Barbell Shrugged - [Juliet and Kelly Starrett] Built to Move w/ Juliet and Dr. Kelly Starrett, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash #729

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

Juliet Starrett and Dr. Kelly Starrett are pioneers of mobility. They’ve spent decades working with athletes of all types, teaching them how to move better to reach peak physical performance. Their revolutionary teachings on movement and the body present an easily achievable roadmap, which they have outlined in their new book Built to Move. Kelly and Juliet teach audiences how to seamlessly implement ten essential mobility habits that can be worked into even the busiest of schedules to alleviate chronic pain, improve range of motion, and break sedentary habits. They advise major companies on how to create a healthier workforce through simple mobility exercises and self-care techniques to alleviate and manage stress. Their teachings apply to all people who want to feel better, work better, and live better. Kelly Starrett, DPT, is a physical therapist and co-author of the New York Times bestseller Becoming a Supple Leopard. He consults with professional athletes and coaches from the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, and U.S. Olympic team, as well as with all branches of the U.S. elite armed forces. He and Juliet co-founded one of the first CrossFit gyms in San Francisco and co-authored the Wall Street Journal bestseller Deskbound. Juliet Starrett is an attorney and CEO of The Ready State. She co-founded the nonprofit StandUp Kids and is a two-time whitewater rafting world champion, winning five national titles. Work with The Ready State: Website: https://thereadystate.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thereadystate Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Juliette and Kelly Starrett from The Ready State are coming in. If there's two people that I have been looking up to in the fitness industry for the past 13 years, that was how long ago I opened my gym and made this thing like a real, like a real go at trying to be good at fitness and helping people in their health and fitness journey. Kelly Starrett was one of like the very first people that truly influenced me. I mentioned at the end of the show today that I was living in San Francisco for a couple months, really wanted to meet him and train with him at San Francisco CrossFit, the very original spot that was like outside. And man, he called me back personally. And it like

really actually changed my perception of just what a great one human being he is. And two, just the accessibility of people. Like I had no idea that he was actually someone that would just call you back or be able to talk to you. And that forever like really changed the way that I wanted to act inside and understanding how the body's supposed to move biomechanics and how to just kind of like run a maintenance check on your own body. So anytime we get to have them on the show, I'm always grateful. And they've played a massive role in me just kind of like lighting a path that I have traveled down over my career. So I'm always grateful to hear their insights into many things. As always, friends, you can head over to rapidhealthreport.com. That's where Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner are doing a

free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that everybody inside of Rapid Health Optimization will receive. You can access that for free over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner. Doug Larson. Coach Travis Mash. Juliet and Kelly Starrett. Guys, always a pleasure having you on here. Now that we have you for the first time as both of you being on the show at the same time, a very personal question. You guys, for like a decade, straight up, ran one of like craziest schedules i've ever seen in my entire life i'm married i have two kids you guys were on the road for like a decade straight and

how in the world did you guys survive that as like a couple that is also in business and running a gym and um there's solid question stuff let me start by saying you're assuming i survived and i'm not just some like robot avatar ai the julia kelly starrett still she left me for dead in the gutter yeah i mean you know we we did i think maybe it might have looked more insane than it actually was on the outside. I think we definitely went through some phases where there was a lot of heavy travel. But you guys know working for yourselves, the bonus is we really can choose our schedule so we can really be on when we're really on and then also off. And I still think we figured out a way to be super present in our kids' lives. And because we had flexibility, we could go to their band concert at 11 o'clock in the morning.

And then one other really key thing that did help us a ton, which we feel so grateful for, is my mom actually lives a mile from us. And I don't know that we would have been able to pull off a lot of the stuff we did if we didn't have that level of support. Because as a parent, you're willing to leave your kids with people. But if you're traveling, it's like, well, the next best thing is your own parent. You're probably not going to want to leave your kid. You're not going to want to leave your kid with like your neighbor or something for an extended period of time. But I think we were able to do a lot of travel and kind of be all over the place knowing that, you know, our kids were with the

next best thing, which is, you is my mom, and that they were in their neighborhood and getting to all the things they needed to get to. And then when we're around, we're really around and try to be really present. And I'll add that Juliet started, because she's an attorney and would live by the clock, die by the clock as an attorney, hyper-organized superstar. And so we live on a calendar. And if it's not on the calendar, it doesn't exist in the world. And the second thing is that JSTAR is my number one homie. And so we spend a lot of time together, training, boating, skiing, biking. And so we're either on the gas full-time or we're 100% on the brakes. And I don't think there can be

in between. There's this notion of this balance for these young kids are like, how do I have balance? I'm like, there's no balance. You think you're going to die. And then you're like, I need more work. And then you think you're going to die. And then you think you need more work. You know, I think one of the problems is that people don't know how to just stop working and really make sure that you're, you know, you're in the sauna, you're chilling, you have quality time. About a decade ago, we started having a weekly feelings meeting where we sat down and we could just say, how's it going? How am I doing as a husband? What do you need?

And sometimes you'd be able to drink between us and sometimes you wouldn't. But I think you just have to be a lot more intentional about that. And lastly, I think one of the things that anyone who listed this as this as an athlete and has been a serious athlete is that Juliet and I have extremely high work pain tolerance. And I think people get burned out a lot easier and a lot sooner and they feel pressure. And I think Juliet and I are really uncomfortable with uncertainty and high pressure just because we've been river guides our whole lives, athletes our whole lives. And so there's always sort of a deadline and a goal's always sort of a deadline and a goal and a deadline and a goal and then you just have to do the work and i think that really makes us like when people are like aren't you blown out we're like no no now it's the weekend

now we're gonna go hard so you know and i don't know maybe last thing i'll say is that juliet's a two-time cancer survivor and she does not suffer so she has kind of of Lance Armstrong syndrome where she does not suffer fools and she's not fucking around with the rest of her life. And I'll tell you that I directly benefit from that vision. One thing I'd add too, and you guys I'm sure can relate to this from running many businesses, is I do think you have to think about

sort of the seasonality of life. And when we were really starting businesses, I think we got early on that like, you do have this period, I think in all entrepreneurship where you kind of need to say yes to everything. And it takes a while where you're saying yes to everything before you can sort of, you sort of like earn the right to say no. And so I think we, you know, both with the gym and with, you know, early mobility, what ready said, I think we really did feel like we needed to say yes to everything. And then, and then once we were sort of established it's like then you can start to say no to some things and so i think i bet you guys did you know man you guys have been all over the place for years and like

digging the ditch right like are you guys the longest running podcast in the history of apple pop like right like what is the what's the data on Joe Rogan? Yeah. I mean, literally, like most podcasts I recently read, they they like the average podcast is 15 total episodes. And I mean, man, you guys have been doing a podcast since I knew there were podcasts. It's like early 2012 is really when we officially started. There was some playing around with it late 2011, but it's actually officially post. I think Rich Fronting was our second episode and we recorded that at the Arnold Classic in 2012 so that would have been March 2012 so it was early that's got to put you guys in like the top five longest running podcast of all time it's amazing I think we

need to start promoting that yeah seriously you know the other thing you know I know I know of Travis's many multifaceted you know know, skill sets, but, you know, you're a coach at the heart of what you do. And I know you're, you know, you're an academic and you have all these other fancy aspects of yourself, but. That's fake. That's just the facade. But yeah. Which allows you to research. Fancy.

Fancy. But, you know, at the heart of it is, I think we all, I use Travis as an example, is that, you know, when does training happen? And you have to be there and you have to be present. You have to get show work. And you just get into that habit of, I know how to work hard. And, you know, I think it was Floyd Landis, the cyclist, who said, look, if you, whoever trains the hardest wins. And someone was like, what about overtraining? Well, obviously you didn't train hard enough

to be able to handle that kinds of volume. So see rule number one. And it's really true that there's no substitute for being in one place for a long time, doing a lot of work, not being a dick on the internet, developing relationships. We've all known each other a long time. And I think that's, you can't substitute. And suddenly when you turn around, you're like,

wow, it looks like a large volume of work, but day to day, it's just what you do. Yeah. It's just what you do. Yeah. Stack. Juliet, I actually, I did not realize that you are a cancer survivor. Kelly mentioned something about not fucking around with the rest of your life post-cancer. Can you comment on kind of the pre versus post-cancer mindset and approach to life? Yeah. I mean, I actually was originally diagnosed with cancer when I was a junior in college. It actually was sort of the end of my college. I was a D1 rower at Cal and sort of ended my college rowing career just because I had

to go through like a treatment thing and never went back to it after that. But I mean, I would say the younger, the first cancer me, I think I learned that I could not mess around with my health. And in fact, that was such a great lesson, right? It was not, it became for me, not a choice at all, whether I exercise and cared about my diet and, you know, tried to make sure that I was like really clean on the edges. And also like, did I really think influenced me in part to what we were talking about earlier to like live hard because you don't know how long you're going to live. And so, you know, man, I was like, I'm 21 and I'm having to face my mortality in ways that most 21 year olds don't have to face. And I think one of the takeaways for me was like, man, I could live five years or 20 years, or I could live a full

life. I don't know, but because I don't know, I have to live my life hard. And so I think that's part of what drives both of us to just do all the things and take the trips and make sure that we're like out there living life, you know? And then, and then I think, you know, when I got cancer the second time, um, I think the takeaway for me, you know, like, like, uh, you know, and then, and then I think, you know, when I got cancer the second time, um, I think the takeaway for me, you know, like, like, uh, you know, other people have talked about having like a gratitude practice and stuff like that, but like, I don't have to do that. I just wake up every day and I'm like, fuck yes, I am alive. And I'm not opening my eyes knowing today that I have cancer. And like, after that, like really all the other little

stressors that you have in your life, like, you know, a really all the other little stressors that you have in your life. Like, you know, a lot of the things that stress me out, you know, as an early entrepreneur that I would have lost sleep over, um, you know, you know, things with my kids, relationships, friendships, whatever that used to cause me stress, you know, mostly I wake up and I'm like, hell yes. Like I'm alive. I get to go use my body and train and talk to people and be a parent to my kids. And, you know, everything became like a get to that second time around. And so, you know, I really do like wake up and feel like, hell yes, I am alive. And that's, that's cool. One of the things that, you know, I don't know, we've been doing it for 12 years, 13 years,

we started running everything through this filter. And I don't think I was able to sort of appreciate that until I was starting to be post-ego, post-young man ego, right? Where, you know, I have something to prove. I need to make something of myself as a man. We started running everything through this filter. And I think this is really important because it really does set a framework for your work and your relationships. Shark family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com,

you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside-out approach.

So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. And then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns, and then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program, and we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward.

I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidealthreport.com, and let's get back to the show. Everything I do and we do is run through the filter of does this get our family more time together or less time together? And when it's my number one priority is to be a good partner to my wife and a really good dad and then good friends, everything else is horseshit. It really is. It doesn't matter. And when you start to really focus on that, it really reminds you why you're working so hard and does this invitation to this thing or going to a UFC fight or this does that, is that the thing that's going to make my career or is that for my ego self?

And does that serve the goal? And I think when you have a principal goal, then it really ends up being an organizing feature that really kind of self sustains and creates a lot of simplicity out of what seems like very complex sort of situation. So you guys, you're just chasing your ego going to cool UFC events without me. I'm staying home with my family.

See, exactly. Exactly. Dang. You messed up the whole thing for me now. As long as your family doesn't listen to this, it's totally fine. Hopefully they won't. I'll tell them, listen to everyone, but this is a terrible episode.

Don't listen to this. I would love to hear my, I have so many like personal questions for you guys after you've been through this now. I know you guys have the foundation standup kids. And one of the, I immediately thought of you guys. We have year round school here, which I actually love. Yeah, I'm a fan. My daughter just entered kindergarten and probably like three weeks into it, we noticed like not normal behavior patterns,

like not in a good way either. It wasn't like she became ultimately significantly nicer and more caring after all of a sudden there was like behavior that just didn't make any sense. And one day she came home and she goes, we were like, what's going on? Like, is someone like not nice to you? Like, what is it? And and she goes I just don't have any time to play anymore and every ounce of my soul like left and I went I am totally maybe not failing you but this is not the path that we're going to be taking for the next like 10 years like I can't I can't do this um how how have you guys kind of managed that um I immediately, like, my brain's like, well,

we need to move to the woods, and we need to be homeschooling, and there's just nonstop play with a little bit of reading, writing, and math, and we should be good from here, which is probably a step too far, maybe four or five steps too far. But I would love to hear your thoughts kind of on youth development and how the school, maybe not school system as the big they, but how did you guys kind of navigate some of those pieces where you want your kids to just be having fun playing and learning these like meta skills that they're going to need forever? Where is the balance in that? Yeah. I mean, I'll do a quick backstory of standup kids because it's so relevant to the story you just told about your daughter. And that is that, you know, you guys know, we became known as like the standing desk people at some point in this whole journey. Right. And that started because, you know, we had our physical therapy clinic inside of San Francisco

CrossFit. We'd see all these people coming in. And then, you know, once we would delve into their background, we'd learn that, yeah, they were CrossFitting or training for a triathlon or whatever, but then they were sitting for like 16 hours. And let me just add that we were working with a lot of corporations trying to untangle a lot of absenteeism, presenteeism with low back pain and neck pain, especially as people were on computers. Small companies like Google. And so Kelly did a talk in 2010 at Google about, you know, not, not sitting as much and, you know, sort of introduced the idea of standing. And this was like very early, like nobody was talking about this then. And fast forward a few years, and we had a daughter in kindergarten and a daughter in like third grade. And every year we would volunteer at field day because field days like this is the star at jam,

like field day is what we're about. Like, it's play and fun. And we would, you know, um, you know, either volunteer at the, the rope, uh, the tug of war or at the sack races. And one year we're at the sack races and we see that the kids actually by and large can't get into the sack, meaning like they can't lift their knee to their chest and like scoop the sack over each of their feet. And then that was sort of secondary to them literally like not being able to jump. Like, do you guys remember? I mean, we're probably a little older than you, but man, in the seventies and eighties, man, like we did the sack race and it was like, you die jumping all the way across the field. And like kids could do it. Kids could do a two leg jump. Yeah. And they were struggling to do a two legged jump. And we just sort of saw these things that were like, wait a second.

And do you remember we added in for the fifth graders, I was like, you need to do a Ford Somersault. Oh, yeah. We added in a Ford Somersault. Because you're in the fifth grade. They couldn't do that. So what we saw were these giant just deficits in sort of basic skill and already like a noticeable loss of mobility and sort of physical skill.

So it's a little bit different than your daughter's play experience, but also like very similar, right? Seeing that you're like, oh shit, this, the one change in my kid's life is this change in environment, which is spending a lot of time in school. And all of a sudden there's all this degradation in their physical function, like scary. And so, so our, our, you know, the, the way that we managed it in our own little school was changing all the desks from sitting to standing desks. And that's when we started Stand Up Kids. And then we've worked over the years to try to add standing desks to more schools. Quick caveat, we did have to at least temporarily shut down Stand Up Kids because of another organization named Stand Up Kids. Stand Up for Kids.

Stand Up for Kids was potentially going to sue us because we had the same name. And so we're actually in a bit of hiatus right now trying to figure out what we're doing and how we're going to rename ourselves. So just if anyone goes looking for us, we're dark right now on the Internet. But what we might say, though, is you need to then think about, okay, like, you know, school can be really important, places of skills. But what kind of environment am I creating at home? Do my kids have a lot of place to play do they have a you know how can i create uh sort of an environment that is more movement enrichment especially early on where we say it's a couple hours where we can sit down but that might mean that we need to sit on the floor and play and you know i would point at erwan lacore's move nat and some of his MoveNet gym related issues or related programs. If you

see it, you're like, oh, it's balance beams and jumping and landing and play. And it's really enrichment. And I think if you put a MoveNet gym into every high school or every middle school, elementary school, you would see a foundationally change in education, everything else, all the metrics that are important to you. But then you also think at home, can I have some rings hanging? Can I put a pull up bar? How do I create this richness? So and we called it we just set traps for our kids. Like, yeah, like there was this point where Adrian Bosman inherited a set of parallel bars and we couldn't fit. We still were at the parking lot.

We couldn't fit him there and they would have died in the rain. And it was like a nice set of gymnastics quality parallel bars. And so when our kids were like your kids age, we put the parallel bars in our garage with the big mat underneath, like it took over our garage. And so we just, you know, we tried to make our house like a play place that that's what we do. Yeah. Pull up bars and mats and balance boards and balls and, you know, like tools everywhere, because you're right. I mean, they're not, they're not going to get enough movement and play at school. And there's too many pressures for the kids to meet these standards and be able to read and do all these things. And, and that's why I also think the second thing is, you know, it, it outsizes the

importance of youth sports and youth athletics and making sure that you're getting your kids into those things outside of school, you know, organized sports. I was really influenced. Actually, our friend is a teacher at a boarding school on the East coast called Proctor Academy. And we went to play them. Oh my God. Yeah. I went to prep school up there. So we having not gone to prep school, we were really inspired by this model they created there. And, and how, and then we modeled our own sort of parenting after this, which is all the kids do whatever they're doing during the day, but then from three to five every day, mandatory, every kid at the school must do a physical activity. Now, mind you, hockey, dance, ball, they give the kids a hundred options. It could be dance.

It could be hockey. It could be sports. I mean, you name it. They give this kids a wide ranging, but I'm telling you, every single kid at Proctor Academy from three to five is engaged in a physical activity. It's part of their culture and their values. And so what we took from that and what we've told our kids is like, Hey, look, move me, moving your body a lot is not an option. What is a choice for you is how you want to move your body. And man, sky's the limit. Like our kids have done it all. They've done martial arts.

They did ballet. They did gymnastics. You know, they did dance. They like, we've let them try whatever they're into and supported that. And that's how we, you know, so, so moving in our family is not a choice, whether or not you move is not a choice. Like, but within movement, man, whatever you want to do, like we will support it. We'll financially support it. We'll get you there. We'll make sure it happens. And I think that's how we've tried to sort of, you know, the standing desk thing, plus trying to like cross balance, you know, the school time with as much movement as we can create in the afterschool evening time as we can. Two things I'd add is that Caroline, very early on, our youngest, who's 15 now, had a trampoline in the backyard.

We had a spring-free trampoline. So parents don't, you're not thinking of the trampolines from your youth that killed people. The spring-free is an elevated bed. It uses these fiberglass rods. You can't fall out of it. And there's nothing to hit. There's no metal part to break your forearm on. And if you just don't backflip and you jump one person at a time, literally it's the greatest child physicality destroyer because they have to self-organize play jump we take little jump breaks so what it says you can get a trampoline that you are fortunate to have that space and that that thing that really is a profound play tool that self-organizes the body last thing is what you're realizing right now is that we need to take all

our most elite fitness professionals and we need to go volunteer at our school. And so if you're a strength coach, you need to teach jump roping and skip it and bring all that stuff in. And once or twice a week, you need to go in and just put it on you to enrich that environment because the teachers who have come through recognize that we want kids that are active and playing. We have all these demands we've got to meet and all these teaching standards and my expertise is not in this it's in teaching kids to read and so we really need our best coaches on the planet to come in and work and we've been doing that for as long as we you know enriching my kids whether they liked it or not like dad's here again for swim team but they become teenagers they're like oh no it's you again but they'll come out of that too and they'll be like coach could you

work with my team so yeah i mean if teachers only realize that you don't have to choose between being athletic and being academic they go hand in hand matter of fact one enriches the other i mean the studies are overwhelming i'm sure you guys have read them you know it's overwhelming that like activity will increase you know like activity in the hippocampus, which is where you learn. And we've all of us, we've had Dr. John Rady on our show before the guy who wrote the book Spark. Yeah. I mean, like, go read, you know, go read the research. Like, you will get smarter if you're more active.

It was dumb of us. You know who's dumb is whoever decided to take PE out of the equation. Yeah. And I mean, that's a man, that's like a, something we can all change in the ballot box. And, you know, one of the ways we can sort of like exercise, but you know, the other thing I forgot to mention is I started this thing when my kids were little called the walking school bus. And I realized that we were doing the same thing that everyone else was doing, which was packing our kids in the car and then going into the drop-off lane and having this unpleasant experience where your kid like

stops, drops and rolls out of the car and they're crying and their lunch falls on the ground. And it's the whole thing is like extremely sad and negative and nobody feels good. And it's like the worst way for them to start school. And we realized if we just woke up 10 minutes early, we could walk our kids to school. And it was like a, what was it? A mile, mile and a quarter, mile and a quarter. And so Kelly and I would get, you know, both directions. We would walk both directions, but it was this amazing, lovely way to have our kids get some physical activity. And, and then the side benefit was we got all this like dope quality time as a family and just walking back and forth. And then, you know, Kelly, you know, sometimes like people would say to me, well, like, I can't do that because I have a job. And I was like,

dude, I have a job. And actually I can walk my kid to school and drive all the way to San Francisco and be in my gym by 9.00 AM. So like, no, get your ass out of bed. Yeah. Get your ass out of bed 10 minutes early and walk your kid to school. And, and man, I think I, you know, we were able to enter the school from this back direction. It was really quiet. We picked flowers. Parents could drop their kids off with us. Yeah. And so we would, we told parents, we said, Hey, at every, every single day, rain or shine, like regardless of the weather, we will be standing on this corner at 7 50 AM. And if you can't walk your kid to school or don't want to leave your kid and don't want them to walk alone.

Leave your kid at this corner. We will shepherd them to school and make sure they make it there safely and cross the streets and all the stuff. And man, some days we would have like 50 kids joining us walking to school. We had adults lose 20 pounds walking two miles.

Just add two miles, they lose 20 pounds, come up to us. And the key here is that we have to think about not necessarily that this movement training, play training happens at discrete times. We want to sort of dissociate that and spread that out, disseminate it across like what's it look like to be brutally tired at the end of the day because I had so much movement. The research is that kids are only moving 2,000 to 3,000 steps a day. That's really, you know, and we've just released recently through another tech company called Nature Quant.

Nature Dose is the app, and it tracks how much time kids are spending outside. And most teenagers and adults are only spending 120 minutes a week outside. So we need to start thinking as parents, where on the margins can I make some change so that my child is getting what she needs? Yeah, I actually have, I feel like most parents, and I'll just lump myself into that,

you end up making really hard decisions. Like my kids get home at five o'clock, 5.15, 5.30, something like that. And I got 45 minutes of daylight and I have to make the decision. Are we going to have a family dinner tonight? Or are we going to go play outside for an hour and a half? And that's really hard, especially when you know, because you're out there every night doing your thing, that there's nobody else outside. Like where does, not even just athleticism, but general movement function, like the ability to hit a baseball or a wiffle ball or catch.

Like I, I don't know. It's not as prioritized in other people's families and that's their own choice and all that. But I, I'm constantly thinking like, well we should all be eating dinner together and saying what we're grateful for every single night. But if we do that, like we're not going to be out here. That's right. And the research is, I think it was Sean Stevenson and his new book talking about looking at the research of that is that the magic numbers three nights a week to eat dinner. Yeah. So I think there's, you know, there's some way where you can do, you know, some of each,

but man, I mean, even just little things like walking to school, like when we were, I think something like 75% of kids live within two miles of their elementary school. So IE within walking distance. And when we were kids, it was like 80% of kids walked or bike to school. And I think it's down to like 12% or something. And, you know, man, I watched as my own school, like where the standing, where the standing desk school, like this lauded school in California. The first all standing desk school in the world. We, the school voted to spend like $50,000 upgrading the drop-off lane because it would get choked by traffic. And man, I was like, if I was the principal, I just freaking rope the

drop-off lane off and say, y'all live within two miles of the school, figure out another way to get here. No kidding. Right. Yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, I think it's really hard, but I do think there's ways that you can make sure, I mean, again, it's hard. And I also would say that I think on a school by school and teacher by teacher basis, I actually think more teachers than you think are open to hearing creative ideas and getting support about how to make more movement rich classrooms. I do think they are because, you know, they're the ones that are on the receiving end of kids who haven't moved and have been on tech too much and have eaten Doritos for breakfast. And so what we found is that often on a teacher by teacher level, there, many of them are very receptive to ideas. And, you know, if you as a family are willing to make investments and,

you know, different ways to think about furniture and movement, rich stuff, like we have found that if you're willing to support your own local school that way, like the teachers and administrators often are receptive to it. It just takes some, a little bit of money and some creative thinking. Well, the benefits you're going to get in the behavior is going to be significant as well. So like, at least we noticed and plus, you know, know to to what anderson i feel like we get more quality time outside playing because kids will naturally bring up things we'll be playing basketball my son will be like you know dad there's this guy who's like annoying me and then we can talk but it seems like when we have dinner they feel pressured to say things that's right you

know what i mean versus just we're playing and they say it naturally so like that's right maybe that's just an old way of looking at things this whole dinner is how people talk versus outside people talking i don't know at least for us the dinner piece is i think we have a culture and this is again borrowing from sean stevenson we have a culture around cooking and we have a culture around eating and it's a free time to talk about family or have a prompt or but just be together and then there's a culture around eating and it's a free time to talk about family or have a prompt or but just be together and then there's a time around teaching our kids how to eat and prepare food and and those things you're right which we may be trying to cram too much in because we're all you know cooked so one of the things that i would suggest everyone if you're listening

to this and you have littles you got to go for a walk in the evening you know take the dog out it doesn't have to be an epic walk 10 minutes but, but just in the evening, this is what we do. And this is how we decompress. And we just retouch, you know, you'll see that there's this theory here, or there's starting to be a theme sort of emerge around how do we create structure that allows us never have to think about doing something. We, you know, we have a sauna and that's one of the ways Julie and I stay in contact, you know, we're in the sauna and we also are lucky enough.

It was one of my dreams as an adult to have a hot tub, and we turn on the hot tub, and I'll tell you what. All our girls, we have two daughters. They're in the hot tub. We're all chilling. Everyone's just chatting under the stars. It's dark, and I'm telling you, man, that time together is part of the routine. We all kind of jump in the hot tub in the evening. I sound like a bougie Marin hot tubber, but it's because I am. And I love it. I'm a hot tub guy too.

And I'll tell you that again, creating structure in your home as the functional unit is just so profound. Turn off the TV, go get, go, go for a walk. Juliet. I actually never even thought, um, cause I went to prep school for four years. So I, every single day of my entire high school career had mandatory. Um, I only cared about playing hockey. So in the fall, they would let me lift weights and in the spring I got to go play golf. And it was like the perfect low to an entire school year, but every single person. And what was so awesome about that is we had varsity for people that really wanted to play. We had JV for people that were on their way learning how to play. And then a thing called thirds, which was let's go learn the introduction

level of how to play soccer. Let's go learn the rules. If you want to go run cross country, we don't care about your mile time. We're going to teach you how to run. And there was a coach for every step of the way. That's so cool. I've never heard of thirds. Yeah. And if you were like a stand, my specific high school had a middle school. So if you were like a straight up gangster in middle school, you got to play thirds with the high schoolers because they knew you were an athlete and you could then go play up with the older kids to go develop skills. But it was always the entire thirds program was a developmental, like how to move. What are the rules?

How do you play this game? How do you work together in a team? There was there was I don't know if they I assume they kept score and played games and all that, but it was always, let's, let's teach the school. I love how you just threw some shade. I assume they played games and they, I didn't go there to be on the third team. There's like 50 things about that, that I think are so cool. And like, I want to learn more and read more about it. But you know, one of the things too, that that also solves is this ongoing problem of sports specialization in kids, right? Like it's something everybody's talking about. And we've, you know, we've struggled with it

because we have a kid who's a high level water polo player and she is needing to specialize now in high school. But man, imagine if part of the baked in culture is like, you need to move your body from three to five. There's a billion options. You can go learn any sport because you can play thirds with no pressure whatsoever. Like as a contrary example, actually, our daughter was invited to play. She's a goalie. She was invited to join the soccer team this year as a goalie because they're lacking a goalie, no experience whatsoever, but they figure the water polo goalie will transfer enough.

But the problem is, is it's a highly competitive team five days a week of practice games tournaments and she can't also she wouldn't be able to do that and still be touching her water polo stuff and so and we had to make the choice but man if there had been a soccer thirds program for her 100 she could have done that so man i mean the whole the whole idea and creating that culture around movement that's mandatory for every kid and that there's this set aside time for it. I mean, man, if every school had that, this would be a different conversation. One of the things that we feel really strongly about is trying to take, and you've heard me say this before, the highest calling of sports performance, sports and elite sport is to transform our communities through health. And if we look,

all of us on this call, look back over the 10 years, we can say, well, how's it going? Are we healthier communities? Are we seeing less orthopedic dysfunction, diabetes and weight gain and all? No, we see more social isolation and adult binge drinking. We're not. The fitness experiment has failed, is failing in real time. And it may be that we're not reaching everyone or it's not inclusive enough, or it's not enough to overpower the sort of sedentary, hyper palatable foods. No matter how much we squat and walk, we're never going to overcome Doritos. That's real. But what I will say is here, we have an opportunity to expand our role in strength conditioning and fitnessing as an aside expand our role in strength conditioning and

fitnessing as an aside that's not strength conditioning that's fitnessing that's like entertainment and belonging to a you know a dance crew which is cool but not strength conditioning but we could say hey part of our mission is to go ahead and work in our communities at that level we just you know, the functional unit of changes we discovered for our school was our kid's teacher. And all we had to do was have a better relationship and to serve the 15 or 25 kids that that teacher was serving. We didn't have to think at the scale and how am I going to get the district? I just had to serve that one classroom. And I think when we start to have that level of intervention and we make it our mission to teach kids. I mean, we had squat club

at our house for a long time. Once a week, other kids would come over and we'd teach them to squat, you know, and it was just called squat club. And, you know, we do squats and it was predicated on this idea. If you just squatted once a week for 10 years, you'd probably be pretty good at squatting. So if we can do that in our neighborhood in our communities then then the promise of strength conditioning and and all of its potential might be realized your parents sorry oh sorry let's relate to schools i hear a lot of people these days talking about exercise snacks and i've tried things like this before like every hour on the hour i i get up my desk and i like shadow box for five minutes like something very simple like that or i just run to the stop sign and back and then I'm back to work. I'm not doing a training

session. It's not particularly hard, but it's just something to get me moving regularly, frequently throughout the day. Do you know if any schools have ever tried to implement anything similar where there's just lots of frequent movement based breaks throughout the day? Yeah, there's there are and there's a lot of teachers interested in there's even this thing that a lot of teachers are doing now called the daily mile, where they're not walking a mile in a row, but they're accumulating a mile with their kids in little snack-like format. And by the way, they're not necessarily going to a track or making it super formalized. They're just leaving the classroom, going outside. And if they have a track, maybe they'll do one loop, but if not, they'll just

walk the halls of their school or go outside and walk around the basketball courts or whatever. But yeah, I mean, there's lots of ways that I think, and I do think, you know, teachers, again, I mentioned this before. I do think teachers are realizing that, you know, this is important because they, they really are the ones on the receiving end of, you know, kids who just have not moved enough. Yeah. Like I've noticed with my kids, especially on

Saturday or Sunday mornings, like we have a tutor comes over to the house. They get a little bit extra tutoring time learning to read. My kids are five, seven and eight. And so just basic reading and math skills on, on the weekend and the days where we wake up and they play outside prior to tutoring, they can focus so much better. It is very tangible. Right. That's just an anecdotal mind-body connection. That means 100%. It's the walking school bus. It's whatever. It is just moving the blood around the body and having some time in the sun.

And then, man, it makes sense that they can focus. If you have a Concept2 rower or a Concept to skier or some kind of there's a thing called the fish game teach your kids how to play the fish game i'm gonna hear this what is the fish game hold on you don't know about the fish game bud i don't know you just keep like pressing the button on the knowledge here dude fish game so great for the kids fish game is great you're a shark and your job is to row until you catch the fish. You go fast and the fish goes up and you go slower and it comes down. You got to sprint and go. And all of a sudden you're like two hours in and you've rode 40 kilometers and you're dead.

But you've, you know, high game on the fish. Yeah. And, you know, you get to the main screen and all of us just click just row, which is like the main option. But you realize below just row is actually like five other choices that nobody ever clicks. And one of those under one of those, you can find the fish game. No way. Sweet. If you, you know, one of the things that has mattered, I think is I, as you, Julia and I have trained together forever and it always is an Epic, but sometimes it's Epic, but we've always, our kids have seen that. And if you really are interested in your kids paying attention, this is what our family does. I mean, just recently our 15-year-old, almost 16-year-old was like,

oh, we don't go on vacation. We travel. She's like, someday, can we just go on vacation? And I was like, that's not what we do. We don't do that. She's like, we're in Norway hiking all day. And I was like, I know. She's like, this is my week off from water polo. I'm like, isn't it great? And, you know, I think they really do model. So if, you know, pick up pickleball, put a basketball hoop. Here's a gift. This probably won't come out before Christmas or the holidays, but there's a thing out now called the Gibb board. Gibbon slack lines made a slack line on a board and you can put it in your house in front of the TV and you have a mini slackline skateboard thing, the Gibboard, and it is so rad.

And it's that kind of thing where we have to be, how can we create this environment where there's just play in the background and you don't have to teach it or be like, let's do pull-ups, children. Like no kid's into that. Yeah. And I think one of the things that's super interesting

in this is we all are in this industry. We have like the cheat code. We have to go do this stuff every day. And it's because when we were 13 years old, we loved playing sports. And then to get better at sports, we started lifting weights. And then we realized like, well, maybe we aren't world-class at the sport to go play pro, but really like this lifting thing. Really like being in gyms.

Those are where my people are. And that physical capacity carries out to want to be able to be able to trust yourself and have the confidence to go play sports as an adult. And what I feel like happens so much is the parents don't have the movement background or the physical capacity to want to go explore movement or to go travel versus being on vacation. And the idea of creating a new habit to go play a new sport or learn something new, it takes so long. Like when I think about people that are just learning how to lift weights because they want to lose weight at 35, well, you're going to suck at lifting weights the same way we all did when we were 14 years old. Like you just, you have to go put in the work to figure out how to sit down and stand up properly, but it takes a long time. How do we kind of bridge that gap of rebuilding

the confidence in people to want to go explore movement in simple ways of even if it's just going for a hike or going to the gym to learn how to lift weights. That gap is and the time that it takes to feel confident in yourself at the gym, I think really is one of the it's like the constraint in the system to people actually getting up to go to move and just do it because they have to suck at it at first. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the big things, and I do think this is changing in our industry and maybe it's just because Kelly and I are getting older. I know you guys have been in a long time and I'm sure the ways in which you think about things have softened over the years, probably the same way it has for us. Not Travis, but I think it's still setting records.

But I think what we've really tried to shift is really removing the dogma from exercise and, and trying to let people know that then I'm talking about the 90%. I'm not trying to talk. I'm not talking about the 10% who are trying to perform at a sport. I'm talking about the 90% of people who just want to feel good in their body and be healthy. You know, we really want to remove the dogma and, and we've just been trying to say, Hey, look, the goal is movement. And what you need to do is try a bunch of things and find something you like doing. And then you should do that because if you like it, you're going to do it. Um, and, and remove this, these ideas of like, there's only one way to do things. I mean, if you even asked my 2011 self, I would have been like

CrossFit and you got to do all the moves and you have to do, you know, like I would have been way more hardcore 10 years ago about what I thought people should do. And now, especially because I'm a parent raising kids in a community of people who aren't athletic and are, you know, doing exactly what you guys are doing, which is they didn't grow up with a training tradition. I'm now in their 35, 40, you know, having kids and little kids, it starts to add up and they're realizing they need to add something in and, you know, telling most of those people to go to CrossFit as a failed experiment, right. It, for some of those people, they may just need to go do like a body pump class at the YMCA or whatever. So I think taking some of the

dogma out of it and being like, look, the primary goal is to move your body. Like, right. And obviously, you know, you can you can tweak that up and down. You can make it more, you know, like more like optimized or whatever word you want to do. But really, I think we've been trying to say, man, find a thing you like to do, find a movement and a tradition you like to do and do that. Get good. That's the key. Right. Yeah. And then and then we always say you had for your kids. You're saying. Yeah. And then the only footnote is, you know, maybe you should lift a weight like that would be a footnote. I'd say a small footnote in like two point bond is like, you know, you probably as you get older should lift a weight. But I mean, primarily the goal is move more. You know, we'd be way better off if people just found a movement that they liked and did that.

You know, a lot of go ahead. I was just going to we we implemented like a morning workout and then a noon workout for we homeschool you know but let me give a caveat my wife is incredibly smart she went to wake forest her grandmother went to juilliard her grandfather went to yale so like i wouldn't just say that anybody should homeschool but i can't think of a teacher i'd want more than my own wife so ash was dead lifting yeah yeah yeah while she's doing all that i'm i'm dead i go to appalachian state someone has to deadlift someone has to do the work someone's got to keep the lights on but it was key so in the morning they do three overhead squats three front rolls they do a

bear crawl down and back they do a rope climb and they do sounds like a lot but it's not they do a pull-up just one then they do monkey bars down and back and then they go to school then at noon they do maximum pull-ups maximum push-ups maximum sit-ups which we document so they're trying to beat it and it's fun it's a game to them of course these are my kids so you know i have an advantage that's all they see they do a plank for time they do a jump in touch where we we actually mark how high they're jumping so they're trying to beat it they do now they do three rope climbs for time five overhead squats and we start to add weight if they're perfect and then we do a sprint ammo like a military yeah yeah and then they do a

sprint around the house so it's's really based on Andy's, all the different parameters of health and fitness that he talked about. Yeah. On Huberman. And so it has been like clutch for us. Anyway, what does the state of your basement looking like these days? Like that's a, you converted it into a big jungle gym for your kids. sounds like that's all it is it's like it's monkey bars it's a climbing wall of course there's all the there's three different levels for bars for the kids for weightlifting i'm not trying to brainwash them but i am and so yes it's all it is they think it's play but to me it's prep and so yeah and it's working you know brilliantly my little six six-year-old is about to turn seven. Bear

is going, I mean, I know every parent thinks their kid is awesome. My kid's a little bit more awesome, but so. You know, the other piece of advice I'd give to all parents, especially those of us who are more fitness inclined is also, I like to tell the story is to be also willing to outsource because there was a point when our daughter Caroline was like 11 or 12, and Kelly's always kind of struggled with finding a balance between making sure he's not that dad. I'm with him, yes. Right?

And so sometimes I've noticed and pointed out to him that he swung the pendulum too far. And I said, hey, dude, our kids should get some benefit from being Kelly Starrett's daughters, right? Like they should be able to go off to college and know how to do all the major lifts. And, you know, and I think he was like, I'm trying hard not to be like the crazy psycho dad. So, so I said, so basically you need to get out there in our side yard and teach our daughter Caroline to lift. And he's like, okay,

okay. You're right. And four sessions in, she comes in the house each time crying and i was like all right this isn't working out too far yeah it went too far so so i found a whiny little bitch i found a local olympic lifting club and i they had a kid's program and i signed her up for that and she did that she went to that twice shout out yasha heavy athletics oh yasha vay yeah yeah and they taught her how to do all the lifts in this great, fun environment. And then, you know,

then, you know, they were able to spin her back to us and she understood what she was doing. And now she can totally train with Kelly under Kelly's guidance. And, you know, there's no tears.

So there, you know, I think there are these key points as a parent where you're like, yeah, here's mine now. Her, her overhead squad is so gorgeous. Yeah.

I mean, you know, you can follow her Caroline Starrett goalie to see one of the nicest overhead squats out there. And I only want to point people to her Instagram only because she's 5'10 and she's 15 and

people are like, I'm too tall to overhead squat. I'm like, is that really true? Let's go and find out because let me show you my daughter with six foot wingspan monster. You know, Travis and I, we talked about about this before but one of the things that we have texted back and forth about a thousand times is how do we get these little micro sessions of lifting in around kids who are doing sports yeah and really hard you know what we found is that 20 minutes of just a couple movements making a little couplet a strength couplet a positionplet, handstands and front squats, you know, you can put in any program you want, tens, fives,

doubles on them. It doesn't matter. But the regular exposure of that, Caroline's doing one round, Cindy every day, she does five pull-ups, 10 pushups, 15 air squats as just part of her skills, just because I want her to be the only kid with pull-ups when she goes to college. And so much of, I think what we're doing is we're seeing, did it work? We just sent our kid off. She's a freshman at Michigan and she knows how to lift. She knows how to eat. She knows how to recover and train. And we're like, oh, look, this is a kid who actually goes to the weight room and knows how to squat and find kids who can squat. So part of what we should be doing as parents is sending our kids out, being prepared to be able to handle themselves physically and to know what it takes to put those inputs in. And there is no

substitution for early decades of conditioning, aerobic fitness, and strength training. You cannot catch those kids. Wait a second, Travis, did you say that your chosen child is named bear bear that there's now there's rock there's bear and there's magnolia and all three are like uh my oldest rock is the most athletic bear is the strongest and then my daughter she might be the ceo of everyone so yeah sure did you know that our that our is she her name or given name is caroline but her nickname is bear no yeah yeah i didn't know that i was like overhearing you say bear and i was like wait did i hear that bear bear bradley yes he's quite the freak little yeah i can barely wrestle and he's six like he is his chest is he's just he's just different even compared to me, he's just different.

I love it. I love it. Yeah, he is. He is. He's crazy. If we're – the idea is to run – when we are actually doing good coaching, this is the problem, I think, with fitnessing. It's hard.

You're making a theoretical hypothesis that if we just dump a bunch of shit into a beaker and stir it up, something's going to come out. And there are some things that come out, some cardiorespiratory fitness, metabolic conditioning, et cetera. But when we're really doing strength conditioning, we make a hypothesis every day around a movement, around a position, around a capacity, and then we test it, and then we adjust for the next time. And we should apply the same level of sort of critical thinking to the long-term movement development of our time. And we should apply the same level of sort of critical thinking to the long-term movement development of our kids. And Juliette is a three-time world champion whitewater paddler. I paddled high level. And one of the things that we got from probably having

very dysfunctional families was the need to exercise and compete and drive. But ultimately, we know that your sports are going to end probably unless you are super talented. So your goal is your kids to be able to play a high school sport, you know, or engage in some kind of physical thing like dance or, you know, something that they love martial arts, something that they love so that then they leave the house. They don't have this negative association with exercise and training because we run in now with the work that we're doing. We run into adults who cannot move well, who are starting to have movement pain, you know, starting to not know

how to, you know, they're getting bad blood panels and they don't know how to self-soothe. And, and it's like, we've, we failed them when we could have had some net positive things going at least to high school. I mean, not to mention too, that there are, I mean, you guys have littler kids, I think, but wait until they get a little older and you start running into the very many parents who all assume their child is going to be the next, you know, Michael Jordan or whatever. Your assumption is that I'm going to run into them because I'm going to be so far on the other side, like if there's the other, the far end away from everybody.

Yeah. Well, it's funny that you say that because I wish you could like visualize Kelly at every water polo game we go to. They'll be like the stands where all the parents are. And I'm over there in the stands. Kelly's like off in some corner, like nowhere. He's alone. He can't take it. He just like he's like in his own little universe.

So that's going to be you. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think, you know, we're, we're just out there beating our little drum of trying to just help people rethink their expectations for their kids and, and think about youth sports as a way to get kids to love moving their bodies and, and know how to take care of their bodies the way we all did. So that when you say goodbye to them and they go to college, they have that skill set. That's way more important than them playing a sport in college, having this toolkit of movement and health in there that you've taught them as a parent, way more important than being an actual athlete. I think it's key that we frame it as fun. See, like with my kids, they get excited. I don't say

you have to go down there. I'm like, Hey, we get to go down there. You know, we get to go and do this thing that they enjoy. We don't, it's not never, ever. Parents listening, never use fitness as a form of punishment. It's a never. So it's just play. They just, they're playing me. Of course they're training, but to them, they're just playing. And that's the way it should be framed.

Oh, I want to transition a little bit and, and talk about the ready state. Um, I want to say the last time, uh, Juliet, we had you on, I guess you weren't actually on the show, but we were in Tahoe and you guys were going through the big transition from mobility WOD, um, and growing into this new big, bad version of yourselves. Um would love to know how, I feel like anytime there's like a rebrand, it's kind of the growth of yourself into this new thing. How has that kind of, and I know the business side is less interesting and more to me is the, um, who you guys as a company have become and the mission that you're, you're putting forward. How has that developed over the last three, four years since we were all standing in a windstorm and everyone stole their

name together. Yeah. I mean, you know, I think it is, I think for us, because I think you guys know this, you know, again, being not 22 and you sort of have seasons of your professional life, I felt like under MobilityWOD, we felt like we were just kind of stuck in this little mini lane when really we did want to be able to expand out and be able to talk about stuff like this that we're talking about with you guys that we're passionate about, like kids and youth athletics and how to get the general public to be excited about moving more. And, you know, and so I think, I think that's what the, it sounds silly that a name could create that expansion, but I really do think it did. It sort of was like, you know, the ready state means something to people, regardless of definition, most people can come up with, it means something to them about being ready for whatever they're into. And so I think that name really did allow us to expand and be able to sort of, you know, not pivot because we still are at our core, like trying to help people with their musculoskeletal pain and injury and movement.

That's still the core of what we do, but it did allow us to expand out and, and really sort of have like an umbrella under which we could talk about all of these other things that we care about and backed into having to care about because we're in this you know crazy health wellness fitness business i don't know what do you think about no just even though the terms that we chose we're the first what anything people probably heard that before when and we basically were so clever the put the word mobility on the map eric cressy had made a DVD about magnificent mobility, but that was the only notice in our whole fitness strength, conditioning landscape, the word mobility didn't exist. And we chose that word to really have discrete, you know,

objective measures. Like this is your range of motion. This is what your range of motion should be. And can you control it? And did it give you better outcomes? But the problem is that, that really, that word became like the word core or extreme or, you know, it just didn't mean anything. So, you know, I think also sort of unencumbering, we've always been, you know, sort of CrossFit transcendent in our work with the militaries or all these national teams or, you know, the professional sports that we work with or the Olympics. It's not CrossFit. And we don't, you know, CrossFit gave us a tool to understand Olympic lifting and conditioning and all these basic skills. And certainly we love CrossFit, but also what we realized is that it was a big

negative association that people were like, those are the cross. I mean, even still today, people were like, Kelly started physical therapist, CrossFit trainer. I'm like, what the I'm CrossFit trainer. Like, that's what I am, I am. So I think it did that. And what's interesting, we're in this moment because getting people's attention is hard. Getting them into the program is hard. Not chasing the little shiny thing. Let me just double click on this. There is no substitute for being in one place for a long time doing the same thing.

You really have to be consistent. Bone crushing consistent. Yeah. I really wanted to ask you guys a question because as Juliet, you said earlier, if you would ask me 10 years ago, well, 10 years ago, I was going into my third regionals. It was the only thing that mattered. If I didn't go to the games, I might as well not come home at night. Why would anybody respect me? It's the only thing. Nobody should train with me. Nobody should come to my gym if I don't make it to this level because that's the only thing I've thought about for the last decade of my life and I have to go do this thing. Never actually got there. So you can still make a career out of it. But as you, as you like progress in it, I'm assuming the idea of mobility, you say the word gets totally

killed and it's like, train your core, but you also start to realize, well, it's not just, are we going to sit here and mash tissues? It's, are we breathing properly? Are we recovering? Are we able to go out and get a walk? Are we getting sunshine? Like all of those pieces add into this like larger idea of for us health. Like I just, where we are right now and understanding with Dan and Andy and all, how do we piece all this stuff together and organize it into a life where you're, you're very healthy. And you don't create orthorexic people who are just, you know, you know, Andrew Huber

out and, you know, just being, you know, nutty, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Like today he posted the thing about, um, I can't wait for all everybody to like go crazy because his, one of his things he's posted recently is that it's actually better to just do one sauna a week but a really long one and like i can't wait to see everyone's gonna freak out yeah they're like what i thought i was supposed to sauna five days a week you know i think in our following this

line of this conversation part of our trajectory in terms of even some of the books that we've been writing where we started where we're going high, what we really have tried to do with all the information and all the experience we've had in the last 15 years is say, what does that look like for a person? And how do we make exercise sort of an extracurricular? So our last book, Built to Move, is a good example of this. Just out in April. And what we've really tried to say was, what's essential?

As Andy Galpin says, what are the performance anchors around, you know, people sort of thriving and then living the lives that they want to lead? Because you, everyone on this call has sort of an idea of what you should be able to do with your body. And it's really divorced from the reality of most people who just don't want to hurt when they get out of bed. Right. And they want to go on vacation, not fall. And what we, one of the things that we really wanted to do was create some objective measures, sort of real clear, vital signs around some of the things you were talking about. And I'll tell you, we, you know, we owned a gym for 17 years and man, you can't talk and

have people in your gym and not talk to them about their sleep and their basic nutrition and their ability to recover and their, you know, and their ability to chill out. Like you can just smash them over and over again and be like, oh, it's, you know, the other 23 hours of the day are on you. But if you're serious about really helping and transforming people's lives, you have to back into these things. And this book that we wrote really has, we tried to create some movement vital signs for people so they could become interested in their range of motion and, you know, what they should be able to do with their body. But then the other part of it are sort of some behavioral vital signs with again evidence-based you know the research supports and here are the things that we think

really make a durable person not just a person who's gonna you know be frail and skinny when they're 100 but a person who's you know is trying to out snatch their friends on the trampoline so that i don't know if trampoline snatches have happened yet, but is that a thing? Oh, it will be. That sounds super cool. I bet. I bet. Once you get it going, that's a, that's a task for bear. That's a task. I think I just saw an Olympic lifter lifting, lifting coach with a,

you know, five pound weight on a, on a rubber thing, trying to show us, you know, and I was like, Oh, here it is again. We can't escape the trampoline analogy us, you know, and I was like, oh, here it is again. We can't escape the trampoline analogy. But, you know, I think one of the ways that we have to do it is becoming experts in behavior change, which means where and when are people going to do all of these crazy behaviors? And if you're a busy parent and you drop into one of these really technical conversations on the internet, you're like, I can't do any of this stuff. Like, where do I even buy supplements? Like, you know? And so I think when we started working with more and more C-suite organizations, teams, universities, we really started to see that the magic was finding the places where we could put inputs in and allowed it to be sustainable

over time. And so instead of just seeing someone commit to a heroic 20 days, you know, of something, they really could spread this out and say, Hey, I can commit to this over the long haul and I'm seeing results. Yeah. I love the long-term trajectory side of it because I just can't imagine doing anything that I did 10 years ago, much less the idea that now I look at my, like I'm so stoked for my mom that goes and lifts weights because she had a shoulder replacement. And she's like, do you see? I can like put a three pound dumbbell over my head.

And I'm like, yeah, that's incredible. So awesome. My dad gets to go, he wake up and go swimming every morning and he thinks that he's at the Olympics. I'm just like, dude, just keep going. Let me ask you, do you think this is a function? I mean, Julie and I are both 50. Travis, I think you're 50.

50. Yeah. And the question is, do you come to this consciousness because you finally like aged up and you're an adult? And could you have this conversation with yourself when you were 20? No. No chance. And that's what I love about it is you start – everything that you do has to be – this is why if I could tell any age person, you have to find a framework or a context to why it's important for you.

And if I was interested in going to the CrossFit games, well, I have to go do things that get me to the CrossFit games. And if I want to be a great parent, I have to go do things that allow me to run a business and be a husband and be a parent. And then I have this like somewhat checklist of it's like, I'm always going to be a parent. Even if my wife leaves me, I still have to be a parent. And then I have to be a husband underneath that. And as long as she doesn't leave you, it fails. You might leave me at the business fails, but even if the business fails, I still need to be a husband and I still need to be a dad, but the business kind of feeds that. And underneath that, the fourth thing now is training. So if fitness

is fourth, notice I didn't say anything about friends yet. If fitness is fourth, what does fitness look like if it's the fourth most important thing? A lot of it is, do I get to go run some sprints once a week? Can I lift two to three days a week and just touch all the pieces to keep the interest going on all the work I've done for the past almost 30 years? There has to be a framework for understanding why you're going and doing the things and the intensity that you're bringing to it, the variety you're bringing to it. Does it kill you if you take four days off? Well, it would have 10 years ago. I would have been an anxiety-ridden mess if I didn't train for four days. But now- And we can flabby.

That happened last week. Right, right, right. Yeah. And you know what I was thinking about when you were saying the fitness is fourth, and I think this is where we've tried to support people outside of our industry. As you think about for all of us, I would say in my order of operations, it would be the same as you fourth. But I also have this man, this like all of you, this infinite access to easy ways to do that. So even though it's fourth, man, I have like a gym in my garage, a gym in my office. I have, you know,

tools everywhere. I have, I have a swing set with a swing sets. It's like, if I go on a trip, chances are, I know someone who owns a gym, right? So it's like, we have this infinite access. And so we're always trying to step back and be like, okay, imagine you're, you know, you have fitness is fourth for you, but you don't have any connection whatsoever to this health, you know, fitness space. Don't have any access to any of that stuff. Like, where do you do? And what do you do? And that's one of the reasons why we're like, man, walking is like a five-star activity because it does actually help. Everybody can do it. I mean, you know, most people can do it. You can, you know, do it on a treadmill or outside or whatever.

We're like five-star activity walking, right? Because if you really step out from our sort of high-performance universe, like that's something everybody can do. Five stars. Now, you know, I totally, with what you said, it's like, you know, the why you do it and like the whole so i announced i'm gonna compete again the only reason nobody saw that coming at all out of the blue the only reason is i want my sons and my daughter to see it you know your parents are always when i was your age

i did xyz and like none of us ever believes it and so like i want them to see it but i also want to see if i can do it in a way that i think i hope they can because if they have to do what i did when i was young i don't want them to do it you know because you obsess you know nothing good else all i cared about was competing so i just want my sons and my daughter to see it once you know at a high level i don't have any you know ideas that i'll win i definitely believe i can compete with anyone in the world in powerlifting but like i don't see me winning but i see me being able to do it at that level. So they can see it. They see that, you know, I sleep right, which I am. They see that I'm eating

right, which I am now. Like they see that and I'm still staying healthy. Like I'm doing my cardio, I'm doing my, my movement prep. So I want to see if they can see it just once. And then for sure want to retire for sure. You know, what's also cool about that is Kelly and I are obsessed with the idea of the importance of taking risks, you know, both having our kids be comfortable taking risks, but taking risks ourselves in life. We just had Dr. Tommy Wood on our podcast and talking about brain health and, you know, how to keep your cognitive function alive, right? He's so awesome.

And, you know, what I took away was like, man, you got to keep doing different and new things and taking risks. And how cool for your kids. I mean, even though I know that you have a history in powerlifting and you're a total slayer, but even still at your age, when you haven't been competing in a while, it's still taking a risk.

And like, what a cool thing to show your kids. To put myself out there, to potentially, I mean, it could be terrible. I don't think so, but like, it could go terrible, could go i don't think so but like it could go terrible but i'm gonna try and they're gonna see it and they're gonna see me do all the things that takes and then i can i feel like i can relate to them then and so then when i say something like this is what it takes to do something incredible they will have seen it instead of heard about it one of the things i love about that and both you two talking about this risk piece is finding ways to compete which is a shorthand for play right

it's okay to like have a moment we're throwing rocks into a cup you know i mean and we're it's for the world champion of the world for rocks into money in the world. That's right. But suddenly if it's darts or you can play slam ball on the net, I think we've seen pickleball work its way into families. And one of the things that I love about Caroline playing so much water polo right now, she plays a lot of games and she always has a game the next day. And it means that she's got to get herself organized, you know, deal with that stress, come through the game, be free afterwards, enjoy it, and then get back to work. And that is why I think there's so many ways into understanding ourselves, but sport is a really good one to understand teamwork and communication and support and, you know, nutrition and training and movement. And, you know, I heard Caroline say something the other

day. She was playing in a big game and the superstar on our team, who's just a monster, was really sick. She showed up, had to go compete, even though she wasn't feeling her best. She's on all the cold meds. And Caroline threw her a ball. It was just, she threaded the needle, just dropped a dime and it hit the kid. And like between the elbow and her armpit, like that's where she, from across the pool, full sprint, Caroline drops it in. And the kid just missed it for a second. You know, and when I talked to Carolineoline about it caroline was like yeah i should

have led her another foot and what i heard was not like i dropped that dime and she didn't score the game you know getting goal what she said was i could have done better i could have been a teammate and it's that teammate related thing you it's so hard to teach that in other models other situations maybe you know hey i'm i'm playing flute or you'm playing flute or I'm doing art and I could have been a more generous artist. But if it's really about interacting and teaching these things over and over and over, because it takes so much repetition, we're starting to see those things reap their benefits a little bit about how am I a good teammate? How do I self-soothe? And exactly what you're saying, you got to risk it. And that can be anything.

Not enough to walk a 5K. What a life lesson she learned right there. What fruit you guys got to see that she is more of a person that takes responsibility versus blaming. You know, because like nothing of any value would have come of her talking about her teammate missing the ball. She can't control that. What she could have, what she could control, maybe I could have let her another foot made it a little easier. And that's what I think is missing people who have done weightlifting from the very beginning. I think right now there's a big talk in the culture, at least for me and a few of the other coaches. There's a culture thing missing, and I believe that's it, is that a lot of them are specializing

now in weightlifting at an early age, and so they never get that team sport experience. And so you get a lot of the blaming or excuses, which is, I mean, nothing of value. When someone has a bad meet and they talk about all the reasons that caused it versus what they could have done better. Nothing good comes of that. And that's, what's missing in the sport away. In my opinion. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. It's tough. It's tough to be meta. Gymnastics do it. Get to gymnastics, gymnastics, kids, gymnastics, get to it. Let's be honest. It's not gymnastics. It's gymnastics. Yeah. Do. Five-year-old. Let's be honest. It's not gymnastics. It's nastics.

Yeah. Do you want to know the most depressing thing in the world? Is that I get to go watch my daughter do gymnastics because they don't have adult classes. And every time I throw her in the car and she's like, I don't really want to go today. I go, all I want to do is take gymnastics with you and they don't let me do it. It's depressing. Gymnastics is the coolest thing in the world.

It's so cool. It is so cool. Finding an adult class is like impossible. Let's be honest. We had some really high gymnasts at our gym for a long time and watching them teach adults gymnastics, it's worse than weightlifting. It is so bad. I can tell you why any coach doesn't want to do that i wouldn't want to take you on

yeah what you're gonna say is can i backflip and that's like hey can i full snatch on my first day i'm like you don't even know where to put your feet i will say this about anders is that dude can pretty much do any movement in the world oh i'm I'm sure. Pretty darn good. Like way beyond me. Like he can do anything pretty good. So I don't know if he does anything incredibly well, but he does everything pretty darn good. So that's why they invented sport for us called CrossFit. CrossFit is your sport, brother.

We are above average at a lot of things. We are a culture of slightly above average. I would dominate CrossFit. It was just a snatch ladder or a deadlift ladder every time nothing else they invented that sport to crossfit specialist made it a week and a half that's right that's right so uh where can people find you guys uh at the ready state on all the at the ready state on the internet and all the channels i'm at juliette starrett if you want to see the family stuff and behind the scenes and that's pretty much it there we go thanks for having us you guys trap smash uh you know actually be my first time plugging stronger

experts.com so i'm a part of that yeah so for any of your courses that you could think of you know like you know nutrition weightlifting uh speed training go to strongexpert.com or instagram massively performance or if you want to see me debate a lot of people go to twitter at massively and win debate and win all right doug larson there you go on it on instagram douglas e larson uh ke, Juliet, always good to see you guys. By the way, I just finished Built to Move on audiobook here in the past couple of weeks and really enjoyed it. So thank you for that. Audience, if you haven't listened to that,

highly recommend it. You bet, appreciate you guys coming on the show. Thank you so much. Not every single time your name comes up, whether we're on this show or it just happens in my life, I always tell those people that about 15 years ago, I called a number on the internet to see if I could come work out in a parking lot. And Kelly Starrett called me back personally to say,

come on down. Don't worry about drop-ins, just come rage. And it was one of the coolest days ever. So we're probably about 15 years away from that date. And I still appreciate you guys just as much. So thanks for coming on the show. Thanks, guys. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. And we're Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. Make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com.

That is where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will receive. You can access that for free over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.