The School of Greatness - 101 How to Get the Maximum Performance Out of Your Body (When You Run, Eat, and Live) with Kelly Starrett

Episode Date: October 27, 2014

"It's a system designed to break you." - Kelly Starrett If you enjoyed the episode, find show notes and more at www.lewishowes.com/101.

This is episode number 101 with New York Times best-selling author Kelly Starrett. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro-athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. What is up, everyone?

Thanks so much for joining the School of Greatness podcast today. Very excited. We are on number 101. Just reached the 100th episode last week. Super pumped about what we were able to create together as a community for the first 100 episodes on this podcast. Again, thank you guys so much for the journey. Thank you for being here, for commenting, for sharing, for subscribing, all that good stuff. It means the world to me and I'm committed to making this even bigger and

better for the next 100 episodes. So make sure to stay tuned. Keep sharing this with your friends and feel free to email me with suggestions for who you'd like to have on. If you know someone specifically who's doing something huge in the world, epic individuals who are achieving greatness and you think they're worthy of being on the show, then send me an email over on my contact form at lewishouse.com. We'd love to hear who you think. And yeah, this is all to support you guys on your growth to greatness. So thank you so much for being here. This episode is with the one and only Kelly Starrett.

Now, if you don't know who Kelly is, he's a New York Times bestselling author of a book called Supple Leopard. And it's a pretty sweet book that came out a year ago, but he's got a new book out. And Kelly is an awesome human being. I've actually met him once, seen him a couple of times, but I've watched a lot of his videos. An awesome teacher. He's a coach, a physical therapist, author, speaker, and creator of the blog called mobilitywad.com. He also has revolutionized how athletes think about human movement and athletic performance. So for me as an athlete, I'm all about movement, performance, and using my body to run an optimal level at all times. Because if my body runs at a

high level, then my mind and my production can run at a high level for what I'm trying to produce and create. So I'm excited to bring Kelly on to talk about all these different areas about the body, about running, about performance, and about some of the best practices on what we can be doing with our body and what we can be eating and stretching and all those different things. Super pumped again today, guys, for the one and only Kelly Starrett. So let's go ahead and dive in with this episode. Jump right in.

This gives you a feeling of power. Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness podcast. I've got my man Kelly Starrett on. What's going on, Kelly? Hey, how are you, man? Doing well. And we were just talking before about how we first met, although I don't think it was like, it was literally like three seconds.

It was like, oh, hey, what's up? Shake your hand through Kyle Maynard. But the first time, and that was at a CrossFit Games somewhere up in some suite or something. But the first time I heard about you was through, I believe Tim Ferriss, like posted something four years ago or something about you. And I remember thinking, Oh, who is this guy? Interesting. You know, I was friends with Tim and I was like, if he's promoting you, then you've got to be someone worth worthwhile. And another story about how I heard about you also was I was working out with a buddy of mine. You'll appreciate

this. I was working out with a buddy of mine back in 2005 and 2006. And he was doing these workouts that were like really extreme workouts. And I was training to be a pro football player. I was playing arena football. And he said, hey, come train at my gym gym with me he was a buddy of mine that i played college football with i was a wide receiver he was a wide receiver and he was like training people after college so he was working me out getting me ready for the pros and funny story uh he's like yeah i'm gonna go do this thing there's like this competition i'm gonna go do like working out and he got like 19th place or something the first year he did it. And then he's like, yeah, I'm going to try to go back. It's like there's another one in a couple weeks I've been training pretty hard for,

and my goal is to get top five at this competition. And I was like, oh, okay, cool, whatever. And then I see him like a month afterwards, and I was like, oh, yeah, man, how did that competition go? He's like, oh, I actually won. And that competition was the CrossFit Games, and my buddy's name is Graham Holmberg. And I know you know Graham, right? Grahambo. A little known fact is that Graham and I have a secret pact to have an arranged marriage between his son and my daughter. Nice.

I'm not sure if that qualifies as we're friends or not. At least we're business allies. Yeah. Storm is the man. I love that little kid. That's awesome. And I know he's been up to San Francisco at least once or twice to come train with you. And he has amazing things to say about your training and your philosophy. So I've always been excited to connect with you. And now finally we have the time to do this.

And I'm very pumped. You just hit me on sort of two aspects. One is to use the Tim test, do you pass the Tim test? And I appreciate Tim is a collector and sort of organizer of best practice and efficiency. And it's definitely fun to get involved with what he's going on. And then you hit on the other side, which is, you know, one of the things that we specialize in and have the most fun in really is we sort of say, okay, we've got some of these people who are the best athletes in the world, but that's only compared to the world. That's not compared to themselves.

Graham, you know, one of the things that happens is that we're taking and inheriting athletes from, you know, who are products of the system and the system designed to break you. It's designed to get as much as we can out of you with as little input as we can give you. And then some other kid is coming down the pipe who's more magnificent than you are. And, and any, we ask every professional athlete we know, would you let your kids be professional athletes?

And in two seconds they're like, no way. This is terrible. This is like, this is like a life of squalor. And we're like, oh, and, um, you know, it's funny. It's the dream for every kid or for most like athletes as a kid, it's like, you want to be a pro athlete. That was my dream. And then now after, and I played arena football for a year and a half, I had went through many injuries in college. Uh, you know, Graham can, can tell you, I broke six ribs back to back seasons. You know, I broke my wrist, had to have surgery and I could barely bend my wrist back. Now, you know, doing a power cleans is nearly

impossible after a certain weight. And you can have another surgery so you can do thrusters, bro. It's totally good. Exactly. Yeah. Well, you know, this is, this is, I think is really the heart of, of the conversation that we're having now is saying, Hey, you know this is this is i think is really the heart of of the conversation that we're having now is saying hey you know is that the nature of sport that we're just going to chew you up or have we figured out enough now because you know football is a little bit different beast um such a you know the injury rate in the nfl is a hundred percent so we guarantee you're going to have contact with injuries in arena football if you're a wide receiver in the arena football like you're so legit because you're gonna you're

gonna catch it into the the walls you know the wall yeah you know it's the best so what really comes down to is you know aside from that are a lot of these issues preventable you know we we have so many athletes who aren't able to express athleticism later on they're like well you know i i have retired now because my knees are shot. I'm like, what do you mean your knees are shot? Like you're 24 and you've got another 70 years on these puppies, whether you like it or not. So I think where we are and what's interesting is twofold. One is, you know, we, we have to take the long view and that say that, look, you've got to try to come out unharmed.

And if we're not taking the best lessons of sport, because sport is really about sort of human self-actualization. It's sort of the highest expression of the human physical art. I mean that's why it's so captivating, right? It's competition. It's all these things. But if we don't take the lessons learned about how to eat and recover and adapt and have good positions and how to train, if we don't take those lessons and aren't able to spin them backwards and apply them to the rest of our lives, then sport is just

circus. And you might as well be, you know, one of the gladiators in the arena fighting until you die, or you're one of the Christians that, you know, they release the lions on. And, you know, and we have to move beyond circus to the concept of, one, if we start playing the long game, we will get more out of you as an athlete. You might be able to compete much, much longer. Because by the time you're in your 30s, like, let's take Drew Brees, for example, you know, and I happen't had good luck to work with Drew. And, you know, he is so hard to beat now because he's in his 30s and he's seen so much football and his chunking ability, you know, his ability to process information and make rapid decisions based on patterning is insane, right? So if we can give that guy another five

or six years, then he becomes this really difficult to beat. I mean, you just can't beat him. And so, I mean, take that and take that idea and transcribe it to any set of athletics, right? So on the one hand, and on the other hand is that, you know, if we injury proof, if we come up with a better set of systems that supports athletes during, because I really feel like it doesn't matter what sport you're at. You know, it's, this thing is a business and, you know, I don't, I don't follow any one sport per se. Like last night, somebody at football's on, I watched it for a half hour, you know, the giants are in the playoffs. You know, I don't, I don't obsessively watch, you know, all our local teams, but I'll watch any sport. But what ends up happening for me now, as you know,

having been behind the scenes and part of the, you know, the modern industrial sport complex is that, you know, it's a machine and it literally is like watching two businesses play. I'm like, this is like Coke versus Pepsi, you know? And when you, when you sort of the shiny, it doesn't, it doesn't denigrate or attenuate the experience of the fan or the extraordinary nature of the athletes themselves. But I think that you have to look at it with this eyes that this is a machine designed to produce a product and it is gamed against the athlete. It is gamed against the human being. And what we've, we've accepted for a long time that that was the, the, the deal we were willing to make to have a shot at being, you know, a pro to play this

sort of this game. Yeah. So now I think though, is that we can, you know, we can start making better decisions about, Hey, how do we manage concussions? What diet do you need to be on afterwards? You know, how are we going to get you a blood test to make sure that you haven't rung your anterior pituitary too many times and you're not making growth hormone. I mean, there's just some things that we can do now that keep you alive for that, so that your whole life isn't defined by these orthopedic injuries you had when you were 19. Man. Yeah. I'm, uh, I'm excited to dive in even more about this because, you know, I had to, I retired playing football because I was diving to catch a ball and I dove into the wall and broke

my wrist and, uh, was in a cast for a full arm cast for six months, bent at 90 degrees. I had a bone graft, which was just miserable. And they took a bone from my hip and put it on my wrist. And then for another, another year I was basically recovering with, you know, the atrophy from my arm and just trying to get the strength back and just trying to straighten my arm. It was painful to straighten it for another six months because it was bent at 90 degrees for six months. And, um, it's really still, you know, very minimal flexibility. I don't even know what percentage wise to go all the way back, but it doesn't go

as far back as I, as I would like it to. And I am a huge believer in physical therapy and recovery techniques. I've got, um, uh, Dr. Trish who works on me, you know, twice a week, just on my whole body because now I'm 31 and I'm, I play on the USA men's national team for a sport called Olympic sport called team handball. And I'm actually playing against Puerto Rico this week with the team. And so I can definitely understand the value of maintaining and being smarter about the efficiency of my body, but how does someone be efficient and be smart for the, you know, the 70 more years that we have, hopefully, while at the same time giving it your all on the field at every moment?

Well, the idea is that, look, you know, we look at sort of the orthopedic problem nature as sort of falling into two camps. One is there is sort of a catastrophe, a 300 pound lineman rolls into your knee, you get blind. So I mean, there's those things that you just can't control. Like, you know, a girl goes up and comes down on her friend's ankle at the net of the volleyball, right? There's some things that are difficult to control, but there's a whole lot of things that are absolutely preventable. And that preventable is shoulder impingement, torn labrum, working in inefficient positions, ACL tears that are non-contact related, herniated discs, scrum. I mean, if we look at your jumping mechanics, the guys at Sparta just in San Jose just came up with a really excellent force plate test where they're able to really quantify your jumping mechanics and then show you sort of where

you're dumping force through the low back, through the ankle, through the knee. And they've just come up with this really excellent model of seeing where you're not sort of being able to, you know, generate force and return force very efficiently in this force graph. And, you know, you don't need to have a force plate as long as you can understand what you're seeing when someone's jumping but so much of that now is okay so people are like yeah so what i wasn't as powerful but i'm still the best well that collapsed ankle is the mechanism for your plantar fascia problem and your bones burn your ankle you know the collapsed foot is i mean now i've destroyed your arch and the collapsed ankle also leads to achilles problems

because your achilles is not pulling straight up and down anymore, right? And if you collapse your ankle, then you're also, your knee comes in and there's that valgus knee, knee in movement where ACL unwinds. And now I've, that's my MCL, that's my ACL. I can't stabilize my back as effectively because my hip function is muted. And then all of a sudden go down the, now you're probably overextending during your jump a little bit. And now we have the mechanisms for stenosis and, and herniation and like, Whoa, check, check, check, check, check. And so, you know, and that's not me colliding into another human being, right? That's, you know, what we're seeing wholesale is that in the world of strength and conditioning, everyone is coming to an agreement about

the things that are the sort of archetypal movements that humans should be able to perform. So if you're with Pavel and Dan John, you're going to see that there's, you know, a squat and a hinge and a pistol and a lunge. All those are the basically things that the hip does, right? Yeah. You're going to see that the kettlebell carry, that front rack position, overhead. You're going to see the swing, which is an internal rotated position. And you're going to see something that looks like a press, a push press, or a push up, right at the bottom, where the elbow comes behind the back. And so what you've seen is, while Dan and Pavel have worked it out, if you go work with Ido Portal, you're going to see the same language of his hip movement, right?

Erwan Lekor, his hip movement. And then they're going to do movements that have been sort of gathered in to express the range of the shoulder. You know, if you study Pilates, then you're going to get very close to the same language, but not implement based, right? So it's your own form, but the language is the same. This is what the human being does. We need to touch these positions. If you understand yoga,

you're going to start to see that except for some of the pulling in those positions, there is pushing and unweighted iterations of putting you into those same shapes. They're the same shapes. And so now enter CrossFit, which don't understand, which is a movement practice. So when CrossFit says something like constantly varied, what they're saying really is, hey, are you touching all of the shapes and movements that your shoulders and hips do and the language of your spine, braced or globally flexed or globally extended? And then are you systematically challenging those things with some load, with some cardiorespiratory demand, right, with some speed? And so ultimately, at the end of the day, what you're going to find is that it doesn't matter what you're doing as long as you're touching these shapes and you're practicing having full range of motion and control through that full range of motion. And then challenging that by becoming stronger in those shapes and getting your heart rate up a little bit.

And pretty soon, what we're really arguing about is, well, do you prefer kettlebells or dumbbells? You know, do you want to press or do you want to, you know, dumbbell press? And so I think what we can really get down to is, well, how many times a week do you need to squat? Two times a week or three times a week? I don't know. That's between you and your coach on the sport. But what we can unequivocally say is, do you have full range of motion? Yes or no? And can you express control through this full range of motion? And what we've seen is that we have athletes who can generate freakish amounts of force,

but do not have full physiologic range of motion and control. And they're stiff. And that stiffness either wears out the joint or wears out a tissue or destroys one of the insertions or we end up defaulting to the sort of the hacked position which is the knee in internally rotated shoulder rounded back right and show positions that we know aren't elegant like intrinsically everyone knows what a good position is in a bad position but we haven't given that language to the, to the athlete. And we haven't started it early enough that everyone can identify if that's a good position or bad position. Yeah. You know, I really wish I would have had proper training as a

child. We didn't. Well, you did. And you did at the time. And I'll tell you what, we didn't know what we know now in the last 10 years, I mean, you know, read Power to the People by Pavel, and you're going to see there are some really good ideas in there, but ideas that don't necessarily scale or aren't as sophisticated as we have now. But, you know, people have been solving these sets of problems for as long as there have been people. But now we have the internet. Now we have coaches. Now you can actually have access. And I'll tell you, if we don't get it right in this generation, and there's a whole bunch of athletes who've already accumulated these bad movement patterns. Right. And I'm already seeing

them in my daughter and who's, you know, nine, not her, but her friends. And what really happened is slap her around if it was her, I might take a eye patch. A loving slap. That's right. A loving slap. But what's happening though is that we haven't empowered people to sort of know what this is. And this is what I call the third sort of estate. The first estate is your psychology and your mental function and your practice and all that, right, which is vital. And there's a lot of people spending a lot of time on, you know, deep learning and looking at how skill acquisition and what is that sort of mental practice. There's the physiologic state, which is sort of nutrition, lifestyle. You know, if you look, if you're a 31-year-old executive, you know, in your 30s and you don't sleep and you eat like shit and, you know, if you look, if you're a 31 year old executive, you know, in your 30s and you don't sleep and you eat like shit and, you know, and you're a stress ball, I don't need to run the numbers.

I can tell you exactly what you look like in half and I can tell you exactly what's going to happen when you're going to auger in because we've already done that experiment. So that's the second estate. But the third estate is this body. And it's not about exercising harder. That's the mistake. People think I just need to train harder. Just go out and run a marathon. No, no, no. Let's make this about technique. Let's make this about diagnostics that I'm constantly aware on my own self. My wife and I, we weight ourselves every morning for the last 15 years.

That's what we do. We get up in the morning. And it's not that I'm obsessed with my weight, right? And I don't have a negative body image thing. But like it lets me know, sort of gives me a template of like, oh, look at how much ice cream I ate last night. Or, hey, I only ate twice yesterday plus a snack because I got busy, right? And boom, if I'm not eating regularly, I just, I shed weight. I just kick out all the muscles. My performance sucks. So my point is we've got all of these

pieces around that, that we know we should be managing, but we're not literate when it comes to understanding what our body should do and how to perform the basic maintenance on that. And it's very simple. And when we start getting people into that practice, then we start taking a whole lot of the problems off the table. And now we can really start to see what's going on. And that's what's amazing. Yeah. And so what are some of these basics that we should be focusing on? Well, the basics are, do you have full range of motion? Yes or no? When you mean that, you mean in all range of motion, yes or no? When you mean that, you mean in all areas of your body or the hips?

Yes, just because people are willing to pay big sacrifices. Look, I play football. I don't even put my arms over my head until you land on your shoulder in this location, right? Until you're trying to out-jump that other receiver, right? And go for position. So I'm a baseball player. Tell you're trying to out jump that other receiver. Right. Right. And go for position, you know, and tell. So, you know, I'm a baseball player. I don't lift overhead until you start throwing a ball overhead every single time. Yeah.

So I think the bottom line is that we have established what is full physiologic range. And you should be able to hit that cold. You know, we named the book Becoming a Supple Leopard because, you know, the concept is that that leopard, and I was just in Africa and I saw this happen, that leopard can attack and defend at full physical capacity. It doesn't warm up. It doesn't activate its glutes. It doesn't like have a pre-protein wad shape. It's not stretching. No.

Doing dynamic stretching. That's right. You know, and you know what? If you look at kindergartners booking for the playground, they don't warm up either. Immediately full range over motion. My daughter, we were just at a friend's house yesterday and she's like, I'll race you home. My youngest daughter is like the most beautiful runner I've ever seen all time. In fact, she's in track, right? She's six and runs 400s. Wow. That's incredible. But she's running all out

barefoot on the concrete. And guess what? Doesn't complain about her feet. Her mechanics look exactly as she does when she's wearing shoes. You know what I mean? And so what, what happens to us that we become stiff and we really lose this normal capacity. You, when you warm up, you should just be warming yourself physiologically, warming the engine, getting the tires warm. You shouldn't be reclaiming range of motion. That's what the movement practice is. We should be practicing reclaiming function because flying in the airplane for six hours is going to destroy my hips. Because running a half marathon and training for a half marathon is going to make me look like a dysfunctional runner. Why? Because I don't squat. I don't sit, you know what I mean? Et cetera,

et cetera, right? Playing football, you're going to get stiff because you, the contact, the pressing. And so what ends up happening is we look at the gym as training time. I need to become fitter and stronger. And that has been our answer for like a hundred years, right? Get stronger, just get stronger. I mean, you've heard that, right? And just put some more weight on. Let's go. You move the weight. Let's make it heavier. And, you know, and guys like Pavel. We very rarely ever stretch.

Right. Of course not. You don't need to. I come pre-stretch, coach. Yeah. And Burst is saying, hey, I don't have full range of motion. I'm going to mobilize to get into that full range of motion. Because stretching doesn't work.

Right. You know, hey, my quads are stiff. I'm going to deal with that stiffness. By stretching. By stretching, which doesn't work. So that's why people don't do it. So what you're saying is you should never be stiff. You should not be stiff.

You should always be mobile and flexible without having to stretch. That's right. So which means that I need to have a movement practice and a mobility practice that helps me to re sort of set the system. Wow. It's like a completely different mindset. It is. So that you can spend all the time in the gym being in the gym. Or you can all spend all the time on the national handball team.

Right. One for handball. And if people don't know what handball is,'s probably the coolest sport it's so cool and it's so like middle european yes and so you have seen it most people think it's the handball in brooklyn but it's you know obviously a a very intense physical like rugby style game think about the capacities to do that and now you're only 31 and you know i'm 41 and you should see the athletes I hang out with who are 51, you know, and how long can we sort of, you know, have this high function instead of sort of just taking movement options off the table, which is sort of what we do.

You know, when I was, uh, I, um, I'm a little obsessed with running these days for the obvious reasons. But, uh, when I was at one of my little obsessed with running these days for the obvious reasons. But when I was at, one of my friends in high school was this brilliant runner, you know, and like he's that, he's that like, he was one of those freakish kids who just off the table could blast. And he just jumped in on the Big Sur Marathon at like age 17 and he led to mile 21. And no one knew who he was. He's just a 17 year old kid but he'd never run 20 miles in his life and then he imploded right but one of our friends uh dabs came over

to us while we're eating pancakes because that's what you do in high school you eat massive and i get puffy yeah and it was like he's like enjoy your running kid because when you hit 40 your knees are shot and then that you don't to run anymore. And we were like, whoa, bro, you're harsh and that's so harsh, bro. And literally, that was his mindset. Hey, I ran until I wore out my knees. I wore these clothes with my bones. And now I don't get to do that anymore. And that's the mindset that we have.

Oh, I don't lift weights anymore. No, I just aqua jog because it doesn't hurt my joints. Wow. So what you're saying is we should be able to have full range of motion of our joints until we're, you know, dead basically. If we do it, if we do it right. Why, you know, it's going to take you a little longer to warm up because you're, you know, your tissues are a little older, but you know, man, we have a whole generation of people growing up on fish oil and, and not eating grains. What's that going to look like? You know, we're sleeping eight hours a night.

You know what I mean? Like there's some things that we've done generationally different, but at what point do you stop healing? You don't. What ends up happening is we end up getting stiffer and stiffer and stiffer and stiffer. And it's, you know, this is the analogy that I've been using lately.

And it's from my friend, Gary Reinhold. He says, if you knew it was going to snow an inch an hour for the next 24 hours, you could go out every hour with a broom and sweep the snow off the deck. Take you five minutes. Or you can wait 24 hours until you have two feet of wet snow on your deck, and you're going to need a different tool than that broom. And the problem is we've been waiting for the snow to accumulate and for the deck to break before we start to realize we need to clean the deck. And when we change our mindset about that, this is what it means to be human, right? And we can make lifestyle changes. You can sit on the floor, you can stand in a workstation, you can drink more water, You can have a movement practice.

But now we're getting to the brass tacks of how much better can you be as a person? And this is really the interesting conversation because this is the conversation of scale. This is the conversation of where do we put this in? You know, at what level do we have this intervention? How do we change culture around PE and middle school? And, you know, this is if we don't scale it backwards, if we don't take a chance, then we're just part of the same Ponzi scheme that we've been doing forever. one to two sessions a week with my doctor who does a lot of this stuff that you're talking about and follows a lot of it. She's been doing this thing called the Prague Method. I think that's what it's called. I don't know if you've heard of this.

I haven't. I think it's called the Prague Method. It's some mobility type of philosophy in Prague. I think it's the Prague Method. I got to double check that. prog. I think it's a prog method. I got to double check that. But basically what it is, is they've developed these basic baby motor patterns or moving patterns. And so what my doctor does now is she puts me into these like one month old, three month old, six month old baby positions to allow me to get back to my natural state as a child, basically, and re, you know, restabilize those

motor mechanisms. Well, you know, what you're doing, you know, honestly is simplifying movement pattern down to, you know, freestyle movement. Show me your body weight control. Show me that you can, you know, we do a lot of things that look like bear crawl, you know, as part of our warmup quadruped movement, you know, and because there's a lot of things that look like bear crawl, you know, as part of our warmup, quadruped movement, you know, and because there's a lot of good range of motion and stabilization skills built in. So, you know, one of the things that we want people to do is spend a little bit more time dicking around, you know, and, you know, and I look, if you're, if you're lucky enough to be able to work with a master practitioner, that's what we want you to do.

We want you to have a long-term relationship with a provider, a chiro, an osteo, a physiologist, a physical therapist, and that you know them for the next 20 years. That we have something you can't solve or you've wrecked yourself. Go get some help. Yeah. I highly recommend that. Is on you. Right. And it looks like the tenements and the basics.

And so if you can see, understand all of a sudden, like why Greg Glassman was like, hey, look, you've got to have the basics of gymnastics down. Right. And people think, oh, that means ring dips, right? And we're like, not really. And, you know, can you do handstands? So Ido Portal is a great example of a guy who says, hey, look, we've really missed the

forest for the trees on this thing. You know, what do you mean you can't do a handstand yet? And what do you mean you don't know how to fall backwards or fall forward? These are the elements. And in that role, in that play play are those developmental milestones that many of us don't get. And, you know, I was just at the track with my daughter. She's six watching these middle, uh, the junior high kids play football and watching these kids get up and off the ground. It's terrible watching some of the kids, you know, and, and some of it is we have not taught

movement skill as a skill. You should not be able to graduate from the second grade until you can pick up your backpack with your back flat until you can jump on an appropriately high box with your feet together. So your knees don't collapse so that you can do a forward somersault. And all of a sudden you're seeing, so we, uh, my, my wife and I, you know, we work with a lot of military groups and as many professional sports as you can shake a stick at. And a lot of this comes down to, hey, what are the noxious stimuli that we can remove so that you don't have to overcome all this BS over and over again? And one of those is standing, you know, versus sitting.

And so what we've noticed is we are having athletes do a lot more standing, being at standing stations, minimize the required sitting that they're doing. And suddenly their hips aren't as tight. They have better ankle flexibility. They're clearing the lymphatics because their muscles contracting, right? All of those things. But we just were, again, we're saying, well, hey, it's great when we start this in college or in the military, but would it be better if we started it in middle school? And we just adopted our daughter's classroom because we have a really progressive school. And it's just a public school, right, in California.

But we went ahead and put in standing desks. It's the first standing classroom in California. Wow, that's incredible. And you know what everyone has said? They love it. Wow. So check this out. So the research is that, and this is a great research out of Texas A&M, that kids who stand burn an additional 25% more calories a day.

Wow. So it's a lot easier to burn an additional 25% more calories a day doing nothing than it is to pull 25% of calories out of Coke and all the things, like big, big food business. So what you've seen is we're trying to make a run around the food business, which is marketing to our kids and it's difficult to change eating patterns. We're not going to be able to support PE because we can barely support teachers. So we know it's easy to stand. Kids who have high body mass index, right, who are technically classified as obese, burn upwards of 35% more calories standing. So you've just taken a whack at childhood obesity and ADHD and TMJD and orthopedic dysfunction, right? And the kids don't get short, they don't get stiff, they don't start modeling. And this is the intervention level where we have got to teach

movement skills. And the problem is we're waiting around as parents and as friends and aunts and uncles for the high school or the middle school sport coach to teach it. But that coach has got to be playing with kids who already know how to move. And what's happening is that those coaches are really good at coaching their sports. We're a volunteer sport system. But if we don't prepare those kids, then I can guarantee unequivocally that we will see the same number of injuries,

but just in college or in high school or until I had, I ran my, we hear this all the time. I did team and training. I ran my first marathon. I injured my knee and I haven't run since. When was that ago? Two ran my, you know, we, we hear this all the time. I did team and training. I ran my first marathon. I injured my knee and I haven't run since when was that ago? Two years ago, you know? Wow. That was an expensive marathon. Yeah. Right, man. This is fascinating stuff. You know, I'm six, four, about two, uh, two 25. And, uh, my entire life I've always had like this lower back, you know, kind of curvature in the lower back. And and then I always wanted to

kind of be on the same level as everyone or, you know, not have them crank their heads up so high. So I kind of like slouch a little bit with my neck down and my shoulders down so I could be in a reasonable level with people. And I've really developed patterns that I've had to change over the years to really make sure that my shoulders are in, in the socket. You know, and I've had a Carl Polly is a good friend. He's been on the show a couple of times as well. And I know your, your buddies with him and he's, uh, you know, he's come on the show and talked about how to sit properly and how to stand properly. And there's, it's definitely like when I look at other people

and still myself, I get to readjust constantly to, you know, have just a proper standing technique. You know, it's like I've done so much bad things to my body. You know, so some of this is, you know, Carl, just everyone knows, is a coach at my gym and is one of my best friends. Right. And, you know, not I'm not trying to steal Carl's thunder, but, you know, we got I got Carl interested in that because we saw that people couldn't translate what they were doing in the gym to what they were doing in real life, which is what we've got to care about.

That's the point. It's not just training for the gym to look good naked. It's about it. It's all day long. It's developing skills. In Supple Leopard, we said, hey, look, your combat stance is your everyday stance. That's what Musashi wrote in the book of the five rings and when you there's you know 400 years ago this this japanese swordsman was like hey look

you can't hang out like you're not going to move you got to hang out exactly the way you do when you fight you've got to hang out exactly the way you do when you run you know and um you know i argue a lot with people about foot position when we squat. And, you know, because people are really like, you know, like turning feet out makes it easy to squat. I'm like, why should we make it easy to squat? Are we using squatting as fitness or are we using squatting as diagnostic tool? Because what's a recipe for disaster is if you walk like a duck and cut like a duck and jump and land like a duck, you're going to get injured. That's the mechanism for injury. a duck and jump and land like a duck, you're going to get injured. That's the mechanism for injury.

So there's my six-year-old daughter who is, you know, a running phenomenon, pulls, literally her heel hits her butt. She's like the fastest kid I've ever seen. And as she was hanging from this kind of tree branch at the beach the other day, like four feet off the ground, as she jumps, she lands with her feet straight, absorbs force, her knees don't come in. And at what point should I be telling her to start turning her feet out? No, no, no. We squat because that's what you did when you went and absorbed the force all the way down. It's just a squat. You know what I mean? There's so many of these mistakes that we're seeing because we haven't understood what is best physiology. We haven't understood what is best mechanics. Right.

We haven't understood that we need to care about it. And so suddenly when we do, you know, just on Twitter day, we put up, we're like, look, you want to be a good runner? Number one, stand with your feet straight all the time. Walk with your feet straight all the time and start to repattern yourself so that your ankles and feet work like ankles and feet. That's crazy. Yeah. You know, back in college football, it's like in the gym doing squats. It was all about ankles out. It was so bad. We didn't know.

We didn't know, man. You know, and it's interesting. The defensive lineman for the Saints, the line coach, you know, he pulled me aside and was like, Kelly, you've got to help me get these guys' feet straight. He's like, power runs in lines. Their feet are turned out. They get cut, they get beat. And when I get them, but they can't do it. And I was like, well, coach, do you think it matters that they're squatting their feet out in the, in the gym? And they were like, he was like, yes. I was like, great. That's a great place to start. Right. And so, and so I, you know,

I think that's where we start to go as we start to connecting the dots and we haven't had the capacity. This is not a failure of omission. You know, this is not we're doing something malicious. It's a fact that we haven't connected the dots early enough. And I'll tell you, as you can attest, if you think the problems will be solved at the next level because there are better resources, you're wrong. Pressures are higher. There are better resources. You're wrong. Pressures are higher. There are fewer resources. I literally have professional athletes who don't want their teams to know about their problems and don't believe the problems can be fixed. Come over to the house

and work quietly and secretly with us so that they can go back and play on Sunday. Wow. That's crazy. It's crazy because they see it for what it is. Hey, I can't have that go on my record. They can't know that both knee surgeries have failed. They can't know that because I'll lose my career. And so we're looking at this thing because that head coach is under a lot of stress to win. It's big money. It's a business. It's not about the person's health anymore. What is about their health, but it's like you've got to play to the end so you know what we want to do is you know like my my nine-year-old's obsessed with volleyball right now and it's all driven by her and i'm like

well you can play beach volleyball till you're dead you know you can play beach volleyball as a short girl you know and and you know what we're we're trying to get our kids to do is develop lifetime movement skills so that you you can go jump into and learn a new sport. You're going to pick up surfing. You're going to pick up skateboarding. And how do you, then the question is, and this is where Carl and I are in lockstep is what does it look like? What are the, the base skills, the base root language of mechanics and motor control of technique so that we can create an operating system that is infinitely malleable and infinitely adaptable. And that is at the same time a diagnostic tool.

And I think that's where we've been making great gains and we're going to see the tide change once and for all. But isn't it, I mean, do you feel like it's too late for athletes who are 25 already or up to just start changing everything they've done their whole life with their movements, their stretching, their working out, and start repositioning? Isn't that almost more dangerous than to just continue doing what they're doing? No, no, no.

And that's what really people don't understand is that anytime we work to optimize your mechanics, it's free money. It's free efficiency and free injury prevention. So what we practice is, you know, is it more dangerous for me to get you squatting and swinging a kettlebell and jumping land with your feet straight? No, because now I'm starting to relay down. It's going to take longer because you are already in the middle of your sport and you've

done something 100,000 times. But we're not talking about, you know, here's an example. I have no problem opening up the hips of my Cy Young Award winner pitchers. You know why? Because they instantaneously will affect that new change into the technique, which is good technique, but they physically can't express the good technique. And so it's not like we're stretching something out. We're only restoring normal motion. Does that make sense? Yeah, of course. It's not like, okay, I'm suddenly hypermobile. Where's my shoulder in space? If you don't have the range of motion, then you're going to work around it and still throw the ball 90 miles an hour. But if I restore the internal rotation of your hip, then all of a sudden my UFC fighters

are punching harder and it's not like they don't practice good technique. And here's the key. All best technique in the world is the expression of good physiology. But just to the sport, people figure it out because we're obsessed with being fast. We're obsessed with living weight. Can you imagine in Russia in the turn of the century, they're like, Dimitri, bring your knees in. And internally, oh, sorry, Dimitri, sorry, don't do that again. That was terrible. And what's happened is the evolution of humans, we have learned technique. But now we're figuring out, oh, you can't eat Popeyes and drink juice before you play.

Gosh, man. We used to just have so much pasta and pizza and like carve it up. Here's the challenge, man. I can't believe that I was able to perform at the level that I did because every game in high school and college, you know, I played basketball and baseball and football and track. I was always yawning in games. I would train so hard, right? I was like the hardest trainer, the hardest worker. And, and then in the middle of the games, I would just be like yawning or exhausted. I wouldn't be able to recover. And I was like, man, I just trained so hard. Why am I so tired? And it was just like a gluten pasta world for me, you know, and pop and it was a constant candy. And I just had no clue about proper nutrition because no one told me.

That's not that no one told you. They didn't know. No one knew. Kept that information from me, you know. And, you know, technically that's called postprandial glycosuria which means right after you've eaten your blood sugar spikes and you get sleepy right so tired man i don't know how i performed you know john wellborn who played in the nfl for about 10 years you know crossfit football brilliant brilliant thinker about strength conditioning and nutrition you know his mom used to ask him do you want two or three? And that was pancakes with every meal. So in order to feed her sons, you know, he's a huge guy, he's 300 pounds, you know, and like 8% body fat. He's that guy. And, um, you know, she'd be like two pancakes

or three hun. And then, you know, he ate three pancakes every meal. And now he's going back. It's like, mom, you were trying to kill me with pancakes. And I think that's the issue is that we didn't know and we didn't have what sort of best practice. And now it's starting to change. The key is there is a generation of strength and conditioning coaches now coming into the system who are all of this last decade, who understand that, hey, we have to pay attention to down regulation. It's not just about ramping you up, but it's also about- What's that mean? of this last decade who understand that hey we have to pay attention to down regulation it's not just about ramping you up but it's also about what's that mean down well can you you know everyone understands sort of the fight or flight response right that yeah like you're getting up

i'm having surge jack 3d before my wand my workout right which is all about getting up but one of the problems that we have is that for our soldiers who are on mission and sleep deprived or for our athletes who play in a huge game, you know, and have gotten up, up, up, is that they don't have any mechanism to get down, down, down. How do you turn off? How do you activate that parasympathetic recovery switch? So how do you do that? Well, exactly. We, you know, one of the things that we see all the time is people are measuring heart rate variability. They're measuring, you know,

through a mega wave, they're looking at, you know, the sort of sympathetic parasympathetic tone. And the problem is that people do not have ways of, you know, so they're there, for example, do you sleep with your phone in a room? Yes no yes every time that blue light goes on or it pings when you're going to bed last two hours your brain gets a massive serotonin boost and your pineal gland thinks that it's waking up time so you don't make serotonin you don't start to you know you don't make not only you don't you don't start to think about going to bed right wow so even if it's on vibrate, do not have your fucking phone in your room. And I use the F word. That's the first time because people don't realize that some of the, you know, all any light in your room is causing your brain

to freak out. And you can do some crazy things. Like we experimented, we got these amber colored glasses that you can just get on eBay for like Amazon for like three bucks. And it just filters out the blue light. And if you filter out the blue light, some people change the light bulbs in the room to be orange. But the idea is that you can start prepping your body for thinking, Hey, there's this natural time of the day where I'm supposed to unwind. That's for example, number two is, you know, you can make sure that you're sleeping in a cold dark quiet room for three no caffeine afternoon i know you can go to sleep after having a cup of coffee but you're gonna sleep like crap right number four is that we want people to start doing some

soft tissue work before they go to bed really so one of the reasons we save all of the soft tissue work for after we train is that we find that it has a huge parasympathetic response, which means that if you get a massage, how do you feel after your massage? Like you want to go snatch a hundred kilos or fight someone or do you want to take a nap? You want to take a nap. So we see that that is the same, same, uh, you know, issue. And if, if you do a little gut smashing, you lay on one of the balls we have and, and roll on your, literally roll on your, on your viscera,

your body starts to freak out and shut down. Like it's time to go to bed. Really? Yeah. What are these balls? Like a little med ball or like a little Bosu ball or you could, you could lay on a, you could go get a princess ball from like Walgreens,

any, any hardware store. Like, you know, one of those princess balls. Yeah. Just a little rubber bouncy ball thing, right? That's right.

And throw it in your gut. Try to do some diaphragmatic breathing in there, right? And there's some other things you can do like the 5-HTP, the phosphatidylserine. There are some nutraceuticals you can take to sort of augment and help the quality of your sleep. But without even doing any of that stuff, a cold shower before you go to bed can help reset your sympathetic nervous system. And there's some things that we know that allow us to be able to basically turn off.

But we see athletes brag all the time, say things like, after a big game, I got to stay up and play, I got to play video games all night. And I'm like, wow, that's terrible. And if you know, you had to jump on a bus and get back to two in the morning and then you're playing the next day, then that sleep is hugely important. A lot of the pro athletes we talk to, actually,

the only way they can turn off at night is they have to smoke marijuana. That's their only mechanism to downregulate because they're so messed up. So that's what we need people to start looking at is all the aspects of the performance. And it's not a big deal because my kids sleep in a dark room with no blue lights. You know, they have a pair of those glasses if they want to use them when they read. You know, there's just some things that we start to do that's become habit. Wow. And when we start applying those best practices across teams, across military,

then we start correcting a lot of the issues. And then we can talk about whether you should have ice cream or whether or not there should be gluten in your diet or not, right? Man, yeah, this is fascinating. I've had a couple of sleep experts on, Amir Rosich came on and did, told me his practices for sleeping and how we really need to be getting eight hours of sleep every day. And he's talking about sleep debt. He's like, you can never get it back. No, it's not debt. It's like sleep bankruptcy. Yeah, sleep bankruptcy. That's what I mean. Yeah, yeah. But you can't sleep more to recover what you didn't sleep, right? No. And we work with a company called

GeneSolve out of Stanford, which is a company that does some really rigorous actionable genetic testing. We're not testing whether or not you have the BRCA gene. We're testing whether or not you process omega-3s or whether or not you have a kind of collagen that reacts poorly to certain antibiotics, right? That's the kind of thing we test for. What kind of – are you a slow responder to aerobic exercise for example right and plus a really rigorous blood test and what dr lee says out of stanford is like look in with his executive people you know that they go through these peak periods of stress of of developing you know a new startup or a big you know acquisition

it takes 18 months to backpedal out of that stress state. Really? 18 months? Yeah. If you've been putting the hammer down for six months or a year, it can take upward 18 months to recover your physiology from that. No way. Everyone knows you need to sleep eight hours, but if you're honest about that, I bet people get eight hours of sleep one day a week. I'll tell you, I don't think, if you're training hard, I don't think eight hours is is enough i think it's closer to nine or ten hours it's true i mean i was sleeping you know i had my first practice today uh after a few months of not playing with the usa handball team

we were just down in uruguay a few months ago playing the pan-american championships and then i i just had a a long weekend business weekend went to bed at like 1 a.m got up took a flight for seven hours to atlanta from la with delays and everything then took an hour and a half bus ride to get to auburn alabama which is where we're training at and then i went right from the bus five minutes later into practice and i tell you what i felt like crap yesterday i was like making mistakes left and right i was i couldn't wrap it around the court. And I woke up this morning feeling like I need to sleep in for another four hours. That's right.

Well, A, you did. B, classic example of just being crushed mechanically. Because I know you were flying first class. And you had a whole sleep down pattern. And you stretched the whole time. And you were totally hydrated. And you had your little paleo meal box. There are some things we've seen,

and the idea is to try to remove as much craziness as you can. I have the pleasure of working with the kids at Arsenal, the physios there. One of the things they did that cost the club very little but had a huge impact was they had herods start catering meals to their soccer players and that meant like they just got steak and salad and you know a sweet potato for dinner delivered to their house and guess what players ate that instead of eating chips instead of heating you know drinking soda and they saw an immediate improvement right i was out working with the wwe recently so all that you know drinking soda and they saw an immediate improvement right i was out working with the wwe

recently so all that you know john cena all the entertainers right seth uh rollins but triple h has done the most amazing job of creating a training table for his athletes that is the single best training table i have ever seen in any sport. It is the best, highest quality food. It is the most progressive. And I'm like, these guys get it. They're starting to put their money into their athletes in a way that is very, very inexpensive. I've learned so much about the diet and the nutritional side of things over the last four years. I remember when I moved to New York City a few years ago uh and now i'm in la

i put on about 30 pounds and again after i kind of retired from football i was still eating crap and eating the desserts without training as much so i put in about 30 pounds everyone started calling me fluis for fat for fat lewis oh and my sister should be like oh hey what's up fluis and and that's when my ego started to be like, okay, I'm, you know, my, when I saw my underwear roll over itself because my gut was like so big, I was like, it's time to do something different and start actually researching on what I could do to be, you know, healthy again. What's amazing is that you just kept, you didn't change anything. Then here's the piece.

And this has happened to so many people. Well, I've always eaten like this, but changed. Well, my, my, my stress went through the roof. My sleep went through the roof, went down, you know, I stopped training at the level and nothing changed. You know, what should happen when you stop playing pro sports, nothing, you eat a little bit less, nothing changes. That's, that's the only difference, you know, and, and, um, you know, like you say, you know, now there, you know, if you go into the paleosphere, there's, it into the paleosphere, I appreciate guys like John Berardi of Precision Nutrition. He's like, look, once the macronutrients are met, my athletes are eating salads and getting what they need and they're eating lean proteins and high-quality fats.

It probably doesn't matter if they're having a little ice cream. I'm going to be perfectly honest. Really? It just doesn't matter. Yeah, he's like, it just doesn't matter. Really? That's a good sign for me. But the issue is you're not eating five bagels and half a pizza.

No. You're being really responsible. Is that ice cream every single night? No. Or is that ice cream – I think when you start looking at it that way, but that's after you've gorged yourself on salad. Right. You've, you've actually eaten, you know, if you look where I was year and a half ago, I probably put on a solid 15 pounds.

Really? How much do you weigh? How much do you weigh now? I'm two 31. What are you about six foot, six, one, six, one and a half. Yeah. And, um, you know, I just got my body fat tested. You know, I did one of those body fat dunk tank in the water. Yep. Yeah. And. And, you know, I just got my body fat tested. You know, I did one of those body fat dunk tank things. In the water, yep. Yeah. And, you know, it turns out that what made a big difference was, one, one of my good friends, Jesse Burdick, who's an amazing power lifter,

was like, hey, Kelly, you're just not eating enough. You just don't eat. You just get busy and you skip meals. And so subsequently, we ended up,, he, he just hammered me. And so just by eating regularly and then, um, just by also making sure that I got eight plus hours of sleep, that's the only thing I changed. And my body fat is 8% and, you know, check the boxes of feeling better, of having more energy in the day of not drinking, you know, three 20 ounce Americanos, the whole thing, you know? It's crazy.

You know, I watched this documentary, I think it was called happy or something or finding happiness or something like that. And they did these studies and research all over the world about the happiest people in the world. And one of the studies was in like this small island somewhere off of like Japan or something of a community of people with the most 100 plus year olds per capita in the world. And they were talking about like the key to happiness and living a long life. And they said like sleep nine hours a day and then take lots of naps. That's like the key to living over 100 years from what they said based on what these,

you know, elderly hundred, 10 year olds were doing. And they had so much energy, you know, and they were like, yeah, I sleep nine hours a day and I take naps. You know, so here's the key is that, you know, people hear that and they're like, yeah, it sounds so great. I'm totally going to sleep nine hours a day and take five naps until, until you have a child. Right, and you don't sleep at all. Right. And then remember, that guy who cut you off in the morning, he's not an ass. He's sleep deprived. Right.

And we look around. So my wife and I are both 41. We look around at all the other parents our age, and it looks like we've been dissolved by vampires. Like we're being capped as like sex slaves by vampires who are draining us at night. What that is, it's called having a kid and being a professional person. Here's the

skinny. Let's control what we can control. Let's go ahead. On days you don't train, you should only probably need between 50 and 100 grams of carbohydrate a day. That's it. Quit it. Mark Bell, our powerlifter friend, he calls it the war on carbs. He's like, so go to Starbucks, get an Americano,

and then take the bun off of the sausage sandwich. He's like, just make a better decision. Okay, so I can control some of that stuff. You don't need fruit. Rob Wolf was the first guy saying, hey, let's keep the fruit down to one piece or less a day. You know, our daughters don't eat massive amounts of fruit. We look at fruit as candy. Fruit is dessert. Our daughters are like, Hey, can I have an apple for dessert? I'm like, how about a half an apple? Really? Wow. Now this is interesting. You say this, I want to hear more about this because my whole life I've hated fruit and I only today still eat apples. They've got to be a specific type of apple and the perfect

banana not like too brown or too green it's got to be perfect and that's the only fruit i'll eat i don't eat any other fruit in the world period well you know people think i'm crazy they're like i can't believe you don't eat fruit i'm like i think i don't think people are realizing that you know one banana is enough carbohydrate that's a third of your carbohydrate for the day. Third. So you can eat two pounds of salad, you know, and, you know, we've quoted this forever in the CrossFit community, but like, you know, like two tablespoons of rice is equivalent of like two cups of broccoli. You know, you're gonna have two tablespoons of rice or you can eat this five pounds of broccoli you know choose it and what's the better choice well you know the broccoli but you know what we're doing is we need to fuel

exercise so on those days where you're not training lean proteins you know just make start making control you can control so if you can't sleep nine hours a day make sure the sleep you're getting is quality. No phones in the room. That's right. No phones in the room, no lights in the room. It's got to be cold that, you know, you wear an eye mask, you wear earplugs that you're like, you're going down that you've haven't had caffeine. We call it sleep hygiene that you're optimizing those things. And so let's make sure you're just drinking enough water in the day, right? You know, most people are not getting the two to three liters that they need in a day. You don't need freakish amounts of water. Really? Yeah. You just

need to drink some water. Don't drink a lot, huh? Well, you need to absorb the water you're drinking. We talk about this in the new book, Ready to Run, that we have Dr. Stacey Sims of Osmo Nutrition. She's sort of preeminent researcher in hydration out of Stanford right now in the world. And she's like, hey, look, take some sea salt, take some table salt, put it in your water. You'll absorb the water you're drinking instead of just bolusing your kidneys and peeing it out and blowing out all your electrolytes too. Man, now this is interesting. I mean, when I'm training, when I'm playing, you know, practicing or something for two hours, running up and down a court, I'll tell you what, man, I feel like I need a lot of water. You do.

That's very different, right? Okay. And what we do then is we treat your hydration differently than your fuel needs. So there are supplements, companies like Osmo, like Scratch Labs, which is done by another very similar formulation by another exercise physiologist from Tour de France. And what you're using is just a little sugar to upregulate the absorption of water and electrolytes. But what we've seen is if you treat your hydration, you can use Ultima, you can use one of those Noon tabs. You just got to treat your water like it's an electrolyte mix that you can absorb it and then

eat if you need to support. So put a half a bar in your stomach while you're training. So in that break, come back, eat a half of a high-quality food. That'll help, huh? That'll help. And then you'll be fine. If you're only exercising for an hour, you're good to go. Just drink. If you know it's going to be longer, have a little snack.

But don't pretend that you didn't eat right beforehand. Right. And then let's also just treat hydration seriously. So to get back, though, you know, when people are listening to this, you know, if you're, hey, I'm going to just make a quality, make a commitment to getting a little bit better quality sleep for as much as I'm able to sleep, right, that I'm not going to, you know, that I'm going to make sure that I can try to control my diet a little bit. Right. And I'm not saying you need to not be a human being. I mean, if you go to someone's house, they make you pasta, eat the pasta, don't be a jerk. But in the meantime, don't go back to their house. Right. So, uh, but you know, I think people just don't control what they control and then they end up writing the whole thing off. You know, it's just,

you know, is you know i love this stuff and it's something i'm constantly wanting to learn about and apply and use before people listening and they may be like you know it sounds like this is a whole completely this is like a full-time job it's like i gotta think about what i'm eating i gotta think about what i'm drinking now i gotta think about how to sleep i can't just uh you know i gotta think about how to sleep. I can't just, you know, I got to think about how to move. I got to do these mobility things all day. That's right. That's right. So it's okay to learn the skills of being a human. And the problem is honestly, we didn't, we haven't valued those things. We haven't sort of said that this is the things that make us human. No one taught you how to run yet. You either learn to run or you don't

learn to run and you either get injured or you don't get injured. Only very few people learn to run well. What point did you not need a teacher? You know? And if you, if you realize that you were with your parents until what you were like 18, almost for some of us who are lucky, right? At what point were they not your parents? And the problem is their parents didn't teach them the skills. And the skills are, this is what people eat. You know, this is what, you know, we, we make dinner. We make one dinner for our kids. The New York times, uh, this magazine last weekend had an article that was like seven different families from around the world and what their kids ate for breakfast. And the most interesting kids are the kids who are like Asian, who have like a pickle. They have like a fermented pickle. They like a fish they have some high quality like you know root

starch you know and there's like that right and then there's some other kids who are like eating toast with like sugar sprinkles on them and orange juice no wonder those kids are gonna get their asses kicked someday yeah man i used to have pop tarts and captain crunch man they interviewed the mom about one of these kids she's like oh yeah our kid used to try to barf that up and then we just kept giving it to him and i mean that's the point you sort of have to be taught how to eat and you have to be taught and when you're moving with your physio or your your chiro and they're teaching you these fundamental movement patterns in there are the root building block.

It's like saying, Hey, I understand you're a good poet, but you still don't quite understand syntax. Let's go ahead and go back and work on punctuation. It's all about the basics, constantly going back to the basics and it's about doing the basics. Well, CrossFit community has said forever, virtuosity is the doing the common uncommonly well. forever. Virtuosity is the doing the common uncommonly well. And when we really start drilling down on the basics, then we can really start having a more enlightened conversation

because we're not just putting out fires. So yeah, what we just did, right, which comes out on Tuesday, it's called ready to run. And when we created, I created 12 standards for people, because like running is the thing that makes us human. You should be able to get on off the airplane, open up your hips a little bit, drink some water, go for a run in a new city. It doesn't cost anything. You can be barefoot, run, right? You can go to the beach and run. Like it is as egalitarian and democratized as you can get. And yet it is probably the single most dangerous sport we let kids do. Running is so dangerous. Really? Why? In terms of the number of people getting injured every year. Right. Because they don't know how to properly run and then they just hurt themselves. And they're not ready to run. They don't have the

ankle. No pun intended. That's right. Their feet aren't strong enough. Wow. They're trapped. They haven't absorbed water. They're puffy. They don't warm up. They don't cool down. And so what ends up happening? Of course, you take your Ferrari stuckari stuck in second gear right with the handbrake on and the wheels are out of alignment and then you just race it down the street and you're like what happened i don't understand how many oil in it blew up it's so stupid now quick question about this i'd be interested to hear your thoughts because a lot of people in the crossfit community at least a couple years ago the extremists i would say have adapted the you know very small sole barefoot style of shoes uh during crossfoot and running and a friend of mine is the head of innovation over at deckers which owns uh ug and teva and uh now a shoe brand called hok i think it's's called Hoka. Hoka or Hoka.

Which is the oversized. It's basically the opposite of barefoot running. It's the oversized soles, very cushion. And I've done both the barefoot stuff and now I religiously run in the Hokas. Or Hokas, I don't remember how to say them. But the oversized shoes. This is the best endorsement ever. There's these shoes.

They're stupid. Yeah, they're so stupid. I can't pronounce them. They're like moon shoes. That's right. endorsement ever. There's these shoes. They're stupid. Yeah, they're so stupid. I can't pronounce them. They're like moon shoes. That's right. But I'll tell you what, man. It's like my knees feel saved. My lower back feels saved.

I feel like I can run longer. I don't get tired. It's like my muscles aren't as sore. I'm like, you know, what's the right way? I feel like it's more efficient with the oversized soles, but everyone's doing this barefoot thing and talking about the efficiency of your body and you're born to run with, uh, you know, what God gave you and you know, what's the right way or what's the more efficient way

for your body? First of all, in order for you to run pain free, to have to have a $150 shoe on your feet is, is, is suspicious, right? The human being, we are evolved to run great book by Daniel Lieberman called the story of the human body all came out like last year. Uh, he's a, he's an anthropologist out of Harvard. All you need to do is read his book and there's all the research about why we have a big toe, why there's a one less mechanism in your ankle and, and how we were designed to locomote. The key here is this. I want you to run pain-free.

I'm not, I want to limit that. Kids are not born with heels on. You're designed to have your foot flat on the ground. The foot needs input to understand how you're striking. The problem with any shoe, you know, in 1991, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and we referenced this book in our in our in our reference this study in our book is that in 91 the american academy of pediatrics put a position paper out that said the foot develops best barefoot really and that if we're

going to choose shoes we need to choose shoes that mimic barefoot that means have no differential that they're highly breathable that they're're very flexible. Kids' feet sweat five times more than adults' feet, for example, right? And what's happened is that we have systematically started to shorten kids' heel cords. They are in running shoes early on. And what happens when I tip your center of mass forward by a centimeter? It's because that heel is a high heel, right? What happens when I start to change your ankle mechanics times 10,000 steps a day, times start to do the ankle mechanics times 10 000 steps a day times start to do the math you know in four months you've gone a million steps that's just a million steps you know that's four million steps a year that doesn't account for any running or jumping

or landing and now do that let's see four million a year times 10 years 40 million oscillations wearing a high heel shoe now now see where i'm going with this so the key here is that you should be able to run barefoot and it shouldn't hurt but you are you don't walk around barefoot because you live in new york city it's sketchy right you know you should be able to have full range of motion barefoot even olympic lifting shoes which allow me to transfer more energy to the ground yep right but by elevating the heel i basically i'm allowing for a more upright torso yeah and that is still a hack that's like wearing a weight belt when i power lift yeah right that's still not that's still not correct human movement it's a it's a hack that allows me to optimize my movements and you should olympic lift olymp lift your shoes because of the sheer forces.

But what ends up happening with that, HOKA, and we did an episode on Mobility WOD about this, where if that's the only way you can run pain-free, I'm going to say, let's start there. But I'm also asking you, what are you doing? Do you have full range of motion in your ankles, yes or no? I don't. And you're not actively working to reclaim it or actively working to make your tissues of your ankles and hips work better, then guess what happens when

the HOKA stops working for you? Because it will stop working for you. Further, with that HOKA, basically because it's so soft, you basically blunt all the appropriate steps of input. No, not the force. You blunt the force, but you end up striking the ground harder. To be able to push off. Well, to be able to get the linkage and to find the mechanics. And so we end up seeing that your ground reaction force in the shoe is much higher than it would be if you were wearing barefoot. Here's the example.

Put shoes on, jump onto a box, take your shoes off, jump and land the same way. You will land differently without the shoes because you will not slam your feet down like a maniac because you're going to respect your feet, right? You'll land softer. You'll land softer. So what we've told people is, and now our position is this, I want you barefoot and flat 24-7. Wow. So be barefoot in your house, spend all day Saturday barefoot, get some flat shoes, cruise around, Tom's are flat, Reebok makes some flat powerlifting shoes and some just cute shoes. It doesn't matter what brand you're, we use Vans for kids. You know, those are great flat shoes.

Then in your running, go ahead and give yourself a little heel differential. So let's give you some breathing room. Ultimately, I want you to run in something that's under five millimeters of differential. You should be able to run flat. It shouldn't matter what your shoes are. It shouldn't matter if you're wearing hiking boots or or combat boots or track flats your technique should look the same but the problem with the hokas is that it hides your technique errors it basically absorbs all the and what you would normally get is immediate feedback about your running technique right through pain in your feet. But the shoe suddenly

allows you to heel strike and it allows you to midfoot strike instead of striking on the forefront where you need to strike. And so it sort of blunts that. The other problem we have with that shoe is that if you're a neutral, beautiful runner and you want to use it like a weight belt, you do one long run a week in it and you're a big boy and big girl, go for it. But here's the problem is that those people who have poor running mechanics You do one long run a week in it and you're a big boy and big girl. Go for it. But here's the problem is that those people who have poor running mechanics, it actually exacerbates and makes their running mechanics worse. Because you're basically falling off a two and a half centimeter platform. And so do you know when people were high?

Remember the thing that was happening, the Japanese schoolgirls, they had these ridiculously high boots, right? They had like a foot platform. And a couple of kids tripped and died in the subway because they fell into the subway. Well, the same thing is happening to you in those hokas, you know, is that you're also basically tripping over the shoe and falling on the shoe a lot. And you may run beautifully because you are an athlete and you didn't have running problems. But what we've done is created a sort of the research. There's no research on that the shoe works. So just so we're clear, there's no research. The running shoe industry is a $4 billion industry. So we have to be suspicious that these people are selling the stuff, right? And if you follow the running shoe guidelines by running shoe manufacturers,

they're saying every like 100 to 300 miles, you change your shoes for a typical runner. That's four pairs of shoes a year. That's about five hundred dollars of shoes just to run like that's already suspicious. The research that that McDougall put out in ready to run or born to run said, you know, there is a direct correlation to the severity of your running injury and the expense of your shoes. And what we're finding is that, you know, your shoes are going to pack out. And here's my other problem. Your hokas are going to start to form and shape into your feet. And so now we have an even tilted, weirder, cushiony mess around your shoes because you are striking weird or wearing weird. And so now instead of being close to the ground and developing a wear pattern that doesn't really matter, you're starting to develop a wear pattern in a shoe that has a two inch

high heel. So this is our concern. Mainly though, is that I don't care what shoe you're running in. You've got to be working on improving your running mechanics and improving your tissues so that you can run and addressing the lifestyle issues which are making it difficult for you to run. Yeah, because I hear stories of people that they went extreme barefoot shoes and then they can't run either and they hurt their knee. But then there's other people that it's like you got to learn to run still. Well, and that's the problem. The military, I was in our army base and they banned five and five fingers from the army base because they saw too many injuries.

And that's like saying, hey, cars are dangerous. They kill people. Let's ban cars. They're just dangerous. Well, it's not really the car. It's really that people drive the cars and right the wrong way and so what what the problem was again we had kids who did not know how to run never had running instruction and who who had huge aerobic engines and had egos and weren't

willing to kind of go backwards into running yeah and the surfaces they're probably running on they might have like rocks and everything so they don't know how to run on those or whatever you know it doesn't matter what surface you run on you could in fact we actually advocate for people to go run a little bit on the concrete because you're going to see that you're going to get immediate feedback about how you're hard you're striking the ground and which direction you're striking the ground wow so you know you need to be able to go run barefoot. You should be able to do that. You know, when you think about this, how strange this is.

Hey, hey, dad, can we go play the football? Yeah, let me put on my hokas. I'm going to run. You know, that's really weird. Right. So, you know, hey, I'd love to go. I'd love to go play some beach volleyball. But, you know, I just don't have my $400 carbon fiber running shoes and the nano

performance of my feet. The problem is what we've done is taken the skill away from the human. We've taken the onus away from being responsible for having a range of motion and making this technique. And what we valued is mileage and time above process. imagine teaching your daughter to drive a car and not worrying about how she drives just how fast she got there in time and how and you know what i mean and that she didn't die good job like it's it's asinine that's what we do towards sport interesting interesting this is fascinating stuff and uh you know i want to learn more about running and we could talk for four more hours on this, I'm sure, and go over every sport and topic,

but I want to make sure everyone goes and gets the book, Ready to Run, Unlocking Your Potential to Run Naturally. And if you have Becoming a Supple Leopard, then you know how awesome that book is and how awesome this book is going to be. I don't have a copy of it yet awesome this book is going to be i don't have a copy of it yet but i'm going to get one and uh definitely recommend it so i hope everyone goes and pick it up we'll have it linked up in the show notes i've got lots of more questions for you kelly but i want to ask you two more just to respect the time here the first one is what are

you most grateful for recently you know we started a practice about two years ago at our house. Every night when we have dinner with our family, we say what we're grateful for. And when you are in your 30s, and this is a generalization. I don't want to speak to me. But I was obsessed a little bit with who am I? What am I going to become? What is my professional legacy? You know, what does that mean, right?

And when I was in college, there was a guy on my floor, the RA, who had a sign on his door that said, let your goal be to lead a simple life. And I remember thinking, no way. I do not want a simple life. And I didn't understand what that meant. And now I can tell you after a lot of deep processing that the only goal I have is to spend more time on the beach with my amazing CEO wife, who is the, you know, the brains behind all of these, you know, both of our corporations and, uh, you know, in that choosing being fortunate enough to have a career where I can work for myself, which is why I got a tattoo below my elbow really allows me to drop my kids off from school. And it's allowed me to have, you know, work 80 hours a week, maybe,

but I'll have a life that makes more sense for me. So I, you know, that's it. And we, we, we say what we're grateful every day. And I'm that I'm grateful for. I love that. And final question is what's your definition of greatness? Your capacity to get better. And, you know, when we measure athletes or we talk about our friends, it's really, people are remarkable, but we're still interested in how much they can get better. And like a guy like Graham Holmberg, we opened the show with, you know, he's an extraordinary athlete. But one of the reasons that I think Graham is so capable is that he can still can get better. He's always in a growth mindset. So greatness is the ability to continue to refine,

continue to have deeper understanding and get better from year to year. That's it. I love it. Kelly, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. Again, I'll have everything linked up in the show notes, but go get ready to run. Dr. Kelly Starrett, I appreciate all the hard work you do all the dedication, the commitment that you have in order to support all of us humans in becoming more efficient with our bodies as athletes but also

just living a better life so thank you for your dedication Is it Shredded Lewis now? So Shrewish? My pleasure man, thank you so much. You know, you know, we're living in such an interesting time and people, you know, have got the vision now and they're seeing that it's up to us. And thank goodness we shifted that back onto us because, you know, I think we have a chance, honestly, to impact sort of the quality of life

of ourselves moving forward. It's an exciting time. Thanks so much for having me. And there you have it, guys. Thanks again so much for tuning in today and listening. I loved this interview, and I want to have Kelly come back on just because he's such a fascinating guy and I love learning about how to optimize and enhance my body whenever I can. So hopefully

I can get Kelly back on when he has his next New York Times bestseller come out. Make sure to pick up a copy of this book. You check out the link over at lewishouse.com slash 101 for episode 101 and also share this out with your friends over on Twitter, on Facebook,

or send an email to someone personally who you think could improve in their life by listening to this specific episode. Again, lewishouse.com forward slash 101. And post a picture on Instagram. You can subscribe on SoundCloud as well and leave a comment there, but post a picture on Instagram. You can subscribe on SoundCloud as well and leave a comment there, but post a picture on Instagram

where you're listening to this specific episode. And if you are running, even better, because it's all about running. So if you're on a treadmill or you're out on the trail, post a picture of where you're running with this episode. Tag me, atlewishowes, and hashtag School of Greatness. Super pumped for the next 100 episodes, guys. Thank you again so much for coming on today.

And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great. Outro Music