Huberman Lab
How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility | Dr. Kelly Starrett
Mon, 09 Dec 2024
In this episode, my guest is Dr. Kelly Starrett, DPT, a world-renowned physical therapist, best-selling author, and expert on improving movement in fitness, sports, and daily life. We discuss strategies to enhance mobility and flexibility to boost physical performance and overall health, including ways to offset aging, heal from injuries faster, and correct movement or strength imbalances. Topics include zero- and low-cost tools, such as how to warm up effectively, prepare mentally for workouts, properly use foam rollers, perform fascial release, and apply heat or cold for pain management and tissue recovery. We also cover the best flexibility protocols. Dr. Starrett explains how to optimize default postures for sitting, standing, and everyday activities. Listeners will gain practical, easy-to-implement knowledge to improve their health and physical performance. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Maui Nui Venison: https://mauinuivenison.com/huberman Joovv: https://joovv.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Dr. Kelly Starrett 00:02:44 Sponsors: Maui Nui & Joovv 00:05:46 Movement; Tool: Daily Floor Sitting 00:12:50 Tools: Stacking Behaviors, Stretching, Floor Sitting 00:17:07 Transferring Skills; Movement-Rich Environments; Range of Motion 00:23:47 Sponsor: AG1 00:25:18 Warm-Ups & Play 00:30:51 Asymmetries & Training 00:38:27 Maximizing Gym Time; Tool: 10, 10, 10 at 10 00:42:41 Tool: Warming Up with Play; Breathwork 00:47:26 Sponsors: Function & Eight Sleep 00:50:35 Tool: Foam Rolling, Uses, Types & Technique 01:01:30 Injury vs. Incident, Pain 01:05:54 Managing Pain & Stiffness, Tool: D2R2 Method 01:11:04 Posture, Neck Work 01:19:58 Sponsor: LMNT 01:21:33 Pelvic Floor, Prostate Pain 01:28:06 Urination & Men, Pelvic Floor; Tool: Camel Pose 01:33:42 Mobilizing the Pelvic Floor, Urogenital Health 01:38:27 Abdominals, Rotational Power, Spinal Engine Work 01:43:51 Dynamic & Novel Movements; Endurance & Strength Propensities 01:50:29 Tool: Workout Intensity; Consistency & Workout Longevity 01:57:41 Hip Extension, Tools: Couch Stretch, Bosch Snatch 02:09:38 Fundamental Shapes & Training, Hip Extension, Movement Culture 02:21:06 Training for Life & Fun 02:30:20 Aging with Range of Motion & Control; Mental State & Training 02:35:38 Fascia, Myofascial Mobilization 02:41:17 Rolfing, Tool: Tissue Mobilization & Reducing Discomfort 02:45:14 Deliberate Heat & Cold, Training, Injury & Healing 02:54:35 Desire to Train, Physical Practice 02:58:54 Balanced Nutrition; Eating Behaviors & Social Media 03:10:23 Sustainable Nutrition & Training; Tool: 3 Vegetable Rule 03:14:30 Supplements 03:23:05 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, Sponsors, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: How can I improve my mobility and flexibility?
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Kelly Starrett. Dr. Kelly Starrett is a doctor of physical therapy and one of the world's experts in movement.
That is, he teaches people how to move better for sake of sport, for sake of recreational fitness and for everyday living. Today, we discuss several important topics, including how best to warm up for any and all workouts.
He also tells us how to improve our movement patterns for cardiovascular exercise, for sport, for resistance training across the board, how to move better and how to improve our range of motion with the minimal amount of time investment. We hear a lot about different forms of stretching, We hear about dynamic stretching. We hear about passive stretching.
Dr. Starrett explains how to improve our range of motion across our entire body in the best possible ways, as well as how to offset or repair any imbalances that stem from musculoskeletal problems or from neural issues and how to reduce soreness, how to improve our posture, seated, standing, and movement-based posture. We talk about nutrition.
So today's episode covers an immense amount of actionable information that I'm certain all of you will benefit from. Dr. Kelly Starrett has authored several best-selling books, some of which you may have heard of, such as Supple Leopard. He was actually one of the first people to become synonymous with the use of a lacrosse ball or foam roller.
But really, even though a lot of people have talked about those, What he was really doing there was to emphasize the importance of understanding the relationship between the skeleton, the muscles, the nervous system, and the fascia. And today we also talk about fascia, which is an incredibly interesting and important topic.
In addition to consulting and coaching for various college level and professional athletes and teams, Dr. Kelly Starrett and his wife, Juliette Starrett, co-own The Ready State, And we provide a link to the Ready State in the show note captions there. They have a plethora of useful information and actionable protocols. I should mention years ago, I took one of the courses from the Ready State.
It's a really interesting course that we touch on some of the protocols from today. It's all about pelvic floor. So whether you're male or female and regardless of age, understanding your pelvic floor, how to take care of your pelvic floor in the context of exercise, posture, et cetera, is vitally important for all sorts of vitally important bodily functions. So today we also touch on that.
By the end of today's episode, I'm certain that you will be armed with a number of new, highly actionable protocols. I should emphasize these protocols take very little time and have an outsized positive effect on your movement, your posture, and your overall health. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
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Chapter 2: What are effective warm-up strategies?
You have to load it, right? Does it do tendon things? Is it lengthening under load? Does it express shortening under load? Is it isometric holds? So we can start at that level. She points out that if you put a, and again, not a perfect analogy, but if you put an orca into captivity, over a while, that orca fin will start to fold over. Folded fin syndrome, it's nicer than floppy fin syndrome.
That's hurtful. And what you're doing is when you alter the environment that this amazing animal lives in, it's not swimming, it's not fighting, it's not hunting, you're not loading the base of that fin. And so what happens is that collagen breaks down and we start to see changes in that, in that expression of that.
So what we can start to say is, again, not romanticizing the Pleistocene era when human beings were paleo, but what is it that we need in our daily dose lives to to maintain the integrity of our tissue systems, exposure, so that our brain says, this is safe, so that you actually have tendons and ligaments that can do what tendons and ligaments can do, and fascia that can be springy.
borrow another sort of Katie Bowmanism, if we have a movement language, an actual language made up of words, how many words are you using today? And most of us aren't using that many words. So very few words. So I sit, I stand, I walk very slowly. I sit, I stand, I walk very slowly. So everything is just in those few – and then I go exercise. Using the same words, I'm on the exercise bike.
I'm on an elliptical, which doesn't actually ask me to have any hip extension. And suddenly you can see that our movement language, which we're really codifying under intensity, load, we're becoming very competent in these adaptation positions, sitting. What ends up happening? Well, we start to see that our bodies are adaptation machines, and they just begin to adapt.
And so suddenly what we have is a human body that doesn't express normative range. The brain may not think that that range is even safe and put there. Then we start to sort of minimize the movement choices that the brain has, the movement options that the brain has. So really the question is – You know, at low loads, let's establish things.
At low loads and low speeds, you can get away with everything. Why? Because this body is rad. And it's designed, it's durable, it's not fragile. It's designed to be ridden hard and put away wet for a long time. Remember when you were 17, we'd cut off your hand? It would grow back the next day, right? You would. Think about the falls you took skating. And you'd be like, oh, that sucked.
The next day, you put your shoulder back in, you just kind of respawn. So what is it that we need to put into our movement diet? And then we can start to separate out, should that be exercise or should that be movement?
And now the real filter that we should be beginning these real and earnest conversations about is what is it in the environment, given that I'm a busy working person, and maybe I have some agency in the morning, And maybe I have some agency in the afternoon. But let's take exercise out of it. The one-hour discreet, working on zone two cardio, working on my evidence-based practice.
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Chapter 3: How to manage pain and stiffness?
I love this.
And as you point out, sorry, the roller's already there. So you're sitting there and the roller's there, another barrier to adherence knocked out. So you're like, oh, I might as well just, what's stiff today? What hurts today? How could I have some self-soothing input? And when we're working at high levels of performance, Like the highest levels.
These range of motion, like keeping you being able to access the full sort of arsenal of what you can do with your body, these movement solutions, sort of like Ido Portal plus the Olympics, right? You would see that this is an easy way for our elite athletes to work and integrate without having to do another thing, right?
So what I'm getting here is that everybody, regardless of age, should get down on the ground once a day and get up off the ground at some point.
You can use whatever you want to help you get up and down off the ground. So those of you listening, you're like, I can't do that. You know, there's a test we write about in the book that if you just do crisscross applesauce standing, you should be able to lower yourself to the ground. and stand back up without using your hands.
Okay, so cross the feet. For those that are just listening, cross the feet. Yep. And then just slowly lower yourself into a seated.
Don't collapse. Just lower yourself to the ground. And then without putting your hands down or knee down, can you stand back up?
And should one be able to do it with either foot over the other?
Seems like I should use my left leg and right leg equally, right? I shouldn't have a good side and a bad side. But what's interesting is the data, I think, is that, like, it's a nice predictor of all-cause mortality, morbidity. That's fine. But what it really hints at is your changes in how your body interacts with the environment.
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Chapter 4: What role does posture play in movement?
That's a warm-up by itself, right? That's not an issue for me. So you walked a mile to load those plates.
No, that's not an issue for me, but that's what you just said is a perfect opportunity for me to mention something that I've noticed, which prompts a question, which is I noticed that I have some asymmetry. My right shoulder naturally sits a little lower than my left, and whenever I get a little back tweak, it's always on the same side, et cetera, et cetera. I know this varies for everybody.
And I noticed that I was always picking up the weights and re-racking them.
because i re-rack my weights like a grown-up um re-racking them on the same side so i've made a point now to switch up you know which side i which side of my body i do them from yeah that's great um and notice i'm significantly weaker on one side of my body i mean not to the point where you know i have to use two different sets of uh dumb or two different dumbbells if i'm doing curls or something but just noticing these natural asymmetries starting to show up because i'm a right-hander or a
Who knows? Or I skateboarded. So I've spent a lot of my life, early life, with my left foot forward and my right foot pushing. And as a consequence, there are a lot of asymmetries. So what I've tried to do is correct those asymmetries in the between movement movements, but also to stagger my stance during curls and then switch it each time or maybe even overemphasize the weaker side.
I have no professional training in any of this. I've just... found that it's made for better posture, more evenly distributed strength. And I must say, all of that is based on teachings that I read in your books and through conversations with you about, hey, we have these natural imbalances, and there are little things that we can do that take moments that can correct those imbalances.
So if you would, could you sort of expand on the number and type of imbalances that you most commonly see and some ways for people to remedy them, excuse me?
Let's – if we just took the word imbalance and put it to the side for a second because it's sort of a nonspecific term. Like are we testing your hamstring to your quad? Like what's the ideal ratio here? Like if you're a professional pitcher, I hope your right arm looks different than your left arm, right? But what we can say is – Number one, imbalances don't necessarily cause pain.
Let's be clear about that. We should be using our time in the gym as training to find deficiencies and blind spots in our patterns, in our skill, in our brains feeling comfortable with a certain movement. And what you just hit was that it's, boy, it's really easy to get a lot of variability just doing the things I want to do anyway. So now I'm in a tandem stance. I skate left foot forward, right?
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Chapter 5: How can I enhance my pelvic floor health?
And really, frankly, the only safe place because there isn't contact and sport and we're not fighting and dancing and moving. And we can really do this controlled formal movement where we can really see inputs and outputs. I explained my mother-in-law a long time ago. what was happening when we were developing our model to understand movement.
And I explained it and she was like, oh, you mean it makes the invisible visible? That's right, is that this is a place to understand how your range of motion is changing, how your skills are changing, right?
Over the course of a season or the course of, you know, something going on in your life, a season in your life, suddenly you're like, wow, my left hip is a little tight or my left shoulder is, my internal rotation is going away. Hard to see when you're swimming, really easy to see when we dumbbell snatch.
And what we're trying to do then is take the gym, not only have it be a stimulus for adaptation, but have it be a really great place to uncover changes in my movement, changes in expression of that movement. And so really what you see – again, if I just do this one thing over and over again – That's patterning. That's repetition. That's practice, right?
And what you've done is just said, hey, let me change my brain. Let me open the door handle with my left side. And coming into the gym with that curiosity means that we can have seven bottom lines. We're working on your fascia. We're working on these energy systems. We're working on these movement skills. But simultaneously, we can have fun. We can work on understanding our range of motion.
So for me, I think it's easier to say let's frame mobility as do you – here's my definition. Do you have access to normative range of motion? The range of motion every physician, every physical therapist, every chiro agrees on. Shoulder mobility. So 180 degrees of flexion.
So for those listening, this is lifting your arm above head so you can bring your hand basically, you know, above the center of your head.
And what you can see right now is Andrew has his elbow bent, his head tipped to the side, his internally rotated. He's solving the problem, which is what his brain is saying. Compensation. Right? Oh, no, no, no. If you want to use the word compensation, I want to put that on you. But what I'd say is that's an incomplete position. Doesn't mean you have pain.
Doesn't mean you're not the world champion. But it means we may have some latent capacity we could chase. And the next question for me then is, what is it that's missing potentially in your training that we're not having this exposure? We're not doing enough close grip hanging. We're not doing seesaw press, right, where the arm is straight up. We're always gripping on a barbell.
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Chapter 6: What are the best practices for injury prevention?
It just may be that I'm using a different tool to have that isometric stimulus or that tempo moving slowly stimulus. So we like to say, let's use mobilizations mobilizing the tissues, why are we doing it? What are we trying to do? Well, pain is a good reason. And again, multifactorial, highly subjective, why do I have pain?
Well, I got in a fight with my wife and I didn't eat and I twisted my knee back in Vietnam and who knows, right? But what are the inputs that I have to self-soothe and desensitize? And it turns out a ball and a roller is a really good one. So I can use those to help myself feel better. Did that solve the problem? Did that solve two weeks of shitty sleep?
Did that solve my poor nutrition and lack of fiber? Did that solve the fact that I don't feel safe in this environment? No. But it got me a window of opportunity where I can go feel better in my body. Is anyone against that? No. Okay. So what we can also say is, hey, this would be a great way to do what? Restore your range of motion. A one tool and a system of tools. to get you to do what?
Have normative range again. For whatever reason, your lats are super stiff. Again, it's more complicated than that, but sometimes it's not more complicated than that. If I just get you getting some input into there, maybe I can restore that range of motion or create a window where you can go use it again.
Lastly, I would say is that it's a wonderful tool to decrease DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness. So in the evening, you blow out your quads, do a little soft tissue work, and what you'll see is maybe that's blood flow. Maybe it's non-threatening input. Maybe it's just massage. Maybe it's just the parasympathetic input that massage has, touch, right, just down-regulates.
Maybe those are the reasons I feel better. But the bottom line is, is that a good use of your time? Yes. Are all techniques on the roller the same? No. Right? And I think that's where we've lost our minds is that if you just rolled up and down on your calf, didn't do anything. I'm like, yeah, well, you just, what are you doing? Right? What if I rolled side to side?
And so suddenly we can start to layer in some really complex thinking around this. How about this? You have a roller out and I put my calf on there and I start rolling side to side. Should that be uncomfortable?
I'm guessing you're going to say no, but... Anytime I've used a roller, anytime I've used a roller, I'm like, man, that hurts.
That hurts. I don't want to do that. That sucks.
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Chapter 7: How to incorporate movement into daily life?
Layers of silk over steel springs. And what we see is that we are loading and training at such high intensity, so such density now, that our tissues get stiff. I'm just going to hang stiffness as, for whatever reason, high fibrotic, high –
density of tissues whatever the reason the tissues don't behave the way the joint system should right and that's a problem because my training shouldn't mitigate or attenuate or change my range of motion it can but now how am i keeping an eye on those changes or as you said earlier As I do a sport and I start to do a sport and specialize, I'm throwing, throwing, or I swim, or I kick on one side.
How can I start to identify as my body is changing and adapting that sport so I can drag myself back to sort of a greater readiness? And that's one of the reasons that that mobilization tool is such a powerful tool. Again, however you want to do it. I think it's useful for us when we have, I came up with this thing called the D2-R2 model because the other ray was taken, R2-D2.
So the first order of business is I want to desensitize if something hurts. If something hurts, let's desensitize it. I can do that all different ways. Scraping is powerful desensitization. Isometrics can be really useful. Rolling, BFR can give me desensitization. There's so many techniques to make my body- Blood flow restriction. Yeah, blood flow restriction.
So that no longer my brain is perceiving this as a threat. Because if you're in pain, you cannot generate the same amount of force or wattage or output, and your brain is going to start to truncate. It's going to start to lop off your movement solutions, right? It's just going to happen. So we want everyone to be saying, hey, we don't panic when we have pain.
We just treat it like another diagnostic tool. Then second D, right, we desensitize. And then we ask, is this something that'd be decongested? So decongestion means that oftentimes tissues that are swollen become more easily sensitized. Tissues that are swollen and congested don't heal as fast. If you have a swollen ankle, those collagen fibers will not knit together as fast as a, right?
If you have a joint that's swollen or a tissue that's swollen, your brain will shut down force production in and around that joint system. Is swelling an emergency? No. Is a swollen joint environment really healthy for the integrity and surface of the joint? No. We want to manage that.
But oftentimes when someone comes in and the tissue is congested, sometimes we say swelling and we think ankle, only capsular. But here we have, if you've ever flown on an airplane and had cankles, that's congested tissue.
If we manage that congestion, if we move those lymphatics along, muscle contraction drives the lymphatic drainage, the lymph system is the sewage system of the body, decongested tissues often express less pain.
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Chapter 8: What are the benefits of foam rolling?
Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, are vital for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells.
Drinking element dissolved in water makes it extremely easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning.
I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and therefore losing a lot of water and electrolytes. They have a bunch of different great tasting flavors of Element. They have watermelon, citrus, et cetera. Frankly, I love them all.
And now that we're in the winter months in the Northern hemisphere, Element has their chocolate medley flavors back in stock. I really like the chocolate flavors, especially the chocolate mint when it's heated up, so you put it in hot water, and that's a great way to replenish electrolytes and hydrate, especially when it's cold and dry outside, when hydration is especially critical.
If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash hubermanlab to claim a free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash hubermanlab to claim a free sample pack. As long as we're talking about posture, it feels like a good transition point to pelvic floor.
Years ago, and this is a plug for the material that you put out online and in books, but long before we met, I decided to sign up for your men's pelvic floor course. I sold our women's pelvic floor course two to one. It was so interesting because, you know... At that time, one could go online and learn a little bit about pelvic floor.
Everyone, and we talked about this with a couple different guests on this podcast, including the director of male sexual health. He's an MD, PhD, or at least an MD, as I recall, Mike Eisenberg at Stanford. We talked about this with Mary Claire Haver and other people in the female health domain.
I'm glad we're normalizing this conversation.
Yeah, we normalized this conversation. You know that the pelvic floor is rich with vasculature for blood flow and neural input for controlling muscles either passively or actively. I'll tell you, the number of people I know who have urinary issues, sexual dysfunction issues, I know because they tell me that they squat heavy in the gym, they do their Kegels and things like that.
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