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 discussed 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. Doctor 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 fashion. Today we also talked about faccia di 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 Juliet Starrett co-owned the ready state,
We provide a link to the ready. State in the show notes 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 Etc, 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 outsize 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. It is however, a part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's
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Welcome, thank you. My friend.
And why didn't get you on here for a long time? For many reasons? Not the least of which is that you've just pioneered so many areas of Health.
And fitness that I don't even know where to start, frankly, but let's jump in with the Big M with movement. You're an expert in dissecting complex movement, figuring out how people can move better. And also figuring out how people who are doing what they think. Are. Simple movements are actually making their life either more complex or more painful than it needs to be. So,
You're also known for helping people with so-called Mobility which of course falls under the umbrella of movement and I can't see somebody do a foam roll or anything with a lacrosse ball, where they're loosening up or talking about fashion without also thinking about you. So that should frame today's conversation at least partially well to kick things off.
When you look at how most people
sit.
Walk and do their quote, unquote, exercise, resistance training and or cardiovascular, hopefully, and cardiovascular training. What are some of the most common problems that you see? Is it imbalance like leaning? To one side is that their bodies are
trained into a symmetry is there any way to
kind of, you know, Mass diagnose everybody all at once in this first question,
let me borrow a couple analogies from of my favorite people. Katie Bowman.
And first thing is, she will point out and it's not a Perfect Analogy. So bear with us, is this notion of meccano transduction, which means that at a cellular level your tissues, some of your tissue specifically need mechanical, input to express themselves, want a strong tendon, how to get a strong tendon? You have to load it, right? Does it do tendon things as it is it lengthening under load? Does it express shortening under load? Is you isometric holds so we can start at that level. She
Points out that if you put a get not a Perfect Analogy but if you put an orca into captivity over while that or caffeine will start to fold over folded fin syndrome. Let's it's nicer than Flopper floppy. Fins, and dramas 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 Finn. And so what happens is that collagen breaks down we start to see changes in that.
In that expression of that. So what we can start to say is again that romanticizing the pleistocene era when human beings were paleo and but what is it? That we need in our daily dose lives 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, ligaments can do in faccia, di that is can be springy if borrowing.
Our sort of Katie Bowman is mm, 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, very few words. So I sit, I stand, I walk very slowly. I sit I stand and 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 ride him on an elliptical, which doesn't actually asked me to have any hip extension and suddenly you can see that our movement language which were really codifying under
Density load, right? We're coming 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 their then. We start to lose some 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 aset, establish things at low loads and low speeds. You can get away with everything. Why? Because this body is rad, and it's design is 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 cut off your hand would grow back the next day, right? You would think about the Falls you took skating and you'd be like, that's suck. Next day, Put Your Shoulder back in, you just kind of respawn. So what is it? That we need to put into our movement diet?
It and then we can start to separate out. Should that be exercised or should that be movement? And now, the real filter that we should be beginning these real and honest conversations about is what is it in the environment? Given that I'm a busy working person and I maybe have some agency in the morning and maybe have some agency in the afternoon but let's take exercise out of it. The one our discrete working on Zone to cardio working. Alright, my evidence based practice, what should I be doing the rest of the time? So for example, one of the things that we're huge fans of
Evening sitting on the ground for 20 or 30 minutes
in the in what
cross-legged? Yes, squatting, yes, long set sidesaddle 1998 time. You need to fidget fidget. What you'll see is you start to accumulate exposure which I think in my world view is the first order of magnitude. And problem solving is, how do we have the human be exposed to the thing we're trying to change or improve or restore normative ranges? So
that would be in the evening just getting down
on the floor.
Yeah, that that behavior alone, cultures that toilet on the ground. Sleep on the ground. We start to see fall risk in our elderly populations, attenuate 20 approximately zero lower hip, oh, a lower low back away, and it may just be that we're using and touching some shapes. And our bodies are saying, hey, let's just keep that around. Let's, let's, let's normalize what the hip should be able to do in terms of your connective tissue, think about, you know, the idea,
That we're loading, you passively actively whatever that you're saying to your brain must. You know this this is a quote from one of my PT instructors and this is really important. People. Take this away. They should listen to this muscles and tissues like obedient dogs at no age. Do you stop adapting annoys? You stop healing those things? Slow down. It's a little bit harder to have the same adaptation. We did, we weren't in full-fledged puberty, but you can always adapt in the first order of business. If you spend 20 or 30 minutes,
it's sitting on the ground, you're going to start to see that hamstring starts feel better, my hips start to feel a little better because I'm just spending time in these ranges and my body's going to start to adapt. As I increase my movement
language, would you extend what you just said to? I'm like, if somebody has a hardwood floor and maybe a little low power rug or something like that and they're going to want to watch a podcaster or movie or show and evening, they stretch out and, you know, like on the, on their belly, like sort of up, sure up, dog or Cobra or whatever it's called. So so basically any kind
Movement where you're on the ground, any kind of squatting stretch and maybe they start to stretch a bit here and there.
Oh, so now we're into the real magic, the behavior where we're going to stack these behaviors. So if you have to get up and down off the ground plus 1, right? I got to get up and down off the ground every day. So, if you're an older person who may have gotten off the ground and I'm older, I'm just, I'm over 50, you may not have gotten them down off the ground for 100 years. You just don't do it anymore, right? We want to hear why I think MMA is. So
Raising you have to get up and down off the ground a lot, right? If you do, go to Jets, right? How about yoga? How about Pilates? You know, like, well, there's a lot of time organizing on the ground. So a lot of people either all fully said, Hey, how do we help the person organizing gravity first and foremost, right? Then we have someone like Phillip Beach. Who is this? Incredible who wrote this book on functional embryology? Which I highly recommend called move my muscles and meridians I think muscles.
But his hypothesis is that one of the ways that the body Tunes itself is by being on the ground. Again, restoring native ranges re approximating joints, right? Kneeling walking in. And if you just took a step back and said, what's it look like for last 10,000 years, you know, when have we 10,000 years ago? My understanding is that I'm a little fatter your femurs a little longer, but we're pretty much the same. People. Maybe I don't digest milk yet, maybe that's the understanding, but ultimately,
Lee what behaviors have changed were off the ground. And so this is an easy don't need any equipment. Can drop this in. I can answer my emails watch TV. That seems like the how we're going to improve and be able to start to untangle this very complex query. Not when people have a lot going
on, I love this.
And as you point out, sorry the rollers already there. So you're sitting there in the rollers there, another barrier to adherence knocked out. So you're like, I might as well just what Steph today.
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 as like, keeping you being able to access the full sort of Arsenal, what you can do with your body, this Moving Solutions, sort of like Eagle Port, all 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. So what I'm getting here is that everybody regardless of age
Should get down on the ground once a day and hundred get up off the
ground. And at some point, right? Will use whatever you want to help you get up and off the ground. So those are listening 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 Guys across across the beach. Yes, sir. For those that are just listening cross the feet. Yep. And then just slowly lower
yourself until seat.
Collapse just lower yourself to the ground and then without putting your hands down or knee down. Can you stand back up
and should it 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 really hints at is your changes in how your body interacts with the environment that because you've adapted.
The skill that you've done a hundred thousand times ten thousand times, the kids and crisscross applesauce, you suddenly are confronted as an adult with a skill. You can no longer perform and it doesn't require massive. Hip range of motion doesn't require a full range of motion, your ankles. It's actually a really fair test. But if you're missing some of these end ranges, you're going to struggle and it's nice. Now that I have this like, what's the session cost? I'm become a love cycling. Mountain biking Is My Jam, but if I ride my bike a ton, my hips, get super tight. But if I have
Assessments just like Vital Signs. Blood pressure 120 over 80 s a good blood pressure but it's a nice decent reference. Now I create some movement minimums that help me understand how my body is interacting, with stress environment nutrition exercise, etc. For some
people, maybe me if I were to, you know, sit cross-legged on the ground for a bit and then stand up. Oh, yeah, it hasn't been in a while like kind of like just kind of take but I consider myself pretty, you know.
No pretty mobile. Once I warm up, I can run for an hour and a half jog for an hour and a half. Once I get warmed up in the gym, I can move it. What? At least for me is is satisfying amounts of weight so I wouldn't say that I'm out of shape. I wouldn't say I'm in spectacular shape. Is it normal for us after a certain age, to kind of feel like we Creek or ache as we move in and, or out of a new movement. I'm is that is that does it fit with being still a healthy person? Or should we just not have any of those kinds of like, that was
Like, got it like,
that was rough? Yeah, super
rough. Maybe, you know, sitting for 30 minutes, then standing up and feeling like you have to kind of open yourself up with a can opener, so to
speak. Well, a couple things there one is, you said New Movement. So one of the ways we Define best athlete is who's the person who can transfer the skill, their current skill set and pick up the new skill, the fastest. So what I'll say is if you want to test how fit you are how good your program is going to jump someone else's program, let me know how that goes. Can you perform the skills are? Are you skilled?
You don't job
chuckling because I join Cameron Haynes for his Weight Workout, which is, you know, High repetition circuit work for the went on for about 45 minutes. None of the weights were particularly heavy but it's just non-stop. I was sore and I normally don't get sore for more than a half day, if it all sort of doesn't really ever been an issue for me, I was sore for almost a week and a half maybe two weeks, but it was, it was insane. It wasn't
organized this. So good opens up the next thing, right? Founder of crossover, Greg Glassman, one of my
Earliest influences, coaches says we failed the margins of our experience. So what you just saw was hey here is this metabolic pathway range work that I am not inoculated myself too and I think we're at an interesting place where Fitness has become hobby. Fitness has become sort of my my personal Pastime and I can go to the gym and I can look jacked, you're jacked and tan, you're very handsome, 49 year old. But we
Start to see is the things that make us look aesthetically pleasing, or I'm functional enough isn't the same thing as preparing for sport or transferring to new skill. And in fact, I would say, if I had a spectrum of activities, I put like, Fitness thing over here. Like I go to a camp. I just do a man wraps. I Breathe hard. It's super fun. I'm in Zoom by. I like a mirroring and I have positive regard. I see my friends on the other side. We have very much sport-specific training. The only goal is to
Support the sport if you're an elite, soccer player. We have goals offseason but in the in season, it's to support your body to win. But one step back from that and called Sports preparation training, which is where we start to see, sort of some really pattern interference between what the internet says, I should do to have huge quads and the best way to create an elite Sprinter or an elite football or right and that Sports preparation training. I can be think of it g PP plus, looking at positions. And how things
Spher a friend's Bosch is a great example of sports preparation, trains a Dutch thinker. His books are great and you'll see understand that really what we're trying to do is in sports preparation and say hey what is this complex system in front of us? What's the minimal amount of input so that we can still go and project ourselves into the world through Sport and performance and on the other side suddenly we do come a confronted with how I'm doing this thing. And I jump in with my friend and I get brutalized which is actually a problem.
We have with people really good fit athletes and I throw them into like a group fitness class and they can do so much work that they wreck themselves for weeks and that's probably what happened. You're so strong and you know how to just feel uncomfortable and he just did this freakish amount of work without giving yourself a chance to adapt and that happens all the time.
So going back to the gang down on the ground once a day. Oh yeah. And then getting up I'd like to just I want to get to Fitness and sports training.
As as well. But is there another practice, or, or set of practices related to where we do our profession work? Yeah. So I can stand, I have a standing desk. Have a drafting table and I'll sit stand, I'll stand for a while. Sit stand for a while. Sit, I have a stool, I like to be a stool that's where my back is not supported and so I try and Vary as much as I can. That and thanks to you. I got thanks to your recommendation that is. I bought one of those little kickstand
That goes underneath the desk from Rogue. I don't have any Financial relationship to Rogue. I've sent them. You're
making $10. As I said, just a no, no, I said them. I sent the money like everyone
else would one could probably build one to. This is all fidget stand. I love that thing because it reminds me that, you know, to swing my swing, my foot while I'm there while you can while I'm standing. So that's what I've done to try and keep some Mobility during the day.
And I want to double click on that because that's really amazing. Because what you've done is said hey I can't control this aspect of my work, I have to do some deep work. That means I net might need
To perch or I might have to sit in a conference table and then what we can start to say as well, what other choice do I have? And, and now, if we, we work with a typical person, you say, you have some agency before you leave for work and then your agency doesn't return to the get home, right? What are you going to do during the day to keep the body moving, right? So that it's easier to escape to your afternoon class. I think that's the thing and what you've just described is what my wife would call a real movement Rich environment. How do I pepper? The
I meant with inputs so that I'm not just in a tiny movement language. I love that, I want to go back to the sitting on the ground. Should it be painful? Should it be sore? One aspect of your physiology? That will not change? Doesn't have to change. Is your range of motion as you get older? We should be able to maintain our range of motion. So what's interesting is that if we suddenly confronted with tasks that asked us to be in certain positions that were not comfortable with, we're going to be sore, you bet.
You have to squeeze your butt and something you said earlier. Like, once I'm warmed up, I love that phrase. All right, once I've had my 27 supplements, in my coffee and my activation, I've gotten to my son. I can do anything. I feel great. The real question is, should I have to do all that stuff for high performance? Absolutely. But should I have to do all of this prep to have native range of motion to have Baseline range of motion? Probably,
not
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Well, as long as we're there, I'm just going to tell you what's worked best for me in terms of warming up. And I'd love to know your thoughts years ago. I think it was Charles poliquin post or something like that where he was suggested to do relatively low repetition warm-up, love it as opposed to going in and doing, you know, 15 reps then 10 then 8 or whatever it is. And I've found over the years, what's allowed me to get strongest and stay strongest for me.
Is to sure I'll go in and do the first set of a movement of resistance training movement, maybe eight repetitions just to get some blood flowing and remind my brain the practice. But you know what, their price range of motion is right, then I'll do maybe just, you know, 542 repetitions on of subsequent three sets. So 54 and then to repetition sets with heavier loads and it's just a prepare, my nervous system for heavier loads. And then when I start my actual quote, unquote works,
That's,
I can get a lot more real work done. And this for me was like, spit in the face of everything I had read everything, I'd seen that. You need to do high repetitions or market and it has allowed me to progress more or less continuously over the decades that I've been training and I'm not a natural athlete. I'm just not I've trained for a long time but I would never fall under what you would call like natural athlete. I don't have a low recovery quotient all that stuff. And so for me, it was like a shocker, but it makes total sense. Prepare the nervous.
For the work you're about to do and don't follow some preconceived idea that you have to do high repetition warm-up or even moderate repetition warm-up and lo and behold you get much stronger and if you want to grow muscle you can grow more muscle. Why haven't we heard more about this? Why don't people and fitness, talk more? I know you do and please do talk about the nervous system and the fact that it's not just all about warming up and getting blood flow. It's really about preparing the brain and spinal cord and all the stuff in
there.
Let's say a couple variables there. What's your training age, right? If I can take a beginner and you and the same thing we can make big jumps, you don't have been. We've developed together a decade ago like we can just go, you know, our bodies the patterns are well and grains are tissues have exposure here, right? There's some things we can do it. So I love that you're starting to see that what's the minimal amount of warm up to to do the task and on some days you may be sore maybe Stephanie takes a little more time to go get right on.
It one of the things I think we have this opportunity to do is put play back into warm-ups. So one of the things is that I suspect and please correct me if I'm wrong, you don't find a lot of joy and doing these like, wrote a be, the world's greatest stretch want. Why do the active like, it's not that fun. So what let me talk about my experience working with a team at Berkeley
I had this shout-out to the Women's Water Polo team at Berkeley. Who are my just total family? These women are incredible. But it came into the sport and looked around and I saw really ineffective warm-ups that weren't a good use of time that didn't prepare us to get into a fight in 20 minutes or 30 minutes later. So, if you went through your warm up and said, I'm going to be in a fight,
Am I prepared for that or not? And that's a nice like rubric to say. I'm a nervous system arousal. I have a little sweat on I've practiced. Right? You know, you know, I've touched some positions and shapes but you know, what? I see is that there's in the typical training session, there's a lot of work to get done. So now I think training has become very, very dense, you know, here's this piece, here's this piece. Now I did success your work. I got to hit these these card and
The warm-up for me, has been one of the last places where I can get you to explore new movement. Something you saw on the internet play around. If you came to my gym, you know, where we came to my house. Now I'd be like let's go through the medicine ball for 5 minutes and there's no wrong way. But I want you to start to explore speed, I want to explore catch an object and going fast and what we haven't done. And I suspect, I wouldn't say that your warm up is the best way. I say it's one way to get to the thing that we want faster.
And potentially you stop doing what didn't work and what didn't serve you, which I really want people to understand is that if you're not blind going through some program, I want you to say does this serve me because my experience working now, 20 years with the best teams and athletes and organization. On the planet is athletes, do what work and they stop doing, what doesn't work. Isn't that interesting? Right? So what I love is that you started to get under heavy loads relatively quickly and movements, you had real competency and exposure
Yes, because what we want to do is come back to say, what's the least amount of work I can do to have the biggest adaptation and three hours in the gym, doesn't fit into your life. And it doesn't fit into typical person's life. And theoretically, you're gonna have to go do a sport. So you're going to have to recover from this Sport and this training session, right? You were like, hey I can't even handle this high volume, you know, it's a ding on me too. I can't handle the same high volumes. My friends can so wasting your time in quotation marks with
Of high-volume sets of an empty barbell. Might have been useful at some point and maybe doesn't serve you as well now or because you have to put so many plates on that bar. That's just that's a warm-up by itself, right? That's not actually walked a mile to load those play. Now that's not an issue for me but that's a perfect. What you just said is a
perfect opportunity for me to mention something that I've noticed which prompts the question, which is, I noticed that I have some asymmetry, right? Shoulders naturally sits a little lower than my left and whenever I get a little backed week, it's always on the same side, etcetera, Etc. I know this is very
For 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, re-racking them on the same side. So I made it a point now to switch up you know, which side which side of my body. I do them from yeah, that's Grand 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 dumb or two different dumbbells. If I'm doing curls or something, but just noticing these natural asymmetry, starting to show.
Because I'm a right-hander or who knows where I skateboarded. So I, you know, I've spent a lot of my life early life, with my left foot forward. And my right foot pushing, and as a consequence, you are a lot of asymmetry. 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 and switch hit each 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 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 here, 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 expand on the number and type of imbalances that you most commonly, see, and some ways for people to remedy the remedy them, scuse 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, what's the ideal ratio here? Like, if you're a professional picture, I hope your arm 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, let's be clear about that. We should be using our time in the gym as training to find efficiencies and blind spots in our patterns, in our skill and our, you know, Ann Arbor our brains feeling comfortable to 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.
Anyway, so now I'm in a tandem stance. I skate left foot forward, right? But you know, suddenly that's my dominant stance. If you're going to ask me to do anything of consequence, I'm going to adopt that stance but suddenly I get to have some exposure here. So what's the point of the gym? What's the point of training just to work on some cardio? Respiratory output? You know that the sign says, is it to move into Play? It's You know, the brains of, you know, problem-solving machine. Let's give it some problems to solve. So you suddenly
Have a new problem to solve and I would even say that weakness isn't even the right idea of just like here is a cop pattern that I'm not as effective at as efficient at. So when we go into the gym, sort of with this great curiosity, then it's a really rich place and it 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'll
In my mother-in-law a long time ago, what was happening when we were developing, our model to understand movement and I was and I explained it and she was like, Oh, you mean to make 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, something you're like, wow, my left hip is 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, right?
And what we're trying to do then is take the gym, not only have it be a seamless 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 be coming to the gym. With that Curiosity means that we can
Have seven bottom lines. Working on your faccia, we're working on these Energy Systems we're working on these movements 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, let's frame Mobility. As do you. Here's the, my definition to have access to normative range of motion, the range of motion, every physician every physical therapist, every Cairo. Agrees on shoulder is 180°, hoop of
flexion. So for those
Seeing this is lifting your arm above head so you can bring your your hand basically, you know, above the, the center of your head.
And what you see right now is Andrew, has elbow bent has helped head tip to the side, his internally rotated, he solving the problem, which is what his brain is saying, compensation,
right?
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 your have pain, doesn't mean you're not the world champion, but it means we may have some latent capacity.
Can 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 or always creeping on a barbell, right? I'm not handling enough, dumbbells or kettlebells overhead and then we can say, well, do I need some position transfer exercises? Mobility work to restore that so we can use it again. And then more importantly, how does that turn up for you in a way that impacts your sport or your job?
That's what's really interesting. Is that make sense?
Yeah. So what I'm hearing is that when we go into the gym or whatever we do R resistance training work that we should think about it as a place to EAS perform to exceed our previous you know, reps and sets and right. Yeah because that's fun. It's
part of the fun and easy to measure. Hardly seemed, are you getting better at soccer? I don't know, but I put another kill on my bench today like that's fun.
Lex Friedman. Who, of course, everybody knows from the likes Freeman podcast likes to make fun of Americans because he's Russian, but he's actually
American now for being Meatheads because we like to spend so much time in gyms working out as opposed to doing sports and I assure him that I've also done and do Sports now, but he likes to make that point and I think it's a fair one in that. Well, he's a Brazilian jiu-jitsu, guys. So, in any event, the gym is also a place for diagnosis to to diagnose where we don't have as much range of motion as we could. And you know, that's very
Helpful, I think for people to hear because most people are are time limited. They don't have, if they're getting their, you know, two or three resistance training workouts per week, plus 2, or 3, cardiovascular training workouts, you on there. Listening to Peter, TS other trying to hang from a bar for, you know, 90 seconds or more. And there, you know, doing some farmer carries and they're doing their Zone 2 and the throne on a weight vest and, you know, and they got it. Either fidgeting under their desk. You know, at some point you can start to understand why people are like, whoa, this is starting to become overwhelming, what you're talking about is going and doing your typical workout.
Paying attention to where some for lack of a better word. I'll call them asymmetries or not full range of motion being expressed where that might be happening. I love, I keep coming back to this, but this thing about getting down under the ground for 30 minutes, each night while watching TV, or while maybe even while eating dinner while, talk to your family or partner, I think it's fantastic. It also gives me an excuse to push the sofas off to the side of the room because I have this weird neuroticism about furniture in the middle of the room. So I'm imagining
getting mats on the down in the down on the floor of the
living room and suddenly we're not programming another thing. That's I think one of the things that's happened and it's a good thing. It's a feature of the system strengthen issuing last 20 years, has become very sophisticated so Juliet and I my wife and CEO open our gym in
2005. This was the CrossFit gym that
Sarah the first video. That's right. Yeah. It's a beautiful location. 21st CrossFit in the world.
Early, but we couldn't buy a kettlebell in San Francisco. We had to drive to Santa Cruz
that says, a lot about San Francisco. I can say that because I'm from the bay area, but,
but you, they was one place in. Santa Cruz has sold and played against sports that imported these Russian kettlebells. Thank you Pavel. And we had to make this Trek down to buy them. So the fitness I think we I bought my first pair of Olympic lifting shoes out of the back of someone's car like a drug deal like Olympic lifting. Yeah. Like you just couldn't buy my last sold shoes. No I'm like actually Olympic lifting show with like a heel but like
like you can buy those at like three different stores in Malibu right now. Like you go right over there. There's it's we've normally you can buy a kettle balls at Target so the the world has become much more sophisticated. Sometimes like overhead squat is a good example. Fantastic diagnostic tool tells us a lot
of bar held overhead squat squat down a
simple. All you have to do is have normal range of motion and your your joint issues. Well, it helps genetics to say I was bending for. I was big, but
You know, the idea here though is, let's go ahead and also put skill back into this, but most people weren't overhead squatting.
You know, at all it wasn't part of their language. Now everyone knows what an overhead squat is Right, Dan? John CrossFit all the Olympic lifters been doing this forever. But what we are seeing is that the Natural Evolution of fitness and strength conditioning is that we've become, we've gotten really decorative in our room. So, we create this room that's just every inch has a knick-knack has an assistance. This is my tip raised as my neck thing, it's very decorative experience. And instead of asking what was
Essential in terms of energy systems in positions that I can train so that I could go use those credits, you know, for lack of a better word, it's Fitness has become very recursive. I have this Zone to so I can do some more Zone to something more Zone, 2 or 5 pull-ups because they beget more pull-ups instead of. Well how did that make you swim? What's the minimum amount of time we can spend in the gym so that you can go Express that Lexus right in a sport or an activity and look, there are times in your life where the gym is the only thing you got, you know,
Juliet 91. We had two kids in a baby or two kids in our businesses. We did the ten ten ten at ten which is like 10 air, squats, 10, kettlebell swings, 10 pull-ups at 10 p.m. for 10 minutes and I was like Elite. My fitness is do that every day. Well, I just did what I could do it right because that's all I could fit in. So, you know I think what's happened is we have now sold people. This idea that Fitness happens in one hour block and if it's not an hour, you know, then it's not worth doing and if you kept it
bar loaded in your garage, you can walk out there and do sets in between making dinner. You kept a kettle on your kitchen. You could do Pavel has four swings on the minute for 20 minutes and at least have some exposure loading. So a long way around the barn of saying, I want to protect your gym time because it's really sacred amazing time where you can have fun, explore ranges, get strong, get jacked feel great about yourself, interact with your friends. And what I don't want to do is encroach anymore on that magic time because we have a lot to get done.
The gym physiologic, if we're going to compete against these other teams, if we're going to beat Stanford we're going to need to really maximize the time the gym. So that means we need to push out some of these other behaviors. So we're not stacking them in and they're a roading the time we could be squatting or benching or cleaning or running or sprinting or cutting or playing.
You mentioned warming up with play, which I think is a wonderful concept and presumably brings about more Dynamic movement. 100% and another reason I like it is that
I loathe warming up aside from the types of warm-ups. I just described and I hate it. And I'm beginning to realize that the way I've been training even though it's been. I would say useful. And and successful for where I've been. I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do heading into the new year love. This is not like a New Year's episode and there's this is a you know Evergreen because it's you but we have a new year coming. A lot of people are going to naturally Mark the time during and after the holidays is a
Transition point and if one wanted to start to not necessarily completely restructure their Fitness but wanted to start incorporating a few things. So we've got sitting down in the evening for 30 minutes, we got incorporating play into the warm-up. What would that look like? Are we taking a tennis ball and bouncing it off the ground? We setting some rule in playing a game. Sure. What if I'm alone in my playing a little will handball type game against the wall?
Absolutely see something. They're not want to learn this skill. This is time to put it in.
I'm gonna talk him on my brilliant friend David wek. He has something called rope flow that he created, and it's just a piece of climbing rope and he will talk about all the things that will do for me. I get 1,000 pmf patterns, I tie my upper body into my lower my body into my lower body. I give you
explain pmf. Sorry acronym.
Sorry, it started. When that's a model of facilitating. Movement developed a Kaiser. Vallejo it
By not in Cabot. I think maybe I'm getting confusing. Those and anyway, the bottom line is this, how do we help the body restore Movement by using its own positional awareness? Got it? So if you've ever done a hamstring stretch we're someone holds you and you resist that contract. Relax is a style. That's a technique born out of
pmf, got it. Sorry to internal problem. Okay, so he's got these ropes and and
so suddenly like I use this with all my teams is suddenly I'm spinning ropes. I'm
And thousands of evolutions of the risk turning the elbow turning the shoulder turning. I'm generating speed and weird positions that would be vulnerable. And as effective at high load high stakes, I get to twist, I can tie my eyes into it, I can develop my stance, and in five minutes and messing around, you're like, oh I feel good and we've added some speed to that, right? Because a lot of the warm-ups I see people doing like, hey there was no speed, you know, what sport is speed and you haven't added
The velocity to your training. So where we going to do that?
I love this. I'm excited too
Dave. Dave whack does a lot of amazing things. His rope is a foundational piece of my if you work with me you have shoulder pain and neck pain. You're going to get my shoulder spin up or David wax, wrote flow every day. That's part of our homework. What are we going to do to give you exposure and restore what you're supposed to with your body?
So, walk into the gym, use the bathroom, hydrate, whatever it is, you need to do and then 5 to 10 minutes of some Play Type die.
Namek after the wrong medicine ball around, jump on a mini trampoline, pick up a barbell do a complex, do some breath-hold work that's a perfect place to lay out all the breath. Hold work. I think they call it dry face breath-holding, right? Is this Dynamic apnea work where you basically holding your breath. So for example, with our teams, we try to, I try to have this is a magic number seven, sort of hypoxic events where we do something on a breath. Hold. Until the athlete has a crisis and has
As to breathe and part of that is I want to get the brain ready for these high, CO2 levels, right? And I want to challenge respiration and it's so easy. Get on the bike, here's something everyone can do for five minutes. I want you to take a 10-second, inhale, on the bike. Hold your breath. As long as you can. When the bomb goes off in your face,
We'll cover knows only started the next one, the next minute. And what you're going to see is wow that was really uncomfortable, really psychologically. Preparing myself to get into a fight that came from the French freedivers. One of the coaches. I was working this like here's something we need to do with our with our French freedivers. I was like, this is so good. Mackenzie Laird Hamilton with off the people who've been exposing us to Dynamic. Apnea work is amazing, but that's another example of something I can do. Instead of mindlessly just being on, and I got to get a sweat.
I'm like, let's go ahead and just layer in play and
destruction. I love it.
Do not lay on the ground and foam roll. Let me say that again, do not lay on the ground fun. Well, that's the worst way to get ready for a
fight ever.
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R8 sleep, currently ships in the USA Canada, UK select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eight. Sleep.com hubermann somehow when we talk about how it's not a coincidence you became synonymous with foam rolling it because swear on my life synonymous with you, that's okay. That's I mean it's not an if it's okay, with me, they weren't saying about me, but I was about to say it's okay. You know, any time somebody goes public facing and starts to do a try and educate people.
Well, you know people there certain things that are sticky, they have like high say Lance like yes, I like to get into a cold plunge but how I how Andrew huberman became associated with coal plunging or buying a goal plunges is wild? I mean sure I own one and you know this sort of thing and I think they're great for shifting your state but it's hardly the Cornerstone of my life or my or my existence but I love it, I use it. But I think foam rolling. I think looked different enough from what people had not seen before.
And it, you know, these things, just they have a stickiness to them. Who knows why what is the deal with foam rolling is, is there a utility to foam rolling? Absolutely. Is there a wrong way to do
it? No, but there's way. That's not a great use of your time. Okay, right. So we're all looking at is we have finite amount of time and what's my goal to quickly? Touch my whole body? You know, what are we trying to do? So if I was using soft tissue mobilization and
Using a roller or ball or something? What's my goal here? Well, I think the research is very clear can help with pain and restore range of motion again, very clear and I want to point out sort of one of my research friends, Brent, Brooke Bush, the brook Bush Institute, has incredible summaries of musculoskeletal care. Brent is a genius and if you go on his site, there's a little hourglass, and you can search like trigger points and you'll see all of the Deep dive research analysis of the meadow.
Research, like you be like, okay this is really excellent and and it is tricky because you know what doesn't work for my body or wasn't a good use for time now is useless and it's easy to show on the internet. So what's our goal, if I was in pain and is about to exercise, a quick two or three-minute intervention working on, let's call it desensitization of the tissues. Let's let's be mechanism agnostic for a second and say that's a really low level and to entry
A highly effective way for you to facility feel better. So we create a window of opportunity to move. That's really cool. I love that. No physical therapist in the room. No one went blind. He didn't dislocate, right? So that could be a really excellent, use of some soft tissue work. The same way a boxer would go, or I'm a fighter or the Olympic lifters in China, they have people who are giving non-threatening input to the body to tell the brain. It's a for to rehydrate something or get some not again is it just
Aeolus. So that the brain says, it's safe. Sure. Are we restoring how the tissue slide and glide? Sure. A lot of times, I think, if you look at any of the mobility work, I'll just put writ large really comes down to just doing a couple things. Most of them are just isometrics. So we have a lot of isometrics, which everyone can agree is good stuff and we do a lot of tempo work. That's really just moving slowly through range. It just may be that I'm using a different tool to have that isometric stimulus.
That, 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 while I got in a fight with my wife and I didn't eat and I you know, twisted my knee back in Vietnam and you know who knows, right. But what are the inputs that I have to self-soothe and desensitized and turns out a ball and roller is a really good.
One. So I can use those to help myself feel better. Does that solve the problem? Did that solve two weeks of shitty sleep to. That's all my poor nutrition and lack of fiber. That solve fact, 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? Right for whatever reason.
Your last or super stiff, your doesn't. Again, it's more complicated than that but sometimes it's not more complicated than that. And if I just get you getting some input into their maybe we 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. Dom's 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.
Or 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. Or all techniques on the roller, the same know. Right. And I think that's where we've lost our minds. Is that if you have, you just rolled up and down your calves didn't do anything. I'm like, yeah. Well you just what are you doing, right? What if I rolled side to side?
This was something we can start to layer in some really complex thinking around this. How about this? You, 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 well anytime I've used a roller anytime, I've used a roller and that
I heard that sucks.
Well, I mean, I don't mind it. Like it's not like the kind of it's not like level level 8 pain or anything. It's just it's sort of like, it feels very localized. Yeah, even if the rollers are big fat Costello, the Bulldog sighs roller. Little feels like someone's kind of needing down in between my muscle fibers. And then I
Hard to think. Maybe I just have like low fiber density and if I were Mark Bell or something, then this would feel comfortable. But, you know, I always feel like the rollers going down to the bone
case of lfd fiber density. So, you know what? I think we can do, is let's establish some, some some guidelines for people because this is, this is one of the ways that we can feel better our home without bourbon without ibuprofen without th see, like, we need to give people some tools that don't like
that. Aren't without having to buy a saint, if you can afford one.
Great. But not everyone. I mean this whole thing was on a love song has but doesn't say, you know, well until very recently my life like I couldn't afford a sauna until very recently, you know. Even as a tenured professor at Stanford I'll just say that right? You can actually
be angry at your parents for not giving you a
song, you know, when I was a kid my dad and I used to go to the Y in the evening. Sometimes I was a little and I'd shoot baskets or he would he would lift weights Nautilus machines back then. Yeah and then get brutal and weekend and then we sit in the sauna or that it was a
hard time you had a different set of trauma traumatic.
Rancic sitting in the sun, why? No, actually, I learned
how I learned how to make I called men. I learned how men over over 40 spoke in 1985. There you go. There you go.
If everyone had a roller and a ball, there's a lot of dysfunction and discomfort we can manage. If you push on at issue, we expect that tissue to be painless to compression or on
Not uncomfortable compression again. Don't pain is a word. I don't want to set that up, but you shouldn't be uncomfortable to compression. What's nice is that if I push on something on, doing is creating an isometric, it's just a vector isometric. Instead of pulling an isometric, through the length of the tissue, I'm putting it in a different Vector, an angle, so that would just be one. I could start there and if it was uncomfortable, well, guess what? Now I can get my nervous system involved. So I can teach my brain, that it's safe to create a contraction here. So what do I do? It's Flex
Flex it, hold it for four
seconds. This is very basic, I realized, but for many people there, either already foam rolling and doing it incorrectly, or they're not foam rolling. We want them to do it correctly. So, if I understand correctly, it's quote unquote, okay, to flex, the muscle that you have in contact with the foam roller while you're rolling.
If I find something that's uncomfortable or stiff, or doesn't feel like my other side, I'm going to stop found a place to work. I'm going to build. Take a big inhale. So I take a four second. Inhale
I want to teach myself that I need to be able to breathe in this position. My one of my, you know, friends, Greg Cook is like, if you can't breathe in a position, you don't own a position. You know, it sounds very Iyengar to, but we're going to do is, we're going to say it's okay to breathe here and I'm going to contract here and then I'm going to slowly relax, and soften that's Tempo, that's moving slowly. And I can handle higher, loads and what will end up happening is if I repeat that cycle, two or three times, guess what? My brain desensitizes that change?
His range of motion my brain Suddenly It's like that's not a problem anymore. So we just move on and in a two or three cycles of that contraction. Breath-hold long. Exhale that starts to sound familiar, right? How do I calm down? Long exhales. I'm not trying to spin up. I'm trying to say this is this is safe. I've done that with my breath. I've done that with contraction. I'm just getting input in, just just touch to my body especially on parts that maybe don't bark at me very often, right?
Shocked to learn that sometimes, when they have knee pain, how stiff their quads are, and then we can test it, load it, feel it palpated. And like, those things are just stiff, and when we unsticking them, whatever technique you want to use restore sliding surfaces, get neural input in there. We create range of motion. Suddenly, we change emotion Dynamic, improved efficiency. The brain says, hey, that's no longer a threat or were experiencing that as a new pattern or position that be enough to reduce your
Pain. But pain isn't the only reason we're mobilizing. We're mobilizing so that we can reduce session cost. So we can work out harder the next day and keep an eye on our minimums of our of our range of
motion love this. And now another just very basic question because I'll be honest, I haven't foam roll much in my life
and it doesn't have to be a big formal everyone. Sometimes those big white, those are pool noodles, right? That's what it was for Ike made in Killeen Texas as like a
Cheering byproduct and someone's like we could put these in the pool and then some physical therapist is like sweet. Like that thing's way too big and too hard and 2 square and two soft. Like there's a whole bunch of things like sometimes need an elbow, sometimes need a forearm. Sometimes you need a thumb so you can have much smaller diameter. I'm a much bigger fan of smaller diameter rollers. I just think they fit your body better.
Thank you for that also very helpful. Let's say I want to quote unquote, loosen up or or
move out some potential soreness or soreness from a given muscle like the quadricep. Does it make sense to start in the middle of that muscle the top? Like does it, can you work above and below the knee? Are all of those things going to help? I realize this is a much Fuller discussion that we can help and if you man spices like how should I approach them like? Okay. You know, my my quads are a little sore, my tour, my back is sore. Do I go straight to the back or do I start with another with another body region? I don't think it matters what I want.
Interested as inputs and outputs, right? What I'm really interested in is what did you do to make yourself feel better? Did you just hope it would just go away? And then one day I didn't and then you had to activate the emergency medical system. So let's define a couple things. What is an injury? This is a great question injury for us is there's a clear mechanism of mechanical trauma. There's a bone sticking out of your leg. Andrew time to go to the hospital injured. Right, you're injured, right? I heard a snap in a pop.
Yikes, I have night, sweats, dizziness fever. Vomiting nausea unaccounted for weight loss weight gain changes in my bladder bowel function problem. I cough sneeze or swallow, as a red flags, you're not sore, you're sick. Let me introduce you the doctor again, right? If your pain or dysfunction is so bad, you can occupy your role in your family, can occupy a role in society. Can occupy role in the team. That's an emergency problem. That is a medical condition that needs medical. So you
You come in today between your back, it may need. We need to activate EMS, you do hospital. We need to get because it's so severe. You can't do your job, everything else. I want to call non-injury. I want to be very specific with the languages we call an incident. It actually comes out of this sort of language. There was a guy, here's the long way around the barn. I read this great book called Deep Survival, which is Lawrence Gonzalez, which is about why people end up in survival situations. And it's a
Literally a lot about like we got away with it for a long time and then I just didn't have them, you know. I ended up two miles out. See I've done it a million times and this time, right, that's it. But there's a footnote in there from a book called normal accidents, by Charles Perrault, who's recently passed on email Charles, because I was like, this is blowing my mind. He calls A lot of times, we'll have trivial events in non-trivial systems. So, he's taking systems thinking he's looking at complex system organization and his idea is
That an accident, a normal accident is actually just expression of the system. If you gave the system long enough to express itself, the inputs and outputs are so tightly. Coupled that it's difficult to see what causes what and how they influence each other. That's the body. So your stiff shoulder isn't a problem until you fall on the ice and then that stiff shoulder suddenly can't take over pressure and overhead, and you tear your rotator cuff off at high speed. You'd say, Oh Black Swan event super
Easy. But that's actually just a normal expression of that shoulder system if we gave it enough time to express itself. So he has sort of like incident an accident. So an incident is I want us to start to think about incident level problems are pain. Loss of range of motion on the Stinger were becoming curious. Why is the brain sending you? The signals pain is a request for change. So when we asked our athletic population they just did this with 100 Kids.
Kids I'm like how many of you are paying 300 high school kids to hands go up to high school high school. So what we're suddenly realizing is it pain is very much a part of the athletic condition. The Human Experience, certainly the athletic experience you've been in pain of billion times and still gone out and done the thing. So what we want to do is say the pain is not always a medical problem. It's a medical problem when the rest of the time were saying, how are you using Fitness training as a scaffolding to?
Stand nutrition hydration, soft tissue work desensitization reperfusion of the tissues so that's what we're trying to do in sport and trainees Empower people to say, what's going on my body and why don't I feel the way I do or why does something hurt and why can't I remedy that? And then when I run out of ideas, let me go get some help.
So the the rolling we can think of as a way to move out soreness prepare us for more work the next day.
Day or something like that. But is it fair to say that we can also use the roller as a diagnostic tool? Sure. Like if I'm feeling like an unusual amount of of not unusual, but let's just say that I'm feeling like a wuss because when I when I lie down on that roller and I like, you know, like slide back and forth. Like I've seen the videos of you and other folks doing them like that really hurts. Does that necessarily mean something's wrong? Okay,
no, it mean, it means that for whatever reason, those tissues become
Sensitized. And that your brain is interpreting that stiffness as a threat and it's reading it as pain, right? And some people don't have that, they just their tissues feel like this but they don't have pain when they do that. But that's not a normal tissue, you should be like layers of warm silk sliding over steel Springs. And what you're saying is that
what is that what quality tissue? She absolutely that layers of silk over steel spring
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, 5 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,
Sport. And I start to do a sport in specialized. 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 a sort of a greater Readiness. And that's one of the reasons that that mobilization tools such a powerful tool again, however, you want to do it. I think it's useful for us. When we have, we came up with this thing called the d2r to model because the other way was taken R2-D2.
So, the first order of business is I want to desensitize with something hurts. Some of the 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 restriction. Yeah, but frustration, so that no longer I, 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 truncates going to start Lop off your move.
Solutions, right? It's just going to happen. So we want our, we want everyone to be saying, hey, we don't panic we have pain. We just treat it like another diagnostic tool. Then second d, right? We desensitized. And we're ask, is this something to be D congested? 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 swollen or a tissue is 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 entire surface of the joint. No, we want to manage that. But oftentimes, when someone comes in and the tissue is congested, right? Just sometimes we say swelling and we think ankle, right? Only capsule are, but here we have, if you've ever flown on an airplane and had cankles
Those that's congested tissue. If we manage that congestion, if we move those lymphatics along, we muscle contraction drives, the lymphatic drainage the lymph system is the sewage system of the body decongestant issues. Often express less pain. And what we find is that in broken bones or soft tissue injuries if we can better evacuate that. Swelling better. Evacuate that congestion. Now, when do we see you now? Healing at the rate of a human being, we're not rate limiting the healing, but also, we can help you manage that sensitivity.
Then the third one is quickest and blood flow in there. Like you said, I want some warm up and feel great, welcome to the power of blood flow, tissues become hydrated or shifting blood from the stomach. All the things that happens, right? All that venous return is coming back on board, but suddenly we see that if we need something pumped full of blood, it tends to be less painful and that's a really easy. So if I have an old Orthopedic thing, maybe I spend a few minutes, just getting a huge quad pump on the leg extension machine. Then I go Squad heavy, right? So now I have desensitization
Congestion reperfusion, whatever tool you want to use for. These is fair game with me, just as how I've come to kind of conceptualize. These are my tools and the last one is restore. Do you have full range of motion full normal in that joint yes or no? Because that's the last thing that we talked about because you're still able to perform your sport in college or do your job. But we're not seeing how in access your ability to not access. That range of motion, may be limiting, your movement choice, and potentially overloading a tissue and by making it
Work in a less effective manner or even
just leading to progressively worse, and worse posture shirt is
probably will try to find posture for me, because I think that's a really great place to start,
right? Yeah. I can Define bad posture as when you catch yourself in a, in a reflection, and you realize, well, I'm starting to. I'm starting to look more like a sea. I love then, then they're
not so great. You know, question is, is that a matter of Aesthetics or
pain? Well, certainly for me, it's not pain. But, you know, I am coming and I noticed that it's not becoming I
I noticed that unless I pay attention to my posture, while sitting, and unless I do, you know, like range my fingers together and pull mud, my chin back, a few times a day that I'm just naturally. Starting to tip over forward towards my text messages, that aren't even in my hands right now. And I think this is, you know, the, the younger generation. I mean, now that I'm 49. I can talk like that, right? I mean, it's trying to 1900.
They are
1900. Yeah exactly there there.
Starting to look like a, they're shaped like a see that? It's and I'm a big believer in people. Especially men doing Network. I feel like I like if he especially
if about specially people doing that work. Yeah, well, here's the thing, ever. Anytime I'm
happy to go go there with this one. Maybe even at the risk of being Politically Incorrect anytime. I've suggested that women also do Network, they say
no, you should see my goalie daughter because for every pound stronger, your neck is your production and concussion wrist drop.
Huge a pounds. Thank you. So we keep the iron neck by the door and she walks in and there's a we have in our family where she's doing her iron next train. She looks at me, she's like, Dad, this is why I don't have a boyfriend. Thank you. Sorry, Caroline, but that's the way it goes, right? Because she's like, look at me. I look like an idiot, but she loves having a big strong neck. That doesn't can take the shot from the ball.
Listen, I wish everyone would train their neck. I had I had an accident where I fell off a roof, but walked away from it. My neck was sore, but I heard it and felt it and I was like oh goodness, but it was actually
From skateboarding stuff and falling. And that I started training my neck years ago and realized that. Wow, when I turn my neck, I'm one of the few people in my age cohort that doesn't complain about shoulder pain. Now maybe I don't have full range of motion, maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong people, but anytime I see somebody with really broad shoulders, where their neck is really inside of their jaw line, it looks like a head was placed on the wrong action. Figure body. I just want to go over to them and say, listen, a is aesthetically a ridiculous. It looks, it looks like one of those flip.
In the kids were, you can change the head, the body and the legs to be different animals. More seriously, it's a hazard because it's your upper spine. It's clearly not in line with the rest of your strength profile. And the other one is the more incentive-based thing is. Hey, listen. If you train your neck, everything else gets stronger and your head and your brain is going to be safer. And as a neuroscientist, that usually listen to love it. Last piece. Well I uh I might so I'm so glad we're talking about this, I do Bridges, I know they can be risky with tongue in the roof of my mouth. I like I do Bridges to the back and then
My I do have a four-way neck Machinery. I use a plate. Jeff cavaliere's. Got a great video of how to do this and we can link to do it. How to do it safely. You gotta you gotta close the Chain by having a hand on the ground. This kind of thing to do it safely but I've just found that neck work. Also serves posture imposter serves the ability to make eye contact. When you have those things, we call conversations with people in real life and I do think it's these things stack up to we won't call it like psychological confidence, but the ability to meet somebody, you know, like firm handshake and I'm trying to crush the other person's hand look.
Only I stand up straight, whatever your height, these things really matter in subtle ways or not. So, subtle ways, I think that I do feel like like yes, that the younger generation and the older generation that they sort of drop the kind of drop out of certain Elements of Life. If you're looking down at the ground or your phone all the time, you can't look people in the eye, your posture Lee, not right? You're in pain, you're not as strong as you could be. I mean, these things stack up to being like, in an aquarium full of fish,
you're becoming the fish in the background that's like you know like it was kind of sickly and the other for sure getting all the good stuff and you
know if you define posture as like the Latin word root is position. So we're really saying is I have good position. I have bad position, who brought that bad position, one of the ways, I think we've lost the narrative a little bit. Is we try to give people these extrinsic cues to correct their posture shoulders back and down Chuck tent-like. So all of a sudden, you're like, what am I going?
Human being. How do I practice? This one are doing a complex skill, so the organization of your body, the organization of your spine, particularly really is a reflection of your movement habits, your behaviors, your self identity. There's a lot of things in there, right? You didn't get the job, you won. The got the number from Juliet or you're sleep-deprived even
small. What? And I'm gonna call myself out because people are going to get there many times on this podcast. When I go and I look at the because I do listen to the podcast, trying to see places, I can improve Etc and
I'll be like, wow my posture. I'm like, hunched over and I think myself and I'll go down below
just reflecting my posture. No, no, I track my sleep so
you don't go back and look how they like. Yeah. I wasn't sleeping as well. Those days are, or whatever it is, right? I mean, I think that we are all guilty of not paying enough attention are
posture. So, what we can do is we could Define posture. Is, there is a median range of the joint positioning where we simultaneously have most access to our physiology, right, and I'll explain Elmore
But also, those shapes aren't associated with increased pain risk, and increase injury risk, which is real. The research does bear, that, that there are positions and shapes that lead to less effective. Movement are more likely to experience pain. It's probabilistic, it's not guaranteed. Its there's more likely. So one of the things that I think you could you could understand is hey do you want to have access to all of those Machinery? So go ahead and slouch.
Ahead with me and then just turn over your shoulder. How far can you turn now? Watch this, get into position, we take a huge breath, get to the biggest position you take the biggest breath.
Okay, so that's a pretty rockin shape now. Turn your head goes further so by you being queued. Can you adopt a shape an organization of your trunk that allowed you to ventilate a little bit more effectively you completely change in reorganize your structure which led to an improvement in output. So when I'm working with people there's only two things. I really can wrap my head around one is, do you have normative range of motion? Yes or no? What are the two
We have to restore that improve that and does that expression. Give us greater biomotor output because those are objective measures when biomotor output. I mean, range of motion Force production power, right? I see that. And I can express the physio physiology in a unique way. That makes me, you know, more effective. And that is why you'll see suddenly, we have this definition that is maintaining the physiology and aspects. I'm not going to have a good shoulder flexion with my arm overhead is when I'm sitting up taller or
In a position where I can take a bigger breath and I think that's what's really great because that gets us away from good posture, bad posture into hey, that position, doesn't serve you as well in these circumstances. And in this position, I'm working with the pararescue team in the Air Force. The number one reason they were having back injuries was getting the litter out of the helicopter because they have a litter, the soldiers there with all their gear on. They've got a lift from a totally weird flexed position.
Right and lessons just turns out, that's not a really effective posture position shape that transfers to handle is higher loads. So what do we do? We work on the range of motion. We give them skills to try to organize more effectively, in that shape and lo and behold, we can reduce injury risk and injury incident in those soldiers, right? So what we're always thinking about here is let's get away from good and bad and the posture doesn't matter and it also doesn't matter at low load low speed and I want to be very clear.
About that. So you can get away with murder at low velocities and low speeds but speed kills how everyone's fine. But when that speed wobble starts to happen, we start to see greater likelihood of deflection from posture. Your abs don't work as effectively. You can create the same intra-abdominal pressure, right? Check, check. Check, check check. So that's why we always are saying, hey is this true that you're saying under high load high speed when there's consequence? Because maybe,
This set of conditions Works under these conditions but it doesn't work across all conditions. And for me, I'm trying to take the best information. I have working in sports and performance and trying to transmit that to my family, transmute that to my neighborhood into the kids. I'm working with
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As long as we're talking about posture, 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 decide to sign up for your men's pelvic floor. Yeah. Course,
outsold are woman's pelvic floor course to the 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 guest on this podcast, including the
Um, director of nurse 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 community, male Health domain. Normally
on this. Yeah, we normalize 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. And I'll tell you the number of people, I know who have urinary issues.
Issues, sexual dysfunction issues. I know because they tell me that they squat. Heavy in the gym. They do their key goals and things like that. Then I've had guests on, like, Mike, Eisenberg and others. And they say, yeah, actually, if you have a tight pelvic floor doing, kegels is about the worst thing you could ever do for urinary function or Rex, erection function. This right? You know? Because you're sending in the wrong direction, you need to learn to relax your pelvic floor, then some women will say and it seems to be women that
This whether or not men just have this but don't report it. I don't know. I've had people write to me and say yeah you know I'll do some lower body work in the gym and some urine is sneaking out and it's like well pelvic floor and you had this great course on pelvic floor that taught me among other things and I will say I wasn't suffering any of those particular issues. But I had prostate pain in my 30s and I was like what's going on when got my PSA measured perfectly normal thought. What's going on? Started researching online, read your work.
Work and realize, oh, I think I might just have tight pelvic floor started doing certain things, including you taught me how to sit down and stand up correctly. In this video is like, you have to keep your sternum high right user. I think you said it was like a stately and let me State least,
let me just there's no wrong way. Wrong way to stand up or sit down everyone. But there are ways that reflect increased function, especially when you're in a dysfunctional state,
right that right. Yeah, right. I don't want to, we're not trying to yet, tell people what to do or not to do.
I was like, wow you know I'm probably hunched over too much. I think my hips are back too far when I'm sitting and maybe I'll move to a standing desk or sit-stand desk, which is what I did. Lo and behold prostate pain goes away. Yeah you know and had I not found that course. I might have gone down the path of medication or something else. Took care of everything. I also, I will say, the other thing I learned was I had, I tend to have a slight enter your pelvic tilt. So, think about the pelvis like a bowl as I understand like, is that bolt could be, you know, the
A ridge of that ball could be parallel to the ground or Tilted forward. The anterior pelvic tilt or back and posterior pelvic tilt neutral, seems like a good idea, but most people tend to have a, you know, some natural propensity towards one or the other started wearing. I pretty much always wear flat shoes, Adidas or you know, skateboard shoes are pretty flat. I lucked out there game is strong. Today is shoe. Game is strong today. A dido still wear them everyday. Love them or no shoes. Yeah, you know, which is, which is great, and I noticed, okay, that corrected some of, some of that process.
Pain to by making. Oh, scuse me. What helps correct. It was to make sure that in the gym. I did something, it turned out to be glute-ham raises that would put my pail, take my pelvis through a fairly full range of motion from from, you know, love the posterior to anterior tilt and I've come to love the glute ham raise. We're talking full range glute-ham, races as one of the most useful tools, just posture lie for pelvic floor. So not, it's
not about dressing stiffness in the system, right? Resetting it. Hi neurological.
Opponent to actually do the thing. One of the things I hinted at earlier, as like, I've chased by a motor output, right, intra-abdominal pressure, and being able to have a pelvic floor that works for you is part of that system. Like again, we can take the physiology and Goose it up and down. What's interesting about, I had a Themis friend who was filming TV show and we were working on his internal rotation of his hip. So if you're here, imagine somewhere on your back and bring your knee to your chest and I swing your foot away.
From your midline, right? The femur roles in, that's interpretation, the famous for everyone, and I worked on his interpretation of his femur and just improved, his hip flexion need a chest. Just got those things going, I get this text. That 9 is a bro. What is up with my boners? They're out of control. What is going
on out of control in the in the positive
direction? Okay? And I was like, well there's this thing called blood flow and when we improve blood flow, turns out reperfusion is all
On the list of things that we
Chase. So he'd been corrupting the hose, just noticed him
a fright and and I think when we start to see that and do pelvic fascia as a system where it's so easy for us to be reductionist like I wouldn't even say had prostate pain, I would say you had pain in your prostate area,
right? And in fact, that's what was told it prostate region, right? And because
players, you're like, I don't know where my prostate it. Okay, that's a
general sense. And I also saw the PSA level was well, within normal actually low range and I was like, what?
The world is going on here and you start, you can find some pretty scary stuff online about about spinal cord injuries. And this kind of thing did what we just talked about and boom, it's never been an issue. Again
we have all the Olympic lifting gyms even our gym, we kept a towel on the platforms so that women particularly would pee themselves when they would receive a heavy clean heavy snatch and we would just wipe it up they'd actually urinate on the plow. Oh yeah, that happens all the time. All the Olympics everywhere. You
See that, that is Bladder. Incontinence is not normal, right? Totally normal to poop yourself before a fight. That's what animals do. Totally not normal to pee yourself. Peeing yourself as a sign of dysregulation, for sure. So, what we're as you're seeing is though, hey, I can't manage this high intra-abdominal pressure on creating and what ends up happening, is we pay ourselves. So we can start by saying water their positions and shapes directly. I want your pelvic floor to work in all the shapes, its
I mean, they'll be some shapes were just doesn't work as effectively and if you're a man, so we're getting into it. If you go P, you'll see a lot of men will put their hand on the wall and they'll adopt a anterior pelvic tilts of to pee. And what they'll do is basically just turn the pelvic floor off. And so if you stand up and do a big anterior pelvic tilt, your pelvic floor will lose some of its tone and it's easier to initiate a string.
So anterior pelvic tilt again, folks is imagine your pelvis is a bowl. You're tilting It Forward. Like you're going to pour water out of the bowl, which is a
Are analogy here. That's right. You're saying ideally, they keep a neutral pelvis and use the force of their of their muscles, controlling their. But no
I'm saying that if it's much more difficult to pee in this position, where we have high in like, high control over the systems, and what you'll see is that most people will adopt a shape where they basically inhibit their public floor, so they can pee standing up. I
can't believe we're going to dissect your in posture urinating urinating posture. But I think it's I think it's really important. Let's contrast that
To the famous sculpture of the boy peeing, and he's, like, leaning back. Then it leaning
that I'm same posture. He's his pelvis is forward, and he's leaning back. That's the same posture. So, he's a
Mormon boy, Sons will know this, right? So, you know, when you're a young kid young boy, you can like it almost feels like you can pee over a car. If you had to maybe I tried that. I'm just was a Volkswagen one.
Yeah. Right. Right. So but here's so, is there a proper posture for p? No,
no no. But initiating a streaming taenia stream is like that's a sign of sexual health of Functional Health, is your General Health? And what's nice now is notice how we got to this very nuanced conversation about erectile dysfunction or about bladder, insufficiency about right, peeing ourselves. We got there through performance by will have
Athletes, who literally had a whole bunch of babies suddenly have difficult time, creating Hines abdominal tone will jump rope and as soon as NP and as soon as they come back to a more organized position that allows them to transfer energy more effectively, recruit better musculature have better organization, pink stops. So what we suddenly female athletes are women athletes. So you recommend the great jump rope. Well, yeah, absolutely. Eventually I need to challenge that for us an easy way to do it, but what we see is, can you squeeze your butt and
At the same time. And what you'll find is that a lot of people as soon as they adopt this into your pelvic tilt glute goes off, and they don't have that glute control so that can be problematic for a whole host of features. So imagine I was hoping we're going to get two hip extension eventually. But you know what we see is that stiffness and the front of the quads anterior and line of the faccia stiff front of capsule, whatever the mechanism is we do a lot of sitting or just we're squatters my inability to take.
My knee behind my hip, but call this knees behind, but knees behind Buckeye. That's what I want to be known as neba goes behind your butt there laughter. That's right, sorry Ben. And then what we're going to you're going to see is a lot of times when we put people in those positions, they can't get a good glute,
squeeze? Okay, could one practice this. I'm thinking about, it's been a while since I've taken a yoga class
and squeeze your butt. You would be like acting
practices, okay, so there's a pose in yoga and I'm not an advanced yoga about taking a few yoga classes and my day where you're on your
Basically propped up sitting on your knees. So it's about in the chamomile and then yeah, hi kneeling. And then our
discussion but there's no it's hard to squeeze your about there and then because of all the forces yanking you interiorly, those facial lines. The, the quads, you're basically in that high kneeling position and because the lower leg is bent behind you, you're being dragged forward and it's difficult to squeeze your butt and extend over
backwards. So there's that. Do they call it camel pose? We reach back and grab your heels and you're supposed to look up at the
ceiling.
That's a gnarly
one. It's a gnarly one. If you do it in the Bay Area, the T-shirt will say, don't be surprised if some emotions come on.
If you do
this in Austin, Texas, they just say it's supposed to hurt. Keep going. I'm just joking here, this is like Regional humor, but in any event, I think that's actually accurate, by the way. But in any event, it's it is slightly unusual for most people who aren't accustomed to it to do that pose.
Again, doing that pose, bring it up for a
reason. If you don't do that post, you might do Kipping pull-ups. That's a global extension position. That all we're doing is taking the spine and putting a huge Global load in it instead of a localized load. So an anterior pelvic tilt. My think of localized extension and flexion where I have one or two segments doing the Lion's Share we whenever we can prefer to have Global flexion extension because the spine maintains its integrity and more effectively so doing things like wheel pose. Awesome.
Putting your hands up near your ears. Pushing it feed that flat on the ground, pushing up into a, you know, an art Arc shape on the ground. Great Diagnostics. This is, this should is this something that most people should be able to do? Yes.
Can most people probably do it? No. Can we then break down the components of it? Yeah, absolutely. Even I Angar Yogi, Master started to bring in props, blocks, and belts because he was seeing that as his students weren't able to achieve.
Of some of the base shapes and what they were doing was human Jenga to get into those patterns. There were just solving the problem and he was like hold up, let's not go around the problem. Let's support you while we load you and breathing these positions and shapes
given that most people don't have a ton of time for movement designated blocks of time. No movement. If one were going to do, let's say some attempt toward wheel pose, practice or camel pose, practice, or any, and
Umber of the other things that we're talking about here which are taking the body into positions that it were not naturally putting it into given our activities.
Yeah. Great. One centralized mail
that would you suggest doing these at the end of a resistance training
workout? When does it work for you? At some point, you need to be exposed in this position? When are you going to get exposed this position? If it happens to be able to be clumped in with your training, fantastic. If it's at home in the evening, fantastic. If you done Sun salutation before, this is old school, right? It's almost like they were like let's get this.
Just am going a little bit. So later on the day, it's a little bit easier. So at some point we need to expose you to some positions. We have something called The Hip spin up and typically for my athletic, populations my teams, especially I'm like, I want you to do one of three things in the morning at ten minutes, that's all. I'm asking 8 to 10 minutes, hip spin up shoulder, spin up, or breath spin up. Just just do one of those, if your back hurts or knee hurts, you get hip spin up if your shoulder or neck hurts, you get shoulder spin up and then if not just cycle through those, so at least in
The morning, we're starting to touch some of these crucial shapes that you're never in. And if you do the hip spin up and suffer, I'm like, well, that's telling me about your movement history or injury history, your movement diet and again, nothing that we do on the ready, state is related to Supernatural levels of range of motion, just basic range of motion, the range of motion again that everyone learns in med school. Everyone learns a physical therapy school. So what's fun about what?
Said around this sort of this pelvic floor Health piece is that when we get people doing some mobilization, really brought to me, really brought my attention of Jill Miller, is that we start mobilizing the Endo public fashion. We just land a ball. Just anywhere from your pubic bone to your die, for your up to xiphoid process but particularly belly button South you'll see that none of that should be uncomfortable and one of the reasons we see high incidence of you know, public floor dysfunction, but also High incidence of sports hernias.
Is that we have a hip that doesn't work very well and ends up dragging that pelvis into positions where it's not muscular very strong, right? I can get out of position where I have a lot of good sort of activation or access to those positions. Then I have faccia and musculature that's super stiff. Because every time you do abs, you celebrate the stiffness, right? You do abs, you're like, oh, I'm sorts. And I'm gonna go have some ice cream. When's the last time you manage your hamstrings, your quads. Probably yesterday. When's the last time you rolled out your abs and your obliques,
Never previous life,
my previous life before you respond. So I think one of the things that we're seeing is again that would be a perfect time during the evening, don't go to the gym and lay on the Kettlebell and be a creepy guy, stead pull out that volleyball at home. Pull that princess ball. You got a Walgreens and start having a conversation with your pelvic floor, turns out your about your ab doing the pelvic floor can also be mobilized. So we just it's really simple front of your pelvis is your pubic bone.
It's the front of the pelvic floor, the back is your coccyx. And each ischial tuberosity, your sit bones as the side everything else is your pelvic floor. So you can take a ball and just stay away from the holes and if anything hurts to compression, you found a problem. So you can contract and relax and apply that same tissue.
So I might be on my side, I might be rolling with the ball right underneath me,
you just be sitting down on your coffee table and just putting that up sitting that ball in and around your pelvis and around your glutes and
Pelvic floor, right? You might be dangerously close to your Grundel. You're welcome. So, the idea here, though is, you know, often times will have assets of back pain. We're not looking at the pelvic floor or hip pain, but you have six short we're hip rotators, right? You don't just have a couple rotators. You have a huge rotator cuff of the hip and some of those things are congruent and kind of part of that pelvic floor. So, it's not that I need to go after my pelvic floor every day. Because again, let me just add another thing to do your list. But if
Nothing changes. I suddenly wake up and I don't have an erection. I suddenly are discovering that, I'm peeing myself because I'm an elite cyclist, right? And something's happening. I'm like, I don't to do here. Let me start to work on my belly. Let me see if I can work on restoring my positions and can I do a little public formalization and that's a great place to start and which doctor was involved none which pelvic floor therapist was involved. Not in fact if you carry that to your your your specialist and we like all right we get to have the real conversation now because you've already done the other
stuff.
One thing that frightens me and maybe unnecessarily. So is when I see men in particular doing crunch work like ab work crunching with ankles crossed a because people tend to cross the same ankle over the other one. They don't, they don't symmetrically switch sides, that's not good. Andrew and my my other understanding is that this can
So lead to some pelvic floor issues in asymmetries simple solution. Could be to not cross the ankles while doing like repeated contraction work of the abdominals, it might being silly.
I would put that lower on the list of problems I have, right? Like I think if we went into the world right now and looked at people doing curls, you know, curl-ups the real thing is is that you're only way that your training abdominals, you know, am I do I have a bigger range of
of the trunk. There are so many ways to be thinking about what the trunk should be doing and reducing it down to this one curl. I think if one of the things that we're looking at, like I'd much rather you hang from a bar and curl up. Yeah. So this is the this
is pretty much. I won't say the only Ad work. I do I do some anti-rotation work by staggering my stance when I do curls or anything else because it's very time. Efficient way to do it. Making sure my bellybutton staying straight. So you're resisting the temptation to rock from side to side and get the anti-rotation work.
See switching up The Stance but doing what you described hanging from a bar doing Pike's suddenly you're also getting grip
worse there just for time efficiency. You're also like not just separating the ABS and working with the abdominals with the need of the chest because that's really what we're seeing. Is that do you only need your abs working in this position. So basically you're reproducing another seated position except you're crunching your chest to your seated knee and that's really what that position is.
Do we do it long? What happens? If you want long lever, short lever means the elbow is bent long. Lever is the elbow straight short leavers. The knee is bent long. Lever is the leg is straight. So why aren't we working in all those patterns positions? And then being creative, there are so many great resources that the kids at Dave. Durante hasn't free ab workout. He's an Olympic gymnast from Stanford Superstar, but you can go onto. I think it's Iron Monkey. Sorry, guys. And you know what you'll see is
Is there's so much fun way to play. And think about what the role of the trunk should do, and I think we're moving beyond. Thank goodness this. Like, I have to be original robot all the time and that we need to ask. What is the trunk supposed to do a good way of thinking about this? And I think you're sit up as a good analogy, really a book that makes the rounds from time to time is a book called the spinal engine by Serge grekov etske. And
he really talks about the trunk as a driver of power, not just as a chassis of which the big engine moves and that really is a nice conceptual way of simplifying movement. But if we Define functional movement, most people agree. It works in a wave of contraction from trunk to periphery from quarter sleeve from axillary skeleton to peripheral skeleton. But that means boy, there are positions where I'm really effective and can generate a lot of force and they'll be positions where I can, but if my spine can't handle flexion it's not a spine.
Four candidates extension. It's not a spine. If you can't rotate and being to this complex position shapes, I'm like red flag. So how are you training that thing? And if you're only rigid, Dogma is straight up and down, which is a great reason to do Mobility. Work is suddenly we can side Bend and we can twist and I am, I exposing myself to some of those shapes. And so we call that work borrowing from one of my Olympic friends to McMillan, spinal engine work, putting PVC side bending playing.
With different shapes. And again, if you through get into the David whack ropes, if you through medicine balls, you would suddenly see your like, you're right. I can't be a rigid piece. How am I training? The functionality of my trunk Beyond just my six-pack because, you know, straight curling will certainly give you six pack, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to surf with power run with power punch with power Etc. I mean, look at what just happened with those fights, right? With the women, you know, fighting just the rotational power, they have, you can't get that from just cross crunches.
Legs. So the fight right? Before the Tyson Jake qualify was arguably the best fight and people had seen in a long, long time, the spirit of it and just I mean, they were just be incredible.
Everyone watch us women sports. I was really great. So, I think what's great now is, if we can get people to start to be curious and play, and, you know, I'm not saying need 10,000 different movements, but instead of just hanging from the bar and doing knees to elbows or toes to bar, but if you brought your right,
Foot to your left hand and you started adding in a rotation to that and some of your like I suck at this. And ultimately, what I want to do is I want to uncover every deficiency in this play because I'm still going to deadlift. I'm still going to swing. So going to watch him do all the things that I know that makes me feel robust and makes me ride my bike better and be a better kayaker. But simultaneously, there's a lot of play on either side of
that. I love that you're defining progression as incorporating these novel, movements exploring,
dude.
Westside 101 loose Simmons. I mean like hey this week were squatting with this bar then we're squatting with this bar and then we're changing your height. Then we're changing your stance. I mean Wes I barbell has been doing this forever. I
didn't realize they did that. I knew they wouldn't like crazy gnarly.
Like every bar has its own Max, right? And so what they've done is said, hey, the squat pattern is the thing. We're training. But how do we put? Another twist to the pretzel. Now, the weights in front. Now, the weights behind now, it's out and now it's too deep, and now we're box squatting now.
Like, wow, you're gonna have to be really competent. Skilled squatter to handle all that.
It seems like in so many sports, not just for resistance training, but it's so many sports, there's this move shift now toward being an ATV and all-terrain vehicle. Like, you can't afford to just be good at one thing, you know. And the cool thing about it is that, you know, the more dynamic range that people are expressing the more kind of evolution, you see of any kind of sport. And I think we're going to see this with Fitness to, I'm realizing this, as we have this conversation that what you're really suggesting is that people
Lord, their movement patterns. I love this thing that I've heard you say for years, and I know Mackenzie harps on this too, which is Brian. Mackenzie, that is, you should be able to breathe well, in every position. It's such a fun test. Actually, it's such an easy test, you know, squat down, like, you're going to get something out of the cupboard. See, if you can take like a full belly principles. That see if you can get that your belly going out on the inhale. They're, I like to do this test myself. Everyone saw hanging from the bar. I'll, you know, those Pike's. I don't get very many of them admittedly. I'm doing like, five sets of five, awesome occasion, will try and twist a little bit and
As my grip strength, improved slightly. Maybe I'll be able to get more. Usually, my grip
strength, goes more legs. It would be easy,
I'll take those either a compliment or an insult coming from you Kelly, Kelly's, exceedingly strong, he deadlift 600 pounds on the regular he's exceedingly strong and he has incredible endurance. You're actually more of an endurance guys, I think this is worth mentioning that you
have. Why not very strong. You have you have more of a right to but you see my strong friends. Not, I'm not I'm not deflecting.
Your physiology is definitely bias towards certain things like unequivocally. And what I'm not good at is being brutally strong. Oh, I've been training for 20-plus years hard training, longer than that, 30 years and this is all I can deadlift. That's pathetic. You see my strong friends. So, what you see is that I've been cramming a square peg into a round hole because I really like it, but really I should be a probably 190 pounds and I should be an aerobic athlete, right?
Like if we threw
Third pound backpack on you and went backpacking. You'd be fine. You'd be like a even now in the you're sitting at somewhere like 240, right? You like six to you. You can go. You can go for days. Like you're naturally an endurance athlete. And I think it's worth saying, because people are
listening Kelly's, a big guy, all my training is biased towards you cannot believe how much condition I do. I'm a disciple Jameson, I'm a huge fan of trying to look at where I'm spending my time in these different heart, rate zones. And then, you know, I'm just
Such a nerd of that because my primary sport is trying to keep up with my wife on the mountain bike.
I think this is really important because I think we've been talking a lot about things, kind of adjacent to resistance training. I think it's a wonderful shift. Now in in culture that resistance training is being used done by. Yeah by Young People, by older people women and men. You know it's fantastic. This was not the case 10 years ago this was definitely not the case 20 years ago. No for was like bodybuilders football preseason, football players and Military were the only people wait
Training. Now, it's everywhere. But you're naturally an endurance athlete. I'm guessing that most people I'm assuming. Is this true fall into the slower twitch? Kind of more endurance propensity than I mean, how many truly naturally strong fast, fiber type people are walking walking around out there. If we just do the
general ones that are are sprinters and super springing, you know who those people are, right? They're mutants you know.
I think I was always best at a skilled sport that use conditioning or you strength. When I compare myself to my friends who have a huge rub again Jin's, it's embarrassing. I'm always the weakest fattest slowest, smallest person in the room and it is I can't look you just want an ego check just come on, hang out with me. Just meet my friends. See the people were working with and you'll see you were like, okay genetics is not the same. I think we've told little bit of a lie-in the internet.
That like if you eat this way and you do these you'll be elite in like we can certainly say that you have a training effect for sure and you should do that but that's not the same thing as being a mutant and there are just so many mutants out there
shocking. Yeah I think it's actually a worthwhile exercise to figure out what one's natural leanings are.
What do you like to do? Yeah but that I just think it's important that we remind ourselves that the hole.
The point of this is to have the most fun and what you'll see, he put up a video of some Chinese elementary school kids and the Chinese Olympic lifting team coaches coming and assessing their kids and very quickly. They put kids over at squats, they had him jump on a single leg. They had him to double jumps and they were like you, you you have your parents call me, right? So you can already see that coordination matters, wiring matters explode and they were able to say, hey, these are the things that we think are going to
Good Olympic lifters. So those kids, I think we start to split cohort early on, but most important is everyone needs to weight-lift period and it's not light to Pink dumbbells, it's real heavy weight lifting. But how much do you need to do to be better at your sport or to minimize your spine? Those are the spine changes? Or, or osteopenia or osteoporosis? Those are great conversations, but not necessarily conversations about performance, right? So, it's almost like, we need to divide this into a like,
X and I'm keeping myself intact in versus. I want to go to the Olympics because what you're seeing on the world right now? Is that it everyone's an expert? I'm like, can I see how you work with 40 athletes? Can I see how you Paradise that going to see how you managed to travel and nutrition? Can I see how, you know, you were responsible or not responsible for this team having all its members? So what we're seeing is that it's a this performance thing is really big task and it gets confused and watered down a little bit by everyone Fitness as well. I, I squat. So I'm an expert too.
Not the same.
Our good friend. Kenny Kane taught me something. He should really shaking his head. The best. He's a wonderful guy. You're not going to find them on social media because a few years ago, he just decided to take his Jim and Denise and himself off social media. He's a very, very talented.
We're gonna give me his phone number. We're gonna have you call him because you can't damn
very talented athlete and wonderful person. He taught me something say about eight years ago that I've found. Oh, so useful.
For my training longevity, my enjoyment of training and it was this very simple, 80% of your workouts. Andrew. He said are going to be at 80% of what you could do that day.
Okay, that involves some humility. I like to sweat hard. I associate intensity with hard work, etc. He said, 10% are going to be at 90 percent intensity. Meaning hundred percent is the most you could give, possibly whatever time is allotted on that day. Given the Sleep, given the nutrition given the life circumstances on that
day. The Readiness for that day, right? And then here's where it breaks down. A little bit, more 5% are going to be at 95 percent and 5 percent across the year, are going to be maximum 100.
And everything you can give do-or-die workouts that day. And for me last year, I believe it was was that was the rock carried came hands as podcast. I gave everything I had had, of course, had the mountain been a little bit higher. I'd like to think I would have gone a little bit further, but I gave everything I could because that rock was slippery and it was muddy. And my hamstring was out the day. When we started that, you know, I was in pain when we started anyway. I think that advice that Kenny gave me was some of the
The best advice I've ever heard because my tendency would have been and had been to come in and go at 90 95 or 100 percent every single workout, the
guy after every workout etcetera. Yep.
Yep. And it also brought me to this place where after 8, or 10 weeks of training I would get a cold or I'd get some nagging thing a little thing not you know, wouldn't put me under but then or now I need to take a week off normal, accident Theory, right? So I think I'd love your thoughts on Kenny's recommendation.
Me. It's one of the things that I pass along any time. Says it about some Fitness advice. I say, we'll listen, I'm a neuroscientist, not a fitness guy, but I know a thing or two based on the mistakes I've made. Here's a great piece of advice, that's really helped me 80%, your workouts 80 % NC another 10% 90%. Then the 95.5% at 95 and 5% across the year. Are the all out. Everything you can give, leave it all on the mat type
workouts. We could start with a simple idea. We say, let's be consistent before we heroic right eye? If your
Density causes you to not be able to show for the gym for three days. I'm like sweet. That was sweet, Rob tation response to that is sucky, right? I much rather you be getting more consistent and not burn yourself out. Remember that. There's a phase were like you shouldn't be so relieved. The gym member that like they're people would talk about hey, leave some reps in reserve like show up the next day. Kris the groove. That's old Pavel, sot Sandlin stuff. I think that's really good advice, especially since most people are not 20, most
People. And when you're 20, you need to go find out what the limits are. Touch the fence. The electric fence once in a while, right? Click the the years look all the doorknobs, let's just go out that way. But you know what ends up happening is there are a lot of things have to be in place for you to be able to go to the well that many times and what we know now because we have all of this data is that we can make better progress, not burning It To The Ground every single time, and it's difficult for us because if
If I'm Just Fitness saying, how do I quantify that, right? It's easy for us to quantify another kilo or another wat that's makes it a lot easier. And what you'll see is the best practices of these athletes, we do spend a lot of 70, 80 % heart rate, that's what we call recovery and Jill Jameson, language 80 to 90 or calling that conditioning 19 above overload. But what I think is nice is that that gives me a lot of there's some days where I touch 78 or 80 percent and it's hard because I am
Deprived stressed out. My nutrition hasn't been graded sleeping in a strange bed, right? You know, traveling whatever. So I think what you're seeing is is something that one of my early coaches talked about Mike Burger, he says when the frying pans hot, let's cook and that means I need to know myself. And as a coach, I need to know you and I'm like Andrew, you look great today. How do you feel great? Let's go, let's go. Chase something, right? And when the frying pans hot we cook but the frying pan is not always hot and
If you pour in, bang energy and jack3d and you can't even hear inputs and outputs. So I think I think that's such solid reasonable advice. And really what we're looking at is, how can we eat a train, much more consistently longer and longer and longer? You can only go to the, well, a few times. And what I'll tell you is that, as I still love to power clean, it's like my favorite thing and that hundred kilo. Power clean is heavier than it was when I was 40, you know. And I wanted to pretend like that hundred
Helo power clean is not a problem, but I actually have to progress and get myself there and there are days where I'm like up 80, 80 kilos is my jam today. So I think that's really good. Advice and difficult for us to say, how are we measuring success in our training subjective experience? No, no problem. Give you a baby, keep, this new born alive and then let's go see how hard your training. Is the next day. You're going to be terrible. You haven't slept all night, you're stressed, right? So I think what's nice is having some
Objective measurements around, maybe body. Composition is one of them that that's important to you. But are you getting faster over the course of a week? What are your testing? How do we know inputs and outputs? And right now we're just doing we're baking a lot or make it a lot of suicides, right? You know, the old fountain drink, where you just makes all the things. It's, you know, they always taste the same at the end like crap. But that suicide, we mixed all. The fountain drinks is a little bit of what we're seeing in that and one way of protecting ourselves as saying, hey, let's make sure
Train
tomorrow, suicides I was some reflecting on that the other day for some reason why at a wedding or a party young? Typically it's a y-chromosome Associated disorder to feel like you had to mix a bunch of bunch of stuff and then get someone to drink it. Not wrong. Non-alcoholic drinks for Everyone Knows by the way, but mixing all the sodas, putting Eminem's it. So something like all
my mail men's. When I think, that's what we see a little bit, and if you, if you I am a deep coach nerd, I love Fitness. I love Fitness saying, I'll jump into any
Class anytime like sure. Let's go. Let's see. You know, it's so fun but I need to see. I do get to watch sort of Trends come and go things get very hot, you know, they are very popular. They and again, the fitness has become a hobby. It's an amuse, and that's okay. It's totally okay, that Jim is a hobby but that doesn't hint about what's the best way to develop capacity, leak capacity, long-term, longevity capacity, those things almost don't go together.
Let's talk about hip extension as somebody who doesn't like the elliptical or stationary bike. But loves the assault bike. I love the assault bike. I don't know why she feels like really good work. It is our work but
you're not gonna find me on our way to build made it harder with dab. Thanks for making it worse. But what is the Echo by the Rogue Echo? Bike is even worse than the assault bike.
The assault by the way, folks is the one with the fan and I'm not sure if they put the fan is for a
Since not to not to keep you cool, but it has that effect
somewhat in the winter, you'll know what the fan does.
So the Echo Bike is a harder
social science just like imagine doing it on fire uphill in the sand with a headwind then you're like okay this is if you can make it worse, it's worse.
If you have one of these, I'm going to swing by this winter break and try this
thing, but I love that because High physiology low-skill. That's great. You just described me in a
nutshell. I can take
Anyone not know, have to know anything about your range of motion. I can be like, who are you physiologically today? Let me introduce this freakish amount of work in this. Tiny range of motion. That's very safe. So we can really touch high. Intensity is very safely there. Hmm.
Yeah. I liked it much more than the skier. I'll do the skier every once in a while but I find that this gear. If I just sit and stand a bunch of times, I feel like I can just do this for 15 days. See, lots like this exercise. I'm like, am I doing this, right? I don't know. For some reason.
Doesn't feel like work the assault bike. Always feel like always feels like we're okay. So hip extension, the assault bike is not hip extension. Typically your, you know, tend to be no, will tend to be hunched forward, you can get up, right, right? You
can still don't have any hip extension. So hip extension, let's talk about if I'm squatting and I stand up, I'm extending the
hip as you stand up,
right? I'm going from flexion to
extension. Yeah, one thing that I think for people listening that at least as helpful for me, when when hearing about squatting is to think about, whether or not to deadlift or a squat
Imagine taking your hands, put your fingers at your hips, and you, you know, hiding your hands in your, in your, in that joint between the femur and your pelvis, as you go down, right? Your hands, get get tucked into the fold between between the two of you stand up. It opens. So it's hip, hinge. They
typically call it and I think what you, we look at the squat and the lunge is very their cousins and the difference is long lever shortly ever and typically, how you're holding the weight, that's the only difference and sometimes upright torso position. But ultimately, we're really looking at
At, you know, what's happening with the degree of Bend of the, of the knee, right? That's why they're such elegant cousins. But if I'm squatting down and I stand up people, like I'm working on extension work on extension all the time. I'm like, okay, now let's continue this extension conversation and bring that knee behind your butt into a lunge and that's hip extension. And if there's one thing that I'm seeing across so many the populations I work with is we're starting to see changes in a Roshan in this fundamental expression.
And of power, the only people we don't see, it is our Olympic sprinters there. And and you'll see that Pockets, like a, we work with the All Blacks and we're obsessed on maintaining. The hip extension is very strong athletes because it means that they can run faster on the
field rugby. Team, one of those it am I correct in thinking that hip extension we can think of as a partially reflecting hamstring function where the hamstring was responsible for bringing the heel up.
Up toward the, but also, for bringing the femur back behind the Torso, I realized I'm not using the treaty language. He was, by the way, the
PT's online you your
community of the Petey's that you guys just crack me up in the field of medicine. There's, there's an analogous sub specialty of medicine where they have the similar kind of like orneriness and it's being a PT's very competitive. And so there's a lot you don't do this, but the PT Community. It's like it's some you can make a cart. You can make a whole sitcom about this, the attacks.
Often range from significant to the cluster around Petty, not because they're not knowledgeable, but because there's so much Nuance in this field, right? And it seems that there are few things that everyone agrees on, and then everything else. People love to argue in community out of community. So anytime I say anything about movement of the body, I wanted to just say, I realize I'm probably not using the correct
perfect - use that same defense of petty, cluster Earnest clustering, the pettiness, I'm sorry. All this
Isabel therapists out there. I haven't represented you in the way that you would like to be represented. Also, I'm just talking about my own experiences differences in nomenclature, right? I'm trying to be very meticulous in my language to issue. One of the things that we want to look at is and this is a Philip Beach muscles meridians ideas that there are contractile fields and this goes along with. If we look at Thomas, Myers Anatomy trains, if seeing the system as a system of system. So we start to look at your back and your Erectors
And then we're tie that into the glutes, and then we tie that into the hamstrings and tie like the calf. It's kind of a hole almost wraps around the doors of the bottom of the foot, right? The plantar surface of the foot, so suddenly we're looking at this global system, that's designed to create this Mass extension position, Locomotion. We start to lock some of those pieces down a little bit, but one of the things that we've seen is that, when you aren't competent in this position, your hamstrings, for example, have to do a
A lot more work because your butt is no longer working on hip extension. Your adductors are restricted, and they're not bringing you back into flexion. So suddenly, what we see is that your hamstrings are having to do the work of calf, but one your hamstrings are tight all the time you don't have hip extension. So a simple test, we do is called the couch stretch, and all you need to do is face a wall and turn away from the wall. So you're kneeling on the ground hands and knees away from the wall.
You're going to put one of your knees in the corner. So your foot is going straight up and down, the knee is in the corner of the wall and then I want you to see if you can squeeze your butt in that position. Still hot hands and knees. Except one foot now is kind of in the corner down the wall going to church but that's position one. A lot of people are going to struggle with recruiting and activating their but in that position because it's what I'm calling positional inhibited, we don't know what the mechanism is. So
you're getting the knee back behind the tour, so much as
One would if they, if you are sprinting and the better your leg is is
extremely, we're just flexing, the lower leg or flexing, the lower leg shank right. That lower limb. Second position is to come up into a high kneeling position. So you just bring your knee up and so like you're kneeling, except that we have a trailing leg. Now with a leg that's going up the
wall. So front leg is a sort of a right angle right foot on the ground right angle right. Rear leg is knee. Tucked in the corner. That's exactly what that the floor, where the floor meets the couch foot.
Is up on the couch. Nope, just on the
ground, okay? And we'll provide a link to it and Angeles
what the catch is because I created this thing a long time ago, and I created on the couch for my young athletes, while they're watching TV, right? I just needed some hip extension exposure but we can do on the wall. You on the couch, ultimately, what we try to see as do have glute squeeze, can you take a breath, right? If your breath starts to get real small in this position. I'm like, huh? So every time your knee comes behind your body. You can't breathe anymore. Hmm. How's that working for you? When you run? Is that good?
That seems to me that your breath should remain pretty constant independent, what your hip does. So then we like to see if people can come to a more upright position, so that's kind of position 3. So a little bit more upright torso, we're starting to increase hip demands as the Torso comes up, right towards those coming up, right? The knee is moving further away from the chest on that loaded leg. And what you'll see is that most people are gonna be like, wow, that's real stiff, are can't even get there. I can't breathe air. I have two banana back to get there and I certainly can't squeeze my butt there. And I want to
Everyone. This is a low-level test. The real test, is your front foot goes up on a 12 inch to 18 inch box. So we're not even in the test
yet, we're with front leg extended.
No front leg, just up higher. So we Elevate the front leg into what's called a hip lock. So that front leg is suddenly taking my pelvis and rotating it, posteriorly knee is bringing the running into pelvis pelvis is like tucking and now you're really going to see what's going on with your hip
extension. So,
This is the equivalent position more or less of front knee sprinting like really larger percent, like jutted up in the air, maybe even past the belly button, definitely pass the Bill. He's 90 rear leg behind you. So this is sort of like, you know, caught in mid-stride. That's right. And
so suddenly, we have this nice test that allows us to see in our competency there. And I want to remind you. If you do the couch stretch and filament, your knee is actually in hip extension each. Not your knee, isn't even behind your. But here it's that hard.
And I'm still biasing it towards flexion. So what we're seeing is that you have a real deficit of hip extension, so that's one way to improve it. You can just do the test camp out there. Pick some breast contract. Relax breathe, do your resistant, isometrics whatever you want to do there. So many ways to judge that up, rotate side, Bend
The question is, how are you now loading that thing in your life? So we can put a band on you and get you do some isometric standing, but show me in your movement language in the gym, how you're reinforcing hip extension. So when we were talking about deadlifting with a tandem stance, still not hip extension, right? I'm extending the hip but that trail leg is not rear foot elevated. Split squat, ding, ding. Ding ding. We start to get there right? Bulgarians flipping. A tire like,
Any time where I need to be able to a big lunge, is a good example for lunge back
lunge. Tell me about flipping a tire. So you talking about flipping a tire, but then at the top of the movement, you're doing like a kettlebell swing Where You Buck your hips forward, like you're gonna try, he over that
Volkswagen pushing over right and don't be, don't try and P at the top. That's right. Last, but if you're saying about bucking the hips forward, that's right. Suddenly you're upright and that leg that trailing leg is an extension in a long lever position. So, we spend a lot of programming. One of the best persons at this is France. Bosh.
I mentioned earlier and he has something I've termed like the Bosch snatch. So if you imagine being in a double stance, so I'm just like, I'm swinging a kettlebell if I took a plate or a dumbbell doesn't matter. I'm just going to basically go from a hip hinge and as I go overhead, with the weight of the load, whatever is appropriate for you. I'm going to take my front foot and step it up on a box. So all the sudden I'm going from a flexed position and the hip C shaped body,
right? Well, or
Upright
torso, but hinged c-shape brighto which C and then have multiple C and then I'm going to step forward. And now I'm going to have that one of those legs is going to be an extension. And so suddenly now we're adding speed to this extension, because that's not what we do with reverse rear foot elevated. Split squats. We're not loading that in speed. So we started the speed component to what we're doing. And suddenly, we've discovered another way to challenge your movement. It doesn't just always be haftar, heavier, it can also be faster, so I'm basically
If imagine, if I was here's a great example, I love pressing, I think overhead pressing is the bee's knees, it's one of my non-negotiables we're going to press seesaw. Press overhead press were pressing, but if I take your front foot and put it up on a box, make sure that back foot is straight with all your toes on the ground. And press. From that position, you're going to find out why you don't have any hip extension. It's going to be so you won't even think about the way you think about your growing exploding.
So a lot of recommended people probe that that Mackenzie those metallic look with very light.
Altos. Go
press go. Find out how well you can press overhead and you're going to see that like, wow, this tandem stance front foot elevated, you know, press is going to kill, you
can, um, there's a movement. I do I'm guessing. Well, I'm curious if it activates hip extension the way I think it does. Here's here's what I've been doing that. I found useful. I don't know if it's true or not, but what I'll do is I'll tie a fairly thick band to a pull-up bar. I'll squat down, I'll hold it. Like, I'm holding a like, a pole in front of you like a pull carrier, and a
In a parade or something. I'll squat down and I'll jump up. And but instead of of but I'll Buck my hips forward at the top. So like feet. Go out in front is very unnatural movement, actually, as opposed to jumping and putting my toes down pointing my toes down, my put toes are kicking for it. So I'm trying to mimic the top of a kettlebell swing at the top of this movement.
I would say, you know, one of the things that is useful for me. As I am asked to come and tear through people's programming look for holes in
Air movement practices, we look at fundamental shapes. So what's nice is that okay? Hang on, everyone. Let me, let me Define exercise for you. We just I'll just give you a little framework and I'll start by saying, if something inflammatory the shoulders, not that complicated. It doesn't do that. Many things goes, overhead goes out to the side. Goes in the front, it goes in the back. That's what your shoulder does. You can bend the elbow, you can twist and all those shapes.
But those are the four fundamental primary organizations of the shape of the of the shoulder hip has flexion extension, right? Really, I can, I can go laterally, but that's just a different kind of squat. Really like a my squatting with the foot really narrow or my squad a little bit wider. So what we can then do is say in these fundamentals, bookends these benchmarks this. What we call archetype suddenly I can ask well how are you loading? Your overhead position. So
So if you're always pressing on a bar or pulling on a lap down machine, you actually are overhead but you're not in the fullest expression overhead, right. Which is your arms straight up and down, parallel by your
ears hands over the top of your
hands, over your head, right? So what we can then do is say, well, what what tools do you like to use kettlebells great? That's one of the reasons Kettle is so great. Single arm. Can't hold it out here. It's going to fall, I have to finish over my head, right, dumbbells, the same. But the kettlebells is salt. It constrains us.
Express full overhead motion. I can look at you have enough into rotation with the Hand, by the side. Are you doing enough pressing like activities chaturanga? The finish position of my row, right? Benchpress, dip running. Those are all movements where my shoulder comes into extension. Whether the arm is straight or bent. So what's nice? Now is I can say, well, am I distracting those tissues or compressing those tissues? Well, you're like, what do you mean? I'm like, are you pressing? Are you doing a pull-up right? Pressing overhead of doing a pull-up that's compressing
Resting or distraction, right? Very simple ways of looking at these movements we can say well how are you coming there? Did you get there from a snatch? Where did you get that from a front rack position? So we can look at start position to this position. And suddenly, what you're realizing is, you're like, oh, I'm starting understand the root movements and root positions. That helped me improve performance, predict future performance and help me get through pain. Because if I have people not expressing the highest levels of expression of the movement, that's something we can improve. That's technique.
Right. It's not just get bigger and stronger and say, let's be more technically proficient. So I have all of these ways of looking at the movement, selection choices. Again, what are you comfortable with? But then I can challenge it with load, make it heavier. We can do volume, we could add speed. We could add cardiorespiratory, demand, you could do more than five and suddenly you have to do 20 and we have metabolic demand in there. You and I are competing all the sudden right now suddenly I go from open Torque to close torque. I go from giving you a barbell to add
Dumbbell. Right? I go from open chain to closed chain. Suddenly we're like holy, moly blocked, practice, random practice. I have all the tools for me to understand. Are you confident putting your arms over your head? Or are you exposing these shapes under these different domains? And I think when we only look at sort of a few ranges of motion and we only look at load is the way then we lose all the opportunity and richness
of programming. Got it will let me come back to my silly example of the
And the jump thing and say, okay so for getting better hip extension, which is what I think a lot of people need is what I'm hearing. A lot of people learn hip
flexion, you're jumping, and then coming up.
Yeah, I mean, or, you know, we've seen these beautiful images of certainly not me but like people doing long jump where they're kind of like, you know, on physician something. Yeah. So the idea is because with the bandits safe, right, you know, trying to get the hip into extension or feet out in
front of it, jumping, it's a Kipping pull-up without a pull up, your
Just keeping on the bar and I
don't keep on my pull-ups, by the way, because I'm a time under know. I don't keep on my pull-ups. I do I train with Ben Bruno from time to time. You kept on a pull-up with Ben Bruno. There. You're never gonna hear the end of it ever. So I don't, but I don't anyway, because I'm at home,
I'm on time under tension. Yeah, I that's fine. I'm going to say that I love strict pull-ups. I do stream or Surplus and you can imagine, but if you can't cap, there's something wrong with you.
Okay, got it. Well, argue about this more offline but I love to Sprint.
That's hip extension absolutely love to ambient. Love this brand and I love jumping like I'm a big believer in. This may be true. Maybe not true idea that as we get older, we tend to jump and land, less a lot of injuries come from, you know, lack of eccentric,
loading and out of the Soviet system. When you stop jumping, you start dying. I believe that you and the lowest form could be trampolining. The highest low, another low form, jump roping, highest
ERM starting to be really powerful. I love it. I you're killing it and what's great. Now is you just made the switch. We start describing your training in blocks of positions. What position am I training? What shape of my reinforcing, right? That's a really not, it's not a muscle. Remember, your muscles are not wired for movement. Your brain is wired for movement, right? You can't you'll have any selective control of a single muscle in your body. That's a mistake. So you're not really working your biceps, you're working.
Arm flexion right in a variety of positions. This squat exercise biases, my quads more but I'm not actually quadding right? Because that's impossible.
Yeah I think that the misconception the broad misconception is that resistance training is just to build and strengthen muscles in a bodybuilding kind of fashion and no disrespect to the bodybuilders but we learned a lot. But you know we learned a ton and and and yet most people would probably do well to think about functional movements, in fact there are few Instagram.
It's that really like to come after not just me. But a lot of people that have talked about resistance training, at all, the talk about functional patterns. And I have to say as much as the messaging sometimes, I think is a little bit abrasive. I pay attention to these and I have seen some of the before and afters that they'll show for people that will incorporate into their training, like a like throwing or, you know, ballistic but movements from, you know, fully stops printing out, the gate kind of thing and focusing immensely on balancing. The two sides of the body
Never having done those programs. I have to say like, yeah, like a lot of these people had some pretty dysfunctional patterns and they look like they're doing better. And I think it's because I must I have to assume that they're incorporating a much broader range of movements. Yeah, more hip extension work in the two sides of the body, all the things that you're talking about all the things that you're talking about. And so I think it love the bodybuilding piece, I think is a great thing for getting people out the gate. I always say the amazing thing about resistance training for
Me for going long hair but I think this is something that if somebody is not naturally inclined to exercise or resistance training resistance training is one of the few forms of exercise that because of the blood flow, the so-called pump give people a visual and sensation a sensation based window into his progress and might make hell. Yeah. Right. I mean, this is unlike like going for a run and getting to like at the end of your run, you see a little less body fat. And then two days later, you you've reduce your body fat percentage, right? At least, it gives you a window into your hair, when
Resistant, strain, that way
and a Gateway into a conversation. That's very complex. This is all I think about and people are like, hey, I just want to feel better. I don't want to get hurt in my calves when I run. You're like, okay. We can be really simple. And also you have a right to look jacked and tan. I mean, you can be jacked all you
want, Mark Bell makes this point. I've recently
this house, look, I think there's something that I tried. We don't ever punch down, we just don't, you know, just point we point to what we do. This is our model, but any model that someone's on the
Annette, a model has to do three things. It has to explain current phenomena, right? It has to predict future phenomenon and it has to be easily communicated. So, let me see your model, how it works. How does it explain if I do your thing? Well, I get better at this thing, right? That's the thing I'm interested in, right? So, what I see is a lot of recursive fun fitness where people feel better, but I still have to go over here and squad or I still have to go over here and, and, and become
And but you can see the truth of needing to expose people to bigger ranges of motion and more skilled movement, than, with some of the things were getting traditionally in the gym, right? And, and I think one of the things that we saw with, like a pivot towards movement culture, right? Kind of coin. But you don't Port. All is that what we were seeing is that the gym didn't baguette necessarily better movers? What we had was people originally
Lee doing a skill, throwing something running track and field, we would train and then go do more of that. And there we did is we took the gym or took the sport skill movement out of it. And we just remained in the gym and you can see the reaction to that as well. You're not very elegant, you can't don't have anymore Moving Solutions, you don't transfer energy very well. You're not, you know, you're not graceful, you can't you have no rhythm. So the real key for us is like I think we want to put playback in
And you can see what the reaction is to. Hey if we're just doing bench press and hack squats, maybe that's not making the best mover, but it's certainly making a jack guy, who's what we call it, what is it in that movie? Hot girl fit? Where, you know, it's one of the recent movies, where the guys who's the guy from Twisters, that incredible actor he was in Top Gun. Anyway, he's swimming and the girl was like, hey why are you out of breath? He's like, I don't do cardio, I just do abs and buy some. She's like, oh my God, you're hot.
Girl, fit, like you have this big engine. That looks good with no go. And I want to make sure that no offense all the hot girls out there. But the idea here is, what does he want to do with your body? Let's start there. And then, we can start to say, well, what do you have access to what your trainee age? And it's a nuanced conversation is probably why you should have a coach and develop a coach for the, for the rest of your life. But let's not pretend having abs and big biceps is going to make you a good image a fighter.
Right. And you can see why the resistance of hey, that made me less athletic. We want to be careful of
that. Yeah, I like using the resistance training to make me stronger and better running. Yes, and that's my, that's actually me. That's what's in my mind? Yes, I only ran across country one season. High School, wasn't very good, but really enjoyed it, but I love running. I've been running for a long time and I'll never be,
I run cross-country one year in high school, maybe we ran against each other, but I know you're a year older than I
am. So
I went to. Yeah, well I'll tell the story some other time. It's not my stories aren't relevant here, but but I use resistance training to be able to run better faster further without
paying for me. That is that is what I would hope. We look at training for now. Apply a longevity lens, durability lens, right or as Juliet says, she's like don't you want to just be able to pop off the couch and go on adventures, right? I want to have a body that's capable of
That I think what we've been pitching in the gym doesn't really do that and even though I just want everyone to hear and double-click on what Andrew said that framework is that I now have a third party objective measure does. My running get better with my training as a really great would do great way to about your training? My faster, do I feel
better. It's really worked for me and it keeps me out of any kind of gravitational pull toward just trying to get more weight on the hack. Squat machine, which I enjoy Progressive.
Overload. I enjoy doing movements better with more weight Etc but I find that the gym just becomes this when it's a closed loop, I finally move it. It becomes this kind of like, yeah, endless exploration of like what am I really also at this age? I like I want to maintain strength and build some muscle
perhaps, but most you want to get heavier. I don't. And that weird, I don't know my goal right now as much muscle as you can because winter is coming.
My goal is to actually get much stronger without getting bigger.
And, and to keep my endurance going. I like to do one long Rucker run per week at one shorter. Run, 11, Sprint. I run. I just figure like
album everyone. What? You just described for a typical person is doing a long piece, a short piece and a high-intensity piece that's rent. That
is that's the we that's the crack. Yeah that's what I do every week. If I'm you know most weeks and then I'll lift, you know, legs one day tour, so everyone laughs store. So what kind of things that, you know, torso, including neck and
abs, let's take an X. Let's go flank to you want.
Get torso on flank really confused, or just gonna flank
and and then I'll do that. What could be called distal muscles? I'll do an extra workout for calves, biceps, and triceps, and forearms, and grip strength on Saturday and that combination of things, right? This isn't about my training, to me, meets the demands of life, like I can Sprint for the airplane with my luggage and get there and not cough up both lungs. I can go backpacking. Like, if you say, hey, let's go backpacking or you didn't Grand Canyon tomorrow. You're going to carry seventy five-pound sack. What a
Be a little bit sore at night but you'll feel good. I feel good sore, right? We can go to the gym together and I can put you know what feels to me like a respectable amount of weight on the hack. Squat, we do some full range glute-ham raises. I can hang from a bar but I'm not trying to beat a pull-up record or run, a trial run a marathon. I find that any time I've gone to the extreme in any one kind of training. I end up injured sick and I'm just not interested in that and I like to think I could be wrong. I'm projecting here probably that I'm representative of what most
All want. I also want to be able to over eat a little bit every now and again, like, thanksgivings coming a little bit. I also want to be able to not have to eat all day and then eat a big dinner and not dissolve into a puddle of my own tears because I'm neurotically worried about something nutrition based. Like, I tend to, I basically skip one meal a day, just by virtue of my schedules, right? It's like not intentional, intermittent fasting and the people who are obsessive about protein will say, well gosh, that is in his good, but yeah. Okay, so maybe I get a little bit less muscle. I'm not doing, I don't want to be so neurotic about my training that I'm not focusing on.
Bigger missions in my
life and notice that what you said was I train so I can have fun. I just want to double click on, we have sucked the joy, and the play and exposure out of training and out of fitness. And now it's, I have to have this vo2max to all live to 150 and I have to do, right? And you're forgot that we this whole thing is, so you can go spend some credits. So I like to say the gym and all that, really
we focused training is spending time on credits, but one of my coach friends, no Christensen says CrossFit Roots. She said, we don't nature for time, stop naturing for time like this, where surfing? So we can surf all day and we can surf more waves than the other kids because you're not fit enough, right? I want to go hike, and then ride my bike and play and Ski and do all the things I wanna do with my body. And that made me, I want to hold my kids, or I want to do my job, and this, you know, in this Warehouse weird start to train for life and a little
More simple way and it doesn't feel like this crazy burden and it also happens to be the best tool to understand how you're moving. Because my expert coaches, can watch you run and be like, that's what we're working on and I'll go right to the thing, right? But for the rest of us, we need to say, wow, my shoulder, that bench that fly dumbbell bench was a little bit tricky. I'm losing some shoulder extension, right? Or at least I'm touching these shapes and that ends up being a really interesting diagnostic tool.
Or we can really take a shot at improving function and reducing musculoskeletal distress. And I think this is the this is the template
for, yeah. Enjoying your training and including enjoying training hard is one of the ones, obsessed things one can do years ago when I was skateboarding. I mean it I ruined skateboarding for myself because got picked up out of sympathy to be fair by a couple sponsors and then got obsessed with the fact that you know, I wasn't progressing. Then broke my foot and, you know, pretty soon I didn't hate it. I loved it and I loved the community but it turned into something.
Else
and had, I just taken a step back from it and said, all right, I'm decent at this, I could get better and I'm just going to focus on doing it for pleasure and make a living some other way. I'd probably be doing, you know, like, you know, frontside inverts and pools. Now in and unfortunately, I'm not, I'm lucky, if I get a nice little front side ground on coping, but whereas, with Fitness resistance training running, I love resistance training, running the cup of coffee, before my workout taste, 10 times better because I'm going to work out. I love to use it as an opportunity. Listen to music, listen to
Podcast, there's so much that's in and around it that still just pure pleasure. Even on the days when I'm like at 95% of output or 100% of output where 80% of output. I'm like I just I'm having so much fun. That's right. And I can't wait to get back in
there. So where we are looking at Society Health, right? The first thing we arguing instead of saying what's most important we said, what is it you want to do and who are your friends are going to do it with and are you going to do in a lot? Let's start there.
We can start to weasel in everything especially with social isolation with sort of lack of community. I mean I feel like sport is the last place where people congregate right Sports Sidelines this is the sort of you know lingua Franca of the whole world I've taught on every continent except Antarctica. Everyone knows that a push-up is ever known as the deadlift. It's not science sorry it's not math. That's not the universal language. It is bench press everyone knows and everyone can tell you how
Much, you bench and any language. So, there are some things there that are Universal. I think, when we look at the humanism moving organism, then we can really start to not feel crazy about how our world is changing. But we how do we fight back by setting up more opportunity to to move more and, and for me, the whole lens ends up being like we basically is worth trying to parse, through complex problems. So I have a world champion who's injured two-time world.
In isn't able to finish at or, you know, the first question, I ask them is tell me about your sleep. I'm a rough sleeper. Oh, tell me more about that, right? Because I can't even tell your inputs and outputs unless we're getting to sleep. Then I say well tell me about your nutrition, I clean crate find that for me. I don't even know what that means. Clean turns out under calorie undernutrition, doesn't get enough. Macros doesn't get enough micros. I'm like, oh, we start to correct that we start to collect sleep when we really start to divide, some of the behaviors into for me.
Me as a 51 year old. I'm obsessed with my tissues, not failing like tearing. Achilles is like every physical therapists, worst nightmare. And I jump rope every day and I have great range. I do so many isometrics. I'm just not going to tear my achilles. Now I'm into my clothes but I'm not gonna tell ya. So tissue health is part of that. So now I have to look at nutrition. I have to look at my blood work and I have to look at my sleep, right? So that I can really Define some of those things as that crates of Readiness tissue tolerance health.
Then I can be looking the other things and that's really as we start to get again the framework of sport or framework of play creates this place where I can suddenly start to understand inputs and outputs and how to take care of this carcass. So that I can do what I want with my body which is our new definition of Mobility. Can I do what I want with my body and kind of be
pain-free am I correct in my very non scientific assessment of Instagram accounts whereby when I see a 80 to 100
Sometimes it'll be somebody in a gym lifting a heavy weight but more often than not, it's gymnastic type movement, pull up, dip parallel bar balance beam sprinting, is that what got them there or is that just the expression of what? What genetics do they feel safe? Show me nutrition. Show me their training age. But what's noticeable there is that we have disciplines that require greater range of motion and skill, body control and high power output.
Right, huh? So one of the things that we do in our programming for adults is I make you sprint once a week like Sprint. Because people have not sprinted and I don't mean you can go out and run, I don't think you're capable of that but IMA put you on a bike. I'm going to put you in control. I'm going to see what your Peak wattages, that's printing. So ideally, I would love you to be able to do some Hill, Sprints and repeats, but I don't think you have the tissue tolerance or the range of emotion for that and I know what the outcome is going to be, but I can put you on a bike and say, can we hit this peak?
Wattage. And what you just discover there was, hey, I still need to maintain my ability to move quickly and have control through great ranges of motion. That is a recipe for. You know, why? If you did yoga and did some Sprints you're going to be pretty badass, you know, that's a pretty good
way and why people who just do the elliptical and the little little small dumbbells or they're fooling themselves.
It's a lot of busy work. There's a lot of busy work out there. It makes people feel like they're involved in a program again.
The way we want to take our feelings out of it. How do you progress those pink dumbbells? Thousand reps is 2000 reps, right? Show me progression, suddenly I can't progress and regress those things. The other thing I want to say is like, is it making the thing better? What are we training for? And, you know, I think it feels decorative to have busy work and I do all this prehab corrective exercise, I'm like, hold up, why don't we do? The thing we're doing and regress and progress that and ask if you have native range of motion. Yes.
Or no. But you know if we look at the typical person, special someone listen to this podcast, they don't have two hours in the gym. So if your program is requiring two hours of me, I'm out, it requires an hour of me, I might be out, you know, I'm so busy that sometimes I lots of 30 and 40 minute pieces pepper throughout plus a lot of other play and that's good enough. So we really do need to look at how people are finding themselves in their environments. To ask is this appropriate for you and what's essential and it turns out a lot of this, you know?
20-something playing around video yourself in the gym is great when you have three or four hours in the
gym. Yeah. Listening to an entire album or podcast or book chapters in sequence. I think is if I'm a far more valuable than allowing oneself, the opportunity to text and be on social media during a workout because it just becomes a very distracted thing. I think that the work out of any kind is also an opportunity for building concentration and one can listen to
Podcasts, or books, Etc, but or an album sequentially through. But I find at least for myself, if, if I work out in a way that's interrupted by social media, or texting or email, because it's available there that it carries through until the rest of the day, that I'm more distract. I believe you.
How about that? I believe you. And that's what's so great is your like, hey, that doesn't work for me, you know, I find that my best thinking is done under enormous
Look like I literally I'm like oh and I have an often one jump up and write something on the Whiteboard and then go back and do my thing because, you know, I'm just it creates flow state and its. And if I'm distracted, I can't really hear what's going on. And that's, there's a time when I want to distract myself, you know, there's a time where I want to be amused. That's fine. You know, I've got a two-hour ride, getting ready for a four-day, Backcountry ski trip here in February. But notice I've already been getting ready for first in the beginning of November. I am.
Ready. It's taken me going to ramp up and so much of my train now is, is going towards, can I successfully do these for Hard? Day's the way I want to. So some things come down a little bit strength, dials down. I changed my body composition, like to be a little bit lighter, I'm playing, but there are some times where I have to get two or three hours in of steady work done and I'm like, headphones, you know? I mean, so it's okay to be amused. You don't have to be a monk doing what you're doing, but I really liked what you said, feels I feel distracted. Yeah, let's use this to, let's use it as a
In time. All right, let's use this interaction time. I the gym should be the loneliest place in the world. If you're not making eye contact and talking high-fiving get a different gym,
I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about faccia. Di you and Jill Miller were some of the first people that I ever heard talk about fashion in a in a in an elaborate way, in a way that allowed me to finally understand what this incredible aspect of our physiology. The many things that it's doing. I realize this is a vast discussion that we could take several more
hours but not official research.
ER, right it. And yet I think as I recall, you one of the first people to talk about, you know, the relationship telling people, what that there's faccia. Now, we have this thing called faccia, clearly, an important part of our physiology, our ability to move to what extent do you think that tight faccia quote-unquote? I'm probably offending many people in this moment. Tell you faccia restricts our movement and that working on fascial release. If we're maneuvering, fascist mobilization, thank you.
On can allow us to move better, maybe better posture, maybe even feel better. There are a lot of theories, some probably wrong, some probably right about what fascia can and can't do for us. But what are some things about fashion that you find particularly interesting that you'd like to pass
along? I think what we should do is if you pull fast out of the human movement equation, human doesn't the fails to stop moving? Right. So the recent like we've just discovered facha around, that's not really entirely true. There's a
really like 20 year old set of videos by a guy whose ass he describes himself as the Soma. Not seems Gil Headley and he did these live two sections on the YouTube. I don't even know if it's still there but he basically did all of this gross anatomy for free on the internet and he describes his of the form of the first people, really describe fascia as this sort of incredible connective tissue Network that envelops wraps, you know, as stores energy communicates is tension ality.
Full disclosure and we'll just go in Boulder and I may have dated a girl who went to Rolfing school and was a rough ride overall was one of the first people to really talk about how can we mobilized fascia with touch so I was introduced to faccia in the 90s when I had Rolfing done on me so when I'm trying to help someone think about pain or restore position and this is overly gross but it'll create a framework for people. We ask is this an environmental problem? Are you poorly hydrated because your tissues need to be hydrated to
Why are you inflamed like, that's why we talk about nutrition and we talk about sleep, because we have this environmental piece, then I often will say, hey, do you have a just a movement problem? Do you just have crappy technique? Like, let's fix the technique. First, let's, um, get you moving to the highest expression of the movement first. Hey, turn your foot. Straighter let's-let's-let's resent rate that joint. Can we can we have a better organization? Then we start to say because sometimes it's just moving problem. Just needed some queuing. We say it's this a joint capsule problem because capsular
Just the joint capsules of bag of connective tissue that surrounds all your joints and it can account for huge chunks of arranged most limitation. So a lot of we do is we after we try to mobilize it a joint tissue and again that's my own bias. The way I was trained us Australian train manual therapists, this Maitland School. Then we say well is this just a good old-fashioned muscle restriction and we call muscle Dynamics because that includes High tone stress fear. But trigger points are well-documented phenomenon muscles, get stiff, they become fibrotic, right? You could have high tone,
I'm trying to protect you all those reasons, but that's still can limit your range of motion. And lastly, we say sliding surfaces. So instead of kind of talking about all the different layers of dermis and scan. And fascia we say, do the things that slide should are they sliding. So, if you grab your skin on your forehead, it should slide and all the directions. Notice that the skin should slide all the directions over your tendons, right? If I grab your typical person's Achilles and grab the skin, over the Achilles, it doesn't budge.
It's like to have an exoskeleton, that's that fascial kind of compartment and it's seized. It's adhered. It's bound to the underlying surfaces, which creates tissue destruction and higher tension. So when we're mobilizing, these tissues were trying to keep tissue sliding and gliding. That's an easy way of thing about it nerves have to run through nerve. Tunnels taking. Huge breasts, keeps all of those, you know, aspects of your trunk moving and we just need to be thinking in like a sea.
Systems approach. So sometimes if you went and saw an AR T practitioner and it didn't solve your problem,
this is Active Release therapy. Yeah. Okay.
It may not have been a fascial problem, right? If you went and saw someone who only worked on the muscles, it may not have been a muscle problem if you want to talk chiropractor and they worked on your on your joint structure. So, I draw good physio. It may not be a joint, restriction problem. If you saw coach and they couldn't kill you out of, it may not have been a. So, what we need to do is we recognize that if more squats, just
A lot of problems when we have solved all the problems. If rolling on a roller had solved all the problems, it seems like we have solved all the problems. So I think what ends up happening is we want to put faccia equally as an important part of the system. And one of the ways that we can directly impact that in a freeway at home, is to begin a conversation of just some simple myofascial mobilization. In fact, myofascial means muscle fascial, but there are Osteo fascial connections does the faccia
Glide over the bone there, right? We can look at the, the tendinous fascial connections and again do these tissues slide and glide the way they're supposed to slide Glide, and that's a much easier way to look at it. And I'm going to test and retest not with subjective pain. But how is your range of motion and access to a range of motion?
Thank you for that. I've wanted to try Rolfing for a long time. And then, a friend of mine, who's a former Seal Team, operator told me that at some point during the roll thing that he received that they put a glove on and went up his nostril and did some fascial relief on the release, scuse me on the inside of his nose and quote, it was the most painful experience he ever had. And I was like, all right, well,
I don't even know anyone in Naval special Warfare, but there are so
Off his rights. I didn't say that Kelly said that,
you know who you are my
friends but I you know that I confess, you know, it's not like I avoid pain at all costs but that that made me think that I might not want to do Rolfing. I also don't want someone putting their finger up my nose. So I'm assuming that I could say hey I want I want to try roll thing and I don't need to get because you hear this stuff like oh you know there's all this emotional release which you know, there are other ways to get that the
I guess is it always painful as the question?
Nothing need to be painful decision
is pretty and pretty small
list of pull was pulled off an outside because I'm not an offer, but let's just say that mobilizing, your tissues doesn't have to be painful. In fact, it's likely that you'll experience some discomfort, but let's talk about a couple guidepost for you. Number one, you always have to go take a full breath, right? So if I mobilizing you or your mobile as yourself and you suddenly stopped breathing, you're going too deep. So an easy way for you is
Hey,
do I have, can I Breathe Here? Number two, I like to have volitional contraction, so if I mobilizing, or someone or someone's doing something, I should be able to flex them out. I should have control over that if the pain or depth or pressure is putting too much load on the system where I literally lose Norm us can control. What am I doing, right? And then, you know, those two pieces. Can I take a breath here? Do I have control here those go? A long way to keeping me in the bounds and then we tend to not work on a tissue longer than five minutes just because
I want to get the rest of it tomorrow and if you give me 10 minutes of work, that's incredible. We like to put the soft tissue work. Before we go to bed and what we found was that we had better adherence, no one's doing anything productive in the 10 minutes before they go to the bedroom. Number two, like a child, when you put a child to bed, you're like, first we take a bath and reread the book and then we go to bed, right? Your brain is like, I know what comes next? So, if you do this rolling or on your soft tissue work self-massage, you are training your brain to know.
Comes next, we find that when people have engaged in massage or self-massage, they don't stand up and want to fight anyone. They're very relaxed if you've ever gone to a spot how to massage you don't go out and snatch or get into a fight afterwards. You're so chill bro. So we found is a great way to as Jill. Miller says, switch on the off switch. That's a beautiful way of talking about that. How do I tell myself to shift out of this, you know, fight or flight into coming down? Five minutes per body. Parts start anywhere on the legs.
Start, any wet stiff. What's asking? Can I breathe connect contract? Boo, you're going to see that. That's a really simple way to start. Getting some input and not all your tissues are the same. If you come to me with knee pain, I'm going to want to be able to look at your rank your positions, but I'm also going to want to be able to stay on your quads. I mean, my full body weight and if you can't take that, I'm calling that incomplete. And those people out there who are going to be like, whoa, that's heavy duty. You have not worked with my population who have monster thighs on are thick and
Roddick and it takes real. Wait. So we all have different sensitivities, but if I respect your ability to take a breath and contract, then all the sudden were up regulating what I recommend you. Go to Thailand, you get a Thai massage, from a 65 year, old Master woman who is ways 109 pounds. And when she is working on your quads and you tap out, she's like no I'm not done here. If you felt your quads, you're going to realize how low the bar is,
all right?
Heat and cold. You were one of the first people that told me. Hey, listen, Colts, great. Cold plunge is cold. Showers are great for shifting, your state for resilience training, it's fun. It's fun.
I swam with Laird's pool. This morning took a breath. Hold cold. Laps is fun. I'm gonna put in quotation marks. Yeah, it seems this type to fun.
It definitely will shift one state for many hours afterwards for reasons. We Now understand, but you were one of the first people to point out to me that
Or injuries often times, it's better to perfuse the tissue and that heat sometimes perhaps is the more favorable tool if you had to pick one. That's right.
So what you, I think even talked about that there is research to show that Coldwater immersion can attenuate training effects
if done in the six to eight hours after hypertrophy and strength training because of its potent, anti-inflammatory properties,
Prevent some of the inflammation that would prompt the adaptation response and put simply if your goal is bigger muscles and getting stronger, don't do immersion based deliberate cold exposure in the six to eight hours, after your training, fine, to do it on other days, fine to do it beforehand. In fact, athletes at Stanford, do that on the basis of a lot of work from Craig Heller and others find it not do it at all. If you don't want to do it again I'm not a I'm not a I'm not going to die on The Sword of cold plunging.
But it can attenuate or even prevent those adaptations, but at other times, it's a great tool for reducing inflammation. Shifting, one's mental, and physical state in the great Direction. Look, it always sucks to get in the thing. The whole point is you feel much better when you get out, then you did before you ever got in. So that's the simplest way to
put it. I'm a middle-aged guy who wanted to be the best middle-aged mountain biker. My neighborhood, he is my tiny of my plunge, going to affect my ability to be that mediocre ass.
Athlete. No, so stop it. When people died, Wednesday optimal time like when's it work for you does, is that first thing in the morning Juliet found that if she got hot and plunged it in the night she was like woken up and fired up and ready. So, I'm not going to sleep now and I get hot and cold, hot cold and like someone hits emergency brake, right? So first of all, when is it work for you? Right? Second of all, if there is a performance concern, we try to put it as far away from training as we can. That's why we say during the evening plunge before.
You like you've trained the in the morning plunge the evening like it cool, that's cool. But what you hinted at is the same reasons why we don't ice injuries because it limits our body's ability to heal so it rate limits and it might do it by physical striction it, your body eventually buys going to warm up anyway. So one of the things we like to say is your body either heels at the rate of a human being or it heals slower. So there's no such thing as a fast. Healer, you're just all you're really good at healing at the rate of human physiology.
And the rest of us are doing dumb, things that are limb rate limiting our healing nutrition sleep, right? When we are talking about anyone after surgery or injury our Benchmark in the Line, in the Sand is eight hours of laying in bed without looking at your phone, that's minimum. And I don't care if you're sleeping because resting is the next best thing. But I can't actually understand inputs and outputs and let me be super clear. If you're trying to grow a body, learn a skill, change your body composition, get
He'll that all rhymes with eight hours, we look seven as our minimum, and of course, your human being you're going to get by. I was stressed out last night. Want to come on this show. With my friend Andrew and do a good job. Like, I didn't get great sleep, but I'm a human being. I'm still going to show up. So what's nice them is we can start to say, okay, what can we control in terms of managing and up? Regulating boosting maximal healing rate for humans and it turns out cold water may not be the best icing. Something.
Might suppress prostaglandin release, right? Which means that you can think of it as you have the circulating stem cells against our. Everyone get this, just very cursory and we need the chemical signalers from the injured, damaged tissue to call those things to be. But if I ice that and suppress that those some of those cells can go swinging on past, there was a great study, I saw a million years ago and it looked at ibuprofen usage in Australian military tactical athletes, who had
Ankle sprains, and those athletes who are given ibuprofen, which does the same thing as I suppress this prostaglandin release, right? Cuts off, someone's chemical signals were back. Faster than their counterparts, who did not have the ibuprofen, but they had chronic ankle instability because they did not have a sufficient healing response because they had shut that healing response down. So what we find is look your body will wait until you it warms back up. But if you think you're going to do,
Do engineer Genesis and make new capillaries and modulate. All these things by slapping, a nonspecific ice pad for a, non specific amount of time. Over a non specific tissue, you've got to be kidding me. And so it's really Mickey Mouse does is help for margaritas that are warm. Yes, open heart surgery. Yes. Right. Waking you up in the morning up in the morning. Hey, I have a kid, who needs a placebo I can, um, that thing and give my kids some Placebo ice. That's great, definitely can work for pain control because as soon as you're numb,
I feel anything, but what's going to happen when you pull that thing off, we're going to come back. So we have found that we have much better and against instead of saying that's bad. We're turning out and saying we have so many better tools now, to manage congestion, because that's really what we're trying to do with ice. And healing is, we're trying to stop swelling, right? But is swelling a mistake by the body. The chances are it's not really a mistake. Again, two and a half million years of evolution. This stuff is pretty awesome. But what we know is failure to move in a vacuum
Eight, that swelling is a problem. So when we get people on non fatiguing muscle contraction enemy s devices like the H wave or something like that. We find that we can actually decongest and keep moving in controlled ways much and we have much better clinical outcomes than we do. If we guys what about
heating pads hot water
bottles song, do you sit in the sauna? Yes, I do love
this on. How often are you in this honest?
Whenever I can, you know, and sometimes it's short sessions and sometimes it's superhot sessions and sometimes I just
Hard called a couple times and I try like you said earlier, I'm not after some specific adaptation response, the song is a great way for us to chill out and hang out. And some of us were born, we got to make dinner or move on. So I, you know, I try this on it. If there's anything I do, I saw a lot bigger the engine, the bigger the bricks and it's for me, it's such a big
break. You mentioned layered seem layered Drag The Assault bike into the sauna. Something most people probably shouldn't do because they would know sky is not to die of hypothermia.
But that Restrepo, it's the worst place on
Earth. It's a, it's an interesting tool though. The, the heat, I find that if I get the sauna uncomfortably hot and then force myself to breathe super slowly only through my nose so that I don't actually feel like a burning sensation on the inside of my nostrils. And I just do that for 10-15 minutes that it's wonderful, stress, resilience training, was that but very different than the cold plunge where you can either muscle through it.
Distract yourself or whatever in the heat, you know, your heart rates going up and there's this temptation to I'm like to follow that heart rate toward a more elevated stress State and so I find that you can get very, very hot. Obviously be safe about this folks but still maintain a lot of calm and I think it's a wonderful tool but you have to work at it and I enjoy this by the way, so people are probably thing. Here you go again, like, why not? Just enjoy the sauna. But I like to listen to Greg.
Orion chance or something in there and do this, like very like how even and calm can I stay? Oh, I love that 215 or 220 and eyewear, I wear the cap. So those higher Heats, don't. Ya registered to the Grave,
you will drive yourself out eventually. Your brain is going to, just, I was driven drives me on the song and I was a wretch. I actually like, feel like I'm going to vomit because I've gotten so hot. My brain stem is like, bro.
You can just override some money. Gotta get that bull and I get out of the sauna. And then you wait, one of the reasons I love the cold so much which up in our cold, our pool or a cold plunge is I can get back in the song, right?
Right. It's a the contrast of I tried it once a week. Sonic old Sonic old cycle once a day once a week. You know, again not training for any specific thing except to be able to go back to Jaco's house because I did sauna at jacko's house with some family members of ID's and friends. And I think they wanted to see when I would do. I'll Crush you. So they went I think they Crank That Thing Go.
220
230 and they call, he got me on this there. I ended up down on the floor, you know? And they were they were teasing me because it's obviously cooler down on the floor. That's going up top and so they call that the huberman spot the Wimpy spot. But yeah, he's a beast of with the
song when it's not a contest and what is it is in the Willing household? I'll tell you it, absolutely is the things I like about the Heat and the cold, is it informs me about my Readiness state.
Cuz just like my CO2 tolerance. My breath holds are very short when I'm stressed and under recovered. My heat tolerance drops dramatically. And so does my cold tolerance, it's easier to pick up really fast. I start shivering right away. I'm like, whoa, I've been in here 30 seconds, I'm already shivering. I'm like huh? Another piece of data says maybe I need to make it a 70% day in the gym and move. I don't have to take a day off, we believe Gillette and I believe in this thing called desire to train, we wake up every day. Like
You probably self-medicate with some exercises kids, right? And we start thinking about what we're going to exercise what we're gonna do. We're gonna ride our bikes. What are we going to do? We lift. Like when we wake up, we start thinking about when we're going to do it and we wake up on some days and it's not there. And what we ask ourselves is not there, why isn't there is it me? I should be there. We should go try anyway but we really try to listen to that voice and when there's no desire to train, it's really strange. How it correlates with crap. Heat tolerance, crap. CO2, tolerance. Crap, cold tolerance. And I think it's a nice way of
Understanding yourself from sort of a third-party objective measure, especially as you get good at this. You're like wow, really suck today.
Yeah, I love that. I think assessing ones degree of kind of forward Center of mass for effort is great. I'm borrowing this analogy from somebody else. I didn't come up with this, he said, you're with all things, you're either, you know, back on your heels, flat footed or forward Center of mass. And I think we've heard a lot about, you know, trying to encourage ourselves to always be forward Center Mass. What I'm hearing today is that
To do that sometimes, great sometimes to back off. But to just explore the full range of for lack of a better way to put it, sort of emotional range of motion, you know?
And remember, ultimately, all this is supposed to be additive, right? And it's supposed to inoculate Me by creating a framework that makes more durable, my body, and my relationships. I mean, we didn't even talk about the fact that the sun is like it just glue for people.
It allows people to come together. I think one of the things I've noticed with my male friends, is that it gives us a place like once a week, we get together because it's so hot. We also, we're also promote, honorable, and the truth Barrel. We talk with our friends and we kind of share stories and can be talked about our lives. And so, it creates a framework for that. And if that was the benefit of the sauna, I'm in just that alone, right? That my wife, and I feel more connected after taking us on together. I'm like, well, who cares about the heat shock proteins and
Alzheimer's, that's probably important to but I like having a lot of bottom things and I think we it's easy for us to sort of so hyper science and Hyper tactic things that we forget, the whole point of the brain is to be around other brains, that's it. That's why the brain exist. And then those brains go do red shit in the world together and sometimes it's that simple. And when we start threading that filter on, it becomes a lot more sustainable. I'm not interested being 110, I miss you being durable enough to take the hits on my way to 110.
I love that.
That some of my best friendships have been forged in the songs true and not by pushing ourselves necessarily just just become the thing.
Yeah, it's so cool. I know that some of my New Zealand teams have a kava, they called recovery and sometimes they'll share. I have a kava ceremony and drink a little Cava and then jump in the sauna and point really binds to the boys. You know, they really creates a down-regulation of fact. I mean, it's so you know, I think
Again, my own bias because I love this stuff. Is that? I think all of it is about physical input. So if we took a sort of macro step back, we can say is what is your physical practice look? Like, tell me about your physical practice. Well, I get move my body and I try to eat a fruit and some protein for I get out the door and I walk all day long. And I try not to sit in one period place for a long period of time and I get home and if I'm lucky enough to exercise I do and then I sat on the floor and I roll a little bit but that's a
Full practice, you walked you got sunlight, you know, mean and that I think is a much better way of thinking about this versus sort of let me add another line of code to your programming where now you're doing 3 sets of 10 in
this thing.
What are your thoughts on nutrition? You seem to be pretty balanced about this before we started recording. You were talking about some meatloaf recipes, that sound pretty amazing. Clearly you
love me because I'm the best at meatloaf but I may be 7 out of 11 times Bamboo Terrace bench Champion, but gonna tattoo, but it's fine.
You enjoy food and the food. See, not you like to eat and you cook a bit as well.
Most people feel like, I think kind of overwhelmed that the discussions about nutrition. Now, we're trying to get a gram of protein per pound of body weight, which I subscribe to. But if I'm supposed to spread that out across the day, sometimes I'm doing that. Sometimes I'm not like fruits and
vegetables. You feel like a failure because you didn't hang around. I mean, honestly, if it can feel for people like, oh, I didn't do it. No, I think if people make
getting high quality, high protein to calorie ratio Foods as the foundation of their diet and then eating some dead,
Vegetables and eating some fruit. Whoa bro. What about the pills? You're gonna kill people
and then I love that smile disdain,
always the whole all eat the orange peels. It's a really good orange. I will people know me, I'm I've gotten some wide eyes at meals, where I'll take the lemons out of my dream. I'll just eat the whole thing down. I don't care if someone will tell me why it's gonna kill me, but I don't need to see his body to appeal to so some vegetables fruit and then some starches, you know, / energetic requirements and or real life like I'm not going to stay away from the sourdough bread.
I don't need a starch that I love a little bit of it. Like, you know, I feel like we've lost our rational approach to eating because people feel these, you know, these quantifiable metrics of, you know calories and protein, they're important clearly. But I've always known you to be somebody who's very balanced about the occasional ice cream. Yes. Steak but also vegetables, I mean a why do you think that the nutrition conversation has gotten so distracted, even contentious and B what do you do? And you know, if
we're going to raise a kid, you've raised kids, if you're going to raise a kid and and say, hey here's what like balanced nutrition looks like to you. Yeah. Okay. Not calling you nutrition as an object to you. How do you see this
picture? When I want to point out is that if we're going to have a conversation, remember my, my real job day job is high performance. I'm going to have to talk about body composition and I'm going to have to talk about fueling to have enough carbs on board to do what we're going to do, are you eating to recover to reduce the session cost, right? How do we minimize the sort of the physiologic
This training, this competition and that's all wrapped around Edition nutrition. I already hinted at, I'm going to have to talk and ultimately ask you to blood panel and look at make sure that you have everything on board so that your tissues are tissues and can handle the loading or prescribing them. So I didn't want to get into nutrition at all because it's always about body composition for me and I'm like that's the most boring reason Mike we Sean Stephenson wrote a beautiful book about creating a table cut
Culture and a culture on eating for your family. So for me, the functional unit of change is the household. That's the place where I want to make and put all my energy and time. That's how we'll transform Society. One household in the time, but sitting down with your kids, the research around the eating, with your kids like twice or three times a week is phenomenal, right? Like cooking is beautiful. I have to become more nuanced because if I have a team I'm working with like we had a tournament two weeks ago,
Stanford, we played four games and the that's for Collegiate nationally, ranked teams that were playing badasses. How do I feel those women? How do I get them? What do they want to eat? What makes them feel good? What makes them feel bad. How do we balance? All of that? Like, I found out that putting food on a table with a tablecloth increase calories. Again, as a high performance for me, I'm like, how are the ways that I can be thinking about?
At this, from a practical standpoint. My personal thing is that we focus on trying to create. This has been really useful for Julian. I'm an objective measure .8, 21 grams of protein, which means I don't measure any more, a drowned body. I'm 51 years old from body weight. So what does that mean? It means that I really try to prioritize protein every meal super simple and I try not to eat one protein. I tell you all the proteins, right? That's probably better. I try not to choose personally very fatty proteins because my genetics don't really support it if I want to see triglycerides and
And things go through the roof, then I'll, you know, watch me, eat eggs and butter and steak like keto gives me diarrhea. So what I'll say is, I try to go for leaner proteins there and then on the fruits and vegetables, because I think we have a real problem with not enough micronutrients. Again, talking about tissue health, and definitely not enough fiber. Those are huge problems and if I get 800 grams of fruits and vegetables, this is a nutrition strategy promoter. I our friend eccn Kowski of a top
reminds me nutrition. She put this 800 gram challenge, based on some research and it changed everything. Because suddenly I was like, oh my God, I got to eat more food. I have to eat more fruits and vegetables and I was stuffing myself with fruits and vegetables getting enough protein, that was like, I guess there's no room for a cookie, you know. And what I really liked about that, it was agnostic about your cultural preferences, it didn't matter. If you're vegan, did matter for vegetarian didn't matter. If you were carnivore you want to do carnivore plus berries, knock yourself right out. It gave people permission to
Of their food identities. But it also meant the met the minimums. And then we can do sup and dose Down based on what your performance needs are.
And this is 800 grams not of carbohydrate. This is a disinfection, 800 grams
has a for Big Apple's. Got you a banana is like 80 to 100 grams. Okay. Yeah. If you want to be real dangerous, you ate ate ate bananas today. You could die. I mean, did, you could
die and a big salad with Leo, Les, cucumber, tomato,
and always, probably two to three hundred
grams.
Okay. So then you'd also want to get some fruit. Maybe another that maybe some cruciferous vegetables,
Etc. Check this out again, I'm going to do some boy math here. Starbucks cookie delicious really 300 Quran calories. I'm just call it delicious, right. A pound of cherries, is 230 calories. So eat a pound of cherries and tell me, you're like still want something sweet. A pound of melon was at like 220 calories a pound of melon. So calorically not very dense.
Right. But nutritionally super dense. So we're end up loading a ton of more food on and it really does. Prioritize those things. And from a performance standpoint, one of our friends. Is this incredible nutritionist at at Michigan, football. Abigail is amazing there and she will tell me about how she's using it nutrition is intervention for sports performance and she'll have men come up to her and say Abigail I pooped today and there she's like, yeah, that's great.
You should prove every day and they're like, no, no. Your said I pooped yesterday, too. And it's the first time these kids have pooped consecutively, they don't poop regularly. And I think again, if I'm just trying to get out in the weeds and talk about, what's normal and not normal, we should talk about, you didn't eat fiber and she said wait until you poop twice in one day and they were like, that's crazy. I've never in my whole life and what were the differences. They started eating fruits and vegetables and fiber and when we start to create those
Those benchmarks. It's a lot easier for me to see inputs and outputs and then we can argue about. Can you choke down a hundred grams of carbs an hour? Because you're in my Elite cyclist, you know, I think you'd be shocked at how my, a lot of my athletes have changed their relationship around food because it serves their needs. It's not their identity around control. And something that you and I have been very cautious of because if you have two daughters to speaking, we're really concerned about creating dysfunctional patterns and relationships to food because in this
Fitness space. It can be real gnarly.
Yeah, I see the progression from, you know, sitcoms of the type that we grew up on to reality TV shows to social media where social media can do so much, good education, wise, Etc connection. But it's basically a reality TV show that everyone's been able to cast themselves in if they want and certain characters are casting their, you know, physique certain figures are casting their outrageous behavior. And
And, you know, we're Saul in this reality TV show called social media. I
think that's really the best way to describe
it. You know, when people start to feel like, oh wow, these people are getting attention for this reason or that reason, it creates a gravitational pull toward people behaving, a certain way. And then obviously, some of that can be really self-destructive.
Do you win Health mean? This is a great question. I ask people so like you shredded Down super dysfunctional. Eating can't go out and eat with friends. You don't drink anything with
It's like, it's really gnarly to be hyper lean. And then what I'll say is when you took your shirt off, did you win Instagram? Did you win? Because you got another 60 70 years on this planet. How does that work? We don't really die. We will manipulate macros to take weight on. Put weight off players in season out of season. You will have will have really good athletes say I think I should lose four pounds, next two weeks for this thing and I'm like hold up. I'm not going to put you in another stressor when our we're trying to like let's go ahead and talk about body composition.
Position after the season. But ultimately, when we really get people on board with how food has the potential to enrich their relationships, how fun it is to cook, how fun it is to prep, how fun is to serve other people, then we have this really different relationship with fueling and that's, that's really remarkable. But it is really easy to say I won. And I'm like, okay, so this 90-day fast, there are so many Fitness things out there.
They start with a fast or brutal calorie restriction and I'm like that's your jam to get people lean fastest just to slam off the calories that we know what's going to happen. How many people have done some kind of 30-day, 90-day thing? And the next day it's like they're off the rails. So if you're doing somebody re comp and then you're off the rails for me. I'm like I'll he was very good because I got a this is a long season we're
playing. I think it's have to be careful here because I realized this gets into some issues when I did an episode about
About anorexia. I learned that first of all anorexia has existed for centuries. This idea that it's more prominent now with social media actually the numbers don't bear out. What does bear out is that it is the most deadly, the most deadly by far of all the psychiatric illnesses Hoshi. It leads to death in far greater percentage of cases than any other psychiatric illness, including bipolar where people often commit suicide, a great great rate, much higher.
Censorship people commit suicide who are bipolar Etc. So it's a really serious thing and yet we assume that social media has made that worse but there's this now cluster of all these different eating disorders that don't qualify as full-blown anorexia nervosa sort of like ADHD. Now we understand people are having attention deficit issues that might not be clinical ADHD but that cluster around it and like people's adults and children's inability to hold their attention on an idea or topic for any appreciable amount of time. So it's very serious.
This thing, I love that today. You've talked about enjoying your training, like really enjoying your training in all aspects, the resistance part of the cardiovascular the mobility part, you know, the in the evening getting down on the floor also enjoying eating with people enjoying the sauna. I mean I think you know, people see the big guy that you are that the amazing track record you have of working with all these incredible athletes and you're quite accomplished athlete yourself. And I think this is the first time for me, anyway, that I realized, I guess you are
Thinking about how to make this whole thing pleasurable, and mesh it with real life, which I'm realizing now, shouldn't come as a surprise because you have a family, a flourishing family, in addition to a flourishing business with the ready State and so forth. I think if there's one message that really comes through over and over again, say it's like how can you make Fitness and Nutrition and health part of your life? But not let it take over your life or your mind in a way that isn't healthy.
Yeah, thank you for that. And if that's coming across at all, I think we're doing a better job and I would say certainly tempered is I've gotten more reasonable you know, I think we get older and you can see a little bit more of the Horizon and, you know, you start to wrap your hands around. How are we going to solve these problems in these different places and what is sustainable? You know, I really think that that's, you know, we see quick inputs and outputs that are high levels of sports performance and some will taste. Again, I want to take
those lessons and transmute them to my own household and it really sustainable fun way. The nutrition piece is such a dangerous one and young right now. Julie and I are very obsessed with youth sports and spending time with seeing, if we can improve that experience for families. So they come out on harmed and, you know, Red's relative energy deficiency in sport. You know, is where we start to see that kids are not eating enough to fuel activity and there
And body simultaneously. And it's really hard on their physiologies and we start to show up with lost periods. It starts to show up with stress fractures, right? And we start to see, sort of this, some degradation and sort of the body's tissues, but can really crash a lot of problems. And, you know, Stacy Sims is probably the first person to really put it on my radar of, hey, you're a physio coach, I need you to become an expert with the people that you're working with, you know, are you eating enough support? And and I see the some of the elite with
II work with Elite, women really battle. This is what the body I need to be paid and to win World Championships. And that's not the body that people want on the Instagram and you know, you know, should I have a salad after this training? I'm like, we just play for three hours. No you're not going to eat a salad. Might go get this big-ass burrito and then we'll talk about your salad next you know
so it sounds like the athletes are under eating and my understanding anyway the statistics and refueling which I know
is confusing but you know, potentially not
About food at the right times
and within the general population of non athletes, especially youth. However, it seems that people are over consuming calories, so there seems to be two, two populations clustering out. Here
we have a, this reminds, we have a rule in our house for dinner with a three vegetable roll. This is from, when we work with Margaret Garvey, who cooks a protein, whatever that is, and has also three vegetables, and that's where she starts. And we have had one daughter. Who is like, Gourmet Chef
If Georgia is just total badass, you know, G and then I've Caroline who was the pickiest human being on, the leg isn't Brown. I'm like, you know, and and she's getting better. But when we had three vegetables that suddenly what we saw was that she might one right and we can start to have exposure but I think if we crowd out some of the kids that we don't want to have a restrictive house, right? But you know, if we crowd out some of the other Foods we found that it was a lot easier for us to say, this is what we're eating and we this together as a family
And then if there's other Foods I mean your teenagers are going to leave the house and whatever they want. Just just be clear everybody. So you might as will stuff them with the good stuff at home.
I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about supplements these days, we hear a lot. About creatine, creatine, creatine, creatine. I like, creatine been taking it for years, will occasionally do wash out where I just kind of let a bunch of water out of my by, why not? And then get back to it. I don't do it for any specific reason. I just do
travel forget to bring creatine so my
God. Yeah. But most of the
I'm I'm taking five to 10 grams a day, okay? We've heard about the Body Benefits. The brain benefits for athletes, and just quote, unquote, exercisers, the typical person listening to this podcast. Do you recommend creatine? What are, what are some of the things that in your household? I'm getting this picture and I've been in your home and I will say that the spirit in your home is a wonderful one. Brian Mackenzie. And I showed up more or less unannounced at one point. I like there's it's it's a delightful thing. Like people's Spirits are so it's a space.
Station. It's a space station of stoking like you want to be part of it. You can come
in. Thank you. It's a it's a great environment and it was very warming to see that and the way that you embrace all these different aspects of life and your it's busy and it's hectic and it's fun and people care for one another and their direct with one another. But in a way, that's really supportive. It's really a, in my mind, a great model for a home and it's really it stayed with me and it's really a pleasure to reflect on a star. Yeah, it's a team effort in there, for sure. So,
I'll just ask this. What supplements do you think our, if not necessary, then highly desirable for most people and then for athletes and maybe because we get this question a lot. Now especially after Stacy, came, on the podcast, for your the female athletes, you work with in particular, are there supplements that add on to that that initial
batch? So I think we can divide these things of like into food like things, right? And then sort of
perform, y'all like Whey Protein that's just a
Protein replacement high quality high protein to Cal ratio.
That's right. And if you don't handle way like my athletes, I'm like, let me reduce you these vegetable proteins and that's because you're having a hard time timing your meals, or just getting enough protein because you sometimes, you just don't feel like it's a great great utilization there for Caroline. She gets omegas at night because she doesn't want to have any accidental fish. Burp at school. She's a teenager. She takes him for. She goes to bed.
And we're really interested in brain health and there's some early research and again not my expertise that I've heard of right about talk to people about that vitamin D creatine and omegas might help attenuate symptoms of concussion if they hit right? So post pre. So those things are on Carolyn, she gets creatine every day. She used to make every day and she gets vitamin D and some of that is probably this enough vitamin D during the summer because we I could pull it out. But
Live in Northern climes and they're indoors and there's good research, someone to I think Dan Garner had a great piece, just talking about vitamin D, supplementation, the military and the decrease of like risk of fractures in the foot just vitamin D. So that's the start for me. I take a good multi because I'm like Miss going to cover the basis, you know. And then you can look, I think the next sort of valence of interest is have had a blood panel higher vitamin B levels.
Is there anything we need to do based on your environment, your genetics, and then, I think it gets real in the weeds past that and again, play around with that one of my super smart friends is like, I think you should take a Statin a small dose Statin once a week. I was like, all right. So I was like, better. Take some co Q 10 with that. It's an experiment. I'm running right down. Sides are low. I'm getting my blood panels, talk to my physician, but still co Q 10 is on the menu for me.
To make sure I don't have anything. And so I think suddenly what we should be looking at is, how do I round out? My family doesn't eat fish. So we're not getting enough. So Meg goes from those sources and no one will eat Walnuts but I'm only 18 walnuts. So you know how I round up my nutrition with some supplementation. And is there a benefit for some other things that with my genetics or what's going on like J. Star has mutated empty. If a charging right
Right? And so we are always watching B vitamins for her, right? So weak or method later, right? Poor Muffler.
Exactly J-Stars his
wife. That's our sorry, Chase Dazzle. See ya.
You guys have such an awesome relationship. You guys have poked fun. At one another, you're clearly awesome companions to one another and you do great. Great work together.
I am the broken anchor of the relationship I like. So she is you know what's really interesting is? I have I'm little bit like you. I think I'm excitable. I get obsessed with things.
It's super fun. Go down rabbit, holes. I like to experiment and J. Star is like the true north like no. That sounds fishy, we're not doing that. You know like I came home one time and I was like, you know what?
This cow's milk is out of here. Our family's only drinking goat milk. I only have the best Gomez, have the best gumbo and Julia is like, sure that's gonna. And I gave some goat milk to Georgia, and she's a cocked, it across the room, she's a baby. And then, I drank the goat milk, and like, vomited into the sink. And I had goat milk on my lip and eye and Juliet just as so patient by saying, huh. I wonder if that's a good idea. I wonder if he will stick around so she's the rudder. She is 100% the writer. She is a three-time world champion, everyone. She's mean, she's a row at Cal
And she is my training partner. She's a great strength. Part overhead. We use training is another way of spending time together. I love it.
Thanks for sharing a little bit of the picture of your home. It matches. Exactly, my experience chaos and Chaos, a little bit of chaos and a ton of love. And I've been quoting him a lot lately. I cannot take any credit for this but navall who is you know, famous on various podcast that he says, you know, what do we really shooting for in
If it's a fit energetic body, this isn't of all not me. By the way, he said fit energetic body, a calm, mind, and resources, we have resources and a home full of love so I don't know from. Yeah, I think that's the list,
then the rest of your life working on those and you're going to have a really, it's gonna be really fun and I just want to remind people, you hear me say it again. That they should all be enjoyable and it is fun to track.
It's also, you know, which, which device is, am I wearing right now? I'm not wearing a single device, you know? Because I want to feel and sometimes I track and sometimes have known track, and how am I feeling? And ultimately everything is really coming down to how do I come to understand my own process and my interaction with the world process. I think I'm getting better at 51 and knowing I don't need six cookies and I really need to get more fruits and vegetables and sleep and I don't need a device to tell me that love
it.
Well Kelly, dr. Starrett, thank you so much for coming on here today and sharing with us so much wisdom. We covered so much you covered so much. Honey pelvic floor fasciae cold heat, movement patterns. You give us a ton of practical tools getting down on the floor. Sit stand and on, and on, but a small portal into the vast amount of knowledge you have in that head of yours. And I just have to say that, you know, it's been a delight today because
These little bits have come through about, who I know you to be in the in the rest of the world. This is the real world. We just happen to have microphones in front of us, the rest of the world. And you've been at this a while this business of trying to help people figure out, best ways to move, how to be a better athlete. How to, you know, improve one's Fitness, how to take a rational fun hard-working Approach at times, but also fun playful recreational approach to. This is really key aspect of our health and
Many key aspects of our health. So I just want to thank you for coming here today for doing the work that you do. And you know, you are one of the real ones as they say my brother. You know you so much and you and you walk the walk, you're strong, you can go far. You have fun doing it. You're a great husband and Dad and you've been a great friend to me. So thanks for coming on here. Let's get you back again and just thanks for being
you my pleasure anytime. And thanks all the great human people that make this thing possible. It's
The thing, thanks for brother. Thank you.
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with dr. Kelly Starrett to learn more about Kelly Starrett and the work that he does with his wife Juliet Starrett at the ready State, as well as to find links to dr. Starett's excellent books. Please see the show, no captions. If you enjoyed today's episode with dr. Kelly Starrett and you'd like to learn more about the science of exercise physiology and the protocols that can best serve you in your Fitness athletic and other goals. You can go to huberman, lab.com, enter the word Fitness and gal.
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