I love your book, "Relax Into Stretch." I think it's a really important concept, this idea that the nervous system and our mental state is preventing, inhibiting a good amount of our natural flexibility, and that we can work with the mental state and progressive relaxation and contraction of muscles and related tissues.

We absolutely can. And it's very much mind over the matter. I have a great success story. So one of my senior instructors, a strong first, Steve Freedis, so I met him a couple decades ago, and he had a severe back injury. So he spent eight or nine months in bed in Percocet, and he was not athletic.

He'd done some jogging or things like that in the past. And he decided to get serious about getting strong. So he healed up until he was healthy. He started lifting kettlebells, then after that he started powerlifting, and he started doing proper stretching like this. So he is, right now he is, Steve is in his late 60s.

He holds a bunch of American Masters records in the deadlift, even though his back was totally messed up. Lifts without a belt. He is, you can break your fist on his abs. I like having people punch, "Would you please punch, Steve? Just don't hurt yourself." But he also worked up to suspended side splits, and you know, at that point he was probably in his 50s when he did that, and maybe 60s possibly.

And then he even competed in this crazy all-around meets where there's one lift where you hang between two chairs, and then you pick up a dumbbell from the ground. You can find the footage somewhere on the internet. So here's the man who did not take his injury lying down.

So once he was cleared to train, he decided to approach his training with the attitude of a musician, because he's a music professor. And in my experience, that people who could become very successful in strength, musicians and martial artists are among the people who can succeed, because they're used to practice for many hours.

They're used to paying attention to small detail, and they're used to doing whatever other people consider boring over and over. So again, here is this 60-something-year-old man with abs you can break your hands on, deadlift records, and full splits. That's what a human mind is capable of. I love this concept of a practice, or of practice, not of a practice.

But instead of training, I always thought training is such a better word than working out, and it probably is, but I think practice is such a better verb than... Training is also good, of course. But yeah, practice is... it puts you in the right frame of mind. You imagine the word "workout," like Litterman quote, "He literally worked himself out." I'm very stringent about form, and always have been.

And I do want to ask, what are your thoughts on, unless somebody is training for isometric or eccentric-specific training, full range of motion, not just for sake of building strength, but can using a full range of motion also improve flexibility without some dedicated flexibility training? Yes, it can. So sarcomeres can grow in length as well.

So the contractile part of the muscle, they can grow lengthwise as well. It's something that needs to be done carefully and cautiously, of course, and it's not with heavy weights. Eventually, it's possible for a person to perform, you know, flexibility feats with heavier weights if it's desirable. But initially, yeah, something go lighter.

So yes, absolutely, you can, and it's one of the easiest ways to promote flexibility. And flexibility also has very much a neural component as well. So part of it, obviously, you know, you're looking at what's happening in the joints, of course. Part, you're looking at, you know, the length of the tissues too.

But a lot of it is also the ability to reset the regulation of muscle length and tension. So it's like the ability to do a split, for example. It's part of it is, yeah, well, if you're provided your hip joints are built for that sort of thing, a lot of it is really in your mind because you're experiencing defensive inhibition.

You're just afraid you're going to get torn in half. So which brings us to a very interesting parallel, as we kept talking about quality and has also talked about that flow channel by Professor Chiksuma, exactly. Thank you. So between boredom and anxiety. So when you're trying to do a split, for example, so you see somebody trying to get into that stretch and that person goes, "Oh," sitting there and panicking and being in total pain and nothing good is going to happen.

You're pretty much just facilitating this pain pathways and you're just learning to hate this exercise. A smarter individual would get to the point to the edge of pain and then stay there for a while and then owning it until the spindles reset, you know, okay, accept the new range of motion, add some contraction, relaxation, contraction, relaxation, you know, isometric stretching, you know, progress, progress even further.

So in any type of training, forcing the adaptations is not going to work, whether it's flexibility, whether it's strength, whether it's endurance. There's time for a very high level of effort, but there's never time for ripping yourself in half, right? There's never time for hurting yourself on purpose. So, but yes, do a long range of motion work to increase range of motion.

For the upper body, I'm obviously very partial towards kettlebells, but one of the great many benefits of kettlebell training, you know, a bow they handle, is the waist design. So you press it from here overhead, that offsets center of gravity, helps to pull your arm back. So you're just improving the shoulder flexion, you're improving thoracic extension.

It's so much easier to place yourself in exactly good position and then just stay there. So it's very important to stay open to keep that, keep that youthful posture and keep that good, good shoulder function. So but yeah, with squats, you can definitely do that just very progressively. One warning about squats.

If you're going for a parallel squat, like it is in powerlifting, it's parallel defined as the top of the knees a little higher than the crease on the hip. Not a right, people will argue about this in some comical ways from time to time. So when parallel is not right angle at the knee, correct?

It's parallel at the top of the thigh. I realize you said it very clearly, but I'm just making sure because debates abound on the internet. The top of the thigh should be parallel to the floor. Or deeper. Yeah, yeah. But when you do go for that depth or somewhere in that ballpark, that's, you can go wide in the stance.

You can progressively increase the width of the stance if you do it for flexibility. There have been people who are doing squats like in almost like a horse stance, stealth squats and progressively developing great level of flexibility. It's possible to do that. But you're doing that, you're going wider, but not necessarily deeper.

So it's okay to go wider, but you still, your femur should not be dipping too much. So if you're trying to go rock bottom in the wide stance, your hip architecture is not designed for that. Right. So like Tom Platz, right? Famous for squatting very, very deep. But he was narrow, but he used the narrow stance.

Got it. So glutes on calves practically, but he was a shorter guy, right? But he also, he was, but also he was also squatting in a pretty narrow stance. So in this particular case, you're not experiencing with the hip, you know, with the hip limitation right there. So it's okay for you.

But imagine if you try to go wider and then you try to go, it's just, again, this is not, not a good idea. You could end up on the floor, literally on the floor. If you want to develop, here's a great way to develop flexibility for this type of rock bottom squat.

If you're not there yet, initially been without resistance, assume your normal squat stance. And I'm talking about a narrow stance, you know, shoulder width or somewhere there. And approach the wall, face the wall, put your arms out and start squatting. And you will find the wall is going to teach you.

So it is the feedback from the wall. If you start doing something funny with your spine, you're going to hit your head on the wall and fall back. So it's, it provides terrific feedback. It is something that I learned originally from Shikun, a Shikun practitioner. And again, quite a number of skills that by system are picked up from, from martial arts.

But we applied that strong first to use that for teaching people that upright squat and developing the, developing the mobility for deep squat. It's a, it's a foolproof. It's like Greg Cook would call this a self-correcting exercise. And those are really the best. When the coach can walk away and, you know, have a cigarette and the student is still going to be able to do it right.