Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Interview With Kelly Starrett on the Modern Healthy Lifestyle

Episode Date: December 29, 2014

In this podcast I interview Kelly Starrett from MobilityWOD and we talk about the detrimental effects of sitting too much, various "little" lifestyle choices that can harm or help us in the long run, ...his new book that is launching in October, and more! KELLY'S WEBSITE: http://www.mobilitywod.com/ KELLY'S BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS: http://www.amazon.com/The-Talent-Code-Greatness-Grown/dp/055380684X/?tag=mflweb-20 http://www.amazon.com/Sports-Gene-Talent-Practice-Success-ebook/dp/B00AEDDQKE/?tag=mflweb-20 http://www.amazon.com/Raising-Cain-Protecting-Emotional-Life-ebook/dp/B0030CMK9Y/?tag=mflweb-20 Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, it's Mike, and this podcast is brought to you by Legion, my line of naturally sweetened and flavored workout supplements. Now, as you probably know, I'm really not a fan of the supplement industry. I've wasted thousands and thousands of dollars over the years on worthless supplements that basically do nothing, and I've always had trouble finding products actually worth buying, and especially as I've gotten more and more educated as to what actually works and what doesn't. And eventually after complaining a lot, I decided to do something about it and start making my own supplements. The exact supplements I myself have always wanted. A few of the things that make my products unique are one,
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Starting point is 00:01:10 see that we explain why we've chosen each ingredient and we cite all supporting evidence in the footnotes. So you can go look at the research for yourself and verify that we're doing the right thing. Three, all ingredients are also included at clinically effective dosages, which are the exact dosages used in those studies that prove their effectiveness. This is very important because while a molecule might be proven to, let's say, improve your workout performance, not all dosages are going to improve your workout performance. If you take too little, you're not going to see any effects. You have to take the right amounts. And the right amounts are the amounts proven to be effective in scientific research. And four, there are no proprietary
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Starting point is 00:02:17 then I guarantee you'll like my books. I make my living primarily as a writer. So as long as I can keep selling books, then I can keep writing articles over at Muscle for Life and Legion and recording podcasts and videos like this and all that fun stuff. Now I have several books, but the place to start is Bigger Leaner Stronger if you're a guy and Thinner Leaner Stronger if you're a girl. Now these books, they're basically going to teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training, and supplementation to build muscle, lose fat, and look and feel great
Starting point is 00:02:45 without having to give up all the foods you love or live in the gym grinding away at workouts you hate. And you can find my books everywhere. You can buy books online like Amazon, Audible, iBooks, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and so forth. And if you're into audiobooks like me, you can actually get one of my audiobooks for free with a 30-day free trial of Audible. To do that, go to www.muscleforlife.com forward slash audiobooks. That's muscleforlife.com forward slash audiobooks, and you'll see how to do this. So thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast. I hope you enjoy it, and let's get to the show.
Starting point is 00:03:44 Hey, this is Mike Matthews from MuscleForLife.com, and in this podcast, I interview Kelly Starrett. You've probably heard of Kelly, but if you haven't, he's best known for his mobility project, mobility, wad.com and his book becoming a supple leopard, which is kind of like the Bible of mobility exercises. Kelly is a physical therapist and he works with elite athletes all around the world, ranging from professional sports players to endurance runners, cyclists, and so forth. In this podcast, we're going to be talking about the detrimental aspects of sitting too much, which I've been reading up on recently. So I was happy to have someone as knowledgeable as Kelly to come on and talk about it.
Starting point is 00:04:18 We're also going to be talking about some different lifestyle choices that people make that either have profound negative consequences or positive consequences, benefits, especially over time and kind of how that relates to longevity and just overall health and some simple things that we can do, little changes we can make in our day-to-day life that can improve our overall well-being. We're also going to be talking about Kelly's new book, Ready to Run, which is coming out in October. And there's going to, as you'll see, there are a lot of other little things thrown in your little, little pieces of wisdom from Kelly. So I think you're going to like the interview. Let's get to it. Okay. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Kelly. I really appreciate it. Oh, it's my pleasure. Cool. All right. So here's the first thing that
Starting point is 00:05:03 I'm excited to talk to you about. So, you know, a lot of us kind of sit at a desk all day. I mean, you probably don't, but I do. And a lot of the listeners also, you know, we sit for at least probably five or six hours a day, and then sometimes in some people's case to come home and then sit even more. That's kind of like the standard sedentary life. Totally. Yeah. And I guess a fair amount of my listeners and my readers and followers are, you know, they're going to be moving around in terms of going to the gym and doing cardio and stuff like that, but still there's a lot of sitting. And I think we all know that the human body, like it wasn't made to just remain seated so much, right? Well, you know, here's the deal. It's easy to say to people, hey, you shouldn't sit. And sitting is a skill, by the way, right? Because sometimes you have to sit. It's tough to be on an
Starting point is 00:05:54 airplane unless you're flying first class laying down. There's going to be some time. Most cars, unless you drive a bread van, are sitting. But the real issue is that we know you're going to be compromised. You're going to be compromised on your cell phone. You're going to be compromised on your technology is not going away. You're going to be forced into these positions. And so we just have to have a plan around that. And two, we sort of need to understand what some of the downstream effects are so we're not surprised when it jumps up and bites us in the butt.
Starting point is 00:06:24 And the research is really, really clear about, and everyone's heard this, yes, it causes cancer and it spikes your blood sugar, but there are some real other things that we're not talking about. The orthopedic back pain problem, there's a half a million spinal surgeries in America every year, half a million. The CDC, the Center for Disease Control, the official position is like back pain is poorly understood. And I have to just say, what a bunch of horse crap that is.
Starting point is 00:06:51 I mean, we really clearly understand the mechanisms of back pain and back dysfunction. But the problem is we've been endowed with this incredible body that just puts up with our crap for so long. And everyone knows this. I mean everyone can relate to having some friend who is like the greatest athlete of all time and smokes once in a while and eats little chocolate donuts, still is the best in the world. And the key is we confuse this sort of genetic bounty, this inheritance, with the fact that that's optimal. And you can buffer it and all of a sudden you can't buffer it.
Starting point is 00:07:29 And people are – we work like you with the assumption that people are doing the best they can with the information they have. But once you really start to wrap your head around sitting, then it ends up being – you know, we tell the story, for example, of like, we think this is what the chief mechanism of childhood obesity, right? We, you can mandate, go crazy about trying to have people have access to fresh food and you can try to exercise, even though there's no PE money anymore, right? But, you know, if you stand, we, the research is that you 50,000 to 100,000 calories a year standing. So, boy, all of a sudden, you've just taken off. That's 33 marathons for my wife, for example, 33 marathons.
Starting point is 00:08:12 Or you could just stand. And, okay, so we have this childhood obesity thing. Well, if we look at the pelvic floor dysfunction in the United States, the adult diaper industry is a $2 billion problem. And you have listeners who have wives and girlfriends and boyfriends and that, and, you know, it's certainly bladder incontinence is not just a gender specific issue, but we tend to see it a little bit more in our, in our women athletes. But what we notice is that, you know, bladder incontin contents and exercise is sort of is just taken for granted oh yeah you're going to pee yourself once in a while and and they think
Starting point is 00:08:50 we think that that's normal it's a two billion dollar adult diaper industry so what we know though is you know what the heck's going on well it turns out we can have this greater conversation around spinal mechanics and that when you sit you you know, like if you pull a bowstring, the bow flexes beautifully. But if you stack one end of the bowstring, all of a sudden the bow doesn't work right. You know, it doesn't load correctly. Well, that's one way to think about your spine is that you're basically putting one end on the ground and it's designed to be this beautiful bow. And instead you're just basically stacking one end. And what you're going to do is you're going to get weak areas that tend to hyperflex or overflex but what we know unequivocally is that
Starting point is 00:09:29 when you're in a good position tissues work right musculature works right the the system is set up to work correctly you don't have to do a lot of muscle activation you just need to move but when you're in a bad position you see a lot of what I call positional inhibition is that things just don't work right. And so, for example, one of the things we know absolutely is that when you sit in a flexed position or that means you just slouch a little bit. Or if you're sitting up like you're like the nun that your Catholic high school did, sit up and you just overextend a little bit like most people sit up. Both of those positions are not optimal positions. They're sort of putting kinks in the nervous system and big bends around the spine. Well, what we know, for example, is that the pelvic floor doesn't activate very well in that position
Starting point is 00:10:17 so that when you're overextended, overflexed, your pelvic floor turns off. And people can listen to this because if you go pee in the bathroom, men standing up peeing, the only way you'll initiate a stream is that you'll dump your pelvis forward into overextension. And that sounds weird that I've thought about it, but it's true. But if you try to maintain neutral pelvis, what you'll see is that your pelvic floor activates. It's actually harder to pee. Most women will pee in a flexed spine position. And so that neutral spine position, again, accesses the pelvic floor, turns it on, but a flexed spine, even dogs kind of tuck under when they pee a little bit, right?
Starting point is 00:10:55 And so the same thing happens with the spine. So we see that, and I'll tell you, remember, I'm a physical therapist. And so when I deal with pelvic floor dysfunction athletes, the first thing we have to go after is resetting the relationship of the pelvis to the leg, pelvis to the spine. And once we neutralize that, then all of a sudden we can actually talk about pelvic floor turning on. Okay, so we see that this pelvic floor problem sitting, not only are we sitting on the coccyx, right, which is like the back end of a diamond tent of your pelvic floor. Your pelvic floor is like a diamond and you're sitting on one end kind of doing wheelies. But the other way that we tension that whole system is through creating rotation through the hip.
Starting point is 00:11:33 And so when you stand straight with your feet straight ahead, what automatically happens through sort of these normal fascial windings, the fascial spiral, the way your connective tissue in your body works, is that when you stay with your feet straight, there's automatically this normal torsion tone that happens in the pelvic floor. And that also makes the pelvic floor stable. And so what we see is that we have a lot of weird dysfunction about the floor turning off because we're sitting and I can't actually activate my pelvic floor because I'm sitting down.
Starting point is 00:12:03 I don't have the torsion through the hip. My spine's in a bad position. We'll spin that up to the diaphragm all of a sudden. The diaphragm is just another pelvic floor, but upside down. They're like two halves of an egg. What we know is that when you sit in a flexed position over an overextended position, you don't have access very well to your diaphragm, and so you end up stress breathing.
Starting point is 00:12:24 Suddenly, this is an issue of, wow, I'm practicing breathing in a bad position. That's 10,000 breaths a day in a wretched, bent-over position where I'm compromised. Diaphragm gets stiff as I'm an athlete. How would that hyperflag, what would that position look like? If I just said sit up and you basically took your pelvis and you just tipped it forward a little bit, right? Like a little banana back. That's an overextended position. If you want to know what position is straight, if you stand up with your feet underneath you, right? Feet straight, and you just squeeze your butt as hard as you can, pelvis shouldn't change positions. And what most people are going to find is that when they squeeze their butt, their pelvis reorientates itself.
Starting point is 00:13:04 That's the straight up and down spinal position. Okay. I'm doing it right now. So you stand up, squeeze your butt, and you probably were overextended and your pelvis tipped backwards a little bit, right? When you squeeze your butt. Is that what happened? Yeah. Yeah. So what normally happens is that you're hanging out in a dysfunctional spinal relationship. That's your baseline. When you reset it with a butt squeeze, which is why we initiate deadlifts with a butt squeeze, squats with a butt squeeze. When we're in the air, we point our toes and squeeze our butt. That same concept over and over again.
Starting point is 00:13:38 The issue is that most people are sitting in a dysfunctional position. What we know through the brain, if you've read Daniel Coyle's book, what you look at is we look at skill acquisition as a complex biologic phenomenon. That your brain, when you start to move a certain way and pattern a certain way, so my pelvis overextended gets mapped in my brain as a certain position,
Starting point is 00:14:04 your brain is clever. And what it does is it recognizes – Oh, sorry. He wrote the talent code. That's right. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then what we start to see is that the cells in your brain that are responsible for myelination, the Schwann cells, come in and they literally reinforce those motor patterns, those physical motor pathways. And they basically lay another layer of cement and concrete around that. And so this is why habits are so stinking hard to break when they're physical
Starting point is 00:14:31 because they've been wired into your brain, hardwired. And so it's really hard to undo that. So if you're taking 10,000 breaths in a day or you're sitting in 14 hours in this wretched position, then what ends up happening is that becomes your default. And so your breathing pattern becomes inefficient. So forget about your ability to stabilize your spine. Forget about your ability to create intra-abdominal pressure.
Starting point is 00:14:55 Forget about your ability to, you know, have good VO2 max and diaphragm function. Check this out. Because you're in the stress breathing pattern, you don't access your parasympathetic nervous system very well and so what we see is that our best smartest most badass people on the earth are literally they're all go-getters they're out there working their butts off and they can't down regulate that means they can't turn off at night and what we're seeing is we're getting caught in this sympathetic loop versus being able to access that parasympathetic turn off, off switch like part of our bodies.
Starting point is 00:15:30 And so what we start to see, and if you've ever done any measurement around heart rate variability, right, is that I should normally have a lot of variation in my heart rate. When I breathe in, my heart rate slows down, right? When I breathe out, my heart rate slows down, right? When I breathe out, my heart rate accelerates. And that's one of the reasons the yogis are holding their fingers is that we know is that they are measuring that change in heart rate. And what we start to see is that people who are breathing in their necks all the time, you know, they get caught and are stressed and drink a ton of caffeine and can't downregulate and they're on their phone right before they go to bed. Literally, they're caught in this sympathetic loop and their brains think that they're always in this stress environment. Boom, now we start to see cortisol flip.
Starting point is 00:16:11 So when the relationships that came about when they're like, hey, sitting position changes cortisol, well, this is the mechanism for that. And so literally, the best thing you can do is understand that, boy, sitting has these complex downstream effects. If you've ever tried to meditate, how difficult is it to sit in a good position for 30 minutes? It's almost impossible. So what we found is the best thing you can possibly do is to remove that stimulus and look at sitting like going drinking with your friends. Is that like you know you're in for three or four tequila shots, right? But at some point you're like, I got to manage this.
Starting point is 00:16:49 I'm going to, you know, because it's going to bite me in the butt tomorrow. And that's where I think the revolution is. And I'll tell you, you know, we just bought, my wife and I just threw down, we feel so strongly this, we converted our daughter's fourth grade classroom to a standing classroom. We went to the district, went to the the principal showed them the research and they were like we're in we're totally in and if you've read people probably have read they've read the sports gene another great book you have to read by david epstein yeah i know that and
Starting point is 00:17:17 brilliant but there's a great piece of research in there where they looked at sort of genetic predisposition for movement and that the mice they were they noticed that some mice were running a mile a day on average and some mice were running three miles a day in the on the treadmill the mice wheel and so what they did is they bred those three mile mice and in a couple generations they had seven mile mice and then they gave those mice who had this desire to move they weren't driven by food or anything just want to run run run born to run and they literally give them Ritalin, boom, they ran one mile. And so what we think is happening is that we're giving some of the kids who we think
Starting point is 00:17:51 have this high genetic predisposition for movement, we're giving them ADHD drugs and we're literally suppressing their movement desire. And what we know is there's a book, another book, I'm going to keep throwing them out there, called Raising Cane, which really looks at this division between boys and girls in elementary school, middle school, high school. And boys are getting their butts kicked by girls because boys are viewing school as unfun. They have to sit. They squirm. They get in trouble.
Starting point is 00:18:17 And it sets up this horrible reinforcement. Well, it's the same reinforcement we're seeing for adults. We got interested in sort the more of the lifestyle components that we noticed that people aren't sleeping right, they aren't sleeping, they're not hydrating, they're sitting too much. The reason that was in our face was because we were dressing
Starting point is 00:18:36 it in our best athletes. I think you've done such an amazing job on your side of promoting mobility, which is our language for reclaiming normal position. We really pushed that language. We got away from stretching, which just doesn't even make sense. Stretching is a concept out of French hospitals in World War II, dealing with flexion contractures.
Starting point is 00:18:59 Literally, that's where it came from. What we're seeing now is, okay, we can be a lot more sophisticated. People are more sophisticated. Now, they're eating better, they're moving better. They're, you know, they're, they're mobilizing, but we're still seeing them stuck in these old patterns of lifestyle. And that's where we're like, Holy crap, let's, we just got to fix it once and for all. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's awesome. Um, and you know, with that also comes obviously nutrition. I mean, even talking with kids where if a kid, if his breakfast consists of like 90 grams of sugar, what do you think is going to happen in 30 minutes? Well, go ahead and give 90 grams of sugar to your little dog and then lock your dog in your little tiny room and watch him tear apart the house. I mean, that's what that is, right? Yeah, yeah. And then comes lunch, which could be more sugar, and then that alone could create what would seem like a hyperactive kid.
Starting point is 00:19:52 Totally. And just as an N of a couple, but we really value the case study and the N of one. We really feel like people should be N of one all the time, thinking of themselves as a great experiment. And it's not a universal application know application the principles are universal yeah but the application sometimes is more nuanced but what we found is no i'm a you know i've been trained in the physiology i've been trained and you don't have to be trained to walk into a classroom and see the one kid out of 50 who truly may have an ADHD diagnosis. That kid is, you know, like just needs to move to live. But we have a lot of kids who have this high desire to
Starting point is 00:20:31 move. We have a couple of friends who they've been talked to by the district about their son. And we're like, Hey, Hey, you know, don't put your kids on drugs. Try this first. Just get them a standing desk, you know, like just work it out. And they do, and the kids are like model citizens. And so we think that there's this large component to this, the TMJD dysfunction. That's you two and a half hours a day on your cell phone bent over. Take a look at carpal tunnel. People are internally rotated, flattening out their carpal tunnels. The same thing happens if you walk like a duck.
Starting point is 00:21:07 You see that your arches collapse, right? if you walk like a duck, you see that your arches collapse, right? If you stand like a duck, you basically collapse. Well, imagine as you internally rotate your shoulders to that dreaded kind of slouchy, douchebaggy shoulder position we always talk about. Well, the same thing happens to the arches in your hands and wrists. You basically flatten those things out. And so, I mean, just go down the list of problems. You basically flatten those things out. And so, I mean, just go down the list of problems.
Starting point is 00:21:31 And what's interesting is these are the things that get in the way of elite performance. And it's the things that, like, this is preventable disease. And so, so much of this, if we just make a little concerted effort to change the shape or change the course, you know, and people listening are having this experience that we see tremendous tremendous changes in their output that they literally start to feel better they move better everything just starts to upregulate a little bit because we i really feel like and most experts will agree that the body is seeking homeostasis yeah seeking back to where it wants to be yeah if you just give it a little feed and caring, and I'll tell you, the strength and conditioning community
Starting point is 00:22:09 is going to be responsible for like, really like saving the planet. Not medicine, not big business. It's coaches and seekers, like the people listening to this, who are like, you know, I can do better. I can take responsibility. That's the revolution.
Starting point is 00:22:24 Yeah, and they want to understand how the body actually works. And it also comes back to that end one point you brought up where, uh, as you said, yes, the principles, universal, something that applies to, you know, take metabolism. When we talk about weight gain, weight loss, our, our metabolisms all run on the same laws, but there is a, some people's metabolisms are faster than others. You do have to learn where your body's sweet spots are and what you can and can't do. Yeah, yeah, 100%. I'm so lucky that I get behind the scenes everywhere.
Starting point is 00:22:56 I see everyone's dirty laundry. I mean, everyone's dirty laundry. But also I get to talk to guys like Ben Greenfield and Dave Asprey and Tim Ferriss is a buddy of mine and those guys are like you are like you know you know collators of information you know like your repositories for best practice and one of the fun things about that is that we've seen that everyone ends up really with all of our boats pointed the same direction yeah and one of the ways that because because you know we're all experimenting, and ultimately the experiments
Starting point is 00:23:28 all sort of yield the same results. Well, one of the exciting things that we've been advocating for a long time and continue to advocate for is people have to get a good blood panel. How do we know what we know? And people have been saying this forever about other things, what gets measured gets managed. Well, we always say, great, diet and exercise, which diet, which exercise? Okay, we have some good templates for that now. But the next piece is how do you measure and truly understand? Well, you've got to look at your blood panel and blood chemistry.
Starting point is 00:24:04 To do that you know we worked with a company called wellness effects brilliant company really just got a little bit more sensitive about just not saying hey you're you're functional you're alive the car's running but like what's going on with the car and then we've recently started working with a company that out of stanford um brilliant physician there richard, and it's called GeneSolve. And what they've done is basically been able to take this really full blood panel and genetic testing. I'm telling you, it's like Star Trek.
Starting point is 00:24:33 It turns out, for example, so Rob Wolf is a buddy of mine, right? Yeah. And he was like, hey, we all need to back off on the fish oil. We were going crazy on the fish oil for a while, right? Okay, yeah. And we were all, a lot of us were just dosing, dosing, dosing. And he was like, hey, once we pull out all these grains, it turns out we don't need all this massive amounts of fish oil. Right.
Starting point is 00:24:54 So we all back off on the fish oil because we're not eating the soy, we're not eating the grains. Well, it turns out I have this gene that doesn't allow me to process omega-3s very well. And so I actually have to double the fish oil or triple it to have it have any effect. The only way you would know is these keys. So this is what's so interesting, I think. That's very cool. I'd like to get that test done. On our site, we have an interview. We did a lecture with Dr. Lee on the website.
Starting point is 00:25:25 And it's about an hour long. It really talks about this neuroendocrine axis of looking at testosterone, looking at cholesterol, looking at vitamin D3, looking at cortisol. Just to your point, you don't have to be an expert in it, but you should understand. Everyone understands how the car works. It's got a little oil. It's got some water. We just don't even have the basics of that. And then we're surprised when the engine blows up, you know?
Starting point is 00:25:50 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that there are, of course, the physiology of the body is vast. But there are certain key metrics that anybody can just understand easily and keep an eye on and see, I mean, something that you can do, you know, get your blood tested. How often, I mean, what would you say for the average person that, you know, they eat well, they exercise regularly just to kind of make sure that everything is working the way it should be?
Starting point is 00:26:18 Well, get a baseline. Start by actually doing the test. You know, an example for my wife, for example, is that, and we've talked about this before, but publicly, is that my wife, we had a daughter who showed up a little early, it's a little bit of a surprise, six weeks early, and Julia had seven blood transfusions during that process. And she basically burned out her bone marrow, burned it out. And what we noticed was that her hematocrit was totally low, right? So her capacity to – her ferritin was low. Her hematocrit was low.
Starting point is 00:26:51 Basically, the hemoglobin is low. So she feels anemic all the time and isn't able to – she isn't able to sort of perform. She feels sluggish. Well, it turns out when we go in to look at her B vitamins, zero, just like in the single digits, which is just so freakish. And when we start asking that question, what's going on? It turns out she doesn't process B vitamins. And one of the reasons is that she has this gene called the MTFR gene, which means it doesn't allow her to process folate very well. And the folate is super important for this B vitamin piece. And so she burns out her bone marrow and then also has this genetic disposition for not processing B vitamins very well.
Starting point is 00:27:33 It takes us six years to put that together when we should have figured that out day one, right? Right. And so at least, you know, it turns out, for example, I don't process saturated fats like everyone else does. And so what that means is I can't eat bacon three times a day. I can't. My cholesterol will go through the roof. And believe it or not, we've had a lot of really good friends who are excellent, meticulous coaches, but eat in the paleo way, and their cholesterol has been 300 or 400,
Starting point is 00:28:04 which is why we don't necessarily look at cholesterol as an absolute number anymore. We still look at it as kind of part of the diagnostic. What we're seeing is, man, maybe you don't need to eat 17 pounds of macadamia nuts and avocado. You know what I mean? You need enough fat, but you can actually moderate the fat. And the only way we know that is to really take a look. So what's great is to get a baseline, understand the relationship of your diet and your lifestyle. That's how we're measuring that stuff.
Starting point is 00:28:32 And then we tweak up and down accordingly. And that's – I think we're just living in this age where we've been able to have access to so much extraordinary information. And being able to just synthesize this a little bit really means that you can feel better yeah you can tack your pain you can go faster and you know the goal is not to be 110 and dead and barely hold on the goal is to be you know 110 and then just flame out yeah that's the goal totally live you live uh live fast live strong with healthy and then one time you just go to sleep and don't wake up and that's it that. That's right. That's the great death. And so that's where I think the key here is that it's hard to talk to people about longevity. They feel fine. Yeah. It's so off in the future or whatever. Who knows?
Starting point is 00:29:19 Impossible. And honestly, I had this conversation with the world's best athletes. The guy's like, I'm a 23-year-old millionaire in the NFL. What are you talking about? I'm the best in the world. I'm like, I won the Cy Young Award. I mean I have this conversation. I'm like, no, imagine if you're the best pitcher in the world but you're only at 50% and then their minds start to explode. And so the key for this is that we get immediate benefits and performance,
Starting point is 00:29:46 plus we just start putting money in the bank. And that's what's so extraordinary. We start to make sense of what's going on. And as it's democratized, prices have come down. Suddenly, you have access to science fiction. And it's easy. It's easy. Yeah, that's awesome. I definitely want to check it out. GeneSolve, right? Yeah. I don't have any fiduciary relationship right now other than I'm a fan. I'm just a user going through this experience. And as a 41-year-old male, finding out like, boy, my vitamin D wasn't where I thought it would be. And I was taking the drops.
Starting point is 00:30:18 I just wasn't taking enough. How much were you taking? No, I was just taking like casually. I'd be like, oh, I should probably take five drops here, 5,000, 3,000. But I just – I wasn't leaning on it every day. Yeah. And we were fine. I'm religious on the vitamin D intake every day.
Starting point is 00:30:35 That's so good. My son, my wife too. I have everybody. I know some people are like, oh, vitamins, yeah, whatever. Oh, no, no. There are certain ones you have to make sure that you get enough of. Certain other ones, you're probably okay if you eat decently. That's right.
Starting point is 00:30:53 And I put the vitamin D drops out for my girls every day. Yeah. Basically, at the climate, the height that we live, we physically cannot get enough vitamin D in the winter. We can't. You're just not exposed to the sun enough. I mean, I mean, most people aren't going to be exposed to sun enough anyway, even I I'm in Florida. And if you, I think it would take, I wrote an article on this, um, and looking at just the simple research of it, it would be, I would need
Starting point is 00:31:17 basically like 75 to 80% of my body exposed to 20 to 30 minutes of Florida to sun a day. But I don't do that. I don't go out and sunbathe every day. Well, can you imagine telling your boss, like, hey, it's PTH prime tanning hours. I'll be outside in my Speedo. I mean, 80% of my body is garish to most people. People are like, start out. I don't want to see 80% of you.
Starting point is 00:31:42 I think this is where we start to be able to dial in and really say, hey, I'm getting enough vitamin D or I'm not getting enough versus just sort of shotgunning it. I guess it. It's ish. It feels good-ish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's the other piece is that we know that if you get a bad night's sleep, you're 30% of them compromised. You can be pre-diabetic for 24 to 48 hours. And you can measure that yourself with a cheap blood meter.
Starting point is 00:32:08 But what I found is that when I was traveling, I started pulling way back on dessert. And I love ice cream. But I literally was like, I am traveling. There's no way I can eat dessert. And I started making a different decision about wine. My good friend Matt Lalonde out of Harvard, he's in the measured quantified self, paleosphere stuff, and he's like,
Starting point is 00:32:28 Kelly, you are going to die. You cannot eat dessert and drink wine when you travel. He's like, your body is too messed up, bro. And I was like, no, Matt. I'm Kelly Starrett. The laws of physics don't apply to me. And of course, as soon as I had to stare down
Starting point is 00:32:44 some of those metrics, you know, my cholesterol was low, but we pulled it apart and I had radical inflammatory markers, even though I thought I was doing really, I'm not, I'm not a heathen, but like thought I was doing best practice, but it turns out it's the lifestyle component pieces that are playing a bigger role than you think. You know, you've got to get seven and a half hours of sleep a night. You've got to do it as the baseline. Most people need eight or nine. If you're training, children, 10 and a half baseline, right? And if you're training the way people are training now, that's a 10 hour piece. You know, we work with Alan Lim, who's a, he was a sports performance,
Starting point is 00:33:21 sports physiologist, sports performance expert. And he he was he was with the tour de france like he was uh team radio shacks guy right and uh he invented scratch labs as his company if you've ever seen the scratch hydration stuff you know and um he's like look you can't cheat your physiology you just there are no shortcuts around it and and you know we were just where were we juliet oh that was was LA. We saw all these testosterone clinics, tea clinics everywhere. Super big right now. Oh, Lord. Well, it turns out that just pumping people full of tests
Starting point is 00:33:52 just basically backfills and floods the system into cortisol, into cholesterol. It's not just the solution. And what we really have to do is we need to take a much more sophisticated organic look saying, hey, you're eating right. You've got to get enough sleep. You've got to drink two to three liters of water a day.
Starting point is 00:34:10 And then we can have a conversation. And you have to exercise. You have to. I love to lift weights. I love it. I'm a big, strong guy. People don't realize, but I am about 6'2", 235. And I've got little abs on the side.
Starting point is 00:34:26 But the thing is, Juliette and I prior, Juliette is like, if you saw her, this is an example of my wife, is that we were out working with the WWE about three weeks ago. And all the entertainers, like John Cena, like everyone. And as we're walking in, some of the fans thought Juliet was one of the divas, right? She's so jacked. And, uh, you know, they're like Charlotte, Charlotte. I'm like, something's doing right, Juliet, because you look good. Right. My 40 year old wife is confused with a diva and the 41. The issue is we prioritize our conditioning
Starting point is 00:35:01 above all of the things. Just like you're saying, you've got to suffer a little bit. If you're a strength athlete, you can still suffer. If you're a rope, but you've got to do some kind of suffering inside something that looks like a movement practice, not just exercise, but every day you got to suffer. Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. And you know, that's just one of those things. It's, it's a basic element of just, it's probably the healthiest thing you can do is just exercise regularly and put your body under that stress regularly. Um, and I would say that probably training your muscles is, especially if you look at, you know, going back to longevity,
Starting point is 00:35:35 uh, where the amount of lean mass that you have in your body is just, it's just correlated with all cause mortality. Uh, especially as you start to get older, obvious reasons like, well, if you're strong and you're 75, you're probably not going to fall and, you know, break your hip. But then also, you know, related to immune system, the more lean mass you have, the more immune, more of a reserve you have for your immune system, if you ever get sick or, or experience a, you know, an extreme trauma. So when I, when I, when I have kind of like simple conversations with people that are new to the whole, cause you know, it's very confusing and there's so many, so much contradictory information. Uh, you have the balanced nutrition side of things,
Starting point is 00:36:14 get the majority of your calories from nutritious foods. Um, high protein dieting wins in every way. Like there's just no arguing that anymore. Uh, use carbohydrates depending on what you do. If you move your body a lot, you need more. If you don't move your body that much, you don't need as much. Um, and then exercise and train your muscles and you know, it doesn't have to be hardcore weightlifting. I mean, I'm like you, I like to lift. I like to lift heavy. I like being strong. I just find it fun. Uh, you know, I think you're, you're more into Olympic lifts and stuff too, as well. Right. Well, we like to lift. I'm friends with Mark Bell and Jesse Burdick and all the powerlifters.
Starting point is 00:36:52 I know all these guys and hang out with them. So there's a little bias towards some heavy squatting. What I love to do, I love deadlifting. I love it. Love it. Love it, love it, love it. So the key here is what you're saying is a movement practice, and you have to put yourself under some kind of load.
Starting point is 00:37:09 Even if you're not push jerking, you better be pressing heavy dumbbells over your head. You know? Yeah. And you can't actually express good movement patterning unless you're like doing a little deadlifting. You know, here's an example. Evelyn Stevens at our gym um she is the number one road cyclist in america top five in the world she just won the this inaugural 17 stage race in former east germany called the wufart and uh she's she's like i mean badass right
Starting point is 00:37:41 and um you know this year we had her squatting a ton. And she was like, hey, look, I'm afraid to get big. And I was like, I know, I know. And we do a lot of rest. But I'm like, we use the squatting to just reclaim good function. My nine-year-old daughter overhead squats and front squats. Not a lot of weight, but enough to challenge her position, which sometimes is just 35 pounds. And so that's really what I think people are missing is they're missing that you're wired this way
Starting point is 00:38:07 and you've got to do all the things that your body is set up to do. So if that's Pilates, you're going to hit all the corners. If it's yoga, you're going to do all the things your body is supposed to do. That's why yoga is so difficult for people. But then you've got to also breathe hard and lift some heavy weights if you're doing those things otherwise you know some some version of olympic lifting plus some hard running you're in there if you do kettlebells chances are you're probably hitting all of those pieces the pistol is in there the goblet squats in there all the snatches are in there you know you're getting pretty full
Starting point is 00:38:42 movement patterning that's why guys like pavel you know and cook are all about the kettlebell because like hey you can swing the rest of your life you know but to your point you've got to have a movement practice i was just lecturing at the uh stanford medical school and uh in their lifestyle class and i was like hey who here has a movement practice and like everyone raised their hands and i'm like what are you doing he's like ride my bike i'm like exercise not a movement practice you know and i'm like. And I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, I'm riding my bike. I'm like, exercise, not a movement practice. And I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, run.
Starting point is 00:39:08 I'm like, exercise, not a movement practice. The girl raised her hand. She's like, Pilates? I was like, movement practice. Good job. And I think that that's the problem is that we've confused exercise, I need to get some exercise, with I need to practice moving like a human being yeah and and that's why you know part of the mobility you know prescription is that people ask us all the time hey can you prescribe a you know a general plan for me every day i'm like yeah you're responsible for all the
Starting point is 00:39:37 ranges of motion and all the tissue health from your head to your feet so right so you know here's 15 minutes today but then that's seven times a week that aggregates into 90 minutes a week. And then pretty soon you can start to see how we make changes, but you've got to touch all of the corners regularly. Otherwise they're gone. Yeah. Yeah. I've noticed big changes in my own body over the last four or five years when I started focusing on heavy compound weightlifting. Uh, whereas before in the past, when I started focusing on heavy compound weightlifting, whereas before in the past when I started working out, it was a lot of isolation stuff and a lot of high reps and bodybuilding. We did.
Starting point is 00:40:10 Yeah. I didn't know what I was doing, right? No one did. So dicking around with that stuff. And then I make the change four or five years ago, somewhere around four years ago. And, of course, I mean, my body looks much different now. I mean, I'm lifting two to three times the weight that I was able to lift then. But also I've become much different now. And I'm, I'm, I mean, I'm lifting two to three times the weight that I was able to lift then, but also, uh, my, I've become much more flexible. I mean, my mobility
Starting point is 00:40:29 has improved a ton, uh, just by doing that. And of course doing these exercises with proper form, you know, squat deep, uh, make, you know, hit the deadlift correctly. Um, bench press correctly, military press correctly, do all these things correctly correctly and I'm amazed at how much more functional I guess you'd say my body is just by doing that. Well you know there's this idea that you know people don't talk about this but if you move inefficiently
Starting point is 00:40:56 your body it's like having one of the wheels in your car pointed the wrong direction and when it's happening it creates you can drive 100 miles an hour with your handbrake on when your wheels go in the wrong direction. And what ends up happening is it creates, you can drive 100 miles an hour with your handbrake on when your wheel's going the wrong direction, but you start to create patterns and problems in the car. And the same thing happens in your body,
Starting point is 00:41:13 that if you're running with your feet turned out, you're going to create sort of tension and connective tissue in your calves and in your hips that are supporting that movement pattern, which is the inefficient movement pattern. So you get stiffer, and that creates even worse problems. And unfortunately, the more efficient you move and the more you really err towards that virtuosity concept, really making sure that, you know, I'm using load and cardiorespiratory demand and speed and metabolic demand.
Starting point is 00:41:42 I'm using that to challenge the robustness of my position. Brian McKenzie does this thing where he's like, hey, we're going to go run. And the second you break technique, you got to walk. And people are like, well, I can't run very far. I'm like, that's because you suck that bad at running. And people are like, what? But I can still run. I'm like, well, I could still lift this deadlift with a rounded back, but should I continue to do it?
Starting point is 00:42:05 And I think once you sort of understand that we can make this – look, if you just need to sweat your balls off, get on an exercise bike. You're less likely to hurt yourself and go ahead and make yourself vomit, right? Or drag a sled or do something that would just – the margins for error is you want to just be a piece of meat. Go be a piece of meat, go be a piece of meat. But the rest of the time, you've got to be this conscious, technique-driven person. And that's a lifetime's work. And we always say now, we're like, no, no, we play the long game. We're in it to just be extraordinary. And as you noticed, you came into the game with a huge engine. I'm sure isolation, leg press still meant you could squat a ton. My squat was actually terrible because I did the standard neglect legs
Starting point is 00:42:55 and do half squats and do it all wrong. Well, right. You were a man who grew up in the 80s and 90s, right? And I think what's amazing is that when you realize it's practice, then you literally can get better and better and better and better. You know, I'm 40 years old. I just cleaned 370 not long ago. I deadlifted 600. The things that matter most to me is that I can run a 5K all out and kill people that I jump into the pool and swim that I can race that I can do paddle boarding and I don't hurt. And one of the keys I think
Starting point is 00:43:33 that we're helping people understand is the resting state of the human being is pain free. And it's so shocking when you talk to people like, Oh, it's totally normal. I was, you know, I played soccer in college. So of course I'm arthritic and I hurt every day and have to take ibuprofen to get up out of bed. You should get out of bed and feel extraordinary. And what's happening is that that's not the case. So what's going on, you're designed to be ridden hard. You just can't ride hard and put yourself away wet every single day.
Starting point is 00:44:00 And that's really the secret about the sitting is that that's what we're doing. We're basically taking this extraordinary machine and then just crushing it. Yeah. And back to that, I wanted to actually ask you on the sitting. Okay. So then how do we sit properly? Like what can we do? Do we need to get up every so often and stretch or like? I think that's intuitive. For example, I really, when I work with professional football teams, I try to mitigate the amount of sitting they do on the sideline. I tell them to raise the height of their benches so that we don't close the hip down. So there's a couple things that you can understand around the spine is that if you stand up,
Starting point is 00:44:40 there's sort of three components to spinal stabilization. One is the butt sets your pelvis position, just like we did before. You squeeze your butt, right? That sets that pelvic position. The second is that my abs and spine and the musculature of my trunk then brace that position. So I need to know how to brace without pushing. I'm trying to create a belt around myself. And if I want to stabilize my spine, I make a smaller belt.
Starting point is 00:45:03 My abs shouldn't bulge out like i'm a bodybuilder i'm a fat guy i should be like my stomach should be flat like a gymnast and the gymnasts who are brutally strong none of them have sort of distended bellies they'll have flat bellies right you can see that in your head so you know if you go to cirque du soleil you'll see what i'm talking about all the strong men all the acrobats all have these rock flat bellies right because if you push your belly out what you're really doing is creating more space to stabilize, and your abs don't work really well in there in arc. They want to be flat, right?
Starting point is 00:45:31 You're not sucking in or hollowing. We're stiffening. The third component to that is the torsion that I set in my hips, so that slight torque by screwing my hips into the ground. And by the way, what I just described to you was Tadasana in yoga. I mean, people have thought critically about how to do this for a long time. It gets kind of muddled in the translation. It's modern, right?
Starting point is 00:45:51 But this is the same setup as your deadlift setup. And so what ends up happening is if you sit down, can you squeeze your butt? Nope. So can you create torque in your hip? In fact, no. Your legs are out in front of you and they're loose. The only way you can really tighten up your hip is to sit in full lotus position, right? Or sit like you're doing a really, really wide box squat, which is almost obscene.
Starting point is 00:46:14 You're like, hey, take a look at my crotch. And that's never going to fly on the airplane. And so what we've done is we've lost two of the three key stabilization principles and techniques and models. That means it's all on my abs. And so what ends up happening is that just my trunk, now I can brace that, but basically what's happening is I'm just going to wobble back and forth over my sit bones, right? My trunk is now connected to my pelvis, but my pelvis isn't connected to anything. So enter what we call the four horsemen. And the rectus femoris is that quad that crosses the knee and the hip. It gets tight.
Starting point is 00:46:49 And I can tell you that a lot of people tell us they get knee pain when they sit down, right? And it's actually, there's a technical term for it in literature called theater sign. And that was when people first described it as they were sitting at the theater and their knees would hurt. That was when people first described it as they were sitting at the theater and their knees would hurt. But that rectus femoris is basically holding your pelvis forward in a kind of a tensioned position. And while it pulls forward, it's also pulling on your kneecap. So your knees start to grind into your leg a little bit. Well, the iliacus, which is inside your pelvis, right, inside your pelvic bowl, blends with psoas, but inserts inside your leg. And so now you have two big kind of movers that are related to knee to kind of pelvis and then inside pelvis
Starting point is 00:47:32 to femur. Those are tight. And then psoas, which is like the quads of your low back, right? Which goes all the way up from sort of L1 all the way to L5. It's the filet mignon of the human being. It goes to your leg inside. Yes. Right? That gets tight. And then in the back, you have the QL. I've run into so-and-so's problem squatting.
Starting point is 00:47:50 Of course. Well, you know, especially if you're overextended. And so what ends up happening is that QL gets short in the back because I'm basically going to shorten that down. Now that's fine when I'm sitting, right? I'm in an overextended position. I'm not sitting in a flexed position. I'm erring towards a more bone-on-bone position, right?
Starting point is 00:48:06 Yeah. It's like the end of the door jam. The problem is when I stand up, what happens? Well, my tissues have become adaptively short and stiff, and now I have a whole system that basically is biasing me towards that dumping my pelvis forward position. So I can't stabilize very well. In fact, I'm basically putting a bunch
Starting point is 00:48:25 of crazy wires and guidelines on my spine to get stable. And then when I stand up, they introduce a ton of sheer load on my back. And so now imagine if I'm running and when I come down, it can be upwards of four to six times body weight on a single leg right and all of that force gets transmitted through a spine and a hip that's brutally short and guess what happens we wear out the mechanics like it's just obvious so you know why did i get interested in sitting because i was having to undo it all the time and then when my athletes stopped sitting the stuff went away wow so practically speaking for us that that people that, you know, work on a computer a lot or whatever, it does boil down to, I mean, what I like to do is probably
Starting point is 00:49:12 every 20 or 30 minutes I get up and I do a couple stretches. I mean, I get up, I drink a lot of water throughout the day. So I'm kind of going pee every hour, two hours anyway. So I'm walking around, but I do make a point of just getting up and stretching and not remaining in a seated position for long, long periods of time. Well, sitting, understanding that when I do sit, I want to sit in a good position so I can still breathe, right? I'm still organized, like if I was in Lotus. But the other issue here is that I can – one of the problems with the standing movement, and people are on it. They're getting savvy to it. But one of the problems is that what we've advocated for and told people is, oh, you just need a $10,000 desk.
Starting point is 00:49:55 And so people are like, oh, I need a treadmill desk or I need some high – and we're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. A cardboard box is cheap. Cover it in some construction paper. Put your kids' faces on it and set your whoa, a cardboard box is cheap. Cover it in some construction paper, put your kids' faces on it, and set your computer on that cardboard box. And ultimately, it's nice to lean once in a while. Standing all day long is tough. What we like people to do is have a bar stool so that you can lean on the bar stool. That leaves your hips open. But then you can also put one foot up on the bar stool. You can put your hip on the bar stool.
Starting point is 00:50:28 So it suddenly creates sort of an environment where you can constantly be changing positions and you're avoiding the dreaded piece. And then when you actually sit down, it feels amazing. At the end of the night and you downregulate, sitting is like an ambient. Yeah, I can imagine. I actually want to try.
Starting point is 00:50:44 I'm going to try it. I'm going to try a sort of standing setup. I mean, I, when I'm working at home, I usually put, if I'm, you know, put my laptop on the, on the kitchen bar and stand. And like you said, I mean, after, after a few hours, I'm like, this is actually not so easy. No. And it's, and what you see is that people start to default to their tendencies, which is like one leg turned out. And so you're always trying to cultivate a good position and remind yourself to come back to that baseline where we're just always thinking about can we get back into good shapes. And so it's okay. It's okay to wander and come back and wander and come back.
Starting point is 00:51:20 And the key is to just remove the most noxious aspect of that, which is the full sitting. And I think when you do that, it's pretty remarkable. You do feel better, and you'll notice that you have less stiffness in your back. These are the same recommendations that we have around not wearing flip-flops. You can just remove some of the noxious stimuli, and lo and behold, the whole thing upregulates and you start to feel better. And you only need to believe you. You don't take my word for it. Go see it for yourself.
Starting point is 00:51:53 Don't need a $10,000 desk. You can go to Ikea and get yourself a little add-on to your little table. But it turns out a lot of geniuses like Hemingway stood up when they wrote. Isn't that weird? I didn't even know that. There was this guy who came to our gym once, and he was a sleep researcher. And they had just kept this guy awake for like six days. Don't you die?
Starting point is 00:52:18 How is he even alive? Well, I mean they kept him awake as long as people could stay awake, right? So he was delirious. Well, wait. He didn't sit down. And so the only rule is they kept him upright. Right. So after like three days, something like that, he just took this test and he crushed it.
Starting point is 00:52:37 He's like, I am – he's getting all cocky. He's like, I'm crushing this. And they're like, okay, now all we want you to do is take the same test but sit down. And as soon as he sat down, he started to slur and he started to become belligerent. And he accused the testers of drugging him and gassing him like, you drugged me. And he literally blacked out on his face. And the only difference was as soon as he sat down, he triggered the whole thing and the whole thing just fell apart. Wow.
Starting point is 00:53:09 That's really interesting. Huge. Implicit. I know you've got to run in a second, but you have a new book coming out. Or is it right? Right. October 21st. It's called Ready to Run.
Starting point is 00:53:20 Or is it right? Right. October 21st. It's called Ready to Run. And what we saw was that there were excellent, excellent coaches around the technique of running. You know, Dr. Romanoff. Brian McKenzie's book is excellent. If you're a chi runner, you know, there's a lot of people doing a good job of educating us on how to run. But what we saw was that people physically did not have the capacity to embody the teaching and kept having the problems.
Starting point is 00:53:50 So what we've done is, you know, we are huge fans of the Bob, Chris McDougall's book, Chris McDougall, I think his book, Born to Run. And it's so inspiring. But literally what we saw was that people went out into the world with their new flat shoes. And by the way, everyone's shoes should be flat. That's a given. But, you know, we think now that you should be in flat shoes all the time. And if your mechanics aren't perfect, give yourself a little heel.
Starting point is 00:54:17 Like a little three to four millimeter differential will not wreck you. But you can't cruise around. We want you to cruise flat, be flat, be barefoot. But when we looked at sort of the culture and the environment of supporting runners, what we saw is that runners weren't wearing compression. They didn't have healthy tissues. They didn't know how to hydrate effectively. They didn't have some baselines. And what we did is we basically gave people a blueprint to get their tissues strong enough and ready enough to handle the mechanics of running soundly. And it's so bad that Chris Powers, who is one of the APTA, American Physical Therapy Association stars,
Starting point is 00:54:58 he's the head of the USC physical therapy department, he literally made a position statement where he said, it's safer to heel strike than to run correctly. And what he saw was that wasn't just a person who's casually throwing that out. What we were seeing was that people could not run correctly and not get injured. We know that 30 million runners in America every year, 80% of them are injured in a year. Yeah, I mean, I run that into my line of work, just emailing with a lot of people. I mean, I'm sure you do too.
Starting point is 00:55:28 Well, you know, it's a disaster. I mean, in fact, Juliet and I call it the modern running industrial complex, you know, because, you know, we're like, okay, running, running is the skill. It's the thing that makes us human. You know, you read the story of the human body, you know, that great work that just came out a couple years ago about sort of the anthropology of the Human Body, you know, that great work that just came out a couple years ago about sort of the anthropology of the human body written by the anthropologist out of Harvard. And it's running is the thing that allowed us to hunt, to move.
Starting point is 00:55:56 It's the skill that links nearly every human sport we do. And yet we don't teach kids to run. Every kid runs perfectly. They run on the ball of their foot. They ran neutral foot, right? No one heel strikes. No child heel strikes as they sprint in the kindergarten. But no one heel strikes until about the first grade.
Starting point is 00:56:14 And all of a sudden we see this divergent motor pattern where half the kids run correctly and half the kids start heel striking. And what you're seeing is the implication of sitting eight hours a day for 10 months of the year plus the addition of these high-heeled shoes plus no motor practice skills, no move practice skills. And what ends up happening is we end up sort of cycling down this pathway of defunct motor patterning. And so big surprise when you've been heel striking for 30 years, then you got a flat shoe and went to learn to run correctly, you couldn't handle it. You basically took your big engine and dropped it into a Yugo, and you bent the frame. The car blew up, right? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:56:55 So I think that's what's so fun about this is we're saying, hey, look, we know this is how you're wired. You should have one skill that allows you to run fast and slow because if you take take a heel strike and play frisbee or sprint, they run correctly. You can't sprint heel striking, right? In fact, you can't even heel strike barefoot. I mean, you can for like eight seconds. And then you're going to start shortening your stride and running correctly.
Starting point is 00:57:17 And I think that's what's so interesting about the running movement is it's become such a construct of the shoes I'm wearing. And we feel strong. You should be able to run in any shoe. Wearing combat boots, this is how you run. running movement is it's become such a construct of the shoes I'm wearing. Can you imagine? And we feel strong. You should be able to run in any shoe. Wearing combat boots, this is how you run. It's the same technique, right? Can you imagine telling your Sergeant Major, like, you know what, Sergeant Major,
Starting point is 00:57:33 I've got to put on my maximal cushion shoes. With my gel inserts. Nonsense. And I think that's the problem is that we've really lost the idea of, you know, how do we get ready? How do we prepare the tissues? And we have amazing, amazing interviews with Stacey Sims, who's the leading hydration researcher out of Stanford, talking about how to really look at, you know, delve deep into your urine.
Starting point is 00:57:58 Are you hydrated? Are you getting enough electrolytes? Are you absorbing the water? You know, where can you wear compression? How does that impact? You know, and just developing a practice around actually being ready to run and you know even just the diaphragm stiffness we see in people we interviewed jill miller talked about the diaphragm you know we get women who talk about they can't go run because they they have bladder incontinence
Starting point is 00:58:19 and you know we just are seeing that running is a great diagnostic tool the problem is you can run terribly for decades until you have a problem. Then all of a sudden one day you've worn a hole in your kneecap. You're like, well, I guess that's it. I guess I wasn't designed to run even though I'm a human being. So what we tried to do is just take all of that, what we think is low-hanging fruit, very actionable. We gave people standards. This is what we think you should be. And here's how
Starting point is 00:58:45 you can get there. And remember, you know, Greg Cook is really good at this. He's like, hey, the function of movement screen is a way of sort of assessing that you're not giving up capacity to get some other capacity, right? People sort of misunderstood the FMS. And I think what's really great is what we've done is tried to establish movement standards. Like can you get into the bottom position of a pistol? Well, if you can't, that's one of the reasons that your ankles are torched and you have plantar fasciitis and heel problems. So let's get back to that. And when you've just come through a brutal cycle of running, well, I bet you look stiff.
Starting point is 00:59:20 So how do you know how stiff you are and how far and what to keep an eye on? And we've just made this like 12 easy steps. This book is amazing. It's really, really good. That's awesome. And what's the title again? It's called Ready to Run. Ready to Run.
Starting point is 00:59:35 Cool. You said it's out in October, right? October 21st. You can actually preorder it now. Okay, great. I'll add it to the post on the website. No worries. But what we think is that people are already – look, if you're out there trying to run, kudos to you because you're doing the hard work.
Starting point is 00:59:51 And this is the easy work. Let's make it so your feet don't hurt after running. When my wife and I travel, we always run when we're there. And the idea is, hey, we can – we always prioritize conditioning. Running is the thing that runners – that travelers should be able to do. But boy, you sit on an airplane, you have cankles, and then you're going to go load those cankles with a 5K? I don't think so. Yeah, totally.
Starting point is 01:00:17 Okay, great. Well, that's awesome. This is a lot of great information. And I'm going to link that book in the post. You've got to run to your daughter's birthday. That's cool. And anything else that you just want to finish and close off with? Why don't you like where, where everyone can find you, you know, the standard kind of. Sure. Well, you know, our, our site is MobilityWOD and we just posted like our 1100th video,
Starting point is 01:00:42 literally. And you know, there's's we have a pro version of the site don't let that fool you we uh we basically have created a sort of an open source content but there's about 600 free videos on there where you can start you know you type in you can use all the search features and it's start taking a crack at fixing yourself it's very very simple we have a book that's still on the New York Times bestseller list. It's called Becoming a Supple Leopard which we really think
Starting point is 01:01:08 is like we try to make a Betty Crocker cookbook for people. It's so simple. I don't think people realize that they really can impact their pain
Starting point is 01:01:19 and their friend's pain and their mom's pain by just even rolling around on a ball. It's so low tech and so simple and really, you can really change your, your, the quality of your life. So check us out on mobility. Like what I, what I push with mobility is that, and like it goes back to what you're saying about stretching where I was never much into stretching because it didn't really serve
Starting point is 01:01:39 a purpose. Like I don't care if I can get another inch on this or whatever, but mobility, uh, is, is much more, uh, purpose driven where I can work on, cause I, you know, I'm in the gym, I'm lifting weights. Um, my, my sport of choice is golf, which is a, puts all kinds of weird stresses on the body. And so I, I run into different things and then I, I mean, I use your book all the time. I find that use your videos, uh, find action, find mobility exercises that I can do, uh, that hit spots, work through it, and then immediately see improvements as opposed to, you know, stretching a muscle that I can maybe be a little, I can get closer to a split or something, but what does that do for me? That's right. I mean, it's a hundred percent giving it context. And also what we found is that a lot of the athletes I was working with, and they were stiff and you know, you know, stiff. And you know what doesn't stretch or doesn't move is beef jerky.
Starting point is 01:02:28 We had to come up with a different plan. You have to chew beef jerky to get any action there. And people were beef jerky-ified. So what we noticed was that when we gave people different tools, they made the best solution. And ultimately, you know where you're tight and what your problem is. And as soon as you're empowered to take a crack at it, it's remarkable. Yeah, that's great. All right, awesome.
Starting point is 01:02:48 Well, thanks a lot for taking the time, Kelly. I really appreciate it. I'm excited to get this out there. I know that people are going to – this is all – what you were talking about, everything is up their alley. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate the time. And we always laugh when people are listening to our podcast.
Starting point is 01:03:03 I'm like, you can't get that hour back. You have to learn something from it, please. Yeah, no, tons of good information. So thanks again, Kelly. And I'll let you know when it's up. Please. Cheers. Talk to you soon.
Starting point is 01:03:15 Okay, cool. Hey, it's Mike again. Hope you liked the podcast. If you did, go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. Also head over to my website at www.muscleforlife.com where you'll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you'll also find a bunch of different articles that I've written. I release a new one almost every day,
Starting point is 01:03:41 actually. I release kind of like four to six new articles a week. And you can also find my books and everything else that I'm involved in over at muscleforlife.com. All right. Thanks again. Bye.

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