Apollo Performance Therapy

Ideally you feel your quads when you load your knee.

If you are loading a single leg effectively (split squat, step down, etc) you should feel both inner quad AND glute working.

This tells me that you are accessing enough of the ranges of motion that you need through all the involved joints to spread that load across the entire leg (cuz you are feeling muscles in both the outside and inside of your leg).

Where you feel load/discomfort/muscles working during Submax exercises (like a fencer position wall sit in the video) tells me where you might be shifting weight to, where you might be cheating.

We just experiment from there to find a position that lets you feel your quads as much as possible, with as few thoughts as possible.

Force travels in straight lines.

Different positions of your bones will change which tissues that force is traveling through.

If you are on the outside of your foot, you may only feel your outer thigh.

If you lose heel pressure, you may only feel shin, calf, or top of your foot.

If your back extends/stiffens you may feel that or just your knee joint.

Impossible to know until you do it.

What I do know is finding a position that loads your inner quad like crazy is useful.

Find that position.

Learn how to apply to normal exercises (step down, split squat, front squat, etc) and watch your quads blow up and your knee pain melt away.

Remember that solving pain is almost never as simple as just one drill/tweak/fix.

We also have to look at calf strength (cuz it helps the knee control your shin moving forward), hip mobility (cuz if your hip is stiff AF you may be asking the knee to do MORE).

Small changes in position can have a huge impact on what you get of exercises.

But you also have to be doing the work to make it matter 😊.

Got knee pain? Better listen up!

Archie coming in with a hot tip to make your knee pain feel better.

Better pay attention for maximum effectiveness.

❤️

Got tight calves or pinchy ankles?

Just like your head should be able to turn left and right, your foot should be able arch AND flatten.

Flat feet aren’t bad.

High arches aren’t bad.

But ideally you can access at least some of the opposite.

You don’t need a lot. Just some.

The key to get the arch to move is to keep heavy on the heel in order to let the foot spread across the floor.

As soon as your heel gets lighter, you stiffen the foot and calf and you start to supinate again (arch will try to lift again).

Accessing pronation will help spread load through more tissues, allowing you better lengthen the calf, and load onto the quad and glute.

You widen your feet to create more space cuz your hips feels tight.

That feels good. So you go even wider.

And wider.

Now you’re wide enough that you have the opposite problem.

You’re at end range of your hips going out, so the only option for your knees is to come in as a way to push down into the floor.

Most people can squat much more narrow than you think you can.

You just have a bad setup for your body or you suck at the skill of squatting.

Balance over your feet. Sit down. That’s it.

Final tip - stop focusing on so many things at once. Pick one of these things to focus on and that’s it.

These all work together, so if you do a good job on your setup, you will be over the bar better, and be able to push through the front of your foot/midfoot better, etc.

Deadlifts can feel good.

Wanna run faster, further, with less effort?

Plyometrics are a low hanging fruit for a lot of people to improve running efficiency, bone health, and general enjoyment of training (bouncing around is fun).

The goal of plyos is to work coordination and timing.

Are you able to position your body, and your legs under your body, in a way that is efficient and allows you to stay springy?

Cuz that’s also the goal in running.

Are you able to create tension/force at the right moment, and not just be stiff the entire time?

Also useful for running. Don’t want to waste a bunch of energy just being all stiff and tight everywhere.

And then there’s the bone and joint health side of things.

Your body adapts to the stress you place on it.

Not enough, things break down (think rusting due to improper maintenance).

Too much, things break down (“overuse”).

The right amount that you are able to recover from leads to positive changes in your body and tissues.

That’s means denser bones. Healthier cartilage. Important things as we get older.

That makes plyos a great way to work on all of these things in an extremely scalable way. That means you can make it work for anybody.

We use plyos to increase springs for runners without needing to add just more running volume.
As a dynamic warmup for most of our clients.
As prep for return to running after lower body injuries.
To increase reaction and power in older adults.

Useful in many ways. But to get the most out of them, you gotta do them properly.

Listen to the differences between the landings on the versions above.

The first 2 can be useful as plyos, the last one is not really a plyos. It can get your heart rate up, but won’t really improve any of the other things.

A principle for all exercises - being more stable will give you access to more mobility.

Being unstable/off balance will make you stiffer.

Ever walked on slippery ice? What happens?

You stiffen up and walk like a penguin so that there are less things for your body to control.

Useful to not fall over.

Not useful to squat.

The other thing that limits mobility is load.

More load on the bar = you have to create more tension to stop the weight from crushing you into the floor.

The better you are at staying balanced over your feet, you can offset a bit of that tension by making sure you still have ENOUGH mobility to still complete the lift with full range.

I see this all the time with both extremely mobile people and extremely tight people.

Very mobile people usually have a poor setup and create too much tension, causing them to limit the depth on their own, not because they are actually tight.

The goal is to create the right amount do tension to perform the list, not maximally tension something like an air squat.

Very tight people need to learn how to stay balanced so they can actually relax and let their tissues go through a range of motion.

Over time, the load will improve the ability of that tissue to lengthen, improving your mobility, allowing to add more load and still access the same ranges.

Rinse, repeat forever.

Stop thinking about your chest, your spine, or your knees.

Where are your feet at? Where are YOU at over your feet? That will tell you pretty much everything you need to know.

Working out frequently can be easy when your kids are heavy.

Biggest issue with people that complain about being stiff all the time?

No ability to relax.

Everything is either max effort or nothing.

When you force a position/movement to happen….

You’ll just take the easy path, not necessarily the one that you want.

Best example of this is watch that stiff dude in the corner of the gym try to absolutely crank on their hamstrings to “stretch” them….and you will see a majority of the movement coming from their spine, not their hamstrings.

For people that struggle to relax, I love using deep tier variations (à la Matt McInnes Watson | The Plyo Guy and PLUS PLYOS ) to focus on smooth, continuous movement.

Create just enough tension to change direction, but not so much that you overly tense up your whole body (arms and spine are great gauges of this).

Make easier or harder by changing range of motion, speed, distance/height jumped, etc.

Great for warm up or conditioning.

Way harder than you think they will be.