Today’s episode features movement coach, inventor and innovator, Adarian Barr.  Adarian has been one of the absolute biggest influences on me in my coaching, as well as my own personal movement and training practices.  You will be hard pressed to find an individual who sees movement in the detail that Adarian does, while also having the experiential and coaching knowledge to back it up.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned from working with Adarian is improving my understanding of how joints work in the scope of human motion.  From the first time I met Adarian, I remember him discussing the spiraling actions of movement to take the slack out of the system, and how he prefers discussing movement on the motion of joints, rather than muscles.  I remember working on what happened when my joints were in flexion, rather than trying to resist, or “punch” my way through movement, the results of which were numerous post-university sprinting bests, and a quantum leap forward in the way I coached athletes.

“Stiffness” is a commonly discussed term in the world of athletic movement.  Athletes are generally instructed to “be stiffer” in their lower body to jump higher and run faster.  The truth of the matter though, is that in motion, there must be something in the body that deforms, and the ultimate stiffness is a limb in a cast.

On today’s podcast, Adarian takes us through what he considers true joint “stiffness” to really be, when it comes to human motion and movement, and throughout the discussion, creates the grounds for better terminology on the level of the coach, when we speak about joint deformity, stress and strain, in the scope of sprinting, jumping, track and field, and beyond.  This is a podcast that will powerfully impact your mindset on the nature of plyometric exercises, sprinting motions and constraints, and how athletes move ideally in their sport.

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Timestamps and Main Points:

4:50 – Adarian’s background in his college studies in the realm of music and athletic movement

10:30 – What “ankle stiffness”, or being “stiff” in the context of athletics, means to Adarian

24:20 – The dynamics of strain passing through joints in movement

26:30 – How much strain exists in various joints throughout acceleration and upright sprinting

36:00 – Horizontal and vertical forces in sprinting, in relationship to levers and friction

39:40 – Long to high bounding and hurdling dynamics

44:20 – How to train an athlete who needs to get up off the ground more quickly in regards to strain and quickness

55:40 – How stress and strain fit with the biomechanics of sprinting, using straight leg bounding as an example

“Stiffness to me means you aren’t moving very well, you aren’t moving fluidly… it’s not a good term… at some point in time, it means that joint’s not moving”

“If there’s movement at the ankle joint, how can it be stiff?”

“You got to get things to work together in pairs”

“How we operate in the air, is different than how we operate on the ground”

“Any type of force is stress.  The strain is resistance to that force… that’s how I engage in these things; the stress, the strain and the amount of deformity I get”

“Class 1 low strain low resistance, lots of movement at the ankle joint; class 2, very little deformity, very little movement at the ankle joint”

“At the start, things have to fold up, at top-end, things don’t have to fold up as much”

“At the start, the first thing I have to do is get to a class 2 lever, but it doesn’t take much strain to resist that force, since there isn’t a large amount of force yet”