Dr. Kelly Starrett
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
So I think you brought up shoes and that's a really good point. And this is another thing we talked about in our book, Ready to Run. But the American Academy of Pediatrics actually recommends that the best shoes for toddlers is no shoes. And then the second best option would be a shoe that basically disrupts the foot the least.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And it really just acts as a protection from the environment, like from stepping on rocks and so forth. Like a ballet slipper. Like a ballet slipper or something that has a very wide toe box that gives the foot plenty of room to move around. So I think shoes are a big part of it. I think the chair is obviously sitting and the chair becomes a big part of it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
When we were doing the research for our book, Deskbound, we read this really obscure book called The Chair by this UC Berkeley professor named Galen Krantz. And she actually said that the way that modern schools were set up
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
were really actually designed to train kids to work in industrial facilities and sort of the sitting position so that we could train them to sit like that and work like that so they could move on to work in industry. And then I think the third big thing is the rise of technology. I mean, sometimes people have said, hey, what's the deal?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
We didn't have to do a standing desk when we were in the 80s or 70s. We were fine in the 60s. But I think the big difference is that we didn't have technology. Computers, phones. Computers, phones, even television.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Right. At the most, you know, in the 80s, we would come home and watch like an hour of Love Boat from 8 to 9, but that was kind of the extent of it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, I'm getting on the computer. So I think, you know, and I think it's become so prolific. And I think the third thing that people don't think about a lot with kids actually is homework. So the amount of homework kids are given has dramatically increased over the last 30 years.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And so in a kid population in particular, most kids, again, because their environments are set up to be sitting, they're given a lot more homework. So between technology, sitting at school, doing homework. And then the other key thing is in kids in particular, they're being driven to school.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
So it turns out that most, something like 90% of American kids live within two miles of their elementary school. And when I was a kid in the seventies and eighties, it was like 75% of kids walked or biked to school. And now it's down to something like 10%. It's just a given that if you take your kid to school, you pack them up in the car and drive.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And so, you know, I'm talking a lot about all of these environmental experiences for kids, but I think We learn those things as kids and then that translates into our adult selves, right? We've become accustomed to learning and learning while sitting and reading while sitting and then we're on our phones and then we have commuting and, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
I just think it sort of becomes this cascading effect related to our environment.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
So I'll start. We opened the book with something called the Sit and Rise Test, which is based on a 2017 Brazilian study that showed that people who could get up and down off the floor without putting a knee or hand down lived longer. And we also know that people who end up in nursing homes, the number one reason that happens is they've taken a fall. Or they can't get up off the ground.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
that abused all of these technology. There's no generation for excellence. If you grew up in that environment, you would have been doing that too. We 100% would have been on TikTok 24 hours a day.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But then leave everybody else behind.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Or they can't get up off the ground. And there's been a ton of press lately. In fact, we just saw this article in the New York Times that hip fractures in the elderly are expected to rise by something like 30% over the next 20 years.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And anybody who's been paying attention to the news knows that once you fall as an older person and then fall and break bones, that starts to be the beginning of the end. And so one of the reasons, though, we wanted to start our book with this was not to scare everybody and say, OK, you're going to die if you can't do this.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Well, I'll just start by saying that we, as you know, owned a CrossFit gym for almost 17 years. And we first sort of started doing the mental research for this book by watching that particular population. CrossFit people come three to five times a week. When they go to their one-hour CrossFit class, they feel like they've done something heroic because they've done 50 pull-ups and
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
air squats and a ton of sort of extreme movements that is definitely for a unique population. It feels like a striking addition. But we were simultaneously running an in-house physical therapy clinic from which we were able to get a ton of data on these people. And these are what I would describe as your classic weekend warriors.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
They love to exercise, but most of them are professionals raising kids. They're trying to check the box of exercise and then move on with their life. And they like CrossFit because it's efficient. They feel like they get a lot of bang for their buck.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But what we noticed, especially in that same population of people who were turning up as patients in our physical therapy clinic, is once we started delving more deeply into what their daily practices were, in most cases, they were doing their one-hour CrossFit workout, and then they were sitting for another 16 hours a day. And then...
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
simultaneously confused about why their body felt stiff and sore, or maybe why they had torn their Achilles or otherwise had some kind of joint injury. And so it was in that environment where we started thinking, hey, we actually think people need to start moving more throughout their day
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And I'm sure you've read about, you've maybe even had him as a guest, but we've done a lot of reading on Dan Buettner's work on the blue zones. And speaking of your grandmother, I think we talked about this in the pre-show, most people who have lived long, especially in the blue zones, they have never strapped on their tennis shoes and gone to CrossFit or Orange Theory.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
What they've done a lot in their life is move throughout their day.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, they're not into Taibo. I'm also a realist. I get it. Most people live in a modern American society where they don't have the luxury of being able to carry heavy things and farm and walk a lot throughout their day. Unfortunately for us, we actually need to create that movement in our lives. We need to actually intentionally decide that that extra movement is important.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
and incorporate it into our day, there's lots of ways to do it. But what we've found for most people, because it's free and accessible, the best way to do that is through walking. And I just actually put this on my Instagram, but one of my favorite things to ask people is like, if you could take a drug that would reduce your risk of death from all causes by 51%, it's walking 8,000 steps a day.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But because this thing that's called the sit and rise test is a really good window into your basic hip mobility and overall mobility. Can you lower yourself to the ground and get up and down off the ground?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And you reduce that risk to 65% by walking 12,000 steps a day. So we can, you know, Kelly can continue to elaborate on why we're so obsessed with walking.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But I think one of the angles we take that is slightly different that maybe your audience hasn't heard is that people don't connect walking with their overall recovery, with their ability to get more out of their training if they are training, and with things like stiffness and injury. injury prevention. And even sleep. And even sleep. We've done some work with the Delta Force.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And this is a military group that has access to literally all the greatest technology on earth, every drug, every amazing, cool gadget bell whistle out there. And if their warfighters come in complaining of not sleeping well, the first number one order of operations is they're prescribed walking 12,000 to 15,000 steps a day. And they're tracked. And they're tracked.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And the idea there is that they are going to develop enough sleep pressure to actually sleep well through the night. And so, you know, there are so many ways in which we think walking is so critical. And, you know, Kelly, I mean, we haven't even gotten to the mental health benefits.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
I'm sure you've talked extensively on your podcast, but I mean, look, if I had to, if I was given like the worst choice in the world, which is like Juliet, if you had to like choose for the rest of your life to formally exercise or walk, you could only do one or the other. I would, even though I'm a major exerciser, I would choose walking.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
I think it's so critical and fundamental to the human that I would actually choose walking over formal exercise if I had to make that horrible choice.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And then secondarily, the reason that we thought it was so important to start the book with this is that the way to get better at this test is to do something that humans have been doing for a millennia, which is actually just sitting on the ground and then doing the thing, which is getting up and down off the ground.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But they've had like a lymphatic massage. They don't really know why.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
I just wanted to add, could I add two more things about walking, my obsession with walking? But there's this whole new field of a subspecialty of researchers that just study sedentarism. It's like a whole field now. Sedentary biology. Yeah, sedentary biology. And what they're starting to realize is that it's all that additional movement in the form of walking is often-
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
how people are controlling their weight throughout their lives. So people who exercise for an hour a day but then don't move, that may not be enough total movement to actually have lifelong weight control. But the people who are moving 8, 12, 15, even more, 1,000 steps a day, those people actually often do not struggle with weight control throughout their life.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
They've got just a little bit more of a buffer to sort of be able to eat whatever they want.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And I think critically we chose, the recommendation we have in this book for people is to walk eight to 12,000 steps. And the 10,000 steps idea was created by a Japanese pedometer manufacturer in the 60s. It was a marketing tool because pedometers 10,000 is an auspicious number in Japanese culture. So it wasn't at that time based on any research at all.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Of course, thanks to this whole sedentary biology field, there's all this research filling in, massive amount of research filling in to support the importance of walking. But the reason we chose 8,000 is because of that statistic I mentioned to you earlier that you get – You know, you get 51% reduction in all-cause mortality.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
You know, you get the lion's share of the benefit of walking at 8,000 steps. And as we looked at our friends and neighbors and people who are busy and time crunched, we thought, man, 8,000 is a much more reachable number for more people than 10,000 or 12,000. Look, any extra is great. But most people, Americans, the data shows are getting about 4,000 steps.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And we really felt like it was realistic to say to people, hey, you could double that with a couple of 20-minute walks or three 10-minute walks. You can double that number pretty easily amongst a busy time crunch life. It may be hard to get to 10,000, 12,000, depending on where you are in your life.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
So we really were very conscious about saying, hey, we want to create a number of steps that is relatable and accessible that people might actually be able to do.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
So I think just to sort of tee this up a little bit, we ultimately prefer the word durability for exactly the reason you said. I don't think anybody cares about living to be 100 if the last 15 years are spent in a skilled nursing facility being taken care of by a nurse or by your adult children. That's an outcome nobody wants.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But what people do want is to feel good in their body now and be able to do the things they want to do physically and also be able to do those things as they age and then hopefully like fall off a cliff and die one day, right? But for me, I don't want to live to be 100 if the last 15 years aren't great and I can't move my body and I have no mental acuity. That's not what I'm interested in.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
What I am interested in is having a durable body. Like Kelly said, take the hits. And I'll give you one example. In 2018, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And, you know, here I am, super healthy, doing all the things. But, you know, even someone like me, you know, cancer's a bitch, excuse my language, but even someone like me who's doing all the things, you know, it might get you.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Or some other disease, or not even a disease, you might have a death in the family, or some kind of work stress, or go through a period of grief. There's so many ways in which, as humans, we're going to be tested. And it's not really an if, it's a when. I mean, it's part of the human condition. There's things in the environment involved. There's things in the environment you just don't know.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, you don't know what's out there or what's coming for you. And one of the things I thought was so interesting as I was going through my sort of surgery process, and I fortunately caught this cancer super early, so it was very treatable with a couple of pretty major surgeries.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But one of the things that a bunch of people said to me as I was going through my recovery process, they're just like, wow, you're just recovering so quickly and you heal so quickly. Of course.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
and you know i was like did you look at my arms yeah yeah yeah and um i'm like you think people heal faster you know and i was like i was like look my genetics are the same users in fact arguably they're worse because i'm the one that got cancer right like like there i don't have any unique special superpower for healing but what i did have was this really durable body when i was given that diagnosis a durable body that was able to manage those gnarly surgeries
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And I had the tools to recover well. And by the way, the tools for recovery for a big surgery like that are the same things in this book, Built to Move, because they're the basics. The way to recover from a hard surgery is to sleep. It's to eat fruits and vegetables. It's to walk a lot. You know, it's to get some sunlight on your body.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
It's these real basic things that we talk about in this book and that I think are becoming, you know, they're becoming a point of discussion in a lot of health and fitness spaces.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But that was the thing that most, so my goal was to be able to do a pull up. That was my goal because I'd had some other friends who had breast cancer after having a mastectomy.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And what I'd seen is a couple of friends who'd gone through the same process and had really been so guarded in their upper body that they actually could no longer put their arms over their head, let alone even consider doing a pull up. And so, you know, I just did the thing rather than doing it with a weight.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
I just made sure that in that recovery process, I touched those corners and I was like, I know that I want to be able to put my arm over my head And I want to be able to do a pull-up. I want to be able to get that skill back. And so I just did, you know, really slow movement, managed getting my over my head. I started slowly doing dumbbell overhead presses.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And then at six weeks to the day from my surgery, I did one pull-up and people were just blown away by this. And I was like, this is actually not science. It's actually not even that it's not some secret scroll program, right? I just kept moving, walking, moving my body through its ranges of motion.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
I slept, I ate well, took care of my body, and I was able to do a pull-up within six weeks of my double mastectomy.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Yes, 100%.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
without pain. That's right.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
I think there's a couple of things I would add to this overall conversation. I mean, I am a busy working mom. And even though I happen to work in the health and fitness space, one of the things that's been really frustrating for me as not only am I in the space, but I'm an onlooker is that
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
at least from Instagram, it looks like a lot of people in our space have enough time to be able to, every single day, do a breathing practice, meditate, journal, ice bath, sauna, workout, prepare the perfect food. I found that to be very frustrating because that's not at all what my life looks like. As a busy working mom, I wake up in the morning and I help my kids get ready for school.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
I'm lucky if I can get in some exercise and a quick cup of coffee with some creatine or something. And then I am, Kelly and I both spend the vast majority of our day in front of our computers, like everybody else would if they just had sort of a traditional job. And then we come home, we're helping with homework, cooking dinner, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
So we, what we really focused on with these behaviors is actually taking a step back and looking at our own life from 30,000 feet and saying, okay, from this perspective as time crunched, busy working parents, raising kids,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
what what can we actually do and what are the things that are really moving the needle for us and what is expansive yet what are the behaviors that can fit into a life that looks like that not the life that looks like the fitness influencer what are the behaviors that are reasonable to fit into that life and remember the fitness influencer test is that it's not working Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And so we found that these 10 things were the things that we both could do in a busy time crunch life and that we found moved the needle for us the most.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And we also found that they were the things, you know, the lessons we learned from high performance, but also the things that when we were speaking to our neighbors, people who stopped by and said, hey, I have low back pain or, hey, what should I be eating or how much should I sleep? You know, these are the behaviors that we were recommending to people. And I think one of the things that
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
we also wanted to do here with this book and these vital signs is that, you know, we're consumers. We've read every book on sleep and every book on breathing and a thousand, you know, strength and conditioning and nutrition books, but we had never read.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
We know all those people. They're all our friends and there, there's amazing works out there, but we had never read was a book that, that, Talked was comprehensive in the way that it said, OK, these are these key behaviors and these are how they all work together and why one influences the other. And and so I think that's you know, that was our goal here.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But, you know, to answer your actual question 20 minutes later after you asked it. We divided the book into what we would say five of the vital signs are more movement related. So like the sit and rise test we discussed and then five of them are more behavioral slash lifestyle like eating, sleep, walking, creating a movement rich environment.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And, you know, I think that's how we thought of setting up the book.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, I mean, Kelly's right. We really, you know, I think my first exposure to diets was in the early 90s. I was in college. And I was a division one rower, but following the fat free diet. So I was living on like red vines, bagels and mochas because they were fat free. So, you know, I started on early, you know, testing out things.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And, you know, then we got into CrossFit and we were paleo, keto, intermittent fasting, you name it, you know, we've done it all. And I think part of it is just that we've gotten a little bit older and more reasonable. But a few years ago, we stumbled upon our friend E.C. Sienkowski's 800 gram challenge. And it's the recommendation we have in the book.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And it's based on some research that she found that showed that you get the vast majority of the benefits of the micronutrients and the fiber in fruits and vegetables at about 800 grams. And we really love this because again, going back to those neighborhood conversations we would have with our friends and family who are like, okay, what should I eat and how much?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
It was the first time we could say, hey, why don't you just start by eating 800 grams of fruits and vegetables a day?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Yeah. And there's a couple of things I'll say about this. I think when people first hear this number, they sort of balk and say, there's no way. That's so much food. I could never eat that much food in a given day. But just for reference- Kale, that's true.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
In kale, it might be hard. But four medium to large size apples is 800 grams. And one of the things we loved when we found this is, again, as diet culture survivors, we would say, it was the first time that sort of an eating diet recommendation, whatever word you want to use, felt expansive versus restrictive. Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And also, I think we found it at a time in our lives when we really started thinking that we sort of lost the forest through the trees when it came to dietary recommendations in many ways. Let's talk about the banana, for example. At some point, the banana became like the demon of all foods. It's obviously the scourge of society.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
It's the scourge of society in that it had way too much sugar and nobody should ever eat a banana. And in fact, I didn't eat a banana for like 10 years for this exact reason. And looking back on that, I started realizing, man, we demonized a lot of really healthy, normal foods that people have been eating for millennia.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Exactly, processed health food. It's a keto cookie, it's fine. So another big influence for me is a book called Deep Nutrition by Kate Shanahan. I don't know if you've come across her work. No, I haven't. But she's a genius. And she went around the world and studied food cultures. And it turns out in every culture since the beginning of time,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
There's sort of these four pillars that all cultures eat. They eat fermented foods, they eat meat on the bone, they eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, and they eat some kind of fermented dairy product. This is literally since the dawn of time. Now, what those foods look like totally vary based on culture. If you're in Korea, your fermented food is kimchi.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
If you're in Germany, it's a pickle. But really that there are these buckets of food that everybody's been eating forever. And so the notion in more recent years that some of these foods are not appropriate, that we might be allergic to them all, I definitely question that. But back to this 800 gram challenge, what we love about it is that it's expansive.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
It allows you to be able to go out to dinner with your friends. It also allows you to eat within whatever diet you like. So look, if intermittent fasting or keto or the Mediterranean diet or paleo is actually working, or carnivore is working, or being a vegan is working for someone, And it is working from a calorie control standpoint or is your cultural preference.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
The other thing is I think in America or Western countries, we really think that the way we've set up our environment is how everybody lives. But it turns out something like half the world actually sits on the floor, sleeps on the floor, toilets on the ground, really is like operating in their whole environment is very floor based.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
The 800 gram challenge actually fits within every single one of those diets.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Right, right. It's the same thing.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
So, The 800 gram challenge, I would say, is more like a lifestyle than a challenge. It's a vital sign. It's a vital sign. So we think, you know, start now and keep doing this for the rest of your life and you're going to get all.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
So there's a couple of big benefits. The first, first of all, is it's a lot of food. So you're going to feel satiated. And you're going to feel less likely or more or less likely to actually want to eat those chips from Whole Foods.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
It's so much food. And also, by the way, it includes things like potatoes and beans.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Yeah. And it, again, is very expensive. The only thing it doesn't include is frying a vegetable like a potato. Those things are excluded if you fry them or if you want to. And the other thing, too, is so accessible. We get it. There are food deserts in a lot of parts of this country, and people actually don't have access to good fruits and vegetables anymore. But guess what?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
On the 800-gram challenge, you can also eat canned fruits or vegetables, frozen fruits or vegetables. Those are all on the table because, again, the goal is to get these micronutrients into your body. And how you do that is totally up to you. You can eat what's within your cultural preference, what's within your dietary preference. One example we like to give is carnivore.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Well, people who are carnivore have sort of been adding in some like berries and things to their carnivore diets of like, great, eat 800 grams of berries. It's actually not that hard. It's like five cups of berries. It's totally possible within a carnivore diet. Again, for vegans, great.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
In many cases, vegans are also eating a lot of processed foods and not a lot of whole food, fruits and vegetables. But what we found is that number one, it's expansive. It allows you to enjoy food with your people. One of the things I like to say is that humans do two things together. We move together and we eat together.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And one of my criticisms of some diets that we have out there is that they are, because you have to be so meticulous about what you eat, it pulls you away from being able to eat with your people. And I think that from a community and one of the ways to combat depression and loneliness and anxiety is actually to do the things that humans do together, which is eat together.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And it turns out in those countries, the amount of orthopedic injuries is much lower and the fall risk in the elderly drops to almost zero. just simply because those people actually are practicing the thing. They're practicing getting up and down off the ground. I want to tell you one quick story that I think you'll appreciate.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And then Kelly can talk a little bit about sort of the tissue impact of eating all these fruits and vegetables and getting this fiber and micronutrients into your body. And then also our protein recommendations.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
One thing I want to say for the listeners on the tracking piece, because, you know, I also don't love having to, you know, weigh and measure my food all the time. And what I've learned with the 800 with this 800 gram challenge is that you can actually do it for like three days, like choose three days of your life and measure it. and you get some really good data.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
So you're not like stuck in a prison of tracking for the rest of your life. You can measure for three days and then actually really get a good sense and be able to eyeball it. The way that I eyeball it is I basically make sure I have a diverse amount of fruits and vegetables or fruits and vegetables in every one of my meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And I know from tracking it that I'm hitting that. So It's not a prison. I know for some people tracking, the idea of tracking anything is like, I'm out of here. But you don't have to be in a prison. I do recommend people get like an $8 scale on Amazon and just track for- Food scale.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, or even Google it and just get some rough ideas. And I think people are number one, going to learn that they're not even getting close to 800 grams. And number two, I think they're going to learn they don't have to be in a prison of tracking forever. You can get some really quick data and then eyeball going forward.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Kelly was just in Japan traveling with some friends on a ski trip in February. They got to a hotel and it turned out there was not enough rooms. Kelly didn't have a room and the hotel staff was getting really nervous.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Is that fried?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
and sort of freaking out and turned out what they didn't have when they got to the bottom of it turns out what they didn't have was a western room where the bed was off the ground the table was off the ground the toilet was off the ground and they had plenty of more japanese style rooms where you know there was a futon on the floor and a table on the floor and you know even things like you know the um the thermostat were like at squatting height not at face height like we would have and and kelly was like yes like
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Just for my wife, my smoking hot wife. That's good, I'm glad he still has that theme. A lot of men give up later on in life. Yeah, me too, I'm really glad too.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
This room was made for me. I am the American who can manage this room.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
It's easy. Yeah. And I mean, that was my, you know, that was my point about this eating together as humans thing. I think people haven't, you know, it's, it's like, I never wanted to be that mom, especially raising two daughters that was like microwaving my, you know, meal that was sent to me by like the paleo meal company while I'm serving my kids some other dinner. Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
They took one look at him and they're like, oh, he's going to complain. This person's going to die. They took one look at him and they're like, we do not have a room for this guy. But it turns out that he was totally comfortable in that environment.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Like I was like, okay, that, that's not a trade-off I'm willing to make. Like I want to be the, the model I want to be, especially as a woman raising two daughters in a world where there's like massive eating disorder. And in fitness, like I want to be the mom that shows that like eating food is great and eating together is great. And that, you know, we can cook dinner and all eat the same thing.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Like imagine that.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And the final thing I'll say on this nutrition piece, as a woman where I think, you know, we've had sort of a separate set of bombardment, especially on the restriction side. I think so many women I know, you know, I'm cresting into menopause now.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And I know so many women that are having to sort of undo this advice we've been given for so many years, which is like restrict your food and do a massive amount of cardio, right? Like that was sort of the, this is what you do as a woman to sort of stay lean and look good as massive amounts of cardio, restrict, restrict, restrict, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And I posted a video on my Instagram recently where I ate, you know, videoed everything I ate throughout an entire day, which was 800 grams of fruits and vegetables. And in my case, about 140 grams of protein. And the amount of women who texted me, called me and said, my God, that is so much food.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But it just gives you kind of an idea of we get so accustomed to thinking that the way that we are in our environment here is how everybody is in their environment.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
You know, and I think they were so shocked because we've been, especially as women, been in this massive restriction mode. That it was like the first time they actually could visualize a whole day of food that included a ton of food. I did a lot of eating throughout the day and a lot of eating of diverse and different things. And, you know, it wasn't all perfect.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And, you know, but it was a ton of food at the end of the day. And still was like 2,000 total calories. So it wasn't like a 4,000 calorie day. It was 2,000 total calories with this really reasonable amount of food. But I think it was really interesting for me to get this feedback from women who were like, whoa. oh my God, I've never eaten that much food in my entire life.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
I'm hoping this helps undo some of that trauma that women have around the only way to be healthy is to restrict and destroy yourself with cardio.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And the almond mom is like back to the idea that like a serving of almonds is three almonds, right? Which is like no normal person could ever just eat three almonds, right? Right. It's like 10, at least you eat 10.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
I mean, my take would be I don't really care about timing. I think sometimes we've, again, lost the forest through the trees and trying to overly optimize. I think people have sort of different desires to eat, when they want to eat. We say the same thing with mobilizing, for example. We prefer to do our mobility work at night in front of the TV, our soft tissue work.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But again, we're like, any time is great. Get the 10 minutes in. So I mean, from my perspective, the goal is to get the total amount of protein every single day. and also the enough micronutrients throughout the day.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And look, if you want to skip having any micronutrients with breakfast and just stick with protein and get all the rest of your micronutrients in lunch and a snack and in dinner, like that's great. I mean, for me, it's really about the total. And I think sometimes when we get caught in this timing conversation, we lose people, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
I think that's one of the ways in which in the fitness business, we lose people. Like We were on a podcast recently where someone said, okay, well, that's great. We should walk. But what should we be doing to optimize our walking? And when I heard that question, I was like, okay, we just lost half the audience. Because for most people, they don't want to optimize.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Most people just want to feel good in their body and be able to do the things they want to do and have the body composition they want. And I think sometimes those of us that are in the space, we're overly optimistic. concerned with optimizing.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
So from my perspective, I think people have to focus on what works for them with this larger principle of get enough protein, get enough fruits and vegetables.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But then on the flip side, the reason we have the Frappuccino test in there is because we're in this health and fitness and wellness space, we also encounter so many people who've become so sensitive that there's like three things they can eat. And that they're like, they've trained themselves to be allergic to like food. and all things.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And so the notion of like drinking a Frappuccino, like they would literally sooner die. And it's like our point- So can you explain the test just so we have context?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
That's what it is. We just use the Frappuccino as the example because it's like sort of horrifying for people who care about their health. And so much sugar, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Absolutely. That's the goal. And we sort of think that like human beings are like, we're omnivores, we're sort of like garbage dumps.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
No, but like we should, we're of the mind that you should be able to manage
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
you know different environments and be able to be flexible in your environment um and this is maybe not related but i'm going to tell you the story about our cat okay oh my gosh old cats i feel like somehow it's related to this because i said the word omnivore but we have this cat named king louis and we we he's in hospice and remember we pretend to know something about bodies bodies right so we get this caddy six years old we call him a used cat because we got him at six and
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Three or four years into having him, we're like, man, he just like always wants to be drinking from the sink. Like he goes, he follows our friends into the bathroom and meows and they lift him up onto the sink and he drinks like massive amounts of water and drinking, like drinking a weird amount of water.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And then we actually happen to have a friend who had a diabetic cat and Kelly and I are like, I think maybe our cat has diabetes. Like, this is so weird. Take the cat into the vet. He has diabetes. Yeah. So we have to give him insulin shots for a year. And on top of insulin shots, we put him on an all meat, 100%.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But in the cat food we were buying him, it had grains. It had grains and who knows what else.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Obligate. Cats are obligate carnivores. They only eat meat. They're not like dogs. Dogs are omnivores.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Vegan cats, yeah. We gave our cat diabetes. Yeah, so we always tell everyone, we're like, we gave our cat diabetes. And then we just fed him meat and he was fine. So he went off, he was on insulin for a year. We had to give him shots for a year. Then we fed him an all meat diet, which we continue to do. And now he's 16 and-
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And I have no idea how the story relates to being an omnivore and flexible diets.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
These underlying principles are we're omnivores and we should be able to buffer having a Frappuccino every so often, you know, if that's the only thing there is to eat on earth.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
It was a little surprising to us because we knew, we know that people have a lot of, you know, identity and investment in their diet. And so when we published this book, we thought, okay, the thing that we're going to, you know, the thing that we're going to have to defend is sort of our point of view on food.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And so we tried to make it as reasonable as possible and as universal, inclusive, accessible as possible. But I don't think we thought that the sleep piece would be like triggering for a certain group. Even in this day and age? Yeah. Who are the people that are coming after you?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Well, so what we realized is Kelly was on a podcast that was sort of outside of this health, wellness, fitness vertical. It was sort of speaking to a different audience. Tim Ferriss? And it was Chase Jarvis and he has a more creative audience. Creative, okay. Yeah, it's a creative, you know, photographer as an artist and so-
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
What we learned from that, though, and again, it was sort of like confirmation bias for us that Kelly and I are like, man, we have a lot of work to do because I think, again, those of us that are in this space, I think we can think that we're getting it. People are getting the message.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
They know because we know and all of our friends know and the people we all talk to on our podcast know, okay, it's not that unreasonable to say seven to eight hours of sleep, but the moment we just took one step out… of, you know, again, this little bubble, our little bubble, you know, Kelly really triggered people by saying seven or eight hours of sleep.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And so, you know, the lesson we took from that is, man, we have a lot of work to do. We are still, we still just have to try to keep reaching across.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And for us, sleep is a keystone habit. People who get enough sleep exercise more. They get more out of the exercise they're doing. They're more likely to make better choices when it comes to food. Their relationships are better. They show up and they're more productive and more creative and attentive at work. And so they enjoy their work more. I can't believe we're talking about sleeping, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But we think it's the habit from which all other good health habits evolve.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Sure. Marathon sitting are just long bouts of sitting in the same position.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
I mean, we maybe should.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
They'd be so uncomfortable.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
You see how much I'm fidgeting?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, and the way we have our podcast studio set up is it's actually at a standing desk. But because of the way our camera angle works, I stand and Kelly sort of perches on a stool. But back to your original question, Kelly and I are trying to change the conversation a little bit because for a lot of years, everybody heard the phrase, sitting is the new smoking, sitting is bad.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And he's a genius and we're fans and he's been a huge inspiration for us in our thinking around this. However, I think the message that sitting is bad is the wrong one. The message that we are trying so hard to spread and change people's thinking around is that moving is the goal. And moving more is the goal. It's not sitting versus standing. Standing isn't better.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
In fact, what a lot of people experienced when they got on the standing desk revolution is that their feet hurt or their back hurt or they felt uncomfortable. And we can talk a little bit more about standing desks. But the message we're trying to get out is that more movement is better and that there are a lot of ways to do that. But one of the things we like to say is...
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
helping people change their environment so that their environment is a movement rich environment. And let me give you a couple of examples about the way our office and our house is set up to sort of create that movement. So our entire office, every single desk in our office is a standing desk and it's set permanently at standing desk height.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Now, does that mean we and our employees have to stand all day? Not at all. Every single desk also has a stool connected to it. But what we like about having all standing desks is that we find that at that position, We move more, we get up more, we have more opportunity to fidget. We're more likely to walk away from our desk to go talk to a colleague than text them, pick up the phone.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
We're more likely to just move more if we're in that position. We also have taken the choice out of it. We don't have an electric standing desk that we can just turn down and sit down. The default is to do the right thing. The default. The constraint. We set it so that the default is to do the right thing, to create an environment where we can move more.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But like everybody else, we have days where we're tired, exhausted, sick, and we have days where we sit on the stool for the vast majority of the day. The other thing we like about the stool standing desk setup is that you can employ this position called perching, which is sort of like this intermediate between standing and sitting. It's like you're at the edge of the stool.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
your feet are actually both on the ground and it actually requires you to be active a little bit in your upper body. So it's this nice, happy medium between sitting and standing. So that, that's what our office looks like. And then when you go to our home, we have a variety of different ways we've constrained our environment to encourage more movement. We actually have a count, a
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Our kitchen counter is at a height where we can work while standing. We also have a lower part of our counter where we can sit and work if we're at home working on our laptop. And then the other thing we really encourage back to the very beginning of this conversation is actually to choose sitting on the floor to work for part of your day.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
So if someone were following me with a hidden camera for my, let's say, eight-hour workday, I would do a variety of things. I would get up and down off the floor and work sitting on the floor for a couple hours. And while I'm sitting on the floor, I'd probably be changing positions. I'd be sitting cross-legged 90-90. Long sit, like you'd see me constantly moving positions.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And then after a while, I'd move to my standing station. I'd stand at my standing station and practice my balance and maybe stretch my calves a little bit. And then after a few hours, I might feel tired. So I'll sit down and work for a few hours.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
I'm always mixing it up. And so what you see in that setup is that I'm constantly in motion. I'm moving, getting up and down off the ground, fidgeting, changing positions, walking around, giving myself opportunity to move. And so that's what we think of as a movement-rich environment.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And the final thing I'll say is that I think we all know, and you've probably had other guests talk about this, we cannot rely on motivation anymore or willpower anymore. We have to set up our environment to make it easy to do the right thing. And so one of the things we know we want to do is create an environment where we automatically move more without even thinking about it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Everyone. Not everybody, but a lot of people.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And it happens quickly.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
I literally was like, I wonder, Kelly's obsessed with hip extension. And I was like, I wonder when he's going to find an opportunity to talk about hip extension.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
They hate doing them because they're used to having their hips flexed all the time versus extended.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And I just want to, because we've talked a lot about the behavioral chapters and then a little bit about the sit and rise test, but there's two things I want to say on this sort of mobility piece. First of all, I want to define what we mean by mobility because I think it's poorly understood or people have never even heard the word.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But what we mean by mobility is it is the ability to move your body freely through your environment without pain. And to be able to do the things you want to do physically. So if people are asking, do I or do I not have mobility? Those are the questions. Are you out of pain? Are you able to do the things you want to do physically?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And that second piece is really important because for anyone who's physical in any way, worst case scenario, especially from a mental health standpoint, is to be able to be told by a doctor or physician or physical therapist, stop doing the thing you love because... You're in pain. That's everyone's worst nightmare, especially people who are physical and like to use their bodies.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And the other thing we want people to think about and hope they care about their mobility a little bit and range of motion is that if you think about your physical capability as a human is this wide open hallway. And as we age, the hallway starts to narrow.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And one of the ways that hallway starts to narrow is if we don't keep an eye on our range of motion, we can't move our body freely through its environment and we can't do it without pain.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
With its native range of motion. That hallway is going to start to constrict. And the reason people should care is they are going to not... Their movement opportunity is going to start to narrow. They're not going to be able to do the things they want to do physically. I don't want to hike. I don't want to ride a bike. And one story I'll tell is I have a friend and... who's a financial advisor.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And he meets with people about retirement planning and all the things to do to get ready to be able to retire and enjoy your retirement. Turns out that he spends like 90% of his appointments not talking about the money piece at all. He talks to people about what it is they want to do when they retire.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And Nobody ever says what I want to do when I retire is get into my lazy boy and watch CNN for the rest of my life. That's not something anyone ever tells him. Everybody comes to him with things they want to do that involve movement. That could be totally varying, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
It could be like Kelly and I, our movement goal when we're 80 is to be able to still comfortably be able to ski and mountain bike. But for many people, they want to be able to travel or play with their grandkids or be able to manage walking around Disneyland for a day, right? Everybody has these movement goals.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And if you haven't kept an eye on this key thing that is range of motion, this wide open hallway, and your hallway is constricted to the point where you can't get up and down off the ground or extend your hip or put your arms over your head, you are not likely going to be able to do those things you want to do as you age because
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And now maybe you think you don't need to care about it because you're 35 years old, but having that native range of motion is going to help you do more, work harder as an athlete, feel better in your body, hopefully experience less pain. So there's a benefit now, but there's a huge benefit to keeping that hallway wide open.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And Kelly mentioned this earlier. I mean, you know, I think we have been told that aging is just this sort of like downhill, like we're all just going downhill and then we die, right? But range of motion is actually something that shouldn't have to change as we age, right? If you keep an eye on it, unlike, you know, everybody's going to lose a little bit of muscle mass.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Like there are some things that are going to happen at the rate at which they happen. We can certainly control with our behavior. But range of motion actually should be able to stay constant throughout our lifetime.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Yeah. I mean, like your grandma being case in point, right? Like if she can squat and get up and down off the ground and her preference is to do ground-based things like sweeping on the ground, she's been able to maintain that range of motion by doing those things. But the other key point I want to make is it's actually not too late.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
That's a question we get often as people think, well, I'm listening to this podcast. It's too late for you. Go on without me. I'm 55 and I've been working a desk job for the last 30 years and I can tell that I already can't do all the things I want to do physically and I've had some kind of pain or whatever.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
It's actually not too late to start and people can make a massive difference in their range of motion by starting whenever and just paying attention to it a little bit.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And explain to them why they should care.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Sure. I mean, since Kelly already teed up hip extension, his favorite subject of all, we have in the book something called the couch test, which is based on a stretch we've been recommending for years called the couch stretch. But basically, you put your knee to the wall or to the corner of the couch and your shin is sort of along the wall and then you want to try to get into an upright position.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And we have demonstrations in the book so people can better visualize it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
You can Google couch stretch. What it is is a test of your ability to extend your hip, this sort of critical range of motion that a lot of people are missing largely because we're spending most of our day sitting.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
The point, one quick thing though, I want to say is that we, again, I know I said this earlier, but we like to do our soft tissue work before we go to bed at night. But there are plenty of people who find that the window of opportunity they have is in the morning or maybe at the tail end of their training session. I mean, we really are totally agnostic. Like we like to do it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
We enjoy it because it also helps us sleep. But again, the goal is to get that 10 minutes in a day. And when you do that is totally up to you.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
marathon sitting on chairs helps you prevent a flat butt oh did i hear you guys talk about that one time in another podcast i don't know about that i'm sort of obsessed with dead lifting as as a as a primary well because uh you know they're not even a flat butt but there's this whole thing where women are getting butt implants which is and maybe this is more common in los angeles but um
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But it's a thing. Women are getting butt implants. And that seems crazy to me, especially as someone who's had to have some surgeries and having surgery is not awesome. So my obsession is, hey, why don't you just take up the habit of deadlifting a little bit because you're less likely to need a butt implant. And it will also help with flat butt syndrome. Check this out.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Totally. When it comes to soft tissue work in particular, we get this question a lot because people are like, well, my entire body hurts. Everything is stiff. Where would I even begin? And how would I begin to address this complex system in 10 minutes a night? And so our recommendation is touch anywhere to begin. And it turns out back to this sort of financial analogy of compounding interest.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Look, if you start and your neck is stiff and sore, start on Monday night on your neck, and then you can systematically sort of work down your body, turns out you can get almost all the major tissues in your body in seven days in that 70 minutes of soft tissue work you're doing in front of the TV at night. And then go back to your head and start and work down.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Or what we find is when people start somewhere, press anywhere to begin, they'll actually learn how to discover the parts of their body that feel the most stiff and sore and and then just gravitate towards working on those. In my case, my calves are always super stiff, super tight, super sore. So that's an area that I prioritize because I know that I feel better if I do it. I can move better.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
My ankle dorsiflexion is better. But then also, if I've been sitting on a plane or doing a lot of not moving. I also find my neck and shoulders get stiff. And so I work there.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
So I think, you know, we do want to give people the empowerment to be able to sort of do a little bit of, you know, press anywhere to begin, either where does it hurt on your body, where do you feel stiff or sore and start there, but just know that you can actually make a lot of progress systematically working through the whole body in just a week.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
He's like, choose your own adventure.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
There's a lot of video demonstrations because some of the soft tissue work and mobilizations we recommend, you know, we have pictures of them in the book, but we kind of bring them to life in video. But I would recommend, you know, for anyone who gets a book, start by doing all 10 of the tests and see where you are.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Because, you know, some people will get an eight out of 10 and some people get a five out of 10. But I think that will give people some information, you know, the tests that people get a green or a thumbs up on, those are just, I would say, things people need to keep an eye on. Like, okay, great that you can squat or you were able to do the sit and rise. That's great, but don't ignore it now.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Make sure that you're still continuing to sort of grease those wheels and don't lose the chance to get up and down. It's a moving target. It's a moving target. And then likewise with the things where maybe you got a yellow or a red or not as great of a score, then those are the places where you want to bring your focus and attention more to those things.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
For me, the biggest thing would be sleep. I see massive sleep problems in my own community, and I believe a lot of the now teenage diagnoses we're seeing of depression and anxiety and loneliness and mental health challenges that have become very pronounced, and especially our teen generation right now, and it's been widely reported in the news.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
I think maybe originally stemmed from a massive amount of sleep deprivation. Or at least exacerbated by it. Or at least exacerbated by it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Yeah. And so for me, again, I would go back to saying we've got to teach our kids how to sleep. We've got to protect their sleep when they're little. One of my biggest pet peeves is I would talk to parents and they'd have an eight-month-old kid and say, my kid doesn't nap anymore. And I'm like, hmm, hmm. That's not really supported by the science. Eight month old kids need to take naps.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
It's actually shown they need to actually take two naps.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
It's not them, it's you. You didn't protect their sleep and create space for them to take the two naps a day that all kids at eight months old need to take. We don't even know what the downstream consequences of all this loss of sleep are, but I think we're starting to see at least anecdotally in teenage kids,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
You know, thanks to technology and thanks to, you know, not prioritizing sleep and actually, you know, lionizing not sleeping as a culture. So, I mean, I think the impact on not enough sleep is huge in our kids. And I think it's something that, you know, is something we can control in our households. But it is difficult. I mean, you know, we're parents. teenage kids.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
And it has to be a constant conversation about when to go to bed, how much to sleep, how much to prioritize that, where to put the phones, how to take the phones out of the room. So it's complicated for sure.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But I mean, for me, of all the sort of health interventions, if I could wave a wand and have every kid get enough sleep, I think we'd be having a different conversation when it comes to diabetes, obesity, depression, anxiety, loneliness. I think that it would be very different.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
A gigantic priority.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Every day.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Two other things too. Our daughter, Georgia, who's a senior, is taking this really cool class called Applied Math. And when I heard that she was signing up for it, I was like, that sounds crazy. That sounds like something that's like way beyond calculus and super complicated. You need to be genius to be in that class.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Well, turns out Applied Math is actually what it purports to be, which is teaching kids all these really practical skills, like how to invest in the stock market and how to understand what a mortgage is. We came home one day and our daughter's like, I'm trying to calculate how much income I'd need to make in order to afford a $3 million house.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
So she's here learning all these super practical financial skills. And I was like, this is such a cool class. Every kid should take this class. And then also kids have what we know as health class, which often is talking about sexual health and more physiologic health. But whatever happened to the home ec class? I'm not sure it needs to be called home ec. That seems like an outdated program.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
But why don't we have in junior highs and high schools classes where kids actually learn how to do things like cook and do laundry.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Now that we have a kid that's on their way to college, I'm being served all this information about how parents literally have not taught their kids how to do a load of laundry and are doing it for the first time with their kid on the eve of them going off to college or that they don't know how to make a pot of rice or cook literally anything.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, like formal exercise.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
We are, I'm at Juliet Starrett on Instagram. Kelly is at TheReadyState. I do kind of the family behind the scenes stuff of what's really happening in our life if people want to follow me there. And then all things book are at BuiltToMove.com and the book is in bookstores and on Amazon and anywhere people find books.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
So I'll start. We opened the book with something called the Sit and Rise Test, which is based on a 2017 Brazilian study that showed that people who could get up and down off the floor without putting a knee or hand down lived longer. And we also know that people who end up in nursing homes, the number one reason that happens is they've taken a fall. Or they can't get up off the ground.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
Or they can't get up off the ground. And there's been a ton of press lately. In fact, we just saw this article in the New York Times that hip fractures in the elderly are expected to rise by something like 30% over the next 20 years.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And anybody who's been paying attention to the news knows that once you fall as an older person and then fall and break bones, that starts to be the beginning of the end. And so one of the reasons, though, we wanted to start our book with this was not to scare everybody and say, OK, you're going to die if you can't do this.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
But because this thing that's called the sit and rise test is a really good window into your basic hip mobility and overall mobility. Can you lower yourself to the ground and get up and down off the ground?
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And then secondarily, the reason that we thought it was so important to start the book with this is that the way to get better at this test is to do something that humans have been doing for a millennia, which is actually just sitting on the ground and then doing the thing, which is getting up and down off the ground.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
Yeah, I can envision it.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
The other thing is I think in America or Western countries, we really think that the way we've set up our environment is how everybody lives. But it turns out something like half the world actually sits on the floor, sleeps on the floor, toilets on the ground, really is like operating in their whole environment is very floor based.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And it turns out in those countries, the amount of orthopedic injuries is much lower and the fall risk in the elderly drops to almost zero. just simply because those people actually are practicing the thing. They're practicing getting up and down off the ground. And I want to tell you one quick story that I think you'll appreciate.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
Kelly was just in Japan traveling with some friends on a ski trip in February and they got to a hotel and it turned out there was like not enough rooms. And so Kelly didn't have a room and the hotel staff was getting really nervous.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
and sort of freaking out and turned out what they didn't have when they got to the bottom of it turns out what they didn't have was a western room where the bed was off the ground the table was off the ground the toilet was off the ground and they had plenty of more Japanese style rooms where you know there was a futon on the floor and a table on the floor and you know even things like you know the um the thermostat were like at squatting height not at face height like we would have and and Kelly was like yes like
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
This room was made for me. I am the American who can manage this room.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
They took one look at him and they're like, oh, he's going to complain. This person's going to die. They took one look at him and they're like, we do not have a room for this guy. But it turns out that he was totally comfortable in that environment.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
But it just gives you kind of an idea of we get so accustomed to thinking that the way that we are in our environment here is how everybody is in their environment.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
It's almost like you fall off a cliff.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
So I think you brought up shoes, and that's a really good point. And this is another thing we talked about in our book, Ready to Run. But the American Academy of Pediatrics actually recommends that the best shoes for toddlers is no shoes. And then the second best option would be a shoe that basically disrupts the foot the least.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And it really just acts as a protection from the environment, like from stepping on rocks and so forth. Like a ballet slipper. Like a ballet slipper or something that has a very wide toe box that gives the foot plenty of room to move around. So I think shoes are a big part of it. I think the chair is obviously sitting and the chair becomes a big part of it.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
When we were doing the research for our book, Deskbound, we read this really obscure book called The Chair by this UC Berkeley professor named Galen Krantz. And she actually said that the way that modern schools were set up were really actually designed to train kids to work in industrial facilities, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And sort of the sitting position so that we could train them to sit like that and work like that so they could move on to work in industry. And then I think the third big thing is the rise of technology. I mean, you know, sometimes people have said, hey, you know, what's the deal? Like, we didn't have to do a standing desk when we were in the 80s or 70s. Like, we were fine in the 60s.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
But, you know, I think the big difference is that we didn't have technology. You know, computers, phones, computers, phones, even television.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
I mean, computers at the most, you know, in the 80s, we would come home and watch like an hour of Love Boat from eight to nine. But that was kind of the extent of it.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
Yeah, I'm getting on the computer. So so I think, you know, and and and I think it's become so prolific. And I think the third thing that people don't think about a lot with kids actually is homework. So the amount of homework kids are given has dramatically increased over the last 30 years.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And so in a kid population in particular, most kids, again, because their environments are set up to be sitting, they're given a lot more homework. So between technology, sitting at school, doing homework. And then the other key thing is in kids in particular, they're being driven to school.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
So it turns out that most, something like 90% of American kids live within two miles of their elementary school. And when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, it was like 75% of kids walked or biked to school. And now it's down to something like 10%. It's just a given that If you take your kid to school, you pack them up in the car and drive.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And so, you know, I'm talking a lot about all of these environmental experiences for kids, but I think we learn those things as kids and then that translates into our adult selves, right? We've become accustomed to learning and learning while sitting and reading while sitting and then we're on our phones and then we have commuting and, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
I just think it sort of becomes this cascading effect related to our environment.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
I literally was like, I wonder, Kelly's obsessed with hip extension. And I was like, I wonder when he's going to find an opportunity to talk about hip extension.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
You're saying that people hate doing them because they're used to having their hips flexed all the time versus extended.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And I just want to, because we just have, we've talked a lot about the behavioral chapters and then a little bit about the sit and rise test, but there's two things I want to say on this sort of mobility piece. First of all, I want to define what we mean by mobility because I think it's poorly understood or people have never even heard the word.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
But what we mean by mobility is it is the ability to move your body freely through your environment without pain and to be able to do the things you want to do physically. So if people are asking, do I or do I not have mobility? Those are the questions. Are you out of pain? Are you able to do the things you want to do physically?
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And that second piece is really important because for anyone who's physical in any way, worst case scenario, especially from a mental health standpoint, is to be able to to be told by a doctor or physician or physical therapist, stop doing the thing you love because you're in pain. That's everyone's worst nightmare, especially people who are physical and like to use their bodies.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And the other thing we want people to think about and hope they care about their mobility a little bit and range of motion is that if you think about your physical capability as a human is this wide open hallway. And as we age, the hallway starts to narrow.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And one of the ways that hallway starts to narrow is if we don't keep an eye on our range of motion, we can't move our body freely through its environment and we can't do it without pain.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
With its native range of motion. That hallway is going to start to constrict. And the reason people should care is they are going to not... Their movement opportunity is going to start to narrow. They're not going to be able to do the things they want to do physically. I don't want to hike. I don't want to ride a bike. And one story I'll tell is I have a friend and... who's a financial advisor.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And he meets with people about retirement planning and all the things to do to get ready to be able to retire and enjoy your retirement. Turns out that he spends like 90% of his appointments not talking about the money piece at all. He talks to people about what it is they want to do when they retire.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And Nobody ever says what I want to do when I retire is get into my lazy boy and watch CNN for the rest of my life. That's not something anyone ever tells him. Everybody comes to him with things they want to do that involve movement. That could be totally varying, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
It could be like Kelly and I, our movement goal when we're 80 is to be able to still comfortably be able to ski and mountain bike. But for many people, they want to be able to travel or play with their grandkids or be able to manage walking around Disneyland for a day, right? Everybody has these movement goals.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And if you haven't kept an eye on this key thing that is range of motion, this wide open hallway, and your hallway is constricted to the point where you can't get up and down off the ground or extend your hip or put your arms over your head, you are not likely going to be able to do those things you want to do as you age because
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And now maybe you think you don't need to care about it because you're 35 years old, but having that native range of motion is going to help you do more, work harder as an athlete, feel better in your body, hopefully experience less pain. So there's a benefit now, but there's a huge benefit to keeping that hallway wide open.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And Kelly mentioned this earlier. I mean, you know, I think we have been told that aging is just this sort of like downhill, like we're all just going downhill and then we die, right? But range of motion is actually something that shouldn't have to change as we age. If you keep an eye on it, unlike – everybody's going to lose a little bit of muscle mass.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
There are some things that are going to happen. At the rate at which they happen, we can certainly control with our behavior. But range of motion actually should be able to stay constant throughout our lifetime.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
Yeah. I mean, like your grandma being case in point, right? Like if she can squat and get up and down off the ground and her preference is to do ground-based things like sweeping on the ground, she's been able to maintain that range of motion by doing those things. But the other key point I want to make is it's actually not too late.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
That's a question we get often as people think, well, am I lost? Yeah, I'm listening to this podcast. It's too late for you. Go on without me. I'm 55 and I've been working a desk job for the last 30 years and I can tell that I already can't do all the things I want to do physically and I've had some kind of pain or whatever.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
It's actually not too late to start and people can make a massive difference in their range of motion by starting whenever and just paying attention to it a little bit.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And explain to them why they should care.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
Sure. I mean, since Kelly already teed up hip extension, his favorite subject of all, we have in the book something called the couch test, which is based on a stretch we've been recommending for years called the couch stretch. But basically, you put your knee to the wall or to the corner of the couch and your shin is sort of along the wall and then you want to try to get into an upright position.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And we have demonstrations in the book so people can better visualize it.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
You can Google couch stretch. What it is is a test of your ability to extend your hip, this sort of critical range of motion that a lot of people are missing largely because we're spending most of our days sitting.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
The point, one quick thing though, I want to say is that we, again, I know I said this earlier, but we like to do our soft tissue work before we go to bed at night. But there are plenty of people who find that the window of opportunity they have is in the morning or maybe at the tail end of their training session. I mean, we really are totally agnostic. Like we like to do it.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
We enjoy it because it also helps us sleep. But again, the goal is to get that 10 minutes in a day. And when you do that is totally up to you.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I'm a middle-aged guy who wants to be the best middle-aged mountain biker in my neighborhood. Is my timing of my plunge going to affect my ability to be that mediocre athlete? No. So stop it. People are like, when's the optimal time? I'm like, when's it work for you? Is that first thing in the morning?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Juliet found that if she got hot and plunged it in the night, she was like woken up and fired up and ready. She's like, I'm not going to sleep now. And I get hot and cold, hot and cold, and it's like someone hits an emergency brake, right? So first of all, when's it work for you? Second of all, if there is a performance concern, we try to put it as far away from training as we can.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That's what we say. Training in the evening, plunge before. If you train in the morning, plunge in the evening. Get cold, that's cool. But what you hinted at is the same reasons why we don't ice injuries, because it limits our body's ability to heal. So it rate limits, and it might do it by phase of constriction. Your body, eventually your body's gonna warm up anyway.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So one of the things we like to say is your body either heals at the rate of a human being, or it heals slower. So there's no such thing as a fast healer. You're just, oh, you're really good at healing at the rate of human physiology, and the rest of us are doing dumb things that are rate limiting our healing. Nutrition, sleep, right? When we are talking about anyone after surgery or injury,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Our benchmark in the line of the sand is eight hours of laying in bed without looking at your phone. That's minimum. And I don't care if you're sleeping because resting is the next best thing, but I can't actually understand inputs and outputs. And let me be super clear.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If you're trying to grow a body, learn a skill, change your body composition, get stronger, heal, that all rhymes with eight hours. We look seven as our minimum. And of course, you're a human being. You're going to get by. I was stressed out last night and wanted to come on to this show with my friend Andrew and do a good job. Like I didn't get great sleep, but I'm a human being.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Blood pressure, 120 over 80, that's not good blood pressure, but it's a nice, decent reference. Now I create some movement minimums that help me understand how my body's interacting with stress, environment, nutrition, exercise, et cetera.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I'm still going to show up. So what's nice then is we can start to say, okay, what can we control in terms of managing and upregulating, boosting maximal healing rate for humans? And it turns out cold water may not be the best. Icing something might suppress prostaglandin release, right? Which means that you can think of it as you have these circulating stem cells. And again, sorry, everyone.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
We get this just very cursory. And we need the chemical signalers from the injured damaged tissue to call those things to be. But if I ice that and suppress that, some of those cells can go swinging on past. There was a great study I saw a million years ago. And it looked at ibuprofen usage in Australian military tactical athletes who had bad ankle sprains.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And those athletes who were given ibuprofen, which does the same thing as ice, suppresses prostaglandin release, right, cuts off some of those chemical signals, were back faster than... than their counterparts who did not have the ibuprofen, but they had chronic ankle instability because they did not have a sufficient healing response because they had shut that healing response down.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So what we find is, look, your body will wait until it warms back up, but if you think you're going to do angiogenesis and make new capillaries and modulate all these things by slapping a non-specific ice pad for a non-specific amount of time over a non-specific tissue, you've got to be kidding me. And so it's really Mickey Mouse. Does ice help for margaritas that are warm? Yes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Open heart surgery? Yes. Right? Waking you up in the morning. Waking you up in the morning. Hey, I have a kid who needs a placebo. I can numb that thing and give my kids some placebo ice. That's great. Definitely can work for pain control because as soon as you're numb, you can't feel anything. But what's going to happen when you pull that thing off? We're going to come back.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So we have found that we have much better. And again, instead of saying that's bad, we're turning out and saying we have so many better tools now to manage congestion because that's really what we're trying to do with ice and healing is we're trying to stop swelling, right? But is swelling a mistake? No. By the body. And the chances are it's not really a mistake.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Again, two and a half million years of evolution. This stuff's pretty awesome. But what we know is failure to move and evacuate that swelling is a problem. So when we get people on non-fatiguing muscle contraction NMES devices like the H-Wave or something like that, we find that we can actually decongest and keep moving in controlled ways.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And we have much better clinical outcomes than we do if we ice.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Whenever I can, you know, and sometimes it's short sessions and sometimes it's super hot sessions. And sometimes I just get hot and cold a couple of times. And I try, like you said earlier, I'm not after some specific adaptation response. The sauna is a great way for us to chill out and hang out. And sometimes we're bored and we got to make dinner or move on. So, you know, I try to sauna.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If there's anything I do, I sauna a lot. Bigger the engine, the bigger the brakes. And for me, it's such a big brake.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
We call that Restrepo. It's the worst place on earth.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
How great is that?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You will drive yourself out. Eventually your brain is going to just... What drives me out of the sauna now is I retch. I actually feel like I'm going to vomit because I've gotten so hot. My brainstem is like, bro, you can just override. So I'm like, got to get out. And I get out of the sauna.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And then one of the reasons I love the cold so much, which up in our pool or our cold plunge is that I can get back in the sauna.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I think that's so great.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
They wanted to crush you.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Everyone, it's not a contest.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I'll tell you, it absolutely is. One of the things I like about the heat and the cold... is that it informs me about my readiness state. Because just like my CO2 tolerance, my breath holds are very short when I'm stressed and under recovered. My heat tolerance drops dramatically, and so does my cold tolerance. It's easier to pick up really fast. I start shivering right away.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I'm like, whoa, I've been in here for 30 seconds. I'm already shivering. I'm like, huh, another piece of data that says maybe I need to make it a 70% day in the gym and move. I don't have to take a day off. We believe, Juliette and I believe in this thing called desire to train. We wake up every day, like you, probably self-medicated with some exercise as kids, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And we start thinking about what we're going to exercise. What are we going to do? We're going to ride our bikes. What are we going to do? What are we going to lift? Like, when we wake up, we start thinking about when are we going to do it? And we wake up on some days and it's not there. And what we ask ourselves is, is it not there? Why is it not there? Is it me? I should be there.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
We should go train anyway. But we really try to listen to that voice. And when there's no desire to train, it's really strange how it correlates with crap heat tolerance, crap CO2 tolerance, crap cold tolerance. And I think it's a nice way of understanding yourself from sort of a third-party objective measure, especially as you get good at this. You're like, wow, that really sucked today.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Yeah, and remember, ultimately all this is supposed to be additive, right? And it's supposed to inoculate me by creating a framework that makes more durable things. my body and my relationships. I mean, we didn't even talk about the fact that the sauna is like, it's just glue for people. It allows people to come together.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I think one of the things I've noticed with my male friends is that it gives us a place like once a week where we get together because it's so hot. We're all super vulnerable. The truth barrel. We talk with our friends and we kind of share stories and it can be talked about our lives. So it creates a framework for that. And if that was the benefit of the sauna, I'm in. Just that alone, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That my wife and I feel more connected after taking a sauna together. I'm like, well, who cares about the heat shock proteins and Alzheimer's? That's probably important too. But I like having a lot of bottom things. And I think it's easy for us to sort of – so hyper-science and hyper-tactic things that we forget the whole point of the brain is to be around other brains. That's it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That's why the brain exists. And then those brains go do rad shit in the world together. And sometimes it's that simple. And when we start throwing that filter on, it becomes a lot more sustainable. I'm not interested in being 110. I'm interested in being durable enough to take the hits on my way to 110.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That's true, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
It's so cool. I know that some of my New Zealand teams have a kava. They call it recovery. And sometimes they'll share, have a kava ceremony and drink a little kava and then jump in the sauna. And boy, it really binds the boys. You know, they really, it creates a down regulation effect. I mean, it's, so, you know, I think,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Again, my own bias, because I love this stuff, is that I think all of it is about physical input. So if we took a sort of macro step back, what you say is, what does your physical practice look like? Tell me about your physical practice.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Well, I get up and move my body, and I try to eat a fruit and some protein before I get out the door, and I walk all day long, and I try not to sit in one place for a long period of time. And then I get home, and if I'm lucky enough to exercise, I do. And then I sat on the floor, and I roll a little bit. That's a full practice. You walked, you got sunlight, you know what I mean?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And that I think is a much better way of thinking about this versus sort of, let me add another line of code to your programming where now you're doing three sets of 10 in this thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That was rough.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Clearly you love food. I'm not going to say I'm the best at meatloaf, but I may be seven out of 11 times Bamboo Terrace bench champion. I'm going to get a tattoo, but it's fine.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Well... A couple things there. One is that you said new movement. So one of the ways we define best athlete is who's the person who can transfer the skill, their current skill set, and pick up the new skill the fastest. So what I'll say is if you want to test how fit you are, how good your program is, go ahead and jump to someone else's program. Let me know how that goes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
What about the peels? You're going to kill people. And then I love that. That's dangerous.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
What I want to point out is that if we're going to have a conversation, remember my real job, day job is high performance. I'm going to have to talk about body composition. I'm going to have to talk about fueling. Do you have enough carbs on board to do what we're going to do? are you eating to recover to reduce the session costs?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
How do we minimize the sort of the physiologic costs of this training and this competition? And that's all wrapped around nutrition. I already hinted at, I'm gonna have to talk and ultimately ask you to get a blood panel and make sure that you have everything on board so that your tissues are tissues and can handle the loading we're prescribing them.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So I didn't wanna get into nutrition at all because it's always about body composition for me. And I'm like, that's the most boring reason. Like we, Shawn Stevenson, wrote a beautiful book about creating a table culture and a culture around eating for your family. So for me, the functional unit of change is the household. That's the place where I want to make and put all my energy and time.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That's how we'll transform society, one household at a time. But sitting down with your kids, the research around eating with your kids like twice or three times a week is phenomenal, right? Like cooking is beautiful. I have to become more nuanced because if I have a team I'm working with, like we had a tournament two weeks ago at Stanford. We played four games.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That's four collegiate nationally ranked teams that were playing like badasses. How do I – Fuel those women? How do I get them? What do they want to eat? What makes them feel good? What makes them feel bad? How do we balance all of that? Like I found out that putting food on a table with a tablecloth increased calories.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Again, as a high performance for me, I'm like, how are the ways that I can be thinking about this from a – Practical standpoint, my personal thing is that we focus on trying to create, this has been really useful for Juliet and I, an objective measure, 0.8 to one grams of protein, which means I don't measure anymore. Per pound of body weight. Yeah, I'm 51 years old, per pound body weight.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Can you perform the skills? Are you skilled?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So what does that mean? It means that I really try to prioritize protein every meal. Super simple. And I try not to eat one protein. I try to eat all the proteins, right? That's probably better. I try not to choose personally very fatty proteins because my genetics don't really support it. If I want to see triglycerides and things go through the roof, then watch me eat eggs and butter and steak.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Keto gives me diarrhea. So what I'll say is I try to go for leaner proteins there. And then on the fruits and vegetables, because I think we have a real problem with not enough micronutrients, again, talking about tissue health, and definitely not enough fiber. Those are huge problems. And if I get 800 grams of fruits and vegetables, this is a nutrition strategy promoted by our friend E.C.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Sienkowski at Optimize Me Nutrition. She put this 800-gram challenge based on some research. And it changed everything because suddenly I was like, oh, my God, I got to eat more food. I have to eat more fruits and vegetables. And I was stuffing myself with fruits and vegetables, getting enough protein that I was like, I guess there's no room for a cookie.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And what I really liked about that, it was agnostic about your cultural preferences. It didn't matter if you were vegan, didn't matter if you were vegetarian, didn't matter if you were carnivore. You want to do carnivore plus berries, knock yourself right out. It gave people permission to have their food identities, but it also met the minimums.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And then we can dose up and dose down based on what your performance needs are.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
It's like four big apples.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
A banana is like 80 to 100 grams. Okay. Yeah, if you want to be real dangerous, you ate eight bananas today, you could die. I mean, you could die.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Probably 200 to 300 grams.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Check this out. Again, I'm just going to do some boy math here. Starbucks cookie, delicious. Really? 300 calories. I'm going to just call it delicious, right? A pound of cherries is 230 calories. So eat a pound of cherries and tell me you're like, ah, I still want something sweet. A pound of melon, what is it, like 220 calories? A pound of melon? So calorically, not very dense, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
but nutritionally super dense. So we end up loading a ton of more food on, and it really does prioritize those things. And from a performance standpoint, one of our friends is this incredible nutritionist at Michigan football. Abigail is amazing there. And she will tell me about how she's using nutrition as an intervention for sports performance.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And she'll have men come up to her and say, Abigail, I pooped today. And she's like, yeah, that's great. You know, you should poop every day. And they're like, no, no, you understand, I pooped yesterday too. And it's the first time these kids have pooped consecutively. They don't poop regularly.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And I think, again, if I'm just trying to get out in the weeds and talk about what's normal and not normal, we should talk about you didn't eat fiber. And she's like, wait until you poop twice in one day. And they were like, that's crazy. I've never in my whole life. And what was the difference is they started eating fruits and vegetables and fiber.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And when we start to create those benchmarks, it's a lot easier for me to see inputs and outputs. And then we can argue about, can you choke down 100 grams of carbs an hour? Because you're in my elite cyclist. You know, I think you'd be shocked. And how a lot of my athletes have changed their relationship around food because it serves their needs. It's not their identity around control.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And something that Julie and I have been very cautious of is if you have two daughters, speaking, we're really concerned about creating dysfunctional patterns or relationships to food. Because in this fitness space, it can be real gnarly.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
It was insane. This is so good. It opens up the next thing, right? Founder of CrossFit, Greg Glassman, one of my earliest influences coaches says, we failed the margins of our experience. So what you just saw was, hey, here is this metabolic pathway range work that I have not inoculated myself to. And I think we're at an interesting place where fitness has become hobby.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I think that's really the best way to describe it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Do you win... I mean, this is a great question I ask people. So like you shredded down super dysfunctional eating, can't go out and eat with friends. You don't drink anything with calories. Like it's really gnarly to be hyper lean. And then what I'll say is when you took your shirt off, did you win Instagram? Did you win? Because you got another 60, 70 years on this planet. How does that work?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
We don't really diet. We'll manipulate macros to take weight off or put weight off players in season, out of season. We'll have really good athletes say, I think I should lose four pounds the next two weeks for this thing. And I'm like, hold up. I'm not going to put you in another stressor when we're trying to – like let's go ahead and talk about body composition after the season. But ultimately –
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
When we really get people on board with how food has the potential to enrich their relationships, how fun it is to cook, how fun it is to prep, how fun it is to serve other people, then we have this really different relationship with feeling. And that's really remarkable. But it is really easy to say, I won. And now I'm like, okay, so this 90-day fast, there are so many fitness things out there.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
where they start with a fast or brutal calorie restriction. And I'm like, that's your jam to get people lean fast? It's just to slam off the calories? Like, we know what's going to happen. How many people have done some kind of 30-day, 90-day thing, and the next day it's like they're off the rails?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So if you're doing some body recomp and then you're off the rails, for me, I'm like, I don't think that was very good because this is a long season we're playing.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Yeah. Thank you for that. And if that's coming across at all, I think we're doing a better job. And I would say certainly tempered as I've gotten more reasonable. You know, I think we get older and you can see a little bit more of the horizon and, you know, you start to wrap your hands around how are we going to solve these problems in these different places and what is sustainable.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Fitness has become sort of my personal pastime. And I can go to the gym and I can look jacked. You're jacked and tan. You're very handsome, 49-year-old. But what we start to see is the things that make us look aesthetically pleasing or I'm functional enough isn't the same thing as preparing for sport or transferring to new skill.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You know, I really think that that's, you know, We seek quick inputs and outputs that are high levels of sports performance. And simultaneously, again, I want to take those lessons and transmute them to my own household in a really sustainable, fun way. The nutrition piece is such a dangerous one.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And young right now, Julie and I are very obsessed with youth sports and spending time with seeing if we can improve that experience for families so they come out unharmed. And, you know, Red's relative energy deficiency in sport, you know, is where we start to see that kids are not eating enough to fuel activity and their growing body simultaneously. And it's really hard on their physiologies.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And it starts to show up with lost periods. It starts to show up with stress fractures, right? And we start to see sort of some degradation in sort of the body's tissues, but can really crash a lot of problems. And, you know, Stacey Sims is probably the first person to really put it on my radar of, Hey, you're a physio coach. I need you to become an expert with the people that you're working with.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You know, are you eating enough support? And I see some of the elite women I work with, elite women, really battle, this is the body I need to get paid and to win world championships, and that's not the body that people want on Instagram. And, you know, should I have a salad after this training? I'm like, we just played for three hours. No, you're not going to eat a salad.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I'm like, go get this big-ass burrito, and then we'll talk about your salad next, you know? Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And my understanding, anyway, the statistics seem to be... Also under-fueling, which I know is confusing, but, you know, potentially not thinking about food at the right times.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
We have a... This reminds me, we have a rule at our house for dinner. We have a three-vegetable rule. This is from a woman we work with, Margaret Garvey, who cooks a protein, whatever that is, and has also three vegetables. And that's where she starts. And we have – I have one daughter who is like a gourmet chef. Georgia is just a total badass. You know, gee.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And then I have Caroline, who is the pickiest human being on the – like, isn't brown on my – you know, and – And she's getting better. But when we had three vegetables, suddenly what we saw was that she might eat one, right? And we could start to have exposure. But I think if we crowd out some of the—because we don't want to have a restrictive house, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
But, you know, if we crowd out some of the other foods, we found that it was a lot easier for us to say, this is what we're eating, and we eat this together as a family. And then if those other foods—I mean, your teenagers are going to leave the house and eat whatever they want. Just be clear, everybody. So— you might as well stuff them with the good stuff at home.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I travel and forget to bring creatine, so I'm like, okay.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
It's a space station. It's a space station of stoke. You want to be part of it, you can come in.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And in fact, I would say if I had a spectrum of activities, I'd put like fitnessing over here. Like I go to a camp, I just do a million reps. I breathe hard. It's super fun. I'm in Zumba. Like I'm mirroring and I have positive regard and I see my friends. On the other side, we have very much sport-specific training. The only goal is to support the sport.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
High five, JSTAR.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So I think we can divide these things into food-like things, right? And then sort of performance.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That's right. And if you don't handle whey, like my athletes, I'm like, let me introduce you to these vegetarian proteins. And that's because you're having a hard time timing your meals or just getting enough protein because sometimes you just don't feel like it. So great, great utilization there.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Um, for Caroline, she gets omegas at night because she doesn't want to have any accidental fish burp at school. She's a teenager. So she takes them before she goes to bed. And we're really interested in brain health. And there's some early research.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And again, not my expertise that I've heard of, read about, talked to people about that vitamin D, creatine and omegas might help attenuate symptoms of concussion and if they get hit, right? So post, pre. So those things are on Carolyn. She gets creatine every day. She gets an omega every day.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And she gets vitamin D. And some of that is probably there's no vitamin D during the summer because I could pull it out. But we live in northern climes and they're indoors. And there's good research. I think Dan Garner had a great piece just talking about vitamin D supplementation in the military and the decrease of risk of fractures in the foot just with vitamin D. So, that's the start for me.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I take a good multi because I'm like, I'm just going to cover the basis, you know? And then you can look, I think the next sort of valence of interest is, have you had a blood panel? How are your vitamin B levels? Is there anything we need to do based on your environment or your genetics? And then I think it gets real in the weeds past that. And again, play around with that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
One of my super smart friends was like, I think you should take a statin, a small dose statin once a week. And I was like, all right. So I was like, better take some CoQ10 with that. It's an experiment I'm running, right? Downsides are low. I'm getting my blood panels, talk to my physician. But so CoQ10 is on the menu for me just to make sure I don't have anything.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And so I think suddenly what we should be looking at is how do I round out My family doesn't eat fish, so we're not getting enough sort of omegas from those sources. And no one will eat walnuts, but I'm the only one who eats walnuts. So, you know, how do I round up my nutrition with some supplementation? And is there a benefit for some other things that with my genetics or with what's going on?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If you're an elite soccer player, we have goals off season, but in the season, it's to support your body to win. But one step back from that I call sports preparation training, which is where we start to see sort of some really pattern interference between what the internet says I should do to have huge quads and the best way to create an elite sprinter or an elite footballer, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Like JSTAR has a mutated MTFHR gene, right? And so we are always watching B vitamins for her. Poor methylator. Right. Poor methylator. Exactly right.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That's right. Sorry. Jay Stizzle. CEO.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I am the broken anchor of the relationship. I like to say. She is, you know, what's really interesting... Is I have, I'm a little bit like you. I think I'm excitable. I get obsessed with things. It's super fun. Go down rabbit holes. I like to experiment. And JSTAR is like the true North, like, no, that sounds fishy. We're not doing that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You know, like I came home one time and I was like, you know what? this cow's milk is out of here. Our family's only drinking goat milk. I only had the best goat milk. I just had the best goat milk. And Juliette was like, sure, that's going to last. And I gave some goat milk to Georgia and she's like hucked it across the room. She's a baby.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And then I drank the goat milk and like vomited into the sink and I had goat milk on my lip. And Juliette just is so patient by saying, huh, I wonder if that's a good idea. I wonder if we'll stick around. So she's the rudder. She is 100% the rudder. She is a three-time world champion, everyone. She's a rower at Cal, and she is my training partner. She's the greatest training partner I've ever had.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
We use training as another way of spending time together.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Spend the rest of your life working on those, and you're going to have a really, it's going to be really fun. And I just want to remind people, you hear me say it again, that they should all be enjoyable. And it is fun to track people. It's also, you know, which devices am I wearing right now? I'm not wearing a single device, you know, because I want to feel.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And sometimes I track and sometimes I don't track. How am I feeling? And ultimately everything is really coming down to how do I come to understand my own process and my interaction with the world process? And I think I'm getting better at 51 of knowing I don't need six cookies and I really need to get more fruits and vegetables and sleep. And I don't need a device to tell me that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
In that sports preparation training, I can be – think of it GPP plus looking at positions and how things transfer. Franz Bosch is a great example of that. sports preparation training. He's a Dutch thinker. His books are great. And you'll see, understand that really what we're trying to do in sports preparation is say, hey, what is this complex system in front of us?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
My pleasure. Anytime. And thanks to all the great Huberman people that make this thing possible. It's really a thing. Thanks, my brother.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
What's the minimal amount of input so that we can still go and project ourselves into the world through sport and performance? And on the other side, suddenly we do come up confronted with, hey, I'm doing this thing and I jump in with my friend and I get brutalized. which is actually a problem that we have with people, really good fit athletes.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And I throw them into like a group fitness class and they can do so much work that they wreck themselves for weeks. And that's probably what happened. You're so strong and you know how to just be uncomfortable. And you just did this freakish amount of work without giving yourself a chance to adapt. And that happens all the time.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And I want to double click on that because that's really amazing. Because what you've done is said, hey, I can't control this aspect of my environment. I have to do some deep work. That means I might need to perch or I might have to sit at a conference table. And then what we can start to say is, well, what other choices do I have?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And now if we work with a typical person and you say you have some agency before you leave work and then your agency doesn't return until you get home, right? What are you going to do during the day To keep the body moving, right? So that it's easier to escape to your afternoon class. I think that's the thing. And what you've just described is what my wife would call a movement-rich environment.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
How do I pepper the environment with inputs so that I'm not just in a tiny movement language? I love that. I want to go back to the sitting on the ground. Should it be painful? Should it be sore? One aspect of your physiology that will not change, doesn't have to change, is your range of motion. As you get older, we should be able to maintain our range of motion.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So what's interesting is that if we're suddenly confronted with tasks that ask us to be in certain positions that we're not comfortable with, we're going to be sore. You bet. You're going to have to squeeze your butt. And something you said earlier, like once I'm warmed up, I love that phrase. Right.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Once I've had my 27 supplements and my coffee and my activation, I've gotten to my sauna, I can do anything. I feel great. The real question is, should I have to do all that stuff for high performance? Absolutely. But should I have to do all of this prep to have native range of motion, to have baseline range of motion? Probably not.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
let's say a couple of variables there. What's your training age, right? If I'm going to take a beginner and you in the same thing, we can make big jumps. You and I have been, we've deadlifted together a decade ago. Like we can just go. We know our bodies, the patterns are well ingrained. Our tissues have exposure here, right? There's some things we can do.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So I love that you're starting to see that what's the minimal amount of warmup to do the task. And on some days you may be sore, maybe stiff, and it takes a little more time to go, get right underneath it. One of the things I think we have this opportunity to do is put play back into warmups.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So one of the things is that I suspect, and please correct me if I'm wrong, you don't find a lot of joy in doing these like rote A, B, the world's greatest stretch, wah, wah, wah, do the active, like it's not that fun. So what, let me talk about my experience working with a team at Berkeley. I have this shout-out to the women's water polo team at Berkeley who are my just total family.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
These women are incredible. But I came into the sport and looked around, and I saw really ineffective warm-ups that weren't a good use of the time, that didn't prepare us to get into a fight in 20 minutes or 30 minutes later. So if you went through your warm-up and said, I'm going to be in a fight – Am I prepared for that or not? And that's a nice rubric to say I'm nervous system arousal.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I have a little sweat on. I've practiced. I've touched some positions and shapes. But what I see is that in the typical training session, there's a lot of work to get done. So now I think training has become very, very dense. You know, here's this piece, here's this piece. Now I do this accessory work. I got to hit these cards.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And so the warm-up for me has been one of the last places where I can get you to explore new movements, something you saw on the internet, play around. If you came to my gym, you know, or we came to my house now, I'd be like, let's go throw the medicine ball for five minutes. And there's no wrong way, but I want you to start to explore speed. I want you to explore catching an object and going fast.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And what we haven't done – and I suspect I wouldn't say that your warm-up is the best way. I'd say it's one way to get to the thing that we want faster. And potentially you stop doing what didn't work and what didn't serve you, which I really want people to understand is that if you're not blind going through some program – I want you to say, does this serve me?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Because my experience working now 20 years with the best teams and athletes and organizations on the planet is athletes do what work and they stop doing what doesn't work. Isn't that interesting? So what I love is that you started to get under heavy loads relatively quickly in movements you had real competency and exposure with.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Yes, because what we want to do is come back to say, what's the least amount of work I can do to have the biggest adaptation And three hours in the gym doesn't fit into your life. And it doesn't fit into the typical person's life. And theoretically, you're gonna have to go do a sport. So you're gonna have to recover from this sport and this training session, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You were like, hey, I can't even handle this high volume. You know, it's a ding on me too. I can't handle the same high volume as my friends can. So wasting your time in quotation marks with lots of high volume sets of an empty barbell might've been useful at some point. And maybe it doesn't serve you as well now. or because you have to put so many plates on that bar.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That's a warm-up by itself, right? That's not an issue for me. So you walked a mile to load those plates.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Let's – if we just took the word imbalance and put it to the side for a second because it's sort of a nonspecific term. Like are we testing your hamstring to your quad? Like what's the ideal ratio here? Like if you're a professional pitcher, I hope your right arm looks different than your left arm, right? But what we can say is – Number one, imbalances don't necessarily cause pain.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Let's be clear about that. We should be using our time in the gym as training to find deficiencies and blind spots in our patterns, in our skill, in our brains feeling comfortable with a certain movement. And what you just hit was that it's, boy, it's really easy to get a lot of variability just doing the things I want to do anyway. So now I'm in a tandem stance. I skate left foot forward, right?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
But you know, suddenly that's my dominant stance. If you're going to ask me to do anything of consequence, I'm going to adopt that stance. But suddenly I get to have some exposure here. So what's the point of the gym? What's the point of training? just to work on some cardiorespiratory output that the science says? Is it to move and to play?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If the brain's a problem-solving machine, let's give it some problems to solve. So you suddenly have a new problem to solve. And I would even say that weakness isn't even the right idea. Just like here is a pattern that I'm not as effective at, as efficient at. So when we go into the gym sort of with this great curiosity, then it's a really rich place
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And really, frankly, the only safe place because there isn't contact and sport and we're not fighting and dancing and moving. And we can really do this controlled formal movement where we can really see inputs and outputs. I explained my mother-in-law a long time ago. what was happening when we were developing our model to understand movement.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And I explained it and she was like, oh, you mean it makes the invisible visible? That's right, is that this is a place to understand how your range of motion is changing, how your skills are changing, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Over the course of a season or the course of, you know, something going on in your life, a season in your life, suddenly you're like, wow, my left hip is a little tight or my left shoulder is, my internal rotation is going away. Hard to see when you're swimming, really easy to see when we dumbbell snatch.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And what we're trying to do then is take the gym, not only have it be a stimulus for adaptation, but have it be a really great place to uncover changes in my movement, changes in expression of that movement. And so really what you see – again, if I just do this one thing over and over again – That's patterning. That's repetition. That's practice, right?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And what you've done is just said, hey, let me change my brain. Let me open the door handle with my left side. And coming into the gym with that curiosity means that we can have seven bottom lines. We're working on your fascia. We're working on these energy systems. We're working on these movement skills. But simultaneously, we can have fun. We can work on understanding our range of motion.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So for me, I think it's easier to say let's frame mobility as do you – here's my definition. Do you have access to normative range of motion? The range of motion every physician, every physical therapist, every chiro agrees on. Shoulder mobility. So 180 degrees of flexion.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And what you can see right now is Andrew has his elbow bent, his head tipped to the side, his internally rotated. He's solving the problem, which is what his brain is saying. Compensation. Right? Oh, no, no, no. If you want to use the word compensation, I want to put that on you. But what I'd say is that's an incomplete position. Doesn't mean you have pain.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Doesn't mean you're not the world champion. But it means we may have some latent capacity we could chase. And the next question for me then is, what is it that's missing potentially in your training that we're not having this exposure? We're not doing enough close grip hanging. We're not doing seesaw press, right, where the arm is straight up. We're always gripping on a barbell.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I'm not handling enough dumbbells or kettlebells overhead. And then we can say, well, do I need some position transfer exercises, mobility work to restore that so we can use it again? And then more importantly, how does that turn up for you in a way that impacts your sport or your job? That's what's really interesting. Does that make sense?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That's fun. Yeah, because that's part of the— It's fun and easy to measure. Hardly see—are you getting better at soccer? I don't know. But I put another keel on my bench today.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And suddenly, we're not programming another thing that's, I think, one of the things that's happened. And it's a good thing. It's a feature of the system. Strength and conditioning in the last 20 years has become very sophisticated. So Juliette and I, my wife and CEO, opened our gym in 2005.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That's right. Beautiful location. 21st CrossFit in the world. But we couldn't buy a kettlebell in San Francisco. We had to drive to Santa Cruz.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
But there was one place in Santa Cruz that sold them, Played Against Sports, that imported these Russian kettlebells. Thank you, Pavel. And we had to make this trek down to buy them. So the fitness, I think we, I bought my first pair of Olympic lifting shoes out of the back of someone's car, like a drug deal. Olympic lifting shoes? Yeah, yeah. Like you just couldn't buy them. Flat sold shoes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
No, like actually an Olympic lifting shoe with like a heel. But like you can buy those at like three different stores in Malibu right now. Like you go right over there. You can buy kettlebells at Target. So the world has become much more sophisticated. Sometimes like the overhead squat is a good example. Fantastic diagnostic tool. Tells us a lot. So bar held overhead. And squat down.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Super simple. All you have to do is have normal range of motion and your joints and tissues. Well, it helps. Juliette likes to say I was bendy before I was big. But, you know, the idea here, though, is let's go ahead and also put skill back into this. But most people want overhead squatting. you know, at all. It wasn't part of their language. Now everyone knows what an overhead squat is, right?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Dan John, CrossFit, all the Olympic lifters have been doing this forever. But what we are seeing is that the natural evolution of fitness and strength conditioning is that we've become, we've gotten really decorative in our rooms. So we create this room that's just every inch has a knick-knack, has an assistance. This is my tib raise, this is my neck thing. It's a very decorative experience.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And instead of asking what was essential in terms of energy systems and positions that I can train so that I could go use those credits. You know, for lack of a better word, fitness has become very recursive. I have this zone two so I can do more zone two so I can do more zone two. Or I have pull-ups because they beget more pull-ups. Instead of, well, how did that make you swim?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
What's the minimum amount of time we can spend in the gym so that you can go express that? Lex is right in a sport or an activity. And look, there are times in your life where the gym is the only thing you got. You know, Juliet and I, when we had two kids and a baby or two kids in our businesses, we did the 10, 10, 10 at 10, which is like 10 air squats, 10 kettlebell swings, 10 pull-ups at 10 p.m.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
for 10 minutes. And I was like, elite, my fitness is elite.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Well, I just did it when I could do it, right? Because that's all I could fit in. So, you know, I think what's happened is we have now sold people this idea that fitness happens in a one-hour block, and if it's not an hour – you know, that it's not worth doing. And if you kept a bar loaded in your garage, you could walk out there and do sets in between making dinner.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You kept a kettlebell in your kitchen, you could do Pavel's four swings on the minute for 20 minutes and at least have some exposure and loading. So... a long way around the barn of saying, I want to protect your gym time because it's really sacred, amazing time where you can have fun, explore ranges, get strong, get jacked, feel great about yourself, interact with your friends.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And what I don't want to do is encroach anymore on that magic time because we have a lot to get done in the gym. If we're going to compete against these other teams, if we're going to beat Stanford, we're going to need to really maximize that time in the gym.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So that means we need to push out some of these other behaviors so we're not stacking them in and they're eroding the time we could be squatting or benching or cleaning or running or sprinting or cutting or playing.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Absolutely. See something on the internet, want to learn a new skill? This is the time to put it in. I'm going to talk about my brilliant friend David Weck. He has something called Rope Flow that he created. And it's just a piece of climbing rope. And he will talk about all the things that we'll do. For me, I get a thousand PNF patterns. I tie my upper body into my lower body.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Sorry. Sorry, everyone. That's a model of facilitating movement developed at Kaiser Vallejo. It is by Knott and Cabot, I think. Maybe I'm getting confused in those. And anyway, the bottom line is this. How do we help the body restore movement by using its own positional awareness? Got it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So if you've ever done a hamstring stretch where someone holds you and you resist, that contract relax is a style, it's a technique born out of PNF. Got it. Sorry to interrupt.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And so suddenly, like I use this with all my teams, is suddenly I'm spinning ropes. I'm getting thousands of evolutions of the wrist turning, the elbow turning, the shoulder turning. I'm generating speed in weird positions that would be vulnerable and not as effective at high load, high stakes. I get to twist. I can tie my eyes into it. I can develop my stance.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And in five minutes of messing around, you're like, oh. I feel good. And we've added some speed to that, right? Because a lot of the warmups I see people do, I'm like, hey, there was no speed. You know what sport is? Speed. And you haven't added any velocity to your training. So where are we going to do that? I love this. I'm excited to... Dave Weck does a lot of amazing things.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
His rope is a foundational piece of my... If you work with me and you have shoulder pain and neck pain, You're gonna get my shoulder spin up or David Weck's rope flow every day. That's part of our homework. What are we gonna do to give you exposure and restore what you're supposed to do with your body?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Sure, throw a medicine ball around, jump on a mini trampoline, pick up a barbell, do a complex, do some breath hold work. There's a perfect place to lay on all the breath hold work. I think they call it dry face breath holding, right? It's this dynamic apnea work where you're basically holding your breath. So for example, with our teams, we try to, I try to have, this is a magic number, 750.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
sort of hypoxic events where we do something on a breath hold until the athlete has a crisis and has to breathe. And part of that is I want to get the brain ready for these high CO2 levels, right? And I want to challenge respiration. And it's so easy. Get on the bike. Here's something everyone can do. For five minutes, I want you to take a 10-second inhale on the bike.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Hold your breath as long as you can. When the bomb goes off in your face, recover notes only, start at the next one at the next minute. And what you're going to see is, wow, that was really uncomfortable, really psychologically preparing myself to get into a fight. That came from the French freedivers.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
One of the coaches I was working with was like, here's something we used to do with our French freedivers. I was like, this is so good. So McKenzie, Laird Hamilton, Wim Hof, the people who've been exposing us to dynamic apnea work is amazing. But that's another example of something I can do instead of mindlessly just being on and I got to get a sweat.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Like, let's go ahead and just layer in play and destruction. I love it. Do not lay on the ground and foam roll. Let me say that again. Do not lay on the ground and foam roll. That's the worst way to get ready for a fight ever.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
No, but there's a way that's not a great use of your time.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Right? So what we're all looking at is we have a finite amount of time. And what's my goal? To quickly touch my whole body? You know, what are we trying to do? So if I was using soft tissue mobilization or using a roller or a ball or something, what's my goal here? Well, I think the research is very clear. It can help with pain. It can restore range of motion. Again, very clear.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And I want to point out sort of one of my research friends, Brent Brookbush. The Brookbush Institute has incredible summaries of musculoskeletal care. Brent is a genius. And if you go on his site, there's a little hourglass, and you can search, like, trigger points. And you'll see all of the deep dive research, analysis of the meta research. Like, you'll be like, okay, this is really excellent.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And it is tricky because, you know, what doesn't work for my body or wasn't a good use for time now is useless, and it's easy to shout on the Internet. So what's our goal? If I was in pain and I was about to exercise – a quick two or three minute intervention working on, let's call it desensitization of the tissues.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Let's be mechanism agnostic for a second and say that's a really low level into entry, safe, highly effective way for you to suddenly feel better. So we create a window of opportunity to move. That's really cool. I love that. No physical therapist in the room. No one went blind. You didn't dislocate, right? Yeah. So that could be a really excellent use of some soft tissue work.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
The same way a boxer would go or an MMA fighter or the Olympic lifters in China. They have people who are giving non-threatening input to the body to tell the brain it's safe or to rehydrate something. Again, is it just stimulus so that the brain says it's safe? Sure. Are we restoring how the tissues slide and glide? Sure.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
A lot of times I think if you look at any of the mobility work, I'll just put writ large, really comes down to just doing a couple things. Most of them are just isometrics. So we have a lot of isometrics, which everyone can agree is good stuff, and we do a lot of tempo work. It's really just moving slowly through range.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
It just may be that I'm using a different tool to have that isometric stimulus or that tempo moving slowly stimulus. So we like to say, let's use mobilizations mobilizing the tissues, why are we doing it? What are we trying to do? Well, pain is a good reason. And again, multifactorial, highly subjective, why do I have pain?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Well, I got in a fight with my wife and I didn't eat and I twisted my knee back in Vietnam and who knows, right? But what are the inputs that I have to self-soothe and desensitize? And it turns out a ball and a roller is a really good one. So I can use those to help myself feel better. Did that solve the problem? Did that solve two weeks of shitty sleep?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Did that solve my poor nutrition and lack of fiber? Did that solve the fact that I don't feel safe in this environment? No. But it got me a window of opportunity where I can go feel better in my body. Is anyone against that? No. Okay. So what we can also say is, hey, this would be a great way to do what? Restore your range of motion. A one tool and a system of tools. to get you to do what?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Have normative range again. For whatever reason, your lats are super stiff. Again, it's more complicated than that, but sometimes it's not more complicated than that. If I just get you getting some input into there, maybe I can restore that range of motion or create a window where you can go use it again.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Lastly, I would say is that it's a wonderful tool to decrease DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness. So in the evening, you blow out your quads, do a little soft tissue work, and what you'll see is maybe that's blood flow. Maybe it's non-threatening input. Maybe it's just massage. Maybe it's just the parasympathetic input that massage has, touch, right, just down-regulates.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Maybe those are the reasons I feel better. But the bottom line is, is that a good use of your time? Yes. Are all techniques on the roller the same? No. Right? And I think that's where we've lost our minds is that if you just rolled up and down on your calf, didn't do anything. I'm like, yeah, well, you just, what are you doing? Right? What if I rolled side to side?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And so suddenly we can start to layer in some really complex thinking around this. How about this? You have a roller out and I put my calf on there and I start rolling side to side. Should that be uncomfortable?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That hurts. I don't want to do that. That sucks.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Now the face of LFD. Low fiber density. So, you know, what I think we can do is let's establish some guidelines for people. Because this is one of the ways that we can feel better in our home without bourbon, without ibuprofen, without THC. Like, we need to give people some tools that don't, like, that aren't just— Without having to buy a sauna, if you can afford one, great.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You can actually be angry at your parents for not giving you a sauna.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If everyone had a roller and a ball, there's a lot of dysfunction and discomfort we can manage. If you push on a tissue, we expect that tissue to be painless to compression or not uncomfortable to compression. Again, pain is a weird word. I don't want to set that up. But you shouldn't be uncomfortable to compression.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
What's nice is that if I push on something, all I'm doing is just creating an isometric. It's just a vector isometric. Instead of pulling an isometric through the length of the tissue, I'm putting it at a different vector and angle. So that would just be one. I could start there. And if it was uncomfortable, well, guess what? Now I can get my nervous system involved.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So I can teach my brain that it's safe to create a contraction here. So what do I do? Just flex. Flex it. Hold it for four seconds.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If I find something that's uncomfortable or stiff or doesn't feel like my other side, I'm gonna stop. I found a place to work. I'm gonna build, take a big inhale. So I take a four second inhale. I want to teach myself that I need to be able to breathe in this position. One of my friends, Greg Cook, is like, if you can't breathe in a position, you don't own a position.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That sounds very Iyengar, too. But what we're going to do is we're going to say it's okay to breathe here, and I'm going to contract here. And then I'm going to slowly relax and soften. That's tempo. That's moving slowly. And I can handle higher loads. And what will end up happening is if I repeat that cycle two or three times, guess what? My brain desensitizes that. Changes range of motion.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
My brain suddenly is like, that's not a problem anymore. So we just move on. And in two or three cycles of that contraction, breath hold, long exhale that starts to sound familiar, right? How do I calm down? Long exhales. I'm not trying to spin up. I'm trying to say this is safe. I've done that with my breath. I've done that with contraction.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I'm just getting input in, just touch to my body, especially on parts that maybe don't bark at me very often. People are shocked to learn that sometimes when they have knee pain, how stiff their quads are. And then we can test it, load it, feel it, palpate it. And I'm like, those things are just stiff.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
improved efficiency the brain says hey that's no longer a threat or we're experiencing that as a new pattern or position that'd be enough to reduce your pain but pain isn't the only reason we're mobilizing we're mobilizing so that we can reduce session cost so we can work out harder the next day and keep an eye on our minimums of our of our range of motion
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And it doesn't have to be a big foam roller, everyone. Sometimes those big white, those are pool noodles, right? That's what it was for. I think like made in Killeen, Texas is like a manufacturing byproduct. And someone's like, we could... Put these in the pool, and then some physical therapist is like, sweet. Like, that thing's way too big and too hard and too square and too soft.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Like, there's a whole bunch of things. Like, sometimes you need an elbow. Sometimes you need a forearm. Sometimes you need a thumb. So you can have much smaller diameter. I'm a much bigger fan of smaller diameter rollers. I just think they fit your body better.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I don't think it matters. What I'm interested in is inputs and outputs, right? What I'm really interested in is what did you do to make yourself feel better? Did you just hope it would just go away? And then one day it didn't and then you had to activate the emergency medical system. So let's define a couple things. What is an injury? This is a great question.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Injury for us is there's a clear mechanism of mechanical trauma. There's a bone sticking out of your leg, Andrew. Time to go to the hospital. Injured. Right, you're injured, right? I heard a snap and a pop. Yikes. I have night sweats, dizziness, fever, vomiting, nausea, unaccounted for weight loss, weight gain, changes in my bladder, bowel function, problem like cough, sneeze, or swallow.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Those are red flags. You're not sore, you're sick. Let me introduce you to the doctor again, right? If your pain or dysfunction is so bad you can't occupy a role in your family, can't occupy a role in society, can't occupy a role in the team, that's an emergency problem. That is a medical condition that needs medical. So you come in today, you've tweaked your back. We need to activate EMS.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You need to go to the hospital. Because it's so severe, you can't do your job. Everything else I want to call non-injury. I want to be very specific with the language you use. We call it an incident. It actually comes out of this sort of language. There was a guy, here's the long way around the barn. I read this great book called Deep Survival.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
which is Lawrence Gonzalez, which is about why people end up in survival situations. And it's literally a lot about, like, we got away with it for a long time. And then I just didn't have a, you know, I ended up two miles out sea. I've done it a million times. And this time, right, that's it.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
But there was a footnote in there from a book called Normal Accidents by Charles Perrault, who's recently passed on. I emailed Charles because I was like, this is blowing my mind. He calls a lot of times we'll have trivial events in non-trivial systems. So he's taking systems thinking. He's looking at complex system organization.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And his idea is that an accident, a normal accident, is actually just expression of the system if you gave the system long enough to express itself. The inputs and outputs are so tightly coupled that it's difficult to see what causes what and how they influence each other. That's the body. So your stiff shoulder isn't a problem until you fall on the ice.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And then that stiff shoulder suddenly can't take over pressure and overhead, and you tear your rotator cuff off at high speed. You'd say, oh, black swan event, super crazy. But that's actually just a normal expression of that shoulder system if we gave it enough time to express itself. So he has sort of like incident and accident.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So an incident is I want us to start to think about incident-level problems, our pain, loss of range of motion, numbness, tingling. We're becoming curious. Why is the brain sending me the signals? Pain is a request for change. So if we ask our athletic population, I just did this with 100 kids. I'm like, how many of you are pain-free? 100 high school kids. Two hands go up. High school.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
High school. So what we're suddenly realizing is that pain is very much a part of the athletic condition, the human experience, certainly the athletic experience. You've been in pain a billion times and still gone out and done the thing. So what we want to do is say pain is not always a medical problem. It's a medical problem when?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
The rest of the time we're saying, how are you using fitness training as a scaffolding to understand nutrition, hydration, soft tissue work, desensitization, reperfusion of the tissues? So that's what we're trying to do in sport and training is empower people to say, what's going on with my body? And why don't I feel the way I do or why does something hurt and why can't I remedy that?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And then when I run out of ideas, let me go get some help.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
No, it means, it means that, for whatever reason, those tissues have become sensitized and that your brain is interpreting that stiffness as a threat and it's reading it as pain, right? And some people, they don't have that. They just, their tissues feel like this, but they don't have pain when they do that. But that's not a normal tissue.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You should be like layers of warm silk sliding over steel springs.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Yeah, absolutely.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Layers of silk over steel springs. And what we see is that we are loading and training at such high intensity, so such density now, that our tissues get stiff. I'm just going to hang stiffness as, for whatever reason, high fibrotic, high –
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
density of tissues whatever the reason the tissues don't behave the way the joint system should right and that's a problem because my training shouldn't mitigate or attenuate or change my range of motion it can but now how am i keeping an eye on those changes or as you said earlier As I do a sport and I start to do a sport and specialize, I'm throwing, throwing, or I swim, or I kick on one side.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
How can I start to identify as my body is changing and adapting that sport so I can drag myself back to sort of a greater readiness? And that's one of the reasons that that mobilization tool is such a powerful tool. Again, however you want to do it. I think it's useful for us when we have, I came up with this thing called the D2-R2 model because the other ray was taken, R2-D2.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So the first order of business is I want to desensitize if something hurts. If something hurts, let's desensitize it. I can do that all different ways. Scraping is powerful desensitization. Isometrics can be really useful. Rolling, BFR can give me desensitization. There's so many techniques to make my body- Blood flow restriction. Yeah, blood flow restriction.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So that no longer my brain is perceiving this as a threat. Because if you're in pain, you cannot generate the same amount of force or wattage or output, and your brain is going to start to truncate. It's going to start to lop off your movement solutions, right? It's just going to happen. So we want everyone to be saying, hey, we don't panic when we have pain.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
We just treat it like another diagnostic tool. Then second D, right, we desensitize. And then we ask, is this something that'd be decongested? So decongestion means that oftentimes tissues that are swollen become more easily sensitized. Tissues that are swollen and congested don't heal as fast. If you have a swollen ankle, those collagen fibers will not knit together as fast as a, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If you have a joint that's swollen or a tissue that's swollen, your brain will shut down force production in and around that joint system. Is swelling an emergency? No. Is a swollen joint environment really healthy for the integrity and surface of the joint? No. We want to manage that.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
But oftentimes when someone comes in and the tissue is congested, sometimes we say swelling and we think ankle, only capsular. But here we have, if you've ever flown on an airplane and had cankles, that's congested tissue.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If we manage that congestion, if we move those lymphatics along, muscle contraction drives the lymphatic drainage, the lymph system is the sewage system of the body, decongested tissues often express less pain.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And what we find is that in broken bones or soft tissue injuries, if we can better evacuate that swelling, better evacuate that congestion, not only do we see you're now healing at the rate of a human being, we're not rate limiting the healing, But also we can help you manage that sensitivity. Then the third one is, can we get some blood flow in there? You said, once I warm up, I feel great.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Welcome to the power of blood flow. Tissues become hydrated. We're shifting blood from the stomach. All the things that happens, right? All that venous return is coming back on board. But suddenly we see that if we can get something pumped full of blood, it tends to be less painful. And that's a really easy.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So if I have an old orthopedic thing, maybe I spend a few minutes just getting a huge quad pump on the leg extension machine. Then I go squat heavy. So now I have desensitization, decongestion, reperfusion. Whatever tool you want to use for these is fair game with me. This is how I've come to kind of conceptualize these different tools. And the last one is restore.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Do you have full range of motion, full normal in that joint, yes or no? Because that's the last thing that we talk about because you're still able to perform your sport at college or do your job, but we're not seeing how – your ability to not access that range of motion, maybe limiting your movement choice and potentially overloading a tissue by making it work in a less effective manner.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I think that's a really great place to start, right? Yeah.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That's so great. The question is, is that a matter of aesthetics or pain?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
How about especially people doing network?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You should see my goalie daughter because for every pound stronger your neck is, your reduction in concussion risk drops huge a pound. Thank you. So we keep the iron neck by the door and she walks in and there's a, we have a video in our family where she's doing her iron neck training. She looks at me, she's like, dad, this is why I don't have a boyfriend. Thank you.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Let me borrow a couple analogies from one of my favorite people, Katie Bowman. And first thing is, she will point out, and it's not a perfect analogy, so bear with us, is this notion of mechanotransduction, which means that at a cellular level, your tissues, some of your tissues specifically, need mechanical input to express themselves. Want a strong tendon? How do you get a strong tendon?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Sorry, Caroline, but that's the way it goes, right? Because she's like, look at me. I look like an idiot. But she loves having a big, strong neck that doesn't – can take the shot from the ball.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If you define posture as like the Latin word root is position. So what we're really saying is I have good position, I have bad position. Who brought, I have bad position. One of the ways I think we've lost the narrative a little bit is we try to give people these extrinsic cues to correct their posture. Shoulders back and down, check your tint.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So all of a sudden you're like, when am I going to be a human being? How do I practice this when I'm doing a complex skill? So the organization of your body, the organization of your spine particularly, really is a reflection of your movement habits, your behaviors, your self-identity. There's a lot of things in there, right? You didn't get the job. You won the, you got the number from Juliet.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You're just reflecting my posture. No, no.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So what we can do is we could define posture as there is a median range of the joint positioning where we simultaneously have most access to our physiology, right? And I'll explain that a little more. But also those shapes aren't associated with increased pain risk and increased injury risk, which is real.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You have to load it, right? Does it do tendon things? Is it lengthening under load? Does it express shortening under load? Is it isometric holds? So we can start at that level. She points out that if you put a, and again, not a perfect analogy, but if you put an orca into captivity, over a while, that orca fin will start to fold over. Folded fin syndrome, it's nicer than floppy fin syndrome.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
The research does bear that, that there are positions and shapes that lead to less effective movement and are more likely to experience pain. It's probabilistic. It's not guaranteed. It's more likely. So one of the things that I think you could understand is, hey, do you want to have access to all of the machinery? So go ahead and slouch. Go ahead with me. And then just turn over your shoulder.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
How far can you turn? Now watch this. Get into a position where you take a huge breath. Get in the biggest position when you take the biggest breath. Okay, so that's a pretty rocking shape. Now turn your head. It goes further. So by you being cued, can you adopt a shape
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
an organization of your trunk that allowed you to ventilate a little bit more effectively, you completely changed and reorganized your structure, which led to an improvement in output. So when I'm working with people, there's only two things I really can wrap my head around. One is... Do you have normative range of motion, yes or no? What are the tools we have to restore that and improve that?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And does that expression give us greater biomotor output? Because those are objective measures. When biomotor output, I mean range of motion, force production, power, right? I see that I can express the physiology in a unique way that makes me more effective. And that is why you'll see suddenly we have this definition that is maintaining the physiology and aspects.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I'm not going to have as good shoulder flexion. with my arm over my head is when I'm sitting up taller or in a position where I can take a bigger breath. And I think that's what's really great, because that gets us away from good posture, bad posture, into, hey, that position doesn't serve you as well in these circumstances.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And in this position, I'm working with the pararescue team in the Air Force. The number one reason they were having back injuries was getting the litter out of the helicopter. because they have a litter, the soldiers there with all their gear on, they've got a lift from a totally weird flexed position, right?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And this just turns out that's not a really effective posture position shape that transfers to handle these higher loads. So what do we do? We work on the range of motion. We give them skills to try to organize more effectively in that shape. And lo and behold, we can reduce injury risk and injury incident in those soldiers, right?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So what we're always thinking about here is let's get away from good and bad. And posture doesn't matter. And it also doesn't matter at low load, low speed. And I want to be very clear about that. So you can get away with murder. at low velocities and low speeds, but speed kills.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Oh, everyone's fine, but when that speed wobble starts to happen, we start to see greater likelihood of deflection from posture, your abs don't work as effectively, you can't create the same intra-abdominal pressure, right? Check, check, check, check, check. So that's why we always are saying, hey, is this true?
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
that you're saying under high load, high speed when there's consequence, because maybe this set of conditions works under these conditions, but it doesn't work across all conditions. And for me, I'm trying to take the best information I have working in sports and performance and trying to transmute that to my family, transmute that to my neighborhood and to the kids I'm working with.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That's hurtful. And what you're doing is when you alter the environment that this amazing animal lives in, it's not swimming, it's not fighting, it's not hunting, you're not loading the base of that fin. And so what happens is that collagen breaks down and we start to see changes in that, in that expression of that.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So what we can start to say is, again, not romanticizing the Pleistocene era when human beings were paleo, but what is it that we need in our daily dose lives to to maintain the integrity of our tissue systems, exposure, so that our brain says, this is safe, so that you actually have tendons and ligaments that can do what tendons and ligaments can do, and fascia that can be springy.
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I think you said it was like a stately... Let me just... There's no wrong way or right way to stand up or sit down, everyone. But there are ways that reflect...
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How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Beautiful, addressing stiffness in the system. Right. Resetting high neurologic component to actually do the thing. Mm-hmm. One of the things I hinted at earlier is, like, I'm chasing biomotor output, right? Intra-abdominal pressure and being able to have a pelvic floor that works for you is part of that system. Like, again, we can take the physiology and goose it up and down.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
What's interesting about... I had a famous friend who was filming a TV show, and we were working on his internal rotation of his hip. So if you imagine someone on your back, and I bring your knee to your chest, and I swing your foot away... from your midline, right? The femur rolls in, that's internal rotation of the femur for everyone.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And I worked on his internal rotation of his femur and just improved his hip flexion, knee to chest, just got those things going. I get this text that night and he's like, bro, What is up with my boners? They're out of control. What is going on?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And I was like, well, there's this thing called blood flow. And when we improve blood flow, turns out reperfusion is on the list of things that we chase. So he'd been crimping the hose, so to speak. Just stiff, right? And I think when we start to see that, that endopelvic fascia is a system. It's so easy for us to be reductionists. Like I wouldn't even say you had prostate pain.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I would say you had pain in your prostate area. Right.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And because PSA- So you're like, I don't know where my prostate is. Okay, that's pain in my prostate.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
We have all the Olympic lifting gyms, even our gym, we kept a towel on the platforms so that women particularly would pee themselves when they would receive a heavy clean, heavy snatch. And we would just wipe it up. They'd actually urinate on the platform. Oh, yeah, that happens all the time, all over the Olympics, everywhere. You'll see that. That is, bladder incontinence is not normal, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Totally normal to poop yourself before a fight. That's what animals do. Totally not normal to pee yourself. Peeing yourself is a sign of dysregulation, for sure. So what we're, as you're seeing is though, hey, I can't manage this high intra-abdominal pressure I'm creating. And what ends up happening is we pee ourselves. So we can start by saying, well, are there positions and shapes?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Theoretically, I want your pelvic floor to work in all the shapes. It's maximally, and there'll be some shapes where it just doesn't work as effectively. And if you're a man, so we're getting into it. If you go pee, you'll see a lot of men will put their hand on the wall and they'll adopt a anterior pelvic tilt to pee. And what they'll do is basically just turn the pelvic floor off.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
borrow another sort of Katie Bowmanism, if we have a movement language, an actual language made up of words, how many words are you using today? And most of us aren't using that many words. So very few words. So I sit, I stand, I walk very slowly. I sit, I stand, I walk very slowly. So everything is just in those few – and then I go exercise. Using the same words, I'm on the exercise bike.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And so if you stand up and do a big anterior pelvic tilt, your pelvic floor will lose some of its tone and it's easier to initiate a string.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
No, no, no. I'm saying that it's much more difficult to pee in this position where we have high control over these systems. And what you'll see is that most people will adopt a shape where they basically inhibit their pelvic floor so they can pee standing up.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Same posture. His pelvis is forward and he's leaning back. That's the same posture.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I'm just saying. It was a Volkswagen.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
No, no, no. But... initiating a stream, maintaining a stream is like, that's a sign of sexual health, of functional health. It's your general health. And what's nice now is notice how we got to this very nuanced conversation about erectile dysfunction, about bladder insufficiency, about peeing ourselves. We got there through performance.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
We'll have athletes who literally had a whole bunch of babies, suddenly have a difficult time creating high intra-abdominal tone. We'll jump rope and pee, and as soon as they come back to a more organized position that allows them to transfer energy more effectively, recruit better musculature, have better organization, peeing stops. Is this female athletes? Our women athletes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Well, yeah, absolutely. Eventually. I need to challenge that floor. That's an easy way to do it. But what we see is, can you squeeze your butt and jump at the same time? And what you'll find is that a lot of people, as soon as they adopt this anterior pelvic tilt, glute goes off. And they don't have that glute control. So that can be problematic for a whole host of features. So imagine...
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I was hoping we were going to get to hip extension eventually. But what we see is that stiffness in the front of the quads, anterior line of the fascia, stiff front of the capsule, whatever the mechanism is. We do a lot of sitting. We're squatters. My inability to take my knee behind my hip. We call this knees behind butt. Knees behind butt guy. That's what I want to be known as.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Knee goes behind your butt like you're at a lunch. That's right. Sorry, Ben. And then what you're going to see is a lot of times when we put people in those positions, they can't get a good glute squeeze.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If you stood up right now and squeezed your butt, you would be like, yeah, I can practice this.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Because of all the forces yanking you interiorly. Those fascial lines, the quads, you're basically in that high kneeling position. And because the lower leg is bent behind you, you're being dragged forward. And it's difficult to squeeze your butt and extend over backwards.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I'm on an elliptical, which doesn't actually ask me to have any hip extension. And suddenly you can see that our movement language, which we're really codifying under intensity, load, we're becoming very competent in these adaptation positions, sitting. What ends up happening? Well, we start to see that our bodies are adaptation machines, and they just begin to adapt.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And if you don't do that pose, you might do kipping pull-ups. That's a global extension position. All we're doing is taking the spine and putting a huge global load in it instead of a localized load. So an anterior pelvic tilt, you might think of localized extension and flexion where I have one or two segments doing the lion's share.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Whenever we can, prefer to have global flexion and extension because the spine maintains its integrity a little more effectively.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Great diagnostics.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Yes. Can most people probably do it? No. Can we then break down the components of it? Yeah, absolutely. Even Iyengar, yogi master, started to bring in props, blocks and belts because he was seeing that his students weren't able to achieve some of the base shapes. And what they were doing was human Jenga to get into those patterns. They were just solving the problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And he was like, hold up, let's not go around the problem. Let's support you while we load you and breathe in these positions and shapes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Yeah, great way of saying that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Sure. When does it work for you? At some point, you need to be exposed in this position. When are you going to get exposed to this position? If it happens to be able to be clumped in with your training, fantastic. If it's at home in the evening, fantastic. If you've done sun salutation before, it's old school. Right? It's almost like they were like, let's get this system going a little bit.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So later on in the day, it's a little bit easier. So at some point we need to expose you to some positions. We have something called the hip spin up. And typically for my athletic populations, my teams, especially, I'm like, hey, I want you to do one of three things in the morning. You got 10 minutes. That's all I'm asking. Eight to 10 minutes. Hip spin-up, shoulder spin-up, or breath spin-up.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Just do one of those. If your back hurts or knee hurts, you get hip spin-up. If your shoulder or neck hurts, you get shoulder spin-up. And then if not, just cycle through those. So at least in the morning, we're starting to touch some of these crucial shapes that you're never in. And if you do the hip spin-up and suffer, I'm like, well...
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That's telling me about your movement history, your injury history, your movement diet. And again, nothing that we do on The Ready State is related to supernatural levels of range of motion, just basic range of motion. The range of motion, again, that everyone learns in med school, everyone learns in physical therapy school. So what's fun about what you've said around this sort of
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And so suddenly what we have is a human body that doesn't express normative range. The brain may not think that that range is even safe and put there. Then we start to sort of minimize the movement choices that the brain has, the movement options that the brain has. So really the question is – You know, at low loads, let's establish things.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
this pelvic floor health piece is that when we get people doing some mobilization, really brought to me, really brought my attention of Jill Miller, is that we start mobilizing the endopelvic fascia. We just land a ball, just anywhere from your pubic bone to your up to your diphoid process, but particularly belly button south, you'll see that none of that should be uncomfortable.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And one of the reasons we see high incidence of pelvic floor dysfunction, but also high incidence of sports hernias, is that we have a hip that doesn't work very well and ends up dragging that pelvis into positions where it's not muscularly very strong, right? I can get out of position where I have a lot of good sort of activation or access to those positions.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Then I have fascia and musculature that's super stiff because every time you do abs, you celebrate the stiffness, right? You do abs, you're like, oh, I'm sore today. I'm gonna go have some ice cream. When's the last time you managed your hamstrings or quads? Probably yesterday. When's the last time you rolled out your abs and your obliques? Never? Previous life.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Right, previous life before you respawn. So I think one of the things that we're seeing is, again, that would be a perfect time during the evening. Don't go to the gym and lay on the kettlebell and be a creepy guy. Instead, pull out that volleyball at home, pull out that princess ball you got at Walgreens, and start having a conversation with your pelvic floor.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Turns out, you know, your abdomen, the pelvic floor, can also be mobilized. So we just, it's really simple. Front of your pelvis is your pubic bone. That's the front of the pelvic floor. The back is your coccyx. And each ischial tuberosity, your sit bones is the side. Everything else is your pelvic floor. So you can take a ball and just stay away from the holes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And if anything hurts to compression, you found a problem so you can contract and relax and apply that same tissue.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You would just be sitting down on your coffee table and just putting that, sitting that ball in and around your pelvis and around your glutes and around your pelvic floor, right? It might be dangerously close to your grundle, you're welcome. So the idea here, though, is, you know, oftentimes when we'll have athletes with back pain, we're not looking at their pelvic floor or hip pain.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
But you have six short hip rotators, right? You don't just have a couple rotators. You have a huge rotator cuff of the hip. And some of those things are congruent and kind of part of that pelvic floor. So it's not that I need to go after my pelvic floor every day because, again, let me just add another thing to do your list.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
But if something changes, I suddenly wake up and I don't have an erection. I suddenly am discovering that I'm peeing myself because I'm an elite cyclist, right? And something's happening that I'm like, oh, I know what to do here. Let me start to work on my belly. Let me see if I can work on restoring my positions. And can I do a little pelvic floor mobilization? And that's a great place to start.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And which doctor was involved? None. None. which pelvic floor therapist was involved in that. In fact, if you carry that to your specialist, they're going to be like, all right, we get to have the real conversation now because you've already done the other stuff.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
At low loads and low speeds, you can get away with everything. Why? Because this body is rad. And it's designed, it's durable, it's not fragile. It's designed to be ridden hard and put away wet for a long time. Remember when you were 17, we'd cut off your hand? It would grow back the next day, right? You would. Think about the falls you took skating. And you'd be like, oh, that sucked.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I would put that lower on the list of problems I have, right? Like, I think if we went into the world right now and looked at people doing curls, you know, curl-ups, the real thing is, is that your only way that you're training the abdominals? You know, do I have a bigger range of motion of the trunk?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
There are so many ways to be thinking about what the trunk should be doing and reducing it down to this one curl, right? I think if one of the things that we're looking at, like I'd much rather you hang from a bar and curl up.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Yes, you're hanging.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You're also not just separating the abs and working with the abdominals with the knee to the chest. Because that's really what we're seeing is that do you only need your abs working in this position? So basically you're reproducing another seated position except you're crunching your – chest to your seated knee. And that's really what that position is. Do we do it long?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
What happens if you do it long lever? Short lever means the elbow is bent. Long lever is the elbow is straight. Short lever is the knee is bent. Long lever is the leg is straight. So why aren't we working in all those patterns and positions? And then Being creative. There are so many great resources. The kids at Dave Durante has a free ab workout. He's an Olympic gymnast from Stanford, superstar.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
But you can go on to, I think it's Iron Monkey. Sorry, guys. And, you know, what you'll see is... There's so much fun ways to play and think about what the role of the trunk should do. And I think we're moving beyond, thank goodness, this like, I have to be a rigid robot all the time. And that we need to ask, what is the trunk supposed to do?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
A good way of thinking about this, and I think your sit-up is a good analogy. Really, a book that makes the rounds from time to time is a book called The Spinal Engine by Serge Grakovetsky. And he really talks about the trunk as a driver of power, not just as a chassis of which the big engine moves. And that really is a nice conceptual way of simplifying movement. But
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If we define functional movement, most people agree it works in a wave of contraction from trunk to periphery, from core to sleeve, from axillary skeleton to peripheral skeleton. But that means, boy, there are positions where I'm really effective and can generate a lot of force and there'll be positions where I can't. But if my spine can't handle flexion, it's not a spine.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If it can't extension, it's not a spine. If it can't rotate and be into these complex position shapes, I'm like red flag. So how are you training that thing? And if your only rigid dogma is straight up and down, which is a great reason to do mobility work, is suddenly we can side bend and we can twist. And am I exposing myself to some of those shapes?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
The next day, you put your shoulder back in, you just kind of respawn. So what is it that we need to put into our movement diet? And then we can start to separate out, should that be exercise or should that be movement?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And so we call that work, borrowing from one of my Olympic friends, Stu McMillan, spinal engine work. Putting PVC, side bending, playing with the different shapes. And again, if you get into the David Weck ropes, if you threw medicine balls, you would suddenly see you're like, you're right, I can't be a rigid piece. How am I training the functionality of my trunk beyond just my six pack?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Because straight curling will certainly give you a six pack. But that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to surf with power, run with power, punch with power, et cetera. I mean, look at what just happened with those fights, right? With the women, you know, fighting, just the rotational power that they have. You can't get that from just crunches with your legs.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Everyone watch this women's sports. That was really great. So I think what's great now is if we can get people to start to be curious and to play and, you know, I'm not saying you need 10,000 different movements, but instead of just hanging from the bar and doing knees to elbows or toes to bar, what happens if you brought your right leg foot to your left hand.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And you started adding in a rotation to that. And suddenly you're like, I suck at this. And ultimately what I want to do is I want to uncover every deficiency in this play because I'm still going to deadlift. I'm still going to swing. I'm still going to lunge and do all the things that I know that makes me feel robust and makes me ride my bike better and be a better kayaker.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
But simultaneously, there's a lot of play on either side of that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Dude, that's West Side 101. Lou Simmons. I mean, like, hey, this week we're squatting with this bar. Then we're squatting with this bar. And then we're changing your height. Then we're changing your stance. I mean, West Side Barbell has been doing this forever.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Every bar has its own max, right? And so what they've done is said, hey, the squat pattern is the thing we're training, but how do we put another twist to the pretzel? Now the weight's in front. Now the weight's behind. Now it's out. And now it's too deep. And now we're box squatting. And like, wow, you're going to have to be a really competent, skilled squatter to handle all that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And now the real filter that we should be beginning these real and earnest conversations about is what is it in the environment, given that I'm a busy working person, and maybe I have some agency in the morning, And maybe I have some agency in the afternoon. But let's take exercise out of it. The one-hour discreet, working on zone two cardio, working on my evidence-based practice.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If you had smaller legs, it would be easier.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I'm not deflecting. Your physiology is definitely biased towards certain things, like unequivocally. And what I am not good at is being brutally strong. Oh, I've been training for 20-plus years. Hard training. Longer than that, 30 years. And this is all I can deadlift? That's pathetic. Have you seen my strong friends?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So what you see is that I've been cramming a square peg into a round hole because I really like it. But really, I should be probably 190 pounds, and I should be an aerobic athlete.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And I think it's worth saying because if people are listening, Kelly's a big guy. All my training is biased towards, you cannot believe how much conditioning I do. I am a disciple of Joel Jameson. I'm a huge fan of trying to look at where I'm spending my time in these different heart rate zones.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And then, you know, I'm just such a nerd of that because my primary sport is trying to keep up with my wife on the mountain bike.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
The ones that are... sprinters and super springy, and you know who those people are. They're mutants. You know, I think I was always best at a skilled sport that used conditioning or used strength. When I compare myself to my friends who have huge aerobic engines, it's embarrassing. I'm always the weakest, fattest, slowest, smallest person in the room.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
What should I be doing the rest of the time? So, for example, one of the things that we're huge fans of in the evening is sitting on the ground for 20 or 30 minutes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And it is, I can't, like, if you just want an ego check, just come out and hang out with me. Just meet my friends. See the people we're working with. And you'll see, you're like, okay, genetics is not the same. I think we've told a little bit of a lie in the internet sphere that, like, if you eat this way and you do these, you'll be elite.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And, like, we can certainly say that you have a training effect for sure. And you should do that. But that's not the same thing as being a mutant. And there are just so many mutants out there. Shocking. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
How about that? I just think it's important that we remind ourselves that the whole point of this is to have the most fun. And what you'll see, he put up a video of – some Chinese elementary school kids and the Chinese Olympic lifting team coaches coming and assessing their kids. And very quickly, they put kids over at squats. They had them jump on a single leg. They had them do double jumps.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And they were like, you, you, you. Have your parents call me. So you can already see that coordination matters, wiring matters. And they were able to say, hey, these are the things that we think are going to make good Olympic lifters. So those kids, I think we start to split cohort early on. But most important is everyone needs to weightlift, period. And it's not light two pink dumbbells.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Yes. Long sit, side saddle, 90-90. Anytime you need to fidget, fidget. And what you'll see is you start to accumulate exposure, which I think in my worldview is the first order of magnitude in problem solving is how do we have the human be exposed to the thing we're trying to change or improve or restore normative ranges.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
It's real heavy weightlifting. But how much do you need to do? to be better at your sport or to minimize your spine. Those are the spine changes or osteopenia or osteoporosis. Those are great conversations, but not necessarily conversations about performance, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So it's almost like we need to divide this into like aesthetics and I'm keeping myself intact in versus I want to go to the Olympics because... What you're seeing on the world right now is that everyone's an expert. I'm like, can I see how you work with 40 athletes? Can I see how you periodize that? Can I see how you manage travel and nutrition?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Can I see how you were responsible or not responsible for this team having all its members? So what we're seeing is that this performance thing is a really big task, and it gets confused and watered down a little bit by everyone fitness says, well, I squat, so I'm an expert too. Not the same.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So we're going to give you his phone number. We're going to have you call him because you can't DM him.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
The readiness for that day.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
We could start with a simple idea. We say, let's be consistent before we're heroic. If your intensity causes you to not be able to show up for the gym for three days, I'm like, sweet. That was sweet. And our adaptation response to that is sucky, right? I'd much rather you be getting more consistent and not blowing yourself out.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Remember that, there was a phase where we were like, you shouldn't be sore when you leave the gym, remember that? Like there were people would talk about, hey, leave some reps in reserve, like show up the next day, grease the groove. That's old Pavel Tsotsilin stuff. I think that's really good advice, especially since most people are not 20.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Yeah, that behavior alone. cultures that toilet on the ground sleep on the ground. We start to see fall risk in our elderly populations attenuate to zero, approximate zero. Lower hip OA, lower low back OA, and it may just be that we're using and touching some shapes, and our bodies are saying, hey, let's just keep that around. Let's normalize what the hip should be able to do.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Most people, and when you're 20, you need to go find out what the limits are. Touch the fence, the electric fence once in a while, right? Lick the... Lick all the doorknobs. Let's just call it that way. But, you know, what ends up happening is there's a lot of things have to be in place for you to be able to go to the well that many times.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And what we know now, because we have all of this data, is that we can make better progress not burning it to the ground every single time. And it's difficult for us because if I'm just fitnessing, how do I quantify that, right? It's easy for us to quantify another kilo or another watt. That makes it a lot easier.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And what you'll see is that the best practices of these athletes, we do spend a lot of 70 to 80% heart rate. That's what we call recovery. In Joel Jameson language, 80 to 90, we're calling that conditioning, 90 and above, overload. But what I think is nice is that that gives me a lot of – there are some days where I touch 78% or 80%, and it's hard because I'm sleep-deprived, stressed out.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
My nutrition hasn't been great. I'm sleeping in a strange bed, traveling, whatever. So I think what you're seeing is something that one of my early coaches talked about, Mike Bergner. He says, when the frying pan's hot, let's cook. And that means I need to know myself. And as a coach, I need to know you. And I'm like, Andrew, you look great today. How do you feel? Great. Let's go.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Let's go chase something, right? And when the frying pan's hot, we cook. But the frying pan is not always hot. And if you pour in bang energy and jack 3D, you can't even hear inputs and outputs. So I think that's such solid, reasonable advice. And really what we're looking at is how can we get you to train much more consistently longer and longer and longer? You can only go to the well once.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
A few times. And what I'll tell you is that as I still love to power clean, it's like my favorite thing. And that 100 kilo power clean is heavier than it was when I was 40, you know? And I want to pretend like that 100 kilo power clean is not a problem, but I actually have to progress and get myself there. And there are days where I'm like, oh, 80 kilos is my jam today.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So I think that's really good advice and difficult for us to say, how are we measuring success in our training? subjective experience? No, no problem. Let me give you a baby. Keep this newborn alive. And then let's go see how hard your training is the next day. You're going to be terrible. You haven't slept all night. You're stressed, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So I think what's nice is having some, some objective measurements around maybe body composition is one of them, if that's important to you, but are you getting faster over the course of a week or, What are your testing? How do we know inputs and outputs? And right now we're just doing, we're baking a lot. We're making a lot of suicides, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
The old fountain drink where you just mix all the things. They always taste the same at the end like crap, but that suicide where you mixed all the fountain drinks is a little bit of what we're seeing in that. And one way of protecting ourselves is saying, hey, let's make sure you can train tomorrow.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Mixing all the sodas, putting M&Ms in.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And I think that's what we see a little bit. And if you... I am a deep coach nerd. I love fitness. I love fitnessing. I'll jump into any class anytime. Like, sure, let's go. Let's see. You know, it's so fun, but I need to see, I do get to watch sort of trends come and go. Things get very hot. You know, they get very popular. They, And again, fitness has become a hobby. It's an amuse.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And that's okay. It's totally okay that gym is a hobby. But that doesn't hint about what's the best way to develop capacity, elite capacity, long-term longevity capacity. Those things almost don't go together.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
In terms of your connective tissue, Think about, you know, the idea here is that we're loading you passively, actively, whatever, that you're saying to your brain, you know, this is a quote from one of my PT instructors. And this is really important. If people take this away, they should listen to this. Muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs. At no age do you stop adapting.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Katie and Bill made it harder with the echo bike. Thanks for making it worse. What is it? The echo bike? The rogue echo bike is even worse than the assault bike.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
It's just like, imagine doing it on fire, uphill in the sand with a headwind. Then you're like, okay, this is... If you can make it worse, it's worse.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
But I love that because... High physiology, low skill.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I can take anyone, not have to know anything about your range of motion. I can be like, who are you physiologically today? Let me introduce this freakish amount of work in this tiny range of motion that's very safe. So we can really touch high intensities very safely there.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Still don't have any hip extension. No hip extension. Let's talk about if I'm squatting and I stand up, I'm extending the hip.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And I think we look at the squat and the lunge as very, they're cousins. And the difference is long lever, short lever. And typically how you're holding the weight. That's the only difference. And sometimes upright torso position. But ultimately, we're really looking at, you know, what's happening with the degree of bend of the knee, right? That's why they're such elegant cousins. Right.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
But if I'm squatting down and I stand up, people are like, I'm working on extension, working on extension all the time. I'm like, okay, now let's continue this extension conversation and bring that knee behind your butt into a lunge. And that's hip extension. And if there's one thing that I'm seeing across so many of the populations I work with
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
is we're starting to see changes and erosion in this fundamental expression of power. The only people we don't see it as are Olympic sprinters. And you'll see that pockets, like we work with the All Blacks, and we're obsessed on maintaining the hip extension of these very strong athletes because it means that they can run faster on the field.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
At no age do you stop healing. Those things slow down. It's a little bit harder to have the same adaptation we did. We weren't in full-fledged puberty. But you can always adapt. In the first order of business, if you spend 20 or 30 minutes sitting on the ground, you're going to start to see that my hamstrings start to feel better. My hips start to feel a little better.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Perfect. I'm going to use that same defense of petty cluster-ness, clustering the pettiness. I'm sorry, all the physical therapists out there, I haven't represented you in the way that you would like to be represented. I'll say, I'm just talking about my own experience.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Right. And I am trying to be very meticulous in my language today. I appreciate that. One of the things that we want to look at is, and this is a Philip Beach, Muscles and Meridians idea, is that there are contractile fields. And this goes along with, if we look at Thomas Meyer's Anatomy Trains, of seeing the system as a system of systems. So we start to look at your back and your erectors.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And then we tie that into the glutes. And then we tie that into the hamstrings to tie the calf. It's kind of almost wraps around the bottom of the foot, right? The plantar surface of the foot. So suddenly we're looking at this global system that's designed to create this mass extension position. locomotion, we start to lock some of those pieces down a little bit.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
But one of the things that we've seen is that when you aren't competent in this position, your hamstrings, for example, have to do a lot more work because your butt is no longer working on hip extension. Your adductors are restricted and they're not bringing you back into flexion. So suddenly what we see is that your hamstrings are having to do the work of calf flexion,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
But when your hamstrings are tight all the time, you don't have hip extension. So a simple test we do is called the couch stretch. And all you need to do is face a wall and turn away from the wall. So you're kneeling on the ground, hands and knees away from the wall. You're going to put one of your knees in the corner. So your foot is going straight up and down.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
The knee is in the corner of the wall. And then I want you to see if you can squeeze your butt in that position. Still hands and knees, except one foot now is kind of in the corner, down the wall, going towards your butt. That's position one. And a lot of people are going to struggle with recruiting and activating their butt in that position because it's what I'm calling positionally inhibited.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
We don't know what the mechanism is.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Really, we're just flexing the lower leg. We're flexing the lower leg shank, right? That lower limb. The second position is to come up into a high kneeling position. So you just bring your knee up and so like you're kneeling, except that we have a trailing leg now with a leg that's going up the wall.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Because I'm just spending time in these ranges and my body is going to start to adapt as I increase my movement language.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Nope, just on the ground.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Yeah, and I called the couch stretch because I created this thing a long time ago, and I created it on the couch for my young athletes while they were watching TV, right? I just needed some hip extension exposure. But we can do it on the wall, we can do it on the couch. And ultimately, what we try to see is, do you have glute squeeze? Can you take a breath? Right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If your breath starts to get real small in this position, I'm like, huh. So every time your knee comes behind your body, you can't breathe anymore? How's that working for you when you run? Is that good or bad? Seems to me that your breath should remain pretty constant, independent of what your hip does. So then we like to see if people can come to a more upright position.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So that's kind of position three. So a little bit more upright torso. We're starting to increase hip demands as the torso comes upright. Torso's coming upright. The knee is moving further away from the chest on that loaded leg.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And what you'll see is that most people are going to be like, wow, that's real stiff, or I can't even get there, or I can't breathe there, or I have to banana back to get there, and I certainly can't squeeze my butt there. And I want to tell everyone, this is a low-level test. The real test is your front foot goes up on a 12-inch to 18-inch box. So we're not even in the test yet.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
No, front leg just up higher. So we elevate the front leg into what's called a hip lock. So that front leg is suddenly taking my pelvis and rotating it posteriorly. Knee is running into pelvis. Pelvis is like tucking. And now you're really going to see what's going on with your hip extensions.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That's right. And so suddenly we have this nice test that allows us to see in our competency there. And I want to remind you, if you do the couch stretch in filament, your knee is actually in hip extension. Your knee isn't even behind your butt here. It's that hard, and I'm still biasing it towards flexion. So what we're seeing is that you have a real deficit of hip extension.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So that's one way to improve it. You can just do the test, camp out there, take some breaths, contract, relax, breathe, do your resistance isometrics, whatever you want to do there. So many ways to zhuzh that up, rotate, side bend. The question is, how are you now loading that thing in your life?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So we can put a band on you and get you to do some isometric standing, but show me in your movement language in the gym, how you're reinforcing hip extension. So when we were talking about deadlifting with a tandem stance, still not hip extension. I'm extending the hip, but that trail leg is not. Rear foot elevated split squat. Ding, ding, ding, ding. We start to get there, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Bulgarians, flipping a tire. Like any time where I need to be able to, a big lunge is a good example. Forward lunge, back lunge.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Like you're going to try and pee over that Volkswagen. You're pushing over.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
but you're talking about bucking the hips forward. That's right. Suddenly you're upright and that leg, that trailing leg is an extension in a long lever position. So we spend a lot of programming. One of the best persons at this is Franz Bosch. I mentioned earlier, and he has something I've termed like the Bosch snatch. So if you imagine being in a double stance,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So I'm just like I'm swinging a kettlebell. If I took a plate or a dumbbell, it doesn't matter. I'm just going to basically go from a hip hinge. And as I go overhead with the weight of the load, whatever is appropriate for you, I'm going to take my front foot and step it up on a box. So, all of a sudden, I'm going from a flexed position in the hip.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Right, or upright torso, but hinged. C-shape, right? Weird C. And then I'm going to step forward, and now I'm going to have that one of those legs is going to be an extension. And so, suddenly, now we're adding speed to this extension, because that's not what we do with reverse rear foot elevated split squats. We're not loading that in speed.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So we start to add the speed component to what we're doing and suddenly we've discovered another way to challenge our movement. It doesn't just always be heavier, it can also be faster. So I'm basically, imagine if I was, here's a great example. I love pressing. I think overhead pressing is the bee's knees. It's one of my non-negotiables.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
We're gonna press, seesaw press, overhead press, we're pressing. But if I take your front foot and put it up on a box, make sure that back foot is straight with all your toes on the ground, and press from that position, you're going to find out why you don't have any hip extension. You won't even think about the weight. You'll think about your groin exploding.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
No, go press. Go find out what you can press overhead, and you're going to see that, like, wow, this tandem stance, front foot elevated. Press is going to kill you.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Oh, so now we're into the real magic, the behavior. Where are we going to stack these behaviors? So if you have to get up and down off the ground, Plus one, right? I got to get up and down off the ground every day. So if you're an older person who may hasn't gotten off the ground, I'm older, I'm just talking about over 50, you may not have gotten up and down off the ground for 100 years.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I would say, you know, one of the things that is useful for me as I am asked to come and tear through people's programming and look for holes in their movement practices, we look at fundamental shapes. So what's nice is that—okay, hang on, everyone. Let me define exercise for you. I'll just give you a little framework. And I'll start by saying something inflammatory.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
The shoulder's not that complicated. It doesn't do that many things. It goes overhead, goes out to the side, goes in the front, it goes in the back. That's what your shoulder does. You can bend the elbow, you can twist and all those shapes, but those are the four fundamental primary organizations of the shoulder. Hip has flexion, extension, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Really, I can go laterally, but that's just a different kind of squat. But really, like, am I squatting with the foot really narrow or am I squatting a little bit wider? So what we can then do is say in these fundamental bookends, these benchmarks, this is what we call archetype, suddenly I can ask, well, how are you loading your overhead position?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So if you're always pressing on a bar or pulling on a lat down machine, you actually are overhead, but you're not in the fullest expression over overhead, right? Which is your arms straight up and down parallel by your ears. Hands over the top of your head. Stands over your head. So what we can then do is say, well, what tools do you like to use? Kettlebells, great.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That's one of the reasons kettlebells are so great. Single arm, I can't hold it out here, it's going to fall. I have to finish over my head. Dumbbells, the same. But kettlebells, it constrains us to express full overhead motion. I can look at, do you have enough interrotation with the hand by the side? Are you doing enough pressing-like activities?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Chaturanga, the finished position of my row, right? Bench press, dip, running. Those are all movements where my shoulder comes into extension, whether the arm is straight or bent. So what's nice now is I can say, well, am I distracting those tissues or compressing those tissues? Well, you're like, well, what do you mean? I'm like, are you pressing or are you doing a pull-up, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Pressing overhead or doing a pull-up. That's compressing or distraction, right? Very simple ways of looking at these movements. We can say, well, how are you coming there? Did you get there from a snatch or did you get there from a front rack position? So we can look at start position, finish position.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You just don't do it anymore, right? We want to hear why I think MMA is so amazing. You have to get up and down off the ground a lot, right? If you go to jits, right? How about yoga? How about Pilates? You're like, wow, there's a lot of time organizing on the ground. So a lot of people, Ida Rolfe really said, hey, how do we help the person organizing gravity first and foremost, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And suddenly what you're realizing is you're like, oh, I'm starting to understand the root movements and root positions that help me improve performance, predict performance. performance and help me get through pain. Because if I have people not expressing the highest levels of expression of the movement, that's something we can improve. That's technique, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
It's not just get bigger and stronger. It's, hey, let's be more technically proficient. So I have all of these ways of looking at the movement selection choices. Again, what are you comfortable with? But then I can challenge it with load, make it heavier. We can do volume. We could add speed. We could add cardiorespiratory demand.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You could do more than five and suddenly you have to do 20 and we have metabolic demand in there. You and I are competing all of a sudden, right? Now, suddenly I go from open torque to closed torque. I go from giving you a barbell to a dumbbell, right? I go from open chain to closed chain. Suddenly we're like, holy moly, block practice, random practice.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I have all the tools for me to understand, are you competent putting your arms over your head or are you exposing these shapes under these different domains? And I think when we only look at sort of a few ranges of motion and we only look at load as the way, then we lose all the opportunity and richness of programming.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So you're jumping and then coming up.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
It's a kipping pull-up without a pull-up.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That's fine. I'm going to say that I love strict pull-ups. I do more strict pull-ups than you can imagine. But if you can't kip, there's something wrong with you.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
There's an old saying out of the Soviet system, when you stop jumping, you start dying. Mm-hmm. I believe that. And the lowest form could be trampolining. Another low form, jump roping. Highest form, starting to be really powerful. I love it. You're killing it. And what's great now is you've just made this switch where you start describing your training in blocks of positions.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
What position am I training? What shape am I reinforcing? That's a really—it's not a muscle. Remember, your muscles— are not wired for movement. Your brain is wired for movement, right? You don't have any selective control over a single muscle in your body. That's a mistake. So you're not really working your biceps. You're working arm flexion, right? In a variety of positions.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
This squat exercise biases my quads more, but I'm not actually quadding, right? Because that's impossible.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Then we have someone like Philip Beach, who is this incredible – who wrote this book on functional embryology, which I highly recommend, called Muscles and Meridians, I think, Muscles and Meridians. But his hypothesis is that one of the ways that the body tunes itself is by being on the ground. Again – restoring native ranges, re-approximating joints, right? Kneeling, walking.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And a gateway into a conversation that's very complex. This is all I think about. And people are like, hey, I just want to feel better and I don't want to get hurt in my calves when I run. You're like, okay, it can be really simple. And also you have a right to look jacked and tan. I mean, you can be jacked all you want. Mark Bell makes this point every single post. Look, I think...
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
There's something that I try. We don't ever punch down. We just don't, you know, just point, we point to what we do. This is our model. But any model that someone's on the internet, a model has to do three things. It has to explain current phenomenon, right? It has to predict future phenomenon. and it has to be easily communicated. So let me see your model, how it works. How does it explain?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If I do your thing, will I get better at this thing? That's the thing I'm interested in, right? So what I see is, oh, a lot of recursive, fun fitness where people feel better, but I still have to go over here and squat, or I still have to go over here and become conditioned. But you can see the truth of needing to expose people
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
to bigger ranges of motion and more skilled movement than some of the things we're getting traditionally in the gym. And I think one of the things that we saw with a pivot towards movement culture, kind of coined by Ido Portal, is that what we were seeing is that the gym didn't beget necessarily better movers.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
What we had was people originally doing a skill, throwing something, running track and field. We would train and then go do more of that. And then what we did is we took the gym or took the sports skill movement out of it and we just remained in the gym. And you can see the reaction to that as well. You're not very elegant. You can't, don't have any moving solutions.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You don't transfer your energy very well. You're not, you know, you're not graceful. You can't, you have no rhythm. So the real key for us is like, I think we want to put playback in there.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And you can see what the reaction is to, hey, if we're just doing bench press and hack squats, maybe that's not making the best mover, but it's certainly making a jacked guy who's what we call, what is it in that movie, Hot Girl Fit? Where, you know, it's one of the recent movies where the guys, who's the guy from Twisters, that incredible actor he was in, Top Gun.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Anyway, he's swimming and the girl is like, hey, why are you out of breath? He's like, I don't do cardio, I just do abs and biceps. She's like, oh my God, you're hot girl fit. Like you have this big engine that looks good with no go. And I wanna make sure that, no offense to all the hot girls out there, but the idea here is, what is it you wanna do with your body
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And if you just took a step back and said, what's it look like for the last 10,000 years? You know, when have we... 10,000 years ago, my understanding is that I'm a little fatter, your femur's a little longer, but we're pretty much the same people. Maybe I don't digest milk yet. Maybe that's the understanding. But ultimately, what behaviors have changed, we're off the ground.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Let's start there, and then we can start to say, well, what do you have access to? What's your training age? And it's a nuanced conversation. It's probably why you should have a coach and develop a coach for the rest of your life. But let's not pretend having abs and big biceps is going to make you a good MMA fighter, right? And you can see why the resistance of, hey, that made me less athletic.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
We want to be careful of that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That is what I would hope. We look at training for now apply a longevity lens, a durability lens. Right. Or as Juliet says, she's like, don't you want to just be able to pop off the couch and go on adventures? Right. I want to have a body that's capable of that. I think what we've been pitching in the gym doesn't really do that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And even that, I just want everyone to hear and double click on what Andrew said. That framework is that I now have a third person. Party objective measure. Does my running get better with my training? It's a really great way to evaluate your training.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
No, Michael, you need as much muscle as you can because winter's coming.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I just figure like I'll be- Everyone, what you just described for a typical person is doing a long piece, a short piece, and a high intensity piece. That's rad. That is really, that's the crack.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Let's take it next level. Let's go flank too. You want to get torso on flank. We're really confused.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And so this is an easy... Don't need any equipment. Can drop this in. I can answer my emails, watch TV. That seems like how we're going to improve and be able to start to untangle this very complex coordinate when people have a lot going on.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And notice that what you said was, I train so I can have fun. And I just want to double click on, we have sucked the joy and the play and exposure out of training and out of fitness. And now it's, I have to have this VO2 max, so I'll live to 150 and I have to do, right? And you forgot that we... This whole thing is so you can go spend some credits.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So I like to say the gym and all that really focused training is spending time on credits. But one of my coach friends, Nicole Christensen says, CrossFit Roots, she's like, we don't nature for time. Stop nurturing for time. Like this, we're surfing so we can surf all day and we can surf more waves than the other kids because you're not fit enough.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I want to go hike and then ride my bike and play and ski and do all the things I want to do with my body. And that may mean I want to hold my kids or I want to do my job in this warehouse. We start to train for life in a little bit more simple way and it doesn't feel like this crazy burden. And it also happens to be the best tool to understand how you're moving.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Because my expert coaches can watch you run and be like, that's what we're working on. And I'll go right to the thing, right? But for the rest of us, we need to say, wow, my shoulder, that bench, that fly dumbbell bench was a little bit tricky. I'm losing some shoulder extension, right? Or at least I'm touching these shapes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And that ends up being a really interesting diagnostic tool where we can really take a shot at improving function and reducing musculoskeletal distress. And I think this is the template for it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And as you point out, sorry, the roller's already there. So you're sitting there and the roller's there, another barrier to adherence knocked out. So you're like, oh, I might as well just, what's stiff today? What hurts today? How could I have some self-soothing input? And when we're working at high levels of performance, Like the highest levels.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So we are looking at society health, right? Mm-hmm. the first thing we argue, instead of saying what's most important, we say, what is it you want to do? And who are your friends you're going to do it with? And are you going to do it a lot? Let's start there. Then we can start to weasel in everything, especially with social isolation, with sort of lack of community.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I mean, I feel like sport is the last place where people congregate, right? Sports, sidelines, this is the sort of, you know, lingua franca of the whole, you know, world. I've taught on every continent except Antarctica. Everyone knows what a push-up is. Everyone knows what a deadlift is. It's not science. Sorry. It's not math. That's not the universal language. It is bench press.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Everyone knows and everyone can tell you how much you bench in any language. So there are some things there that are universal. I think when we look at the human as a moving organism – then we can really start to not feel crazy about how our world is changing, but how do we fight back by setting up more opportunity to move more?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And for me, the whole lens ends up being like, we basically, we're trying to parse through complex problems. So I have a world champion who's injured, two-time world champion, isn't able to finish a tour. The first question I ask them is, tell me about your sleep. I'm a rough sleeper. Oh, tell me more about that, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Because I can't even tell your inputs and outputs unless we're getting into sleep. Then I say, well, tell me about your nutrition. I eat clean. Great, find that for me. I don't even know what that means, clean. Turns out under-caloried, under-nutrition, doesn't get enough macros, doesn't get enough micros. I'm like, oh, we start to correct that. We start to collect sleep.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
When we really start to divide some of the behaviors into, for me, as a 51-year-old, I'm obsessed with my tissues not failing. Like tearing an Achilles is like every physical therapist's worst nightmare. And I jump rope every day and I have great range. I do so many isometrics. I'm just not going to tear my Achilles. Now I'm going to tear my Achilles, but I'm not going to tear my Achilles.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So tissue health is part of that. So now I have to look at nutrition. I have to look at my blood work and I have to look at my sleep. Right. So that I can really define some of those things as that creates a readiness, tissue tolerance, health. Then I can be looking at the other things. And that's really as we start to get, again, the framework of sport or framework of play changed.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
These range of motion, like keeping you being able to access the full sort of arsenal of what you can do with your body, these movement solutions, sort of like Ido Portal plus the Olympics, right? You would see that this is an easy way for our elite athletes to work and integrate without having to do another thing, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
creates this place where I can suddenly start to understand inputs and outputs and how to take care of this carcass so that I can do what I want with my body, which is our new definition of mobility. Can I do what I want with my body and can I be pain-free?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Genetics. Do they feel safe? Show me nutrition. Show me their training age. But what's noticeable there is that we have disciplines that require greater range of motion and skill of body control and high power output. Right? Huh. So one of the things that we do in our programming for adults is I make you sprint once a week, like sprint, because people have not sprinted.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And I don't mean you can go out and run. I don't think you're capable of that. But I'm going to put you on a bike. I'm going to put you in control. I'm going to see what your peak wattage is, that sprinting.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So ideally, I would love you to be able to do some hill sprints and repeats, but I don't think you have the tissue tolerance or the range of motion for that, and I know what the outcome is gonna be. But I can put you on a bike and say, can we hit this peak wattage?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And what you just discovered there was, hey, I still need to maintain my ability to move quickly and have control through great ranges of motion. That is a recipe for why if you did yoga and did some sprints, you're gonna be pretty badass. You know, that's a pretty good way.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
It's a lot of busy work. There's a lot of busy work out there. It makes people feel like they're involved in a program. Again, the way we want to take our feelings out of it... how do you progress those pink dumbbells? 1,000 reps is 2,000 reps, right? Show me progression. Suddenly I can't progress and regress those things. The other thing I want to say is like, is it making the thing better?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
What are we training for? And, you know, I think it feels decorative to have busy work. And I do all this prehab corrective exercise. I'm like, hold up. Why don't we do the thing we're doing and regress and progress that and ask if you have native range of motion, yes or no.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
But, you know, if we look at the typical person, especially someone listening to this podcast, they don't have two hours in the gym. So if your program is requiring two hours of me, I'm out. If it requires an hour of me, I might be out. You know, I'm so busy that sometimes I eat lots of 30- and 40-minute pieces peppered throughout plus a lot of other play, and that's good enough.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So we really do need to look at how people are finding themselves in their environments to ask, is this appropriate for you and what's essential? And it turns out a lot of this, you know, 20-something playing around, videoing yourself in the gym is great when you have three or four hours in the gym.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
How about that? I believe you. And that's what's so great is you're like, hey, that doesn't work for me. You know, I find that my best thinking is done under enormous aerobic load. Like I literally am like, oh, and I have an often jump up and write something on the whiteboard and then go back and do my thing because, you know, I'm just it creates flow state. And it's and if I'm distracted.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You can use whatever you want to help you get up and down off the ground. So those of you listening, you're like, I can't do that. You know, there's a test we write about in the book that if you just do crisscross applesauce standing, you should be able to lower yourself to the ground. and stand back up without using your hands.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I can't really hear what's going on. And there's a time when I want to distract myself. And there's a time when I want to be amused. That's fine. I've got a two-hour ride. I'm getting ready for a four-day backcountry ski trip here in February. But notice I've already been getting ready for it in the beginning of November. I am ready. It's going to ramp up.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And so much of my training now is going towards can I successfully do these four hard days the way I want to. So some things come down a little bit. Strength dials down. I change my body composition. I like to be a little bit lighter. I'm playing. But there are some times where I have to get two and three hours in of steady work done. And I'm like, headphones. You know what I mean?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So it's okay to be amused. You don't have to be a monk doing what you're doing. But I really like what you said. I feel distracted. Yeah, let's use this as a concentration time. All right, let's use this interaction time. The gym shouldn't be the loneliest place in the world. If you're not making eye contact and talking, high-fiving, get a different gym.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I think what we should do is if you pull fascia out of the human movement equation, the human fails to stop moving, right? So the recent, like, we've just discovered fascia, right? That's not really entirely true. There's a really, like, 20-year-old set of videos by a guy who describes himself as a somonaut. His name's Gil Headley, and he did these live dissections on YouTube.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I don't even know if he's still there, but he basically did all of this gross anatomy for free on the Internet. And he describes—one of the first people to really describe fascia as this sort of incredible, you know, connective tissue network that envelops, wraps, you know, stores energy, communicates, is tensionality—
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
In full disclosure, I went to school in Boulder, and I may have dated a girl who went to rolfing school and was a rolfer. And Ida Rolf was one of the first people to really talk about how can we mobilize fascia with touch. So I was introduced to fascia in the 90s when I had rolfing done on me.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So when I'm trying to help someone think about paying a restored position, and this is overly gross, but it'll create a framework for people, we ask, is this an environmental problem? Are you poorly hydrated? Because your tissues need to be hydrated to slide. Are you inflamed? That's why we talk about nutrition and we talk about sleep, because we have this environmental piece.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Then I often will say, hey, do we have just a movement problem? Do you just have crappy technique? Like, let's fix the technique first. Let's get you moving to the highest expression of the movement first. Hey, turn your foot straighter. Let's recenterate that joint. Can we have a better organization?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Then we start to say, because sometimes it's just a movement problem, just you needed some cueing. We say, is this a joint capsule problem? Because capsular stiffness, the joint capsule is a bag of connective tissue that surrounds all your joints, and it can account for huge chunks of your range of motion limitation. So a lot of what we do is we try to mobilize the joint tissue.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Don't collapse. Just lower yourself to the ground. And then without putting your hands down or knee down, can you stand back up?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And again, that's my own bias, the way I was trained as an Australian trained manual therapist, this Maitland School. Then we say, well, is this just a good old-fashioned muscle restriction? And we call it muscle dynamics because that includes high tone, stress, fear, but trigger points are well-documented phenomenon. Muscles get stiff, they become fibrotic, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
You could have high tone trying to protect you, all those reasons, but that still could limit your range of motion. And lastly, we say sliding surfaces. So instead of kind of talking about all the different layers of dermis and skin and fascia, we say, do the things that slide, are they sliding? So if you grab your skin on your forehead, it should slide in all the directions.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Notice that the skin should slide all the directions over your tendons, right? If I grab your typical person's Achilles and grab the skin over the Achilles, it doesn't budge. It's like they have an exoskeleton that's that fascial kind of compartment, and it's seized, it's adhered, it's bound to the underlying surfaces, which creates tissue restriction and higher tension.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So when we're mobilizing these tissues, we're trying to keep tissues sliding and gliding. That's an easy way of thinking about it. Nerves have to run through nerve tunnels. Taking huge breaths keeps all of those, you know, aspects of your trunk moving. And we just need to be thinking in like a systems approach. So sometimes if you went and saw an ART practitioner and it didn't solve your problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
It may not have been a fascial problem, right? If you went and saw someone who only worked on the muscles, it may not have been a muscle problem. If you went and saw a chiropractor and they worked on your joint structures, right, or a good physio, it may not be a joint restriction problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Seems like I should use my left leg and right leg equally, right? I shouldn't have a good side and a bad side. But what's interesting is the data, I think, is that, like, it's a nice predictor of all-cause mortality, morbidity. That's fine. But what it really hints at is your changes in how your body interacts with the environment.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If you saw a coach and they couldn't cue you out of it, it may not have been a... So what we need to do is we recognize that if more squats just solved all the problems, wouldn't we have solved all the problems? If rolling on a roller had solved all the problems... Seems like we would have solved all the problems.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So I think what ends up happening is we want to put fascia equally as an important part of the system. And one of the ways that we can directly impact that in a free way at home is to begin a conversation of just some simple solutions. myofascial mobilization. In fact, myofascial means muscle fascial, but there are osteofascial connections. Does the fascia glide over the bone there, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
We can look at the tendinous fascial connections. And again, do these tissues slide and glide the way they're supposed to slide and glide? And that's a much easier way to look at it. And I'm going to test and retest, not with subjective pain, but how is your range of motion and access to your range of motion?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I don't know if you know anyone in Naval Special Warfare, but they're so soft.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
I didn't say that. Kelly said that. You know who you are, my friends.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Does it need to be painful?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So let's pull Rolfing outside because I'm not a rolfer. But let's just say that mobilizing your tissues doesn't have to be painful. In fact, it's likely that you'll experience some discomfort. But let's talk about a couple guideposts for you. Number one, you always have to be able to take a full breath.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So if I'm mobilizing you or you're mobilizing yourself and you suddenly stop breathing, you're going too deep. So an easy way for you is to say, hey, can I breathe here? Number two, I like to have volitional contraction. So if I'm mobilizing someone or someone's doing something, I should be able to flex them out. I should have control over that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If the pain or depth or pressure is putting too much load on the system where I literally lose neuromuscular control, what am I doing? Right? And then those two pieces, can I take a breath here? Do I have control here? Those go a long way to keeping me in the bounds. And then we tend to not work on a tissue longer than five minutes, just because I wanna get the rest of it tomorrow.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
That because you've adapted, suddenly the skill that you've done 100,000 times, 200,000 times as a kid in crisscross applesauce, You suddenly are confronted as an adult with a skill you can no longer perform. And it doesn't require massive hip range of motion. It doesn't require full range of motion in your ankles. It's actually a really fair test.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And if you give me 10 minutes of work, That's incredible. We like to put the soft tissue work before we go to bed. And what we found was that we had better adherence. No one's doing anything productive in the 10 minutes before they go to the bedroom. Number two, like a child, when you put a child to bed, you're like, first we take a bath, then we read the book, and then we go to bed, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Your brain is like, I know what comes next. So if you do this rolling or on your soft tissue work, self-massage, You are training your brain to know what comes next. We find that when people have engaged in massage or self-massage, they don't stand up and want to fight anyone. They're very relaxed.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If you've ever gone to a spa and had a massage, you don't go out and snatch or get into a fight afterwards. You're so chill, bro. So we found it as a great way to, as Jill Miller says, switch on the off switch. That's a beautiful way of talking about that. How do I tell myself to shift out of this, you know, fight or flight into coming down?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Five minutes per body part, start anywhere on the leg, start anywhere. What's stiff? What's asking? Can I breathe? Can I contract? You're going to see that that's a really simple way to start getting some input. And not all your tissues are the same.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
If you come to me with knee pain, I'm going to want to be able to look at your positions, but I'm also going to want to be able to stay on your quads. I mean, my full body weight. And if you can't take that, I'm calling that incomplete. And those people out there who are going to be like, whoa, that's heavy duty, you have not worked with my population.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
who have monster thighs, are thick and fibrotic, and it takes real weight. So we all have different sensitivities. But if I respect your ability to take a breath and contract, then all of a sudden we're upregulating. What I recommend is you go to Thailand. You get a Thai massage from a 65-year-old master woman who weighs 109 pounds.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
And when she is working on your quads and you tap out, she's like, no, I'm not done here. If you felt your quads, you're going to realize how low the bar is.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Did the breath hold cold laps? It's fun. I'm going to put in quotation marks.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Sometimes it's type two fun.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
So you, I think, have even talked about that there is research to show that cold water immersion can attenuate training effects. Yes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
But if you're missing some of these end ranges, you're going to struggle. And it's nice now that I have this, like, what's the session cost? I've become a—I love cycling. Mountain biking is my jam. But if I ride my bike a ton, my hips get super tight. But if I have some assessments, just like vital signs—