Barbell Shrugged - The Science of Biomechanics and Human Movement w/ Dr. Scott Lynn - 280

Episode Date: October 4, 2017

This was one of the most enjoyable shows we’ve done all year.   Really, really enjoyed speaking with Dr. Scott Lynn. He earned a PhD in Biomechanics and is now an associate professor of Kinesiology/Biomechanics at Cal State Fullerton.  Loosely put, biomechanics is the study of how forces effect your body (stress —> adaptation) as well as how the forces produced by your body effect the world (moving yourself and objects… in our case heavy barbells). Want to know how front squats are different than back squats?  Is there a difference in muscular activation?  Is there a difference in the stresses on the hips, knees and lower back?  Scott has you covered.  Collecting, analyzing and interpreting this kind of data is exactly what biomechanists do on a daily basis (often using cool things like 3D motion capture systems like the ones used to make video games and animated movie characters). In this episode Dr. Lynn teaches us: Why scoring well on a movement screen could actually make you MORE likely to get hurt How you can use “movement variability” to stay healthy and minimize injury Why your lower back isn’t designed to “move under load” and how to avoid lower back pain How he tests muscular activation in his laboratory Enjoy!  -Mike and Doug   ► 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've been doing academic research for a really long period of time and you do those studies that sit in academic journals that nerds like Andy and I read sometimes and nobody else really. And so I think to me taking that technology or that knowledge and getting into the hands of the average person is I'm more excited about doing stuff like that now where I can get people using these really cool tools that have sat in academic settings for a long time and using them in a real life setting. So whether it's in the gym or on the golf course or wherever, that's the kind of stuff that I'm doing a lot of work on now is trying to take these tools and make them useful to every single person. All right. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged.

I'm Mike Blitzer here with Doug Larson and Andy Galpin, and we are here at Cal State Fullerton visiting Dr. Scott Lin. He's a biomechanist, which means you study how the body moves and what's firing and what's not firing and how to fix it. Basically, I'll give you that. It's a stretch. Yeah, so it's basically the mechanics of a biological system is the technical definition. And mechanics is actually defined as the influence of force on body.

So really what we're studying is how forces affect. And there's two ways of biomechanics. We can do things that look at the structure of the human body. Some people look at how forces affect the cartilage in your knee or the discs in your back or the ligaments in your knee or whatever. And then you can look at how it affects your function. So how it makes you lift better and jump higher and hit a golf ball further and all those types of things. So a lot of people do talk about it as being just a study of motion. But I think a lot of stuff do talk about it as being just a study of motion.

But I think a lot of stuff that we do looks at the forces that go into creating that motion. Newton told us that we can't produce force without an external, or we can't produce motion without an external force. And most of us, when we're walking around moving, the only thing we can push off of is the ground with our feet. And so we're really, that's a lot of the work that I'm doing, is looking at how we interact with the ground and how that produces the resultant motions and muscle activities that allow us to lift and move and do all those different things.

Yeah. Sound way cooler than what I said. Yeah, I mean, people can make claims all day about, like, you shouldn't let your knees dive in when you squat or you round your back when you're deadlifting. That's going to hurt your back because this, that, or the other thing. But until it's actually tested in some way where we can measure the forces and or do some type of study, we can't really know what the truth, so to speak, is. Sure.

If there even is such a thing as the truth. Yeah. And that's the thing. I think a lot of us, we always teach to the average. So on average, I would say, yeah, rounding your back during a deadlift is terrible. But I've seen a lot of people lift a lot of weight by rounding their back and not injuring themselves still. So what we're finding with biomechanics research is there's variability in how human beings do stuff. And so we need to figure out who is the type of person that can round their back in the deadlift and not have a herniated disc and the person who, you know,

that's super dangerous. And so I would argue that more on average, I mean, I think it's a rare case that you want to round your back in the deadlift. That is pretty dangerous. It's not something you ever want to recommend to go do. To anyone, no. There can't be too many reasons for that. Right. And to me, I always tell my students, I mean, why do you go to the gym? Why do you lift to get stronger, to get faster, to get healthier? And if you hurt yourself while doing that, that's probably the worst thing that could happen. So, again, unless you're competing, you know, and I think a lot of people do compete in terms of the amount of weight they can lift.

But still, I think we want to try to make it as safe as possible so that you can achieve your goals without injuring yourself because your performance will really go down if you get hurt yeah as a coach i can coach an athlete i can watch them move i know what's typical i've been taught and through my own experiences i know how people should be moving not moving and there are a lot of exceptions to the rule, like what you were talking about with rounding the back. What are the tools that you're using that are not your eyeballs to measure these things? So we have a 3D motion capture system right behind us here.

So there's nine cameras that circle the lab. And as long as two of those cameras at any time can see the little dots that we put on you, it can give me the 3D position of that marker in space. And so if you think with a normal video camera, you can only see things in 2D. So if I'm looking at this camera here, if I do this, it can see me. But if I do this, it looks like my arm gets smaller and then bigger, which it doesn't get smaller and then bigger. It's just moving out of the frame that the video camera can see.

So I think standard coaches or trainers or whoever would give people feedback based on video evidence, which is two-dimensional. And so this allows us to see things in 3D. So we can see how things are moving in three dimensions. And it's similar technology that's used in video games and that makes movies. So like all those animation-type movies, they have the same thing. EA Sports has the same type of system. And we can do that in our lab here. We can remake an animation of you or an avatar of you doing whatever it is that you're doing.

So that's kind of the goofing around fun part. But then we can actually calculate 3D angles and positions of each segment relative to other segments throughout any movement. So that's kind of half the game. You're looking at kinematics and position and joint angles, et cetera. And then the other half of it is the forces and loads involved in sport and athletics? Yeah, so the forces that go into producing that motion, which to me is a lot more interesting because I do a lot of work in the game of golf, and it's been taught kinematically for years. We just watch somebody or we take a video of them, and we say,

oh, you should fix it, you should do this, or you should do that. And the analogy we like to give is the kinetics lets you look under the hood a little bit more um so that would be like if your car's not working properly just taking a video of it driving down the street and saying oh this is what's wrong with it right you're just guessing right um versus when you look at the kinetics that allows you to open up the hood and really see what's going on underneath there that's driving the motion that you're seeing so a kinematic approach would be something like um you know you're you're doing this and the pull fix this part of your back, right? Where the kinetics would be something like the reason

that's happening to your back is because you're putting too much force on this side and it's turning you this way. Totally. Something like that, right? Exactly. Or there's too much, you know, pressure in your toes or you're way too much onto your heels or, and I think it's a combination of the two. So we do a lot of things with joint torques or joint moments. So it's looking at where the force is relative to where your joint is in space. And that's going to determine how your muscles respond and react to that. And so it'll determine, you know, whether your glutes more active in your squat or your quads more active in your squat. And to me, I would argue, I mean, a quad dominant squat has been considered a bad thing for a lot of years. And so a lot of the work we're doing in here is trying to get the bigger, more proximal, more powerful muscles involved. Cause I think it'll make you

stronger and more resilient to injury. So, uh, we talk about that as being a, a more efficient movement if we're preferentially activating bigger, more proximal muscle groups. Um, cause we know that, you know, force production is related to cross-sectional area. And if we can get the glute, which is, I mean, I have some studies where they've dissected cadavers and looked at cross-sectional areas of muscles. And if you add up all of the quads, they're not even like a quarter of what the glute is in cross-sectional areas. So to me that if we're using bigger, more proximal muscles,

that seems to be the way we're designed to move. And more proximal meaning? Closer to the midline of your body. And if you think about it, if you look at your body, like look at your bicep versus your forearm, which one's bigger? Well, generally as we move further away from our bodies, things get smaller and less powerful. And so if we're going to move, it's probably better to use the bigger, more powerful muscles to do it. And I think that's going to be a more efficient movement that will hopefully keep you safe and also make you stronger.

And I don't think those things are a trade-off. I think if we move efficiently, we'll be strong and fast and also resilient to injuries. Andy was mentioning that you had looked at the differences between front squats and back squats at one point, and they seem to be very similar in many ways, but they're same, same, but different. They're obviously not the same, but they're very similar. I mean, they're obviously both using the, you know the hips and the knees and and quads and glutes and hamstrings like all those muscles are fine and all those joints are moving but they're not quite the same thing no what did you find when you were digging into those two movements and how they're the same and how they're different well so this kind of originated from uh when i was doing a lot of

personal training myself during grad school i found that you could improve somebody's squat movement patterns pretty easily by just giving them dumbbells in their hands and having them bring the dumbbells in front of them as they squat it down. So I call that like a counterbalance squat. So where you bring the dumbbells up in front of you. So increasing the weight that is forward actually is going to shift where you're putting force into the ground. So your force kind of shifts a little bit forward, which allows you to stick your hips back. If you think of like a teeter totter, um, sticking your hips back with that weight forward balances itself. And so sticking your hips back actually increases the torque on your hip, um, and allows the glute muscles to work harder as relative to the quads. Um, and so we did

a study where we looked at just having the weights on your shoulders and doing like body weight squats, and then doing the same thing with those same weights and just bring them up in front of you. And we got way more glute activation and less quad and more external load on the hip in the counterbalance squats, which is what we thought. And so then we carried on that same theory with the front and back squats. So, sorry, just to clarify,

because it was either basically a, what would you call it, maybe like a goblet squat kind of thing? Sure, but just with dumbbells. Right, so two dumbbells in the rack position. Similar to, it was one of the CrossFit movements this year, right? They had to do something with the two dumbbells right here for the games, for the Open? They did.

I don't remember exactly what it was off the top of my head, though. So something like that. Anyways, that compared to a squat where you have to lift kind of the weight up as you're going down. So it's in front of you, but it's extended out, you know, a foot or however long you're two feet how long your arms are and the problem with that is i mean and when we tried to publish it we sent it to the journal of strength conditioning research and the reviewers came back and said well you're really limited in loading that squat up based on how much you can front right shoulder front right delt raise your shoulders so and we're

like yeah i mean totally so we said you know this could be used as like a movement prep or like a warm-up to you know activate the pattern that you then use when you load it up a little more. And so then we went on and did a study. My grad student did a study this year looking at front versus back squat. Because by that same rationale, having the weight in front should allow you to stick your hips back a little bit more and use more glute and less quad, which I would argue is a more efficient movement. The problem is we had a small number of people. So I think the fact that the weight is a lot closer to us, so the difference between the front and back squat where that weight is a minuscule difference.

So the effect size, if we talk about statistics, was a lot smaller. And we have a smaller effect size, you need a lot more people. And this was just a student that did an undergrad thesis project. So we didn't have enough people, I don't think. So we're collecting more data to hopefully find a statistical difference but it seems logical to me that it would mechanically be that way but i think a lot of this could be affected by shoulder mobility or the ability to stabilize your scapula or because it is inherently a lot more stable position to have it on your traps on the back there and that might make people feel

safer and then they might move in a different way because what we're finding is a lot of times in biomechanics there's there's tons of variability in what human beings do and how they do it um and so i mean it could be limited by your ankle range of motion so if you have a decent mobility in your ankle you could be able to load a front squat properly and stick your hips back the way you need to and if you're limited in your ankle dorsiflexion then maybe you got to adapt and do it some other way so um i think um and again when you read research you have to realize that that's like an average we're saying so on average when people do that counterbalance squat we call it they activate their glute more than than the other way um doing it with the what did you call it goblet squat kind of deal or whatever um but again that is an average so there are going to be outliers that are going to do the complete opposite of that too so we have to

implementing research and practicality is um you have to realize that research is generally you know done to the averages so and it's based on the population you test too so um and that's something we were talking about with this study um i think we just tested like kinesiology students who weren't really super you know effective lifters or have lifted a lot so um that could be something that maybe affected our results as well but the theory is is pretty good that you know it would seem logical that moving the the weight forward however you you have that weight would allow you to stick your hips back a little bit more and create a little more load on the hip which is surrounded by much bigger musculature which would technically seem to be a better a

more effective movement and i think also the the external rotators the big muscles the hip externally rotate your femur so i'm well i mean that internal rotation of the femur that causes the valgus kind of motion or having your knees come together is it's considered to be a pretty inefficient movement and has been shown to lead to a lot of different injuries so um so again loading your hip in the sagittal plane by you know sticking your hips back you get that side benefit of hopefully preventing external rotation of external rotation yeah there you go so if you're if you're sitting back more you get naturally just more external rotation um yeah well you get more activation of the muscles that and i don't know if they really cause external rotation? Yeah. Well, you get more activation of the muscles that,

and I don't know if they really cause external rotation or they just absorb internal rotation and keep your knee from collapsing inward. So I think they, you get that side benefit where your quads have no chance of doing that for you. I mean, people used to talk about VMO and vastus lateralis helping, but all they do is pull the patella and the patella acts through the middle of the tibia and that just pulls your tibia forward. So their knee extensors, they can't do much in the frontal or transverse planes at all. Right. When you're measuring muscle activation, what tools are you using for that? So we use a technology called electromyography.

So basically you put two electrodes similar to, I don't know if you've ever seen somebody get like an EKG. Yeah. They put two electrodes somewhere near the heart and it gives you the little electrical activity of the muscle. It's basically the same technology, but you put it on the skin near the muscle group. So that's electromyography. It measures the electrical activity of the muscles underneath those sensors. And the problem with that is with skin sensors,

especially as there's a lot of stuff under there. If there's adipose tissue or any fat between the muscle. Not on me. No. You'd be an excellent subject. Never heard of it. Mike's actually 100% pure muscle. Right. There's nothing in him besides muscle.

Perfect. No bones. No brains. No brains. Definitely no brains. All muscle. Muscle and testosterone. That's where me came from.

Right. Yes. But when there is fatty tissue there there that can make the signal a lot more difficult to get because it kind of dampens it. I mean, if you think of, if you take your speaker at home and you put a pillow on top of it, the sound doesn't get out quite as well. So that's kind of what EMG activity with adipose tissue on top of it. So the, uh, the gold standard is to put a needle right into the muscle and measure the EMG that way. But that is, uh, not so comfortable and then not really possible to move normally after that.

And that's one of the problems with biomechanics is we put all this shit on you and we say move normally and you're like, wow. Yeah. Right. 85 markers on me. Even if it's taped on, it's like, oh, okay. Like now I'm a robot.

You feel, it's true. So I think that's where the technology is getting better and better to where it's a little less invasive. And there's a lot more technology now being available for consumer use outside of the lab. Because I think that's one of the biggest problems is a lot of this cool technology that allows us to look under the hood and see how people are moving was only available in academic settings like this. So there's a lot of different companies now that are trying to develop this for the average Joe to use in the gym or in their basement or wherever. What are some of the misunderstandings or misinterpretations of EMG? Because a huge amount of coaching talk is about what exercise gets this muscle activated more or

that activated more. So whether they know it or not, EMG is a very cornerstone of why you do something or why not to do something. Right. But it's often extremely misinterpreted. Right. So what are the pitfalls of those things and how is it appropriately used? Well, I was going to say something similar, so I'm going to jump in with this. So, yeah, on par with his question, how does muscle activation as measured by EMG relate to actual force production and or progress from training?

Right. Those are really good questions that i don't think a lot of us yes good job have the answers to um i don't know if we have those answers because to me um and we've talked about this quite a bit so if you let's say you have you know an 80 of your max activation in like a bench press of the pec muscle and you measure that through emg and then you work out for a long time and get stronger. Generally with that same load, you're going to need less activation of that muscle

because it's using less of its optimal capacity. But then you might come back and say, wait, I was at 80% two weeks ago, and now I'm at 60%. Am I doing worse? Because a lot of people would assume 60% is worse than 80%. If I got 60 in class and you got 80, you did better than me, right?

Win. Win. But that's where we have to understand it in terms of, and I think that's where it gets confusing in terms of using it. Because generally when we use EMG in a research setting or even in a practical setting now, we use it compared to your maximal activation. So you'll do maximal activations of all your muscle groups,

and then we can say, like, that exercise activated that muscle to 80% of your maximum. So there always has to be some form of a reference contraction and then another problem with it is especially surface emg is there's a lot of crosstalk that could happen because there's it's going to pick up electrical activity from anywhere under that muscle and it could be you could say my bicep was active at this percentage and you're like well how do you know that wasn't your brachialis muscle or your brachioradialis muscle because those are kind of close there and there could be some crosstalk feeding over so if you're measuring glute activation you have you have a reference

max voluntary contraction yeah just i have leads on my glutes and i just squeeze my butt as hard as i can and it measures yeah generally we'll do uh it depends sometimes like i was taught in grad school to do my maximum isometric contraction so we used to do like donkey kicks we would lie people down on a bench and then have them flex their knee to 90 degrees and i would resist their heel and they would try to donkey kick backwards gotcha because that was where we found we could maximally activate the glute and somebody would like hold their foot down so they couldn't move gotcha and you had to push as hard as you could. And so, and what we'd find when we did that is we would always have electrodes

at a bunch of different muscles. And sometimes we would get a maximal activation in exercise where they're actually trying to activate a different muscle. So like, right. Because a lot of time in the donkey kick, you get max hamstring and not even max glute. And then the max glute would happen somewhere else. So this is all part of the, and so what I'm talking about a lot

with, um, a lot of this work that I'm doing now is with a company named Athos up in, uh, Northern California. Um, they've created a way to take EMG out of the lab and put it in real life. So now they have these compression suits that have EMG electrodes in them. So as you're moving around, working out, it collects the EMG, it ships it to the cloud, and then sends it back to your phone in real time. So you can see how your muscles are active and when. And so a lot of the work I'm doing with them is how to interpret this information so that we can use it. And so absolute activations of EMG is like, there's a lot of variability in it and it can be, there's a lot of error and there's a lot of misinterpretations that can happen. So what we're doing a lot of is like ratios.

So to me, if you squat and your activation ratio from glute to quad is shifted towards the glute, that's probably a good thing. As I said before, we want more proximal, bigger muscles to produce the same movement. And so that's what we're doing. We're dividing like glute activation by quad activation and hoping over time that ratio goes up.

So the absolute numbers don't matter, but if you divide them by each other, you're probably producing a more hip dominant and less knee dominant movement which to me is probably a good thing and so that's what we're trying to come up with now is a lot more ratios and things that we can say here wear this thing and if this number goes up you're probably doing something good in your squat so the coach could be just sitting there looking at the app while he's watching the athlete go do jerks or whatever and he can see that what the activation is with upper trap, lower trap, serratus anterior as they're catching the load overhead.

Well, that's where there's complications with this suit because it's just a compression gear, so they're having trouble with contact of certain muscles. So I don't think they've figured out serratus anterior yet. They did have upper trap previously. I don't think we have lower trap yet. So there's, yeah, there's different muscle groups that are available right now, but they're going to try to add more as they go.

But yeah, you could definitely do that. And there are coaches I know that are using it currently with like screens up in the gym. All my motor learning buddies tell me it's better to learn motor tasks with external cues than internal cues. So me telling you squeeze your glute is an internal clue because your glutes start at part of you yeah but if i point at the

screen and say see right here make that red then you got to figure it out on your own what do i got to do to make that oh shoot that's what i got to do um so it's a really good external cue to use to teach you or to have you learn better basically um because if Because if I say squeeze here, you know, and I point to somewhere, I talk about somewhere on your body, the motor learning people tell us that that's not the best way to learn something, whereas this is a good external cue. So if I just show you a screen and say, see this right here, this little dot? Make this red.

And you've got your phone in your hand, and you're like, how do I do that? Oh, shoot. Andy, you were asking your question. So I wanted to jump back into something you mentioned earlier which is that we all move really different yeah and I want you to actually talk about I know you've done some studies looking at different positions for glute bridges yeah and things like that and so I want to get there eventually but first I want you to talk about how that gear that that wearable EMG when you can see that feedback what it allows you to do is say, for example, if we all had problems activating our glute and a coach prescribed us a single leg glute bridge, for example, that might get the three of us to activate our glutes very well.

But the fourth, it might be a terrible one. Exactly. This software allows you to look and be like, okay, look, which one are you doing? Instead of me arbitrarily picking or guessing which exercise you need, you can actually just figure it out on your own because you get that feedback or you could like trial and error right you could just say twist your foot out a little bit oh yeah don't do that do this a little bit or whatever right so like if say you get a certain amount of activation with your foot straight i mean you say well it's an external rotator maybe if i twist my foot out i'll turn on a little bit more and if it does well look we

found something if it doesn't oh, let's go the other way. So it gives you that immediate feedback, and so you're not guessing, really. And so that's why I like, I mean, I've been doing academic research for a really long period of time, and you do those studies that sit in academic journals that nerds like Andy and I read sometimes, and nobody else, really. And so I think, to me, taking that technology or that knowledge and getting into the hands of the average person is, I'm more excited about doing stuff like that now where I can get people using these really cool tools that have sat in academic settings for a

long time and using them in a real life setting. So whether it's in the gym or on the golf course or wherever, that's the kind of stuff that I'm doing a lot of work on now is trying to take these tools and make them useful to every single person. Yeah, if someone was to do what you just talked about, they have that whole setup or the apps on their phone and they do glute bridges or front squats or whatever, they can see the data and where the graphs are heading

and what's activated and what's not activated. But the art of it all really isn't actually interpreting what the hell that really means and why it's happening right that's where i think most people are going to fall short they don't they don't have the background to know why it might be happening the way that it is happening so like when someone reads a research study or or they you know or a journalist reads a research study and they write about it in an article or what have you like how how how is someone supposed to know how to interpret yeah that's tough that's tough because i think a lot of times journalists butcher studies as well i think a couple years ago they had did a study and the journalist said that uh eating one egg a day is just as bad as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day or something like that

and i came out and like i forget what and and the journal i remember that yeah yeah and the uh the author is like whoa like that's not what i said at all but yeah but that's such a tangible headline or quote to snip it out of something where like that's gonna get blown up and go viral over everything but the data didn't support that and i don't know how i don't know the whole story about how they got from the data to that but so you have to be really careful about journalists and uh some publications that aren't so academic. Well, you've done a lot of media. I know I have. Almost every single time I've done media

about a study, when it comes to print, I'm like, that is not at all. How the hell did that happen? You've proofread this seven times and then somehow. And especially when you do media like TV media, you talk for 27 minutes and they put 30 seconds on TV and they pick that one thing that you said, well, maybe like you talk for 27 minutes and they put 30 seconds on TV and they picked that one thing that you said, like, oh, maybe it could be, and they cut out that part. And then they take the thing that they wanted you to say. It's all out of context. Well, what I find to be really, uh, like exciting is, and I've been looking at some, uh, what's happening in medicine, especially with technology is a lot of the technology is being more widely

distributed. So the researchers is being more widely distributed so the researchers get way more data. Totally. Because as of right now, the majority of research is conducted with 18- to 22-year-olds. Because that's a college kid. And a university. Right. We give them extra credit and they volunteer for a couple extra points on their next test.

What do you think these kids are doing over here? It's actually a pretty small sliver of the population, right? 100%. So now we're going to get a much larger pool. Right. And that's what we're saying sliver of the population right so now we're going to get a much larger pool right and that's what we're saying in terms of the variability so when there's more variability in your population if not everybody does the same things you need more numbers to answer those questions and so when we're um yeah when we're doing it on 20 university kids with most of our studies are because that's kind of a convenience population that gives you

limited you know take-home messages because it only really applies in those 20 people. And if there is lots of variability, it's hard to find differences in those 20 people, so you need more people. So that's what we're running into with our front squat study is that I think that the effect size or the change between taking the back squat to the front squat is so small, you need a lot of people to determine

if there is a real difference there. Earlier you were saying some really interesting things around the functional movement screen and some studies that have been done that show certain things. Can you dig into that a little bit? Sure. So I always tell my students, if you ever are reading the research and you want to discover if differences in movement patterns lead to whatever, a different type of injury.

So that's what a lot of the stuff with the functional movement screen is. I think Gray Cook would tell you it's not there to decide who's going to be the best athlete. It's generally there to tell you who's at the highest risk of injury. I think that's what it's been designed to do. And so you need to read these prospective studies. My students always joke with me when we're in Canada. We call that prospective. We'd say prospective. Prospective?

Prospective. I'd say prospective. But I grew up in Washington State so I'm pretty close to Canada. Yeah, we're almost Canadian. So like process versus process? We would not say process. I know way too many Canadians. You also say pasta. No, we don't say that. Pasta. We say pasta. Iasta? We don't say that. Pasta.

We say pasta. Oh, no. I have a Canadian friend that says pasta. Pasta. That's like Boston thing. Yeah, kind of. A funny story about that. So when I first taught here, the very first semester I moved from Canada, there was a

button in the software reviews in our biomechanics class that had that word on it, P-R-O-C-E-S-S. And the first time I was teaching in front of like 30 university kids, I said, so push the process button. They're like, would you say it? I said, process. And they all died laughing. Saying that that's not the right word. It's process. And so for the rest of, um, when I started teaching for a bit, I would write P-R-O-C-E-S, or I took P-R-O on the board. And I would go in front of the class and write P-R-O. I say, say that word. They'd be like pro. And I'd write C-E-S-S. And they'd say, so how does that turn into process? You don't say like Tom Brady's a pro football player. And so I would do that before, like preemptively before every class to show them obviously that I'm right and you're wrong. And then I did that in one of my

younger classes. And then a student had taken that class and progressed on to another class. So I did it in this older class, and I got halfway through it. I wrote PRO on the board, and the student actually walks up to the front of the class, and he's like, give me your marker. I was like, what the hell is he doing? I was like, all right, here. I give him the marker. He writes PRO on the board. He's like, say that word.

I say PRO. Then he writes B-L-E-M. I'm like, shit. He's like, you don't have a problem. I think nobody would say that. He got you. So I get stuck on that word a lot, process. I don't know how to say it.

I say it with like a southern twang now just to get the mark and stuff. Process. So like a prospective study would be if we tested a whole bunch of people's movement patterns when they were healthy like at the start of a season and then you track the injuries throughout the season and at the end of the season you say these people got injured and these people stayed healthy could we have predicted that based on how they moved at the start of the season those are the most powerful studies and there's several of those on the fms so there's some on on football players nfl football players they did a study on that that's the one where they came up with like 14 as the cutoff saying, if you're above 14,

you're less likely to be injured below you are. They've done it on military trainees. There's been a whole bunch of different studies that have basically shown that if you score higher in the FMS, you're less likely to get injured. And right before we did our study, they did a study at a university on a whole bunch of like the whole university athletics population. So they had golfers and basketball players and volleyball players and track athletes. And they just threw them all into one pot. And they found nothing. Like there was no prediction of injury.

And then we came and did ours. And so I did mine with a student who was the athletic trainer for the track and field team. And we did the sprinters or the runners on the track and field team. So it was the long distance runners and the sprinters. And I don't know if you know this, but track and field athletes are like Derek Zoolander.

They go straight and turn left. They're like NASCARs, basically. And I always tell my students, NASCARs are great because you can go into the pit stop and change the tires around, right? Because obviously the wear is going to be uneven.

And so you can go into the pit stop with a NASCAR and change the tires around. That's the wear is uneven right and so you can go into the pit stop with a nascar and change the tires around that's not possible with a human right so they have a very low variability in what they do every day they just run straight and turn left they're they're producing the same stresses over and over and over again which i think is probably going to cause a lot of injuries and we actually did find a ton of injuries i think there were more people that season on the track team that got injured than that didn't wow which is yeah ridiculous um but what we did you wouldn't predict that in a sport like track like how you're getting hurt there like there's well and that's the thing with that the best part about that is you're not

getting hit by a linebacker right there's no linebacker running into the side of your trauma you're not hitting into the boards a hockey player or whatever like so there's no trauma it's just repetitive stuff that builds up over time um and those are the ones that we can predict right if um i do a lot of or i've done a lot of research into shirley sarman's work and she calls two types of injuries pathokinesiologic where the pathology causes altered movement so that's where like i always show willis mcgahee getting hit in the road or right he has to bowl there right not much you can do about that when a 300 pound guy hits the side of your leg, going full steam ahead. If you've never seen that injury, it's unbelievable.

And then if you think of Marcus Lattimore too, that one a couple years ago. I always show those ones because they're nice and gross. Yeah, legs get broken in half and stuff. That kind of stuff. Well, they say Marcus Lattimore got the unhappy triad, ACL, MCL, medial meniscus, and Marcus Lattimore had the unhappy everything.

His leg was literally holding together by I think a little strand of PCL. Yeah, it was like borderline amputated. Yeah, totally. Oh, jeez. And then he came back and played for a while in the NFL. That was unbelievable. Yeah, that guy is a complete specimen, but it's too bad that that happened because I think he could have

been something. Anyways, where was I? I don't remember. Oh, the track athlete's white. They turn left every time. Anyways, where was I? I don't remember. Who am I? Oh, the track athletes. Why? They turn left every time. The two different types of injuries that Shirley just talked about. Oh, Shirley Simon. Right.

Yeah, I was. Okay. So the pathokinesia are the ones you can't really do much about, right? Getting hit by a truck or something. But the kinesiopathologic is where inefficient movement patterns build up over time. And there's little micro traumas that happen over time and eventually cause a, sorry, little micro traumas that build up and cause a macro trauma. So I show a video of David Beckham when he played for,

I think he was on the Galaxy at the time, but then he got lent to AC Milan. I don't know how that works. I'm not a big soccer fan. So there's not many other sports where you get lent to another team. Yeah. It's pretty awesome actually. It's not like Steph Curry is going to be lent to the Barcelona,

whatchamacallits. For the offseason? For the offseason. I didn't know that was a thing. I didn't either. I think that's a thing because I know at the time he was with the LA Galaxy but then he got hurt playing for AC Milan or something. I don't know how it works.

I don't really watch sports so don't let me tell you wrong. But he literally, he tore his Achilles tendon several years ago and literally the ball came to him and he stopped it with his foot and he stepped back like this and his Achilles tendon popped. Everybody's wondering how did his Achilles tendon several years ago. And literally the ball came to him and he stopped it with his foot and he stepped back like this and his Achilles tendon popped. Everybody's wondering like, how did his Achilles tendon top like doing that little motion?

Well, it wasn't that little motion. It was all the shit he'd done for probably years before that. They caused those little micro traumas that build up. And this is what we were finding in these track athletes. Nobody was hitting them. They were just getting hurt by these little things that build up over time. And so we, we went in, we collected all the data,

and then we analyzed the FMS at the end and compared the people who got hurt to the people who didn't. And we found the opposite of what everybody else had found previously, that the people who scored higher were more likely to get hurt. So the people who moved better... Generally higher is better. Yeah, the people who moved better by FMS criteria got hurt more than the people who moved not as well.

And I remember seeing that. We had a stats person do this for us because it's a pretty complicated statistic. And I got the results back and I was like, holy shit, how do I explain this? I have no idea. But then I went to the literature and I started looking and I was like, wait, it looks like all these sports where they're showing that if you move better, you get hurt less are variable sports. So there's been an NFL athlete.

Explain to me what an NFL athlete does. Like movement wise. They run forward, they run backwards run backwards they fall down they get up they everything right every single plane all the time it's just a random chaos yeah how about it like military trainees so there was a military trainee study where they have the same thing they're jumping up walls I don't know what military training has. They crawl under those things. They do a bunch of different stuff. Yeah, totally. So to me, so I went back to this guy, a really prominent biomechanist named Joe Hamill

was at the UMass Amherst. And when he retired, he did the keynote lecture at the American Society for Biomechanics meeting. And basically what he said was, when I started my career, I assumed that the more variable movers are going to be the ones who get hurt more often and the less variable movers are going to be the one who stay healthy.

And what he's found in his research is that actually is not the case. So what he found is there's an optimal level of variability. I think this is true with anything. It's kind of like the three bears, right? Too hot, too cold, and in the middle somewhere. And in the middle somewhere. Goldil the middle somewhere, it's just right. Goldilocks. That's the one.

So in the middle somewhere is going to be just right. And so this is what he's finding with variability. If you have too much variability, you're going to get hurt. And not enough variability, you're going to get hurt. But if you're in the middle somewhere, you're going to be okay. And so to me, if you're a football player, and I think you can get variability from what you do every day or how you do it So what you do every day is

basically the sport you play and the demands on how you move or what you have to do to play your sport or to train for Your sport or whatever and then how you do it is your movement patterns And so to me if I'm a football player and I have a very or a really variable sport that puts me above in The too hot range or whatever you want to call it. But then if I move really well on the FMS, which makes me a more consistent mover, that moves me back down into the normal range and I stay healthy. If I'm a military trainee, the same thing. My movement puts me up here or what I do every day.

And then if I move very well, it moves me back down. And I think that's why the one study at the university that put all their intercollegiate athletes in the pool. If you're a good mover, because you're a good mover, even if you're in a place of high variability, you actually have less variability is what you're saying. Well, to me, this is where I always think of the hurdle step. So where you have to step over that string in the FMS. And if you score really well in that, you look like a robot. You're just like everything's moving in perfectly in plane

and there's nothing kind of going out of plane and so to me that's a it's a very consistent very um efficient movement i'd say it looks very efficient but to me if i'm always running in a straight line and turning left and i'm always doing it with these very consistent movement patterns i may be the one who gets hurt and so i always i was the one who had to score these fms videos because i was the only one that was fms certified in the team of researchers and so i had to look at all these videos and there was one guy in the video that did three hurdle steps because that's what you have to do for the fms you do three and you take the best rep and he did three different compensations on three different reps so the first one he like flung his leg around to the side the

second one he tilted the stick to one side and the third one he flexed through his spine so i saw three different very uh compensations on three different reps and i was like i watched that like a bunch of times over and over again i was like i've never seen that before that's so weird so he's a really variable mover he finds a way to make it happen with different strategies over three reps did he get like uh now can you do it without flinging your leg to the side and then he tilted no no yeah you're not supposed to give them feedback it was just i don't know how this happened but so he's just he just has all these different strategies that he uses and i remember seeing that and being like well fms

criteria is if there's compensations it's two so i watched three of them like well he's got compensations he's a two so i circled it and i moved on and then when we got the results back i was like i wonder if that guy got hurt or not. So I went back into my data. What do you think based on what I just told you? He didn't get hurt. No, he was a healthy guy. Yeah. But to me, the next part of that equation. So after we did this study and I started to explain it that way.

So to me, basically, because the sport puts them in the low variability group, if you move a little wacky, that moves you up into the normal variability. You don't get hurt. So after I did this study, because the track coach allowed us to do the study with their athletes, I had to go meet with them and explain the results. And I was thinking about, am I going to go into this meeting and say, okay, coach, what I want you to do, if you've got an athlete that moves really well, like fuck them up, like make them move all crazy.

Like, no, I'm not going to say that, right? And so what I told them was like, how about on Wednesday you turn right? Is that so wacky? Or maybe like play a game of soccer every once in a while or run up and down a hill. And I think if we did it in – because most of the athletes that do the long distance track also do cross country. I think if we did it in cross country season, we'd find something different

because they're going up and down hills. They're turning right. They're turning left. They're getting variability. And so this is where I think we've got to start thinking about these things a little bit more and understanding, you know, people do move differently and we need to figure out how to keep everyone healthy. And so to me, uh, it really depends on kind of what you do every day and how you do it. And so you have to kind of enter all those factors in.

Uh, I was working with a guy down at the beach where I live and he used to say he'd, he'd run, he was getting a lot of knee pain on one side. He said he would run, he'd go down to the beach and he'd run along the beach to the end of the strand then he'd go up to the strand and run back and so down by the beach it's slanted like this and then the strand is flat and so he would always run on this and like obviously that's uneven stresses right so I told the men if you're gonna run on the beach run down and then run back so you're this way that way and then this way coming back and so and then also with runners I mean it is such a constant repetitive sport and a lot of runners have their constant route they take so they're like i go out

of my house i turn left i go down the hill i turn right they always do the same way like why not go the other way every second day to get a little variability and try to to keep you healthy but the second part of that why we haven't published it yet is i'm still waiting for the performance piece so we went through all that data i had a student go back and mine the data from the NCAA records and get each athlete's personal best time in each of their events during that season and then because all they all had different events we divided it by the NCAA standard in that event so we had a couple hundred meter athletes who ran I don't know 11 something as their personal best that, uh, that season. And we divide it by 10. I don't know what the nine something is the.

Uh, probably about 10, two, 10, two. I don't really know. Yeah. So they're going to be a one point, whatever. So if you're a one, if you're a one, you're the NCAA record holder. And we don't have any of those people. Right. And so we had people who are 1.2, 1.3, 1.whatever. Um, and so the lower number, the better. So that was our performance variable. And if they ran multiple events, we just average their multiple events together

to give them one number for performance. And our hypothesis is you might find the opposite of what we found with the injury. I would find that the consistent movers are probably the faster runners. And so to me, we don't wanna mess up their movement patterns because it'd probably make them slower. Because I don't think, we've never found, I've never seen any evidence of a correlation.

I think there might be the odd one in the literature, but there's not many between performance variables and FMS scores. Yeah, right, right. But to me, in an event like just straight up running, it could be there. So if there's, you know, if you're a wacky mover, if you think like, if I'm recovering after every step and doing what that guy did and swinging my leg around to the side and somebody else is recovering straight through they're probably going to be faster they're getting through that recovery phase into the propulsive phase a lot faster than me

they're probably going to be faster so i i don't know if we're going to find anything even if we find a little bit of a trend towards that um that could tell us that you know you don't want to mess up the patterns of the people who are moving well you what you want to do i think is introduce some variability somewhere else. So whether it's turning left on Wednesdays, whether it's playing a game of soccer, running up and down hills the odd time. One thing that I talked to them about

was what you do in the gym every day. So to me, if my sport, every day when I'm practicing, if I'm only moving in the sagittal plane like these runners do, why don't we do some slideboard stuff in the frontal plane or do some transverse plane rotational med ball throws in the gym to give us the variability

in the gym that we need to stay healthy and this is what i'm finding with a lot of the people who are working in pro sports there isn't a whole lot you can do in terms of getting people stronger and better during season because most pro sports they're playing every second night i mean i do some work with the anaheim ducks in nhl i think on average they're playing every second night. I mean, I do some work with the Anaheim Ducks in NHL. I think on average they play once every second or third night, and they're practicing in between. You can't really get stronger. And so what you want to do in the gym is just undo all the bad stuff that you do on the ice

so that you don't get hurt. And so I talk to a lot of people that I know in hockey about this. And hockey, they get out on the ice and they do a lot of frontal plane hip stuff. They have to push out to the side. So when they come to the gym, are we going to do slide board stuff? Probably not. They already got a shitload get out on the ice and they do a lot of frontal plane hip stuff. They have to push out to the side. So when they come to the gym, are we gonna do slide board stuff? Probably not, they already got a shitload of that on the ice, so let's do sagittal plane

and transverse plane stuff in the gym with them. I do a ton of work in golf. What do golfers do? Swing one way. Transverse plane rotation too. And so do we wanna do rotational med ball throws with a guy who just hit 300 balls on the range and then played a round of golf?

No, he just got a shitload of that already. So maybe we go the other way. Sure, that might be a good idea to do some left-handed ones or throw them the opposite way or do some sagittal plane and frontal plane stuff to get the variability we need to stay safe. I think there always is that trade-off between

performance and safety. Like I said, I mean, I always tell my students, you know, you could throw the safest baseball pitch ever and never hurt yourself. But the performance is going to be shitty but if you wanted to throw a 190 mile or a fastball you got to put some things at risk of injury and so managing that where do we go along that performance and safety curve so to me if I'm a runner and I only train on the sagittal plane I'm going towards the performance side and just ignoring safety but if I blow up my achilles my performance is going to be pretty bad too so that's something we got to start thinking about a little bit and deciding you know where do we

draw those lines in the sand in terms of you know how much performance but to me most of the people that i've worked with in pro sports in season i mean off season is a whole different thing but in season it's really about just maintenance and keeping them healthy and keeping them out there yeah i think for a lot of the sagittal playing athletes that listen to this show you know weightlifters powerlifters crossfitters in many ways being out of season or far away from a competition doing more uh more agility work more more lateral work more um more more high explosive jumping um rotational throwing etc etc like all the things that you don't normally do in a crossfit weightlifting or powerlifting competition is is a very good thing not just not just to be a better athlete to be injury free but it's just to be well-rounded which is

in a lot of cases for for crossfers they pride themselves on not being the best at anything but really good at everything and if you're avoiding all you know throwing things and agility work and sprinting etc then you're not truly well-rounded in an athletic sense although of course they're amazing athletes yeah i have a question for you. So you mentioned Greg Cook. We talked about functional movement screen. He worked with Shirley Salmon in some context with building that, from what I know. Yeah.

And then also, if I'm not mistaken, you were the person that worked with Stuart McGill that you said? Yes. That's right. So they all have very similar things to say around the low back and the hips, around stability and mobility and how the low back should be trained yeah um number one are you are you uh comfortable talking about that topic sure with what mcgill has put out over the years yeah yeah uh and or you know where do those

thoughts come from and and what's what's the big picture there i mean i was schooled in um stew mcgill you know, science and methodology because I did my postdoc at the University of Waterloo where he's based. So I sat in on his spine biomechanics class, and I've talked to all his grad students. And what, I mean, a lot of the stuff he says makes a whole lot of sense. And I've put it into practice because I've worked with a lot of athletes. I've worked with a lot of general people. And basically he says the lumbar spine is not designed to move um it's not a very efficient looking system if you think about it we got that

big hunk of mass that's our rib cage and our thorax and a big hunk of match which is our pelvis and then we got this little strand in between this little bar like if i build a building where there's a big hunk of mass and this little thing and then a big hunk of mass that thing's going to fall over and so to me the musculature around it is designed to lock that down and move through the more efficient ways to move which are the ball and socket joints the hips and the shoulders are really efficiently designed to move the way this thing is designed you look you're like if if i was building a building that looked like that i'd be like i'm not meant to move through there this whole thing's going to fall over and collapse and and so um i got really schooled and it made a ton of sense to me. And I've found that basically when I work with people with back

problems, generally they move too much through their back. And if you can stop them from moving through their back, which is like the, the joint by joint approach that Mike Boyle and Greg Cook invented, which, I mean, you have to take it with a grain of salt for what it is. But to me, if you can make the hips and shoulders move better and reduce the motion through the lumbar spine, that's something that generally takes people's back pain away. Um, and so it makes a lot of sense to me, but, uh, so I don't know if you guys are familiar with the whole bracing versus, uh, hollowing debate. Yeah. You're familiar with that. Um, so there's a lady, I don't, I don't even know who she is, but in, uh, I, I mean, I can't think of her name off the top of my head, but there's a lady i don't i don't even know who she is but in uh i i mean i can't think of

her name off the top of my head but there's a lady in australia who um is the bracing expert or sorry the hollowing she she she says we should hollow we should suck our belly button closer to our spine before we left and stew's not he wants to brace so just to isometrically activate everything um and i didn't know that this was the whole debate when i was at waterloo and then i went to a conference while i was there um in phoenix arizona and we were at a bar one night after the conference and i met this guy that was at the conference and we started chatting he was a good a nice australian guy we're having beers and stuff and he's like so where do you work i'm like oh i'm at the university of waterloo and he looks at me he's like who do you

work with and i mentioned that name he's like oh we can't be friends i was like what are you talking about he's like well my supervisor and your supervisor like if they got in the same room like world war three breaks out and i was like what are you talking about um and so that's so that's so true of academia too by the way yeah it's like what's that got to do with you and I? I know. What? No, but we. He's not my dad. Right. Anyways. I mean, and so after several, several beers, I know he was a good dude.

I don't really care. I mean, it doesn't bother me, but he. Got to get him drunk so he can take him down. That's how it works. After several beers. Keep hostage. We have one of yours. That's right.

Admit you're wrong. Don't publish that paper. After several beers, we figured out a plan. They said, this is what we're going to do. We're going to go to a conference, and we're going to somehow get them both there, and then we're going to lock them in a room and say, you're not coming out until you figure this shit out. One knife.

Oh. Make it spicy. One man leaves. But to me, that would be if somehow they could get together and design a study to answer some of these questions. Because I think a lot of times experts kind of say the same things. They just use different terms to say it. I mean, I studied a lot of Shirley Sarman and Vladimir Yanda stuff.

And I remember I'd go to these conferences and people would be like, are you a Yanda person or a Sarman person? And I was like, I don't know. It kind of sounds like they're saying the same thing. A lot of crossover there. I don't even put them in that different categories. No, no, no. Well, I mean, Yanda is supposed to be more of a neurological type person sarman's a little more biomechanical but i think again that they are using you know similar terms

so um like uh yonda would call something like a structural or a functional pathology where sarman calls it a pathokinesiologic or kinesiopathologic where to me, they're basically the same thing. They're just using a different word. So different. I'm smarter. No, I'm smarter. So different. Use my word. Yeah. But, uh, what's interesting. I wouldn't have thought there was a conflict between the two because I see way more similarities than differences. Yeah. Well, so that's, that's the thing. I don't know the answer to that,

but I think for the good of society it would be great if the two of them work together and, and you know, I don't care if I'm right or you're right. I want to find the answer to that, but I think for the good of society, it would be great if the two of them worked together. And, you know, I don't care if I'm right or you're right. I want to find the answer. That's what science should be. And so, I mean, but I have great respect for Stu McGill. I mean, I did a lot of work for him. He taught me a heck of a lot.

And he's done a lot of really awesome stuff that's helped us understand a lot of stuff about the low back a lot better and, and overall movement pattern. So, and you, you know, like without saying anything, like you can't put yourself out there that much without being wrong about something. Yeah. And when somebody like that, who's tried so much and has been, you made so much progress, you're going to miss on a couple of them. Yeah. But again, I think it's a variability issue. So like sometimes, I mean,

maybe there's some people on this planet that, that hollowing does work for, but who are those people?'s a variability issue. So like sometimes, I mean, maybe there's some people on this planet that hollowing does work for. But who are those people? I don't know. I mean, and maybe there's some people. I mean, I've had a lot of success, like I said, you know, with my Stu McGill methods. I mean, I trained a guy when I was in my postdoc who had five complete posterior herniations of his L4, L5 disc. And on the fifth one, he paralyzed himself from the level of the herniation down. And so once he was kind of back up and moving again, he came to see me and I trained him for

a bit and I implemented a lot of stuff Stu taught me and like, you got a lot better. I remember at one point he was, he was doing like a, and this is what Stu talks about. You kind of want to increase that margin of safety because most back injuries, especially like disc herniations are like the David Beckham injury I talked about. Right. It's not like one thing that causes it. It's over time. Right.

And so, yeah, you sneeze or you roll over in bed or you reach for a pen. And you're like, how does reaching for a pen work? Or you hang on an inversion table. Yeah. It just happened to Mike. Dude fell over crippled. He was like, Doug, come get me. Oh, my God.

Two weeks ago, I'm like, like i just like i'm in a gym and i see an inversion table and i get in it yeah i lay back and then all like 10 seconds later sharp pain in my lower back on the left side i was like could you get out of it i couldn't i had to like use my arms i couldn't activate my core i was just like freaking out yelling dog help come help me he thinks i'm being funny i'm in excruciating pain that's funny we're actually on a meeting at the time, like on a phone meeting. I was like, Mike's fucking dicking off. Hold on.

Yeah, as usual. For a lot of those injuries, it's not an acute trauma. It's just the straw that brings the camels back. It builds up over time. And so I remember one time I was training him, and I think a lot of what I learned through a lot of the FMS stuff was um I mean I think to me if you're moving so poorly that you're herniating discs by moving it means you don't know how to move anymore like you've if you're injuring yourself by moving you've lost the ability to move and so what we need to do is reteach you how to move and how do we how did all of us learn how to move when we came home from the hospital and we got put on our

back in the crib and we learned how to move. And then eventually we learned how to roll over and then we would crawl. And so I think a lot of the stuff that people are doing now is really awesome work where, I mean, a lot of people are looking at breathing. I mean, I know a lot of lifters are looking at, you know, doing that type of breathing training to get them out of using the accessory muscles. And if you can't breathe properly, I mean, that's the first movement all of us have to do, right? We went from a water environment to an air environment and all of a sudden if we can't get air in and out of our lungs we're not going to live very long so that was the first movement that we all learned as kids and it's funny i've had a bunch of my brothers

have both had little girls and so i've had access not access but i've had little babies around and so i've watched them like i was i literally watched my little niece just lying there breathing for like hours and i got mesmerized it was unbelievable how efficiently she was like the little belly was moving up and down there was no movement in her chest or her shoulders and like like wow that's really cool like you don't have to teach them that they just get it um and that's where i like you know watch my little niece cruising around and go down to pick up something off the ground she just drops her ass right to the floor and stands up with the thing. And you watch people in the gym and they're like, ugh, restricted here.

And so I think a lot of what we do every day messes us up. And then our goal is to get back to moving like we did when we were little kids. And so that's what I was doing with this guy. I was training him. And literally he'd come in for an hour and a half training session. And we'd say, hey, Mr. So-and-so, how are you doing? And I'd say, get on the floor. And then he'd work out for like an hour and a half.

And he'd get up and shake his hand and go shower. Wow. Like we did not do anything that wasn't on the ground because he couldn't do anything on the ground he didn't move well enough to be and if you think about it you got to walk before you can run both literally and figuratively and you got to crawl before you can walk and you got to breathe before you can crawl you got to roll before you can crawl yeah and so we went back along that chain and started to teach him and this is kind of the stuff that i got from gray cook and a lot of the the um stew mcgill stuff and he was getting way better which i think to me was increasing his margin of safety between movements and injury and so he was doing like a chop we got to like a you

know a cable chop and he was doing this cable chop and he was keeping his core nice and stable and he did five or six and he got to the seventh one and he kind of lost his core and he kind of went like this and he looked at me with this look of sheer terror in his face because a couple months earlier, had he done that, he'd be paralyzed. And he told me the story that, like, your bladder control is below this level of your spine. So he's like a 40-year-old, something-year-old man, and he had to wear a diaper. And he was in a wheelchair. Like, that's not cool. He had a little baby at home.

So he's doing these chops and, like, he does this. And he looks up at me with this sheer terror on his face. And then he kind of wiggles around a little bit and he's like, wait, that didn't hurt. And then he looked at me again and then just like waterworks, bawling, crying.

I was like, this is awkward. I don't do well with crying. I thought you were going to say, I'm proud of you. He did a good job. Dude, knock that shit off.

You're making me uncomfortable. Knock it off. You can get out. I is awful, bro. Dude, knock that shit off. Stop it. You're making me uncomfortable. Knock it off. You can get out. I didn't say that. You've got to pick two sessions right now. I mean, you're in a gym setting, right? You're in testosterone heaven here in this gym, and there's this big guy. He literally was like 6'5", or something like that, and he's a big dude.

So I shuffled him off to the trainer office, and I remember him telling me, I threw a ball with my son for the first time last week, and he could do all this stuff that like he couldn't do before and so i think that little movement which would have put him over the edge that would have been the straw that broke his back previously you know as he'd learned to move better and let those structures heal themselves a little bit um gave him that little bit of safety so um i think there's there's definite um there's a lot there i mean as, as much as, you know, people might criticize Stu McGill, he's got a lot of really good stuff to say. I mean, and, and I think to

me, again, you just have to keep that variability piece in your head all the time. So, you know, the best thing for you might be the absolute worst thing for you. And we got to figure out, you know, what's the exercise. So whenever everybody asks me, what's the best thing to do when I have a bad back? I'm like, it depends. And then obviously the next question should be, it depends on what? And then you've got to have something there. And so that's where we've, I mean, I've tried to work with some really simple ways that I can teach my students that they can run some people through tests. And to me, like for a bad back, I think a lot of bad backs are either like extension intolerant, they don't like extension, or flexion intolerant, they don't like flexion. So the two FMS screening tests that I really like are the flexion and extension screening tests so basically if somebody comes to me and

says and has a bad back i say do the cobra pose and do the child's pose and tell me which one you like better if they get in cobra and they're like oh my god that feels amazing because i did it with this guy with the posterior herniation he got in cobra pose he's like oh i could hold this all day this feels awesome he got in child's pose he's like i don't like that so much so i guess he's flexion and tolerant makes sense with the posterior herniations so then everything we did was to figure out the patterns we could do to keep him out of flexion and so one of the things i talked to my students about and i think it's really important is that i mean i'm a biomechanist when i went to school and took kinesiology they make you take everything sports psychology

sociology all that stuff and i remember being there and being like what is this psychology crap i don't like this stuff. I agree. I agree. To me, it was so wishy-washy, right? I actually had the same problem. I remember going to this. I'm like, oh. Yeah.

It's like I can just – I'm good at working out. Right. Nobody wanted to take sports like in graduate school for some reason. No. When I went to school, I wasn't going to school to teach anybody else or to even coach. It was because I was interested in my own athleticism. And sports psychology, I'm like, I can train. I've got no problem doing whatever I want.

I'm mentally strong. That's funny. But now I love, that's like my favorite subject. It's kind of funny. I mean, I always joke with Lenny. They just talk about their feelings all the time. He just walked into class and talked about your feelings. How can you get that wrong it's just

your feelings right and I remember I had a buddy who taught this philosophy class when I was in school and I used to always make fun of him because like philosophy like I would come on and and my favorite movie when I was a kid was Bill and Ted's excellent adventure and so there's that scene where they meet Socrates, and he comes up, and he's like, all we are is dust in the wind, dude. And so I remember he was teaching when I was in grad school, and I used to be a big joker, and he was teaching in a classroom with like 100 kids, his sport philosophy class,

and I walk in, and I'm like, all we are is dust in the wind, dude, and then I walk down. That's all you've got to know about philosophy really right dude like philosophize with them sorry where was i going with that uh i don't know oh sorry so this guy um that had posterior herniations he um he was six five i told you but he was super shy and i remember we were i was doing all my stew mcgill stuff with him and i was doing all my great cook stuff and i was getting him better and now but he wasn't getting better at the rate that i thought i thought he should be doing progressing a little quicker and uh i watched him walk in the

gym one day so i'm working at the table doing my paperwork whatever and i watched him walk in the gym and he was like six five he's a big dude big dude. And if you think about it, I had a buddy that was on the volleyball team when I was in college and we used to go to bars and stuff and clubs and we would get together at the start of the night. This is before cell phones, right? I didn't have a cell phone back then. And we'd be like, okay, if we get separated during the night, at the end of the night, we'll meet at him. Right? Because his head's like this far above everybody, right? So you look around the bar, you're like, yeah, there he is. And you go over and everybody meets there and we go home. And so that's what this guy's like. He's 6'5 and he's so tall.

He's above everyone. And so I literally watched him walk into the gym, look around at all these people, and then get down to everybody else's level, which puts his spine into flexion all the time. And so part of the training I had to do with him was like psychology training. And I wish I had paid more attention in psychology class because I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. And so that's what i try to tell my students that's why we teach all this stuff like it's not just for fun like it's it's important and to me like if you're working with a human being and you're not thinking about

psychology you're not doing the best for them possibly because lenny has a great line that he uses whenever a student asks him like do i need to know this or am i gonna have to use this later whatever he always says i don't know. Tell me in 10 years. Right. Tell me in 10 years if you need to know or not. Totally. Oh, fucker. It seems every coach that I know almost, once they get a handle on the basics of training, they almost all go, oh, this is really a psychological game.

A hundred percent. Knowing how to program right workouts and teach movement and whatever, that's the basics. You're supposed to know that shit. But learning how to get people to follow you and to actually do what they're supposed to be doing and to want to do it for their reasons and to, like, be able to manage, like, their whole mentality in their life and, like, be a part-time therapist for them, et cetera, that's 90% of what you do. I agree.

But it's still fun to make fun of Lenny. Yeah. You got to make fun of your friends. I got one last question. I actually want to go back to the suit with the EMG. Okay. Athos, right? Yeah, yeah.

Athos. Athos. Whatever you want to call it. So you were talking about before we started the show, you mentioned the suit, but you were talking about there's also accelerometers built in. Is that right? Yes. So could you talk to us?

So EMG can be a little fickle at times, but when coupled with accelerometer, you're getting a lot more data. Sure. How are you using that data together? So I think they're working on coming up with something you know similar to um like catapult or one of those things that measure load on the athlete which is basically you know how much acceleration your body does as you're moving um and a lot of a lot of people are using that now to to prescribe work rest cycles to say you know you've got to this load it's time to

rest or whatever um and so the accelerometer can give us that information. And so if you only have that information, we both might do the same amount of work, like acceleration wise. But without the EMG data, we're not really sure. Like you might have to shut yourself down, but me, I could be fine. And so what we're doing now with the EMG data is we're actually taking the area under the EMG curve. So you could put this suit on and go out and play a game of soccer for two hours. And it'll tell you through the accelerometer data how far you ran or how much accelerations your body had or how much external load you had on your body. But if we both had the same external load on our bodies

and your hamstring has been used to like 200% of its capacity and my hamstring's only been used to 50% of its capacity, I was more efficient out there and I can keep going, but you need to be shut down. And so it gives you that individual muscle load which tells me because all all load on an athlete is not created equal depends on how you're producing that load so if you're like maxing all your muscles out or maybe you're using your hamstring your right hamstring to 300 and your left one to 20 and i'm using mine equally to maybe 60 each that's a whole different story so it gives us a much more individual look into how those loads are affecting each athlete.

Yeah, and to reference Greg Cook and Mike Boyle and all those guys again, one of the things that they say is that movement asymmetry is one of the largest predictors of injury. So in that case, using one hamstring double the other one in this oversimplified example, that's a red flag that something is wrong that needs to get fixed or you're looking to get hurt eventually. And to me, if I had this gear at the time we did the FMS study, you know, when you're only running straight and turning left, I guarantee you we would have found something like that that would have led to the injuries and the people we saw injuries. So to me, this technology now allows us to look into stuff like

that, which previously we couldn't have. So, I mean, we had previously our EMG system here, you had to be tethered to the computer by a big long wire. So clearly we can't put it on track athletes who are running around the track. And then they came up with these telemetered systems that you didn't have to be connected by a wire, but you still had to have a whole bunch of wires on you, so it was still hard to move.

But now if you can just wear like with this Athos gear, and this is where when I first started working for athos i was like skeptical because you're taught as a scientist to be skeptical right and uh i've worked with enough emg data it's so fickle it's so hard to get the electrode has to be in the right spot there has to be gel there you have to abrade the skin shave and all this stuff to get a good signal and i was like how the hell are you guys getting a signal from this there's no way that's even possible and then they collected some data and they showed me the raw signal i was like holy cow that looks amazing like i couldn't even believe that you could and the mechanics of how they do it i don't even understand like you collect it on your skin it ships up to the cloud i don't know

how it does that and then it comes back down into your phone i'm like yeah that's amazing what they can do so technology is just ridiculous i mean i always tell the Athos people, when I took my first EMG course in grad school, the electrical activity that comes out of a muscle is a very low-grade electrical activity. And there's tons of electrical activity around us all the time. These cameras, that computer, tons of it. And so discerning what's EMG and what's the rest of the shit in the air is really hard to do. And so I think, I don't know the year exactly on this, but it was not very long ago. I'm going to go, I'm not even going to guess at the year,

but not very long ago. EMG could only be collected in this electrically neutral cage that this guy Baz Magian created. He's one of the first guys who did EMG. So he created this cage that was like, it was shielded from all of their electrical activity and he could collect EMG in that cage. So basically, I don't know, let me take a guess, 50 years ago, let's say,

EMG could only be collected in one cage in the world anywhere. Right. And we're only, I mean, we're not long out of that. And now you can put this suit on and be wherever with your phone and collect EMG, really good EMG data. I'm like, it's unbelievable that we've gotten that far. I'll add a little piece to that physiology. If you're wondering, if you're like, you're yourself like, how in the hell do muscles give away electricity?

The way that you basically contract is your nerves send a signal and it's just an electrical signal. And when it gets into your muscle, it's the same thing. So it gets converted from electrical and the chemical and then chemical back into electrical. And you just have a literally different between a positive charge and a negative charge those get flipped and it shoots off this electrical signal that causes your muscle to contract and so you can actually then reverse and say okay if a muscle contract it must have caused or the result of that muscle contraction is then the electrical signal so if you measured that electrical signal that's why you can measure heart activity or any other thing and that's how you can get an electrical signal from right and generally like the more i always tell my students the more

electrical activity your brain sends down that highway to the muscle the harder it's going to contract and so we're basically measuring the magnitude of that and the magnitude that does is pretty variable like i mean if you take an emg electrode and you hit it it can give you a big spike yeah which isn't an EMG activity. And so I think I like a lot better the way Athos is going now in terms of giving you EMG over a big, long period of time and averaging it versus those little spikes that could be really variable. So to me, I want to know how hard your hamstring worked during that two-hour workout, your right versus your left.

That's pretty accurate, I think, and pretty good information because it's averaged over a really long period of time. So taking the area under pretty accurate, I think, and pretty good information because it's averaged over a really long period of time. So taking the area under that curve, I think, is going to be a lot more useful to us than the little spikes that can happen here and there. For sure. And then combining it with the work, the external work that's happening with the accelerometers, I think,

is going to be pretty exciting in terms of where that product could go. I'm going to have to get a suit. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Scott, thanks for having us in your lab and coming that product could go. I'm going to have to get a suit. Yeah, definitely. Scott, thanks for having us in your lab and coming on the show today. I really enjoyed it. Awesome. Thank you, guys. If people wanted to reach out to you, is there any way we can contact you, social media, your websites, or email?

If you want to throw it out there, you're welcome to. You don't have to, though. What's that? Yeah, I have social media. I don't even know whatever you call them. What do you call that? Instagram or Facebook or your name? Handle, is that what you call it?

Handle. Some people call it a handle, yeah. Yeah, like where do you put your booty shots? Do you do selfies in the mirror with a duck face? I don't have any of those, unfortunately. You're on Instagram. Instagram, yeah. I don't even know what my thing is.

So, handle, is that what you call it? Yeah, Scott Lynn. I don't know what it is, though. That's Kay Lynn, yeah. I don't even know what my thing is. So, Handle, is that what you call it? Yeah, Scott Lynn. I don't know what it is, though. SK Lynn or something. I don't even know. Are you on Facebook, too? Facebook, yeah. Okay.

You don't sound like you're concerned about it. I'm not that concerned. My email is fine. S-L-Y-N-N at Fullerton.edu is how they could get me. That's old school, I guess. But, yeah, I do have it. I'm not very good at using it. So, maybe I'll...

It's a good trend here. All the academics are like, yeah, I don't really do this self-promotion it's ever handy it's it's hard man it takes a huge chunk of waste of your time to do it but it's i mean it's the way that people are getting information these days that's what i was talking about in terms of like publishing papers that sit in academic journals that nobody uses is that useful maybe you know that was the number one breaking reason why i finally broke and did it yeah it's because i was just like well you have to fight this battle of feeling like a whore and feeling like that's because you're doing the duck face

you're supposed to be publishing useful information i give the people what they want go look at my Instagram. The market decides. I'm definitely catering to the masses. All right, Scott. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks, guys. That was awesome.