STUART McGILL

Assessing Movement: A Contrast in Approaches, Part Three of Three

This transcript has been edited for smoother reading. Editorial decisions were made to retain Stuart’s meaning while
converting the live lecture format to text—Stuart has not reviewed this transcript for accuracy.
For more information on this workshop DVD, please visit
movementlectures.com, backfitpro.com or otpbooks.com.

Let’s say I’m a clinician seeing my first specialist—an MMA fighter. I don’t know anything about the discipline, so I
catalogue the movements. I decide I need to add endurance to enhance fitness and increase capacity to compete. In doing
so, I don’t compromise explosive power. How would I accomplish that?
When you catalogue an MMA competition, you realize the fighters don’t run, so you won’t use running to enhance
power and endurance. The demands analysis will show they perform Greco-Roman techniques for controlling an com-
petitor up against a cage. It’s pushing, pulling and lifting—double-leg takedowns are just a lift. What are the movement
patterns and where’s the bottleneck of this person? They might test fine on a simpler screen, or they might not.
Could one of you stand on the rope? You’re going to stabilize him. Who was the guy doing the FMS? Was that you,
sir? Do you want to help with this? Do you mind getting a little bit tired and winded? Come on!
I don’t know anything about this person except let’s say he’s an MMA fighter and I’ve done a little bit of an inventory.
I’m going to see how he breaks. I need to know where his level of compensation is—where the injury mechanisms appear.
Will is going to help me begin the demonstrations. He’s going to grab that rope and pretend it’s a fire hose. When
I first started working with this population, this became an exercise specific for MMA fighters, within their movement
rubric and demands, to enhance endurance.

1—Stuart McGill—Assessing Movement: A Contrast in Approaches DVD transcript, Part Three of Three
For more information on this workshop DVD, please visit movementlectures.com, backfitpro.com or otpbooks.com.
 Will is going to pull this rope hand over
hand, He’s a pretty fit-looking, dude. Start to pull
on that. Are you familiar with this? Start pulling
it. Chop it in, hand over hand. Ensuring there’s
enough resistance and making it quite difficult will
help clean up his mechanics. I want symmetric
legs. I want him to get right down into the hole.
Firefighters have a combat challenge—the
Olympics for firefighters. The mechanics of the
champion hose pullers is beautiful. Wouldn’t you
love that trophy over your mantel? It goes right
into the navel every time. It’s why they survive
and it’s why they don’t get hurt. But they all break
down eventually. Let’s just observe Will.
Could I have another guy standing on that
rope as well? That’s not heavy enough yet but any-
way show us what you got. Get down. Get down into the hole. Chop it in. Chop it in. I’m going to increase the resis-
tance for better mechanics. Chop it in through your navel. Come on! Get to work!
Can you see that he’s not going to survive? I’ll break Will real quick. He doesn’t understand the mechanics of tech-
nique. He has frozen his hips and is allowing his spine to do all the work. Use your hips. Use proper mechanics. Let the
power express out of the hip joints and move well. This isn’t a dance either, so soften your knees. He should lift his chest
to get a back that’s ready.
I believe he has a bad disc. I can feel it a mile away—I don’t need an x-ray. Will has an antalgic disc at L4. We don’t
need to go any further. I was hoping to see beautiful pulling…after a while, he would get into the mechanics of it.
Now, we’re going to find out how he breaks down as we add difficulty. If he froze his hips, it’s all spinal after that and
he’ll quickly break down. We can coach him otherwise, “No. Keep form. Don’t sacrifice your joints. Survive. Keep form.”
That was an example of where I might have to take someone into deeper water to learn the reaction to that stress. Is
he going to become injured or become the world champion? It was just a context specific screen, if you will.
During the earlier discussion I was asked to show the screen for the anatomical hips. Jason, do you mind sitting on
the end of the table to demonstrate?
His tight pants are going to completely disguise his hip function. I can’t show this in jeans, I need pleated pants or
something where I can get some mobility. Slouch for me. Now, sit upright. Aha! How did he do it? What strategy was he
dominant in? He froze his hips—It was all thoracic extension.
I think he will have pain as we progress. You can see how I’m developing a Maitland-like hypothesis. Already, I’ve ob-
served a character of movement. Had he rolled his pelvis
and extended, he would have aligned the spine and be free
of stress. He chose not to do that. He chose to use a tho-
racic extensor. Now I’ve got a rough idea of a fundamental
underlying pattern there.
To determine if I should load his back, let’s get Jason
on his hands and knees for Shirley Sahrmann’s test. He
will rock the buttocks back to his heels. Come on forward.
Right away, his back position is broken. I’m starting to get
an idea of the capacity of that spine, but that’s not a back
I can load.
Using a clinical technique, I’ve established what his
spine can do. Next I’m going to cue up the rib cage. I’ve
got load-bearing optimality here and am starting to get a
back that I like—one in with more load tolerance.

2—Stuart McGill—Assessing Movement: A Contrast in Approaches DVD transcript, Part Three of Three
For more information on this workshop DVD, please visit movementlectures.com, backfitpro.com or otpbooks.com.
 Jason rocks his pelvis back to his heels, but I’m going to have him stop because the sacrum just broke away. It’s
starting to break away because I’m creating lumbosacral stress. Come on forward. Just go back. There…I can identify the
breaking point.
I’ll have Jason take his knees out to the edge of the table, open up his feet a bit and lift his tail. Now he’ll push the
earth and drop back into the squat. Come on now – a little bit more. Come on. Come on. Come on. Whoa! Again, I
can see the point at which it breaks.
That was a great demonstration of the function of knee width. I haven’t done a squat with him yet, but I’ve learned
I can squat him a little bit wider. He’s already locked up his femur and pelvis just by squatting too narrow. These details
matter.
How do I figure out the anatomy without x-
rays? Let’s get Jason on his back—straighten a leg,
relax, surrender and give me 100% mobility.
I’m very perceptive at this point. I’m feeling
the shape of that femoral head around the acetabu-
lum. His is very square. I know where his genes come
from. Now I’m going to stress the labrum and the
hip capsule. Beautiful!
I’m trying to discern whether I’m buttressing
bone to bone, or am I into soft tissue? Can this hip
even be stretched? In Jason’s case, I’m just pushing
bone to bone. I’m not going to get anywhere except
to hurt him. The spring is all there and he’s got lots
of capacity, but we have to contend with the shape.
I’m not able to get much angle because of tightness. If I can come out just a bit, there’s more room. I know I can set
up his deep squat at the hole in his acetabulum, but it’s going to be a lot wider than he thought.
I don’t need an x-ray to determine anatomy. I keep playing with these simple little tests. If a person wants me to
set up a squat, I do a little orthopedic exam to determine what tissues are at risk and what strategies I need to employ to
minimize the stress.
For a few more demonstrations, I’ll bring up two people I’ve already picked out of the audience. Jerzy Gregorik is a
three-time world record-holding Olympic lifter If I took his knee through the same process, it would come right up to his
chin. I’m going to have him face me and show us a nice squat. There you go! That is how you lift a world record with no
stress on the lumbosacral discs. If that form is not there, we are now compromised.
When I’m asked to see a pro-football team or a NCAA team, we start with that exam. Only after that do I want to
see them start to set up with the bar on the floor.
Next, Serge, who is not an accomplished lifter,
is going to help us. Serge, face me and pretend you’re
going to pull a bar. I can tell he’s got a sore back and
can’t pull heavy weight. He’s got a little antalgia there
as well.
To further assess him, I’ll set up and coach a pull.
We’ll have his hands on his thighs like he’s playing
shortstop. He can’t bear load on that spine yet. This
position has no power and no bearing capacity at all.
Instead of the idea of the triple extension in the shrug,
I want him to do the polar opposite. He should make a
crotch with his thumb and finger and put it around his
knees. Now, he can carry all the load down his arms,
and anti-shrug. I want him to stiffen and not allow any
laxity in his back.

3—Stuart McGill—Assessing Movement: A Contrast in Approaches DVD transcript, Part Three of Three
For more information on this workshop DVD, please visit movementlectures.com, backfitpro.com or otpbooks.com.
 We’ve lifted the tail and he’ll anti-shrug with his pecs and lats. He’s pulling down and stiffening. He will not lift with
his back ever again. He is going to stiffen and pull his hips through. Now I will have him go down, grab his knees and
pretend he has a bar. He’s going to drag that bar up his thighs. Anti-shrug. Pull down. There’s no laxity in his back as he
pulls his hips through. Very nice!
Now, let’s sneak it down a little bit lower.
His knees are coming forward. That’s acceptable at
this point. He should pull his hips through, but he
scooped underneath and lost it. He just broke his
back position, but if he hadn’t scooped, he would have
survived.
When I probe and poke, I’m looking for dif-
ferent strategies to make the most resilient body to
bear load. I can get the movement if I keep coach-
ing it, even with his default patterns that clearly aren’t
there or well established. If he can keep that move-
ment, neuroscience shows that if we repeat the move-
ment with stronger mental thought, the patterns will
strengthen.
I can’t stand it when I go into a gym with people chewing gum and music playing. What is this, a fairground? In
my world, you’re thinking at 100% and laying down the strongest neural connection and engrams you can—creating the
strongest default patterns. Then we’re going to strengthen those patterns with load. That’s how you do it and it’s perfectly
consistent with neuroscience.
Now, let’s set up a pull. I’ll have Serge face me and slide his hands down his thighs. He’s going to remember the
anti-shrug and take the slackness out of his body. For the next one, he will fall back on his heels, be a leaning tower and
explode his whole center of mass.
The center of mass will be somewhere in the mid-
dle of his foot. But now I’ll ask him to be a monkey
and grip the ground with his toes and heels. The fastest
corrective I know of is to grip the ground like that. You
won’t fall over.
He’s going to grip the ground, pull his hips for-
ward, push his knees into my hand, pull his hips through
and stand up. Right away, I’ve engaged the biggest mo-
tors I can.
Set up the squat. Anti-shrug. Head up. Grip the
ground and start to spread the floor. The knees can’t
move. He just took the line of drive and created a natural
buckle in his leg. He mustn’t do that. Grip the ground
and feel the stiffness there. Again, spread the floor, anti-
shrug and now pull the hips through.
I’ll get Jerzy to do a pull and demonstrate why the neck is so important. All of the pulling muscles and trapezius, they
hang from the neck. If you’re chewing gum and think you can pull well, you are asking for trouble or injury.
Jerzy is intense compared to Serge. Remove the movement flaws and magic happens. We’re not even close, Serge.
Anti-shrug for me and stiffen again.
He shouldn’t be smiling like that. The fastest way to steal strength is to smile. If I’m arm wrestling, I just tell a joke
and get the other guy to laugh. I’ll win because he will lose the neural drive. We’re working to densify the neural drive.
With the motor cortex, the game face matters. It’s not fun, but it will teach you to pull the most out of your body. That’s
why I game face in my operation.

4—Stuart McGill—Assessing Movement: A Contrast in Approaches DVD transcript, Part Three of Three
For more information on this workshop DVD, please visit movementlectures.com, backfitpro.com or otpbooks.com.
 He’s going to anti-shrug, start to spread and start to stiffen through. Now we’re going to work with a bar and I want
him to push the bar away—to try and bend the bar. My strategy for bending a bar is called the latissimus dorsi post. Pull-
ing the bar closer to his center of rotation, he’s shortened the lever arm and is starting to gain a mechanical advantage.
There’s no laxity in his body. There’s no injury potential as long as he has load-bearing capacity in the spine.
These steps are the nuances of setting up a pull Set up your feet. You’re falling back on your feet, man. Remember
the leaning tower? Get all of that right. Serious. Push down. Head up. There we are. Grab the bar. Start to bend it
a little bit. Post through the latissimus dorsi. Now, pull your hips through. You scooped a tiny bit there. We’ll have to
engineer that out a little bit, and help show you how hard I probe the system to find out where it’s going to break down.
I want to know where the weaknesses are, and where I can perform small movement corrections to add resilience and
performance and take away potential injury mechanisms.
I want to make note of Jerzy’s preparation before he does a pull of the bumper plate. He’s a world champion and
makes it look so easy. I also want to mention that he is almost 60 years old. In his prime, there was no one who could beat
him. He can do a pull—snatch or any lift—I just want a demonstration of world-class form. Nice! There was zero spine
motion.
Now, the herniated disc has to be bent. There’s no other way to do it. If you take a disc and you bend it—if I had an
orange seed that I wanted to squirt out, I have to bias the pressure, and out it goes every time. The only way to get a disc
bulge is to bend it and then apply load.
Every time you pick up a load off the ground, every
time you put one down, every time you get in and out
of a chair, that cumulative movement flaw throughout
the day will emanate the collagen. When you do get seri-
ous, you’ve stolen your capacity and compromised your
ability to train. Often, one of the best ways I can help
athletes is to clean up their lives for the other 23 hours to
regain their training capacity
If Jerzy will perform a snatch for us—I want you
to see the power out of the hole at the very bottom. No
spine motion at all. Beautiful! The hips…they don’t get
any better. Jerzy, I’ve learned so much from you and I
thank you.
Now, we’ll have Monica demonstrate her squat.
That is nice, but I wouldn’t let her lift heavy. The
hips just broke away—posterior rotation of the pel-
vis—the ‘wink’ as they call it. At that level, I wouldn’t
allow her to go under heavy load. Some of you will
argue with me, but I’ve done enough disc herniation
studies to know that’s the injury mechanism.
If Monica will repeat that, this time I’ll work
with her. I’m stopping her now and not allowing her
to go any lower. If she does power cleans, I want her
pulling off blocks. Whatever she does, she shouldn’t be
pulling a bar off of the floor. If she does, she will even-
tually get to a volume of training where she will break
her disc. Sorry, that’s the way it I,s but it shouldn’t stop
her from achieving her goals.
Who said you had to pull from the floor? It was
just some guy who came along and said we’re going to
make Olympic plates this size. There’s no other reason and no science behind it. Put the bar up on a couple of 2x6s and
we’ll get some good training and all the good things that come with lifting.

5—Stuart McGill—Assessing Movement: A Contrast in Approaches DVD transcript, Part Three of Three
For more information on this workshop DVD, please visit movementlectures.com, backfitpro.com or otpbooks.com.
 Now, we can use those tools and really create some athleticism, but I want to look at speed and load. If I was consid-
ering her as a candidate to do some Olympic lifting, she needs strength and the ability to quickly turn muscles on and off.
How’s that height? Do you think you could just from here and nail that box, Monica? Do that for us. I want you
to land into a squat.
Nice, now we’ll go to a higher box. Would you be willing to jump up onto that? You saw the prep that we did for a
squat? Do it. Focus. She’s going to take that smile off of her face and prepare and focus as we did for the squat. Image it,
rehearse it and nail it. Not bad! Beautiful!
She’s going to perform it again, but now I don’t
want to hear her land. I want her to explode with
muscle. The rest of the exercise is complete relax-
ation and just enough activation to absorb the end.
She’ll focus on what she needs to do, rehearse it in
her mind, explode and relax. Nice!
When I clap, I want her to image. Bang. Relax.
When you nail it, bang so it’s going to be loud. Do
you understand? Rehearse that in your head now.
You’re going to relax. You’re going to…boom. You’re
going to fly. Relax. Just as she hits I want it to be
loud—I want some violence this time.
We’re really getting there. I like what I see. She
has the software and the hardware and now I would
consider getting her into some of the snatch progres-
sions. Monica, thank you.
These demonstrations have been a way to display my tools, but have some stories that can help as well. I was working
for an Olympic volleyball team and while watching the players I mentioned to the coach, “Do you see in the game films
that all you have to do is spike to the right side of that setter and the tall men and women in the middle of the court lose
every time?”
He looked at me and said, “How did you know?”
“Look at their hips,” I replied. “You could see the drop step on one side. They just play in a small box with the tall
person in the middle. Look at the other side.”
I see the drop step in the NBA—Shaquille O’Neal comes to mind. It’s how you clear to get the rebound, and the
rebound is basketball. I couldn’t care less about their deep squats. I care everything about their hip external rotation.
I’m going to have Bobby, another Olympic lift-
er, do a quick hip external rotation demonstration.
He tells me that he is a little sore in his back, so this
might be perfect.
He’ll spread his arms, get his hips back into me
and try to guard me. Okay? You’ve got to get me
out of the way. Spread your wings now. You’re getting
into a position. Now I’ll have him drop step one way
for me. Nice! Show me the other side. That one’s a
little crisper; my eye is seeing an asymmetry. Let’s put
a band around his knees and then look at his move-
ment.
That’s my movement screen. Everything the per-
son does is a screen to me.
Next he moves the band down his knees a little
and takes the one knee out. Now, the other side. I can see he has to work more on that side.

6—Stuart McGill—Assessing Movement: A Contrast in Approaches DVD transcript, Part Three of Three
For more information on this workshop DVD, please visit movementlectures.com, backfitpro.com or otpbooks.com.
 I’m going to get him on his side on the table
and peel him back just a little bit more. Would you
hop up on the table there? Lay on your side. Face
them. Okay. Just put your hand under your hip and
make a nice little pillow for yourself. There we are.
Let’s do the same maneuver. He’ll externally rotate
with his ankles pinned together, and bring up that
knee. I can immediately see the sloppy pelvis. I want
Bobby to stiffen his pelvis. If he rounds his back he
makes himself easy to break tension. Lift. He’ll keep
his pelvis stiffened and drive his hip. Beautiful!
Bobby can assist with a demonstration of one of
the elements of core stability. People talk about core
stability. There are about four elements to core stability but this is one of them. The pec major creates arm flexion and
crosses the shoulder joint. As it shortens, it does this to the arm. Does it do the same to the rib cage? If he stiffens here and
locks down proximally to the joint, 100% of the athleticism goes there.
We just locked down the core so 100% was expressed on the distal side. When we didn’t lock down the core, we
could see the energy leak in his performance. I didn’t peel Bobby back enough to know what’s really going on, but I think
with work he can improve that pattern. Still, I know where I’d spike the volleyball to him.
Watch a volleyball game next time and you won’t miss it. Watch a basketball game—you’ll learn how to beat your
competition like that.
Movement analysis. It was all given away in the movement. These were just a few little tidbits on how this crazy
mind works.

7—Stuart McGill—Assessing Movement: A Contrast in Approaches DVD transcript, Part Three of Three
For more information on this workshop DVD, please visit movementlectures.com, backfitpro.com or otpbooks.com.