Barbell Shrugged - Positional Strength, Mobility and Stability for Weightlifting - Dr. Quinn Henoch - 284

Episode Date: October 25, 2017

Today we welcome Dr. Quinn Henoch, Doctor of Physical Therapy and author of Weightlifting Movement Assessment & Optimization: Mobility & Stability for the Snatch and Clean & Jerk.  He is also the founder of ClinicalAthlete, which is a network of health care professionals who understand the performance-based needs of athletes. Since 2011, he has trained exclusively for the sport of weightlifting, having competed in the 2014 American Open and posting qualifying totals for the 2015 National Championships, as a 77kg lifter.  In this episode he discusses how to achieve weightlifting specific positions and why just trying to stretch to increase your mobility may not be the best way.  He's a damn smart coach, this episode is loaded with great advice and suggestions for you if you're working to improve your snatch, clean or jerk.  Enjoy! Mike, Doug and Team Barbell Shrugged   Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Barbell Shrugged helps people get better. Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. Find Barbell Shrugged here: Website: http://www.BarbellShrugged.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast Twitter: http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged Instagram: http://instagram.com/barbellshruggedpodcast

I try to base my thoughts and my kind of perception and the way that I digest information based on science and based on evidence. So as opposed to being like the guru who says, hey, you know, I have a bunch of Instagram followers and so what I say is correct. We're going to Barbell Shrugged. Here with Doug Larson, Kenny Kane. We're hanging out up here in the backyard of Chad Wesley Smith's house. We broke in. He's not even here. We broke in.

He's not even here. And he's got an avocado tree. That's right. He's got two avocado trees. I walked out, and then we heard a thud. We're like, oh, shit. He's hoarding all the California avocados in this one location. That's where Chad makes all of his money. All the stuff he sells doesn't make shit compared to these avocados in this one location. That's where Chad makes all of his money.

All the stuff he sells doesn't make shit compared to these avocados. We weren't originally scheduled to be here. Just this is where Mike fell asleep last night. He turned up for the show. Fortunately, Quinn and Chad were here to record. We're lucky. So we're here with Quinn Hennick, a clinical athlete. And you also have a book, Weightlifting.

Help me with, it's a long name. It it is I have a terrible short-term memory yeah it's it's movement for weightlifters optimizing stability and mobility for the snatch and clean and jerk so movement assessment for weightlifters essentially and it's yeah it's just breaking down the lifts phase by phase both the snatch and clean and jerk, which obviously encompass a deadlift, a squat, overhead components, and any variation thereof. And we just go down, and each phase, we're kind of breaking it down and hopefully building them back up. So that's what that book's all about. So that's actually one of the things I want show of this episode where you talked about mobility and you give some of your unique thoughts on mobility with how to achieve a position independent of actually having to stretch or mobilize the joints or actually creating more range of motion around

a joint. So as we dig in further, I'd like to hear some more of your unique thoughts on mobility. Perfect, man. I can do that. Cool. I think one of the things I want to talk about, Quinn, is when you're codifying a system, like you've written a book for athletes, so there has to be some principled thought on how you're going to educate. But I noticed when you were working with Mike, your ability to individualize was something that I think every great coach has. So how to fill that gap between broad codification and individualizing an approach for an athlete is something that I'm always curious about as it relates to the art of coaching. Yeah, perfect. I want to learn a lot about positional strength, how you build strength in those positions and get athletes to move through them. And first, I want to get into, how did you get into weightlifting in the first place? And can you fill us in on your full

background? Yeah, absolutely. So I am a physical therapist by trade. Currently, I want to get into, how did you get into weightlifting in the first place? And can you fill us in on your full background? Yeah, absolutely. So I am a physical therapist by trade. Currently, I have a little office that's attached to a barbell gym, which is awesome. Like, it's my dream setting. And my background consisted of mainly football. So high school, played football in college at a small D1AA school. Was lucky enough to have trained the snatch and clean and jerk in some capacity over those eight years so and and developed a lot of bad habits by the way in

college football you can imagine it's just strapped up it's all power variations just heave and let it rip right after college i was going to be a strength conditioning coach and that's also where i found the competitive weightlifting and so that's what i did for probably a year and a half uh realized that i wanted something more in regards to my education and and kind of fill that gap. People will come to me and they're hurt or I see something weird going on with their movement and I'm just a coach.

You know, I can write a program and I can teach the lifts, but I wanted something more. And so that's where physical therapy school came in and was also around the time that I started my competitive weightlifting career. This was about 2009, 2010. So I had the snatch and clean and jerk

as my training background was always my favorite part of the lifts. And it's just kind of grown on me. I've done lots of meets since then and stayed very mediocre. But I love the sport. I love the fact that it's so challenging, both physically and mentally. And, yeah, that's where we are today. So I just try to blend my coach background and my physical therapy background

and then the fact that I have an athletic background on both sides and bring it all together. What was the point, or was there a point when you were studying physical therapy and getting into corrective exercise, and then you're also developing yourself as an athlete and a coach, was there a moment where you go, oh, I think I'm on to something that most people aren't talking about? There were a lot of moments, and it has nothing to do with me. So your question is did you have a moment where I found something that I was doing that was right that nobody else was talking about? Those are usually the moments that I look back on now and say

well I was wrong. I was way wrong. And so we'll talk about this but I try to base my thoughts and my kind of perception in the way that I digest information based on science and based on evidence so as opposed to being like the guru who says hey you know I have a bunch of Instagram followers and so what I say is correct this is what gurus usually say though it is I think you're sucking it is what gave me out and so. God damn it. And so there were a lot of inflection points in my career. You know, again, with football and training the snatch and clean and jerk, I was developing terrible habits.

I couldn't overhead squat. I could power snatch more than I could snatch. I could power clean more than I could full clean. You know, these types of things, right? But then I was starting physical therapy school, and it was all like, oh, I'm a rehab specialist, like a movement. And so I'm overthinking these things for probably like two years. And I was the guy who took two hours to warm up before he touched the bar. I'm doing every little physical therapy one-on-one exercise.

I'm doing every little stretch and mobilization. And one of the first inflection points was the fact that I wasn't getting anywhere with that stuff. And I started like, where am I missing this? You weren't training more pain-free or anything like that? Not really. I mean, nothing was really changing. Training was still hard. And my movement wasn't necessarily, because I was allotting all my time into things in which I didn't understand the mechanisms and what they didn't do. I had this preconceived notion and narrative that these passive things

or these lower-level things that I was doing were creating these long-term changes in maybe structure or somehow reducing my injury risk. And now when I look back at the literature and I just look back at some of the things we do, it was not doing that. And so when I began to change my approach and say, how can I make my prep and my injury reduction programs more specific to the movements that I plan to load progressively? That's when things really, really changed. And then it's right in parallel with the scientific evidence to show that load and stress is what causes adaptation.

And these lower level things that are inundated with me, especially in physical therapy school, like God forbid you do a deadlift or you lift more than, you know what I mean? Don't use your back to lift, use your leg, like all these, these weird things, right? You start to get, you start to see in the literature that it's just not so right. And, and I'm actually, this is where coach in me comes in because I can now take strength and conditioning principles and make that my rehab and my injury risk reduction programs and these lower level teaching drills or passive mobility drills or implements however you want to describe them can fit in certain places as long as we understand the mechanisms and by mechanisms what they do and probably more importantly what they don't do. So you went from doing

kind of everything under the sun just because it felt like you should be doing it and it's good for you to now only doing like the very specific drills that you need for that day's training or for your very specific injury profile or you know only the ones that have a real purpose behind them. That's correct. It's exactly right. One of the biggest questions I get is like oh what's your warm-up routine, Quinn? I want to know what you do. Cause for some reason, my warmup routine would be better than anybody else's. Right. And usually my question is pretty boring. Well, I go in the gym and I like move my arms around a little bit and then I grab the

barbell and I do. So I'm a weightlifter, right? Snatching cleaners is all I do. I don't run to my car if it's raining, that type of thing, like very specialized. So I take the bar and I do the barbell as many times as I need to, to feel the groove. And this is where we can start to get into mechanisms here because one of the, one of the benefits of a warmup is literally increasing your core temperature is literally creating blood flow, right? Is also practicing the patterns that you plan to train. So if I have two choices, if I have empty bar work, or if I have, well, I'm going to do all these paths, I'm going to, I'm going to foam roll for 20 minutes versus empty bar work for 20 minutes. Empty bar work is going to increase blood flow because you're moving. Foam rolling may too, but only to the local tissue

and that you're foam rolling and probably much more superficially than just systemic exercise right increasing core temperature I'm given all the props to movement for that and then practicing the movement patterns the specific movement patterns I'm giving all of that to the bar work so think about the the 20 minutes that you spend on a passive implement could be 20 minutes that you spend just practicing more of the movement that you want to get better at. Imagine all that time, right? It's like Steph Curry doesn't practice his free throws or his threes by foam rolling his lats.

So like I understand that the joints have to get into the positions first, totally understand that. But the mechanisms of which we can talk about these passive implements don't give you the stressor response to create the adaptation that we think that they do or that the common narratives say that they do. Whereas moving and creating load through those positions absolutely does. So my warmup right now, because I'm not currently injured, consists of the exact movements that I plan to train, just lighter variations and lots of reps until I feel that shift. And you guys know what I'm talking about, right? Like you go, you go into the gym and that first squat always feels like dog shit. Always. Right. And like,

I'm 30 now. So now my knees pop and I'm like, Oh, I'd like to crap. You can barely stand up from an air squat. And that's all 46. And so I think, but it's that moment that I think people freak out a little bit, and they say, oh, God, I've got to go warm up for their warm-up. Like, just do more squats. Like, yeah, the first one's going to suck. The first five are going to suck. Do more of them. Do it again.

Sit down, tie your shoes, put some tape on, do more squats. Do it again. Practice the patterns. You will hit that inflection point of warming up, like, oh, I got it now. You know what I mean? Just like you would have jumping off of two minutes of the foam roller where you feel loose. But after that foam roller, now you have to go practice the movement again. So you've added time. And that's where I was. Only it was like, I say 20 minutes of foam roller. It was like that times 10 with everything that you can think of that was very nonspecific to what I needed.

But that's just kind of a, I was going to say short answer, but very long-winded answer of like, what I do now. If I'm currently injured, the narrative changes only in the variation. I now am only able to train variations of the movements because maybe I'm too hurt or I can't tolerate certain variations, certain loads, intensities, volumes.

But that doesn't mean that I go straight back down to the floor and start doing arbitrary things, right? It's still as specific as we can get. I feel like corrective exercise really came into the fitness industry pretty strong like 10 years ago. And then a lot of people did what you're suggesting is they kind of overdid it for a while and now everyone's kind of pulling back to the middle ground where they realize that stuff has some value, but it shouldn't be half your workout. It should be sprinkled in there only when there's a really good reason to do so. Well, and we have to define corrective exercise, right? Because a snatch balance with a hundred kilos could be a corrective exercise for the snatch. If you're having

confidence issues getting under the bar, if you want to get more load to the shoulders without the front rack adding to your fatigue levels, that type of thing. So a snatch balance is a corrective exercise the same way that a dead bug can be a corrective exercise for somebody who's in, who's experiencing debilitating back pain to which they can't do anything. And at least that little low level ab exercise is something right. But to say, to take, so to take a high level weightlifter, say one of juggernauts, national champion weightlifters, right? And to watch them wiggle under like 140 kilos snatch a little bit and say, oh, you must have core instability. You're going to need to do dead bugs or like three sets of 10 bird dogs.

It's, it's, it's just not a stressor that's going to create any type of adaptation. The loads don't match up. The loads don't match up. The stressor doesn't match up. The, the laws of physiology and training still apply to rehab. So if I'm going to use, let's take again, that high level guy. If I'm going to use some type of very low level drill, like a glute bridge or, you know, or like a Y with a band for your shoulders, it's going to be a teaching tool. And that's the narrative that I'm going to spin. I'm going to say,

this is the position that I want you to feel. This exercise creates a little bit of resistance in that position so that you can at least have some proprioception and some cueing, you know, internally with that. And then the idea is to take that and put it into your movements, like not at your top level working sets, but you work it into your lighter warmups. And it's a teaching tool. It in itself is usually not the physiological stressor that's going to be the fix. Yeah, so in a giant nutshell, just recreating the motor pattern, I'm assuming from myelin patterning to just the diaphragmatic control and the movement awareness is what you're looking to do.

You can lessen your time training by getting into the position. It's all about specificity, though. The laws of specificity are always king. So I like to take a top-down approach, which means if somebody's having trouble sustaining an overhead squat position or in the snatch, perhaps they can overhead squat, but something goes wrong in the snatch, to which all of a sudden they look very inflexible,

which is that there's a disconnect there, right? The snatch balance is my corrective of choice because it's the next tier down and it's as specific as we can get to have the athlete attain the positions that we want a bottom-up approach would be to say you're not attaining the snatch depth or positioning that you desire and i desire as a coach i'm going to have you do 90-90 supine diaphragmatic breathing, and I'm going to have you foam roll your lats and do a passive band distraction to your hip. That would be a very bottom-up approach in which those stressors are very, very low level

and in reality are probably much more to do with short-term change in perception than anything structural. And now we have this huge gap. I guess they're going to do those things and probably stand up and feel looser, had this huge gap. I guess they're going to do those things and probably stand up and like feel looser. But is that truly going to translate to a high threshold stressful motor pattern like a snatch? There's some question there. I would argue probably not. As well as a snatch balance. As well as a snatch balance without moving their feet. As well as an overhead squat. Now we start breaking

it down. Maybe it's a split squat with their front foot elevated. So their hip front hip goes into a deep amount of flexion with their arms over their head. Maybe it's some type of eccentric pullover with a weighted PVC so that they can feel that position of their arms going over their head, right? There's combinations now. Now we can break it down into these more and more passive, but hopefully we don't ever get there. You know, it's always these tiers of corrective exercise, you exercise, and it should correct something. That's another thing, too. If you've been doing the same, quote-unquote, corrective program for six months, and nothing is changing, it ain't correcting anything.

It's either implemented incorrectly, or it's just not the exercise for you, and I think that's a big thing as well. Yeah. Really enjoyed this so far, digging into like the specificity of the movement and corrective exercise. And we're going to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to have a video where you're actually teaching me how to get in a better position over at squat. So if you're listening audio only, make sure to go over to YouTube, watch the video. If you're interested in improving your weightlifting technique, you can go to

flightweightlifting.com to download for free our 54-page Olympic weightlifting training guide. It covers the snatch, the jerk, the clean, all aspects of those lifts from first pull, transition, second pull, the third pull where you're pulling under the bar, et cetera. We have videos attached to it. We have two weeks' worth of programming. It's a fucking awesome, awesome, awesome guide.

Go to flightweightlifting.com and check it out. Okay, Mike, so we're going to work on the overhead squat positioning. My biggest thing is we're going to try to trim all the fluff as far as the warmup, you know, prep, corrective exercise, that all that stuff has a place. But if we can be specific and actually do the overhead squat to improve your positioning with just minor tweaks or variations, that's what we're going to do. It's a top-down approach. We take it as specific as we can. We need to break it down into extra correct as we can do that.

But let's just look at your overhead squat first. I won't do a lot of coaching. Generally when I'm working with a new athlete, I don't do a ton of coaching. I say put your feet where you would normally squat. And so we're just looking at it. Go and stand up one more time. My biggest thing is can the joints get into the positions that we plan to load?

Let me see that one more time. Now, this is actually not too bad. So hang out there. If I'm just looking at you from the side, at least I know from the very first squat, I'm seeing this for the very first time with you, at least your hips get down there. Go ahead and relax for a second. So if the first thing you come to me and say, you when my hips are tight I feel like I can't overhead squat because my hips are too tight to hip parallel and I see you overhead squat

show me another one and you show me that's death I'm gonna question the fact that your hips don't actually go down there because I'm seeing them go down there relax for a second one of the big things or big complaints that you get is somebody says, yeah, I can overhead squat just fine. My hips feel fine during an overhead squat, but then they get tight during a snatch. Well, where's the disconnect there? If you have the hips for the overhead squat, then you have the hips for a snatch. There's other things that happen and Max Ada will probably talk to you guys about that

at some point in the future. But what I want to do is show us that overhead squat one more time and some of the cues here. I'm looking at shoulder position here and the bar resting right over the mid foot. I think this would be sustainable but if you look from the side here you can kind of see, go ahead and stand up and show us one more time you can see how the hips sit way back behind the bar and sometimes that can drive the bar forward so relax for a second what I really love to do even if the athlete is wearing weightlifting shoes I love to elevate the heels to a point that would be more than a weightlifting shoe and I

consider this kind of giving the athlete some slack in the system so we take any type of limitation and right away go and stand up for me I'm gonna have you borrow her head again right you know getting your workout today. Reach. Good. So, I'm going to have you go slow and I'm going to tell you to pause. Okay? And so you just stop cold where you are. Go ahead and slowly start to squat.

Pause. Good. You can kind of see this disconnect here as the ribs get shot forward, the ass gets shot back. What I'm going to have you do, Mike, is breathe in through your nose, exhale really hard and try to pull these ribs down and also pull your hips underneath you. So tuck your tailbone slightly. Yeah, there you go.

And then drive your knees forward as you sit down. Drive, drive. There you go. Now we've got a position where the hips are much more centered under the bar. Now when you stand up, drive your hips forward. Very good. Relax for a second. I don't know if you felt the difference, hopefully we see that on camera, but the first one is

kind of butt shooting, shooting back, back, back, back, back. Just from a physics standpoint, bar's going to get dumped forward. If we can give you, again, give you some slack in the system and then slow the movement down, cue you to drive those hips under the bar. Just from a physics standpoint, your positioning gets better. We did no corrective exercise other than the movement itself. So the great thing about change plates

are that they come in different widths, right? And so these are two kilo plates. Let's kick those out. Quinn, can I just apologize for one second? Yeah, absolutely. Quick question on that. So your larger intent was to verticalize this torso? Correct.

Okay, so that's the big picture, and that's what you're putting that under to do. Big picture, it's a counterbalance putting that under to do. Big picture. It's a counterbalance. Cool. So there's a couple things here. People will say, oh, elevating the heels does one of two things. It increases your dorsiflexion, right?

That's one of the main things that we hear. But what if your ankle range of motion is just fine and you still benefit from a heel lift? Well, there's got to be something else at play there and it's just physics. So the heel lift gives you a counterbalance it allows you to drive your hips under the bar your muscles your core your abs all these things can act as your counterbalance if you understand how to position your body and that's exactly what we did there so we can lose that or maybe we just go to a slightly lower counterbalance so we're at the half kilo plates here, but

same exact thing. What you're going to feel is I'm going to slow you down, we're going to do the same thing again. Now from a shoulder position standpoint, good. And I don't, so one of the big kind of debates out there is whether the shoulders should be externally rotated, you know, show me your armpits or it should be some of the international coaches you'll see them cue actually internal rotation. For me it is experiment with whatever feels comfortable.

I usually put people somewhere in the middle and I just have them reach up on the bar slightly and for me that's good enough. You'll find people that will naturally seat their shoulders where they feel is most comfortable. Everybody's a little different. So this is all good to me. With the overhead squat, you know, right? With the overhead squat, if I'm only seeing you

from the belly button up, I shouldn't know whether you're squatting or standing, right? And what we see very often is that you're standing there with the bar and as you squat down, that's what we're trying to avoid. Keep this constant. That's what we're trying to avoid keep this constant that's what the counterbalance is going to help with so here here slowly start to squat down push up on the bar pause for a second good pull your hips underneath you there you go drive your knees forward very

nice push up and back on the bar there breathe in exhale really hard and drive up yeah for a second good job so for me that is mobility work you know what I mean so what we could have done is gave you three or four hip mobility drills very passive things that probably don't do a whole lot but create short-term change in your perception, right? We could give you a bunch of shoulder stretches, blah, blah, blah, or we could just put you in the position under time, under ISOs, slow tempos, give you a little slack in the system, right? And we can create that change by just cueing movement. So you change the system by adding a heel lift.

That's one way to make a change. What about changing foot placement? You stand a little wider or you toe out a little more. What other changes can you make to get a similar result? Everything you just said. That's a great, great point. And what we'll do, it's a perfect segue. Grab me that green 10-kilo plate there, that big one.

Yeah. So sometimes people aren't as good athletes as you are, Mike. They're just phenomenal, top class, elite athletes. And they're unable to make those subtle changes and all of a sudden get the movement, right? Like you did a really, really good job. Some people can't do that. The overhead squat encompasses a whole lot. It's just more complex, right?

And so what we can do is take the overhead position out of the equation for the short term and work on like Doug said optimizing your stance and everybody's a little different there's a ton of variables that come into play as far as squat stance it's like everybody's it's like a fingerprint very individualized and if the palmetry has something to do with that the way that your hip joints are structured and oriented all play a part in which position is going to feel most comfortable for you to just sit down and stand up so what we like to do is create another counterbalance by just holding something in front. So grab that 10-kilo plate.

And we're going to experiment a little bit. So show me your normal squat stance, what you would typically use. Okay, so you prefer a slightly narrow stance, toes relatively forward. And let's just do a few counterbalance squats. This is also an assessment for me. Now do you think you would be able to sit down there? Go ahead and squat down there like that. If you let go of that weight right now, would you fall on your ass?

You can just head nod. I don't know. You don't know. Stand up for me. One mistake I think people make with the counterbalance squat as an assessment tool, because I'm trying to see where your pattern is, is they sit way back and they keep their shins vertical, but that's not a realistic position. So I want you to, again, drive your hips under the bar, let your knees track forward, it's

okay, right, as long as your feet are flat. Just use this as an implement that you're not going to fall on your butt, because we're going to play around with different stances to kind of figure out what's most optimal for you. So that's just kind of a rule of thumb. Try to make it as realistic as possible. Good. And again, if you came to see me for the first time and you said, oh my hips are just too tight to squat, and you show me that, I'm going to call you on it.

Because I see your hips get down there, right? Go a little wider, same toe angle. Now some of these are going to be awkward, and this is because I think you've already found your comfortable squat stance but just for the people you can kind of experiment with stuff. So show me. How does that feel? It feels wide.

It feels wide. Stand back up. Go a bit more narrow and now go toes out. So flare them a little bit more than you would typically do but you but the width will be the same as your typical squat as your normal squat like your heels yeah good and then squat from there I think you're one of those guys who's got options you could probably put your feet wherever you want but what you're fine with a lot of people is that there's their positioning their squat will change depending on where their feet. They either won't be able to hit depth.

You'll see their back angle change a little bit. They'll report to you that it's much more restricted in the hip joints. And I think that's where people run to doing drills. Oh, I have to increase my mobility so that I can squat to this arbitrary gold standard of very narrow toes forward. And in reality, that is dictated much more so by structure than it is by something that you can change. Now, go to your normal squat stance one more time. This is kind of the, once we've found the most comfortable position for that person,

we start to work on being able to control that position without the use of the counterbalance, right? Because we've got to lose these training wheels at some point, like with the extra heel lift, the goal is to go back. So you need whatever shoe you use for training, right? So show me a squat, just a counterbalance right because we got to lose these training wheels at some point like with the extra heel lift the goal is to go back so you need whatever shoe you use for training right so show me a squat just a counterbalance squat like you did before now i want you to hold this position slowly transition this weight down to the floor tuck your elbows don't rest on your thighs now literally one finger at a time start to let go of that weight and the goal is that you don't lose say tall here you don't lose that positioning hold hold hold hold hold and stand back up good

come from the side because i think this is going to be a really good example we talk about one of the big things in mobility land is uh thoracic spine extension right it's like i need more t spine extension extend extend extend so I can be nice and tall. There's actually some pretty cool studies that show the amount that the thoracic spine can actually move is about 10 to 13 degrees for guys. I don't know if anybody's seen like a protractor or a goniometer. 10 to 13 degrees ain't that much, right? One of the things that we can do to at least get that 10 to 13 degrees

and then work on anti-flexion, which is trying not to lose it, is getting you in the bottom of a squat first in order to lock in this position and then we can isolate up here. So show me that counterbalance one more time. And our camera angle is here. Breathe in for me. And I want you to exhale and get tall with your upper back. Yeah, good.

And you can kind of see his shirt wrinkle up here up top. That's about 10 or 13. That's all you're going to get. Do that again. Breathe in. Exhale all the way and get tall. Nice. Bring your elbows in.

Bring the weight close to you. Breathe in. Exhale and press the weight up towards the ceiling. So just, yeah, it doesn't have to be all the way and you can see his upper back extend and stand and that's mobility work you know and I think that's the big difference could we do a bunch of stretches for your shoulders and your hips yeah we can do that stuff but to know what's appropriate for you would take a little bit more printing right this stuff anybody can work on just get in the positions and spend

time there boom all right and we're back uh with quinn uh quinn just did a video with us where he was showing mike uh how to do an overhead squat and we're talking about mobility uh so you covered a lot of this on that video so if again if you're listening audio only uh go to the video and watch that that way you know what we're talking about for the second half. But you have some very unique thoughts on mobility, as I said at the very beginning of the episode, that are independent of doing mobilizations and stretching and just trying to get individual joints working. You have a more holistic approach, as you mentioned before,

doing kind of the top-down assessment model where you're not regressing to very low-level corrective exercise like bird dogs and dead bugs. You're more friendly towards doing snatch bounces and things like that. So I'd just love to hear more about how you think about mobility and how, if someone isn't hitting a position, what to do about it. Yeah, all great questions. Lots to unpack there. It's all about the mechanisms of what the corrective exercise or the drill is trying to attain. It's the goal, right? Always. That's training in general. If the goal is to always go back to the overhead squat because it's an easy example,

it's something that we can kind of conceptualize. If the positions that you want to attain are not being so, we've got to think about what can we do to apply the stressor needed to not only teach you the position, but also to create change and load tolerance through the tissue. Not necessarily about changing your joint structure or changing your bone morphology, because that may not be possible, but changing your tolerance to the position. So I'm going to go to explain this. I'm going to go bottom up because I think it's important to discuss the mechanisms of common narratives. I say foam rolling because it's the

most common thing to think about with these passive mobility implements, but lump anything in that bucket. Whatever the latest and greatest toy that you've seen that's being put out, whether they're balls, bands, foam rollers, whatever. If they vibrate, I don't care. It's all kind of in the same bucket. The research at this moment seems to suggest that those things give nothing more than short-term changes in perception. This is not to say that they don't create range of motion changes,

but the length of time that those changes last and the true structural nature of what you're changing is what's being called into question. So the common narrative is that you're rolling on a roller and you're breaking up your scar tissue. The logic there, let's just unpack that. How do we selectively know that we're breaking up the scar tissue that we want to break up and not the muscle and all the other connective tissue around it, right?

If the foam roller is strong enough to break up our tissue, what would a 400-pound barbell on our back do? Good God, it would obliterate us, right? We'd have a permanent dent in our upper traps. Nobody would have tightness in their upper traps. You just put a barbell there. So we have the foam roller, these types of implements, passive changing in perception. Okay, cool. It can create a short-term change.

Static stretching. Very similar mechanisms. Very little evidence to show that stretching in the way it's usually incorporated and with just being human nature, we can't stretch for 30 minutes a day and time constraints. Usually just modifying sensation, right? Short-term changes in perception, short-term changes in range of motion. Those are great, but short-term changes in perception short-term changes in range of motion those are great but short-term means that we're going to revert back you say short-term you mean just like for that workout and then potentially we don't really know maybe only a couple minutes yeah hell i don't know you know if you form all your quads and your and your

legs feel a little looser like what if you sit down for 10 minutes on the couch and and you try to do another squat like are you going to be right back where you are sometimes, right? So it's, what is that giving us that just practicing the movement more is not? And again, I would argue, and this has actually been shown in a few studies that have compared active warmups to foam rolling, that those short-term benefits are also available for exercise. And this is why I take those top-down approaches more so, because not only do you get the short-term change in range of motion, short-term change of perception, if my legs or knees are sore and I just do 30 air squats, I'm probably going to feel looser after those 30 air squats, the same response. But I'm also imparting load through the tissues much more so than any of those passive implements could. So when I prescribe those things, those more passive things, they're in short bouts. Actually, I don't, to be honest, I don't ever prescribe them. But the way I explain to them is if you want to do this, this is the truth behind

what they're doing, what they're not doing, my recommendation would be short bouts, minimum effective dose, create the perceptual change that you like, and then find a variation of that movement pattern that you can load. And that's, it's my philosophy simply based on the science of what we know changes tissue, what changes tendon morphology, what changes your tolerance to certain positions. And it's being in the position. It's loading the position. So I would much rather use isometrics or tempo work.

This is coming out of like the tenonopathy literature too. Slow tempo in both directions. It's not just eccentrics. It's either direction within the range of motion that's comfortable for you at that time with the understanding that your range of motion will improve with load over time. That's where I'm going first. And then the tier down is, you mentioned like dead bugs, bird dogs, all these things, should teach a specific thing. If somebody's overhead and they're all wiggly in their trunk

and they just don't look stable, okay, a bird dog, just so they can feel a motionless trunk and movement of the arms. But the narrative is not, all right, you need to do three sets of 10 bird dogs and just do it mindlessly. No, we're gonna do it

right in that moment. We're gonna do five reps really slow and I'm gonna have them create some tension. I'm gonna say, you feel that? You feel how this is stable? And it's just your arm? And they'll say, yeah, yeah, okay, now get on your feet and let's go through that that empty bar work again and practice that feeling. Gotcha. Well, this is getting into that positional strength is what you're talking about. And what's your favorite way of achieving that? I personally find, and you mentioned it before, tempo work being really, really great because most of the time it's not being done at maximal loads where form is breaking down.

It's done in submaximal loads. And I definitely find that when I'm doing a slow eccentric, I'm maintaining positions that I might be skipping through if I'm just doing a normal squat, for instance. I would agree. As far as going back to your question, like what is your favorite? As far as favorite drill or favorite variation, I don't have one because it's always so different. But the philosophy or the concept of what's going to get somebody in the position

under time is what you just mentioned. It's is it's isometrics, it's a tempo work in both directions. There's a lot of variables that we can manipulate. You can manipulate the range of motion. Like you don't, your range of motion will improve over time. I think people do a variation like once and because they can't move through the full range of motion, they think, ah, and they all go on to the next thing. Changes in tissue structure and load tolerance take weeks and months. I mean, like talk to me in two years and like things will be different, right? You know, I had a series of injuries up until three years ago, almost exactly. And it took me a while just to get back to where I could lift again. And then it's been about two and a half years of constant looking, trying to do different things

and heal the body. And it's one of those things that in my 20s, I didn't have the patience. Like, oh, my shoulder's bothering me. I'll do these quick exercises. It feels good enough for this workout. I wake up, it aches, and I just keep on pushing through it. And then two and a half years ago I go oh I actually have

to like pull out completely figure out what exactly is going wrong like what is that the core that's going on oh my right foot's diving in right glutes not firing this diaphragm you know my right side the whole thing is just shutting down and now I'm having to take the time to rebuild it and it the patience I would have had when I was 25 would have been about two and a half days. And now it's two and a half years later, I go, oh, this is, I'm actually seeing structural changes. It's an ego check too. It's one thing to have the patience, but it's an ego check. Because honestly, the things that you just mentioned, workload, overall workload, what we're seeing is the best mitigating factor for reducing injury

risk is monitoring overall workload. So you went into some of the minutiae, you know, look at my right glute or it's my left lower trap or like this half of my diaphragm. But way before we unpack any of that, let's look at the workload because there's a lot of times where something goes wrong or my knee blew up or this and that. We can look at your programming and just like you were doing way too much here that your body couldn't recover from right there was definitely something being done way too much somewhere now and you mentioned about 15 years and now you mentioned uh we still have to train hard like don't get me wrong i'm not i am much more so on the maximum effective dose that you can recover from because i want performance enhancement and and that type of much more on that, just that's the athlete in me. But you mentioned a couple of things there.

You were like, I do these low level things to get me through the day. There's nothing wrong with that. Like do what you got to do to train, but bigger picture now, we've got to dial back something. And this is where we go back to changing variables before complete rest, because complete rest is probably the worst thing that an athlete can do. Not, yes, mother nature is probably going to put the pieces back together if it's an acute injury but what's going to happen now is the rest of the system is going to become deconditioned right and what we're seeing what we're trying to avoid in in workload monitoring is acute spikes in either direction right and even down like when you're hurt and all of a sudden you just tank i have guys come in the doors like where the f**k have you been dude like oh well i tweaked my back on

the deadlift and i just took it easy for two or three months. And I'm like, oh, fuck. You've got preseason in three weeks. Like, you know what I mean? And so now they're deconditioned and kind of predisposed. They likely healed much slower. Oh, they heal. Yeah, it's like, yeah, the pieces, like you're okay.

You're put back together. But your conditioning is now so low that you're now at increased risk for injury, even before. So what you mentioned, the low-level exercises that get you through the day, that's totally fine. increased risk for injury even before. So what you mentioned the low level exercises to get you through the day that's totally fine there's nothing wrong with that. Now we take a bigger picture and say where can I dial back the maybe the overall volume or is my specific injury an intensity trigger? So do I only feel it at 90 plus percent? If that's the case you've got a whole lot of other percentages that you can train at dude. So like it because this is not you right but you hear it of other percentages that you can train at, dude. So like, this is not you, right?

But you hear it all the time. If somebody can't max out, they just don't train. And like, that's so ridiculous. It's the biggest mistake you can make. You've got 85, 80, 75, 70, so all these percentages that you can train. Higher volumes. Now, if volume is your trigger, let's say on the day you have, you have a tendency for your knee to fire up, like anterior knee tendinopathy or something like that.

You got five sets of eight, that's slated, like it's on the paper, it's like, all right, I'm gonna hammer it. Three sets of eight feels fantastic, right? The fourth set, the first five reps feel real good. Those last three, I'm feeling my familiar symptoms, right? That last set, the entire set is shit. You're kind of resensitized, right?

It's okay, you have a volume trigger. And it also, pain is not necessarily bad. It just depends if it's acute or chronic. Acute injuries, we don't want to recreate it because we can let mother nature do her thing. Chronic injuries, sometimes we've got to brush that capacity a little bit to create change. But the point is find your trigger. Is your trigger volume induced? Is it intensity is induced? Is it range of motion induced? In which case we'll have to probably change up the variation. That doesn't mean don't train, right? Or is there a combination that we can find? Position and what we worked on with you. Can we alter position? Maybe even just the short term. You don't have to change your positioning permanently, but for the short term, it

desensitizes your symptoms. It allows you to train within a recoverable capacity. Many times I would suffer from some type of hamstrings bothering me and then I just, instead of doing full depth squats or something, I might do a box squat. Sorry, knee, that would be weird, but the knee's bothering me. Let's do box squats, low bar back squats instead of high bar full depth squats. Or a trap bar deadlift. Make it a squatty deadlift. That's reduced range of motion inherently with the trap. Any variation, but that the mindset that that we need and i think that's the mindset that coaches need and probably i'm biased that's what physical therapists need who work with

athletes is they don't have this knowledge of how to adapt the workout because we don't get that in school quinn i wanted to ask about that and i'd like for you to dive into that more philosophically like this this whole idea of codification principles so you started this conversation by reducing a couple things the the training specificity and adaptation for two specific movements now as you kind of zoom back out and zoom back in how do you look at coaching as art trying to figure out the general principles in which you teach these basic, very sophisticated movements, and then how do you individualize them,

and how does the coach do that? Because we were talking before we started to record on just that a little bit. We talked about all the good stuff first. We were talking about how when people see you in the clinic, it's that dance between you can come get my magic fingers all the time or giving the person some autonomy to have the movement. You know what I'm saying? Totally. So how do you dance between those two things, big picture and philosophically?

Okay. Well, you mentioned philosophically. The whole, I can fix you with my hands, but I'm going to need you to sign up for three visits a week for the next six months. We're talking ethical issues now. You know what I mean? So we're diving into different worlds, but the, my goal, my goal can't speak for anybody, a therapist. My goal is to create the autonomy to the athlete. I want the locus of control to be with them. I want them to feel like they have the power to be able to control their situation. And I'm just helping to steer the ship a little bit because ultimately my relationship with the athlete is not going to be as concentrated as the one with the coach.

The coach is the more important part. My interaction with the coach is more important than my overall interaction with the athlete because they're the one, unless they're my athlete, I'm going to see them every day. I can only pack in so much. So number one, it's always spinning the narrative to say, all right, this is what you can do. Not necessarily what you can't do, not fear-mongering to say, oh, you've got a, your left diaphragm doesn't fire and that's why you're injured. Let, you know, let's ignore the stupid program that you were on or the fact that, you know, you need a little bit more base to recover, all that stuff. So I spin the narrative that way. And as far as my, my philosophies, it's, I think taking an individual approach is important.

The pushback to that is always, well, I coach group classes. I'm in a college weight room coaching 50 kids, 50 football players that have 45 minutes to get in here and get the hell out. I can't be individual. My argument is that there are principles that you can make individual if you teach the athlete how to experiment themselves. So in our video with Mike, we taught him how to create a counterbalance so that he can play around with different stances and find what's most comfortable and quote unquote stable for him. It's the same idea with the shoulder. If I can't, you know, assess 50 people in the weight room and say, oh, you should put your shoulder,

it should be 10 degrees of interrotation, but you're here, but here's a little bit better than here. Like you just can't do that, but the athlete can do that. So lay them on their back, put a two and a half, five pound plate in their hand and just have them experiment with different ranges of motion. Not only are they learning about themselves, learning where their shoulder feels most comfortable when being put overhead, but it's also creating a little load tolerance to that low level load tolerance, that stretching quote unquote it's creating it's using load and stressor to put a joint in a new ish position so back to your question is how do you what's your philosophy on individualizing things i very much so believe that an individual

approach is is uh the best one but i think you can teach the athlete how to make it individual for them with just nuance yeah creating the autonomy. If you find an athlete has a very specific localized range of motion problem, they have just zero ankle mobility. Like how do you address that athlete? So the first question is, does it matter? So we go measure ankle range of motion and, you know, maybe it's a test that, um, one ankle is three quarters shorter than the other. What we have to figure out, does that correlate to what we're seeing in training? Does that truly matter? Because if you look at every human, they're going to have asymmetries, right?

Is that joint restriction actually impeding their ability to get into the positions? If the answer is yes, the intervention or the principles that guide that don't change. So for the ankle specifically, for example it's you were doing ankle mobility earlier with the counterbalance squat just driving your knees forward is that not ankle mobility under load under tension? Definitely. A split squat is another really useful tool where and obviously split squats just like a static lunge right but instead of keeping that front shin vertical, you actively exaggerate driving that front knee forward as you're driving the heel down with some decently heavy load. You're holding kettlebells, you're holding dumbbells, you're holding a plate here.

Can you just demo that real quick right on camera? Right, yeah, absolutely. You can see my slides, my sweet slides. We've got the flippy floppies. Yeah, so let's say you're holding, you can even have both feet elevated on a platform. Uh, and let's say you're holding weighted implements in both hands, one hand here, instead of a more traditional split squat, where we're kind of keeping a vertical shin or something like that, what we can do. Yeah, absolutely. So more traditional split squat where we just sit straight down.

What we can do is shorten up the stance a little bit and drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive the knee forward as I'm driving the heel down. With my body weight and with load, this is ankle mobility and probably more so than you're able to get with just sitting in a squat or even just stretching with a foam roll on your calf and then I drive my knee forward on the way up so not only is it mobilizing the joint drive drive drive drive drive drive drive drive but you're also getting used to what it feels like to actually use your quad let's think front squat let's take overhead squat I think we've gone way too far into the glutes and hamstrings control all and forget about the forget about the quads. We need these guys. Drive forward, drive forward, drive

forward. Usually prescribe these for three to four sets of like five to eight reps with a tempo that's maybe three seconds down, three seconds up. Think about that. Three seconds down, three seconds up. Anything more than like eight reps, and I find that people just rush through it, and they start, it's like, you know what I mean? So five reps is better than ten reps if you're just going to flow through it. Now, the question is, well, could I also just foam roll my calf for ten seconds and combine that, like alternate back and forth? Yeah, sure, you can do whatever the hell you want.

And you understand that that foam roller is just giving you a little short-term change maybe it's adding like one percent to the short-term range of motion equation then you load it that's totally fine and that's a there's there's validity to that but it's finding a variation where you can get the joint in a leveraged position all right does that make sense it does yeah yeah that's actually one of the big takeaways that I'm getting from the show is that that specificity matters and you don't need to do just like a regular stretch. If you can find a way to mobilize a joint in a position that's very specific to the position that you're trying to achieve, that's all the better. It's also stressors. The static stretching just typically simply does not impart the amount of

stressor needed for your body to create an adaptation, for it to be like, oh shit, I need to change something permanently because if he does that to me again, I'm not going to be prepared. That's what training does. It's a stressor. That would create so much force through the joint and load through the tissues that it would slowly over time adapt because it has to. Yeah.

Right? Static stretching, not necessarily unless it's like an eccentric like stairs. Calf raises, no seriously calf raises could be your best ankle mobility drill. Great. Every day. Loaded calf raises. Alright, two things I'm gonna do now after today's show is I'm gonna go burn my foam roller and I'm gonna go Jim, I'm gonna burn all their foam rollers. And what I really got out of this, what I really liked about what you were saying and you rarely hear this from a physical therapy perspective or a and what I really got out of this, what I really liked about what you were saying, and you rarely hear this from a physical therapy perspective or a therapy perspective at all, is let's look at the program you're doing and just look at volume and intensity.

You know, that's rarely, you know, everyone's so focused on movement, but that's not a conversation that's normally entered into. So that's my big takeaway, and I really enjoyed that. Yeah, I think for me the big one is get in the position. Just get in the position. And there's something very simple about that, especially as a coach and a coach who coaches coaches. That's something that's misguided very often. So that's a big one for me.

Quinn, where can we find out more about you? Oh, boy. I'm on the social medias. I have an Instagram Quinn dot Henick. Uh, DPT is my Instagram clinical athlete.com is probably the, is probably the most important here. This is a network of healthcare providers who hopefully have a better understanding of what we talked about because they're, they're up on the literature. And so there's a directory. If you're an athlete and you're hurt, you can go on clinical athlete.com and find a provider

in your area. Um, and then we also have a forum. So if these clinicians and students and coaches want to learn, have talk shop like this on the interwebs, that's what we do. And then my Facebook, you know, having a weird name, Quinn Hennick, just type that into whatever social media, like I'm going to show up, right? My YouTube channel is the exercises that I usually pump out to my peeps. And I just put them on my YouTube for free. There's no ads or anything like that it's cheap quality but like I have a YouTube channel that shows a lot of the drills that we talked about and I think it's good start them all my articles have juggernaut training

systems website and then I've done some YouTube videos for them regarding these things what's the next book that's coming in through Amazon for me weightlifter assessment and movement optimization. Perfect. Said like a German. Awesome. Awesome. And for those of you at home, make sure to go over to iTunes,

five-star review, positive comments only. And if you're listening, there are videos. We videoed some stuff that's going to be really helpful for you. Go over to YouTube, hit the subscribe button. That way you're always updated when we post them.

Thanks, Quinn. Thanks, Quinn. Thank you, guys. That was awesome. Thanks so much. Yeah, sure.