This is Brent coming at you with yet another overhead squat assessment video.
In this video we're going to go over the excessive forward lean, a very very
common sign which I'm sure you've all seen before. I'm gonna have my friend
Leanne step out. Leanne is going to help us demonstrate an excessive forward
lean. The first things you're going to notice is that Leanne actually steps so
we can see sideways, right. This is one of those signs we see from a lateral view.
I'm still going to set her up the same way, second toe pointing forward, two feet
underneath her hips, and her arms are up over her head, and then when she
does that I'm going to go ahead and have her squat. Now an excessive forward lean
is based on the tibia torso angle. Her tibia and torso should line up parallel
to one another. Now to help you guys visualize, I'm going
to go ahead and line these dowels up. So there's her tibia anglem there's her
torso angle, and as you guys can see, those two lines meet. So by definition
they're not parallel, and Leanne has a excessive forward lean. So very very
common impairment. I think you guys are going to see often. Thank you Leanne for
demonstrating. Sometimes you guys will see something far worse than that, where
people almost look like they're pancaking over, and sometimes it won't be
that bad, and maybe you are going to have to break out a couple dowels or broom
sticks, or whatever you guys got at your club, to kind of help you see whether
that excessive forward lean is coming out. Now this isn't a terribly hard
dysfunction to start correcting, it's not a terribly hard dysfunction to analyze,
as soon as you know what's driving it. Now I know most of you guys are probably
thinking excessive forward lean, well that's excessive hip flexion, but we
actually have to take one more step back from that. What's actually driving that
hip flexion is the inability of my knees to track forward. Now the inability of my
knees to track forward is a lack of dorsiflexion. So the same joint action
that causes my feet to come up, alright is the joint action that allows my
tibias to come this way, so dorsiflexion foot on tibia, dorsiflexion tibia on foot.
Since I can't track my knees forward, here's what happens. I can't track my
knees forward, which means as I squat my backside gets further and further behind
me, which is where my center of mass is located right. My core, once it goes past
my base of support, I end up having to throw all of my upper body mass forward
to maintain balance over my feet, so that's what's actually driving this
dysfunction, is that lack of dorsiflexion, which then causes the excessive hip
flexion. Now a lack of dorsiflexion is the same thing as excessive plantar
flexion for our analysis purposes. So now we're right back to the same five steps
that we've been going through on every video, Excessive forward lean equals
excessive hip flexion, and excessive plantar flexion. You guys know your hip
flexors, TFL, psoas and iliacus, rectus femoris, adductors. You're going to
release these muscles. Save the psoas, we don't want to try self-administered
release techniques on the psoas, but we'll release all of our other hip
flexors. Then we'll start doing our hip flexor stretches, plantar flexors. You
guys know your plantar flexors, your plantar flexors are your calves. Make
sure you stretch calves in these individuals, all right you want to
release and stretch. You see an excessive forward lean
first thing you want to put them on is softball on those calves, as well as
maybe a slant board. As far as what's under active, this gets a little tricky
we're going back to some of this synergistic dominance. You guys probably
have heard this phrase before this idea, before in excessive forward lean,
you have hip extensors as long and under active, they're on this side of the graph,
but once you get past the glutes and the semis you end up with two muscles that
take on this weird relationship. They become long, but they get overactive. What
that means is you can release these muscles for their over activity, but you
don't want to stretch them just because they're overactive. You don't want to
just go ahead and stretch and lengthen them because they're overactive. You also
don't want to activate them. If you guys get somebody in an excessive forward
lean big muscle to think about is actually
the glute max. So you guys can kind of forget the other muscles that will
extend the hip. If you're trying to correct this
dysfunction and keep going after the glute macx with your isolated activation
techniques, dorsiflexion of course is a huge important thing to gain back. You
guys are going to want to continue to go after the tibialis anterior, and if you
don't know some good tibialis anterior activation by now, I would definitely
recommend you guys looking up those videos putting them in your repertoire,
because you can definitely correct a lot of these lower leg dysfunction problems,
by learning how to get this guy going. I hope you guys learned a lot from this
video. I hope you guys understand excessive forward lean and get great
outcomes, thank you.