004 Proximal to distal sequencing

I'm here with my co-host Rob and I'm going to talk about Proximo to this door sequencing today. So essentially the last couple of episodes have been focusing on ways to gain maximum strength, ways to gain maximum speed, and of course combining those to improve power. But essentially, we can't really understand the context of those adaptations until we start talking about

“biomechanics or specific exercises. And one of the most important principles of biomechanics is”

the Proximo to this door sequence. So what we mean when we say the Proximo to this door sequence is that during pretty much every athletic movement, whether that's jumping, running, throwing, anything like that, there is a specific order in which the joints reach their maximum and the velocities. So essentially, if you're looking at a jumping motion or a sprinting motion, where you hear what you will see is that the joints more proximal to the central body

proximal meaning closer to the kind of center of the body. So the hip in this case, the hip is going to stop accelerating first. It's going to reach its maximum and the velocity first, and then what you're going to see is the knee reaching its maximum and get a velocity. Second, and of course the ankle later on. So there's a sequence in which the maximum and the velocity is reached. Now the reason for this is because we are transferring kinetic energy

from the more proximal segments to the more distal segments. Essentially, every time I explain this,

I always come back to this image of like a kind of a superhero character. So it's standing on

a moving vehicle and then jumping off the moving vehicle at some point. And when the superhero jumps off the front of the moving vehicle, and you know, disappears into the distance, what should actually happen is that the vehicle and it doesn't happen in the films of course, but what should happen

“with that enormous amount of kinetic energy? You should see the vehicle go backwards. Imagine”

like a character cartoon character maybe on a moving vehicle and they jump off the vehicle should move backwards with that enormous amount of force being generated in order for the character to be able to jump that far forward. You should see the car or the vehicle go backwards. Now essentially that is happening in a proximal distal segment. So the hip will start rotating the, you know, obviously that proximal segment will start moving. And then as it reaches towards its maximum angle

of velocity, the knee will start rotating and that will push backwards and dissellerate the segment,

the rotation of the hip and allow obviously that kinetic energy to be passed always

into the knee and then the same thing happens with the ankle. And you can do the same thing in throwing motion as well with the rotation of the torso and the movement to the shoulder. So what we're saying then is that all of these athletic movements involve the transfer and soft kinetic energy from the center of the body outwards and it follows this very distinctive sequence that you can literally measure, you know, in a laboratory setting and watch athletes

moving in this way. So the reason this is so important, well there's a number of reasons, but I'm just going to highlight two of them before I throw a toe to Robin and get some input from him on the programs that he's writing and how they make use of this principle. But basically two of the most important observations that we can draw straight away are that because

the movement is always starting approximately that and the energy is then being passed down the

body from the more proximal segments. Those proximal segments are going to play a bigger role in driving the actual movement and the success of that movement. So the extent to which somebody is good at running, jumping, throwing those kind of things is going to be more dependent on their ability to produce force or more accurately power depending on what we're talking about, but mostly power up, which is a pretty close to related to these kind of athletic performance metrics. But if we're

trying to generate a high power output at the hip and we're trying to produce a hammer or supposed to generate that large power output, then we're going to be more successful in doing that because the hip plays a bigger role in the overall movement because of this proximal to this still sequence. So essentially the proximal sequence, the proximal segments are going to be more important and more distant. Secondly, and this is the part that nothing most essence of practitioners

“get that to a certain extent. What I think they tend to miss, and I think this is really exciting,”

and I want to kind of develop this over a number of episodes in the future and we come back to this idea in the context of specific movements because we will talk about how to optimize no vertical jump height and sprinting speed in those kinds of things. But most people miss the fact that when we look at the angular velocities of the hip and the ankle or any other sequence of joints that we're interested in, the more proximal segments always reach slower

maximum angular velocities than the more distant ones. That's literally just because you're passing the energy down the chain and so you can reach higher joint angular velocities further down the chain because you've got more kinetic energy at point because you've got everything that you generate the duct at point plus more besides. What it means is that the hip in the case of some like jumping or sprinting is always going to reach a slower maximum angular velocity and that

and the joints further down the sequence. And so as a result, you can actually benefit much more though essentially more force dominant, you can benefit more from strength training than the segments further down the chain. And in some situations in really fast movements, if you look right at the end of the sequence like the distal segments of the sequence, distal joint to the

sequence, you're basically fine that you're moving so fast that there's no possibility of adding

really anything in terms of kinetic energy unless they're kind of right to against the velocity end of the force plus distal spectrum so it's the strength training isn't going to do anything.

“And I think this concept is super super interesting. We've talked about it before or many times”

about how this kind of feeds into strength training programming, but that's the introduction that's the explanation. So can you give us some examples of how you're using these ideas in your training programs that they know? Yeah, definitely, Chris. I mean, coaching tons and tons of people and everybody has different goals and stuff like that. So I got some people that want to prove their jump height. I was like kickbox, there's one I've proved their kicking power,

things like that. We talked a little bit before we got out of our grapplers and stuff they

would need. So one of the things you just mentioned is how the force output to the hip always

super important. So one of the big ones, you know, we just talked about a little bit. But hip posts people used to hate on the matund and I've gotten into programming them more and more over the years, including them in tons of programs, you know how to barbell or machine and people have access really trying to get just high loads out of the hip joint and training it out like a shorter muscle length as well. That's generally going to correspond better to what the athletes

get a need. And you know, also you train that shorter muscle length super easy to recover from train a little bit more frequently through the week. Yeah. So we're trying to prove jump height, things like that starting there and then like you said the knee being a little bit more balanced still. So I use a mix generally above them. Maybe some loaded jump work, loaded jump work, things like that. And then when it comes like the calf, you know, further down down the line just as fast

stuff as possible. So just like some repeated calf hops, things like that. I don't really overthink that end of things too much and then to expand on it a little more. I know you and I just mentioned about like grapplers and things like that. So if we're thinking of hip joint work for like those kinds of athletes, we just mentioned good mornings before we got on and I know I jumped about

for me. It was always easy to like pick someone up, you know, when they're holding on to me,

on my back, something like that. I had tons of good morning work and my programs over the years. And we were just talking about keeping the torso stiff while you moved the hip joint there.

“And I think that's really really valuable. I've used good mornings with tons of athletes for”

a record strength than that over the years. It just hadn't really actually fought. Honestly, as much we do more really recently about why it was so useful. So that's a really good one, verse hypers, great for keeping everything torso, not moving and just moving the hip. So really like those as well, if you have access to a good machine, I'm working in my gym. We have one of the Atlantis ones. It's very nice. You can customize the loading a bit as well, but even

kind of the old school ones like Louie Simmons made a really nice. So when it comes to the hip joint, I think those are probably some of my favorite ones. Stiff like deadlifts we talked about as well. So where's with the hip thrust, you'll get a lot of glutes. Good mornings, you're going to get some more vectors in there while the hips working. Obviously, the stiff like deadlift when you keep the knee nice and straight and don't extend it as you go, like maybe a Romanian deadlift,

you're going to get a lot more hamstrings. So you're not just chatting out before we got. Got on here about if you have thrust for glutes, stiff like deadlifts for hamstrings, that'll be

“really really nice combo. And then you know, all the usual caveats there training them heavier”

lower up ranges, making sure the recoverable session decision and things like that. But when I'm going about designing a program, that's kind of where I'm starting, you know, really optimizing what's going out of the hip thrust. And then like we just said the knee a bit more balanced depending on the activity. I don't tend to worry about it as much. So a bit more of a mix of things, some speed work, some heavier work depending on what the athlete might need. Well, this is the, that's just kind of

capturing that point there that you said depending on what the athlete might need. That's the really interesting thing about this focus on heavy strength training for the hip, isn't it? I mean, because like we were saying, you know, before we jumped on the call, it's so easy to including almost everybody's problem, if not everybody's program. Because because this because that is going to be relatively forced dominant, except in maybe sprinting more balanced,

it's going to be pretty much fourth dominant and everything that the athlete is doing. Because it's the starting point of the proximal to this two sequence, which means that it's max angular velocity isn't going to be as high as stuff further down the sequence. So you can pretty much throw it into everybody's program and it'll work. Because even if you're athlete who's already pretty forced dominant and says like people are going, oh well, maybe we shouldn't,

you know, do too much heavy strength training with that athlete. So I will know, if you think about a proximal to this two sequence, you can still actually get away with doing heavy strength training for the hip in that athletic training program. And it won't

ignores biomechanics. So you can have a sense of see and that kind of going or what we need to make sure forced velocity profiles are optimal for my athlete. Therefore, you know, I've noticed that this athlete has a forced dominant vertical jump at the moment. So we're going to stop doing heavy strength training and just do, you know, kind of unloaded stuff and it's like, okay, but if you bring biomechanics into the conversation, you can carry on doing heavy strength training for the hip.

Yeah, one artist. Because it's not going to hurt, because you can't really get to a point, especially not for a vertical jump. You can't get to a point where your hip is too forced dominant, not really, not for a vertical jump. Okay, maybe for sprinting, you can. And that's a separate conversation. I mean, but ultimately that would be, you know, kind of extreme under this spectrum. Generally speaking, you know, for something like a moderate kind of forced velocity type

activity like vertical jump, you're really not going to get at point where the hip is going to have to be trained without heavy strength training. So it's the really cool situation, as you are saying when you are kind of introduced your ideas, you were saying, you know, your programs are

going to include these things because you can pretty much program them for everybody and it's always

going to work. You know, just picking up two things that you said prior to that, you mentioned about how what you talked a little about kind of the vertical jumping side of things and improving, you know, kind of hip extension in that context. But then you went on talk about grappling. So let's

“expand that a little bit, because I think when I've asked people for questions on Instagram,”

one of the most, um, kind of sort of common questions I get for this podcast is, you know, let's hear more about the combat sports side of things. Let's hear more about, you know, kind of strict training or just training in general for, you know, various different combat sports, but, you know, that's the theme that I'm starting to see in a question. So maybe people are following you and then and then asking for questions on that, but it doesn't matter how audience is interested. So let's

kind of dive in and talk about this a little bit more. So, you know, you you frame this as saying, you know, okay, so we know that we've got three major hip extensions, so we want hip thrust, you know, for the glutes, you know, we want something for the Adopt Magnus and Armstrong's, which I think, um, you know, stiff leg deadlift is fantastic for it does, you know, most of that, okay, so sure if we've got a particular requirement to really add mass to the Armstrong's

maybe we're bringing a couple of other things, but in enough that the context I think, you know, hip thrust plus stiff leg deadlift is going to get, most people will most of the way they're most of the time. But then you brought in this idea of including good mornings, which I think is really, really interesting, you know, because most of the time, and the way I think about it, is that most of the time in athletic situations when the athlete is just running around jumping

doing whatever they do, you've basically got hip extensions as the tar, um, obviously,

“driving force into the ground, but the only thing that having to stabilise in the upper body”

is the upper body weight, which isn't going to be massive most of the time, if their an athlete is running around, okay, fine, there will really be players and, you know, kind of American football players who are gigantic, but, you know, most of the time, we're not talking about throwing a huge amount of weight around in the upper body. So, it's not that big a deal to be able to maintain the tool so completely stiff, but obviously,

in certain situations, I mentioned, when we're talking about this recently, I mentioned obviously rugby being a great example of where, I guess, American football is well, which I don't know, I think about tool. It's a background that you come from, doesn't it determines what you kind of know, but obviously, you know, again, super interesting in the context of grappling, kind of in the combat sports space, where you maybe have got

an enormous amount of resistance to you extending the hip, which has been applied to aid point on the tool. So, you're trying to extend the hip, but it's the tool so that's resisting, it's not necessarily, you're trying to, you know, drive away from the ground, is you're trying to drive somebody off your back or move yourself in a direction and that other person is resisting you. And if you're all kind of being a bend over, because you can't

maintain the tool so in that position, then your hip extensors aren't going to do what you want

“them to do in that. And that's why I think the example you gave that good morning in the application”

of that, you know, I think is really cool. Yeah, there's a, and there's a really famous

moment in combat sports, everyone always likes to watch, everyone who's been watching for a long

time, who's got a rampage Jackson, and he picks up a guy, a Ricardo Arrona, over his head one, Ricardo's trying to put him in his submission, and absolutely slams him to defy on the ring. I hope that's not true. I'm sure he tried and you can win. And so I always think of that when I'm thinking of like, you type of strength you need and like those scenarios, and those guys just have like, absolutely enormous back strength. You know, some of my dad who know a problem

can pick up a 200 plus pound guy and just drive him through the the ring for almost say it was a crazy moment. But yeah, the good morning is so so good for those, you know, strength like that. I think they're really falling out of favor as well. I don't really see them programmed to turn,

and then, you know, on the other side of things, things that are like way too sport-specific,

“like a look exactly like the thing you need to do. And a good morning is just going to give you”

like roots, strength like that. Some people find them uncomfortable. So I guess another thing I'll mention when it comes to programming them is if you have, yeah, you have access to like a safety bar, something like that, on the pad on your back, and a much more comfortable hand position, maybe then a straight bar. And just as useful, really real, I've saved you by myself. So I use those at ton. Probably one of my favorite variations, and if you have like, I don't know if you've heard of

them, but maybe one of the transformer bars by Kabuki strength, you can change where the loading sits, on the bar. So you can make it more like kind of a front squat position if you're doing something else, or you can shift the weight so that's a much more suitable for a hinge position. So if you have bars like that, and a lot of gyms, a lot of athletes do now, those are really really nice, just hinging with those. I'm pretty good mornings in that. So it makes it much more

comfortable, you know, one more like easy on the shoulders for some people. So yeah, those are all things that I look at when I'm programming those as well. Cool, not us really cool. So yeah,

basically, it depends on the situation that we're programming for, but ultimately at the end of the

day, what we're looking for is to apply this approximate distance of sequence in the contact of training program by saying that, you know, we know already that the hip is going to play a bigger role in many of these movements, because of its approximate nature. But also, it's going to be more forced on an intending so. So we cannot apply more strength training situation, more strength training methods to maximize its development and its contribution. The opposite is going to therefore

be applicable to the opposite end of the approximate distance of sequence. So this is why when people say to me, you know, why don't you put in like, you know, so many times I get questions people say, why don't you, why don't you think that isometric car freezes or why do you think car freees training is a great idea for athletes and like because it's a distal segment. It's like any time you're moving in a, you know, kind of an athletic situation when you're moving quickly,

the car is going to be moving really quickly. You're not going to be able to do what you think you can do, you know, in that situation because you're just moving too fast. So, you know, it's like, and then I kind of had to explain to people recently that if you then add on the fact that if you're doing like a cyclical movement like sprinting, you know, you've got this conservation angular momentum problem, you know, as well. So, you know, you've you've you've created this enormous

amount of kinetic energy with the hip, you've passed it down and then the angle you move away quickly, and then in a cyclical movement like sprinting, you're going to decelerate now and go back here. If you've got a large mass at the end of your kind of sort of proximal distal sequence, your distal segment, by, you know, your calves are heavier. It's like running with heavy boots on.

“You're going to find you have to really decelerate and then it's going to tell you a lot of energy”

then go right up to the direction and then it's going to do the same thing at the opposite end of the game cycle. So it's just going to massively massively massively slow you down. So not only is it pretty much pointless because the force under the kind of force velocity spectrum is not helping you when you're moving that quickly. But secondly, it's actually going to create problems

in many of the situations if you've got this conservation angular momentum problem. So ultimately,

you know, we can learn not just what to do, you know, in what we've been talking about, you know, all these kind of hip-focused exercises can also learn what we might want to try and avoid. You know, and it was great when you were describing the exercise sequences that you were programming, you mentioned that primarily for the calf and the the proximal distal sequence, you're kind of focusing more on the plyometric side, you know?

Yeah, I mean, as though we're in a ton of it, it's not a much use of. It's not a much you can do. Yeah, it's like, how is it going to help you? I mean, sure, if like there's scenarios where you might want to look at the attendance, definitely some people say, okay, well, you know, so okay, I'll use the metrics. Now, but don't go overboard with it and start, you know, kind of, you know, not that anybody really does have the ability to add huge amounts of calf,

muscle must really, but no, let's use that too. It's just kind of like an illustration of how this kind of proximal distal sequence is working. Cool. So that's kind of like, well, I would

“say is the most important, you know, kind of core of this topic. But when I do talk about this,”

I do get a couple of other interesting questions. And one of them is, what happens if you're going from like a body movement, like throwing, for example, and we will do an episode on throwing, and I will explain exactly how the proximal distal sequence works is just a little bit more involved than it is in something like jumping because you actually have two, you have a rebound, you have one in the ground, which looks like jumping, and then you have the other one, which goes

all the way back up through the body and kind of reverses, you know, reverses the original one, but then carries on into the torso and then obviously down to the arm. What happened, and this is a question I get a lot, what happens to the proximal distal sequence if we add an implement? So

striking something like engulf or, you know, kind of baseball or anything like that, you know, obviously

“involves an extra second added on the end of the body. Then exactly, that's exactly what it is.”

It's an extra segment added on the end of the body. So what does that then mean with it? It means you've converted most of your body into a more proximal set of segments, you know, and so this is why if you put somebody who's literally just throwing an object like a, you know, ball or a jabbling, and you put that person next to somebody who's, you know, kind of athletic pastimes hitting a similar object like a ball with a bat, then you tend to find that a person who is doing the

hitting tends to have more overall muscle mass than the person who's doing the throw. And that's literally because we're seeing someone who's more segments, more of their segments on our

classifying us proximal. So you can kind of go and extra kind of segment down when you're dealing

with those guys. And a lot, because a lot to the questions again with people like, okay, so, you know, why is this, you know, baseball athlete, for example, why are they gigantic? Why, why are they so good at, you know, kind of hitting elements? So well, it's because when you add the extra segment on the body, you are making more of the body act more proximally. And so you don't end up having the same velocity limitations that you would do if you were, I mean, golf is probably

“an even better example. Yeah, I think it was out of the board. The wild one, you and I,”

there's a quite a while, you and I added about like, why are over the years, golfers, well, players, and all that are gotten so much bigger as they're, you know,

hitting abilities have increased and like, I was exactly why they can just use more of that mass

and then have much more, you know, our and all that from it. Totally, and as I say, is that extra segment that you win, it's like, you know, in the case of athletic movements without those extra segments, you can't have several, really, the most proximal segments, the only one you can really go to town on when it comes to heavy strength training. I think with the extra segment in your hand, you probably get maybe the extra joint that you can kind of

push it and maybe you start to see. You know, so really I would say, you know, to give an example of this, I would say, if I was looking at, you know, sort of literally throwing a ball like pitching, I would say you're unlikely to see any benefit of, you know, kind of meant to pressing in that situation. I would say it unlikely. I don't have that much time out of the throw. It's, it's mostly going to come on. We'll do a whole episode on this concept. We're really trying to do

this as a short and sweet intro to a concept that nobody's really talking about, but actually, you know, almost 90% of the exercise selection process that I go through in an athletic program is just proximal to this, or sequence analyzing. For, you know, if I'm looking at a picture, most of that kinetic energy is coming from the lower body and the torso. After that, it's just mostly velocity under the spectrum. You're just kind of passing on that kinetic energy from the

rest of the body. She doesn't going to do anything I don't think in those situations. But if you then say, "Well, okay, well, what about actually the other end of that athletic environment where they're eating a ball?" Is that, I could say, "Okay, well, maybe you could see some benefit from venting in that scenario." There's a difference there because you've moved the segment, the segment is allowed you to move the torso closer to your proximal center of the sequence. So you've moved

“away from the thing the end result. And I think that's really kind of the answer to the question”

that people ask me, which is, "How does it change when we go from just a throwing, I could object with my hand to actually having another segment like a golf club or a, you know, baseball, I would have, you know, how does that then change what the kinetic sequence is doing? Doesn't change it fundamentally. It just adds an extra segment on and that allows you to have more proximal segments that are going to be more forced on and essentially in that context. So yeah,

I think I kind of answered the bit that you reported. Yeah, where you're right. You're right. I love the experience. Sorry, brother. I was just kind of on a roll talking about, you know, vent your breast even stuff. I can't stop you. So I've been told. It's like, yeah, not allowed to stop middle as people can play. Yeah, so Jake has the same problem actually. He says, "Is this that a way to meet the finish because it's like, if he interrupts, people will just write

him, read messages and say, "Don't interrupt him." But it's great. And it was, I mean, it wrapped it up so nice. And it's like, you know what I'm coaching? People are in a doll from things like that. Like, the result is a big primary focus on more of the heavy strength than the things. And like you said, I'm like working, you know, the hip joint very heavy, you know, I have a lot of heavy squats, partial squats, you know, or he else hip muscles, sorts of things over time. But it just very heavy

strength training focus and that's an area for the most part. I know we've talked to about like heavy rotational work for the core and things like that. Those work great as well over just, you know, ripping out a medicine ball as fast as can over and over with no real end door one

relevant to what we're saying today. But it does refer to the proximalistic sequence. I often tell people that fatigue is going to stop them from improving coordination in a movement of

“that practicing. And I think maybe I say, maybe a minority of the people in my words don't actually”

believe that or if they do believe it, it doesn't translate into their programming. But the proximalistic sequence is actually one of the features of coordination that you can measure quite easily, because literally just ask the sort of data set that you've collected or what point

in the time, you know, you kind of say it's taken them as one second, for example, to complete the

count of movement jump. And you break that down into eccentric and a concentric phases. And then if you've got like motion capture of the athlete, you basically say, you know, let's just graph the point of which the hip is accelerating and then kind of accelerating on the knee is accelerating and then the ankle joint is accelerating and then the ankle joint is, you know, kind of accelerating and then accelerating and then accelerating. And you'll see that there's a proximalistic sequence

and they kind of occur in this really nice order. You get a nice kind of wave of the hip, join on the graph and then you enjoy and then you can enjoy. When you ask someone to do exactly the same movement in a fatigue state, those three curves superimpose on top of each other and you get all three happen at the same time. And that's just some good data and himbop layer is right where pre-voteging disruptively get the same thing with the upper body is now exactly. So you get this

thing where basically the proximalistic sequence disappears if you try and get a fatigue goes

north, if the fatigue is going exactly the same movement that we're doing like three minutes ago. You put them through a fatigue and work out, you get to do the same movement again. The proximalistic sequence disappears. I mean, the reason behind that, I probably, you know, deserving of, of a separate episode. But the point I'm illustrating here is that we can actually observe a movement pattern or a key feature of movement pattern which is the proximalistic

sequence and we can show that it gets immediately a lot worse because we're now not passing kinetic energy from on, you know, to internet. Yeah, immediately that's a lot worse which contributes to reduction in performance. But of course what it also means is that my efficiency, the optimization of my movement is now just tanked and my brain is going to recognise that I'm no longer as efficient as I was and there's now no way I can actually improve the existing

coordination pattern. I've got, you can't practice movement pattern badly and it's basically a brain to learn something positive from that. Yeah. Well, obviously, you could say it's going to learn to try and avoid that but you can't really avoid what the cause for reasons we'll get into another day. But what it can't really do is it's kind of upgrade your existing kind of software if you like to be a better version of what it is, why practice some things in that fatigue state.

You know, even though that isn't really hugely relevant for what we're doing today, it's just, you know, using the approximate list of Siemens as a way of teaching the fact that, you know, fatigue does have these negative effects and it is going to stop people from benefiting

“from those, kind of, in principle, they're hoping to get. So, you know, a lot of the time, I think”

if this is not the biggest mistake in essence, it's definitely on the first page. So, a lot of the time when we're practicing something, there isn't, there's maybe a clear goal in mind for the outcome that we want to improve. So, let's say you've got a bunch of pictures throwing, as I, oh, we're doing this because we want to get better at throwing. Okay, cool. But what are the adaptions you trying to create? So, if I'm, if I'm saying, okay, but, you know, I'd quite like

them to improve their coordination a little bit. Okay, great. Well, if we know that, then you're going to need to make sure that fatigue isn't building up over the series of throws that you do because if your proximity list of Siemens disappears, bring the loss you're going to drop, and it's going to drop primarily because actually your coordination is worth. So, you know, not strictly relevant to what we're describing today, but I think it is just such a

good opportunity to, you know, show people that when I say that coordination is reduced because of fatigue being present, we actually do know that. It's not like, you know, we're kind of inferring it from, you know, it's something we're data set. It's like the problem with the distance sequence has really well described. We know it's happening. We know it's a really key feature of the boom. If we lose that, we absolutely are going to see points going on. It's just really cool that,

you know, we do our data showing that fatigue does make it totally effective in that way.

“Yeah, and I think I mentioned in the, the first episode that we did about like people trying to”

prove punching power and things like that and they're doing, you know, those things like weighted punching and, you know, circuits and things like that, that's the exact same thing. You just get tired. You just rub that coordination and I know most of the hardest hitters I've ever seen. My brother being known like when he was still active for like his ridiculous

power. When he was hitting the bag hitting mitts, he was always, you know, fresh as he could be,

doing like single shots, his throwing as hard and as fast as possible. And the really was

sport of improving his power. He was just hitting as hard as he could over and over with good

rest between and people at the time of trying to keep their power up when they were tired and doing all kinds of weird goofy things like that. And he was hitting harder than all of them doing just some punches, so far as good, some kicks, so far as he could. And then just doing, you know, the other stuff in the gym and that, and then not getting super tired and doing garbage reps. I mean, and of course, punching itself is very similar to the throwing kind of concept. So again,

like where we would expect the kinetic energy to come from in a throw, we would also expect the kinetic energy to come from the same place in a punch. So again, when everyone's kind of thinking "Oh, I need to hit my arm stronger." So I'm not really, that's not where your power is coming from. In the power is coming from the hip, really, and the torso, rotation of the torso, and the and the extension of the hip are probably going to be definitely the primary factors in throwing.

You know, so you expect them to play a pretty important role in punching as well. And I just I didn't think the data is quite as extensive in punching as it is in throw. But everyone at

“fundamentally kind of, you know, that's the territory that I think we would be in. So again,”

you know, for all those listeners out by who are, you know, pestering me asking, you know, for more information on the strength training for combat sports. You know, really, you know, start with the proximal to digital sequence, look at the movements. And again, okay, so let's extend this a little bit away from just talking about proximal to digital sequence. And let's just talk a little bit about needs and analysis in our in sports.

You know, how are we actually, you know, choosing which movements to go after?

Well, we look at the sport, we look at the points in the sport that are critical, you know,

and we go, how do we get the athletes better at doing those things? You know, you know, you describe punching the kicking, you know, whatever aspects of grappling are going to be really critical. You know, and you look for the key aspects of those biomechanical situations, you know, okay, great. And most of the time, you're going to find that the proximal to digital sequence is going up like. And of course, that means that we can go chasing after these, you know, kind of hip,

basic sizes, you know, back, torso, basic sizes. And that's a really good point actually for something just to say before we finish. Even though the rotation of the torso is absolutely critical for so many of these situations like the throwing and, you know, potentially the punching in certain situations, certainly, you know, kind of swinging, you know, backs and clubs and rackets and that kind of thing. We do almost no rotational work of any mean for nature in essence.

And okay, fine, people are going to send me all kinds of videos of them in some kind of cookie exercise, whether balancing on something, waving their cable around. I'm like, you know, don't get to it. What we're describing here is a, as a, an exercise for which the same rules apply for everything else. If you have low stability, if you've got a high stability demand and you are having to stabilize yourself in order to move a cable, that's not going to do very much for you in comparison

“with exercise that already has the stability baked into it. And I think residency really does lack”

good, high stability rotational strength training. And yet, like you were saying earlier with kind of strange power exercises that people do, a lot of people will train rotation with power. And I'm like, sorry, what? It's like, this is a very proximal segment. If not, you know, deep proximal segment of certain situations. So why would you be training it for power when you would actually need to train it for strength? What force dominant? Yeah, it's a force dominant

second. This is one of those kind of like things that I sort of bring out in conversations when

people are asking me to consult and I go, all your rotational work is power based. Why is that? And then they kind of told me through their rational and I explained to them that it's a force dominant segment in the bottom of these two sequence. And you can literally see a kind of the computation is going on. They're going, right? Okay. So we're really missing something pretty fundamental here. And if we bring this in, it's going to actually, and yeah, probably will.

Because if you're athlete, it's just, it's like imagine that you didn't ever did ever did any kind of squats ever again. You literally just did jump squats. You'd be like, you'd be like, wow, I'm going to lose so much. My program might, and this is even more proximal segment than your quad dominant squats. Yeah. So this is a bigger loss to your program than what you're, you know, kind of worrying about. If I tell you that you can't do squats again,

I'll just hypothetically. I'll have to work. But you know, hypothetically. So, you know, that idea of saying, okay, you know, back to the drawing board, how can we go about, you know,

“sort of looking for ways to train rotation in that in that way. And I think not only as I”

can see, not really doing very much in that space, but you know, Jim equipment doesn't seem

his name, a guy who had posted a file on Instagram who had a great, super stable machine set up

for a rotation. And it was one of the few ones I've seen. That one's like really nice and not

“conky. And I, I wish I could remember the exact piece. You know, I just scrolling one day saw it.”

And I was like, wow, that'll be absolutely great to have. I don't have it. Well, if anybody

now, there was listening, and they know of some really cool ways, even if it's, I mean,

even if it's a way that they've kind of, you know, kind of figured out with a barbell, maybe with a, you know, kind of a rotational situation with a barbell with a weight on on one side. I don't know. But, you know, if somebody's figured out a way of training rotation for strength in a

safe and a stable way for that, that'll be fantastically valuable for everybody. And I do,

I do confess that when I do consulting and mental shifts and things, you know, and I explain this to people. And they expect me to kind of real out this perfectly designed exercise for them. And I'm like, no, that's not my skill set. You know, I do physiology better by mechanics.

“I tell you how this is working. You need to find somebody who's more of an engineering mindset”

to, you know, kind of, you know, figure out the solutions to implementing that. I would expect that in many of these, that's the difference. If you trained rotation for strength, you would actually get a surprisingly big improvement in power and speed, help put to the movement, because you're actually training a pretty proximal segment in this particular context. Yeah, I mean, most boards, a lot of the stuff you described, the hip-axons,

but also this rotational stuff in certain context could be really cool as well.

“Definitely. Fantastic. So I think that's a great episode today.”

I actually ran on a lot longer than I thought we would. I thought we would return it to the mechanics. That's great. So thanks again, Rob. I great to have you here. I appreciate it. And thanks to all our listeners as well. We'll be back with another episode next time.