's still kind of developing, but I think it's really, really solid. And when I saw that presentation, I thought, ah, this is amazing. This is great. And immediately I went back the next day to the clinic and I drew it up here on a chalkboard, which I have on the wall. So now I show patients that these are the functional capacities. These are the functional gaps. This is the threshold. And here's where we're going to train. Here's what you guys need to start to learn to feel. Okay. Because I honestly believe in my clinic that people shouldn't have to stay around forever. Okay. I want to make them autonomous. I want to make it so they can start to do a lot of rehab and training on their own, but some people it takes a little bit of time to develop and kind of get that awareness about their body. So when I show them this, this thought process, a lot of times I think, ah, I get it.

I get what I'm trying to feel. So we do have a correlated video to this as well at bodybuilding.com. So I want you guys to listen to that, but, uh, without any further ado, let's talk to Dr. Richard Ohm. Hi, everybody. As promised, this is Dr. Richard Ohm, and he's going to talk to us about, tell us about yourself, man. About myself? Yeah. Is the whole podcast about me or is it just... Well, I want to know why you're drinking Spitzer water over there all the time. I've got, I've got some snot. Well, you'd be, you're a coffee guy. I've got some Chemexed. Um, what is this? Yemen? I think. So I had to get, bring my coffee game up if you're going to be here.

And then the, the Pellerino water I got hooked on in Europe and it started off with being nostalgic and then ended up, I just like it. So. Yeah. I remember. So the, yeah, the first time we met you were, you were eating this huge steak and drinking this Spitzer water. And I thought this dude's a snob. It's funny. Did I tell you that when we were in a long beach that, you know, I sort of joke with myself about being a snob and I had a patient come in and he said, Oh, I, you know, I love coffee. I was like, Oh, I'm a super coffee snob. And he's like, Oh really? Cool. Me too. And I was like, no, no, no, no. I'm like super coffee snob. And he goes, Oh, well, how do you roast your beans?

And immediately made me feel like, you know, not a snob at all. And I was like, uh, I don't. And he was like, Oh, okay. Like, how do you roast? And he's like, Oh, it just depends on the type of bean I get. I was like, wow. But he's a food scientist. He's like a scientific snob. He knew, he knew exactly what, like he already categorized, like who you are as a person. Just when you said that I think I'm a snob and I'm not really a snob. Exactly. I don't want to be snob at that point. Well, that's all evolution. That's how we get better. That's right. Um, okay. So we met in long, you and I met in long beach. Um, we have sort of similar backgrounds, I think, but I got to the physician side of things or the clinical side of things by way of being an under talented, hardworking athlete that wanted to maximize performance. And so I had to be super picky about my training and recovery stuff and nutrition and sleep patterns and all this kind of stuff to really squeeze every ounce of talent that I could get out of my little mini Honda cord, um, trying to race against Ferraris. So I went to school in a small D2 school in Ohio called Ashland university. And I went there because the coach at the time was a three-time Olympian and a former American record holder in the event that I did. And so I went there to train with this guy and just learn from the best. Right. So I actually turned down scholarships at Kentucky and Florida and South Carolina because I wanted to go where the guy had a coach and went there and his name's Judd Logan. And so he was able to expose me to what I know now I would consider sort of elite strength training. He's really good at strength training.

Uh, I got some just one-on-one stuff with Charles Poliquin got to work a little bit with Louie Simmons. Um, and so I really got to see good, good high-end stuff. And that's, I mean, that was in 1996. That was kind of the start of this, like, Oh wow, you don't just write workouts to be difficult. There's a, you might say, Oh, in addition to, Oh, let's write a hypertrophy program for squatting or let's write a program that'll get my bench up. It is what we need to get the body working properly so that you can maximize your performance and whatever lift that was, this is 96. This is before any functional training stuff had really come out at all. Um, and I just thought that was really interesting. Like, Oh man. So that started kickstarting my, my interest in mechanics and anatomy and starting to understand a lot of the science behind the strength training stuff. So, you know, I'm just training and being a meathead and going to school and doing all that stuff. And I stayed on after I graduated in 2000 and trained for the 2000 trials.

Um, again, all the while studying this stuff, I went into coaching. So I did master's work at Emporia state where I continued to train, continued to study. Um, that's where I was able to get into some actual like biomechanics classes. And then I moved back to Ashland to train for the trials. So I qualified for the trials actually in Sacramento and California. You're part of the world. And then just after that, I still wanted to train for fun, but it was evident that like, okay, I qualify for the trials. Yay for me, but no one was in fear of me knocking them off the podium to go to the Olympics. And so dedicating full-time to training just didn't seem like a logical conclusion there.

So I went into coaching and again, while I'm coaching, I just kept program designing and studying like muscle physiology or neurology and all these things, uh, to get as specific and as purposeful with the programming as possible. And I just, the farther you dig back that you eventually you're no longer in the performance realm. You're in the medical side or the science side, right? So I, I kept backing up or double clicking, so to speak on the information. And I either was going to end up in the PhD program doing research, or I was going to end up in the medical field. And so I decided to go into the medical field and then while I was in school at national university of health sciences in Chicago, I mean, I, it really just turned into me making my own program. So I, I got a degree in chiropractic medicine, but like you, I'm not doing the walk-in just a quick crack and get out of there. Um, I'm probably doing a combination of a lot of manual therapy mixed with functional rehab. And so I don't do passive modalities, um, other than dry needling, which I guess technically is a passive modality, but you know what I mean?

Um, and so that when I was in school, I was like, okay, I want to learn about these things that I was seeing in as a strength coach. Like I, I, why does this dude's knee collapse in words? Right. Remember mind you, this is like 98, nine, this isn't there, there wasn't YouTube there was, you know, you were like interning with people to learn about these things or reading articles. And a lot of this functional stuff didn't really start catching any momentum until 2008, 2009. I mean, really getting going. And that was the same time with, with YouTube and Instagram. And now you can get on and you're inundated with, uh, the problem now is the quantity of information and you have to sift through it and find the good stuff. So I just wanted to know, like, how come this chick, you know, constantly pulls her right hamstring, right? This is Siobhan Miller was a girl and she weighed about a buck 20. Okay. And she could do, we call them toger curls, like reverse curl where you're holding onto their calves. And then you keep your body straight and you lower yourself down and come back up.

Oh, there's a Nordics. I learned it was Nordics. Same thing. Sure. I mean, okay. Yeah. They're just basically, they're kneeling and there's somebody behind them and they're just kind of like holding their legs down. They just lower down. Yeah. This shit could lower herself down without any breaking at the waist, lower herself down, touch her chest and come back controlled for a set of five. And she's pulling her hamstring. And the, and the athletic training staff kept telling me that her quads are too strong for her hamstrings. If you look at her hamstrings, it looks like a gigantic like sausage down the back. I mean, and I'm just going like, all right, I don't know a lot about the medical side, but that looks like a pretty big hamstring to me. And it just didn't make sense. Right. And so then that was one of the things that sort of dug in and got me into the DNS world where I started learning about tonic and phasic muscles and muscles that tend to get inhibited and muscle recruitment patterns and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that I was able to study while I was in school. Okay. So I turned the college education or the chiropractic education into this degree and understanding, you know, human movements. So I did almost, I think it was almost 2000 hours of gross anatomy dissection. Like I was just, I just smelled like anatomy lab for four years basically. Um, but I wanted to know if I'm standing there and I have a patient raise their left arm, it's not enough to be like, Oh, their scapula is winging or all the shoulders coming up. I want to know if I stop in that position, what is the infraspinatus doing there? What is the super spinatus doing there? Where is the serratus and what direction can it move the scapula?

And if you don't know anatomy really cold, um, you're not really able to do that. So I think a lot of people, they, they can name muscles of the rotator cup, or, you know, maybe they can name 10 muscles that attach to the shoulder blade, but I want to be able to look at any joint and know where's the axis of rotation and all three planes. Where is the direction of pull from all of the muscles and in each position, what could those muscles all be potentially doing to that joint or other joints? But so before we go on to the actual topic of things like you, you hit a couple of points in there that is that Lacey the dog it's Lacey, isn't it? No, it's, I've got, I've got two standard poodles. You can make fun of me. Um, they don't have the foo-foo haircut like you're assuming, uh, but they're great dogs and they are very protective. So anytime a mosquito or something run flies by the house, they're ready to pounce on it and bark at it. So West Nile is a real thing, man. Yeah. Um, well, going back to a couple of things on that is that, so we have a, I think I'm not sure exactly the list of population. I know we have some DCs and PTs. Um, but the idea is to be able to make break this down really easy for general pop too. So there's a couple of things in there I wanted to readdress before we hit the main topic. So you mentioned strength training. Now the way you talk about strength training, I'm sure everyone's hearing it already. They're like, gosh, this doesn't sound like bicep curls. So in your, in your definition, what would strength training actually be versus what people think it is? So, I mean, that's a great question.

You don't, you don't know. Go ahead. Yeah. I think one of the like biggest problems is that we have, uh, people that think they know what they're doing at the gym, but then they end up having all these compensation patterns, which we're going to talk about later. Right? Yeah. Um, yeah, we can dig a little bit more into the, the actual recruitment patterns and musculars technique or whatever, but with weight training, the you're, you're basically using outside of the ring for me or off the platform exercises to strengthen and improve that athlete's ability to do whatever they're doing. That's I think an area where people get a little bit confused because you think strength training. So, okay, I want to get somebody stronger. Okay. Well, if I've got a, a female tennis player, does it benefit her to get her back squat up another 50 pounds? It might, you could argue that, but you have to really tailor it. So it's, it's, it's going to actually improve their sport. That's our job. The job is not to make someone strong.

And a lot of times in strength training, we get so hooked up on the classic numbers, like, oh, what's their back squat, you know, what's their bench press or whatever. But strength training is about, you know, using weightlifting, just strengthening, not conditioning, just the weight lifting part to improve an athlete's ability to do something. And so that's going to be completely different. That's where it started. It started with, oh, okay. I've got some football players and football players have different requirements and needs from a strength training program than a track athlete. So they have to be different. So that's where I like, literally like, that's where I started writing different things. And then I started getting into, well, wait a minute, the NFL linemen need different things than the wide receivers. So then I was like, oh, all right, I guess I'll write those. And then ultimately it came into, wait a minute, this wide receiver needs something different than this wide receiver. And that's really where in the late nineties, where I started getting into like, oh man, we're really not all put together the same. And there's lots of differences between, you know, the ability to handle volume. Like maybe someone responds to high reps better than someone else. Maybe someone likes back squats better than front squats. There's morphological conditions. There's all kinds of things that go into specializing it. So it ends up being, um, if you want to make it really good, it ends up being pretty complex. I think that most people fall into the habit of just writing difficult programs. Like, oh, I'm going to, I'm going to kick their ass. That's kind of the CrossFit mentality. I think CrossFit is doing really well. Actually. Well, I think one of the bigger groups is Invictus down by you. That's starting to get into the, like what I would say they're combining some old, good strength training, um, and even track and field and things like that. Like these traditions that have been around for a long time and produce some amazing athletes. They're starting to pull those in. Like I've been telling CrossFitters to use heart rate forever. And until recently, OPT was the only one that was doing it. I mean, I'm sure there were other ones, but in general, no one was using this. And I think that it's a little bit of this FU. We know how to do it better than everybody else attitude, but there's really smart people out that are like, okay, as it turns out, you know, the dude that ran, you know, two minutes, two hours and 25 seconds in the marathon probably knows how to improve his endurance pretty well. So why don't we look into some of those things? But CrossFit has got a neat place. Like right now, I think most CrossFit gyms are just writing hard workouts and it's just like, oh, that would be difficult. Oh, that's within that time domain. Oh, it has deadlifts in it. What else can I do to make it hard? Oh, let's do toes to bar and GHD sit-ups. Okay. As opposed to thinking, all right, well, what does this athlete need? Like, and, and, and this would be like a professional CrossFitter. You might think, okay, you know, like I work with Christy Aramo, I don't program for her, but going through and saying like, oh, okay, you know, she might have a problem with this or that movement or this or that time domain. So we need to be specifically targeting that weakness and expanding it in that way.

That's a specific program, right? So I used to program for Graham Holmberg and people would ask me like, oh, can I see the program? I was like, yeah, I was like, you can see it. But I mean, just doing Graham's program or just doing Kendrick Ferris's Olympic weightlifting program doesn't mean it's going to be ideal for you. It's going to be close. I mean, if you've never done high volume squatting and you do high volume squatting, like a Wendler or a Hatch program, sure. It'll go up. But when you reach that, it's usually about two years and tons of CrossFitters running this problem. They get into weightlifting, they get really strong in like two years and then they plateau.

I know CrossFitters have been doing CrossFitters five years and they haven't PR in the back squatting three. Really? And it's because just working hard when you come into the weight room doesn't cut the mustard long term. You need to eventually have lower volume, not lower volume, lower intensity. You can't just throttle yourself every time you walk into the weight room. That's the CrossFit mantra, right? High intensity, constantly varied functional movements, right? But you have to do these like back off. We're just going to move for 25 minutes. We're not going to, you don't have to throttle yourself.

It's not a race. Just, just move, get your body going or getting into the specifics and training the neurology there and not just working hard. And that requires specific loads, um, specific contraction types, all these things that are tailored to that athlete. Um, but in general, CrossFit by default, cause they're, they're classes, you lose the specificity and that's where the athletes start running into some difficulty. I think. Yeah, no, I told, I totally agree. I totally agree. Um, you said something there, which is a little tangent in this conversation slightly. So you talked about neurology. So when we go into the main, so the main reason I want to have you on actually, which, uh, something that you lectured on at perform better was functional capacity, functional gap threshold training and the neurology behind basically where these form deficiencies or compensations for movements such as squatting with knee cave or running with hip drop or these things come out. So can you talk a little bit about how people can improve their form flaws using their neuromuscular system? Um, big question, the big question. Well, that's the question.

Really? We can break down parts. Let me, let me, let me back up and talk about the patterns for us. So you've got, when someone says in neurology, they might think of axons and neurons and all those kinds of things. Um, but you have like neurophysiology, which is the, like the structural stuff like, and that's where most of them get hooked up. Like, Oh, this is a type two X fiber, or this is a C fiber, or this is a gamma motor neuron or whatever. And they get into a lot of that. And all that is fascinating and fun, but there's another type of neurology. I don't really have a name for it. And that's, you've been exposed to it a little bit, but that's what, um, Yanda and Collage, um, uh, Fleming, uh, Vili, uh, all these guys from the Czech Republic started getting into, and this is a little bit more functional neurology that, that, that term has been coined and wrecked really. We can't use that one anymore, right? Not really. No. I mean, core is a great term, but it's been wrecked. So you can't really use that either. Right. Yeah.

But there's, there's neurology where you get into different levels of the brain, right? And you have, um, conscious movements and you have subconscious movement. And when we think about, um, heart rate, for instance, like we're not, neither of us are consciously trying to control our heart rate while we're standing here. That's being controlled, um, by the sub cortex, right? A part of the brain that just sort of runs in the background while we're doing everything else. And one of those areas, areas are one of the jobs that the sub cortex has is actually posture control. And we're not really thinking about this, right? And this is the, this is the posture. This is the program that's running, um, behind the scenes that, that allows us to do all the other things that we know where we start our analysis. So if you're doing functional testing, you're starting the analysis with whatever postural, um, stabilizing strategy you're using. You haven't really assessed that it's, it's already working in order for that athlete to be able to stand there. And so I think a lot of us go in and we start right there, like, Oh, okay. They're just standing in place or, Oh, okay. They're just laying on the table. I'm going to assume that everything's neutral and, and they're fine.

Whereas whether you're laying on a table, standing up or running down the street, that postural stabilizing strategy controlled by the sub cortex is active. And it's really only DNS that I'm, that I'm aware of that has dug in that deep and goes in and tries to assess that movement strategy. So I, I said this in the lecture, but a lot of people will say, you know, when you hear mobility before stability all the time, I've had two hour conversations with gray cook about this, who's great dude, by the way, um, good, good taste in tequila. Um, but I always, whenever I say stabilization precedes movement, I changed that from stability before mobility. Cause it was just getting confusing for everybody. The mobility before stability is what, you know, gray would say, you need to be able to address the mobility first. And then the stability second, if you don't have the range of motion, then you're not going to be able to stabilize in that area. Yay. In my opinion, though, more often than not dysfunction in that, in that, um, postural stabilizing strategy, right? Dysfunctions in the way in which we stabilize for movement is what produces the mobility issues that manifest in the functional testing. So for example, uh, if I, to keep it super simple, if I use my lat to stabilize my lumbar spine. So for the non-anatomy geeks out there, the lat is going to do adduction, pull your arm towards your trunk. It does internal rotation.

Yeah. Well, that'd be back. That'd be weird. Cause it does internal rotation too. Depends if you're front to back or back to front. That's it. That is it. Yeah. That's it. That's what we got to get that, get that through today. So the, the butt wiping muscles, you say, if you're using that muscle and the sub cortex is therefore turns the activity of that muscle up a little bit while you're standing and moving around, that means you're going to lose functional length on the other side. So if a muscle creates adduction, external, internal rotation, excuse me, and extension, if it's tight, it will limit flexion, external rotation, AB duction. So if I'm using my lat, if my sub cortex chooses to use my lat to stabilize, I'm going to lose the ability to get into, let's say a received position in the snatch, or let's say for the CrossFitters out there, if I'm coming through in a kipping pull up or I'm coming through in a total bar where I'm swinging my torso in front of the rig, if I can't do that, I mean, the lat absolutely blocks that. So you might see either of your, what you're coaching someone and you say, oh man, that athlete's shoulder is not moving right or man, they keep, they keep catching with their shoulder rounded over in a snatch. You might think, oh, we got to, we got to work on, you might get it down to the lat. You might say, oh, we got to work on that. You might've also seen that in, you know, the, the lat screen against the wall. Okay. So if I address the, the, the mobility there, we can foam roll that. You can just Kelly stir up the crap out of that and get it opened up.

But if you don't address the stability issue, it'll come back tomorrow. The easiest example with that is, um, dorsiflexion, right? So dorsiflexion is a common limitation that we see in gait and squatting and all kinds of stuff, right? Well, that's limited in many cases by the, by calf tightness. And there's a lot of causes where, let's just say it's only calf tightness. I'm one of these guys. I can go in and mash and voodoo floss and just crush my calves. I open up some good dorsiflexion and I come back the next day and it's the same, right? So I technically addressed the mobility issue. If, and what we think about a lot of times is mobility is we have, I guess as an industry wide, and that's both medical and performance industry. We have, um, we tend to have a mechanical view of things, a structural view of things. Like my hamstring attaches to my tibia, my tibia, you know, attaches to the talus and all those things, but really nothing happens in the body without the brain's permission. And so if you're not addressing the neurology of the movement, you're just going to keep, you know, butting your head against the wall. That's why they just keep coming back, right? So the calves are tight because of overactivity of the erector spinae, the back extensors secondary to instability of the trunk. You could stretch your calves every day and they'll come back every time you challenge the trunk. Right. And, and the, the confusion there is that people think when I'm stretching something, we see this in active release technique or grasped in the explanation is usually very mechanical in nature. Oh, there's adhesions in there. The muscle is short, right?

And so, or the muscle, you know, the, the muscles tight or short or limited or whatever. And the, the assumption is that there is a change in the physiology, a change in the histology that is preventing it from reaching full length. Now you and I both know that that can happen, but that takes years. In most cases, if you're improving the length of a muscle, what you're doing, let's say that you're foam rolling your calves. And when you get done, Oh man, you've got better range of motion there. Um, or you voodoo floss them or triplanar stretching, whatever you want, you increase the length. What's happening. There is not so much physiological where you're stretching sarcomeres or breaking myosin cross bridges or anything like that. What you're doing is you're kind of locally overriding the brain's resting tension of that muscle. So if the calves are on or the back is on because the brain, that sub cortex is telling it to be on, I can foam roll it, shut that down neurologically. Now I gained my range of motion again. And until you address the subcortical stabilizing strategy, it will just return every single day for the rest of your life.

So I got a, I had a question. I'll, I'll go back to the lat as well as, well, that's probably the same answer roughly. So if someone is thinking or they're listening to this or like, that's exactly me. I voodoo floss. I mash work. I do all that stuff. My calf, it comes back. What is he talking about? Like, how do I get, how do I stabilize the torso? And is there something they can try right now? They're like, Holy shit, this is, this is the answer. I didn't realize it. Cause I'm guessing when they're doing all this flossing and all this, uh, all this stretch work, they keep doing it because they see short-term results, right? Is there a short-term result way they can see the other way? Well, first off mashing and stretching before you, you train is smart. You want to, you want, you want to do the mobility to get that full range of motion so that you can actually, uh, have as good a movement quality as possible. So I'm not against stretching by any, by any means, by any stretch of the imagination, uh, that that's pretty bad.

This isn't on video. So you're good there. Great. Um, so you want to do that, but in terms of the stability, before I answer the question you asked, I would say that, you know, you can make it very complex. We can get down to foot function, knee stability, hip stuff, shoulder, neck, trunk, rib cage, everything. But in, in most cases, I think that lumbopelvic stability, stability, or like the core, uh, the trunk, the torso, whatever you want to say, breakdown in that expresses itself in a lot of mobility issues. So getting in and working on trunk stability is going to pay some pretty good dividends on it. Um, let's just stick with the lat example.

You need to be able to establish solid trunk stability, um, with really just two main mechanisms. One is going to be that pressure in the abdomen, which is only participating in very, very high bracing strategies. It doesn't like you sitting there and me standing here. I'm not, I'm not benefiting. I'm not, I'm not utilizing intra-abdominal pressure. What I'm using is a, a coordinated co-contraction of all the torso musculature. So that's going to be the transverse abdominus, the external oblique, the internal oblique. Um, you know, also the diaphragm, the pelvic floor, these are sort of like this inner core, right? Paul Hodges talks about like this, this, this deep in interior, uh, part of the core. And when that's activated, well, when you have what collage calls central stability, then you don't need to use a lot of these bigger, more superficial muscles, like the erector spinae, the latissimus dorsi, the pectoralis major, um, to act, to come in and use what I call an, an external stabilizing strategy as opposed to an internal stabilizing strategy.

So when you, when we improve that, then all like the lat, like literally with no, depending on how new this lat tightness is to you, let's say it just happened last week for whatever reason, you're training the core a lot. Then you notice your shoulders not moving, right? It's possible to completely open up that shoulder range of motion, um, without doing any mobility stuff at all, right? Cause stabilization precedes movement. So if I use the lat to stabilize, it will be tight before I move, right? That's the thing that we forget a lot. I think the assumption is that if we have a limit in range of motion, active range of motion, and then you lay someone down on a table and you check passive range of motion, the assumption is that if the passive range of motion is still limited, then that must be a mobility issue. And that's completely false.

But every day in the clinic, I have people come in and they have limited glenohumeral internal rotation, right? That says sleeper stretch. That's the one that every throwing athlete says, Oh, I got to increase this. And if it's limited because of Kibler and some other researchers, they would say, Oh, that's tightness in the posterior capsule. Well, every single day I will do trunk stability stuff with that, that patient. And I will take that and increase it by 40 degrees, which means that there's no way without working the shoulder, without stretching the tissue of the capsule, there's no way that that would change unless there is a neurological component to that tightness. And you just blew, you just blew the minds of, uh, all the, all the chiropractic and PT students right now. That's like ingrained, like, like what we were talking about earlier. Um, yeah, no, it's, it's, it's funny too, because if you, if you really want to get into it, if someone has tightness in the posterior capsule, it's usually secondary to scapular instability. Actually, I've never seen one without the other. And so what people need to realize is that hyper or sorry, hypertonicity muscle tightness is the body's compensation for instability. So if we have, if we have muscle tightness, let's say that we have that throwing athlete and that tightness in that posterior capsule. And every day I'm ripping through that posterior capsule. What I'm doing is I'm actually removing the body's protective mechanism to stabilize an otherwise.

Oh, I think, uh, so I'm taking the art off of that. I'm in and like their right shoulder is tighter than their left because me. Oh yeah, I'm losing you. Can you see me there? Yeah, I'm here right now. Yeah, I can see you. Okay. Let me turn my, I'm going to turn my video off real quick to make sure that, see if that changes the, uh, speed. Maybe it's using the bandwidth. You hear me. Okay. Yeah, I can turn mine off if you want. Yeah, let's, let's do that. I'm tired of looking at you. That's fair enough. How do I do that? Uh, it's on the bottom. It's on the bottom of the, uh, the picture. If you just hit the picture, just hit the camera thing. There's a little camera thing. Yeah. Stop video. Okay. Is that better? Uh, yeah, we'll, we'll see. We'll keep talking and see if it cuts. So go back to, I lost you when you said we are, we stopped or we're not, we're loosening up the protective mechanism. Oh, right. So when you have someone with, we take that picture and we go through and we have them, you know, stretch out that posterior capsule. And what I, what I said before was that, um, hypertonicity, right? Muscle tightness is oftentimes the body's compensation or even, um, protective mechanism for instability.

So if we have a glenohumeral joint, like arm bone into scapula is unstable, then the body might tighten up the posterior capsule in an attempt to protect it. If a pitcher then goes through and shreds through that every day before they train, um, they might actually be exposing themselves to more damage later on because you're making the joint unstable. And if you make it unstable, but then you don't actually stabilize it, you could be injuring it. I get CrossFitters all the time that come in and that, you know, their, their left shoulder is tighter than the right. And so every day they're mobilizing the shoulder like crazy, just getting it to move, getting it to move, getting it to move until they can, you know, receive a snatch or do a butterfly kipping pull-up or whatever, without, without pain. But essentially there, they might, in many cases, they might actually have a small labral tear in there or the injury to the rotator cuff. And by opening up that range of motion every day and just training on it, they just expose that joint or that area, that tissue to more damage. So again, I'm not against mobility stuff, but if you had the same mobility issue for two, three weeks a month, um, on one side, that's a problem. If it's asymmetrical, if you have like, you know, my calves are tight because I did 5,000 double unders. Okay. That's fine. That's symmetrical. That's no problem. But if every time you come into squat, your right hip is tighter than the left, there might be an underlying stability issue that needs to be addressed.

If you're going to, um, you know, improve your function and decrease your, the chance of getting injured. So, so back onto that, on that shoulder thing where you're talking about, um, stabilization or looseness of it. So we got a little bit down the route of talking about structure, which I'm totally okay with, but I want to make sure to remind everybody that we're, so we're talking about how the, the central nervous system controls that joint, correct? Okay. So when it comes to other joints, the body, say we're talking about a knee condition and it doesn't matter which obviously, or ankle ones, does the same type of cascade occur? Yeah, you can. There's just, um, certain joints tend to be more stable than others based on a structure. So there's essentially two major components that go into stability of a joint. You have structural stability, which is just the actual, the bone and the, and the ligaments and the cartilage. And then you're going to have more of your dynamic components. And that can be divided into two categories. You have the quality of the information going to your brain. And then you also have the, the brain's utilization of that information to control and coordinate muscular contraction to keep the joint in the right place. In the case of the knee, um, there's more passive stability there than there is in the shoulder, right? Um, probably an even better example would be the hip. If you look at the surface area of the pelvis and how much of it actually covers the surface area of the thigh bone, the femur, there's a lot, which means that much of that stability is given to it by structure. And then also joint orientation is another big one.

So the, the actual hip socket itself is, is downward and forward facing, which means that when the femur is underneath it, gravity provides a ton of stability to that joint, similar kinds of things happen in the knee. You've got gravity pushing that knee together and contributing the shoulder. If I've got my arm out to the side, gravity is pulling it down and it's not usually, um, upward facing all that much. So the shoulder itself is going to be less stable. Number one, because the actual available surface area to stabilize the joint is limited. And two, the orientation of that joint is limited, which means that gravity and movement and all these other things are more likely going to have forces that can move it out of position.

So go ahead. Oh, I was going to say, I strongly suggest everybody look at a skeleton model of the hip and shoulder and you'll know exactly what he's talking about with that. Right? Yeah. It's the, both are, are hip, excuse me, both are ball and socket joints. And the, there's a guy named Tom Purvis, um, who refers to the shoulder as a ball and saucer. It's not really a socket. It's basically a saucer that you have this, you know, the, the humeral head, the arm, the arm bone, uh, just sitting on it. Whereas in the hip, it really is a socket into which the femur fits. So there are two, but that makes sense. It actually reminds me of like, when you put your coffee cup on a saucer, like that's how stable the shoulder is pretty much. Yeah. Only in that case, right?

The, the saucer is facing up and the low gravity is going down and it gives us stability. If you were to turn that on its side, now gravity is like actually making it slide off the saucer. Let's ignore that there's fluid in there, the slide off the saucer. So now you're going to need all this extra muscle, um, the rotator cuff around that shoulder being active to hold it in place. This is, we don't want to get super off topic here, but that's one of the things why posture and scapular positioning matter. If you have good scapular function, the surface of your, of the glenoid, which is the, the saucer part of the ball and socket joint, their ball and saucer joint should face lateral outside forwards a little bit and up. That means that there is a little bit of a shelf that the humorous can sit on and gravity can give some passive stability. If you've got that, that athlete where the scapula wing out or they're downwardly rotated. Now that that surface area is no longer facing up. It's actually facing straight lateral or down, which means there's no passive stability there. Like, yes, there's surface area that's available, but because of the direction gravity is affecting the shoulder, it's pulling it out of the socket as opposed to pushing it into the socket. Does that make sense? Total, total sense. So now just standing there, if you've got poorly positioned scapula, your rotator cuff is on all day to hold your arm in place. As opposed to if you had good scapular positioning, the rotator cuff can actually relax a little bit because gravity is pushing that humeral head into the glenoid, um, and giving and utilizing the passive stability. Okay. So just to reiterate, and I'll come back to this quite a few times, you're probably going to notice why you keep asking the same question. No, no, no, you're doing, I think it's great. Cause you're, you're, you're trying to reign me in from just, I, I am, but, but also too, I think the, uh, well, so what we talked about earlier, we were talking about meat, which is a whole different, uh, concept or fat meat fat and how we grew up with the idea of the, uh, fat from animal was, uh, created a heart issues. Um, so we were, and we were saying like, it was mind blowing. It's hard for us to get over this idea because we grew up with it. So since everyone grew up with the idea that the shoulder is the issue, the rotator cuff is the issue, the knee is the issue. What's the, what's the issue on these most of the time? I'm just going to have you reiterate a couple of times. So everyone re I'm reeling you in there. That's good. So the, the issue usually, um, is going to be the quality of the stability that the, that the, the, the body has to establish to allow movement. If I have a breakdown or any limitation in stability, it's going to compromise my movement. In the case of the shoulder, if I have poor scapular stability, which itself is dependent on trunk stability, then the most unstable joint in that chain is usually the one that's going to get chewed up.

In that case, it's the glenohumeral joint, which is why, um, where we have most of the injuries to the shoulder happening to the rotator cuff, to the labrum, the biceps tendon, all that kind of stuff. These are all structures that try to stabilize that joint. So if we have a breakdown in the, in trunk stability or scapular stability, we're going to see that as a torn rotator cuff or something in that range, um, that a lot of the medical field just goes right after that. We take an MRI, we take a CT ultrasound, whatever you want. And you're like, Oh, there's a torn rotator cuff there. That must be the problem. Well, that's actually the end of a very long cascade of events that resulted in that injury. And so if you go through and you actually really improve the quality of your trunk stability, the quality of the scatterer stability, then you're actually stopping that cascade, um, where it started as opposed to just trying to, you know, take the water out of the boat instead of patching the hole. Does that make sense? So, so this, so when people are there right now, they're thinking trunk stabilization, they're probably thinking, I'm going to add core exercise to my program tomorrow. Do you have any tidbits on that?

Well, that's what, that's what I was going to sort of lead into here. The, the difficulty here is that, remember I said the quality of the strategy, there are lots of people out there that the, the quantity of their strategy is good, right? They can squat 900 pounds or they can do a hundred sit-ups or whatever the case may be. And this will tie us into the, the reason I think you got here, which is that functional capacity that we talked about in long beach. Um, so if you do a lot of like sit-ups or a really good example is going to be hollow rocks, that's a common one as a day one exercise for crossfitters in the gym. Well, if we go way back to the neurology part that you asked me about in the beginning, right? We know, uh, originally it was proposed by this guy named Vladimir Yanda, who was a neurologist from the Czech Republic. Um, that we had these postural syndromes with upper cross syndrome and lower cross syndrome. If you've not heard of those audience, then check them out. They're very consistent patterns that will affect performance or even injury. If you're, if you're in the medical field and it basically, there is a consistent pattern of muscles that will tend to become overactive and muscles that will tend to become underactive inhibited, right? So in the case of lower cross syndrome, we'll stay here today. Uh, in general, over time, we'll notice that the abdominal wall and the glutes tend to become inhibited and the spinal extensors and the hip flexors tend to become hypertonic or overactive. And that creates excessive, um, arching of the low back and that pelvis getting pulled into an anterior pelvic tilt.

That's your lower cross syndrome, right? Um, similar patterns for the PRI people out there. Um, Ron Ruschka calls it PC if you speak PRI, but that stands for posterior extensor chain. And again, that's the same kind of a thing where you have hyperactivity of the latch and the spinal extensors, right? So this is a consistent pattern that we see. Um, I refer to this pattern as an extension compression stabilizing strategy, which is a little bit of a mouthful, but it's worth the mouthful because it explains exactly what it is. It is the brain in the absence of good trunk stability, in the absence of good pressure in the abdomen, in the absence of quality co contraction of the torso musculature. It's going to default to excessive extension and compression of the lumbar spine to stabilize it. Right. Yep. Now those muscles, the spinal extensors, Yanda classified as tonic muscles. Later, collage came along. He was a protege of, of Yanda and collage, um, sort of realized that a lot of these muscles that tend to become hypertonic, right? These are the muscles that we're all stretching every day.

So hamstrings, adductors, hip flexors, spinal extensors, pecs, those are all tonic muscles. He noticed that those muscles tend to be active at birth and the phasic muscles, the ones that we're trying to activate all day, the glutes, the serratus anterior, the abdominal wall, the deep neck flexors, right? Many of the muscles in the foot, those are muscles that we start activating later in development. Okay. And so kind of like the polyvagal theory, the later you acquire something in function, the more easily you lose it. Once that function is challenged. Okay. So if I acquire glute function later in life, right? Six weeks, right? Eight weeks. And we're starting to roll around or whatever. Um, then if I'm challenging it in sports, that muscle is going to be more likely to, to become inhibited and just sort of stop working. Um, then the adductors that were present, even in utero, you can challenge them all you want. They're going to stay active.

Because they have a much stronger hold on the brain. And they, when they are challenged, they become overactive. When the phasic muscles are challenged, they become inhibited. Okay. And this is kind of where I came up with the idea of what I call functional capacity that you talked about in that, um, was it bodybuilding.com? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or yes, he was. So the, the idea of functional capacity came from me trying to be able to take the DNS material, that's dynamic neuromuscular stabilization material, which is predominantly used in rehab. And I wanted to be able to apply it to sports. And there was a gap there, right? We can't just have someone laying on their back, you know, breathing into their belly or, you know, on their side using a yellow TheraBand and think that that exercise right there is going to work for every elite athlete out there.

Now that exercise might be useful in some capacity, but there's the performance end of the spectrum, which requires higher thresholds and that kind of a thing. And I realized in working with different athletes, and I tend to work with training sports. I work with a lot of Olympic weightlifters, a lot of crossfitters, a lot of powerlifters, a lot of track athletes, a lot of triathletes. Right. But what I found is that there's really three ways that we can challenge the nervous system with Yanda, with the lower cross syndrome. It really was just over time, people tend to collapse into these positions, but I realized that you can accelerate that process by challenging the athlete, by challenging the nervous system.

And the three main stressors are one is load or force, right? So force output, if you ask the athlete to load up the body, generate more force at some point, you're going to exceed their threshold and exceed their capacity to maintain proper stabilizing strategies. And that is when the phasic muscles, glutes, abdominal wall, in the case of lower cross syndrome will become inhibited and the tonic muscles, hamstrings, adductors, hip flexors, extensors, spinal extensors will become overactive. So if we have someone do an air squat, let's say that they just learned, you know, how to squat, they can do this perfect air squat.

You put 60 kilos on their back, still good. You put 120 kilos on their back and now suddenly they're starting to break down their technique a little bit. Well, they can either not compensate, in which case their trunk flexes forward and, you know, that's a fast track to a disc injury, or they can compensate. If they compensate, they will compensate with overactivity of the tonic system. That will be cranking the spinal extensors on, anterior tilting the pelvis, you know, and in many cases, they're coming out of the hole, that's where you would see the knees collapse in. And the knees collapsing in only happens in a state where the glutes are not matching the force generated by the adductors.

So when you're coming out of the hole, if we're above threshold, I'm going to be moving and stabilizing with a strategy dominated by the tonic system. So the knees are going to come in, I'm going to arch my back to try to stand up. We see this all the time in lifting. You can also do that with, by challenging the athlete's speed. So if I ask someone to do a box jump, right, a lot of times we'll see the knees quickly sort of come together in that box jump. It's not because the actual force they generated is so low that their hip abductors, right, their glutes, couldn't match the force. It's because you ask them to move so quickly that they're unable to maintain that balanced activity between, you know, your, your adductors and your, your, and your glutes.

The non-contact ACL injury was the example that I used in Long Beach. Girl jumps up, grabs a rebound, lands, no one touches them. Her knee collapses inward. And now she, you know, um, tears her ACL. It wasn't because of, um, a lack of tensile strength in the glute. It was that the glute just wasn't able to fire coordinatedly, um, in that moment at that speed to control the knee collapsing inwards. Right. The last one is going to be duration. Um, if we have an athlete perform a movement for a long period of time, the tonic and the phasic muscles will fatigue at different rates. And so I'll give you two examples.

We'll do a kettlebell swings and then we'll maybe do muscle ups, right? If I'm doing a kettlebell swing, let's say that we've got a 53 pound kettlebell, we're doing American swings. And let's say we're going to do 50 unbroken. As I go through, let's say the beginning, I'm maintaining really, really good technique. Well, as I keep going, now I'm starting to fatigue. The spinal extensors will fatigue much later than the abdominal wall and the glutes. So as I keep going, instead of being able to keep my trunk in a good position, ribs down, pelvis neutral pressure on the belly, the ribs will start to come up a little bit.

I'll start to arch my lumbar spine a little bit. I'll start to rock my weight back on the heels a little bit, right? So when you sit on the heels, you're loading the tonic system. When you have a full foot loaded, you're keeping the tonic and the phasic systems active. But let's say about 20, 30 reps in, I'm going to start getting into a state that is dominated by the tonic system. And then I can finish it out with the tonic system. But the compromise is that structure. We might be damaging the structure. We might be increasing the load on the spine. And then also you're blocking movement, right?

So once you start losing neutral spine, neutral pelvis, now you're actually affecting range of motion of all these different joints and you're affecting muscle function. If I'm doing 50 kettlebell swings, then the tonic system will fatigue much later than the phasic system. So my glutes will shut off far before my spinal extensors. And so then that's why you see at the end, if the athlete is compensating, if you watch the form at the first rep versus the form at the 50th rep, the 50th one, you're going to see that athlete is going to have a very, very arched back sitting back on their heels because that's the only, or in that position, you can load the tonic system better.

Well, the phasic system is done at that point because it's fatigued. So you have to overload the tonic system. So then how does, because I'm sure a lot of people don't even realize when they're doing this. Um, or when this is occurring, how do you, how do you train it to become more balanced? I guess, as you're going to 50 reps. So this is the difficult thing and there's no cookie cutter program to do it. This is, this is about as specific to the athlete as it can get. So when you have somebody going through and you're doing the movement, let's say that we're doing Olympic weightlifting, kettlebusting, it doesn't really matter.

You either have to, as a coach, you're watching it. And the threshold training that I think you asked about is when you're going to train the athlete up to threshold, right? You're going to train the athlete up to the point where they're able to, but struggling to maintain proper positioning. They're struggling to maintain that co-activation of the tonic and the phasic muscles. Once you get there, you keep them there. The easiest is to think of as Olympic weightlifting, right? So we have somebody, let's say they're a hundred kilo snatcher. And we start them at 50 kilos first day. Cause we have no idea.

And they're going to do doubles. Okay. So you come in and you do a W your first one, second one, everything's easy. Um, you've cued them on ribs down pressure on the abdomen, full foot loaded, you know, knee positioning, whatever you're working on that day. And then you say, okay, that was pretty good. Let's go to 55. Good again. Let's go to 60. Good again. Let's go to 70. Okay. A little bit harder. First rep was kind of shitty. So now let's reposition. Can you execute good technique on the second rep? Yes. All right. Well, maybe you stay there for one more set and try to get both of them, right?

Oh, next set. No problem. Get them both. All right. Well, now we'll go to 75 kilos and at 75 or 80, they start really struggling to be able to do that. So you can choose as a coach to go down to, you know, 72 or 70 again, and you're just going to hang around right in that range where they have to work really hard to keep the trunk stabilized, to keep the ribs down, to maintain the full foot loading, whatever the case is. And that day, you've made them aware of the positioning, right? Or as a coach, you're telling them, no, you need to do this better, drop the weight. Or if they're training by themselves, you need to have cued them so that they know what it feels like to do it correctly and what it feels like to do it wrong.

And they can, on their own, go, oh, I felt like I sat back on my heels on that one or my chest came up too much. I couldn't keep my ribs down. I couldn't keep pressure in the abdomen. And when they feel that extension, compression, stabilizing strategy kick on, they can decide to try to stay there for another set or even back down a little bit. Okay. So actually, in your experience, how long does it take to get someone to realize all that on their own? It's completely dependent on how good the athlete's, you know, proprioception or kinesthetic awareness is. Some people, like, they have no idea.

And so you have to spend a lot of time with video and hands-on stuff to get them to feel that. Some of them immediately, you just ask them to change it and they can change it right there. So it could be one minute. It could be a month. It just depends. Okay. That's why, so I think that the reason that this is not adopted by every system out there is because, number one, that extension, compression, stabilizing strategy is so pervasive in the sport of, you know, the training sports like powerlifting, crossfit and such, weight training in general, that coaches think that it's normal, right? I mean, think about the extension, compression, stabilizing strategy is essentially overactivity of the posterior chain.

Well, all day. I mean, when I tell someone that the posterior chain is massively overtrained in CrossFit, they about lose their shit because they're like, well, the posterior chain is important. Like, yeah, I'm not saying it's not important, but we want to have balance between the posterior chain and the anterior chain. We don't want to just have, you know, overactivity of that. And this goes back to what you said initially. When you take someone and you're not doing the threshold training that we just described, and you're just going balls out every time you walk into the gym, you will spend more time outside, above your functional capacity, and therefore, you're just training the extension, compression, stabilizing strategy, right?

So when you have a program that's like, oh, I'm going to do six sets of triples in the clean, I'm going to do five sets of five in the back squat, and then I'm going to do some RDLs. And then for core, I'm going to do hyperextensions, and I'll do reverse hypers and supermans, okay? I've seen that exact program. So that is all posterior chain with no effort to train any of the other muscles. So essentially what you're doing is you're strengthening a compensatory movement strategy. You're strengthening what I would consider a pathological movement strategy so that the advocate just perform the movements, you know, badly but longer, right?

And so if I've got a squatter and I want to strengthen their posterior chain so I have them sit back on their heels, push their knees out, jack their chest up, and do a bunch of RDLs, then, yeah, they might get a short-term improvement. But you're actually limiting their performance long-term. You're decreasing what I call their functional competence, their ability to move well, which can hinder performance, it can make stubborn technical flaws, and it can also expose them to injury. And so you're limiting performance and you're increasing the likelihood that they're going to get injured. What we need to be doing is trying to train optimal function, and that requires taking your foot off the accelerator a little bit and then doing some threshold stuff, doing some auxiliary exercises, you know, like, you know, laying on your back with your calves on a bench, learning how to activate your trunk correctly.

You know, doing some exercises that are going to actually stabilize and move correctly in your sport, whatever that sport is. You know, I think it would be, I don't know if you've done one already, but I think a good extra thing to this podcast, and I think bodybuilding.com should pick this topic up with you, is in the seminar, you did the one where you were showing the overactivity of the spinal rectors or the back muscles. And then we worked on breathing and stabilizing and trying to kind of turn that dominance off. Have you done a video where you are talking about athletes dash enhancement dot com?

That is going to have, there's an article that I did in there for NSCA coach that just came out recently. Let me see if I can pull this up and the third article, which I think I put at the top of the page is actually on correcting the extension compression stabilizing strategy. So if you look there, you can, yeah, yep. So the top article right there, you can download the PDF. Um, it's got pictures of exercises and an explanation of proper stabilizing strategy and all this stuff that we're talking about. Um, so it's got a couple exercises on there that number one are designed to just break the extension compression stabilizing strategy.

And then it has exercises that are designed to improve the quality of movement, which is different than just breaking over activity, that poster chain, right? So breaking the over activity to the poster chain enables us to train proper stability, but they're not the same thing. Right. So there's an article there. And then there's also videos that you can look at, um, on there specifically on the extension compression stabilizing strategy. Um, let me see. There's foot loading. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to link to all these in the show notes, by the way, so people can have them right there. Yeah.

There's a, there's a couple exercises on shutting off the poster chain. Um, there's all kinds of good stuff that are on there trying to explain this. This is kind of for a long time, been, uh, one of my passions. Cause I feel like going back to my, my career as a strength coach, this is, this is an area that I absolutely was unaware of that was a, that I think would have profound effects on athletes performances. If they, um, if they actually started paying attention to this and training that. So those, those two sources are good. Um, obviously, you know, I'd love to get out and do more stuff with testosterone or bodybuilding or whatever.

Um, cause I, my, my, my goal, my job now with this athlete enhancement, um, platform that I've got is to take stuff that I've learned in the medical field. So in seminars or in reading research or with, with actual patients, I need to be able to sort of like screen out the stuff that is super important for strength coaches and performance coaches and then expose them to that. Like this is one of them, right? I, I, I was the posterior chain dominant dude when I was an athlete. Um, and I was a 600 pound back squatter. I qualified for a couple of Olympic trials. Like I was an okay athlete with decent numbers.

I couldn't squat below parallel. And it was because of this extension compression stabilizing strategy. I have injury to my back because of this extension compression stabilizing strategy. So there are absolute advantages to training an athlete for proper stability, which is completely different than just training them hard. If you only push them as hard as you can, every time they walk into the gym with no, um, efforts to train proper stability, you will inevitably train this extension compression stabilizing strategy, which is why it is so pervasive. That is why I get kickback. They'll be like, well, I know somebody and we train the poster chain or we sit back on the heels or we, you know, a common cue that we use is butt back, chest up.

Okay. Well, just because some superstar athlete can get away with that doesn't mean that that's the good, the proper strategy or the most beneficial strategy for that athlete long-term. And it doesn't mean that every athlete is going to be able to get away with it. Everyone's got tissue tolerances. I mean, my coach, Judd Logan, God love him, like never had back pain in his life and, and never been accused of having amazing squat form. Judd is like one of the most amazingly intense athletes I've ever met in my life. But if I lifted with the technique that he used in squatting, I would be in, in, in a wheelchair.

This dude's just put together better than I am and could handle it. Yeah. I have to be me with all my, my limitations have to be more precise and, and have to have a higher standard of quality so that I, I could perform at a better level, or I could do so without getting consistently injured. Well, I think you have a good point there where I know that earlier we talked about taking other people's program and saying, well, they're, they're doing this. I should do this and I'll be the same person. And, um, I, I, the body's really adaptable. You know, some people can take it. It doesn't mean it's right.

Um, but it's hard to argue when someone is performing so well, although you see these compensation patterns, you're like, oh, you can make this a little bit better, but no one wants to, no one wants to really, uh, you know, pry into that really. Cause you could affect their performance. Right. Yeah. That is a, that is a scary thing to do, but the more, you know, as a coach, I might not want to do that, you know, 15 years ago, but now as someone who has seen the benefits of changing the technique and everything, I, I absolutely would go in and change someone's, um, how they're stabilizing. And to answer that question, cause that's a big one that I get, you know, Oh, would you, if you, if Usain Bolt, you know, he's got a little bit more of an anterior pelvic tilt, Oh, would you, would you change his technique?

The answer is no, I would stay in my lane. I'm not a sprint technique coach, but if you train him in a way that allows him to maintain balance, co-activation of all those muscles, you treat, you do the threshold training. If you cue the weightlifting better, you, you pick the exercises better so that you're not overtraining and driving and perpetuating that extension compression stabilizing strategy. It will express itself in his technique without you directly saying, no, Usain, I need you to have your pelvis tucked underneath you. That would wreck his speed. But if, if you train him correctly, he's not going to have the overactivity of the hamstrings, which is really why going way back to the Siobhan Miller, that's why she was able to actually, or not able.

That's why she kept pulling her hamstrings. It wasn't because her quads were too strong for her hamstrings. That's at the time, that's what all the research was saying. Um, it's because she was overusing this pathological stabilizing strategy, the extension compression stabilizing strategy. So when she's running down the track, she's using all hamstrings and she's not able to actually get glutes involved or maintain that balance activity of all the muscles around the hip and the pelvis. So her body is using the hamstrings and the spinal extensors to both stabilize and move her. And when you're trying to run down a track as hard as you can, and you're a 200 meter runner, now you're running on the outside of the track.

That's putting even more strain on that stuff as you're turning. Now you're overloading one hamstring more than the other. It just goes. Whereas I believe wholeheartedly, if I had known what I know now, and I had been training her differently, then she would not have had those chronic injuries. Yeah. Now on the actual note, the next year, I didn't understand a lot of the stuff that I've, that I've learned from collage and yanda and those guys, but I said, okay, screw it. I'm not going to train the hamstrings anymore in the weight room. Okay. So I stopped doing hamstrings. So if I was going to do an RDL, instead of saying, sit back on your heels and keep your knees neutral, right?

That's going to get a little more hamstring. I started doing anything that I could to, if I'm going to train, what I'll say hip extension, I need to be putting the body in positions that favor the glutes. So I might have them move their feet out a little bit and turn them out because the glutes are not just hip extensors. They're a B ductors and external rotators. So if I externally rotate the foot a little bit, I'm actually giving a little bit more mechanical leverage to the glutes to help hip extension and taking some away from the hamstring. So I would do that and I would put a band around the knee.

So they might do an RDL, but I wouldn't allow the pelvis to go forwards, right? It had to stay in a good position with the trunk. They had to keep the full foot loaded and they had to keep the knees over the feet. In order to do that, they have to use balanced activity of both the tonic and the phasic muscles. If I just sit back on my heel, drive my chest up and just drop down into that RDL, let the pelvis go forwards, I'm essentially putting the athlete in a position where they have no alternative but to overuse the tonic system and use that extension compression stabilizing strategy. That's the posterior chain, right?

I know this would probably bastardize the whole thing, but you mentioned being a back on your heel and using your whole foot grounded. Would that be one feedback tool that people can use to at least getting out of the extension ECSS? You're right, it is a mouthful. Would that be one thing? It can be. Yeah, the cueing of the foot, like you need to have a full foot loaded and we don't, I'm going to have to scoot here in a second. We don't, we don't have the ability to go into all the mechanics of the foot. I could come back and we could talk about that sometime if you want, because the more that I'm coaching, the more I realize that if the foot's not right, then nothing is going to be right.

So you can get someone to stabilize well, but if that truly is your foundation, your ground, if you have the foot in the wrong position all the way up the chain, you will drive that extension compression stabilizing strategy. So if you get the foot to load correctly, full foot loading in the squat, the clean, the RDL, whatever, and you keep the knee over the foot, then you're going to actually make the athlete use the tonic and phasic muscles better. So you're not going to have that extension compression stabilizing strategy. I like it. I think, uh, yeah, I know, I know you have to go, uh, how can people reach you, uh, what your Twitter or Instagram handles, what's your email?

So the, the website is, is, is a good one. www.athlete-enhancements.com. Um, I'm on Facebook is Dr. Richard Ulm spelled, uh, ULM is the last name. Uh, that's also my Twitter or not Twitter, um, Instagram handle. So at Dr. Dr. Richard Ulm, um, the email would be dr. ULM at athletes-enhancement.com. All that's on the website too. So you can get on there and check that out on. There's a bunch of videos, most of which pertain to what we talked about today. Um, not necessarily the functional capacity, although one of the articles is about functional capacity that was in, uh, NSCA coach, but a lot of the videos are about training this way, right?

A lot of, I've been heavily influenced, um, by Pavel Kolaj, uh, cause I think he gives the best explanation of movement and function out there. And a lot of what I'm trying to do is be taking his material and what I've learned from him and being able to apply it to the performance industry. And that's really, uh, where the functional capacity observation was, was realized in trying to do that. I think it's golden. I think the last 30 minutes of this podcast is just absolute gold. So I think it's going to help a lot of people. Let's hope. All right, cool. Um, then I, one more thing before you leave, I want to know how keto you are right now.

How keto I'm 1.2 this morning. So that was my, um, my, uh, ketone bodies, my millimolar, excuse me, my concentrated millimolars per liter. So I have to, if you really want to get into it, you have to blood test. Okay. Okay, everyone. That was Dr. Richard Ohm. And I strongly suggest you go to his site. He's has, uh, like I said in the beginning, the, the, the, uh, presentation he put together, uh, that I saw, it was amazing. You know, it was one of those, uh, aha moments that I think everyone needs. And I know he's speaking a little bit more technical than probably a lot of you, if you're general population or not a, uh, sports medicine student would like to hear.

But realistically, if you break through some of the, um, terminology, the anatomy terminology, we are really getting gold on this because I think it is a big problem where a lot of us push through our threshold really early. And then we train within that functional gap. Okay. Just to reiterate that functional gap is where our form has been compensated. So we're kind of reiterating and ingraining those compensation patterns. So that's something that I think the next fitness movement is going to start adapting. So hopefully you heard it here first. Okay. If you have not gone to the show notes yet, that, that is at P two sports care.com slash podcast.

Um, and just put in pound or number as well as the session number you're listening to right now. So I think this is a 52 it's going to be. And, uh, so it's going to be P two sports care.com slash podcast slash pound 52. And you'll take it right to it. So any of the stuff that he was mentioning today in the podcast will be linked to there. Uh, hopefully a strong majority of it. Cause I do listen to this podcast before I launch it. So hopefully I pick up all the pieces in a written good notes for it. So if you haven't gone to iTunes yet, please subscribe on iTunes. And if you have not reviewed on iTunes, please do that as well.

I want to hear what you guys want to hear about next. Cause really this is for you guys. Um, and lastly, if you have not gone to the bodybuilding.com article that I wrote on the concepts that Dr. Rome came up with, then, uh, you shouldn't. So I'll put a link to that as well. And hopefully we hear a lot more from him. I will speak to you guys soon, and thanks for sharing this with all your friends and training partners.