101 How to Get the Maximum Performance Out of Your Body (When You Run, Eat, and Live) with Kelly Starrett

"It's a system designed to break you." - Kelly Starrett If you enjoyed the episode, find show notes and more at www.lewishowes.com/101. Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is episode number 101 with New York Times bestselling author Kelly Starrett.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  What is up everyone? Thanks so much for joining the School of Greatness podcast today. Very excited. We are on number 101. Just reached the 100th episode. Last week, super pumped about what we were able to create together as a community for the first 100 episodes on this podcast. Again, thank you guys so much for the journey. Thank you for being here, for commenting, for sharing, for subscribing, all that good stuff. It means the world to me and I'm committed to making this even bigger and better for the next 100 episodes. So make sure to stay tuned, keep sharing this with your friends and feel free to email me with suggestions for who you'd like to have on.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  If you know someone specifically who's doing something huge in the world, epic individuals who are achieving greatness, then, and you think they're worthy of being on the show, then send me an email over on my contact form at lewishouse.com. We'd love to hear who you think. And yeah, this is all to support you guys on your growth to greatness. So thank you so much for being here. This episode is with the one and only Kelly Starrett. Now, if you don't know who Kelly is, he's a New York Times bestselling author of a book called Supple Leopard, and it's a pretty sweet book that came out a year ago, but he's got a new book out. And Kelly is an awesome human being. I've actually met him once, seen him a couple of times, but I've watched a lot of his videos.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  An awesome teacher. He's a, he's a coach, a physical therapist, author, speaker, and creator of the blog called mobilitywad.com. He also has revolutionized how athletes think about human movement and athletic performance.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  So for me as an athlete, I'm all about movement, performance and using my body to run at an optimal level at all times because if my body runs at a high level, then my mind and my production can run at a high level for what I'm trying to produce and create. So I'm excited to bring Kelly on to talk about all these different areas about the body, about running, about performance and about some of the, uh, the best practices on what we can be doing with our body and what we can be eating and stretching and all those different things. Super fun today, guys, for the one and only Kelly Starrett. So let's go ahead and dive in with this episode and jump right in.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness Podcast. I've got my man Kelly Starrett on. What's going on, Kelly?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Hey, how are you, man?

• 3:03Speaker 00

  Doing well. And we were just talking before about how we first met, although I don't think it was like, it was literally like three seconds. It was like, oh, hey, what's up? Shake your hand through Kyle Maynard. But the first time, uh, and that was at a CrossFit Games, uh, somewhere up in some suite or something. But the first time I heard about you was through, I believe Tim Ferriss, like posted something four years ago or something about you. And I remember thinking, oh, who is this guy? Interesting. You know, I was friends with Tim and I was like, if he's promoting you, then you've got to be someone worth worthwhile. And, um, another story about how I heard about you also was I was, um, working out with a buddy of mine. You'll appreciate this. I was working out

• 3:48Speaker 00

  with a buddy of mine back in 2005 and six and, um, he was doing these workouts that were like really extreme workouts and I was training to be a pro football player. I was playing arena football. And, uh, he said, hey, and come train at my gym with me. He was a buddy of mine that I played college football with. I was a wide receiver. He was a wide receiver and he was like training people after college. So he was working me out, getting me ready for the pros. And funny story, uh, he's like, yeah, I'm gonna go do this thing. There's like this competition I'm gonna go do, like working out. And he got like 19th place or something the first year he did it. And then he's like, yeah, I'm gonna go try to go back. It's like, there's another one in a couple of weeks I've been training pretty hard for. And my goal is to get top five at this competition.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  And I was like, oh, okay, cool, whatever. And then, um, yeah, I see him like a month afterwards and I was like, oh, yeah, man. How did that competition go? He's like, oh, I actually won. And that competition was the CrossFit Games. And my buddy's name is Graham Holmberg. And I know you know Graham, right?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Grambo. I are, you know, little known fact is that Graham and I have a secret pact to have an arranged marriage between his son and my daughter.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  I'm not sure if that qualifies as we're friends or not. At least we're business allies.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, Storm is the man. I love that little kid. That's awesome. And I know he's been up to San Francisco at least once or twice to come train with you. And he has amazing things to say about your, your training and your philosophy. So I've always been excited to connect with you. And finally, now finally, we have the time to do this and I'm very pumped.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  You just hit me on sort of two aspects. One is to use the Tim test. Do you pass the Tim test? And, you know, and I appreciate, you know, Tim is a collector and sort of organizer of, you know, best practice and efficiency. And it's definitely fun to get involved with he's going on. And, and then, you know, you hit on the other side, which is, you know, one of the things that we specialize in and have the most fun in really is we sort of say, okay, we've got some of these people who are the best athletes in the world. But that's, that's only compared to the world. That's not compared to themselves. And Graham, you know, one of the things that happens is that we're taking and inheriting athletes from, you know, who are products of the system and the system designed to break you.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  It's designed to get as much as we can out of you with as little input as we can give you. And then some other kid is coming down the pipe who's more magnificent than you are.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  And, and any, we ask every professional athlete we know, would you let your kids be professional athletes? And in two seconds, they're like, no way. This is a terrible life. This is like, this is like a life of squalor. And we're like, ah. And um.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  You know, it's funny, it's the dream for every kid or for most like athletes as a kid. It's like you want to be a pro athlete. That was my dream. And then now after and I played arena football for a year and a half. I had went through many injuries in college. Uh, you know, Graham can can tell you I broke six ribs back to back seasons. You know, I broke my wrist, had to have surgery and I could barely bend my wrist back now, you know, doing uh power cleans is nearly impossible after a certain weight.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  And you can have another surgery, so you can do thrusters, bro. It's totally good.

• 7:00Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Well, you know, this is, this is, I think, is really the heart of of the conversation that we're having now is saying, hey, you know, i- is that the nature of sport that we're just gonna chew you up? Or have we figured out enough now? Cause you know, football's a little bit different beast.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  It's such a.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  You know, the the injury rate in in the NFL is a hundred percent. So we can guarantee you're gonna have contact related injuries. And arena football, if you're a wide receiver in the arena football, like you're so legit because you're gonna, you're gonna catch it into the.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  The walls.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  The walls.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  You know, it's the best. So what it really comes down to is, you know, aside from that, are a lot of these issues preventable? You know, we, we have so many athletes who aren't able to express athleticism later on. They're like, well, I, you know, I, I have retired now because my knees are shot. I'm like, what do you mean your knees are shot? Like you're 24. And you've got another 70 years on these puppies, whether you like it or not. So I, I think where we are and what's interesting is twofold. One is, you know, we, we have to take the long view and that say that, look, you've gotta try to come out unharmed. And if we're not taking the best lessons of sport, because sport is really about sort of human self-actualization.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  It's it's sort of, you know, the highest expression of the human physical art. I mean, that's what, that's what's why it's so captivating, right? It's competition. It's all these things. But if we don't take the lessons learned about how to eat and recover and adapt and have good positions and how to train, if we don't take those lessons and aren't able to spin them backwards and apply them to the rest of our lives, then sport is just circus. And you might as well be, you know, one of the gladiators in the arena fighting till you die, or you're one of the Christians that, you know, they release the lions on. And, you know, and we have to move beyond circus to the, the concept of, one, if we start playing the long game, we will get more out of you as an athlete. You might be able

• 8:56Speaker 01

  to compete much, much longer because by the time you're in your 30s, like, let's take, let's take Drew Brees, for example, you know, and I happen to have had good luck to work with Drew, and, you know, he is so hard to beat now because he's in his 30s, and he's seen so much football and his chunking ability, you know, his ability to process information and make rapid decisions based on patterning is insane, right? So if we can give that guy another five or six years, then he becomes just really difficult to beat. I mean, you just can't beat him.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  And so, I mean, take that and take that idea and transcribe it to any set of athletics, right? So, on the one hand, and on the other hand is that, you know, if we injury-proof, if we come up with a better set of systems that, that supports athletes during, because I, I really feel like it doesn't matter what sport you're at, you know, it's, this thing is a business. And, you know, I don't, I don't follow any one sport per se. Like, last night's a Monday at Football's On, I watched it for a half hour, you know, the Giants are in the playoffs, you know, I don't, I don't obsessively watch, you know, all our local teams, but I'll watch any sport. But what ends up happening for me now, as you know, having been behind the scenes and part of the, you know, the modern industrial sport complex, is that, you know, it's a machine and it literally is like watching two businesses

• 10:13Speaker 01

  play. I'm like, this is like Coke versus Pepsi, you know? And when you, when you sort of the shiniest, it doesn't, it doesn't denigrate or attenuate the experience of the fan or the extraordinary nature of the athletes themselves, but I think that you have to look at it with this eyes, that this is a machine designed to produce a product and it is gamed against the athlete. It is gamed against the human being. And what we've, we've accepted

• 10:39Speaker 01

  For a long time that that was the the the deal we were willing to make to have a shot at being, you know, a pro to play this sort of this game.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  So now I think though is that we can, you know, we can start making better decisions about, hey, how do we manage concussions? What diet do you need to be on afterwards? You know, how are we, you know, going to get you a blood test to make sure that you haven't wrung your anterior pituitary too many times and you're not making growth hormone? I mean, there's just some things that we can do now that keep you alive for that so that your whole life isn't defined by these orthopedic injuries you had when you were nineteen.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Man, yeah, I'm I'm excited to dive in even more about this because, you know, I had to, I retired playing football because I was diving to catch a ball and I dove into the wall and broke my wrist. And was in a cast for a full arm cast for six months, bent at ninety degrees. I had a bone graft, which was just miserable. And they took a bone from my hip and put it in my wrist. And then for another, another year, I was basically recovering with, you know, the atrophy from my arm and just trying to get the strength back and just trying to straighten my arm. It was painful to straighten it for another six months because it was bent at ninety degrees for six months. And it's really still, you know, very minimal flexibility. I don't even know what percentage wise to go all the way back, but it doesn't go as far back as I as I would like it to.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  And I am a huge believer in physical therapy and recovery techniques. I've got Doc Trish who works on me, you know, twice a week, just on my whole body because now I'm thirty one and I'm, I play on the USA men's national team for a sport called, an Olympic sport called Team Handball. And I'm actually playing against Puerto Rico this week with the team. And so I definitely understand the value of maintaining and being smarter about the efficiency of my body. But how does someone be efficient and be smart for the, you know, the seventy more years that we have, hopefully, while at the same time giving it your all on the field every, at every moment?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Well, the idea is that, look, you know, we look at sort of the orthopedic problem nature as sort of falling into two camps. One is, there is sort of the catastrophe, a 300-pound lineman rolls into your knee, you get blind. So, I mean, there's those things that you just can't control. Like, you know, a girl goes up and comes down on her friend's ankle at the net of the volleyball. There's some things that we just are difficult to control. But, there's a whole lot of things that are absolutely preventable. And that preventable is shoulder impingement, torn labrum, working in inefficient positions, ACL tears that are non-contact related, herniated disc, scrum. I mean, if we look at your jumping mechanics, and you know, the guys at Sparta, just in San Jose, just came up with a really excellent force plate test, where they're able to really quantify

• 13:22Speaker 01

  your jumping mechanics, and then show you sort of where you're dumping force. Either through the low back, through the ankle, through the knee. And they've just come up with this really excellent model of seeing where you're not sort of being able to, you know, generate force and return force very efficiently in this force graph. And, you know, you don't need to have a force plate, as long as you can understand what you're seeing when someone's jumping. But, so much of that now is, okay, so people are like, "Yeah, so what? I wasn't as powerful, but I'm still the best." Well, that collapsed ankle is the mechanism for your plantar fascial problem, and your bone spur in your ankle. You know, the collapsed foot is, I mean, now you've destroyed your arch. And the collapsed ankle also leads to Achilles problems, because your Achilles is not pulling straight up and

• 14:07Speaker 01

  down anymore. Right? And if you collapse your ankle, then also your knee comes in, and there's that valgus knee, knee in movement, where ACL unwinds, and now, that's my MCL, that's my ACL. I can't stabilize my back as effectively, because my hip function's muted. And then, all of a sudden, go down, now, you're probably overextending during your jump a little bit, and now, we have the mechanisms for stenosis, and herniation, and like, boom, check, check, check, check, check. And so, you know, and that's not me colliding into another human being. That's, you know, what we're seeing wholesale, is that... In the world of strength and conditioning, everyone is coming to an agreement about the things that are the sort of archetypal movements that humans should be able to perform.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  So if you're with Pavel and Dan John, you're gonna see that there's, you know, a squat and a hinge and a pistol and a lunge. All those are the basically things that the hip does, right?

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  You're gonna see that the kettlebell carry, that front rack position, overhead. You're gonna see the swing, which is an internal seated position. And you're gonna see something that looks like a press, a push press, or a push up, right at the bottom, where the elbow comes behind the back. And so what you've seen is, while Dan and Pavel have worked it out, if you go see, work with Udo Portal, you're gonna see the same language of his hip movements, right? Irwan Makor, his hip movements. And then they're gonna do movements that have been sort of gathered in to express the range of the shoulder. You know, if you study Pilates, then you're gonna get very close to the same language, but not implement based, right? So it's your own form. But the language is the same. This is what the human being does. We need to touch these positions. If you understand yoga,

• 15:48Speaker 01

  you're gonna start to see that except for some of the pulling in those positions, there is pushing and unweighted iterations of putting you into those same shapes. They're the same shapes. And so now, enter CrossFit, which is, people don't understand, which is a movement practice, you know? So when CrossFit says something like constantly varied, what they're saying really is, hey, are you touching all of the shapes and movements that your shoulders and hips do? And that the language of your spine, braced or globally flexed or globally extended? And then are you systematically challenging those things with some load, with some cardio respiratory demand, right, with some speed? And so ultimately, at the end of the day, what you're gonna find is that it doesn't matter.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  What you're doing, as long as you're touching these shapes and you're practicing having full range of motion and control through that full range of motion, and then challenging that by becoming stronger in those shapes and getting your heart rate up a little bit, and pretty soon, what we're really arguing about is, well, do you prefer kettlebells or dumbbells? You know, do you want to press or do you want to, you know, dumbbell press? And so I think what we can really get down to is, well, how many times a week do you need to squat? Two times a week or three times a week? I don't know. That's between you and your coach on the sport. But what we can unequivocally say is, do you have full range of motion? Yes or no? And can you express control through this full range of motion? And what we've seen is that we have athletes who can generate freakish amounts of force,

• 17:16Speaker 01

  but do not have full physiologic range of motion and control, and they're stiff. And that stiffness either wears out the joint or wears out tissue or destroys one of the insertions, or we end up defaulting to the sort of the hacked position, which is the knee in, internally rotated shoulder, rounded back, right? And positions that we know aren't elegant, like intrinsically, everyone knows what a good position is and a bad position. But we haven't given that language to the athlete, and we haven't started it early enough that everyone can identify that's a good position or a bad position.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I really wish I would have had proper training as a child.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  We didn't. Well, you did. And you did at the time, and I'll tell you what, we didn't know what we know now. In the last 10 years, I mean, you know, read Power to the People by Pavel, and you're going to see there are some really good ideas in there, but ideas that don't necessarily scale or aren't as sophisticated as we have now. But, you know, people have been solving these sets of problems for as long as there have been people. But now we have the internet, now we have coaches, now you can actually have access. And I'll tell you, if we don't get it right in this generation, and there's a whole bunch of athletes who've already accumulated these bad movement patterns, right? And I'm already seeing them in my daughters, who's, you know, nine, not her, but her friends.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  And what really happens-

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, you'd slap her around if it was her.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, I might take the iPad.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  I love being slapped.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  That's right, I love being slapped. But what, you know, what's happening though is that, you know, we, we haven't empowered people to sort of know what this is. And this is, this is what I call the third, the third sort of estate. The first estate is your psychology and your mental function and your practice and all that, right? Which is, which is vital. And there's a lot of people spending a lot of time on, you know, deep learning and looking at how skill acquisition and what is that? Sort of mental practice. There's the physiologic state, which is sort of nutrition, lifestyle. You know, if you, look, if you're a 31-year-old executive, you know, in your, in your 30s and you don't sleep and you eat like shit and, you know, and you're a stress ball, I, I don't need to run the numbers.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  I can tell you exactly what you look like when we cut you in half. And I can tell you exactly what's gonna happen, when you're gonna auger in, because we've already done that experiment. So that's the second estate. But the third estate is this body. And it's not about exercising harder. That's the mistake.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Is that people think, I just need to train harder. You know, just go out and run a marathon. No, no, no, no. Let's make this about technique. Let's make this about diagnostics that I'm constantly aware on my own self. You know, my wife and I, we weighed ourselves every morning for the last like 15 years. That's what we do. We get up in the morning and it's not that I'm obsessed with my weight, right? And I, I don't have a negative body image thing, but like, it lets me know, sort of gives me a, gives me a template of like, oh, look at how much ice cream I ate last night. Or, hey, I only ate twice yesterday, plus a snack, because I got busy. Right? And boom, if I, if I'm not eating regularly, I just, I shed weight. I just kick out all the muscles, my performance sucks.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  So, my point is, we've got all of these pieces around that, that we know we should be managing, but we're not literate when it comes to understanding what our body should do and how to perform the basic maintenance on that. And it's very simple. And when we start getting people into that practice, then we start taking a whole lot of the, the problems off the table. And now we can really start to see what's going on. And that's, that's what's amazing.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so what are some of these basics that we should be focusing on?

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the basics are, do you have full range of motion? Yes or no?

• 21:05Speaker 00

  When you mean that, you mean in all areas of your body?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Just because, you know, you know, people are willing to pay big sacrifices. They're like, look, I play football, I don't even put my arms over my head. Until you land on your shoulder in this location, right? Until you're trying to out, outjump that other receiver.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Right? And go for position, you know, until, so, you know, I'm a baseball player. I don't, I don't lift overhead. And until you're throwing a ball overhead every single time.

• 21:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  So I, I think the bottom line is that we have established what is full physiologic range. And you should be able to hit that cold. You know, we named the book Becoming a Supple Leopard. Because, you know, the concept is that that leopard, and I was just in Africa and I saw this happen. That leopard can attack and defend at full physical capacity. It doesn't warm up.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  It doesn't activate its glutes. It doesn't like have a pre-protein wide shape.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  It's not stretching, you know, doing dynamic stretching.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  That's right. You know, and you know what? If you look at kindergartners booking for the playground, they don't warm up either. Immediately full range over motion. You know, my daughter, we were just at a friend's house yesterday and she's like, I'll race you home. My other, my youngest daughter is like the most beautiful runner I have ever seen all time. In fact, she's in track, right? She's six and runs four hundreds.

• 22:22Speaker 00

  Wow, that's incredible.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  But she's running all out barefoot on the concrete. And guess what? Doesn't complain about her feet. Her mechanics look exactly as she does when she's wearing shoes. You know what I mean?

• 22:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  And so what, what happens to us that we become stiff? And we really lose this normal capacity. You, when you warm up, you should just be warming yourself physiologically, warming the engine, getting the tires warm. You shouldn't be reclaiming range of motion.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  That's what the movement practice is. We should be practicing reclaiming function because flying in the airplane for six hours is going to destroy my hips. Because running a half marathon, a train for half the marathon is going to make me look like a dysfunctional runner. Why? Because I don't squat, I don't sit, you know what I mean, et cetera, et cetera, right? Playing football, you're going to get stiff because you, the contact, the pressing. And so what ends up happening is We look at the gym as training time. I need to become fitter and stronger. And that has been our answer for like a hundred years. Right? Get stronger. Just get stronger. I mean, you've heard that, right? And just put some more weight on.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  You move the weight, let's make it heavier. And you know, and guys like Pavel.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  We've never ever stretch.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Right. Well, of course not. You don't need to. I come pre-stretch coach.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  You know, and versus saying, hey, I don't have full range of motion. I'm going to mobilize to get into that full range of motion. The stretching doesn't work.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  You know, hey, my quads are stiff. I'm going to deal with that stiffness.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  By stretch, by stretching.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  That by stretching, which doesn't work. So that's why people don't do it. So.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  So you're what you're saying is you should never be stiff.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  You should not be stiff.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  You should always be mobile and flexible without having to stretch.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  That's right. So which means that I need to have a movement practice.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  And a and a mobility practice that helps me to re sort of set the system.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  Wow, it's like a completely different mindset and philosophy.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  You can spend all the time in the gym, being in the gym, or you can all spend all the time on the national handball team.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  One for handball. And if people don't know what handball is, it's probably the coolest.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  Sport.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  It's so cool. And it's so like Middle European.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  Yes. So you have seen it. Most people think it's the handball in Brooklyn, but it's, you know, obviously a a very intense, physical, like rugby style game.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Think about the capacities to do that. And now you're only thirty one. And you know, I'm forty one. And you should see the athletes I hang out with who are fifty one. You know, and and how long can we sort of, you know, have this high function? Instead of sort of just taking movement options off the table.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Which is sort of what we do. You know, when I was, I am a little obsessed with running these days for the obvious reasons.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  But when I was at, one of my friends in high school was this brilliant runner, you know, and what like he's that, he's that like, he was one of those freakish kids who just off the table could blast.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  And he, he just jumped in on the Big Sur Marathon at like age seventeen and he led to mile twenty one. And no one knew who he was. He's just a seventeen year old kid, but he'd never run twenty miles in his life. And then he imploded, right? But one of our friends, Dabs, came over to us while we were eating pancakes, because that's what you do in high school, eat massive amounts of pancakes. And I get puffy.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  And it was like, he's like, enjoy your running kid because when you hit forty, your knees are shot and then that you don't get to run anymore. And we were like, whoa, bro, you're harsh and that's so harsh, bro. And, uh, you know, and literally that was his, his mindset. Hey, I ran until I wore out my knees. I wore these clothes with my bones and now I don't get to do that anymore. And that's the mindset that we have. Oh, I don't lift weights anymore. No, I just, I just awkward job because it doesn't hurt my joints.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  Wow. So what you're saying is we should be able to have full range of motion of our joints until we're, you know, dead, basically, if we do, if we do it right.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Why, you know, it's going to take you a little longer to warm up because your, you know, your tissues are a little older. But, you know, man, we have a whole generation of people growing up on fish oil and,

• 26:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  and not eating grains. What's that going to look like? You know, who are sleeping eight hours a night.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, like, there are some things that we've done gener- generationally different. But what, at what point did you, do you stop healing? You don't.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  What ends up happening is we end up getting stiffer and stiffer and stiffer and stiffer. And it's, you know, this is the, this is the analogy that we've been, I've been using lately. And it's from my friend Gary Reinal. Says, if you knew it was going to snow an inch an hour for the next twenty-four hours, you could go out every hour with a broom and sweep the snow off the, the deck, right? Take you five minutes. Or you can wait twenty-four hours until you have two feet of wet snow on your deck. And you're going to need a different tool than that broom.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  And, and the problem is we've been waiting for the snow to accumulate and for the deck to break before we start to realize we need to clean the deck.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  When we change our mindset about that, this is what it means to be human, right? And we can make lifestyle changes. You can, you know, sit on the floor, you can stand at a workstation. You can drink more water, you can have a movement practice. But now we're getting to the brass tacks of how much better can you be as a person? And this is, this is really the interesting conversations because this is the conversation of scale. This is the conversation of where do we put this in? You know, at what, what level do we have this intervention? How do we change culture around PE and middle school? And you know, this is, if we don't scale it backwards, if we don't take a chance, then we're just part of the same Ponzi scheme that we've been doing forever.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  This is fascinating and it's reaffirming, uh, you know, I've been doing, you know, one to two sessions a week with my doctor, uh, who does, you know, a lot of this stuff that you're talking about and follows a lot of it. She's been doing this thing called the Prague method. I think that's what it's called. I don't know if you've heard of this.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  I haven't.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  It's, I think it's called the Prague method. It's some like mobility type of philosophy in Prague. I think it's a Prague method. I gotta, I gotta, I gotta double check that. But basically what it is, is they've, um, developed these basic baby motor patterns or moving patterns. And so what my doctor does now is she puts me into these like one month old, three month old, six month old baby positions to allow me to get back to my natural state as a child, basically. And re, you know, restabilize those motor mechanisms.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Well, you know, what you're doing, you know, honestly is simplifying movement pattern down to, you know, freestyle movement. Show me your body weight control. Show me that you can, you know, we do a lot of things that look like bear crawl.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  You know, as part of our warm up, quadruped movement, you know, and because there's a lot of good range of motion and stabilization skills built in. So, you know, one of the things that we want people to do is spend a little bit more time dicking around.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  You know, and, you know, and I, look, if you're, if you're lucky enough to be able to work with a master practitioner, that's what we want you to do. We want you to have a long-term relationship with a provider, a chiro, an osteo, a physiologist, a physical therapist, and that you know them for the next 20 years. That when you have something you can't solve or you've wrecked yourself, go get some help.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I highly recommend that.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Is on you.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  It looks like the tenements and the basics. And so if you can see, understand all of a sudden like why Greg Glassman was like, hey, look, You've got to have the basis of gymnastics down, right? And, and people, people think, oh, that means ring dips, right? And we're like, not really. And, uh, you know, you know, can you do hands? So Ito Portal is a great example of a guy who says, hey, look, we've really missed the forest for the trees on this thing. You know, what do you mean you can't do a handstand yet? And what do you mean you don't know how to fall backwards or fall forward?

• 30:18Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  These are, these are the elements. And in that role, in that play, are those developmental milestones that many of us don't get? And you know, I was just at the track with my daughter. She's six, watching these middle, uh, the junior high kids play football. And watching these kids get up and off the ground, it's terrible. Watching some of the, the kids, you know, and, and some of it is we have not taught movement skill as a skill. You should not be able to graduate from the second grade until you can pick up your backpack with your back flat, until you can jump on an appropriately high box with your feet together so your knees don't collapse, so that you can do a forward somersault.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  And all of a sudden you're seeing, so we, uh, my, my wife and I, you know, we work with a lot of military groups and as many professional sports as you can shake a stick at. And a lot of this comes down to, hey, what are the noxious stimuli that we can remove so that you don't have to overcome all this BS over and over again? And one of those is standing, you know, versus sitting. And so what we've noticed is we are having athletes do a lot more standing, being at standing stations, minimize the required sitting that they're doing. And suddenly their hips aren't as tight, they have better ankle flexibility, they're clearing the lymphatics because their muscles contracting, right? All of those things. But we just were, again, we're saying, well, hey, it's great when we start this in college or in the military, but wouldn't it be better if we started in middle school?

• 31:45Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  And we just adopted our daughter's classroom because we have a really progressive school, and it's just a public school, right, in California. But we went ahead and put in standing desks. It's the first standing desk in California.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  Wow, that's incredible.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  And you know what, you know what everyone has said? They love it.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  So check this out. So the research is that, and this is the great research out of Texas A&M, that kids who stand burn an additional 25% more calories a day.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  So it's a lot easier to burn an additional 25% more calories a day doing nothing than it is to pull 25% of calories out of Coke and all the things, like big, big food business. So what you've seen is we're trying to make a run around the food business, which is marketing to our kids. It's difficult to change eating patterns. We're not going to be able to support PE because we can barely support teachers. So we know what's easy to stand. Kids who have high body mass index, right? Who are technically classified as obese, burn upwards of 35% more calories standing. So you've just taken a whack at child obesity and ADHD and TMGD of orthopedic dysfunction, right? And they don't, then the kids don't get short, they don't get stiff, they don't start modeling.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  And this is the intervention level where we have got to teach movement skills. And the problem is we're waiting around as parents and as friends and aunts and uncles for the, the high school or the middle school sport coach to teach it. But that coach has got to be playing with kids who already know how to move. And what's happening is that those coaches are really good at the coaching their sports, right? We're a volunteer sport system, but if we don't prepare those kids, then I can guarantee unequivocally that we will see the same number of injuries, but just in college or in high school or, you know, until I, I had, I ran my, you know, we, we hear this all the time. I, I did teaming training, I ran my first marathon, I injured my knee and I haven't run since.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  When was that ago? Two years ago, you know? Wow. That was an expensive marathon, bro.

• 33:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, right? Man, this is fascinating stuff. You know, I'm 6'4", about 225. And my entire life, I've always had like this lower back, you know, kind of curvature in the lower back. And, and then I always wanted to kind of be on the same level as everyone or, you know, not have them crank their heads up so high. Uh, so I kind of like slouch a little bit with my neck down and my shoulders down so I could be on a reasonable level with people. And I've really developed patterns that I've had to. Change over the years to really make sure that my shoulders are in in the socket. You know, I've had Carl Polly is a good friend. He's been on the show a couple of times as well.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  And I know you're you're buddies with him and he's, you know, he's come on the show and talked about how to sit properly and how to stand properly. And it's it's definitely like when I look at other people and still myself, I get to read adjust constantly to, you know, have just a proper standing technique, you know, it's like I've done so much bad things to my body.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  You know, so some of this is, you know, Carl, just everyone knows is a coach at my gym and is one of my best friends. Right. And, you know, not I'm not trying to steal Carl's thunder, but, you know, we got I got Carl interested in that because we saw that people couldn't translate what they were doing in the gym to what they were doing in real life.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Which is what we've got to care about, right? That's the point. It's not just training for the gym to be look good naked. It's about

• 35:14Speaker 00

  All day long.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  It's developing skills and right. And, you know, and in Supple Leopard, we said, hey, look, your combat stance is your everyday stance. That's what Musashi wrote in the Book of the Five Rings. And when you there's, you know, 400 years ago, this this Japanese swordsman was like, hey, look, you can't hang out like you're not going to move. You got to hang out exactly the way you do when you fight. You've got to hang out exactly the way you do when you run, you know, and, you know, I argue a lot with people about foot position when we squat. And, you know, because people are really like, you're like turning feet out, makes it easy to squat. I'm like, why should we make it easy to squat? Are we using squatting as fitness? Are we using squatting as diagnostic tool?

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Because what's a recipe for disaster is if you walk like a duck and cut like a duck and jump and land like a duck, you're going to get injured. That's the mechanism for injury. So there's my six year old daughter, who is, you know, a running phenomenon, pulls literally her heel hits her butt. She's like, it's the fastest kid I've ever seen. And as she was hanging from this kind of tree branch at the beach the other day, like four feet off the ground, as she jumps, she lands with her feet straight, absorbs force, her knees don't come in. And at what point should I be telling her to start turning her feet out? No, no, no, we squat. Because that's what you did when you went and absorbed the force all the way down. It's just a squat. You should, you know, I mean,

• 36:36Speaker 01

  There's so many of these mistakes that we're seeing because we haven't understood what is best physiology. We haven't understood what is best mechanics.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  We haven't understood that we need to care about it. And so suddenly, when we do, you know, just on Twitter today, we put up, we're like, look, you want to be a good runner? Number one, stand with your feet straight all the time. Walk with your feet straight all the time. And start to re-pattern yourself so that your ankles and feet work like ankles and feet.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  Hmm, that's crazy. Yeah, you know, back in college football, it's like in the gym, doing squats. It was all about ankles out. It was so bad.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  We didn't know.

• 37:12Speaker 00

  We didn't know, man.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  You know, and it's interesting, the defensive lineman for the Saints, the line coach, you know, he pulled me aside, he's like, Kelly, you've got to help me get these guys' feet straight. He's like, power runs in lines. Their feet are turned out, they get cut, they get beat. And when I get them, but they can't do it. And I was like, well, coach, do you think it matters that they're squatting their feet out in the gym? And they were like, he was like, yes.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  And I was like, great, that's a great place to start, right? And so, and so, you know, I think that's where we start to go, is we start to connect in the dots. And we haven't had the capacity. This is not a failure of omission. You know, this is not, we're doing something malicious. It's a fact that we haven't connected the dots early enough. And I'll tell you, as you can attest, if you think the problems will be solved at the next level, because there are better resources, you're wrong. Pressures are higher, there are fewer resources. I literally have professional athletes who don't want their teams to know about their problems and don't believe the problems can be fixed, come over to the house and work quietly and secretly with us so that they can go back and play on Sunday.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  Wow, that's crazy.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  It's crazy because, you know, they, they see it for what it is. Hey, I can't have that go on my record. They can't know that both knee surgeries have failed. And they can't know that, you know, because I'll lose my career, you know? And so, you know, we're looking at this thing because, you know, that head coach is under a lot of stress to win. It's big money.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  It's a business. It's not about the person's health anymore. Well, it is about their health, but it's like, you've got to play to the end.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  So you know what we want to do is you know like my my nine year old is obsessed with volleyball right now and it's all driven by her and I'm like well you can play beach volleyball till you're dead you know you can play beach volleyball as a short girl you know and and you know what we're we're trying to get our kids to do is develop lifetime movement skills so that you you can go jump into and learn a new sport you're gonna pick up surfing you're gonna pick up skateboarding and and how do you then the question is and this is where Carl and I are in lockstep is what does it look like what are the the base skills the base root language of mechanics and motor control of technique so that we can create an operating system that is

• 39:27Speaker 01

  infinitely malleable and infinitely adaptable and you know that is at the same time a diagnostic tool and I think that's where we've been um that's where we've been making great gains and we're gonna see the tide change once and for all.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  But isn't it I mean do you feel like it's too late for you know athletes who are 25 already or up to to start changing everything they've done their whole life with their their movements their stretching their working out and start repositioning isn't that almost more dangerous than to just continue doing what they're doing?

• 39:59Speaker 01

  And that's and that's what really people don't understand is that when you tell me work to optimize your mechanics it's free money it's free efficiency and free injury prevention so what we practice is you know is it more dangerous for me to get you squatting and swinging a cannonball and jumping land with your feet straight no because now I'm starting to relay down it's gonna take longer because you are already in the middle of your sport and you've done something a hundred thousand times but we're not talking about you know here's an example I have no problem opening up the hips of my Cy Young Award winner pitchers you know why because they instantaneously will affect that new change.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Into the technique, which is good technique, but they physically can't express the good technique. And so it's not like we're stretching something out. We're only restoring normal motion. Does that make sense?

• 40:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  It's not like you're, okay, I'm suddenly hypermobile. Where's my shoulder in space? If you don't have the range of motion, then you're going to work around it and still throw the ball 90 miles an hour. But if I restore the internal rotation of your hip, then all of a sudden my UFC fighters are punching harder. And it's not like they don't practice good technique. And here's the key. All best technique in the world is the expression of good physiology. But just to the sport, people figure it out because we're obsessed with being fast. We're obsessed with living weight. But can you imagine in Russia and like turn of the century, they're like, Dimitri, like bring your knees in. And, you know, internally, oh, sorry, Dimitri, that's sorry. Don't do that again. That was terrible.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  And what's happened is the evolution of humans, we have learned technique. But now we're figuring out, oh, oh, you can't eat, you know, Popeyes and drink juice before you play.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  Gosh, man, that was the, we used to just have so much pasta and pizza and like carpet out the day, the night. Here's the challenge, man. I can't believe that I was able to perform at the level that I did. Because every game in high school and college, you know, I played basketball and baseball and football and track. I was always yawning in games. I would train so hard, right? I was like the hardest trainer, the hardest worker. And, and then in the middle of the games, I would just be like yawning or exhausted. I wouldn't be able to recover. And I was like, man, I just trained so hard. Why am I so tired? And it was just like a gluten pasta world for me, you know, and, and pop and, and it was a constant candy.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  And I just had no clue about proper nutrition because no one told me.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  It's not that no one told you. They didn't know.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  No one knew.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  They kept that information from you, you know? And, you know, technically that's called postparticular glycosuria, which means right after you've eaten, your blood sugar spikes and you get sleepy.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  So tired, man. I don't know how I performed.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  You know, John Wellborn, who played in the NFL for about 10 years, you know, CrossFit football, brilliant, brilliant thinker about strength and conditioning and nutrition. You know, his mom used to ask him, do you want two or three? And that was pancakes.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  With every meal. So in order to feed her sons, you know, he's a huge guy. He's 300 pounds, you know, and like 8% body fat. He's that guy. And, um, you know, she'd be like, two pancakes or three, hon? And then, you know, he ate three pancakes every meal. And now he's going back and it's like, Mom, you were trying to kill me with pancakes. And, um, you know, I, I think that's the, the issue is that we didn't know. And we didn't have what's sort of best practice. And now it's, it's starting to change. The key is there is a generation of strength and conditioning coaches now coming into the system who are all of this last decade, who understand that, hey, we have to pay attention to down regulation. It's not just about ramping you up, but it's also about.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  What's that mean?

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Well, can, can you, you know, everyone understands sort of the fight or flight response. Right? That, yeah, like you're getting up. I'm having Serge Jack 3D before my WAD, my workout, right? It's all about getting up. But one of the problems that we have is that for our soldiers who are on mission and sleep deprived, or for our athletes who play in a huge game, you know, and have gotten up, up, up, is that they don't have any mechanism to get down, down, down. How do you turn off? How do you activate that parasympathetic recovery switch?

• 44:21Speaker 00

  So how do you do that?

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Well, exactly. We, you know, one of the things that we see all the time is people are measuring heart rate variability. They're measuring, you know, through a mega wave. They're looking at, you know, the sort of sympathetic, parasympathetic tone. And the problem is that people do not have ways of, you know, so they're, they're, for example, do you sleep with your phone in your room? Yes or no?

• 44:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Every time that blue light goes on or it pings when you're going to bed, last two hours, your brain gets a massive serotonin boost and your pineal gland thinks it's waking up time. So you don't make serotonin. You don't start to, you know, you don't make melatonin. You just don't, you don't start to think about going to bed. Right?

• 45:02Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  So.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  Even if it's on vibrate?

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Do not have your fucking phone in your room. And I use the F word, that's the first time, because people don't realize that some of the, you know, all, any light in your room is causing your brain to freak out. And you can do some crazy things, like, we experimented, we got these amber colored glasses that you can just get on eBay for like, Amazon for like, three bucks. And it just filters out the blue light. And if you filter out the blue light, some people change the light bulbs in their room to be orange. But the idea is that you can start prepping your body for thinking, hey, there's this natural time of the day where I'm supposed to unwind.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Right? That's for example. Number two is, you know, you can make sure that you're sleeping in a cold, dark, quiet room. For three, no caffeine afternoon. I know you can go to sleep after having a cup of coffee, but you're gonna sleep like crap.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Number four is that we want people to start doing some soft tissue work before they go to bed.

• 45:57Speaker 00

  Really?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  So, one of the reasons we save all of the soft tissue work for after we train is that we find that it has a huge parasympathetic response. Which means that if you get a massage, how do you feel after your massage? Like, you wanna go snatch a hundred kilos or fight someone? Or do you wanna take a nap?

• 46:15Speaker 00

  You wanna take a nap.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  So, we see that that is the same, same, uh, you know, issue. And if, if you do a little gut smashing, you lay on one of the balls we have and, and roll on your, literally roll on your, on your viscera, your body starts to freak out and shut down like, it's time to go to bed.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  Really?

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  What are these balls? Like a little med ball or like a little Bosu ball or?

• 46:36Speaker 01

  You could, you could lay on a, you could go get a princess ball from like Walgreens, any, any hardware store.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Like, you know, one of those princess balls?

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, just a little rubber bouncy ball thing, right?

• 46:47Speaker 01

  That's right. And throw it in your gut, try to do some diaphragmatic breathing in there. Right? And then, and there's some other things you can do, like the 5H2P, the phosphatidylserine. You know, there, there are some, some nutraceuticals you can take to sort of augment and help the quality of your sleep. But, you know, without even doing any of that stuff, a cold shower before you go to bed.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  You know, can help reset your sympathetic nervous system. And in, there's some things that we know that allow us to be able to, you know, basically turn off. But we're, we see athletes brag all the time. Say things like, you know, after a big game, I gotta stay up and play, uh, you know, I gotta play video games all night. And I'm like, wow, that's, that's terrible. You know, and if you know, you had to jump on a bus and get back to, you know, two in the morning and then you're playing the next day, then that sleep is hugely important. A lot of pro athletes we, we talk to actually, the only way they can turn off at night is they have to smoke marijuana. That's their only mechanism to down-regulate because they're so messed up. So, you know, that's what we need people to start looking at is all the aspects of their

• 47:47Speaker 01

  performance. And it's not a big deal because my kids sleep in a dark room with no blue lights. You know, they have a pair of those glasses that they want to use them when they read. You know, there, there's just some things that we start to do that's become habit.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  And when we start applying those best practices across teams, across military, then we start correcting a lot of the issues, I know. And then we can talk about whether you should have ice cream or whether or not there should be gluten in your diet or not, right?

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Hmm. Man, yeah, this is fascinating. I've had a, a couple of sleep experts on. Amir Rosich, uh, came on and did, uh, told me his practices for sleeping and how we really need to be getting eight hours of sleep every day. And he's talking about sleep debt. He's like, you can never get it back.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  No, debt, it's not debt. It's like sleep bankruptcy.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, sleep bankruptcy. That's what I mean. Yeah, yeah. But you can't get it, you can't like sleep more to like recover what you didn't sleep, right?

• 48:39Speaker 01

  No, and you know, and we, um, we work with a company called Gene Solve out of Stanford, which is a company that does really rigorous actionable genetic testing. We're not testing whether or not you have the BRCA gene. We're testing whether or not you process omega threes or whether or not you have a kind of collagen that reacts poorly to certain antibiotics, right? That's the kind of thing we test for. You know, what kind of, what kind of, um, you know, what kind of do you, are you a slow responder to aerobic exercise, for example, right?

• 49:06Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  And plus a really rigorous blood test. And what Dr. Lee says out of Stanford. It's like, look, with his executive people, you know, that they go through these peak periods of stress of developing, you know, a new startup or a big, you know, acquisition. It takes 18 months to backpedal out of that stress state.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  Really?

• 49:27Speaker 01

  And, you know.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  18 months?

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you've been putting the hammer down for six months or a year, it can take upward 18 months to recover your physiology from that.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  No way.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Everyone knows you need to sleep eight hours, but if you're honest about that, I bet people get eight hours of sleep one day a week. You know, and I'll tell you, I don't think, if you're training hard, I don't think eight hours is enough. I think it's closer to nine or 10 hours.

• 49:47Speaker 00

  It's true. I mean, I was sleeping, you know, I had my first practice today after a few months of not playing with the USA handball team. We were just down in Uruguay a few months ago, playing in the Pan American Championships. And then I just had a long weekend, business weekend, went to bed at like 1 a.m., got up, took a flight for seven hours to Atlanta from LA with delays and everything, then took an hour and a half bus ride to get to Auburn, Alabama, which is where we're training at. And then I went right from the bus, five minutes later into practice. And I tell you what, man, I felt like crap yesterday. I was like making mistakes left and right. I was, I couldn't wrap it up and down the court. And I woke up this morning feeling like I need to sleep in for another four hours.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  That's right. Well, you, A, you did, B, you know, classic example of just being crushed mechanically. Cause I know you were flying first class.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Right? And you had a whole sleep down pattern and, you know, you stretched the whole time and you were totally, you're totally hydrated and you had your little paleo meal box, right? You know, there are some things we've seen, you know, and the idea is to try to remove as much craziness as you can. And, you know, I was, I work, have the pleasure of working with the kids at Arsenal, you know, the physios there. And one of the things they did that cost the club very little, but had a huge impact was they had Herods start catering meals to their soccer players. And that meant like they just got steak and salad and, and you know, a sweet potato for dinner, delivered to their house. And guess what? Players ate that instead of eating chips, instead of eating, you know, drinking soda.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  Fry stuff.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  And they saw an immediate improvement, right? I was out working with the WWE recently. So all the, you know, John Cena, all the entertainers, right? Seth Rollins. But Triple H has done the most amazing job of creating a training table for his athletes. That is the single best training table I have ever seen in any sport. It is the best, highest quality food. It is the most progressive. And I'm like, these guys get it. They're starting to put their money into their athletes.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  In a way that is very, very inexpensive, you know?

• 51:55Speaker 00

  It's, I mean, I've learned so much about the diet and the nutritional side of things over the last four years. I remember when I moved to New York City a few years ago, and now I'm in LA, I put on about 30 pounds. And again, after I kind of retired from football, I was still eating crap and eating the desserts without training as much. So I put in about 30 pounds. Everyone started calling me Fluus for Fat Louis. And my sisters would be like, oh, hey, what's up, Fluus? And, and that's when my ego started to be like, okay, I'm, you know, my, when I saw my underwear roll over itself because my gut was like so big, I was like, it's time to do something different and started actually researching on what I could do to be, you know, healthy again.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Well, what's, what's amazing is that you just kept, you didn't change anything. And here's the piece. And this has happened to so many people. Well, I've always eaten like this. But it changed. Well, my, my, my stress went through the roof. My sleep went through the roof, went down. You know, I stopped training at the level and, and nothing changed. You know what should happen? When you stop playing pro sports? Nothing. You eat a little bit less, but nothing changes. That's, that's the only difference, you know? And, and, you know, like you say, you know, now there, you know, if you go into the paleo sphere, there's, it's, you know, I appreciate guys like John Berardi of Precision Nutrition, you know, he's like, look. Once the macronutrients are met, my athletes are eating salads and getting what they need and they're eating high lean proteins and high quality fats.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  It probably doesn't matter if they're having a little ice cream. I'm gonna be perfectly honest.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  Really?

• 53:22Speaker 01

  This doesn't matter. Yeah, he's like, this doesn't matter so much.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  Really? That's a good sign for me.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  You know, but the issue is, you're not eating like, you know, you're not eating five bagels and half a pizza, right? You're, you're being really responsible. Is that ice cream every single night?

• 53:35Speaker 00

  No.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Or is that ice cream, you know, I, I think, you know, you make, when you start looking at it that way, but that's after you've gorged yourself on salad.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  You've, you've actually eaten, you know, if you look where I was a year and a half ago, I probably put on a solid 15 pounds.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  Really? How much do you weigh? How much do you weigh now?

• 53:56Speaker 01

  I'm 231.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  What are you about six foot, six one?

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Six one and a half.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  And, um, you know, I just got my body fat tested. You know, I did one of those body fat dunk tank things.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  In the water, yep.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, uh, you know, it turns out that what made a big difference was one, one of my good friends, Jesse Burdick, um, who's an amazing powerlifter, was like, hey Kelly, you're just not eating enough. You just don't eat, you just get busy and you skip meals.

• 54:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  And so subsequently, we, we ended up, um, you know, he, he just hammered me. And so just by eating regularly and then, um, just by also making sure that I got eight plus hours of sleep, that's the only thing I changed. And my body fat is 8% and, you know, check the boxes of feeling better, of having more energy in the day, of not drinking, you know, three 20 ounce Americanos, the whole thing, you know?

• 54:47Speaker 00

  It's crazy, you know, I watched this documentary, I think it was called Happy or something, or Finding Happiness, or something like that. And they did these studies and research all over the world about the happiest people in the world. And one of the studies was in like this small island somewhere off of like Japan or something. Of a community of people with the most 100 plus year olds per capita in the world. And, uh, they, you know, they were talking about like the key to happiness and living a long life. And they said like, sleep nine hours a day and then take lots of naps. That's like the key to living over a hundred years from what they said. Based on what these, you know, elderly 110 year olds were doing. And they had so much energy, you know? And they were like, yeah, I sleep nine hours a day and I take naps.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  You know, so here's the key is that, you know, people hear that and they're like, yeah, it sounds so great. I'm totally going to sleep nine hours a day and take five naps until, until you have a child.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  Right, and you don't sleep at all.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Right, and then, you know, remember that guy who cut you off in the morning, he's not an ass. He's sleep deprived.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  And, and we look around, so, you know, my wife and I are both 41. We look around at all the other parents our age and it looks like we've been dissolved by vampires. Like we're, we're being kept as like sex slaves by vampires who are draining us at night. And, and what that is, is called having a kid and being a professional person.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  So here's, here's the skinny. Let's control what we can control. Let's go ahead on days you don't train, you should only probably need between 50 and 100 grams of carbohydrate a day. That's it. Like quit, quit it. You know, Mark Bell, our other power of friend, right, calls, he calls it the war on carbs. He's like, so go to Starbucks, get an Americano and then take the bun off of the sausage sandwich. Like, he's like, just be, make a better decision, right? So, okay, so I can control some of that stuff. And, you know, you don't need fruit. You know, Rob Wolf is the first guy saying, hey, let's keep the fruit down to one piece or less a day. You know, our daughters don't eat massive amounts of fruit. We look at fruit as candy, fruit as dessert. Our daughters are like, hey, can I have an apple for dessert? I'm like, how about a half an apple?

• 56:55Speaker 00

  Really? Wow, now this is, this is interesting you say this. I want to hear more about this because my whole life I've hated fruit. And I only today still eat apples. They've got to be a specific type of apple.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  And the perfect banana, not like too brown or too green. It's got to be perfect. And that's the only fruit I'll eat. I don't eat any other fruit in the world, period.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Well, you know.

• 57:16Speaker 00

  People think I'm crazy. They're like, I can't believe you don't eat fruit. And I'm like.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  I think, I don't think people are realizing that, you know, one banana is enough carbohydrate. That's a third of your carbohydrate for the day. A third.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  So you can eat two pounds of salad. You know, and, you know, we've quoted this forever in the CrossFit community, but like, you know, like two tablespoons of rice is equivalent of like two cups of broccoli. You know, you can have two tablespoons of rice or you can eat this five pounds of broccoli, you know, choose it.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  Which, what's the better choice?

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the broccoli. But, you know, what we're doing is we need to fuel. Exercise. So on those days where you're not training, lean proteins, you know, just make, start making control what you can control. So if you can't sleep nine hours a day, make sure the sleep you're getting is quality.

• 58:03Speaker 00

  Hmm. No phones in the room.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  That's right. No phones in the room, no lights in the room. It's gotta be cold that, you know, you wear an eye mask, you wear earplugs, that you're like, you're going down, that you haven't had caffeine. We call it sleep hygiene, that you're optimizing those things. And so let's make sure you're just drinking enough water in the day, right? You know, most people are not getting the two to three liters that they need in a day. You don't need freakish amounts of water.

• 58:26Speaker 00

  Really?

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just need to drink some water.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  Don't drink a lot, huh?

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Well, you need to absorb the water you're drinking. We talked about this in the new book, Ready to Run, that we have Dr. Stacy Sims of Osmo Nutrition. She's sort of preeminent researcher in hydration at Stanford right now in the world. And she's like, hey, look, take some sea salt, take some table salt, put it in your water, you'll absorb the water you're drinking, instead of just pinging it out. Your kidneys and peeing it out and blowing out all your electrolytes, too.

• 58:54Speaker 00

  Man, now this is interesting. What, I mean, when I'm training, when I'm playing, you know, practicing or something for two hours, running up and down a court, I'll tell you what, man, I feel like I need a lot of water.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  You do. That's very different, right? And what we do then is we treat, we treat your hydration differently than your fuel needs. So there, you know, there are, there are supplements, companies like Osmo, like Scratch Labs, which is done by another, very similar formulation by another exercise physiologist from Tour de France. And what you're using is just a little sugar to upregulate the absorption of water and electrolytes. But what we've seen is, if you treat your hydration, you can use Ultima, you can use one of those Noon Tabs, you just gotta treat your water like it's an electrolyte mix that you can absorb it, and then eat if you need to support. So you put a half a bar in your stomach, you know, while you're training. So in that

• 59:49Speaker 01

  break, come back, eat a half of a high quality.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  That'll help, huh?

• 59:53Speaker 01

  That'll help. And then you'll be fine. You don't need, if you're only exercising for an hour, you're good to go. Just drink. If you know it's gonna be longer, have a little snack.

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  You know, don't, don't pretend that like you, you didn't eat right beforehand.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  And then let's, let's also just treat hydration seriously. So to get back, though, you know, when people are listening to this, you know, if you're, hey, I'm gonna just make a quality, make a commitment to getting a little bit better quality sleep, for as much as I'm able to sleep, right? That I'm I'm not gonna, you know, that I'm going to make sure that I can try to control my diet a little bit. Right? And I'm not saying you need to not be a human being. I mean, if you go to someone's house, they make you pasta. Eat the pasta, don't be a jerk, don't be a jerk. But in the meantime, don't go back to their house, right? So, uh, but you know, I, I think people just don't control what they control. And then they end up writing the whole thing off.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  You know, it's just, you know, I love this stuff and it's something I'm constantly wanting to learn about and apply and use. Before people listening and they may be like, you know, it sounds like this is a whole completely, this is like a full-time job. It's like, I gotta think about what I'm eating. I gotta think about what I'm drinking now. I gotta think about how to sleep. I can't just. Uh, you know, I gotta think about how to move. I gotta do these mobility things all day.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. So it's okay to learn the skills of being a human. And the problem is honestly, we didn't, we haven't valued those things. We haven't sort of said that this is the things that make us human. No one taught you how to run. Yet you either learn to run or you don't learn to run and you either get injured or you don't get injured. Only very few people learn to run well. But at what point did you not need a teacher, you know? And if you, if you realize that you were with your parents until what you were like 18 almost for some of us who are lucky, right? At what point were they not your parents? And the problem is their parents didn't teach them the skills. And the skills are, this is what people eat.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  You know, this is what, you know, we, we make dinner. We make one dinner for our kids. The New York Times. Uh, this magazine last weekend had an article that was like seven different families from around the world and what their kids ate for breakfast.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  And the most interesting kids are the kids who are like Asian who have like a pickle. They have like a fermented pickle. They have like a fish. They have some high quality, like, you know, root starch, you know, and then there's like, right, right. And then there's some other kids who are like eating toast. With like sugar sprinkles on them and orange juice. No wonder those kids are gonna get their asses kicked someday.

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. I used to have Pop Tarts and. Captain Crunch, man.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  They interviewed the mom about one of these kids. She's like, oh yeah, our kid used to try to barf that up. And then we just kept giving it to him and now he loves it. And I mean, that's the point. You sort of have to be taught how to eat. And you have to be taught. And when you're moving with your physio or your, your chiro, and they're teaching you these fundamental movement patterns. In there are the root building block. It's like saying, hey, I, I understand you're a good poet, but you still don't quite understand syntax. Let's go ahead and go back and, and work on punctuation.

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  It's all about the basics, constantly going back to the basics.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  It is the basics and it's about doing the basics well. CrossFit community has said forever, virtuosity is the, doing the common uncommonly well. And when we really start drilling down on the basics, then we can really start having a more enlightened conversation. Cause we're not just putting out fires. So the book we just did, right, which comes out on Tuesday. It's called Ready to Run. And when we created, I created 12 standards for people. Because like running is the thing that makes us human. You should be able to get on, off the airplane, open up your hips a little bit, drink some water, go for a run in a new city. Doesn't cost anything. You can be barefoot, run, right? You can go to the beach and run. Like it is as gallitarian and democratized as you can get.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  And yet it is probably the single most dangerous sport we let kids do. Running is so dangerous.

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  Really? Why?

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  In terms of the number of people getting injured every.

• 1:03:46Speaker 00

  Right. Cause they don't know how to properly run and then they just hurt themselves.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  And they're not ready to run. They don't have the ankle injury.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  That's right. Their feet aren't strong enough.

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  They haven't absorbed water. They're, they're puffy. They don't warm up. They don't cool down. And so what ends up happening? Of course you take your Ferrari stuck in second gear, right? With a handbrake on and the wheels are out of alignment. And then you just race it down the street and you're like, oh, what happened? I don't understand. And how many oil in it? Blew up. It's so stupid.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  Now, a quick question about this. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts because a lot of people in the CrossFit community, at least a couple of years ago, the extremists, I would say, have adapted the, you know, very small sole, barefoot, style of shoes during CrossFit and running. And a friend of mine is the head of innovation over at Deckers, which owns Ugg and Teva and now a shoe brand called Hoka, I think it's called Hoka, Hooker or Hoka, which is the oversized, it's basically the opposite of barefoot running. It's the oversized soles, very cushioned. And I've done both the barefoot stuff and now I religiously run in the Hookas or Hookas,

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  I don't remember how to say them, but the oversized shoes.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  This is the best endorsement ever. There's these shoes, they're stupid.

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're so stupid. They're like moon shoes.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  But I'll tell you what, man, it's like my knees feel saved, my lower back feels saved. I feel like I can run longer. I don't get tired. It's like my muscles aren't as sore. I'm like, you know, what's the right way? I feel like it's more efficient with the oversized soles, but everyone's doing this like barefoot thing and talking about the efficiency of your body and born to run with, you know, what God gave you and, you know, what's the right way or what's the more efficient way for your body?

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  First of all, in order for you to run pain free, to have to have a hundred and fifty dollar shoe on your feet is suspicious, right? The human being, we are evolved to run. Great book by Daniel Lieberman called The Story of the Human Body. Came out like last year. He's a, he's an anthropologist out of Harvard. All you need to do is read his book and there's all the research about why we have a big toe, why there's a one less mechanism in your ankle and how we were designed to locomote. The key here is this. I want you to run pain free. I'm not, I don't want to limit that. Kids are not born with heels on. You're designed to have your foot flat on the ground.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  The foot needs input to understand how you're striking.

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  The problem with any shoe, you know, in 1991, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and we reference this book in our, in our, in our, we reference this study in our book, is that in 91, the American Academy of Pediatrics put a position paper out that said, the foot develops best barefoot.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  And that if we're going to choose shoes, we need to choose shoes that mimic barefoot. That means have no differential, that they're highly breathable, that they're very flexible. Kids' feet sweat five times more than adults' feet, for example.

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  Right? And what's happened is that we have systematically started to shorten kids' heel cords. They are in running shoes early on. And what happens when I tip your center of mass forward by a centimeter? It's because that heel is a, is a high heel. Right? What happens when I start to change your ankle mechanics? Times 10,000 steps a day, times, start to do the math. You know, in, in four months, you've gone a million steps. That's just a million steps. You know, that's four million steps a year. That doesn't account for any running or jumping or landing. And now do that, let's see, uh, four million a year, times 10 years, 40 million oscillations wearing a high heel shoe. Now, now, see where I'm going with this?

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  So the key here is that you should be able to run barefoot. And it shouldn't hurt, but you are, you don't walk around barefoot because you live in New York City, it's sketchy, right? You know, you should be able to have full range of motion barefoot. Even Olympic lifting shoes, which allow me to transfer more energy to the ground.

• 1:07:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Right? But by elevating the heel, I basically am allowing for a more upright torso.

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  And that is still a hack. That's like wearing a weight belt on a power lift.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Right? That's still not, that's still not correct human movement. It's a, it's a hack that allows me to optimize my movements. And you should Olympic lift on Olympic lifting shoes because of the sheer forces. But what ends up happening with that, HOKA, and we did an episode on mobility wad about this, where, you know, if that's the only way you can run pain free, I'm going to say, let's start there. And then, but I'm also asking you, what are you doing? Do you have full range of motion in your ankles? Yes or no?

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  And you're not actively actively working to reclaim it or actively working to make your tissues of your ankles and hips work better, then guess what happens when the Hoka stops working for you because it will stop working for you. Further into that Hoka, basically because it's so soft, you basically blunt all the proper receptive input. No, not the force, you blunt the force, but you end up striking the ground harder.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  Ah, to be able to push off.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Well, to be able to get the linkage and to find the mechanics. And so we end up seeing that your ground reaction force in the shoe is much higher than it would be if you were wearing barefoot. Here's the example. Put shoes on, jump onto a box, take your shoes off, jump and land the same way. You will land differently without the shoes because you will not slam your feet down like a maniac because you're going to respect your feet, right?

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  You'll land softer.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  You'll land softer. So what we've told people is, and now our position is this, I want you barefoot and flat 24/7.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  So be barefoot in your house, spend all day Saturday barefoot, get some flat shoes, cruise around, Toms are flat, Reebok makes some flat powerlifting shoes and some just cute shoes. It doesn't matter what brand you are. We use Vans for kids. You know, those are great flat shoes. Then in your running, go ahead and give yourself a little heel differential. So let's, let's give you some breathing room. Ultimately, I want you to run in something that's under five millimeters of differential. You should be able to run flat. It shouldn't matter what your shoes are. It shouldn't matter if you're wearing hiking boots or, or combat boots or track flats. Your technique should look the same.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  But the problem with the Hoka's is that it hides your technique errors. It basically absorbs all the, and what you would normally get is immediate feedback about your running technique through pain in your feet, but the shoe suddenly allows you to heel strike and it allows you to midfoot strike instead of striking on the forefront where you need to strike. And so it sort of, it blunts that. The other problem we have with that shoe. Is that if you're a neutral, beautiful runner and you want to use it like a weight belt, you do one long run a week in it and you're a big boy and big girl, go for it. But here's the problem is that those people who have poor running mechanics, it actually exacerbates and makes their running mechanics worse.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Because you're basically falling off a two and a half centimeter platform. And so, do you know when people were high, remember the thing that was happening, the Japanese schoolgirls, they had these ridiculously high boots, right? They had like a foot platform and a couple of kids tripped and died in the subway. They fell into the subway. Well, the same thing is happening to you in those HOKA's, you know, is that you're also basically tripping over the shoe and falling off the shoe a lot. And you may run beautifully because you are an athlete and you didn't have running problems. But what we've done is created a sort of, the research, there's no research on that the shoe works. So just so we're clear, there's no research. The running shoe industry is a four billion dollar industry.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  So we have to be suspicious that these people are selling this stuff, right? And if you follow the running shoe guidelines by running shoe manufacturers, they're saying every like hundred to three hundred miles, you change your shoes. For a typical runner, that's four pairs of shoes a year. That's about five hundred dollars of shoes just to run. Like that's already suspicious. The research that McDougal put out in Ready to Run or Born to Run said, you know, there's a direct correlation to the severity of your running injury and the expense of your shoes. And what we're finding is that, you know, your shoes are going to pack out. And here's my other problem, your HOKA's are going to start to form and shape into your feet. And so you're, now we have an even tilted, weirder cushiony mess around your shoes.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Because you are striking weird or wearing weird. And so now instead of, you know, being close to the ground and developing a wear pattern that doesn't really matter, you're starting to develop a wear pattern in a shoe that has a two inch high heel. So this is our concern. Mainly though is that I don't care what shoe you're running in.

• 1:12:39Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  You've got to be working on improving your running mechanics and improving your tissues so that you can run and addressing the lifestyle issues which are making it difficult for you to run.

• 1:12:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I hear, you know, stories of people that they went extreme barefoot shoes and then they're like, and then they can't run either and they hurt their, you know, it's like, but then there's other people that, you know, it's like, you gotta learn to run still.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Well, you know, and that's, that's the problem, you know, um, the, the military, I was in our army base and they banned five of my fingers from the army base because they saw too many injuries.

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  And, you know, that's, that's like saying, you know, hey, cars are dangerous, they kill people, let's ban cars.

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  They're just dangerous. Well, it's not really the car, it's really that people drive the cars and right?

• 1:13:26Speaker 00

  Wrong way.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  And so what, what the problem was, again, we had kids who did not know how to run, never had running instruction and who, who had huge aerobic engines and had egos and weren't willing to kind of go backwards into running.

• 1:13:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the surfaces they're probably running on, they might have like rocks and everything. So they don't know how to run on those or, or whatever, you know?

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter what surface you run on. You, you, in fact, we actually advocate for people to go run a little bit on the concrete because you're going to see that you're going to get immediate feedback about how you're hard you're striking the ground and which direction you're striking the ground.

• 1:14:01Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  So, you know, you need to be able to go run barefoot. You should be able to do that. You know, when you think about this, how, how strange this is, hey, uh, hey dad, um, can we go play the football? Yeah, let me put on my Hoka's. I'm gonna run. You know, that's really weird.

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  So, you know, hey, I'd love to go, I'd love to go play some beach volleyball, but uh, you know, I just don't have my $400 carbon fiber running shoes and banana foam into my feet. The problem is we've, what we've done is taken the skill away from the human.

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  We've taken the onus away from being responsible for having a range of motion and making this technique. And what we valued is mileage and time above process.

• 1:14:41Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  Right? Imagine teaching your daughter to drive a car and not worrying about how she drives, just how fast she got there in time and how, and you know what I mean? And that she didn't die. You didn't die. Good job. Like it's it's asinine. That's what we do towards sport.

• 1:14:57Speaker 00

  Interesting. Interesting. This is fascinating stuff and you know, I want to learn more about running. And we could talk for four more hours on this, I'm sure, and go over every sport and topic, but I want to make sure everyone goes and gets the book. Ready to Run. Unlocking Your Potential to Run Naturally. And if you have Becoming a Supple Leopard, then you know how awesome that book is and how awesome this book is gonna be. I don't have a copy of it yet. But I'm going to get one and definitely recommend it. So I hope everyone goes and picks it up. We'll have it linked up in the show notes. I've got lots of more questions for you, Kelly, but I want to ask you two more, just to respect the time here. The first one is, what are you most grateful for recently?

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  You know, we started a practice about two years ago at our house. Every night we we have dinner with our family. We say what we're grateful for. And you know, when you are in your 30s, and this is a generalization, I always speak to me, but you know, I was obsessed a little bit with, you know, who am I? What am I going to become? What is my professional legacy? You know, who, what does that mean? Right? And when I was in college, there was a guy on the on my floor, the RA, who had a sign on his door that said, Let Your Goal Be Delete a Simple Life. And I remember thinking, no way. I do not want a simple life. And I didn't understand what that meant. And

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  now I can tell you, after a lot of deep processing, that the only goal I have is to spend more time on the beach with my family. And I am so grateful that, you know, that I get to work with my amazing CEO wife, who is the, you know, the brains behind all of these, you know, both of our corporations. And, you know, in that choosing, being fortunate enough to have a career where I can work for myself, which is why I got a tattoo below my elbow, really allows me to drop my kids off from school and and it's allowed me to have, you know, work 80 hours a week, maybe, but I have a life that makes more sense for me. So I, you know, that's it. And we we say what we're grateful for every day and I'm that I'm grateful for.

• 1:17:09Speaker 00

  Hmm. I love that. And final question is, what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Your capacity to get better. And when we measure athletes or we talk about our friends, it's really, people are remarkable, but we're still interested in how much they can get better. And like a guy like Graham Holmberg, we opened the show with, you know, he's an extraordinary athlete, but one of the reasons that I think Graham is so capable is that he can, still can get better. He's always in a growth mindset. So greatness is the ability to continue to refine, continue to have deeper understanding and get better from year to year. That's it.

• 1:17:51Speaker 00

  I love it. Kelly, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom again. I'll have everything linked up in the show notes, but go get ready to run. Dr. Kelly Starrett, I appreciate all the hard work you do, all the dedication, the commitment that you have in order to support all of us humans in becoming more efficient with our bodies as athletes, but also just living a better life. So thank you for your dedication.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  Is it shredded Lewis now? So Schreewitz?

• 1:18:22Speaker 00

  That's it.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  My pleasure, man. Thank you so much. You know, we're living in such an interesting time and people have got the vision now and they're seeing that it's up to us and thank goodness we shifted that back onto us because I think we have a chance honestly to impact sort of the quality of life of ourselves moving forward. It's an exciting time. Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:18:45Speaker 00

  And there you have it, guys. Thanks again so much for tuning in today and listening. I loved this interview and I want to have Kelly come back on just because such a fascinating guy that I love learning about how to optimize and enhance my body whenever I can. So hopefully I can get Kelly back on when he has his next New York Times bestseller come out. Make sure to pick up a copy of this book. You check out the link over at LewisHowes.com/101 for episode 101. And also Share this out with your friends over on Twitter, on Facebook,

• 1:19:28Speaker 00

  or send an email to someone personally who you think could improve in their life by listening to this specific episode. Again, LewisHowes.com/101. And post a picture on Instagram. You can subscribe on SoundCloud as well and leave a comment there, but post a picture on Instagram where you're listening to this specific episode. And if you're running, even better, because it's all about running. So if you're on a treadmill or you're out on the trail, post a picture of where you're running with this episode. Tag me, @LewisHowes, and #SchoolOfGreatness. Super pumped for the next 100 episodes, guys. Thank you again so much for coming on today. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.