Jeff Cavaliere

So raising the heels.

Raising the heels up.

As level as you can get them.

Again, the bed's a little soft, so sometimes you kind of dip down as you're lifting your legs up, but it's sturdy enough that you can get to almost a parallel position to the floor.

I like to make sure we'll talk about this, but like you're moving, the muscles are doing the work and not momentum, right?

So you want to hold that contraction briefly at the top to convince yourself that you actually were able to perform the movement.

So you get up, hold it for a second.

And I think what's important on that, too, is

People who don't have the strength in their glutes, because it really is a glute weakness issue, not necessarily a low back issue.

A lot of times it's weakness in the glutes that's transferring the load to the low back that can't handle it.

And people get the symptoms in the back, but it's the weakness somewhere else that's causing that.

So I like to focus first and foremost on the glutes, glute max, glute medius, to make sure that they're strong enough.

And again, if you test even big time athletes, we would test the rotational strength of their hips.

some of the strongest athletes some of the biggest squatters some of the best lungers right they're lunging over 200 pounds they you put them in position you try to bend their their uh their hip into internal or external rotation of their bent knee

they can't resist it at all.

So it just goes to show you that all the squatting, all the big lifts aren't enough to counteract the smaller muscles, right?

There are different functions.

A rotational muscle of the hip is not a sagittal plane muscle of the hip.

It has a different function.

So they all have to be strengthened.