Episode 241: The Myth of Stretching

stretching, icing, all that sort of massage, all that kind of rehab stuff, super, super important, right? Maybe it's the worst thing you could be doing for yourself if you're trying to be a healthier, better human being, let alone athlete. We're gonna find out more about that on today's episode of the Movement Movement podcast, the podcast for people who want to know the truth, about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body, starting with the feet first, because those things are your foundation. We get rid of the mythology, the propaganda, sometimes the outright lies that people have been telling you for 50 years, about what it takes to run or walk or hike or play or lift or do yoga or crossfters, hang out with your kids and do that enjoy it, but effectively, and did I mention enjoy it, because if you're not having fun, please do something different until you are.

We call this the Movement Movement podcast, because we're creating a movement about natural movement. We're trying to make natural movement the obvious or remind people really, the natural movement is the obvious, better, healthy choice, this is the same way we currently think of natural food. And it's a movement that means it involves you and all that means is sharing with your friends. So, you know, like and subscribe, give us a thumbs up and hit the bell icon on YouTube if you're on YouTube and come visit us at www.jointhemovementmovement.com.

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Okay, let's jump in and talk about whether all those things that you think you need to do for staying healthy or really bad for you. And let's start by saying hello, Brianna, how are you? I am awesome. It's my name is my favorite day of the week.

So we're good. Really? Well, people won't be hearing this on a Monday. So now you just mess them up, of course, during the last 12 months.

No one knows what day it is anyway. So it's not gonna really matter. So before we jump into why all these horrible things are these wonderful things are horrible for you, why don't you tell people who the hell you are and what you do with your life? Who am?

I'm still thinking about myself. But for what I do know, I am Brianna Stoneman. I am a physical therapist by trade. But what I do primarily is coaching for runners and obstacle course racers.

I, many years ago, I was a traditional therapist who saw the injured person in an insurance based clinic. And I got very fed up with insurance companies due to control us. I got very fed up with fixing broken people constantly. So I became a coach to get people on the front end of things in order to make more resilient athletes rather than constantly fixing broken people.

Well, I want to jump back into that in a second because I want to start with just what we actually want to start with something else. So since it is the movement movement podcast, I'm gonna put you on the spot. We have not prepared for this. This is gonna be a high pressure situation.

So take a deep breath, shake it out if you need to. Is there any movement to anything, whether it's physical or mental, if there's a mental movement, if you can figure out what that means, or anything that you would want to share with human beings that could give them some sort of experience, whether they're sitting down right now or taking a walk or in their car or doing whatever they might be doing. But we've done things like doing short put exercise, they do an isometric foot strengthening thing. We've done weird things like turning your head in one direction while turning your eyes in the other direction and finding out how that can make you stretch or move better.

So anything you can think of that you might want to share with humans. Ooh, I think. You know what, I think just because it's such an important element that tends to be forgotten by a lot of people, it's just you and we're in high stress environments, is breathing and just remembering to take those long deep breaths in through your nose, out through your nose. That was easy.

Let's just do one, shall we? Actually, wait, hold on. Do you have a theory about the timing of in-breath versus out-breath when you're doing things like this? Just some people do.

Yeah, it kind of depends on the purpose. I do a lot of box breathing myself, which is making an equal amount of time for that inhale, hold, exhale, hold, but then there is a lot of science behind in order to help decrease your heart rate and bring more calm, doing a longer exhale than longer inhale. So it depends on what your purpose is. So let's do a combo.

Let's do a four second inhale, six second hold, seven second, or eight second out. So four, six, eight. Got it. We're in six hold, eight out.

And we'll do, and we'll do, let's do two of those. What the hell? Let's do it. All right, ready?

I'll count it off. I'll count and read the same time. Here we go. Let's see out.

Okay, in, two, three, four, hold, two, six out. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Repeat in four, hold, six, out, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Now, I gotta tell ya, that actually was really helpful.

I was surprised. You were trying to count and breathe in at the same time, which is really not easy. But that's, for me to be able to do the breath hold and the exhale, I have to make sure I get a good inhale, good belly breath in, and then also into the upper chest as well, so like a complete breath in, gives me an effort to do all of that. I hope people report back on what they do when they're doing that.

I do something like that to help me get to sleep sometimes, actually. Yeah, it's nice. I use a lot of the breathing techniques for, even if I just have something in my mind that I just cannot like, what go up, I'll just do some box breathing and just kind of like, because when you focus on the numbers and counting versus anything else, it just helps everything relax and calm down. Yeah, and to be clear, I agree with you and nothing's perfect.

And I'm thinking that because last night, I just could not get to sleep because I had these four thoughts running through my head incessantly, basically, I was playing a negotiation out in my head. I have some people that I'm gonna be talking to and I'm trying to figure out the right way to frame everything we're gonna be doing. And it just was nonstop. And for me, this is gonna sound weird.

The only thing that works in that case is I get out of bed, I go into the other room where we have a couch in a television and I put the TV on, I put it on some YouTube thing, that's like a two hour lecture by someone who I don't care about and put the volume down below. And for some reason, that's very soothing for me. And I'll wake up once or twice at night and have something going on in my dreams that's based on what they were just saying, which is really fun, the other day I was dreaming about black holes because suddenly there was, I think someone talking about Stephen Hawking and who I do care about. And that worked.

It's awesome. Yeah, it's just, I don't like to be really prescriptive and assume there's something that's perfect for everyone all the time. So I don't wanna make it seem like, hey, this is nothing. Anyway, so in the intro, I said, maybe things like stretching and massaging, foam rolling and all those things we have are not necessarily the things that we need to do.

And I wanna hear, this came from you, of course, and I wanna hear what you think about that and why you gave me that idea to start with, but I wanna start with a story that may jumpstart this. This is maybe eight years ago or so. I had a lead, there's a guy named Dr. Bill Sands who was at what's now Colorado Mesa University.

He was formerly head of biomechanics at the US Olympic Committee. They gave him a huge human performance lab to work in Colorado Mesa State, or Colorado Mesa University. And he would do like a whole day's worth of analysis on you for 50 bucks. There was all these Olympians who told me about him, he was gonna go see this guy.

And so I went out there and he did all this amazing stuff. And he was using infrared things to measure where parts of your body are hot and cold and doing compression things and it's like really fun stuff. And at one point, I was having some issue, I can't remember what it was at the time. And I said, what do I do about this?

And he says, well, at the end of every workout, you should ice that. I said, well, that's cool, but what do I do about it? He says, how old are you? That's not 50 years.

Yeah, at the end of every workout, you should ice that. And so I was like, that wasn't the answer I was looking for because I had this idea that there was something I could do that would fix it, cure it, make it, never come back, make it, never happen. And so that's where I hope that leads you to a jumping off point for this idea. Yes, yes it does.

I mean, I guess those the pain, but it doesn't do anything for you, but why would I want it to dive into and what I gave you? But other than that one sentence debugging years and years of rest, ice, compression, elevation, but the ice, pretty, you know, whatever. We let that whole other rabbit hole jingle down that rabbit hole in a bit. We'll come back to it.

But when it comes to stretching, like at the end of the day, stretching is not going to hurt anybody, but it's not the end all be all that a lot of athletes think it is. A lot of times I'll talk to people who are injured and that's what you're doing while I'm stretching before I run, I'm stretching after, I'm stretching local times a day, and it's just they're constantly stretching. And if you're acutely injured, it might be helpful, but it's one of these things that if something's continually getting tight, there's a reason for it. And that if all you're doing is stretching constantly, we're just treating those symptoms.

We're not actually getting to the cause of it on what's actually causing that tightness to be there. So it's not that stretching's necessarily a bad thing. It's just the thing that if that's all you're doing and you're having to do that to maintain a pain-free state or be able to continue training, then there's other answers that need to be looked into. And how would someone go about finding those other things that might be the real cause that's leading them to do all this, other than someone telling them that's what they should have been doing?

Yeah, you know, it's a very general statement, but for the most part, a lot of the things that get tight and that chronically tight is because something is weak. The question is what is exactly weak, but the way the body works is muscles, the deep muscles around the joint have to stabilize the joint. That's what keeps it nice and strong. If there's weakness there, or if it's fatiguing out faster than what's then the demands you're putting on it, the only way the body knows how to control itself and protect that joint is too tight and up.

So this constant tight state that we're getting in often means that something's not strong enough to do its job. So that's an interesting thing. It makes me think of reciprocal inhibition. It makes me think of two things, reciprocal inhibition, one, which is ironically, if someone's going to stretch perhaps a better way to do it, and for people who don't know what that is, it's like, let's think about doing like a hamstring stretch or sitting on the ground like a hurdler stretch or something.

And what most people do is try and relax the hamstring or stretch into the hamstring, but if you do the opposite of trying to lift your foot off the ground by tightening your quad, then that's going to make the hamstring stretch. It's the, or it's like when you're doing a bicep curl, your tricep relaxes, when you're doing tricep relaxes, when you're doing tricep push down your bicep relaxes, because these are reciprocal muscles. And so activating one reciprocally inhibits the other one, which can allow it to relax and stretch more. But I'm so glad you said that finding the thing that's weak because it's one of the things that I've seen with a lot of runners and I wish you could talk, I hope you can talk more about it is they're notoriously weak in exactly the places they need to be strong.

Absolutely. Especially talking about a lot of what I see is what ningle issues, obviously zero shoes are starting because of the foot and the barefoot and even the beating foot strength. Yeah, when we're talking, I wanna go for a ningle because there's still much of that goes on. When we're talking most foot ningle issues, post-tib to anitis, perineal issues, even shin slits, these things are tightening up, we're getting these inflammations in that area because it's tightening up because they're weak and they don't know how to actually stabilize that either the joint that's supposed to stabilize or the entire foot itself.

I see a lot of these issues too with hamstring tightness. Like everyone tends to think they have really tight hamstrings, which you might, but the question is what is weak? That's causing that hamstring to tighten up so much. A lot of times it comes down to the core.

Even like you may do sit up all freaking day long, you're still probably have a weak core because that's just a small component of things that go wrong there. So are you including the core, I mean, basically how high up and how low down are you going when you use that phrase? Yeah, that's a great question because it's different for everyone thinks differently on it. Technically, in my opinion, the way I've learned is the core is actually from your shoulders down to your knees because it all is, you know, related.

And when you're looking at foot and ankle things, how often do you see glutes, especially glute and medias related to that? There's a lot of correlation between the glute need and the foot and ankle weakness and strength or inter just because of other portions that are taking place there. Can you do me a favor and for people who don't know, can you help them identify what their glute medias is and then talk about that relationship and how you would work with someone? Yeah, absolutely.

So your glute need is one of your deep glute muscles. So the biggest one on your, that you can palpate when you contract is your glute max, underlying that is your glute need. It's a little more lateral. So it almost sits on the outside of your hips, just above what you would think, what a lot of people call their hip bone.

That's primarily where that muscle sits. And then what was the rest of that question? The rest of the question was talking more about the relationship between that and foot and ankle and what you might do with people to experiment. I mean, if they're on their own, they're not seeing you or someone like you.

What they might do is experiment to see what's going on, whether their glute medias is in fact weak, how that might be impacting their foot and ankle. Okay, awesome. So there actually is like a lot of co-contractions that happen. So I know on this podcast, you talk about short foot in the past.

There is a co-contraction that happens between the short foot, the glute medias and then our deeper core muscles. And I get that bit. Let me interject. So the short foot for people who don't know, it's basically just an isometric thing where you're just, well, you're not imagining.

You're trying to shorten the distance between, like you put your stand up and do this, you can do it sitting but it's easier standing at first and try to pull the ball of your foot closer to your heel while keeping your toes as relaxed as possible. So you're basically just engaging the arch and it's the longitudinal arch that most people think of as the arch in their foot. Doesn't matter if you're flat foot or high arch feet and really it's an isometric contraction because you're not going to be moving that too much. And so what you're saying is that contraction ripples up into your hips, into your glute medias.

Correct. So like I'm standing here right now, actually going short with my thumbs on my glute medias and I'm actually feeling a contraction in that glute me when I do it. So there's a huge correlation. And just vice versa when you activate that glute me, that foot turns on a little bit better as well.

The one of the big problems we have though is our bodies are great at compensating for its weaknesses. We essentially find our workarounds for any weakness. So when I'm thinking about, this comes into play a lot of someone's working on squats. And like the big common cue is to get the knees out.

Well, rather than activating their hips or activating the foot to actually get that to happen, I see people just totally like pick up the foot and go on the outside of their foot to actually get their knees out. So if we can learn how to contract that foot, contract the hip together, we're just getting so much more control and stability over that leg. That's interesting. The cues that people give or often cues that they were given.

And they sometimes those people learned how to implement that cue correctly often they didn't. And then they're just repeating it because that's the only way they think to say it. I mean, when you said that just now, yeah, the idea that you would roll onto the outside of your feet in order to get your knees out is sort of like, it reminds me one of the first times I made a pair of running sandals for someone. And I said, let's take a little run together.

And the woman who was with, she's reaching her foot way out in front of her body and then pointing her toes to land on her forefoot. I said, what are you doing? She's supposed to land on her forefoot. I said, but you're not supposed to prance.

You're supposed to have your foot like underneath your body. You're not supposed to be just like bounding and landing on your forefoot. So similar thing with squats, the obvious and easy fix for what you just described is keep your feet flat on the ground and then stick like a band around your knees and just make sure you're pushing the band out while you're squatting, which would be cute. And just reminded me, the glute medius, when I wasn't Bill Sands lab for my $50 diagnostic, whatever, he said, yeah, you gotta do glute medius stuff.

And so if someone is gonna be strengthening their glute medius, I'm not gonna say which thing he taught me. I wanna see what you say. They discovered that when they try to engage their foot, they're not feeling their glute titan. Sometimes they can't just tighten their glutes at all.

You put, I've done this repeatedly with some athletes where they just can't feel their glutes. And I say, this is not personal. Stick your hand on your butt. And then I show them what it feels like when your glute goes from relaxed to tight.

And they're like, oh my God. And then I said, all right, this is not personal. I'm gonna stick my hand on your butt now. You just gotta do the same thing.

And then they quickly figured out. They just didn't have the cue. So anyway, some people aren't really hip to, pun intended hip to how to do this. So what do you, if someone discovers they have this, what do you recommend they do for working on glute medius?

Yeah, that's a great question. The reason I have so many cues and exercise ideas because everyone kind of responds to a different thing. But I will say first and foremost, typically unless someone's had, so standard if you go to a therapist, what they're gonna do is always lying down exercises. For the most part, unless you've had a surgery and you need to start there, we function standing up, we should start training standing up, which is how I normally do it.

Now that glute medius typically, it's job is to hold our pelvis and hips stable when we're standing. So when we're standing on a single leg, it's going to fire more than when we're standing on one leg. So a lot of times just to understand where it's at. I'll have someone just stand like, have both of you on the ground, then lift one leg up, stand on it, and have their thumb in that area.

So they just understand what that feels like to work with. From there, I'll do some different isometric things as far as standing on one leg, pushing the other leg, saying next to a wall, pushing the other leg into the wall. Just to start getting used to some isometric contractions there, and then from there, starting adding different movements to it. But that's where I usually start, it's just like getting someone to understand where is it, when is it fire, and how do we truly activate it in a functional position?

I like the isometric when I've never done that. So let's break that down for people. So you're gonna stand perpendicular to a wall, like how far away from the wall. So let's say with your right shoulder facing the wall.

So how far away do you want someone to be? So typically I will be, so my shoulder is on that wall itself. Okay. And then the leg that is off the ground is the one that's next to the wall.

So you're lifting up by bending your knee a little, or flexing your hip a little bit. Okay. And then basically, and using the other legs, in this case your left leg to try to push yourself into the wall without letting your hips drop or arise too much. Is that the idea?

Correct. And then how hard someone pushing, how many reps, how many, whatever. Yeah, not pushing real hard. Typically with these isometric, like just learning teaching the body how to move again.

It's not a 50% contraction. So you're not using a whole lot of force. Just teaching the body how to move, usually like 10 to 15 reps is good at a time before you. After that, if you're just learning how to use that muscle again, you might start fatiguing out.

Yeah. And it occurs to me, one indication, and this is going to be potentially tricky for people to self-diagnose, unless they get video or have someone watch them. But one of the things that I know that's highly related to a clear indication of glute medius weakness is when someone's running and their knees end up basically pointing in and banging into each other as they run. I saw a woman the other day and I was driving to have brunch with some friends, who are doing socially distant outdoor picnic brunches.

And this woman's running and I almost pulled off the side of the road to yell at her, stop doing that because her knees were like banging into each other and her feet were like way, way out to the side. I mean, at first I didn't think that this was someone who was actually meaning to run. Like they realized they left their keys in the car or something. But then as I got closer, I could see this is someone who clearly spends a lot of time running, had all the gear, had everything, had otherwise decent form, except her legs were completely out of whack and I seen a bunch of video from people like Irene Davis, for example at Harvard showing that that's one of the things that happens when your glute medius can't stabilize your hips.

The other is your hips kind of just shifting up and down as you're going from the leg to leg. You just can't maintain that stability. So if anyone sees that in video or has someone watch you and sees that, then you really know this is definitely something to play with. Yeah.

And one thing I want to throw in there too, when we're talking glute medius, yes, a hip drop is a huge one that I see a lot with weakness in there, is it's been found that just working on strength does not correlate with improvement in running techniques. So you can strengthen your glute medius all you want, but that doesn't mean that hip drop is going to correct itself when you're running. So you also have to combine some different running drills of learning how to control that hip in that position with your strengthening work in order to really get that carryover. So what would be an example of a drill?

Because again, what we're trying to do with the exercises is really, there's a guy that I know, Asap Merik, he's a YouTuber out of the UK, he's a former sprinter who refers to strength training as the thing you do after you're done running to get your body back into balance because you just whacked it out from running, which I think is a fun perspective. But so we're doing these things, isometric things or whatever strengthening things we're doing to awaken a neurological path, if you will, or keep us aware of something. But like I said, there's no substitute for the actual thing. There's no amount of foot strengthening exercises you can do that prepare you for running barefoot other than running barefoot.

Now that doesn't mean don't do them, but don't kid yourself into thinking you can shortfoot your way into running a barefoot marathon. So if we're going to do that translation and running, what do you have people become aware of or do to bring that into action? Yeah, my favorite drill to start with, and you can find this on my YouTube channel, is co-falling into wall, basically. But you're facing a wall, literally like a board falling into a wall, you're just going to keep your body straight and fall.

But as you, like just when you get to that falling point before your hands hit the wall, you're going to pull one leg off the ground as if you were bringing that leg up into your running position. And your goal on that is to maintain that good pelvic position when that leg comes off the ground, not letting it drop. I'm so glad you said right before your hands hit the wall because I could imagine some people, I think they're going to catch themselves with their face and which makes me think, I don't know if you've ever seen, there are a couple videos of this where, have you seen the Trust Fall videos where people don't know how Trust Fall works? Yeah.

I mean, I think they're going to find them and they fall forward. Oh my God, it's my favorite thing in the world. I mean, you know, it's not like someone is skateboarding and then landing on the rail and racking himself, but it's pretty damn close. So that's a good one.

And I'm willing to bet that people will find that they're better on one side than the other. Typically one side's gonna be a little bit stronger and more coordinated than the other, yeah. And I don't know if this is true also, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are people who discover that the side that they're actually stronger on is the side that they think they're weaker on. Probably, possibly.

I just say that thinking, there's like, there are a couple things that I do where I think my left side is the weaker side. My left leg is undeniably stronger than my right leg. And I'm right handed and right leg and right, whatever. But my left leg is definitely stronger.

And so what the hell? It just makes no sense to me. It's very confusing. And it's really interesting too.

We don't necessarily, like, when I'm looking at hip drop is have the people have the injury on their right leg, have the people have the injury on the left leg. So there's really no correlation necessarily between if this hip, the injury is always gonna be the same side or it's always gonna be opposite side. It just depends how your body's compensated over the years and how your body wants to, like how your body gets injured because of that. Well, and to that point, if you do tighten something up as a compensatory measure over time you become numb to it and you don't feel it anymore.

And you can become aware of a tightness that you didn't have where you think it's on the right side and it's the left side that's actually tightening something up and you've been oblivious to that. And then you discover that and that changes your whole self image and then you have to get a new name and buy a new wardrobe. I think it works that way. Something like that.

Right here. That's what somebody told me. I'm not really sure. So backing up to the very beginning of your transition from working with injured people to working with people to try to keep them from getting injured.

I love that you delineated that you're working with probably predominantly runners and obstacle horse racers. That is an unusual thing to specialize in. Yeah, super fine. I've been a runner since high school and then I started CrossFit about nine years ago now.

And a couple of years ago, I was like, why not meld these two sports together? So I started getting involved in the obstacle course world, fell in love with it. And realized there's a very underserved population there when it comes to more of the rehab type specialists, functional movement specialists. There's a lot of coaches, but there's not a whole lot that really understand the intricacies of the body.

Whereas the CrossFit world and just the running world is very inundated with that. So it's just a direction that fell into my lap and I was having a lot of fun with. And I absolutely love still working with running technique and the runners. So I still have pulled the runners in, but I absolutely love my racers.

So what are the things that are potentially unique about obstacle course racers that you don't see with other populations? I think that for me, the biggest thing is training for both elements. Runners for the most, like a lot of runners just run whether it's road or trail. Crossfitters for the most part hate running.

People typically hate running, but when you're looking at the obstacle course racers, it's both of them combined. And the really fun thing is like, half of them absolutely hate running, but they can do it for the obstacle part. And by the way, they're half like, the runners, and then they were like, dared to do an obstacle course race by some other friend and fell in love with it. So it's a very unique population because there's like, people who absolutely love running, then there's people who hate running, but do it because of the joy of everything else.

And it's just like really fun. There's some crazy ass obstacle courses. I mean, I'm thinking of the one, it's a mud run thing where, isn't there something you're like calling on your belly or calling through the mud? There's something electrified above you?

That's a tough mudder. And to be honest, I refuse to do that race for that one. Off course. That's a shame.

I was hoping you were to say, those are the people I work with and I just tazed them. I just compete. I hit them with 50,000 volts over and over until they don't mind. I think that would be a good thing of opening up a gym and all you do is taze people and hit them with blogs and all those things that people do just fall off of things that be very entertaining.

One of the whole training thing for like those Japanese TV game shows where it's just obstacle course, and they're just getting pummeled with things and thrown into mud mess. There's gotta be someone who does that. There's all like ninja training gyms now. There's gotta be goofy ass gyms for things like that.

Probably are, probably are. I would wanna go there. See, I'm one of those guys, not only for me, I don't do an obstacle course run because there's way too much running. As a sprinter, if it was things like a 50 or 100 between obstacles, I'm all in.

If it's a half a mile to a mile between obstacles, just get me a scooter. And there used to be, you're not opening for this. There was a thing, when I was growing up, it was a network battle of the stars. And so it was all TV and movie stars, mostly TV stars, doing like tug of war.

And I can't remember what all the things were. And I just remember things as a kid. I wanna get famous just so I could be on that because I think I could crush that game. Cause it was all just obstacle course level things.

It would be really, really fun. It's like the celebrity version of the presidential physical fitness test or something crazy like that. That's awesome. Yeah, it was really fun.

Just for the fun of it, since you're such a big fan of us here, our stuff, if you were gonna to talk to someone who was thinking about, or maybe it wasn't even thinking about doing their first obstacle course run, what would you suggest to them in terms of how to pick one, what to do to prepare, what to be prepared for once they do it? Yeah, as far as picking one, you know, if you think the biggest thing with them is obstacle course racing, even though there's obstacles, like the biggest thing is the distance factor. Like there's a lot more running in that than there are obstacles. So you need to be able to cover the distance.

If you've been a runner for a while, most likely, that will not be an issue. If you haven't been running for a long time, start with the ones that are more with 5K distance. There are a lot of races that are in that 5K range. From there, just to get, like, start going to the park and look at the parks are open right now.

Start going to the park and play on the monkey bars and just be a kid and have fun. Just getting used to like, I think the biggest part with them is the hang-ups course. Like most people, it may be a little bit heavy, but most people can like lift, like some sort of sandbag or something, because we lift things in our day to day life. But I think most people aren't used to the hanging thing.

So even if you just go to the park and hang on the monkey bars for a little bit, or like actually do the monkey bars, and just do things like that. I think that's where people tend to have the worst That's the thing, when I look at the Ninja Warrior stuff, it's so much about grip, which is so disappointing, because I, it's the one thing I don't have, everything else, like all the jumping, all the bounding, all the whatever else, I'm all in, but I'm just not a grip guy, it makes me very upset. Because that's my other fantasies. I want to be like the oldest Ninja Warrior guy, but I don't stand a chance.

You just have to train your grip. I'm such a fast-twitch guy. It just seems unlikely. It's like, I don't run distance for a list of reasons, but my VO2 Max is low, and I'm a VO2 Max non-responder.

If I do VO2 Max training, it just nothing changes. And people don't realize that there are some people who don't respond to doing long, slow distance. It doesn't change things. There's some people who when they lift weights, it doesn't make them stronger.

You know, people are really, it's kind of funny, and people don't want to believe that. They want to believe that all they have to do is train long, slow, and they get better cardiovascular conditioning. All they have to do is lift weights and they're getting stronger. And there's some people who just don't respond that way, or even worse, they make it stronger, but they don't change their body shape.

And that's the reason they wanted to do it. I had a friend growing up who, he was the strongest guy I ever knew, and he was twig-thin, just had no muscle mask, and would go into the gym and just lift the stack on every machine. It was so annoying. But also really cool to watch, because people would like, look at him and not be able to figure it out.

That was great. I've known people like that too. Like they would eat so much in order to try to bulk up, and there was this like, and they were wrong, but yeah, there was this no adding muscle mask. Now there's the opposite, there's a disease.

I don't know what's called where you don't produce myostatin, and when you don't produce myostatin, the limiting amount of muscle growth that you can have, and when you don't produce it, you just get more and more muscle growth. And I know of one person who has this disease, and I grew up with someone who were pretty sure had it, because he would come in when we were doing gymnastics, he'd come in bigger every day. And we would say, so what'd you do to get your biceps bigger? He goes, cheerios.

I mean, no lifting. He never lifted. He just kept getting bigger every day, just the tiniest bit of stimulation. Just one.

Yeah, it was fascinating. We once found a gene jacket that was too small for me to wear. And this guy was, I mean, I was five, two at the time. This guy was like five, 11.

And I could barely get this thing on. We spent an hour squeezing him into it. It took that long to get the buttons done. He could barely breathe.

And then he just did a flexing thing like he was a hulk, and literally ripped the seams and popped the rivets on a gene jacket. It was awesome. Things you do with your freaky friends. Right.

So can you think of anything else I want to back up to the beginning? Anything else we talked about stretching and how that's not an actually thing? And I actually do want to talk more about any thoughts you have about why ice is doing nothing other than temporarily numbing things. Do you have any other thoughts on why ice is not all it's craft to be?

Yeah. So in order for our bodies to actually heal, we need that inflammation response to have it. When we put ice on an injury, especially in a cute injury, even though like you think you need to take that swelling down, the swelling actually is what brings the healing properties to the area. So if we get rid of that swelling, we try to decrease that inflammation.

We actually are delaying that healing process that's going on. So rather than you spring your ankle, rather than going home and icing it, you'd be better to just do some active range of motion, try to keep it moving. And just like that healing response happen. Like if you want to ice it to numb the pain, it's not a bad thing necessarily, but it's going to delay that healing process.

Interesting. I remember I did things with contrast. So ice and heat, nice and heat, just going back and forth like a minute each. Do you think that does something different?

The biggest thing is it helps control the swelling. So it doesn't necessarily hope the healing process at all, but sometimes that swelling can just be uncomfortable. I've done contrast myself when I was dealing with some injuries. So sometimes just getting that swelling out of there can help decrease the discomfort so you can sleep better or so you can concentrate for your job.

So there definitely is a time and place and it's nothing that you can't do at any ever. But I would say if it's an acute injury, let that swelling stay in there for a little bit and let the healing happen. Yeah, that's a really, really interesting idea. You reminded me, just backing up to the thing you just said, is perhaps the key thing is just doing that active recovery, just as much movement as you can without pain to just keep things moving, keep things flowing.

And it reminded me, I asked Dr. Evan Davis from Harvard, she was before she became the preeminent researcher in natural movement and natural movement footwear. She was teaching people how to make orthotics. She was a physical therapy professor, whatever that would be at the University of Delaware.

And I said, what was your kind of aha moment about natural movement? And she said, one of the things was I realized people would come into our clinic and we would try to keep them moving as much as possible as whatever they could do, except suddenly we were putting their feet in an orthotic that wouldn't let their foot move. And that didn't make sense all of a sudden. And I say the same, I even say to people who are convinced that they need to wear thick padded motion girl running shoes, I go, that's cool.

If you're happy with those, do it. But when you're done, put on something like what we do, so you can have that active recovery. You can keep the blood moving, keep everything flexible and let it possibly heal faster as a result. And then they go, oh, that's OK.

Now what I don't tell them is once they get used to wearing our shoes, afterwards, they're not going to be able to put on this big, thick, chunky, heavy, ridiculous foot coffins. But you know, can't tell people everything. Right? When I was in PT school, I went for a run in the morning and stepped down from a curb wrong, like knee, drink, all spring, limped my way and my only half back home.

And went to class that day. I was like, all right, I keep the same cometives as we can. So I was going into those circles alphabet while I was sitting there. Thinking I was like moving my foot through a huge range of motion.

It was so stiff and swollen. I was like, that's not good. No, that is definitely not good. It's so funny to say that I actually was carrying a 50 pound box this morning out into our garage and tripped on one of the stairs and did exactly one of those things, face planted after my ankle twisted.

And I got up thinking, well, I'll be very curious to see how this goes. And then I just kept walking. And then until like right now, and this was what, six hours ago, until right now, I'd forgotten that it even happened. And so that made me feel pretty good.

Wait, I'm checking you out. No, it was fine. Nice. One thing that came to mind going back to the stretching a little bit, too, is if you are, or one of the downfalls was stretching, is now I was stretching itself, but we aren't teaching the body how to use that extra motion.

So you stretch, but then you don't train that, say, we're stretching our caps. Awesome. We loosen it up, but then you don't actually teach the body how to control that new range of motion. And so it's just going to go right back to where it was.

So a lot of times if you ever see me stretching on a video or in the gym, it looks like I'm stretching, but I'm actually doing more of an isometric contraction or I'm doing like a contract relax or something to actually teach the body how to be controlled in that end range. You just gave me a crazy flashback. I was getting PT for a calf pull when I just got back into sprinting. So this is about 12, 13 years ago.

And so they were having me just facing the wall, just leaning into the wall to get a calf stretch and then do that reciprocal ambition thing, that tight and relaxing. So I was like pushing in and then relaxing or trying to push away and then relax in. And I kept getting a deeper stretch and a deeper stretch and a deeper stretch. And I got like really crazy far.

And it felt really good until I couldn't walk for the next week, because I just strained my calf so much from doing that. I had no idea. In fact, to talk about stretching, there was a coach that I worked with and I got back into sprinting. And at the end of every workout here, everyone's stretching.

And one day I realized there was one other person who wasn't doing it other than me. That person became my best friend because I said, why aren't you doing any stretching at the end of the workout? Because it's useless. And I love you.

And one of my first actual sprinting coaches, same thing. Our cool down was let's walk around the track and talk and then get in the car. That was it. So do you know from your experience of research about any value to post workout stretching or not?

From what I've seen, there's a whole lot of value, especially when it comes to endurance sports. Like when I'm thinking like if I do a workout that's very like hamstring heavy or triceps heavy when I'm lifting. Sometimes stretching that out afterwards can delay like the tightness that happens as that rebound effect. But even that's far in between.

If you exhaust those muscles so much, they're just going to get a little just that overuse tightness. Not a bad thing. Just an overuse tightness. I don't think most when you like get down to it, I don't think most injuries are due to stretching or lack of stretching.

Like the people who stretch all the time get injured just as much as the people who don't stretch all the time. So if it makes you feel good and stretch afterwards, cool, but I don't think it's really necessary. Do we want to debunk the whole idea of a cool down? Depends what your definition of a cool down is.

Like you're walking around afterwards or hopping on a bike and just getting some low grade movement. Like I think it's awesome. But as far as like doing a cool down of stretching, like I don't think it's going necessary. Yeah, we did not prepare this, but you and I agree.

And again, it's one of these things that's so interesting. I'm really curious to know how this idea evolved, where it came from and how it caught on. Because it seems like so many of these things have just become, they're almost urban myths that have become in common wisdom. And I'm always dying to know how there's, it's an old teaching story joke that I love that's related to this.

A couple gets married and it's the couple's first Christmas and the husband is making dinner and he makes a pot roast and he pulls out two pans and cuts the pot roast in half and puts it in two pans and puts it in the oven. And so I just like, why'd you do that? He's well, that's what my mom taught me to do. So next year, their mom's house for Christmas and she cuts the pot roast in half and puts it in two pans and the wife says about her law in this case.

And why'd you do that? She says, well, my mother taught me to do that because it cooks better, it cooks more evenly, it tastes better when you do it that way. The next year, they're at grandma's house and now great, whatever that, believe it, the wife says, so how can you do the cutting the pot roast in half? Does it make things taste better and cook better?

She says, no, I just never had a pan big enough for a whole pot roast. And I think that there's so many training things that are like that that just have been passed down because someone thought it out for some reason and probably just pulled it totally out of their butt to begin with, which by the way, you need to stretch to be able to pull something out of your butt like that. You really have good hands for flexibility. So it seems to be one of the only things I'm interested in is finding those things out to debunk them if they're not useful, if they don't help.

Like even sometimes warming up. Like I've never found that if I'm warming up to lift weights, I've never found that warming up helps me lift any better other than just going down and doing one set to know that I'm doing something, but I don't do something elaborate warm up to get my heart rate up to a million and start sweating and all those things. Yeah, I think that not agreeing with the warm up conversation, the biggest thing with doing a warm up is I call it activation. Like if I'm going to be doing overhead presses, I know I'm going to do a piece of weight.

I'll do some lightweight bottoms up kettlebell presses in order to just activate those muscles, get those dynamic muscles kicked in. If I'm going to be doing squats, I'll do some banded standing hip abductions, some side stepping, some short foot stuff, just some things to get the legs activated. So that's how I view a warm up is it should be more dynamic. It should be activating those muscles that you intend to use during that workout.

Well, you just nailed it to be candid, I mean, or honest about it. When I'm going out for a sprinting workout, I do an extended set of drills and warmups, the point of them is to make everything we do has a direct application to sprinting. Mm-hmm. So the way that we do for people who know A skips and B skips and C skips, there's ways of doing it where it's just glorified hip movement and not really doing anything or there's ways of doing it that are actually simulating and stimulating part of what the gait cycle should be when you're sprinting.

And I learned that from a sprinter who said you're warming up like a distance runner who doesn't know anything about warming up, you're not warming up like a sprinter. And the difference is dramatic. Some day after go out and shoot video showing the difference. But I think that's a really good point is to do things that are movement specific to activate those movements that wake up that neural pathway.

And I don't think people think about that typically when they're doing whatever their warmup is. And I think you made a great point there too that I like to talk to my athletes about is so many people do whether it's a drill or actually part of their workout is just going through the motions, not really thinking about how their body's moving, are they moving in a way to be powerful or are they just moving just to move. And it's such a difference on how the body responds when you're moving with intention and with purpose than if we're just moving just to do it. Yeah, yeah.

That is a good point of just bringing intention to it. And again, to be candid, it could be challenging because you're not doing the thing that you want to do. I know like the last three or four drills that I do in my warm up, I'm just like, I'm like, can't actually get these things done? And they're the most important ones.

They're the ones that are the closest thing to actually running. And I just want to get back to like a matter of run. What the hell's going on? Absolutely.

Well, anything else that you can think of that you would like to leave bipeds with before to as we wrap this up? I'm okay with monopeds too. I think the biggest thing is no matter what you do if you are stretching or if you're doing a dynamic activation exercise or whatever it is you're doing, like know why you're doing it, know the purpose of it. So many times we just go on to YouTube and we find exercises for hit pain or knee pain or to make me faster or whatever it is.

And we just grab five or six of them and do them without really the actual purpose and intent behind them. If we don't know that purpose, if we don't really know why we're doing it, we're just doing it, you might be wasting your time. And how might someone figure out the why considering that when they're looking at something, they're assuming the person they're seeing it from that some sort of expert knowledge? Yeah.

I think it's really tough to figure out that why some videos when you look on YouTube will have it some won't. For me personally, if someone sees one of my videos and wants to ask me why, like what it's for or why it's out there, I've always happened to answer someone's question. So I think most people who put their information out there, if like you look at it, you don't know why it's there or what the purpose of it is. If you read up to them, I'm sure they'd be happy to respond.

And my guess is that, you know, if you do that a couple of times, you'll start to be able to hear the difference between something that seems like it really makes sense and something that sounds like more mythology, more, you know, more just repeating what someone else said to them some number of years before. Well, that's the perfect segue to if somebody does want to find out what you're up to and learn some of the things that we've been talking about with a little more depth, how might they find you? Absolutely. So if you're a writer, you can find me on Facebook.

I'm most active in the obstacle course, raise your health and performance group. Your fix PT dot com. Get your fix PT dot com as my website. And then you can also find me, I'm going to have my own podcast.

It's called highly functional, where I talk to all sorts of experts about everything to help somebody become a highly functional human. That sounds delightful. Well, thank you so much for, I mean, we dove into a handful of things that maybe some people are going to be in an uproar about because it's what they've been spending their life believing and maybe we can make lives a little simpler, a little happier for people. So I really appreciate you sharing all that.

Of course. And if you're interested, anyone who listens to this podcast, if you go to my website and or you can just email me at briannegetyourfixpt.com, I would be happy to do a free running analysis for you. Ooh, and your B-R-I-A-N-E at getyourfixpt.com. Right.

So awesome. That is a splendor offer. I appreciate you doing that. Of course.

Let me call the day for everyone. Thank you all for being here. If you want to find out more about what's happening at the movement movement, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com Again, previous episodes, all the different ways you can interact with us. If you have any questions for me or recommendations for people to be on the show or suggestions or you want to tell me I might head up my butt because I'm super flexible, then you can send me an email, move at jointhemovementmovement.com.

And as always, the most important thing, please go out, have fun, and live life-y first.