What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, Athlean-X.com.
So I'm doing my impression of my horrendous drawing here.
The idea though is this drawing, by the end of this video, will become incredibly helpful
for you.
Not only in understanding more about how your body works, but more importantly how you need
to fix it, or start thinking about how to fix it if it ever breaks down.
If you're training, most likely the way you're training these days is probably leading to
more breakdowns than it might be to actually building you up.
That's not a good thing, but this is sort of the trend that we've seen in training these
days and breakdown is happening all over the place.
What I want you to see is, I've listed a bunch of joints on the board here.
I basically started at the foot and worked my way up the major joints and there's going
to be a pattern that you're going to see that's established here between the relationships
of one joint to the next.
I'm going to point that out in a second, but the first thing you should really find cool
is when we're developing as little cells, originally in the body, before we become developed
adults and before we become babies we start off folded upon itself.
When that cell starts to split and open up it's basically opening up a mirror image,
top and bottom, right lower body, upper body of itself.
You see joints that function very much the same.
Your ankle is really a reflection of your wrist.
It's the lower body version of your wrist and therefore your calves are kind of like
your forearms.
They kind of do the same thing.
Then down here you've got your quads and your legs – your legs are just like your arms
– so the quads will extend the knee, and the triceps will extend the elbow here.
So there's a lot of reflection going on from top to bottom which makes it really easy to
understand this next point.
We have mobile and stable joints.
A joint is usually – except for two big cases that are already outlined here which
I'll point out – has a role of being mobile, or stable.
What I mean by "mobile" is it's there to give you motion.
You really want those joints to provide as much motion as they can to help you move properly.
The stable joints aren't meant to necessarily bind down and prevent motion altoge4ther.
Their main role is to be able to control mobility, or control the motion at that joint in the
face of mobility from other joints around it.
So here's how it all plays out: when you look down here and you start at the toe you ask
yourself whether it's a mobile or stable joint.
The main thing is that the toes need to be mobile.
Those things need to be able to move and when they don't, I'll tell you in a second here
how it actually winds up compromising a lot of other areas and creating injury.
That's a mobile area though.
The mid-foot is sort of the area right – you can't see my foot here – but the mid-foot
is that area right through here like the flexion of the hand.
That needs to be more stable.
That area of the foot is a stable area because it needs to be able to – as I defined it
just a second ago – control the motion in that joint when you're running, when you're
jumping, when you're doing a lot of other things.
It needs to provide some stability.
Your ankle needs to be mobile though.
Your mobile ankle needs to provide you with enough motion.
If it doesn't, things break down.
Especially things when you squat.
People who lack ankle mobility wind up having problems.
The knee is a pretty stable joint.
There's nothing really going on at the knee.
It's a hinge joint.
There's not a lot of motion there.
It should be a pretty stable joint.
The hip on the other hand, yes; it's a mobile joint.
It's a ball and socket joint, but it's also a stable joint.
Remember I said at the very beginning here how it points out the two areas that need
to be mobile and stable and have a dual role?
It's the two that are really similar.
It's the hip ball and socket, and the shoulder ball and socket.
For the most part it's a mobile joint.
Then you get back into the lumbar spine.
You want stability in the lumbar spine.
If you don't have stability there that's when you're going to get breakdown.
I'll explain these all again in a second.
Just get the idea here of having stability here.
Mobile, stable.
Thoracic spine is mobile.
You've got to be able to move here.
Most people can't move in their thoracic spine and that causes a lot of problems.
The scapular thoracic joint gives you the ability to keep your scapula in place on your
ribcage as you move your arm up.
That needs to be stable.
We know that stable joints here are really hard to find because people have all kinds
of things going on with their scapula.
They have winging scapula, tilted scapula; they have all kinds of problems there.
Back up here, again, we want mobile because we've got that ball and socket joint again,
but we also want it to be stable for reasons I'll explain in a second.
Back into the elbow, like the knee, we want that to be stable.
Then we've got our wrist.
We want our wrist like the ankle to be mobile.
Then you've got the mid-carpal.
You want that to be stable.
Then you want your fingers to be mobile.
You can figure this out yourself, but look what happens when you look at the pattern
here.
Mobile.
Stable.
Mobile.
Stable.
Mobile and stable.
Stable.
Mobile.
Stable.
Mobile and stable.
Stable.
Mobile.
Stable.
Mobile.
It's an alternating pattern of all of these.
There's good reason for that because in order to have a stable joint it's got to have that
motion, the mobility around it.
The same thing, in order to control the motion from those joints that are supposed to be
mobile you need to have a stable joint somewhere to be able to bring it all together.
When we look at what goes wrong we can talk about – like I said in the beginning – even
at the toes, if you lack mobility in your toes you might get a compromised mid-foot;
an injury to the mid-foot.
A lot of football players I train will suffer and injury called Lisfranc Sprain.
That's a pretty damaging injury to the mid-foot and it's really because the mid-foot was trying
to be stable.
When the mid-foot had to contribute, or sacrifice some of its stability to the toes that were
supposed to be mobile but aren't, guess what happens?
That stable joint becomes less stable and it breaks down and causes injury.
If the toes aren't mobile enough – and it's really a serious problem – your toe, especially
your big toe, better be damn mobile.
The problem with a lot of football players is they get really arthritic in their toes
and they lack motion there.
Well, if it doesn't get the motion from there guess what?
It's going to find it somewhere else and it's going to grab it from the next joint up.
When it does, and it reaches for that mobility in a joint that's supposed to be stable; that's
when things go wrong.
Maybe you can't appreciate that because you've never sprained your mid-foot before and you
don’t really know what that's like, but I can tell you, how many of you watching have
had a knee injury?
That's a stable joint.
That's supposed to be a stable joint, but it can be influenced by those mobile joints
above and below it.
What if you don’t have mobility in your hip?
What if you don’t have mobility in your ankle?
When you're going down to a squat and you can't get down because you have no mobility
in your ankle guess what happens?
The knee said "Well, I'll try to give it to you if I can.
I'll give it to you.
I'll bend more from my knee."
You put all that pressure on the front of your kneecap and the patellar tendon, you
get a lot of problems in your knee, but guess what?
It's not the knee's fault in the first place.
It's the fact that your ankle didn't have the mobility and the dorsal flexion to be
able to allow you to go down and allow that knee to stay where it's supposed to be.
Instead, it starts to travel forward more.
So you're blaming your knee, but your knee is not to blame.
What's to blame is the fact that you have no mobility in a joint that's supposed to
be mobile.
The same thing could be said here for the hip.
The same thing here.
When you have a lumbar spine breakdown – a problem in the lumbar spine – normally it's
just trying to help the hell out.
If it says "Well, the hip isn't really mobile enough.
So I'll help out."
So you get all this motion going on through the lumbar spine, all this motion that's not
supposed to be there, the lumbar spine is not supposed to move that much.
But because it' knows that it needs to get to where it needs to be to be able to perform
whatever lower body move you're doing; it's going to sacrifice some of its own stability
becoming mobile.
That's a problem.
It starts to breakdown when really what you should have done is make sure you had mobility
in the hip to begin with.
So the answer is not to run out and mobilize everything.
That's people's approach these days.
They hear "mobilization", "mobility drills", and these buzz words that they think is the
greatest thing in the world.
It's not the greatest thing in the world.
Sometimes you've got to work on stability and not mobility.
The direct opposite of what people will tell you to do.
I did want to point out the last thing here is that some joints – these two in particular,
your shoulder and your hip – need to be able to benefit from both mobility and stability.
We talked about a few of these.
This is already where our mobility, or lack of mobility, will cause those other areas
that were supposed to be stable to give in some of their stability to help out, but it
also needs to be stable, too.
I've seen so many people – athletes especially – but even gym rats who lack stability in
their shoulders.
Yeah, they lack mobility too.
We know that.
People can't move their shoulders.
Especially anytime they start a rotation the way they should, but even when they get the
mobility there – you go and start a bench press and you can't stabilize your shoulder
blades.
You can't stabilize your shoulder itself.
What happens is, it starts moving all around as you're trying to bench and you're asking
for a problem.
The other day I did a video on dips and how it's important to have stability in through
your shoulders as you do that exercise.
Not just to protect your chest, but to actually get more out of it.
If you haven't seen that video you've got to watch it.
Right here, I'll put a link to it.
This is the video about how to actually do dips by maximizing stability of your shoulders.
I'm telling you, way more effort being done by the pecs and therefore growth and value
out of the exercise by doing it.
So this is a whole, big-ass mess of my bad drawing, but the idea is simple.
It's that you have to start thinking and understanding how your body actually is setup, and how it
works.
Understand that not everything is meant to be mobilized.
Understand that when something does go wrong you don’t want to necessarily look right
at the source of that problem, but you want to start looking above and below and figuring
out where it is that you're in trouble.
Once you know that then there's a lot of things that you can do to try to fix that long term.
As a physical therapist that's sort of my specialty, but I've at least got to get you
to start feeling like you can diagnose your own injuries and issues since you at least
have a better idea of how to start honing in on what's wrong, all right?
So hopefully you found this helpful.
If you did, leave your comments about it and your thumbs up below.
In the meantime, if you're looking for a training program that puts the science back in strength
– and I know this can be a little overwhelming, but it's not meant to be that.
It's meant to give you the idea that we know what we're doing here at Athlean-X.
I pride myself on not being the average YouTube guy, okay?
I don’t need to be a YouTube guy.
I want to be here to be an educator and a resource for you guys that want to take training
seriously.
We've got our training program over at AthleanX.com that puts the science back in and takes training
seriously.
You can get your hands on that by going over to AthleanX.com. in the meantime, like I said,
if there's another issue you want me to talk about and add the PT angle to it let me know
and I'm glad to do that here for you guys to the best of my ability.
All right, I'll talk to you guys again real soon.