Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Built To Move — How To Take Care Of Your Body | Dr. Kelly Starrett

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

How can we ensure that we function optimally and feel great as we age? What makes a durable human? How do we combat the effects of our modern, more sedentary ways of being on our body’s need for activity? These are a few of the questions that this week’s guest, Dr. Kelly Starrett, can help us answer. Known as a “mobility pioneer,” Kelly’s career as a doctor of physical therapy has led him to some extraordinary places. He consults athletes and coaches from the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, US Olympic Team and CrossFit; he works with elite military personnel; and he consults with world-leading corporations on employee health and well-being. Kelly’s work, however, is not limited to coaches and athletes – he believes that every human being should know how to move and be able to perform basic maintenance on themselves.The author of two best-selling books, “Becoming a Supple Leopard” and “Ready to Run,” and co-founder of the mobility training platform, The Ready State, Kelly’s work offers comprehensive tools and foundational wisdom to optimize movement and unlock pain-free performance. His newly released book “Built to Move,” which he co-wrote with his wife Juliet, guides readers through the ten essential habits to help you move freely and live fully. In this thought-provoking conversation, we explore why intentional movement is so vital to our well-being over time, best practices for managing stress and pain, and what it means to have a game plan for the long game._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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A physical should actually be not just what's going on with your blood panel and your blood pressure, but how you actually move too. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. And I'm thrilled to welcome Dr. Kelly Starrett to the podcast for this week's conversation. Known as a mobility pioneer, Kelly's career as a doctor of physical therapy has led him to some extraordinary places. He shared his health and well-being methods with a vast and varied audience. He's worked with professional athletes, Olympians, elite military personnel, corporations as well. Now, after spending decades consulting and coaching, Kelly has helped to revolutionize the field of performance therapy and self-care. A best-selling author and the

co-founder of the mobility training platform, The Ready State, Kelly's work, it offers a comprehensive set of tools and foundational wisdom to optimize movement and to unlock pain-free performance. These are massive abilities for people to unlock here. His newly released book, Built to Move, which he co-wrote with his wife, Juliet, guides readers through the 10 essential habits to help you move freely and to live fully. In this conversation, we explore why intentional movement is so important for our well-being over time, how to assess your vital signs for basic movement, and even things like the downfalls to intermittent fasting.

So many people are talking about intermittent fasting, and Kelly brings up really important points to make sure we pay attention to. We get into how to enhance your sleep and the benefits of fidgeting. If you're ready to create your game plan for the long game, this one's for you. So with that, let's get right into this week's conversation with Dr. Kelly Start. Kelly, I've been looking forward to sitting down with you for a long time. Your work on social and the way that you convey the importance of healthy mobility and moving and getting your body dialed in has been awesome to watch. I listen, I learn, and I practice your stuff. So I'm stoked that you're here. You recently just released your

book, Built to Move. Why this book and why now? I thought stretching could really use a facelift. I think with all of the changes in our lifestyles, being impacted by sleep, inactivity, the food choices, the stress, the work, we're starting to see that for us, it's starting to begin to impact our ability to move freely and in a pain-free way. So what we're trying to do with Built to Move is establish some benchmarks and some vital signs that anyone can use to say, hey, how is my lifestyle impacting my way to move through the environment? And what are some of the misconceptions and some of the myths surrounding movement that are creating problems for people right now?

One is that one hour exercise three times a week solves all our problems. We want to expand what people think about in terms of how their body is moving their environments to 24 hours. So a physical practice means what happens when I wake up to when I go to bed. We want to start to view exercise as an extracurricular. So if we can start to empower people on small behaviors that they can integrate into their life, they will feel better and have better access to the range of motion so they can do the things they want to do. How did you get into, before we get into the tactics of like what people can do to have a healthier body, because we are professional sitters, how did you get into this space? Like why, why this? As long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with performance, exercise, training. I grew up in a, as a single child of a single mother in Germany, and I was exposed to a lot of sports, but I remember clearly like the, I think the first

awareness moment was watching a Andre Arnold who was the world cup. I was at a ski race camp and he was diagramming the term and talk the turn and talking about foot pressure. And I remember being like, I was 12, I think. And I was like, this is it. This is the greatest. How can we talk about this and other aspects of my life? Uh, full disclosure, everyone, my mom's a psychologist and I think I had a little bit too much awareness of my own process and awareness. But I really came to understand pattern recognition and understanding how things fit together. Like I was obsessed with Legos. I could stare at 10,000 pieces and find the piece.

And I think all of those things started coming together in terms of understanding and then getting, having some success with sports that I could as a, as a young, as a youngster, as, as understanding my body as a way of coming to understand the world in my own brain, a little bit through stress, through sports, through kayaking, through skiing, through mountain biking, all the things we did. And it's interesting. I, uh, became a professional paddler and then injured myself. Paddler meaning? Whitewater slalom. So in the Olympics where they hang the gates over. I paddled myself right out of a job with an overuse injury. One that was completely of my

making. The old model was work till you break and then we'll back off and we'll go a little further. Literally it was the old model and I broke. And at that moment, I sort of had an existential crisis that, A, I wasn't probably a very good paddler relative to the world champions at the time. But, B, what I saw was, hey, this isn't working for me. And I started asking a lot of other questions, sort of applying the same rubric. And I remember pointing and being like, well, did know, did you know this was going to happen? And they're like, well, we anticipated what happened. And that's really frustrating. And that really sent me on this path of ultimately trying to understand what

was going on by going to physio school. How old were you at this time? I'm in like early twenties. Okay. So you were already done with the college? Always done with college. Okay. So you're aspiring to be a professional

athlete. I was. In rowing. In this esoteric sport that no one cared about, no one paid attention. Was the Olympics? It is the national team and I did non-Olympic years. So we didn't make the Olympic team. We wouldn't make the national team. We wouldn't make the Olympic team because they take one boat. Oh, it's take one boat. But that idea of everything in sort of this low level, you know, very decentralized programming kind of, that's the one, the goal at the time was to try to make the Olympics. And, but, you know, underneath that, we were all river runners. We kayaked on the weekends, we were river guides. We taught kayaking. We rafted.

We traveled. And, you know, I think what I realized is that I was developing all this really rich experience. And the way I was learning how to do those things was the way I had learned to do all these things. And then all of a sudden I had that moment where I was like, I think I need to grow up and actually be able to have a set of skills. And it seemed like physiotherapy was the best way in to working in this environment that I wanted to work in. And the punchline is it didn't get me very far. Classical physio education didn't answer the questions to which I was looking. Okay. That's an easy segue. What were you trying to unlock early and is it still the same now? I think one of the things that I was really interested in is trying to not just play defense all the time. I think that's what I felt like in my own experience. You mean physically or in life?

Just reacting to injury, reacting to loss. I felt like there had to be a better way to be more robust. When we're paddling big rivers, big classified rivers, you get immediate feedback about, was it a good line? Was it a good choice? Did you do the right things? And let's back up. Class one is like-

Flat water. Yeah, we're just kind of cruising. Yeah. You know, and like, it's nice. That's right. Super fun. Three is like, no, this is like, we're doing so- Hey, did you-

Oh, that was fun. That was good. Splashy fun. Yeah. Splashy fun. Right. Four is you might find a hole. For sure. And most people stop there because there's a real risk and perceived risk. That's right. Yeah. So four is like, there's an imaginary line for most folks between three and four and then four is more business. But when you hit five. It's big. And the consequences are real that you can do everything right and end up in the wrong place. And it's a big, scary place. And you really rely

on your friends and your experience. And so understanding a little bit of my framework was, you know, through the lens of being a guide, this chaotic environment where we can't control everything, having to rely on each other, and then coming into this professional sports world where my experience there was all reactive. That, you know, we just sort of, I did all the things you told me to do and I got injured and I got burned out and I got, you know, and I saw that happen over and over again. And I started asking a lot of questions. So like, how could we have prevented these things? How many eggs have to be broken?

We're just like, I don't know. The egg wasn't very strong. We threw it against the wall a bunch and it broke. And I think that really was the genesis. I don't know if I've ever even said this before. I think that was the first time I realized, hey, I wonder if there's something we could do to have these inputs on the front hand to build better resilience, better performance guarantees, instead of just waiting for something to go wrong. I'm going to pause the conversation here for just

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Okay. And now I feel like you're, I feel, this is a feel because I'm just i've i'm excited to know you now i've been watching you for a long time is that you're speaking to people like me you're speaking to yeah so you're speaking to folks that are sitting a lot that are you know professionals in something whether it's uh an active way to engage in your work or it's more of a passive sitting that and i'm just talking about physically like you're speaking to folks like us, right? Which is you got to take care of your hips, your knees, your joints, you've got to take care of yourself. So there was a migration from elite sport, elite operators to, I don't know what you would call it, like folks like you and me.

Yeah. Okay. And I think you pick up on that there are echoes of this performance idea that somehow there has to be a way of informing better practice through this laboratory. What I had come to understand was something that recently was said by a coach named Franz Bosch. He says there's more variation in waltzing than there is in sprinting. And by that, what he's saying is at high speed, we see a lot of practice look the same. And at low speed, it doesn't really matter. You can get away with a lot. And I think the allegory for people here maybe is that the things that work for you suddenly stop working for you in really stressful situations or injury or trauma or death or loss or you're losing or your business isn't doing well and you don't have a plan.

Wait, real quick before you pay that off. Does that mean like this idea that it's easy when it's easy? And then as soon as it gets hard, the things that were making it easy might not be the solutions when it's hard. I think that's one way of looking at it. I think the other way of thinking about it is there's a lot of tolerance in the system when the stakes are low.

You can not have to manage your sleep. You don't have to manage your range of motion. You don't have to manage your nutrition or hydration or mindset or downregulation. You don't have to do those things. You can go drinking and get up and do your job and not have slept and eat like a spoiled teenager and still be pretty rad, you know? But all of a sudden when the stakes get higher, we find that the best practices really is all start to approximate each other because there's less tolerance for all of that undisciplined

behavior. So not that discipline is good, but just there's no organization to the behavior, right? That doesn't look like the things we're doing at low speeds, low stress environments, don't really track with the things we do to win a world championship. And working in high performance for the last really 15 years of my life, what I've come to realize is that environment is the greatest testing lab in the world. Which environment? Speed? World champions, Olympics, professional sports, Fortune 500. It's a great working laboratory. Right, where I can see inputs and outputs. And really what you hinted at was I've come to believe, and my wife and I have

come to believe that if we don't take those lessons in sport, especially in my area of expertise, the body, and transmute them to our households, our families, then this is just circus. And let's honor it as circus. And let's just say it's so great. Or we can say, wow, we're putting all these men and women and people through these experiences. Maybe we can learn something and actually transform our families and our communities. And that's where I am today. It's still fun to work here. But boy, wouldn't it be great if we could take those lessons and transmute them into

having kids who feel better, who sleep better. We see more durable tissues, et cetera. Is there a guiding philosophy that kind of sits right underneath your approach? I think that every human being should know how to take care of themselves. So a long time ago, I said basic maintenance. You should be able to perform basic maintenance. The same way I think we ask, like, can you self-soothe? Like, what are your, I mean, if I just leave you out in the world, what are you going to reach for? Bourbon? Ibuprofen? Are those your strategies? Those strategies work for a while until they don't work.

Right, right, right, right. So I think that's the one is sort of democratizing, you know, we say democratizing high performance. I think people say that a lot. Yeah. But how do we take those lessons and just make them so pedestrian that everyone knows it? Yeah. When your knee hurts, you don't have to go freak out and get an MRI. And we've done that in some things. If you, your kid has a fever, you're like, here's some Tylenol. I mean, let me monitor your fever. Your back hurts. And you're like,

it must be rabies. Okay, good. So what, all right. So the, the underlying thought is that everyone needs to know how to take care of themselves and you want to share best practices that they, and what you've done is you've made them or not made them. You have cleverly included those practices in the natural rhythm of somebody's day. When I watch you do that, I go, that's the same thing that I want to be able to do. There's a front loading process. You got to do some heavy lifting up front at some point, but you can also take great advantage of like before the mics turned on, I was telling you that, you know, when I turn on the TV, I'll sit

in a 90, 90. So I get off my couch and I'll sit on the ground in a 90, 90. Maybe you can explain what that is to folks to just open up my hips, to get my joints working in a little bit more range of motion. Before we go into the 90-90, can you set up what you think the most common problems are for us, for us professional sitters? Oh, which one do you want to talk about? Yeah, let's hit them all because I feel them all. Yeah. Yeah, You do. Yeah. Just, you know, is as speed and performance matter,

we have to pay attention to mechanics. The details matter. You don't just walk up, walk up to the T and was it, whoever said that and say today I'm going to be great. That's not how it works. Right. You don't switch it on. No. Yeah. We, we use that phrase a lot. Like, oh, he switched on or she switched on or whatever, but it is that it's probably why your company's called ready state. I wanted to ask you the ready state, meaning that you're in striking range at all times. Like you're, you're not, you don't turn it off and turn it on. That's exactly right.

You know, uh, the original idea, uh, first book, which is 10 years old this month, Becoming a Supple Leopard. It's a textbook. Yeah. And it's a heavy duty textbook about how to care. It's basically a unified field theory of trying to understand movement phenomenon. Okay. Predict future movement phenomenon and being able to communicate that. That's called a model, right?

So that's what I tried to do with taking strength conditioning as a diagnostic tool. The idea of, we called it supple leopard. One of our friends was a seal who got injured, shot. And one day he pulled me aside and he's like, you know, Kelly, the leopard doesn't stretch. And I was like, well, Andy, A, type one error in your thinking. You're not a leopard. I don't know if you know this. And B, that leopard can attack and defend at full physical capacity. It doesn't have to activate

its glutes or warm up or go through a pre-cog energy thing. It doesn't have to snack or preload carbs. It just is a leopard. So what happens if we just gave people access to their range of motion again? Then suddenly we can give them more movement choice. We give, we increase movement solutions and we start to untangle a whole lot of things. You know, you can start from the top down the brain and the mind, or you can start from the body up, but we're going to get to the same place. Eventually we have to. Are you more of a top down or bottom up approach? Because I know that you have a deep value of psychology. I would say they're equal. And depending on the person and the needs, we may need to start either side. Okay. But let's go big

picture first. The big problems that people are facing right now. One of the useful 30,000 foot tools that we can steal from sport is something we call session cost. Okay. And this comes from one of my friends who's in premier soccer and he kind of threw it out there just as a throwaway. And I was like, hold up. I think there's something really there. And session cost is if we do a training session or have a lifting activity or training activity, we can ascertain what the, the physiologic psychological cost of that training was.

We can look at heart rate variability, resting heart rate, readiness, desire to train, psychological gameness, anything. Mood. Sure. All those things are valuable. And we can basically say, boy, I crushed you yesterday and your readiness isn't really great today.

That's session cost. So any of the behavior clusters around reducing session cost suddenly start to make sense. Decongesting your body, walking, sleep, nutrition, hydration, recovery, soft tissue, visualization, whatever it takes to basically allow my athletes to work harder and to minimize session costs. There's a real session cost for everything we do. We can't, you don't get something for nothing.

Wait, I want to hit that because that's really an important note, which is there's a cost to everything. Yes. And so there's this like cold shower, cold tub, infrared sauna, napping would be one of the lowest cost activities. That's right. Right. But because it's so passive, but just about everything else does have a cost.

And so when you're thinking about recovery, it's not as simple as there's things that you do to quiet yourself down because some of those actually cost expenditure. There's an expenditure for those activities, but they're required or necessary to get the most out of your body and mind when you want to stress it. So what you just said is materially important. So I just wanted to double click on that. I appreciate that. And understanding then all of the things that I could do to engage in self-soothing recovery behaviors, I can then really start to say, where are resources? How does this fit into your life? How does this interrupt your time as a person, not as a robot automaton going through a checklist of things? Which things do you enjoy doing?

There's a whole lot of things we can think about there. But as the whole, this fallacy exists where I can outwork the competition. I'm like, oh, really? Because it's interesting. Your competition said they can outwork you. So we're just in this arms race. Eventually, we just don't sleep. We just keep training.

And what we know is that's not true. Our experience on the ground is the people who can adapt to these higher workloads, reduce the session cost over time, those people actually make more progress. Because they can work harder at higher intensities longer and be fresher. So you're done with the physical workload, let's say, and then you're jumping in your car to go home or whatever you're going to do. But the entire ride home, you're stressed out. I'll use that in quotes. You're thinking nervously about your future. So you've got some level of hum that's taking place in the body.

You're not allowing the natural comedown, the natural parasympathetic activation to turn on because you're so active with an excessive worry about later. Do your athletes get home after a big, I don't know, NFL game and just go to sleep right away? Nobody does. We actually recommend that they, some of them not travel home with family or friends. There's a, there's a, there's a reduction of cortical arousal that needs to take place before you're even around people. And that takes time. It's one of the competitive advantages is to figure out how to increase the recovery

time post-intensity. And so we believe that if you can increase that recovery, the span of recovery or the time to get fully recovered or better recovered, we're winning. I love it. Yeah. So this means now I have a framework of all of these tools and tactics to reduce session costs, but let's just apply session costs to non-athletes. So suddenly we have a model of saying, hey, I'm not sure your brain understands if that was a race or a board meeting, or if it was a world champion or you have a sick parent. Your brain doesn't know the difference.

Right? I think a physical behavior and emotion, these are the same practices. Real or imagined? Same. It's wild just how closely linked those are. So what we find is that if we can empower people to self-soothe, do the right things, the foundational principles, eating, sleeping, soft tissue work, all those things, what we found also was that, and notice I haven't even mentioned the word pain. Just how can you handle greater stressors in your life to be more durable for your family or show up and not just be taken out by these workloads, stress loads that a lot of people are facing? It's real. behaviors, suddenly we have a model for understanding, well, if you're sitting all

day long, that may incur a cost on your physiology, but not in the way you're thinking. It may impact your ability to extend your hip. You may, your ability to take a full breath. One of the things that gets lost in all this conversation is, I don't know where I heard this the first time, practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. And I'm like, well, what are you practicing for hours and hours and hours? Are you mouth breathing? Are you slunched over?

Are you taking shallow non-diaphragmatic breaths? What are you practicing? We know that you're going to default to your most practiced patterns. This is in training why I'm trying to induce load and stress to uncover patterns and practices and behaviors that don't serve you as well as a different set of patterns. You and I and everyone in our communities are always practicing something, even if it's an internal invisible process. Practicing the way that we're listening to each other right now, practicing the way that we are trying to solve or optimize something, but it's a private internal psychological experience.

There's a practice in the way we respond. It's a practice in the way that we choose our words or language. And so that practice is materially important as well. And so I love that you're, the reason I'm adding this is because your model is holding up so far to the physical model, the psychological is holding up brilliantly. So I'm enjoying this. who was in a car accident, superstar athlete, division one superstar, lost his leg, bad car accident. You know, he's a local member of our community. My first interaction with him isn't about teaching him to walk or balance at all. It has nothing to do with the knee, the leg, the foot. It's where are you and how are we going to get you to start to own your process? And where do we begin? That's why I think I have to be so aware that it's not just your stiff quads or your lack of range of motion.

It's if I'm not addressing or talking about or honoring this piece of it, I'll just, it's not working. And do you have a system there or is it more intuitive, high social, emotional IQ that you rely on? My wife would say it's not high. It's not high. It's fun watching you and Juliet, your wife, like tag team on social. It's really fun to watch your relationship in a very public way. She is a superstar.

Yeah. Attorney, world champion, you know, badass. And she doesn't take herself seriously. You can tell she's really smart. She knows a superstar. Yeah. Attorney, world champion, you know, badass. And she doesn't take herself seriously. You can tell she's really smart. She knows her stuff. Like, yeah. And we're married 20 years this year. Congrats.

Thank you. And she is the greatest partner ever. And if I am evolving at all, I owe a lot to my very patient wife. That's very cool. Who I will say in this context, about 10 years ago, she was like, I think you're really angry about your family and you're probably due for some therapy. So I'm just going to go shout out, you know, to Fran, my therapist who really helped me untangle a lot of family drama. The same things that got me here about like putting a little door

down over my heart and dissociating like a sociopath did not serve my feelings very well. And now I'll just let everyone know I have feelings, not many of them. And I feel my feelings a lot and it's really stressful. It's like a heavy load when you're not exposed to putting any weight on your back and all of a sudden it's loaded with like four plates. Like, yeah. So same thing. That's awesome to hear because, you know, you are a modern leader in many respects and that's why I wanted to include you here. And so it's awesome to hear you saying, yeah, like I'm working from the inside out.

That's hard. Step up. You know, like what else am I going to do with my life? I'm not going to continue to close down, reduce the relationship, the quality in my life because I'm scared. I look backwards. Every therapeutic relationship is about trust, really first and foremost. And you engage in a therapeutic relationship, coach, athlete, you know, we don't think of that as therapeutic relationship, but very much is. And realizing the more vulnerable I could be and aware I could be, man, it just turbocharged everything for me.

Really just to be in touch with my feelings and my ego a little bit. I think that really helped. Okay. Quick pause here to share some of the sponsors of this conversation. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters.

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that let's jump right back into this conversation how many hours are you in you know in therapy oh i went i was in therapy for about a year. Just once a week. So is that like 50 hours? Yeah, something like that. Think about that. 50 hours of practice on something? That's it.

I bet I could get good at something if I practiced for 50 hours. But that's it. Only 50 hours. And think about how far you've taken whatever from A to B. 50 hours of shooting a basket, like you'll get pretty good at it, but you're not going to be great, right? There's thousands of hours, according to Anders Ericsson, more like 20,000, not the 10,000 that most people recognize. Thousands of hours to be an expert at something. And so we think about like for a year, I went once a week,

50 hours. I say, yeah, you probably got, you saw some change. There's a lot more work to do. Not only that, but I'll say the application of it over and over in practice. Yeah. So it's like intense work once a week, right? But then if you can practice it on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. You had Mr. Mumford in recently? Yeah.

George. George. George immediately went out and read his book, but something my friends and I did, because one of the things that I realized 10 years ago, and I know this is all sidetracked, was that I needed to create better support systems for me. If I, in that recovery strategy, I had to make sure I had other men, particularly non-wife, other friends of which I could be vulnerable and ask for help. I needed coaches. I mean, right?

Like, you know, in the meantime, I was, we were so burned. We were starting this business and we had two kids and two corporations. And man, I was spread so thin and burned out. And no wonder. That's like, you're going to crash this family into the ground, you maniac. But one of the things that has happened is creating this relationship with my friends. We have been talking about George a lot. This interaction, the space between stimulus and response, that has been a really important

concept for a lot of my friends. Isn't it cool? So cool. And then I messed it up a few times. And then I literally was like, oh, I think I can do better on the next rep on that. And it's so great. And is that your approach? It's that clinical, like, oh, that wasn't right. I can do better next time. I, yes, yes. Very much Carl Rogers is in my blood, which is, boy, the better version of me is here. All I have to do is work towards it.

And I, why can't I be capable of infinite growth, infinite, all of the things. I just, I have to be mindful of the whole system and not so much that I get away from actual deep practice. You just got to go do the thing, but you have to be aware of the thing. And let's open up Carl Rogers, one of the foundational humanistic psychologists. He's also from a distance because he wasn't alive when I was alive, a mentor of mine, and that I'm grounded in his theory as well. And so the core foundation of philosophy of Carl Rogers is unconditional positive regard. And everything

that you need, whoever the you is across the table here, everything you need, Kelly is already inside you. And so the relationship is going to allow the unfolding of that brilliance. So it's cool to hear that a fellow Rogerian. And that therapeutic relationship, that may be the only place anyone gets unconditional positive regard. That is the only repository for that. It could be. It's an interesting place between that unconditional positive regard and holding a standard.

Like you can have both, but if you don't have that first component, the unconditional, which is a big word, positive regard, those three words are radical words to string together. If you don't have that piece, the challenge feels quite hollow, quite threatening. You know, so there's, okay. I couldn't agree more with you. Yeah. I'm so glad you brought that up. Because when you come into supple leopard,

the objective measures there, because I'm interested in observable, measurable, repeatable phenomenon. Say it again, observable, measurable, and repeatable phenomenon. Okay. Hold on, before you go, do you have a system for how you meet somebody

at the first go? No. So it's more EQ, IQ, social intelligence. It's a feel. That's why I, social intelligence. It's a feel. That's why I'm here. So it's a feel. That's why I am a subscriber to this podcast. But it's a, thank you. It is a philosophy that you're working from. I would say some. And in physio school, we had some formal training and listening.

Formal training in interviewing, formal training in subjective and objective data measurement. So I think, could I be as good a coach if I wasn't a physio? No way. Because I actually, someone told me one of the worst drills you can do. This is for every coach on the planet. Anyone who's working with someone, I want you to either get permission and record yourself just with your phone or watch yourself and record an entire session, soup to nuts, and then go back by yourself and be horrified at the listening, at the stories, the word choice, all of it. But be very aware that that is a feedback that you need to be aware of every single time you interact with another one, another person in a situation. And I say that only because I've had some formal thinking and training around that,

but I don't come to you necessarily. And I'm like, this is a, this is B, this is B. I need to understand the person in front of me really quickly and figure out where are we going to start this conversation. Okay. All right. Cool. I would like to have a framework. Yeah. Well, okay. Well, we can build on those. Yeah, that's good. But the philosophy is the first piece of a framework. So. In the body, I have a framework. Okay. Right. Understanding what should be when we're working with performance, my objective measures are, can you do what your body is supposed to be able to do? Does your shoulder have as much range as it should? Can you control that range, right? And that's the second piece. And we do that in the language of strength conditioning, this formal

movement training. It's like, here's what your body's capable of. Let's challenge it. But ultimately the expression is, what do you want to do with that thing? Wattage, poundage, output, right? All of those things, the test is, oh, you're in master, go ahead and spend a weekend with your family. Let's see how Zen you really are. But you can practice it. You can do drills to get better at it, but it's the application of the thing. So I, my two objective measures really are, can you do what your body's supposed to do? The wattage and improvement in power and output is how I test. Are you more? Okay.

So that's the test. And so is it joint by joint? It can be. Or is it more movement based? Well, it turns out your body, hold on everyone. Your brain isn't wired for muscles or joints. It's wired for movement.

100%. So when you say I'm working my biceps, I'm like, no, you're not. Your brain is thinking, hey, let's bring the hand to the face. That's the movement. They did a study in physio. I read this study when I was in physio school where they basically wired the monkeys with electrodes. And the monkey reaches for the banana and a certain pattern reaches. And they reach for the banana chip over here, completely different pattern.

What is happening? It's not deltoid biceps. It's when I move this way, this pattern lights up in my brain. If I move like laterally. It's a different, it's a different because your brain is the same muscles. Yes. Because your brain is wired for movement. Your brain is not wired for individual muscles. Okay. So we were talking earlier about the problems that people go through. Do you want to pull on that thread or do you want to just maybe walk through some basic

assessments that people could do to have a feedback loop about how they're doing? What you just said there is the thing. Feedback loop, benchmark, objective measure, vital sign. How can we help people start to establish normative values or normative things in their experience? It's very difficult for me to assess how good a husband I was with objective measures other than I'm not in trouble and my wife's talking to me and my kids hug me. It's harder to do that. It's easier along the body, easier. In the new book, what we tried to do is say, hey, let's take some really simple objective measures and create a vital sign baseline for people that has nothing to do with exercise, but them moving through their environment. Okay. So for example, and this book is built to move, built to move. Okay. The way that my brain works is that I sort movements into what I called archetypes. Oh,

wonder where that came from. Carl Jung. There you go. And what you can recognize is that if you put your arm over your head, that's what I call an overhead archetype. And there's a complete and an incomplete version of that. So a complete version was that I should be able to have my thumb backwards, arm straight, and I should be able to create rotation there. And I have full flexion, full external rotation in that position. Cool. It doesn't matter if you're swimming or doing down dog or shooting a free throw, hanging from a pull-up bar, doing a handstand, snatching. Even out here, this is still in the overhead archetype. So the problem traditionally in physio is that we think every joint or every movement

has its explicit range or position, but no one's checking to see if the whole range is complete. So arm out in front of you, we call that a front rack position. Arm behind you, we call that press shape because it looks like the bottom of a bench press. Arm out to the side, we call that the hang shape because that's when you'd pull. Of course, your arms move through and you go from position to position. When we establish a complete position, now everyone can understand one or zero, yes or no, complete and complete, not good or bad i don't know what you did yesterday i don't know what your injury history is i don't know all of the things you jumped out you played and then nba finals you jumped on an airplane let's

measure you you're going to be a disaster the next day it's going to take you a little while to warm up and reclaim these positions but now that's an interesting statement reclaim the position yeah that's part of your philosophy as well meaning that the position is already there was there when you were a toddler yeah for most people right can you imagine if every doctor we had to memorize how many people on earth and everyone has a unique range of motion you're a human being yeah that's the shoulder is the shoulder the difference between you and me in 10 000 years your femur is a little longer i'm a little fatter it's the same shoulder it It's the same body. And do you think we haven't been thinking about the body in this way

in high performance for 10,000 years? I think we always have. And in fact, what's nice about having a model of understanding positions and really looking at human movement through the lens of position is that every strength and conditioning movement is a very formal diagnostic test. But you can suddenly drop in and say, why do the gymnasts teach that position? Why do the Olympic lifters teach this position? Why are the triple jumpers doing that choice? Because as long as we've been coaching humans, we have figured out what the best expression of the physiology is, what the best expression of putting the joint into position where it can lift the most weight or be the most, we've worked that out over and over again. If you drop into Tai Chi or yoga or Qigong, you're like, oh my God, someone did some real thinking here. Like these are pretty integrative systems.

The problem is we haven't, until we had access to the internet, really been able to synthesize and integrate all of those practices to see that the position is a unifying root that links all those. So if you ask me what's the best athlete, who's the best athlete, it's the person who can pick up the new skill the fastest, which means that person can represent or transfer skills, which are really expressions of position. So we better start by giving people their positions back so that they can go express. That's really cool. Okay. So there's your philosophy sitting underneath of it. And so you start with some basic range of motion stuff, but then you want to put people in positions to see how those complex joint movements work together? Can I give you a model for understanding strengthening and conditioning? Yeah, sure. Okay. Bear with me, everyone. All we're doing is strengthening and conditioning. When I say

we're going to the gym or training for something, or we're doing a movement to get better, is we're taking a foundational position and we're challenging it. Like a squat. Squat. Great. What are the ways I can make a squat harder? Make it heavier. That's traditionally all we've done. But what happens with that squat when you're breathing hard? Is it easier or harder to hold that squat?

Harder. That looks like sport, doesn't it? What happens if I start making you go fast? We see more errors when you start to, yeah, you can't get away with some of those positions. You start to see speed. We see changes in motor development, motor control, movement control. Sometimes I say movement control instead of motor control. So the

motor control experts don't freak me out. Yeah. Right. Yeah. What happens if you and I are in a stressful situation? Does that alter your patterning? Right. What happens when I make you do more than five and you have to do 20? What happens if you put it off access a little bit? What happens if I hand you a dumbbell instead of a little bit? What happens if I hand you a dumbbell instead of a kettlebell? What happens if I flip you upside down? It's open chain, closed chain. So suddenly we have all of these variables that I can draw from to challenge your ability to maintain that stable position or express a movement under control. So if we start benching and all of a sudden your elbow starts flaring out when it gets heavy, I'm like, huh, we've exceeded your,

we've seen a foundational change in your skill. Now you're coming up with a novel strategy to solve this problem that we've already solved. So we've exceeded your practice, your practice limitations. So I can either back off, we can give you more rest. But at some point the skill no longer is stable or robust under those conditions. That's training. Got it. And our hypothesis is the person who can be the most stable in these foundational shapes like squatting or lunging or putting their arms over their head under as many different conditions and potentially those conditions that look like their sport tend to be more

robust and tend to be able to transfer skills more effectively in the domain that they're trying to be experts in. And now one final word from our sponsors. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that.

Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate temperature. I tend to run warm at night, and these sheets have helped me sleep cooler and more consistently, which has made a meaningful difference in how I show up the next day for myself, my family, and our team here at Finding Mastery. It's become part of my nightly routine. Throw on their lounge pants or pajamas, crawl into bed under their sheets, and my nervous system starts to settle. They also offer a 100-night sleep trial and a 10-year warranty on all of their bedding, which tells me, tells you that they believe in the long-term value of what they're creating. If you're ready to upgrade your

rest and turn your bed into a better recovery zone, use the code FINDINGMASTERY for 40% off at CozyEarth.com. That's a great discount for our community. Again, the code is FindingMastery for 40% off at CozyEarth.com. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Caldera Lab. I believe that the way we do small things in life is how we do all things. And for me, that includes how I take care of my body. I've been using Caldera Lab for years now. And what keeps me coming back, it's really simple. Their products are simple

and they reflect the kind of intentional living that I want to build into every part of my day. And they make my morning routine really easy. They've got some great new products I think you'll be interested in. A shampoo, conditioner, and a hair serum. With Caldera Lab, it's not about adding more. It's about choosing better. And when your day demands clarity and energy and presence, the way you prepare for it matters. If you're looking for high quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. And with that, let's jump right back into our conversation. There's plenty of folks that are listening right now in their car or sitting at their desk or possibly standing at their desk. What is something that folks could do right now to be a better mover?

Nothing. You're doomed. No. What I want you to think of is, hey, there's a cost to my spending a lot of time in this seated position. And so first of all, can you find a position wherever you are now where you can take a bigger breath? If you can find a position where you can more easily and freely take a big breath, that will tend to help you support your muscles and tissues. You'll feel better after that marathon bout of sitting. And then we get two more things. When you stand up, I want you to squeeze your butt as hard as you can.

I just want you to remind your brain, your legs have to go straight. Squeeze your butt as hard as you can for five seconds. Just squeeze it. And no one needs to know you're going to do that. So you can do that subtly. And the last thing, think, Hey, I'm going to need to move. There's a cost to my sitting being inactive. It means I need to make sure that I move my body with a few short walks. That might be a two minute walk. That might be a 10 minute walk, but think, Hey, the more I sit, the more I'm just going to want

to walk and move during the day. Awesome. Super clear. What about like doing something for your shoulders or your chest, like some sort of unlock? Would you do anything for your posture while you're sitting that could be useful? Easy way to do that is to say, Hey, look, you know, just like standing up and squeezing your glutes might just help reclaim that function. If you could secretly put your arms out to the side, put your arms over your head, you know, if you can get your shoulders to engage in some work, what you'll find is that your neck and back will feel better. You could even kind of grab your hands and just resist yourself in some isometrics, like some 1970s, like build isometric power in some comic

book. But if you can just get your shoulders to work a little bit better, what you'll find is you're like, oh, I feel better. It's a quick reset. Were you naturally Gumby like with your joints or? My friends say I was bendy before I was big. Yeah. So I remember the things I'm asking you to do are native to the human species. I'm not asking you to be Simone Biles. In fact, a lot of my assessments, getting up and down off the ground, that's a mid-range test.

That's not even a full test. I think you should be able to squat with your feet forward and your heels on the ground, ass to grass. Can't get ass to grass, but I can get close, but then my mid-back collapses. That's okay.

Yeah. Because that wasn't part of the test, right? We're just looking at the range. Yeah. But what this says is you may, the data on. Ask the grass. Ask the grass. The data on getting up and down off the ground without using your hands cross-legged is that if you struggle with this, then we see increased mortality and increased morbidity as you age.

Mm-hmm. increase mortality and increase morbidity as you age. Because suddenly you're not able to take your hips and use that range of motion to solve movement problems, balance, have movement choice, pick up new skills. And so your movement agency starts to get a little smaller. And the problem is unless someone says to you, you should keep an eye on this. How are we going to do that? How are you going to fit this into your busy life, working single mother, right? How are we going to fit this into children? What we find is we'll wait around until you fall. We'll wait around until we have a whole bunch of lagging behavior, lagging indicators. We can wait till you have a hip replacement or wait till you have hip pain or your back hurts. And then we can be

like, oh, your hips are stiff. And you can be like, why didn't anyone tell me? I had all this time and I was interested in this. And I've been exercising and going to Peloton. What's the problem? The problem is we didn't tell everyone, here's what we should keep an eye on. Here's a simple benchmark, modern physical. Imagine if your physician asked you to do this during your annual physical. A physical should actually be not just what's going on with your blood panel and your blood pressure, but how you actually move too. Okay. So let's say somebody does the crisscross,

applesauce, stand up, sit down, and they can't, they can't do it. And they say left knee, right hip, mid back. I just described myself. We're speaking, yeah, hypothetically. Yeah, just, yeah. It's nothing to do with an old surfing injury and a basketball injury. Where do I begin?

The first, where do we begin? Where do we begin? What does one begin? The first order of business is you're already doing it. Just you sitting on the ground assessing it is the first order of magnitude where we see the most gain. Cool. If you're never doing a thing,

you're never going to be good doing it. Correlates for the thing, talking about the thing, you have to do the thing. All of this practice, fantastic. Go have a hard conversation with someone. Go deploy those strategies. I see. Right?

You have to go do the thing. Right. So what we then start to, Juliet and I start to realize is the real game is not the tactic. The real game is how I'm going to show you where you can engage in this behavior in your life. This is where you guys are like your genius shines is because it's the little things and

what's the name of the Instagram handle? The Ready State. Okay. So encourage folks to just tune in there because you've got these small little thin slice practices where like, like for me, one of the ones I'm borrowing from you now is sitting 90, 90. I realized we need to explain that while I'm watching TV or sitting and doing some emails. That's so progressive. Yeah. So, well, I learned it from you. So, but that's what you're talking about right here, right? These thin slice in the rhythm of your day, somewhat stressful, somewhat straining. Yeah, challenging is like, it's not comfortable. Like, and I can stay in it for like-

Oh, I'm sorry. Dr. Mike wasn't supposed to be comfortable. I see what you just did. 45 seconds and I'm, you know, I'm a kind of a disaster, right? Yeah, so I need more of them from you. Yeah. Okay, so do the 90-90 for just a minute so we can just clear that up.

So one of the things that we recognize is that most people are watching TV and. How many hours a day do you know? I think it's three hours. Okay. What ends up happening is that there's a lot of agency and time where we can do something while we're doing something else. If I tell you, Hey, I don't want you to watch TV. Let's go work on your hip range of motion. Boy, I'm going to get a lot of

buy-in. People are super stoked. That's right. It's never, they love that. But if I'm like, Hey, just prop, sit down in front of your couch while you're watching TV. Some of the people are like, I can do that. Yeah. Barrier to adherence. That was ultimately what my doctoral work was looking at barriers to adherence. Barriers to adherence. Did you just throw in, you have a doctoral degree? Oh, did I? It's kind of cool. Excellent. Sorry. It's kind of cool. I have a fake doctorate. I'm a physical therapist. Just remember. Okay. So barriers to adherence.

What keeps people from doing what they know is in their best interest? Oh my God. Teach on this. This is so good. What are some of those findings? I know we have not... Stay with us on the 90-90. Okay. Like what are some of the barriers to adherence? Cause what you're talking about right now, if you could remember your dissertation or your research here is that this is the dissonance for many people. When I put an apple and an apple pie on a table, you and I both know which one's healthy. One of them's already cut up. One of them's already set up for me. Yeah. right. And so- No, no, really. If I cut up the apple, you'll eat the apple.

Oh, that's an interesting- If I give you an apple that's whole, you'll not eat the apple. That's a hundred. And my point, I love that. My point was that we know which one's healthy and we want to be healthy, let's say. We do.

And we choose the easier, the more temporary, pleasurable experience, the apple pie. But you're saying if the apple pie wasn't cut and the apple was cut or both were cut, we might, in a more evolved way, choose the apple. Cool. All right. So- We've run that experiment in our own house. You have? Yeah. If we cut up fruit and put it on our counter, our kids destroy it. Yeah. I remember reading this research somewhere. I don't know if it was even,

it was like maybe five years ago that I first was exposed to that idea. And so fruit out versus like sweets or something else, whatever it is, game changer. We just don't have it in the house. You can do that too? It makes it a lot easier. So that's called constraint, right?

Environmental constraint. Yeah, it's a forced choice. Forced choice. And I only have to exercise when I'm walking down the aisle in the grocery store. Like I have to exercise constraint or something there. When I was a young physio, I was in a class with all the occupational therapists and people were being treated for head injury. There was head trauma. There were cerebral vascular accidents, strokes in there, and people would

have a more affected side and a less affected side, depending on what side the injury was on, the lesion. And when someone came in and they were really comfortable using their right hand, for example, and my left hand was more affected, that's the right language for that. What they would do is they'd put a glove on that right hand and then saran wrap it. So you don't use it. You can't use it. I just take that choice away from you. So what you did was say, it's better if I don't have apple pie in the house.

That's right. Right? Yeah. So I don't have to, I make the choice once as opposed to making it 15 times. Because. You know, every two days. I don't know if you know this,

but willpower. What is, what are we doing? Is a limited commodity. If I'm asking you to be heroic when it comes to like your range of motion, dude, I have a thousand other things that you'd be heroic on. So where am I going to fit that? And why did range of motion and your mobility drop to the bottom of everyone? Because it didn't matter. I was still great. I beat you in basketball today, right? I still could do the things I want

to do. I can't play tomorrow, but that's fine. That's true. So what, a lot of what we've ended up thinking about is when and where can people engage in these behaviors so that it's not another thing. Okay. So do the adherence, the barriers to adherence, what are some of those? What I found the most was the number of steps was a big one. So just the number of steps between you and doing something. And we've seen that from the research around garbage in Disneyland. If I have to walk somewhere to put something in a garbage can, I'm not going to do it. If I can see a garbage can, I'm going to walk over and deposit my trash in the garbage can. The more, if we're asking people,

and you know this because you have teenagers, but if I ask someone to engage in a healthy behavior, for example, but they have to call someone, set up a time, right? The more barriers or the more steps, the chances of me actually doing the thing just starts to diminish. It becomes approximates to zero. And eventually you're like, I don't even know where to get started. Okay. Right? Cool.

So I really do like the cookie analogy. If I don't want to eat cookies in my house, I don't buy cookies. There you go. Right. But we can start to think about these essential behaviors. Again, remember I said I'm about bottom up because your hip range of motion is important to me because you can't do the thing you want to do suddenly. You can't play basketball the way you want. That impacts your relationship with your friends, how you express

yourself. There's a whole lot of psyche attached to this body in terms of the way that you interact with your community, the way you define play. Just that alone, if I can't play, one of the most, I think, important pieces of advice we give is when people are injured, I'm like, do not separate yourself from your team. Go bring the bike and do your rehab with the team. Go be around the team. Why would I pull you away? There's a reason why athletes fear injury and the training was death because we've called you out of the herd. It's really hard when an athlete gets hurt, like to be in the treatment room for X months or X weeks. It's really hard. So we should move the squat rack closer to the treatment table. So you're getting a treatment, but I'm just right there and still part of my community, my identity. Well, the same thing is I want to view your

limitation, pathology, injury, impairment through the same lens. If this is preventing you from occupying your role in the family, occupying your role in society, that's a real thing that I've got to be paying attention to. It's not just your ankle. It's what are you doing with your ankle, right? So now I start to think, well, where and when am I going to put these behaviors in? So one of the ones that worked really well for our athletes was say, who's going to care about position? And I stumble into big blind spots all the time with organizations. I work with universities and I'll say, well, who owns position? Who's assessing position in the athlete? Right now we have coaching going on to a high level complex skill. And then I have

athletes who are injured and where's the middle here. Who's picking up the fact that your starting goalie doesn't have any hip flexion or rotation in their, in their hip. Who assesses that? Right now, no one does. Isn't that where like FMS or functional movement screening or some of those, some of those assessments would sit typically? Hopefully, but now the question is who owns those? Okay. So usually is it the rehabs? Normally it's the rehab. ATCPT. Or that trainer says that coach comes in and says, I assessed you today, but what do you look like halfway through your season? What happens when you tweak your ankle and start? Like we think it's such a tightly coupled system that I want to use every day as a diagnostic tool. Right. So if we're running today, running is my

diagnostic tool. That means I better understand the shapes that are native to running. Got it. Right. My warmup can be a diagnostic tool. I'm putting you into these end range positions and seeing if you can control them. So suddenly we can see if there's waxing waning positions. If we make the universal language of position, the lingua franca for athletes, for coaches,

for then suddenly- What is lingua franca? Like the language of the universal language of the country what where'd that come from i don't know yeah it's cool sounded smart sorry thank you lingua lingua franca yeah frankly yeah i think that's right sorry everyone we're gonna look it up so uh fact checking happening charlatan dr kelly starhead fake doctor um that's so good i think what we now have decided is in the training room, in the strength and conditioning, that's the perfect place to look at position. Not saying we squatted today, but what are the components of squatting?

Hey, I noticed that we're assessing squatting. You're struggling to get to depth. time we found really sticky, really a set of behaviors that were consistent with the goals of the training session and were easy to manage in the moment and didn't add an additional cognitive load, another barrier, right? Suddenly we tied position to training. We saw people started really carrying out position. The athlete got better. That's cool. Right. And that's now, let's apply that. Where are you or me who doesn't identify

as a professional athlete? Where am I going to work on this? Got it. Right. So coming back to sitting on the ground, first of the thing, if you want to get better,

the number one reason people end up in nursing homes is they can't get up off the ground independently. That's number one. So it seems like getting up and down off the ground

is something we should keep an eye on. That's right. Right. If you're sitting on the ground, then you have all these options of loading your hip. And really what we're doing is we're starting to expand your movement language without having to think about it. Because that language, the movement lexicon of the average person is very small. It's basically three words, a little bit of elbow flexion to my face, right? To feed myself. I sit up and down off a chair three words, a little bit of elbow flexion to my face, right? To feed myself. I sit up and down off a chair and I walk a little bit. That's it. That's all most people are doing day after day after day. And so your brain starts to say,

well, those other shapes, they're not important. I like the word shapes. Yeah. Those other shapes. Watch your shapes. Yeah. My thumb shape from my phone. There's another movement you're really good at. My chin protruding out as I walk through the dangerous jungle. If suddenly you're sitting on the ground, the first thing we're doing is getting exposure. You're now in more hip flexion. You maybe long sit and you're loading your hamstrings and your tissues. And that means like I'm sitting in an L shape.'m sitting in l shape long shape long long sitting legs straight in

front of you the 99 for a long time i i love i just interrupted 99 again no for as long as remember we said hey i'm sitting on the ground that that was hard for me to do two years ago sitting in an l shape on the ground. That's how tight my hamstrings have gotten. Someone, no one in your environment said that this is important. We should value this. This should be part of your practice.

My wife would just laugh. She grew up as a ballerina, jazz dancer. And so she's like, you're a mess. You know, like she knows. Meanwhile, she spent thousands of hours of working on giving her brain permission to be in those positions. And some of that stuff is like forced and really dangerous. Some of the stuff that her old school coaches would do or teachers would do to her.

But like, so there's a different set. You're not wrong. They're not wrong. You're not wrong. Yeah. And so anyways, I share that with you because again, this is why I was excited to have you here is that your, your, your encouragement to put it into the rhythm of my day has made a difference.

And so finally you want to do a 90, 90. So imagine if you're sitting side saddle, you kick one leg out to the side. That's not 99. That's a 90, 90. We call it 99 because you're let, you could be more formal in the gym and it sounded like you're doing your, like, I don't know, Russian Sambo training does a lot of 90, 90. This is a foundational movement for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. What you'll see is, oh wait, human beings have been sitting on the ground

for a long time. It's a foundational practice in any culture that sits on the ground. Is it, is, is this maybe an easy way to describe it? And you've done this way more than I have. If you're sitting back on the couch, so on the ground, back on the couch, your knees are bent. Okay. So your, your feet are kind of in front of your, your, and then you let your left knee drop and your right knee drop. And then you put those thighs on the ground and put the thighs on the ground. That's close to a 90, 90 as an image. And then you can start to spread that out, spread it out just a little bit. You weren't using the counts, cuts or balance.

But what we've done there is we've started to tell your brain, these are positions that are safe and there we're back to it. Do I feel safe in this team? Do I feel safe in my family? Does my body feel safe in this position? Seems like if I spent a lot of time breathing and I'm in this shape, my brain's like, that's no problem. The founder of CrossFit said a long time ago, we fail at the margins of our experience. And he was talking about metabolic pathways. If you only train 30 second pathways, it's going to take you to five minutes, you're

going to be dog crap, right? But we can apply that same thinking because it's such an important truth that if you don't ever expose yourself to these fundamental shapes, when it comes time to do that under load and speed, not gonna have control, not gonna have access. Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore. When it comes to my health, I try to approach things with a proactive mindset.

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My son was probably, I don't know, nine years old, 10 years old, somewhere in that range. And we went to this fitness center or this place that I really liked these coaches. They were kind of coming up and they're local. And I was with the medical director for the WSL, the World Surf League. And he was staying with us for the week. And so I said, Hey, there's these coaches, like, I want to go check them out. And like, I really thought they're, they're going to do a nice job. And so the three of us go and he pulled me aside like 20 minutes in and he switched, he is definitely switched on to use that language earlier. And he says, do you favor loading dysfunction?

What do you mean? He goes, like, we should leave now. So there's levels to it, right? Where even sophisticated folks like these coaches were missing some of the major things that you were talking about. Everyone comes from somewhere. What was your training? Who were your coaches, coaches? Can you show me your coaching lineage? If this is the best expression of what you know, are you being negligent because you're not coaching it or you don't know? That's a problem.

Okay. So loading dysfunction is where you said loading dysfunction. Let's not, let's not use the word dysfunction per se. Let's say that we're practicing positions that don't transfer as effectively or shapes that don't allow me to access as much physiology or positions where I'm not as strong and powerful. Cool. And if we practice those shapes, what will happen? We'll get that.

And what really has happened because we suddenly were flooded with training tools, weightlifting and all of these varied skills, barbells, machines, et cetera, is that we didn't ever start by saying, well, can your ankles bend? You know, why aren't they bending? Why can't you bend? Your ankle is missing 100% of its dorsiflexion. So who owns that problem? If the coach is saying, we're going to squat today, my job is to get you fitter and stronger. We know we have a window of time where I can get you stronger. And that problem may never, ever show up as my issue because this athlete went on and won a world championship.

See, I'm still the best coach in the world. Meanwhile, that athlete is working around a whole lot of problems, is using the brilliance of the brain to problem solve, to come up with strategies and solutions. And if this sounds like psychology, it should be, it's the same. I'm doing mental gymnastics to be able to solve this lack of fundamental positioning and no one is doing anything to restore that position or open up that position window. That's cool. Okay. So for- So loading dysfunction would mean I am ignoring the fact that I've exceeded certain parameters or aspects of the athlete, but I'm adding on additional load.

That's where you start to get these weird compensations. Okay. So let's just go big picture for a minute. For most people that are, let's say that they are, they're doing okay. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like they've got no issues. They don't need to go to the doc for anything. They're doing some fitness, maybe two, three times a week. Killing it. Yeah. They're doing pretty good. Um, I want to be less gross for my wife. That's my chief. Less, less what? Gross. You can interpret that as you'd like. Oh God. Um, so I've done pretty good. I'm making some

good choices, uh, with nutrition. I'm doing my best job I can on sleep. Let me ask you that. How do you know? Well, I'm saying the lay person's. No. And I'm saying, how does the lay person know any of that? Because you're, you got up and your heart beats. Because I know, well, no, because I know that an apple is better than apple pie. I know that grilled fish is better than a pie. I know that grilled fish is better than a burger. I know that vegetables are better than packaged foods. And so I'm doing pretty good, let's say, on those fronts. And I can tell you how I'm interested in people knowing, you know, like a blood draw, nutritional blood draw and like doing panels and whatever.

But I'm not trying to be cute here. Yeah. But a lot of people say, if I ask you how you're doing on your sleep and you're here for your chronic back pain. Oh, you said sleep. And you're not actually getting seven to eight hours of sleep. But you told me you're doing good, but you're only getting five hours of sleep. Well, so that's another point is that you bring up is most people overestimate skills and abilities. What I'm hinting at is it'd be nice if we had some objectives around some of the physical qualities of our body. So that's where, yeah.

Okay. All right. So let, but I'm just painting a picture here for I'm exercising a couple of days a week. I'd like to do more. I want to be less gross, not more attractive, less gross. Yeah. And I'm doing, I'm doing okay. I'll give myself a 70%, 75% on nutrition. I'm traveling a little bit too much. Sleep is compromised, but I'm trying my very best. Okay. So modern executive leader, if you will. And I sit a lot. I'm sitting in front of a screen. My posture, I'm having to work pretty hard to keep my head above my shoulders and hips. How do you start to shape what somebody what a program would look like for that type of scenario the easiest way in is to say let's begin with 10 minutes of positional restoration of soft tissue 10 minutes a day 10 minutes a day okay we arrived on 10 minutes clinically because we found that if I said 12 minutes or 15 minutes, my adherence went down. If I said 10 minutes, someone's like, I got 10 minutes.

I can do this for 10 minutes. Five minutes on my left leg, five minutes on my right leg. It's never 10 minutes. I always get more. But if I said 10 minutes, I'm like, that's a really reasonable amount. And you can't look me in the eye and be like, I don't have 10 minutes. That's right. Right.

So that's where that came from. Okay. And we can do a couple of things. One is we can choose one body part, quads. Again, what do you use your quads for? I'll give you a hint. Everything. Standing up, moving around, walking laterally, running.

Quads are engaged for all of that. So if I improve the quads or the tissue extensibility, the quality of the tissues, I get you less painful. I get more blood flow in there. Whatever the mechanisms are, soft tissue mobilization, rolling, stretching, whatever. Do you like vibration in the role? I think vibration can be a really important tool for a couple reasons. One is that oftentimes people are very sensitive to these things. So if I push on your body and you're like, ah, but I vibrate and push on your body, your brain's like, that's fine.

Right, we can interrupt some of that pain gate theory stuff with movement. Same reason they use the buzzy bees when they're giving kids injections. The vibration blocks what the brain is interpreting as threat. That's right. The second reason I like vibration,

so I like it for children, is that we have a lot of people who are very shut down. Did you call me a child? Less child. My teens prefer the vibration, right? So teen. Yeah, good, thank you. What we also find is that people who are really shut down

have poor proprioception or have had a lot of chronic pain. There may be, I think the term is cortical smudging, where they don't even know. I'm like, point to your back, and they're like, you know, they don't, brain doesn't even know what's painful anymore. It's just the area, all of my back hurts. So if we bring some vibration there, we can bring some awareness in and that can be very important. And then I'm like, okay, flex into that. And suddenly we're doing isometrics into an area where they can feel that's very powerful. So I would say it's another tool in the thing. Like say we're doing a stretch or we're doing some vibration work and then flexing or some ball work, right? Like whether it's a foam roller

or a lacrosse ball or something, are you trying to move right to the threshold of pain, stay in that right before it? Like where are you, where's the decision tree on where to stay when you're in a range? Yeah, range of motion? Let's start by saying everyone is different. And if I, you know this, if I dropped into, you and I have shared some athletes over the years. If I dropped into the brains of some of your athletes during the middle of their competition, I would perish. I would just melt from pain. It's like, I would just become that guy in Indiana Jones and my skin would melt. So very subjective about the suffering we can entail. We have a couple guidelines for people.

Whenever we're doing work on ourselves, rolling, soft tissue work, getting a massage, here are my rules. One, I want you to be able to take a full breath. So if I see you engage immediately in altered breathing patterns, you're breath holding, you're doing static breathing. I'm like, Oh, look at that threat. And your brain knows, look, you do not own this shape. Look at the altered breathing pattern. Why are we doing all this breath training and then smashing the crap out of our tissues and not breathing?

Well, I'll get on my IT band, which is that for folks that for an image, it's that band that sits between my hamstring. And you're working on where the quads come in and where the hamstrings. Yeah. And I'll get on a spot there, like on a foam roller. This is almost every day. And I'll, and I'll lose, I'll lose my breath. Like it'll be like, Oh God. And then you're going too deep. Okay. But then what I'll do is I'll breathe. So tell me, of course, correct me here. And I'll take a nice breath. Yes. And then I'm like, Oh, I'm actually okay. And I'll move around it. I'll move and I'll keep breathing and I'll keep, but am I, did I back off on pressure? I don't know. Maybe I did.

Okay. Or maybe you just told your brain it's okay. Yeah. And guess what? Your brain was like, oh, it's non-threat. Yeah. So I feel like if I can get my breathing right, when I'm in that moment of intensity, like I can override or there's something. I wonder if that has applications towards anything. How about that? Okay. So, so you're, but you're not suggesting get to that point of pain and then, or that discomfort, that deep discomfort. No, I am. You're saying get to it and then breathe.

Or are you saying get to it and back off? So let me give you two strategies. One is that I want you working in intensity. You do want. A pressure where you can still breathe and you can still contract. I'm interested in you demonstrating to your brain, I still have control. So that means just flexing, tightening, whatever it is on the thing.

If I stand on your quads and you black out, we've exceeded your capacity. I want you to be able to still contract on those quads. Got it. And there as two general rules, what that does is that actually keeps people from layering in weird dysfunction and pain guarding, right? It also gives you a conversation to your body that, hey, this is okay. And as we're trying to untangle complex, complex behaviors, complex histories of pain and injury, what I want the brain to know is this is

safe. So when I say you can start top down or bottom up, I can change some aspect of your tissue system. I can restore how the joint works. I can restore how the muscles are articulating with each other or themselves. I can change how your fascia is connecting and signaling. Fascia is the tissue that surrounds the muscle. That's right. It's like the wetsuit that sits around the muscle. That's right. How interested are you in fascia

as opposed to muscle lengthening? You can't be a human being unless you have fascia. You can't actually address movements unless you're talking fascia. Okay, so range of motion and fascia have equal value. Oh yeah, but so are your muscles, so your joints. Which one is less important? Okay. So range of motion and fascia have equal value. Oh yeah. But so are your muscles. So are your joints. Which one is less important? When we come in and we're saying, hey, we have a limitation to a movement here. Remember, I'm not interested in usually looking at your quads. I'm interested in asking,

what can't you do with those quads? Is it your squatting? Is it your lunging? What are the positions where you may not have enough quad or your stiffness in your connective tissue? Or is there a joint problem that's the limitation? So we still think in systems approaches as we're working on restoring position. And now any tool we have might go towards ultimately restoring or enabling you to have control in a shape. So myofascial work is one thing. And if people are like, I've rolled my quads and rolled my quads. And I'm like, well, guess what? It wasn't a roll your quads problem, was it? Right? You couldn't sleep your way out of not training. I did all the visualization,

coach. I don't understand why I didn't make the shot. So you have to actually do the shot too. So ultimately what you're discovering is this is an easy way in to have someone begin a conversation with their body. Okay. And oftentimes not all the area of the leg is the same. I might have some areas that are much more sensitive, some areas that are fine. We know that their trigger points are well-documented phenomenon. All of a sudden I can get you to contract and relax in there. I throw isometrics.

Do you want to work around a trigger point or right on it? No, right on it. Right on a trigger point. What I want you to do is I want you to look for the spots that feel awful. Okay. And then I want you to work on them until they feel like Switzerland. And if I push, wait for it, if I push on something that feels great, keep doing that.

Oh, it feels so good. Oh my God, I'm going to stop now. You know what I mean? Someone rubs your neck, you're like, don't do that anymore great. Keep doing that. Oh, it feels so good. Oh, I've got to stop now. You know what I mean? Someone rubs your neck, you're like, don't do that anymore. It feels too good. Keep doing it until it feels like Switzerland. So we can either use that pain or we can use that pleasure response. But really what I want people to understand is when you experience pain with pressure,

that's a spot that could be changed. That's a spot that your brain may pay attention to. And that can be a breadcrumb around restoring function or restoring sort of positions or tissue slideability. Give us a couple of shapes that you would hope we could do with an extended range and just start with a couple of shapes that people could do. You have talked about in this people who are consumers of this podcast, particularly, we do a lot of sitting. Juliet and I do a lot of sitting. And first of all, let me say that sitting's not good and standing's not better. What we want to do is thinking, how can I move more?

But sometimes we're going to find ourselves through marathon bouts of sitting. So what's the session cost? Well, the number one most obvious session cost is your ability to get into a lunge. That will be attenuated. So oftentimes people have heard from their trainers, my butt, my glutes are sleepy or I have glute amnesia. Maybe you've heard that before, right? What's often happening is that when we don't have access to positions, we can't recruit or have access to the full physiology. So we see a lot of what I call positional inhibition. If I can't extend my hip or get into a lunge shape or bring my knee behind my body, like I'm sprinting, then what we see is that the glute is often inhibited. It's not weak. It's not turned off. It's just in a position where it's not very effective.

Like when you're sitting. Like when you're sitting. And so what we can do is say, well, where are, how much, or how can I engage in some movement behaviors that help me give my brain access to that? Either through loading or through just simple exposure, getting into a lunge shape after long periods of sitting, just a little tiny lunge. You don't have to do the splits. You don't have to be the weird person in the boardroom, but stand up, get into a lunge position and squeeze the back butt cheek as hard as you can. So if you're on both knees, you know, I'm talking about standing. Right. Right. So, well, what I was, what I was suggesting like a lunge, tell me if I'm off,

is that you're on both knees and then you'll kick your left foot out and you're now your left foot is on the ground and your right knee. That would be a very deep lunge. So you're not saying that. No, I'm saying from the standing, go into a tandem position. Just a lunge. Yeah, one leg in front of the other.

Go as far as you can squeeze your butt and just squeeze your butt and take some breaths and hold that for 30 seconds. With which hand? Which one? I'm joking, I'm joking. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, and so if I do that, if my hand? Which one? I'm joking, I'm joking. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, and so if I do that, if my right leg is back and my left foot before your right glute,

that's my weaker joint of the two. And so the whole thing goes, I think you want to throw up, don't you? Yeah, you might want to throw up. Perfect. Should you throw up? Or should you hold this shape a little bit longer? We should be curious.

We should have intense curiosity. My strength coach always says it. He goes, that's good information, Jervais. What are you going to do about that? I love it. That's really good. So suddenly what we have then is a methodology of saying, well, when I'm in my clothes at the work, I could do these high lunges, right?

And just restore, get my body spending time in these positions, which are going to be valued to me later on. One of my assessments that I use at all levels is something we call the couch stretch, which you may have done. If you're on your hands and knees with a wall behind you, you put one of your knees in the corner where the wall comes to the floor.

That's basically taking that leg and just putting a bend in it. The foot is going, the shin's going up the wall. Then all I want you to do is bring your other foot up into a lunge. So it's the same lunge shape. It's near torture. It may be.

For some people other than Gumby. I don't like talking about my feelings. You don't like to do the calf stretch. Same, same. It's so gnarly. It's so gnarly. Yeah, I know. Right?

Can you breathe? Can you squeeze your butt? And what we find is that when we start putting in these isometrics, we're just doing contraction to end range without movement. So you're just holding, just holding, squeezing, contract. Suddenly your brain is like, oh, let's give you a position there. We start to roll on your quads a little bit. We mobilize your hip a little bit. All of a sudden things start to get better. Okay. So we've got a couple, we've got. You just start sitting on the ground, all these positions. Sitting on the ground. Cool.

Started couch stretching. Okay. Your life will begin to change. And again, one foot, one foot is planted on the ground. The other knee is on the ground. And then you bring it up into a high kneel if you can. Yeah. And what you're doing is like one of the, um, the back foot is on the couch. Yeah. And imagine you see runners at the stoplight, they grab their laces and they pull their heel to their butt. We're doing that, but real. Not that fake, like, you know, virtue signaling that you're like doing something. Virtue signaling that you bring in all the language.

Okay, good. But I do want to give one more thing that I think is a really powerful tool for everyone. Cool. Because what we found is that soft tissue work was a wonderful way to downregulate. And that when I'm feeling out of control or I'm feeling stressed, if I engage in self-massage and I'm watching my breath, after 10 minutes,

man, I feel like a different person. So is that self-massage, is that from a roller? Roller or ball. Yeah. Just have you ever had a massage? Did you jump up off the table and fight someone? Never. No.

No. And what we find is that there is large parasympathetic drive through massage. And so it's a fast way. What about a deep tissue? No problem. Still parasympathetic. Yeah. Yeah.

Even if the masseuse is like putting it on and like, it's like, wow. If you can't breathe, maybe it's too deep. But yeah, even if it's deep and again, depending your idea of deep, I'm really, I'm really sensitive. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Got it. Right. But what we know is, or we found is that one area of the body that no one ever talks to is between the pubic bone and the xiphoid process okay i'm talking about your trunk and if i get you the soft area below your ribs what is it man would think he was a god except for his belly you've heard that before no that's good yeah and i think that they're talking about like either like stomach flu

yeah right but like this is a soft part no No one wants to touch it. Yeah. And you probably have worked your quads, massage your quads, stretch your calves. You have done nothing for your trunk in the history of time. You've been like, I don't know what happens to those abs. Like when your abs are sore, you're kind of stoked because you're going to look good tomorrow. Right. But you never thought about them the same way you thought about your calves. Spoiler alert. This is a painful part of the body. I keep saying this, and you keep making fun of me. It's perfect. It's like if you get someone digging in underneath your rib cage

or kind of lower ab stuff, it's really nasty. Interoception, we have poor map for what that is. Yeah. Think about the language around that. Gut response, visceral response. So how do you do it for yourself lay on a roller lay on a squishy ball get a princess ball from walgreens princess ball like one of those bouncy balls that has like a disney princess on it they're in the

bins yeah like you know okay you just need a like a deflated soccer ball softer soccer ball a volleyball would work i lay on a uh the handles of a kettlebell. Oh, well, is that a little too much? No, no, that's a little too much. That's not, it's just flip the kettlebell on the side. On the hip flexor. Yeah. That's, that's fantastic. What we find is that when we begin having people just address diaphragm, work down in psoas, work into the obliques, remember we're working on the whole system. Yeah. And I'm not doing that hard metal against my lower my oh i do sometimes because i need to yeah i'm doing it down by my hip region great to get to

activate some of those hip flexors if you just flipped a kettlebell on side and laid on it take a full breath in and a full breath out and find out what you find yeah and what you're going to find is oh i feel sick i feel mad at my mom, what's happening? It's really gnarly when we start. You're not damaging your intestines or something. There's not something that's getting- Think about that statement. We're gonna go play football later. You're worried about damaging your intestines,

laying on a princess ball. No, I was on a kettlebell. How would I know I was hurting myself? What would I do? We've already talked about two rules. Breath changes. Yeah, and I couldn Breath changes. And I couldn't contract. And I couldn't contract. So I know I'm always working my tolerance.

There you go. Okay, cool. And I think that's really cool. There's this other thing called pooping yourself. Have you ever done that? If you feel like you're about to poop yourself, what's about to happen? I have no idea. You're about to poop yourself.

If you feel like something is tearing, what's happening? It's probably tearing. It's tearing. So listen to the deep body knowledge. It's super there. We don't find that happens. Just start by laying on your roller and really explore your trunk.

And what our experience has found is that especially in our warfighter populations are super stressed people who are like, I have to go to bed in eight seconds to get this three hours of sleep to go fight. We get them doing 10 minutes of gut smashing. That's what we call it. Very technical term. Just mobilizing the trunks and they helps them really relax.

So this is a sympathetic activator during the massage? Parasympathetic driver. But is it sympathetic first to get the parasympathetic like rebound response? No, just, just massage, just parasympathetic. We just, we're trying to get that vagal tone. That could be it. Or it could just be, we're doing some intentional focus breathing and it allows me to focus that. What our experience is, is that, wow, if I work on your trunk, you transferred energy better from your body to your lower body. And you could almost think of the lower abs as your high quads. And now we've improved your hip extension. There you go.

And if you've been sitting all day long and you've been compressing your trunk and not moving or taking these big breaths, here's a way of getting those tissues to restore and slide and glide. So we improve your function once we've been doing marathon bouts of sitting. You got all the rhythm down, all the words down. It's perfect. Quick summary here. A handful of things that you would love for our community to do. And then I want to hit you on breathing and hit you on sleep

and get you out of here. If we're just talking about tonight, homework, sit on the ground, grab a roller or a ball. They've become commodities. You can grab a wine bottle, grab a vodka bottle if that's your jam, Doesn't matter. Whatever your coping strategy is. But start engaging with your body. Ask yourself, because now we have a self-reflective mechanism. What's tight? What's sore? Where is it holding my tension? How can I get some input in? If we can more closely conjoin what happened during the day with some of my behaviors to self-remedy, that's really amazing. And you'll probably fall asleep faster. So that's it.

Five minutes on one side, five minutes the other side. See if you can get 10 minutes and see how you feel. So is the bottle for drinking? Is it for rolling on? What do we do with the bottle? It could be. Most of the time we've had the, you could roll on the bottles, I'm saying.

You could use that wine bottle as a soft tissue roller. It can have double purposes. That's my point. It is that strong? I guess it is. Well, I don't know. I've never seen you do it. Yeah, right. Yeah.

Okay. Dr. Mike Watts. Yeah. Let's just get a foam roller. Let's just get one. Do you have a brand that you like and I want to pin you on a certain brand? Nope. I want people to use what they have.

They have accessible, what they like, what they can afford. It really doesn't matter. Okay. Gotcha. What you'll probably find is that there are some rollers that are super soft and they're too soft eventually. Yeah. Right. Like those, the foam ones. Yeah. Those are children's toys for the pool.

Got it. Okay. But for you, that may be where you need to start. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Thanks very much. Okay. All right. So let's do a little bit of work on breathing and then best practices for sleep. I was kind of drag kicking streaming into the breathing conversation until I realized it was such a performance driver. And my thing was I was less interested in how I might change my state through my, through my breath. Of course, that's usually how we come in.

And that's so important. I started to realize through the friends, Brian McKenzie, Laird Hamilton, that there was a huge opportunity for me to work harder if I started to train my breath practice. I'm like eight or nine years into this thing now. The amount of wattage I can push out only brings through my nose, big difference. But again, my view on this was this is super cool. The physiology is interesting, but what else can we do around the body? So a couple of things that we got out of the breathing practice. One is that we had improved

performance if I also looked at how those tissues were moving. So suddenly I could give you access to your shoulders and your neck. So bear with me. If you take a big breath and you're all breathing up in your neck, chances are you're not getting a lot of rib translation. You're not moving. But if I teach you to breathe in a 360, right? We can think of the trunk as a radial contractile field. Suddenly I get 10,000 repetitions of you moving your back and accessing parts of your geometry of your structure that don't move and certainly don't move under pressure and tension when we need them to move maximally. So I can do things like change your VO2 max. I can improve how much air you can move in and move out.

If we're trying to untangle your shoulders and your shoulder pain or shoulder function, I have to look at how well your back's moving because those are a system. If I'm looking at your neck pain, if your shoulder is stiff and your trunk is stiff, how am I ever going to get to the bottom of that neck? So we start to see this trinity of neck, shoulder, upper back. What's the easiest and fastest way in? What's the first movement of the spine? It's the breath. It's not walking. It's not crawling. It's breathing. If you come to me with a little back pain, guess where I'm going to start? Breathing. We're going to start by showing you how to get more movement into the trunk, into the spine, so that the brain says, this is not a problem. We can start to restore

and renormalize your trunk function. So suddenly that breath became the through narrative for everything that I do. In fact, when we start with people, I'm talking about either Tour de France or Olympic weightlifters in the Olympics, we talk about breath. And one of the concepts I love is this sort of one rep max breath. Let's do it here. And I think this is a great takeaway for people, especially if you find yourself in stressful situations. If I have you slump, just let it go. I feel so good. Take the biggest breath and you can. I'll even give you a hint. Go through your nose, but take a biggest breath in. We can quantify that.

Now watch this. Get into a position where you think you can move more air in. Just get into a better position. Notice I did not have to teach you or coach you. I didn't say anything, but prove it to me. Yeah. Objective. Ready?

Oh, look, we had better function. So it turns out that position gave you better access to your physiology, better access to your function. So if I can improve your breathing quality, then I can improve your power on the bike suddenly. If you're finding that your neck is hurting, ask yourself, can I breathe in this position? Or is there a position where I might have better access to my physiology?

And suddenly the world is your oyster. So if you find yourself pinned in a chair, identify shapes and positions where you feel really comfortable and take a huge breath. And what you'll see is that you'll start to adopt positions and shapes that transfer more effectively.

So that one rep max breath concept, we use as a way of addressing positional quality. If I have you put both arms over your head and I measure that one rep max breath, I shouldn't see a whole lot of decay. If I put you in a squat and you can't breathe, how functional is that squat? There you go.

Right. So suddenly now we're like, Oh, I can't breathe in this position. I remember that from the mobility. Now I can work on restoring this by breathing and I can improve my power in these positions by breathing. And then I can use that breath for down regulation.

So let me give you another hint. One of the ways we use breathing when we find a painful spot is that we empower people to breathe. We say, take a four second inhale, contract for four seconds, and then lengthen that exhale for eight seconds. And what we found is that long exhale does what?

Calms me down, helps attenuate pain, helps to signal chill. So now this breath narrative has gone all the way through everything that we're doing. Because I think it was Iyengar who said, nerves are king of the breath and breath is king of the brain. That's right. So we better be honoring that and thinking about that. And what we found is that when I fundamentally changed how I started organizing the same information, making sure I was looking at breath mechanics and breath volume, man, I got way more bang for the buck and everything we did. What I thought you were also going to hit on and probably limitation of time here is that during fitness or some sort of cardio event to use the gears as Brian McKenzie talks about,

or the stages of breath where and so i'll purposely what i'll do is try to breathe through my nose as long as i possibly can yes you know when i'm on a bike or a run or whatever it is and and so that's teaching me about my threshold and there's a discipline that's attached to that and then when it gets hard to do that and if i pick up the pace or even maintain the pace for longer and then the next next phase or gear is in through my nose, out through my mouth. So first it's in through my nose, out through my nose. Second gear, in through my nose, out through my mouth. And what I'm, I'm just looking to try, I'm playing with that breath at stages of cardiovascular stress. Wait, wait, in the middle of cardiovascular stress, you have a mindful breath practice?

How about that? Yeah. And suddenly you can really derive a lot of insight about effort, about recovery. Brian McKenzie popularized that. That's Rob Wilson's original work, who was a member of his staff. Oh, I didn't. Yeah, I just. Those breath gears, one of the most important things that's come out of strength conditioning in a decade. That's really cool.

It helped me in a bunch of stuff that I've done, you know, but it's- We can push 90% of our max heart rate through our nose now. And through the nose, out through the mouth. I did not know that. It's crazy. Oh, out through the mouth.

Yeah. Yeah, I would, I understand that. But I thought you were going in and out through the nose. We do a test. It's a 20 minute FTP test. So functional threshold. And we put you on an assault bike and we have you breathe

nose only. There's a reason they're called assault bikes. You're not wrong. And it's interesting. We have you only breathe through your nose and that's who you really are. Yeah. That's it. Cause what you're going to fatigue, I'm going to see how you fatigue when you breathe. I'm going to see all the weakness in your vascular, in your respiration muscles. And what I'm really interested in is watching your face and how you manage that discomfort. There's so much information. That is like, you know, our test is crisis and observation. That is, that is Dune 101. That's really cool. Okay. Sleep. What are some best practices? What are some ways you're thinking about sleep right now? One of the things that we've tried to do, and I got, I stepped on a rake recently on the internet.

I suggested that people get seven, eight hours of sleep. Oh, you stepped on a rake? That hit you in the forehead? Knocked me out. Oh, yeah. It's a revolutionary idea. Couple million views later, and someone called me Dr. Flatbill.

I was wearing a hat when I said it. So, this is true. This is true. Like you got a bunch of feedback. Yeah. Like people are saying. Oh yeah, man, the hate. No, wait, why? Because no one gets that much sleep.

What would you even do with that much sleep? That's not true. I slept seven hours once and I felt terrible. This is not true. Like they ask this question all the time. I can't wait to show you the response. I'm sorry. So your clinical experience does not outweigh my feelings.

My research does not outweigh. Yeah. So wait, the pushback was that people were like, you're out of touch? You're out of touch. Because everyone who's working hard and rich. Is at six. Or five or four. I mean, it's just a really bad idea.

It's a total. Let me just say, everyone. It's a really bad idea. It's just, let me just say, everyone. It's a really bad idea. You cannot win. So what we've tried to do with sleep, say, hey, let's create an objective measure. When you come to me with back pain or some chronic pain or an injury, I'm going to make you track your sleep. Because I'm going to make you show me. Initially, I don't trust you.

That's why I say, I just need, I need, I'm like, right? Is this paper and pencil? You're just doing duration? That would be first. first but otherwise i really want you to get some tracking device yeah whatever one you like yeah do you have i'm using aura ring you're using aura ring yeah i just find it's unobtrusive yeah disclosure i love their tech disclosure i've also invested in them so disclosure i have no relationship with aura ring yeah but i've tried everything yeah yeah i like what they're doing so So, so keep going. I was just gonna say, we were trying to say, Hey, let's get seven hours of sleep.

Period. That's our bet. That's our benchmark for survival, but we're really trying to push towards eight. And the reason we put sleep as such a benchmark behavior is I really can't tell what's going on with your chronic pain, your stress, your nutrition, your recovery. I can't tell if you're getting less than seven hours of sleep. What do you mean? Because the body's in a compromised state.

It's we get dirty data. That's right. And so what I'm doing is layering on complex solutions into a physiology that isn't even at a baseline. Okay. And it gets complicated. People have chronic pain. They don't sleep very well.

They get really stressed. They don't sleep. So that means we better work. And notice that I said 10 minutes of soft tissue work before you went to bed, that could be helping you into falling asleep and staying asleep. We get everyone off caffeine by noon. Like you have to stop. Yeah. I go from, let's go black tea until noon. Great. And then green tea till two or white tea. But you also figure it out. I trade back on the caffeine. Yeah. I love to drink tea,

but I found that it erupted my deep sleep. It did. So did you stop drinking caffeine? After two, after like 12 or two. 12, I'm done. Somewhere there. Because I used to be able to drink a espresso and go to sleep.

Well, so you thought. So I thought. So you thought. So I thought. Yeah. You would pass out for other reasons, but not actually get into deep sleep. But what I love about organizing principles

is that it helps me to organize a whole bunch of behaviors. So we saw that if we didn't give- What's the principle? Sleep. Okay. We know, for example, from all the tracking that you might lose an hour of sleep. So if you're going to get seven hours of sleep,

I need you to be in bed for eight hours. That was something that was a big quantum shift for us. Wait, if you're going to get seven- I need you to be in bed for eight. Because that hour is the doubt is the fall. Cause you will take a while to fall asleep and you'll have an hour of sleep disturbance. I see. While you sleep. Great. Okay. Up to an hour. If you're 14, you have one minute of sleep disturbance. If you're, I'm just kidding. I'm like, when you're 14 years old, but my, my 14 year old put my aura ring on and she was like, wow, I was up for an hour last night. I'm like, when you're young, you need to sleep like you're dead. But my 14-year-old put my Oura ring on and she was like, wow, I was up for an hour last night. I was like, isn't that interesting?

So when you go to bed at 11 and sleep to seven, how many hours of sleep did you get? She's like seven. And I was like, huh, curious. Why is dad trying to get into bed early? She's like, I heard you. Right. So letting her sleep. We compete just like in my family, we compete for sleep.

Like we work really sleep. Like, like we work really hard, you know, not competing with each other, but we're like, we love life, big life, want to have a lot of fun. And, you know, we get to the end of the day, we're, we're, we're tired, but not exhausted. You know, it's not, that's not the rhythm we're trying to run. And there's so much I want to do in life but i i do need to be really disciplined and so when i'm at seven and a half eight eight eight point two is the upper threshold for me but when i'm between seven and a half and eight i'm good that's right yeah so i've can i ask you a question yeah personal question when we try to as active as we can we prescribe steps as our first sleep intervention if someone can't sleep,

what we learned from working with Delta Force was that if we got them to walk 12 to 15,000 steps a day, they fell asleep. So we increase sleep pressure through non-exercise activity. We cut out caffeine. We give them strategies to self-soothe that don't look like bourbon and THC,

which are valid strategies, just less effective. And what we ended up seeing was that we started to re-soothe that don't look like bourbon and THC, which are valid strategies, just less effective. And what we ended up seeing was that we started to re-regulate sleep. So we're super on it. But I fall asleep in three minutes and my aura ring dings me on it. They're like, you sleep latency. Yeah, it's too quick.

It's too quick. I'm like, you know what's quick? It's time to go to bed. Yeah, right. So I go to bed. I'm more like at 15 to 17. Oh. 15 to 17 15 and 17 very reasonable all year i'm just a dumb meathead physical therapist okay so so all right uh

backtrack so you've got steps did you say 10 to 12 15 12 if you're having a hard time asleep if you're just trying to decongest and move the body and help manage the eight how many how many miles is about 10 000000 for a normal gate? I think that's not the way to think about it because you can get, because you don't know the math, right? It's like, it's like 10 K six miles.

Is it? I have no idea. It's roughly six months, six miles. But remember if you're standing and moving, getting your fidgeting, working, all of that counts.

Yeah. So it's not like doing laps around the block. You're just saying like, but you may need to do laps around the block because you're not moving enough i see okay most of us are moving two to three thousand steps a day yeah not the minimum eight where we see a 50 decrease in all-cause mortality whoa back that up 50 all-cause mortality i misspoke 51 50 is that right? Yeah. So you see, okay. It seems like it's important. That's eight at 8,000.

Yeah. Is that where the 10,000 came from? 10,000 is an auspicious Japanese number. If you yell bonsai, that's like may you last at 10,000 years. So the 10,000 was the 10,000. That's where they grabbed that. Okay. God, that's a really important number.

10,000 is an important number. No, no, no, no. 8,000 is a really important number ten thousand is important number no no no eight thousand is a more important one of the reasons we love that too is that we get the lion's share of the benefits at eight thousand at eight thousand and we found that most people could fit into their life that it wasn't hey you need to walk twenty thousand steps because people are like i'm out it's too much right that we could start to add in 10 minute walks a little after dinner mosey being and you could hit it easily hit 8 000 okay and by the way on the for sleep as well the after dinner or after lunch mosey actually is increasing metabolic conditioning as well right like so if you can get your heart rate up a little bit after you're smiling i think that's called postprandial narcolepsy when you're trying to get rid of that.

Yeah. No, like it makes a huge difference for me. Yeah. So one of the things that I love is that I love to have bottom lines that are multiple bottom lines. And one of my favorites is my wife and I leave our phones at home. We walk to the end of the block after dinner and we check, check in with each other. Oh, that's cool. And so that's a multiple bottom line yeah you're getting your metabolic you're getting your steps in for sleep regulation and then you're also doing your emotional we know that people walk side by side it's easy to talk yeah we know that if you want to have a really great neighborhood go outside see your neighbors every every day yeah that's cool there's a guy next to me steve he and i've been battling for offense for a long time and uh man i have to see steve

all the time and i'm like what's up steve and he's like what's up kelly and we just sort of hate each other but we see each other like five times a day and i thought that's how we have a civil society you have no fence do you have no fence we have a fence oh you do have a really good fence yeah okay so our fence now is inside our property because steve didn't want to yeah steve but what i'm saying is, look what's happened. We start to walk a little bit more. Now we're like, hey, what's up? It's not mutually assured destruction. Okay. All right. So we got the awesome multiple bottom lines is a cool takeaway. So you've got some steps that we're trying to get in and 8,000, 51% all-cause mortality reduction.

Yeah. Imagine you can give everyone a pill. And 8,000 steps is the pill. And 51% all-cause mortality, just to be clear, means that- You're less likely, 51% less likely to die. From- All diseases. All diseases. Okay. And then what about folks that are highly fidgety? They're bouncing their knees. They're not anxious person, but they've just got all that high clinical arousal. We call that high genetic drive to move. There's actually measures where you can look at people's genetic drive to move. Those people have high genetic drive to move.

So they're sitting and they're, and they're bouncing their knee. Yeah. Like they, they want to get up and go. They need to move. Caged animal. We did this experiment where we flipped our daughter's elementary school to an all standing school, became the first all standing school in the world. We got the world. That was you? That was us. I read this research. My son's school adopted that. Hey, you're making a difference already. That's really good.

Turns out if we're really going to apply the lessons of society, we should probably start with our school kids. That's really good. How did you get that done? We talked to the principal and our teacher. After I did a Google talk, 2010. Oh, you did? What was it on? Deskbound. And then, because we saw it as a competitive advantage to move more.

Was this after the research that standing is the new, or sitting is the new smoking? About the same time. That's actually James Levine of the Mayo Clinic, who was working on obesity. So people are like, eh, sitting's nothing to do with smoking. I'm like, hold up. Do you remember where the quote was from

and what he was really talking about? Sedentariness. Being inactive. That was where he was like, hey, this is a real problem. So James Levine, we got you. He's amazing. What we found was, I read Sports Gene, David Epstein. And when they gave thosestein. Yep. Awesome.

And when they gave those mice- We had them on the pod. It was great. Yeah. Minch. When you gave those mice who had high genetic drive to move, right? They bred them and they got these super mice that ran like three miles an hour. Oh, I remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then you gave them Ritalin, they just like stopped running. That's right. So we may be not honoring. And if we look at, I mean, this is a whole podcast with experts on this, but we look at how boys are doing. They're not coping well. They're not, they're in environments where having them sit. And we found in our own experience, end of 10,000, 10 years, many kids, we saw that giving kids movement choice where they could fidget with the, with the foot, they could sit on the ground. It really leveled out a lot of behavior problems. The big ball, whatever those, what are those called? Like a physio ball. Yeah. Thank you. Anything to get more movement in.

It was a game changer in our family. Yeah. For my son. And they had him in his classrooms and he's flopping on them, laying on them. Yeah. So like, it's a great, so that's, he doesn't have a chair in his desk, in his room. He's got the big physio ball. We wrote a book called Ready to Run. How many books have you written? Six. Oh, my God. Thank you.

I don't recommend it to anyone at any time. It's a terrible process. Wow. Good job. We have great support and help. We noticed that halfway through the first grade our our kindergartners went from running like Usain Bolt to halfway through the first grade they start heel striking so what taught me early on is

Wow something in our behavior and environment fundamentally changed how we interacted with our environment that is really the allegory yeah that's really cool okay so steps yes the next one try to get some steps in let's try to shut how we interacted with our environment. That is really the allegory. Yeah, that's really cool. Okay, so steps. What's the next one? Try to get some steps in. Let's try to shut off caffeine. Let's get some soft tissue before you go to bed, right?

And let me know how that goes for you. I'll add one more just for fun. Is that an anxious mind, I'm not talking about clinical anxiety at this point, but just a mind that worries about the future, maybe a little bit more. Oh, my wife. Okay. I'm a sociopath. I just go to bed. Yeah. I dissociate. She's worried about when you wake up and when you fall asleep. Okay, good. So, so a bit of an anxious mind, like a worrying, and if it, this, this comes out of the research

for clinical anxiety and is a best practice is that there's this pervasive worry that takes over throughout the day. And that's pretty much what clinical anxiety is. And if you catch yourself that that sound, or if that sounds familiar, you're catching yourself that you're worrying a bit too much about just about anything, you can time bound your anxiety worrying. So for 10 minutes, you say, okay, at two o'clock, at seven o'clock, whatever the time is, you say, I'm going to worry for 10 minutes. And that's my period to do my worrying. And you can write it down or just sit and worry. And that's all you do for those 10 minutes. Now you've compressed that rather than it have it bleeding all over the place. So it's a bit of like a tourniquet

for anxiety. This is amazing. Yeah. And so if you add a dump pad next to your um next to your bed and or you time bound 10 minutes of worrying you've now just given an accelerant to being able to down regulate or decrease the cortical activity in your mind in your brain wow so that's i would add that one as a nice strategy i don't know if you fit it doesn't fit as nicely in the three that you mentioned. Oh, no, no. I will tell everyone. I don't think we're talking legitimately about sleep enough. Julie and I organize our whole life around sleep. Can I give you an example?

So it's a first principle. It is. We played around with time-restricted eating, right? Intermittent fasting. Ditto. Just like everyone else. And what I found was I couldn't eat enough to get my minimums on protein and fruits and vegetables. This is what's not talked about enough.

It's hard if you're going to restrict the amount of time that you eat. And the research was that people lost a lot of lean muscle mass. Yeah. Calorie restriction for adults is really what we should call time-restricted eating. That's right. Which is not, that's not the goal. That's not the goal. That's not the goal. That's not the goal.

To lose lean muscle mass is not the goal. Not the goal. But what I found was I was deeply under-caloried for my training and it's starving at night. So at the end of the window, I'd be like, oh, let me eat this jar of peanut butter and this chicken. Chicken. And full chicken. And I don't know the last time you went to bed after eating like 3000 calorie bolus.

And then I'd be like, oh, is that ice cream and cookies? And like, what else? And then I slept like crap. Yeah. And I did that rinse, wash, repeat. And I was like, I'm not sure this is really me and my jam. Yeah, that's right. So like say my first meal is at one o'clock or 12 o'clock, let's just say.

And my last meal's at like six or seven. So there's like a 12 o'clock to seven o'clock window that I'm eating. And if I get a 12 o'clock in, I'm good. You know, it's, I feel pretty good. Another three hours go by, I get another meal in. And then if I miss, and then I eat dinner at like six 30 with my family. So there's three meals that I've just accounted for, but then there's this long window between my second and third meal. And if I don't get something in there, I don't eat right on my last meal. Like to your point, like I'm really hungry after, because I've only gotten like 1200 calories in a day.

Yeah, you're under calorie. Yeah. And so like, I'm glad you're bringing that up because now you're in a bit of a starvation mode and that's a sympathetic activation, which is going to- It really ruined my sleep for a long time. I would be under calorie during the day and I'd overeat at night. That's right. And I will add in that I really have found in my own experience that it affected my deep sleep if I had a late meal.

This is why a technology I'm going to, we're both biased towards aura right now, but like is really important to see is a deep sleep that's compromised. You know, if you have a, if you drink alcohol, eat late, high sugars, high stress, you're likely going to have a compromise in sleep. It's not that complicated. It's nice to see the inputs and outputs. Inputs and outputs, right? And so one of the things that happens while we're sleeping is that we'll find ourselves

configured in a shape. Go back to your language. And so now we're not talking about the lead up into sleep, but the actual disturbance potential during sleep. And so my wife is, like I said, a former ballet dancer. So her hips are hurting more than she would like at this age. And it's not, it's from a hyper mobility, not from, okay. So sleeping on her side, she, she likes it. It feels comfortable. It feels safe, but then her hips will wake her up. Okay. So do you have any guidance on sleep shapes? Let's say that you should be able to sleep on a concrete floor.

Wait, what do you mean? What are we doing? Humans have been sleeping on hard surfaces. No, no, not concrete. I'm saying you should. This is like- Now let's go ahead and talk about reality. Humans should have like bars in front of them, concrete. You can, ultimately, I am really agnostic about the tools and we're huge fans of eye masks, for sure. I wear an eye mask. Yeah, you have to train yourself to do it.

It's a trigger. Yeah. It's an absolute trigger. We found, so- Pavlov's dog was right. You're absolutely right. It's a trigger. Yeah. It's an absolute trigger. We found, so. Pavlov's dog was right. You're absolutely right. It's a trigger. Now it's dark.

I also can control the environment. Which brand do you use? I like them all. What color is it? Black. Oh. I do. Mine is too funny.

It's got like compow and like, yeah, it's like, it's silk. It's awesome. I do like the manta ray. I don't have any. I've got to show you. What is the manta? Oh, the manta ray. Yeah. It just had like eye. Oh, no, this is not mine. It's awesome. I do like the manta ray. I don't have any. I've got to show you. What is the man? Oh, the manta ray. Yeah.

It just had like eye. This is not mine. Mine's actually not thick. It's real. It's not like there's no weight to it. Listen to this. Get yourself an eye mask. It's a legit.

And train yourself to use it. It'll come off. It'll take a month. It doesn't matter. You start traveling. You're in a weird hotel. It's always dark. It's a game changer because like with all the little green, blue things in hotels. Yes. It doesn't matter. You start traveling, you're in a weird hotel, it's always dark. It's a game changer because like

with all the little green, blue things in hotels, like it's really. I saw research that one flashing light will disturb your sleep. Like just one, your toothbrush. That research is pretty clear. Yeah, I also want people to know that when our athletes travel,

I have them take their own pillow or their own pillowcase. A little too much. That's extra. When you're the person on the plane or you- You take your pillow case, you put it on the pillow on the bed. Now it smells like your own bed. Yeah. And all the triggers, you put the eye mask on, your pillow, and all of a sudden you're

like, oh, I'm safe in this room. So thieves was a way I was doing that. Do you remember the spray thieves? Yeah. Yeah. So thieves is like a peppermint. Great idea. Yeah.

And so it's a familiar smell. It's got a little bit of, I don't know what's in it actually Great idea. Yeah. And so it's a familiar smell. It's got a little bit of, I don't know what's in it actually. I can't remember, but it was a familiarization. And so that was a nice one, but the, let's go back to the eye mask for a minute is, um, have you found that when you travel or you don't have your eye mask, that it's a bit of a problem for sure. Yeah. What do you do? What do you do at that point? Like it happened. I take a shirt and I tie it around my head. Oh, you're a maniac. Is that what you're doing?

Oh yeah, for sure. So you know what I've done? I take two eye masks. Okay. So I keep, this is crazy. We're talking about that. I keep one eye mask in my luggage and I have a second one by my bed.

And so now- Hating confessions with Dr. Mike. Yeah, so now- Well, again, what the key is, you just change your environment so you had the right outcome. And what you knew was that, hey, because you valued sleep and you knew it was such an important metric when you traveled and taught or taught or worked with someone that you set up the environment. That's it. Now you're on the crack. This is the game where I set the world up where I don't have to make

another bloody decision. And I'm engaged with, with better practices. I feel better and we're rolling. Yeah. Cool. And then let's see, we'll, we'll, we'll compete when we're 110. Is that what we're doing? I think so. Are you in the category that you're trying to live to like 200? I'm trying to be as durable as I can. Yeah. My wife is a two-time cancer survivor um i've had my knee replaced i've had a bunch of friends die kayaking we want to be as functional and rad as we can until we can't and then i for as long as we can that's right that's really how we feel and we feel like the hits are going to come so it's not about can you live to be 150 it's can you be durable enough to take the hits that are coming? Yeah, that's right. And there was a phrase in my, my wife and I would talk about a bunch and she

learned from some of her, her clients that were like 20 years older than her. And they would say like, going into your forties is really important. The way you go into your forties is telling the way that like, I can't remember the phrase, but like the way you enter certain decades is telling for the next decade. So if you're kind of a mess going into your fifties, like your sixties are going to be tough or your seventies are going to be, I think it's true. There's probably that much lag. Yeah. I turned 50 this year and I was something you're embarrassed about. No, no, no. Full disclosure. Well, I want to admit the reason I, I think somebody says they admit something. It's usually not very good. Right. I, i uh i want to be 50 because when i

lose i can be like oh you beat me because i'm 50 and you're 20 yeah right god but when i beat you i'm like you should beat me because i'm 50 i don't get the credit yeah 49 49 but what i'll tell you has been true more true than ever is that if i want to go do something rad with myself i went six days of backcountry skiing this year with a friend, with some young guys. I have to do the things that I talk about every day. I have to do them. My diet has to be better. I can't go drink a bunch of beer with them afterwards. I have to protect my sleep. Otherwise I cannot do the things. That for me is the, I'm like all these things help my young 20 year olds win

world championships. That's super cool. It helps me at 50 not be crippled. Are you friends with Steven Cutler as well? Yeah. Yeah. And so I figured that you guys maybe were, did you ski with him? I haven't skied with him yet. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Are you kidding? I know better now. I've listened to your podcast. It's like he gets after it. Yeah. Yeah. I will say everyone rises. Superman is one of my top 10 favorite books. Really? Yeah. Oh,

he'll love to. I love that book. Oh, that is awesome. Yeah. He did a nice job there for sure. All right. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for your expertise. The fun way that you talk about the depth of knowledge, the style in which you and your wife are presenting to the world. It's appreciated. It's made a difference in my life. And so I'm stoked that you're here. Thank you so much. Where do we drive people?

If you want to know more about this way of thinking, you can go to the Ready State at the Ready State or the readystate.com. And if you happen to grab Built to Move, we have a 21-day video companion guide for free at builttomove.com. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Nice job. Yeah. Awesome.

Appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you, sir. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of finding mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe

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