Why Your January Goals Die in March (And How to Build a Running Program That Lasts) | EP6

DESCRIPTION:

88% of New Year's resolutions fail by mid-February. Sheldon reveals what the successful 9% do differently, breaks down the kinetic chain connection between knee pain and hip dysfunction, and delivers a complete progressive loading framework for sustainable running habits.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Process goals (daily actions) beat outcome goals for lasting change
• Three fatal mistakes: outcome focus, changing everything at once, ignoring capacity
• 70% of running injuries originate from kinetic chain dysfunction
• The knee is the victim, not the criminal—look upstream to hips and core
• Progressive overload: ONE variable at a time (duration → frequency → distance → intensity)
• Every fourth week = deload week (reduce volume 20-30%)
• Expect setbacks—resilience, not perfection, is the key

CHAPTERS:

• 00:00 Introduction & The 9% Who Succeed
• 01:20 Process Goals vs. Outcome Goals
• 03:27 The Three Fatal Mistakes
• 06:47 The All-or-Nothing Trap
• 12:03 The Kinetic Chain: Why Your Knee Isn't the Problem
• 16:16 IT Band Syndrome & TFL Connection
• 20:51 Micro-Breaking Strategy for Desk Workers
• 27:45 Three Key Movement Patterns for Runners
• 32:28 Trendelenburg Gait & Glute Med Weakness
• 35:51 Progressive Overload: The Four Variables
• 39:27 The MBT Progressive Running Framework
• 46:37 Common Mistakes & Pain Signals
• 53:45 Building Your Personal System

Transcript

Sheldon (00:01.422)
What's going on crew. Welcome back to another episode of the MBT movement. I am your host Sheldon. And in today's episode, we're going to talk a little bit about, uh, new year's resolutions here, right? Specifically with it being January, we're to talk about why your January goals die in March and how to build a running program that lasts specific to running. We're also going to talk a little bit about knee pain. We're going to talk about the kinetic chain.

and everything in between. So buckle up, because it's coming at you. Right now, 48 % of you listening just committed to exercising this year, which by the second Friday of January, also known as Quitters Day, 23 % will have already given up. And by mid-February, 88 % will have failed. But in this episode, we're going to reveal what the 9 % who actually succeed are doing differently.

Some recent data that came out from Forbes Health indicated that only 9 % of people successfully maintained their New Year's resolutions, with 23 % quitting in the first weeks and 88 % failing by mid February. And by the end of this episode, you'll understand exactly why most fitness resolutions fail. The three movement patterns.

Every runner needs to master before actually adding mileage. So we're going to kick off this episode talking a little bit about the psychology. This is what we have to be thinking about. People make the same three mistakes every January. First, they set outcome goals versus process goals.

And if you're not familiar, outcome goals are basically the end result you want to achieve. It's the final destination. It's once you cross the finish line and you're done, you check it off your box, you move on with your life. And quite honestly, that's going to be something that's outside of your complete control because it's going to depend on external factors. It's going to depend on competition and other people. So these are going to be extrinsic motivators. In addition to that, they're measurable and specific, which is nice.

Sheldon (02:02.2)
But again, their future focus, so it's more or less out of the grasp of the present moment and having you think about something that's leading into the future. This can be something that evokes anxiety, evokes stress, and when you get to that tipping point, could be the determining factor as to why one would fall off. So like an example of this would be losing 20 pounds or winning the tournament or hitting $10,000 a month or bench pressing X amount of weight, whatever the case might be.

The end goal is the idea here. Whereas a process goal, this is where the daily actions and behaviors lead to the outcome. Right? So it's all about the journey in this sort of idea here where it's within your control. It's action based, right? So it's based off of what you do and it's focused on the present moment, not in the future. So like an example this would be something like train four times per week or eat X amount of protein per meal or posting a certain amount of content per day.

Again, sort of future-focused, but it stays more within the present moment, whereas something that's a little bit more immeasurable in the present moment, like losing X amount of weight over a certain period of time, is gonna be something where if you're not consistent based on that goal, it's more likely that you're gonna fall off or miss those days or give yourself some slack, which ends up being the reason why one would fall off. Now the second main concept here is that they try to change everything all at once. So it's like an all or nothing idea.

And the third main idea here is that people tend to ignore their current capacity. So layering it all together, you're outcome driven, whereas the goal might be losing 50 pounds over the next three months. That's, that's Drake one. Drake two, you're trying to change everything all at once. So overloading yourself, giving you more than you can handle, trying to do everything all at once and being focused on a very extrinsically motivating goal is, the main idea here. And in my experience, I can almost predict who's going to get hurt.

based off of a series of questions that I would ask. So I may ask, OK, if we're talking about New Year's resolutions here, I say, what's your New Year's resolution? What would you like to do? Let's just take a fitness idea here and say that someone wants to participate in their first Spartan race. It's January, and there's a race coming up in March. And I say, OK, have you ever run before? Or what is your experience with running? They say, OK, well, I used to run a little bit in high school.

Sheldon (04:24.051)
And life caught up with me and I haven't really ran since, but, but, know, I got a walking pad. I work from home and you know, I get about 5,000 steps in per day. And I say in my mind, okay, this is a pretty aggressive jump. You're going from basically couch to fit in three months and you're to run your first Spartan race. So then I'll say, okay, what's the distance of the Spartan race? They'll say half marathon. That's pretty aggressive. And it's a Spartan race. So they're throwing obstacles at you. It's multi-terrain. So you have more stability coordination.

These types of things to take into consideration that you have to at least have a foundation for. I'm not saying it's impossible. People do it all the time, but the likelihood of an injury happening goes significantly up because of this strategy here. So I'm not going to turn the person off and say, okay, well, you shouldn't be doing this. Shut you down. Go back to bed rest. Right? I'm going to encourage them and try to basically give them strategies here to say, okay, well, here's what you want to be thinking about. If I were you, this is how I would be programming my exercises and training so that I'm the most prepared I can be for this timeline.

for this time horizon. But the other piece here is gonna be, okay, you're running a 10K in the amount of three months, you're not really conditioned or you haven't really done any endurance. Next question would be, what does a gym routine look like for you? And if they give me a confused look, I say, okay, well, here's what I would recommend you start with. Start by training at least two to three times per week. Start to progressively build that up over the next two to three weeks where now you're doing four, five times a week. The goal is gonna be training at least

three to five times per week. You should be running anywhere between two to five miles over the next three weeks and then start to progress that up where you're running five to seven miles after that and then seven to 10 miles after that trickling up the distance so that by the time the competition comes, you're surpassing the amount of volume you need to run within that competition because you don't want to just consistently run 10K, especially on like a flat terrain or on a track because one, it's very boring.

Two, you're basically just meeting yourself with where you need to be. And there are gonna be things that fluctuate within competition that you're not gonna foresee within a controlled training environment, right? Things like weather, things like terrain, things like the adrenaline factor when you have other people around you trying to accomplish the same goal. Things like, I don't know, a dude whacking you in the face with a foam mace. You know, these types of things that they do.

Sheldon (06:47.146)
And then also the obstacle course factor that you have to be prepared for in the instance of something like a Spartan. So it's not just running, it's also fitness and capacity that you have to build on in terms of strength, resiliency and durability. So let's speak a little bit more to the all or nothing trap here. Let's say there's a client who went from zero to running five miles daily.

in week one and then lo and behold, they're injured by week three or they quit by week four, right? This is exactly what the research predicts as well. And I've seen this time and time again, whether it's a client I've worked with directly, whether it's something I see on social media, whether it's a conversation I have with an acquaintance, whatever the case might be, it's either the discussion of they were running and they got hurt or they were running and they ended up quitting because life took over or they were running and they just weren't into it anymore.

These conversations are something that I've seen over the course of time and are indicative of a sort of pattern of the type of person you're talking to, where they're in the mentality of all or nothing, right? And this is something, one, we have to give ourselves some grace for. We have to understand where we're at. We have to meet ourselves with where we're at. And then from there, we can start to build on the capacity. You can really look into the goals and the purpose as to why someone is...

running this much, you know, and we can really create clarity on a plan and goals that are more sustainable over the long term. You know, hey, if you truly want to run, you truly want to run distance, we're going to start you off here. It's going to be a slow drip where we trickle up the volume over the course of time, right? And in an ideal case here, we can integrate even things like strength conditioning. We can throw these types of different

training methodologies to streamline the process such that one, we decrease the likelihood of injury to we build capacity, resiliency and durability. And three, we're able to implement a strategy that is going to be sustainable over the long term. Right? This is a long game sort of thing. And we have to think about this more as lifestyle exchange versus again, the outcome based process. Right? It's not I'm going to lose 20 pounds.

Sheldon (09:10.221)
within the next two months. It's not my goal is to hit X amount of weight on a deadlift, right? Because the other side to the question of that is, okay, what about after that? You okay, you lost the 20 pounds. Now what? Are you going to revert to old patterns and habits that no longer serve you with where you're currently at? You hit the deadlift, you hit the PR, now what? You've checked the box. What's going to happen after that? Right? So

These are things. mean, these aren't bad goals per se, you in the instance of, you're a power lifter and you have power lifting meat coming up and you want to crush your PR by, you know, 5 % and you want to smash power lifting meat at whatever subjective standard that means to you. Okay, cool. Hey, I'm not going to knock you for that, right? Live your life out. However you want to do it. But at the same time, we got to think about the long game here, right? Because we're thinking about lifestyle factors.

So it's not, I'm gonna lose 20 pounds over three months. It's, this is just how I live my life now. I found better nutritional strategies that help me feel fueled, that give me vitality, that I feel invigorated through the whole day and I have no crash and I'm able to be a lot more productive. This is what's gonna give you a lot more meaning to your life, to your purpose, as well as give you insights down the road in your life.

that you can reflect on and say, wow, this is just so much more better for me. And I think it's sort of ingrained in our society where we're groomed to sort of think a certain way, right? Like the whole mentality of sleep when you're dead, like I think that whole concept is dead in itself, right? Because it doesn't serve a true purpose. We know the research is out there, the benefits of sleep and what we lose when we're not getting enough of it, which is something we'll talk a little bit more about in a future episode.

but there's tons of research on all these things that go against the societal grain that were sort of groomed to think about. And I would encourage you to question the status quo. Always be curious because this is something that has helped me get to this point in my life. And I'm not saying I've made it by any means, but when you start to question things, it makes you look deeper and understand not just what is going on around you,

Sheldon (11:33.498)
but it helps you understand yourself on a philosophical deep level, which I think at the end of the day, this is all we should be doing. We should only be looking to improve upon ourselves because when we can show up to ourselves to the highest, most authentic version of who we are, it's not just doing it for ourselves, it's doing it for our community, for the people around us, for our families, you know, and that's all we should really look to be doing. It's aren't enough. What actually works? So now, so now a little transition here.

Now, full power and good intentions aren't enough. What actually works? And before we get into the framework, we need to talk about what's actually happening in your body when you run, because this is where most people get hurt. Whether it's the IT band, whether it's a back, whether it's the knee, whether it's the hip, whether it's the foot, whether it's the neck, whatever the case might be, we have to understand kinetic chain and we have to understand injury to a certain degree.

We're not going to go too far down this rabbit hole as, as this content can get very dense. So I want to save these specific topics to speak and elaborate more on in another episode, but we can at least cover the surface level things to get a better understanding as to why things may be happening the way they are. And here's something that might surprise you. Over 70 % of running related injuries originate from dysfunctions in the kinetic chain. So someone might say, I got knee pain or I got IT band syndrome and

What a lot of clinicians providers do and I'm not knocking them for it is they'll treat sort of the symptom. I got knee pain. Okay, let's look at the IT band. Okay, we're going to treat the IT band. We're going to scrape. We're going to tape. We're to do some cupping. We're going to do some rehab to strengthen the hips. But what if it wasn't the hip? What if it's actually the foot with how you're connecting to Earth? What if it stems from an over rotated shoulder? Because maybe when you actually look at the gate or you see some running footage of them,

they're rotating their left shoulder forward as they stride, and then they're under countering that with the right side. So now we're looking at oblique sling kinetic chain here. This is something we have to be thinking about, but again, 70 % of these running related injuries specifically come from movement dysfunction in the kinetic chain with the knee being the most commonly affected joint.

Sheldon (13:54.96)
accounting for nearly 28 % of all running injuries. But here's the thing, the knee is the victim, it's not the criminal. And we have to look at it from that lens. We can't just point the finger at the knee and say, the knee is the problem because there's so much more to the anatomy than just the knee, especially with an activity like running. You think of it, crawl, walk, run, right? Everyone should be able to run, you know, running something that majority of people should be able to do. But in actuality, it's

pretty high demanding activity that you have to be doing. One, you're on a single limb, right? So single limb gait, you get a little air time. So there's going to be a little bit of an impact factor. It's the coordination of the movement at a faster cadence as well too, compared to walking, you can kind of put one foot in front of the other. This is the whole idea of speed walking. If you ever seen that the rule of a speed walk is you have to have both feet in contact with the ground the entire time. Is that true?

And the rules for speed walking are you have to have one foot in contact with the entire time and there can't be any flight time. So you can't have any air time or both feet are off the ground simultaneously. So this is the idea here is walking is going to be a lower demanding activity compared to running. Obviously one, because you have the endurance factor to you have balanced coordination, proprioception three, you have to basically sync it up to a faster cadence. So there's a speed factor, there's an agility factor, there's an impact factor.

So yeah, running is easy to take for granted, but when you break it down to its core elements, it's a pretty high level demanding activity. And I can tell you straight up that 70 % feels relatively low in comparison to what I've been seeing in the clinic, the conversations that I'm having, the people I'm engaging with. And when I have these conversations with the runners, they're always talking about one of two things, the back or the knee. And when I'm analyzing run footage, it's multifactorial.

So one, so it could be a matter of over striding. It could be a matter of too much vertical displacement on the hips. It could be a matter of in-balance structures. Therefore, their erectors are locked on, their quads elongated, their hamstrings are short. They could be demonstrating an anterior pelvic tilt. They could have dysfunctional breathing mechanics. There's a whole list of things that I'm looking at when I'm analyzing someone's run footage. But when it comes down to it,

Sheldon (16:16.368)
this 70 % number seems relatively low. And I guess that could be the lens at which you look from. You know, if you're around runners 24 seven, the number could seem a little conservative, but maybe it's something you see in powerlifting. Dysfunctional mechanics don't discriminate no matter what the sport with the activity. So another thing I spoke to a little earlier here was the connection between the knee, the back and the hip. These structures are all integrated. And if you think about it,

the low back, thoracolumbar fascia, et cetera, that next connection is going to be the hip, right? And if we look at the next joint downstream, that's going to be the knee. So knee, hip, back, all interconnected. And if we have length tension dysfunction, if we have a postural dysfunction, if we're seated at a desk for a long period of time, if we're too flexible and not strong enough or too strong and too tight, these are different avatars that we're speaking to.

In essence, the idea here is that again, dysfunctional mechanics do not discriminate. So I can look at someone's image and see if they're optimally aligned. I can understand based off of whatever sport someone is participating in, their likelihood and risk of injury based off of watching them take five steps. And it just comes down to one, getting the experience to having the eye for movement. And this is the key here. And quite frankly, specifically to runners,

When a runner comes to me and say that they have knee pain, I say, OK, show me where the knee pain is. And they're pointing to basically like right on the outside of the knee cap. This is an area known as Gertie's tubercle. It's an attachment point for the IT band. So in my mind, I say, OK, looks like potentially some IT band syndrome. So now I'm going to look upstream. I might palpate the IT band itself and say, that feels a little tense. So for someone with IT band syndrome, you see this big thick white line on the outer thigh here. That is what's known as your IT band.

And you can see it inserts right onto this little tubercle here on your tibia. This is known as Gertie's tubercle. So most people who have IT band syndrome, it's most commonly known as runner's knee. They'll say, hey, Sheldon, my knee's kind of bugging me out. I what you been doing? I I just started running a ton. I just started feeling like running, like straight up for his gum. OK, cool. No problem there. Well, let's see what's going on. Where are you feeling this pain?

Sheldon (18:38.533)
And then they'll sort of point like in this area here, right to the outside of the knee. And that's known as Gertie's tubercle. And then what I'll do is I'll say, OK, well, I'll start to kind of prod on that. They call it palpate. I'll start to palpate on that. it's like, it's a little tender there. I'll say, OK, cool. Well, we're going to go little upstream here. So then I'll start palpating outer quad. That's vastus lateralis, IT band.

I'm starting to kind of palpate these structures and I maybe, maybe I feel a little tonicity, right? So it's a little more taught in this area. Okay. And they're like, God, that's really tender there. Okay, cool. So then I'll go upstream here and this typically tends to be one of the culprits. This is known as your TFL or tensor fascia lata. That's the starting point of your IT band. Basically it attaches to your iliac crest or the hip bone, right? So if you feel the front of your hips and you feel those kind of two

two bumps on the front of your hips, one on each side of the hip. You go right to the outside of that. You trace that bone up to the outside of your hip. That's where the TFL is going to start at. It's probably about three, four inches or so of that whole real estate. So it starts there, leads down. It's a muscle. And it turns into white connective tissue, which is known as your IT band. And more oftentimes than not, TFL is a common culprit to this because we live in a seated society.

So I said, hey, what do you do for work there, Jim Bob? And they say, you know, I work from home. I said, well, do you have a standing desk? That's usually my next question. said, no, I don't have a standing desk. I usually just stay seated. I'm like, OK, well, how long are you seated for? They're like, anywhere between five, six, seven hours a day. I'm like, OK, well, are you taking breaks in between? They're like, no, I don't really have time. Or, I never really thought about that. OK, well, here's what I'm have you do, Jim Bob. I'm going have you set an alarm on your phone every hour where at least you're getting up and doing a little movement.

And then I'll say, here's the movements I want you to do. I'll give them maybe three things that they're doing every hour. That's key. And this is a strategy I incorporate with a lot of my clients. It's called micro breaking. The reason why this is so important is because you think about it, you're seated for a long period of time. We're not meant to stay seated for a prolonged period of time. This static posture here is gonna basically deform our fascia, deform our posture.

Sheldon (20:51.163)
create compensations when we try to move around. And more often times than not, if we're seated for a prolonged period of time and we try to get up, we got that sticky hip syndrome. So our hips stay in flexion. We actually hinge from L5 S1 and use our back to upright ourselves versus actually extending our hips. And now you're using L5 S1 to hinge on. Now you got posterior compression on the disc and you're saying, God, I have low back pain now.

And this is systematically what I've seen in clinical presentations time and time again, is someone works a remote job, they wanna get back in shape, so they start running, but they don't address the dysfunctions and compensations that are going on in their body. So when they do physical activity, those compensations are exacerbated tenfold, and they start to elicit pain, increased dysfunction over the matter of weeks, where now,

they're in my office or they're in pain trying to find a YouTube video that will get them out of pain. This is going to be the band-aid fix approach that we want to avoid. We want to understand root cause. So root cause of low back pain is dysfunction because we're not moving enough throughout our day. So integrate micro breaks, let structures start to loosen up, open up a bit more, loosen up structures like the TFL downstream. That's going to have an effect on the IT band, but we also can't neglect

balance and symmetry when it comes to these muscle structures. So we have the outer quad, IT band, vastus lateralis. Sure. What about the inner quad? The adductors. Pectinus, adductor longus, gracilis, adductor brevis, and adductor magnus. Those are your hip AD ductors. So your inner thigh muscles. Big group of muscles. You have a lot more of them compared to the outer thigh muscles. You can see specifically the IT band as well as the vastus lateralis.

technically IT band wouldn't be considered a muscle, but the vastus lateralis, they're thicker and ropey-er, which means that they can produce a high amount of torque and tension, which is more oftentimes than not, why runners typically feel this running knee pain here? Because these muscles are too taut, the inner thigh muscles are too loose, and now we have essentially movement dysfunction because of an asymmetrical activation pattern through the muscle groups here.

Sheldon (23:04.613)
So these are something we have to be understanding. Same thing front to back, right? So you have your quads and you have your hamstrings. And more oftentimes than not, what I've seen specifically with ACL ruptures is that there is an imbalance between the quad to hamstring ratio. So we have to understand these when it comes to athletic performance, and even when it comes to just longevity and just trying to get back into something like running. Think of it like this, during running, forces can reach upwards of two and a half times your body weight.

So with each step you take, let's just say for instance, I'm 200 pounds, that's gonna be 450 pounds of weight coming down on one joint at a time with each step. That's one step. Now you think of it over the course of mileage. Let's just say in the instance of something like running, there's 2000 steps in a mile. So you multiply 450 times 2000, and that is gonna give you basically a map of.

how much poundage you've taken, literally poundage you've taken on your joints. We do a similar strategy here in terms of plyometric training. D1 and elite level strength conditioning coaches, they're accounting for this. They're accounting for jump volume, how many jumps you take in a week, because it's been well researched that the more amount of jumps that you take is not only gonna stifle and hold you back from your performance, but it's gonna increase the likelihood of your injury. So in the instance of something like

preseason, it coaches might program anywhere between 40 to 50 jumps within that week. Side of this, you know, let's say we have a volleyball athlete. There's going to be even more of an observational lens from the strength coach as well as the athletic staff so that they're accounting for training volume so the athletes don't over train and the sports medicine team can have a better understanding of things like injury metrics when and if the athlete does end up going into the athletic training room to get treatment.

And for those of you who aren't familiar, right, within the collegiate setting or even within the high school setting, here in the United States, we have what's known as certified athletic trainers. We're basically sports medicine specialists. So more oftentimes than not, you're very familiar with this. If you've watched professional sports, something like American football, where an athlete goes down on the field, they're holding their knee, the person running with the fanny pack goes on the field, assesses the athlete, sees what's going on, and basically walks them off the field, this is what you're going to see initially. Behind the scenes,

Sheldon (25:25.893)
the athlete is doing rehab to get back to their sport. So if the athlete gets injured, maybe they sprain their ankle, they go down on the field, athletic trainer comes on, assesses and evaluates, walks the athlete off the field. Behind the scenes, athletic trainer, physio, sports PT is doing rehab to strengthen the athlete to get them back to functional so that they can get back to contributing to the team sport. This is the idea here. And this is what kind of sparked me to do my venture with movement-based therapy is that something like this service,

shouldn't only be available to elite level athletes. This is a service that is preventative, not reactive and helps the community, helps members streamline their plan of care. Cause in a lot of instances, what I've seen is that maybe the athlete does have this resource and they're able to get rehab, whether it's traditional physical therapy, whether it's sports BT, whether it's cash based, whether it's through their athletic trainer, they have at their institution. After that discharge, they want to get fully back to the activity.

But in a lot of instances, what happens is the individual gets discharged and they're back to basically the level of ADLs, which is activities of daily living, doesn't necessarily mean they're ready to get back to full activity. So there's definitely a bridge when someone gets discharged back to playing American football or running their first Spartan or whatever the case might be. And this is something that I've really taken on as my passion project to fill in.

in this sort of capacity with MBT. Getting back to runners, impacts being over two and a half times body weight. Think of it like this. If your hips aren't controlling the rotation and our hips and each hip can independently have a little segmental rotation, the hips aren't controlling rotation. The next structure up is gonna be your trunk. And if your trunk is in stabilizing your pelvis, all that force transfers directly downstream, which is gonna be your knee.

This is the connection between the back, the hip and the knee is that they all help one another where if one structure isn't doing its foundational level of job, it's gonna trickle. It's gonna have a trickle effect and lead to dysfunction, lead to injury and lead to something like pain. When it comes to running, there's gonna be three specific movement patterns I'm thinking of to optimize performance. Basically the lowest hanging fruit here. One is gonna be hip stability.

Sheldon (27:45.82)
Two is gonna be single leg control. And the third is gonna be trunk to pelvis connection. Starting off with hip stability, we have to understand hip stability because it is basically the intersection between our legs and the rest of our body. And if we don't have sufficient hip stability, the next structure upstream, our trunk has to work that much harder. And for any listeners out here, when I'm referring to trunk, this is something that's often referred to as the core. I don't like the idea of core here.

because when most people think core, they think six pack. They just think superficial muscle. So I like trunk as it's a lot more integrative to the entire system. That is basically the cylinder of what would otherwise be known as your core. It helps absorb, it creates, and it transmits forces between the upper and lower body. Let's take the sport of javelin throwing, for instance, here. When you see an athlete,

getting ready to throw, one, you have the ground reaction force, right? So the athlete is starting to run and get on the line of having to throw the javelin. When you look at that final release, the energy is transferred in a matter of milliseconds, very quick, very aggressive. So let's take this athlete for instance here. You can see that they're counter rotating their upper body and they're getting ready to launch the javelin and he's getting ready to throw this next step here, one. So he's hopping.

Basically when you hop again, it goes to this idea of forces being absorbed through the body can be upwards of two and a half times body weight for this athlete because he's incorporating an intentional jump. Those forces is going to be a lot greater than two and a half times, right? And when he comes down here, he's going to basically gallop and that second foot that makes contact is going to be the force transmitter. So one, right? So he's launched.

And basically what's happening now is the foot makes contact, energy is transferring up, he's recoiling the upper body. So now energy is going from down to up and now he's got the energy in his upper body into his hand and he's going to transmit that energy up to down back to that ground reaction force. If I were to reverse this one more time, you can see he's running, he's preparing. One, two, three, one. So Gallop one.

Sheldon (30:05.879)
One more jump, little double trot, jump, force is going down to up. Boom, right there. So now once he releases a javelin, energy is going back down into his foot at a lot more than two and a half times body weight, I guarantee that. And then recover. So you can see, very aggressive. And that's why I'm such a fan of something like javelin throwing, because it takes such a high level of

coordination of athleticism of ability and of strength. You have to be able to control the energy because it's sort of like a, it's sort of like a hot rod. Now you can have all the torque, all the muscle, all the horsepower under the hood. But what's the point of it? If you don't have good traction, if you don't have any control of that. So something like javelin is demonstrative of strength coordination agility, cause there's a change in direction here and that's all agility is agility is

the ability to transmit speed and change direction, as well as demonstrative of strength and power. So now moving into single leg control, running is essentially a series of single leg stance differentiation, right? So you're going from one single leg to the next single leg with a little bit of air time and the air time when you come down on that opposite leg, this is a stat that we were mentioning earlier is forces are upwards of two and a half times of your body weight. And to even regress something like running,

to an exercise like a single leg squat, this is gonna be demonstrative of the quality at which you can maintain your capacity. So one single leg squat, if this is something that you're unable to do or struggle with, I question the integrity and the quality at which you would run. And I would wanna see what the run footage looks like if you weren't able to do a single leg squat versus if you were. And there could be a side to side comparison and you would be able to objectively quantify

Based on a biomechanics analysis, which run is going to be optimal? One probably demonstrates lack of knee stability. So knees waving bye-bye to you. Whereas the other one, you have a more stable knee, a more grounded foot. There's just going to be overall efficient mechanics when it comes to these sorts of things. And the last one here, core pelvis connection. Your core, and again, mentioning your core, they're not just your abs. It's your entire cylindrical trunk that we constitute as your core.

Sheldon (32:28.07)
a lot more than superficial muscles. It's not just rectus abdominis. It's going to be your internal or external obliques. It's going to be your transverse abdominis. It's going to be your paraspinals. It's also going to be your diaphragm. We can transmit, we can absorb, and we can produce forces to connect the upper and lower body. It's more about pelvic stability, hip stability, than it is about core strength and excessive pelvic drop, specifically with something like a run where we have this test known as a Trendelenburg gait.

And at Trindellenberg gate, for those of you who don't know, it's basically a hip sway, a side to side hip sway. Right? So you can see here, this gentleman has a positive Trindellenberg on his left side. You can see his hip sway to the outside. And he was like, what's the big deal with the hip sway? Hip sway is indicative of a weak glute med. And when we think of glute med, this is a primary hip stabilizer. You can see the whole muscle essentially originates from the posterior compartment of the IT band.

attaches to the iliac crest, which again is your hip bone and it inserts again onto the IT band. So the whole structure of the IT band are basically sandwiched between the TFL and your glute med and if the glute med is weak, that means that hip AB duction is not optimized and we're going to have issues with hip stability, right? So Trendelenburg gate is usually done when someone's walking and you can see the hips sway. This is going to 10 fold increase with running where now you have more reps.

where the hip sways and now hip sway is going to lead to dysfunction downstream. So now if the hip is swaying outwards, you're to have more compressive forces on the lateral aspect or the outer aspect of your knee joint. So now it's basically synergized with the IT band syndrome. So you say, I got pain on that Gertie's tubercle that we mentioned earlier. And I also have outer joint line pain and the joint line pain, you know, in most instances is an inflammatory response from the reps

from the excessive compressive forces on the outer aspect of the knee. This can lead to wear and tear on structures like your menisci. And your menisci are basically the shock absorbers of your knee. So we gotta be mindful of this. We wanna have symmetry, not just from an athletic performance standpoint, but also from a longevity and durability standpoint. So something you can try at home as a quick assessment tool is one, try a single leg squat. You don't have to have a low bench. You can just do it on a chair and see how well you can control the descent.

Sheldon (34:55.612)
So you can have the opposite foot on a kickstand where you have your heel out and you're basically using the one leg to squat yourself down on a chair. If you drop off at that last six inches, this is speaking to something like hip strength, which is something I would probably advise on if you're my client. The other piece here, again, as we spoke to the Trendelenburg gate, right? So if you're walking, you notice one hip sways or both hips sway, you're doing a little hula dancer walk. This is something you gotta be thinking about pertaining specifically to glute mean.

There are tons of glute knee strengthening exercises that you can YouTube, but something that's very simple is an isometric side bridge, right? So you're on your side, you're driving the outer aspect of your knee into the ground and you're holding it, ensuring you have good alignment through your trunk, through your hips, through your neck. You're not compensating. You're not rotating, nothing like that. So now we're going to low back. We can't ignore the lumbar spine. Lumbopelvic dysfunction affects hip mobility, which is going to in turn affect knee mechanics.

as we've already discussed and we know it's all interconnected. Studies have actually shown that hip pain is common across adolescent, collegiate and adult athletes where abnormalities in hip range of motion can lead to problems upstream in the kinetic chain. So something that is most common that I find is a lack of hip internal rotation. One of my go-tos for lack of hip rotation, I'm looking at the psoas. I'm also looking at

integrating something like a car, controlled articular rotation, pales and rails, passive and active insufficiencies, and these types of exercises to help strengthen and range in conjunction with something like soft tissue work manual therapy. Reason why I love manual therapy so much, and you can even do self-guided manual therapy, is that it's feedback for your nervous system. And people throw this term, nervous system. This is like one of those trendy new topics that are getting thrown around, just like breath work is getting thrown around.

but there is definitely a connection between regulating your nervous system and how it interacts with your body. Shoot, the nervous system is integrated with everything we do, with when we're looking around, with how we're breathing, with how we carry ourselves posturally, with even the stressors going on in our life. I mean, back in the day, the term used to be called a nervous breakdown, where now we have a better understanding as, sure, the nervous breakdown stems from nervous system dysregulation, which is paired with some sort of

Sheldon (37:16.934)
physical or mental manifestation that is intertwined with this dysfunction. But one of the most eye-opening experiences I've had was working with track and field athletes. These athletes are chronically postured up with excess of anterior pelvic tilt and they have rib flare, right? So the ribs are basically bucked up. They have excess of anterior pelvic tilt. And this is something known as open scissors posture. So you can see here,

Excessive anterior pelvic tilt, excessive bucking of the rib cage here. And if you look at where that scissors converts on, it's going to be that lumbar section. So paraspinals are going to be hyperactive here. There's going to be excessive compressive forces on the posterior aspect of your spine. So basically, if you think about the whole idea of the spine, you have two transverse processes, which are the bone in between that you have the disc, which is our cartilaginous jelly filled like structure. And what you want is symmetrical loading of this.

when you are in this open scissors posture here, you're gonna basically sandwich and you're squishing the sandwich a little harder on one side. And this is gonna increase wear and tear on that disc, eventually leading to something like a disc herniation in the most worst of instances. But this is the posture that I've constantly seen in track and field athletes. And even if you look around in society, people again, are sort of grooved.

to think that sticking their butt out and making their chest big and broad is something that looks good where physiologically, biomechanically and posturally speaking, it is the most disadvantageous position to be in. You can start off in an ideal pattern, but as you start to fatigue, you're gonna start to revert to old compensatory movement strategies that are not necessarily ideal. So in the instance of this athlete here, maybe she started doing some thrusters or some overhead presses.

and had her diaphragm locked in, had her ribs pulled down, had a nice posture starting out. But as you fatigue out, your brain is gonna figure out how to do a task no matter what. Sort of like the idea of having to run from a saber tooth tiger back in the day, day. This is how our body figures out movement strategies based on threat. So no threat here, maybe the threat is the gold medal. So now that we understand a little bit more about why injuries happen.

Sheldon (39:27.986)
Let's talk about how to progress. And that's where strategies like progressive overload come in handy. See, progressive overload isn't just about adding more weight to a barbell. In the instance of a runner, it's systematically increasing the frequency, one training variable at a time, not all at once, whether it's distance, frequency, or intensity, where recent 2024 research from the journal of science and medicine in sport showed that progressive intensity increases over six weeks.

improved cardiorespiratory response rates to 63.6 % compared to constant intensity training, something like HIIT training or something where you're changing all the variables all at once. So when it comes to these variables, again, there's four that you can play around with. One is going to be duration. That is how long your training. Two is going to be distance says it in itself. How many miles are you modulating the training? Three is going to be frequency. How many times per week, how many days per week or month are you going to be training?

More than likely, I find the week to be the most helpful as you can sort of be more in the present moment. Again, going to outward versus inward process. Three is going to be intensity. That is how hard are you training? How hard are you pushing yourself? Are you in zone two or are you going into the orange red zone, four zone five? And we have to realize that your body can only adapt to so many stresses at one time. If we do too much, we zap our nervous system. Now our nervous system becomes dysregulated.

our performance decreases and our likelihood of injury increases because now we're training in an overly fatigued state where if we end up in a state of being chronically over trained, it's gonna stifle, hinder and most likely leads us to motivations to not wanna train. And if you remember what we just talked about regarding the kinetic chain, when you're fatigued, again, it's gonna lead to instances like the open scissors posture, instances like the hip is gonna dip into a trend Ellenberg and now the knee has to make up for the slack and if the trunk isn't able to stabilize,

It's a whole mess of things that are leading to dysfunction and increased risk of injury. And we can have physiological manifestations of pain. Something like IT band syndrome could be understood as doing too much too soon, overloading the nervous system, not being attentive to the recovery days and the maintenance work. When it comes to how I integrate training at MBT, here's a simple quick and dirty version of the framework. Phase one is going to be the foundation.

Sheldon (41:50.578)
And this is going to take anywhere between one to four upwards of six weeks. The research is backed and we know that the nervous system takes anywhere between the first six to 12 weeks of training to create adaptations. After 12 weeks, we can then start to look at muscular hypertrophy and these physical and physiological changes. But when it comes to the nervous system, it's just getting online the first six to 12 weeks. So within these first few weeks of training, going back to something like running

We want to start with something like time over distance, running off with something like 10, 15, 20 minutes. Don't even pay attention to the distance. You can use distance as an indicator to understand how your progress is training. So week to week, maybe you start week one, 15 minutes, Monday, Tuesday. Let's say you get a mile and a half in, right? By Thursday, Friday, maybe you're trending upwards of two over two miles. This is progress, how we can measure it objectively. In addition to that, the following week comes

Now we add five minutes on, we say instead of 15 minutes, we're doing 20 minutes. So now the baseline is gonna be Monday and then by Friday, we see if we've increased and continue to make that progress. Eventually, progress is gonna stifle and now we can start transitioning from time over to distance because now we've built that capacity or that foundation. And here's the key is you don't just wanna be doing running, you wanna make sure you do the maintenance work, you wanna make sure you do the strength work that compliments the running as well, especially if this is a long game, right?

We don't have to be so hard and stringent on ourselves, especially out of the gate, because as I mentioned earlier on, these are going to lead to things like demotivation and burnout. We want to make sure that everything we're doing is systematic and helps us understand the bigger picture as to why we're training. Again, it's not I'm training to run my next Spartan race. So yeah, maybe that might be one goal, but the training is conducive and in alignment with understanding the deeper root, which is

this is just the way I live my life now. This is a lifestyle change. It's not just a short-term gratification change. And when you're able to flip that narrative in your mind, something changes within your psyche, where now you have a different approach to knowing that, hey, this isn't the only day I'm training. I'm training for the rest of my life. And this is gonna be something that is a slow burn that I'm able to build up where I can reflect on 10, 15 years down the road and see this accumulation of training.

Sheldon (44:13.734)
benefit where I am at that phase in my life. And again, going back to this phase of training, it's called the foundation because you wanna make sure that you have a foundation set before you build a house. You can't build up from not having a foundation. Otherwise that's like building a house in quicksand. It just doesn't work. So phase two builds on consistency, consistently showing up for yourself, putting in the training, paying your dues so that you can see the dividends compile over time. So the variable related to consistency would be frequency.

So increasing the amount of days you're training per week. maybe instead of three days per week, now you're training four days per week, but you're keeping the duration and you're keeping the intensity the same. Within consistency, we want to build this within weeks five to eight. And again, this is still going to be nervous system territory. So there's going to be interplay in terms of time, in terms of intuition and how you're building your training program and what you're feeling. The main thing here is balance and symmetry and making sure you're not

overspilling into one area and neglecting another. Phase three is going to tie onto distance. And this is going to be weeks nine to 12. Again, with a little variability here, which is dictated on an individual case by case basis. And with solid time and frequency established, we can now begin to add distance and really interplay between both time and distance or just focus on distance in itself. And when it comes to distance, you want to follow the 10 % rule. That is

increasing weekly mileage by no more than 10%. Finally, when you get out of nervous system territory, that's going to be weeks 13 and beyond. We're focusing on intensity. I always tell my clients speed and strength are the last things to come. And these are indicators of intensity. We have to be respective of that because if we try to add on too much too soon, again, this is going to lead to increased risk of injury. This is going to lead to burnout and it's going to lead to a stifling of progress. So we have to be very systematic.

and respect the process such that when we get to that week 13, we're now integrating more intensity. We're able to basically capture all aspects within our program. Not just that, it gives us a higher level overview of the structure of our program to understand the bigger picture to the training. Because now we've basically crossed off consistency. We've crossed off distance. We've set the foundation and now we can say, Hey, okay, we're going to spice it up a little bit more. We're going to add some intensity, whether that's going to be in the form of temple runs.

Sheldon (46:37.124)
interval training, anything of that nature. This is going to be something we can layer on within that later phase of training. And remember the three pillars of MBT, it always starts with breath. So we have to remember that breath is going to be a part of that foundation that we can work on within the initial phases of our training program, because breath is going to be predicated on having a solid foundation such that when we layer on intensity, again, the main thing here is we have the capacity and the ability and control of our breath, of our diaphragm.

which is gonna enhance athletic performance, endurance and longevity. So something as simple as nasal breathing can be the leading indicator that helps you continue or have to take breaks within your training regimen. And again, this is gonna be something that we can measure our progress upon because maybe week one, you have an allocation of 15 minutes of a run and within the first three minutes you're zapped. You gotta take a breath because now you're mouth breathing and you gotta get back in control of the breath, breathing through the nose, nice and relaxed tone. You get back into it.

and then you got to back off again. But maybe week two, week three, you're now able to breathe through the nose a little bit longer. You're able to sustain the full 15, 20 minutes of a run without having to stop. This is measurable progress. So now with regards to progressive overload, we're to talk about some common mistakes I see. Mistake one is going to be skipping the recovery weeks, where I usually recommend every fourth week should be a step back, right, in terms of progressive overload. So if week one,

We're hitting maybe 15, 20 minutes or 60 % week two, we hit 65, 70 % or we're getting 20, 25 minutes week three, we're getting 30 minutes plus, or we're hitting maybe around that 70 % week four, you want to taper down. You don't have to go all the way down to 60%, but you should definitely back it off. This is going to allow your nervous system to recover and you're to have a lot more of a bounce back coming into the forward weeks. So you can continue to build very much like a stock market chart. It goes up.

it comes down, but in the long term, it always goes up. This is the same idea and how our physiology works. So again, every fourth week you want to reduce volume about 20 to 30 % to facilitate adaptations. And I've seen this time and time again with athletes who skip D-load week and they question why they're not making progress. You know, I usually ask, Hey, when's the last time you have a D-load and it's either, Oh, what's that? Or I just didn't take a D-load because a lot of the times I get the answers of, you know what? I felt like really pushing hard. So one,

Sheldon (49:04.658)
they either didn't trust the process or lost faith in the process or thought they knew better. And now it's biting him in the butt because when they get into week one of the next training phase, they're asked to do a lot more and they're not even recovered from the previous training phase. it behooves one not to take advantage of a proper deload. And a proper deload doesn't mean turn into a sack of potatoes and eat ice cream all day. You can do active recovery. You can do things that are conducive to your training that keep you moving.

but facilitate recovery such that your nervous system and everything is primed leading into that next phase of training. So having said that, mistake two that I see with regards to progressive overload is someone saying that linear periodization takes forever. Sure, but in the grand scheme of things, this is how we make progress. We have to understand and respect physiology to say we're gonna make adaptations, but it's not gonna be massive jumps. At the elite level, sprinters are taking off

milliseconds of their time to set a PR. Same with elite level lifters. They're adding on tenths of a pound to break their PR, right? It's not bigger jumps. And at the higher level of athletic performance, I've seen this time and time again, is athletes aren't breaking the record by that much, relatively speaking. But really what's happening here is they're at the max of their genetic potential and they're just trying to push that threshold that much further.

And that is what's most impressive at that level. So at the novice level, you're going to see gains. mean, PRS can be hit every training session for a certain period of time, but this is because they're still widening and broadening out that foundation to build up from. Mistake three here is ignoring pain signals. We have to understand movement is medicine and pain is information. And pain is basically the check engine light coming on where we don't want to ignore it. Now don't get me wrong. There's going to be a difference between pain and discomfort.

Right? If you're training hard and you're sweating and you're like, my God, this is so difficult. And you get a little muscle domes delayed onset muscle soreness. And you're like, that was a challenge, but I feel good. That's going to be the threshold of discomfort. And I always say ride the line of mild discomfort because that's how you're going to make the adaptations. You got to push the body a little bit to get, but when you're running into pain, this is something that is specific. I have pinpoint pain on my knee. It's sharp. It's jabby. The more I do something, the worse off I feel.

Sheldon (51:29.318)
this is your body telling you to back off and you have to respect that. understand movement is medicine, but the dose and the quality dictate the poison. So we must distinguish between adaptations, which are again, are going to be more in the realm of mild discomfort and pain, which, which could be a warning sign of injury. And again, remember that knee pain might be speaking to something, whether it's low back or whether it's trunk. And another piece worth mentioning here is also the foot. We can have dysfunction.

from our low back, we can have dysfunction from our trunk, from our hips, from our knee, but even downstream is that first initial point of connection to earth is our foot. What is our foot and ankle doing and foot and ankle posture speaking to? And we can understand this and I've had profound realizations with clients I've worked with specific to running when I just tell them to pay attention to their big toe. Literally knee pain will abolish by me just telling them to pay attention to their big toe.

and to focus on slowing down movements, something like a single leg squat. You can regress that to even like an isometric wall sit. So basically you're in a wall sit for an extended period of time. And this could be a way that we increase lower body strength and tie it into the trunk. Because when we're doing something like a wall sit, you want to make sure that low back is pulled into the wall as well, not bucked up where you have daylight. Because this is essentially analogous to the open scissors pattern. So ribs pulled down, back connected to the wall.

hips are grounded, you're at about a parallel squat, right? And you're holding that for an extended period of time. Spice level up a little bit more, you can put a ball between the knees and now you have adductor engagement, the inner thigh engagement, which is key here as well. So now when we talk about building your own personal system here, there's gonna be a few things we have to understand and respect. The first being the minimum effective dose or what is the least amount of training stimulus you would need.

to create those adaptations and make progress. Recent studies have even shown that you can get as little as 20 minutes over the course of three days per week, which will elicit meaningful cardio respiratory improvements when progressively overloaded. Two, you want to track what matters, right? You can have all smart devices in the world. You can have the heart rate monitor. You can have the whip band. You can have an ankle. You can have all these tools and gadgets and technologies.

Sheldon (53:47.398)
But at the end of the day, what's going to be the most meaningful for you. So, so be mindful, only track what matters. You don't want to get into this zone of analysis paralysis where now you don't even know why you're doing what you're doing. The message here, don't track everything, just track progressions. Things like weekly mileage, consistent percentages, and how you feel post-run are going to be key metrics here. And like I mentioned earlier, you can even look on a more micro scale, intro week and say, okay, here's what my training was looking like Monday.

Here's what it's looking like Friday. That looks like progress to me. And when life happens, give yourself some grace, right? If you miss a week, understand this is a long game. This is a slow burn here. So just start off where you left off. Don't try to catch up and do double duty. And actually the research on successful long-term goal achievers show they expect 14 slip-ups over the course of two years. So remember, it's about resiliency, not perfection. And that's gonna be the key takeaway here.

You know, I've had clients time and time again, they train hard and for one reason or another, life comes up and they go AWOL for two months. And then they come back, they start training again, right? They want to get things back on track, you know, and it's no fault to their own. You know, they had their own life circumstances where they legitimately just needed to take time off. It wasn't an excuse. It was their circumstance. And I understand that and I respect that. So they come back to me, you want to start training again, we put the wheels back on the bus and we just keep going round and round, right? So we start the training.

back from where they left off and we build from there. And we can even regress the training based off of their needs and abilities. If they need to work on some things a bit more, hip strength, trunk integration, postural things, these are things that we can pay attention to. And again, we want to set a nice wide foundation so that we have the capacity to build up over the long term. So a quick recap here.

Remember, 88 % fail because they change too much too fast. So don't be that statistic. Understand that your knee pain is often related to hip, trunk, low back, and even foot and ankle. And these are things we have to be respectful of when it comes to the kinetic chain. Know that progressive overload means changing one variable at a time, not everything all at once. Because when we make the progress, we want to be able to point the finger and understand where that change came from.

Sheldon (56:05.638)
And if we're changing more than one variable at a time, it's very hard to track that specific metric. When you start off with training, specifically with an activity like running, we want to track time over distance, then frequency, and then we start to work on distance where that last and final step is going to be the intensity. And when it comes to training for the long term, expect setbacks, as it's inevitably a part of the process, not evidence of failure. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to pick one variable.

Just one, okay? Don't try to go ham and do everything. Again, remember what we just talked about. And if you're starting from zero, start small, right? 15 minutes a session, three times a week. That's all you gotta do. That is a simple way to build a base. You'd be surprised how quick you're able to build capacity and broaden that foundation where you're inevitably gonna start building up. It happens over a relatively quick period of time, especially when we shift our mindset from short-term gratification to playing the long game.

So if you're serious about making this year different, I'm working on creating a course that's gonna walk you through exactly how to build your own progressive loading program. It's gonna include some good templates, some video instruction, and really everything you need to create the most sustainable outcomes into the new year. And if you're interested in this, it's gonna be in the classroom of my free school communities. So if you aren't already a member, feel free to go to school.com, that's S-K-O-O-L.com, forward slash movement based therapy, and you can join there.

And as well as if you want ongoing support and accountability, that's where we go on deeper dives on these sorts of topics. We share weekly wins and you can ask questions directly. Not just that. I also include exclusive podcast material to include long form video content as well as research citations. You can get exclusive access to again, the link is school.com forward slash movement based therapy, which I'll also have in the show notes. And if you're not already subscribed,

hit that subscribe button so you don't miss the upcoming deep dives on the hip, knee and back. And if you know someone, you got a friend who's struggling with their new year's fitness goals right now, and maybe they're already feeling that February frustration, please do share this episode with them as it might be exactly just a cup of tea they needed. And if there's something specific you like about this podcast, whether it's the research, the practical tips, or just the way I break things down,

Sheldon (58:23.9)
please leave a review as it's gonna help the almighty algorithm get this podcast out to more people like you. And I wanna let you know, I read every single review and it really does make a difference. And I truly do appreciate the support. And with that, stay tuned as in the upcoming episodes, we're gonna do deep dives into the hip, the knee, the back, and how to bulletproof your kinetic chain. We're gonna talk about all sorts of things to include sleep, physiology. I'm really excited to bring on different guests as well.

that we can extrapolate more information from and collaborate with conversations on. And we're gonna go down all of these rabbit holes together. So thanks again for listening to this episode. Again, my name's Sheldon. I'm the host of the MBT movement. Take care and I'll see you on the next one.