 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Gwakie, and today I want to talk about why I think strength work is so important for people who are struggling with various functional exercise or mobility or pain problems. So my story today is I have a guy that I've been training with a spondylolisthesis. That's when you have a body of a vertebra and the spine of the vertebra and basically it's broken off. The spine is broken off and they become kind of two separate pieces here. So this guy has been very diligent with his exercises and he is great about doing them. He's very easy to queue and all of that is a necessary first step. So the first thing that I want to emphasize is if you are working with somebody who is, you know, struggling with, you know, kind of an outlier issue, right? Something that can be very challenging. You have to first make sure they understand what you want. And so this guy's back curve is pretty excessive. So the first thing that we need to do is teach him how to make it. Oh my goodness. That was a terrible pelvis. First thing we need to do is Okay, this was just okay. We need to teach him how to make it a little. Oh my goodness. You guys, what is going on with me? Let's just restart. Do you know where I'm going with this yet? He's got his pelvic bones and he's got a really excessive curve both in his upper and his lower back and then he has a head, right? And eyes on the front. This is posterior. This is anterior. Now, what we have to do is we have to reduce this curve. We have to bring the lumbar spine backward. We have to bring the thoracic spine forward and we have to lengthen him upward, make him taller. And so that might look something like this. Maybe we have a little bit less of a curve in the pelvic bones and then maybe something a little more reasonable throughout the rest of the body. And then that head's gonna go off screen because he's taller. Cool. So in dealing with spondylolisthesis, I need to make sure that he can achieve something like this. This is absolutely necessary first. And so you might use something, some sort of exercise, that looks simpler, that isn't so fatiguing, that doesn't sound much like exercise. But eventually you can create stronger changes if you load them more, if you make them stronger in those positions. And so what I've been doing with this guy, he's been working with a great trainer that I know and she has done so much good work. And he's been working with a great physical therapist and they've all been doing really, really good work. And I love working with him because he understands the language that I'm trying to speak already. He already knows kind of how to get in the right spot. I just need to help him a little bit. And so now my role here is to say, hey, now that you know what to do to get here, we need to make sure that you are getting as strong as possible in these good positions. And so for example, I had him today. He did this hands and knees exercise. There's a foot. I'm gonna make that a knee. And if he normally wants to let his low back drop, really hunches up or back and let his head kind of fall downward. What I wanted to do was, again, this is just the same drawing we just had over here. I want to take the lumbar spine move it backward and take the thoracic spine and move it forward, just like that. And so that's what we tried to do. Here's by the way the ground. So, you know what? We got to erase this too because that changes. So I want to make sure that he can fully tilt his pelvis this way. We call this a posterior pelvic tilt. And in doing that, I want to make sure that he can round his back in general. Not without or not without. I want him to be able to do this without letting his head fall down like it was before without having a huge hump in his upper back like he had before and by taking away that excessive lumbar curve and even showing me that you can flex the lumbar spine. Okay, this is not necessarily just a long-term goal. It's just what I need to see to make sure that he's doing okay. There's an elbow and there's some hands there. Okay, so this is now our new goal, but this is not it. This is not the only thing. I need to make sure that he has a really strong contraction holding him there and that, ladies and gentlemen, is your ab muscle. So we have the transversus of dullness really, really deep that wraps all the way around everything like this. And then we have crosshatching, which is internal and external obliques like this. Let me have this six-pack muscle here in the front. All of those are pretty important. I think people overuse that six-pack ab muscle a lot and don't really get the obliques. And the transversus subdominus quite as well. But if you get a spine that looks really good like this drawing, then you're probably feeling pretty good about it. You don't need to be super paranoid about whether or not they're feeling those abs. You just say, hey, keep that position. Maybe even get greedy and get a little bit more of that position. But force a bunch of air out while you breathe. And this is me having him exhale. And so that helps cinch everything down. And as everything cinches down because there's now, you know, maybe there was big lung here before. Now there's a smaller lung there now that helps bring these muscles from being way out here and kind of not really on. Way out here and not kind of not really on to way back here and really, really tight. And so that helps me load him. Now if his knee and hand are on the ground, he doesn't have a very long lever here. There's not a whole lot to oppose. I want to as quickly as possible transition him into doing this with a nice straight leg. And that then becomes a plank. Now, if he loses any of this, if this head tries to drop down and if this hump comes back, then we stop. We have to stop. We just say, hey, you got to go back to putting your knees on the ground, right? Because you can't demonstrate that you can do this with your legs straight. But I want to get you to do it with your legs straight as fast as possible. And once you can do that, you know, sometimes you can still do that in the same session. Maybe you just use that as a teaching tool you say. So when you straighten your legs, your head fell down and you really hunched up this part of your back. You can tap them. That's a really good time to use a tactile cue. You say, okay, what I want you to do instead is bring this part of your upper back way up that base of your neck. Keep that away from the ground while you straighten these legs out. And then maybe they get something that looks really good. And then you're like, okay, good, good, good. Maybe two months goes by and they're starting to get stronger. And you're like, yeah, you're really getting good abs. That's nice. Now I want to make it even harder and you make them straighten their arms way out here. And so now we have an even longer lever that they have to do this plank on. Makes the plank a lot harder, puts a lot more torque from gravity onto these ab muscles. Now I need to keep the integrity of these ab muscles. Let's get rid of some of this here. And then you can start to look really good. What's great about this is now I need a more forceful contraction in those muscles. And I've taught this person's body and neuromuscular system how to be really strong here. They've spent X number of years for the guy that I work with, maybe, you know, almost 70 years going through doing stuff where it encourages, oh my goodness, my pelvis is are getting so bad. It encourages this hyper curve of the spine, right? They've done a lot of things that turn on their back muscles and make their pecs really tight. Right? So we need to be equally vigilant in making them reverse those positions. So it's okay to make sure that your people are in the right position. But what I would challenge you as a trainer to do is to find ways to load them in that position, to get them as strong as possible because if you are strong in those positions, they're going to last a lot longer.