004 Proximal to distal sequencing

Hello again and welcome to the high performance physiology podcast. I'm Chris Beardley, I'm here with my co-host Rob Narseri. I'm going to talk about proximal to this or sequencing today. So essentially the last couple of episodes have been focusing on ways to gain maximum strength, ways to gain maximum speed and of course combining those to improve power and but essentially can't really understand the context of those adaptions until we start to map the by mechanics of specific exercises and one of the most important principles of by mechanics is the proximal to this or sequence. So what we mean when we say the proximal to this to sequence is that during pretty much every athletic movement whether that's jumping, running, throwing, anything like that, there is a specific order in which the joints reach their maximum angular velocities. So essentially if you're looking at a jumping motion or a sprinting motion where you what you will see is that the joints more proximal to the central body proximal meaning closer to the kind of center of the body. So the hip in this case, the hip is going to start accelerating first is going to reach its maximum angular velocity first and then what you're going to see is the knee reaching its maximum angular velocity. Second of course the ankle later on. So there's a sequence in which the maximum angular velocities are reached. Now the reason for this is because we are transferring kinetic energy from the more proximal segments to the more distal segments. Essentially every time I explain this I always come back to this image of like a kind of a superhero character so standing on a moving vehicle and then jumping off the moving vehicle at some point. And when the superhero jumps off the front of the moving vehicle you know disappears into the distance what should actually happen is that the vehicle and it doesn't happen in the films of course but what should happen with that enormous amount of kinetic energy you should see the vehicle go backwards. Imagine like a character cartoon character maybe on a moving vehicle and they jump off the vehicle should move backwards to that enormous amount of force being generated in order for the character to be able to jump that far forward you should see the car or the vehicle go backwards. Now essentially that's happening in a proximal to this to the sigle so the hip will start rotating the you know obviously that proximal segment will start moving and then as it reaches towards its maximum range of velocity the knee will start rotating and that will push backwards and decelerate the segment the rotation of the hip and allow obviously that kinetic energy to be passed onwards into the knee and then the same thing happens with the ankle and you can do the same thing in throwing motion as well with the rotation of the torso and the movement to the shoulder. So what we're saying then is that all of these athletic movements involve the transference of kinetic energy from the central body outwards and it follows this very distinctive sequence that you can literally measure you know in a laboratory setting and watch athletes moving in this way. So the reason this is so important well there's a number of reasons but I'm just going to highlight two of them before I withdraw to Robin and get some input from him on their programs he's writing and how they make use of this principle but basically two of the most important observations are that we can draw straight away are that because the movement is always starting approximately that and the energy is then being passed down the body from the more proximal segments those proximal segments are going to play a bigger role in driving the actual at the movement and the success of that movement. So the extent to which somebody is good at running jumping throwing those kind of things is going to be more dependent on their ability to produce force or more accurately power depending on you know what we're talking about mostly power output is pretty closely related to these kind of athletic performance metrics but if we're trying to generate a high power output at the hip and we're trying to produce a high muscle force to generate that large power output then we're going to be more successful in doing that because the hip plays a bigger role in the overall movement because of this proximal to this still sequence. So essentially the proximal sequence the proximal segments are going to be more important and more distal. Secondly and this is the part that nothing most most S&C practitioners get that to a certain extent. Well I think they tend to miss and I think this is really exciting and I want to you know kind of develop this over a number of kind of episodes in the future and we come back to this idea in the context of specific movements because we will talk about how to optimize you know kind of vertical jump height and you know sprinting speed in those kind of things but most people miss the fact that when you look at the angle of velocities of the hip and knee and the ankle or you know any other sequence of joints that we're interested in the more proximal segments always reach slower maximum angular velocities than the more distal ones. That's literally just because you're passing kinetic energy down the chain and so you can reach higher joint angular velocities further down the chain because you've got more kinetic energy at a point because you've got everything that you generate the dot dot point plus more besides what it means is that the hip in the case of some mic jumping off sprinting is always going to reach a slower maximum angular velocity and that means it's going to operate close to the force and the spectrum in comparison with the segments and the joints further down the sequence and so as a result you can actually benefit much more, they're essentially more force dominant, you can benefit more from strength training than the segments further down the chain and in some situations in really fast movements if you look right at the end of the sequence like the distal segments of the sequence distal joints of the sequence you're basically fine that you're moving so fast that there's no possibility of adding really anything in terms of kinetic energy unless they're you know kind of right to begins the velocity end of the force-fosterous spectrum so the strength training isn't going to do anything and I think this concept is super super interesting you know we've talked about it before Rob many times about how this kind of feeds into strength training programming but you know that's that's the introduction that's the explanation so but can you give us some examples of how you're using these ideas and you're in your training programs at the moment? Yeah definitely Chris. I mean coaching tons and tons of people and everyone has different goals and stuff like that so I got some people to want to improve the jump height as the kickboxers want to improve their kicking power things like that we talked a little bit before we got out about grapplers and stuff they would need. Oh one of the things you just mentioned is how the force outputs of the hip always super important so one of the big ones you know we just talked about a little bit but hip thrusts people used to hate on the maton and I've gotten into programming the more and more over the years including the matons of programs you know how they're barbell or machine when people have access really trying to get just high loads out of the hip joint and training it out like a shorter muscle length as well that's generally going to cause a lot better to what the athletes going to need many know also you train that short muscle length super easy to recover from train a little bit more frequently through the week yeah so when you're trying to improve jump height things like that starting there and then like you said the knee being a little bit more balanced still so you know I use a mix generally above them maybe some loaded jump work loaded jump work things like that and then when it comes like the calf you know further on down the line just as fast stuff as possible so just like some repeated calf hops things like that I don't really overthink that end of things too much and then to expand on a little more I know you and I just mentioned about like grapplers and things like that so for thinking of hip joint work for like those kinds of athletes we just mentioned good mornings before we got on and I know I joked about for me it was always easy to like pick someone up you know when they're holding on to me on my back something like that I had tons of good morning work in my programs over the years and we were just talking about keeping the torso stiff while you move the the hip joint there and I think that's really really valuable I'd use good mornings with tons of athletes for a record strength in that over the years it just hadn't really actually fought honestly as much until more recently recently about why it was so useful so that's a really good one verse hyper's great for keeping everything torso not moving and just moving the hip so really like those as well if you have access to a good machine I'm working in my gym we have one of the Atlantis ones it's very nice even customized loading a bit as well but even kind of the old school ones like Louis Simmons made a really nice so when it comes to the hip joint I'd say those are probably some of my favorite ones stiff like Denliss we talked about as well so where's with the hip thrust you'll get a lot of glutes good mornings you're gonna get some more vectors in there while the hips working obviously the the stiff like Denliss when you keep knee nice and straight and don't extend it as you go like maybe your Romanian Denliss you're gonna get a lot more hamstrings so you now you're chatting out before we got got on here about if you have him thrust for glutes stiff like Denliss for hamstrings that would be a really nice combo and then you know all the usual caveats they're training them heavier lower ranges making sure they're recoverable session decision things like that well when I'm going about designing a program that's kind of where I'm starting you know really optimizing what's going on at the hip first and then you know like we just said the knee a bit more balanced depending on the activity I don't tend to worry about it as much so a bit more of a mix of things some speed work some heavier work depending on what the athlete might need well this is the that's just kind of capturing that point there that you said depending on what the athlete might need that's the really interesting thing about this focus on heavy strength training for the hip isn't that I mean because like we were saying you know before we jumped on the core it's so easy to include enormous everybody's program if not everybody's program because because this because that is going to be relatively forced dominant except in maybe sprinting more balanced it's going to be pretty much for dominant and everything that the athlete is doing because it's the starting point of the proximal to distal sequence which means that it's max angular velocity isn't going to be as high as stuff further down the sequence so you can pretty much throw it into everybody's program and it'll work because even if you're athlete who's already pretty forced dominant and says like people are going oh well maybe we shouldn't you know do too much heavy strength training with that athlete so I will know if you think by the approximate of this to sequence, you can still actually get away with doing heavy strength training for the hip in that athletic training program and it won't create a negative effect. This is one of those great examples of how essence C sometimes ignores biomechanics. So you can have essence C and they're kind of going, "Oh well we need to make sure force velocity profiles are optimal for my athlete." Therefore, you know, I've noticed that this athlete has a force dominant vertical jump at the moment. So we're going to stop doing heavy strength training and just do, you know, kind of unloaded stuff and it's like, "Okay, but if you bring biomechanics into the conversation, you can carry on doing heavy strength training for the hip." Yeah, it won't, I'll just. Because it's not going to hurt, because you can't really get to a point, especially not for a vertical jump. You can't get to a point where your hip is too force dominant, not really, not for a vertical jump. Okay, maybe for sprinting, you can, and that's a separate conversation, I mean, but ultimately that would be, you know, kind of extreme under the spectrum. Generally speaking, you know, for something like a moderate kind of force velocity type activity like vertical jump, you're really not going to get a point where the hip is going to have to be trained without heavy strength training. So it's the really cool situation where, as you were saying, when you kind of introduced your ideas, you were saying, you know, your programmes are going to include these things because you can pretty much program and ferozibody and it's always going to work. You know, and just picking up two things that you said prior to that, you mentioned about how. What you talked a little bit about kind of the vertical jumping side of things and improving, you know, kind of hip extension in that context, but then you went on to talk to them about grappling. So let's expand that to a little bit, because I think when I've asked people for questions on Instagram, one of the most, kind of sort of common questions I get for this podcast is, you know, let's hear more about the combat sports side of things, let's hear more about, you know, kind of strength training or just training in general for, you know, various different combat sports, but, you know, that's the theme that I'm starting to see in the question. So maybe people are following you and then asking for questions on that, but it doesn't matter that our audience is interested. So let's kind of dive in and talk about this a little bit more. So, you know, you frame this as saying, you know, okay, so we know that we've got three major hip extenses. So we want hip thrust, you know, for the glutes, you know, we want something for the adductumagnus and hamstrings, which I think, you know, stiff leg deadlift is fantastic for does, you know, most of that, okay, so sure if we've got a particular requirement to really add mass to the hamstrings, maybe we bring in a couple of other things, but in an athletic context, I think, you know, hip thrust plus stiff leg deadlift is going to get most people most of the way there, most of the time. But then you brought in this idea of including good mornings, which I think is really, really interesting, you know, because most of the time, and the way I think about it is that most of the time in athletic situations when the athlete is just running around jumping, doing whatever they do, you've basically got hip extenses, the tar, obviously driving force into the ground, but the only thing they're having to stabilize in the upper body is the upper body weight, which isn't going to be massive most of the time. If their an athlete is running around, okay, fine, there are rugby players and, you know, kind of American football players who are gigantic, but, you know, most of the time we're not talking about throwing a huge amount of weight around in the upper body. So it's not that big a deal to be able to maintain the torso completely stiff, but obviously, in certain situations, and I mentioned from a little amount this recently, I mentioned, obviously, rugby being a great example of where I guess American football is large, I don't know, I think, about tall. But it's a background that you come from, doesn't it determines what you kind of know? But obviously, you know, again, super interesting in the context of grappling, kind of in the combat sports space, where you maybe have got an enormous amount of resistance to you, extending the hip, which has been applied to eight point on the torso. So you're trying to extend the hip, but it's the torso that's resisting, it's not necessarily that you're trying to, you know, drive away from the ground, is you're trying to drive somebody off your back or move yourself in a direction that other person is resisting you. And if you all kind of have been, been over because you can't maintain the torso in that position, then your hip extensors aren't going to do what you want them to do in that. And that's why I think the example you gave that good morning and the application of that, you know, I think is really cool. Yeah, there's a, and there's a really famous moment in combat sports, everyone always likes to watch, everyone who's been watching for a long time. There's a guy named Rampage Jackson and he picks up a guy, Ricardo Arrona, over his head one, Ricardo's trying to put him in submission and absolutely slams into death on the ring. That's not straight. I was never tried and just went and so I always think of that when I'm thinking of like the type of strength you need and like those scenarios and those guys just have like absolutely enormous back strength. You know, someone like that who know problem can pick up a 200 plus pound guy and just drive them through the ring for almost it was a crazy moment. But yeah, the good morning is so, so good for those, you know, strength like that. I think they've really fallen out of favor as well. I don't really see them program to tongue, you know, out of people tend to think of only I guess the context of hypertrophy now and then, you know, on the other side of things, things are like way too sports specific, like look exactly like the thing you need to do. And a good morning is just going to give you like brute strength like that. Some people find them uncomfortable. So I guess another thing I'll mention when it comes to programming them is if you have access to like a safety bar or something like that or the pad on your back in a much more comfortable hand position, maybe than a straight bar. Just as useful, really, really love safety bar myself. So I use those a ton probably one of my favorite variations. And if you have like, I don't know if you've heard of them, but maybe one of the transformer bars by like Kabuki strength, you can change where the loading sits on the bar. So you can make it more like kind of a front squat position if you're doing something else or you can shift the weight. So it's much more suitable for a hinge position. So if you have bars like that and a lot of gyms, a lot of athletes do now, those are really, really nice just hinging with those and frigging mornings and that. So it makes it much more comfortable, you know, one more like easy on the shoulders for some people. So yeah, those are all things that I look at on a program and those as well. Cool. Now that's really cool. So yeah, basically depends obviously on the situation that we're programming for, but ultimately at the end of the day, what we're looking for is to apply this proximate to this sequence in the contact of training program by saying that, you know, we know already that the hip is going to play a bigger role in many of these movements because of its proximate nature. And but also it's going to be more force dominant and doing so. So we can apply more strength training situation, more strength training methods to maximize its development and its contribution. The opposite is going to therefore be applicable to the opposite end of the proximal to this sequence. So this is why when people say to me, you know, why don't you put in like, you know, so many times I get questions from people saying, why don't you why don't you think that isometric car phrases or why do you think car phrase training is a great idea for others and like because it's a distal segment, it's like any time you're moving and they, you know, kind of an athletic situation when you're moving quickly, the car is going to be moving really quickly. You're not going to be able to do what you think you can do, no, in that situation because you're just moving too fast. So, you know, it's like and and then I kind of had to explain to people recently that if you then add on the fact that if you're doing like a cyclical movement like sprinting, you know, you've got this conservation angular momentum problem, you know, as well. So, you know, you've you've you've create this enormous amount of kinetic energy with the hip, you passed it down and the momentum, the angle, you move away quickly. And then in a cyclical movement like sprinting, you would have to accelerate now and go back here. If you've got a large mass at the end of your kind of sort of proximal distal sequence, your distal segment by, you know, your cars are heavier, it's like running with heavy boots on. You're not finding after really to accelerate and then it's going to tell you a lot of energy then go right the opposite direction and then it's going to do the same thing at the opposite end of the game, cycle. So it's just going to massively, massively massively slow you down. So, not only is it pretty much pointless because the force under the kind of force, force, force, dispatcher is not helping you when you're moving that quickly. But secondly, it's actually going to create problems in many of the situations if you've got this conservation, van der Momentum problem. So, ultimately, you know, we can learn not just what to do, you know, in what we've been talking about, you know, all these kind of hip focused exercises, we can also learn what we might want to try and avoid, you know, and it was great when you had describing the exercise sequences that you were programming. You mentioned that primarily for the calf and the the proximate to this sequence, you're kind of focusing more on the plyometric side, you know, yeah, I mean, yeah, I just don't worry a ton about it. Why would you? Because that's not the moment you can do it. Yeah, it's like, how is it going to help you? I mean, sure, it's like there's scenarios where you might want to look at a tendon stiffness and people say, okay, well, you know, so, okay, I'll say metrics. No, but don't go overboard with it and start, you know, kind of, you know, not that anybody really does have the ability to add huge amounts of calf muscle mass really, but no, and they're choosing that too. It's just kind of like an illustration of how this kind of proximate to distance sequences working. Cool. So that's kind of like, well, I would say, the most important, you know, kind of core of this topic, but when I do talk about this, I do get a couple of other interesting questions. And one of them is what happens if you're going from like a body movement, like throwing, for example, and we will do an episode on throwing, and I will explain exactly how the proximate to distance sequence works. It's just a little bit more involved than it is in so much jumping because you actually have two, you have a rebound, you have one into the ground, which looks like jumping, and then you have the other one which goes all the way back up through the body and kind of reverse the body. versus the original one, but then carries on into the torso and then obviously down to the arm. What happened, and this is a question I get a lot, what happens to the proximal to this tall sequence if we add an implement? So if we're describing the basic throwing action, but then I say, okay, well throwing and striking something, like in golf or, you know, cut a baseball or anything like that, obviously involves an extra second added on the end of the body, then like exactly, that's exactly what it is. It's an extra segment added on the end of the body. So what does that then mean? Well, it means you've converted most of your body into a more proximal set of segments, you know, and so this is why if you put somebody who's literally just throwing an object like a ball and you're a javelin and you put that person next to somebody who's you know, kind of athletic pastime is hitting a similar object like a ball with a bat, then you tend to find that a person who is doing the hitting tends to have more overall muscle mass than the person who's doing the throw and that's literally because we're seeing someone who's more segments, more of their segments are now classified as proximal. So you can kind of go an extra kind of segment down when you do any of those guys and a lot because a lot of the questions I get with people are okay, so you know, why is why is this, you know, baseball athlete, for example, why are they gigantic, why are they so good at, you know, kind of hitting everyone's. So well, it's because when you add the extra segment on the body, you are making more of the body act more proximally and so you don't end up having the same velocity limitations that you would do if you were, I mean, golf is probably an even better example. Yeah, I think it was throughout the body. Well, a while ago, you and I, it's quite a while you and I had added about like, why over the years, golfers, club players and all that, I've gotten so much bigger as they're, you know, hitting abilities have increased and like, that was exactly why they can just use more that mass and then have much more, you know, hour and all that from it. Totally. And as I say, it's that extra segment that you win. It's like, you know, in the case of athletic movements without those extra segments, you kind of say more really the most proximal segments, the only one you can really go to town on when it comes to heavy strength training. I think with the extra segment in your hand, you probably get maybe the extra joint that you can kind of push it and maybe you start to see, you know, so really, I would say, you know, to give an example of this, I would say, if I was looking at, you know, sort of literally throwing a ball, like pitching, I would say you're unlikely to see any benefit of, you know, kind of meant to pressing in that situation. I would say unlikely. I don't have guys, but I'm trying to have their throws. It's mostly going to come and we'll do a whole episode on this concept. We're really trying to do this as a short and sweet intro to a concept that nobody's really talking about, but actually is, you know, almost 90% of the exercise selection process that I go through and after I take program is just possible to this to sequence analyzing. But, you know, if I'm looking at a picture, most of their kinetic energy is coming from the lower body and the torso. After that, it's just mostly velocity under the spectrum. You're just kind of passing on kinetic energy from the rest of the body. And she isn't going to do anything. I don't think in those situations. But if you then say, well, okay, well, what about actually the other end of that athletic environment, whether it's in the ball, is that I could say, okay, well, maybe you could see some benefit from bending in that scenario. It's like there's a difference there because you've moved the segment, the segment has allowed you to move the torso closer to your proximal center of the sequence. So you've moved away from the thing, the end result. And I think that's that's really kind of the answer to the question that people ask me, which is how does it change when we go from just a throwing, I could object with my hand, to actually having another segment like a golf club or a baseball or whatever. How does that then change what the kinetic sequence is doing? Doesn't change it fundamentally. It just adds an extra segment on and that allows you to have more proximal segments that are going to be more forced dominant, essentially, in that context. So yeah, I think I kind of answered the bit that you were probably doing. Sorry about that. I was just kind of on a roll talking about, you know, bench press scene and stuff. I can't stop you. So I've been told it's like, yeah, not allowed to stop middle-aged people or complain. Yeah. So Jake has the same problem actually. He says, is this their way to meet the finish because it's like, if he interrupts, people are just writing read messages and say, don't interrupt him. But it's great. And it was, I mean, it wrapped it up so nice. And it's like, you know, when I'm coaching people in a golf and things like that, like the Rizel is a big primary focus on more of the heavy strength than the things. And like you said, like working, you know, they have joined very heavy, you know, I have a lot of heavy squats, partial squats, you know, or else have put us all sorts of things over time. But it just very heavy strength training focus in that scenario for the most part. I know we've talked to about like heavy rotational work for the core and things like that. Those work great as well. Versus just, you know, ripping a medicine ball as fast as you can over and over with no real end goal and mind. So many people loved it. Which is actually worth just, this isn't, this isn't a hundred percent relevant to what we're saying today. But it does refer to the proximate understood sequence. I often tell people that fatigue is going to stop them from improving coordination in a movement of their practicing. And I think maybe I say, like, maybe a minority of the people in my once don't actually believe that. Or if they do believe it, it doesn't translate into that programming. But the proximate of this sequence is actually one of the features of coordination that you can measure quite easily. Because you literally just ask the sort of data study you've collected. Or what point in the time, you know, you kind of say it's taken them as one second, for example, to complete the count movement jump. You break that down into eccentric and concentric phases. And then if you've got like motion capture of the athlete, you basically just say, you know, let's just graph the point at which the hip is accelerating and then kind of decelerating and the knee is accelerating and then the ankle joint is, you know, kind of accelerating and decelerating. And you'll see that there's a proximate understood sequence and they color occur in this really nice order. You get a nice kind of wave of the hip joint on the graph and then you a knee joint and then you get the ankle joint. When you ask someone to do exactly the same movement in a fatigue state, those three curves superimpose on top of each other and you get all three happening at the same time. And that's just some good data and handball players, right? Where pre-fatiguing disruptively the same thing with the upper body as well. Exactly. So you get this thing where basically the proximate or distal sequence disappears if you try and get a fatigue goes, no, if the fatigue gothly is doing exactly the same movement that we're doing like three minutes ago. You put them through a fatigue workout. You get to do the same movement again. The proximate or distal sequence disappears. I mean, the reasons behind that are probably, you know, deserving of of a separate episode. But the point I'm illustrating here is that we can actually observe a movement pattern or a key feature of the movement pattern, which is the proximate or distal sequence. And we can show that it gets immediately a lot worse because we're now not passing kinetic energy from one, you know, joint to next. Yeah, meaningly, that's a lot worse, which contributes to reduction performance. But of course, what it also means is that my efficiency, the optimization of my movement is now just tanked. My brain is going to recognise that I'm no longer as efficient as I was. And there's now no way I can actually improve the existing coordination pattern. You can't practice movement pattern badly. It's probably a brain to learn something positive from that. Yeah, way, arguably you could say it's going to learn to try and avoid that. But you can't really avoid what fatigue does for reasons we'll get into in another day. But what it can't really do is it's kind of upgrade your existing kind of software, if you like, to be a better version of what it is by practicing things in that fatigue state. You know, even though that isn't really hugely relevant for what we're doing about today, it's just, you know, using the proximate or distal sequence as a way of teaching the fact that, you know, fatigue does have these negative effects and it is going to stop people from benefiting from those kind of improves that they're hoping to get. So, you know, a lot of the time, I think, if this is not the biggest mistake in essence, see, it's definitely on the first page. So, a lot of the time when we're practicing something, there isn't, there's maybe a clear goal in mind for the outcome that we want to improve. So, let's say you've got a bunch of pitches throwing, as I, oh, we're doing this because we want to get better at throwing. Okay, cool. But what are the adaptions you're trying to create? So, if I'm, if I'm saying, okay, but, you know, I'd quite like them to improve that coordination a little bit. Okay, great. Well, if we know that, then you're going to need to make sure that fatigue isn't building up over the series of throws that you do, because if your proxy, but to see distal sequence disappears, your gloss is going to drop, and it's going to drop primarily because actually your coordination is worth. So, you know, not strictly relevant to what we're describing today, but I think it is just such a good opportunity to, you know, show people that when I say that coordination is reduced because of fatigue being present, we actually do know that it's not like, you know, we're kind of inferring it from some of the data set. It's like the proximate of distal sequences really will describe, we know it's happening, we know it's a really key feature of the boom. If we lose that, we absolutely are going to see forms going on. And so it's really cool that, you know, we do have data showing that fatigue does negatively affect it in that way. Yeah. And I think I mentioned in the, the first episode we did about like people trying to improve punching power and things like that, and they're doing, you know, those things like weighted punching and, you know, circuits and things like that. that and that's the exact same thing. You just get tired, you just rub that coordination. I know most of the hardest hitters I've ever seen, my brother being known, like when he was still active for like his ridiculous power. When he was hitting the bag, hitting mitts, he was always, you know, fresh as he could be doing like single shots, just throwing as hard and as fast as possible. And there really wasn't anything too too specific when he was focusing, you know, from the sport I'm actually doing the sport. I've improving his power. He was just hitting as hard as he could over and over with some good rest between. And people at the time were trying to keep their power up when they were tired and doing all kinds of weird goofy things like that. And he was hitting harder than all of them doing just some punches, sorry is a good, some kicks, sorry is a good, and then just doing, you know, the other stuff in the gym and that, and then not getting super tired and doing garbage reps. I mean, and of course, punching itself is very similar to the throwing kind of concept. So again, like where we would expect the kinetic energy to come from in a throw, we would also expect the kinetic energy to come from the same place in a punt. So again, when everyone's kind of thinking to, oh, I need to make my arms stronger. It's like, not really, that's not where your power is coming from. You know, the power is coming from the hip really and the torso rotation of the torso and the extension of the hip are probably going to be, you know, or definitely the primary factors in throwing. You know, so you expect them to play a pretty important role in punching as well. And I just, I don't think the data is quite as extensive in punching as it is in throwing. But fundamentally, kind of, you know, that's the territory that I think we would be in. So again, you know, for all those listeners out there who are, you know, pestering me asking, you know, for more information on the strength training for combat sports, you know, really, you know, start with proximal digital sequence, look at the movements and they get, okay, so let's extend this a little bit away from just talking about proximal digital sequence. And let's just talk a little bit about needs analysis, you know, in sports, you know, how are we actually, you know, choosing which movements to go after? Well, we look at the sport, we look at the points in the sport that are critical, you know, we go, how do we get the athletes better at doing those things, you know, you know, you describe punching the kicking, you know, whatever aspects of grappling are going to be really critical, you know, and you look for the key aspects of those by mechanical situations, you okay, great. And most of the time, you're going to find that the proximal digital sequence is going to apply. And of course, that means that we can go chasing after these, you know, kind of hip-based exercises, you know, back torso-based exercises. And that's a really good point, actually, for something just to say before we finish. Even though the rotation of the torso is absolutely critical for so many of these situations, like the throwing and, you know, potentially the punching and certain situations, certainly, you know, kind of swinging, you know, bats and clubs and racquets, and that kind of thing. We do almost no rotational work of any mean for nature, in essence, see. And okay, fine, people are going to send me all kinds of videos of some kind of cookie exercise, whether balancing on something, waving a cable around. I'm like, you know, don't get it. What we're describing here is a, as a, like, an exercise for which the same rules apply for everything else. If you have low stability, if you've got a high stability demand, and you are having to stabilize yourself, you know, to move a cable, that's not going to do very much for you in comparison with the exercise that already has the stability baked into it. And I think, essencey really does lack good high stability rotational strength training. And yet, like you were saying earlier, with the kind of strange power exercises that people do, a lot of people will train rotation with power. And I'm like, sorry, what? - It's like, this is a very proximal segment, if not, you know, the proximal segment of certain situations. So why would you be training it for power when you would actually need to train it for strength? - To work for us down in it. - Yeah, it's a force dominant segment. This is one of those kind of like, things that I sort of bring out in conversations when people are asking me to consult, and I go, all your rotational work is power based. Why is that? And then they kind of told me through their rational and then I explained to them, it's a force dominant segment in the proximal vis-to-sequence. And you can literally see a kind of the computations going on. They're going, right, okay. So we're really missing something pretty fundamental here. And if we bring this in, it's gonna actually, and yeah, probably will. Because if you're athletes, it's just, it's like imagine that you never did, ever did any kind of squats ever again. You literally just did jump squats. You'd be like, you'd be like, wow, I'm gonna lose so much my pro. You know, and this is even more proximal segment than your quad dominant squat series. So this is a bigger loss to your program than what you're kind of worrying about. If I tell you you can't do squats again, I'll just hypothetically, not that I would, but it's like hypothetically. So that idea of saying, locate back to the drawing board, how can we go about looking for ways to train rotation in that way? And I think not only is I seen not really doing very much in that space, but the gym equipment doesn't seem to be available to me. I've rarely seen a good piece for that. There was a, I can't even remember his name, a guy who had posted a violin and serum who had a great super stable machine set up for rotation. And it was one of the few ones I've seen that one, like really nice and not conky. And I, I wish I could remember the exact piece. You know, just scrolling one day saw it. And I was like, wow, that would be absolutely great to have. I don't have it. Well, if anybody out there is listening and they know of some really cool ways, even if it's, I mean, even if it's a way that they've kind of, you know, kind of figured out with a barbell, maybe with a, you know, kind of a rotational situation with a barbell with a weight on one side. I don't know. But, you know, if somebody's figured out a way of training rotation for strength in a safe, unstable way for an athlete, that will be fantastically valuable for everybody. You know, I do, I do confess that when I do consulting and mental shifts and things, you know, and I explain this to people. And they expect me to kind of re-allow this perfectly designed exercise for them. I'm like, no, that's not my skill set. You know, I do physiology a bit of biomechanics. I tell you how this is working. You need to find like somebody who's more of an engineering mindset to, you know, kind of, you know, figure out the solutions to implement in that. I would expect that in many of these athletic movements, if you trained rotation for strength, you would actually get a surprisingly big improvement in power and speed, output to the movement, because you're actually training a pretty proximal segment in this particular context. Yeah, I mean, most boards, a lot of the stuff you were describing with the hip exercise, but also this rotational stuff in certain context could be really cool as well. - Definitely. - Fantastic. So I think that's a great episode today. I actually ran on a lot longer than I thought. We would, I thought it would be over 20 minutes. - Oh, yeah. - With us. Great. So thanks again, Rob. Great to have you here. Appreciate it. And thanks to all our listeners as well. We'll be back with another episode next time.