Elastic Mobility

So in this lesson, we will explore how healthy fashion can help you to stay young and bouncy. From head to toe. And, that will have 3 parts, and each part will have a theoretical part and a practical application afterwards. In this first part, we look at facial elasticity. And that was a new contribution to the fashion research field that was more dominated before from manual therapists.

And we use FASURE to explain how we change type TSU into soft to one, how fashion can glue, etcetera. But at the 2009 Congress, in Amsterdam. It was a big surprise when a Japanese researcher showed us some video images with ultrasound, how the fibers in the muscle of the calf are changing their lengths in milliseconds when some is jumping and how the tendon fibers are doing so too. And that that was a new development. Because with ultrasound, you can see tissue changes in real time.

So while people are doing a movement, So, in the, black and white picture that you see on the lower left, you see the middle of the calf, and you see this pen aid, muscle fibers, And they meet a tendon or a tendon sheet in the middle, which is more light gray colored. So, basically, the ultrasound head is here at the middle of the calf, and people are doing different movement. A classical movement would be to contract your calf and to go into plant deflection and then slowly go down. And that's how you have been, lifting weights in a gym. And what you would expect in a classical workout movement So similar if I do an elbow flexion here, it would be similar that the muscle fibers of the elbow flexors.

For example, the biceps, here they are long, here they are much shorter. And they transmit that length change onto the joint in order to get the elbow flexion by pulling on a short tendon here, but the tendon would not lengthen very much. And that basically you can show in this model here. That would be the bone that you are moving. That would be the tendon.

For example, the coolest tendon in standing. And in rosy, pink or red color, My finger on my hand would be the sarcomeres of the muscle fibers. So in a classical movement, you shorten the muscle fibers in your hand, and the tendon is basically transmitting that. And this is how we exercise in a regular gym. The tendon just needs to be strong enough to transmit the main contraction and length changes of the muscle.

And this is how you lift weight. But if you do a bouncing movement, so if you are not going for 2 seconds in going down. But if you find a rhythm where you can bounce in a flexible rhythm where you feel like it has a resonating frequency. What then the ultrasound showed is, and you can see it on the image in the middle, is that the blue tendon The a kilo tendon is making much more length changes than the muscle fibers are doing up there. So if I show it to you in this model, if you bounce on your feet, then your finger is making only minute length changes.

So your calf muscles are almost doing isometric contractions, And it is the tendon that does does all the length changes. And, that was, a mind opening for many of us. So if you are doing balancing movement, The muscle is not doing much, but it needs to have the right wisdom. So I can show you here If I want to do it with muscular movement, I want to be the best bouncer in whole Germany, this will be very difficult. But if you have the right rhythm, I can do with an almost Nothing movement.

So, like, I I need to lift half a millimeter at the right frequency. And the frequency is dependent on the pendulum lengths, but also on the stiffness of it. And then I can do big movements. Like, imagine I'm an ninja fighter, and people are attacking me from the right and the left. And my arms and legs are swinging, and I say, I'm not doing anything. It's just my fascia.

That is an exaggeration. Because the finger needs to make a minute movement. But if the movement is at the right frequency, And if your fascia has elastic storage capacity, here, I can do the right rhythm as much as I want. It will not do it. So you need a nervous system that can find out for each elastic system What is the resonant frequency for it? Similar, if you have a rope and you find the right rhythm, then it becomes almost effortless.

Same thing. You shake a tree. If you find the rhythm for that system, you don't need to do much after a few seconds. Just a tiny bit, and it will almost swing forever. So that was a big contribution for the movement field. And so now people are looking, where do we engage elastic recoils, intended, intended sheets, and other dense collectionist connective disease.

And even before, they had done that with ultrasound, they had found it in animal locomotion research. That had been a big question that some of the kangaroos in Australia can do 13 meter long jumps. So that would be from here to there. And a koala bear cannot do that. So they thought it must be not the size of the muscle because the kangaroo's legs are not that much more bulky than in Aqualaba. It must be the contractile power or the speed that they have more fast twitch muscle fibers. That was very logically.

I would have assumed so too. That the kangaroo must have either more fast rich fibers as opposed to slow switch fibers, or that they have a new category of rich fiber that can contract even more rapidly, more explosively, because what's making the jump is not deliver, you know, it must be the muscles. They are the tissue that makes acceleration. That was the assumption. So then they looked in the kangaroo, and they couldn't find any unusual contractile muscle fibers.

They didn't have more fast twitch. They didn't have a super fast, rich category as people had been hoping. They couldn't explain it. Not by the muscle morphology and mass muscle chemistry until out of despair, they looked at the tendon, the tendon. I mean, that's there to transmit it.

It needs to be strong enough. No. It's not how strong it is, but how much kinetic energy can its store and bounce it backwards. And that's called kinetic storage capacity. And that was the big, explanation. So the, killers tendon of the kangaroo has more than 90% storage capacity.

So if you bounce it to you stretch it, it, recoils with almost the same energy that you have put in. And if you do that with the a kilastendin or a koala bear, it doesn't bounce. A lot of the energy is dissipated and converted into heat and not into kinetic energy. And then they found out many animals use that. So it was discovered with kangaroos.

Their secret is not the mussels. It the tendon, the casualties you the tendon is a casualties you specialize, fatalities you for us. That they have tendons that can store kinetic energy and then release it, return it. With almost the same amount of energy that you put in. And then they found it in gas cells.

They also have non bulky lags. But they have pendants, which are almost like perfect stainless steel, Springs are perfect rubber bands. And then later, they found it in horses, and then they found it in one monkey, a primate monkey, that we should actually understand quite well because it is homo sapiens. Our a killer standard separate us from all our relative primates, chimpanzees, don't have as much recall capacity. Gorillas don't have it.

We are the gazelle. We are the kangaroo. Among the primate monkeys. And that is unique in our body, not only in the a killer standard, but also in the petal attendant, and they even showed it in other connective tissues that we have there. And that has been feeding very well into the evolutionary research.

When people looked at What is special about homo sapiens, that separates their morphology, their anatomy, from the other monkeys that have a different locomotion style. And Dan Lieberman and his group at Harvard University, they came up with a hypothesis, which is pretty much accepted now. But when he proposed it, it was more There was more debate around it, that our ancestors evolved even at a time where they didn't have a bigger brain, but we had long legs for, bypass locomotion. And that our body adapted for persistence hunting that our forefathers and fore mothers They often got their food by running other animals to exhaustion. And they were running in small teams.

Most of the animals can run faster for a short distance. But if you are good at reading traces and predicting where they would go, you will catch them 5 minutes later and get them to gallop again. And usually after this, 3rd time of galloping, their body is overheating, and then they have to stop. Now, homo sapiens, not as a couch potato, but if you live an active hunter gatherer lifestyle, You are a better endurance runner than most animals. There is only a few wolves and dogs who are as good or even better than humans.

But almost all animals, if they overheat, they have to stop. Now, the dogs involves develop their tongue in order to prevent overheating. But if you have a glue and it, gallops for the 5th time, it will have to stop because it's overheating. And the dog is using the tongue in order to, cool down. Homo sapiens developed a tongue that covers 90% of your body's surface.

So we lost our hair in big of our body as a large tongue. So when our forefathers were were running, in order to hunt some animals in small groups, they use the whole body as a tongue in order to prevent cooling down. Now if you are not a runner, you would not catch some dinner for your family. But if you grow up in a gathering hunter or family, where running and walking and being active in a bypass way is part of your lifestyle, you have the ability to get some animals back to the family as some protein. So that means our body is adapted for economic persistence running.

And, that was a big theory. So that has, has been shaping our evolution And, it also explains that running is physiologically differently regulated. Like in most sports, you get significantly less good if you get forty, fifty years old. You cannot keep your same time and the same speed, etcetera. But in endurance running, many people can keep If they, keep on practicing, they are not losing the capacity. So it's something that you can even do in old age.

Maybe because it was not just one more fancy movement that it was essential for our locomotion and for our survival. And, there there is a very nice book of written about that persistence hunting. And the ability of fashion to store kinetic energy, by, Chris McDougall born to run, which has now become a bestseller. And I highly recommend it, because in the story, they are learning from these Mexican haramuara runners, how they live in a, kind of barefoot oriented, sensory interaction with the environment, and how they listen to their body more. But a big part of the book is the adventure, not in Mexico, in Copper Valley, It is in the laboratory of Dan Lieberman, who is testing this hypothesis that we humans We have made elastic recall capacity in our body wide fashion net as an essential feature of our survival and of of what, of what makes us humans in terms of our anatomy physiology, etcetera.

So when I read that book, I I got really excited because there is a lot of chapters about fashion, and facial elasticity. And particularly after these ultrasound pictures, that many of us could not forget after the 2009 Congress. And I had the big luck to meet Daniel Liberman. And, so he invited me to go for his Sunday morning run But one of us was much faster than the other one. So we stopped the run and went into a coffee and chatted for the half of the morning.

But the one who was much faster was not me. It was him because he had been practicing this kind of barefoot running for for a much longer time. The as he has been doing there. And, that, that also led to me inviting him, and he was at the 2018 Congress, he was our prime keynote speaker in Berlin University. And many people got very inspired by Dan Lieber Mans. Contribution to the fashion research field there where he emphasized, the elacic recall capacity as something that that we, together with kangaroos and, gazelles have, optimized to a much, much bigger level for our style of locomotion that we have.

Now many other evolutionary scientists have joined him. And they have looked at running to be one of the adaptation. Of course, we can also swim better than many other animals, etcetera. But a lot of the features in our body make sense in making us a better runner. Our ancestors probably spend more hours walking in a week than running But for their survival, the optimization of running made more often a selective difference, whether you get something home to eat, or whether you are being eaten.

So sometimes the better runners or the better walkers arrived, because they got into it. But usually, the running was that made the difference. How fast you can run away and how fast you can chase an animal. That you get some protein back to your, family. So, you are the running animals in the in in in the monkey, kingdom.

That's why our toes are shorter. That's why we have a gluteus maximus. That's why we lost, through such a degree, our body hair. So a lot, there are 15 to 20 different features which you can primarily explain by being a better runner. And, so that means our body shape for being a better runner.

And that running is, kind of for humans. What swimming is is for for a fish. So even if you're not a runner, which you are welcome to do and say, I'm, I, I'm a bicycle person or a swimmer or dance, so I'm made to to dance. Born to dance. So that would be my next book or your next book. Yeah. But but the physiology, the anatomy, in human selection and evolution was shaped around optimization of running in it.

And he showed that not only in the a killer tendon, not only in the patellar tendon, but in the biggest facial continuous plate that we have with which is the eliotbiel band. And no other animal has an eliotbiel band because it's also related to our pelvis. So, in the monkey, they have something similar, but it's not eliotibial band because the elium doesn't come so much forward. And that makes us very unique. So if a Martian would look at this biped monkey that is, heating up the planet earth, and changing the the climate.

So, what is so special that you you can see that they are monkey, but they have these long legs. And they would explore our anatomy. So one of the first thing besides the gluteus maximus and, bigger cortex would be that we have this white plate here on the lateral side. And it's not soft So it is like a guitar string, and they would probably say, what do you do this? You know, are they making music with it? It has a high degree of pretension.

And, so then Liberman showed it is made to store kinetic energy. So when doing the 1 legged landing phase, a lot of kinetic energy stored with it. And the recoil of the stored energy is much, much better in homo sapiens than it is in a chimpanzee or orangutan. So the elacic recall capacity is not only in our attendance. It's also in several fashion membranes. Particularly, and that's where the research is very, convincing in this very important IT band that we have developed here.

Now, that led to an emphasis on barefoot running because our answers, they didn't have night shoe and and better shoes. And so, people liked and Liberman suggested. If you want to to do natural running, you should, slowly do it in the way how our ancestors have been doing it. And, so, in the barefoot running, actually, very interesting, Two thirds of the people land more with the front foot, even in slow running. So if you do slow running, most people who wear shoes, they land with the heel.

But if you take the shoes off or you only have minimal shoes, than 2 thirds of the runners land with the whole foot or with the front foot. Probably in order to dampen the impact in landing on the ground. And interesting, if you look at the curve shown here, If you run with padded shoes, there is a bigger spark there. So when your heel hits the ground in a choose, there is a bigger force impact going up your hip. Then when you run without padded shoes, and then land with the front of the foot. So people think, padded shoes are better when you run on, concrete pavement because better choose dampen the hard impact.

But it could even be the opposite. If you wanted to dampen the impact from the concrete ground, I sometimes want to increase it. So I have more mechanical stimulation. And, don't have to do as many jumps in order to prevent osteoporosis. So sometimes I want to have a strong mechanical impact.

But let's say you say landing for thousands of step on a hard concrete ground is too hard for my body, And that's why I want to wear a better shoes. But when you run with better shoes, the majority of you will land with the heel. And then at the split second where the heel lands on the ground, even with the padded shoe, there is this high spark that you see on the curve here. Now if you then take the shoes off, then you have less padding But then your forefoot becomes your active padding. So before you heal sharply lands on the ground, the forefoot is already doing some dampening there.

And that's why actually the forced transmission is softer in barefoot runners, even on concrete ground. Then it is with people who have, better shoes there. Now, you know, the whole barefoot running, debate is is a, a big active one because also Dan Lieberman, now he was used from Reebrum and from other company who do so called barefoot running, as if that is always better. And, there was a study very interesting where they had 2 kinds of runners, one where we're running with, the Rhbrom shoes with minimal pattern shoes, almost like barefoot running. And the others were running with conventional one.

And they had the same protocol. They were non runners before, and they start to run with with a modest training schedule. 10 minutes on the 1st day. And then 1 week later, you add 30%. And that was according to the very modest recommendations from the barefoot running, shoe company, which nobody does. Either you love barefoot running, and then you keep them on half the day, or you don't like it.

But, of course, they do these careful recommendations. But very interesting, in the group of the barefoot runners or so called barefoot runners, they had a higher likelihood of a bone marrow edema. There is some debate around it, but there was more water content. In the bone marrow of the TBI in the lower leg. And that could be interpreted as a sign of a over challenge as if there is some micro injury happening.

And then the increase in water is already part of the healing process. And that led to a big, paddling backwards of the Hen Lieberman and many others. They said, maybe barefoot running was good for our ancestors because they grew up like that. But if we do it, we need to really think about it. Do we want to go back to nature?

Because we need to give more time for our body to adapt to it. So, people who do barefoot running, they don't say it's better. Usually, they say, please get adapted to it slower. So I recommend barefoot running, not for mechanical reasons, but for sensory reasons. You have a better interaction with the environment. You feel the ground.

You feel the the pebbles. You feel the moisture. I mean, this is like as if you have been swimming in a, Velcro or neoprene diving suit for months, in winter. And then comes the 1st day where you can swim naked over the basal. I mean, the water is so much better if you can have it on your skin.

And you know exactly where where it's touching you. So that's why I recommend barefoot running. But I would recommend not to start the first minutes barefoot running. To take it the last 2 minutes before you arrive at your car. Because then if you have fun, you don't, over exaggerate.

So so that is a nice debate. It's not that it's healthier for everybody. It is definitely more for how our evolution has designed us, but you cannot go back immediately. There was this, video about Willie. I think that was not a dolphin. It was an Oka or Vail.

Yeah. Yeah. And there there are some, people who said, really needs to go back to the ocean. He's sick and, a big adventure And the movie starts really goes back in the ocean and ever her and sunrise, an happy person, etcetera. That's in the movie. So go back to nature, and this is paradise.

You know how the real story ended up? Really went back into the ocean, and he died in the ocean because he couldn't cope with it. He hadn't learned how how to react there. So that's the same thing. If you say I'm really, I'm born for nature, now no longer barefoot running, that would be like getting your cat that has been living, for you and your living room, cozy next to the chimney for sick sears and you go out in the winter and say, I give you freedom, you know, and your cat will not be very happy and healthy for that. So that is very important.

Barefoot running or barefoot like running is more the way how our forefathers and for for mothers, were locomoting, and that's where our body was originally designed for. But you need to give it much more adaptation time, that you do it with slow adaptations. And that is something that we also learn We didn't know that because we didn't have the new measurements on the collagen renewal times. That we now have. I learned in school every 7 years your body renews itself. But that is very outdated now.

We have much more exact measurements. And some TSUs renew themselves much more rapidly. And others much more slowly. And the collagen fibers materials belong to the ones that renew much slower. And, the intramuscular collagen tissues, they are renewing every 6, 7 months.

So that means if you do barefoot running or stretching or hopping or something like that, for 3 months, already, every second fiber is more choosy. So you it's a young one has more elastic recall capacity. And every other fiber is a rotten fiber from your lifestyle before. But then you would say already you have a significant material property change, if 50% of the fibers are already more bouncy and more elastic. So we recommend for any fresher training that you practice it not for 3 weeks and then you decide. You can do that with muscles.

You can do it with mental coordination, but you should practice at least 8 weeks, 10 weeks, 12 weeks. Before you decide whether the TCO is changing because it's a very slowly, slow, material property. So this is a theoretical foundation. Let's put that to practical application. Okay.

So let's explore some skipping if we go back here and I do a light running and only once on the run, I do one skip in which I land with the same foot in which I left the ground. Normally, you will land on another foot, but here, you do it once. That if you go there that you land with the same foot in which you're left and you do that only once, So the experiment, how how that feels. Very nice. You come next. Wonderful.

And already, you really the arms are doing funny things. And, then if you want to come back, you may actually switch once a while. To the other leg and see what kind of rhythm comes up. There is no right and wrong. Yeah. So sometimes it's the left one.

Sometimes it's the right one that you have there. So experiment with different rhythms that you have there. You can change positions. And you see your arms already are doing some kind of flying movements that you have there. And then if you want, you can actually do it in an alternating manner.

And there you already hear on my voice. This gets your cardiovascular system. In a in a very nice dynamic activation that you have there. And and you feel like it's a dancing movement that you have there. And, in a safe environment, if it later go running, you can also do the skipping.

And see if you can do a turn in between. So, yeah. So you can do it at the side and change directions and come back. W very nice. So imagine you are chugging on the beach and your board.

So then you could be doing, and then you continue with, with your machine like jogging that you have there. So now let's come to the wall and explore the bouncing movement that you can do on a wall where you use your arms as a jumping legs. So this would be a push up in a muscular way, similar like you are working out on the gym. It's a steady movement, but now you can do a bouncing movement. Very nice.

So you can come with different angles. Very nice. And I advise you once a while. When you're in a standing position, hoover in it so you stand there and see are you growing tall? And then you come back.

That's very nice. So you have this stands like suspension. Yeah. So it says the suspension would be in there. Very nice. So you have a similar lightness in the bounds in your arms, and you can do that with different directions.

And then let me see if we can be evolved for each other. It's easier if you have the same body height, that now we need to this would be impossible to do with eyes closed. Because we need no. You need milliseconds. So, yeah, this is nice.

Yeah. Very nice. Yeah. Very nice. And and and, it feels very much like you're jumping or flying, it's not like arm wrestling.

It's not about muscle force. It's about the right rhythm. And then you get the default in the flying bird, or it feels as if that's totally effortless. So now let's look at healthy mobility. And there is a very nice story about a New Zealand radiologist who discovered that chimpanzee in the zoo when they get old, They are not so much prone to join the generation as humans are.

So if we would need in a few decades and we are all over 80. I would ask you, do you already have one artificial hip, or do you already have too, like I am. And my tennis is now much better. So in people who are in a geriatric age as homo sapiens, joint degeneration is taken for as natural. You don't get younger and where entire takes its toll. And that seemed to be a very plausible explanation.

Why? As you get old, you have more osteoarthritis and other joint DTC generation because just like in the car, if you do millions of repetitions, it will weigh out the materials down to a certain extent. But he found out that the chimpanzees when they get to the corresponding age that, is, similar to ninety year old, humans, hardly any of them gets, osteoarthritis with one exception. If they live in a zoo that doesn't follow the protocol for how much locomotion, how many toys, and, so for the species, appropriate handling conditions. Now, in our country, even for chicken, you know, they need as many square centimeters per animal.

And they need as much fresh air, etcetera. So we have that for all the different species. And the swoos also have that for chimpanzees. They should not be alone. They need to have ropes.

They need several square meters to engage. And then you can have a chimpanzee. And then they don't develop joint degeneration when they get old. But there are a few zoos on this planet in some developmental countries where they don't follow these conditions, and they keep them in an environment, which is not made for chimpanzees. It's made for chicken or for birds or something like that.

And then they develop homo sapiens like joint degeneration as they are getting older. So he started thinking, could it be that we homo sapiens are living like a chimpanzee in a chicken cage? We living in an environment that should be regulated. How many toys? How many playgrounds? How many square meters?

How many movement invitations you should be having? And that was his hypothesis. So that it's not, the repetition of wearing down movements So wear and tear that it's the lack of natural movements for which your body hungry to have them. And then not having these movements leads to to to join degeneration, that is a revolutionary hypothesis. What do you do? If you have a hypothesis, as a clinician, you look for matching examples, And then you say, this is true, and you ignore all the other ones who contradict.

And then you say in my clinical experience, it's working. As a scientist, you need to test the hypothesis. So he sent, 2 teams of students to videotape the movements of the chimpanzees in their normal environment, not in the zoo. So in the jungle, So the videotapes analyzed, how often do they load the shoulder joint with how much weight in which position. And they did that for all the joints in the chimpanzee over a week when they leave in their normal shingle shingle environment. And then they did it with homo sapiens in our so called normal environment.

And for example, your hip joint in a normal environment, you have either 0 degrees in the sagittal plane, or you have 90 degrees in sitting. And, these 90 degrees is all you have. But you don't have the lag to the site. You don't have it to the back. So you're lacking three quarters of the available range of motion, and you don't practice it, at least not with loading in an average week.

But there are other joints where you practice a whole range of motion. And he found out there is an almost one to one correlation In those joints in which you practice and load the full available range of motion, like in the elbow joint, you you load it in a given week in every available position, you are immunized against, osteoarthritis. You stay as young as a chimpanzee who gets old. And in those joints, in which you only practice a fraction, of the available physiologically available range of loading variations There you are the most prone to join degeneration. So that became the unused ARC theory.

And more and more scientists are looking at that now, that our body was made for a very rich loading variety, and you are not giving it to him. And then we pay the toll for it. For example, in osteoarthritis, I didn't know that. The osteoarthritis starts at the unused corners not where you have the maximum load in the middle of the head of the femur. So it it start at at the unused calls, and then it creeps into the middle by changing the whole microcirculation, the whole biochemistry, fluid, distributed distribution, etcetera.

And that is now a a new emphasis for you as a movement teacher. How can you invent monkey gymnastics? Where the hip joint is bent all the way where it's rotated this way, this way, in order to give the joint what it was designed for and to also load it with 10%, 30% body rate, into these different positions. And our arms were not only made to eat. They were also made for clambering and for, hiking and climbing in in mountains in in in trees that you have there.

So, basically, it's part of the mismatch, a mismatch hypothesis. That a lot of our modern pathologies are, because our body was made as an almost optimal adaptation, to a certain movement environmental context, but we don't live in it anymore. And then we pay a partial price for it. And then we have to become, creative. You know, you don't want to go back and live in the trees.

So you need to invent some monkey gymnastics. Where you move like a monkey. And I like to go into the children playground and hang upside down. I do that with almost every workshop. So we go into the rope net and hang there, and it's great. It's re it's really great.

So I also, it's it's not possible in every country. But I know in most of the cities, where are the children playgrounds? And, so and and at what time of the day I can go there? And most people, when they go chalking, they go past the children playground, I think it's a smart idea in chalking to look at the children playground and see How can you make a monkey out of yourself in these different positions that you have included there? So, This is now the the question, what is the species appropriate locomotion?

Or what is our body originally designed for? Of course, in evolution, it's not a paleological evolution. Didn't create homo sapiens with a purpose. It was selected. That is at least.

So it is as if evolution had a purpose, but it didn't have a purpose. It was just survival of those who were the most best adapted to the functions that were important in their, in, in the context in which they lived in. And, so if you have a cogs screw, for example, if you don't know what it is, you can say that's very good. You can put, peanut butter on your sandwich with the cork screw. You can peak somebody.

But, but, but, when you use it for the first time, To open a wine bottle, then you say, holy cow. This tool, now I know this is a great tool. Because you can put peanut butter much better with, knife on it. But when you do the function for which this tool was not designed, but optimized. Then, you know, I am boss made to be a cock screw, and I can do other things. In a, in addition.

So that's the question. You look at your body, and you should ask yourself for what function has it been optimized? And that is, that is a, of course, you can do many things with it. You can do many things with the corkscrew. But what is the function, the movement function?

For which it has had, has been most optimized. And for a fish, it's definitely swimming. Some of the fish pingu in. They can walk on the land and do impressive things. But as soon as they are in water, you go holy cow, you know.

This penguin is not some kind of, flappy movement person. He is a genius or she is one. So you, you see the fish is most optimized for for elegant, powerful, efficient swimming, and it can also walk. A little bit, and it can hop. And the same for bird.

So a bird, if if you're a bird and you grow up as a chicken, as a broiler chicken in a farm and you're, I made to hop, and now, etcetera, But the day in which you're flying, maybe not the 1st day, you realize I was made to fly. Imagine your broiler chicken growing up on the ground. And you think that that is your purpose to be a broiler chicken on the ground. And then one day, a friend gets you out of the chicken, cage and teaches you to fly. And you realize, wow, these wings are not for hopping.

They are made for flying. How how will you feel when you do that? Probably not the first fly when you fall on your nose. And you say, no, that's not it. I want to be a broiler chicken. But when you finally come to the elegance where every feature of your fin makes sense.

So that would be, that you'll discover the real optimization purpose of the human body. And I'm speaking to you as a runner because running could be seen for the human body as swimming is for fish as a flying is for a broiler chicken or for other birds. It is not the only function, but it is where most things fall in place, where you realize where the IT band is there, where you realize our sweating ability makes sense. And many, many other things, come, come to, a, an almost perfect, regulation that you have if, if, if, if you practice running in it. And in the running, basically, is a hopping from one leg to the other.

In walking, you don't have that. So you, have your body weight on one leg, and then you're flying with no lag on the ground for a split second. And then you are landing on the other. So you're partly a chicken flying in between. And that is different in a biped running from a quarterly pet, doing most of the locomotion styles that they have.

And, so this is very unique. If you see how children of a species do child's play, It looks very different when cats, young kittens play with each other. It looks different to young goats and to young dogs. And if you look at it, there there are certain stereotype movements, and you realize that makes sense. So the dark they need to do much more biting than their cats have.

And so it it is usually interpreted that child's play is not a waste of attention, that it's ideal to optimize those locomotion aspects which are in adult life particularly important. Now what is unique about child play in humans before the iPhones came on the planet. It's the hopping and skipping. Wherever you travel on this planet and there are no iPhones there, the young children, you see, they have these chalk figure on the ground, and they are doing skipping movements. The adults don't do that as often.

And you don't see that in chimpanzees. But you see it wherever they are young children, even without adults, they teach each other. To do hopscotch with with ropes, to do skipping where you land on the same leg as you land. That is a childish locomotion play exercise. And we now think this is very important that you give that to children, but also to adult children.

Because it's not random that we have the skipping jumping, rope, flip flop exercises, or double scotch on whatever the names are. I saw them in New Zealand. I saw them in Tibet. It's the same children exercises that they have there with the rope and with squares on chalk on, on the ground. And whenever I still see that, they have almost disappeared.

If you go in the backyard of houses, There used to be chalk squares there. And they would know exactly what to do in each field. And nobody has, it's usually the children teaching each other these games. And they are international. So I think, this is as important for homo sapiens. To do elastic skipping bouncing exercises as it is, for young dogs to do the barking wrestling exercises that they are doing because it's an essential training in in these motor capacities, which are essentially needed.

Very interesting. When you do these hopping access and we'll be doing them in a minute. There is a sense of lightness, and you feel younger And there is immediately it doesn't take 20 seconds. The first person starts to giggle or to make a lighthearted joke. So it seems to have an antidepressant effect.

It, light hearted also means light footage. You are And that's the danger of it. You don't take life and yourself so serious if you do a skipping movement And that means you are more prone for injury than when you're lifting weights in a nonelastic recoil manner. And that's what our grandparents, when they did Swedish gymnastics that had some of their elastic recoil, they found out people who injure themselves. Maybe in a Swedish gymnastic class, 1 out of 40 or 50 participants who would do with this bouncing, God and the killers tendons drain afterwards.

But 100 years ago, that was okay. You know, they will rest and they will come back. That's part of life. But today, we don't want to do that. And that is my explanation why these bouncing movements that our grandparents use to do why they have they have survived in, in biometrics.

So in jumpers, etcetera, but in health oriented, not athletic sport. So in health oriented, they have been almost banned. They have been not no, they have been replaced by strength training at a more steady speed or by cardiovascular training or by neuromuscular coordination. But the balancing has almost disappeared, or at least got less. And that was because people thought, you can train muscle better than with bouncing.

And that's true. If you want to strengthen muscles, bouncing is not the most efficient. If you want to to strengthen cardiovascular endurance, bouncing is also not as good as on a treadmill or on a, algo meter or bicycling because you can control it better. So why do bouncing when when it only has an increased injury rate? But now we are reintroducing bouncing because we think it's related to some very essential functions. For example, for the elastic recall feature that we have there.

So when we will be doing some bouncing movement, it is important that we differentiate them from swinging movements because they feel the same. For example, if I'm swinging my arm this way, It looks as if that's the same movement that I'm doing here. It has the same kind of rhythm here. I can even do them in rhythm. But in this position, there is no stretch. So why the arm comes down is not because the capsule in the shoulder is stretched, and then it comes back.

It is basically because the weight of the arm in terms of gravity is at the highest position, and then it comes back. So if I swing my arm this way, That is elastic recoil because I'm storing the kinetic energy, not in relationship to gravity, but in relation to tissue stretch. So here, this gets stretched, stretched, stretched, And then it doesn't cannot or doesn't want to stretch. And then it brings the arm in the other direction. So that is something that our grandparents did not include because they have the same style.

They have the same elegance. But if you want to train collagen misuse, it's not sufficient just to do swinging movement. This is nice as an end of the present. But it doesn't do much elastic recoil stretch on the collagen issues. That you have included in the disease.

And now before we go into practice, it's very helpful in modern times. To look at some music or at some rhythm that match to your body. And in running, you can explore that in dancing also. Dancing is a great activity. Almost in all nature associated cultures, they have several times in the year.

Parties where the whole tribe is celebrating, and you have live dramas. And old and young. They are all moving to the music, but the drummers see in the eyes which rhythm gets most of them into a lightness of where the movement is not a heavy exercise. And that would be the ideal rhythm for a so, so for dancing. So I gave you some beats per minute, and you can explore with them.

And it may also be different. For example, as a woman, in days in which you have more estrogen hormones, For example, around the days of the ovulation, your pretension in the faculties use is a is a little bit softer than in other days. And then you may want to dance with a slightly slower beat per minute frequency than on days in which the pretension is much higher. And, so then you may sit down as a music and get up at another music because it matches to the resonant frequency that you have in your body. So this has been newly applied now also in health oriented movement.

And one study has been done in Scandinavia where they took, average age of seventy, a year old man, And, they had them do jumping for 10 seconds only. And that was the whole training. And they did it on a force plate. They measured before what is your maximum jumping force or jumping height. And then in the 1st week, they ask him, please jump only at 60% of that for 10 seconds, and then you pause 1 minute.

And that is ideal. So I highly recommend that. So we are using that Scandinavian protocol. Only 10 seconds of jumping and then pause. And then you may do 2 more cycles of that.

And that's all you do, but you don't do that every day. You do it Monday, Wednesday, Friday. 3 times 10 seconds jumping. And that is not sufficient training for muscle hypertrophy. Not enough training for cardiovascular endurance. But when you do a similar protocol every week where you slowly increase the amount of, 10 second cycles.

So I think in the last week, they, they, they, they, they did 9 times 1 minute application there. And they included 90% of loading. The beauty of that study is none of them had any strain injuries. And that would have been different when our grandparents were doing Swedish gymnastics. There would have been one out of the seventy year old who would be doing too much.

So that is a very nice study because originally, they did the study as an anti osteoporosis study. Yeah. So you need strong mechanical loading. For the bones not to get brittle as we age. And, they wanted to find out if 10 seconds of jumping is sufficient for that. But the study failed for that purpose.

The osteoporosis, you need more loading than 10 seconds. That that they did there. But then they looked at the tendon properties and the elastic recoil And there, they saw a big, advantage. So the man after 3 months, they had a higher elastic recall city. And you could see they have more airtime than than ground time.

And so that means if you do ten second of jumping, which is not much three times per week. After 3 months, you have more stainless steel. You have more rubber bands in your IT band, in your patella band, and, and in your a killer standard. But when we do that, we need to know how the remodeling is happening, and that what we cover now before we go into the practical application. On the curve on the upper right, It's been shown that you need more than 50% maximal 1 repetition contraction force.

For the achilles tendon in order to change its morphology over 3 months. If you only load the a killer tendon, so for example, if you only bounce like this, you say, that's special exercise. But you're not jumping. So then the maximum loading on the achilles tendon is only 50% or less. Of the maximal contraction force of your calf muscles.

And in muscles, that would be sufficient So, older people, we often say only practice with with 50% of your muscle force. That means the strength increase per month is less. But it's still increasing because muscle training is more like a dimmer. The more you load it course, within physiological limits, the stronger it grows over time. But in the tendon, it was shown It's more like an all or nothing. You need to load the tissue strong enough And then these lazy fibroblasts produce more collagen.

But if you load them with less than 60%, nothing happens. It's not that less happens, but nothing. So that's the difference. Muscle training is more like a dimmer. The more you load it, the more it grows, the faster training is more like an on off switch. And that also means you don't need much repetitions. So it may be sufficient that you do 10 or 12 jumps per day. And if you do a 1000 jumps, you don't add much.

You, you, you, you are not getting a big advantage out of it because the few jumps were would already be sufficient. Because it's already turned on that you have there. And the other thing, the protocol on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and that's also something that our grandparents didn't know, that if you stimulate the fibroblasts to produce more collagen And we know now they need strong loading for that. Moderate loading is not sufficient. So you need to jump.

Just bouncing is is not enough for the tendon, at least. For the intramuscular connective tissue, if you're just bouncing, That may be sufficient loading for the endomissium and perimissium on the inside of the muscle. For the intramuscular connective tissue. But for the tendon, you need high load and only 10 repetitions, 20 repetitions, And then you can see on the curve on the right, in the next 24 hours, you have increased collagen synthesis, and that's what you want to have. That, the fibroblasts produce new collagen type 1, but they also eat away. They, deconstruct some of the old aging collagen, and that's also good. So that's how you make your your city more modern by tearing down some of the oldest building.

And creating new buildings. But what I didn't know is, but of course, I could have known the construction is more complicated than the tearing down and therefore takes more time. So if you are exercising every day, you can see on the curve that maybe more collagen has been torn down then the body had time to create. And if you do that every day, you may end up with a less strong lumbar fascia or a killer standard. So now if you do fashion training, It would be recommended.

You do 10, 20 repetitions, high load, and you do it Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Because by that time, you have a excess of collagen production, more than of collagen degradation. And that would be more safe in the way how you can arrange that. So these are the general principles. And let's put them to a practical application.

So let's explore an armed downward movement, and I'll show you how an armed downward movement would look like if the muscles are in control. And that's what you should do if you have an act and you're cutting wood, then you are not bouncing and swinging, that would be not so good. You want to be in positional control. So your trunk is stable. You don't bounce much.

And the first part that moves, is your wrists here. And you move them like this. Because if there would moves, you can stop the the arms much better than if you do a swing movement. So that would be cutting wood, and that would be, primarily muscular contraction movement. But if you're not cutting wood, I recommend the swinging sword exercise.

And that's actually good when you have a little weight because then your proprioception is not so much in your elbows. It's at the most distal part here. And before you go down, you swing backwards. Here. And the first part that goes forward is not your acts like this.

It is your powers. Or your chest and then your elbows. And the last part is the weight of your, of the weight and of the hand. So this is a swinging pendulum here. So the chest goes first or even the pelvis and the risks are coming last in it. And that's, of course, more like a swinging pendulum.

Very nice. And your head follows, of course, and you bounce upwards. And you realize this feels very different. Than a cutting wood movement. And, that's not a very powerful movement for the erector spina.

Because you don't need much muscle force to come up from this position, but it would be an ideal movement for your lumbar fascia that you have in there. And then if you want, you can even go into angle of variations. So you the first one, you go between your legs and you come up. But the second one, you start in the middle up up here. And you go to the right and back to the middle and to the left and then up to the middle.

And you will see that very nice. Different parts of your lumbar dorsal fascia are being emphasized there. And, of course, you are your breathing to be easy. So that would be an exhale in the downward swing and an inhale in the but swing. Very nice movement.

And your head follows that. Very nice. So that the wonderful swing that you can include in your bags exercises in the future. So we learned from turkey researchers, that, facial tissues and muscle tissues have more than one interaction style. And, the first style is what I had already emphasized on. And they call it power amplification.

And that's shown on this, illustration So when you are in the air with your feet, the kinetic energy is not stored as tissue stretch, It is stored in relationship where your gravity center is in relationship to the ground and to gravity. If you're then landing, that kinetic energy is transmitted into a stretch of the tendons. And that's where the kinetic energy is stored. And the muscles are just allowing that to happen when it happens to what degree. And then when the stored Connecticut energy in the tendon, goes into the recoil phase.

That gives you, as a jumping care kangaroo, than the kinetic energy. So that basically is called power power amplification. And for a rhythmic locomotion, this is actually what you're doing. And that's what we have been emphasizing so far. But I will go in a minute that they are 2 other styles that we are now including also into facial fitness or fashion oriented training.

Explanations. But for this first style, the use of trampolines is often recommended and is often a very good question. The advantage of a trampoline is it has the sense of lightness that you have there. And, you also have the advantage that if you get the right rhythm that you feel like you don't have to do much. And you get immediate, reward out of it.

It's not like more pain, more gain. It's the opposite. Woo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo. And and you don't see clench cheese, teas. You see beaming eyes. So it has a a very strong rhythmic antidepressant, effect on it. But if you analyze the movement on the trampoline, you see that you stiffen your body at the moment of return.

You don't bend your knees. So you are the more powerful, the more like a stiff piece of wood you become, because that's better for the elastic recoil of the trampoline. So you are stretching some fibers outside of your body. And they start kinetic energy and then give it back to your body, but your body basically is stiff. There is no elastic recoil happening inside your body, but it's still a perfect exercise or almost perfect exercise.

Because you train your nervous system about resonant frequency. So for each trampoline, you find a frequency related to your body weight that gets the sense of lightness of effortlessness. So I would recommend you have 2 trampolines, one that is a little bit softer and one that is a little bit stiffer. And you find out if you use your nervous system, to find the ideal rhythm. Woo hoo.

And then you go and the other. Woo hoo. And then you get the lightness. But then you are training your nervous system, which is very important, but you collegiate is you is not getting trained. The trampoline is getting trained, but not, you, your acrylonal will not get more elastic from that.

So then the 3rd trampoline is your own body. So I ask people to take their shoes off. And go not on a mattress, but on a hard floor. So usually, if you have 2 elastic tissues, interacting. They are, so on a hard floor, rubber ball bounces better on a hard floor than on a trampoline.

Because if you have 2 elastic TSUs, they are not adding to each other. They are dampening each other, usually. So the same thing, if you want to have this as a trampoline, a hard floor is better. In order to get you a killer tendon, to become like a trampoline, but you need to find the right rhythm for that. So that would be an ideal way how to focus on power amplification.

So we have been doing that for 10 years all over Germany. People are skipping in the parks and outside. And we call that facial fitness, and you see it, too, because we had a lot of media attention on on pressure training in Germany. And, that's why now in many households oriented, they rediscovered gymnastics. And they think, oh, now we call it treasure training.

But we used to call it rhythmic gymnastics before. But I think it's a very good movement. What we didn't emphasize so much And we got that from Roberts in Art City. These are locomotion researchers who did a lot of locomotion research. With turkeys is a second style, and that is basically when a frog sits very quietly on the ground. And when a fly comes, He doesn't bounce the frog.

It starts with an explosive muscle contraction. And then the, quadriceps, for example, contracts, but it loses some of the transmission to the joint by stretching the petal tendon. And then you don't get off the ground so quickly as if you would have, if the patellar tendon would be made out of steel, So the muscle contracts very quickly, but it takes a split second later that you are then getting off the ground. But when you're getting off the ground, then the speed is much faster if the muscle has converted the contractile explosive contraction into the tenant first. Because when the tenant then recoils, it can recoil much faster than any fast rich muscle fiber can do it.

So if the frog only would use muscles and transmit the muscle force with steel cables into the joints, it could not jump as high. But if it has elastic tendons, it doesn't get off the ground so quickly, But when it gets off the ground, it jumps 1 meter higher, then it would be able to do that. And that is a very different movement style. And we realized, you need to train that differently. Because the muscle contraction is the power. It's it's the chief of that.

And, for example, you have that in throwing, and we'll be doing that, after this, theoretical part here. So I had the great privilege to be a fashire adviser to the former gold medalist in javelins rowing. To Thomas Royal or he's a hero in Germany because he used to be the gold medalist, and he's still one of the world's best chivalents role. And shoveling throw a very interesting, according to Daniel Liberman, that was also important for human locomotion for, for human survival. So no other animals can throw as good as we can, and we'll be doing some throwing. And that's you, to some elastic storage capacity that we have in our torso and shoulder joint that other animals don't have.

And apparently, that was very important for our ancestors as well. So I had the advice, the chance to give Thomas Wheeler advise, I use my ultrasound to look at the epimuseum of the pectoral may major stupid me because I thought that is where his power comes from. Later, they told me, Robert, why didn't you look at the powers? That's where the power comes from. And from the leg. But I thought, you know, and, of course, his right pack is much stronger in muscles.

As the left one. So I thought this is the most powerful muscle in him. And indeed, the epimuseum on the right chest muscle was 3 millimeters thick and only one millimeter on the left. And I've never seen that. So it's 3 millimeters you only have on the plant of fascia, not even the IT band. You have 3 millimeters. So I knew he uses fascia, to store kinetic energy.

And then I made the mistake because I had been coaching golfers before. And Tiger Woods, if you see how he makes a very strong push with the golf stick, he bounces backwards before he goes forward. And that is how the kangaroo gets momentum. So I wanted to make a kangaroo out of Thomas Reuler by telling him before you jerk the traveling forward while he's running, why don't you bounce a little backwards? And he said, no, Robert. You know, you don't understand, and he was right. Because I was translating what I had learned about kangaroo efficiency, into throwing.

And throwing is more like the frog jump. You don't do the preparatory counter movement. In counter movement jump, you have an advantage if you bounce downwards. And you gain momentum and you fly better if you bounce down. But in the throwing here, you don't bounce down.

You start out of quiet situation with a muscular contraction. And then that is transmitted into the stretch of the tendon. So now in facial fitness, we are also doing swelling. That is also if you run uphill that is all you do. A, squat jump where you are in a, a bended position you are as quiet as a frog who feels, a fly, you don't bounce, and then you jump upwards. It's a very different mentality.

You become a hunter, and it's not happy bouncing that you have there. And you need the explosive muscles first, that then use elastic pressure to amplify. They are contractor speed, which is first. It it's a very different, almost psychological she behind it. And now there is even a search style, and we just learned that a couple of years ago. Which is power attenuation or dampening.

And, that is when a cat jumps down from a table and lands quietly and smoothly on the ground. And when your dog would be doing that with the same body weight, you would hear a sound because they don't have the graceful power dissipation that the cat has, that it has. So here, you don't want to bounce. And that's what a gymnast does. When they jump down at the ground and they land quietly. So it's almost the opposite of the second style.

So you finish with quietness. And before you have a, kinetic dynamic energy, and you dissipate it, you stop it. And that is, where most of the injuries are happening. So in soccer players, you run-in one direction and the ball comes here. Then you want to dissipate the right running forward direction with your leg and come to an almost stop before you change direction.

And if you haven't exercised that because you did Roberts happy bouncing forever, you will not be very good, and you will be injuring yourself. So this is also now very interesting. And probably it's not related to the collagen fibers. For the happy balancing, we learned that the collagen fibers in the microscope have a regular undulation, a wave formation. You only see it in the microscope.

And if you do more hopping and running, at least in animals, you see more crimp undulation in the microscope. And that means you become a little bit like the stainless steel layer. And the more crimpier you have, the more recoil you have. But for the dissipation, I don't think it's a crimp in the collagen. It is probably more the gel like fluid distribution in the ground substance.

And that's what you have in shock absorbers in cars. The first shock absorbers that that were created in the first, horse carts, etcetera, they had elastic bands in there. And that was good for the 1st speed breaker. But if you have several bumps here and you have elastic bands in, you would have to stop the car because it's bouncing forever. So now they have like, elastic bands or stainless steel springs in the shock absorbers of cars and other engines, but they have heavy oil around them for dissipation.

And then you have dissipation, and kinetic storage. And probably that's what you're exercising when you're catching a ball. So, if you're throwing a ball, that would be like the frog jump. But if you're catching a ball, So if somebody throws you a heavy ball and you catch it and you stand there quietly, this is a very different engagement that your to sing in there. And, that is now very nice so that we, incorporate now all three interactions into a healthy, fashion oriented movement, training that you do in addition to your muscle training and cardiovascular training and, coordination training.

Let me finish with a very nice study where they used MRI to look at the morphology at a cross section of the thigh. And on the upper two pictures, you see a sedentary eighteen year old person, and you see there is more light green color intramuscular fibrosis happening on the inside of the calf. But when, eighteen year old, young man, does regular chalking, you have less of these light green colored intramuscular connective tissue in the car. In the, in the cordless apps. So we know exercise influences your morphology and lack of exercise leads to fibrosis.

But what about aging about biological aging? And that is now very, very depressing. So on the lower left, you see in the picture, a sixty year old person who is as much a couch potato as he is eighteen year old son. So they, it's not lack of movement. They have the same kind of movement, but one is 60 years. The other one is 18.

And you see biological aging with the same kind of movement per week, leads to a disastrous amount of fibrosis much more than the lack of exercise at the same age. So that is a depressing story. So if you continue to move as much as you used to do, you will still become fibrotic on the inside. But what happens if you increase your amount of exercise. So if at the age age of sixty, you say I can afford And I have learned enough to do more skipping per week, then my son is doing that.

Could you come back halfway of where where you have been. That would be wonderful so that you could, have an anti aging effect. If you do three times per week, skipping on the beach, for example. So I'll show you here. And this is a wonderful news.

Because they show in some of the sixty year old man, they are young girls and they are eighteen year old sons. Isn't fashion research wonderful. So that really means, yes, aging has an fibrotic effect. But to do the right kind of loading exercise can make you younger than you ever have been. Isn't that a wonderful message?

So let's now do some practical exercise so that we become not only that we not only feel younger, that that also our body. Becomes more choosy, more elastic than it may have ever been. Okay. So throwing can be a lot of fun. And as we covered, it used to be a big part of our evolution. So in indoors, it's difficult to do a throwing.

So I'll take a piece of paper. So each of you take a piece of paper and make a snowball out of it. Very nice. In your home environment, you can also take your socks off and they are also, but it needs a little way to have that. And then the fun is you can throw it against the window, against the wall with paper there is no danger.

And the first one is usually just the upper body from here. And you get to use it. So you throw it with your arm and with your shoulder joint, and you realize, okay, the window is fine. You can do that. But then you do two principles where you bounce backwards here. And you initiate the forward movement with the opposite hip.

So if you're a right hand thrower, The first part that comes forward is your left hip and then your chest bone. And then you will realize that you have much more smash behind it. Very nice. Yeah. And It's also fun that you stay in this position and you get much, much more smell. Very nice. Yeah.

And, of course, also, you do a forced exhale. So if you want to have more power, you're, yeah, very nice. So the trick is that you do a diagonal sling, and then you really get shoes behind it. So most of you, you are right dominant. Do a nice exercise where you try to throw with your left hand, and you will realize you're a little girl or a little boy or whatever, it doesn't have as much power.

But if you analyze it, what's different with your left hand is because you didn't initiate with the pelvis. You did it as a regional movement from here. So do 2 or 3 teaching lessons to make your left hand better. By having more pelvis initiation and having the hand come as a last piece. And not as a first piece.

In cutting wood, the hand was first, but in throwing and swinging, The hand is the last piece of the swing that you have there. And then the last thing is after you have done it on the left side, you can transport that to the right side and become even more. Like, Very nice. Very sweet. Yeah. And, they actually train chimpanzees in throwing. And they gave them bananas.

But I think the world record was 3 meat or 50 or something like that. Ridiculous. So homo sapiens, we can throw almost 100 meters if we have to have the right coordination and the right weight visit. So this is fun. You know? Yeah. So thank you very much for sharing these fashion oriented elastic recall principles.

And I invite you to include them into your daily life. And if you are a movement practitioner or body rack practitioner, to get them over with your fund, with your clients with the same fund that we had here. I'll say it again. And if you are a movement practitioner or bodywork practitioner, I invite you to inspire your clients also to transport and to learn and engage some of these elastic recall principles into their everyday life.