There's plenty of research that shows that strength training is good for improving speed and running efficiency in a number of things, but only if you do it right maybe, and maybe you've been doing it wrong. We're going to find out more about that on today's episode of the Movement Movement, the podcast for people who like to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy strong body starting feet first with those things at the bottom of your legs. And we break down the prop again in the mythology, sometimes the straight up lies. You've been told about what it takes to run or walk or play or to yoga or cross whatever you like to do, and to do those things enjoyably and efficiently and effectively.
It's a nice thing to enjoy. I know I did. It's a trick question. Because look, if you're not having a good time, you're not going to keep it up.
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In short, you know, the drill, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. So that said, Griffin, do me a favor. Tell people hello and who you are and what you're doing here. Hey, Stephen, thanks for having me.
And hey, let's start with everybody. It's great to be here. My name's Griffin Coombs. I am the founder and head coach of the North Star Body.
I, in short, help people resolve chronic stress, anxiety, and joint pain, particularly as barriers to exercise. So I do help with those things just in general, but the people who come to me seem to be experiencing those things as barriers to exercise. And so I use breath physiology for stress and anxiety. You could think of psychologist or therapist kind of addresses it through the mind through psychotherapy.
I'm not a therapist. You could say that I address sort of stress and anxiety through the physiological lens and then joint pain through, we'll call it gate informed fitness training, which I'm sure we'll get into a lot of. So which one of those do you want to start with? We don't have to start with what I teased at the beginning just a few moments ago.
Oh, yeah, let's start there because it was just such a good tease. Let's do it. All right. Go for it.
So like we said, again, strength is an important part of human functioning. People don't have as much as they would like or think they would like or actually need for things they're doing. I'm having flashbacks to when I was training on the track of a bunch of people who also trained there were Olympic level, mostly long distance runners. And the amount of strength they had was more than the average fifth grader.
They could barely do a push up. They were doing kettlebell swings with a five pound kettlebell, which is a paperweight. It was really amazing. And if you suggested to them that they even take a day doing real strength training, they would be terrified.
But as I said in the beginning, only because of you, what many people do for strength training may not be what's valuable for what they're trying to do. Did I get that right as an over encompassing encapsulation? Yeah. Yeah, I would say so because, and I love just the movement, the idea of wanting to foster a happy and healthy life, enjoying your body.
I think we're talking to the people who just are trying to be as happy and healthy as possible and using fitness and exercises a way to do that. And so I want to say right off the bat that I'm not trying to yuck anyone's yum who loves deadlifting or back squatting. And if you feel great and you particularly love those lifts, keep doing them. Just listen with an open mind to keep doing them.
But I'm talking more to the people who think because they don't know any better. That's the only route to go to live a happy, healthy life. And those who are in chronic pain and don't really understand that it could be the training itself that's causing that pain. So when we look at the adaptations we're trying to get from strength training or just working out in general, a lot of people think about, yeah, I want the metabolic benefits.
I want the strength benefits. Maybe I want muscle growth, but people don't usually stop to think about number one, the structural adaptations they're making and the neurological adaptations that they're making. And so the stuff that we do repeatedly over and over again, especially under a high neurological load because strength training, especially if we're lifting heavy is a huge demand on the nervous system, that's feedback for the body to then organize itself around those movements. And so those movement patterns will eventually change the way that our body organizes itself and feels safe and structures itself as it walks in as it runs.
And so you can do all of the strength training and feel great while you're doing it and get stronger at the gym and you might not even injure yourself or feel that bad while you're doing it. But then outside of the gym, when you start to do other movements that almost contradict the patterning that you've ingrained in yourself through strength training, that's when injuries and pain can start to show up. So you think about that athlete who or that fitness enthusiast who lifts a ton and has a great time doing it and then throws their back up tying their shoe or stepping down a stair the wrong way. So it's more complicated than just, oh, you get a progressively overload and then you'll be fine.
You won't get injured because it doesn't exist in the gym vacuum. We're talking about how does it transfer to everyday movement and everyday movement is the gate cycle. I'm having a couple of interesting thoughts and flashbacks. One is there was a guy in my junior high school who was a natural bodybuilder and the guy was massive.
And of course everyone assumed he'd be a great athlete and he could not run at all. He was also not the smartest guy he got kicked off the football team because he couldn't remember the place. So I'm not saying that all muscle heads are dumb. I know a lot of brilliant ones, but this guy was pretty typical.
So that was an interesting thing is he just couldn't use those all that size in a way that was functional. The other thing is that when I got back and sprinting, I was getting injured a lot and for the first couple of years, and one of the coaches that I talked to said, how much can you deadlift? I said, I don't know. I've never tried.
So I just went and tried and I pulled like 250 pounds, which was not me. And he said, how much do you weigh? I said about 150. He goes, call me when you're over 300 pounds deadlifting.
And I said, what? Because we've just seen that a lot of injuries go away once you're able to be that strong. And it was a combination of things. One is getting out of my shoes and learning about a form problem that I couldn't feel in regular shoes, but barefoot was able to feel it and incorrect it.
But the other is once I got over 300 pounds, that also not personally people chummed like once I was deadlifting over 300 pounds, I never got over 300 pounds person. That would be insane since I'm five miles. Important distinction. That just to be clear.
That also helped a lot. Now that said, there was there are two things about that. One is when we were doing deadlifting the way he recommended, it was just the concentric part, just the lifting and then just drop away. And the idea being that's actually the functional part of the deadlift for sprinting.
Those are the two things that pop into my mind, just maybe jumping off point for talking more about the structural things that might occur and throwing whatever examples you can think of exercise that people are typically doing that might get in the way of either just daily functional stuff or sports-specific stuff. And I'm going to keep doing water because I don't know why I'm really dried up. Yes. Drink the water is always good.
I'll go with the first thought that you had, because I was a little more straightforward, where it's just bodybuilding people who are stuck in, I remember growing, I grew up in the 90s, and so I remember the commercials and the infomercials about the Bowflex and the Nordatrack and all that was just like, there was cardio and then there was bodybuilding. Style strength training. And a lot of people still equate strength training with bodybuilding, and they don't realize that bodybuilding is a sport in and of itself. So if you bodybuilders are supposed to have, it's an aesthetically based sport, so you're trying to get the most size and the nicest looking proportions of your body, it has nothing to do with being able to do functional movement.
Right. And it doesn't even claim to. It's just, it's a sport in and of itself. And so that's one way to strength train, and it might be really accessible to a lot of people.
But then we had this sort of quote unquote functional movement explosion in the early 2000s, CrossFit came along, tactical style, military style training, and that was a step in the right direction. But what I'm finding now, there's a new movement. I call it the niche biomechanics movement. That's this gate informed fitness train.
And basically what they have in common is that we're looking at how does the body move? What is the function of these muscles and joints and connective tissue when the body is walking or running or sprinting? So I'm not, I don't care that your shoulder blades can retract fully and you can squeeze them together and do a pull up or a row. I want to know, what is the purpose of the lap, for example, or the chest or the bicep or the glutes for the gate cycle?
Because the gate cycle is the primary human movement pattern. And even if you disagree with that, it's the most used human movement pattern. So unless you're handstand walking from the car to the office, your gate cycle is the most important thing. And if that's not working for you, you're going to be fighting against your body for the rest of your life.
So we train and there are a few different systems. There's functional patterns, there's Goda, there's weck method. The system that I'm certified in and I train people in is called one of a kind fitness or okay for short. And there's a ton of educational content on the okay f Instagram page, their website.
So just talking about what it means to respect and prioritize the gate cycle. But with, I think the functional people get wrong is that they've, I shouldn't say it's wrong, I should say it's incomplete because they're looking at, we want to use compound movements that you multiple muscle groups all at the same time. But we don't look at how that actually translates into athletic movement, which is very little. So even though if you're looking at how do I become more athletic, a deadlift is going to serve you better certainly than bodybuilding style exercise, no doubt about it.
But is there a better approach than a deadlift? I think so. Now, to speak to your second thought, it's absolutely sprinting requires so much force absorption, four to five times your body weight for the ground reaction forces of a sprint. So being stronger is important for sprinting.
There's no doubt about it. And if you go for, I've never streamed to now I can deadlift 300 pounds, I do believe that those strength adaptations are going to help you with sprinting. So I don't think it's all for nothing. But I think that when we get to a certain point of athleticism, and you want to say, how do I really optimize for sprinting?
I don't think that a sprinter needs a traditional deadlift. The way that we train is something a little bit different. And I can go into kind of the differences of the exercises. But some of these systems, they'll tell you don't strength train.
There are some who say strength training is bad for running or athleticism or hurt your joints and never pick up weight. I think that's a BS. As you said at the beginning, strength training is important. It's correlated to longevity.
Muscle is important. Bone density is important. Anyone who says you shouldn't strength train, I just don't agree with that at all. I don't think that we should prioritize strength as the number one attribute where after at the cost of everything else.
So there comes a point of diminishing returns. So let's take the deadlift, for example. If I'm picking up a barbell, that barbell is in front of my center of mass and I'm biasing the hinge. So when I sprint and you're a sprinter, so you can visualize this and probably feel it interceptively in your body as we talk about it, right?
What's happening is you're going through the motion of triple flexion and triple extension of the ankle, the knee and the hip all coming up on that swing leg, that front leg. And then you reverse that by extending, you absorb and react to the force in the ground and then you repeat it all over again. So let me just, so we're humans who aren't hip to that terminology. Let me paint the picture a little bit.
So the triple flexion, imagine a spinner, this is a classic sprinter pose. There's one foot that's on the ground and the other leg, which is the leg that is swung through. You're going to be, and this is not actually accurate, but for the sake of painting a picture. So there's 90 degree angle between your upper body and your thigh, 90 degree angle between your thigh and your lower leg, 90 degree angle between your lower leg at your ankle, basically lower leg and foot.
Now again, that's not true and it doesn't stay like that. And then the triple extension part is when you've got that foot that's on the ground as it's coming off the ground, I'm going to do it in reverse order, you're extending, basically your planar flexing, your foot is moving away from your knee, your knee is also relatively straight, your hip is also relatively straight. So that's the more importantly, the hip or the leg is behind you. So you're extending the hip.
So that's the triple extension part. And again, those are not, it's not what people actually do. There's not full extension. There's not full flexion.
Yes. But I want to clarify that. Yeah, because we're talking about when we and one of a kind fitness and when I in my practice talk about triple flexion and triple extension, we're actually not talking about those end range positions. We're talking about the action.
So the moving of the leg up involves the ankle coming up, the toes coming up toward the shin. That's your dorsiflexion of the ankle, the knee bending and the knee coming up. That's the hip flexion. And then the extension starts at the top of that.
So with the leg off the ground, we actually have to start bringing it back down to the ground. The knee straightens, the hip comes behind and the foot starts to slightly point, as you just said. So yeah, so those aren't end range positions with those are the actions that are happening. So just using the deadlift as an example.
So why am I biasing basically just hip flexion? Yes, there's some depending on your body type and your joint angles. Yeah, there will be some knee flexion extension and maybe some ankle movement too. But we're biasing the hinge, which is just focusing on hip flexion.
Think about the neurological load that I'm putting into my nervous system and the structural load, the axial load on my spine and the stimulus I'm giving all of these muscles to bias this one third of the actions that I'm doing during a run. So what what what of a kind fitness is has modified is a squat that again, prioritizes triple flexion triple extension, but also the eccentric isometric phase because which is interesting because you were talking about prioritizing the concentric phase. But the idea of strength at length seems to be really important for tendon health as the research shows, right? And also because generally, if you can handle a force at length, you can handle a force in a shortened position, but the opposite isn't necessarily true.
In my own practice and for clients, I've filed that just prioritizing eccentric isometrics with some movement, but not really prioritizing concentrics. And this triple flexion triple extension position as may occur in the gait cycle is a wonderful way to train the lower body, just get out of pain and to build athleticism. So can you paint the picture of what that exercise looks like more explicitly so people can get that in their minds? Absolutely.
So the one of a kind of fitness squat, we do it. We train people very intentionally because we want to make sure that we eliminate as many compensations as possible. So we don't want the whole point of it is to not let people quote unquote cheat, right? Because we want to be able to feel these connections in really quote unquote easy positions and then really gradually progress so that I can feel the same stability and the same connection throughout my body when I'm ready for the squat position as I did when I was lying on the floor, for example.
But when we get to the one of a kind fitness squat, it looks like the toes are actually slightly turned in and the knees will track over the toes. Now, people look at this and they say, that's a recipe for an ACL tear and that's knee of Algas. It's not knee of Algas. Knee of Algas is when the shin is turned out and the femur is turned in and you get this twist when the knees continue to track over the toes.
So by turning the toes in and letting the knees come in, the knees are still over the toes. How far in are we turning our toes? So like outside of the foot parallel, outside of the foot at like the right foot pointing to 11 degrees left, point into one or what would that look like? Great question.
It's not it's not heavily prescribed, but I would say we want more or less the shin and ankle bone to be just about facing straight ahead zero degrees, which would mean the toes are just a couple degrees in. Now, some people may need, if they lack a lot of internal rotation, they may need to make the legs a little bit wider and turn in a little bit more to start to open up the back of the glutes, but in general, it doesn't really need to be much. But the idea is that the glutes, they lengthen and they load through flexion of the hip, internal rotation of the hip and an adduction going in of the femur. And so we want to load the glutes properly.
So the reason that we don't shove the knees out in the squat is because if we're abducting femurs outward in space and externally rotating, that's not allowing the glue to lengthen completely. So we let the knees come in and to avoid the knee injury, we turn the toes in with it. And with the tensions that we cue and we've built up, like I said, all the way from lying on your back in the ground. When you're ready for the squat, you should be able to feel tension from the foot connecting through the fascia all the way up to the glute and around the hip.
So you're not feeling knees or a lot of low back or anything like that. It's a real lateral stability pushing like you could spring load from any directions. Very athletic and from there. So you can just imagine us going to about 90 degrees of hip flexion about and about 90 degrees of knee flexion.
So you can think Shinta at 90 hip to torso 90. We'll start isometrically holding that position. We can do that for one to two minutes. We might start to add a little bit of a bounce where we mimic reacting to that ground reaction force during the run.
We might add some weight after that. And eventually we will train different variations of the squat as well. We might add a little bit of knee flexion going lower just to train the quad at that length where the knee comes up when you're running that leg that's in the air is coming back and that knee tends to come into some deep reflection. But the position I just described is the main one of a kind fitness squat, you would say.
Interesting. So the asymmetric part, you're just doing that unsupported and not doing like a wall squat or anything. It's literally just standing, dropping down. So you've got about 90 degrees, shinta, and 90 degrees by two torso, which means that your back is not straight up and down.
Your back is going to be, yeah. So to do that 90 degrees, those 90 degree angles, because of the greater flexion in your ankle, that's going to make everything, but you look at it from the right angle of the Z shape, if you look at the other side of the S shape. I don't know what that font would be, but the system is it's some font that's an S or Z depending on where you look at it. So you're starting out the asymmetric thing and then yeah, that little bounce, it's really funny.
And I don't mean funny, ha ha funny excruciating. That little bounce can make a big difference between, oh, I can just stay here for a while and I'll be like, holy crap, I just stay here for 10 more seconds. Yeah. It's so funny you say that because I just started adding those back into my own routine again.
I was focusing, we cycle through. It's very, you can think of like the triphasic eccentric isometrics and then we do reactives with those little bounce and then we go to plyometrics. So again, we don't focus so much on concentric stuff, but it's, I just cycle back adding these oscillations, these bounces back. And I was actually in Maryland this past weekend with the founder of the system, my coach, it's based in Maryland and we were training together and I swear to God, Stephen, I did, I think three sets of 100 little bounces because they're really tiny and just bodyweight, I didn't have, I wasn't holding on anything.
My glutes the next day were talking to me and I was like, wow, it's just insane. The different kind of stimuli that you can give your tissues, especially if you're not used to it. So we start with the isometrics again, because we want to make sure the tendons can handle plyometric movement and proper running and sprinting down the line. And also it's, we're training the muscles at length.
We're training them to handle force at length because if they can, and they're good to go. So you mentioned something that piqued my interest, which is so after you do the bodyweight version, then possibly a little weight, et cetera. And then you said plyometric version was the plyo version of that. So we don't really do apply a version of the squat per se, but we'll start to add in higher intensity plyometric, just jump training, more like traditional jump training box jumps, maybe some broad jumps, depth drops.
But I don't think a lot of people need those plyometrics, the advanced or higher intensity stuff. If you want to do it, great. But it's extra. Or if you're an athlete, I don't particularly train professional athletes.
It's not my personal demographic. This system has trained professional athletes. And so it's definitely part of it. For me, I'm just looking at the people who are, they're duck-footed when they walk and they have near low back pain and they're sitting all day.
And it's the people who are, they think they're trying to do the right thing and hurting. So let me, I just had a bit of a aha moment, a phrase that I have never used and I hope I never use it again. But it's to me. So the average human being will, from what I've seen, have a couple of issues.
But one of the biggest ones that their glutes just aren't working and even more of their glutes and their feet don't know how to work together because you can do things with your feet, turn them in or turn them out like you described. They can impact how your glutes function. You can do things with your glutes that will impact how your feet function and everything in between. So if you're in a situation where their feet point out, their knees could either be pointing out or pointing in depending on what's going on through glutes.
If they have weak glutes, that is a number one contributor to low back issues. If they just go and start doing regular squats, regular death list, regular whatever, and we're only talking lower body at the moment, there's a high probability that they'll be doing that with a bad fundamental alignment or movement pattern to begin with. And if they're just doing that and arguably getting stronger in those positions, they may not be either A, strengthening the requisite muscles in the right way, or B, they might be doing compensatory movements where they don't have to ever strengthen their glutes in this case. There you go.
Find some other thing that happens. So if you're doing a really re-pattern reprogram, some of those basic things first and foremost, and then start doing that under load, then start doing so, I would argue this is a whole different game than what most people think of as functional fitness, which is get a cable trainer and do wood chopping with oceans or lift up heavier bags or whatever the hell it is that's functional because hey, you lift up a bag of groceries. Hey, you have to, I don't know what the wood chopping thing is. You chop up wood anymore.
Except I, it's one of my all time favorite things, quick, two quick tangents just for the fun of it. Where in Maryland? Because that's where I drove. The headquarters is in Bel Air.
Okay. I was nearby, but not there. And the total, no reason to bring it up anyway. I was in college one, wood chopping.
When I was in college, my last semester, I think I took a group therapy class. I was a psych major, but it was really just an excuse to get eight seniors into therapy. And I didn't know that, but it was fun. And the other, I think the only other guy in the class was the captain of the football team, quarterback, a super buff dude.
And we did a weekend marathon, something at our teacher slash therapists, country cabin. And so the first thing he did is he just wanted to tire us out. So he sent me and the football guy out to chop wood because it was a wood fire. So I don't remember what the women did.
We came back and said, what was that like for everyone? What emotions came up? And everyone else had something about how, by just exerting all that effort, it brought something up for them. And the football guy was like, I just felt all this anger towards my father.
And I was just getting out of that anger. And I just felt how I'm just myself. And he said, oh, no, no. And they turned to me.
And so I was like, for you. I said, yeah, I really like chopping wood. What was the experience? What was the emotional thing?
Really satisfying because I got really good. Just I got better as I did it. So I really enjoyed it. Anything else come up?
No, man. I just like chopping wood. I picked the wrong guy out of the Caribbean. I love chopping wood too, actually.
I used to when I was like 15, we had a little wood stove in the garage and I would go out there and I was doing my dad a favor because it was a chore, but it wasn't a chore for me. I just loved doing it. So I'm with you. I realized that my mind does not do focus.
I can. But the things that I do physically are all things that are high precision things. Sprinting is a high precision activity. I used to be in an archery and target shooting and bowling and putting anything that was like high precision for my body.
I like it. For my mind, I'm going as broad and as wide as I can. And then that economy is interesting to me. So chopping wood, it's a precision sport.
It's super fun. So we talked about arguably replacing a squat slash deadlift. I do want to bring something up there. Because one of the things that is an exercise highly correlated with reduction of injuries for sprinters in particular is having eccentric hamstring strength.
Basically for people to think about it actually goes straight to it. The exercise of the door is the Nordic hamstring curl. And for people who don't know, imagine you're standing sitting on your knees, you're on your knees, knees on the ground, you are straight up and you have something holding your feet down and from your knees, giving your body as straight as you can, doesn't have to be perfectly straight. You can bend a little bit of the hips, but then slowly lower yourself towards the ground.
Now for the average human, you will make it if we think about a clock and if we're looking so you're facing left, you'll make it to maybe 11 o'clock, maybe 10 o'clock and then you'll fall on your face. And the goal is to make it all the way down under control. And then if you're a real beast, make it back up in the same way. And I don't know if it's from that exercise, which I've gotten good at of these, but I haven't had a hamstring injury to save my life in the last 14 years.
And so that's a very specific kind of strength training thing that obviously doesn't have that same functional component per se, but I'm just curious what your thoughts are about some injecting something like that, even if we're not talking about something specifically for sprinters. Yeah. Yeah, because if it were for sprinters, I'm not super up to speed on statistics for sprinters and high density. The people that, yeah, the people who work with them, like I said, the system I'm talking about works with professional athletes, my practice that my target client is the gen pop who wants to get out of pain, become more athletic, but you're not competing.
You could if you wanted to, but in general, so the Nordic curl has become more popular seed all over Instagram. And again, I think going from nothing to having a lot of eccentric hamstring strength is going to be better if you're running or if you're sprinting. The issue that I have with the Nordic curl is that like you mentioned, getting your foot to work with your glute is important. And I 100% agree.
We're not really teaching the hamstring to do what it does during the gate cycle. And we're not really teaching it to do it with all the other things that it is supposed to do in the gate cycle. Now, again, eccentric strength is important, but if you look at the hamstrings job, I think and this is up for debate. So don't PhD physios don't come after me, but I think that the hamstring is more of a stabilizer than anything else during the gate cycle because we're not if you, and again, if you were just a picture, what's actually happening is that triple flexion action, triple extension hits the ground and pushes the ground out and behind you at an angle and reacts to that force comes right back up and starts all over again.
I think a lot of people get lost in the role of the hamstring because we picture like a treadmill or like those curved treadmills where we're like pulling the ground behind us. And that's not really the case, right? Because the ground's not moving where the ones move. Yes.
One of the reasons that I don't assess gate on a curved treadmill because it's a completely different mechanical thing going on. So it's not really it's not a curl. It's not the hamstring pulling. It's the whole hit the ankle coming up and coming down, pushing the ground away reacting to that force and repeating the cycle.
So for that reason, I think the exercises that we do in OKF, the OKF squat, we have a single leg squat or own variation of a single leg squat as well. We have some ground exercises that are like regressions that lead us up to the squat and the single leg squat. And we'll do things with rotating the pelvis while we're in those positions as well. So that is training the hamstring as a stabilizer in that length and sort of triple flexed position.
And then again, we add the reactive component, we can add the pelvic rotation component, we can add weight to it. I find that integrates much more. The hamstrings function is how it works in the gates cycle rather than isolating just that muscle for a eccentric part. The hamstrings trick you want to force because it is attached below the knee and above the hip.
And the argument for the Nordic hamstring actually, more than what you're describing is that when your leg is in front of you, when it's already swung forward and you're about to start driving down towards the ground again, if you didn't have a hamstring, your foot would just kick straight out. So once your knee comes out, your foot would follow just from the momentum. And so the idea is you're exerting this eccentric force to slow your foot down so that you can't extend your knee at the right time without putting it. Because if your knee is perpendicular to your torso and your foot kicks out, extending your hamstring, now you're stretching it at both ends.
And so that's the mess of it. But ignoring that, let's move away from hamstring. So it gives a shit. But I want to hear about some more of these things that you talked about because let's move away from just the OKF squat to some of the other movements that you would do with people.
But now that we have this idea of let's get things working in conjunction with each other the way they normally would. But under this, let's say for lack of, I'm not trying to be dismissive when I say this semi-artificial way of doing it. And I say that simply because if you're not just doing the actual motion, if you're not just running, then you're doing something semi-artificial that is designed to help with when you're doing the actual thing. So let's talk about some of the other fun things people would do if they were going to hang out with you guys.
Yeah, so we start everybody with breathing mechanics because if we can't manage pressure, then we're going to compensate all day long. So the goal is to do is strength training while I'll minimize the compensation pattern. So we're very attentive to details. So I remember when I first years and years ago, I read the Kelly Star-Etz book and he talked about, I love the analogy because he talked about the gym as the laboratory, right?
And then the application is on the field or Europe, sport, your hobby, whatever you're doing. And so we really treat the strength training like the laboratory where that's where we're thinking the most and dialing in details the most so that when we go run and play frisbee or when we go for our jog or whatever we're doing, we can focus on enjoying the activity and we don't have to think about those details. So that repatterning becomes automatic over time. That's the whole point.
So we start people lying on their back and breathing and being able to find length and tension in the abdominal tissues, proper use of the diaphragm, proper expansion of the ribcage, all that stuff. And so that sort of overlaps with my work as a breathing coach and we'll practice all that stuff. So let's pause there and talk about what proper is compared to what people walking in the door with. There's so many mechanical breathing dysfunctions.
So there's people who breathe paradoxically, which is not super common, but it's the most extreme, which is basically you inhale and the belly comes in and then they exhale and relax and the belly comes out. So that takes a whole lot of just, we have to regress and repattern that completely. But a lot of people, they use accessory breathing muscles primarily instead of the diaphragm and the muscles around the rib. So we don't see a lot, 360 degree belly and rib expansion.
We see maybe a little bit, but it's dominated by the muscles around the collarbone, the chest, you see a lot of lifting shoulders. Or we have people who are kept to belly breathing, but they only get the belly part and they don't understand the diaphragm functions as a dome that expands 360 degrees. And so you get people with kind of a rounded back and that's their natural posture. So they breathe and the belly just comes out, but there's no, that tension is not even.
So if you were to think of a balloon, it's my coach calls it to Hebrew first, like the balloon animals, the hot dog balloons, right? It all that tension, it's inflating, but it's also gaining tension as it expands. If you were to just fill one side of that balloon and the rest stayed flaccid and just one side of it popped out, that's the just belly breathing imagery. And so I get a lot of that, either you're a shallow breather or you've got the belly, but we're working on building that intra-dominable pressure around the whole thoracic and abdominal cavity.
Really? I'm so glad you went there because if you hadn't, I was going to cue you for it. Because it is one of those things that most people, especially if they've come out of yoga or a lot of the breathing breath work that came out in the 80s and 90s, it was in belly only and not recognizing that you should feel that expansion in your beliefs, in your lower back and really should be expanding in your perenium everywhere. And it feels really weird at first when you do it and you'll also feel that, I know for me when I first started doing that, it was really interesting to get like a feel things letting go and releasing in my thoracic spine, which was super fun.
Yeah. And I think, I was on a couple of years ago and we were talking more about goals and health coaching at that time. But we did touch a bit on breathing and I remember talking about that backside, that the Racco lumbar junction and how a lot of rib flare and people who are always queued, especially lifters who are queued to pull their shoulders down and back doing bench presses, pull ups like this, it's always, we've got to stabilize the shoulder and we've got to activate the lats by doing this. And so we end up with the ribs popped out and all this tissue in the mid to low back is compressed.
And so now I don't actually have more thoracic mobility. Like my upper back is not changed. It's below the rib cage. I start to get a hinge point of bending point down there.
And then that leads to a lot of jutas to belly breathing because I can't expand back here because it's all compressed. And so the breathing mechanics relate to the shoulder mechanics that we work on too, which is that we want the shoulders to be able to remain more or less flat against the rib cage and be able to move without popping out and disconnecting from the rib cage. If you were to think about, again, the gate cycle, if you were to think about the arm swing exists for a reason, it's not just to swing the arms, but as the arms move, if they stay connected, so we think about the pecs and the lats and the biceps because across the shoulder joint, we think of those as shoulder stabilizers primarily, not as push and pull muscles because as my arm swings, this is locked in, it pulls the rib cage to counter rotate the pelvis. So we think about function of the upper body.
We still train, we have push up, we have a pull up and we add weight to those and they're tough, man. So I'm going to move them with the sense of, okay, can I get my shoulder into a position that's probably going to look wrong or unstable to the traditional lifter because we're not shoving them down or back. We're letting them find this neutral position where I can feel chest and I can feel that and I can feel bicep all locking this into a position where I'm not shrugging, it's not all traps, but I'm certainly not doing that traditional cue that like I just explained with the breathing causes way more problems than it really solves. So now we're here, we have the OKF reactive ball with this build with sand, we start to make circles and we can feel those muscles contracting and relaxing, right?
Just as they would as you pull yourself. For people who are listening, the reactive ball is how big? It's a, I would spot the size of a, oh man, I'm not a field athlete. So I don't know.
It's smaller than a softball. It may be slightly bigger than a softball. So what you're like those weighted swishy balls you would use like fitness, like the really tiny hand weights. Yeah, I got it.
So again, what you were describing was that those are under each hand as you're doing this push up and the first thing you're doing is a little rotation, a little wax on, wax on. Yeah, we're not doing the push up with them. So we just, we have that we're standing, we, yeah, we're standing with them. Yeah, it's a reactive circle.
So this is just open chain and this starts to teach the shoulders to dynamically stabilize, to stabilize during movement. And so it's stimulating chest and lat to contract, relax, contract, relax, because it's filled with sand partially. So that momentum is creating that, that simulation. You do that with the shake wave, but that would look creepy.
Total tangent again. It amazes me how when that product came out as an infomercial project, everyone mocked it to high heaven. Now you can go and almost any physical therapist office and they've got one. There you go.
And I'm seeing stuff with water too now, like there's stuff coming up on Instagram and rehab stuff with what it's the same principle and it's really close to what we do. It's using momentum and reaction to get the muscles to be able to contract, relax. That's really, that's again, another very interesting distinction. The whole idea with doing a bench press and pulling your shoulders back and down, squeezing all that is in part to not just about shoulder stabilization, but also because otherwise most people will do all this wacky compensatory stuff to try to just do the bench press.
And if those are locked in place, you just have fewer degrees of freedom for moving that bar outside of the proper, the proper path. And also if you do pull back, it does move your chest forward, which means as you bring the bar down, it doesn't go as far. So simultaneously get more stretch in the pecs as you pull the shoulders back without having to drop the bar all the way as far down. It's an interesting, positively paradoxical thing, but I love what you're describing of doing something where it's actually just training all those same muscles to work more in concert in a more realistic way than that isolated thing.
Again, not bashing the bench press depending on what you're trying to do. There's the other thing when you're talking about just what doing that does to the torso, especially the thing about running. And of course, this is a, there's arguments about this, but what's fascinating people to understand is, and I can only use sprinting as an example because I don't run slow, but I had some bicep issues going on last year. And the last race that I did prior to having my bicep removed from my shoulder and my humor.
Oh man. I'm not just painful, but I was shocked at how painful it was to run 100 meters. My bicep was destroyed from running 100 meters because of all the force that it does when you're just, you know, probably your arms back and forth. And similarly that stretch in the chest was tremendous.
Now some people, I won't mention that my name, friends of ours, both of ours, they try to over exaggerate this sort of twist and the counteracting motion in the pelvis, which arguably, you know, when you watch a sprinter, there's a little bit of that. When you watch a distance runner, there might be a little more. But again, it's more, it seems to be more a question of having the right amount of motion and the stability in that kind of only again thing rather than just some constant. Yes.
So I know that there are a lot of people and systems who, or at least in this space of gate optimization, whatever, who will try to have you change the way that you run in time. And I do think I've benefited very recently, in fact, from some queuing, like there's some, especially me as not a natural athlete, some queuing, like for the sake of rhythm and fluidity in my run is really helpful. However, if we think that just exaggerating a certain balance point or motion or exaggerating, try to recreate shapes that we see in a really good runner is going to help us. We're missing the point because exactly like you said, these are byproducts of having the requisite stability.
And so we, again, one of our principles at an okay, F is, or one of the things to look out for is lateral stability. We're trying, the hips are looking for lateral stability when they hit the ground in a run or when they're loading for a jump or doing anything athletic. If the hips don't find lateral stability, they'll look for it somewhere else. And that's where compensation patterns start to happen.
So I completely agree with you. It's not about how do I get my more rotation for the sake of more rotation. It's that if my shoulders are dynamically stable and meaning they know how to lock in and continue to be able to move and are my hips laterally stable, then the way that I interact with the ground while running is going to cause rotation of the pelvis and counter rotation of the rib cage to the best degree for my body. Right.
Yeah. You remind me of another thing. We see often that, and this goes back to the beginning of our conversation, we see often that runners who are getting injured have glutes that either don't fire or don't fire correctly or one fires the other dozen or some variation. One of the ways you see this is if you fill someone from behind, especially if you're doing slow motion, you'll watch that when one foot lands on the ground, their pelvis will basically not stay level.
They won't have that control. That lateral control you're talking about. And this leads to a whole bunch of issues. And this point is, and what we're coming back to is that here, correct me if I'm wrong, the foot bone is connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone is connected to the shin bone, the shin bone is connected.
Yeah. We're doing all these things to find those connections organically rather than trying to fake it. And again, you're giving me flashbacks over being at a day camp when I grew up and watching the other kids run. I think it was really watching the only kid who was faster than me, which annoyed the cramp out of me.
And just watching how he ran and I tried imitating him. And I remember thinking, that feels might look interesting, but it feels way stupid. Exactly. And so when people look at professional runners, how do I want to scry this?
Nicholas Romanoff talks about how the better you get at something, the more alike you are to the other people who are that good. And it just never gets to be everyone's identical because there's always going to be some little idiosyncratic thing. But fundamentally, they all look pretty much the same. And if you watch a video of Usain Bolt sprinting in slow motion and then look at the other seven guys in the race, they all look exactly like him.
They all have the same form. It's really quite wonderful to see. But you can't fake it till you make it. You got to build up the foundation.
Right. And then that's part of the result. When you then give the movement pattern correctly, which includes all the things we're talking about in a handful more. It's exactly you really summed up nicely with the whole approach and particularly how our approach differs from a lot of the other.
I think every one of these other systems has great things to offer. They have pieces of it. But one of the big things is that we really shouldn't be trying to alter. If you're thinking about the way you're sprinting while you're sprinting, you're not going fast enough.
And so that's why we're so intentional about the training itself and so focus on details because this is our laboratory. This is our how do we eliminate compensation? It's actually worse than that because if you're at full speed, you can't be thinking about your movement pattern. Because I had this minor glitch in my giddy up that if you watch me in slow motion, you can see back in the Roman office, one who diagnosed me and said, you're not getting into the right position at the right time.
You're like, I don't know what speed we were videoing at, but you said you're three frames late. And then, but I could never figure out what to do. Or even if I thought I figured it out, once I was at full speed, I was just relying on what my brain knew how to do. And quite amazingly, someone actually gave me a cue that someone who was on the podcast recently, my friend Doug Adams gave me a cue that ironically, I can think about it full speed.
But after I did it for a while, I don't even think about it anymore. And then I don't have to think about it again. And then it's just the thing about sprinting, you only get three thoughts. It's like drive the transitions, take off like an airplane, don't stand up, and then do this weird thing for maximum velocity and then hold on and crush your fingers.
That's the way the last 20 meters the race goes. So anyway, this is all super, super interesting. We've hit that time where I get to ask if people want to find out more about, okay, if we're you in particular, how should they do that? Yeah, they can act about Instagram.
So I'm the North Star body app in North Star body. And then my website is the North Star body dot com. And if you're like I said, I do we didn't touch too much on it today, but I'm also coach breathing and respiratory using respiratory science for stress and anxiety relief, but it ties into the movement as well. They overlap.
So there's more about stuff there. And then one of the kind of things you can look at. The world's fastest thing about that. The relationship between breathing and emotional states is well documented, frankly.
Although there are some interesting twists. I think it was the psychologist Fritz Purls who said it's anxiety, just excitement without the breathing. But suffice it to say, you can work on this, whatever the psychological thing seems to be about why you may be thinking you're feeling whatever you're feeling, or you can just do some physiological things that will impact it through the back door, if you will. And if you are hip to that, it does two things.
One gets you a great tool. But the other thing, it makes you really have a second thought about what you thought the problem might have been. Yes. Yeah.
Because you realize that that the role your body is playing in this is maybe bigger than the role of the story that you're telling yourself. And so that's really empowering. Yeah. Because often you'll be having some let's call it emotional experience and your brain is just looking for an answer for what's going on and it'll latch on to whatever the hell it will find, which may not be remotely accurate.
I'm so glad you said that because this is something that it just when people understand this and including myself, when I started to understand this, it was like, wow, your breathing pattern, particularly the rate of your breathing, but it all they're all related. But let's say your breathing rate will impact the state of your nervous system. So it's not just the other way around. So you get anxious, you get stressed, something happens, you almost get in a car accident, your heart rate spikes, you go into sympathetic nervous system, drive your breathing rate starts to increase, but your brain reinterprets your breathing rate as threat detection.
Now, here's the crazy part. And here's the thing that I really want people to understand about what you just said. When you're in a state of threat detection, everything, the job of the human brain at that point is to find out what the hell that threat is. So if I'm a hunter, gather, and I hear a roar in the distance, now I need to know where is it?
Was that a bear or a lion? Is that is, does it just passing by or does it want to eat me? And it's my brain's job to figure out and identify the threat. Right.
So if physiologically, I'm in a state of hyper arousal, threat detection, everybody I come into contact with is a potential threat. It changes my worldview. It changes my personality over time. And from a biochemical standpoint, the breathing, and I know you've had Patrick McKewen on a couple of times.
So I'm an oxygen advantage guy myself. I have a few other certifications as well. It's all the scientific side of breathing. I wish more people in the kind of more spiritual space would get hip to the role of CO2 and blood pH and the nervous system, because when you start to overbreathe and you start breathing off CO2, now it's been a couple days because you haven't now regulated from that stressful moment, your blood pH will change and then your kidneys will compensate.
So now your kidneys have dumped the bicarbonate so that your blood pH gets back to normal. And now that fast breathing rate is your new normal. And now if you were to breathe at any slower, it would alter your blood pH again. So you've just locked in a breathing pattern that is causing you to be constantly stressed and constantly looking for threats, even though you have no idea because it's subconscious.
Isn't that nuts? Your brain is always just trying to figure out how to acclimate to whatever the hell you've just made it do for some time. There have been more than my share of times where I've been on my bike and gone by someone closer than they wished I had gone by. And then they yell at me, like, you almost hit me.
So the evidence is that I didn't hit you. So what's going on now is you're just surprised. And that's not my problem. By the way, that does not work.
They do not get any more calm. That's when they want to fight me or some shit. I didn't hit you. That's in the past.
You're just thinking about something that may have happened that clearly didn't happen. But they are like wired and I had this happen once with a really big guy. He got really mad at me. I was like 10 feet away from my past.
I got scared of him and more importantly, it scared the woman he was with. And then he got all protected. And I wish I thought of this sooner. I stopped my bike and I said, do you really want to have this argument?
Or maybe I probably yelled it and we yelled at each other from afar. But if I was smarter, I would have said I would have done a weird pattern and rough. This guy was huge. I would have walked up again.
I'm 5'5", 5'5", 1", 45. And I would have said, do you know Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu? That's what I would have been like, what? I go, if you don't, you might want to come to my dojo.
Now, do you still want to fight? Assuming you don't actually have a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I don't have a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu dojo. But you never know, because you're a side project.
It's just when someone my size does something like that, acts in that way, people are like, okay, this is a problem. I've way underestimated the situation. Yeah. Pull the crazy card on the wall.
Like this guy must have something. He must either know how to fight or be really nuts. I had that happen in New York. I just remember a couple of times where somebody cut me off.
I don't know what it was, where someone threatened to come after me and I just stood there and went, all right. And I said, okay, let's get it over with. You start. What?
I said, come on. You said, you want to kill me? You start. And they're like, if I see you again, it's just entertaining to do things like that.
I don't put myself in those situations, but it's happened a few times and I find it utterly as if you're there might as well have fun. Yeah, pretty much. So speaking of fun, please go check out what reference up to and let us both know what your experience is in discovering how your body can work more naturally and how that will lead to change and what you're actually doing, running, hiking, whatever it is you like to do. And also go back to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find previous episodes, ways you can subscribe to hear about new episodes, other places you can find us on social media.
And if you have any requests, any comments, any questions, anybody you think should be on the show, as I always say, especially if you can find someone who's willing to talk to me who thinks I have cranial rectal reorientation syndrome, that would be super fun. I just can't get anyone who's got the courage to have that conversation with me for some reason. Either way, you can drop me an email at movemovt at jointhemovementmovement.com. And most importantly, until whatever's next, go out, have fun, and live life-feet first.