 So I think you just gave me permission to tell Reynolds that I don't actually have to get my chest up. When he tells me that, every single heavy... I don't think you fall into the short leg long torso category. I'm sorry. I just want to be able to round my back and flare my elbows on the bench every single time. You're listening to Barbell Logic, brought to you by Barbell Logic Online Coaching, where each week we take a systematic walk through strength training and the refining power of voluntary hardship. Welcome everybody to the Barbell Logic podcast. This is not Matt's voice. In fact, this is totally somewhat different. Nikki here with Andrew Jackson and Carl Schutt. Hello. Hello. Yay. So we have these guys here. They're going to talk about the new course that we just started offering through the Barbell Logic Academy on biomechanics. We are offering two classes, introduction to biomechanics and then biomechanics one. So really, we wanted to lure them onto the podcast so that we could also lure you into the class so that you can lure everybody you know into learning more about biomechanics and then we'll become better people. Yeah. I'm really excited to talk about this for a couple of reasons. Carl, CJ, and Becca and I have been working for this entire year really reworking the curriculum for the academy and then just recently transitioned into working more on what we're calling our online learning environment. So these are self-paced classes that don't require calling it at a specific time and it's allowing us to go into a little bit of a deeper dive into specific subjects. And biomechanics in particular, I'm excited about because if I go back to what got me really interested and excited about barbell training as being something more than just throwing weights around in the gym, it was thinking about the lifts in terms of physics and biomechanics and the moment model. And I'm really excited that we have Carl who's got a particular background in these things and also a passion for nerding out on the physics of things. So actually let's go over there right now. So Carl, I know a few things about Carl. I know he squats 600 pounds, right Carl? 615, but I got called for death. 6 or 2 officially. We're gonna have to kill that person. And then did you get your 600 pound deadlift? Not yet. Okay. And then did you get your 600 pound bench press? No, the bench press 470 is, but I like that my lifts are almost all at the same number. Me too. Whenever I watch your lifts, I'm just like, which 600 variation am I gonna see today? And I also know Carl, you have studied so much. You have like a really broad spectrum of things that you've studied like philosophy. I don't even, I can't keep up. Yeah. A whole bunch of useless stuff that fits together to, I think, make me pretty good at my job currently, which is coaching and getting people strong. We also do some stuff over it online, great books too, but that's a different thing. But my background, I started in engineering. So I got a, believe it or not, I got a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering in 1991. So I'm, I guess, officially a rocket scientist. That's so cool. You can say that. I didn't, I didn't really work much in the field. If you remember the time that was peace, evident time. And if you're an aerospace engineer and they're not building a lot of new bombs or airplanes, there's not much to do. And I went and got a master's degree in engineering mechanics from Ohio State, finished that in 1992. So engineering mechanics is kind of like mechanical engineering, except they switched the word around. But it's, it's probably just a little more theoretical. It's the thing Ohio State does. And after that, I got distracted by other things. I worked in engineering a little bit, mostly in civil engineering actually for a while, and then got distracted and got a PhD in philosophy. It's the ultimate thing to do if you're distracted. But I don't know. I liked school as a very, very odd person. I threw in another MA after that, but I think I'm done. My wife won't let me get any more. So anyway, I've got a decent engineering background, which I agree with Andrew. I mean, when you start lifting with barbells, when you start doing it seriously, if you think about what you're trying to do, you're trying to apply a stimulus to your body to do good things to it. And what we want to have is strength increase. And so we have to figure out what are the best ways to do that. And if you don't have that stuff that you didn't learn in high school, if you don't know forces and vectors and moments, you're really handicapped in how you can think about this stuff. It doesn't mean you can't be a good lifter. You can probably be a good coach, but I think you'll be a little bit better if you can understand this stuff. So what's your quickie definition of biomechanics? The quickie definition of biomechanics. I'll just sum that up. Give me one sentence. Yeah. It would be Newton's laws applied to the human body. How's that? Okay. Well done. That's philosophical. I like that. The way you just described it a second ago made me think of as a coach, you have this organism and you're trying to get the most out of the organism that you possibly can. And that organism has a lot of different levers and probably not pulleys, but a lot of different things that will move the segments. And you need to figure out how to get that organism in the best position to perform at its best. And in our situation, that means moving the most weight. Is that fair? Yeah. Well, it's more than moving the most weight. I can move the most weight on a rack pole. So what else is important then? Well, you know, we want to make sure that we're training the most muscle mass. And so the way this works. So when I started lifting, I've been lifting for a long, long time. I started with my mom actually back probably in 1982. Did your mom get you into it? Yeah. But it was Nautilus machines. I can remember it's 1982 or so because there were a lot of Kenny Logan songs in the gym. So I've been doing it for a long time. And when I was in college, I'd go and get muscle and fitness. And I'd just sit in the restaurant and eat a hamburger and read muscle and fitness and get the latest. What kind of stuff do you remember from those articles? I remember doing sevens, like 21s on the biceps. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, but there was never any bit of the theory and no real concern about increasing strength. It was all aesthetically based. There wasn't really much science in it. So this is just something that somebody did and that you're supposed to do and it's going to give you results. And if you did that sort of thing, you found out you didn't get the same results. You didn't get the results. I mean, those guys probably didn't do the program that they were modeling in the magazine. Yeah, that's an interesting thing that can happen. I noticed in translation is what really works isn't exciting to write about and it's not usually something that people are going to respond really positively to. So yeah, you can write these programs that look really hard and then you have these dudes that look really great, but it's actually not the same thing because the hard stuff is boring, the stuff that works. Yeah, but if you go back and look at the articles, there's just no thought about it either. This is what a squat is. This is how you should squat. I remember, everybody would look up. Everybody looked up. It was all high bar. Why? Nobody ever thought to ask why. Were you as a hamburger eating person reading muscle and fitness? Is that what you were like? Well, why 21s and Y7s? No, I was a moron for a long time about it. I don't know. I didn't really think about it too much back then, but I know I would have done better. I'm a little bit frustrated, so I'm a lot frustrated. I'm 49 years old and I've been lifting for a long time and I've only been doing it right probably for the last 10 or 11 years. So there was a lot of wasted time. I didn't know what a deadlift was or why I should do them because nobody does deadlifts in muscle and fitness. And just frustrated over lost opportunities. I got a pretty good bench press when I was 19 years old, but I didn't have anything else. I think I squatted 300. I thought that was a big deal. It was probably high. Had no idea. But I like to think of it in terms of the goal. I always want to think about strength is our goal. What will lead us to the most strength? And that's what leads us to things like the moment model of understanding the lifts. Yeah, when I think about engineering, it's creating solutions within a realm of constraints. The physical world that we live in has constraints. We live on earth that has gravity. We're constrained by our physical bodies, the segment lengths, the muscles that we have, how our body operates, and how it responds to different stresses. And one of the things you talked about is why somebody might be interested in this is to become a better coach or to become a better lifter. And in order to do that, I think you need to be able to engineer solutions. You need to understand the system that you're operating, the constraints that you're operating within, and then be able to troubleshoot, diagnose, and come up with solutions for how to achieve that goal of getting stronger. Sure. And you can do it for each individual lifter. It also helps you avoid mistakes. Right. So I'll give it some examples. So my squad is higher than my deadlift. And for most people, they look at that and they say, well, that's a problem. Why can't you deadlift more? You know, are you slacking on the deadlift? No, I'm training it hard. Yeah, I had a guy in the gym in Chicago. He's going to be the same way. Long torso, little short legs, tiny hands. My hands are normal size, but he had tiny hands. Deadlift is never going to be his greatest lift. He's going to squat a lot. Well, how do we know that? It's because we're thinking about the lift in terms of where it's going to fail. What are the limitations? If your torso is super long, you're going to have an awfully hard time in the deadlift. You're just going to have a hard time getting in the position. And if you don't know the physics involved, you won't see where the problems are. You'll just say, oh, deadlift, everybody should look like this. Right. So how does that help you in that situation? Does it help you manage their expectations around the lift and how you program? Sure. It can manage expectations. You can see some things. I've noticed this recently. A lot of people that are long torsoed when they deadlift, they look kyphotic, but they're not necessarily. So kyphosis, dear listener, is when your upper back just tends to be hunched over normally, you have more of a curve in your upper back. But if you think about it, so if you have short femurs in a conventional deadlift, your hips can only go back so far. If you have short arms, you've got to connect your scapula to the barbell with your hips in a certain position. Well, if you have a long torso, you've got 30 pounds of potatoes for a 10 pound bag. Right. So that was exactly what I was thinking. I was thinking about Mr. Potato Head with his really short arms. No waste. Yeah, that's me, Mr. Potato Head. So then you realize that some lifters, their backs are going to be perfectly flat, and that's what we want a deadlift. Some are never, ever going to get there. So I think you just gave me permission to tell Reynolds that I don't actually have to get my chest up when he tells me that every single head. I don't think you fall into the short leg, long torso category. I'm sorry. I just want to be able to round my back and flare my elbows on the bench every single time. You can. You could do whatever you want when you lift your body, your choice. Thank you. Well, and you might do other things too, like you might introduce the forbidden sumo deadlift if it's a competitive lifter. Yeah. Are we going to have to edit that out of the podcast? Yeah. No, I mean, if it's allowed in the meat. Look, what is a powerlifting? We often talk about those three criteria of most muscle mass, biggest practical range of motion, most weight. Well, powerlifting is most weight through the smallest range of motion and who cares about the muscle mass. So if you're in a competition, that's a different game. And you can understand, you look at somebody and say, no, I don't think you're going to have your heaviest deadlift in a conventional deadlift. And here's the question. If you wanted to switch someone to sumo because of that anthropometry with the longer torso, short arms, shortest legs, would they train more muscle mass by doing a sumo deadlift for them? Maybe their longevity of training would be better because in the conventional, they're just going to kind of hit these frustrating walls. Well, funny you should ask that because I'm attempting to do that. I don't think it's more muscle mass in the sumo, which brings us to another way where biomechanics can help. So if you think, why is the sumo deadlift better for some people? If you have long torso and short arms, it's not going to be great for you. Sorry, deadlift is not going to be good for you. You need long arms to be great at the deadlift. The sumo might be better for you. You can try it out and see. So I just did a set of three outside before I came down to do this. It's the muscles in the delicate region of the body that I feel the strain in the sumo, it's adductors and groin muscles. It's like you squeeze it off the ground with your perineum, frankly. I tried sumoing a few times and it really is terrifying. It's just like I feel like all of these muscles are going to detach from my pelvis and I'm a little afraid of breaking this off of the floor. Yeah. So that's not where the most of your muscle is. So you're not training this. Conventional is better for training your hips for sure. Yeah. For sure. But some people just aren't going to have a very good conventional deadlift, but this brings up something. So people will think sumo is better for some people because it shortens the moment arm. Between the bar and the hips. Right. Yeah, but that's not quite true. That's not quite true because that's a two-dimensional way of thinking. Yeah. Okay. So if you look at, let's consider the moment arm between the knee and the hip. Mm-hmm. Okay. Which direction are we looking? Just front to back. Okay. Well, if you shove your feet out, your femurs are still just as long. The moment arm is still your femur. It's just changed its direction. Right. You have brought your lower back closer to the barbell, so there's less moment there, but you've just changed the direction of other moments. So if your weak point is you can't hold your back off the ground, well then maybe you can do sumo because it'll take some pressure off that. But as you know, you're kind of crushing watermelons to get it off the floor. Have you guys done that? Tried to crush a watermelon? Yeah, with your thighs. Have you? No. Have you? No. I think we just found something we're going to try to do when we're at the SoCal camp. Gotta go to the store real quick. The 3D versus 2D shifted mindset. It kind of flashes me back to Carl Sagan, the Cosmos series that he did when he talked about Flatlanders. And so if people are only used to looking at the two-dimensional view and then they all of a sudden get flipped up into floating around and seeing a three-dimensional view, that can kind of blow some minds. Is that something that you dive into within the biomechanics class? So the first two courses are mostly two-dimensional. I'm envisioning biomechanics two as being a more in-depth look at lifts, maybe the squat, where the three-dimensional analysis will help. But this so far is kind of prep work. There's a bunch of stuff that we have to get you to understand before you can do more. You need to understand what forces are. You need to know what Newton's laws are. You need to know what vectors are. I'm sorry. But you do. And then understanding what a moment is, I think these are crucial first steps. And this is stuff that we talk about in some depth. But after you know what moments are now, you can start thinking, well, moments are vectors too. And sometimes we're just changing their direction and we're not shortening them. So I'll give you another example. The press. So the conventional explanation for the bar path in the press, which starts in front of you and then we move it back under the shoulders is we're shortening the moment arm on the shoulder. Are you shortening the moment arm on the shoulder? Because the moment arm is from your shoulder to your elbow. Right. The moment arm is your arm. Whoa. Yeah. Wow. Whoa. We need piano riffs. You're changing direction to the moment. You're not shortening the moment arm. So I think it's much more likely that the beginning of the press is front delts and triceps. And then as it comes up, it's we got to get it out to the medial delt. And that's why you flare. And if you keep it up front here, it's not a good position for... Yeah, it's not going to go. So it's more complicated than a two-dimensional analysis of the lift shows. Oh, that's good. So I remember in our first curriculum of the coaching academy, the biomechanics section was like the section that we really had to like make our students just like brace for impact and just be like, just get through the next couple of weeks. Just get through the next couple of weeks. It's going to be okay. And now it's like you're giving like people like me, like I was a good student, but I totally bombed physics while I got like a C. And now it's just like devastating for me. Like it took me forever to understand physics, but it sounds like you're creating a course that someone who's just like totally inept at vectors could handle that. Right. Well, that's the hope. Nothing valuable is without a little bit of work. It takes some work to think about this stuff. But so my appeal to people who might take the course is it's just like, you know, when you were a kid and you learned a new word, you would start seeing it and hearing it everywhere. And you might notice that in whatever field you work in. When you learn a concept, you start seeing examples of it everywhere. So I think that learning this stuff helps you see more. That's cool. Yeah. So it might take a little work. Vectors are weird. You know, they're like that from that Minion movie, magnitude and direction. It's a little strange. Don't you remember the bad guy's name was Vector? Because he did evil deeds with both magnitude and direction. Yeah. My daughter's just into that movie right now. Okay. All right. It left me hanging there. I made a pop culture reference. It fell flat. Give me a baking show reference and then I'll jump in. A baking show. If you figure out what umami is, that savory thing that, right, that fifth flavor, and then you're going to notice it. This is why Carl's so good. Okay. Thank you. And moments are trickier than that. We have to do forces to get moments. And here's a key thing that we talk about. So forces are important, but muscles generally don't act by generating forces on the barbell. They act by creating moments around joints. Hear that everybody? Let that sink in. So it's going to be useful to you to know this sort of thing. And it'll allow you to see stuff. So I can give you another example. Although we don't quite cover in biomechanics ones, probably being biomechanics too. When you start learning about center of mass and balance and base of support, you can analyze somebody's squat by looking at the feet. Ooh, yes. I like that. We've talked about that a lot. What's Scott called the diagnostic foot? Yeah. The diagnostic foot. And so you tell a lot when they walk out or when they start moving. Go a little more into that. Oh, well, when I teach it, I stole some of this from Andrew. So you should know out there listeners that coaches steal everything from other coaches. Yes. This is why this current year is a little difficult because we haven't been able to get together very much. Yeah, you know, very tough not at all. But just go around the gym and you're just like, I'm stealing that. Yeah. Oh, that's a good cue. Well, what's that? Yeah, so I think Andrew said at some point that when you teach people the squat, you have them learn the midfoot position first, right? Before they even get under the barbell and I have stolen that it works pretty well. Yeah. I like to teach people to lean forward, lean back, and feel the weight shifting around. I find that to be really useful for understanding where their center of mass and their center of balances. And then when they're lifting, you can look at the shoes and you can see the toes come up. Right. And if the toes come up, you know, center of mass is too far back. And sometimes the heels come up. You can tell them to keep their heels down. It's the cue that I like. Otherwise, we might say something like, get your hips back. You know, get your torso forward, get your hips back, shove your knees out. Or you could say, I mean, that's complicated. There's a lot of things to do. But you could say, keep your heels down. Simpler cues are better. Yeah. Especially ones that they can feel. Yeah. And that's something that a great coach does is they take that really complex ask or complex understanding and you turn into something really simple that they can do right then. Right. And so being able to see more, having this like knowledge base will help you just say things like keep your heels down. But the impact of that would be pretty tremendous. I think it also helps you understand cues that you may be saying that you don't even totally understand. Classic example for me was the cue to keep the bar over the midfoot, which is a great cue until you start trying to do it literally. Right. Yeah. Because the bar might not actually be needing to be over midfoot to be balanced, depending on your body mass and how much is on the bar and your anthropometry, it's going to be a little bit different. So it's a great cue to give to a lifter because it's effectively telling them to feel balanced over midfoot. But if you don't understand what's going on with the combined center of mass and how that should change during the lift or how that should be balanced during the lift, depending on the weight, you might be telling somebody to do the wrong thing. Yeah. You might be making them get into their heels and then you'll have to fix that later. Yeah. I mean, I remember having somebody stand on my side and tell me, okay, with an empty bar, is the bar over the middle of my foot? And I'd be, oh, I got to lean back more and lean back more. My toes are popping up trying to make this cue work. It's because I didn't understand what I was actually needing to do. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Some of the cues we give are BS cues. They're cues that aren't real. You can't actually do them, but they might be useful to a lifter. CJ talks about this in his section in the coaching academy on the model. The model is not the reality. Right. And when we teach you a model of the lift, if you are a new lifter, we might not teach you all the details because you just need to perform the lift, especially if it's like a clinic and I've got five people I need to teach to squat in 30 minutes, it's going to be pretty quick and not very much theory. Right. Yeah. That's something you'll see a new coach do kind of often as they just talk too much about what the lifter should be doing and, oh, you need to do this because of this. And they really teach them the theory of the model instead of being like, okay, keep your full foot on the floor. Right. Yeah. So for most of the time, the advanced stuff in biomechanics, Newton's laws and all that stuff, it's not going to seem like it's so useful. This is why I taught high school physics for a year and they would always say to me, when am I ever going to use this? They don't see it, but the thing is if you don't learn it, of course, you're never going to use it. Boom. That's like the first time my head just exploded in the last hour. I can't wait to use that on someone sometime. Except it'll come out like, Carl said this thing once. Except if you don't know it, you don't know it to use it. You know what I mean. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. So you might not expand out on the model too much, but sometimes you will when you're problem solving. Yes. When you have a client that is obnoxious. I have one, she's great, but I treat her differently. She'll never listen to this podcast. But I treat her differently than the other people in the gym because she likes to yell at me and she needs me to yell at her. Oh my goodness, that's great. And there's other people that you're very quiet and say, I'd like you to do this. And every time I tell her to do something, she says, why? Like with the weight still on her back? Yeah, she turned her head and said, why? And she'll never listen to this podcast that has the answer to the why. That's all right. That's all right. She's fine. She sounds great. She's really strong. But knowing the theory will allow you to answer questions like that. Right. It will help you see things that are going on in lifts. We always know as coaches, the good lifter is easy to coach, but it's also kind of boring to coach. The people that just can't get it right, that you have to problem solve, figure why is this happening? What's going on here? You guys had a podcast on knee cave. Okay. So if you ever have knee cave is like wrist bending in the press. It's one of the things I hate. It's one of the things that if the lifter starts doing it on day one, they're probably always going to do it and just trying to fix it. And so if you think about what's going on, why knees come back and why they come in. And I remember Rebecca Krieg, I always want to say the other name, but she got married. So Rebecca Krieg, she said about it, that it's quad insufficiency. And you can think about this in the moment model because what the lifter is probably doing is that the quads aren't strong enough to start the hip drive off the floor, which is another thing hip drives actually knee drive. It's quad drive. So if the quads aren't strong enough to overcome the moment on the knee, they will shift back to make that moment smaller. And so she had this suggestion and I've tried it with a few lifters and it's worked better than anything else. She said, well, why don't you try front squats? That's cool. Yeah. I've got a fun variant to that going on myself. My right knee is not as strong as my left. So my body will solve the problem by turning and shooting my hips back at the same time. And kind of like corkscrew my way up. But that feels real good. So how are you going to solve that? You're going to do some one-legged. I'm going to have pistols. Do some pistols or some Bulgarian split squats or something. I don't know. Yeah, that's sort of spicy. You said something that I thought was really cool, Carl. You said the lifters who are more fun to coach are the ones who have a lot of problems you have to solve. And I think that is important for new coaches here because they might run into these lifters and instead of it being fun, it just ends up feeling really frustrating for them and they can't help them. And so they might feel a little insecure or the client might leave because they don't have the tools to think of it as a fun challenge. It just becomes maybe a sense of insecurity and then just kind of like a failed client-coach relationship. That's a great point. Yeah, I think the best coaches are people who like solving problems. So if you can see it that way, you know, if you like, I don't know, if you like playing chess or Secret Hitler or something like that, problem-solving games, then if you can bring some of that into your coaching and see it, this is a challenge. All right, let's, if you've ever watched the Rocky movies, Rocky always is terrible in the fight until he gets punched in the face. And then it's like he wakes up, okay, all right, Apollo Creed, let's go. So when that lifter, when you say, show your knees out and the lifter brings the knees in, that's like you getting punched in the face. Okay, this is somebody to solve. So some excitement, I think you should have. And that sounds like the coach that I would want to work with. Like I want a coach who like- Oh, giddy. It's me like, oh, well, she's doing that now. Let's see what we can do about this. Instead of just like, oh, God, she's horrible. I don't want to work with this. Right, right. And to connect it to the biomechanics, I mean, the more you know the theory of the lifts, the more you do any of the educational stuff that we've done here at Barba Logic, the better. I think knowing a bit more of the physics gives you a better chance to solve these sorts of problems. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, because then you don't spin your wheels trying, you know, 15 different cues and four different lift variations. Oh, I have a cooking example for you. Okay, did you ever watch Alton Brown? I have a few times, not a time. Okay, so he always does the science of cooking. Right. Which is why I like to show. Let's say you're trying to cook pork chops. Okay, and like everybody in America, you cook them and they come out tough and awful. Yes, can't confirm. What will I try? Well, I'll cook them with apples this time and they're still tough and awful. Well, I'll do that because you don't know why they're tough and awful and you can't solve the problem. And then you watch Alton Brown and he'll say something like, well, protein bonds get tighter the more that it's cooked. And so if you overcook it, this is what happens. This is why eggs get terrible when you go past the right temperature. They're terrible. And then he'll give you a solution. Well, you could, you could brine them to put more water in the cells and make them resist it. So if you know the science, you think, what do I need to know about protein in order to cook? You'd be like that kid in my class. What am I ever going to use this? Right. Well, you're going to use it when you cook pork chops. You know, and you'll solve that problem. So our lifters are the pork chops. And we need to know how to brine our lifters. I mean, it's... Right. Pork sous vide them, that works too. So I'm curious, you know, we're talking about going into the depths of physics and biomechanics here. People that are interested in taking this class need to have any prerequisites. Do they need to have taken the academy before? Or can they sign up for this class? No, you can come into it. You should probably take the intro course first and then biomechanics one and that ought to get you ready to do more advanced analysis of the list, which I hope to do at some point in the future in biomechanics two. What is some of the coursework look like in the intro class? Well, the intro class is going to get you... I'm just pulling up my outline right now. Just knowing what the anatomical reference planes are, knowing XY coordinates, all the terms proximal and distal, knowing what abduction or abduction is. There is a teaser in the end of it on Newton's Laws. I'll show you some of the cool things you can do once you know a little bit about what's going on. So there is a... Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert, yes. Okay, this is a very, very tiny, tiny bit of calculus. I'm sorry. Ro-ro. Actually, it's not. It's just shapes. Okay, so if you graph the velocity of the end of your barbell, okay? Okay. Then you graph it versus time, that graph will have a slope. So a slope means how steep it is. So if it looks like a mountain, the steeper it is, the higher the slope. That slope is the acceleration. Right. The first derivative... The change of velocity over time. Right? Yeah. So if you just know that little bit and you can get a velocity graph of your lift, so Newton's second law, the acceleration is proportional to the force. And we're all about force generation. So if I can get a graph of your bar position over time, I can tell you exactly where you've generated the most force, which is very cool. And... That is very cool. So you can find out some interesting things. You can... You might find where your sticking points are. Right. Because where that barbell slows down is that's your sticking point. There'll be times when you are not applying positive force on the barbell. For most of us, the fastest part on the squat, the point where you generate the most force, is exactly at the bottom. Right. Right when you turn it around and drive it up. Right. Yeah. And then it dies. You know, when you get to that middle point, that's when you're going to fail. Yeah. That's when Andrew's left side is like nine inches. Yeah. I mean, it definitely emphasized the importance of getting the most out of the bounce, the stretch reflex, which we talk a little bit about in the academy as well. You know, why that is and connects to this biomechanics understanding of it as well. Yeah. So when I've been thinking about this a bit, so at least on my list, I haven't analyzed everybody's list. On my list, for the squat, the press, and the bench press, that's true for all three of those. I haven't done my deadlift. The deadlift makes me sad. You don't get a slope. You just get a frowny face. Right. But the slope of the velocity curve peaks right at the same point in all three of those lists, right at the bottom. Ooh, mm-hmm. For me, at least. And so I've brought that into my coaching. So this is the way biomechanics has helped my coaching is, it makes it very important for lifters to get the most velocity they can right when they can. There's a part in your lifts where it's easier. And you had better hit it hard when you get there. I was chatting with another one of our coaches, Jordan Stanton, because he's having us do some of us are doing velocity training. Yep. Working all right for me. Working okay for both of you guys. Both of you guys are just hitting PRs this week, right? Yep. Yeah. Pulled a five-hour in on my deadlift a couple of hours ago. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. It's working pretty well. Mm-hmm. But so one of the things that he said that he noticed about genuine competitive power lifters is how fast they move the barbell all the time. Right. Yeah. All the time. Yeah. And so I thought, well, that combined with thinking about velocity curves. So I'm getting a lot more out of my lifters by saying be faster and explaining a little bit of the science to them, just enough to convince them. Right. That, you know, when you hit the bottom on that stretch reflex, I'm not sure it's a reflex because it's volitional. Right. People talk about the stretch reflex at the bottom of the squat, but a reflex for me is something like when they hit the patellar tendon with the hammer and make your knee kick and you can't choose not to do that. But you can choose to be a slacker on your squat or you can choose to fire out of the bottom really fast. Enjoying the force generation. Right. That's our new team name just so you know. The force generation. So they get through a set of five that they wouldn't have gotten through. Yeah. Put more weight on the bar, be stronger. Oh, I dig this. I'm going to try that this week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That stuff you've done looking at the bottom of the squat and also some of the things you've posted on the internal slack discussion about the top of the extension for the Olympic lifts has been really interesting. Yeah. That's in the biomechanics one class when we talk about momentum. So I like to think about Newton's laws in terms of momentum. I think it makes more sense. So you think about a quantity of motion. So this is what Newton does. This is getting into the weeds a little bit. So a mouse and an elephant both moving at the same speed. One of them has a lot more motion. You don't want to get hit by the elephant. And the reason is because it has a lot more mass. So the way Newton did it is mass times velocity is momentum. Mm-hmm. So now we've quantified motion. So the ancients before Newton, they just didn't quite figure that out. So Aristotle doesn't really know how to turn motion into numbers. And so that's a big step. And what we found, I was looking at Andrew and Caleb's power cleans and cleans and snatches. And what I found is at full extension, I haven't really figured out why this is. But they would have the same momentum on each lift. Right. So the mass times velocity of the barbell when they were in that full extension was the same or near enough the same. That's pretty interesting. You mean Andrew and Caleb, if they're moving the same amount of weight? Andrew's two lifts would have the same momentum at his peak extension. And Caleb's would have the same momentum at his peak extension. Mm-hmm. Right. That's pretty interesting. Yeah. I mean, this is really interesting. And I don't have fully formed thoughts on this, but having been working with the velocity tools and thinking about what you've looked at, it seems that we have a maximum force production capability. And the reason I'm kind of wrestling with that idea is that we see the bar speed decrease directly proportional to the intensity, meaning on any given day, my 70 percent is going to move the same speed as my 70 percent on a different day where I might be a little bit stronger. 80 percent is going to slow down, and it's going to be directly proportional to the change in the intensity. And then we're also seeing on the weightlifting that we hit for a max snatch or clean, we're hitting some maximum momentum. And it's also somewhat proportional to the weight on the bar. So, I don't know, this doesn't necessarily blow any minds per se, but I think this idea that we have some maximum force production capability, and we can demonstrate that at 70 percent, or we can demonstrate it at 100 percent, has some practical implications to programming and thinking about how we coach our lifters to move quickly and teach them lifts that move quickly, because we want them to generate max force production as much as possible. Yeah. And for the Olympic list, it makes it really interesting. Farah Clever, I would do this. You might be able to predict. It seems to me there should be a relationship between the clean and the snatch. In other words, you ought to be able to predict what somebody should snatch based on how much he or she could clean. That would be interesting. Where it gets tricky, there is the technical component to it. That's the X factor. For the record, I can't do any of those lifts. When you have really short arms, I have to rack it inside my neck. Right. When you have baby humorouss. I have an 11-year-old boy, and we went to the beach today, and I was testing it. I said, so put your fist out, and I want you to put your fist on my nose, and I'll put my fist on your nose. We'll see who does it first. And he did it first. Did anybody get punched? No, we weren't really punching him. He's 11, and he's longer arms than I do. I thought this was going to turn into a rocky story. You were going to teach him how to fight back or something. This is what it means to get punched in the face. No, we don't do that, as far as we know. All right, so the thing I took away from this, and this is really neat, is how much more fun you can have working through problems, and how much more you can appreciate different lifters when they come to you. It's like a whole new opportunity to see how you can make them produce more force, and how you can get them to their sticking points. And like all the stuff you just have more you can bring to your clients, but also just makes you feel more capable as a coach, which I think is the most important thing for a lot of us. I also think I go a little further. I think knowledge is fun. So it might be its own reward just to understand more. I don't know. I think life's a little bit better when you know stuff. Yeah, agreed. Awesome. So if you became very curious listening to us talk about this and want to learn more about biomechanics, head on over to Barbell Logic and click on the coaching development section, and you'll see our options for courses. In addition to biomechanics intro and biomechanics one, we also have a self-paced class on functional anatomy. And those classes are cool, like Andrew was saying earlier, you can take them at your own speed. So if you want to work for a couple hours during the day, if you want to spend a lot of your Sunday working on it, like it's really on your own schedule. So you can figure out when you work the best and get it done then. But there's also group discussion, right? You can join our Coaching Academy Slack. So you're not totally alone in the wilderness figuring this out. There's also a Facebook group for Coaching Academy that you can get added to. Anybody can go join and if you want to ask questions or talk to other coaches. Oh, cool. Awesome. That's rad. Cool. Well, thanks for joining me today, fellas. Carl and Andrew. And crap, I don't know how to finish the show. You need a tagline. It's super awkward. You need a cool tagline. Go get strong. All right, thanks everybody for listening to us. This is another episode of the Barbell Logic Podcast. And we'll catch you next time.