Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 611: An Owner’s Manual for Your Body | Juliet and Kelly Starrett

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

From the way we sit while watching TV to the way we put on our shoes, our days are filled with opportunities to improve our mobility–without getting all sweaty. That’s according to today�...��s guests, who are here to teach us about some simple ways to keep our bodies durable for as long as possible.Kelly and Juliet Starrett are the authors of the new book Built to Move: The 10 Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully. Their book covers 10 tests you can do to assess your mobility “vital signs” and 10 practices you can do to improve those vital signs and make your body work better.In this episode we talk about:What the Starrett's see as the shortcomings of “the fitness industrial complex” What mobility is, and why working on it is different from working out Why you should practice getting up off the ground without helpThe importance of your hip range of motionWhy the Starrett's recommend a minimum of 8,000 steps per day, not 10,000The ‘Old Man Balance Test’The ‘SOLEC test’The Starretts’ recommendations on nutrition, sleep, and breathingFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/juliet-and-kelly-starrett-611See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. This is supposed to be a show about happiness. So why exactly are we talking today about physical fitness? Because of course the two are linked. If your body is in pain or if you're having mobility issues, that is highly likely to impinge upon your happiness. So today we're going to learn about some simple ways to keep your body durable for as long as possible. Think about this. Have you ever tried to sit down on the floor and then get up without any
Starting point is 00:00:48 assistance? You're going to find out why that is actually a key test. We're also going to learn about other tests such as the old man balance test and the solec test. Plus why your hip range of motion matters so much. And how many steps you actually need every day is the 10,000 number correct. It's week two of our three week series about how to get fit safely. Last week we covered longevity with doctors Peter Atia and Mark Hyman. This week it's movement and next week it's eating and nutrition. With both Atia and Hyman we did talk a little bit about exercise. But today we're going to talk about how to train your body outside of your formal exercise period.
Starting point is 00:01:28 Today's guests argue that from the way you sit while you watch TV, to the way you put on your shoes, your day is filled with opportunities to improve your mobility without getting sweaty. My guests are Kelly and Juliet Starrette, authors of the new book Built to Move. Their book covers 10 tests that you can do to assess your so-called vital signs and then 10 practices you can do to improve those vital signs and make your body work better. Together, Kelly and Juliet have also written the book Deskbound and co-founded the San Francisco CrossFit.
Starting point is 00:02:03 Kelly also co-wrde a big best seller called the coming Asapal Leopard. He consults with athletes and coaches from the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB, also the US Olympic team, and many huge corporations, and also the military. This is a fascinating interview. They have a lot to say about what they see as the shortcomings of what they call
Starting point is 00:02:22 the fitness industrial complex. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, as the shortcomings of what they call the fitness industrial complex. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral.
Starting point is 00:02:45 Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our Healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelli McGonical and The Great Meditation Teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Like, it's only fans only bad where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Juliet and Kelly Starrett, welcome to the show.
Starting point is 00:03:33 Thanks so much for having us. Let me start with just getting some background from both of you. How did you get interested to this degree in fitness? Oh boy. Whew. You started on an alcohol. I would say my whole life has been about sport and play.
Starting point is 00:03:51 And I think I grew up early on in an environment, actually, in Southern Germany, where we were just feral kids, mountain bikes, soccer, skiing, kayaking, as many different sports we could play. And I think early on, to be totally, completely transparent, it's how I self-southed some probably some high desire to move, a little touch of ADHD, and realizing that keeping my body and motion actually made me feel better and was a way of sort of identifying the things that were important to me.
Starting point is 00:04:21 And then ultimately creating a community around that. In university, I ended up becoming a professional paddler, and my sort of continued interest blew up into strength conditioning and nutrition, and ultimately led me to physio school, and here we are. Yeah, and in my case, I started off as a high school rower, and then went on to be a division one rower at Cal and college. And I simultaneously became a guy during that time. So I had this sort of joint interest of athletics and outdoor sports and, you know, being outside. And like Kelly, that transformed into becoming a professional paddler in my 20s.
Starting point is 00:04:58 And you know, then I went off on sort of a professional tangent and became an attorney for a little while. And during that time, I was struggling to figure out ways to move and be in my body and sort of stay in touch with all the things I loved about being an athlete and a professional athlete. And I was really struggling because at that time, only things that were really available to me were like going to a globo gym and, you know,
Starting point is 00:05:24 stairmastering and doing some bicep curls. And I just didn't really feel that I was like learning and growing in my body at that time. And right around then Kelly and I discovered CrossFit and went on to own a CrossFit gym. We were the 21st CrossFit to open. And I went on to compete in the CrossFit games in the very early stages and became a nutrition coach and have been in and around health and fitness basically ever since.
Starting point is 00:05:49 And to pick up the narrative, running a commercial gym for 16 years exposes you to a lot of people and a lot of patterns. We get to see real behavior and ultimately be responsible for people's physical health three to five hours a week. At the same time, we were invited in some very high-level, high-performance environments. We're working with military and all the different branches. Fortune 500 companies, Olympians, across as many different professional sports as you might think. And what we started to see was that we were creating a model that helped sort of demystify and simplify complex movement behavior. We saw that ultimately didn't matter where creating a model that helped sort of demystify
Starting point is 00:06:25 and simplify complex movement behavior. We saw that ultimately didn't matter where you were, everyone was struggling with the same sets of variables. How do I feel better? How do I accomplish the things I want to accomplish? If that's the Olympics or going to be a war fighter or being a CEO, how do we make sense of the 24 hours we're given?
Starting point is 00:06:45 What are the essential behaviors? Now here we are, and we've been continuing to work in this professional space. But as we turn around and sort of crest 50 years old and are looking at the body of work that's been created in health and fitness, sort of this fitness industrial complex, we recognize that we've really left a lot of people behind.
Starting point is 00:07:04 I would say the majority of people have not come along. And so in the vertical of people who are very interested in their health and into fitness and strengthening and issuing nutrition, perhaps they're getting better and they're starting to become more durable. But the failure of our entire industry has been to transmute and sort of transform the principles and practices out of high performance into the lives of people who don't necessarily identify that way. How can we simplify some of that confusion? Because if we actually take a third party validation and say, how are we doing, especially
Starting point is 00:07:38 after COVID, we can look at obesity or diabetes or chronic pain or substance abuse or social isolation, ACL and your rates social isolation, you ACL injury, raising kids, you can almost choose any metric. And it turns out all of those universally are looking worse. And so we have to ask ourselves, is this trillion dollar experiment we're running in fitness and commoditization and fetization of exercise? Is it serving our communities and it turns out it's not? So we decided maybe take a different
Starting point is 00:08:05 tact at that. Can we improve and sort of help people make sense of their lives? So you're doing high performance for people who don't think of themselves as high performance. So maybe they're that we've aged out of it or we've got some sort of disability or we're just not really that into exercise. Or maybe we do think of ourselves as high performance, but you're trying to speak to everybody if I'm hearing you correctly. Yeah, and we're trying to take those lessons we have learned working with high performers and apply those to every day people and I'll tell a little story, you know, we live in a suburban neighborhood amongst people who are raising health and fitness enthusiasts and some of them like to exercise and some of them don't. But that doesn't change the fact that they actually all do care about their health and want to be durable in their bodies and they want to feel good and be out of pain
Starting point is 00:08:53 and be sort of ready to manage stress and any sort of curveballs that life throws their way physically. But they may not want to talk about their health fitness and wellness at the dinner table like Kelly and I do and so We we found that in that community people really do want to feel good in their bodies But are confused by the messages being sent by the greater health wellness, you know fitness industrial complex Aren't sure what to prioritize and aren't sure how to actually fit those things into their busy time crunch
Starting point is 00:09:25 leaps. When you talk about the messages from the fitness industrial complex, meaning that everybody's got some plan and I don't know which plan or religion to sign up for. And so I can just get stuck doing nothing. Yeah, I mean, I can't tell you the number of questions we've gotten just from people in our neighborhood, from our friends, kids, parents to neighbors to, you know, just people walking by our house with their dogs, who stop and say, hey, should I be keto or what about intermittent fasting? And then two weeks later, they're like, wait a second, I heard about
Starting point is 00:09:57 this thing called carnivore and wait a second, maybe I should be a vegan, you know, and that's just in the nutrition space alone, not even touching what kind of exercise should I do? How much and for how long? And should I take supplements? And there's just a lot out there and a lot of confusion. And people aren't sure what identity to take on. And how to approach this complicated thing that is taking care of their bodies.
Starting point is 00:10:21 We want to be agnostic about the way you want to move. But one of the things I think that we've sort of misrepresented is that fitness happens and health happens in like a one-hour chunk, that if you go to this Peloton class and bleed through the eyes, that's enough to manage the rest of the kind of complex systems of your body. And ultimately, we want to reimagine what does physical practice look like? And where do people have agency
Starting point is 00:10:49 and where do they have some control in their lives to be able to integrate behaviors that ultimately all aggregate into a body and a brain that is more capable, has more movement choice, feels better. And where we decided to begin was say, hey, look, we appreciate that you culturally might have certain ways you like to eat
Starting point is 00:11:11 and certain things you want to do. Well, let's go ahead and have some objective benchmarks, some vital signs, often what you can quickly self-assess. So imagine an essential physical panel that, like you would do, see your doctor for an essential physical panel that like you would go see your doctor for an annual physical, except you can administer this to yourself in your home across a set of behaviors that look like physical behaviors, sleep, movement, sedentaryness, walking, things
Starting point is 00:11:37 like that. And then some actual mobility, range of motion assessments that look at how well you're moving, you're your capable moving in your environment. And when we re-empower people, suddenly you can realize, hey, if I said your blood pressure is 120 or 80, that's not great blood pressure, but it's also not terrible blood pressure. It gives us some benchmark in a place where we can begin to understand some of our inputs and outputs and then sort of minister to those things as they are appropriate in the context of our busy lines. So you Kelly started to take us kind of a little bit into the 10 essential practices in the
Starting point is 00:12:13 book and the 10 tests that we can run before each of these practices. And I do want to dive pretty deeply into that. But if it's okay, I just want to stay on a higher level for a minute here, which is you touch on something. I think think will be very resonant. I think it was you said it, Juliet, that we are in this, you know, morass, this measma of information without a lot of knowledge. We get hit with all these ideas about how we should stay fit, eat right, whatever, what exercise religion we should be, you know, signing up for blah, blah, blah. And it's hard to know who to trust or what's right for us.
Starting point is 00:12:45 So I guess I asked this in a very friendly way, people in the audience may be thinking, well, why should I trust these two? Why they've got their own plan? What makes yours different? Well, I mean, I'll start by saying that we have worked with so many high performers over the years so that gives us some bonafides. And it turns out that the things we recommend in this book for everyday people weekend warriors warriors, people who just want to feel good in their bodies are actually the same things we recommend to people who are trying to win world championships and go to the Olympics and
Starting point is 00:13:12 compete at the highest level. It turns out that these basic practices are the things that we've been able to test and retest with high performers and show that they do make a difference in overall performance. And on top of that, are actually scalable to everyday people. What ends up happening is that people are experts in their lives, around raising their kids or being in family or the work they do, and all of a sudden, it really does feel like this enormous task to try to suddenly become an expert in your health and fitness and wellness. One of the things that we're able to do is help people
Starting point is 00:13:45 see that the things we're recommending here are a physical practice. For example, you can sit on the ground while you watch TV tonight. Why? Because that turns out to be a really excellent way to work on your hip range of motion. Suddenly, if we can show you how that hip range of motion improvement makes your back feel better, makes your knees feel better, gives you more movement choice, and it's another thing to work on so that you actually can improve your performance and output while you're watching TV, then suddenly we can begin to create what we think are a set of benchmarks that help people understand this physical capacity. And I think that's really where it's confusing. Humans are immensely tolerant.
Starting point is 00:14:28 We can handle so much and tell we can't. And then all of a sudden, when we try to dig out of those holes, we're like, how come no one ever showed me that I needed to flex my hip beyond the degrees of a chair? What turns out we want to have and maintain that movement choice our whole lives? Because of the space we're in and who we are in the space, we've had occasion to be sent and test every fitness and health and wellness bell and whistle that is out there.
Starting point is 00:14:54 Our neighbor calls our house a space station because literally every day there are five Amazon boxes or boxes outside of stuff that people have sent us. And I'm talking, you know, every kind of health and fitness wellness gizmo on the face of the earth. And we've tried them all. We've basically considered ourselves test subjects and figured out how we could sort of wade through all of this information
Starting point is 00:15:16 that, you know, literally comes to our front door every single day. And we've really taken the last 10 years to figure out what are these things are we actually using? And so I think we've really taken the last 10 years to figure out what are these things are we actually using? And so I think we've just had the benefit of being able to wade through so much of this information, overload, and being able to parse out what we think are the fundamentals and most important things that actually matter and that we think every day people can actually
Starting point is 00:15:42 implement in their regular lives. If we're going to democratize health and democratize fitness, we have to ask, where do these things scale? So you're telling me that every American family needs a peloton, one peloton, two pelotons. Suddenly, you see that a lot of the solutions that have been proposed don't necessarily scale, they're not democratized, they're not practicable. And so we really have to start to ask, well, what is it that is essential to the physical well-being of the human? And what we turns out is that we can create a great capacity of durability and a great
Starting point is 00:16:21 capacity to feel better in your body and do the things you want to do, independent of exercise. We can start to say, hey, exercise is a wonderful, extra curricular. In fact, we encourage it. People have got the message that exercise is important. But when we turn around and look at the other 23 hours of the day, it turns out it's not working very well. And there's a lot of confusion. Some of that is just the way our modern world
Starting point is 00:16:46 has crept in and changed our essential behaviors. You know, if we look at the blue zones where people tend to have lower morbidity and lower mortality, they don't go to orange theory. They don't do keto. There's a lot of built-in practices into their day-to-day life, being in strong communities, walking around, eating whole foods. All of those things really integrate practices into their day to day life, being in strong communities, walking around, eating
Starting point is 00:17:05 whole foods, all of those things really integrate into a holistic thing that supports and cares for how the body might work to its optimum effect. Just to say for anybody who doesn't know what the blue zones are, that this was something done by Dan butiner who was working with National Geographic and traveling around the world and found the areas where people were living the longest. And the results are very interesting and you just reference some of them, Kelly. And so just to put a fine point on it,
Starting point is 00:17:32 what I think I'm hearing you say is yes, exercise is great. You should do it. Everybody kind of knows that already. So what we're focused on is the other 23 hours of the day. So how can you use that time to have your here to four quarantined exercise attitude jump out of that hour and metastasize in a positive way across the rest of your day.
Starting point is 00:17:55 So having established that, which I think is very, very interesting. So you talk about 10 essential practices and then kind of 10 tests we can do beforehand. Should we aim to cover all 20 of these items? Should we pick out a few that we think are most valuable? How should we proceed? I propose we pick out a few that are most valuable
Starting point is 00:18:13 and to set it up a little bit, I think, you know, you can almost think of the 10 tests as divided into sort of two buckets. Five of the tests are really movement and mobility-specific tests. Can your body move through its environment the way that it was meant to? Do you have the range of motion you need to do the things you want to do physically? And then the other five are things that people probably have heard about more commonly,
Starting point is 00:18:36 which are things like sleep and breathing and nutrition. What we've tried to do here, though, because of course, everybody knows you can go out and buy a thousand books on nutrition or exercise or, you know, nowadays even breathing in some of these other topics. But what we've tried to do is explain to the reader how all of these behaviors are interconnected and influence each other and aren't just things that sort of happen in their own silo that all of these behaviors influence the other. I think maybe what we could do is talk a little bit about some of the more physical vital signs
Starting point is 00:19:07 and then maybe layer in how we think all of these more behavioral vital signs influence the bigger picture. All right, so let's dive in. Where should we start with the tests? I say we start with the first one, which is the sit and rise test. Okay, I tried that this morning,
Starting point is 00:19:23 just sitting in the ground. And how did you fare? How did you fare? You're a Buddhist. You're meditating. This was easy, right? Well, I'm a Buddhist who's not particularly limber, so I meditate in chairs. The full lotus is not available to me, at least not yet. So I just hurled myself on the ground and tried to get up without using my arms. Is that the right way to do it? Exactly. Arms in, you're not supposed to put your knee down either. Just from a crisscross applesauce position, can you lower yourself to the ground? And then are you able to stand back up from that crisscross applesauce position? I was, but I did need a little momentum. I kind of had to lean my back up,
Starting point is 00:19:55 engage my core and get up that way. That's so counts. I often have to do that too, especially if I've had a big training session or some kind of more serious physical load the day before I have to do a little rocking to make it. So what people might imagine is that, wow, children can do this. Sitting on the ground is endemic to every culture that we used to twill it on the ground, sleep on the ground, work on the ground, hang it on the ground. And the number one reason you might end up in a nursing home is your inability to get up and down off the ground independently, and that's actually true.
Starting point is 00:20:28 So here we have a simple test, well validated, that shows that, hey, this is an easy sort of snapshot into how well you're going to move or how well you're going to move into the future. It doesn't require full hip range of motion. It doesn't require ankle range of motion. You don't have to be very strong because you're a human being
Starting point is 00:20:46 and you've been doing this and practicing this from kindergarten on beyond. So what is it that suddenly has diminished your capacity to move as freely? If I hand you a baby and ask you to get up off the ground, you're like, I can't do it. So once we do the test, what's the practice that's associated with it?
Starting point is 00:21:03 What should we do about it? Sure, and I just was gonna back up for a second and say one of the reasons we do the test, what's the practice that's associated with it? What should we do about it? Sure. And I just was going to back up for a second and say, one of the reasons we love this test and wanted to start the book with it is that it is so ultimately scalable. Anybody can do it. It's actually fun to try with your family and friends. And it's also scalable. So if you're worried about falling down onto the ground, you can first practice by going
Starting point is 00:21:20 down to a chair, to a coffee table, and slowly work your way into seeing if you can achieve that position. And it also does really quickly and easily give you some basic information about your overall hip range of motion and movement capacity. And the second reason that we wanted to start the book with this is that the way that you can get better at this is so ultimately also accessible.
Starting point is 00:21:43 And that is by first doing the thing, which is actually practicing getting up and down on the floor exposure. And then secondarily, it's spending time sitting on the floor in a variety of positions. And we recommend that people do this while they're doing something we know they're already doing, which is watching TV in the evenings. And what we found, especially because we haven't become as accustomed to sitting on the floor as a culture anymore, is that it's often uncomfortable, especially to begin with, and people naturally move from position to position to position.
Starting point is 00:22:13 So they'll start in crisscross applesauce, but move to long-set or 90, 90, or even kneeling, and that naturally in order to sort of buffer sitting on the ground, their body is sort of queuing them to move into different positions. But ultimately, that's actually great because you're exposing your hips and your body to these different positions,
Starting point is 00:22:33 which is ultimately help you in your overall hip range of motion and ultimately help you get better at this test. And we've seen people who really struggled at the beginning with this test and just implemented some practice getting up and down off the floor 30 minutes of sitting a day, whether that's in front of the TV at night, or if you're someone who happens to work from home, maybe you spend 30 minutes or an hour of your
Starting point is 00:22:56 workday actually sitting on your living room floor with your laptop on your coffee table. And so the practice is ultimately something that really, again, doesn't require you to put on your running shoes and get in your car and drive to a class. The practice to get better at this is actually just something you can do while you're doing something you're already doing and at home. And there's a key concept here that I think everyone should put in their back pockets. Something I learned in Physio School from our pediatric instructor, muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs. So the first order of business is exposure.
Starting point is 00:23:29 Just go ahead and begin to sit. And if you can manage five minutes fine, if you need to sit on a cushion, fine doesn't matter. You'll figure out how to scale this. Not only does it just load the aspects of the body, the hip capsules, the connective tissue, the muscles, your joints, they all have to move in this way, which is the most important thing, but also signals to your brain that this is a safe position, that this is a position we value. And so your brain starts to open up, it's control and starts to view those positions as
Starting point is 00:23:57 non-threatening. So when I'm sitting on the ground, I can't lean my back against anything. Sure, you can. How you can, yes. Yeah, my choice position is I sit on the ground on a little very thin like meditation cushion and often with my back leaned against the couch or if I'm choosing to work at my laptop in that position on the floor, I tend to be leaning more forward because I have to reach my laptop. But yeah, I mean, really anything goes. You can lean
Starting point is 00:24:23 against your couch or anything. And you can see suddenly that sort of slippery slope. You asked, well, is it okay? Yes, explore. I think what we've been conditioned to do is look, I've got to do this right way and this wrong way. Or, you know, am I doing this correctly? Sitting on the ground should be a non-political conversation. We're just asking you to do and expose your body to very fundamental positions and shapes, and those fundamental positions shapes over time start to do things like, make your back feel better,
Starting point is 00:24:54 make your hips feel better. You know, we have to ask ourselves, when and where can people begin to access these essential behaviors and start to explore and restore and own their body's capacities and abilities. And that can start as easy as in front of your TV tonight. I don't know that I've spent much time taking about my hips. Why is hip range of motion so important? I would just like to start and just sort of define the word mobility if I could because we're
Starting point is 00:25:21 often associated with that. People are like, you guys are the mobility experts, but nobody knows what that means. And so to us, what mobility means is, can you move your body freely through your environment without pain? And can you do the things you want to do physically? And that's very personal and wide-ranging for people from being able to garden, to meditate, to ride your mountain bike to ski. I mean, you name it. You know, that physical capacity is very individual,
Starting point is 00:25:49 but turns out everybody desires to have that. And the way that I like to think about your physical capacity in this way is sort of this visual that is helpful to me. If you think about the things you wanna do with your body is this sort of wide hallway. And when you're young, you're always like so wide, you have the widest hallway because you can really do whatever you do with your body is this sort of wide hallway. And when you're young, you're hallways, like so wide, you have the widest hallway
Starting point is 00:26:05 because you can really do whatever you want with your body. But as we age, people start to feel that hallway, start to constrict a little bit. And the things that they were able to do at 20, you know, and then 30, they start to slowly constrict. Well, the goal here is for all of us, especially as we age, to do our level best to keep that hallway as wide open as possible so that we can continue doing the things we want to do our level best to keep that hallway as wide open as possible
Starting point is 00:26:25 so that we can continue doing the things we wanna do physically. And it turns out having hip range of motion is a key part of that. And I'll let Kelly sort of elaborate on the why. Why you should care. Well, I think it's interesting to see, for example, if we take that 30,000 foot view
Starting point is 00:26:40 in cultures that twill it on the ground, sleep on the ground, spend more time and value things that look like squatting, the truth is that in those cultures where there's a lot more range of motion required to engage in the sort of demands of the society, we see lower lumbar disease, we see less hip arthritis, fewer joint replacements, fall risk, starts to approach zero in the elderly because they have to get up and down and practice these skills every day. Oftentimes, remember, I'm classically trained as a physical therapist, people really don't make an association between losing their range of motion and the stiffness demands that
Starting point is 00:27:18 that imparts on the body. And how suddenly, oftentimes when we restore people's ability to move more effortlessly, we restore them toward more natural, normative ranges that every physician, every orthopedic surgeon, every physical therapist thinks that everyone should have, and what, by the way, doesn't have to change through your lifespan. We often see an associated reduction in pain that people improve their function, and suddenly they start to feel better. So suddenly you can say things like, well, as I'm able to get up and down off the ground, that's ultimately at the car, sit the desk, sit on the couch, and never actually touch any of these full ranges of motion unless you're conscious about
Starting point is 00:28:11 doing it, unless you go to a yoga class or Pilates class or unless you're front squatting or doing some of these practices that traditionally have exposed the tissues to their normal full range of motion positions. Kelly is one of the most sought after physical therapists. There is. And so he obviously over his career has seen a ton of people with low back pain, which is a huge problem for many people. And I think people would be surprised to learn his prescription for people who come to see him with low back pain.
Starting point is 00:28:42 Isn't some secret, amazing manual physical therapy procedure he's doing on their bodies. He teaches them how to breathe. He prescribes them to walk a lot more than they are, and he teaches them how to mobilize their hips. And those are kind of the three key pillars of his strategy of working with people with low back pain, which I'm sure many of your listeners either have or have had and can be very debilitating.
Starting point is 00:29:08 And you know having range of motion in your body is one of the key things that is going to help keep that physical cord or wide open as you age. And so it's just something that you've got to put a little input into and be mindful of. And so we find that these tests in this book give you a little bit of information about where you are and some pretty simple practices to do what we call care and feeding of the body. So you can make sure you're keeping an eye on maintaining that range of motion. For no other reason, then that you wanna be able to keep
Starting point is 00:29:38 doing the things you wanna do physically, whether that's playing with your grandchildren, your older or if you're in your 30s and you're trying to train for a triathlon, it's universally useful for all those things. Coming up, the Starrettes, talk about why they recommend a minimum of 8,000 steps per day, not 10,000, the old man balanced test and the solec test. Hey, I'm Ares, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wonder E's podcast, Even the Rich,
Starting point is 00:30:09 where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newer series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul Born Naked, we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad
Starting point is 00:30:50 free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. So we've done one test and one practice, one test is can you get up off the ground without any support and the practices spend at least 30 minutes sitting on the ground. Let's do another pairing. Well, I think because I mentioned it around back pain and its connection to having range of motion, I think we should talk about our deep love and obsession for walking and encouraging people to walk more. Take it away, Kels. So one of the things that we have tended to see through the data is that people don't walk very much.
Starting point is 00:31:27 The average person is walking about two to three thousand steps a day. And if you have a phone, and most people have a smartphone now, you actually have a built-in pedometer. It's right there. It'll count your steps for you and show you in the background. It's following you around anyway.
Starting point is 00:31:42 So one of the reasons that we're huge fans of walking is first, it's following you around anyway. So one of the reasons that we're huge fans of walking is first, it's accessible to everyone. Well, not everyone. Well, you're right, absolutely. But moving through your environment is so whether you are walking, whether you are in a wheelchair, they're still moving in that way. And people who have chronic pain and persistent pain, one of the things that we feel very strongly about is, hey, you're walking today, maybe 10, 1 minute walks around your kitchen island, right? Out of the hospital, the first thing the physical therapist does is say, let's get you up out of bed. And that means you walk across the room and then
Starting point is 00:32:20 you sit back down and then you're done because that's all you've got. So our goal is to increase more movement in the body. That is the ultimate goal. So it's not about necessary walking, per se, although walking is the most accessible behavior to the most people. And what we know is that that movement behavior, and this one will put the surgeon in here of walking, allows us to do certain things. We can de-conjest our bodies. So naturally, your body creates a lot of waste products and a lot of that waste is carried out through something called your lymphatic system. So your lymphatic system handles all of the proteins, all of the broken down cellular material, goes through your lymphatic system
Starting point is 00:33:01 and ultimately gets filtered out by your body. That lymph system is the sewage system of the body and is bootstrapped into your muscles. And since it's a passive system, the way that it ends up dumping and clearing is through muscle contraction. So if you've ever sat on an airplane for a long time and your ankles are kind of swollen up, that's basically your drains clogging up, your lack of calf muscle function is happening, and your tissues are congesting. Your tissues are sort of backing up, and the only way to manage that is through movement. So one of the natural processes of the body's ability to clear waste is bootstrapped into our need to move through our environment, And that's a very clever process.
Starting point is 00:33:50 But we also see that if you go outside, you're going to get sun. If you go outside, you'll probably see your neighbors. We also know that that could be a perfect time for mindfulness or breath practice. But one of the reasons we love to walk very much is that it actually allows us to accumulate enough non-exercise activity fatigue that it actually helps us to fall asleep and stay asleep. So we also, as Julep Regulate points out to me, that some of the emerging data is supporting that one of the best ways for people to manage their weight throughout their life is not intense activity, but consistent walking steps. And more particularly, movement that often people who move more are the people who do not struggle
Starting point is 00:34:30 with their weight throughout their lifetime versus people who don't move enough. And that honestly is independent of exercise, which I think is one of the many reasons why we want to keep exercise separate from this book. If people are worried about their weight or body composition, the goal for us is to encourage people to move more in those 23 hours. And I think back to the point we made earlier, one of the challenges we've had with sort of fetishizing exercises, the culture, as we've told everybody they should
Starting point is 00:34:57 do it, they are doing it. And they're spending billions of dollars on it. It turns out usually happening in one hour blocks where you have to leave the home and do some kind of formal process. And at the end of that, people both feel heroic, which they should, because often it's hard and it's intensive and takes a lot of willpower and motivation to have that practice in your life. And they feel physically tired depending on what the practice is. But I think the mistake we've made in the fitness business and even Kelly and I
Starting point is 00:35:24 include ourselves in this, just we told people like, if you've done that one hour of exercise, you've checked this box that we all universally know as health, whatever that means, health, you check the box and you're good. And often those people, you know, crossfitters and, you know, everyday athletes alike, just actually then sit down and don't move enough for the remainder of the day. And then later wonder, hey, I'm exercising for an hour a day.
Starting point is 00:35:49 Why am I struggling still with my body composition so much, you know, also independent of nutrition which we can get to? So I think this movement and non-exercise activity for us is at the core of what we're talking about. So all of the benefits from walking really come at 8,000 steps, 50% reduction in all cause mortality. And that number continues to go up with even more walking. So look, if you're motivated to walk 15,000 steps great, we find that is difficult for most people. One of the reasons that we were delighted to learn about this research, about 8,000 steps is that is a much more attainable number for more
Starting point is 00:36:25 people than 10,000. The 10,000 steps number was actually originally created by a Japanese pedometer maker as a marketing scheme because 10,000 is an auspicious number in Japanese culture. But something about 10,000 feels far away, especially if you're starting at 3,000. And then the other thing that we've learned in our own lives is we can actually accumulate 8,000 steps in the form of doing five 10 minute walks in these little snacks every day that we don't again have to add another hour block to our day, that if we take some walking meetings, take a walk after dinner, take 10 minute walks after our meals, that we actually
Starting point is 00:37:03 really are pretty easily able to accumulate 8,000 steps. And in turn, enjoy all the benefits of longevity and better health of walking at 8,000 steps. I was just going to ask you about the time thing, because a lot of people really, they have non-negotiable desk bound jobs. That's right. And they can't get out. So you're saying, just do short bursts throughout the day. If you can get a meeting where it's a walking meeting and you're just calling in, do it. Maybe,
Starting point is 00:37:31 I don't know if you can get 8,000 steps in an hour, but maybe you can't, I don't know. But just getting these short bursts throughout the day. Yeah, and that's exactly how I do it. I mean, the one hour that I have that I feel like is discretionary time, my prioritize getting some more formal exercise in. And so I have to figure out ways to get the remaining 8,000 steps. I will say that just by doing everyday household activities, like cooking and getting ready and, you know, just that every day things we're doing is humans. Most people accumulate two or three thousand steps. So it's, it's really about sort of intentionally, how can I gather another 5,000 steps? You know, Kelly and I have, we live on a block that's maybe 800 meters long.
Starting point is 00:38:09 It takes about 20 minutes to walk from one end to the other. It's maybe like too long New York City blocks of people think about that. And we calculated it's 1750 steps. So it takes us about 20 minutes or 25 minutes to walk that. And we often just do that after dinner at night. It has this great benefit of not taking that long. We accumulate almost 2,000 additional steps. We do not take our phones.
Starting point is 00:38:33 So it's this really nice time for us to connect with one another and recap our days and see how we're doing. We get a little time outside. It feels good to walk after you eat. It eats with digestion, so that's a side benefit. So, yeah, I mean, there's rarely a day where I'm doing a one-hour walk in addition to the other things I'm doing.
Starting point is 00:38:51 I'm really accumulating these steps through walking meetings, little 10 minute walks after meals, and any way that I can think of getting steps. And this really begins to highlight for people the fact that our health and some of the behaviors are in the care and feeding of our bodies can happen in little chunks of time. And that they all aggregate over the course of a day. And then tomorrow I get to reset the clock and start again. Kelly's done a lot of work with the elite military units
Starting point is 00:39:19 including the Delta Force. And he learned in working with them that if their warfighter folks are having any sleep problems and keep in mind this is an organization that has access to every single medication, toolbell whistle, everything that's out there to optimize sleep, what they prescribe is walking 12 to 15,000 steps because what they've learned is that even though these men and women are very physically active in certain blocks throughout their day, they often weren't getting enough total movement to induce sleep pressure, enough sleep pressure to actually fall asleep
Starting point is 00:39:54 and stay asleep. And so that's for us, one of the best examples of how all these behaviors are really connected. It's, you know, it's one thing to say, okay, I'm going to work on optimizing my sleep, but for us, you really can't look at optimizing your sleep without actually looking at all the things you're doing leading up to sleep, including, are you getting enough total movement in your day? We always say, we'll take these same principles. Let's go ahead and apply them to a growing body.
Starting point is 00:40:17 You have children or you know someone with children. Do you think it's healthy for a child not to move their bodies during the day? And you answer, of course, if it's going to be, it's healthy for a child not to move their bodies during the day? And you answer, of course, of course, it's not. So at what point do humans decide that they get to age out of some of these fundamental biological processes, like sleep and like moving, for example? Where should we go next? If we did nothing else with this book, if we reduce the fall risk for some percentage of the population, that would be a public health coup.
Starting point is 00:40:47 That would fundamentally change the lives of millions of families. We see that one of the key metrics that we've come across to improve athletic performance, running, sprinting, Olympic lifting, cycling, whatever it is, is actually having our athletes work on their balance. We know that fall risk is a considerable issue for a lot of people, particularly as we age and as our balance gets challenged less in our day to day lives, and as our ankles and hips become stiff, we actually lose the ability to write ourselves and to make corrections. It's not that typical adults don't lose their balance.
Starting point is 00:41:27 It's just that they're really good at recovering. But as we get stiffer, we lose those movement choices to be able to recover from these losses of balance. So one of our favorite tests in here is something we call the Old Men Balance Test. And it comes from a coach we have, our friends with named Chris Hinchah, who's a really great running coach.
Starting point is 00:41:46 And he created this test so that he could beat his children at something. He had these young superstar athlete kids. And he was like, great, I'm gonna challenge you. And the test is, standing on one leg, put your socks and shoes on the ground, reach down, grab one sock without putting your foot down, put that sock on while standing, then reach down again without putting in that reach down, grab one sock without putting your foot down, put that sock on while standing,
Starting point is 00:42:07 then reach down again without putting that foot down and then put your shoe on and tie it while standing. And then once you have balanced and worked on that, put that foot down and do it, repeat it with the other side. It's a good example of dynamic balance and more importantly, how you might actually formally practice these complex balance skills a little bit every day, just like brushing your teeth. You can either just wait every six months and then go brush your teeth right before you
Starting point is 00:42:31 see the dentist or you can brush your teeth a little bit every day. And it turns out that this balance skill is so innate to humans keeping our head level working in the environment that this is an easily trainable skill. What we don't want people to do is wait until they fall and then realize they have terrible balance. And the easiest way, the second test that we have in the book is something called the solec, the standing one leg eyes closed test, which is a very clinically validated test to a false fall risk in our populations.
Starting point is 00:43:02 And the solec test is you just stand on one leg, eyes closed, 20 seconds aside. And it seems very straightforward. And I think people listening to this and I think, oh, I've got that. But the key thing here is once you close your eyes and lose that visual cue, it becomes very difficult. And you'll see a lot of windmill arms
Starting point is 00:43:19 and struggle to balance is actually very difficult once you close your eyes. And that's part of the reason why older people often fall in the dark because they've lost the visual cue or in the snow. The similar thing happens in crowds when people sort of lose that spatial and visual cue, it becomes very difficult to balance. One story I wanted to tell about this that was influential
Starting point is 00:43:39 for me in writing this chapter about balance. And one of the reasons that I care is my mom, Janet, who's now 78 years old and she's very fit and she's an original built to move her. She's always moved her whole life and rarely ever formally exercised by the way. She's mostly just walked and hiked and kept moving and danced. But she actually by the time she was about 68 years old could no longer ride a bike. She felt too timorous and nervous riding a bike and had really lost that skill of balance. And what I saw in watching her do that and just sort of lose the opportunity to do things like, you know, go for a bike ride with
Starting point is 00:44:17 all of us when we're on a family vacation or just be able to bike around our nice suburban neighborhood. I think it was one of the first moments I realized that balance in particular is really a use that or lose it kind of thing. And I realized that I didn't want to become 68. And again, I had my hallway of physical movement be constricted to the point where I couldn't ride a bike anymore or do whatever I wanted to do because I'd lost, you know, terminally lost too much balance. And one of the reasons I love both of these tests that we have in this book is that I literally do the old man balanced test every morning, Kelly can attest
Starting point is 00:44:50 to this, that's how I put on my shoes every day, my shoes and socks in the morning. And then also with the soleck test, the standing on one leg, eyes closed, the way that I practice that test is by doing it while I brush my teeth in the morning and the evening. So if you sort of got eyes on my process while I'm brushing my teeth,
Starting point is 00:45:09 it may look a little weird because it is difficult to balance on one leg with eyes closed, but there I am in front of my sink, practicing these simple balance skills. And again, one of the things we've tried to do in this book, which we've emphasized over and over again, is we really tried to say, okay, it's balanced as important. It's something we all need to keep an eye on both now
Starting point is 00:45:28 and as we age, and how can we fit in simple practices to make sure that we can not use it or lose it when it comes to all these physical skills and be able to do the things we wanna do? I'm a little confused, so the old man, one legged tester, whatever, and then the soleck, are legged test or whatever, and then the soleck are those tests or practices or both.
Starting point is 00:45:48 They're both. Okay. We use them as tests to just sort of get some again basic information about where you are in your balance, and you can score them. The tests are also the practices. And in the balance chapter, we have a bunch of other practices. You know, one of the things I love is I have this thing called a slack block that is sitting by my desk where I work.
Starting point is 00:46:09 It's a piece of wood with some foam underneath. It's, you know, maybe a foot long. And I just keep it at my desk and I practice standing on one leg and balancing on that thing throughout my work day. And it's fun and feels like a play toy. And it's just yet another way that I've sort of incorporated practicing balance into things I'm already doing in my day. Coming up, the star hats, talk about their recommendations
Starting point is 00:46:32 on nutrition, sleep, and breathing. Okay, so we've done the hips, we've done balance. Where should we go now? Well, I tell you, um, you know, I do think we should talk about nutrition. And the reason I say that is when I mentioned the keto diet and a bunch of other diets earlier, I did see you kind of smile a little bit in the background. Um, I thought maybe our diet culture resonated a little bit with you. For sure. Juliet and I would describe ourselves as veterans of the diet wars. We're survivors.
Starting point is 00:47:07 We're survivors. From early fat free, when we were teenagers in the 90s, all the way up into zone, keto, carnivore, paleo, standard athletic diet, we have seen it all. And ultimately, when we set up this framework for everyone, we want to start with the idea that we're agnostic about the way you want to eat. Your culture, your values as a family, your moral and ethics, how much money you have, all of those things sort of come into the choices that you'd be making or maybe can make.
Starting point is 00:47:40 But underlying that, what we know, unequivocallyally is that people typically don't get enough protein and So that means if you're a vegetarian or convoire we want you to meet these minimum protein requirements and There's really good research to support the things like fiber and micronutrients that come from fruits and vegetables and so One of the things that we are trying to reimagine for people is how do I start incorporating more whole foods into my diets and expand my eating choices. And it turns out, let me give everyone an example. We feel strongly about a diet sort of recommendation and nutrition recommendation that came from one of our friends, EC Sinkowski of Optimized Nutrition. And she stumbled on some research that showed there's a
Starting point is 00:48:29 real health benefit that kicks in around again, all cosmortality, decrease morbidity, when people eat 800 grams of fruits and vegetables every day. That's 1.7 pounds or four gigantic apples. So we're asking people to actually eat more fruits and vegetables every day. And I would just add that I have two big influences in my thinking around this nutrition piece. And the first is a woman named Kate Chanahan who wrote a book I love called Deep Nutrition. And she went around the world and studied food and diet culture. She's a physician, studied food and diet culture, like in way back into the dawn of man. And it turns out that human beings of all cultures have been doing the same four things with their diets. And by the way, this is also the same in the blue zones.
Starting point is 00:49:17 Humans eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. They eat protein sources. They eat some kind of fermented food, and they eat whole milk dairy products. And this is pretty universal for all cultures. Now, how those foods are expressed depends on the culture. If you're in Korea, your fermented food is kimchi. If you're in Germany, your fermented food is a pickle.
Starting point is 00:49:36 But it doesn't change the fact that those four things are the pillars of the human diet going back to as long as we know what humans have been eating. And then the second really influential piece is I follow a guy and have studied under a nutritionist named John Barardi who has a company called Precision Nutrition. And years ago, he made this really cool article called The Cost of Getting Lean. And it's actually not an article, it's a series of infographics that very clearly and visually show what people would need to do to have certain body compositions. And it turns out that to be extremely lean,
Starting point is 00:50:17 you have to be so restrictive in your diet. And what I love about this article is I think there's a lot of people who think they want to have shredded abs and that's their goal But when presented with this article the cost of getting lean and Presented with what the reality would mean of actually being able to look like that and look like some kind of fitness influencer red wine gone Yeah, I think that she knows gone, you know going out to dinner with your friends gone And I think it's a really important reality check that most people, if really ask what their goals are in terms of body composition, they mostly want to feel good in their body. They don't want their clothes to feel tight. They want to be able to do whatever physical activity they want to do. But even perhaps more importantly than that, to me, the two things that
Starting point is 00:50:59 human beings do together in the way we commune as humans, as we eat together, and we move together. And, you know, if your diet has removed you from your community and made it so that you can't eat dinner with your kids or enjoy a meal out with your friends, to me, that's a gigantic red flag. But I think everybody knows that one of the most important health habits is strong family and human connection. And that may trump all of these habits, is connection and community around us.
Starting point is 00:51:32 And if we remove that key piece of eating together because we're on such a restrictive diet, I think that's a giant red flag. So those two things have been such an important influence for me. And one of the reasons that I'm such a fan and very proud of this approach to nutrition we have in this book is unlike almost all the other
Starting point is 00:51:49 nutrition approaches, it's actually the first time people have reported to us that they feel that a diet or nutrition strategy has been expansive versus restrictive and also creates space for them to be able to be normal and enjoy food with their family and friends. I strongly agree with all of that. I was just talking to Dr. Peter at Tia a couple days ago, and he and I were both agreeing
Starting point is 00:52:11 that now that we're both North of 50, and I wish I had come to this conclusion 10, 15 years ago, that I'm not willing to do what it would take to have a six pack anymore. I used to have one in my mid-therities, but the cost would be too high. And it was a relief for me to hear Peter, who is so intense, say the same thing. I could have saved a lot of pain if I had put this into practice many, many years ago. But just before we leave food and go on to something else, can you, one of you please put a fine point on what are the actual recommendations here? What's the essential practice that we should put into place around food?
Starting point is 00:52:51 So the first is to endeavor to eat 800 grams of fruits and vegetables a day. And again, if that seems overwhelming, that actually is four large apples. And the sky's the limit on which foods you choose under that umbrella and things like white potatoes actually count and beans. So foods that people have often been restricted from eating from other diets. So it's in our experience very easy to meet that recommendation.
Starting point is 00:53:14 Typically if it's fried, we don't count it. Yeah, and then I'll let Kelly talk about the protein recommendation. But I think it's useful to say, why are we talking about getting enough protein? Because we want to make sure that you are able to build and maintain enough lean muscle mass into your age. And when we're trying to keep muscle mass on and support lean muscle mass, that is driven
Starting point is 00:53:37 very much through protein. So that can be fruits and vegetables. You can be give that from grains. You can get it from peas. We're totally agnostic about it. But turns out if you can hit that 0.7 to 1 gram of protein per pound body weight, that's a pretty reasonable start.
Starting point is 00:53:56 The whole thing that we're getting at here is we wanna make sure your body has what it needs to thrive effectively. What we get in the bargain though, is that oftentimes people start eating the recommended amount of protein, plus enough fruits and vegetables, they're shocked at how they've actually been underfueling
Starting point is 00:54:17 and fueling with things like really, really nutrient-poor, collerically dense foods. So again, what's nice about giving people some guidelines is that we trust that you'll be able to fit these things in. And we can sort of have you say, here's what my values are. Here was what my culture is, how am I going to work all these things out?
Starting point is 00:54:39 Start with these benchmarks and then work backwards from there. You think we can hit breathing and sleeping before we run out of time? Yeah. What we find is on the internet that sleep is very personal. And that people really do believe that the way that they're sleeping is optimal for them. And what we want people to, again, we've tried to do in the book is not say sleep more. You know, we know that growing bodies that people are trying to heal from injury or surgery, people are trying to change
Starting point is 00:55:10 their body composition or learn a new skill or grow a body like a teenager, all of those things require probably more sleep than you're getting. And so what we've tried to do here is say, hey, let's create a reference line. That reference line for us is seven hours. Seven hours is our minimum due diligence. We see regularly and the research supports that most people are getting six hours and less and wondering why we're having a hard time changing body composition or not feeling good or we have a lot of chronic pain. As we start to tug out this gourdy and not, we need to
Starting point is 00:55:45 make sure that we're at least looking at outputs from better data. And one of the ways we can begin to clean up the data is to say, let's get better about tracking our sleep. The way that I think of sleep is that it is a keystone habit. It's the habit from which all the other habits that we all know we should be doing to take care of our health stem. And I think Kelly referenced briefly this idea of tracking. And as I said earlier in the podcast, we obviously have had access to every health, wellness, bell, and whistle, including every tracking device. And if push came to shove, I would say still, after all of this technological innovation, the most important and only thing I really think people should be tracking is their steps.
Starting point is 00:56:28 I think that still continues to be the most important measure and all the other things are just sort of like vanity metrics. I do think tracking your sleep is interesting. You can get some useful data from that. I think most people track it because it's fun, but don't really do anything actionable or change their habits around it. But for me, the most important thing I learned from tracking my sleep is that we all commonly lose about an hour of sleep a night through various wakeful cycles or getting up to use the bathroom or whatever, and that that's
Starting point is 00:56:58 actually totally normal and not something that we should feel anxiety about. That's part of a normal sleep cycle. But it turns out that if your goal is to get eight hours of sleep, it might mean that you need to be laying in bed for nine hours. And so for me, like, I really lived in a universe for a long time where if I went to bed at 11 and woke up at seven, I was like, check the box, I just got eight hours of sleep. And I was shocked when I started tracking my sleep to learn actually, that was only seven hours of sleep. And so for me, that was, that was a useful piece of data, but not necessarily something I need to track on an ongoing basis. So I think for people who would like to get some, you know, early, interesting information
Starting point is 00:57:34 about sleep, certainly tracking is useful for a period of time, but I don't think it's anything people need to do on a super regular basis. I think there's some real important sleeping principles and some benchmarks. And I think if people are mindful of those things are gonna feel better and perform better in their lives. And remember, you'll go through periods of time where you don't get enough sleep. That's okay, you're human being, you'll thrive.
Starting point is 00:57:57 You'll go ahead and survive. Go ahead and have kids, have a business deadline, jump on a red eye, have someone get sick, have an emergency, you'll see it. Maybe work shift work. You'll see that there'll be times and periods where you can't sleep or not getting enough sleep. And so we don't worry about that. But when we have a benchmark or a vital sign, we can say, hey, I've been below that.
Starting point is 00:58:18 Now I'm going to start to reprioritize that. And as Juliet hinted at, suddenly sleep begins in the morning where I'm making sure I'm getting enough food so I can not have a big meal before I go to bed. It means that, hey, I really do cut my caffeine off. Maybe at 12 or 1 because that caffeine will impact the quality of my sleep. It means that if I move enough during the day, then I'm actually going to accumulate enough non-exercise fatigue, sleep pressure that I fall asleep and stay asleep, that I might choose not to have a drink at night
Starting point is 00:58:49 because I know it's going to impact my sleep. And in fact, I'll save that alcohol for when I'm rested and on vacation or celebrating. And what we suddenly see is that that key behavior, we fail to appreciate how, as Juliet says, Julie says we get behind then all the sudden we start to see this Sort of aggregation of survival strategies where I'm for our energy and I have a coffee at four o'clock And then I have to hit the brakes with a bourbon and suddenly it's easy to erode that sleep But you'll be hard pressed to find any of our Olympians who are sleeping less than nine hours.
Starting point is 00:59:25 We're really starting to get the message that this is a performance hack. And again, your mileage may vary. It may be seven and a half hours for you, maybe eight and a half hours, but again, apply that to your kids. Really six hours of sleep is good enough. And what we are finding out in our communities is that we have really devalued sleep. In fact, we've made not sleeping heroic and we brag about not sleeping. But can you adapt or manage as effectively as if you were getting more sleep
Starting point is 00:59:54 than the answer is unequivocally no? Let's see if we could do breathing in the remaining time. Love it. What's the test? What's the practice? Yeah, talk about the CO2 telling test. We grab the test from Patrick and Cune and it's called the body oxygen level test. And all you need to do is take a big breath in and then slowly exhale as long as you can.
Starting point is 01:00:15 And what you'll see is that you measure. You can measure your exhale. Right. Or you can take a big breath in, exhale, and see how long it takes you need to breathe. Either one of those can feel appropriate, but what we're seeing is we should be comfortable with high levels of CO2 in our system. And when we test either one of these ways, what we begin to come up with is a reference.
Starting point is 01:00:41 And what we find is that people who haven't had a lot of training in this experience or a lot of exposure here find that they really need to breathe very quickly. And about 20 seconds, they feel like they need to gasp again. And people who've done some programming here, some practice here usually can get to about 40 seconds, 40 to 60 seconds without feeling they need to breathe. So if you just take a big breath in, breathe all the way out, and don't breathe again, you can start a clock right then, and we can begin to see when you feel like you have this urge to breathe. So after you take the deep breath in and then breathe out, and then how many, I start running us stopwatch, what's the right result? The right result is to go as long as you can without breathing and our goal is about 40 seconds
Starting point is 01:01:28 Okay without feeling like you need to like twitch or the first desire to breathe is that sort of first metric of where you are Okay, but I think I got the test, but what is the practice that I'm doing? Well, one of the practices were encouraging here is actually to do some soft tissue mobilization work on your spine, your T-spine in particular, to be able to sort of create the space in your carcass to actually be able to breathe this way. That's right. And to be more comfortable working in breath holds while you walk. So here's an example.
Starting point is 01:02:05 One of the things that we love is while people are walking, take a 10 second inhale, hold it as long as you can, and then breathe only through your nose when you're recovering. At the top of the minute, repeat that cycle. Take a 10 second inhale, hold your breath as long as you can while you're walking. Don't pass out, don't crash, and then nose only breathing. We find that most of us,
Starting point is 01:02:29 because of the poshers we engage in in our day-to-day workplace, we do a lot of mouth breathing, which doesn't really allow us to access good diaphragm function. When we start forcing and constraining people to actually start breathing through their nose, through some activity, one of our intentional walk practices is nose only breathing.
Starting point is 01:02:48 Just walk as fast as you feel comfortable breathing through your nose. And all the sudden, you'll see you're going to have to pick up a whole bunch of accessory breathing mechanics and your diaphragms are going to work better. Your ribcage is going to expand more, but as soon as your mouth breathes, you tend to breathe much more shallowly. And that leads you to a decrease in sort of ventilation problems. And I would just add that, you know, we do not have time, like most people to add a full hour of a breathing practice into most of our days, and must we've gone to a yoga class
Starting point is 01:03:17 or done something formal. But we prioritize it. And so the way that we incorporate it into our lives is we do a lot of nose only breathing practice while we're warming up for lives is we do a lot of nos-only breathing practice while we're warming up for whatever workout we're gonna do. We try to stack breathing practices on top of what we're already doing in the form of getting steps and walking every day.
Starting point is 01:03:34 And then we also incorporate breathing into all of the mobility work we do. And so we figure from a compounding interest standpoint, if we practice our nos-only breathing while we're warming up, as we exercise and done some breathing practices as we're walking, we've really touched that corner. And one of the most important corners, we think a lot in any given day. I've held you past our time here.
Starting point is 01:03:54 So let me just say this, Juliette and Kelly Starrette, tons of practical advice here and tons of, and I don't mean this in the pejorative at all, the life that you can do, and really all of that will scale up to some big change it sounds like. So that's super useful and exciting. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. Thank you to Kelly and Juliette Starrett. Thank you as well to you for listening.
Starting point is 01:04:22 We appreciate it. We couldn't and wouldn't do it without you. And thanks most of all to everybody who worked so hard on this show. 10% half here is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin, Davey Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. DJ Kashmir is our senior producer. He did a ton of work on this series. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultravalent Audio and Nick Thorburn, of one of my favorite Indy Rock bands, Islands, Rotar Theme.
Starting point is 01:04:50 We'll see you all on Wednesday for a freshie, a new episode we're gonna stay with the exercise theme. We're gonna talk to the Buddhist teacher, Kara Lai, who used to run Marathons barefoot, and then for a bunch of reasons, lost the ability to exercise the way she was used to, and that's really changed her attitude about fitness in ways that I found to be extremely helpful personally. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
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