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.