#85: Kelly Starrett on the 80/20 of Mobility and Performance

By popular demand, this episode features Kelly Starrett http://www.mobilitywod.com/. He's trained CrossFit athletes for more than 130,000 hours (!) and his clients include Olympic gold medalists, Tour de France cyclists, world record holders in Olympic lifting and powerlifting, Crossfit Games medalists, professional ballet dancers, and elite military personnel. In this episode, we cover: - The 80/20 of mobility and the movements you need today - How Kelly fixed himself as an athlete - Kelly's picks for easy-to-add mobility movements - And much more... Even if you have zero interest in "mobility," this conversation invites you inside the mind of one of the world's top coaches. Kelly discusses habits, strategies, and thinking that can be applied to nearly everything. Please also check this out -- Kelly and I are joining forces to build the first standing desk-only elementary school in the world http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/06/16/standing-desks/. We're almost there. Please click through and help! This episode is also brought to you by Audible.com/tim http://www.audible.com/t1/30DayGoldFT_at?source_code=PDTGBPD06161500AZ. Be sure to check out some of my favorite audiobooks, including The Graveyard Book and Vagabonding http://www.audible.com/t1/30DayGoldFT_at?source_code=PDTGBPD06161500AZ.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Tim Ferriss?

  No, I would have seen it before, Peter.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I have used for years. I love audiobooks, and I have two to recommend right off the bat. Number one is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time, and that is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, the only audiobook I've wanted to immediately listen to a second time as soon as I finished. It's amazing. You will thank me. The Graveyard Book. The second is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what became The Four Hour Work Week. So, all you need to do to get your free audiobook and a free 30-day trial is go to audible.com/tim, and you can choose one of those two books, The Graveyard Book, Vagabonding, or more than

• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

  180,000 audio programs. So, that could be a book, that could be a magazine, that could be a newspaper, it could be a class. It's that easy. Go to audible.com/tim. That's audible.com/tim, and grab a book. Enjoy.

• 1:24Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, my wonderful lads and lasses. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where my job is to deconstruct excellence, to tease out the practices, the habits, et cetera, of world-class performers that you can borrow, whether those people are investors, athletes, celebs like Arnold Schwarzenegger, anything in between, and everything in between. And this episode is by popular demand. We have Kelly Starrett making a reappearance, and for those of you who don't know who he is, Kelly Starrett is co-founder of San Francisco CrossFit. He's been there 10 years, 130,000 hours of training CrossFit athletes. He's one of the first 50 affiliates in the world. Now there are more than 10,000. His clients include Olympic gold medalists, Tour de France cyclists, world record holders in Olympic lifting and powerlifting.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  Professional ballet dancers, elite military, it goes on and on. And when I break myself, Kelly is the guy who helps me fix myself. And produces some pretty hilarious encounters because he's very fond of tearing my hips apart, among other things. But in this episode, you submitted questions, a lot of questions, and then voted them up or down. So there were 3,317 votes on different questions at last count. And he answers some really, really specific questions that are very tactical. So for instance, top three to five mobilizations that everyone should be doing, 15-minute mobility wad that every company in America should enforce three times a week, applying 80/20 analysis to post-workout recovery, and much more than that.

• 2:55Tim Ferriss?

  He busts my balls a bit, which is always good fun. That's something that Kelly's also world-class at. Takes the piss in the beginning for you Brits and Commonwealth folks out there. In any case, I hope you enjoy it, and I would be making a grave mistake if I didn't mention one other thing, and that is my birthday's coming up shortly. It is my 38th, and every year, instead of getting gifts, I try to rally all of you to do something very, very cool and groundbreaking. And in this case, I'm partnering with Kelly and his wife Juliet to create the first standing desk-only elementary school in the world. And this is intended to be a prototype, a proof of concept, that could do a lot of

• 3:37Tim Ferriss?

  good around the world and basically serve as a model for redesigning schools around the country, since kids 8 to 18 spend 85% of their time sitting down. And the effects of extended sitting have been compared to smoking, for instance, by people at the Mayo Clinic, and we think that is a big problem. So if you go to fourhourworkweek.com/standing, S-T-A-N-D-I-N-G, all spelled out, so fourhourworkweek.com/standing, you will see exactly what we're up to. It's very, very cool. I've put in 10 grand of my own money to put my money where my mouth is. Kelly and Juliet have done the same, and a lot of you are rallying.

• 4:18Tim Ferriss?

  It's, it could really be a groundbreaking, high-leverage, sort of Archimedes lever to do a lot in the educational system, but we need this prototype. And it's about halfway there, so please help us finish it off. Fourhourworkweek.com/standing. And now, please enjoy the Q and A with the very funny and very talented... And very handsome Kelly Starrett.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Hey there, this is Kelly Starrett for Mobility WOD. I have to tell you, anytime Tim Ferriss calls me up or has a hairy idea, some kind of crack up idea about, hey, you know, why don't you come on or let's talk or let's have some dinner, my red flags go up. I'm not gonna lie, my antenna goes up because, you know, Tim is a little smarter than me, he's a little faster than me, he's more wily than I am, and he always ends up sort of getting me to expose myself. And what was great about when he said, hey Kelly, will you come on and answer some questions? And I was like, absolutely my pleasure, but you're not gonna be there, right? So, I get a chance to sort of speak my piece without having to be worried about what is Tim thinking of me, and you know, Tim is so pretty and he's such a good dancer and

• 5:28Speaker 02

  I'm so jealous. What we get to do is say, you know, take the questions that you guys valued as important and just riff on them. So I'm gonna do my best. I have a cup of coffee over here, I'm spun up, done my breathing exercise, I'm ready to bring it. So, without further ado, here's the first question. 10 questions with Kelly Starrett. This is from Chris Livingston in Ontario, Canada. And Chris says, Kelly, how long did it take you to fix yourself once you started seriously self-mobilizing? Can you share any stories from your personal experience of becoming normal again? And I have to tell you, hell yes. I am, you know, I may be, you know, a guy who's out there talking, but I'm a user. I mean, I fight for the users. You know, so much of my own experience has come

• 6:11Speaker 02

  out originally of solving the problems of the athletes and my friends right around me and my own experiences. You know, people forget that I was a broken, broken athlete who hand went numb, went down the sports medicine rabbit hole, had, you know, cortisone, you know, prednisone, all the zones. I had MRIs, I had acupuncture, some massage therapists, I went on decompression, and I really couldn't get to the bottom of what had happened. What had happened was I was moving like crap and I wasn't taking care of myself at all. And I lit myself up to a place, my body was giving me warning for a long time. You know, my hand would get weak sometimes, it would pump out, my form would pump out, it couldn't hold the paddle. That was my nervous system telling me, hey, you've got a problem. I didn't, I just overlined, you know, overrode it.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  So, you know, rehabbing that nervous tissue injury or realizing that, boy, you know, it's not about working harder, there has to be some other piece that really put me on the pathway of thinking critically about my body in a very different way. My girlfriend at the time in college was a Rolfer and we were together the entire time. She was in Rolfing school and I'd been exposed to all the soft tissue work and it was great, was laying down on the table and having someone fix me. And she, we used to fight about it and she'd be like, "You have to do a stretch or take care of yourself." And I was like, "I'm pre-stretched and you don't, you're not the boss of me and why don't you just fix me?" And what a terrible, terrible paradigm to be in. Of course, the relationship ended terribly because it was my fault, because I didn't, I didn't mobilize. You know, my C2 partner would, he would cramp up

• 7:43Speaker 02

  in the boat and his feet couldn't handle it. So he had to do these elaborate routine, which took him all of like seven minutes to get his feet and hips ready to be in the boat and I didn't. And what was interesting is that he got feedback that his mechanics were off, as in he couldn't sit in the boat and he got hurt and it hurt him and I didn't. And I waited until I literally broke before I was like, "Oh, that's why Shane is doing the things he's doing." So my, you know, red flags were, I remember being a young, um, obviously I had that problem. I also had this problem where my quads were always tight and I had knee pain all the time. I definitely had knee pain when I ran and of course, Brian McKenzie showed me that I was running like a moron, heel striking. So I fixed that. But one of the things that was happening was that in the early days,

• 8:27Speaker 02

  when I was initiating this strength conditioning experience in 2001, 2002, I was Olympic lifting with Jim Schmitz and I was following what Pavel said and I found CrossFit early on. And what was happening was I was doing what guys like Mark Ripeto were advocating, even Greg Glassman and Nicole Carroll, which is to crank my pelvis over as hard as I could, which made my low back stable, right? It was functionally stable, but I was bone on bone in those positions. And what would happen is I was trying to squat heavy, these five by fives, and my back would ache for like 10 days afterwards. I literally couldn't squat heavy again for at least a week. And my back would be thrashed and my quads were really tight and I was always

• 9:07Speaker 02

  trying to work on my quads. I was doing these crappy, low-grade, you know, static stretches and it didn't seem to really work. And, you know, of course, my quads were stiff and, you know, I really hadn't addressed the stiffness. I'd do some like Pinchay foam rolling and that didn't really work. And it wasn't until I realized that I think I was overextending. And I couldn't do what these coaches were saying. And the coaches were trying to get us into a non-flexed position, but they were not talking about a brace-neutral position, which is a very different idea of sequencing and organizing the spine so that the abs and the nervous system do what they do. So I was in this overextended position and my quads get tight. And that's one of the first times I realized that if, you know, I had to prioritize the motor

• 9:49Speaker 02

  control and the bracing and sequencing of my nervous system, organization of my nervous system, if I was going to get ahead of some of the downstream muscular problems, right? The neuromuscular, the contractile feature problems. So, you know, once I started organizing my spine differently and doing what I was supposed to be doing in gymnastics and the things that we were talking about and all the positions, not just cranking over again as tight as I can, extending into the belt, my quads, my musculature, my quads released and I stopped having knee pain almost immediately. You know, I looked like a professional kayaker. I used to boat 300 days a year. I surfed, you know, sometimes I boated twice a day and

• 10:28Speaker 02

  I basically had no inter-rotation in my shoulders, like none. And I remember seeing or being a physical therapy aide in like 2000 and someone pointing out that I had no inter-rotation. I mean, like, my shoulders don't hurt. I'm strong enough and I'm a kayaker, so what's the big deal? And no one could really articulate why that was important, just that, hey, you should have this. And, you know, we never even went back to it. No one fixed it. It wasn't something we kind of dealt with in the clinic I was in. And it wasn't until I started, you know, teaching a lot and seeing the ramifications of missing shoulder rotation that I really started to address my own. And what was happening was that I would, when I would go from a hang position to an overhead position, my shoulder would, you know, translate forward. You could see it in my dips. You could see it in a lot of things. My shoulders

• 11:13Speaker 02

  would cook out a little bit. And this, again, early CrossFit. And when I started really drilling down on it and then correlating what to normal range of motion was, it really cleaned up pretty quickly on the inter-rotation front. So that was a big deal.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  You know, if you take a look at the photos of me in uh Becoming a Supple Leopard, you can see that in the old Supple Leopard edition, I'm pretty turtley. I have a, it looks like a hinge in my mid thoracic where I was hanging on the meat, basically. And that was a function of sitting and kayaking and being, you know, paddling all the time. And you can see it in my deadlift, I would literally, like, you know, my head would be lower than my lumbar because I had this hinge there. So I've spent a lot of time fixing that and that has really changed my ability to, you know, manage, manage a brace neutral position without sort of being stuck bent. What I noticed in the practice, to get to your, your bottom line, is that I, I had to start noodling on this stuff within the context of still training and, and within the context

• 12:11Speaker 02

  of um having a family and working a job and being a busy physio and teaching. And what I started doing is, I made a commitment to like fifteen minutes a day. I was like, I can solve these things if I just work on a problem fifteen minutes a day. And, and I started working around with other people. The work I did around in physio school to graduate, I looked, really looked at and investigated and researched barriers to adherence. And what I found was that there was like a fifteen minute, twenty minute magic window where I, I know I could get some people to do some work for ten or fifteen minutes and I'd get really good adherence. And if I extended that at all to twenty or thirty minutes, it would, it would drop off, it would flag. And so, uh with my own practice, with my own clinical practice, with around the gym, trying to work the, the, the mobilization into it, we found that literally ten or fifteen

• 12:56Speaker 02

  minutes was a magical number to make some significant change in yourself if you, you know, were primed to do it and you did it regularly. So, you know, I started obsessing about some problem and I would just obsess about it for a couple of weeks and then the problem would go away. I, I think um, you know, I am lucky because my tissues are pretty healthy, um I have pretty good indigenous range of motion. Anyway, I'm not the stiffest guy, but I can tell you I had real stiffness in my quads, my shoulders were manky, my mid back was totally a junction. And I really noticed that when I got consistent, I got ahead. And when I get behind on something, you know, I start to, start to see that it gets stiff

• 13:39Speaker 02

  and I'm usually not a guy who experiences pain, but I can tell you that The more I optimized my mechanics, the less stiff I got. So if I went out and heel striked, for example, it seemed to make my quads and calves very tight. But when I worked on running, good running mechanics, I had no problem. When I deadlifted in an overextended position, it turned out my lower back would get really stiff and my glutes and my periformis would light up all the time and I was always smashing up. When I stopped overextending on my deadlift, my periformis stopped lighting up. And that really was a key aspect of this is for me figuring out, you know, that I had to put position mechanics first so that, and then I had to do less maintenance.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  And I think that is an unfair, unfair equation where if you put more time into the moving well, then your body has to compensate less and you get less stiffness patterns out of that. You know, I just paddled the Molokai Challenge, Jim Foddy's race from Molokai, Toahu. It's a 53 kilometer open ocean race. And I didn't have any mechanical problems. My left hip got a little stiff because, you know, I was sitting and paddling for my life and a very technical race and a very long race. But nothing hurt and nothing hurt because I moved pretty well. And I'm really grateful for that, that I've been cultivating that. So as an indicator, fortunately, the worse you move, the stiffer you get. And then that stiffness begets more poor movement pattern, which makes you stiffer.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  So, you know, really, really keeping in mind that I had a physical therapy instructor who taught pediatrics and she was talking about dealing with spasticity in kids and tone. And she was like, hey, look, muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs. She's like, look, you know, it comes down in some kids that we have to cast them into end range. A week later, take the cast off, move around, exercise and put the cast back on. She's like, but in two weeks, you can get a massive amount of tissue change in a kid who was so functionally short that they would just cast them at these end ranges. And I know that sounds barbaric, but the idea underneath that is... You know, it's about will, you know, and uh, and I think sometimes some of us need to spend more time on a certain problem, but it always comes around. And I think a good example at our gym is

• 15:45Speaker 02

  Rup Soda. Uh, Dr. Rup, you know, he does these regularly, these mobility clinics at our gym and one of our staff and a great physio. But like that guy was the stiffest, stiffest guy on the planet and the amount of change he's made consistently over a few years has been profound. The guy can basically do the splits now, he can do the splits now. I'm telling you when I met him, he couldn't even squat down with his heels on the ground. So we know it takes time, but you, you know, if it's seven months to turn over all your fascia and 18 months to turn over your whole skeleton, then chances are you need to, to really drill down on that. And that means eliminating a lot of the things that are, are causing your problems like high heel shoes or sitting. So that's, that's the short end of the story, which isn't short at all. Um,

• 16:28Speaker 02

  next question comes from Connor McClure from North Carolina. Generally speaking, what are the top three to five mobilizations that everyone should do every single day? Well, the problem with frankly with that is that if you end up creating a program, then you're going to create a lot of blind spots. And what we've done instead of saying, here are the basic five, is we said, here are the seven positions around your shoulders and hips that you should have cold. And that means you should be able to do it cold out of bed. You shouldn't have to warm up. You shouldn't have to work hard to reclaim your position. You should be able to go into the gym, grab a barbell and start moving and getting physiologically

• 17:09Speaker 02

  hot, right? You shouldn't have to work on establishing overhead position in your jerk, because you should all have overhead position in your jerk when you go to jerk. And I think the problem is we've confused, you know, the training with, uh, hey, I have normal range of motion. And, and I mean baseline range of motion. Like I can actually put my arms around my head. I, I see so many people who literally are missing overhead range of motion and then wonder why their shoulders hurt when they do pull-ups. Well, it's because you're missing overhead range of motion and you can, that pull-up is forcing you to have a whole bunch of car accidents in your shoulders. So the problem with three or five mobilizations is that you end up prioritizing some areas and some tissues and completely deprioritizing other areas of your body. So

• 17:54Speaker 02

  the issue as an athlete and as in a complete movement practice, you have to be able to do everything physiologically that a human can do. Means you gotta be able to pistol, even if you don't do pistols, you have to get into the pistol shape. And that means you probably have to talk to your feet and your calves and your hip, even if you're just a swimmer, right? You're pushing off the wall or running or whatever. The point is, you know, I can say unequivocally that probably everyone can benefit from something that looks like the couch stretch, right? It's low level, it's a static stretch, but at least it gets you into this extension pattern out of the other pattern of sitting of this kind of rounded flexion position. You could probably do that every day or spend as much time in a lunge every day as you could.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  Probably hammer your T spine a little bit every day, those of you who are on a computer or phone, which is, i.e. all of us. You know, you could probably send to do some gut smashing every day for down regulation before you went to bed. You could roll on that, that ball, you know, around the shoulder, I would really hammer, you know, overhead positioning is just so crucial. And then missing shoulder into rotation. I think you can get away with some missing, missing some of the press, doesn't have to be perfect. I don't think your, your, you know, the, the front rack necessarily has to be perfect. They all have to be normal, you know, and, and I think you bring up to this point that if there was just three to five things, that might be a problem list thing that I kept for a week. Maybe I'm just gonna do three or five things for three or five days in a row, right? All a pavel, three to five, three to five for three to five.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  But the idea here is, you know, I've got to make a problem list in my brain around a position and then I've got to go actively looking. And that's a conversation that you need to have with yourself around being, you know, generally physically prepared. And so, you know, I don't want to waffle, but that three to five mobilizations a day won't cut it and it has never cut it, you know? So, you know, dynamic warmup is dynamic warmup. That can be the same, but your job is to freestyle around the other stuff. So, sorry Connor, but you're gonna have to be smarter than that. This is from Marcus Wong, from White Rock, Canada. If you were to program a 12-minute MO that every company in America can force three times a week for their employees, what would that program be? What?

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Once again, we're back to a problem. We're saying, well, if sitting or standing is the issue, then we could program around that problem. So what am I saying? Well, you know, if I have, I work with a lot of pilots in the Air Force, a lot of pilots in the Marines, and a lot of pilots in the, in the Army. And we see, and even the Coast Guard, okay, we work with them all. We see that all the pilots share similar positions in mechanics. They're in a really bad position with a really heavy helmet. And then the, the cockpit isn't set up for them. So, you know, what we do is we try to get them to prioritize their spine and sacrifice the shoulder whenever they can. Because once you're, once you've herniated the discs in your neck, it's really hard to unring that bell. But you can reclaim

• 20:47Speaker 02

  your crappy shoulder position once it's on the cyclic, right? So, you know, sitting at a desk is really a big deal. And if we were going to prioritize anything around that, I would say getting into the, you know, the activities of daily living shapes. So what happens is when people sit a long times, you kick out two of the three stabilization practices, the, the systems that stabilize your spine. You can no longer create torsion through the hip, through the foot, because you're sitting. You can't squeeze your butt or use your glutes to, to control your pelvis lumbar relationship. And so you're left with just your abs. And then, so we, we say what the, the four horsemen get tight. The QL gets tight, the lumbar gets tight, uh, the rectus femoris gets tight, the psoas gets

• 21:32Speaker 02

  tight, iliac gets, gets tight, and the rectus femoris gets tight. So basically, your high quads and your low quads. And then in your back, which is like the hamstrings, your back, your quadriceps and glute. And what ends up happening is we see a pattern develop around the sitting. And that should be no surprise. So we could program to some soft tissue that would ameliorate the very, some of the very symptoms of those static positions. And that really brings up an issue and question that, boy, if I'm a swim coach, and we, we've experienced it with, with Sage Hopkins, who's the head coach at San Jose State. Um, is, you know, he knows what swimmers look like. And there are a common group of symptoms around the swimmers.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  But he can program to directly, and if you're a runner, you know, you could probably, you'll see that there are very specific running related problems. Do you have to have a good thoracic spine? Yes. Do you have to be organized? Yes. Does it matter what your shoulders do when you run? Absolutely. But I can say unequivocally that, you know, there are very specific running related issues that you could prioritize. So if we took that concept, um, away from, if we took that concept away from saying, hey, you know, what are, what's a 12 minute thing? If we said, well, we see that people have a hard time shutting down. So I would teach them to shut down, teach them to breathe, do some breathing exercises, because all of a sudden that would,

• 22:59Speaker 02

  that would improve the mechanical efficiency of their breathing, that we would see decreased stress breathing patterns. People would literally feel better with, you know, when, when we got them out of a stress breathing, inefficient breathing pattern, they'd be able to stabilize instead of stabilize or breathe, they'd stabilize and breathe. And then I would probably address honestly, T spine, the four horsemen, and maybe some crappy internal shoulder rotation. And, and all of a sudden, you know, you, you've created a little recipe. And the thing that I think really has helped, um, we see around program design is, it helps to keep people interested with new things. So they find a new mobilization. They're like, holy crap, I suck at this. You know, one of the, the, one of the reasons people like Bikram yoga, I think,

• 23:44Speaker 02

  is that they get to do the same series of poses over and over again. And then they can, they, they know the steps and they're not really uncomfortable. And what I think is a really valuable lesson is to go expose yourself to the, the same thing in a slightly different way. And, you know, that sounds a lot like conjugate programming, a la Louis Simmons. Well, we like to do the same thing in, in programming mobilizations. If we make packages even, and we do this for the universities that we work with, we'll put a package together and then that package might be a neck package or a shoulder interrotation package. And that's literally how we program a little bit. It usually takes about 10 or 15 minutes. And then we cycle through those. So people start to learn the dance steps, but the dance steps,

• 24:26Speaker 02

  the dances themselves are constantly changing. So that's the way to think about this. It keeps it novel and it keeps my mind looking at different things. And also I've got to address this, this systems approach to tissues. I've got to address for the joint capsule. I've got to make sure I'm going after the sliding surfaces, how well tissues are sliding over one another. And I've got to address for the, the contractual features of the muscle, the trigger points in there that are, they're gobbling that up. You know, hopefully someone has a movement practice, but if I hit those three things right away, I could knock out a lot of the problem, even if they kept moving like crap at home. At least, you know, we could start to program to those issues. So that, that was what I would say. You know, the real issue is, you know, we're going to adopt the positions we spend all our time in. So let's constantly vary those positions a little bit. Let's create a movement-rich

• 25:10Speaker 02

  environment. Um, you know, how would you apply the 80/20 analysis to post-workout recovery? Uh, this is from Che. Um, in order, in other words, what selective 20% of recovery methods account for 80% of the majority of post-workout recovery? Well, you know, I am not a sports scientist, but I hang out with a lot of sports scientists. And what I can tell you is that the best practices around, uh, post-workout recovery are simple. One, and this is the things that we, we lecture about to all our, all our soldiers and all our professional teams. One is drink something right when you're done. You know, if you're slightly dehydrated, you can't kick on any of the protein synthesis stuff that needs

• 25:53Speaker 02

  to happen. And so what we see is that people are blown out. And then, you know, you get into your next window. So, you know, you, you start, you start getting on the next thing. If you, if you drank some water or absorbed some water, then you would set a stage for being able to recover a little bit. So, you know, slugging some water right afterwards with some sea salt makes a huge difference. And putting those electrolytes back in, massive, massive difference. If you can eat something within 20 to 40 minutes, I hate to say that, so old school, but it really does work pretty well in terms of not, you know, not only recovering, because I think it probably matters what you have in your system before you train, more than what happens after you train, but you're looking ahead at the next thing. So, you know, I think it matters, you know, if you can eat a little bit, you know,

• 26:38Speaker 02

  afterwards, that, and if you're already well fueled, then probably just eating some food afterwards is great, instead of some, uh, instead of some manufactured thing. Uh, I think one of the biggest problems that we see is that people train really hard and they become immediately static. And what ends up happening is that, you know, if you think about your own practice, you train, train, train, train, train, and then, wah, and then you go to work. Or you train, train, train, then you come home and sit on the couch and go to dinner, or have dinner. And what I can tell you is that you are not, you're really good at bringing the engine up, you know, get it idling and to get it revving, and you're pretty, pretty good at that, but you're not good at cooling down, or bringing the, the heart rate down, or giving yourself a chance to, you know, shift out of exercise mode. What ends up happening is we see adaptation

• 27:21Speaker 02

  errors in the tissues. Tissues become poorly perfused, you get stiff, you get congested. Um, if you, you know, if you can keep moving a little bit, that would be difference. And we, we see that change, even if you have a standing station, you can kind of constantly shifting and moving and putting your foot up and putting your foot down. But if you go sit down or jump on an airplane, you're gonna really see the effect of your, of cankles. Throwing some, some compression socks on is a game-changing experience. I really have found with all the athletes we work with, I mean, LeBron James, you know, jumps in a cold bath, which is about resetting his nervous system, not about, uh, not about cooling him down, um, resets the nervous system, but he wears compression before he gets on the airplane. And, you know, with our athletes, our high-level athletes, we throw Mark Pro

• 28:06Speaker 02

  on them, right? We start, we start getting them to clear that, that ugliness. And then in multiple events, we'll have athletes go for a walk in the evening, or ride a bike, or just get themselves moving, sort of non-exercise activity. I think the biggest error is we don't get a lot of non-exercise activity. And what's happening is that most of us are exercising, then we're sedentary. We've got to break that cycle. Um, you know, I, I don't think people are sleeping enough. And, uh, someone tweeted the other day, they're like, look, if you just- You know, we should, if we just got enough vitamin D, a little sunlight and some sleep, you know, a lot of the problems underlying our physiology would clean up because the

• 28:47Speaker 02

  system is pretty robust. So, um, you know, get some sunshine, get your eight hours of sleep, whatever it takes, you'll fight for your sleep, especially if you're training hard. I, I think those are the big errors. So, um, you know, you can go back through that list, but you know, I think being hydrated, well hydrated with the right, don't have to drink gallon of water. I think that's ridiculous, but I think you need to absorb the water you are drinking, thinking critically by putting a pinch of sea salt in there. Really clean up your sleep, cleaning up what happens to you after exercise. Can you walk around? Can you be constantly moving? Can you wear some compression? Get some, get some vitamin D. I think those are, those are the biggies. Well, thanks Shay. I think that's a fantastic question. I think the, you know, we like to save all the soft tissue

• 29:29Speaker 02

  work as in denim. We save all the soft tissue work for afterwards because that's the perfect time to tell your body to chill out and the soft tissue work really kicks on your parasympathetic nervous system, gets you out of that sympathetic fight or flight, you know, squat heavy and back down into, hey, it's cool. The animal is none under no stress. What we need to do is stress and then de-stress. So we like the soft tissue work for afterwards, even before you go to bed. Uh, this is from Mike D in Seattle. What is the key to permanently improving mobility? I do my mobility work daily, but if every day it feels like I'm just as tired as day one. So underlying that is, you know, you can fix the problem, but if there's a hole in the tire, it doesn't matter how much air you put back in the tire,

• 30:11Speaker 02

  we're going to see an issue. So if you're running like a duck and moving poorly, again, that's going to reinforce movement patterns underneath that are going to trigger stiffness or inefficiency. So if you look at your calf and the pennation, the muscle striations of your calf, it's designed to work really, you know, in line. And if your foot is collapsing and your calf is pulling obliquely, you're introducing a lot of strain and stiffness into the system that your body is going to appropriately deal with and accommodate for by just creating stiffness in the calf. And so you're going to see people who run Really efficiently, their calves get stiff, but not to the degree that the people who are moving less efficiently do. So you've got to go back to the movement mechanics.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  And that's why the name of our course is Movement and Mobility, because what we found is that when we gave people the solutions to their crappy problems, we didn't ever fix up their movement in the first place. All we did was keep putting up fires. We've got to get beyond that, which means we've got to move towards, do I have full range of motion? Am I moving well? This doesn't mean I don't make errors from time to time, and I don't challenge that. But you know, if you, for example, if you squat or deadlift and you round or reverse, you know, you know that your back is cooked, you can mobilize your back and deal with that periformis, but the best thing to do is not to be in there in the first place. So you know, what we want to do is break that vicious cycle. The other issue we've got to look at is the

• 31:35Speaker 02

  environmental load, you know, as I'm sitting here, and I say sitting in quotation marks, I've actually been squatting, I've been sitting in lotus, I've been sitting in middle splits. Right now, I'm in a sort of a pistol position on my left foot. And what I've been doing is making sure that what's happening in my environment, my day to day, is not overcoming the background. And so, you know, a piece of, an example about this is that I saw someone in the hospital when I was a physio, working at Kaiser, and she was very, very sick, had a wound vac, this wasn't at Kaiser, it was another hospital, Mills Peninsula, and she had a wound vac and from a problem she'd had. And I was going up and doing physio with her

• 32:18Speaker 02

  for a half hour day. That was what I was allotted as, as a physio, and I was a, I was a young student there. And what was happening is that she kept getting worse and worse. So what was happening is that she was orthostatic, which means she had orthostatic hypotension. So her blood pressure would drop out. Anytime she stood up or sat up and then we couldn't walk and then the little walking that we were doing wasn't a big enough stimulus to overcome the amount of time sitting and laying in the bed. And what ended up happening is I ended up spending my breaks and I ended up spending my lunches going back in, getting her up and squatting in the chair and just getting enough to overcome the rest of her time because that half hour wasn't sufficiently robust

• 33:00Speaker 02

  to overcome the orthostatic hypertension that was sitting in from her being so sedentary. And I think that is one of the things we've got to do is look at what's happening in the rest of our lives because if you know, if it's not making change, it may be making change, but you're just changing faster than you can keep up with. So you have two choices. You can either mobilize for an hour or make a better decision around your life and really try to clean up your mechanics. I'm sorry, that's a tough question. This is from David from New York. What is the best position to sleep, i.e. on one's back or one's side? The way to answer this question, because when you start messing with people's bed and their sleep postures and, you know, I had a guy on the internets once, you know, he came

• 33:42Speaker 02

  onto the message board and he was like, you know, my doctor, you know, my spinal surgeon says I have to sleep. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, like you've already had three spinal surgeries and you're trying to lecture us about the best position of sleeping? So the key here is that if we look at what a good position is for your spine, right, an organized, you know, kind of braced position in standing, like sort of that active spinal shape, right, not forward, not rounded, not overextended, rib cage down. If I took away all the structures that were active to make that in place, then the thing would just have to stay in stasis or be organized in that position.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  And what ends up happening is we find is that when people go to sleep, they turn off, right, they can't brace anymore, they can't organize anymore, they don't have the structure to support and they default to the same people they are when they swim, they default to the same broken, overextended people we see on the trampoline bouncing. And what ends up, what we can start to say is, I should be in a sleeping position that respects my spinal mechanics.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  And so, you know, if you're jamming your hands underneath your neck, you need another pillow, because you're using your hands as a pillow. That's a good indicator. So how much pillow I need? You need enough pillow to support your neck, so that your head is in the same position. If you have a huge back, you're probably gonna need thicker pillows. If you have a little tiny back, probably need thinner pillows underneath your neck. You just need a neck roll or some pillow to support and to meet the anatomy to keep your spine aligned. So suddenly, you can make any, you know, intelligent decision about sleeping. Sleeping on your side is fantastic. Comma, if you drop that leg into that sleeping soldier and you're three-quarter turned and closing down the facets on your little back, you're gonna wake up stiff. So, you know, the idea here is, well, can I maintain or does my mattress facilitate a neutral position?

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Where I don't have to constantly burn out of a shape and move because my body's aching. So, the real issue is, I have no problem sleeping on your back. You know, what we see a lot is that people are sleeping on surfaces that are too hard for their structures, can't lay on their back, so they have to flip one leg up. And if you always are flipping your right leg up when you sleep on your back underneath your left knee, guess what that's gonna do to your hip? If you spend six hours a night in that position, you're gonna start to see that you get a weird capsular pattern that shows up. You know, the real problem I have is sleeping on your stomach. And I know out there you're like, "I sleep on my stomach, so I can go to sleep." Well, these are all trained positions, anyway. The only problem sleeping on your stomach is how are you gonna breathe? What you're gonna see is that you're gonna turn your head to the side. And that means you're spending six to nine hours a night

• 36:20Speaker 02

  with your head cranked to the side, closing those facets down, which is the position we test your neck in and your nervous system in when your body's pissed off, your neck is pissed off. We're clearing the neck by putting you into the sleep on your stomach position. So as long as you have a hole in your mattress and you can maintain neutral and breathe through the hole, I am totally down with you sleeping on your stomach. I have no problem with that at all, right? Just like, imagine you get a massage, you lay on your stomach, you've gotta look through the hole, otherwise your head's cranked to the side. That's the problem. So what we should be thinking is, we can be more position agnostic or we can be more spine-centric. So, am I sleeping in a position that facilitates a neutral position? And, when I wake up in the morning, I should feel stinking great.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  What I've found is that as we've moved into a more formal strength and conditioning cycle, as athletes are sitting more and more, as being modern humans and walking less, I'm seeing that people are becoming, and I feel like they're becoming more extension sensitive. We're seeing, you know, Esther Gokel.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  Just put up that piece on NPR. She's talked about these primitive postures versus, you know, what we've seen is that people have ended up with these exaggerated spinal curves, more forward ahead of neck, more lumbar lordosis. And what ends up happening is that we see that people are sleeping on hard surfaces. And the reason we mentioned, we advocated as an industry for much harder beds. People were herniated and by sleeping on an extension that ameliorated their herniation. But what I see is that a lot of people are not sleeping well because they're extension sensitive, their mattresses are so hard and they're extension all night long. And when we put them into a little bit of flexion, they sleep a little bit better. So, you know, I think the bottom line is you should wake up feeling great

• 38:03Speaker 02

  and you shouldn't have to be stiff on that first stretch. You know, I've, I've talked to a lot of people. It takes them a hot shower and 20 minutes where they start to feel like they can lift heavy. I think that's sort of an issue for us. I think what we should be doing is we should be able to validate our sleeping position based on how I feel and I should be able to maintain the integrity of my spine. So that's all I have to say about that. That's a big one. This is from Connor McClure of North Carolina. He says, "What supplements do you take on a daily basis and why?" So for a long time, I was a big time advocate of eat food, food's enough, food, food, food, you know, and what I found was when I started getting really regular blood tests,

• 38:47Speaker 02

  was that I had some deficiencies. And when I had some genetic testing, support that blood testing, I found out I wasn't getting some baseline things. So I always feel better in the summer. I always feel better sunburnt. Well, it turns out I sort of have chronically low vitamin D and I always take vitamin D, otherwise I nuke myself in the sun. It turns out that I don't process omega threes very well. And I had sort of doubled my omega three dose to be able to see the needle move on the omega threes versus the omega six ratio. And so even though my ratios were within the normal limits of good ratio to three, six, because I wasn't eating a lot of crappy omega sixes,

• 39:29Speaker 02

  in order to bump up the fish oil, I had to up my fish oil a bunch. I, a little bit B12 low. I started taking some B12. Every once in a while I get a B12 shot. That seems to really upregulate the system a little bit.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Let's see, around sort of other supplements, you know, um, I think that a little cocktail for me of ZMA and 5-HTP, you know, I don't have a neurotransmitter problem, but that 5-HTP and ZMA before I go to sleep really does make me sleep a whole lot better. Um, I take a great kick-ass multivitamin every day, you know, um, I don't care where you get yours, a food-based kick-ass multivitamin, you know, um, I work with a company called NutriForce. They, uh, they make a really great multivitamin packet that I'm a big fan of, um, you know, and so I would say on the surface, it looks like, you know, I, I don't take massive amounts of supplements, but those are certainly supplements beyond food. And, um, you know,

• 40:29Speaker 02

  things come and go. Should I take some more Q10, CoQ10? When I see it, I take it. You know, I think that's, that's where I go. But the real issue is, you know, supplementing a whole bunch of things just for the sake of it was what didn't really respond with me. And but when I got the blood tests and I found there were issues going on and, and there were some specific micronutrients I could take, um, that would change some of that, then I, I got on it and I seemed to have much better blood testing as a result of it. Um, with my wife Juliette, you know, she, she has a faulty MTFR gene, so she doesn't like process the folate, is the way I understand it. And, um, what we noticed was that, uh,

• 41:13Speaker 02

  you know, that when she, she was always a little bit anemic because she, her B vitamins were super low, like critically low. And when she got on the folate regularly, everything seemed to upregulate a little bit. And I, I think we're in a, a brave new world of actionable science and being able to handle some of those things. And that's, I think, we're the role of supplementation, very specific, very personalized supplementation and companies like Wellness Effects, you know, Tim and our physician, Justin Major, who's been on the show before, is really, really excellent at this, for example. And, uh, you know, he can steer us in the direction of saying, hey, here are very targeted things for your physiology. So I think that's a, that's a good question. Um, I'm, I try to be obsessed about, uh, drinking enough water with salt. And I, I'm not saying that because I'm not

• 41:56Speaker 02

  a guy to overhydrate. If anything, I underhydrate, I think it's a problem.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  This is from Coach McKenna in New York. She says, "What's the most important thing I can do with my child to limit future mobility issues?" Well, we like to think around kids. Our model is saying that, hey, kids have pretty rockin' indigenous mechanics. Just watch any toddler squat and you know exactly what I'm talking about. So, at some point, we either, we like to say that the tubes or the conduit is there for the wiring, right? Squatting is not a skill. Squatting is the way we move ourselves up and down, right? That's the functional movement, primary, primal movement pattern. The idea is that we need to then reinforce that pattern with skill and repetition. And so, we need to sort of pull the wires through the conduit.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Around child health, there's a couple of things. Getting your kids into some kind of formal movement practice. MMA, karate, jiu-jitsu, dance, ballet, gymnastics, something like that. Regularly, kids yoga. We have a kick-ass kids yoga program down the street where you're exposing your kids to full range of motion and asking them to maintain those positions. I think that's a critical, critical way to think about that. We have to have, you know, we sort of give lip service to, you know, "Kids should exercise." Rah! And if they are playing, if they're jumping, I mean, I pick up my daughter Caroline from daycare and she parkours underneath three bars and jumps up onto the stairs and ends up in a big squat. A lot of the kids are playing in these indigenous positions anyway.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  We can formalize that play a little bit more or make sure we're touching those corners. And that, that should do it. I mean, that really should do it. But, what we see is that kids are, you know, and are, you've seen that recently, we started a nonprofit called StandUpKids.org. And what we've done is we've converted four classrooms, which is 100 desks at our daughter's school, to standing desks. And getting kids out of a rounded, flexed spine, sedentary position that they're adopting, what the research says, between 12 and 14 hours a day, is profound. So, if you can limit the sitting... That is a gigantic game changer. And so our kids are standing. And when I say standing, they're leaning against the desk.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  They have a foot up on this bar that swings under the desk. Their elbows are propped up on the desk. They're in these really, really great positions and staying there for about 14, 15 minutes before they move to the next task. They can sit on the ground. They can work on the ground. Basically, by getting kids out of the chairs, you're creating a movement-rich environment, which, once again, doesn't sort of violate the primary patterning system of the body, which is sort of being in constant motion. Getting your kids in flat shoes, gigantic, gigantic deal. You know, don't systematically shorten your kids' heel cords. And I wonder why they have crappy ankle range of motion one day. I mean, that's your fault. So get your kids' vans. Get your kids Chuck Taylors. Get your kids into the flattest shoe you can find.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Reebok is moving closer with their athletic shoes. They're at like four millimeters of differential, which is better. Some of their kids' lines are flat. We've been killing them on it, but they still haven't gone totally flat yet. But there are plenty of kick-ass kid's shoes out there that are moving flat and they're going flatter. So I'd say flat shoes or barefoot as much as you can. And then when you're at home, avoid postures that reflect the things you're trying to kill. So if you're all hanging out watching 60 Minutes, which is what we love to do on Sunday nights, we sit cross-legged on the couch or we sit on the floor leaning against the couch. But what we don't do is more sitting. All right? Oh, here's a good one. This is from V in London. What are your all-time favorite life-changing books? Ooh, explain how.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Dude, when I moved to Germany in the beginning of second grade, I was sort of an okay reader. I mean, I read a lot, you know, sort of. My mom was a psych professor.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  But when I got there, TV, I didn't have a TV. And um to entertain myself, I started reading and I started reading voraciously. And that, I think, was probably the single greatest thing that ever happened to me. About moving to Europe with my parents was I lost TV. And my friends all had Atari's and, you know, VHS and I didn't. I just literally was like a Luddite again. And I read so much and I got so much into reading that my parents actually took me in one time to see if I needed glasses because I was getting eye strain from reading at night in the dark. All right, so I discovered reading and I discovered, you know, that I was good at seeing messages, hidden messages.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  I was good at seeing patterns and concepts that affected my life. And I started reading, of course, you know, you you fall down the rabbit hole. Anything that smells like the hero's journey. I think uh Island of the Blue Dolphin is a good example of the first hero's journey book I read. Uh there's a book in like middle school I read called Whivern. That was like A at Nacia blew my mind about, you know, this young kid coming of age, that that sort of thing. And no wonder that when I read Dune, you know, which is the really a classic hero story, The Sleepy Most Awakened, that really resonated with me. Um as I got on my, I read a lot of nonfiction. And, you know, I I think a lot of times we we read sometimes in our own niche really heavily.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  And we don't go out and so we end up siloing some of the information that we're seeing instead of seeing that people have already solved these problems somewhere else, like The Power of Habit is an extraordinary book. Um Sports Gene, an extraordinary book. The Talent Code, an amazing book. Um, you know, some of the sci fi read, you know, has really been informative. I'd say one of the. You know, one of my favorite concepts of this, and I talked about this once, was the Diamond Age, right? Neil Stephenson. And, you know, in there, you know, there's this technology, this book that grows with these guys' granddaughters. And the idea is that the book teaches the girls allegory,

• 48:02Speaker 02

  so that they simultaneously have to be perfect products of the system, and they have to work to subvert and burn the system down while they're creating a new system. So, you know, it's those kinds of things. I'm like, hey, you know, that matters to me, you know. So, you know, I read widely and variedly, and in a lot of different disciplines, because it's amazing to see what happens and how you're influenced by that. You know, I was reading a Wired magazine article talking about a few years ago, talking about breaking the speed record on sailboating, because they get this wild cavitation, you know, that happens at speed, you know. And that was sort of like, it was like, well, we see the same thing happen with adults when they go too fast, you know.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  And so, you know, I think it's important to read widely and variedly, especially around the problems that are like collateral problems, because you can see and solve the problems you're doing, because someone's already solved them in another genre or another idea. All right?

• 49:04Speaker 02

  This is from Cinema, where the top three things I can do to maintain a functional mobility well into my 80s and beyond. Ooh, easy. One, have a physical practice. That means a breathing practice. You know, a bunch of people are discovering Wim Hof. Brian McKenzie brought me to that. You know, really exaggerating breathing and downregulation practices. Boy, the yogis have only been talking about that for a billion years. My friend Jill Miller, all over me about mobilizing my diaphragm and the soft tissues in my gut. You know, let's say, some kind of breathing practice that's part of my physical practice. You can't eat like an asshole. You just can't.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Uh, our good friend John Welborn noticed that when he ate clean, he felt like he didn't have to exercise as much. And I was like, well, that's probably true. Um, you gotta sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, and then sleep some more. I, I think, you know, you don't realize the impact it plays. People like to point out the outliers, well, so and so, Bill Clinton only slept four hours a night. And I'm always like, yeah, Bill Clinton died of a heart attack. And so it's crucial that you just put the base things in, uh, in place. There is a, you know, um, British Cycling Union, I forget who the coach was, we had this, this concept called aggregation of marginal gains. And what their idea was that they would, you know, take care of the tires and take care of this. And, and all

• 50:30Speaker 02

  these little micro percents would aggregate into two percent gain or three percent gain. Well, the guy who used to be the director of performance for Slipstream Garmin, uh, is, his name is Alan Lim. He's a buddy of ours out of Boulder. And he's just a badass physiologist and has, you know, worked with the Finnis forever and ever. And, um, you know, he actually doesn't like that idea. And I, I don't like it either. He's like, he thinks that there are just roadblocks to people's performance. And our idea is just to undam that. So your roadblock may be your sedentaryness from your job, or your roadblock, maybe you, you're stressed out, know how to deal with that, or your, you know, roadblock or, or dam or, or bottleneck is your nutrition, or your bottleneck is,

• 51:13Speaker 02

  you know, your breathing mechanics, your bottleneck. So by the time you just get to the bottom of your big, you know, whatever your bottlenecks are, I think you find that, you know, we're all engaged in practices that are above a hundred percent necessary. Like, you know, how much do you need to deadlift? I mean, you know, like strength is never a weakness. Well, that's true. But if you can deadlift 500 pounds, you're probably strong enough to do almost everything except win a deadlifting competition or a powerlifting competition. I mean, that's a really big deadlift. So, you know, I think the idea is, you know, what we needed to be doing is working towards economy and refinement of everything we're doing instead of just making the engine bigger and bigger and bigger, which is what we're doing. Um, let's see. Oh, next set of questions.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Uh, when you can't go barefoot, this is from Mike Vincent in Memphis. If you can't go barefoot, uh, our minimalist shoes are a good option. So what do you prefer? So, you know, I think barefoot is, is king. Although it's creepy to be that barefoot guy all the time. Sometimes I go pick up my daughters at school and I'm barefoot and I'm like, I am that guy right now. And, uh, you know, the teachers know me and everyone knows me and they're like, hey, you're barefoot on campus. I'm like, yeah, it's, you know, came over from the house. So, um, you know, I, I think the bottom line is, you know, the reason, uh, anti-fatigue mats work when we're standing on them is that, uh, we see that in the anti-fatigue mat world, um, you know, what's happening is,

• 52:42Speaker 02

  when you stand there, you're making constant movements and you're pumping out, uh, you're bringing garbage out and groceries in because you're, you're, you're getting constant little small perturbations in your balance. Okay, that, that makes sense. If I'm standing static all the time, a cushy shoe is amazing. But make it a flat cushy shoe, right? Because I, I'm a cashier and I just need to be balancing and wobbling. So the Nike Air flat shoe, two inches, go for it. But I think you should be, you know, in a constant state of movement. So whatever shoe you're in, it should be just enough shoe to protect you from the environment. You should still feel what's going with your feet. So you don't bruise your toes,

• 53:24Speaker 02

  but you can, you know, bruise your, the ball of your foot, but you still can, you know, cruise around. And if you're running a long distance or on, you know, a heavy duty, you know, trail, you probably need some little, you know, you need some more protection, you know? And, and I think the idea is that there's not one perfect shoe. If I'm cruising around, be as flat as you can, be as, as thin as you can. I, I'm, uh, around my house, I rip out the insoles of all my shoes because I don't need it for padding. I maybe keep them in my running shoes, right? But I don't keep that little liner in because I, I don't need it. So as long as it's flat, as long as your feet are moving in the shoe a ton, and there's a lot of flexibility in the shoe, I think you're golden until you can get barefoot again. And, uh, our model is, hey, be barefoot as much as you can.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  Then if you need to, you know, ramp up and give yourself a little extra cushion or an extra heel to compensate for patterns or bad mechanics, then that probably makes more sense. Um, let's see, we're, we're, we're at 15 minutes now. I'll take one more. Um. How did you approach educating your kids about correct movement practices? How old were they when you started and what difficulties did you encounter overcome? This is from Chris from Hong Kong. Well, you know, at some point as parents, we, you teach your kids how to sleep and how to eat. Why don't you teach your kids to walk with their feet straight? And, you know, you risk nagging your kids, but you just have to make it about this is what we do.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  And showing your kids how to squat, you know, is, is what you do. So, you know, if we watch TV, you know, a long time ago, I used to be like, all right, we're watching the squat. Or you have to couch stretch or, you know, and, and I think what ends up happening is that, you know, certainly your kids are going to mimic your behaviors. But we teach positions that scale up infinitely. So that positions that can go from, you know, a kid squatting with feet straight to cutting and jumping and landing to, you know, to lifting heavier weights. And we don't, you know, we don't kind of keep going around the problem. We keep, we keep coming back to basics. And those positions also inoculate our kids from, from danger.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  So if you jump down, the chance from a, a high step and your feet are straight or your feet are together when you land, the chances of you blowing a knee out are very low. Because you've blocked that position into a position where you can handle the mechanics. Uh, everything works right and your tissues function well. So, um, you know, the real issue is that if you move like crap, you know, we see a lot. Someone posted this great, uh, picture on crosser.com of a, a guy carrying a bag and his kid carrying a bag. They're doing like a sandbag carry and they're both walking the same. And the dad has got his foot turned out a ton and the kid has got his foot turned out a ton. I think we end up mimicking unconsciously a lot of our movement patterns and practices. Cause that's what we see around us. And so, you know, cultivating that makes a difference.

• 56:16Speaker 02

  And just saying, hey, this is, this is how we move. And what we're honestly seeing is that. Our kids need to get some kind of formal movement training. CrossFit Kids does a great job. Again, gymnastics does a great job.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  You know, any formal movement practice is really teaching the mechanics because that's how we get safety and performance out of it. So getting kids into some kind of formal thing like that really does well. But you can take your formal thing and teach kids pull-ups and plank and doing all that stuff. It's great. The problem is thinking it's A, going to get done somewhere else. I think you've got to take a little bit of responsibility for that. And also show your kids what doing daily mobility looks like. You know, kids respond so fast. If you teach your kids a couple of things, how to smash out their calves on the roller, how to, you know, couch, they're sorted out.

• 57:05Speaker 02

  You know, it's a little tricky sometimes because it's your kids. And I think it's a fine line of, you know, do as I say, not as I do. And you can definitely be, you know, a movement Nazi, but your kids get it. They totally get it. And if they can see it, if my daughter can tell you if you're over standing or standing with your man belly hanging out, then I know you can do it too. So I think that's all we got.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's so many good questions here. Well, maybe Tim will have me back on. The bottom line is, thank you guys very much. You know, there's so much to talk about in the world of sports and performance and self-actualization and taking the lessons we're learning at the highest level of sports and performance and spinning it backwards. You know, we say that, you know, it's got to be observable, measurable, repeatable phenomenon. You know, we have to see change within the visit and see lasting change between visits. So we see intersession change and intrasession change. So I see change within the visit, intrasession, and between episodes, intersession. So that guides a lot of our thinking.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  And then also, you know, it's got to be inter and intra-reader reliable. So it's not just me. You know, I think people forget that we can apply real scientific rigor on top of our daily practice around clinician practice, which is you. That's N of one. So if, you know, you find something that works, is it observable, measurable, repeatable? Does it work every time? Does it work when your friends do it? Does it work at scale at 40 people? What happens when you apply it to 10,000 people? What happens? I think that's where we are right now is really demystifying one-on-one, you know, personal experience and really, really blowing it up into practices and best practices that sustain us as we literally are punching into the brave new horizon of

• 58:58Speaker 02

  human self-actualization. And speaking of which, that is the heart and soul of this show. And I think guys like Tim Ferriss have opened the door. I mean, my wife is able to quit, her little personal anecdote, Juliette Redd, Four Hour Work Week, and literally left, was able to leave her job as an attorney and become CEO. And that's one of the reasons that Tim, you know, I have to do these things for Tim because he holds that over me because I got my wife out of the corporate law environment. Anyway, Tim Ferriss, thanks very much. You guys, thanks very much. We're in San Francisco. Come visit us. We'll talk to you guys soon. Cheers.

• 59:35Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. Tim Ferriss again. Hope you enjoyed that. Kelly is always good fun. And I would like to invite you and implore you to help us build the first ever standing desk only elementary school in the world. Please join forces with me and Kelly. I'm doing this for my birthday in part. I've put up 10K of my own money to get things started. We are very close, so please check it out. Fourhourworkweek.com/standing. All spelled out, F-O-U-R-H-O-U-R. Workweek.com/standing. Please take a look. Would appreciate your help. Until next time, thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I've used for years. I love audiobooks.

• 1:00:18Tim Ferriss?

  And I have two to recommend right off the bat. Number one is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time, and that is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, the only audiobook I've wanted to immediately listen to a second time as soon as I finished. It's amazing. You will thank me. The Graveyard Book. The second is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what became The Four Hour Work Week. So, all you need to do to get your free audiobook and a free 30-day trial is go to audible.com/tim and you can choose one. Of those two books, The Graveyard Book, Bag of Bonding, or more than 180,000 audio programs. So that could be a book, that could be a magazine, that could be a newspaper, it could be a class. It's that easy.

• 1:01:03Tim Ferriss?

  Go to audible.com/tim. That's audible.com/tim and grab a book. Enjoy.