E47 | Lee Taft Follows Up on the Movement Foundations Course

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- New Exercise Database resource launched

- Movement Foundations Course and Exercise Database promotional event

- The Resilient team joins Lee Taft to answer some follow-up questions Lee had from going through the Resilient Movement Foundations Course.

Links:

- Movement Foundations Promotion: https://www.resilientperformance.com/rmf-intro/

- Resilient's Exercise Database Page: https://www.resilientperformance.com/rexdb-intro/

- LeeTaft.com

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Episode Transcription: Lee: [00:00:00] So I'm so fortunate to have the owners and the creators of this course. So I've got with us Dr. Greg Spatz, Dr. Trevor Rappa and Dr. Doug Kechijian and guys, thank you so much for being a part of the show today. Trevor: [00:00:56] Thanks. Appreciate it. Lee: [00:00:59] Absolutely. So let's do this. Let's just go ahead and have you take a second to kind of introduce yourself quickly we'll go through, so I introduce you first, Greg. So you go ahead and introduce yourself a little deeper and maybe talk a little bit about the program and then we'll go right through each one of you. Greg: [00:01:13] Yeah, I'm Greg Spatz, I'm a physical therapist and performance coach, and the three of us started Resilient Performance back in 2015. We all met in physical therapy school and it was sort of a perfect situation for us that we kind of stumbled upon, but before physical therapy school, I was a strengthening conditioning coach with the Arizona Diamondbacks in the minor league system. So I like to say that I wouldn't be here talking to any of you guys right now if it weren't for them because they really introduced me to a lot of the stuff I do now and I mean, I didn't know anything back then. I still feel like I don't, but they've kind of sent me on my path. So that's where I was sort of introduced to anything that we're talking about today, but yeah, happy to be here. Lee: [00:01:57] Awesome. Thank you, Doug. Do you want to go ahead? Doug: [00:02:00] I'm Doug Kechijian, thanks for having us Lee. So I'm the old guy of the group, almost 10 years older than the other guys. But the funny story was how we all met. I was in the library at PT school and I saw this guy who turned out to be Trevor wearing a Mike Boyle strength and conditioning t-shirt and I had interned at Cressey's a couple of years before that and what are the chances that someone, who's wearing a Mike Boyle shirt is not there for physical therapy school. So it turned out that he was in the class behind me. He told me about Greg who had worked for the Diamondbacks and we kind of all had an interest in the performance side of things, then ultimately developed a friendship which turned into a business relationship. So, I work in the New York facility primarily with Resilient and then prior to that, I was in the Air Force where I worked as a para rescue men where we did search and rescue, for the military. So that's kind of shaped a lot of my ideas about preparation and physical training and even like your work as well. So kind of the idea with rehab and our philosophy is you've got to be ready for whatever it is that you need to do and in physical therapy school, we get a lot of the rehab centric stuff, but your progressions with change of direction have been immensely helpful in preparing our athletes. So being able to learn from different fields, I think is, what these conversations are really about. Lee: [00:03:18] That's awesome. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that, Trevor. Go ahead, man. Trevor: [00:03:22] They kind of filled in most of the gaps there and yeah, I'm Trevor Rappa like Doug said, I met Boyle prior to going to PT school and I think like Greg said, it's; meeting in PT school was really fortunate for all of us because we found people who were like-minded and kind of motivated and wanted to and the learning and kind of doing the same things and it's been a really cool, just kind of going through this journey of owning the business and learning more together and figuring out how to help athletes and like learning from other professionals like yourself who have been hugely influential and been great mentors for us. Lee: [00:03:52] Oh, that's great. So you guys have two facilities. Where are, I know you got one in New York City, but where is your second facility? Trevor: [00:04:01] Our second facility is in Chatham, New Jersey. So like Doug said, he works in Manhattan only. I go back and forth between both and then Greg only works at the Chatham location. Lee: [00:04:09] Awesome. Great. Greg, is there any connection with your facility that is primarily baseball oriented? And your background is that connection that happened because of your background? How did that first start to come about? Greg: [00:04:25] Yeah, yeah, definitely. So our New Jersey facility, we rent space inside of a gym called Annex Sports, Performance and Fitness. The owner there, his name is Mickey Bruckner. He's had the business for probably a dozen years at this point, he's been around a long time and he works with a lot of baseball players. He himself played baseball at a pretty high level and then because of that and his interest in baseball, he really liked to focus on the pitching athlete. So he attracted a lot of baseball players and had a few that he wanted somebody to work with and at the time we were only in New York and he was connected through one of his coaches, Eric Mattis, who was a friend of a friend, everybody's kind of knows each other at this point and he would bring a couple of athletes into the city and then eventually it just kind of started a conversation about us moving into the space that he had in New Jersey that took probably about a year to actually happens. But, yeah so my background in baseball definitely kind of created that connection a little bit. If I didn't play baseball and work in baseball at all, I don't know that I would have really been introduced to Mickey. So it's been a fortunate experience. Lee: [00:05:30] That's great. That's cool facility. I was fortunate enough and honored to go down and visit with you guys there and I loved it. It was really nice facility. You got the opportunity to do a lot of things with that space will allow you to do so I'm going to kind of jump into some questions if you guys are cool with this, because I just think I love your philosophy. I love the concepts you use and so Doug, I wanted to ask you. You talk about like this complexity theory. Can you go into that a little bit to give the listeners kind of a little deeper in look as to what you're thinking of this complexity theory? Doug: [00:06:02] Sure. And with that, like, I'm not trying to be esoteric when I talk about it in the course, because you can say, oh, well, like things are so complex to the point that we don't really know anything and what are we supposed to do? And they can become very theoretical and philosophical to a point where we're trying to our audience is coaches and people who actually have to apply information. But the idea with complexity theory is as it pertains to training, we're working with human beings who are very complex and there are so many variables that influence performance, and we've got to figure out as coaches, what are the variables that are actually important and what can we impact? And if you look at like a different field, it can kind of help to enlighten what we're talking about as coaches. So when it comes to complexity, extremes are usually problematic. So if we're talking about even a political thing, like border security, if on the one hand you have people who are saying we shouldn't have any borders, anybody who wants to come in should be able to, without any vetting process, that's like a little bit problematic but so is it also problematic to say let's just put a wall up and not let anybody in. So if we take an extreme position, we can say that like we probably shouldn't be doing these things. So we're talking about change of direction, and I don't like these dichotomies because I think that most things aren't an either or phenomenon, but for change of direction, it's like, do we only do these kind of open loop, change of direction drills or should we do things like five, 10 fives that are very rehearsed and predictable? And the reality is like most coaches that I talk to aren't doing just one of those things, they're doing a combination of both and there can be a time and a place for both. So like in a rehab setting, for example, like the first time you do change of direction work after an ACL surgery, you're not going to play tag with somebody with five other people who are having just come off an ACL surgery. Like you want to be able to kind of minimize the degrees of freedom, reduce chaos that you're trying to isolate variables in the system. So if it's a knee, you want to see can this person actually produce good angles with their knee, lower the knee so that when they do end up doing a more complex movement pattern we know that what they're doing is really a strategy that's effective and it's not compensation. So, you need to be able to isolate parts of the system to make sure that everything is in working order, but if all you do is just isolate things, that's not what sport is about. So it's always this interplay between how do we take a complex movement and do things that like mimic the game versus break things down into their components. It's basically part whole training and I think that the good coaches have this idea of like intuitively of when to do what? So even like in a military setting, if all we ever did was flow mission profiles where we just parachuted into an objective, we have mock enemy forces that had like paintball rounds and stuff like that, even though that's the most realistic form of training, you don't develop the individual components of a mission. So if you want to get better at jumping, you have to go away for a week and just jump 10 times a day. If you want to get better at shooting, you have to spend hours on the range and do full; it's almost like the idea of block training but if you take block training to its extreme, then you never integrate all the variables. That's kind of complexity and I go into a little bit about like the theory behind it, but the idea behind the course is theory is great but what does this look like in practice? Because I think a lot of times, and especially on the internet, people have these like circular discussions that go nowhere because no one's willing to show what they actually do and we have program templates, things we've actually done with athletes in the course. It's not a set of like what we're doing as good or bad. It's like how we learn is through sharing information and then having conversations like we're having now and not being judgmental. So that's kind of the idea. So with complexity, we can be as esoteric as we want but ultimately it comes down to almost like the art of coaching and how do you make that judgment between part-whole training and knowing when to really be specific and mimic the game versus when to reduce the variables and work on isolated components and then bring it all together. Lee: [00:10:06] Yeah, that's great and I love the point that you brought up. It's so important that everybody understands. There's a place for all, variations of exercise and intent of an exercise. And if you want to build some tissue quality in a movement, well, you're better off making it a rehearsed pattern. Like you said, maybe a five, 10, five, or a shuttle run because I can predict where they're going to plant their foot and I can predict how many reps they're going to get in that. But if they're playing tag they may only cut off their leg for one time. Because the situation demands that. Doug: [00:10:39] Exactly. Lee: [00:10:40] That's great. Trevor, would you talk about, and I like how you go into, kind of like the lumbopelvic biomechanics and you can go in any direction you want and talk a little bit about how extension and back when I grew up, when I was younger and muscle and fitness was the mother of all training, we followed Arnold Schwarzenegger and squatting, there was this big, hard back extension, walk in, don't have any movement. Would you talk a little bit about that lumbopelvic biomechanics and rhythm that's really important to be not only perform well, but to be safe. Trevor: [00:11:18] Yeah, I think one of the reasons why we really wanted to cover that with some depth was because of that kind of spinal stabilization strategy that everyone has been taught, like you just said, which is kind of that hard arch pinch your shoulder blades back. But not really understanding and be kind of downstream effects it has actually locally on the spine and the fossette joints, which recover and then also in terms of hip impingement and how that affects just overall moving patterns because of the shift in your center gravity that occurs with that type of spinalization strategy and then also going in a little bit more depth on the kind of specific structures that are loaded with that pattern, which like we said, is the spinal Fossette joints more than it is kind of distributing stress throughout the other muscles of the trunk and pelvis. Lee: [00:12:02] I love that and when you want to evaluate that in a client could be an athlete, it might be somebody that's not injured or just a new athlete that you're working with. What are some of the things you're looking for? Like how would you assess that if you want to see that normal rhythm from a basic standpoint, what would you look at exercise wise? Trevor: [00:12:25] Well we always talk about how the training process is really our number one assessment. Us, as physical therapists, we have the ability to put people on table and check joints and check ranges of motion to be able to kind of create a bigger picture for ourselves, but ultimately if you don't have that tool and like Doug said, we wanted this product to be for coaches as well as therapists, is like from a dynamic movement assessment of watching somebody, squat, watching somebody, deadlift, watching somebody split-squat, run and all the different moving patterns that we have or what are some of the things that we want to see. So that's where we talk about the model of movement, which is an idea I got from you Lee, the first, retreat that we did at your house. You talked about having a model of moving forward, shuffling sprinting, acceleration, all that stuff and that really clicked for me because it gives us an idea of what are the things that we should be looking for and then how do we actually, if we see a deviation from our model and movement, how do we get back to our model and movement? So for example, with a squat, like we teach people to bend at their ankles, knees and hips. We don't want to see people block their shins and not like not let their knees go forward. So one of the things I look for is a pretty much a parallel line between the torso and their tibia. So that's just one of the things that I look for when I watched somebody squat to know if they're kind of keeping that good mid-range position because really arching their back, they're not going to give me a parallel torso and tibia. I'm going to have a much more vertical tibia and it really pushed back rear end. So those are just some of the things that we look for and I think creating the model and movement has helped us a ton in terms of being able to help others kind of understand what are the things that we look for. Lee: [00:13:54] Yeah. I love that. And you know it's cool with the models and you guys have talked about this and Doug kind of alluded to is you develop a model and then you say, okay, how much bandwidth am I going to allow? And what other models can help my model? Because we realized I have a model that I go, and I'm very biased because this is how I learned from back in the eighties, up through to what I do. But I understand why other people have a different model. Like I get it. I understand it. I just teach my model better for me. You know what I mean? Like I couldn't coach a pole vaulter because I was never a pole vaulter. I can look at how they run down the runway and I could look out how they get off the mat, but all the stuff in between that matters, I can't do that model, but I can give you a model of sprinting to help you run. So it's kind of being able to say yeah, I love that. I love that. Greg: [00:14:50] And like, going along with that too, to piggyback on that, like it's always, depending on the goal and like Doug was saying, there are different extremes and there's like one extreme is this huge arch back and shoulder blades. That's something you'd probably want to use if you're powerlifting and you need some list of the maximum amount of weight possible, but that's something, if that's a client we're working with and we understand that that's part of what they need to be able to do. So we're going to kind of flirt with that edge of the spectrum a little bit versus like somebody who's a field sport athlete. The goal isn't to back squat, the goal is to be a field sport athlete. So it's just like, what's the focus and what's going to keep them healthy while we're still actually able to load them in a way that is going to cause an adaptation. Lee: [00:15:27] That's great. That's a great point. Greg sticking with you, would you talk about, you talked about like this concept of digital performance is dictated by proximal orientation. Would you talk a little bit about that? So the listeners will understand the meaning of that a little bit more and how important that is in our function. Greg: [00:15:45] Yeah, for sure and that's something that it starts in Trevor's section for sure and it's throughout the entire body. Just to keep; let's talk about the hips first for a second. So Trevor was talking about you arch your back and you tip your pelvis forward, that's changing your proximal orientation. So the acetabulums are going to be angled at a different position, which then if that's going to be your sort of bias and that's going to be your starting point, we should expect to see some differences in the femurs and how they're going to work. So we're trying to, we don't like to say like neutral spine or whatever. We like to call it a midrange position because everybody's neutral. There is no neutral. It's like this, again, it's always moving and it's always changing. So same thing with my section. I talk about the upper body. So. with the rib cage, if I'm in a more, going along with Trevor's section of minimal or extended position, that's going to alter where my shoulder blades, my scapula are starting from what my bias is to begin with movement and then I'm going to expect to see, on the table, I'm going to expect to see certain ranges of motion that are different, which is probably beyond the scope of what we're doing in this talk right now. But, essentially if we don't respect the position of the rib cage, the spine and the pelvis, We shouldn't expect to make changes that are healthy and long lasting for longevity, with our athletes, with shoulder issues or elbow issues, and working with so many baseball players, I'll have to do this a lot with the rib cage and make sure they have the proper shoulder range of motion and that they're actually getting it from where they need. If I'm getting shoulder external rotation by doing this, that's not useful, that's very unhealthy for longevity. You probably get away with it for a while when you're 15 years old or whatever, and you can kind of go wear it for a while, but eventually it's going to come back and bite you. So that's something that we focus on primarily is what is the trunk and doing, because that's going to sort of dictate downstream effects. Something that you've taught us, if you don't have some sort of proximal stiffness you can develop a lot of these fake throws that we've stolen from you. If you don't have that proximal stiffness, you're going to see some force leak downstream when you're putting force into the ground and your angles are going to change. So all goes back to that model of movement. What's the position that we're looking for approximately. Lee: [00:17:59] Yeah, go ahead. Trevor: [00:18:01] So much of understanding what the proximal orientation does downstream makes our coaching so much easier as well. If we see somebody who cannot dorsiflex, because their weight is always on their tiptoes so they're always have this calf tone, but during this excessive, bilateral extension pattern or anterior pelvic tilt or whatever you wanna call it, we can cue them as much as we can or do different mobility drills to keep them into dorsiflection, but ultimately an easier fix, just going to be giving them to control a better proximal position and then we have to do less corrective exercise and things that just won't be as effective as just getting somebody into a better proximal position to let them access the ranges of motion that they actually do have, like Doug said, the alphabet. Lee: [00:18:42] Yeah. Yeah. Well, one thing you guys do really well is you have a really good eye to assess movement. Well, what makes that easier is because you understand what you're looking for and you understand the kinetic chain. If this is out of line, well there's a good chance way upstream or way downstream is going to be out of line and that helps you identify it quickly when somebody goes through a movement, like you just said, perfect example, if we watch somebody run or sprint and they are way extended in their lumbar spine, but they have this laxity within the hip and maybe their shoulder blades are just scorched down in back. Then of course they're going to be there so we can identify that center. So yeah, those are great, great points. Doug, I wanted to ask you, you do a really good job of explaining how to safely and appropriately stretch through the hip capsule. You do a really nice job of some stretching exercises that you take people through. What are some of the concerns as to why you want to make sure people understand how to get into that posterior hip? And what are some of the strategies that you would look for to use with people or not, depending on who it is? Doug: [00:19:53] Yeah. So with the posterior hip, the reason why you want to have some extensibility there is because we've all heard the saying load to explode you can't load unless you can get into your posterior hips. So if we're talking about, we can talk about any plane of movement. Let's say we're talking about a lateral change of direction. If you want to plant and be able to absorb force, you're effectively enclosed chain internally rotating your hip. If you don't have extensive building your posterior hip and/or your proximal position is off, which it could, there's a lot of variables that could influence it. It could be like just tissue tone or length, and it could be proximal position. So we'll start with proximal position first. Somebody who lives in that anterior tilt when they go to load or to plant, they're not going to be able to sink into their hip because they're effectively already in hip flection because their pelvis is anteriorly tilted. So they effectively have a bony block or an impingement there and they're going to have to work around that problem and it's usually the way to work around flection with an anterior tilt is to just externally rotate more, which kind of creates its own set of problems because that could lead to laxity in the front of the hip and a place that you don't want. It's the same thing in sprinting where if you're sprinting and you see somebody who runs in that anterior tilt, they're not going to have that vertical posture, which again is a range but we've all seen runners who when they sprint, they're really, really leaning forward where it's obvious even to an untrained eye. If you're doing that now you're going to have to be backside when you run. So now you've got this really long lever, instead of being able to get a good heel recovery, you've got this long lever and now you've got to really pull your swing limb forward with the hip flexor that leads to hip flexor overuse injuries and because you've got that anterior tilt, now you have to externally rotate more to get into tip flection and on top of that, because of the physics involved, you have to land with your foot way out in front of you which makes you more predisposed to a hamstring injury. So you've got an anterior tilt where your hamstring is already lengthened relative to that home base and now you're landing with your foot in front because of the way your center of gravity is manipulated. So you need to be able to get into that start in a neutral home-based position, and then you need to have bandwidth in both directions. External rotation is not bad, but when you're loading, you want to be able to load from an internally rotated flex position and if you don't have that available to you now you're basically extending from extension or loading from a loaded position and you don't have any bandwidth. So that's why that stuff is so important and as part of whether it's through a formal assessment or through just your coaching eye, you need to be able to determine can this person not load i.e. flexor internally rotate because it's like a tissue or a tone issue, or is it more of a proximal motor control, pelvic positional issue and it's not that you talk about all the time and your courses. We're really saying the same thing, just using different words. Lee: [00:22:49] Right. So if you were to assess someone and you would have put them on a table and you were just assessing their hip capsule and the posterior aspect of the hip and it was not maybe fairly low functioning or it wasn't getting hit in the range that you would like, how would you see that presenting itself when they were standing up and how would you test it standing up? What would you do? Doug: [00:23:15] That's a good question and that's like; it's not always a hundred percent, but I would say starting with a table test, we want to see that somebody has internal rotation of their hip. That they can also extend because usually people who can extend their hip without compensatory movement through their back, they're going to typically have a hard time internally rotating that always, but that's often the case. So like, we'll do a test where we'll basically stabilize somebody's sacrum and then we'll try to extend their hip and if they can't extend the hip with us stabilizing, then we know that there's something that's blocking hip extension and probably internal rotation as well. Now, typically we've all seen people who they test poorly on a table, but then when you watch them, they move well in real life and the things that matter. And some people will say, oh, well that means the table tests don't matter. I still think in an ideal world, assuming that we have time to work with the athlete and develop all these qualities, I'd rather see somebody who at least has the alphabet, so to speak or the variability on the table, because now we know that your eye, even no matter how calibrated and how good it is, it can deceive you. So at least we know if they have the positions on the table that they're able to choose from them when they do the complex task because some athletes are really good compensators and they can look good to us, but either they're working around restriction. So again, I don't think it's an either or like I want athletes to, I'm not saying like move perfectly at a table because there is no perfect, but yeah, I'm just saying, we don't want to see athletes who have like zero degrees of hip internal rotation on the table. And we actually see that all the time. We're not saying, oh, we've got to take a goniometer out. We're trying to get it from 35 to 40. I just want them to have something. I want them to move like a normal human being, because I think what we find is that the less human somebody is i.e. like if they can run a sub 1000, but they move like garbage on the table, that disconnect between general ability and specific ability is oftentimes what puts somebody at risk from a health standpoint? Like you shouldn't be so specialized as an athlete that when you go to touch your toes, you're like two feet off the floor. We're looking for extremes and low hanging fruit, not like one or two degrees of each thing. Lee: [00:25:24] Yeah, that's great. Thanks. Thank you for explaining that because that's really, really important. Trevor, I wanted to ask you, you get a really nice job of explaining lower body movements and mechanics and all, walk us through the split squat and some of the mistakes that you see, because I would say that is a go to exercise for most trainers and coaches to go to, to be able to safely train their clients if they didn't want to load them, just using the single leg, which becomes inherently more intense. But what are some of the mistakes that you commonly see executing the split-squat? Trevor: [00:25:59] You know, I'd say one of the main things, especially like one of the clients I'm working with right now is getting back from her ACL surgery. She's roughly about two months out and when you see people who don't want to load their knee, they really have their front foot way out in front of their knee. So they're not really getting into any knee flection and they're keeping all the weight on their heel, which is going to load their glute hamstring. That's one of the comments. So they take kind of a really long split, like you would see in a yoga type of split squat or lunge position where their back leg is almost straight and they're really not even bending their back knee. They're just kind of like pushing their body weight down towards the floor. So we like to have people with their foot kind of underneath their front knee and in a straight line between their backside, hip, knee, and shoulder as they go up and down. So that way they're maintaining actual hip extension when they reach the bottom of the movement and they're not getting their butt kicked back with this lot of quad tone, that's keeping them kind of pulled forward and keeping them in hip flection as they're trying to go down and actually get into hip extension. So those are kind of some of the things that we see, it's just the bias of people not wanting to load one leg or the other, or not wanting to actually let their knees bend while keeping that good proximal, thoracic and pelvic position. Lee: [00:27:07] Yeah, I love that. And you know, I've been one and I've caught some criticism for this because I know as a society, we always immediately say, oh, they're too weak in the posterior chain. They don't have hamstrings and glutes, but I've worked with a lot of like young ladies, 12, 13, 14 year olds and when they can't decelerate, it's usually they can't control knee flection, the quads just say, nope, I'm out. Trevor: [00:27:32] Yes. Yeah, I totally agree. Lee: [00:27:34] Yeah. So I think there has to be, we forget about quads. We think quads over dominate everything and I'm going to tell you, a lot of the athletes I work with they don't have any quads, they can't decelerate from landing or a basic slow tempo split-squat like, you're talking about. Trevor: [00:27:50] Yeah. I think what you see from a compensatory strategy with that is they like either trying to always keep that limb blocked. So they're basically just in 10 degrees of knee flection constantly, and they're never actually going into a deeper levels of knee flection or they don't let their knee go towards their toe and like you said, you can't decelerate or you can't load if I don't get into actual dorsi flection and that's one of the reasons why we want to see dorsi flection with our split-squat, with our squat, with our deadlift. We really look for that flection at the ankles, knees and hips kind of all the time because it shows that they're able to distribute stress across three joints rather than just one or two. Lee: [00:28:25] Yeah. Yeah. That's great. That's really good. Greg, you, and I know this is really a paramount in the sport of baseball or a quarterback or tennis or anybody throwing, you did a nice job of explaining scapular movement and some of the mistakes that we see of locking down those scapulas and then trying to go through a range of motion. Would you talk a little bit about that and maybe using an example of, I mean, you could use like a push-up if you wanted or something like that, to talk about the rhythm of the scapula. Greg: [00:28:55] Yeah, sure. So definitely like I know for myself, when I was growing up playing baseball, I was always told to pinch your shoulder blades together when you're doing any of these expand exercises or things like that because that was always sort of known as that's a stable scapula because it's as close to your body as possible. But we would sort of take a little bit different approach to that and that bias of having the scapula in that downwardly rotated retracted position, is going to, we already spoke about that. It's going to change where the glenoids sits, and then how the humerus acts. So, first talking about like anything overhead, a thrower, if you're not a thrower, if you're lifting overhead, if you're trying to keep your shoulder blade in this downward position, which maybe you were, with good intention coached to do that as a younger athlete, and that's something that's just in your head. I'll have to keep my shoulder blade down while doing these things. If you're doing that, you're taking away some of what we would expect to see as like a normal scapula humeral rhythm, where we want the scapula to move, almost as much as we can so that we're not requiring more movement or end range positions at the shoulder blade or at the shoulder joint. So if my shoulder doesn't move and I go to lift my arm, I'm going to have shoulder impingement sooner. My chromium is just going to be on the way. There's only a few millimeters of space there with four issues of running through. So it's not really conducive to that position. So we'd like to focus on having as much of a reach, so to speak. I always say the word reach with people doing, like you said, push-ups or overhead pressing, because that reach is going to have them move their scapulas as much as possible into that position. So then for something like a push-up, if you're in, even just in the top of a push-up position, you know, like with your arms straight out, if your shoulder blades are already sort of like retracted and popping off of your rib cage and you can't change that and you can't bring your rib cage backward, you're already starting like Doug has already talked about being in a flex position to begin with, with change of direction. You're already starting at your end position. So you have nowhere really to go. So you're not really distributing the stress through your shoulder blade and getting muscles that we'd like to use for throwers and for just distal performance of the upper extremities. We're not getting some serious anterior activity if our shoulder blades are always staying in that position. So we like to focus on a nice long reach and then from there, we're trying to almost like maintain that because if gravity wins or if you have a barbell in your hand and that wins and each your shoulder blades you've already lost and then any of this is just going to be essentially bodybuilding training. So we're trying to promote proximal, like proximal orientation, proximal stiffness with the rib cage and then the shoulder blade is another thing that we need stiffness on, fighting against that force. So I think that answers your question about what we want the short list to be doing against the ribcage. Lee: [00:31:39] Yeah. That's perfect explanation because we've all been taught different and again, I believe it was you Greg, who even talked about, if I'm working with a powerlifter and they're squatting, okay they might have to do something different because that sport demands it and it might be the same thing with a bench press. If I'm trying to set a world record in the bench press. Well, I might have to do something different than normal population, knowing that those compensations are going to probably greatly limit my range of motion and normal function, but be a powerlifter. I don't know that I want a ton of freedom all the time. I need to be able to you know, so it's having that ability. Greg: [00:32:21] Yeah, a hundred percent. Lee: [00:32:23] Would each of you kind of give your, and you could even do it to kind of what you've already talked about, but talk about breathing a little bit and how breathing is just helpful in helping position, helping opening things up. Even if one of your even wants to go into the parasympathetic and sympathetic, but how does that help position if I understand breathing better? So, Doug, if you want to start and then I'll go through the, or Greg, yeah. Greg: [00:32:52]  I was just going to just jump in since that's my section, but we'll talk a little bit about it breathing in our third section that I go over. I think of it mostly. I'm focusing mostly on it when I'm start doing some sort of intervention with breathing. It's because I want to change position. I'm not ultimately trying to deal too much with sympathetic parasympathetic, with my population. So how that might affect movement. So if we have, that bilateral extension pattern that Trevor goes into, and then we kind of elaborate on if we have that extended position with a flat back and sort of this big protruding chest ribs sticking out. It's just sort of like path of least resistance, where is air going to be most likely to go? So if I'm in this position, I'm so closed in the back and then open in the front. So when I take a breath in, stuff's just going to go in the front, which can promote this position and kind of reinforce it and make it like, this is where I want to be. So if we see that with somebody, we might see differences in how their shoulders move, how they're able to access positions overhead, and how that kind of can trickle downstream to the lower body as well. So if we want to change somebody's ability to expand their back and close down the front, we might have them do some sort of reaching activity where they're getting some more kyphosis because they're typically very flat in the back. They're getting some kyphosis and then just like biasing their position, maybe have them in almost like a rock back, almost like a child's pose type thing or quadrant bed. Where they're reaching. We're just going to have them breathe in that position and expand different parts of their rib cage that they otherwise aren't normally doing throughout the day or with exercise and that's going to then change the trickle down effects of where my scapulas are going to sit, where my pelvis is going to sit and sort of just where that home base is. What about you guys? Lee: [00:34:36] Yeah. And I'll let you guys go. So when you're explaining that you're trying to affect the tissue. So therefore then the bone structures adjust as well. Correct. You're trying to get some extensibility just by blowing air into those pockets, right? Greg: [00:34:56] Yeah. It's more, I would say it's more like a tone saying, like we're trying to reduce tone on structures and muscles that are always on, and I'll explain it to patients as if every muscle in your body has a dimmer switch, some on your back are probably turned up too high. Some on the front might be turned down too low. So we've got to sort of even those out a little bit, and to do that, we have to put you in this position and have you breathe a little bit, that's sort of just easily kind of draws a picture for them, makes sense. I'm working with a lot of high school kids too, so they need some sort of a visuals like that as well. Lee: [00:35:26] That's great. Yeah. Trevor, go ahead or Doug. Trevor: [00:35:28] I was just going to say what Greg talked about, there are kind of two things that for myself and when I think about what I covered in this section in terms of breathing related and it's that kind of idea of spinal stability, which Greg talked about with like that power lifter, traditional power lifter big arch position, doesn't allow us to have optimal intrabdominal pressure and it creates us or makes us find more stability from our Fossette joints kind of being jammed together, this passive stability, this impingement in our back, versus when we actually have the ability to kind of close down the front and get air throughout our entire thorax, if you will, lets us kind of have 360 degrees of stability and you know, it's not just sagittal plane stability, but it's frontal and transverse plane stability, which is so hugely important for acceleration and change the direction and sprinting and all that, and dynamic environments. That's why we kind of go over the soda can analogy where it's like a soda can, when it's pressurized, I could stand it on all day and it's not going to break. But if I were to arch that soda can or open it up and then dent it I am naturally decreasing some of it's stability and I can reinforce the exterior of the soda can, but eventually it's going to break. What's going to fix it is just finding a way to kind of repressurize the system and that's why  the breathing stuff for us is important, but we try not to overemphasize it. We just want to get people in good proximal positions and then let the difficulty of the task dictate how they breathe. That's something that I speak a lot with my clients is if we're doing some of those easier type of exercises at the beginning of each section, that aren't really with low, they're not with speed. They're not overly demanding. I don't want to see people holding their breath and using a really high threshold breathing strategy to accomplish the task because that just kind of doesn't make sense. It's very inefficient. So I want people to be able to breathe and kind of feel what we're trying to go after with this so they get an idea of what's going on and we can kind of build the connection to different parts of their body. Then as we get going and we're doing things that are faster and harder, the breathing strategy will change but if we're doing something submaximal I shouldn't see somebody breathing like a power lifter, like Thor when he pulled 1,104 pounds where he's using the super high threshold Valsalva maneuver like he has to for that task. I don't want to see people use that type of task if we're doing something much more submaximal. It's be the same thing if we're watching somebody do sprints and just completely hold their breath because that's going to just restrict their degrees of freedom and limit how much they can move. Lee: [00:37:50] Yeah, that's great, I love that. Doug, do you want to go ahead and add some thoughts? Doug: [00:37:55] The last thing I would add, I think that Greg and Trevor touched on it is like what's the intent? To be clear, we're not like last somebody sprained or changed direction, or even like lift heavy weights. I don't want him to think about breathing at all, actually because that's when it's time to perform. So part of like good coaching is putting people in positions to be successful. So if we're doing like a variation of a squat or a lunge or whatever, we know that because of where the bar is they're going to reflectively have to stabilize the way that we want. We don't need to cue breathing there. The idea with the breathing, if we do use it is to basically give people an off switch or have people relax when it's appropriate to relax. So like, if I have some; and when you're performing or maxing out in a squat, that's actually not the time to relax, but we don't want people like maxing out so to speak when they're like doing a plank or even when they're just sitting down and talking. I mean, I've worked with some people like web anxiety and like neck pain and back pain and when they're talking to you, when you're asking them about their neck, they're like, you could see their SCMS popping out and it's like, all right, we're just literally going to get into like a rock back or a child's pose position, and I want you to breathe without tensing your neck. Just by doing that, they get a lot of their neck range of motion back because they learned that like, I don't need to maximally contract my neck to do the most benign tasks. So it's more about like, if people can do these benign things without having to like tense every muscle in their body and hold their breath, that's kind of all we're looking for, but we're not trying to make reading the super cognitive thing where like every time people are doing something, they're thinking about it because if you're thinking about breathing, when you're on a basketball court, you're going to get dusted. So that's when you're clear about that. Lee: [00:39:33] Yeah. No, that's so well said from all you and I can't emphasize enough to the listeners that the impactful nature of the way you created this educational course, going through the various systems and execution points and queuing points, which we really didn't even get into, which was really, really well done. The feedback how you guys use and just understanding and what I like about your program is that you have bandwidth, as you allow people to understand that this is a foundation, this is our model, but we also understand that there will be some variation in there and I think that was so wonderfully done. So thank you for putting the course together for people like me, who don't have any friends and all I do is I look at courses and so this was great for me. But hey, would you guys share like what's going on with Resilient in the future, where can they get this course? Are you guys putting out like a live core sign and stuff where they can come see you? I know right now is a little bit of a tough time, but hopefully soon. So whoever wants to jump in there, go ahead and share where we can learn more about this. Greg: [00:40:41] So we started doing this course years ago because a local gym had asked us to do it and they wanted to kind of learn more about what we were doing. It just was like, all right, if you guys are interested in what we're doing, for sure, they're friends of us, let's get a group of people together and we'll do it. And then after that, we sort of had some more people start to ask us to do it. So we realized we should probably make this more accessible for people to take, a lot easier for people to access it. If you don't have to spend a weekend and fly across the country to get to a live course. So at this point we don't have any live courses scheduled. We sort of focused and put all of our eggs into this online platform. I think it's alot of education is kind of moving that direction anyway and then obviously with the whole pandemic and everything, it makes it a little bit easier for people to continue to learn. So yeah, if you're interested in the course it's at our website's resilientperformance.com. The website is mostly catered towards patients or parents of patients to find out how to work with us in person. But if you go down and you click on education, it'll bring you right to the page and you can kind of look through it and learn about it and, go from there. Doug: [00:41:48] Yeah. And just to add to that, I mean, like, we're not opposed to doing in-person courses. We do it like on a demand basis, but it's just not like something that we promote. Like Greg said, we got into it because people asked us to, and the goal of a lot of these like products that we're going to be releasing is really until it kind of like raise the floor more than the ceiling. I mean, I think that what we're doing is really basic not to say that like an advanced coach can't get something out of it because everything is a derivation of the basics, but we like to have these discussions online where it's like, should I use the EXOS change of direction system or the Lee Taft. In real life, I wish that all physical therapists were like, that's the level they were at with us it's like all right, if it's physical therapists, we just want people to do some change of direction work. It doesn't need to be like the best thing in the world and even like with lifting and the strength and conditioning community, we just want people to pay some attention to like, hey, it's not just about how much you squat. It's like how you do it and how you run. So I think from if you really want to make an impact, it's more about like not these like 1% discussions, but how do we get everybody up to a level where they can really make an impact on people? And that's kind of our focus right now because like I don't think we really know what the 1% is, but we do know what like the 80% is, but if we're being honest, a lot of people are even ignoring the 80% and that's kind of the goal of what we're trying to achieve. Lee: [00:43:10] Yeah, that's great. That's awesome. Well guys, I'll tell you what I can't thank you enough for doing the course, for taking the time to be on the show and sharing this with the population and hopefully this is something that people take the time to get involved with and learn more because like you said, you can never be foundational enough. If you're great at your foundational stuff and then understand where the sequence, just go from there. You've always got a shot in this profession or as an athlete or as a coach or whatever. So I thank you guys were doing this and thanks for being on the show. Doug: [00:43:45] Thank you. Thank you. Trevor: [00:43:47] Appreciate it. Lee: [00:43:48] Awesome. Greg: [00:43:50] All right.