#231: Kelly and Juliet Starrett - Master the Essential Habits to Move Freely and Live Fully
Juliet and Kelly Starrett, authors of Built to Move
Mastering the ten essential habits to help you move freely and live fully starts from the ground up. Literally.
If you’re having trouble with movement and mobility, know that it's not your fault. Our modern-day society has conditioned our bodies to become more inflexible, especially as we age. We sit at desks, on our couches, in cars. We hover over screens and laptops. Our bodies are losing the ability to move freely, but we can combat this.
Kelly and Juliet Starrett share their physical practices designed to improve the way your body feels and boost your quality of life, no matter your age.
The Starretts are the experts on movement and their latest book, Built to Move, highlights ten habits, assessments, and practices to make your body work better for you. The good news? None of them require heavy weights or a gym membership.
Juliet and Kelly share ways to integrate more movement into your daily life right at home, as well as advice and practices to improve sleep, nutrition, and even breathing.
After all, being fit isn’t necessarily about being the fastest or the strongest. It is, however, about being able to move freely and without pain. It is about building “durability,” as you’ll hear today.
Through their company, The Ready State, Kelly and Juliet bring movement and mobility practices to some of the most elite athletes on the planet, but this book and interview bring those practices right to you.
Episode Highlights:
0:02:25 Introduction to Juliet and Kelly Starrett and their background as world-class rafting champions
0:19:16 Understanding the complexity of being a human being
0:22:24 Can you get up off the floor? Intro to the Sit and Rise test
0:34:34 Breathe easy - The importance of breathing mechanics for both stress reduction and mobility work
0:43:00 Making improvements in body and health at any age
0:43:52 Beginner gains: small progress = big impact
0:51:39 The importance of sleep and its benefits
0:54:18 Impact of coffee and alcohol on sleep quality
1:02:20 What sleep accessories actually work?
1:11:06 Unlocking range of motion and restoring mobility
1:17:05 Counteracting hip flexion with the couch stretch
1:20:31 Incorporating conscious choices to reduce sitting time
1:30:08 Sitting on the floor for better hip mobility
1:33:32 Finding balance with two tests - SOLEC and the Old Man Balance Test
1:37:02 Incorporating Play and Toys for Balance Practice
1:46:02 Future-proof your neck and shoulders. You’ll never look at an airport scanner the same
1:50:54 Importance of maintaining flexibility and comfort during sleep
2:03:22 The Protein Craze and Sedentary Lifestyles
About Kelly and Juliet Starrett
Juliet Starrett and Dr. Kelly Starrett are pioneers of mobility. They’ve spent decades working with athletes of all types, teaching them how to move better to reach peak physical performance. Their revolutionary teachings on movement and the body present an easily achievable roadmap, which they have outlined in their new book Built to Move. Kelly and Juliet teach audiences how to seamlessly implement ten essential mobility habits that can be worked into even the busiest of schedules to alleviate chronic pain, improve range of motion, and break sedentary habits. They advise major companies on how to create a healthier workforce through simple mobility exercises and self-care techniques to alleviate and manage stress. Their teachings apply to all people who want to feel better, work better, and live better.
Kelly and Juliet Starrett are at the forefront of the conversation on mobility and movement. They have spent decades working with and training pro athletes, from Olympians to Navy SEALS and currently provide coaching and information to people at all levels of physical fitness through their company The Ready State. They also co-host The Ready State podcast, which features interviews with world-class experts on how to get—and stay—ready for anything.
Episode Resources
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Full Episode Transcript via AI Transcription
I'm Rip Esselstyn, and you're listening to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast.
Mastering the 10 essential habits to help you move freely and live fully starts from the ground up, literally.
If you're having trouble with movement and mobility, then listen up.
Kelly and Juliet Starrett share their physical practices specifically designed to improve improve the way your body feels, and boost your quality of life, no matter what your age.
We'll have that for you right after this message from PLANTSTRONG.
Last April, a book came out that really made me think about fitness in a new way, especially as I get older and get into new sports like pickleball that you've heard me talk about, which requires a new skill set and all kinds of different movement patterns.
[0:57] Being fit isn't necessarily about being the fastest or the strongest.
It is, however, about being able to move freely and without pain.
Take my mom, Ann Esselstyn, for example. At 88 years young, she is still hiking, doing yoga, swimming, playing pickleball, and pulling tires up hills.
Her body is durable, and to me, that is fitness at its finest.
Today's guests, Kelly and Juliet Starrett, are the experts on movement, and their latest book, Built to Move, highlights 10 habits, assessments, and practices to make your body work better for you.
The good news, none of them require heavy weights or a gym membership.
They share ways to integrate more movement into your daily life right at home, as well as advice and practices to improve your sleep, nutrition, and even breathing.
Through their company, The Ready State, Kelly and Juliet bring movement and mobility practices to some of the most elite elite athletes on the planet, but this book brings those practices right to you.
Please welcome to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast, Kelly and Juliet Starrett, authors of Built to Move.
Introduction and excitement to have Juliet and Kelly Starrett on the show
[2:25] Juliet and Kelly Starrett, welcome to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast.
I can't even tell you how jazzed I am to have you guys on the show because movement is so fundamental to everything that has been my life up until this point.
And you guys, I mean, this is your life and you've written several books about this.
And I really want to dive in today into the latest book that that you've written, you know, this one right here, Built to Move, which is absolutely insanely incredible.
But before we dive into this, I want to know more about you two.
[3:08] So first, I think it's a great story and I'd love for you to let the audience know, how did you two meet?
And was it really love at first sight?
Well, I you know, first of all, thank you so much for having us and we're delighted to be here And you know when it comes to our meat story That's when I really have to pass over to kelly because he does a better job of telling it.
[3:32] And it is it is funny and I you know, I don't know. What do you think?
Is it love at first sight baby?
Oh for sure You told me the first night we were hanging out that our daughter would be named after your grandmother So we knew early on.
Yeah, I I met kelly in the first night we sort of spent together I said, Hey, look, you know, we're going to have a daughter and her name's going to be Georgia.
[3:51] Um, so just, you know, making sure that's fine with you. And he's like, that works for me.
So, so anyway, I'll let you do a little retell of the story.
Well, to try to tie those, the couple of those things together.
One is that I met Juliet at the world championships for whitewater paddling in Chile.
She was on the women's team, us team. I was on the men's team.
We're running these big class five rivers.
Uh, Juliet is already a world champion, a couple of time world champion at this point.
And she's on this really famous, famous team full of legends and Hollywood stunt women and just pioneers of women in outdoor sports.
And then there's this ragtag team of assembled people, the boys team from national teams.
And we basically were like, we all race together. We can go to Chile and someone will pay for that vacation for this race.
So that's how we got there. So we're asymmetrical from the beginning, But we end up having a practice run together down this really treacherous section of river on the Fudalafu River in Chile. And it's big class five.
It's really scary and gnarly and it's high water.
And the women pull over to scout this rapid called Mundaka.
And at the bottom of the rapid, there is a feature, a hole that's about the size of a house.
And the only thing you need to do is not go in that spot. Like, just don't go there. It's so easy.
See that thing? don't go into that thing.
[5:11] But the men had scouted. We had looked at the river about a half mile up from the road on the way in.
And so we were like, yeah, yeah, just don't go there. It's a piece of cake. So the women pull over.
We go ahead and just decide to run it without the idea of meeting.
And you can just see the sort of differences and approaches right there.
And that really is the allegory for our whole life. I just run it.
Juliet always has a plan. And we end up having carnage where we flip above the hole.
We end up swimming. We lose our, all our like $500 carbon fiber paddles are just floating down the river.
We're just getting our butts kicked. And then I think it was a yard sale yard sale.
And then Juliet's team paddle up to us and then proceeded to rescue everything.
They rescued me. They rescued my friends. They rescued our paddle. They rescued our boat.
And that really has been, uh, I always say kind of in, in jest, but not in jest.
That was the first time Juliet saved my life. So from that moment on of understanding Juliet in this context of high performance, high output, big stress, big consequences, I was pretty sure that if we could get through that, we could probably get through having kids or starting a business together.
My gosh. And for those of us that don't know the rafting lingo, when you say class five, is it go class one to class 10 or is class five the end of that?
[6:35] So it's, it really is class one to class five. I think occasionally they will classify a rapid as class six, but by being classic six, that means it's unrunnable.
So class five is understood to be the largest runnable type of rapid.
And, you know, they specifically would choose these class five rivers to host these events because, you know, it's, you know, this is a real sort of fringe kind of like X games type sport. port.
And, you know, the more carnage and yard sale type activity they could capture from their helicopters and, you know, video cameras on the side, the better the, the video footage and the better the TV coverage.
So, um, so, you know, that's just to paint a picture of what, what we were looking at for those events.
It was, it was pretty scary and, you know, It was, it was, it was before there were, there was before there was like phones and internet. So our parents didn't really know what we were doing, you know, thankfully for them.
[7:33] And, and Kelly, my understanding from reading the first chapter of the book is that you didn't quite have your life jacket on, uh, as tightly as maybe you wish you would have.
Yeah, you know, talk about the second sort of metaphor that's germane to this conversation about us is that we as the men's team were really competent and everything that we had done to that point, we benefited from having a loose life jacket because it allowed us to have flexibility and we could move effortlessly and we weren't sort of didn't feel like we were compressed.
Kelly's loose life jacket and the allegory for their relationship
[8:09] The problem is when something goes wrong, sometimes those strategies that we play loose with don't necessarily serve us. Like, do you really need a seatbelt?
You don't really need a seatbelt.
[8:19] You really don't need to eat fruit and vegetables. You don't really need to move or sleep until there comes a moment where you may have a crisis.
In this crisis moment, we were swimming a gigantic high-volume river.
I was bouncing on the bottom of the river trying to tighten my life jacket.
Jacket and that really is sort of the allegory the the moment where we many of us feel like something has happened in our lives and we're now in the bad place trying to change all of our behaviors i probably should have my life jacket tighter a little earlier so anyway you're you're absolutely right fly fly you know and we may have had a little tequila on that uh that river trip too you know you can just sort of see the type one errors compounding when you're Did you guys have tequila during the day before that?
No, no. Oh, okay. So that would have been new for me, new part of the story.
No, not during the day. That was definitely not it.
[9:11] And so Kelly, I mean, Juliet, so you reached down to Kelly and kind of helped him out and you had already seen each other on the bank, right?
And kind of made eye contact.
And was it, I think you guys mentioned in the book, it was kind of biblical.
Biblical it was biblical and and i love to paint the visual picture especially because kelly is so visible on the internet and you know a lot of people know him and know what he looks like you know today but if i could just paint the picture at the time i met him he was almost 50 pounds lighter um and he had dyed his hair he had hair to start with and then secondarily he had dyed his hair white blonde at the time I met him.
Um, and you know, it was a very nineties look, I would say.
World championships was a world championship. So, um, so, so yeah, I mean, you know, just to paint the picture, he looked, he physically looked very different than he does today.
Um, but yeah, I thought he was adorable and funny and, um, you know, we hit, we, we hit hit it off immediately.
[10:14] Love it. You know, the, uh, I think that the, I've been whitewater rafting a couple of times.
Have you ever been to the, um, the new river in West Virginia?
Oh yeah. Kelly has been, I've never been.
Yeah. Race the world championship there too, in 2001. That is an amazing river.
And then up, I think higher above it's the, uh, the, the gully or the galley.
Which that's right. The galley is really big there too. That's, uh, we, uh, we, I paddled on the galley as well. Well, you know, one of the things that, I think, cemented Juliet for me as a human being was, I remember, here we are racing.
She's a high level. She paddles very well. She's a world champion.
[10:55] She also had just applied to law school and I could tell that she'd had her act together.
But I think that's really an important framework for us is that we really love to play together.
And we had a lot of activities that we had in common that put us outdoors and in adventures.
And I think if, you know, not to derail this, this kind of concept of rafting and racing, but one of the things is that we always were training for something.
And I think a lot of times people come into a health situation where suddenly they realize they have to change their movement behavior.
We were lucky in that we always had a reason to try to keep ourselves fit and able so that we could do the things we liked.
And I think that's one of the reasons that I just so understood Juliet right away is I didn't have to explain my need to like sleep in a truck and, and scare myself. Yeah.
What makes a fantastic world-class rafting champion?
[11:45] What do you think is that makes for a fantastic world-class rafting champion?
I mean, is it your upper body strength? Is it your, your feel for the water with the paddle?
Because, you know, I have an extensive background in swimming and I feel that it's a number of things, but I'm fascinated to know what you guys think it is that makes a, you know, a world-class rafter.
Well, let me start by explaining what the events are because it's such a weird and fringe sport, you know, and it's super popular in other parts of the world and very fringe and out there in the United States, not many people even think of it as a sport.
But there are three events in it. There is a sprint, which is a short.
[12:33] You know, like head to head, knockout, head to head, knockout, two boats, maybe two to three minutes.
You know, you start at the top of a gigantic rapid and hope that you're the first person to enter the rapid.
Um, and so it's, you know, an all out sprint through a pool and then you have to technically make it through a rapid. The second event is a classic slalom.
Um, just like you'd see in the Olympics, people may be familiar with kayak slalom in the Olympics. It's like that.
But with RAS similarly also placed in some kind of, you know, rapid that has a lot of obstacles and big rapids.
And then the final event is a down river event and it's a mass start.
Um, and usually you need to make it 10 to 12 miles down a river.
It could take up to an hour.
Um, and again, you know, you're not only sprinting for the whole hour, but you're navigating class five rapids and then navigating them often offline because you haven't made it there.
Um, you know, you've approached a rapid at the exact same time as some other team.
So, um, so there's a lot going on there, right? There's the fitness, there's the endurance, and then there is a lot of skill involved.
So my background as an athlete is I was actually a rower in high school and college.
[13:44] And so I do think that specific background, sort of the ability to just pull hard on a thing, you know, in, in rowing, it was an or in whitewater paddling, it's a paddle, but nonetheless, it's sort of, you know, I think a very similar skillset.
You know, the ability to suffer a little bit, there's, there's quite a bit of suffering, especially in the down river events.
And then I will say there is a lot of skill involved because, you know, navigating these very technical class five rivers and doing it at speed is a really unique skill. Um, and again, with high heart rate and, and, you know, unlike it, you know, a lot of people listening to this have probably been on a commercial rafting trip where they have a guide in the back in this situation, you know, usually there's four or six paddlers and there's no specific guide.
You're sort of, uh, working your way down the river. Um, in, in almost in like a mind meld with your teammates, you know, everybody knows what paddle stroke they need to take to be able to get the raft to be where, you know, you need to go.
And so um so there's a lot of coordination and teamwork but there is a lot of technical skill and then you know then there's this whole element of being complete there there's an element of you know nature that you cannot control at all and you can't control if you know you you know you enter a rapid in the wrong spot because a team that's 10 feet ahead of you have entered it in the right spot so you know there is this whole element of the unknown and risk real risk And real risk.
[15:09] And so it's a super unique sport and requires a lot.
And I would say my own rowing background and then Kelly's background as, you know, he was sort of a multi-sport athlete most of his life, but then his background as a slalom canoeist, obviously was a very good crossover for that sport. Yeah. Oh, go ahead.
No, I was just going to say, I spent two summers up in Canada doing rowing.
Canoe camps where we would paddle paddle every day for about a month and a half and it was crucial to learn a good j-stroke oh yes i'm sure you guys have the best j-stroke kelly is a j-stroking master you just uh no matter what we're gonna be friends forever because he's like so excited that you even know everyone what that means is if you've ever paddled a canoe it's you need to be able to paddle and then not just turn yourself sideways with raw force you actually need to to put in a little bit of English, a little bit of bias on the paddle at the end.
So you can kick the boat back in the other direction, which really, you know, hints at, you know, it turns out you can't just, there's some skill involved with all the things we're doing. Hopefully. I love that.
Yeah. Well, we, and we just did a family trip to the boundary waters. Oh, yeah.
[16:26] Incredible. So for all of you out there that want to do a canoe trip or maybe even a rafting trip, I'd recommend it. But I want to dive into your book.
I hope you guys can get excited about that. Oh, yeah. We're very excited.
I want to talk about the 10 Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully, which is the subtitle of your book.
I noticed in flipping through that you, I think you've dedicated this book to Georgia and Caroline. Who are they exactly?
Those are our two daughters. Our daughter, Georgia, is 18 and a freshman at University of Michigan.
And our daughter, Caroline, is 15 and a sophomore.
[17:10] And they are, you know, I will say we've had a grand old time being parents.
We love it. It's like our favorite thing.
And, you know, and it's cool also to watch our daughter grow up and, you know, see if our efforts at parenting were successful.
Are they paddlers?
They are. They both love to run rivers and are competent and can do private river trips and rowboats and guide rafts.
And, you know, yeah, so we've really made a point of making sure that having this like weird skill of being able to run rivers is something they have.
Yeah, Carolyn went down the Grand Canyon each 10. Yeah.
And did most of it on a river board where she swam with fins and a kind of a big boogie board. So, you know.
The Last Frontier: River Canyons vs. Cell Phone Service
[18:26] And then I'm convinced that river canyons are the last place on earth where there still isn't cell phone service.
I mean, Kelly and I went on a safari in Tanzania and we were literally in a tent in the middle of the Serengeti and we had cell phone service. You were editing a book.
And by contrast, you know, we can go on the Rogue River in Southern Oregon, which is just, you know, eight hours north of our house and we can lose cell phone service in two seconds from shoving off from the beach.
So, so it, you know, I think we feel lucky that we, we can sort of get into what is like the last real wilderness away from cell phones with our kids.
Yeah. Yeah. Crazy how it just is, uh, permeates everything and everywhere we are. Yeah.
Um, I move, therefore I am who, who said that quote and why do you guys love it?
Understanding the complexity of being a human being
[19:16] Uh, you know, that, uh, that quote Murakami, I believe. No, it's salt and rice. It's Murakami.
Haruki Murakami. Oh yeah, Murakami. You know, one of the ways to try to understand the complexity of being a human being, you know, I think it's for average people, for ourselves, for our parents, our friends and family, you can get lost in the minutia of all the complexity.
I take this vitamin, I do this thing, I have this morning practice, I get in this sauna.
And you really don't understand how all of those seemingly very disparate behaviors are connected.
[19:54] And when you begin to view the human as a moving machine, as a person who's designed and really constructed from the nervous system to the brain, to how we're supposed to decongest our bodies and interact, it's really through the lens of moving.
And that doesn't mean lifting weights or going on a Peloton.
It means, you know, how do I interact with my community?
How do I identify as a role of my family? And when we start to put movement in there, suddenly it really does create an – for us, again, lots of ways into understanding yourself through the mind, through the brain, through the breath.
But for us, this move piece is really the central tenet that allows us then to have conversations around why am I engaging this behavior? Why does it matter?
If my brain is really sharp when I'm 100 years old, but I can't move or get out in the sunlight, is that what I'm looking for? If I can't pick up my grandkids, is that what I'm looking for?
So how can we think differently about the problems associated with being a human being?
But more importantly, where are opportunities where we might, through the sort of habits of daily day, day in and day out living, have these inputs that really allow us to maintain our ability to move as humans and in our environment and communities? Mm-hmm.
[21:12] So what I'd love to do with you two is go through the 10 vital signs to whatever extent that you guys feel comfortable.
But basically, the 10 tests and then the 10 physical practices associated with each one.
And ultimately, you guys say that this is 10 ways to make your body work better.
And I want you to know that I did every test. Yes.
And? Well, I'm not saying I did it. I mean, I completed it, but I tried every test. Let's say that.
And the first one that you guys have is getting off, getting up and down off the floor.
Right. And with each one of these, you have an assessment and then you also have a physical practice associated with it.
And I was looking at this going, give me a break.
Right. I'm sure so many say we all exactly.
And I, and you just, you know, you, you say cross your legs and go down on your butt on the floor and then come up without using your, your hands or your arms.
And I could not get up. I couldn't, I could not get up. And I was like, gee, these guys got me. You got me.
Introduction to the concept of durability and practices for the body
[22:24] Well, I think your experiences, you know, that's, that is exactly why we put that as chapter one of this book.
Um, I'll start by saying, but, you know, I'll just frame this a little bit is that, um, you know, I think we, there are these 10 tests and 10 physical practices.
And I think we sort of group them into like, you know, five, five of them are, are sort of all grouped around, ground, you know, how well can you move your body and do the things that your body is supposed to do? Do you have, it's not about fitness.
[22:53] Can you get up? Can you do things like get up off the ground? How is your balance?
Um, is your, you know, are your joints moving the way they're supposed to be moving so that you can do the activities you want to be able to do?
And then there's a second half that we sort of backed into over the years and didn't initially consider ourselves to be experts at.
And we, these are the more lifestyle chapters.
Um, and, and by that, I mean, nutrition, sleep, and some of the other chapters where, you know, we say, okay, in order to be a durable human, it's not just about movement.
It's about this sort of set of practices that help make you a durable human.
And, and we think, you know, what we have found in, in working with people on this book is, you know, there's many people who struggle with all the tests.
There are, you know, lots of our athlete friends who think they're going to ace the tests and are They're shocked to learn that there's a couple they can't do.
So we really get a, it's a real mixed bag. But what we really wanted to do is say, hey, we think these are the behaviors, the small hinges that will open the biggest doors in terms of being able to feel good and have a durable body.
And that was our goal in making these tests and choosing the specific things we chose. Because of course-
[24:07] You know, there's 101 things we could all be doing on a daily basis to take care of our health.
And, you know, every day there's something new that is added to the list from the internet.
But we found that these are the base, most fundamental things that if, you know, we find if we do consistently and if we prescribe people do consistently are the most effective for the longest amount of time.
And we ran a gym for 17 years and really trying to help people.
And again, some of our day job is we work with the army, we work with the CIA, we work with the FBI, we work with national teams and professional teams trying to untangle this Gordian knot of performance.
We have a handful of Olympians this next year.
And we cannot get to the heart of the matter unless we're also talking about some of these environmental behavioral things, which people sort of will poo-poo a little bit.
And so it's important that everyone understands that we've been running this through our filter of high performance and saying that these are these essential behaviors.
[25:08] And not only that, but what we've tried to do is say, hey, look, we respect that we all like to train a little differently.
We all like to eat a little differently. We'll have different demands on our time.
So however you're living your lifestyle, here are some evidence-based science-backed practices. And what we've done is created benchmarks and vital signs, reference ranges like blood pressure or cholesterol or heart rate.
So now you can sort of just quickly check like you, you may have struggled on one, but I guarantee you that you're crushing all the other things, even though you and I have such radically different lifestyles and sort of backgrounds.
And so that allows us to say, here's a template.
Let's go ahead and check how you're doing day to day or week to week or month to month. Mm hmm.
Well, I can't wait to go through all 10 and let you know how I did on all 10.
But also, I like like two things that well, I like everything that I heard.
But two things that jump out is is Juliet, you said the word durable about 10 times.
And I find that right now, so many of my I'm 60.
So many of my friends now, they're not durable. They've got all kinds of issues going on, whether it's their lower back, shoulders, knees, ankles, you know, feet problems, you name it.
And then same thing as people get older, obviously. But the thing that you said, Kelly, you jumped in to say it is this is not just for exercises.
This is for non-exercisers as well.
[26:32] Which really kind of hit home with me when I was reading the book and, and doing everything.
It's just, it makes you a much more durable human being. That's what, what we all are, are seeking, I think.
Yeah. And you know, what, what I would add to that is we, you know, you know, some people have said, well, you guys are exercisers, you know, your gym, you know, you're a performer, professional athletes, you own gyms. Like, why don't you guys have chapters on exercise and strength training?
And, you know, the reason we excluded those is we did not want this to be an exercise book.
We thought the moment we added chapters on exercise and drew a line in the sand about what we think is the best way to exercise, all of a sudden this book would be a book for exercisers.
When really we wanted this, we of course value exercise, we exercise, we believe in strength training.
I mean, we could have a whole podcast about our philosophy on exercise, but we also have come to think that exercise is ultimately very personal There's tons of different ways to do it.
There's no one right way to do it It needs to be something that brings you joy, and that Really the way to feel good in your body is to do all of these other sort of fundamental basic, Behaviors and skills and and that those will allow you to be able to exercise the way you want to exercise So so we are definitely pro exercise But we wanted to write a book that you could give to someone in your life who doesn't relate to or care about exercise, but does want to feel good in their body.
[28:02] Absolutely. Well, so how do you guys recommend that we start?
Should we just talk about each one?
I say you, you know, you teed off the sit and rise test chapter one.
So I'll just provide a little color commentary on that one.
You know, the sit and rise test is based on a study that showed that people who were not able to get up and down off the ground doing this particular test didn't live as long.
And And importantly, you know, the number one way that people end up in nursing homes is they fall and they're not able to get up.
So someone who's listening to this who's 30 is going to be like, why would I care about that? I'm 30.
You know, I'm not going to worry yet about being able to get up and down off the ground.
But interestingly, actually, the number one reason that all people, even younger people, end up in the ER is from falls.
So, you know, falling is definitely a thing for all humans.
But, you know, I think what we love about this test and why we wanted to put it in there first is that it is super eye-opening for people.
And I think that's what you experienced when you did it, Rip, right? Like you probably see yourself as athletic and, you know, you move well in your life and you're able to do most of the things you want to do.
But probably pretty eye-opening to think, oh, my God, I cannot get up and down on the ground comfortably.
[29:17] And then secondarily, the other reason we liked and wanted to start with this test is it's.
[29:22] You can improve. I, you know, I am in a classic example.
When we first started working on this and discovered this test, I really struggled to do this test.
Um, and what we realized is that it's, you know, we wanted to include things in this book where people could actually practice and get better.
And this is one of those tests. And, and what's great about it is one of the best ways to get better at this test is to do one of our favorite activities, which is sitting on the the floor while we watch television.
Um, and just the act of getting down up and down off the ground to, you know, sit on the floor to watch television is already practicing the thing.
And then wouldn't, you know, it, when you're sitting on the ground, you're naturally going to be moving and changing positions and, you know, putting your body into shapes that ultimately are going to help you get better at actually performing this test.
Well, you know, what's interesting is I'm just going to get a little personal here with you guys.
And that is, um, yeah.
So I, yeah. I mean, like you guys, I identify as an athlete.
I have my whole life and, um, I've had three, three falls in the last, probably three years.
And I, I really can't remember falling much other than, you know, mountain biking and being on a fall, but one was mountain biking in 2000.
I fell and I broke my right ankle.
And I had to have surgery and eight pins and a little bit of a rod.
Unexpected Injuries: Pickleball Mishaps and Accidents at Home
[30:49] And then it was probably six months ago, I've gotten into pickleball. Yes.
Oh, I mean, pickleballers need this so bad.
Incredible. But I was playing pickleball. And next thing I know, I was down on the ground. I twisted my ankle bad. That was the right one, right?
And I was like, how did that happen? Wow. wow.
And then the other day, um, we were, we had a dinner party and my youngest was bless you.
My youngest daughter was outside and she had fallen and her friend came to the front door and said, Oh, come help, uh, hope get off the ground. She hurt herself.
So I, I flew out the front door, the, the, the mat slipped out from underneath me and I landed in my left pinky finger was in a 90 degree dislocated it and was like, but, um, you, anyway, you talk about falls and falling as we get older and it just, it, it, it, it resonates with me in a big way and how, how I am very fallible, I used to think of myself as being bulletproof and you are, you are still bulletproof.
Yeah. Let me just say that you are still bulletproof.
You know, I think Kelly was going to chime in, but I wanted to make the point as well, that if you look at, you know, cultures where people sit on the ground, use the toilet on the ground, sleep on the ground, you know, the fall risk in the elderly falls to almost zero.
[32:13] Um, and the, the number of orthopedic injuries, especially things like low back pain and hip replacements.
And a lot of things that we've just come to, you know, take as like a normal part of aging here in our culture are really much less.
[32:26] And so, you know, wouldn't you know that just the simple difference of, you know, spending some time on the ground and getting up off and up and down off the ground and practicing that skill is really important to having a durable body as we age.
Let me tie a couple of things together for people. One is that, you know, I'm a trained physical therapist. That's my background.
And one of the things that the field of physical therapy he's done a terrible job of is helping people understand their movement as a vital sign.
Well, how much hip flexion, what is hip flexion? That's bringing your knee to your chest, sitting in a ground or sitting in a chair is going to have about 90 degrees of hip flexion.
And one of the things that you do on the sit and rise test is you need a little bit more hip flexion in that test than you're probably expressing day to day.
[33:14] And so, and by the way, way, it's not even maximal hip range of motion, but in order to lean forward and shift your weight, you actually have to bring your knee closer to your chest and something that looks a little bit like pigeon pose.
And if you're not exposing that, what ends up happening is that you, it's a one or zero situation where suddenly you're like, well, I can't shift my weight. It's not about strength.
It's not about ankle range of motion, but you can't shift your weight over your hip to be able to sort of initiate that weight shift and stand up.
And so subsequently it's the first time in a a long time where we have found real tests to make range of motion matter to people.
And one of the reasons it matters is if we're going to try to talk about creating durability, then we want to always keep your movement choices open and the stiffer your body gets.
[33:59] The fewer movement solutions your brain can develop to solve in a chaotic world.
So a mat slips out or you're playing pickleball and you can't reach across your body or something else.
And suddenly your brain starts to pare down your total number of movement solutions.
And in real world for everyone, that means less balance, less choice.
I feel less safe riding my bike. I don't want to do this new sport or activity because I'm afraid I'm going to fall.
And that's your brain perceiving your now changing range of motion.
As sort of a, as a liability to itself.
The Importance of Breathing Mechanics
[34:34] Great, great color on there. All right, let's go to number two, which is breathe easy.
And this, this, I, I nailed this one, right? I'm sure you're a swimmer.
You're really good at this.
So I nailed this one, but I could see how a lot of people have a hard time.
So what is it and what are you looking for?
Well, you know, I think a lot of times we We don't appreciate the mechanics and all of the things that breathing can do for us.
And breathing had its moment a couple of years ago. It was very hot.
Everyone's talking about it. But let's look at it this way. The first movement of the spine, the first movement of the body is really the breath.
[35:11] So one of the things we're asking is, well, if I'm stiff through the upper back, I have 10,000 opportunities to restore motion in my trunk to keep myself dynamic and supple, just making sure that I have access to that.
From a performance standpoint, it means that you and I are able to lean into higher VO2 max, our oxygen consumption, because we can simply move more air in and more air out.
A lot of the environment sort of hints at we do things that alter some of our breathing patterns because we're sitting.
Suddenly, it's more difficult for us to kind of take bigger, more expansive breaths led by the diaphragm.
And so suddenly we do a little bit more mouth and neck breathing for no other reason than we just happen to be sitting or driving in the car.
So by having people understand a little bit around sort of the mechanics of breathing then we can initiate a conversation a little bit about some of the downstream effects iangar one of the greatest yogis in all time says nerves are king of the breath and breath is king of the brain so we know that if we can change how we are consciously volitionally moving air in and out we know we can change our states whether that's decreasing sensitivity in a tissue because it's painful painful, or I'm feeling stressed, or I want to relax, or I want to wake myself up.
Suddenly, when we just give people a little bit of this testing, it can be really tell us about the efficiency of our breathing and how much sort of low hanging fruit there is around making ourselves feel better.
[36:36] You know, one thing I would add about this breathing piece is, you know, and Kelly was right.
Breathing did have a moment a few years ago. It was, you know, Jacob Nestor's book was amazing. And, you know, Wim Hof was on tons of podcasts.
And so I think it sort of came into people's consciousness.
But one of the things we've tried to do in this book is actually a lot of the physical practices we prescribe for other tests, give people an opportunity to practice this breathing.
Breathing because one of the things we wanted to say about this book is that one of our primary goals here was to try to make this information accessible and relatable and actually doable for normal people.
Um, one of the things I think that I feel really lucky about is that I worked, I actually have spent part of my life not working in the fitness space.
I had like a traditional job as a lawyer was had little kids at the time.
You know, I really had like a very standard issue job and was trying to figure out how to fit in my health practices in these little teeny windows at the beginning of the end of the day.
[37:34] And so it was through that lens that we really wrote this book, you know, understanding that most people are busy raising kids, having busy jobs, and are going to have to fit these activities in on the periphery of the other things they're doing.
And so, you know, we aren't prescribing that people sit down and spend a half an hour doing a breathing practice every day.
What we're saying is, okay, well, you know, when you're doing some some of the mobilizations, for example, on to help you get better at the couch test, which is another test we can talk about.
We, we encourage you to incorporate a little bit of a breathing practice to help you get into those positions.
And so we think about that as a way to say, okay, we value breathing.
We think it's important.
We think it's something that people should bring their attention to, but not something that you need to go and take 30 minutes doing or sign up for a class.
It's, it's something that you can bring your your attention to while you're doing some of these other things we suggest you do. Even like walking in the neighborhood. Even walking around your neighborhood.
[38:31] And for people that are curious, what's the assessment for the breathe easy vital sign?
It's called the BOLT test, which is the body oxygen level test.
And it comes from a gentleman named Patrick McKeown of Oxygen Advantage.
And one of the ideas here is looking at how CO2 tolerant you are, how well your brain can tolerate having high levels of CO2. So, without getting into the specifics of the physiology here, it's not lack of oxygen that makes you want to breathe.
It's the higher raising of the CO2 levels in your brainstem, perceiving that higher levels of carbon dioxide that's triggering your breathe mechanism.
And what we find is that people who are shallow breathers, who are doing a lot of mouth breathing, are sort of breathing through their necks, they end up breathing off a lot of the CO2.
And so the brain ends up, because they're breathing more often, And so the brain ends up becoming a little twitchy, a little more sensitive to these higher CO2 levels.
[39:31] So one of the things that we can test is just your desire to breathe.
And when you have this little test that you can do, when you feel that trigger to breathe, that's a good indicator of your CO2 sort of tolerance.
And the reason that matters for so many people is that it's actually the CO2 in your bloodstream that's really important, enabling you to actually access all the oxygen that's circulating through your body.
So oftentimes if you just held your breath really quickly you would get this incredible breathe drive but it turns out your oxygen is still maxed out but because your brain is not comfortable having these higher co2s you can't actually access that oxygen so when we get people more co2 tolerant turns out they feel less twitchy they feel less anxiety you remember when people would start to hyperventilate they would get a little you know feel gnarly and you have breathe breathe into a paper bag.
Well, what you're doing is actually putting CO2 back into the system so they could access the oxygen.
That was what that breathing in the paper bag was. So here we have an idea of saying, if we can improve the mechanics, well, now we've got a strategy to help you have managed low back pain, which is if you come see me as a physical therapist, I'm going to prescribe walking and lots of this sort of big diaphragmatic breathing practice for your low back pain.
But now we have a way of improving your performance so you can walk You can walk upstairs, you can play pickleball more effectively, you know, and even change how your neck and, and, and, you know, head feels sitting on your body because we're not sort of cranking on those soft tissues to take a breath all the time.
[41:01] And, and the test itself, you, you exhale and then you hold it for 20 seconds, right? Yeah.
It's so simple. Just take a, take a big breath in, exhale, and then see how long you can go before you need to take a breath.
And you measure that. And you can just time that. And it's really simple for your high performers who are listening.
We see that this CO2 tolerance correlates really well with your readiness.
So if you're really over-trained and sleep deprived and stressed, you're going to see that your brain is not so good at handling those higher CO2.
So we use this even just as a readiness assessment for some of our elite athletes.
What are some times that some of these elite athletes can go?
Can they go two minutes after exhaling?
Oh yeah. We see that people can easily go a minute or two minutes after exhaling. No problem.
[41:48] What's amazing about the physiology of the lungs in the cardiorespiratory system is that it's almost infinitely trainable.
And so that's, what's really extraordinary is that suddenly many of us engage in a physical activity and we suddenly get out of breath and we're not even, you know, we haven't even tapped like the true limits of the lungs.
So what we're finding is that if we can start to shift people, even from doing this, everyone, if you're walking, I just want you to breathe through your nose while you're walking, just that practice alone of walking up a hill and trying to breathe only through your nose, you're going to be shocked at, wow, I have to to work really hard.
I have to rate limit myself.
And all that's done is it's not allowed you to have sort of free access to scrubbing off your CO2.
So if we can get people to start to think about these little behaviors, we start to see big changes in how they feel, how their bodies work.
And again, I'm sort of interested in also the mechanics of the whole system.
Yeah. And I think the theme that, you know, I mentioned earlier, but Kelly mentioned again, again, is we've chosen another thing that is trainable.
And that's so important for us because I think that we wanted to make sure that people who are brand new to this, who are just, you know.
Making Improvements in Body and Health at Any Age
[43:00] At whatever age now trying to figure out how to feel good in their bodies, that they can know that just with a little bit of effort and a little bit of, you know, kind of work on the fringes of their busy life, they actually really can make improvements and not just the breathing piece, but all of the tests we have in this book.
And, you know, I think that's important because people often ask, is it too late for me to start? And the solid answer is no, it is never too late to start.
And you, you don't actually have to quit your job and, you know, you know, open an influencer fitness account in order to be able to do these things.
You know, you can actually continue on and, you know, fit these things in on the fringes and improve.
And Rip, something you can relate to kind of being an athlete your whole life, for you to get a gain now is actually really difficult. You have to train really hard.
Beginner Gains: Small Progress, Big Impact
[43:52] You like diet and it's just for a little marginal gain.
It's almost not worth it, right? The sacrifices you have to put in to make a little bit of progress.
[44:01] Juliet and I are all about the beginner gains. If you're starting out and you just do a little bit, going from zero to five is life-changing.
Going from 95 to 100 is going from A to A plus.
[44:15] That's the difference between world champion and not world, second in the world, but it's not really meaningful in terms of your your daily life.
And so across here, what's really fun, as Juliet said, is that when we begin to have these conversations with people, illuminate some of their blind spots, help them just experience a couple of dramatic changes in a couple of things.
It's literally like someone pours water on a thirsty plant. It's pretty remarkable.
Beginner gains rule. And I want beginner gains for everything in my life.
And I just want to make this side point. I don't mean to go too off off the rails here, but you mentioned my constant repeating of the word durability earlier.
But I think what most people have been taught in this country and maybe throughout the world is that we all have this, we've accepted this long, slow rot theory of aging, that it's this idea that you're just going to continue to slowly break down until one day you die and there's nothing you can do about that.
Now, I do think the consciousness is changing on this because because there's been a lot of talk and books written, people thinking and talking more publicly about longevity, longevity science, what we can do to live longer, health span.
These words are starting to permeate our culture more.
But I think that that continues to be largely within a space of people who would use the word athlete to describe themselves and hasn't necessarily stepped out from there.
[45:39] But what we're trying to say here is, man, there's a lot of things you can do actually to not, you know, go into long, slow rot theory of aging.
And one of them is range of motion.
You know, like Kelly says, unlike your muscle mass, which we are all going to slowly lose our muscle, you know, some of our muscle mass over time, don't have to lose all of it.
That's a myth, but we don't actually have to lose our range of motion as we age.
And, and that that's a myth and something something that we can, you know, start late, continue to approve and something we can focus on and should be able to retain as long as we live.
And so I think that's an important point to have a dura, you know, in terms of this durable body concept.
So this is range of motion of your breathing range of, well, I, yeah, this way it's nothing to do with breathing.
I love that. I actually really appreciate it. That's a really good way of explaining what I just have to stop and interject for a second and say, what a wonderful team you two are.
I we've only been been talking for maybe 40 minutes or so but um i uh you guys i i love what you guys have um before we move on i just want to touch upon a couple things with breathing like have you ever seen somebody play a didgeridoo oh yeah that has incredible control of their their breath and their lungs and i'm just like they're doing this circular breathing pattern and i'm like wow but But they've trained themselves to do that.
[47:02] And I know that we could too. It's just a matter of working at it.
But that would be cool to have that kind of control of your breath.
Performance and Benchmarks: Unleashing the Body's Potential
[47:08] And that would blow your mind when your back ached and you're like, oh, I'm going to go ahead and just do some big diaphragmatic breathing to increase circulation and get my tissues moving, extend and flex.
[47:21] Boy, that really made it easier for me to crush my friends and pickleball.
I think what we don't always get with some of these behaviors is, hey, take this CoQ10.
And you're like, well, I didn't really feel bad before I took the CoQ10, whatever.
But if you start to engage in some of these benchmarks, it is profound what ends up happening to your performance. And that performance can be very individual.
You'd love to go to your dance class, your Zumba, your spin.
You walk with your friends. You play pickleball. But you really are bringing it up. I don't think people realize they're just, we just take the handbrakes off the human body and it is going hard and it is going really, really extraordinary.
I think before we move on, I'll just say that we're the first time there are always been outliers of mutant men and women out there.
Diana Nyad, I'll just put it out as just like, you know, such a mutant, but we're starting to see our friends of this first generation, like you, you're the same age as a couple of my friends, your same age as Laird Hamilton.
And what I see, I'm 50 years old, but when I see my 60-year-old friends doing, I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm going to have to train my butt off to be able to catch those guys when they're 70, because look what they're doing when they're 60.
And I think we're really starting to write a whole new chapter of what's expected of our bodies as we age. It's incredible. Yeah. Yeah.
Should I be taping my mouth when I go to sleep?
[48:42] Well, it is fun and funny. I'll start by saying that. And, you know, sometimes it, you know, we definitely, we've done it a lot.
And, you know, we don't do it as much anymore because we've realized, like, we can make it. Like, I can easily make it the whole night with my mouth taped.
Kelly doesn't like it as much, and he finds that he rips the tape off after a couple of hours. But, um, but yeah, I mean, I think it, it does give you some really good information about whether you're spending your night mouth breathing or nose breathing.
And, you know, certainly breathing through your nose is connected with, you know, much better overall health and health outcomes and breathing through your mouth is less great for a variety of reasons.
So I do think it's really good just from a pure information standpoint to try it a few times. And it's funny.
And, you know, we, I mean, we, we find ourselves taping our mouths and then like falling into fits of laughter.
And so, I mean, it's fun and I do think it gives you some, you know, some good information about what your breathing habits are as you're sleeping that you might not otherwise get.
Yeah. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it tonight because I feel like I've been waking up, It's 3 o'clock, and my mouth is incredibly dry, and I can tell I've been breathing through my mouth. And I'm like, come on, stop that.
Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up.
[49:55] We see that there are a whole host of people who are apneic.
They're holding their breath. They're mouth breathing.
They've got a lot of disrupted sleep. And it really does sort of fragment how your brain is allowed to rest and recover.
And again, this is one of those things where you don't need revolutionary.
Evolutionary you don't have to buy a mouth tape if you go to cvs you can get a little kt tape it's that like kinesio tape there's usually even like adhesive tape yeah but you know that tape is safe for your skin it's not gonna irritate you and you just have to tape tape your mouth shut before you go to bed and just do it for an hour and sit you know if you wake up in the night you may find that there's a real opportunity to learn something about this and we have a lot of friends who won't go to sleep without it now because they sleep so much better.
Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yeah. So, you know, I feel like we should move on to sleep because we already started talking about it.
[50:50] Hey, you know what? Let's do it. That's number 10 on the list.
And we're skipping ahead a little bit, but.
Well, and that is one of our superpowers, right? Sleep.
Yeah. I mean, you know, we, even though we put this as the last chapter, you know, if, if pressed rest and someone said to us, you know, Hey, Kelly and Juliet, you can only do one thing for your health.
Like that's it. You get one thing, like otherwise everything else you can't do.
This is it. Like you get one choice. I think we would both unanimously say sleep is the most important thing.
Um, we consider it to be a keystone behavior from which all other good health behaviors come, you know, people who, who sleep enough and have quality sleep, make better better food choices.
If you're well rested, you feel motivated and want to move your body more.
You know, obviously there's a.
The Importance of Sleep and Its Benefits
[51:39] Thousand mental health reasons why we need to sleep more so we can consolidate our memories and, you know, process stress and trauma and learn information.
I mean, there's a thousand reasons why sleep is so important and why it should be so prioritized.
And, you know, one quick story I'll tell you is that Kelly was on another podcast, um, that had listeners that are more of a non-exercise variety, I would say.
And, you know, in our universe where we're often working with high high performers and, you know, athletes, I think we thought that the messaging around sleep was pretty well understood and not controversial at all.
Um, you know, in our book, we recommend that you need seven to eight hours of sleep a night, and that's not really a debatable number by, you know, any of, any of the scientists who study sleep and if you're trying to get out of pain, grow a body, learn a skill, change your muscle mass, right.
Any of those things is closer to eight should be closer to eight hours.
So Kelly mentions this in like a 20 second clip on Instagram on this podcast.
And this, this clip now has like 3 million views and 10,000 comments.
And I'll say that most of those comments are negative.
People were very upset by the suggestion that.
[52:53] Everybody needs seven or eight hours of sleep. And many people thought that, you know, they were unique and only needed four hours of sleep.
And that, you know, it was really shocking and eyeopening to us because I think we live in a universe and tend to associate with people who I think have really, you know, sort of gotten on this sleep train, so to speak a lot earlier.
[53:13] So I think, you know, to the extent there's non-exercisers out here listening to this or people who this is new information.
I mean, it is, you know, what we think to be such an important and critical keystone behavior.
And there really isn't, you know, it, we could go into our nutrition chapter and certainly, man, when you get into the nutrition world, great minds can really differ in that department, as you well know.
And there's no clear science when it comes to nutrition in many ways.
I think there's some, some clear principles, but you know, there's controversy, there's controversy there when it comes to nutrition.
When it, when it comes to sleep, there really isn't. If you look at every sleep Academy, every medical Academy, every sleep researcher, there's universal agreement that people need to sleep seven or eight hours.
And, um, man, I, I think if just people, you know, I think as a society, if we just adopted that habit alone out of this book, you know, I think a lot would be going better for us from a health standpoint.
Yeah, we could just sleep and our bodies would rot in our sleep.
Impact of Coffee and Alcohol on Sleep Quality
[54:18] Well, one of the, I think the useful things about sleep as a keystone is it's a lot easier to start to organize some of your behaviors during the day through the lens of, will this impact my sleep or not?
So Julie and I love coffee, but we really stopped drinking coffee at 12 o'clock because we found that a late coffee or even a coffee at three or four really impacted the quality of our sleep. We'd fall asleep. We wouldn't sleep great.
Well, we started to have the same feeling around alcohol.
Wow, I think a glass of red wine is amazing. Having a margarita with your friends is incredible.
But what we found was, wow, it really disrupted some of our heart function.
And we could see that when we started looking at those measures.
So suddenly it wasn't that alcohol is bad that, well, I need to make a choice about being a human when I'm going to do that.
Because if I'm stressed or I'm under massive amounts of pressure, or I want to compete really really well.
I'm not sure I want to interrupt my sleep or, or decrease my sort of cardiac function, rest function.
[55:16] And then suddenly we realized, well, boy, if we ate dinner before we went to bed, we didn't sleep great.
If we, if we waited a few hours before our last meal and we went to bed, we ended up having better sleep scores.
If we, if we got, went to bed at the same time and got up at the same time, we started to feel better.
And so we suddenly were able to start to put in all All of these behaviors, walking more during the day, allowed us to create enough non-exercise activity where we actually were sleepy enough.
And suddenly, that sleep concept ends up being a really kind of nice organizing framework around, hey, what should I do today?
Well, I don't want to interrupt my sleep. In fact, I want to do some things to make my sleep even better, so I may not have that chocolate cake at midnight, right?
So I think that's – what's nice about that is then it gives me the power to make a choice about the things I'm doing with the impact or understanding its impact on my sleep or on my quality of sleep.
And sometimes I can control those things. So I'm about to jump on a, on an airplane and go to the East coast and lecture.
And boy, if I'm sleep deprived and on three hours of jet lag, maybe I don't drink any little chocolate donuts because that's another stressor on top of the stresses I'm already having.
Yeah. No, I'm glad that you guys just talked about all the, the sleep hygiene there and you go into it in the book.
[56:39] Um, you know, the caffeine, the alcohol movement, all those things that really can help contribute to a great night's sleep. What are your thoughts on wearing a mask and earplugs?
Amen. Yes.
[56:56] Amen. So you're fans of it. The reason I ask is I just started using a mask maybe a year and a half ago. And I've gotten to the point now where...
If I don't have my mask, it's kind of the same feeling I have when I don't put my seatbelt on when I'm driving or I don't put a helmet on when I'm riding a bike. I just feel a little naked.
How many masks do you have next to the bed? I have four because I might lose one and I won't be able to.
You know, one of the things, remember that we're. Do you have a mask you recommend too? No, no. I do.
Yeah, go ahead. I really like the Mindfold mask.
[57:31] Okay. Okay. And you know, quick, quick story on that.
We, where we live in San Rafael, California is the home of the national center for the guide dogs for the blind.
So all guide dogs for the blind or the national center for it is, is based right here in our town.
And so often walking around on the sidewalks, you'll see volunteers and people working training dogs and they're wearing mindful masks, which is where I first saw it.
And I thought, well, if it's working to to simulate, you know, blindness and in training, you know, guide dogs for the blind, this has got to be a good mask. So I'm a fan of it.
Yeah. And one of the reasons I want to put on people's radar, if you travel a lot, we use this as a performance hack for people who travel or athletes who end up in multiple beds.
So, you know, you have a hundred away games a year in baseball, for example, that's a hundred different beds potentially than your own bed.
And if you sleep outside your own bed one night, your brain thinks, Hey, this is, you're under threat. you could be attacked by bears and wolves at any point.
So you won't sleep as well because you need to be in sort of a higher aroused state.
And what we found is that when we had athletes be able to sort of simulate the same environment night after night, so it didn't matter where you were, your brain starts to say, it's dark.
I put the mask on. I associate that with my sleep. We can control light pollution.
[58:51] There's a whole lot of things that are sort of on the competitive advantage.
And it may take you a little while to train yourself to sleep without a mask, But we know that for people who are sensitive, I mean, if there's a flashing toothbrush in the room, in our bathroom, it wakes me up. And I'm like, holy moly, that thing is like a spotlight in my life.
Juliet sometimes wears her watch and like, there's like a laser, this green laser is lasering my face in the middle of the night and I freak out.
And, and so I think what's really great there is what we're saying is not only what can I control in my environment, but second, how do I give myself the same sets of cues so that my brain knows what's next.
And if you put the eye mask on you bring those what's next and i really love that sort of sets of behavior you know what's interesting about that is any of us who have raised kids know that little kids you know infants and toddlers thrive on a bedtime routine um you know we've all raised kids they you know almost everybody i know puts their kid in the bath and then they read them a story and they rub their chest or whatever routine everybody creates in their own household everybody has one for kids and it's interesting because we sort of reach an age where we're like, well, I don't need a routine.
Well, it turns out- No, it's a glass of wine, Netflix, a weed pen.
[1:00:04] A cookie. It turns out the same things that worked for your baby are going to work for you.
They don't need to be the exact same things. You don't need to put on a onesie and read a children's book, but it turns out if you get into the routine of wearing an eye mask and earplugs and kind of set this up as a routine, go to sleep at the same time every night, it turns out it really is going to to positively impact your quality of sleep.
One of the things we learned recently, which we love is, um, is that I think it was the, the phrase was like weekend jet lag or Monday jet lag.
So, you know, a lot of people like we all sort of struggle on Mondays and sometimes Mondays, it's hard to get going.
And someone pointed out to us is that the reason for that is that we're all jet lagged on Monday, because what we've done is during the week, we all go to sleep at the same time and wake up at the same time.
And then Friday night, we stay up late with our friends and watch watch a movie or whatever we do, it turns out by Monday morning, we're actually jet legged.
And that's part of the reason why we struggle to get going on Mondays because we've altered our sleep schedule enough to the point where we're jet legged.
And I, that's really, that really stuck with me. I was like, oh, that's so true. That's exactly what it is.
Yeah. Yeah. No, that definitely resonates for sure.
What about earplugs? I haven't gone that far yet. And I'm wondering if you're a fan of the earplugs as well.
Let me jump in. I snore.
[1:01:20] So Juliet's a fan of the earplugs. I don't wear earplugs. And partly it's because I am the person responsible in my family for hearing all the noises. And so that's real.
And my daughters are sound sleepers.
Juliet, I could start a jet airplane in our room. She wouldn't wake up.
So I don't wear earplugs because I'm always listening and sort of vigilant in that way. But I think it can be one more cue, especially if you can start to regulate or you find yourself with a roommate or you're traveling and you have these other noises.
Again, sort of creating the same stimulus over and over again is really an important tool to trying to maximize your sleep when you can.
And I will say it does take getting used to like one of the weird things when I first started wearing earplugs is like you can hear the blood pulsing through your own brain when you're wearing earplugs.
Like there's some weird things that you have to get used to.
The Importance of Sleep Accessories
[1:02:20] But, you know, again, like the eye mask, it's totally trainable.
Like I've just trained myself to.
So I'm like you, you know, if I travel anywhere, I need to have my eye mask and my earplugs.
And I feel weird, you know, even if we go camping, I have that stuff.
So, you know, it's it's with me always. I've got two issues with the earplugs.
One is, you know, I'm a former firefighter. I did that for 12 years and something about always wanting to hear like you, like you, like I want to hear what's going on.
If you know, some, if a window breaks or if the alarms are going off, whatever.
So that's, that's real. And then the other thing is.
[1:02:58] I find my ears are really sensitive. And if I have anything in them for more than even 30 minutes, like even the eye buds, I got to take them out because my ears start to ache.
So, I mean, again, I'll ask you, do you have a, do you have a set of ear earplugs that you recommend that?
No, I am like Walgreens special. You know what I found?
And I think what's important for people to know is that, you know, most of these earplugs you can get over the counter, do not block out all sound.
Like I can actually, if I'm, if I'm wearing my earplugs and Kelly's laying right next to me, we can pretty much have a conversation. I can hear exactly what he's saying.
Um, you know, so it's, it's more like a muting of, it kind of mutes a little bit of sound, but yeah, I'm just, I'm like, whatever's at Walgreens, whatever has the sort of highest rating.
I grabbed those, but it's, it's all over the map and I haven't found one that's superior.
I'll be honest. And I do love that. We're talking about really inexpensive experiments you can run on your, on your sleep, on your, you know, want better, same, worse.
You know, I think it's sometimes that, that simple.
What I will tell people is that, you know, when we're talking with high performers.
[1:04:06] I'm working with currently an Olympian who's a two-time world champion who'd been injured a whole bunch.
And as we tried to, to get them through why would these things were happening?
It ended up we were talking about sleep and that ended up allowing us to talk about nutrition and this person tended to be undercaloried and that actually impacted their sleep quality and then sleep quality set them up because they were poor sleepers for more likelihood of of sort of having tissues that weren't robust nervous system that wasn't going and so we ended up solving a lot of performance pieces by working on sleep but ultimately by making sure they were eating enough calories during the day.
And I think that's one of the things that we want people to understand about this book is that there's a whole lot of little small experiments that you can try.
The second thing is how all of these behaviors interact. And I think it's easy to sort of think of these as silos, but we're a complex system of systems and that we find that your mileage may vary on any one of these, but you can't really say, which one am I not going to do?
Because it turns out they're all important and they all impact each other sort of tightly conjoined.
Let me ask you this about the story you just shared with us with the individual that was not sleeping as well because they were under-caloried.
[1:05:24] Were they underweight? Was their weight an issue? I mean, was that something that was visual? No.
No, but the output that we, when we saw what was happening during the training sessions and during the sort of pre-fueling and post-fueling, you know, after a three-hour session where heart rate's 170, we were just seeing that, oh, there wasn't even close to nutrition.
And there was a lot of pressure to sort of look a certain way or to eat a certain way, the culture they were in.
And all we did was to say, hey, how can we sort of help you navigate that and look at places that this makes sense?
And when we started adding some just some nutrition back, this person put on a whole bunch of muscle very quickly, ended up having a great season. in.
External Pressure and Body Image in Relation to Nutrition
[1:06:10] So, you know, the key here is, you know, for this piece, it wasn't necessarily that we were seeing a weight management issue, but it was just simply a fueling issue.
Although you bring up really good points that it's easy to end up because I'm chasing some aesthetic value or some other aspect, or I have a lot of pressure on me to look a certain way that I can inadvertently disrupt a whole lot of processes because of some kind of external demand on my body. Yeah.
And I guess the reason I asked that is, so I was a professional triathlete for about 10, 11 years.
[1:06:46] And I knew as soon as my weight got below 165 pounds, I needed to just make sure I was eating more.
And eating became almost like a, you know, the fourth sport of the day.
Yeah yeah that's right that's right exactly yeah i don't think people realize um you do a couple things here one of the things is um when we start to look at nutrition not only through the lens of aesthetics that i i want like i want to be less gross for my wife that's a that's one of my that's one of my goals and that means i make certain decisions around eating so i don't think you're gross by the way thanks baby i just want to be less gross so but one of the things that you did intuitively or because of your coaching is that you had a benchmark and you said hey here's my benchmark and that i don't need to worry about it but when i look at that benchmark and i'm starting to drift down or trend down that allows me to make a behavior change and that's really what we think is good about this book is that by giving people benchmarks you're going to see you're like whoa i'm way off or hey i'm 164 and you just what it means is you're like hey i took my eye off it because I'm a human and I am racing hard.
And now I have to eat a little bit more and add those macadamia nuts back or whatever it is you need to do to keep the weight on.
[1:07:56] And by having sort of the baseline for some of your physical behaviors, whether they're movement or behavioral, that allows us to make big boy, big girl, big person decisions about where we're going to put our energy.
And now we don't have to freak out. If my blood pressure is a little bit high, we're like, okay, I'm just going to keep an eye on it. And then maybe if it gets really high, I have to get get some intervention.
But now we know 120 over 80 or 130 over 90 is sort of a reference range for us where we say, Hey, now we've got this sort of value that we can start to wrap our heads around and start to play with. Yeah.
[1:08:31] This is such great stuff. Um, you guys ready to move on?
Let's do it. All right. Um, let's talk about extending your hips.
And I want to start by telling a story and I'm going to throw it to you guys.
So twice a year, we throw these six day plant strong retreats.
One's in black mountain, North Carolina. One is in Sedona, Arizona.
And I got this great yoga instructor and the first day, so as not to be intimidating, she does chair yoga.
So she does all the yoga, but you're in your chair.
And one of the moves that she has everybody do is, I want you to cross your right ankle over your left leg.
So you're sitting, your left leg goes over it. And then she said, let's see who can touch the floor with your, with your palms.
And literally no one can even get close. And this this is a class about 50, 60 people.
[1:09:27] I, this is one of the things I pride myself on is my, my hips and how kind of, you know, flexible they are.
I can go down and touch, but I'm amazed at how that this is, seems to be a, an attribute that has started to rot on most people.
So I'm really glad to see that you have this, this in here. And so, but like, talk to me about about extending your hips?
Well, I'm going to let Kelly take this away, Rip, because I'll tell you that it's an ongoing joke in our family that Kelly's number one favorite topic is hip extension.
[1:10:03] And our poor kids, we sit around at the dinner table and talk about hip extension.
My 15-year-old's turned into a drinking family. Other families talk about their days and how their lives are going.
And meanwhile, we talk about hip extension in our family. So So I'll let Kelly talk about why it's so near and dear to his heart.
Well, you brought up this really excellent point is that when we ask people to sort of go into ranges that they don't use very often because the environment or the movement practice doesn't ask us to express normal, full, native ranges of our body.
So every physician, every physical therapist, everyone on the planet says, hey, the human shoulder does this. The hip does this.
And the thing you described is rounding your back. It's flexing your hip.
It's actually not that difficult to do what you just described.
It shouldn't be that difficult, especially in a chair, very low demands.
But what we see suddenly when someone dropped that in was this benchmark vital sign where you're like, whoa, I suddenly realized that all of my.
Unlocking Range of Motion and Restoring Mobility
[1:11:06] Biking or Peloton or my lifestyle. I'm thinking I'm killing it, but I'm not able to access this range.
So what we're starting to see is, Hey, just like vital sign or, or blood pressure or resting heart rate, something's off.
Now we can begin to minister to it. We can start to think about programming to it. We can.
And when people start to do that, as you know, low back starts to feel better.
Knees start to feel better. Hips start to feel better. Why?
Because we're just restoring not some Simone Biles, Olympic gymnast level range of motion, but simple access to what you're supposed to be able to do at any age.
And just like what you described was hip flexion, folding forward, sitting in a chair, you just went a little further than the chair.
[1:11:50] We now have are saying, Hey, one of the things that's missing in today's society is being able to, if you were standing, standing, getting into a lunge position and bringing your knee behind your hip or your knee behind your butt.
I want to be known as the knee behind butt guy. That's sort of my dream.
And what we find is that's the position you would use if you were running.
That would be the position you would be able to express if you were doing a really aggressive flutter kick.
And it's why if some of you- Or just walking though. I mean, going into hip extension, just walking.
But if you are doing yoga, you'll be like, like, wow, these people are sort of obsessed with spending a time in this lunge shape. Why is that?
Because hip extension is so important. Jump into Pilates.
Joseph's made you spend so much time in some kind of lunge variation.
It's gnarly. And you're like, Joseph kind of has a lunge fetish here.
And what you'll see is suddenly, oh, that's why we put lunges and rear foot elevated Bulgarian split squats.
And we really need to start spending time practicing getting in that tandem stance and having access to our glutes and being able to put that hip with that knee behind us.
And what ends up happening when we do that is that we end up.
[1:13:01] Usually having a lot less knee pain, a lot less low back pain.
And we start to unlock for me, a lot of hidden performance.
And I'm, again, I'm talking through the lens of, Hey, my low back hurts all the time. Kelly, what do I do about it?
And this athlete is having a hard time squatting 600 pounds or going to the Olympics and Olympic lifting because she's missing hip extension.
[1:13:25] Yeah. And so what is the assessment that you have?
Ooh, everyone, you're not going to like me. It's something we call the couch stretch.
Couch test. The couch test. And originally it was called the- Sounds pretty funny.
That's right. And what we did was we said, hey, let's make sure that we at least have access to the tissues that allow you to expose yourself in this position.
And if you imagine your couch at home, and if you took your knee and you had your kind of foot on the floor and you took your knee and you tucked it into the cushions between where the back of the cushion met the seat, that would be putting your hip in extension, right?
You're kind of an exaggerated lunge position there.
[1:14:09] Well, we do the same thing on the floor. And so all the test is, is if you just were on your hands and knees on the floor, you backed up against the wall and you put your knee in the corner where the wall meets the floor and then you just brought your other leg up into kind of a high kneeling position so it's kind of a mini exaggerated run position or a little bit of a lunge but your leg is going straight up the wall, we want you to be able to get your back upright squeeze your butt and take a breath there and most people struggle to even get into that position much less struggle to get their leg up up.
And it's a hint at how far away from just mid range capacity they really are.
So this couch test is one of my favorites and it's one that most people fail in the test.
And what I'll say is that it's by no fault of anyone's because our environment is set up for us to have our hips inflection all the time because, you know, we are set up to sit at work and in our cars and and at our homes and at tables in front of TVs on our computer, we squat.
I mean, you know, so we really have set up our environment in a way that subconsciously we're all in, you know, hip flexion all the time.
And, and so the idea is that you, you know, you need to actually consciously figure out how to practice the opposite of that.
I mean, we, we see so many runners are in, in our, you know, for years we ran a physical therapy clinic, so many runners who would be so shocked that they would experience some kind of injury.
[1:15:37] Um, but oftentimes upon further discussion, we would learn that, you know, these folks were getting up and running for an hour and training for races and, you know, spending time running, but then spending literally 12 or 13 or 14 hours for the rest of their day with their, their joints and tissues all inflection.
Um, and so, you know, at some point their body just said, okay, yeah, you can't just stand up, um, you know, out of flexion and hope that your hip is going to go into extension in a sprint while you're running and not think there's going to be a cost for that.
And you can appreciate sprinting is probably the single most dangerous sport there is for middle-aged men.
You're playing basketball, the torn Achilles, the ruptured quad ligament.
But for a lot of people who are maybe like to run, not accessing your hip extension means that your leg is going to spin out at the end of their stride.
And then you're going to overstride. You're going to have to reach way out in front of you and heel strike and your foot's going to be turned out.
And so not having this range of motion means you start to have problems in sports that sort of you know are cyclical or you when you do kick sets your low back pumps out and that's because you can't actually squeeze your butt and every time you have to bring your butt your hip up into that butterfly kick or straight legged kick you've got to use your low back as a second set of hips so um.
[1:16:57] What do you recommend is the best way to counteract all of the hip flexion that we do every day?
Counteracting Hip Flexion with the Couch Stretch
[1:17:05] And I know you have it laid out extensively in the book, but for the listeners, is there one thing that you would recommend for two minutes a day or?
Yeah. Well, I mean, the first thing is we recommend, I mean, this is one of those cases where the test is also the practice.
[1:17:20] So we recommend, you know, doing the actual couch stretch for a couple minutes per side each day. You can do it actually on the couch while you're in front of the TV, watching Netflix.
You know, I do it every day at the end of my training session.
That's how I kind of like to fit it into my life. So I finished whatever workout I'm doing, you know, I've got two minutes left and I quickly jump into the couch stretch, you know, and, you know, one of the things that makes Kelly's head start to like tweak to the side is when people say, Hey, Kelly, what's the one mobilization I should be doing?
You know, and Kelly kind of dies on the inside because he's like, Hey, why don't you just summarize my life's work into one mobilization?
You know, he's sort of, and he, he likes to say, well, what part of your body is not important, but because I don't have as much of a connection to it, I would say the one that I would do and continue doing for the rest of my life is the couch stretch.
Um, because I really appreciate how many opportunities I have throughout my life and my day to be inflection.
And I know that I really need to put some energy into extension.
So for me, it would be the couch stretch and that's where I fit it into my mountain bikers. That is our primary sport.
We love the mountain bike and you can generate a lot of force in a seated position and end up not being able to get your, your hip, your knee behind your butt and sort of a lunge very quickly. You're like, wow, I really stiff.
Let me give you two things you can do. Cause one of the things that you've heard us say is instead of developing all these secret practices, like Juliet's right.
The couch stretch is amazing.
[1:18:48] Um, but if you, every time you stood up from a chair, if you just squeeze your butt as hard as you could for 10 seconds, that will be a life changing experience.
And what you'll see is you oftentimes takes a second before you can actually squeeze that butt really hard.
And that's because that the butt has been on a lengthened position.
Your hips are a little bit short and squeezing the butt is going to open up that hip a little bit. And that will redrive a neural connection.
And the research is clear that if you just want a bigger, stronger, but if you just squeeze your butt a little bit, it'll work.
So every time you stand up, just squeeze your butt. If you're sitting a long time, squeeze it so hard. No one needs to know you're doing it right.
You don't have to pass out or do make it weird, but squeeze your glutes.
The second thing you could do pinch the penny.
[1:19:32] Pinch the penny like it's your job. Make that penny a diamond.
And the second thing you could do is if in your kitchen or in your hallway or safe, put your hand on something, get into the biggest lunge you can with both feet going straight.
And I don't care how far apart your feet are, but get into the lunge where you can squeeze your butt and find a position where you stop being able to squeeze your butt and hold that for 30 seconds.
[1:19:57] And just sit in that position position and remind your brain, this is a position I value.
This is a position that's important. This is a safe position.
And 30 seconds is long enough.
We're going to have to take a few breaths in there and you can see, oh, wow, that's really, really stiff. Or I didn't realize I had that access.
And if you, if you just did those two practices, dropped in some 30 second isometrics, that's all we did there.
And a little bit of a lunge shape and you just squeeze your butt.
I think you would be shocked at how much better your body's going going to feel specifically your knees and back.
I don't want to overwhelm people, but can I add a third thing? Oh boy.
Incorporating conscious choices to reduce sitting time
[1:20:32] Third thing to this, do it because I see you doing what I'm doing, which is, um, maybe taking a sort of inventory of what your day looks like and trying to figure out opportunities where you could not sit, where you traditionally are sitting.
Like, for example, we're recording this podcast and I think it looks like to me, you're standing, I'm standing.
Um, Um, you know, I work a lot at a standing desk.
I also sit, you know, people associate us with being the standing desk people.
And I think they literally think we never sit.
And then they, like, if they see a photo of us on the internet, they feel like we've been busted, like busted.
I saw this, I read sitting, but you know, we do sit, we're like normal people, but I do, you know, I do try to take opportunities when I can, when it's not required for me to sit. Like if I'm on an airplane, obviously I'm going to sit.
[1:21:18] Um, but when I have chances to not sit, I stand. end.
And I think it's a, it's a pretty easy transition people can make is just, just bringing some consciousness to the amount of sitting they're doing and maybe, Not sitting as much. I want to toss out the couches that we have in our living room. So we're just sitting on the carpet.
[1:21:37] Yeah, well, you know, we've been searching. And if you find one, let us know.
Because, you know, we want to strike a balance between being like normal members of society that can have like people over for a dinner party and not throwing out all our furniture.
So we're always on the hunt for sort of a low to the ground couch, right?
Yeah. It still looks cool. You don't have to make another choice. choice.
I think one of the lenses through which we wrote this book is we understand that people are fatigued with choice and fatigued with willpower.
And if you automatically just had to sit and you couldn't sit on the, on a couch, but you had to sit cross-legged on your couch or you had to get them. And that's the way the environment was set up.
You would do the right thing or a better thing or a different thing without having to be like heroic.
You know, now I'm going to yoga class, which is amazing, but you know, I'd much rather have that yoga instructor in your house in between, you know, cooking dinner and answering emails.
So really what we're looking at is how can we shape the environment so I don't have to make another choice.
And I think that's, that's really an important sort of lens because then we start to see this thing called consistency and we end up seeing significant change because as we all know, the key to adult learning is repetition and muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs. We just need repetition.
Repetition is the mother of learning. Yeah. Let's go to squats, if you don't mind.
I think that follows nicely after extending your hips.
[1:23:06] So in honor of Kelly...
This morning, I sat in a squat with my, you know, my butt, maybe half an inch from the ground. That's great. Yes.
For 10 minutes. Cause I know that Kelly. That's his hallmark.
That's what he did. And I can tell you, it was not easy.
I was actually surprised how hard it was, but the longer I did it, the more everything kind of like, you know, let go.
And I kind of fell into it, but I was amazed how tight my, my ankles and my calves felt. and I could not put my, I just tried putting my, my hands behind my, my back doing it.
And I, I couldn't do it. I had to have my hands in front.
[1:23:45] Right. Well, I'll, I'll take an initial crack at this and then Kelly can talk about why squatting is so important for humans.
But, you know, you said that you were shocked to learn that, you know, you couldn't do the sit and rise test.
And for me, the, the most challenging test in this whole book is the squat.
So I did a lot lot of sports like rowing and paddling and sports that did not require me to have full hip and full ankle range of motion.
And so it is a struggle for me. And in fact, I, you know, I don't think I'm ever going to get the perfect squat, um, and started late in life, but man, it is something that I keep an eye on.
And, you know, for those people who can't, you know, immediately drop into a squat in this position, there's a lot of ways to practice it.
I mean, I, I often just, you know, know, make sure I can grab a hold of something and get into a squat position so that I can practice a 10 minute squat.
There's a lot of ways to modify this so that you can still put your hips and ankles through that full range of motion.
But for me, this is the most, you know, like this is the difficult one for me that I always am going to be working on my whole life. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah.
[1:24:50] Yeah, you know, this is one of those things where, you know, it seems so shocking to people when we ask them to engage in full hip range of motion simultaneously with bending your knee all the way and then bending your ankle all the way.
Like putting all those things together just blows people's minds. I can't do that.
And what you see is that every child can at any age, whether you're Scottish or not.
Again, some of you may reverse your back in the bottom position.
You may not be a great Olympic lifter because of your hips. but suddenly we see that's very much there are shapes that we don't sort of spend time in unless we're asked to be in there and as soon as you travel abroad you recognize that this squat position is where people toilet on the ground every day in this position and you recognize that people wait for the bus in this position and kids play in this position and i think what we have to do unfortunately is is take people just like you did sitting in a chair with 50 people folding forward, that would be a great first step towards also doing what we're doing here, which is saying, hey, let's begin a conversation of restoring your native range.
[1:25:57] What's interesting is that when we do this, we start to see, again, maybe that we're just using the hip a little bit more, we're reminding the cartilage it needs to be regenerated, we're keeping tissues in their full ranges, we're addressing stiffness, but even things like pelvic the floor function starts to get better in this position and in yoga it's called malasana that's this kind of squat you know shape and ultimately the reason we put the squat is the very first video we ever made back in 2010 youtube is barely a thing we're filming on an old camera the iphone doesn't even have a video camera yet we did the 10 minute squat test was because in athletics and specifically sport training there are a lot of people engaged in squats and all these deep kind kind of Olympic lift style movements who couldn't even squat all the way down, you know, and they weren't very comfortable there.
So here was a position we identified early on in sports, like doing a kick turn and flipping off the wall. I mean, this, this is all we're talking about here.
And what we saw was that if we just got people to start spending more time in there, we started to see the low backs feel better. We were getting people out of extension.
It's one of the ways the back hydrates itself, the disc hydrate themselves.
And it's just a shape that that we used to do all the time, because for two and a half million years, we didn't involve in chairs, we just had fires and we cooked and we worked on the ground and we interacted on the ground.
And just telling a story about this.
[1:27:23] I was in Japan skiing with some friends last January and we got, we were sort of misbooked in this traditional Japanese lodge.
You're going to love this. And my friend got really sick. And I was like, I don't think I should be in this room.
And they freaked out because they were like, we don't have a room for you.
And we were like, we know you have a room for us. You're in this gigantic place.
And what they said was, well, we don't have a room for white people.
[1:27:46] And what they had was a traditional Japanese room where the futon was on the ground.
This toilet, the toilet was really low. The table was on the ground.
[1:27:55] All the controls are low. Even the thermostat is like a shower mirror is on the ground.
And so they were like, well, white people who've come here before Westerners can't actually function in this room. And I was like, oh, this room was built for me. You have no idea.
Can you imagine the glee that Kelly felt when he realized that this was the problem?
He was like, this room was designed for Kelly Starrett.
So what's, what's amazing is actually three days in that room of sitting cross-legged, working hanging out doing i even felt better even having access this because it was automatic for me to have these ranges so things like going out into the world and skiing those days in the back country was easier because it was like i was restoring my range of motion and opening up my tissues just while being in the room yeah and that's what's so key about it and you know we have a whole chapter on creating a movement rich environment and that is the classic example i mean I mean, you know, again, it's like nobody wants to spend hours a day mobilizing and, you know, working on their breathing practice or whatever.
But, you know, this is why this is such a great example about how if you just tweak your environment a little bit, you really can hit some of these shapes in your body.
And again, we're not saying people throw out their furniture and put their bed on the floor.
But, you know, man, we all we know average American is watching three hours a day of television like there's good data. on.
[1:29:17] So, Hey, how about spend one third of that sitting on the floor?
Just that simple act could make such a difference in how your hips feel and your low back feels and how ready you are to play pickleball or go for a walk.
And you're going to have to stand up in that position too. And you've got to get up again from that position. So you've practiced that position.
Three hours of TV. I think it's probably more like eight hours of screen time.
Well, yeah, I think that's probably, yes. I mean, you know, there's also data out there that says like, you know, that people sit it for 10 hours a day.
And I, I call major BS on that.
Um, you know, I think it's probably most of their waking hours and most people are sitting for most of their waking hours. I think the data is from like 2005.
Um, and you know, so, so yeah, we're definitely watching a lot of TV and sitting a lot. If you take this test.
[1:30:05] We have a real average range, a real familiar range.
Sitting on the Floor for Better Hip Mobility
[1:30:08] Just trying to get with your feet straight, which is an uncompensated squat, just keeping your foot pressure between the ball and foot of your heel, you should easily be able to go past 90 degrees without falling over.
And again, don't worry about your back.
That's a different conversation. But being able to squat down that deep, not even the true test, which is putting your feet together and keeping your balls or your feet and your heels flat on the ground as you squat all the way down.
That's actually the fullest expression of the range of motion in your body.
And what we find again, this isn't your fault.
This is, oh, what we're seeing is sort of, if we did a blood panel and you've been in Vegas, you know, only, you know, eating chocolate donuts and smoking cigarettes and only drinking wine for a month, your blood panel is going to show that, right?
And so suddenly here is this nice little, you know, benchmark around a movement that's so foundational to human being, but just is allowing you to coordinate some of your ranges of motion.
[1:31:06] Yeah, no, we've all heard it a jillion times sitting is the new smoking and, uh, yeah, it's, it's crazy.
So squats, can you guys pistol squat? That's the one thing I've never been able to do is the, the old, I definitely cannot.
Kelly definitely can. But let's say this. So So a pistol for everyone is a one-legged squat.
Now, being able to go up and down with your leg in front of you requires a lot of access to these end ranges of motion.
[1:31:34] What I'll tell you is I don't really care if you can get down into a pistol.
I would love for you to be able to go feet together and then just be able to get into that shape because that means you could lower yourself down off a ledge.
You could squat down on the end of a porch and lower yourself down and then move more effectively or step up on a high step. That's really what that range is.
So there's a reason that if we jump into our movement traditions and our training histories, the Russians really bought the one-legged squat and the pistol as part of kettlebell sport. That was part of this training modality.
It's an essential part of gymnastics, being able to forward tumble, roll, and stand up from one leg or two legs in that position.
And there's a reason those movements were in those sports because they also kept us having access to that range and position.
And suddenly our shoe choice, and we just haven't done it in a long time or ever, can be really shocking.
So it's not important that necessarily you can even do that movement, but even having access to that position can be a nice benchmark of where am I and what's the cost of my training?
Because clearly both of you are pretty great athletes and you still couldn't do a pistol. So we want to sort of separate that out.
Yeah. It's like I get stuck on the way up right at my hip flexor.
It's like it just doesn't have the –.
[1:32:53] The strength. And I know people like when I was a firefighter, everybody was showing off to see who could do it.
And there were these guys, they weren't really that great athletes, but they just had, they had a way of doing that pistol squat and they would always shove it in my face.
[1:33:09] Well, you know, I hope you're destroying those guys in pickleball.
A hundred percent you are.
And, you know, again, it's one of those things where what we're really talking about is not even that the access of the position, they weren't particularly strong or talented. They just could access the shape.
And it meant that even if they were 20%, because they could be in this position, they had some more movement choice in that shape. Yeah.
Importance of Balance and Simple Balance Tests
[1:33:33] Let's talk about find, find your balance. I found this to be actually really.
[1:33:38] They're, they're all fascinating vital signs, but this one I find so apropos, especially as I'm getting older, as I see my parents going into their nineties.
Yeah. And how this actually seems to really be an important part of maybe not falling along, obviously, with a lot of other things.
But I did the two tests, right?
I was surprised how hard it was for me to stay on one foot with my eyes closed for 20 seconds.
I can tell you that because I'm a unicyclist. I, I can, you know, walk on a slack line and I was like, Whoa, give me a break with my eyes closed.
[1:34:20] And, um, so that was fascinating. And then the old man, you know, the old man, you know, put on your sock and put on your shoe.
I reveled in that one. I love that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I could see how that is really challenging, but find your balance.
I hope I haven't stolen your thunder. No, not at all. And, you know, I think this is, um, this is also one of my my favorite chapters too, you know, unlike some of the, unlike range of motion and some of the other things we've talked about, I really do think balance is a use it or lose it scenario and also so connected to your range of motion, right?
If you have poor ankle range of motion, it's going to be harder to balance and so forth. But, you know, I, I love these two tests and, and And also the practices here, because back to the theme of trying to make this book accessible, like the ways to practice and get better at balance are so simple and can be sort of fit into any life.
You know, the, the Solek test you talked about, it's Solek standing on one leg, eyes closed.
[1:35:16] Again, the moment you take your eyes out of the equation, it's shocking how, how difficult that test become.
You know, we actually have a 21 day built to move challenge on our website and we have a video of Kelly and I doing this test. And, you know, we're definitely wobbling all over the place and it's difficult.
And, you know, one way to think about it is, you know, if you think of a lot of older people fall in the dark or in the snow, it's very similar, right?
You take the eyes out of the equation and the balance, it becomes much more difficult to balance.
So I think that's a very eyeopening test in terms of balance ability.
And then I love the old man balance test.
And in fact, I try to do it every day when I put my shoes and socks on.
That's another reason. Which is just everyone standing on one leg and putting your sock on without putting your shoe down or your foot down and then put your shoe down and tie it without putting your foot down.
So you have to do all this dynamic balance and work in shapes that are not just obvious and intuitive. It's tricky.
You know, one of the reasons I've worked so hard at this test is Kelly has such excellent range of motion that he basically crushes me and all the other range of motion tests.
But I practice the old man balance test more than him. So like head to head, I can, I can take him on this one.
So, I mean, that's important in any marriage. Obviously, it's the only thing you can take me on.
[1:36:29] Put it on the list, woman. But anyway, so I love that test because I think it's just a simple way to practice.
And I think there's lots of other simple things you can do.
We're really big fans of this thing called the Slack Block.
If you go to any corner of our house, our office, it's designed to be kind of like a little...
[1:36:49] Um, freestanding slack line. Um, and we have them underneath our standing desks and around our kitchen and, and they're just fun toys to have around the house because everybody who comes over and kids and teenagers, they all want to get on the slack block and play with it.
Incorporating Play and Toys for Balance Practice
[1:37:02] And, and so it's just a nice, simple way to practice balance again, without thinking about it, how to, how to just create an environment.
I'm not going to go to a balance class for an hour.
And, and, you know, the other simple things we do, it's like, you know, we brush our teeth standing on one leg. Like, um, that's another simple thing you can do.
You can do the old man balance test every single day when you put on your socks and shoes or every so often.
And there's just simple ways to touch these positions, um.
[1:37:27] To just make sure that, you know, you keep that, that skill alive and well, because it is, it becomes more and more and more important with each passing decade and more critical to our independence as we age.
And and so you know we're definitely focused on it you know we let me stop playing defense for a second because there's obviously a whole lot of reasons why but what we find is that when we begin to train the feet to be more dynamic more reactive as the sort of base of the foot as it relates to the balance system we start to see pretty dramatic improvements in performance people ski better they balance better the mountain biking is better something that you said just sort of in the as as you were talking about, this was you unicycle, right.
And that, and you also have a slack line and a slack line.
Everyone is just a, you know, a piece of webbing sort of suspended between two, you know, fixed objects that play and that challenging of that balance.
[1:38:28] You know, as part of a regular piece, uh, of your physical practice can go, I mean, my favorite workout is deadlift, slackline, and barbecue.
I'd go three, like I'm working the barbecue, I'm building the fire, I go mess around.
And what you suddenly realize is that really there's a hidden opportunity in this sort of well of performance of hidden feeling better in your body.
[1:38:50] And by working on the balance at any age, we actually see dramatic changes in how the person interacts and the things that matter to to them.
And so we can make it about fall risk.
And if we removed every other test and this book was built to move, and it was just this balance, if we just kept one person from falling at age 65 or 70, this book would have been a revelation because already if we can diminish some of the sequela of problems that happen when you fall, when you're older, it's gnarly.
But from the the other side, I want people to hear this is that if you begin to work on these things, your feet will be stronger.
You'll run faster. You'll kick harder.
Your biking will be better. Like whatever's important to you is going to get better. If you start working on your balance and play through your balance.
And one other thing I want to add here that, you know, Kelly mentioned, and I think is so important in this chapter and I think is, is the best place to incorporate it is the play piece.
[1:39:47] You know, we have balance boards, a slack line, you've got a unicycle and you know, what we've tried to do in our life is pepper our environment with toys that are, that both are fun and can sort of improve our physical and mental health and balance boards are chief among those.
Again, you go in our garage, there's balance boards. We have a slack line in our backyard.
We have slack blocks all over our house. And I think that can't be under, undersaid how important it is for, especially as, as we age and get older to continue to play, um, and play with our bodies.
You know, I mean, man, we could have a whole pickleball.
I mean, we could have a whole podcast on how great we think pickleball is.
Like we're such fans on a thousand levels.
[1:40:30] But man, the play piece is so important. And I think this balance chapter is really one of those ways to, you know, figure out creative ways to add both balance practice and play into your life.
Yeah. What is your stance on walking around barefoot as much as you can?
Are you advocates of that or not? not we are we are advocates of it shoes are the devil we so you like the five finger like the five finger toe look toe or we i think what we can look at is this way.
[1:41:04] Your body is an extraordinary, extraordinary piece of engineering.
Your brain is the most sophisticated structure in the known universe.
And if we look at the homunculus, which is the sensory motor cortex, what areas of the brain and how much energy and space and sort of data processing is the brain giving to different areas?
Your face and hands are the lion's share of sort of sensory motor.
We need to be able to perceive, see.
But the next on that line is your feet followed by your genitals.
And so it turns out that your feet almost have as much real estate as your hands.
So if I put your hands into two gloves day after day after day, these mittens, and I was like, go about your life.
What would happen to your ability to feel, sense, have rad grip strength?
It would just be impacted.
So ultimately what we think our shoes are awesome. They allow us to go faster.
They allow us to not burn ourselves and cut ourselves.
And they allow us to jump and do all the things we need to do.
But ultimately, day to day, we're looking for the shoe that interrupts the foot the less, the least.
In fact, even the American Academy of Pediatrics, on their recommendations of shoes back in I think the 90s, was saying the shoe we recommend is no shoe, followed by the shoe that disrupts the foot the least, which is like a thin moccasin.
[1:42:23] And really what ends up happening is that we have sort of lost the narrative.
Is it practical for people to be barefoot?
If you can in your house, do it. If you can walk around or be, you know, barefoot, I think you're going to pick up a lot of information.
[1:42:37] Oftentimes when people have chronic pain or persistent low back pain, one of our interventions is actually just to get more input into the feet.
So suddenly you're like, oh, I understand that weird spiky mat, or I understand that there are other issues that are other systems I can, can move on.
But if I can get more info into your feet, we're going to do better. Yeah.
The Influence of "Born to Run" on Mobility Training
[1:43:00] Did you guys ever read Christopher McDougall's book, Born to Run, that came out?
You know it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're big fans of him.
Chris is an old friend of ours, and that book is so important that when we wrote our running book about mobility around running and things, we actually called it Ready to Run as an homage to that.
And really, again, looking at where are the opportunities for us to have the significant significant change.
You know, if you're terrified of having your feet barefoot, you know, that's a simple place to say, let's just start spending a few minutes a day barefoot. Let's go beyond some different surfaces.
And really when we start to change people's perspective about having strong feet and the way to have strong feet is to use your feet in sort of an unencumbered way.
That's I've been having a lot of discomfort and I feel range of motion in my neck and tightening in my shoulders.
And like when I'm driving lately, I feel like, you know, an old person where I'm almost turning my whole body sometimes.
And I know it's just because of, I don't know if it's stress or the way I'm holding myself, but I'd love for you to talk about what we can do to future-proof our neck and shoulders.
[1:44:24] The way we might think about this is, you know, we should look at the neck and the upper back and the shoulder as sort of a system, as a trifecta.
[1:44:35] And one of the things that always sort of gets lost when we're talking about neck and head is what is going on with the thoracic spine, the upper back.
And when we see stiffness begin there or postural changes where we start to not, we're kind of in a flex rounded shrimp back.
You know, if you're sitting, if you're listening to this, round your upper back and then try to look over your shoulder and you'll see that you just can't turn your head as far.
And then if I say, get into a position where you take a bigger breath, you'll sit up, right?
And then recheck your range and you'll see that your head turns a little bit better because you've organized your trunk a little bit more effectively.
And so when we start to say, well, let's look at the shoulder range of motion there too, oftentimes people are remarkably surprised that when we restore shoulder function, one of the reasons we're such fans of having arms overhead and oh, guess what?
We're in downward dog again. No wonder they do that so much. or hanging is that we see that when we improve people's overhead function it changes their thoracic spine it changes how their head ends up interacting with that system and we start to feel a lot better and you know the test in this chapter is called the airport arm raise scanner test um and you know i'm sorry for anyone listening to this because we've now just ruined the airport security line because all you're going to be doing like us is judging people's shoulder range of motion.
Um, but you know, the, the scanner you go into, you know, you sort of.
The Importance of Shoulder Range of Motion and Simple Drills
[1:46:02] You know, you, you take on this overhead position with your arms.
And what you see in most cases is that people really actually can't lift their arms over their head.
Their arms are sort of in front of their bodies, their hands are in front of their faces.
And it's not because of any other thing that they literally just cannot, they no longer have full shoulder range of motion. They can't express that.
And it's just one of the most public and obvious places we see it.
And so that's why we decided to call the, you know, name the test after this.
[1:46:30] And, you know, but I think there's a a lot of really day-to-day things people don't think about that they need their shoulder range of motion for, you know, putting your suitcase into the overhead bin, putting, grabbing things high off of counters.
There's a lot of day-to-day things that we take for granted that we do that we really do need our shoulder range of motion for.
And, you know, like, like many things with range of motion, people are like, why should I care?
Well, you should care because you want to be able to put your suitcase in the overhead bin. You want to be able to get things off of a high shelf.
You know, if you're a swimmer, you want to be able to swim fast.
I mean, there's so many athletic positions that require full overhead shoulder range of motion that it's, it's definitely something that people need to be aware of and keep an eye on.
And in, in this chapter, believe it or not, we've sort of snuck in a whole lot of shoulder range of motion tests around restoring rotation of your shoulder, but also we've got a simple drill, which is taking something about the size of lacrosse ball while you're laying on the ground, putting it in your traps, sort of between your shoulder blade and your spine, and beginning some breaths and bringing some arm movement.
And we start to restore those ribs. We get those ribs moving.
We get some input into the soft tissues.
Lo and behold, people often feel a lot better. And then when you start to turn your head, you can go a little bit better. So again, ultimately...
[1:47:49] We have plenty of books and resources around restoring and going into the weeds here, but we have a couple key positions that end up being really simple isometric holds, just grabbing your sink and bending over, doing sort of a downward dog position without having to be on the ground and taking some breaths there.
And all of a sudden, you're going to see that, oh, I'm touching some of those shapes, laying on the ground and putting your hand behind your back.
That's an internal rotation stretch. We've got a, you know, with that same ball going behind your shoulder and just sort of working on your rotator cuff a little bit.
And again, what we recognize is oftentimes people feel achy and they have completely dissociated their range of motion from how they're feeling.
And the easiest thing that you can do without needing a physical therapist or a physician or some kind of skilled intervention is just to work on some input to restore your range of motion. And so suddenly if you have pain and full range of motion, you're doing these other things, then maybe let's go get some help.
But this, this things we're talking about, they should be part of the cookbook of how I take care of my body.
And I don't need anyone to come into my house and show me how to do that.
One of the things that i think is associated with my neck issues and uh you guys i know you have a saying in the book uh let me see if i can find it i wrote it down um.
[1:49:14] Was uh something about how whatever you think it is it's not it you had something an analogy with the rats where the rats get in is not where they chew that's right but i'm wondering because to me one of the most important things about my sleep is having the right pillow and you know it's got to be soft and ideally down made or some sort of a down down like material and as opposed to, you know, hard or too high.
And anyway, I find if I don't get the right pillow, my neck always is, is, is it's a log jam the next morning.
And do you guys have any correlation with that?
[1:49:54] I mean, I think that that's so individual, although Kelly and I sleep in with vastly different pillows.
So we both have, you know, Kelly has like, I think it's so personal and specific, what kind of pillow that you want to sleep with.
And I will say it's one of the things we really struggle with when we travel, because we always bring our eye mask and earplugs and try to simulate our home sleeping experience as much as possible.
But we don't typically bring our own pillows on most of the trips we take.
So, so that's a, that can be a struggle for us, but I do think it's really individual, but yeah, I mean, I think certainly, you know, sleeping in strange positions can 100% contribute to having your neck feel a little janky the next morning.
We should be able to sleep anywhere, anytime, any place, right?
Like put a kid in a crib, There's no pillow, you know, think about people sleeping on the dirt with their arms as a pillow, you know, ultimately we want to build tolerance, but we all have slightly different bodies and we really, you know, there's an old saying around the bed, like hard body, soft bed, soft body, hard bed.
Importance of maintaining flexibility and comfort during sleep
[1:50:54] And, you know, there are some real truths in that is that if you're, you know, extension sensitive and you're, you know, when you overextend it, you're uncomfortable sleeping in a little bit of a flexed position can feel better. And the same thing is true around the neck.
And, you know, remember that as, especially as we start to do 50, 60, 70, 80, we've made a lot of choices.
You've turned your head swimming a thousand million times, and that's not necessarily what we're supposed to do.
So you don't get something for nothing. thing. And what I'll tell you is your resting state shouldn't be pain-free, but you may lose some of the tolerances for sleeping in awkward positions.
Should you still be able to turn your head? Yeah, without pain.
But what we find suddenly is, hey, if your shoulders are stiff, your upper back is stiff, and we've got tissue systems that aren't coming on board, you're doing a bunch of mouth breathing, your neck is tight.
Well, you may have less tolerance for silliness when you sleep and you really have to have that pillow.
I think one of the overall messages we're trying to share is that there are some super simple, really accessible tools, like a toolkit we have given people in Built to Move, that you can really make a difference in how your body feels in a short amount of time on your living room floor with a $2 lacrosse ball.
[1:52:08] And I think that's a bit of a mentality shift for people.
I think in many cases, when we have pain of any kind, it's often an emergency or we assume that we need to seek high-level medical care, When, you know, one of the messages we're trying to share in this book is, you know, a lot of the, you know, typical aches and pains and stiffnesses that we all experience as part of being a human who's using our bodies can be alleviated and worked on, you know, with some simple tools on our living room floor.
And I think the biggest part of that is not doing it. The biggest part is realizing that you can do that.
[1:52:43] And that that's possible. Just, just since we've been talking about future-proof your neck and shoulders, if you, as you guys can see, I've been just doing all these things and I cannot believe how much better I feel just in five minutes. Yeah. I was, I was imitating you.
You move during the day and like suddenly you feel better.
You know, I think, um, you know, if people understood, you know, when we have arthritic changes, oftentimes we have of joint surfaces that just aren't as tolerant to loading.
And so one of the ways that we can help those things is just to be moving a little bit, just move the fluids around, change the loading on the joint.
And the same thing is true with your body.
You know, we really, you know, it's not sitting as good or standing as better.
[1:53:28] It's, hey, how do we create more movement? And the stillness in our body really hints at ways that are sort of not natural.
And I'm not pining for the old days where we were sleeping by the fire and we had scurvy. That's not what I mean.
What I'm saying is I think when we start to say, well, it is easy for me to take a break in between this and put my arms over my head and take a few breaths.
And that's all it took for me to feel better. Simple.
And what we can do is help people attach some sort of emotionality to, Hey, my brain has given me a signal and I'm like, Oh, my, my neck is starting to ache.
Maybe that means nothing's wrong, but I should move a little bit bit more.
And so if you start to view pain as a request for change, then you suddenly can have a positive reaction.
When your body is achy, you can be asking a different question.
Can I move my body? Can I restore?
[1:54:21] Have I not touched a shape? Have I not bent my spine? And so that, that really can be a really powerful tool.
When I say emotionality, I mean, like you actually sort of recognize that, Hey, I was feeling stiff.
I need some input and now I can change the input and And maybe I can even change the environment.
Yeah, no, I...
Praise for Knowledgeable Hosts and Invitation to Hang Out
[1:54:41] You guys are so incredibly knowledgeable. This is what we think about, everyone. You express it all so well.
I want to come hang out with you guys tomorrow.
You're invited. Anytime. You are invited. It's incredible.
The last thing that we haven't talked about is eat like you're going to live forever.
You guys know this is the PLANTSTRONG podcast. So we, you know, we really are fans of fruits and vegetables and whole grains and beans and nuts and seeds. Amen.
[1:55:14] Is there anything you'd like to add about, you know, kind of maybe your research about, you know, eating well?
[1:55:24] Yeah, I mean, you know, I think we approach this from the point of view that there are sort of some basic principles that we can all agree on.
When it comes to nutrition and that we need to move beyond the universe of demonizing certain foods.
[1:55:39] It seems like we're starting to get to a point where there's a lot less dogma around nutrition, a lot more voices who are saying, hey, there's lots of different ways you can eat based on your culture and preferences, but there are some principles.
One of those principles is that human beings...
Need to, and probably should eat a wide range of fruits and vegetables and quite a lot of them each day.
Um, and I, I think that that's, it's, it's pretty hard to dispute that, you know, we are fans of EC Sienkowskis and we talk about it in our book, the 800 gram challenge.
And the reason we like that is because, you know, we are believers as you can tell by having a benchmark for every one of our chapters, we're believers and having a benchmark and actually measuring these things.
So, you know, um, what's been interesting about the 800 gram challenge is when we talk about how how we do it and advocate.
We often learn from people, including many people who are, you know, even vegans and vegetarians, when they actually measure their intake of fruits and vegetables a day, they're often below a hundred grams a day.
Um, and I think that that's really eyeopening for people.
Um, because I think people often think, well, I'm eating, you know, many more fruits and vegetables than the action than I actually am.
So what we like about the 800 gram challenge is, you know, it just brings some awareness to people around making sure that but they're getting this wide array of fruits and vegetables.
No fruit and vegetables off the table, which really allows people to eat within their preferences and their cultural choices.
[1:57:02] They're getting, you know, all the bright, the wide variety of micronutrients you get from eating a diverse amounts of fruits and vegetables.
And, you know, you know, we have this funny thing that happens in our office because all of our staff also follow the 800 gram challenge that people come in with these Tupperwares of like perfectly measured fruits and vegetables.
And if it's sort of sitting out in the open and you walk by and grab someone's raspberry, they're like, Hey, now I'm at 798 grams.
And so we get, you know, we all get possessive over our grams, but, um, yeah, I mean, I, I just, I would be hard pressed to, uh, disagree that people need to be eating lots of plants and diverse ones. Let me, let me go ahead.
Go ahead. No, I was just going to say, so for people and to help put it into perspective, what visually is 800 grams?
Sure. I mean, it's a lot less than you think, actually. It's like four medium to large size apples would be 800 grams, which most people could reasonably eat in a single day.
The other banana is about 80 to a hundred grams. The other reason we like the 800 gram challenges, is we're sort of like, great.
Like if you want to get your 800 grams from eating four large apples, you know.
[1:58:11] Um, you know, obviously we're fans of a diverse amount of fruits and vegetables or diverse types of fruits and vegetables, but, you know, again, it's got to go down to preference at some point.
And so it really is a reasonable amount of fruits and vegetables.
And, you know, if you're, if you're going to try to get 800 grams of kale, that's going to be a lot of chewing, you know, I'm not going to lie.
Uh, so we like to break it up with, you know, some that are a little more high density, like, like apples and fruits and bananas and, you know, mix that in with vegetables.
And, And, you know, we found that ultimately it's not that hard to reach 800 grams.
Yeah. Yeah. But even from a, at a level of like tissue health, if you're want to have healthy connective tissue, you've got to get enough vitamin C, you know, your vitamin C depleted in the morning.
And so if you're taking all these collagen supplements and you're not eating also some vitamin C with it, you can't even utilize that stuff.
So we find at a very performance oriented level of having the most bomb proof tissues, We want to make sure that people have the micronutrients on board and the fiber on board.
They have guts that are working, allowing them to absorb all that.
[1:59:15] And we have found that there's no better way for adults for also to get sort of built-in calorie control because a pound of melon is about 300 calories.
One cookie from Starbucks is 350 calories.
So go ahead and eat a pound of melon and let me know how you feel.
You can be stuffed. Like, I can't eat any more melon. I'm like, well, still got another 800 grams to go.
So this can't be about – we find that we have much higher rates of satiety and satisfaction and curiosity, and it really opens the door instead of sort of being so restrictive.
It's one of the first ways we've said was, hey, let's go ahead and start to explore this.
And what we find is that people start putting really nutrient-dense foods back on the plate.
And when you focus on, prioritize those things, there's just less room for ultra-processed foods.
The only other thing I would say is from our side –, is that we really often find that people aren't getting enough protein.
And especially as we get older, we need a little bit more protein.
And so the only thing we say is we don't care if you're a vegan or a vegetarian or carnivore or however you like to eat, let's go ahead and see if we can get enough minimums of proteins, kind of 0.8 to one gram of protein per pound body weight is our recommendation.
[2:00:27] Certainly you can get by on the RDA levels of protein. But what we find is that when we match those two things together, you're going to be mired and having to eat so much food.
It's so boring, all this food you have to eat.
And so it's really shocking when we start to pull out the ultra processed foods from people and we replace it with all of these wonderful protein sources, all of these fruits and vegetables.
People are like, wow, where has this been my whole life?
[2:00:52] Yeah, that's interesting. I recently had Dr. Michael Greger on the podcast.
He's got got a new book coming out how not to age and he's a big advocate of less protein not more protein based upon obviously the uh i think the book has 13 000 citations amazing so you know um and he just talks about how it how particularly animal protein affects with the aging pathways particularly particularly because it's so high in methionine um but i think that.
[2:01:25] You know, interesting, um, about you guys advocating for that much, like a hundred and if I'm 150 pounds, I'm, I'm, I'm about 180 right now, 180, you're saying I should get 180 grams of protein a day.
Well, some people do 150, 180. Yeah. And that actually really comports with, again, are we looking at, um, we're trying to say, Hey, how do we, what are the, what's the research say?
And what's the best clinical practice say around, you know, performance requirements and keeping lean muscle mass on people.
And what we're, we're finding is that we're in an epidemic right now where people are losing a lot of lean muscle mass and they're skipping, you know, the people who are all doing that intermittent fasting, we're losing a ton of lean muscle tissue because they were just missing this.
So again, also not stepping on this or, or getting to a bit debate of how much protein or what kind, but if you really love and feel better with vegetarian protein sources, knock yourself out.
We have no problem with how you're doing that but most people, when they begin to track their actual protein intake, they're shocking to not even get a hundred grams a day.
Yeah. And I would say that our thinking and approach is really very muscle centric and coming from the point of view that, you know, especially at 50, our individual goals, our personal goals are really to maintain as much, maintain and hopefully even gain some muscle, but maintain as much muscle mass as possible, especially because our overarching arching goal is to have a durable body.
[2:02:53] And, you know, the more muscle mass you have, the more survivability from disease you have.
And there's just a thousand reasons why muscle mass is like having, you know, bars of gold glued onto your body in our opinion.
And so we find that a protein forward, um, diet approach is, you know, conducive to that various sort of muscle centric approach that we are fans of.
I think I'm sensitive to this because I feel like this whole culture is so insanely powerful.
The Protein Craze and Sedentary Lifestyles
[2:03:22] Protein just like yep we're we're i hear you we couldn't agree more oh my god this shampoo's got got pro it's yes that's right i need it this everybody is playing off of twice the protein it has become the marketing hack for every food that you could put so twice even more than gluten free or anything else and so i i love i love like to me it's like if you want to build muscle you you got to hit the gym.
You got to work the muscles. And obviously you have to have a minimum amount of protein to help make that happen.
But I think it's about everything about your book. It's like, we lead this insanely sedentary lifestyle.
We're sitting 10 to 15 hours a day. No wonder we have all this dark opinion going on. Yeah, seriously.
You are right. I don't think it's a protein issue. I think it's a sedentary issue. No, we agree.
The other thing I'll say is you said this alluded to it earlier.
You had a a benchmark for your weight.
[2:04:23] And let's go ahead and put some objective measures in there.
Let's go get a DEXA scan and let's look at how much lean muscle mass you actually have.
And then let's look at what your interventions are. And let's look at, you know, if you're over fat and this is something that we're trying to change for metabolic health, then what are our tools and strategies?
And let's go ahead and put some objective measures on here around this.
And I think that that ends up being really reasonable.
And again, Juliet and I are, we want to give people a blueprint and then say, say, Hey, look, why don't you go up and down?
If you're only eating 800 grams, maybe it's 700 grams is the magic number or 900 grams is the magic number.
But it turns out that generally, when we're looking at health practices for folks in our community, we're not getting enough protein.
We're getting a lot of processed carbohydrate, and we're definitely not getting enough fruits and vegetables and plants.
And in this community, people are, you know, in the fitness performance community, they've demonized plants, which is just insane.
[2:05:17] And I know you guys have heard this a jillion times, but I think it's 95 to 97% of this, this, this country is not getting enough fiber, but I don't know, I don't know really anyone that is technically protein deficient.
Uh, but right.
And I mean, that's just, you know, reason number 999, why we love the 800 gram challenge because it's like, okay, show me you ate 800 grams and I can tell you, you got enough enough fiber that day.
Well, and let me ask you this. So if 800 grams, if I'm going to eat 800 grams of fruits and vegetables, exclusively fruits and vegetables, do you guys have a rough guesstimate?
And I know it varies, but how many grams of protein you'd get in an 800 gram challenge?
[2:06:02] Any idea? Man, I would be, I would not hazard a guess. Cause I know I'd be off.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it would depend on which, you know, fruits and vegetables, right? So too Too many dependencies for me to make a guess. Yeah. Yeah.
I just like, for example, on my breakfast cereal this morning, I had, uh, two two cups of frozen mango that i threw in the microwave i had a kiwi i had a banana and i and had a grapefruit i had walnuts i had ground flax seed meal chia seeds and then i had my foundational cereal that's that's the rips big bowl cereal that's uh that i've commercialized but um yeah so i mean we love cereal clean cereal absolutely Absolutely. It's the best. Yeah.
Kale, yeah. So what you just described was a really extraordinary breakfast.
I mean, you're killing it with the breakfast. And I think if I look at what people are doing with their coffees or sugar drinks, I mean, what you're seeing is you just ate the most micronutrient-dense breakfast a human being can have.
And now we can actually talk about turning the dials up and dials down to meet your needs and to look at actually what's happening. I think that's really reasonable.
[2:07:15] Yeah. Yeah. And it's working. It turns out it's, it's working.
Yes or no. One or zero. Are your tissues doing great? How's your, how's your bone density?
How's your, how's your energy and fatness? Are you keeping your muscle on?
I mean, I think when we start to put some of these objective measures and first principles in, you know, it's, it's easy.
Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's working very well, but listen, what I have learned in reading your book is I need help. I need some fine tuning.
And so say we all, and this can definitely do that.
Tell me, um, you two, what are you super jazzed about right now going forward?
Any projects you're working on, any vacations, anything you're going to do with your daughters? Great question.
Oh man. I mean, we, uh, we've got a daughter who is a serious water polo player and probably going to play in college.
So we are just on the the precipice of maybe seeing what the college recruiting process looks like, which I think we're both terrified of and excited about.
So on a personal level, that's one thing that we're looking forward to.
Yeah. And I think one of our next sort of intellectual projects is trying to put the household back in control and at the center of talking about athletic performance for teenagers.
So I think we're sort of interested because we're very much living in this world of collegiate athletes and professional athletes who are young adults.
And we interact with a lot of teenagers and there's a lot of misinformation.
[2:08:44] A lot of TikTok driven information about how do we create durable, healthy, psychologically intact people who like to play sports as an aside.
I love hearing that about your daughter playing water polo.
I played water polo in high school And then I also played it as a club sport after I graduated from University of Texas.
Swimming there. I played water polo for another two years. It is such an incredible sport.
It really is the coolest sport. And one of the things I love so much about it is how many people we meet like you who have actually, I mean, I know you're into pickleball now, but we know so many high school and college water polo players who actually have continued to play club like well into their mat, you know, sixties, fifties, sixties, seventies.
And, and that's, you know, I mean, there's a lot of sports that you can continue playing, but that's one really cool cool piece of it. You see how much love there is for the sport.
Well, I know you guys, you guys have, have mentioned pickleball a lot.
I know I mentioned it at the top and I do, I love pickleball, but I swim six days a week, six mornings a week. I, uh, I mountain bike.
That was my, that was my jam for, for a good 10 years was the Xterra off-road triathlons. Oh yes. Amazing. Yes.
Yeah. I never, we just had Nathan Adrian over at the sauna. He was a pretty good swimmer. Nathan Adrian, absolutely.
[2:10:08] University of California. That's right. Incredible freestyler.
Yeah, he's a legend. Oh, and he's a beast of a guy.
Yep he's like what six six three just built like a lot of than that i think he's like six six yeah monster you know um you know we what's really interesting is a lot of is the people are coming to you know PLANTSTRONG sometimes didn't have a schema and one of the reasons a schema for understanding themselves in the world and we just see that sports can be such a wonderful tool to to begin to understand concepts of sleep and downregulation and nutrition and, you know, how do I interact and communicate with a team or how do I deal with a difficult teammate?
And, you know, that for us has been such a, continues to be such a gift that we found sports early and allowed us to have these really interesting conversations with people who are really doing important, interesting work.
And we just want, we want to reframe that, kind of de-fetishize it a little bit, take Take some of the commercialization out of it and help people really recognize that that teenage, you know, athletic experience can be so transformational and so foundational for people for their lifetimes.
[2:11:19] I have absolutely loved every second of this conversation with you guys.
If it's OK, I'd like to refer to you guys as the humunculus of athletics and movement.
Yes, you may. I love it. I've never heard that term before, and I don't think I'll forget it.
You guys, I love everything you're doing. I appreciate your time today, and I hope that I get to run into you guys and we get to play sometime soon.
Yeah, consider yourself invited, and it was an honor to be on the podcast.
Thank you so much for having us. And play, you nailed it. I mean, circle that. Everyone, hear that. More play.
Humans are built to play. Yeah. Yeah. Can I get a virtual PLANTSTRONG fist bump on the way out? Yes, you can.
Boom. Boom. Thank you, sir. Juliet and Kelly, until next time. Bye. Thank you.
Their book, Built to Move, is available wherever books are sold, and you can learn more about them at their website, thereadystate.com.
I'll be sure to link up to all of those resources in the show notes.
Thank You for Listening and Stay PLANTSTRONG
[2:12:32] Again, you guys, thanks so much for listening. Keep moving.
Let's get durable. And always keep it PLANTSTRONG.
If you have a question for us at the podcast, simply email us at hello at planstrong.com or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com forward slash planstrong.
Again, that's speakpipe, one word, S-P-E-A-K-P-I-P-E dot com forward slash planstrong.
The PLANTSTRONG Podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, and Ami Mackey.
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You can always leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
And while you're there, make sure to hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode. As always, this and every episode is dedicated to my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr.
And Anne Crile Esselstyn. Thanks so much for listening.
