Kelly Starrett | Getting Better At The Game Of Life | Modern Wisdom Podcast 119

Kelly Starrett is a CrossFit trainer, physical therapist, author and speaker. Expect to learn what Kelly thinks about the Game Changers documentary, his new brand The Ready State, what his most important principles are to focus on for fitness & wellbeing and much more. Extra Stuff: Follow Kelly on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thereadystate/ Check out The Ready State - https://thereadystate.com/ Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #kellystarrett #crossfit #mobility - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We were in New York and we saw this thing called the pagan diet. It was being advertised.

• 0:03Chris Williamson?

  The what pagan diet?

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Pagan.

• 0:06Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Paleo plus vegan, plant-based diet with small amounts of animal protein. And we were like, you mean food? You know, so one of my friends is a woman named E C Sinkowski and she's optimized me nutrition. And she has this notion, first things first, let's improve the caloric density of your diet by getting you to eat eight hundred grams of vegetables and fruits a day, eight hundred grams. Just hit that mark.

• 0:31Chris Williamson?

  Me.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  So that's how far away we're having a conversation about is this movie about being plant-based good or bad? I'm like, hey, I eat meat and eggs and cheese and all these other things, but I also get eight hundred grams of vegetables and fruits or a kilo of vegetables and fruits a day. That's my base.

• 0:51Chris Williamson?

  Are you able to stick to around that?

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Piece of cake. I eat salad for breakfast. I eat a palm full of blueberries is eighty grams. So what you're seeing is, oh, you know, we villainize fruit, right?

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  And I'm like, seriously, you think an app like eating two apples is really the limiting factor to your performance today? What are you gonna eat instead? You know, like a protein shake, a highly processed Impossible Burger?

• 1:18Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by the supple leopard himself, Mr. Kelly Starrett. Kelly, welcome to the show.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  It is a pleasure to be be back on the, I don't know, I can say it's the better side of the of the ocean, but I do have an affinity for the UK.

• 1:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man. Well, you're with me now. You're adopted for the next hour. We're going to be talking about whatever we talk about. You can be British for a little while. Get a cup of tea out.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  Uh, well, I really, what I'm gonna need is a cup from the Borough Market and then also a sausage roll. So if you can make that happen, I'm in.

• 1:50Chris Williamson?

  That's like knowledge, but that's you dropping your peak UK knowledge bombs, isn't it? So what's the most quintessentially British thing that I can think of? It's a cup of tea and a sausage roll.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  That's right. That's right.

• 2:02Chris Williamson?

  So how are you, man? It's awesome to see you again. I follow your stuff. I'm sure a lot of people that are listening will be as well. You guys have been super busy recently.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  You know, here's the deal. We try to treat our thinking about human beings and our lives as a game you cannot win. All you can do is sort of play better and better and better. And to that end, if you if you treat your fitness, your wellness, your health, like a game with clear and clear winners and losers, you know all the rules are, you're a fool. I mean, that's that's the same in business, the same in raising kids. These are open-ended tasks and we have always reserved the right to get better and to refine our thinking and to and to think differently and critically about the needs of the people we serve. And to that end, you know, we just applied that same amount of thinking

• 2:53Speaker 00

  to to our business. And what we we had is 10 years of experience helping people improve pain, helping people take a crack at moving more efficiently, more effectively, and the things that they love. And we're trying to get the physio and the doctor out of the conversation because frankly, so much of this, of what we're working on is is disruptive in the way that, hey, this is a part of the language of being a human being. The same way that like you don't have to talk to your nutritionist when you have lunch, right? You don't have to talk to your doctor, you know, before you go to bed. I mean, it's crazy that there you have divorced muscle skeletal health and care and understanding, you know, from our environmental lifestyle selves. And now we're trying to fix that.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  So what we what we realize is that people are a lot more clever than we have originally given them credit for. And I mean, we've always assumed that people are more clever, but I don't think that that our traditional industries have necessarily. And to that end, you know, we we went ahead and rebranded and changed our the user experience and user interface. And we went from mobility wad, which was really confusing for people. Mobility now means nothing and wad is a, you know, is a technical term that has been sort of co-opted by lots of companies like sobriety wad and faith wad and mentality wad. And then we really felt like what we were doing was trying to help people in the context of their lives. Get as ready as they could for whatever they want to get ready for. And I've been talking

• 4:20Speaker 00

  about this notion of this ready state, which is sort of saying, you can't live in a, you're not a monk. You have family obligations and private, previous history of injuries and maybe you played a sport and maybe you have a job that forces you to stay awake sometimes at hot hours. So how can, how ready can we get you? And what can we control? Which is really a different idea around, hey, I've got a, I have a box of a hundred things. And if I don't check off my list of a hundred things, I'm somehow a failure and I haven't bio hacked or optimized. And instead, we're saying this, hey, look, let's play a more beautiful game. And that was really the, the birth of the ready state.

• 4:56Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome. I mean, a lot of people will be familiar with mobility wards. I think you're right. The opportunity for you to expand out from a term which is, uh, obvious, but perhaps a little constrictive in that mobility just focuses on that to the ready state, which is something that seems a little bit more holistic. So what's, how would you define the difference between what you were doing before and what you're doing now with regards to what you provide?

• 5:24Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I think people forget that when we started this project, you know, 10 years ago, you know, the iPhone didn't have a video camera. So, you know, YouTube was a nascent emergent thing. And, you know, I, we were on Blogger, it was the original platform. And, uh, you know, we didn't set out to make a library that ended up looking and feeling like the, like the out library of Alexandria with 4,000 videos in it. We set out to raise the bar and give people the tools to be able to take a crack at fixing themselves and making themselves feel better and improving their movement efficiency. And one of the things that, um, I think is in there, it's, it's confusing for people is mobilizing is a tool to restore your position.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  And for example, one of the reasons I don't think stretching ever really took off. I mean, we've been known to stretch your whole life. I mean, you're, you're, you're a football coach, maybe you stretch, et cetera, et cetera. Right. But athletes don't do things that don't work. And when an athlete perceives poor value, poor return on value, they drop it out. And I, we saw that, and of course, stretching can be a large and nebulous term. But what we saw was, you know, we, we came out, I'm a physio, but I'm a coach first. And if you ask me, sit me down in the airplane, I'm gonna say, I'm a coach. And then I'm like, oh, I'm also a physio. And into that end, you know, part of the magic of what we're trying to do here is always to say, hey, look, it's movement first. And our movement cues come from the language of gymnastics and powerlifting and Olympic lifting and bodyweight control.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  And there's a lot of cueing and understanding around sport that these coaches have discovered what is the best expression of human physiology. What are the shapes that are the most powerful? What are the positions and skills and cues that give us the most robust and most stable person? And underlying that then is that mobilizations really end up for us becoming position transfer exercises. If you can't put your arm over your head, that's a problem. And no matter, no matter like how much, you know, compensation you do or magical thing you do, if it's a tissue restriction, that's a tissue restriction and people get stiff. That's okay. So what are the tools to restore that? So that's the piece. But the first half of, you know, two thirds of Supple Leopard is really about how to move

• 7:38Speaker 00

  and move more efficiently and then tying these movement principles into the foundations of strength and conditioning. And when we begin to layer on additionally, the fact that, you know, the gym is the greatest place on earth to be, to work on your weaknesses, to work on painful positions, to talk about nutrition and sleep and stress, to be a member of a tribe and community, to be seen. We have all the aspects of the biocycle social model, which people have been saying, oh, we've got to look at, it's not just your knee, it's how you exist in society. And I'm like, oh, no crap. What do you think we do at the gym? We, if you show up and you're a hot mess because you haven't slept and you've been newborn and you're super stressed, that's immediate to us. And that's part of this language of conversation. When someone's injured, we keep them engaged in our community.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  We don't cut them out of their tribe. Like we keep them as part of their community and, and, and so that they feel safe, they feel secure, that they're, they're still a member of a, of a group and we still exercise and we talk about nutrition. So what's really happening is that You know, it's easy for people to say, even in the term mobility, people think, oh, if I'm squatting, I'm working my mobility. I'm like, no, you're just squatting, right? Ultimately, what we're saying is, do you have full access to your physiology as a human being? Yes or no? And then what are your tools to maintain that? And then optimize that. And we're gonna have to talk about your tissue quality. And we're gonna have to talk about all the other things that matter to you in the context of your life.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  Guess what? That's called strength and conditioning. That's called getting my fourteen year old team of swimmers ready to compete, right? Homework, stress, boys, it doesn't matter what the, what the demands are. Ultimately, we're trying to recognize that human beings are existing in these lives. And the things that we've sort of presented on Instagram is a false reality of what's possible and the way we should be living. So what are the minimum effective doses? And more importantly, how do I get people to be able to feel uh, when they're out of position, or they need to change, or something hurts? So they actually have a plan, because people have got very sophisticated about their eating. They're very sophisticated about their training, but they're not sophisticated about recognizing that bringing your knee to your chest is the root component of squatting or kettlebell swings.

• 9:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's interesting. You talk about the bio-psychosocial model when it comes to a gym. I recently did a podcast with Douglas Murray, who wrote The Madness of Crowds. And in that, he identifies the fact that we've had this loss of grand narrative, as he calls it. The fact that the modern, the modern era might be the first generation of people who have no reason or no idea why they're on this planet. We've had a drop away with regards to religion. The typical community that you would have had locally has now been opened up because people can make connections online. We no longer have such quite typical jobs for life anymore, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I often think about myself, the fact that I enjoy training so much. I've enjoyed exercising since I was a kid.

• 10:34Chris Williamson?

  And I feel so fortunate that that is a pathway and a mechanism which is inside of me. Because if I didn't have that, if I wasn't able to go to the gym and I didn't have the support structure of the people who are at the gym and are people who are like me. They have similar interests to me. They wanna make themselves better, all that sort of stuff. If it wasn't for that, I'd, I'd, I'd be half the human that I think I am. That outlet, that support structure, everything is more than just the movements that you're doing in the gym. It's everything else. And I think that really helps to compensate for what we might be seeing with this loss of grand narrative.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  You know, we try to remind people. So for example, you know, we have, um, I'm looking at a coach who's been coaching here for 12 or 13 years. Um, we've grown up together, you know, we, if we're in a class together, I take her class, she takes my class, we still shake hands like it's the first time. And part of that is being seen. Part of that is saying, hey, I see you and I appreciate that we're here together and that acknowledgement. So we shake hands every single time, even in people that I've been training for over a decade, coaching for over a decade, right? Who've been coaching me, we still pretend like it's the first time. It's also maybe the only time where people are getting any unconditional positive regard. You know, and why I think training in a group is so important.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  And while the gym, the traditional gym is, look, I don't care what your reason is for your health and, and training and aesthetic, whatever. But that gym is isolating and lonely. And the, the short story is that human beings are what's most important. And when we spend more time with other human beings in a way where we're supporting and coaching. For example, one of the things that sometimes I've heard in the past is that coaches don't like athletes to self-coach. You know, they don't like to coach. And I'm like, that's nonsense. The, the idea is to be able to have people be so competent that they can have these really tight feedback loops and mechanisms within the, in the structure of the group training environment.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  So it's not one coach shouting, it's coaches and athletes having these small conversations and self-correcting and making modifications. And, and being, being party to a greater conversation. You know, we say, we always get back together. We, I always point out a star baker in the class, which is actually the truth. Like, I'm like, you're the star baker.

• 12:49Chris Williamson?

  What's that? What's that mean?

• 12:51Speaker 00

  The Great British Baking Show? You don't know that show?

• 12:52Chris Williamson?

  The Star Baker.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, from the Great British Baking Show.

• 12:56Chris Williamson?

  I mean, so what, are people bringing in cupcakes? Or is that the performance of the day?

• 12:59Speaker 00

  No, that's, that's, that's the person who I thought was just move the best or you know, showed up, right? And so we have this, uh, we have this notion where we also look each other and they are like, good job. And someone, someone has recognized your effort and we try to build these feedback loops, which are, you know, cognitive, social feedback loops were just as important as making gains on your squat, right? What we want people to recognize is this has to be the only place where you can completely fall on your face. The gym is the only place where you can show up trashed and say, I'm here and you're going to be safe. You can expose your weakness, you can expose your old injury, you know, your ability to generate force, breathe hard, even your range of motion is a moving target.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  If you don't believe me, let's go take a red eye and we'll fly across the country, you know, fly across the ocean and we'll measure you the next day and see how you do. And you're going to see that you're, you're crap. And that's okay. And so what we want people to recognize is that the training stimulus is also the diagnostic tool. How am I feeling? What's going on? How does this fit into the context? And I, if I'm a Maitland trained physiotherapist, which is an Australian model of manual therapy and thinking about a systems approach to the body. But the original Maitland model was I would see someone for an injury three to five times a week. Can you imagine that? Seeing a physio five times a week? Imagine, in fact, our, the follow-up questioning is like, well, how, how did you feel after the first hour after I saw you? How did you feel after the, the first 12 hours? And now how'd you feel first thing in the morning?

• 14:30Speaker 00

  Because I'm seeing the next day and those feedback mechanisms is really tight and then my treatment would be predicated on the next thing. Who, what medical professional do you see five times a week? You don't.

• 14:41Chris Williamson?

  You have to have something very wrong with you to be seeing a medical professional five times a week.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  You're in hospital, right? That's right. And, uh, and we're having a different conversation, but you might see your coach or your training partner see you five times a week. Right? So we have to reconceptualize who's in charge, who owns pain, you know? How do we recognize that, hey, this pain is a normal experience of being a human being? It doesn't mean I'm injured. But also night sweats, dizziness, fever, vomiting, nausea, unaccountable for weight loss, weight gain, changes of our bowel function, right? Call me, problem cough, sneeze or swallow? Those are red flags. And everyone in our gym can smell out that, hey, I don't think you're just sore. You've got something going on. You've got a fever and there's some, let's go get, talk to a medical professional. Also. As you can't occupy your role in society, you can't do your job, can't play your role on this team, or there's a bone sticking out of your leg, or you've got, you know, rabies of the knees,

• 15:31Speaker 00

  you are injured and you need to get out of here. And the rest of it though, our coaches own it, our, our staff owns it, our athletes own it, right? That it's a normal experience to come in with the patina of injury, with a, with the fact that you're stiff, or you, you, you know, you came out of a, a, a bad soccer match when you were 14 and, and you, that ankle gets stiff sometimes, or you've just overdone it because you're a meathead and you're, you know, and you, and she, and she loves to do back-to-back triathlons, that's totally fine. But in this place, we actually have the one safe place. And to your point, it may be the only way that I'm not on jail, I'm not on drugs, because I figured out that I can self-medicate with exercise and I

• 16:13Speaker 00

  found a community of people that said, I'll be there for you no matter what. That's, that's, that's the new church.

• 16:21Chris Williamson?

  I think it is. I think it is. And I feel very sorry for people who do not have that natural pull towards exercise. Uh, to your point about the gym on its own, this is something I've mentioned about before, but some of the listeners, it was a long time ago I first brought this up. And I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it as well. So I came up with something when I was probably around about 26, 27, and I called it the fitness menopause. And what it felt like to me was a change in my body, what my body was there to do. And it may, meant that I'd spent eight years training purely for aesthetics. All I was bothered about was going into the gym, steeping in my own neurosis, as I had the head, the headphones in, I'm looking in the mirror, talking to myself, despite being in a gym surrounded by people, not talking to any of

• 17:05Chris Williamson?

  those people, except for, mate, have you finished on that bench yet? Can I take your plates? Blah, blah. Um, and then very quickly, I think, as I was like 27, 28, and as you begin to approach 30, you become chronically aware of your own mortality. You're also a little bit less bothered about maybe purely training for aesthetics. So I decided to make the change. I switched across to CrossFit. Um, and as this byproduct of that, bizarrely, my condition got better. I actually ended up in better condition than I'd been before because I was enjoying my Training, but my body's makeup, my body composition was no longer the purpose for my training. I'd externalized that to my performance and so many people, so many of my friends now I'm seeing that have been like, um, maybe little Instagram stars or whatever of the UK bro lifters and they get to

• 17:49Chris Williamson?

  twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty, I'm thinking, I'm watching my watch going, it's fucking coming. It's coming for, and then sheer enough, bang, they start doing, uh, park runs, five Ks on a morning, on a Sunday morning, every single Sunday they're doing that. Darren, who's one of my buddies is doing that. Another one of the guys, they'll start doing some swimming, a lot of guys I'm doing are now doing open water swimming because they've found some pull through that as well. And it's so interesting that you have this move away from what is essentially bolstering perhaps a lack of self-confidence or obviously it is exercise. But what that made me reflect on was so many people, especially young guys particularly, they take a route to bodybuilding as their first port of call because the barriers to entry are so low. But people spend their entire lives doing snatch and a clean and jerk. That's it. Whole, whole athletic career.

• 18:33Chris Williamson?

  Take me into a gym, I can do a probably a moderately competent bicep curl within about two minutes. Like it's so simple, right? And I just, uh, you know, that was something that I'd thought of a long time ago and I, I really do applaud CrossFit and these more public weightlifting gyms that are now coming across to the UK as well. For creating a community that forces people to talk. If you're doing a partner workout, you have to talk to the person that's with you. No one trains in a CrossFit gym with their headphones in. Everyone's talking, you know?

• 19:00Speaker 00

  No, well, you know what? It's important to recognize how that that is not a sustainable model, right? That go and put your headphones in, put your head down, taking selfies. It works for a minute, but also it's, you inherit the system and what you're seeing is that people are products of an environment, a product of a system. And, and it takes a minute to, to raise your consciousness and, and people come to that consciousness at different phases. I, so here's an example. My daughter, Georgia is fourteen.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  She plays varsity water polo. She, you know, has grown up and if you've ever watched a video, George is in the videos, right? And she doesn't have school on Friday and she said is, hey, can we go into the gym with my mates? I'd like to go jump into a class. So I've been waiting for 14 years for her to say that.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  And you it takes a minute to plant the seed.

• 19:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  It takes a minute to look around and say, hey, is there a better way? And this model of training on the internet, it's it's nascent, it's it's developing, it's it's less than fifteen years old. And the notion of sort of sharing kettlebells is very Russian. And if you came out of a track and field tradition, if you came out of, you know, kettlebellista or kettlebell tradition or an Olympic tradition, you had training partners and engaged in a training hall and a training environment. And that was because you just lucked into a community that already engaged in and valued these things. This is how we get together, how we train. You know, in the in the United States, I think we have a complicated relationship with American football. Right?

• 20:38Speaker 00

  And one of the reasons it's complicated is we recognize that it's it's dangerous and it's potentially splits our socioeconomic lines. But the reason I have come to believe that it still exists is it's the only time that young men in America were ever on a team, ever, where they were ever, you know, it didn't matter what your size was, there was a role for you. It didn't matter what your capacity was, it was a role for you. And even if you were a backup and you just supported the teams with scout offense, scout defense, you would you're still such a valuable member of the team and it's painful and you're hurt together. And that those things are one of the reasons that this small group training or being in a running club or swimming group really, really matters.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  And again, you know, to your point, hopefully we'll all see that there is a better way. And and the world has changed. We try to remind people that when we started this thing, this November is our official fourteenth year of being a gym, fourteen years. And we started a year before that, so you know, we've been doing this for a minute.

• 21:38Chris Williamson?

  Have you managed to have you managed to hold on to your same affiliation from the very start? Are you still paying like three hundred dollars a year or whatever it was or like two twenty dollars a year?

• 21:49Speaker 00

  It's five hundred.

• 21:50Chris Williamson?

  Five hundred dollars a year, well, that's probably about like three thousand five hundred less than most gyms that are opening now.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  You know, and you know, we we took, you know, we're we're now officially the twenty first CrossFit in the world. And I'll tell you, the style of training that we do.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  Its core values remain the same as it was 15 years ago. The difference is, we are so much more sophisticated. Why? Because we've all evolved, because we now are hanging out with way more Olympic lifters and Olympic athletes and exposed. And so the, the training, but the, its core value is that we show up. We, we train together, we play together, we compete together, right? We expose faults, everyone is down. One of the things that I, for instance, I try to do with a lot of coaches is I, this is my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law? There she is.

• 22:38Chris Williamson?

  Hi!

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Hey! Right? Seventy-two?

• 22:42Chris Williamson?

  Seventy-five in March.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  Oh, seventy-five in March. Oh. At my gym, swinging kettlebells and, uh, Getting after it. So, that's right. So, you know, the, the short story is we're getting better and better at tweaking, refining, training. But I try to remind people, hey, look, you couldn't buy a kettlebell in San Francisco 15 years ago. We had to drive down to Santa Cruz, we had to drive two or three hours to buy kettlebells. In the entire city, you know, Diane Foo is an incredible Olympic lifting coach. She and I used to drive to South San Francisco to train with the only Olympic lifting coach in the city named Jim Schmitz. You know, and, uh, we were in this basement and you couldn't buy Olympic lifting. She was like, the world has changed. You know, uh, I'm sitting here and looking at one of my staff.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  And who was an All-American hammer thrower in track and field. And he grew up snatching. He grew up overhead squatting. We did not. And we all came to that lane. And 15 years ago, I'm like, you know, people were like, overhead squats. And I'm like, what, what were you overhead squatting 10 years ago? Oh, you weren't. You were doing cable crossovers. And you were doing what, you know, what Muscle and Fitness told you to do to get bulky. And now it's okay for us to say we're a little bit better. But the, the core value is, hey, human performance, high performance, has told us.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  This are the best ways to eat and fuel. Here's the best ways to down-regulate and recover. Here's the best ways to feel connected to other human beings. Here's the best ways to warm up. Here's the best ways to look at your minimums. And I'll be honest, I really feel like physiotherapy is chasing and even medical professionals chasing what strength and condition now has become, which is a really complete physical practice and a place to, to, to remedy the holes in people's lives by making them, giving them a member of the tribe and then also developing practices which are super sustainable. I mean, no one in here is ever too skilled a squatter. You know, as you get older, you care a little bit less. I mean, I just began my deadlift not very long ago.

• 24:41Chris Williamson?

  Congratulations.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  I'm forty six years old. It's taken me this long to understand deadlifting. Like now I feel like, oh, I really understand what I'm doing. Before, as a kid, I was just doing it, right? And so what's nice then is we should be able to continue to then uh engage in a model that we've always believed in, which is let's make performance and training not just circus. Let's, let's make it matter so that we can go back to our children. We can go talk, talk to our mother-in-law about eating more vegetables and fruits and trying to sleep more and drink less alcohol and manage what you can manage. Because we know, you know, to your point, we're going to be a hundred and ten years old. That is on the horizon. And if you can get to sixty or seventy today, chances of you

• 25:28Speaker 00

  being a hundred are very, very good. And, you know, the idea now is if you're going to be a hundred years old because of modern medical technology, because of the way we can keep people alive. I mean, Yuval Harari has said it all. I mean, like, you know, we're, we are going to be immortal here in a second, not immortal, immortal, right? And, and that means we need to be thinking about this much longer game. What does it look like? When I'm forty and fifteen, sixty, what does my physical practice look like? How do I take care of mind? How do I take care of brain? All those things are going to have to be part of our conversation because we're not going to die when we're sixty and we're going to continue to work and want to train and play.

• 26:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so I did a podcast with Dr. David Sinclair from Harvard Medical School. And I asked him the question, do you think humans will ever live to a thousand years? And he said, yeah, eventually we're going to get there, which was a an interesting answer. I mean, if you PR and you deadlift at a thousand years old, that would be interesting. But, um, so, yeah, I, I totally get it, man. It is, um. I wonder how many people that that really need to start having a passion with regards to fitness and training have been brought into a gym like yours and have found have found a passion that they never really thought that they had before with this this community that they've got going on. And one of the things that strikes me, I've spoken to Dr. Quinn Hennick from Juggernaut Training Systems, I've spoken to mutual friend of ours, Dr.

• 26:51Chris Williamson?

  Stu McGill, spoken to Brian Carroll, you know, only last week had the guys from Strong First on as well. And everyone is constantly updating that OS. Everybody, all the time, they're always learning new things and integrating them and stuff like that. So, over the last 10 years or so, actually, how long Supplelep had been out, was it seven years, something like that, six years? Cool. So, since that's come out, what would you say are some of the headline changes or new pieces of information or new philosophies that you've found with regards to either training or mobility, new information you've come across? Anything come to mind?

• 27:31Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I think what we got a lot right upfront. And that was because that wasn't not based on thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of experience in grad school and lifetime being an athlete and all the coaches and McGill. And, you know, I had Stuart McGill's book in the loo when I was a physio student. And I read it cover to cover 20 times.

• 27:53Chris Williamson?

  He's the real deal, man. He is the real deal.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  And, you know, and so, you know, I think one of the things that we've realised is, hey, we need to package this so it's easier for people. We, we need to make sure that they're not missing components. We've been talking about breathing forever. It's in the first notes that I ever put out in a course I started teaching in 2008, but realised there was Even more low hanging fruit around how we can use the breath to dereg- down regulate, or use the breath to find the limits of the range at the fullest breath and the smallest breath. We can use breathing to assess our ability to get into good positions and even pressurize for maximal lifts. So I think what we've done is realize that, you know, hey, there are some things that are less effective.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  There's some mobilization that we just don't do a lot of because we just don't need them, right? They haven't solved a lot of problems for us and there are things that we've found to be a lot more effective. And so what, you know, over time, you know, you strip away what isn't essential and we've continued to do that. So, you know, BFR, Blood Flow Restriction of Clusion Training was not really a thing 10 years ago. Of course it was. Katsu's been around forever, you know. Um, but realizing what a powerful tool it was. The tools of being able to desensitize and how we've thought about who's responsible for pain. You know, that's a big, big deal, you know? How do I, you know, have a gym full of 400 people be able to make themselves feel better?

• 29:19Speaker 00

  You know, and giving those tools so that they can take those back to moms and dads. They can take the kids, they can take, you know, they, they become the combat medic. And, um, you know, in a safe, in a safe and responsible way. But what we've done is we really reconceptualize sort of the role of the physio and the medical professional and the role of the coach and the athlete and the person. And what we're seeing is that they do overlap, of course, but there's a lot more from the coach person side who, uh, they're just capable. And the world has changed. So, you know, you can, people are cooking their meat on the bone and eating collagen again. And, you know, uh, you know, the, you know, we're seeing people actually move away, believe it or not, from protein shakes and protein bars to back to this thing called food.

• 30:02Chris Williamson?

  Who'd have thought it?

• 30:04Speaker 00

  It's better for you.

• 30:06Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  Some, some of it is that we're all engaged in a grand experiment. And the greatest thing that's happened is this fundamental notion amongst the masters like McGill is test, retest and share. You'll see that the brightest minds on the planet never throw shade. They don't attack people's techniques. They're like, hey, what problem are they trying to solve? Is that a better tool than the current tools that I have? And what's nice about that is you stop, you know, this is my, my dance space, this is my Kung Fu hard style. We get about the business of solving problems and it's okay to have different, different tools and tactics. That's okay to disagree on that. But, um, you

• 30:47Speaker 00

  know, you need to, you need to start showing your work. Like for example, right now, um, there's this team, there's a little world series going on and I currently work with only two teams in professional baseball. One of them is the Nationals and the other one is the Astros and they're both playing each other, right? And I'm not saying I have any part to do with that, but it's pretty fun that I get to test my principles at the highest levels of baseball. Nick Gill is the head strength and conditioning coach for the All Blacks. They're doing pretty well in the World Cup right now. They've been using our stuff in ready state for a long time, right? Nick's a good mate of mine. Do I have anything to do with their success? No. But I get to test my theories and principles against them and see if I can support them and make them more efficient.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  So at some point, I need to see your Olympic medals. I need to see your associations. I need to see what groups you're in. I need to see how you think of public health. I need to see that you, one-on-one is great, but that, I'm interested now in this notion of social justice and do your, do your models and, and ideas scale. Because if we can't begin to walk this back to high school and walk it back to middle school and walk it back to elementary school, then we're just perpetuating the same old bullshit that we've done where people show up poorly prepared, down regulated, eating like crap on the internet, not, not in a physical culture, not tied to a group of people. And then we start backing out of that. And that's a much more difficult conversation. So, you know, this has got

• 32:12Speaker 00

  to be about, uh, public health. This has got to be about, you know, this sounds totally cheesy. The original vow of the Bodhisattva is like, dude, if you're a coach, you're working to make sure that all people are better movers, better athletes, better people. That's the central tenet of the coach.

• 32:29Chris Williamson?

  It sounds like-

• 32:29Speaker 00

  And I will say that the best athletes and the best, oh, excuse me, the best coaches in the world, all are on that vibe. They're like, they'll call you up, you can call them up, they'll help you. You know, there's no shit talk amongst the best because they're too busy working.

• 32:43Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't agree more. Having been very fortunate to have shared either oxygen or bandwidth with some of the smartest people on the planet over the last 18 months, everyone that I speak to is, they're so concerned with trying to come together with even me to walk away from the conversation knowing more than they came into it. Absolutely everyone has this insatiable hunger for improving themselves and the people that are around them. Like, Stuart McGill doesn't, I asked him before, I was saying, "Oh, I'll, I'll took a photo together, I'll tag you on Instagram and blah blah", and I was like, "Oh, you might, you might see it once it goes up", and he's like, "I don't, I don't have Instagram, I don't do this". All that he's concerned about, all that Dr McGill's bothered

• 33:25Chris Williamson?

  about is trying to focus on his work and do the thing that's in hand. And yeah, the best guys in the world, they don't do that. We live, my particular industry is a zero-sum game. It's a very, very small market, about 10,000, 12 to 15,000 people, and it means that if someone is going to your event, they're not coming to my event and vice versa. And I'm seeing that kind of mentality globally. It's like there's 7 billion people. There are enough to go around.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  There's a scarcity mindset, you know, and the internet is a confusing place. You know, I go on Instagram and really try to understand what I see, and I see a lot of gym fuckery. I see a lot of wasted time, and that's okay. I'll never comment on it, right? And it's not that I think that, you know, we can't be more efficient, more effective, but I really try to understand what problems people are trying to solve and then evaluate critically what's happening. And it takes a minute, it takes context, you have to show your associations. We want you to talk about, you know, the people who are influenced you and where you came from, and it's okay. It doesn't make you less, you know, and that's okay. That's, you know, this is a, this is a newish market,

• 34:36Speaker 00

  right? It's a new field, and it's only been around for 10 or 15 years, which it really has. It's gonna take a second for those things to equal, you know, to equalize, and the cream will always rise to the top. Um, we saw or listened to Jay-Z talking about excellence, right? And he's like, definition of excellence is performing at a high level for a really long time, like a decade. And being hot means that you're really popular for a year or two. He's like, and those things are not, you know, conflated, they're not the same thing. And so we see a lot of people get hot and it's super hard to be around for a decade. You know, Mike Boyle has been around a long time, you know? He must be doing something right, or he's managed to fool tens of thousands of athletes and coaches. And, and, and, and the thing is, I'm like, are we that dumb?

• 35:21Speaker 00

  That we can't tell that something works or doesn't work? Is that what you're selling? And it may be that this is all placebo and belief effect. And I'm like, wow, you know, that's a lot of gold medals and a lot of national, you know, it's effective placebo. And, and I'm willing to say that, you know, but I'm also willing to say, is there a better way? Show me a better model and show me a rationale for that thinking that way. And that's okay, it's okay to disagree on those things, but I need to know your rationale. But you shouting at me on the internet is childish, it changes nothing.

• 35:50Chris Williamson?

  My dad's always had.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  Show me your work.

• 35:52Chris Williamson?

  My dad's always had this saying, which is form is temporary, class is permanent.

• 35:58Chris Williamson?

  And, and I think that that, that kind of epitomizes what you're talking about there. Um, and you, you're right as well, the fact that it is so easy for people on the internet to throw shade. Like, anyone can criticize because you have to build it. Law of entropy, right? It's much easier to break something than it is to build it.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Well, you know, you guys, this thing going on in a little Brexit right now, that's everyone's talking about, right? And, um, it's, it's, it is easy to be an opposition party. It's much easier, it's much more difficult to go in and work at a, an organizational level or systems level. Well, you can come in and, and do your grassroots guerrilla. I'm special, this is my secret school program. But I'm going to be more interested when you start to, to take a swing at improving from the top down. And at the whole thing, you know? And, and I, I think it's really, it's crucial that. You know, you can show your associations and that your models work across cohorts. So this isn't a, you know, this is someone else's thinking, but a good model is explanatory. Explains what you're seeing.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  It's predictive, it predicts what's gonna happen and it's repeatable, right? You can communicate it. And so if I watch someone teach a coach, does it explain what I'm seeing? Does it predict what's gonna happen if this person runs or moves at speed or under load? And can lots of coaches communicate and understand it? You know, so we start with that. And then the other, the other piece is for me, it's gotta hold true that I don't teach children one thing and Olympic athletes another thing. It's all a continuum of skill and ability of complexity that, you know, the things that I'm working on, every human being should be able to flex and extend their spine, right? And if I, everyone should be able to run and cut and jump and play frisbee.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  And so if I'm teaching one skill for fitness, but another skill for actual expression of fitness, then that ends up being a really confusing idea. So we need to be able to explain phenomenon across cohorts, across ages, across templates. And because the internet has connected so many coaches and so many, so many movers, we can see what first principles are. And more importantly, we can see what first positions are, what first patterns are. And then that's gotta be mutually accommodative, right on top of what the physiology says is a better expression of the position. And it's gotta explain gymnastics and it's gotta explain a little bit of good thing. And it's gotta explain running and swimming. And what's nice about that is it's the same shoulder over the last 10,000 years. And people have been thinking critically about getting more out of the human body

• 38:27Speaker 00

  for as long as there've been humans. We are obsessed with being better than ourselves and we always have been. Alexander invaded where? Invaded Afghanistan in like 50 B.C. Like, are you telling me that they weren't talking about food and logistics and paying? Well dude, people have been sophisticated for a long time. And just because we're modern and we have this internet and like you and I are talking to each other via sorcery, doesn't mean that someone hasn't been thinking about how to go faster. So, you know, when you drop into yoga and you're like, wow, this is really clever. Yeah. Joseph, Joseph Pilates wasn't fucking around, you know? And if he was still around today, he would have advanced his practice. You know, so.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  When you see a system or methodology that is stuck in tradition and doesn't take in new information and can translate, then it may be valuable. But you know, for me, man, I wish I had, I wish I had fifty Russian STEM units. They're great, but I don't. And that doesn't scale when I'm working with a bunch of teams, and that doesn't scale. So now for me, it's valuable to say, hey, does this hold true? And then can I shake my thinking up and down, same principles, to talk about public health at Google, to talk about a little back pain at Google? Why, why do we have to say it's totally okay to have crappy posture, and posture's fine, and posture doesn't even matter, and you can do whatever you want? I'm like, until you need to swim, or take a breath, or rotate, or throw a ball,

• 39:54Speaker 00

  or put your arms over your head. So why don't we just make your base position the position of being a more functional human being, right? Sure, you can do that. You can be a demi person, and I'm not even talking about pain, I'm talking about output and function. So quit, you know, there's no more complex structure in the known universe than the human brain. That's it. You have a Brit there named Adam Rutherford, who is the greatest writer about genetics, and that's his phrase, the human body, the human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe, attached to a physiology that is robust and tolerant and designed for survival and adaptation. But we've got to get beyond, it's okay now

• 40:36Speaker 00

  because it doesn't hurt, and it's not costing me anything, into, are you gonna be a hundred years old, and you're gonna be stuck bent? Because that shit sucks.

• 40:43Chris Williamson?

  That's what's gonna happen.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  And it'll be too late for me to be like, told you.

• 40:48Chris Williamson?

  Fifty years ago, told you. Have you watched the Game Changers documentary?

• 40:53Speaker 00

  Uh, no, but I have had a lot of conversations about it.

• 40:57Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay. Have you got any intention to watch it?

• 41:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, we should watch it because uh I I think one of the things that we're seeing right now is people are very, you know, nutrition comes very confusing.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  I just read an article about that Chris Cresser put up about just being keto, right? And and and carnivore based. And I I think what's interesting when you look at our our traditions, we've always eaten plants. And whatever very protein sources are available to us. I think the human being is tolerant to be able to burn whatever it wants, to use whatever it wants. I think that what we've seen is that people love to go keto or carnivore because they can be lazy again and then just take supplements to make themselves better. Right? And so if I if I'm having to exercise and then I have to do all the supplemental work, there may be some issues with my movement practice. If I'm eating a certain way, but don't get enough B vitamins or essential fats and I have to add them in with a pill, that could be another thing.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  We also need to separate out potential drug use and anabolic use. We need to separate out and not always use context. So in historical context, can you imagine what the quality of the meat was when the gladiators were fighting? And maybe they found out they didn't get sick in that context. So we're like, oh, gladiators don't eat meat. You know, I'm like, well, think about the Roman meat population problem, right? So I think what's interesting, if you look at Kate Shanahan and her book Deep Nutrition, you'll see that there are fundamental principles to the way people eat and have always been so. I think you can turn up and down the dials of how much protein you need. It's difficult, you you know, I um, you know, the fastest way, people are like, Kelly, I need to lose weight.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Like, I need to lose muscle, right? We get this conversation sometimes, and I know that's madness.

• 42:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, who is that? Give it to me.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  So you're too big and I'm like, no problem. Here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna become a vegan. And I'm gonna get you on a bike and we're gonna bike two hours a day and you're gonna be a vegan. And I guarantee you, you will blow through your musculature very quickly on that that regimen. And now we have all these protein powders and processed foods that allow us to have multi protein sources that are vegetarian based. Ultimately, though, absolutely a choice like religion to eat the way you want. But what you're gonna see is that. People have been eating tofu for a long time, not eating meat, right? Not eating the flesh of animals. We've been eating the animal itself. We eat organs. We connective tissue. We don't eat steaks, right? So something's weird there. Um, we eat the whole animal.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Eat the brain, eat the eyes, eat the organs, right? You crack the bones and eat the marrow. You ate all of the, you know, plant matter you could get into your hands. What was available to you? And what you'll start to see is that we tofu. We drink whole milk dairy if it's available to us. You know, we cook our meat on the bone. We don't, you know, we try to get as many different kinds of vegetables as you can. And so when you come in, imagine that you have an athlete who's been eating protein shakes and In-N-Out burgers and sausage rolls. And all of a sudden they start adding a ton of plant matter to their diet. And guess what happens? They feel better. Gut biome turns on, energy goes up. They lose weight because they're not eating these calorically dense processed foods. They're eating plants again.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  That seems pretty reasonable to me.

• 44:17Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  But then I'd say, let's put our money where our ethics is and our, you know, if you're a 22 year old kid trying to survive, you may be able to afford the really cheap eggs and the, the, the, the, the bags of frozen chicken, which is like, I'll put in quotation marks, chicken, right?

• 44:35Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  As you get older, you were like, hey, I can put my money into this, this animal that has a name, is pastured, right? That is sustainably sourced, that I'm closer to my meat. I eat from this, like, there's a whole lot of variability there. So I think what it proves is, man, are we eating as well as we're eating? You know, what is the basis? And then the second thing is I need to see what the experiment looks like at 20 years, 30 years and 40 years, right? And I'm going to need to see your blood panels. Because I'll tell you that most vegetarian proteins are handled by the body like a carbohydrate. So if you're highly inflamed and spiking your blood glucose and your A1C is off and you're like, my plant based diet is great. And meanwhile, your testosterone is in the tanker, your IGF looks terrible, you're B

• 45:19Speaker 00

  vitamin deficient, vitamin D is shite, right? I mean, let's, let's make sure that we're actually measuring. And I can apply that same rubric to your standard American diet or your, I eat plants with a little bit of protein diet, right? So what you'll see is that the rules are the same. And the thing that we're really careful about saying is that, hey, there is variability in human beings. Your squat width and my squat width is a little different. My torso comes forward a little bit more, and your torso's a little bit more upright when we front squat. Based on our anthropometry, your genetics look a little different. If I just ate fat all the time, I would be a disaster. I would have disaster pants, my, my blood pressure, I just don't handle all the saturated fats that my friends do, or Italian, right?

• 46:03Speaker 00

  So, let's just say that there are first principles always, and I think it's absolutely a good thing to try to eat more diversity. Um, our friend Kate Shanahan points out that, you know, we used to probably eat close to forty to sixty kinds of vegetables and fruits in a year. And I'll ask you, can you name twenty vegetables?

• 46:21Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  How many, when's the last, when's the last time you ate five different kinds of vegetables? And what you're seeing is, holy shit, what we're doing is we're saying brown rice and broccoli and a sashimi chicken breast is the answer to nutrition and performance. And all of a sudden, what we saw was that, man, we're missing all the micronutrient density. So if you move to a plant-based system, fantastic, eat enough protein to signal correctly, do you need, I mean, I can see where they're coming from. The byproducts of sometimes the gut fermentation of eating all of this meat may not be the best thing for you, right? It has a consequence. We used to have this, uh, I used to be a professional chiropractor and we had this stove in college that we'd cook on. And it was called the MSR International.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  And it would then diesel, white gas, kerosene, like it'd burn everything.

• 47:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  And one time we were like, let's burn diesel. It says it burns diesel, let's do diesel. So we turn it on, black smoke, it's just boiling everywhere, like it's just charred everything, and the jet clogs. So we have to take it apart, clear it out, turn it back on, blah, black smoke, like our noodles, our ramen smells like smoke. It's just shit, and we're like, oh, it can burn diesel, it just shouldn't burn diesel. And I think if you realize how tolerant the human genome is, then there are a lot of ways in. Test, retest, you need to show me your blood panels, we need to talk about what this looks like over the long haul. And I think you absolutely can be vegan and absolutely can be vegetarian, you just have to be very disciplined about it. Fantastic, great, I'm in. But you need to show me your work.

• 47:49Chris Williamson?

  The problem is, the problem is that all of the things that we're doing. Whether it be to do with training, whether it be to do with nutrition, whether it be to do with our mindset and the way that we structure our days. There is such a gap between the cause of whatever your choice is and the effect down the road. And that vacuum, that gap is exactly where charlatans are able to move in and potentially commercialize or monetize. That's also where disinformation can go in. That's where social campaigns can garner momentum and all sorts of stuff. Everything that we've actually spoken about today, whether it's from a strength and conditioning perspective, whether it's from a more holistic mobility side, whether it's the diet.

• 48:30Chris Williamson?

  All of these things are very, very complex and people have different goals. What I want out of my training and my diet might be different to you or somebody else.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  100% and I, I think when we come back to first principles and then we can say, you know, if you. You're like, I heel strike because heel striking is the best when I run, right? You don't want to change it? That's totally okay. I mean, you don't want to use your heel cord and you're so fast. But you have to come out unharmed at 20 years, at 30 years. And if all of a sudden you have destructed heel cords. And you're injured and your heel bone is terrible and your back is, and you can't run anymore, then I'm like, maybe we shouldn't think differently about that experiment. And, and that is, that is difficult, right? And it's difficult for us to see inputs and outputs. So if someone went, went super plant-based and then they stopped going super plant-based, would you say that was a failed diet?

• 49:25Speaker 00

  Right? Cause it didn't work for them. How would we know? So I'm like, yeah, plants, wow. And then how do I measure or keto? Right? So ultimately, you know. It's difficult for us to say inputs and outputs because we have, people haven't eaten this way for a long time. You know, or, or people who have been vegans for a long time aren't really, really strong, you know, necessarily, you know, those, those populations do different things. And, you know, I think it's, it's okay to look at the variability of the human being and say, where am I? What are the best choices I can make? What are the ethical considerations? But again, if we're talking about optimal, let's cut you in half, let's count the rings, let's look at your blood panels, let's look at how well you're managing your tissue health. And what I can unequivocally say about this topic is that I don't think you're eating enough

• 50:09Speaker 00

  vegetables with these, period. And show me when you are. Show me when you've had too many. No? And if, you know, you know, one of our friends said, and this is very crass, but you watch a television show about a superly morbidly obese person who's been failed by society, they're taking down a wall to wheel the person out. That person is surrounded by processed foods, not apples and bananas, not heads of lettuce. And so, you know, to the extent that we are trying to say this is better, man, I think, I think that's very reasonable. If you want to pull back on your meat consumption and up your plans, how did your performance go? Or are you just lifting in the gym? Because that's not performance. You know, are you, how many of my Olympic athletes are on the medal stand on those diets and able to sustain

• 50:54Speaker 00

  that diet and sustain that eating? I haven't talked, I met many of them, right? Do they need as much protein as like point seven grams per pound? You know, that, those are different conversations, right? So tuning up and tuning down, does that hold true across cohorts? So as I age up, I lose my muscle mass, my signaling comes down, do I need to eat more protein or less protein because I'm, my signaling has come down as I've gotten older, right? And my engagement weight bearing, what about sarcopenia? So if I'm micronutrient dense and I start to have, my body's going to protect clotting mechanisms more than my bone growth, right? So, or muscle growth. So we start to see osteoporosis, we start to see a whole bunch of other things show up. So it's difficult for us to say inputs

• 51:36Speaker 00

  and outputs. What we have to do is look at what our eating traditions have been, what are the overlaps? And then let's start running the experiment, but let's actually make the experiment not about value, right?

• 51:46Chris Williamson?

  I think everyone gets so tribal and emotive about this, right?

• 51:49Speaker 00

  Oh, and, and, and that's okay. I mean, that's, that's all right. So I'm like, great, I'll see you, I'll see you on the medal stand.

• 51:54Chris Williamson?

  It's muddy as the water. It's, it's, it's hilarious to watch, but it doesn't help us come up with what is the effective solution. And it is-

• 52:01Speaker 00

  We were, we, we were in New York and we saw this thing called the pagan diet. It was being advertised.

• 52:05Chris Williamson?

  The what? Pagan diet?

• 52:07Speaker 00

  Pagan.

• 52:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  Paleo plus vegan.

• 52:11Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 52:12Speaker 00

  Plant-based diet with small amounts of animal protein. And we were like, you mean food? You know, so.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  One of my friends is a woman named E C Sankowski and she's optimized me nutrition and she has this notion, first things first, let's improve the caloric density of your diet by getting you to eat eight hundred grams of vegetables and fruits a day. Eight hundred grams, just hit that mark.

• 52:36Chris Williamson?

  Fuck me.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  So that's how far away we're having a conversation about is this movie about being plant based, good or bad? I'm like, hey, I eat meat and eggs and cheese and all these other things. But I also get eight hundred grams of vegetables and fruits or a kilo of vegetables and fruits a day. That's my base.

• 52:56Chris Williamson?

  Are you able to, are you, are you able to stick to around that?

• 52:59Speaker 00

  Piece of cake. But I have to have, I eat salad for breakfast. I eat a palm full of blueberries is eighty grams. So what you're seeing is, oh, you know, we, we villainize fruit, right?

• 53:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 53:11Speaker 00

  And I'm like, seriously? You think an app like eating two apples is really the limiting factor to your performance today? What are you gonna eat instead? You know, like a protein shake, a highly processed Impossible Burger? So there's a lot of ways where we can start to improve density and improve quality. But um, you know, let me know how that goes for you. We know when you start eating it, you know, so you, oh, you're plant based. Oh, that means you're drinking plant based shakes. That's not food. That's a food like product. So let me see you go to town and eat massive plates full of vegetables and massive amounts of fruit and massive amounts of good grains and massive amounts of high quality fats. And maybe you need to supplement with some fish collagen because holy shit, you're not getting any connective tissue in your diet.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  And that's a problem if you're an athlete, right? So that's okay. You're allowed to eat and live and sleep as little or as much as you want. You can't make the statement that this is the best way for children to develop or the best way, especially when I'm like, hey, you should eat eight hundred grams of vegetables and fruits. And you're like, ah.

• 54:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  Like that's impossible.

• 54:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  You know?

• 54:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man, you're so right. So one thing that I wanted to to finish on, we've touched on the word first principles a few times today. If you were to um talk about the first principles that you aim to have a holistic life from overall. Do you have a number of first principles that you try and stick to? So a guiding, a guiding rule set that you try and have in your mind at all times?

• 54:37Speaker 00

  Julian and I protect our sleep like it's our job. It's the most important thing. We, we, and we control what we can control. We protect our sleep. And we just prioritize, prioritize for ourselves and our children because we see that that is, that's the game. We stopped drinking predominantly because what we found was that it really affected our sleep. And we also had to show our, our family, our kids that like we didn't need alcohol to come down or to have fun or, right? And dude, someone pulls a great bottle of wine out, we'll have a glass, right? We're at, we're at an, you know, an amazing show, we're gonna have a vodka tonic, it's, it's okay, right? But what you'll see is that we've gone to drinking twice a month, you know? Because we, we were like, hey, this really has a huge cost on our sleep and our performance.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  And so we start to realize that, hey, I can start to begin to organize my thinking around protecting my sleep. So for example, around this first principle, I don't, I personally don't drink caffeine after four o'clock because it will mess up my sleep. I'll sleep, I just won't sleep as well. And so, you know, we started doing a lot of our soft tissue mobilization, just simply rolling out foam rolling ball stuff before we went to bed. Why? Because it caused us to relax and to sleep better. So suddenly, you know, we all sleep with iMasks and earplugs in our house. I don't sleep with earplugs, so I don't want to hear the, all the fights and all the scary stuff. But everyone else sleeps with iMasks and earplugs in a pitch dark cold room because it's about protecting the quality of the sleep. So suddenly you start to see this organization around sleep as a first principle.

• 56:05Speaker 00

  Juliet and I try to walk 12,000 steps a day in addition to our training because it takes that much to load, to accumulate enough fatigue, to decongest after the loading that we're doing. So the same way that we're saying to people, hey, you can't just eat protein shakes and balance bars and bulletproof coffee and pretend like coffee has no micronutrients and it's 700 calories. Like you've got to be fucking kidding me. Let's make a better decision. Right? So the same way we're thinking about that, we're thinking about, you know, movement. So if you're going to the gym and slamming yourself, but then you're sedentary the rest of the day, I guarantee you, you're not decongesting and unloading and reperfusing and, and moving your tissues enough, you're gonna get stiff. You're not, you're not gonna

• 56:47Speaker 00

  look great. Why? Because humans have to move. So however you want to get that, and if you live in a city, believe it or not, you may be hitting your steps just because you live in a city. Could be that the living in a city is, is more important than like driving in your car from to your country house. So all of a sudden then we start, we start to organize ourselves around vegetables and fruits. That is the primary organization of our eating, vegetables and fruits, plus the best available protein that's, you know, that we can afford. And then, you know, then things start to layer in. So you'll notice that I said sleep and move and vegetables and proteins. And holy crap, that's not sexy. That's free. And you can control that. And on days where I can't train, I still move my body, still protected

• 57:30Speaker 00

  my sleep. So when it's time to go, I can go. And really that's, that's what we're trying to see is that, hey, let's not make these lists. Let's control what we can control. And then if you want to drink, drink when you're on vacation, drink when you're not stressed. Don't drink when you're stressed out and training hard. Don't, you know, don't, don't sacrifice your sleep because you're watching Netflix. Protect that shit, especially if we're talking about going the distance.

• 57:54Chris Williamson?

  Couldn't agree more, man. Couldn't agree more. I'm now 15 months sober because I wanted to see if I could do 18 months in an industry where everybody drinks and I wanted more time. I wanted my sleep to be better. And the listeners will know that they've heard, they've heard this story a million times, but it's, it's the single best upgrade that I think most people in the 21st century can give themselves is to have a sustained period of sobriety with a reason for doing it.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  But go ahead and just test, retest. How do you feel? How's your sleep? How's your body composition go? How's your mental acuity? We realize is that alcohol is a tasty, tasty poison. And one of the reasons we, alcohol was so important to us in the past is it was safe. That alcohol wasn't poisonous. You could mix water and rum. Water and wine. You knew that that was safe. It was an important, stor-able way to sow grain, to stir grapes, right? It was, you know, imagine, you know, I'm just saying that it had its utility. We maybe don't need its utility as much. And, um, you know, and when you start to track those things, especially if the thing you care about is going faster and lifting more. You're like, hey, that's gonna have to come at a choice, the same way this chocolate cake is.

• 59:06Speaker 00

  And what we try to have people do is I'm like, look, is chocolate cake a problem? No. Do you eat chocolate cake every day? Do you start eating chocolate cake at 11 o'clock like you do Pim's cup in the summer? No, like, you know, so you don't start eating it like, let's, let's, let's have a brunch and start eating chocolate cake every hour on the hour for the next 14 hours. That's crazy, right? And so, you know, again, don't take our word for it. This is on you. Test, retest. Do you feel better? Are you happy with the way you feel? Great. Do you look great naked? Are you planning on being 100? What are those best practices? And it turns out that the performance community, how did I meet Kate Shanahan? The physician who's talking about food because I worked with her with the Lakers, right? Because those are the, those are the eating recommendations she put in into high performance basketball.

• 59:51Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man. Kelly, today has been absolutely fantastic. Um, for the listeners who want to check out more, where should they go now? Where's the hub for all things Kelly today?

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  We are at the ready state. And, uh, you can see how we coach and think on the Instagram. Um, we've got a couple of podcasts ourselves. We, we don't, we're not like you, we're not prolific. We have a season, something we're interested in, and then we go silent for a while. You know, we've talked about chronic pain, we've talked about kids, you know, so, uh, we've talked about the history of CrossFit a little bit. Um, you know, all things, you know, we ended up having to care about sleep and hydration and walking and nutrition and stress. Because that was why your tissues sucked and why you're so stiff, bro. You know, because, because you're living in some kind of, you know, demi-human state. So I, I think that's. Really ultimately worth saying is, hey, we can't strip out your kneecaps or your hamstring

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  stiffness from the way you're existing in the world. We better talk to our smart friends who are experts in those things. So we're at the ready state. Come see how we coach. Come hang out with us.

• 1:00:57Chris Williamson?

  Awesome, man. I'm sure that you will have a number of people who are very interested to find out what's going on. Final thing, what's happening for you next? What's next on your schedule? Have you got anything coming up that's going to be cool? You've got two big teams playing against each other at the moment. What else?

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  Well, you know, let's see, you know, we're Phase One of the Ready State. And one of the things that we're really great about, and we're stoked on is that you have two weeks of trying it out, and we're going to teach you how to mobilise in those two weeks. So if you've never mobilised or thought, hey, I should do some of that, or are my positions enough, come on board for two weeks. And in those two weeks, we'll show you how it works, and we'll show you what the thinking is. Cancel after two weeks and already you've had a free education. We're going to come to Asia, our Phase Two. We just have a lot planned, you know. There's another edition of Supple Leopard coming around the corner eventually.

• 1:01:46Chris Williamson?

  Oh, there we go.

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's, you know, we're figuring it out. We're smarter. And if we were still saying the exact same thing we said six years ago, you should be alarmed. If you're not seeing the core principles stay the same, but the application of the principles being involved, then, you know, you should run the other way.

• 1:02:03Chris Williamson?

  Couldn't agree more. Kelly, today's been awesome. Everyone that is listening, all that we've talked about will be linked in the show notes below, of course. Go and check out the Ready State. Any questions, comments or feedback, leave them in the comments below or get at me at ChrisWillX on all social media or get at the Ready State. And Hassel Kerry and Kelly, and he'll have to come on and reply to some DMs or something like that. Kelly, it's been awesome. I hope you have a really good day, man.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  Thanks, brother. Appreciate you guys.