Nick Tumminello dug up some cool videos showing Mark Young taking us on a guided tour through a pig's spine. Good stuff!  Literally pointing out--with he surgical tool--how the spine works, Mark makes a strong case for emphasizing some of the more popular fitness techniques du jour: thoracic mobility and unilateral lower-body training while minimizing lumbar rotation and excessive spinal flexion and extension.

What that means to you and me is to foam-roll the thoracic spine and find additional ways to twist and mobilize the upper spine; to work with lunges, step-ups and other single-limb lower-body movements in lieu of a lot of compressive movements like heavy squats (unless they are an essential part of your athletic program), and to remove crunches and broomstick rotations from your program at all costs. if you're still doing those things after all my ranting and raving anyway, I don't know what to do with you.

When it comes to heavy bilateral squats, Mark suggests to rotate them in and out of your program so as to avoid damage inflicted by repetitive movement.

But the most interesting thing is watching Mark poking away at the pig's spine, and hearing him suggest, at the end of the video, that we get "a pig spine of our own," which he says we can get at our local butcher's for next to nothing. What are you waiting for? And why am I sitting here blogging away when I could be at the Ralph's picking one up? I'm outta here!