Modern Wisdom - #612 - Kelly Starrett - 8 Essential Strategies To Maximise Your Fitness

Episode Date: April 8, 2023

Kelly Starrett is a physical therapist, speaker, author, and considered one of the most influential voices in the fitness industry.  Deep down we know we should take better care of ourselves. The random aches, pains and cracks many of us have become accustomed to simply shouldn't be a part of our everyday experience. Thankfully, Kelly has broken down his philosophy into simple vital signs you should focus on to move smoother, sleep better, live longer and train harder. Expect to learn how to fix your posture if you sit at a desk all day, what nutrient dense foods you need to be eating more of, why you need to spend more time on the ground, how to burn an extra 100,000 calories per year with one change, the simplest way to hit 10k steps per day, the most important health metrics you need to be tracking, how to stay disciplined with your new fitness habits and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Built To Move - https://amzn.to/437sM6D  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Kelly Starritt, he's a physical therapist, speaker, author, and considered one of the most influential voices in the fitness industry. Deep down, we know that we should take better care of ourselves. The random aches, pains, and cracks many of us have become accustomed to simply shouldn't be a part of our everyday experience. Thankfully, Kelly has broken down his philosophy into simple vital signs that you should focus on to move smoother, sleep better, live longer, and train harder. Expect to learn how to fix your posture if you sit at a desk all day, what nutrient-dense foods you need to be eating more of, why you need to spend more time on the ground,

how to burn an extra 100,000 calories per year with one change, the simplest way to track 10,000 steps per day, the most important health metrics you need to be tracking, how to stay disciplined with your new fitness habits, and much more. In other news, this episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. We all can need help at some point in our lives, whether it's because of stress at home or work or loneliness, it can be invaluable to know that there's someone professionally trained who can help us get through whatever we're facing. Over 2 million people have taken charge of their mental health with better helps online service, it removes all of the hassle and awkwardness that can be involved in finding a therapist

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travel packs, that 90-day money back guarantee, and more. That's athleticgreens.com-slash-modern-wisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Kelly Starritt. It seems like your most recent book where you've tried to break down very fundamental principles that people need in order to just exist as a human. In the body, relationship with sleep, relationship with mobility, movement, etc., etc. It seems to me like that really getting back to a nice basic foundation. And at the moment, I think is the trend that I'm seeing as well, that we have a lot of information, and it's all about synthesizing that into applicable strategies now.

I think you're right. This industry of fitness, and we'll call it capital F, the industrial fitness complex. Used to be global gyms and big protein companies. And now it's like this decentralized, net bot. Everyone's got abs and everyone's got their opinions about everything. It's a trillion dollar industry. And if we say, well, how's it going? We can ask these questions.

Well, how about obesity? Are we solving our communities obesity problems or diabetes or chronic pain or surgery or ACL injury rates and kids or substance abuse or depression or chronic pain? And literally every single one of those is trending in the wrong direction. So something, this experiment we've all been running,

we have gotten really good in this vertical. If you accidentally slipped into the Instagram feed, I mean, there was just an article in the New York Times last week about, are you being crushed by fitness on your Instagram social media? Because fitness is literally just, like, it's like the rest of us, the last of us, and we're just taking over like a fungus. And I suspect that it has confused or mudded the waters a little bit. And I think hopefully we're seeing a trend towards what is essential. And what we've tried to do in this book is honestly synthesize the information we've had from 15, 20 years of working with really good teams and

really good athletes and say which hinges swing the biggest doors A and B which which are the fundamental behaviors or can we create some vital science and some benchmarks so that you could scale that up into a world championship or scale it backwards into I want to have kids who are durable when they grow. Okay, so how frequently do people sit stand and walk? Have you ever seen any statistics on this? Yeah, it's not great. The key to think about all of this is to say, all right, for literally, we haven't changed much to two and a half million years of evolution. And especially in the last 10,000 years, we're the same person. I mean, I'm a little fatter.

Your femur's a little longer, but we're the same kids. And then what we really can, from there, is not have some paleolithic, romantic model of we should, you know, ferment it and buffalo livers and you get so crazy. But we can ask is what did our environment look like? Because I have to think, yeah, it's important to be useful as an intellectual exercise to sort of ask, why is our lymphatic system bootstrapped into our movement system?

When phatic system is your sewage system, right? It processes all the normal waste that are two, waste particles and products that are too big to go into circulatory system. And that system is a bunch of one-way tubes that's driven by muscle contraction. And so it's almost like we've been evolved to walk or move a little bit more in the day than we currently are.

And what we're seeing, for example, is that most adults are moving less than 3000 total steps a day. And we can find that now because everyone has a motion tracker. It's their phone. So what we're seeing is, hey, there's sort of this been this creep into mismatch between human and environment.

And now we're having to be a little bit more conscious about seeing if we can remedy some of those things. What are the longest levers that can offset somebody that sits at a desk all day? You know, the first order of business is to get beyond like sitting is bad and standing is good. Because if you ever had a job where you stood all day long, it's gnarly.

And it's a real problem. We have to actually create a whole bunch of surfaces for people that are squishy and we have to give them special shoes and you have to give them breaks. It's complicated. So human beings, what that tells us is standing still is not good, sitting still is not good, that we need to move a little bit more during the day. So, you know, this is in our opinion, you know, what we've seen the last particularly 10 years with the evolution of technology and you know when we when we opened our gym You know in 2005

We were on Yahoo business And our our staff was like why aren't you on Gmail? We're like because when we started this business There was no Gmail just so everyone's clear So something has changed a lot where everyone's got a laptop everyone's taking it home and What we're seeing is you know the the Demands on us have changed, as we've said. And Harvard suddenly got really interested in some of this sedentary biology, sedentary behavior, sort of physiology. And one of the things we noticed where they define is that sedentary lifestyles, if you drop below one and a half metabolic equivalence. So everyone

here is into fitness and exercising. If you ever want to like a stair master at a hotel gym and it was like, you can work out, it melts. I'm at six mats, I don't have no ideas, that good or bad, but mats is a unit of measurement like an urg or a watt. We've all adopted the watt, but metabolic equivalent is basically how much your body burns at rest.

And what they've said is, hey, any behavior that falls below one and a half metabolic equivalence is a sedentary behavior. So you're standing, I'm perching, I'm leaning up against a bar stool with my feet on the ground. Both of us are engaged in movements and positions that allow us to fidget and require a little bit more body movement, body stabilization, recruitment, and it kicks us above one and a half metabolic equivalence. As soon as you sit in the chair or couch, you're below that. So Harvard defined sedentary lifestyle as trying to limit total time in the day spent underneath

one and a half at six hours. And what we're seeing is that we're crushing that, We're at like 10, 12, 13 hours a day. Okay. What about offsetting the mobility issues that you have. You're in this C-shaped human position, hips are tight, lower back's tight, next tight, shoulders are tight. Let's say that someone is sat down at a desk. Is there anything?

And they can't get up, you know, they've got a job to do they're in a sales role or whatever. Yeah. Is there anything? Are there any cues that they can have at their desk any movements they can do any little stretches? They can do whilst on a call whether video maybe isn't on The science quit your yeah, right. I can't quit your job. I have to feed my family. Correct So one of the ways I think is useful to just about, think about this, is that you're not fragile and you can sit all day long and go ahead and jump on a red eye, take a long flight, you know, go to a conference, you'll see that it's fine. But what we can start to say is, I think if we can give people some vital signs, so the

book, for example, is just kind of, you can divide it into two categories. The first category is, here are some vital signs. And when I say vital sign, like we'd say, like blood pressure, if I say 120 over 80, everyone's like, well, that's not very good blood pressure, but it's not bad blood pressure either. It's sort of like, I should pay attention to this. So when we give people objective values, objective experiences where they can say, okay, I'm above or below that. But then we can start to ask what the next question is. And what we can, what we can strip out one of the, my favorite ways of talking about training.

And this came out of some of the work we did with Premier Soccer is Premier Footy, is that we call the session or the training day or whatever what the stimulus was, we call its effect on the body the next day, the session cost. So you can see that. If you have an or ring or a whoop, you can see what your heart rate variability is, what your resting heart rate is, you can see your kind of recovery score, your total sleep. That's really a very technical version of this idea of session cost. And what we're trying to do with all our athletes is say, hey, we think that you can no longer

outwork anyone anymore. That sort of ship has sailed. Like maybe you could outwork someone in the 90s. You had your secret school program and you outworked them. Everyone's working really hard. That ship has sailed. But what we do know is that our athletes were really working hard on saying, how can we reduce the session cost, the CNS load, the implications of soreness,

DOMS, anything that's sort of important to you. What we find is that those athletes who are engaged in better behaviors that allow them to handle higher volumes and higher intensities over longer periods of time, they tend to make more progress and they tend to be that work everyone eventually, but it's not really true. They end up adapting everyone. They're better at adapting to the stimulus and over time they have better results. So that session cost is really useful because suddenly we can say, okay, you're a cyclist. How does that all the time spent cycling impact your ability to access your native physiology? So if you're engaged in a sport and all the time spent cycling impact your ability to access your native physiology.

So if you're engaged in a sport and all of a sudden you can put your arms over your head or you can't extend your hip, suddenly we have a really excellent way, I mean, one second, we have an excellent way of sort of wrapping our heads around what the cost of that position is. So instead of heart availability, we can start to look at actual shapes. And what's nice about that then is that allows us to quantify what's going on. So ultimately, coming back to your question,

we can say, hey, I spent a lot of time in this position. Instead of taking the tack that this is a bad shape or this is gonna cause you injury, well, you can say is, what was the cost of all of this behavior where I spent in the chair? And it turns out, well, I wasn't able to take a full breath or turn my head or extend my hip or I lost some hip flexion. And that really helps us to say, now, what are the behaviors that I can start to fair it into my life? And maybe I can do it all,

maybe I can just do it at home. And how do I come back to fair it into my life. And maybe I can't do it at all. Maybe I can just do it at home. And how do I come back to a baseline? So once we establish a baseline for some certain movement behaviors, positions, then this gives us a real opportunity to start to say, hey, let's keep you above that. And now you can say, oh, hey, I've been doing a lot of sitting. I wonder if that's impacting this shape or this position.

And that gets us away from, again, that really specious and overly simplified conversation of, soon as bad, standing as good. What's the cost of the behaviors I'm in? Does it implicate my ability to access my range of motion and physiology? Okay, so rather than pathologizing, just sitting down, you are saying, let's break this down. What does sitting down cause the next day? What are some of the issues? So I'm just... Yeah, well, what do you think sitting does?

Titans, the hip flexors, titans the lower back in terms of how it feels but probably actually de-conditions the back because you're not bracing quite so much. Curves the top of the spine because most people's... In this sense, dangerous. I don't think I want that. Well, look, I mean, those of us that are standing up in this beautiful position here, shoulders rolled forward.

Yeah, and again, let's just say that your body is solving a problem for you. Right? Let's look at that. Like, this is the position where if I'm in this shape for a long periods of time, this is how my body is solving it. So it's, so I can do this job. You know, I'm gonna get into this position. My neck's gonna go ahead and get a little more tonic because it's useful to hold my head up.

Now it doesn't have to work. It just sends the message to make it stiff. The only reason typically people care about these kinds of behaviors is why. What do you think? Why? Because they want to do something outside of that particular environment. No, I don't think that's it.

I think it's pain. I think someone gets to a place where like this hurts and the normal ways that I self-sooth don't work anymore. Usually, I just wake up and my hand off the day before and it re-grows, right? Like when I did when I was 19, that's, that's then work. And then I used to take this ibuprofen and that worked and then it had to work. And then I used to get a massage and that didn't work. And then I started taking this T.H.C. to sleep and that didn't work.

And so all of a sudden, I think what, I think for a lot of people, we're not really interested in title volume, we're not interested in public floor function, we're not interested in hip extension, we're interested in, hey, I just want to go back to be able to do whatever I want to do and not care. But you're absolutely right. Underpinning that physiology, underpinning those changes in function, right, is some aspect of my body being changed by this behavior that I'm engaged in a lot and how my body's adapting to that. So, you know, ultimately we want everyone to hear pain is a

request for change. So if you're sitting in your back, starts to ache, you should not think, oh, my back is aching. This is a bummer. You should be thinking, huh, wonder what my message my body is telling me. And that probably if I have some different inputs, my brain will stop caring about what's going on. Pain does not mean tissue trauma. Pain does not necessarily mean that something you need an MRI. Pain is your brain becoming sensitized or interpreting what's happening for your body. And that's why I think one of the things that you said is we're trying to help people kind of organize all of these at different aspects of these behaviors.

We always forget how the systems work together and that if you're super stressed, underslapped, alcohol fueled, you meaning pizza, I guarantee you you're more likely to experience a less effective brain that handling your silly bullshit than if you're well loved, feel like you're safe, there's a beautiful person in your waiting room, right? You know, I mean, like you can see that there, we need to understand the brain and that's all we have to talk about, you know, nutrition and we have to talk about your sleep

and we have to talk about your safety and your movement. And then we can also talk about your shapes. Okay, so give us something applied. Somebody that does sit all day. They need to change that position as frequently as possible. They need to probably spend a little bit of time walking if they can or standing up or just get it around. Let's say if I know that I'm engaged

in some sedentary behaviors, because I can't help it, then the first thing I need to do is say, hey, I need to move more. So what does that look like? I don't know how much I exercise. If you get to the gym, that's good news for you. But the first order of business is to say, hey, where in my day can I control and have some more agency?

Well, that might be around lunchtime, around breakfast, around dinner. So maybe it's sort of the book ends of my day. And then the chaos of the day, I got my kids off to school, and now I'm just, you know, holding on tight. All I can do is try to walk more, move more. And now when we give someone a clear objective and say, hey, look, we know that most of the good benefits really start to happen between six and eight thousand steps,

that becomes a reasonable number to hit, right? I'm not saying 15,000 steps or you're a failure. I'm just saying, hey, we really can start to see a lot of the good benefits of moving more kick in at six to eight. But if you're also having a hard time falling asleep, we might need to push that to 10 to 12 to accumulate more exercise fatigue. On the other side too, we can start, so that means for you, you're like, hey, I have to sit all day long, can't control that, but I can control the book ends of where and how

I'm going to move more just to get more steps in. Potentially, I can also change and reframe how I'm working so that I have movement choice. Maybe I can perch against the bar stool. Maybe I can change my workout environment where I'm just going to stand for a little bit or I'm going to take a call standing, something like that. But then we can start to say, well, are there some simple things and inputs into some shapes that I can put in

that help me maintain my native ranges? And you'll see in the book, we have things like the couch stretch, which maybe you can't do at work, but you absolutely can do things called split squats at work. So get into a tandem stance, squeeze your butt, drop it a little low, hold that for five breaths. We can put in isometric, sneaky isometrics that remind your body, he hears shapes that I want to value. So the ultimate thing that we say

when we're trying to restore someone's position or improve their position and output is exposure. Before we get into some technical technology, before we have some secret school mobilization thing. I'm like, hey, if you want to get better sitting on the ground, let's sit on the ground. If you want to have time improving your squat, let's not do a whole bunch of complicated things. Let's hold you, have you hold on to something and start to spend time in a position that we value. Start to tell your brain, I really want the own this position. This is native range. So one of the things you can do at work is just start getting

into a tangent position, squeeze your butt, and go as deep as you can and hold that for five breaths. And then next 10 minutes, do it again. Or do you mean when you say tandem position for the peak? I mean, something looks like a lunge shape, or we're taking that hip into extension. Look, Ben Patrick of Knees Over Toes has done such a good job of saying, hey, it's okay to have ankle range of motion.

That's really what he said. Your ankles are actually supposed to flex and you're supposed to use all of that 20 and 30 degrees of knee coming forward. That's totally normal. But now I'm saying, hey, let's go knees behind butt guy in that in this situation, the thing that's going to be probably most likely to be limited

from lots of sedentary time is your ability to extend your hip, not hip extension standing from a squat or the toilet. I've actually taken that knee behind your butt into a lunge or a sprint like shape and spend time there. That's the thing that we want you to start to be exposed to more. Have you got any idea when we're talking about things like couch stretch, which most people will be familiar with and they can Google it if they're not, or getting themselves into a lunge and pushing that hip through to open up that hip flexor to open up that set of

hips. Have you got any idea about the minimum effective dose or where you really, you've mentioned between six and eight thousand steps is where we start to see a big amount of impact for walking. Is there an amount of exposure, time and attention that you see that is where the impact really begins for mobility as well? I think we want to always remind people

that these things compound. So, you know, you're like, I did it once, I have to do it again, you know, I understand, it didn't fix me. So how stiff for you, how old are you, how much time you, what are your sports, what's your behavior? You see, there's too many variables for here. But what we can start to say is, let's begin

by spending time in this position. So how much can we fix it in? So did you do rear foot elevated splits, quats, it's a gym, probably don't need to do a lot more of that today. But what we can, again, come back to is what we start to see is in some of these shapes, if we can just get 30 second holds, we can really start to move the shape.

And notice that I'm less pedantic about, I think it's 27.6 seconds in this shape that starts to make your tissue change on a Tuesday in October. Instead, I'm like, hey, can you take a big breath here? Show me you can take five big breaths in this position. And now we start to unlock a whole lot of other things. We've got your brain paying attention. You start to own that position because you're breathing in that position. I made you take five breaths there. That's really long. It might take you longer than 30 seconds to get five big breaths. But when we move away from this, I did the minimum dose. And now I'm starting to say qualitatively, qualitatively, can I occupy this shape and breathe in this shape, it turns out to be more effective.

How much do you need to do, as much as you need to do to get back out? I ran yesterday, I have to run again. You know what we're looking for is how well your body can adopt to the stimulus. I understand, and this seems like a much more holistic way to do it rather than just picking an arbitrary number and prescribing it I get that when it comes to shoulder neck back as well What are the big leaders that? You know when when we're

When you come to me with some kind of neck pain or lumbar pain remember it turns out to be your spine It's it's arbitrarily diced up by us, right? But it is your spine. It's like saying, I'm here for my upper femur pain. You're like, I think it's your leg. Pretty sure it's your leg. No, no, it's my upper leg I'm here for. So one of the things that we try to do

when anyone comes to us with pain, because again, what you're telling me is, hey, I'm really concerned about my lumbar stability under 600 pounds squat. That's a different conversation, right? What we always prescribe first for all our patients is I need you to walk more. I need you to de-conjest.

And I need you to accumulate enough non-exercise fatigue that you fall asleep and we can control that. Number two, I wanna make sure that you are actually sleeping, right? And number three, I need to make sure that you are actually breathing. And the first motion around the spine is not walking, it's not rolling, it's not squatting, it's breathing. And so the very first thing we start to look at is how well and how vastly you can expand and contract these tissues around the trunk. Can you take a big breath in your upper back? Can you take a big breath in your belly?

It's an easy way to start to signal to the brain. Hey, look at all this movement here, and also we can start to upregulate the system. Whether that's de-conjution of the system, or just moving the tissues and getting them to slide and glide, improving pressurization, improving VO2 max, all of the things. But what's useful about that thinking then, is most people who are coming, are to talk about low back pain, are starting to realize that their hips

are somehow connected to their back. And so sometimes on the internet, you would think that the back is just this isolated thing that has nothing to do with how someone moves or how the structures are connected to it. So if you're hip, and we see this all the time in soccer players, it was one of my young physio moments when one of the senior physios was like,

oh, it's another tail wag the dog thing, where I was like, what are you talking about? They were like, well, we have these really stiff young soccer players with huge quads and big butts, and they just yank around their spine. And I was like, well are you talking about? They're like, well, we have these really stiff young soccer players with huge quads and big butts, and they just yank around their spine. And I was like, well, what do you mean? Because they're so powerful, they're like, no, they're so restricted in the hip range motion. They have so much available power that when they go, the hip, the leg drags the pelvis

into position, which just wags the dog. So what we start to see is this very powerful leg starts to impose a lot of hidden demand on the trunk. And what you think is we need a stronger trunk, because that's always, oh, we need a bigger transmission, we need another cylinder on the engine wrong. Let's go ahead and see if we can just restore this native range of motion of the pelvis. So sitting on the ground helps restore those ranges.

Getting into a lunge helps restore those ranges. We've got a lot of sneaky ways to hit rotation from 1990 to elevated pigeon. Lots of ways to be looking at rotation of your hips to help your lumbar. But with the upper back, notice that the first order of business to get your shoulder neck better was to take a big breath because that gets your upper back to move more effectively. And now if your thoracic spine is very stiff or less stiff because you're not in that C position or you got in the C position to move, suddenly you can organize your head more effectively and wait for it just like the pelvis, the lumbar and the femur. We're all a relationship. Well, so is your thoracic spine, your neck and your shoulder. So if we want to get to the bottom of your shoulder pain, we've got to have to talk about how that shoulder is connected to the trunk.

And if we're going to get to the bottom of your neck pain, we're going to get to talk about how effectively you can move your shoulder. And that's why we start to see these things in systems. No system of the body works by itself. You mentioned breath. James Ness has been on the show, Brian McKenzie's been on the show. Oh, yeah. But neither of them have been on for quite a while and the show is about a hundred times bigger than the last time that they were on. For the people that didn't get to catch either of those episodes, when it comes to how we breathe, what are most people getting wrong? We should shift the language from getting wrong to, man, you're not fully as effective as you could be.

So let's talk about, you know, Brian is gotten so good at the deep physiology of breathing, the real technical aspects and its implication on athletic performance. And I am obsessed with the mechanics of breathing. What, how, how springy is your rib cage? What's going on? But most people can relate to this. So why you're listening to this, go into Slouch Forward, let your shoulders round, let your chin kind of go up, get a good hank,

if you get a crease in your neck fat in the back, that's even better. And without changing your position, this is how most people are sitting on their computer. Go ahead and take the biggest breath in you can. We can measure that. You can breathe through your nose if you want. Now breathe through your mouth and watch it's going to be less. Okay. Now watch this. All I'm going to say is find a position where you can take a bigger breath and everyone will automatically organize, not brace, not sequence, they'll

organize their bodies into a position where they intuitively can take a more powerful breath. So let's measure that. Let's make this objective. Let's not make it feely. So all of a sudden, now you take a huge breath and your diaphragm descends and your ribcage expand, your chest expands, and you were like, wow, that's 10x bigger than that little pinche around it off breath. So we start to see is well that round to see shape is less effective at maintaining the integrity of my diaphragm, letting me access the musculature of my ribcage. It doesn't allow me to really powerfully stabilize or stiffen because my pelvic floor isn't functioning very well in that shape. So what most people don't think about because they haven't sort of had their faces rubbed

in it is that a lot of the shapes we adopt end up inhibiting a lot of our function. So if I'm in a rounded position and I can't really descend my diaphragm, then I'm going to do chest breathing. I'm going to breathe up my neck. I don't know why I clench my jaw at night and why I have a headache and why my neck is always tight and I always have to beat the crap out of my scalings. Well it turns out if you're using your neck to breathe 10,000 times a day, guess what your body is going to do. It's going to say no problem bro. This is how we're doing it. No problem. We've got your back. Your body is always going to solve this problem for you. It doesn't

always hint at the best way to expand your physiology. So we're always looking for choices that allow us to regress and progress. And so what we can say is, hey, this shape you're in works, but it's not going to allow us to progress your physiology. You're not going to be able to go faster, you're not going to be able to go harder, you're not going to be able to go do the things

you want to do. It works for now until it doesn't work. And then we're gonna have to reshape. So ultimately, when we put the body into more efficient positioning, the whole thing starts to change. Yes, you should probably tape your mouth at night when you sleep.

Yes, you should probably learn how to breathe your nose. Yes, but also, only moly, you're super stiff in the back. And if your back is stiff in your cyclist, and you can't take a breath there, that's gonna be decreased decreased via two max. Why don't we do someone with that? How should people consider queuing themselves to remind, I'm not in the right position, I'm not breathing sufficiently deeply, you know, we're going about this throughout the day and

for the next, for the remainder of this episode, everyone's going to be breathing fantastically, but in and hours, in and hours time, maybe less so. And in a day's time, they've forgotten what they learn from you. What are some of the things that can cue people to remind them? We've got to be breathing deeply. We need to be breathing into both the upper chest, but also into the stomach as well, expanding that ribcage, sitting up nice and tall. So repetition is the mother of skill, right? That's what, you know, practices make perfect, practice makes permanent. So now you know, you know, you have this idea around, hey, can I adopt a more functional position in whatever shape I'm in? So if I'm

working at my desk and I have to sit, those all those shapes aren't evil. They're not equal. The shape that allows me to maintain the most integrity with the lowest session cost, that's my shape. That's the shape that's gonna impact my biology, the least over the long haul. So already, you have this idea that we talked about, can I take a bigger breath in a different shape? So suddenly, you now, you're on the peloton later on

and you're finding yourself doing a sprint and you're like, huh, I wonder if I can breathe in this position. Oh, I wonder if this position which I can breathe more effectively. I've only had that conversation with, I don't know, three or four world champion bikers where I'm talking about finding shapes for them

in the Tour de France and on the World Cup or in the Olympics where we're trying to maintain their ventilation position. Or I have athletes who are in the wind tunnel being tested at specialized and we're having a conversation between aerodynamics and ventilation, this compromise. I have athletes who are in the wind tunnel being tested at specialized and we're having a conversation between aerodynamics and ventilation this compromise eventually I can make you into an aerodynamic wing

But you can't breathe in that position. So you know what's happening now is that as soon as you have this consciousness This thing can I breathe in this position? because fundamentally We can ask the question or or come back to this truism if I can't breathe in a position, I don't own that position. And that was a great cook who I first said that, right? The one of the masters and the brains behind FMS. But simultaneously, I angar set a long time ago, nerves are king of the breath, the breath is king of the brain. So if I want to tell my brain that I own a shape

and that this shape is safe, the first and easiest way to do that is to make sure that I can ventilate fully and maximally. It's almost like in yoga, they put me into these pretzel positions and then make me breathe there. Why don't they do that? I understand. You and mutual friend of ours are in Alexander very big about getting up and down off the ground.

It's something that he is always telling me to do whenever I go to the sauna with him, and I sit down, homeboys in the bottom of a squad, or he's in a lotus position, or he's in a 90-90. What is it that you guys are arriving at with regards to being on the ground and getting up off the ground? Why is that so special? You know, I think even just a few hundred years ago, we slept on the ground, we toileted on the ground, we cooked on the ground, we spent a lot of time on the ground. And again, just like if we looked at the circulatory system and the waste system of the body, right, that being bootstrapped into movement,

there is some thinking and really proposed by a really brilliant person named Philip Beach that one of the ways the body tunes itself is to spend time on the ground. All the different positions that you're fidgeting load us in specific ways. They make our backs around, we have to load on sit in this 90-90 position, we long sit, where during the course of just sitting on the ground for 30 minutes, you are going to spend 30 minutes at some end-range positions that are gonna help you

work on your having access to better range of motion and things you actually care about, like Downward Doc or Being on the Bike. And all you have to do is sit there. Simultaneously, I think if we used this idea of retirement. So when I'm saving for retirement, what I think is I've got to save this much money every month so that I can retire on this day

and I start working backwards, right? I need to have this much of my retire, how much I need to save a month. I'm training for the world championships. What I do is I get all organized and I start working backwards from the day I need to be the fastest human being on the earth and we start to plan your training. Well, one of the things we know is that the number one reason people end up in nursing homes is they can't get it off the ground independently.

One of the ways that, I just saw this article New York Times last week that said that we expect hip fractures to double in this country by 2050. So in 25 years, we're going to see double the number of hip fractures and hip replacements because of that fracture, hip repairs. Tells us that in the future, there's a couple things that are hugely important, getting up and down off the ground and not losing my balance. So if I work backwards from backwards from them then I can say hey, it's really easy for me to wait till I'm just 70 or 80 I'm like oh, I can't do it. Let me go to a special class and see a physical therapist and rebuild my bone density and get stronger or

During the course of the day, I can just say hey, I'm watching TV at night Everyone's watching TV at night stop lying. You're watching TV at night. You're watching Netflix just like us everyone's watching TV night, stop lying, you're watching TV at night, you're watching Netflix, just like us, sit on the ground for the first 30 minutes of that show. And what you'll find is, man, I can bury that in. I don't have to go to some sitting class. I don't have to drive myself to my friend's house and jump in this sauna to be told. I just need to sit on the ground a little bit more. And when we start to do that, you'll start to see things like my back feels better. My hips feel better. I was, oh, hey, my roller's my back feels better. My hips feel better.

I was, oh, hey, my roller's right there, as I'm sitting on the ground. And now I have buried in this really essential behavior of expanding the load, expanding the positions that my body's engaged in day to day. And I improved my movement lexicon while doing something else. I didn't have to go to a yoga class. It just needed to sit on the ground.

That is how we untangle this freakish-gordy knot and how I respect your time. If you like to go to spin class or crossfit class or lift heavy weights, let's continue to do that. Let's not take away from that. Let's just expand what your movement choices are, movement options are. All I'm asking you to do is sit on the ground. And this isn't just in one position. It's not just cross-legged,

it's not just, you know, sat with your legs out in front of you. Oh, you're so cute. You think that you're actually mobile enough to sit cross-legged and like load us pose for a half hour? You are not. What's gonna happen is you're gonna be like, mom, I'm a back, I better fidget,

so I'll now go 90, 90, and then, oh, let me kneel. Oh, this long sitting position is gnarly. My abs are cramping, and you'll change position. So fidget, once you've sort of run the course, exactly what you're saying. As soon as you've run the course, change your shapes. And that's okay. It's almost like, wait for it.

Yoga is all about meditation and the brain. And they were like, you're not flexible enough or mobile enough I've worked enough to sit quietly so do all this yoga so you can come to this cross-legged position and Sit there for an hour and meditate you can't do that you can't even do that You're like my legs are burning my low back takes you out of that meditation So let's use that same idea of hey, I don't need you to be still fidget all you want I'm going to look for a

I don't need you to be still, fidget all you want. I'm going to look for a C table. So I use one of these, it's a small little square table that is the shape of a C. I'm going to say I haven't bothered looking yet, but I'm going to look to see if there's one that's about six inches high. And that would mean that I would be able to throw a laptop on that and I would be able to work away.

I could have an external keyboard and mouse if I wanted to do that. My Netflix time genuinely actually is quite low because on an evening I'm doing a lot of dinners here in Austin because it's like the most sociable place on the planet but Coming downstairs and maybe answering emails and and doing that whilst on the ground for 30 minutes I think would be really great. So that's and easy to work in I was just in Japan on a crazy backcountry ski tour in February with some friends. And we were at this amazing lodge in this national park. And one of the

guys started to get sick. And I was like, I can't be in your room. I'm going to come home. My wife's going to kill me if I show up with a cold and a man cold, right? I just can't be in the same room. So we talked to the hotel staff and we're like, hey, is there another room? They're like, there's another room available. And we're like, are you sure? This is a big hotel. There's not many people in there. Like, no, sorry. When we dug down, turns out there weren't any more Western white person rooms. There were plenty of Japanese rooms, traditional Japanese rooms. And they were like, but look at this guy. They literally pointed it and they're like, he can't go in that room. And the reason is I have food on, yeah.

All the chairs are low. You have to sit on the ground to use the toilet. All the controls for the room are low. You have to food on the tables are designed to be sitting on the ground. And they were like, this guy, they literally pointed me like, he'll die in this room. And I was like, just me, I have this room. So if it's about, you know, not getting sick and staying in a room, what we're seeing is, I wanna maintain your choice. I wanna maintain your movement solutions. And what we're really talking about

is creating some benchmarks that allow you to start to rewild yourself, to come back into, being able to do the things you're about to do. When we were becoming supple-epid, it had two objective measures in there. The first was your range of motion, which is non-negotiable. That's what every doctor, every surgeon, every orthopedist, everyone thinks that your shoulders should move this much,

your hips should move this much. Even if you have a special snowflake Scottish hip, it should squat to 120 degrees, maybe not 135 degrees, but 120 degrees. Suddenly, what we can start to say is, okay, here's your native range of motion, here's the objective, and then here's your output, which is when start to say is, okay, here's your native range of motion, here's the objective, and then here's your output, which is when we improved your position, we

saw your wattage improve and your poundage improve. Those are two objectives. So now, we've taken those same ideas and tried to give them to people around these other behaviors. Let's add movement and make movement of vital sign. How easy? You mentioned walking early on. I'm going to guess that what you're going to say is

the best way to get between 6 and 8,000 steps in per day is whenever you can get 6 and 8,000 steps in per day. But I've also seen from mutual friend Mark Bell some interesting stuff to do with insulin sensitivity if walking after you eat a meal. That's a nice way to get small doses in. I'm going to guess that if you could, you know, three walks of 15 minutes

is probably about between six and 8,000 steps. I'm going to guess. As opposed to cracking out last thing at night before you go to bed, a full 8,000 steps because you've only moved 500 throughout the rest of the day. Are there any other things that people need to consider when looking at that walking routine? If you know what's going to snow, an inch an hour, we can go out with a broom and just

sweep that right off. Or we can wait there's two feet of snow and go out with a very different tool. And I think imagine I was like, I'm not going to eat protein all day, but instead I'm just going to eat all 200 grams of protein I'm trying to get in this one meal. You can do it. It's just not less good. It's not as fun, not as effective. It's better to spread that out over the day. If someday you're able to get a 30-minute walk and cool, the other thing I would suggest

is it's not really about just steps. It's about movement. If I can be moving and fidgeting at my desk, if I can have someplace to balance and change my shape and put one foot up and suddenly the whole thing is total movement. And let me just frame this for everyone when we wrote Deskbound. One of the things that Juliet found, she found this online calculator that you add in your weight and she discovered that if she just switched from sitting to purchasing being more active she burned an additional 100,000 calories a year, 100,000. I weigh my wife by 100 pounds basically and so I'm like okay let me round down. So 170,000 calories a year if I choose not to sit just in choosing not to sit in a traditional chair, 170,000 calories of ice cream. Go ahead and Google what your favorite ice cream is,

and then just convert that into peeps, beer, whiskey, whatever it is you give a shit about, convert that amount, and that's free money. That's free, I didn't have to exercise, I didn't have to change my diet. I just was able to revolutionize my body composition just by making myself move more and requiring more of my body And what I want everyone to remember is that it's not even about that

It's about this is how much is required to get your tissues to not be congested. I want you to be able to handle the workloads You're engaged in we have started having all of our elite teams and athletes walk more, even if they're elite athletes. And guess what happens? Their tissues are healthier, the heart rate variability improves, the resting heart rate goes down, they feel springier the next day, they have fewer tendon problems and skin problems. It's remarkable when we think about circulation and the congestion. That's what walking is. I am among the group of people that has been using a whoop for a very long time. And I've had Joel Jamison on the show, you know, Mr. H RV.

We've spoken a lot about that. Given that we're talking about everyone, go follow Joel Jamison. Joel Jamison is the man. Please go follow him. He's a beast. His content is so good. Given that we're talking about vital signs today, one of the first places that people will go to will be metrics,

objective metrics of what their body is doing. You've mentioned blood pressure and stuff like that today. Obviously, we're getting things like breath rate, resting heart rate, heart rate. Yeah, we've expanded those people. I'm talking about that, right? SAO 2. I mean, my ring picks up whether or not I was breathing last night and had lower oxygen saturation. That's bananas. What is it that you are looking at with regards to the clients that you work with, the athletes that you work with or just the normal people day to day where you're saying,

these are the big benchmark markers that you should be looking at. You've mentioned blood pressure a couple of times today, so I'm going to guess that that's one of the big ones. I want people to look at the bigger behaviors. We expect blood pressure to be lagging indicator of a whole bunch of other things. One of my favorite people around this is Stan Effarding, the Rhino, who has done so much to help big guys

manage their blood pressure and diagnose sleep apnea. So if you're a big guy with him, he's gonna insist that you start, you're a power athlete, you have to use a CPAP machine. So he starts the assumption that you're actually apnic and not getting good rest and lo and behold, he starts with that assumption, let's organize your sleep, and then all the gains happen.

All the body transformation happens. All the strength improves. So we can start to see if we work on these vital signs, we expect this independent set of panels to simultaneously improve. And those vital signs are, did you get fiber, did you get enough micronutrients, did you get your protein macros, how was your sleep, did you walk, right?

We can start to say those things are some real physical behavior pieces, then we can start to expand what the sort of, the benchmarks include balance, we can talk about range of motion, some of these other aspects. And lo and behold, what we want is to appreciate that these things that we've chosen, these 10 kind of hinges, again, that are swinging the biggest doors, you should be able to clinic, validate them against anything you want to.

I want to row faster. Cool. I want to lift more cool. I want to be more durable cool. Science supports all these things, the literature supports all these things, behavior supports all these things. But then you're like, well, prove it. I'm like prove it to everything. I want to see like your secret school training program is the best in the world. You shout it out all the time about how rad your program is. Take anyone from your program, I'm going to drop you into some a third party program. Oh, you think you can do David Weck, come over here and show me. You think you can, you know, jump into a power, a powerlifting meet or do an Olympic lift

cool. What I want people to understand is that if we are hitting first principles, you can validate them in any way you want and we should see them trend in positive directions. You don't have to have like, hey, I'm doing this thing to affect my HIV. If I start using sleep as an organizing principle, suddenly I start cutting off caffeine much earlier in the day. I start making just different decisions about walking and even about alcohol. You know, for example, let me give you a good example. One of my sort of, we're always trying to get our athletes to be 10 out of 10. Remember, this book is the same thing that I take in to the military, to the Air Force,

to the Army, to England national soccer team. These are the same things. We're trying to figure out what's what. But one of the things for me is I always struggle to eat enough, believe it or not. I'm always behind. So getting enough protein every day is sort of one of my things that I'm always working on. For some reason I get full fast, I don't like, you know, I just, I get busy, I'm like shit, I'm behind. So intermittent fasting comes around, right? And I'm like, oh, this is cool. What a sneaky way for calorie control. And it works for a lot of people. But here's why intermittent fasting

didn't work for me, right? Because, and again, the sleep principle, this allowed me to say, okay, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna feed in the morning. Super cool. I'm not hungry. I don't bonk. I'm fat adapted.

I can drink black coffee or not. And then, but when I came time to do a brutal workout in the early afternoon, I was under calorie. So I was missing a key feeding time to fuel so that I could go smash myself and training on my bike. I was like, wow, my times are sucking on this FTP on my normal climb. Then I found out, holy crap, I'm way behind on my calories in this compressed time. And by calories, I mean, am I going to get enough micronutrients to fruits and vegetables? Am I going to eat enough protein? And it turned out I couldn't do it unless

I had a meal laid in the day. So now it's like nine o'clock at 10 o'clock. I'm like, let me have another meal. And guess what happens to my sleep when I eat a big meal before I could bed? I sleep like shit. So running that for a few days and a week, and I was like, man, this is not working because my third party adaptation, my third party validation was in sleep scores was telling me I was sucking and that my strategies weren't facilitating improvements in those things. And that's a really nice way of understanding sort of infariting through all of the kind of crazy diet information we're seeing, training information we're seeing.

What are the easiest ways for people to get more micronutrients and protein into the diet? What are your favorite hacks for that given that it's a challenge for you? Actually eating more, food, actual food. So you know, when most people come to diet, if you're listening to this, you may actually see nutrition as a way of winning, like that's a lot of ways like We actually work in sports real sports not the internet where I have abs. That's not a fucking sport Sorry for the swearing The idea here is that I need you to understand that we look at fueling as a real way of

Can I handle playing division one water polo? Can I play in the NFL? It's fuming is a real thing. Most people come to nutrition not for fueling and some people come to nutrition because they got a bad blood panel. But most people come to nutrition because why? Because they want to lose weight. They don't even want to change their body composition. They just want to lose weight. They don't even know what that means. And so what we've seen is the best way to do that is to expand their food. Look, again, 10 years, 15 years of diet culture going amuck, keto, carnivore, primal, paleo, vegan.

Right, we're all fighting, this is identity politics. So what we've eventually said is, and we'll figure it out in these first principles, this is what we know to be reasonable protein intakes. You're very sedentary person. It's probably 0.7, 0.8 grams per pound body weight. And if you're growing injured, want to change your body composition, want to heal, want to do something rad, you probably need a gram per pound body weight. That's really our goal for those things, which again, super reasonable, not 1.4 or 1.1.2.1. We also found that through our friend, EC Stinkowski, who has at-optimized nutrition, she discovered this thing that a lot of the massive benefits in health and chronic disease

started to improve when people got 800 grams of fruits and vegetables every day. Because there were so many micronutrients in there, and wait for it fiber. If you want to tease someone up, go ahead and ask Laynorton about, you know, is fiber bad for you or not. And it turns out micronutrients and fiber and protein, that's the game. And if I say to you, I don't really care how you do it. I want to be a vegan cool. Show me, hit these markers. I want to be carnivore cool. Show me, hit these markers. You

want to do it just because you're super pale and you hate yourself and you want to eat six pounds of broccoli every day, knock yourself out. But the bottom line is when we give people those benchmarks, they're, it respects their cultural identity, respects their family heritage or respects their personal policies and beliefs around the foods that they eat. But we can now start to really sort through and not say, you know, I'm like, hey, carnivore, you don't really get enough fiber. We know that fiber is better. Hey, and now you've seen all of the carnivore kids are like, hey, carnivore plus berries. Carnivore plus honey.

Eating fruit. Eating fruit. Eating fruit. Eating fruit. So suddenly we're like, cool, welcome to the meat and fruit, micronutrients, but what we've really done for a lot of people is we stopped restricting what the ate, because a pound of cherries is 230 calories. Just, I challenge everyone here to take the, all you have to do is eat a pound of cherries, not have diarrhea, and you'll see that that's 230 calories.

Our friend EC recently took a tiny cookie, right? Out of a packet of like 50 cookies. And she's like, what's the equivalent in calories? It was three bananas. So look, you know, like we demonize fruit, all of a sudden we're like, you really think it's all the bananas and apples? That's why you're so fat.

Is that the problem? It's not the problem. And if you have, if you eat four big apples a day, because that's what you can get down, I'm down with it. Super cool. I don't care. It's funny to see the kind of flip flop that's happening in Diet culture, especially over the last 10 years or so. You know, and even, even stuff like the liver king is a good example. I know that there are a ton of people that I respect Derek from all plates of my dates,

the guy that did the take down of the liver king, says himself, he's like, I, you know, between sort of one and two ounces of liver a day because I do think that it is good for me. So it's like, because of what you said, like, dietary identity politics on the internet, everybody wants to plant their flag in one particular group or in another particular group.

And yet it's interesting to think about what health implications are being lost, simply because people want to identify with one group or another. Yeah, and what we haven't done is recognized its impact on the rest of society. This non one percent people who are on Instagram arguing about diet, the rest of people who are like, well, these are diet Oreos, right? And this is diet soda and I eat this keto brownie and just all the process bullshit

where people aren't getting fed, right? Like right now, you know, this move towards, you know, demonizing meat, for example. You know, just, we'll just open it right up. It is one of the most, like culturally insensitive, racist, socio sort of oppressive things to say meat is bad. Meat is one of the most nutrient dense foods that you can possibly give someone.

And in some cultures, women can't own land, but they can own animals. And what you're basically saying is, no, no, those women shouldn't own those animals because meat is evil. Are there problems with factory farming? Yes. But even if you're like, you got to eat organic,

I'm like, no, you don't. You do not, we want to put the most nutrient dense foods. Why? Because in this country, we are so sick and so fat and so unhealthy. And it's not because that's a choice people are making. Right. If you pin anyone down on the street and say, Hey, do you want to, you know, be disabled and feel terrible? No one does. No one does. But we again, I'm going to put the blame right on us and start to say, well, how is our experiment going? If we're running this experiment

to transform society. And remember, our hypothesis is sport is a laboratory through which we can understand ourselves. It's a laboratory for which we can, it's a test kitchen, then we should transform our communities and transform society. and we're not. So how can we better transmute the lessons that we're learning in sport and in high performance in all this and actually take those first principles back to our neighbors and to our families? Otherwise, man, this is just we're going to leave everyone behind and that's not the calling of science. Other, any foods that most people think that they have to eat every day, but in reflection in the harsh light of day,

they're focusing on incorrectly. Oh, it's not my expertise. Look, what I'll say is, one of my favorite books is by Kate Shanahan, who wrote deep nutrition, and she's like, hey, she's a physician, she's like, let me look at all the diets in all the world. Everyone needs a fermented food. That's super weird. We don't. Everyone cooks their meat on the bone. I wonder why they do that?

Why do they eat all the collagen? Connective tissue. Why do they? What is it about cooking meat on bones that are so amazing for the human body? Why do they eat, why variety of seasonal fruits and vegetables? Like you start to see is there's good fats in there, there's fermented foods in there, there's raw home milk dairy in there, right? There's, so what I think is we've represented for people who are like, hey, I need to lose body weight. We're like, okay, here's this brown rice

and this sushimi chicken breast, which we used to give to the dogs and then this broccoli and you're like, that's it, you know? And simultaneously, look, was it the Kevin Hart movie with the rock and he's like how'd you get all big You know, he's like well, I just ate chicken and rice and I lifted weights for 10 years So simultaneously we know that this this kind of calorie restriction and lift weightlifting works But that sort of negates how rad it is to be human. And as soon as we demonize

things like beans, because beans are dangerous, and they'll tell people bananas have too much sugar, I was at a biohacking conference this year, Dave Asperger's biohacking conference talking about this, and I told the woman in the front row, I was like, hey, too many ass today, and she was like, oh, she gasped, like, what about the sugar? And I was like, you've got to be kidding me. I was like, how many fruits and vegetables you had today? And she had? And I was like, you've got to be kidding me. I was like, how many fruits and vegetables you had today? And she had none. I was like, you ate at 800 gram, 800 calorie fat coffee. I was like, what are the micronutrients in that?

And she was like, none. And I was like, nailed it. I've had two bananas crushing you, lady. And what is that? 170 calories. I was like, come on, I weighed 235 and I have abs. That's not the problem. It's interesting. I found it very interesting at the moment. I've got, you know, over the next couple of weeks, I've got a Peter Tiron this week. I've got Thomas De Laurean Thursday.

I've got Dave Asprey in a couple of weeks time. I've got you today. You know, the number of different approaches, different conversations that are happening around this at the moment. I'm not surprised, man. I've been deep in this world as the most advanced normy on the planet for forever. And I find myself getting sort of confused and overblown with the new fads that come through as well. Yeah, right.

All of those people are in their way really, like what I really appreciate about Peter, Attia, please buy his book, it's so important. You know, he is speaking from this position of being a physician saying, hey, we can really reshape what modern medicine is. Like, that's a really important voice. And a voice, he can't have,

as me as the physical therapist, the same way I can't have as, but what we can do is we can work from our respective corners and come towards the middle. We'll never meet in the middle. There's too much work to do. But you're absolutely right. And it's okay that there are multiple voices with slight variation, but Eel Wilson has this idea of conciliance, which is the unification of knowledge. And what we should be able to do is I should be able to take all of the principles from Peter's book or all the principles from anyone else and overlay them on my principles. And they'll have different language, they'll have different lexicon, but the principles and the outcomes are the same.

And if there's a moment where one of us has interference, then that's an opportunity to say, well, are we saying the right thing? Do we mean the right thing? Or does one of us have a type one error in our thinking? But otherwise, what you're going to see is you should be able to overlay all of these things. Again, tactics will be different, language will be different, culture will be different, doesn't matter.

But outcomes are the thing. So when we get your ego out of the way and we drive this only by looking at our objective outcomes, that is when we start to change society. But we have to transmute those objective outcomes into behaviors that look like maybe eat some fruit, maybe walk around a little more, hey, you're balanced sucks

and that's why you're gonna break your hip. Like, we can do this. We are clever people. And I think what we have the possibility now is to sort of deputize our friends and family who are into this. Like, my friends are into this. This is all we talk about.

You and I, we've never really met in person, but I guarantee you, I can, training is the universal language on the planet. I've taught on every continent except Antarctica. Everyone knows what a push up is, everyone knows what a deadlift is. Everyone who eats to try to get better at those things, like it's all the same.

It really is this universal. So let's go ahead and take that power of this sort of cluster of us, and let's reach out to our aunts and our uncles and our neighbors. And let's see if we can transform our families and our uncles and our neighbors. Let's see if we can transform our families and our households and our neighborhoods. And that is how we'll solve this global health epidemic. We don't have to think at a state level or a national level. It's too large. We just need to invite the neighbor over to back squat in the backyard.

The final thing, one of the longest levers, something that I had my life changed by Matthew Walker on Joe Rogan five or six years ago, it's talking about sleep. I've spoken a lot about sleep on the show, Cuban to be known, we've spoken about it in that way. When it comes to preparing for bed, when it comes to thinking about sleep, what are the longest levers that you're looking at. Our experience is setting up yourself for sleep starts in the day. So I need to make sure I've eaten enough calories and I can stop eating early. That's made a big difference for me.

What's sort of a time window is that typically? 7.38 pm. Because I have kids. And what's that two hours, two and a half hours before bed? Yeah, it's about two hours usually. If I can get, we usually try to eat between six thirty and seven. That's sort of when it works for our family. But sometimes I have kids who play water pole and it doesn't work. So we have to do the best we can. But I try

to eat earlier in the day, then later, because it's just messed up my sleep, it doesn't feel very good. I cut off caffeine earlier in the day. I maxed up my steps early in the day. And of course, my phone's out of the room, like there's some things like that. I have some red lights in the bedroom that I think really make a difference because the red light does not muck up your circadian rhythm. So our red bed, like we have some red lights

that we can switch in our living room, but we switch to red at night. Not because, and because my girls are never gonna wear dorky glasses. So we just, but they think the red lights are cool. So I like to sit on the ground when we watch TV a little bit, but I do a little soft tissue work pretty good. And what I usually find that that soft tissue work helps me relax. It's like getting a little soft massage. That's when I put my soft tissue work in. And then I go to bed at the same time every

single night or in that same window. And it's early. And so keep, and I sit with an I'm ask and I my bed is cold. And I do all the things. I take 500 milligrams of of magnesium for a good bed. And those are my routines. And then I don't fuck around with it. I do that. And with what Lane Norton says is bone crushing consistency. Really? One of our friends recently said that, you know, you feel so terrible on Monday, not because any other reason it's Monday, it's because you're jet lagged,

because you messed up your sleep. Because look, everyone goes through this time change, right? And they're like, eh, whenever I sleep, I'm like, you did that every weekend. You stayed up till super late and got up early. You messed with your sleep the whole weekend. You were in some different time zone. So I think around this sleep thing,

we are such cultures of habit. When I've been doing this routine for almost a decade, and I sleep like I'm dead, I get regularly at 90s on all my sleep quality, because it's the only way I can get through my day. You would be disgusted with the routine that I did the week before last. I went, Austin to Vegas on the Saturday morning, four hours sleep after South by Southwest. Oh, so good.

Some Spotify thing. Worked all day, recorded a podcast, went and trained, went to the UFC's Power Slap event, went to bed on the night, got up first thing, flew from Vegas to LA, went out for a late dinner, didn't even eat until maybe 9.30, 10 o'clock at night. It was a bad day. It's a bad day to bed at midnight yet. Hopefully it was a huge steak in a ball and wine. Two for two, no alcohol, but two for two there, got up the next morning, did another podcast,

then from the podcast, flew straight from LAX to Qatar, which was a 16 hour direct flight plus 10 hours of time change. It's fine, it's fine. Arrived there, three days in Qatar, then flew to Dubai, two days in Dubai, and then flew back to Austin on the Sunday. So in eight days, I'd done 20,000 miles and gone through eight time zones.

Last week, so, That's no different, everyone hear this. That's bananas, but it's no different than having a baby or taking a ride off the work. Okay. And in that situation, the key is we control, we can control. And when you have this benchmark, the problem is thinking that's normal and that you don't ever try to get back to something that looks like it.

What we're trying to do is build in enough tolerance and durability that you don't ever try to get back to something that looks like it. What we're trying to do is build in enough tolerance and durability that you can weather those things and not be sidetracked for a month. I mean, you know what I mean? And look, we're not the same age. I'm almost, I'm 50 this year. And if I did that in a month, it would take me a month to crawl off in the hole.

Like I said, you're like the next day, you're like, yeah, I had one bad workout, but it was fine. The key is having some benchmarks for yourself so that when your life gets out of hand, and it may not just be travel and work, it may be disease or injury, or someone gets sick in your family, or you have some heroic thing you can do for work, you have the tolerance, and you can get back to that. Because that is typical. And I think what we want to do is say, what an awesome life. Next time call me up, I'll go with you. One final thing that's just come to me here, when something does occur that perturbs your beautiful, routineized sleep and training in 8000 staffs and all the rest of it,

for instance, I've gone through this little period where I've got all of this travel. This weekend I'm going to Manchester and back in the space of three days to record five podcasts for Gymshark. Or there's a bereavement, there's a catastrophe, something needs to happen, the child, there's something up with the kid, whatever it is. What have you found in terms of the people that you work with, of either mindset, reframes, firm places for them to stand emotionally, psychologically, when there is, or they get injured, or whatever it is, why should people go to? They understand that there are these vital signs,

they understand that there are these things that will make them feel better, and they understand that sometimes life either through accident or on purpose, get in the way and smash us to smithereens. Where can they stand? What can they think about that makes them go, okay, like this is gonna be, all right, where do you take people mentally for that? We have conditioned people to say,

unless it's an intense exercise session in one hour, and I meal prepped, it's all failure. That's what we've told people, right? I either eat like a monk and I train like a elite UFC fighter or otherwise, it's nothing. In the course of 24 hours, we want to expand this conversation about what is a physical practice? And a physical practice means I take care of my body in all these disparate ways, seemingly disparate ways. In the course of that three days, what we can start to say is we'll give you two approaches.

One is we can say, hey, they're going to be net benefits to my nervous system and net taxes on my nervous system. So you made a choice. Hey, I'm eating late, but I'm not going to drink. That was a really simple thing. I can't control. I'm going to eat and enjoy it, but I'm just not going to add another stressor because I'm super stressed right now, right?

I might go out and say, you know, gosh, I, Julia and I probably have two drinks a month. And the reason hang on, we're not tea tolders, we're like, man, we're really stressful time in our lives right now. And it really messed up my sleep. And I'm trying to be fit and do a bunch of rad stuff. And I have to say to myself, is this drink worth messing up those things or it doesn't mess up, but cost me a little bit. You made a really simple decision there. Hey, I don't think I'm going to throw another stressor in, but then you also have to say, well, hey, I don't need to train because my muscles aren't going to go away.

My fitness isn't going to rot. Right now I'm in these other phases of my life, but I bet I can get my steps in. So on Saturday, where my or Saturday or Sunday, I forget, I met my daughter's national water polo tournament, right? We're there first games at eight, next games at five, we're in some, you know, high school in the middle of nowhere waiting around for these water polo tournaments. So my wife and I are like, let's go for a walk. So we just maxed out our steps that day. Then I sat on the ground during the games. And those are the two things I did. And I was like, well, I can eat fruits and vegetables today and I get enough protein. And I checked the box. And I say, two things I did. And I was like, well, I can eat fruits and vegetables today

and I get enough protein and I check the box. And I say, this is what I could control today. And that's enough. That was my physical practice. Tomorrow, I get a whole different day to say, hey, can I expand my physical practice? So I think what's nice about having these benchmarks is that I'm on the airplane and I'm like, well,

let me grab these two cups of fruit and these four harbohled eggs. That way, at least I can be working towards getting my grams in for the day, right? And then I'm going to walk around the terminal like I did in Japan waiting because I got to get some steps because I know I'm going to be still for 16 hours on this airplane. Yep. And suddenly what we've done is we didn't say, hey, training or eating perfectly was the goal. We said, I'm going to hit my minimums. I'm going to control what I can control. And because I'm so durable and because I'm such a rad being on this earth, that will be enough today. Tomorrow, I'll get another chance to play the whole game again. Let's expand what it means. So when those things happen, you know, I don't believe

in periodization. Hold on. Do everyone freaks out, I know periodization works. You're Russian, you're on drugs, you're tightly controlled. We definitely manipulate volume and intensity for our athletes, of course, but as a, as like a middle-aged dude who's just exercising, I have to jump on an airplane and go to New York. There's my periodization, there's my built-in rest. So I'm gonna smash myself this week

because on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, I have no control over my schedule. And I think when we start to think about that, I don't throw the whole baby out with a bath. Oh, fuck it. I'll just drink a bottle of whiskey or, you know, I'm going to eat whatever I want. I say, oh, here's the one thing where I have some agency. I'm going to control the agency. I really, really like that. I like the fact that you can control certain things, certain things are going to be outside it because we talk about that, we've spoken about it on the show, the stoic fork or the dichotomy of control as it's called in stoicism about the things that you can and can't control. But you forget about that when it comes to stuff to do

with health and fitness because it is such an all or nothing mentality, right? I'm either completely dialed in, calories are being hit, I'm training, I'm getting my walk in, I'm either completely dialed in, calories are being hit, I'm training, I'm getting my walk-in, I'm doing 180 minutes of zone two cardio per week in my sleep scene track, or I'm just like a complete hedonist slob covered in Papa John's and you know book-carcades with with Oreos. So you have this, you do have this sort of all-enotthing mentality. And I love a turn of that stuff there. You know, getting a walk-in when you're in the airport terminal, you can, if you arrive at the suggested time, I think, like a remotely appropriate suggested time for a domestic flight and you're through, you've got an hour, an hour is 10,000 steps. Easy.

Especially if you're in a good airport terminal with a lot of walking, where you don't have to keep on turning around. So everyone sees you every five minutes and thinks that we're either doing another lap for. Yeah, I love all of that, man. I really, really appreciate the fact that you're simplifying this. I think, you know, even for me, someone that's trained for, you know, coming up on 20 years now in all manner of different forms, getting back to basics, reminding myself that once I finish this, I've been inside for, you know, a couple of hours. I probably should go outside, get a bit of sunlight, go for a walk, get moving. I probably should come back and maybe think about the protein that I've had today. All of these basics, I think, are really, really good reminders and good fundamentals

that are scalable, no matter what someone's level of skill is, someone's progression is, no matter how much catastrophes going on in life as well. You can think about, I'm going to build up as many credits as I can, I'm going to spend the credits however I want. And sometimes they spend those credits and sometimes the credits spend me, right? Things are out of control as you say, catastrophe, bad things are going to happen, weird deadlines are going to pop up, you're just blowing through your credits and you don't have any choice. And sometimes you're like, we're going to Vegas, I'm going to burn through all my credits.

And the idea is, hey, if we can be consistent for long periods of time, really, just do and you don't have any choice. And sometimes you're like, we're going to Vegas. I'm going to burn through all my credits. And the idea is, hey, if we can be consistent for long periods of time, really, just do the basics. It's not heroic. All the things that we're suggesting are small things that I want you just to integrate into your life so they're hidden. If we look at the blue zones,

no one there is intentionally doing anything to live long. The whole world is set up so they don't have to make another choice. The whole thing is like, well, they got to walk to the market. And then at the market, they only have ingredients. I have to buy food, and then make food with food about it. Right? I have to see friends as I walk there. You didn't have to do anything. That's the goal.

Can we hide the wraps? Can we bury this into your life so that you can spend your willpower on the things that really matter to you? Not unlike, I should do this one hour yoga class. Like, let's get over that. Kelly, Starat, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you're doing at the moment, why should they go? Well, the first place I would send you is builttomoove.com. We've got a 21-day follow-along that goes with the book. So you can hand this to your mom, your dad, your brother, and uncle, and say, hey, let's get involved. Or if you work with a company, and you're like,

hey, I think we can transform the health of our company, we're always at the ready state, always around. But mainly, we'll see you in public. Let's hug it out. Kelly, I appreciate you. Thank you, mate. Thank you. Oh, oh, oh,'t forget that you might be listening but not subscribed and that means you're going to miss episodes when they go live.

So head to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you are listening and just press the subscribe button. It really does support the show, it helps me get bigger and better guests every single week and it makes me very happy. Ah thank you. And I will see you next time. single week and it makes me very happy. Ah, thank you.

And I will see you next time.