 You are listening to the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. You guessed it. This is mine pump. Now today's episode, we talk about squatting with one of the world's authorities on one of the best exercises you could possibly do. Uh, we talked to Dr. Aaron Horsig from squat university. Great guy, very smart person, performance oriented, uh, physical therapist. Um, and in this episode, we talk about how to squat for your body type. So it's one of the best exercises, but not everybody should be squatting this same. By the way, you can find Dr. Aaron Horsig at squat university.com or you can find him on Instagram. He's got a great Instagram page at DR Aaron's. That's A-A-R-O-N-H-O-R-S-C-H-I-G. By the way, as a new book called rebuilding Milo, pretty, pretty cool stuff. By the way, this episode is brought to you by our sponsor Paleo Valley. They make some pretty great products. We talk about one of the products all the time because we love them. 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And then we also have thrown in maps starter, which is a phenomenal new way to get into fitness, your starter way to get into fitness. So if you haven't worked out for a while, start with maps starter. Now, if you got all these programs on their own, normally it would cost you over $340, but with the January promotion, you can get all of them in the starter bundle for 80 bucks. That's it, $80 gets you lifetime access to all the things I mentioned. Maps starter, maps and a balik, maps prime, and the intuitive nutrition guide. Go check them out, go to mapsjanuary.com. That's M-A-P-S January.com. Check them out, sign up. By the way, they come with a 30 day money back guarantee so you can follow them for 30 days. Doesn't blow your mind, return them for a full refund. So, Aaron, how long have you squat university existed? It feels to me like in a short period of time, you guys just exploded. Has it been a short period of time? I know sometimes people become successful and you're like, oh, it was an overnight success. I'm like, no, we've been doing this for 15 years. It just took off last year. I mean, when did you start and what got you started? How did it all happen? So I started squat university in October of 2015. So it's been just a little over five years now. Now, I guess everything that sort of went into squat university was a long time coming. I've been an Olympic weightlifter ever since 2005 is when I started competing very early undergrad and then did strength conditioning, sort of coaching and everything and then went into get my doctorate of physical therapy and then I started working with athletes as a physical therapist for many years before I then started speaking to the world as squat university. The reason I decided to call it squat university really as a physical therapist, I started doing a ton of evaluations on some amazing athletes across just the complete spectrum of athletic pursuits, football, baseball, basketball, weightlifters, powerlifters, crossfitters. And I kept on getting this deja vu-like scenario where during the evaluation for something back pain, knee pain, hip pain, whenever it's non-surgical, your goal as a physical therapist is to sort of be a detective. You wanna uncover the movement-based problem, sort of like what we talked about earlier with Greg Cook and the FMS, the idea of looking at the body through a movement lens. And I was continuing to see this deja vu-like scenario of problems in body weight squatting and nevertheless, single-leg squats as well. So seeing these athletes who can squat tremendous weight, I mean the squat for anyone in the weight room is a staple exercise. But yet when I was asking people who were in pain to remove their shoes and just show me a basic body weight squat, I was seeing a number of these flaws and it sort of dawned on me that as a society, we've sort of conceptually rearranged the squat to first and foremost be an exercise. It's how much do you squat, not how well do you squat? You know, in third world countries, you see people often sitting for the butts in a deep squat, preparing food in a deep squat. Yet in the US, we look at the squat as first and foremost an exercise. And I think because of that, we have sort of flipped our performance pyramid upside down. You know, Louis Simmons always said a pyramid can only be as tall as it is wide. Well, the way in which I think a lot of athletes nowadays are set up theoretically is an upside down pyramid. We have this very minimal base of movement quality. Yet we try to add so much strength and performance on top of that. And I think when you can rearrange those and put the squat back into perspective as a movement first, because in order to squat with great movement, you have to have good foot stability, good ankle mobility, great ankle or hip mobility. You have to have good core and pelvic control, good balance. And whenever you can move well first, sort of put that building block of a quality squat back into your repertoire, your movement repertoire, I think it allows so many things to happen. You're gonna be able to first off get out of a lot of injuries because you're just moving a little bit better. And then you're also going to be setting yourself up for better performance. You're almost unlocking, taking the key on unlocking the potential for future performance athletically. So I sort of thought, all right, well, this is the one building block, the squat, that I think so many people are missing. And when you can regain that, so many more things are possible, unlike many other movements out there. So sort of dawn on me, all right, the squat, this is sort of where I'm gonna go. I ended up writing a book, which my first book, The Squat Bible, I wrote like 500 pages single space. Like I just wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote. And back in 2014, 2015, it's all done 500 pages. And I'm giving it to my friends to read just to print it out version, which is like that thick. You know what I do? This is way too science-based. Like you're talking down to people with all this scientific jargon. You know, it's not gonna be relatable on one topic. And I ran into this person who told me about a guy named Gary Vaynerchuk. There were a lot of people out there who are in the social media world. We know who Gary V is. But his big thing was, you need to create a brand. If you're gonna sell anything, you need to create branding. You need to give away your best information for free. And that's how you build brand. And then people will want to find out what you have to offer to learn more. So I sort of redid things. I completely rewrote my book, my first book. It's only 128 pages now. It's clear as day. But I started a brand called Squat University to give away literally every single piece of information I know on how people can move better, how people can have better technique, how they can lift more weight, stay safe. And then eventually over the past couple of years has turned and molded it more into what I actually do professionally, which is be a physical therapist. So how people can fix common aches and pains. There's not a single person that walks in the weight room as I know you guys have had experiences with. You're never pain free all the time. My achy head, my right elbow aches up sometimes when I'm benching. These are common to every single person. So I wanted to be the person that could be that intermediary between the ivory tower of the medical world, the physical therapy world and the athlete. Because I've been that athlete for such a long time. I competed in weightlifting for over 11 years before I finally decided to take a step back to do this more. And I've had so many injuries. So many things where my right knee hurt so bad I couldn't even squat, but I'm trying to pull two days to get ready for a national championship meet. I understand that drive that athletes have. So I wanted to take that knowledge that I had, but speak to people in a way in which they could understand. We talked about communication. I wanted to be able to take all this stuff that you find in textbooks and stuff that you find in the medical world. But I wanted to relate to people, on that athlete, on that coach level. You don't have to have a college degree to become empowered to move better, decrease your aches and pains and find what your true potential is. And that's what Squaw University's been and sort of molded into. And it's been five years now. What most people don't understand, I'm still full-time physical therapist. As you can see, I'm in my office right now at work. I still treat patients 40 hours a week here in St. Louis. And then Squaw University is technically, I guess, my second job, another 40, 50 hours a week job on top of that. I love that philosophy. And I love the idea of the Squaw and flipping it on its head like that. Now, how do you, and I know you have to get this, we get this all the time, how do you speak to somebody that tells you that they can't squat like that because of their morphology? I can't get out of the grass or I can't do a narrow stance. What's your thoughts on that? That's a great question. So I think there's a number of people that like to blame their anatomy. Now, first and foremost, you have to understand anatomy because the way we evolve from a baby to growing up, things change sometimes. So there are some people that will not be able to get an ass to grass squat because things change. You're ass to tabulums of your hip socket. Some people develop a deeper hip socket. I'm sure some of you guys have heard the phrase the Scottish hip. Well, that was done based on epidemiological studies where they looked at the rate of hip dysplasia throughout different countries of the world, different ethnic groups. And they found that a number of people, particularly in Scotland, but there's a very high numbers in other areas of the world where they have a very deep hip socket. What that does is it's gonna limit, obviously the amount of forward flexion that the hip can go into and then how far someone can squat down. Someone can have a lot of retro version in their hip, which would limit that sort of classic toes forward squat. The one thing I want people to understand is it's important to understand what type of anatomy you have, but realize you've probably not maxed out your potential mobility-wise. So just because someone has deep hip sockets doesn't mean they don't work on their hip mobility or work on their ankle mobility. Just because someone has a lot of retro version doesn't mean we don't continue working on hip internal rotation to become just a little bit more optimal. We also have to understand that, hey, let's not say everyone needs to squat toes forward because that's not right for everyone. Let's not say everyone has to squat astro grass because that's not right for other people. Some people can do as much ink mobility as they want, throw some weightlifting shoes on, and if they try to squat below 90, they're gonna get a crazy amount of butt wink just because their body's not built for that. That doesn't mean they don't still squat. It just, we have to understand that there's gonna be specific limitations for that person and we need to modify it for the individual so that we can find the most optimal results. Now that being said, what percentage or, would you say it's a lot of people that the reason why they can't squat is due to their anatomy or would you say that's a very small minority and it's really mostly due to the fact that they just lack mobility? I would say it's a small minority in my experience of evaluating people. I would say a large portion of it is mobility restrictions because of the way in which we use our body. I think so many people nowadays we sit in chairs all day long, you get up, you know, you've been sleeping all night long, you sit in your car, you go to work, you sit all day at work, you know, we're not actually using our body optimally. I have seen so many people just make tremendous progress in their depth just by having a rigorous mobility type, you know, program throughout their day and knowing just doing 20 minutes of mobility before your workout a couple of days a week is not enough to see long changes. This has to be a movement lifestyle change and when you can integrate different things like we talked about Kelly Starrett with his first book, Becoming a Supple Lever in his very first mobility wide video, if you guys remember back, this is like 2005 in YouTube, his very first one was a 10 minute squat challenge and can you sit in the bottom of a deep squat for 10 minutes cumulative throughout the day? And I think so many people when they first started, they're like, holy crap, this is crazy. Well, it's because so many people are never in that bottom position. So if you're never exposing your body to that deep squat and you think, you know, five sets of 20 second deep galbit squats is gonna make a big impact, you're out of your mind. You have to integrate this stuff throughout your day. So I do think there are some people who will not be able to perform an ass to grass deep squat because of their anatomy. So again, it depends. But I think way too many people are using their anatomy as an excuse for why they cannot get a more optimal looking squat. When in reality, I think they just need to be a little bit more consistent with their mobility work. Now you mentioned about butt wink and we get a ton of questions about this. Is it truly problematic or can you kind of break that down and explain to people what this might be? Yeah. So butt wink for those out there that don't know exactly what it is when you're squatting down eventually some people sort of hit this gap in their squat where their pelvis tips under. So it's a posterior pelvis tilt and what it looks like is a little wink. The butt is winking under the body. Now, what is happening is because the pelvis is being pulled under the body, the lower lumbar spine, particularly L4, L5, L5, S1, those joints are leaving a relative neutral position and they're flexing a little bit. And that's where the problem occurs is not because we're having gradual flexion because if you see like a strong man lift an Atlas stone or you see some of these power lifters have a slight curvature within their spine, slight flexion that's braced is not a problem for most people long-term, especially a strength athlete who's built up a lot of capacity. But what happens is that when you get concentrated flexion at one or two joints under load, over time that is the injury mechanism that just over time increases your risk. I'm not saying you have butt wink, it's gonna blow a disc like that, that's not the case. Everyone's back is different and it takes repetition, repetition, repetition. But we know through a lot of urge that flexion under load at specific concentrated, stress concentrated joints is what eventually leads to injury. So what we would say is that butt wink is not optimal. Now, is a little bit going to be okay? I'm sure it depends. If you see a little bit of butt wink for someone who's squatting once a week, it's probably not the biggest deal, especially if they're not squatting a lot of load. But what we're looking at is there's a lot of, it depends with the more frequency, the more load, the greater the movement, just the more increased risk there is for injury. So we have to look at a couple of different things when we're discussing butt wink because the first thing people ask is, well, can you improve it? If you have improved ankle mobility, it will lead to less compensation movement at the pelvis. So a lot of times people have butt wink and they're just concentrating on their hips and they don't even look that their ankles are just super tight. So yes, ankle mobility work. For some people, putting on a pair of weightlifting shoes, adding that other inch and a half heel height allows you to mimic more ankle mobility, which allows a lot of people to squat deeper with less compensatory movement at their pelvis. So you're maintaining that neutral range that much better. I think that's a big thing. Sometimes we can look at spacing the hips a little bit further apart, driving the knees out to the side because for some people, if they're having too narrow of a stance, their femur will run into the front side of their acetabulum a little bit sooner, which then their body has two choices. A, you impinge on yourself and you get a front of the hip impingement, pain feeling at the deep squat, or your body works around it and the pelvis turns under as a way to not impinge upon itself, but then you have something else at compensate, which is your low back rounding. So it's not a black and white answer. It depends. And you also have so many confounding factors of how much load, how much motion is actually occurring? Is it a tiny amount or is it a big butt wink? And then how much repetition? Are we squatting once a week or are we squatting five, six days a week? Are you an Olympic weightlifter? You're going into butt wink every single day, five, six days a week with a lot of your lifts because you're catching it to full depth. And we just know that it's not optimal for long-term resiliency of the spine. So we wanna try to modify it as much as possible, but no, it's not gonna just blow a disc the day of you see it. So let's not throw up our hands and throw a cause for concern up right now, but let's understand it for what it is. So what you would say for a lot of people, I know it depends, but for a lot of people, look at ankle mobility as one of the areas, okay. Yes, for sure. And I mean, someone who just has a pair of weightlifting shoes do a quick test for any test or just put some plates on the ground and squat with your heels elevated on the plates and without. And you can quickly see a huge change in a lot of people's butt wink just by elevating those heels and having a little bit more knee over toe translation, which is that ankle mobility. And it's gonna allow everything up the chain to remain in that ideal stacked position. Now, what do you say to people? Cause there's people on social media now that, you know, strength athletes and some of them having, you know, like formal education and background saying that correctional exercise and mobility work is a waste of time. Just practice the exercise with a ladder load and just keep practicing squats and getting it. What do you say? I mean, are you familiar with that argument? And what do you say to them? I'm not familiar as much with that argument. What I do here is a lot of like, as far as warming up goes, they're like, oh, you don't need to do foam rolling. You don't need to do stretching. Just grab the bar and practice the bar more. So a similar way of understanding it. Again, I think a lot of it comes down to an, and it depends. I don't think foam rolling is right for everyone. I also don't think grabbing the bar and just doing squats is right for everyone because just like a performance like formula one car or a NASCAR, every single athlete's body, and if you walk in the weight room, you're an athlete, everyone's body has its own specific needs and requirements of what it needs to be tuned in order to perform as well as possible. If I have a person who's had five ankle sprains on their right ankle from praying soccer their whole life and they have a big difference in right ankle mobility than their left, because what happens is that many times when you have bad ankle sprains, you develop a little scar tissue in your right ankle. Now, no amount of just squatting is gonna fix that. You have to be able to do for that person some banded joint mobilizations to improve the mobility of the ankle. And then you get under the bar and you work your body within that symmetrical range of motion. So it's all about it depends in finding what works best for the individual. I like to look at warming up or corrective exercises, sort of like going to a fancy restaurant. You look at a menu. Now, the last thing you wanna do is just order everything off the menu. You're not gonna be able to do that. You're gonna pick an entree. You're gonna pick a dessert. You're gonna pick an appetizer. You pick what you need. You pick what you want. Well, when it comes to corrective exercises, it's ridiculous to say every single person is gonna do all these banded joint mobilizations or everyone's gonna do hip squats with a hip circle on because not everyone needs that. But for one person, that may be exactly what they need to tune their body in order to perform as well as possible. And what we do is just a simple scientific method, test retest. I've someone come over and they squat. What does it look like? Is it easy? Can they sink into the bottom? Does it look symmetrical? Are they shifting to one side versus the other? If so, let's find out why. If someone has a hip shift because they're limited in their left hip internal rotation mobility, I'm not just going to have them squat, squat, squat and cue them. I can't cue them out of that. I have to do very deliberate and specific exercises to improve their mobility, retest it, see if I made any change, and then we use the barbell or whatever implement you're using to then make sure that they're now moving better. And then maybe the next time they come in because I've worked it well enough, I can throw that mobility exercise out. I don't need it anymore. But I'm very much so looking at corrective exercise as a tool in the toolbox to keep my car running well. So I think again, when it comes down to arguments like that, I think a lot of times people like to stay in their own camp and they get married to this idea of either being on one side versus the other. And there's some people we know and all they do is corrective exercise. And if you were to look on their page, it's like, man, are these people literally doing 50 minutes of corrective exercise every day? When are they ever loading up the bar and lifting some heavy ass weight? And then you've got other people in the other camp and they're like, corrective exercise, that's wussy stuff. I'd never foam roll in my life. Banded joint mobilizations are just goofy things. People put on social media to look cool. Well, those people can run into issues themselves because some things can't be solved by just lifting more or taking weight off the bar. Sometimes you need a screwdriver when a problem's going wrong. And I think when you can find that blend of it depends in finding what's best for the individual, that's when you find the marriage of having met your true performance in movement potential. And that's really what it's all about. So true, Aaron, do you have, so we're talking about the squat breakdown when you have a client that lets us, they got forward head, they got rounded shoulders, they got the butt wing, maybe they got some pronating in the feet. They don't have good ankle mobility. It's all kind of, which is actually pretty common with an average person that's middle age that you get in the gym first trying to learn how to squat. Do you have an order of operation on how you would address all those issues? You know, there's a number of different people that will use like a top down or bottom up or like core out type of approach. I think it's all about sort of finding what works best for the individual because you know, you can use a bottoms up approach of starting at the feet and working up for 10 people and it works for eight and then there's those two people that, hey, you got to start at teaching them core stability and proper breathing and bracing first or else it's not going to work. So I think it's you're finding out different methods but the big thing I like to use is just a simple joint by joint approach when I'm looking at people to understand the connection and that understanding that the foot it needs to be stable. The ankle has to be mobile. Knees have to be stable stacked in line. Hips have to be mobile enough to maintain that proper alignment. We have to have good core trunk stability which means proper breathing and proper bracing. In understanding that if one of those are out everything else along the chain can be affected. Now, sometimes certain cues for people, hey, create an arch in your foot, don't let it move. Learning that tripod foot, that alone sometimes can create everything else optimal alignment all the way up the rest of the body. Sometimes for other people it's, hey, open your hips up, spread the floor. Like Ed Cohen says, open the taint. Sometimes that works well for people and it's just automatically things kick on and their foot stability is all of a sudden there. They had horrible pronation before. I didn't cue them about their feet. I told them to open their hips up as they started and all of a sudden everything went into optimal alignment. I'm a big fan of Chris Duffin and a lot of his work with Kabuki Strengthen and talking about breathing embracing mechanics are some of the most important cues. You can get someone with great alignment in movement everywhere else but the second you put them under load if they don't know how to optimally breathe diaphragmatic breath and then have that proper stability their backs can be moving all over the place and their lift is never gonna look as good as possible. So I think it's understanding and taking someone through each sort of step looking at what that individual needs and what maybe few cues I can give them. I don't wanna overload them with 15 cues because they're trying to learn one movement. They're probably a novice at that. So you give overload of information they're not gonna take it in and move very well. So sort of figuring out what that person needs and trying to optimize and find what puzzle piece works best for them. I think is the ultimate approach. So I don't say I'm married to one approach of top down bottoms up or core out but sort of understanding the different cues that can work in finding what works best for the individual. Okay, so I have kind of a two-part question. The first one is when you're doing mobility work or like what we like to refer to as priming before your workout, what's actually happening to the body? Like why am I all of a sudden improving my ankle mobility because I did 10 minutes of ankle mobility exercise before I squatted. And then the second part is I'm just interested in my aesthetics. I just wanna look better. Why would I even care? Why don't we even care about improving my mobility? Besides preventing injury, is it gonna benefit my aesthetics? So I'll talk about the first one first was what exactly is happening with mobility? Now, if you were to look up the vast amount of research on what's going on with different tools like soft tissue mobilization, stretching, things like that, there's a number of different theories and not a single one of them are like 100% proven. So if you ever speak to someone that's like, yep, it's 100% this, they're married to one camp. There's a number of different theories. But I would say for the most part, when we're talking about stretching and we're talking about soft tissue work, most people are in the belief that a lot of it's more of a neurological response within the body. You're not actually creating a lengthening of the muscle because we're not adding sarcomeres in length. So for people out there that don't really understand muscle architecture and anatomy, think about your muscles almost like a Lego stack. You have different building blocks. Well, those are called sarcomeres in length. That's basically what the breakdown muscle building blocks are. And when you can stretch a muscle and you maybe cast it. So let's say someone had their elbow casted completely straight or something like that. Sometimes if you cast someone for weeks and weeks, their muscle will actually physically get longer because they will add more sarcomeres in length. So basically they add more Lego blocks to the architecture of the muscle. But that's usually you take the cast off, it's gonna go back to its normal length within a couple of weeks. So it's tough to really make the muscle longer that way. So what we see is that when someone does a stretch, if you're stretching a muscle for maybe 30 seconds, then afterwards you retest your flexibility and you see it's longer. What happens is you're not actually making that muscle longer, but you're decreasing your sensation of pain. So you have a neurological adaptation to the stretch at what you just imposed on your body and allows you to move into further range of motion. Same sort of thing happens to a point when we're doing a lot of soft tissue work, which is why we often don't see a lot of stretching or soft tissue work create long-term adaptations. Some people will be like, oh, foam rolling, it doesn't work at all. Well, there's a lot of research that shows that it does. The changes in improvement in flexibility just aren't very long lasting. They're usually maybe about 10 to 45 minutes in length. Same sort of thing with stretching. So whenever we're talking about a mobility or flexibility regimen, most of the research is really only like six to eight to 10 weeks long. There's not really like long duration stretching protocols in the research to see if we can actually add more sarcomeres in length. Can we actually make the muscle physically longer, long term? Now we see a lot of these like ballet dancers and things like that that literally they stretch every single day for years and years and years. So we believe there's the potential to physically change the length of a muscle, but often what happens is that when we're doing mobility work, we're changing our sensation of pain, threshold that you get when you push a muscle to its physical length. And you allow yourself to get into a little bit more mobility range of motion. Now the thing about mobility versus flexibility is that flexibility is purely the ability to elongate a muscle. Mobility has to do with movement. It's how a joint moves, how you move in space when you're weight bearing, things like that. So for example, you could have crazy tight hamstrings yet someone could squat to full depth. So we have to understand that there's a difference and a lot of times people just love to stretch, stretch, stretch, stretch, yet they still move like crap because they don't understand how to use their body afterwards. So that's the difference between the mobility work versus just stretching to stretch. Now when you talked about someone that's looking for aesthetics, I think the big thing to understand is that mobility work is to allow better movement, better freedom of movement throughout your training and throughout your life. If you're there in the gym to be able to just look better, if you can improve your mobility it will allow you to access different parts of your physiology, of the movement, of a bench press, of a squat, of a push press overhead that could then allow for different stimulus on your body that could then allow you to maybe have different types of adaptation. There's a number of different research articles that'll show that someone who squats deeper sometimes and this is again, certain research articles there's always conflicting evidence that sometimes you may elicit a little bit more glute max activity if you're squatting deeper than someone who's maybe only doing a three quarter depth squat or a half squat. So someone that could potentially squat deeper may potentially allow themselves to have different physiological adaptations to their strength training that prior they weren't able to get. And then I think it's just about life. We don't wanna be that person that can't bend over to pick up a box off the ground because we're so stiff. So aesthetics matter, yes but having the ability to move the rest of your life is very important as well in being able to access that strength that you're creating in the gym so that you can pick your kid off the ground when he's a young kid, being able to put a box on the top shelf when you're 80 years old, being able to walk up and downstairs that in sense is mobility and strength allows you to access that mobility in a functional manner. Aaron, when talking about mobility and stretching do you subscribe and you alluded to it being a neurological issue? Do you actually encourage people while they're in the stretch to have an isometric contraction while they're also in there or do you not and why or why not? Yeah, I think you can definitely do that. For example, I love using like the world's greatest stretch. So you're in like a deep lunge stretch and driving that knee up to the side. So we're working a little bit of hip external rotation flexion on one side. And in that position sometimes sort of squeezing and contracting the muscle, that isometric contraction, I think what it can allow you to do is integrate what we would call muscle reeducation in teaching the body how to own that new movement because yes, you can push a joint to its end range of motion but adding that muscle contraction and sort of allows you to then own that new movement capability. So yeah, I think, I mean, it's a little bit of PNF at times if we're talking stretching but when we're talking movement through mobility exercises having that isometric contraction at the end range or through certain specific ranges, I think allows you to lock in that movement quality that much more so it bleeds over into your movement that you're gonna do afterwards. Yeah, it's the difference between like passive flexibility and being able to own it and control it. Exactly. Are squats a fundamental human movement? I know, I mean, from my perspective, I think squats are phenomenal. They're great performance, strength, they build incredible lower body but you sometimes get the argument from people in our space that say that squats are not this fundamental movement. I know some strength coaches will say that they only do unilateral or split stance movements with their athletes. So is it a fundamental movement? Is it something that humans should practice often because it's as fundamental to us as let's say walking or standing upright? Yeah, so I think you have to look at it two different ways. You said fundamental human movement and then you talked about training because those are two different things. So when we're talking fundamental human movements, yes, the first and foremost, the squat is a fundamental movement because it's something that we learn as a growth and development milestone. If you watch a baby, it's gonna crawl then it gets into a squat pattern and eventually to stand up. If you watch a baby pick something up, it is a way in which we as a young child learn to explore the world. We use the squat as a fundamental building block to eventually standing, walking, running, things like that. Now, when it comes down to training, I think Mike Boyle gets brought up in this a lot because he uses a lot of single leg movements, Bulgarian split squats, things like that more so than the squat. What you have to understand when we're talking about training, we're looking first and foremost what are the desired adaptations I wanna bring out specifically for the sport at hand? If I'm training a weightlifter, a powerlifter, a crossfitter, yes, the squat is first and foremost an extremely important fundamental for that training, especially in the powerlifting because it's one of the three competition lifts. As a weightlifter, the squat is an assistant exercise that allows you to strengthen and reinforce the capacity to get in and out of the bottom position for a snatch and a clean and jerk. For a hockey player, is it always something that you're in a double leg symmetrical stance? Probably not. For a baseball player, I would say potentially, especially like a shortstop, third baseman getting down in a ready position, that's a squat, I think it sort of depends on the sport at hand. And when we're looking at sport specificity, we wanna take into account what in the training room am I doing that's going to lead to better performance on the field? Do I need someone to squat 500 pounds astro-grass in the weight room if their sport is tennis? You know what I'm saying? We want to be able to bring out the best adaptations. Now, do I think the squat should be something that should be trained by all? Yes. The way in which we squat then has to meet the individual's capabilities and end goals. So while a back squat is amazing, it has to be a fundamental for a weightlifter or a powerlifter, you know, what's wrong with maybe a zurcher squat for someone else? Or maybe just like a kettlebell goblet squat, because having a load in the front and showing capacity to show symmetrical mobility through a four-range emotion that that person can perform, I think it's a fundamental movement. Now, maybe we're only doing that once a week and then we're doing Bulgarian split squats and single leg RDLs and single leg squats, three out of the other lower leg days for that athlete if they're a hockey player. So again, I don't think it's something, I think there's a lot of, it depends. And I think at the end of the day, it comes down to the individuality of what you're looking for. But I don't think there's a situation where I would ever say we completely cut out a double leg squat. But then understanding that who says a barbell back squat has to be performed by anyone. Because you can squat in a lot of different ways. I just think we have to meet the individual what goals that they need. But regardless of that, they should be able to perform a great quality looking body weight squat. Again, coming back to fundamental human movements first, and then as we go up the chain of how do we develop strength, how do we develop power, we can then base and change our things off that. But we have to, every single person should be able to perform a good quality looking body weight squat. Yeah, now speaking to sports specificity, we've all seen kind of videos out there with LeBron James doing a quarter squat. And in general, can you justify a quarter squat, say for a basketball player? I think when you look at the research, there are some articles out there where they talked about quarter squatting as far as improvements in vertical leap performance as compared to a full depth squat. I can't remember the article offhand and I haven't read it years. It's stashed away. But I do believe that there are some research articles that have shown that. Now, here's the deal when it comes to that again, is a lot of times people will take like one research article and then they'll just run with it. Just like sort of split squats or full depth squats with a barbell on your back. What's to say for a basketball player, I can't do both. If LeBron James feels like he gets benefit from doing a quarter squat in his vertical leap performance, what's wrong with doing a quarter squats one day the week and then having him do a maybe full depth goblet squat the other day the week? Again, I think there's not a right or wrong. There's an it depends. And I think when you come out and you make a big large black and white statements like I would never quarter squat. Well, then why is there an article saying that it did help some people show better vertical jump performance? I think you have to understand what's our end goal. Am I gonna have a power lifter quarter squat? Probably not. But who's to say that box squats or pin squats from different heights aren't also helpful. So I think there's a lot of it depends and variability is the name of the game at certain points in your training career. Speaking of the squat, is there an easy way for somebody to find or figure out the ideal squats dance for themselves? Is there an easy test that they can do where they can find where they should place their feet if it's a little wider, a little more narrow, feet out, feet in, or is it just trial and error? So there's a lot of it that's trial and error but there's a lot of science that we can bring into it. And I actually made two recent YouTube videos. So if anyone listening just goes on Squat University YouTube and types in how to squat for your anatomy. The first one was talking about understanding toe angle. Now, like I said, I think a lot of people haven't reached their max potential mobility wise. So this is only a small glimpse into the potential way in which you should be pointing your toes. And that's looking at antiversion versus retroversion. And basically what we do is we have someone look at their internal rotation and external rotation in both a seated and on their stomach position. So when a seated position, your hips flex to around 90 degrees and we look at internal and external. And then on your stomach, your hips fully extended. So at a zero degree extension. And then again, we look at hip, internal rotation and extension. Now, if someone shows limited internal rotation in excessive external rotation in both positions, we can say that likely they have a degree of retroversion. So their hip socket and the way the femur attaches is retroverted. So it's more of a flat angle. That person is likely going to have a greater ease at squatting deep with their toes turned out to a greater degree. Now to what degree? Obviously there's going to be a lot of variability, but more so than probably 15 degrees. For someone that has excessive internal rotation and very limited external in both a seated and a prone. So on their stomach position, we can say that they likely have a good degree of antiversion, meaning that their hip socket alignment with the femur is more angled compared to a retroverted position. Meaning those are the people that usually can squat with their toes 100% straightforward. Now again, this is only a glimpse into the potential anatomy contributions because here's the deal. Some people could have a crazy amount of retroversion or antiversion at their hip and as they grow and develop, they develop a twist, a torsion in their tibias, their lower leg bone to hide the fact that they have a specific twist at their hips. So it's not 100% this way or that way, but it gives you an understanding because some people are like, and I just cannot squat with my toes forward every time I do, I just get this huge block sensation in the front of my hip. And then they do this test, they're like, wow, I'm really retroverted. I literally have no anterior or internal rotation. And then they turn their toes out and they're like, I can finally squat full depth. Well, that doesn't say that you are never gonna do internal rotation mobility work because you probably haven't reached your end potential with that. But if you actually turn your toes out and allow yourself to accommodate for what your body's mobility needs, it may allow you to move better and that's gonna allow you to have less increase injury risk and it's going to allow you to potentially unlock future performance. So that's sort of toe angle, but there's other ways too. What were you gonna say? Oh, I was gonna ask the question of how you did though. So you said seated and on your stomach. So if I'm sitting down, do I have my knees bent in 90 degrees and then am I rotating? So essentially for the listener who doesn't know external internal rotation, I'm turning my foot out and then turning it in. And when I'm on my stomach, my legs totally straight out, I'm doing the same thing, turning my foot out, turning it in and then. So on your stomach, your knee will be bent still and you'll let your foot come in and out. Ah, got it. Okay, perfect. All right, continue. Sorry. So that's just sort of the toe angle based on retroversion or interversion. Now, another thing you can do is you can lay someone on their back and you can either do it by yourself or have a friend, but you can bring their knee towards their chest and see how far can you go before they sort of run out of end range of motion and either get a pinch sensation or just the femur just stops moving forward and then have them go out to the side a little bit. And some people will be able to get their knee all the way to their chest. That's what I can do. Like I can literally have my knee touch my chest. Some people, they'll sort of get a black sensation. They may get to like 90 degrees, but yet if I take their femur and go sort of towards their, maybe their bicep, so I bring them out at an angle, they can get their knee further toward their shoulder so they can get more hip flexion. Well, that's showing that person that a slightly wider stance can allow them greater hip flexion, greater depth of their squat. So again, it's sort of a, again, it's a lot of trial and error, but there's a few different tests in which we can do to give ourselves a little bit of an insight into what stance may bring out the most optimal squat depth and sort of position for our feet. What are some of the fundamental differences between correctional exercise and exercise to build strength and muscle? For example, I'm doing a cable row because I wanna develop my back or I'm doing a cable row because I'm trying to, I don't know, fix forward shoulder. What are the fundamental differences between the application of this is how you apply corrective exercise, this is how you apply exercise to improve performance and build muscle? I would say probably the few big differences are first the load at which we're using and the tempo at which we're going about. Now, not to say that you can't use tempo work for regular strength building, but especially when we're looking at corrective exercise for improving strength and stability, I think that's a big disclaimer that a lot of people don't realize, strength is your ability to produce force, to create movement. Stability is your ability to limit excessive or unwanted motion. Just because someone is strong doesn't mean someone has good stability. And this points back to a lot of research where they've taken people at their core and they sort of train them different ways. They've had them do dynamic movements of like sit-ups, Russian twists, things like that, things that build strength within the core abdominal muscles. And then other research where they are different, same research study, different group, where they have them do isometric. So this would be like the McGillby three, modified curl-up, side planks, things like that, things that aim to improve endurance of the muscles but to limit any spinal movement. And then they would test them after performing and they found that those who had done the stability protocol of the planks, things like that, they had better ability to limit excessive motion in the spine when they were put on the specific training regimen. So it shows that sometimes, especially at different parts of the body like the shoulders and the hips, if we're looking to improve strength, we're going to have usually faster tempos comparatively and we're going to be using more load because we have to have progressive resistance exercise to be able to show more and more strength. Whereas stability exercises, usually we're going to be going much slower because I want that person to feel for the problems, for the waverness in their technique. I want to put them sometimes into positions where they have very little basis support. So like a single leg RDL is a great stability exercise. And I would double that with a double leg RDL to improve strength, sort of they work together. So you talked about like a single arm rope. If I'm, or just a row in general, if I'm having someone do a row for strengthening their back, I'm going to be probably having them do what between usually 10 to eight to five reps with progressive load. But if I'm having someone that maybe just has poor stability of their mid-back muscles, their rhomboids aren't kicking on well, posture, shoulder, musculature isn't kicking on well. So they have poor posture strength imbalance compared to the front side of their body, which is a common reason for some people developing shoulder pain. I would maybe have them do that same row, but with less weight and in that final position, they're pinching that pencil between the shoulder blade. They're getting that good retraction and I'm having them hold for five seconds, getting that brain body connection and then a slow tempo back. So I'm allowing them to really realize how that muscle should work to limit the excessive motion at that particular joint or joint complex, to allow them to sort of build that ability to limit motion, control that area, which is then going to be a little bit different when we're talking strength and power because we're going to be adding more load and doing less reps usually. Okay, so essentially you're going to go lighter, a little slower and you're going to focus on the contraction, the squeeze of the connection, you would say, is that summarized a little bit? All right, perfect. Now, I used to own a personal training studio and I had a physical therapist that worked in there and I learned so much about correctional exercise from just from watching her. It was, I learned so much, it was a great experience. She learned a lot from me in terms of strength and performance because that was my background. You have both, right? Your background is physical therapy, but also you talk a lot about performance and strength as well. What irks you the most about the physical therapy space now that you do both? What are some of the challenges you see? Do you ever have clients that come to you from other physical therapists and then you're applying now your performance knowledge to kind of take it to the next level? Like what are some of the challenges with that space? Physical therapists hate to load the body. They have no idea across the board how to actually lift some big weights. So like you walk into any physical therapy clinic across the US and you'll see tiny little dumbbells up to 10 pounds. You'll see a lot of fair bans. You may see some kettlebells, but they're probably not over 15, 20 pounds. In my physical therapy clinic, if I were to show you around right now, I've got five barbells, a transformer bar, a barge bar, squat rack that's five feet away from our bed, kettlebells up to 50 pounds. It's the idea that functional fitness stops at 10 pounds and you can't treat an athlete. They're just a person in general because the next time they go to pick a box up in their garage, that's more than that five pound kettlebell you had them do. Like I think across the board because physical therapy in general for a long time treated very debilitated people that are injured that can't lift heavy. We didn't realize that there's this spectrum that once we get them out of pain, we have to then continue the cycle of getting them back to performance or back to strength, back to functional levels. And that requires loads. That requires you to put someone in a position where they have to be challenged and you can't do that with small little bands. I think it's something that the physical therapy profession could learn a lot from the strength and conditioning profession. Yeah, I asked that question because I actually had a lot of clients who did physical therapy and then they'd come to me and they're like, oh my gosh, I feel so much better. And I remember communicating this to the therapist that I worked with and it was great. It was a wonderful relationship where we learned from each other. So that's why, I asked you knowing that you have both backgrounds, what the big differences are. So for the average person who goes to physical therapy because they have a bad back and then they work with the normal, your average, typical stereotypical physical therapist to get their range of motion, they get their stability. What's the benefit then to get a little bit more specific? What's the benefit then to go from there to then building some strength and working out more traditionally? I think the big thing a lot of people don't realize is that even though they have gotten out of pain that doesn't mean that they are back to their prior level yet. Because what happens is that when you have injury it really cuts down on your strength, on your power, on your performance and it doesn't take a very skilled individual sometimes to get someone out of pain. You can do that by just removing the injury stimulus. So if bending forward hurts you, we stop bending forward, we remove the flexion and tolerance, we build back some stability. But then what happens is that a lot of times I get clients that are like, well, I got out of pain and then I went back to doing what I was doing and then my back pain came back. Well, it's because we ignored the idea of capacity. And capacity is your strength and your ability to stay resilient under load or just in different situations, speed power, however you're pushing your body. So while you may be able to build up some genuine core stability that's authentic for the load that you're putting yourself into and you improve your mobility, if you don't improve capacity, so your ability to withstand load and maintain postures and positions, the next time you go out to train, have your pick up a heavy box in your garage, it's going to be putting you in a situation where you could potentially find injury again. So that's that sort of in-between grace space. I think that a lot of people ignore in an area in which we can get, I think we can improve upon a lot in both the physical therapy profession or also the strength and conditioning coaches who are seeing athletes sort of get kicked out of physical therapy early, having a better awareness of how they can build capacity because that person, they used to squat 500 pounds, comes back to you and they're not squatting 500 pounds anymore. They're pain-free now, but if you put 500 pounds in their back, they're going to crumple. Well, how can I still continue along that transitional line to build back strength and build back stability and capacity so that they can't enter a normal strength and conditioning program again? Excellent. Okay, so another question in terms of helping with pain what role does controlling inflammation play with this? I mean, I know that in the past, we were told to really eliminate inflammation, use ice and take non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. Later on, we learned that inflammation plays a crucial role in signaling the body to repair. You work with a lot of people, athletes, people who have pain and have injured themselves. How do you coach them through the use of anti-inflammatory either drugs or ice? Or is it something that you even need to manage? Is it just movement-based? I think there's a lot of, it depends, because inflammation is not good nor is it bad. That's a big thing we need to understand here. Inflammation is normal. It's a normal part of the injury cycle. If you ask any medical professional what are the three stages of injury? You have inflammation repair a model. If you don't have inflammation, your body will not optimally repair and remodel the injury. So to say, well, every single person just needs to take these anti-inflammatories and ice, ice, ice to control inflammation, you're actually delaying the injury process. There's a lot of research that shows that those who ice excessively after an injury actually delay the healing process. And actually, so a lot of people use the rice protocol, rest, ice, compress, elevate. And that was from Dr. Gade Merkin, who in 1978 created the rice protocol. Well, actually he came out in 2013, I believe, and actually recanted his statement saying that ice actually hinders the healing process. And we know much more now than we did back then that it actually delays and hinders the optimal healing of any type of soft tissue injury. So what we wanna do is not stop inflammation, but understand it. And that by improving our movement within a pain-free zone, can actually bring your blood flow to an area, allow proper healing to take place, but not continue the injury cycle. Now, there are gonna be some people that are just, they're so painful, it's not allowing them to do any type of movement. For those people sometimes, cortisone shots in anti-inflammatory medications do have a place. I'm not gonna say that for a positive situation, but for the most people, what I find is that pain-free movement, using things like a neuromuscular stimulation device like the Mark Pro, the Power Dot, complex things like that, that can help bring more blood flow into an injured area and remove the injured debris that happens from any type of soft tissue injury or just heavy intense training will allow the most optimal situation for healing from anything without trying to stop inflammation. So if I could say one thing, it's to people out there, it's inflammation is not a bad thing. It's just a part of the injury cycle. And we need to try to optimize the healing process as much as possible, not just try to stop it, which same thing was swelling. Awesome. Well, I'll tell you what, Aaron, this has been a great podcast. I think we all enjoyed the hell out of this, talking to someone like you, as smart as you are and you communicate things very well. We appreciate what you're doing. It's great to see people like you putting out great information in the fitness space and then communicating it so well. You do a very good job with that. So thank you very much for coming on the podcast. I appreciate it. It's been an honor to be on, guys. Thank you very much. Thank you, Aaron. Appreciate it. Great having you. I don't want to keep talking about how fat I am. Why not? It's like the fifth episode like this one. Oh, we have? Yeah, dude. We have? Oh, yeah. No, we haven't. Close to years. Yeah. Just like an asshole. Yeah, just like piss off, bro. You've been teasing me like that for years. Take one jab and he's like, that's it. That's it. We're done. We don't need to tell anybody else that I'm fat.