#664: Dr. Kelly Starrett — The Magic of Movement and Mobility, Training for Range of Motion, Breathing for Back Pain, Improving Your Balance, and More

Brought to you by Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, Athletic Greens's AG1 http://athleticgreens.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement, and Shopify http://shopify.com/tim global commerce platform providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business. Kelly Starrett, DPT (@thereadystate https://twitter.com/thereadystate) is one of my favorite performance coaches. When I have problems other people can’t solve, I call Kelly. He’s also a treasure trove of one-liners. He is, along with his wife Juliet https://www.instagram.com/julietstarrett/?hl=en, co-founder of The Ready State https://thereadystate.com/tim. The Ready State began as MobilityWOD in 2008 and has gone on to transform the field of performance therapy and self-care. Kelly’s clients include professional athletes in the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB. He also works with Olympic gold medalists, Tour de France cyclists, world- and national-record-holding Olympic Lifting and Power athletes, Crossfit Games medalists, professional ballet dancers, elite military personnel, and more. Kelly is the author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers Becoming A Supple Leopard https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Supple-Leopard-2nd-Performance/dp/1628600837/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 and Ready to Run https://www.amazon.com/Ready-Run-Unlocking-Potential-Naturally/dp/1628600098/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. His new book is Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully https://www.amazon.com/Built-Move-Essential-Habits-Freely-ebook/dp/B0B5STDSC8/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, co-written with Juliet Starrett https://www.instagram.com/julietstarrett/?hl=en. Juliet was the U. S. National Champion in extreme whitewater racing from 1997 to 2000 and World Champion from 1997 to 1998. She returned to the sport in 2018 to become World Champion in the Masters Division. Please enjoy! * This episode is brought to you by Shopify http://shopify.com/tim! Shopify http://shopify.com/tim is one of my favorite platforms and one of my favorite companies. Shopify http://shopify.com/tim is designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. In no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day and drive sales. No coding or design experience required. Go to shopify.com/Tim http://shopify.com/tim to sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period. It’s a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today by visiting shopify.com/Tim http://shopify.com/tim. * This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep http://eightsleep.com/Tim! Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. Go to EightSleep.com/Tim http://eightsleep.com/Tim and save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. * This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and 5 free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product. * [08:05] Where in the world are Kelly and Tim? [13:34] A lesson in how our environment shapes us. [19:12] Optimizing vital signs and range of motion as we age. [30:31] Walk and fidget more for better sleep and body maintenance. [40:37] Balance training: not just for "old" people. [50:51] Extending the end range of motion. [54:58] The old man shoe-on game. [59:50] The airport scanner shoulder test. [1:05:55] Simple corrective exercises. [1:09:44] Tower of London. [1:12:41] Breath as a mobilization device. [1:19:13] A reasonable amount of daily protein. [1:23:09] 800 grams of fruits and vegetables. [1:32:27] Never do nothing. But my something doesn't have to be your something. [1:43:23] Cultivating cross-cultural, timeless movement in a busy world. [1:53:43] Who is Built To Move for? [1:58:54] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors http://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, Margaret Atwood https://tim.blog/2022/02/22/margaret-atwood/, Mark Zuckerberg https://tim.blog/2022/03/24/mark-zuckerberg/, Peter Thiel https://tim.blog/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/, Dr. Gabor Maté https://tim.blog/2018/02/20/gabor-mate/, Anne Lamott https://tim.blog/2021/07/09/anne-lamott/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, and many more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is one of my favorite companies out there, one of my favorite platforms ever. And let's get into it. Shopify is a platform, as I mentioned, designed for anyone to sell anything, anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. So what does that mean? That means in no time flat, you can have a great looking online store that brings your ideas, products, and so on to life. And you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day business and drive sales. This is all possible without any coding or design experience whatsoever. Shopify instantly lets you accept all major payment methods. Shopify has thousands of integrations and third-party apps, from on-demand printing to accounting to advanced chatbots, anything you can imagine.

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

  They probably have a way to plug and play and make it happen. Shopify is what I wish I had had when I was venturing into e-commerce way back in the early 2000s. What they've done is pretty remarkable. I first met the founder, Toby, in 2008, when I became an advisor, and it's been spectacular. I've loved watching Shopify go from roughly 10 to 15 employees at the time to 7,000 plus today, serving customers in 175 countries with total sales on the platform exceeding $400 billion. They power millions of entrepreneurs from their first sale all the way to full scale. And you would recognize a lot of large companies that also use them, who started small. So get started by building and customizing your online store, again, with no coding or design experience required.

• 1:29Tim Ferriss?

  Access powerful tools to help you find customers, drive sales, and manage your day-to-day. Gain knowledge and confidence with extensive resources to help you succeed. And I've actually been involved with some of that way back in the day, which was awesome, the Build a Business competition and other things. Plus, with 24/7 support, you're never alone. And let's face it, being an entrepreneur can be lonely, but you have support, you have resources, you don't need to feel alone in this case. More than a store, Shopify grows with you, and they never stop innovating, providing more and more tools to make your business better and your life easier. Go to Shopify.com/Tim to sign up for a $1 per month trial period.

• 2:11Tim Ferriss?

  It is a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today and learn more by visiting Shopify.com/Tim. One more time, Shopify.com/Tim, all lowercase.

• 2:29Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top, and repeating all of that ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in record time. Why? Because I'm using a device that was recommended to me by friends called the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep. The Pod Cover fits on any mattress and allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment, providing the optimal temperature that gets you the best night's sleep. With the Pod Cover's dual-zone temperature control, you and your partner can set your sides of the bed to as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees. I think generally in my experience,

• 3:12Tim Ferriss?

  my partners prefer the high side and I like to sleep very, very cool. So stop fighting, this helps. Based on your biometrics, environment, and sleep stages, the Pod Cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wake-ups and increase your percentage of deep sleep. In addition to its best-in-class temperature regulation, the Pod Cover sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable. So go to eightsleep.com/tim, all spelled out, eightsleep.com/tim, and save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover. That's eightsleep.com/tim. Eight Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, and the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com/tim to save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Optimal minimal.

• 3:58Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start shaking.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Now would be an appropriate time.

• 4:09Speaker 02

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

• 4:21Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. Going to keep this intro short because I am in windy Wellington, New Zealand, and it is howling outside. You might hear that in the background, and this is audio verite for this introduction. Dr. Kelly Starrett, who is he? He's one of my favorite performance coaches. I've spent a lot of time with him. When I have problems other people cannot solve, if I have aches and pains, injuries, performance goals perhaps, that people can't spec out for me, make sense of, I call Kelly. He's also a treasure trove of one-liners and is hilarious. So I think you'll enjoy our conversation. He has been on the podcast before, is very, very

• 5:02Tim Ferriss?

  popular. Kelly Starrett, DPT, you can find him on Twitter and Instagram, @theredystate, is, along with his wife Juliette, co-founder of The Ready State. The Ready State began as Mobility WOD in 2008. Just a side note, Kelly's like 230 pounds of pure muscle with quads bigger than my chest, and he is more mobile and flexible than I am. Full Lotus, no problem. Couch stretch until you think your hips would explode, no problem. So, he really walks the talk and squats the talk, as it were. Alright, so The Ready State began as Mobility WOD in 2008 and has gone on to transform the field of performance therapy and self-care. You know, I'm gonna keep

• 5:44Tim Ferriss?

  adding in little tangents. I think it was for Kelly's 40th birthday, he decided, and he'll have to correct me if I get this wrong, that he wanted to do a few things to celebrate his 40th birthday and mark it as a milestone. And if my memory serves me, it was a standing backflip, remember the dimensions that I mentioned. It was running an ultra marathon, the quad dipsy, so look that up, it is no joke. Again, remember his physical dimensions. And then power cleaning, something like, I have no idea, 300 pounds, 350 pounds, something outrageous. So that is Kelly Starrett. He is the decathlete of power and mobility. So let's get back to the bio. His clients

• 6:26Tim Ferriss?

  include professional athletes in the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB.

• 6:32Tim Ferriss?

  That's Major League Baseball for folks outside of the US. He also works with Olympic gold medalists, Tour de France cyclists, world and national record-holding Olympic lifting and power athletes, CrossFit Games medalists, professional ballet dancers, elite military personnel, and much more. Kelly is the author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers, Becoming a Supple Leopard and Ready to Run. His new book is Built to Move, subtitle, The 10 Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully, co-written with Juliette Starrett. So, her name has come up a few times now, and I've known Juliette for a long time. Who is Juliette? I just have to mention a few things before we move on. So Juliette trained as an attorney. She's done a million different things, badass

• 7:16Tim Ferriss?

  in business, incredible operator, but also, she was the US national champion in extreme whitewater racing from 1997 to 2000, world champion from 97 to 98. She returned to the sport in 2018 to become world champion in the Masters division. So, she is also very smart, very capable, very fit, and both of them as a team have really thought through what it takes to build yourself to move. So, you can find all things related to them at thereadystate.com, all one word. And without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Dr. Kelly Starrett.

• 8:01Tim Ferriss?

  Kelly. It's Bud.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  My friend.

• 8:06Tim Ferriss?

  We are sitting, we're sitting, emphasis on sitting.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:11Tim Ferriss?

  We're very low to the ground. We have a table in front of us that is about, let's call it 12 inches, 14 inches off of the ground, which means we're seated on the floor. And under some very thin mats, we have Tommy mats, and that is because we are in Japan. Not only in Japan, we are in the Northern Island, Hokkaido, of Japan. Looking outside, we have snow-covered mountains, and we are in a Japanese-style room. What else would you like to say about this particular trip to Japan, and experience in Japan?

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Well, I have this friend named Tim who sometimes drags me on wild goose chases. And it's become a feature of my life where I have to ask myself, am I capable enough to go have fun on adventure with Tim? So here we are after a week of, I've done a lot of intense things. This is very intense. We were skiing and it's deep snow. It's backcountry skiing. We were climbing mountains and skiing down. It's very cold and very vigorous.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  And I've also found myself in the first time ever, I'm the oldest person on the trip.

• 9:24Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  And I have all these young friends who are, I cut off your arm and it regrows the next day.

• 9:33Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I should use that as a segue. Yesterday, when we're climbing this mountain, and I guess with wind chills, probably, I want to say probably negative 10 Fahrenheit, something like that easily. It was very, very, very, very

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Maybe the coldest day of skiing I've ever had.

• 9:46Tim Ferriss?

  Extremely cold. And we are skinning up the mountain, which means, for those people who don't know, because I certainly didn't know a few years ago, you have your skis. They're slick on the bottom. That's what helps you go down the mountain. But if you try to put on your skis and go up the mountain, you don't get anywhere because you slide backwards. Well, back in the day, I believe it was seal skin, hence the name skins, were used on the bottom of skis by indigenous populations to go uphill because the hair is matted down in one direction, kind of like blades of grass that have been heavily blown in one direction, which means if they're placed correctly on the bottom of the ski can catch.

• 10:30Tim Ferriss?

  And you wouldn't imagine this would work, that the physics of this would work on snow.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Actually fun.

• 10:36Tim Ferriss?

  Or be fun. But it does. And so you can basically slide one ski next to the other and use special touring boots and bindings that allow your heel to come up so that you can slide your way up the mountain. And the ratio for those wondering is, what would you say, six hours up to every six turns down? I'm exaggerating, but it's, it's a lot of work.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Is the juice worth the squeeze?

• 11:04Tim Ferriss?

  And I would say in this particular case, since we were all completely buried in

• 11:11Tim Ferriss?

  Unearthly light powder. And when I say buried, I mean, friends were over their heads in powder, just plowing through.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Way steep.

• 11:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  When the ski guides say powder of the year.

• 11:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Best run of the year.

• 11:28Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  I've never experienced anything like it.

• 11:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And so if you're, if you're going at reasonably high speed through waist deep powder, it is going to go over your head, in your face. You're going to get face shots, which is good thing in this case. And the reason I bring it up is number one, just to paint a picture for folks with respect of why we're here in northern Japan. Why would you fly all the way across any pond? Because it's an island. So you're going to be flying here over some form of water to ski. And the answer is the powder is unlike anything anyone on this trip has ever seen. It's unbelievable. However, on the way up, you're exerting a lot and you're exposed to the elements. And I was thinking yesterday, like,

• 12:10Tim Ferriss?

  wow, I'm 45. And if I had posed the question to my 20 year old self, do you think at age 45 that you would ever be able to do this? Think the answer would have been no, probably. Think the 20 year old self would have had very, very low confidence. And that made me happy to think about. I was like, yeah, I got some aches and pains. And as you know, I have some pain in the right lower back. And when you're on steep inclines, really working all of that hip musculature and the psoas and everything else. It's like, oh, I'm really feeling it. But nonetheless, was able to do it. And we're having onsen, meaning

• 12:51Tim Ferriss?

  hot springs and cold baths and the contrast of hot, cold, hot, cold.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  And the food is pretty, like, if you're gonna do this thing day after day, like, I'm going to say that getting hot, getting cold, eating like rice and meat.

• 13:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  And then going to bed very early. We're all sleep deprived. It's worked. Every day I think to myself, well, that was it. And the next morning I have, I am resurrected. And I'm like, okay, well, let's go see how we feel. And it's been really just remarkable.

• 13:24Tim Ferriss?

  How much time have you spent in Japan overall? And this is going to tie into the broader conversation we're going to have, folks. Just so I'm laying the table a bit. I want to tell you what I'm doing. But how much time have you spent in Japan?

• 13:35Speaker 01

  That's 100% zero.

• 13:37Tim Ferriss?

  So let's call it roughly a week. What are some of the things you've observed in terms of Japan? In terms of, let's just say this hotel, which is a reasonably, especially with your particular room that we're sitting in, very traditional hotel. What have you noticed in the lounge area? What's different about the lounge area? Keeping in mind also that at least half of the people here, maybe 70, 80% are probably 70 years old or older.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Yes. So imagine a world around you where you come into a really fancy, we'll call it mountain lodge, and it's not fancy. This is like a mountain lodge where people are coming on vacation. And you take your shoes off at the door and you walk around slippery wood floors and socks. And they're everyone, serving staff, waitstaff, front staff, it doesn't matter your age, you're cruising on slippery floors in socks. So already it's remarkable to see sort of the balance required, the, your foot is contact to the ground. People are really uncomfortable barefoot. And the first thing you notice when you come in is everyone is barefoot, serving barefoot, acting barefoot.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  And it changes how you move, how quickly you move. It's very interesting to just perceive that. And that's just at the door. What's interesting is it reminds me how much queuing we take from our environment. And really, honestly, how quickly I've adapted to, I talk about this a lot, but the environment shapes us in subtle and unsubtle ways. And quickly, within a week, I have been shaped again by my environment in a whole 180.

• 15:21Tim Ferriss?

  If you go to the lounge on the second floor, which is the main hang area for the entire building, which at full capacity probably holds at least a few hundred people, I would think, maybe 300 people, and it's an active area. The vast majority of tables are just like this, and if you want to sit down, there is a stack of mats, and you get your mat, which is maybe half inch to an inch thick, and you sit on the floor. And that is just how it works, and nobody complains because they're accustomed to it. And I remember

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Everyone can do it.

• 15:54Tim Ferriss?

  Everyone can do it. And I remember when I was 15, first in Japan as an exchange student, my first trip out of the US really of any type was a year as an exchange student, and I went to a baseball game with a high school friend, and all of the toilets were squat toilets. And so for people who haven't used these, I mean, there's basically a hole in the ground. It's clean. I mean, it's porcelain, but you squat down and your ass is basically on your heels, and that is how you do your business. And I remember asking him, how do old people do this? Don't they fall over? And he laughed and he just said, they're used to it. They've done it their entire lives. So I would imagine

• 16:36Tim Ferriss?

  net-net that there are more people in the US who can clean and jerk and snatch and press heavyweight overhead, but that if a facet of functional fitness is sitting on the ground for a half hour without having to fidget nonstop because there's some issue biomechanically that is making you uncomfortable, that Japan wins hands down over the US.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  It should be noted, just the body is so simple, use it or lose it. And I think imagine all the complexity that we have to program and come to this functional fitness class to solve the issues of you not sitting on the ground and pooping on the ground or sleeping on the ground. We've created a, we have a whole construct to remedy the fact that you're not doing things that people have been doing a long time. And I'm not pining for our paleolithic selves. I don't need to, you know, fermented whale carcass. I don't need that. I'm stoked that we've moved beyond. But it is interesting that built into the environment here are some truths around your body. There's a great writer named Philip Beach, who wrote a book called Muscles

• 17:47Speaker 01

  and Meridians, really wonderful book. But he thinks that one of the ways the body tunes itself is actually sitting on the ground. Hips get reset because you're kneeling, you're putting fashion to certain positions, you're maintaining key ranges of motion. And all you have to do is sit on the ground. And we used to sit, toilet, eat, hang out, celebrate, sleep. Just we were just interacting on the ground. And all of a sudden that's gone. And so it really begets this interesting question of how much more complexity are we having to always add in when there's a mismatch, or not even mismatch, but we've made certain choices about the way our environment shapes us.

• 18:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And we were chatting earlier today, and I just said, I've been to Japan as an adult, not that many times with groups of non-Japanese, but maybe two, three times I've been. Yeah, let's call it three times, maybe four. In any case, the number doesn't really matter. What matters is in every single trip, if we walked into a Japanese restaurant, the chorus of the group would say, oh, God, I hope there are chairs. Because in each group, even if these people are overall very, very athletic, I would say 70 to 80% would

• 19:03Tim Ferriss?

  not be able to sit on the ground for more than five minutes without getting very uncomfortable.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Fidgety.

• 19:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Or finding something to lean back against. As we talk about this, and this is where I thought we would be led in the conversation, is singing about environmental modification, or what your shape diet might be.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Hmm. That's really good.

• 19:28Tim Ferriss?

  Right? Yeah. It's like, okay, you do intermittent fasting X number of times per week. Like maybe you spend. One day per week, sitting on the ground, you somehow modify your environment or your behavior just to incorporate some of these older, more common shapes. The broader question, I suppose, could be, and I know this is something you've thought a lot about, are how we might think of vital signs, right? So if anybody goes into see their general practitioner for an annual checkup, or they go into the ER, first thing they're gonna do is take a couple of measurements, and it's standardized for a lot of good reasons. So they're gonna check your blood pressure, they're gonna check your heart rate, maybe they'll check your blood oxygen saturation with pulse ox, there are a handful of things

• 20:13Tim Ferriss?

  that they will check. How do you think about vital signs as it pertains to your areas of expertise now? And part of the reason I enjoy hanging out with you and chatting is that you do not have a static repertoire or model for thinking about these things. As we've talked over the years, I've seen it evolve and change and be informed by new experiences and new observations. So how do you think about vital signs? I'll keep it broad.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  If we take the allegory for where we are right now, we're sitting, getting up and down off the ground without using your hand, just being able to sit crisscross applesauce and lower yourself and stand up without having to put your hands down or knee down, turns out is a really excellent predictor of morbidity and mortality. So you can do this wherever you are.

• 21:08Tim Ferriss?

  So no knees, no hands means getting into a squatting position?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  No, cross-legged.

• 21:12Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  So you don't even have to have full hip flexion. You don't have to squat. You can be on the outside of your feet. How strong you need to be able to do this? I don't know, children can do it. I've seen some elderly Japanese people do this pretty effortlessly. They're not that jacked. You know, they're not on the gale hack squat program. So there's something that this with your knee out to the side and crisscross, it's a real mid-range position, but if you can't flex forward in this position to shift your weight and push up on that, you'll discover really quickly, you're like, wow, having a hard time getting off the ground. Does that mean that you're not an elite athlete? No. Does that mean you're... You know, you can't live in your society. No, but it means that, hey, there's something going on with your ability to move freely

• 21:56Speaker 01

  that may be reducing your likelihood of having movement choice or feeling better. And now what we've done is begin to have a greater conversation about if we can help you restore, or you can restore in your own home, how your hips move and how easily you can move, you might feel better and be less likely to fall and be more independent. The number one reason people end up in nursing homes, can't get up off the ground by themselves.

• 22:22Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm. I've fallen and I can't get up.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 22:26Tim Ferriss?

  You know, this, I'm just thinking, so folks can envision this, right? You're sitting cross-legged on the ground. Can you get up without using a hand on the ground, not posting? And it gave me a flashback because Coach Christopher Summer, who used to be the US National Gymnastics Team Coach, had me at one point training quite intensely. This is probably five years ago. And one of the key exercises that he used for his athletes to not just work on broader mobility, let's just say, but specifically on lateral knee strength, and I suppose lateral leg strength to be more accurate.

• 23:09Tim Ferriss?

  He would have people do basically this exactly. So they would be in a cross-legged position, they'd come down, then they would lift themselves back up, rotate 180 degrees so the legs are in the opposite position, let's just say, in terms of stacking, lower down, get up, and then rinse and repeat, just as repetitions in a controlled fashion. So you're not just dropping your ass to the ground.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  It's not for time, movement for time.

• 23:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I hadn't connected these two, even at home in Austin. It's not like I sit on the ground cross-legged that often. I mean, I do, but not as much as I have on the strip in Japan, certainly. And how much that helped, not just durability, but also performance. I suppose what comes to mind, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts, is that if you aim for a certain degree of durability and you're getting your ABCs in terms of shape, vitamins, and you're ensuring that you can do things like you just described, getting off the ground with your legs crossed, like that leads into performance. Those things will almost certainly all aid.

• 24:16Tim Ferriss?

  Performance in some capacity or make it more sustainable, but not necessarily the other way around, right? Like you can be a one-trick pony from a performance standpoint, but it will not necessarily contribute. Let's just say in one movement pattern, you're spectacularly good. I'm interested in archery right now. It's like, okay, you're really good at archery asymmetrically on one side, but that does not mean when you are 70 that you are going to have full health span and be able to do the things you want to do. But if you focus on the durability, those should, I would imagine, contribute to a lot of different performance goals.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Bringing up a really good point is that we have come to appreciate, because again, we have really smart friends, we're in really interesting communities, trying to solve some of these problems of the human condition. If you look at our first book, Becoming a Self-Lepard, there's really two key objective, measurable, repeatable, explainable ideas there. One is range of motion, native range of motion. This is what every physician, every surgeon, every physical therapist all agrees your shoulders should be able to do. It's not, you don't have to be a gymnast, but there's some basic ranges that's endemic to every human. So let's just get back to that. Second is biomotor output, which is a fancy way of

• 25:33Speaker 01

  saying wattage, poundage. Like what we saw was that if we could restore your range of motion and teach towards the highest expression of our formal movements, we saw that you could go faster and win world championships. Now, all of the behaviors that we got interested in around supporting those two things meant we had to sort of start to care about sleep. We had to start to care about micronutrients and are you getting enough protein? Are you decongesting your body through walking? So in service of high performance, we have what we've come to call base camp behaviors. And it's shocking how many world-class athletes We come in contact with who are really good. Let's say the best in the world, and this is not

• 26:15Speaker 01

  hyperbole, really extraordinary mutants who are very thoughtful, but have big holes in their understanding of their process. They can go do that thing, but their sleep isn't great, or they don't eat enough carbohydrate, or like you can just, whatever, just for the individual person. But it turns out, I like this analogy of the spinning coin, I think it's an Edo Portal, he, last time I heard him talk about it, is that the other side of that coin is, these are the behaviors that make a durable person independent of performance. And so you get to care about being a hundred years old and moving the way you want to be. Juliet has this great idea, she's like, look, you probably do some goal setting as a human, if you're a business, like, you're like, we're gonna, there's our first quarter goal, here's what we're doing. When have

• 27:00Speaker 01

  you done that for your life? What does it look like? What do you imagine your life looked like to be seventy? People are like, financial security. I'm like, okay, but what does it look like in your environment? Peter Thiel had this centenarian games concept, which I think is really elegant. But let me go a step further, because a lot of those things were metrics around, like, I want to be able to put a kettlebell out in front of me and squat. That was like one of

• 27:23Tim Ferriss?

  them. Or like, lift a grandchild.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:25Tim Ferriss?

  At, at a hundred, therefore I need to work backwards, what should my...

• 27:30Speaker 01

  So let's just take that, and then let's go ahead and expand on that idea and start to say, well, what are the key vital signs that illuminate what behaviors create that reality? So instead of just saying, well, I'm just gonna go around and lift children, excuse me ma'am, can I pick up your child, which can get you there, we can start to say, do you have the components, and what are those components? And more importantly, how do I fit them into my crazy schedule? Because that is the thing.

• 28:02Tim Ferriss?

  So what are some base camp behaviors? What are some important base camp behaviors?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  You know, none of them end up being very sexy. Here's the caveat. So it's hard to commoditize these things, hard to charge for these things. And more importantly, and I'm being facetious, but these are things that are easily done in your home by you. Totally controlled. You don't need a physical therapist or a physician or anyone else to come in and give you these things. That's, I think, really important. We see that the functional unit of getting anything done in your family, in your life, in your health, is in your house, you. So we could start by, took some behavioral ones. We might say, like, sleep is a good one. I think this is good because one of the things that I think is hidden from a lot of people is how tightly coupled or connected our behaviors are.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  So let's take sleeping and walking, for example. Does everyone agree you should sleep more? Sure. Okay, sounds good. Good. Carry on. What's going on? We see that the sleep data is that people don't sleep and that they need a lot of help. And it's a big business to help people to sleep more. So what we've tried to do is say things like, hey, look, seven hours of sleep is very reasonable for survival. And if you're trying to change your body composition, I want to get skinnier, leaner, I'm trying to grow muscles, I'm trying to learn a skill of a growing body, or I'm trying to heal, I need to get eight-plus hours of sleep in order to facilitate the maximum adaptation and to really make it easy for my body to do that. And I started really becoming obsessed about this. One is that we started to learn in high performance

• 29:35Speaker 01

  that if you can't sleep, you can't perform. And I'm not talking about one bad night of sleep before the big game. That's not what I'm talking about. But we started to see that when we improved sleep, and more importantly, started tracking sleep and really putting that as something we cared about, we started seeing improvement in performance. And then swung around to my work in persistent pain and chronic pain. That one of the big holes when people had persistent pain and chronic pain was their sleep. And you might not be able to sleep for a whole host of reasons relative to your persistent pain and chronic pain. But when we were able to improve your sleep density, your brain stopped to be less sensitive about, and you had more desire to move and maybe had less pain sensitivity. So everyone's like, growing kids need sleep, but adults, we don't. So... If we take that sleep idea now, we have a benchmark.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Seven hours for survival, eight hours for doing something that is important to me. That means that I need to start thinking about some of the behaviors in the day to make that happen. So we come back into walking. I think it was debunked that 10,000 steps is the magic number. Well, the research now, the people who study these things are saying somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 steps is like really good for your health. But one of the things we learned from some of our friends in these tier one military groups who have really struggled with sleep, think of the ninjas in the army, for example. The one of the first things that was being prescribed when trying to untangle this Gordian knot was they would increase the step count of the people walking or people that they're working with. So pushing to 10,000, pushing to 12,000, pushing to 15,000 steps.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  And those people were exercising, but they weren't getting enough non-exercise activity. So suddenly, here we have this society who's cued not to walk, where my shape, my work, where I park, the whole thing is that I just maybe get 2,000 or 3,000 steps a day. Your iPhone actually has a step counter and you probably have your phone with you. Open up your health and it'll tell you what your trend is. This is in the background, watching how much you're walking. You're welcome. You have a step counter, probably you're carrying with you, you didn't know you had. But one of the things we know is that if we can get people to improve their step count, we also start to see that they accumulate enough sleep stress, sleep pressure is the technical term, where then they want to fall asleep. And again, there are experts here on sleep.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  I'm not trying to be, I'm just saying, we need to change how you're thinking about your movement in the day so that you can actually fall asleep. And it turns out, when you get a good night's sleep, you wake up and what happens? You feel a little more like moving and those behaviors suddenly become tightly coupled or tightly linked. And I don't think sometimes we can appreciate how these seemingly pinchy, silly, non-technical things can really make a big change. And if we start to put those in play, if you just committed to walking more every day, say, just say, minimum threshold, let's say 8,000 steps, right? I just want you to get 8,000, whatever that means. That means you need to get 10-minute walks after every meal. However you're gonna do it, just get more steps than you're doing.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  And you start doing that, run that for a week and let me know what happens with your skin and how do your consciousness and do you need that four o'clock coffee bump? And it's shocking when we start to help people do these base camp behaviors. Again, why do I care about this? Cause I want you to win a world championship. Also, I want you to be a hundred years old and enjoy it.

• 32:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. The sleep conundrum, right? For me, which has also been a Gordian knot, but it turns out that a lot of the, for me, biggest levers are so fucking simple. I love to solve complex problems because I think I have some predisposition to being good at it. So I tend to insert complexity sometimes where it's not needed and right?

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Like people- I'm raising my hand. I totally agree. It's much cooler to be on the secret squirrel sleep program.

• 33:22Tim Ferriss?

  If you can problem solve, you get rewarded and you get positive reinforcement. So you look for problems to solve, but sometimes the, the problem is actually just tic tac toe. It's not three dimensional chess and with, it's like on this trip, has anyone on this trip had trouble falling asleep doing?

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Has anyone stayed up past nine thirty?

• 33:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. No, no. It's like, yeah, just go climb a mountain for five hours a day and you will fall asleep. And now it doesn't need to be that extreme though. At home, I noticed, for instance, in Austin, I was having trouble sleeping for a week or so. And I was like, you know what? Trying all the supplements, I'm trying all the cues, I'm doing all the things and seems like 17 disparate elements. Why don't I just disallow myself from sitting down and working at a computer? I will only use my laptop if I'm on a treadmill desk and got a relatively cheap treadmill desk, nothing fancy, pretty easy to stow away. And lo and behold, it's like if you're standing and walking for almost every minute that you're on your laptop, you fall asleep really easily.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  I became hyper obsessive walking because it's elite. No, because one of the things we found, it's not only did it improve the sleep of the people we were working with, but we also found that we had healthier tissue quality. So everyone, we're going back to anatomy. You're going back to your early physiology in high school. You have a circulatory system and you have this lymphatic system. So if you ever had a blister, that's lymph. Your lymphatic system is the sewage system of your body. And it's doesn't just there when you have injuries and you something swells. And by the way, your joints are drained by the deep lymphatic system. But you can think of them as highways that carry the normal sewage and waste products of your body. The cells turning over, proteins breaking down, things that are too big to go through your bloodstream,

• 35:11Speaker 01

  go through your lymphatic system. Those lymphatic vessels are buried into your musculature and they're one-way valves and it's a passive system. So how do you move your sewage through your body? It turns out it's muscle contraction. Like, that's a really clever system. It's almost like when we came to be, someone's like, you know, these people move a lot. Let's just put the sewage system in the movement system. And so suddenly, if you're doing the walking, you're decongesting and you're bringing the garbage out and bringing the groceries in. And if you've seen a drain, this is from one of our friends Perry Nicholson. If you've seen a drain in a bathtub, it doesn't drain, it gets backed up and it's kind of gross. That's your body if you don't move.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  You can elevate, sure, that feels good. You can compress, you can get into the compression boots. You can do all the lymphatic massage you can, or, wait for it, you can walk around a little bit more. So one of the things we found was that our athletes were having better recovery scores because they were able to move the serious waste products of exercise. We're doing a lot of adaptational stress when we train. And we found they had healthier tissues. And more importantly, when tissues were injured, because remember, sometimes I get that lens, right? I see everyone's broken parts and bits through sport. How do we manage a swollen ankle? Well, we can compress it, we can elevate it, and we can move it.

• 36:36Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry, I'm just smirking because the number of times people have been like, Kelly, Dr. Kelly, fix me on this trip. I'm like, ah, man, didn't know Kelly was coming on a work trip. Anyway.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  It's all I think about, and I'm gonna need you to dig me out of that snow pit. So suddenly, all of, if we wanna say, hey, I wanna have joints that are normal, and again, not normal isn't good or bad, but just typical, trying not to get that language, then decongestion is a way that you can actually adapt to exercise more effectively. So if you are smashing yourself on the Peloton, because that's what your life demands, you are such a crazy working parent, busy business owner, you're getting it in, high five yourself, then you figure it out, well, wait a minute, maybe I can actually adapt to the stress a little bit more by walking, perching,

• 37:31Speaker 01

  which is leaning up against a stool, valid, working, fidget, move, stand. You don't have to stand like a robot, sit a little bit, stand a little bit, fidget. But one of the things we know is that if you're smashing yourself and then not continuing to move, you're gonna see congestion. If you've ever flown on an airplane, which I did, and I got off the airplane in Japan, and I was like, look, I have cankles. This is not a good look. I, I have gigantic cankles. And that cankillage is you not contracting your calf to move the congestion. So your tissues are being congested because you're, you've been inactive so long. And then you're like, oh, is that the source of DVTs? Yes, it is, right?

• 38:09Tim Ferriss?

  Deep vein thrombosis.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Yes, where so suddenly you're like, oh, for some population, we can see that this could be really dangerous.

• 38:16Tim Ferriss?

  Dangerous.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  If you've ever been in the hospital, they're like, put on these boots, they're squeeze your calves. And then, oh, yeah, ankle pumps, you gotta do all the ankle pumps. Everyone who has ever had a, any surgery injuries, like ankle pumps, ankle pumps, ankle pumps. Well, what is that about? It's about pumping out the garbage. So now we have another reason to move around a little bit more. And more importantly, if you're a busy person, I can tell you, hey, you can work this intense training because we're training like maniacs. I think the training that people are doing today is gnarlier. More people are doing harder training than they were 10 years ago, more than they were 20 years ago. And we may not have set up our lives or have the capacity in our lives to manage those training stressors as effective as we could. If you can just kind of keep the engine idling a little bit, standing desk, fidgeting, perching,

• 39:01Speaker 01

  moving around a little more, movement choice, you will adapt and have healthier tissues that can take more load more often.

• 39:11Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1 by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably AG1. I view it as my all in one nutritional insurance. I recommended it long ago in my 2010 number one New York Times bestseller, The Four Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, you'd be very hard pressed to find a more nutrient dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, a multi mineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens.

• 39:55Tim Ferriss?

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• 40:37Tim Ferriss?

  What are some more, I don't want to say pass fail tests, but experiments that people can do with vital signs. So we talked about one, which is the cross legged on the floor. Can you get up? And can you get down for that matter, right? Into that position?

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Everyone can get down usually to the ground.

• 40:56Tim Ferriss?

  You know?

• 40:57Speaker 01

  One time.

• 40:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So that's one. What are some others?

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Here's one that I think we're really interested in, and it's balance. We like to talk about balance because any young person, I'm like, here's what you're going to do on Tuesday. You're going to go to a balance class. You're not going to lift weights. You're not going to do a sport. You're going to go to a balance class. You're like, for the hell I'm going to a balance class. That's for old people. So one of the things that we have come to appreciate even more is that this balance system, it's crucial to humans moving.

• 41:30Tim Ferriss?

  Can I pause for a second? We learned this yesterday. The scariest part for me of the entire program, which was pretty fucking gnarly. I mean, when we got up there.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Hey, your words, not mine.

• 41:44Tim Ferriss?

  But yeah, but the scariest part for me was there were multiple stream slash river crossings where there was like a pirate plank. That's about.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  That's generous.

• 41:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, generous, like 12 inches across, maybe 10 inches, covered in snow and ice.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  And. Into a snowbank that you get to climb up.

• 42:03Tim Ferriss?

  And you have to, right, exactly. And you have to get across that in your ski boots without falling several feet into the freezing cold water.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Put on these sensory deprivation coffins.

• 42:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Kumite.

• 42:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Kumite. And I realized, wow, I really have fear around my lateral balance. Even though oddly enough, maybe you can tell me why this is the case. I'm much more comfortable on a slack line than I am on, say, a balance beam. I have a lot of trouble with balance beam. And I've torn a lot of stuff in my lower legs and ankles, but I have thought quite a bit around where this telescopes to longitudinally if I don't deal with it.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:45Tim Ferriss?

  I'm like, okay, this is already. Fear inducing.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Juliet's mother is a good example, who is so active. And you've been on the Grand Canyon with Juliet's father. He's very active. But about 10 or 15 years ago, Juliet's mom just said, I'm not riding a bike anymore. I don't feel safe. And guess what? I trust her. That she suddenly has said, this is outside my scope of experience where I feel like I can recover. That's a balance task. So we can either do what we've always done is wait until someone falls and then be like, oh, we should work on your balance. Which works. We're going to now go to physical therapy and do balance training. We started to really focus on and performance side, bear with me everyone. This intrinsic feeling of your foot pressure during these complex movements.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Catabell swings, air squats, back squat, power squat, whatever. We really realized that if we could get people feeling what was going on their feet. We corrected a whole bunch of downstream movement perturbation things that we would used to have a whole bunch of corrections for. Right, oh, the bar path is going here, or this is happening, or now you need to shove your knee out. But if I just said, hey, here's where your ball of your foot is, and here's your heel. And keep your ankle in the middle, best you can, just in a organized foot. Let's see if we can challenge that with all the things we're already doing, exercise. And it means that it translates to like real world balance. I'm gonna stand on this beam. I'm gonna wanna pick up, stand up paddling. I, I need to be better on my feet.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  And really, the interesting question then comes to, when and where do you do this? It turns out that we saw that balance was a performance hack. And in fact, my favorite thing in balance training, I discovered in your garage. And one of the things I discovered there was this really cool thing called a slack block. And it was like a portable slack line. And immediately, I was like, Tim is a genius. He's figured this thing out. Where I don't have to have a slack line, but I can play with my balance. I can challenge my balance in my kitchen.

• 44:47Tim Ferriss?

  It's the size of like a large brick.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, but it's squishy.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  And I was just like, oh, Tim Ferriss, you, I'm like bummed out that I didn't know about this and you've like brought this thing into my life. Because what I found out was I could stack, give those to my athletes like candy and be like, when you're making coffee, stand on this.

• 45:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  When I'm on Zoom calls, I am working my foot strength and balance. So here's another vital sign, please, where you can say, hey, maybe I need to work on this. Maybe I need to brush my teeth and my eyes closed or stand on one leg. You should be able to stand on one foot easily for 20 seconds without putting your foot down. And if there's a difference left to right, maybe because you got injured on that side, or you do a certain thing on that side. That's okay.

• 45:33Tim Ferriss?

  You know where you can figure this out very quickly. So this year.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Ski boot slack line.

• 45:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yes. Ski boot slack line. Franken slack. Skiing. So this year I have skied, and this is, I mean, it's taken some planning and a lot of commitment and moving things around, but to really say, okay, I want to do a really proper ski season for the first time in my life. And that was this year, has been, and it's still going. And when you start trying to move around on skis, not just going downhill, but skating, say on flat ground or even uphill,

• 46:13Tim Ferriss?

  holy cow, do you realize what asymmetries you may have, or turning one direction versus the other and what you end up doing with your upper body? It's been an incredible diagnostic tool for me. And I'm not saying, I'm not saying everyone should use skiing this way because I realize skiing is not the cheapest sport to deal with, but becoming more familiar with like foot pressure has real ramifications in skiing.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Ruler of the case is for not falling down.

• 46:38Tim Ferriss?

  And boot pressure, right? It's like if you're leaning back, if you're weighing your heels versus weight on the toes versus weight on the midfoot versus weight on the inside of the midfoot, say for edging, it's been really, really eye opening for me. And while trying to skate, which for people who are trying to envision this, I mean, just imagine that you're ice skating, but you have skis on, which means it's a lot easier to trip over yourself and it's a lot easier to fall over an outside edge. You just have kind of different lever arms and so on.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  And no ankle range of motion.

• 47:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and no ankle range of motion. I was like, wow, I'm really, really asymmetrically compromised.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  And that's okay.

• 47:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  That we have one side that's more dominant. You professional skateboarder, you drive a car with your right foot. It doesn't matter what the mechanism is. You tore your ACL in high school. It doesn't matter. What matters is that you can become conscious of it and then think, well, what are the things that are in my control? And so you turn skating into a diagnostic tool, into a vital sign. As soon as you're aware, then you can start to connect the dots all these other places.

• 47:40Tim Ferriss?

  Can I tell you?

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:42Tim Ferriss?

  What ended up happening? So what ended up happening, which I was only able to spot with video review, which is not that hard, folks. It's like everybody has a video recorder called a phone now. So I had someone record me from downhill. We looked at it together and what came of it was very simple. It was like, oh, you're really kind of winging one of your poles up when you take this weaker turn. It's like try to keep the pole down, meaning keep the basket, the bottom of the pole dragging on the ground. And as soon as I did that, I was like, oh, that's a lot easier. And now I can actually work on that weak side without as much fear involved. So for this type of vital sign, 20 seconds.

• 48:27Tim Ferriss?

  On each foot, is that the?

• 48:29Speaker 01

  It's called the soleck.

• 48:30Tim Ferriss?

  That's the 120 or 80?

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Yep, the soleck, it's standing, one leg, eyes closed. Soleck.

• 48:39Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, the eyes closed, that adds something.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  That adds something. And what we find is that when people are over reliant on their vision and not their sort of intrinsic other vestibular systems, other sort of

• 48:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Input systems, then when you start to lose that, this is why falling in the evening is a big problem for people in the night.

• 49:02Tim Ferriss?

  They're over dependent on their, like a fixation point with vision.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  So it turns out, wait for it, improving your ankle range of motion means you have better reaction when you get outside of your base of support.

• 49:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  And suddenly you're, you're like, oh, that foot strength and ankle range of motion means that I can right myself more quickly. The brain is very clear about you can do this, you can't do this, you have access to this position, I can open up and unlock the next level for you. If you don't, your movement solutions start to be diminished and pruned in your brain. So when we start to give people inputs and improve their inputs, the brain starts to say, oh, when you're falling or you're outside of this base of support, we can start to give you movement solutions and movement options to this perturbation in the system.

• 49:52Tim Ferriss?

  I want you to correct me if I'm wrong, and also, I'll also name the auditory pink elephant in the room. So we've, we've decided to take today as a rest day prior to extremely long international travel. What that means is we are one of the few people in our rooms while the wonderful house cleaning crew is going to town. So if you hear anything, it's not ghosts, no poltergeists, it's just cleaning going on. There's a lot of cleaning that happens in Japan. It is immaculate.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  It is immaculate.

• 50:23Tim Ferriss?

  Chances are, the public bathroom at the bus stop, not kidding, is cleaner than your bathroom at home. Very, very high probability.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. In fact, there's been several times where you're like, Kelly, you need to come check out this bathroom.

• 50:36Tim Ferriss?

  Oh yeah, I've said it multiple times, like Kelly, it's your first time here, go to this public bathroom, tell me that-

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Look, I trust you on so many levels, you haven't been wrong.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  This bathroom is amazing.

• 50:50Tim Ferriss?

  So just mentioning that, but what I was gonna say is, and I haven't looked at the literature for this, but just from observation, I would say it, your body will not allow you to operate right up to the edge of your established comfort zone, whether that's vestibular, on the balance side, or on say, the flexibility slash strength side. And we have a friend on this trip, not gonna mention him by name, so I don't wanna incriminate him, but he is extremely athletic, taller and lankier, I'll just say that, and very successful former competitive athlete, and incredibly inflexible.

• 51:33Tim Ferriss?

  And it's become more and more of a problem as he's gotten older. And the recommendation that he typically gets, and this is not to paint with too broad a brush, because I know there are many different types of yoga, but the recommendation that he gets most is you need to stretch more. And I did one, and I'm gonna get ridiculed by some people for this, but I'll tell you, before you ridicule it, try it, which is going to a very, very, very technical, hard-ass Pilates instructor for

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Love, great advice.

• 52:05Tim Ferriss?

  Personal instruction is, uh, it's, I find it just incredibly impactful.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Just Pilates was not messing about.

• 52:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, he was not messing around. And so I took this friend to that class, and what we both noticed, and this is not a miracle, I think it's just the way that things work, is as he became more comfortable at his end range of motion, and as he started to gain strength in that end range of motion, voila, suddenly the body's like, okay, now I'm not afraid of you breaking us, therefore I will allow you an additional, say, two inches of hang in the yoga class. But it came from strengthening at the end ranges of movement, not just stretching more passively, right? And so I have to imagine balance works that way, too.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Very much, the brain is looking for inputs to perceive the world is safe or unsafe. That's a really simple way of looking at it. The first thing we can think about as where we want is we talked about sleep. We want to add in these complex solutions. The first order of business is to spend time in the positions you're trying to improve and not do a end range like thing, spend time in the end range. So if you're sitting on the ground and it's uncomfortable, the first thing we should do is start to get you to start sitting on the ground more. It's that simple. So tonight, just get off the couch. We love TB in our house. We love it. We love his thing is so clever. It's a way that we'd like chill in the evening. We sit on the floor in front of the couch.

• 53:37Tim Ferriss?

  The English. As many times as I've recommended you go check out a Japanese bathroom, you've recommended that I watch The English. I've not seen it, folks. However, Emily Blunt in it, so automatic.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  It's excellent.

• 53:48Tim Ferriss?

  Recommend.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  I'm not being paid by Emily Blunt to say this. She should. Everyone is excellent. So if you just sit on the floor, you're going to take some of your tissues to end range. And your long sitting is just sitting out with your legs in front of you. Do you remember the sit and reach test in middle school?

• 54:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's long sitting. So we're actually going to train for the test. We're going to train by the test just by making sure that you're exposed there. Monomai, I think you've maybe even you know who he is, Gray Cook, FMS, has this old saying, I'm sure he cribbed from my Angar. If you can't breathe in a position, you don't own that position. So the first order of business is getting you to the end range shape where you best of your ability today. Cause remember your range of motion and capacity move is a moving target. Just run a marathon, jump on an airplane, have a newborn and let's just test hamstring range of motion. It's going to be awful. And so what we want to do is we want to more tightly conjoin our day to day processes with understanding who we are. You don't have to go skate on your skis every day, but sitting on the ground every day

• 54:51Speaker 01

  can be like, whoa, this side sitting is tough today. I'll just do here and I'll spend enough time here that I'll take some breaths here. So when we come back to balance, one of the easiest things to do is figure out ways where we can begin to expose it in a native way that you don't have to do another thing. Everyone who's listening to this, you have some go getters. My friends listen, they are killing their lives. But I'm like, here's a list of 10 more things to add on. They're like, thank you, no, thank you. So for example, we have this friend named Chris Henshaw, who's a great coach, and he discovered this thing called putting your shoes on.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  And he wanted to create a test that he could beat his kids at. So he called it the old man test. And all you have to do is stand on one leg, use your hands, bend over, pick up your sock without putting other foot down. Put on your sock on one leg and then put on your shoe, all standing on one leg. That's all you have to do.

• 55:46Tim Ferriss?

  So it's like a, it's like a single like deadlift, old man shoe on game.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  If you want to solve it that way, you can. I don't really care how you want to solve it. You want to come into a pistol, you want to hinge, you want to do some kind of weird side. Cossack squat, like it doesn't matter. But stand on one leg, put your sock on and then reach down with your hand, pick up your shoe, put your shoe on. And you can cross your legs to do it. You can pull your knee to your chest, but you'll be shocked. And really what's amazing there is instead of just static balance. You're being moving and having to control it and you're going to make mistakes. And some days, guess what? You're going to be terrible at it because you're burnt. You're overtrained, you're frag, you're stressed.

• 56:27Tim Ferriss?

  So with balance specifically, I've always wondered this, like, what is the minimum effective dose for improving balance? Because testing balance is one thing, improving it may be another. I don't know enough about it. There's a neural component, there is a vestibular component. So if the hardware in your inner ear and so on is damaged, then you're probably going to be compromised.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Or just age.

• 56:51Tim Ferriss?

  Or just age. Then there are the sort of musculo coordination pieces.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Lot of components to this.

• 56:58Tim Ferriss?

  There are lots, there's a lot. So if I just want to go in and like, I want bigger lats, I want, then I know how to do it. I know how to do that, right? Like go in and there are a million and one ways to do it. But if you have a, let's just take a very, very simple example. If you wanted to do one set to failure, it's like, okay, let me try to get, I'm not saying this is perfect, but like 100 seconds under tension to failure. Okay, great. And you do that, you wait a week, chances are your lats are going to get bigger, especially if you're sedentary. And you just don't have a lot of lifting experience. What does that look like for improving?

• 57:33Tim Ferriss?

  Balance. And I guess it depends on your weaknesses, like which link in that chain is weakest, but I wouldn't even know how to dissect that necessarily.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  And maybe we don't. Maybe we could start by saying, is there any time in your day to day life regularly where you're challenging your balance? So you're like, I live, work in a slackline factory. You're probably set. Do you have a, come back to the mini trampoline. Oh, wow, that maybe has some real validity to it, like just bouncing. And suddenly you can start to understand.

• 58:03Tim Ferriss?

  Mini trampoline, you mean like the one person?

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. All of a sudden, you're like, okay, how do I begin to challenge this vestibular system, where I am in space? How do I begin to challenge, what does that look like? Well, for the most of us, for a middle aged dad, I can stand on one leg and put on my socks and work that. What we found is that if we got put in some of this more balanced play, that slack device, the balanced play was enough. If we like worked it into their, the kitchen. And what we saw was that we had athletes who had stronger feet and better reaction times. Hard to quantify it. So how much is the right amount of dose? Is the second question. The first question is, how do we get you started on the dose?

• 58:47Speaker 01

  And I think if you're out on one ski, you're mountain biking, you're walking on unstable surfaces, you're probably getting a lot of it. But I think what ends up happening for a lot of us is that we don't get a lot of it. And we think we're experts at it until we see the internet and we watch ourselves slip on icy surfaces.

• 59:05Tim Ferriss?

  Till we try to do parkour. And then you're like, oh, actually.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Wait a minute.

• 59:10Tim Ferriss?

  Wait a minute here.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Or you go to a yoga class, like go to a yoga class and look at how much programming is done on a single leg. And I'll tell you how effective your programming is. If you think you've got the best secret squirrel program on the planet, great, let's go apply that. We're going to jump into Pilates class, we're going to jump into yoga class.

• 59:29Tim Ferriss?

  You say secret squirrel?

• 59:30Speaker 01

  Secret squirrel.

• 59:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, squirrel. I wanted to bring up some notes.

• 59:37Tim Ferriss?

  Of other vital signs because we've, I think we've, we've covered getting up off the floor.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  We've covered some, we're starting to get in some physical vital signs.

• 59:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, physical vital signs. So I'm going to give you a cue and you can tell me where we go with this. Shoulder airport scanner.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 59:56Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm. That's right.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  So the first time I became.

• 1:00:00Tim Ferriss?

  The sass. Shoulder airport scanner.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  The first time I became aware of this, a very clever coach named Mike Boyle was talking to me. He's like.

• 1:00:10Tim Ferriss?

  I know that.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a G. He's been holding the door open for a lot of us for a long time. And he said, oh, do I think the average working adult should Olympic lift? Just watch them put their arms up over their head in the airport scanner and you can answer that question. Thank you, Coach Mike Boyle. And I suddenly was like, oh my God. You know, when there you are in the airport scanner and you have to put your arms up over your head. It's shocking to see how people solve that little thing. So we see crazy banana backs and feet are turned out and bellies out and elbows flared and it looks kinda ugly. And that's a pretty mid-range position. So with the airport scanner test is really how well can you put your arms over your head?

• 1:00:52Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have to tuck your chin like you're in the.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  You don't have to do anything to solve.

• 1:00:55Tim Ferriss?

  Torture tower? That's getting put in a, in a vice to get your hands behind your.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Well, one of the things that I'll have you know is that if you go to yoga class, what is the bane of every yoga class? Downward dog, rest and downward dog. We were talking about with our mutual friend.

• 1:01:13Tim Ferriss?

  Who's downward dog looks more like a plank.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  Let me.

• 1:01:16Tim Ferriss?

  And he's like, this is not restful.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Downward dog is two things, putting your arms over your head, that's it. And being in a long sit position, sitting with your legs out in front of you. So it's almost like the yogis were looking around and they're like, we don't have any equipment. But there's two positions that we've found to be very valuable for people. Having the leg out in front of you, sitting to 90 degrees, which is, is an actual vital sign for, or a test for a physical therapist. And putting your arms over your head. And if you go to a yoga class, you'll be like, why are we spending so much time with my arms over my head? And it turns out, not only do we have a healthier shoulder, but we start to untangle.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  Seemingly complex problems around neck pain because your neck, your shoulder and your back are a trifecta. They're a system. And if one aspect of the system isn't working, or less effective, or doesn't have access to its range, for whatever reasons. And one of the things that happens as being modern people is that we just tend to be a little stiffer in the upper back. You may not actually put your arms over your head ever until you're asked to. Even putting your shirt on, you figure out all these ways to bend your arms and not put your arms through over your head like a little kid putting their arms up. You may not be hanging from a pull-up bar. If we come back to Ido Portol, he prescribed hanging, simple hanging for people to improve their shoulder.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  What elegant programming. If you suddenly are in an old gymnastics room, they're like, why are these stall bars here? There's stall bars everywhere. Hanging is a thing that really worked and came out of all of our movement traditions. And if it wasn't hanging, it was downward dog-like things. The gymnast friends I have are obsessed with walking on their hands. You are obsessed, like you like to be upside down, walking on your hands, balancing on your hands. So what we found was, this was a way of getting people to move their upper backs and take a breath there. It was restoring this full range of shoulder flexion. And again, you don't even have to be perfect. You just have to have more than you had yesterday. And it's a really important way to improve the functionality of the neck body system

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  by honoring and looking at the relationship between the shoulders and the body. And it's really simple. So we have you lay down on your stomach, grab a broom, put your arms over your head, withholding the broom. So the broom's out, like you're like presenting the broom. Light contact with your head, just light contact, just don't cheat. It's like you're Superman, but you're flying with a broom. Yeah, that's right. And all you need to do is lift that broom up off the ground, keeping your arms parallel. And guess what? It's shocking when you can't do that. And that's really generous because we're allowing you to use your upper back and we're allowing you to use your shoulder. And I don't care if you're a physical therapist, you're documenting, again, vital signs. This is mid-range.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  And what we find is, if you're not exposed to that on the regular, it can be shocking when you're... And then let's go into Amazon and look at all the marketplace of all the thoracic wheels and thoracic mobility. And let's beat the crap out of your upper back with a lacrosse ball and all of the things. You're a partialy.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  You're not, you're not wrong.

• 1:04:28Tim Ferriss?

  It's like when I complain, I'm like, Austin's always all these Bitcoin CrossFit ayahuasca bastards. I'm so sick of it. And people are like, you made that happen. I'm like, no, no, no, no, I can't take full credit.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  I own that. Look, it's very valid that what I saw was that you were having a hard time cleaning and jerking and walking on your hands or snatching. And what we saw was that we improved people's thoracic spines and overhead.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  If you have shoulder pain and you know someone in your family has shoulder pain, one of the things that you can do is to begin to just return your body to what its native ranges are. So I can't say definitively that your shoulder pain will go away if you restore your ability to put your arms over your head. But there's a whole lot of things that get better. And it may be that your brain starts to think differently about or perceive what's going on. When it has more movement choice, when you're able to recruit more musculature, when your connective tissue is working better, et cetera, et cetera. And so again, we aren't saying you have to do this. But we've come to understand that if you're going to swim, that's a great activity we should do when we're older, right?

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Low weight bearing, it's super cool. But if you can't put your arms over your head, that's going to sort of curtail yourself.

• 1:05:41Tim Ferriss?

  Not only will it curtail your swimming, but if you don't have that range of motion and you swim regardless, you can also create all sorts of orthopedic issues.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Well, it's called workarounds. So your body's going to solve this problem for you no matter what.

• 1:05:55Tim Ferriss?

  Couple of things come to mind as I'm listening to this. The first is a question, which we'll come back to, which is for people who get faced down with the broom handle and they're like, my hands are glued to the floor. Or maybe they can't even get their arms over their head. What are some building blocks, maybe some corrective exercises? My thought here, because I remember when I was working with Jersey Gregorik, amazing coach, who's in Northern California, has several world records in Olympic weightlifting. And I've had one shoulder reconstructed and also just haven't at that point had not prioritized.

• 1:06:35Tim Ferriss?

  Straight arm overhead positions.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  So that long lever, that's right.

• 1:06:39Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So the idea of doing, say, an Olympic snatch was just out of the question. I mean, I would have killed myself or it really required surgery. And getting stronger in the mid back and at those end ranges, which would be, I suppose, exemplified in the example you gave of someone laying on their stomach with the arms overhead, holding the broom handle and then lifting it off the ground. That is strengthening that last few degrees. What I found is once I strengthened those last few degrees for me, right? Whatever those last few degrees were, body's like, oh, okay. We're not going to break automatically. We're going to give you a few more degrees.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  Maybe it's not even strengthening. It's just accessing and using.

• 1:07:21Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, that's interesting.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  We put that software back into play. So I'll answer your question. When we're working with people who have pain or incomplete range of motion or after surgery, we regress a lot of movements. And regression means, and here's a spoiler for everyone. Any rehab program, corrective exercise program, anything you're seeing on the, on the web, comes down to two things. It's a version of these two things. You're going to either go slower. That's called tempo. That's what we do for people when we want them to feel time under tension. We just slow down. Gives your brain a chance to understand where you are. You can signal that this is a safe position. We can move slowly. We just move slower. Or we stop.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Those are called isometrics. So putting your arm over your head and taking a breath there is a fancy way of doing an isometric, which means you're moving, you're creating tension without moving the joint or moving the tissue.

• 1:08:19Tim Ferriss?

  Bruce Lee style.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so notice that what we're testing you here is your ability to have some end range isometric control. So very fancy. All you need to figure out is kind of take a breath, actually five breaths, because I'm interested in you being able to breathe in that position and hold that position because you can do a one rep max breath hold. But I actually, you're a human being. I need you to be able to breathe there, right? So what we can come back to is, well, what's the first thing I need to do? Go get a lat pull down machine for my, my living room? Probably not. Even pull a pull up bar in my living room? No, probably not.

• 1:08:56Tim Ferriss?

  Let's get you- Japanese table and a tree, right?

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  Let's get you to grab your sink, walk your body back into an L, so you're hinged over, and just start to put your hands, again, parallel, close to each other, and just start taking some breaths there. And that's a, you could do that wall hanging, put your hands on the wall. I don't have a sink, okay? You live in a sink society, sinkless society. So you put your hands up on the wall, walk down, walk back until you feel you can't go anymore, then just take five breaths there. The first thing that you're doing is exposing yourself to the positions you want to improve. If we are trying to teach a complex skill, we don't just lecture about the skill. The thing we do is say, "Let's start the skill. Let's make the skill slower,

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  so you can feel what's going on, but we need to start to expose you to the thing." If we're gonna talk about skate skiing, that's super cool, but let's go skate ski a little bit and see what happens first. And could we then say, "Well, I wonder if your lats are tight," or "It might be useful to see if we could get some sneaky ways into mobilizing specific aspects of the movement system, get your thoracic spine to move more effectively." And this is why we actually have breathing as one of the practices here, because if you start to tap into this idea of breath, you can use your lungs to get motion in your upper back. That's so weird, I do that a lot.

• 1:10:17Tim Ferriss?

  You showed this to me, I thought you had almost killed yourself, because we were in a sauna together, because we were doing a lot of hot, cold, and you took a huge breath and then bent down over your quadzillas, for those people who don't know, these quads are the size of my torso, and hugged your own legs and popped your thoracic.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Tim Ferriss?

  And I was like, "Holy shit, what'd you just do there?"

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I call it the Tower of London.

• 1:10:46Tim Ferriss?

  The Tower of London.

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  When Julian and I were traveling, we saw that in the Tower of London, there was a torture device where you were kneeling in that, basically that position. You put your chest on your legs, and then someone would screw a vise over your back, basically like a wishbone, and compress your back till you couldn't breathe anymore. And I was like, "That's a cool..."

• 1:11:05Tim Ferriss?

  Sad Christmas.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  But I was like, "That's a clever way to get into the upper back. I'm gonna try that."

• 1:11:08Tim Ferriss?

  So I went home.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  Inspiration strikes all over the place, right? Always be mobilizing. And I discovered that that was a really wonderful way to help get this global flexion of my back. Instead of having my neck just hinging down, I wanted to get more total rounding of the back. And you've heard, you started a little internet fire with Coach Summer when you were like, Jefferson curls are necessary. And everyone was like, bro, you can't round your back, you'll die, you know? And like, okay, maybe, but we do seem to round our backs a lot. And maybe something you want to do. And that Jefferson curl turns out to be a really simple isometric that anyone can do. But if you go to a yoga class, the amount of bending over you're going to do rounding, and then come back to flat, show me your control, and then round again. Then let's see if you can extend your back.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Upward dog, downward dog, that's going from extension to flexion. So we can again, come back out of that and say, well, what in your exercise program that you're doing for fitness, and really, it's not for fitness, it's usually for body composition, let's be honest, are you touching these shapes that your body should do? And if they're not, you're going to have to come up with a solution for putting them back into your diet.

• 1:12:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you know, the number of times in any yoga class that there is the slow return to standing, vertebra by vertebra. Long before Thomas Jefferson ever came up with Jefferson curls.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  Long before. There was a, there was a little kid in India, it was like, this really makes people better.

• 1:12:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I want to give a mention to something that was introduced to me by Boss Ridden, famous fighter.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  Oh, so great.

• 1:12:48Tim Ferriss?

  Which is the O2 Trainer, which is a resistance device that allows you to have progressive resistance by breathing through a mouthpiece with different types of breathing exercises. And I don't want to speak for BOSS, but I think it's fair to say, and I've continued to use this device, I've been super impressed by it. And using respiratory resistance has a number of sets of clinical data to support that it reduces lower back pain. And I was like, that's interesting. Found these studies on PubMed. And I was like, that's very interesting. Let me take a look at this. And what BOSS, these are all tying together, BOSS would

• 1:13:32Tim Ferriss?

  indicate sort of frontal breathing. There's a particular exercise for, let's just call it frontal breathing, where you feel what you would normally feel, which is like, if you're meditating, focusing on your breath, chances are it's your chest or your abdomen. But then, he would round over and focus on back breathing. And he said to me, be really careful with this. He said, do not do three repetitions off the bat. He's like, do 15 repetitions, 15 breaths. Doesn't sound like very much. And he's like, you will feel like you've done 1,000 lap pull downs the next day. Your back will be incredibly sore. And I thought to myself, that's strange. That doesn't make any sense. And then I did it. And lo and behold, incredibly sore in the back. But becoming more familiar with the

• 1:14:17Tim Ferriss?

  anatomy of breathing outside of the most obvious that has been highlighted for us, which is the abdominal or chest breathing, I found to be incredibly helpful for all sorts of things.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Pavel used to talk about breathing behind the shield. So if you're an Oreo cookie, you should breathe into the cream filling when you're under load. We want you to have as much movement choice and options. If you're carrying something or holding something, where are you going to pick up that breathing? If you're compressed, or you're like, it can't just be diaphragmatic breathing. It can't just be, and if you're running away from bears, can you breathe up in your neck? I sure hope so.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  So, one of the things that I went back and found the original notes from the original course we did back in like 2008, and I have a section on breathing mechanics there. And I didn't realize now that I was just laying on gold. And then, of course, we had through our friend Lair, Brian McKenzie, and definitely Wim Hof homage, I start to become more breath interested. And now, if you come work with me, or do some of our stuff, we talk like the first intervention for back pain is breathing, is diaphragmatic breathing, to get that diaphragm dissociated from the psoas, to get input into the movement system. Because when you breathe, you extend, when you exhale, you flex. And if you're in

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  bad back pain, I can get you to do a ton of small motions attached to your breathing that your brain thinks is non-threat. And guess what? It turns out also that if we do breath holds isometrics, that can help attenuate pain. And if we do long exhales after an isometric, well, that can also signal less threat to the brain. And so, we can suddenly tap in and use this breath as a mobilization device, as a diagnostic tool. What do you mean, you can't breathe in that position? As a way of self-soothing, as a way of control when I'm stressed, whoa, look at this crazy thing. And that's why, look,

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  James Nestor wrote a great book on it. If you look at Lauren Chaitao, if you look at all the masters, I mean, Butreko, shout out, Oxygen Advantage, like, people have been beating this drum. And the yogis figured this out very early. But because it was sort of wrapped in the language of spiritualism, I think a lot of the athletes forgot. And we found that if we thought about the mechanics, which is what you and I are talking about here, the mechanics of breath, not the CO2 tolerance, or the breath control, or down regulation, we're just talking about mechanics. We were able to improve people's VO2 max. You think that's important to a world-class biker? Being able to pressurize more meant that my Olympians lifted more at the Olympics, because they could pressurize more effectively.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  So, we started, in my thinking, I started reorganizing how I was teaching, and I put the breath volume. As the core belief, core foundation, because suddenly it was a way of people understanding. So you can do this. If you're just sitting here, take the biggest breath in you can. Just go ahead. Breathe through your nose and we can actually measure that volume. Don't change your position. Now, watch this. You're doing this at home. Get into a position where you think you can get more air in. So Tim and I just both sat up. We just pulled our heads down. We kind of organized our shoulders. And I didn't say to do any of that. I didn't say put your rib cage down or change your pelvic position. I didn't say get into shavasana with your shoulder or tuck your chin. I just said,

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  can you breathe more effectively in that position? And you did. You got into position and you could tell, better, same, worse. We improved biomotor output by organizing your body slightly differently. So now you have a powerful tool to bring attention to your shape. So I don't think there are good shapes and bad shapes. I'm just like, well, you can't really breathe in that shape. Or that shape doesn't pressurize very well, or that shape doesn't transfer. So if you're on your Peloton bike and you think you're killing it, ask yourself, is there a position on this Peloton bike where I can take a bigger breath? And you'll start to organize your body and guess what? You'll power more effectively. And because we see better function of the body, we see better output of the body. And I think that's how we can begin to have people feel these things,

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  which seem like esoterica, but all of a sudden you're in a position where you could take some breaths. So now, arms over your head, take a breath. In that bottom position of the squat, take a breath. Like, we suddenly have ways to begin to pressurize and to begin to restore, just based on that feeling I have of being able to take a bigger breath, or take a bigger breath, or a better breath. So if I'm shrimping at my desk, good, that probably feels good sometimes. Shrimp at your desk. Then every once in a while, you're like, why do I have a neck ache? And then ask yourself, can I take a breath, a bigger breath in a different position? And that position tends to transfer a little bit better.

• 1:19:13Tim Ferriss?

  Eight hundred G, I assume that doesn't mean eight hundred thousand dollars, eight hundred grams?

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Eight hundred grams. So, food can be a little sensitive for people. When we talk about food with people and diets, five percent is per performance. I'm a cyclist runner, right? I want to build muscle. And the rest of it tends to be around, how do I change my body composition? So, we'll start with that assumption. Now, here is the non-trigger trigger warning. If you're vegan, carnivore, paleo, vegetarian, I'm still talking to you. Okay? Doesn't matter what you eat. We found that, when I back up,

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  didn't want to ever get near nutrition, for all the reasons that it's complicated. It's highly individualized, it's cultural, people have strong ideologies around it, and real personal identities around it. Super cool. I think nutrition for a lot of people has become almost like entertainment. It's like a hobby.

• 1:20:24Tim Ferriss?

  Or religion.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. But if we get down to, you're working with me, and I'm worried about your tissue recovery, or tissue health, or you're injured, because again, a lot of times it comes through. Or, we're trying to keep lean body mass on you, because you're aging, and it turns out maybe fat is a problem, but keeping your lean body mass is a bigger problem. When we actually get into, how much protein are you eating? People oftentimes do not get enough protein. And so, notice that I'm like, oh, you want to eat raw bear steak? You knock yourself out. You want to do plant pea cricket protein? You knock yourself out. And I don't care.

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  But let's see if we can establish what a reasonable amount of that is. And again, what I really like in my life is getting something for nothing. And something for nothing in this situation is that we found that when people started eating more protein, guess what happened? They got fuller.

• 1:21:23Tim Ferriss?

  So, eight hundred grams of protein today?

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  No. Yes, that would be great.

• 1:21:29Tim Ferriss?

  For the low, low price of $69.95 per month with a free dialysis machine.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  All you need to do, that's right. So, we found that a reasonable amount of protein was somewhere between .7 and .8 and 1 gram per pound body weight. That's a reasonable amount. That's not crazy. We're not going to shock load you. That's, and remember, a lot of times, if you're trying to change your body composition, or heal, or grow, you need to make sure you have enough protein on board. And so, one of the things that we found was, this was an easy way of controlling satiety, and actually making sure that people had on board what they needed to recover and to heal. And what I'll ask you is, if you count the protein that your growing children are eating, you might be shocked to discover they're actually in some pretty low to moderate protein diets, because it's hard to get kids

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  to eat those things. Okay, protein aside, and again, however you want to do that, is fine with me. If vegetarian, it may be harder to hit your protein minimums. But one of the things that we saw a lot, was our vegetarian friends would come in with these little tendinopathies and some of these issues. And when we asked them about the whole sort of pantheon of potential behaviors that went along with that, we found that they were really under protein. And the international track and field folks, everyone, sports, they really have this 1 gram, it hovers around 1 gram per pound body weight. It really is, ends up being a very reasonable number that a lot of people agree on. Okay.

• 1:23:02Tim Ferriss?

  Which is still a lot more than most people consume.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  Great. So, guess what? Now you have a vital sign. Okay? And if you didn't nail it today, you'll nail it tomorrow.

• 1:23:10Tim Ferriss?

  So, where's the 800 come in?

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  Okay. So, this is the magic. We have seen...

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  A dearth of fruits and vegetables eating. And this 800 grams comes from our friend EC Sinkowski. And EC came up with this idea that, hey, what if instead of taking these out of your diet, we expanded your diet? What if I said, Tim, you want to change your body composition? I'm gonna have to have you eat a lot more. You'd be like, well, sign me up. So 800 grams is 800 grams of fruits and vegetables. And it can be, they can be frozen. They can be fresh. They can be cooked. It doesn't matter. So four big apples is 800 grams, right?

• 1:23:50Tim Ferriss?

  So it's not as crazy as it sounds.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  It's not as crazy as that. A banana is about 100 grams. You can think of it that way. So what I'm asking you to do is eat fruits and vegetables. And what we find is people don't really eat fruits and vegetables. They talk about it a lot and they have a little iceberg lettuce salad. We've struggled to eat vegetables here in Japan.

• 1:24:08Tim Ferriss?

  Actually, not only have we struggled, but we went to a sushi restaurant where one of our guides, who's fantastic, native Japanese. And I was overhearing and someone's like, why are you laughing so hard, Tim? And I was like, well. And then the guide explained, she said, well, I just asked, where can we get some vegetables? What are your vegetable options? Do you have vegetables? And they're like, no.

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  It says sushi on the door.

• 1:24:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  What's the question?

• 1:24:39Tim Ferriss?

  It's not a vegetable restaurant. This is sushi restaurant.

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  So we're agnostic about how you do that. You're like, I'm a rutabaga guy. Cool. You want to get 800 grams of rutabaga? But buried in there are these things called micronutrients, vitamins and minerals.

• 1:24:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  And what also buried in there is crucial is this thing called fiber, which most people don't get a lot of. And one of the things we've seen when we have gone into this diet culture where we restrict and take out, it's really not very sustainable. And I have two daughters, full disclosure for one, who aren't, haven't always been the best eaters. But if I pack them full of strawberries and apples and whatever they want to eat, fruits and vegetables wise, again, fruits or vegetables. If you're like, I don't eat vegetables, I'm like, down. Cool. Just you do you. You do fruits. That's fine.

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  We found that there's a lot less room for crap. Yeah. Yeah. And all of the research is that 800 grams is about this magic number where a lot of really good things happen to you from a health perspective. Fiber, micronutrients. Should you eat the rainbow? Sounds great. Let's eat the rainbow. I try to get six to eight kinds of fruits and vegetables every day. It's kind of a game. And guess what? Tomorrow? Six to eight servings? Six to eight different types. Oh, types. Yeah. So grape is one, then I had some spinach and trying to eat this diversity. I think it was Kate Shanahan of Deep Nutrition who wrote that we used to eat roughly somewhere between 40 and 50 different kinds of fruits and vegetables every year. Typical person in America. And now it's like three or four. But we just don't eat a lot of fruits and vegetables.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  And those two things, we find that we have people focus on getting more protein, getting more fruits and vegetables. There's just not a lot of extra room for keto donuts. You know what I mean? Like you're, you're like, holy crap. I'm really like, guess what? Everyone wipe potatoes? It's a vegetable. Fried potato, not a vegetable. Right? We should probably do. You have been advocating for these very dangerous things called beans for a long time. Oh, boy. Internet. You're gonna give me a Brian McKenzie TED Talk on beans? No. Beans count towards your grams. I'm like, how cool. Redemption. You're eating a thing that's a plant, full of plant matter and fiber. That's so great. Let's eat more beans. Right?

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  And like, I think the S, of course, if you're a person who'd like beans, cause me anxiety, not trying to be beanist here, but if that's you, you're excused from eating beans. And that's what I want to give people permission is saying, hey, I understand you don't like these things. Let's, what else can we open up to? 800 grams of kiwi fruit. Do it. Do it. Do it. And you know what we found is that? If you are like, I'm only gonna do this with apples, you'll do that for four or five days and you're like, what else is there? Kiwis are super cool. Uh, Kiwi every day is a little bit much. And again, we're looking at through this lens, this built to move lens of durability.

• 1:27:38Speaker 01

  If we keep lean muscle mass on you and get fiber and micronutrients in you, you're probably going to feel better and do better long haul. And maybe we have all the things your tissues are gonna need to repair and heal. And sometimes that is, one of our friends described it as supply chain economics of your tissues. There's a reason here in Japan, they eat everything. All the collagen, all the skin, all the bones, everything, bra, blah, blah. Those things have been part of our diet for a long time.

• 1:28:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally. So, few thoughts for folks also on top of that. So, with getting an increased volume of vegetables, fruits, it may make sense if you have the savings to do so, and the cash flow. Look at a list called Dirty Dozen. There are certain plants that have more pesticide exposure in the United States.

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:28:37Tim Ferriss?

  And so you can use that to selectively either avoid certain things, or consider selectively buying certified organic, so that you're not dealing with.

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  Like a strawberry is, my understanding is like a sponge. So maybe spend your money on better strawberries.

• 1:28:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. Or like, stick with bananas.

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  But you'll, that's right. Less skin. Bananas, it's not great. But you'll notice there, it's easy to demonize meat, for example. And I didn't even say eat organic meat. I just said, whatever you can afford, whatever works in your socioeconomic system, is gonna be a better health outcome than... Not getting enough protein and fruit submissions.

• 1:29:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. So on the vegetable side of things, most people in the US don't think in grams. And I recognize this is an international audience, but a lot of US listeners. What's the easiest way to figure that out?

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  Here's the caveat, of course, is that if you have control issues, right? And this has been a problem for you in the past, don't weigh and measure everything. Kind of get a rough idea of what it is, right? Like, hey, look it up. You can see like, what is a grapefruit weigh? What is this bag of spinach is 12 ounces? Great. I'll eat this bag of spinach. I've eaten 12 ounces, right? And it's in grams there too. And if you want, you have a sort of a rough idea or wait for it. Did I eat a banana this morning for breakfast? Plus pineapple, plus a salad, plus tomatoes. That was all the fruits and vegetables I consumed this morning. And what I do to myself is I hate weighing things. Juliet loves to track it. I don't. We're different.

• 1:30:11Tim Ferriss?

  Shocker.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  So I obsess on, I should probably eat more fruits and vegetables every meal. Like, it's that simple for me. And I end up, when I do track it, usually right around there above. And this is not that big a deal. What I'm saying is add some beans back to your Chipotle bowl. That's what I'm asking you to do. And you can get a really cheap scale on Amazon. Or again, you can just look up the reference. Cause what we're trying to do is make this sustainable. And what's sustainable is gamifying. Tomorrow I'm gonna, I was on the airplane. I did terrible. I reached for donuts. Great. Tomorrow you get to play again and again and again and again. And Juliet and I really have found that, for example, for us, I don't know if you know this, Tim, about me, but I love sweets.

• 1:30:58Tim Ferriss?

  On this trip, I have noticed, yes.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  I have gone

• 1:31:01Tim Ferriss?

  Granted, Japan

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  Deep in the paint.

• 1:31:03Tim Ferriss?

  Has exceptional sweets.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  Catch up on my daughter.

• 1:31:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  Georgia Starrett texted me and said, you need to go to 7-Eleven and get a strawberry and cream sandwich.

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  We went to seven 7-Eleven until I found that. And George.

• 1:31:18Tim Ferriss?

  Fortunately, that's just one square block in Japan.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  George, all right, you're correct. And I've used this opportunity of burning lots of calories to eat all of the strange and wonderful Japanese sweets. So for me, I have a penchant for eating sweets. I love it. But this morning, there was no freeliness. Like, we're not outputting today. I didn't have any carb. The carbohydrate I had today was in fruits and vegetables on my, on my plate. And what this does is it expands what I'm eating every day and it leaves me less room for toast. It leaves me less room because I'm full and I'm trying to play this health game.

• 1:31:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  And I am obsessed. The thing I fear the most for my own body right now at age 50 is tweaks of soft tissue. That's the thing I fear the most.

• 1:32:05Tim Ferriss?

  Tweaks of soft tissue?

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  Like pull a muscle, tweak a tendon, like a little hotspot, tendinopathy, like, you know, plantar fasciitis. Like, I do a lot of things to keep any of that at bay. That's how I'm viewing my tissue health. If I have tissues that are more robust and are loaded regularly and decongested, I'm less likely to be taken out from a sore shoulder.

• 1:32:27Tim Ferriss?

  So you're about five years ahead of me, I guess. I'm 45. You mentioned Grey Cook and the functional movement screen, FMS. And he's in the, has certain movements that are used to diagnose. What would you have me do? It doesn't have to be, I mean, we're not necessarily going to go through it physically right now, but if, if I were to say, all right, Kelly, I want to be hard charging, nothing crazy, but like still have the capacity to go out with my most athletic friends around the same age and have physical adventures. I want to do that multiple times a year.

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:05Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the screens that you would put me through?

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  The most important thing would be, "Show me how you're loading your tissues." That's the first thing. I don't start with an assessment. The assessment is the thing. So, we're gonna press today, no matter what, but we're just gonna limit your range of motion overhead. And we may slow down, we may not snatch, but we're gonna go overhead, in some way or another. People who can't go overhead often can hang from a pull bar. Oh wait, I assess programming, because people ask me to look over their programming a lot, is I look at key positions. What are, we call them archetypal shapes. They're sort of the bookends, or reference positions for your body. And, the shoulder's actually not that complex. It only does like four really things. There are variations, and it moves between those things, but it goes over your head,

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  goes out in front of you, goes out to the side, wait for it, goes behind you. That explains all complex movement of the shoulder. Some combination. You may not actually touch some of those end range positions, but you should have access to them. And what's cool about range of motion is it's actually one of the few attributes of your physicality that doesn't have to change when you age. It doesn't mean that you have to lose your ability to flex your hip, bring your knee to your chest. Who cares about that? Lower yourself to the ground to poop in the toilet. Get up and down off the ground. So, this is a highly trainable aspect. So, one of the things we wanna do, inside your resistance training, your loaded movement training, which unfortunately you're gonna have to do.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  You know, we have at the very end of the chapter of the book, we have a little chapter called "Never Do Nothing." So, Dave Spitz of Cal Strength is like, "Never do nothing." He's old, like me. He's really busy, has a family. And he's like, "Well, some days, I just did like some pull-ups in the garage. That's what I got today. Never do nothing." And, ultimately, if you want to then say, "Okay, I wanna be durable, Cal..."

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  And I want to have the opportunity, then some of these behaviors, range of motion things you could do if you didn't have access to exercise. They can help you create a foundation. Then we are all at base camp, and that's why we call them base camp behaviors. Then you and I are saying, well, hey, I want to go up Everest. And now we're, our Everest is, can we ski six days in Japan and not implode and come out intact? Then we can work backwards to say, what exposures

• 1:35:30Tim Ferriss?

  do we need to have? And by skiing, I think you mean it mostly in the way that Laird Hamilton, famous big wave surfer, has said, they should call surfing paddling because it's 90% paddling. By skiing, we mean mostly sliding up mountains.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  I don't know if you noticed this, not only the oldest, but I'm also the largest.

• 1:35:50Tim Ferriss?

  Oh.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  One of our guides is akin to Legolas. Like she doesn't even deform the snow when she stands on.

• 1:35:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, she can run across the snow.

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I'm like, hey, we're not the same animal.

• 1:36:03Tim Ferriss?

  I am a snowplow. You are, you are an Arctic hare.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  So ultimately, if we start with this root pattern shape, this idea of this, I call it the archetype, then you have a master key of understanding any movement structure, any physicality, any system, because what you're ultimately seeing is different tools to challenge fundamental position shapes. If you're a gymnast, you may be walking on your hands, swinging from a bar overhead. If you're an Olympic lifter, you're lifting overhead. Maybe you're in the gym doing lat pulldowns. You're going to yoga, you're doing downward dog, you're on the reformer. Suddenly you're like, oh, okay, there's, everyone says being overhead is important. And here are all the different ways to train that. And I'm probably going to need to do some resistance around that, some kind of progressive loading. And again, we can have

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  now nuanced conversations, how strong do you need to be to do what we did? I don't know. How durable do I want to be? I want to be all the durable. So I think one of the things that is a fair criticism of fitness is that we have convinced everyone to basically become doomsday preppers, where you're never strong enough, strength is never a weakness, you're never fit enough. That is crazy. One of my good friends has this idea now, he's like, maybe we should not call it functional fitness, which is sort of a scarcity mindset. We should be calling it practical fitness. Can you do what you need to do? And if you're saying, I need to ski up a mountain for two hours and descend in minus 10 degrees, that's a different set of circumstances than I want to walk around the block with

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  my baby. But the kinds of training, ultimately, we're going to need to put you under some load. How to do that? Simple loading for someone who's listening doesn't like to exercise could be jumping. There's an old Russian saying, when you stop jumping, you start dying. The Chinese say you're as old as your spine, or you're as old as your feet. And again, if I got those wrong, please, you can correct me. You can correct him. But the idea here is there are fundamental truths about how we load. Do you remember in the 90s, every woman suddenly was osteoporotic? They all, everyone had osteoporosis. And they're like, you need this calcium chew. And we sold calcium chews to everyone in America. And it didn't change the bone density of everyone because we didn't change the loading of anyone.

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  So ultimately, for you, as a middle-aged person, I need to make sure that you have control through these things. So we would do more strict kinds of movements. And suddenly you're like, oh, wait a minute, that looks like classic strict gymnastics training. That looks like classic barbell training. That looks like simple kettlebell training, like some of these strict push-ups. I have taught on every continent except Antarctica, and everyone knows what a push-up is and what the bench press is everywhere. So it's like, training and movement is the fundamental, common movement language. So now we can say, well, what tools do you have? What's your training experience? But ultimately, we need to do something that goes up and down and rhymes with a squat. How you want to do that? You want a goblet squat?

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  You want a back squat? You want a full snatch? You want to squat to a chair? There's a really famous test in physical therapy called the timed up and go. And it's, you stand up out of a chair, you walk 10 meters, you turn around, you sit back in the chair. We can time you. That's a power. They're measuring wattage because you can put a clock on that. And it's a really good indicator of fall risk. Litvinov, one of the most famous hammer throwers in all time, used to front squat 200 kilos for seven, then run 400 meters. That's the same test.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  So you can see fun.

• 1:39:44Tim Ferriss?

  Good lord.

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  Same test. Those are very different extremes, but that's the same thing. So you and I can have a polite disagreement about how big and strong we need to have, how much we fetishize and need to be in the gym to develop the capacity, and how much we need to spend other time becoming more skillful, or more springy, or playing. And I think we have, and as I said, it's a fair criticism of strength and addition gym culture that we have obsessed on these gigantic, huge bodies, big crunch presses, right? It's easy to quantify that. There's a famous coach named Bonderchuk, who is one of the greatest throws coach in the whole history of the world. And he's like, "You're probably strong enough. I know you can add another kilo to the bench, but what you need to do is go throw more."

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  It's more fun for a thrower to add a kilo to their bench than to go throw some implement more times. So one of the things that has worked well for me and some of the older people is that we're always challenging position. Remember, that root idea of the gym is that we're challenging positions and shapes. In fact, your brain isn't wired for musculature. It's wired for movement. So a shape is really just a snapshot of a movement. So squatting up and down is a movement that we need to challenge. And we can change the variables. Where are you holding that? How upright is your torso? How fast are you going? But can also not just make it heavier. I can also say, "Well, like what we did, I need you to walk up this hill for two hours, blow yourself out,

• 1:41:13Speaker 01

  and then I need you to squat all the way down. How well are you going to handle that squat under some metabolic demand?" There were some times where I post hold up to my, like, waist, and I had to do a deep one-leg squat, and my heart rate was at 190 already.

• 1:41:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:26Speaker 01

  And I was like, "Whoa, how do I train for this?" Right?

• 1:41:29Tim Ferriss?

  Or you go really fast in chest deep powder, and then you stop in chest deep powder, and you're like, "My legs are stuck."

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  My legs.

• 1:41:38Tim Ferriss?

  How do I?

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:39Tim Ferriss?

  I need camel, camel hip flexors to get this out.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  So it turns out just being stronger, though, in that moment, doesn't actually solve the movement problem, doesn't. You need to be competent with the skilled movement under cardiorespiratory demand, breathing hard, under metabolic demand, a little fatigue. There are real loads out there, real loads, who are fighting. Like, I was like, wow, I'm really glad I'm, I have a big butt doing this, right? There was a skill component to it. And so suddenly, we can, what's really great about viewing the training of shapes is that it allows you to have permission to do what you like to do. And so instead of saying, my hard style, your non-hard style, we're not fighting that, you think that this is the kind of training that really speaks to you, that puts you in

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  a community, that hits these things. We can test the veracity of your training by dropping in over here and seeing how well you do. You should be able to jump into Pilates class. You should be able to handle, if I hand you some dumbbells, you're like, okay, I can do that. I don't care if you're the, it doesn't matter if you're the strongest at dumbbells or Pilates class, but you should be able to transfer those skills back and forth. And now, rinse, wash, repeat for a few decades. And what you'll find, we have a simple test in the book. We talk about squatting, of course, because I love squatting. But turns out squatting is one of the ways to restore your back and to get flexion in your spine, this big butt, ass-to-grass squat. It's a nice test of hip range of motion, ankle range of motion, balance. But for those people who can't, we say, hey, let's squat to the chair.

• 1:43:07Speaker 01

  And then today, if you've never squatted before, you're gonna do one squat, and tomorrow you can do two squats, and the next day you're gonna do three squats in a row, and you're just gonna build up for a month. And guess what's gonna happen after 30 days of doing 30 squats in a row? Your life is going to change. But we just have to begin some progressive overload for some of these things.

• 1:43:24Tim Ferriss?

  Totally. So if I were thinking about the last couple of groups of foreigners I've come with to Japan, and I'm painting along national lines, let's just say, and this will tie then into

• 1:43:39Tim Ferriss?

  Question of age groups, I could look at just let's limit it to this group and how people look trying to sit the way we are sitting right now. There are plenty of things that other people in this group, plenty of things they can do that I cannot, just to be very clear. I haven't been good at sitting on Japanese floors.

• 1:43:55Speaker 01

  Nailed it.

• 1:43:59Tim Ferriss?

  There are some incredible athletes on this trip, but they're bad at sitting on the floor. Right. So I could think, all right, maybe that like external rotation of the femur is something as a group, they might want to pay more attention to, just as an example, sitting in a cross legged or one leg on top of the other position, which they can't currently do. If we were to take a very specific picture, so let's just say former athletes, not high level athletes. I mean, I'm basically talking about myself, right? So I competed at a decent level through high school and college in various things, was never world champion, was never Olympian, anything like that, but was very movement

• 1:44:42Tim Ferriss?

  immersed. And then trained very, very seriously. And then let's just say between, who knows, 35 and 45, maybe the training got a little lighter, maybe it got a little more sporadic. And this is the group we're dealing with, right? So let's just say.

• 1:44:59Speaker 01

  These are my people.

• 1:45:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So let's just say we have 145 year olds who kind of mirror that like me. They got some aches and pains, maybe they've had a couple of fractures, maybe one or two surgeries. That's the group. Much like looking at this group that came to Japan and saying, huh, seems like a lot of these guys have trouble sitting with their legs sort of splayed open in any way. In that type of kind of post competitive athletic group that I described with some aches and pains and some injuries, are there any particular types of movements? I know this is kind of a question that you may hate, but I'm just curious if there are any particular types of movement, training that come to mind where you're like, you

• 1:45:43Tim Ferriss?

  know, I think that group should overall be doing more of A, B, and C.

• 1:45:49Speaker 01

  I think we sold hard cardio respiratory to fitness. That is, you had lungs like Lance Armstrong, all things would be solved. And it's easier to quantify that because you can go wattage, you can count and look at heart rate and power. Let's say the biking, and again, Juliette and I are huge cyclists. We love to ride. And riding is great for these reasons. Very time efficient, and it's what we call high physiology, low skill. Put your feet here, put your butt here, grab the hands here. You have five points of contact. Very safe. Mid-range, not full leg flexion, not full knee flexion, not full hip flexion, you're just gonna move around.

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  And we can die, you can die. I can kill you on nothing. Like, pour hate on you and you can suffer and vomit on the bike. And what you think is, wow, that was really hard. I'm fit. Until you need to move yourself through the environment a little differently. And I think we've confused work output, we've confused some of the cardio-respiratory capacity. If I took the criticisms from some of the big thinkers who reacted to CrossFit on its strength and addition bros. They have some valid ideas here. How well are you actually challenging this and using this in the world? And now the question is, how much fitness is the right amount of hard fitness and shouldn't I play?

• 1:47:17Speaker 01

  And is there anything wrong with going to the gym every day for an hour and smashing stuff? No. But if you're, all you're doing, again, having some vital signs, one of my favorite vital signs in the book is called the couch stretch. And here's why you should care about the couch stretch. One is you're gonna find out that you suck at it. You're welcome. And all you do is put your knee into the corner of the wall, you're on hands and knees, kind of facing with the wall. And you put your knee into the corner where the wall meets the floor, and then just bring your other leg up into a lunge. Squeeze your butt. Your leg, back leg is bent and you're in a lunge position, using the wall to support that. That is a shock to people because their quads are stiff or their brain's protecting, whatever the mechanism is. They can't access that position. They can't squeeze their butt in that position. They can't take a breath in that position.

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  They can't even hang out in that position. And that is an easy position to be in. But if your environment doesn't queue you in to also being a diagnostic tool regularly, because your body is so robust and so badass and so good at working around these things for so long, it's designed for survival. Your brain doesn't care if you're missing hip extension. But that hip extension is you walking up the hill, having that knee behind you when you walk or run or lunge, that shape. What goes away faster than anything, what movement quality and capacity is compromised in this society more than any other movement, is that hip extension. Why? Well, we do a lot of cardio on the bike. The elliptical

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  machine was genius because it just removed hip extension entirely. You can stand up, but you don't have to take your hip extension. Congratulations. And all the sitting we do is modern workers and the commuting. And we're sort of queued in, so we just don't get a lot of exposure here. And again, if you dropped into Pilates, you're like, whoa, a lot of hip extension. And if you do yoga, you're like, a lot of warrior one. Like, why are we doing this long lunge into chaturanga? It's because they recognize that this is a position we wanted to nurture. And if I could say, wave my magic wand and say, I would like you to spend more time in this position, suddenly you could still squat, but you just do a Bulgarian squat or a split squat, right? You, instead of pressing a barbell over your head, I just want you to put your front foot up on something and press.

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  I want you to push a sled. Oh, that sounds tremendous. We've seen that. Like, that's out in culture. And when we, again, stop talking about the capacities, but look at the shapes first, then it's all like, what tools do I have available to me? How can I do this? Throwing your foot up on the edge of a couch and jumping out into a big lunge? Nailed it. And let me give you an example. We regularly work with really good athletes and teams who have these deficiencies. I've worked with several Olympic

• 1:49:58Speaker 01

  Lifting Olympian groups who don't do enough hip extension. And all we did was start programming in hip extension for them. These shapes of being like a lunge. Lo and behold, everyone's back pain got better and their lifts went up. So weird. And so again, what I want to do is say, let's make sure that we're not confusing capacity with movement choice.

• 1:50:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  Because I think that goes away really fast. What we've seen, we can have really strong, very, I'll put in quotation marks, fit people who aren't very skilled at moving.

• 1:50:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  So how was my fitness? I don't know. I just had to balance on one leg and put my ski on in a, the binding I didn't love on the side of a mountain, right after being smoked. Let me tell you how my fitness is. Like, that's the test.

• 1:50:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. And for people who want to get a visual on the couch stretch, you can certainly just give it a search on Google. But if you imagine the capital letter N and then put like a little circle in the very middle of that, the left side of that would be your front leg and the right side of that would be the rear leg with the knee in that corner.

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  It's also in four hour body.

• 1:51:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it is. It is indeed.

• 1:51:15Speaker 01

  That's how long I've been saying you should be doing the couch stretch.

• 1:51:18Tim Ferriss?

  It is. It isn't. And we're, I think, I think you're demoing on an actual couch.

• 1:51:23Speaker 01

  I am demoing on our couch and our, our old couch.

• 1:51:26Tim Ferriss?

  Back when we both had a little more hair.

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't even know how much hair I had then. You know, um, one of the things that I just want people to hear is that we're trying to build an extra capacity to the system. And oftentimes the initiation for a lot of the reasons why people are interested in this is pain. Or I can't do something I don't want to do. My friends are going to Japan and I can't ski or not from a skill, but my knee hurts. That's a problem. So where do we begin to tug? Do I have to go hire an expert and go seek this thing and go away from my family and take time off from my job? That's a, yes, great, cool. You can afford that and fly in your private physical therapist to work with you. That's, doesn't seem that scales very well.

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  And what we instead can do is say, hey, look, here's things that you can do in the course of your day. And this really, right or wrong, you know, Juliette, who is our CEO, my partner, world champion superstar, she really felt attacked a little bit sometimes when people talked about their morning routines and all of the things they did to optimize their day and biohack their day. And she's like, I'm so swamped. And this really feels inaccessible to me. It feels like a bunch of single people with a bunch of free time, right? And interestingly enough, the thing that I ended up kind of getting out of PT school by looking at was barriers to adherence. What keeps people from doing what they want

• 1:52:57Speaker 01

  to do. And one of the things that we started to recognize as we worked with some of these groups is that we couldn't just say, do this. We had to say, when are you going to do it? How do you fit it in? So all the things we've talked about are wonderful. But if you're a person who has a life, you have to ask, where are these moments where I'm going to be able to fit these key behaviors? And I think that's one of the things that we really started to appreciate and say that, you know, we need to do a better job of showing people where they're going to have some agency and control.

• 1:53:28Tim Ferriss?

  The Karate Kid approach.

• 1:53:29Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:53:30Tim Ferriss?

  Wax on, wax off.

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  Built it in.

• 1:53:32Tim Ferriss?

  Put on your shoes, standing on one foot.

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  You've nailed it.

• 1:53:35Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't been training. Yes, you have. You just don't know that you have.

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  Show me.

• 1:53:41Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, man. Why don't you tell people a bit more about the book and who it's for? Right? Who's, who is it, who is it written for? Who's it best suited to?

• 1:53:55Speaker 01

  Imagine that one of the things that we, Julie and I felt like was that we, as fitness, and again, part of the fitness machine, there was a cog in the machine, is that if we ask ourselves, how are we doing? If fitness is, the promise is to transform society and make people healthier, are we living up to that? And what we really feel like is, well, the objective measurements are, well, let's look at obesity, or diabetes, or chronic pain, or persistent pain, or injuries, or surgery, or depression. And what we see is that, I think 100% of those things are trending in negative ways. So if fitness is a trillion dollar industry, and we're not making people fitter.

• 1:54:37Speaker 01

  And whatever, expanding their fitness besides, I look great on Instagram with my abs, right? Just expanding that definition a little bit. Then we have to start asking sort of a different set of questions around this. So this book is for whom potentially fitness is left behind. Who, hey, I don't identify with exercising. Cool. That has nothing to do with being durable. Think about how many people in their, when we were in some of those towns, we saw some elderly people here. How fit were some of those elderly Japanese people? They didn't bench press a lot. I don't think her deadlift was very strong, that 90 year old we saw, right? But there's something about being durable and being useful, however we're defining that, that there is a set of things you have to keep doing that

• 1:55:18Speaker 01

  your body just requires. And then we can layer on exercise if that feels good. So imagine the first thing order of business is saying, hey, look, let's get everyone to base camp. And then we can argue what color rope you should take up the Everest route. Because that's, I feel like that's the conversation on the internet. And people are like, wait, what's base camp? What's Everest? The number of people that stop us in our community, remember Jill and I are just parents in our street. And they're like, hey, do you think I should do this keto shred? And what do you, there's a lot of questions we get where people are, don't know how to be sustainable. They don't know how to exercise because we've overwhelmed them with options and choices and data and flashy science. So if we can get built to

• 1:56:01Speaker 01

  move into those hands first, or how about this, you love fitness, you're into this stuff. I'm into this stuff. And I have always wanted a reference and be like, start here. It's not diet exercise. Well, just have a go at this and then let's talk, we'll sum up when you're ready to have, learn how to swing a kettlebell. Or you're a physician who says, hey, I know you're on this blood pressure medicine and this isn't the place to have these complex psycho emotional behavioral conversations in this eight minutes. But here's something you can do. We know that it's going to make a healthier, more robust platform. And we gave this book to our world champion friends who were like, how do we do? And they were like, this really helped me.

• 1:56:45Speaker 01

  Because I had some holes here that I wasn't thinking about. I wasn't walking enough and I was wondering why my knee was hurting. And it's tried to say, who's this for? I want, Juliet and I really want to make sure that we've reached out to people who haven't been served well by the fitness community. Because what we see is that those people who are in, it looks like a classed society in terms of fitness and health now. People are measuring and monitoring and tracking and like getting fitter. Meanwhile, everyone else is saying, hey, I don't even know where to start.

• 1:57:15Tim Ferriss?

  I would also say, tell them if you disagree with this, but a lot of folks probably who think they're being served by whatever form of fitness they're consuming, when they get taken out of a very narrow band of fill in the blank cycling, fill in the blank powerlifting, fill in the blank some form of bodybuilding. Once they're thrown into an environment that is a little more stochastic, requires movement patterns that are a little more varied. They're like, oh shit.

• 1:57:49Speaker 01

  Our friend Mark Bell couldn't put a shoe on without sitting down and using a shoe horn when I first met him.

• 1:57:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  He was a world champion, but couldn't put a shoe on.

• 1:57:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:58Speaker 01

  That he wore like his shoes were always tied. Now, look what happened to Mark.

• 1:58:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:02Speaker 01

  You know, as an idea of, I think that's really a great, and we might even say we have some vital signs to help you identify your blind spots. And I think if we have always, right or wrong, we've always said, if we can give people the tools, the right people, the right tools, they know how to incorporate in their lives and make the change. You've seen that. I have seen people come up to you a hundred times and say that you changed their life. And you're like, I've never met you, you know, sir, this is a Wendy's, you know? But given the tool, people are smart enough to have figured that out and that's what we want to do. You don't know what you don't know. This is a really simple way. And I want everyone to understand this is what Juliet and I do.

• 1:58:45Speaker 01

  And this is what we have been sort of winnowing out of our elite performance conversations with all the crazy teams that we work with.

• 1:58:54Tim Ferriss?

  Kelly, we've covered a lot of ground. Built to Move is the book. Actually, just everybody check it out because we are built to move. Turns out that this fancy brain of ours is scaffolded around this machine that is intended to move through space. And I think the diversity of our movement diet, much like the vegetables, has gone from dozens down to just a handful. And there's no way that doesn't end in tears, right? Individually and collectively. So I'm really excited to

• 1:59:31Tim Ferriss?

  have the set of vital signs, the descriptions, the means of self assessing to identify blind spots. Areas of opportunity. Growth opportunities, growth opportunities, which I'm very excited about because this trip for me has been decades in the making, in a sense. And I've always wanted to bring some of my closest friends to Japan and to train. I mean, I really trained my ass off for the last six weeks, more than six weeks, but especially in the last six weeks to make sure that I wouldn't be a total embarrassment. And it was still hard. I mean, it's still hard. And I was like, okay, 45, it doesn't seem impossible to me. I'm not going to be

• 2:00:16Tim Ferriss?

  Laird Hamilton, but it doesn't seem impossible to me that if I approach training in an increasingly intelligent surgical way with regular self assessments, that I could be doing this stuff 10 years from now, if I play the cards right. But like to play the cards right, you got to know what the game is, what's in your hand. And I think Built to Move will help people to do all of those things. Any other closing comments, requests of the audience, anything you'd want to point people to, anything at all that you'd like to say before we go have a gigantic Japanese lunch? Three things. One,

• 2:00:54Speaker 01

  Be consistent before you're heroic.

• 2:00:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yes. Excellent advice.

• 2:00:58Speaker 01

  Two, wait for it. The glacial pace is the breakneck pace. It takes time to make change. Your body is there for you. It just may be that you have to put the burning tractor trailer out of fire first before you back it down the blind alley. Like, it takes a second, but it always works. And three, you're not alone. Bring someone with you on this adventure. If that means just you walked out after dinner and that was what you started for this week, grab one of your family members. We think that the living unit is the functional unit of change. That's where you begin. So bring someone along with you.

• 2:01:34Tim Ferriss?

  Roger that.

• 2:01:36Speaker 01

  Thanks for bringing me along with you. I'm gonna have to go into some counseling for, uh,

• 2:01:41Tim Ferriss?

  Before round two.

• 2:01:41Speaker 01

  Get dragged up this hill.

• 2:01:44Tim Ferriss?

  There you have, folks, Kelly. Always a pleasure.

• 2:01:48Speaker 01

  Thank you, Tim.

• 2:01:48Tim Ferriss?

  And to everybody listening, we'll have links to everything in the show notes as per usual. Tintodblog/podcast. Just search Kelly Starrett, S T A R R E T T. There are many episodes. This will be the most recent, of course. And Built to Move is the book. Check it out. Until next time, be just a little kinder than is necessary. That includes to yourself. Remember, be consistent before heroic. Good advice for a lot of things, whether that's writing, walking, hanging, squatting down to take a heroic poo in a Japanese bathroom. You never know when you're gonna need that skill. Facts. Facts. And thanks so much for tuning in. Talk to you next time. Jannit.

• 2:02:33Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including

• 2:03:14Tim Ferriss?

  a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and heat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top and repeating all

• 2:03:56Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:04:41Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:05:12Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is one of my favorite companies out there, one of my favorite platforms ever. And let's get into it. Shopify is a platform, as I mentioned, designed for anyone to sell anything, anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. So what does that mean? That means in no time flat, you can have a great looking online store that brings your ideas, products, and so on to life. And you can have the tools to manage your day to day business and drive sales. This is all possible without any coding or design experience whatsoever. Shopify instantly lets you accept all major payment methods. Shopify has thousands of integrations and third party apps from on demand printing to accounting to advanced chatbots, anything you can imagine.

• 2:05:57Tim Ferriss?

  They probably have a way to plug and play and make it happen. Shopify is what I wish I had had when I was venturing into e-commerce way back in the early 2000s. What they've done is pretty remarkable. I first met the founder, Toby, in 2008, when I became an advisor, and it's been spectacular. I've loved watching Shopify go from roughly 10 to 15 employees at the time to 7,000 plus today, serving customers in 175 countries with total sales on the platform exceeding $400 billion. They power millions of entrepreneurs from their first sale all the way to full scale. And you would recognize a lot of large companies that also use them who started small. So get started by building and customizing your online store, again, with no coding or design experience required.

• 2:06:41Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:07:26Tim Ferriss?

  So I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today and learn more by visiting Shopify.com/Tim. One more time, Shopify.com/Tim, all lowercase.