I think if you asked everyone from professional athletes to competitive lifters, "What do you think about good form?" They would all go, "Yeah, gotta have it," right? What does good form mean?

Good form is super subjective, right? Good form is what we were taught in school.

No, it's not.

We were taught in school that there was an automatic right way to do everything.

Here's how you barbell back squat.

Here's how you conventional deadlift off the ground with a barbell.

There is one right way to do everything, and there are education systems out there that still perpetuate this idea today.

Yeah

Now, one of the things that might give people some apprehension about doing a Bulgarian split squat is the balance factor, which is one of the benefits as well, but are there any cues that you give your, your clients and your athletes to get them to stabilize? Maybe like grounding, pushing that front foot into the ground, or is there any kind of cue that you can help people with?

Yeah.

The setup is gonna be key for being able to facilitate balance and being able to have that stability factor.

So you never just wanna be like searching for your foot position on the front side or even on the back leg that is reaching for the bench.

Almost always, I will position my clients in front of a mirror, and then I will have them strategically in their stance that is marked by a band down on the ground.

So the band is on the ground.

It is marking your position for your front foot.

Yeah.

So how do you sell somebody? on prioritizing their health so that they can repeat that mantra to themselves to do the things that they know will pay off long-term in a way that also reminds us of how important they are to potentially other goals we might be prioritizing right now.

I'm in a very fortunate position that people are seeking my services out because they are hitting those challenging path changes in their life, whether they plateaued out in their performance, whether they got hurt, whether they've been sidelined with an injury and then are coming off of physical therapy.

Shit went wrong for them, and they know that they need to make some changes.

But it would be a beautiful thing, and we're getting more and more into this model of a preventative-based model versus a reactionary model.

And a preventative-based model means that we don't have to make these mistakes.

You don't have to blow out your back in order to train your lower back smarter.

We don't have to go in and drip ourselves down in nutrition to the point where we're unrecoverable to go in and actually restructure your nutrition.

How do you shift that mindset and help someone embrace changes when there can be resistance? I mean, change is hard.

Don't

feel bad if you thought this before this conversation.

I'll tell a quick story here.

I promise it'll be a good one.

But you said bodybuilding.com and I got really triggered.

I was like, ah, bodybuilding.com.

In 2018, they signed me on to do this like mega program.

Let's talk to me about my perimenopause self and what that looks like, what that feels like, what you see, just so my ladies can feel good, validated, normal for a while.

You're a little out of breath, but you're not gassed.

Correct.

So you're really thinking about a heart rate anywhere from like 110 to maybe 135 and you are getting quality work in.

You maybe have a little perspiration on your face, but you're not getting gas.

Just like you said, the talk test is going to be how you know you're in zone two.

That is going to allow us to widen the base of our cardiovascular health and our performance.

And that is extraordinarily important.

It's like getting started is a problem, but at the opposite end of the spectrum, what is OTS and what do you counsel your clients on that?

So in your experience, what benchmarks should, if the split squat is going to be this tenant of creating a functional human being who can perform well long term, what should people be aiming for if they are a strength-orientated person to do on those patterns?

So you'll introduce the lunge pattern out of the base split squat, which is essentially splitting your stance out, going down and going up, and the floor actually hitting your knee before you can achieve full range of motion.

From there, the next jump up would be a full range of motion split squat with feet on the same level of ground.

So you'd go up on elevation on the front, elevation on the back, be able to go down through a complete range of motion.

That is where the split squat will be.

Very quickly, we want to move from that deficit split squat is what we'll refer to it as, as a Bulgarian split squat or a rear foot elevated split squat.

I love that one because that allows us to train full range of motion and it is the perfect athletic movement to be able to have maximal muscle recruitment and a huge amount of load capacity.

five pounds.