Never Stop Doing This Exercise (Or Your Lifespan Will Shorten) - With Dr. Kelly Starrett

0:00Shawn Stevenson:You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Shawn Stevenson. For more, visit themodelhealthshow.com. Welcome to The Model Health Show. This is fitness and nutrition expert Shawn Stevenson, and I'm so grateful for you tuning in with me today. What if we had access to the ultimate body mechanic? Somebody who's able to assess what's going on with our bodies, what we might need to improve, change some parts, switch some fluids out, whatever the case might be, but ultimately to ensure that we have optimal performance. Well, today we have the world's greatest body mechanic, the one who's teaching physical literacy to the top of the top professionals professionals in physical therapy, as well as everyday people.

0:53Shawn Stevenson:And he's such a powerful thinker and expert in instruction. But today we're going to be able to really look at some powerful insights in relationship to, you're going to learn what is the number one thing that we want to avoid not doing? What's the thing that we don't want to stop? We don't want to stop till we get enough. if we wanna keep doing this particular movement, this particular exercise to literally stave off the end of our lives. We wanna keep doing this particular exercise and it might not be what you think. We're also gonna be talking about the most valuable opportunity that you have to self-assess your readiness to be able to engage in fitness, right?

1:39Shawn Stevenson:In fitnessing, whether that's working out in the gym or playing your sport, being active, where's the most valuable spot? What is the very best time for us to get this self-assessment in? And what does that really look like? Because every day we're different. Life is happening, but we want to be able to play. We want to be able to access range of movement so that we can do the things we wanna do. And so he's gonna give us some great insights on how do we self-assess and when's the best time to do it. Plus, we're going to be talking about this overarching idea of being pain-free and really look at the truth about pain and being pain-free.

2:21Shawn Stevenson:And also, how do we reconstruct or even program around where we're having pain or even an injury so that we can keep moving, so that we can keep healing. And you're going to hear some remarkable stories when it comes to the importance of utilizing movement as rehab. movement as medicine. We have all of this and much more with our special guest, Dr. Kelly Starrett. Dr. Kelly Starrett is a coach, physical therapist, speaker, three-time New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling co-author of Becoming a Supple Leopard, Ready to Run, and Built to Move. Kelly is also the co-founder of The Ready State, the program helping everyday athletes to enjoy better movement, agility, and strength with less pain and more protection against injury.

3:18Shawn Stevenson:Let's dive in this conversation with the one and only Dr. Kelly Starrett. Now, this is a word I don't use lightly when I say legend. We have the legend, Dr. Kelly Starrett in the building. Well, not actually in his building. We're in the same building in the quantum field. We are in the same place, my friend. Going through so many of the same things. Our kids are graduating. We're transitioning. I don't know how you keep that beard ungray, but you're going to have to let me know. There's some there's some popping through there for sure, for sure. So, listen, I've got some really, really important questions that I want to ask you.

3:56Shawn Stevenson:And I want to kick things off by talking about a statement that I heard you make that when you stop jumping, you start dying. What do you mean by that? That is one of those phrases that comes out of this embodied knowledge of human beings. And that is an old Soviet idea. And there are a whole host of these. Like people will say, I think the Chinese would say, you're as old as your spine. You're as old as your feet. You might hear some of these old colloquialisms, old pieces of knowledge. The first thing I want to recognize here before we kind of talk about really why that's important, especially now, is that human beings have been rad for as long as there have been human beings.

4:44And we have been athletic. We've been heroic. We are capable of incredible feats of strength and stamina and durability and survivorship. And I want to just reframe because I think sometimes it's easy for us as modern people with like we can track our squat velocity. You know, we know how many grams of, you know, protein we're eating. Humans have been obsessed with being awesome for as long as they've been humans. I mean, can you just imagine like young kids playing around like I'll carry this rock, you carry this rock, you know, we'll like let's race the goats up this mountain. I get there faster.

5:24I'm telling you, humans have been competing and playing, and this is playing for as long as they've been doing this. That statement is interesting because the true ism there is about maintaining capacity. What we've come to understand and interpret that as is that power is a hugely important aspect of our movement system. For everyone who's maybe not a super science nerd, that just means can you generate force quickly? And you might think to yourself, jumping, I don't know about that. My knee hurts. My back hurts. But if you have to stumble and pick up a foot quickly and recover, that speed is what's missing from your perfect training Peloton, Pilates.

6:14And look, no shade on those things. But as we've come to fetishize capacity, my ability to perform amount of work, wattage, putting another pound on the bar, we forgot that this brain is designed to problem solve, move quick, play. And one of the keys here is that we see that springiness, which is actually a term of art from some of our coaches of yesteryear, springiness, is that it's a capacity that speaks to our connective tissues. It speaks to our brain. It speaks to safety. I feel safe enough to move quickly. And so what's interesting is that we can start to ask, well, when's the last time you moved quickly?

7:02Well, maybe it was when I picked up pickleball and I got injured. I'm like, oh, okay. We can see that you have this dearth, this vacuum of quick movements in your life. And all of a sudden, you had to go do that. I had to stumble or do a new sport or pick up a skill or jump in. And my tissues couldn't tolerate it. My brain was uncomfortable with it. So some of the easiest things we can do is just say, hey, let's start jump roping. So accessible. You were just spinning your rope back over there. So we're getting ready. and a nine foot piece of half inch rope, not fancy, very inexpensive. That is our default jump rope now.

7:38And in my programming, I program some kind of jumping for all of our athletes every day. And I don't want to get into the weeds of like what kind of plow metric, you know, the idea is, are you jumping or not jumping? And for those of us who are starting to think about jumping again, or hear this, this, I, Hey, I think I've got to get into this. it may just be you're bouncing holding onto a sink, right? You're on a rebounder. That rebounder is a form of jumping. Do you need to do these super crazy, you know, superstar plyos? No, don't need to do that. But what we're understanding is that power is a better predictor of the quality of your life as you get older, because maintaining that connective tissue, that health, that brain output really makes a big difference.

8:26And it's going to make a big difference in the quality of your life and your ability to sort of stay upright when it gets a little bit chaotic. So I love that phrase because it reminds us that, wow, the key element of play is moving quickly. And all you need to do, you and I need to do is go throw a Frisbee. We need to, you know, go play some, some basketball. We need to go play tag. We need to engage in some play that looks like a little bit one valence away from sort of, I'm doing pool aerobics. And don't get me wrong. What's nice is that when I have injury, when I have surgery, when I have pain, I can slow down, keep you moving.

9:07In fact, when we're working with people coming back from these things, rebuilding the body after injury or trauma, we slow way down. And when we start to say, hey, I think you're recovered. I can tell you're recovered because you're moving quickly. And I start to program speed elements into your training, into your daily life. And what this really hints at, I think, is how do we develop athleticism? Where does that come from? How is the gym the best place to make athletes? And I will say something radical here, and I'm not alone in this. It is not. But the gym is a great place for us to perchance enhance athleticism, restore movement choices, expose tissues so that they're more robust, find blind spots in conditioning.

10:01But we got to remember why we were in the gym in the first place, so we could take those skills and go be the best problem solver. And I'll say for the last, especially the last 20 years, as again, the rise of capacity, the assault bike is a good example. you can crush the assault bike or the echo bike doesn't mean you're a good athlete i'm not going to choose you from my kickball team but the the gym took a lot of really good athletes and made them look mediocre right because the gym became a place where i could practice this step aerobics with weights and look like i was a really good athlete in my abs and my cap delts and you know i look so good on instagram and i'm like good we're gonna go play some pickup ball and i'll tell you good luck.

10:44All show, no go. So that's what the heart of that idea is, is just remind us we are springy, powerful, problem-solving wonder machines. Is that what your training looks like? Yes or no?

10:57Shawn Stevenson:I love this already. I love it already. So are we asking ourselves, are we proactively maintaining, protecting, and even developing our springiness, right? And so just to go back to statement again, when you stop jumping, you start dying. So finding creative ways to employ jumping intentionally into our workouts, into our week, and also play. That's the emphasis here, engaging in these things in the real world. And so I want to ask you just a couple of, I know you said you didn't want to get into the weeds on what to do, but you're the weed whacker. So I want to ask you about this because, you know, one of the things that I love to do, I find a resonance with, and I see such a great transfer over into sport is skipping.

11:48Shawn Stevenson:Is skipping on a rope with my jump rope and skipping also in my training and my warmups when I'm going to do some type of sprints and things like that or push the sled. Skipping, I think, is like a hugely underrated, valuable human movement. And also it just really points to this kind of youthful kind of capacity as well. Like you got to be happy AF if you're just skipping for no reason. You feel me? So what do you think about that? So let's go ahead and again, let's pretend that we have this laboratory of sport out there. We've been running these experiments, independent experiments for, let's just say the last hundred years, really thoughtfully.

12:33and we go, hey, I don't know, who's super springy? All boxers are super springy, right? Well, do they do a lot of jump roping? 100%. You see that the jump rope is synonymous. In fact, I think boxing kept jump roping alive, right? Then we're like, okay, well, who else is super springy? Jump, run, throw, that sounds like track and field. So look at how much preparation has gone into the warm-up, movement preparation, skill development of our fastest athletes in the world. If you did a track and field warm-up, the A skips, the B skips, the bounding, the wickets, you as a society, if we just went to the track and pretended like we were elite sprinters, but much slower, who didn't do anything powerfully, and we just were cool, like, you know, I'm a middle-aged white guy.

13:27Let's pretend that we just went through that. I guarantee you, your back would feel better. You'd be more protective. You'd be springier, be more athletic. And again, imagine that if we looked around at the people whose jobs require us to be powerful and springy and how they train, they're leaving breadcrumbs for us in that position. something you're hitting at i think is really important is that when and where are we going to do this stuff because you know what we what we we've ended up especially i'm going to call this where we currently are the beginning of the third wave of fitness so first wave fitness is like that malt nut power bar right it's an early heart rate monitor i mean in the late 1900s which i'm from where I was, uh, I was, you know, professional paddler in the late 1900s on the national team, early 2000s.

14:26Shawn Stevenson:The way it sounded when you said late, late 1900s, it sounded like 1800s. Okay. Okay. I like, I get it, you know? And, um, I think what we saw then is that if you came out of a movement tradition of sports, maybe you lifted a weight to become more powerful. You were lucky if you were doing some Olympic style weightlifting. I'll give you a hint. Most people have heard of this thing called the FMS, the Functional Movement Screen. And FMS was created by Burton and Cook, two amazing thinkers, Lee Burton, Greg Cook. And what they wanted to do is come up with a quick assessment to see how could people access fundamental patterns.

15:13And that was a way for sort of beginning to make the invisible, what we call now making the invisible visible. So imagine we don't really, people are doing cable crossovers and leg press and really bodybuilding is what we're doing there. If you're lifting weights in the 90s, it's probably some version of some bodybuilding for muscular development, Joe Weider, right? Arnold. and those guys introduced this thing called the overhead squat and that was really the they and let me be clear if you're an olympic style weightlifter you are overhead squatting since the dawn of time because it's a fundamental position it's a slowed down version of a heaving snatch balance and then ultimately a snatch the olympic style snatch these guys took this thing and said, Hey, let's, we can really ask a lot about the coordination and the access of this person.

16:09Cause all you have to do is keep your arms over your head and squat piece of cake, right? I'm just going to put a piece of cake because if you've ever overhead squatted, we saw suddenly people like Dan John, who came out of a throwing community, Olympic lifting community, you know, he was like, yeah, you should be able to overhead squat your body weight 10 times. You should be able to do plus 20 or 40 pounds over your body weight for a couple reps. That's a huge amount of weight to have over your head. Balance, coordinate, organize, systematize. He talks about making the body one piece. The reason I mention this is that 1996, can I see your phone from 1996?

16:50Can I see your car from 1996? It is not very sexy. So 1996 is when that came out And it was the first time we started to expose people and think about, hey, what's happening with our bodies? This first wave adaptation or first wave fitnessing is happening. And then all of a sudden the internet hits. And you were lucky if you came out of a movement tradition and had professional coaching. But now suddenly we are, it's fitnessing, it's performative fitness, it's vanity fitness, it's bodybuilding. and we've seen the proliferation of every tech tracker tool device we've become very sophisticated and what i like to say is that the room of strength conditioning has become it's like you had that one grandma and you went into her living room and there was a lace doily and a little figurine and pictures and like you couldn't sit anywhere and there's plastic on the seat and the whole room was just like, what is this place?

17:55And you were afraid to like sit down because you'd knock something over. That's strengthening and conditioning right now. It has become the most decorative, heavy, overburdened, some sort of idea where I'm gonna go into the gym, I'm gonna touch every position, every shape, hit every need of my possible body in this one hour section. Theoretically, that's gonna make me feel like a human and connected to other humans. We know that the gym is a lonely place. You put your headphones in. You don't want to make eye contact. The fitness influencers are in the corner filming themselves. It is a weird, weird stinking place right now.

18:32We forgot that the reason we were training in the gym was it allowed us to develop capacities and tissues and exposed positions so that we could go out into the world and take those bodies and become extraordinary. Yes. and the training should be in service of. Now, people listen to this and they're like, well, I don't have time for that, or I love training because it gives me a community. I'm totally cool. But I just want to remind you that as soon as I drop this performance filter over what we're talking about, I can't do what you're doing in the gym and still go play soccer. I can't do what you're doing in the gym and actually go be an elite fighter or basketball player.

19:19you're going to crush me so much in the gym with all of this fanciful, powerlifting, you know, style training where I'm obsessing over strength, worshiping strength, where I may actually be making myself a slower, less capable athlete. Now, I'm going to use a couple examples here. And two people I respect hugely, and I just want to be very clear. I'm not throwing shade on these two men. Mike Isretel is a big brain in RP Renaissance periodization. He is such a savage intellect and a very, very strong, very jacked dude. And that is, he would say he's done that. Mike went and was vulnerable. And I love this.

20:02And he took that body in that frame, which is extraordinary. I would like to have his hamstrings and his biceps. And he went and tried to pass the army physical fitness test and he could not do it. He couldn't run. He couldn't. The deadlift crushed it, of course. Any strength thing, that man is a savage. Again, huge brain. He wasn't purporting to train for that. He wasn't saying. He's saying, hey, I'm a bodybuilder. I'm going to be jacked. I'm going to be tan. I'm going to look so good in clothes. And I don't care what the result is. So, and I'll give you a second example. Larry Wheels, one of the strongest, freakiest human beings who have ever walked on the planet.

20:45You can see some video of him sprinting on a treadmill. And what you can see suddenly is, hey, there is a cost to being so strong and so sort of buff that it stopped his athleticism. Now, that's totally okay. We can do that. But what I want to make sure is that when we are having a nuanced conversation about performance, and again, let me just set this straight. If you've never heard of my work or where I am, let me just tell you my bona fides. I work in NFL, NBA, NHL, right? Premier football, premier soccer, rugby, the Olympics, track and field. I see all the branches of the government, FBI. I see people who have this body that we need to go do something extraordinary with.

21:33And we might steal ideas from our brothers and sisters in the strength community. But we have to keep in mind that the thing is the thing. And so as we're moving out of the second wave of fitness, we're now beginning, which is where we got real good at saying, here's how much, here's the exposure, here are all the fun tools that we have. But on this other side, the performance side is, is this in service of making my daughter swim faster in the pool? Is this in service of my eighth grader playing good basketball and being more resilient and more tolerant so that he can play more basketball and come out of harm?

22:16So we're in a place now where you can see where we've lost springiness, we've lost athleticism, and we've forgotten that part of the magic of having this physical body is going out and playing. And I'm going to give everyone a reason here, a rationale that sometimes I understand there was a time where I had two kids, business, Juliet's an attorney. We did this thing called the 10-10-10 at 10, which was like 10 kettlebell swings, 10 pull-ups, 10 pull-ups at 10 p.m. for 10 minutes. It was not great. That's all I got in my garage. We're not going to the Olympics on that. but if the we're in service of actually sort of taking all the tools we need to figure out what's essential what is the minimum amount and i'm not the first person to talk about this cal deets has been talking about this pavel at one point a million years ago was like yeah double bodyweight back squat you're probably strong enough to do any sport we can possibly think of now let's do something else bonder chuck who was the greatest throws coach of all time you know create all these this mutants.

23:25He was like, I know you want to put another kilo on your bench press, but we should probably go out and throw more. You know what I mean? It's easy to see progress in the gym. It's hard to see progress in sport and athleticism. So that's where we are. And when we hear these maxims now of, hey, let's make sure that we're jumping and playing and keeping an eye on, one of the things for those of us who sometimes are too busy to actually go do sports, the warm-up the movement preparation the first 15 or 20 minutes in the gym can be a place to explore to play to dance to feel to integrate to get a trainment to wake up your nervous system to get your eyes working and now suddenly we've just stumbled into our movement culture brothers and sisters so suddenly we're like oh i really understand edo portal and why he was raging against just the fetishization, the worship of capacity, because we were forgetting how to problem solve, move, twist, access, dance, be fluid, be rhythmical, et cetera, et cetera.

24:32So that's where we are. And what we need to do is help people reclaim some of those aspects because they give us so much more and inoculate us and make us better athletes.

24:45Shawn Stevenson:I want to share with you something that's transformational for not just our appearance and beauty, but for our healing and performance. A double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial published in the Journal of Phytochemistry and Phytobiology took 76 patients with notable wrinkles and treated half of their face with red light therapy, near-infrared therapy, or both, while other patients received a fake light treatment that was used as a placebo. Participants received two light therapy treatments each week for four weeks. Here's what happened. Within just four weeks of treatment, participants had up to a 36 % reduction in wrinkles and up to a 20 % increase in skin elasticity.

25:28Shawn Stevenson:Phenomenal in just four weeks. Obviously, red light therapy is changing the game right now when it comes to beauty and appearance. But it is so good for reducing pain and healing. A meta-analysis published in the BMJ sought to see if red light therapy could reduce pain in people with osteoarthritis versus a placebo. The study included over a thousand people and found that red light therapy significantly reduced knee pain in study participants. But not only that, the results appeared to have lasting effects with benefits seen up to three months after the treatment. The researcher stated, quote, the positive effect from red light therapy seems to last longer than those of widely recommended painkiller drugs, unquote.

26:12Shawn Stevenson:Yes, red light therapy is phenomenal, but it's critical to make sure that we're getting our devices from a reputable FDA registered source to make sure that we have both red, which is the 660 nanometers light and near infrared, which is the 850 nanometers light. This is the same irradiance seen in these studies. And this is something that we can do from the comfort of our own homes. The wavelength and irradiance needs to be verified in third-party labs. And the red light therapy devices that I use meet IEC safety standards and EMF safety standards. The only red light therapy devices that I use meet the key IEC safety standards for electrical and EMF safety.

26:59Shawn Stevenson:They have the number one red light therapy mask in the world. And I'm talking about the incredible team at Bond Charge. Go to bondcharge.com forward slash model and you're going to get an exclusive 15 % off all of their red light therapy devices. I personally prefer the max and super max red light therapy panels to do more of a whole body treatment. because if I'm going to get the treatment for my skin health, for my face, why not get some healing when it comes to my recovery from exercise or pain or injuries, things like that, just really helping to stack conditions. So they have these large panels as well, and also small portable handheld red light therapy devices too.

27:45Shawn Stevenson:They've got so many different iterations that can fit our lifestyles. So head over there, check them out. Again, all FDA registered and really checking off those boxes for performance and irradiance and safety. Go to bondcharge.com forward slash model. That's B-O-N-C-H-A-R-G-E.com forward slash model and use the code model at checkout for 15 % off. Now back to the show. Love it. I love it. You know, I just, I don't know if it was just intuitive, but prior to moving to LA, the gym that my family would go to, there's, you know, basketball courts there. I would always warm up just shooting around, right?

28:27Shawn Stevenson:Yes. You know what I mean? That was my number one warmup every time I go to the gym. Now we don't have that kind of access. LA, far in between when you're going to find a gym and a basketball court. Are you kidding me? That's right. Shout out YMCA. Shout out to the YMCA. But I'm doing the whole dance in my head now. But with that being said, now rope flow, right? I've got my rope in my bag and I'm just doing dynamic things with the rope, throwing some jabs, doing some backhands, doing some single arm stuff. And just again, finding ways. And also, again, as you just mentioned, this is a way to just check in with your body.

29:03Shawn Stevenson:You are, you are the supple leopard. So you, you, you have encouraged us. We, we do want to be able to, if we need to, to run and, you know, be the hero and, you know, get somebody out of the way of a moving vehicle or whatever the case might be. But we also, when we're looking at training, it's a different, this, we're, we're, we're doing training, right. Versus again, just the capacity to do things when we need to do them. And so this is an opportunity for us to check in, see how we feel and see based on, and this is actually a great question, evaluating our bodies, evaluating our current training program, right.

29:43Shawn Stevenson:To, to find out like what might, what might we want to train around? What might we want to adjust? Where do I have some blind spots potentially, you know, kind of exploring that and having the ability to self assess basically. Well, you're hitting on this thing about, um, a concept that I want us, look, if I ask you how much you bench, you can tell me how much you bench. And it was 1985 and you were hopped up on, you know, monster energy drinks, whatever it was back in 1985. And you all, beautiful people were in the room and you're cheering on your football team. And I'm like, that person is dead.