When it came to fitness, Griffin Coombs was doing “all the right things,” but that didn’t stop the chronic stress and regular back spasms. It wasn’t until he completely overhauled the way he was breathing and moving that he actually saw lasting results. He now runs The North Star Body, where he uses breath science and biomechanics to teach adults how to get a handle on stress, get rid of pain, and actually enjoy living in their bodies.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Griffin Coombs about the importance of strength training properly.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How strength training is crucial for improving speed and running efficiency.
– Why incorporating deadlifts and strength training into fitness routines can enhance physical performance and prevent injuries.
– How understanding the gait cycle in fitness training is crucial for improving lower body strength and stability.
– Why deadlifts and alternative exercises can significantly improve sprint performance.
– How proper breathing mechanics are essential in strength training and running.
Connect with Griffin:
Guest Contact Info
Instagram
@thenorthstarbody
Links Mentioned:
thenorthstartbody.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Xeroshoes.com
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
There is plenty of research that shows that strength training is good for improving speed and running efficiency and a number of things, but only if you do it right maybe, and maybe you’ve been doing it wrong. We’re going to find out more about that on today’s episode of The MOVEMENT Movement, the podcast for people who like to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first, you know those things at the bottom of your legs. We break down the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the straight-up lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run or walk or play or do yoga or CrossFit, whatever it’s you like to do, and to do those things enjoyably and efficiently and effectively. Did I say enjoyably? I know I did. It’s a trick question. Because, look, if you’re not having a good time, you’re not going to keep it up, so you want to find something that you enjoy.
I am your host of the show, Steven Sashen, co-founder, CEO of xeroshoes.com. We call this The MOVEMENT Movement podcast because we, that includes you, more about that in a second, are creating a movement about natural movement, letting your body do what it’s made to do. The way you participate is really easy. Basically, subscribe and share. That’s it. So go to our website www.jointhemovementmovement.com. There’s nothing you actually have to do to join. That’s just the domain we have. But you’ll find all the previous episodes, all the ways you can find the podcast, all the ways you can find us on social media as well. So give us a review. Give us a thumbs up. Hit the bell icon on YouTube so that you hear about future episodes. Subscribe actually to hear about future episodes on the website. In short, you know the drill. If you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. That said, Griffin, do me a favor, tell people hello and who you are and what you’re doing here.
Griffin Coombs:
Hey, Steven, thanks for having me, and hey, listeners, everybody, it’s great to be here. My name’s Griffin Coombs. I am the founder and head coach of The North Star Body. I, in short, help people resolve chronic stress, anxiety, and joint pain, particularly as barriers to exercise. I do help with those things just in general, but the people who come to me seem to be experiencing those things as barriers to exercise. So I use breath physiology for stress and anxiety. You could think of a psychologist or a therapist kind of addresses it through the mind, through psychotherapy. I am not a therapist. You could say that I address stress and anxiety through the physiological lens and then joint pain through, we’ll call it, gait-informed fitness training, which I’m sure we’ll get into a lot of.
Steven Sashen:
Which one of those do you want to start with? We don’t have to start with what I teased at the beginning just a few moments ago.
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah, let’s start there because it was just such a good tease.
Steven Sashen:
Let’s do it. All right, go for it.
Griffin Coombs:
So-
Steven Sashen:
Let me set up again. Strength is an important part of human functioning. Many people don’t have as much as they would like or think they would like or actually need for things they’re doing. I’m having flashbacks to when I was training on the track with a bunch of people who also trained there were Olympic level, mostly long distance runners, and the amount of strength they had was worse than the average fifth grader. They could barely do a push-up. They were doing kettlebell swings with a five-pound kettlebell, which is a paperweight. It was really amazing. If you suggested to them that they even take a day to do any real strength training, they would be terrified. But as I said in the beginning, and only because of you, what many people do for strength training may not be what’s valuable for what they’re trying to do. Did I get that right as a over-encompassing encapsulation?
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah, yeah, I would say so. I love just The MOVEMENT Movement, the idea of wanting to foster a happy and healthy life, enjoying your body. I think we’re talking to the people who just are trying to be as happy and healthy as possible and using fitness and exercise as a way to do that. I want to say right off the bat that I’m not trying to yuck anyone’s yum who loves deadlifting or back squatting. If you feel great and you particularly love those lifts, keep doing them. Just listen with an open mind, but keep doing them.
I’m talking more to the people who think, because they don’t know any better, that that’s the only route to go to live a happy, healthy life, and those who are in chronic pain and don’t really understand that it could be the training itself that’s causing that pain. So when we look at the adaptations we’re trying to get from strength training or just working out in general, a lot of people think about, “Yeah, I want the metabolic benefits. I want the strength benefits. Maybe I want muscle growth.” But people don’t usually stop to think about, number one, the structural adaptations they’re making and the neurological adaptations that they’re making.
So the stuff that we do repeatedly over and over again, especially under a high neurological load, because strength training, especially if we’re lifting heavy, is a huge demand on the nervous system, that’s feedback for the body to then organize itself around those movements. So those movement patterns will eventually change the way that our body organizes itself and feels safe and structures itself as it walks and as it runs.
You can do all of the strength training and feel great while you’re doing it and get stronger at the gym, and you might not even injure yourself or feel that bad while you’re doing it. But then outside of the gym, when you start to do other movements that almost contradict the patterning that you’ve ingrained in yourself through strength training, that’s when injuries and pain can start to show up. So you think about that athlete or that fitness enthusiast who lifts a ton and has a great time doing it and then throws their back out tying their shoe or stepping down a stair the wrong way. It’s more complicated than just, oh, you’re going to progressively overload and then you’ll be fine, you won’t get injured because it doesn’t exist in the gym vacuum. We’re talking about, how does it transfer to everyday movement, and everyday movement is the gait cycle.
Steven Sashen:
I’m having a couple of interesting thoughts and flashbacks. One is there was a guy in my junior high school who was a natural bodybuilder. The guy was massive. Of course, everyone assumed he’d be a great athlete, and he could not run at all. He was also not the smartest guy. He got kicked off the football team because he couldn’t remember the plays. I’m not saying that all muscle-heads are dumb. I know a lot of brilliant ones. But this guy was sort of prototypical. So that was an interesting thing is he just couldn’t use all that size in a way that was functional.
The other thing is that when I got back into sprinting, I was getting injured a lot for the first couple of years. One of the coaches that I talked to said, “Well, how much can you deadlift?” I said, “I don’t know. I’ve never tried.” So I just went and tried, and I pulled 250 pounds, which was not a big deal. He said, “Well, how much do you weigh?” I said, “About 150.” He goes, “Call me when you’re over 300 pounds deadlifting.” I said, “What?” He goes, “Well, we’ve just seen that a lot of injuries go away once you’re able to be that strong.” It was a combination of things. One is getting out of my shoes and learning that I had a form problem that I couldn’t feel in regular shoes but barefoot I was able to feel it and then correct it. But the other is once I got over 300 pounds, not personally, people helped, once I was deadlifting over 300 pounds… I never got over 300 pounds, personally. That would be insane since I’m 5’5″-
Griffin Coombs:
Important distinction, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
… just to be clear, that also helped a lot. Now that said, there are two things about that. One is when we were doing deadlifting the way he recommended, it was just the concentric part, just the lifting, and then just drop the weight. The idea being that that’s actually the functional part of the deadlift for sprinting. So those are the two things that popped into my mind just maybe as a jumping off point for talking more about the structural things that might occur, and throw in whatever examples you can think of of exercise that people are typically doing that might get in the way of either just daily functional stuff or sports specific stuff. I’m going to keep drinking water because I don’t know why I’m really dried out.
Griffin Coombs:
Yes, drinking water is always good. I’ll go with the first thought that you had because that one’s a little more straightforward where it’s just… Bodybuilding, people who are kind of stuck in… I grew up in the ’90s, and so I remember the commercials, the infomercials about the BowFlex and the NordicTrack and all that. It was just like, there was cardio and then there was bodybuilding-style strength training. So a lot of people still equate strength training with bodybuilding, and they don’t realize that bodybuilding is a sport in and of itself. Bodybuilders are supposed to have… It’s an aesthetically-based sport, so you’re trying to get the most size and the nicest looking proportions of your body. It has nothing to do with being able to do functional movement, and it doesn’t even claim to. It’s a sport in and of itself. So that’s one way to strength train, and it might be really accessible to a lot of people.
But then we had this, quote/unquote, functional movement explosion in the early 2000s. CrossFit came along, tactical-style, military-style training, and that was a step in the right direction. But what I’m finding now, there’s a new movement, I call it the niche biomechanics movement, that’s this gait-informed fitness training. Basically, what they have in common is that we’re looking at, how does the body move? What is the function of these muscles and joints and connective tissue when the body is walking or running or sprinting?
I don’t care that your shoulder blades can retract fully and you can squeeze them together and do a pull-up or a row. I want to know, what is the purpose of the lat, for example, or the chest or the bicep or the glutes for the gait cycle? Because the gait cycle is the primary human movement pattern. Even if you disagree with that, it’s the most used human movement pattern. So unless you’re handstand-walking from the car to the office, your gait cycle is the most important thing. If that’s not working for you, you’re going to be fighting against your body for the rest of your life.
There are a few different systems. There’s functional patterns, there’s GOATA, there’s Weck Method. The system that I’m certified in and that I train people in is called One of a Kind Fitness, or OKF for short. There’s a ton of educational content on the OKF Instagram page, their website, so just talking about what it means to respect and prioritize the gait cycle. But I think what the functional people get wrong is that they’ve… Or I shouldn’t say it’s wrong. I should say it’s incomplete because they’re looking at, we want to use compound movements that use multiple muscle groups all at the same time, but we don’t look at how that actually translates into athletic movement, which is very little. So even though if you’re looking at how do I become more athletic, a deadlift is going to serve you better, certainly, than bodybuilding-style exercise, no doubt about it. But is there a better approach than a deadlift? I think so.
Now to speak to your second thought, sprinting requires so much force absorption, four to five times your body weight for the ground reaction forces of a sprint, so being stronger is important for sprinting. There’s no doubt about it. If you go from “I’ve never strength trained” to “Now I can deadlift 300 pounds,” I do believe that those strength adaptations are going to help you with sprinting, so I don’t think it’s all for nothing. But I think that when we get to a certain point of athleticism and you want to say, “How do I really optimize for sprinting?” I don’t think that a sprinter needs a traditional deadlift. The way that we train is something a little bit different, and I can go into the differences of the exercises.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, please.
Griffin Coombs:
Some of these systems, they’ll tell you don’t strength train. There are some who say strength training’s bad for running or athleticism or it’ll hurt your joints and never pick up weights. I think that’s BS. As you said at the beginning, strength training is important. It’s correlated to longevity. Muscle is important. Bone density is important. Anyone who says you shouldn’t strength train, I just don’t agree with that at all.
I don’t think that we should prioritize strength as the number one attribute we’re after at the cost of everything else. So there comes a point of diminishing returns. Let’s take the deadlift for example. If I’m picking up a barbell, that barbell is in front of my center of mass and I’m biasing the hinge. So when I sprint, and you’re a sprinter so you can visualize this and probably feel it interoceptively in your body as we talk about it, what’s happening is you’re going through the motion of triple flexion and triple extension of the ankle, the knee, and the hip all coming up on that swing leg, that front leg. Then you reverse that by extending, you absorb and react to the force in the ground, and then you repeat it all over again.
Steven Sashen:
For humans who aren’t hip to that terminology, let me paint the picture a little bit. So the triple flexion, this is a kind of classic sprinter pose. There’s one foot that’s on the ground, and the other leg, which is the leg that has swung through, you’re going to be… This is not actually accurate, but for the sake of painting a picture. There’s a 90-degree angle between your upper body and your thigh, 90-degree angle between your thigh and your lower leg, 90-degree angle at your ankle, basically, lower leg and foot. Now again, that’s not true, and it doesn’t stay like that.
Then the triple extension part is when you’ve got that foot that’s on the ground as it’s coming off the ground, I’m going to do it in reverse order, you’re extending basically your plantar flexion. Your foot is moving away from your knee. Your knee is also relatively straight. Your hip is also relatively straight. More importantly, the hip or the leg is behind you, so you are extending the hip. So that’s the triple extension part. Again, it’s not what people actually do. There’s not full extension. There’s not full flexion in that way, but-
Griffin Coombs:
Yes. I want to clarify that because we’re talking about… When One of a Kind Fitness and when I in my practice talk about triple flexion and triple extension, we’re actually not talking about those end range positions. We’re talking about the action, so the moving of the leg up involves the ankle coming up, the toes coming up toward the shin. That’s your dorsiflexion of the ankle. The knee bending and the knee coming up, that’s the hip flexion. Then the extension starts at the top of that. So with the leg off the ground, we actually have to start bringing it back down to the ground. The knee straightens, the hip comes behind, and the foot starts to slightly point, as you just said. So those aren’t end-range positions, but those are the actions that are happening.
Just using the deadlift as an example, so why am I biasing basically just hip flexion? Depending on your body type and your joint angles, yeah, there will be some knee flexion extension and maybe some ankle movement, too. But we’re biasing the hinge, which is just focusing on hip flexion. So think about the neurological load that I’m putting into my nervous system and the structural load, the axial load of my spine and the stimulus I’m giving all of these muscles to bias this one third of the actions that I’m doing during a run.
What One of a Kind Fitness has sort of modified is a squat that, again, it prioritizes triple flexion, triple extension, but also the eccentric isometric phase, which is interesting, because you were talking about prioritizing the concentric phase. But the idea of strength at length seems to be really important for tendon health, that’s what the research shows, but also because generally if you can handle a force at length, you can handle a force in a shortened position, but the opposite isn’t necessarily true. So in my own practice and for clients, I’ve found that just prioritizing eccentric isometrics with some movement but not really prioritizing concentrics and this triple flexion/triple extension position as it may occur in the gait cycle is a wonderful way to train the lower body to get out of pain and to build athleticism.
Steven Sashen:
Can you paint the picture of what that exercise looks like more explicitly so people can get that in their minds?
Griffin Coombs:
Absolutely. The One of a Kind Fitness squat, we train people very intentionally because we want to make sure that we eliminate as many compensations as possible. So the whole point of it is to not let people, quote/unquote, cheat because want to be able to feel these connections in really, quote/unquote, easy positions and then really gradually progress so that I can feel the same stability and the same connection throughout my body when I’m ready for this squat position as I did when I was lying on the floor, for example.
But when we get to the One of a Kind Fitness squat, it looks like the toes are actually slightly turned in and the knees will track over the toes. Now, people look at this and they say, “Well, that’s a recipe for an ACL tear, or that’s knee valgus.” It’s not knee valgus. Knee valgus is when the shin is turned out and the femur is turned in and you get this twist. When the knees continue to track over the toes, so by turning the toes in and letting the knees come in, the knees are still over the toes.
Steven Sashen:
Well, so how far in are we turning our toes? Outside of the foot parallel, outside of the foot, at the right foot pointing to 11 degrees, left foot pointing to one? What would that look like?
Griffin Coombs:
Great question. It’s not heavily prescribed, but I would say we want more or less the shin and ankle bone to be just about facing straight ahead zero degrees, which would mean the toes are just a couple degrees in. Now, some people, if they lack a lot of internal rotation, they may need to make the legs a little bit wider and turn in a little bit more to start to open up the back of the glutes. But in general, it doesn’t really need to be much.
The idea is that the glutes, they lengthen and they load through flexion of the hip, internal rotation of the hip, and an adduction going in of the femur. So we want to load the glutes properly. So the reason that we don’t shove the knees out in the squat is because if we’re abducting femurs outward in space and externally rotating, that’s not allowing the glute to lengthen completely. So we let the knees come in, and to avoid the knee injury, we turn the toes in with it. With the tensions that we cue and we’ve built up, like I said, all the way from lying on your back on the ground, when you’re ready for the squat, you should be able to feel tension from the foot connecting through the fascia all the way up to the glute and around the hip so you’re not feeling knees or a lot of low back or anything like that. It’s a real lateral stability pushing, like you could spring load from any direction. It’s very athletic.
From there, so you can just imagine us going to about 90 degrees of hip flexion, about, and about 90 degrees of knee flexion, so you can think shin to knee at 90, hip to torso 90, and we’ll start isometrically holding that position. We can do that for one to two minutes. We might start to add a little bit of a bounce where we mimic reacting to that ground reaction force during the run. We might add some weight after that. Eventually, we will train different variations of this quad as well. We might add a little bit of knee flexion going lower just to train the quad at that length where the knee comes up, when you’re running, that leg that’s in the air is coming back, and that knee tends to come into some deep reflection. But the position I just described is the main One of a Kind Fitness squat, you would say.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting. So the isometric part, you’re just doing that unsupported and not doing a wall squat or anything. It’s literally just standing, dropping down, so you’ve got about 90 degrees shin to thigh and 90 degrees thigh to torso, which means that your back is not straight up and down. Your back is going to be-
Griffin Coombs:
Correct.
Steven Sashen:
So to do those 90 degree angles, because of the greater flexion in your ankle, that’s going to make everything… Well, if you look at it from the right angle, it’ll be sort of Z-shaped. If you look at it at the other side, it’ll be S-shaped.
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
I don’t know what that font would be, but it’s some font that’s an S or Z depending on where you look at it. So you’re starting out with the isometric thing and then that little bounce… It’s really funny, and I don’t mean funny ha-ha. I mean funny excruciating. That little bounce can make a big difference between, like, “Oh, I can just stay here for a while,” and “Holy crap, I have to stay here for 10 more seconds?”
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah. It’s so funny you say that because I just started adding those back into my own routine again. I was focusing… We cycle through. You could think of the triphasic, eccentric isometrics, and then we do reactives with those little bounce and then we go to plyometrics. Again, we don’t focus so much on concentric stuff, but I just cycled back adding these oscillations, these bounces back.
I was actually in Maryland this past weekend with the founder of the system, who’s my coach. It’s based in Maryland. We were training together. I swear to God, Steven, I did, I think, three sets of 100 little bounces, because they’re really tiny, and just body weight. I wasn’t holding onto anything. But my glutes the next day were talking to me, and I was like, “Wow.” It’s just insane the different kind of stimuli that you can give your tissues, especially if you’re not used to it. So we start with the isometrics, again because we want to make sure the tendons can handle plyometric movement and proper running and sprinting down the line and also we’re training the muscles at length. We’re training them to handle force at length, because if they can, then they’re good to go.
Steven Sashen:
You mentioned something that piqued my interest. After you do the bodyweight version, then possibly add a little weight, etc., and then you said the plyometric version. What’s the plyo version of that?
Griffin Coombs:
We don’t really do a plyo version of the squat per se, but we’ll start to add in higher intensity plyometric, just jump training, more like traditional jump training, box jumps, maybe some broad jumps, depth drops. But I don’t think a lot of people need those plyometrics, the advanced or higher intensity stuff. If you want to do it, great, but it’s extra or if you’re an athlete. I don’t particularly train professional athletes. That’s not my personal demographic. This system has trained professional athletes, and so it’s definitely part of it. For me, I’m just looking at the people who they’re duck-footed when they walk and they have near low back pain and they’re sitting all day, and it’s the people who they’re trying to do the right thing and hurting.
Steven Sashen:
I just had a bit of an aha moment, a phrase that I have never used and I hope I never use it again, but it just hit me. The average human being will, from what I’ve seen, have a couple of issues. But one of the biggest ones that their glutes just aren’t working, and even more, their glutes and their feet don’t know how to work together. Because you can do things with your feet, turn them in or turn them out like you described, that can impact how your glutes function. You can do things with your glutes that will impact how your feet function and everything in between.
So if somebody does walk in or somebody is in a situation where their feet point out, their knees could either be pointing out or pointing in, depending on what’s going on with their glutes, if they have weak glutes, that is a number one contributor to low back issues. If they just go and start doing regular squats, regular deadlifts, regular whatever, and we’re only talking lower body at the moment, there’s a high probability that they’ll be doing that with a bad fundamental alignment or movement pattern to begin with. If they’re just doing that and arguably getting stronger in those positions, they may not be either a) strengthening the requisite muscles in the right way, or b) they might be doing compensatory movements where they don’t have to ever strengthen their glutes in this case-
Griffin Coombs:
Bingo.
Steven Sashen:
… find some other thing that happens. So what you’re trying to do is fundamentally re-pattern, reprogram some of those basic things first and foremost and then start doing that under load, then start doing it. So I would argue this is a whole different game than what most people think of as functional fitness, which is get a cable trainer and do wood chopping motions or lift up heavier bags or whatever the hell it is that’s, quote, functional because, hey, you lift up a bag of groceries, hey, you have to… I don’t know what the wood chopping thing is. Who chops wood anymore? Except I do. It’s one of my all-time favorite things. Two quick tangents just for the fun of it. Where in Maryland, because that’s where I grew up?
Griffin Coombs:
The headquarters is in Bel Air.
Steven Sashen:
Ah, okay. Well, I was nearby but not there. And total, total, no reason to bring it up, but I will anyway, on wood chopping. When I was in college, my last semester, I think, I took a group therapy class. I was a psych major, but it was really just an excuse to get eight seniors into therapy. I didn’t know that, but it was fun. I think the only other guy in the class was the captain of the football team, quarterback, super buff dude. We did a weekend marathon something at our teacher/therapist’s country cabin. The first thing he did is he just wanted to tire us out. So he sent me and the football guy out to chop wood because it was a wood-fired stove. I don’t remember what the women did.
We came back, and it’s like, “What was that like for everyone? What emotions came up?” Everyone else had something about how by just exerting all that effort, it brought something up for them. The football guy was like, “I just felt all this anger towards my father, and I was just getting out all that anger, and I just felt like how I’m just myself,” and how went on and on and on. He turned to me and said, “What was it like for you?” I said, “Yeah, I really like chopping wood.” “But what was the experience? What was the emotional thing?” “Really satisfying because I got really good. I got better as I did it, so I really enjoyed it.”
Griffin Coombs:
Oh, man.
Steven Sashen:
“Did anything else come up?” It’s like, “Nope, man. I just like chopping wood.”
Griffin Coombs:
They picked the wrong guy, I guess, for that experiment. I love chopping wood, too, actually. When I was 15, we had a little wood stove in the garage, and I would go out there. I was doing my dad a favor because it was a chore, but it wasn’t a chore for me. I just loved doing it. So I’m with you.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I realize that my mind does not do focus. I mean, I can. But the things that I do physically are all things that are high precision things. Sprinting is a high precision activity. I used to be into archery and target shooting and bowling and putting. Anything that was high precision for my body, I like it. For my mind, it’s like I’m going as broad and as wide as I can. That dichotomy is interesting to me. So chopping wood, it’s a precision sport. It’s super fun.
We’ve talked about arguably replacing a squat/deadlift. I do want to bring one thing up, though, because one of the things that is an exercise highly correlated with reduction of injuries for sprinters in particular is having eccentric hamstring strength basically for people to… An easy way to think about it… Actually, I’ll just go straight to it. The exercise du jour is the Nordic hamstring curl. For people who don’t know, imagine you’re just standing, sitting on your knees, you’re on your knees, knees on the ground, you are straight up and you have something holding your feet down. From your knees, keeping your body as straight as you can, it doesn’t have to be perfectly straight, you can bend a little bit at the hips, but then slowly lower yourself towards the ground. Now, for the average human, if we think about a clock, and if we’re looking so you’re facing left, you’ll make it to maybe 11 o’clock, maybe 10 o’clock, and then you’ll fall on your face.
The goal is to be able to make it all the way down under control, and then if you’re a real beast, make it back up in the same way. I don’t know if it’s from that exercise, which I’ve gotten good at and am a beast, but I haven’t had a hamstring injury to save my life in the last 14 years. So that’s a very specific kind of strength training thing that obviously doesn’t have that same functional component per se. But I’m just curious what your thoughts are about injecting something like that, even if we’re not talking about something specifically for sprinters.
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah, yeah, because if it were for sprinters, and I’m not super up to speed on statistics for sprinters and high-intensity athletes and injuries-
Steven Sashen:
Who would be?
Griffin Coombs:
Well, the people who work with them. Like I said, the system I’m talking about works with professional athletes. My practice, my target client is the gen pop who wants to get out of pain, become more athletic, but you’re not competing. You could if you wanted to, but in general… The Nordic curl has become more popular. I see it all over Instagram. Again, I think going from nothing to having a lot of eccentric hamstring strength is going to be better if you’re running or if you’re sprinting.
The issue that I have with the Nordic curl is that, like you mentioned, getting your foot to work with your glute is important, and I 100% agree. We’re not really teaching the hamstring to do what it does during the gait cycle, and we’re not really teaching it to do it with all the other things that it is supposed to do in the gait cycle. Now, again, eccentric strength is important. But if you look at the hamstring’s job, and this is up for debate, so PhD physios don’t come after me, but I think that the hamstring is more of a stabilizer than anything else during the gait cycle because we are not… Again, if you were just to picture what’s actually happening is that triple flexion action, triple extension hits the ground and sort of pushes the ground out and behind you at an angle and reacts to that force, comes right back up and starts all over again.
I think a lot of people get lost in the role of the hamstring because we picture a treadmill or those curved treadmills where we’re pulling the ground behind us. That’s not really the case because the ground’s not moving. We are the ones moving, so one of the reasons that I don’t assess gait on a curved treadmill because it’s a completely mechanical thing going on. So it’s not a curl. It’s not the hamstring pulling. It’s the whole hip/knee/ankle coming up and coming down, pushing the ground away, reacting to that force, and repeating the cycle.
So for that reason, I think the exercises that we do in OKF, the OKF squat, we have a single leg squat, our own variation of a single leg squat as well. We have some ground exercises that are like regressions that lead us up to the squat and the single leg squat, and we’ll do things with rotating the pelvis while we’re in those positions as well. So that is training the hamstring as a stabilizer in that lengthened sort of triple flexed position. Then, again, we add the reactive component. We can add the pelvic rotation component. We can add weight to it. So I find that that integrates much more the hamstring’s function as to how it works in the gait cycle rather than isolating just that muscle for eccentric work.
Steven Sashen:
Well, the hamstring is a tricky one, of course, because it is attached below the knee and above the hip. The argument for the Nordic hamstring, actually, more than what you were describing is that when your leg is in front of you, when it’s already swung forward and you’re about to start driving down towards the ground again, if you didn’t have a hamstring, you foot would just kick straight out. Once your knee comes out, your foot would follow just from the momentum. So the idea is you’re exerting this eccentric force to slow your foot down so that you can extend your knee at the right time without putting… Because if your knee is perpendicular to your torso and your foot kicks out extending your hamstring, now you’re stretching it at both ends. That’s sort of the mess of it. But ignoring that, let’s move away from hamstrings. Who gives shit?
I want to hear about some more of these things that you talked about. Let’s move away from just the OKF squat to some of the other movements that you would do with people. Now that we have this idea of let’s get things working in conjunction with each other the way they normally would, but under this, let’s say for lack of… I’m not trying to be dismissive when I say it this way, this semi-artificial way of doing it. I say that simply because if you’re not just doing the actual motion, if you’re not just running, then you’re doing something semi-artificial that is designed to help with when you’re doing the actual thing. So let’s talk about some of the other fun things people would do if they were going to hang out with you guys.
Griffin Coombs:
We start everybody with breathing, with breathing mechanics. Because if we can’t manage pressure, then we’re going to compensate all day long. So the goal is to do strength training while minimizing compensation patterns. So we’re very attentive to details. I remember when I first… Years and years ago, I read Kelly Starrett’s book. I love the analogy because he talked about the gym as the laboratory, and then the application is on the field or your sport or your hobby, whatever you’re doing. So we really treat the strength training like the laboratory. That’s where we’re thinking the most and dialing in details the most so that when we go run and play Frisbee or when we go for our jog or whatever we’re doing, we can focus on enjoying the activity and we don’t have to think about those details so that re-patterning becomes automatic over time. That’s the whole point. So we’d start people lying on their back breathing and being able to find length and tension in the abdominal tissues, proper use of the diaphragm, proper expansion of the rib cage, all that stuff. That overlaps with my work as a breathing coach and practitioner of all that stuff.
Steven Sashen:
Let’s pause there and talk about what proper is compared to what you see people walking in the door with.
Griffin Coombs:
Oh, man, there are so many mechanical breathing dysfunctions. There’s people who breathe paradoxically, which is not super common, but it’s the most extreme, which is basically you inhale and the belly comes in, and then they exhale and relax and the belly comes out. So that takes a whole lot of just… We have to regress and re-pattern that completely.
But a lot of people, they use accessory breathing muscles primarily instead of the diaphragm and the muscles around the ribs, so we don’t see a lot of 360-degree belly and rib expansion. We see maybe a little bit, but it’s dominated by the muscles around the collarbone and the chest. We see a lot of lifting of shoulders. Or we have people who are kind of hip to belly breathing, but they only get the belly part and they don’t understand the diaphragm functions as a dome that expands 360 degrees. So you get people with a rounded back. That’s their natural posture. So they breathe and the belly just kind of comes out, but that tension is not even.
If you were to think of a balloon, my coach, he calls it, he refers to the balloon animals, the hot dog balloons. All that tension, it’s inflating, but it’s also gaining tension as it expands. If you were to just fill one side of that balloon and the rest stayed flaccid and just one side of it popped out, that’s the just belly breathing imagery. So I get a lot of that. Either you’re a shallow breather, or you’ve kind of got the belly, but we’re working on building that intra-abdominal pressure around the whole thoracic and abdominal cavity.
Steven Sashen:
Brilliant. I’m so glad you went there because if you hadn’t, I was going to cue you for it. Because it is one of those things that most people, especially if they’ve come out of yoga or a lot of the breath work that came out in the ’80s and ’90s, it was belly only and not recognizing that you should feel that expansion in your obliques, in your lower back. It really should be expanding the whole… in your perineum, kind of everywhere. It feels really weird at first when you do it, and you’ll also feel that… I know for me, when I first started doing that, it was really interesting because I could feel things letting go and releasing in my thoracic spine, which was super fun.
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah. When I was on a couple years ago, and we were talking more about goals and health coaching at that time, but we did touch a bit on breathing, and I remember talking about that backside, that thoracolumbar junction and a lot rib flare and people who are always cued, especially lifters who are cued to pull their shoulders down and back doing bench presses, pull-ups like this, it’s always, “We’ve got to stabilize the shoulder and we got to activate the lats by doing this.” So we end up with the ribs popped out, and all this tissue is the mid to low back is compressed.
Now I don’t actually have more thoracic mobility. My upper back has not changed. It’s below the rib cage. I start to get a hinge point, a bending point down there. Then that leads to a lot of just belly breathing because I can’t expand back here because it’s all compressed. So the breathing mechanics relate to the shoulder mechanics that we work on, too, which is that we want the shoulders to be able to remain more or less flat against the rib cage and be able to move without popping out and disconnecting from the rib cage.
If you were to think about, again, the gait cycle, and if you were to think about the arm swing, the arm swing exists for a reason. It’s not just to swing the arms, but as the arms move, if they stay connected… So we think about the pecs and the lats and the biceps, because it crosses the shoulder joint, we think of those as shoulder stabilizers primarily not as push-and-pull muscles. Because as my arm swings, this is locked in, it pulls the rib cage to counter-rotate the pelvis.
So when we think about function of the upper body, we still train, we have push-up, we have a pull-up, and we add weight to those, and they’re tough, man, but we do them with the sense of, okay, can I get my shoulder into a position that’s probably going to look wrong or unstable to the traditional lifter because we’re not shoving them down or back? We’re letting them find this neutral position where I can feel chest and I can feel lat and I can feel bicep all sort of locking this into a position where I’m not shrugging. It’s not all traps, but I’m certainly not doing that traditional cue that, like I just explained with the breathing, causes way more problems than it really solves. So now we’re here, we have the OKF reactive ball where it’s filled with sand, we start to make circles, and we can feel those muscles contracting and relaxing just as they would as you pull yourself.
Steven Sashen:
For people who are just listening, so the reactive ball is how big?
Griffin Coombs:
It’s about the size of… Oh, man, I’m not a field athlete, so I don’t know. It’s-
Steven Sashen:
Like a softball, smaller than a softball?
Griffin Coombs:
Maybe slightly bigger than a softball. Kind of like those weighted, squishy balls you would use in fitness, the really tiny hand weights.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, got it. Again, what you were describing was that those are under each hand as you’re doing this push-up and the first thing you’re doing is a little rotation, a little wax on/wax off to-
Griffin Coombs:
Yeah, we’re not doing the push-up with them. We’re standing with them, so it’s a reactive circle. This is just open chain. This starts to teach the shoulders to dynamically stabilize, to stabilize during movement. So it’s stimulating chest and lat to contract/relax, contract/relax, because it’s filled with sand partially, so that momentum is creating that stimulation.
Steven Sashen:
Got it, got it. You could do that with the Shake Weight, but that would look creepy. Total tangent again, it amazes me how, when that product came out as an infomercial product and everyone mocked it to high heaven, now you can go into almost any physical therapist’s office and they’ve got one. It’s like, aye-yai-yai.
Griffin Coombs:
Bingo. I’m seeing stuff with water, too, now. There’s stuff coming up on Instagram of rehab stuff with water. It’s the same principle, and it’s really close to what we do. It’s using momentum and reaction to get the muscles to be able to contract/relax.
Steven Sashen:
That’s, again, another very interesting distinction. The whole idea with doing a bench press and pulling your shoulders back and down, squeezing all that, is in part, not just about the shoulder stabilization, but also because otherwise most people will do all this wacky compensatory stuff to try to just do the bench press. If those are locked in place, you just have fewer degrees of freedom for moving that bar outside of the proper path. Also, if you do pull back, it does move your chest forward, which means as you’re bringing the bar down, it doesn’t go as far. So you can simultaneously get more stretch in the pecs, because you pull the shoulders back, without having to drop the bar all the way as far down. It’s an interesting positively paradoxical thing. But I love what you’re describing of doing something where it’s actually just training all those same muscles to work more in concert in a more realistic way than that isolated movement.
Griffin Coombs:
Exactly.
Steven Sashen:
Again, I’m not bashing the bench press, depending on what you’re trying to do, there’s a place for it. The other thing, when you’re talking about just what doing that does to the torso, especially if you thinking about running, and of course, there’s arguments about this, but what’s fascinating for people to understand is… I can only use sprinting as an example because I don’t run slow. I had some bicep issues going on last year, and the last race that I did prior to having my bicep removed from my shoulder and screwed back into my humerus-
Griffin Coombs:
Oh, man.
Steven Sashen:
It was painful, but I was shocked at how painful it was to run 100 meters. My bicep was destroyed from running 100 meters because of all the force that it does when you’re just pumping your arms back and forth. Similarly, that stretch in the chest was tremendous. Now, some people, I won’t mention them by name, friends of both of ours, they try to over-exaggerate this torso twisting motion and the counteracting motion in the pelvis, which arguably, when you watch a sprinter, there’s a little bit of that. When you watch a distance runner, there might be a little more. Again, it seems to be more a question of having the right amount of motion and the stability in that on again/off again thing rather than just some constant stress.
Griffin Coombs:
Yes, that’s exactly it. I know that there are a lot of people and systems, or at least in this space of gait optimization, whatever, who will try to have you change the way that you run in time. I’ve benefited very recently, in fact, from some cueing. Especially me as not a natural athlete, some cueing for the sake of rhythm and fluidity in my run is really helpful. However, if we think that just exaggerating a certain balance point or motion or try to recreate shapes that we see in a really good runner is going to help us, we’re missing the point, because exactly like you said, these are byproducts of having the requisite stability.
Again, one of our principles at OKF or one of the things to look out for is lateral stability. The hips are looking for lateral stability when they hit the ground in a run or when they’re loading for a jump or doing anything athletic. If the hips don’t find lateral stability, they’ll look for it somewhere else, and that’s where compensation patterns start to happen. So I completely agree with you. It’s not about, how do I get my more rotation for the sake of more rotation? It’s that, if my shoulders are dynamically stable, meaning they know how to lock in but continue to be able to move and are my hips laterally stable, then the way that I interact with the ground while running is going to cause rotation of the pelvis and counter-rotation of the rib cage to the best degree for my body.
Steven Sashen:
Right, yeah. You remind me of another thing. This goes back to the beginning of our conversation. We see often that runners who are getting injured have glutes that either don’t fire or don’t fire correctly or one fires, the other doesn’t, or some variation. One of the ways you see this is if you film someone from behind, especially if you do it in slow motion, you’ll watch that when one foot lands on the ground, their pelvis will basically not stay level. They won’t have that control, that lateral control you’re talking about, and this leads to a whole bunch of issues.
The point is, that we’re coming back to, is that, I hear, correct me if I’m wrong, the foot bone is connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone’s connected to the shin bone, the shin bone connected to… Yeah. So we’re doing all these things to find those connections organically rather than trying to fake it. Again, you’re giving me flashbacks. I remember being at a day camp when I grew up and watching the other kids run. I think I was really watching the only kid who was faster than me, which annoyed the crap out of me, and just watching how he ran, and I tried imitating him. I remember thinking, “It might look interesting, but it feels way stupid.”
Griffin Coombs:
Exactly.
Steven Sashen:
When people look at professional runners… How do I want to describe this? Nicholas Romanov talks about how the better you get at something, the more alike you are to the other people who are that good. It never gets to be everyone’s identical because there’s always going to be some little idiosyncratic thing, but fundamentally, they all look pretty much the same. If you watch a video of Usain Bolt sprinting in slow motion and then look at the other seven guys in the race, they all look exactly like him. They all have the same form. It’s really quite wonderful to see. But you can’t fake it till you make it. You got to build up the foundation. Then that’s part of the result when you then do the movement pattern correctly, which includes many of the things we were talking about and a handful more.
Griffin Coombs:
Exactly. You really summed up nicely what the whole approach is, and particularly how our approach differs from a lot of the other… Well, I think every one of these other systems has great things to offer. They have pieces of it. But one of the big things is that we really shouldn’t be trying to alter… If you’re thinking about the way you’re sprinting while you’re sprinting, you’re not going fast enough. That’s why we’re so intentional about the training itself and so focused on details because this is our laboratory. This is our, how do we eliminate compensations?
Steven Sashen:
It’s actually worse than that because if you’re at full speed, you can’t be thinking about your movement pattern. I’m just taking the same thing you said and turning it upside down. Because I had this minor glitch in my giddy up that if you watch me in slow motion, you could see… In fact, Nick Romanov is the one who diagnosed it. He looked at me in super slow-mo and said, “See, you’re not getting into the right position at the right time,” I don’t remember what speed we were videoing at, but he says, “You’re three frames late.” But I could never figure out what to do. Or even if I thought I figured it out, once I was at full speed, I was just relying on what my brain knew how to do.
Quite amazingly, someone actually gave me a cue. It was someone who was on the podcast recently. My friend, Doug Adams, gave me a cue that, ironically, I can think about it full speed. But after I did it for a while, I don’t need to think about it anymore, and then I don’t have to think about it again. The thing about sprinting, you only get three thoughts. It’s like drive… The transition, it’s like, take off an airplane, don’t stand up, and then do this weird thing for maximum velocity and then hold on and cross your fingers because that’s kind of the way the last 20 meters of the race goes. Anyway, this is all super, super interesting. We’ve hit that time where I get to ask, if people want to find out more about OKF or you in particular, how should they do that?
Griffin Coombs:
I’m active on Instagram. So I am The North Star Body @thenorthstarbody. Then my website is thenorthstarbody.com. Like I said, we didn’t touch too much on it today, but I also coach breathing and respiratory using respiratory science for stress and anxiety relief, but it ties into the movement as well. They overlap. So there’s more about stuff there.
Steven Sashen:
The relationship between breathing and emotional states is well documented, frankly, although there are some interesting twists. I think it was the psychologist, Fritz Perls, who said, “Anxiety’s just excitement without the breathing.” Suffice it to say, you can work on whatever the psychological thing seems to be about why you may be thinking you’re feeling whatever you’re feeling, or you can just do some physiological things that will impact it through the back door, if you will. If you are hip to that, it does two things. One, it gives you a great tool. But the other thing, it makes you really have a second thought about what you thought the problem might have been.
Griffin Coombs:
Yes, yeah, because you realize that the role your body is playing in this is maybe bigger than the role of the story that you’re telling yourself. So that’s really empowering.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, because often you’ll be having some, let’s call it, emotional experience, and your brain is just looking for an answer for what’s going on, and it’ll latch onto whatever the hell it’ll find, which may not be remotely accurate.
Griffin Coombs:
I’m so glad you said that because this is something that just… When people understand this, and including myself, when I started to understand this, it was like, wow. Your breathing pattern, particularly the rate of your breathing, but they’re all related, but let’s say your breathing rate will impact the state of your nervous system. So it’s not just the other way around. So you get anxious, you get stressed, something happens. You almost get in a car accident and your heart rate spikes. You go into sympathetic nervous system drive. Your breathing rate starts to increase, but your brain reinterprets your breathing rate as threat detection.
Now, here’s the crazy part, and here’s the thing that I really want people to understand about what you just said. When you’re in a state of threat detection, the job of the human brain at that point is to find out what the hell that threat is. So if I’m a hunter gatherer and I hear a roar in the distance, now I need to know, where is it? Was that a bear or a lion? Is it just passing by, or does it want to eat me? It’s my brain’s job to figure out and identify the threat. So if physiologically I’m in a state of hyper-arousal threat detection, everybody I come into contact with is a potential threat. It changes my worldview. It changes my personality over time.
From a biochemical standpoint, the breathing… I know you’ve had Patrick McKeown on a couple times. I’m an Oxygen Advantage guy myself. I have a few other certifications as well. All the scientific side of breathing, I wish more people in the more spiritual space would get hip to the role of CO₂ and blood pH and the nervous system. Because when you start to over-breathe and you start breathing off CO₂, now it’s been a couple days because you haven’t down-regulated from that stressful moment, your blood pH will change, and then your kidneys will compensate. So now your kidneys have dumped bicarbonate so that your blood pH gets back to normal, and now that fast breathing rate is your new normal. Now, if you were to breathe any slower, it would alter your blood pH again. So you’ve just locked in a breathing pattern that is causing you to be constantly stressed and constantly looking for threats, even though you have no idea because it’s subconscious. Isn’t that nuts?
Steven Sashen:
It is. Well, your brain is always just trying to figure out how to acclimate to whatever the hell you’ve just made it do for some period of time.
Griffin Coombs:
Exactly.
Steven Sashen:
There have been more than my share of times where I’ve been on my bike and gone by someone closer than they wished I had gone by. Then they yell at me, like, “You almost hit me.” I said, “Well, the evidence is that I didn’t hit you. So what’s going on now is you’re just surprised, and that’s not my problem.” By the way, that does not work. They do not get any more calm. That’s when they want to fight me or some shit. It’s like, “I didn’t hit you. That’s in the past. You’re just thinking about something that may have happened that clearly didn’t happen.” But they are wired.
I had this happen once with a really, really big guy, and he got really, really mad at me. I was like 10 feet away when I passed the guy. But it scared him, and more importantly, it scared the woman he was with, and then he got all protective. I wish I had thought of this sooner. I stopped my bike, and I said, “Do you really want to have this argument?” or maybe I probably yelled it, and we kind of yelled at each other from afar. But if I was smarter, I would’ve done a weird pattern interrupt. This guy was huge. I would’ve walked up, again, I’m 5’5″, 145, and I would’ve said, “Do you know Brazilian jiu-jitsu?” is what I would’ve asked. He would’ve been like, “What?” I’d go, “Well, if you don’t, you might want to come to my dojo. Now, do you still want to fight?”
Griffin Coombs:
Assuming, you don’t actually have a Brazilian jiu-jitsu dojo.
Steven Sashen:
No, I don’t have a Brazilian jiu-jitsu dojo.
Griffin Coombs:
You never know. It could be a side project.
Steven Sashen:
Well, it’s just when someone my size does something like that, acts in that way, people are like, “Oh, okay, this is a problem. I’ve way underestimated this situation.”
Griffin Coombs:
Pull the crazy card. Like, “This guy, he must have something. He must either know how to fight or be really nuts.”
Steven Sashen:
Well, I had that happen in New York. I just remember a couple times where somebody cut me off, I don’t know what it was, where someone threatened to come after me, and I just stood there and went, “All right,” and they went, “What?” I said, “Okay, let’s get it over with. You start.” They’re like, “What?” I said, “Come on. You said you want to kill me. You start.” They’re like, “If I see you again.” I went, “Ah, damn it.” It’s just entertaining to do things like that. I don’t put myself in those situations, but it’s happened a few times. I find it utterly hysteric.
Griffin Coombs:
If you’re there, might as well have fun.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, pretty much. Speaking of fun, please go check out what Griffin’s up to and let us both know what your experience is in discovering how your body can work more naturally and how that will lead to changes in what you’re actually doing: running, walking, hiking, whatever it’s you like to do. Also go back to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find previous episodes, ways you can subscribe to hear about new episodes, the place you can find us on social media. If you have any requests, any comments, any questions, anybody you think should be on the show, as I always say, especially if you can find someone who’s willing to talk to me who thinks I have cranial rectal reorientation syndrome, that would be super fun. I just can’t get anyone who’s got the courage to have that conversation with me for some reason. Either way, you can drop me an email at move, M-O-V-E, @jointhemovementmovement.com. Most importantly, until whatever�
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