The Rich Roll Podcast - Play Is The Miracle Drug: Dr. Kelly Starrett On Movement, Recovery, & The Wellness Trap

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Dr. Kelly Starrett is a physical therapist, New York Times bestselling author, and co-founder of The Ready State. This conversation explores human performance and a wellness culture that's become a kind of secularized religion, fixated on optimization while the fundamentals get ignored. We discuss the carbohydrate revolution, why the brain chooses safety over performance, the Enhanced Games, the power of play, and much more. Before the pod, Kelly put me through the paces with a Frisbee, a tennis ball, and a rope – and it reframed how I think about starting over. Kelly is a grounded source of trust and a force for good. Enjoy! Show notes + MOREWatch on YouTubeNewsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% off your first month of DS-01®👉🏼https://www.seed.com/RichRollWHOOP: Join now and get one month free👉🏼https://www.join.whoop.com/RollRivian: Electric vehicles that keep the world adventurous forever👉🏼https://www.rivian.comFreaks of Nature: Save 20% with code RICHROLL👉🏼https://www.freaksofnature.comGo Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF👉🏼https://www.gobrewing.com  Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors  Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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He's worked with professional athletes, Olympians, elite military personnel. corporations as well. He teaches people how to move better for sake of sport and for everyday living. What are the principles that are actionable and applicable to the average everyday athlete? People are treating their training like a Super Bowl weekend every weekend. PR, PR, PR, PR, PR, and if there is no offseason or downtime and you're on this belief that you have to make constant progression, that is a misunderstanding of how this works. If it's going to be a sustainable experience, we better go ahead and have fun.

that's how I want this to leave us. I wanted to leave us so that we go out into the world and we're better people. The last time I saw you was I think it was probably eight months ago. We were both at a wellness conference out of town. I was in the early days of recovering from the surgery. I don't think I was still wearing a brace,

but I was probably like 50 pounds heavier than I was. You were amongst it. You were in it. probably in a semi-deflated state, realizing how much patience this was going to require and how long this road was going to be. Here we were at this event in which a lot of, quote-unquote,

like wellness influencers were speaking. And you and I are both kind of OGs in this world, whether it's fitness or wellness, where we've seen a lot of changes. You know, there's been a lot of... Is that a euphemism, changes? You know, one thing about this conference is it was undeniable, like, how huge wellness is. Like, it was just like a giant convention where people had spent a lot of money and, you know, a lot of well-known people were speaking.

But there was also a, like a convention hall filled with vendors of every imaginable product. And, you know, I was just reflecting on kind of the current state of wellness, what it was like when you and I were kind of both coming up in this world, how much it's changed. and how in certain ways it's really become deranged. That's a kind of work. In the ways in which it's impacting and influencing the average well-intentioned person out in the world who's just trying to make good choices for themselves and their families. We walked around and ran into a woman that we knew and she was like, hey, can I ask your opinion? Should I buy this $1,000 vibration plate? And I was like, well, tell me what you're doing currently.

And I was like, no. And then we walked over here and she's like, do I need this? And I was like, no. And she walked over here. And you need a tennis ball and a rope and a frisbee. You need a friend. You need some hopscotch. You need some like, you need to play tag.

We have these belts that we use. They're flag football belts. And the fastest way I know to get people fired up is to try to play, capture the flag. And you and I, the five of us, six of us, started doing this with no, tech very instantly would be activated, fun, play, moving weird crazy places. What's that Amazon flag football belt cost? So I think what we saw there was that we had confused, like, which core pillar is this thing improving? Is it nutrition? Is it really making a difference in my nutrition? Is it making a difference in my sleep? Is it many difference in my pain?

I think what we see is that we can purchase a thing and then that will take care of the thing. Right. It's a way of offloading responsibility on some level. I spent a lot of money on this thing. It's going to take care of it for me. In the same way, maybe I go to my doctor and they say take this medication. As opposed to looking inward and saying, well, what is causing this? What's the root cause? The solution generally isn't something that necessarily costs money. But it might require work and a little... And some investigation. Yeah, like. Yeah. And, you know, let's let's be generous that, you know, people have always been looking for ways to sell things to people. We, I sell a mobility app where you can come in and learn how to take care of your body. Okay.

Everyone's a little bit guilty of some of this. But I think what we're starting to see there is the maturation of this marketplace that's that really, misses the idea of what it is, what's important. Like, do you cook food? Do you eat dinner with your friends? Stun Stevenson wrote a really good book about creating kitchen culture for his family. And if you want to transform your family, sit down, no tech, everyone contributes in the kitchen and you eat food together and then do the dishes together. That will 180, any biohack you possibly do. and I think to feature

not a bug all of that stuff and it's our job to help people sort of see through theirs see through and see what's essential and let's be generous about all that stuff let's say that some of those things could be totemic

and they're like I did this thing and it changed started to get me to think differently about my sleep and because I got interested in my sleep I started thinking about drinking more water and then I started thinking about walking so it can be that Way leads to way leads to way, but that's a little bit like trickle-down economics,

and I'm a little bit skeptical, you know? Yeah. What I see is that when you used it, it was novel and it went into your closet. And it didn't change anything that we're talking about here. On the one hand, it's fantastic that people are thinking about their own well-being in a way that, you know, generations prior didn't. And that's good. Anything that gets people moving or making better food choices, et cetera.

is a net positive. I just think that the focus is so firmly placed on the marginalia, like these hacks or these devices or these things, that there's nothing wrong with them, and they have their, you know, some are more evidence-based than others, but, you know, probably do some good for you in some certain way, but it's one tree in a massive forest.

It's like losing the forest for the trees, overlooking, like, the things that we know, the major pillars that are driving us towards being happier and healthier because they're sexy. I don't think that you can talk about this without talking about the epidemic of loneliness and this crisis of meaning that I think is a kind of a cultural phenomenon right now. People are looking for more meaning in their lives. And wellness in some respects, to my mind, is now showing up almost as secularized religion. Like it is a identity-bearing, case on into the ground that people can associate with where they're going to find like-minded

people. And so in the absence of, you know, any other kind of like faith institutions as those things declined, more and more people are gravitating towards this as a kind of religion and as a way of defining themselves, like creating an identity around it. And within this world, we have a whole spectrum of influential people from very solid. to just patent grifterism within which there is an incentive structure for people to behave badly for the cause of, you know, selling some product. And so we see a lot of confusing messaging around everything they, you know, like, we've all seen the reels where like everything they told you was a lie and here's the secret they don't

want you to know about because of big farmer or whatever and you should get this. and then the next reel says the exact opposite. And it just creates a lot of paralysis and confusion. And it's obfuscating the message that someone like you was trying to put out, which is very grounded and principle-based around what we know deep down in our DNA. We don't even need you to tell us. Like, you need to move your body. You need to experience joy.

You need to make your life about something bigger than you. And I think there's something very navel-gazing. and kind of narcissistic about wellness because it's so focused upon the self. Like this optimization culture is really like an egoic pursuit that I think is fundamentally unhealthy, if not checked.

Yes. One of the ways that helps me filter this out, because I'm a consumer on the internet too. And I love all this stuff and I'm in it, you know, and I probably, you know, Like, I'm not only am I a participant, I'm a purveyor. You know, and so like, what is my responsibility in this?

I am part of the problem. I recognize that. One of the ways that I try to make sense of it is if I drop a performance lens, how does this hold up? Does this get me to the Olympics? Does this, you know, at high speeds, high loads, does this matter? And that could be high psychological loads and demands. And that really gets me through like, okay, this is sort of entertainment. fitness and wellness is entertainment.

It's the bourgeoisie dying of their en-wee, and this is another cake party. That's what this is. Like, I have some money, and I want to, it feels good, and I'm a dilettante and sort of, you know, a tourist, like, touristing is super fun, and didn't meaningfully change anything. But as soon as I dropped this performance filter,

you know, did you go faster? Did it improve your wattage and your recovery? Did, like, that's a really easy way for me to see. And the other thing, I can look around and I'm like, well, who's using this thing? I mean, I think that's really, it's interesting. A lot of that, we haven't, and it's getting complicated with GLP-1s, which I'm a huge fan of, but it's always been about aesthetics and in service of being skinny and having this ideal.

So there is very much an egoic narcissist thing underneath this. And look, I think it's reasonable not want to be gross for your wife. Like, that's my, again, my goal. and have a body that I have feel proud of and is capable. I think that's a really reasonable goal for people. But if it's only about being skinny and restriction and again, this, my brain doesn't think I'm safe and I have to do these things in order for me to have this. It's, we know what's going to happen.

We've run this experiment. How many generations are we going to run this experiment on? We've been selling fat shakers to women about, you know, like the German, you know, belt drive from, you know, we've been, we've been talking about these things for as long as there've been humans. So I think it is, it is a feature of being human. When I, again, try to understand this, I'm like, well, is it, does it fit in? And if, could this get me to the Olympics? Do I bring, how does this scale? Let me ask you this. If you're, anyone is doing these things, a simple way of understanding is this value, I'm worth my time was, would you let your kids do it? You know what I mean? And you're

like, oh, your kids aren't getting infusions and ozone treatments and like, why not? Because it's 17. It's dangerous or it's, you know what I mean? But you'll take, I just saw the Guardian, this is a really good example, the Guardian just did a test of some peptides that had they gotten from a reputable site. I'm just going to put, you know, and they had to test it and it contained no peptides. Wow. But it contains lead. And but because the solution is, is this is easier than I'm more willing to put that aside. And again, if we just look at the dichotomy between, hey, I'll take this untested peptide that doesn't have any rigorous trials,

but I won't take this vaccine. Like, there's a real sort of divergence of logic there. Yeah. And I want... You have to do some real mental gymnastics to justify that, you know, that conflict. And without, you know, I know I just hear the rake's going to hit me in the face here, but, you know, again, the performance piece really helps me, you know, hey, I discovered that I'm vitamin D deficient, right? So just saying metaphorically, right? We had a woman who we knew was a strength coach in New York. She got pushed into a railing. She's a woman of color, broke her ribs. And she was like, I couldn't believe it. And I was like, oh, you found out your vitamin D deficient. She's like, how did you know? I'm like, you're a strength coach in New York. She's like, how did you know? I'm like, you're a woman. a woman of color, you work out in a gym and you live in New York. And I was like, you're never in the sun, ever in the sun.

When our second daughter was born, Caroline, she was born a preemie. She was born six weeks early. And we spent three weeks in the NICU with Carolyn. This is our Division I Water Bowl player. And we had a placenta mama problem. And when they sent us out, and I think this says it all, they were like, okay, you got to give your kid these vitamins. We're getting out of the NICU.

And I was like, I have to give my kid vitamins. And they're like, yeah, she has to take these vitamins. And I was like, look me in the eye and tell me that this mother's milk is incomplete nutrition for my child. Go ahead. Go ahead. I'm waiting for it. And I just crossed my arms.

And they were like, well, and I was like, what's the problem? And they were like, the problem is that the white women in San Francisco don't go in the sun. There's no vitamin D in their bodies. The child doesn't get any vitamin D. And I was like, okay. So what you're saying is, here's a solution to a behavior problem. What I need to do is make sure that my. kid gets a little bit of sun exposure every day and they're like, yes. And I was like, great.

And I think that is sort of what we're doing. This wellness thing is surrogacy for the real work. It's hard work to have relationships and to schedule dinners and to go on adventures. It's hard work to be a human engaging in a human society. But as long as we can be on my phone, not doing those things, then I'm looking for this exogenous solution. And we'll continue to do that until we wrap our heads around. What does it mean to be a person in a community? The other interesting thing that I think a lot about is using that conference as an example. And it's not to denigrate the conference.

Like, I had a great time. There's a lot of cool people there. But when you're in that environment where there's lots of doodads and gadgets and here's the latest biohack, et cetera, and all of these things are being kind of positioned and sold as this is what's missing in your life. And if you want to be a peak performer, you need this. Performing what again, exactly? So as somebody who has competed in sport at a high level and has a long history of being in athletics

and yourself being somebody who has worked with so many athletes in so many different sports at the highest level, like do any of the Olympic athletes that you know do any of those things? No. Not at all. This doesn't exist. This is not how you do it.

No Olympic athlete is doing any. I mean, maybe they're dipping their toe here and there into certain things, but it's not like a major aspect of how they're training and recovering on a day-in-day-out basis. It can't be. There's no room. And these are the highest performers in the world. And so the conversation around high performance has, you know, the elephant in the room is the fact that the highest performers in the world actually aren't doing any of those things. And your high performance is what?

Looking good naked in the mirror on a Tuesday for Instagram? You know, your high performance is having less brain fog because you drank one less bottle of wine. You know, I mean, like, I agree with you 100%. And I think that's what is suspicious. You know, when you are in these places, then you see that, you're like, where is this disconnect? That's why I say that filter of performance,

real performance, athletic performance, mental performance, you start to see. Let me give you an example. and I hope I don't get in trouble with this. Delta Force spends a lot of time thinking about sleep. And the Army is starting to think differently about sleep. Maybe we should do training differently. If we keep our young captains awake for 36 hours,

they make bad decisions. So they're changing the core DNA of some training exercises because they were having too many injuries and all these things. One of the things that, one of this tier military groups do, they're always looking for,

how do we improve performance? Well, you know what made the biggest, the only thing that changed, changed heart rate variability and recovery. One of the squadrons went dry. They didn't drink for a month. They just didn't drink for a month. Everyone slept better. Everyone performed better. They won the monthly Olympics. Their heart rate variability changed. What did we pull out? We just pulled out this coping strategy, this elite. They didn't change. They didn't add some tech thing downregulate, vasal, vagal, like none of that. It wasn't injections of super serum. It was maybe when we're

stressed we shouldn't drink. And when we come back to these fundamentals, you and I are the same person. We were 10,000 years ago. I'm fatter. Your femurs longer. It's the same. So there hasn't really been, and you're telling me in 10,000 years, we haven't really been obsessed with, I mean, the first sports science in the world is military science. The Prussians figured out that at this temperature, we can march these dudes with this load this far. And at this ten, temperature, we can march these dudes this low, this far. People have been obsessed with this forever. Go to Scotland, what are all those stones just laying around? People are just like, I bet I can lift that stone. Hapthor, right, the mountain did this famous thing where he walked this mast. And it's like a

3,000 pound mast, some insane mass on a ship. And he lifts it up and he walks four steps. And it is. Everyone loses their mind because the old Viking history of a thousand years ago is the guy, I walked three steps. So we have all of the technology, all of the drugs, all the recovery, and he gets one more step with the 3,000 pound mask. That's how long people have been savages. That's what I mean? I mean savage athlete performance machines.

Let's not pretend we're the first generation to give a shit about going fast. Come on. That's so, that's just not even true. So how is the average person meant to get their head around all of the messaging that's out there on social media, et cetera, around like, I just want to be healthier, I want to eat a little bit better, I want to feel good, I want to be robust. The other piece that's missing here is the fact that all of these things should make us more resilient and more robust. And it seems as if there's a little bit of the opposite going on. Like there was that whole kerfuffle when Stephen Bartlett

said, oh, I drank and then I couldn't like focus for three days and it ruined my, like, oh, if you're thrown off your wellness routine by a micrometer, then like your whole life caves in and you're, you can't get out of bed. Then you've never, ever been at the point of the spear. Like, the whole idea is to be robust and resilient so that when you are in a position, we're not in control of your environment in the way that you would like, you can like roll with the punches and be fine. I'll give you two examples. I love that position. Our friend Laird Hamilton, he's like, hey, if we go out for a long time and you bonk, you're a liability.

What do you mean? You have to eat every, like, you know, you're up, you watch one off, glucose, like, you can't just go out long when Jimmy Chin climbed and did Meru, right? This is, you've probably seen Meru. The first failed attempt, they're what, like 300 meters from the top, 30 feet from the, like they're turned around, it's a failure, right?

They're out of food. And you can watch this in a documentary, What you don't know, and he told me, is that they had a third of a cliff bar a day for four days. They had to down climb that whole thing, and they each got a third of a cliff bar. So what I'm going to say to you is you get a third of a cliff bar a day for the next three days. Go about your life. Let me know how it goes. If they don't get down, they die. So this is the reality.

They get to the bottom. All their food's buried. They have another 12-mile walk, something some ridiculous, right? And that says a lot about the capacities that, You know, it's not these micrometer, little micro, that's not, it's not reality. Laird also says that if the only food we have available to us is a hamburger and you can't eat it because your knuckles are going to swell up, your liability. Like, you can't go out and have amazing glass of wine or amazing beer or be a human being and partake.

And I'm not going to say that that's, you do whatever you want with the alcohol piece. The point is, you know, that if you're so fragile and you're off, you're not going to be able to take that. that show dog, that show pony and go race it, Hidalgo style across the desert, you're not going to last. I'm on a training camp in Greece with a team. There's no gels. There's no bar. Like, you know what I did? I went down to a local bodega thing and bought these one euro chocolate, crispy wafers bars, and they're one euro, and they had 30 grams of carbs in there, and they're super palatable. And we crushed the shit out of those week after, like day after day after day. Local, what's available. How do we solve this problem? These are elite athletes. Let's make sure it's fueling and not

worrying about it. And then we'll, you know, we'll solve it on the back end. So, you know, if we get so special and specialized and so precious that we can't go out into the world and make mistakes, when's the last time you bonged, like really balked? Well, it's been years because I haven't been able to like move my body adequately enough to get to the place where I could bong. But I bonged. Yeah, you've bonked and you're like, I don't want to do that again, but I'm just saying that like, as we talked earlier, when is the last time you risk something? Like, you know, I don't know what saying we need to some misogy that we're, you know, like, but we oftentimes are like, I have to do this. If you're going for a bike ride with your friends for an hour, you don't need a water bottle. You'll feel better

if you have some water, you know, if we're racing. And if you want to reduce the session cost, yeah, drink some water. But like, we, it doesn't have to be perfect. Stop it. Stop being so, dressing yourself up in the cloak and the mantle of professionalism when that's not the real world because you're not elite. This episode is brought to you by Woop, the wearable health and fitness coach that for five and a half uninterrupted years has delivered me tremendously valuable, highly personalized insights into how my habits impact my sleep, impact my recovery and stress levels so I can up-level those habits and make more informed decisions about the strain I impose upon myself. It keeps me on an optimal growth trajectory and sets me up to show up as my best self more consistently,

which is even more urgent for me these days as I rebuild my body in the aftermath of spinal fusion surgery. And one of the key lessons whoop has helped me learn is that pushing harder isn't the answer. It's knowing when not to. and humbling myself to hold back when my instinct is to hit it like I always used to when I was 23 or even 43, all of which is a long way of saying that whoop saves me from myself by decoding my body's reactions to my decisions. Now I adjust my training and my work output to ensure I don't exceed what my body can absorb. By knowing when a hard day is the right call and when the right call is rest. By doing that, I've actually accelerated my recovery because I'm not.

not breaking down and that's really priceless. So try it for yourself. Go to join.wup.com slash roll for one month free of whoop. The first time I saw an R2 in person, I got it immediately. This is the Rivian that a lot of people are going to be able to enjoy. Driving it with RJ, only confirmed that. All right. So first impressions in my first experience in the R2. Nice. All right. Now I'm getting the feel. Yeah. It feels really tight. It feels nice, right? Yeah.

Interestingly, like from a first impression point of view, when you see it from a distance, proportionally, it looks very similar to the R1. You know, like the way that it is designed, it looks kind of integral with the original. It's quite a bit smaller. And so when you look at them separately, sometimes people be like,

is that an R1 or an R2? And they have a lot of similarities. But I actually think R2 ended up with a better set of proportions. And it's that kind of thinking that just exists across everything to try to deliver an experience that still feels really Rivian-like, but at a fraction of the cost of R1. First impressions aside, there's a lot more to the R2 than what you see at first glance. To learn all about the R2, watch the rest of our conversation and book a demo drive at stories.ruvian.com slash rich roll. One of the things that's so compelling and unique about you is that you, is that you, worked with so many different types of athletes and sport teams like all kinds of athletes from

every imaginable discipline plus special forces people and first responders like in your career of having work with such a diversity of people like what are the what are the consistent or like parallel principles that you extract from all of them that are you know like actionable and applicable to the average everyday athlete. One of the most important ones is the ability to start again. I don't think people realize, like the internet leads us to believe, especially if you're watching the gym stuff, the fitness thing, is that you just make infinite progress.

PR, PR, PR, PR, PR, PR, PR. I mean, you're a beginner, yeah, it's true. You take an untrained personing, put them on the bike, they squat more, right? One of the most important principles that comes out of this is the ability to start again. The consistency is really amazing. We think that sometimes people should just continue to see linear progression, which is just not the way it works. For example, in the weight room, like, if I miss this workout, X will happen.

You know, I'm like, really? Like, you didn't do pull-ups for a week and when a vacation, you thought you lost your gains. Like, let me introduce you to what actually happens in sport. We traveled to a different country. We got to compete. We had multiple games. No one was in the gym. So the next time we went back to the gym, we started over again.

And when we start to see that, it can't just be about naked, raw progression and strength. Like, athletes started over and over and over again. You didn't just continue to build off of a season at Stanford. You had an off season. And then you hopefully took some time off and then rebuilt your body. And initially in that season, you were slow. You couldn't handle the volume. You started again and again.

So there is natural periodizations. that happens for professional athletes, where they have an off-season or a downtime, or they, and we see that in our pro, I mean, this is it. I mean, basically, you go to the Super Bowl and then you need to chill. But people are treating, they're training like a Super Bowl weekend every weekend.

And if there is no off-season or downtime, and you're on this belief that you have to make constant progression, and you can't start again, otherwise you've failed, that is a misunderstanding of how this works. We're just gonna come back in, and begin again and begin again. And as soon as you ever been injured, yeah, we're going to start again.

Ever had a hotspot and couldn't compete in a thing? Yes, and we're going to begin again. That is one of the biggest through lines. So we look at this concept of, you know, sort of like what's important and essential across all domains, this raw, naked consistency and ability to start again wherever I am. It gives us curiosity and it's not a failure. You know, I just was talking, I was at a friend's wedding, and I was talking to a two-time Olympic swimmer.

He's pretty good. He's a mutant. Six-six, Matt Target. And I was telling him about, he's an Australian, you can look him up. I was telling him about my, I'm a beginner now. And basically you pointed out something. I am the worst, fattest, skinniest, weakest, slowest person in every room I am. So I got to, I didn't say that.

You made it sound like I said that to you. I did not say that. You said, Kelly, you work with a lot. of diverse sports. Like I am the worst person in the room. So it's nice to be really curious. When you come in and you have nothing at stake, because I'm not in my domains, I really get to be curious. And like, what's that a little rare? And I talk to all the coaches and how, when are your off days? And, you know, how do you feel your women? And I'm always gathering, because someone has solved this problem for me. So Matt said, he's like, I was like, hey, I'm, I'm working

on these timed 100s. I want to do 10 timed 100s so that when we do a conditioning piece, like our test set, I want to. get in with some of our athletes and just be able to be like, I see you, I know what you're suffering. I'm going to do a time 50 to their 100. That's maybe I'll do a 25. Like, they're so fast. But I was like, no one told me about swimming with fins. Like, this is amazing. And he was like, bro, you cannot believe that every single time I got in the pool, I put fins on first. Because swimmers get in the water and they're like, I feel slow today. I feel sluggish. My body, right? It takes a second to kind of come to yourself. One of the reasons we love movement

preparation is game is to just remind yourself, who am I? How is it work? What's, what's feeling today? And he's like, I put fins on and I did my first few hundreds of fins because every time I put fins on, I'm fast. And my brain was like, look how fast we are. And then I took the fins off. And he's like, I'm going to have a great day because I'm fast versus getting in the pool and being like, whoa, I'm so slow. This is so hard. And here is this idea that he recognized that he couldn't say sustain these two-time Olympic swim marries and monster but he was going to have

down days and here was a coping strategy he had where instead of getting in his own head about wow it's hard to put out he put fins on felt fast and then the rest of it was right that's so interesting just a psychological reframe yeah it's very different from

waking up like the average person example of that is like waking up and then looking at your phone that is tethered to you're wearable that's telling you like you're not awesome. You're not awesome. And then you have to go do whatever you have to do that day anyway, you know, despite that, which is starting your day off with that kind of messaging versus like how do I start my day off

with something that feels good that gets me in a positive frame of mind. I think as sport has become more sophisticated, training for sport has become more sophisticated. The thing that continues a lag is the psychology. we don't have the language, we don't have the tools. I'm talking about NARPs, non-athletic, regular people. Like, I'm just a wreck athlete. Everyone is like non-athletic.

Regular person. That's a collegiate term that there's kids who do college sports, and then everyone else, they may be the best athlete in the world, but they're not the only college sport, they're a NARP. And it's not a denigration term,

but just, you know, you don't have to do all this silliness. You're probably what we would call a SARP, a super athletic now, regular person. Let's say if we took the average NARP and like me, I just, I want to be less gross for my wife. That's one of my physical goals. I don't want my wife to leave me.

I want to be less gross. I know I'm gross. I think you're doing all right. Less gross is the game. So I'm interested in training and I love training and I love to exercise and play. And what's my self-talk? When it gets hard, what do I say? So even the mental framework of how do I approach this hard thing that I'm going to do?

And then how do I actually approach that and say, okay, What's my framework for having this difficult conversation with my wife or my child or addressing something at work or grief? We're not sort of consummating the, you know, the experience. And we're certainly not empowering people to have a template for even how to frame some of these, the mental piece. We just were like, let me just throw as much at the wall and I hope it sticks. And I hope I become mentally tough.

And I just, David Goggins the crap out of this and, you know, weakness. Strength is never a weakness. And like, that just doesn't work. work for me. I was much more need to understand and be party to the process. But the self-talk is a great example of Matt swimming, figuring out a mechanical self-talk that he got in the water. He's like, look how fast I am. And already he was going to have a better workout than me because I got in the water and was like, oh my God, I suck today. Right. And we need formal training in this. And there are plenty of great places and resources for this, but it's the least sexy, and it's the one that

we feel like is the least hackney. Yeah, we did a workout earlier today. For people that are watching on YouTube, you can see this is my home gym behind me right now. Kelly was kind enough to arrive very early this morning and put me through a few paces. We're going to make a video of that that we're going to be sharing. But you gave me that gift because you kind of contextualize this as like you're wiping the slate clean like you're recovering from this back surgery you're reassembling yourself and so every time you do something it's a PR you're like you just PR'd you just PR'd like you had five PRs then reframe instead of like oh my God I can barely do this or whatever you're like no that you just you just set a new PR because we're starting from a new

place we've wiped the slate clean it's tabla rasa you've rebooted the operating system everything that came before that burned down in the library of Alexandria a long time ago or whatever, and like we're, we're thinking about this as a fresh start. And that just little, like, reframe, that little mental tweak made it a lot more fun. Do you imagine if we have that same phrase towards, if we took that and applied it to the curiosity, the joy,

I mean, that's really what we're supposed to do. Like, and there are people in your life who are like that. You're like, they're always stoked. One of the common threads for Juliet and I and all the friends, the most successful people and the people we want to be around are the most stoked. And they're like curious and they're fired up. And it's not Pollyanna, but they're just like, oh, I can't what to see.

You know, they're just so curious about the process. And if we could use training as a way of practicing that, then this all becomes physical practice. And theoretically, no one's going to look at your Strava someday. and no one's going to be like, well, Tuesday. Yeah, after you pass at your funeral, everyone's like, well, I don't know, you didn't have a good day that day. Like, you think these things matter and that people care and nobody cares. And it is reasonable as a human, especially when you can track it and see it.

And one of the things that you haven't had a chance to do in a long time is experience beginner gains. And if you do something or pick up a new skill for the first time, you're like, whoa, put 100 pounds on my bench. I'm like, well, how long have been benching? two days, right? You can make massive progress with skills or physiology when you're beginning, but going from 9 to 10, 9.9 to 10,

like, how long will that take you to shave a second off your best time? One of the things that happens progressively as you get older and you become more and more set in your ways is that you just want to do the things that you are good at, you know, like, oh, I'm good at this,

and I just want to get fit enough to be able to continue to do that thing and you lose a little bit of that curiosity and that willingness to learn a new thing and be bad at it and allow yourself that joyous experience of vulnerability. And when you showed up today, in my mind, I was thinking,

okay, Kelly's going to take me through a workout, I can't wait to learn. I thought, like, he's going to pick up these kettlebells and show me these compound movements. You know, Kelly's the mobility guy. He's the, you know, kind of strength and condition. guy, yes, but really it's about all of these more holistic, complex movements that are creating a stable infrastructure for adventure and performance, et cetera. And instead, what you did is you showed

up with a frisbee, a tennis ball, and an orange rope. And you had me, like, swinging a rope around in a way that was confusing my brain and, like, making me catch tennis balls. And I was like, what are we doing here? And I was bad at it. I have terrible eye hand coordination. My bowels. balance isn't great right now in this post-surgery, you know, kind of reparations period that I'm in. And even on my best day, I'm not strong in these areas, but it was fun. Like, it was goofy and, like, silly, and it reminded me, like,

this is supposed to be fun. It's not about, like, fronting with a puffed up chest and, you know, whatever ends up on Strava. It's about, like, falling in love with physical movement and doing certain things that are, yes, like setting you up for a stable, you know, a future of movement with longevity. But let's not forget like why we're really doing this, you know.

And that is something that is a mountain that has been difficult for me to climb because I hold these athletic pursuits so preciously with a certain hardness. And for me, training has always been equated with suffering, almost like self-punishment or like a tariff that I have. have to pay to feel worthy in the world.

Yeah. And my goal is to do it from a place of joy and kind of transcend that hardness that has always accompanied my relationship with endurance sports for sure and swimming. What you just said is so beautiful and so important and so difficult. And we have really suck the joy out of the gym. It's become this austere place where I'm. measure like Russian Drago doing his like you know and then you know Rockies in the woods throwing logs and playing around and venting and being creative and as allegory we need to

figure out a place where we still were doing preparation for your back like I needed to see how you were moving were you able to move quick were you able to breathe and rotate we did a lot of very complex things under the guise of play and as I get to work with other teams and other cultures, one of the things that we see is this has got to be a joyful, if it's going to be a sustainable experience, we better go and have fun. You know, I mentioned that, you know, I get to go and travel. I'm the performance director, performance lead for this water polo team in college. I travel with them, but I'm also in charge of their warmups. And our games, warmups are gnarly. We'll wrestle on an exhale breath hold. Like I have women. Like, before the national championship, we're locked up. We exhale. The girls are fighting and the laughing, the atrainment, the listening, we're dialed in together.

I created a, I really love the Haka. Every time I see a Haka, you know, it hits me someplace. The All Blacks. I wish that I had that. I will tell everyone that if you want to cry, there's a wedding video where in, in New Zealand, the men perform a Haka for the bride and groom. And every single time, it just makes me weep because of just this intensity and what's going on. Having a chance to work with the All Blacks, spend some time with them, you know, they would do the

Haka, and then they'd actually have to go in and chill out because they were too revved up and they would play terribly. So they would be like, ah, then okay, too much. Let's go. But I recognize that. I thought that was the point to get them into the line. Just two or else, like make mistakes. But I recognize that like our team needed that thing.

And we're not Maori. We're not traditional indigenous New Zealand people. And so we're not going to do a haka because that would be inappropriate. But I was like, what could we do? And we circle everyone up and we try to do it in a place where we own the place. So we've done our official warmup. And then we're on the pool deck. We're about to do our swim warm up.

And one of our seniors goes in the middle. and she yells the word hell, as loud as she can, and everyone just goes, yeah. And it's just back and forth. Hell, yeah, hell, yeah, yeah. And what we have is this moment where all of these women are locked in,

prepped, and the affirmation where you say, yeah, yeah, yeah, and you're looking at your friends in the eye, we're unbeatable. We might lose, but we are unbeatable. And the metaphor here, the story here, the moral is that's how I want,

this to leave us. I wanted to leave us so that we go out into the world and we're better people, that where we've gotten out our demons and we sweat hard and there's still time to do intervals. I'm not like if my training is difficult. If you do my programming, which I hope you'll jump into, you're going to be like, Kelly is a terrible person. He doesn't care for my well-being. And simultaneously, I want us to feel like we can go out. And we just have to remove some of this stigma, one or zero. I'm a failure. And that begins with a self-practice. Yeah.

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So here's what you're going to do. You're going to go to go to gobrewing.com slash richroll 50. and there, you're going to get 50% off your first subscription order to Go Brewing's Beer Club. Speaking of addressing yourself up in the cloak of professionalism, did you watch the enhanced games? So I have friends who were asked to be on the advisory board. I may have been approached about being part of that. Professionally, I couldn't touch it and wouldn't touch it. I had two friends who are Olympic lifters. One of them was an Olympian.

One of them was real good who went in and partook. And I loved it for them because they got to make a living Olympic lifting after their retirement. And what I would say is, did you watch the documentary about the cyclists who discovers the crazy doping thing in Russia? Yeah, Icarus. So I had him on the show. He's amazing. and that story is amazing. But when that movie came out,

I was working with a cyclist, a professional Tour de France cyclist. And I told him, I was like, hey, do you have you heard about this? And he's like, let me guess. He did all the drugs and he went slower. And I was like, yeah. And he's like, it's because it's never just that.

And he wasn't elite. And so sometimes we can tell our stories that I could have been great if this thing didn't happen to me. And that was because someone else had something. And the point, of this is drugs and performance sanctions drugs have always let the best athletes of the world work harder and recover fresher so they can work harder. They were never shortcuts, never have

been shortcuts. And now we're recognizing that there are places in methodologies and systems that doesn't even require us to do that. I think there's an opening when someone has a really bad injury, should we be able to avail ourselves of modern pharmaceuticals to repair this person, that's a different conversation. You know, like, you know, there was a famous football player who got popped for taking HGH, a quarterback, right? And because his neck was destroyed. And I'm like, wow, if he's the marquee of my team and he's on human growth hormone so that he

can repair this thing on his neck, I'm like, so that he can stop that and then go back and do job. Is there a morality? And already the NFL is entertainment anyway, right? Yeah. I mean, that is a serious gray area. I think it speaks to many things. I mean, first of all, let me just say that I agree with you that the enhanced games provided well-deserving athletes with the opportunity to actually be fairly compensated for their gifts. And I appreciate that. And I think that athletes who signed up to participate in it and were able to be remunerated in that way, like, good for them. You know what I mean? Like, they've been taken advantage of for way too long. There's been gigantic organizations that have leveraged athletes for their own gain.

Yes. And athletes are always at the bottom of the food chain. And this was an opportunity for them to actually make decent money. So that's fantastic. They did the wrong thing for the right reason. That's what I would say. So I guess I can also understand an athlete in the twilight of their career who's being thrown a lifeline to get up on a stage and do their thing in front of a lot of people and make that bargain for themselves. I think that's a personal decision. And I have no judgment on that. But I think the broader point that I want to make or explore with you has nothing to do with like good or bad or judgment. it's more a reflection of where our culture is at right now.

It's a very different relationship with what we would traditionally call PEDs because of things like peptides. And even to your point, human growth hormone, like somebody who just wants to repair their neck, like, is that a performance? Like, should they be barred for life because in the off season when they were injured, they needed something to like help them improve their recovery? That's a conversation that, you know, has valid points on both sides of it. But I think we're entering an era in which we're developing a different cultural relationship with these things. Because it normalize. It's normal. Yeah, like the enhanced games normalizes this use, which was the entire reason for doing it because this corporation that put it, it's a private entity.

It's unregulated. Like, they want to sell their enhancements. Like, that's the entire value. That was why they're doing this. But when you reflect upon the self-optimization culture and kind of obsession and fascination that we have right now, and then you look at these biochemical developments with peptides, where people-

And normal people are using these things. Unregulated, unmanaged, unsupported, like garage gym. Let me just work this out. Like, holy shit. But now it's sort of out in the open. You know, it's not the guy. in the locker room at Gold's Gym who's secretly handing the bodybuilder a bag when no one's looking, like it's out in the open. It's commerce on the internet and it's being broadcast and live streamed

through the enhanced games. And that is, you know, to again use the word trickle down, like how does that trickle down into the 40-year-old guy who is still remembering how he could throw a touchdown pass and wishes he could do it again? You know what I mean? And is that, it's a super-sliply. Is that a bad thing? Is it a good thing? How should we be thinking about these things? Let me go step further. How should the 14-year-old, aspiring athlete be thinking about his relationship to sport and his future as an athlete in the context of what that person is seeing online right now? Let me make two points.

One is when I met my wife, Juliet, we were at the World Championships for Whitewater Paddling, sponsored by Campbell's Cigarette, South Africa. Yeah, because Camelley used to sponsor all these like raid and like I think even like some of these adventure races and stuff like that which is so hilarious. So I obviously was so evolved that I was like,

I'm not going to take a free trip to Chile as a broke slalom athlete and a sport no one cares about and promote the cigarette brand. Like that didn't even occur to me. And I will say that we're on the same slope here, right? and there were stacks of cigarettes on the table every dinner and we would take them and then bribe our way

through South America with cigarettes. So on one level, you want to say that, you know, that athlete position is really untenable. I'm broke. How do I have health insurance? How do I, you know, the system hasn't set me up to retire. So that's a thing. The real question here, and I think what's interesting is,

well, let's apply that logic. So the enhanced games, everyone's over 18, everyone's consenting to, but if we take that to nicotine, we're seeing an epidemic of young people, young athletes, take buying zins, using zins, using these pouch nicotine, massive amounts of these huge energy drinks with huge amounts of. And what we're seeing is sort of the greenwashing of it, but it's called sport washing. And I think that's what the enhanced games. it sport-washed a lot of these sort of gray areas, untested, unregulated things. And I'm not saying that everything they did was, I know they were under care of physician

and testosterone is a great, safe supplement for the right person. However, you're right. When you have a generation of kids, what's our morality and what are our ethics towards this generation? What are we normalizing in terms of, again, you think that you're elite, but you're not elite because you just didn't do the thing. and we in the case of when we see influencers talking about the nootropics the effects of brain focus and then kids at college and again this is firsthand witnessing this isn't second we're seeing

the use of these zins among college athletes is astounding and where kids are packing multiple 15 milligrams which is like pack of cigarettes in your mouth and they do that multiple times today and highly addictive, but so-and-so influencer told me it was safe and good for my brain and I'm optimized. And so really we don't have this filter. Meanwhile, the gum disease, the heart problems of this huge amounts of nicotine, this is the same conversation. And one, it's worth having. Do I think we will learn anything from the, what do we learn from the? We were entertained.

We saw old gladiators. It was the Coliseum. It was the Coliseum. It was the Coliseum. The new Coliseum, it seems to be of two minds. Either the lackluster performances are a commentary on the fact that everybody at an elite level is on these things. And that's why the performances at the enhanced games were not so impressive. Or it's that they don't really work in the way that we thought they did.

But I believe these athletes needed them when they were at the peak of their game. These athletes were only on like a two and a half month protocol or something like that. So, you know, listen, you need to train on these things for a longer period of time, I think, to reap the benefits. I don't know, but... In Canada, I have heard firsthand from people's families that elderly people going to do a big adventure, the doctor would be like, let's put you on HCH for six weeks. And they would prescribe it. And this person was able to go be an adventurer. have less pain come out because the doctor prescribed a course of HGH for six weeks.

I'm like, that is the best use of a pet I've ever had. Grandma went hiking in the mountains. Like that's awesome. That is not the same thing of what we're talking about here. And when particularly first principles are displaced and the message is I don't have to do this work and I don't have to put in this time and I don't have to do all these things and I don't have to be genetically gifted, then it cheapens this experience. It definitely cheapens. And I'll tell you, it's real hard to use performance essential drugs these days. It's hard. The biological passport

is real good. And you'll see there are countries we won't name, but you can imagine that these countries go dark, they train up, then their athletes become mutants, and then they come back to the Olympics. And we see that happen for sure. So drugs in sport, if there's an incentive, Castro Semenya is a great example. She is the biological woman who had a high, she's, you know, high natural testosterone. The track and field was like, no, you can't run the 800, right? You can run a long distance, we can't run the 800. So I was like, this is crazy, you know, and I went and watched her run at the Prefontein.

And she was tiny. She was a tiny woman. I literally was like disappointed. I was like, oh, I thought I was going to see some hulked up person. She doesn't even have any of the top 800 meter time. in the world. Those are all done by East German women in the peak phase. So it is

not a level playing field. If you chose the wrong parents and have the wrong genetics and the wrong motivation and the wrong coaching and you get injured, like, it's not that we're never, it's never been a level playing field. If you're a swimmer and you have size 15 feet, that's probably going to

inure to your benefit. Right? There are some people and bodies that just are freakish. And simultaneously, I guess we have to ask the question, what is it we value as a culture? How do we protect those innocents so they can come through

and make good decisions for themselves? And there's Alan Lim, again, we're coming back to him. He has a great saying is you cannot cheat your biology. Full stop. You cannot cheat your biology. Your physiology cannot be cheated. You don't get something for nothing.

as somebody who's parented young athletes through this confusing world what is the message that you have for the parents out there who are trying to make good decisions for their kids who they know are seeing all kinds of strange stuff on social media there's so many fitness influencers out there and such a push around aesthetics and that doesn't even consider like this whole new world of enhancements and all this sort of stuff that is like filtering into the awareness of the mind that is not even fully formed. So how do you help your kids make good decisions when they're being impulsed and influenced in those ways on these addictive supercomputers that we all have? Someone can probably control some things in their household, not every household, and that's not leave. Do your kids eat breakfast? do you eat dinners together? Are you feeling with whole foods? Did your kids even eat a vegetable or a fruit today?

Chances are or not? You know, where's there caffeine consumption? Can you help say, hey, we go to bed at 11 because we wake up at 7. That means lights are off at 7. 11, we all agree. You start to set standards with this and you just can't ghost ride in and hope that it works out anymore. You have to be much more aware and intentional. because if you're not the voice and your family isn't the model,

the kids will solve that problem somewhere else. Why are kids needing three energy drinks? I just heard of an 11-year-old or 12-year-old drinking two or three monsters a day. He's a skater. You know, like, where do you go from there? That's kind of like skate culture too. Where do you go from there? So how are we going to keep in mind that probably the most important thing you can do

is say, I love you, I'm so proud of you. That was so fun. And I'm going to swear on. this podcast, you can bleat me out, shut the fuck up in the stands, and do not talk in the car on the way home, create a safe environment where you're like, it is so enjoyable. I want to ride home with my dad because we put on the music and we vibe and he doesn't ask me about it and we have such a good time and we make it this enjoyable process that's sort of agnostic to performance and we stop carrying our expectations of high level performance and eliteness on our children. We

fuel them, we hang out with them, we talk, we're not their coaches, we are there cheerleaders. And this is most important. This came from Carmen Bot, who is a specialist in Canada on return to play after ACLs. And she said, your job is chief reminder. Your kid is not an elite pro athlete. So I think that, so for example, with Caroline, I would make her breakfast every day. Why? Because it gives me enjoyment, but I know that she's going to leave the house with a fruit and vegetable. Maybe there's a probiotic food and a protein and I'm covered, right? One meal as I've controlled. And I discovered that sleep is so important and she went to a hard school and she's a badass that I would let her sleep to the very end. And guess what she didn't want to do first thing in the morning? Sit down and eat a big breakfast. Do you want to sit down and eat a big breakfast first of the morning? But she wanted to eat first period. So I would would make her breakfast to go, and we discovered that I had better adherence. She ate breakfast. She got the micronutrients.

She got in, right? And I got to help control that and shape that. And then we took it with her so she could do that. So that's the kind of thinking where I got to protect her sleep instead of waking up her half hour earlier and forcing her to eat some breakfast. She didn't want to eat that moment where we could sleep a little bit longer. She could take this meal with her. You know, I think one of them, you want to talk about a performance-intencing drug. This is everyone get ready.

there's this thing called Grooons. Have you seen this? The Grooons, the gummy bears, the green gummy bears? No. I'm not sponsored by grooms, but I want to be sponsored by Grooons. So Grooons is just a green powder gummy bear that is highly palatable. And just like all athletic greens, all greens, it's just a vitamin. Let's just treat it like a vitamin. But your kids don't get any fiber.

Your kids don't get any vitamin C. Your kids don't get any micronutrients and minerals. And this highly palatable gummyble gummy butter. green powder candy snack gummy is the adherence goes through the roof. You send your kids with one of those, at least it's not a food, but at least we're putting something into the system to water the plants. It's like putting miracle grow on the thing. You still need sunlight. But that, they just sold to Unilever for $1.2 billion. But of all the stuff I've seen in the last decade, that is the most cutting edge behavior-changing thing that's come out because I can make sure that my kid

eats something that is good for them in a packaged way that they can be highly reproducible for years and years and years. It's the 2026 version of the Flintstones multivitamin. Well, those kids are never going to be elite because they didn't eat the Flintstone vitamin. Maybe that's why we're elite. Why you are elite. So in the workout this morning, you walked me through all of these warm-up exercises that were joyful and about play. So I think a good way to kind of bring this conversation to a close is to leave the audience with some version of that that they can begin to practice and incorporate into their lives. We have ruined the Jib experience. There's some person in the

middle with their camera filming themselves. It's lonely. There's so many good examples of physical culture on the internet of people dancing of people playing with tennis balls of rhythmic drills if you took the first 15 minutes of your gym time and you need to get hot and sweaty and prepped and awake anyway and we could do breath work and we could do we could do eye training and tracking if you played spike ball right if you just engaged with having to move in a funny way played frisbee like we talked about you would see that that you would have a better workout, it would be fun, and you'd get to create a community around that.

There's so much cool stuff on the internet. I'm so inspired, I get so many good ideas. I will point at a friend named Rhett Larson, who is an incredible coach. He used to be at Exos, he's the German national volleyball team women's coach, and he has a thing called no zombies. And what he saw was that for years, kids would just zombie through the warm-ups,

and adult zombie, I have to touch my toes. And he was like, this is, isn't getting what we want. So he created an entire ecosystem of play, of games, where he got invested as a coach again. He wasn't phoning it in, and his athletes perform better. And I think you could go on the internet and be inspired by something you see and be like, I'm going to learn that. I'm going to play that. I'm going to throw a tennis ball against the wall and play butts up. Do you remember that game, right? That was just like you would throw a ball. And if you didn't catch it, you had to like go up against, this is not a politically correct game. And this is again in the 70s.

you would bend over and then whoever threw the ball got to peg you in the butt with the ball. But what it did was shorten the distance between you and making errors because you didn't want to get pegged and it incentivized you to catch the ball. That idea of play, of engagement, of, like, we have lost that section as adults

and we know that everyone learns better through play, like play is the miracle drug and let's put a little bit of play. What I'd say is if you're on a bike, I mean, do you remember these, little rides where you'd sprint to the town sign, you sprint to the town line sign, those are games within games. We play a game on the rowing machine. This is the worst game ever. Rowing is terrible. It's suffering. It's awful. And we see who can get closest to the 500 meter, who can get closest to

the thousand. And we play it like golf. Whoever's closest gets a point. So there's so many ways where you can start to gamify. Don't lose the narrative. But in that first 15 minutes, I think there's a lot of ways to explore, move. There's a gentleman named the Fitness Marshal, and he has a YouTube channel full of dances. He's a local kid here. I have used the Fitness Marshall to warm up my athletes more times than you can shake a stick at, because dancing's fun and moves you in funny ways, and you've got to load and rhythm, and four minutes or five minutes later, you're sweating and grinning. So let's do more of that. All right. Awesome. More dancing. Dance Marshall, fitness Marshall. The Fitness Marshall on YouTube? Yep. All right.

Have your mind blown. He has 14 million followers. Wow. Yeah, you're going to have your mind blown. Caleb is a genius. It's wild how there are people that can have that many people following them, and then you've never heard of them. And you're like, you know, sort of in the space. I am.

Kelly Starrett. Well, I don't know. Tens of followers. I love you, man. You're such a force for good. And I just appreciate you being such a grounded source of trust in a very, confusing world. You haven't lost your mind in this crazy insanity that we're all trying to survive right now. And you're my go-to guy on all things, fitness, movement, mobility,

stability, strength. And I do want to say publicly that you have been behind the scenes an unbelievable support system for me. Like when I came out of surgery, you were just on it, like, you need to do this and you sent me that electro-stem thing and here's how you use it. Like, you've just really taken care of me in a way that, like, you didn't have to do that, man. And it just speaks to your character and who you are as a person. Oh, thank you. And I just adore you and your wife and really appreciate you basically spending almost an entire day with me today.

So thank you. Thank you. This is all I think about it. It's so fun. You're really important to us and to the world. And so we need you back. So very selfishly, I was like the faster I can get rich back to being rich than I do. better, right? And I just want to say, Rich is dead, long live Rich. Thank you, brother. Thank you, man.