Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Signs and Signals You Aren't Aging Well with Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett (Rebroadcast)
Wed, 11 Dec 2024
This episode is brought to you by Birch Living, One Skin, and Aqua Tru. When it comes to longevity, many of us envision a future where we can keep doing what we love—whether it’s gardening, hiking, skiing, or playing with grandchildren. Taking steps now to maintain our mobility is key to ensuring a long, active, and joy-filled life. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Juliet and Kelly Starrett to discuss their no-frills approach to promoting durability and mobility as we age. Drawing from decades in the wellness industry and insights from their new book, Built to Move, they share impactful diet, lifestyle, and movement strategies to help you build strength and move freely into your 60s, 70s, 80s, and beyond. They dive into at-home mobility tests like the sit-and-rise test, the power of walking, and the importance of dietary fiber, protein, sleep, and resilience. Juliet and Kelly also highlight how simple dietary changes lay the foundation for true progress and sustainable change, helping your body bounce back from injuries and setbacks as you age. Juliet Starrett is an entrepreneur, attorney, author, podcaster, and professional whitewater paddler with three world championships and five national titles. Dr. Kelly Starrett consults with pro athletes, elite military forces, and corporations on health and performance and is the author of Becoming a Supple Leopard and Ready to Run. Together, they founded The Ready State, San Francisco CrossFit and co-authored the bestsellers Deskbound and Built to Move. In this episode, Dhru, Juliet, and Kelly dive into: Why the sit and rise test is a key marker of longevity (1:58) The major milestones where declines in mobility start to happen (13:06) The power of walking for longevity (26:09) How to build up your sleep pressure (30:24) Increasing your durability to aging (41:08) Fundamentals for longevity that make the biggest impact (45:26) Breaking free from diet culture and finding what works best for you (53:02) The 800 grams of fiber challenge (57:57) Why metabolic flexibility is the ultimate marker of a successful diet (01:19:01) Recommendations for sleep (01:30:53) Creating a movement-rich environment (01:34:49) Mobility for everyday movement (01:41:50) At-home tests for determining your range of motion (01:48:22) How to get started (01:56:07) Societal shifts for creating a healthier lifestyle for the next generation (02:02:06) Final thoughts and where to follow Juliet and Kelly’s work (02:08:53) Also mentioned in this episode: Builttomove.com Built to Move 21-Day Challenge Get Kelly and Juliet’s latest book, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully, here. Juliet Starrett’s Instagram For more on Juliet and Kelly Starrett, follow The Ready State on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, X/Twitter, and through their Website. This episode is brought to you by Birch Living, One Skin, and Aqua Tru. To get 20% off your Birch Living mattress plus two free eco-rest pillows, head over to birchliving.com/dhru today. Right now, One Skin is offering my community 15% off; just go to oneskin.co and use coupon code DHRU to save 15% and give your skin the scientifically proven, gentle care it deserves. AquaTru is a countertop reverse osmosis purifier with a four-stage filtration system that removes 15x more contaminants than the bestselling water filters out there. Go to dhrupurohit.com/filter/ and get $100 off when you try AquaTru for yourself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the top signs that you aren't aging well?
Hi, everyone. Drew Proat here. What are some of the top signals and signs that you aren't aging well? Well, on today's episode, we have a powerful rerun of one of our top podcasts that still so many of you have not heard. It's with Dr. Kelly Starrett and Juliette Starrett. And they're here to talk to us about some of the things that
are the basics of longevity that many people don't pay attention to, including how a simple at-home test is one of the best markers of longevity. And you can listen in and see if you can do it. If you can't do it, maybe this episode gets you motivated to work on some things that actually will make it easier for you to do it. It's a little bit of a tease, but I promise you it's worth listening to.
Another thing, my own mindset around the topics around longevity and aging and health and wellness, they've evolved over the last few years. And one of the things that I would say that I have doubled down on is actually this idea of doubling down on the basics.
And on today's episode with Kelly and Juliet, we talk about what are those basics that have so much evidence around them that are related to longevity. Sure, it's fine or okay to experiment with the latest technology or supplement or this or that, but we don't want to do those things at the expense of the basics. And that's what today's episode is all about.
With that being said, I think you're going to love today's episode. So let's jump in with our interview with Dr. Kelly and Juliet Starrett. Kelly, Juliet, welcome to the podcast. I want to jump right in on something that actually blew my mind when I read your book.
And it's the connection between longevity and something so simple that I think everybody should be paying attention to, but they may not know this connection, sitting down and standing up. Who wants to start off by explaining what that connection is?
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.
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Chapter 2: How is the sit and rise test related to longevity?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Yeah, it's so basic. I mean, anybody listening, you just heard it. You sit on the ground. Crisscross applesauce. Crisscross applesauce, which by the way, we were just talking a bunch about my Indian culture before we started recording. I've been sitting on the ground since we were like, basically could actually sit.
And everyone in your family, your aunties, everyone.
Everybody in my family, my grandmother, would regularly prefer to sit on the floor. And actually when we moved to America, we got vacuums, we got other stuff, my grandmother still would prefer to squat and kind of clean the floor with this thing that's kind of like this like weird broom stick. Yeah, I can envision it. And she enjoyed it. It was part of her life.
But anyways, I got excited because I was like, oh my gosh, I've been training for this my whole life and I could actually do this test. You know, we talk about VO2 max in this podcast. We talk about grip strength. We talk about a lot of other predictors of longevity, but here is one of the simplest ones that anybody can do. In fact, if you're listening, you can pause right now and just try it.
Sit on the floor and see if you can get up without any assistance.
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Chapter 3: What role does walking play in longevity?
This room was made for me. I am the American who can manage this room.
They took one look at me and were like, nope.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 4: How can you build up your sleep pressure?
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.
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.
There is some thinking, Phillip 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.
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. You know, Julia, you were saying about we don't want to scare people. But in a way, when we look at the world and chronic disease and how, unfortunately, people... spend usually the last 15 years of their life, especially in American society, which is being exported around the world, right? Like India is one of the fastest growing rates of diabetes anywhere in the world.
You know, the Middle East is in shambles on health-wise. As people get more money, they want to live like Americans do, which usually means a lot more sugar, more sedentary life. So there's a little part of this, which is that
We don't want to leave it at fear, but we do want people to be scared enough because often what I find having taken care of my grandparents, like I kind of had two sides of the equation. My dad's parents had a lot of mobility in their life and my mom's side of the family, her parents had less so. And I saw that decline when I was taking care of them.
And anybody who's taking care of somebody elderly, who's losing their mobility, losing their body, and then they start to see that the entire body and the brain starts to decline because they can't move, it's scary. And you wouldn't want that for even your worst enemy. And it happens quickly.
And it happens quickly.
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Chapter 5: What are the fundamentals for longevity that make the biggest impact?
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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. 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. And all of a sudden, half of the cohort of the kids that we observed
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. So what is it about the environment and the human interaction that changed?
That's like saying, okay, we're going to develop your writing skills with your right hand and 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 with your left hand. You'd be like, why are we doing that? That's a really interesting question.
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.
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Chapter 6: How can you break free from diet culture?
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.
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.
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.
And suddenly that idea 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
Chapter 7: What is the 800 grams of fiber challenge?
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.
And now you can basically start to apply that across a thousand different variables. And we start to see it have real changes in how you move in your environment.
Run through a little bit of a list of some of those variables, just so we can connect the dots for people, right? You're talking about at a young age, kids, they're running like Usain Bolt, you know, are shoes part of the equation and kind of how that plays into it.
Of course, you mentioned sitting as well, like run through a few of these things that if we contrast, let's say how my grandmother grew up and how I grew up, you would see that it's not that she's training at CrossFit or that she's trying to get better. She just has to operate a particular way to function in her world and her environment.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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Chapter 8: How can you create a movement-rich environment?
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.
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...
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
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.
What they've done a lot in their life is move throughout their day.
You're right, they're into Taibo.
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.
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.
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.
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