Kyle Baxter | ETP#162

This week on the podcast we have Kyle Baxter. “Bax” is a physio by trade but with some unconventional approaches to his work which is why we wanted to bring him on. I can almost guarantee you will hear some refreshing perspectives on common lifting injuries and what you can do to reduce the likelihood of these issues presenting themselves in your future.

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Life/episode updates
7:35 - Getting to know Kyle Baxter
13:20 - Training Optimal vs. Training Hard
24:31 - Foot pressure and lower back or hip hinge issues.
41:48 - Breathing and rib cage for shoulder issues (Rib cage movement discussion in general)
54:56 - Performing leg extensions unilaterally for a better stimulus?
1:00:30 - How about unilateral hamstring curls?

You can find more from Kyle Baxter on his Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/coachbaxter/

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Transcript

0:26

What's up guys, happy Tuesday. Welcome back to Eat, Train, Prosper. Today is episode 162 and Brian and I are joined by Kyle Baxter who we like to call Bax. Very interesting person, especially his positioning in the kind of lifting and physio world which we will have him get into in a little bit once we get into a little bit of a formal update. But as always, we'd to start off with some updates. Bax, since you are our guest, can you kick us off with some of your most recent updates please? yeah, so updates on my life. I live in Thailand, Bangkok to be specific. I just spent the last week in Bali looking for looking at some investment opportunities. having coffee with Aaron in person. so yeah, that's pretty, pretty much it back to normal, normal things here in Bangkok, sitting on a computer and doing all the things that I do. Bax, what are you doing with your fitness these days? In your last seven days, are you in a contest prep? Are you training to gain? Are you doing cardio? What's your getup right Yeah, so currently I haven't, uh, I've been torn about talking about this on the Instagram, but, I am 14 weeks out from my first bodybuilding show. Um, currently everything is going very smoothly. Um, so training is really just like more of the same hyperdivisive training. Um, just trying to maintain performance while I get ridiculously lean for the next three months. Are you doing that mostly with manipulation of diet? Are you adding cardio in? So right now we are trying something a little bit new which will spark a lot of questions especially from the research-based listeners if there are some. Calories are 110 % of maintenance on five days of the week. We have cardio in at 15 minutes just up to 20 minutes per day. at 150 plus beats per minute. I usually do like 160. Today it was like 165. So like a grind for like a short period of time. And on my rest days, I am doing a complete fast. So zero food, just water, which obviously makes up, makes up the deficit in order for me to lose the fat that I need to be. ridiculously lean on stage. thought process there is in terms of like fat loss, muscle gain, anabolism, catabolism, I should be able to kind of group all of that, group all of it together. So I have like a day plus the morning where I do like most of my steps, most of my steps in cardio are on like the fasted morning on that morning. So I basically just take all of the fat loss and I group it together. And then I'm having a place where I'm actually in like kind of a surplus from a caloric standpoint, which will hopefully allow me to gain tissue as I get ridiculously lean up to a point where like, obviously there's probably a body tap percentage where that can't really recount can't really happen. But I don't know if anyone has done it this way before. Cause everyone is scared that fasting makes you lose tissue. which I don't believe is true. I kind of align with you as well. Is that a 24 hour fast or a 36? Like are you going the full day plus the night before you eat Yeah, so I won't eat. So I'll stop eating at night with my last meal, like 8 p .m. So like tomorrow I'll eat. Thursday will be my fasting day. So Wednesday, 8 p .m. I'll stop eating. Wake up, do my cardio in the morning. Just mosey around throughout the day, do my work. And then on Friday morning, I will wake up, do my cardio, do usually like, I just work on my phone. So I have zillion client messages. and I can do a lot of work on my phone. So I just walk back and forth in this alley. And I'll just accrue probably 15 ,000 steps before I even go back upstairs. And then I'll eat my first meal at like 9 a .m., 8 .30, 9 a .m. And then I'll go on with the day. So that'll be like, I guess 36 hours. I'm excited to follow that. That's definitely a unique approach. Brian, do you wanna kick us off with your updates or I guess continue with your updates please? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to be quick and I don't have much today anyways. So everything's swimming along great with all my stuff. As y 'all know, I'm in this period of time where I'm prioritizing cardio over weights for the summer, spring period. cardio's going great. after my kind of monologue on running in the last episode after reading the book Born to Run, naturally I decided I should go out and try barefoot running this past weekend and ended up with blisters all over my feet. maybe I need to take the barefoot running thing a little bit slower. I plan to do one or two runs a week along with all my biking and then all my lifting and all that and kind of keep that process going. All of that's going great, weights are moving up. I made a story post yesterday about how on the weights I'm taking this really slow methodical approach to progression where, for example, last week I did 150 pounds for straight sets all across. This week I did 155 for the first set and then 150 for everything else straight across. And just kind of like stepping up progression that way and despite all the cardio and stuff it seems to be working. gonna try barefoot running again at some point, but I need to let my feet heal up first. So that's really the shortest updates you'll ever get from me. And I feel like we mostly wanna focus here on our guests. So yeah, Aaron, what's going on in your world? How's it getting back into training again? It's been very nice. or yesterday was five weeks post -op. And I guess like my sixth or something like that session back touching some weights. I am the hard thing is where to where to not push because I do feel I feel completely normal for the most part. I'm not doing like crunches or anything like that. But I did today get some soreness in my abs, which was a little bit scary. But it's like inches away from where the incision would be. So I think it's literally just my abs have gotten pretty deconditioned from practically using them minimally, you know, five and a half weeks. So I think I just put a little bit of load in there and now they're just a two out of 10 sore, but it's the first kind of sensations in there. So I'm just being trepidatious there. Do, are you doing, like, you're not doing anything that involves bracing in the way that, you know, how you tore it potentially on the, on the leg press. You're not doing any of those lower body compounds where you need to brace or anything. No, I did two sets of body weight goblet squats of 10 reps. like, see that like unilateral leg extension, unilateral leg curl, upper body, I did use dumbbells for the first time today, anterior delt press, but I went up to 24 kilos. So still like, literally half of what I was doing before I got injured. So sets of 20 there were like pretty kind of trivial. Yeah, so still being super conservative, but enough where I can put some tension back through my muscular system and actually get a little bit sweaty and do use my body of sorts. All right, cool. So let's dive into things. So Bax, the first thing I wanted to touch on is your background a little bit, because I feel You know, we all kind of have this meandering approach to where we land or end up where we currently are, but yours is just a background that I find interesting. I was a little bit curious about it before, you you and I got to sit down and hang out. So if you can just take, you know, the listeners through kind of how you got to where you are now, because you have some strong opinions on things, which I'm not saying is necessarily a bad thing, but I think it helps if we can get a little bit of backstory for where these opinions come from. Yeah, so if we were to put Gen Pop, like training Gen Pop people in a gym as like the starting of our fitness journey for most of us, I kind of took like an inverted U path to that. So I started in high performance strength and conditioning. I was going to school to be a physio. And as I mostly hockey players, some NHL college, et cetera. I kind of got very turned off by physio. At that same time, I started teaching biomechanics at a college. I got a little bit more into the pain side. was doing, in Canada, your credential is called a kinesiologist, so in between. You basically are not a physio, but you have a kin degree and like you can build through insurance. so I started doing a little bit of that and then I got to a point where I was kind of just like working myself to the ground. So I quit both of my jobs and I just started training. Like I've got a job at a commercial gym training, like Jen pot people. and my goal was like to not go to physio school, didn't really know what was going on, but I'm like, all right, cool, I start to do this. I learned like way more about like running a business and all of that. And then I got to a point where I was still doing like the active rehab thing and people didn't, physios and clinicians didn't take me seriously because I didn't have a piece of paper. And a lot of the things that, like I really just like to solve problems. So a lot of the things I was. being told that these people were doing that weren't working. I was like, okay, why are they not working? And nothing really made sense. So I kind of had like a, it was a little salty towards clinicians of like, okay, I don't want to be a clinician because like they don't learn anything clearly because they can't help these people. And I was salty because they were like mostly dicks to me. And then COVID happened right before COVID happened. My buddy was like, Hey, I'm going to physio school. you should come. And I was like, I don't know, I'll apply. So I apply, I knew I wouldn't get in in Canada. Cause it's like harder to get into physio in Canada than it is to get into med in Canada. So he was going overseas to the UK. So I was like, all right, doesn't hurt to apply. There was like this company that basically does it all for you. You just pay the money, got like a bunch of interviews and got into school and then COVID happened and I thought I was just going to go to physio school, figure out how to be a better physio than what I was exposed to. I thought I would be humbled by physio school and I kind of went there and spent three years in the UK, got my physio degree. At this time I was doing long distance with my fiance. So I had a lot of time because it was COVID and it was an eight hour time difference. And physio school didn't really make sense to because I actually had some sort of background, which is different than most people just go straight from school to school to school to school. So yeah, I kind of just started asking different questions and seeking out answers. And then when physio school ended, halfway through physio, I kind of started doing the online coaching thing when I realized I had a little bit more time than I thought. And then when physio school ended, I was like, well, I need to, I can't be an actual physio in Canada until I get my accreditation, which takes like a year and a half after school anyways. So they're like, just like go to Asia and just hang out and do the online coaching thing. And now here we are. So that's the, I've kind of done everything in the fitness industry slash clinician industry. Like I spent some time working in a hospital in the UK, spend some like doing some other stuff in the UK and now I'm just like an online physio consultant slash online coach slash don't really know what to call myself. So that's why I basically went to physio school because I was like, hey, like I'm, I'll just, these people won't take me seriously. Like I'll just be a physio myself and then do it myself. But yeah, so that's a kind of my story, I Yeah I love that story that backstory and I wanted to include it because I think it it lends itself to where this kind of positioning where you are right now you don't do a lot of traditional kind of physio work at least from my understanding of it but you do get like flown to places to do consults you do some like you work with pre script you have a course with pre script which is one of the bigger you know companies that's kind of more closer to like like the I don't know how to really describe it but closer towards like your athletes and your trainees right. It's not like What's that term for people who just want to get back to being able to do their daily life stuff? We call them, we call them narps. Hahaha. Yeah, but like the kinder version of that. But yeah, so with that and then leading into some of the questions that I have in the first one, I like your approach to this, so I think it's worth talking about, but I want to talk about like training optimal versus training hard. And to give you a little bit of a backstory here, back. Brian is Brian's pretty good on biomechanics stuff. I would say is someone who doesn't have a degree or anything like that in those things. Brian's very, very knowledgeable and good. And he helps does a really good job of like filling the gaps of where I say things incorrectly and stuff like that on the podcast. So the listeners are pretty well informed from him. I will say, though, we have a very kind of. splitting views in the current state of the industry of like the training optimal versus training hard. There's people like us who I think try and get people on both sides to see the bigger picture. But I wanted just to get your takes there because obviously I respect your opinion and I do think you explain it really well. So can you share with us your thoughts on that please? Yeah, so I think everyone wants to be a part of something. And it's hard to just take the stance on the internet. like, yeah, everything works. Just pick something. And I think I'm in between the camp with the clinicians of like, I shit on traditional physio stuff because it kind of doesn't work long term sometimes. And then I'm more. into like lifting things, which I think works a little bit better, right? So in terms of like training optimal versus training hard, I think we need to look at like a full lifting career of like, it's not optimal if you can't continue to do it for that. Right? So say that I go to failure, pass failure on every single set forever. Biomechanics are optimal. I might not even be able to do that forever. So like, is that optimal? Probably not. So I think looking at it as you can only, when you talk about, assuming like we're mostly coming from the hypertrophy lens. And I think like you don't have to, you don't have to choose really. I think, I don't know, we've trained together. We've trained with similar people. Like we train very, very hard and also accurate at the same time. And I think there is something to be said With training optimal, think it takes a very muscular approach when I think there's a lot more to creating a stimulus than just muscle in terms of like, I need to stimulate these specific fibers. So it's become in my outside view, I guess not outside, but I guess my view of it now it's become It's not how much we can put tension across a muscle or stretch a muscle. It's how much we can load a muscle. Right? it comes and load a muscle long term. So I'll kind of give some examples of when, of when from my, especially physio perspective, like optimality falls short. Right? So we're on, we're on a leg press. Guy would just, guy who trains hard, classic bodybuilder, meathead guy, the effort crowd, would just load up gazillion plates. He'd maybe do like half reps and he would do that which is fine. Will he, in my perspective, run into issues? Probably if he doesn't take his joints through full range of motion. Could he get more range of motion and more gains with less load? Maybe. But if he goes to the same proximity to failure, does it really matter? Probably not. There is the conversation different muscle length, hypertrophying a muscle in a different way, but that's a very long conversation. And then the other side is like, I need to get as much stretch as I can across my quads. So I let my heels come up because then I can get more knee flexion, which limits the load to like 25 % of what meathead would do. Say that they're twins for this example. Right now I'm using 25 % of the load and still going to failure from a, I do think from a hypertrophy perspective, like load will always be king. So if we're sacrificing that much load for a little bit more range of motion, I don't know if the trade off is there. So like that would be like the two ends of the spectrum. And then from my physio perspective, as soon as your heel comes off, we don't have any range of motion through the. entire chain. The task will always win and our knee will bend and our hip will flex, but is it bending and flexing the way we want it to? Which is a little bit different, which eventually puts stress across soft tissues instead of putting stress, you can't really, putting stress across places we don't want that don't heal, don't recover as fast as a muscle. And that's when we run into like maybe actual injuries, but it's like impossible to say. So I think that there is, there is kind of a sweet spot. of like, we do need to load things. But I mean, effort equalizes all of that. And I feel like enjoyment and training longevity is a thing. And it's like, okay, if you like training hard, train hard because you enjoy it. If you like doing something slower with more meticulous range of motion, also do that. But there, I think there's a lot taking a side before you've tried something? Right, so like I'm sure all three of us have tried kind of both ways. And we've probably like landed somewhere in the middle. Right, because going all the way to one side or going all the way to the other, I don't think works as well. But I think people choose a camp before they have the experience to know what they're really choosing. Right, so if I was like, hey, go ahead. I saying, with that example that you're using then, where the feet up high with the short range of motion is one end of the spectrum and then the feet down low doing almost like a sissy leg press is the other side of the spectrum and you're losing stability and output because your heels are coming off, would then the perfect compromise essentially be putting your feet low, but using a full range of motion, you know, bringing your knees into your chest, but keeping your heels fully planted on the platform the entire time. And then with that said, is there potentially a difference in your mind between the stimulus that one might go for by putting the feet high and keeping the shins more perpendicular to the platform, in which case we'd be essentially trying to bias more glutes and the load? would be higher as a result of the range of motion decreasing. And then as you lower the feet down and get more knee flexion and ankle flexion, we're now going to have to reduce the load, but not as much as you would by going into a sissy leg press because you're keeping your full foot on the platform. Am I clarifying that correctly in your mind? Exactly, right? So in my mind, a sissy leg press from my perspective would always be a no -go just because biomechanically we don't move through joints well when we are quote unquote off balance. If we don't have our foot completely pressing into something, we don't have full range of motion throughout the chain. And I think the other end of that would be like range of motion for the sake of range of motion. And Aaron Aaron can attest to this without actually knowing it, but he will understand when I explain. Going just because the load moves in your joints move does not mean you have full range of motion somewhere. So if we think about the hip joint, we only have so much range of motion and we need to manage pressures in the thoracic cavity in order to get everything to change orientation as we go down. If we can't, the load will kind of like squish us and pressures will go where they want. If pressures win the battle for long enough in a place, for example, your abdominal wall, now your abdominal wall tissue tolerance might get compromised. So I think like if you look a lot of the team full ROM people on the internet, they do a large range of motion. but they're actually, in my opinion, out of their physiological range and just doing more range for the sake of range, which is not a bad thing from a hypertrophy perspective and from a muscle perspective, but there's more things to just think about than looking close into the, to just the hypertrophy lens. Like I think we need to zoom out a little bit of like, there's a nervous system that governs everything. There's soft tissues that heal slower than muscle tissue and recover slower than the muscle tissue. Right? So if we're not looking at all these systems and checking the box and we're just like zooming into our hypertrophy lens, I think that's when we might run into issues long term. But yeah, Brian, I do agree like the range of motion trade off with the load. And then like if we're biasing certain muscles, it's probably another thing that we need to think about. In terms of like, okay, where do we do we want range of motion here? And then there's another thing that we could think about it like okay. Do we want to use more? Passive structures to help move this load Or do we want to move more active structures, right? Maybe I cut the range by 10 % So I don't get enough as much connective tissue involvement. So I actually have to contract contractile tissue to move Yeah, it's kind of like if you're doing a like I think of pendulum because you see this a lot, especially in the team full ROM stuff, but they'll show somebody doing a pendulum and they'll get to the point of maximum knee flexion. But then they'll keep going down to the point where the knees actually start moving backwards. And now we're loading the hip structure more than we're actually loading the quad structure. Exactly, right? you end up with in that you'll see it a lot. It's like you'll end up with people with no glutes and just massive adductors because their pelvis is just going all over the place. And then the only thing that can push them that can extend their hip because their pelvis is just all over the place is their adductors. And then we kind of get into this when we look at it from a hypertrophy perspective is like, it is that what we want? Probably, probably Yep. So what I wanted to do is kind of shift the conversation very, similar to that, but into a few specific examples and things that I was able to learn from you that you were able to help me with within minutes, which was pretty sweet for me, to be completely honest. And the first one I wanted to touch on is foot pressure and then how that relates to the lower back and hip hinging issues. Yes. So basically we are at the mercy of gravity 24 7 365. If the body deems itself to be balanced, we will have dissociation between joint segments, meaning we will have range of true range of motion. Easy example, you do a bodyweight squat. It looks like trash. You hold a 15 kilogram dumbbell in a goblet position. It looks a lot less like trash. Right. Did we open up more range of motion? No. We just manage your center of mass a little bit better. So now we have more range of motion throughout the entire chain. Hip hinging is no different. So the prerequisites of a hip hinge, if we think about it from a joint by joint perspective, we need movement at the SI joint. So the pelvic outlet can open. That's a complicated topic, but basically we need movement at the SI joint. We need internal rotation and flexion of the hip. We need internal rotation a little bit at the tibia and we need pronation of the If we don't have movement of the foot, we have a stiff limb, we will not get a change in shape at the pelvis, which means we won't be able to load the hip musculature as effectively. If we can't put the tension across the hip musculature, the tension might go across other musculature and the pressures might go across other musculature. And then when I'm done my set of hinges, where might I feel Probably in the low back. So when it comes to, this is why I harp on foot pressure and hand, not really hand pressure, because it's boring for Instagram, but it's as equally important and upper body things are way more complicated to deal with than like lower body things. But if we look at, if we were to Google sensory homunculus, it's like this kind of topical map of the body that shows where we have the most sensory receptors, right? Four places. feet, hands, face, genitals. Okay, hopefully you're not cuing your client's genitals or face. If we can focus on distal input, right, what the hand is doing, what the foot is doing, and then we focus on changing the shape of the axial skeleton, the rib cage and the SI joint, now we have true range of motion. So if we cannot pronate the foot or internally rotate the foot, we have no range of motion. at the hip, regardless of what it might look like, because range of motion at the SI joint is something that you cannot see. If we look at research between one and four degrees of range of motion, my physio school profs actually just wrote it off as like, doesn't move at all. And it's like, no, no, no, like it's probably quite important. And if we have two degrees somewhere and I take away one, that's a 50 % reduction. So in terms of hinging, most people just don't have the range of motion anywhere. But we think about hinging of like, where do we move through the hips? But range of motion isn't local, it's global. Right? If I don't get a change of shape of my foot, I won't get a tibia that rotates, which means I don't have a knee that bends properly, which means I don't have a hip that internally rotates. I don't have a pelvis that can move, means everything is kind of like associated. So you're basically just sponge ball square pants trying to minus the legs because they can actually move. Right. So now if I'm just like a Lego guy, just, the tension just goes Does that make sense? Can we quickly clarify pronation of the foot? Because I feel like to practically put this into perspective where somebody can apply this, are we looking at pronation of the foot as like we're slightly internally rotating to the point where the pressure is being pushed through the big toe? Or like, how can we explain Okay, so there is a difference between supination, supination of the foot, very good. Pronation of the foot, very good. A foot that doesn't have full foot contact is not completing either of those supination or pronation. We're just falling over, right? So we have the two sides of the spectrum as we do with everything. We have the runner who just wears hokas and insoles their entire life and they take off their shoe. and their foot is so arched and the troll is under the arch because it's so high and the first metatarsal head, that's the bone beside your big, your big, behind your big toe, doesn't even touch the ground. That's not supination. That's a foot that's not balanced. Right? That's world's stiffest foot. We need to unstiff that foot enough. If we unstiff it a little bit, we have full foot pressure. We have what we would be supination. If we go to the other end of the spectrum, we have pronation, which is demonized. And that would be the foot is falling in so much that we lose the fifth met head, which is behind your little piggy. Right? So that's a foot that's falling over too. That's not good. We want to be somewhere in the middle where we can have pressure on five spots. I made up these five spots that usually here tripod foot, right? So the heel bone. So lateral and medial, so inside and outside calcaneus. So if you're all on one side of the heel, probably not good. This is only when we're pushing force into the floor, but that's usually when we assess these things. Right, your first med head and your fifth med head, and then your big toe. We should be able to have pressure on those five spots. And then, depending on the task, if I was doing a split squat, it's the easiest task to like kind of see this. The foot. will change shape from supination to pronation as we go through internal and external rotation. If we, and that will tell us, it's a sign that we have range of motion all the way up the chain, which means we have true hip range of If we lose foot pressure on one of those five spots, we are falling over and we immediately have less range of motion globally. We're usually talking about lower body, but actually globally. Does that make a little bit more sense? Yeah, no, that's great. love the five pressures of the foot. One thing that I've been cued on in the past, and this may be completely wrong, but to almost think of like the way a bird would grip a tree branch with its claws, you almost wanna kind of think about like gripping the floor with your feet through that. Like what would you think of that cue? I think it's a good cue for someone who is what would be maybe over, over pronated, like losing their fifth mad head, right? So they're all the way on that side of the spectrum. And then there's like the, the balanced in the middle. And then there's like losing their first mad head would be the other side of the spectrum. like we're over pronated. We say, okay, grip the ground and like screw your feet out just a little And that puts you to a place where like, do you feel full foot pressure? Good. Now your knees tracking over your second toe. Just like, keep it there. When that cue falls short is when we try to grip the ground the entire time, right? Cause pronation or internal rotation is forced production by nature. Right? If we think about how you run, if you run fast, you're just not hitting your heel on the ground. You think about like someone who runs slow, it's a little bit more. Gate cycle and running, very not the same. Gate cycle and slow running, a little bit closer. Right, so someone hits the ground with their heel, their foot is supinated, it absorbs force, they need to produce force to push themselves to the other side. As it pronates, it goes back to supination as they push. Right, so if you're under heavy load, your foot should not be supinated whatsoever. Right, you unrack a leg press, you unrack a heavy squat, your foot should already be like, you shouldn't see it change shape. because it's already there. Because it needs to push it to the ground or you would just be a bag of bones. Right, so the screw your foot out cue is not bad. I really just focus on like whatever I can say to get someone to have full foot pressure, I'm gonna say it. Right, with any cue it's like you could give me the best cue in the world and if it doesn't work for someone it's a You're on mute, Aaron. You're still on mute. There we go. I love that because it was something that, mean, within five minutes back, you were like, you had me take my shoe off and you watched a couple things. like, your foot doesn't move. You need to do this. And you gave me a couple cues and then I would pay attention as I was walking and I had very little foot pressure on the inside and just consciously paying attention to that within a day, my, what do I call it? My transient lower back pain gone. And then any time it like shows up again after like a bad night of sleep, I just have to like mentally pay attention to placing those pressures there when I'm walking as I get back into, you know, my my unilateral and bilateral squat pattern movements and then things feel, you know, better within hours, which is really, really cool. So that's one thing I definitely wanted to cover because I can guarantee there's at least a handful of listeners out there who like, shit, that happens to me. Like, maybe I should try this and then things will improve for them, which is pretty cool. Yeah. With the, yeah, go ahead, Brian. I just have one quick question on the arches thing because I noticed on your page as I was scrolling through earlier yesterday that you had a post saying, show me someone with high arches and I'll show you flat glutes or something along those lines. And that pinged a nostalgia of sorts in my mind because when I was younger, call it the 90s, and mom was telling me what was right and what was wrong. Mom told that I needed to have high arches because athletes have high arches and that, you know, she was a big fan of those, those inserts that you would put in the shoes. If you had shoes that were the arch wore out, you would buy these insoles, you would put them in, it would raise your arch, et cetera, et cetera. And she always... I'm for that. Any good force producer Will have likely very low arches if not no arch at all Mainly because to have a high arch is a slow position to be in Right in order to push force into the ground. I need my foot to pronate It's very easy to push force in the ground if my foot's already flat right so someone with a high arch has pronate the foot and then push into the ground again. It's slow. At the highest levels, milliseconds matter, right? If you look at LeBron James' foot, it's absolutely disgusting. His feet, toes are like on top of each other and all these podiatrists is freaking out on the internet, but he's LeBron James. If he had a high arch, he'd be slow because he needs to change the shape of the foot in order to produce force. But he's already there. He's ready. The gun is loaded. He just has to shoot, right? So I With the high arch thing, a foot should change, a foot has joints in it, a lot of joints. And joints should have range of motion, right? If we had no range of motion in any of our joints, we would have a big problem. But for some reason, we don't think about feet like that. So I think with an arch support, it would The only time I would prescribe that and be like, hey, maybe get this is if we had very, very chronic bad symptoms and how the foot, we needed to change what the foot is interacting with on a daily basis. So as soon as we put something under the foot, that is not the foot, that is the ground. I put a wedge under Aaron's foot, it shifts his center of mass forward. He has to compensate shift the center of mass back, he squats better. Right? I'm just changing the ground. Right? Do I want to change the ground forever on someone? Probably not. Might I want to do it to change someone's symptoms? Yes. caveat, something I'm very passionate about when I worked in pediatric physio. If anyone listening has a child, a child's arch does not develop until they're like five or six years old. your child has flat feet it's because they aren't strong enough to pull their foot into an arch yet they don't need insoles and I would have to explain this not only to parents but to other physios as well and it was the one thing not that other things don't get me upset but I got very upset about because like you're messing up but you're kind of maybe putting a child at a disadvantage All right, one more quick question on feet before we jump on. And this is a completely selfish one, but a couple of years ago, I tore my medial and middle plantar fascia on my right foot. The lateral plantar fascia apparently is still intact, so I'm missing the two middle ones. The recovery sucked. It was like 12 weeks of pain. It was awful. But now it feels mostly normal, and I don't feel like I'm limited in my performance. Just curious if you have any thoughts on whether that impacts my performance, whether, you know, running, doing hip hinging, anything like Right now I don't, like now I don't think it, I don't think it would, depending on FASHA is an interesting one because it's like, doesn't heal the best. But FASHA in a place where there's not a lot of range of motion and pressures going through there, right? It's not like around the axial skeleton where we have like a cavity of pressure pushing against the FASHA. It's usually just like a either A, you have a repetitive thing. I'm assuming running was the reason. Right? So like you just run too much. Well, I don't run. I was sprinting and I don't sprint. yeah. Yeah. Or you, yeah, either overuse or misuse or too much use too fast. Misuse being like, you basically, if you have a stiff foot, imagine you have like a peg leg, right? If you have a super high arch and you have a shin that can't rotate, you have basically minimal range of motion at your knee, minimal range of motion at your hip, but you decide like running is your thing. You're basically a pirate running across the ground because you can't change any, but then what do you You buy Hoka's and they absorb like some of the force which is good. Right? And then you're like, Barefoot Chews are the best I saw on the internet. And you buy Barefoot Chews, it actually makes you worse. So I don't think now would be an issue because you're not gonna sprint out of nowhere. But I mean, we can't really change. We can't really change anything now. So I don't think it would be an issue. My first thing would be like, okay, do we have range of motion at the foot? Can we pronate and supinate? Do we have range of motion up the chain? Okay, train accordingly. If you want to run, maybe we grade at you up to something. There is some sort of like tissue tolerance needed for these things. And then we kind of just go from there. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of the way I figured it as well. I haven't noticed any limitations, and I can still supinate, pronate. Seemed to be fine. I'm a little tentative in wanting to ever go all out, 100 meter as fast as possible type thing. But I seem to be fine running 200s, 400s, stuff like Yeah, if you can run 200, you're probably fine running 100. It was probably just like a bunch of other things as well. Cool. Well, thank you, Aaron. I'll let you continue from here. Yeah. another one of the other things that I really like to you talk about it's just different from what I've heard. again I wanted to bring these things to the the our podcast listeners is ridge ribs are rib cage movement in general. So you've you've on numerous times said very interesting things about the movement of the rib cage and how that in people with limitations of it can lead to you know shoulder or restriction mobility issues and those sorts of things. So can you give us a little bit of like a general outline of that and then how pertains to common issues that pop up with people. Yes, so in order to move a joint, usually, well, a joint consists of two bones, just generalize. I need to have movement of both of the bones in order for the joint to move effectively. That should be a very straightforward concept for even the people who don't know that much about the body. They can be like, my shoulder has two bones. In order to move my scap, what is my scap connected to? My scap is connected to my clavicle. What is my clavicle My sternum. What's my sternum connected to? My sternum is like my ribs. So it's like, okay, by proxy, if I can't move my ribs, I can't move my SC joint. SC joint, not a ton of movement. It's kind of like the SI joint of the upper body. It needs movement, don't get me wrong, but there's very little movement. But where do we get shear force if we can't? The AC joint. Right. And then if the AC joint can't do things, the shoulder girdle can't move. If the shoulder girdle can't move, the glenohumeral joint can't move. And then we have maybe some shoulder issues. So similar to what we talked about with hinging of the lower body, the upper body is pretty much no different. I think one of the things that in order, so in order to get true range of motion at your shoulder, we need to get movement of the ribs. and if we get movement of the ribs we will get full range of motion at the shoulder and the upper limb very quickly. For example, if I wanted to improve my overhead range I might grab a band and do a lat stretch. which would transiently give me the ability to put my arm over my head a little bit higher. And would that range of motion be true range of motion? Probably not because we're not moving. We're not changing the orientation of all of the joints on the chain. If I, for example, was like, okay, Aaron, you suck at getting your arm overhead. I'm going to manipulate your ribs a little bit, maybe just even teach you to do it through breathing. through trunk movement. Now, as soon as your ribs move, your clavicle can move, which means your scap can move a little bit better, which means your glenohumeral joint, the pressures in the joint are now different, which means now muscles are in a different orientation because everything's controlled by the nervous system. Now you can get your arm over your head. Now we use that range of motion and now we don't lose it. And this is my literal philosophy of like why training is the best thing. because as long as you just train well, you never have to do boring physio things. My goal is for no one ever on the earth to have to do boring physio things because they're Does that make sense in terms of the ribs? Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And would you say, just to give, we always try and make things like practical and have takeaways for people. What would you say is one of the most effective ways that you can kind of teach that to someone or that people can conceptualize ways to get a little bit more movement of the rib cage? Okay, very simple. Everyone here has probably heard about belly breathing. You want to do the opposite of that. Your lungs are not in your belly. They're in fact in your rib cage. So what I'd like someone to do, everyone listening can try this right now, take your hands, put it on your ab wall. If you have a hernia, put it right over where the hernia is. you're going to close your mouth, you're going to tilt your chin up a little You're gonna put your tongue on the back of your teeth. You're gonna breathe out slow through your nose, very, very slowly until you feel like you almost need to gas for air. And then you're gonna breathe in slowly through your nose. But I don't want your abdominal wall to push into your hand. As you breathe in slowly and quietly, should feel 360 degree movement of your rib cage. It will be hard for everyone. Congratulations, you just improved your shoulder range of motion. Not just in flexion, but in internal rotation, external rotation, literally everything. Okay, I've never once heard that we should breathe in that manner. It's always been explained to me that belly breathing is like the proper way to breathe. So is this like just a drill that we're doing or is this like how you recommend breathing in general? Okay, so breathing, just like walking, is an autonomous task. Meaning, it is beyond conscious control. If you don't think, you'll breathe. If you don't think, you'll I want autonomous things to be autonomous, right? I'm never gonna tell someone how to breathe. I'm never gonna tell someone how to sit. I'm never gonna tell someone how to walk. And if I give someone, if I train someone's body to have kind of a different way to do those things, when we're not thinking about it, we might use that different way a little bit more, right? So with the breathing stuff, it's like, okay, usually what say, say you're my physio client. You say Aaron's my physio client and he has a hernia. Like, okay, you suck at managing pressures in your thoracic cavity and you ripped a hole in your belly. Cool. We should probably get more rib cage movement. We should probably get more pelvis movement. First exercise, we're going to stack the rib cage and pelvis. We're going to take away gravity. We're going to put you on the ground in probably like a bridge, a very low bridge position. And you're going to do exactly what I just explained. You're to do that for 10 breaths. then we might put you into something else. Then we might eventually lift. And then eventually you'll get good at that enough that you don't need to do the boring stuff and your ribs will just move around and you'll be able to manage pressures. But in terms of like things that are autonomous, I always want to keep them autonomous. Nothing pains me more than someone who's like, have bad desk posture. And I'm like, yo, you've been dieting for 30 weeks. You're energy deficient. Your body's trying to save energy. Right? So all the autonomous things should stay autonomous with the breathing stuff. It's something that we can practice to just make a different way for our, we're basically modulating the nervous system. So the brain finds a different way to do things. And that's why when Aaron was like, these things made such a quick change. We're all physio is doing. If we're not actually like healing tissue, which most of the time we're not. We're just trying to find a tissue that's not actually injured. We're just modulating the nervous system. Right? You feel pressure across your low back. We move the shape of your pelvis by giving you different foot pressure. You have less stress across your low back. We have bad shoulder range of motion. We manage pressures in your thoracic cavity by giving you specific breathing cues. 10 breaths later, wow, my shoulder feels so much better. And then we just go use the stuff and then we're good. Does that make sense? Yeah, so I guess like is that are we still like is the intention then I mean it's autonomous but I guess the clarification in my mind would be like I've always heard and felt myself that that more diaphragmatic breathing seems to create a higher stress response within my body and it seems like the belly breathing allows me to get more parasympathetic and kind of it's like the more meditative state of sorts. Is that accurate or like, yeah, I just tried to assess It depends on, okay, one, there's no such thing as breathing that doesn't involve diaphragm. Right? Two. the belly as we just Yes, so that basically is just a byproduct of the speed in which you exchange air with the Right, so a slow exhale or inhale is by proxy parasympathetic. Right, some people will say like one is one and one is the other. If you're exchanging air with the environment slow, you're in a relaxing Do you know when you need to exchange air with the environment fast? When your pH is frigged or you need a high oxygen demand, one of those two. That is not parasympathetic by any means. So, sorry, can you repeat your question? The question was, I think you mostly answered it. mean, my experience and that of other, I guess, experts in the field in quotes would just be that the belly breathing and specifically the exhale, which you alluded to, potentially has more parasympathetic feelings than faster, shallower breathing that maybe would be more associated with keeping it in the upper chest as opposed to in that full kind of belly spectrum. Yes. So with that using more, so we have our primary muscles of breathing, mainly diaphragm, intercostal a little bit. And then we have our secondary breathing muscles, right? So if I just use my diaphragm, which occurs when I exchange air slowly with the environment, that would be like a parasympathetic activity. If I was to exchange air faster, with the environment than a resting tidal volume. I wouldn't be pushing my rib cage open by creating negative pressures with my diaphragm. I would be using my external musculature to actually pull my rib cage open. Right, scalenes, neck muscles, I've tight, I have a tight neck because I'm a mouth breather. Right, you're just exchanging air with the environment too fast and you need to change the shape of your rib cage in order get the air in. And if we can't push the rib cage open by creating negative pressure with the diaphragm, because the amount of air we need is greater than the speed in which we're inhaling or exhaling, we need to use external musculature. The more musculature we use, the more sympathetic it becomes. I think that's a better way, a better way to explain it. With all of these things, we are fighting an uphill battle because of our lifestyle. for multiple reasons. Number one, we don't move around as much as we should. A human should take like 30 ,000 steps in a day. Two, this is a part of the barefoot shoe argument, a human should not walk on hard concrete or tile or anything except the forest. Right? So as soon as you don't have super squishy shoes, we are at a disadvantage. But if we have super squishy shoes walking on a hard concrete, we're actually off balance. So we're actually at another disadvantage. So we're just at a disadvantage all the time. Three, we stare at screen for way too long. And there is something, everyone has probably heard of sleep apnea. There is something called screen apnea. It's basically the same thing. Will you stop breathing when you stare at screen for too long? And the more of those sympathetic activities we do, the more joint range of motion we lose. the more of these things might be an Does that make Yeah, it's interesting. I would love to dig into the mouth breathing comment that you mentioned, but I'm going to let Aaron take it from here for a second before we run out of time. Yeah, so I wanted to make sure we covered some lifting things, which I mean, I know you love talking about backs and I think that's where some of your best information comes from. There's kind of two parts, they're very related. Performing leg extensions unilaterally for a better stimulus. So can you give us a breakdown? This is something that you and I talked about in person of why that might be in kind of some suggestions for someone who maybe has some issues, joint issues when performing like seated leg extension where they might like pain on the inside of their knee or something like that. Yeah. so I actually have a new opinion about this in terms of, and it kind of works for lats as well. So in terms of bending my knee and extending my knee, I need a certain amount of range of motion at the hip and at the shin. Right. We assume that if the shin is on the pad, we're not getting a ton of shin rotation in which it still is. The shin is still rotating. That is what knee flexion is, If I do something unilateral, I can modulate my position of my pelvis relative to my femur that is on the seat, which is putting my femur in a different range of motion, which is going to affect how my knee basically functions. so someone who has a hard time bending their knee doesn't have a lot of hip range of motion experiences some sort of pain with usually on a knee extension. It's in the shortened position. because the knee is actually already extended and we're trying to extend it more. Modulating the position of our pelvis on the seat just by proxy of doing it unilateral might be a little bit better. caveat to that kind of the tension argument we talked about if Someone does have good range of motion Depending on the brand of leg extension. I think bilateral is the play if we can line up shin knee and hip Simply because it regardless of the low I think it allows for more stability even though there will be probably double the load Because the pelvis won't kind of be like rotating, you know, you defined a place for your other foot. You're kind of a little bit more locked in. take home, easiest way to get good at leg extension if you have knee issues. Don't put your shin in the divot that is made on the leg extension because that's where everyone puts their shin and it's way too far out and it's not in line with your knee and your hip. Which means you're basically twisting through your knee in a place that's not the best. Your knee will be already extended from a joint mechanics perspective when you're in because your tibia is like turned outwards. So take your feet or take your shins and put them a little bit more close together on the divot so that as you extend, you shouldn't see your kneecap move. If you see your kneecap move, your hips are going everywhere. That's not true range of motion through your knee. One, you'll get a better actual stimulus. I do think there's like a regional hypertrophy conversation to be had there. People who suck and have knee pain. bending their knee will have different quad development than someone who actually can bend their knee properly. But yeah, that would be my tip for quad extension things. Something that just kind of went off in my head as you were speaking and I wish I thought of this when we you and I first talked about it. Well months back I kind of discovered when setting up on the leg extension that if for the listeners if you ever gone to like a yoga class and they have you sit down and then they have the the yoga instructor will say to like remove like pull out your hips to like kind of expose like your sit bone which pretty much means get your fucking butt cheeks out of the way. And when I would do that I would find that I be able to get like a much better set and stimulus and really what I was doing was just kind of like internally rotating my hips a little bit to line things up and I have a pretty big glutes and an ass so it'd be like getting that out of the way so that I could internally rotate and sit a little bit more aligned and I'd be able to get like a much better stimulus out of it so I just wanted to bring that up as I thought that could potentially be helpful for the listeners. Yeah, like with single joint exercises, with a lot of exercises, we need to understand where we are moving through. I think one of the other ones where like big glutes come into play is when we're doing some sort of like core bracing. For those listening on podcasts, I'm doing the quotes, air quotes, like core bracing dead bug activity. When someone's like, you got to keep your back flat on the ground. It's like, no, no, no, your spine is an S and you have massive glutes. If your back is flat on the ground, you're doing something wrong. So understanding where we're moving through and what joints shouldn't move as we move other joints, probably a little bit more. It's so individualized. Like my training partner, Ben, his hamstrings are so big, he has to like pull his hamstring out of the way. and relax it so he can get a nice position to put his femur on the quad eccentric. Which is just a tomfoolery. But the way he does it, it's way better than if he contracted his hamstring and his quad is like a foot off, like his femur is a foot off the seat. Now it's not lined up very much. So individual differences very much, so make it. Those are the big things that I wanted to cover. Brian, did you have any follow -ups while we have the last few minutes? No, not really. Man, I thought it was a really interesting conversation, though I love when these conversations are able to make me think about things differently or someone brings a different perspective than what's commonly held. So I think that it's always kind of good to self -test your, shit -test yourself. would be the way of saying that. So I thought that was really cool. And then you had also mentioned the same thing that he talking about for hamstring curls, single leg as well. That was in the notes. So is that kind of the same idea there along with the stimulus that you might receive from doing the single leg extension? Yeah, I mean, that's actually how how backs and I originally started that conversation is we were doing seated leg extended seated leg curls and like I would get some only on one of mine. Some in some some some medial pain. And he was like, basically, look how you have your legs set up. And I would like have them out like a V. And then I forget I think I would either like I just had my legs not straight pretty much. And he's like, yeah, look how you're trying to bend your knee. does. as you were externally rotating as you were in the leg curl. Is that, is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So no, I feel that too. I feel like the, single leg leg extension, single leg leg curl, really do allow you to just get that slight hip rotation in there that allow things to line up just much better. so aside from my inclination to hate single leg movements, cause you have to do double the amount of work and fail twice. I do see the benefit there. Yep. Cool. we can wrap this one up. Bax, can you tell everyone where they can find more of you if someone is having some pain or issues that they would like some help solving, the best way to get in contact with you and those sorts of things? Yes, quick take -home messages before we leave number one get your full foot in contact with the ground and or surface that you're using Number two rather belly breathing is a myth and you've been lied to your lungs are in your rib cage. I promise If you don't believe me get an x-ray as you breathe you should feel your ribs move, but don't think about that all the time If you want to hang out with me And or if you need some physio ask help My Instagram is coach Baxter Co a ch and then Baxter like my last name DM me I answer all of my DMS. I do everything through there. I actually deleted my website because it was just a waste So yeah, DM me give me a follow. I'll follow you back message me say hey the podcast sucked But you're still sound like a cool guy and then yeah, it's pretty much Awesome, yeah. And I'll make sure we put everything in the show notes for you there. So again, appreciate you, Bax. Thanks for coming on and sharing some of your insights with everyone that listens to ETP. I'm sure we'll get some messages and questions from follow -ups that I will have people kick over to you. So again, thank you for coming on. To everyone listening, appreciate you guys. always, Brian and I will talk to you next week.