The Robust Human Project, 2529 East 7th Avenue, Flagstaff, AZ (2025)

09/14/2025

HISTORY MADE 😱

In her second career marathon, wins Uruguay’s FIRST EVER WORLD MEDAL with a bronze-winning run in the marathon, clocking a 2:27:23.

Paternain looked stunned at the finish line when she found out she’d finished third- a truly inspiring moment.

📸

09/10/2025

All 3 training blocks are live on the site! Click the link in the bio!

07/27/2025

Think of a deadlift as a thing, and running as a behavior.
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When it comes to creating power for an athlete, we need to think of the behavior that needs power development and assign exercises that will benefit the behavior.
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Deadlift are great if that is the goal of the athlete. A power lifter as an example.
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When it comes to running, the hip is what produces most of the power. So they should be practicing hip.
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The body adapts to the patterns presented to it. If you want it to get better at deadlift, by all means, do deadlifts. If you want your athlete to get better at running, choose hip hinge movement that will make them better at running.
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07/12/2025

We had a deload/mobility week with the team before moving into their power development phase.
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If you’re local to Flagstaff and want to learn more, I’m giving a lecture at next Wednesday on July 16th! I hope to see you there!
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06/14/2025

Busy day at the gym with and putting in the work!
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🎥
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04/16/2025

I’ve been seeing a lot of hamstring pulls in my manual therapy practice lately. These injuries typically happen while doing speed work on a track. Let’s unpack it!
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While doing speed work, the hamstrings are resisting the essentric load of knee extension. In a maximal effort such as 400 meter repeats, muscle failure doesn’t happen over time, it happens suddenly. And the muscle will lock up in order to prevent further injury.
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More often than not, the injury will present in the muscle belly itself. However, the load does tend to move either upstream or downstream.
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An upstream compensation will present in the high hamstring, just underneath the glute. This presentation will be “easier” to train through and will lead to chronic pain and will ultimately lead to a more severe injury over time.
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A downstream compensation ultimately ends up in the popliteus. This is a tiny but formidable muscle located behind the knee. This compensation usually presents as pain at the hamstring attachment on the inside of the knee and could lead to a litany of other symptoms as it pertains to pain in the knee.
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04/04/2025

Dysfunctional hip flexors are a common malady I see in my manual therapy practice. Weak hip flexors can present with a myriad of different symptoms. Let’s unpack it.
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Generally, when we’re talking about the hip flexors, we’re referring to the section of the quads closest to the trunk of the body. If that section of the quad has failed, the athlete will lose their capacity to drive the knee forward. Without that knee drive, the lower leg will tend to compensate by either swinging out and around, causing pain and tension on the inside of the knee, or back and around causing pain on the outside of the knee.
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The first muscle that tries to take over is the TFL. Once this guy takes over, it tends to recruit the outside quad, the vastus lateralus, to assist. This combo usually presents as pain in the TFL, however, as this compensation persists, that pain can symptom will begin to present as pain on the outside of the knee as well. The TFL in combination with the glute med blend into the IT band. If the dysfunction is not addressed, it can begin to present as IT band syndrome as well. In a rare case that I’ve seen, this dysfunction can ultimately lead to femoral nerve entrapment, which also presents as IT band syndrome.
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Next up is the Psoas. The attachment point of the Psoas as you can see in the photo provided is high on the inside of the femur making it a wildly inefficient hip flexor, if it is being recruited for hip flexion, it’s generally working in conjunction with the TFL to pull the hip into flexion. Dysfunction as it pertains to the Psoas usually presents as low back pain on the opposite side. However, it can present as pain in the high in the adductors or in the crease of the hip.
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Last but not least, we have the Illiacus. This muscle often presents as low back pain on the opposite side as well. If you’ve gotten to the point where this muscle has taken over, your hip flexors have been checked out for a while.
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I’ll be posting an easy solution to make your hip flexors more robust tomorrow. Stay tuned!

$Continuing the trend from the last few posts, we’re diving into sacral stress fractures. Ive seen a handful of these ove...$

03/30/2025

Continuing the trend from the last few posts, we’re diving into sacral stress fractures. Ive seen a handful of these over the years. Let’s un pack it.
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Our bodies tend to absorb force from the outside in which is why we should be building strength from the inside out. As I have mentioned before, traditional strength training tends to ignore the white stuff while focusing only on the red stuff.
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The exercises we choose tend to be exercise specific, not body specific. Therefore deadlifts and the squats definitely help the athlete get stronger, but they only target a certain line of linear tissues. And those tissues trend towards the red stuff.
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But most injuries happen in the white stuff and we only address the white stuff post injury. The red stuff tends to offload force into the white stuff as the red stuff fatigues. In this case, as the white stuff gets overloaded, the enormous amount of load created while an individual is running gets transferred into the bone.
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Just like all other tissues in the body, bones can only handle as much load as they can handle. Without proper strength training, the trend of injuries will become more severe and the time fore healing will take longer.
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Therein lies the problem. The sport of running is accelerating at a phenomenal rate. Records are being broken left and right as the years progress. I’ve personally witnessed athletes taking a year or more to heal from injuries. At the rate the sport is progressing, that’s a long time to be out of the game, and they have a lot of ground to make up. Keeping them in the game should be a strength coaches highest priority.
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03/28/2025

Track season is in full swing. Hip, low back, and high hamstring are the most common issues I see coming into my manual therapy practice this time of year. Let’s unpack this particular issue.
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As I have mentioned in previous posts, when it comes to strength training for runners, the most over looked tissues in the body is the connective tissue. Coming in at a close second are the rotational muscles of the hip.
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During track season, athletes spend a majority of their time turning left. The muscles that are absorbing a majority of that load are the glute med, and the external rotators. When those tissue inevitably become over loaded, they transfer that load to the sacrotuberous ligament. That’s the white stuff that you see going from the SI joint, to the tale bone, and attaching to the opposite side of the hamstring attachment on the ischial tuberosity.
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The pain that pops up is at those attachment points with the most distal point of the sacrotuberous ligament presenting as pain in the high hamstring.
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I’ll be posting a video tomorrow evening on how to address this issue tomorrow evening. Stay tuned!
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03/25/2025

I’m in the process of reading through Tom Michaud’s Injury Free Running for the 3rd time, and I came across a section of the book that explaining how femoral neck fractures occur.
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As we run, our bodyweight increases 3-5 times depending on the level of fatigue. On top of that, once those impact forces travel past the foot and the ankle, the lower leg begins to vibrate at around 40-50 cycles per second.
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The knee and the quad absorb a majority of that load as I travels up toward the hip. But that hip still has some work to do as it pertains to absorbing the load of that foot strike. In his book, Tom Michaud speak to the importance of both the piriformis and the glute med in protecting the femoral neck from the increased bodyweight and the aforementioned oscillations.
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The mechanism for injury is when the load going into the tissues is greater than the load bearing capacities of the tissues. Therefore, it stands to reason that you would want to recruit as many tissues as possible to protect the femoral neck from fracturing. And starting from the inside out.
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This is where I bought in on FRCs Internal Strength Method and integrated that system into my strength training. Start with the hip capsule, strengthen the connective tissue there. Move on to the external rotators, all of them, not just the piriformis. Then the linear tissues such as the glute max and the glute med. If you train all of those tissues in sequence with each other, then your brain will have a full and complete understanding of what the hip is, and what it needs to do.

03/21/2025

The Lateral Subsystem is trained as part of the core in my strength training program. It consists of the adductors and glute med on one side and a muscle called the quadratus lumborum on the opposite side. As you can see in the photo, it keeps the pelvis level in the frontal plane preventing the pelvis from dumping to one side ore the other.
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This subsystem has been plaguing runners coming into my manual therapy program for years. The points of pain are generally the low back on one side or, in rare cases, a dysfunction within this system can present as high adductor pain. I’ve even seen it present as IT band syndrome in more than a few people.
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The metaphor I tend to use when runners are dealing with this issue is, the muscle that is causing your pain is usually the only kid in the group doing the group project. Once you get all the other kids in the game, the project will run a lot smoother.
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It’s pretty easy to fix and I will present those activations in a forthcoming video. Stay tuned!
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03/18/2025

The human body is broken down into 2 different types of tissues. The white stuff (connective tissue) and the red stuff (muscle). The density of said tissues is directly correlated to the amount of forces those tissues absorb. Therefore, the white stuff has a lot more density because it absorbs more load.
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A common occurrence that tends to happen with athletes that run on a regular basis is the high hamstring doing the work of a glute that has failed. The problem here is, the glute extends the hip, and the hamstring resists knee extension. At the point of glute failure, the white stuff at the top of the hamstring becomes responsible for hip extension and that is not its job.
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Its job is to assist the hamstring in absorbing the load of knee extension. This is most prevalent when you are doing speed work.
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As of late, this compensation has become more prevalent amongst the athletes I coach when they are running up hill. That’s when they notice their hamstring doing all of the work when, in reality, that glute likely went on vacation a few workouts before this one.
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If this pattern continues, the white stuff at the top of the hamstring will become more and more irritated and eventually turn into a chronic injury. The typical rehab protocol for connective tissue injuries is to rehab the hamstring. Now the athletes has a stronger muscle belly that is putting more force into injured tissues and the issue gets worse.
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To prevent that, we need to prep the tissues for load, and then we need to load them properly. Prepping the for load is the preseason isometrics block. And loading them properly is the connective tissue training block that is available now in my online store.
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If you want to read more, I have a blog post about this very subject on my website now. Check it out!
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The Robust Human Project

09/14/2025

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