0:05 We're going to go superficial to deep. So let's start with the external obliques. 0:10 Now your external obliques fiber direction, which way does it go? This way 0:17 right. The way your fingers would be if you put your hands in your front pockets. 0:23 So you guys can write external obliques front pockets, to help you guys out a 0:29 little bit. How many of you guys look at pictures of bodybuilders and fitness 0:33 models, and you know you've seen a muscle and fitness magazine or a shape magazine, 0:38 and people get all striated in here right, you see the lines. Which direction 0:43 do those lines always go? Right because your external obliques are external 0:49 right, they're the ones that are most superficial that's what we're seeing. So 0:53 if the fiber direction is this way alright this muscle goes like this, 1:00 what joint actions is it going to cause? Yeah which rotation is it? If this 1:09 muscle shortens what's gonna happen to my spine? It's going to rotate this way? 1:22 Alright if this muscle shortens it's going to twist me this way right, which 1:28 would be contralateral rotation. So we got external obliques 1:49 contralateral rotation, what else might they do? Okay so we got we got the 2:02 obliquity thing, I told you guys muscles with a diagonal usually do 2:05 rotation, we got rotation out. There's got to be a couple other things this muscle 2:09 will do though. It's going to help with flexion right, because the obliques do lie in 2:16 front of the lumbar spine right, this is the joint that they cross there in front 2:22 of it. So external obliques flexors of the spine. I'm gonna say yeah. What else 2:34 might they do? Lateral flexion. How many of you guys think lateral flexion? Yeah I 2:42 mean how do people try to work their external obliques 2:45 a.k.a their love handles, because they're trying to spot reduce the fat over their 2:50 external obliques which absolutely doesn't work, and then they do an 2:53 exercise which is kind of ridiculous we already talked about this yesterday. They 2:57 do this one right we talked about this. Well your external obliques actually are 3:02 not your primary lateral flexor of the spine, 3:05 but do they lie lateral to the spine? Sure so they'll definitely help a little 3:11 bit, it will definitely help. 3:22 Now the other thing you have up on that chart there and this is more just some 3:29 extra information for you guys, we were talking about connective tissue this 3:34 morning right, when you open up a cadaver you don't see all these pretty red 3:38 muscles, you see a lot of white connective tissue that is especially 3:44 true in this area. The most superficial thing here on your six-pack is not your 3:53 rectus abdominis, but this abdominal connective tissue. And 3:58 you guys see a little evidence of that because what actually makes the 6-pack? 4:02 You have the Linea Alba which is the connective tissue in the middle and 4:08 then all of this these transverse little separations, which are also made of 4:13 connective tissue. They're probably there because connective tissue with its 4:18 rigidity and strength, probably improve the overall strength and ability for the 4:25 rectus abdominus to prevent what? What don't we want to do with the lumbar 4:30 spine? Forceful hyperextension right. So we have a nice nice bit of connective 4:37 tissue here to help help the rectus abdominus to its job. Just reinforce it a 4:42 bit. I think that's one of the next muscles up here, yeah rectus abdominus. 4:45 This one should be pretty easy for you guys right. Rectus abdominus runs, which 4:52 way does its fibers run? Up and down. 5:03 So it runs up and down in front of the spine. What plane do you think it's 5:08 probably going to work best in? It's a sagittal plane muscle, being that it's a 5:13 sagittal plane muscle and it's in front of the spine, what do we think it's going to 5:17 do as far as joint actions? Flexion. I 5:27 always love every once in a while I get these calls from like a writer for like one of 5:33 the magazines or whatever, and of course what do they always ask what's the best 5:39 exercise for the abs. And of course what are they talking about when they say abs 5:44 rectus abdominus, and my answer is always the same. 5:49 What's the best exercise for the rectus abdominus? Flexion. Do you have anything 5:58 other than flexion? No that's what the rectus abdominus does well. What else 6:07 could the rectus abdominus do a little bit of? Does anybody know? Like think 6:10 about your tilts, you remember your pelvic tilts right, it'll do this. Isn't 6:16 this still spinal flexion though? Yeah you have to do spinal flexion to 6:19 posteriorly tilt. So they'll be like so so the the rectus abdominus just is flexing? 6:25 Yeah and it'll posterior tilt your pelvis. But what do you mean? Oh you can 6:30 do a crunch, or you can do a reverse crunch. 6:35 I guess isometrically you could do a plank. Would anything else really affect 6:44 the rectus abdominus all that much? No. No the truth is when we look at EMG studies 6:51 guess what has the highest activity for the rectus abdominus? Crunches, reverse 6:58 crunches, like those things that actually do the action of really not that 7:03 complicated right. What keeps most people from having a 6-pack, is it the 7:07 exercise they chose? It's diet. How do you get a six-pack? 7:13 Shut your face, move your glutes right. 7:20 You want to get that tattooed, that was actually the original title of my first 7:24 book, and the agents were like you can't have shut your face and move your ass as 7:30 the title of your book, that's not going to work, and I was like why not. Internal obliques, 7:39 internal obliques. So we talked about external obliques being this way right, 7:44 those are the muscles you can see, it's fiber direction as if you put your hands 7:49 in your front pockets. Guess which way the internal obliques go? This way all 7:55 right. So it's like the direction your fingers would be if you put your hands 7:59 in your back pockets. You guys cool with that. 8:10 Internal obliques, so which way, what what joint actions are we looking at? Rotation. 8:21 We got the obliquity, we know it's on a diagonal. We know it's probably going to 8:24 contribute to rotation. You got to tell me ipsilateral or contralateral though. 8:28 If it's this way and it's going to shorten, and you guys see how that would shorten. 8:36 Exactly exactly ipsilateral, all right. What else might it do? Lateral, lateral 8:56 flexion. Yeah it's on the side of the, it's on the side of the lumbar spine. 9:00 I'll say lateral flexion. You guys think this can contribute to a sagittal plane 9:12 motion, like you can contribute to flexion or extension. 9:20 Flexion, why flexion? It's still in front of the lumbar spine right. Now remember 9:28 your lumbar spine is way back here, so all these anterior core muscles that 9:33 we spend so much, that we give so much attention right in the popular media, 9:38 they're pretty much all flexors. 9:50 Everybody's got this. 10:06 So yeah so this does get a little confusing, the contralateral versus ipsi- 10:10 lateral thing. So if you guys, let's pick two points right. These both, both these 10:16 muscles have pretty broad origins, pretty broad insertions, but let's take 10:19 the external obliques first, since we covered those first. Put one finger on 10:25 your ASIS okay, and then put one finger back on your ribs all right. Now try to 10:34 bring those two fingers closer. Which which direction did I rotate? I ended up 10:47 rotating a little bit to the left right, so that's rotation to the opposite side. 10:53 the muscle is on. Contra means against, right against our away, so that's 10:59 contralateral rotation. Now let's do the same thing with the internal obliques. 11:04 Let's pick a point, let's let's pick this little angle of your ribs here right, and 11:10 all the sudden changes let's do that one. Point on your posterior ilium and now 11:16 try to bring your fingers closer together. Yeah you guys see how that 11:22 works. So now we have a muscle on the right is rotating me which direction? To 11:29 the right. So that's the same side that would be ipsilateral. You want to totally 11:34 freak yourselves out? When I rotate to the left, which oblique am i working? 11:43 Oh yeah right external oblique right, but my left internal oblique. Muscles work 11:56 best in the direction of their fibers. Isn't it kind of true that if I rotate 11:59 this way, that this external oblique and this internal oblique kind of have the 12:06 same fiber direction, and then if I go the other way its. Transverse abdominus, 12:18 how many of you guys have heard of this muscle? Definitely a muscle a lot of 12:22 people talk about. Definitely a muscle of a lot of controversy. But the transverse 12:30 abdominus is an interesting one, because 12:36 what joint action based on its fiber direction do you guys think this muscle 12:43 does? 12:49 Which is the fiber direction is is what? It's transverse right, that's why it's 12:57 called the transverse abdominus because its fibers are orientated transversely. Its 13:02 origin and insertion is basically the thoracolumbar fascia. 13:08 It's a little different than that in textbooks but you guys get what I'm 13:11 saying. The attachment goes from here, it 13:14 wraps all the way around and goes right back into here. So when it contracts what 13:19 actually happens? It's basically your weight belt right. You guys remember like, 13:29 you guys seen the big guys with like the, and they do, they have the big weight 13:33 belts and they it's like pull them as tight as they can before they get 13:35 underneath something like a squat, that's what this muscle is supposed to do. it's 13:42 supposed to cinch everything up ,which what that ends up doing is increasing 13:50 intra-abdominal pressure. 14:10 It also tightens this piece of fascia back here right, this thoracolumbar 14:17 fascia, it pulls it like this really tight. Is that gonna help stabilize my 14:22 lumbar spine? A little bit - yeah. It's like having guy wires on each side just 14:27 getting pulled really really tight So it'll increase stiffness in the 14:32 thoracolumbar fascia. 14:46 TLF not to be confused with the TFL right, we think that these two things 14:54 together increase the stabilization of the lumbar spine so that make sense. 15:21 Now there's some varying opinions on how effective that is, 15:24 but if you guys want to write down a couple researchers there's, I know 15:29 some of you guys are way into the core you got Richardson Hodges and Heinz, so 15:36 I'm gonna put Richardson et al. Then there's another guy named McGill who has 15:44 a little different theory, and then another guy named Liebenson who has 15:52 more research and a different approach. A lot of stuff out there. You guys heard of 16:01 your multifidi. 16:06 Yeah so your multifidi are interesting little muscles, they're 16:12 fairly deep and they go from spinous process to transverse process. Spinous 16:24 process-transverse process, spinous process-transverse process. Very 16:28 segmentally. They're on the back of the lumbar spine 16:33 so what joint actions do you think they do? Extension, sure they have an obliquity 16:41 so what else might they can contribute to? Rotation. 17:03 So we got extension, rotation, and what we believe that's really important about 17:23 these muscles, these aren't the big extensors of the lumbar spine right. 17:27 These little tiny muscles that you see in those pictures, but they have 17:32 something different than the other extensors we're about to talk about, 17:35 which is they're segmentalIy innervated. They cross only a couple segments at a 17:42 time, so we think they're important for what we call segmental stabilization. 17:48 Which is basically, if you thought of your lumbar spine like Jenga, you guys 17:55 know the game Jenga, right you got to keep all your bricks stacked up, So if 18:01 these were the bodies of my lumbar vertebrae right, I got my five little 18:11 blocks there, what we think these muscles do is when movement or pathology or 18:19 dysfunction cause our blocks to be this way, 18:32 it might be these muscles that aren't doing their job. When movement causes us 18:40 to do something like that, one of our blocks to move out of place, we think 18:44 that these muscles doing their job will cause these blocks to do what? Straighten 18:52 back out again, does that make sense .So your multifidus 18:59 basically keep your blocks aligned. You guys ever heard the term segmental 19:06 stabilization? No. You would. That's segmental stabilization. All we're 19:13 talking about is keeping our block stacked on. It's a pretty bad thing right, 19:17 if one block slides over the other starts moving out of place, instinctively 19:23 guys do you think that's a good thing? No probably not. So we think the multifidi 19:29 have a big role in this. This is the joint actions they'll help with, but 19:36 this might be their more important function. Just like when we talked about 19:39 the rotator cuff, we talked about the rotator cuff doing external rotation, 19:42 internal rotation, abduction. But what was their important function? Dynamic 19:47 stabilization of the shoulder right. Same thing with the multifidi and the 19:51 TVA, they have an action, but their function-stabilize the lumbar spine. 20:02 Alright let's look at another big mover. 20:11 No no so the multifidi are very deep and lie right against the the facet joints 20:19 of the lumbar spine. Your TVA actually more or less stops at the thoracolumbar 20:25 fascia. Your multifidi there's layers to the thoracolumbar fascia it lies with, 20:32 sandwiched between a couple of those layers. Does that kind of make sense? I got a 20:38 bunch of pictures online, if you guys go to those muscular Anatomy articles, you 20:41 look up multifdi, you look up transverse abdominus; I have tons and 20:45 tons of pictures showing like cross-sections and stuff, so you get a 20:48 good idea of where all of this stuff exists relative to something else. The 20:57 erector spinae. 21:02 Alright I'm going to ask a question knowing that I'm probably going to get 21:07 twelve-year-old laughs out of it, what does it mean to erect something? To 21:14 stand it up right. So if my erector spinae will erect me or stand me back up 21:32 and I started down here, what joint action is that for the spine? 21:37 It's extension. I like the erector spinae. I like the 21:49 little muscles of the back the erector spinae, even the multifidi, I just like 21:53 the way they're shaped, I think they're shaped cool, you know what I'm talking about? Looks 21:57 like an upside down Christmas tree. 22:01 Alright so if only this side of the erector spinae contracted, what would 22:07 happen to my spine? Yeah contribute just a little bit to lateral flexion. 22:29 You guys realize how long your erector spinae are? Yeah exactly, so just keep in 22:37 mind all the way down to your sacrum, all the way up to your mastoid process, 22:43 depending on which of the erector spinae muscles we're talking about. Another 22:48 thing to keep in mind, something once you guys start digging a little deeper into 22:51 your Anatomy is, is there one erector spinae muscle? Yeah, is there only one 23:01 erector spinae muscle? Yeah there's actually three, and they all do a 23:06 slightly different thing. So you have your spinalis, your iliocostalis and 23:13 your longissimus. You know at this level your okay calling it the erector spinae. 23:20 Like I said your next level once you guys get into graduate school, you start 23:25 tearing things apart, maybe do some cadaver work, you're gonna start needing 23:29 to know all of the different erector spinae muscles. 23:40 How many pushups per ring? I'm going to make you start dancing if it happens again. 23:54 You have to dance until you get your ringer to stop. Alright so what do I mean 24:01 by bilaterally and unilaterally, great question. So bilaterally means what? Both 24:07 sides. If both sides of my erector spinae fire at the same time, what are they 24:14 going to do? They're going to pull down on my spine, 24:17 pull down on my ribcage and I'm going to do this. But if only one side 24:21 unilaterally right, like unicorn one horn right, unilaterally pull down, what's 24:26 going to happen to my spine? This. Well we could see, this is where the layers come 24:36 in right, if we start dividing out these erector spinae muscles we'll see that at 24:41 least one of them will contribute a little bit to rotation, and that's one of 24:46 the larger erector spinae muscles being your iliocostalis. Usually when you see 24:52 that word cost, C O S T, costa, costol right it has to do with the ribs. Iliocostalis 25:01 is the big erector spinae muscle which goes into the ribcage, and it probably 25:05 can cause a little bit of that rotation. 25:14 Yes yeah it kind of looks like a Christmas tree depending on which one 25:20 we're talking about, but it'll be like the iliocostalis does this right. The 25:28 spinalis just goes from spinous process to spinous process like this. 25:40 The function of this class guys is to is to get down the joint actions. I'm 25:44 excited though because you guys are starting to ask deeper and deeper questions. But 25:48 as I kind of mentioned earlier when we were just warming up and going through 25:52 our Q&A today, this doesn't ever stop. It's one of the exciting things about 25:57 getting into this field is, like there are, we keep calling rabbit holes right. 26:03 There are rabbit holes to jump down forever, you find something you're into 26:07 you can just keep going, as I mentioned those those functional Anatomy articles 26:11 that I have up on my site, talking like six seven pages of text on one muscle, 26:18 and then pictures, and videos and illustrations and diagrams, and research. 26:26 Depending on what muscle you talk about you may have hundreds of research 26:30 studies to look at. Fun stuff. Quadratus lumborum, 26:46 how many of you guys have heard of this muscle before? Cool, so this muscle goes 26:59 from my 12th rib to my posterior ilium. The thing I want you guys to keep in mind 27:07 though, this isn't a superficial muscle like out here, 27:14 it's a twelfth rib to posterior ilium with some connections into these 27:19 transverse process; it's actually a very deep muscle, comparatively. Your erector 27:25 spinae are on top of them, your latissimus dorsi, transverse abdominus, 27:31 internal and external oblique, on top of them. So it's fairly deep it's like just 27:36 like this. What joint action do you think it's going to cause? Lateral flexion. 27:42 Anything else? Where would it have to be to cause extension? They'd have to be 27:52 here right, they'd have to be somewhere behind 27:54 the lumbar, at least on the spinous process, be behind the bodies of the vertebra, 27:59 this is right here. No rotation, what would it have to have to do rotation? 28:05 Some sort of obliquity, come forward a little bit, this is this is lateral 28:10 flexion. In fact your quadratus lumborum is your primary lateral flexor. This 28:17 exercise -quadratus lumborum exercise, a little bit of oblique but quadratus 28:23 lumborum. Sure quadratus lumborum is very important for stability. It is 28:30 one of those muscles we've kind of talked about though like the iliacus, 28:33 that has a propensity to get tight. If the quadratus lumborum got tight, 28:44 what is that going to do? It could pull you this way if it's one side, if it pulls on 28:52 both sides what's it going to do? Yeah it could, it could start to compress and 29:00 give you a little soreness, eventually contribute to maybe some pain and 29:04 dysfunction, you guys see how that would work. I'm not, I totally agree that the 29:11 quadratus lumborum is important to stabilization. Is this a muscle that I'm 29:15 going to write down and exercise for in a routine? Probably not. I don't think 29:21 this is something we have to individually strengthen, and I think 29:25 targeting it too hard might help contribute to that cycle of 29:30 this muscle getting a little overactive, a little tight, and contributing to some 29:35 of that low back pain that we see in so many individuals. This exercise 29:42 we'd never give anybody, and not just because it makes people look silly, like 29:48 they're trying to impersonate a wheel wobble, I think it contributes to low 29:52 back pain. Oh you guys didn't think you'd go a whole hour without doing a graph 29:59 did you? You know what that means though, we just did, you guys just finished all 30:08 the muscles for functional anatomy one. So the one thing I think I mentioned 30:14 there guys is the TVA, although it will play a role in all joint actions, it 30:19 doesn't have a joint action so it's not going to end up on this graph. Don't forget 30:24 about it though, that's what that little box at the top says. Action, plane, muscles, 30:31 exercise that includes that joint action. So this one's a little bit more like the 30:37 scapular graph we did. Whats that? 30:43 TVA what about it? TV, TV-transverse abdominus. I'm sorry did I not define 30:55 that? TVA, yeah TVA is transverse abdominus. Occasionally you'll see 31:01 it as TA, what's the problem with that one? Tibialis anterior. Your transverse 31:14 abdominus right, does that make sense? It just wraps around like this. he hasn't, 31:30 he yes exactly. 31:39
