WHOOP Podcast - Dr. Kelly Starrett shares everything you need to know about mobility, injury prevention, and performing at your best.

Episode Date: August 11, 2021

Dr. Kelly Starrett, a world-renowned performance and mobility expert, explains how mobility is so much more than just technique for injury prevention – it’s one of the fundamental keys to unlocking your best performance. Kelly sits down with Mike Lombardi for a wide-ranging discussion on how to improve your range of motion and what he believes are the benchmarks to good human functioning. He details why he uses WHOOP (2:20), the importance of movement (6:30), avoiding the "training until you break" mentality (12:35), dealing with injuries (13:45), different types of movement (19:11), how the pandemic affected our bodies (23:55), sleep and long-term health (28:31), movement minimums (30:18), defining mobility (34:53), Becoming a Supple Leopard (36:31), fitness and quality of life(48:46), and why you should raise your own performance expectations (49:38). Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, where we sit down with top athletes, scientists, experts, and more to learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak. And what you can do to unlock your own best performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop. We are on a mission to unlock human performance. If you haven't tried Woop, you can check it out at Woop.com. get a membership 15% off on me. Use the code Will Ahmed, W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D. Okay, this week's guest is world-renowned mobility expert, Dr. Kelly Starrette.

Kelly is a physical therapist, a trainer, and the best-selling author of becoming a supple leopard. And if that isn't enough, he also coaches Olympians, Crossfitters, and top athletes across all of the major sports teams. Kelly is the superhero of all things mobility. He joined Mike Lombard to explain how mobility is so much more than just technique for injury prevention. It's one of the fundamental keys to unlocking your best performance. He also covers the difference between mobility and flexibility, how to improve your range of motion, and what he believes are the benchmarks to good human functioning.

I think this podcast is so relevant, especially when you walk around, you see everyone hunched over on their cell phones, their posture looks like shit. this is a very important message. So without further ado, here are Mike and Kelly. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Woo Podcast, live at the CrossFit Games. I'm joined by Dr. Kelly Starrett. Most of you hopefully have heard of this brilliant, brilliant man.

PhD, formerly MobilityWod, now the Ready State. You've probably read the book, becoming a supple leopard. Keep going. I love this. Talk about my dancing prowess. Great dancer. saw him at a dance at a wedding in 2015, really absolutely, I don't think Palm Desert's been the same sense. So, Kelly, thanks for joining us. Always good to talk about WOOP. I know you did that on purpose. A Woop has, is such a net positive, so I'm going to gush, because we don't,

I actually don't work directly with Woop other than being a fan and our whole family's on it and our staff. But we have needed a way to talk about what's going on on the inside and such a cogent way and I think that's one of the missing pieces around a unlocking a lot of untapped potential because it really is not about people to understand this is not about doing less it's actually about doing it right so you can do more right and then secondarily having a better way in to take what we're learning in our laboratory our sports performance laboratory and say hey look here's what we know about how much you need to sleep and here's how we need about looking at your movement so we can actually take those lessons and apply them back towards the rest of society

which is actually the highest calling of science, which is to inform the humanities. And that's largely kind of what you're doing now. We'll get there. I mean, you're always, you always have a fun project that's driving the human race forward. So let's just start with your own background growing up.

My mom was a psychologist, single working mom. I'm an only child. I grew up in Europe. My mom got me out of the States early on. And the reason that's salient is that I grew up, in an environment where the best athlete was the kid who was the best at everything. So we didn't have soccer players. If you just played soccer, which we all did, you were an incomplete athlete.

You had to ride your bike, play soccer, mountain bike, ski. And really, we worshipped sort of the multidisciplinary approach to that as a kid. And we were out in the woods 24-7. You know, we would ride our bikes to Austria. And I grew up in a time, especially in the 80s, where it was, I'd be home at dark. and I was free in the Bavarian Alps with my friends. We always had a backpack ready to go. And we were really sort of autonomous and self-reliant.

You know, we could fix our bikes. And that framework of autonomy and sort of generalization, as I started to ski more, I was a ski racer, and that was really like my chief sport. And I remember being at a camp with a World Cup winner and Andre Arnold, and he was diagramming the ski turn and where the pressure was through the foot

during the ski term. And I remember being like, oh, like I was 12 and I was like, yes, this is who I am. This is what I want to talk about. I mean, early on, that intersection of biomotor expression of output and sort of really being conscious and meta and aware that it wasn't just work harder, right? What's so interesting about where we are right now, where suddenly we really are coming to understand what are the benchmarks and the foundations of good human function. You have to sleep. You have to walk. You need to eat whole foods. You need to feel safe and be loved and in a tribe. And we can quantify some of those things by your native strain, right, and your heart rate variability. And do you feel safe and loved? And, you know, overlay on that now

that we have available to us all of these methodologies and tools and it really can feel tribal. I'm a this person. I do this. I eat keto. And what we want to do is say, hey, look, there are all roads lead to Rome, but what are our best practices and where are these things same? Where do we see the mutually accommodating systems here so that we can get to best practice faster. So I don't have to wait until you're at the end of your career before we really figure out what's going on. We can figure out what works best for you in the contest of your actual expression of strength conditioning, right? Not just am I in pain or not pain, not just can I do more pull-ups? I don't know if that make you a better athlete or not. That's the thing

I want to talk about. So the first thing you, that resonated with you in sport was the pressure of the foot. So does that mean, like is that just how you understand, it was like seeing the matrix basically for sport and performance and physiology it's just kind of like okay you're unplugged and you're not in the matrix anymore did you immediately know that like this is what you wanted to do with your life or that's just kind of how you understood human motor patterns and you almost felt like I'm a cut above in the understanding well I think um I have been interested in going fast and lifting big weights for a long time yeah you know and there was always a technical aspect to the sports that I did. And I thought a lot of people can relate to that,

you know, throwing, you know, track and field or there was just, you know, I found out early on that, you know, the SEALs have a saying, like, it pays to be a winner, right? And one of my saying, like, it pays to move well. It pays to be efficient. It pays to be mechanically effective. You can tackle better. You, you know, you can tackle more often. You can do more reps. You can have more fun. You know, in kayaking for playing, it turns out that we were fitter and more efficient. We could surf more waves than everyone else. You know, so it came down to, well, why are you huffing and puffing in the eddy when I can just keep surfing around you? So I think simultaneously, the language that we're in now and the things I'm obsessed with have been obsessed with for, you know, almost 20 years on sort of this current journey is it didn't exist yet.

You know, when I paddle on the U.S. canoe and kayak team, I ended my career because I had a bricule plexus traction injury, had a neck injury. I was missing into rotation of the shoulder. I was paddling canoe. if you're a rower and you paddle sweep, you understand what I'm talking about. You're a unilateral athlete, and I just watched the Olympics, and there was a woman from Great Britain

who had a hump on her back, and she was flexed, and I'm like, man, she can get away with that now, but she cannot do that forever. Eventually, it's just not effective. And moving this conversation from good versus bad to, that's not as effective as you can be, really honors the durability of people,

and simultaneously, we can sort of have a more nuanced conversation, about durability, longevity, and performance at the same time. So I don't know if I answer your question. So how did you go from soccer in Europe and cycling to canoe kayak at the highest level? I started paddling as a kid in Europe. So whitewater kayaking is very big. And the Germans in the 72 Olympics, they built an artificial course in Augsburg called the Ice Canal.

and one of the things that happens in a lot of countries and it's something we should emulate here and we do a little bit with some of our club programs but there are a lot of local clubs that get together and do things like a rowing club is a really good example if you're part of a rowing club system people just go in row they're not necessarily compete but they go in row there store boats and paddle

and we're starting to see that in other sports but in Germany there's a large local club kayak whitewater kayaking program and it's part of the culture it's like everyone can ski everyone mountain meers everyone reminds their bike And so when I was in Europe, in Garmish, it was this rite of passage. I was 12 years old, and they were like, now it's time for you to learn how to kayak. So I learned to kayak in that program.

Fast forward to college where we're paddling and suddenly realized that there is a place where we can go with this besides just hucking pure white waterfalls. And what's interesting, I think, to your point, is there was a time in college. It was really the onset of the extremeness. I remember this in the 90s. It was like everything was extreme, right? and we were starting to see the nascent and emergent phenomenon of people getting paid money to huck off of big waterfalls

and race head to head in class five. And there are a whole bunch of local races where my kayaking friends and Rafguid friends, we'd all get together and put ourselves in peril for like the Teva Mountain Games. I've won the Teva Mountain Games. Now it's the GoPro Mountain Games. I've won those games.

And we made like $300 for the weekend of like near death. And we were like, this is amazing. And then, so we have like this emergent way of being athletes, being able to pay or at least get some money. You know, I was sponsored by Power Bar. And if you put a picture in the newspaper of your, like with your Power Bar, they sent you 50 bucks. 50 bucks was so much gas for us that if we got one Power Bar and a mention in a local paperman, we'd send it in three months later we get a check for 50 bucks. It changed our lives.

Add in that. And then we started becoming technical. kayakers and where we started doing racing and slalom and so it's like we had a formal movement language of ballet but we were modern dancers and that was really i really started to see sort of the interface of technique drives mechanics drives performance it sounds like it was more of self-discovery or you know happy accident or you're smart guy but about the technical proficiency leads to the next thing were you also sort of studying at the same time about human physiology and movement? And in a way, not knowing that you were going to rewrite the book of how definitely this community and, you know, probably as people steal from the CrossFit community, you know, the world thinks about mobility or even uses the word mobility.

It's tough to appreciate pre-internet strength conditioning and fitness communities. So what did that look like? It looked like I discovered a book at the library from Donald Chu, who was a Stanford coach, about medicine ball plymetrics. And then I wrote in and they sent it to me and it was a flip book, right? It was a little tiny book and picture book and had stick drawings of people throwing the medicine ball. No on-ramp, no exposure, no theory, just 300 exercises. So my friend and I, because we're good athletes, I asked my girlfriend's parents for a medicine ball for Christmas and I got one. and then he and I went to the gym and we did all the exercises.

And then we didn't paddle for three days because we were so confident. 300 exercises. And he was, whatever. No, no, no. But I'm just saying, maybe we only did 400 exercises. I mean, it's, you know, I think that that's kind of true. I probably came into strength training as maybe the Internet's starting to grow. And my guide was the Schwarzenegger's guide, like, bodybuilding.

I'm a rower. I'm an athlete. I should figure out how to body build. And there are some things we can take there around 10. I mean, it's just strength movement. That's right. I don't know how this leg extension machine makes me a better, more coordinated athlete, but maybe it does. Yeah, I'll max it out and do 100 reps. That seems good, right? I think we just need another cylinder on the car. That's the problem.

That's all it is. It's not the chassis. It's not the brakes. It's not the tires. We just need a bigger engine. and that's one way to do it and that worked for a long time and honestly our old model was and if you're an athlete over 35 you can appreciate this and definitely 40 that our model was trained as hard as you can

until you break and the thing that drove the system our coach on the national team just had a clock and he would be like that was faster do that again and that model really let results you went faster

it didn't mean you were better or that you had a technique or a system that led to open, was open ended and transferred. It was you could close as many doors down as you want to add in a half second to your time. And that short term thinking

got a lot of people in trouble where we started to see a lot of overuse injuries. So I ended up with this overuse injury in my neck where I can't turn my head and my hand is numb and I only had like 300 warning signs that I just blew through because no one said it was important. We weren't talking about it. We didn't talk about position. My C2 partner

used to have to stretch his stretch, I'll put in quotation marks, his hamstrings before he got in the boat, because he couldn't sit in the boat for the whole session. And he had to do all this elaborate and I just bust his balls for that. Like, bro, like, come on. And now, like, oh, you were so smart. I'm so sorry. And, you know,

understanding that I, you know, when I went in and all of a sudden I have this problem, I was confronted with the classic athlete dilemma, which is I'll do anything to get back to my sport. So, give me the prednisone, give me the shot, give me the needles, give me the

chiropractic, give me the physical therapy, give me the massage. I did it all to try to just get back to my thing. In retrospect now, understanding I created my problem, that problem blew up in my face. There were a hundred things about my mechanics and my breathing and my efficiency and my reducing recovery and nutrition. I could have changed some aspect of that. Instead, that ended my career. And that was a real wake-up call where I was like, when I started asking around, I was like, hey, every girl on this team has had shoulder surgery. And they were like, that's true. And I was like, so if my daughter's dream is to be on the national team, she should just have shoulder surgery now? And they were like, what? No, what? Maybe. Yes?

Well, she's going to have it because she's on the nationally. I was like, there's got to be a better way. Do you think that the PT field is having an explosion right now, and it's growing at a pace that makes it difficult to add quality people? Physical therapy has a real opportunity because in its emergence field, it really was in this reactive model. I didn't know anything about you, and I tried to ask you five questions about your life and then give you the minimum amount of homework that was covered by your insurance. So there's sort of a type one error in a lot of the way we're treating. If you go, if you have knee pain and you go see your doctor,

if that knee pain isn't, and let's define injury as no longer can occupy my role in society, can no longer do my job. So let me just be clear with him. There's a bone sticking out of your leg, go to the ER, right? you have a fever or go they are. There's some obvious things. This doesn't smell muscle skeletal. It feels like I need a doctor.

But if you can't go to work because of your pain, that's a medical emergency. If you can't occupy a role in your family, that's a medical emergency. That's when we're going to get help. Everything else is not that. And what physical therapy has come out of is, and it's an artifact also of the construct of fitness, which was afraid to touch pain or talk about pain. And so what we said is, oh, pain is a medical problem. So the coaches were like, just keep rolling around it or we'll just keep it just ignore it or go lighter.

Like we didn't actually give any athletes solutions. What they did was they'd go out and solve their own problems with ibuprofen or bourbon or opiates. You know, how many of my NFLers, you know, started with Vicodin and to solve the problems like you keep playing? A lot, right? It's a slippery slope. And if we don't empower athletes to be able to understand their physiology and a basic tool set to self-soothe, for an example, if someone comes to us with, the chronic pain and persistent pain, we make them get a whoop. Because I need to track your activity and I need to get you up above baseline.

And the ruple, your strain can be picked up through activity of just walking. So even though we don't have a steps count, it'll count us just moving around enough. So it's an easy way for people to say, I need to get more activity. And I can get your baseline and say, I need you to walk more to raise your activity. But tracking the actual sleep means that I can suddenly understand what the hell is going on. But if you're not moving and not sleeping, I actually can't even parse out. the data to really get what's happening here. And so what we're trying to do then is say, well, what can we control here?

The top-down function means the healthier, the organism, the more loved and stoked they feel, the less likely they are for their brain to persevereate on a pain problem. And what we've told people in this biocyco-social model is, you know, pain is in your head, and it has nothing to do with how robust your tissues are, how decongested your tissues are, how much sleep you've had. All of that, again, comes. down to performance. So how are we measuring the things we care about? Pain, no pain? Horse crap. It's all about biomotor expression. So the thing I'm interested in is not, look, if I focus on you being a

more durable person, then by default, I'm going to have you work at the highest levels of expression of the human body. It means you're going to have to move better the way we know the best athletes move, because that's what athletics teaches us. These are the best shapes. These are the best positions. Then it turns out if I have a more durable person, they're less likely to get injured, they're less likely to, you know, malinger, and I don't mean malinger like they're malingering, but be injured for longer because they can manage that really quickly. And so that is a tide change. And if your physical therapist isn't on board and ultimately looking at your genetics and your nutrition, you need to get a physical therapist. If somebody is just listening

and I was like, well, I think I move okay, but I'm not sure. Is there one movement that you would say, okay, let's try this? And, you know, I've seen you, you know, Tear people apart? Yeah, you know, I just watched you, you know, lead a group of people and they were engaged and they actually moved much better than the last time I saw you speak. It's happening, it's happening, right? I mean, we're at the CrossFit game, so largely, hopefully those people are going to move better, but is it something like, how much time can you spend in the bottom of a squat?

Where do you kind of see some of the biggest issues just kind of in the world that we're in now with maybe more people at home? They're not even in like desk chairs or standing desks, you know, poor posture. Is it more that people need to be checking, you know, their back posture, shoulder mobility, chest mobility, is it the squat? It's such a good question. And what it speaks to is our failure to have told people how their bodies work and what to be able to expect to other bodies. So we have all these ranges of motion that are normative, right?

And I would say normal, but that hurts people's feelings. So I'm going to say normative, right? There's some things you should be able to do that every physical therapist, every physician, every Cairo, every osteo, everyone agrees, that are within a standard deviation. So you actually aren't that unique. Your hips may be a certain wider or certain geometry, but the expression of that is still going to be a squat. So what we see fundamentally is people's movement, daily movement language is actually

really small. They only speak a few words. Sit, stand, lay down. That's it. Wash repeat, right? And if I said to you, you're only going to eat a tomato and iceberg lettuce and a carrot, you'd be like, bro, there's a lot out there. I'm like, no, no, that's all you need.

We're just going to keep doing that for a decade or so. And you'd be like, maybe there's some deficiencies in my meal programming, right? But that's the sort of greater movement language that you're exposing yourself to. And then maybe if you fly to the airport, you have to put your arms over your head in the scanner one second, right? That's kind of on my mind because every time I see it, I'm horrified.

And what we need to understand is, fundamentally at a base cellular level, there's this idea called mechanotransduction, which means that your tissues have to be mechanically loaded for their normal expression at a genetic level. Let me say that again. If you want a tendon to be a tendon, it has to absorb force, has to pause, isometric, and has to generate force.

That's a concentric movement. So if you don't expose the tendon to those three things, you're going to have a demi tendon. Okay, so if you want a planter fascia to be strong, you have to load the planar fascia. What we're seeing is chronic systematic unloading, parsed with people aren't exposing these positions to any kind of language. So if you jumped in and it's a sun salutation,

guarantee you, you're going to be 90% of the way there to at least saying, I brushed my teeth today. I didn't need to use my teeth, but I brushed them. I took care of them. So what we're seeing is in people's physical practice, and I'm not talking about exercise, if you did things like sit on the ground, right, that would be, you would have to sit side saddle, you have squat, you sit cross-legged, people can't sit on the ground. They can't even get them down off the ground without using their hands. And that is a expression of having incomplete position or access to your position. So what we can say to people is not this is good, this is bad.

I'm just like, well, if you want to live in a dark house, that's your right. But I like to turn all the lights on in my house because that's why they're there. And I can live in this lighthouse with lots of music and all these cool things, but you can just go live in your dark cave. And that's fine. You can survive that way. So what we're trying to do, again, is shift this conversation from good to bad to more effective, less effective, more choice, more movement solutions, more movement options.

And that starts with asking people to actually put their arms over their head or squat down. So the question is there a movement that we should do. What's underneath there is what's essential and what are the essential positions that a human needs to do? And if you jump into any Pilates program or yoga program or cross-shirt program or kettle of a program, you'll see that the exposure to those positions is built into the program because people are really clever and they've been thinking about this for a long time. What's essential about the shoulder? It needs to extend.

It needs to go overhead. It has to rotate. Right? I need to be able to be stable up in front. And so suddenly, when you have that matrix, everything just drops into it. Oh, it doesn't matter what the exercise is. I'm ultimately just challenging this position. And that's why we can be really agnostic about the way you like to train.

As long as you're training these shapes, we can then have the conversation about which style we should turn up and turn down. So what's interesting is people are like, what's the one movement? I'm like, well, what you're really asking is what's not important? And if you want to hip that functions, you better have hip extension and hip flexion and hip rotation. Yeah, I guess what if you use. Can you tell I obsess about this all the time? Yeah. That's all I think about.

What do you see the most, I guess, in the last year, 18 months that people are missing. Obviously, everything's important. And I think the food example that you gave is hopefully very tangible for people. Is it something new or is it just kind of the same human problems? I think we're seeing a continuation of similar human functions and conditions for a long time. Yeah. But some of the conditions that were keeping these things at bay have eroded, right? So it's not like we're

It means we're suddenly walking less Or if you're not going to work And you're not forced to commute You don't have to squat it out of your car So there's a lot of things that suddenly kind of Were more and more attenuated And I think it's easy to romanticize You know what's going on with the way we used to be

You know and I tell my kids I'm like look if I had Snapchat I'd been snapping my hose late in night Just like my I'm just kidding That's what my daughter says And she's 16 That's what her friends report When they're snapping

The boys they're interested in And I would have abused this technology. I would have been on the iPad. I would have been all over Netflix. I would have watched everything. I was obsessed with TV just like everyone else was in the 70s days. But those fundamental changes have happened. We're now we're seeing changes in the biology, changes in the physiology.

I'm calling it a sort of a de-wilding of humans. And what we need to do is say, well, what's essential? Like, well, probably you need to walk about 8,000 steps a day. That's probably the number for minimum effective dose. You need some sunshine on your body. And you're like, well, I can do that. I'm like, yeah, but you didn't. You didn't go outside once in the sun today.

You did not expose any of your, you know. And so I'm like, well, if you have chronic low vitamin D, it's really hard for me to understand what's going on with your homeowner profiles and your mood, right? So what I think people forget is how the human body is the most sophisticated structure in the universe. And the brain is on top of that. But these systems of the body are tightly coupled. And we fail to appreciate how the inputs and outputs interact into a stew that makes something tasty, which is how the human can function durably, maximally for a long time.

And if you are super stressed and you have some alcohol to self-soothe, because that's the tool that you've reached for and it's worked for you, it's going to mess up your sleep. So I'm not saying alcohol is bad. I'm just saying that's a choice you made to self-south, and now I know that you're going to have crap sleep. Our friends at Woop, early on, one of the most important pieces of research that came out was working with some young rowers who drank some alcohol and saw altered cardiac function three days litter. That has stuck with my head. And suddenly when athletes see that, they're like, oh, I'm

stressed right now. I'm under a lot of strain load. I'm not going to drink. I'm going to drink after the race when I'm rested and fun. So we're not ever saying don't drink. We're saying, understand that this choice. But if this is the only way you're self-soothing, then your sleep is going to be bad. Then you're going to be sleepy and tired and less likely stoked to move. And you're going to eat a lot more carbohydrate to pump up that serotonin. And then at 4 o'clock, you're going to have a coffee to get through the day. And then guess what's going to happen when you didn't move all day? You're going to have a hard time falling asleep. So you hit the alcohol again. Now you're caught in a depressant stimulant cycle and you didn't even see how you got there because you didn't appreciate that

your coping mechanism for stress with alcohol i hope everyone really appreciates that well what i'm saying it's too real it's too what i'm saying is it's real because look last year there's a baseball team that's really amazing in san francisco and one year they won the pennant and that the starting pitchers were taking between 20 and 30 milligrams adderol a day and do you know how you sleep after taking 30 milligrams is at all, you don't. You take too ambient. And this is, what you're thinking to yourself is ambient and Adderall is a cycle. Whoa, I'm not like that. I'm like, that's THC and coffee. That's you self-medicating with a bottle of wine and you're a mattoe. Like, don't, you're not precious. You're just doing it differently. And no, it's not even, I don't even say it's

self-medicating. It's so soothing. These are the tools that we've given people to feel better. That's what they're going to reach for. So it's on us. And do you think that that's just the new construction of society? I think we don't teach people how to be human. They don't know how to cook. They don't know how to shop. They don't know how to sleep. And I'll tell you, because we're doing research with Cal Berkeley right now

because we've been trying to get kids more active in schools for about a decade now. Yeah, you've been doing that a long time. You've been doing that a long time. Because what I finally realized is maybe it's too late for you, but not your children. I think, like, well, you're going to have to come to it on your own. But your children are a function of their environment. And one of the things that we did last year, because we had some research planned, but COVID made a little weird. But we went ahead and did some.

And some of the inventories and surveys with the kids is that they actually didn't have an understanding of how much they needed to walk or how much they needed to sleep. These are fifth graders, fourth and fifth graders. They didn't understand what macros were or what good food looked like or what constituted a good meal. And so some of the foundations that we just take for assumption assume are our base. People haven't ever been formally instructed in that. And so what we expect then is when they're 30 or 40, you're just going to figure this all out? You know, there's an important way of thinking about

sort of environmental degradation and change. And what we tend to think about, and this is an economic theory piece, and I don't know the name, so forgive me, but it's called Future Discount is the theory. And again, those of you who are ninjas in this, I'm bastardizing this. But what we always tend to think is that the person in the future is going to be smarter and wealthier

and we'll have a better set of solutions our current problems. So it's easy for us to put that off. We'll do the same thing with our health and we do the same thing that I'll get it together. Instead of right now is your best chance and actually the tolerances get a little bit finer. At no age as a human being, stop healing.

You can continue to heal until you're dead and you're probably going to be 100 years old. But what we see is that the tolerances for silliness you have to sleep more. research that came out that said in your 40s and 50s, if you aren't on your sleep, the chances of that making for mental like Alzheimer's and dementia are significant. Those are really excellent predictors. So in your peak earning age when you have children is when you're most screwed because you're

getting the worst sleep and that's going to set you up for a back half of your life. Again, how are we thinking about these systems approaches and now is the best time to start for your future self, for your future? And if we can go back in time, really what we're doing is behind us is teaching our children, we're leaving them a better environment because we're just saying that this is what you have to do. There's a, you know, if you put an orc in captivity, the fin will fold eventually. And that's, they call it floppy fin syndrome or folded fin syndrome. It's a little bit nicer.

I think it's a little hurtful to the male, orcas. And what ends up happening is if you don't load that fin, it's not swimming and hunting and doing orca stuff. And then you subject the fin to higher gravitational loads at the surface. the collagen breaks down and the fin folds over. That's your Achilles because you're an orca who's not moving, not loading, not hunting, not fighting, not walking. So your Achilles becomes dysfunctional. Then you try to load it and you have a problem. We're just modern orcas.

So you could talk about this obviously forever. Sorry. But you did it in a book. You've done it in multiple books on different things. The next book is called Built to Move. We just signed a contract for this. and what I think our failure to do so far is we haven't taken what we've learned

and stripped out the eliteness of it, right? Because it really is daunting for people. So I'm doing, I've been working with Amazon on a computer vision project trying to help them create, use the phone to help establish movement minimums. So people are getting pretty good to understanding what good resting heart rate is,

what blood pressure is, and now what HRV is. You've taught people to understand what's going on. But we still aren't talking about movement minimums or movement quality as movement vital signs. What is it I should be able to do? And what do I need to keep an eye on it. And what we've seen is the interventions, a two-minute intervention of walking is a win for a lot of people

because that's how far the bar is set. The bar is so low. The bar is so low that two minutes of walking is positive. So what we're trying to do with the built-to-move is say, here's what we've learned in the laboratory of sport. in the laboratory of human performance, let's go ahead and apply those lessons and be agnostic. And so it's not about exercise.

It's not about diet, like dieting. Are you keto? Are you paleo? Are you, you know? Right. And how can we then say, well, here's what you need to do to get to base camp. Because then once you're at base camp, then you can go up and down and do whatever you want,

but let's get to base camp first. So I think something that you said really resonated with me was that the breakneck pace is the glacial pace. So, how long ago did you start, well, now what's the ready state? Mobility, Wad, and Right, becoming a supplemental. How long ago was that? 2010, I made the first 10-minute squat video where I filmed my crotch for 10 minutes. That was 2000, then you're welcome for that.

Can you explain this, the 10-minute squat test, just so that people have no idea? Yeah, it's basically squat all the way down, relax, keep your heels on the ground, and hang out there for 10 minutes. So for people that don't have the range of motion. They should realize that they need to go talk to a doctor. To squat all the way to the bottom. You can hold onto a couch. You get to the best position that's available to. So we want to, this is classic.

We have a complex system. So what we want is to add complexity on top of the complex system. That'll help, right? And always does. And that way we can't understand inputs and outputs. If you're trying to change your range of motion, the first thing you need to do is spend time in the range of motion you're trying to change. So your nervous system, your brain will say, oh, look at this.

You know, Lombardi is down this. position we should probably pay attention to this position and your body will remodel it's constantly remodeling itself and so the first order of business is not to mobilize it's not to do some secret scroll exercise program it's not to do squat therapy it's to let's spend some time of this end range and by the way that's an isometric like that's how we can you know think about these positions are the end ranges of our function so if you hold on to something with your heels down or you have to come up or squat down with your heels above and that's fine let's start there and start thinking hey how do I start to spend more time in this shape and position

And I can fidget around, I can come in and out. And imagine that not too long ago we used to toil out on the ground, sleep on the ground, eat on the ground. We did all of that on the ground. It's one of the ways that the bodies, we think the body is the ways that self-tunes, is that it's so complex, but there are these fundamental positions. Like, for example, rowing, let's just take rowing, I'm maybe familiar with it. If you finish and you're sitting up with your legs out, that's a long sit position. And if you can't easily sit with a straight up and on torso and your leg straight out, that's minimum range of motion

that's 90 degrees that's a long sit that's how we would evaluate your hamstring posterior chain tissue length and capacity to be there but if you sit up there on the rowing machine and your back automatically flexes because you don't have the hip flexion to get there then now I've just added complex in the system which your body can model but under load

and speed and fatigue it's going to get worse and it's going to compromise your breathing and it's going to compromise your shoulder position one of the biggest things we see in rowing are a lot of fractured ribs right we move from kind of lumbar to like rib pathology Yep. And it's weird that if you're bent over and flex forward,

your shoulder doesn't function very well. And guess what? Lo and behold, you don't stabilize very well. So your serratus breaks your ribs and that horrible jerky catch that happens that we've seen people slam, right? And if you want to fix that,

you actually go back to the hips and look what's happening with the back. So what we haven't done, though, is for athletes to say, well, do I have this minimum? No, instead we were like, your 500 was slow today. I'm sorry about your shoulder pain. Right? Instead of saying, well, you know, here are the ingredients

to good rowing. Let's just, and athletes believe it or not are smart enough to understand that. Yeah, definitely getting there. So when you first started mobility-wide, ready-state, how do you want to refer to it? The ready state now? Yeah. And the reason we took it away is we were the first company to use the word mobility anywhere. So if you've used the word mobility in the last five years and you're not talking about wheelchairs or mobile phones, you're welcome.

And I'm sorry, it's like the word core. I created a word like core that's non-specific. And I'm sorry about that. well how do you define mobility then and do you just not even refer to it anymore your ability to move just the ability to move well mobility is as we defined it because it didn't and i chose it because i thought flexibility described the properties of rubber hose i didn't think that was very good very accurate you know stretching was a non-specific thing i pull i feel some tension is that it i feel when i when i deadlift heavy i feel tension i'm stretching my hamstrings

yeah um so what i tried to do is say hey look mobility is a system's approach to understanding two things. One is, do you have the raw tissue extensibility to achieve a position? Because if your capsule stiff or your facial restriction or your neuromuscular system is holding on and you can't get into position, that's why we mobilize. Because they're what I call position transfer exercises. So on the one hand, you just have to have enough tissue capacity to be able to do what your body can do. The second part of that is do you have the skill to express that.

And that's called movement control. And then some people might call it motor control. So we have the two things there. One is the technique and one is because if you're a hyper mobile athlete, which we see plenty of, dancers, gymnasts, you know, right, acrobats. They have plenty of range of motion and crap control. And again, what we've done in our system is try to say, hey, look, there's two things here. Do you understand what you're supposed to be able to do? And you understand how that fits into the technique.

It's not about doing pull-ups. It's about what you're doing, doing the pull-ups that matters. And then do you have the raw range of motion to get there? So we have to be able to handle those things. and when we work on movement control, when we work on having the raw tissues, then whose training system works the best becomes a lot more evident.

How did you become a supple effort? How was that the name? Oh, it's so good. The great movie Gallipoli with Mel Gibson. Okay. It's about World War I. It's about the young Australians hucking themselves against the Turks

and dying in huge numbers. And it follows this young, Olympic sprinter from Australia, kind of the promise of the youth of Australia, and his coach would say, what are your legs? And he goes, steel springs. He's like, how fast are you going to run? Fast as a leopard. So that's stuck in my head. And then I have a Navy SEAL friend, Andy Stump, who was like, Kelly, the leopard never stretches. And I was like, uh-huh. And I was like, well, that's true, but A, you're not a leopard. And B, the leopard has full access to its available physiology at a moment's notice, it doesn't activate its glutes. It doesn't worry about

going keto shred. It's just, it's a leopard. Yeah. So how, why is it you have to warm up to get your range of motion, right? That's crazy, right? We should be warming up to practice. We should be warming up to shift blood. We should be warming up to, to, you know, raise arousal, not to restore your hip flexion. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And what I think is that we're just leaving a lot of potential on the table. So let's, let's go ahead and get it. Because remember, at the end of the day, hot, dirty, nasty speed. This is all I care about. And that's how it became the ready state. That's how it began the race. We tried to pivot around from being, there are too many wads and mobility became a non-specific word to, hey, we need to say, what do you want to get ready for? And it may be the CrossFit games,

it may be the Olympics, or maybe you want to walk around your neighborhood without having foot pain. I'm fine with that too. When do you feel like your focus shifted from elite level athletes? Obviously, you still work with them to just the mass. Because, A, it's fun. And B, it's our laboratory,

because we know what works and doesn't work very afo. Yeah. If you, I'm like, here's my program. You're the English national soccer team. Or you're the all blacks. Oh, you work with you do my stuff too. You're going to get feedback about what is bullshit and what is not bullshit. You're going to like, so we're constantly testing our model in the field of play and then refining, adjusting, tweaking up and tweaking down. But I think as I've gotten older, I've really started to care about durability. And that's a conversation around health and then having kids

focuses. And I don't think I could have had this conversation or has been as vulnerable and sensitive as I am now. 10 years ago because it wasn't on my brain, right? I was more obsessed with how can I make you faster as an athlete or how do we win the cross at games again? Those conversations were crucial for me to understand what was happening and understand what the cooking was doing and what the results are. Now I'm a little bit more saying, okay, I think we've got, we're starting to get a handle on that.

Now we need to ask the next question. What's your most important population now? I think I talked to you two years ago, 18 months ago. You're really working a lot with first responders, firefighters, police, military. That's always been sort of part of our language. You know, and I think it's because it's really fun to work one-on-one with small groups. I love working with athletes. I love working with little small teams.

It's super fun. You understand we've done a really good job with a groundswell grassroots model, but real change happens at a system's approach at the top down too. So how do we reform or limit muscle skeletal? problems in the military at the army level at google at amazon at microsoft i go in and i'm trying to help them at that scale how do we change behavior of society that's really interesting so i think what's you know one of the things mike bergner is my original coach um and one of the things that i learned from mike coach b was that he could coach high school teens 13 year olds 14 year olds

as well as he could coach Olympians because he had Olympic lifters in his family who were Olympians. So he was capable of saying this is this set of skills that are going to translate up to where I need to go. And a lot of people have this really sort of discrete skill set.

They don't know how to get there and they don't know how to go past that. They're really good in this moment. And we're looking for best practices that scale up and scale down from injury to moms and dads from children development to Olympians. It has to go across cohorts.

So when I work with, you know, high school, or I work with first responders, it informs me about working with my Olympic rowers or informs me with how I work with my Olympic cyclists. Every population teaches me something a little bit differently, and I start to see what we need to turn up and turn down for each one of those groups. Again, thinking at a systems approach level and organization level,

you have to make different decisions around how we're going to influence behavior. And so it's really important that we're thinking at all those levels because it makes me, when I describe the elephants, because I've walked around the elephant 17 times. Do you have a sort of proud of success that you've had in your professional career, post-athlete? Yeah, I'm still married. My wife, Juliette is our CEO. She is the most incredible woman.

I like to get to work with her every day, to be able to work with her every day. I can't imagine working with anyone else. I am a pretty, I'm going to swear, stinking good father today. I'll be better tomorrow. You know, and my family's intact. I came from a lot of family dysfunction. And I've kind of come through enough ego drives young self that I really see what's important. And what's important is my family.

So I think I'm a good friend and good family. And I would say that I feel as stable and as grounded as I've ever felt with the most set of skills. I'm done being a beginner. So I think that's my greatest. I'm ready to have the next conversation. There are so many wins today. A woman talked to me and burst into tears because she decides she's going to have her knee replaced

and she realized what's possible and life's not going to end. And, you know, from those levels all the way up to getting high fives from, you know, I work with the president of the United States. So, you know, it's super fun to connect the dots on, you know what I mean? Casual.

And you know what the thing is... Oh, did I just name, John? That's all right. You rarely do. And, you know, you're kind of... sneakie in the crowd. How do you, you know... I think it was pretty good.

I think what people have to... Look, we're at a place now on the internet where I sort of need to see your work. I need to see your bona fides. And you don't have to lead with that. I'm good because I worked with this one athlete, but I need to see sort of what your track record is because there are so many internet geniuses and gurus.

And I'm like, that's really cute. Can I actually see where all your systems work and who's using it at a systems level? Which teams are using your stuff? How's that working? Which athletes you're working with? If you're going to be a guru and put yourself out there, show me your work.

But simultaneously, be a pro. You know, you don't need to talk about all the wins you do because it's super fun. So you share a good amount of, like, amazing content just for free on the ready states, mostly IGTV, right? YouTube, IGTV, other places. If I pick what you're putting down, I see social media is a way of,

public service to help coaches and athletes solve problems that way. It also lets people know what's going on. You know, be of use. If you want to have a good business, help people solve a problem. You know, that's really a, that's a good successful model. And if you're smart enough to be like that kid at the mall who can walk back and be like, oh, that picture with 17,000 videos is a sailboat and you can put it all together. I've probably put it all out there for free. You just have to stitch it together in your brain into a coach at model. No, it's interesting that your philosophy and kind of feeling it is very similar to the conversation I had with Chris Hinshaw of, well, if you really are, you know, the genius or you can really help people, like, go help people. Yeah, there's, what you'll see is that the, anyone who is, who's got the super secret score program behind the paywall, they won't show you any about, because there is, it's okay to get paid for your work. That's 100% true.

but if you'll see that the best coaches are transparent and you can show up and you watch Chris coach anytime you want and I learned that early on even from CrossFit and Greg Glassman that you could show up and they were 100% transparent in their methodologies and if you're seeing people hide their program

and you know what I mean and you can't even get a taste then I guarantee you you uh there's something there's a hole in the program So what you're going to see is that the best coaches are the most open and the most dedicated to helping the coaches behind them solve a set of problems faster. So be transparent. Continue to put it out there for free. You're effectively building the trust. And then when you say, okay, I've got even more people like, well, let me get that.

Yeah, that's right. You can't serve people enough. You can't give enough away. And I'm not saying that you don't need to, it's okay to charge for a program. You got to make a living too. You pay for Netflix. It's okay. Not 100% free.

So the ready state now, if people were to kind of come and check it out, you can kind of give people guidance on almost all problems, right? Not all problems in their life. Let's talk about human range of motion, injury, performance. We try to do it in three buckets. I think for most people, you can wrap your head around this way. One is that we want to reduce the session costs of your training. We want you to help to adapt and recover faster.

We want to reduce central nervous system strain and improve readiness. after your hard training. So how do we limit that? My favorite word is session costs or the cost of your training session. Because what we're seeing is, you know, this is an old Pavel, quote, lift the heaviest weight, the fastest, the most, as fresh as you can, right? Something like that. Lift as heavy as you can, as often as you can, as fresh as you can. So we can do that. So we have some daily recovery sessions. You can come in for pain and we can help you guide through that pain. And then also we can improve your positions. So if there's a position you want to work on because, again, a model has to explain why a snatch works like a snatch

and why we're using the techniques and the cues that we're using. Yeah. We have a model for that. I mean, if you want to PR and go fast, that's cool. If you don't, it's cool, too. So where can people find you? I'm at Mike Lombardi.com. Oh, man.

I don't know what's at that website, so I wouldn't go to it. Don't go to that website. We're at the ready state. And, you know, I just want you to know that we're users. My wife and are users. You know, Juliet had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. She was a roer at Cal. She's a two-time cancer survivor.

She's a tough, tough lady. And we're interested in this durability. I just had my knee replaced after a horrific ski accident seven years ago. I buffered it until now. Got my life back. You know, we are, we're not like, we don't live in a bubble. We have two children. We have businesses.

Like, come in because we're realists. We're not, you don't need to, like, give up your family to go to mobility camp. Right. Right. That's the mistake. Like, if I take you on a retreat where I make you food and exercise and massage you, you're going to do great there. Right. And then as I drop you back into your life with your one-year-old, you're screwed. So where really, my doctor work was, you know, looking at barriers to adherence.

How do people interact in their environment? And where are they going to do all this? So that's really something that has driven a lot of our thinking about what is actually practicable, what's actionable? If you have a chance, Kelly actually documented. the basically the surgery and the return I think one of my favorite workouts was you were trying to do your

slowest 400 ever for time Oh man It was the slowest And there was a PR Yeah That's my personal best But you know what Kelly's out here

Hitting some really cool post surgery numbers I'm right now as we speak I'm like nine months out And you know I deadlifted at 575 Casual I can ride my bike

as hard as I want. I can run. I'm running. I just snatched the 100 pound fat bell the other day. Okay. I power cleaned 100 kilos and can front squat it. You know, I'm, there's, I think I power clean like 275. So I'm starting to get back. And more importantly, what gives a crap about my numbers? I can ride my bike. I can go for a hike. I carried my kayak down a three-mile canyon, did an expedition on Class 5 River and hiked it out. Bam, like, it's all about using your fitness. Go spend your fitness credits, people. Yeah, I mean, it's just, but it's just

validation of the process and, you know, both are. My surgeon is a little surprised. You know, he's the head, he was the head of orthopedics at UCSF, which is a pretty fancy place. And he honestly was like, I didn't know it could do that. I've never seen anyone told me to go as to grass or squat or he just

like, the implant is rated for 155 degrees. I was like, well, it's rated for that, but I can squat all the way down. And And, you know, when I did backflips and trampolines, and like some surgeons were like, you're the first person with the total need to ever do a backflip on a trampoline. I was like, well, someone has to go first. You know, so what I think is, generally, we've set the bar in expectation very low for people physically in our society.

And what we should constantly be reminding ourselves is that we are savage, savage animals. And you don't even realize what you're capable of. Even at the top level, you know, we, one of the games that I like to play. with the world's best athletes is I give them a percentage score of their potential. And they're like, but I'm the best in the world. I'm like, that is not neither here or there. I'm talking about how good you can be. And it's rare that I meet an athlete in their 90s.

Most of the athletes I know who are the best in the world are in their 70s and 80s. That's how much more potential we have. That's pretty unbelievable. Yeah. So are you even surprised with your own progress in nine months? What I'll tell you is that eating, if I gave you, like 200 pounds of cake and I was like get started you'd be like oh man this is great and oh my god I'm still eating cake so I think what it's done is it's given me as juliet said it's given me a lot

more empathy and deep understanding what it's like to be a surgical patient and the things that I was preaching and hammering on I've doubled down on I'm like what do you mean you're swollen and you know I mean like you know so what it's done is it's it's given me real insight into realizing there was a lot of slack in our surgical protocols that we could take out I think we can do better you got to follow the ready state oh man i'm just telling you brain it's welcome welcome you're welcome to come along for the ride but uh you know what's so fun and i'll just say back is that right now i forget who said maybe it's conier someone like that is just the second podcast this week that we're talking about conya well maybe we should talk about conya more did you listen

did you listen did you tune into the the live listen i did not yet well it didn't happen so we want i want to do dope shit with dope people And what I don't, what I, there's an old saying that everyone can relate to. If you want to go far, go with people. If you want to go fast by yourself, you want to go far, go with friends. And right now I have the most savage, talented, bright, hooked up friends. And if we don't figure it out, if we don't figure it out together, if, you know, if I, if I can't take what my friends are doing at whoop and understand and apply, shame on us.

It's, it's our ball to drop and fumble. That's a good way to go out. Whoop. Thanks, Doc. Always appreciate it. You guys are amazing. And, you know, really, I, this is, if you're, I mean, I'm a nerd. There's so much nerdiness we can go down here. But I'm obsessed and I think this is a worthy thing to be obsessed about. Thank you to Mike and Kelly. If you enjoyed this episode of the Wooop podcast, be sure to leave a rating or review. Great way to share your feedback and help other people out there find the WooP podcast. Now, is there someone you've been dying to hear from on the Whoop Podcast?

podcast, head over to the show notes for a link to a short survey where you can tell us that and a lot more. Take a few minutes to let us know what you think. A reminder, you can always find us on social at whoop at Will Ahmed, and you can get 15% off a whoop membership by using the code Will Ahmed. We'll be back next week. In the meantime, stay in the green. You know, I don't know. You know,