Tension cues and clues for lifting without pain

You used to be sore there, and I've had multiple people come in, they're like, yeah, I did lift every day, but I only get sore in my back and my hamstrings. Okay, we got shit to work on here, okay? And so when I tend to teach things again, especially through that day one, day two of loading people again, I'll do all these cues, these external or internal in case I really need to, I'll do analogies, and so I'll have them start to move. And so when they start to move, it's under really not a lot of load. I might give them a little bit, maybe like a 35, 44-pound kettlebell from a block, usually, if we're deadlifting, and I'll say, look, let's just try it.

What do you feel working? You're listening to the Restoring Human Movement podcast, where movement experts discuss the latest evidence-based practices to help you and your clients move with mastery. And now, your host, Dr. Sebastian Gonzales. Hey, everyone, it's Dr. Sebastian Gonzales, your host with the Restoring Human Movement podcast. Thanks for joining the Movement Movement. If this is the first time in the podcast, welcome. It is patient and clinician-friendly, by the way, in case you're a lifter, a runner, a person who's just looking to solve some of their problems. Like, this is still a useful podcast to you, okay?

Most of the communication is very common ground. It's about a 45-minute to hour-long format where, imagine that we're all hanging out around a bar. We're all having a beer, or you're probably having a martini. I don't know why, you just like martinis, a little dirty martini. And we're talking about the same topic that is lifting injuries, let's just say, and how to offset the possibility of lifting injuries and how to really get most out of your lifting. By the way, today's topic, as you heard the little snippet, is going to be about tension, clues, and cues, all right? I have a correlated document with this, mainly intended for the healthcare professional or the movement professional, as well as I think I'll do some related videos.

I'll do my very best to put some related videos in there. At the time of recording this podcast, I'm not 100% sure. But I'll probably do a raw, fairly unedited version because that way I can get through a little bit quicker, but you guys are going to still get the information that you're looking for. This idea was brought up to me because I've been interacting with some of my Instagram followers recently, that is at Performance HB. And they said they've really, some of them have really questioned about how to do certain lifts without having certain problems, specifically back, hip, hip flexor, and so on, groin pain, and whatever.

And so I've had the opportunity to work with a couple Instagram people, I guess, let's just say, where they've really taken some of these cues to heart, and they've done a really good job of posting things on their social media. And a lot of their followers, I think, are learning a lot from that. And so I thought I would make a tool for the people who are reaching out to me, and maybe them or maybe you, about how to use tension through their lifts. And this is mainly targeted with lifters, weightlifters, crossfitters, and so on. How to use tension clues and cues within their lifts so they don't feel the pain that they feel.

All right, if you're, if I'm not, I'm not sure if everyone knows this, but usually if you go to someone who is fairly good, and you're not super, like, down the drain, like, is in, like, a really acute injury, like, you've been on the floor for, like, a couple days. Like, if you're just kind of walking, you're able to walk into an office, and you're like, hey, I have some pain with deadlifting, a lot of the time, I'd say strong 50% of the time, someone who's really knows what they're doing in regards to cueing and looking at movement can probably get you pulling from a block with a little bit of weight, usually a kettlebell deadlift, or maybe, like, a trap bar, within the first or second day.

All right? It doesn't take, it has to take forever to get back into that lift. Same thing with squatting, and same with the thing with a lot of different compound lifts. And so, we're going to cover some of those clues and cues today to help you guys realize that there is light at the end of the tunnel with these things, and you can start lifting sooner than you think. Now, if this is your first time in the podcast, again, just to give you a rough format, is I will outline some things as I go. I tend to dart around. I apologize. That's just how I am. But I'll do my very best to keep things clustered into a rough format.

Also, too, I tend to share a little bit of a short story about myself just so that you guys understand who your host is. I'm hoping that you like your host, and you follow along with the host, even after this podcast, because there's lots of great information, even in the past, in the future, that I intend on sharing. And if you don't like your host, I mean, you ain't gonna go. You ain't gonna listen. It's like going on a hiking trip with someone you don't like. You might like hiking. You might like what's going on with hiking, but you don't like the person. So, I'm hoping that you like me a little bit, and that's why I'll share this story.

So, we'll get into that story first, and then we'll get right into the content. Last year, I went with some friends to Las Vegas, actually, and they wanted to go to a steak restaurant. So, they always want to go to these steak restaurants, and I kind of don't want to go. And I guess the reason is because I think steak and restaurants are overpriced. And also, too, as you see via my Instagram, at PerformanceHB, I make a lot of steaks. And I've been to steak restaurants, and I always think I could do better, you know? And so, I really don't really like going. And so, these guys this time, like, we were walking along, and we tried to get into a steak restaurant in, I think it was a Monte Carlo at the time.

And they wanted about an hour waiting. They said, no, we're not going to go there. But a couple of us were wearing shorts. And so, they said, well, will they take us in shorts? And they said, yeah, we will, right? And so, we're like, well, we don't want to wait an hour. We went on. And so, we walked up the strip, and we got into Bellagio. And there's a place in Bellagio that they, apparently, it's the place. It's the place, you know? And you walk in there, and they're like, well, we can take you right now, but you guys can't wear shorts. And so, the guys that, a couple of the guys who were with her were like, dude, you guys got to go buy pants now.

We got to go in here. I'm like, I'm not going to buy pants. And I did have pants. My friend didn't have pants, but I didn't wear pants because I just didn't care. And it's hot. I mean, we were in Vegas in the summertime. It's hot. Why are you going to wear pants? This is stupid. And so, this place wouldn't let us in. And so, you see, we see this guy and the girl walk in, and the girl's wearing a short skirt, as they do in Vegas. And so, I was thinking, like, you look in there, and you see the tables. They have draping tablecloths. They go all the way down to the ground. And I'm thinking, when you get in, like, is anyone really going to see my shorts?

Like, does it really matter that much? And, like, at the same time, it's like, she's showing more leg than I am. Like, what's with this stupid double standard here? Like, do my legs offend you that much where they insult the taste of your steak, you know? And so, I was like, screw it. I ain't going. I'm like, I'll tell you what. We'll go to this other place. Someplace finally let us in, which it tasted good. But, by the way, I could do better, and I have done better. And a tomahawk steak there for two was, like, $140. Like, come on. Like, you do a Costco one that's bigger and better, and you do it in your own garage and have all the beer and wine that you want for $25, you know?

Anyways, it's just, I don't quite understand. It drives me insane. Insane. I don't quite understand these dress codes in these restaurants, you know? Like, I don't think dressing up makes it better, really, for anybody, other than the fact that the restaurants want to be pretentious, okay? So, think about that. I think we should all boycott these restaurants and just start wearing shorts or just don't go, right? I don't think the steaks are that good, and if you think it is that good, start learning to make a steak. All right. So, I'll stop my rant with that. Let's get on to the content. Now, the reason why I thought I would do this podcast is, again, because I've had a lot of people reach out on, hey, I got pain with deadlifting.

Hey, I have pain with squatting. Hey, it hurts my shoulder to actually bench press. And so, they're wondering, what do I do? What, like, should I stop doing it? And me kind of, like, on my head, I'm like, number one, I don't know what's going on with you. But, if I had to guess, you're probably losing tension with certain ranges of movement, or you need some type of appropriate first aid for your problem. Now, I've had, I've talked to many healthcare providers, or many movement docs, let's just say, who are, who feel very confident with coaching these types of lifts, and coaching tension through those lifts.

I'll talk about tension here in a second. There's other people who, they're very good at the lifts themselves, but they're not good at coaching those lifts. I'd probably be the other way. I'm not good at lifting. I'm good at coaching the lifts. And I'm not talking about Olympic lifting. I'm talking about squatting, deadlifting, pushing, pulling, and carrying. I'm good at those. I'm good at the Dan John model. And so, I don't tend to claim anything when it comes to Olympic lifting. So, please don't ask me about those questions. Now, the problem a lot of times that we have with lifters or people who get hurt while lifting is that they tend to lose their tension, okay?

Or tension through a certain range, in my opinion. The way I typically explain this to patients when they come in is it's basically physics, okay? Usually, I'll stand by a wall in the office, and I'll push my, I'll put my hand on the wall, and I'll push the wall. And I'll say, who's more stable, me or the wall? And they say, well, the wall, because I moved, all right? I also have a skeleton there. And so, I call him Norman. And so, I push Norman, and I say, who's more stable, me or Norman? And they say, you. I say, great. Do you see what's happening here? Whoever's more stable moves, or whoever's less stable moves.

Whoever's more stable stays. And so, when we're talking about lifting an object, it's basically physics. Something that is more stable is more resistant to being deformed. And if you're more stable than the weight that you're moving, you'll move the weight. The weight won't deform you. And so, what we oftentimes see is people who, let's just say with a deadlift, they start in a quote-unquote perfect position, and they lose tension, or they lose the stiffness, or the rigidity, or the support, or the stability, whatever you want to call it. They lose it as they start to move the weight. Meaning, the weight is now more stable than they are.

And so, you start to see these, like, crapping dog types of appearances, the rounded spine. You see a shift of the body to a certain side. You see the feet start to unload. You see the fingers start to kind of unravel from the bar. Or you start to see their head position change. There's a lot of things that can change. And again, I don't like to nitpick these lifts too much. It's just mainly if someone comes in with neck pain while deadlifting, I need to be very considerate of keeping their neck more stable than the bar that they're pulling from. If they have an elbow condition, there's a possibility it's because that wing, that wing of their body, is less stable as they start to pull the bar from the floor.

Does everyone understand that? Sword in the Stone is a really good movie for me. The sword is pretty darn stiff. It's stuck there. So, anyone who comes up is not stiff enough or have enough tension to pull it out of the thing until Sir Arthur. He pulls that thing out because it's probably as tense as hell. It just worked. So, remember that. The reason why we're going through tension here is that people tend to lose tension through certain movements, certain speeds, certain loads. And it's based upon your individual ability to keep tension through those variables. Now, I've seen someone come in before and they had pain with squatting.

And so, I asked them, well, what kind of squatting do you do? And they said, well, I do back squatting. Great, cool. Show me that back squat. And so, they did. And so, we did little tweaks here and there. And I told them the cues, which I'll tell you guys later. And it worked out well and they felt better. And they came back the next time. And I said, how's it going? They said, good. The pain with squatting went away, but it still hurts when I'm doing it. This was a CrossFit athlete. And so, they were doing their AMRAPs or their Metcons. And I said, okay, so what movement specifically? They said, squatting.

Okay, so show me that squat. And so, they were doing it quicker. And I've never seen someone lose tension who had previously had the ability to keep tension. I've never seen anyone lose it so quickly. As soon as she started to hit the hole and jump out of the thing, I saw so much deformity of the spine, of the area of her problem, of her low spine, of the area of her problem. It moved quicker than her hips did. And there was such a good bend point there that I was like, oh, my intern was there. I was like, did you see that? And they said, yeah. And I said, okay, we got to clean this up. So, right now, you're very good at tolerating the load of the back squat and keeping tension through that slow methodical movement and the grinding movement.

But you're not good at doing it with a quicker pace. All right? They're different skills, in my opinion. And so, typically, what I ask people is that if you're not able to do something slow, you're not able to do something fast. All right? As a general thing, when I have people slow down a little bit, I want them to pay attention to what their hands and their feet are doing, ideally. And so, the main tension points through some of these lifts are at the feet and at the hands. And you might say, well, what the hell do the hands have to do with anything? A lot. Okay? And so, I'll cover this in a little bit here.

However, realize the things that you're contacting are the things that you can create stiffness against. What does that mean? Well, if someone were to come in and say, well, I have pain doing a single-arm dumbbell row, I'll be like, great, cool, show me that. And so, sometimes you see their feet get all wiggly or their heels start to raise or their toes raise up from the ground. Or you might see that their hand, like their fingertips start to kind of unload or they start to kind of shift into the pinky aspect of the hand versus the entire hand completely. And so, sometimes as well, you'll see the person, if they have a heavy weight, you'll see the person moving more than the weight does almost.

It's almost like the weight is moving the person. All right? And so, obviously, when the weight gets heavier, at some point, you're not going to, like, if you're a light person and you're moving a heavy weight, yeah, like, the weight's going to have a good effect on you. It's like it's the physics part again. All right? But the effort is to become stiffer than the weight you're moving. And so, in the example of the single-arm dumbbell row, I might have them spread the floor with their feet. Okay? When you do this, you'll say, holy shit, my glutes are on? I thought this was an arm workout, a lat workout.

No, no, no. It's a whole body workout. Okay? When you generate tension, all of a sudden, those questions about, hey, what muscle does this work? You're like, holy shit, everything. Right? And so, Dan John teaches a push-up position plank with high tension. And so, if someone was doing a push-up plank and they're kind of sitting there talking to yourself and they're like, yeah, I feel this in my, like, abs a little bit. Okay, don't let me pick you up off the floor. And so, you start trying to rip them off the floor, try to push them off the floor, and they're like, holy shit, that was everything.

Right. That's what we're trying to do with tension. And so, I think an important part here, and I will come back to that supportive contact here in a second, is that I was talking to this with a friend the other day. And so, they said that, well, there's one methodology where they say that they're fine-tuning the tension, or they don't want to make sure that there's not too much tension in the body before striking. They were talking about punching. They said, right. But, in my experience, people who have a problem or who have an injury suffer with inadequate tension or the inability to generate tension, period.

It's not if they can fine-tune it or not. Like, you can't even pick up a violin and play a note versus being able to do an orchestra or doing a full song. So, I tend to teach high tension, high dimmer switch, and I scale it down appropriate to the task. I want them to see that there's a higher echelon of this thing. I want to see that there's a 10 out of 10 tension, and that it doesn't hurt them. And they'll say, oh, man, my shoulder pain went away after doing that. Great. Cool. Let's dial that back a little bit, okay? And that way, you can actually breathe when you're going through sequential reps.

So, it's important, at least for me, in my opinion, in my own opinion, to teach high tension to the point to where the person doesn't have any pain and then scale that back. And so, what does that mean for your lifters out there? Well, if you guys are hearing this and you think, well, I have back pain when I lift, how do I generate this tension? Well, a lot of times it takes feeling it for the first time, all right? The tension through the floor and through the hands is probably the easiest thing to pay attention to. There's a lot of what we call inadequate or internal cues that people use. One of them is pushing the knees out.

I know I've covered this in other podcasts before, but pushing the knees out is it actually unloads part of the foot, and you actually lose part of your ability to actually use the floor as the solid object to push from, again, the physics of it. You're pushing from a solid object so that bar that is attached to your body is moving upwards with your body, and you're not being crushed or sandwiched in the middle. You're not jelly in the middle. Imagine, like, a jelly donut doing, like, a back squat. Like, it's going to squish the jelly out, right? Like, both of them are stiffer and have more force than the actual jelly donut.

And if the jelly donut firms itself up, maybe gets old, maybe gets a little bit, like, you left it out in the sun for, like, five days, like, it has more ability to control its shape while you're moving with the floor and the barbell on both sides of it, okay? Sorry, I don't know if that's the best analogy there, but I like where it was going anyways. So, again, create stiffness so you can move the object. Now, I talked about hand contacts, foot contacts, or supportive contacts, okay? So, if your hand is on a wall, break the wall. If your hand is on a bench, dent the bench or try to push the bench through the floor.

If your foot is on the ground, rip the floor. Rip the rubber off of the floor or spread the floor in half like you're standing on two rocks at the tide pools and you're attempting to push the rocks physically apart. And now, some people tell me, that's not possible. I'm not going to move the floor. I know you're not, but try to. When you try to, all of a sudden, tension happens. And an easy way to show it is that, imagine, so I don't know if you guys have actually had walnuts, okay? If you get a walnut, they're pretty damn hard. Or there's other ones, Brazilian nuts, which are hard. You're never going to break a Brazilian nut with your hand.

But imagine that Brazilian nut is the last food on the earth. You can only break it with your hand. Break it with your hand. Well, I can't break it with my hand. Well, then you're going to starve. Break it with your hand. Attempt to break it with your hand. And so when they start to squeeze, you start to see the face change. You start to see the lats turn on. You start to see the delt turn on. You see the belly work. They're like, holy shit, that was my entire side of my body. That's right it was, okay? Use the objects you're attached to, to create tension from within. So in this case, the walnut, or the Brazilian nut in this case, it's obviously not attached to anything.

But you can surely grip and create a stiff side of your body right there that helps you with moving that weight. Now, when we're talking about cueing, cueing a movement, I prefer the external cue. The internal cue has been shown to be a little bit more subpar. But my personal experience is dependent upon, we're trying to get someone to do something and do the right thing for that problem or for that lift. And so I'm not 100% opposed to internal cues because I've found a lot of instances where it works. One of them is with dancers. I can tell them to exhale or breathe or whatever. Like if I'm trying to get their, they like to extend a lot at the low back.

And so sometimes because they've been conditioned throughout their dance career to hide their ribs or have a long neck would be one. Rather than depress the shoulders or anti-strug, the long neck or the hide the ribs works for them. So I'm okay with using it. The cues are, they're based upon what the person does with them. I'd love to say there's perfect cues. There's ones that work really well for me with most people, but surprisingly, and it's funny. I feel like I've been told my cues work better for men than women. And I don't know why. For men team to take the ones that I'm suggesting to them, women have to be a little bit more creative sometimes.

I don't know what the difference is, but maybe they're more illogical about it. Because I say rip the floor, they're like, well, I can't. Well, try, you know. The guy will be like, oh, dude, I'm going to try that, you know, just to see what happens. But anyways, so your cues might be specific to the population as well as the gender. Now, let me give you some examples of internal cueing. Internal cueing, by the way, is where we start to use our body as the reference point, meaning contract a muscle. Raise your arch of your foot. Turn your foot. Make a fist. Contract your glutes. These are examples of internal cues.

Now, ways that I might change that for somebody with an external cue. And by the way, it's been shown that external cues are just more efficient, all right? There's less thinking involved with it. They just do it because they're trying to affect something. It's kind of like rather than having someone raise their arm, you just say, pick that apple, right? And so they can pick the apple, right? You don't have to explain too much. You just pick the apple, right? Let's just see if you wanted somebody to lay face down into a prone prop position, which is one that we sometimes give for back pain. And so I'll say, you ever played video games when you were a kid?

Cool. Go ahead and lay down and act like you're playing video games face down. And so they do it. And so sometimes doing like internal cues or analogies are actually better than the external cues, in my opinion. Now, the external cues, let's say we want to get them to contract your glutes. I usually tell them to crush a quarter between the butt cheeks to make five nickels to become a human slot machine. So that works for me. Or if I need them to actually straighten out that pelvis a little bit because they're hanging back and their glutes aren't really working, quote unquote, I tell them to push their belt buckle to my fist.

And I'll put my fist right in front of them. If I want them to make a fist, I'll tell them to break the Brazil nut or the walnut. If I want them to turn with their feet on their floor or just make sure that they're actually rooting into the floor, I'll tell them to rip the rubber off the floor. If that doesn't work for people, I'll tell them to act like this was a Cody D-Mac one. He said, wait in the tide pools or go to the beach and actually act like you're in the sand. Turn, turn, turn, turn, turn. Act like the waves are coming up hitting your legs. Just imagine. Just chill, right? You're getting deeper and deeper into the sand.

Cool. Now you wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, get deep into the sand and then turn, right? And so other people use the example of root into the ground. So there's lots of examples of external cues for different lifts or different corrective exercises. And I know that not everybody loves these. Sometimes the patient or the athlete will be like, I don't understand what you're asking for actually. And so once they feel it the first time though, we're using that single cue to coach movement in the movement. All right? Coaching, I've heard this from Dan John. I think it was a great analogy, was that coaching happens between the lifts.

Cueing happens within. And so if I saw somebody do something like, say the person in a deadlift wasn't standing straight up. Like they were arching backwards too much and it was provoking their problem. I might say, crush the quarter between the cheeks. So quarter, quarter, quarter, quarter, quarter. Usually I'll explain that cue prior to the lift, right? And so when they finish, I'll say, look, here's what I saw. You tended to arch a little bit like a bow and arrow rather than straighten the line. Remember we did that plank earlier? Cool. All right, so I want you to make a plank. And the reason why I want you to crush the quarter is to straighten out the middle of that plank.

And so I'm going to say quarter, all right? Go ahead and go. Quarter, quarter, quarter, quarter, quarter, right? Rather than glutes or whatever. And so it really depends what you want the person to do. However, I tend to talk a little bit more through the break and tell them what I'm looking for versus talk to them in the moment. I want a quick cue, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick, all right? Because it's really hard to focus on multiple things. Now, back into the analogies with things, all right? I like to use analogies personally because, so we have internal cues, external cues, analogies, all right?

I think analogies are one of the easiest things for me to use because it allows me to express my creativity. And I have fun with it. And people tend to remember them. And my rule and all goal with when people come in is that they have retention. They feel better and they have retention. And they're able to do the things they want to do. So if you guys want to squat or deadlift, by all means, that's cool, all right? If you want to go climb a mountain, by all means, that's cool, right? But here's the suggestion that I'm giving you to make it so you're not going to hurt yourself or provoke your problem as you go through your activities and things start to go on the mend.

And so as long as I get you to remember what I need you to remember and do the things I need you to do, perfect. And so analogies sometimes work. The analogy I usually use, if someone really doesn't understand the spreading the floor with the squatting or deadlifting because floor tension, which I will cover later, floor tension is probably one of the most important things in my opinion, all right? So what I look for, number one, is that we sit there and talk, all right? We do a little bit of like I'm going to mirror you, you mirror me, and so on. And let's just get into an athletic position right there.

Like the top part of your, like the middle to top part of your deadlift, okay? Hang right there. You don't have a weight in your hand. Let's just hang, all right? So I might explain that rooting into the sand. I might talk about spreading the floor, ripping the rubber, and they're like, oh, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. And so sometimes I'll go right into the bathroom and I'll pull out a piece of toilet paper that's about two feet long. And so I'll put it down on the ground right there and I'll say, go ahead and stand on both ends of this thing, okay? This toilet paper right here is going to be, do you see the perforation right in the middle?

Yeah, I see it. Cool. All right. This perforation, like this is the only last piece of toilet paper in the entire earth, okay? I need one, you need one. But do not tear mine. Do not shred it. Like if you move your feet, you're going to shred this toilet paper up, all right? I don't want my toilet paper shredded because I want a little hole in it and stuff because your finger's getting in and it's not cool, all right? And you don't want it either. And the only way you're going to separate this perforation right in the middle, is to attempt to tension both sides, all right? Turn your feet, but do not let your feet turn.

Grab the floor, grab the toilet paper between your foot and the floor and attempt to rip it right at the perforation. And once they do that, they're like, oh, I get it, right? And so I take the toilet paper away. And I say, look, toilet paper, okay? If you fray yours, if you fray one of them, that's your piece and your hand's going to get all muddy, okay? I'm taking the perfect one. And so if you're attempting to turn the floor, stick to the floor. If you're not stuck to the floor, your feet will turn. You're trying to turn the earth. Grab the earth and turn the damn earth, all right? The toilet paper just happens to be between your feet and the earth, all right?

So that's an example of analogy that might work. Another analogy that might work, and this is more for a corrective exercise that I use, where all I need them to do is press their hand into their knee, all right? Imagine like a dead bug, all right, where you face up and have them push their hand into their knee so they're supplying some tension. Because I know a lot of you have probably done dead bugs or someone told you to do dead bugs and you're like, oh, this is so easy. I can just weigh my arms and legs around and like talk to my friends, so on. Okay, that's low tension, all right? That's low tension.

It's not setting your dimmer switch to high so you can fine-tune it to low. And so sometimes I'll keep them a little bit more in tension. And so I'll put their hand right on the inner part of like your, say, that magic teardrop muscle, that VMO right there. And so they'll put their hand right there. And so you can actually do the seated if you want to, not when you're driving, maybe if you're seated like this, like I am right now at a podcast table. And so put the hand on the VMO on the opposite side so you have to contact the inner part. Now, imagine there's a ladybug in there. And a ladybug is, I mean, it won't bite you, but if it gets out of the hand, it has a contagious disease that will literally kill the entire earth.

Okay? No matter what you do, wherever you move, wherever you roll, whatever arm moves or leg moves or whatever in your dead bug position, your dead bug exercise, if that ladybug comes out, you killed everybody. Okay? Squish it. It won't bite you. Squish it. And so this is, again, an analogy. It takes a long time for me to explain it. However, they remember, like, remember that dumbass, like, ladybug story that you had, as well as that stupid toilet paper one? I remember that. These are things people resonate with and remember because they're unique situations and dumbass conversations. And so that's usually what I'll do if I have trouble getting someone to remember something or they're not very easily coachable.

Some people are very easily coachable in this and other people need a little bit more coaxing into it. So next, I'll usually ask them, or actually in the moment of all this stuff, I'll ask them what they feel. And so usually when I work with people with injuries, it's important to realize that sometimes motor programs just go a little haywire. All right? We say that movement gets corrupted by pain. And so bending forward shouldn't really hurt on most people. Deadlifting shouldn't hurt on most people. But sometimes it does. By the way, surprisingly, if there's any lifters out there listening to this, if you deadlift and squat and all you feel at the end of that workout or into the next day is soreness into your back and hamstring, you got some patterning problems.

Okay? And so one day, that may catch up with you. I'm not going to say it will because pain is a very unique thing. It's very complex. However, it may catch up with you. And so the main engine of the body is the glutes. Allow the glutes and the lats to work. All right? You should be sore there. And I've had multiple people come in. They're like, yeah, I did lift every day, but I only get sore in my back and my hamstrings. Okay, we got shit to work on here. Okay? And so when I tend to teach things again, especially through that day one, day two of loading people again, I'll do all these cues, these external or internal in case I really need to.

I'll do analogies. And so I'll have them start to move. And so when they start to move, it's under really not a lot of load. I might give them a little bit, maybe like a 35, 44-pound kettlebell from a block usually if we're deadlifting. And I'll say, look, let's just try it. What do you feel working? And so number one, I'll note their face. Okay, and so if their face is like, well, you know, like I, you know, I don't feel a lot right now. I'm like, I had a bad day. And I'll say, okay, pause right there. Rip the floor. I want you to make it so the floor tension is so absurd and it gets your glutes to work so much that the weight is irrelevant.

And so when they start doing it, they're like, yeah, okay, I feel it. Good. Cool. Got it. That's rule number one is make sure that you have, again, we're going into a movement which you guys are familiar with. Let's not make it the same familiar experience that you have because that's maybe what put you here. So why don't we focus on turning the floor first? Now what do you feel? Oh, I feel my butt cheeks on. Great. Cool. If it moves at all from your butt cheeks into your back, into your hamstrings, into your groin, into your thigh, you tell me and we pause. Some people won't tell you. They'll keep going.

They're grinders, right? And so at the end, they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they hold their back a little bit and it's like, did that hurt you in the back? And they said, yeah, yeah, yeah. I started hurting my back. And I said, why do you keep going? They're like, I can push through it. What's not what I asked you to do? Okay. Understand this is a give and take situation here. Okay. I'm trying to help you. I only want you to feel it in a big old handful of cheek. Only. If you feel it anywhere else, we stop. Do you have that? Yes, we got it. Cool. One rep. Two rep. Three rep. Good. You still feel it in the cheek?

Yeah. Good, good, good. Cool. Cheek, cheek, cheek, cheek. Rip, rip, rip, rip. Cool. Go ahead and pause there. All of them are in cheeks? Good. Perfect. We can load you a little bit more now. Okay. So asking them where they're feeling it is actually fairly important in my opinion. I'm not trying to internalize the cue, but I'm trying to give when the volume starts to increase, I want to know where their effort is coming from. If it's coming from a different area, I need to scale back a little bit. I don't need to push through. I don't need to add more weight. I don't need to make it more challenging most of the time, although sometimes making it more challenging actually helps out.

However, probably for most people who are, if you feel unexperienced with playing with this, maybe scaling back a little bit, we can scale this person back into a lower risk, higher reward type of movement, but still a hinge. And so we might do a cable pull through or a band pull through. I call it threading the needle. We might do a barbell hip thruster. We might do a kettlebell hip thruster. We might do just a banded, like a resistance band glute workout. We might do bridges. We might do double leg, single leg bridges. We might do goat bags. There's so many ways to progress these things down.

I've even found people that they work very well doing the stallion versus a standing hip hinge. A stallion is basically a hip hinge movement from the knees, and you can load them up from a band or something like that, or even a kettlebell. And so these are all options, but it comes down to if the person is accepting the cue that you're giving, they will feel it in the area that they're supposed to. And then we have something to build upon. If they don't feel in the area that is intended, you need to change your cue or their tolerance of that movement has exceeded. Say they feel it after five reps only, and then we start to cluster that set a little bit.

Maybe we do four, a little break, four, a little break, four, a little break. Oh, hey, you did about 25 of those things. Does that hurt? Nope, not at all. Okay, let's do 25 in a row. Oh, it hurt after five. So you can cluster it a little bit. Okay? And so you've got to get a little creative when you're doing your programming. It's not just all or nothing. It's not no pain, no gain. It's that you should feel in the area that is intended and use the cues that work for you. Now, how do you know which cues work for you? You probably got to work with somebody. Honestly, if you're a lifter, it's very hard to cue yourself.

It's very hard to be a patient. All right? Now, I'm not saying it's not possible to use cues for yourself because, again, it is. I think I might have misspoke there a second ago. It's hard to make up your own. It's hard to coach yourself. Very hard to coach yourself. It's hard to be a patient to yourself as well. And so I would suggest go to somebody, let them do the hard work of finding what cues work for you, and then you remember the cues. So when I have people leave, if we're talking about floor tension there, I say, which cue worked for you? Oh, the toilet paper really worked. Cool. So when you're lifting, we're going to go from a block with a kettlebell first, and then we might scale you back to a barbell maybe in a week or so, and I want you to imagine tearing the toilet paper, but this time the toilet paper is so damn thick, you have to generate so much tension through that toilet paper on the floor that the weight picks itself up.

Okay? And so every time you lift, set up, toilet paper, bend the bar, stand tall. Toilet paper, bend, stand tall. So these are maybe three cues, right? Let's not overcomplicate this stuff here, but you can see all this conversation. It's been about 20 minutes in the podcast now or so. All this conversation with an athlete might take five to 10 minutes, all right, just to make sure that we're going the right direction. Just because we're throwing random cues and suggestions at them doesn't mean they're going to get it. Understand that. So when you start to load somebody, make sure that they have a rough 80% ability to do every rep perfect or pain-free.

Actually, I don't want to say perfect, let's just say pain-free or symptom-free or in the way that it's intended. Roughly 80%, all right? If it seems like every single rep is a grinder and it takes a lot of effort to really feel good, then I think you have to really buck up and just be a big boy or big girl. All right? Understand that sometimes what your mind thinks that you can lift is not actually what your body is tolerant to. I'm not saying we're not resilient. I'm not saying that the body's not able to do all the things we're wanting it to do. And I'm not saying that the body is really amazing.

And I'm not saying the body is just not truly amazing. You know, we can get it to do a lot of cool things. We have a lot of people who are like fantastic athletes. They run fast. They climb mountains and so on. However, when it's not tolerant of that movement yet, you have to be a big boy or big girl and just understand that you haven't done it well in a little bit of time. Maybe it's going to take a little bit of time, maybe a month or so, to really start to scale back up. I would have a rough rule that if you've been off of a lift for a month, it's going to take you a month to return. If you're going to be off of a lift for a year, it's going to take you a year to fully return.

All right? The accelerated process right there, I don't think it's necessarily a good idea because there's a lot of deconditioning components which have happened. The muscles have decreased in size and strength. The tendons have also done the same and actually the bony structure as well. And so you run the risk of having another type of injury just because your mind's like, dude, I feel good. Let's just crush it, right? That's not necessarily the case. And so you have to be more responsible about it and understand that this is a long game that you're playing, not a short game. If you want to lift, there's no quicker way to lose your gains and strength than having an injury.

And it's nice to say that like, you know, you came from a heroic like zero to hero all of a sudden within like two months and you had this amazing story, but it's not extremely responsible in my opinion. I think going into the goals of understanding why you lift, why you're looking for your gains, why you're looking to become strong, I think is an important part. The why behind why you do it is important. And so I've always posed the question of how much is too much strength to have a higher risk than reward ratio for your tolerance level. If you invest in the stock market, there's high risk, lower stocks.

All right. Based upon your age and your income, you kind of go in between. It's nice to say everyone's like, let's just go high risk because I want to be rich. Well, if you lose all your money, what's going to happen to you? All right. Do you have a buffer there? Some people have a buffer and they can put a certain percentage in those high risk ones because they're okay with losing that money. They can take the risk. However, for me personally, my goal setting for myself is that I don't give a shit about being able to squat X amount, deadlifting X amount. I just want to be able to feel good, look good, and be able to play baseball is all.

All right. And I don't need to be a power lifter to do that. I don't need to do bulking to do that either. I don't need to have five days a week in the gym to do that. However, if that's what you like to do and that's what you're passionate about, that's a whole different story. Okay. It's about the why. If you love it, do it. Okay. I hope that's not a tangent too much of the conversation. We're going to come back into tensioning here in a second. Now, as we get into, maybe we'll get into squatting, I think, because I wrote down mainly squatting and deadlifting in this module and buddy awareness are three categories that you should go into the, if you go into the show notes, by the way, there is access to this document.

It's going to be available for everybody who wants it. It has a lot of the, I wrote down a lot of the categories of what I just kind of talked about. I apologize if there's spelling errors, but I don't tend to spell check my work very often. But I'll do my best to read it a couple times. And so, the three things that I wrote at the bottom is deadlifting, squatting, and buddy awareness. Okay, we're going to take a short break here just to, I'm going to brain break this. Everyone brain breaks, just chill. Okay, just chill. Take a breath. So, I want to take this moment to talk about a couple workshops I'm putting on.

I know you probably heard me over the last couple weeks, or if it was your first time, welcome. Welcome to the mid-session break where everyone's like, maybe I should do that 15-second fast forward. No, don't do that. Don't do that. Okay, this is actually really important, and there's things that I do believe in strongly over the years, and people have asked, well, what workshop should I take? And I mention a few, which I won't mention at this moment, and I say, because this is going to sound really biased, but mine. Come to mine. And they're like, no, no, no, mine. And the reason why I say that is because I really do feel like I have a lot of great things to share.

I feel like I've practiced many different ways that I feel like I'm at the apex of my game, right now. I'm sure I could get better. Everybody could get better, but I think I have a lot of things to share, and I have a good thought process, I think, that goes along with learning how I trained the interns over the last couple years. And I think they've all walked away with a good mindset of how to use certain tools, certain strategies, certain treatments that are not married together. A lot of times the treatments kind of, they say, hey, we're going to do this type of treatment for everybody. This is our system.

This is a conglomeration of systems. You have to learn to use things when things are needed. So this workshop is called Putting It All Together, okay? I might show you how to refine some of the things you already know, and you might teach me things, and I might show you things that I think are better than yours. Either way, though, we're going to all come out feeling better about how to manage people and how to get them to the efficient outcome that they're looking for, not the long-treatment plans that we're looking for, or some of us anyways. So there is two versions. There's a student one, which is May 30th.

It's only one day. We're going to have a barbecue afterwards. Everybody chill, hang, bring not your favorite potato salad, because no one wants potato salad at a barbecue. We're going to have some beer, some tomahawk steaks, as well as maybe some tri-tip, because it'll keep costs a little bit down. Plus, it's good to really sear it up on there. That's only one day. It's going to be capped about 20 people. April 25th, 26th, there will be a doctor version, CEU. I would strongly suggest first- and second-year doctors, more so than anybody else, because we're not stuck in our ways yet. I'm the same way.

12 hours for California, so please come, especially if you run your own practice and you're looking to get some amazing testimonials from people. I'll show you how to get those, okay, by some really efficient care. So please reach out to me. Again, that is April 25th, 26th. On the Saturday, there will be the barbecue, same as with the students, too. So please reach out to me on Instagram, that is performancehb, or email me, which is even better, seb, that's S-E-B, at p2sportscare.com. And so I think I'll start with squatting here. I might not get into deadlifting based upon the time, but just know that a lot of the same cues will carry over, or a lot of the same visual, a lot of clues, we'll say, because we've already gone through some cues.

We're going to go through clues now, all right? And so as I mentioned earlier, squatting, deadlifting, pushing, pulling, running, whatever, a lot of times there is a loss of tension through a couple different aspects of the movement, lift, activity, whatever. So sometimes people lose tension at certain ranges, all right? Some people lose tension with certain speeds, sometimes beyond a certain rep, sometimes a certain weight. And again, I addressed that 80% rule earlier. And so let's talk about ranges first. There's a thought that has been around for a while, or a standard, let's just say, that's been around for a while, where it says, you should squat below parallel.

I think that's bullshit, okay? Nobody is required to do anything of certain depth or range. There's certain ranges that'd be nice to access, okay? However, I know when people say, like, you should be able to squat past, you know, parallel, like you're asked to grass, well, watch videos of people who do that out there. And you'll see they're very strong through certain ranges, the top ranges, as soon as they pass parallel and get asked to grass, let's just say, they lose their ability to generate tension. I'm not saying they can't acquire that, but their strength within a certain range is different than in the other range.

And I'm not necessarily saying that it's not a natural human movement to go ass to grass or go into a, like a, like pop down into a squat. But I'm saying, I don't think we need it with 500 pounds on our back. I don't think we need it with 200 pounds on our back. And there's going to be a range down there where we're kind of hitting a tipping point. I'd say 35, 40 pounds is probably, yeah, sure, right? At some point in your life, you're going to pick up a bag of dog food, which is about 40 pounds. And you might have to get it up off the ground and put it up onto the counter. That is an acceptable range for a human of this era.

Now, I'm not saying that other people didn't used to build Stonehenge and stuff like that. Maybe that was important back then, but I don't personally think it's needed now. And so don't pigeonhole yourself into a certain range because you're still going to get some of your gains and the strength improvement you're looking for if you keep within your power range and explore the other range with lighter weight or change of speed or working on tension. Hope everyone understands that, okay? Also, too, we talked about speed. Speed of movement, sometimes people can go really, they'll go really slow on the way down, which I really like because it gives them the ability to feel the floor and to grab the bar.

Usually, I'll look at people's fingers during a barbell squat, barbell back squat, and I'll look to see if they're actually grabbing the bar and pulling the bar down into their body. It's like they're trying to squish their body under the barbell, all right? Or they're trying to white knuckle the bar, make your knuckles white or crush the bar, all right? And so these are things that I'll look for and their ability to do them better tends to improve as they slow down. Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't do things quickly at some point. However, if you have not fine-tuned your dimmer switch and been able to create high tension and then dial the tension back appropriate to the speed, the duration of time that you're lifting, as well as the weight that you have with you, I don't know if I would speed you up yet if you don't have that fine-tune yet.

And so I would prefer people work on tension at variable speeds and then feel comfortable with that so it's like they've been doing it forever and they feel good about it and then they start to add a little bit more of speed or weight with it, okay? So certain repetitions, we talked about clustering the sets earlier. If you have, some people have pain with, it's like good with five, six, seven reps, eight, every time, every time that eighth rep or hey, we're talking about running mileage, seven miles, it's always that one. Maybe we need to cluster that up a little bit. We can still get you to seven miles.

We can still get you to like eight plus reps, but maybe we need to take a mini break in the middle. Not long, mini break. 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, whatever, right? There's no shame in the game, all right? You're getting your weights in, you're getting your gains and the ability to generate tension and kind of clear your mind rather than to hit that struggle rep so far, you're still gonna get some big volume in, all right? In my understanding with weightlifting in particular, volume is king now, I thought. Or just overall weight or poundage lifted, I forget what it's called. But I'm under the impression that that's the thing now, is it not?

You might have to double check me on that. But I would rather play the long game with people and make sure they can still lift a challenging amount of weight five days a week versus one very heavy and just go for broke. Now, with certain weights again, that is where people tend to lose tension again, is this one is a little bit more challenging, I think, because unless you got your cues really dialed in and you have your tension points, your hand and your foot grips really dialed in, it's hard to cue them in that movement because it's a struggle point. I won't address this too much, but just make sure that you know that it's there.

And if you're dealing with a problem, I'd suggest you stay below 80% 1RM for a little bit of time until you have these cues really dialed in and you really feel the tension and you don't have to think about it, it's just second nature before you actually go into it again. So let me address again the floor tension real quick. Number one is that usually this is what I'll do when I have people sit up for a squat, okay? First of all, we'll teach that floor tension. Next is, they'll ask probably about foot position. Where should your foot position be? Well, it's really individualistic, but here's a general rule that I'll do.

I'll have them stand up really tall, crush the quarter between their butt cheeks like your human slot machine, make nickels, and then rock back and forth on their heels and toes. Do your feet feel like they kind of flare out a little bit? And at what point do they stop flaring? And then go ahead and stop. Cool. This is where we have max glute contraction and extension of the hips to where you're not hindering yourself at the top of the lift. Good. Don't change your feet. Now we're going to go into a shortstop squat. Practice turning the floor a little bit. Pull yourself down to the floor. Grab the floor like you have little gecko feet.

Rip the floor in half and then pull yourself down to the floor. And then turn so hard that you propel the button of your hat to the ceiling. Do that 10 times. Now we'll put a bar on your back. Now put your hands on the bar there. I don't care if you go high bar or low bar, whatever you pick. I don't really care. Break the bar in half and pull the bar downwards. I want you to actually try to break your traps with the bar. Is that exhausting? Yeah, it is. Cool. Turn the floor. Rip the rubber. Rip, rip, rip, rip, rip. Good. Pull yourself down to the floor. Okay. So usually at this point, we've gone to the point where a couple cues are working for them.

Let's just say bend the bar and rip the floor. Stand tall. Or ceiling. Skyward. Whatever. Jump. Okay. Pull the bar. Pull the bar so hard that you pull yourself down on the floor. Turn the floor so hard that you propel your head to the ceiling. So at this point, I'll start using those cues and I'll let them pattern out with an empty barbell. And then we'll start to scale weight a little bit here. And so people might be thinking, well, this is going to take forever. Well, we've done a little warm-up most of the time. I've done some glute priming as well as belly wall stiffness. So usually there's some type of side wall, front wall, back wall.

If you're not doing a specific warm-up for this type of torso tension with lifting, I really think you should. And you should do some type of glute primer. Your glutes should be beyond reasonable doubt, quote-unquote, on. And by the way, a lot of the glute exercises that people give you, like silly bridges and stuff that you're kind of talking to a friend and just like, no. Okay. You should be struggling. Struggling. 80% perceived effort near failure in that glute exercise. Something simple on the ground. You can do glute exercise. You can do bridges, but it might take you two minutes to get there and put a little weight on you.

Okay. You might have to put something in your hands to generate tension. It should be exhausting. It gets your heart rate up and then we're going to go straight into something which helps pattern the movement of the day, which in this case is squatting. We're going to work on those tension cues that we worked on. All right. Go with no barbell. Go to a barbell and then start to slowly add weight. Now we're into our working sets. Does everyone understand where we're going here? Okay. You can do the same thing with a deadlift too. By the way, I know that some of you have questioned why do you do it from a block or why do you put plates underneath the barbell?

Well, I don't think most people have the ability to go that low. I questioned Dan John before and actually it's funny. I wrote an article on bodybuilding.com on this or on aspects of the quote unquote safer way to deadlift and so I just panel interviewed a couple people. I did Stu McGill. I did Dan John. I did myself, I guess. I did Brian Carroll and I did Cody D-Mac and so three of the five people said one simple thing. Elevate the bar. Okay. I know in a setting where you have a group it's like, well, no one else is doing it. Why would I do that? Well, be a big boy or big girl. Do it for yourself.

Most people cannot generate tension through that depth. Their hips lose the range of motion and they start to dump some of the movement into the spine. Now, if you want to end up having some spinal issues, by all means, I don't care and I'm not saying that you, oh, I guess I shouldn't say I don't care. I do care but I'm saying it's your choice is I guess what I'm saying but I tend to, again, my goal for me, this is just for me, is I want a high reward, low risk exercise and you adding that extra little bit of motion is not always conducive and so when I teach people to lift again, I usually put them onto a block first, about six inches elevated.

All right? It puts them into a range which is more acceptable for most people. We usually go into a pseudo-sumo stance. A standard stance is okay for some people. A wider stance is okay as well. Just as long as you can keep tension through the range, it doesn't matter again. It's really up to what you can individually tolerate but if you insist on going from the deck, that is okay but just know it is not what I would suggest for most people. All right? Those barbells and the plates are not designed from God. All right? They're not designed as the ideal structure to be lifting. They're not designed as the perfect height.

They're designed upon a design. All right? If they invented them with a diameter that was six inches larger, I probably wouldn't be saying the things I'm saying or I might just say let's put a one-inch block under you. Let's put a phone book and so just understand that you have different body mechanics or geometrical ratios between one person and second person and so a lot of people have experienced back pain or hip pain. They say, well, it's the same go-on-go-in story. I was deadlifting or squatting or helping a friend move or I was sitting a lot and we end up creating a problem. A lot of deadlifting and squatting can create back pain.

I'm not saying it does create back pain but people have stories. All right? We can't refute this. People have stories of hurting themselves while doing that movement. They felt a pop. They went to the floor. They're backwards and spasm for a couple days and it just happens. All right? And I know there's always a push of load it, load people, load people. I'm not saying the pendulum swung too far that way but I'm saying that make sure that the movement and the load is appropriate for the person's problem. It's not always appropriate and sometimes the range isn't appropriate. We can certainly teach someone to deadlift and by the way, I've had back pain if you don't know it already.

I still deadlift today because it's helpful for me. All right? However, I don't deadlift from the floor right now because I don't think it's helpful in my rehab and my strength training. I'm not gaining really that much extra to change my life. I'll access deeper range through a squat, through the hips but I'll do it with lighter loads or less reps or lower speeds or to a box. Okay? There's different ways to do this. All right? I've said before there's different ways to skin a cat but at the same time someone got really mad at me for saying that. I didn't know people got offended by that thing.

It was, what did that, I don't know where that came from, the phrase. Anyways, there's different ways to tackle the same problem is all I mean. I apologize for the analogy if you have a cat but just understand that there's different ways to do these things. Okay? Now if we're going through, if you're going through a deadlift, again, hands are important. I want you to sandwich the bar like you're a lobster clawing it. That was a Brian Carroll and a Stu McGill cue. Crush oranges under your armpits. That's a Dan John cue. And stand tall. So, I don't believe with the dip, grip, and rip anymore. I know that's out there but I've seen enough people have really terrible form and wear back, back, belts, back belts during which, and I kind of wonder why.

I mean, I don't tend to think that most people have the training to actually do these things with that recklessness on a daily basis. Most people don't have the training. I don't do it either. I don't do it all the time. Okay? So, I think that's important to realize that are you an athlete or are you just a recreational athlete just trying to do hard work? I'm that second one and I think most of us are. Now, the last thing I'll cover in this audio format and this is also in the document too is buddy awareness. I do suggest people lift with buddies or coaches and here's the things that I usually look for and I think your buddies should be looking for it too is number one, facial expressions.

All right? I believe in to, for the most part when we're training, I believe in the no struggle rep with certain types of movements and so sometimes, obviously, you got to challenge yourself. I'm not saying you should never challenge yourself but you can kind of see when people are starting to lose their shit and if we're working with someone with a problem or an ache and pain, sometimes this is the point where we should cluster the set. So, facial expressions, smiling, grimacing, eyebrows, lips, lip biting, okay? Grimacing, kind of like the skin under their chin starts to tent. So, smiles for me would mean that there's not enough tension and it's too easy for them.

Grimacing means that we're starting to hit that point. Eyebrows and lip biting means that we're partway there in my opinion and so just observing this with your friends and just making sure that your lifting buddy is like, okay, pause there, cool, 30 seconds break, go again, right? So, these are reasons why your buddies should be there in my opinion. They should know what you tend to do when you're falling apart or if you have a problem, all right? There's no easier way to lose your gains and lose your momentum than having an injury, okay? So, be responsible. Second is talking. If they're talking through their lift or looking around, then they are, probably not paying attention to their floor contacts and their grips.

They're not deforming the objects that are not them. They're just going through the movement, all right? They probably have low tension and they're not being challenged either. So, make sure that lifting, at least lifting in my office, it's an exposure to improving the way people are navigating loads throughout life. I'm not always talking about barbells. I talk about implements, all right? And if I'm getting someone to just be good at lifting a bag of dog food, I might set them up with a water bottle and I want to make sure that they're paying attention to how they're doing it, okay? Because if they've come in with a back or a hip problem, then maybe I need to get them to be a little bit more diligent about that movement until it becomes seamless, all right?

And if you're lifting heavyweights, I would say you'd probably have to pay attention to what you're doing and be attentiveness to your cues and your floor contacts and your bar contacts at all times until the bar is off you. What I usually tell people with, they're like, why are you being so neurotic about this? And I say, look, if you're trying to save a kid from under a car, do you look around? Do you talk to a friend? Because that's a one rep max right there. You got one chance. You don't even breathe. You're just trying to pick the damn thing up, right? Your sole attention is on that. And actually, I think what's the value of lifting as well as sports is that we're so distracted nowadays with like phones and people emailing and bullshit like that.

This is the time and place where you can pay 100% attention to the thing that you're doing. I mean, half the time people go home and they talk to their spouse and they're on their phone doing it, right? Pay attention to what you're doing, all right? This will help out with other aspects of your life. And so make sure that you're paying attention 100% to your cues in that lift, especially if you're being challenged. Number four is three, I guess. Well, let's just say looking around was three because that's what listening might think. Number four is being silly, okay? Again, that's on the same thread as the last ones, looking around, talking, and so on.

It's like, it's okay to be silly between, but just get at it when you're actually under a barbell if you have an implement in your hand, all right? If you're lifting, get at it and stop. What, it's only about 30 seconds or so of paying attention, pay attention to it and do it. Lastly is for the coach. Notice where you're standing. Don't stand in front of the person. Stand to the side or stand behind and coach them that way. It distracts them, okay? I know that people might stand in front of people, instead of in front of people lifting if they have to, but if you have the opportunity, go to the side of them.

You can look at sagittal form or movements that way a little better, and they're not going to be looking at you. They should be paying attention to something else anyways. They should be staring at a hole in the corner of the room. So they shouldn't be looking at you and you shouldn't be locking eyes and having that moment at that point in time. So these are the things that I would probably pay attention to. And let me recap again. So number one, dial in your attention and make sure that you know what your goals are, okay? If your goals are not really to be big and massive, wonder why you're going to the gym so often and why you're doing so much effort, okay?

Again, my goal is to just feel good, look good, and be able to play baseball. I don't need to go to the gym five days a week for that. If you're in contact with an object, deform that object, crush it, break it, bend it, move it. If the object is more supportive than you, you will not move it, but it will help you create some internal stiffness. Internal versus external cueing, understand the difference and which ones are better and which ones work for you. Analogies, if you're struggling to really have a cue work for you, maybe an analogy will work better. Knowing what you feel, you should feel effort from a certain region of the body prior to another one.

If you are dead lifting and you said, I feel it in my wrist before I feel, my forearm feels like it's burning before my glutes and my back or my hamstrings or leg do or whatever, down there and I'd say, okay, pause this for a second. Let's just figure out what's going on. Know where you're supposed to feel it. Know when it's appropriate to load weights. That's usually going to be after some type of movement competency. I've listed some things on the document for squatting and dead lifting and I will do a video for floor tension, implement tension, as well as some different implements you can use.

Kettlebells, I don't have a trap bar so I won't be able to show that. I'll do barbell and I'll do vision as well. I'll do it mainly for dead lifting. I'll probably dabble a little bit in squatting but most people are interested in dead lifting it seems. Then use the buddy system. If you're looking for those videos, again, go to the show notes, sorry, go to the notes under the podcast player that you're at. If you don't understand, if for some reason your podcast app doesn't have text or writing below it, just go to my website p2sportscare.com and look up tension clues and cues or tension cues or tension clues or whatever and hit search.

I have a little podcast section that will generate at some point, it'll generate this podcast, just search through a little bit. That is where I'll have an opportunity to download this stuff. By the way, if you are a, I haven't decided exactly what I'm going to do, how I'm going to distribute this but I know that people might be interested in one topic like the hips that we went over like two weeks ago or the shoulder only or just the tension cueing. If you're like a lifter, you might only care about this one thing in particular. I don't know if I'm going to have you go directly to it. I'm not quite sure because I don't want to make more work for myself and I'd rather just disseminate these things via email format and so you will get an email but you got to put your email in and make sure that it's a valid email.

If it's not a valid email, you ain't going to get it. You might get the hip first, then the shoulder, and then the tension. I'm not sure yet but maybe I'll be able to clean this up. I'll talk to my tech guy and see how we can make it easy for everybody but I don't want to make extra work for myself and I hope you guys understand that part. Now as we start to finish up this podcast, I will recap again that you guys, at least the clinicians out there, by the way, this is not intended for lay public. You won't get anything from it probably. This is more intended for clinicians. The students, the first 50 people, you're going to have an opportunity to get that a lot, the videos that Cody DMACC did on this from ProCyro Online CE.

I strongly suggest you do it. If you text me via Instagram or in person or on email and say, hey, I need to figure out what I'm going to do with practice and I'm lacking these skills, what I do, I'm going to tell you, you should have done this. If you're looking for clinical pearls, this is one of them, okay? So RHM podcast, Strength 25, you'll be able to access that way. Again, the first 50 people. If you're an athlete or a lay public and you like this podcast, follow my Instagram, okay? That is at performancehb. I do have some free audios available for hip, piriformis, low back, and it covers a lot of kind of like a similar format like this.

Like there's a lot of topics to cover that you can't just cover on Instagram. And I believe in audio format, honestly, for most things because people are busy. They got to drive or you can run and lift and listen to it, okay? Don't listen to it when you're lifting heavy. And so just go on there and message me and tell me what problem you're dealing with and see if I have an audio for it. If you are local in Huntington Beach or in Orange County, California, Southern California, just come in, okay? I'd love to say there's like things that you guys can look on videos and documents and have all the answers on it.

You won't, all right? Just the real thing is that, and this is that, again, that big boy conversation that I believe that everybody should have. If you're struggling with something, you have some back pain, hip pain, you're trying to improve your lifts, whatever the heck it might be, okay? And if someone were to ask you, okay, if money was not an issue, what do you think the best situation was? Well, I wish I could get a coach and the coach could have me two days a week and blah. Do it. Do it for yourself. Give yourself a chance, all right? Most of the time people don't need ongoing like direction with these things.

They just need a little bit of guidance, all right? And so, most of the time, people who are looking to resolve some back or hip problems, they only need like five, six, seven times, if that. They can probably feel better within a first couple visits, but probably, if you're a lifter, you're going to ask about tension. How do I do this? How do I do that? How do I scale that? And it's more of a college course on it, and so that's what I tend to promote, at least in my office. One to two times, you should feel significant improvement. 30% would be the bottom rung, 50 to 75% would be amazing and a bonus, all right?

Now, after that, we have to mitigate risk by developing tension, and that would be more of a workout style type of treatment. And again, not everybody does this, but you will find healthcare providers around the country, movement specialists, as we'd kind of say, they will do this for you, okay? I don't have a personal directory for this, and I don't know everybody, but if you go on to, I'll make a list at the very bottom of this podcast here. Again, in that same, if you find the show notes somehow, I'll make some directories right there. There's three directories in particular that I would guide you towards, all right?

Hopefully, those people can help you, and hopefully they can resonate the same kind of message that I'm doing with you guys. Last message before we leave is that next week, we're going to go over a low-back case that I think you guys are going to be really interested in. We're going to deviate a little bit away from the student interview, at least for the last podcast of the year, because I think there's a good message in this one, and I don't want to hold off on it too long, because as it kind of goes, the longer you have a problem, or the longer you've been removed from a problem, the easier it is to forget all the details.

So I want to get all the nitty-gritty details quickly. And the very last thing here is that I was informed just today that there is a rehab to performance, the R2P. There is going to be a workshop, multiple spots throughout the country, before the symposium, which is in May. I've been to the symposium once at the end of May. It was really good. But I'm not sure the drive behind this. I don't know all the particular details, but Cody D-Mac called me this morning and he said, hey, we're attempting as the R2P group to get multiple satellite small workshops, single-day workshops, four to six hours or so.

They don't even know the price yet. They don't even know the date. But they're like, there's things that could be really improved on from student populations. It's really targeted at students mainly. You can have some docs come in, but I know that students will really benefit from it because the most common thing that I hear from them anyways is like, we learn all these things in school, but we don't know how to apply them all. We've learned a couple of corrective exercises, but we don't know how to use them. And that just comes from experience. And so what I'm guessing what is probably going to happen is that within about four to six hours or so in that day, we're just going to bombard you with all of these productive ways to use these tools that you've learned, basically curating things for you.

And so the rough date is supposed to be after February 2020 and before May. And so rough right around that timeline, you can figure out if you're going to be available or not. And do not email me about the details because I do not know them. And so I'd suggest you go to the R2P site that is rehab2, the number performance.com and just find there's going to be a form in there and just fill it out and say, hey, look, I heard about the workshops that might come. Give me all the information. I heard it on Restoring Human Movement podcast from Sebastian. So, but that's the last part that we're going to cover today.

Thanks for being part of the movement. I'm very thankful for everybody sharing and supporting the podcast over the years. Remember, in January, we are going to have that little meetup. I guess I guess I do keep adding things, don't I? Sorry. I guess all the housekeeping's at the end. There's a little meetup that I'm putting on. It's a non-formal thing. You just hang out. We're going to hang out at a bar with food, kid friendly. We're going to call it the Movement Meetup. It's in Huntington Beach at Sandy's, 5 p.m. on Saturday, January 18th. There's no, I'm going to see if I can get some docs there, some people I've had on the podcast before.

I know a lot of the students from SCU are going to be coming, at least from the R2P Club. It's just to hang out. I know I've gotten a lot of questions over the months about random business-related questions, podcast questions, clinical questions. I would love to have me as well as some other docs that I think you guys can really learn from at the thing. It's just a couple hours. I'll stay as long as you want to. By the way, if no one shows up, I will be there alone eating and drinking alone for two hours, which I don't mind, it's right by my house. I'm going to be there. You don't need to confirm that you're going to be there.

Just come. It should be a good old time. We'll just bro down. No formalities. Dress however you want. It's right by the sand. It's an epic spot. Sandy's, right at the end of the pier in Huntington Beach, 5 to 7, January 18th, for the Movement Meetup. The Movement. Thanks for being part of the Movement Movement. I'll see you guys next time.