Barbell Shrugged - Should You Stretch? - The Relationship Between Mobility and Stability w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash - Barbell Shrugged #493

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged:   What is Mobility? What is Stability? What is the relationship between mobility and stability? How do you improve mobility and stability together? Should you increase your stretching?  Why is flexibility not the answer to lifting more weight?   Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram ————————————————   Training Programs to Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/34zcGVw   Nutrition Programs to Lose Fat and Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/3eiW8FF   Nutrition and Training Bundles to Save 67%: https://bit.ly/2yaxQxa   Please Support Our Sponsors   Shadow Creative Studios - Save $200 + Free Consult to start you podcast using code” “Shrugged” at podcast.shadowstud.io   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   www.masszymes.com/shruggedfree  - for FREE bottle of BiOptimizers Masszymes   http://onelink.to/fittogether - Brand New Fitness Social Media App Fittogether   Purchase our favorite Supplements here and use code “Shrugged” to save 20% on your order: https://bit.ly/2K2Qlq4    Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://bit.ly/3b6GZFj Save 5% using the coupon code “Shrugged”

Shrugged family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, mobility, stability, should you be stretching and how much flexibility do you really need to be as strong as you possibly need to? But before we get rolling, I want to thank our friends over at Organifi, the green, the red, the gold, and you get some protein in there, you can get some gut bacteria, you can get some probiotics and prebiotics, all the good stuff, but Organifi.com forward slash shrugged, that is where you're going to save 20%. And let me tell you something, I actually was on a real vacation for four whole days. That's a full four days. I didn't even really get on social media. It felt so good. I was hanging out with my friends,

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the app stores on all your devices. Once you download it, find me at Anders Varner. I'm also in the Barbell Shrugged group. We have the most people in our group of any other group on Fit Together. That's pretty savage, right? Um, there's going to be two grand prize winners. That grand prize is six months of your gym membership paid for in full six months up to $1,500 value. Two of those are

going to be getting out. All you got to do work out, post it, use the hashtag check-in challenge so we can follow along with you. And you are entered to win. The more you do it, the better your chances of winning. We're picking the two most check-in challenged people. Also, if you finish in second place, guess what? That's cool because you're going to get a free Fitbit. That's awesome. You can track your steps. You can see your health. You can see about your sleep. I don't have a Fitbit yet. I'm getting one soon.

But here's the deal, friends. Check-in challenge. Use the hashtag Check-in Challenge. Go download the Fit Together app, F-I-T-T-O-G-E-T-H-E-R, on all your devices. Get involved in the Check-in Challenge. Win six months of your gym membership paid for free. Let's get into the show Welcome to my most shrugged I'm Brad Morrison, Coach Travis Mash. Today we're going to talk about everything mobility and stability because mobility is the big sexy word

Stability is typically the thing that gets overlooked and it's a little bit more complex of an issue So we're going to dive deep into mobility and stability, talk about exercises, ways that you can increase your mobility, increase your stability, and what that means for overall performance and health. But before we get into that, I have to talk about this thing I saw on the internet yesterday. Yeah, I've been wanting to hear. Oh, I have to get into this. My dude, my dude, Travis Mash, front squat at 450 pounds. Is that what you did the other day?

44. I saw it on LinkedIn. I saw it on Instagram, and then I saw it on LinkedIn. I was like, damn, this is cool. And I watched it like four times because I just enjoy watching people front squat a lot of weight. And my dude is in the backyard at the farm. He's got a red beanie on. The Apple ear pods are super tight.

I mean, you're basically 24 years old mentality right now. You're ready to rip a head off a bat and eat it like Ozzy Osbourne. You just happen to be front squatting instead of singing in front of thousands of people. And you smoked the 450, 480 pound squat. And the very first thing you do is you drop the barbell. You give like the Tiger Woods fist pump. You're so stoked on life that you just did it. And you turn around and you winked at your wife.

Did you see that? Did you know you did that? No. You were shocked. You're flirting with your wife. It was the most. I watched that video four times before. I was like, what is he doing? Oh, my gosh.

He's hitting on his wife in the farm. And he's still using that freaking front squat to get laid at night. I can't wait for my wife to hear this. And then two seconds later, you went right into dad mode. I watched your whole life in a seven-second front squat video. You got strong as hell. You were angry. You were fired up.

You wanted to get laid right after get laid and then you turned around and you looked at your daughter and your whole heart melted and i went i fucking love that guy that was the greatest video i've ever seen in my whole life so yeah man i definitely flirt when i'm lifting i mean i feel like I call it, you know, pretending I'm a gorilla, you know? Like, you know how gorillas prance around, you know? The other gorillas. Yeah.

I watched it last night. I was up doing work late. I popped on LinkedIn, share a bunch of shows that we've been putting up. And, dude, I watched it like five times and I was like, tell me he didn't really wink. He winked! He just winked!

Yeah. Oh, it's so good. Man, back to mobility and stability. As soon as I watched it last night, I was like, dude, I gotta start the show with that because that story is just one of my favorite stories of all time. That you're – how old are you now?

I'm 47. And my man is still in the game, not just strong, under the bar, but the dude is flirting with his wife. And if you want to know how to keep it going in life, do that. That's key, man. Yeah, dude. Yeah. Rad. Tell me about some mobility and stability.

Let's get to the high-level framework. Looking at joints, tissues. I had someone reach out yesterday talking about they're 20 years old. They lift weights, which inspired this podcast. They lift weights three, four times a week, and they're in constant joint pain and heal through movement, basically. Yeah. Well, I don't know that person and their whole story. I creeped on their Instagram just to check them out.

You're totally informed now. I've got 15-second videos to prove I'm right. Yeah, I mean, it's very common. If you talk to somebody, they're like, I can't lose weight. I don't know what to do. I've tried everything, and I eat really well. And then you get a three-day food log from them, and you go, oh, okay. What you told me, you said you did really well. I assumed

what your really well was is the same as what my really well is and that's not the case. My really well is different than mine. That might be the case here. A lot of people, it's tough to always know exactly what is specifically causing you to hurt. Is it a lack of mobility? Is it too much training volume? Is it because you are using movements that are just higher stress on your joints than they need to be? Do you have a pre-existing injury that's just kind of, even though you have good technique, like, you know, you sprain your ankle so many times in high school soccer that now your ankle just hurts all the time regardless of what you do. Just anything kind of aggravates it. So it's tough to know really what's causing someone's pain.

I don't know about the weak tendons comment. That's a tough one to be able to say, like, confidently, like, I have weak tendons compared to what. I don't know about the weak tendons comment that's that's a tough one to to be able to say like confidently like i have weak tendons compared to what i don't know uh but but what she does know is that she has joint pain um and looking at mobility and technique is is they are two components of of something to look at where you could make tweaks and potentially reduce her chances for injury in the future or reduce joint pain. But regarding our conversation, regarding exercise technique and movement quality, like you do need to have very mobile,

we'll say the basics of hips, shoulders, and ankles at a minimum. Like if you have really mobile hips, shoulders, and ankles, and you can go full depth on squats through a range of motion that you actually have, and you can go overhead through a range of motion that you actually have, the chance of you getting more joint pain or getting joint pain while you have full range of motion is dramatically less than if you don't actually have full range of motion, but you're, you're doing full depth squats, even though,

even though your hips are stopping and your low back is starting to move or whatever compensation you're, you're having. So I think getting an assessment, if you think mobility is your problem, getting an assessment from someone in person, you know, physical therapist or whoever is whoever is a great option. You know, I have two products that actually go through mobility assessments,

both maximum mobility and movement specific mobility. They both walk through, you know, if you have pain here or if you have this movement compensation where your technique's breaking down with your knees are diving in or your low back is rounding,

whatever it is, then you can do these things to figure out what's actually causing the restriction and then you can do these things for fixing whatever the restriction is that you found yeah step by step process i think you do if can you define kind of those those big key words of like mobility stability flexibility always gets thrown in there even though that isn't necessarily the same as either of those um and then even like the word stretching like stretching tissues um i feel like all four of those really get like lumped into this like kind of pile of joint health without a lot of people having a clear definition

of what all that really means right I mean at the most basic level mobility is just the the ability to achieve a position right if you can get into a position then you're mobile enough to get into that position yeah like having a full range of motion in your joint can your hip get below below your knee that's just the mobility of that joint right and then stability is not moving in the presence of potential change so a force is being exerted on you but you're not changing your body position at all you're essentially holding an isometric and you can you can maintain a position because you're essentially holding an isometric and you can, you can maintain a position because you're strong enough to not fall out of position.

A easy example, you know, like when you're doing, when you're doing a squat or actually when I get more easy, we'll do a, we'll do a good morning on a good morning. If you can, if you can hinge and keep that,

that normal lumbar curve and that you have a totally neutral spine, then your back is stable because your back is not moving. It could move. If you, if you relaxed your spinal neutral spine, then your back is stable because your back is not moving. It could move. If you relaxed your spinal erectors, then you would go into lumbar flexion and you would kind of fold over out of position. Then you're not stable because your back is moving under load. Your hips should be moving under load, but your back should not be moving under load. Your back is supposed to be stable. Your hip joint is the joint back is supposed to be stable your hip your hip joint is the the joint that's supposed to be moving it's designed to to to move against large loads but your low back not not so much each individual joint between your vertebrae is not not very strong once you're in full flexion all your muscles basically stop working which is a real that's a real statement

like if you look at at emg studies on people that end up in full flexion on a deadlift or whatever it is there's basically no muscular activity in there. It's all passive restraints. It's all ligaments and joint capsules that are holding their back together. And then that's how you eventually tear something and blow your back out. Yeah. Mash, when – I guess when you're working with your athletes, do you have some sort of assessment protocol when you're bringing on new people? Like, where do you start this conversation?

I think it's like a really glorified version of, you know, having athletes that are potential Olympians going to be Olympians and these high-level lifters that you work with that they just don't have issues. And the truth is like they create so much stability in their positions that it almost becomes a problem so do you have kind of an assessment protocol that when you're onboarding athletes and how does that work for you

if i you know if i could choose one movement for either crossfit or weightlifting it would be a close grip overhead squat i think would tell you pretty much everything you need to know. If someone can do a full range of motion, you know, close grip overhead squat, that tells me that they have ankles, knee, hip, they have structure in their back, and they have the thoracic mobility, shoulder mobility to stay overhead. And then they can pretty much perform every movement that I would have them do in weightlifting. And I think that's key.

And any more, but the thing is that we get a lot of athletes who are hypermobile. And so understanding what's optimal is the key there in both. There's no, you get so many people who take sides, they're like, I'm a mobility person. And then there's a person over here who is, I'm a stability person it's like you neither one are correct it's like yeah they have to flow together right right um yeah go ahead i'll just say that they they really do go together like the the more mobile you are the greater your ability to maintain stability where you

need to maintain stability like back to our our full depth squat example if you're if you're not able to go below parallel because your hip stops moving in order for you to move the bar any lower then now you get you have to start rounding your back something else to give right yeah and then also if you're if you're not very stable then your body will the way the way I often hear described like if you aren't very stable, then your body will, the way I often hear it described, like if you aren't very stable, your body will lay down stiffness at the joints above and below where you're lacking stability as a super weak in your rectus abdominis, your obliques, your spinal erectors, like you're just not very strong in your torso area. And you're kind of like your body knows this, so to speak. It'll lay down stiffness in your thoracic spine.

It'll lay down stiffness in your hips that keep you from moving correctly as a compensation. Right. Does that make sense? So not having stability makes you less mobile. that keep you from moving correctly as a compensation. Right. Does that make sense? So not having stability makes you less mobile. Right. Whereas having more mobility will make you less stable and having more stability will make you less mobile. They really go together. A lot of people, they're not very flexible

and they keep trying to stretch and become more mobile and they're not really making very much progress but then if they if they add in some stability training well now because they're more stable it's kind of like their body lets them become more mobile is a way to do about it I agree I think the one way if you want to achieve a certain position like let's say an overhead squat or like you want to get more mobility in the snatch or in the clean you know the best way to achieve that is by doing that movement because you get both naturally so if i overhead squat on

a regular basis three four or more times per week like i'm working on mobility and i'm working on stability all at the same time and really what's happening is your body's getting more efficient and more comfortable with that movement. You know, there's no amount of the cross ball work or PVC pipe rolling that will help you get better at snatching or clean jerking. Other than, you know, more than snatching and clean jerking will do it. Yeah, right. Yeah, I think pause is at the end of movements. Like I know, Travis, you're a big fan of pause squats and pauses for many reasons. But like doing heavy pause squats where you're sitting as low as you can in a perfect position,

if you're a person that doesn't have very good mobility and you can only do a half squat, we'll say, well, go down into a perfect half squat where everything is lined up the way it needs to be lined up. You got knee over toe. You got that perfectly neutral spine. But to go any lower, you know you would have to compensate just go down pause you know for five seconds and do you know five sets of five with with a five or seven or ten second pause whatever it needs to be where you're treating the bottom position like it's a stretch yeah i'll go down there stretch kind of trying to sink just a little lower in perfect position, always in perfect position, and then do sets like that frequently, and I think you'll get very good mobility gains in the right place,

exactly where you need it if we're talking about squats. But you could do it with RDLs. Just go down, get a big stretch on RDLs. You could do it with pull-ups at the very bottom position. Just do an active hang or an L hang where you're pulling your ribs down. Yeah. You're getting a full stretch overhead and then do your next rep and then pause again at the bottom. Pausing at the bottom of movements is phenomenally beneficial. I would recommend, and one step farther, even spending some time pausing with deep breaths because deep

breaths what happens you know a lot of times when we're pausing and holding our breath the inner abdominal pressure is what's holding you and so a lot of those supportive the supportive structure is not working like it would if you breathe so like if i start to breathe and i'm still going to maintain correct posture then like for example in a front squat or overhead squat your multifidus will will be recruited more so than it would if you were holding your breath you actually and you also kind of uh desensitize your body to the and get into the parasympathetic when you're doing the breathing right your body is not recognizing fear and getting to that position um it just calms everything down you actually go zen down there for three seconds your body realizes you're not going to get hurt i think the majority of people

that struggle with a lot of these issues there isn't necessarily a tissue or a joint issue. It's your brain not feeling safe and stops you from doing movements. That's exactly right. Stability is a really tough one because to get somebody, most people, and this boils down to strength, and many other,

we attack things from this physical side. We don't really want to get into the next level of training. And when you see people struggle with stuff, you go, well, you have a stability issue. And you go, well, what does that mean? You go, well, kind of have this neurological piece to movement in which your brain has to recognize all of the ranges of motion in which it needs to move through. And if it doesn't trust you in a specific range of motion, it's going to do something to protect it in that place. And for most people, it just means it's going to stop you from going there. So you can't stretch your way out of poor movement. You can't stretch your way out of, you know, a lack of trust that

your brain has in your body. you have to go to that place, desensitize your brain to the fear of being there, breathe a little bit in that position. And then you actually, you'll notice that your body will very slowly, if it's a squat, slowly bring yourself into a better position. It just naturally happens. It's like you're using a little bit of gravity, you're using a little bit of the parasympathetic, but they don't realize how far that range of motion is and that your feet, your head's got to talk to your heels throughout that entire movement, the bottom of your feet and your brain. There's a lot of wires that go up and down there. And if the, if that conversation between your feet and your brain, and then your hips going

all the way down, isn't an efficient conversation, something's going to go wrong. There's a short in the wire. And in order to protect itself, to protect your low back, you're going to go wrong there's a short in the wire and in order to protect itself to protect your low back you're going to get low back pain because your brain saying hey we're putting our spine at risk every time we send our hips back what's going on and you keep doing it you keep fighting through it until one day you've got really bad back pain and in understanding that there's a neurological component to stability is to me, one of the most difficult things for people to understand because they just want to go stretch the tissue or they want to go foam roll. And it's not that foam rolling, I'd actually love to hear

kind of like when you guys think that stretching and foam rolling actually has its benefits, um, because it does. Yeah. It just, I don't think it has the benefit that people are looking for. No, it's not going to do, it's a way of,

it helps things, but it's not the answer. Does that make sense? Like, you know, like I would say frequency is going to be the answer. If there's a movement you want to do, do the movement,

but to do some foam rolling and like if you can like assess your body and find like for me example obviously it's my hips um you know they're old and arthritic and so like i know that one bit of like foam rolling i use a lacrosse ball actually like on my hip helps me prepare that tissue to to move better but but it's still not the it's not going to be the thing that like fixes it doing the movement like the more i i squat the better i get at it you know the more you in a few weeks i will be lower and then a few weeks i will be lower and then eventually i'll be to where i was and so do the movement yeah yeah just just accumulating

time in a position is the best way to improve that position right you know like if you if you have the majority of your overhead reach but you're lacking kind of like the last five percent like you just you aren't quite there then you can just go hang on a pull-up bar for and accumulate five or ten minutes a day and you probably get there pretty quick if you're doing an active hang and you're just doing you know 30 seconds 10 times a day like you're you're going to get more range of motion overhead exactly how you need it if you're in a different way than if you're just if you're just going up to the wall and put your arm overhead and kind of pressing your elbow into the wall where you're getting a a lat shoulder flexion type stretch well that's not the exact same thing as as how

you're going to be if you're if you're hanging in a chin-up position right yeah it can help for sure but i think just going straight assuming you can accomplish um you can accomplish roughly the movement if you're so far gone that like you can't even get close to getting into a position like like if you're a person that you you when you try to lift your arms overhead you can kind of get to like you know if right out in front of you is 90 degrees you can get to like 135 you're kind of like at a 45 off to the sky well if you go try and hang it's either going to hurt your shoulders a lot or uh or you're going to hang in this really funky position. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like where, where you're kind of like leaning back, but in your, in your, your resisting going all the way straight because your joint

can't do it. So something's, something's going to break. Uh, in that case, you know, maybe, maybe you, you just have a lower pull up bar and you keep your feet on the ground in front of you and you kind of just, you just adjust to whatever angle you can you can comfortably do because it's not supposed to be it can be uncomfortable is okay but painful is is probably not beneficial you should be experiencing pain yeah mash coming from like the the power lifting world um how much because the idea of stability you you really want that tension when you're squatting a thousand pounds you want you're gonna put 800 pounds on your back if you're a competitive power lif when you're squatting 1,000 pounds. If you're going to put 800 pounds on your back, if you're a competitive power lifter,

you're actually really only interested in, you know, like a hundredth of a centimeter below parallel. So you get the white light and then you stand back up. And in order to do that, you want to create as much stability as possible. Like you want to be as tight as you possibly can to spring out of the bottom with 6, 7, 800, if you're Chrisris duffin a thousand and one pounds three times right um so but that doesn't eliminate the conversation of like i guess coming from the power lifting world how is mobility discussed um kind of with these like big strong giant humans because are they all walking around

in just massive pain or do they have relatively healthy joints they're just able to control the movement to a specific range of motion it depends on the person like chris duffin sounds like you know he's wise enough to realize sounds like he's got a forklift running over him yeah for massaging every day that's good but there's lots of ways to um to manipulate the lift itself to create that you know um you know that higher range of motion because what happens is like you know if i sit back first you know the hip is going to determine when the end range of motion is so if i sit back i immediately start you know hip flexion and so yeah you're only going to perform so much so you're going to reach the bottom sooner or if i put my feet wider you know and if i turn my toes forward that was that will stop it sooner

so there's so many different ways that i can like manipulate that because you want to still be able to do a full depth squat you know if I'm going to do a bodyweight squat as a power lifter I still want to do you know roughly a vertical spine sitting nice and deep you know if you want to do it long time you know if you want to be like Ed Kong you know then you need to have you know you need to prepare your tissue to move correctly. So, yeah, there's more than one way. Some people just get super tight, and no matter what position they're in, they can't go below, and that's not good.

That ends up, that's going to end your career. Well, what is the benefit then? I mean, Chris Duffin, just specifically talking about him, like he's got these gigantic, basically, rollers that you would see more or less at the end of a loading dock so that a semi-truck doesn't back into a building. Right.

You know, that's more or less like what his mobility products and foam rollers look like because he's such a giant, strong human with so much muscle. I love his products. It takes that much weight to break into the tissue so what is the foam rolling actually doing if if he needs it and it's not

that people don't see success from foam rolling our buddy kelly starrett we all have talked to him yesterday i think he's one of the i think he's one of like the smartest dudes in our industry. And nicest. And nicest. I have thoughts about Kelly. I'm angry at all of the people for him. Because he put all of that stuff on the map. The lacrosse balls. He put it on the map.

And within like six months, the whole world was like, that's standard now. We're just going to take that. Yeah. And now we're going to put our own videos online. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's that dude's stuff. That's his. Do not use the lacrosse ball without saying Dr. Kelly Starrett, please.

It's like using bands and not saying Westside Barbell. I know so many people who are like, you know. I invented this. No, you didn't. I know so many people who are like, you know. I invented this. No, you didn't. I know the guy that did. Yeah, absolutely not. Or they'll say, I hate Louie Simmons. He's so dumb.

Meanwhile, they're using the bands. I'm like. But Kelly Starrett showed up, introduced lacrosse balls, introduced a lot of these soft tissue pieces, and revolutionized the way Pts strength coaches he made uh basically what physical therapy is accessible by strength coaches everybody had i have a really good story about falling in love with kelly starrett and using everything he said because it was like gospel and then but what is actually happening when you take the lacrosse ball put it in your glute your brain says ow i've never felt pain like that before and then you're better in two minutes

there's a lot of theories man you know if you guys ever had charlie weingroth on your show no i went to i watched him talk at perform better though he was like the leader in in mobility as far as like research that is and so he would say that a lot of it is probably just desensitizing the tissue. So therefore, when you go and do your overhead squat or you go and whatever movement you're going to do, it's desensitized towards the amount of, like, you know, desensitizes the threshold. So you're able to get in a better position before the body says ouch this hurts and so but then there's a theory of what people would say then you know does it does it stretch the fascia i mean i'm not so sure i don't think so based on the research but

you know really i think there needs there truthfully there needs to be more research done on stretching because depending on the experts you ask you get different answers but charlie is my go-to dude just because he performs a lot of the research so i'm going to go with him just saying it desensitizes the tissue and allows you to to move into positions it wouldn't have allowed before so yeah i think the desensitization seems to make the most sense to me. Mainly just because what we were talking about earlier, especially when Kelly is prescribing it and talking about it, there's always a breathing component to it.

Right. So you're going to this place that has tightness or tension in the muscle. It's around a joint about an inch or two above or below the joint, which he always talks about. And then you put the lacrosse ball there. It's a very hard object. And then he says, hold it and breathe for two minutes and have slow movement. To me, in a way, when you kind of conceptually understand what's going on, that's in a a way to me just it's doing the movement almost without doing the movement without without doing the squat you're you're kind of finding that weak spot going to that place you just have a lacrosse ball right one of the things that i i was really stoked when i saw kelly start doing because i was like when kelly and when kelly was like out back

in san francisco at the golden Gate Bridge doing just freaky human stuff and I was like three, two years into CrossFit and when I went to Kelly's gym for the first time, guess who picked up the phone? Kelly Starrett! No way! I was like, I'm on the phone with you! You called me back! You're a celebrity!

I love you! Can I come to your gym? And he was like, dude, come on in. Hang out. No big deal but um because he was called mobility wad um me specifically i'm sure a lot of other people fell into this but i can only talk about me um i really fell into everybody needs to be foam rolling everybody needs to be on a lacrosse ball it needs to be really painful you have to go to that spot that's going to hurt so bad everybody needs to be taking a barbell and mashing out their legs um and then he invented like the ultimate thing which was the voodoo floss do you guys use the voodoo floss i have i don't all the time but i have i learned about hypermobility in a very bad way with one of my clients because i had never

really experienced it before or i'm not you know i live heavier weights hypermobility really isn't my issue so she came to me with knee pain and young dumb Anders decided to voodoo floss her above the knee I was like bang out like 30 squats move nice and slow stretch everything out in there basically what I did was I took all the already extremely loose tissue yeah and her knee was just like flopping around in there after I was done she was like this is this is way worse what'd you do I had to go to the internet I learned about hypermping around in there after I was done. She was like, this is way worse. What did you do? I had to go to the internet.

I learned about hypermobility like that afternoon. I was like, stop doing everything I told you. This is really, really bad. I took this piece of information. I thought I knew what I was talking about and I hurt you and I'm so sorry. But now I'm better. I had to go learn. I had to figure it out. But because it was called mobility, I thought everybody should just be stretching more. I wasn't smart

enough to – I didn't have all the information. But if you're really going to start kind of assessing on the stability side, I think that it's really a joint by joint thing. Do you, and I've said that a couple times, but I know, do you guys, do you buy into the understanding and kind of assessment side of Boyle's joint by joint system of going from a stability joint to a mobility joint stability? I think that's great cook as well that put that system together. Yeah, yeah.

And like, yeah, great. Great got her from kind of Shirley Sarman pioneered I think that's Grey Cook as well that put that system together and like Grey got it from Shirley Sarman pioneered a lot of it and then Grey kind of simplified it into a concept and then Boyle kind of further simplified it for the everyday meathead so to speak right

I agree with much of it though you can shoot holes in little parts of it like okay well there are situations where this thing actually isn't 100% accurate. But like every model, no models are correct. But some models are useful. Coronavirus. What? The coronavirus model.

Sorry. That was my one-liner I threw in there talking about models. That could go ahead rabbit hole but yeah but yeah like with the drone by drone concept like there are little little nitpicky things you could you could say about it where it may maybe does not apply 100 of the time but but by and large i think it's a really important thing to understand if you understand that model then you have a good idea of how movement is supposed to be performed where you were now as a as a movement expert you can go watch somebody hit a tennis ball

and you can have a pretty good idea if they have good technique or not but is their body moving the way that it's supposed to be moving you know i can't can you tell this person is is rotating at the hips and that they're keeping the ribs down and they're, and they're, they're, um, they kind of have that, that whippy action because their, their core is strong enough to, to, um, have their shoulders follow their hips where they're not losing power by, by flaring the rib cage as they twist or whatever it is. Like I'm not a tennis expert either, but, but you can, you can look at somebody and know, okay, that person's moving pretty well or that person has some movement flaws that I can take care of. Yeah, I mean, the big one I think is that you can't, I don't think you can shoot a hole in this would be like if the hips aren't moving like they should, then the low back. This is the most common one that we're all going to, you know, eventually we're all going to experience a little bit of this.

The hips don't move well, then the low back will start to move the way it shouldn't it's going to start performing rotation and it's really just supposed to do flexion extension for them and not much of that either so if the hips won't let you move properly the low back will start to and then eventually you'll get the low back pain so if your hips you know a lot of times low back pain is directly attributed to bad hip movement like mine so yeah um on the other end of i guess kind of if kelly's methodology is really um kind of the more physical side of things and you know putting a lacrosse ball above the joint and moving a little bit um doug i know that you've interviewed him a couple times, and we've all hung out with

him before. Have you ever heard of Max Schenck, Travis? Yeah. He's awesome. Yeah. I miss hanging out with him in sunny SoCal in his backyard. I saw him on the internet the other day. He hasn't shaved in like three years.

He hasn't shaved since I left. I think he's waiting for me to come back um but he has a product and a kind of a methodology that he's put together just called five minute flow um of really light gentle movement throughout the day um in five minute chunks that's a very flowy system that he's put together for eliminating pain and increasing mobility. Without him being here right now, Doug, do you buy into, I know that you do these somewhat regularly, but that method is on the opposite end

and in a way probably a little bit more difficult than handing somebody a lacrosse ball and saying, hey, go do this. But when you interview Max or when we're all hanging out and listening to him talk, do you kind of buy into the other side of it where maybe having such a physical approach

to mobility and stability isn't necessarily needed we just need to you know passively be hitting in ranges of motion well again it depends on what your goal is like what max is is pointing out with five minute flow which i which i love that whole concept is also that is that every day everyone should be moving all of their joints through a full range of motion of all types. Whatever position you're able to achieve with every joint, you should be achieving that position at least once a day. And that might just mean, you know, say we're talking just about our wrists. Like, okay, well, every day you should put your wrist into full flexion, put your wrist into full extension, spread your fingers out as wide as you can,

make a fist as strong as you can, keep your fingers closed, full flexion, full extension with closed wrists. You go side to side a little bit. Okay, I just put my wrist through basically all the ranges of motion that it can do. Now, because I've done that, we're all doing it,

I'm less likely to lose any range of motion before tomorrow. As you get older, people tend to not do all the activities they used to do. And as a result of kind of the if you don't use it, you lose it type of thing, you will over time become less and less and less mobile because you haven't your joints haven't gone through those ranges of motion so you can use those ranges of motion so what what five minute flow is is basically just taking all of your joints um through a full range of motion you know you do a bunch of neck circles and then you do a bunch of like twists and then you do a bunch of arm circles and etc and you just put all your all your joints through a full range of motion that way you don't lose range of motion as quickly

because you've touched end range in every possible way you can. That said, if you want to become more flexible, five-minute flow is not going to make you more flexible. It's only going to keep range of motion you already have. And so that's where actually doing intense mobility work comes in. If you want to do the splits, you have to work on it, That's where actually doing intense mobility work comes in. If you want to do the splits, you have to work on it, and you have to put yourself into that end range and comfortable position many, many times in order to eventually get lower and lower and lower and lower and lower

and get all the way into the splits. But five-minute flow and doing leg swings and all that is never going to get you there if you're far away at all. This Doug Larson guy and his segues. So this is a perfect way to get into the next thing I want to talk about. It's like the splits is kind of like this beautiful, I would love to be able to do it, but do I need it to be pain-free

or is doing the splits a performance thing that is just really cool is is everybody should probably be able to you know back squat at least their body weight but double body weight is really a performance thing you don't need to do that so on the mobility side of things what how does somebody go about finding out what a like some assessments or what is normal range of motion if they are in pain. And then if you want to take it to the split and add in a performance side of things, like where do they go? If you were to kind of start thinking like big joints, ankle, knee, hip, we don't have to go through every single assessment they could possibly do, but understanding a range of motion just so they can at home start testing

if I have a knee pain, well let's go below and above. do, but understanding a range of motion just so they can at home start testing, you know, if I have a knee pain, well, let's go below and above. What do my ankles and what do my hips look like? What's an assessment process that people can start working on? I mean, we have videos and all this stuff where I can demonstrate exactly what the range of motion is supposed to look like, how to test it, and then how to quantify it. Is that in movement-specific mobility? Yeah, many of the things are movement-specific mobility, but it's laid out more comprehensively in maximum mobility

where I really lay out the joint-by-joint concept and I go through each and every joint one by one and talk about how much range of motion you ideally should have and how to test it, how to quantify it, and then how to improve it. But to answer your question for the moment, I'll just give like, you know, like one simple example, like say we're talking about ankle mobility, like how much ankle range of motion do you need? That's going to vary from person to person. Not everyone's going to need the same amount of ankle range of motion, even if you're competing in the same sport. If you're a weightlifter and your friend's a

weightlifter, well, if you have really long femurs and short torso you're going to need radically more ankle range of motion than than your friend who has a long torso and and short femurs like if you have if you're built like a like an adult toddler like you have you have a long torso toddler and really toddler. And really, really short femurs. Babies do. If you look at a baby, their torso is three times as long as their femurs. Having those proportions as an adult is very unique. It happens with midgets.

They have that same type of body type where they have really short legs, really long torsos. And some people just kind of naturally have that build but if you have that build um you you don't need as much ankle range of motion like your your knee when you squat full depth you know with a close stance toes straight ahead might only go to the very end of your foot it won't even it won't even go past your toes at all if you're a person that has really long femurs and a short torso, well, number one, like squatting close stance with toes straight ahead is going to be really tough. You just can't do it because you're going to have to fold in order to go all the way down. And you can try this yourself. If you put your feet all the way together underneath you and you put a bar on your back and you try to go ass to grass, like full depth, most people are going to have to round their back to get all the way together underneath you and you put a bar on your back and you try to go ass to grass

like full depth most people are going to have to round their back to get all the way to the bottom but you can take that same person and just widen their stance and toe out a little bit and they can go to the bottom with a neutral spine no problem so part of rounding your back is a balance issue if your if your foot placement isn't correct and then and then part of it can be a range of motion issue but if you're if you can if you can squat as it as a test if you put your feet all the way together and you can squat all the way down then you probably have good enough ankle range of motion for most things you would do in crossfit and weightlifting uh if you if you can't squat all the way down and you you just keep falling over backward well that your your knees

can't go any further forward and so and so to get lower you kind of have to start falling over backward yeah right um and again the more range of motion you have the easier that becomes and and depending on your body type the easier that is so yeah the answer is not the same for everyone no definitely not the i think that that the kind of towards the end there we're talking about the movement patterns i think that coaches need to develop um really just the eyeball test for a lot of this stuff which just takes a lot of time um and yeah every every movement you watch an athlete do at some level in your head you're assessing their movement totally so like they had there there are movement assessments out there some of them are better than others of course none of them really tell the whole story like if you look at

the functional movement screens probably the easiest one to cite like I so good I was yeah go we I mean that's that's that's greatest thing like he yeah joint by joint idea and then he also also gave them the functional movement screen. And if you are a professional, if you're a physical therapist or a high-level strength coach, well-educated, then you don't necessarily need to just do the functional movement screen the exact way it's prescribed. There's many other tests that you can do in addition to the seven that are on that test. But if you're in the military and you need to test 2,000 people for movement quality, you're not going to be training all those people every day.

Many of them, you're only going to have five or ten minutes with them or whatever it is. And you can just run them through a series of tests, kind of like Travis said with the close grip overhead squat. You can run a whole football team through that quick assessment just to get a general idea of how they're doing. But if you're training somebody one-on-one, you wouldn't need to rely simply on one single test. So some of the assessments, like the functional movement screen, they do really well if you

need to do a large volume of people very quickly and comprehensively. But if you're training an athlete and you're going to be training that athlete for years, well, you can just kind of, you can do like an initial, just good. I give them a quick eyeball, look at a close stance overhead squat and go, okay, yeah, you're probably probably good enough. Go ahead and just start working on this exercise or that exercise. And then as you're watching them move, you can say, okay, well, that was kind of funny. Okay. That because of that movement compensation, let's try this other test. Okay. Gray Cook is the man. You know, he's right up the road from us.

He's just in, he's right where Averitt University is in Virginia, across the border. Really? Yeah, we should go see, when this is over, we should go, we should go see him.

It's in a little town. I forget the town. Averitt is the name of the university, but. Here's my, here's my story about him. I went to perform better in Long Beach, like 2000. Sold the gym in 16, so 16 or 17. It was like the year after I sold the gym, I just wanted to get out of CrossFit. I wanted to go do the anti-CrossFit thing and learn from other people

because I was so tired of hearing the same thing over and over and over again. So I went to Boyle's Functional Strength Coach certification, whatever that is. It was great. I enjoyed it. And then I went and watched all the people speak at Perform Better. Yeah. speak at um perform better yeah and he got up there and he just crushed trust he slayed like there was a delivery and a cadence and the way that he talked about it it was like why doesn't everybody understand mobility and stability and assessment the way that this guy does?

Like, he makes this so easy and so clear that there should be no pain in this entire world. Everybody should just follow this guy, and it should be so easy. And sure enough, we go and interview Boyle. And it turns out Gray Cook has a father who is a pastor. And he's been listening to him run sermons on Sunday since he was a baby. And there's a reason that he knows how to coax an audience into this beautiful cadence and this storyline. And he weaves this thing for you. And by the end of it, you're like,

just give me the board with the two pegs coming off with the piece of rubber band in the middle. I'll take my money. I need it. I'm going to go solve all the problems. Give me the book too. While you're at it, give me the book.

Yeah, it was, it was like the most, yeah, of course it was like the most beautiful drawn out like system for assessing your athletes and i think this is the thing that doug was talking about of like when yes you can poke holes into any model and system and structure but if you're consistent with the middle the model and the system and structure but if you're consistent with the middle the model and the system and

structure that from point a to point b and you can quantifiably show an improvement that is the assessment that's going to be working if you can understand ranges of motion and movement and then create your own system off that it doesn't have to be the fms like the fms is just a tool that is used by thousands of people right um and it's very easy and very well studied that if you're at point a and your score improves from an 11 to a 16 you got better you probably don't have as much pain and you're probably going to be moving significantly better. But it doesn't mean that the FMS is the end-all, be-all. It means that every coach should go out and find out what's important to them,

create some sort of assessment process to look at each joint and understand proper ranges of motion, where the issues may be, and then create a program off of that assessment to to progress their clients i'm with you if you guys ever heard of like you know like um i forget the guy's name i think i wrote it down but like you know actually assessing the big toe you know the um i have big toe issues actually go ahead the first metatarsal so like um that it needs at least needs to um be able to get to 90 degrees of flexion and um most people and if it if it can't there's a lot there's a good chance that you're compensating it could cause back pain like i'm honestly not as familiar until in the last year i started hearing something we heard it you know when we were in jamaica you know we heard on both phil and Coach Cav talking about the big toe and so um what do you got what are your thoughts on that Doug? Well I mean that that falls right in line with the joint by joint concept like

if you have this alternating pattern of of mobility and stability needs that that alternate on a joint by joint basis if you start at the very bottom of your bottom very bottom of your body at your big toe your big toe tends to need to be trained to have more mobility and it has a tendency towards stickiness we'll call it right and then your your foot itself is going to be something that that requires more stability and has a tendency towards sloppiness and it keeps alternating like that like your your big toe needs more mobility your foot needs more stability your ankle needs more mobility your knee needs more stability your hip needs more mobility your low back needs more stability your upper back thoracic spine

needs more mobility your scapula and shoulder blades need need more uh more stability your glenohumeral joint your shoulder joint itself needs more mobility elbow stability wrist mobility hand mobility fingers fingers mobility. You just have this alternating pattern all the way through. And if you have any issues at any one of those joints, then it causes compensation up or downstream. So as a practical example, like you talked about the big toe, I have this buddy who, he trades bonds in New York City. Really successful guy. Super athletic.

He's like one of the only people that has ever come into my gym that was 200 plus pounds. He's probably like 215. And someone goes, you're pretty strong. Can you do a one-arm pull-up? And he goes, I don't know. Never tried it. And he went over there and did a one-arm pull-up. And he weighs 215 pounds.

One arm like this or one arm like this? No, no, no. One arm only. Yeah. Yeah. That's very athletic. Yeah. Yeah.

So I took this guy with me to boxing back when I used to do boxing, kickboxing, MMA, and all that stuff. And he came to boxing with me. And he, as strong and athletic as he is, had almost no range of motion at his big toe. And so, like, you think about, like, when you do a push-up, your foot, your big toe is at 90 degrees. That way, your toe is on the ground, and also the ball of your foot is on the ground, and most of your weight is really going through the ball of your foot. Your toe is just kind of getting out of the way. Right.

Right? Well, in his case, when he'd do push-ups, he's on his toes because he can't bend his toe enough to get the ball of his foot on the ground. And so if you look at somebody when they hit a baseball or they throw a punch, their back foot is going to twist and you're going to be in a lunge position, just like you do when you jerk, kind of, right? And so he, when he would throw punches, he couldn't really sit balanced between his two feet and put weight on his back foot. He was always kind of like, you know, 80% of his weight on his front foot because his back foot just couldn't really support his weight very well, which made his punching power and the ability to throw combinations really funky. For how strong and

athletic he was, he didn't hit near... I mean, granted, he just didn't know how to box in general. He's still learning, but he just didn't... He wasn't able to generate the same level of power because he was kind of like punching on one leg. And so... Oh, we lost Travis. Yeah, he's back. Go ahead. We're still recording. So, yeah, that's just one of many examples about how having a lack of mobility can cause you to compensate and, in this case, end up in a dramatic loss of potential power. Yeah. I actually feel like my big toe, I'd love MASH to pop in on here so you could hear this awesome

story. My big toe was the kind of like the early end to my weightlifting career. Because in a weightlifting competition, I dropped 205 onto my big toe, trying to bail and get out of the way, and my foot got stuck. So I basically slammed 205 straight onto my big toenail, and multiple places probably broke, chipped the bone, and enough trauma to it that my body was like, no, no more. This thing is, it took me over time it was like a three-year path to not being able to compete really because the big toe basically turned stiff like there was no there was no flexion in that joint at all and then that happened. So I dropped the weight on my foot.

Now I'm out. About, it was like six weeks before regionals. And I had to keep training. There was no way that I couldn't keep training. And as soon as I got back to training, it basically, there he is. There we go. MASH is back.

MASH, I'm telling a story. I'm so glad you're back about the big toe. So I dropped 205 at a weightlifting competition like six weeks before the CrossFit regional. I had already qualified for the regional, and I went to do a weightlifting competition. And I dropped 205 straight on my big toe smashed the the whole thing like like i i say i shattered it because i couldn't walk on it for like two weeks but of course you're six weeks out from regionals which is the big competition and i was like i just got to keep training i'll figure this thing out lost the toenail it's actually one of the

gross stories i like the toenail popped off and it like there was like the blood like actually squirting out of my big toe and my partner was looking at me because the way it happened we were carrying like this basically like a box jump out to the the dumpster and i kicked the box which made the toe just like the whole thing was just like janky. And all of a sudden there was like blood splurting out of my toe. And then I looked up and there was some girl like five feet behind me. And I just looked and I was like, I am so sorry. I'm the most disgusting human on this planet.

But I got to go train for regionals, so sorry. But I kept training on it. And I never, ever fixed it. I didn't know that you could stretch your big toe. And so I was running 400s. It completely changed the way I walked because my big toe was stiff as a board. There was no movement in it. I was trying to change everything in my body to not have a toe that would move.

So I started running different. So I would run and everything would be on like the outside of my foot versus the normal flow. And then when I would also do that, change the way I squatted. I was sitting too far back on my heels on my right side, which then created a hip shift to the left side and all the movement because yeah but i had no idea why i started to develop these problems until i went to go see a pt because i just kind of realized like if i keep going when i was getting older everyone else is getting really good

and then my body started to like get to the point where it's like hey dude stop this is this isn't the thing anymore like all of this, yeah. Yeah, all of it hitting at once. And I went to a PT, and I was like, man, my hip sucks. Like I got this little thing over here and kind of like the tic-tac-toe board from your knee to the opposite hip to the opposite shoulder. Then you get the neck issue on the left side. It's just kind of like everything always tic- tack toes its way up your body and she was like well was there any trauma that ever happened

anywhere it's like yeah well i mean i dropped i like smashed a barbell on my toe one time and you know she was like oh let me look at that toe and like my big toe was like hadn't moved in like three years janked up and it's still super jacked up but i've broken both of my big toes and they both considerably uh changed the way that my brain moved so i walk around barefoot a lot more specifically to overcome that issue just because i want my body in contact with the ground and on harder surfaces instead of being in shoes like just forcing the muscles to move but it's a giant issue if you don't get your big toe looked at and some sort of traumatic thing happens yeah um i think we we nailed it all

i think generally like if we were to, like the understanding that mobility and stability have to flow together. When we talk about the idea of mobility, that is the range of motion that a joint can go. If you can possess stability, which is the neurological component, and being able to control your body through that range of motion, there is no amount of mobility that is bad. The only thing that can really become a problem is that you have too much mobility and lack the stability to control the joint in that end range. So if you have a system to be able to create a plan or an assessment to diagnose where your joints are in there, and then finding finding out are you hypermobile. If you have back pain, just a really simple test can be bending over and touching your toes. And if it's really easy for you to palm the ground, you probably need to work on a little bit of stability. If you're barely able to get your hands down to your shins, there's probably a really good,

there's a real need to get a barbell on your back or in a front squat and just sit down into a squat, close your eyes, breathe, get parasympathetic. But doing the movement is going to be the number one thing. And as you go through a checklist, yes, you can get into some foam rolling, some lacrosse balls, some stretching, some static stretching. But really be able to put a plan together and understand kind of what the role of each joint is on a stability and mobility side of things so that you don't do what I did when I first learned about voodoo floss and trying to attack hypermobility with massive amounts of stretching. Get Gray Cook's book. Get Gray Cook's book, too. Yeah, very good.

I love it. And just understanding how to screen yourself and get in and check out Maximum Mobility, too. Doug Larson's got a killer product there. My bad. For sure. No, that's a live all-day presentation that I gave to my gym back when I owned the gym. That's very comprehensive. I totally buy as it gets because it's my material, but I really think it's quite good.

Can I get that? I would love to look at that. Oh, yeah. I'll buy it. I'll shoot you the leg. $9.90 in the store. The love. I'll send it over to you.

All right. It's a video course, course it's on our membership site Travis Bash mashthelead.com come join Strength University beautiful tell us about Strength University it's just for coaches

if you're a coach it's just pretty much caps all of my years of uh it tells you how to assess not you know what it is it's like a very base level so it's going to tell you how to assess for you know how to do you know weight lifting power lifting or strength conditioning definitely not as comprehensive as like i'm sure your your all-day assessment but then we've got we got that we've got got getting buy-in culture. Then it's going to be programming. It's pretty in-depth programming now.

And then teaching the movements, progressions, regressions. It's a lot. How to fix certain dysfunctions. It's crazy. Now it's about probably 12 hours of videos. Beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah. Doug Larson, where can they find that at?

Hold on. Mash, where do they find the strength? If you go to mashlead.com, you'll find everything. Beautiful. Doug Larson. Dig it. Right on. Yeah, again, check out Maximum Mobility or Movement Specific Mobility,

which is a separate program that's just focusing on getting full range of motion for squats and deadlifts. You know, back squats, front squat, overhead squat, and deadlifts and sumo deadlifts. And then, of course, all that transitions over pretty well to weightlifting. If you're hitting full range of motion front squats and overhead squats, you can pretty much do whatever you need to do in the world of weightlifting. So go check both of those out in the Barbell Shrug store, barbellshrug.com backslash store. And you can find me on Instagram at Douglas E. Larson. Yeah, we're going to figure out a way

to put all that together into a big bundle so you can get both those products and some programs to help you out. I don't know what it's going to be yet, but by the time this airs, we'll have all the links and the show notes and everything. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner.

Find us at Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. I'm at TikTok. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. Find us at Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. I'm at TikTok. I'm at Instagram. But before we get over to BarbellShrugged.com forward slash store, that's where all the programs, nutrition, mobility, where all the strong people are getting stronger. We'll see you guys next week.

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