IOL Strength and Conditioning

by Mike Robertson

This past year, I’ve stuck to my traditional routine of constantly bombarding myself with new information.  It just so happens that I’ve gotten a chance to review Dan John’s new book Never Let Go, as well as his 4-disc DVD series. As a result, I came to a fairly major conclusion:  Dan John is smart. I’m definitely not the brightest bulb in the bunch, but I can say this with a fair amount of certainty.

While I’ve taken away a ton of nuggets from Dan over the past 8-10 years, here are four of my favorite tips from the man himself. I’ll do my best not to mangle his words!

#1—Goblet Squats are Sweet

I remember first hearing about goblet squats several years ago, when Dan gave his infamous squatting presentation at the LA Sports Performance and Nutrition Seminar in Los Angeles.

He rambled on and on about how important goblet squats were, how they could teach how to squat safely and effectively, blah, blah, blah. At the time doing in-home one-on-one training, there was plenty of time for me to teach people how to squat.  Who needs another tool?

When we opened our gym, Indianapolis Fitness and Sports Training, I started training in small group settings again. These weren’t one-on-ones anymore; I had groups of two to four people at a time to supervise.  Along those same lines, there were often up to ten other people training on their own in the gym.

Those goblet squat things I totally ignored a while back? All of a sudden they became an integral part of my programming.

Not only do goblet squats teach how to squat properly, they do so with a minimal amount of coaching effort.  A few quick cues and the clients are off and running. So yeah, those goblet squat thingies work pretty well.

Well played, Danny, well played.

#2—Reflexive Core Training is the Real Deal

I’ve been turned on to offset loading for years, but it wasn’t until hearing about it from guys like Dan John and Stuart McGill that I considered making it a bigger part of my programming.

The basic principle here is this:  If you don’t have to coach or cue someone into the right position, if you can “trick” them into doing what you want, that’s a powerful exercise.  I like to call it reflexive training.

We know  goblet squats teach how to keep the chest up and out, open up the groin, and squat between the legs.

Waiter’s walks and offset farmers walks cue to stay tall and activate the core, all without having to think about it.  The action is reflexive in nature: Hold a weight on one side of the body and the body has this weird tendency to turn on the opposite side of the core to stay upright.
This single Dan John concept has revolutionized our training at IFAST.  Beyond waiters walks and farmers carries, we’ve extended offset loading and “reflexive” core training to bilateral lifts, unilateral training, and just about everything between.  If you take a second to review my Single-Leg Solution training package, you’ll see reflexive/offset training is a huge component of how we do things.

#3—Attack the Zipper on Your Kettlebell Swings

One of the biggest issues we see with new clients who perform kettlebell swings is the inability, or unwillingness, to “tame the arc.”  Instead of keeping the kettlebelll tight to the body, especially in the bottom of the lift, they’ll have a tendency to get loose.

Attacking the zipper may be one of the single best cues in our coaching arsenal.  After a quick description of how the lift should look, I simply tell my clients to “attack their zipper” —not only actively pulling the kettlebell down, but pulling it directly at the crotch.

The result? Their swings are tighter, more explosive, and balance is improved immeasurably.

#4—Punch and Crunch Your Way to Turkish Get-up Success

“Punch and crunch” is to the Turkish get-up just as “attack the zipper” is to the swing.

Time and again, the most challenging portion of the Turkish get-up is the start.  There are many different cues to get people to do this properly—lead with the chest, lengthen the straight leg, drive with the down heel… And while all of those are great, coaching is often defined by how few words you can use versus how many.

Punch and crunch effectively describes exactly what we want people to do.  The moment people hear this cue, the light bulbs turn on and get-ups immediately look better.

Summary

Dan John is the man.  He’s quickly become one of my strongest coaching influences in the strength and conditioning world. Don’t be an idiot like me – listen to what Dan says and apply it immediately.  The guy knows a thing or two about training.

As by now you know (since I babble a lot), I spent most of my working hours between January and June editing and putting the packaging around Gray Cook’s new book, Movement: Functional Movement Systems, Screening, Assessment & Corrective Strategies. Today that book ships from the printer, and tomorrow, Gray, his co-authors and I get our first look at the results of our efforts. A few days after that, those of you who have preordered will get a shipping confirmation of a book on the way.

I don’t have the writing skills to even begin to tell of the insights I’ve gained while working closely with Gray these past months. Prolific in writing, he’s not, er… all that great at email, so most of our interactions are by phone. Gray’s this brilliant guy from whom those gems of how the body works just flow during a conversation. Plenty often, I’ve had to make him stop talking to give me a chance to sort out a thought lingering from two sentences before.

And that’s what will happen to you as you read his new book—nearly every page has a buried nugget that you’ll have to stop reading to ponder, insights you’ll be thinking about for the rest of the day. Still, you probably want to know about the structure of the book, after all this talk, what’s it really about anyway? I spent a day distilling the content into a couple of sentences per chapter to help you decide if this is the right book for you.

I can say with confidence: Anyone who trains, coaches or treats individuals or teams will find value in this text.

Chapter 1—Introduction to Screening and Assessment
This introductory chapter builds the foundation you’ll need to fully understand the purpose of screening movement. You’ll learn the concept of movement patterns and how to recognize these patterns in action, as well as the history and primary goals of movement screening.

Chapter 2—Anatomical Science versus Functional Science
The next 16 pages expand on the differences between authentic movement and scientific anatomical function. The functional systems of muscles, joints and ligaments are covered, as are the fascial matrix, breathing and the neuromuscular network. Understanding movement deficiency and dysfunction and how these develop will illuminate your work, and clarify your explanations to your athletes, clients and patients.

Chapter 3—Understanding Movement
In Chapter 3, you’ll gain an appreciation of the natural laws of basic movement before specific, with an overview of how to use screening, testing and assessment to classify movement proficiency or deficiency. You’ll also get a summary of the differences between the two systems, the Functional Movement Screen (FMS) and the Selective Functional Movement Assessment (SFMA).

Chapter 4—Movement Screening
Where in your intake process should you screen? Can you screen an injured client or athlete? This section will help you place movement screening in your existing business model, or it will show you where your program structure might be improved.

Chapter 5—Functional Movement Systems and Movement Patterns
This summary explains the differences between the two systems, the FMS for fitness professionals and strength coaches, and the SFMA for medical professionals. You’ll get a brief look at the systems, and finish with an appreciation of primitive and higher-level movement patterns.

Chapter 6—Functional Movement Screen Descriptions
The chapter used to cover the FMS will teach you the seven basic screens in detail, including where to stand, what to watch for during the movements and how to plan your modifications. You’ll get a description of each screen, the purpose of each, tips for testing, implications and photographs showing how to score each test.

Chapter 7—SFMA Introduction and Top-Tier Tests
The top-tier assessments of the SFMA are covered in these 26 pages, which contain a discussion of the overlying considerations of functional versus dysfunctional and painful versus non-painful, the overriding criteria of the SFMA system. The seven elements of the top-tier will direct you to the breakout tests found in Chapter 8.

Chapter 8—SFMA Assessment Breakout Descriptions and Flowcharts
Taking 58 pages and 66 photographs to cover the SFMA breakouts will serve to remind medical professionals of the individual assessments, and at the same time make fitness trainers and strength coaches aware of the tests used by professionals to whom they refer clients and athletes. The rationale for each of the breakout regions will pull the process together for you as it simplifies the overall approach.

Chapter 9—Analyzing the Movements in Screens and Assessments
Chapter 9 teaches how to analyze the various test results. Using the tests of the Functional Movement Screen as the base, you’ll learn what mistakes most beginners make in screening, how to distinguish between stability and mobility problems and how to determine asymmetries. Here you’ll get your first introduction to reverse patterning (RP) and reactive neuromuscular training (RNT), two of the primary corrective tools of the Functional Movement Systems arsenal.

Chapter 10—Understanding Corrective Strategies
This begins the wrap-up: What do you do with the resulting screen and assessment information? The 20 pages of Chapter 10 comprise the performance pyramid and how to use it to form your corrective strategies. Understanding the differences between correct and corrective exercises, between challenging versus difficult, and having a selection of self-limiting exercises in your exercise menu will give you confidence as you assign and program exercises.

Chapter 11—Developing Corrective Strategies
Now that you’ve discovered dysfunctional patterns in your clients, athletes and patients, the next section will guide you in the corrective decisions that make up the three primary categories of mobility, stability and movement pattern retraining. You’ll get comparisons of conditioning and corrective exercise, movement prep and movement correction, skill training and corrective prioritization, and understand when each is appropriate.

Chapter 12—Building the Corrective Framework
This chapter provides a checklist for your corrective decisions: pain, purpose, posture, position, pattern and plan. Even though every person’s movement is unique, without this framework, your corrective path will not be as clear as it could be. You’ll also become familiar with the basic structure involving special considerations and populations that may make up part of your client or patient base.

Chapter 13—Movement Pattern Corrections
Chapter 13 builds on your knowledge of basic mobility and stability corrections and movement pattern retraining. Using passive, active and assistive techniques, you’ll be able to help your clients, athletes and patients recover lost mobility. Understanding stability and motor control, transitional postures and using facilitation techniques such as reactive neuromuscular training will give you the tools to challenge that new mobility. You’ll also become proficient at rolling after practicing the material in this rich chapter.

Chapter 14—Advanced Corrective Strategies
Finally, in the 24 remarkable pages of Chapter 14, you’ll learn how to make corrective exercise an experience. This is how corrective exercise actually works in the human body, and the thorough discussion found in this chapter will teach you how to create this for your clientele. Using PNF, RNT, reverse patterning, conscious loading, resisted and self-limiting exercises, you’ll grasp the concept of the manageable mistake zone, and you’ll be able to use these ideas and techniques to stand out in your crowded professional field.

Chapter 15—In Conclusion
This wrap-up section pulls the material together for one last review of where the industry is now, and where it’s heading. When you finish this section, you’ll have a complete understanding of the 10 principles of the Functional Movement System. These principles will guide you in learning and training authentic movement.

Appendices

• Michael Boyle: Joint-by-Joint Concept
• Gray Cook: Expanding on the Joint-by-Joint Approach
• Greg Rose: SFMA Score Sheets and Flowcharts
• Laurie McLaughlin: Introduction to Breathing
• Gray Cook: Introduction to Heart Rate Variability
• Gray Cook: Functional Movement Systems Team List
• Gray Cook: Early Perspective and the Jump Study
• Phil Plisky: Core Testing and Functional Goniometry
• Lee Burton: FMS Scoring Criteria and Score Sheet
• Authors: FMS Verbal Instructions
• Gray Cook: Conventional Deep Squat Evaluation Process
• Patient Self Evaluation Forms
• List of Illustrations
• References
• Index

About Movement, head of the Russian Kettlebell Certification and author of Enter the Kettlebell! Pavel Tsatsouline wrote, “Once a decade comes out a book that you will keep reading, rereading, and crowding with notes until it falls apart. Then you buy a new copy and enthusiastically start over. In the 1990s it was Verkhoshansky and Siff’s ‘Supertraining.’ In the 2000s McGill’s ‘Ultimate Back.’ Enter the 2010s and Cook’s ‘Movement.’ It is a game changer.”

by Gray Cook
Excerpted from
Movement: Functional Movement Systems—Screening, Assessment and Corrective Strategies

If you did not yet see the first two parts, click here to start at the beginning.

Ribs, vertebrae and lots of muscle and fascia crisscrossing the front and back of the thorax cause thoracic stiffness. We don’t inherently have a lot of mobility there, but we need all we can get. However, stiffness isn’t just something we need to get rid of. Stiffness is there for a reason. Biological mechanisms that move very well in childhood will develop stiffness following an injury or following repetitive bad mechanics over time. If the body doesn’t stabilize correctly, it will figure out another way to get stability: it’s called stiffness.

If you find tight hamstrings or a tight T-spine and you just hit the foam roller, you may change mobility, but you will see the stiffness return the following day. Mobility efforts without reinstalling stability somewhere else simply don’t last. Those hamstrings were tight for a reason. That T-spine is stiff for a reason.

If you don’t also backfill some of that new motion with reflex muscular integrity and motor control, you’re going to have a problem. Usually we see tight hamstrings on people who don’t extend their hips well. They don’t use their glutes well, and so the poor hamstrings get double-time. The hamstrings get too much use, and they fatigue—a fatigued muscle and a tight muscle look very much the same. It’s all just protection.

Most T-spine mobility problems occur in people who also don’t have full range-­of­-motion core stability and strength. We may see a tight T-spine on a person who can side plank or front plank for an hour, but who don’t have great core stability through a full shoulder turn in the golf swing. This may be a stiffness developed as a protection. As we get up in the thoracic spine, we’d like to have mobility.

In the scapulothoracic complex, there is only one boney connection of the scapula to the entire axial skeleton (rib cage or vertebra) and that’s at the sternoclavicular (SC) joint. This is where the top end of the collar bone and sternum meet. The acromioclavicular (AC) joint and the SC joint are at each end of the collarbone connecting the shoulder girdle to the rest of the body. But that poor scapula is floating on the rib cage, held in place mostly by muscles and by two joints that aren’t much bigger than the joints in the index finger.

That scapulothoracic area needs stability. Does that mean we don’t have to get rid of some trigger points in the upper trap first? No. But often that scapula is stuck in the wrong position. We think it’s stable, but instead it’s just not mobile. It doesn’t mean it’s stable where it ought to be. Sometimes we loosen that scapula up to make it more stable. We foam roll the upper back, do a little bit of stretching of the teres major, stick a little ball in the armpit, stretch that out, and reset the scapula. Then we train it for authentic stability, but only when mobility is acceptable.

Once again, we see tight traps, and we think the last thing we need to do to those shoulders is add stability, thinking instead we need to do mobility work. Maybe you get the scapula back where it belongs, but if you want to see if it’s stable, watch the person deadlift and see if the exact same scapular position can be maintained throughout a deadlift. No? Then the individual has no stability. The deadlift represents distraction, and plank and pushups represent compression. The stable shoulder must be able to manage both situations.

At the glenohumeral joint we look for mobility. But certainly you can think of a person who dislocated a shoulder. Once you see the dislocation, you may think everybody needs to stabilize their glenohumeral joint, but if you actually go around and measure glenohumeral range of motion, you might start to feel different.

In past shoulder training, we’d work on the rotator cuff and try to strengthen it. Then we got better and realized the shoulder needed a stable base. That base was the scapula.

How can you make the scapula stable if the T-spine is stiff? The scapula may be moving around in-correctly or too much when the shoulders don’t turn right. I’ve seen many golfers try this. They don’t have T-spine mobility for rotation, so to get a good shoulder turn on a golf swing, they protract one shoulder, retract the other, and it looks like they’re turning their spines. They’re not. They’re just destabilizing both shoulders and in doing so, they’re really losing a lot of good contact and connection with the ­lub.

We can take this a few steps further. Past the glenohumeral joint, we were back on the T-spine, we go up into the mid-neck, the vertebrae from maybe seven up to two. Most people need more stability there. They need their curve back, and they need good stability.

Most people in the computer age, in the driving age, are stiff in their suboccipital region, the joints between the base of the skull and C-2. That’s why so many people with their teeth together can barely touch the chin to the chest or do 45 degrees of rotation without using the rest of the neck. They’re very tight in the suboccipital region from many bad posture habits and from tension. They overuse the middle components of the neck, which are usually where we see degenerative changes.

Where do we see degenerative changes in the spine most? In the mid-neck and in the low back, areas that need to be more stable. Once these areas are degenerated, they become stiff, Many people don’t understand that the stiffness is the body’s attempt to stop the sloppiness.

We usually see quite a bit of degeneration in the knees. That doesn’t mean we don’t have it in the hips and ankles, but in the knees it just seems to be compounded. These are areas that could probably use better stability, and better alignment, better ­everything.

We can follow this out into the elbow and hands, but it gets complicated there because we’ve got injuries to consider. The elbow is more than just one joint, too; there are a lot of things going on there. When we get into the hands and all the manipulative things people do, one of the first things I always do is look for full wrist extension and flexion. Without that, the other mechanics all the way up the chain are compromised: elbow, shoulder, scapula, T-spine and neck.

In our Secrets of the Shoulder DVD, Brett Jones and I discussed all the neurons in the brain dedicated to the hand. These exceed all the neurons dedicated to the entire arm, scapula, and even the same-side leg.

There is a large amount of brain area dedicated to the effective management of the hand. When there are restrictions, compensations and problems in the hand, a person will nearly contort the whole body to accommodate it.

Because sensory information is so important, because foot information is so important, because hand information is so important, a person will sacrifice other parts of the body. This is to make sure to get a good perspective with grip, with stride and step, and the way the foot connects, and with the way vision interacts.

The whole purpose of the joint-by-joint concept is to realize generalities. It’s a mobility stacked on a stability, stacked on mobility. The examples are there to make you think above and below the area you’re working on and in the things you’re asking for. That’s why, in a strange sense, the joint-by-joint is simply another way to make people appreciate whole movement patterns outside of the movement screen.

Once you get it, if you decide to go on through the rest of your life without using movement screen, it won’t bother me a bit. It’s simply a tool. Once you get the perspective, that’s fine. What happens, though, is this tool sets a great baseline and sometimes protects us from our subjectivity. A doc can get really good at calling fractures, but we still appreciate him shooting the X-ray.

It’s very easy without an X-ray to get about 85-percent accuracy on a fracture, and anyone who’s done sports medicine for a long time gets a sense of  a sprain or a fracture in a joint. But, you’d always want to have that X-ray.

I have a pretty good perspective on how a person moves, but I want to revisit the baseline because if I improve the movement in some way, I don’t just want my subjective information to say that. I want to know I followed a joint-by-joint perspective, and have something to show for it.

We often see somebody focus on core stability. They hammer the side plank, they hammer another core exercise. The core stability is better, and I won’t argue that. But now you’ve jacked up the upper trapezius, threw the neck out of alignment, and the hip basically doesn’t move any better than it did before the side plank. The side plank fired the core, didn’t fix the hip, and jacked up the shoulder and the neck.

That’s what? One step forward, two steps back? That’s the problem we get into with the Kinesiology 101 approach. We find a movement error and we want to fix it. We map the major movers in that area. We exercise them concentrically, and think we did something. We didn’t.

Honestly, we leave so much on the table in rehab, we can’t throw stones at anyone in strength conditioning. The number one risk factor for a future injury is a previous injury. That pretty much means there are a lot of chiropractors, physical therapists and athletic trainers discharging people, or giving them a clean bill of health when patients say they feel fine. That’s great, I am glad they feel fine.

If the doctor releases an NFL player to play, the strength coach might agree that the medical problem is resolved. However, being well and being ready to play in the NFL are two different things. The movement screen and other functional testing demonstrate risk factors, and the best strength coaches watch these risk factors constantly. The guy might have an asymmetrical lunge. He’s pain-free; nobody’s arguing that. But we as clinicians in the musculoskeletal fields discharge people feeling fine, but who are still moving poorly. We send them back to their personal trainers, back to their strength coaches, back to their yoga instructors.

Now we’ve got an entire fitness industry trying to deal with issues that should have either been cleaned up in the rehab situation or at least forecasted, meaning clinicians need to be ready to have another conversation.

“Insurance isn’t going to pay me to treat you anymore, you’ve got no back pain and you feel fine, but you don’t squat well. When you lunge on the left side, it looks great. When you lunge on the right side is very unstable. I want to get you hooked up with a trainer who gets it, but here’s the deal.

“You’ve got to get your lunge patterns symmetrical and get your squat pattern back. I know you want to lose weight and get back in the gym but you need to move well before you move more. I know you want to get fit again. I know you want to play golf in the spring. These are the fastest ways to get you there.”

That’s what I talk about in our movement training workshops when to get people working together. The top risk factor for an injury is a previous injury. That is an insult to anybody who’s treating injuries, because it means we leave risk factors on the table. It does not mean we need to fix all these problems, but we can use our professional network to give our patients options.

When we peel the onion, guess what we find these risk factors are? It isn’t strength. It isn’t even flexibility. It’s left-right asymmetries. Not mobility asymmetries or stability asymmetries—movement asymmetries.

Break these down. Figure out what’s causing them: dorsiflexion restriction, poor spine mechanics, whatever. Fix it, but recheck the movement pattern. If the movement pattern didn’t change, you think you fixed it, but you didn’t. Keep working, keep tweaking it. When the movement pattern changes, you’ve done your job.

Motor ­control

Motor control is the ability to balance and move through space and range of motion. People call it stability; we’re going to call it motor control. It’s not strength. It’s just can you balance on one foot? Can you control a deep squat? Can you lunge narrow without losing your balance?

Asymmetries and motor control are the two underlying things that aren’t addressed in rehabilitation. I want the entire fitness and conditioning community to learn from the mistakes we make. Just because a person feels fine doesn’t mean he or she is not at risk for an injury, and it doesn’t mean the person is not going to butcher the great exercise program you designed. It’s not because it’s a bad exercise program. Your clients are going to try to move around things because they can’t move through the things.

Joint-by-joint is an excellent template to get you past that entry-level thinking that Kinesiology 101 is going to save the day. It makes you consider joints above and below, but if you really want another way to check yourself, look at the whole patterns of movement.

Movement, once we get through the mechanics, is still a behavioral entity that largely goes unaddressed. Really, when we train people and we’re working on functional training, we’re working on conditioning, training or changing movement behavior. To take joint-by-joint a little bit deeper, don’t only focus on the segment in which you think you found a problem.

Realize this: Until you clear everything above or below, it cannot be a singular problem.

This was part three, excerpted from Appendix 2 of Gray’s new book, Movement.

by Gray Cook
Excerpted from
Movement: Functional Movement Systems—Screening, Assessment and Corrective Strategies

If you did not yet see part one, click here to start at the beginning.

Reviewing the Joints

I often start at the discussion at the foot, where I defer to Todd Wright and Gary Gray. They have great perspective and discussion with respect to the foot. People have always tried to pull me into a top-down or bottom-­up argument, but I’m not committed either way. Problems can come from either place and be corrected by either approach. The real question is what do you see.

Here is an example.

Let’s say we do the movement screen and we learn that the active straight-leg raise, shoulder mobility, pushup and rotary stability patterns are great, but in standing, the squat, hurdle steps and lunges are bad. You need to consider the foot. This is because everything was going great until you asked the foot to contribute. It does not imply a foot problem; it simply suggests that perceptions and behaviors are com-promised when the foot hits the ground.

Here’s what I want people to know: The brain and its information pathways work two ways. We’re not just sending information down the spinal cord out to the hands and feet. We’re also uptaking information through the hands and feet.

If the feet are sloppy and the grip is off, not only will the person not activate the right muscles, but he or she is not even up taking the right sensory information. Let me say that again. If there are any mobility or stability compromises between the foot and the brain, it’s like standing on two garden hoses wondering where all the water is. The information pathway is broken two ways… up and down.

The foot is no longer a sensory organ because any information that foot could collect in its normal alignment has to be compromised. The foot has to pronate even more because of a stiff ankle, or maybe the foot has to fire too much throughout the plantar flexors because of a sloppy knee.

The other reason we’ve got to clean up these issue is it’s not just motor pathway down; it’s sensory pathway up. The foot will keep flattening out to grab as much sensation as possible because the brain knows there is a problem. It’s hoping more information will help. If you’ve got bad shoulder positioning in a push or pull movement, you’re going to do things with your grip that aren’t as authentic as they could be.

Let’s look back at the foot. The foot needs to be mobile, but it’s inherently set up to be mobile. Look how many bones, how many joints are in the foot. There’s movement all over the place unless there’s arthritis. The muscular role in that foot should be that of stability, and that’s why we have all those intrinsic muscles. These are muscles that dwell within the foot, within the arch of the foot.

Then we get to the ankle. It’s a bony, stable joint. You’re never going to see many people over-dorsiflex or over-plantar flex. But since people know of inversion or eversion sprains or strain, they think the ankle must be trained for stability.

Most of the time, the patient with the rolled ankle will also have restricted dorsiflexion, unless the person stepped on a foot or had a contact injury. There’s a huge prevalence of restricted dorsiflexion in people who present with knee problems, whether MCL or ACL.

When a client can squat to parallel, we often leave that last 10 degrees of dorsiflexion on the table, thinking it’s no big deal. We want the foot to be stable, but that doesn’t mean the foot has to be stiff. We want a mobile foot to be instantaneously stable at contact and push-off, but also to be relaxed enough to accommodate great range of motion.

The foot has to be adaptable, but it also has to be instantaneously stable. The ankle has to have freedom of movement. You can’t have ankle restrictions. The ankle also has to be stable, but one of the major problems we see is lack of dorsiflexion. Is it our footwear? Is it the way we train? It’s all that. The muscles attaching around the ankle have great leverage and strength, but the mobility provides the best overall function to utilize the potential strength and power in the ankle.

We need that inherent reflex stability in the foot. We need to have a clear ankle when it comes to plantar flexion and dorsiflexion.

Knees are simple hinge joints. They’re supposed to flex and extend, and when they rotate too much or move valgus or varus too much, we start seeing problems with the knee. Does the knee need to be mobile? Yes, but once it’s mobile, it needs to be stable enough to stay inside the proper plane of movement where its functional attributes are possible and practical.

The rotating joints are the ankle and hip. The ankle doesn’t just hinge, and the hip doesn’t just move in one plane. The knee is more of a hinge joint. What we want to see at the knee is once we have the mobility, we need stability.

What are the common problems we see at the hip? Can we see a sloppy hip? Can we see a dislocating hip? Absolutely. But in general, we see a lot more hips that don’t have the full authentic mobility.

• Common problems in the foot: People give up their stability.
• Common problems in the ankle: People give up their mobility.
• Common problems in the knee: People give up their stability.
• Common problems in the hip: People give up their mobility.
• Now we’re at the low back: People give up their stability.

So once again, these aren’t the 10 Commandments, but they’re common tendencies when injury, poor training, unilateral dominance, one-dimensional training, a lack of training or an excess of training occur. These are common defaults the body will go to; they’re not absolutes.

Click here for part three of this three-parter excerpted from Appendix 2 of Gray’s new book, Movement. In it, he continues his discussion of the joint segments and discusses how he clears the larger joint regions.