8 Powerful Fitness Strategies For Peak Performance - Kelly Starrett

1. 0:00 – 2:42

   Intro

   1. KSKelly Starrett0:00

      ... switch from sitting to perching, being more active. So 170,000 calories a year if I choose not to sit. Just in choosing not to sit in a traditional chair, 170,000 calories of ice cream, beer, whiskey. Whatever it is you give a shit about, convert that amount and that's free money.

   2. CWChris Williamson0:20

      (wind blowing) It seems like your most recent book, where you've tried to break down very fundamental principles that people need in order to just exist as a human, in the body, relationship with sleep, relationship with mobility, movement, et cetera, et cetera. It seems to me like that's really getting back to a, a nice basic foundation and that, at the moment, I think is the trend that I'm seeing as well, that we have a lot of information and it's all about synthesizing that into applicable strategies now.

   3. KSKelly Starrett0:50

      I think you're right. Uh, you know, this, this industry of fitness, and we'll call it capital F, the industrial fitness complex, used to be, you know, global gyms and, and big protein companies, and now it's like this, you know, decentralized, you know, net bot where everyone's got apps and everyone's got their opinions about everything. Uh, it's a trillion dollar industry and if we say, "Well, how's it going?" We can ask these questions. Well, how about obesity? How are we- are we solving our community's obesity problems? Or diabetes, diabetes or chronic pain or surgery or ACL injury rates in kids? Or substance abuse or depression or chronic pain? And literally every single one of those is trending in the wrong direction. So something, this experiment we've all been running, we have gotten really good in this vertical. If you accidentally slipped into the Instagram feed... I mean, there was this at- an article in The New York Times last week about are you being crushed by fitness on your Instagram social media? Because fitness is literally just, like, it's like the rest of us, the last of us. It's just taking over like a fungus. And I suspect that it has confused or muddied the waters a little bit, and I think hopefully we're seeing a trend towards what is essential. And what we try to do in this book is honestly synthesize the information we've had from 15, 20 years of working with-

   4. CWChris Williamson2:19

      Hm.

   5. KSKelly Starrett2:19

      ... really good teams and really good athletes and say, "Which hinges swing the biggest doors, A, and B, which, which are the fundamental behaviors? Where can we create some vital signs and some benchmarks so that you could scale that up into a world championship or scale it backwards into I wanna have kids who are durable when they grow up?"

   6. CWChris Williamson2:39

      Okay, so how frequently do people sit, stand, and

2. 2:42 – 14:35

   The Consequences of a Sedentary Lifestyle

   1. CWChris Williamson2:42

      walk? Have you ever seen any statistics on this?

   2. KSKelly Starrett2:45

      Yeah, it's, uh, it's not great. Uh, t- well, you know, the key to think about all of this is to say, all right, for literally we haven't changed much through two and a half million years of evolution. And especially in the last 10,000 years, we're the same person. I mean, I'm a little fatter. Your femur is a little longer, but we're the same kids. And then what we really can g- from there is not h- have some Paleolithic romantic model of we should eat, you know, f- fermented and buffalo livers and... It gets a little crazy. What we can ask is what did our environment look like? Because I have to think y- h- it's important, it will be useful as a, as an intellectual exercise to sort of ask why is our lymphatic system bootstrapped into our movement system? Lymphatic system is your sewage system, right? It, it processes all the normal wastes that are too... Waste particles and products that are too big to go into circulatory system, and that system is a bunch of one-way tubes that's driven by muscle contraction. And so it's almost like we've been evolved to walk or move a little bit more in the day than we currently are. And what we're seeing, for example, is that most p- adults are moving less than 3,000 total steps a day. And we can find that now because everyone has a motion tracker. It's their, it's their phone. So what we're seeing is, hey, there's sort of this, been this creep into mismatch between human and environment and now we're having to be ca- little bit more conscious about seeing if we can remedy some of those things.

   3. CWChris Williamson4:15

      What are the longest levers that can offset somebody that sits at a desk all day?

   4. KSKelly Starrett4:21

      (inhales) You know, the, the first order of business is to get beyond, like, sitting is bad and standing is good, because if you've ever had a job where you stood all day long, it's gnarly and it's a real problem. We have to actually create a whole bunch of surfaces for people that are squishy and we have to give them special shoes and you have to give them breaks. It's complicated. So human beings, what that tells us is standing still is not good, sitting still is not good, that we need to move a little bit more during the day. So, you know, this is in our opinion. You know, what we've seen in the last particularly 10 years with the, the evolution of technology and... You know, when we, when we opened our gym, you know, in 2005, we were on Yahoo Business. (laughs) And our, our staff was like, "Why aren't you on Gmail?" We're like, "Because when we started this business, there was no Gmail, just so everyone's clear." So something has changed a lot. We're- everyone's got a laptop. Everyone's taking it home. And what we're seeing is, you know, the, the demands on us have changed, as we've said, and Harvard suddenly got really interested in some of this sedentary biology, sedentary behavior sort of physiology. And one of the things we noticed or they defined is that sedentary lifestyle is if you bel- drop below one and a half metabolic equivalents. So everyone here is into fitness and exercising. If you're ever on a, like a StairMaster at a hotel gym and it was like, "You can work out at METS." I'm at six METS. I don't know. No idea. Is that good or bad? But METS is a unit of measurement, like an erg or a watt. We've all adopted the watt, but metabolic equivalent is basically how much your body burns at rest. And what they've said is, "Hey, any behavior that falls below one and a half metabolic equivalents is a sedentary behavior." So you're standing...I'm perching, I'm leaning up against a bar stool with my feet on the ground. Both of us are engaged in movements and positions that allow us to fidget and require a little bit more body movement, body stabilization, recruitment, and it kicks us above one and a half metabolic equivalents. As soon as you sit in a chair or couch, boom, you're below that. So Harvard defines sedentary lifestyle as trying to limit total time in the day spent underneath one and a half at six hours, and what we're seeing is that we're crushing that. We're at, like, 10, 12, 13 hours a day.

   5. CWChris Williamson6:40

      Okay. What about offsetting the, uh, mobility issues that you have? You're in this C-shaped human position.

   6. KSKelly Starrett6:49

      Hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson6:49

      Hips are tight, lower back's tight, neck's tight, shoulders are tight. Let's say that someone is sat down at a desk. Is there anything ... And they can't get up, you know, they've got a job to do. They're in a sales role or whatever.

   8. KSKelly Starrett7:01

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson7:02

      Um, is there anything, are there any cues that they can have at their desk, any movements they can do, any little stretches they can do whilst on a call where the video maybe isn't on-

   10. KSKelly Starrett7:10

       (laughs)

   11. CWChris Williamson7:10

       ... um, that can-

   12. KSKelly Starrett7:11

       (laughs)

   13. CWChris Williamson7:11

       ... that can help?

   14. KSKelly Starrett7:11

       Besides quit your job. Yeah, right. Uh, you can't quit your job. I have to feed my family.

   15. CWChris Williamson7:15

       Correct.

   16. KSKelly Starrett7:16

       So one of the ways I think is useful to s- to sit about- think about this is that you're not fragile and you can sit all day long. Go ahead and jump on a red-eye, take a long flight, you know, go to a conference. You'll see that it's fine. But what we can start to say is, I think if we can give people some vital signs. So the book, for example, is just kind of you can divide it into two categories. The first category is here are some vital signs. And when I say vital sign, like, we'd say, like, blood pressure. If I say 120/80, everyone's like-

   17. CWChris Williamson7:47

       Hmm.

   18. KSKelly Starrett7:47

       ... "Well, that's not very good blood pressure," but it's not bad blood pressure either. It's sort of like, "Hey, I should pay attention to this." So when we give people objective values, objective experiences where they can say, "Okay, I- I'm above or below that," then we can start to ask what the next question is. And what we can, one, we can strip out one of the, my favorite ways of talking about training, and this came out of some of the work we did with Premier Soccer, is, Premier Footy, is that we call the session or the training day, or the, whatever, what the stimulus was, we call its effect on the body the next day the session cost. So you can see that if you have an Oura Ring or Whoop, you can see what your heart rate variability is, what your resting heart rate is. You can see your kind of recovery score, your total sleep. That's really a, uh, a very technical version of this idea of session cost. And what we're trying to do with all our athletes is say, "Hey, we think that you can no longer outwork anyone anymore. That sort of ship has sailed." Like, maybe you could outwork someone in the 90s, you had your Secret Squirrel program and you outworked them. Everyone's working really hard. That, that ship has sailed. But what we do know is that our athletes, we're really working hard on saying, "How can we reduce the session cost? The CNS load, the implications of soreness, DOMS, anything that's sort of important to you." And what we find is that those athletes who are engaged in better behaviors that allow them to handle higher volumes and higher intensities over longer periods of time, they tend to make more progress and they tend to be, they outwork everyone eventually. But it's not really true. They end up out-adapting everyone. They're better at adapting to the stimulus, and over time they have better results. So that session cost is really useful because suddenly we can say, "Okay, you're a cyclist. How does that all the time spent cycling impact your ability to access your native physiology?" So if you're engaged in a sport and all of a sudden you can't put your arms over your head or you can't extend your hip, suddenly we have a really excellent way ... Hang on one second. We have an excellent way of sort of wrapping our heads around what the cost of that position is. So instead of heart rate variability, we can start to look at actual shapes. And what's nice about that then is that allows us to quantify what's going on. So ultimately, coming back to your question, we can say, "Hey, I spend a lot of time in this position." Instead of taking the tact that this is a bad shape or this is gonna cause you injury, what we can say is, "What was the cost of all of this behavior I spent in a chair? It turns out, well, I wasn't able to take a full breath, or turn my head, or extend my hip, or I lost some hip flexion." And that really helps us to say, "Now, what are the behaviors that I can start to ferret into my life? And maybe I can't do it at all. Maybe I can just do it at home. And how do I come back to a baseline?" So once we establish a baseline for some certain movement behaviors, positions, then this gives us a real opportunity to start to say, "Hey, let's keep you above that." And now you can say, "Oh, hey, I've been doing a lot of sitting. I wonder if that's impacting this shape or this position." And that gets us away from, again, that really specious and overly simplified conversation of, "Sitting is bad, standing is good." What's the cost of the behaviors I'm in? Does it implicate my ability to access my range of motion and physiology?

   19. CWChris Williamson11:11

       Okay, so rather than pathologizing just sitting down-

   20. KSKelly Starrett11:14

       Right. (laughs)

   21. CWChris Williamson11:14

       ... you are saying, "Let's break this down. What does sitting down cause the next day? What are some of the issues?" So I'm gonna guess-

   22. KSKelly Starrett11:21

       Yeah, well, you got it. Uh, yeah, go, uh, h- what do you think sitting does?

   23. CWChris Williamson11:26

       Tightens the hip flexors. Uh, s- tightens the lower back in terms of how it feels, but probably actually deconditions the back because you're not bracing quite so much. Uh, curves the top of the spine because most people's-

   24. KSKelly Starrett11:40

       And this sounds dangerous. I don't think I want that.

   25. CWChris Williamson11:42

       Uh, well, look, I mean, uh, those of us that are standing up in this beautiful-

   26. KSKelly Starrett11:46

       (laughs)

   27. CWChris Williamson11:46

       ... beautiful position here. Um, shoulders rolled forward, um, or at least better rotated.

   28. KSKelly Starrett11:51

       Yeah, and again, let's, let's just say that your body is solving a problem for you, right? Let's, let's look at that. Like, this is the position where if I'm in this shape for long periods of time, this is how my body is solving it. So it's, uh, so I can do this job. Uh, it, you know, I'm gonna get into this position. My neck's gonna go ahead and get a little more tonic because it's useful to hold my head up, and now it doesn't have to work. It just sends a message to make it stiff.The only reason, typically, people care about these kinds of behaviors is why? What do you think? Wha- why?

   29. CWChris Williamson12:21

       Because they want to do something outside of that-

   30. KSKelly Starrett12:24

       Nope.
3. 14:35 – 18:13

   Strategies for Standing & Moving More

   1. CWChris Williamson14:35

      so give us something applied. Somebody that does sit all day-

   2. KSKelly Starrett14:39

      Hm.

   3. CWChris Williamson14:39

      ... they need to change that position as frequently as possible?

   4. KSKelly Starrett14:43

      (laughs)

   5. CWChris Williamson14:43

      They need to probably spend as, uh, a little bit of time walking if they can or standing up, or just turning around?

   6. KSKelly Starrett14:47

      Yeah, so let's say, if I, if I know that I'm engaged in some sedentary behaviors, 'cause I can't help it, then the first thing I need to do is say, "Hey, I need to move more." So what does that look like? And I'm not talking about exercise. If you get, uh, get to the gym, that's, kudos to you. But the first order of business is say, "Hey, where in my day can I control and have some more agency?" Well, that might be around lunchtime, around breakfast, around dinner. So maybe it's sort of the bookends of my day. And in the chaos of the day, I got my kids off to school, and now I'm just, you know, holding on tight, all I can do is try to walk more and move more. And now when we give someone a clear objective and say, "Hey, look, we know that most of the good benefits really start to happen between 6 and 8 tou- 1,000 steps," that it becomes a reasonable number to hit, right? I'm not saying 15,000 steps or you're a failure. I'm just saying, "Hey, we really can start to see a lot of the good benefits of moving more kick in at six to eight." But if you're also having a hard time falling asleep, we might need to push that to 10 to 12 to accumulate more exercise fatigue. On the other side too, we can start... So that means for you, you're like, "Hey, I- I have to sit all day long, can't control that, but I can control the bookends of where and how I'm going to move more just to get more steps in." Potentially, I can also change and reframe how I'm working so that I have movement choice, maybe I can perch against the bar stool, maybe I can change my workout environment where I'm just gonna stand for a little bit, or I'm gonna take a call standing, something like that. But then we can start to say, "Well, are there some simple things and inputs into some shapes that I can put in that help me maintain my native ranges?" And you'll see in the book, we have things like the couch stretch, which maybe you can't do at work, but you absolutely can do things called split squats at work. So get into a tandem stance, squeeze your butt, drop it a little low, hold that for five breaths. We can put in isometrics, sneaky isometrics that remind your body, "Hey, here's shapes that I wanna value." So the ultimate thing that we say when wherever we're trying to restore someone's position or improve their position and output is exposure. Before we get into some technical technology, before we have some secret squirrel mobilization thing, I'm like, "Hey, if you wanna get better sitting on the ground, let's sit on the ground. If you wanna have time improving your squat, let's not do a whole bunch of complicated things. Let's hold, have you hold on to something and start to spend time in a position that we value." Start to tell your brain, "I really want to own this position, this native range." So one of the things you can do at work is just start getting into a tandem position, squeeze your butt, and go as deep as you can and hold that for five breaths. And then the next 10 minutes, do it again or-

   7. CWChris Williamson17:28

      What do you mean when you say tandem position for the people at home?

   8. KSKelly Starrett17:30

      I mean something that looks like a lunge shape or taking that hip into extension. Look, Er- Ben Patrick of Knees Over Toes has done such a good job of saying, "Hey, it's okay to have ankle range of motion." That's really what he said. Your ankles are actually supposed to flex and you're supposed to use all of that 20 and 30 degrees of knee coming forward. That's totally normal. But now I'm saying, "Hey, let's go knees behind butt guy," in that, in this situation, the thing that's going to be probably most likely to be limited from lots of sedentary time is your ability to extend your hip. Not hip extension, standing from a squat or the toilet, actually taking that knee behind your butt into a lunge or a sprint-like shape-

   9. CWChris Williamson18:09

      Mm-hmm.

   10. KSKelly Starrett18:09

       ... and spend time there. That's the thing that we want you to start to be exposed to more.

4. 18:13 – 24:15

   How to Exercise for Mobility

   1. KSKelly Starrett18:13

   2. CWChris Williamson18:13

      Have you got any idea when we're talking about things like couch stretch, which most people will be familiar with, and they can Google it if they're not, uh, or getting themselves into a lunge and pushing that hip through to open up that hip flexor, to open up that- th- th- that set of hips, have you got any idea about the...... uh, minimum effective dose or where you really, you've mentioned between six and 8,000 steps is where we start to see a big amount of impact for walking. Is there an amount of exposure, time and attention that you see that is where the impact really begins for mobility as well?

   3. KSKelly Starrett18:45

      I think we wanna always remind people that these things compound. So, you know, you're like, "I, I did it once. I have to do it again?" You know, "I don't understand. It didn't fix me befor-" So, how stiff are you? How old are you? How much time have you... What are your sports? What's your behavior? You see, there's too many variables for here. But what we can start to say is, let's begin by spending time in this position. So how much can we, we fix it in? So, did you do rear foot elevated split squats at the gym? Probably don't need to do a lot more of that today. Um, but what we can, again, come back to is, you know, what we start to see is ins- in some of these shapes, if we can just get 30-second holds, we can really start to move the shape. And notice, that I'm, I'm less pedantic about, I think it's 27.6 seconds in this shape that starts to make your tissue change on a Tuesday in October. Instead I'm like, "Hey, can you take a big breath here? Show me you can take five big breaths in this position." And now, we start to unlock a whole lot of other things. We've got your brain paying attention. You start to own that position 'cause you're breathing in that position. I made you take five breaths there. That's really long. It might take you longer than 30 seconds to get five big breaths. But when we move away from this, "Hey, I did the minimum dose." And now, I'm starting to say qualitively, qualitatively, can I occupy this shape and breathe in this shape, it turns out to be more effective. How much do you need to do? As much as you need to do to, to get back at it. I mean, I, I ran yesterday. I have to run again? You know, what we're looking for is how well your body can adapt to the stimulus.

   4. CWChris Williamson20:14

      I understand. And this seems like a much more holistic way to do it, rather than just picking an arbitrary number and, and prescribing it. I get that. Uh, when it comes to shoulder, neck, back-

   5. KSKelly Starrett20:24

      Mm-hmm. Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson20:26

      ... as well, what are the big levers there?

   7. KSKelly Starrett20:29

      You know, when we're, when we're ... When you come to me with some kind of neck pain or lumbar pain, remember, it's, turns out to be your spine. Just, it's arbitrarily diced up by us, right? But it is your spine. It's like saying, "I'm here for my upper femur pain." You're like, "Mm, I think it's your leg. I'm pretty sure it's your leg." "No, no, no. It's my upper leg I'm here for." So, one of the things that we try to do when anyone comes to us with pain, because again, that's, what you're telling me is, "Hey, I'm really concerned about my lumbar stability under a 600-pound squat." That's a different conversation, right? Um, what we always pre- prescribe first for all our patients is, "I need you to walk more. I need you to decongest. And I need you to accumulate enough non-exercise fi- uh, fatigue that you fall asleep, and we can c- control that. Number two, I wanna make sure that you are actually sleeping, right? And number three, I need to make sure that you are actually breathing. And the first motion around the spine is not walking, it's not rolling, it's not squatting, it's breathing. And so the very first thing we start to look at is how well and how vastly you can expand and contract these tissues around the trunk. Can you take a big breath in your upper back? Can you take a big breath in your belly? It's an easy way to start to signal to the brain, hey, look at all this movement here. And also, we can start to upregulate the system, whether that's decongestion of the system or just moving the tissues and getting them to slide and glide, improving pressurization, improving VO2 max, all of the things. But what's useful about that thinking then is most people who are coming, are, to talk about low back pain are starting to realize that their hips are somehow connected to their back. And so sometimes on the internet, you would think that the back is just this isolated thing that has nothing to do with so- how someone moves or how the c- the structures are connected to it. So if your hip, and we see this all the time in soccer players. There was a, it was one of my young physio moments when a, a, uh, one of the senior physios was like, "Oh, it's another tail wag the dog thing." Where I was like, "What are you talking about?" And they were like, "Well, we have these really stiff young soccer players with huge quads and big butts, and they just yank around their spine." And I was like, "Well, what do you mean? 'Cause they're so powerful?" And they were like, "No, they just, they're so restricted in their hip range of motion and they have so much available power that when they go, the hip, the leg drags the pelvis into position which just wags the dog." So what we start to see is this very powerful leg starts to impose a lot of hidden demand on the trunk. And what you th- what you think is, "We need a stronger trunk." (laughs) You know, 'cause that's always, "Oh, we need a bigger transmission. We need another cylinder on the engine." Wrong. Let's go ahead and see if we can just restore this native range of motion of the pelvis. So sitting on the ground helps restore those ranges. Getting into a lunge helps restore those ranges. We've got a lot of sneaky ways to hit rotation from 90/90 to elevated pigeon. Lots of ways that we're looking at rotation of your hips to help your lumbar. But with the upper back, notice that the first order of business to get your shoulder and neck better was to take a big breath, because that gets your upper back to move more effectively. And now if your thoracic spine is very stiff or less stiff 'cause you're not in that C position or you gotta have the C position to move, suddenly you can organize your head more effectively, and wait for it, just like the pelvis, the lumbar, and the femur were all a relationship, well so is your thoracic spine, your neck, and your shoulder. So if we wanna get to the bottom of your shoulder pain, we're gonna have to talk about how that shoulder's connected to the trunk. And if we're gonna get to the bottom of your neck pain, we're gonna need to talk about how effectively you can move your shoulder, and that's why we start to see these things in systems. No system in the body works by itself.

   8. CWChris Williamson24:14

      You mentioned breath

5. 24:15 – 27:41

   What People Get Wrong About Breathing

   1. CWChris Williamson24:15

      there. James Nestor's been on the show, Brian Mackenzie's been on the show.

   2. KSKelly Starrett24:18

      Oh, yeah. Those guys-

   3. CWChris Williamson24:18

      But neither of them have been on for quite a while, and the show's about 100 times bigger than the last time that they were on.

   4. KSKelly Starrett24:24

      (laughs)

   5. CWChris Williamson24:24

      For the people that didn't get to catch either of those episodes, when it comes to how we breathe, what are most people getting wrong?

   6. KSKelly Starrett24:32

      We should shift the language from getting wrong to, man, you're not fully as effective as you could be. So, we- let's talk about, you know, Bryan is- gotten so good at the deep physiology of- of breathing, the real technical aspects and its implication on athletic performance. And I am obsessed with the mechanics of breathing. What- how- how springy is your rib cage? What's going on? But most people can relate to this. So, while you're listening to this, go ahead and just slouch forward. Let your shoulders round, let your chin, you know, kind of go up. Get a good hank. If you can get a- like a- a crease in your neck fat in the back, that's even better. And without changing your position, this is how most people are sitting on their computer, go ahead and take the biggest breath in you can. We can measure that. You can breathe through your nose if you want. (inhales) Now breathe through your mouth and watch, it's gonna be less. Okay. Now watch this. All I'm gonna say is, "Find a position where you can take a bigger breath," and everyone will automatically organize, not brace, not sequence, they'll organize their bodies into a position where they intuitively can take a more powerful breath. So, let's measure that. Let's make this objective. Let's not make it feely. So, all of a sudden now, you take a huge breath (inhales) and your diaphragm descends and your rib cage expand, your chest expands, and you were like, "Wow, that's 10X bigger than that little pinche rounded off breath." So, what we start to see is, well, that rounded C shape is less effective at maintaining the integrity of my diaphragm, letting me access the musculature of my rib cage. It doesn't allow me to really powerfully stabilize or stiffen because my pelvic floor isn't functioning very well in that shape. So, what most people r- don't think about, because they haven't sort of been- had their faces rubbed in it, is that a lot of the shapes we adopt end up inhibiting a lot of our function. So, if I'm in a rounded position and I can't really descend my diaphragm, then I'm gonna do chest breathing. I'm gonna breathe up in my neck. And I don't know why I clench my jaw at night, and why I have a headache, and why my neck is always tight, and w- I always have to beat the crap out of my scalenes. Well, it turns out if you're using your neck to breathe 10,000 times a day, guess what your body's gonna do? It's gonna say, "No problem, bro. This is how we're doing it? No problem. W- we got your back." Your body's always gonna solve this problem for you. It doesn't always hint at the best way to expand your physiology. So, we're always looking for choices that allow us to regress and progress. And so what we can say is, "Hey, the shape you're in works, but it's not gonna allow us to progress your physiology." You're not gonna be able to go faster, you're not gonna be able to go harder, you're not gonna be able to go do the things you wanna do. It works for now, until it doesn't work and then we're gonna have to reshape. So, ultimately when we put the body into more efficient positioning, the whole thing starts to change. Yes, you should probably tape your mouth at night when you sleep. Yes, you should probably learn how to breathe through your nose. Yes, but also, holy moly, you're super stiff in the back and if your back is stiff and you're a cyclist, and you can't take a breath there, that's gonna be decreased VO2 max. Why don't we do something about that?

6. 27:41 – 30:10

   How to Remind Yourself When You’re in the Wrong Position

   1. CWChris Williamson27:41

      How should people consider cuing themselves to remind, "I- I'm not in the right position. I'm not breathing sufficiently deeply." You know, we're going about this throughout the day and for the next- for the remainder of this episode, everyone's gonna be breathing fantastically.

   2. KSKelly Starrett27:57

      (laughs)

   3. CWChris Williamson27:57

      But in an hour's- in an hour's time, maybe less so, and in a day's time they've forgotten what they-

   4. KSKelly Starrett28:03

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson28:03

      ... what they learned from you. What are some of the things that can cue people to remind them, "We've got to be breathing deeply. We need to be breathing into both the upper chest, but also into the stomach as well, expanding that rib cage, sitting up nice and tall"?

   6. KSKelly Starrett28:15

      So, repetition is the mother of skill, right? That's what, you know, practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. So now you ch- now you have this idea around, "Hey, can I adopt a more functional position in whatever shape I'm in?" So, if I'm working at my desk and I have to sit, those- all of those shapes aren't even. They're not equal. The shape that allows me to maintain the most integrity with the lowest session cost, that's my shape. That's the shape that's gonna impact my biology the least over the long haul. So already, you have this idea that we talked about, "Can I take a bigger breath in a different shape?" So suddenly now, you're on the Peloton later on, and you find yourself doing a sprint and you're like, "Huh, I wonder if I can breathe in this position? Oh, I wonder if there's a position in which I can breathe more effectively?" I've only had that conversation with, I don't know, three or four world champion bikers where I'm talking about finding shapes for them in the Tour de France and on the World Cup or in the Olympics, where we're trying to maintain their ventilation position. Or I have athletes who are in the wind tunnel being tested at Specialized and we're having a conversation between aerodynamics and ventilation, this compromise. Eventually, I can make you into an aerodynamic wing, but you can't breathe in that (laughs) position. So, you know, what's happening now is that as soon as you have this consciousness, this think, "Can I breathe in this position?" Because fundamentally, we can ask the question or- or come back to this truism, "If I can't breathe in a position, I don't own that position." That was Gray Cook who first said that, right? The- the- one of the masters b- and the brains behind FMS. But simultaneously, Iyengar said a long time ago, "Nerve is the king of the breath. The beth- breath is king of the brain." So, if I wanna tell my brain that I own a shape and that this shape is safe, the first and easiest way to do that is to make sure that I can ventilate fully and maximally. It's almost like in yoga, they put me into these pretzel positions and they make me breathe there. Why on earth would I rather do that?

7. 30:10 – 37:39

   The Need to Get Your Feet Off the Ground

   1. KSKelly Starrett30:11

   2. CWChris Williamson30:11

      I understand. You and a mutual friend of ours, Aaron Alexander, are very big about getting up and down off the ground. It's something that he is always telling me to do whenever I go to the sauna with him and I sit down. Homeboy's in, uh, the bottom of a squat or he's in a lotus position or he's in a 90/90. Wh- what is it that you guys are arriving at-

   3. KSKelly Starrett30:33

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson30:33

      ... with regards to being on the ground and getting up off the ground? Why is that so special?

   5. KSKelly Starrett30:38

      You know, I think even just till a few hundred years ago, we slept on the ground, we toileted on the ground, we cooked on the ground. We spent a lot of time on the ground. And again, just like if you looked at the, the circulatory system and the waste system of the body, right, that being bootstrapped into movement, there is some thinking and really proposed by a, a really brilliant person named Philip Beach that one of the ways the body tunes itself is to spend time on the ground. All the different positions that you're fidgeting load us in specific ways. They make our backs round, we have to load and sit in this 90-90 position, we long sit, where during the course of just sitting on the ground for 30 minutes, you are going to spend 30 minutes at some end range positions that are gonna help you work on your having access to better range of motion and things you actually care about. Like downward dog or being on the bike and all you have to do is sit there. Simultaneously, I think if we used this idea of retirement. So when I'm saving for retirement, what I think is, I've gotta save this much money every month so that I can retire on this day and I start working backwards, right? I need to have this much when I retire, how much do I need to save every month? If I'm training for the World Championships, what I do is I get all organized and I start working backwards from the day I need to be the fastest human being on the Earth and we start to plan your training. Well, one of the things we know is that the number one reason people end up in nursing homes is they can't get up off the ground independently. One of the ways that, I mean, I just saw this, this article in New York Times last week that said that we expect hip fractures to double in this country by 2050. So in 25 years, we're gonna see double the number of hip fractures and hip replacements because of that fracture, hip repairs. Tells us that in the future, there's a couple things that are hugely important. Getting up and down off the ground and not losing my balance. So if I work backwards from them, then I can say, "Hey, it's really easy for me to wait till I'm just 70 or 80 and be like, 'Oh, I can't do it, let me go to a special class and see a physical therapist and rebuild my bone density and get stronger.'" Or during the course of the day, I can just say, "Hey, I'm watching TV at night." Everyone's watching TV at night. Stop lying. You're watching TV at night. You're watching Netflix, just like us. Sit on the ground for the first 30 minutes of that show. And what you'll find is, man, I can bury that in. I don't have to go to some sitting class. I don't have to drive myself to my friend's house and jump in this sauna to be told. I just need to sit on the ground a little bit more. And when we start to do that, you'll start to see things like, "My back feels better. My hips feel better." I was, "Oh, hey, my roller's right there as I'm sitting on the ground." And now I have buried in this really essential behavior of expanding the load, expanding the positions that my body's engaged in day to day, and I move, improve my movement lexicon while doing something else. I didn't have to go to a yoga class. I just need to sit on the ground. That is how we untangle this freakish Gordian knot and how I respect your th- time. If you like to go to spin class or CrossFit class or lift heavy weights, let's continue to do that. Let's not take away from that. Let's just expand what your movement choices are, movement options are, and all I'm asking you to do is sit on the ground.

   6. CWChris Williamson33:58

      And this isn't just in one position. It's not just cross-legged. It's not just, you know, sat with your legs out in front of you.

   7. KSKelly Starrett34:05

      Oh, you're so cute. You think that you're actually mobile enough to sit cross-legged in, like, Lotus pose for a half hour? You are not. What's gonna happen is you're gonna be like, "Oh, my back. I better fidget." So now go 90-90. And then, "Oh, let me kneel. Oh, this long sitting position is gnarly. My abs are cramping." And you'll change positions. So fidget once you've sort of run the course, exactly what you're saying. As soon as you've run the course, change your shapes. And that's okay. It's almost like, wait for it, yoga is all about meditation and the brain. And they were like, "You're not flexible enough or mobile enough or worked enough to sit quietly, so do all this yoga so you can come to this cross-legged position and sit there for an hour and meditate." You can't do that. You can't even do that. You're like, "My legs are burning, my low back." Takes you out of that meditation. So let's use that same idea of, hey, I don't need you to be still, fidget all you want.

   8. CWChris Williamson34:57

      I'm gonna look for a, um, C-table. So I use one of these small little square table that is-

   9. KSKelly Starrett35:04

      Oh, yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson35:04

       ... the shape, the shape of a C. I'm going to say I haven't, I haven't bothered looking yet, but I'm gonna look to see if there's one that's about six inches high, and that would mean that I would be able to throw a laptop on that and I would be able to work away. I could have an external keyboard and mouse if I wanted to do that. Uh, my-

   11. KSKelly Starrett35:17

       Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson35:17

       ... my Netflix time genuinely actually is quite low because on an evening I'm doing a lot of dinners here in Austin 'cause it's, like, the most sociable place on the planet. Um, but coming downstairs and maybe answering emails and, and doing that whilst on the ground for 30 minutes I think would be really great. So that's my-

   13. KSKelly Starrett35:33

       And e- and easy to work in. Uh, I was just in, uh, Japan on a crazy backcountry ski tour in February with some friends and we were at this amazing lodge in this national park and one of the guys started to get sick. And I was like, "Hey, I, I can't be in your room." I'm gonna come home and my wife's gonna kill me if I show up with a cold and, a man cold, right? Like, I just can't be in the same room. So we talked to the hotel staff and we're like, "Hey, is there another room?" They're like, "There's not anoth- another room available." And we're like, "Are you sure? This is a big hotel and there's not many people in here." And they're like, "Nope. Sorry." Well, when we dug down, turns out there weren't any more Western white person rooms. There were plenty of Japanese rooms, traditional Japanese rooms and they were like, "But look at this guy." They literally pointed at me and they're like, "He can't go in that room."

   14. CWChris Williamson36:15

       Homeboy's gonna get-

   15. KSKelly Starrett36:15

       And the reason is-

   16. CWChris Williamson36:16

       ... wrecked by a futon. Yeah.

   17. KSKelly Starrett36:18

       (laughs) All the chairs are low. You have to sit on the ground to use the toilet. All the controls to the room are low. You have the futon. The tables are designed to be sitting on the ground. And they were like, "This guy." They literally pointed at me like, "He'll die in this room." And, uh, I was like, "Trust me, I have this room." So if it's about, you know, not getting sick and staying in a room, what we're seeing is I wanna maintain your choice.I wanna maintain your movement solutions and what we're really talking about is creating some benchmarks that allow you to start to re-wild yourself to come back into being able to do the things your body should do. When we wrote Becoming a Supple Leopard, it had two objective measures in there. The first was your range of motion, which is non-negotiable. That's what every doctor, every surgeon, every orthopedist, everyone thinks that your shoulders should move this much, your hips should move this much. Even if you have a special snowflake Scottish hip, it should squat to 120 degrees. Maybe not 135 degrees, but 120 degrees. Suddenly, what we can start to say is, "Okay, here's your native range of motion, here's the objective, and then here's your output," which is when we improved your position, we saw your wattage improve and your poundage improve. Those are two objectives. So now, we've taken those same ideas and tried to give them to people around these other behaviors. Let's add movement and make movement a vital sign. How easy?

   18. CWChris Williamson37:37

       You mentioned walking earlier on.

8. 37:39 – 41:03

   Strategies to Walk More Often

   1. CWChris Williamson37:40

      Your ... I'm going to guess that what you're going to say is, the best way to get between six and eight thousand steps in per day is whenever you can get six and eight thousand steps in per day. But I've also seen from mutual friend, Mark Bell, some interesting stuff to do with insulin sensitivity if walking after you eat a meal. That's a nice way to get small doses in. I'm gonna guess that if you could, you know, three walks of 15 minutes is probably about between six and eight thousand steps, I'm gonna guess. Uh, as opposed to cracking out last thing at night before you go to bed, uh, a f- a full eight thousand steps because you've only moved 500 throughout the rest of the day. Are there any other things that people need to consider when looking at their walking routine?

   2. KSKelly Starrett38:18

      If you know it's gonna snow an inch an hour, we can go out with a broom and just sweep that right off. Or we can wait till there's two feet of snow-

   3. CWChris Williamson38:27

      (laughs)

   4. KSKelly Starrett38:27

      ... and go out with a very different tool. I think ... Imagine I was like, "I'm not gonna eat protein all day, but instead I'm just gonna eat all 200 grams of protein I'm trying to get in this one meal." You can do it. It's just not less good. It's not as fun, not as effective. It's better to spread that out over the day. (breathes in) If some days you're able to get a 30-minute walk in, cool. (smacks lips) The other thing I would suggest is, it's not really about just steps, it's about movement. So if I can be s- moving and fidgeting at my desk, if I can have some place to balance and change my shape and put one foot up, and suddenly, the whole thing is total movement. And let- let me just re- frame this for everyone. When we wrote, uh, um, Dust Bound, one of the things that Juliet found, she found this online calculator that you add in your weight and da, da, da. And she discovered that if she just switched from sitting to perching, being more active, she burned an additional hundred thousand calories a year. Hundred thousand. I outweighed my wife by a hundred pounds, basically. And so I'm like, "Okay, let me round down." So a hundred and seventy calories a year if I choose not to sit, just in choosing not to sit in tra- traditional chair. Hundred and seventy calories of ice cream. Go ahead and google what your favorite ice cream is and then just convert that into peeps, beer, whiskey, whatever it is you give a shit about, convert that amount and that's free money. That's free. I didn't have to exercise, I didn't have to change my diet. I just was able to revolutionize my body composition just by making myself move more and requiring more of my body. And what I want everyone to remember is that it's not even about that. It's about this is how much is required to get your tissues to not be congested. I want you to be able to h- handle the work loads you're engaged in. We have started having all of our elite teams and athletes walk more even if they're elite athletes. And guess what happens? Their tissues are healthier, their heart rate variability improves, their resting heart rate goes down. They feel springier the next day. They have fewer tendon problems and skin problems. It's remarkable when we think about circulation decongestant. That's what walking is.

   5. CWChris Williamson40:40

      I am among the group of people that has been using a Whoop for a very long time.

   6. KSKelly Starrett40:44

      Ah, cool.

   7. CWChris Williamson40:45

      And, uh, I've had Joel Jameson on the show. You know, Mr. HRV? We've spoken a lot about that. Given that we're talk-

   8. KSKelly Starrett40:52

      Hey, ev- everyone list- go follow Joel Jameson. Joel Jameson is the man. Please go follow him.

   9. CWChris Williamson40:57

      He's a beast.

   10. KSKelly Starrett40:58

       His content is so good.

   11. CWChris Williamson41:01

       Given that we're talking about vital signs today,

9. 41:03 – 46:19

   What Kelly Looks For When Helping Athletes

   1. CWChris Williamson41:03

      one of the first places that people will go to will be metrics, objective metrics-

   2. KSKelly Starrett41:07

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson41:07

      ... of what their body is doing. You've mentioned blood pressure and stuff like that today. Obviously, we're getting things like, um, breath rate, resting heart rate, heart rate variability-

   4. KSKelly Starrett41:14

      Yeah, we've expanded those.

   5. CWChris Williamson41:16

      ... et cetera.

   6. KSKelly Starrett41:16

      People are getting comfortable with that, right? SaO2, I mean, my ring picks up whether or not I was breathing last night and had lower oxygen saturation. That's bananas.

   7. CWChris Williamson41:24

      What is it that you are looking at with regards to the clients that you work with, the athletes that you work with, or just the normal people day-to-day, where you're saying, "These are the big benchmark markers that you should be looking at." You've mentioned blood pressure a couple of times today, so I'm gonna guess that that's one of the big ones.

   8. KSKelly Starrett41:41

      (smacks lips) I, um, want people to look at the, the beh- the bigger behaviors. We expect blood pressure to be a l- a lagging indicator of a whole bunch of other things, right? Um, one of the, one of my favorite people around this is Stan Efferding, the rhino, who has done so much to help big guys manage your blood pressure and diagnose sleep apnea. So if you're a big guy with him, he's gonna insist that you start ... You're a power athlete, you have to use a CPAP machine. So he starts with the assumption that you're actually apnic and not getting good rest. And lo and behold, he starts with that assumption, "Let's organize your sleep," and then all the gains happen, all the body transformation happens, all the strength improves. So we can start to see if we work on these vital signs, we expect this independent set of panels to simultaneously improve. And those vital signs are-Did you get fiber? Did you get enough micro nutrients? Did you get your protein macros? How was your sleep? Did you walk, right? We can start to say those things are some real physical behavior pieces. Then we can start to expand what the, sort of, the benchmarks include balance, we can, you know, talk about range of motion, some of these other aspects. And lo and behold, what we want is to appreciate that these things that we've chosen, these 10 kind of hinges, again, that are swinging the biggest doors-

   9. CWChris Williamson43:11

      Mm-hmm.

   10. KSKelly Starrett43:12

       ... you should be able to clinically validate them against anything you want to. I wanna row faster, cool. I wanna lift more, cool. I wanna be more durable, cool. Science supports all these things, the literature supports all these things, behavior supports all these things. But then you're like, "Well, prove it." I'm like, "Prove it to everything." I want to see, like, your Secret Scroll training program is the best in the world, you shout it out all the time about how rad your program is. Take anyone from your program, I'm gonna drop you into some in- a third party program. Oh, you think you can do David Weck, come over here and show me. You think you can, you know, jump into a powerb- uh, power lifting meet or do an Olympic lift? Cool. What I want people to understand is that if we are hitting first principles, you can validate them in any way you want and we should see them trend in positive directions. You don't have to have, like, "Hey, I'm doing this thing to affect my HRV." If I start using sleep as an organizing principle, suddenly I start cutting off caffeine much earlier in the day. I start making des- different decisions about walking and even about alcohol. You know, for example, let me give you g- a good example. One of my, sort of... We're always trying to get our athletes to be ten out of ten. Remember, this book is the same thing that I take in to the military, to the Air Force, to the Army, to England National Soccer Team. Like, these are the same things, we're trying to un- trying to figure out what's what. But one of the things for me is I always struggle to eat enough, believe it or not. I'm always behind. So, getting enough protein every day is sort of one of my things that I'm always working on. I, for some reason, I get full fast, I don't like, I, like, you know, I just, and I get busy, I'm like, "Shit, I'm behind." So intermittent fasting comes around, right? And I'm like, "Oh, this is cool. What a sneaky way for calorie control." And it works for a lot of people. But here's why intermittent fasting didn't work for me, right? Because, and I'll, again, the sleep principle, this allowed me to say, "Okay, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna feed in the morning, it's super cool, I don't, I'm not hungry, I don't bonk, I'm fat adapted, I can drink black coffee or not." And then, but when I, came time to do a brutal workout in the early afternoon, I was under caloriied. So I was missing a key feeding time to fuel so that I could go smash myself in training, on my bike. I was like, "Wow, my, my times are sucking on this FDP on my normal climb." Then I found out, holy crap, I'm way behind on my calories in this compressed time. And by calories I mean, am I gonna get enough micro nutrients through fruits and vegetables? Am I gonna eat enough protein? And it turned out I couldn't do it unless I had a meal late in the day. So now it's like nine o'clock or ten o'clock, I'm like, "Let me have another meal." And guess what happens to my sleep when I eat a big meal before I go to bed? I sleep like shit. So, uh, running that for a few days and a week, and I was like, "Man, this is not working because my third party adaptation, my third party validation was the sleep scores was telling me I was sucking and that my strategies weren't fas- facilitating improvements in those things." And that's a really nice way of understanding, sort of in ferreting through all of the kind of crazy diet information we're seeing, training information we're seeing.

10. 46:19 – 58:14

    Easiest Ways to Increase Macro & Micronutrients

    1. KSKelly Starrett46:19

    2. CWChris Williamson46:19

       What are the easiest ways for people to get more micro nutrients and protein into their diet? What are your favorite hacks for that, given that it's a challenge for you?

    3. KSKelly Starrett46:27

       Uh, actually eating more food (laughs) . Actual food. So, you know, when most people come to diet, i- i- if you're listening to this, you may actually see nutrition as a way of winning (laughs) . Like, that's a lot of ways. Like, we actually work in sports, real sports, not the internet where I can have abs.

    4. CWChris Williamson46:45

       Oh.

    5. KSKelly Starrett46:45

       Like, that's not a fucking sport. Sorry for the swearing. The idea here is that I need you to understand that we look at fueling as a real way of, can I handle playing division one water polo? Can I play in the NFL? It's, fueling is a real thing. Most people come to nutrition not for fueling. And th- mo- some people come to nutrition 'cause they got a bad blood panel, but most people come to nutrition because why? Because they wanna lose weight. They don't even wanna change their body composition, they just wanna lose weight. They don't even know what that means. And so, what we've seen is, the best way to do that is to expand their food. Look, again, 10 years, 15 years of diet culture going amok, keto, carnivore, primal, paleo, uh, uh, uh, vegan, right? We're all fighting, this is identity politics. So, what we've eventually said is, and we'll figure it out in these first principles, this is what we know to be reasonable protein intakes. You're a very sedentary person, it's probably .7, .8 grams per pound body weight. And if you're growing, injured, wanna change your body composition, wanna heal, wanna do something rad, you probably need a, a gram per pound body weight. That's really our goal for those things, which is, again, super reasonable. Not 1.4 or 1.1, not two, one. We also found that through our friend, E.C. Cienkowski, who is @optimizemenutrition, she discovered this thing that a lot of the massive benefits in health and chronic disease started to improve when people got 800 grams of fruits and vegetables every day, because there were so many micro nutrients in there. And wait for it, fiber. If you wanna tee someone up, go ahead and ask, you know, Layne Norton about, you know, is fiber bad for you or not (laughs) . And it turns out micro nutrients and fiber and protein, that's the game. And if I say to you-I don't really care how you do it. You wanna be a vegan? Cool. Show me you hit these markers. You wanna be carnivore? Cool. Show me you hit these markers. You wanna do it just 'cause you're p- you're super paleo and y- and you hate yourself and you wanna eat six pounds of broccoli every day? (laughs) Knock yourself out. But the bottom line is, when we give people those benchmarks, they're... It res- it respects their cultural identity, it respects their family heritage, it respects their, uh, their personal policies and beliefs around the foods that they eat. But we can now start to really sort through and not say, you know, I'm like, "Hey, carnivore, you don't really get enough fiber. We know that fiber's better." Hey, and now you've seen all of the carnivore kids are like, "Hey, carnivore plus berries. Carnivore plus-"

    6. CWChris Williamson49:15

       Meat and fruit.

    7. KSKelly Starrett49:15

       "... honey."

    8. CWChris Williamson49:15

       Meat and fruit. Meat and fruit.

    9. KSKelly Starrett49:16

       Mood free. Mood free. Right? So-

    10. CWChris Williamson49:18

        Okay.

    11. KSKelly Starrett49:18

        ... so suddenly we're like, "Cool. Welcome to the meat and fruit micronutrients." But what we've really done for a lot of people is we stopped restricting what they ate, because a pound of cherries is 230 calories. Just, I challenge everyone here to take the pi- all you have to do is eat a pound of cherries, not have diarrhea, and you'll see that that's 230 calories. Our friend, EC, recently took a tiny cookie, right? Out of a packet of, like, 50 cookies, and she's like, "What's the equivalent in calories?" It was three bananas. So, look, it, you know, like, we demonize fruit. All of a sudden, we're like, "You really think it's all the bananas and apples? That's why you're so fat? Is that the problem?" It's not the problem. And if you have, if you eat four big apples a day, 'cause that's what you can get down, I'm down with it. Super cool. I don't care.

    12. CWChris Williamson50:04

        It's funny to see, uh, the f- kind of flip-flop that's happening in diet culture, especially over the last 10 years or so.

    13. KSKelly Starrett50:12

        Mm-hmm.

    14. CWChris Williamson50:13

        Um, you know, and even, even stuff like The Liver King is a good example. I know that there are a ton of people that I respect. Derek from More Plates More Dates, the guy that did the take-down of The Liver King, says himself, he's like, "I eat, you know, between sort of one and two ounces of liver a day because I do think that it is good for me."

    15. KSKelly Starrett50:28

        Yes.

    16. CWChris Williamson50:28

        So it's like, because of what you said, like, uh, dietary identity politics on the internet. Everybody wants to plant their flag in one particular group or another particular group. And yeah, it's, it's interesting to think about what health implications are being lost simply because people want to identify with one group or another.

    17. KSKelly Starrett50:51

        Yeah. And what we haven't done is recognize its impact on the rest of society. This non 1% people who are on Instagram (laughs) arguing about diet. The rest of people who are like, "Well, these are diet Oreos," right? "And this is diet soda, and I eat this, you know, keto brownie," and just all the processed bullshit where people aren't getting fed, right? Like right now, you know, this move towards, you know, demonizing meat, for example, which, you know, just, we'll just open it right up.

    18. CWChris Williamson51:26

        Mm-hmm.

    19. KSKelly Starrett51:27

        It is one of the most, like, culturally insensitive, racist, socio, sort of oppressive things to say meat is bad. Meat is one of the most nutrient dense foods that you can possibly give someone. And in some cultures, women can't own land, but they can own animals. And what you're basically saying is, "No, no, those women shouldn't own those animals 'cause m- meat is evil." Are there problems with factory farming? Yes. But even if you're like, "You gotta eat organic," I'm like, "No, you don't. You do not..." We wanna put the most nutrient dense foods. Why? Because in this country, we are so sick and so fat and so unhealthy. And it's not because that's a choice people are making. Right? If you, if you pin anyone down on the street and say, "Hey, do you wanna, you know, be disabled and feel terrible?" I'm like, "No one does. No one does." But we, again, I wanna put the blame right on us and start to say, "Well, how is our experiment going?" If we're running this experiment to transform society, and remember, our hypothesis is sport is a laboratory through which we can understand ourselves, it's a laboratory wh- for which we can... It's a test kitchen, then we should transform our communities and transform society, and we're not. So, how can we better transmute the lessons that we're learning in sport and in high performance in all this and actually take those first principles back to our neighbors and to our families? Otherwise, man, this is just, we're, we're gonna leave everyone behind. And that, that's a, that's not the calling of science.

    20. CWChris Williamson52:56

        Are there any foods that most people think that they have to eat every day, but in re- reflection, in the harsh light of day, they're focusing on incorrectly?

    21. KSKelly Starrett53:06

        Oh, I don't know. That's not my expertise. Uh, uh, look (laughs) , what I'll say is, if, you know, one of my favorite books is by Cate Shanahan, right? Who wrote Deep Nutrition. And she's like, "Hey," she's a physician, she's like, "Let me look at all the diets from all over the world. Oh, everyone eats a fermented food. That's super weird. We don't. Everyone cooks their meat on the bone. I wonder why they do that? Huh. Why do they eat all the collagen (laughs) connective tissue? Why do they... What, what is it about cooking meat on bones that are so amazing for the human body? Why do they eat v- w- wide variety of seasonal ve- fruits and vegetables?" Like, you'll, you start to see is, there's, there's good fats in there. There's fermented foods in there. There's raw whole milk dairy in there, right? There's... So, what I think is w- we've represented for people who are like, "Hey, I need to lose body weight," who are like, "Okay, here's this brown rice and this sashimi chicken breast," which we used to give to the dogs, "And then this broccoli," and you're like, "That's it." You know? And, and simultaneously, look, uh, was it with the Kevin Hart movie with, uh, The Rock? And he's like, "How'd you get all big?" (laughs) You know? He's like, "Well, I just ate chicken and rice and I lifted weights for 10 years." So, simultaneously, we know (laughs) that this, this kind of calorie restriction and lift, weightlifting works. But that sort of negates how rad it is to be human. And as soon as we demonize things like beans because "beans are dangerous," and then we tell people, "Bananas have too much sugar." I was at a biohacking conference this year, Dave Asprey's biohacking, uh, hacking conference, talking about this. And I told the woman in the front row, I was like, "I ate two bananas today." And she was like, "Oh." She gasped. Like, "What about the sugar?" And I was like, "You've gotta be kidding me." I was like, "How many fruits and vegetables have you had today?" And she'd had none. I was like, "You ate a 800 gram, 800 calorie fat coffee." I was like, "What, what are the micronutrients in that?" And she was like, "None." And I was like, "Nailed it. I've had two bananas. Crushing you, lady." And what is that? Like-... 170 calories. I was like, "Come on, I weight 235 and I have abs." That's not the problem.

    22. CWChris Williamson55:00

        Dude, it's interesting. I find it very interesting at the moment. I've got, uh, you know, over the next couple of weeks-

    23. KSKelly Starrett55:04

        It's wild.

    24. CWChris Williamson55:04

        ... I've got, uh, Peter Attia on this week. I've got-

    25. KSKelly Starrett55:06

        Mm-hmm.

    26. CWChris Williamson55:07

        ... Thomas DeLauer on Thursday. I've got Dave Asprey in a couple of weeks time. I've got you today. Uh, you know, the number of different approaches, different conversations that are happening around this at the moment, um, I'm not surprised, man. Uh, you know, I've been deep in this world as a, like the most advanced normie on the planet, uh, for forever.

    27. KSKelly Starrett55:28

        (laughs)

    28. CWChris Williamson55:28

        And I find, I find myself getting, getting sort of confused and, and overblown with the new fads that come through as well.

    29. KSKelly Starrett55:35

        Yeah. Right. Um, all of those people are in their way really, like w- what I really appreciate about Peter Attia, please buy his book, it's so important, you know, he is speaking from this position of being a physician saying, "Hey, we can really reshape what modern medicine is." Like that's a really important voice. And a voice I, he can't have as me as the physical therapist, the same way I can't have as, uh, but what we can do is we can work from our respective corners and come towards the middle. We'll never meet in the middle, there's too much work to do, but you're absolutely right, and it's okay that there are multiple voices with slight variation. But E.O. Wilson has this idea of consilience, which is the unification of knowledge. And what we should be able to do is I should be able to take all of the principles from Peter's book, or all the principles from anyone else, and overlay them on my principles, and they'll look, they'll have different language, they'll have different lexicon, but the principles and the outcomes are the same. And if there's a moment where one of us has some interference, then that's a, that's an opportunity to say, "Well, are we saying the right thing? Do we mean the right thing? Or does one of us have a type one error in our thinking?" But otherwise what you're gonna see is you should be able to lay, overlay all of these things. Again, tactics will be different, language will be different, culture will be different, doesn't matter, but outcomes are the thing. So when we get your ego out of the way and we drive this only by looking at our objective outcomes, that is when we start to change society. But we have to transmute those objective outcomes into behaviors that look like maybe eat some fruit, maybe walk around a little more. "Hey, your balance sucks and that's why you're gonna break your hip." Like let's, we can do this. We are clever people. And I think what we have the possibility now is to sort of deputize our friends and family who are into this. Like my friends are into this. This is all we talk about. You and I, we've never really met in person, but I guarantee you I can m- Training is the universal language on the planet. I- I've taught on every continent except Antarctica. Everyone knows what a pushup is, everyone knows what a deadlift is. Everyone who eats (laughs) to try to get better at those things, like it's all the same. It really is this universal. So let's go ahead and take that power of this sort of cluster of us, and let's reach out to our aunts and our uncles and our neighbors, and let's see if we can transform our families and our households and our neighborhoods, and that is how we'll solve this global health epidemic. We don't have to think at a state level or in a national level, it's too large. We just need to like, invite the neighbor over to back squat in the, in the backyard.

11. 58:14 – 1:03:02

    How to Prepare Properly for Sleep

    1. CWChris Williamson58:14

       Final thing, one of the longest levers, something that I had my life changed by Matthew Walker on Joe Rogan-

    2. KSKelly Starrett58:21

       Yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson58:21

       ... five or six years ago is talking about sleep. Spoken a lot about sleep on this show. Huberman's been on, we've spoken about it in that way. When it comes to, uh, preparing for bed, when it comes to thinking about sleep, what are the longest levers that you're looking at?

    4. KSKelly Starrett58:39

       Our experience is setting up yourself for sleep starts in the day. So I need to make sure I've eaten enough calories and I can stop eating early. That, that's made a big difference for me.

    5. CWChris Williamson58:48

       What sort of a time-

    6. KSKelly Starrett58:49

       I also-

    7. CWChris Williamson58:49

       What sort of a time window is that typically?

    8. KSKelly Starrett58:52

       7:30, 8:00 PM.

    9. CWChris Williamson58:53

       Um, and-

    10. KSKelly Starrett58:53

        Because I have kids.

    11. CWChris Williamson58:54

        And what's that, two hours, two and a half hours before bed?

    12. KSKelly Starrett58:56

        Yeah, it's about two hours usually. If I can get w- we usually try to eat between 6:30 and 7:00. That's sort of w- when it works for our family, but sometimes I have kids who play water polo and this doesn't work, so we have to do the best we can. But I try to eat earlier in the day than later because it just messes up my sleep, I just don't feel very good. I cut off caffeine earlier in the day. I max out my steps early in the day. And, of course, my phone's out of the room, duh. Like there's some things like that. Um, I have some red lights in the bedroom (laughs) that I think really make a difference because it, the red light does not m- muck up your circadian rhythm. So our red bed, like we have some red lights that we can switch in our living room, but we switch to red at night not because, and because my girls are never gonna wear dorky glasses, so we just, but they think the red lights are cool. So I like to sit on the ground when we watch TV a little bit, but I do a little soft tissue work before I go to bed. And what I usually find that that soft tissue work helps me relax. It's like getting a little self-massage. That's when I put my soft tissue work in, and then I go to bed at the same time every single night, or in that same window, and it's early. And so keep, and I sleep with an eye mask, and I, my bed is cold, and I do all the things. I take 500 milligrams of, of, of, uh, magnesium before I go to bed. And that, those are my routines and then I don't fuck around with it. I do that and with what Layne Norton says is bone-crushing consistency. Really. Um, one of our friends recently said that, "You know, you feel so terrible on Monday, not because any other reason it's Monday, it's because you're jet lagged, 'cause you messed up your sleep." Because look, everyone goes through this time change, right? And they're like, "Uh, one hour of sleep, I mean," and I'm like, "You did that every weekend. You stayed up till super late and got up early." Like you messed with your sleep the whole weekend, you were in some different time zone. So I think around this sleep thing, we are such cultures of habit, and I've been doing this routine for almost a decade and I sleep like I'm dead. I get, regularly get 90s on and all the, of my sleeping quality because it's the only way I can get through my day.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:00:57

        You would be disgusted with the routine that I did the week before last. So, I went Austin to, uh, uh, Vegas on the Saturday morning, four hours sleep after South by Southwest- Oh, it's so good. ... some- some Spotify thing. Uh, worked all day, recorded a podcast, went and trained, went to the UFC's Power Slap event, went to bed on the night, got up first thing, flew from Vegas to LA, uh, went out for a late dinner, didn't even eat until maybe s- 9:30, 10 o'clock at night. Oh, it's perfect. Went to- to bed at- to bed at midnight, yeah. Hopefully, it was a huge steak and a bottle of wine. Two for two. No alcohol, um, but two for two there. Got up the next morning, did another podcast. Then from the podcast, flew straight from LAX to Qatar, which was a 16-hour direct flight plus- It's fine. ... 10 hours of time change. It's fine. It's fine. Uh, arrived there, three days in Qatar, then flew to Dubai, two days in Dubai, and then flew back to Austin on the Sunday. So, in eight days, I'd done 20,000 miles and gone through eight time zones. (laughs) Um, and then last week, I was gonna-

    14. KSKelly Starrett1:01:56

        So-

    15. CWChris Williamson1:01:56

        ... get-

    16. KSKelly Starrett1:01:56

        ... but that's no different, everyone hear this, that's bananas, but it's no different than having a baby or taking-

    17. CWChris Williamson1:02:02

        (laughs)

    18. KSKelly Starrett1:02:02

        ... a ride off of work.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:02:02

        (laughs) Okay. Right. Fine.

    20. KSKelly Starrett1:02:04

        And- and- and in that situation, the key is we control what we can control.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:02:08

        Yeah.

    22. KSKelly Starrett1:02:09

        And when you have this benchmark, the problem is thinking that's normal and that you don't ever try to get back to something that looks like it. What we're trying to do is build in enough tolerance and durability that you can weather those things and not be sidetracked for a month.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:02:25

        Yup.

    24. KSKelly Starrett1:02:25

        I mean, you know what I mean? And- and look, we're not the same age. I'm almost f- I'm 50 this year and if I did that, in a month, it would take me a month to crawl out from the hole. Like, like you said, you're like, the next day you're like, "Yeah, I had one bad workout, but it was fine." The key is having some benchmarks for yourself so that when your life gets out of hand, and it may not just be travel and work, it may be disease or injury or someone gets sick in your family or you have some heroic thing you got to do for work, you have the tolerance and you can get back to that. Because that is typical. And I think what we want to do is say, "What an awesome life. Next time, call me up. I'll go with you."

12. 1:03:02 – 1:11:10

    How to Recover After a Break in Routine

    1. KSKelly Starrett1:03:02

    2. CWChris Williamson1:03:02

       One final thing that's just come to me here. When something does occur that perturbs your beautiful routinized sleep-

    3. KSKelly Starrett1:03:11

       Happens all the time.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:03:11

       ... and training and 8,000 steps and all the rest of it, um, uh, for instance, I've gone through this little period where I've got all of this travel. This weekend, I'm going to Manchester and back in the space of three days to record-

    5. KSKelly Starrett1:03:21

       (laughs)

    6. CWChris Williamson1:03:21

       ... five podcasts for Gymshark. Um, or there's a bereavement, there's a catastrophe, s- s- something-

    7. KSKelly Starrett1:03:29

       Yeah.

    8. CWChris Williamson1:03:29

       ... needs to happen, the child, there's something up with the kid, whatever it is. What have you found, in terms of the people that you work with, of either mindset, uh, reframes, firm places for them to stand emotionally, psychologically, uh, when there is a- or- or they get injured or whatever it is, where should people go to? They- they understand that there are these vital signs. They understand that there are these things that will make them feel better, and they understand that sometimes life, either through accident or on purpose, gets in the way and smashes those to smithereens. Where can they stand? What can they think about that makes them go, "Okay, like this is gonna be all right"? What- where do you take people mentally for that?

    9. KSKelly Starrett1:04:08

       We have conditioned people to say, unless it's an intense exercise session, "One hour," (sighs) and, "I meal prepped," it's all failure. That's what we tell people, right? I- I either eat like a monk and I train like a elite UFC fighter, otherwise, it's nothing. In the course of 24 hours, we want to expand this conversation about what is a physical practice. And a physical practice means I take care of my body in all these disparate ways, seemingly disparate ways. In the course of that three days, what we can start to say is, we- we'll give you two approaches. One is we can say, "Hey, there are gonna be net benefits to my nervous system and net taxes on my nervous system." So, you- you made a choice, "Hey, I'm eating late, but I'm not gonna drink." That was a really simple thing. "I- I can't control it. I'm gonna eat and I'm gonna enjoy it, but I'm just not gonna add another stressor because I'm super stressed right now," right? I might go out and say, you know, "Gosh, I- Juliet and I probably have two drinks a month." And the reason, hang on, we're not teetotalers, we're like, "Man, we're in a really stressful time in our lives right now and it really messes up my sleep and I'm trying to be fit and do a bunch of rad stuff." And I have to say to myself, "Is this drink worth messing up those things?" Or it doesn't mess them up, but costs me a little bit. You made a really simple decision there. "Hey, I don't think I'm gonna throw another stressor in." But then you also have to say, "Well, hey, like I don't need to train 'cause my muscles aren't gonna go away, my fitness isn't gonna rot, and right now, I'm in this other p- phase of my life, but I bet- I bet I can get my steps in." So, on Saturday, we're at my, uh, Saturday or Sunday, I forget, I'm at my daughter's national water polo tournament, right? We're there, first game's at 8:00, next game's at 5:00, we're in some, you know, high school in the middle (laughs) of nowhere waiting around for these water polo tournaments. So, my wife and I are like, "Let's go for a walk." So, we just maxed out our steps that day. Then I sat on the ground during the games. And those are the two things I did. And I was like, "Well, I can eat fruits and vegetables today and I get enough protein." And I check the box and I say, "This is what I could control today, and that's enough." That was my physical practice. Tomorrow, I get a whole different day to say, "Hey, can I expand my physical practice?" So, I think what's nice about-

    10. CWChris Williamson1:06:13

        Yeah.

    11. KSKelly Starrett1:06:13

        ... having these benchmarks is that I'm on the airplane and I'm like, "Well, let me grab these two cups of fruit and these four hard-boiled eggs." That way, at least I can be working towards getting my grams in for the day, right? And then I'm gonna walk-

    12. CWChris Williamson1:06:25

        Yeah.

    13. KSKelly Starrett1:06:25

        ... around the terminal, like I did in Japan, waiting 'cause I gotta get some steps 'cause I know I'm gonna be still for 16 hours on this airplane.

    14. CWChris Williamson1:06:31

        Yup.

    15. KSKelly Starrett1:06:32

        And suddenly, what we've done is we didn't say, "Hey, training or eating perfectly was the goal." We said, "I'm gonna hit my minimums. I'm gonna control what I can control." And because I'm so durable and because I'm such a rad being on this Earth, that will be enough today. Tomorrow, I'll get another chance to play the whole game again. Let's expand what it means. So, when those things ha- happen, you know, I don't believe in periodization. Hold on, before everyone freaks out. I know periodization works. You're Russian. You're on (laughs) drugs. You're tightly controlled. We definitely manipulate volume and intensity for our athletes, of course. But-... as a ma- as, like, a middle-aged dude who's just exercising, I have to jump on an airplane and go to New York. There's my periodization. There's my built-in rest. So, I'm gonna smash myself this week because on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, I have no control over my schedule. And I think when we start to think about that, I don't throw the whole baby out with the bath water, "Oh, fuck it. I'll just drink a bottle of whiskey," or, you know, "I'm gonna eat whatever I want." I say, "Oh, here's the one thing where I have some agency. I'm gonna control that agency."

    16. CWChris Williamson1:07:33

        Mm-hmm. I really, really like that. I like the fact that you can control certain things. Certain things are going to be outside... Because we talk about th- we've spoken about it on the show, you know, the- the stoic fork or the dichotomy of control, as it's called in Stoicism, about the things that you can and can't control. But you forget about that when it comes to stuff to do with health and fitness, because it is such an all-or-nothing mentality, right? I'm either completely dialed in, calories are being hit, I'm training, I'm getting my walk in, I'm doing 180 minutes of zone two cardio per week-

    17. KSKelly Starrett1:08:02

        (laughs)

    18. CWChris Williamson1:08:02

        ... and my sleep's being tracked, or I- I'm just, like, a complete hedonist slob covered in Papa John's and, and, you know, bukkake'd with, with Oreos.

    19. KSKelly Starrett1:08:12

        (laughs)

    20. CWChris Williamson1:08:13

        So, you have this... You, you do have this sort of all-or-nothing mentality. Um, and I love a, a ton of that stuff there, you know, getting a walk in when you're in the airport terminal. Um, you can, if you arrive at the suggested time, I think, like, a remotely appropriate suggested time for a domestic flight and you're through, you've got an hour. An hour is 10,000 steps, easy, especially if you're in a good, a good airport terminal with a lot of walking where you don't have to keep on turning around so everyone sees you every five minutes-

    21. KSKelly Starrett1:08:40

        (laughs)

    22. CWChris Williamson1:08:40

        ... and thinks, "What's that weirdo doing another lap for?" Uh, yeah, I- I love all of that, man. Uh, I- I really, really appreciate the fact that you're simplifying this. I think, you know, even for me, someone that's trained for, you know, coming up on 20 years now in, in all manner of different forms, getting back to basics, reminding myself that once I finish this, I've been inside for, you know, a couple of hours, I j- probably should go outside, get a bit of sunlight, go for a walk, get moving. I probably should come back and maybe think about the protein that I've had today. You know, all of these basics, I think, are, are a really, really good reminders and good fundamentals that are scalable no matter what someone's level of skill is, someone's progression is, uh, and no matter how much catastrophe is going on in life as well.

    23. KSKelly Starrett1:09:19

        You can think about, "I'm gonna build up as many credits as I can. I'm gonna spend the credits however I want." (laughs) And sometimes I spend those credits, and sometimes the credits spend me, right? S- things are out of control, as you say, catastrophe, bad things are gonna happen, weird deadlines are gonna pop up. You're just blowing through your credits, and you don't have any choice. And sometimes you're like, "We're going to Vegas. I'm gonna burn through all my credits." And the idea is, hey, if we can be consistent for long periods of time, really, just do the basics. It's not heroic. The... All the things that we're suggesting are small things that I want you just to integrate into your life so they're hidden. If we look at the blue zones, no one there is intentionally doing anything to live long. The whole world is set up so they don't have to make another choice. The whole thing is like, "Well, I gotta walk to the market, and then at the market, they only have ingredients. I have to buy food and then make food with the food I bought," right? "I have to see friends as I walk there." You didn't have to do anything. That's the goal. Can we hide the reps? Can we bury this into your life so that you can spend your willpower on the things that really matter to you? Not on, like, "Uh, I should do this one-hour yoga class." Like, let's get over that.

    24. CWChris Williamson1:10:21

        Kelly Starrett, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you're doing at the moment, where should they go?

    25. KSKelly Starrett1:10:26

        Well, the first place I would send you is builttomove.com. We've got a 21-day follow along that goes with the book. So, you can hand this to your mom, your dad, your brother, and uncle and say, "Hey, let's get them involved." Or if you work with a company and you're like, "Hey, I think we can transform the health of our company," we're always a- at the ready state, a-always around. But, uh, mainly, you know, when we see you in public, let's hug it out.

    26. CWChris Williamson1:10:48

        Kelly, I appreciate you. Thank you, mate.

    27. KSKelly Starrett1:10:50

        Thank you.

    28. CWChris Williamson1:10:51

        What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.

Episode duration: 1:11:10