From Stiffness to Stillness: How to Reset Your Body, Soothe Your Mind and Reclaim Your Energy with Lawrence van Lingen #559

Our posture, our breath, the way our feet strike the ground – all tell the story of how we move through life. But how often do we pay attention to this story - or even rewrite it? Today’s returning guest on my Feel Better, Live More podcast believes that pain, stiffness and fatigue aren’t just things to manage – they’re messages. And when we learn to listen to the body with the right lens, we can move better, feel better and even live better. I’m delighted to welcome Lawrence van Lingen back to the show. Lawrence is a highly sought-after expert in biomechanics, bodywork and human performance. Described by Triathlete Magazine as ‘the genius of running,’ Lawrence has over 25 years’ experience working with elite athletes and everyday people. He’s developed a unique approach that goes beyond traditional methods, blending a deep knowledge of movement, posture and breath to optimise performance and overall well-being. Lawrence works with some of the world’s greatest athletes to enhance their performance and help them with so-called ‘untreatable’ injuries. His online running workshops have become the backbone of remarkable athletic comebacks, and they’ve also helped many people worldwide move without pain and with greater enjoyment. His first appearance back on episode 491 of this podcast really resonated with a lot of listeners, and I’m so pleased to be diving even deeper into his holistic philosophy. In this conversation, we explore a variety of topics, including: The life changing benefits of backward walking The relationship between our stress levels and the way that we move Why most of us are over-breathing and the implications of doing so The true role of the diaphragm – not just for breathing, but also for spinal alignment, emotional balance, and nervous system regulation How modern habits like sitting, shoe-wearing and screen use are affecting us Why your feet are more than just a base – they’re a sensory system that guides your balance, posture and power How fascia – the body’s connective tissue matrix – influences everything from flexibility to feeling grounded Why stretching alone often doesn’t resolve tightness – and how restoring communication in the body is the real key to lasting change Lawrence’s clear explanations and everyday metaphors bring the body’s complexity to life. What emerges is a truly empowering message: your body isn’t broken, it’s just been misunderstood. And with awareness, patience and the right input, it knows exactly how to heal and realign itself. I hope you enjoy listening. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://drinkag1.com/livemore http://www.vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://timeline.com/livemore https://airbnb.co.uk/host Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/559 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Emotion and motion cannot be separated. If you get it right, it's so incredibly powerful. You move better and you experience life better. And then the way the world interacts with you changes. You make better choices and people around you react far differently to you when you're calm. It's just life changing. Your relationships heal, your way you see the world gets better. You just deepen and enrich and improve every aspect of your life. It's much more than movement. So just start with one small thing and have hope and trust and believe and it'll change your life.

• 0:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hey guys, how are you doing? I hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better Live More.

• 0:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Our posture, our breath and the way our feet strike the ground all tell a story of how we move through life. But how often are we actually paying attention? Today's returning guest is the inspirational Lawrence Van Lingen. Lawrence is a highly sought after expert in biomechanics, bodywork and human performance. Described by Triathlete Magazine as the genius of running, Lawrence has over 25 years' experience working with elite athletes and everyday people. And he's developed a quite unique approach that goes beyond traditional methods, blending a deep knowledge of movement, posture and breath

• 1:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  to optimize performance and overall wellbeing. Now Lawrence works with some of the world's greatest athletes to enhance their performance and help them with so-called untreatable injuries. And his online running workshops have helped many people around the world move without pain and with greater enjoyment. In fact, Lawrence has very kindly agreed to offer a 10% discount to any of my listeners who wish to join his wonderful online community where he offers four live classes per week, covering topics like mobility, breathing, strength and so much more. Just go to lawrencevanligen.com and use the code FBLM10.

• 2:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now Lawrence first came on my podcast back on episode 491. And because that conversation proved to be such a big hit with so many of you, I decided to invite him back for a part two. For me, the beauty with Lawrence is not just what he says, it's also how he says it. In this conversation, we discuss a variety of different topics, including the life-changing benefits of backward walking, the relationship between our stress levels and the way that we move, why most of us are over breathing and the implications of doing so, the true role of our diaphragm,

• 3:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  how modern habits like sitting, shoe-wearing and screen use are affecting us, why your feet are more than just a base, how fascia, the body's connected tissue matrix, influences everything from flexibility to feeling grounded, and why stretching alone is not always enough to resolve tightness. Lawrence's clear explanations and everyday metaphors bring the body's complexity to life. And throughout the conversation, he shares simple, practical tools that you can integrate into your life immediately. This really is a conversation about empowerment.

• 3:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Your body isn't broken, it's just been misunderstood. Pain, stiffness and fatigue aren't just things to manage, they're messages. And when we learn to listen, we can move better, feel better and live better.

• 4:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Lawrence, you work with some of the best athletes on the planet. You're an amazing movement coach, you're so much more than that. But one thing you recommend to a lot of your athletes is backward walking. Why?

• 4:25Speaker 00

  I think there's a lot that goes on with backward walking. If I had to distill it out really simply, I think it's basically an antidote to modern life. I think it introduces an element of play into our movement. It's grounding.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  It changes the timing of your walking. So I think we spend a lot of time inflection, a lot of time sitting, and it's a really, really good way to sort of open up your posture and create length and space and kind of get the chair out of your posture. But there's a lot to unpack in backward walking. It's just, it's something that you should just try and do and experience for yourself.

• 5:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  What are some of the benefits that people can get if they start backward walking?

• 5:07Speaker 00

  For a lot of people, it down-regulates your nervous system. So it can be very calming. And, and that's, that's amazing in and of itself to find a way they can kind of quickly ground you or calm you or change your autonomic nervous system. And then the other one, it kind of decompresses your low back and pelvis and creates space in your joints. When you're stepping back and you put your whole weight through your leg, you almost learn to trust the, the tensegrity, which is like a fascia word, the internal sort of structure of your body, and you learn to put your whole weight through your leg. Whereas a lot of time, people are kind of hurried and rushing and taking the next step, and there's a lot of tension in their movement. It really frees up tension from your walking and running.

• 5:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's really interesting. I think most people listening to us right now will have heard the benefits of walking more.

• 5:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like they, you know, we all know, don't we, that we should be trying to walk more in society, and the modern world has made it harder, or certainly more difficult for many people to get basic levels of low-intensity movement that we would have had for much more evolution.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  But there's very few people who are talking about backward walking, right? Which is, which is super interesting for me. You've told me before that some of your athletes will actually do a bit of backward walking before they go to bed. It helps them switch off, it helps them calm down. And so there's this relationship, isn't there, between the way we move and our body's stress levels?

• 6:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 6:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, can you talk a little bit about that?

• 6:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, this is something that I'm really immersing myself in at the moment, and it's, because it's so powerful when you get it right, and it makes such a big change. And it's this relationship between your parasympathetic nervous system and your sympathetic nervous system. So, you know, for clarification, I think most people are pretty familiar with these terms now, but your parasympathetics rest and digest. And your sympathetic nervous system would be sort of like what we need to in an emergency state. So it's fight or flight or form or freeze. And I think a lot of people are overstimulated in the modern world. And so can tend to be a little bit wired or a little bit anxious and a little bit uptight.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  And, and we really do need to calm down and down regulate. And you're seeing this incredible interplay between your autonomic nervous systems and the way you move and the way you breathe. And, and if you get it right, it's so incredibly powerful. And so we really do want to sort of learn how to down regulate the stress at the end of the day so that you sleep better, so that you wake up and your next day is better. But also in that moment, learning how to move with more ease, learning how to move in a more relaxed manner, learning how to move in a more grounded manner. Then walking becomes rehabilitation. And so your forward walking gets so much better if you, if you're walking and it's a creative act and you're thinking and you're thinking better on your feet.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Whereas, you know, on another level, you could be anxious and angry and stomping along or, you know, rushing to get somewhere and having a sense of anxiety and time pressure. And, you know, those are not the same walking. And I think modern people, modern life can pull you into a state where you're not really aware of, of, you're just in a constant state of reacting. You're always late, you've got deadlines, you're always rushing somewhere. You're not immersing yourself in the, in the walking itself. You know, you're not extracting all the gold from walking that there could be. So I think that's kind of where I'm playing around with it at the moment, is trying to get people more centered, more embodied, more in themselves. And then you move better and you experience life better.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  You make better choices and people around you react far differently to you when you calm. So it's just life changing.

• 8:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  It's much more than movement.

• 8:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  There's a couple of interesting themes there for me, Lawrence. Okay.

• 8:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Firstly, this idea that many people these days are chronically stressed.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  So they're chronically in the sympathetic part of their nervous system, which is the fight or flight part. As opposed to the parasympathetic, that relaxation part.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think many, most people listening would go, yeah, yeah, I kind of get that. Okay. I'm too busy. I'm too stressed. I'm looking for practices that help me de-stress. And what's interesting for me is I think a lot of people, when they think of,

• 9:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  you know, winding down their nervous system and switching off, a lot of the time they're thinking about doing less things or maybe practices like meditation or journaling. Right. And again, nothing wrong with those things, right? But you're talking about a particular movement practice, backward walking as a way to down-regulate.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now, I think that's,

• 10:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  I guess some people would maybe say, well, yoga helps me down-regulate in the evening. It helps me switch off. Okay. So I think that is an understanding that movement, the right kind of movement, can help us down-regulate. But I guess I'm really interested as to why you think backward walking does this? Is it because it's such a pattern interrupter? So because we don't do it, our brain is having to adapt because suddenly, you know, you're walking now not with the heel down first, your toes going down first and your, do you know what I mean? Is part of it a pattern interrupter for the brain?

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's an element of neuroplasticity because, you know, you're walking backwards and you sort of have a fresh look at walking. But it's, there's a two-fold answer to that question is if you walk forward and you're up on your toes. And sort of elevated, you'll feed into your sympathetic nervous system. But if you use your whole foot and you really sort of trust the ground and your heels hit the ground, what will tend to happen is you'll activate more your parasympathetic nervous system. And so, walking backwards, you learn to trust your heel, you learn to connect your bones. And so, if you just walk backwards and you, as you put your whole way through the leg that you're standing on and as you translate backwards, you learn to take a lot of tension

• 11:25Speaker 00

  out of your hips and your adductors and your hamstring muscles and your leg muscles. And because of that, you learn to move in a way that's much softer and it really does impact the nervous system. And it might not work, you know, some people are really big responders and I think from our previous lesson, a lot of people walk backwards and have very, very quick results. Within a week, they're like, oh my word, this is incredible. And then the second one is, I think it impacts our tonic and phasic muscle system. You know, you had a great run this morning and we sort of got a new move. And yeah, really getting into your tonic and phasic muscle system as a way of actually understanding and healthily intervening and healing your autonomic nervous system.

• 12:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, well, we'll get to tonic or tonic and phasic muscles in just a minute.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  This, this word you, you mentioned a lot, trust.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's really interesting. Ever since I started consuming your content online, one of the things that I always loved about the way you talk about movement is, you know, in many ways, you talk about movement as being life. The way we move is the way we live. If you can't trust through movement, you can't trust in life. I'm not saying you directly say those words. This is what I take from it, this is how I think about it. And, and I think sometimes we, the collective we, we think about movement as separate from our lives. Okay, so I've got my job, I need to answer my emails, I need to do this.

• 13:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  And then if I have some time, because I heard on a podcast that movement is good for me, I need to go to the gym and move my body.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Again, I understand that. I'm not saying there's necessarily anything wrong with that. But what I really love about your work. And this is how I think about movement is the way you move, your ability to trust yourself when you move impacts your wider life beyond that specific movement. And backward walking is really interesting, isn't it? Because if you think about it, on so many levels, you're having to trust. You know, have you had experiences of athletes who perhaps were, for whatever reason, maybe trauma, past experiences, you know, bad relationships, whatever it might be, struggled to trust in life. And through the trusting of their movement, through something like backward walking,

• 13:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  it started to impact their lives beyond that movement.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think you're really onto something. So the trust notion, you know, it's like in, I don't know, they'll have people fall backwards and you get caught from behind. You know, there's an element of that for sure. But the more people start to trust their bodies, you know, trust starts to show up elsewhere in your life. Like, let's say, running, running, we're going to hopefully talk about this a little bit later. You know, running, the injury rates are really, really high. And so a lot of people have a sort of a love-hate or a fear sort of relationship with running. They're always injured. Or when's the next injury going to come? Or you are injured and you're very, very frustrated. Like, if, say, we're an antelope in the savanna in Africa. If you're walking with a limp, you know, you're the food. Like, you're the weakest in the link. We don't like limping. We don't like being insecure.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  We don't like not trusting our knee or our bodies or our joints. It's very, very unsettling. So if you can start to trust your body, like, you know and you're confident that if you reasonably well behave, you're not going to be injured. That's very, very empowering. And we see it with athletes, for sure. I mean, like, Taylor Nebbia, I work very closely with, she had, in, I think, three years, 13 MRIs.

• 15:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Wow.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  And, you know, in the last nearly two years, she hasn't had a single MRI. And her level of trust in her body is blossoming in all areas of her life. And then the self-confidence, and she's just showing up different. And the way she perceives the world's changing, and the way the world perceives hers changing, you just know, he has a young, confident woman that's stepping into her power. And you know, you can't fake that. Well, you can try and fake that, but it comes from a very authentic place.

• 15:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  For people who are not familiar with the elite triathlon worlds, can you just explain who Taylor Neb is? Cause she's not just any athlete, is she?

• 15:45Speaker 00

  No, no, Taylor's, um, Taylor's a very special athlete. So, um, she's won world seventy point three champs three times. And last year she won the inaugural, um, T one hundred, which is like a middle distance triathlon racing. She won every race she entered in that.

• 16:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  So she's one of the best athletes on the planet?

• 16:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, yes. At the moment, currently middle distance, she's unparalleled. And you know, she went to the Olympics for two different sports. She went for cycling and for triathlon. She's, she's exceptional.

• 16:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, that, that, that whole idea that, you know, maybe before she started working with you or taking this approach, she, but she had thirteen MRI scans in three years. The fact that running injury rates are so high, I, I definitely, let's come to that in just a moment. Let's just, for people who are interested in backward walking, um, we'll shoot a video afterwards and we'll try and sort of, Yeah. pop it in or pop a link so people can see it. But just give us some, uh, rough guidance. How can people actually do it? Is it outside? Is it inside? You know, what, what, is it on a treadmill? Like, just walk us through those things, please.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Okay. So you wanna be safe. Okay. You know, don't, it's, it's very easy when you're walking backwards to walk into things. So if we do it in a gym, for example, with athletes, they'll, they'll actually focus on what they're doing so much. And they, they will walk into equipment. So try and walk in the place where there's quite a bit of space. Or you're familiar with. So like your back garden is great because you know how big it is.

• 17:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. I think we touched on it first in our first conversation, but I think it's such an important concept for people to realize is,

• 17:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  I feel very much that your posture will often reflect your personality.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I know for me that the more open I'm able to be, the more trusting I'm able to be, the more I'm able to actually, um, you know, be with my height. I'm a tall guy.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, I'm actually getting taller. I'm, I think, an inch taller.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like my spinal measurement compared to five years ago.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, that's important and that's what we want. We want to decompress the spine.

• 17:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly. So it's not that, um, it's not like I'm suddenly miraculously growing. It's that I wasn't in my full height before.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  No, yeah, you've regained your potential. That's what you're supposed to be. That's your birthright.

• 18:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly. But, but, but this is where it gets really interesting for me, Lawrence, is that that is also reflected in my personality. So I was telling you in the kitchen just before, and I think Mate Change At Last, that is my sixth book that came out just a few months ago now. It is without question the best and most confident book I've ever written.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I don't think you can take my posture and the way I move away from that. Because, okay, so I'm, you know, six or seven now, I think. Okay. But like many tall people, um, you try and hide your height, you know, when you're like eighteen, nineteen, twenty. You're at university, you're trying to fit in, you're trying to make friends, you know, you're trying to get down to everyone's level. So what does that mean as you get down? You start to compress your chest.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I've realised that as I can move into my body better, as I can lead with my heart and have an open chest and be in my height, I'm more confident, I'm more secure, I'm less concerned with whether people agree with what I put in that book or not.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm like, it's fine if you disagree. No problem. Like, this is how I see the world.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  If you find it helpful, great. If you don't, okay, no worries.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's, so, again, you asked me about backward walking. I'm saying backward walking and a number of other movement practices have helped me change my posture, change my height, and that has also played out. And the way I interact with the world.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then the way the world interacts with you changes.

• 19:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  It's amazing. And I mean, you know, for the listeners, I we had a treatment session yesterday and your body's just so much better. Your joints are more aligned, you've got space in your joints, your stack, your posture, everything's dramatically improved since I last saw you. So sometimes, you know, people say, walking backwards, you notice this initial result, and then there's slow change. But that's why whatever you choose to do, you should stick with. Because if we took Rangan now back into your old body, you'd hate it. You just wouldn't want to be in that same, usually like, no, no, no, get me out of here. Yeah. And because it's a learned technique, you know, if we could take what you knew now and then take you back five years ago and put Rangan now into that body, you know,

• 20:26Speaker 00

  instantaneously, you'd have a different posture. So posture is almost a learned technique.

• 20:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'd have a different posture and a different personality.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  And a different personality, yeah. Emotion and motion cannot be separated. And your posture and your deportment, and we see it in the lines of your face, you can see it in, you know, we're a reflection of what we habitually do.

• 20:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  And how we move and how we think are absolutely linked. And that's why, like, with running, often we'll give emotional postures rather than a cue. So instead of saying, oh, drop your elbow, you know, you want to have a sort of run with an open heart or run with a sense of trust. It's more powerful. Because then you start, you start to realize, oh, that's how I keep this sensation is the feeling of it. You know, the feeling of what it means to you to be open hearted, what it means to you to be in your full power. It'll mean something different to someone else, but it's a really good running cue.

• 21:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  If someone wants to start backward walking on the back of what they've heard and go, okay, all right, Lauren's wrong and you've sold me, I need to, not I need to, I want to start playing around with backward walking.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like, cause people love a bit more precise guidance, don't they? Like, what is it? Is it five minutes a day, 10 minutes a day? Morning, evening, barefoot, wearing shoes, you know?

• 21:43Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 21:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  What, you know, just help someone understand that.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  Okay, so yeah, you're gonna walk backwards into your new life.

• 21:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Love it.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  So what we wanna do is prefer ideal situations, backward grass. We want texture with sand, so we want texture in our feet. And you've got more nerve endings in your feet than your hands. So, so skin on something pushing up into your arches, like ground or sand would be absolutely ideal.

• 22:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  So outside, if you can.

• 22:12Speaker 00

  If you can, barefoot.

• 22:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Barefoot.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  No barefoot shoes, skin on the ground.

• 22:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Skin on the ground. Now, let's just pause there a minute. If you don't have access to grass or sand.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  Do the best you can.

• 22:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Do the best. What about, can it be okay on a carpet inside?

• 22:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. Yeah, barefoot on the carpet. Barefoot is best, so barefoot on the carpet inside, AstroTurf, gym. Barefoot's better, but if it's with shoes, it's fine. Just, just do the work. You've gotta start somewhere. You, you don't have to nail it. You know, perfection is the enemy of progress.

• 22:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, love that.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  Just get it done.

• 22:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Get it done, and how long for?

• 22:46Speaker 00

  And so five minutes.

• 22:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Five minutes a day?

• 22:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, five minutes. We really wanna try for five minutes, pretty continuous. And the reason is, your brain will sort of discombobulate or break down after about two minutes or 90 seconds. And you almost wanna refocus and then go again. And, and we think that in the, in the second part of that practice, you will get more neuroplasticity and more gains out of it. It's kinda like you play guitar, right? You, you should do your scales for five minutes. And often, you can concentrate. It's really easy for about 90 seconds. And then at about the two-minute mark, you'll make a few mistakes. And then you concentrate. And then the second part of your practice seems to create neural change and neuroplasticity. So five minutes is the magic number.

• 23:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so five minutes a day, backward walking barefoot. And I know from when I started to do it, that there's a particular pattern you want, right? And I know, I think I shared this on the first one, like, in my family of four, three of us. Did the wrong pattern initially, so our intuitive feeling was we didn't do it right. My daughter nailed it first time, she just got it.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Um, I can now nail it now because I know it.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I, I mean, we'll try and shoot a video to show people, but can you, are you able to articulate it in words for people so they know?

• 23:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So, so the cues are soft toes. So as you step backwards, you want to relax your toes and let your toes bend on the ground.

• 24:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  And then your heel goes down, your heel must, you, as you step backwards, you want to be able to have full weight through your heels. It's really important.

• 24:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  Um, so that's the important thing. And then your belly button or your sort of solar plexus, so here where your ribs are, that should point towards the lead leg, the leg in front of you. And it's very common for people to sort of step out of pattern the wrong way around, which would be your, your belly button pointing to the leg that's stepping backwards.

• 24:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  Okay. And, and that's basically a reversal of your normal gait patterns.

• 24:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  And, and.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  And that's one of the reasons some people respond to it. Once you, you restore that pattern, it has a profound effect on the nervous system. So if you walk the wrong way around, you want to be thinking, oh, this is an opportunity because if I correct this, good things are going to happen.

• 24:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. And not just in your backward walking practice, right?

• 24:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Your stress levels, how relaxed you feel, but also I'm guessing when you go forward walking or when you go for your park run at the weekend.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  You're going to run with more efficiency because of the backward walking practice.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. And, and it shows up really, really quickly. So I would encourage anyone that if you're going to do flow rope, measure your height before you, because the flow rope often decompresses people's spines by about an inch and pretty rapidly.

• 25:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  What, that, that term, you used it a lot last time as well, decompress the spine.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  What does that mean?

• 25:31Speaker 00

  So your, your body works like a suspension bridge. We've got rigid levers and elastic tissue. It's a combination of the two. So steel and, you know, like a suspension bridge has steel and concrete, right? So your spine can often be compressed by muscle tension. So all the, there's hundreds of muscles that run up and down your spine. There's a lot of long muscles that run across multiple joint segments. And if they're tight, they'll compress your spine. And the flow rope and learning to sort of move from the center and taking the tension out of your movement will, will relax those muscles and your spine will decompress. It gets longer, you actually take pressure off the discs. So anyone that's got back pain or, you know, has sort of degeneration of their spine,

• 26:15Speaker 00

  you know, I really strongly encourage you, if you start these sort of practices, you know, for flow rope, measure yourself, your height, and I'm pretty sure you'll decom, you know, if people comment and come back and say, yeah, I measured myself and I got taller, it'll be really good feedback because a lot of people will, and I almost expected it should happen. And with backward walking, your running will improve and will improve quickly. You'll, if you take a before and after video, so you take a video of you running on the treadmill from the side and you walk backwards five minutes a day, and it doesn't have to be every day, it can be three times a week, whatever you can fit in, you know, within two weeks and if you, you know, video, you're running again, it'll have, your form will have changed.

• 26:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  There's no doubt about it and for the better and you, you know, your, your experience of running will be, will be better.

• 26:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  What's really interesting, Lawrence, is those two practices you mentioned, backward walking and the flow rope. Not only are they incredibly beneficial for multiple aspects of our health, our happiness, our wider lives, they're also really fun.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? A lot of people have this love hate relationship with movement, don't they? They, they hear public health messaging that they should move more, but what, for some reason, and there can be many reasons, they don't enjoy the movement and maybe the particular movement they're doing. Or it could also be that their body is locked in certain patterns, so movement feels hard and difficult. Backward walking and the flow rope, like you're gonna have a smile on your face as you do them, that you feel like you're a child again playing around. How important is that when it comes to healing our bodies?

• 27:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's episode is sponsored by the daily health drink AG1. The clocks are about to change, the mornings are darker, everyone around you seems to be coming down with something and suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals and one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over eight years. And one of the many things I like about it is the fact that many of the nutrients it contains, for example, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, supports a healthy immune system. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous

• 28:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  improvement and updating their formula as the scientific research evolves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy metals, allergens and banned substances. This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering a free AG1 flavour sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavours, plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's $87 in free gifts for first time subscribers.

• 29:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  All you have to do is head to drinkag1.com/livemore to claim this offer before it ends. Today's episode is sponsored by the daily health drink AG1. The clocks are about to change, the mornings are darker, everyone around you seems to be coming down with something and suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals and one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over eight years. And one of the many things I like about it is the fact that many of the nutrients it contains, for example, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, supports-

• 30:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  A healthy immune system. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous improvement and updating their formula as a scientific research involves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy metals, allergens and banned substances. This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering a free AG1 flavour sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavours, plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's $87 in free gifts for first time subscribers.

• 30:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  All you have to do is head to drinkag1.com forward slash live more to claim this offer before it ends.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  Well, it's really, really important. I think, let's say for the listener, you're sitting there and say, well, I wonder how wired I am or how stuck in a sympathetic state I am. You know, well, one of the things is if you're not curious and you don't have a sense of play, you're in a sympathetic state. So parasympathetic and curiosity and play go hand in hand.

• 31:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, hold on, just pause there a minute. I want to make sure everyone follows the term. So sympathetic nervous system, I know we've covered it, but I just want to, I just want to land this point right. Sympathetic nervous system is the stress part of your nervous system, which you don't want to be in all the time, just now and again, but unfortunately in the modern world, many of us are mostly in that state. The opposite is the parasympathetic nervous system, the relaxation part of the nervous system. You're basically saying, one way you can ask yourself and determine if you are in that stress state or that relaxation state is to ask yourself how playful and curious you are.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because if you are in the relaxed state, you are going to be curious.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, you should be playful and curious. And that's the precursor to neuroplasticity. It's the door you have to go through, walking backwards, to get into a sense of, of change.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  And, and, and, you know, so, so what would be the opposite of playful and curious would be reactive, opinionated, guarded, defensive, fearful, you know, the lack of trust. So yeah, trust, play and curiosity would indicate that your nervous system is healthy. And yeah, it's, it's really hard to imagine that people are going to walk backwards and not start smiling or, you know, laughing or, yeah. And then, and it's so important. And then, and then what happens is when you start bringing those concepts, you know, the flow rope can bring a sense of creativity and flow and release. And a lot of people with the flow rope, you know, also it can be very down regulating because you're sort of mobilizing the spine and you're waking up

• 32:50Speaker 00

  all these incredible nerve endings and muscles feeding back into your brain, which you're not, you know, we all understand like a massage can be really, feel really, really good, you know, well, that's, because we were sort of wired for, for touch and movement. And so it releases oxytocin and oxytocin is the hormone of trust. So you can start, you know, doing these things and totally reframe your relationship with movement into a healthier one. You know, that, that Strava did a questionnaire of quite a lot of runners and 90% of people don't like running. They run because they perceive the benefits of it, but they don't enjoy running. And we would definitely want to shift 90% of people hating running and 10% enjoying it to 90% of people

• 33:33Speaker 00

  enjoying running and having a healthy relationship with running and movement because then it's sustainable.

• 33:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  That is a staggering statistic.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right now, I don't know the sample size. I don't know.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  It was like 10,000 people.

• 33:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. And again, I don't know if the people were more likely to answer if they didn't like running as opposed, you know, I get all that stuff, but nonetheless, even if it's a, you know, not quite right.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's still pretty alarming. Well, Strava is a, you know, a movement tracking app, right? So people are interested in movement if they're on the app.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're, they're monitoring their fitness and their activity levels for sure. Yeah.

• 34:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  90% not enjoying running.

• 34:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's a remarkable statistic.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  It makes you think, why do they actually keep doing it if they're not enjoying it?

• 34:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, probably for the benefits afterwards or because they're told that it's good for them. You know, and it doesn't seem to be that intrinsic. I mean, Dan Lieberman touches on this, Professor Dan Lieberman. You know, from an evolutionary standpoint, we're kind of wired to conserve calories. And so there is an initial resistance to exercise, you know, but once you get into it, it then rapidly reframes and you realise, oh, I feel so much better. I mean, often you don't feel like going for a run, but you feel fantastic afterwards. So there is always a bit of resistance to, to exercise or doing hard things usually.

• 34:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  I wonder what your take on this is, Lawrence. My perspective is that one of the reasons a lot of people don't enjoy movement, or running for that matter, is because there are restrictions in their body. So when they, you know, they, whether it be from stress, trauma, stored emotions, the modern work environment, right, it changes our bodies. So we then take that changed body to this kind of natural playful activity like running, right? And we're taking, I don't know, this kind of flexed, inefficient body into that movement.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? So then we don't enjoy that movement, or let's tie this into those injury rates. The running injury rates are through the roof. I think you told me yesterday or this morning that running injury rates are higher than NFL.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I mean, you know, again, they're stats and, you know, but yeah, I mean, pretty decent.

• 36:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  American football injury rates.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, American football, yeah. You're more, the injuries are miles higher for running than NFL.

• 36:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  But, but the, the natural conclusion for some people would then be.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  Running's bad for you.

• 36:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Running's bad for you. But maybe it's not that running is bad for you, it's the way that you are running is not currently helping you.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. I mean, you've, you've experienced it, you had a great run this morning. I mean, it's just, it's extraordinary when you get it right, like how.

• 36:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  It's, it's just, it's, it's a pretty incredible experience. You feel your body opening up, space in your joints, a sense of energy, a sense of lightness, a sense of.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  Sort of animation or, you know, it's just, it's just profound. And, and yeah, a lot of people unfortunately just will never ever in their lives experience what you experienced this morning. And so it's just much harder than it could be. And then I think a lot of people try too hard when they're on and, you know, almost like a work ethic, you, you, you straining or you forcing it and, you know, like there's ego involved or you being trapped or you worrying how fast you're running or you're not good enough or, you know, you're comparing yourself to others, whereas you, running should pretty much be within yourself. And we walked multiple times this morning, you know, we played, we walked, we skipped, then we ran, then we slowed down. And it's okay to play if you, you know, hunters, you had to be curious about where the animal was going, you know, if we, if we go into this persistent hunter model. But yeah, we, you know, the hunter was tired, he'd slow down or every now and again you'd

• 37:24Speaker 00

  stop to slow down and listen because you can't really listen when you're running. So I think an element of play and an element of not being, you know, I've got my pace. I want to run this pace. I should be running this pace. I want to basically run faster than I ran last week. You know, we just bring a whole lot of drama to running. There just really doesn't need to exist there.

• 37:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. I think this is such a big issue, right? I've noticed it. I don't have it myself anymore, that's for sure, but you see it everywhere, particularly with running, you know, they, I think it's called the Strava effect. You know, when people know their run is being tracked on Strava. They're like, oh my God, I, I can't post that time. I must go quicker. What will people think? It's like, who are you having this conversation with? It's like, it's just an internal conversation with no one, basically. But we cause ourselves this mental stress over nothing. It should be this expression for you and you alone.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  And so a couple of things come to mind there, Lawrence, for me. Okay. One is the fact that you told me last night, after you treated me, that you've made so many improvements in your running efficiency, that now you can do like a 20K run and not feel it the next day.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  That is super interesting to me because there's an idea, and I'm not saying people should or shouldn't run every day, but there is an idea that.

• 38:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  When I run, of course, I'm going to have pain the following day and stiffness the following day, but that's not necessarily true if you're running with beautiful running efficiency, right?

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, so that's quite interesting to me.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, we see, I mean, for me personally, running, you know, I obsessed about running because I couldn't run and I found it harder than it should be and I wasn't very good. So if you look, I did triathlon, right? My swimming was exceptional, my biking was okay, but and it didn't feel like I had a hard, I thought I could just with time and effort, I'd get better at cycling, but I was a very, very bad runner. And when I ran, it hurt, like my muscles would get sore, my muscles would get damaged. So I'd have to train more and more to condition myself enough to be able to do long runs. And it would beat me up. And now I have a totally different relationship with running. You know, I'm really, really efficient when I run. It feels amazing. I don't get tired. I don't break down as much. It's not as harmful for me at all. And we had this, so I worked with Jan Fredino, right?

• 39:54Speaker 00

  Who was, he's a gold medalist in the Olympics and triathlon and multiple world champion. His running efficiency improved so much that he said like, I kind of stole his, his track workout from him. So what, what he meant by this is, you know, he got down to the track and he'd do sort of eight by one kilometers and then afterwards he'd be pretty beat up, but he enjoyed the satisfaction because it was like I'd done work and he actually liked the sensation of being beat up. And then every day he'd just have physio, deep tissue, try and restore himself and the next day he just repeated. And I was with him in Andorra when he did a track workout and he said, that didn't touch sides. It feels like I haven't worked enough and I haven't done enough. So he added two more, I think one Ks on there.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  So he did 10 by one Ks and said, that's still not enough. And he started doing 400 repeats and I was like, dude, it's enough, but your relationship with running is so changed that, you know, and this is in a, in a world champion and a gold medalist. So we really can change the, our relationship with running through how well we move.

• 40:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's super interesting that you're talking about this Olympic medalist, this world champion. And from, from what you just shared there, it strikes me as though he had conditioned himself over a number of years that if this workout is going to help me improve my performance, it's got to feel hard.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  I've got to feel as though I've worked.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  There wasn't this idea that it could actually feel effortless or more efficient.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right. And I, I really find that point interesting because I would say one of the biggest things I've changed with myself over the past years is this goes beyond movement, actually. This is just, well, can you separate movement from personality? I don't think so. But I also, you know, I remember I used to cram for exams at school, at medical school. You know, I had to feel the pressure, had to, had to stay up late to know, oh yeah, you've, you've right, you've really tried to get it in there for the exam. And over the last few years, it's very much been a, a different approach to, for me to be thinking, oh, well, does it, what if it doesn't feel hard?

• 42:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  What does this look like if it was going to feel easy?

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it's been a seismic shift because I can now go into things not feeling that stress that I have internally generated to make me feel something is worthwhile. I tell you, actually, I'm not, I don't think I've shared this with anyone yet. In March, I did a 16-date National Theatre Tour.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Of the UK.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it was an incredible experience for a variety of different reasons. But one of the things, actually, there was, I can't remember which event it was, but some of my mates were there in, in my dressing room beforehand. And I said, I'm kind of feeling so calm, like I'm not even feeling remotely stressed about going on stage. And then this is where, when you change, you have to almost challenge existing narratives.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 43:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  That have maybe served you in the past.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  So the comment, well, I've changed a lot over the last years, but, but still, one of the things people will say about stress is that a little bit of stress is good for you.

• 43:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Too much stress starts to give you diminishing returns and starts to become problematic. And I, I believe that is generally true.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think chronic unrelenting stress.

• 43:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 43:36Speaker 00

  So, so parts where you push and then fall back, but it's, it's that chronic. And relenting.

• 43:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I've been really thinking about this. Well, I haven't thought about it for a few weeks now, but I was thinking on, when I was on the road in March, I was thinking, people say, and I've said before, that you need a little bit of stress to get on stage and perform.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I promise you, Lawrence, some days I felt, I felt no stress, no anxiety, no pressure going out on stage.

• 44:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because all I had to do was be myself, I didn't kind of need any stress, you know.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just make it sad. How would you, how do you see that? Well, totally. Well, it requires, let's say you tell a lie. Okay. So I don't know. I did something really bad and I'm being interrogated by the police and I tell a lie. It's exhausting. You've got to be consistent. You've got to work at it. You know, it's draining and a lot of people, I wouldn't say living a lie, but not as authentic as they can, or don't express themselves as purely as they can. Whereas if you just show up and that's you, there's, there's no drama, there's no fuss, there's no mental emotion. You're not, you don't have to second guess yourself. You don't have to think, well, did I say this? Did I mean this? Am I in character? It's just you, you know, and, and it's really, really, you know, that's getting down to the crux of all of this sort of the movement

• 44:59Speaker 00

  drama is just shedding away the drama and expressing yourself and because it's liberating and it frees up energy and that's why it's high performance.

• 45:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Why do so many people allow comparison and the time that they're running something in to infiltrate and get in the way of their experience of running?

• 45:25Speaker 00

  I think it's culturally imprinted on us. It's keeping up with the Joneses. It's school, it's hierarchy.

• 45:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Everywhere. I mean, you grew up in South Africa.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you moved to America. Is that the same there? I know there's many cultural differences.

• 45:37Speaker 00

  I think, no, I think if you wanted to go to a cultural place in the world at the moment where that wasn't apparent, it would be you go into the Amazon or into Tanzania and find subsistence hunters. Because in a small band of like, let's say a hundred people, everyone adds value and your value is different. So some person's good at skinning and some person's good at hunting and some, you know, everyone's got a different role and function. And I don't think there's the same sense of comparison. But from a social structure, I mean chimps, you know, there's hierarchy in the chimps. You've got the. You know, the alpha males, whatever, we just hierarchical. It's part of the human condition. But if you can let it, you know, you don't wanna let that sense of hierarchy and comparison ruin your life or, you know.

• 46:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  For someone who is listening to us and let's say loves to do a 5K park run every Saturday, something that's very, very popular in the UK.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Especially with my audience.

• 46:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  And they're trying to PB. So get a personal best every single Saturday. They've got a busy job, maybe they're stressed, but Saturday morning it's like, no, no, I've gotta go and push it. And they are someone who always compares. And even if they have a good run, but it was 10 seconds slower than last week.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Instead of looking at the fact that, hey, I got out there and I started the weekend with some fresh air in nature. They're beating themselves up that they were 10 seconds slower than the week before. What would you say to them?

• 47:09Speaker 00

  Is it worth it? What's the cost? I mean, is it, you know, is it worth it? Oh, you're ruining a beautiful Saturday morning. Is it worth it? Perfection is the enemy of performance, which, which there's not that narrative. It's, it's, it's excellence. You've got to show up every day and be like amazing. It's the devil's in the detail or there's marginal gains. But trying too hard just never works out, right? And I think most people, when you, if you look at the greats, like, you know, Elliot Kipchoge, he trains within himself most of the time. He only really, really pushes himself in a race when it matters. And, you know, so, yeah, it's law of diminishing returns.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  You're gonna go to that park run, you're ruining a really good experience and an opportunity. And running is so social. We, we're a band of brothers. Like the African proverb is, you know, if you wanna go fast, go, go alone. But if you wanna go far, run with friends. I, I think running as well is one of those lessons in life, cause it's, it's a great metaphor for life. Is at some stage you just start slowing down and you've run your last fastest time. You know, you can go to Boston Marathon and you go to age, you know, you're running in your age group and you've got to qualify. So you can always compete against your relative age. But I think, you know, judging your self-worth or your personality or how you I don't know, just judging your self-worth based on how fast you run, it's not a great

• 48:35Speaker 00

  metric. What I will say is, instead of don't and telling people what to do and what they shouldn't do, you know, the way to do this is learn to run more efficiently, learn to trust your body and suddenly the drama seems to just disappear. I think you've experienced that.

• 48:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  You know, you trust your running, you enjoy your running, it feels amazing, you're showing up and suddenly there's no need to try and better yourself every week to the next. And chances are, you are running faster.

• 49:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly, I am. And I'm not even looking at my times. What really drives me is efficiency, is fluidity of movement. And I'm really, as you can probably see, as Helen can see, like I'm, I'm, I think too much focus in society has been on how much we move and not how we move.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  So all the guidance is you've got to run more, you've got to walk more, you've got to work on your strength. And we'll cover all these things, because I know you've got some interesting thoughts on these topics. But, but very little of the messaging is about how you're doing those movements. You have this beautiful phrase, I think, Florence, you say, we need to move in a way that respects our joints.

• 49:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  What does that mean?

• 49:50Speaker 00

  Joints have a particular pattern. So like your hip joint, your, you know, where your femur joins your pelvis. As you move into flexion, so as you bring your knee forward, it's sort of coupled with external rotation. And as you move it into extension behind, it's coupled with internal rotation. You want to respect that pattern. There's very strong ligaments that reinforce that pattern, the muscles around that reinforce that pattern. So that's a pattern, you want to run with that pattern. Um. For those of you that walk backwards and you you'll, you know, you realize, oh, hang on, my belly button is pointing towards the back leg, not the front leg. You know, that hip's working out of pattern. So you're not respecting the joint.

• 50:34Speaker 00

  These are biomechanically just how it works. An example, well, like even if your elbow, if I bend my elbow, you know, my elbow can bend, you know, this far, that way, it cannot, that's, that's as far as it goes that way. We need to respect that. That's a, that's a hard wired into your joint. Let's say you've got knee pain and it starts to hurt in your joints, especially weight bearing joints. You know, you need to recognize you're not running in a way. First, learn to move in a way that doesn't hurt your joints. And then what we do is we strengthen it up, which is almost the, the current narrative is, if you have an injury, you're going to rehab and strengthen it. And I, I think what I would say is first learn to move in a way that doesn't stress the joint

• 51:18Speaker 00

  and then strengthen up and rehab that movement. It's just a little bit of a different way of looking at it, you know, but we have to respect our joints.

• 51:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's interesting. As you say that, I'm, I'm drawn to the London Marathon. Okay. We're a few days out from, you know, the 2025 London Marathon. That's one of the reasons you're in the UK is because you're running the event. Okay. So firstly,

• 51:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  in a, in a society, in a running world obsessed with goals.

• 51:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  I would argue overly obsessed with goals or that, that over focus on goals can come at a cost that a lot of us aren't recognizing. What is your goal or what is your plan for this Saturday or this Sunday's London Marathon? I should say that's the first question. But the second question is, in relation to what you've just said, we should move in a way that respects our joints.

• 52:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  The London Marathon is an incredible event. And what will no doubt happen this year, as happens every year, is that some people will still complete that and raise a lot of money for charity, let's say, but they will not be moving in a way that respects their joints. Right? So first of all, let's talk about your relationship with, with the London Marathon this Sunday. But then let's move into that because I think. I think there's this narrative in society that it's always good to do a marathon. Ah, you know, I did it. I pushed through.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I know, and I'm sure you know more than me, people who literally were so bloody minded about completing a marathon, they then never ran again afterwards, ever, because they broke themselves or they wrecked their knee. And that impacted their life for years afterwards. But hey, they got the marathon. They can put there on their Instagram handle, I completed the marathon. It's, it's a really interesting relationship, I think, we have. So what's your relationship, number one? And then how would you help someone think about this sort of other conundrum? Yeah.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  So my relationship is I'm going to run with Chris Evans. So I'm going to run with a friend, you know, we're going to go far, run with someone. So I, I don't have a time goal. I just simply would like to run with him. And if we, we decide not to run with each other, then that's just okay, you know, we can just go on and do our own race.

• 53:39Speaker 00

  So I don't actually have much of a time goal or a pacing goal. I'll just run with him.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  And which is interesting because I haven't, I haven't run a marathon in a long time. And I really enjoyed the fact that I was sort of almost like a little bit late notice. I think I was given 11 weeks notice to run a marathon, you know, time to prepare. But I think like it, it was good for us because I hadn't been doing long runs for quite a long time. We just sort of run six to eight Ks every day, but at altitude, at a high. So we're running 40 to 50 minutes a day. And then in the weekends, we'd run 10 Ks or at that altitude, like an hour, just over an hour. And that, we were pretty set in that routine. So it was actually quite nice to get out of my comfort zone, run a little bit longer.

• 54:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  So you're looking to have fun.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  So I'm looking to have fun, yeah, and camaraderie and a sense of fellowship.

• 54:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  And if, I'm not trying to tempt fate at all, and I don't, I don't think this can happen, but let's say during. The race on Sunday.

• 54:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  At some point, you start to feel something.

• 54:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? Now, obviously, you know your body very well. This is your area. You're a, you know, an incredible expert. Right? With the human body and how it moves. So you can probably figure it out on the fly. But let's say you got to a point where you're like, actually, this is hurting. And this pain in my knee is getting worse. You're going to pull out, right?

• 54:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, 100%.

• 54:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  100%.

• 54:59Speaker 00

  100%.

• 55:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because your identity is not wrapped up in you completing that race.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 55:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  You pulling out doesn't say anything about your worth as a human being.

• 55:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, it's good. I mean, so what?

• 55:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think for some people listening to this right now, that is.

• 55:15Speaker 00

  You're a quitter or you're a loser. But I mean, those are labels. Like, you're not a quitter or a loser.

• 55:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  And interestingly enough with Taylor, so Taylor did, Taylor Nurd, you know, the triathlete we were talking about. She did Ironman on, in Kona, not last year, the year before.

• 55:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  And that is the, just for people who are not familiar with the world, that is the.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  The pinnacle of.

• 55:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  The pinnacle. You have to, like, the pros even have to qualify to even get in. And that's in Hawaii.

• 55:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  And it's a, it's a big deal, like 3.8 k swim, 180 k bike, and then a marathon afterwards. And it's in heat and hot conditions and wind. It's, it's pretty brutal, right? And I was kind of helping her and she wasn't as well prepared for the race as she could have been. Like, she didn't do very long Ironman specific prep. And she's never done an Ironman before. So one of the agreements was that if I thought she was doing any permanent damage, I could tell her and she'd walk off the course. So not, you know, not her feeling like I'm damaged to the point that I'm hurting myself. She says, Lawrence, if you think I'm now doing, I'm now damaging or impeding my future career, you tell me and I will step off the course. That was like an agreement that she made.

• 56:24Speaker 00

  So at the world-class level, you know, where we, we really do idolize these people, you know, to have that sort of sense that I'm not risking my future career, my future self in this race. And, and, and to come back to your second point about, you know, I have a tragic, tragic story where. A very well-known marathon runner was going through sort of online and publicly on social media, a problem with her knee and running through knee pain. And she was having injections and, you know, it was a story and there was blogging about it and we can get through this. And one of my clients that was really enamored with this, ended up with a double knee replacement and ended up with a hip replacement as well. So three joints

• 57:04Speaker 00

  replacements, because she was following her idol, trying to get through this, you know, run through and do marathons and training. And she wanted to show so desperate to do a trail race. She ended up with a double knee replacement and a hip replacement.

• 57:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  This conversation is going to go out after the London Marathon. Okay. But I just want to, only because I've come across this so many times and so have you. Right now, someone's listening to this and let's say they have a big race coming up that they signed up for a year ago. And it was a big deal. They've had it on the calendar, right? And I'm like, God, I can't believe I've got in, I'm gonna do this. But they know as they're training that something that keeps flaring, their hip or their knee or their back. And they know, but they think, I just push through for a few more weeks and do the race. If they were your athletes and you were their coach, what kinds of things would you be

• 58:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  saying to them?

• 58:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's episode is sponsored by the daily health drink AG1. The clocks are about to change, the mornings are darker, everyone around you seems to be coming down with something. And suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling. And that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals. And one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over eight years. And one of the many things I like about it is the fact that many of the nutrients it contains, for example, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, supports a healthy immune system.

• 58:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous improvement and updating their formula as a scientific research involves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy metals, allergens and banned substances. This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering a free AG1 flavour sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavours, plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's $87 in free gifts for first time subscribers.

• 59:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  All you have to do is head to drinkag1.com/livemore to claim this offer before it ends. Today's episode is sponsored by the daily health drink AG1. The clocks are about to change, the mornings are darker, everyone around you seems to be coming down with something and suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals. And one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over eight years. And one of the many things I like about it is the fact that many of the nutrients it

• 1:00:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  contains, for example, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, supports a healthy immune system. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous improvement and updating their formula as a scientific research involves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy metals, allergens and banned substances. This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering a free AG1 flavour sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavours,

• 1:00:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's $87 in free gifts for first time subscribers. All you have to do is head to drinkag1.com/livemore to claim this offer before it ends.

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  I think so as a guideline, if you have more than three out of 10 pain when you're running, it's concerning. It's okay to sort of wake up and feel a little stiff and then it should clear up very quickly. But if you have persistent pain and if it's more than three out of 10, or when you're running, it gets worse while you're running, you really need to reconsider what you're doing. And it's not worth it. Like, when you, when you create inflammation, some ways inflammation everywhere. So when you create joint inflammation and you damage a joint, it's irreparable. It's, I've seen some pretty crazy things happen in 30 years of working with people where you do see osteosarthritis reverse itself, but it's very, very rare. And you have to have like sort of like on the, if

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  you looked at your spine and you decompressed it by an inch, if you took an MRI from a year ago to an MRI now, this MRI would look better than a year ago more likely because you've got, your disc heights would be higher. You'd have better hydration of your disc. So there we, there might be some deterioration maybe somewhere, but it's more likely that you've reversed that deterioration. That is extraordinarily uncommon. Okay. So no, you, you hurt a joint and you damage cartilage and you damage bone, you put inflammation in the joint, it's very, very difficult to settle down. And it's not just that it's that joint, it's now systemic. And so you really are harming your health and then you're creating a fear response and you're not trusting your running, you're not trusting

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  your joint, you guarded, you're defensive, you're gambling your future for this short term goal of completing a marathon. Or again, I'm not trying to put people off, right? I, I get what a phenomenal experience it is, people raise money for charities, but I think, I think also for some people.

• 1:03:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think they may regret doing it when they're not ready. Looking back, they go, actually, maybe I shouldn't have done that.

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think more.

• 1:03:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  And that's sad.

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  That is sad.

• 1:03:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  But that's identity. That's like being attached to this story that actually the time I get in this marathon actually says something about me as a human being.

• 1:03:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it doesn't.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that goes back to trust. So the Harvard Review or something, trust is authenticity, empathy and logic. You know, if you're, there's a breakdown in logic, like, of course, your health is more important than an event. That's just made up. And, um, you know, it's not authentic because you're not, you're not truly concerned with yourself and showing up and being the best version of yourself. There's, there's, there's compromise. You're letting society or the opinions of your friends or, you know, you're too embarrassed to show yourself up at the running club because you were, you know, like, that's not authentic. You're not being true to yourself.

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  You don't have a, you know, real sense of, of sort of strong identity and anyone relating to you should have a sense of empathy. They should understand that, yeah, marathon's hard. You're not going to get it right every single time. Pros often don't show up at the starting line when they don't feel good. You know, so, so it's just a breakdown of a whole lot of things.

• 1:04:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  I wonder how much of this is, um,

• 1:04:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  is,

• 1:04:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  is cultural in the sense that you brought up Kip Chugi. Okay, I had the great privilege of having a long form chat with him a couple of years ago on the show. And he had literally broken the world record the week before in Berlin. And then he, he was coming to London to do press and interviews. And I, you know, very luckily to have, I had some time with him. And one of the things I've never forgotten from that conversation is this idea that he never ever runs by himself.

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Never. It's always with his crew.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  His running club.

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  They run together. And I, to me, it was like, this is so interesting because. You know, we explored it together, this idea that in the West, that's a very broad term, that people often go for runs by themselves. You know, work was tough. I need to make sure I'm taking care of my health and doing something, so I'm gonna go for a run to unwind.

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, I do that. So I, I, I'm not judging it or criticizing it.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  I mean, there's a book, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

• 1:05:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, but these guys don't have that. It's a different culture.

• 1:05:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? They run together. And I remember he said, he said, you know, the reason, one of the reasons we run together is if, you know, if I'm not showing up for whatever reason, someone's gonna be phoning and saying, hey, Ellie, are you okay? What's wrong? Why aren't you here? You know, we're all at 6am, we're all running today.

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I thought that was such a, such a beautiful thing for me to think about this relationship we have with running. So coming back to this big identity that people now have about their park run time on a Saturday, or whether they can even do a marathon or not, it's, surely it all comes from this Western individualistic mindset.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Whereby it does say something about me. Whereas if you always run in community and in a supportive tribe.

• 1:06:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, maybe there's less of a need to define yourself.

• 1:06:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  By the time you run a 5K in.

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. And, and you know, like you, you say it is Western, or let's say, I don't know, you go to Scandinavia, you, you're the son of someone. You, you, any, I don't know, there's a, she was a CrossFitter, any Thor's daughter, you're the daughter of Thor. So your identity is more familial. And you can be in, in China and your identity is your tribe, or your value of your tribe, or you know, you, you are concerned. It's a very, very Western idea that you're the most important person and that you're running for yourself. And, and it's really healthy to, to be a part of a community. Because the culture is the coach and you know, those guys, they don't, they won't tell you what to do, how to do it. There's no sort of direct instruction. There's no sense of guilt or blame,

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  or you shouldn't be running like that, or this is bad form. You start running like that and you'll start picking up their pattern and their rhythm. We were talking about this morning, like Buddha says, if one person in the house meditates, the whole house meditates with them. One, as you start running with people that run better, your form will naturally improve and the way you understand and approach. So this community-based running approach is really, really important.

• 1:07:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:42Speaker 00

  I, both Yan and Taylor, really like it if I ride a bicycle next to them when they run. And it's just for the community and camaraderie and just holding a space, because you're almost bringing a sense of calm and relaxation and ease, and they pick up on it, and then they just run better.

• 1:07:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hmm.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  So we're incredibly sensitive social creatures, and we can get so locked up in our little silos and running on a treadmill and doing our workouts and following a training plan. And one of the amazing things about running is how many people there are, and we just go like, yeah, the crowds and the energy. We absolutely understand that people make running better, but then we train in a way that's like the antithesis to that. It's not, it's crazy.

• 1:08:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  You've got your own online community, don't you?

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Um, how do some of the themes that you've just mentioned show up in the community that you kind of host and curate?

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  I think the culture is the coach. Like, let's say I'm the coach and I'm gonna say, I think wrong in that you should be running in this way, or you should be doing this, or this is the workout, right? When you have a culture, you realize like, oh, that's not appropriate. I need to behave like this because no one else is doing it. Does that make sense? So it's a much softer way of shaping and malleable. Like, that's why businesses have a strong culture, because then everyone knows, oh, at Apple, this is how we do things. Or at this place, this is how we do things. Schools have culture. So culture, like if you play for the All Blacks, it's a very, very different experience than if you played NFL.

• 1:09:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  In what way?

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  Because of the culture. Well, the All Blacks play for each other and the captain and the vice captain will clean the change rooms and make sure the change rooms are clean afterwards when they leave. You know, you lead by example and you as a captain are service to your team. And the All Blacks, if you played rugby against, let's say, England, they'd invite England the team round for drinks and a social function afterwards. So you can socially decompress. You can interact with the people that you just competed with. Like, I promise you, like, the Denver Broncos are not having drinks with the Philadelphia Eagles after an NFL match, you know, and no one's cleaning up after themselves in the change room.

• 1:09:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  This culture piece is so interesting and I'm really fascinated because you grew up in South Africa.

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  And moved to America.

• 1:10:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, are you able to articulate some of the cultural differences between those two amazing countries?

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  That there must be some really stark differences, I imagine.

• 1:10:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think in running is how hard people try to run, like in America, like the effort that people put into it and then how technical it's perceived to be and how sort of almost over-engineered and the massive sort of role that strength and conditioning plays in running. In South Africa, running was way more organic and sort of they run on rhythm and feel. I mean, I worked a lot with African runners and they'd often, they weren't that worried about pain because they could deal with pain and they, we were touching on this earlier, is like some of the runners came from such a humble and hard upbringing that they were just naturally really, really tough.

• 1:11:00Speaker 00

  So they didn't have to work on resilience and mental toughness. They've got that in spades. But, you know, when they were running, they were more concerned with, oh, I've lost my rhythm or I've lost my feel or it's not quite working like it should be. Whereas, you know, in America, you know, a lot of people perceive that you've got to be tough to run and you almost, you know, I think generally your quality and standard of life is a lot higher. So sometimes people almost feel like they need to work on their mental resilience or fortitude or toughness, but, you know, people are obsessed with pain. Culturally, you know, enjoying pain and obsessed with strengthening the pain out of their body.

• 1:11:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  You know, rather than this notion of rhythm or feel or working with your body and, you know.

• 1:11:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  That that thing about strength is really interesting. Let's talk about strength because one of the things in this health and wellness space at the moment is the growing awareness of the importance of our strength and our lean muscle mass.

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  As we get older.

• 1:11:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so as we get older, unless we do something about it, we're going to lose muscle mass. And maintaining that, preserving it as much as you can.

• 1:12:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is very important for your longevity and your ability to stay well as you get older.

• 1:12:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, I'm agreed on that. But then going back to what I said before.

• 1:12:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think there's too much focus on the what and not the how.

• 1:12:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  So. Let's take strength, for example. Preserving your muscle mass is important.

• 1:12:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right, there are multiple ways you can do that. Yes, you could do that at the gym.

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  You could also do that in many other more, you could call them natural ways perhaps. But one of my concerns is, is that a lot of people don't move very well.

• 1:12:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  They've got all these inefficiencies in their body. They can't walk very well. They can't run very well. They then hear the podcast on strength and start going to the gym. Maybe with a personal trainer if they can afford it. Many people can't, so they're trying to figure this stuff out by themselves. And then they're strengthening on top of these imbalances. So they think, yeah, I'm doing my strength training.

• 1:13:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I do worry with some people, they're actually making things worse in the long term. I'm not trying to put people off, right?

• 1:13:26Speaker 00

  No, no, we really do want people to move and strengthen, get out there.

• 1:13:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I think, I don't know.

• 1:13:31Speaker 00

  And give them a sense of confidence too, you know, and and just to be clear, there is also a metabolic cost to this muscle. So at some points, it's the law of diminishing returns. And we kind of see that in in bodybuilders, you know, hypertrophic bodybuilders, like, let's say, you know, old Arnold. Arnold's friends are all dead. The miracle of Arnold is how long-lived he is. I think we have a society problem and you know, like I was telling joking, it's like it's really dangerous being an influencer these days because a lot of influencers are all having major joint surgery and joint replacements at very inappropriate ages.

• 1:14:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, I see a lot of bodybuilders or people with big muscles who tick the box. They've got strength, right? They've preserved their muscle mass. But there looks to be a stiffness and a roboticness in the way that they move. Okay, I'm not having a go at anyone, to be clear. Everything has a cost, right? There's a consequence to everything we do. And I think that that freedom in movement, that efficiency, that mobility is also important as we age. So if you're putting on strength at the cost of those things, I'm not sure it's going to end that well.

• 1:14:41Speaker 00

  I think it's really a world of diminishing returns. And like, let's say, you know, we understand that if you've got a big V8 muscle car, it's, you know, it's going to cost a lot of money in gas to keep going. And when you, you know, you work an engine hard, you might be sort of slightly shortening your life expectancy and not lengthening it. But so, and you're not athletic, you know, if I was going to pick a basketball team, we were going to play some hoops or whatever, you know, I'm not going to go to the gym and the biggest person there is the person I'm leaving out of my team. So there is a point where, you know, what is the goal? Is it function or is it just hypertrophic or looking good? And a lot of people, and that's okay for where you are at that moment in your life, but a lot of people, it's looking good.

• 1:15:26Speaker 00

  I mean, I know triathletes are more concerned with looking good than their performance. You know, that vanity metric and their appearance is more important than than actually performing. So.

• 1:15:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  How do you deal with that as a coach?

• 1:15:37Speaker 00

  Well, okay, so one is I don't coach in terms of training and training programs anymore. I did it for a little while in a kind of niche market for select few individuals, but I don't actually write training programs. I'm more like a movement coach, just to be clear. I don't, I really am very, very picky with who I put my time and effort and energy into. So only people with a really clear sense of trust and understanding. So that, a person like that wouldn't even enter in my world. There's no, they have no access to me because it's, why? It's a, it's a, you know, my job is not to try and tell you how to live your life.

• 1:16:20Speaker 00

  You know, for where I'm at, I'm interested in a professional athlete that wants to sort of focus on mastery, not medals and express themselves and bring their fullest potential to what they're doing. And at that level, you know, we're not having conversations about what you look like and how it's important to you. It's just that, that,

• 1:16:40Speaker 00

  that would have needed to fall away in your life by the time you'd want to work with me one on one.

• 1:16:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:46Speaker 00

  You just, you know, it's not part of my world.

• 1:16:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Earlier on, we were talking about tonic or tonic muscles via phasic muscles.

• 1:16:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  We were talking about the stress response and how that's intimately linked with the way that we move.

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so I don't think we actually expanded on those terms. So it's really, really interesting, this stuff, okay? And it relates to breathing, which a lot of people have questions on. So can you, let's go back to that. We're talking about the relationship between the way that we move and our stress levels and our stress response system. What are tonic muscles? What are phasic muscles? And why should we even care about these things?

• 1:17:27Speaker 00

  So I think, you know, one of the things we just touched on with strength is this compartmentalization. We're not compartments. We, everything interacts with itself. And so the interrelation, the interrelatedness of all of this, or the human is a system. And so for the listeners now, don't, don't, we'll go through some technique, we'll keep it relatively simple. The big takeaway with this is how the different systems start to interrelate with each other. Because I don't think it's something that we're kind of taught at medical school. And I don't think it's something that most people are very good at or have a high level of awareness, right? So we have tonic muscles, which are your postural muscles and often breathing muscles. So an example, a very famous muscle is your psoas muscle is a tonic muscle.

• 1:18:11Speaker 00

  Your hamstrings are a tonic muscle. They help support your posture. And a tonic muscle is more slow twitch, so it's because it's endurance based. So you have to hold your posture for a relatively long period of time. So there's a lot of slow twitch muscle fibers, so they're endurance based muscles.

• 1:18:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 1:18:32Speaker 00

  Okay, and that's your tonic muscle. And when tonic muscles become dysfunctional, they tend to have a lot of tone. So that's easy to remember, and they tend to be reactive. So tight reactive muscle. So a lot of people have tight reactive hamstrings. A lot of people have tight reactive psoas muscles, okay? The opposition sort of muscle of that is your phasic muscles. And phasic muscles are your movement muscles. So the quick animated, I'm moving my hands, how do I get forward? How do I go somewhere in life are phasic. Your glute max and glute medius are phasic muscles.

• 1:19:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  So your butt muscles.

• 1:19:03Speaker 00

  Your butt muscles, yeah. And so really simplistically, the muscles, your hip flexors are tonic and your hip extensors are phasic. So you can almost think that it's not quite this simple. So someone that really understands is going to say, well, that's too simplistic. I just, but for the sake of getting somewhere with this conversation, the muscles in the front of your hips are tonic and the muscles at the back are phasic.

• 1:19:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 1:19:26Speaker 00

  Okay. The important part is when phasic muscles are dysfunctional, they become weak or inhibited. Your core muscles are also phasic because you're using your core to twist and animate quite rapidly.

• 1:19:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  So this idea that many people have sleepy butt muscles.

• 1:19:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Fits in here.

• 1:19:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, or weak core.

• 1:19:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Weak core and weak butt muscles.

• 1:19:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  These are phasic muscles.

• 1:19:50Speaker 00

  That are prone to being inhibited. So you've got to, instead of, so people will obsess with trying to strengthen their glutes and it doesn't work. I mean, you know, I guarantee this is resonating with so much of you, so many of people in the audience. It's like, you know, I do a ton of core and a ton of butt exercises and I have weak core and weak glutes. Well, they're being inhibited by your tonic muscles. The tight reactive tonic muscles that tend to lock on and hold on for a long period of time are stopping your phasic muscles from moving.

• 1:20:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so just relating to this, the things and the themes we've just been talking about.

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  If you have, or you've been told, or you've seen that you have weak glutes and you're trying to address that, it's easy for people to go, "Oh, they're weak."

• 1:20:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  "I must strengthen those muscles."

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:20:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  But you're saying for some people, simply trying to strengthen them without identifying and working on the root cause of why they're weak in the first place is not going to lead to any improvements or any results.

• 1:20:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you're saying that for some people, it's this relationship between tonic and phasic muscles.

• 1:21:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. I wouldn't say some, I'd say the majority.

• 1:21:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 1:21:05Speaker 00

  Most people, your most efficient route is to restore the balance between the two. Rehab and strengthening generally needs to be simple. I mean, Pavel Tatlin is sort of the guy that brought kettlebells to America. Like he says, "Find a very simple strength routine and then just do it for decades."

• 1:21:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:24Speaker 00

  You know what I mean? So we have this perception of, "Oh, well, I don't know, I'm doing hip bridges and my glutes aren't switching on or don't seem to be improving. So now I need to do more complex exercises or more different." Were you looking on Instagram and you're saying like, "Oh, my word, that's why my butt muscles not engaging." So we can start to get very, very complex and do a lot more, whereas simple rehab should work. And if it's not, you need to probably pause at that moment and say, "I wonder why my muscles not responding because I'm giving it an appropriate dose or stimulus."

• 1:21:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, doing some work on people's breathing patterns, I know we spoke a little bit about that in our first conversation.

• 1:22:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I shared how in one of your YouTube videos, you have many more now, Lawrence, you are pumping out the content on your YouTube channel for sure.

• 1:22:11Speaker 00

  You're inspiring me, Ron.

• 1:22:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  But it's great. There's this beautiful, I think it's a 15-minute video that I, for a few months, I literally followed it. And interestingly enough, pretty soon after doing that, I went to see Helen and on her machine, Doris, that tries, it's like, she could see just doing those breathing exercises.

• 1:22:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  How it changed the way that I moved.

• 1:22:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which is just amazing. It was amazing for me to see that. But how does breath work relate to this tonic-phasic muscle interaction? Or does it?

• 1:22:45Speaker 00

  So I think with tonic muscles and phasic muscles, we've got to go just one level sort of deeper. So Dr. Steve Porges wrote about the polyvagal theory. And so your diaphragm is a tonic muscle and your pelvic floors are tonic muscles. And they're breathing muscles and they're intrinsically linked to your posture. So on a very powerful level, if you interact, if you get a healthier diaphragm, and let's say a lot of people, you remember the default for tonic muscles that they're dysfunctional is spasm or tone and reactiveness. So if you have a tight reactive diaphragm, it's massively going to affect your breathing and the state of your autonomic nervous system.

• 1:23:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  And those glutes that you're trying to strengthen.

• 1:23:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so there is a relationship between tonic, which tends to be more parasympathetic, and phasic, which tends to be more up regulatory or sympathetic. So if you had to run away from a bear, you're going to use your phasic muscles. So there is a feedback loop here. And so breathing is a fantastic segue into balancing out your tonic and phasic muscles. Because if you soften your diaphragm and you have a greater soft, like excursion, your diaphragm can then draw deeper and move without tension. You're going to, one is, you know, change your autonomic nervous system. You're going to make it healthier, you're going to be able to rest and digest. And two is it changes the tone of the muscles and it's a feedback loop. So as your tonic muscle tensions change, your glutes can switch on.

• 1:24:11Speaker 00

  So you want to put soft, slow, that's why Feldenkrais, so a lot of people said you do like Feldenkrais. Feldenkrais was slow, soft somato visceral movement, which means like organ and spine movement, which is richly slow twitch. So slow, soft breathing, slow, soft somato visceral movements tend to make the tonic muscles let go and then your phasic muscle system is just much easier to switch on.

• 1:24:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  I heard yesterday your conversation with the Foot Collective recently on their podcast. And I think, I'm pretty sure it was in that conversation, you said that slow somato visceral movement is the biggest deficiency that modern humans have, or something to that effect.

• 1:24:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, Western, certainly where I'm living.

• 1:24:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, so this is really interesting, okay. What does somato visceral movement mean? And, you know, why are we so deficient in it? And how can we start correcting that?

• 1:25:12Speaker 00

  So somato visceral means soma, the body, and viscera, the organs. So it's like this.

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  Let's go back to embryology. So when we're just a little bean in the embryo,

• 1:25:25Speaker 00

  how we neurodevelopmentally develop it, we have a sort of central notochord, which is where your spine comes out of. And so somatovisceral movement is like this central, slow, soft contractions or moving from the center out. We kind of discussed this on the run this morning. If you can learn to move from the center out, if you can either move from the outside in, so let's say my hands move a lot, and you're almost creating tension into your body, or you can move from the center and your hands express, your hands get to express what the center's creating. Or think of a fly fishing rod. Your hands moving a little bit, but the fly at the end is darting all over. And you can with great precision in a small hand movement, land a fly in the water and dip it out and pull it back in.

• 1:26:08Speaker 00

  Okay, so somatovisceral movement is the ability to move from your spine, move from the center out and do so in a slow, controlled manner that's a force amplifier. So it's like cracking a whip. Your hand's not moving at supersonic speeds, but the end of the whip is moving at a supersonic speed. A lot of people, and you experienced this, you're using your hands to help generate movement, but then that's movement going from the outside inside. And you can't move with your hands, the end of a whip at a supersonic speed. It's impossible. So in terms of movement, generally speaking, you know, if you can use your spine as an engine, you tend to amplify the speed of the movement at the extremities.

• 1:26:51Speaker 00

  So it's a really cool way of looking at it. But why it's deficient is everything we've been talking about culturally. You know, John Rain rode a horse and he had a stiff spine and he had to have backbone. You had to have backbone to go to war. So you play staccato drums before war to give you a backbone, to give you a stiff spine. Because, you know, I know it's kind of weird. People, this freaks people out.

• 1:27:13Speaker 00

  But it's got a lot to do with, we live in rigid structures, you know. We're in a beautiful room, again, and I really like the look and feel for it, but everything's a straight, hard edge. We're not in nature. There's no straight lines in nature. I mean, some trees are pretty straight. So I think we culturally, we move on hard surfaces. We're sitting in chairs. We're surrounded by pretty rigid architecture. And so we've become pretty rigid. Um. And then, like I say, this obsession with almost moving from the outside or your your outer sleeve, which is your mask and how you show up in the world, you we want a six pack, we want to cosmetically look good. And people are walking around with a sort of tight or engaged stomach. And a tighter out and we suppressing our internal movement. And again, it's that level of authenticity.

• 1:27:59Speaker 00

  You know, nothing, everything I'm saying just ties in together. We're one person. It's all one thing.

• 1:28:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  How how do we start bringing in somatic visceral movement if it's deficient?

• 1:28:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think one way you're saying is with breathwork practices.

• 1:28:13Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:28:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Um. How else can we start bringing in somatic visceral movements?

• 1:28:18Speaker 00

  Kind of everything I do.

• 1:28:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  The flow rope must be that.

• 1:28:21Speaker 00

  Is massively somatic visceral. Yeah, spinal engine. You learn to animate your spine and to move from the sacrum out.

• 1:28:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  And what's interesting about that, just if I just share my own experience, I've got, I think, pretty good at some of those basic moves on the flow rope, but I was probably overusing my hands.

• 1:28:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  And so what I'm trying to do at the moment is use the hands less.

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  And see if, you know, my inside, my my pelvis, my hips, my spine.

• 1:28:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Can generate those movements. So the hands are almost just holding on for the rides.

• 1:28:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:28:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  But it's not coming from the hands because you can cheat it with your hands.

• 1:28:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which is fine, I think, to start with as you're learning it, right?

• 1:29:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. As soon as you learn some of the basic patterns, like, let's say, it's really important that you can swing the flow rope backwards in a figure of eight. And most people, if you if you're sympathetic, or if you've got an imbalance in your tonic and phasic system, you probably like chopping down because you're going to be flexion based and you won't want to extend. So you won't.

• 1:29:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:21Speaker 00

  When you swing the rope, you're chopping down and you're not swinging it backwards or or underhand. So it's really important to get the underhand figure of eight pattern down with a flow rope. If you pick up and you can swing any rope, a jump rope, a skipping rope, you can swing a towel. You can swing theracords, you can swing a pair of sweatpants. It doesn't really matter if you enjoy it.

• 1:29:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's just easier with the flow rope.

• 1:29:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, if you enjoy it, then get one, you know. But anyway, so you you swing in the flow rope. If you can swing it back. Backwards in a figure of eight pattern, that's the most important thing. We really like the drag and roll for running. Um, I know a lot of your, your listeners run.

• 1:29:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is that, can I ask, cause I, I learnt that off YouTube about a month ago, right? And I love it. Okay. Is it drag and roll or is it dragon roll?

• 1:30:07Speaker 00

  Um, I didn't invent the dragon roll. So I think it's a dragon roll, but you teach it as drag and then roll. So it's both.

• 1:30:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Got it. And guys, for anyone who wants to know how to do this, have like, you've got a YouTube channel with all these how to's on there, right? So your YouTube channel has literally got.

• 1:30:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. How to make a flow rope, how to swing the flow rope, how to um, get the flow rope to help you with the timing and gate patterns and movements.

• 1:30:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  One thing we haven't done yet, we're gonna do after this conversation and we're gonna film it is tire walking.

• 1:30:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:30:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Where, well, first of all, can you explain what tire walking is? And does it or how does it fit into the things that we've just been talking about?

• 1:30:48Speaker 00

  Okay. That is a very good question. So tire walking or resisted walking, so you're walking with resistance is basically restoring tonic and phasic muscle balance.

• 1:30:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right.

• 1:30:59Speaker 00

  You know, and the reason when you walk, you don't really use your glute max and you don't really use your hip extensors because it's almost too slow. It's too passive.

• 1:31:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  You're not meant to.

• 1:31:09Speaker 00

  Well.

• 1:31:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Even if you're walking well, you're not going to use them much.

• 1:31:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're not using them much, even if you walk well. Yeah.

• 1:31:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 1:31:14Speaker 00

  It's just not an activity that requires a lot of hip drive. It's, walking is very efficient. We populated planet Earth because we're so, such efficient walkers. So we don't really use our glutes. We don't drive forward when we walk. So what we're doing with a tire is adding a bit of resistance to walking so that you can then get hip extension or your hip extensors, your glute max can basically help push your hip forward. Right? So that's why we add resistance because people say, well, do I have to walk the tire? It really helps people move across the line in terms of sorting out this tonic and phasic muscle balance. Um, so, and then we, we almost like reverse walking backwards. So like when we walk backwards, our belly button should point to our lead leg and your heels should really have a good contact with the ground.

• 1:31:58Speaker 00

  And you should have a sense of relaxing your hips in order to make that happen. With resisted or tire walking, you just flip it around. Now you're going to step forward. And the thing that you want to do is as your knee goes past your hip, you then want to straighten your leg. So it ties into the flow rope. It's like this delayed first you move in the hip, then you move in the knee and then you move in the foot. Cause you're almost cracking a whip.

• 1:32:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  So the timing, the flow, the rhythm.

• 1:32:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, the sequencing. So, so tire walking is simply learning how to get the step back into your running and into your gait. Cause a lot of people pull themselves forward with their hamstrings. Or a lot of people have got really tight feet. Or maybe you were taught natural running, natural running, um, by running on your forefoot or picking your hamstrings up off the ground or flexion based running. So like, you know, you've got to lift your knees or on your forefoot. So basically trying to get that tension out of your running and learning to basically run by pressing the earth away. So running is about downforce. You experienced it this morning. You know, when you start hitting the ground down, you start to free up.

• 1:33:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:03Speaker 00

  So not a pulling. So, so running is how you get, um, tire walking or resisted walking is how you get the step back into your gait patterns. And it's really, really good for you. And then we've got like the happy hip hack,

• 1:33:17Speaker 00

  which is, um, which we'll also do. And that really what it does is you actually lengthen and release the inhibition from the tonic muscle, your psoas, and then your glutes really switch on. So coupling resisted walking with arms overhead pattern is really, really amazing way of, of creating that synergy of you lengthening and making healthy your tonic muscles and then switching on your phasic muscles.

• 1:33:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay. So we're saying that the balance between tonic muscles and phasic muscles is really important. Many of us have got that balance slightly wrong or maybe a lot wrong, which is impacting our nervous systems. It's impacting the way that we move, our efficiency, our injuries. Right. So you're then saying one of the things we want to then focus on if we're trying to move more efficiently and move in a way that respects our joints. Is to do some practices, hopefully that are fun.

• 1:34:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  And enjoyable that naturally start to correct this.

• 1:34:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:34:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  One thing you can do is backward walking, which we spoke about at the start of this conversation. One of the other things you can do is play around with the flow rope.

• 1:34:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  And on a personal level, I love the flow rope. And it's playful, you feel like a child. And when you walk or run after you've been using it, you feel that flow, you feel that rhythm. You know, when you're talking about those African runners and they're more in tune with the rhythm feels off.

• 1:34:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  I feel flow rope is a way to to give you that sense of rhythm. So when you run, it's less technical and in your head and more about feel.

• 1:34:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the flow rope as well is if you if you're an awkward runner, you know, if your one elbow is a little bit up, the flow rope after starts to tidy your running up. So you start to look way, way, way more symmetrical, which is really cool.

• 1:35:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:07Speaker 00

  So just doing the flow rope. So, you know, I don't have to say to you, drop your elbow or that's inappropriate. Or, you know, the flow rope really starts to make you symmetrical. And I think a really good way of of thinking about that is we tighten with a twist. And you you might have an asymmetry because you've got tension and we let go and things fall into place. But the flow rope is really, really good at unwinding tension. And because of the symmetry and the timing, we start to unwind. And it makes people that run with the flow rope, it takes time. It starts to run very, very beautifully and very, very symmetrically.

• 1:35:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:39Speaker 00

  You know, it just gets tidy and you look at that and it's that undefinable quality. I know some people use the term and I think it's terrible, like what defines good and bad. But it's like, it's like, let's say food, what makes a really great meal and what makes not such a great meal? What makes something taste off? You know, when you look at someone that moves while you go like that, that's something. You know, what is that indefinable thing? And the flow rope puts that into you into your running and your movement.

• 1:36:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so we've got backward walking, flow rope.

• 1:36:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  We mentioned tire walking. So for people who are interested in taking it, you know, not upper level necessarily, you know, people who are interested in this stuff and, you know, I've got the drill ready, we're gonna do it. We're gonna, you know, with an old tire, make it and hopefully shoot a video to show people what the source is. But there are videos on your YouTube channel anyway. That's also gonna help.

• 1:36:30Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:36:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  And then the fourth one you mentioned, which we did yesterday and I've been obsessed with already this morning, this healthy hip pack, which is the current name you've given it. Guys, this is, this is a brilliant exercise. It's really easy, right? I don't know if you can do it wrong.

• 1:36:48Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:36:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I, I feel after I do it, I feel two things. I feel I'm standing up more. I feel I'm, I'm, my heart's more open.

• 1:36:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  And at the same time, I feel more grounded.

• 1:37:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it's, it's, it's a very simple exercise. Can you, I don't know if you've already done this, can we, can we try and describe it? And then what we'll do, we'll shoot it. And certainly for the YouTube version, we'll try and just put it in the screen in the corner so someone can at least see what, what it looks like. But are you able to, I know it's hard with movement to try and talk about them in words.

• 1:37:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Give it a go.

• 1:37:24Speaker 00

  Okay. So, so the happy hip hack, um, it's remarkably simple. It's, it's so simple. You're gonna say, no, it can't be that good. It's amazing, right?

• 1:37:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  I agree.

• 1:37:36Speaker 00

  You really, really got to try this. I, I think, I think for people trying to fit up, because now it's a lot, suddenly you've got like, oh, I've got to do this and this and this. You know, I think it works better if you understand backward walking in these movement patterns. Um, certainly, but anyway, it's really, really simple and make a big, big difference. And if you're very skeptical about everything we've been saying, just do this one drill and I'm pretty sure it will change the way you run and move and your experience of movement. So basically all that you do is as you take a step on the same side that you stepping back with, your driving leg, you just raise your arm above your head. Okay. And so the right leg will be back and my right arm's above my head.

• 1:38:20Speaker 00

  And then you'll swap and you'll go left leg back, left arm over your head.

• 1:38:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:25Speaker 00

  And so for people that were backward walking and you were walking the wrong way around, so you couldn't get your belly button to face your lead leg. If you walk forwards with this pattern, your belly button will face your lead leg. So I don't have to, you don't have to try and cue it into someone, you don't have to try and get them to correct it. It'll just naturally happen. Whereas it can take, well, I mean, I know I've, I've had people that have sort of walked a time done resisted walking the wrong way around for three months before they figured out, oh, hang on, my belly button isn't actually facing my lead leg. So this immediately corrects that posture. You, you cannot basically do this wrong. I think the only thing you've got to be mindful of is drive through your heels. So leave your heel on the ground when you do it.

• 1:39:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:03Speaker 00

  Okay, it's if you're very reactive and like I say, if you've been running on your forefoot, you might get up onto your toes doing it. So leave your heel on the ground and then just basically step and you put length on the one side.

• 1:39:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love what I call sort of roots, cause exercises or movements like these where you're not directly working on your running or how your arms or hips are moving when you run. You're just doing a fun activity and exercise.

• 1:39:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:39:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it naturally starts to change all those things. Cause I guess.

• 1:39:33Speaker 00

  It's very, very upstream, this movement.

• 1:39:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly. And that's what I think is what, you know, whether it's in medicine where I feel we're too downstream, just treating the symptoms rather than getting to the root cause.

• 1:39:44Speaker 00

  And being reactive.

• 1:39:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  And be reactive, the same kind of thing as with movement, isn't it? Often it's like, oh, well, you're doing that and you're running, change the way you hold your hand in your running. But it could be that, is there an exercise that you could do that would naturally?

• 1:39:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:39:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Make that happen.

• 1:39:58Speaker 00

  And yeah, I mean, that's what I'm really trying hard to do is trying to address the root cause of things so that, you know, downstream falls into place. And this is one of them. This is extraordinarily powerful. So what it does, it really helps restore your tonic phasic balance. You can couple it with resisted walking. So you can walk the tire in this pattern because now you, you strengthening your glutes as well as releasing your tonic muscles. For those of you who are technically minded and saying, well, why is it so powerful and what level it's interacting on? One is it's a crawling pattern. So you, we were touching on this this morning with running, you're saying, but running is equal and opposite. So why is it same leg, same side? And one of the reasons, because that's how you crawl.

• 1:40:41Speaker 00

  When you crawl, your right hand reaches forward and your right leg goes backwards. So you're putting a crawling pattern into your upright gait. And we crawl for a reason. So when we crawl, we learn really healthy gait patterns. So you as a child might have skipped crawling or didn't crawl that much. And this is common these days because parents don't get down onto the level of the children. So the child's on the floor and everyone's up there and they want to get going. So then they'll try and climb up chairs and stand on their feet prematurely. Or maybe you'll put in a baby walker, a jolly jumper. You know, kids, we're talking about this flexion pattern. Kids don't lie on the floor and open up. They've been in, they go from the carry cot to the baby feeder, which is sitting upright, to the chair in the car. And they never really lie on the ground and learn to crawl and roll and put some of these

• 1:41:26Speaker 00

  functional patterns into them. So it's a crawling pattern. And what happens is you, you're lengthening your psoas, which basically puts, stops its inhibition of your hip extensors and your iliacus. So your iliacus functions in, we talk about these joint patterns. Your iliacus inflection is an external rotation, but when it lengthens, it's internal rotation and extension. So you put that internal rotation, extension into your hip, length through your psoas. You're getting your shoulder off your hips. So if someone's running, you've got the dreaded hip drop and you think it's a glute medias problem, this is really, really good. And then also because your shoulder starts to elevate, so when you walk and your shoulder

• 1:42:06Speaker 00

  starts to elevate up, you put the third dimension into your running and it makes it much, much easier for you to realise you have to have down and up in your running. So you have to sort of step into the earth to get to go forward.

• 1:42:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:20Speaker 00

  So that shoulder popping up. So a lot of people will swing their shoulders from side to side to try and run or try and use their hands. And once you start the stepping pattern, you realise, no, the running and the energy is just up and down and you just happen to move forward. So it really powerfully on so many levels will totally transform your running.

• 1:42:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  You mentioned some of the things that we now do with our kids that is so different from hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

• 1:42:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:42:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  And the knock on consequences this can have, right? Yes, we, we talk about this a lot on the show in the context of food, for example, and how our food supply has changed. But even those movement inputs into the developing child's brain that we've always had.

• 1:43:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Are now being leapfrogged in the name of progress. But we have the question, is that really progress? Right? Screens are another thing that have been dramatically introduced into children's lives, but also our lives as adults.

• 1:43:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm interested in your perspective on screens. What is the impact of screen use? What happens to our eyes, to our neck, to our hamstrings? What is the impact on our muscles? Because I think a lot of the time we're talking about screens through the lens of, what is the content people are consuming on their screens? That's a valid point. What is the impact on our circadian rhythms by looking at these bright lights into the evening? When we're not designed to look at bright lights in the evening. Okay, so content, circadian disruption. That I've spoken about quite a bit on this show.

• 1:44:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I think you have quite a fresh perspective on the impact that screens are having on our movement.

• 1:44:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think two sort of central things is the the ability to do hard things in our serotonin levels and our hormone levels, which I'm sure you've discussed as well, is profound. So I think a lot of people are losing a sense of agency and the ability to do things and as a sort of level of focus, which is

• 1:44:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, because it's too easy to be distracted by your screen.

• 1:44:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, you get cheap serotonin hits.

• 1:44:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:40Speaker 00

  And, you know, so it's just on a, and you just end up in a feedback loop. I mean, how many times have you picked your phone up, checked your emails, checked your messages, gone onto Instagram? Then there's nothing there for you. So what do you do? You check your email, check your, you know, you're just cycling through apps.

• 1:44:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  I was thinking

• 1:44:58Speaker 00

  So you're in this crazy feedback loop of doing nothing and

• 1:45:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you think you've done something.

• 1:45:04Speaker 00

  You think, well, it's stressful because humans are actually partly prey, not just predators. You know, we like to think we apex, the apex of the species on the planet. But, you know, wait until you encounter a lion in the wild and you'll very quickly realise, like, you're not an apex predator, right? So we like to immerse ourselves in our environment to make sure our environment's safe. So just think of, you know, you you look at an Instagram post and you transport it to Africa. Part of your brain is like, oh, this is a new environment. What's the threat? Am I okay? You know what I mean? Like, it's it's not just looking. You can be exhausted after work being on your phone. And and and there's, I don't want to get, I what I want to get into is the eye and the movement and your posture, which is

• 1:45:46Speaker 00

  kind of what you're asking, but also this notion of, we know that people's reflexes, people's ability to play sport diminish after being on the phone.

• 1:45:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  I don't even think we know the long term consequences here, right?

• 1:46:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Of being able to be easily distracted, because it's also, what are you not doing with that time? Now, last year, I filmed this Channel Four documentary on screens and children with Matt and Emma Willis.

• 1:46:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Matt Willis is a singer songwriter. He's part of the British band Busted.

• 1:46:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? And I don't think this made the final edit in the show, but one of the days we were filming, and I think we were talking to the parents of the kids, who frankly, all of them said that we've lost our children to technology. None of them wanted their kids on the technology, but they were all doing it because everyone else's kids were on it, right? It was this really bizarre situation. No one wants it. Everyone's doing it because they think everyone else's kids are doing it. But everyone, or all those parents at least, were saying, we've lost our kids to technology, right? And Matt said something so interesting, which is, he he was one of the main songwriters in Busted. And he said, he, you know, yes, he has to really carve out time now to write songs.

• 1:47:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because he goes, you know, how many of these great songs and albums we listen to came from boredom? People were bored. You know, I'm just gonna pick up my guitar and start playing. And for after a few hours, they start to express these emotions, and we get these gorgeous songs. I'm wondering what's gonna happen in 2030 years when that boredom is literally been engineered out of our lives, right? So Matt was saying, I don't write anywhere near as many songs. I don't pick up my guitar. I don't pick it up as much as I used to because it's easier to pick up your phone. My son and I love playing snooker. Snooker coach a few years ago said to me that he worries now that snooker's a hard game.

• 1:47:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:47:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  To get really good is difficult. You have to put in time, attention, practice. You have to go through not being very good before you break through. Why would a kid do that anymore? When it's just easier to get these hits on a screen, right? So just echoing what you're saying.

• 1:48:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I mean, when you stare at a screen, also, small screens are terrible because your rate of attention is terrible. So what you'll get out of an email message on a screen is not the same as if you were on a big screen or if you printed it on paper. So I think that's really, really important.

• 1:48:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  What do you mean it's not the same?

• 1:48:18Speaker 00

  So if I sent you a reasonably technical email, you know, a long email with valid points and content on your phone as a text message, if you looked at your ability to sort of what you got out of that email or text message would be different if I sent it to you via an email and you looked at it on a big screen because you're sitting back and you've got a bit of a broader perspective and your eyes are bigger, so more panoramic view, not pinpoint focus, okay? And if you printed that out into analog into paper, your retention rate would go through the roof. So we're getting data, but we can't even interpret it decently because how our eyes perceive it affects our retention rates.

• 1:49:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  There's also research showing that children do not retain stuff as well on a screen as if on paper.

• 1:49:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you must write it out.

• 1:49:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, and I'm, just to be clear, I'm very, very against the rapid adoption of technology into the classrooms. I think it's coming at a huge cost. For a variety of different reasons that we're covering. But purely just on that of learning, what do we want our kids to do at school? We want them to learn, but we know that they're learning better. If it's on paper as opposed to a screen. So why would you not give them the learning on a piece of paper as opposed to a screen?

• 1:49:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's better. And well, anyway, so the radical impact that our eyes have in our posture, how we interpret data, how we see the world, you know, how much, I mean, this is all sort of relevant. But one of the things that we do as well is when you look at a screen, you'll hold your breath. It's called screen apnea or email apnea. So here's a really interesting, you'll say, no, that's not true. So a great breathing practice is to hum or whistle. Whistling has gone out of fashion. It used to be a big thing. You whistled while you worked, right? So, but you can hum. So let's say, you know, humming slows down your rate of breathing, which is really, really good for you. So we can start to over breathe or take too many breaths per minute. So humming is, you know, if I breathe in and then I hum out, hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm, okay? I'm slowing my rate of breathing.

• 1:50:24Speaker 00

  I'll take, I'll take fewer breaths per minute, which is generally a good idea. Okay, try and hum and write an email and be on your phone. It's almost impossible. So looking at the screen disrupts your breathing patterns so radically. And when your diaphragm, when you hold your breath, your diaphragm tends to get tight and people are over breathing and having breathing issues just by screens. It's really, really hard to breathe through an email or a screen or a text.

• 1:50:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  There was a study, I think it was UCLA, did maybe five years ago. And in that study, I think the conclusion was that 80% of office workers change the way that they breathe when they're looking at their email inbox.

• 1:51:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:51:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, which is incredible and not for the better.

• 1:51:11Speaker 00

  No, not for the better. No, no, no. And hopefully what you get out of this conversation is at a very, very intrinsic, deep level.

• 1:51:20Speaker 00

  You know, in a space that you don't really wanna mess with. You get your autonomic nervous system wrong. It's not great. It's really, really difficult sometimes to create health in a damaged autonomic nervous system.

• 1:51:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so we don't retain information as well when we're reading it on a small screen compared to a big screen or on paper. It also messes with your breathing patterns.

• 1:51:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:51:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which of course, I was gonna ask about posture, but of course messing with your breathing patterns is gonna relate to your posture.

• 1:51:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:51:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  But what else does it do to your posture?

• 1:51:51Speaker 00

  So the fixed, so your pupils become fixed and they don't really dilate and change the aperture and your focal distance changes. So one, it can ruin your vision.

• 1:52:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  We know that, it's increasing rates of eye appear.

• 1:52:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, perfect, okay. So that's a big deal, but what happens is your eye muscles are intrinsically linked to your postural muscles. And like, so just on a very, very quick feedback loop, you can do, like if you bend forward to touch your toes and get a sense of how flexible, let's say your hamstrings and your back is, so like whether you can touch the floor, just so do that now. And then what you wanna do is take your finger and look at the back of your nail. And then we do pencil push-ups. So you take your finger and you sort of move it out and then move it closer to you.

• 1:52:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  While you're staying focused.

• 1:52:34Speaker 00

  While you're staying focused on the nail. So you really wanna be able to focus on the nail and then move out and then move closer. So basically you're changing your focal distance of your eyes.

• 1:52:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:43Speaker 00

  Okay, and then the third component is go close, far, and then look up and then have a, try and really relax your eyes as if you're looking at a sunset, like so panoramic. And you do that just for a minute and then bend forward and try and touch your toes and you'll be more flexible. It really, really changes your eye muscles and how relaxed your eyes are and whether your eyes are able to open and close and change in distance, radically affects the tone of your postural muscles. The other thing that's really important is the muscles at the back of your neck, at the top of your head, your suboccipital muscles, are intrinsically linked to your eye patterns and that's so that we can track a bird or a ball. So you know, if something comes past us, our eyes track it, our head immediately moves.

• 1:53:28Speaker 00

  And when we stare at a screen, our peripheral vision decreases so that you can have more accidents. You can be in a car accident because you didn't see them coming because we have no more peripheral vision, which is one of the things backward walking does. It really opens up your peripheral vision. So it's great for that. And your sort of your ability to be aware of things behind you, which most people are so forward focused that they've lost. But tight upper cervical muscles means restricted head movements, anterior head posture, text neck, text posture. And then your back tightens up and your hamstrings tighten up and you affected your movement patterns. And it's not happening on one level. It's happening on the level of the eye, the actual posture with your head forward. Your head's really heavy. It weighs what a bowling ball weighs.

• 1:54:12Speaker 00

  So for every inch, your head travels further forward. It's four times the pressure at the base of your neck. People are walking around with their head four inches too far forward. That's 16 times 15 pounds through the base of your neck. And you wonder why you've got neck pain and a breathing pattern disorder.

• 1:54:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  And wondering why they're tired and got a migraine and all kinds of whatever it might be.

• 1:54:32Speaker 00

  And your upper cervical region. So one of the things that defines us, like Dan Lieberman talks about this is our neutral ligament because only animals that run have a neutral ligament. So chimpanzees don't have a neutral ligament. So that's at the base of your neck.

• 1:54:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  N U C H A L.

• 1:54:47Speaker 00

  N U C H A L.

• 1:54:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  The base of your neck. So only animals that run.

• 1:54:51Speaker 00

  Have a neutral ligament because it's a head stabilizer. So we really need to work on stabilizing our heads when we run. So possibly it's really good neck rehab to run because it's a strong stimulus to stabilize your head.

• 1:55:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's amazing, I think about my own profession.

• 1:55:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:55:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  And how many of the issues that we've just spoken about end up

• 1:55:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  in front of doctors, neck pain, migraines, stress related issues that I can't sleep, right? But we learn. It was a while ago since I was at medical school. But this idea that our posture, that the function follows our structure. We're not taught this stuff, right? We're literally taught, oh, that's the symptom is the head. Oh, that's the headache. Okay, what could be causing that? Or what's the name of that headache? Is it migraine? Is it a tension headache? Is it something else? And then we can decide what drug treatment we can give for that.

• 1:55:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:55:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's broadly speaking, you know, with a few caveats, kind of how we're trained.

• 1:56:00Speaker 00

  Of course, yeah.

• 1:56:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  I've always looked at the human body here, and I remember at medical school, like, following online or reading magazines about this kind of stuff, about posture. And I thought, wow, if you've got someone really bad posture in their head forward position, I don't know how many of their symptoms might be related to that until that's corrected.

• 1:56:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:56:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  But it's not, this whole thing of that the way we look at health now or body parts is so reductionist, so separate everything out, or that's a head issue, or that's a neck issue, or that's a knee issue. So, well, maybe there's a root cause behind them all.

• 1:56:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it comes back to, so it just ties in beautifully. When people are tight in tension, they tend to move in a disconnected way. And when it's disconnected, it lights up in your brain as multiple moving parts. And movement is complicated. And so like when you work with people and let's say you start with backward walking, one of the things you're integrating your joints, you're making movement simpler, you're tying the jots together. So what will happen is when you really get this right and you run down the road, it won't be busy and there won't be a lot of moving parts. It'll feel like one thing. So everything starts to fit together and become one in your mind. Because it's integrated, it becomes one. And then you become better thinking in systems.

• 1:57:17Speaker 00

  So, you know, someone is asking me, Lawrence, how did I end up where I ended up? It's by working on yourself and integrating your body and learning to move better. And the more, the better you move as a system, the better you are at systems thinking. And system thinking is very, very hard for most people. What you do have to do is you have to know the basics really well. I think I told you when I met Dan Lieberman and, you know, I had dinner with him. It's extraordinary life changing at the time. And I realized like, I really need to know my anatomy better.

• 1:57:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  What was it about meeting Dan that was so life changing for you?

• 1:57:50Speaker 00

  One, he's curious and playful.

• 1:57:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, he's a great guy.

• 1:57:53Speaker 00

  You know, and so I just realized like this guy's having fun and he loves what he does.

• 1:57:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:59Speaker 00

  You know, and that's why the quality of his work is so extraordinary and he's gonna last for times. You know, and people like misrepresent him and misquote him and project all stuff onto me. He's having fun and he truly loves what he does and he loves teaching, he loves being in help. So that was a big thing. His, his whole perspective and how important evolution we are, like so a lot of what we're talking about, if you just go Dan Lieberman mode, it's a mismatch of evolution. We haven't caught up and adapted to the technology and the food and the diet that we live. We haven't, you know, so it's the evolution sort of mismatch. And the other one was, was how structured and routine his life was and with quite a lot of thought. So he, I can't remember how far his house was from work, but he specifically bought a house

• 1:58:44Speaker 00

  that was, let's say, twenty or forty minutes away from work, walking distance, so that he could walk to work and back every day, because that's, walking for him is really, really important. So that's where he gathers his thoughts, prepares for his lecture, you know, the creativity in thinking. So, and, and his day, his routine, you know, his pretty simple life and just very, very productive.

• 1:59:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:05Speaker 00

  And sort of non-negotiables, an hour breakfast with his family in the morning, ninety minutes supper with his family in the evening. You know, walk to work, walk back from work, like, so I don't know. He was just a true, true inspiration and kind of like you saw something in me that I didn't see in myself.

• 1:59:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Why is it, do you think, that Dan and me can see things in you that you weren't able to see in yourself? Or didn't have the trust in yourself?

• 1:59:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:59:38Speaker 00

  A lot, you know, growing up, childhood, I lost my mother when I was eleven, you know, boarding school, being bullied a little bit, I don't know, society. Like, I think Rick Rubin says, like, your job as an artist is to sort of break through all the obstacles that society's beaten into you, you know, if you wanna think clearly. So, I don't know.

• 1:59:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Do you have more trust in yourself these days?

• 1:59:59Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. You know, my, one of the reasons I'm so passionate about what I'm doing, and I want to really start working on my influencing and my YouTube and get this content out there, it's been totally, totally life-changing for me. I mean, I'm 54 now and I run better than I've ever run in my entire life. I love running more, I move better, I feel so much more confident and comfortable in who I am, in my authenticity. It's so incredibly rewarding when you start getting this right. And I wish that for everyone.

• 2:00:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:29Speaker 00

  And, and not, not in a way you must, and I'm telling you to do this, I'm just saying, come on in, the water's great. And if we can just slowly, one person at a time, on a deeply authentic level, start to live better, you know, we can just heal the planet or make the world a better place.

• 2:00:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Although, as you know, I think you're incredible. I think you, not only do you have a proven track record with elite athletes, you move far beyond that. You just help people move better, move with more freedom, express themselves with more freedom, be more authentic, all these things you do. I think you have a wonderful way with words and a wonderful manner, which is what I think draws a lot of people to you. You clearly want to help. For people who want to kind of get involved with you, you've got this online community.

• 2:01:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:01:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you've got this new breathing app that you've created. Okay, so tell us about the online community. Who's it for? What do people get if they sign up for that?

• 2:01:30Speaker 00

  So the online community, you know, we talked on this earlier about the culture is the coach. We're trying to create a, a community of like-minded people. And you can go on there and someone's very likely experienced what you've experienced. And there's just this sense of you can come there, you can learn by assimilating, you can say, oh, that's how they solve that problem. That's interesting, this relates to me, without, without it being too direct. So a good cultural space to be in to start thinking about movement and not just running, walking, movement, how you show up in the world.

• 2:01:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you, you go on there, you give classes, there's mobility.

• 2:02:02Speaker 00

  Four, four classes a week, Monday, mobility class. On Wednesday, we do a mastery class. So we'll, we'll deep dive into some aspect of movement or, Thursdays is a breathing class. So, and it's a very, very safe and secure breathing class. Well, you know, breathing needs to be safe. And we'll talk about why. So Thursday, we do a breathing class and then Friday, we do a strength class. And then I have community only videos on there. So some of the stuff that I do, I don't release to the public. And it's more because of structure. We really do want you to understand the basics before you start doing something a little bit more advanced, because you can get distracted. You can be trying to solve a problem that's not appropriate for you at that time.

• 2:02:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  So people can go to your website. That's Lawrence Van Lingen dot com.

• 2:02:48Speaker 00

  Dot com, yeah. Also, I go on there. You can ask me questions. So it's a way of people having access to me and my knowledge.

• 2:02:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, okay. So that's one thing people can do.

• 2:02:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:02:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Obviously, follow you on Instagram and social channel. I think Instagram is your main channel, from what I can tell, apart from YouTube, of course. And then, tell me about the Aerie app. This is a new thing you're putting out into the world that's, you know, you're pretty excited about, aren't you?

• 2:03:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I am. I mean, breathing is really, really important. It was born out of frustration that the apps didn't have what I wanted. And so one of my, one of the people in my class said, oh, we can build that app for you. So it's like the app that I wanted you to create. And we've got a signature sort of breathing protocol on there. Like, we call it level up breathing or resilience breathing. So it's free. So it's A E R I, the Aerie app. If you search Aerie app, it should be available on Apple and Android and it's free. There's a couple of different breath practices. So one's calm, one's to help you sleep, your three, four, or five breathing, is it? Your favorite breathing protocols on there? So

• 2:03:54Speaker 00

  thank you. But I'm, yeah, I'm pretty excited about it. But I think what we want to do is, we talked earlier, you and I, we, not on this podcast, we talked about if you get injured in a place of trust, it can be very, very difficult to heal that.

• 2:04:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, hold on. So when people hear that, they might go, yeah, okay, this is obviously pretty harrowing, but. We know, for example, some people trust their parents and then their parents have abused that trust in a variety of different ways, okay, but you don't just mean that, do you?

• 2:04:28Speaker 00

  No, well, I do mean that. So if you try, like, let's say we're training a dog and like you have a rescue dog and it's had a traumatic past and so you want to gain its trust. You betray that trust, it's much harder for a traumatized dog to then regain that trust again. Does that make sense?

• 2:04:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:46Speaker 00

  So, but if you have a puppy that grew up happy, resilient, lots of love, it's just trusting, you know, you can do wrong to that dog and it's far more forgiving. Now, so let's say, I don't know, like, I, you, it's happened before, it was like you're in a safe space and you do assisted stretching and someone stretches you too far and you get injured. Those injuries are often unsizably difficult to help people with because it happened in a place of trust. And so breathing is the same. When you're working on breathing, the more relaxed you are, the easier it is to hold your breath because nervous energy basically burns up calories. And this is one of the reasons, you go back to the autonomic and nervous, it's exhausting being in a sympathetic state.

• 2:05:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:27Speaker 00

  So anyone here who's not curious and playful, start thinking you might be more tired than you think because it's exhausting to run an overdrive all the time. Okay. So anyway, we go back to breathing. So breathing is so powerful and so also breath-holding practice. So one is it takes back your agency and your ability to sort of do hard things or to concentrate. So if you find like your phone's robbed your free will or your ability to concentrate, breathing is a really, really good way to reclaim that. The reward system for it really, really helps with, with sort of scatterbrain, right? And doing hard things. But if it's in a place of trust, you learn to relax and the more you relax, the easier

• 2:06:10Speaker 00

  it is to hold your breath for longer. Whereas the more you force it, the more you try, the harder it is to hold your breath for longer, which I think is a great analogy. We're talking about the marathon, people training too hard, people trying too hard, people forcing it. So breathing in a, in a safe space, in a position of trust is very, very empowering and a good, great life lesson and it's a transferable skill to many parts of your life. What happens is many, many people have done breathing and let's say you go after it or you do hyperventilating breathing or you, you know, you have a pretty aggressive breathing practice. There are lots and lots of people that have got, it creates a sense of anxiety in them. So they're basically upregulated and feeling way more anxious afterwards. Commonly, these people with tinnitus or tinnitus.

• 2:06:54Speaker 00

  So tinnitus is also a sign that you're sympathetically in overdrive. There's a couple of levels that tinnitus works on, but it's, it's basically an upregulating of your nervous system in your ears. And so anyway, breathing for us is in a very, very safe and measured way and we want to increase your breath holding time. And so like the resilience breathing on there is designed for that is to, to teach you how to slow your breathing down, increase your breath hold time, have recovery, add some amount of visceral movement to it, to all the things we've been talking about. In one beautiful practice and we talk about doing it is while you're holding your breath,

• 2:07:34Speaker 00

  not to focus on holding your breath, but to focus on mantras or visualizations and, which is like what I'm going to do on the London Marathon on this weekend. Like the discomfort is inevitable. I wouldn't call it pain, but the suffering is optional. And you shouldn't focus on the uncomfortableness of your sensations. You should be focusing on, are you doing the things right or are you moving well? Or you can do visualizations or mantras because in breathing practice, that's what we do is by focusing on not holding your breath. It's pretty extraordinary. Like people's breath holding times just absolutely opens up. And the other one that ties in, like a lot of the work that you do or the walking backwards, when your, when your tonic and phasic muscle system starts to relax and starts to work

• 2:08:18Speaker 00

  in synergy, we can see really big improvements in your breath holding time. And the opposite, it's bi-directional. So what happens is I had an athlete and of a ridiculously high caliber, right?

• 2:08:32Speaker 00

  But was running on with a mismatch between tourniquet and phasic muscles, sort of very, very hamstring dominant and hip flexor dominant. Couldn't improve her breath holding times. They would not improve for three months. She tried to work on breath holding for 20 to 30 minutes, three times a week. And her ability to hold her breath did not budge. It probably got worse over three months. Her husbands went from a breathe out score of like under 20 seconds to like nearly 90 seconds. And hers stayed at 27, 20 seconds or 17 seconds. So a lot of the time when we start balancing your phasic muscle system, when you start hip extension based and your posture opens up, your ability to hold your breath opens up and it gets easier. So it's quite a nice way to have your finger on the thumb of, am I moving better?

• 2:09:16Speaker 00

  Because generally as you move better, it gets easier to to improve your breath holding.

• 2:09:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:22Speaker 00

  So, so for us, we, the dose for resilience training would be about 15 to 20 minutes. But if you do it once a week, if you're moving well, your ability to hold your breath will increase.

• 2:09:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love it.

• 2:09:32Speaker 00

  And most breath experts will say you've got to do at least 20, 30 minutes, three times a week to do that.

• 2:09:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, that's amazing. So Lawrence van Lingen dot com is where they can find the community, the Aerie app, A E R I. They can look on Android and on Apple and get that. Lawrence, I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversation as always. There's definitely enough to go into a part three, so which I'll be trying to get in the diary with you next time you are in the UK. Of course, good luck for the marathon on Saturday. And just to finish off, Lawrence, for, for someone who's listened to this conversation and is a bit fed up with their body.

• 2:10:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:10:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  They've given up on movement and things like running and walking because it hurts. It doesn't feel good. They don't think that those movements are for them. What would you say to them?

• 2:10:30Speaker 00

  Come on in, the water's great.

• 2:10:34Speaker 00

  Start moving in the right direction, like baby steps and don't be paralyzed by perfection. Just start, it's just learning. It's like when you pick up a guitar, you are not going to play that guitar well. That's just inevitable. There's very few prodigies in the world. So, you know, it'll be a bit difficult in the beginning. It'll be a little bit uncomfortable. It won't be in your comfort zone, but it's just a journey that you should definitely, definitely start. We need to age well. We know we go back to longevity.

• 2:11:05Speaker 00

  You know, I want to have quality of life when I'm old. I don't think I'm obsessed with how long I want to live as in how the quality of life of my later years. And I think, you know, we really do need to start putting money in the bank for our future selves. You're going to look back, if you're moving well at 80, you are going to look back and you're going to thank your current self so much. And it's so empowering and your relationships heal, your way you see the world gets better. You just deepen and enrich and improve every aspect of your life. And so it's absolutely crazy not to. I understand why, because we can be stuck in patterns of self-harm or we can be really, really fearful.

• 2:11:49Speaker 00

  So just start with one small thing and have hope and trust and believe and it'll just, it's just a self-fulfilling prophecy and it's not complicated. I know we talked about all this elegant stuff. It's not difficult. It's all one thing. It's just we're not used to being having it explained this way.

• 2:12:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, and you know, if people don't like all the explanations about tonic muscles and phasing muscle balance.

• 2:12:13Speaker 00

  Doesn't matter.

• 2:12:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Doesn't matter because if you do the backward walking and the flow rope, you're going to naturally start to work on those things straight away. So that's a pretty good place to start. Lawrence, you're an incredible human being. I feel very lucky to call you a friend. I really appreciate you coming on the show again. You are literally doing such wonderful work all over the world. It's a pleasure for me to be able to help you spread your message.

• 2:12:36Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:12:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  With more people. I think many more people need to hear it and thanks so much for coming back on the show.

• 2:12:42Speaker 00

  Well, thank you so much for having me and yeah, you're a blessing and all your good work. It's, you're an inspiration.

• 2:12:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Oh, thanks, man.

• 2:12:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Really hope you enjoyed listening to that conversation. As always, do have a think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And don't forget to check out Lawrence's website, www.lorancevanlingan.com. On it, he has so many helpful resources. And of course, if you want to join his brilliant online community, where he offers four live classes per week, he is giving my audience a fantastic 10% discount. Just go to his website and use the code FBLM10. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you

• 2:13:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every

• 2:14:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Friday, you can sign up for free at drchatge.com/friday5. Now, if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics, happiness, food, stress, sleep, behaviour change, and movement, weight loss, and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out. They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks, and as audiobooks, which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family, or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And please

• 2:14:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it, because when you feel better, you live more.