Are Zerchers Just A Fad? And Why Strength Is Nothing Without Rhythm w/ Joel Smith (SSOF Ep 194)

James de Lacey2:45

I'm happy if you want to talk about that I'm happy to offer what I think because I think there's a lot of ways to look at.

Joel Smith2:50

We're just going to have this flow straight in.

James de Lacey2:53

Sounds good to me.

Joel Smith2:55

You just go straight in. We'll just continue on.

James de Lacey2:59

I mean I guess my two cents with the AI thing is I always think when something poses a threat to your business we're always going to be very all like at this and this is, it can't do but I think that it's going to from my experience it will write a better program than a lot of coaches. From just a strict program general writing than a lot of coaches. Especially uninformed, you think about the high school football coaches writing the strength program. 90% of the time it'd be better if they just had AI write the program for them. Straight up.

If you're just an uninformed kid just like, oh this or that, you're probably going to be better 90% of the time having it write it for you. But then I think the good thing is it's going to make you think clearly, what actually makes a program come to life? And you could say coaching, but what does that mean?

It's human interaction, it's belief, it's ritual, it's the emotional exchange, it's the vibe of the group or if you're an online coach, it's that working with that person. And if you're working with that person, what does it mean to unique, what's unique about that? How does it feel unique versus computer writing it?

But I mean, I'll tell you for me, I do a lot of different programming. I'll do sprints and jumps is a lot of what I do, masters track, but I also do programs for people who want to go to buds and special forces and 1 and 1/2 mile tests and 4 mile tests. And I've gotten a tremendous amount using AI to help me because I'll say, here's my program. If this was Jack Daniels writing critiquing this, what would he say? It's like, bam, your threshold pace is too fast. It's always too fast, your mileage sucks. I'm like, okay Jack Daniels, or Arthur Lydiard, same thing.

Okay, Arthur Lydiard, for whatever, maybe it's different than actually talk to the person, but it's like in a way, it's not like talking to the coach exactly, but in a sense, you can have a panel of experts critiquing your program and you're going to think about it in a way you never would before. So, I guess what I think is I think on average, the average bar of training will be forced to be higher. It will make us think more deeply about what makes a program human and what the human actually brings to the table.

And obviously in person is the biggest, but also paying attention to what that means. Online, I think it means what is creativity? What can you write and how can you present it in a way that AI won't? And because I do think, okay, let's say some programming it's not great now, what about in a year? What about in 2 years? That scaling effect.

So I do view it as a good thing, but I think that my hope is that one it just makes programming better, two it helps us consider our humanity better, and also three I'll say this is artistry and we talked about this and maybe this made it on the podcast, but the AI slop Instagram, you just tell it's just there was no curation. Just hey AI, make me a thing. You probably gave it three sentences. Maybe that's a straw man. Maybe eight. But there was no, there was nothing that was unique that was leading into that and it's just everything looks the same.

And that's I guess that dystopian future. It's almost the beast if you will from the esoteric perspective that everything is this stamped same. There's no human individuality. And I think we need to be protectors of that. Even when I before I write a program, going for a 15-minute walk to clear my brain, to let the humanity part of my brain work better.

And it's kind of a, it's a calling. It's a strong mark obviously in human history for a variety of reasons, but I think in the coaching space, I hope that we consider those things instead of I think it's easy just to take a strong position in one place or another.

Joel Smith7:09

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Where also is awesome is sports science data analysis. You can, now anyone with a limited understanding of whatever of actual code, etcetera can start to break down data and get deeper into everything, which is actually quite cool. And I've got a, I've actually got a, is it a Vertruve? I think that's what they call it. Just so I can get some acceleration time, velocity time data on some different things.

And I'm trying to, now I want to take a bunch of the common, not miss, common thought processes around different training things and just go into the data and match it up. Actually look at for example a squat versus a jump. See when that acceleration profile actually starts to dip during that concentric of that squat or squats versus squats with bands or different Olympic weightlifting variations and see how those curves change.

And you can with my code I have a little dashboard that I can just put the CSV in and then it just puts it all in there. And then I can click buttons and break it all down. So, it's, that's the cool part of AI that I really like for I guess for coaching now.

Yeah, it's interesting what kind of brain it all lends towards in the sense that I think I'm particularly excited because I'm the type of person that my brain is a very high intuition, high ideas, but it has trouble sometimes tying ends together, doing the boring laborious statistical work if that makes sense.

That was my struggle in graduate school. I'm going through SPSS and stats and I'm like this is getting a tooth pulled. And honestly, my professor helped me with the vast majority. I had the idea I was like, all right, hey, three depth jumps. This is what I want to see. This is what I'm curious. I found a lot of constraint-based stuff, but I'm like, dude, the stats, I am brain dead, man.

But he was the type that he didn't have his domain, but you could tell his brain was very much wired towards more of that I can do stats, I can crunch numbers. I think he was a great professor and advisor and did some great research and ACL work, but my brain is still the opposite. Give me the, I'll give you the ideas. I'll give you 10 ideas for how to, master's thesis ideas or whatever.

And in that sense, it is nice because the mundane, it does assist with that and it does help tremendously.

James de Lacey10:34

For sure. And we should go straight I wish you go into our topic that I titled this around Zercher squats. Now you had an issue on my comment that I made on Nick Garcia's Instagram. Anyone's interested, I interviewed Nick Garcia maybe two or three years ago if anyone's interested go back there. He's a great high school coach, track and field coach out in California.

And we were talking about Zercher squats. And it would probably be interesting to go into this. I mentioned that I think it's become a fair exercise. I think it's been used pretty much everywhere almost places a lot of the time for any reason. And it'll be interesting to know Joel, I know you have different thoughts on the Zercher and use it often.

So it'd be really cool to go into I guess maybe we can go into Zercher squats in terms of where you see them being more beneficial or just generally better applicable in certain settings over maybe other squat variations and what you're typically looking at when you're using a Zercher squat over other variations.

Joel Smith11:40

Yeah, it was interesting to see that with Nick. I have the world of respect for Nick. I mean, I think about track and field being the bellwether of so much of your coaching. We can say, "Oh, you should do this method or that method." But in track, it's like at the end of the day, did your athletes throw farther? Are they faster? I love, I mean, he's been on my podcast as well.

But yeah, in that with that post, I actually, that's something where I'm in favor of Zerchers. And I think somebody who's doing it very well, I think that post was directed towards was Anthony over SMU at volleyball there. And again, results, if you want to talk track and field, he gets undeniable results with the vertical jump improvement. I definitely have an eye on what he's doing there.

And so the first time I actually used a Zercher, I was maybe like 20s. And it just didn't feel good. I was like, "Oh, this just feels like shit." And it's hard on my elbows and I didn't get it. And I, there is something to be said about that initial intuition as well. I will say that point being more like a high jumper build. I think I've kind of filled out a little more old man strength over the years, maybe more like a decathlete than a high jumper.

So, you're more of a high jumper type, that lift is not necessarily, if I was training a bunch of high jumpers for weight room, I probably wouldn't have a Zercher as a go-to. We'd probably do goblet squats and probably leave it that. And I'll get into why that is.

But in terms of just general development, the way I view it is every, no one's going to fight goblet squats. No one's going to be like having a post that says, "F goblet squats. They suck." Maybe someone did back in the day. I'm sure maybe there's always some pushback when something new comes in. Mark Rippetoe probably doesn't like them.

James de Lacey13:33

He doesn't like much.

Joel Smith13:34

Yeah, I know. Hex bar deadlifts, anything that's not very strict powerlifting. Anyways, so to me a Zercher is very much an extension of a goblet squat. And we would think, okay, well, why is a goblet squat good? Well, more center mass in front, kind of like a baby's big head, because babies are good squatters. They have more mass in front. Or sandbag squats, just mass in front. It makes it much easier to drop down.

When you do a back squat, it's more mass in back. So, to get down is actually fundamentally harder because a lot of times you have to arch or extend more, especially if your feet are flat on the floor. You can do it, but it's not what I would call a natural motion.

And Julian Pino, who is a big sandbag guy, he's a quote he said that I really like is of times, you don't have a squat problem or it's something to the tune of, if you can't back squat, it's just you have a back squat problem. You don't have a squat problem. Just grab a sandbag in front of you and squat it. It's very easy because that's where the mass is.

And I would say that in something like a vertical jump, now, of course, people are going to get results from a lot of things. Back squats are really big in vertical jump. I definitely get that. But in terms of a very natural squatting motion, that's very easy to go in the pipe up and down, it really doesn't get better than a Zercher. And another as an extension of a goblet squat.

It's like, but you can only load a goblet squat. Once you get to 70, 80 lb, 100 lb, depends how strong your upper body, but volleyball players, I mean, once you get to 80 or 90, it's more shoulder strength than it is just strength. And so, the ability to drop naturally straight down is what you're really going for.

And then from a biomechanics perspective, a lot of Bill Hartman's type world, and all the tree of that, where that came from and where that's gone, a lot of that is based on how do I set up the stack of the pelvis and the rib cage. And if you have a bar on your back, again, not to say, I mean, back squats are great, but I think they're actually better if you've done a goblet Zercher build up.

And so, if you have a bar on your back, a lot of times if you can't naturally get down, it's ankle flexibility issues, maybe your center of mass is pushed forward a little bit, there's certain tightnesses. You have to extend, meaning push the rib cage forward, arch the back a little bit to get depth. Now, to an extent, that's also okay, because some level of compression helps me to go forward faster and better, especially if I'm a track person versus more of a multi-directional.

But having the elbows in front kind of retracts the rib cage in a way that really makes it easy to keep that stack. It is very much better way to maintain a straight-line cylinder in the body. And in such, it actually makes it easier I find to recruit hamstrings, to get a more thorough leg recruitment. The only bottleneck is the elbows.

So, building into it a lot of times it's like first time you do it, start with a low weight, build up. Anthony uses the fat grips on the bar, makes it way, way way better. I mean, it's literally as simple as that little constraint. If you complain about elbows, just throw a fat grips on the bar. And you think about it, too.

Oh, elbow stress. I mean, okay, an arm curl with 25-lb dumbbells, think the lever arm. That's not a whole lot different than all the weight at the base. It could be 185 lbs at the base. I don't think the lever arm difference is that terribly much.

And so all that being said, I view Zercher as an extension of the biomechanics of a goblet squat. The elbow stress is easily mitigated with using something like a fat grip and just building into it and it allows a better stack of the rib cage and pelvis. So, that vertical cylinder and I think for stuff that's very vertical jump oriented where there is a more vertical torso, I think it's even better. So, I'm not saying it's the absolute gold standard, I use the heck out of it. I program it all the time.

James de Lacey17:51

What about with two questions here. Where does the front squat fit into that as basically just a quote unquote Zercher with obviously a high center of mass since it's on the shoulders. You still have that stacking and that kind of vertical.

And then also obviously you mentioned about the stacking with the Zercher in the for vertical stuff. Well, often if you see now obviously this just depends on programming how someone's doing, but someone goes very heavy on Zerchers, you don't keep that. You see a lot of almost it becomes like a Zercher good morning.

Yeah. So where kind of how does that all kind of fit together I guess within that kind of framework?

Joel Smith18:24

For sure. Yeah, that's a good question. So where I tend to go with it is one, and Nick mentioned this in his post, but this is where I would probably potentially part ways. I'm sure if we talked about it, it might be a little different, but I prefer heel elevation for that reason. I prefer heel slats and heel wedges for that reason.

A lot of reason you will get a good morning in a Zercher because if your feet are flat, if your feet are flat, what that does—well, let's just say if your heels are elevated, what that does is it gives you access to your heel earlier. It takes away any restrictions from ankle dorsiflexion issues or ankle mobility issues in the squat, and it just generally makes it easier to drop straight down like a rock.

And in terms of just leg development, if you think proportion legs versus even upper body that you're getting out of it, which if it's a jumping sport, like a volleyball or a basketball, even better. Like, if it's strongman, maybe I don't care. Or football, I get it with football and things.

But yeah, heel elevation is going to make it far easier to hit a natural squat better. And if you want to say, "Oh well, you're not getting ankle mobility." Well, do your ankle mobility, use pronation drills on a single leg. Like, you don't have to—why do you have to use a thing with hundreds of pounds to get at one joint ankle? I just don't think that's necessarily a good idea.

I prefer to get ankle mobility through more targeted single leg stuff. I use Gary Ward wedge stuff a lot, pronation drills and that kind of thing, because to me it's like you want to get the bones of the foot operating to get the range before we just want to throw hundreds of pounds on ourselves and crank it. I mean, I think it's good to be able to do a good squat, but there's a lot more than just the ankles. It's a full body. The knees coming forward is kind of a full body thing.

A lot of people's mobility restrictions come from the hip or come from—you could say I hate demonizing anterior pelvic tilt, but just kind of one of many parts in the equation that can lead to inability to drop down effectively. So if you can't get down effectively, if your feet are flat on the ground and you have a lot of weight there, yeah, you're going to pitch forward. You'd be surprised by how well you can do when you have some sort of elevation.

What I typically program though, I will say I don't necessarily program if someone can do over 315. I mean, bobsled maybe, it's fine. But if it's getting towards limit strength, then you have to start, well, what's the true limit of what someone can actually hold? I guess what is the Zercher? Maybe Tom Haviland probably has a Zercher, I don't know. It's probably up there, but I think once you get to true limits, and this is where maybe the high jumper comes in and where your pure strength needs to be. I'll go to more like a Zercher split.

Zercher split and Zercher staggered, dude, that stuff is so good. Staggered stance, too, is really, really good. And I say it because even the bilateral squat, like a bilateral feet the same, a lot of people do better with a little offset. It allows more natural external rotation, that kind of thing. But to me I'm like the most pure leg loading you can get is a front heel elevated or front foot elevated Zercher split.

Yeah, even strong athletes can get—I mean it's you, if you're wrapping out 315 on that, good for you, man. So that's that. And if you look at what Anthony does, he does a lot of pause positions, control positions, getting more out of less. I really like the idea of getting more out of less because I mean it's easy just to throw weight on the bar, but if we're talking for how I program it, too, I'm looking at how can I really give you a place to go over time?

Let's do more with less in a lot of ways. That I hate to say load—the loading the spine is good. You should be able to load your spine, but if that's all you can do, I just think you create bottle—you can create bottlenecks earlier than you like. So yeah, that would be it I would say with that.

And then just last thing with high jumpers though and just pure track types, I'm a little—we can still Zercher. And it's funny because I haven't been a strength coach specifically for track where that was my only job. I still write all the strength programs for track athletes, so we do Zercher. Zercher split usually, it's more if we—if we go heavy, it's more on the back.

And the reason I mentioned with extension for track athletes, it's more permissible and okay to have more of that forward anterior extension pattern. If you look the best sprinters—Chris Korfist was on my podcast recently saying that there was some elite 10-flat guy and he's like, oh yeah, we could push my whole finger into the gap of their lats in their back. And it's like that's not just lats, that's a sternal mass that is cranked forward, pelvis that's cranked forward to specifically be extremely fast in a straight line.

And so it's like okay, if that's the adaptation, I'm more okay with using things like a back squat derivative and that kind of thing for that. High jumper probably be more heavy step-up type stuff and partial squats and you would hit some deep—yeah, probably some Zercher splits for the deep stuff, but we're not going to go crazy with that for that population. So a lot of it is dependent on what you're trying to do as well.

James de Lacey23:38

Have you played around with—I was just thinking now like a front foot elevated Zercher squat, but like you do like a medicine ball twist, like a Zercher twist? Just thinking now that would be pretty gnarly.

Joel Smith23:47

Ooh, yeah, like rotating into it a little bit? Oh, I've seen like the Jefferson, like you have the bar kind of between the legs and you're twisting or like a U-bar hex bar and you twist into the turn, which is awesome. Yeah, I—sure you can. I think the thing is with that, the higher the mass goes, the more it is kind of that top-down stress versus bottom-up.

So I would probably be care—I think I would do it for more like maybe no-rep sets where it's like every rep's a little different, every—warming up, exploration, that kind of thing, but once the bar's kind of heavy, swinging that, I don't know. I don't know why I'd say you can't, but—

James de Lacey24:35

Yeah, you meant to front squats as well, too? That Anthony's rationale for the front squats and I would concur, 'cause front squat, it used to be goblet, front, back squat. That's the, that's your setup, which is great.

Joel Smith24:45

I think that's fine. I think if you're using the Olympic lifts, it's probably even more of a thing. I think Zerchers are almost something where if you don't use Olympic lifts, it makes more sense. 'Cause if you use Olympic lifts, well, you should be able to front squat. You're probably going to be worse at Olympic lifts if you don't front squat.

So the only thing with Olympics, if we're talking extension patterning, and again, it's like, dude, you don't want to split hairs or do any nocebo or demonize anything, but I will say the one thing is when you're in that front rack, there's a little more extension through the upper back. And so if we're just talking volleyball, overhead sports, and you want to maybe free up a little resources in the shoulders to not have that kind of compressing force through the upper thoracic, I think there is there is a case that could be made for that for the long term.

But it also—to say volleyball players shouldn't Olympic lift, I think is silly. If you do it, why not? And so, but I think maybe the heavy front squat, if it's the point where that crank is kind of turning you into a little bit of those postural characteristics of an Olympic lift are maybe not ideal for some sports. Again, it's like you get into such—you have to be in such a high weight before it is that hairsplitting. But yeah, I think Anthony mentioned the extension piece, and I can see that. That makes sense to me.

James de Lacey26:07

Nice. You actually mentioned some of the ankle mobility stuff, and you need the bones in the foot to move. Do you maybe want to go through a few different options there for anyone who's looking to jump into that?

Joel Smith26:16

Yeah. So I really like the work of Gary Ward and then others who have taken on his work. And so if you have an ankle restriction, typically it's like the wall test, right? You go, you take your foot, all right, my toes are 3 inches from the wall. Can I push my knee forward and have it touch the wall or whatever the distance is. If you struggle with that, a lot of times people will try to stretch you into submission.

And okay, like every time you stretch, there's going to be some change in the bones of the foot. But you want it to be more the bones first and not the soft, the passive tissues first. And I think if anything it's like that's where traditional S and C can be a little obtuse is that it only sees things through this lens of barbell back squatting and Olympic lifting and the knees going over the toes and guys stretching those tissues to get there.

When in reality you want to have a foot that has a strong base of support. So, that means heel ball of little toe ball of big toe. So, it has that tripod. If you go to like the Dr. Scholl's machine or whatever it is at the store, sometimes they'll give you a pressure map of your foot. A lot of the shoe stores use it now, too.

I think half the time it's just to sell you whatever more expensive pronation control devices which I think is, it could be more harm than good in a lot of scenarios. There's a lot of research at least from the past showing that like those pronation control insoles didn't really help anything or at least one study I was aware of.

Anyways, if you go though and you get that pressure map if there's like if you don't have kind of a distribution across the transverse arch and you're wobbly you're really on one side, that's going to be a bottleneck to good pronation and therefore good natural ankle mobility. You want the arches to flatten and those bones to be able to relax so that the tibia can then translate forward. If it can't, you're kind of stretching on a base that doesn't want to do anything.

So, that's where like one of the simplest is a sock pronation drill. I saw this David Gray I think was the first person I saw use this, but basically like get in a staggered stance, have one foot in front of the other, barefoot. Make sure you have a good tripod, heel ball of big ball of little, put a sock a little bit under the arch, and then take the knee forward, but try in that process try to let your arch push into the sock. So, it shows that you're not just stretching you're actually allowing the bones to drop and mobilize.

I use it a lot with people who have had like a foot history issues, like maybe they've had like a navicular fracture in the past or they just have midfoot mobility stuff. That is in the program a lot. And then once you get good at that, you can load it a little bit. Like you could do like a goblet split and trying to get that to drop in that condition.

But at the same time I think we have to realize that explosive springy athletic movement, you're not pronating that much. You're not Your arch isn't going to like hit the floor and all of a sudden you're going to go flying. It doesn't work like that. The foot does work differently. So in many ways it's like a health and range of motion concept. So I'll go there first and then, I don't do like any stretching really of the calves and feet.

I think you could, but I'll let calf raises do that. So I try to approach it from that sense, but I don't do any flat foot on the ground squatting. You have to be this mobile because I just think it puts people in positions that aren't the most natural. You could do it, but I just don't know if it's the best for the biggest bell curve of athletes over a long period of time.

James de Lacey29:57

And actually we have to come back to the Zerchers quickly as well. You mentioned something about Zercher flywheels.

Then yeah. Jump into that. That sounded interesting.

Joel Smith30:10

Dude, that is the ultimate leg, that's about as pure of a leg force stimulus I think that there is. Paul Cater showed me that for the first time and the nice thing is that Kbox had like a little handle that was really padded. Like it was like it actually you could get that thing in the crook of your arms and you could crank on it.

And I think that's actually if you're worried about Zerchers and arms and like that force, that the flywheel kind of dampens the peak force of that bar. I mean, you don't have like 300 lb sitting there the whole time. It's only going to be at the bottom. And if you have a bar that has a little pad to it, it really is no problem on the elbows.

So, yeah, I've used that a lot. I do really like that. I would say it's a little bit of both. If I'm worried more about pure squat strength, I would prefer that. If it's more athletic outcomes, I'll take like the harness and do a lot of stuff. So, I think they're both good. But yeah, that one's a leg blaster, man. That will help your squat.

James de Lacey31:09

Did you say that had a dampen for your jumpers?

Joel Smith31:12

Yes. Yes. Dude, you've taken me personally full circle in a lot of things cuz the first time I used like a Kbox, this is as a high jumper. So, it's just spring city. Does not want to hold on to muscle for long. I used it and I'm like, you know, this is cool, but I don't love it. I don't feel like a bouncy beast like the next day. It just feels like I'm really getting sucked into a black hole and my muscles are.

And then I use it. I have one. There's some things I've kind of messed around with it. And then the Bill Starr, you got me connected with him and he was on my podcast and he was talking about it and then I'm like, okay, I'm going to get back into this. So, this past summer I got back into it.

I found knees and high jump like health-wise was amazing. My knees and high jump felt indestructible. And my Achilles, it helped my Achilles tendon stuff so much. It was so good for every health and force related measure. The only drawback is I was going to do like scissor high jumps. I just felt like my plant was just glued into the ground. Like I just didn't have that spring snap like I felt in the past. And yeah, I get a year older, so I get that, but Chris Chase who's worked in the NBA for a while was on my podcast recently.

I was talking about flywheel. And he mentioned something. He's like, yeah, it dampens the spring turnover. Basically, the plyometric effect. It's almost the opposite of plyometrics and it makes sense. Like it literally is. It's you're getting sucked into a black hole versus plyos spring off the ground as fast as you can. So, but I was thinking, okay, MMA, Bill was like, yeah, my guys vertical jumps is not very good.

And that's fine for that population. And it's like, okay, look, if you don't have to worry about vertical and it's just tissue health and robustness and resiliency and the metabolic effect of the flywheel, seems like a great choice for that population.

Chris seemed a little less excited about it for NBA players, but even so, I know Mike Robertson uses it with NBA guys. I could see it like, look, if health is your priority, you got someone who's a little banged up, needs some strength, needs some love in the tissues, dude, I would use a lot of flywheel, especially in the off-season. But I think for people it's like, hey, if it's track and I got to be springy or basketball and hey, my game is just good in the hoop and dunking on people and maybe we don't use it as much.

That's later on. Or like contrast, I've seen Paul Cater use it in like a French contrast. Maybe if you contrast it enough, it's fine. Yeah, that's just what I noticed from it recently.

James de Lacey33:49

It also depends on how much using it was in the program and then I guess what you're doing after, like if you're going through an eccentric overload phase, it's a perfect tool for it because it's easy to do. You don't need like weight releases or two partners or 110% one rep max to do it. And you don't have the same soreness that you would if you did do like 110% one rep max squat versus like maximal eccentric overload flywheel. You just don't, you can walk the next day. Whereas the barbell version, you're probably not going to walk very far the next day.

Joel Smith34:24

Yeah, 100% that, yeah, I'm glad you mentioned it. Yeah, that too, the soreness. It is crazy. I mean, that's it's probably like just the gradual distribution of the eccentric too versus the yank.

James de Lacey34:34

Yeah, and cuz there's no burst it just pulls you the entire way. Even if you try and not get it to pull you inside the bottom half or whatever it will still pull you the entire way and it's different. It's a different feeling. I don't know, yeah, I don't know how or why it just doesn't make you less sore it just decides that it doesn't, which makes it good.

So once you come and I was scrolling through some of your latest Instagram posts too. It'd be cool to touch on some of these. We can continue on the strength training one. We've touched on that a little bit. Let's start with this one around floating heel training. I saw you doing some floating heel work on your hamstring machine there. Obviously floating heel stuff became very popular maybe four or five years ago. I guess when Cal Dietz was really pushing it there. Interesting to know is that something that you still using a fair amount and if so if not why?

Joel Smith34:58

That's a good point because yeah, I know there was a podcast with Cal I did. Yeah, it's probably about five years ago. I guess I lose track at this point but he's like every bilateral squatter most bilateral squats are floating heel or something and I think I was really kind of going through a little bit of that. I tell you that there's a lot of ways you can go with this. I'm sorry that's always a bad answer to start with. I think everything goes viral and it's like, flat foot floating heel everything or the other way around, right?

Where it, I'll just start where it lands for me practically before I start to go into some sort of exposition on all the things you could do with it. I use if I use floating heel it's almost always only in a single leg because if it's double leg that you're losing the point very quickly. It's almost always single leg. It's almost always for people who just have a gross lack of foot and lower leg strength. And once you have it, it's mostly foot flat on the ground. I'll use other things. I'll use plyometrics. I'll use different like complexes and things like that.

Now, with the setup I had with the, oh, I guess there's something to be said to you I think about the iso pushes, like max iso push. Taylor Care talked about like a max like a 3x bodyweight. I'm not sure if the foot was flat or the heel was floating there. I do use a lot of, the big thing I do like for single leg that involves that is just a single leg stand.

So, just put a bar on your back 315 and just lift one foot off the ground and just stand there. Like I've seen Brady Volmerines kind of stuff. I think he was doing a lot of that for a while. So, it's not necessarily a floating heel, it's just the foot. I mean, you can't be weak in the, you can't be really weak in

So you're just keeping the leg straight and that tripod feeling, enough of the three point anything. Yeah, just three points.

So that's a big one. I use that a lot. It's a warm-up tool a lot. Paul Care calls it bartending.

That's one of, that's where I would say once you go through the point where you can do the split squat floating heel, if you're really weak there, we go through that, you're getting better, okay. Then I'll move to just that single leg stand and it's tripod. So it's just, it's everything. It's heel and it's the.

And occasionally, if someone has a setup or someone has Achilles issues, I will do iso push, like just where you're floating heel, just push up in the bar max iso type thing. I think that's where the highest value of that type of stimulus is. Like, why would I do a floating heel bilateral squat if I could do an iso push? Like, it's just not even close the loading. It's so it's actually inefficient and noisy to do a floating heel squat when I could just get it in an iso push.

So I will do that if I'm going to do that or just the bartending single leg standing. So yeah, that's pretty much where I've gone with it just because it's just, you really with that stuff you want to be as little noise as possible and as specific to the forces of sport as possible and a split squat with a floating heel is, it's just kind of specific. It's specific up to a point, but the forces are just not like plyometric loading.

I mean, Mike, you have young kids. Like when my kids jump on me, jump on dad, I just feel the pressure in their little feet and I'm like, geez, the way your body uses gravity through the foot is just ridiculous. Like the outputs. Like we are designed to put output down in the ground many, many body weights. And a floating heel is just not going to give you even close to that.

So it's one of those things where I think it could be useful if someone's just their feet are really, really weak. Yeah, let's do a lot of stuff. But once you get there, it just might end up being more noise.

James de Lacey39:36

Yeah. No, that's fair. And yeah, squatting bilateral with your on your toes, that's even just balancing.

Joel Smith39:46

Yeah, it's more ballet. I guess if you had a pit shark or something and handles. Yeah, I think you could. Super cat stuff, I guess. Like it's jumpy anyways maybe or whatever, but yeah, at that point you just got to look at what adaptation are you going for.

I do want to actually, I do want to talk about my disc setup with the Hammer Strength because I think people would see that. And it lends to kind of an interesting conversation because if you would look at it, it's like you have two poles. You have on one end you have the, I like to think of mythos. Like you have standard hard real barbell training. That's the Saturnian mythos. It's discipline and order. It's like the military. It is very rigid.

Your dad's here and he might be a little angry and you better do your job, and that kind of thing. And I think that's the mythos of the strength coach. And then the other end you have Mercurian trickster energy. That's like, that's like functional patterns would be the epitome of that. Like the trickster. And everyone here.

James de Lacey40:57

I can't believe that was added on this podcast.

Joel Smith40:59

Yep, sorry. I mean I just say it to prove a point because it just shows the tension. Why do people hate Naudi so much? I mean, he's antisocial that stuff or whatever. I actually don't know. I think some of his stuff is fine. I've never really done his program, but I think about the old Paul Chek videos in the '90s. I was just digging one up. A cable, there was a cable exercise he was doing that I thought was just money that no one really does anywhere. Not how he did it.

And it's like you have a high to low chop, but you're sitting on a physio ball. So it's a chop, it's a rib cage, and it's a hip mobility because you have this bottom up pressure of the ball that unloads the pelvis and allows the bone strolls. Like this is freaking genius. So I've been using that for a while, but I just started programming it for online clients. But the way Paul was doing that I think was really good.

That being said, there's just this constant, or like the Bosu ball or anything that's that functional energy and there is drawbacks to both. Like if you're overly Saturnian, that traditional, like you Mark Rippetoe or something, you're going to be more rigid. You're not going to move through that well. You're probably not going to be that elastic in a lot of ways at the end of the day. And if all you do is the functional stuff, you're just not going to be that strong and robust and you're going to lack some of the force or high-end conditioning and capacity adaptations.

So the goal is to take what is needed from each side into your own situation. And I think to me, I don't get triggered by Naudi, I don't get triggered by Mark Rippetoe. I don't care. All I care about is what the athlete in front of me needs and the best way to present that to them. Even my own training is a lot like, I intentionally do both.

I intentionally have exploratory days. And I intentionally have days that are more like just Jay Schroeder, just rip sets and rhythm. To me, he's very Saturnian. It's not many exercises, dig into this, and go. And it's very difficult. So I like to dig into both personally.

So that just being said, that exercise I think is interesting because some people are going to think it's great. Some people are going to be triggered by it where I have a Hammer Strength machine that is very much rigid, but yet I'm standing on a disc that is mobile. Like, what the hell?

To me, so what you learn by that though, that is it's floating heel, but it's different because the disc wobbles. So you get this subtle wobble that your foot really can lock in. Like, if you were to look at just the foot and the way the arch forms and the way the tension carries in the foot, there's so much more there.

And I can genuinely feel how, okay, if you talk about how strong is strong enough? A two times body back squat or two and a half. Well, okay. If it, if you stop transferring that strength to the speed, why? Is it just the speed involved or is it something else?

And to me, there's, it's a lot of things that I believe. And one is that transmission. The transmission's more than the floating heel. It's actually how the foot articulates and senses the little skate grip tape. And it's bottom-up and top-down. So it's just basically feeling, well, how does my foot actually work when it's heavily loaded and it's a bottom-up force and the foot has to sense and figure out what it's doing and how to get the upper body to come along.

I like that movement, too, because it's not like standing on the Bosu ball. Like, you can load it. Like, you can load it pretty heavy. And that's the thing, too, is if I couldn't put hundreds of pounds behind it, it's not that valuable. If it's something that I can feel like I really have to generate a maximum output and my foot is getting the transmission, it to me it's just better than floating heel.

But, I will say that that disc is almost impossible to stand on. Like, my clients who come train with me, they think I'm from the circus. I'm like, maybe I have a wide foot or I just played dirt for a lot. I don't know. So I'm making discs that are easier. Sports Science Lab used to sell them, but they appear, it's hard to get, I don't know if their store's stocked. They're out of stock a lot. So I'm just starting to make those and make them easier to stand on.

And it's kind of like the flywheel, I will say. This is, sorry to go on a little rant, but the flywheel, you feel good the next day. The disc stuff, you can lift heavy weights and do a lot of reps and feel very good the next day. And there's something to be said about, oh, it's just fun and I feel good versus, well, where's the work?

But the proof is always in that, well, were you jumping higher? Did you run faster? A lot of times if I'm doing a sprint workout the next day, especially tempo sprint, it feel really good. Like, my tempo sprints are very fast. So it's a complex equation, but I do think that's a better way of transmitting than just straight floating heel for the sensory and the manipulation of the foot's pieces with the hammer strength grounded actually able to put force into the thing, because otherwise you're just playing, you're just doing a circus act then, so.

And it's kind of a specialty thing. I hope I didn't spend too much time describing this very special tool in this program, but it's interesting.

James de Lacey46:01

I was, were you going to go into that post you made around that kind of imposing force thing?

Joel Smith46:06

It's such an interesting idea. I'm positive I wrote an article somewhere around that. I don't know where. I'll have to try and find somewhere where I wrote something, but I kind of see it a similar way where it's a mechanical, purely mechanical output approach versus a coordinative approach. There are these people in both camps and typically you think mechanical, you mentioned Mark Rippetoe, whatever else. Coordinative side, you typically have Frans Bosch, kind of different names. And you have two kind of camps, but most coaches have a little middle ground there.

And I think what's really interesting is the idea of strong enough and yes, we could maybe put a number to it. We could maybe be like, "Hey, once you have to take away from something else to get stronger, you're probably strong enough." All that kind of stuff. But I think what's interesting is with this kind of fluidity and rhythm, if you just look at dancers, breakdancers, whatever else versus pure strength athletes.

Are people going to say that dancer's not strong? Because he doesn't squat. And you watch them move and you're like, "Holy [expletive], how is he doing whatever he's doing?" And it's fluid and they are strong in those movements, but they're probably kind of squatting their body weight. So then there's this interplay here where there's something else, but I don't know how to quite articulate.

James de Lacey47:31

I know what you're saying. I've thought about that too. I went through a phase where it was like probably too far into dance. At all, sport is a dance, but it is a very forceful tactical dance.

And it's again, it's an integration because I like watching Michael Jackson dance, but that guy, I don't think that guy could probably squat, I don't think he could squat his body weight. And there is that. But I'm going to mispronounce his name because I had to ask him on the show. It's like Bour Bezreglu. He stayed with Ido Portal a lot. And he had said this as like, "Yep, you're right." He's like, "The more you can dance, the better you are at dancing, that means you have more degrees of freedom."

If you have too many degrees of freedom, that is fundamentally opposite of being forceful. You think about the big powerlifter who has nothing for joint options, and the dancer who almost has too many. So you have to find, "Okay, well, what's the middle ground for my sport that I need to fundamentally be good at?" And I think a middle ground is like, I think the African dance beats and up and down beats, and just being able to apply a fundamental beat to your sport-specific skill and movement patterning. And if you can just see, do athletes have rhythm? Have they grown up in a culture of rhythm?

But you don't have to be, nor should you be, Michael Jackson. And even breakdancers, I mean, they're freaking amazing, but at some point, it's like these guys are strong, but it's a very specific, it becomes a very specific type of strong at some point as well. So it's like, how do I take some of the fundamentals of breakdance that are good, and then, and even I like spinal manipulation too, I think is underrated, but I used to do the worm when I was in high school.

And I said back and I try to do that now. It's like it's almost a test of the spine. So but there's like it becomes a point where it's just at some point it does become specific to itself too.

Joel Smith49:26

So then what I guess within training then, how does that influence or apply? Because obviously, you have the thought process of everything is general, so just do your main lifts, and then do the sport. But then where does this potentially fit in? Because is the sport enough just to develop that kind of rhythm?

I guess maybe for a lot of athletes, potentially, yeah. Right? But maybe for those who need a little more, what happens in between? Is it now the coordinative approach to training where you're looking at maybe sandbag, aqua bag, hip lock stuff? Is it more rhythm based plyometric work? Is it a lot of the stuff that you've mentioned here with the floating heel work? I don't know. I don't even know if there's a question there.

James de Lacey50:10

I don't know. Aqua bag is some trickster [expletive]. I use it. I just think aqua bag is pure tricksterism pretty quick. I do think, I have a couple in my garage though. But so, I think it's important to look at the principles of generality. This was an email from an author Billy Oppenheimer I read not too long ago and I really liked it. And it was the idea of someone in life they wanted to be more aggressive and decisive in life, in their career and their writing and their.

And so what they did is, in their, I think they did martial arts on the side. Jiu-jitsu, whatever. And they decided, I want to be more aggressive when I'm in my combat sport. And they found that the generality being more aggressive in sport actually led to the ability to be more aggressive in the life choices and that type of thing. It's very similar for me. I think when I was younger I stopped playing video games around age 25 when I kind of grew up. But I used to play a lot before then and I liked strategy games like Starcraft and that kind of thing.

I was always very defensive. I was always build my base and I was afraid to be the rusher. But it would be like the same thing. If I wanted to, if I was still playing those games, I would be the opposite. I would rush and all that because it's just the things you start to get good at generally do leak through. And I found there's general things in training that I think are important.

If you have a purely, I guess, you the mythos that the angry father Saturn order, the bank, the central banks, BlackRock. It's very cubical and dark and orderly. And if I, if I'm taking athletes who are kind of like, especially think like soccer players who just grew up playing all the time, you want to have that order with them, but you can only go so far with that.

They need a little bit of that for sure. They need that experience. But it's such a contrast for so many people. There needs to be some middle ground applied I think in many situations where it's like hey, I understand this is even the spirit of how you play. I see how this shows up.

And so yeah, I think for me it's finding the generalities that can bind a lot of those things together. So I think that is where things like Cory Schlesinger's the rhythm kettlebell type thing where it's upbeats, downbeats. Or he was talking about a basketball player who didn't want to hold an iso lunge and he said I will just dribble a ball while you do it. And then the guy held it for a very long time. It's like you're finding these halfway points that have general pieces of athleticism woven into them.

And that's where, honestly I think that's where, I know you posted something like this with Marinovich's stuff and it's very fun, it's more the trickster piece, but Marv was a more of a standard. I mean I think the guy quarter squatted over a thousand pounds. He had the standard life before and everything he put his son through, it's very, and then the stuff later is a lot more balance and discs and kind of like that more, I don't know I don't want to call it whimsical, but it's definitely not the traditional.

But if you do that stuff a lot, there is a very athletic feeling because there's a lot of timing, balance pieces. It just feels athletic.

So my feel is okay, how do you get all the pieces in the system but you cultivate a general feel of just being an athlete. And I do think it changes for different people. A football lineman probably needs a different distribution of that than a basketball point guard. Or a soccer striker or something like that. So it's just distribution. I like it like Ajax. Like when they were doing the '90s, just killing people and their work ethic is so dance, all this dance and rhythm type stuff. That was great for them. I think that's awesome.

So but you're not going to get the defensive line of the Baltimore Ravens or something out there probably getting as much out of that. So I think finding the heart of what really motivates the group, the athletic generalities, and then finding ways to play into that. I don't think it has to be everything, but I think at least finding enough of that to cultivate that heart of athleticism, and then working some of the other pieces and ends of the spectrum.

Joel Smith54:41

Yeah. I like that take as well. I understand the whole everything is GPP, so just do squat, bench, whatever else. But at the same time, it's like, man, as you start to see what's happening at different levels of sport, no one's just doing squat, bench, whatever else. There's so much more going on. And yeah, I get it, on social media, your target audience is Jody the accountant who probably should just be going to do her squat, bench, and deadlift because he's training twice a week and doing everything else.

So I understand kind of where that comes from. But as generality, yeah, there is a lot in between that is often missed. It's probably hard to kind of put together in a 30-second clip or whatever. I mean, you do a good job of a lot of your stuff there. And to round this podcast out anyway, you had a post about arms, arm sprint mechanics. I thought that'd be interesting to go into as well. As you mentioned, yeah, we kind of get taught from a young age, what is it? Air to a or whatever it is with the thumb kind of thing and you get told

James de Lacey55:39

They didn't teach me that for some reason. I got taught by the ground, which I gave up on pretty quick because it did not help. Yeah, happy to talk about that though. Yeah, go into it.

Joel Smith55:45

So I think that's one of the things too where, if you talk about the two kind of ends of the spectrum of functional versus traditional, we could call it—like traditional likes things in boxes. You could think, like, again, that traditional geometric representations, like the black cube that you would see outside of financial institution. And it makes sense that those people or that energy tries to turn athletic movement into right angles and things that are very orderly, because things moving and rotating to the center, it's kind of disorderly. It just doesn't fit with that ethos.

And so I think that, to me, the alignment is—well, on the other hand, I'll say this: if all you do is mechanics and rotations and that's your whole thing, I also think you will run into a problem. Because, well, one, you're not really letting the body just self-organize and just do its thing. Because at some point that really needs to be the meat and potatoes: self-organization.

But the funny thing is, usually if athletes self-organize and they're relatively strong, they're going to usually be okay unless there's something neurologically wrong or primitive reflexes—even sometimes is a thing there, like when people switch their arms excessively side to side, there's usually a lack of a cross-connect reflex in there. But just that being said, that hyper-orderly, it tries to cubify, to have a term. And I think that that is then the contrast of rotation and really digging into that is needed just to get people out of it.

But at the end of the day, if you tell an athlete to sprint and sprint fast is the constraint, they're probably going to move their arms how they should on their own, and we do more harm than good trying to cube it. So a lot of the posts I do, from arms to squatted runs to all that stuff, it's not necessary that you should try to do that hard. It's just to wash out some of the stuff that got too cornered off. It's to kind of feel and redeem how your body actually wants to move.

And in rhythm, too. If you give an athlete rhythm, different sprint rhythms and bounce rhythms to work to, a lot of times it's like those Chladni plates, where there's a plate with sand on it and you're hitting it with different frequencies, and the sand just forms these geometric patterns. If people have seen that, the body kind of works the same way. If it's strong enough and connected enough, and you give it different rhythms and frequencies, it's going to form the thing that it needs to do so many times, and we just need to get out of the way.

And then, before we think of a technical solution, we should think of a strength solution first. Like, are you missing—if it's arms, are you missing basic—can you crawl? Can you lizard crawl? Can you do push-ups? Just that kind of stuff. So yeah, I think we just tend to try to 90-degree straight, front-to-back, cube energy. We need to get out of that, because that's not how we move.

James de Lacey58:58

I don't know if it was you I heard it or learned this from so many years ago around what your hands do when you're sprinting—open, close, holding things. And I must have been you years ago. I can't remember. It must have been an old post or something about the foot mimicking the hand. I don't know if I remember correctly at all. I don't know if there's any guidance there.

But ever since then, when I see people running and they're holding their phones in one hand, I'm always thinking, "You're yourself up." That's all I can think. It's ingrained in my head because it's one hand's closed, one hand's not, or something like that. But I don't know. Is there anything there?

Joel Smith59:38

Yeah. Yeah, I'm glad you made that connection. Well, I think—sometimes I occasionally do sprints where I have—I try not to hold my phone if I'm doing stuff to a beat or rhythm. But the thing is, if the hand you're holding the phone, at least the hand's kind of spread a little bit, which is a little more of a stiffness thing.

So here's the thing with that. Yes, the feet will absolutely mirror what the hands—and feet are interlinked through whatever nervous highways, fascia, I'm doing the wave, however we transmit information through the body, the feet and the hands will link up. But the key is that I used to be in this place where I tried to think, "Oh, how can I coach that up?" Here's where I landed, because the best athletes, really good runners—sometimes people who they're almost uncharacteristically good.

I think of—I was at a conference track meet a month ago, and the girl who won the 400, I think she might have won the 800 or had won the 800, and also could have run a good 200. Just a good runner. I'm watching her hands when she runs, and she's doing these little kind of flicks. It's like her hands don't stay like this.

There's these little flicky manipulations of the thumb and pinky. I'm like, "What is going on here?" I couldn't do that if I tried. I'm like, "How did you—I'm not just going to tell someone to lift their pinky up and run and they're going to be able to do that." There's just some advanced networking that's happening that is beyond me.

But John Garrish—and the first thing I learned with the pinky, that was Darien Barr back in the day, and then I started to watch that and got interested in that. John Garrish would have athletes, strength coach out of Florida, speed coach, have athletes do Spock hand or different hands and run, and sometimes it would be faster with certain hand alignments. So I do think there is probably—honestly, maybe that's just a fun notepad project for me someday. How can I have this tree where it's like explore these hand positions, now you get to the next level and you find this one.

But the whole flicky—I mean, sometimes it just gets crazy, or what high jumpers do sometimes, they have just weird, interesting—

James de Lacey1:01:46

You mean gang signs while jumping?

Joel Smith1:01:48

Yes, yes, gang signs. And no one taught you that. So how did you figure that out? And I think there is—you got David Weck will be doing the, "Hey, I learned this fist hand and things." And I think, again, I think there's something there, but then the question is, how do you take that and make it organic and you're just doing it? And maybe there's hand dances we can do in the formative stages. I think that would be—exploration is definitely the way you have to approach it and play, right?

But I'm not there yet. Maybe someday that'll be my opus. But for now I just notice when people do it. I think that's interesting. More connected athletic people tend to do more stuff with their hands, I find.

James de Lacey1:02:31

It's funny because, as you mentioned with the kind of cubic thing, you get taught hands open and that's it, this rigid—

Joel Smith1:02:38

Yeah, or it's a fixed—maybe it's like this. It usually resembles some fixed position. This tends to happen—this is a very hard way of running. Track, you get this a lot. People who they're in spikes and they have the track, and so it's a very stiff, pingy situation, and the hands just kind of figure out, "Oh, if it's pingy and I do this, I can get a little more ping out of my foot."

I don't think you see that as often in team sport athletes as you do in track. So it is a self-organization. But you see good accelerators with kind of more closed or relaxed hands too. So it's the body—it's more of a map of how the body processes the movement strategy, honestly, and there's just different ways to do it. So it's just the question is, do you really want to get into that minutiae?

But again, I think the play and the exploration with the different hands is the way to go. And now I'm thinking about—baby just sent me a video, his latest hand alignment, so I'll have to play around with that and see what's there. But I do think—it's just giving people different experiences. Hey, try this, try this, try this, or jump and balance and feel how this works.

I don't have all the answers with that, but I just think observing, starting with observing, and then play around with some different hand types and just see if it impacts the way you move, I think is maybe the next place to go.

James de Lacey1:04:01

Now I'm going to have to watch people's hands and stuff when I run. It's weird. Pivot, Joel, I appreciate you coming on here and chatting. Where can people find and follow you, keep up with everything you're doing?

Joel Smith1:04:12

Sure, yeah, just Fly Sports, Instagram and Twitter, anything related to the running. If people want to find kind of the combination of the two types, I have a Sprint Drills Reloaded course. You can get a free preview in my Courses tab. So amongst different products, I did want to highlight that one because I think for tying ends together, I think people might find that a little bit interesting.

James de Lacey1:04:32

Perfect. Now I appreciate you coming on, Joe.

Joel Smith1:04:35

Yeah, thank you, James.