Glute Activation Myths with Rich Willy

Rich Willy is a Physical Therapist and PhD Running Researcher. Today, Brodie talks with Rich about glute activation including. How important are the gluteals during running? How effective are pre-activation exercises prior to running? Will glute exercises reduce your risk of injury? What to do if you have glute fatigue imbalance Follow Rich on instagram @montanarunninglab Also on Twitter @rwilly2003 Run Smarter YouTube Channel Become a patron! Receive Run Smarter Emails Book a FREE Injury chat with Brodie Run Smarter App IOS or Android  Podcast Facebook group

Show Notes

Rich Willy is a Physical Therapist and PhD Running Researcher. Today, Brodie talks with Rich about glute activation including.

• How important are the gluteals during running?
• How effective are pre-activation exercises prior to running?
• Will glute exercises reduce your risk of injury?
• What to do if you have glute fatigue imbalance

Follow Rich on instagram @montanarunninglab

Also on Twitter @rwilly2003

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On today's episode, glute activation myths with Rich Wheelie. Welcome to the Run Smarter podcast, the podcast helping you overcome your current and future running injuries by educating and transforming you into a healthier, stronger, smarter runner. If you're like me, running is life, but more often than not, injuries disrupt this lifestyle. And once you are injured, you're looking for answers and met with bad advice and conflicting messages circulating the running community. The world shouldn't be like this. You deserve to run injury free and have access to the right information. That's why I've made it my mission to bring clarity and control to every runner. My name is Brodie Sharp. I am a physiotherapist, a former chronic injury sufferer and your podcast host. I am excited that you have found this podcast and by default become the Run Smarter Scholar. So let's work together to overcome your injury, restore your confidence and start spreading the right information back into your running community. So let's begin today's lesson. We were going to do the second Q and A this episode, but I have just finished chatting to Rich Willie and I thought it was too good and I'm getting impatient. So I'm putting it in this week and we'll do our second Q and A next week. Um, for those who aren't familiar, Rich Willie is a very well renowned running researcher. He's a physical therapist. Um, sports is done sports medicine, done a PhD, uh, very, very heavy in the research side of things. And I'm just a super fan. So if you're ready to hear me geek out and freak out as to chatting with one of my heroes, then I hope you strap yourself in for the next 60 minutes. I wanted to have the theme of the myth around glute activation, glutes falling asleep, glutes not firing, like those sorts of things. And so Rich was more than happy to have a chat about that and We take a few other tangents, which you'll hear in a second. Uh, I kept it all in there. I wanted those tangents in there cause it was just jam packed full of value. He was very grateful for his time. I'm very grateful for, for him and his knowledge. And this has been one of the highlights of being a podcast host, getting to chat to people like Rich. So here we go. Rich, thank you very much for joining me on the run smarter podcast. Thanks a lot, Brody. It's really awesome to be here. I really appreciate. the opportunity to talk with everybody. So looking forward to the next bit. I have been reading a ton of your research over the years. And so it's really nice to meet you face to face and then actually get to have a chat with you. Before we get started, for those who aren't familiar with you, would you mind just introducing yourself and how your academic career and passions of just like momentum into where you see yourself today? Yeah, sure. Well, see, I'm a physical therapist. I've been a PT since 1999. And I worked as a full-time clinician for eight years and worked in a couple different settings. Actually, I first started off in occupational health, which is not really where I initially saw myself, but that was the first job I got. And it's actually been, was a great job to have because I got to work with injured workers and actually. rely on my experience working with that population quite a bit when I work with runners because there are a lot of similarities there. But I eventually was gravitated toward what I really wanted to be doing, which is more sports medicine and working with the running athlete. In 2007, I went to the University of Delaware and started my PhD. I studied under Irene Davis at the University of Delaware and finished my PhD studies in 2011. My PhD work was on patellofemoral pain. And it did a lot of stuff looking at gait retraining and hip strengthening. And so I did some work with that. I started to do some work with bone stress injuries as well. And since then, I've been a faculty member and I do research and I work with two different populations, I work with runners and I also work with tactical athletes. So that would be soldiers and wildland firefighters from a research standpoint. So. Yeah, I teach in our physical therapy program. It's something I really love to do. And the research I do is a lot of fun. I get a chance to work with a lot of other researchers who have similar interests and passions as me. And yeah, it's a really wonderful job. I couldn't probably ask for a different career. So I think one of the things that I think is really important to me besides doing research and teaching is that I still treat. Uh, which is something I think is really important for researchers to do. So I still treat, um, you know, a couple hours, several hours a week, um, and do some consultation work as well with athletes. And, um, I think that that's a really important part of being a clinical researcher is that you're actually, you know, doing clinical work. Yeah, absolutely. And is there any research in the pipeline at the moment, anything you're currently working on? Yeah, let's see here. Yeah, we've got a couple, we've been doing a lot of work in a couple different areas. One of them is return to run after ACL reconstruction. And that's an area that we've been focusing on for a couple of years. We have some work coming out shortly. Looking at that, we're looking at that in both athletes, but also tactical athletes as well. So we're looking at the challenges of going back to, back to service after you've had an ACL reconstruction in the military and how that's really hard. So big challenge because you have to run and carry heavy loads. So we've been doing a lot of work in that area, doing some work with Achilles tendonopathy as well, looking at how we can control loading, both from adding load from it, that's going to be therapeutic enough, but also how we can also reduce loads in the runner with some sort of Achilles tendon injury so we can help them make a smoother transition back to running. So I would say that those are kind of the main areas that we're working on. And I think the other thing too, is we always have a little bit going on with bone stress injuries. We've got some additional projects coming up very soon looking at that as well. Excellent. I want to pick your brain. One myth in particular, that being around glute activation, the relevance of glute strength. There's a lot of things about lazy glute or glutes falling asleep and like that, that's sort of, uh, terminology that's thrown around a lot. Um, and so I want to pick your brain and I think it might be good to start with, uh, what myths around this area have you heard that, um, based on your research and expertise think is, uh, predominantly untrue. Yeah, I would say that it is, it is something that seems to be persistent as far as a belief that runners and also clinicians hold as well. And I think when I, when speaking about clinicians, I would extend that also to coaches. I would also extend it also to strength and conditioning coaches as well, besides just running coaches. So, you know, I think, and I will tell you too, that one of the things that I've really have come to enjoy about what I do is that I get to take, you know, beliefs that I might have as a, when I, I mean, I run and I used to treat runners. you know, almost all the time, as much as I don't do it as much anymore. But one of the things I get a chance to do is to take some of those preconceived notions that I have or other people might have and then test them out in our laboratory. So, yeah, so we've done some work in this area. And I think that for me, and I think a lot of runners have this belief as well, that, you know, we used to think that the hip extensors or your glutes had a big roll in running. And they do. There's certainly a very important muscle group, but I would say that if you were to rank the order of importance or the order of contributions to running, it's really your plantar flexors or your calf musculature that contributes the most. So if we were to divide up the contributions from the hip, the knee, and the foot and ankle to running, we see about half of the contribution to running is coming from your plantar flexors or from your calf muscles, so your gastrocnemius and your soleus. Your quads account for... I don't know, about 30%, maybe 35%. And the last 15% or so come from your glutes. So we really see your hip extensors as being a relatively small contributor to the overall effort of running. Of course, this is looking at level ground and that's during like endurance pace running. Now, if you start to run uphill, your hip contribution goes up quite a bit, your knee contribution goes down. When you run downhill, your hip contribution becomes very minimal. It's mostly a hip flexor activity, and that's because your hip flexors are acting eccentrically to try to control that limb as you're passing over top of that leg. Planner flexors are still really important going downhill as well. So I think when you look at the overall contributions from your hips to running, it's very minimal. And again, I'm not saying that they're not important because they're a really important stabilizer of your trunk, important stabilizer of your um, your hip joint as well, but it's just not this muscle that, that seems to be so critical to running. So yeah, so when you, when you, if you pick up runner's world or triathlete magazine, it's not so much anymore, but you'll, you'll hear, you'll see a lot of articles or certainly on, on Instagram, you see a lot of things about like, okay, how can you activate your glutes before you go for a run or how can you run a little bit differently to activate your glutes more? Um, really if you, if you run, you're going to be using your glutes. These are not muscles that you don't really have. You really can't say I'm gonna use this muscle or I'm not. I mean, you certainly can contract your glutes and squeeze them and you're gonna be getting more force out of them. But just by running, most runners when they run get about, they're getting about a full body weight of muscle force out of their glute max, which sounds like a lot, but the soleus is responsible for about six to seven body weights of muscle force when we're running. So. We're talking about a muscle that is 1 6th of the contributor to running as the, as the deep calf muscle, your, um, your sole is. So, yeah. So I think that, you know, and then along those lines, there are a lot of, uh, drills that people will do to kind of activate their glutes before they run. Or if you go to the gym, you'll see a runners in there. They'll be spending a lot of time working on their, on their glutes. Um, and I would say really probably the best thing to do is to take a step back and take a look at what running really is. And running is really basically just repetitive hopping. And then when you look at the main contributor to hopping, it's your Achilles tendon, your patellar tendon, and those structures store and release a tremendous amount of energy. And so if it were me and I were designing a strengthening program for a runner, I'd be spending a lot of time working on, you know, strengthening those tissues and the muscles that actually attach to them. The glutes don't have a large tendon attached to them. And so because of that, they don't store and release a lot of energy when we're running. When you're talking about the glutes not playing as big of a role in the running phase, it mainly talking about the propulsion phase of the running cycle. Are you talking about the whole cycle in total? Yeah, I'm really talking about the whole, the whole cycle. And when your glutes are most important is during weight acceptance. So right when your foot first hits the ground, your, your hip extensors are pretty active. And when I'm talking about hip extensors, I mean the glute max and also your hamstring musculature as well. So when you look at them, some of your hamstring muscles actually have a larger moment arm acting on the hip than your gluteus maximus does. So the big difference is of course is your glute max is so much larger from a cross sectional area standpoint. So yeah, it definitely plays a big role there. And we often think too that Our hip extensors have a big role when it comes to hip extension during that last part of, of our gait cycle. But that's really the plantar flexors. Again, your plantar flexors, when you look at the muscle modeling studies, when you look at what contributes to that propulsive force, it really comes down to your plantar flexors, you do get some load from your hip extensors, but most of it is coming from your plantar flexors. Okay. The other thing that I hear a lot is, you know, we're sitting all the time. And that switches off our glutes. And therefore when you go from sitting all the time to then running, we need to wake up our glutes or, you know, something along those lines. Um, what would you have to say about that particular narrative? Yeah. So that, that actually comes from, I think there's some, I mean, because that's really something I've heard a lot. And, you know, you, you hear that, oh, you know, you sit a lot, your, your glutes fall asleep and you, your, your hip flexors get very tight. Um, this, there's some historical, uh, I guess. source for that. And that's it's this, this crossover syndrome that, you know, was really, was very popular, I'd say 20, 25 years ago. And it still is kind of hanging on a little bit. Yeah. I would say that when you, when you stand up, if, if you're, if you like, I mean, even just the, the process of standing up, you have to use your, your glute max to stand up and to do that, you lean forward a little bit and by doing that, you know, this relatively large external moment arm acting on the hip and your hip extensors counter that and allow you to stand up. And then I think like once you, you know, if you have been sitting for a while, I mean, muscles don't like fall asleep, I would say. I mean, I think that before you go for a run, I think most people will do some sort of a warmup. And I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think for me, again, going back to what running really is, running is not this where we're pushing forward, or it's not this thing where we're falling forward. It's this activity where we're, we're basically bouncing or basically just in repetitive hopping and we're starting to repetitively hop forward and that's what running really ends up being. And so if anything, I would say if you've been sitting for a while, the thing to probably do is some light plyometrics before you go for a run, like some jumping jacks, um, just double leg hops, if you will. Um, I think that's going to be one of the best warmup exercises that you can do because you're actually going to be warming up the structures that are going to be called on the most during running. And, um, You know, I think if you look at the EMG activity, which is looking at the overall neural drive to your hip extensors or whatever muscle that you end up testing, you know, I would say that I would, I'm not aware of anybody who's really looked at that, but I would say that there's, I would think that the neural drive is not any different if you've been sitting for a while versus if you have been doing exercises for a bit either, it certainly wouldn't be a very big difference. I'm curious to get your thoughts, especially since you recommend a bit of plyometrics before running. Um, what I would usually recommend for some, or like just advise is if you're doing a slow, easy run, you don't really need to do too much unless a particular routine feels good for you, like dynamic warmups, stretches, those sorts of things. But, um, if If someone tries those things and feels indifferent when they don't do those things, um, maybe their warmup would be their slow, easy run. Um, would you recommend that? Or do you think doing some warmup plyometric exercises is still warranted? Yeah. I mean, I think for me, I would say, uh, that just the, I mean, just the, the act of running is basically just what we just talked about, which is some sort of repetitive hopping. So if you feel good going out, stepping out the door and just start of maybe start walking for a little bit and then ease into a jog. I think that's probably the best warmup really, you know? And I think if you're, if you don't have the ability to do that, I mean, I live in Montana, it's pretty cold right now here. And, um, I think for me to go out and walk for a little bit and then start easing into a jog, uh, sounds, sounds uncomfortable with how cold it is at this time of year. It's, it's, you know, it's, it's January and certainly not very warm. So for me, like this morning when I ran, I, I was in my. my house and I was doing some hopping activities before I went outside. So I was, I was getting warmed up so I could step outside and start running at a decent pace. I didn't get too cold. But I mean, but other than that, I mean, I think, I think it's, I think what you described makes a lot of sense. And I certainly, I, you know, I don't think you can really argue against that. Um, you know, the flip side of that though, too, is that, you know, if you're someone who likes to, likes to stretch before you run, um, I think that's great. I think that sometimes you'll, you'll hear that, oh, you shouldn't stretch before a run because you stretch out your. these, your, your tendons and their ability to store and release energy decreases. But that doesn't seem to really be the case unless you're doing really, really long, long stretches, several minutes in length. So I don't know. And now with that said though, is this, is that if you stretch before you run, it doesn't seem to reduce your risk of having a run-related injury. If you do stretching during, during the week, if you say like on Mondays, I'm going to do a lot of stretching that that also doesn't seem to reduce your risk of having a runner related injury, but it also doesn't increase your risk either. And so I think that going, I think flipping back to what, you know, your earlier point is the runner should do whatever they want to do is like, if that's something that feels good for them, I don't think that they should get too stuck into doing something that is, that, that has been overly, that has been prescribed to them. If it doesn't feel like it's making a big, a big difference for them. I know when I was younger, I, I certainly would start runs out a little bit differently than, than I do now that I'm 49. I kind of eased into runs a little bit more and take a little bit more time to get going. But, um, other than that, I think my, my overall routine is relatively the same. Yeah. I'm glad we're on the same page there. Cause I, I recommend the exact same thing. Try a whole bunch of different routines. You can try some stretches static and you can also try some dynamic or a mixture of both. Do it for two minutes, do it for five minutes, do none at all. And just like tested out yourself and see how you feel when you go for a run. Um, and then. See what's the best for your slow, easy run, see what's the best for your sort of tempo sort of faster runs or hill repeats, you might need to focus more on a bit more of a warmup and that sort of thing. But like you said, you'd then reassess, you know, every couple of years, change up that routine and see if that is now maybe doing more mobility work. When you do get into your fifth or sixth decade of running, you know, maybe that's starting to. tilt more in your favor, but does come with a lot of trial and error. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And I mean, I think like, if you, if you, if you look at, or if you talk to elite runners, uh, or if you go to like a big track meet and you, you're watching everybody warm up, you'll see everybody's kind of doing their own, their own thing. And there's a lot of variation even at that level. So, um, you know, I don't know. I think, I think the most important thing is that runners figure out what's going to work the best for them. I think that easing into a run makes a lot of, makes a lot of sense for, for you know, for many reasons. Um, and I think walking and then easing into, into a run, I think if I were to kind of structure it, like the best warmup, at least for a good starting place would be exactly what we talked about. It was just doing like a nice, easy walk and then easing into a run and then going from there. So, um, yeah, I think that sounds, I think that sounds good. So I would, I would certainly agree with everything you're saying. Back to the glutes. You mentioned that, okay, this has been a particular, like persistent narrative. That's, uh, we've come across it across like. health professionals, coaches, runners, strength and conditioning. Where do you think it all originated from if there's no particular premise? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that it came about, I could be wrong, but in the mid to late 90s, there started to become this awareness of how important your hip and hip external rotators are to controlling hip adduction and hip internal rotation. So that this knee valgus type mechanic. And it was certainly something that I was taught and learned. And so, and then there was this idea that, you know, if people have patellofemoral pain, there's some early biomechanical studies that showed that people that had patellofemoral pain or iliotibial band pain, that their knees tended to drift in a little bit. And so we immediately started, and then also lo and behold, you go and like look at hip strength and people who have patellofemoral pain or iliotibial band pain. And lo and behold, their hip strength is a little bit less. They tend to have less strength. And so there was this idea, well, okay, so the hip controls hip adduction and hip internotation. And we see that runners who have patellofemoral pain or iliotibial band pain, their knee tends to drift medially. Um, and they're also testing weaker. That means that the reason why they're getting patellofemoral pain or iliotibial band pain must be because their hips are not strong enough. And we need to be doing more strengthening of the hips, either that, or they're not using their hips to the same degree. So, um, so that was the idea. And so this is, I think the way physical therapy was for probably 15, 15 years or so, and there's been, you know, some really great, I would say cross-sectional studies, um, and the. that would kind of reinforce that whole idea. But I think that this gets to some of the shortcomings of doing, looking at cross-sectional studies, which is basically looking at just a moment in time, looking at people who have pain and looking at different characteristics that they might have, in this case, hip strength or hip weakness, and then also certain running biomechanics. But then people started doing these really large biomechanical studies. And what I mean by large are several hundred people. And then in those studies, they started looking at a lot of different factors, like how many miles people were running per week, how strong their hip abductors were, and so forth. And then they would follow them over time to see who would develop patellofemoral pain or iliotibial band pain or what have you. And one of the things that was really interesting was that hip weakness did not predispose people to knee injuries. And I think that that's a really important finding that still seems to be escaping, I guess collective knowledge when it comes to running related injuries is that hip strength does not seem to predispose people to either hip injuries. And it also doesn't seem to predispose people to knee injuries either. But one of the things that's really interesting about that is that once you develop knee pain, suddenly you lose hip strength. And so what a lot of people are starting to think now is that. What I mean by people, I mean scientists who are looking at this is that they're seeing that when you have knee pain, it tends to inhibit your hip muscles proximally. And so you tend to lose some ability to generate force from your gluteus maximus and gluteus medius when you're having knee pain. And lo and behold, once your knee pain goes away, that hip strength tends to come back. And so people have even looked at this a little bit like more creatively and they've experimentally induced knee pain by injecting hypertonic saline, which is this very salty solution that you put into your, your infrapatellar fat pad. And that results in a tremendous amount of knee pain that actually mimics patellofemoral pain very closely. And one of the things that you see that's really interesting is that once you do that, of course it goes away after about an hour, the people immediately lose hip strength. When it's going to be, so if you test them before you do that injection, then immediately after they lose about 20, 25% of their ability to generate force from there. their hip abductors and hip extensors. And then once that pain goes away, lo and behold, their hip strength comes back. And then the other side of that too is that then at the same time, during all this, people then, particularly in the military, as I'm sure you can imagine that knee injuries are very prevalent in the military, they started doing a lot of injury prevention type studies where they would do hip strengthening because they were getting a lot of knee injuries and so we're gonna put people through these big hip strengthening programs. And, um, strengthening your hips did not seem to reduce injuries in the military. And of course, they're doing a lot of running and walking with, with heavy loads and so forth. So it didn't seem that the strength in your hips seemed, did not seem to prevent injuries. It seems that, um, being weak does not predispose someone to having some sort of knee injury. But it seems like once you have knee pain, that it does seem to make your, your hips weaker and weaker is probably not the best term I would say. less able to produce force because once that pain goes away, that ability to produce force comes back. And so I would say though that doesn't necessarily mean that doing a lot of hip strength is not important during rehab and it's something that we really need to make sure that we're doing. But I would say that it's part of an overall kind of global loading strategy to try to get someone to be confident and accepting more load through their lower limb. And also train their nervous system. That's okay to be tolerating more load through their lower limb as well. Yeah. I can definitely see if someone is injured, whether it's consciously or unconsciously, they're a bit more apprehensive to produce in a maximum, a maximal amount of force on an injured leg, no matter if it's away from the injured side, like if they tell, if they have a sore knee and they have to like externally rotate their hips or something in a, um, a strength test, I could definitely see the brain being like, Okay. Let's, you know, not go full gas here. Let's try and protect this, this whole limb because we're injured. Um, I could definitely see that being at least one component of the reason why you can't produce that max amount of force, um, tends to make a lot of sense. Yeah. And, and, and so, you know, I think, you know, for me, and it wasn't really how I thought about it initially. And it's not really until the last couple of years where I started thinking more and more along those lines. But I mean, it's been a gradual process for me. And I think, so I don't want to sit here and say, oh, I've had all the answers all along. It's that I've been kind of along this same kind of journey as everybody else from a clinical standpoint. And back when I went for my PhD, the very first study that I did was we took a lot of runners who were uninjured and they had this running mechanic where their knee would drift inward. So this knee valgus. And we did a randomized control trial and we put them through six weeks of, you know, I would say pretty focused hip strengthening exercises, a progressive program where each week at progress and load, they were strength training three times per week. And we were doing, everything was based off like ACSM guidelines for building strength. So we had all these female runners. We looked at the running by running by mechanics before and after this hip strengthening program, our control arm of the study, those runners. They just continued to run. They didn't do any sort of hip strengthening whatsoever. And what we found was that at the end of the six weeks, our hip strength training group, they increased their hip strength by about 25%. So they had 25% gains in their hip abduction torque ability and also 25% in their hip external rotation torque ability. So our hip strengthening program was very successful at changing hip strength. But then we looked at their running biomechanics. And we found absolutely no change in their running biomechanics whatsoever. So they did not change how much hip adduction they went into, did not change how much, how much hip internal rotation they were going into either. And so I think that tells us a lot about there isn't necessarily this, this big cause and effect there, but that when we see someone moving a certain way that we have to, you know, in order to fix that, you have to strengthen the muscles that are attached or that control those motions. because it's much more of a motor control issue than it is an actual strength issue, I think for, for most, for most of these runners. It's very important to know because narrative is very important when it comes to injury and I can totally see someone having hip pain or knee pain and they see a therapist and they say, Oh, your glutes are weak. Let's strengthen you up because your knees caving in while you run. Let's strengthen up your hip. So that you don't have that knee caving in and then you do all this hip strengthening and you get better, but, and you get better because you've built up strength, like the capacity of the hips is, like you say, can increase by 25% with a particular program. And so you feel better, but then you're going away after that experience with this narrative of my glutes were weak and it's causing my need to collapse in. Um, and then people get and develop, um, that narrative a bit further by saying, I need to make sure I activate my glutes. I need to make sure that, you know, I can feel my glutes when I do my strength exercises, or I need to engage my glutes when I run, um, otherwise my knee's going to collapse in, I'm going to start getting this pain and that's, it's not only untrue, it's, it creates a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear for a lot of runners to, you know, have that narrative only, and it's very popular. I've heard it tons of times with different runners that come to me. Um, so. It's very important what we tell our runners and like the, how you sort of explain what's happening, cause you know, your research would prove that a lot of that is untrue. Yeah. I think you're a hundred percent right. And what you described is something I hear from runners all the time. The runners who ended up seeing me a lot of times have been runners who have seen other clinicians, um, and have not had the outcome that they were looking for. And when they come in, a lot of times they have these sorts of narratives, you know, in their head and it's very. And I think as a clinician, for me, these patients have kind of really clung to this narrative and it's very, I think that's one of the hardest things that I do certainly and I'm guessing you're the same, is that when you're working with a patient, it has a very kind of fearful view of either their structure or how they move as teaching them that it's okay to move in certain manners and directions and that load is actually a very good thing and load is gonna be your ticket out of this injury, but there's not necessarily something wrong with you. And so, and you know, we kind of, I touched on structure too and that's another one that we have to really talk a lot about when it comes to knee injuries is that, you know, a lot of times people think that, like if they have wider hips, like wider pelvic structure that tends to contribute to how much their knees dive in. And that's been looked at in several different studies where they've looked at the interacetabular distance. So that distance between one hip socket and the other, and they've correlated that against how much your knees dive in. And there doesn't seem to be any relationship there whatsoever, and there have been a handful of studies that have done that have been done in a very rigorous manner. And the same thing also with just looking at hip strength too, just correlating hip strength to the amount that amount of knee valgus should go into. The highest R values or correlations suggest that hip strength contributes only about eight to 10% of the total variance and how much knee valgus you go into. So that means that there's 90% other variance that's hanging out there that's not being explained by how much hip strength you have. Um, and again, it probably comes down to motor control. And, um, so there are lots of different ways that, you know, you, that if you have a runner who is doing that, that you, you can work on their knees, not diving in quite as much, but it might not even be coming from the hips at all. Because if you've ever watched someone who's had, who's had a knee injury for, like, for instance, like, uh, like an ACL reconstruction or has a very, and of course those, those individuals often tend to be very fearful of loading their knee as well. um or someone has patellofemoral pain they're often going to be very resistant to or very hesitant to bend their knee. So if they're going down steps for instance you'll see them kind of not really want to flex that knee as much but they still have to get that foot down to the next step or down to the ground and so in order to do that a lot of times they'll drop their hip or drop their pelvis down into more pelvic drop or they'll let that knee kind of dive in by and by doing that they're actually shortening the limb and they're compensating for either a painful knee or fear of bending that knee. And so that's one of the things that we see a lot with the athletes that we're working with that are recovering from ACL reconstruction or looking at their running biomechanics is that these individuals do tend to have more hip adduction when they're running, but it's because they're not flexing their knee enough when they're running. And they have to lower that mass somehow. And so they're, you know, of course it would be, if you look at them, if you just do like a gait analysis with like, if you're doing like a... standard video analysis that someone might get in a clinic, you'd be like, well, look how much that person's hip is moving and they're when they're running. And so I need to do lots of lots of hip strengthening, but the real issue is down at the knee, they're not able to accept as much weight through the knee either because they're being very fearful or they just don't have the, the amount of quad strength or capacity down there that they need to, to be accepting load through that, through, through their knee when they're running. Hmm. Yeah. significant factor, I think also just like people's habits of running. And one of them being like your step width, like we know some runners have this crossover step width, which is just habitual, it's just how they've been running and they don't really think about it, they don't really do too much about, but that would obviously cause a lot of, um, uh, a knee sort of collapsing or coming more towards the midline and. That's not strength. That's just habit. And I sort of went on a rant. I can't remember if I was on a previous podcast episode or not. But when people say, oh, your knee's collapsing in, do, you know, six to 10 weeks of strengthening to correct that. And like you say, that doesn't, that doesn't work. You'd do all this hip strength and get back on a treadmill. You'd run exactly the same, but what you can do is increase your cadence. If it's a little bit lower than optimal, or just consciously widen your step width, if you do so. If you think it's a good rationale to do that and instantly instantaneous, you have that change in mechanics and you haven't gone through that 10 weeks of strengthening. It's, um, why maybe some gate retraining might be suitable for certain people. Um, have you done much work on like step width or like widening step width, if someone does have a crossover pattern and is like constantly injured with ITV issues or knee issues and that sort of thing? Yeah, absolutely. Um, I would say that was one of the key or one of the I would say one of the top three, I think, biomechanical contributors that we see to like iliotibial band pain, for instance. And also, when you do that, and you can even see how this feels if you stand and you kind of cross your legs over and then you do a squat. Like when you go down, you'll feel a lot more pressure on your fourth and fifth metatarsals. When you do that, your knees will want to kind of bow out and that puts a lot of extra strain on your iliotibial band. And it also creates a like a twisting type force on your on your tibia. And so when you're doing that, like one of the reasons why, why people do that is what you just described is that they actually, a lot of runners take too long of a stride and when the easiest and quickest ways to fix that is to have them run with a slightly higher running cadence. And when you do that, their step with automatically will increase. You don't need really big increases in cadence to see that. You only need a five to 10% increase in running cadence to see a widening of the step width. And Catherine Boyer and Tim Derrick published a really nice paper in American Journal of Sports Medicine that they were looking at that and they correlated the step length. So how big of a step someone is taking when they're running at a given running speed. So everybody was running the same speed. The people that tended to take longer steps and they scaled it to the person's leg length. So it was normalized to leg length. Um, they found that the longer your step length was the, the greater likelihood you, you were to crossing over or having this very narrow step with. Um, and they also see that biomechanic, um, with forefoot strikers as well too, because they tend to want to make contact on the outside part of their foot. In order to do that, they will often kind of sweep their feet across the front of their body a little bit too. And so, yeah, just like you said, the easiest way to address that is by asking runners to increase their. their running cadence or step rate or whatever you want to call it by, you know, five to 10%, five to 10%. We ended up using around seven and a half percent because we find that 5% seems to, yeah, it seems to work for some runners, but not everybody. 10%, that's getting pretty high. And I think a lot of runners tend to have a hard time getting that high with their running cadence. We know that once you start getting above, up above 10% of an increase in your running cadence, the metabolic cost of running goes up and it becomes too hard to do. So that seven and a half percent is kind of nice in the middle. And we use Garmin running watches or any sort of GPS watch. Almost any watch will give you feedback on your running cadence nowadays. But that would be one of the main things that we do. We have also done it too where we've actually had runners work on running with a wider base. And so let's say you have a runner that increasing their running cadence doesn't seem to help with that. One of the things we might do is we might take them down to a track. And have them straddle two lanes. So, and that will help them kind of learn to run with a slightly wider base. And again, you don't need like big changes. What we found, we have a, we have a paper out, out shortly where we were looking at how much of a change we needed to really have as from a, from a stepwise standpoint to reduce tibial bone stress. And it really only ended up being about two and a half centimeters of a wider base. These are very, very small changes. And same thing with cadence. If you increase your running cadence by five to seven and a half percent, it's not really a big change. You can barely tell if you're just visually watching someone. This idea that we need to, you know, lean our trunks forward or convert ourselves to a four foot strike or make these big massive kinematic changes in the way we're running because we're quote unquote not running right. I think those are introducing more problems than they're actually fixing. This episode is sponsored by the Run Smarter app. This includes all my free and paid content along with housing the Patreon exclusive podcast episodes. You can download this free app by searching Run Smarter app in your app directory and start scrolling through past podcast episodes, blogs and videos. You'll find categories like injury prevention, running misconceptions, strength and performance and of course injury specific information. You've already learned a lot listening to the podcast. Why not kick it up one more gear? through the Run Smarter app. I'm glad to talk about that because if I do see someone who has a narrow or crossover step width, like there needs to be justification to change it to start with, but, you know, I usually start with increasing their cadence. And I say to them, if you increase your step rate, you simply don't have enough time to crossover, you know, your body just doesn't have that enough time to do that. So it will place it a bit more underneath the body. But if they have a high cadence, and it's still crossing over, then I like to widen to say just consciously try and step wider, but almost everyone that I do that they overdo it, they step too wide and they start like, you know, moving side to side in a very like inefficient manner. And I'm glad that you said that because I say it needs to be like an inch, just move it by an inch and see how you feel. And so I'm glad you're doing work on that actually talk to Chris Brammer, a researcher in the UK about his research on pathological sort of biomechanical issues. And I asked him about step with, and he doesn't really, well, that was about two years ago, but he said at that time, he didn't really do much work with step width. So I'm glad there's, I have seen the research on ITB strain and how correlates with step width and that sort of stuff. So I'm glad it's being worked on. Yeah, you know, before I get, Oh, sorry, I was just gonna just add on that. Like Chris's study, and you know, I know Chris relatively well, like his, that. his paper that was published in AGSM and one of the things that he had, he found in there was this pathological gait pattern, which is this excess of hip or contralateral pelvic drop. And because you see that with a lot of running related injuries. And going back to what I said just a couple of minutes ago, well, that's because a lot of running related injuries are indeed knee injuries and they're not wanting to accept load through the knee. And so they end up dropping their pelvis quite a bit more. So I think that's a good, I don't know, maybe we could call it a that there's an injury that the runner has an injury. I would say that I would be careful because again, that's a cross-sectional study, I would be careful saying, Hey, this is the reason why people get running related injuries. Yeah. It's trying to get a snapshot in time and trying to, um, paste a kind of conclusion, cause if you say, um, a hip drop and very associated with someone being classified as injured, um, some people might draw a conclusion, oh, it's hip weakness and that's causing that hip drop and there's hit that hip weakness is then maybe causing that injury. But like you say, if you that's just taking a snapshot in time. But if you have a look at a whole bunch of healthy runners, hip strength, and then see if they get injured in the future, there's no correlation between hip strength and injuries. So very good to clear those things up. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think like one of the for me, one of the I would say one of the most important studies for me in the last five years was a paper. that came out of North Carolina that Steve Messier's group did. And it was a large study. I think they had 500 and some runners in their study. And this also was published in American Journal of Sports Medicine. And they did a biomechanical analysis of these runners. And then they followed them for I think a full year. And they had a full spectrum of ages and everything like that. And they were trying to identify and they had, it was a mixed sex cohort as well. So it was, and it was, and they had them, they they checked in with the runners on a very regular basis and they only found, I think of the 20 some biomechanical variables that they found, the only one that they found that seemed to relate to risk of getting a running related injury was increase in knee stiffness. Hip adduction didn't contribute to a risk of running related injury. One of the things that was really interesting, the strongest finding that they had was an increased and perceived stress and a perfectionism type personality trait, that was the number one contributor or predictor that someone was gonna get injured is if they were very, if they were reported having a high rate of life stress and they were tended to view themselves as perfectionist. Those are the people that ended up. getting injured the most not there was no, and strength didn't seem to make that much difference either on, and I think they looked at hip strength and also quad strength as well. Yeah. And there's been a ton of podcast episodes I've done the past linking stress to injury and perfectionism and that sort of stuff. So yeah, I'm glad that sort of comes full circle. I'm going to ask this patron question before we move on. Cause I think, well, first of all, I've already answered it and while we may have already answered it, but it's I'm liking the direction that this is. coming into, but have to answer some of these questions. Craig, a patron here asks, I've seen exercises such as donkey kicks, glute bridges and clam shells. And he's done them before and is asking, does it help prevent injuries? Is there any benefit in doing them after a run as well? So I guess these exercises are pretty common. I see a lot of people doing clam shells, maybe trying to wake up their glutes and those sorts of things. Where are we in terms of preventing injury and where are we in terms of maybe doing them? after a run to be a better. Yeah. I think those are, I always definitely agree. I think those are some of the running, the injury or the, the types of extras that you see runners will do a lot. Um, you know, when you look at the amount of load that the person is experiencing when they're doing like a donkey kick or like a clam shell or type stuff, something like that, the overall load is, is pretty low. Um, and so they're talking about basically almost doing like body weight or even less type exercise. So. Strengthening is one of the most important things that we can do for our musculoskeletal health. It improves our tendon stiffness. It improves our bone density. It helps our metabolic health as well. And we also know that strengthening will improve our running economy. The evidence on that is, I would say, is getting to be pretty strong and also improves our running performance. And so what I would say that those extras, thinking about strengthening your hips, I think, let's not leave out the other muscles, but I would get into the gym and do some work on doing some squats, some Romanian deadlifts. And I really love Bulgarian split squats. I think that's one of the best exercises that are, that's out there. And, and don't be shy about throwing on some load. So I would say right on, you know, doing the hip strengthening is a great idea, but I would say let's get in there and do some other exercise. And also let's do some calf, some heavy calf raises as well, or heel raises at the same time. Yeah. We're definitely on the same wavelength there. I think, um, the squats, the deadlifts are great. uh, the, when it comes to like glute strength, particularly like the glute medius, um, you probably need to be on like a single leg, which is why your Bulgarian split squats, which for those who aren't familiar, it's like a lunge, but your back leg is elevated on like a bench or a chair or something. Um, that is kind of a really nice combination of it being kind of single leg, but able to provide heavy load. Like you can, you know, have a, um, a barbell or a a weighted vest or dumbbells hold on to those because I find if someone does single leg squats, very, very tough to add load to that, to hold on to dumbbells because you're off balance, you know, it's, it's really, really tricky. So I think like a lunge or a weighted step up or a Bulgarian split squats, that perfect combination of having enough stability that you can really load them up, but it's still being single leg that you're stimulating the glutes, the glute medius and that particular you know, muscle group. Yeah, I think when you're looking at certain populations, strengthening the glutes is really important, particularly your gluteus medius. And that would be, when you look at tendon related injuries, gluteal tendinopathy is a really common injury, particularly when you get into a male, like masters runners, particularly female masters runners. And I think for them, I would say that that's gonna be a really important muscle group to hit. And I do think that doing some of the exercises that we talked about would be great additions. I think doing a cable column, like this just straight standing and doing some isolated hip abduction work, I think it'd be really good. That's a great option. I'm just throwing out some other options for listeners to try out, but also doing some side planks where they're progressively getting themselves and making sure that they're getting their hips forward over top. So they're kind of a nice straight line. I think it's also a really great glute medius strengthening exercise as well. Hmm. Well, just say for those very, again, a very common question or fears that people come to me with is they do their glute exercises and they can only feel activation on one side. It's like, okay, I do my glute bridge single leg. I get a lot of fatigue in one side and then I do the other side. I just can't feel my glutes activating. So if you have that discrepancy, how relevant is that? And how much should we focus on it? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think like running looks like a very symmetrical activity. And so we would think that we would have very symmetrical strength as well. And so when you look at running biomechanics standpoints, people have looked at this, looked at biomechanical asymmetries to see if they can predict a running related injury. And that doesn't seem to really pan out super well as far as it doesn't seem to really predict who's going to get injured. When you look at strength deficits, I don't know if that's really been looked at a lot. We certainly see it when someone's trying to recover from a post-operative procedure, like post-operatively, like after an ACL reconstruction, it does seem that asymmetry does seem to matter. When you're doing the exercises, if you're feeling the exercise more on one side than the other, yeah, you might have some side-to-side strength deficits, and you're probably noticing that when you're doing the exercise with how many plates you have on your weight machine. Um, why is that? That's a, that's a, that's a hard, it's a hard answer to, uh, it's a hard, hard question to answer. I don't really know. I don't really know why that is. Um, you know, it may be that there's a, there's a past injury there. Um, you know, I, I would put myself in that category. So I, I had, um, I had a hip arthroscopy, uh, about a decade ago. And to this day, my, um, it seems to really inhibit my, my left quadricep. So I always have to do a little extra work on my left quadriceps. We're doing some knee extensions and also my left hip flexor as well. I always have to do some extra strength. And I feel that exercise, I started getting fatigued way earlier than I do on my opposite limb. And so there might be just a past injury that's there that may be causing some inhibition. Yeah, it's really hard to say exactly why. Okay. So... probably as a takeaway, if there is a fatigue pattern deficit or a strength deficit, it's probably, uh, you know, relevant enough to focus on it and start doing some individual work. Uh, but probably not too important in translation to your running. If your mechanics aren't that affected. Because I think if someone really believes one glutes firing more than the other. And then they start running. You'd expect like some limping or you'd expect some sort of like obvious, um, biomechanical changes, but if they're not producing that, then maybe it's not as much of an issue when it comes to the running side of things, just make sure your training loads are in check. Yeah, I think so. I think that makes a lot of sense. Um, you know, I think that, uh, I mean, you know, a good way to think about it is if you if you were using your max strength, and again, I'm a huge proponent of doing strengthening with runners. It's one of the things that I probably advocate the most. But at the same time, if you used your max strength every step you took, you'd wear out, you'd get tired pretty quickly. You know what I mean? And so the muscle dynamics are much different when we run as well. And so when you're lifting, you're getting this muscle that is shortening and lengthening and it's doing, and you can watch that muscle move. So when you're doing some sort of strength training exercise, but when you look at running, running is really interesting in that the muscle, the muscular tendinous dynamics are much different. The muscle almost stays isometric and your Achilles tendon is stretching and then that's recoiling back and it's snapping back and that's that energy storage and release. Um, so I had this really great video that I have, or I have someone doing a calf raise and the person's doing the calf raise and you can see their, their gastrocnemius moving up and down. And as they're doing this calf raise, and then I have the exact same person hopping in place, but that gastrocnemius is not moving at all, but you can see the tendon really stretching there quite a bit. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, running is this, is this basically this big hopping activity. And so the most important thing when we do strength training, and this is probably the reason why. why strength training is so effective when it comes to improving our bone health and our tendon health is that it's not so much being strong that's important, it's the act of getting strong. And so when you go into the gym and you do a lot of progressive loading, you're not just loading that muscle, you're loading that tendon that is attached to it, you're loading that bone that is attached to it. And so a good rule of thumb is that the stronger a muscle is, the stronger the underlying bone is gonna be and the stronger that attached tendon is gonna be as well. And that's typically where we get injured as runners. We tend to get injured in our tendons. We tend to get injured in our bones from bone stress injuries or medial tibial stress syndrome. And so if you're going into the gym, even if you feel like you're strong in a certain area, still do the strengthening exercises because all the structures that are attached to that muscle are gonna get a very nice, very important benefit from doing that we just don't see with running. Running alone does not seem to be adequate enough to improve tissue tolerance in our tendons and our bones. to the point where you've got this extra kind of safety margin that can potentially help us as far as keeping a healthy musculoskeletal system and also keeping our bone and tendon health where it needs to be. And certainly when it comes to recovering from injuries also. Yeah. I can't remember the exact study, but I looked at one looking at tendon synthesis and the response. comparison from like doing a really heavy, I think they did a knee extension at like 85% one RM and compare that to running and you had to get to like 35 Ks of running to meet the same amount of tendon synthesis, then just doing, you know, three sets of 10 for that max out effort. And so it goes to show that stimulus is just so different when it comes to the slow heavy load and you can get so much stronger and so much more efficient way of doing so rather than just trying to rely on you're running volumes to get stronger. Yeah, those are the, yeah. The paper you're talking about is the paper from Magnuson. It was published in 2010 and, and it shows that really well. It shows that what happens is that you, the, um, the tendon ends up getting saturated, um, with running and it doesn't seem to get it. It just seems like it takes so much more running, um, to get the same benefit in that tendon as it would just going into the gym and doing some, some heavy strength training with it. So. Yeah, we see the exact same thing with bone, but bone does a little bit better with faster, more rapid loading, so more like hopping. So plyometrics seem to cause the type of twisting and bending of bone that the bone is going to respond the best to. But bone behaves in the very same way in that you could do all the running in the world that you want, but all you're going to have are the bones of a runner. But what you really want to have are the bones of a gymnast who's running. And that's one of the things that we see is that people who did a lot of gymnastics or a lot of ball type sports between the ages of nine and 12 or nine and 13, that ends up giving people this kind of lifelong benefit of reducing their risk of developing a bone stress injury. And we also see that in adults too, that if they do some hopping activities, it will improve their overall bone health and hopefully that'll reduce their risk of developing a bone stress injury. Hmm. One thing I heard you on another podcast, which I found very interesting was the fact that it's not necessarily the ground reaction force that stimulates a lot of bone tissue to grow. It's more the tendons pulling on the bone. And to use the example of running downhill and getting a lot of that ground reaction force, it probably isn't that the stimulus we're after compared to running uphill where the muscles tugging on the bone a lot more and creating that stimulus. Am I right with saying that or did I interpret that? No, you're absolutely correct. Yeah. And so, yeah, it's really funny. We used to think that the impacts were really important and they certainly are. But what's more important is the muscle that gets you off the ground, up in the air that then when you land, what's going to attenuate that load is not the bone, but the muscle itself. So, so much so that if you cue someone to land stiff, versus you cue them to land very soft, the person who's gonna get more bone load is gonna be the person who's landing softer. And the reason for that is that the muscle is attenuating that impact. So when you look at gymnasts, when gymnasts are doing their tumbling and stuff like that, they tend to land very, very stiff. And when they're doing that, their bone forces are certainly high, but if they were to land very soft, and that's gonna give you the bigger bone forces or bone... bone stress and it's because the muscle that the muscle is attenuating that load and that muscle is attached to the bone. And so it kind of goes back to some of the other things, like, you know, if you think about like where we were a decade ago with like born to run and, and everything, like everybody's really worried about impact forces and when you're running off, you're, if you're, if you're, you have really high impact forces, this kind of increase your risk of developing a bone stress injury. And so we started queuing everybody to run softer and then. And then really what happened there is that when you're doing that, you're actually, you're actually increasing their overall bone stress. And so when you look at runners who were a rear foot striker, a lot of runners at that time would, they were like, oh, they read born to run or whatever, and then they decided to become a forefoot striker. And so of course, what's attenuating that load are your plantar flexors, your calf muscles, and lo and behold, when you look at the bone stress studies, when you're looking at people that convert to a forefoot strike pattern, it actually increases their bone stress and their tibia, even though they're landing very soft and stuff. And so that just goes to show you how important muscle is. And when you look at your ground reaction forces, when you're running, most of us are around two and a half times our body weight when we hit the ground. So that's the ground you're hitting the ground and the ground is reacting and pushing back up against you. But when you look at tibial bone force when you run, it's about nine body weights. So if you subtract out, the two and a half times your body weight of that vertical ground reaction force, you still have seven and a half body weights that are still out there. And that contributor is coming from your muscles and in particular your soleus and your gastrocnemius. And that's why, for instance, if you ever are treating someone who has an anterior tibial cortex bone stress injury, so this is a very risky bone stress injury that's on the front of the tibia, it's very hard to manage it. And every time that your plantar flexors, your calves contract, what it will do is it'll gap that fracture and it will keep it from healing. And that's why those people need to be in non-weight bearing is so that they're not using their plantar flexors. So you can allow that fracture fissure to basically to heal because otherwise it'll never heal because the muscle, even just with the act of walking is getting bent quite a bit. Yeah, I think people. of underestimate how violent of a pull or a tug that tendons and muscles have on bone and how much of like contributes to almost like trying to bend the bone in some way for the long bones anyway and that's exactly the type of stimulus a lot of the bone needs to adapt and get stronger and become more dense and all those sorts of things. So yeah, very interesting. A conversation I never thought we'd have when I wrote out the template that we had for glute activation and glute myth and that sort of stuff. But, um, yeah, I had like this, this sort of stuff. Like when I just, I just like geeking out about this stuff and happy to take these tangents, um, but I guess summing up the conversation today, particularly around the glutes and glute myths and that sort of stuff, is there any other final takeaways or comments or maybe something we hadn't covered that you think the listeners would want to take away? No, I mean, I, you know, I don't, I don't think so. I think. Yeah, I think you kind of hit on it really well. I think that this idea that you, your, your glutes are asleep or that, they're not, you're not activating them or using them enough. I think that I would encourage runners to, to really work on moving away from that narrative because the glutes just aren't, they are really important with running, but there's certainly are other muscle groups that are, that are, that are far more important. And. I mean, the best thing you can do when you go for a run rather than worrying about what muscles you're activating, just go for a run and do that. And, you know, and I think at the same time, I think it's important to keep in mind too, that strengthening is still really important from an overall musculoskeletal health standpoint, but also overall metabolic. And we're starting to see the benefits of doing strengthening when it comes to even cognitive health as well as we age. And so I would say to runners is still go in the gym. And when you go there, don't worry about doing a lot of body weight strengthening exercises, get in there and lift some heavy weights. And maybe replace one of your at least one of your running days with that. Don't necessarily think that you need to, you know, add that load on top of the running that you're already doing. But, you know, mix it up a little bit and get out and run and don't worry about your glutes fall asleep. They'll be okay. You're not going to forget them. And I will say too, is that like it's okay to challenged what you've been thinking for a while, because that's one of the things that I've, for me in my career has been really helpful for me is to always think about like, okay, well, why do I think that? And now let's go see if I'm, if I need to maybe make some adjustments and try to write down the three, three or four reasons why I hold a belief really strong on the end I go and I, and I see if I can prove myself wrong. And, and, and that's for me, I think that's really served me very well from a, just from a personal and professional growth standpoint. Yeah. I definitely respect those that I. follow on social media that are happy to change over the years as they sort of learn more and more research comes out, that they actually start to change their advice on things or change their narrative or certain stances on things and are very upfront and honest, whereas some people like to double down on a particular narrative when in the face of new evidence that sort of counters that belief, they sort of actually go the opposite way instead of changing or like, you know, doing a bit of a thought experiment, it tends to go the opposite way. So I like to gravitate my war myself towards people that do like, a very upfront, honest, happy to change their opinions, because that's all it is just an opinion. And the work that you do is extremely beneficial to helping runners and helping researchers and health professionals and the social media that you're active on, I've got your Twitter. So I really 2003 and I've got your Instagram, Montana running lab. Is there any other social media tags or websites or anything that you want me to include in the show notes? I think that's the main thing. I would, I would say that Instagram is probably where we're putting, you know, I'm putting most of my efforts there now. I think I just find that the conversation to be, I enjoy it a lot more. I like the, I really like the visual part of, of Instagram. And so I, I've had a lot of fun. you know, making infographics and stuff like that in last year. And it really helps me figure out better ways to explain the literature or interpret the literature. And so I would say that, you know, that's kind of where I spend most of my time. I find myself even less and less on Twitter, but so yeah, if you want to follow me on Twitter, you're more than happy to, and I definitely respond to tweets on there as well. But yeah, those are the two social media platforms I'm on. Yeah. Well, a lot of the listeners will gravitate towards those accounts because this is what the, the thought ethos of the podcast is it's running smarter and the emerging research and the stuff that you talk about right in line with that sort of stuff. So everyone go check out, uh, particularly on Instagram. I follow you on Instagram as well. And like you say, the visuals are very impressive. Um, so thank you very much. Thank you for all you do for the running community as well. The amount of research that you've done. The amount of publications I've read of your research has been tremendously helpful to my development and understanding of running injuries and injury prevention, that sort of stuff as well. So thanks from the academic side of things and thanks a lot for coming on and sharing your thoughts on the podcast. Thanks, Brody. That's very kind. I mean, it's great. I love the fact that I don't know. I can't even believe people read papers that are right sometimes. So it's a lot of fun that they, that they seem to inform what people are doing. So that's great. Thank you very much. That's very kind. And that concludes another Run Smarter lesson. I hope you walk away from this episode feeling empowered and proud to be a Run Smarter scholar. Because when I think of runners like you who are listening, I think of runners who recognize the power of knowledge, who don't just learn but implement these lessons, who are done with repeating the same injury cycle over and over again, who want to take an educated, active role in their rehab. who are looking for evidence-based long-term solutions and will not accept problematic quick fixes. And last but not least, who serve a cause bigger than themselves and pass on the right information to other runners who need it. I look forward to bringing you another episode and helping you on your Run Smarter path.