#111 The Optimal Mobility Protocol for a Durable Body | Dr. Kelly Starrett

23:50And let's see if we start to expose that overhead position. as we get into complex understanding of movement, we look at start position effectiveness and finish position. So if I'm pressing overhead and I'm starting in a less effective position, then it's really difficult for me to end in a great position, right? That's why that bottom up kettlebell press forces us to be in a good shape as we press overhead. But if I don't have complete overhead position, my overhead position is here where I have to internally rotate a little bit, I'll achieve some overhead-like shape, but that's not full position.

24:26So even if I'm pressing a barbell out here where I'm not anywhere near full overhead position, I would still check this full overhead position. And it could be that we just don't have as efficient access for whatever reason, because you've had this amazing life. And now this movement is highlighting something for us that we can become curious about, because you should be able to press overhead.

24:47Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I like to do pull-up, assisted pull-ups. Doesn't hurt. Doesn't flare up with that hanging. I'm going to do more of it. I do hang and it feels good. If you're doing pull-ups, you're hanging already. You're there. Yeah, I do pull-ups and I don't have that problem. So it's definitely - You know, we can constrain it. You know, if I have you put your thumbs backwards, then the shoulder by necessity is going to be in a mechanically sort of more effective position where I'm going to have better features of stability. The capsules wound up. The mechanic of pressing is a little bit better. And in this situation, I might even have you, you know, when anyone has pain with a problem, an area or movement, there's two things we can always do.

25:27We can always pause if I have a painful range or B, I slow down. So we can slow this down a little bit and ask you to show me that you've got control, signal that it's safe to the brain, et cetera, instead of sort of I'm overhead, right? and I didn't really touch some of those overhead shapes and really use it as a diagnostic. But in this situation, I'd be really curious. Again, let's look at your range of motion of that shoulder. I bet that there's some rhyming things that maybe I've got a little restricted because I didn't know and I'm doing all the things and now I'm getting this feedback that this position doesn't always feel good.

26:01Once in a while is fine, but if it's happening all the time,

26:03Dr. Rhonda Patrick:then we can come curious about it. How would a person at home, I'm talking about my problem, but other people have styrofoam, the blank problems. Only there was an app that had all of these simple movement tests you could do at home. And that's the app that you have. What's the name of that app again? It's called the Mobility Coach. The Mobility Coach. And the reason what we're trying to do is, so I'll lay out for you real quick. Built to move, we've got really simple pedestrian assessments and some range of motion. These are some things. So Entree In. The app has really sophisticated self-assessments, but easy to do, easy to understand.

26:41end. We're going to look at fundamental ranges and you should see it in the context. You'd be like, oh, I understand why we're doing that. Maybe you don't understand why we're looking at rotation in some of these things, but there are components there and that all belongs in the hand of the user. Then we have a whole host of professional courses where we're much more sophisticated about complete, incomplete, hands-on assessing, but we don't need that. For the average person, we should be able to know what our movement minimums are and then start to identify opportunities to work and restore those positions because that is really part of the conversation that gets lost in search or in service of performance and wattage.

27:20We're not looking at, did you express normative ranges, even though the classic strength and conditioning really does ask us to have full range of motion. That's why classic strength and conditioning is all the same. Front squat, back squat, lunge, pull up, bench. Those are all tests. I've been on every continent except Antarctica, everyone knows what a pushup is. That is our universal expression of shoulder extension in a short lever position, right? I don't need a bunch of tests. I need to see how well and how much range you have in a pushup.

27:52Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I love pushups. My favorite workout to do anytime I'm traveling is the Cindy workout. Oh, isn't that so simple? I've done Cindy more than any other workout in the history of the world, everyone. Cindy is the best workout. Maybe we should explain what that is to people. So it's five pull-ups, 10 push-ups, 15 air squats. You can do it on the minute. You can do it as many rounds as you want. You have 10 minutes. You have 15 minutes. That body weight volume is excellent. Put a bike on it for two minutes. Do a round. Put a bike on it. Do three rounds. We call it Cindy-ish. And pretty soon you can rinse, wash, repeat that combo forever.

28:27Dr. Rhonda Patrick:My favorite Cindy-ish workout for me is like if I'm in my, you know, like I said, I'm traveling. I'm in a hotel, is I'll do the bodyweight squats, and then do push-ups, and then V-ups. And there it is. And what you've just described is in 20 minutes, you've got tons of exposure, no equipment. Wonderful. Wonderful. This, we have so many different things that you mentioned to get into in terms of range of motion, you know, the blood flow, especially with the tendons, you know, not a lot of blood flow at attendants, but maybe we can start there with this range of motion and warming up, you know, because I mean, so I worked with my coach and thankfully, you know, she knows what she's doing.

29:09Dr. Rhonda Patrick:And so if I hadn't had her, I wouldn't really have known the difference between warming up and stretching. I certainly wouldn't really understand what the goal of warming up is. And you're going to educate me even more, but just from learning through experiencing what she tells me to do, I've realized that it's like, okay, first thing, you know, I'm just kind of like, I do two minutes of just getting my heart rate up first thing. So it's either rowing or jumping rope. And then after that two minutes, then we kind of get into more range of motion. You know, if I'm doing arms, I'll do pass-throughs with a pole.

29:44Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Or we'll do, you know, bodyweight squats first if I'm going to be squatting that day. And then we go barbell only squats. And I eventually like, you know, gradually get to the weight that I'm eventually going to do, but I'm warming up. But I wouldn't have known to do all that if I was just kind of working out on my own. That's crazy. How did we fail, Dr. Patrick, where you're like, hey, I'm not, I'm about to go do this crazy thing. And maybe I just spun on the bike for 10 minutes. I looked around. We just haven't really taught people, hey, here's what it looks like. And theoretically, we should have gotten that in high school when we were still engaged in sports, competitive sports before we all became rec athletes.

30:26But what you see is that there's a real opportunity to help people feel better and prepare for the movement. And don't get me wrong. I think you should be able to sprint down the street, grab a baby out of a burning building and fight off a tiger like that. Probably not the best expression of your physiology in those moments, but we should be able to do those things cold, right? But when we start to look around, we start to see that most people aren't treating their warmup as a chance to feel better. Who am I today as I show up at this gym for this thing? Because your range of motion is a little bit of a moving target.

31:06And it's like a credit score, one of our friends says. And so you're sort of touching base with how tired am I? How springy am I? What's going on? You're getting to know this carcass today, right? And that might mean, hey, you know, I just, you are flying all over the place. Suddenly you're a little bit stiff from that plane ride. You're squatting doesn't feel the same. So we're trying to remind the brain of fundamental movement patterns. We're trying to get hot and sweaty. We're trying to wake up the nervous system. You are doing this jumping, which is activating. You're getting hot and sweaty.

31:39You're shifting blood. There's a lot of things that can happen, but also we see that this is a great opportunity to add in some movement and wait for it play right you can explore positions and shapes safely here tell your brain if i end up in this shape later on it's going to be safe some of those path through pass throughs there we're starting to see rope flow kind of some of these physical culture ideas from people like ito portal fighting monkey we're bringing those things back into our warm-ups and a simple way to ask this is if we treated your workout like it was a fight, you and I are going to fight, what does our warmup look like?

32:17It does not look like I'm laying on the ground doing some foam rolling, right? Like you're jumping rope and getting hot and prepping yourself and doing some hypoxic work and breathing and activating and integrating with the people you're like, we're about to fight. Like that's a really nice sort of rubric for, am I prepared or have I used this warmup as an opportunity to be like, I am not good today. I'm just going to take it easy, right? I can use it as a self-assessment. So that's what we try to do in the warmup. Sometimes it gets a little bit watered down. As a coach, I try to not do the same warmup every single day.

32:50I try to keep my athletes guessing. I want them to be entertained. I want them to be curious. And that's a real opportunity to put some of these things we see on the internet. Hey, that looks like fun. Let me try that as part of my warmup.

33:03Dr. Rhonda Patrick:How much does doing a warmup that's properly a warmup play a role? helping with injury prevention? Well, I think from a simple idea that we have a chance to prime and remind our brains that movement is a skill, right? Sometimes we have like, we're like, oh, movement is good, right? It's all like the movement optimists are like, it doesn't matter what you do. And we're like, well, from injury, which is not what we're trying to do. We're never on this track of, hey, let's warm up so we don't get injured. I think that's kind of a fool's errand. And like, it's not really inspiring. Don't get injured.

33:43Like, I'm not injured. You know, what's going to happen that I'm going to get injured? Instead, we think, hey, we can actually get more work done. We can feel better as we do it. We have less discomfort as we do it. And what we tend to see is we don't get as stiff afterwards. And so oftentimes when we're trying to compress a lot of really dense work into a little time, we don't leave permission for us to really get tissues hyperperfused, like blood flow, ready to go. If the first motion you do is push the sled and you tear your Achilles, I'm like, well, that tissue wasn't as prepared maybe as it could have been.

34:18Maybe we could have mitigated some of these aches and tweaks. Maybe some of those insertions of those connective tissues weren't so friable and dry. Just like the rotator cuff, for example, it just takes a minute. It's like hard packed earth. And if you just take a, you know, exercise, which is like a hose blasting on hard packed earth, the water doesn't really soak in. It takes a second for those tissues to, you know, to really become well perfused. And then you might have better range of motion and more important, you'll have better power, better work tolerance. And then afterwards, there's all these models that exist already.

34:51Like the Soviets used to say, if you leave the gym stiff, you're going to be stiff. I think if we take a look at some of our movement traditions, people have been training and thinking seriously about this for a long time, but we have sucked the joy out of the, and the potential out of, potentiation out of warmup for sure. But to your point, when we're dripped in sweat, so I coach at Cal Berkeley and I travel with the women's water polo team. So I'm their performance director. And our joke is like, I'm the health coach, right? And sometimes that means I hand out snacks. And sometimes that means I'm doing mobility work.

35:24I'm helping them manage pain. But I also run the warm-ups and sort of amongst other things. And we'll be battling another team. That team has their coats on and they're real stiff and not really trained to each other. Our women are down to their sports bras. We are battling and fighting, ready to go. And I'm like, which team do you want to be part of here, right? And so we can really use that warm-up time to connect, play, integrate, have fun, and perform better because those tissues are better ready to go.

35:56Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I sometimes do a really short – if I don't have a lot of time, I'm traveling or I have to get to a podcast or something, and I know I need to get my blood flow up for at least 10 minutes. It's important for me. I love that. Cognition. Yeah. It doesn't matter what I do. Changing your state. I'm transitioning into now going from brain to, you know, meat. Right. But sometimes I'll get on my Peloton and I'll do two back-to-back Tabatas. So it's like a – it's a 10-minute two-to-one ratio, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, 30-second recovery in between. But I don't warm up before I get on that bike and I do that.

36:34Dr. Rhonda Patrick:And what I'm hearing from you is like even that type of, you know, hyperperfusion, as you called it, like where you're getting all of a sudden you're going from nothing to boom. you're getting that blood flow up, man, you're going hard, needs a warm up. Well, what we could start to say is, are we trying to meet all of your movement needs only by the time we get there? So what we can start to say is, well, what does the rest of the day look like? Because if you're just going from sitting to more sitting, and we have a little, like, that's already great. You're getting your heart rate up, you're starting to breathe, We could put in breath holds there.

37:09We could do hypoxic work there. We could, you know, you just taking the resistance out and going fast could be a really great way of, you know, priming yourself. I think the key here, though, is what if we had a little movement first thing in the morning? What if, like, we do a thing that we kind of give people three options. We're like, hey, as a place to start, I would like you to do the hip spin up, the shoulder spin up, or a breath spin up before you leave the house. because if the day gets away from you and you can't train or you can't exercise, we want to have said, well, what does a physical day look like for a person?

37:43How do we get more movement in throughout the rest of the day instead of just saving it up? Because what I really like to do is recognize that you're a busy working human. And then if we had a little bit of hip prep in the morning, we worked at a desk that gave us movement choice. Maybe we sat on the floor. Maybe we sat at the computer. We walked around a little bit at lunch. then by the time I actually got to my workout, I'm not going from zero to 60. I'm going from 40 to 60 because I've prepared my body a little bit more. Maybe that's a great way to sneak it in. And the rest of the thing is, hey, when we have the opportunity to do a better thing, fine.

38:19Sometimes I'm at the airport and I grab a fruit bucket, a$17 cup of grapes and two horrible eggs. That is really not great food, but it's going to do today. And now we'll get the rest of it tomorrow. We're not worried about it. The main thing is I love that you are thinking about this as a physical practice. And hey, there's nothing wrong with taking the first five sets under the bar and taking your time and just moving slowly and adding weight. Hey, you don't have, sometimes when we have time and luxury to play and move and prep, let's do it. If not, let's just be a little bit more conscientious about it.

38:54Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Awesome. What is this hip, like if you're drunk, you talk about this hip mobility or hip prep, What does that look like? Well, number one, we wanted something that you could do. Imagine, again, homage to the people who've thought critically about some of these things. Yoga has sun salutation. And what I thought was, what a great practice. Everyone did sun salutation every single day before they left the house. They've touched some end ranges. They reminded their brain. They had to breathe. They had to rotate. They had to weight bear. They had to move their spines a little bit. That's great. But that sun salutation sometimes comes entrapped in a little bit of too much asana, a little bit too much spirituality.

39:37And sometimes our athletes are like, really? This doesn't feel athletic enough. So I was like, what can we do to sort of simulate that? And that's where I came up with the idea of the hip spin up, which was fundamental positions of flexion and rotation of the hip. We touch some end range tissues. We throw some isometrics in. We make your spine work with your hips, just ground-based. Don't need any equipment. Can be scaled. and it gives you a touch of like, hey, what is, am I at least at these full ranges of motion for a second today? Because I think what ends up happening oftentimes is that we can live in a world where we're not asked to actually do all the things our bodies can do.

40:14And now we're having to be like, okay, here's your vitamin, here's your X and such to make up for the fact that we're not really doing the things we need to do with our bodies.

40:23Dr. Rhonda Patrick:What is a simple hip mobility test look like? Well, the question here is, you know, what should the hip be able to do, right? And I say hip as in the chain, right? But that's the big primary engine. The spine is the first engine. But then we have these big primary engines of the hips and shoulders. And what's interesting about that conversation is that if I ask people who are very sophisticated about their running training or their nutrition, I'm like, what should the hip be able to do? What's normal? What's far from normal? What does every physician agree we should be able to do? They have no idea.

40:59What's normal hip flexion? Bring your knee to your chest. Well, this was really where we recognized that one of the problems that we had or opportunities we had is to make these range of motion tests part of the training so that I could, the stimulus for adaptation exercise was also the diagnostic tool, right? So I can understand what's going on. So easily, we all should be able to squat hip crease below the knee, right? That's a really simple test. And if you're struggling to do that, it tells me a little bit about your readiness today. And again, you could be stiff. You could have old injuries.

41:34You could have – there's no judgment there. If you stand on one leg, you should be able to pull your other knee up past 90 degrees. And most people would struggle for that. We have a simple test in the last book called the Sit and Rise Test, which everyone has heard of now. Just lower yourself to the ground, crisscross applesauce, right, without falling. and then without putting a knee down or hand down, pop back up. And so what's nice about that is that that's not even a full range of motion test. It doesn't require that much strength, but it's a good indicator that you might be missing some hip flexion.

42:09Being able to fold forward to shift your weight is really the limiter there. So if we can begin to create some fence posts, some guidelines for people to understand what's more normative or not around their own range of motion, then you can keep an eye on it.

42:24Dr. Rhonda Patrick:And the sit and rise test, isn't there some data on that with associations and longevity? Yeah. Basically, imagine that all of these things are proxies, right? As you've talked about, like, I don't really care what your grip strength is. I care what you do with that grip strength. But if you're doing a lot of fun stuff with your grip strength, your grip strength is going to be good. So it's a proxy for all these other things, right? And that test tells us a lot about your movement choice, your ability to solve movement problems, your ability to modulate your balance. And so it may not be that that's the end all be all.

42:59If put a hand down, you could probably still be 100. I mean, we probably have some aunties in our lives who are over 90 who've never done the sit and rise test, never done keto, never went to a high intensity exercise class, but there's something about their lifestyle. We just got back from Japan. We're sleeping on the ground. Cultures that toilet on the ground, sleep on the ground, eat on the ground, fall risk in the elderly, drops to almost zero. Osteoarthritis in the hips and low back, drops to almost zero. There's something about maybe we should touch these shapes once in a while. And then that makes it so that it's on the map of the brain.

43:34We're touching and loading those tissues. The brain doesn't start to pare down some of that movement as irrelevant. So really the question is, what should I do every day? and then now we can ask the next following questions. What are essential movements in strength and conditioning, which is really just a formal movement practice under load?

43:52Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Yes, and that is my next question because I recently did this sit and rise test with someone who is in good shape. They work out and I had no problem getting up and doing the sit and rise test and they did. That's right. So how can someone be healthy, work out? I mean, when I mean work out, I mean, like strength and conditioning both, right? They're doing running, they're doing squats, deadlifts, and have trouble with a sit and rise test. It's a great question. What it hints at and what I love is get to a place where you and I have our own ways we like to train, right? You have things, like you're a big power cleaner and deadlifter and rower.

44:32You do these hard things.

44:35Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Power cleaning is the hardest thing. I hate doing it, but I do it. It's almost like it's an Olympic sport and you'll spend the rest of your life working at it, right? Okay. That aside. So that aside, what we can say is you have your way of training. Things that we love, the way we like to move our bodies in the sports we play. I should be able to take any third-party system and thrive there. So if you go to yoga and you get your butt kicked, yoga is not crazy. Yoga is just saying, hey, here's what humans should be able to do with no load. But we're going to hold these isometrics and you have to be able to breathe for a long time.

45:08Go to Pilates class. If you're really elite, you'll spank Pilates. You might be sore afterwards because there are some shapes you don't spend a lot of time in that are normative towards Pilates, right? That are signature Pilates. But ideally, we should take whatever you're doing and run it through a blood panel. How do you like to eat? Cool. I believe you. Let's go ahead and check over here. And so that third-party validation is a nice test. And what we often see is we've compared sort of the capacity of physiology and we've confused that with choice, skill, right, coordination. But I can generate thousands of watts over here, but I'm not very coordinated.

45:47Or because I've generated thousands of watts over here, it's cost me my rotation of my hip or my hip extension. and ultimately you can do that for a while until you want to learn a new skill until that tissue is somehow a little bit misused because it doesn't have its normal ranges of motion and i think when we ask people to sort of engage in some baseline testing then we can start to understand inputs and outputs and so if i have an elite cyclist i'm working in the tour de france we don't really spend a ton of time in hip extension training knee behind the butt like a lunge we are in those shapes to make sure that we restore power, keep the hip doing what it needs to do.

46:28We don't necessarily have to train in those shapes as heavily as we might with an Olympic sprinter. So, but we need to look at where is this person able to put some of these isometrics or some mobility work or some soft tissue work to keep it, you know, the sort of the window open. Because what we're really trying to do for the typical person, again, we're all basically rec athletes at some point is we're trying to say, let's maintain as much range as we can, right? And by that, we'll say, how do I maintain movement choice, movement options? How do I pick up a new skill? How do I have a body that's free and unencumbered?

47:05Dr. Rhonda Patrick:We covered this hip thing, but the shoulders is another kind of obsession of mine because I do get some pain there. And there's a couple of questions I want to ask. And one has to do with, obviously, the ways to assess shoulder mobility. But the other is, like, you know, I do work at a desk a lot. And we're going to get into desk ergonomics, people, because that's also an interest of mine, as well as I know other people are interested. But what can someone who is desk working a lot, but also who lifts, you know, what's, I would say, a common problem in those individuals in terms of, like, their shoulder mobility?

47:39Dr. Rhonda Patrick:and what would be a good, you know, ROI in terms of like working your shoulder to reset it. Yeah. Let's take a look and we'll split the upper body from the lower body because it's easy to go for a walk and we can decongest, right? The lymphatics are built into our muscle system. The lymphatic system is suede system of the body and it's bootstrapped into our muscles. And so if we go for a walk, that calf is acting like a second heart. It's pumping. We're dumping all those lymphatics through the groin, through that muscle contraction. And it's easy to say, hey, let's decongest, right? I ran, I did something, and now I'm just going to walk a little bit more in the day.

48:17And so one of the reasons, you know, if you fly on an airplane, you get cankles. It's lack of movement that's giving you those cankles, right? That's congestion of the tissues. Well, it's easy on the – but if I say, hey, I'm going to need you to get on this rower for an hour, you're going to be like, bro, I'm not doing that. Get on this assault bike for an hour and decongest. What? It's impossible. And so sometimes it's hard to get enough exaggerated cross-pattern motion and movement of the upper body to decongest it the way we're working. So what we can say then suddenly is, well, what tools do I have available to me?

48:50Well, number one, maybe a little bit of shoulder motion where I'm touching some fundamental shapes during the day. That'd be easy. And that's an easy place to start because it's, you know, for example, it's easy never to have to put your bra on on the back. That would be a test of internal rotation and some extension, that aptly scratch test, all the, hey, let's look at the, if you do the FMS test, can you get your hand behind your back? But if you're not practicing and in those shapes ever, it's going to be tricky. And if you start loading the upper body significantly the way you are, the way we're kind of modern training has sort of influenced us, remember that the first thing the body does after training stimulus is it lays down more collagen.

49:35It makes the container stronger to withstand. Now, when it starts to put the muscle down inside that, the fascial connective two-shirt containers are set up first. We have a bigger engine frame, then we can make a bigger engine. So if you don't do anything, you're going to become stiff and fibrotic. Like, welcome to being, you know, big squats. I mean, they're going to make your quads stiff if you don't keep your eye on it. All that running can make your quads very stiff, right? So suddenly we can ask around the shoulder, well, let's make sure that we're doing something to keep an eye on this range of motion.

50:10And I could hint at you could do something like the shoulder spin up in the morning, which is just touching some fundamental shapes with some arm swings. It's very simple. You could do something like David Weck's rope flow, which is super fun and very easy to touch a bunch of shapes. it's basically imagine like pnf patterns which were this kind of model of looking at how we load the shoulder in this rehab that came out these diagonals and rotation and if you just spin a rope a whole bunch you're going to touch a ton of rotation you're going to be in some of fundamental shapes it's really fast it's easy it's great prep or we could go you know a step further and say okay we we've trained all day long now we're going to hook you up to this very sophisticated neuromuscular device that's going to decongest the tissues.

50:57But ultimately, we want to remind you that the body is not fragile. It's designed to be loaded and adapt forever. So let's just, at the very least, keep an eye on our range of motion. And I just came from the airport where I just got to see people put their arms over their head in the scanner. And it's sort of a disaster, right? I mean, they're just banana back, internally rotate, like people just aren't very confident in putting their arms over their head anymore, but it's because their life doesn't ask them to do that.

51:23Dr. Rhonda Patrick:And how often I like, like what, how much time do you think someone should spend like myself who is desk sitting a lot and many of us are, and I do work out, you know, but as you said, I'm not doing that throughout the day. So like, you know, is there a couple minutes a day? Yeah. I think, I think we saw if you started this conversation about when you could say, Hey, I think my lower body is the big problem. Let's focus on that for a week. Upper body is, my shoulders are really, that's the thing I want to feel better at. Well, what we could do is almost say, well, let's look at a day, right? That's maybe the keystone idea.

51:57And the morning, what did you do in the morning? Did you just get up on the laptop right away? Could we go for a five-minute walk? Could we just get you engaged in a breath practice? I mean, just getting your rib cage moving through some breathing, like something even looks like old school Wim Hof style breathing or oxygen advantage, just getting your trunk moving and the trunk wall a little bit more compliant, you're going to see your shoulder blades work better. And if your shoulder blades work better on your trunk, you're going to have better arm function. But if my trunk gets stiff because I sit in a C shape and I don't really take any big breaths, then maybe I'm going to see some decreased function in the shoulder blade.

52:33So a couple minutes of the day in the morning, then I'm just going to not worry. I'm just going to move as much as I can during the day. That's my goal. Is the breath work like, is it equivalent?

52:45Dr. Rhonda Patrick:like let's say I do get up and I go for that, let's say short run, you know, two miles. Is that doing something similar as the breath work or is there something independent? Because you mentioned the trunk. Yes. Well, I think what we haven't helped people understand is that ventilation efficiency is very much a skill. And you, you know, doing some formal, thoughtful, full range of motion of the trunk, full exhale range of motion of the trunk, I would say that most people are probably occupying some mid-range in their breathing. They're very shallow breathing. They're stiff. They're just breathing in their available container.

53:25If we look at the work, Jill Miller wrote a great book called Body by Breath, simple ways to mobilize the trunk so we actually have better diaphragm function, better pelvic floor function. Brian McKenzie really brought some of the work back into, hey, let's take a look at this interesting physiology that we can harness, right? Iyengar, we were back at yoga. Nerves are king of the breath. The breath is king of the brain. So one of the easiest ways we can change state is by being a little bit more conscientious about our breathing. But I think you're hinting at like, when and where do I do all this?

53:55So one of the things that we love is if you're on the bike and that's part of your warmup, let's just drop in a couple of simple breath routine practices that make you have to touch that range of motion.

54:05Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Can you give me an example? Yeah, yeah. This is from the French free divers I was working with when they're coaches. During a simple warmup, they take a 10 second inhale, which is going to kill the average person. That's a long inhale. And then they do a max breath hold on that inhale for as long as they can. And then recover nose only breathing, which is going to constrain the breathing. You're going to have to really be functional on that diaphragm. You're going to have to work harder. You're going to prep that. And you repeat that every minute. 10 second inhale, max breath hold, repeat every minute.

54:38Another simple example is just, hey, every minute, I just want you to exhale as long as you can. Go ham as long as you can on an exhale. And when you need to breathe, go ahead and just keep it moving instead of stopping. So we can almost use some of this hypoxic work where we just put you into a little dynamic apnea where we ask you to work, do a little breath hold of some kind. Suddenly, you're going to have to touch that range of motion. You're going to have to get caught up. you're breathing all the way out. You're being a little bit more intentional. And then we've already set up your brain to be a little bit more CO2 tolerant.

55:13And we've done a couple other things. So the first time that lactate starts spiking, CO2 starts to climb, your brain is like, it's fine. We've already done this a bunch.

55:22Dr. Rhonda Patrick:So it's like preparing the nervous system. Oh, I love that. Or reclaiming that because I'm trashed from this trip or going to drink with my friends or the big work volume last week. It allows me to reset a little bit. What I think we're really seeing some of the innovation is how do we stack these behaviors? So I'm not giving you another listicle of things you have to do. And that's what we want to do. How do I integrate this into your, well, you're on the bike. Great. Let's do some breath work on the bike. What if you become a little dizzy when you're doing this breath work? Is that a sign of anything or is that normal?

55:58I think if you are holding your breath to the place you're passing out, maybe, you know, take that back a notch, right? But if you get a little uncomfortable, that's cool. And if you get a little luminous, just take a second. Like, you know, I think that's the word that the yogis would do is luminous, right? Your face is tingling, you're like, what's going on? But really, you're just changing probably what's happening with pH or, you know, some aspect of that breathing system is being modulated, and you're feeling a little tingly, totally okay. Unfortunately, those things go away. All the getting high on your own supply that you get from, it all just becomes normalized.

56:39So I would say one of the reasons we start with breath, anytime someone has neck pain, and sometimes had mid-back pain or low back pain, we teach the breath mechanic first because it's such a powerful way of desensitizing a painful spine or irritated spine. We normalize a lot of motion around the spine. The book that everyone loves to reference is called The Spinal Engine by Grakovetsky. And it's a really hard book to read, everyone. It's like gnarly biomechanics of salamanders, side mending. But really hints at that this is a really great whip, that the spine is a powerful engine and initiator of movement.

57:21And that's actually how we define functional movement in the first place. Works with a wave of contraction from trunk to periphery, from core to sleeve, from axillary skeleton to peripheral skeleton. And it's one of the reasons we take a moment to always organize the trunk into a little bit better position if we can, because it allows us to have better function, right? So if I'm slouching at my computer, hard to take a big breath there, hard to turn my neck there. If I'm driving in my car or I'm on my bike and I'm like, is there a position here where I could take a bigger breath? Well, suddenly we might not say that that's a good position or a bad position.

57:54We're just like, hey, that position doesn't give me access to as much physiology, as much power, as much volume, as much rotation, as much range of motion. So we might make decisions about how we organize the body to maintain the integrity of the breathing movement system. And that's a good indicator of when we start to look at the breath and our ability to take a diaphragm breath, breathe laterally in the ribs, actually get some motion in the upper back and trunk. We suddenly see that we can start to flip on lights in the room that was once dark. And lo and behold, we also got the brain and the mind okay with high CO2s.

58:34So for example, with Berkeley, we try to have seven hypoxic events before we compete. So I want the women I work with to die seven times in a controlled death, right? Like we're going to jump rope and hold our breath and then put a little bit of that hypoxic load on. And then later on, we're in the pool or doing something of consequence. It's a lot easier.

58:55Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Is the response to the slight hypoxic event? It's kind of like an adaptation where you're kind of depriving the tissue of a little bit of oxygen and therefore it's like, oh, I got to like make things move faster and better so that that doesn't happen again. It may there, it's more likely because there's probably some systemic like blood flow restriction like thing that happens, right? Like if you can truly desaturate. But for the typical person who says, hey, I want to run a 5K, for example, or I'm doing a half marathon or something like that. you know they tend to over breathe so they tend as soon as it gets hard mouth breathing opens very shallow and turns out they really can't access all the oxygen on the hemoglobin and this is sorry that everyone this is a primer on on you know physiology but it's the it's the co2 high levels of co2 that allow you to strip the oxygen off the hemoglobin and again let me point at butrayco oxygen advantage brymkins all the people have been talking about this forever all the yogis.

59:59But if we can get the brainstem to handle high circulating CO2s by practicing, exposing that brainstem to these climbing CO2 levels, then we're able to tolerate higher workloads, strip more oxygen off and not quickly scrub, breathe off that. And now we can actually get more work done because it's the CO2 that's triggering the breathing response, right? And we don't sort of realize that that's very trainable and that we can suddenly really get a lot more work done and feel better and less stress on our bodies if we can handle those high CO2s. But that's uncomfortable.

1:00:34Dr. Rhonda Patrick:So these seven sort of slightly hypoxic events really are just the breath work that you're doing before your competition. 100%. And then instead of saying, hey, let's lay down, we might do that. You and I put our hands on each other's shoulders. We take a breath in. or breath out and then you and I wrestle a little bit. And so suddenly now I'm thinking whoever breathes first loses, we're battling a little bit and doing something dynamic. And then we're both going to have this moment of fugue. And that's what we're trying to do is make it so that when that happens, when that first interval hits, you're much more capable.

1:01:11Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I wonder, I used to be a surfer. I no longer am able to call myself that. I mean, I still once a surfer how to surf always a surfer um but you know even back in the days when i used to actually go surfing like every day like i was still terrified every time i'd paddle up particularly in like you know with the big swell valid and i'm wondering if and now it's even worse like i if i go out like a couple times a year and it's like it's like oh my gosh it's just even though i'm so fit i mean i'm not so fit i just you're fit you're very fit yeah you know but it's still like Like paddling is hard and holding my breath and like, you know, getting bombarded by the waves.

1:01:47Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I'm wondering if doing some kind of breath work before going out and paddling out, because the fear also gets me, right? Where it's like, I know it's coming. I know I'm holding my breath for a long period of time and it's scary and I don't like it. So I'm wondering if that would prepare me for - 100%. And let me introduce you to the work of Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reese, who are really the first people who, for me, put this into the language and context of performance. That they, for whatever reason, Laird got onto Wim Hof and recognized that if he trained for these, to be able to handle this very dynamic work on a breath hold.

1:02:27That he could get more work done, get held down longer, pop back up, recover faster. And so he saw it as a competitive advantage. and then those two cleverly just were like, boy, we can repurpose this into a lot of aspects of our life. And in your experience, what you're actually describing is something that's very common these days where I have this very fit human who now goes and does a sport that they don't do often or a sport they used to do, but now they're so fit and it's easy to overdo it. It's easy not to have that exposure and it's easy to suddenly maybe recognize it like, hey, there's some aspect of my training that's not preparing me for this sport.

1:03:08And ideally, I think one of the things that's happened that's interesting is that people are exercising because it's about health, right? It's my bone density and it's my VO2 max and right? Well, you're athletic and you're doing an athlete and you do sports. But we forgot that the reason we used to train was to get better for something. And I think I really want to recouple that. What are you training for for people? because ideally you can't, you still need to go do your sport. We wish we could just be fit and then go do sports. And that's certainly a recipe for overuse. Cause you can be like, I surf for four hours today.

1:03:43My first time back. You're like, why did my shoulder surge so bad? Well, you haven't loaded those tissues. You haven't said it's safe to your brain. So you hint at something really important, which is that the brain is really a tool that's designed for safety and survival. It's not designed for optimization. And so when we take this lesson, that your brain is really trying to protect you and is like, what's a threat, not a threat. There's a reason you're like, I'm a little concerned about being held down. And like, because you probably did that once or twice and your brain's like, we're not doing that again.

1:04:14And I see what you're doing. You're dragging us back out. So how do we signal safety to the body? How do we signal safety to the brain? Well, that'd be one way, but suddenly you start to expand that sleep is safety. Nutrition is safety. Having access to my range of motion is safety, right? things that don't hurt is safe. We can really start to put in a lot of ideas around how do we help the brain optimize for performance through feeling safe. And that, you know, having some hypoxic events beforehand can be a really easy way. And you can even do this walking with your dog. I mean, I don't know if you're a psycho like me, but I might walk my dog and be like, if I breathe before that sign, everyone in my family is going to be wiped out by a meteor.

1:04:54And I play these games where I'm like, I have to just hold my breath to a certain place. And when you get into the weeds on some of the Gracies, always we're working on breath holds, always interested in this hypoxic work. Because ultimately, as you know, in sports and doing activities, it's this breathing piece that's the limiting factor so often.

1:05:15Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I'm sorry to take it here, Kelly, but like I'm thinking about my heavy lifts now. Like how I've never really, you know, done. I just breathe how I'm supposed to. I just breathe how I breathe. when I'm lifting. Breathe early, breathe often. Sounds good. Breathe early, breathe often. No, I mean, that's what we do. I'm just going to bring my skills in and not recognize that, whoa, this breath, it could be a real opportunity to get better and to learn other skills. You're absolutely right that there's opportunity here. So how should I be breathing when I'm doing a heavy squat, front squat, and I got to come back up and I'm grunting, all of that.

1:05:54Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I'm kind of just, you know this is all new for me i've been lifting for about that i would say the last year and a half maybe two years now um but you know relatively new so fun so fun but also i'm realizing like you start to then realize oh i can optimize here and i can optimize here and um you know maybe even just use a different different language that instead of optimize we're like well i can become more skilled wow i think i deadlifted for like 20 years before i actually deadlifted for the first time. I was like, oh, that's what she meant a long time ago. Oh, I think I understand. And sometimes I work out.

1:06:27I'm like, I might do something. We love something called an E-top, which is every 30 seconds, you have to do a lift. It's an easy way for adults, for me to rate limit my ego, protect myself, put a little cardiorespiratory demand or metabolic demand on my working. But sometimes I've done 20 lifts, 20 singles before I'm like, oh, okay, now I'm connected again. Now it's starting to go. So putting that skill in there is very much the game. And it's okay for us to be skill limited, not be limited by how strong your hips are. Like, how nice that we have to, we look at all the things and I'm like, well, it looks like the limitation for you is that you're just not very good at this.

1:07:04That's really fun. But in that moment, I'll tell a story about one of our two-time Olympians in heavyweights. His name's Wes Kitt. and he's an incredible athlete and an Olympian in Olympic lifting and heavyweights, which are the strongest humans on the planet, right? His coach, Dave Spitz, who's a genius, local at Cal Strength, was like, hey, can you meet with Wes? He was just at the Pan Am Games, received a heavy clean over 400 and passed out, right? On stage, pressurizing for the next jerk, right? Cleaning is getting up to your shoulders, jerking is probably your head. And I was like, well, that doesn't sound like a good way to win, right?

1:07:42And so Wes came in and what we worked on was him pressurizing under those loads. Could he sequence and take a second and do a little bit more diligence about getting more air and creating this high intra-abdominal pressure? And when we started working on that with him, same drill, same skills, but just, and then also being a little conscientious, he never missed a jerk again, like set the American record, qualified for the Olympics. So we can, at the highest level, at low level, low speed, walking around, you know, the breathing, you can have one lung and still climb Everest. Like we're so efficient.

1:08:18But on the other hand, when we start to look at, hey, we're going to do these five reps on this squat. I need you to get back to that breath. Your first breath is great. You get back to the top. Can we pressurize again? Can we pressurize again? And suddenly that becomes a skill. Can I breathe while I'm under this load. And if that doesn't sound like something you can relate to, go ahead and do a plank because everyone on this call or listening has probably done a plank and watch what happens when you plank. You stop breathing or you breathe very shallowly. So show me you can maintain this reference volume, taking these huge breaths in and out while you're doing some of these mundane skills.

1:08:55You're back at yoga again.

1:08:56Dr. Rhonda Patrick:So that, is that a good thing to practice? Would be like doing the plank and really just trying to like breathe and pressurize as you call it. Yeah, yeah. And what you can certainly see is, wow, as soon as it gets a little bit hard, the first thing that goes out is the window. So when I work with coaches and teams or even a group of people will do, like you, do a little demo. Hey, let's do a squat or do something. And the first thing people do is hold their breath. Why? Because they've created a little stable trunk, requires less skill, less movement control, and they can simplify the system. So if I just hold my breath, then I can do a skill for a while.

1:09:34And what we actually, many of us are doing is going from breath hold to breath hold to breath hold to breath hold when we work. And you're not actually limited by your strength. You're limited by our ability to manage oxygen use because you're not breathing. You're going from breath hold to breath hold. And you'll see it and actually watch your kids, watch people. They literally are existing in a world where they're going from breath hold to breath hold. And oftentimes we're like, oh, that's a curious strategy, given that we're aerobic animals.

1:09:58Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Right. So just take some time, focus on your breath while you're doing a static hold. I like that. Super simple. And train your breath. Yeah. And look, we establish it this way. If we lay you down on the ground and I have you take the biggest breath in through your belly, through your ribs, through your chest, through your upper back, we could measure that, right? But I call that the reference volume because there's no load on your spine. You don't have to do anything. Like you're out of gravity. We can just like, what's the most air in we can get? And we can practice that. put your hands here, breathe here, right?

1:10:29We can measure that. Then in gravity, I basically want you to be at 90 % of that. So now there are all these competing demands on that. But if I suddenly have an idea of how much air I should be able to move in and out, and then I drop down into a plank and I'm at 30 % taking these really shallow breaths, you're like, what are you doing? You know, because now why does your swimming suck? Why does, right? You can start to see that you're making, you're losing capacity. And again, the reason we're interested in this is that we're interested in training these available capacities in the mundane things that we're already doing.

1:11:03And so with just a few twists to the pretzel, we can really zhuzh up and get even more bang for the buck.

1:11:10Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I'm excited. I'm going to, we do, I do planks often, you know, mostly at the end of my workout with my coach. And so I'm going to start practicing. Oh, it's so fun. The breath work. And you'll be shocked. You're like, wow, I really aren't breathing here. That's what is, And what a great strategy. What a great strategy that our brain goes, this is complicated. This is potentially a little dangerous. We'll just simplify the system. We just have so many wonderful workarounds as the body to maintain capacity, maintain range of motion. Let's keep you in the game. Let's make it so you can still get your hand to your face and you can negotiate the world.

1:11:44Right? We have all of these workarounds.

1:11:46Dr. Rhonda Patrick:It's funny because you mentioned Gabby and Laird, who I've are mutual friends. and I've over the years something has come up every time but I was supposed to go train with them and do their their XPT the pool work the house yeah yeah and I know it's going to happen one day it's a bucket list item I'm going to be more prepared for it oh yeah yeah for sure less embarrassed and what what's really great is I just I want you to appreciate that when Laird is there Laird has 17, 200 levels of hell. Like there's some way to exceed your capacity, right? And that's what all good training is. We're trying to say, how skilled are you as a mover?

1:12:31And then we're going to add a little bit of construct or constraint to exceed your ability. And then we're going to try to keep you there. That's our hypothesis. We're going to test our hypothesis. Like that's all we do in exercise. And that might be adding load. That might be adding speed. Hey, did you notice the first time you had to squat after rowing that it was a little bit harder to squat? Breathing real hard makes that skill harder? Oh, yeah.

1:12:53Dr. Rhonda Patrick:When I have, when my coach has, it's like if I design the workouts that we do, like at the end of our session, it's hard. After you're doing the rowing and then you have to go right into the squat or look after the cleaning and then doing a front squat. So what you've just discovered there is that, hey, this movement is a skill and there are a lot of ways to challenge that skill. I hand you a barbell. I hand you dumbbells. I flip you upside down. Now we're competing. Now there's a little psychology of, hey, I have to do this thing and I'm not sure I can. The imposter voice, the fear voice. Now you're breathing hard.

1:13:30Now I have to do 20 reps. And you see that there are so many ways to manipulate that, that ultimately when we start to view strength conditioning as coordination training with resistance, the resistance is a lot. but if we're just about, we have a lot of choice here to make this hard, but if it's just about capacity, then let's just give you an exercise bike and do some dumb work, but it's not. How do we become more skilled? And I guess, I think one of the critiques and a valid critique of the last 20 years of strength and conditioning, it's become very capacity-based. We're so interested in capacity, but your VO2 max means nothing unless you can handle and carry that with skill.

1:14:16Dr. Rhonda Patrick:you have this great quote train for life don't live to train which i mean you kind of touched on it a little bit and we're we're talking about both ends of the spectrum here i mean obviously there are athletes that are training for something but there's a lot of people listening to this podcast that are not athletes they're just interested in being healthy let's okay then if that athlete word is not the right word okay what is the right word what is the right move Because I think what we want to say is that everyone needs to move their body. We're getting that message. But we want you to not – I've been saying this lately and it's very unpopular, but pull-ups are the worst sport there is.

1:14:58It's what a terrible sport pull-ups are. It's not interesting. No one cares. Like going from 20 to 25 pull-ups is great for you. Did it make you a better swimmer? Did it make you a better surfer? So ultimately, in this quest for bigger front squats, like strength is never a weakness. You know, let's slave to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. At what cost to actually have you left the house and done a sport? Have you tested your fitness? Have you spent your fitness credits? We run a program for adults over 40. You know, it's like, what does a strength and conditioning movement lifestyle program look like for a busy person who's not interested in necessarily, you know, snatching one rep max at the Olympics again?

1:15:37and um one of the things that we see there is that people are still treating exercise like a commodity where i it's i have to do the makeup sets of math homework if i miss a day i go back i'm like hold up hold up hold up that's not what good consistent strength conditioning practice looks like at any sport level if you and i are competing we had a tournament this weekend we We come back in, we reclaim, right? Your positions, there's actual life going on. Hey, we're working on, you know, what you'll see is that the strength and conditioning done by real sports teams changes a lot. Travel, competition, off season, in season, when do we turn up?

1:16:19I can't, I mean, one of my critiques of strength and conditioning right now is that like, if you train kids the way we're training adults who don't do sports or train anyone who's like adults who don't do sports, you will crush them and they won't be able to do their sport. So if you and I train together and then you're like, Kelly, I wasn't able to surf today because I'm so beat up. I'm like, well, it doesn't matter. It does matter. So ultimately, we're trying to get to a place where we can start to think about this training as having context instead of just being recursive hell where, oh, my VO2 came down or my pull-ups came down.

1:16:52I lost some capacity. Yes, you should lose capacity. You went on vacation, right? You did a sport. You did, you hiked the Grand Canyon. Like, of course, your pull-ups are going to change. Come back in and get restarted again. Don't see it as this like perfect decorative room, which doesn't match your lifestyle, your stress, your nutrition. We kind of were like, look what the Soviets are doing. They could like, you're going to be 82.3 % of your one rep max on Tuesday, three weeks from now. Are you serious? Like you don't even know where you are going to be in the world three weeks from now. How could we possibly plan for that?

1:17:22And I don't know if you're going to get sick or your kid's going to get sick or you're going to have a deadline at work. So let's go ahead and just give ourselves permission. what's the goal today to find relative loads and relative speeds and relative skill and then we'll

1:17:35Dr. Rhonda Patrick:we'll go on yeah i think there's a lot of people that perhaps don't even play sports and i mean adults here i'm mostly talking about adults that are thinking about these statistics in their head like oh i'm 50 years old i'm 60 years old my muscle mass is declining my strength is declining. My cardiorespiratory fitness is declining. And they're scared about that aging process. And they're trying to battle it and slow it. And so they're like, well, I need to put stress on any muscles to get the adaptations. I need to make sure I'm growing at the least, maintaining muscle mass, building strength.

1:18:18Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I need to make sure I'm keeping my blood flow going and challenging my lungs and my heart, right? My cardiorespiratory system. And so for them, they're like, you're saying it's the, the, the, the gym is kind of like a checklist. Exactly. It's a checklist. And, um, and so, yeah, how, so how should those people think about training and what types of training should they, I mean, what's their mindset like, and then translate that to, to action. who that is like here here we go the million dollar question right what does it look like the most important thing i i think let's let's take another model um humans in america don't eat fruits and vegetables we like we like to pretend like we do we don't we don't no one gets enough fiber not five percent of us get enough fiber day okay so so we have we have what we should do and what we are doing right the most important thing is to find a way that you like to move your body in community.

1:19:19That's the most important thing. How are you, do you enjoy dance? Let's go dance. So what we need to do first and say is if we just reduce exercise to like this physiologic, you know, input so that my heart rate, you know, my blood pressure, I'm exercising in my blood. That's a side effect. I want you to exercise so that you can have better communication with your partners, a more fun household, that you're in a community. Like that's what we were supposed to do. Then we can take a look at that and say, okay, we have a physical practice, movement practice, game play, which is really important.

1:19:54Then we can say, what's the minimum dose over here of loading of cardiorespiratory demand? And theoretically, you can do that in an enjoyable way too. You have mentioned CrossFit and we discovered CrossFit in 2004. We opened a CrossFit gym in 2005. The model of CrossFit, especially modern, sophisticated CrossFit programming, is that there are a lot of needs being met simultaneously. You're going to get strong. You're going to become skilled. You're going to have to do this under a high aerobic demand and metabolic demand. And simultaneously, it's pretty fun. And, you know, my wife has would describe herself as having exercise ADD.

1:20:36Like she doesn't want to do the same thing every single day. Like I could eat the same breakfast for now to the end of time. She's like, nope, that's not for me. So what we want to do is again, go in and say, well, what, what are the things that you need to do? And now we can start to ask, what do you have access to? What's, you know, how, you know, do you have, do you have a weight? Where are you going to do that? How often are you going to do that? And we really end up getting in the weeds very quickly and more importantly into the right conversation. And, you know, they sell kettlebells at Target now, you know, and if you just had a kettlebell at home and did some swings, you know, in your kitchen for 10 or 15 minutes, plus went to dance class, plus through a Frisbee, you're going to start to approximate some pretty good, well-balanced fitness.

1:21:24And then we can take that, the things that you like to do and the minimums of these things, like we love it. People hang from a bar. If you can hang three minutes a day, that's such a great thing to do. Why? Good for your neck, good for your back, good for your shoulders, right? We tend to find that people who can hang have less shoulder pain, less neck pain. Okay. It's a fundamental position. And what we're really doing when we're hanging...

1:21:49Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Three minutes. Three minutes in total. What we're really doing when we're hanging is an isometric. And we're just telling our brain these are really important positions to be in. and that hanging really popularized by Ido Portal was the first version to be like, let's aggregate hanging. We start to see that shoulders hurt less, back works better, neck functions more effectively because we're just spending time in these end ranges. You don't like to hang? Let me introduce you to downward dog. Downward dog is another version of spending a lot of time with the arms over your head. And if you've ever gone to yoga class, you spend like two and a half years in downward dog for a reason, because it's a really important position.

1:22:24So now, Now, theoretically, I can take all the things Dr. Patrick does, all things that Dr. Kelly does, and then we can test them and say, who's got the best? And does it get me, if my VO2 max has improved a little bit or it's good enough? Isn't that what we want to do? Just discover what's good enough so that we, again, can be pain-free, have the most movement choice, play, pick up skills, occupy a role. And then if we want to go to the Olympics, that's a slightly different conversation. But for the average person, we should be able to say, our goal isn't to be so specialized that we're afraid to have a margarita or drink and eat an acai bowl, right?

1:23:02We want to have tolerance in the system and be amazing. One of my personal bugaboos is I don't always want to talk about body composition. I really stayed away from nutrition conversations because it was always about losing body fat. I have to talk about it because I want to talk about your tissue health. I want to talk about all the things that are going going to allow you to not get injured or tweaked. Simultaneously, one of my goals is to be less gross for my wife. My wife is the CEO. She has these abs. She's this superstar rad woman, and I don't want her to leave me, so I want to be less gross.

1:23:37Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I love, Kelly, how you added leisure time activity in that equation. You mentioned dancing or whatever it is you like to do. For me, it's tennis. Because I've had Dr. Ben Levine. Have Have you heard Ben Levine? I mean, he's a rock star in, you know, the exercise physiology world when it comes to cardiovascular health, right? And his prescription for life from just, you know, decades of aggregating data, you know, looking at individuals from an age range from, you know, younger athletes, middle age, older. Really, that is an important part of the equation in addition to the exercise volume and the types of exercise that people are doing.

1:24:19Dr. Rhonda Patrick:It's got to be at least an hour a week of leisure time activity in the equation. I've never heard a minimum of leisure time activity. But yes, yes, yes, we do not play enough. You're right. And you're absolutely right. Especially, I mean, kids play a lot. And we're going to get into kids too. But we're both parents and I'm very interested in that. But adults don't play enough. And even adults that are interested in health and fitness and improving the way they age and feeling better, being more mobile, all of that, even those adults oftentimes don't have any sort of leisure time activity. I mean, and that could be even riding a bike with a group.

1:24:56Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Oh, that's leisure time activity. Right. Oh, yeah, 100%. Tennis. I guess pickleball is making a comeback now. I don't know how you feel about that. Pickleball will save America. Yeah. I mean, a lot of older people are getting into it. And my mom's like, I'm going to start doing pickleball. So I love that leisure time activities back in the equation because I feel like we lost that as adults. We somehow lost the fun of playing a sport. I was just in Hawaii this weekend. We were speaking at the University of Hawaii and working with some different – we did a keynote there. And then I worked with the strength and conditioning staff, right?

1:25:30Just had a session with the University of Hawaii Athletics, go Bows. and um on the the outside wall of the kniste department is a sign that's really old from the 70s that replaced it says leisure like leisure activity research or leisure activity research something like that and julian and i were like look at that they were like someone was looking at like sports and playing sports as a way of getting fit and like quantifying that And we have a really good friend who, Nicole Christensen, CrossFit Roots, she says, hey, my family doesn't nature for time. So any health benefits that we get from riding our bikes or paddling or doing it, that's just free money because it's in service of our sport.

1:26:15So let's go ahead and get fit for our sport. And so if you're a runner, here's this radical idea, train for running because running is your sport, right? And pelotoning is a terrible sport. I mean, that's just the worst fun, right? And yet, we figured out, hey, I got to be fit. There's just some really efficient ways to do it in my home, etc. Someone told me this weekend who works at the University of Whitey Law School that the treadmill was invented in prison because no one could think of a more demoralizing thing than doing a bunch of work that didn't do anything. I was like, wow, okay. Sign me up.

1:26:52Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Yeah. Yeah. Peloton's changed my life for the 10-minute blood flow when I am on the go. I am such a fan of the exercise bike. We can protect people's range of motion. It's what we call high physiology, low skill. Not many people die. Your knee doesn't dislocate. You can get a lot of work done really fast on that thing. If we had the exercise bike in every household in America, we would see a lot of changes, comma, you know, I don't know if that scales or is very calitarian or democratizing. Oh, it's everyone needs a complex solution to a complex problem. Right, exactly. Well, let's talk a little bit about the healing because, you know, just I want to, it's something that I'm personally interested in because I do, as I mentioned at the start of this podcast, do have pain.

1:27:44It's not rehabilitating pain,

1:27:46Dr. Rhonda Patrick:And it usually goes away pretty shortly after whatever, you know, exercise I'm doing. But it's annoying. And I want to know, you know, like, should I be doing things? You mentioned voodoo floss. You know, there's the lacrosse ball. So it's like the tendon. I have these, you know, it's like, it seems as though my nagging pain, I know a lot of people experience this, you know, is there, is there, you know, what's the science behind this? Is it really just increasing the blood flow to these not very well, you know, vascularized tissues? Yeah, that could be it. It could be that you tweaked yourself a long time.

1:28:23We have a thousand just so stories, right? It's really easy. I think they call it harking, right? Where you look, right? You look at a data set afterwards, you're like, oh, here's what I meant to do. So what we can, if we're looking at a complex system and we're trying to derive essential information out of that complex complexity it's important that we take a look at the environment the person lives in and and that maybe is not the first conversation because that's annoying hey my shoulder is killing me i can't play my game tell me about your stress like bro like that's not the place for like come on make this stop hurting then we can talk about my stress so but we we do try to create benchmarks and we call them vital signs for those people sleep nutrition because we do sometimes end up, give me an anecdote here.

1:29:09We had a woman at our gym who had a bad ankle sprain, kind of tear in one of her ligaments. We had a lot of physios at our gym. She healed back up. We got her back. She's fully returned to play. A couple months later, I walked back into the gym. She's wearing her boot again. And I was like, oh no, like you injured yourself again. She's like, I don't know what happened. I just woke up and it started hurting. And then what I said to her was, tell me more. And I was like, what's going on? Like, this is not, that's not how the brain works. It's not how your body works. Like, I've seen you move after this thing.

1:29:39She's like, well, my dog just died. And that death was so significant for her that her brain was basically took stock of what was going on with her body. It was like, it must be the ankle again. So just lowering that, that sense, or raising that sensitivity by that stressful event was enough for her to trigger her brain thinking that that body was unsafe. safe. So as we're working through this and trying to gather information about a complex system, and remember the brain is the most sophisticated structure in the known universe, we can start with saying, well, do you have range of motion here?

1:30:16That's an easy place to start. Because we can play press and guess where I get you to scrape and we mobilize and we can do some isometrics, but we could be much more targeted in our approach here. And rarely is it like the tendon, We want to see that tendon in a movement system because that tendon oftentimes is just putting up with your crap. It's actually doing the job of like three things. Like, for example, we have a simple test called the couch stretch. Have you ever done the couch stretch? You put your knee in the corner.

1:30:45Dr. Rhonda Patrick:No, but I've heard about it. Okay, okay. So it's basically just a real simple assessment of some hip extension. So if you were kneeling facing away from the wall, you put your knee in the corner. so your foot is going up the wall and then you bring your other leg up into a high kneeling position, right? So it's kind of like a lunge but your leg is really bent and going up the wall. So it's a short lever lunge position. And what we're looking for there is can you get your back upright without banana backing, without just kind of arching? Can you take a breath there? And then can you squeeze your butt there?

1:31:18And what we often find is that people are so restricted in their quads they can't even get into that test position because they're so restricted for whatever reason, but also it inhibits their ability to squeeze their butt. So what we see is sometimes when people are missing hip extension, because this is really a simple test of looking at what the tissues should be able to do as we move towards extension, getting that knee behind my butt like a lunge or run, that butt gets inhibited because the quads are tight and the pelvis tips over, whatever reason, the brain is basically like, we can't fire that glute against this resistance.

1:31:54So we use that as an assessment for, hey, let's spend some time here, isometrics. We can get your butt practicing that squeezing. So your brain says, oh, in this position, I can do a normal muscular drill, get my butt squeezing when the quads are tight. But that's a good example of why a lot of times people have really stiff hamstrings all the time. They're always sitting in a bent position. And then the hamstring is doing the work of the butt and the hamstring all the time instead of the butt doing its job and the hamstring doing its job together. So it's a good example of sometimes that hamstring pathology could be as a result of working in incomplete positions where a lot of my physiology is sort of what I call positionally inhibited.

1:32:37And the same thing could be true of your shoulder.

1:32:39Dr. Rhonda Patrick:So what do we do? So you mentioned spending some time in the isometric position to help. Yeah. And for everyone, that just means you're pausing in a position, right? And making your brain control that position when we stop. So if you're doing a squat and you stop, that's an isometric. And so shoulder hanging, I mean, hanging from a bar, would that be considered? That might be one, working on overhead position. We also could take, if you've ever laid, like you could lay on your back, put a lacrosse ball or some kind of ball in your T-spine and put your arm over your head. and one of the ideas that I stole right out of my instruction at physio school is that we mobilize at the position of restriction whenever we can we want to give context to the tissues that we're mobilizing so if I'm missing internal rotation so if I put my arm out to my side so here's a quick primer for everyone the shoulder really does four things I know it seems like it does a lot more but don't lose the narrative here.

1:33:36You put your arm over your head. Okay. Arm goes out in front, arm goes out to the side, arm goes behind. That's really it. In some version of that, I'm going from position to position. What gets confusing is that the arm can bend and be straight, right? And it can rotate. So suddenly I can get into some very complex positions, but this is just still arm out in front, right? A plank is training what? Arm out in front. And we have some, we call them archetypes, right? So a pushup, the start of a row, start of a bench press, those are all beginning shapes that are similar. And then we can ask, you know, how am I spending time in these shapes?

1:34:16Do I have any exposure to these shapes? Or do I even have access to the shape? So if my arm is out, I should have a rotational window of about 160 degrees. So it's easy to see, harder to see with the arm straight, easier to see when the our elbow is bent. So from 90, arm is parallel to the ground, I should be able to go straight up to 90. That's normal range. If my hand is here, I should be able to get my hand all the way down to my hip if I was laying on the ground without my shoulder coming forward. And that shoulder coming forward is how your body solves the problem if you can't access that position.

1:34:50And that shoulder coming forward suddenly asks that deltoid, biceps to work really hard. The deltoid's like working like a seatbelt, trying to squeeze you back. That's potentially the mechanism of injury for biceps tears, for labral tears, puts my rotator cuff at a huge disadvantage. And what we can say is it's not necessarily bad because you have pain. It's less effective if you're trying to access all the wonderful things that your shoulder should be able to do. So now when we give people a few quick tests, you can be like, oh, this must be my internal rotation. And oftentimes when you just restore these fundamental shapes, pain mitigation we get in the background right but more importantly what can we measure power wattage poundage those are the things that we really keep our eyes on have you heard i mean

1:35:36Dr. Rhonda Patrick:i know you've heard of it but what what causes women who are perimenopausal to get this frozen shoulder i as you were mentioning the the range back here like some women i'm so glad you brought that up so one of the things that our industry physical therapy everyone all for did did dirty by women for a long time is we did not recognize what Dr. Vonder Wright calls the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause. And that when we suddenly see women in their 40s and 50s who show up with some weird occult tendon thing, got a weird hot tendon, I want everyone to ask the fundamental question, hmm, I wonder if this is related to my gonads, right, which is my ovaries and testes.

1:36:21What is happening? Is there some fundamental change in my biology that has left me, because you're doing everything's the same. Nutrition's the same. But all of a sudden I woke up and this new body, absolutely, we should be asking that question, does this have a hormonal component? Yes. And we can also work on restoring your range of motion. We could also get blood flow and we could move slower so that it doesn't hurt while simultaneously maybe we run that down.

1:36:50Dr. Rhonda Patrick:So essentially, you have to fix the hormone problem. I would say that for generations, we didn't fix the hormone problem for as long as there have been humans. But now what I would say is we are more aware that this should be a component of care for women who are perimenopausal and menopausal when we're suddenly seeing a cold frozen shoulder. And by the way, frozen shoulder translates in Japanese and Chinese to 50-year-old shoulder. Isn't that weird? Yes. That's what it's called, 50-year-old shoulder. I haven't gotten it yet, but I'm like, I have friends that have it. I'm hearing about it. And now I'm like scared.

1:37:27Well, what we can say is how do we manage range of motion? How do we optimize? What can we control? And oftentimes that's enough. And then we may need to jump on that. But when there are changes in the tissues and there is no parody here. We often have men who come out of being exposed to a lot of head trauma in the military, in professional sports. They've rattled their antipituitary, right? Through concussions. They don't really make testosterone. They don't really, you know, plus all the lifestyle things that go on. No growth hormone. Tissues start to fall apart. In two seconds, we're like, men, here's some testosterone.

1:38:04You're set, right? We measured it. You have all these concussion histories. Imagine if we applied the same thing to women and we're like, hey, the system isn't working. And now you're starting to expose yourself to these fundamental changes in your tissues. They're changing because of the lack of estrogen. So seems like that would be another thing we could look into.

1:38:24Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Yeah. One other thing I want to touch on on the sort of healing recovery spectrum is, you know, we're talking about blood flow, perfusion. The voodoo floss is like one way to get to that. I like to run on days that I'm not lifting. And I find that if I'm really sore, if I did something, if I've been traveling a week, it's crazy. I'll travel for a week. And then I come back and I do squats and I'm like, I'm sore. And I'm like, I've been doing these. I can't take a week off. Like, really? I know. What? But I find that if I go for a run the next day, it is insanely important for my recovery. It really helps.

1:39:05That's right. That's right. So I don't want to interrupt.

1:39:08Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Yeah. No, do. First of all, your experience there is really important. I figured out that if I move after these sessions, I feel better and that works and I know how to do that. So someone should not come in and say, that's wrong or let's change that bully for you because you're figuring it out that the goal is this constant motion. That's fantastic. And I mean, it's probably a lot of things going on, but I feel like blood flow is one, right? You're getting all the goodies to your muscle to recover and your tendons and so on. But the other way to do that would be something that I've definitely talked about a lot on this podcast and I know that you're a fan of, which is deliberate heat exposure through sauna or hot tub, where you're also increasing blood flow.

1:39:52Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I mean, it's sort of mimicking moderate-intensity cardiovascular exercise. So I wanted to get your thoughts on, first of all, using temperature, both hot and then on the opposite end of that would be cold, which causes vasoconstriction. combining the two, how you think about using that for healing, recovery, and then we can talk about growth hormone too because I want to bring up something as well. We're huge fans of entertainment of your body. Michael Easter talks about the comfort crisis, just that exposure to those ends making you a little bit more psychologically resilient. How about that there's probably a ton of really good science.

1:40:34Thank you for showing us all about the sauna exposure, heat exposure. Simultaneously, I would say that what if the sauna, the miracle of the sauna was just that you have to chill out and be in there with your partner and there's no phone and there's a community. I think it can work on lots of levels. We tend, I think the easiest way of thinking, and I'll borrow this from our friend Laird and Gabby, that heating up and cooling down are two of the most expensive things our body does. And if we can become a little bit more efficient at it, that's probably a good thing. Getting cold and getting hot might be really great for your range of motion of your vasculature.

1:41:10Just reminding all those smooth vessels, this is what it means to get cold and this is what it means to get hot. And you're right. Maybe the fundamental aspect of sauna is that we just start moving and pumping and things start, you know, that's great. I'm into it. Now we can say, well, how often? When should I? Can I make it too hot? You actually brought our temperature way down. Thank you very much. We listened and now we're at like 180, not 230. You know, I'm not retching in the sauna anymore, you know, because I'm overheated. But I think if we're talking about performance, great research around sauna.

1:41:48We can sauna, sauna, sauna, but it's a stressor and we'll definitely smoke you. We probably tend to use cold a little bit more judiciously because it can blunt adaptation to exercise, right? Which is not what we're trying to do. And yet simultaneously, I would just say, hey, if you're a middle-aged rec guy, get cold when it works for you, right? Don't worry about it. If we're trying to win a gold medal, maybe we think about when we're dosing that exposure of cold so we don't blunt any application. But if we're talking about jumping in some cold water for a minute, that's not the same thing as icing, right?

1:42:20Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Yeah. I also love how you talked about your brain and doing the hard things too. We're also training our brain, right? People freak out when they get cold. I'm like, what's wrong with you? It's just cold, you know? And full disclosure, my wife, I know we're professional river guides and kayakers and paddlers. We've been cold our whole life, it feels like. So we're like, oh, this is just like my 20s, being freezing in a river. But I think it's real fun to entertain ourselves a little bit on the side. And I think maybe we can look at some of those objects as like totemic objects that focus other health behaviors.

1:42:55Maybe that's the best, nicest thing about them. Right.

1:42:59Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Yeah. Well, I wanted to bring up growth hormone because, one, I want to get your input on what I'm going to say, but also because there's not a lot of research on this. There's, like, independent research in one area and in the other, and you kind of have to connect the dots, right, which isn't always great, but it's a start. And so we know that sauna, deliberate heat exposure, does increase growth hormone. So growth hormone does respond to a stressful type of, you know, stress, right? So you can do that through exercise. You can do it through deliberate heat exposure. You can do it through, you know, intermittent fasting.

1:43:36Dr. Rhonda Patrick:All those things have been shown to increase growth hormone. And depending on the temperature and duration, you can get a more robust response, right? So like the longer you do the sauna, the more hot without going above, you know, 200 degree Fahrenheit, you're going to get a more robust response with growth hormone. and you know the effects of growth hormone particularly on like tendons making them stronger i believe that's that's something that's you know known so my my idea here is like is this is using the sauna also potentially you know helping your tendons because that growth hormone pulse that you're you know getting from from doing exercise also does right it elevates growth hormones as well.

1:44:17But if we're managing someone's pain or after injury, again, I might even say hard for me to measure that growth hormone effect. But what is really useful is that I can get people feel better. We get better blood flow without having to work hard on a tissue that we need to protect temporarily, right? It's easy to do that and sort of, I don't have to, you know, we're lucky we have a sauna, but maybe you have one at home and you don't have to drive. We can have lots of these little sort of exposures more often. And ultimately, I think it would be real fun to be like, I got into the sauna and look at my skin now.

1:45:01It's amazing, right? One time, but it's really the consistency of these exposures. I think we just, it's easy to sort of lose that. We love the sauna because we have a bunch of friends who are maniacs who work really hard. They're at the peak of their power. They're families. And we find it to be the easiest e-brake to yank to slow them down. In the evening, if you get hot and cold a couple times, you're going to fall asleep because it's so exhausting. But what I really like is you start to say, hey, here's a practice that's pretty easy, low skill, and maybe I could really goose my tissue healing times by optimizing.

1:45:38Because now we start to say, well, are you getting enough protein? Are you going to have sleep? How are we getting that blood moving? And if there's side effects from some of these things, that's really great. I'll take it. Right.

1:45:49Dr. Rhonda Patrick:And the nice thing now is I think there's enough research showing that even getting in a hot tub, hot bath, you could do a hot bath. Most people do have a bathtub at home. You will have to get a little pool thermometer and make sure you're at 140 Fahrenheit. So you might have to constantly refill the bath for it to stay for it to stay hot for 20 minutes, but it's also more accessible, I think, now, where it's like, well, people might go, I don't have a sauna, and maybe they don't have a gym membership, and their gym doesn't have a sauna, so it's nice to know that they can even use their bathtub at home.

1:46:21Yes, I love that, and the way you're thinking about this is, okay, here's what we think best practice looks like in an elite institution. How do I transmute that to my little home? You know, getting hot, really, once in a while, it's probably really good for you.

1:46:35Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Yeah. Yeah. Okay, let's kind of translate to the opposite of exercising and moving, which is what we're doing now and sitting and what most of us are spending, I would say, the majority of our day doing. doing. I have to admit, I'm selfishly interested in some of the stuff that you talked about in your bestselling book, Supple Leopard, desk ergonomics, and kind of optimizing that because I, as I mentioned to you off camera, embarrassingly have a standing desk. I mean, I toggle, it can toggle it up and down. And yet I'm sitting the whole time that I'm working at that desk. I used it as a standing desk like 10 years ago, got out of the practice.

1:47:20But before we get to the standing desk, I do want to just mention, you know, there's a lot of people in my life that are affected by sitting at a desk that I care about.

1:47:32Dr. Rhonda Patrick:And so I want this information to get to them. So where do we start? Let's define the problem, right? It's not sitting is bad. Standing is good, right? We're designed to be in motion throughout the rest of the day, for the whole day. I think that's the way you should look at it. And there are absolutely times where it's appropriate to simplify. You have trained your body through high school and college and university and grad school to be able to sit and focus. And that is not a problem. What's the problem is these marathon bouts. So Harvard defines sedentary lifestyle as sitting more than six hours a day in aggregate.

1:48:10it. So that's TV, dinner, commuting, right? All the, you know, we're having to sit like this is our organism, you know, and again, we should have a body that's tolerant enough to handle these sitting things without my back hurting, without my hips getting stiff. But what we can start to ask is, okay, are there opportunities where we can break up that sitting into optional, non-optional sitting. Because remember, the goal is just to move more, right? So one of the things that's been useful for us is that data that says walking 8 ,000 steps a day reduces all-cause mortality by 51%. That's a pretty good bargain.

1:48:498 ,000 steps turns out to be clinically relevant because a lot of people can get that without having to do a big crazy walk and organize your whole life around walking meetings. You can kind of get that 8 ,000 steps. So now we've got a benchmark in there where we're, instead of saying, don't do this, we're saying, hey, let's do this positive behavior. And that tends to change what's going on with all the sedentariness. You're like, oh, got to walk. And people have been down this road before. The healthiest people in the building were the smokers because they had to get up and walk to the smoke place, right?

1:49:20And the further away you put that, the healthier they got. But what we can then start to say is, well, okay, I have this desk thing. Are there any modifications to the environment that might allow me to not be as sedentary? So we can look and go further and say, well, what is a sedentary behavior? It's like falling in half below one and a half metabolic equivalents. That's really what it is. So you remember the old treadmills, like you can be like watts, calories, mets. A met is like an erg or a watt. It's just a measure of, of work output. And one and a half metabolic equivalence is a sedentary behavior.

1:50:01So any activity where I have more than one and a half metabolic equivalence, like, like there's a landmark research that when the Wii came out, remember that, that, that PlayStation, the Wii, and they were like, Wii fit. It turns out playing Wii burned as many calories as standing, right? It wasn't the Wii. It was the, now we're not sitting and playing. So if we were at a bar stool working, that's still, I can focus, but now I have to do a lot more with my trunk. And now I'm above one and a half metabolic equivalents. As soon as I got my legs a little bit involved in the conversation, boom, above one and a half.

1:50:36And not that we need to perseverate on that, but suddenly you could really do say that, hmm, those drafters had something going on. So we say it's not a standing workstation until you You have a place to put your foot to get you out of this extension. So you need like a stack or something. And two, I want you to have a bar stool so that you can sit down, you can perch, you can lean, you can use it as a prop. You can put your foot on it. You can do half pigeon pose on it, right? And all of a sudden you're like, wow, there's a lot of movement choice. I think the problem with just sitting is that we don't have a lot of movement choice here.

1:51:10and as soon as I go from a sitting traditionally sitting station to a more work-friendly position there's a lot more choice to fidget move take a break step back etc etc and that suddenly cracks the whole thing open so having that range of movements really key and

1:51:28Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I also have a it's a bar stool chair yes that um I don't use anymore but I still have it yeah and And it's kind of like you sit on it like a saddle. It's a saddle chair. Perfect. You can go down the rabbit hole. You can go to Ikea and get the cheapest bar stool you want there. I just want your trunk to have to work. Yeah, you're right. As you're talking about this, I'm sitting here going, oh, yeah. As soon as I sit back, everything turns off. And there's a time for that. Absolutely. Let's go ahead and kick back. Welcome to the couch. Welcome to laying down. But the rest of the time, we might even say, well, hmm, if we have remote work or I need some work at home, maybe I sit on the ground.

1:52:07And so suddenly what you're doing, as we come back to a kind of a conversation we were having, is what does a day's movement look like? And if I'm not able to exercise, could I still say I moved enough during the day, I took care of myself, I was able to put all these things in while I walked, I did some breath spin up, I moved a little bit more when I was at work, I sat on the ground for 20 or 30 minutes in the evening at home while watching TV. And maybe I did a little mobility work. I pulled out a roller and said, what's tight? Look at that day. It's pretty agnostic of exercise, but we put a lot of inputs into the body.

1:52:46And sometimes that's what we're trying to do. And since most of us go to work, maybe there's an opportunity to get some more inputs.

1:52:52Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Why is sitting on the ground so important? You've talked, you talked about this earlier, floor setting in the Japanese culture and the Asian cultures where they're squatting and And you've mentioned in your book even, like floor sitting is important. Why do you think it's so important? If we look at the number one reason people end up in nursing homes, can't get up and down off the ground independently. So let's practice that, right? So now I have this practice where I have to get up and down off the ground. So it's built into something I'm doing. Most of us are watching TV. This is the truth, right?

1:53:23So what we found was that this was a simple behavior to put in where you could be in some of these end range positions that you just don't touch very often. Sit with your leg straight out in front of me. Oh, that's uncomfortable. Sit cross-legged. Oh, that's uncomfortable. Now kneel for a while. Oh, that's uncomfortable. Now side saddle. That's uncomfortable. So we can touch a lot of postures. And most important thing, as we already hinted at, is this exposure and consistency. But if you're on the ground for 20 or 30 minutes, the total time we're spending at some of these end ranges of your hip, your knees, a typical person may not actually bend their knee all the way.

1:54:01They don't bend their knee all the way. They kind of sit in a chair. They walk around. When's the last time your heel touched your butt? And suddenly people are like, I can't kneel. I'm like, well, when did that happen? When did that change?

1:54:12Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I mean, kids are constantly in that position. Constantly. So I think what we found, Philip Beach wrote a wonderful book called Muscles and Meridians. It's a functional embryology, you nerds out there. It's the best book on embryology there is. But he has this hypothesis that it's one of the ways that the body used to tune itself, that we spend time, for example, loading and kneeling on the hip, re-approximates the hip into the socket. We get better hip function after that, right? We have all these mechanics that function better when the hip has sort of better congruence is better centrated. And all you need to do is sit on the ground or work on the ground or kneel on the ground.

1:54:49And that happens automatically. Most of the time when we're sitting, we're actually sitting on our femurs. We're not even sitting on the part of our pelvis that really handles that weight, the ischial tuberosis, the sit bones. And so his idea is, well, we can get into some of these fundamental shapes and patterns and restorations doing something we always used to do. Two and a half million years. I mean, I'm a little fatter, your femur's a little longer, but 10 ,000 years ago, we're the same person. What's changed? Well, we don't ever get up and down off the ground. So suddenly you were like, oh, that yoga, that mat Pilates, those wrestling games, those things turn out to be hugely important.

1:55:25When am I going to put that in? I'm a busy working person. I can do it in the evening sitting on the ground. And you will see your wattage change.

1:55:32Dr. Rhonda Patrick:You'll see your wattage change. You'll see your power change. As we improve your range of motion and give you more movement choice, you will see anything that you care about improve. That's fascinating. Um, okay. So got a, got a family movie night on the floor. Yeah. Um, but also older adults. I mean, this is important because, you know, they're the last person that ever sits on the floor because it's uncomfortable and scary. Yeah. Their back will start to hurt. And so, so for older adults really, you know, sitting on the floor sounds like it's even more important because they're practicing that getting up and if they use their hands and fine, totally fine.

1:56:07Turn on your stomach, use your couch, crawl up on the couch. you'll see that absolutely have this conversation with your parents your parents are like oh i've been on the ground since vietnam or since korea you know i mean like we don't get on the ground anymore and it really is you know you'll hear people talk about playing with their grandkids and they're like wow you know it's it's a lot to be able to get up and down off the ground and what's interesting is your range of motion is the one part of your physiology that doesn't have to change as you age can you imagine if we just said oh yeah everyone gets stiff because it doesn't have to why why it's just one the one aspect of your of your movement probably going to lose some bone density probably going to lose some muscle unless we're you know enhanced right yeah and we have all these but your range of motion doesn't have to to change as long as you're

1:56:55Dr. Rhonda Patrick:allowing as long as you're practicing it right i mean like if you're not practicing it then it's gonna change yeah but also remind everyone muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs they Readapt and readapt. It's going to be slower than when you were 17, but you can reclaim that position and shape. I did a talk at the Olympic Club in San Francisco, which is kind of a fancy athletic club. And they were like, we want you to talk about mobility and performance. And I was like, great, there's going to be no chairs. And the demographic there was decidedly over 50. And there were so many people who wanted to have a very sophisticated conversation about performance and mobility, but couldn't sit on the ground.

1:57:34At the end, it was about an hour long. We were doing lots of demos and things. Probably a third of the room was laying down because they couldn't sit.

1:57:44Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Were they just experiencing pain? Just uncomfortable. Or comfortable? Didn't have access to the range of motion. Didn't have to do anything that required that normative range of motion. You know, that's a problem. Yeah. And it's not always a problem. I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm glad I don't have to kill my own chickens every day. but simultaneously I may have to be a little bit more intentional about taking my body through its shapes so my mom she has this condition it's it's a orthostatic tremor it's called and so essentially she is fine if she walks if she's moving if she's sitting obviously but if she stands still her legs will start to shake pretty rapid and so she can lose her balance really easy And so she's gotten in the habit of like, if you watch her like, you know, go do laundry in the laundry room, she'll sit down.

1:58:33Dr. Rhonda Patrick:She will sit down on the floor and do the laundry because she can't stand. And so even though she's, you know, 71 now, she is probably like one of the few older adults that I know that's sitting constantly because she has to because of this orthostatic tremor where she stands. Stops getting the output. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'll tell her to keep working on her. I love that. Yeah. And she's also the one that gets on the floor and plays with the grandkids because she's used to being on the floor. She's used to being on the floor. She's used to being on the floor. And again, I think what's wonderful about that is we can say, first of all, we can have, hey, fall prevention, mitigation.

1:59:16We could get better getting them down off the ground. We can have better, but also gives us more movement choice. And that's really what gets lost in a lot of this conversation about is letting people have access to as much physiology so they can problem solve, move in the way they want, pick up new novel skills. You can think of movement. This is Juliet's analogy is that when we're young, our hallway is huge and you have a lot of choice in what you do. And, oh, we're going to play basketball and then we're surfing and then we're like, it doesn't matter. Yoga, okay. You can do whatever. And as you get older, that hallway potentially gets narrower and narrower until we're on a walker up and down that hall.

1:59:58And what we're trying to do is say, hey, how do we keep that as wide as possible? And we have to talk about tissue health and some range of motion and community. And it's a conversation about being human. But ultimately, we can have less suffering and still have a body that we can care and is built for adventure for as long as we try. Right. And I think that context really matters. What's important to you? And again, I think we wrote Sepple Leopard. It came out in 2013. Very much obsessed with winning more Olympics. Let's go world champions. And now I'm like, okay, I'm 52. Maybe this is all about maintaining as much playability as you can.

2:00:44Having a body that you can trust and doesn't hurt all the time.

2:00:47Dr. Rhonda Patrick:So that you can enjoy life with your family. I love that idea. That's a really great definition of mobility. Can you do access and can you use that in things that you love to do? Well, it's your quote, train for life, right? Don't live to train. Well, you know, I do like training. I love training. I'm obsessed with training. My wife and I love to train, comma, but it's always in the context of other things, right? In service of. And I think that that's really great. And look, no shade. If you're the gym is your whole world. Awesome. Yeah. That's what makes you happy. That's your life. Right. But let's also now say, cause this is the only thing I would, I would caution is sometimes that highly decorative room where we're checking off all the things is not the same thing as how do we train a group of people to win an Olympic medal or, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

2:01:37Dr. Rhonda Patrick:So Kelly, I just also, since we're talking about this sedentary time and I mean, how sedentary time is defined and how that is an independent risk factor for higher all-cause mortality. And particularly, there's an interesting study that correlates it to cancer, increased cancer risk. I spend a lot of time sitting, a lot of us spend a lot of time sitting, people that listen to this podcast know that I've become over the years really interested in these exercise snacks or actually, as you call them, movement snacks. And I just want to take a moment to give you and Juliet props because you guys have been talking about these for, you know, I don't even know how long now.

2:02:18Dr. Rhonda Patrick:It's been about almost a decade maybe. You've been, you know, it's been quite a few years. you guys were ahead of the curve talking about the importance of, you know, breaking up your day with moving, moving throughout the day and how it's not just about spending that one hour, you know, block of time at the gym. And we're trying to make up, we're trying to overcompensate for our modern day lifestyle, which is very sedentary. That's absolutely true. But, you know, there's so much data that has come out even in the last five years. And this is where my attention, I really became drawn to this literature where it's undeniable that even people that are taking advantage of everyday life situations, so they're not even necessarily doing these structured exercise movements or these structured exercise snacks where they're getting up and doing body weight squats for two minutes or something like that.

2:03:06Dr. Rhonda Patrick:They're just going around and they live on the third floor. Sorry, they could live on the third floor of the building or they could work on the third floor of a building. Either way, they take the stairs to get to that third floor. They don't just take the stairs. They sprint up them. They're really going fast. Or they're taking time to play tag with their kids or their grandkids or sprint around with their new puppy. Whatever it is, this is everyday situations. They live in the city and they're not taking Uber. They're walking briskly to get to wherever they need to go, shopping or to work. And so people actually live like this, believe it or not.

2:03:41Dr. Rhonda Patrick:It is something that people still do. And researchers have studied these people by putting accelerometers on their wrist and studying how fast they are, these intentional types of movements that they're getting throughout the day. And even vigorous housework, right? To some degree, people are moving around if they're vacuuming really or mopping or something like that is, I would say, more moderate intensity, but they can get their heart rate up and they're moving, right? They're moving around. And really, I think the data is clear and repeatable where individuals that are doing these short bursts of exercise, if they're doing three minutes of it, three-minute bouts of it, three times a day, so a total of nine minutes a day, that's a 50 % lower cardiovascular -related mortality, 40 % lower all-cause mortality, 40 % lower cancer-related mortality.

2:04:29Dr. Rhonda Patrick:And this is even in individuals that don't define themselves or identify as people that actually exercise because they're like, no, I don't go to the gym. I don't exercise. But they do exercise. They just don't realize that they're in these moments, right? So you get props because you've been talking about this. You and Juliet both get props. You've been talking about this and really emphasizing the importance of movement throughout the day for a long time. So thank you for that public health service. and let's talk about how some people that perhaps they don't have a puppy or they're not a parent or they don't live on the third floor of a gym and unfortunately they use Instacart because they need to work more.

2:05:08Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Whatever their situation is, they're desk bound, right? That's the title of one of your bestselling books, right? So how can individuals take time to get up and get these movement snacks, these exercise snacks. Amen. Word. I love just the framing of this. And I suspect part of the problem in us not recognizing that sort of additive movement through the day is that it didn't look like a one hour paid for exercise class, which we've trained people to do, right? Oh, I have to be an hour. And that means it's a half hour drive to the gym. I have to do an hour. Then there's a half hour drive back. And that's a two hour endeavor.

2:05:47I couldn't block. No, you know, like you said earlier, even some of the sprinting we got people habituated doing on Peloton, that was really effective. Like, you know, go out and just quickly, you know, are you going to go to the Olympics? We're not having that conversation. We're saying, how can we put this input in? The research right now coming out of the Stanford Lifestyle Medicine Group is that these movement breaks, movement snacks are even more powerful than we thought. They can actually do a ton in terms of maintaining muscle mass or challenging. If we even get into the pain science world, like chronic pain, persistent pain, walking really fast in your neighborhood is one of the ways that your brain starts to pay attention, puts all those growth factors out there, rewires itself because your brain says, oh, we're walking fast.

2:06:32Something's going on. Better make this wiring a little bit more adaptable. So what's great about this is that means, hey, I have 10 minutes. What could I do? Or I have 20 minutes right when I get home. that can be real work. And we actually apply that even to when we're starting to get our kids doing some strength and conditioning, we can even just like 20 minutes of, hey, we got some front squats in, like let's go through the Frisbee. I think if we start to view recreation as again, we'll borrow Katie Bowman, right? Who's just a G. She says, hey, if we took all your movement and made a language out of it.

2:07:12How many words are you using a day? What's your vocabulary? What's your lexicon? And number one, we want to have a huge vocabulary, but two, we actually want to use that vocabulary during the day. And most of us are getting up, sitting, walking around, sitting, walk around a little more, sit, get into a different car, sit, walk around. That's it. That's the whole day. And then I brought my hand to my face a lot, right? And so one of the first things we could say is, well, how do I break that up? So I'm just using more movement, language in the day. And even just getting up and down off the ground one time starts to blow up in that vocabulary.

2:07:46But to your point, we don't need to obsess on this. Let's find ways to be enjoyable, to go for a walk with our neighbors, to how can we play more or just monk around more. And suddenly you're revisiting those those park, you know, I'm sure they have a name where you're at a park and then there are these workstations. I can't, I can't believe I'm blanking on this. You know, where suddenly you're like, you do some dips, you hang from a bar, you, you know, you touch your toes, you bounce from, you know, pole to pole. How do we work that in? So it's not another thing a busy working mother has to do or a busy working executive person do.

2:08:26And then how do we normalize that so that it's not so weird to to munko to muse your body a little bit more instead of these very formal

2:08:33Dr. Rhonda Patrick:workout channels i i find for myself you know i have i have a child i have a puppy and and i now there those are those are two different things right right two different things two different things yes but i you know there's there's moments in my life in the past where you know i my workload is so high that I find myself, I found myself in this, I don't have time to go like play with puppy. The puppy needs to be played. Like this is important or, you know, go around, play, kick the ball, soccer ball with my son. And now I find myself completely different mentality where it's like, these moments are part of that.

2:09:17Dr. Rhonda Patrick:You know, I spend an hour in the morning doing my workout, like this is part of it, you know, and it's more motivation for me now. Plus I enjoy it. And now it's like giving me a re like an excuse. It's like, Oh, I enjoy it. And it really does add up and matter. And it's part of that fitness equation that's always in the back of my mind. And so I think that it does give people this kind of, they can like, it's like, Oh, finally, I mean, I don't have to always spend an hour in the gym or go for that like long run while you should be doing those as well, you can have these little movements now. I will go further.

2:09:53Not only can you, but that's the secret to be really functional. Look, Juliet and I are – there's a lot of talk of longevity. I think it's how long have human beings been on the quest for the fountain of youth forever? So I think that's an old trope, an old archetype. But we really want to be durable because what we think is the hits are going to come. You're going to get sick. Someone in your family is going to get cancer. You're going to have a deadline. I was skiing with my wife in Japan just three weeks ago. I took a horrific high-speed interaction with a rope and I tore my ACL. And so I have an MCL sprain, ACL, tore my meniscus.

2:10:32Did you see me? Have I mentioned? No, I'm still walking around. I'm still moving. What can I do? Stay in motion around this. And the hits are going to come for us. So how can we prepare the tissues? How do we prepare our brains? And what you're hinting at is something very powerful that constantly being in motion and seeing the opportunities. I'll hint back to our friend, Dave Spitz, the Olympic coach. He owned a gym and was suddenly like, I'm out of shape. I don't train. I own this gym. All I do is coach people. So he started doing something called never do nothing, which was one set of bicep curls, one set of squats, one set of pushups, one air chair, one, like there was something he could do that had net positive input.

2:11:17And he got out of that all or nothing. Instead of 90 minutes of Olympic lifting training, I'm going to do something for my body and something that makes me feel fun to move. I think the greatest secret ever is a gentleman named Caleb Marshall. His YouTube channel is The Fitness Marshall. And if you put on one of his dance routines, you will see very quickly he and the amazing women, Haley and Allison, who work with him. You could dance if you did a three or five-minute dance on YouTube free, jump on his channel. We use it for warm-ups. We use it for fun. but you'll be like wow i'm mirroring i'm touching shapes i'm moving in ways that are novel three minutes you don't have three minutes to do a little dance i do i bet you do yeah

2:12:05Dr. Rhonda Patrick:i also love what you're you're talking about this you know there's there's been a big push over the past i don't know you know how many years now maybe 10 this go hard go home right i mean and and like there's there's good lessons there too right like yeah you got to do it you got to form the habits i think the habits is a big part of that which you know something you got to take the pieces that work for you. But I think there's also burnout. Sometimes you can take it to the extreme, right? I spoke one time at Strava headquarters. We had a podcast there, a live podcast. And I was like, how many people in this office consider themselves injured?

2:12:45It was like 95 % of the hands went up. Because what does Strava value? Going faster, personal PRs, king of the mountain, queen of the mountain. And what we saw was that if you're just in service of just elite, bleeding edge, high performance, and that's the only thing that you do, that's what we get.

2:13:03Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Well, it sounds like this idea of never do nothing, I like it. It's kind of on par with Ben Levine's, you have to make it part of your personal hygiene exercise. It has to be part of your personal hygiene, something you do every day. You brush your teeth. Why do you brush your teeth? You brush your teeth because you don't want to get cavities. You don't want your teeth to fall lot. You want good gum health, right? And everyone does that. Everyone brushes their teeth every day, at least once a day. But exercise in some way, shape, or form is something you have to do every day. And look at the roots of why people wouldn't want to move their bodies.

2:13:38Didn't have access as a kid. Didn't come from a family that valued this. My only experience with physical education was PE in the 80s, like not great, right? And so suddenly you realize that like, hey, I don't identify, I identify as a creative person. Like I haven't even had the access to move. I'm a woman, I'm not a boy. Like suddenly you can see that there are a whole lot of reasons that people suddenly get the message where they're like, what do you mean my bone density is bad? What do you mean that I'm losing muscle? What do you mean I'm pre-diabetic? And we're starting to see that in a lot of women in their 50s in our neighborhood who are, they're like, hey, I'm skinny and I've been running or walking, speed hiking forever and calorie restricting because I want to be a certain way that the universe is telling me I need to be for good or for bad.

2:14:25I'm going to say for bad. And lo and behold, it doesn't hold up against that test of, right? Like, hey, we'll take what you're doing and let's third party validate it. And for whatever reason, the messages we got don't comport with what you're saying, which is, hey, how can we engage with each other more and more. How do we change that society? I mentioned we were just at University of Hawaii and the Queens grounds there, the Queens Park was packed with people just outside, walking, throwing, playing soccer. And really, this is almost a cultural problem. As long as it's my house and Costco and then work, and then that's all I go and see, and then I have some formal thing that I do twice a week, we're never going to solve the problem.

2:15:14Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I was in China last September and you were mentioning these sort of playgrounds, these parks where they have all these outdoor dips. Oh, China leads the way. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's like mandatory. If you're 50, I mean, you're out and it's great. And I was walking around with my family and there's Tai Chi, a lot of Tai Chi too. And you just see them doing the Tai Chi in the parks and you see them doing, they're doing dips and we were out there doing it with them. And it's like the middle of the day and it's like if you're over – I said 50, but like it's actually surprisingly younger than what you would imagine like if you were here and that was the thing, which it's not, but it should be.

2:15:49Dr. Rhonda Patrick:But it's true. It's a cultural problem where we're not valuing the importance of movement because – And we haven't constructed society so that that's easy and valued and there's a premium on it. And seriously, that's a harder problem to solve, obviously, that's going to involve civil engineers and everything else. That's right. You're really looking at human-environment interaction. Yeah. Is there a park? Is there a place to move myself in an urban landscape? Are there sidewalks? How? And suddenly you start to see that, oh, if we're really interested in getting to the bottom and having a population that's healthier and has less strain on the system and less, you know, cardioreceptory and metabolic disease, we have to think differently about all of these things and they need to work on the scale of decades so we might start by saying hey if this is really important to us i'm not sure we should rip out pe out of the schools right right yes i mean also just being outside and that's something that seems to be a message that i keep occurring message i hear you talk about is you know getting outside and being being active in some way whether it's going for a walk or you're doing interval walking or you're going to the park and playing with kids, puppies, whatever.

2:17:04Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Being outside also is, there's an added layer, right? You're getting the sunlight. That's really important for circadian rhythm regulation. You're getting vitamin D. If you want to have a civil society, be civil towards your neighbors because you see them all the time walking. Right. You're with people. A hundred percent. Yeah. You know, rucking really had a moment. I don't think we're past peak ruck maybe. And I love that idea because people suddenly could put a little load through their spines, 10, 15, 20 pounds, and walk around the neighborhood again. Everyone can walk. It's suddenly accessible.

2:17:38Maybe you're not a runner. We could load. And don't get me wrong. I'm not saying wearing a six-pound weight vest is going to change your bone density issues. But if I need you to work more, carry this pack, and your feet are going to get tired carrying this pack.

2:17:49Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I need to start rucking. So I do – sorry to interrupt you. I, you know, on weekends, part of my leisure time is like hiking. I say hiking. It's not like really hard hiking because I'm doing it with my eight-year-old. But we take our puppy and we go out and we do like little short canyon hikes and stuff. Hour, hour and a half sometimes. Legit. Yeah, legit. But I'm not – and I had a conversation with Andrew Huberman the other day. And he was like, oh, do you wear a weighted vest? And I was like, damn, why am I not doing that, right? Well, it's how easy to slip right in. And if it's not a weighted vest, wear a backpack.

2:18:22I would say a backpack is even easier and better for your body. You know, you don't have to load –

2:18:28Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I do that when I go to Disney World and walk. That's right. That's right. Let's say I wanted to get the weighted vest. Perfect. What weight do you think I should start with? Yes. Start with some. You know, the idea is that, hey, let's – don't go to level 12 immediately. Let's say, hey, I found a vest I could afford. What does that feel like? Hey, maybe I can have – maybe I need a couple things. right maybe uh you know if you just left it by the door and every time you walked out you had to carry that thing around and normalize carrying loads uh coming back to philip beach he's like human beings throw we get up and down off the ground and we carry resources like that's really what human beings do and that caring of resources and if you're a mother out there carrying your baby around you're doing it already yeah right carry that squirmy 10 pound thing around and you're going to be exhausted.

2:19:16But how can we layer in maybe a better thing on top of something you're already doing? And the research, if you look at the company Nature Quant and Nature Dose, they actually have an app that can let you know how much time you're spending outside every day and every week. And it will score that based on how rich and green your environment is. So not all time outside is equal, right? Like being outside in green, seeing far, like the parks, It really does change what's going on with the biology. But the average American is spending 20 minutes outside a week.

2:19:53Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Get out. That's what the data says. The average American is spending 20 minutes outside a week. And this is just in any environment, not necessarily nature. That's right. That's right. They're going from their house to the work to the, right? We're just not actually outside. So what you start to see are a lot of these type one errors sort of woven into our biology. Like we don't sit on the ground. We're not actually eating fiber and fruits and vegetables. We don't see the sun ever. We don't know our neighbors. Like what we have is a lot of signaling of a lot of threats to the brain. And no wonder maybe we're not living as well as we could if we just thought differently about the problems and taught people from much earlier ages.

2:20:38Our hypothesis is, Julian and I, that sport, and this is John Rainey, right? The Anxious Generation. He's like, for kids, we really have two solutions, church and sport. And what we feel like is sport is an opportunity to teach all of these things about recovery, nutrition, mindset as a formal framework, because we're all gonna stop doing sports the way we kind of traditionally think about them. We're all going to become recreational athletes eventually. But where and when did you learn all this? Not in health, not in home ec, but maybe we need to have a kind of health ec, you know, back in our schools and teach kids, hey, walking is great.

2:21:19You know, it's not always about, you know, doing the least cool thing. And how do we normalize, you know, more adult recess?

2:21:27Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I like the idea of this app you talked about because, you know, a lot of people measure their screen time a lot. And it's kind of the opposite where you're looking at you're obviously not going to be. Screen time's never going away. Yeah, that's not going away. It's only gotten worse. Hopefully we'll swing around and make it better again. I feel like that we're coming to that point now where people are realizing how terrible it is for health. But with the outside time and outdoor time, oftentimes when you have data, you can make a behavior change, right? That's right. So when people start to realize, and I know, like, for example, you know, people think about when they're eating and how much they're eating throughout the day.

2:22:04Dr. Rhonda Patrick:And you ask the average person, they think they're like, oh, no, I definitely eat all my food within 12 hours. There's no way I'm like still eating. 22 hours. It's like 15 to 20 hours, you know. And so it's not until they actually have the data that they realize that they're eating constantly. And so probably something similar with, I bet most people are like, there's no way I'm only getting 20 minutes a week outdoors. There's no way, right? Right. And so it would be I think it's kind of an interesting concept for people to kind of start paying attention to that, because when you are outside, you know, especially if you're in a natural environment, and that's cool that this app is able to kind of distinguish somewhat between urban and nature, because there's even been studies comparing people that exercise in an urban versus natural environment.

2:22:49Dr. Rhonda Patrick:And when I say studies that are comparing, I mean head-to-head comparison. The study looked at it. So they're doing the same, you know, aerobic walking exercise in either a natural setting or an urban environment. And it's that only in the natural setting that people are having this really profound antidepressant effect. It's affecting their brain, their mood, their mental health, which is at the core of a lot of our problems as well, health problems included. So I guess where I was going with that is I do like this idea of people kind of paying more attention to how much time they're spending outside.

2:23:24Remember, I work with a lot of fancy sports teams. I spend a lot of time with small organizations like the different aspects of the government, Navy, the Army. Everyone's trying to solve these problems. and when it comes down to taking the lessons that we're learning in high performance and transmuting them so we can ultimately have these hyper local effects which means it is the household that is the functional unit of change and if you want to change your whole society grab up your parents grab up your in-laws take your kids and you're going to go for a walk in the evening after dinner and that could be five minutes and that already is a quantum change that That's three valences away from the old behavior.

2:24:08And those small things applied for decades and decades and decades. Bone crushing consistency. I mean, all this talk about sun gazing and circadian. I'm like, when did you go outside? You're not doing that anyway. So it's very sophisticated and very complex. But anytime we can take that and put it into the lens of when and where and how are we going to do this with my kids or my family, then we really start to win. I like to point towards, hey, let's get more time outside versus limit. The scarcity thing, like for example, when we do talk about nutrition with folks, we have a couple benchmarks.

2:24:44We're like, we want you to eat 800 grams of fruits and vegetables every day. It's quantifying. That's right from EC Sinkowski, great study, but quantifying the sort of nutrient density of your diet, making sure you get enough fiber. And we get a lot of calorie control in the mix there. But it's the first time to people were like, actually, you're not eating enough fruit and vegetables. And by the time we had protein in there, we have a lot of calorie control in the mix. But also, you're going to be able to keep those muscles and the bone and your connective tissue and your brain, right? So it's a lot easier for me to say, hey, let's go ahead and focus on this first.

2:25:20And then if there's room for cookies, knock yourself right out.

2:25:23Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Right. How many – what does 800 grams of fruits and vegetables look like for like – Like five cups, five big cups. A big apple, maybe, you know, you could probably do that in four big apples a day. It's really reasonable. Of course, we love to eat the rainbow. A banana is like 80 to 100 grams. But I'll take, like, you're a rutabaga person, and you're going to do this all in rutabaga. That's still better than you not doing it in rutabaga. It's a good, this is how I like to think about nutrition as well, is like, what do you need? What does your body need? You need to get the fruits and vegetables for the fiber, for the micronutrients.

2:25:56Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Yes. I mean, and the balances of them are really important too. Phytochemicals are in them. You need the protein, obviously, for muscle, for a lot of, I mean, you need protein for everything. And, you know, the fats come along with that. But yeah, I mean, once you like, once you meet those goals and those needs, you're, everything else is like easy. Like, you don't have to worry about, like, you're not eating the refined sugar. Why? Because you don't need it. It's not part of the equation. And you're so full. And it also represents, you know, look, I'm a complete advocate for cookies. I love myself a good cookie.

2:26:30But I will tell you that if that cookie represents the lion's share of my calories for the day, that's different than, you know, I've got this really well-nourished human who's got his hitting all these things. And again, beans are on the menu. White potatoes are on the menu. Like those things count. Lentils, we're in there. So I'm agnostic about your family traditions, your religious, cultural traditions. Show me you're getting all the fruits and vegetables, and then we can have the next conversation. And because you know what's going to happen, your sleep's going to get better, your connectivation's going to get better, gut health's going to get better.

2:27:03So we start to see the whole system start to change. Now my shoulder doesn't hurt as much anymore. Oh, weird. You started eating more, sleeping better, shoulders started feeling better too. And you're absolutely right that when we focus on that, then it is less of a problem. And again, for a lot of people who are interested into nutrition for body composition, if you eat this way, there's a lot of calorie control in the background. You're going to be shocked. And don't worry about the fruit, everyone. You're like, oh my gosh, these bananas are going to kill me. They're not. A, you're not eating the bananas.

2:27:39But one of those loaves, I was just passing Starbucks, right? And one of those little piece of lemon loaves is like 430 calories. It's so good. Do you know how much a pound of cherries is or a pound of melons? 230 calories. So go ahead and eat a pound of cherries. Don't do it. You'll have disaster pants. It'll be a disaster. But you'll see that while you can crush the crap out of fruit and have a lot of calorie control plus fiber plus, you know, in the background. And then that's a really nice way of saying, hey, if I'm spending – I got to get this much time outside, it automatically limits indoor behavior.

2:28:12Or I've got to get this many steps that automatically limits these. So I don't have to say, don't do this. I'm like, let's get this instead.

2:28:20Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Right. Focus on what you need. Yes. Yes. Because I just love it. It's great. A great way to think about it. And also it helps you like the processed food thing. You know, with this, I think, as people became more educated with the dangers of refined sugars, for example, they didn't – there was focused on just this refined sugar. It's like this tunnel vision. Refined sugar is bad. And so it's okay to eat these processed foods that are high-protein – Protein pretzels. Protein pretzels, protein chips. That's right. I mean, like everything, it's protein cinnamon buns with no sugar, but it's like allulose, but it's a cinnamon bun, but it's high protein.

2:28:59Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Right. All of it's garbage. It's all garbage. It's not food. It's a food life thing. And there's times for that. If I'm a high level athlete, I'm going to have to eat some processed foods because I've got to get these calories in. That's fueling. That's not nutrition. We call that. Those are different things. Oh, we're fueling. Let me introduce you to the bagel. We're fueling. Hey, maybe there's less bagels for an average person. All right, Kelly. Like, I want to take this opportunity to talk to you about a topic that is of interest to me. I know other folks are interested in it as well. I think it's something that's not really discussed enough.

2:29:30Dr. Rhonda Patrick:And that really has to do with youth sports, training youth. I mean, this is a whole big area. And there's a lot of interest. There's a lot of excitement. There's a lot of problems. Are there? I mean, I guess I see them on the playing soccer field, for example. I see them arising in even young, young athletes. So maybe we could just start. I mean, actually, where do you want to start? Where do you think is a good start? Let's call it the industrial youth sport complex, right? And say that, yes, if you have a parent or you're a guardian of a child who plays, you're probably not having the experience with sport that you were hoping to have.

2:30:15It's a lot more complicated in that we're asking parents and guardians to be sports psychologists, nutrition experts, pseudo physios, right? You got to do strength and conditioning. You're suddenly at performance timing. When do we eat this meal between these three? I have a child. Wow. Do we specialize? Do we play multiple games? Do we specialize in two sports simultaneously? How do I manage the crazy parents in the crowd? It's expensive. It's not, right? It's not working. Most kids are dropping out at age 13. It's not fun anymore. Youth injuries are through the roof. Like what's happening with sport?

2:30:55And I think what's happening is we need to train parents for the job they're already doing, which is become the high performance directors for their families and begin there to sort of pull at these strings. Because theoretically, we all got into sports or got our kids in sports because it was good for them. And it taught us rules about working with other people and losing and sacrifice and being coached and taking feedback. But it doesn't feel like a really wholesome experience for everyone anymore, does it?

2:31:26Dr. Rhonda Patrick:How do we start by just making training fun for kids? Well, parents, is this for you? Is this for your kids first, right? And there is a direct correlation, and I'm going to out everyone here. The more experienced and nerly an athlete you were, the more chill you are as a parent. And the less experience you had playing college or professional sports, the more hyper agro you are as a parent for some reason. You know, we just came out of the Olympics, and there's a lot of talk about Norway. Norway, Norway. What is Norway doing? They've dominated the Winter Olympics and they don't keep score with their kids till age 13.

2:32:06They have national programs that work on development. So the kids love it and continue to move. You know, for us here, typically the tradition is winning and getting my kid to the next level so she can unlock the scholarship or go to university or be pro. And it's just not likely. So if we're going to tug at this, let's start to say that what can we control at home? Instead of adding complexity on long-term youth athletic development, does your kid sleep? So we can start there. The golden rule is really adults need seven to eight hours of sleep.

2:32:45Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Yes, roughly? Yes. Okay. So what we say in our program is, hey, we want you to be in bed for eight hours without looking at your phone. So if you wake up into the night, don't panic. You're just going to lay there and rest. Super cool. There is not a single study that says that a child needs less than 8 to 10 hours of sleep. Zero studies say that. Like if you're growing a body. You need more than that, for sure. More than that. So 8 to 10. But if you go into the typical teenager and track them, they're not sleeping 8 hours. So we have this fundamental problem where kids are not sleeping, not recovering, not adapting, not growing.

2:33:25And then we're just adding more volume and more complexity on top of a system that's not adapting to the exercise. Then we can go to nutrition. And then we can – like you'll start to see you're like, oh, it's the same conversation. How do we normalize some of these things? And then ask what the next step is.

2:33:42Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I think also something that I've seen is like even starting at like an early age, you know, five, six, seven. They're like you mentioned, it's not really there's no focus on development. It's like it's already like I want my kid to be on the A or B team. And if they're not on the A or B team, then I want them to get there. And how do I train to get them on the A or B team? Yeah. What's wrong with that mentality? Well, why does that mentality exist in the first place? I think every parent wants their kid to get playtime and be recognized as the chosen one and not ride the bench. And there's a lot there.

2:34:21What I can talk about is Juliet and I, we derived a lot of experience and a lot of benefits from sport. So it was really important. We saw – and we're such fans. But we saw there was an opportunity to get our kids some of those same lessons. And so we – number one, we just said, hey, sport is not optional here. But let's define that. You can be in dance. You can be in yoga. You can be in club soccer. You have to find something you want to do. Swim team. What are the local CYO leagues? What are the options available to us? But you have to choose one of those. So it wasn't optional. You have to move year round.

2:34:59And then eventually you'll find the thing that you want to do. We did a lot of sampling of things. And I have a daughter who is fully retired. She's a retired. She's what's called a NARP. Do you know this term? No. Non-athletic regular person at college, right? She's not a D1 athlete. She goes to Michigan studying econ, but can snatch a barbell, cook, knows how to deal with her stiff quads, knows how to sleep, right? Just has some tools. She's like, oh, this is how I care for her. And then I have a child who's 5 '11", is going to play a goalie at Berkeley next year, and she is a monster, right?

2:35:33So we have one kid who we graduated and retired. with one kid who we're trying to prep up and the approach is the same. And what we have to ask as parents is, what can we control? So I'll give you an example. The sleep thing, I can't, if you want to reduce injury risk, sleep. You want to grow and have that kid be better athlete, sleep. And what you're really going to see is, wow, we have to have a lot of conversations at our house around tech and bedtime. And that's going to be a big one.

2:36:02Dr. Rhonda Patrick:But can I pause you there? Because even if you have those conversations, if you have an athlete and they're training late because you have games late, practices are late, and then they're, let's say they're in school because most kids are in school. Hard school. Hard school and their start time is early. And they have homework to do when they get back from their training. What gives? Well, what you'll see is now we start to say, okay, eight hours is going to be our minimum sleep time. So that means we all agree that we're going to go from 8 or we're going to go to bed at 11 because we're night owls too.

2:36:43And we're going to sleep till 7 in this situation. Then we can at least start to say here is our minimum on that. And when we can steal a half hour here or steal a half hour there, we will. And you're really bringing up the problems with this perfect secret school youth athletic program. I'm like it falls apart with when do we eat together as a family? When do I feed my kid a snack? she comes home and we ate dinner at five, you know, but she had practice late and now we've got to feed her again. And now like I'm pro cereal. Cereal is like a secret post-workout fueling panacea. Kids will eat it.

2:37:20My child can digest milk. So she's got cow milk on there, right? You could choose whatever milk, but I need to get some calories in after that, right? That thing has a little bit of protein. It's not going to be a huge, crazy fat meal. It's not going to disrupt your sleep too much. But like you started to see, you're like, wow, when are we going to do this? I started making breakfast for my kids. They're in high school that they could take with them. Because when I start to look at my wife, I'm like, hey, wife, you don't eat breakfast. She's like, I'm not very hungry in the morning. My kids weren't hungry in the morning, but they were hungry a little bit later.

2:37:52So I could wake them up early, force them to eat this meal they didn't want to eat, have this terrible interaction. Or I could have them sleep till 7.20. they run out the door and I now have controlled breakfast. Emergency done, omegas taken, vitamin D taken. There's a fermented food, then a little yogurt or kefir. There's a protein. Here's an apple cut up. I know my child leaves the house, at least with the constructs of things that look like the first meal of the day, plus some snacks later on, and we're rolling there. And so you really have to think, I can't play the best game. What's the next best game I can play?

2:38:27Where do I have some agency and control? because it is really tricky. And it's going to only get trickier. The more serious your kid gets in sport and with the demands of high school, it's, and theoretically, your kids will need to have friends, theoretically.

2:38:41Dr. Rhonda Patrick:All right, let's go, let's rewind a little bit before high school and talk about early specialization because you were talking about like how important it was to sample everything. And, you know, like what are some of the pros and cons of, for example, a child just sticking to one sport after they started doing it when they were five or whatever and stuck with it and then not really trying, you know, like let's say they're soccer and they never do baseball or basketball or something with their upper body, for example. So what are some of the pros and cons? Well, I would say number one is what's the point?

2:39:18Specialization is here and it's real. And you're never going to be the one parent who just bucks the whole tradition. And like, It's going to take a cabal of parents to be like, we're not doing this. We're not playing year round. And remember, we're aware and we have children in these sports and club goes year round. But we'll pull Caroline out, for example, and say, hey, during this time, maybe you can do another sport. Maybe for some of these kids, the extra sport is yoga or dance or strength and conditioning becomes the extra place to teach movement skills. because kids will become hyper-specialized very quickly.

2:39:56I'm an outside hitter. I'm a pitcher. I do this one thing, and we don't have a chance to develop the motor skills and problem solving that happens through a diversity in sampling. So what you can do is recognize that, hey, I can try not to say, okay, I'm gonna specialize now in two sports, which is how parents solve the problem. Now my kid is a lacrosse specialist and a soccer specialist with camps and both, right? But we have to look at are there times off? Specialization is a feature of the system, but we have to now look at when and where we're going to put movement diversity, other play. And I'll say I'll take specialization over not moving.

2:40:43I think it's important to recognize that free play does not exist anymore, will not exist anymore. That's a construct of Gen X. We used to play in the street. It just doesn't happen. And now we're going to have to have these formal movement programming engagement because that's the only place we're going to get that free play in club soccer, club basketball, club those things. So what can we control? Are we controlling for those things? Are your kids eating enough? Are they sleeping enough? Do you have the skills to protect what you can protect and control what you can control so that we can keep the kids moving?

2:41:21And I think if Norway has a phrase, it's like the most kids for the longest. That's their goal.

2:41:26Dr. Rhonda Patrick:The most kids for the longest. For the free play, the unstructured play, that was a question I was going to ask you, like the importance of that. And I mean, it is weird how it doesn't, I mean, it doesn't exist anymore. I mean, I guess we're all too afraid of everything because we have all this information and it's made us scared of everything. I remember playing for just hours and hours outside in the streets. I mean, I - You came up with games. You invented things. Oh, you invented games. It was so fun. I mean, we had all kinds of crazy games. Now parents have to create these sort of artificial environments that are playdates, right?

2:41:59Dr. Rhonda Patrick:And so now playdates are, at least my way of like trying to allow my child to get free play. Let's have a playdate here. You're in our yard, whatever. Like have at it, like have fun. The doors are locked. Stay outside. Stay outside. They're always outside. How is that really important for athletes? All youth skills are learned best under play conditions. In fact, I would go a step further and say that play is the secret sauce to any adult having any fun and sticking to something in the long term. And if you watch a soccer practice of an elite team, it doesn't look like a lot of play. It doesn't look like a lot of fun.

2:42:41And no wonder kids are like, this sucks. My friends aren't here. It's not fun. So we really have to think about protecting the sanctity of this play idea and exploration. And David Epstein has a new book coming out about constraints and this constraint-led model of how can we create better play through a set of constraints. That's how we problem solve. And you're hinting at where's play need to happen? Resource? Well, we've just stripped recess. You see the playgrounds of the 70s and 80s were kill a child. And now they're just like these neat little two foot off the ground, round things. There's no expiration, no feedback.

2:43:27Think about the number of times you jumped off a swing and peak velocity and peak apex, right? And just there's no place for kids to get this kind of input. So it's really important that we're looking at, well, wow, tumbling in gymnastics seems to be really important skills if you could access them, right? And again, everything I'm going to say, I'm just layering on that not everyone can afford that or do that. But we have to think differently about what inputs we're having earlier so that we don't have these problems later. Every kid should be required to have PE year round and that PE could be dance, it could be weightlifting, it could be yoga, it could be right.

2:44:05We need that sort of movement, literacy, movement competency as part of the things that we value. If we're really going to get to the bottom of, cause it's not here. I would say some controversial, we have PE or we have less red dye. Number five, I'm going to take PE. It's going to have a bigger impact on the world means we're gonna have to fund it. We're gonna have to play it. I'm with you. Yeah. And so I think it's, you know, we need to work on all these different systems, I'll give you an example. There's a physician we work with who was president of the Knee Society for ACLs. And when a kid would tear his ACL or her ACL in the 80s and 90s, they pull out this big drill, drill into the cortical bone.

2:44:43It's very intense. The bones are very hard. Now they just core the bone by hand. They just hand turn the drill because the bones are so soft. So we're seeing this demineralization, this less hardening of the bones of children.

2:44:58Dr. Rhonda Patrick:What is that about? Is that why they're breaking their – they're so like more – the kids are breaking their bones. We're seeing a whole host of injuries that did not exist. Torn lats, more UCLs, more ACLs. I mean the epidemic of ACL right now is its own topic. But when you come underneath that, what we see is women didn't have access to movement control, overplay, did not have – don't have good nutrition features, aren't sleeping. right no off season right just you we can see is we've set up the the perfect conditions and this is a normal feature or normal accident given the sort of errors and the complexity of this person engaging this play which was supposed to be fun in the first place and for off season now off season is now for me at least what i've seen is okay it's off season but now we have this other sport too i mean and and maybe that's that's fine but again going back to the the unstructured free play and how important it is.

2:45:59Dr. Rhonda Patrick:It's just... Kids don't do it. Maybe if you surf, maybe if you're into some extreme sports, skateboarding is a great example of probably the best pickup basketball. There are a couple of pockets where that still exists, but mainly there looks like recreational sports. Kid finds a recreational sport. She's a skateboarder. She's skating at the park all the time. That's the best free play there is. And some kids even decide that they don't like to exercise and yeah what do you what what kid likes to exercise no one but you know kids likes to play tag and right and scramble and climb and and play games every kid so i think imagine if we just took our adult sensibility let me introduce you to the peloton johnny you're 12 like that sucks that's a sucky life i mean that is the you know that's not a steer child sport life and there are mutants out there who probably picked up early, but that's not the whole.

2:46:55And I think if we, I'm going to shout out a gentleman named Jeremy Frisch.

2:47:03You can see how he programs for long-term youth athletic development in his community and the number of tag games and diving and problem solving and skills. And you're like, oh, that's PE. It really should look like that.

2:47:18Dr. Rhonda Patrick:what about um adding in strength training like at what age is that well i guess i shouldn't say that like what's the readiness like there's a there's a readiness that people can look so i mean do my kids need to front squat heavy early right this is like you know like no but what we're doing is we're trying to solve with a complex thing a complex problem with a simple solution Like our kids need to be jumping and crawling and sprinting. Like you're going to try to replicate sprinting with a child like in the gym. That's for adults. We can start to layer in formal instruction early. That's what gymnastics and tumbling and parkour looks like, right?

2:48:02That's why we get our kids into swim teams because there's okay to layer in some technical skills early on. as the child moves into sort of middle school, we might start to add in a few things where it looks like, Hey, we're doing work on pull-ups where, you know, can you control your body weight in space? We don't necessarily, we're not worried about loading children because children are loading themselves, but you know, it's okay to start to say, Hey, we also should have some formal movement training on top of this play structure training. And now when you get out there, um, And you'll see that there are lots of people who have good play models.

2:48:42I'll point out Ido Portal. I'll point out Gold Medal Body Fitness, GMB, MoveNAT. There are so many ways where we can be a little bit more formal in our movement play, where we're exposing. Erwan LaCour, who's the originator of MoveNAT, started to ask people, who can do a pull-up? How many of you who can do pull-ups had a tree in your backyard that you could climb? And there was like a one-to-one correlation. I grew up climbing, grew up playing, can still do a pull-up. So let's think in those terms, how do we change the environment so that there's better exposure? Because what we're seeing is we just, kids don't tumble.

2:49:20You know, we, Juliet and I worked at a, we worked field day for our school, our middle school. And they were like fifth graders who couldn't do a two-foot hop. Fifth graders who couldn't do a forward somersault, right? It was shocking to us. And we were talking about doing like we're doing the sack race, right? And the kids struggle to have enough hip range of motion to put the sack on. So by the time fifth grade has come around, we're really starting to see these patterns set up where we don't have a lot of movement fluency, movement control, just because the environment isn't asking for it.

2:49:52Dr. Rhonda Patrick:How do you feel about jujitsu? Is that something that's online with like the gymnastics? Let's say they don't do gymnastics, they do jujitsu. Lovely, lovely, lovely. I think suspect that if every human had jujitsu, we'd have a better society, right? Because you died 10 times today. I got choked out by this, you know, this old lady choked me out. Like that's definitely humbling. You learn how to have contact. That's safe contact and formal contact. You know, there are real clear, this is okay. This is not okay. You learn to what your tolerances are. You tap out. You can, you know, I mean, that would be amazing if we could create, and once again, maybe martial arts training or some kind of training that existed for a reason.

2:50:37So martial arts are another wonderful way to put kids into some formal movement skills before we start to just say, hey, we got to get to the gym.

2:50:45Dr. Rhonda Patrick:And some of these, you know, movement skills and working on, I mean, trying to recreate free play essentially. That's right. We're trying to recreate free play. Right. Along with nutrition and trying to really at least get that minimum dose of like eight hours of sleep per night helps with injury prevention with kids. Probably bigger than any other thing. If you are interested in protecting your children so that they're less likely to be injured, sleep would be the number one thing I would lean into. But also more importantly, not more importantly, but also equally important would be not just training in the sport that they're doing and just adding more volume and adding more volume, right?

2:51:26Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Does that work for adults? Hell no, it doesn't work for adults. I know. But it's going to work for your child who's like – the whole thing is bananas too. And if you're in a sport that has rink time, your 12-year-old's playing at 11 o 'clock at night, it is anathema to what it means to develop a person who's durable and wants to play and enjoys the game. Those kids are going to self-select eventually. Caroline identified that she wanted to play in college and was starting to put in the extra work much earlier. Enjoys the game. That's key. So why do 13-year-olds on average, is that the 12 to 13-year-olds, why do they – I call it drop out.

2:52:09Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Yeah, drop out. They reject it because it's not fun. Like they suddenly aren't with their friends. They don't have a good time anymore. It's not enjoyable. It really becomes about outcome-driven, you know, one or zero. I won. I have value. We didn't win. It wasn't fun. And, you know, and one of the great opportunities we have is that where do we train adults to become coaches? So the whole American model is predicated on you being a volunteer coach. And where did you get all that training? Maybe when you were in high school, you modeled some behavior from a good coach. But we don't do enough formal coach development, even how to talk to kids at different times.

2:52:50Or where and how we kids acquire skills. and that movement theory, motor learning, there's a lot of richness here, but we have to start to level up because right now sometimes we're like, we just need a body, you know? And men particularly are like, well, I played in high school, so I'm a qualified coach. And you're like, that's just insane. Like, you know, it's, oh, you did a sport for four years, a hundred years ago, and you think you're qualified to teach this developing person? No. So we can do a lot better.

2:53:19Dr. Rhonda Patrick:I mean, I'm certainly grateful that there's people that volunteer out there but I can through experience tell you as my child was doing, you know, the, the rec, you know, volunteer dad sport versus the actual coach night and day difference. And I mean, night and day difference. Yeah. And, uh, you know, this is a community level problem. Right. And I think, you know, Julian and I are deep into a book project called outplay. We're, we're trying to see if we can straighten what we could control out because we can't control, you know, private equity is coming into youth sports. That's all I need to know, right?

2:53:54Oh, this is a for-profit venture that we can maximize for efficiency and profit.

2:53:58Dr. Rhonda Patrick:You called it the sport industrial complex? Youth and sport, something like that, right? And what you're seeing is it's very expensive and is it giving us better outcomes? Do we have kids playing longer? Do we keep all the kids playing? We don't. And at some point, your child, if she is legit, will become a specialist. They asked Caroline to be the goalie for a different team when she was a junior. And I was like, too late. If you want to do this, you're all in on this. Because that's what it takes to play at these levels. And simultaneously, one of the, I think, real opportunities we have to protect kids is to get them a little stronger and a little fitter.

2:54:41And that can be very simple, classic strength and conditioning. We have a lot of parents who come up to us and say, hey, my daughter's been recruited or my son's been recruited, but the coach is asking him what his front squad is, what his power clean is. What are those things? And we're like, your child's 18 and has never been in a formal strength and conditioning program. That's crazy. So we're going to have to start to add some of that back in as we get into high school so that we can come a little bit more durable, but also some of those things can happen in your own home.

2:55:09Dr. Rhonda Patrick:What are some of the main, I would say, important points of you and Juliette's new book, Outplay, that you could kind of just easy – Well, I tell you, without giving the whole thing away, we have real talks. We can establish what the research says about needing sleep, but real tactics about how you're going to solve that sleep problem. Okay. The fueling is such a problem. And we see hugely under-fueled kids who are, I'll say, malnourished and under-fueled, drinking a lot of energy drinks, eating a lot of reactive snacks. I'm starving. I eat a bag of Doritos. So we're not putting base nutrition on kids who have these growing body needs.

2:55:54And then our fueling is really, really tricky. When do we eat as a family? What's the pregame snack? So we try to really kind of get to the bottom of that. We also try to give parents a simple rubric for helping their kid get out of pain. Because a lot of times your kid comes, you know, when we ask, we work with big camps and stuff all the time. And I raise, I'm like 100 kids in here. I'm like, who's pain-free? And like one hand goes up and that girl's 12 years old and she's wrapped in bubble tape and on drugs, obviously, because she's the anomaly. And every other hand, these kids are like, yeah, my shoulder hurts, my back hurts, my knee hurts.

2:56:26And parents head snap around. They're like, what is this? And the kids are like, you never asked. We just thought it was normal. And for children particularly, those things are so superficially myofascial typically. It's just very simple inputs. Change the range of motion, put a little isometric in there, a little soft tissue, we're back.

2:56:46Dr. Rhonda Patrick:And what about with the nutrition part's interesting because I'm not in the middle school, high school phase yet. I'm in like still the picky eater. I mean I guess they continue to be picky eaters but for different reasons, right? Right. And so, you know, how do you, how do you solve that problem when it's, the kid doesn't want to eat something? Well, we've, we've, this is, uh, ungenerous, but we've never seen a kid, uh, um, not eat when they were hungry. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So some of this is you as an adult, like we have a three vegetable rule and I have one child who is a gourmet and like started a subscription cookie business and loves to cook and eat.

2:57:27And I have another child who loved brown foods, right? And like, it was very picky. And what we started to do is if we just had three vegetables every dinner, there's three vegetables and you can eat any of those three vegetables you want, but there's always three vegetables in everything that we cooked. And when we sit down and this is the meal and there's not a snack right afterwards or a thing like this is what we're eating, then, you know, we have to train our kids. And then there's a place for nutrition on top of that. An emergency is very inexpensive. At least you're going to get some vitamins and minerals.

2:58:01Maybe it's the lowest form of that, but that emergency fizzy drink. Caroline has been chugging one of those because at the very least, I know she has some vitamin C and some micronutrient in her system when she leaves for school. And our hypothesis is that, hey, if we can control a little bit more in the morning and a little bit in the evening, plus maybe a snack, the rest of it, you don't have any control over. So let's control what we can control. You know, a lot of times we have a lot of conversations about when do we eat and how do we fuel. And so we sort of have a simple rubric like three hours out, just regular meal.

2:58:35And you can relate to this. You go to a swim meet, kid swims at 25. She gets like a 1 ,000 calorie Jamba Juice or a donut. You're like, dude, your child does not need to eat. Like she ate breakfast. But then on the other hand, we have kids who are playing and playing and playing and don't want to eat because they're nervous, don't have access right in this situation i'm like have you met the uncrustable like this is a powerful you know tool we can get some calories in you to fuel what you're doing and so on the other hand we have to like force kids to eat and and there are body composition issues there and timing issues there and how can we think about fueling in a way that's you know parents don't go insane.

2:59:18Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Yeah. I like also the idea of, it's like, this is what we have. You're going to have three vegetables or you're going to be hungry. And you'll wake up talking about breakfast. Yeah. You will. Yeah. You know, and so as we notice though, we're not talking about optimization. We're saying, okay, this is what humans do and we have to learn and teach that. And here's the framework for that, right? You know, when we have training table, I will stand, be set up near the, you know, the, the buffet line, I'm like more rice, more fruit. You know, I got to make these kids eat to support what they're doing in the pool or on, on the field.

2:59:56And it's, it really is fueling is we see an, an epidemic of under fueling and reliance on caffeine and sugar.

3:00:03Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Wow. So in high school, high school sports, it's a real bad. Okay. I have a few rapid fire questions for you on this. So if you have a 10 year old soccer player, you've got a 12-year-old swimmer, and you've got a 14-year-old basketball player. What would the first month of training look like for each of those? Would they be similar, different? How would they differ? They differ in terms of, as we've run these programs, they're different in terms of maybe the load or the volume, but not the fundamental skills. And I'll give you an example. We're huge fans of handstands. Talk about being upside down, learning new skill, great for shoulders.

3:00:43Kids love it. It's play. You can walk up, we can pike on it. There's so many ways. A downward dog is a handstand. But that's a great example where everyone gets handstands. And even my adults get handstands, right? Because we're able to teach and learn in this play. And that's body weight overhead. Now I'm going to put the same body weight overhead on this strict press. And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing? But I'm like, handstand is constraint led. No one dies doing a handstand. It's skill-based, right? Kids get it. So what we can start to do is that, hey, probably if we took the fundamentals of track and field, running, jumping, and throwing, that might probably get us 90 % of the way, right?

3:01:27Like who, Stuart McMillan, Altus track and field, has really said, hey, we should really teach people how to skip again. And we now have to program skipping into our adult program, but kids can't skip. So if you did a track and field warmup, threw some medicine balls around, bounced and jumped, rolled, played, like all of a sudden that feels like a lot of play and a lot of movement exposure. And then we might say, hey, let's work on this aspect of the barbell, or we're going to teach you a kettlebell swing or basic calisthenics of pushups and lunges and and pull ups, but in a game.

3:02:07Dr. Rhonda Patrick:In a game. Yeah. So body weight control, you know, done. And then remember, we can make it hard with breathing. We can also make it hard with speed and we can make it hard with, right? There's so many ways where we can challenge that body weight control stuff without just saying, here, hold this. Love it. Okay. Next question. What are the five exercises or movement practices you would keep in nearly every youth training program? We need to spend a lot more time jumping on landing on one leg, learning to basically do some tumbling. There's got to be some aerobic training. But again, that can be done with tag and play.

3:02:43You've got to have that exposure. You know, we probably don't train sprinting acceleration through games enough. That's a real opportunity there. you know it's not about core strength for kids it's not about you know if we look at what the body needs to do I'm like, here, Dr. Patrick is a squat for you. But if I had a kid jump from a seated position or do multiple broad jumps, it's that same squat position, same squat mechanic applied at speed load, same shapes, just with a different set of tools. Does that make sense? So we can suddenly see that FIFA had recognized that they were having an ACL problem in soccer.

3:03:30It's a problem. And they came up with a really well-documented, well-validated way of mitigating lower extremity injury in children with some simple hopping, simple neuromuscular control drills on a single leg. And no one does it. And even if you do it well, it still purports to work. So at some point, we've got to just have some fundamental movement language where maybe it's jumping, jumping, pause, and we can, hey, push that knee out, get that foot straighter. Can you take a breath there? And then can we constrain? I would submit that if you and I played spike ball, we would touch a thousand shapes and positions that we could not get in a formal movement practice.

3:04:12So more of that, and then it becomes a little bit more formal as we start to get into high school, I think.

3:04:17Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Is your data showing that doing those sort of movements and training programs does reduce the ACL injuries? Like dramatically. And so that's a thing that we're like, well, who owns that problem? Well, maybe the parent at home. And we have to have coaches who are like insisting on this work because, you know, they're like, hey, I want to coach, right? But meanwhile, we have kids who are unprepared to be coached. Right. Okay. So what can a parent do at home for 10 minutes a day? You're kind of talking about somebody. There's overlap here. What can a parent do at home in 10 minutes a day that would meaningfully improve durability and movement options?

3:04:57In 10 minutes, I would say you guys need to play a game. So what games are available? One of the things we identified with Caroline as a goalie early on, and even in water polo, and this came from their coaches, they said, hey, if you're really interested in your daughters being good at water polo, they need to do more long toss. We need to throw a ball. So we went out and we started throwing a baseball, throwing a softball with a mitt, smaller than a water polo ball. And we do so much throwing. And even today I see women in the pool who do not, cannot throw. They, they huck, they, it's because, and they've never thrown outside the pool ever.

3:05:33So what you can start to see is, hey, what are these fundamental skills? Maybe that's a frisbee. Maybe we go play catch. Maybe it's spike ball. Maybe it's reaction off the wall. We probably need to figure out ways to play where the brain and the eyes are the limiter and the driver, not necessarily the physiology. That's the piece that we're really needing to lean into now is we've got to get this brain and this eye all working together. We're having to train that now. We do a lot of tennis ball work because I need kids to throw and catch and jump and bounce. And there's lots of great examples on the web of all the drills you can do playing around with a tennis ball.

3:06:12Dr. Rhonda Patrick:There's so many you can do. That's right. And it's, I mean, it's a tennis ball. At the local sports store near us, there's thousands of tennis balls and I just take hundreds at a time. Yeah. And then lastly, what should be removed from a young athlete's program before adding anything new?

3:06:33I would say, ooh, that's a really good question. You know, the sort of junk volume first, if we can, right?

3:06:46The sophistication that comes along with the trappings of parents feeling like their kid is getting a leg up with like sports ladders. we see a lot of agility training kinds of things that feel sciency but aren't really sciency really right so you know we see a lot of kids working extra hard on more pitching or more throwing or more hitting and what kids really need is you know gross motor skill development so i see i think parents will go down the rabbit hole of more special hyper specialization too early and they'll get more private lessons in this very small thing because that's what they think.

3:07:29But on the other side, there's so much more opportunity. We're picking up dimes. We're stepping over quarters.

3:07:34Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Great answer. Great answer. Love it. Well, Dr. Starr, Kelly, thank you so much for sharing all this just vast amounts of very important information, everything from mobility to injury prevention, to moving throughout the day, to helping train and coach our kids better so that they are able to handle the world better. Able to handle the world, that's it. Yes, yeah. You have, there's a lot of, you've got many books, you've got a podcast, you've got, I mean, let's go through, people wanna continue to listen to, they wanna follow your work, they wanna continue to learn from you. And you need to meet my wife.

3:08:17I think that's really important. No, for sure.

3:08:18Dr. Rhonda Patrick:We're going to do that one in April, right? That's right. Please, everything is at the ready state. And you can see our coaching platforms, our courses. If you're interested in, hey, I want to begin a mobility practice, we have an app called Mobility Coach, which is really good. There are self-tests in there. If you have a ball and a roller, we can really get you a long way in terms of making your body feel better at home. And, you know, way leads to way. There's so much. Any one of those things are in there. Our last book, Built to Move, we wrote as kind of a primer because a lot of us nerds aren't doing this, but we wanted to bring neighbors and family members and members of our athletic community along.

3:08:59So we kind of wrote a prequel to everything. And I think that's a really nice place to start.

3:09:03Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Well, awesome. Again, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been a dream. I mean, you have been like the science voice in my head for over a decade. Oh my gosh, thank you. Being here is incredible. Thank you. A big thank you to Kelly for such a wide-ranging and practical conversation. And thank you all for listening. For those of you still here, Kelly also has a podcast called The Ready State. I'm also excited for Kelly and Juliet's upcoming book, Outplay, which takes on youth sport, sleep, fueling, pain, and what it really means to help kids become durable, capable, and resilient athletes.

3:09:40Dr. Rhonda Patrick:And always, if you enjoyed this episode, two quick things before you go. Please make sure you've downloaded my free How to Train Guide, which distills key training principles from many of the top experts I've interviewed on this podcast. You can find that right now at HowToTrainGuide.com. Once again, that's HowToTrainGuide.com. And second, you may have noticed that this podcast is ad-free. That is because it is supported by fans like you. If you appreciate the unbiased approach we take here at Found My Fitness and you would like to support this podcast and get more in-depth special content, please, please consider becoming a Found My Fitness premium member.

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3:11:05Dr. Rhonda Patrick:Once again, that's foundmyfitness.com forward slash premium. Thank you so much for your support, for listening to the show, and I'll talk to you soon.