Today’s episode features performance coach and nutritionist, Matt Cooper. Matt has been a multi-time podcast guest and writer on Just Fly Sports, and trains athletes and individuals out of his gym in Los Angeles, California. Matt is a bright young coach who has encapsulated many of the training concepts from top coaches, nutritionists, and human performance specialists, into his own system which keeps the athlete operating in proper neurological and fascial harmony.
One of the things I’ve really enjoyed observing in the work that Matt is doing is his incorporation of the work pioneered by Marv Marinovich and Jay Schroeder, into his own training design. The combination of proprioception, reaction, and neurological emphasis is something that creates explosive and adaptive athletes, with a priority on the function of the body, rather than a priority on lifting a barbell max at all costs (and when you respect the nervous system in training, you tend to get improved lifting numbers without the neurological cost that comes from hammering away at bilateral sagittal plane lifts).
Recently, a few arenas of training that Matt has been working through that I found particularly intriguing, were his thoughts on training the fascial system, as well as a recent article of his defending proprioceptive training, when we define its role in the training process correctly. For today’s podcast, Matt talks about the role of the fascial system in human movement, as well as its importance in regards to training in light of exercise selection. Matt also talks about proprioceptive training, its role in light of the greater training process, and practical exercises for training both the proprioceptive and fascial systems.
Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.
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Timestamps and Main Points
6:15 What training the fascial system means to Matt
16:15 Methods to engage the fascial system appropriately in training
24:45 Reasons that barbell squatting can cause neurological irritants to high-performance athletics over time
37:35 Training movements that can improve tensegrity in the body and fascial function
46:15 How Matt programs Olympic lifting and Keiser/Supercat machines, in respect to the feet and fascial dynamics
53:15 The value of proprioceptive and dynamic balance work in training and performance
“The fascia being well-wound together is not just an injury prevention concept, but the fascia being well-woven together like a basket, that actually helps store, transfer and release elastic energy effortlessly”
“(In a powerlifting squat) the athlete’s fascia has to revolve around the bar path”
“If the fascia is adapting around these big compound movements, and they are the centerpiece of our training, then we are sort of adapting athletes neuro-myo-fascially to be sagittal movers, and not everything else”
“You can do corrective exercises in a way that get the neuro-myo-fascial segments of the body well-orchestrated”
“The main emphasis of our training is one that respects natural biomechanics”
“You are setting off a completely different muscle firing pattern by having someone squat off the heel; and the heaviest load is going to happen at the joint angle that is most compromised”
“The engine of the car in humans is a lot more horizontal, it’s push-pull; this is the engine that really drives the car, and if you really (axially) stack the body, chances are you are not going to see that turn into more fluid movement”
“If I’m doing a little too much sagittal lifting, the movement is too much about the bar and the bar path, and the athlete has to mechanically adapt around that load”
“I’ve been having my guys do Olympic lifts, pretty much all off the forefoot”
“The bread and butter should not be the pure sagittal linear lifts, that’s kind of my stance”
“There is a case to be had that proprioceptive training is, more of a feedback mechanism than anything”
“Doing proprioceptive exercises might be a way to get an athlete to feel parts of the body they might not have previously utilized”
Show Notes
Matt’s addendum to ideas on facial work in compound movements versus machines
“In addition to the neuro-myofascial element, the athlete also has to create proprioception and engage stabilizers on some of those big compound movements that maybe would not compliment them for sport. What we should be trying to do as coaches is reinforce stabilizers, proprioception, and fascia in a way that respects the demands of the sport, whereas if you take something like a Keiser squat or a heavily loaded Super-cat squat, you’re not going to have the consequence of creating the wrong code of stabilizers, improper muscle firing patterns, not-necessarily-ideal proprioceptive maps, and unwanted neuro-myofascial connections”
Supercat training for a more athletic strength stimulus and fascial adaptation
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Coiling lunges inspired by David Weck
About Matt Cooper
Matt Cooper (Coop) is a nutrition consultant, strength & conditioning coach, and human performance coach from California. Driven by an obsession to expand human performance, Coop spends his time researching, experimenting, doing nerdy things, and building better humans in general at Stand Out Performance (Fast Twitch LA) in Compton, California.
Coop works with athletes and individuals-from developmental to professional levels-remotely and in-person to optimize their health, performance, and fitness.
Coop translates research, experience, and human performance technology to design one stop shop services and programs that address relevant areas, including nutrition, health, training, sleep, mind/body integration, the nervous system, recovery, and beyond.
Coop’s own personal journey began in athletics and fitness-until poor health and mental states befell him at an early age- this lead to him becoming his own practitioner and fuels his current work, marrying functional medicine and human performance to help others become superhuman.
- Certified Nutrition Consultant
- Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist (CSCS)
- NeuFit Electrotherapist
- Speed of Sport Affiliate; Certified Sport Performance Specialist
- Director: Wellness I Performance I Sport Science; Fast Twitch LA
- Director: Wellness I Performance I Sport Science; Black House MMA
- Consultant: The Third Wave
- Chief Scientific Officer, Ketone Score
- Over 1K Clients Helped (pro/developing athletes, individuals, businesses, addiction/trauma)
- Co-Author, The Ketogenic Diet: A Metabolic Manifesto For Dieter & Practitioner
- Communications; SSU
Transcripts
Joel Smith: Welcome to another episode terms like the fascial system and proprioception, I think have a bit of a mystique to them. Training those entities is probably not as directly measurable as doing a 12 week bicep/ tricep arm training program and measuring how much bigger your arm got, or even doing a 12 week squat program and seeing how much your squat run up, or a plyometric program and seeing how much your vertical jump went up. But nonetheless, these are components that feed into a good training program and addressing these elements will allow athletes to see improved outputs. Particularly if we’re talking fascial training and proprioception, seeing it in dynamic output. Sprinting, jumping, athletic movement, explosive athletic movement. And I get asked every now and then, what’s a good resource for these things. And I think the fact is that there’s not a whole lot of solid, readily available material linking these concepts and entities to training.
Joel Smith: And so that brings in our guests for the day, which is performance coach and nutritionist, Matt Cooper. Matt’s been a multi-time guest on this podcast. He’s written a lot of great articles for Just Fly Sports. And Matt is a coach who every time I talk to, I always come away learning something new. Not just something, but a lot of things. And he is one of the brightest young minds, the most inquisitive, a guy who is just really driven by learning from so many of the best and also most progressive coaching minds in the game. People like Marvin Marinovich, Jay Schroeder to name a few. Matt has a system that is truly driven on just driving neurologically optimal training means and methods to the athlete in the athletes program. So a few things that Matt had been talking about recently with me was ideas on the fascial system as well as the proprioceptive system.
Joel Smith: And that was partly coming from an article that I had read that Matt wrote on Simplifaster about kind of redeeming proprioceptive training for athletes. I think we just, if it has to do with standing on a balance ball, we instantly write it off. When in reality body awareness and kinesthetic awareness and, and honing in the proper receptive system, it does offer benefits and can play a role in the training program if we just look for just distinctly what it has to offer. So that being said, Matt’s going to get into the role of the fascial system and movement, how the fascial system adapts to different training methods, specifically axely loaded lifts versus more dynamic movements, how to mix that all together in training. And then he’s going to get into the role of the proprioceptive system and training how to train it and how to address that is part of the bigger picture.
Joel Smith: So this was an awesome talk. Matt is such a bright guy and always enjoyed having chats with him on training. But one last note before the show if you want to get a little companion to this episode, head to the website, just fly sports.com, the podcast page, and in the show notes, scroll down to that. There’s some exercises that relate to what Matt is talking about when he’s getting into the fascial and proprioceptive systems and also some notes expanding on some of Matt’s viewpoints in the show itself. Alright, that being said, let’s get onto the show.
Joel Smith: There’s stuff that we look at, and this is true with anything in life, right? Like there’s stuff that we look at and right away, all our biases come and hit us. Right? Like we see someone just messing around and it’s got the tagline functional, or someone’s doing some sort of balance based movement.
Joel Smith: And we insulate tag that there’s not enough strength. Like I know we got into proprioception last podcast, and we’re getting into it this time. And so obviously there’s always these biases that we have, and it’s not to say that these, some of these methods are the perfect method. Right? And I always enjoy talking to you, but digging into the parts of some of those methods that we would just kind of toss as functional garbage or whatever, insert your term here. Right? But trying to dig into what actually is useful there. What does fit with how the human body.. Because clearly it’s someone had to do it and feel good doing it. There had to be some component of that that felt right. And good and worked with the body. And so, yeah, I was hoping that we could get into a little bit of I know we’re going to start talking about fascia and fascial wiring. So with all that in mind. Like, what’s your thought on… I don’t see, watch those videos probably enough as I should, but like just kind of like the functional triplanar type activities and fascia and fascial wirings. Could you give an overview of what training the fascial system means to you for athletes?
Matt Cooper: Yeah. So basically I think that training the fascial system in a holistic capacity is sort of one of the more missing ingredients when it comes to training fascia. Like, you’ll hear it talked about in isolated silos, which is kind of interesting.Because a lot of people are very familiar with Thomas Meyer’s work on anatomy trains. So they’re used to hearing about how like the spiral line and various slings of the body are interconnected, yet for some reason it doesn’t necessarily make it to the training application. That’s like, we all might be reading the same research, but we’re distilling different applications, different training modalities from it. Yeah. You’ll hear it talked about a lot with just like foot morphology, things like that. And that is very important for sure. But a lot of people aren’t necessarily… Like the integration of the fascia. Isn’t making it to their training.
Matt Cooper: Otherwise they’re not necessarily doing ballistic exercises, strength, movements, power movements, corrective exercises that integrate all of these things at one time. And when you do that, it kind of almost creates like a suspension type effect, like the wires that hold up the golden gate bridge, for example, to give you something close to you, in a way that’s like connecting the body like that with tension with, with integrity, you know, instead you’ll have these sort of isolated silos. People might generate tension in one muscle group, but not in the others at the same time. And so you kind of tend to see some fascial disjointedness show up when someone goes to get out on the court in the gym, whatever.
Joel Smith: The whole tensegrity and that whole element of it all. And you spoke about the foot there and there was a presentation I did. It was a couple of years ago on the foot. And one of the pictures I had included was a, it was a dinosaur and it was, I think it was like, it was a brachiosaurus, like one of those dinosaurs with a really long neck. And it’s kind of like the same thing. Like each of the ligaments that connected and the fascial lines that connected each of those bones was really the, the total structure. The total, the tensegrity created by that total structure was what was required to hold that head up. If it was just a muscle, like individual muscles that were linking the bridges, it just wasn’t going to happen or linking the spinal segments.
Joel Smith: It wasn’t going to happen. You needed something that was more… That superseded like the single joints and kind of was like a grand, a more grand wrap that actually could hold that neck up. And I think about that too. I’ve mentioned this on the show before, but my kids, they like the book hop on pop. They’re two and four and they like to do that. And so when they’re jumping on me barefoot and the pressure that goes through the foot, I mean the only weigh like 30 pounds, you know, 30 and 40 and the pressure that goes through the balls of their feet into me is, is massive compared to any other strength output they might have. So it’s like, you know, if walking is their first skill and you don’t really have any muscle yet, but you can put all that pressure through one point through the fascial system. That to me, I’m like, okay, every time they step on me, I’m like, yeah, I think this is the fascial system at work here. And it’s that, that type of strength you can just get, that’s not the strength you build by really by… I mean, you can get it better by lifting weights and particular ways that you do it. But I feel like it’s just so much more developmental and in our wiring and our physiology.
Matt Cooper: Yeah. I mean, and that’s kind of, that’s a nice little loaded carry that you have manual load and carry exercise you have going on there with your kids. But yeah, I mean, so a lot of us, like in a kind of all strength and conditioning community, it sort of sounds woke right. To talk about the nervous system. And I mean, there is obvious, obvious, obvious like component for that. But if you’re not also addressing it on the structural side, right. So if the nervous systems, the hardware, you’re not also addressing it on the structural side, by developing integrated fascia, then you’re still muscling through movements, right? There’s a lot of people who might think that they’re doing performance training, but they’re only really tackling it from kind of a rate of force production, nerve contraction, and relaxation, velocity side of things. However, if the fascia is not integrated well enough, at least you’re still kind of building an engine without building handling and suspension.
Matt Cooper: You know, you’re building power, speed, but capabilities in the nervous system without having the structure to transfer that energy. Right? So the fascia being well wound together is just an injury prevention concept, right? It will, yes. Distribute forces that you absorb and create appropriately or more appropriately. So you’re less likely to get hurt, but the fascia being well woven together almost like a basket or, or like one of those Chinese finger traps. That actually helps store transfer and release elastic energy effortlessly. So that way you get 10 times and no, that’s not an official figure, more bang for your buck, from everything that your nervous system produces or absorbs in sport. Right? You’re also going to use up less energy from a mitochondrial perspective, ATP production perspective. So I do think that the fascia integration is a missing piece for a lot of people. And just because you weren’t in the gym doing kind of conventional bro powerlifting with your athletes doesn’t mean that they’re not going to still go out on the field and to some extent, muscle through movements, Right? If that fascia is not well-built, you’re still muscling through the movements on some level.
Joel Smith: Yeah. I like where you mentioned like if we start saying words like the nervous system now it’s like I’m woke. I said the nervous system, like I I’ve got out of the muscle bubble and I’m in the, you know, but ultimately, I’m like, well, where does the rubber meet the road? Like, what are you doing? That’s taken advantage of that and those principles. And so one of the things that I think about with elasticity is something that I’ve learned from Adarian BarrBecause after spending enough time in the weight room and athletes who pride themselves on their strength abilities and you watch and it’s not wrong, I think it’s good to be strong, but it’s like, but when there’s a mentality that comes with some of the strength that takes away from the fascia, I think that’s what hurts you.
Joel Smith: And so one of the things that Adarian barr has taught me and that’s really made a profound impact is the idea of learning to feel for when the elastic element of the movement. Let’s just say a depth jump.Because I was doing some of those today with the training partner and we were working on this is if I’m doing a depth jump, I need to feel for when the elastic element is done. Basically when that quick elastic force load and explode, when that’s done, I need to be done with the jump. And a lot of people will kind of almost like set the foot on the ground isometrically for longer in that depth jump and then really get more of an arm swing or use more of like… I have the picture in my head, the torso is leaning forward more, the arms swing is bigger.
Joel Smith: There’s these things happening upstream that are prolonging, that are more muscular and that are prolonging everything. And then you’re kind of killing that impulse that’s coming out of the foot because you didn’t sense that elastic system. It’s like the elastic system had it ready to go, and you just decided to decided to put some muscle on it, so to speak. And I see that happen a lot. Like my biggest culprit is probably power skips. If you watch athletes do power skips, you can tell who has a muscle mentality and who doesn’t. And the muscle mentality to me is always the who’s really lifting their arm and their knee super hig, and they’re never the fastest either. They’re usually the ones who are getting dusted and the ones who are fast are usually the ones whose knees don’t go that high in power skipping because they intuitively felt when that force transfer was done. And then they’re done with it. I’ve noticed that for a long time. And maybe I haven’t said on the podcast before, I want to say it, but that’s just one example that I’ve, I’m sure there’s a ton of them. What are some ways that you’ve thought about that in your approach to movement in the weight room, tri-planar work and Thomas Myers slings and all that stuff.
Matt Cooper: So the more I’ve had the time to kind of marinate on that, the more, I would say that a lot of the times when you hear people say that a lot of these conventional lifts in their original format, like a back squat, for example, or conventional deadlift, this and that, why they sort of debate on how that will carry over to sports. I think there is something to be said about like nerve contraction, relaxation, velocity, maybe getting the muscles to behave in an anaerobic state, the nervous system to behave, like also come along with that in which, you know, not getting the appropriate oxygen and calcium dynamics in and out of the cells might result in an inability to relax the muscle efficiently, like neurologically. I do think there’s a software perspective, but I also think like part of the reason why you might see people go too far down the maximal strength, powerlifting type rabbit hole and get bad results from that.
Matt Cooper: And I, and I will provide like the devil’s advocate to this too, just to be fair to everybody why that might happen is because when you’re talking about a load like that, the bar path is going to… The athlete has to adjust to accommodate the bar path, right? That load is what dictates the movement, right? Whereas if you take something like a Kaiser squat, the athlete gets to self organize against that movement. And that’s really important because if you’re talking about the former, because of all the bracing and accommodation that has to occur mechanically for that, the athletes fascia has to adapt around the bar path. That’s where we run into more problems, because then we’re weaving a really maximal strength, sagittal based linear layer of fascia, which won’t necessarily translate out of the weight room. If we’re doing this too much, I’m not saying you can’t do anything like this.
Matt Cooper: I still lift guys. So, there is that component as well, right? It’s if the fascia is adapting around these big compound movements and they’re the centerpiece of our training, then, then we’re sort of adapting athletes, neuro myofascially to become sagittal movers, sagittal powerlifters, and not necessarily respecting everything else. Now on the opposite side of that argument, right, is it’s sort of like to use a recent example that everyone saw in The Last Dance with Michael Jordan. How’s a guy like that, who’s a phenomenal mover, get into what we would call, If you’ve sort of studied a lot of the way he trained get into a lot of basic
Matt Cooper: compounds/ bodybuilding kind of lifting and then still move as efficiently. Well, the difference there would be that he was so well wound like a basket neuro myofascially, that that structure was so goddamn solid that when he then went and then added in some of that weightlifting at the right dose, it actually expanded his force production and absorption qualities. Right? And so he didn’t really get the blowback from that as well. I mean, he also used unconventional things too, like some isokinetic training and biometric stuff, but that would be the opposite side of it is maybe there is a way to kind of have your cake and eat it too. If the athlete is already neuro myofascially, well wound; however, most athletes still need some work there. So to get into the application, part of your question probably way longer than most of your listeners wanted. I’ll actually do corrective exercises that come from the Thomas Myers, not any trains community, the functional patterns community, and these are ones that they don’t really post online, by the way.
Matt Cooper: That’s why a lot of people don’t know all the hidden gold that they have to offer. Also some, you know, some other folks too, David Weck being one of them. You basically can do corrective exercises in a way which unite the different neuro myofascial connections of the body. Get the body very well fascially, well-orchestrated get the brain used to activating these parts of the body and sequence together. And then there’s also ways to do it in training too. Right? So if I was going to do maybe some ballistic exercises, I might do it in a way in which the athlete is sort of connecting their coiling core spinal engine with, let’s say like some abduction techniques, like, you know, sucking your feet in towards each other, things like that, or, you know, abduction techniques. And so you’re getting the whole body neuromod factually connected. And then you kind of take the car out on the track, right?
Matt Cooper: You train in movement patterns that actually respect the natural slings of the natural biomechanics of the body we’ll say mostly. And then that’s kind of how I tend to view things. And we, you know, we’ll still do some, of course, some sagittal stuff, some traditional stuff. It’s just that the main emphasis of our training is in a way that neural myofascially integrates the body respects natural biomechanics. And that way we’re always complimenting what comes, comes out on the court, in the cage, whatever, you know, I realize that was probably the longest diatribe you’ve ever had on your show. So I’ll give the keys back to you.
Joel Smith: It’s not, it’s not the longest I, you know, actually be funny to kind of see, which has been the longest. I’m sure it’s up there. Yeah, no, I’m pretty sure the longest has probably been over 20 minutes, but no, I like, but I like those. One because it’s good for me, because I get to work on my listening skills, which has always, if you ask my wife, that’s always good for me anyways. But two,Because it’s kind of fun for me too, to kind of get it’s like, here’s this little piece of this that I want to get back to. So hopefully I come around all the things that were in that in that those nuggets of information, you just laid down. The first area I wanted to go, because I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about it this way. The idea that the tensegrity model following the pattern of the lifts you do. Maybe you’ve mentioned it before, but I don’t remember it as well as I probably could have, but like the idea of if it’s a Kaiser squat versus regular squat, how that might change the, like you said, the tensegrity of it, like how you have to meet that problem or how your body needs to solve that problem and what I’m picking up.
Joel Smith: But this is just my take… Is it’s very simple in a squat it’s in many coaches have led me here and to my, you know, my thoughts and views and many would say the same thing as at the end of the day, a heavy squat is oftentimes more of a lower back exercise than it is a foot and a glute, you know, the way we actually move to get the heavy weight to, or to get my squat from three 50 to 400, maybe all I had to do was just learn to lean forward a little more and use, you know, quote unquote, use my hips. But really I was just arching my back a little more. Maybe I laid down more muscle in the lumbar rectors. And like you said, maybe my tensegrity through that, the hip and the upper back became a stronger. Oh, and I can squat 50 pounds more. Wait….
Joel Smith: I didn’t get faster or jump any higher. In fact, I actually got a little slower. You know what I’m saying? Like, yeah. But to add in the fascial tensegrity, it’s almost you thinking, where do you feel the tension in this movement? Where is that peak? And it’s squatting, it’s almost never going to be in the foot, but what athletes stand the greatest chance of it being more than the foot. And this is where I go back to the podcast I did with Ross Jeff’s a little while ago. It would be the athletes who can squat with a more vertical torso and you know, maybe their knees push forward more and that would be the conccentric athlete or the quad dominant. Where at least they’re still driving down through the foot and there’s maybe some vertical tension in the system versus for an elastic athlete to get their squat up It’s almost like the tensegrity has to shift away from the feet, which is their moneymaker to being more lower back thing. And I never thought of it in terms of where should the tensegrity model switch. And then like you were just saying in a back squat, or we can set our athletes up in the weight room, especially when there’s that more forward, lean and heavy weight where the tensegrity is just going to go somewhere else.
Matt Cooper: Yeah. I think there’s, there’s two things to be said there, right? Like I’m not telling anyone how to do their job. It’s I just want to open up the conversation for discourse. I’m definitely not someone who is saying that my way is the way. Because you know, you look at someone like Joe Staley, a lot of other elite athletes who, you know, he can squat 600 pounds as my friend Saazi pointed out, and yet he’s been in the NFL forever and had a great career. I’m not saying that what I’m doing is the bee’s knees. But you know, I do think there’s something to it. The other part of that with the, with the squat is more so, like you’re, you’re actually setting up a completely different muscle firing by having someone squat off the heel. Also your heaviest load is going to happen at the joint angle that is most compromised in the depth portion of that.
Matt Cooper: Whereas if you were going to do, let’s say like a heavily loaded, super cat squat, or you were going to do a Kaiser squat or something like that, or maybe a variation of a rear foot elevated split squat, you’re talking about being able to load the joint at the strong angle. And that’s the angle that’s actually where it’s going to happen in the sport. Right? For example, a Kaiser squatter is super cat there’s compensatory acceleration training. That’s where you unload the weakest joint angle. Part of that movement built into the machine, right? So basically when you are coming down into the part where you would necessarily like in what would look like a jump, when you would come up and reverse that that part is naturally unloaded about, I think 25% on Kaiser squats. And so it’s not going to necessarily slow down your changeover speed biometrically.
Matt Cooper: Whereas if you’re talking about the neuro myofascial consequences of excess heavy back squatting, you’re talking about someone having to slow down and decelerate and have like, you know, minimal acceleration coming out of that squat. And I think it can, that stuff can kind of interrupt how energy is transferred, being able to store and release energy, transfer it efficiently through the fascial system. And then the other thing is that if you do too much axial loading, right, like the engine of the car in humans is a lot more horizontal. It’s more push -pull, you know, , as like, you know, the spinal engine theory would state and David Weck kind of built upon the push pull swimming effect of the body along the various slings of the body is really the engine that drives the car. And if you vertically stack the body, especially when there’s like left to right, maybe some discrepancies chances arguing, you’re not going to see that turn into more fluid movement.
Matt Cooper: If anything, you’re going to kind of load the spine in a way that makes you a worst mover over time. Right? You could do some linear jumping exercises that are great, right? Like depth jumps, things like that, rebound kind of stuff. But jumping onto itself is a, like a multi movement vector endeavor. So that’s kinda more my thing with the back squat and things like that is, it’s just like if you do too much of the things that are going to cause the athlete to layer in fascial connections that are not the same or similar connections that they’re going to see out on the court, you’re probably not doing them a disservice and it’s totally okay to include things like that. Right? But if it’s freeway that should be dosed at the right level and the rest of your training around that should respect the biomechanics, the neuro mild fascial connections, things like that.
Matt Cooper: And that’s also why, like, if you look at like a, we’ll use like a accelerating ISO kinetics SuperCAT squat Kaiser squat, just to, just for that one pattern, Right? That, that is actually about the load that the athlete gets to impart and basically push against the machine. Right? It’s about the force. You can project against another object, which is a little bit more similar to sports because the athlete actually gets to self-organize. Whereas if it’s, if I’m doing a little too much traditional sagittal lifting, the load is all about the bar itself and the bar path and the load that’s actually being implicated on the athlete. And then the athlete has to mechanically adapt around that load. Right? So I think that kind of getting away from this whole machines suck because we classify all machines like Nautilus machines, like that kind of thing. I do think kind of needs to die.
Joel Smith: I think I understand a little bit more too with the, I mean, when you said it made sense, but the idea of if it’s a heavy squat weight, there’s really only one bar path that’s going to work there for me, you know, with whatever my muscle strengths are. But if it’s a padded Kaiser, super cat, and I know Randy, Huntington’s a huge fan of the Kaisers to track coach. It’s like, you, you have some different ways that you can probably press up into that. You’re not, you’re not married to one way to do it. Your body gets more options and it’s going to be able to pick the elastic option more than something it’s more fixed
Matt Cooper: For sure. And then the other part of that is that because it’s not a freeway that you need to then brace for, you can kind of get some dynamic like relaxation, right? Not like flacid relaxation, that’s going to cause problems, but like relaxation with tensegrity in that, you know, even if you’re not necessarily in a triplanar way going to attack the thing, the load itself, isn’t going toBecause consequences on your tri planar movement, it can be just your movement in general. You know, that’s sort of more of that concept.
Joel Smith: I it’s funny.Because you were saying everyone who watched the last dance, well, everyone minus one per I didn’t watch it. It’s on my to do list, but athletes like Michael Jordan, like that super elastic, it reminds me of something that Ross Jeffs was saying that when he was categorizing like the elastic athlete and he had the three buckets of sprinters, the concentric, the elastic and the metabolic, and he was talking about the elastic as an athlete who would generally not respond super well to the heavy barbell lifting. As for all the reasons we just talked about, you’re shifting the tensegrity model, but that could do okay with a lot of the auxiliary, like more low level, like, like you were saying like more than almost bodybuilding methods, as long as they’re not getting too big. If they’re a jumper, if your track jumper, you can’t get too big, but just doing some of this rudimentary, no frills lifting that isn’t actually loaded.
Joel Smith: That might just be simple, kind of muscular in nature, but you’re not necessarily blowing up and getting huge hypertrophy, almost maybe an antivirus says Derrick easily would say to the rest of the work you’re doing just a little bit of supportive work and then you’re not messing with the tensegrity model. You’re not messing with the fascial model. I like that idea. Like it makes sense. And even just doing something as simple as doing your track, meet your speed, imply a workout. And then just doing a set of lunges across halfway across the field, something simple like that to get just a basic supportive system. And I think that stuff goes a long way. So it makes sense.Because I’ve seen multiple athletes who are jumpers or sprinters who are elastic, at least who kind of have followed that system where they’re just doing the simple, even, even machine heck, even like curls and leg extensions and just, but they’re doing, it’s just supporting their sprinting, explosive elastic, sprinting and plyometrics.
Joel Smith: And I’m not saying those athletes couldn’t do okay by doing some half and quarter squats here and there stuff for the torso can be vertical. And there’s still a tensegrity vertically through the feet. Although this is what I was going to say to the I that’s cool that you mentioned that we are horizontally biased because I had this in my mind. I’d forgotten it. We oftentimes look at like you, same bolt as this. And then the track community. They paint them as the picture of vertical force. And, and I’ve written a little bit and I’ve had a little bit written on my site about how we’d like to talk about vertical force and sprinting, although, but what, the number that actually changes the most as you percentage wise, as you go from say 80% to a hundred percent or 60% to a hundred is actually horizontal, that that I’ll put has to increase the most.
Joel Smith: It’s just you step on a force plate and it’s in the vertical and it was there. I don’t want to get too far into that. They’re both important. Both vectors are important. I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole, but we look at your same bullet as like the King of vertical force.Because he looks like he’s floating. You, you see these pictures of him and freeze frame and he’s like floating in the air.Because he’s, he’s so elastic as he goes down the track, but the same bullet hated squatting and probably for a good reason, he probably didn’t feel. And I feel like a lot of those sprinters who come from not the westernized version of training so much where it’s like, Oh yeah, of course, you’re going to squat. Your, you know, you’re here in the United States and the sprints, of course you have to get strong and squat and all this stuff.
Joel Smith: And this is just my feeling towards like the Jamaican sprinters. But I feel like they’re very intuitive. It’s more, it’s more of a dance to them. You watch those guys the way they come out of blocks and they use rotation it’s way different than the Western sprinters. And it’s just, and I mean, here’s a guy who’s got this great elastic, vertical, you know, airtime action. And he doesn’t like swatting him. So I just, I put that together. And again, I’m not saying if you listen to the Ross Jeff show, I’m not saying that that’s gonna be like that for everybody. I think some athletes need to squat more than others and that’s fine. It’s just, that’s just fits with what you’re saying to me. And I thought that made a lot of sense.
Matt Cooper: Well, you didn’t, you actually, you did touch on something. That’s like, I don’t know if we put it as something to talk about initially, but it’s very important to kind of tie this together and that’s that the classically held model, especially in Western culture for the most part has been that walking, running locomotion has been more like a legs driven exercise. And that’s where the bias on the vertical axis would come from. Right? The vertical vector as far as like forest production to absorption goes. Whereas the core is kind of just along for the ride and you need to have it developed in a way that’s, it’s kind of able to brace a bit and keep the structure upright. But someone like you saying, bolt someone like David wax, his theory that the spinal engine. But basically they would hold that the various myofascial connections of the torso, Right?
Matt Cooper: Are going to help store release and transfer that energy. And really just the force produced by the torso and that whipping the opposite arm opposite that hip action, like at the insertion points, when you think proximal, the digital kind of stuff, the whip of that is actually what’s causing the impulse and the propulsive forces downstream from that, that are then resulted in ground reaction forces. Right? So that’s sort of where it originates from. And that’s where like horizontal engine is the engine that’s going to drive movement. And then you also get some vertical where you have vertical needs in that framework. For sure. Right? But I think the easiest way to look at this would be like, when you look at like sprinters feet, touch the ground, or like watch like a cheetah run. It’s like, there’s a whole element where when the foot or the PA hits the ground, it like tugs forward on the ground and pulls you forward and your arms are kind of helping you swim through the air as well. You know? So I do think it’s an ANZ situation, but I, but I do think that that kind of contralateral reciprocation, Right? That reciprocal movement of opposite upper quadrant with opposite lower quadrant, like that is where the elite sprinters are going to start. And I think that’s also why you see other countries that just seem to have it figured out across the board. I don’t know that it’s necessarily purely a genetic thing. As some people would say, I think it’s more more to do with how they view that. Right?
Joel Smith: Yeah. I think that the cultural element is really interesting and at all I wanted to get quickly before we move on topics. You, you talked a little bit about the exercises and some of the things that you were doing, you mentioned, I think the floating heel, because that’s right where I go with just like squatting, right? Like if we’re going to squat just by doing more floating heel stuff for this, just for more forefoot oriented by nature, we’re going to put more 10 secretary, we’re going to prioritize that through the foot and then it’s going to change the way we solve the problem too.Because I think it’s going to require a squat there. And I see a lot of people doing like single leg, especially single leg floating heel stuff where there’s even more gun, that’s going to go through the foot. I think that stuff’s awesome.
Joel Smith: But so that’s, I think a simple way that we have as an industry, I’ve really started to change just the squat to prioritize how we move. But you mentioned some of those other exercises and I know it’s always hard to explain things on just the radio and maybe we can get some stuff thrown in the show notes, but could you explain, because I haven’t seen on your social media, Instagram, I haven’t seen you drawn any, you know, circles on the floor. I made the joke, Right? We just started this, the functional parents, but what could you explain a little bit about those I’m used to, like, I think Thomas Myers or some of the simple exercises that you’re doing to address some of the things that you just talked about.
Matt Cooper: Yeah. Are you talking more from kind of like a corrective standpoint or more from like a, a ballistic kind of, or performance sort of exercise selections standpoint,
Joel Smith: Let’s go corrective justBecause I think that I want to, maybe we can start kind of getting away from the, I mean the ballistic is yeah. I mean, that’s always fun too, but yeah. So with the corrective,
Matt Cooper: So, you know, with, with being respectful to some of the institutions that taught me this, they kind of don’t want them there’s stuff out there. We might do something where you’re sort of exaggerating like the lean from your torso in one way to create a little bit of extra latency, which is going to create like a better connection through, let’s say that upper lat all the way down to that, like lower lap to be able to weaponize the whole core. So that would be like kind of with poles, for example. And then we might actually be like sucking our feet together in one direction or spreading them in another direction to create some of those neuro myofascial connections as well. And that’s where I think personally having explored a lot of these different spatially oriented training systems, just being open to all of them, I feel like functional patterns, even though they don’t post these corrective exercises that they have, they tend to have the best grasp of how to have the how of the applied side.
Matt Cooper: Right? They might have read the same research as anatomy, trains for example, but they translated into a bit better corrective exercises that make multiple connections happen at once PRI also another one that people want to take a look at some of their kind of stuff. Sometimes friends Bosch can dig into that realm as well. So that’d be one example. I’m also big on like, let’s say if we were going to do an isometric lunch hold, we wouldn’t necessarily do that. Like a traditional lunch. We would probably have someone bring their foot safe. If I had my right foot or to my left leg back, we would try to emphasize placing the weight in a way that kind of maps it almost a few probably should just reference the, like the David Weck bitmap, just so people can take a look at that.Because it’s a little bit hard to picture the forced distribution along those lines.
Matt Cooper: And then we might also do something where the torso would lean into that tip itself in such a way that it’s actually potentiating the opposite side of the body a little bit more making connection with that lower lap. And then depending on if we’re spreading the floor with our feet or something like that, it’s also going to help basically just unite and connect the body in a way where the fascia is fully integrated. For example, that’s a corrective exercise that David wet. I learned from him just to give credit where it’s due. So he actually has that one, I believe up somewhere on his website. People want to check it out
Joel Smith: On my own end on that, that corrective to a performance continuum. Yeah, I’ve actually been thinking of David wax, coiling lunges. I’ve been coming back to those recently. I was trying to play around with those a little bit with how I was going. I don’t know if you call it going full Bosch is the term like when you get the water bags and doing all this? I mean, so before I found the gym I’m working out at, I was just doing some water bag, like coiling lunges in the basement, which I shouldn’t use a medicine ball, but I don’t have one size, have a water bag and I’m trying to do these coiling lenses, but the, the effect is pretty cool. Like it’s, it’s very challenging and you’re really, and what got me back and thinking about the coiling lunge,Because I know David had said how big of a fan he was of it on this podcast a little while ago.
Joel Smith: And, and I remember immediately after that podcast and going and doing coiling lenses and things like that. And I think it’s great. I, and I, I think for some reason, sometimes you start doing stuff and then you kind of forget about it, but I came back to it because I’ve been really into Gary Ward’s stuff and specifically his cogs, a which cog and Rocky Snyder, I guess I’ve been spending time with Rocky Snyder in Santa Cruz too. And the cogs being like, it’s like two wheels. I believe there are two, the cogs on it, like a clock, the clock wheels. And they it’s thinking about the body going all the way through its range of motion and not just the sagittal, but also like the transverse plane or the frontal plane. And so doing a lunge where the knee comes towards the midline a little bit like over the big toe and then maybe you rotate the torso to counterbalance that need going.
Joel Smith: And so it’s kind of like you’re creating joint opposition all the way up the chain where it’s like the knee might be going in a little bit and then the lumbar spine is going kind of going like maybe the opposite way the ribs are going the opposite way. And then the shoulders rotating the opposite way. And so this goes all the way up the chain that can almost go anywhere from the corrective all the way up to the performance driven side of things. So it’s just, I mean, it’s, again, I’m describing it on air and that’s not easy to do, but it’s anyways, just, I should just say, Oh, let’s do, he said just doing a lunge with a coil, like with a really coiling up. And there’s a lot to be said just in, in that and just taking it to something that’s really simple, like a lunge or any sort of split position or any sort of gate even gate related, or I could even say like a crawl, like a lizard crawl, right?
Joel Smith: Like anything like that. I think there’s a lot of power in there and you usually can tell someone who has been doing a ton of bilateral lifting and has gotten stuck in that and just have them do like a lizard crawl where there needs to be separation of the ribs on the floor and there just isn’t much happening there. So Hey, I, Hey again, it’s stuff that it’s hard to describe, you know, just trying to describe coiling and joint movements on air or on the radio. And it’s not necessarily easy, but I hope I’m not over complicating it. I think we could probably both agree on the thing. That’s probably easy to describe as just do a lunge and then shortening the shoulder and the hip and the one side and coiling up and then going the other.
Matt Cooper: Yeah. And that would be a way in which you could then take a traditional exercise and do it in a way where you fully integrate the body. And that’s why I think like there probably is some level of mixed bags of results when for, I think Cory Schlesinger said it on all favorites as podcasts, but I forgot who told him, but he basically said if the movements or the lifts you’re prescribing or not, if those lifts are not the ones that the best athletes you have are the best at hitting, then you’re prescribing the wrong list. Right. And I think it’s the same thing with this. It’s like if you’re kind of, depending on how well neuro myofascially integrated in the athlete is if you were to say, Hey, like let’s do lunges like this or whatever, like more traditionally, some would probably get the benefit and some wouldn’t. Whereas if I just start to have all my guys do it in a way that’s like more neural myofascially integrated, I’m much more likely to make that connection and to have a higher level of athlete, higher percentage of my athletes succeed. At least that’s what I’ve found
Joel Smith: Based off what you were saying before, like the Kaiser versus squat.Because I was thinking about this, this came into my head, as, as you said, that is, what do you think about Olympic lifts versus a Kaiser from that perspective of, of options? I mean, I know there’s a few different ways you can pull a bar, you know, some people I like for me, like my heels will come off early in the pool.Because I think I maintain a lot of like fascial tension, but a lot of people, you know, if your heels are staying straight on the ground, I dunno. Like what, what do you think about that with Olympic list versus a Kaiser or something like that?
Matt Cooper: I actually do a lot of Olympic lift variations and, and have for a while. I haven’t really talked about it as much as I should have, but I’ll do a lot of Olympic lift variations or, or exercises with like kind of that sort of intent behind them. I, for the most part will tend to do something like, you know, maybe like a hex bar high pool or like something like that, or like a, like get one of those sort of horse shoe bars from like kind of like a, a landmine attachment. And then we might do some Olympic lift variations off the forefoot on there. Right. I’m basically all about giving the athlete a lift to do that respects their natural biomechanics and muscle firing patterns. Because I think that’s going to translate a lot better because they don’t like the bar path will not interrupt the athletes center of mass or anything like that.
Matt Cooper: Right. Like if you’re talking about a X-bar high pool, which I like to call a TJF pulls after my, my buddy Paul favorites sees the one that I first learned them from, that’s going to be an example of an Olympic lift where the center of mass is your true, your true center of mass, the athlete’s center mass is the actual center of mass that it’s not being thrown off by the bar. Thus, you can get a little bit more, I guess you’d say like the right connections there. You can pro you can make it happen probably with a little bit more, more velocity. Right. The other thing that I’ll do is I’ll actually like fix up the athletes to have a little bit more biomechanical leverage, right. And maybe we’ll do something off of like a high pull off of blocks or something like that.
Matt Cooper: Or I might fix up one of those. Like I have these sort of like, I call it maximum leverage training and there’s some stuff up there on that. Maybe we can talk about that at a future time, but I might fix up one of my machines, like the attacker or like the SuperCAT in such a way to where I really load it up. And then I get the athlete ready to basically go from completely relaxed to exploding from a fixed biomechanical angle. And for me, that’s been a little bit more ideal of a way to tackle the strength speed part of the equation are these, both these Olympic live variations. And then also some of these like maximum leverage force production machines, but that’s sort of how I tackle that I am pro totally pro Olympic lifts, for sure. I think that some of them translate better than others. And I think a lot of the very like the ones that don’t necessarily carry over as well, we can actually do, we can do a variation of those. I’ve been basically having guys do them pretty much all off the forefoot and kind of that, that foot pressure mapping type way, because the way that these are biomechanically stacked, I’m not going toBecause injury to the guys.
Joel Smith: Yeah. So that’s the forefoot thing is really interesting to me too. One of the things I keep coming back to is, was what happens to our ability to self organize. And once the weight gets to a certain point, because I keep going back to that heavy squat versus Kaiser example. And I was even thinking with the Olympic lifts, like when a boost check Seders Homebase workouts is a little bit, I mean, high rep, relatively speaking to an Olympic lifter. Like I think it might be like maybe fours or fives, but lighter Olympic lifts. And to me, I like the light Olympic lift and having like some variations in it to like a split catch or different things like that. There’s you have so many more options, like you’re able to move more elastically and more organically and probably in a tensegrity model that fits with natural athleticism.
Joel Smith: But as soon as you regularly, and I think it’s good to do heavy Olympic lifts every once in a while, just the same way. It’s fine to do a heavy squat every once in a while to get that nervous system pickup. But that can’t be your home base. You have to go to the place that you, your home base is the exercises that you model your tensegrity properly and gives you more movement and motor options. So that maybe in some ways that 70%, one RM clean for a set of five where you’re able to still move it fast and it’s super elastic, that’s a home base. And that model is a good model for the tensegrity. And then, but you can’t model tensegrity with grinding out, you know, those sets of 90% all the time. That’s not a good way to model that.
Matt Cooper: Yeah. And that’s kind kinda more, what I’m talking about here in general is not advocating not to do these things. It’s more so just the, the bread and butter of it should not be the compound lifts or these like kind of pure sagittal linear lifts. That’s sort of my stance is that’s where I’m coming from. And if you actually, I mean, it’s kind of funny. I’m gonna use a powerlifting example to reinforce my point there. But if you look at like the West side barbell model of exercise selection, they’ll show that pyramid, right. And then like, let’s say 80% of the pyramid is like the, the is beneath and that’s your auxiliary stuff. And then at the very tip top there, that’s going to be your main list. So it’s kind of like, you can take pretty easily take that and plug and play what we’re talking about there and extrapolate it to movement and biomechanics, right? It’s like that the more oriented stuff
Matt Cooper: Is the base of the pyramid, whether you want, you know, you want to talk, what percentage of that’s the corrective versus movement integration, holistic pliers, so on and so forth. But at the very tip top, that’s probably where we should be having our kind of more like sagittal, little bit more conventional kind of lifting in the whole scheme of things. Unless of course you’re a CrossFit athlete or a Olympic lifter or something like that. In which case you can disregard what I said for the most part.
Joel Smith: Matt quick, I know we’re running out of time. I didn’t want to get to this and this doesn’t have to be a long little part of it, but you wrote an article not too long ago for simply faster. I don’t think we actually have discussed that on any of the podcasts and just to get into it just briefly, because, well, I know you talked about the Marinovich training systems and the ball work, and I think that sensation and picking up sensation is so critically undervalued and your article was on redeeming proprioception.Because I think we, we, we look at anything on a balance ball and it’s just, it’s just very stuff and it’s, you know, it’s stupid and it doesn’t do anything. And so what’s your take on what, what is valuable. So if we look into that, what is valuable from a property receptive perspective, why and then what exercises should we look to put in the system and how could we integrate them?
Matt Cooper: Yeah. So first thing would be from a injury prevention standpoint, it’s not just about having like, Oh, I need my hips to fire more and that’ll take pressure off my knees. So I’m going to do band walks. It’s also about like micro contractions around the joint. It’s about creating a quicker feedback loop of a reaction time and proprioceptive exercises can do that. I’m a big fan of the WAF. That company is really doing it, you know, no vested interest or anything. That company is really doing it right. As far as I’m concerned, they actually have while being respectful of their research and everything, they, their stuff creates a quicker synaptic loop from the feedback point all the way up the central nervous system and then that, or if it’s a new exercise to the brain and then that then other things, and that’s also going to help train injury prevention into it.
Matt Cooper: It’s also obviously going to quicker reaction times going to translate into performance as well. Maybe we can link to that article so people can see it. But on top of that, there’s definitely a case to be had with proprioception being training, being a more of a feedback mechanism than anything. Right? So if I’m, if I’m taking an athlete who is used to pushy shoes, who is used to maybe flat heel down lifts and things like that, they basically maybe been training mostly one way for a while. Or maybe if they’re just kind of a green up and coming athlete, developing athlete in general, doing some proprioceptive exercises can be a way for me to get them to kinesthetically, feel parts of the body that they might not otherwise have utilized. Right. They might normally use a set of prime mover muscles, let’s just say, and not as many smaller interconnected micro muscles that propel the prime movers and thus the body through space.
Matt Cooper: Also neuro myofascial aspects of this as well. I didn’t talk as much about fashion and that article, but you know, let’s just say there there’s some like lying and standing corrective exercises you can do on there to make these happen. That are a little hard to describe on a podcast. But as far as like the performance exercises, I might have a take one of my like high level developing a pro basketball guys. I might have them stand on there. And then I, myself, and we’re a small group, if it is sort of a semi-private format might throw light exercise balls or something like that, tennis balls, whatever to them to get them to basically react to it. We also could do something where I might have them. I might throw them like a medicine ball that’s very light and then have them kind of catch it and then do a medicine ball toss back to me.
Matt Cooper: And what that’ll get them to do is distribute force, maybe left and right into their foot, each foot a little bit better use some of those oblique slings in there throws a little bit more, teach them how to generate force from the foot all the way up the chain from there. And because we’re not going to get like maximal force on those, then we might go over on like a flat, traditional surface and then do our bulk of the work. Let’s say, if we’re doing some sort of like medicine ball throwing or tossing variation, because then the athlete has the right feedback to know without thinking about it without queuing what muscles they ought to be recruiting for that.
Joel Smith: So that would be a great warmup then, right? Like if it’s helping those Snapchat connections go faster, just doing like some WAF and some, some medicine ball throws with it, or just some quick tap stuff with the heel in a unbalanced environment is going to force faster, firing up from the foot, which if, if that’s all we ever did, maybe that wouldn’t be the best necessarily workout. I’m sure there’d be good things. But if we did at the beginning of the workout, I would imagine, right? Like that would prime us for better output.
Matt Cooper: Yeah. Oh for sure. Yeah. It wakes up everything. I mean, most of our corrective stuff in a typical workout is going to start with, or the workout itself is going to start with more waking up the core and torso, things like that. And then kind of going a little more distal outward from there. But yeah, also things like the ball work too, like the speed of sport Nickerson and, you know, the Marinovich ball work that stuff’s done on a ball. And so that’s, that’s a way to kind of get that feedback as well, motor control and approximal distal control of your limbs in space, things like that, get the right connections made from the brain’s perspective without the athlete having to think about it. And then we’ll go into some other stuff, you know, one sort of thing we’ll do quite a bit as well as use the Pilates reformer to help integrate the body. And then we’ll, you know, some constellation of that kind of stuff. And then it’s important to, to, to not get too, too caught up in just correctives. And you’ve got to take the car out on the track now and then as well, and have enough of that enough of that going on too.
Joel Smith: Yeah. A hundred percent. I love the way that you see everything and you put it all in its respective place as per the adaptations, you’re going to get out of it and being able to break it down and not make it esoteric is I think is really helpful. And so I appreciate it, man. I think, you know, we’re out of time, I feel bad.Because I feel like we could have talked about this to the proper steps and all the integration ideas, especially mixing in like the lower with the foot up or the ball they’ll do the workout, but maybe next time we get to chat for the podcast, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of conversations off air, but I thank you so much, Matt, for your time today, man. It was great talking to you again.
Matt Cooper: Yeah. Juul. I really appreciate you having me on as always thank you for giving me a, you know, a platform for my ideas.
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