An Interview with Dr.

Stu McGill
Bret: Hello. Welcome. This is a very anticipated interview here. Ive got Doctor Stu McGill on
the call and Im very excited to interview him. I posted a blog last week sometime, I believe
(maybe Wednesday) and I asked people if they wanted to know more about these topics.
There was an overwhelming response from people saying, Please interview Stu. They
wanted to hear what he has to say so just to set the stage, I went out there to Waterloo,
Canada and spent the day with Doctor McGill. We had a lot of great conversations and we
did some really nice experiments at his laboratory. Without further ado, Stu why dont you tell
the listeners a little about who you are, Stu.
Stu McGill: Who I am. Hi Bret, first of all. Im a professor of spine biomechanics, at least
thats my official title. How about that?
Bret: How many years have you been studying the spine?
Stu McGill: I dont know. Over 30.
Bret: Over 30 years of studying the spine. Since youre gonna be humble here, I would say
Stu is regarded as the worlds leading spinal bio-mechanist. You see some guys in the
literature that might have advanced knowledge of the spine, like with modeling or with the
physics of it but they dont understand the practical aspects of strength and conditioning and
physical therapy. That requires an equal study of the science, mathematics, and the physics.
So, thats what makes Doctor McGill special. I decided Im just gonna roll through the
questions that I have listed on my blog, because we talked about a lot of interesting things.
So first off Stu, please tell the listeners, in college what did you think you were gonna do and
how did you discover your love of physics?
Stu McGill: Well Im glad youre leading this Bret because I cant remember what we talked
about. I appreciate this.
Bret:: Are really you surprised by how much of it I remembered?
Stu McGill: Id have to say that. I never saw you take one note. Yet, you seem to recall all of
these serial topics. Nonetheless, what I thought I was going to do in university I hadnt a
clue. This will be a fun story for you. Have you heard of this website: RateMyProfessor.com.
Bret: Yes
Stu McGill: At our program at the university, Im the first professor that the students see out
of high school at our program and I also happen to be the last. I sort of bookend the
program. A student was in my first lecture, straight out of high school, September the 9th,
maybe it was the 13th, I cant remember. There was a new entry on rate my professor, this
kid straight out of high school and rated me with one lecture and no other context, other than
the high school experience. Apparently, I suck. There you go. But what I did say in that first
lecture was that look, when I was in university, I had not a clue what I was going to end up
doing and it was just a bit of fate and a bit of karma. I was sitting in math class and I could
not do math or physics to save my life in high school. And this professor came in and said,
Look, you dont need to understand limits to understand calculus. Thats where they started
us in high school and I was totally lost. He said, You know its basically how one variable
changes as a function of another. You know, distance and time or mass and something
else. All of a sudden, I could feel all of these relationships in my hand. So these were
magical quantum events for me where I suddenly understand the magic of math and physics
and could feel it in my hands. And I mean as you know, we did talk.
Looking at my body now, its shameful. I did, at that time, train fairly heavily. I was interested
in sports performance for myself, of course, but I slowly became more interested in physics.
Would you like me just to finish up that library story?
Bret: Sure
Stu McGill: I must have been lost one day but I found myself at the university library and
there was a book on Biomechanics and I picked it up and started to thumb through it and
thought Wow! This is a terrific fusion between anatomy (because I had been taking the
medical anatomy courses) and I quite enjoyed that and physics. So I applied for
biomechanics at the University of Ottawa and did my Masters there.
Bret: Before you finished off you degree, did you assume that you were gonna be a
carpenter, a plumber or something like that?
Stu McGill: Coming out of high school, I thought I was gonna be a plumber. Yeah, thats true.
Bret: So then you realized that you have a knack and a affinity for physics but at this point in
time you had no clue that you were gonna go study the spine. Correct?
Stu McGill: Thats correct. I went to university with no real interest other than football. As it
turned out, I was not a very good university footballer. As youll recall (towards the end of my
undergraduate career) I got into road cycling. I wanted to go to university of Ottawa so I
could ride my bike up in the French Gatineau Hills in Quebec. For my PHD
Bret: Before you get into your PHD, basically your father fell sick and you needed to move
home to be with him.
Stu McGill: That is correct, yeah.
Bret: Then you moved back to Waterloo. But at this point in time, you met your future PHD
supervisor, correct?
Stu McGill: Well its sort of like that. My parents didnt live in Waterloo. they were outside.
But I did come home to give my mother a hand. My father was in a wheelchair by this time.
So I applied to the University of Waterloo for systems engineering and I was gonna work
with a professor there who was interested in injury prevention.
Then I was playing hockey for the professors team at the University of Ottawa while I was
going my masters and we happened to play the University of Waterloo. And there was a
professor there named Bob Norman who played for Waterloo. He was quite a hockey player
when he was an undergraduate as well. In any case, we started to talk to make the long
story short he did become my actual PHD supervisor.
At that game, he invited me back to his place and said come to Waterloo and visit. By the
way, you can process some of your data in my laboratory; because I was having a devil of a
time. Computers werent even invented yet. I had taken films of people doing movements. I
was digitizing old movie film on a piece of graph paper and writing down the XY coordinates,
believe it or not. Bob had a machine that would play the film and it would electronically
obtain the XY coordinates.
So anyway, he was very kind and he invited me down to stay at his house. I did and finished
off my masters and then switched my direction. He was just starting spine work so together
we started to work on the spine as a PHD student. That was the story of how all that came.
But you see, I think the moral of the story is that it was really just dumb luck. Meeting the
right people at the right time some good people and just progressing.
Bret: Well, we see that a lot (probably in every industry) but in the field of strength and
conditioning that there are a lot of coaches who just stumbled into strength coaching and
ended up in it. A lot of these people would have been good at whatever they chose to do just
because they have passion and talent.
I expect the same would be true for you.
So moving on to the early work with Norman, Ive gone back and read a lot of your original
papers from the early 90s, maybe some from the 80s. Some of your work with Norman
seems like you two were out busting bro-science. You guys were busting myths and
misconceptions. I always got the impression that this was indeed your supervisor and he
was kind of thrilled by your enthusiasm to go break down these doors.
I dont know if thats true or not but I know that there were a lot of things that spinal
researchers were saying that werent exactly on the right path. Ive also read a lot of papers
by spinal researchers at that time. For example, Serge Gracovetsky, who is a very popular
spinal researcher. Its funny because having read enough of your stuff over the years, I can
read some of Serges stuff and go, Okay. Thats not accurate Thats not accurate. In fact,
Ive read a couple of legendary papers by Gracovetsky including The Spinal Engine (HERE),
where he basically talks about how the spine drives gate and the spine is responsible for
basically, powering the walking mechanism. Also, a paper called The Optimum Spine
(click HERE) which is like this 55 page document, and pretty much piece by piece, you can
take everything he wrote and kind of pick it apart- as youve written papers saying otherwise.
So when I spoke to you last month I brought that up. You guys used to butt heads a lot.
Correct?
Stu McGill: Yeah, those were, not a time that was stressful but looking back now it was a lot
of fun. Ill attribute much of my forging to some of those battles (if you will). Heres how that
evolved. My PHD supervisor was a very astute, political fellow. He understood what drove
science. How political and social forces drive science. He was interested in questions like
Whats the number? What would a lawyer use to say this is a risky load on the body? One of
the first projects that assigned me was to use some of the simple spine models of the day to
come up with some of these numbers. Because he was being asked to be an expert witness
in legal cases where the court wanted to know, was this a dangerous load or not and the
lawyers needed a number. I would program some of these simple models with basically a
gym crane and then a single equivalent muscle representing the whole extensor complex.
You and I both know thats not anatomically accurate. It doesnt capture the contraction of
the abdominals and intra-abdominal pressure, in the individual ways that good movers
perform a task and that a poor mover might use at task. This wasnt good enough for me. So
I went back to Bob and said, I dont believe these models. I think what I would like to do is
create
Bret: Stu. Let me clarify that real quickly. Essentially they would take correct me if Im
wrong The common process back then was to take the average of the moment arms of the
thoracic extensors and just estimate them and generalize them to be, like say five
millimeters or something like that, or whatever.
Stu McGill: Exactly. The distance was a five centimeter moment arm.
Bret: 5 centimeter moment arm. Youve found that was not correct and that led to an
overestimation. Also, your PHD model you made is much more complex. You basically
looked at every single muscle, tendon, and all the ligaments basically every component
that contributes to forces on the spine. Correct?
Stu McGill: Exactly. See I wasnt a political back in those days. I was the guy who wanted to
know why was the sixty-two year old lady getting injured lifting boxes at the post office and a
twenty-two year old wasnt. We sort of know why, the tissues were weaker. But was she
doing other things that, perhaps, loaded the tissues closer to tolerance.
Then we realized that with this entire spectrum of biological variability, you cant come up
with single numbers. This is politics that lawyers want these numbers. Were going to get
into some controversies that are later in my career.
Getting back to these spinal engine and these theories of Doctor Gracovetsky, he was a
brilliant engineer and very persuasive speaker. He came up with his colleague, Harry Farfan
at the time, who was a spine surgeon who had theories on how the spine worked. He would
say things like, Well, the muscles of the spine are not strong enough. Now lets look at this
power lifter picking up 400 Kilos from the floor. Theres no way the spine muscles are large
enough. Therefore, there must be mechanisms that we do not understand or are in current
models. So he came up with the lumbodorsal fascia theory where the fascia gets stretched
behind the muscles and takes some of the load. And increases the mechanical advantage of
the extensors and this sort of thing.
But when I went at it with my model, I in those days had something like 96 lips of muscle.
Everything that crossed the low back and if you take an MRI slice through the lumbar spine,
you will see the lumbar musculature cutting cross-section and youll measure its size. What
you dont realize is there are muscles all the way up the back that also contribute to that
force. But when they are at the lumbar level through the layer of the skin, theyre just a little
tendon so you cant see the muscle. So the fact that his models were ignoring all of this
musculature, the latisimmus dorsi, big lat muscles working through the fascia, I didnt think it
was anatomically accurate. If you just captured the anatomy correctly, you didnt need these
very esoteric explanations about how the back was. In fact, it became quite simplified. Then
his ideas on when we walk, we move the hips.
Bret: Stu before we get into this spinal engine let me elaborate on that. I actually embedded
a video in my blog two years ago because it was a video of Gracovetsky talking about the
first facial congress (link is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-
SMUA3QfVw&list=PL5DC2627D5F32C664&index=1) and he brought that up, and hes a
wonderful speaker and made a joke and the whole audience erupted in laughter. This just
goes to show you just how little people know about biomechanics and spinal biomechanics
because you could tell them anything and they will believe it. he said that if you look at what
the muscles are capable of doing, it is a very small amount. So the lumbar fascia has to be
contributing to stabilizing the back. But correct me if Im wrong, wasnt he using a smaller
moment arm and also the physiological cross sectional area of ordinary people and not
power lifters. Correct?
Stu McGill: I dont even think he captured ordinary people with enough ability for my
satisfaction.
Bret: They were elderly cadavers or something.
Stu McGill: I cant recall exactly where the data came from but again, if you look at the whole
spine and capture it, the statement that the muscles are not strong enough is patently wrong.
Bret: Youve talked about how the thoracic extensors are great stabilizers of the lumbar
spine because of their longer moment arms.
Stu McGill: If we get into a study or a conversation on stability, do you wanna spend three or
four minutes on that?
Bret: No. Lets get into that later. So essentially, a lot of this stuff he was talking about at the
time. One-by-one you would kind of pick it off. Just talk about the spinal engine real quick. I
remember reading that and it just doesnt make sense. Like you said, its very esoteric and
elusive. I will tell you that people in our industry are drawn to this. He talked about how if you
take a metal rod and you bend it and then twisted and side bend it, it will create rotational
torque. Thats what drives gait. What are the problems with that?
Stu McGill: Well the problem is that its true for a rod made of fiberglass or graphite or
something like that. So lets replicate the motions that hes showing in his graphite rod in a
real person. What you have to do is walk while swinging your hips, rolling each hip over.
Well when you measure people there are some people who have totally the opposite pattern
in their hips. In other words, their spinal engine is in reverse. Yet, theyre still able to walk
forward. I remember being at a spine meeting one time and Gunnar Andersson, who is a
very well known spine surgeon and scientist out of Chicago. He stood up and said, Yes, but
this patient right over here. Theyve had a fusion from L1 down to the sacrum. Their spine is
stuck in neutral and cannot move. Does that mean they cant walk? The fact that the room
erupted in laughter the other way. The point is that you have big leg muscles for a reason
and thats how you walk.
Bret: The hips are the engine in most situations, huh?
Stu McGill: Thank you. I thought you might appreciate that.
Bret: Yeah. Okay, because of your work with Norman and he was, at the time, trying to
please the political powers by creating things like what are the maximum compressing
loading limits and things like that. Which are very vague. But for your PHD thesis, you
wanted to know everything that contributed towards these loads. So what was your thesis
on?
Stu McGill: The first objective was to build the most biofidelic and anatomically accurate
model of the spine ever done before. That was the objective. The reason for that objective
was two fold. Number one, understand how the spine works with all of the pressures,
muscles, and ligaments with all the decrees of freedom of movement. That was the first
reason why I did it.
The second one was so could I understand injury mechanisms. What are the conditions that
are required to create a herniated disc or a fractured end plate or torn ligament, whatever the
injury was. That was the motivation for the thesis. And as you know, we still use that model
today. Of course, its much more anatomically robust than ever now but we use it to create a
foundational knowledge of how the spine works. Then we can ask clinical questions like
what was the injury mechanism and how can we best rehabilitate that injury mechanism? Or
how did that person not achieve the performance? How did that person achieve super
performance? What was the mechanism there? If we can quantify that then we can figure
out better ways to train it.
Bret: So most people (its almost comical in my field) will say, Take the bar off of your back
for a week so that you have no spinal loading. So you have no compressive loading. Its
good to not do squats and dead lifts for a week just to unload your spine. But what they
dont realize is that most of spinal loading is created by the muscle, not the effects of the bar
working through the body. Its the muscles themselves contracting and creating joint forces.
Its not just muscles, all tissues can create loading. So if you bend over and the ligament
gets pulled tight, then its gonna create compressive forces as well. You basically create a
model that will look at all of the different tissues and would partition the different tissues. If
you have a certain amount of forces, it would tell you where the forces are coming from:
which muscles, which ligaments, and which different structures. Correct?
Stu McGill: Yeah. Youve stated it quite eloquently. In the first description is that you have a
very accurate description of the anatomy. These blocks of bone held together by discs and
ligaments. So as you move that spine out of its elastic equilibrium, which is its rest neutral
position, the ligaments tighten up. As they tighten up, they impose forces on the various
skeletal parts of the spine. Then we do whats called stress mapping so we know the
tolerance and strength during the various modes compression, bending, shear, torsion,
twisting, tension, etcof the various boney elements. Then as the stresses develop in these
passive tissues (ligaments, discs) they stress the connections of the bones. Then we just
map it and watch when the applied load gets close to breaking tolerance of that particular
boney element or disc element, or whatever it happens to be. So thats the first bit of it and
thats why we you saw our infrared system where we create an avatar of the person. We
create a skeletal avatar so that as that person moves in 3D, our skeleton now moves in 3D
driven by their own personal movement patterns.
Bret: Lets elaborate on that. For the listeners, if you go to my blog the posts include pictures
of me (link: http://bretcontreras.com/a-day-with-dr-stu-mcgill/). First of all Stu, I wish you
hadnt taken me out to breakfast and had me order the biggest breakfast on the menu.
Stu McGill: Thats where we take our big athletes when they come in for testing. Ive gotta
feed these boys.
Bret: My stomachs bulging out. I was embarrassed. But the deadlift picture was good. I
looked very strong because its hiding my belly. But the other one wasnt. If I knew you were
gonna be taking the picture I would have sucked in my stomach. Anyway, you see me
hooked up to a bunch of electrodes and motion sensors. Then with the deadlift picture (for
example) you can see that Im standing on a force plate. You can see cameras around the
room, the cameras are using infrared. They detect the sensors on my body. That creates the
3D avatar.
You can look at the computer screen and see; its like the movies. Its like you see in those
animations where I look like a robot and its kind of funny because I could see in my
physique that I have these big adductors and I could tell that it was my own personal
physique. That model picks up your joint motions. Youre standing on a force plate that is
detecting the forces on the force plate. The vertical, horizontal, and lateral forces that are put
into the ground as you perform exercises. And then all of the electrodes are sensing the
electrical activity of the muscles. This is all fed into that model that Stu is discussing. This
anatomically accurate model of all the parts of the body with the spine, the vertebra, discs,
ligaments, muscles, the fascia. Thats all blended together to tell you forces so that you can
get a ton of different data out of that. If I do a dead lift, you can tell the EMG of the muscles,
you can get the spinal motion, the hip motion. You can calculate the spinal forces. There are
only a few laboratories in the world that can do this. Thats why I felt so privileged to be there
because this is rare. The only other laboratories are on other continents. I was very
privileged to be there. That kind of explains this method the McGill method if you will. Is
that what you would call it Stu?
Stu McGill: Well on a real life persons side, yeah I think I took you into some of our labs
where we actually take spines and create the injuries. Thats a whole different technology.
Certainly for that lab we tested you in, thats what it does. Ill send you some of your avatars
when they get fully up with the full stress mapping done. You can put them on your website if
you want.
Bret: It would be hilarious to see a robotic Bret. Yeah, robotic hip thrust or robotic dead lift.
Stu McGill: Just so your listeners know, thats exactly the same technology that was used to
make the movie Avatar, Pirates of the Caribbean (when they have all the zombies walking).
Those are actors driving their avatars with their motion that those 3D infrared cameras pick
up. Then they create the skeleton and then render the muscles on and activate the muscles
with the EMG. So it really is light years beyond an MRI, CT, or anything like that. Because
its 3D and as the person activates their muscles, we measure that activation profile through
the EMG and convert that to force; attach those forces to the skeleton; do the stress
analysis.
Most importantly, we go far beyond that and even measure variables such as joint stability.
So when we hear about how this stabilizes the spine. Well, does it really? I find a lot of
people talk through their hand waving saying that this is a spine stabilizing mechanism when
it may very well be destabilizing.
Bret: Awesome. In a few questions, we will talk more about the EMG aspect of that. You
worked with power lifters early on. Was this the 80s or 90s?
Stu McGill: No. We worked with all sorts of people. But I have a sneaky suspicion of where
this conversation is going. Thats middle 80s and a lot of the top Canadian power lifters
happened to be training in Kitchener. Are we to talk about the actual stories?
Bret: Basically, what I want people to know is that youre not just some lab geek who always
stayed in the lab. You have seen world class dead lifts. Youve worked with strong power
lifters and strong men. Youve worked with incredible athletes and seen it all. I think thats
important because I dont really trust someone if they havent. If theyre gonna make
comments about athletics and movement, its important that youve been around the block
and seen and worked first hand with these people.
If you were working with power lifters in the 80s, that just goes to show your 30 years of
working along-side of the power lifters and the athletes. Your initial work was mostly focused
on injury prevention with occupational workers (for example). Then over your career, youve
seen more of a transition into working with more of the athletes and the strength and
conditioning field.
Stu McGill: Thats correct. Again, not all of this was by design. Some of it was by
happenstance. I mean as you know, I get asked to consult and see athletes from around the
world. I dont even see local people. Every patient I see flies in. They come from all sorts of
sports. I guess Ive got this little reputation that if someone has a painful back that I can
usually give them some advice in how to train around whatever the cause is. We see if we
can create a performance enhancing program that will restore their backs and get them back
to competition. Again, I cant talk about individual names obviously because its medical
confidential information. But there are quite a few people who have told their stories where
we got them back to the Olympics or back into the NFL or back in the UFC whatever their
sporting endeavor was. So we took them from a state of being unable to train because of
their disabling back pain, to the point where they could be elite performers in the world of
virtually every Olympic sports rowing, weightlifting, the combative, track and field,
kayaking.
Bret: Basketball.
Stu McGill: Certainly. Ive consulted with a number of NBA basketball organizations for sure.
Anyway, Ill stop that.
Bret: Were you always comfortable when people came to you for advice as a practitioner.
Were you always comfortable giving advice?
Stu McGill: No. I was scared silly. I mean look, you got it. I was trained as a scientist not a
clinician. I would be asked to go to scientific meetings: neurology meeting or an orthopedics
meeting, or a sports medicine meeting. Some of the docs would say, You know. Thats
really interesting. The mechanism that you just showed for that injury and the recovery.
Would you see a difficult patient for us? This patient is a foxing us. I would say, No. I dont
see patients. They would say, Well its okay. Well be with you. Would you come and see
this patient with us? And show us how you think and interpret what you see.
So thats how I started working side-by-side with them and then slowly realizing that what I
was able to see and understand because of what I was seeing about the mechanics
associated with pain, elite performance, and that sort of thing. I gained confidence to see
people on my own. So how it works now is if an athlete or a disabled vet wants to see me, I
send them a package (which is an information package) with travel instructions and that sort
of stuff. Then I need a referral letter from the referring physician. It will say, Please see so
and so for mechanical back pain. Here are some of the peculiarities that should know. And
there might be a kind of contraindication for a certain type of exercise or blood pressure or
something like that. Then I see the person.
It takes me 3 hours, at least I set aside 3 hours, for an assessment. Which includes pain
provocation. So Im able to identify that the triggers of their pain, in terms of very specific
motions, postures, and loads. Then to design a program for them to avoid their painful
triggers. Thats number one. I dont do corrective exercise off the bat. The first thing I do is
remove the cause. Then we devise a corrective exercise program. Then a full on training. It
makes me laugh sometimes when people say, Oh. We did the McGill exercises. And I say,
What in the hell are the McGill exercises? They say, Its the bird dog. And I say, Have
you ever read my books? Do you know what we do? We have people picking hundreds of
pounds off the floor and throwing men around the room. the McGill exercises its quite
comical sometimes.
Bret: Its funny you talked about its purposely provoking their pain to find out what are the
mechanisms that cause pain and telling them to avoid that. Thats so simple and so often
overlooked. I cant tell you how many people come to me and they say, It hurts when I do
this. One of my favorite articles ever written in strength and conditioning was by Mike Boyle.
I think that the title was If it Hurts, Dont Do It. He talked about the same thing. Now that Im
more popular on the internet, I get all these emails from people saying that it hurts when I do
this so I say Dont do that! Its just common sense.
Stu McGill: You know what the tragedy of that is Bret? When I get a person, Im never the
primary contact. Im further down the tree. Theyve already been to ten different doctors. And
Ill say to them, Have any of those docs ever asked you to show them how you create the
pain. Theyll say, No. And I think that man, what an indictment of medical practice; or at
least the people who they saw. They failed to try and understand the cause of that persons
pain.
Bret: Thats a whole other podcast topic. I cant tell you how many people come to me and
say, My doctor, physical therapist, personal trainer says that I have a weak core. Okay, did
he test your core? What exercise did he give you? Its just that person was using buzz words
and the patient is gullible so theyll believe anything. It may be that they have too strong of a
back and that they are trying to use their back for everything. It doesnt always mean, just
because you have back pain, that you have a weak core. A lot of times, its not strength but
your movement patterns. You have the strength, you just need to learn to move differently.
Okay moving on.
Stu McGill: Can I just follow that up because what you said is so wise for the listeners? May I
have one minute on that?
Bret: Yeah. Of course.
Stu McGill: Weve done enough of studies on populations. Weve done sporting groups,
factory workers, line distributions, guys who climb hydro poles. It keeps coming back, over
and over, that strength as a single variable does not prevent back pain. Im using that very
generically because there are all kinds of back pain. What happens is that if you think youre
gonna get rid of back pain by getting a stronger back, then you might be in that category of
person. But thats not the common pattern. The common patterns of people who get back
pain have almost too much strength and a movement pattern that causes that concentration
at the area where the pain is. Its almost incumbent on every strength and conditioning
professional that if you add strength to a person, the pattern better be there so you dont
create a stress concentration and Gray Cook preaches that until the cows come home. You
have been preaching it as well. If you have a lot of strength, you have to have control and
you need a certain amount of endurance because that strength has to be harnessed over
and over again with every repetition. People get hurt when they break form. They dont get
hurt when they pick 800 pounds off the ground if they do it well. When you talk to them, it
was the one that they were not paying attention on. You know what Im trying to say.
Bret: And I cant tell you how many times Ive heard this. Its funny because Ive been lifting
weights since well a friend on email just reminded me on Facebook. He said, Remember
when we went to this gym? I wrote him back and replied, How old were we? 15 years
old. Ive been lifting now for 22 years and Im just finally learning to listen to my body. Over
the last 5 years in particular and if you just learn to listen to your body I cant tell you how
many times in the past decade where I got hurt and my body was screaming at me, giving
me warning signs. You just have to listen to bio-feedback and learn when to push and when
to hold back and to pay attention to what form feels better and what form doesnt. Your body
is good at giving you warning signals, you know?
Stu McGill: Yeah. Ive been lifting weights for double the length of time you have. I dont
know why I said that. Ill just mention this because youll appreciate it. Are you familiar with
Bret: Because you are big timing me Stu. You just wanted to throw that up there haha.
Stu McGill: No. It was quite the opposite. You young bucks Im trying to keep up to. My old
body just doesnt hang in there anymore. Youve probably heard of Marty Gallagher.
Bret: Yup.
Stu McGill: One of the grand old men of power lifting and Marty, if you ever listen to this, hes
gonna bust me for calling him an old man. In any case, Marty is older than I am. Do you
know Marty has picked up 500 pounds off the floor for five consecutive decades?
Bret: Thats great.
Stu McGill: Now you listen to him because hell tell you how you manage that. Yet, both you
and I will take a lot of flack from kids on the internet who are anonymous saying that we
dont know this or that. And I think man, I think I should be listening to the guy whose done it
for 5 decades.
Bret: That leads us to the next question. You mentioned to me that its hard because
sometimes I would kill to be in your position, where you dont have a blog and you dont have
to deal with blog comments. Me, I have Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, email, text
messages, and I got these things flying at me all day. Sometimes Id kill to be just like you.
My supervisor John Cronin laughed at me and said, Man, Theres something nice about
being inaccessible. Your work is that people hear snippets of things you say. Then itll blow
up into this thing where if they were to talk to you about it, they would see that theres more
of a common ground that people dont get to see.
Stu McGill: Theres a lot of mythology and misunderstanding and the quotes that I keep
hearing over and over again. Well, do you want a reaction to that?
Bret: Sure.
Stu McGill: It reminds me of the old kids school ground. One kid says something to another
and it starts a rumor. The next kid passes it on and it gets slightly translated. Then the next
kid passes it along so by the time 4th kid gets it, it resembles nothing like the original bit of
gossip. I think thats what happens on the internet so now theres this thing that apparently
McGill thinks that theres a number of bends that hurt the back. Or theres a load that hurts
the back. You know, they just dont know what theyre talking about.
I talked about that whole political process. If they realized there is a branch of the American
government called NIOSH (National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health). They go
around and ask experts their opinions on strategies to protect the American worker. They
have single number limits called TLV (Threshold limit values). For things that hurt
Americans. You know, theres one for radiation exposure for example. Now theres a limit
that if youre exposed occasionally, there is a limit and if you exceed the limit then its legal
negligence. Theres another limit that you must never expose an American to X amount of
radiation. But you see, its a single number. That single number might not hurt one person
whos not very sensitive to it. And it might really hurt someone else. Another example are the
nutritional guidelines put out by the government where theres a daily healthy of lets say
vitamin D or Vitamin C. These are all values. What person is average? The answer is
nobody. It doesnt fit anybody! Now people will be surprised to know that NIOSH has a single
number limit for low back compression. That limit, if youre exposed over and over again,
happens to be 4300 Newtons. Now lets go to post office. Theres a 62 year old lady at the
post office lifting boxes. And theres a 22 year old, big strong guy lifting boxes. Do they have
the same tolerance? No. Is the number of load that their body can take the same? No, its
not even close.
But the American political system will not allow the discrimination between old and young.
We all realize that biologically its ludicrous. So when I have made a statement, its at the
request of a body to come up with an average number based on a lot of science and a lot of
perspectives. Its not pigs and its not an animal. It comes from many different perspectives.
So that got translated through that schoolyard banter to the next person who wrote
something on the internet. But they had no idea the political contesting and gravity of when
that statement was made. So now kids go through the internet and say that Bret doesnt
know what hes talking about. McGill doesnt know what hes talking about. Because of that
one number. They are just totally unaware of the process of it all.
Bret: Stu. The higher up you get and the more popular you get, the more you have to deal
with it. On my blog (a couple of years ago) I had a fourth of the readership that I have now,
and I flew under the radar. Now anything I say I get hammered for it I feel like. If someone
misinterprets it, I definitely understand there. Not trying to cut you off, but you mentioned the
4300 NIOSH compressive loading limits. I have a folder of research involving compressive
loading. And also shear loading. I think the highest Ive ever seen is a deadlift and this, I
think, was Callahan? Was this your student who published this paper and it was on deadlifts
and I think it was 23,000 Newtons of compression?
Stu McGill: No. His name, it looks like Cholewicki (HERE is the paper).
Bret: Oh yeah, thats right.
Stu McGill: Hes Polish. Anyway, he was my first PHD student.
Bret: Now there was a paper before that by Granhed (HERE is the paper) that showed like
35,000 Newtons. But they used a different moment arm. So the Cholewicki was more
accurate.
Stu McGill: No Bret. Nope. Ive listened to Granhed as well because the load lifted these
days are a lot more than the loads lifted in those days.
Bret: Well thats what I was gonna say. If you think of a Andy Bolton (Or Benedikt
Magnusson) deadlifting a thousand pounds, I would think that they would have more of the
lines of 40,000 Newtons of compression.
Stu McGill: Youre right on!
Bret: And this just goes to show you what you said earlier, you know that you can build up
the body to be very strong. The muscles and as long as you hold good position and your
training parameters are proper, your frequency, volumes, postures, load, all these things,
you can build your body up to withstand that. The body is a very impressive unit if you train
properly.
Stu McGill: Some people cant.
Bret: Well thats what I would like to talk about. Okay, Im gonna veer off. You mentioned
genetics as it pertains to the spine. Talk for a second about ovoid and the limacon disc
shapes.
Stu McGill: Just let me preempt that by saying that McGill learns everything from pig spines,
which again just annoys me to no end. We use animal models in about 10% of our
publications in medical journals. We have to use animal models to answer the question that
you just posed. So I cant get 50 identical human spines. They dont exist. But we can raise
50 identical pigs, at least from genetic material.
Anyway, the pig neck, the pig roots for food. It has a very robust lumbar spine in its neck. It
cant move it very much. The fact that it has to hold its head up since its a quadruped
cantilever. The head is out in front of the body. All of the time it has to turn on the extensor
muscles just to hold its head up. So when you look at the architecture of a pig neck. If I
showed a pig neck or vertebra to a human surgeon, and we do this in the lab, they dont
know whether its a pig C4 or a lumbar C4 out of a human. They are that close.
So people dont realize that but anyway, what the animal models allow us to do is we can
have a variety of disc shapes. We inherit that from our parents. If you take a slice through
your low back, you will look down and birds eye view and see the shape of your disc. Some
are oval. If you twist an oval disc (an oval disc likes to twist). The great golfers, not all, tend
to have ovoid shaped discs simply because of survival of the fittest. If you cant swing a club
very well and you cant twist, then youre going to choose another sport besides golf. People
with these slender, oval discs tend to become golfers. Those types of spines can twist. Now,
if you take the typical middle linebacker from NFL, they dont have oval discs. By definition to
survive in that sport, they have to take a lot of compression and they have much bigger,
thicker, much bigger radius discs. But theyre shaped like a lima bean when you look down
on them. they are big and indent at the back where the spinal canal is. When you get a thin
branch and bend it, it will bend. Theres not much stress. But if you take a thick branch and
bend it, it breaks. Thats what happens with very thick discs that tend to be limacon shaped.
The hydraulic stresses that come from bending in big heavy spines get focused to the back
of the curve of the limacon and these kinds of people end up with posterolateral disc bulges
if they bend too much.
Bret: Real quick. Stu showed me this in his lab. He could show the herniating mechanism.
Stu McGill: I hope Im making my point in that we all have different spines. So when were
looking at the physical performance from a persons back, it depends on its shape. If they
have a thick spine, chances are that they shouldnt be doing hundreds of sit-ups. In fact they
cant. The stresses would accumulate and they would damage their backs. But if you take a
thin person who naturally gravitates to yoga and these kinds of things, they can bend their
spine around with relatively little stress and very little chance of harm. Again, I get quoted
that theres a certain number of bends. It depends entirely on who the person is. So when
were consulting with a particular athlete, we examine all these features and try to convert on
the most common sense approach. Depending on the shape of their discs and previous
injury patterns. For example, when we see a tear in the annulus of the disc, I can almost bet
that its a twisting injury in their spine. Then we look for that pattern and try and help them
remove it. But if its a very focal disc bulge, then thats probably an interior bending injury.
Bret: One thing that I always wanted to know about was if you read a lot of the work of, who
is it, Dolan? Michelle? Is that the right name? She says theres a lot of spinal research that
talks about heredity as it pertains.
Stu McGill: Hold on. Theres two people who do that. Theres Michelle Battier at the
University of Alberta, that has a lot to say about genetics and particular types of back
disorders. Trish Dolan is at the University of Bristol in England.
Bret: Okay so theyll tell you that they haveIve seen estimates at 85% or something like
that of that. What was interesting to me when I was doing a ton of spinal research a few
years back was all of these different chemicals. So you talked about the anatomy of how
genetic anatomy can affect spinal durability.
But theres also physiological genetics, I wouldnt just say genetics. I bet you lifestyle can
affect this a lot as well. Theres all sorts of chemicals and I cant remember all the names but
theres like metalloproteinases that can wreak havoc on disc health. Theres a lot of anabolic
chemicals like IGF 1 and things that are like, God I cant remember all of the names of them.
I wrote them down at one point. There were like 11 different chemicals I had written down
that can have therapeutic or anabolic healing, repairing effects. Then theres other chemicals
that can break the discs down. Different individuals probably have varying percentages of
these as well. So that probably has a lot of influence over spinal health and durability. Would
you agree?
Stu McGill: Id absolutely agree that they have a biological spectrum and that they can cause
different rates of repair in different people. The total ability of them to create total repair or
how influential they are might become a question for debate. They will not be the dominant
factors in whether your back pain gets better or not is my position at this time. They will have
smaller effects but if you cant get rid of the cause, or if youve flattened a disc, then theres
not a hell of a lot those chemicals are going to do to restore the height of the disc.
Bret: I guess what Im trying to say is that if they do something if they have, whatever the
injury, whether its shear related, compressive related, bending related, if theyre only doing it
every few days. Or once a week, twice a week. But they have good reparation systems. That
injury may never appear versus in someone else who does not have them. For example,
smoking can affect the disc physiology. Am I right about that?
Stu McGill: To a very small degree, yeah.
Bret: The reason why Im saying this its not pure physics. The word biomechanics implies
that theres the physics but theres also a biological component as well. Theres a living
component.
Stu McGill: Youre absolutely right. Lets just go back to that point you just made because
that was a very important one. You can build a little bit of cumulative trauma and then the
disc will repair if you leave sufficient time. And then have another cycle of loading. In some
sort of interval sort of training situation you want to be careful with that assumption. The
muscles absolutely will follow the law that you just described. The collagenous tissues, yes,
but not quite so well. The disc even poorly still. So building trauma, delaminating the
collagen in the disc will not repair in a week and it may not even repair in a year. Its that
slow.
So folks need to understand, I think, be very careful with accumulative loading. Now, Im not
talking about pristine good movement. The spine is really quite robust if you load it in
ansay youre putting high loads on it, the very best thing you can do, the safest common
sense thing, is to keep it in a neutral position with a high load. If theres not high load, then
Im not so worried about it unless you already have an injury. If sitting is painful and a certain
sitting posture bothers you then you better not sit in it. But if the spine has no cumulative
load, thats a very common sense wise practice. To do a little bit of bad form and then think
youll take a few days off and then do the same thing once again, that will accumulate and it
will come back to haunt you.
Bret: So moving on. Earlier we talked about EMG. A lot of spinal models dont utilize EMG.
They just make assumptions that if you do a squat lift or a stoop lift, they just look at joint
torques. Sure you can get the net joint torques but youre making assumptions about the
muscles. Why is it critical to throw EMG into the mix? To incorporate muscle activation into
that model?
Stu McGill: Because we all use different motor strategies to accomplish a task. When you
were in the lab a couple of weeks ago, we tried a few little training interventions. We tried
internal/external rotation of the hips. We tried some little strategies to see if we could migrate
muscle activity between the glutens and hamstrings. So we did all of this. Were able to do
that because we were measuring neurology while we were doing it. We were measuring the
personal differences in your muscle patterns. Those are all going to create very different joint
loads. So we then have the ability to say, You know Bret. For you, if that exercise tool was
to achieve this goal, that was a wiser exercise. This other one, this variant might have been
a poor choice. Because not only did it achieve the activation level that you did not want, but
you also paid a hell of a penalty for doing so by having a very high joint load. Thats why
EMG is so important. To pick up the individual differences.
Bret: So for example, if I do a squat lift or a heavy squat, should Ifirst of all, Ive heard a lot
of experts claim that the squat and deadlift are the best abdominal exercises that you can
do. In which case, I just know that theyve never measured EMG because theres exercises
that for example, an ab wheel rollout that exceed the activity of the abdominal and oblique
muscles that you get in a deadlift. That aside, lets say it was the best abdominal exercise.
Those place the greatest challenge on your abdominal muscles. Luckily thats not the case
because if so, in order to keep spinal stabilitynow, you have co contraction which
stabilizes.
However, if you are creating a flexion moment with your abdominals, if youre actually
crunching down with the abs and not bracing, the more you activate your abdominals and
erectors, the more your erectors have to do now to stabilize the spine to prevent flexion of
the spine. So two questions here. If you didnt look at EMG and you just looked at joint
torques, you might assume that this person is performing optimally because maybe their net
joint torques were low and the spine stayed neutral and you just assume that their spine
stayed neutral so they are fine. But you might find that they are so highly activating their core
muscles that theyre creating tremendous joint forces and spinal loading. Which is
unnecessary if its a lighter load. So thats one reason why EMG is critical because you can
look at the co-contractions. When you co-contract, you create stability but that comes at a
penalty with increased joint loading. Talk about that real quick Stu. Do you want to activate
the abdominals to their greatest possible degree when you do simple tasks?
Stu McGill: Of course not. I think the term youre looking for is called sufficient stability. You
need just enough to accomplish the task without the spine buckling well, I need to get into
that stability concept in terms of mechanism to really answer this question. The short answer
is you need sufficient stability. Any more would be silly. Youre just crushing yourself.
Bret: When you hear people say, Squeeze your abs as hard as possible. Thats not the
wisest strategy in that situation.
Stu McGill: I think youre dealing with someone whos very crude.
Bret: You had mentioned a very cool story to me. You were on the path to you were
limping and this was in your thirties. You had some calcification or growth on you labrum.
You were limping and on your way to get hip replacement surgery and you took matters into
your own hands. You started exercising and performing certain movements. And that spur
on your labrum diminished. Your posture improved and you prolonged the surgery, in fact
youve still not had hip replacement surgery. That was a very cool story because you took
matters into your own hands. Can you describe to me what you did and what mechanisms
would cause your labrum growth at your hip to improve itself. Because you dont see that too
often I wouldnt think.
Stu McGill: The story starts, I broke my hip. If you look at it on an x-ray, instead of there
being a nice femoral head it looks like half a ping pong ball. Its the inner half, the medial half
that is just a fat pad. So the joint itself was quite unstable. It became quite arthritic. It was
about when I was forty-five years old, I was starting to have really terrible hip pains. The hip
socket, the acetabulum was growing nasty spurs all around it, like little teeth almost so that
when I extended and walked, one of these spurs would poke the femur and it would cause
me to lurch forward and limp and people who knew me when I was in my forties knew that I
had quite a nasty limp. Anyway, I arranged a hip replacement with one of my surgical
colleagues. I thought what the hell, I might as well just exercise the hell out of the hip
because its going into the garbage bin anyway and get myself in the best possible shape for
post surgery recovery.
It was at that time, it was a very magical time, in that we were talking earlier about
serendipity and how you meet people and they change your life in funny little ways. At that
time, I had met Vladimir Janda, who I think youre very familiar with his work. Janda was
talking about all this cross pelvis syndrome where hip pain and back pain inhibits the gluteal
muscles and facilitates the psoas. When I measured this on myself with the EMG and the
model, it turned out to be very true. Then Shirley Sahrmann came along and I did a little bit
of work with her at the time. These are all just brilliant, insightful clinicians. Her work was
showing that as Janda said, if you have hip pain, then your gluts become inhibited so you
become hamstring dominant. When you get out of a chair and do squats or get off the toilet
or any of those functional things, you tend to extend the hip with the hamstrings leaving the
glutes out of the motor control picture. Well what Shirley Simons group found and Im trying
to think of her lead researcher on that and Im embarrassed that
Bret: It was Lewis.
Stu McGill: It was! It was Lewis! Thank you! Bret, youve got a mind like a trap. Thank you
sir. It was Lewis and Sharman and Ben Dillon were on those works as well. In any case,
when you use the hamstring to extend the hip, it pulls because of its line of action. It pulls the
femoral head posteriorly. Sorry. It pulls it anteriorly and creates an anterior femoral
impingement, which a lot of people will be familiar with. However, if you can get the gluteals
reintegrated back into the motor pattern and you become glute dominant once again, it pulls
the femoral head back out of interior impingement. Well, I started doing hip thrusts and glute
bridges and these kinds of things.
But remember now that I was coached by Janda, the brilliant clinician teaching me squeeze
my gluts a certain way, push my feet away to activate the quadriceps, and further inhibit the
hamstrings and all of these bridges. I didnt use heavy load. It was all about re-patterning the
interplay between glutes and hamstrings. At the same time, I started to take glucosamine
chondroitin, MSM and a few cartilage builders. At the same time, I started to get youll
notice my physique went much more skinny in that decade. That was all purposeful because
all of a sudden, my hips started to get better and I set a goal for myself. Oh if I can only
reach 50 years of age with my own hip, that meansbecause replaced hips only have a
finite length of time and Im pretty active so Ill eat up that hip and if it lasts 10 years, then I
would need a fake hip that would be all I could get. My objective was to make 50. I started to
get close to 50 and low and behold, my hip was betting better! People thought I had a hip
replacement. Then with our x-ray, my colleagues x-rayed my own hip and I was watching the
bone spurs shrink. So the more gluteal dominant I became, the better biomechanics of the
hip joint was created. It took away the femoral impingement. My labrum settled down. The
hip spurs decreased. The cartilage thickened. Now I am skinny, what am I, 56? I think I am. I
would have to do the arithmetic. And I still have my own hip. I dont limp very much at all
now. Anyway, theres a little bit of a cool story for the glute guy.
Bret: Well it just is so cool because in our field, theres a lot of talk about how you never want
to use internal cueing, internal intentional focus. You never want to tell people to focus on
the muscles. It should always be focused on the external environment. Here you have a
case where you did focus on building that mind muscle connection to the glutes and you re-
patterned in your language, you reestablished gluteal dominance and brought the glutes
back into the motor pattern. It changed the biomechanics of your lumbar-pelvic-hip complex.
Now youve got glutes pulling rearward on the femur, keeping it more centered in the
acetabulum and you arent getting that impingement. Now you arent getting the pain. Pain
inhibits muscle activation so just getting rid of the pain is huge. So you can keep using your
glutes and they arent inhibited. A lot of people dont realize this (I didnt realize this until you
told me) but hip replacement surgery is a big deal because it only lasts around 10 years so
youve gotta get another one. Well, you have to spike that hip replacement into the femur
and so you can only do so about twice in a lifetime. Am I getting that right?
Stu McGill: Yeah, you lose so much bone stalk the second time around because they have
to bust out the first implant.
Bret: This is greatly impacted your life for the better and its just such a cool story. Now, I
think you also said its the frequency. Every day you would be doing your glute exercises
and hip thrusts and bridges. But also, I have heard from other interviews that you get down
to a deep, full squat. You arent using weight. You might go into a posterior pelvic tilt but
youre squatting all the way down and just keeping that ability. Youre not using weight but
youre just going as deep as possible to retain that ability. Am I getting that right?
Stu McGill: Yeah. Youre right on. Again, Ill tell another story so the listener-ship is starting
to appreciate that these brilliant people have fantastic influences on my life. Theres Janda,
Sahrmann, now the next one is a fellow named Jerszy Gregorek. He was a Polish
weightlifter. He now lives in California. He wrote the book called The Happy Body. Which is a
really wonderful read.
Jersey is a former Olympic lifter. I think he has 3 or 4 world records. So hes very competent.
Now we used to discuss the old sort of Soviet block and Polish weightlifting routines. He
said, Let me have a look at your hip. This would have been, we met at Craig Liebensons
place originally, that probably was right when I was in my no this would have been after
Janda. Id still be in my forties. Jersey said, Im gonna give you some advice with that hip.
Do one deep squat every day. And I said, Jersey, that would turn me into a cripple. He
said, Try it. Dont use any load. Hold onto a pole or a table and keep your body vertical. Go
down and when you get to the bottom, sink into it. Let all muscle tension go. Get into the
deep squat and just go and sit into it. Take all the tension out. And after a few days, I
started to feel again, a change and it was a change for the better. So my hip with whats left
of it now, I cant squat with a bar on my back. I cant do Bulgarian split squats. I would love to
do all of that stuff. I cant. It would flare me up so Id be crippled again.
However, theres another little piece of the puzzle and I used that with my patients all of
these wisdoms. I use in making decisions I wouldnt use them with every patient of course,
but its helped me in making these decisions. One deep squat a day, sink into the bottom,
preserves the squat ability. But its so spares everything else in your back so these guys that
say, You gotta deep squat with heavy load. Really? Let me see then when theyre sixty.
Bret: This leads is right into the next question. We talked about the butt-wink squat, which
the technical term would be posterior pelvic tilt. There is a relationship between posterior
pelvic tilt and lumbar flexion. There are very few people who can actually achieve a rock
bottom ass to grass squat if you will and keep a solid anterior pelvic tilt and lumbar
extension. Most people lose that arch with some people losing it before they even can reach
parallel and other people not. This is very influenced by genetics and which country you
came from.
But we talked about this Stu. We talked about butt-wink and why some people improve on it.
I actually filmed a video on this. I used a little Halloween skeleton I called Skelly and showed
what we talked about. People can improve this ability but it is genetic there is a genetic
limit. So talk about the difference types of hips Stu and then also talk about why you can
improve it over time if there is some genetic like an anatomical limit. How can we improve
upon it?
Stu McGill: Okay, great question. When you do a deep squat, there are several components
that determine the amount of motion that they have. Of course, there is muscle tightness.
But if youre doing the squat then thats overridden. Thats probably not gonna matter much.
Theres the joint capsule, neural tensions, and for the clientele I see, people with disc bulges
and traps in their back, that matters. The neural tension that they will feel through the
piriformis area behind their hip and what not.
But the most important matter on all of this is the depth of the hip socket. If people are
looking up on the internet, depth of the hip socket and squat ability. they wont find it. They
have to go to the hip dysplasia literature. What theyll find is that there are groups in the
world with very shallow hip sockets and they have very high rates of hip dysplasia. The
center of the world for hip dysplasia is Poland. They have very shallow interior hip sockets
and they can squat very deeply. The femur comes right up because there is no bone on
bone contact there.
Its actually called the Dalmatian Hip, which originates on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia up
through Bulgaria into Poland and into Western Russia, which is the Ukraine. Now I think I
just named the countries that produce year after year, unbelievable Olympic lifters. They
also have the highest rate of hip dysplasia. So again, its form and function and form and
function determines athletic ability. It determines where you become arthritic and all the rest.
It was very interesting. I occasionally do legal cases as a spine knowledge source (I guess)
and I worked on a couple of murder cases believe it or not, where they needed some spine
expertise. And another one of the scientists was a professor of forensic anthropology. It was
her who first showed me all of these different hip architectures and how they change
throughout the world. So it helped her to identify bodies when the skin and the hair and other
features were burned off, say. Thats the Dalmatian hip, which is ideally suited for deep
squatting. Now you take the archetypical shallow socket hip and its a very deep hip socket
and thats a Celtic hip, prevalent in the Normandy area of France, Ireland, and Scotland.
Now how many Olympic lifters come from those countries. Not very many. The reason is
they have very deep hip sockets and when you measure the power production out of that hip
architecture, youll find that they dont have much power at the bottom of the squat pulling
out of the hole to use an athletic term. But the top half of this squat is really powerful. So for
throwing the caber and things like that, its a standing strength or a very shallow squat
strength. Thats where the power is. Am I saying that all Scottish people have deep hip
sockets and that all Polish have shallow? No Im not. Im just saying thats the tendency from
those genetic pools. Anyway, thats a start to the discussion. And its not that I care where
youre from but what it motivates me to do is a hip exam. As you know, I have an
assessment DVD where I show these techniques and then I can start answering the
questions to guide athletes. Should they be squatting deep? Should they be concerned
about butt-wink? Or should they avoid that because theyre stressing the interior labrum of
the hip. They are stressing their spines. Chances are that they are gonna survive a lot much
high volume of training if they pull off blocks. So they only squat deep enough where they
can save the labrum of their hip and save their spine. You know, say youre an NFL lineman.
Why do you need to deep squat if youre an NFL lineman? Why not just squat as deep as
you can to the point of where the pelvis starts to break away? Because thats where the
femur is collided up against the labrum of the hip anyway. Take all the stress out. Youre still
gonna play offensive tackle in the NFL just as well. Youre still gonna get strong and better
yet, you can now tolerate a higher volume of training because youre removing that stress
riser. Thats a key for a lot of people.
Bret: Amen. I completely agree with you. I mean, really how much difference is it gonna
make if the person is doing squats just above parallel versus squatting deep if theyre
already world class athletes. It will prolong their career. So the training must suit the
individual. So answer to me the second part to that question: you will notice some people
this happens with my clients a lot theyre butt-winking like crazy and then they get better.
They actually can go deeper over time and hold that position. Whats happening there?
Stu McGill: Well, I would speculate that when you do a hip exam I think I did one on you,
did I now? Or I scoured your thigh around an arch looking at the shape of the acetabulum so
we could determine optimal knee width?
Bret: Yep.
Stu McGill: So you could squat deeper. So you know what I mean by that. You can actually
tune an athlete. What I mean by that is that if you can adjust their foot width in the setup of
the squat, and as they are descending, you might want to coach, Dont try and spread your
knees. Dont try and spread the floor. But try and open your hips, abduct your hips. You can
coach them into that nice little pocket in their acetabulum which is the stress riser. You
determine that by doing the hip exam. So it might be coaching.
Bret: Real quick Stu, let me clarify this. This hip exam, you can basically get people into
positions and this can be quadruped or it could be supine. But your playing with their leg and
figuring out which width elicits maximum squat depth without losing the spinal arch. That
way, you can determine a proper stance width for the individual. So this is the way their
stance width and foot flare should be that actually maximizes their squat depth. Thats gonna
allow them to go to the deepest without creating the most damage. And its different for
different people. Some people feel better out wider and some people do better narrower.
Correct?
Stu McGill: Exactly.
Bret: So they are improving their motor control. Youve got muscles that are working to keep
them in that groove. You also can have muscles potential pulling and doing things to keep
you know, like say the glutes for example: Pulling rearward. That could actually help some
people possibly achieve a little bit more depth just by creating some space in the anterior hip
socket. Is that correct?
Stu McGill: Thats not a maybe Bret. Thats an absolute definite. Thats absolutely true. If
they are descending and they can use the glutes in eccentric control, its not in everybody
but a few people. They can now get deeper into the squat because they de-stress the
anterior labrum you see. They pulled the femoral head back. Youll find there are a few
athletes who can achieve that. Not everybody of course.
Bret: Okay, so next question. We talked about this and Ive experienced the same thing with
my EMG testing. Its very fascinating. When you work with everyday people and youre
testing EMG, most people dont realize is that theyll see something like over 100% of
activation and they dont realize how can you get over 100%? You have to normalize the
data so you have to choose either a basic position or exercise. Like you could do a
bodyweight squat or an MVC position where you try and elicit a maximal contraction out of
them. Then when you do the exercises that youre testing, youre comparing it to that activity.
Otherwise, you just get the millivolts which doesnt really tell you much. For example, the
glutes have fat covering it. Youre gonna get lower millivolts. So when you test MVC, when
you test athletes versus average Joes, the average Joe is not very good at activating their
muscles. They will get way higher when they do the exercises because they dont have good
mind/muscle connections or good motor control. Athletes do way better. Is this true Stu?
Stu McGill: Yeah. There were two thoughts going through my mind listening to you. One is
this idea of the brains ability to send neural signals to the muscle. Weve all read
documented cases where, say, a woman has seen her child under a car and is now trapped.
Well documented, she went over and picked up the front of that car as someone pulled her
kid out. She lost her hips and fractures vertebra but somewhere she summoned the ability
for her brain to send out super potentiated volume of signals to her muscles to contract with
such intensity that she picked a car. Correct? These are well documented. So that just goes
to show you that people have this ability deep down, somewhere in the primal brain. The
great athletes become much cleverer at inhibiting the inhibitors. If you know what I mean by
that? We had a good discussion I recall about inhibiting the inhibitors and Doctor Frank
came into my office, hes an expert in inhibiting the inhibitors when we were talking about
this. Athletes become clever at learning to inhibit the neural inhibitors so they actually send
stronger, denser signals to the muscles. That was one thought that was going through my
mind.
The second thought and bodybuilders by the way. If you measure an accomplished
bodybuilder. They spend a lot of time posing in front of a mirror and simply with their brain,
activating muscles and getting them to stick out. So if you say to a bodybuilder, Give me
some serratus anterior. Man, they give you terrific signals. You go to the average guy on the
street and coach them, Heres what I need to do to get serratus anterior. They have no clue
what youre talking about. They are completely at a loss at how to activate those muscles.
Thats one very interesting feature of athletes. The other is more petite in muscle contraction
physiology. Most people, I hope are in strength and conditioning anyway, are aware of the
motor pull within a muscle. There are motor neurons that stimulate the muscles that contract
associated with certain fibers. They are intertwined throughout the muscle. There are fast
twitch and slow twitch but there are all sorts of subcategories. Its not just fast twitch and
slow twitch. There are certain motor units that only get activated during rapid concentric
contractions.
There are others that only get really activated as youre really releasing force or controlling
an eccentric contraction. In other words, to really stimulate the full family within the motor
pool of a muscle, you need a variety of contractions. You need slow grinding strength, very
quick rapid strength, etc. So now we can talk about the MVC. That is an attempt by the
scientist to get maximum voluntary drive to the muscle and you do it in an isometric
contraction. In the great athletes you get them to mentally focus on it and as you cue them
etc.. Say you were doing a leg muscle, then you simply get the person to walk or run and
even just a mediocre pace of running will recruit a whole new membership in that motor
control pool that you could never get, even in a maximum contraction. I sent you some EMG
traces today of you which were normalized. But they are not still telling the truth. What the
model does is kind of interesting. It takes the EMG signals, which were collected and
normalized to an isometric maximum contraction. But as you move, whether the muscle is
shortening or lengthening, we take all of that into account. Instantaneous muscle length is
also taken into account. Because all of these are modulators of that relationship of the
muscle converting the electrical signal through to a muscle force. We still have a lot of work
to do on your data that we collected although I sent you the raw signals today and we can
say, Oh okay. One muscle is on more than the other. Which is true from the sense of
neural drive. The question was, were they producing more force or not. We cant answer yet
until we get into the actual joint position of the muscle activity at that instant in time and
whether it was modulated by shortening or lengthening and all of these other modulators of
that relationship. I probably spoke way too much on that.
Bret: Its something that kind of ties into attentional focus. External versus internal. Have you
had a lot of success in your career using an internal attentional focus. For example, for fixing
movement patterns or getting people to direct more neural drive to a muscle. And then
eventually that reaches automaticity. Thats the whole goal. You want them to eventually not
have to think about using their glutes when they do something. Initially, Ill just say that in my
opinion, our industry goes too far with most things. Something new comes out and it
becomes this all or nothing approach. Yes, if I have an athlete whos trying to set a broad
jump record, Im not gonna say, I want you to maximally contract your quadriceps before
take off. Or something stupid like that. Obviously, Im going to give an externally attentional
focus and say, I want you to jump as far as possible. You see this line here? I want you to
clear this. Its gonna be directing their attention towards the external environment. Thats
gonna lead to better performance.
But in my opinion, a lot of the role of the strength coach or the physical therapist is not to
maximize performance, but to maximize form and prevent them from injury. I mean, you see
these Crossfit highlights (nothing against cross fit) videos that are just ridiculous. Thats what
you get when you have a purely external attentional focus on setting records rather than
using good form. I personally have found that I had a lot of success with giving people
internal cues. Knees out, chest up, squeeze the glutes, you know? Things like that. Over
time, they reach automaticity and you can shift more towards external focus. But you use it
sparingly. When you want them to set a record, external. When youre working on form,
internal. Do you agree with my approach?
Stu McGill: Im gonna say yes. Hows that?
Bret: Yes.
Stu McGill: Yeah. I am. But you know, I think you hit the nail on the head in the lead up to
that. That is when people take a position thats dogmatic. Theyre following dogma. Always
do this. External is better than internal. These are ridiculous arguments. Theres a time and a
place for all of these. I said my answer was yes because I agree with generally speaking,
when youre coaching good movement; you begin with the internal cues. You shift to
external cues when the person is competent. Im just repeating what youre saying. No great
person follows dogma. They make decision; theyre not a computer running algorithm thats
based on a dogma. Theyre thinking people who are well educated and know their material.
They know the person that theyre working with. They pull out the best tool to achieve the
goal at that point in time. As the person changes, they will have to change tools. Theres no
room for dogma.
Bret: Thats why its so important to have a large arsenal over time because you never know
when youre gonna use this tool or that tool and they come up with different people. You
mentioned youre a case study guy. I loved that because you are handed over an athlete, a
million dollar athlete, and youre charged to try and help their back pain. Its a different
situation for every person.
Stu McGill: Would you go for a 50 million dollar athletes?
Bret: Good point. But its dependant on their anatomy, their movement patterns, their sport,
their goal, their age, everything. That leads us into another question. The universal answer
to everything is it depends. Can you comment on that?
Stu McGill: People ask me whats my position on an issue or what am I gonna do with this
person or whats the best exercise. For any of these questions, the answer is always, it
depends. Now tell me about the things that I would need to know to make the best decision.
I dont have a position on anything. All I have is a knowledge base that I have some
confidence in and I also have confidence in what I dont know. I try and seek the best
solution but if you put two people in front of me with (for the most part) a certain category of
back pain I might choose a different tool for each person because one has longer legs, for
example. There you go. The answer is always it depends. In fact, I teach that introductory
course that I was describing earlier. I would pose a question on the board and Id point to
students and say, Whats the answer to that? They got it with an it depends. I said, Good
for you. Then I would post another question and ask another student for the answer. They
said It depends. So that was the lesson for the day.
Bret: I found a quote that I really like from my supervisor, John Cronin. First thing he said to
me when I started studying under him, You know Bret. I always say this. This is how I feel
today and tomorrow, as I learn more, my opinion is subject to change. He flows with the
research and I think thats we talked about the mindset of an evidence based person. You
flow. You are not set in stone. You are not black and white. Theres a grey area. Sometimes
were wrong. Sometimes we have to change our mind. As long as you use an evidence
based approach which does not mean ignoring anecdotes it means trying to use all of
the tools available and weighing the evidence and looking at research, experiments, logic,
and anecdotes, trying to make the most sense of all the different scientific tools out there.
I think thats one thing Stu. for example, with what we just did at your labs. I dont know how
the chips are gonna fall but Im interested to see it and Im open minded to learning stuff that
I was wrong about certain predictions. Its kind of funny. You and I both felt confident in our
MVC position for the gluteus maximum to the people still listening now at an hour and fifty
minutes in, I said you know, Stu, its gonna be the quadruped hip extension, bent legs with
no external resistance. So Im gonna get on all fours, bend my knee, kick my leg back,
squeeze my glute as hard as possible and thats gonna elicit the maximal contraction in the
gluteus maximum. Whereas Stu had me straighten my leg, get still in the quadruped
position on all fours, had me straighten my leg and kick rearward, kind of focusing on
extending my leg as far as possible and extending outward and not upward. Then he pushed
downward on my leg and offered resistance hip extension. Its funny because we were both
very confident. In fact, we bet that the loser had to buy the other a beer the next time we see
each other.
As it turns out, we were both right. Stus MVC position elicited more EMG in the upper glutes
whereas mine worked more in the mid-lower glutes. Thats a learning experience. You
categorize it. You keep it in check. Say, okay thats how it worked with me. Id like to see
how it works with 10 other people, you know? I think thats so important for the practitioner to
have that type of mindset. It has to be developed. Just like you get better as an athlete, you
get better as a lifter, you get better as a scientist as well. You agree with all of this Stu?
Stu McGill: Yes.
Bret: Anyway. Lets move on. A couple more questions and then I will let you get going. Talk
about your thoughts on breathing training. A popular trend in the industry right now is this
diaphragmatic breathing. I have not done a ton of research on this but I think a lot of people
are like upper chest breathers and they have dysfunctional breathing patterns. Some
coaches and therapists have found that if they get people down and work on their breathing,
they can take them out of sympathetic you know, maybe they are relying more on the
sympathetic division of their autonomic nervous system. Activating that through their
breathing and when they get them to calm down and breathe through the diaphragm and let
their abdominal cavity rise first and then the chest. You will turn more to a parasympathetic
state. Youll relax. Youre not mimicking this fight or flight response. Youre gonna possibly
decrease cortisol, things like that. I could be getting some of this wrong. Thats just my
impression through reading some blogs.
I have not done a ton of it in my practice just because I dont see a lot of research. Im
waiting for research and I will add that theres nothing wrong with waiting until research
emerges if you dont know the answer to something. Or you dont feel confident about it. But
I surmise that I wouldnt want to do this with athletes before a workout because youre
actually trying to get them to prime their nervous system. You want them to be warm and
primed for the workout. You dont want them to be in a relaxed, parasympathetic state. I
could be wrong. I think most of my colleagues would say to that, Well, they are in a
sympathetic state around the clock. You want to get them out of that so their muscles can
fire properly. To which case I would say fine, lets do that at the end of the workout. Again, I
dont know much about this. What are your thoughts on this?
Stu McGill: Im like you. I dont have any experience at all in this. Ive certainly seen people
put on workshops for breathing. At these very low levels of demand I dont know what to
make of it. So Im like you on that. I dont have the expertise. But Ive done analysis on
breathing in challenge situation and I can comment on that if you want to hear.
Bret: Yep, Sure.
Stu McGill: Okay. When we are doing what we call stabilization training making this stiff
core we try and breathe freely. Train the breathing. And then perform the exertion. For
most of that initial stabilization training, we breathe freely. However, when we start adding
load and speed, our breathing instructions and exercises change dramatically. Im just gonna
tell a quick story. I was in a hotel one time just watching tennis on the TV. Venus Williams
was on. The announcers were saying, There goes Venus, really intimidating her opposition
today because she would yell. Its called a guttural effusion when she served the tennis ball.
I thought that those guys, that maybe sensational but thats not why she does it at all. That
whole idea of guttural effusion adds stiffness to the core. Its active expiration. Weve
measured this in spades. It turns on the oblique muscles. It super drives them in that instant,
you filled the lungs with air and then that first little expulsion is driven by the abdominal
muscles. That adds even more stiffness. Now, when shes serving the tennis ball, lets just
take the example of the pec major muscle the pec major goes from the rib cage across the
shoulder joints, to the humerus. If we shorten and contract the humerus the arm flexes
around and moves. But the ribcage also bends towards the shoulder joint. So thats an
energy leak. That doesnt help swing the arm around. It causes the ribcage to bend.
However, if you can fixate and stiffen the proximal end of the muscle, 100% of the pec
activity is expressed on the discal side of the shoulder. In other words, it brings their arm
around at a higher velocity. Because a hundred percent of the velocity is on the arm, the
ribcage is being prevented from moving. So now were getting into real stabilization
mechanics.
The more we can stiffen and prevent movement in the core during rapid explosive shoulder
and hip movements, it means the legs and the arms move faster. So when she super drives
that stiffening mechanism through that yelling, just as shes letting air out, weve measured
this, it creates a super stiffness in her core and higher arm velocity. She puts a few more
miles an hour on her serve. So that is a form of power breathing and its this form of super
stiffness that shes able to create in the core as many athletes do. When you get into
carrying heavy load, whether youre doing a farmers carry, a suitcase walk, a deadlift, we
can then get into where you fill the lungs to about 70 or 80 percent of full tide and then you
lock it down. You make it very stiff. Then you can use your hips to lever the stiff crane and
pull a load, lift the load, creating a very rigid derrick through your upper body and the hips
then become the prime movers of that lift. When you measure the great lifters and I have,
thats the mechanics of what theyre doing. And breathing or not breathing shall we say, is
very very important. Then what they do is they sip the air.
So if you look at an Olympic lifter for example, on a clean and jerk, they perform the clean
and if they let the air out of their lungs and breathe, chances are their spine would collapse.
Theyre that close to a braking mechanism. Theyll sip the air, theyre holding the bar and the
clean. If the listenership gets what it is I was just doing, a very small volume sipping the air.
Then they time that last sip with the explosive thrust through a stiff core, driving the bar
upwards for the jerk part of the lift. Now having said all of that, we then get into the martial
arts. And the fighting skills and we could start that off with a kettlebell swing. Where the
kettlebell is swung and as it comes through top dead center, at the top of the swing, the
spine actually undergoes an odd combination of compression and shear and theres some
people where they dont like that. It tweaks their back a little bit. Other people will say that its
very therapeutic for their back.
If you watch someone like Pavel Tsatsouline, who is an absolute freak he really is a
master with a lot of these kettle bell techniques. And hes a superb lifter. He power breaths.
So he swings the bell up and breaths, if you know what I mean.
Bret: Its a hissing sound.
Stu McGill: It is. What that does is, once again its another form of super stiffening his core.
Which does several things: It accentuates the hip drive on one hand, but if you can then
learn that power breathing and apply it to a combative match where youre striking with leg
strikes and hand strikes. Youll hear the fighters do the same hiss and guttural effusions,
which is super stiffening the core and then they release the air, the arm is increasing velocity
as the fist is increasing closing velocity to the target.
Then once again, when the fist strikes the opponent, their body becomes super stiff again.
So theyre not hitting the person with the weight of their foot or their fist, theyve actually got
their whole body in a stone like fashion behind the fist. Which is called creating effective
mass.
So if youre a 172 pound welterweight in the UFC, youre hitting your opponent with 172
pounds of that stiffened fist. So Ive measured all of these things. Certainly not the corrective
breathing as you were describing the diaphragmatic breathing I dont know anything
about that. But I know a little bit about super charging performance with appropriate
breathing. Ive given you 4 or 5 different examples that were all slightly different.
Bret: Well just some things youve touched on. I remember reading in Zatsiorsky s Science
and Practice of Strength Training where he recommends holding 70 to 85% of tidal volume.
Thats the sweet spot for optimizing performance. It was good to hear you use the same
percentages.
Then when you talked about Pavel, he and I have had some interesting conversations
through email. Ive never met him in person. I hope to eventually. I have a ton of respect for
him and his attention to detail with exercises. Even the plank and things like that or the
things he can do with that. I never thought of a plank before I started reading his stuff and
realizing all the different things you could do to kind of create increased joint moments just
through using the floor as resistance.
Anyway, lets move on to the next topic. We talked briefly about head and neck position
during deadlifts and you mentioned that you feel that its optimal to kind of look up and I told
you that its kind of a controversy in our field that we should be packing the neck. Now I did
research on this topic and I found that youre never the strongest in neutral and youre not
delivering the most neural drive. Now the research is limited. We dont have research on
deadlifts but there is research on gripping and isometric curls and things like that. But when
you do a grip, you get the strongest strength the strongest MVC torque, when your head is
turned the opposite way of the hand thats gripping and when doing a curl its looking up. I
have studied a lot of the strongest lifters and I think its very individual. Some guys look
down, some look up. What are your thoughts on this? Are there reflexes that could be
initiated? I know that Mel Siff might have written something about looking up creates an
extensor reflex with the posture chain muscles. Ive never seen that in the research though.
Do you have any opinions on neck and head position with different exercises?
Stu McGill: Yeah. I do Bret. I wish you could see me because Im just laughing to myself
here. We just met and I had heard things about you because people would come up to me
and say, What do you think about Contreras because he said this? Either supporting
something you said or against it. I really didnt know what to think but what is uncanny in this
was that your little explanation there was just exactly the way I would have thought. Ive
heard these dogmatic positions on the best neck position for lifting. Ive measured the neck
position in some elite performers and you hit the nail on the head. They are all different and
we get back to that it depends answer.
So as soon as you believe in the dogma that its always one way or another, you will help a
few people. You will be good with them. But you wont be so good with some others. The
trick of it all, the magic happens when you realize that there are different mechanisms and a
lot of variables. Im not so sure what those variables are. I suspect that in lifting, the lifting
musculature starts with the trapezium hanging from the neck. Youll see some big necks and
youll see some people who have very long necks. Others who have very short necks. How
they position their neck and the style of the pull and how the architecture of trapezius all
hangs from their neck. It really is gonna depend on their own personal architecture. So thats
my first reaction to that.
But the second one is, we dont really talk too much about our current work in progress but
Im working with one of my colleagues in Europe right now. As we speak, hes measuring
nerve conduction velocity and muscle performance in the back the back extensors as a
function of different head positions. Now what those head positions do is put a pre-stress on
the neural track. When you tension a nerve, it thins out. It necks down and bends out, which
changes its nerve propagation velocity and ability to conduct volume. You follow what I
mean with that.
Bret: Is that when you put it on stretch.
Stu McGill: Yeah, exactly. When you put a nerve on stretch, it changes its ability to carry the
amount of signal and the speed at which it carries it at. I dont know where but hes shown
me some of the preliminary data and I can tell you that were gonna have a really interesting
story to tell because the head position determines the performance out of your back
muscles. So it isnt always one and not always the other, there are some variables that the
true expert will come to understand. Thats why we all see a variety. Look, if youre Andy
Bolton and youre lifting, youve gotta figure that Andys figured out his neck position for him
pretty well.
Bret: Yup, exactly.
Stu McGill: You know? Hes a very methodical guy. He has tweaked and tuned every tiny
little element and thats why hes so good at what he does. Is his neck position the same as
another person who has a different architecture? The answer is of course not. Its different.
Bret: Thats interesting. Is this research that youre doing overseas, is it with stoop lifting,
dead lifting, or is it with different things. Because theres been no research on this. This will
be the first research that Ive seen.
Stu McGill: Im not gonna give away too much more at this time if you dont mind, Bret.
Bret: I dont mind at all. I understand. But what you mentioned thats whats so nice when
you actually because its so easy to just make theories. When you actually work in a
laboratory with EMG, force plates, and all of these youve got a lot more to go by.
Speaking of, I would love to have your lab. Maybe you can leave it to me in your will?
Stu McGill: You can arrange for my demise.
Bret: No. Better be careful about that. Anyways, when you measure the different variables,
you see you know, with EMG you see such research tends to report averages. I like how
in a couple of your papers Stu, youll break out and kind of say this person did this, thats
one thing I love about your research. Youll talk about well this strongman did this or Pavel,
when he was swinging the kettlebell did this. He was able to activate this. I dont see that
very often. Usually all you see is the averages. That doesnt tell the whole story because 2 of
the 10 people might do better with this technique but the average shows differently so thats,
again what were talking about, the power of the case study. At the end of the day, youve
got to find out what works best for the individual.
Stu McGill: Again, youve hit the nail on the head. If I could just make a brief comment on
that because I do tend to turn heads every now and then. When I hear people criticize a
study because it didnt find statistical significance. On average there was no difference. Yet,
theyll leave the paper and walk away. You and I dont do that. We will then go into the data
and then we find low and behold, forty percent of the people had a positive effect of the
intervention. 40% had a negative effect. The remaining 20% it made no damn bit difference.
But 40% of those people were affected positively. What were the features of those people
that it affected? Now were really getting into the nity gritty. Thats another key point. I love
studies that on average, are statistically insignificant. I wanna know about the outliers.
Bret: Amen. Okay I know I said this but a couple more things and then well be done. In the
world of pain research, there at one point I was purely all biomechanics and pain. You
know, someones hurting, theres a biomechanical reason for that. I need to fix it. Then I got
exposed to these very bright individuals who studied pain and got exposed to the
biopsychosocial model. I learned about things like the neuromatrix. The neuromatrix was
fascinating to me. Talking about phantom limbs and how these people are still experiencing
pain even though their limb has been amputated. Your brain has a mental map, a
neuromatrix if you will. Your brains depiction of the body is not the actual body. These things
are all important to know about pain.
However, when I help people when Ive tried to fix people. Again, Im not a physical
therapist but hell, everyone you take the average client and they have some aches and
pains and things that dont feel so good. They also can when you start getting them
stronger things arise. I always take a biomechanical approach to that. I dont say to them,
Okay. Youre depressed. Im gonna try to cheer you up. I always use a biomechanical
approach and I know thats been the crux of your career. I guess my question is, do you
keep this stuff in the back of your mind when you work with people and kind of realize that if
you look at the research there is not a lot of research showing that anterior pelvic tilt
increases the incidence of back pain? Or that peoples biomechanics really on average it
does not lead to pain. But when you work with people, and you like what you said you
provoke their pain. Usually you can find things that hurt it. Then you get them to avoid that
and you get them to move in a way thats not painful and then you gradually increase their
fitness and build on those patterns. The biomechanics would say you are improving; you are
decreasing their mechanical insults. You are improving their function, biomechanics, and
decreasing pain.
Whereas, the pain scientist or biopsychosocial model might explain it differently. They might
say that you have these neurotags and youre having these threat responses. Through doing
the new movement you are decreasing that threat response. Youre teaching the body to
move in a different way and accept it. Theyre working with a high level coach or trainer in
your case, the worlds leading spinal biomechanics. They are comfortable. They are
confident. So thats gonna really affect the results of their recovery because theyre so
confident with you. Theyre expecting results. So its kinda like the placebo effect in a way. Is
it important to know both sides or are you a pure biomechanics guy? Talk about that a little
bit.
Stu McGill: I dont think Im a pure anything. Its important to be as knowledgeable as you
possibly can to explore alternate possibilities. Alternate explanations for what youre
observing. I could give you case after case where traditional pure biomechanical thought
couldnt give an explanation for what youre seeing in front of you in a patient or athlete.
Having said that, let me just take the other side and then Ill come back to this. There are
those who say, Oh for pain, were going to teach them to live with their pain, to handle their
pain. Were gonna tell them that the pain is mostly in their head. Its a perception and were
gonna modulate their brain to handle their pain. This is where I really start to disagree. If
you can do provocative testing and cause their pain to get worse by putting them in an
awkward posture or stressing the pain somehow. If they say, Oh yeah. That hurts more.
Youve just proven that its a mechanical variable that makes their pain worse and probably if
you can take that mechanical insult away, the pain will be less and hopefully even disappear.
This is a rather harsh opinion, but those who are real proponents of all this psychosocial,
they are very poor with their mechanical of understanding. Their mechanical understanding
of the phenomenon. So it becomes a default diagnosis. By default, we cant find the pain in
you. Our interventions dont work on you. Its not that were bad doctors, its that youre a bad
patient. The pain is in your head. So its a default diagnosis and therefore, the patient should
have physiological counseling. Thats what I really get annoyed with because weve had
patients who have had these diagnosis and we find that sometimes its very simple and
obvious. Its just that theyve never been tested for the mechanical cause of their pain. I had
a patient yesterday, I phoned her, and asked how she was doing. I couldnt figure out her
pain. It didnt make mechanical sense. Yet, she said she had surgery. They found that two
nerve roots from two adjacent levels were coming through the same foramen. I had an
anatomic anomaly. Im going to be in the medical literature because I had a freak. Im a freak
with the anatomy and then I said, Ah ha. Well that so explains how you are having both
femoral and sciatic nerve symptoms.
You know, again, its just when you keep the detective work going, you can usually find it.
There are cases of fibromyalgia that Ill see occasionally, where the person has as you said,
a changed neuromatrix. What is movement to some person, their brain has now perceived
this pain. To change their neuromatrix, the way we would attempt it (and admittedly were
not very successful with it) but occasionally we are on the very tough cases who failed all
other approaches including the psychosocial approaches. You teach the body to move pain
free. Do what it can do pain free. And then slowly increase the repertoire of pain free
movement as the brain learns how to perceive those movements. Anyway, there are a few
discussions skirting around that issue of the whole psychosocial but you know, theres no
question. Mechanical things, injury, tissue stress causes pain,. How the person reacts to that
it depends. If youve got a spouse who is yelling at you and stressing you out, chances are
you will become more sensitized to that pain. If you hate your job and you really dont wanna
go back to work, thats a social issue and you will probably magnify that pain.
Bret: I think they would say that it causes deformation and tissue damage, but the brain is
what decides whether to elicit that pain response. But what I always wonder with some types
now I interviewed a guy named Jason Silvernail. I cant tell you how much respect I have
for him. Hes a CSCS. He cares about both sides of both worlds. But when I get someone
who just tells me that theres no association with biomechanics and pain, I want to say to
them, Let me have you do three sets of round-back deadlifts to failure. See how you feel the
next day. I bet if I did that to 100 people, all 100 would hurt. Im talking full lumbar flexion,
under heavy load. I could probably herniate some discs or snap some ligaments right there if
I really loaded them up as heavy as possible. So I just wonder trust me, I try to be cautious
in my conclusions but sometimes I wonder if theyre not trying to meet in the middle and
learn our side of the equation. Stu, youve worked with people with some of the most jacked
up spines. Ive seen the literature, like 50% of people have herniated discs and a lot of them
are pain free. The point is when you work with a person, usually you can get them out of
their pain by incorporating biomechanics and whether thats working through the brain.
Youre working through the psychological, biological model, but its all related. Thats what
those guys would admit. Hey, the bio portion is biomechanical. Of course! I just think we kind
of, since we deal with athletes, we tend to possibly look more at the mathematics, physics.
But its very critical because I have heard of stories where people were kind of given a
nocebo effect by being told that this movement causes pain, squats are bad for your back.
Deadlifts are bad for your back. Or this is bad for your back. This posture is bad for your
back. You have anterior pelvic tilt, youre gonna have back pain. Its very important to
understand the limitations of the biomechanical model and to understand the
biopsychosocial model but to keep them all in their place. Thats just my two cents at least.
Stu McGill: Okay. Im not gonna add anymore to that.
Bret: Two more questions. The last questions gonna be about your mustache. This next
question is probably what my listeners and a lot of people in the industry wanna hear us talk
about. I wrote a blog post a couple of years back a few years back talking about how I
like back extensions and reverse hypers. At that time, see, you have to put into context. Ive
purchased a glute ham developer and a 45 degree back raise off and a reverse hyper from
EliteFTS like 10 years ago. So I used this equipment with my clients and I dont train 20
athletes at once. I would train people out of my garage and then I opened up a gym. I would
train a few people. I did small group training. I could watch their form. I could teach them
how to move at the hips. To me, a back extension is really a hip extension. You are teaching
them how to stiffen their spine and erect their torso with their glutes and hamstrings. Pull
their body up using the gluts and hamstrings while keeping the spine stabilized. Thats just
hip extension to me. I didnt even like glute ham raises that much. I use them for pure back
extensions mostly like 9 times out of 10. I just love the exercise and its very well tolerated
as long as youre doing it that way. I would say the reverse hyper is harder to control spinal
motion because its so dynamic. There is a way to perform reverse hypers where when the
pendulum is swinging down, you dont let the belt swing you into full flexion the way that
Louis Simmons does it. You actually stop at yourself using the eccentric nature of the
hamstrings and glutes. You stop it, you dont let your low back move into flexion. Then as
you reverse the weight and raise it into full hip extension, youre squeezing the glutes to
prevent that excessive lumbar hyperextension. But its easier with the back extension and
the 45 degree hyperextension. So well talk about that and then crunches after this.
Can these lifts be performed in a safer versus so theres a way you typically see them
performed. And theres a safer way to perform them. Can you categorically say that back
extensions are bad for everyone or will they be good for certain people or can you paint a
broad, stroke and say that no one should be going these exercises? What do you think
about that?
Stu McGill: It depends.
Bret: There ya go.
Stu McGill: I mean, you know look you were talking earlier about Professor Vladimir. He was
there in the great years of Soviet dominance in the 70s and the 80s. They had athletes like
Vaslier Alexiev and personalities like this. I mean, I dont know anyone who has set more
Olympic and international records. Certainly in heavyweight Olympic lifting theres no one
that would compare with the number of records that he set. Yet, if you can talk to Professor
Z, because he was there at the Moscow institute of physical culture the Russian Institute.
What do you think Alexias favorite exercise was?
Bret: Actually I remember reading about that. He loved his back extensions.
Stu McGill: Of course he did. A heavy weight either clutched to the chest or on his back. Are
you gonna argue with that? You know, in terms of proof of the pudding you and I or no one
else can argue. But realize that he was one in a billion. These great athletes are mutants.
We can look at some and look at their training volume and what they tolerate but there was
something very special about his back that allowed him to tolerate. Would it be good for me?
No. It would break me in two.
Bret: Was he doing hip extension or spinal extension? I guess thats what you would need to
know.
Stu McGill: I didnt see it so theres a good question for Professor Z. Lets go back to the
glute ham raise because I know again, Ive been so misinterpreted and misquoted on that
one.
Bret: Now I dont wanna talk about the glute ham raise where youre doing knee flexion to
raise your body up. Im talking about a horizontal back its called a back extension but its
really folding in half at the hips and the raising up.
Stu McGill: Yeah, Simmons glute ham raise is what youre talking about.
Bret: No. He does the reverse hyper where the torso is laid across the unit. The legs are free
to move. Whereas, the glute ham developer.
Stu McGill: Hold on. Just let me comment on that one because thats a small little study in
my book Ultimate Back Fitness and Performance. Theres a picture of Art Mcdermott, one of
the great strong men personalities of a few years ago. And Im showing him resting his belly
and chest over the glute ham machine, doing the reverse hypers the way youre describing.
But then I prop on his elbows where he stiffens his whole spine to really isolate the hip
motion, so it really is a hip extension. Then it becomes a really nice device. But again, there
are some people and they dont mind that little bit of spine motion. There are other people
that it just is such an exasperator of the problem.
Bret: Those who are extension-intolerant who might have aggravation with the posterior
elements of the spine?
Stu McGill: It could be someone whos flexion intolerant, extension intolerant, or just motion
intolerant down at that lumbar sacral joint. There are all three categories to be irritated if they
didnt fixate that junction to allow the fixated pelvis and really focus the motion at the hip.
Bret: If you have a talented coach and you take think about how much time and effort we
put into teaching squats and deadlifts and these exercises and if you put that same sort of
attention and develop a very good system with teaching certain exercises, they can be done
in ways that are much more tolerable. Again, there are a lot people who do the reverse
hyper and they feel irritation. Its neural tension related and it just irritates them. They feel
tingly and weird and numb and it feels off. But with back extensions off the glute ham
developer or like the 45 degree back raises, thats easier to do, where you can kind of make
it more hip extension.
Now I would guess that you are getting lots of shear forces when youre doing these on the
spine. However, as we talked about earlier, maybe you can build up a tolerance to shear or if
your spine is in neutral I dont know how do you explain? Cause even pushing sleds
would induce a lot of shear. Kettlebell swings produce a lot of shear. When we train them up
to be these beasts where they can tolerate it. How is that explainable?
Stu McGill: There are a lot of variables that youre touching on now. The spines ability to
bear shear is a function of its curvature. The ligaments have huge cosines to them. So if you
bend the spine to a position where the ligaments become taut and bold, they create quite a
shear force. The muscles themselves have a restored shear cosine so if you are doing a
spine extension, the low back has a shear cosine to the erected spine. That supports that
shear. So the forces of say a driving force on sled, you have to be careful with some of those
assumptions. Sometimes you can balance the shears right up.
Bret: Yeah, I think I remember in your article on rowing. I think it was bent over rows or
something where I expected these huge shear loads and I didnt see that. Thats because
the muscles are balancing out the loads.
Stu McGill: Theres a reaction shear. Gravity is working on the load plus your rib cage and
its pulling your rib cage forward on your pelvis creating an anterior shear. But the muscles
are creating a posterior shear and balancing that to a very tolerable level. Heres the rub: the
direction, the cosine of those muscles and the ability to balance shear is a function of their
spine curvature. So this is yet another consideration if someone rounds their back or flexes
their spine a little bit. On some people, it really changes the muscles ability to neutralize the
shear.
Now, you mentioned different peoples reactions. Im not gonna mention specific names here
but there are some very strong personalities with extremely strong bodies. Your listenership
would, if I said their names, they would know who they are. When you work with them, you
find that they have a very specific training regimen but they have tuned it for them. But if
were up in our cottage and I take them out kayaking, they cant tolerate kayaking. Well give
me a break! You mean you can pick up that, you can throw this and you can fight this
person, yet, when we go kayaking together your back is screaming. Or I might take someone
else. You might find this interesting. We did a study on the elliptical trainers. We wondered
why some people say, Oh I like this. It really makes my back feel okay. Then youll take
another person, quite robust athlete, and they get on the elliptical and say, Oh man. This
tweaks my back. It was so interesting. I did this with Jan Moorside, one of my PHD
students.
Bret: I read that study.
Stu McGill: We screened a couple hundred students and then she trained the tightest hips
and the loosest hips so to speak. In any case, guess which hips really enjoyed the elliptical.
It was the loose hips. Well, of the dozen people she trained with the tight hips, surprise 9 out
of the 12 were hockey players. She didnt screen for hockey players. That was what was
selected in the tight hips group. That group got bad backs when they used the elliptical. So
again, I hope theres been a common theme today in the answer it depends and that we
have to look at individual differences. You cant follow dogma on this, there are just so many
variables.
Bret: Yup. That moves us right into, again what my readers will want to hear. Because when
Brad and I published our article on crunches. Its funny. I still remember talking to Brad and
saying, I think Stus gonna like our conclusions here. Now, we were very hardcore in
scrutinizing, however, with our conclusions, if you read I did not like the industrys reaction
because it was like I think most people just glanced at it. They were saying dont ever do a
crunch and so if Im saying that its okay to crunch, then theyre thinking Oh my god,hes
going against us and hes going against Stu McGill. Lets feed him to the wolves. It annoyed
me because I dont even think some of the coaches read the article are even capable of
reading an article properly. If you look at our whole conclusions, we are saying to do like
control the tempo. First of all, the most important thing was to just go to 30 degrees of total
trunk flexion. Most of that range of motion would be taken in the thoracic spine. Then we
talked about posture, volume, and load and said, Look. If you kind of control the tempo and
squeeze the top. The people I work with, they cant do 100 crunches that way. They get to
20 or 25. Some get to 15 and they are shaking like hyenas. So we said to do it at a slow
tempo and kind of hold the isometric. Then limit it to like 50 cycles, 40 cycles or something
like that. Three times a week. To me, thats so much better than what most people out there
are doing 500 crunches. Were not saying to go crunch away in full lumbar flexion. We are
saying to watch your lumbar spine and this is a lot due to a very important study done by
Michael Adams a prominent spinal researcher. I think it was in 1985 he had a study where
he showed that the bending stress if you took a disc, say a motion segment and say it
went to 13 total degrees of motion. But you just went to 11 degrees instead of 13 and you
reduced the stress on that disc by 50 percent. So that just goes to show you how important it
is to avoid full lumbar flexion and how dangerous it is. I would imagine it like an exponential
curve with that stress on the disc. Correct me if Im wrong but I would just say that if youre
only going to 4 degrees range of motion per motion segment, then youre gonna greatly
reduce the injury potential there. The nucleus will not be working its way through lamella.
That was just my take on it. I felt like I gave safe recommendations and it was a good
compromise because you have the McGill crunch, where you just kind of rise up and kind of
keep the spine in neutral. Brad and I are just saying to go a little higher. Were both saying to
avoid end range of motion in the lumbar spine. Comment on that and dont pull any punches
if you totally disagree. What do you think about my recommendations there?
Stu McGill: It depends. A few of the things you said I would completely agree with and
partially disagree with others. This idea of, Okay, you can do a partial curl up because
youre avoiding lumbar flexion but then youre gonna have thoracic flexion. Thats okay. But
what happens when you have a person who sits at a computer for 8 hours a day? Then they
are slouched over the computer. This idea that you create cumulative trauma in the training
session and thats where youre gonna measure what the total exposure and the workweek,
that doesnt fit anymore. This person sits watching the television. They sit, propped up in bed
reading a book. This modern lifestyle. When you do some provocative testing and try to
understand their pain a little bit, theyll be showing you, No. I get pain up in my mid back. I
hope we would both agree that for that particular person, you probably dont wanna do
thoracic extension cause its hurting them as well. So this idea of cumulative trauma, its
accumulating all day long. Whats interesting is and people who work out find this so unfair
that they train an hour every day and yet they sit at work for 20 minutes and their back gets
sore. Then theres the couch potato who sits in the booth beside them at work, never does
any training, they eat awful things, and yet they never have back pain. They think its so
unfair but this is what happens. That couch potato has never started cumulative trauma or
the delamination of the lamina as youre describing, the collagen fibers of the disc. Theyve
never started that traumatic process whereas the person who trains an hour a day, they may
have started it through doing deadlifts and power cleans and things with poor form and its
pretty easy to do. With high load and poor form. Then when they sit at work, which little bit of
extra bending stress suddenly becomes painful. Its only painful because they have that
preexisting trauma from the way they chose to train. So Im in little bit of a spot here. Were
trying to make general recommendations for the general populous, finding the balance
between training and becoming fitter and stronger and all of those good things, with not
allowing the pace of laminar delimination to run ahead of that repair process. So its difficult.
Its really difficult in this modern lifestyle. Our grandparents didnt have to deal with this. They
were walking behind the horse, plowing all these things. Even our parents as plumbers and
electricians didnt have to deal with it. Im not saying that modern plumbers dont have back
pain because they do. My point in all of that is why take the risk?
Why are you training? If youre training because youre an athlete, and you have to reach a
certain level of physical proficiency to perform, alright you gotta choose the tools to do that in
a wise way. The purpose of your training is to enhance your performance. If youre me, all I
want to do is have no pain be reasonably fit and when I put on courses and seminars, I have
the physical ability to do good demonstrations and have some content validity in what Im
doing. Thats what I need. Thats all I need and if I do any more, I risk getting sore. I will get
sore and Ill get hurt. So folks have to find the reasons why theyre training and then choose
the best tools. Its a risk/reward all the time. I would say that if youre the average person and
youre just training to be healthy, get to 80 years old and still have your joints intact, then do
the McGill crunch. Youll probably be better off. Do a few push ups. Theres a great
abdominal trainer. Maybe do a few stir the pots? All these kinds of things. I really wouldnt do
curl ups. Then when we look at the military studies where they tested soldiers who have to
pass the speed sit-up test every year, they took a group where they didnt even train speed
sit-ups. They took it right out of the program but they replaced it with these kinds of
exercises which were much easier on their joints. Lo and behold, when they came to test
them on the speed sit-up scores, they did better and they never trained it. So they were still
able to train hip flexion and torso moment and people get confused of the difference
between flexion motion, which is the kinematics variable, and flexion torque, which is the
moment or the average shall we say? The key is really
Bret: For example, to clarify that. You can do abs wheel roll out from the knees, keeping the
spine in neutral, youre gonna contract the abdominals very hard to prevent spinal extension
so they have to create a huge internal flexion moment. But you dont have the motion there
as long as you keep your spine stable. So youre saying train the moment, but dont train the
motion.
Stu McGill: Right. Thats a wise thing. Now lets do some case studies. Lets take a few UFC
fighters who have to train Jujitsu. You have to have a very flexible spine you have to move
it into flexion and you have to have the ability to have high flexion torque as well. Now
theyre 26 years of age. Theyve worn out their backs. They are in so much back pain that
they cant tolerate training. They will not make the next UFC gig, their big payday.
So what are we gonna do? What well do is we will take out the pain trigger which is the
motion, not the torque, but the motion. Well replace their 1,000 sit-ups, 1,000 partial curls
ups that they do because that has stolen their ability to train. Theyve got no volume
capability at all left. Were gonna take that out and have them do stir the pots, push ups, and
roll outs and all of these kinds of things. Interestingly enough, youll find that their striking
speed quite often increases because of that idea of the stiff core unleashing the athleticism
of the distal side of the bone socket joints. Youve taken out the pain trigger. Now all of a
sudden, weve restored their training volume and they are back in the game. Ive taken very
athletic examples and then weve also given an example from everyday living. Lets take a
gymnast now. Someone who has to really flex their back to do their athletic job. Youve gotta
earn to do that in a way where if you really are moving the spine around, you cant have high
load at the same time. It will restrict the total cycles that the spine can take. Whats that
magic number? Well thats a political discussion now. Its not biologically relevant to that
individual but you will find the provocative testing where that number lies for that particular
individual and come up with the cleverest training regimen around that injury and pain
mechanism so they can still achieve their goals.
Anyway, it all depends on whom were talking about. Are we talking about me, all Ive got to
do is get through life now with my joints as intact and as pain-free and as less arthritic as
possible. And still have enough where I can do my job vs. someone who is younger and they
still have their joints and they can really train and enjoy it. Thats their gig. Theyll enjoy it
longer the more it can spare them.
Bret: I guess what I like Stu is that this used to haunt me at night. The same thing, I
remember its coming up on the 7 year anniversary for when I actually thought up weighted
hip thrusts. To use a barbell for doing hip thrusts. It was October 12, 2006 and thats coming
up. I always knew it was a good glute exercise but I didnt know, Hey, Im gonna have all my
girls do this for their glutes. And they liked it. Then I started doing it. I had a gym and I
started getting all of these people, one-by-one, and coming up to me saying, Hey Bret. Im
running faster than Ive ever ran before. Its that hip thrust. Thats why Im running faster. Id
go, We do like 20 different lower body exercises. Were doing Bulgarian split squats. Id
start listing off the exercises. How do you know its the hip thrusts? Because I feel my glutes
working in the same manner that it does when I do the hip thrusts. I can actually feel my
glutes when I run. And Id sit there and wonder why wouldnt they say that about the squat?
Whats different between the squat and the hip thrust?
Wed take this for granted Stu that now we have this advanced understanding of
biomechanics and we can say, Well, its gonna change the hip extension torque angle
curve. We understand all this stuff now. Back then, I didnt have this great biomechanical
understanding. I would stay awake at night and think a lot. This same thing happened with
crunches. Id sit there and think how can some people tolerate these like how come
everyones discs arent obliterated? Like with the flexion cycles. We all go through so many
of them and yet you could say well its not creating the compressive load under that cycle.
But I just have such a curiosity and I think about things like this. I think about when youre
lying down in a crunch, theres two points of contact: your sacrum and your mid-back
connected to the floor. Maybe when you do the crunch, those are resisting compression
because theres two points of contact and youre not getting the compression. Ive seen
studies by Goel, he did as many flexion (like 100,000) cycles but with no compressive load.
The spine could tolerate it. There was no damage to the discs. You need the compressive
load and the range of motion.
I think of all these things and I wonder biomechanical and physiologically and do discs
repair. Wolffs law states that soft tissue gets stronger. Then I also hear you say the discs
dont repair that well, Its this cumulative trauma. I think this is whats nice is that we have
demonstrated here that, hell, I tell people when they ask me questions. I say that I might like
people to use a little bit of posterior pelvic tilt at the end range of a hip thrust or when they
lock out a deadlift. You like a neutral spine and neutral pelvis. When people ask me a
question, Ill say Heres what I think but I also listen to Stu McGill. I have no problem
admitting that you know more than me about the spine. It just shows a good case of how two
people can get along. Cause we both trust each others intent. We both trust that were
evidence based and were looking at the evidence. Were not just trying to be these gurus
who make bold black and white statements. Its a nice demonstration about two people can
get along well. Two smart people, have you ever agreed with any person on every single
topic?
Hell, youve taught me so much about spinal biomechanics. Most of what Ive learned in this
area is from you. So it just shows that we can have differences in opinion but we agree on
most things. Of course, that guy who has mid back pain of course Im not gonna give that
guy crunches. I dont even give a lot of crunches to anyone. I just think about these things.
But I remember just to demonstrate a case where its important to be evidence based.
In my crunch article I did mention that its important to expose the discs to if youre gonna
be doing flexion, you wanna be doing extension too. It can balance things out. I remember
reading a study by one of your students. It showed that adding extension to the flexion
equation actually made matters worse. It exacerbated, fast forwarded the symptoms. So I
was wrong there. Anyway, I think this is a good example of how you and I get along well. We
can hang out and have great discussions and we dont have to agree on everything. The
industry likes to paint two people against each other when we both admit grey area and
heck; I totally appreciate your viewpoint on things. With that, I will leave the listeners to the
last question. This pertains to your mustache and whether or not youve ever shaved it off.
You told me a funny story about that, can you relay that the listeners?
Stu McGill: Yeah. Is that the one where I have a daughter whose kind of a daddys girl. She
came to me and said: Dad, why dont you shave your mustache off? You know, I thought
about that for no more than 30 milliseconds just because she said it. And you know my
wifes mentioned that over the years because I dont think Ive ever been clean shaved since
I was about 18. Ive either had some awful beard or through the 70s those awful sideburns
and that sort of stuff. Anyway, so I shaved it off and I was really quite unrecognizable.
As I learned afterwards, I would go and do a clinical course or someone would fly me in
somewhere. They were so disappointed. The mustache I came to learn was part of the gig.
Thats what they wanted so I grew it back and now thats all part of whatever this McGill
thing is.
Bret: Its part of your brand. I agree. Id be very annoyed at you if I flew you out to do a
seminar and you had shaved your mustache. Thats part of the equation. Thats what weve
come to expect from you. Thats so funny though.
Stu McGill: Can I ask just one that last point you made before the mustache things
though?
Bret: Of course. I didnt give you a chance to respond.
Stu McGill: I mean what you said, thats just a great way to finish this. its funny. I know youll
have your admirer and disciples and there are some disciples
Bret: Youve got more than me.
Stu McGill: Disciples of other people as well. And what the listeners I hope they
understand is that it doesnt matter whether Im with you or Pavel or Dan John or back in
the old days of Mel Siff, Zatsiorsky and Gracovetsky any of these people, we were all good
friends. We enjoyed one another. We enjoyed debating. And it was over a beer and peanuts.
We knew one anothers kids, all of these things. They came and stayed at houses just like
you did.
You know, staying at Mels house. Wonderful time! Its the disciples that are ready to kill
someone who would dare challenge who they perceived as being a leader or a guru. I wish
all that would go away. Georges St. Pierre who you know Im quite a fan of his hes just an
outstanding individual. He has a quote. Something about, I honor my opponents because
they define me. Without my opponents Im nothing.
We started out this conversation talking about our battles with Gracovetsky and whatnot. We
quite enjoyed one another. He called me up after all those battles were finished, maybe
somewhere in the mid 90s. He said, Stu. You know, I hope you dont hate me. I hope it was
nothing personal. I said, No, of course not. Of course at the time they were stressful and
these letters to the editor and things were stressful. But its all part of your forging and its all
part of becoming who you are. I talked about some of the great personalities.
All of them, when you look back, had such great role to play in developing all of us. With
yourself, I met you for the first time a couple of weeks ago .I enjoyed it so much, we had
wonderful conversations. Ive enjoyed this evening. And I hope people just get all of that.
This is all about friendship and were all trying to seek the truth.
Bret: Yet, were all working to try and maximize our understanding and advance the field and
I hope Stu, I hope that we can do more stuff together over time. Its been a pleasure. I hope
you stick around and I get my PHD and Ill call you up and say, Did you hear what this
persons saying. We gotta look at this.
Stu McGill: Will I have to call you Doctor Contreras.
Bret: Yes you will.
Stu McGill: Thats my honor. Ill be very pleased on that day.
Bret: Since we both lost the battle, I look forward to now I have to buy you a beer and you
have to buy me a beer with our EMG bet. So look forward to that next time we meet up Stu.
Thank you very much for coming on. Were on 3 hours now so this was great. I told you it
would be along interview but we would get through all of it. Im sure the readers will very
much appreciate this.
Thank you so much for your time. If my readers want to learn more about your stuff, where
can they access your books and DVDs and things like that? Talk about that real quick.
Stu McGill: All the information is synthesized on some book that Ive tried to put together.
Theyre at BackFitPro.com, just as it sounds.
So Bret, thank you sir.
Bret: Thanks you very much appreciate it.
Stu McGill: Goodnight.
Bret: Goodnight
Ill leave you with a video of McGill working with GSP and other fighters very cool!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb8ShtGSLHk