Head Position and Spinal Health

how many people when deadlifting look up themselves themselves the mirror when they're learning to deadlift yeah and you know that changes lumbar position as well then even not including this stuff with an early system i mean the the big thing with that is just there's not a lot of space in the back of your c-spot so when you go like this and you have a massive weight you're just ramming those facets together um so yeah ali uh gilbert now weingroff her uh her husband charlie weingroff which is one of the top uh doctors of physical therapy in the united states is a fantastic video on this that shows i think it's looking at a scan of someone who's lifting and they have nice neutral head position they're tucked and slid back and it shows what happens when they go into lordosis and extension and it just ramming the back of their uh vertebra together and he's got i'll send it to you it's a it's fucking funny as shit the way the way he could he does the commentary on it is just fucking gold that's that's really interesting and it's interesting personal to me as well because i think a lot of like like i've got a bit of bit of forehead posh and i feel like that gives me a lot of issues and like so i i've done you know looked at this kind of thing a lot and i i for ages i've spoken to you about this on consult so like having this sort of like mid thoracic spine pain underneath my shoulder blade and like for a while i was like i couldn't place what was going on with i tried sorting out a lot of stuff with the hip and that got better and it didn't go away what's going on and as I started in the last few months as my training's picked up again and gone a lot better that I'm starting to realize there's a definite correlation between my head position and I start to feel how I can now it's much more precise of what causes the pain where before it was like random whereas now I'm like if I do this and go into a neutral spine position I just feel that pain go right down the middle of my spine and I think like that has a lot to do with it and like something I've looked at a little bit I want to get your advice on it now you brought it up Like, have you noticed when you're looking at neck position and forehead posture and things like this, having a big effect on something like HR fit for that exact reason of the nervous system coming like through here and, you know, into that position? I don't know because I haven't measured it. But I mean, anytime you're deviated, if you look at all these people who say there's not a perfect posture, cool. I get that. There's not a perfect posture. Like we're not all Vitruvia, man, but there are acceptable and unacceptable deviations from what would be considered perfect posture. So it's like saying there's no good foods and bad foods. Of course, it's good food and bad food. You fucking kidding me? Like you telling me a fucking Twinkie is good compared to a fucking chicken, rice and broccoli? Of course, of course, that's fucking silly. There's not good and bad posture. Of course, there is. You look at somebody who looks like goddamn Quasimodo and you say that their posture is just not it's not bad. It's it's just not as good as yours. It's like, no, it's fucking horrendous and they're going to be in pain and they're going to be 40 years old. How are they going to feel when they're fucking 65? So I would imagine, you know, if you have if you have massive deviations like this, there's going to be a pain response. It's just not to the point where your brain feels that it needs to bother you about it. So mechanoreceptors, they're like, okay, we got an issue here. Maybe there's no space or maybe they're pressing on something. So let's say that every time you lift this up, it's smacking into the supraspinatus. And now the supraspinatus tend to start to thicken up and you're losing subacromial space. And the mechanoreceptors are going to go, hey, there's a problem. They're talking to the brain and the brain's like, yeah, we don't need to let Luke know about this just yet. So what I want you to do is I want you to tighten this here. I want you to tighten this here and then lengthen these two guys. And then this will move forward. We can we can play with that for a while.

But your body does this over and over until one day the brain goes, oh, fuck, we have nowhere else to go. Let Luke know there's a problem. So then you wake up one day and you go, what the fuck is that? That wasn't there yesterday. Oh, fuck. And then you can't do anything. And a lot of people, I would say most people I see are moving towards that. And that can be easily rectified if we just take care of it. Like if you're not in pain, that doesn't mean you're not heading that way. You want to take a prophylactic response because it's much easier to do it preventively than it is to do retroactively. Yeah, I totally agree. Looking at my experience, my upper back pain and issues that I've had, a lot of that was like when I first started training, it was like, and I'm not bashing the guy, but it was like old school bodybuilder workouts. what's the foot of men's health i used to do a jamie alderson workout which started with 100 leg extensions and a few sets as possible into four sets of 20 back squats not a hamstring not a glute exercise inside like so my pelvis came in a really bad position this cough and then you know as we know work up into a thoracic spine and now it's like i'm ticking off one problem find another problem that comes and i'm just working my way through the chain and in that the same sense it's like i remember speaking to nick daniel um you know good buddy of both of us he was like do you get back pain like no he's like how surprising and he just walked off yeah it's weird to nick to finish the sentence that quickly but um that is an understatement oh he's not as bad as he used to be in his in his in his mellow years anyway um but like and then you just take up the chin and then eventually you know getting to late 20s early 30s i'm like oh this is starting to sound to her and all my back pain stuff and you get this with clients where it's like they'll go yeah like i'm up i'll bloom a lot back out well what happened i picked up a newspaper that must have been a newspaper you know like yeah it's it's five ten fifteen years of this sort of stuff that causes an issue right yeah yeah it's it look what you're looking at is you're starting to lose space, lose space, lose space, lose space. And then you nick a nerve. You just pop a nerve. It just, it's the slightest little chink and your nerve goes, fuck you. I'm just going to seize up. And then your client's like, oh, oh fuck. And they can't turn. They can't do anything. And then it stops spasming and they're like, okay, cool. I'm good. And then they go do something else. And then all of a sudden it's like, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. And then and there's spas spas spas and then and then it goes down um so there's so many people that are on the verge of that i never had back pain until i had fucking horrendous like fucking horrible nuclear holocaust back pain and it it's i'm not gonna say it came out of nowhere i was avoiding some niggles but they weren't they weren't such a pain in the ass that it was inhibiting me from doing things until I came down on on my foot wrong and then boom I couldn't fucking walk I couldn't crawl I couldn't turn in bed I had a piss in a cup and poured in a bucket like there's so many people that are that close to one wrong move this stuff can be easily avoided if we stop fucking ignoring it just say well you can squat the pain away no you can't squat lighter no fix the fucking problem Yeah, don't put a plaster on it, right? Yeah. So before we go into some of the strategies we can potentially use to start getting people away from the danger zone that we're talking about, obviously you mentioned, we both spoke about yourself, ignoring some niggles that weren't really affecting you. Me, ignoring clear issues in my posture because I wasn't experiencing any pain. Often when you see people speak about this with the mechanics guys, which is yourself, it all comes from this. they did stuff like, you know, carbs, super diet, but I'm going to do straight bar bicep curls anyway because Arnie did them and then their elbows are jacked up. Like, how do you get people, like, committed to improving, for use of a better term, their structural balance? You know, when, like, it's not causing me any issues now, why should I bother doing it? I'd rather do this. Like, how do you get people to value it as important? Well, the first thing is I don't give them a fucking choice. You want to, yeah, you, look, you want to work with me, you're fucked up here you go i'm gonna i'm gonna show you proof of concept go into a split squat awesome that looked like fucking garbage you know i can give them i can give them indicator lifts i can show them and they go okay that's not supposed to like then they try to do it and they're like yeah it didn't look like the way you did it and i'm like that's right so we're gonna work on fucking achieving those things and i look at it as almost like leveling up in a video game i'm a I'm a big World of Warcraft fan. I been playing it since it started And you start off as like know fucking gnome you a little fucking gnome running around gnome mage or warlock and you can do shit like you got a fucking stick and like everything kills you and so you know the whole goal is to do these quests and repeat things until you go to the next step which is the next level where you throw fireballs or whatever the fuck you're doing right so for me they don't get a fucking choice you you're paying me for my expertise. I'm telling you you're fucked up. I'm going to fix your fucked upness, right? At least I'm going to tell you how to fix it and you're going to fix it yourself. And then we're going to move to level two mage and level three mage. And then when you move up those levels, I'll give you different exercises, but you're not getting bigger, crazier exercises until you can be, you can hit the basics and hit the fundamental shit. Another thing I do is I take pictures of them. I'll take pictures and I'll draw plumb lines. I'll draw plumb lines. I'll draw angles and show them like the pelvic tilt. I'll show them a plumb line or where their ear, shoulder, uh, middle of the canter, knee and ankle should be. Um, I'll show them from the front and back, how deviated they are from where they should be. And realistically, the proof's in the pudding. they're going to see that and go cool my the line is here and my head is here there's obviously something fucked up i need to fix or they'll look at from the side and like the line will be here and their head will be over here and they'll look like uh i'll tell them i'm like you look you look like you got the michael jackson lean like you fucking feet are back here and you're fucking leaned way over here like we got to fix that because the further you lean out the more you have to rotate the hips and extend the lower back and then all you're doing is creating a lot of compression and shear that's eventually going to give you debilitating lower back pain if we can get your hips to rotate back and get your spine to move back into alignment that's going to take a lot of that pain away and that's going to fix everything from the hips all the way up and most of the time all the way down so when you actually like looking at but unless someone comes to you with actual pain you have to get mega mega specific do you sort of look at sort of like use a better term almost hiding some of this you mentioned the 80 percent here earlier on like almost hiding some of this pre-step and pre-habby sort of work in exercises like positioning them in certain exercises to elicit that whilst also improving the other goals you mentioned whether that's proving getting jacked arms getting jacked shoulders or do you tend to be like i want something really targeted in lower traps or something like that i'm using that well did you did you ever do picp um not directly i've done like it you know versions of it like andre ben was equivalent yeah and we're used to work i mean they basically run that model right so if you think about it most people who are listening to this that went through any type of polyquin training or were used to work they're already kind of doing that anyways So if you think about it, if I do A1, A2, B1, B2, and let's say that's incline press and then maybe a lean away pull down. And maybe that's a flat press with a seated cable row. So there's your 80 percent. And you might have a C1, C2. Your 20 percent might be external rotation and lower trap raise. So a lot of people are already doing this. But the way I look at it, a lot of people are doing exercises that aren't as effective as they should be because their client isn't in a good position to make those exercises work. So I was actually thinking about this today because I'm going to do a video of how I teach people how to understand internal external rotation. So when you get a client who's doing internal external rotation, a lot of times, though, they don't have the range. So they'll go like this and they'll go, they'll throw the shoulder and throw it back. Okay. When I say internal external rotation, I just want the humerus to move. If your shoulder has to move, you don't own that range. Something we've got to fix. But, um, and the same thing with the hips, you gotta, you gotta be able to teach what is actually internal external rotation. But if they are in a protracted position and they try to internally externally rotate, you're not, you can't be in protracted position and externally rotate. You can't get there. it's not going to happen can't be in a protracted position and do upper rotation or i mean sorry shoulder flexion so if you have somebody who's got massive protraction internal rotation and you're giving them external rotation and lower trap raise what the fuck are they supposed to do with that their shoulder's not in a position where they can actually do it so then you tell them that they need to do this shove that fucking shoulder back shove that scapula back and then do your fucking that would make a really good gift yeah wherever they go but like they you see it all the time people are doing their single arm lower trap and they like like what the fuck are you doing you should that should be there naturally if you can set that there naturally and just lift your arm well what the fuck are you doing it's like getting on a it's getting on a row and doing this like doing that like you do that when you start that you should you should have that figured out later um you keep on working with coaches right where i i i i cannot stand when i watch someone coach a pull down they're literally just like forcing their shoulder blades down so teachers can't have to do that like rather just like literally like pulling them into position holding the truck like you're now just touching the things you don't want work to try and force them in the position where you want to rather than going back what is that supposed to happen here let me build an awareness i'll tell you i'll be a devil i'll be devil's advocate on this um did you go no i'm gonna be devil's advocate i feel like there is a time and place for that but those trainers have no idea about that time or place so um i feel like Sometimes when you have a really imbalanced body, you have to have a really imbalanced training program. So like I'll tell you, like Amanda that you see me post about on the forum where she was a massive guy like that's the Quasimodo look like you couldn't get more excessive kyphosis, forward head posture, forward shoulder position, protracted scapula. You couldn't get worse than her. we might do something where we actually do over accentuate T-spine extension, over, overdo shoulder extension and depression, and then just work the humerus through that position while holding all of that nice metric position. Same thing with a pulldown. We may actually overextend, over depress, over retract, and just do this without moving anything else. but I'm using that for a very very specific reason it's realistically only applicable to someone with her condition but like you said a lot of these coaches make all of their clients train like that whether they know why they're doing that or not and it's not good because that's not how the shoulders are supposed to work I suppose it's bad it's also balancing it out with terms of like in a good program design balancing out these things like if you're putting someone in a position with something else balancing something else out to allow it to move like for case in point a lot of things at the moment is the should should the scapula be locked retract and depressed when you look at things like pressing movements and some people say yes it certainly should some people say no it certainly shouldn't and like the way i've always talked about it's like if i've got if i'm trying to get the strongest bench possible and i've got 120 kilos or plus above you know above my chest i'm if i can get myself as stable as possible by locking down my shoulder blades then that would be pretty advantageous but i'm also not doing every exercise for the exact same thing i will then what else goes in the program to allow the shoulder blade to move how it should to make sure that we don't end up with someone that's just locked down all the time and ended up have nickels like you said i'm not sure what start this podcast or before we get on the answers in the middle yeah it's always the middle you've got you got two sides every story your side my side somewhere in the middle lies the truth and so with the people who say that you don't want to set the scapula like that in a bench i i'll bet most of them have never had a decent bench like i can tell you my best bench was around 218 and that's kilos not pounds so for the americans that's 480 or so right so um you're you that you're getting into us you're getting into a position of inhalation and dissolve a maneuver. The last thing you want to do is go into a position of exhalation and instability with weight that weighs more than most people squat. Like that's a terrible fucking idea. And furthermore, you're not really moving the bar far enough to worry about your scapula anyways, right? Because if you're benching competition, you're going to be trying to posteriorly rotate your thorax as much as you can while trying to get as much T-spine extension and get kind of on your neck. And you're actually trying to get most of your back off the bench. You want to get it as high as you can, even to the point of putting a Coke can underneath your back so that your sternum and your esophagus process is high enough where you don have to move the bar very far So if you think about it if you in this position you not moving the bar far enough to fucking worry about your scapula So who cares that you have your scapula set in depression and retraction? Like that's a stupid fucking argument to me. It's the same thing with elevation and depression and upward and downward rotation. if I'm doing partial range side laterals and I'm down here I'm not even to a position where my scapula involved anyways not till I get right here so who cares if someone wants to lock it down but the minute I come up here I better start moving the scapula because if I don't I'm just going to be ramming at humerus right in the AC joint I think it's a problem like social media becomes certainly in this realm everything becomes sound bites so it's like you know everything has to be this way it's like well if you look at this in context in a program we're looking at what you know like four to eight nine exercises like you can you can do this this way and this because i've got this you know and you know that brings we're going on to sort of the posture myths now and like when we're looking at with that