Our guest for today’s show is Katie St. Clair. Katie is a strength and conditioning coach out of Charleston, SC who has been training general population and athletes for over 20 years, and is the creator of the Empowered Performance Program. She is passionate about helping everyone reclaim movement and find joy and reduction of pain using sound biomechanical principles alongside proper breathing. Katie has embarked on a journey of learning and combining that knowledge with her love of athletic movement, as well as her passion for empowering female movement professionals, with the intent to elevate the entire industry standard.
In my last few years as a coach, I’ve become more and more aware of the underlying physical and structural characteristics of athletes that work to determine biomechanics that show up when they perform various sporting skills. I’ve really enjoyed having a variety of coaches on this show who have gone in detail on the biomechanics of the human body, (the pelvis, ribcage, breathing, etc.) and then have linked that up with what we might see in athletic movement, such as sprinting and jumping to name a few.
Katie is an expert in human performance, and the fine details of human movement. On today’s show, she takes us on an approach to forward pelvic tilt, breathing mechanics, abdominal function, the feet, proper squatting, plyometrics and more that comes from a perspective of the underlying function of the human body. Katie helps us understand the “inside” mechanisms that are so often leading to compromised movement seen on the “outside”.
So often we have athletes who just can’t seem to “find” the right joint motions in their movement, and this is when we need to have the ability to go a level deeper in our coaching, or our ability to know when to “refer out” to experts better able to cater to those areas. The more you know from “the inside out”, the greater the bandwidth of athletes you can serve in your efforts.
Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly
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Timestamps and Main Points
4:45 – What led Katie into working in fitness and performance
10:15 – Katie’s “inside out” view, of helping athletes acquire better technique via changes on the level of the thorax, pelvis and rib-cage
15:45 – The art of coaching humans in a manner that helps them self-organize and learn to move effectively
18:45 – How being biased, or stuck, in anterior tilt impacts one’s ability to move, and how to help athletes get out of that position
25:45 – How to use inhalation and exhalation to neurologically reinforce supination/ER and pronation/IR
42:15 – General primers on how to start working with breathing and breath for clients
45:50 – Ideas on how compression can drive expansion on the opposite side of the body, and ideas on “functional” abdominal muscles
49:50 – Katie’s view on building strength at length with the abdominal wall
55:50 – Why some athletes (particularly female swimmers) often have a lot of spinal extension patterning in a pushup movement, and then what to do about it (if it is even a big deal in that group)
– Hypermobility as systemic laxity, versus adaptations that can lead to acquired hypermobility in the limbs via proximal stiffness
– The dichotomy between accessing the heels, and then moving into the forefoot in the process of squatting
– Dynamics of “no-toes” squatting and what it can do for athletes, and how it zeros in on the mid-foot
– The balance between being able to keep the heel down and pronate, and then get off the heel to make the foot a second class lever, in squatting and even in running/jumping
– How to help people who struggle to yield to gravity be able to do so, and achieve better glute activation in the process
“I realized I was looking at everything from the outside in, instead of from the inside out…. I would see these patterns all the time, but just coaching it didn’t change it, I had to alter the mechanics of their thorax and their rib-cage and pelvis to be able to create the change that was necessary”
“(Athletes) are creating compensations that are really genius”
“The trees, the way the rocks are, the seashells… (nature) gives you an appreciation for what the human form is”
“The foot diaphragm and the thoracic diaphragm are going to alter the ability for the foot to do its’ thing too”
“You have to have enough expansion to create compression…. if you don’t have enough range you are going to compensate to get it”
“They do need to learn the fundamentals of getting the diaphragm to dome up, both the pelvic diaphragm and thoracic diaphragm, and to use the breath to leverage that position”
“If I can use the breath, then I can create a neurological change in the brain”
“If I am on my heels, that is going to generate that internal rotation, the increase in all the curvature… now I can do the complete opposite by going to my toes, tucking under, and decreasing the spinal curvature by inhaling and allowing the chest to rise”
“If the ribs don’t move, the spine is not going to move”
“Expansion where you need it does require holding tension on one side to drive expansion on the other, so if I gripped my abs, and held them down and took an inhale, the pressure is going to push back into my ribs and create some expansion”
“We have to manage the leaks in the system to push the pressure elsewhere”
“I almost think the athletes who can lengthen the abdominal wall and create tension, are the ones who are impressive… that’s a very athletic body to me, when you can create tension in a lengthen position, that’s the jam”
“If you suck at lengthening and eccentrically loading position, try exhaling when you are all the way out in that lengthened state (not allowing yourself to go into an excessive extension pattern) exhale, then pull back and inhale”
“You see this a lot, people can’t pronate or supinate, so the arch of their foot is not as dynamic as it should be, so they create a lot of mobility at the ankle joint because the midfoot is so rigid”
“Allowing the knees to go forward, and more pressure into the mid-fore foot, to allow for internal rotation… that is much needed, and so if you are always elevating your heels, how are you ever getting that, so I think it makes sense to bring a person down to the lowest range they can work with at that time, plus doing other activities to get the thorax over the pelvis”
“We need that moment of the knees jutting forward, and the arch coming down and the calcaneus tipping without going onto the toes and missing that, so when you try to squat with your toes off of something, there is no cheating it”
“Not doing a quick jump, holding a heavy yielding isometric, and then sinking into the ground, doing a depth drop, but instead of a reactive jump you are sinking into it, I’ve used it in my programming and 9/10 the people that can’t feel their glutes in the bottom of a squat and utilize that, that’s when they tell me “I finally felt my glutes””
About Katie St. Clair
Katie is a wife, mom, strength coach, educator, business owner, and lover of all things movement. After 20+ years in the industry, Katie decided to create an educational program based on her passion for seeing other women excel in the industry as leaders and educators. There was a time when life got in the way and she couldn’t be the professional she wanted to be because she had to put her family first. She has spent the past 5 years embarking on a journey of learning and combining that knowledge with her love of athletic movement, as well as her passion for empowering female movement professionals, with the intent to elevate the entire industry standard.
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