Juliet Starrett
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
That's huge. And by the way, I'm glad that it sounds like you're in remission and you're doing better.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
I'm so glad to hear that.
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)
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
Everyone in your family, your aunties. Everybody in my family.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
Yeah, and it's from that cross-legged position. And the reason the cross-legged position is notable is that it's a real mid-range position. It actually doesn't require full hip range of motion or ankle range of motion. Those things are sort of put to the side. It's a test or expression of your range of motion of your hips and how easily they move. And ultimately, as we point out,
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
it's difficult to get people to care about the range of motion until they can't do something. And so by opening the book, what we've given people is, hey, here's something you've been doing since you were a child and every child around you, you've practiced this thing, I don't know, 100,000 times, 200,000 times in your life. And now suddenly you're struggling to get up and down.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
What if you're sitting there and I'm like, here, hold my baby. Can you get up? You can't. I'm like, here's two cups of coffee. Here's a great glass of wine and a cigar. You still can't stand up.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
So I think what's interesting is that when we started with that, we got people's attention about saying, oh, I wonder if I have blind spots because your hip range of motion for no fault of your own suddenly become a blind spot. And that influences potentially what your knees do, how your back functions, the movement choices that you have, the amount of ability to regulate your range and balance.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
All of those things start to come together. But by starting with that conversation, it's easy to say, okay, okay, okay. I got what you're saying now. Where do we go on?
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
They took one look at me and were like, nope, no way.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And you really hit up two pieces that we're trying to set up with the book. The first one is people do not need another listicle, right? They don't need another, here's 17 ways to optimize. Here's your checklist. Here's how you're going to add in complex behaviors without really understanding anything about your life.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And what we know is that we need to think differently about where people are going to engage with behaviors that turn out to be well evidenced, easy, practicable to change their lives. And sitting on the ground while you watch TV is an easy thing to do.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And instead of having to go to a class or talk about these things or take some course, all I need you to do tonight is sit on the ground for 30 minutes while you're watching TV and fidget. Find all these different positions. And as you hinted at, it's interesting, your grandmother said, hey, I like to do it this way.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
There is some thinking, Philip Beach is a great writer about these things, but that sitting on the ground, all these ground-based positions are one of the ways the body tunes itself. And once you become accustomed to having access to that range of motion, things function better.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And that when you take them away, your grandmother might've said, I don't feel as good when I don't bend my knees all the way or change my ankles all the way or sit in these positions or load my connective tissue in this way that's just in the background of doing something that human beings have done for a long time. Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
We wrote a book about running. And one of the things that we noticed, because we had school-aged children at the time, was that all of the kindergartners run like Usain Bolt. They all run beautifully. They sprint on the ball of their foot. Their mechanics are good. They're springy.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And we got to first grade and we watched at Christmas around the holiday, half the kids came back and started heel striking. And so if you're listening, what that means is they fundamentally altered a running movement pattern. They went from running and landing, like if you were jumping, you'd jump and land on the balls of your feet. You wouldn't do that with your heels.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And all of a sudden, half of the cohort of the kids that we observed started started putting their heel out to initiate a running kind of position. So just so everyone knows, if you take your shoes off and go run, you cannot run with your heel slamming into the ground. You'll immediately get feedback that that doesn't feel very good.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
So what is it about the environment and the human interaction that changed? That's like saying, okay, we're Halfway through your first grade, we're going to switch to left-handed writing. That's the equivalent of that. Or you've been throwing a ball with your right hand. We're starting to throw it with your left hand. You'd be like, why are we doing that? That's a really interesting question.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
Well, if the whole world started to shift you into only left-handedness or left-footedness, you suddenly would say, hey, this is... Something's going on here. The environment is shaping us. And I think... When we start to view that way, we start to then, it's easier to understand the thousands of small choices that are made for us. We talk about environmental constraint a lot.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
When I was a first year physio student, I was working next to the occupational therapist and they were working with people who'd had some head trauma, people who'd had cerebral vascular accidents, strokes. And people would have a more affected side and a less affected side.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And they would come in and what they would do is if your right hand was your dominant hand that was less effective, they would actually tape an oven mitt to that hand so you couldn't use it. And they would force this other hand, the more affected side, to do all the work. And so that the brain had to work and learn how to reuse that sort of injured side.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And I came home and I was like, Juliet, I think I found the key. I have to get all the cookies out of the house. Then I won't eat the cookies. Like this is environmental constraint.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And suddenly that idea of, of how the environment is shaping us in hidden ways really started to become clear to us, especially when we started owning a gym and started becoming really the touch point for so many people's wellness and fitness. We realized that so much of what we needed to do to actually help people to
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
engage with health, engage and control their lives was really about how they were being shaped by their environment. So if you and I all sit down and the only place for us to sit culturally makes sense is a chair, that's what we're gonna do. And not that sitting is bad, but the idea is if this is the only option I have, that's the only option I'll engage with.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And now you can basically start to apply that
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
Everyone used to say, I'm getting on the computer.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And then we talked a little bit about the session cost early on. We mentioned that we could look at an athlete's sport or skill or training session and sort of assign how expensive was that on the physiology, how it was able to manage that workload and still be able to do more work. Well, we can take a kind of a window back and say, well, what's the session cost for sitting?
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
Not on the physiology, but access to your range of motion. And what we find is that people who do a lot of sitting end up lacking or missing their ability to extend their hip. So the problem is, and I mean, taking your knee, but she's laughing because I'm obsessed with hip extension.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
The idea here is you need to be able to have your knee come behind you, like in a lunge position. And it is a fundamental reason. It's actually a meme on the internet about... split squats or rear foot elevated split squats or Bulgarians are the worst exercise. It's the number one exercise everyone hates the most to do.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And the reason is that getting your leg behind you in a loaded lunge position is the hardest thing we do because we're so conditioned to what? Sitting in this flexed position.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
What this allows us to do is not say you shouldn't sit because it'll hurt your back. I'm like, your back may hurt just because you're that person and you're super stressed and your dad didn't love you, whatever. I don't know what the reason is your back hurts. But what I can say and measure is, wow, you did all the sitting and now your hip extension sucks.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
You've fundamentally altered just like those kids in the first grade who started heel striking. We're starting to see that, hey, we have a society that is not able to extend their hip. I wonder why your knee hurts. Oh, and also I see you're also missing hip extension. I wonder why you have chronic back pain. I don't know what the mechanisms are, but I also see you're missing hip extension here.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
So what we want to start to say is just like that sit and rise test, a lot of the movements that we engage in or don't engage with start to shape our ability to access our native ranges of motion.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs. They always come around. What age did you, when your great-grandmother got a cut, did she heal? She did. She healed a little slower than the 12-year-old. But you always are healing and turning over.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
So there's no reason why we can't reclaim this range of motion, especially if we keep an eye on it, especially if your grandma likes to squat and kneel and sit on the ground. That's one of the things we're trying to do is say, where do we put this formal movement practice in that's a side or separated from exercise? Because that's what we think. I've done the Peloton. I'm good, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And basically you haven't You moved your ankles. You haven't moved your hips in a full range of motion. You haven't extended your spine. You haven't put your arms over your head. You can start to ask, well, what is it the body's supposed to do? And suddenly you're like, whoa, that sun salutation practice, that made a lot of sense.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
That was like, how do I have a little breath and a little bit of movement? And how do I touch some of these positions for 10 minutes in the morning so that if the day gets away from me? I have at least taken my hip through a full range of motion. And what we're seeing is that the average person is basically living in a little tiny movement window with like three words.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
Meanwhile, the body is capable of Shakespeare.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
Can you imagine – would there be human beings for two and a half million years who are like, well, you're over 60. You don't get up and down off the ground.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
But we haven't given people clear benchmarks and clear vital signs.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
So I think that's what we have tried to do is say, hey, look, I think a lot of us are getting the message around some of these other key behaviors, keystone behaviors like nutrition, sleep, etc. But those people are still not looking at range of motion. They still haven't established what it is I should be able to do. Those things are always in the context of exercise, not exercise.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
movement choice, movement freedom, balance, those things. So when we've at least put this on the radar and we're like, look, you really like to engage in some strange esoteric practice. Let's test how well that's doing. You do Peloton and yoga. Let's test how that's doing. You do CrossFit. Do you have access to your range of motion?
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
When we have third party benchmarks and vital signs, we become agnostic about how you want to do that. But now we can begin a conversation about, hey, the thing that you're engaged with, maybe there's a hidden cost to that in your inability to move or expose your tissues to positions.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
Just Google couch stretch.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
Yeah. What's nice then is, again, the test is the practice. The practice is the test. Oftentimes the real problem we've seen is that people want to be heroic. Show me the, I'm going to go to range of motion bootcamp. I'm going to hire this expert and do remote zoom coaching. What we need to figure out is how to get these little small doses into everyone day's practice.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And so we started, for example, by saying, hey, let's sit on the ground for 30 minutes tonight. I just want you to watch TV while you're sitting on the ground. We went to, we have this story in the book, but we went to the Olympic Club in San Francisco, very storied, you know, social club, athletic club in San Francisco. And they were like, you're going to talk to mobility with all our people.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And I was like, great. And they were like, oh, well, that's weird. And I made like 300 people sit on the floor and these are like squash players and tennis players and like athletes and men who styled themselves as the captains of industry and athletes. And no one, I had eventually had men in half hour laying down. They could not sit up. And I was like, what do you think the problem is?
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
What sophisticated elite program do I want to drop into? You can't even sit on the floor, sir. So one of the things we love is that when you start to figure out when am I going to do this? Again, I'm not just, I'm not, I don't want you to kick anything else out. Well, one of the things that we know, we love sitting on the ground because Juliet talked about the positions, but guess what's
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
Oh, look, what's that right there? That's my roller. It's right next to the couch. And if I'm already sitting on the ground watching TV, I might as well engage in a little soft tissue work. And now I'm conjoining what happened to me during the day with a little soft tissue mobilization. What's stiff? Oh, my feet, my calves, my back, whatever. Hey, I'm a little bit sore.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
If you have a ball and a roller, you can get... so much net positive input. You can make yourself feel better, you can restore your range of motion in as little, I sound like an infomercial, 10 minutes a day. But the key here is that it's 10 minutes a day, five to seven days a week. That aggregates into so much input into your body where we really see holistic, wholesale changes
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
in people's ability to access their range of motion, to develop force, to have less pain. And if you really, it's like what we found is our minimum dose is five minutes, five minutes on the left side, five minutes on the right side, work on something that's- For the soft tissue work. Yeah, soft tissue work. And since you're already sitting on the floor, it's right there.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And if we can start to stack those behaviors- where, well, I sit on the ground for 30 minutes, I watch TV, and then the roller's there, and I do my 10 minutes. What you find is that you get all these ancillary benefits. Like not only do you feel better, but you start to train your brain. Well, first I sit on the ground, then I do the soft tissue, then I go to bed.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And what we know is that that soft tissue work has large parasympathetic input. It helps you to relax. No one jumps off the massage table and is like, let's fight. No one does that. And if you can get a little soft tissue input on the ground, Chances are you're going to fall asleep and stay asleep because that's what the data supports.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Make It To 100 With A Sharp Brain And Good Mobility
And now we have this pretty holistic system that really you can be consistent with and work into your busy life because anyone can sit on the ground and a foam roller is like, it's like toilet paper. You can buy it at Target.