I’m happy to welcome Dr. Pat Davidson back to the podcast. Pat is an independent trainer, consultant, author, and lecturer in New York City. He is the author of MASS and MASS2 and is the developer of the “Rethinking the Big Patterns” lecture series, as well as an upcoming book on the same topic. Pat is one of the most intelligent individuals I know when it comes to human performance, and communicates his knowledge in a manner that makes it easy to understand difficult concepts. He has been a guest on episodes #88 and #122 of this show as well speaking on topics such as an educated approach to movement screens and re-evaluating the “big lifts” in light of athletic performance.
That combination of intelligence and communication is paramount for the topic we’ll be tackling today, which is pressure systems and their correspondence to our movement patterns. That sounds kind of complicated, but in reality, it’s as simple as looking at the dynamics of a bouncing ball, or the lungs expanding with air. Pat has extensive experience learning from leading organizations and individuals in this area, such as the Postural Restoration Institute and Bill Hartman.
The ability to look at the human body as a pressure system is important because it helps us link what is happening in various gym exercises, as well as what we see in particular athletic presentations (internal vs. external rotation for example), and then look at how that fits to an elastic (tendon and static spring) based strategy of movement, and a more muscular strategy.
In addition to a discussion on pressure, Pat also discusses his take on having a “strength score” for athletes in the weight room that normalizes performance metrics based on things like limb length and height. He also gets into ideas on how to “de-compress” the athlete who is compressed in a manner that may be negative to their overall performance. This was a really smart show with some powerful principles for any athlete or coach who wants to navigate the weight room without harming elastic power outputs.
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
4:40 Pat’s history of athletics and his recent thoughts in regards to normalizing weight room outputs across a variety of athletes with different heights and levers
30:40 Implications of athletes who “over-lift” in dynamic outputs and what physiological elements are playing a role in diminished movement abilities
35:30 Expansion and compression rules in regards to the movement of the human body
44:30 From a rib-cage perspective, what happens when the body becomes too compressed from a front-to-back perspective that often happens from excessive bilateral lifting
51:00 My personal journey in barbell squatting and Pat’s analysis of my tendencies towards compressive forces that allowed me to retain my elasticity well (and how I ended up hurting that elasticity later on)
How to work with athletes with substantial anterio-posterior compression to get into becoming more elastic and robust
“Who measures the distance (of a lift), nobody measures the distance. It’s half of the equation of work”
“You get punished in many ways, in the reward system of the weight room. If you go full range, and have to use less weight, that’s a “punishment”. If you have to do less reps, that’s a “punishment”.”
“You are going to want to make progress so much (in the weight room) you will lie to yourself (by subtly cheating lifts)”
“You can recognize people that have done a tremendous amount of strength training; it’s visually obvious. Watch wrestlers or bodybuilders go out for a jog. The whole body turns like a refrigerator”
“Movement goes older than biology, it’s pre-biological. In-organic physics precedes everything”
“That’s the original rule of movement, things have to accept, or yield this incoming matter, and that’s a good lesson to apply to every other part of that body. That’s the original rule of movement: Things are either moving into something, occupying it and expanding it, or something is compressing something out of it”
“When I’m externally rotating a femur or a humerus, that’s expansion. When I’m supinating my hand or my foot, that’s expansion”
“Compression is internal rotation, pronation, dorsiflexion… it’s all this compression strategy that we use to squeeze things with… ultimately you can be too biased towards one side versus the other”
“The deadlift is kind of like a lower body bench press”
“I want a rounded ribcage, because a rounded ribcage will roll like a ball through space”
“If you get an athlete who looks like me (short, squat, wide) and you feed them a ton of these exercises that are going to compress anterior to posterior, and expand medial to lateral, you are going to make me run like a 2×4 that’s jerking and halting through space”
“If I get an athlete’s whose spine is shaped like a paper towel roll (expanded A to P) by compressing them anterior to posterior, I might be giving them a lot of benefit”
“Deadlift to me is sitting the pelvis backwards in space, posterior displacement of the pelvis to the greatest degree I possibly can (that’s a hinge) and vertical displacement of the pelvis to the greatest degree I possibly can (that’s a squat)”
Where you will displace in a yielding manner is going to be based on which tissue is in an eccentric orientation… the only way I am going to be able to hinge and sit back, is if I allow the posterior pelvic floor to reach an eccentric orientation. The only way I am going to be able to squat is if I allow the anterior pelvic floor to be in an eccentric orientation”
“If I want to purely hinge, and not squat down at the same time, I need to allow an eccentric orientation of the posterior pelvic floor to yield in that direction and I need a concentric orientation of the anterior pelvic floor to block movement going in that direction”
“If I want to squat straight up and down, and I don’t want my hips to sit back, I need to reach a concentric orientation of the posterior pelvic floor and an anterior orientation of the anterior pelvic floor”
“What is happening at the ankle is also happening at the pelvic floor, in a lot of ways”
“In many ways, during these athletic movements for elasticity, my muscular system needs to be this re-enforced roll cage so everything else crumples”
“100% (the knees in prevents the pelvis from descending/expanding in squatting)”
“Internal rotation and adduction are compressive strategies, and you could very well say that what is happening at the femur is happening at the pelvic floor”
“A wide obtuse infra-sternal angle is someone who is biased towards compression systematically, and a narrow infra-sternal angle is someone who is biased towards expansion”
“(Intervention) could be not letting the AP compressed person do planks”
About Pat Davidson
Pat Davidson, Ph. D., is an independent trainer, consultant, author, and lecturer in NYC. Pat is the former Director of Training Methodology and Continuing Education for Peak Performance, and former Professor of Exercise Science at Springfield College and Brooklyn College.
Author of MASS and MASS2 and developer of the “Rethinking the Big Patterns” lecture series and upcoming book on the same topic.
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