Emmet Louis

@Kit_L The picture of your face I think I screen capped from the conversation you had with Dave when he asked how that epic ballistic experiment you were doing when Fred was in Australia. The base meme is from Lord of the rings https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/one-does-not-simply-walk-into-mordor That Tache was epic btw it should come back.

Great idea JIm. Will have to knock one of these up myself at some point.

People have also told me I have the face for podcasting too. We use anchor to distribute our casts as it can do transfer to most services as well as stats and a few other things like letting people leave voice messages for us. Spotify doesn't play ads during podcasts so its good there. I'm not sure of the other platforms like apple but assume its the same.

Thank you! I get what you're saying and its a case of many ways to skin a cat. The goal in the exercise you've mentioned is to bypass the whole, feel this muscle working etc and achieve the goals of the lifting via the set, irradiation and the intent of the task. With a suitable task or target here then as the leg crosses 90 degrees if you follow the constraints given the activation is forced to switch into illio psoas to lift higher. I want everything on that activation chain to cramp in the manner of true irradiation as a point to point phenomena, initially the cramping will be quad only but then will shift deeper. Struggle through this for couple of months and see how you progress. The exercise you describe of lifting the knee would count as an accessory exercise for this goal. Generally I tell people to aim for about 10-15% of their max deadlift for sets of 6-8 with added resistance here.

Glad you enjoyed it! The long lunge family is one of the jewels in the crown of the stuff I teach. Some things that are nice to try in it: Doing reps in an expand contract thinking. So you try to expand the legs everything in the feet moving apart direction hold for a period of time then switch to contract trying to bring the legs together and pull hips deeper etc. These can be short reps or longer holds. Holding a light weight over head, kettlebellls are great for this, in the contra hand to the leg that is going into extentsion. This can be a a game changer in this. Try them out as you get the chance.

Hard to say what it could be exactly. The general rule of thumb I have is that most peoples exercise training for the lower body is heavily focused on extension based motions of the hips and knees. Squats, deads etc. So there should be a decent amount of hip/knee flexion work so it would be worth adding some in if you're not already.

Try fiverr next time!

I'm not dead yet. I read here daily ish just I'm trying to limit my post on the internet as a self imposed fast. But will gladly answer when tagged etc

Shout out to @Kit_L solo standing hip flexor as well. But the nice thing on all these is that you can scales them by adjusting the width of the stance as well as the depth. My advice is if coming back from an injury start gentler than you think you need for a couple of weeks then start exploring more depth.

Sorry I don't have the time to read the whole thread as its wall of text central. So apologies to anyone if i miss anything or repeat something So what you say you're doing is "overcoming isometrics" to use the correct term. There's a large body of research on the effect of these versus the "yielding type" isometric. Its very different end result. In general you'll find that the overcoming type have a really strong effect initially and then it kind of tapers off after a few months. Maybe you're also part of the group that gains strength across the whole range when using isometrics. Iirc @dave wardman is part of this group so he might be able to add something. You have to get creative alright to find ways of doing these. Using sticks and poles to help wedge your self will help alot here as will "lifting strops" these aren't for weight lifting but from an industrial lifting / crane shop / warehouse. these can help a lot here as they're loops and can be attached to something heavy enough to not move and then wrapped around the limbs while being wide enough to not stop circulation.

Just to add to this. You need to read deeper into the research on isometric training. There's a limited sub grouping of people circa 15% iirc who gain strength over the entire range from isometrics at any joint angle, 85% of the rest of the population only gain the normal plusminus 15-20 degrees. But these are using only normal strength science testing, i.e isokinetic machines. You also need to more closely define what you mean as an isometric, there's two main types and they have very different effects on the muscle and development of flexibility. Examples given of a planche as an isometric exercises is poor as due to the constant rebalancing action of the planche its not a true isometric as the joint angles are generally wobbling about plus minus 5-15 degrees during the set. To throw some counter data at you, there's some people I've met who lose flexibility when I've used isometric training at lengthen ranges. We've had to use different methods as the isometrics failed completely at gaining range.

It's nothing I wouldn't do myself ?

Deadlifts have been attempted numerous times over the years in various schools of High frequency training and the conclusion is you just end up getting fried. Interesting article on this https://www.t-nation.com/training/max-out-on-squats-every-day

Just going to throw this out here for the brave. This is the program I used to take my squat from 140kg to 180kg and FS from 100kg to 137.5kg in about 7-8 weeks. I also pulled 190kg sumo completely cold @Frederik used a variant of it too lately to take his into the 170kg from 120kg iirc but he might give the right numbers. The goal is to squat everyday but allow for autoregulation in this frame work. The plan is to alternate days of back squat and front squats, to a daily max. The max is a gym max so no grinding and all concentric should be done in 2s or less. You'll generally hit a new PR once a week on each lift and will then fluctuate based on day to days. Fred had an addition of having a daily minimum target to lift then base the next attempts on how that felt. Simple, now we apply the auto regulations. On days when you feel slow or weaker, you switch to paused squats of either type and work to a max which will be reduced due to the pause so have two tally lists running. On days you feel fresh and want to do more, you drop the weight to either 80, 85, 90% and perform 3-10 sets of singles or doubles as a back off. Once a week you'll do 4 sets of romanians or back extensions in the 10-12 rep range, and some leg curls or leg curl variant of the lighter type. and some calves and abs as you feel fit. Warm up sets as needed.

There's a lot of good posts here, I'm dying with some respiratory illness that I got on the flight from Hong Kong so won't comment on each one. There's a few details missing that I think I can give that will help all your exploration. Remember that whole point of the system in the intial phases is to educate the body about what the task at hand is. Strength training at the initial phase can be also described at just getting better more efficient at the movement. I think stretching to relax / remove restrictions and stretching to develop active ROM are two different beasts so make sure what your wanting to achieve when you're training. They're perfectly complimentary but the active methods will raise HR etc which isn't the best for relaxing etc. I've found that if you training the shortening side of the joint first it'll get you the full depth and possibly beyond that you would achieve with multiple c+r in the position so that's what I do first now when design programming. If you try to use the the shortening side when you're at the very limit of the stretch it won't be effective as we know muscles will be prepped to fire when stretched so you need to back out a bit. The overcoming isometric is used to give the body clarity on agonist antagonist usage in the position as one of the things these type of contractions do is reduce co contraction. Also great for normal strength training. A lot of this stuff is "hidden" in sports where the usage of flexibility is high, things like ballet or rythmic, circus etc, have all these sorts of things but maybe in a less formal way as they're part of the daily training and not the "stretching" at the end of training. The idea is that you go from vector assisted, eg @Kit_L using the lawn slope, to vector neutralish eg flat ground, to vector resisted as general plot when using it in big posiitions eg pancake. But then as a pre exercise you'll do a targetted movement on the shortening side. Simple example would be standing active straight leg raise then a single leg forward bend. There's another class of movement here that isn't obvious but I'm terming the concentric quasi isometric, this is where you pull into a resisted movement and hold the end range but with the intent on going deeper, People who've done the work shop know I use targetting and external focused tasks here to achieve this. If the loading is too much you won't achieve this effect. In general there's a risk of over using the end ranges strengthening with out fully integrating it into full range movements so be careful of making your movements all end range as some systems are promoting. I've been helping more than a few people this year so far who've experienced the issues related to this. End range closing aka ERC refers to the specific technique of using 10s contractions to achieve a deeper stretch. Its a technique of Concentric stretching (I'll keep this term Kit) but not the only one. Emmet

Looking forward to bending you in person!!

I'm seconding the IG option. You guys need to get on this. Its perfect for giving people a taste of your work. With K's love of editing and photography and the ability to reach a big audience via hashtags its perfect

If you really want to get the PHA going. Then get this high tech device. Skipping even the basic one will do 140-180bpm even 10 mins will get more fluids flowing than either of the above by a a massive factor.

That's ok, underdoing things is better than overdoing!

The goal of the contraction is to contract with a good steady contraction as hard as you can for the duration of the set. if you contract too hard at the start you die early so that becomes a nice gauge. Also contracting too hard stops the breathing which is another key thing to avoid.

There's none, train them all at the same time. I generally split training front splits and bridge one day, side splits and pancake on another day.

Depends on the style of dropback. There's variations of drop backs and they have different purposes. One thing that doesn't feature in many coaches progression for it are natural leg extensions. There's better leg exercises for the leg strength it you're doing a leg's bending drop back.

In the above one about the pre cooling their application of pre cooling was incorrect to trigger an increase of ROM. I have some methods of using pre cooling that will result in an immediate and massive increase in ROM. Obviously then training this new ROM is needed to retain. Its interesting that you can get the opposite results when you know how.

3: Sounds like too much too soon. Also the pre-requisites are there for a reason and should be considered the minimum. Sounds like in general you're lacking hamstring tissue integrity, you should after getting checked by a professional spend 6-12 weeks working on hamstring strengthening exercises focusing on a slow eccentric. Leg curls and variants, romanian deadlifts etc.

Taking a break would be good. Getting a decent series of massages or gua sha would also be good. Oddly calves can be a bottle neck for this issue so giving them a dose of the rod of correction would also be good.