The Tim Ferriss Show - #664: Dr. Kelly Starrett — The Magic of Movement and Mobility, Training for Range of Motion, Breathing for Back Pain, Improving Your Balance, and More
Episode Date: March 30, 2023Brought to you by Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, Athletic Greens's AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement, and Shopify&nb...sp;global commerce platform providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business. Kelly Starrett, DPT (@thereadystate) is one of my favorite performance coaches. When I have problems other people can’t solve, I call Kelly. He’s also a treasure trove of one-liners.He is, along with his wife Juliet, co-founder of The Ready State. The Ready State began as MobilityWOD in 2008 and has gone on to transform the field of performance therapy and self-care.Kelly’s clients include professional athletes in the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB. He also works with Olympic gold medalists, Tour de France cyclists, world- and national-record-holding Olympic Lifting and Power athletes, Crossfit Games medalists, professional ballet dancers, elite military personnel, and more.Kelly is the author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers Becoming A Supple Leopard and Ready to Run. His new book is Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully, co-written with Juliet Starrett.Juliet was the U.S. National Champion in extreme whitewater racing from 1997 to 2000 and World Champion from 1997 to 1998. She returned to the sport in 2018 to become World Champion in the Masters Division.Please enjoy! *This episode is brought to you by Shopify! Shopify is one of my favorite platforms and one of my favorite companies. Shopify is designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. In no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day and drive sales. No coding or design experience required.Go to shopify.com/Tim to sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period. It’s a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today by visiting shopify.com/Tim.*This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep! Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature.Go to EightSleep.com/Tim and save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia.*This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 by Athletic Greens, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and 5 free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product.*[08:05] Where in the world are Kelly and Tim?[13:34] A lesson in how our environment shapes us.[19:12] Optimizing vital signs and range of motion as we age.[30:31] Walk and fidget more for better sleep and body maintenance.[40:37] Balance training: not just for "old" people.[50:51] Extending the end range of motion.[54:58] The old man shoe-on game.[59:50] The airport scanner shoulder test.[1:05:55] Simple corrective exercises.[1:09:44] Tower of London.[1:12:41] Breath as a mobilization device.[1:19:13] A reasonable amount of daily protein.[1:23:09] 800 grams of fruits and vegetables.[1:32:27] Never do nothing. But my something doesn't have to be your something.[1:43:23] Cultivating cross-cultural, timeless movement in a busy world.[1:53:43] Who is Built To Move for?[1:58:54] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is one of my favorite companies out there,
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slash Tim to save $250 on the 8sleep pod cover. I'm flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?
Now would have seemed an appropriate time.
What if I could be out of here?
I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
The Tim Ferriss Show.
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs.
This is Tim Ferriss.
Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm going to keep this intro short because I am in windy Wellington,
New Zealand, and it is howling outside. You might hear that in the background,
and this is audio verite for this introduction. Dr. Kelly Starrett, who is he? He's one of my
favorite performance coaches. I've spent a lot of time with him. When I have problems, other people cannot solve. If I have aches and pains, injuries, performance goals, perhaps,
that people can't spec out for me, make sense of, I call Kelly. He's also a treasure trove of
one-liners and is hilarious. So I think you'll enjoy our conversation. He has been on the podcast
before, is very, very popular. Kelly Starr at DPT, you can find him on
Twitter and Instagram at TheReadyState, is, along with his wife, Juliet, co-founder of
TheReadyState. TheReadyState began as MobilityWOD in 2008. Just a side note, Kelly's like 230 pounds
of pure muscle with quads bigger than my chest, and he is more mobile and flexible than I am. Full lotus,
no problem. Couch stretch until you think your hips would explode, no problem. So he really walks
the talk and squats the talk, as it were. All right, so the Ready State began as MobilityWOD
in 2008 and has gone on to transform the field of performance therapy and self-care. You know,
I'm going to keep adding in little tangents. I think it was for Kelly's 40th birthday, he decided,
and he'll have to correct me if I get this wrong, that he wanted to do a few things to celebrate
his 40th birthday and mark it as a milestone. And if my memory serves me, it was a standing
backflip. Remember the dimensions that I mentioned? It was running
an ultra marathon, the quad dipsy. So look that up. It is no joke. Again, remember his physical
dimensions and then power cleaning something like, I have no idea, 300 pounds, 350 pounds,
something outrageous. So that is Kelly Starrett. He is the decathlete of power and mobility.
So let's get back to the bio. His
clients include professional athletes in the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB. That's Major League Baseball
for folks outside of the US. He also works with Olympic gold medalists, Tour de France cyclists,
world and national record-holding Olympic lifting and power athletes, CrossFit Games medalists,
professional ballet dancers, elite military personnel, and much more. Kelly is the author of the New York Times and Wall
Street Journal bestsellers, Becoming a Supple Leopard and Ready to Run. His new book is Built
to Move, subtitled The 10 Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully, co-written
with Juliet Starrett. So her name has come up a few times now, and I've known Juliet for a long time. Who is Juliet? I just have to mention a few things
before we move on. So Juliet, trained as an attorney, she's done a million different things,
badass in business, incredible operator, but also she was the US national champion in extreme
whitewater racing from 1997 to 2000, world champion
from 97 to 98. She returned to the sport in 2018 to become world champion in the master's division.
So she is also very smart, very capable, very fit, and both of them as a team have really thought
through what it takes to build yourself to move. So you can find all things
related to them at thereadystate.com, all one word. And without further ado, please enjoy this
wide-ranging conversation with Dr. Kelly Starrett. Kelly.
Good to see you, bud.
My friend.
We are sitting.
We're sitting.
Emphasis on sitting.
Yeah.
We're very low to the ground.
We have a table in front of us that is about, let's call it 12 inches, 14 inches off of the ground, which means we're seated on the floor.
And under some very thin mats, we have tatami mats, and that is because we are seated on the floor and under some very thin mats we have tatami mats and that is
because we are in Japan not only in Japan we are in the northern island Hokkaido of Japan looking
outside we have snow-covered mountains and we are in a Japanese style room What else would you like to say about this particular trip to Japan
and experience in Japan? Well, I have this friend named Tim who sometimes drags me on wild goose
chases. And it's become a feature of my life where I have to ask myself, am I capable enough
to go have fun on an adventure with Tim? So here we are after a week of, I've done a lot
of intense things. This is very intense. We were skiing and it's deep snow. It's back country
skiing. We're climbing mountains and skiing down. It's very cold and very vigorous.
And I've also found myself in the first time ever, I'm the oldest person on the trip.
And I have all these young friends who are like, I cut off your arm and it regrows the next day.
Now, I should use that as a segue.
Yesterday, when we were climbing this mountain, and I guess with wind chills, probably, I want to say probably negative 10 Fahrenheit, something like that, easily.
It was very, very, very, very cold.
Maybe the coldest day of skiing I've ever had.
Extremely cold.
And we are skinning up the mountain, which means, for those people who don't know,
because I certainly didn't know a few years ago, you have your skis.
They're slick on the bottom.
That's what helps you go down the mountain.
But if you try to put on your skis and go up the mountain,
you don't get anywhere because you slide backwards. Well, back in the day, I believe it was seal skin, hence the
name skins, were used on the bottom of skis by indigenous populations to go uphill because the
hair is matted down in one direction, kind of like blades of grass that have been heavily blown in one direction,
which means if they're placed correctly on the bottom of the ski,
it can catch.
And you wouldn't imagine this would work,
that the physics of this would work on snow.
Or be fun.
Or be fun.
But it does.
And so you can basically slide one ski next to the other
and use special touring boots and bindings that allow your
heel to come up so that you can slide your way up the mountain and the ratio for those wondering is
what would you say six hours up to every six turns down i'm exaggerating but it's it's a lot of work
is the juice worth the squeeze and i would say in this particular case, since we were all completely buried in unearthly light powder.
And when I say buried, I mean friends were over their heads in powder, just plowing through.
Wastey.
Yeah.
When the ski guides say powder of the year
yeah best run of the year i've never experienced anything like it yeah and so if you're if you're
going at reasonably high speed through waist deep powder it is going to go over your head
in your face you're going to get face shots which is a good thing in this case and the reason i
bring it up is number one just to paint a picture for
folks with respect to why we're here in northern Japan. Why would you fly all the way across any
pond? Because it's an island, so you're going to be flying here over some form of water to ski.
And the answer is the powder here is unlike anything anyone on this trip has ever seen.
It's unbelievable. However, on the way up, you're exerting a lot
and you're exposed to the elements. And I was thinking yesterday, like, wow, I'm 45. And
if I had posed the question to my 20-year-old self, do you think at age 45 that you would
ever be able to do this? I think the answer would have been no,
probably. I think the 20-year-old self would have had very, very low confidence.
And that made me happy to think about. I was like, yeah, I got some aches and pains. And
as you know, I have some pain in the right lower back. And when you're on steep inclines,
really working all of that hip musculature and the psoas and everything else. It's like, oh, I'm really feeling it.
But nonetheless, I was able to do it.
And we're having onsen, meaning hot springs and cold baths
and the contrast of hot, cold, hot, cold.
And the food is pretty, like if you're going to do this thing day after day,
I'm going to just say that getting hot, getting cold,
eating like rice and meat,
and then going to bed very early.
We're all sick,
deprived.
It's worked every day.
I think to myself,
well,
that was it.
And the next morning I have,
I am resurrected and I'm like,
okay,
well,
let's go see how we feel.
And it's been really just remarkable.
How much time have you spent in Japan overall? And this is going to tie into the broader
conversation we're going to have, folks. So I'm laying the table a bit. I want to tell you what
I'm doing. But how much time have you spent in Japan?
That's 100% zero.
So let's call it roughly a week. What are some of the things you've observed in terms of Japan, in terms of, let's just say this hotel, which is a reasonably, especially with your particular room that we're sitting in, very traditional hotel.
What have you noticed in the lounge area?
What's different about the lounge area?
Keeping in mind also that at least half of the people here, maybe 70, 80% are probably 70 years old or older.
Yes. So imagine a world around you where you come into a really fancy,
we'll call mountain lodge. And it's not fancy. This is like a mountain lodge where people are
coming on vacation and you take your shoes off the door and you walk around slippery wood floors and socks.
And everyone, serving staff, wait staff, front staff, doesn't matter your age, you're cruising on slippery floors in socks.
So already it's remarkable to see sort of the balance required, your foot is contact to the ground.
People are really uncomfortable barefoot. And the first
thing you notice when you come in is everyone is barefoot, serving barefoot, acting barefoot,
and it changes how you move, how quickly you move. It's very interesting to just perceive that. And
that's just at the door. What's interesting is it reminds me how much cue queuing we take from our environment and really honestly how quickly i've
adapted to i talk about this a lot but the environment shapes us in subtle and unsubtle
ways and quickly within a week i have been shaped again by my environment in a whole 180 yeah and
if you go to the lounge on the second floor, which is the main hang area
for the entire building, which at full capacity probably holds at least a few hundred people,
I would think maybe 300 people. And it's an active area. The vast majority of tables are
just like this. And if you want to sit down, there's a stack of mats and you get your mat,
which is maybe half inch to an inch thick,
and you sit on the floor. And that is just how it works. And nobody complains because they're
accustomed to it. And I remember everyone can do it. And I remember when I was 15,
first in Japan as an exchange student, my first trip out of the US really of any type was a year as an exchange student. And
I went to a baseball game with a high school friend and all of the toilets were squat toilets.
So for people who haven't used these, I mean, there's basically a hole in the ground. It's
clean. I mean, it's porcelain, but you squat down and your ass is basically on your heels.
And that is how you do your business.
And I remember asking him, how do old people do this?
Don't they fall over?
And he laughed and he said, they're used to it.
They've done it their entire lives.
So I would imagine net net that there are more people in the US
who can clean and jerk and snatch and press heavyweight overhead.
But that if a facet of functional
fitness is sitting on the ground for a half hour without having to fidget nonstop because there's
some issue biomechanically that is making you uncomfortable, that Japan wins, hands down,
over the US. It should be noted, just the body is so simple, use it or lose it.
And I think, imagine all the complexity that we have to program and come to this functional
fitness class to solve the issues of you not sitting on the ground and pooping on the ground
or sleeping on the ground.
We've created a, we have a whole construct to remedy the fact that you're not doing things
that people have been doing a long time. And I'm not pining for our paleolithic selves. I don't
need fermented whale carcass. I don't need that. I'm stoked that we've moved beyond.
But it is interesting that built into the environment here are some truths around your
body. There's a great writer named Philip Beach who wrote a book
called Muscles and Meridians, really wonderful book. But he thinks that one of the ways the body
tunes itself is actually sitting on the ground. Hips get reset because you're kneeling, you're
putting fashion in certain positions, you're maintaining key ranges of motion. And all you
have to do is sit on the ground. And we used to sit, toilet, eat, hang out,
celebrate, sleep. We were just interacting on the ground and all of a sudden that's gone.
And so it really begets this interesting question of how much more complexity are we having to
always add in when there's a mismatch or not even mismatch, but we've made certain choices about the
way our environment shapes us. Yeah. And we were chatting earlier today and I just said,
I've been to Japan as an adult,
not that many times with groups of non-Japanese,
but maybe two,
three times I've been,
yeah,
let's call it three times,
maybe four.
In any case,
the number doesn't really matter.
What matters is in every single trip,
if we walked into a Japanese restaurant, the chorus of the group would say, oh, God, I hope there are chairs.
Because in each group, even if these people are overall very, very athletic, I would say 70 to 80 percent would not be able to sit on the ground for more than five minutes without
getting very uncomfortable fidgety yeah or finding something to lean back against as we talk about
this and this is where i thought we would be led in the conversation is thinking about
environmental modification or what your shape diet might be that's really good right
yeah it's like okay if you do intermittent fasting x number of times per week like maybe you spend
one day per week sitting on the ground you somehow modify your environment or your behavior just to
incorporate some of these older more common common shapes. The broader question, I suppose, could be,
and I know this is something you've thought a lot about,
are how we might think of vital signs.
So if anybody goes in to see their general practitioner
for an annual checkup or they go into the ER,
first thing they're going to do is take a couple of measurements.
And it's standardized for a lot of good reasons.
So they're going to check your blood pressure.
They're going to check your heart rate.
Maybe they'll check your blood oxygen saturation with pulse ox.
There are a handful of things that they will check.
How do you think about vital signs as it pertains to your areas of expertise now?
And part of the reason I enjoy hanging out with you and chatting is that
you do not have a static repertoire or model for thinking about these things. As we've talked over
the years, I've seen it evolve and change and be informed by new experiences and new observations.
So how do you think about vital signs? I'll keep it broad.
If we take the allegory for where we are right now, we're sitting,
getting up and down off the ground without using your hand, just being able to sit crisscross
applesauce and lower yourself and stand up without having to put your hands down or knee down,
turns out is a really excellent predictor of morbidity
and mortality. So you can do this wherever you are. So no knees, no hands means getting into
a squatting position? No, cross-legged. So you don't even have to have full hip flexion. You
don't have to squat. You can be on the outside of your feet. How strong you need to be able to do
this? I don't know. Children can do it. I've seen some elderly Japanese people do this pretty
effortlessly. They're not that jacked.
They're not on the Gale Hatch squat program.
So there's something that this, with your knee out to the side and crisscross, it's a real mid-range position.
But if you can't flex forward in this position to shift your weight and push up on that, you'll discover really quickly, you're like, wow, I'm having a hard time getting up off the ground.
Does that mean that you're not an elite athlete? No. Does that mean you can't live
in your society? No. But it means that, hey, there's something going on with your ability to
move freely that may be reducing your likelihood of having movement choice or feeling better.
And now what we've done is begin to have a greater conversation about
if we can help you restore or you can restore in your own home,
how your hips move and how easily you can move,
you might feel better and be less likely to fall and be more independent.
The number one reason people end up in nursing homes,
can't get up off the ground by themselves.
I've fallen and I can't get up.
That's right.
You know, this, I'm just thinking, so folks can envision this, right?
You're sitting cross-legged on the ground.
Can you get up without using a hand on the ground, not posting?
And it gave me a flashback because Coach Christopher Sommer, who used to be the U.S. National Gymnastics Team coach,
had me at one point training quite intensely. This is probably five years ago.
And one of the key exercises that he used for his athletes to not just work on broader mobility,
let's just say, but specifically on lateral knee strength, and I suppose lateral
leg strength would be more accurate, he would have people do basically this exactly. So they
would be in a cross-legged position, they'd come down, then they would lift themselves back up,
rotate 180 degrees so the legs are in the opposite position, let's just say, in terms of stacking.
Lower down, get up, and then rinse and repeat, just as repetitions in a controlled fashion.
So you're not just dropping your ass to the ground.
It's not for time.
Movement for time.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And I hadn't connected these two.
Even at home in Austin, it's not like I sit on the ground cross-legged that often.
I mean, I do, but not as much as I have on this trip in Japan, certainly.
And how much that helped, not just durability, but also performance. I suppose what comes to
mind, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts, is that if you aim for a certain degree of durability
and you're getting your ABCs in terms of shape vitamins, and you're ensuring that you
can do things like you just described, getting off the ground with your legs crossed, like that
leads into performance. Those things will almost certainly all aid performance in some capacity or
make it more sustainable, but not necessarily the other way around, right? Like you can be a one
trick pony from a performance standpoint, but it will not necessarily contribute.
Let's just say in one movement pattern,
you're spectacularly good.
I'm interested in archery right now.
So it's like, okay, you're really good at archery
asymmetrically on one side,
but that does not mean when you are 70
that you are going to have full health span
and be able to do the things you want to do.
But if you focus on the durability,
those should, I would imagine,
contribute to a lot of different performance goals.
You're bringing up a really good point,
is that we have come to appreciate,
because again, we have really smart friends.
We're in really interesting communities
trying to solve some of these problems of the human condition. If you look at our first book, Becoming a Supple Leopard,
there's really two key objective, measurable, repeatable, explainable ideas there. One is
range of motion, native range of motion. This is what every physician, every surgeon, every physical
therapist all agrees you should shoulder should be able to do. It's not, don't be a gymnast,
but there's some basic ranges that's endemic to every human so let's just get back to that
second is biomotor output which is a fancy way of saying wattage well poundage like what we saw
was that if we could restore your range of motion and teach towards the highest expression of our
formal movements we saw that you could go faster
and win world championships. Now, all the behaviors that we got interested in around
supporting those two things meant we had to sort of start to care about sleep. We had to start to
care about micronutrients and are you getting enough protein? Are you decongesting your body
through walking? So in service of high performance, we have what we've come to call base camp
behaviors. And it's shocking how many world-class athletes we come in contact with who are really
good. Let's say the best in the world. And this is not hyperbole, really extraordinary mutants who
are very thoughtful, but have big holes in their understanding of their process. They can go do
that thing, but their sleep isn't great, or they don't eat enough carbohydrate, or you can just, whatever, just for the individual
person. But it turns out, I like this analogy of the spinning coin. I think it's an Ido Portal.
Last time I heard him talk about it, is that the other side of that coin is these are the
behaviors that make a durable person independent of performance. And so you get to care about being 100 years old
and moving the way you want to be.
Juliette has this great idea.
She's like, look, you probably do some goal setting
as a human.
If you're a business, like you're like,
we're gonna, there's our first quarter goal.
Here's what we're doing.
When have you done that for your life?
What does it look like?
What do you imagine your life looks like to be 70?
People like financial security.
I'm like, okay, but what does it look like in your environment?
Peter, Tia had this centenarian games concept, which I think is really elegant.
But let me go a step further because a lot of those things were metrics around,
I want to be able to put a kettlebell out in front of me and squat.
It was like one of those.
Or lift a grandchild at 100.
Therefore, I need to work backwards.
What should my...
So let's just take that and then let's go ahead and expand on that idea and start to
say, well, what are the key vital signs that illuminate what behaviors create that reality?
So instead of just saying, well, I'm just going to go around and lift children. Excuse me, ma'am, can I pick up your child?
Which can get you there. We can start to say, do you have the components? And what are those
components? And more importantly, how do I fit them into my crazy schedule? Because that is the
thing. So what are some base camp behaviors? What are some important base camp behaviors? You know, none of them end up being very sexy. Here's the caveat.
So it's hard to commoditize these things, hard to charge for these things. And more importantly,
and I'm being facetious, but these are things that are easily done in your home by you,
control and control. You don't need a physical therapist or a physician or anyone else to come
in and give you these things. That's, I think, really important. We see that the functional unit
of getting anything done in your family, in your life, in your health is in your house, you.
So we could start by, we took some behavioral ones. We might say, like, sleep is a good one.
I think this is good because one of the things that I think is hidden from a lot of people is how tightly coupled or connected our behaviors are.
So let's take sleeping and walking, for example.
Does everyone agree you should sleep more?
Sure.
Okay.
Sounds good.
Good.
Carry on.
What's going on?
We see that the sleep data is that people don't sleep and that they need a lot of help.
And it's a big business to help people to sleep more.
So what we've tried to do is say things like, hey, look, seven hours of sleep is very reasonable
for survival.
And if you're trying to change your body composition, I want to get skinnier, leaner.
I'm trying to grow muscles.
I'm trying to learn a skill of a growing body or I'm trying to heal.
I need to get eight plus hours of sleep
in order to facilitate the maximum adaptation and to really make it easy for my body to do that.
And I started really becoming obsessed about this. One is that we started to learn in
high performance that if you can't sleep, you can't perform. I don't want to talk about one
bad night of sleep before the big game. That's not what I'm talking about. But we started to
see that when we improve sleep, and more importantly, start tracking sleep and really
putting that as something we cared about, we started seeing improvement in performance.
And then it swung around to my work in persistent pain and chronic pain.
That one of the big holes when people had persistent pain and chronic pain was their sleep.
And you might not be able to sleep for a whole host of reasons relative to your persistent pain and chronic pain. But when we were able to improve your sleep density, your brain stopped to be less sensitive about,
and you had more desire to move and maybe had less pain sensitivity. So everyone's like,
growing kids need sleep. And put adults, we don't. So if we take that sleep idea now,
we have a benchmark, seven hours for survival, eight hours for doing something that's important
to me. That means that I need to start thinking about some of the behaviors in the day to make that happen.
So we come back into walking. I think it was debunked that 10,000 steps is the magic number.
Well, the research now, the people who study these things are saying somewhere between six
and 8,000 steps is like really good for your health. But one of the things we learned from
some of our friends in these tier one military groups who really struggle with sleep, think of the ninjas in the army, for example.
One of the first things that was being prescribed when trying to untangle this Gordian knot was
they would increase the step count of the people walking or people that they're working with. So
pushing to 10,000, pushing to 12,000, pushing to 15,000 steps. And those people were exercising,
but they weren't getting enough non-exercise activity. So suddenly, here we have this society who's cued not to walk, where my shape, my work, where I park, the whole thing is that I just maybe
get 2,000 or 3,000 steps a day. Your iPhone actually has a step counter, and you probably
have your phone with you. Open up your health, and it'll tell you what your trend is. This is in the background watching how much you're
walking. You're welcome. You have a step counter. Probably you're carrying with you. You didn't know
you had. But one of the things we know is that if we can get people to improve their step count,
we also start to see that they accumulate enough sleep stress. Sleep pressure is the technical term
where then they want to fall asleep. And again,
there are experts here on sleep. I'm not trying to be, I'm just saying we need to change how you're thinking about your movement in the day so that you can actually fall asleep.
And it turns out when you get a good night's sleep, you wake up and what happens? You feel
more like moving and those behaviors suddenly become tightly coupled or tightly linked. And I don't think sometimes we can
appreciate how these seemingly pinche, silly, non-technical things can really make a big change.
And if we start to put those in play, if you just committed to walking more every day,
just say minimum threshold, let's say 8,000 steps, right? I just want you to get 8,000, whatever that means.
That means you need to get 10 minute walks
after every meal, however you're going to do it.
Just get more steps than you're doing.
And you start doing that, run that for a week
and let me know what happens to your skin
and how your consciousness.
And do you need that four o'clock coffee bump?
And it's shocking when we start to help people
do these base camp behaviors.
Again, why do I care about this?
Because I want you to win a world championship.
Also, I want you to be 100 years old and enjoy it.
Yeah.
The sleep conundrum, right, for me, which has also been a Gordian knot,
but it turns out that a lot of the, for me, biggest levers are so fucking simple i love to solve complex problems because i think i have
some predisposition to being good at it so i tend to insert complexity sometimes where it's not
needed and right like people raise my i'm raising my hand i totally agree it's much cooler to be on
the secret squirrel sleep program if you can problem solve you get rewarded
and you get positive reinforcement so you look for problems to solve but sometimes
the the problem is actually just tic-tac-toe it's not three-dimensional chess and with it's like on
this trip has anyone on this trip had trouble falling asleep doing as you in the state of past
9 30 yeah no no it's like yeah just go climb a mountain for five hours a day and you will fall asleep.
Now, it doesn't need to be that extreme, though.
At home, I noticed, for instance, in Austin, I was having trouble sleeping for a week or so.
And I was like, you know what?
Trying all the supplements.
I'm trying all the cues.
I'm doing all the things.
And it seems like 17 disparate elements.
Why don't I just disallow myself from sitting down and working
at a computer? I will only use my laptop if I'm on a treadmill desk and got a relatively cheap
treadmill desk, nothing fancy, pretty easy to stow away. And lo and behold, it's like if you're
standing and walking for almost every minute that you're on your laptop, you fall asleep really easily.
I became hyper obsessed with walking because it's elite.
No, because one of the things we found is not only did it improve the sleep of the people we were working with, but we also found that we had healthier tissue quality.
So everyone, we're going back to anatomy.
You're going back to your early physiology in high school.
You have a circulatory system.
You have this lymphatic system.
So if you ever had a blister, that's lymph.
Your lymphatic system is the sewage system of your body.
And it doesn't just there when you have injuries and something swells.
And by the way, your joints are drained by the deep lymphatic system.
But you can think of them as highways that carry the normal sewage and waste products
of your body.
The cells turning over, proteins breaking down, things that are too big to go through
your bloodstream, go through your lymphatic system.
Those lymphatic vessels are buried into your musculature and they're one-way valves and
it's a passive system.
So how do you move your sewage through your body?
It turns out it's muscle contraction. That's a really
clever system. It's almost like when we came to be, someone's like, you know what? These people
move a lot. Let's just put the sewage system in the moving system. And so suddenly, if you're
doing the walking, you're decongesting and you're bringing the garbage out and bringing the groceries
in. And if you've seen a drain, this is from one of our friends, Perry Nicholson.
If you've seen a drain in a bathtub, it doesn't drain.
It gets backed up and it's kind of gross.
That's your body.
If you don't move, you can elevate.
Sure, that feels good.
You can compress.
You can get into the compression boots.
You can do all the lymphatic massage.
You can, or wait for it, you can walk around a little bit more. So one of the things we found was that our athletes were having
better recovery scores because they were able to move the serious waste products of exercise.
We're doing a lot of adaptational stress when we train. And we found that they had healthier
tissues. And more importantly, when tissues were injured, because remember, sometimes I get that lens,
right?
I see everyone's broken parts and bits through sport.
How do we manage a swollen ankle?
Well, we can compress it, we can elevate it, and we can move it.
Sorry, I'm just smirking because the number of times people have been like, Kelly, Dr.
Kelly, fix me on this trip.
I'm like, oh, man, didn't know Kelly was coming on a work trip.
Anyway.
It's all I think about, and I'm going to need you to dig me out of that snow pit.
So suddenly, all of, if we want to say, hey, I want to have joints that are normal.
And again, not normal isn't good or bad, but just typical.
Try not to get that language,
then decongestion is a way that you can actually adapt to exercise more effectively.
So if you are smashing yourself on the Peloton, because that's what your life
demands, you are such a crazy working parent, busy business owner, you're getting it in,
high five yourself. Then you figured out, well, wait a
minute, maybe I can actually adapt to the stress a little bit more by walking, perching, which is
leaning up against the stool. Valid, working, fidget, move, stand. You don't have to stand like
a robot. Sit a little bit, stand a little bit, fidget. But one of the things we know is that if
you're smashing yourself and then not continuing to move, you're going to see congestion. If you've ever flown on an airplane, which I did, and I got off the airplane in Japan,
I was like, look, I have cankles. This is not a good look. I have gigantic cankles. And that
cankelage is you not contracting your calf to move the congestion. So your tissues are being
congested because you've been inactive so long.
And then you're like, oh, is that the source of DVTs?
Yes, it is, right?
Deep vein thrombosis.
Yes.
So suddenly you're like, oh, for some population,
we can see that this could be really dangerous.
Dangerous.
If you've ever been in the hospital,
they're like, put on these boots.
They're squeeze your calves.
And then, oh yeah, ankle pumps.
You gotta do all the ankle pumps.
Everyone who has ever had any surgery injuries, like ankle pumps, ankle pumps, ankle pumps. You got to do all the ankle pumps. Everyone who has ever had any surgery or injury is like, ankle pumps, ankle pumps, ankle
pumps.
Well, what is that about?
It's about pumping out the garbage.
So now we have another reason to move around a little bit more.
And more importantly, if you're a busy person, I can tell you, hey, you can work this intense
training because we're training like maniacs.
I think the training that people are doing today is gnarlier.
More people are doing harder training than they were 10 years ago, more than they were
20 years ago. And we may not have set up our lives or have the capacity in our lives to manage those
training stressors as effectively as we could. If you can just kind of keep the engine idling a
little bit, standing desk, fidgeting, perching, moving around a little more, movement choice,
you will adapt
and have healthier tissues that can take more load more often.
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.
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Tim. What are some more, I don't want to say pass-fail tests, but experiments that people can do with vital signs. So we talked about one,
which is the cross-legged on the floor. Can you get up? And can you get down for that matter,
right? Into that position. Everyone can get down usually to the ground.
One time. One time. Yeah. So that's one. What are some others?
Here's one that I think we're really interested in, and it's balance.
We like to talk about balance because any young person, I'm like, here's what you're going to do on Tuesday.
You're going to go to a balance class.
You're not going to lift weights. You're not going to do a sport.
You're going to go to a balance class.
You're like, the hell I'm going to a balance class.
That's for old people. So one of the things that we have come to appreciate even more is that this balance system, it's crucial to humans moving.
Can I pause for a second?
We learned this yesterday.
The scariest part for me of the entire program, which was pretty fucking gnarly.
I mean, when we got up there.
Hey, your words words not mine but yeah
but the scariest part for me was there were multiple stream slash river crossings where
there was like a pirate plank that's about that's generous yeah generous like 12 inches across maybe
10 inches covered in snow and ice and into a snow bank that you get to climb up and you have to right exactly and you have to
get across that in your ski boots without falling several feet into the freezing cold water sensory
deprivation coffins yeah kumite yeah kumite and i realized wow i really have fear around my lateral
balance even though oddly enough maybe you can tell me why
this is the case, I'm much more comfortable
on a slack line than I
am on, say, a balance beam.
I have a lot of trouble with balance beam. I've torn
a lot of stuff in my lower legs
and ankles, but I
have thought quite a bit around
where this telescopes
to longitudinally if I don't
deal with it. Yeah.
I'm like, okay, this is already fear inducing.
Juliet's mother is a good example who is so active.
And you've been on the Grand Canyon with Juliet's father.
He's very active.
But about 10 or 15 years ago, Juliet's mom just said, I'm not riding a bike anymore.
I don't feel safe.
And guess what?
I trust her that she suddenly has said, this is outside my scope of experience where I feel like I can recover. That's a balance test.
So we can either do what we've always done is wait until someone falls and then be like, oh,
we should work on your balance, which works. We're going to now go to physical therapy and
do balance training. We started to really focus on, and performance side, bear with me everyone,
this intrinsic feeling of your foot pressure during these complex movements. Kettlebell swings,
air squats, back squat, power clean, whatever. We really realized that if we could get people
feeling what was going on their feet, we corrected a whole bunch of downstream movement perturbation
things that we would used to have a whole bunch of corrections for right oh the bar path is going here or this is happening or now you need to
shove your knee out but if i just said hey here's where your ball of your foot is and here's your
heel and keep your ankle in the middle best you can just in a organized foot let's see if we can
challenge that with all the things we're already doing exercise and it means that it translates to
like real world balance i'm gonna stand on this beam i want to pick up stand up paddling i i need
to be better on my feet and really the interesting question then comes to when and where do you do
this it turns out that we saw that balance was a performance hack and And in fact, my favorite thing in balance training,
I discovered in your garage. And one of the things I discovered there was this really cool
thing called a slack block. And it was like a portable slack line. And immediately I was like,
Tim is a genius. He's figured this thing out where I don't have to have a slack line,
but I can play with my balance.
I can challenge my balance in my kitchen.
Yeah, it's the size of a large brick.
Yeah, it looks like a brick.
Yeah, but it's squishy.
And I was just like, oh, Tim Ferriss, you.
I'm bummed out that I didn't know about this,
and you've brought this thing into my life.
Because what I found out was I could give those to my athletes like candy and be like, when you're making coffee, stand on this.
When I'm on Zoom calls, I am working my foot strength and balance.
So here's another vital sign, please, where you can say, hey, maybe I need to work on this.
Maybe I need to brush my teeth and my eyes closed or stand on one leg.
You should be able to stand on one foot easily for 20 seconds without putting
your foot down.
And if there's a difference left to right,
maybe because you got injured on that side or you do a certain thing on that
side.
That's okay.
You know where you can figure this out very quickly.
So this year,
ski boot slackline,
yes.
Ski boot slackline,
Franken slack skiing.
So this year I have skied and this is i mean it's taken some planning and a lot of commitment and moving things around but to really say okay i want to do
a really proper ski season for the first time in my life and that was this year it has been i mean
it's still going and when you start trying to move around on skis, not just
going downhill, but skating, say on flat ground or even uphill, holy cow, do you realize what
asymmetries you may have or turning one direction versus the other and what you end up doing with
your upper body? It's been an incredible diagnostic tool for me. And I'm not saying, I'm not saying everyone should use skiing this way.
Cause I realized skiing is not the cheapest sport to deal with,
but becoming more familiar with like foot pressure has real ramifications in
skiing.
Real ramifications for not falling down.
And boot pressure, right?
It's like if you're leaning back,
if you're wearing your heels versus weight on the toes versus weight on the
midfoot versus weight on the inside of the midfoot, say for edging. It's been really, really eye-opening
for me. And while trying to skate, which for people who are trying to envision this, I mean,
just imagine that you're ice skating, but you have skis on, which means it's a lot easier to
trip over yourself. And it's a lot easier to fall over an outside edge you just have
kind of different lever arms and so on and no ankle range of motion yeah and no ankle range
of motion i was like wow i'm really really asymmetrically compromised and that's okay
yeah that we have one side that's more dominant you professional skateboarder you drive a car
with your right foot it doesn't matter what the mechanism you tore your ACL in high school it doesn't matter what matters is that
you can become conscious of it and then think well what are the things that are in my control
and so you turn skating into a diagnostic tool into a vital sign as soon as you're aware then
you can start to connect the dots all these other places can i tell you yeah what ended up happening
so what ended up happening which i what ended up happening, which I was
only able to spot with video review, which is not that hard folks. It's like everybody has a
video recorder called a phone now. So I had someone record me from downhill. We looked at
it together and what came of it, it was very simple. It's like, oh, you're really kind of winging one of your poles up when you take this weaker turn.
It's like, try to keep the pole down, meaning keep the basket, the bottom of the pole, dragging on the ground.
And as soon as I did that, I was like, oh, that's a lot easier.
And now I can actually work on that weak side without as much fear involved.
So for this type of vital sign 20 seconds
on each foot is that the it's called the solec that's the 120 over 80 yep the the solec it's
standing one leg eyes closed so like oh the eyes closes that adds something that adds something and what we find is that when people are over reliant on
their vision and not their sort of intrinsic other vestibular systems other sort of input systems
then when you start to lose that this is why falling in the evening is a big problem for
people in the night they're over dependent-dependent on their fixation point
with vision. So it turns out, wait for it,
improving your ankle range of motion
means you have better reaction
when you get outside of your
base of support. And suddenly
you're like, oh, that foot strength and
ankle range of motion means that I can
right myself more quickly.
The brain is very
clear about, you can do this, you can't do this.
You have access to this position. I can open up and unlock the next level for you. If you don't,
your movement solutions start to be diminished and pruned in your brain. So when we start to
give people inputs and improve their inputs, the brain starts to say, oh, when you're falling or
you're outside of this basis of support,
we can start to give you movement solutions and movement options
to this perturbation in the system.
I want you to correct me if I'm wrong.
I'll also name the auditory pink elephant in the room.
So we've decided to take today as a rest day prior to extremely long international travel. What that means is we
are one of the few people in our rooms while the wonderful house cleaning crew is going to town.
So if you hear anything, it's not ghosts, no poltergeists, it's just cleaning going on.
There's a lot of cleaning that happens in Japan. It is immaculate. It is immaculate. Chances are the public bathroom at the bus stop, not kidding, is cleaner than your bathroom at home.
Very, very high probability.
100%.
In fact, there's been several times where you're like, Kelly, you need to come check out this washroom.
Oh, yeah.
I've said it multiple times.
I'm like, Kelly, it's your first time here.
Go to this public bathroom.
Tell me that.
Look, I trust you on so many levels.
You haven't been wrong.
This bathroom is amazing.
So just mentioning that.
But what I was going to say is,
and I haven't looked at the literature for this,
but just from observation, I would say,
your body will not allow you to operate
right up to the edge of your established comfort zone, whether that's
vestibular on the balance side or on say the flexibility slash strength side. And we have a
friend on the strip, I'm not going to mention him by name because I don't want to incriminate him,
but he is extremely athletic, taller and like here, I'll just say that. And very successful former competitive
athlete and incredibly inflexible. And it's become more and more of a problem as he has gotten
older. And the recommendation that he typically gets, and this is not to paint with too broad a
brush because I know there are many different types of yoga, but the recommendation that he gets most is you need to stretch more.
And I did one, and I'm going to get ridiculed by some people for this, but I'll tell you
before you ridicule it, try it, which is going to a very, very, very technical,
hard-ass Pilates instructor for personal instruction is,
I find it just incredibly impactful.
Joseph Pilates was not messing about.
Yeah, yeah, he was not messing around.
And so I took this friend to that class, and what we both noticed,
and this is not a miracle, I think it's just the way that things work,
is as he became more comfortable at his end range of motion, and as he started to gain
strength in that end range of motion, voila, suddenly the body's like, okay, now I'm not
afraid of you breaking us. Therefore, I will allow you an additional, say, two inches of hang in the yoga class.
But it came from strengthening at the end ranges of movement, not just stretching more passively.
And so I have to imagine balance works that way too.
Very much the brain is looking for inputs to perceive the world as safe or unsafe.
That's a really simple way of looking at it. The first thing
we can think about as where we want, as we talked about sleep, we want to add in these complex
solutions. The first order of business is to spend time in the positions you're
trying to improve and not do an end range like thing. Spend time in the end range.
If you're sitting on the ground and it's uncomfortable, the first thing we should do
is start to get you to start sitting on the ground more. It's that simple. So tonight,
just get off the couch. We love TV in our house. We love it. We love this thing. It's so clever.
It's a way that we'd like chill in the evening. We sit on the floor in front of the couch.
The English. As many times as I've recommended you go check out a Japanese bathroom,
you've recommended that I watch the English. I've not seen it, folks. However, Emily Blunt's in it, so automatic. It's excellent. Recommend. I'm not
being paid by Emily Blunt to say this. She should. Everyone is excellent. So if you just sit on the
floor, you're going to take some of your tissues to end range. And you're long sitting. It's just
sitting out with your legs in front of you
do you remember the sit and reach test in middle school yeah yeah that's long sitting so we're
actually going to train for the test we're going to train by the test just by making sure that
you're exposed there one of my i think you've maybe even you know who he is great cook fms
has this old saying i'm sure he cribbed from my anger. If you can't breathe in a position, you don't own that position.
So the first order of business is getting you to the end range shape.
Are you best of your ability today?
Because remember, your range of motion and capacity move is a moving target.
Just run a marathon, jump on an airplane, have a newborn.
And let's just test your hamstring range of motion.
It's going to be awful.
And so what we want to do is we want to more tightly conjoin our day-to-day
processes with understanding who we are. You don't have to go skate on your skis every day,
but sitting on the ground every day, you can be like, whoa, this side sitting is tough today.
I'll just do here and I'll spend enough time here. That takes some breaths here.
So when we come back to balance, one of the easiest things to do is figure out ways where
we can begin to expose it in a native way that you don't have to do another thing.
Everyone who's listening to this, you have some go-getters.
My friends listen.
They are killing their lives.
But I'm like, here's a list of 10 more things to add on.
They're like, thank you.
No, thank you.
So, for example, we have this friend named Chris Henshaw, who's a great coach.
And he discovered this thing called putting your shoes on.
And he wanted to create a test that he could beat his kids at.
So he called it the old man test.
And all you have to do is stand on one leg, use your hands, bend over, pick up your sock without putting your other foot down, put on your sock on one leg, and then put on your shoe.
All standing on one leg.
That's all you have to
do so it's like a it's like a single leg deadlift old man shoe on do you want to solve it that way
you can i don't really care how you want to solve it you want to come into a pistol you want to
hinge you want to do some kind of weird side caustic squat like Like it doesn't matter, but stand on one leg,
put your sock on and then reach down with your hand,
pick up your shoe, put your shoe on.
And you can cross your legs to do it.
You can put your knee to your chest, but you'll be shocked.
And really what's amazing there is instead of the static balance,
you're being moving and having to control it.
And you're going to make mistakes.
And some days, guess what?
You're going to be terrible at it because you're burnt.
You're over-trained, you're fried, you're stressed. So with balance specifically,
I've always wondered this, like what is the minimum effective dose for improving balance?
Because testing balance is one thing. Improving it may be another. I don't know enough about it.
There's a neural component. There's a vestibular component so if the hardware in your
inner ear and so on is damaged then you're probably going to be compromised or just age
or just age then there are the sort of musculo coordination pieces a lot of components there
are lots there's a lot so if i just want to go in and I've got, I want bigger lats, I want it, then I know how to do that.
Right.
Like go in and there are a million and one ways to do it.
But if you have a, let's just take a very, very simple example.
If you wanted to do one set to failure, it's like, okay, let me try to get, I'm not saying this is perfect, but like a hundred seconds under tension to failure.
Okay, great.
And you do that.
You wait a week.
Chances are your lats are
going to get bigger, especially if you're sedentary and you just don't have a lot of
lifting experience. What does that look like for improving balance? And I guess it depends on your
weaknesses, like which link in that chain is weakest, but I wouldn't even know how to dissect
that necessarily. And maybe we don't. Maybe we could start start by saying is there any time in your day-to-day
life regularly where you're challenging your balance so you're like i live work in a slackline
factory you probably said do you have a come back to the mini trampoline oh wow that maybe has some
real validity to it like just bouncing and suddenly you can start to understand traveling you mean
like the one person traveling?
Yeah. All of a sudden you're like, okay, how do I begin to challenge this vestibular system
where I am in space? How do I begin to challenge? What does that look like? Well,
for most of us, for a middle-aged dad, I can stand on one leg and put on my socks and work that.
What we found is that if we got put in some of this more balanced play, that slack device,
the balanced play was enough if we worked it into the kitchen. And what we saw was that we had
athletes who had stronger feet and better reaction times. Hard to quantify it. So how much is the
right amount of dose is the second question. The first question is,
how do we get you started on the dose? And I think if you're out on one ski, you're mountain biking,
you're walking on unstable surfaces, you're probably getting a lot of it. But I think what
ends up happening for a lot of us is that we don't get a lot of it. And we think we're experts at it
until we see the internet and we watch ourselves slip on icy surfaces
until we try to do parkour and then you're like oh actually wait a minute wait a minute here
or you go to a yoga class like go to a yoga class and look at how much programming is done on a
single leg and i'll tell you how effective your programming is if you think you've got the best
secret school program on the planet,
great.
Let's go apply that.
We're going to jump into Pilates class.
We're going to jump into yoga class.
Secret squirrel.
Secret squirrel.
Yeah.
Squirrel.
I wanted to bring up some notes of other vital signs because we've,
we think we've,
we've covered getting up off the floor.
We're starting to get into some physical vital signs.
Yeah, physical vital signs.
So I'm going to give you a cue,
and you can tell me where we go with this.
Shoulder airport scanner.
That's right.
So the first time I became...
The sass.
Shoulder airport scanner.
The first time I became aware of this, a very clever coach named Mike Boyle was talking to me.
He's like, you know that.
Yeah, he's a G.
He's been holding the door open for a lot of us for a long time.
And he said, oh, do I think the average working adult should Olympic lift?
Just watch them put their arms up over their head in the airport scanner, and you can answer that question.
Thank you, Coach Mike Boyle. And I suddenly was like, oh my God. You know, when you are in the
airport scanner and you have to put your arms up over your head, it's shocking to see how people
solve that little thing. So we see crazy banana backs and feet are turned out and bellies out
and elbows flared and it looks kind of ugly and
that's a pretty mid-range position so with the airport scanner test is really how well can you
put your arms over your head do you have to tuck your chin like you're in the you don't have to do
anything to solve the torture tower that's gonna put in a in a vice to get your hands behind well
one of the things that i'll have you know is that if you go to yoga class, what is the bane of every yoga class?
Downward dog.
Rest and downward dog.
We were talking about with our mutual friend.
Whose downward dog looks more like a plank.
And he's like, this is not restful.
Downward dog is two things.
Putting your arms over your head.
That's it.
And being in a long sit position.
Sitting with your legs out in front of
you. So it's almost like the yogis were looking around and they're like, we don't have any
equipment, but there's two positions that we've found to be very valuable for people. Having the
leg out in front of you, sitting to 90 degrees, which is an actual vital sign for, or a test for
physical therapists and putting your arms over your head. And if you go to a yoga class, you'll be like,
why are we spending so much time with my arms over my head? And it turns out, not only do we
have a healthier shoulder, but we start to untangle seemingly complex problems around neck pain.
Because your neck, your shoulder, and your back are a trifecta. They're a system. And if one aspect
of the system isn't working or less effective or doesn't have access to its range for whatever
reasons. And one of the things that happens as being modern people is that we just tend to be
a little stiffer in the upper back. You may not actually put your arms over your head ever until
you're asked to. Even putting your shirt on, you figure out all these ways to put your arms over your head ever until you're asked to.
Even putting your shirt on, you figure out all these ways to bend your arms and not put
your arms through over your head like a little kid putting their arms up.
You may not be hanging from a pull-up bar.
If we come back to Ido Portal, he prescribed hanging, simple hanging for people to improve
their shoulder.
What elegant programming.
If you suddenly are in an old gymnastics room, you're like, why are these stall bars here? There's stall bars everywhere. Hanging
is a thing that really worked and came out of all of our movement traditions.
And if it wasn't hanging, it was downward dog-like things. The gymnast friends I have
are obsessed with walking on their hands. You are obsessed. You like to be upside down,
walking on your hands, balancing on your hands. So what we found was this was a way of getting people to move their
upper backs and take a breath there. It was restoring this full range of shoulder flexion.
And again, you don't even have to be perfect. You just have to have more than you had yesterday.
And it's a really important way to improve the functionality of the neck
body system by honoring and looking at the
relationship between the shoulders and the body. And it's really simple. So we have you lay down
on your stomach, grab a broom, put your arms over your head with holding the broom. So the broom's
out like you're presenting the broom. Light contact with your head, just light contact,
just don't cheat. It's like you're Superman, but you're flying with a broom in your hand.
Yeah, that's right.
And all you need to do is lift that broom up off the ground, keeping your arms parallel.
And guess what?
It's shocking when you can't do that.
And that's really generous because we're allowing you to use your upper back.
And we're allowing you to use your shoulder.
And I don't care if you're a physical therapist and you're documenting.
Again, vital signs.
This is mid-range and what we find is if you're not exposed to that on the regular it can be shocking when you're
and then let's go into amazon and look at all the marketplace of all the thoracic wheels and
thoracic mobility and let's beat the crap out of your upper back with a lacrosse ball and
all of the things. You're a partially- It's fine. Oh, man.
You're not wrong.
It's like when I complain.
I'm like, Austin's always all these Bitcoin CrossFit ayahuasca bastards.
I'm so sick of it.
And people are like, you made that happen.
I'm like, no, no, no, no.
I can't take full credit for that. I don't take partial credit.
Look, it's very valid that what I saw was that you were having a hard time cleaning and jerking and walking on your hands or snatching.
And what we saw was that we improved people's thoracic spines and overhead.
If you have shoulder pain and you know someone in your family has shoulder pain, one of the things that you can do is to begin to just return your body to what its native ranges are. So I can't say definitively that your shoulder pain will go away if you restore your ability to put your arms over your head.
But there's a whole lot of things that get better.
And it may be that your brain starts to think differently about or perceive what's going on when it has more movement choice, when you're able to recruit more musculature, when your connective tissue is working better, et cetera, et cetera. And so again, we aren't saying you have to do this,
but we've come to understand that if you're going to swim, that's a great activity we should do when
we're older, right? Low weight bearing and super cool. But if you can't put your arms over your
head, that's going to sort of curtail your swimming. Not only will it curtail your swimming,
but if you don't have that range of motion and you swim regardless, you can also create all sorts of orthopedic
issues. Well, let's call them workarounds. Your body's going to solve this problem for you,
no matter what. A couple of things come to mind as I'm listening to this. The first is
a question, which we'll come back to, which is for people who get face down with the
broom handle and they're like my hands are glued to the floor or maybe they
can't even get their head arms over their head what are some building blocks
maybe some corrective exercises my thought here because I remember when I
was working with Jersey Gregorick amazing coach who's in Northern
California has several world
records in Olympic weightlifting and I've had one shoulder reconstructed and
also just haven't at that point had not prioritized straight arm overhead
positions so the long lever that's right right so the idea of doing say an
Olympic snatch was just out of the question. I mean, I would have killed myself or it really required surgery.
And getting stronger in the mid-back and at those end ranges,
which would be, I suppose, exemplified in the example you gave,
of someone laying on their stomach with the arms overhead,
holding the broom handle, and then lifting it off the ground.
That is strengthening that last few degrees.
What I found is once I strengthened those last few degrees for me,
whatever those last few degrees were, the body's like,
oh, okay, we're not going to break automatically?
We're going to give you a few more degrees.
Maybe it's not even strengthening.
It's just accessing and using.
Okay, that's interesting.
We put that software back into play.
So I'll answer your question.
When we're working with people who have pain
or incomplete range of motion or after surgery,
we regress a lot of movements.
And regression means, and here's a spoiler for everyone,
any rehab program, corrective exercise program, anything you're seeing on the web comes down to two things.
It's a version of these two things.
You're going to either go slower.
That's called tempo.
That's what we do for people when we want them to feel time under tension.
We just slow down.
It gives your brain a chance to understand where you are.
You can signal that this is a safe position.
We can move slowly.
We just move slower.
Or we stop.
Those are called isometrics.
So putting your arm over your head and taking a breath there is a fancy way of doing an isometric,
which means you're creating tension without moving the joint or moving the tissue.
Bruce Lee style.
Yeah.
And so notice that what we're testing you here is your ability to have some end range isometric control. So very fancy. All you need to figure out is kind of take a breath, actually five breaths, because I'm interested in you being able to breathe there, right? So what we can come back to is, well, what's the first thing I need to do?
Go get a pull-down machine for my living room?
Probably not.
Even put a pull-up bar in my living room?
No, probably not.
Let's get you.
Japanese table on a tree branch.
Kunte.
Let's begin.
Let's get you to grab your sink, walk your body back into an L, so you're hinged over,
and just start to put your hands, again, parallel, close to each other, and just start taking some breaths there.
And you could do the wall hanging.
Put your hands on the wall.
I don't have a sink.
Okay.
You live in a sink society, sinkless society.
So you put your hands up on the wall, walk down, walk back until you feel you can't go anymore.
Then just take five breaths there.
The first thing that you're doing is exposing yourself to the positions you want to improve.
If we are trying to teach a complex skill, we don't just lecture about the skill.
The thing we do is say, let's start the skill.
Let's make the skill slower so you can feel what's going on.
But we need to start to expose you to the thing.
If we're going to talk about skate skiing, that's super cool, but let's go skate ski a little
bit and see what happens first. And could we then say, well, I wonder if your lats are tight, or
it might be useful to see if we could get some sneaky ways into mobilizing specific aspects of
the movement system, get your thoracic spine to move more effectively. And this is why we actually have breathing as one of the practices here.
Because if you start to tap into this idea of breath,
you can use your lungs to get motion in your upper back.
That's so weird.
I do that a lot.
You showed this to me.
I thought you had almost killed yourself because we were in a sauna together
because we were doing a lot of hot cold and you took a huge breath and then
bent down over your quadzillas for those people who don't know is quads are
the size of my torso and hugged your own legs and popped your thoracic.
Yeah.
And I was like,
holy shit,
what'd you just do there?
Yeah.
I called the tower of
london the tower of london juliet and i were traveling we saw that in the tower of london
there was a torture device where you were kneeling in that basically that position
you put your chest on your legs and then someone would screw a vice over your back basically like
a wishbone and compress your back till you couldn't breathe anymore and i was like that's
sad christmas but i was like that's a clever way to get into
the upper back. I'm going to try that. So I went home, inspiration strikes all over the place,
right? Always be mobilizing. And I discovered that that was a really wonderful way to help
get this global flexion of my back. Instead of having my neck just hinging down, I wanted to
get more total rounding of the back
and you've heard you started a little internet fire with coach summer when you were like
jefferson curls are necessary and everyone was like bro you can't round your back you'll die
you know and like okay maybe but we do seem to round our backs a lot and maybe something you
want to do and that jefferson curl turns out to be a really simple isometric that anyone can do.
If you go to a yoga class, the amount of bending over you're going to do, rounding,
and then come back to flat, show me your control, and then round again.
Then let's see if you can extend your back.
Upward dog, downward dog, that's going from extension to flexion.
So we can, again, come back out of that and say,
well, what in your exercise program that you're doing for fitness, and really
it's not for fitness, it's usually for body composition, let's be honest, are you touching
these shapes that your body should do? And if they're not, you're going to have to come up
with a solution for putting them back into your diet. Yeah. You know, the number of times in any yoga class that there is the slow return to standing vertebra by vertebra
long before thomas jefferson ever came up with jefferson girls
long before there was uh there was a little kid in india was like this really makes people better
yeah i want to give a mention to something that was introduced to me by Boss Ritten, Famous Fighter, which is the O2 Trainer, which is a resistance device that allows you to have progressive resistance by breathing through a mouthpiece with different types of breathing exercises.
And I don't want to speak for Boss, but I think it's fair to say, and I've continued
to use this device and been super impressed by it. And using respiratory resistance has a number of
sets of clinical data to support that it reduces lower back pain. And I was like,
that's interesting. Found these studies on PubMed. And I was like, that's very interesting. Let me take a look at this. And what BOSS, these are all tying together,
BOSS would indicate sort of frontal breathing. There's a particular exercise for, let's just
call it frontal breathing, where you feel what you would normally feel, which is like,
if you're meditating, focusing on your breath, chances are it's your chest or your abdomen. But then he would round over and focus on back breathing.
And he said to me, be really careful with this.
He said, do not do 30 repetitions off the bat.
He's like, do 15 repetitions, 15 breaths.
Doesn't sound like very much.
And he's like, you will feel like you've done a thousand lap pulldowns the next day.
Your back will be incredibly sore.
And I thought to myself, that's strange.
Yes.
That doesn't make any sense.
And then I did it.
And lo and behold, incredibly sore in the back.
But becoming more familiar with the anatomy of breathing outside of the most obvious that
has been highlighted for us, which is the abdominal or chest breathing,
I found to be incredibly helpful for all sorts of things.
Pavel used to talk about breathing behind the shield. So if you're an Oreo cookie,
you should breathe into the cream filling when you're under load. We want you to have as much
movement choice and options. If you're carrying something or holding something, where are you
going to pick up that breathing? If you're compressed or you're like it can't just be diaphragmatic breathing you
can't just be and if you're running away from bears can you breathe up in your neck i sure hope
so yeah so one of the things that i went back and found the original notes from the original course
we did back in like 2008 and i have a section on breathing mechanics there. And I didn't realize now that I was just laying on gold.
And then, of course, we have through our friend Laird,
Brian McKenzie, and definitely Wim Hof, homage.
I start to become more breath interested.
And now if you come work with me or do some of our stuff,
we talk like the first intervention for back pain
is breathing. It's diaphragmatic breathing to get that diaphragm dissociated from the psoas
to get input into the movement system. Because when you breathe, you extend. When you exhale,
you flex. And if you're in bad back pain, I can get you to do a ton of small motions attached to your breathing that your brain thinks is non-threat.
And guess what?
It turns out also that if we do breath holds, isometrics, that can help attenuate pain.
And if we do long exhales after an isometric, well, that can also signal less threat to the brain. And so we can suddenly
tap in and use this breath as a mobilization device, as a diagnostic tool. What do you mean
you can't breathe in that position? As a way of self-soothing, as a way of control when I'm
stressed. Whoa, look at this crazy thing. And that's why, look, James Nestor wrote a great
book on it. If you look at Lauren Chaitau,
if you look at all the masters, I mean, Butreyko, shout out, Oxygen Advantage, like people have been
beating this drum. And the yogis figured this out very early. But because it was sort of wrapped in
the language of spiritualism, I think a lot of the athletes forgot. And we found that if we
thought about the mechanics, which is what you and I are talking about here, the mechanics of breath, not the CO2 tolerance or the breath control or downregulation.
We're just talking about mechanics.
We were able to improve people's VO2 max.
You think that's important to a world-class biker?
Being able to pressurize more meant that my Olympians lifted more at the Olympics because they could pressurize more
effectively. So we started, in my thinking, I started reorganizing how I was teaching,
and I put the breath volume as the core belief, core foundation, because suddenly it was a way
of people understanding. So you can do this. If you're just sitting here, take the biggest breath
you can. Just go ahead. Breathe through your here, take the biggest breath and you can just go ahead.
Breathe through your nose and we can actually measure that volume.
Don't change your position.
Now watch this.
You're doing this at home.
Get into a position where you think you can get more air in.
So Tim and I just both sat up.
We pulled our heads down.
We kind of organized our shoulders.
And I didn't say to do any of that.
I didn't say put your rib of that. I didn't say put
your rib cage down or change your pelvic position. I didn't say get into Shavasana with your shoulder
or tuck your chin. I just said, can you breathe more effectively in that position? And you did.
You got into position and you could tell, better, same, worse. We improved biomotor output by
organizing your body slightly differently. So now you have a powerful tool
to bring attention to your shape. So I don't think there are good shapes and bad shapes. I'm just
like, well, you can't really breathe in that shape, or that shape doesn't pressurize very well, or
that shape doesn't transfer. So if you're on your Peloton bike and you think you're killing it,
ask yourself, is there a position on this Peloton bike where I can take a bigger breath?
And you'll start to organize your body. And guess what?
You'll power more effectively. And because we see better function of the body, we see better
output of the body. And I think that's how we can begin to have people feel these things,
which seem like esoterica, but all of a sudden you're in a position where you could take some
breaths. So now arms over your head, take a breath. In that bottom position of the squat, take a breath. We suddenly have ways to begin to pressurize and to begin to restore
just based on that feeling I have of being able to take a bigger breath or take a bigger breath
or a better breath. So if I'm shrimping at my desk, good, that probably feels good sometimes,
shrimp at your desk. Then every once in a while, you're like, why do I have a neck ache? And then
ask yourself, can I take a breath, a bigger breath in a different position?
And that position tends to transfer a little bit better.
800G, I assume that doesn't mean $800,000, 800 grams?
800 grams.
So food can be a little sensitive for people. When we talk about food with people and
diets, 5% is per performance. I'm a cyclist runner, right? I want to build muscle. And the rest of it
tends to be around how do I change my body composition? So we'll start with that assumption.
Now, here is the non-trigger trigger warning.
If you're a vegan, carnivore, paleo, vegetarian, I'm still talking to you, okay?
Doesn't matter what you eat.
We found that when I, back up, didn't want to ever get near nutrition for all the reasons that it's complicated. It's highly individualized. It's cultural. People have strong ideologies around it
and really personal identities around it. It's super cool. I think nutrition for a lot of people
has become almost like entertainment. It's like a hobby.
Or religion.
Sure.
But if we get down to you're working with me and I'm worried about your tissue recovery or tissue health or you're injured because, again, a lot of times it comes through.
Or we're trying to keep a lean body mass on you because you're aging.
And it turns out maybe fat is a problem, but keeping your lean body mass is a bigger problem. When we actually get into how much protein are
you eating, people oftentimes do not get enough protein. And so notice that I'm like, oh, you want
to eat raw bear steak? You knock yourself out. You want to do plant pea cricket protein, you knock yourself out. I don't care. But let's see if we can establish what a reasonable amount
of that is. And again, what I really like in my life is getting something for nothing.
And something for nothing in this situation is that we found that when people started eating
more protein, guess what happened? They got fuller. So 800 grams of protein a day? No. Yes. That would be great.
For the low, low price of $69.95 per month with a free dialysis machine for the first year.
All you need to do. That's right. So we found that a reasonable amount of protein was somewhere
between 0.7 and 0.8 and one gram per pound body
weight. That's a reasonable amount. That's not crazy. We're not going to shock load you.
And remember, a lot of times, if you're trying to change your body composition or heal or grow,
you need to make sure you have enough protein on board. And so one of the things that we found was
this was an easy way of controlling satiety and actually making sure that people had on board
what they needed to recover and to heal. And what I'll ask you is if you count the protein that
you're growing children are eating, you might be shocked to discover they're actually in some
pretty low to moderate protein diets because it's hard to get kids to eat those things.
Okay. Protein aside, again, however you want to do that is fine with me.
If vegetarian, it may be harder to hit your protein minimums. But one of the things that we
saw a lot was our vegetarian friends would come in with these little tendinopathies and some of
these issues. And when we asked them about the whole sort of pantheon of potential behaviors that went along with that, we found that
they were really under-proteined. And the international track and field folks, everyone,
sports, they really have this one gram. It hovers around one gram per pound body weight. It really
ends up being a very reasonable number that a lot of people agree on. Okay.
Which is still a lot more than most people consider.
Great. So guess what? Now more than most people consider. Great.
So guess what?
Now you have a vital sign.
Okay.
And if you didn't nail it today, you'll nail it tomorrow.
So where's the 800 coming?
Okay.
So this is the magic.
We have seen a dearth of fruits and vegetables eating.
And this 800 grams comes from our friend, E.C. Sienkowski.
And E.C. came up with this idea that, hey,
what if instead of taking things out of your diet, we expanded your diet? What if I said, Tim,
you want to change your body composition? I'm going to have to have you eat a lot more.
You'd be like, well, sign me up. So 800 grams is 800 grams of fruits and vegetables. And it can be
frozen. They can be fresh. They can be they can be frozen they can be fresh they can
be cooked it doesn't matter so four big apples is 800 grams right so it's not as crazy as it sounds
it's not as crazy as bananas about 100 grams you can think of it that way so what i'm asking you
to do is eat fruits and vegetables and what we find is people don't really eat fruits and vegetables
they talk about it a lot and they have a little iceberg lettuce salad.
We've struggled to eat vegetables here in Japan.
Actually, not only have we struggled, but we went to a sushi restaurant
where one of our guides, who's fantastic, native Japanese,
and I was overhearing, and someone's like,
why are you laughing so hard, Tim? And I was like, well. And I was overhearing and someone's like, why are you laughing so hard,
Tim? And I was like, well, and then the guide explained, she said, well, I just asked where,
where can we get some vegetables? What are your vegetable options? Do you have vegetables? And
they're like, no. It says sushi on the door. What's the question? It's not a vegetable restaurant.
This is a sushi restaurant. So we're agnostic about how you do that. You're like, I'm a rutabaga guy.
Cool.
You want to get 800 grams of rutabaga?
But buried in there are these things called micronutrients, vitamins and minerals.
Yeah.
And what also buried in there is crucial is this thing called fiber, which most people don't get a lot of. And one of the things we've seen when we have gone into this diet culture where we restrict and take out, it's really not very sustainable.
And I have two daughters, full disclosure, one, who haven't always been the best eaters.
But if I pack them full of strawberries and apples and whatever they want to eat, fruits and vegetables wise, again, fruits or vegetables, if you're like, I don't eat vegetables i'm like down cool just you do you you do fruits that's fine we found that there's a
lot less room for crap in their diet yeah and all of the research is that 800 grams is about this
magic number where a lot of really good things happen to you from a health perspective fiber
micronutrients should you eat the rainbow sounds great great. Let's eat the rainbow. I try to get six to eight kinds of fruits and vegetables every day. It's kind of
a game. And guess what? Tomorrow? Six to eight servings? Six to eight different types. Oh,
types. Yeah. So a grape is one. Then I had some spinach and trying to eat this diversity. I think
it was Kate Shanahan of Deep Nutrition who wrote that we used to eat roughly somewhere between 40
and 50 different kinds of fruits and vegetables every year. Typical person in America. And now it's like three or four.
Like we just don't eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. And those two things,
we find that we have people focus on getting more protein, getting more fruits and vegetables.
There's just not a lot of extra room for keto donuts you know i mean like you're you're like holy crap i'm really like guess what everyone white potatoes it's a vegetable to
fried potato not a vegetable right we should probably do you have been advocating for these
very dangerous things called beans for a long time oh boy internet you're gonna give me a brian
mckenzie ted talk on beans? No. Beans count.
Towards your grams.
I'm like, how cool.
Redemption.
You're eating a thing that's a plant full of plant matter and fiber.
That's so great.
Let's eat more beans, right?
And I think, yes, of course, if you're a person who's like, beans cause me anxiety.
I'm not trying to be beanist here.
But if that's you, you're excused from eating beans.
And that's what I want to give people permission is saying,
hey, I understand you don't like these things.
What else can we open up to?
800 grams of kiwi fruit.
Do it.
Do it.
And you know what we found is that if you are like,
I'm only going to do this with apples,
you'll do that for four or five days and you're like, what else is that?
Kiwis are super cool.
Kiwi every day is a little bit much.
And again, we're looking at through this lens, this built to move lens of durability.
If we keep lean muscle mass on you and get fiber and micronutrients in you,
you're probably going to feel better and do
better long haul.
And maybe we have all the things your tissues are going to need to repair and heal.
And sometimes that is one of our friends described as supply chain economics of your tissues.
There's a reason here in Japan they eat everything.
All the collagen, all the skin, all the bones, everything.
Those things have been part of our diet for a long time. Yeah, totally. So a few thoughts for folks also on
top of that. So with getting an increased volume of vegetables, fruits, it may make sense if you have the savings to do so and the cash flow.
Look at a list called Dirty Dozen.
There are certain plants that have more pesticide exposure in the United States.
Totally.
And so you can use that to selectively either avoid certain things or consider selectively buying certified organic so that you're not
dealing with like a strawberry is my understanding it's like a sponge so maybe spend your money on
better strawberries yeah yeah or like stick with bananas but you don't need the skin that's right
less skin it's not great but you'll notice there it's easy to demonize meat, for example. And I didn't
even say eat organic meat. I just said, whatever you can afford, whatever works in your socioeconomic
system is going to be a better health outcome than not getting enough protein and fruits and
vegetables. Yep. So on the vegetable side of things, most people in the US don't think in
grams. And I recognize this is an international audience, but a lot of US. Most people in the U.S. don't think in grams, and I recognize this is an
international audience, but a lot of U.S. listeners. What's the easiest way to figure that out?
Here's the caveat, of course, is that if you have control issues, right, and this has been
a problem for you in the past, don't weigh and measure everything. Kind of get a rough idea of
what it is, right? Like, hey, look it up. You can see, like, what a grapefruit way? What is this bag of spinach is 12 ounces. Great. I'll eat this bag
of spinach. I'm eating 12 ounces, right? It's in grams there too. And if you, once you have a sort
of a rough idea or wait for it, did I eat a banana this morning for breakfast plus pineapple plus a
salad plus tomatoes? That was all the fruits and vegetables I consumed this morning. And what I do
to myself is I hate weighing things. Juliet loves to track it. I don't. We're different.
So I obsess on, I should probably eat more fruits and vegetables every meal.
Like it's that simple for me. And I end up when I do track it, usually right around there above.
And this is not that big a deal. What
I'm saying is add some beans back to your Chipotle bowl. That's what I'm asking you to do. And you
can get a really cheap scale on Amazon. Or again, you can just look up the reference. Because what
we're trying to do is make this sustainable. And what's sustainable is gamifying. Tomorrow,
I was on the airplane. I did terrible. I reached for donuts. Great. Tomorrow,
you get to play again and again and again and again. And Juliet and I really have found that,
for example, for us, I don't know if you know this, Tim, about me, but I love sweets.
On this trip, I have noticed. Yes. I have granted Japan.
Deep in the paint.
Has exceptional sweets. Can i shout out my daughter
yes georgia star at texted me and said you need to go to 7-eleven and get a strawberry and cream
sandwich we went to 7-7-11 so i found that and george fortunately that's just one square block
in japan georgia star at you are correct and i've used this opportunity of burning lots of calories to eat all of those strange and wonderful japanese sweets so for me i have a
penchant for eating sweets i love it but this morning there was no frilliness like we're not
outputting today i didn't have any carbohydrate the carbohydrate i had today was in fruits and
vegetables on my on my plate and what this does is it expands what I'm eating every day, and it leaves me less room for toast.
It leaves me less room because I'm full, and I'm trying to play this health game.
And I am obsessed.
The thing I fear the most for my own body right now at age 50 is tweaks of soft tissue.
That's the thing I fear the most. Tweaks of soft tissue. That's the thing I fear the most.
Tweaks of soft tissue.
Like pull a muscle, tweak a tendon,
like a little hotspot, tendinopathy,
like plantar fasciitis.
Like I do a lot of things to keep any of that at bay.
That's how I'm viewing my tissue health.
If I have tissues that are more robust
and are loaded regularly and decongested,
I'm less likely to be taken out with my sore shoulder.
So you're about five years ahead of me, I guess. I'm 45. You mentioned Gray Cook and
the functional movement screen, FMS, and he has certain movements that are used to diagnose.
What would you have me do? It doesn't have to be i mean we're
not necessarily going to go through it physically right now but if if i were to say all right
kelly i want to be hard charging nothing crazy but like still have the capacity to go out with
my most athletic friends around the same age and have physical adventures i want to do that
multiple times a
year. What are some of the screens that you would put me through? The most important thing would be
show me how you're loading your tissues. That's the first thing. I don't start with an assessment.
The assessment is the thing. So we're going to press today no matter what, but we're just going
to limit your range of motion overhead. And we may slow down. We may not snatch, but we're going to press today no matter what, but we're just going to limit your range of motion overhead. And we may slow down.
We may not snatch, but we're going to go overhead in some way or another.
People who can't go overhead often can hang from a pull bar.
A way I assess programming, because people ask me to look over their programming a lot, is I look at key positions.
What are, we call them archetypal shapes.
They're sort of the bookends or reference positions for your body. And the
shoulder is actually not that complex. It only does like four overly things. There are variations
that moves between those things, but it goes over your head, goes out in front of you,
goes out to the side, wait for it, goes behind you. That explains all complex movement of the
shoulder. Some combination. You may not actually touch some of those end range positions, but you should have access to them. And what's cool about range of motion is it's
actually one of the few attributes of your physicality that doesn't have to change when
you age. It doesn't mean that you have to lose your ability to flex your hip, bring your knee
to your chest. Who cares about that? Lower yourself to the ground to poop in the toilet. Get up and down off the ground. So this is a highly trainable aspect.
So one of the things we want to do inside your resistance training, your loaded movement training,
which is unfortunately you're going to have to do. We have at the very end of the chapter
of the book, we have a little chapter called Never Do Nothing. So Dave Spitz of Cal Strength is like, never do nothing. He's old like me. He's really busy, has a family. And he's like,
well, some days I just did like some pull-ups in the garage. That's what I got today. Never do
nothing. And ultimately, if you want to then say, okay, I want to be durable, Kel, and I want to have the opportunity, then some of these
behaviors, range of motion things, you could do if you didn't have access to exercise. They can
help you create a foundation. Then we are all at base camp, and that's why we call them base camp
behaviors. Then you and I are saying, well, hey, I want to go up Everest. And now our Everest is,
can we ski six days in Japan and not implode
and come out intact?
Then we can work backwards and say,
what exposures do we need to have? And by skiing,
I think you mean it mostly
in the way that Laird
Hamilton, famous big wave surfer,
said they should call surfing paddling
because it's 90% paddling.
By skiing, we mean
mostly sliding up mountains.
I don't know if you noticed this.
Not only am I the oldest, but I'm also the largest.
Uh-oh.
One of our guides is akin to Legolas.
Like, she doesn't even deform the snow when she stands on it.
Yeah, she can run across the snow.
Yeah, and I'm like, hey, we're not the same animal right now.
I am a snowplow.
That's generous. You are an arctic hare
so ultimately if we start with this root pattern shape this idea of this i call it the archetype
then you have a master key of understanding any movement structure, any physicality, any system, because what you're ultimately seeing is different tools to challenge fundamental position shapes.
If you're a gymnast, you may be walking on your hands and swinging from a bar overhead. If you're an Olympic lifter, you're lifting overhead. Maybe you're in the gym doing lat pulldowns. You're going to yoga, you're doing downward dog, you're on the reformer. Suddenly,
you're like, oh, okay, everyone says being overhead is important. And here are all the different ways to train that. And I'm probably going to need to do some resistance around that,
some kind of progressive loading. And again, we can have now nuanced conversations,
how strong do you need to be to do what we did? I don't know. How durable do I want to be? I want
to be all the durable. So I think one of the things that it's a fair criticism of fitness
is that we have convinced everyone to basically become doomsday preppers,
where you're never strong enough. Strength is never a weakness. You're never fit enough.
That is crazy. One of my good friends has this idea now. He's like, maybe we should not call
it functional fitness, which is sort of a scarcity mindset.
We should be calling it practical fitness.
Can you do what you need to do?
And if you're saying, I need to ski up a mountain for two hours
and descend in minus 10 degrees,
that's a different set of circumstances
than I want to walk around the block with my baby.
But the kinds of training, ultimately,
we're going to need to put you under some load.
How to do that? Simple loading for someone who's listening who doesn't like to
exercise could be jumping. There's an old Russian saying, when you stop jumping, you start dying.
The Chinese say you're as old as your spine or you're as old as your feet. And again,
if I got those wrong, please, you can correct me. You can correct him. But the idea here is there are fundamental truths about how we load. Do you remember in the 90s,
every woman suddenly was osteoporotic. Everyone had osteoporosis. And they're like,
you need this calcium chew. And we sold calcium chews to everyone in America. And it didn't
change the bone density of everyone because we didn't change the loading of anyone. So ultimately,
for you as a middle-aged person, I need to make sure that you have control through these things.
So we would do more strict kinds of movements. And suddenly you're like, oh, wait a minute,
that looks like classic strict gymnastics training. That looks like classic barbell training.
That looks like simple kettlebell training, like some of these strict push-up i have taught on every continent except antarctica and everyone knows what a push-up
is and what the bench press is everywhere so it's like training and movement is the fundamental
common movement language so now we can say well what tools do you have what's your training
experience but ultimately we need to do something that goes
up and down and rhymes with a squat. How you want to do that? You want a goblet squat, you want a
back squat, you want a full snatch, you want to squat to a chair. There's a really famous test
in physical therapy called the timed up and go. And it's you stand up out of a chair, you walk 10
meters, you turn around, you sit back in the chair. We can time you. That's a power. They're measuring wattage because you can put a clock on that. And it's a
really good indicator of fall risk. Litvinov, one of the most famous hammer throwers in all time,
used to front squat 200 kilos for seven and then run 400 meters. That's the same test.
So you can see same test. Those are very different extremes, but that's the same thing.
So you and I can have a polite disagreement about how big and strong you need to have,
how much we fetishize and need to be in the gym to develop the capacity, and how much we need to
spend other time becoming more skillful or more springy or playing. And I think we have, and as I said,
it's a fair criticism of strength and conditioning gym culture that we have obsessed on these
gigantic, huge bodies, big pinch presses, right? It's easy to quantify that. There's a famous coach
named Bondarchuk, who is one of the greatest throws coach in the whole history of the world.
And he's like, you're probably strong enough.
I know you can add another kilo to the bench, but what you need to do is go throw more.
It's more fun for a thrower to add a kilo to their bench than to go throw some implement more times.
So one of the things that has worked well for me and some of the older people is that we're always challenging position. Remember that root idea of
the gym is that we're challenging positions and shapes. In fact, your brain isn't wired for
musculature, it's wired for movement. So a shape is really just a snapshot of a movement. So
squatting up and down is a movement that we need to challenge. And we can change the variables.
Where are you holding that? How upright is your torso? How fast are you going?
But it can also not just make it heavier.
I can also say, well, like what we did, I need you to walk up this hill for two hours,
blow yourself out, and then I need you to squat all the way down.
How well are you going to handle that squat under some metabolic demand?
There were some times where I'd post-hold up to my waist, and I'd do a deep one-leg
squat, and my heart rate was at 190 already. And I like whoa how do I train for this yeah right or you go really fast
in chest deep powder and then you stop in chest deep powder and you're like my legs are stuck
my legs how do I yes I need camel camel hip flexors to get this so it turns out just being
stronger though in that moment doesn't actually solve the movement problem, does it?
You need to be competent with the skilled movement under cardiorespiratory demand, breathing hard, under metabolic demand, a little fatigue.
There are real loads out there, real loads who are fighting.
Like I was like, wow, I'm really glad I have a big butt doing this, right?
There was a skill component to it.
And so suddenly we can, what's really great about viewing the training of shapes is that
it allows you to have permission to do what you like to do.
And so instead of saying my hard style, your non-hard style, we're not fighting that.
You think that this is the kind of training that really speaks to you,
that puts you in a community, that hits these things. We can test the veracity of your training by dropping in over here and seeing how well you do. You should be able to jump into Pilates class.
You should be able to handle that. If I hand you some dumbbells, you're like, okay, I can do that.
I don't care if it doesn't matter if you're the strongest at dumbbells or Pilates class,
but you should be able to transfer those skills back and forth. And now, rinse, wash, repeat for a few decades. And what you'll find, we have a simple test in the book. We talk
about squatting, of course, because I love squatting. But it turns out squatting is one
of the ways to restore your back and to get flexion in your spine, this big butt ass to
grass squat. It's a nice test of hip range of motion, ankle range of motion, balance.
But for those people who can't,
we say, hey, let's squat to the chair.
And then today, if you've never squatted before,
you're gonna do one squat.
And tomorrow you can do two squats.
And the next day you're gonna do three squats in a row.
And you're just gonna build up for a month.
And guess what's gonna happen after 30 days
of doing 30 squats in a row?
Your life is going to change.
But we just have to begin some progressive overload
for some of these things.
Yeah, totally.
So if I were thinking about the last couple of groups of foreigners I've come
with to Japan, and I'm painting along national lines, let's just say, and this will tie then
into the question of age groups. I could look at, just let's limit it to this group and how people look trying to sit
the way we are sitting right now. There are plenty of things that other people in this group,
plenty of things they can do that I cannot, just to be very clear. I happen to be
good at sitting on Japanese floors. Nailed it.
There are some incredible athletes on this trip, but they're bad at sitting on the floor,
right? So I could think, all right, that like external rotation of the femur is something as a group they might want to
pay more attention to just as an example sitting in a kind of cross-legged or one leg on top of
the other position which they can't currently do if we were to take a kind of very specific picture
so let's just say former athletes, not high-level athletes.
I mean, I'm basically talking about myself, right?
So I competed at a decent level through high school and college in various things.
Was never world champion, was never Olympian, anything like that, but was very movement-immersed.
And then trained very,
very seriously.
And then let's just say between who knows,
35 and 45,
maybe the training got a little lighter.
Maybe it got a little more sporadic and this is the group we're dealing with.
So let's,
let's just say these are my people.
Yeah.
So let's just say we have 145 year olds who kind of mirror that.
Like me,
they got some aches and pains. Maybe they've had a couple of fractures, maybe one or two surgeries.
That's the group. Much like looking at this group that came to Japan and saying, huh,
seems like a lot of these guys have trouble sitting with their legs sort of splayed open
in any way in that type of kind of post
competitive athletic group that I described with some aches and pains and
some injuries are there any particular types of movements I know this is kind
of question that you may hate but I'm just curious if there any particular
types of movement training that come to mind where you're like, you know, I think that group should overall be doing
more of A, B, and C? I think we sold hard cardiorespiratory fitness. That is, you had
lungs like Lance Armstrong, all things would be solved. And it's easier to quantify that because
you can go wattage, you can count and look at heart rate and power. Let's say the biking. And it's easier to quantify that because you can go wattage, you can count and look at
heart rate and power. Let's say the biking. And again, Juliet and I are huge cyclists. We love
to ride. And riding is great for these reasons. Very time efficient. And it's what we call high
physiology, low skill. Put your feet here, put your butt here. Grab the hands here. You have five points of contact. Very safe. Mid-range. Not full leg flexion, not full knee flexion,
not full hip flexion. You're just going to move around. And we can die. You can die. I can kill
you on that thing. I can pour hate on you and you can suffer and vomit on the bike. And what you
think is, wow, that was really hard. I'm fit. Until you need to move yourself
through the environment a little differently. And I think we've confused work output. We've
confused some of the cardiorespiratory capacity. If I took the criticisms from some of the big
thinkers who reacted to CrossFit on its strengthitioning Bros. They have some valid ideas here. How well
are you actually challenging this and using this in the world? And now the question is,
how much fitness is the right amount of hard fitness and shouldn't I play? And is there
anything wrong with going to the gym every day for an hour and smashing yourself? No.
But if all you're doing, again, having some vital
signs. One of my favorite vital signs in the book is called the couch stretch. And here's why you
should care about the couch stretch. One is you're going to find out that you suck at it. You're
welcome. And all you do is put your knee into the corner of the wall. You're on hands and knees,
kind of facing off the wall. And you put your knee into the corner where the wall meets the floor.
And then you just bring your other leg up into a lunge. Squeeze your butt. Your back leg is
bent, and you're in a lunge position, using the wall to support that. That is a shock to people
because their quads are stiff or their brain's protecting, whatever the mechanism is. They can't
access that position. They can't squeeze their butt in that position. They can't take a breath
in that position. They can't even hang out in that position. And that is an easy position to be in.
But if your environment doesn't cue you in to also being a diagnostic tool regularly,
because your body is so robust and so badass and so good at working around these things for so long,
it's designed for survival.
Your brain doesn't care if you're missing hip extension.
But that hip extension is you walking up a hill,
having that knee behind you when you walk or run or lunge, that shape.
What goes away faster than anything, what movement quality and capacity is compromised in this society more than any other movement is that hip extension.
Why?
Well, we do a lot of cardio on the bike.
The elliptical machine was genius because it just removed hip extension entirely. You can stand up, but you don't have to take your hip extension.
Congratulations. And all the sitting we do is modern workers and the commuting. And we're sort
of cued in. So we just don't get a lot of exposure here. And again, if you dropped into Pilates,
you're like, whoa, a lot of hip extension. And if you yoga, like a lot of warrior one,
like, why are we doing this long lunge at a chaturanga it's because they recognize this is a position we
want to nurture and if i could say wave my magic wand and say i would like you to spend more time
in this position suddenly you could still squat but you just do a bulgarian squat or a split squat
right you instead of pressing a barbell over your head,
I just want you to put your front foot up on something and press.
I want you to push a sled.
Oh, that sounds familiar.
We've seen that, right?
That's out in culture.
And when we, again, stop talking about the capacities,
but look at the shapes first,
then it's all like, what tools do I have available to me?
How can I do this?
Throwing your foot up on the edge of a couch and jumping out into a big lunge, nailed it.
And let me give you an example.
We regularly work with really good athletes and teams who have these deficiencies.
I've worked with several Olympic lifting, Olympian groups who don't do enough hip extension.
And all we did was start programming in hip extension
for them these shapes of being like a lunge lo and behold everyone's back pain got better and
their lifts went up so weird and so again what i want to do is say let's make sure that we're not
confusing capacity with movement choice yeah because i think that goes away really fast. What we've seen, we can have really strong,
very, I'll put in quotation marks, fit people who aren't very skilled at moving. So how's my
fitness? I don't know. I just had to balance on one leg and put my ski on and the binding I didn't
love on the side of a mountain, right after being smoked. Let me tell you how my fitness is. Like,
that's the test yeah yeah totally
and for people who want to get a visual on the couch stretch you can certainly just
give it a search on google but if you imagine the capital letter n and then put like a little
circle in the very middle of that the left side of that would be your front leg, and the right side of that would be the rear leg with the knee in that corner.
It's also in four-hour body.
Yeah, it is.
It is indeed.
That's how long I've been saying you should be doing the couch stretch.
It is.
It isn't.
And I think you're demoing on an actual couch.
I am demoing on our couch, our old couch.
Back when we both had a little more hair.
Oh.
I don't even know how much hair I had then.
You know, one of the things that I just want people to hear is that we're trying to build an extra capacity to the system.
And oftentimes, the initiation for a lot of the reasons why people are interested in this
is pain or I can't do something that I want to do.
My friends are going to Japan and I can't ski or not from a skill, but my knee hurts.
That's a problem.
So where do we begin to tug?
Do I have to go hire an expert and go seek this thing and go away from my family and
take time off from my job?
That's a yes. Great. Cool. You can afford that and fly in your private physical therapist to
work with you. That's doesn't seem that scales very well. And what we instead can do is say,
hey, look, here's things that you can do in the course of your day. And this really, right or wrong, Juliet, who is our CEO, my partner, world champion,
superstar, she really felt attacked a little bit sometimes when people talked about their
morning routines and all of the things they did to optimize their day and biohack their day.
And she's like, I am so swamped. And this really feels unaccessible to me. It feels like a bunch
of single people with a bunch of free time, right?
And interestingly enough, the thing that I ended up kind of getting out of PT school by looking at was barriers to adherence.
What keeps people from doing what they want to do?
And one of the things that we started to recognize as we worked with some of these groups is that we couldn't just say, do this.
We had to say,
when are you going to do it? How do you fit it in? So all the things we've talked about are
wonderful. But if you're a person who has a life, you have to ask, where are these moments where I'm
going to be able to fit these key behaviors? And I think that's one of the things that we've really
started to appreciate and say that we need to do a better job of showing people
where they're going to have some agency and control. The Karate Kid approach.
That's right. Wax on, wax off. Filt it in. Put on your shoes standing on one foot.
You've nailed it. I haven't been training. Yes, you have. You just don't know that you have.
Show me. Oh, man. Why don't you tell people a bit more about the book and who it's for, right?
Who is it written for?
Who is it best suited to?
Imagine that one of the things that we, Julie and I, felt like was that we, as fitness,
and again, part of the fitness machine, and we're as a cog in the machine,
is that if we ask ourselves, how are we doing? If fitness is the promise is to transform society
and make people healthier, are we living up to that? And what we really feel like is, well,
the objective measurements are, well, let's look at obesity or diabetes or chronic pain or
persistent pain or injuries or surgery or depression.
And what we see is that I think 100% of those things are trending in negative ways.
So if fitness is a trillion-dollar industry and we're not making people fitter and whatever, expanding their fitness besides,
I look great on Instagram with my abs, right?
Just expanding that definition a little bit.
Then we have to start asking sort of a different set of questions around this. So this book is for
whom potentially fitness has left behind. Hey, I don't identify with exercising. Cool. That has
nothing to do with being durable. Think about how many people in there, when we were in some of
those towns, we saw some elderly people here. How fit were some of those elderly Japanese people?
They didn't bench press a lot.
I don't think her deadlift was very strong, that 90-year-old we saw.
But there's something about being durable and being useful, however we're defining that, that there is a set of things you have to keep doing that your body just requires.
And then we can layer on exercise if that feels good.
So imagine the first thing order of business is saying,
hey, look, let's get everyone to base camp.
And then we can argue what color rope you should take up the Everest route.
Because I feel like that's the conversation on the internet.
And people are like, wait, wait, what's base camp?
What's Everest?
The number of people that stop us in our community.
Remember, Jill and I are just parents in our street.
And they're like, hey, do you think I should do this keto shred?
And what do you... There's a lot of questions we get where people are don't know how to be sustainable they don't know how to exercise because we've overwhelmed them with
options and choices and data and flashy signs so if we can get built to move into those hands first
or how about this?
You love fitness.
You're into this stuff.
I'm into this stuff.
And I have always wanted a reference.
I'm going to be like, start here.
This is not diet and exercise.
Just have a go at this.
And then let's talk.
We'll sum up when you're ready to learn how to swing a kettlebell. Or you're a physician who says, hey, I know you're on this blood pressure medicine,
and this isn't the place to have these complex psycho emotional behavioral conversations in this
eight minutes, but here's something you can do. We know that it's going to make a healthier,
more robust platform. And we gave this book to our world champion friends. And we're like,
how do we do? And they were like, this really helped me because I had some holes here that I wasn't thinking about. I wasn't walking enough. And I
was wondering why my knee was hurting. And it's trite to say, who's this for? I want,
Juliet and I really want to make sure that we've reached out to people who haven't been served well
by the fitness community. Because what we see is that those people who are in, it looks like a
classist society in terms of fitness and health now people are measuring and monitoring and tracking and
like getting fitter meanwhile everyone else is saying hey i don't even know where to start
i would also say tell me if you disagree with this but a lot of folks probably who think they
are being served by whatever form of fitness they're consuming when they get taken out
of a very narrow band of fill in the blank cycling fill in the blank power lifting fill in the blank
some form of bodybuilding once they're thrown into an environment that is a little more stochastic requires movement patterns that are a little
more varied they're like oh shit our friend mark bell couldn't put a shoe on without sitting down
and using a shoe horn when i first met him yeah there you go he was he was a little champion yeah
but couldn't put a shoe on yeah he wore like his shoes were always tied now look what happened to
mark yeah you know as an idea of i think that's really a
great and we might even say we have some vital signs to help you identify your blind spots and
i think if we have always right or wrong we've always said if we can give people the tools
the right people the right tools they know how to incorporate in their lives and make the change
you have seen that i have seen people come up up to you a hundred times and say that you changed their life.
And you're like, I've never met you.
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
But given the tool, people are smart enough to have figured that out.
And that's what we want to do.
You don't know what you don't know.
This is a really simple way.
And I want everyone to understand this is what Juliet and I do. And this is what we have been sort of winnowing out of our elite performance conversations
with all the crazy teams that we work with. Kelly, we've covered a lot of ground.
Built to Move is the book. Actually, just everybody check it out because we are built to move turns out that this fancy brain of ours is
scaffolded around this machine that is intended to move through space and i think the diversity
of our movement diet much like the vegetables it's gone love that from dozens down to just a handful. And there's no way that doesn't end in tears, right?
Individually and collectively.
So I'm really excited to have a set of vital signs,
the descriptions, the means of self-assessing
to identify blind spots.
Areas of opportunity.
Growth opportunities.
Growth opportunities, which I'm very excited about
because this trip for me has been decades in the making,
in a sense, and I've always wanted to bring
some of my closest friends to Japan and to train.
I mean, I really trained my ass off for the last six weeks,
more than six weeks, but especially in the last six weeks
to make sure that I wouldn't be a total embarrassment. And it was still hard. I mean, it was still hard. And I was like, okay,
45, it doesn't seem impossible to me. I'm not going to be Laird Hamilton, but it doesn't seem
impossible to me that if I approach training in an increasingly intelligent, surgical way with regular self-assessments,
that I could be doing this stuff 10 years from now if I play the cards right.
But to play the cards right, you've got to know what the game is, what's in your hand.
And I think Built to Move will help people to do all those things.
Any other closing comments, requests of the audience,
anything you'd want to point people to, anything at all that you'd like to say
before we go have a gigantic Japanese lunch?
Three things.
One, be consistent before you're heroic.
Yes, excellent advice.
Two, wait for it.
The glacial pace is the breakneck pace.
It takes time to make change.
Your body is there for it. The glacial pace is the breakneck pace. It takes time to make change. Your body is there for you.
It just may be that you have to put the burning tractor trailer out of fire first before you back it down the blind alley.
Like it takes a second.
But it always works.
And three, you're not alone.
Bring someone with you on this adventure.
If that means just you walked out after dinner and that was what you started for this week, grab one of your family members.
We think that the living unit is the functional unit of change.
That's where you begin.
So bring someone along with you.
Roger that.
Thanks for bringing me along with you.
I'm going to have to go into some counseling for getting dragged up this hill.
There you have it, folks.
Kelly, always a pleasure.
Thank you, Tim.
And to everybody listening,
we'll have links to everything in the show notes
as per usual,
Tim.blog slash podcast.
Just search Kelly Starrett,
S-T-A-R-R-E-T-T.
There are many episodes.
This will be the most recent, of course.
And Built to Move is the book. Check it out. Until next time, be just a little kinder than is necessary. That includes to yourself. Remember, be consistent before heroic. Good advice for a lot of things, whether that's writing, walking, hanging, squatting down to take a heroic poo in a Japanese bathroom. You never know when you're going to need that skill.
Facts.
Facts.
And thanks so much for tuning in.
Talk to you next time.
Ja ne.
Hey guys, this is Tim again.
Just one more thing before you take off.
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