Today’s episode brings back Alex Effer.  Alex is the owner of Resilient Training, and has extensive experience in strength & conditioning, exercise physiology and the biomechanical function of the body.  He also runs educational mentorships teaching biomechanics to therapists, trainers and coaches.  Alex was recently on the show talking about the mechanics of the early to late stance spectrum and it’s implications for performance training.

Something that has been dramatically under-studied in running, jumping, cutting and locomotion in general is the role of the upper body.  Since the arms don’t directly “put force into the ground” and the world of sports performance and running is mostly concerned with vertical force concepts; the role of the arms gets relatively little attention in movement.

This is unfortunate for a few reasons.  One is that sport movement has strong horizontal and rotational components that demand an understanding of how the upper body matches and assists with the forces that are “coming up from below”.  Two is that the joints of the upper body tend to have a lot in common with the alignment and actions of corresponding joints in the lower body.  When we understand how the upper body aligns and operates, we can optimize our training for it in the gym, as well as better understand cueing and motor learning constraints in dynamic motion.

Today’s topics progress in a trend of “expansion to compression”, starting with a chat on the expansive effect of aerobic training (as well as the trendy thera-gun) and Alex’s favorite restorative and re-positioning aerobic methods.  We then get into rotational dynamics in squatting, focusing on the actions of the lower leg, and finish the chat with a comprehensive discussion on the role of the upper body in sprinting, how to train propulsive IR for the upper body in the gym, as well as touching on improving hip extension quality for athletic power.

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Timestamps and Main Points:

5:00 – Why Alex thinks that the Theragun is actually a useful tool in the scope of training

15:00 – Thoughts on the use of aerobic training, and blood flow as an “inside out” expansive stimulus to the muscle and the body in general

22:30 – The importance of tibial internal rotation, and how it fits in with the ability to squat and bend the knee

33:30 – How to restore tibial internal rotation for improved squatting and knee mechanics

38:15 – Talking about Chris Korfist’s “rocker squats”, and viability in regards to specifically improving tibial internal rotation

44:00 – Isometrics and work done at shallower knee angles for knee health in respect to the vastus lateralis and vastus medialis muscles

51:00 – The importance of hip and shoulder internal rotation in sprinting, and the role of the upper body in helping the lower body to get off the ground more quickly.

1:07:30 – Narrow vs. Wide infra-sternal angle athletes in regards to upper body dynamics , and general biomechanics in sprinting

1:13:00 – Alex’s take on hip extension in sprinting and how to improve it

1:22:00 – The role of hill sprinting in improving hip extension, as well as the benefits of walking down the hill in terms of priming the body to leverage the glutes better on the way back up

1:24:00 – Why Alex likes hip thrusts with the feet elevated, relative to hip height

1:28:00 – Some key exercises to improve shoulder internal rotation for sprinting

“The vibration aspect of the Theragun I really like; if you slow the landing of running or sprinting, you will see a vibration or wave-like effect of the muscle upon impact”

“Whatever my upper back or torso is going to do; I am going to ha...