 Hello team, I am home for the holidays. There might be some noise that happens upstairs if that dog keeps barking and running around. But today marks the beginning of a nine video series we're gonna do on fixing a chest cave while you're squatting. The show must go on, so we've gotta start talking about some of this stuff. So a chest cave when you're squatting, I'm not gonna do the whole thing, but basically what happens is you notice that as you come out of the squat, the chest collapses, and you'll see it looks like your upper back is extra kyphotic. It looks like it's more around than it needs to be. And what happens there is when you're trying to overcome loads and you're trying to become strong, then that is a display of energy leakage, right? So we want to put the force that we generate from the ground up into the bar. And if we collapse, we lose some of that. Those forces get dissipated in our joints, especially the ones that bend a lot. And then we don't get to demonstrate as much strength, right? We don't get to lift as much weight. So fixing the chest cave has two, three components to it. One is we need to restore as much mobility as we can. Two, we need to find as much stability as we need. And then three, we need to do that all in concert with one another. We need motor control. We need to be able to control what we're doing. So step one here, we're gonna start out with this mobility stuff. We're gonna start out by restoring the ability to move. And so to understand what we're gonna start with, this rockback exercise, we need to understand why we're chest collapsing in the first place. Generally what happens is it's not that the whole back becomes kyphotic. It's that one part of the back becomes kyphotic. And you can see I get a little bit of a straighter spine here. I get a little bit more bend there in the middle of my back. And then I get a little bit straighter up top as well. So it's more like a hinge than it is like one around curvature. So what we have to do is we have to restore the ability to round in the flat parts so that the part that's bending a lot doesn't have to bend so much. And we're gonna do that on our hands and knees first. So I'm gonna set up just like this. First step pretend like you're wearing a belt and you're gonna pull your belt buckle into your belly button just like this. Now I want you to feel your abs a lot of times. This cue gets misinterpreted. I don't want you to have crunching abs. I don't want you to have six pack abs here in the middle. If you feel them a little bit, that's okay. What I need you to have are these lower outer abdominals. I need you to have control of your hip bones. Right? So tuck your belt buckle up. If you don't feel them yet, I feel them already. If you don't feel them yet, give me a nice big exhale. Try to pretend like you're wearing a corset, right? And squeeze out everything that's in your abdomen. Everything that's, try to bring your stomach into your lower back. That's a cue that I stole from Joseph Sinelli that I really like. So we're holding right here and I can feel this. Now we're gonna, I'm gonna bring my toes up a little bit. I just kind of like it that way now. And we're gonna rock back just like this. If you crunch, you're gonna lose your ab, okay? And you're gonna find the middle ab. So make sure you keep the tuck, don't crunch. Make sure you keep the tuck, shift back, and like this. If you find yourself unable to stop crunching, take your eyes and look up. That'll undo your crunch right there. Okay, and now I feel my abs a little bit extra. So I'm gonna keep my neck in this position right here because I feel pretty good with it. My legs are getting tired, so I gotta start going. This should be difficult. It looks like nothing is happening. And sometimes if you do it, it feels like nothing is happening. Make sure you're looking up. Make sure you got your hip tuck and make sure you're forcing as much air out as you can. We're gonna do six breaths. In the nose, out the mouth. I keep my tuck, push myself away from the ground. Oh, two breaths. I'm just trying to keep everything even. So I want even pressure on my hands. I wanna feel my abs evenly. And good. Okay, so this is your first challenge, right? How can I get that crunching pattern? How can I get my back to round without crunching? Without just crunching. One of the good tests for this one is a toe touch test. I'm not gonna move the camera, but if you just keep your feet together and then you bend over and try to touch your toes. Lots of times you can see what the back is doing. So you wanna see a nice gradual curve in your low back, middle back, and upper back. Lots of times what you'll see is a locked lower back and kind of like a hip hinge. You feel a lot of tension here and you'll think that you're not very flexible because you can't touch your toes or maybe you can, but it just doesn't feel right. It feels too stiff. What you gotta do is teach your back how to round and then it's easy to get down there, right? What you're actually doing here is you have too long of hamstrings and they can't control you. They can't control your back. And what we're gonna see is with the chest cave, we need to be able to keep your weight and the weight that you're squatting from falling forward and the big, big anti-forward anti-gravity muscles you've got that keep your body upright are the hamstrings. So that's gonna be our next video.