Dr. Andy Galpin

And so when I'm thinking about, yeah, how much muscle do I have?

And then also what's the quality of that muscle?

I need to be thinking about how that muscle is actually used.

As a simple explanation here, I look for four basic things when determining successfulness of human movement.

If you're in a specific sporting context, you're of course going to add your own unique flavor.

So how a major league baseball pitcher moves is going to be quite different than even somebody like a golfer who are both in rotational asymmetrical sports, how they move.

You can expand that even beyond that to somebody like an NBA player or a pickleballer.

All of these coaches and athletes in the individual sports are going to want to have different muscles move in different fashions in different sequences.

I can't get into all those details now.

So just stepping back and thinking globally, what are the core principles that are true?

in all those examples.

To me, it's really four basic elements.

The very first one is range of motion.

Are you able to go through a range of motion in all of your joints that is appropriate for those joints?

As an example, your elbow is meant to flex and extend.

It can rotate internally and externally.

This would imagine taking your palm of your hand and sticking it up in the air, and then taking the palm of your hand and sticking it towards the ground.

Internal and external rotation.

However, your elbow is not meant to bend left and right.

If you want to move your hand in closer to your body or away from your body, you actually have movement of your shoulder joint.