The Ready State

One of my favorite rehab questions ➡️ how can we keep the thing… the thing?

Watching Lindsey Vonn rebuild her squat is a beautiful example.

The squat is already a movement her brain and body understand. So instead of abandoning that language during rehab, you can start manipulating the variables around it.

Give more stability. Limit the range. Slow down the tempo. Use a box, add assistance, or change the load. Start with what you can tolerate today, then progressively move the dial as capacity returns.

That creates a bridge between rehab and training because the athlete never really leaves the movement behind. The squat progresses with her.

The goal is to work back toward the full expression of the movement, one version at a time.

There are a lot of ways to rehab an injury, and every athlete and injury brings its own considerations…

Regression and progression remain one of my favorite frameworks because it gives coaches and athletes a shared language from day one.

Lindsey Vonn continues to be an absolute masterclass in what rebuilding capacity can look like.

Work. Kids. Poor sleep. Family responsibilities. Sometimes life stress is unavoidable – and strength and conditioning expert Joel Jamieson says your training needs to account for it.

Mental and physical stress draw from the same recovery resources. So when life gets especially demanding, reducing your training volume or intensity can give your body the space it needs to recover.

🎧 Our full conversation with Joel Jamieson is live now on The Ready State Podcast. Comment “211” and I’ll send it directly to you.

This episode is brought to you by .momentous, , and .

Before you add another exercise to solve a movement problem, try changing the speed.

Tempo is one of the most useful (and underused) variables we have as coaches.

Slow a movement down and suddenly you can see things that disappear at full speed.

🔹Where does the athlete lose connection?
🔹 Where do they rush through a range?
🔹 Where does a position start to feel uncertain?
🔹 Can they actually control the entire movement instead of just arriving at the finish?

Keep slowing things down and eventually you stop.

Welcome to isometric town. 😎

Now we can spend meaningful time in a position, create tension there, build confidence, and give the brain and tissues repeated exposure to a range we want to own.

This is especially useful when we’re rebuilding after injury, managing pain, learning a new skill, or trying to restore a position before we add speed back into the equation.

Good coaching doesn’t always require another clever drill. Sometimes the exercise you already have is exactly the right one… you just need to change the clock.

Tempo and isometrics. Two very simple tools with a ridiculous number of applications.

Follow me for more practical coaching tools that help you simplify movement, rehab, and performance problems.

Can you have a low HRV and still be healthy? Absolutely. One number doesn’t tell the whole story. 🤔

HRV stands for heart rate variability — the variation in time between heartbeats. And as strength and conditioning coach explains, comparing your score to someone else’s can miss the point.

What matters is what your body can do: handle a demanding workout or a stressful day, then shift into recovery when the work is done.

In the full episode, Joel joins us to unpack HRV, VO2 max, resting heart rate, and Zone 2. We get into:

→ Why a higher HRV doesn’t always mean you’re better recovered
→ What Zone 2 training is actually trying to accomplish
→ Why your aerobic engine matters even if endurance isn’t your thing
→ How to balance low, moderate, and high-intensity conditioning
→ Why stress outside the gym should shape how you train

The goal isn’t to win at wearable data. It’s to understand what your body can handle and train accordingly.

🎧 Our full conversation with Joel Jamieson is live now on The Ready State Podcast. Comment “211” and I’ll send it directly to you.

This episode is brought to you by .momentous, , and .

If your shoulder isn’t moving well, spend a couple minutes looking beyond the shoulder proper. 👀

The tissues along the side of your chest wall (particularly around the serratus) can get pretty nasty, and restoring some motion here can have a big impact on how well the shoulder blade moves and controls protraction.

For this Daily Dose, grab a roller and get some pressure into the tissues along the ribs.

Instead of rolling back and forth, tack the tissue and gently scrub across it, working through that lateral chest wall and sneaking into the edge of the lat where needed.

This can be sensitive territory, so pay attention to your breathing and give yourself a couple of minutes to explore rather than trying to smash your way through it.

Then retest your shoulder and see what changed.

Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QeYj5pju6Co for more Daily Dose mobility work like this ➡️ quick ways to troubleshoot your positions, work on your tissues, and keep up with your basic body maintenance.

Every once in a while the internet reminds me why I’m still on the internet. 😂

This is the Krikati Log Race (corrida de tora) in Brazil, and I immediately went down the rabbit hole.

Look at the physical demands here. They’re carrying enormous loads, running barefoot over uneven ground, managing speed and fatigue, coordinating ridiculous handoffs, and then keeping up with the group after handing off the log.

This is human capacity on full display.

Writer and thinker Philip Beach has a framework I love ➡️ human beings are fundamentally built to get up and down, throw things, and carry resources around.

Well, here you go. Carrying resources turned into a race.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can get more carrying, throwing, reacting, coordination, and real-world movement back into our increasingly organized ideas about “fitness.”

Then the internet serves up something like this and reminds me that humans have been finding extraordinary ways to test these capacities for a very long time.

Holy moly, I’m a fan.

Who’s ready to replace the local 5K with a log race?

Follow me if you want someone to sift through the black hole of the internet, pull out the good stuff on movement and human performance, and bring it back here for you.

Before you add another corrective exercise, ask yourself a simpler question ➡️ how much time are you actually spending in the position you’re trying to improve?

If you want a better bottom position in your squat and the answer is “basically none,” that’s useful information.

Find a version of the squat you can access. Elevate your heels, hold onto something, use a band, decrease the load… whatever allows you to spend some actual time in that shape.

The same principle applies overhead. If getting your arms overhead is the problem, at some point we need to create an appropriate way for you to get your arms overhead and accumulate some exposure there.

We have an enormous number of tools available to us as coaches and athletes, and they absolutely have their place. But sometimes we can solve a lot of complexity by getting back to the movement itself and asking how we can scale it so the person can practice it.

Practice and exposure signal to the brain: this is a position we value.

Give the system enough appropriate exposure and see what starts to change.

If you want more simple frameworks for making sense of mobility, movement, and the problems your body throws at you, follow me.