Built To Move: Kelly & Juliet Starrett On Functional Strength, Mobility, And Falling In Love With Movement

25:46Yeah, just nudging you gently in the right direction, and repeatedly throughout the day, every single day. And I'm like you, Rich, I wanna suffer and breathe hard. It doesn't count for shit unless you got that going on. I feel like I have one hour a day. Yeah, I'm sure, real suffering. I have like, let's say one hour in my time schedule a day, and I'm always gonna default to choosing to do some form of suffering, whether that's a CrossFit workout or mountain biking or something like that. I'm always going to choose that. I'm never going to be the person who's like, I should probably take a recovery day.

26:23And instead I'm going to go to a yoga class and I enjoy yoga, but I mean, I am never going to be someone who chooses going to yoga over doing a workout. If I have, if I only can choose one. Um, and so I'm in the same boat as you in, in, in order for me to actually figure out ways to do some of these sort of range of motion, mobility practices and practice things like balance. Like it has to just be sort of like baked into other things I'm doing. Otherwise, I literally won't do it because I often feel like I really have that one sacred hour a day to do what I want and what I want is workout. You mentioned earlier that there's a lot of confusion around what you mean when you talk about mobility.

27:04So let's just clarify that. And I kind of wanna build on that to get into the various principles that form the framework of this book and your philosophy. Well, I mean, I'll start and maybe - Yeah, take a swing at it. Let's take a swing at this. I think - I mean, at this point, you ought to be able to define it, right? Yes, yes. To us, mobility is really the ability to be able to move freely through your environment and do the things you want to be able to do with your body, whatever those things may be. Now, we offer a lot of tools, which we call mobilizations, which are things you can do to help improve your mobility and range of motion.

27:42But to us at the highest level, it's the ability to move freely, ideally without pain or at least minimizing pain and feel to do the things you love to do. And if I added a - How did I do? Pretty good for an attorney. You've been in the game for a minute, I can tell. I would add your body, everyone agrees that your shoulder should be able to do certain things and that your spine should be able to do certain things and your hips should be able to do certain things. Every physician, every orthopedic surgeon, every physical therapist, we all agree how how much shoulder is normal, how much your ankle should be able to move.

28:17The problem is that we don't give people benchmarks for what is normative or what you should be able to do. And our lives sometimes don't ask us of that. And so suddenly when we have pain or a problem, that range of motion is never part of the conversation about, hey, I see that your steering wheel doesn't go all the way to the left. Let's just make sure that you can, the pilots where they take off, They check to make sure everything's working right. So we could also define mobility as, do you have your native range of motion and can you control that native range of motion? So are you a skilled person?

28:53And what Juliet said is all of that is important, but really what is it you wanna do in your world and environment and how do you wanna express this body? That's the most important thing. And I think that's where we got in the weeds. You know, yeah, hip range of motion is important. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if it prevents you from doing something or you're having pain and that's also conjoined with the fact that you don't have access to that range, maybe that's the reason you should care. Well, and like, let me just give you one example. Like if you just asked anyone on the street, like, do you care about your hip range of motion?

29:22They're gonna be like, no, why would I care about that? But as an example, we were recently talking to a friend of ours who has a four month old baby and has both sets of parents visiting and his parents are like in their mid sixties. So, you know, not that much older than us. and his mother is able to get up and down off the ground and sit with the baby, but his mother-in-law can't get down onto the ground or up off of the ground and so can't sit on the floor and play with the grandchild. And that's one of those things that you don't think about until it's like a use it or lose it kind of thing.

29:58But like that right there is hip range of motion. So you may not care athletically about hip range of motion because you're not trying to run faster or lift more weights or whatever. whatever an athlete might need to care about hip range of motion for. But most people would say, man, do you wanna be able to sit on the floor and play with your grandchild when you have one? And they'd be like, yes, I do. And so that's one of the reasons why people should care about their hip range of motion. Right, I feel that humans are not very good at casting their gaze that far into the future though. So true.

30:29Especially like it's not until - Yeah, if you're 25. Yeah, like you're 25, like, yeah, you're just like, I'll deal with that when I can. Do you remember the - Or that's not gonna happen to me, especially with an elite athlete, like forget about it. So the barrier to being able to convince somebody that these things are important has to be, it's like a high bar for you, right? To like communicate with people like, hey, we can talk about longevity. How long do you wanna live? What is it that you wanna be able to do when you're 80 and 90, et cetera. But when you're 30, even in your 40s and you're essentially pain free or you don't have some kind of injury, that's a challenge.

31:09But it is true that like, whether it's heart disease, diabetes, any kind of brain degeneration, similarly with our physical bodies, like these things are progressive. And if you're not working on this stuff far in advance of those aging years, you're gonna have a problem. But if you do undergo, sort of shoulder the responsibility of doing these things that you guys talk about so much, you're taking out this insurance policy to be able to do all those things in your later years. But it's just that humans are not good at like, you know, evaluating the cost benefit analysis of these sorts of things.

31:44And our environment gives us a lot of cues or guides us into poor decisions. I just think New York Times had an article just recently about how some of our foods hijack our brain chemistry, right? Our modern foods is umamis. We just think, oh, they're so good. So here's a story. I was a young physio student watching the cardiac catheter lab. And I'm watching a really wealthy kid, a wealthy man in San Francisco and his whole family's outside. He has three beautiful daughters, which I can start to like put myself in his shoes. He has this amazing wife, killer law practice. He's rich in every definition of the term.

32:22He's one life. And he's in there having three stents put in his heart and he's overweight. And what I thought in that moment was, if this guy has every resource and every reason to live. And it's still that hard to change and to make these things to keep himself alive with his family. What recourse does an average person, mortal person without his resources have? And really that was a kind of a shocker. And I think if I'd video the two women, putting in the catheter like chain smoking, like as a matter of fact, that may have showed him that video, maybe that would have changed his behavior, but it's really difficult to sort of untangle what seems like the biggest Gordian knot in your life?

33:02Where do I go? Especially since sometimes we don't see the results right away. Yeah. So when talking about mobility and movement, you know, how do you diagnose somebody's mobility? Like everybody, you know, you guys have like this superpower. You can like look at somebody just sitting or standing or walking and be like, oh, I see 10 things wrong with like what's happening there. Like most people don't have that ability and don't think about that kind of stuff. You know, the average person, if they're pain-free is gonna say, well, this is not, I can walk and I can get up and sit down and all that kind of stuff.

33:38So where does one begin to try to self-diagnose and understand their own mobility capacity limitations and what they should be focused on working on? Well, in this book, we literally identify five areas where we think that if people just kept an eye on it, like just kept an eye on it. A vital sign. Just, yeah, we call them vital signs because we have these 10 things. Yeah. We have these 10 vital signs, but we specifically chose the word vital sign because it started coming up more and more in the pandemic. Actually, everyone was like tracking all these vital signs, like their SEO too. And, you know, obviously everybody knows that 120 over 80 is like, okay, blood pressure.

34:15And if you go over that, it's something you should keep an eye on. And so that's why we, we thought, well, if, if regular people can keep an eye on a vital sign like blood pressure, then why can't there be some movement specific or health specific vital signs? And so, um, you know, obviously the human body is the most complicated thing in the known universe. Um, but we really tried to boil it down to a few areas of range of motion. We thought people should keep an eye on or that we consider to be vital signs. And we do have these simple tests in the book, um, that people can just do once and sort of say, okay, this is where I'm at.

34:48You know, this is something I need to keep an eye on. This is something I'm doing great at. And, you know, and then the things we suggest for people to work on them, we think we've suggested, you know, things that they can literally do like while they're watching Netflix at night or while they're still sitting at their office. Like we've really tried to make it so that you don't have to go to the one hour mobility balance class and, you know, journal in the morning in order to get it in order to get these things done. But, you know, I think they're just some simple tests. I think if everybody had a real baseline of what their range of motion was in their big movers, their hips, their shoulders, their ankles, and just literally kept an eye on it.

35:25Turns out everyone has a universal language, running. Everyone knows. When I say run, everyone knows exactly what I mean. This is why the running community is global. If we use yoga as a movement language, everyone has probably done yoga a little bit. Everyone knows what Chaturanga and downward dog is. So we have some touch tones of movement that we can all agree on. If I say push up, everyone knows what a push up is. But what's nice about that is we now have this formal language of diagnostic movement that everyone has heard of or at least been exposed to. And it's not the language of rehab. I think rehab gets confusing.

36:03There's so many ways to restore position or help to activate or normalize. And that is like, hey, I speak Esperanto but I speak classic Greek and this is my, but this training language is pretty ubiquitous. And one of the things that Juliet pointed out was when we can make some of these diagnostics in that normative language of squatting up and down, standing on one leg, you know, suddenly, you know, can you get into this position and squeeze your butt? Suddenly we have a universal language that reflects the movements that we do. If I say lunge, usually everyone knows is what a lunge looks like, or if a pushup looks like, or putting your arms over your head.

36:44So that I think is a way where we can begin to cast a bigger net and have people come into understanding what it is maybe that they're limiting or what they're having struggle with. And we set some booby traps in this book. It's pretty shocking. We were hanging out with one of our super strong, badass athlete friends who struggled to get up off the ground. And he was like, whoa, my hips. And I was like, oh, your hips tight? Like I didn't know. So I think when we kind of confront people with tests that we think are very reasonable because we've gotten to see the world a little bit and they're confronted with it, then they are knowing, hey, maybe that's something I need to work on.

37:23And I think, again, creating that vital sign line helps people to make decisions once they know they're above or below.

37:39So early in the book, you have this test, it's like, okay, let's see what's up. Like cross your legs, lower yourself down into a cross legged position. And now try to stand up without using your hands or kind of using the side of your legs to like, so I'm gonna do it. And I was able to do it, but like it was harder than I thought it would be. My back kinda hurt. You're Rich Roll. I mean, you're like, come on. You're like a legend, Rich. Well, my, like, here's the thing. And this is kind of like what I wanted to get into, which is just because if you're an elite athlete or super fit, like these are not necessarily predictors of whether you have great range of motion or mobility.

38:25And in fact, it could be quite the opposite because you're so specialized at a certain subset of activities that it makes you kind of brittle in terms of being like a robust overall, like, you know, mobile, functional, flexible athlete. I mean, Kelly, I know you grew up in Europe and were exposed to all different kinds of sports and became this like generalist. And that was sort of the root of like, you know, all of the work that you've done since and appreciating like the importance of, you know, having like a robust battery of different kinds of activities that you do as an athlete, but elite athletes are just good at one thing, right?

39:04And so actually that makes them kind of fragile in the context of overall, like, you know, kind of stability, mobility, et cetera. And how do you, in an elite population, what are our minimums? And we can, for the people who are nerding out on this deep, if I'm an elite sprinter, so Stuart McMillan of Altus track. I'm sure I know, you know Stu. I've never met him, but like on Twitter, I love like his feed and like all this. Shout out to one of the greatest coaches I've ever met. But Stu and I got into this conversation about how much dorsiflexion, ankle range of motion, his elite sprinters needed, right?

39:39Where he's worked coaching Andre de Grasse, like pretty good sprinter. And he's like, my sprinters only need zero, they need zero degrees. And I was like, totally agree. That's how much they need to do their sport. But does he need more range of motion in his hips and ankles who went downstairs? And he was like, wait, what? And then I was like, does he train? Do you go to the weight room? Do you need more than some ankle range of motion, zero ankle range of motion to perform the training? So what we can start to say is, do you have enough range of motion? And as a coach, I wanna make sure you have enough range of motion so that you don't kind of create alternative strategies to solving movement problems.

40:16And I think one of the problems with being a human being is we're so robust for a long time. until something changes, or we can't get away with a strategy that worked for us. You may even be the best in the world at using this strategy, but that strategy doesn't actually hint at the possibility or total possibility of your physiology. That if we improved your hip extension, your ability to get your knee behind your butt effectively, we actually can make you more efficient, more effective, and potentially solve or prevent weird tweaks in the system like your low back pain or your knee pain. so on the one hand we with those athletes we want to give credence to hey your job is to do this sport what are the minimums so that we don't end up creating and sometimes we have to use pain as a diagnostic oh you're starting to get achy let's keep an eye on that but for the rest of us we have an opportunity to create a little bit more robust platform of generalism right and one of our tests with all of our athletes we're like oh you think you're a good athlete jump into a yoga class let Let's know how you do there.

41:19Can you stand on one foot and breathe? Oh, you couldn't. Maybe your elite program isn't so elite. You can't even do downward dog and take a breath. We've been totally against sports specialization for kids, and we've been really trying hard not to have our own kids become specialists. They both play water polo. And we sent them this winter in Tahoe to a Pilates class, and they were destroyed for like four days. And these are kids who are training all the time. So, you know, we're trying to, um, this isn't really related to your question, but you know, we are always like, Hey, if you think your program is so great, like go try someone else's program.

41:53If you love CrossFit, go do some other program and see how you fare. Right. Especially if you're not an elite athlete, obviously elite athletes need to get so specialized and they have to, I think, leave a lot of things behind. Right. If you look at elite cyclists, it's like, well, they have zero upper body strength on purpose. Um, but you know, for the rest of us, it's like, Hey, we should all, you know, become generalists and at least try, try some of these other things, including our own kids. It is crazy how untransferable some of that, like, you know, real specialized fitness can be. Like if you're a Tour de France cyclist, you're so like, yeah, you have zero upper body strength or whatever, like you're so adapted and efficient at doing this one thing, but the minute you take that person and put them into some other kind of environment, they're hapless, right?

42:40And there isn't like a robustness to all of that. And look, you have to do that to be at the highest level of that sport. And any athlete who's trying to be an elite in their specific thing is gonna get really good and efficient at that one thing. But there's gonna be atrophies of other muscle groups and all kinds of other sort of downstream byproducts of that specialization that create physical workarounds. So I just as somebody who, I love the fact that you've worked with swimmers. I come from a swimming background and then did this triathlon thing and got very efficient at that one thing, but became like really not overall like all that stable.

43:23Like I used to be really flexible as a swimmer and I had great balance and yoga and all that. And like a lot of that, like now when I try to do that, I'm like, wow, like I'm like kind of messed up. Like I have a lot of work to do and now I've got this back pain and everyone's telling me I gotta get my glutes to fire. And I was like, I don't even know what that means. Like what does that mean? I know, I know. You need to hire people to walk around. That's like one of those internet things that people say, you're like, get your glutes to fire. You're like, what does that mean? I have consulted with lots of bright people who've given me great advice.

43:52And it's been beneficial to me, but there also is that paralysis too, where it's like, you have conventional Western medicine people telling me, like you 100 % need surgery. And then a whole battery of alternative modalities and practitioners, all of which are really great people who've given me a lot of tools, but also it's sort of like there's so much, like I just don't quite know what to do. I don't even know, that wasn't a question. I just like gave me a ton at you about a whole bunch of different stuff. But anyway. If we pull that apart, the first thing is I think we have confused people about what is a health practice.

44:29And so I think we can actually take exercise out of it. If you have any 90 year olds or 100 year olds in your family, a lot of people listening do, how fit and jacked are they? They probably came of age in a generation where they did not, but they were doing something, good genetics plus some behaviors, good relationships. They eat, they - They moved a ton. They moved a ton. They were always moving. I just saw a world record set in the 5K by that 90 year old woman. Did you see that? I did, yeah. I was like, she could outrun me. That's, she's amazing. So one of the things we can do is help to pull that apart because I think what we said was as long as you could just crush it on the Peloton, you're good, right?

45:07And it was easy to measure that cardiorespiratory fitness, cardiometabolic fitness and get a wattage, but it doesn't speak to all the wonders and ranges. So if you look at something like Joseph Pilates and what he was trying to solve, you can really see genius in his methodology and system. If you jump into any yoga class, there are positions that are foundational to the function of the human. And that's why yoga will persist forever. Can you get into this end range position where you don't have a lot of control? Can you breathe and stabilize there? I mean, that is just a practice that you could do forever, layer onto anyone.

45:41And any of my athletes ask me, I'm like, yeah, yoga. Whenever you wanna do it, it's one of those all you can eat buffets. One of the things that we see then is if we sold that, in the season, we have this kind of competitive time, sports specialization training, sports specific training. And the only goal is to make you a better triathlete. That's the season. But we come out of the season and we're into general physical preparedness where we can start to open up a little bit and say, hey, I see that the session cost or the sport cost caused you to specialize or miss some ranges. And that's what we're not typically doing with a lot of seasons, especially as we go year round and our kids, you said we used to play all these different sports.

46:22We used to allow the different exposure to these positions and shapes and different things, account for all of the possibility and variability. And as that play has gotten diminished as the amount of exposure has come diminished, we're realizing we're having to teach a lot of formal movement skills to kids and really good athletes because they didn't have it as a child. So in season, there's only one goal, to win. And we're gonna burn everything we need to do on the bonfire of winning and keep you in the game and minimize. And the second the season's over, we start to expand that a little bit.

46:54That makes sense. And that's an easier way to wrap your head around to say it's okay that you became hyper specialized, but we didn't have the tools and didn't prepare you to say, okay, now I'm out of season. What's essential to make me robust again? And I would say too that, you know, just in the broader community, and I see this a lot with parents of kids I know that are doing athletics, is I can't tell you how many times a parent has asked me, well, I really want to get my kid into a mountain bike specific strength and conditioning program, or what secret strength and conditioning programs should my kid who swims be doing?

47:30And, you know, our response to that is always like, well, they need to do general physical preparedness. Like every kid probably could stand to practice balance and get more agile and get a little bit stronger and work on their motor control and stability, like coordination. I think every kid and adult could stand to do all of those things. But I do think this whole idea of, well, if I'm a specialized athlete, then all of everything I need to do is specialized. It's like, you know, it's become part of our psyche. Yoga, kettlebell, hill sprints. That's a pretty vicious combination. I mean, you're gonna go a long way like that.

48:03How many Tour de France cyclists do you have like doing kettlebell workouts? A lot of them. During the season though, not as much. One of the things that I think is amazing, and you know this, you've run into and worked with so many mutants. You know, Peter Sagan could be a world champion in multiple sports. I think he's that talented. He's brilliant at what he does. Levi Light Palmer is a very good family friend for a long time. You know, he grew up ski racing. He's a really good athlete. And sometimes I think we, it's easy to pull the athleticism out. You know, if you look at, you know, the best athletes in the world, they were always good athletes and athletics.

48:46They didn't necessarily just, you know, I do this one little thing. So, you know, what we're finding though, is if you wanna win, you have to be durable. And suddenly durability comes in the form of some really simple strength training. How much strength training in season? Enough not to ruin your surfing, not enough not to ruin your sport. Enough that you, you know, and I, you know, was we, one of the things we're always asked to do is we'd come in and can you help us untangle this? We wanna win, make it through the season longer. And we have to look at all of the pieces. Tell me about your sleep.

49:20Oh, my sleep is wretched. Okay, it's really hard for us to understand what's going on. One time we're working with a CrossFit Games champion who was having this really weird knee pain. And my friends are brilliant coaches and I'm not bad. And we're talking about all things. Ultimately, she was traveling alone without her partner and she slept with the TV on at night because it made her feel safe in the room. But that TV on all night long kind of messed up her sleep a little bit. She didn't actually recover. And that was what made her brain start to perceive her knee as a problem. So it's important that we're looking at all of the features that kind of go into making a robust person.

49:59And sometimes it is fueling, believe it or not. And sometimes it is, you don't have any range of motion here. And some of it is, you're not even strong in this position. So that's why I think these single approaches don't necessarily work. We always have to take a systems approach. Yeah. And in the book, you have these 10 vital signs. you go through them chapter by chapter that begins with sort of getting up, how do you get up off the ground? I mean, it's like basic stuff, right? But then it's like hip extension. Like you talked about. But to you, you nailed it. Right, like I, go ahead. No, just that, but if I grab someone off the street and say, I got 20 bucks if you can do this, you'd be shocked at how we have set, the bar has gone away from us and has gotten very low.

50:45Right, and in addressing that, Like back to the whole like we've become unwilded and we need to rewild ourselves. This conversation often is rather binary. And I'm thinking about my friend, Tony Riddle. I don't know if you know who Tony is. Do you know who Tony is? Like the natural light, he's this guy in the UK and he was a strength coach and had a gym and had this lifestyle and had a sort of an existential crisis. And now he's kind of like this rewilding expert who has broken some amazing records in barefoot running. Like he runs barefoot all over the UK and holds these retreats and has kids, but he's taken all the furniture out of his house and there's no chairs.

51:33And like, it's all like, you know, Japanese in the, you know, you're crouching and you're squatting and you're, it's all, you know, this kind of movement and breath work and a lot of the things that you talk about. But I guess the point I'm trying to make is that but it's rather extreme. Like you need the extremes as an example, like here's a guy who's really doing it, you know, but for most people, the moms in your neighborhood or whatever, they're not gonna like get rid of the chairs in their house, right? So it's like, I see you guys like in the middle as a translator of what works and, you know, the principles behind kind of what Tony's doing, but translating it in a way that is accessible for like the person who lives in the world.

52:11I mean, you're exactly right. Like nobody in our neighborhood is going to get rid of their living room couch and, you know, furniture in order to have a fully floor. Yeah, there's like no way anybody's doing that. I agree with you. But yeah, I mean, I think you're exactly right. I mean, I think that's we're trying to really come at this from like the most reasonable place we can, which are, you know, what are the things that you can do that that can also exist within your normal environment? You know, like we have we have a couch and chairs in our living room, but we happen to have some mats in our living room that you can sit on so we can sit on the floor and be comfortable as well.

52:42And so we're just trying to really strike that balance all the time by saying, hey, it is important to take care of your body. We believe in real rewilding the body like we're total fans of anything related to rewilding. But it's also got to fit within the context of people's lives. I mean, I think, you know, the third rail in this book, of course, is food because everybody, you know, the food thing is so charged and such a part of people's identity. you know but one of the things that people I know don't want to do is they're like well I'm not going to follow anything that is not going to allow me to go out to dinner with my friends every so often on the weekends you know if I have to follow a diet that means I can't enjoy a community meal with my friends like I'm out right and you know so many of the the diets and suggestions people have mean they can't eat dinner with their kids or they can't go out to dinner on the weekends with their friends and you know for most people that trade-off and loss of community and connection just isn't worth it from a health standpoint.

53:34And so we really tried to think about what can people actually do within the context of being a regular person who wants to be a normal part of society and not totally on the fringes. Juliet has done, she is into nutrition, has done some nutrition coaching and some studying nutrition through Precision Nutrition. I hate that stuff. It just doesn't speak to me and I see all the third rail opportunities, like the cuts on the internet I'm gonna get. I say something. Careful. Get ready, Kels. Yeah. But I had to back into it because we had to talk about the health of your tissues and we had to talk about your healing properties.

54:13And I deal with people who are injured. You know, oftentimes there's two cohorts of people who come and see us professionally at the high level. I used to win, I'm not winning anymore. Why am I not winning? Help me. I got injured winning and I don't wanna be injured because it's keeping from winning. And it turns out micronutrients are hugely important to your healing and your body. And when I mean micronutrients, I'm talking about vitamins and minerals. And what is the revolution in performance nutrition? Food, that's what we're now back in. Alan Lim, Stacey Sims, you know, hey, are you eating fruits and vegetables?

54:45Yes or no, one or zero. Cause that, you know, no shade on a 900 calorie cup of coffee, but there's no micronutrients in that fat MCT bomb that you're having. It's not actually, I mean, it's a fuel, but it's not a vitamin source. There's no nourishment. There's no nourishment. Yeah. So if I'm going to try to get you to use all this collagen you're taking, you better have some vitamin C on board. Well, where does vitamin C come from? Am I just taking more pills and eating this ground bison? Is that my recipe for the future? And so what we've tried to do here around the nutrition piece, because we had to in our work to be able to talk about keeping muscle mass on or leaning out or body composition, or just having what you need on and it turns out people don't eat enough fruits and vegetables, period, anywhere.

55:31And especially kids, shocker, right? And so we could start there. And what we try to do is cast this net and saying, you're vegetarian, cool, I respect that. But let's make sure you're getting some protein and you're actually getting fruits and vegetables as a vegetarian. You're vegan, cool, we respect that. You're carnivore, cool. You can eat these berries with your raw liver, whatever that is that you need to do to be you and identify. but there are these certain metrics and baselines. Principles. Principles that underpin that, that give you a lot of freedom. And that's, we do think that people are smart enough to make the decisions, but then you can start to say, wow, I thought I was eating a great way, but we just saw that study that came out that most kids aren't eating any fruits.

56:12You know, most kids are, 56 % of the kids aren't eating vegetables. Like that may be a long-term problem for us as a society. I think it's pretty certain to be a long-term problem. It already is a long-term problem. That's right. We're reaping it right now. When you look at the incidence of obesity and type two diabetes and pre-diabetes and metabolic health is kind of a core piece in your nutrition chapter, like having metabolic flexibility and all of that. Like that's a newer conversation where there's a lot of emergent science coming out. So I'm super interested in looking at that. And perhaps that's a way into talking a little bit about the wearable technology.

56:56Like you've got, I assume those are aura rings that you got on, I got the whoop on. And that's another piece when it comes to the suburban moms or like the average person. We're now in a situation where we have all these data points. Like we can look at like, oh, my sleep stages and my HRV and my resting heart rate and my metabolic rate and my skin temperature. but it's like, what do I do with that? How do I interpret this? What is it? What's important about this? Do I have a second lesson or not based on that? And with, you know, the kind of continuous glucose monitors also like monitoring, you know, glucose intake and how to make sense of that.

57:35I think there's a lot of risk of people leading to conclusions with this, these data points and then making poorly informed decisions about nutrition, et cetera, because they don't understand the complexity and the nuance of what all these data points are trying to tell them, setting aside also just the accuracy of all of these things, which I think you can't rely on too much. No, I mean, I'm often wearing more than one tracking. So between the two of us, I mean, Kelly does really enjoy this aura ring, but he hates wearables and tracking as a general rule. He just, he's not into it. And I, on the other hand, am a total nerd and I love like tracking everything and seeing everything.

58:17but I think over my own life of having every single possible wearable and tracking every possible piece of data, for me, when push comes to shove, the only one that really matters and is really actionable for me is my step count, which I literally could get from like a$5 pedometer that was made in the 60s. You already have one on your phone. And I already have that on my phone. And you're exactly right. I mean, I could be wearing a Garmin and an Oura ring and do a workout and it would track completely different calories and different metrics and I would get different sleep scores and my heart rate variability would show up as different on each one.

58:54So I sort of enjoy seeing at a high level how my sleep looks on my Oura Ring. That's really what I use that for. We recognize people are unique in your tolerances and your history and all the things going on. So you get to, we run at this always as, here's what most people are gonna experience. Drinking alcohol before you go to bed typically will impact your sleep. So that doesn't mean we don't drink alcohol. That just means we make it now an informed decision about alcohol related to sleep. That, hey, I'm with friends. There's an amazing bottle of wine out. I haven't had a margarita in a long time.

59:31It's hot. I'm gonna have a margarita. But I know the trade-off is here. And I think that helps us to make informed decisions about some of these behaviors. Let me tell a story about our friend who works with Whoop, Kate Courtney. I don't know if you've met Kate. Yeah, yeah, I haven't met her, but I know she is. We have the same managers. Oh, okay. So Kate Courtney is one of the greatest American mountain biking cyclists ever. She's a world champion. She's a superstar. And one of the most complete athletes I've ever met. Just really pays attention is thoughtful about details. She's racing for the world championship title, her first world championship.

1:00:08And she wakes up and her whoop says, poor recovery. And she's like, nope, it's wrong. She has like a 12, it's red. And she's like, no way, I feel great. I'm gonna win today. And so she just ignores it. And she goes off and wins and then calls up Whoop and was like, hey, your algorithm's off. And they're like, we're Whoop, we're not off. And then they were like, you're right, we were off. And she got this weird data telling her to ignore how she felt, right? And again, instead of taking that piece of information and saying, huh, how does this integrate into my behavior and my understanding of how I feel myself and trusting that because she's done that and she's so capable of it, she could have said, oh, my device is telling me not to race today.

1:00:49But here we have such an incredible athlete who's done an amazing job of understanding herself, controlling what she can control, setting the parameters to win that she was like, oh, that data doesn't make sense with the whole. And I think that's amazing. And simultaneously,

1:01:32We have people who come in with chronic pain and persistent pain with them, like you have to look at trends over time and not get too caught up in individual data points because like maybe the thing flips up or like you don't know how they, so it's like, and look, I love my whoop, I leave it on and they're a great sponsor of the show and all of that and I get a lot of value in it. And I think on the sleep piece, one thing I've learned and it was interesting, you talked about this in the book, like you realize that if you're trying to get eight hours of sleep, like you better be in bed for like nine hours.

1:02:03I mean, I was gonna - Because you're not actually asleep the whole time that you think you're asleep. No, I was actually gonna say that when Kelly was talking. I mean, that's the other key learning that this, you know, one of these tools have given us is that we really had no idea until we started tracking that, that, you know, the average person is losing a whole hour of sleep. I think Matt Walker talks about that in his book as well. But, you know, between Matt Walker's book and actually seeing it in real life, realizing that, oh, okay, going to bed at 10 and waking up at six is not eight hours of sleep, that's seven hours of sleep.

1:02:31that was a big revelation for us. And these tools are what helped us get that. So I'm with you. I mean, I think there's, there are tools. And I think if you, you know, you don't, as long as they're not dictating how you feel, which I think actually can happen, but as long as they're not dictating how you feel and you have a good relationship with them, then they're great. And they also have to fit in, you know, early on I became sort of mini obsessed with HRV when it was just new. And do you, there was a - It's complicated. It is. and there was an HRV device that came out. Really, can I tell the story?

1:03:03Oh, please. Yeah. Okay, so we get like an early, early HRV thing. This is what it's like to be married to me. This is probably 2012. Like you probably got one of these. I don't even know what company it was, but in order to track his HRV, he had to get up and be up for 15 minutes, but then he had to go back and lay down and put all these nodes all over his body and then lay there for 20 minutes. This sounds like a Tim Ferriss thing. And meanwhile, at this point, and our kids are like, you know, seven and four and they're awake and like, we're trying to get them ready for school and make breakfast and make lunches.

1:03:37And I was training for the Molokai. So I was like, I am an elite middle-aged dad who's gonna slay this. I need this information. And I finally, after like four days, I was like, dude, like this whole thing we're doing in the morning, like you need to be present helping with this kid thing. We had funny, and I'd be like, you just ruined it. Now you have to lay here longer. So we got in this whole battle about, because he had to go. So obviously that wasn't sustainable and the technology has gotten so much better since then, but that was where we started. But what is important to understand about heart rate variability?

1:04:09Like I just, all I know is that, okay, when it's low, like that's not good and you should chill out. And when it's high, like, okay, that's, you have a green light to like push it. Well, I think that's a really great use of it. You know, I suspect you are a very durable person and then I could throw a lot of stress at you and you can swallow that down and kind of normalize the next day. That would be my guess based on your past. You might be surprised. You might be surprised. You could suffer through. We're not experts in heart rate variability. It's another piece of the equation. We're trying to understand inputs and outputs and where can we help people understand why they may not be recovering or feeling as good, even though they feel like they're doing the thing.

1:04:57So, you know, one of the things that statement that we have is we're like, the bigger the engine, the bigger the brakes. You need a really, if you're an executive person, you're, you know, working hard, you're an athlete, you're a working single mother, you need to have a set of tools to be able to hit the brakes at the end of the night. I think it's like the moto people are like, you're either wide open on the gas or you're on the brakes and the back wheel is locked up as you're sliding. And I think we're really good at opening the gas now. And if you look at so much of what happened the last 10 years before, we've kind of gotten into sauna and cold and downregulation.

1:05:32It was all about how do we wake up and go? And then you get to the end of the day and you don't know how to calm down. You know, this came to view when a few years ago, we had a friend who got a blood panel and it freaked her out because said she was pre-diabetic. And some of her liver markers were off. And so the first thing we said was, well, tell us about your day. Are you under stress? I mean, like we need to know a little bit about you, not just show me how many macros you counted. And she said, well, you know, I'm under a lot of stress. And we're like, how do you cope with that stress? And she said, well, I usually drink some wine before bed.

1:06:03Okay, great. So tell us about that. You know, we're curious. And she's like, well, it's sometimes it's two bottles of wine. And that, if I just walked in and was like, well, you're crazy. No wonder you can't drink two bottles of wine. If I take her only strategy of self-coping and not understand that's the tool she was given. And that's what she discovered on her own. Then shame on me. I'm a really terrible performance coach. And I think that's where we started to really understand this notion of trying to look at stress and how people are coping with their stress. So they can hit the brakes in their own home at that hyper local, you don't have to go somewhere, you don't have to hire an expert, you should be able to self-soothe in the evening.

1:06:43And the heart rate variability is just one of those pieces, I think. Yeah, yeah. I think also one of the things Kelly and I have really tried to pay attention to and I think it took turning 40 for us to have the maturity to do this because we both do like to bleed through our eyes and suffer in training. But that is, the question we ask ourselves a lot is, do we have a desire to train? And then we actually try to listen to that and we try to not let our device override that. Like, it's really powerful if you're someone who uses and moves your body to actually sort of listen to that inner, do I have a desire to train?

1:07:16And then actually follow through with that. And if we wake up and don't have a desire to train, and that's a day where we just walk. Yeah, we still move. For us, that's an evolution because we, in the old days, it was like we would - That's not, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it didn't matter. It was like six days a week, no matter what, maybe you take one day off. And so, we really have tried to learn how to listen a little better to our own bodies. And you're talking about what's interesting is that that's an individual, as soon as you're on a team, you're on a triathlon team, you're in a soccer team, you're gonna have to perform.

1:07:50And this is what time practice is for everybody. So you don't have the luxury of really dialing up and dialing down. And so it becomes even more incumbent on us to ask, how can we control what we can control? You know, when we work, we're working with a division one water polo team at a local university that's really good. Cal shout out. They are, go bears. They are an incredible, please. I know, I know, I had to come up with something. They are an incredible coaches, a world-class, The women are amazing. Like I really am inspired. I just volunteer and just get to be around. And one of the things I tell those women is they're not outworking the competition.

1:08:30That model has sailed. Were you just like, I'll sneak in some extra volume. I'll do a little bit extra. Everyone is doing that. So what's the limiter now? The limiter for what we believe is how well you can adapt to the stress. Whoever can adapt the best can handle higher volume and still show up and be fresher. And we've been saying that forever, right? Right. Whoever does the most volume is the freshest winds. I think that's like Alan Lamb or Pavel or someone. And so then we can say, well, if that's a generality, can we apply that to humans? right? How can I show up for my family on the weekends without being torched or in the evening, you know, and not, not black out on the couch.

1:09:08Cause I'm so exhausted. How can I adapt to the stresses in my life, whether they're good or bad and manage that in a way that leaves me or intact or leaves me to have more stress. And one of the things that we believe is believe it or not, people think they're working really hard. They're not, and they could actually work harder. So some of this isn't just playing defense. Don't do this because you'll make it injured. We just think like actually you're only working at like 50%. You know what I mean? Like you can actually go harder.

1:09:43I think it's a very interesting time because this conversation around recovery, holding back, like trying to calibrate your output so that you're properly bouncing back and can be fresh for the next day. is even if you guys have been talking about it for a long time is pretty new. Like, I'm older than you guys and I'm a product of that era where it's just like, you just go as hard and as long and as much as you can until you just absolutely break yourself. Like, swimming in the eighties, it was like volume. I mean, we were doing 20 ,000 meters a day every day and you're going into, you're just, there was no like, okay, today you're gonna ease off and you're no, you just go in and you go as hard as you can for as long as you can.

1:10:27and I walked around like a zombie for like a decade and a half. And then you roll the dice on a two week taper and see how it goes. And, you know, there was no like, if you were to say like - What you just said, by the way, is so bananas. Oh, I mean, this was the whole sport, you know? And I'm sure there were other sports that kind of approached this similarly. It was like, how much volume can we actually do? Just to add to that really quickly, I was a rower at Cal. Yeah, it's similar. And I mean, it was 30 hours a week plus of training, but we would train for three hours in the morning and then like another four hours in the afternoon.

1:11:02And even though the rowing season is spring, we would start doing that on like August 1st. I mean, it was just like non, it was just like destroy ourselves. How was your nutrition in the 90s? All I ate was red vines and bagels. Calories, calories, it didn't matter what. And like the idea like, oh, you need to be fresh for the workout. what are you talking about? No, no one ever talked about that. That was like not part of the conversation. Like five hours of swimming a day for a race that literally is like 47 seconds long, you know? And you were really good. Yeah, good, but like now I look at the times now and I can't even relate to the sport.

1:11:41Like the progress is extraordinary and that is due in no small part, I'm sure, to the kind of work that you guys do and understanding how the body works and the importance, the primacy of recovery, like allowing your body to repair itself in between training sessions. Like, what is that about? Like literally just being a zombie for as long as possible and being in a chronic state of overtraining, which really is an injury. Like that is an injured situation. It's a stress and it's a stressor on the body. It's a stressor on the body. If you can't do your job or occupy a role in the team, we call that an injury, right?

1:12:18Clear mechanism is injury. There's a bone sticking out of your arm, right? There's a fever or something going on. Zombie count? Zombie, I think we're gonna add that in. That's a really important piece. I can't show up and perform the way I should perform. And it's tricky. You know, it's tricky working with young people. You know, we have two teenagers and we are, turns out, the strictest parents in the whole, you know, we're like, you will have to sleep. You'll have to eat these fruits and vegetables, you know. I heard you tell a story, like, what's required in order for somebody to date your daughter these days?

1:12:47Have you updated that, like, you know? Well, it's actually worked. So we - It's worked to prevent her from dating? Yeah, basically. I mean, just the myriad ways our kids are gonna need to be in therapy in their 20s. It's starting to add up, I think. But Kelly used to make his own strong man stones. He doesn't. And I would come into the backyard on a Sunday afternoon and there he is stirring the concrete and pouring it into these molds. And I was like, you are such a weirdo. I'm even into this stuff, but that's weird. And so we've had two or three of these, you know, what do they weigh? 100, 150 pounds, these stones.

1:13:24Some are a little heavier. I thought you said 200 pounds. I think it might be 200 pounds. And so we have these stones in our yard. And Kelly's rule has always been, well, when Georgia starts dating someone, like if he or she wants to date our daughter, they need to be able to lift up this stone. And I said, and my point of view was like, no, no, no, you don't want the kid. You know, you don't want like the oversized 17 year old kid with like all the testosterone dating your daughter. I was like, that's actually the exact opposite. The one kid who can lift that is actually not the kid. You don't want that kid dating your daughter, but nevertheless, our daughter did, does have this lovely boyfriend named Yannick.

1:14:03And fortunately the kid loves to train and he can actually pick up the stone. He heard the story finally, he heard the story, rolled it out of the yard. And then one day, and then he like sent me a picture with the stone on his shoulder. Yeah, so Kelly was so proud. You know, I think what's interesting about that is I actually stole that idea from, I think it was Dan John, who said, you know, it was like this, he had this test of like overhead squatting your body weight 10 times. And as a test, and as you get heavier and heavier, that becomes quite a thing, but just overhead squatting a barbell is quite a thing.

1:14:38But no one does that without practicing. No one does that without training. And so my intention with this is no kid just comes in and picks up the stone without having some things built in. Like this kid trains, this kid loves to play, this kid is interested in, you know, theoretically it was a screening device and maybe it was a little blunt, but you know. The idea is that - We also had that diet that we did in like 1999, right? Yeah, that's right, the vertical diet. Only protein shakes. No, it wasn't vertical diet, it was something else. Velocity diet. We briefly followed Dan John's diet. Because we like to tinker.

1:15:09Tinkers. This was probably like 2003. We made it 36 hours. and the diet is you just eat protein powder for 30 days. I don't think it was 30 days. It was 30 days. It was supposed to be 30 days. Lord help us all. But I mean, keep in mind that this was in the dawn of protein powder where you could only get it in these, you could only get it at GNC and it was in these giant houses. Weight gainer 900. It was like weight gainer 900. And I actually was practicing law at this point. So I'm trying to do this for the, and I think we made it 48 hours. How, that is so messed up. I would like it if you didn't tell that story anymore.

1:15:41That is so, it shows us that like - It makes it okay because it was 2003. Body composition is the reason I think most people come to nutrition. You know, if you're an athlete, maybe you come to nutrition, cause you're like, it is a secret weapon to fuel and do these things. But for most people, they initiate a conversation because it's about body composition or my cholesterol is so high, I gotta stop eating this. Yeah, either a health crisis or I mean, weight loss. When you say body composition, for most people it's weight loss. Let's say weight loss. Yeah. That's right. And imagine if I'm just like, hey, why don't you just eat some food?

1:16:13Protein powder for 30 days? No, that metal taste in your mouth, it doesn't go away. Food? Yeah, food. I think that's really, as we're trying to untangle this, we keep flip-flopping back and forth between here, if you wanna win a world championship, this is what we recommend. And we are gonna help you find your blind spots so you can be more durable. And simultaneously, because that's our view through this. This is what we talk about with all of the seals and Delta Force and all of these things. And simultaneously, we know what's good for the goose is good for the gander. So how do we scale that through?

1:16:50That comes from even ideas where I got to work with really good coaches. Mike Bergner is a good example, who was coaching high school kids in the morning. And then he'd go home in his evening and be coaching Olympians in Olympic lifting. And being there on either side of his day, I could see the through thinking in his methodology. What was essential? Why is he teaching this first skill and how's that skill progressed to go to the Olympics? And we should be able to do those things with these principles that this is the foundation and then you can get really sharp and pointy as you need to, to go as far as you want.

1:17:27Because really, we always talk about potential and sometimes I think it's easy to get doom and gloom, but really you can feel better and do more in your life if you take care of the care and feeding of this husk. Yeah, I mean the way that I see kind of the value of your work in the context of, at least with respect to elite athletes is with respect to the best of the best, what's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander because they're doing something so specific and they're training really hard and they're training only specific muscle groups, all that kind of stuff ultimately is potentially at odds with longevity, long-term health, like all these other, it's like if you're chasing a performance goal, that goal is not necessarily in alignment with long-term health goals.

1:18:17Or even relationships. Yeah, or everything else in your life, right? And you kind of come in and say, well, we have all these other things that will help you long-term be the best elite athlete, but also are in service of your life as a civilian down the line, which I think is great. Which is gonna happen. Yeah, which yeah, ultimately, despite you thinking you're gonna be like in that elite state for the rest of your life, you will not. I was at, so I swam at Stanford in the late 80s and my coach, Skip Kenny recently passed away. And there was a memorial service for him up in Fresno where he moved, it was his hometown.

1:18:55He moved there after he retired. And so a ton of alumni, people that I swam with over the years showed up for this event. And I was standing at the reception and just off to the side was Anthony Moss, who in my era was the number two 200 butterfly in the world. Pablo Morales, winningest NCAA swimmer in history at the time, never lost a race at NCAA championships. And Sean Murphy, who was a Canadian backstroker, went to the Olympics, incredible finalist at the Olympics. And all three of them, this was the era in which the underwater dolphin kick was being pioneered for the first time. And all three of these guys, like their knees bow back, but we're bowing backwards and they were standing like, you know, like they're all standing like this.

1:19:47Like my knees hyper extend a little bit, but like Anthony's literally looked like a bow back that way, like that, right? And I'm noticing this and I knew this about them And it's what made them, those three guys were the best underwater dolphin kickers in the world at the time. Like they could go underwater faster than anybody. And I went up to Anthony, cause he had the most extreme, like, you know, bow. And I'm like, how's your back? And he's like, it's terrible. I've got bulge discs. I've had two, you know, I can't remember. I don't think he's had surgery, but he's had chronic problems. He can't do flip turns in the pool anymore.

1:20:25And I was like, yeah, me too, man. Like, what do you think that's about? And so I'm interested. So the reason I bring that up is, it is that contrast between like though that quality made them extraordinary at that one thing. But here we are, we're in our 50s and there's chronic pain problems as a result of, that's just the way he stands. It's probably the way he's always stood. It made him great at that one thing and now is causing him pain. So that dissonance between what makes you great and elite at one thing and how you wanna feel later in life and be stable, bulletproof, mobile, functional, and the rest.

1:21:08We were hanging out with Sean Payton, who is now coach at Denver. And we were working with the saints and he had just gone to a hall of fame gala and all of the coaches that he worshiped as his mentors had to be helped on stage with like multiple people helping them. They were so crippled. And he just said to himself, okay, that can't be me. You wanna jump in? Well, yeah, we actually just were talking to our old friend, Mark Bell, who is a world champion power lifter. I don't know if you've heard of Mark Bell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's the smelly bell guy. Mark smelly bell. But when he won his world championship, he was 330 pounds, and sort of by all conventional metrics, like super unhealthy.

1:21:50Like he couldn't tie a shoe, and he felt terrible, and his blood panel was probably horrible at that time, and he was taking massive amounts of performance-enhancing drugs. And, you know, it just like he was basically not doing well from a health standpoint, but that body allowed him to win a world championship. And then a few years later, he got injured doing a lift and kind of had this light bulb moment and realized that that wasn't how he wanted to live his whole life. And he's actually spent the last 10 years basically trying to like totally overhaul his body, rewild his body. And his transformation is exceptional.

1:22:24He's running marathons. And he's going to run the Boston Marathon. but he started literally by just walking three times a day for 10 minutes. You know, he really started small and realized he had to take these real baby steps to sort of figure out how to get back to health and transform his body and lose all that weight and gain back some of his mobility. But I mean, it's been a slow process. It's taken him 10 years of baby steps and just adding in different practices as his body got better and more mobile and healthier. And now 10 years later, he's running a marathon next month. And let me apologize to all the athletes in the 80s who went before in the 90s.

1:23:04We broke a lot of people, the model, you were right. As long as the clock was faster and you did it and solved it, there were a lot of eggs that were broken that didn't need to be broken. And if you could survive because you had the will and the coach and the support, you maybe came out of that and thrived or survived and did well enough. One of the things that we like to say is you should come out of this thing unharmed. Even if you're elite, crashes are gonna happen. Of course, there's gonna be, you may have some laxity in your shoulders. There's some things like that that are related, but it isn't necessarily a given that because they were able to have a greater range of motion and hyperextend their knees a little bit, it's called genu recrovatum.

1:23:46That doesn't always translate to low back dysfunction. But what we see is this special skill that gave them this incredible kick and big range doesn't necessarily, we didn't know how to control it or support it or take some of the load out of the low back. And what we did was we just said, well, as long, we worship the clock. Instead of saying, are there inputs in there? Think about the nutrition. I mean, just Power Bar was just on the scene. I remember hearing like, I think it's Dave Scott talking about like running with bags of figs and bananas. Bananas and dates. Oh my gosh. And so if that's how far we've come, we know what we know because we broke a lot of people.

1:24:30And I wanna say that absolutely you're right, that sometimes there is a cost at being an elite. There is a cost, but not necessarily it's one-to-one that that had to be the outcome. It was the only outcome we knew how to deliver at that time. But if you look at what Stanford has done to support its athletes, because we work there, they're really sophisticated about nutrition and supporting and it looks like a very, I mean, you know, cause you'd go back, but it's, you're like, where am I? Is this is Mars? Yeah, it's a completely different place from when I was there in a good way. Well, maybe we can say you can do this and you don't necessarily have to have spinal surgery.

1:25:12Right, right, right. So in thinking about like these vital signs and the kind of principles around mobility and stability, et cetera. I wanna talk a little bit about like some of the, core things that the listener or somebody who's watching this should be thinking about incorporating into their daily routine. Like I don't wanna complicate people's morning routines, of course, God forbid, but like, what are some of the key things that you think, move the needle the most that people are not thinking about, not practicing about, not, you know. How about let's start with just some getting some input, beginning a conversation with your body about pain or about making yourself feel better.

1:26:01We think that in our clinical experiences that if we had people do a little bit of myofascial work, rolling, soft tissue, self-massage, whatever language you're comfortable with, in the evening before they went to bed, that was a great entree into understanding your body, feeling your blind spots, getting non-threatening input into the system. So if you in the evening could sit down next to a ball, tennis ball, softball, roller, and ask yourself from the day, what's sore? What hurts? What's achy? And I'm going to commit 10 minutes. The first part of this show I'm watching, I'm just gonna roll around on whatever, ails me.

1:26:41That's a really important conversation you could begin to have. And I'm talking about 10 minutes. Like that's super reasonable. And the reason we started shifting that to the day, from the day and the gym to the evening was that we saw that people didn't actually do it or wanna do it as a team. But in the evening, they had time and agency and nothing was happening at the end of the day. Like you're on Facebook, you're surfing Instagram. So there was this great moment where you could do some self-care. And 10 minutes a night usually turns into 12 to 14 minutes because you discover something. You can sit on your coffee table, put that ball right in your hamstrings, just roll around.

1:27:15Then the next sort of level there is we could say, hey, can you take a full breath in that position? So if you're working on something or you've got some aspect of your body that hurts and you push on it and that takes your breath away or you catch your breath, then we found an area of interest. And it doesn't mean we need to shy away from that. It's okay that that's uncomfortable to compression. So when the first things we can do and say, am I doing harm to myself? No, not at all. If you can take a full breath in and out, you're signaling to your brain, this is safe. Nerves are king of the breath, the breath is king of the brain.

1:27:46That's Iyengar 101. And why breathing is such an important part of yoga is teaching your body to accept and be able to control those positions by breathing there. Your brain says, it's not a threat. So if you find a painful spot or a sore spot or an uncomfortable spot, you found a spot. And all you need to do is take a four second inhale there, contract into the ball roller and hold that for four seconds we call that an isometric in the in the parlance right you're just building a tension or a movement without motion in the limb and then exhale a long time for eight seconds long exhale and what you'll find is if you just repeat that cycle a few times whatever hurts in that area that you're working sometimes starts to hurt less you're desensitizing you're changing you're some threat resetting some threat signals And if you started doing that on your back, your hips, your calves, your feet, what you realize is, wow, I can make myself feel better.

1:28:39And because you did it before you bed, it's like getting a massage. You tend to sleep a little bit better. You're down regulating. Yeah, and we snuck in breath practice. And you had to get up and down off the ground in order to do that work. You ruined it. Exactly right. That's exactly right. Yeah, and I mean, I think we talked about it a little bit earlier, but we are really such huge fans of people, you know, taking, using these practices and thinking about how they can constrain or change their environment so they don't have to think about it. You know, we have standing desks everywhere at our office.

1:29:10So you can sit, we have stools, but the default is a stand. And so it just makes it not a choice if you're, you know, you can't rely on your willpower that day. And, you know, we have mobility tools all over our living room floor and we have easy ways to sit on the floor and we have balance boards all over our house and, you know, ways to practice balance. And, you know, I'm sure you've heard of Chris Hinshaw's old man balance test where you put your shoes on. Oh, this is great. Everyone, you're welcome. Everyone listening should do this test. You stand called again. It's called the Chris Hinshaw and it's called the old man balance test.

1:29:41And he actually created it so that he would have something to compete against his kids and win. And so the idea is you put your socks and shoes on the floor and you stand on one leg and you reach down and grab your sock and you put on your sock without putting that foot down. and then you reach down and grab your shoe and put your shoe on and tie it and then you switch and do it on the other side. And it's a really great two minute balance practice. And that's how I put my shoes on every single day. You know, and that's something, you know, that's just this little, you know, small behavior that we add into our day that's easy and fun and you can, you know, challenge your kids to do it.

1:30:17And so, you know, that's just one of those things that we've snuck in and said, hey, there are ways that you can change your environment and just slightly think about your environment differently so that these are just things you do without having to rely on willpower or motivation. I think I would struggle with that. Everyone struggles with it. It's okay. And that's okay. Keep in mind that if you just grease that, I mean, I don't know where you're living, some kind of barefoot cult. That's cool. But some of what we're trying to do is that dynamic balance work. And if you can just start to think about your environment a little differently, then that's something you never have to do ever again.

1:30:54I don't need you to work on balance because you did all this. And if you really want to make it super gnarly, put your shoe three feet away from you. You have to do like a crazy lunge or a drinking game to get it. But when you start to shape your world this way, rinse, wash, repeat for a decade and let me know how that goes for you. And you brought it up. It's difficult for us to imagine our futures. I think in economics, we always think that the future is going to be more valuable. I think there's a term and phrase for that. But in willpower, we always think, Kelly Starrett tomorrow is not gonna eat the cookie and he'll start yoga tomorrow, right?

1:31:27But that future self is never as valuable as today. And you'll have more money and more time and you'll be able to do all the things that you can do today, right? Yeah. I think it's also important for people to, once you, with this old man balance test, for example, we traveled yesterday, sat on a plane, did a lot of driving. I may have had a harder training session. And so, you know, every single day, my experience is different with it. I have some days where I just grease it and get my shoe and sock on, tie my shoe. And I'm like, I am crushing this. And then other days based on, you know, what's been going on in my life, it's different, but it's all just sort of information I have.

1:32:04And I'm able to say, Hey, you know, I'm struggling a little bit with my balance day. I'm feeling a little bit stiff. You know, maybe I should spend a little time, you know, mobilizing my hips today and make sure I get enough steps in because I was, you know, stuck sitting all day yesterday on a plane. It's like, you know, it's just information on which we can make different decisions. And the vital sign is a good piece of data. It's called the SOLEC. Staining one leg, eyes closed. And you should be able to stand on one leg, remove the visual field, that's with the eyes closed, and balance for 20 seconds without touching.

1:32:35That's the benchmark. And it sounds really easy, but it's not. You know, I was just speaking at a big conference and a provider from Norway came up and he said, you know, what we do is that the SOLEC is actually too hard for most people. And so what we do is we put them in front of a wall, a white wall, so you can do this with your parents so they can touch the wall, but the white wall allows them to keep their eyes open, but removes the visual information. Oh, right, right. Because what happens is as we get older, we stop feeling, I mean, remember the foot has so much real estate in the brain, right?

1:33:06that homunculus sort of sensory motor cortex part. And if you take away the eyes, if you have down-regulated how good your feet are, you know, how surfaces you're on, you take away a lot of key balance visual information. He started doing this because everyone falls, elderly fall in Norway in snow storms, because it's all white and you don't get any visual information or in crowds. People fall in crowds because you can't see where the ground is and understand. So, you know, it turns out of course that we're obsessed with foot function and being barefoot and having rock solid rad feet makes you better at surfing and everything else.

1:33:42Yeah, and it's such a simple thing, right? And not sexy. That seems like it would be easier at least when you get older, it's actually harder. But when we started working on, there's obviously from our friends at FMS and it's originally a Gary Gray idea, this Y balance test, where you can actually have someone stand on one leg and then just make a Y. You know, the first part of the Y goes out in front of you and then the two other arms go behind you. And you can just reach out as far as you can with your foot and take a breath there. And we use it as a dynamic warm-up. I hand you a medicine ball and then I'm like, okay, how far can you get that foot out in front of you?

1:34:18And suddenly you realize, oh, there is time for me to play more in some of my training. If you're jumping on the trainer, I love to, I mean, mountain biking is our jam. And I spend a lot of time on the trainer. and during my warmups for the trainer is when I do a lot of exploring and playing. And I see something on internet and I'm like, ooh, that rope looks cool or that's fun. I use it as a warmup device. And I think one of the things we could give to all the athletes listening and people who like to exercise is incorporate a little bit more play into your training. Still do the training. We're still gonna suffer and do brutal one minute on pieces or whatever it is we're gonna do.

1:34:56But there's a lot of exploration and it may be as simple as Juliet and I I'd love to go out and play Frisbee, you know, before we go exercise. Or like we have double Dutch ropes at our office. And I don't know the last time you tried to do double Dutch, but it's really hard. It might've been, it might be 50 years at this point. Yeah, yeah, it's early eighties. If I've ever tried it, I don't know. It's how we pick a playground. Yeah, but you know, we have double Dutch ropes around and we have balance boards and we have, you know, in our garage at our house, we have a pegboard and you know, every single teenager who walks through our garage, beelines directly for the pegboard and like tries their luck on the pegboard.

1:35:32And so we just try to have these things around to make it fun and play. And so that it's not just all like, get on the bike and crush yourself. You know, we just try to make some of this fun because, you know, it is fun to use your body and be able to use your body and connect with other people and, you know, throw a ball and throw a Frisbee. And if there was one thing though, people love to ask us, what's the one mobilization? What's the one? And it's my favorite thing to watch Kelly's face when someone asks him this. He does this like, If I could just do one thing. Yeah, hey Kelly, if I just do one thing, like what would it be, you know?

1:36:04And so his head like tilts to the side and then he kind of starts like twitching a little bit. Well, he was really asking, what's not important, right? Yeah, and so I just peek out from the background and I'm like the couch stretch. I think today we are not spending enough time with the hip and extension. And if you go to a yoga class and jump into warrior one where you're like, wow, you're really into this kind of triangle pose, split stance position. And there's a reason that's so heavily in a lot of the movements of rehab, of sort of movement practice. It's such an important person. That's the position we walk around in, being able to take my leg behind me and sprint and sprint faster.

1:36:50And if I wanna run faster, I'm gonna be able to need to have that knee and further behind my butt into a lunge. But it's the one thing I think we're witnessing as modern people, because we do so much sitting and so much work on the computer, we're seeing that people are losing that capacity to effectively have that leg behind them. And we have a test in there called the couch stretch test, which is a shocker. And to your point earlier, someone said, hey, I can't act with my glutes. One of the things that happens is that if that into your line, so the line running down on the front of your body, your quads, the connective tissue system, your hip capsule.

1:37:27If you can't bring that hip effectively behind you, like in a deep lunge and squeeze your butt, that tells us we sort of are being inhibited by that position. And oftentimes what happens is that we end up in shapes where we're not very competent. We don't even have the range or we don't have the exposure there, whatever is the limiter. And that can inhibit our ability to control that. And one of the reasons we see that stiff quads being on a bike, kicking, long lever kicking all day long, rectus femoris, all the running can make us really stiff. All of a sudden, when we're in a hip extension or hip extension, we can't squeeze the butt effectively or recruit very effectively.

1:38:06We call it positional inhibition that can contribute to the loss of glute function controlling the back. So whether it's knee pain or low back pain, and we have so many stories of us adding in these movements, and some lunges, some Bulgarian split squats, some isometrics in these positions, and people's backs get better, their knees get better, their butts turn on. That would be the thing I would say. Yeah. The one thing. I'm sorry, everyone, the one thing. The one thing. Plus vegetables. Well, that's like the main antidote for all the sitting in the sedentary lifestyle. That is the low hanging fruit.

1:38:41That's the one thing that we're all doing too much of that's contributing to all of these imbalances and ultimately, you know, atrophies of certain muscle groups that lead to our pelvises not being, you know, like all of the kind of things that have those lower back and knee downstream, you know, injury repercussions. And when people, if you're listening to this and you're like, hey, I've got some pain in my body, it can be really daunting to say what's going on there. You know, and if I give you this laundry list of like sleep, nutrition, hydration, stress, breathing practice, you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

1:39:14Okay, that's a lot. I gotta work on that. But one of the things you can absolutely control right away is your range of motion. And oftentimes when you go see a physician or we're trying to manage pain and positions, no one really owns range of motion or position. What we end up seeing is there's all this conversation about the tissue health or getting stronger, but no one ever checks your native range of motion. And we see this actually as a feature of a lot of the very sophisticated training. So we've had the pleasure of working with the 49ers last year. and one of the things their strength and conditioning staff has identified was the rehab staff is putting out fires and trying to get return players to the field.

1:39:53The strength staff is trying to develop the capacities and physiology. Let's get you stronger and fitter. But no one really owned full position. So they had athletes who were coming in who couldn't bring their knees up very high or missing hip extension or ankles. And they were realizing that they weren't really seeing it. And the rehab staff might put people out back into play. but they were pain-free or healed and now they gotta do their job. And the strength staff was like, didn't get enough. So enough time to develop these positions. But as a mortal person, if I discover that there's some aspect of my tissue system, I have shoulder pain, for example.

1:40:27Just saying is a, I don't, but you get the idea. If I can't put my arm over my head, that's a really simple place to start by restoring the function of your body. And you can imagine if you're swimming and you're ineffective at putting your arm over your head, that's gonna be tricky. Sure. Right, so when we can start giving people some simple diagnostics, some vital signs around key movement features, that can be a really powerful way to untangle what seems like very complex pain problems. Yeah, I mean, the question that I have as a follow-up to that is, is where does flexibility come in? Because when you talk about range of motion, particularly if you're over indexing on strength work, you're going to reduce your range of motion.

1:41:08Not necessarily, you shouldn't. Well, I just know if I start throwing heavy weight around, like suddenly, I might swing in my arms around my shoulder, it doesn't feel the way it did prior to putting on a little bit more muscle mass, unless I really focus on making sure that I'm maintaining that level of flexibility. You can't just say to someone get stronger. I just saw a great coach named Franz Bosch talk about, if you get hypertrophy on athletes, you just get them big, you can actually really wreck their coordination. You change the penation, that's how the fibers align, you change angles of pull, you change how the brain is interpreting what's going on.

1:41:47You can't just say get stronger. Otherwise we just give you blood pressure, blood flow restriction cuffs and an assault bike and we would just get everyone big. Well, yeah, and on the extreme spectrum of that, just look at a bodybuilder, they can't like, they can barely move, they have no range of motion at all. Yeah, like our friend Mark Bell, he literally couldn't, like he had to put a shoe on with a stick. Did you watch the physical 100? No, this great Korean show where they brought in. Oh yeah, I've seen the ads for it, but I haven't watched it. It is really fun. Like ripped up like Korean dudes.

1:42:17And men and women who are badass, wrestlers, skeleton athletes, track cyclists, we won't give it away. It's very diverse though. I mean, it's like every kind of, you know, there's some dancers, it's a really mixed group. There's a 50 kilo concrete ball. And then there's a test, they call it like the Hercules test or something Atlas. And they had to just hold it. They had a couple of strong man and another guy. Well, you had to get it over your head. Get it over your head. Get over your head and then stand there and hold it. And there's a jacked bodybuilder in there. You're like, well, that guy, I mean, clearly that's the guy.

1:42:47He's definitely gonna win. Unless you have any insider knowledge and that guy couldn't even get the ball over his head and hold it for one second. Everyone else held it for two hours. He couldn't even find a position because the cost of his aesthetic drive had nothing to do with the application of that. And I think one of the things that you bring a really good point to is our fetishization of the gym and gym culture hasn't necessarily always connected to, am I training for something? What's the minimum dose in the gym so I can be a better swimmer? We're like, oh, just get bigger and stronger.

1:43:24Strength is never a weakness. If it starts to mess up your swim, that's real. If you can't put your arms over your head because you're so strong, then... Yeah, or you just start to cramp up. You could, you don't have to, but suddenly you, but somewhere in there, you know, I think Tyler Hamilton said in his book, would you rather be, have your hematocrit up two points or be two pounds lighter? He's like two pounds lighter, you know, because strength to weight does make a difference. That matters. So those are all considerations. And if your point is that I'm doing something, we call that session cost.

1:44:00and if that thing is removing my ability to move freely, I need to either modify it or put in another stimulus to maintain my range. It doesn't necessarily mean just because I got a little bit stronger that I have to change my technique or style, but it could certainly if we're not keeping an eye on it. And I think that was why a lot of athletes were like, hey, I'm a worse swimmer when I do this leg press. Yeah, you start bulking up and suddenly you can't, you don't have the flow and the technique and the range of motion. I believe you. Yeah, but the important distinction here is that mobility, like mobility work is not the same as stretching.

1:44:38And you make that point pretty clearly in the book. Like there is a distinction between these two things, just cause you're stretching, you're not working on your mobility. Not necessarily. Not necessarily. I mean, you could be, and I'll let Kelly talk about the anatomy part of this, but I mean, I think what we learned in the eighties and nineties, and I know I did when I was a D one athlete at Cal is that nobody ever really did much stretching because it didn't work that much, right? We were just all passively stretching our tissues. You guys stretched, you would swing your arms around. I was like incredibly flexible.

1:45:08And then when I got back into multi-sport in my forties, there was this idea like, oh, you shouldn't stretch if you're a runner. And I kind of bought into that. And I've lost a lot of that flexibility to my detriment. Like I wish I had kept that up. And I think that that has been harmful to me. Your range of motion doesn't, I want to jump on you, but your range of motion doesn't have to change because you age. That's the one physical, you're gonna be less powerful. You may be able to maintain your aerobic power for a long time. We know that that to be true, but your ability to express your range of motion in your joints doesn't have to degrade necessarily.

1:45:46You may have bony blocks and a patina of athleticism. You gotta work through the fascia and all that stuff. As we take the systems approach, which you being able to get up and down off the ground or flex your knee all the way, doesn't have to go away. And I think that that's important to remember to consider for people. Squatting. No boy. People love to talk about squatting. They do. I couldn't agree more. People are obsessed with deadlifting and squatting for some reason. You know, what's amazing? We just made two new things. One of them is a pad that makes it easier to do a Bulgarian split squat.

1:46:27So you can slip this pad on the end of a barbell and you can put your foot up there and it really does help you get into a lunge and it doesn't work. People hate it. They don't like to do this movement. It doesn't sell. It's like one of our best ideas. We just did another thing that allows you to do hip thrusts which is when you lay on like a bench and you put a barbell on your hips and it's kind of a modified squat. People love that. And to your point, it's so much more fun to squat. It is not fun to sprint, lunge, get into these split stance positions. But why are these so important? Like, why did you make an entire vital sign chapter on squatting?

1:47:09Like, why is this so key in your mind? You know, really you're going to lower yourself up and down a bunch. So you squat all the time, whether you like it or not. And notice in this book, we don't talk about squatting weights. We just talk about the ability to access the squat. And the reason that's such a fundamental position is that it ties in a lot of joints and a lot of tissue systems all at once. So we don't just look at your ankle by itself or knee by itself or hip by itself. We're looking at the coordinating the system and getting up and down out of a chair, off the toilet, all of those things, very important.

1:47:46Cycling is a bunch of single leg squats done in that position. So what we can start to ask is, I don't always have to be a bilateral squat. Can I do a single leg squat in that position? But when we say squat, what we really mean is I'm in a hinged shape and my knee is bending towards my chest. That's really the definition of a squat. So to take squatting away means that you're going to not be moving in your environment very well. and it's an easy diagnostic for people to quickly pick up if they're having these gross motor restrictions or can't access these positions. I think that's what's, that's amazing.

1:48:23And if you wanna go in Japan or toilet in another country or you're gonna find that sitting by the side of the road waiting for a bus, we should be, have access to these positions. These are resting positions. And I also, you know, there's data to show that people in those cultures have far fewer or orthopedic injuries, hip replacements, low back pain, and sort of a lot of the chronic issues and pain problems that we have as Western humans that are sitting in chairs and have lost the ability to squat. It's malasana and yoga, right? It's this deep squat position. And one of the reasons that it's so important is that it's one of the ways where we can get really good flexion in the lumbar spine.

1:49:03When we sit all the way down, like we're just hanging out, whether your heels are up off the ground or not, your knee comes to your chest, you take that knee in full range of motion, you take that hip into that aspect of full range of motion and the lumbar spine reverses. And so it's a restorative position for so much of the extension, arching forces that are sort of modern and endemic to us. It's a way of restoring and putting in loaded flexion into people in a really graded position. And that's my most challenged position for me of all the tests in this book, that's where I struggle the most.

1:49:37And like you said, you wish you'd focused a little bit more. I mean, my ankle range of motion is terrible. And I was still with terrible range of ankle range of motion able to be a D1 rower at Cal and go on to win three world championships in paddling. You do a foot turn. And - Are you pushing off the wall in a squat? Yeah. Well, certainly you are, yeah. So it turns out maybe, if we had been more effective, we could have shaved more time by getting you and training you into positions to be more efficient. Just to be clear, you don't have to be a huge squatter. I think a squat is a practice. We can goblet squat, hold something in front of you.

1:50:18You could just air squat. I think there are better ways and more effective ways for most people to train the system. Do I need to have my mother-in-law do heavy back squats? No, we've definitely fetishized it because it's easy to see progress. I can put another kilo on the bar. It's easy to measure that I've changed some capacity, but does it make me better at my sport? Maybe not. So there's an old saying, train the deadlift, train the hinge, kettlebell swings, good mornings, those kinds of things, practice the squat. Right, but the ability to squat, even if it's just air squat, do it without pain, et cetera, becomes like this proxy for longevity, right?

1:50:59Like the longer that you can kind of maintain your ability to do that, puts you in a position where you're not gonna fall down and break your hip or you're gonna have that kind of flexibility. Or your pelvic floor is gonna work better. We're gonna start to expose the connective tissue systems of your body to the forces that were there and have been there all along because you used to toilet on the ground. I'm not trying to make romanticize paleo living. We watch alone and now we're like primitive living. Primitive living is not for me. I'm not into it. Yeah, I was really happy to see that. Like there is a fetishization of like, you know, the ancestral lifestyle, all that.

1:51:39And you're like - Yeah, really, not for us. The first time I took - Not for us. And like that is, I mean, listen, you talk about, you know, the de-wilding and the re-wilding and all of that. Like there is wisdom in trying to be, live our lives more in alignment with certain aspects of how we've evolved to be, et cetera. But that doesn't mean we're, we need to, you know, martyr ourselves. No, on the contrary. Yeah. Yeah, I, you know, I, first time I ever was sort of discovered paleo, I was like, that makes sense. I'm eating more whole foods. Like, that makes sense. The old osteopathic model was don't anything that's white and don't anything that doesn't rot.

1:52:14And I was like, well, that's also really good, right? That pulls out a lot of things that potentially irritate to people. So I sent this to Julia. I was like, what do you think about this? This, by the way, was in like 2003. So it was like early. Yeah, I remember. I remember all this. Paleo, right? I was probably still at my law firm. I did a little bit of Google research, whatever you could do back then. And the first paleo recipe that came up was a recipe for like larva soup or something. And I was like, dude, Kelly, we're not doing this. Like I was like, this is way too extreme for us. Like it's not up our, this whole paleo thing is like, you know, I was like, people in the paleolithic era died at age 30.

1:52:51A lot of has changed in the last 150 years for sure. And what we can say is like, there's definitely a trend to getting a little bit more light in the morning. People are talking about that. That's who you may have heard. There's one guy responsible for that. We see, we see. You may have heard that you're supposed to face the sun in the morning. But what we can start to say is, well, what are the biologic processes that are required for my body to function well? And a good example is walking. your lymphatic system is the sewage system of your body. So everyone knows their cardiovascular system, you have capillaries, arteries, veins, but your lymphatic system is how you move all of the other waste, normal waste from your body.

1:53:38So if you've injured yourself, you get swelling, all of that swelling is evacuated through your lymphatic system. Your joints are drained through your lymphatic system. The proteins break down, the small, the gut things, all of those things get recycled back into the body through lymphatic system. your lymphatic system is built into your movement system. What drives the lymphatic clearage? It turns out it's pumping of the muscles. So if you don't squeeze your lower limbs, you don't actually decongest and circulate. So Andy Weil talked about, was it cross pattern motion? Well, maybe it was just that we were moving and in that moving and breathing, we're starting to decongest and move the waste out.

1:54:17And if you've ever had a sink that's clogged up, that is an example of what's happening when you sit on an airplane and you get cankles. You're not decongesting. Which is why doctors are so obsessed with getting people up out of bed as soon as they can after surgery because the only way to really clear your lymph is to walk around, is to move, keep moving. So now we can start to say, well, if walking is about drainage, how many steps do I need in order to facilitate that? And it turns out 6 ,000 to 8 ,000 is a pretty good number to get people moving. and again, that's not even about burning calories.

1:54:55That's not about strong feet. That's just about - It's a circulation. Circulation. So I think when you're right, when we can push back on this romanticizing, hunting my own chickens in my backyard, I don't need to do that. But somehow there are some things that used to happen to us. We used to sit on the ground a lot. We cooked on the ground, we toilet on the ground, we slept on the ground, we walked around. There's some things we did that we probably could do a little more. Well, we were in a persistent state of like low energy movement, right? Like we were just kind of like moving throughout the day consistently.

1:55:30That's another blue zones thing as well. Like, and we don't really do that. Like even if we, and you make this point in the book, like we, you may go to the gym and kill it, but then you sit in a chair all day and like, you know, that's certainly, that's me, you know, that's a lot of people, right? And this is not great. And we're not saying that that - You're not like, all of that kind of stuff, you know, is not happening. So if you're an elite athlete or someone who trains hard, because I think that the distinguishing between elite athlete and someone who trains like that is your genetics and what you're doing with it.

1:56:03Because as you have seen, people are training really hard and gotten really sophisticated about their training. They're training like the elites, whether they can handle it or not. And one of the things we know is if you wanna have a better adaptation to that, You need to continue to decongest and continue to move along those - Keep moving throughout your day. Non-exercise movement. That's it. Whatever that looks like to you. And bringing it back to sunlight, that's one of the, I mean, we're obsessed with walking, as I think you know, and just general movement and non-exercise activity throughout the day.

1:56:34But it's also this bonus thing where you get a little bit of sunlight on your body. You decongest your tissues. You accumulate a bunch of non-exercise activity. Check this out. Our daughter, Caroline, was a preemie. and Juliet had placenta previa. Caroline comes a little early. We are being discharged from UCSF, really good hospital, super gnarly. Caroline, who is 5 '10 now, her APGAR was two. She was very small and purple and she's a monster. Small and purple. And they were like, okay, you're leaving and Juliet is breastfeeding. She's made this heroic effort to get milk into our kid. And they're like, you just got to give your kid these vitamins.

1:57:13And I was like, look at me. Yeah, Kelly's like, isn't breast milk like God's food, like the perfect food. What are you talking about? I have to give my kids these vitamins. I just know enough as a physical therapist to be annoying. This is UCSF. That place is the shit. They are the shit. And they saved both my kid and my wife. I'm very grateful. But so I asked them, what do you mean I have to give my kid these vitamins? I'm like, have you tasted these vitamins? Like they're awful. And why don't I give my kid these vitamins? She's drinking milk. And they were like, well, you just really gotta do it.

1:57:43And I was like, what's the problem? And they said, well, the problem is women even in San Francisco don't get enough sun or don't go into the sun. So there's not enough vitamin D in the milk. And so the child oftentimes - So we were like, so we could just go into the sun with our baby and then not have to take these vitamins. And so we, you know, we just would lay our little teeny daughter who was like six pounds at this point, we would just lay her in the sun for like three minutes a day. And she was fine. That's how they used to get rid of John as the kids. So that's kind of a case study of the fact that we make some of these from no fault of our own, we find ourselves in environments where we have to now be a little bit more conscious about some of these other things.

1:58:25Yeah. A sort of analogous thing that you talk about or like a counterintuitive sort of thing that I was really happy to see because I've always agreed with this, but never really was validated for it, which is that you should not put ice on an injury, right? Like it's always struck me as wrong. It's like, oh, you gotta get the inflammation down. It's like, it's inflamed for a reason. Your body is sending all of this stuff there. Where did you figure that out? Who told you that? Like, that's crazy. I have to tell the backstory here. So I think this was back in 2011, maybe. We were at the CrossFit Games and we met up with a guy, Gary Reinall, who wrote the book Iced.

1:59:10And he was really the first person to - In my world. In our world, anyway, to take this different perspective on icing. And at that time though, the guy who had created rice had already - He had already, you know, turned the corner and said that was actually terrible. That's rest ice compression elevation. That was terrible advice. So, you know, there was starting to be this groundswell of people talking about how icing injuries was not the way to go. And we put up this one hour long video on YouTube where Kelly was interviewing Gary Reinald about icing injuries. And that thing got, well, first of all, this was in the dawn of time and we were un-pro.

1:59:47So we put the video on YouTube and the title of it was like IMG underscore four four seven and we just You know, you know, it was the olden days and we put it out and it this thing I was worthy of the appropriate and thousands of views but I mean there's been a couple things we put out into the world that have generated a lot of hate and Skepticism and I think that icing video was probably top of the list because it was so shocking to people I mean, it's just default if a kid injures themselves you make an ice bag, you know It was so part of our understanding of how to manage an injury in the short term that people were really bothered by this advice.

2:00:25And slowly but surely, I think people, the word's been getting out that icing injuries is not the way that you actually, you wanna welcome that swelling. Even in the cold plunge community, people are realizing maybe we need to put that cold a little bit further away from training stimulus. Yeah. And that's not even the same thing as icing something for hours. The reason you train is to create the stimulus and an adaptation. And if you are robbing your body of that adaptation by getting in the cold, then you've just undercut the purpose of the training itself. And I believe in ice baths, I have an ice baths.

2:00:58I think it's great, but I think you have to be conscious about the timing, when, the purpose and all of that. And listen, if it's halftime at the Superbowl and you blow your knee out and you gotta get back in the game, put some ice on it. You wanna reduce that inflammation, reduce the pain so you can go, if there's an immediacy to the thing, but if you're trying to heal yourself, you want heat. You wanna get blood flow in there. You wanna get your immune system sending what it needs to be sending to that area to repair it as quickly as possible. Yeah, and you're right. It can be a short-term pain reliever, but it's not a great long-term strategy.

2:01:33If your kid gets a bee sting, give her a bag of ice. And if you cut off your finger, you should put it in ice. That's also another useful medical way. Where did you figure that out? because that is really so progressive. It just seemed obvious to me, but it was so contrarian. Like, I don't know, I never really talked to anybody about it, but I've always preferred putting heat on any kind of injury over ice for that reason. The head athletic trainers in Major League Baseball now basically say, we don't ice anymore. And if you're doing that, you can't keep up with, you know, how we're managing these soft tissue injuries.

2:02:05And really what you can see is, well, is the body so sophisticated that we're gonna modulate this process of angiogenesis and remodeling tissues by getting it cold? And for everyone who's out there who isn't into the cold physiology, when you have an injury, your body sends out a whole bunch of chemical signals to the rest of your body. And these circulating cells, local stem cells, circulating cells come and repair that. The macrophages, they gobble up the tissue. and what can happen when you get something cold as you cut that connection, you suppress prostate gland and release. That's the same reason where we say now we're like, ooh, ibuprofen, maybe let's not use ibuprofen because it may do the same healing limiting problem.

2:02:50You're gonna go on with your life. But on the other side of that coin, if you have to go out there and perform as an athlete and you need to take a couple of ibuprofen because that's how you're gonna make it through your game or sport, then that's fine. I mean, we're not anti-using anti-inflammatory in the right context. But I will say that even though there's been a conversation about this icing thing for well over 10 years, maybe 15 years at this point, I mean, still it's the default though for most of the people we know who have an ACL tear or any kind of orthopedic surgery for the recommendation from the physician to send them home to ice or get a game ready.

2:03:25So, I mean, we're making little baby steps in trying to get that word out, but it's still, people really still want to go for the icing. You know, I think that's what it is. And until like so many other behaviors, until we give someone else something else to do, we're gonna default to the thing that makes me feel like I've done something. You know, I took this, you know, this pill that has micronutrients in it, that must be good enough as eating a salad or vegetables, right, or fruits. And yes, that's better than nothing. But in this situation, it just turns out now we were incomplete in our thinking and we reserved the right to evolve our positions.

2:04:01and here's one where we think we weren't as effective as we were and the proof is we're returning people to play at higher levels of function faster because now people are healing at the rates of human beings. Then we're not delaying that or retarding that healing process. We're just saying, hey, there's no such thing as a fast healer. You're gonna heal at your genetic limit. Let's at least get you to that limit. Right, and not unnecessarily slow it down. I mean, it seems to me to be a conversation around the difference between a chronic, you know, talking about inflammation, is it a chronic inflammation or is it an acute inflammation?

2:04:36If you have an injury, you have an acute inflammation, you need to like, you know, figure out how to address that. Chronic inflammation, that's a different protocol and a different set of problems that need to be looked at. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And it's okay to become more nuanced and not just attack everything with the same hammer. I think that's absolutely okay. And even if we just, you know, sometimes people get a little confused on this Listen, we love getting cold. We think it's really fun. And maybe that's just the best part of it. It's super fun that we feel better. And wait for this, everyone, all you touchy-feely data people, athletes that feel better tend to perform better.

2:05:13People that feel better in their lives tend to be more stoked and do better. So if icing, getting in a cold plunge, excuse me, makes you feel better, I'm down with it. It could be range of motion for your vasculature. It could just be - Well, there's hormonal impacts to it as well. What I'm saying is there's so many aspects of monkeying with being uncomfortable. You know, Laird says, Laird Hamilton says, hey, heating up and cooling down are the two most expensive processes your body engages with. Let's become more efficient at that. Well, that seems reasonable. Have you ever done heat training for Ironman?

2:05:44Well, and - No, I know, but I know like people who train for bad water put treadmills in saunas and things like that. So we know we can adapt to these things a little bit. Yeah, I mean, our friend Michael Easter wrote a great book called The Comfort Crisis And, you know, one of his main points is that we've, you know, in our modern world, we no longer feel any discomfort. And one of the easiest ways to do that is to get hot and cold. And so, you know, that's one of the 10 ,000 reasons that we love those two things. But, you know, I think the other side benefit of, you know, our own heat and cold practice is for us.

2:06:16And this may be, you know, what's been the greatest part of us for us is that it's a chance for us to connect together. And then also we use it as a community building. It's a social thing. It's a social thing. Good enough. We've had some of the best connections and conversations with our friends and community and people who come over for dinner in the sauna that we've had in the last 10 years. And I mean, so there are a myriad of well-studied health benefits at this point to saunaing and definitely emerging in terms of cold plunging. But if I could look back and say the greatest thing that our sauna has done for us is just connection.

2:06:48Yeah. Gabby and Laird called the sauna, the truth barrel. Yes. And then Neil Strauss and Gabby had a podcast called The Truth Barrel where they would get someone in the sauna to have a conversation. I think Tim Ferriss was the first one to do that when he had Rick Rubin in his sauna for a podcast conversation. The heat will bring the truth out. And then you'd see the guests slowly start to lose it. By the end of the podcast, they're sitting on the floor of the sauna, you know, and it's like Gabby and Laird are just totally fine. And the guest is like dead. Well, they crank it up to like 220. I mean, it's no joke how hot it gets in that thing for sure.

2:07:28But you have your own sauna cold plunge protocol in the book. I can't remember exactly, but I think it's three minutes in the cold and then you kind of go back a number of times. Think of it this way. We think, again, we're privy to a lot of tech and a lot of ideas, but we think that the functional unit of measurement is the household. It's you and your roommates, you and your partners, you and your kids and family. And that's where the real change happens. And that concept of hyperlocality, of really understanding what's going on in the context of someone's life, that's how we make the big change.

2:08:06So we can come in with these big principles, but ultimately it's you. And I need to understand where you're going to put this in and what your resources are. are in any time we can move something into the household, like a shower that gets hot and cold or massage or some kind of thing where you don't have to go out. We see that adherence goes up. We see that compliance goes up and it becomes manageable. And especially in those people who are working really hard, I want you to have your castle set up to the extent that you can so that you don't have to make another decision or go to the place. And if it's easy for you to step out and get hot, cool, you'll do it.

2:08:43And if you have to walk across the street, the chances of you doing drop to zero. Right, which beautifully segues and the next thing I wanted to ask you about selfishly, which is I'm in the process of building a home gym right now. I got like a 40 foot shipping container that we're customizing with a deck out front and stuff like that. So it's gonna take a couple months. We're in the middle of the build right now. And I haven't acquired any kind of equipment for it yet. So obviously you two are the best people to ask, like what are the things that I should get? What should I avoid? So 40 foot, it's big, it's pretty big.

2:09:21Oh yeah. But it's not like unlimited space. Like I gotta be, I have a, you know, I have like a indoor bike trainer and I've got a hydro rowing machine. Great. So I have those two things, but then what kind of weight equipment should I be getting? What should I be looking at? What are the essentials? Quick backstory. Did you know our first gym was a shipping container? No, I didn't know that. So we actually started San Francisco CrossFit in 2005. And because real estate was so expensive in San Francisco and CrossFit was so emergent and we actually weren't starting it to be a business. We were just starting it because we were like, hey, this CrossFit thing is fun.

2:09:56And, you know, and I was, Kelly had a full-time physical therapy job. I had a big firm, law firm job. So this was a complete side hustle for us. And so we actually had the idea to get a shipping container. and put all of our equipment inside the shipping container. And then we got this awning. It was like a, is awning the right word for it? This canopy. You could say tent if you're disrespecting us. We were outside, our entire gym was outside for seven years from 2005 to 2012. And our members, we had 350 members and our members would come and work out outside in the rain or shine. And eventually we moved inside into a cool building in the Presidio.

2:10:33but we've been laughing during the pandemic because everyone's like, look at this thing I'm doing, outdoor gym. And we were like, hey, we were the first, like we invented the outdoor gym and we saw all the positives and negatives of having an outdoor gym when there's any kind of weather. But - I would say that the main thing that people sort of think is my gym at home needs to look like a college strengthening conditioning platform. I need all the, like think about the old school, the programs at Stanford. You walk in there and you're like, whoa, this is an impressive gym. Maybe you need a squat rack, maybe, because that's convenient.

2:11:08But those could be squat stands. So really, I think it comes back to, you have a couple monostructural pieces of cardio equipment, which you love, that you're gonna do, because it's easy to get intervals in when you're compressed for time. Otherwise, go out, right? Dumbbells, kettlebells, maybe one barbell for pressing overhead. I think overhead, we could come into this and say, well, what are the fundamental positions and shapes we should train? Especially as a person who's not 20s trying to win world championships anymore. You know, I am a huge fan of deadlifting with a hex bar, right, a trap bar deadlift, because we can really get control and we can put the tissues into good shapes.

2:11:48But it really is a lot simpler having medicine balls, having things to pick up and carry. Those where I'd put all my energy, like I am not, I have such a bad risk from paddling all those years and broken that I can't handle a regular barbell anymore. I have to use a sort of a neutral grip, but I can handle all the sandbags. And really, how do we make you durable in a short amount of time when you're, what's the minimum effective play dose so that you can go out and do what you wanna do? And then what is it your family likes to do? What's their input? And leaving it as open as possible is the game.

2:12:26Cause it is easy to be like, oh, this is so fun. You know, let me go to Rogue and get all of a sudden nerd out. I mean, there's a couple of things I would add. It sounds like you have a bike, but I would really recommend getting an assault bike or some kind of, you know, bike with arms if you don't really have. And there's two reasons for that. Number one, because it seems like you do like to go hard in the paint. You really can go hard in the paint on an assault bike. But number two, in the event that anyone in your household ever faces an injury or a surgery, that is the single piece of equipment we recommend people get who have.

2:12:57because you can do it with three limbs. Yeah, no impact. No impact. So if you, the amount of people that we've put on with a cast, a knee surgery, a brace on that thing and done three-limbed biking is all the people. And in fact, in all of our surgery recovery protocols, that's one piece of equipment we recommend everybody get because, you know, just for your psychological health, you know, getting injured and going through a surgery and not being able to move your body. And that's like the first thing you can always do is three-limbed anything on that bike. So to me, that's like one of the greatest investments you can have if you can invest in a gym.

2:13:30And what I would say is, as you are an experienced mover, you have this ability to go out in the world and do those things. I want you to spend your tissue tolerance credits on actual sports. So do I care that you can full snatch? No, I don't. But I care that you can muscle snatch a dumbbell, right? And from a hang position. and what we'll see is that a lot of the training decisions, I think makes sense for people like my age, I'm 50 this year, is I want high physiology, low skill, where I can get all the bang for the buck and then go stand up paddle or go ride my mountain bike or spend my Achilles credits running the hills instead of smoking myself with exercises.

2:14:15Right, yeah, that's certainly my attitude. I'm not trying to like, yeah, completely wreck myself. I just wanna be sturdy, stable, mobile, flexible, functional, pain-free. So I can go and do all the other things that I enjoy and basically work on maintaining that to the best of my ability for as long as possible. I think you could do your entire, I mean, you could get a barbell if that's something that you, if you like to do barbell work, but I think you could get all the stimulus you want with some dumbbells, some kettlebells, a couple of heavy balls, a few sandbags. I mean, the amount of things that you can do with just those things are infinite.

2:14:56And to me, you can get so much bang for your buck with that. So I mean, if you like to do barbell training, then I would get a squat rack and a couple pounds of weights to put on those things. But recently one of our friends was like, they're building their gym out. They're like, what do you think of this? I'm like, I'm not sure you need a competition bench. Like that seems a little excessive. Like, you can floor press just fine. But if you just have a rack where you can, and a bench or whatever, where you can do all the multiple things. And they swing out, you can get them so they tuck away. And then it's a pull up bar too.

2:15:28You can make your rack a pull up bar. So that's a bonus. On that subject of like making, movement a priority in the home, the obvious kind of next thing that I wanna talk to you guys about is parenting and how you instill a passion for movement in young people, right? Like it reminds me of Peter Atiyah talking about watching his kids when they were young and realizing that kids are naturally geniuses at movement. Like they're able to do things that now, you know, we wish we could do. So we are all built to move the title of your book, right? And children know exactly what to do. And somewhere along the line, we lose that touch, that connectivity, that capacity.

2:16:14to move like a supple leopard, right? So like, how do you guys think about this and practice it in your own home and talk about it with respect to young people? I think the way we've approached parenting in every respect is trying to sort of do as we do, not do as we say. And so we've always had a home gym. And I think that that is such an important part of teaching our kids how much we love movement and how much we value movement. And, you know, there's, and I also have a group of ladies who comes over and works out at my house three or four times a week. And, and, you know, as we said, we have peg boards and pull up bars and balance boards and, you know, double under or double Dutch ropes around the house.

2:16:58You want to set a lot of traps for your kids. Yeah, we want to, we've just tried to set a lot of traps and show them that, you know, movement is a priority for us. One of the things I've seen in now that I'm in my late 40s is that the friends of mine who didn't grow up moving in some way are the ones that have really struggled to figure out how to fit exercise into their life now as adults. And so one of the things I really wanted and was sort of intentional about it, and I think both of us were, was that I was like, when my daughters leave the home, I want them to want to move on their own, to be motivated on their own, to keep moving their body because they've learned how much better they feel if they just keep moving.

2:17:39And we like to tell a story way back when our daughter, Georgia, was like nine. We had occasion to do all this genetic testing on the whole family. We did all this genetic testing on all of us. Sorry, kids. And I know. and it turned out that Georgia had a low genetic drive to move, our daughter Georgia. And Georgia does - There's a genetic marker for that? There's a genetic marker on desire to move. Wow. And so Georgia has a low genetic drive to move and that's actually obvious. She loves to bake and left her own devices, she probably would bake and watch TV. She even created a subscription cookie company.

2:18:10She has a subscription cookie company. So when we got that piece of information, we realized, hey, this is a kid who might need to be pushed a little bit more to move because she's not going to naturally get off the couch and start moving. And so we definitely made sure that she was involved in some kind of sport or activity. I think the other key thing we did is that we made movement. Our kids were allowed to choose what type of movement they wanted to do, but not whether or not to do movement. And that's one of the ways I think we found ourselves to be like the strictest parents. Like we give our kids choice, but it's within these very clear sort of parameters.

2:18:48And that movement was one of them. Movement was not, whether or not they moved was not a choice and how they wanted to move. Sky's the limit. We wanted to give our kids the opportunity to try anything they wanted, because I'm really a true believer that if you find a type of movement that you like and enjoy, and that's fun for you, then you will do it. And probably for your entire life. And so my goal was to let see my daughter, Georgia, go off to college, which she's going to do this year and know that on her own accord, without any outside motivation, she was, she was going to know that if she kept moving, that she would feel better and do better in school and have better, more connected relationships and feel good in her body and be able to do things she wants to do.

2:19:29And it's so interesting to see that, you know, we didn't really see that click individually for her until about two years ago when she was 15 or 16. And now the kid who, when she was younger would bake and then go sit on the couch and watch movies, now bakes and then goes out to our home gym and deadlifts. So what was the, I'm interested in how that tipped from one to the other, cause I, you know, similar situation, some, not frustrations, but you know, queries or challenges around like how to instill or inspire movement in young teenagers that aren't interested in listening to their parents or.

2:20:09Yes. An expert is someone who lives a mile away. Yeah. And I'm doing, it's not like I'm not the example, you know, I'm like I'm doing it every day and my wife is doing it in her own way. Like we are modeling that and yet it's not connecting. It's not connecting. Necessarily. I think one of the solutions is when our daughters are exercising with their friends, they're in an environment where there's a team doing it, that reduces a lot of the drag. You know, I'm like, let's go front squat and do sprints. You know, and my daughter's like, that's so boring. But, you know, it lights me up. You know, I have this insane desire to move.

2:20:48You know, gamifying it, putting in a class setting, those are the ways when we have, you know, you two at this end of the table have, you know, you can be live a life of austerity and put in the work and grind for its own satisfaction. But that's not the, a lot of the reason that especially young people love to do it. They like to relate. Yes. It's very cool that Georgia now can go back squad. And she's in, as an aside, she's in a little bit of a power struggle with our school right now who has a great weight room because the coach there wants her to do this foundations work. And she's like, no, no, no, I don't need to do that foundations work.

2:21:22I just want to come in and squat. Do you know who my parents are? Don't I get a pass on that? She really wants to get a pass, but she's like, what do I need to do? Power snatch, what do you need? Anton is not giving her a pass. Anton, this is for you. So, one of the things I've learned, I've learned working with this women's water polo team is that the women like to do things together differently than boys or men, I'll do it on my own. And so thinking differently about that solution, putting our daughters into environments with their friends, that really made a big difference. And creating a social structure around it really made a big difference.

2:22:06And I would say also, what are we talking about? How fit do your 14 year old need to be? When we talk about shaping the environment, one of the things that Juliet and I figured out early on when our kids were in elementary school was we created a walking school bus. And we realized that we lived within a mile and a half of the school and we do this thing where I'd work the drop off lane. and if you've ever had a kid, you work at drop off lane. It's like the most depressing place on earth, the drop off lane. You open the door, you hear the hate and the stress of each family roils out. And then you absorb it.

2:22:37I love you, I love you. You absorb it as the parent volunteer that's opened the door and it's like the worst experience. It's the worst. So what I said was, maybe we don't have to do that ever again. We could just walk our kids. Juliet's created this walking school bus, but that was a great example of making it so that we all walked as a family and that wasn't one more thing we had to do. Like at the end of the day, your dad's trumping in being like, let's go exercise. You know, like that was, I made my kids cry a lot. Yeah. Like teaching them to Olympic lift. Like quick side story. I said, you know, Kelly's been really worried our whole kid's life about being like that dad at sporting events.

2:23:15And so, but, but the problem is the, in my view, the pendulum swung too far. And at one point I said to Kelly, I was like, Hey, so our kids should at least get some benefit from the fact that they're Kelly Starrett's kids. Like, like you don't ever coach them or cause he's so worried about being that dad. And so I said, so I was like, you've got to start weightlifting with our daughter, Caroline, like you've got to start weightlifting. And of course she was very resistant to it and not excited. And there were three occasions where she came in from the side yard and was crying and she was like, dad was mean.

2:23:47Dad was mean. And so look at your I realized we needed to outsource. And so we actually started sending her to this Olympic lifting club and she on her own in with a group of other kids actually really learned how to like weightlifting and learn the fundamental skills with these great coaches. And, you know, we took ourselves out of the equation there. And so, you know, we're definitely fans of outsourcing. Yeah, it's interesting how that works. Like they just, it can't be the parent. It can't be the parent. It can't. And like, I'm thinking of, I had Joe to send on here and he's talking about his parents.

2:24:20And I was like, this dude is insane. like oh my we just had him on our podcast his kids up at four in the morning and yeah you know oh my god trudge up a mountain before they can open up their christmas court quitter's office is closed the quitter's office did you tell you about the quitter's office no but i can imagine i think one of the things that you know my my daughters were gifted because their mother is a world champion and a sufferer and you get your mitochondria from your mom so children, you're welcome, three-time world champion, superstar. We, as a family, like to go into the woods and wilderness.

2:24:55We love to run rivers and be active outside and pulling our kids into that forces us to do those things. And so, you know, making your kids uncomfortable because you do this as a family is a really great way to do it. And if you, if for some families who are saying, hey, I want to struggle or struggle with this, let's go for a walk after dinner for 10 of minutes, that's what our family does. And it could be a simple beginning a conversation of doing that together. And again, I think we're gonna have to culturally have to wrap our heads around, what is it to be a human being and a member of society?

2:25:31How do we do a better job supporting coaches? How do we put PE back? It's a big multi-layer problem. What you can do is start to control some of this in home just through activity. and theoretically, again, give your kids all the opportunities to do as many different sports and as diverse experiences. And then when they start to get older, you can specialize. And I just want to make very clear, we have met a massive amount of resistance. You are not alone. And in George's case, it did seem like it was more of a maturity thing. Like she turned 16 plus 17. And that was when - She liked being jacked.

2:26:08Yeah, there was kind of a shift. I think she saw the difference in her body composition. if she exercised, I think she probably had some external motivation from just wanting to look a certain way. She had the hardest shot in the league on water polo. And people were like, where did she learn to throw so hard? I'm like, muscle snatch. But I mean, getting our 14 year old daughter who probably will be a division one water polo goalie, who is extremely athletic and gifted athlete. But I mean, getting her to like leave TikTok in her bedroom is a serious challenge. Right. So what we started doing recently is in between all of the training, we just do little micro sessions.

2:26:43We just keep it. It's like 20 minutes. We're just gonna do one movement. That's gonna be enough. Really the idea of never do nothing. Like there's always things you can do in your house together. And Caroline, who is crazy and awesome, she was like, hey, can we throw knives out here too? And I was like, you bet. So front squats and knives. She likes to throw knives. We have like a knife throwing setup now in our side yard. So now she's like, hey, you know, I fetch the knives. I'm like, you wanna go throw knives? She's like, yeah. I'm like, why don't we press in between? I think that's really reasonable.

2:27:14So making about music, making it the most enjoyable experience possible. Anytime you're doing any sport activity with your kids. I mean, we used to with Caroline, we'd go hiking. We love to hike. And we invented these things called emo bears and they're gummy bears. And when our daughter started getting emo and all gummy, I'd whip out the emo bear and boom, she'd be back. I was like, hey, how about a couple of gummy bears? So, I think you have to do high manipulation to learn to like to exercise and train and be in that training environment. That's a learned experience. And I do think keeping it playful and fun.

2:27:47I mean, we went through like a, Kelly will get mad that I describe it this way, but like a bow and arrow phase, right? How did I say that? You go right ahead. We went through a bow and arrow phase. So we have all these targets at our house and, you know, so kids can go in the backyard and do that. And, you know, we just, anything that they're willing to do that seems fun to them, like we're game, like we're in, you know, if they want some cool device, we're like, yes, we're in. And the other thing, and this is the most inaccessible sport for most people, but I mean, one of the most fun things we've done with our kids is ski because nobody's on their phones.

2:28:19You're on the chairlift. You have a ton of time to connect. We're outside. So we've had a ton of fun doing that with our kids too. It's very inaccessible, but it's been fun. I think you don't ever get to take your foot off the gas. I think that's really, and if we use this allegory we've been talking about like scaling from, you know, children all the way up to the Olympics. Think about how hard it is for adults to develop the practice and love to suffer and be uncomfortable. It takes a minute to do that and to change those behaviors. So you just have to put it in front of your kids in micro doses for decade plus.

2:28:52That's how long it's going to take, I think. Yeah. And our dear friend TJ gave us this, he told us this story and his kids were in high school at the time and our kids were in middle school. But he said, you know, one of the things he'd noticed with parenting is that if you think of parenting like a marathon, he noticed that a lot of parents stop running the marathon at like mile 24 when their kids are like 15. Like they sort of give up. Pull the hamstring and you go on with the gas. Yeah, the foot comes off the gas. They're pretty much baked. Yeah, they're pretty much baked. They're pretty independent.

2:29:20You know, and his point of view was like, well, actually that's when you need to put your foot on the gas. Like that's when they're the most mature, the most able to absorb information. They actually, they pretend like they don't, but they need the most support. You know, and then that's actually the time to sort of put your foot on the gas as far as parenting. And so that really had an impact on us. And so I think we've been trying to, you know, make sure in our own way that, you know, we're gonna run across the finish line of the marathon and really be present and kind of stay on them when they're in high school.

2:29:50George is a senior. She's looking at, last year was looking at colleges and doesn't wanna play in college, understands and recognizes that collegiate athletics is professional athletics. And it's just like, that's not for me. And, but one of the things she graded every university checked on was the weight room and training facilities. And I was like, it's perfect. And she was super bummed that sometimes she's like, daddy's girl. Yeah. Kelly was so proud. Like we had these, like we went, we went on this Midwestern tour tour and she created these spreadsheets and it was like, you know, overall campus feel gym.

2:30:21And she actually really loved the university of Indiana. And it's like one of the most beautiful campuses I've ever seen. It's like Hogwarts. And we went into the gym and she's like, nope. She's like, no way. I'm out. Peace out. Wow. Literally that was like, why are the kettlebells so far from the rowing machine? She was really confused. And she, you know, she said, and the other thing she noticed is she said, there's no women in the weight room at this college gym in Indiana. She's like, I'm out. So Olympic lifting and powerlifting were the original amateur sports because they really could, with just a York barbell set, you could train yourself in your basement.

2:30:55And if we can get back to some of those basic competencies and exposure of kids to these things, you don't have to be a weightlifter, But I want you to be able to be comfortable with that. Well, on that subject, I'm sure you've put quite a bit of thought into how you would revamp PE physical education in the school system. Like it's a disaster. When I grew up, it was the president's physical fitness test and dodgeball and what have you. But in terms of something that needs an upgrade, I mean, this is certainly primed for that, given the fact that childhood obesity rates are through the roof and through devices, et cetera.

2:31:34Young people are more sedentary and less engaged with physical activity than perhaps they have ever been. So we need to solve this problem. And I don't think we, maybe you both have such genetic drives to move and cope, but if you'd given me all this tech, I love how you like bucketed Rich and I into this like suffer lawyer category. I know, exactly. He's just like, he's just put us over here in this like suffer lawyer. Over here. Yeah. We're just one unit. You're like, we're just one unit. And then there's him. In his mind, we represent like one thing. Yeah, it's okay. Multidimensional suffer.

2:32:11Yes. What you really just brought up was sort of two things. One is how can we reconfigure what we're doing during the school day where kids are mandated to be there, it's a government activity. What does that look like so we can get more movement in? And that may mean we need to give kids three meals a day there, or they can take a snack home. They can have access to good food there for the first time. Of course, that's tricky. You know, if we just started something like the Daily Mile, which they started in the UK, just kids have to walk a mile a day, right? Just during that time, what teacher can't administer a walking mile?

2:32:47Every kid has to walk a mile. we started the first our kids went to we did a google talk in 2010 about looking at the workforce and then we realized that we were not applying our lessons to our children and we went into our local elementary school and said what do you think about this radical idea of creating a different kind of classroom where kids could move more they could stand they could fidget they could sit on the ground we could give them more movement choice and our principal was like yes let's do it and then And in the next course of a year, we flipped the entire school, became the first all moving school in the world.

2:33:20So kids had all this agency and choice and the desk was individually hired for them. So we didn't have to program in a specific program. We just made it so that there was more movement in the day. And so there's that one piece of what happens if you couldn't drop your kid off, you know, or you had to drop your kid off to a walking place or something like that. How can you, how could you get more movement in? Because I think we need to do that. And then simultaneously, redefining PE is not this horror show of the flexed arm hang tests where kids who don't move or don't have any families that move.

2:33:54How can we start to use that time to explore dance, yoga, weightlifting? And what movements do we think that every child should know how to do in order to progress? What movement skills? And so it becomes a skill base. Just like reading or math or anything else. So we could do the same thing with that. And there's a real opportunity for that. I think there's a real hunger and awareness because I think parents are like, holy crap, we're behind. No parent wants their child to be unhealthy. And I do think there's a lot of separate from PE things that could be done. I mean, one of the things that drives me insane and I went to like 500 PTA meetings and now my kids are in elementary school, but our elementary school was set up so that on rainy days, the kids would stay inside at recess and watch movies.

2:34:36And I was like, that is the craziest thing I've ever heard. Like, I mean, I grew up in a snowy climate and we actually would put on our snow gear and go outside and play. So the notion that kids have to sit inside and watch movies when it's raining and that it's, you know, they're not going to get a cold. They're not going to get sick. And kids actually love to play outside in the rain. So that that was a battle I tried to fight and lost. But I mean, to me, that's just one of those simple things that it's like kids can go outside in cold weather and kids can go outside in the rain and they need to.

2:35:04They need to move their bodies and they need to play. The other thing is that something like 90 % of kids live within a mile and a half of their own elementary school. And, you know, when we were kids, it was like 75 % of kids biked or walked to school. And now it's like 15%. You know, we've just had this huge draw. You know, schools have rebuilt themselves around the whole concept of the drop-off lane that we talked about before. And so, I mean, yes, the PE programs need to be massively revamped. But I also think there's all this sort of connected stuff. How do we make sure kids can move more in the classroom?

2:35:35How do we build in things like the daily mile? How do we make sure little kids are getting all the time they need to play outside at school? How do we facilitate environments where kids can walk and bike to school safely? And I think even that would make a huge difference because, you know, tackling the specific PE problem is such a huge one. It makes me feel tired to think about it. But I mean, you don't agree. You don't have to solve the problem for the school district. You have to solve the problem for your classroom. So you have a child in a classroom. You can improve that classroom. The teacher is the functional unit of that.

2:36:07And there's all of those things. And if your teacher can teach math and skills and social studies, they can teach squatting. And there are tons of resources available. What we're gonna have to do is think differently about the problem because clearly who owns this? That's the issue. No one wants to own it. Yeah, well, it's a grassroots problem in the classroom with the teacher and the students in that particular classroom. And it's a federal program issue that scales all the way up to the White House. So the question is, is there political will for this? Like I remember when, you know, Michelle Obama was the first lady and there was initiatives around moving and like eating healthy and, you know, that did not go well.

2:36:48And it's like insane. Remember Jamie Oliver was like run out of the country. Pizza is not a vegetable. How dare anybody come in and try to like improve, you know, the health and welfare of young people. Like I think the last time physical fitness in the public school system was a thing was when Arnold Schwarzenegger was talking about it, right? Like, I don't know what the current state of it is now, but I know it's decrepit in comparison to what it could be. And there's certainly a need, but there's so much bureaucratic red tape. All you can do is like you said, Kelly, is get involved in your kid's classroom and try to begin there.

2:37:23There is, the other thing is to say, okay, this high school, middle school, elementary school problem is beyond my skill. But then there is this thing, this kind of irregular army of youth sports. So the youth sport coach becomes even more important because this may be the only time where kids learn to move and play. That's a good point. And we actually, the data is pretty good that a lot of kids actually do engage in small sports. It's not everywhere and it's not equal for sure. But the data is that kids are starting to play so that we now can think, well, how can we support the coaches? Because that may be the only place where kids are getting any actual coaching.

2:38:00It's not about basketball. It's how do I self-regulate and how do I calm down and what does movement skills look like? So we have to, I think, be clever enough to look at some other opportunities to support. And right now, you know, there's Positive Coaching Alliance and some of these things, but who teaches volunteer coaches how to coach kids? It doesn't happen. Well, and I think a lot of, you know, as we were talking about before where, you know, your kids often don't want to hear the message from you, but they can better hear it from other people in their lives. And oftentimes that could be a coach.

2:38:28And so if youth coaches did get into the game of a little bit of like, you know, teaching kids how to take care of their tissues and, you know, telling kids they do need to sleep and maybe get off their phones, like that would be such a support for I think all of us parents who are trying really hard within our own homes. You know, sometimes that outside voice is really what kids need to hear to actually try to make change. And so I think - Yeah, they can't hear it from their parents. No, they can't hear it from their parents. But man, if we had our youth coaches out there saying, hey, you guys really need to put your phone down and get eight hours of sleep if you wanna perform on the soccer game tomorrow.

2:38:59And hey, you guys should probably eat a few vegetables. And hey, here's this$2 foam roller. Like if your calves are sore, you can do some input. I mean, that alone would make a huge difference. Right. But how dare you, you know? How dare you volunteer coaches? It's tricky. It's tricky. It's really complicated. It shouldn't be, but it is, right? And you know, we'll let you know how the experiment goes, you know, our kids. Well, also, you know, on the subject of like the White House and stuff like that. Is it correct that you have worked with the president? Is this true? That's correct. Is this like, you signed an NDA on this?

2:39:35What are we talking about here? We have a friend who is the physical therapist and coach was to President Obama and also to President Biden. And he is a good friend of ours and says, hey, we need help with resources or do you have ideas for this or how do we solve this problem? And I think we can say now because he's just a citizen, but one of the strangest experiences we had is making an air-gapped computer full of mobility drills and things where I talked directly to President Obama. That was very uncomfortable for me. But - And little strategies, you know, like we're obviously huge fans of standing desks, but Obama was writing his next book and he finds that he can concentrate the most and the best when he is sitting.

2:40:19And so he, but he also was uncomfortable and couldn't figure out a good sitting setup. So we consulted with him on, okay, here's sort of a sitting desk setup where you can still manage to get some movement in and fidget and be able to keep your brain alive, but actually be in a sitting position. I mean, it's really like minor stuff like that, but that makes a difference in the end. It's pretty cool. How do we keep weight on an aging executive? I mean, these are the real questions. How do we, you know, whoever is doing this job, how can we support them so that they can do the job the best? And we have put our name in the hat, although no one's come a calling, but our name is in the hat to be on the president's physical fitness council.

2:40:59Oh, yeah. Well, that's a no brainer. We would love to do that. I mean, that would really be like, you know, an amazing thing. And we think we have something to contribute, but no one's come a calling. Well, I'm setting you up for that layup and, you know, on the subject of keeping President Obama on the basketball court. Right. Well, yes, that's very true. You know, one of this is a great allegory for everything we're talking about. President Obama is a great athlete and very competitive. He's said as much. And one of the things that was happening was he would play basketball at the White House and he was ruining a lot of cabinet members and staff members.

2:41:39They were having catastrophic injuries. The most dangerous sport for a middle-aged person. He's burning out his whole staff. They were like tearing their ACLs. the quad ligament tears, Achilles. You know, the most dangerous sport for middle-aged people is basketball because you go from zero to sprinting, lateral movement, don't have the tissues. You haven't exposed yourself to, when's the last time you jumped rope, much less cut. Well, I think it's now been surpassed by pickleball though. That's true. I don't know if we have the perfect data on that, but we think that's the allegory for how can you be prepared to come off the couch and theoretically come out intact and have fun, especially when the game ready, When the president asks you to play basketball, will you be ready?

2:42:20Yeah. That's what I want. Yeah. Without having to sacrifice your ACL. This was super fun, you guys. I really appreciate your time. I'm a huge fan of the work that you're doing. I think it's really important. And the new book, Built to Move, it's got like we talked about the 10 chapters, which kind of goes through Syriatim, all of these practices that are very easily incorporated into our lives and obviously, you know, super important to keep us moving and stable and mobile and flexible and all the good stuff. And I might just start practicing. Can't wait to see. Do you have any blind spots? Yeah, let us know if you have any blind spots and we're really grateful to have.

2:43:07That's a whole other podcast, Juliette, but we'll get to it. Let's do it. Yeah, we can then, you and I can sit down and have a Sufferfest slash recovering lawyer, retired lawyer conversation as well. I look forward to that. Thank you so much for having us. It was really fun to chat. Really, really, really cool. So if people wanna check you out, obviously pick up the book, Built to Move, but thereadystate.com. You've got tons of materials and programs there. Your YouTube channel, The Ready State as well. You know, a million videos and on Instagram. Anywhere else you wanna direct people? That's it.

2:43:41Those are the two things, builttomove.com. All right. Thanks, you guys. Thank you so much. Cheers. Until next time. Peace. Blance.

2:44:01That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

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2:46:16Thank you.