Dr. Kelly Starrett: How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Huberman Lab

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Episode: Dr. Kelly Starrett: How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility

Author: Scicomm Media
Duration: 03:26:09

Episode Shownotes

In this episode, my guest is Dr. Kelly Starrett, DPT, a world-renowned physical therapist, best-selling author, and expert on improving movement in fitness, sports, and daily life. We discuss strategies to enhance mobility and flexibility to boost physical performance and overall health, including ways to offset aging, heal from injuries

faster, and correct movement or strength imbalances. Topics include zero- and low-cost tools, such as how to warm up effectively, prepare mentally for workouts, properly use foam rollers, perform fascial release, and apply heat or cold for pain management and tissue recovery. We also cover the best flexibility protocols. Dr. Starrett explains how to optimize default postures for sitting, standing, and everyday activities. Listeners will gain practical, easy-to-implement knowledge to improve their health and physical performance. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Maui Nui Venison: https://mauinuivenison.com/huberman Joovv: https://joovv.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/hubermanlab Timestamps 00:00:00 Dr. Kelly Starrett 00:02:44 Sponsors: Maui Nui & Joovv 00:05:46 Movement; Tool: Daily Floor Sitting 00:12:50 Tools: Stacking Behaviors, Stretching, Floor Sitting 00:17:07 Transferring Skills; Movement-Rich Environments; Range of Motion 00:23:47 Sponsor: AG1 00:25:18 Warm-Ups & Play 00:30:51 Asymmetries & Training 00:38:27 Maximizing Gym Time; Tool: 10, 10, 10 at 10 00:42:41 Tool: Warming Up with Play; Breathwork 00:47:26 Sponsors: Function & Eight Sleep 00:50:35 Tool: Foam Rolling, Uses, Types & Technique 01:01:30 Injury vs. Incident, Pain 01:05:54 Managing Pain & Stiffness, Tool: D2R2 Method 01:11:04 Posture, Neck Work 01:19:58 Sponsor: LMNT 01:21:33 Pelvic Floor, Prostate Pain 01:28:06 Urination & Men, Pelvic Floor; Tool: Camel Pose 01:33:42 Mobilizing the Pelvic Floor, Urogenital Health 01:38:27 Abdominals, Rotational Power, Spinal Engine Work 01:43:51 Dynamic & Novel Movements; Endurance & Strength Propensities 01:50:29 Tool: Workout Intensity; Consistency & Workout Longevity 01:57:41 Hip Extension, Tools: Couch Stretch, Bosch Snatch 02:09:38 Fundamental Shapes & Training, Hip Extension, Movement Culture 02:21:06 Training for Life & Fun 02:30:20 Aging with Range of Motion & Control; Mental State & Training 02:35:38 Fascia, Myofascial Mobilization 02:41:17 Rolfing, Tool: Tissue Mobilization & Reducing Discomfort 02:45:14 Deliberate Heat & Cold, Training, Injury & Healing 02:54:35 Desire to Train, Physical Practice 02:58:54 Balanced Nutrition; Eating Behaviors & Social Media 03:10:23 Sustainable Nutrition & Training; Tool: 3 Vegetable Rule 03:14:30 Supplements 03:23:05 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, Sponsors, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures

Summary

In this episode, Dr. Kelly Starrett discusses strategies to improve mobility, posture, and flexibility, emphasizing their importance for enhancing physical performance and overall health. He addresses common movement issues, the role of diverse movement patterns in maintaining tissue integrity, and the significance of ground movements as predictors of fitness and health. Starrett shares insights on effective warm-up techniques, injury prevention strategies, and the use of foam rollers for recovery. Overall, listeners gain actionable advice to counteract the effects of aging and enhance their physical capabilities.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Dr. Kelly Starrett: How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_03
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Kelly Starrett.

00:00:18 Speaker_03
Dr. Kelly Starrett is a doctor of physical therapy and one of the world's experts in movement. That is, he teaches people how to move better for sake of sport, for sake of recreational fitness and for everyday living.

00:00:31 Speaker_03
Today, we discuss several important topics, including how best to warm up for any and all workouts.

00:00:37 Speaker_03
He also tells us how to improve our movement patterns for cardiovascular exercise, for sport, for resistance training, across the board, how to move better and how to improve our range of motion with the minimal amount of time investment.

00:00:52 Speaker_03
We hear a lot about different forms of stretching, We hear about dynamic stretching. We hear about passive stretching.

00:00:57 Speaker_03
Dr. Starrett explains how to improve our range of motion across our entire body in the best possible ways, as well as how to offset or repair any imbalances that stem from musculoskeletal problems or from neural issues and how to reduce soreness, how to improve our posture,

00:01:14 Speaker_03
seated, standing, and movement-based posture. We talk about nutrition. So today's episode covers an immense amount of actionable information that I'm certain all of you will benefit from.

00:01:24 Speaker_03
Dr. Kelly Starrett has authored several best-selling books, some of which you may have heard of, such as Supple Leopard. He was actually one of the first people to become synonymous with the use of a lacrosse ball or foam roller.

00:01:35 Speaker_03
But really, even though a lot of people have talked about those, What he was really doing there was to emphasize the importance of understanding the relationship between the skeleton, the muscles, the nervous system, and the fascia.

00:01:45 Speaker_03
And today we also talk about fascia, which is an incredibly interesting and important topic.

00:01:50 Speaker_03
In addition to consulting and coaching for various college level and professional athletes and teams, Dr. Kelly Starrett and his wife, Juliet Starrett, co-own The Ready State. And we provide a link to the ReadyState in the show note captions there.

00:02:02 Speaker_03
They have a plethora of useful information and actionable protocols. I should mention years ago, I took one of the courses from the ReadyState. It's a really interesting course that we touch on some of the protocols from today.

00:02:13 Speaker_03
It's all about pelvic floor.

00:02:14 Speaker_03
So whether you're male or female and regardless of age, understanding your pelvic floor, how to take care of your pelvic floor in the context of exercise, posture, et cetera, is vitally important for all sorts of vitally important bodily functions.

00:02:27 Speaker_03
So today we also touch on that. By the end of today's episode, I'm certain that you will be armed with a number of new highly actionable protocols.

00:02:35 Speaker_03
I should emphasize these protocols take very little time and have an outsized positive effect on your movement, your posture, and your overall health.

00:02:43 Speaker_03
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:02:49 Speaker_03
It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

00:03:01 Speaker_03
Our first sponsor is Maui Nui Venison. Maui Nui Venison is 100% wild harvested venison from the island of Maui. And it is the most nutrient dense and delicious red meat available.

00:03:11 Speaker_03
I've spoken before on this podcast about the fact that most of us should be consuming about one gram of quality protein per pound of body weight every day. That protein provides critical building blocks for things like muscle repair and synthesis.

00:03:24 Speaker_03
but it also promotes overall health, given the importance of muscle tissue as an organ. Eating enough quality protein each day is also a terrific way to stave off hunger.

00:03:33 Speaker_03
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00:03:43 Speaker_03
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00:03:57 Speaker_03
I personally like all of those. In fact, I probably eat a Maui Nui venison burger pretty much every day, and occasionally I'll swap that for a Maui Nui steak. Responsible population management of the axis deer on the island of Maui

00:04:09 Speaker_03
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00:04:17 Speaker_03
If you'd like to try Maui Nui Venison, you can go to mauinuivenison.com slash Huberman to get 20% off your membership or first order. Again, that's mauinuivenison.com slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Juve.

00:04:32 Speaker_03
Juve makes medical-grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast, it's the incredible impact that light can have on our biology.

00:04:43 Speaker_03
Now, in addition to sunlight, red light and near-infrared light have been shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health, including faster muscle recovery, improved skin health and wound healing,

00:04:54 Speaker_03
improvements in acne, meaning reductions in acne, reduced pain and inflammation, improved mitochondrial function, and even improving visual function itself.

00:05:02 Speaker_03
What sets tube lights apart and why they're my preferred red light therapy device is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning specific wavelengths of red light and near infrared light in specific combinations to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations.

00:05:15 Speaker_03
Personally, I use the Joov whole body panel about three to four times per week, typically in the morning, but sometimes in the afternoon. And I use the Joov handheld light both at home and when I travel.

00:05:25 Speaker_03
If you'd like to try Joov, you can go to Joov, spelled J-O-O-V-V.com slash Huberman. Joov is offering an exclusive discount to all Huberman Lab listeners with up to $400 off select Joov products.

00:05:37 Speaker_03
Again, that's Joov, J-O-O-V-V.com slash Huberman to get up to $400 off. And now for my discussion with Dr. Kelly Starrett. Dr. Kelly Starrett, welcome. Thank you, my friend.

00:05:49 Speaker_03
I've been wanting to get you on here for a long time, for many reasons, not the least of which is that you've just pioneered so many areas of health and fitness that I don't even know where to start, frankly.

00:06:04 Speaker_03
But let's jump in with the big M, with movement.

00:06:09 Speaker_03
You're an expert in dissecting complex movement, figuring out how people can move better, and also figuring out how people who are doing what they think are simple movements are actually making their life either more complex or more painful than it needs to be.

00:06:23 Speaker_03
So you're also known for helping people with so-called mobility, which of course falls under the umbrella of movement. And I can't see somebody do a foam roll or anything with a lacrosse ball where they're

00:06:38 Speaker_03
loosening up or talking about fascia without also thinking about you. So that should frame today's conversation at least partially well. To kick things off, when you look at how most people sit, walk,

00:06:52 Speaker_03
and do their, quote unquote, exercise, resistance training, and or cardiovascular, hopefully, and cardiovascular training. What are some of the most common problems that you see? Is it imbalance, like leaning to one side?

00:07:05 Speaker_03
Is it that their bodies are trained into asymmetry? Is there any way to kind of, you know, mass-diagnose everybody all at once in this first question.

00:07:16 Speaker_01
Let me borrow a couple analogies from one of my favorite people, Katie Bowman.

00:07:21 Speaker_01
And first thing is, she will point out, and it's not a perfect analogy, so bear with us, is this notion of mechanotransduction, which means that at a cellular level, your tissues, some of your tissues specifically, need mechanical input to express themselves.

00:07:38 Speaker_01
You want a strong tendon? How do you get a strong tendon? You have to load it, right? Does it do tendon things? Is it lengthening under load? Does it shortening under load? Does it do isometric holds? So we can start at that level.

00:07:50 Speaker_01
She points out that if you put a, and again, not a perfect analogy, but if you put an orca into captivity, over a while, that orca fin will start to fold over. Folded fin syndrome, it's nicer than floppy fin syndrome, that's hurtful.

00:08:05 Speaker_01
And what you're doing is when you alter the environment that this amazing animal lives in, it's not swimming, it's not fighting, it's not hunting, you're not loading the base of that fin.

00:08:15 Speaker_01
And so what happens is that collagen breaks down and we start to see changes in that, in that expression of that.

00:08:22 Speaker_01
So what we can start to say is, again, not romanticizing the Pleistocene era when human beings were paleo, but what is it that we need in our daily dose lives

00:08:34 Speaker_01
to maintain the integrity of our tissue systems, exposure, so that our brain says, this is safe, so that you actually have tendons and ligaments that can do what tendons and ligaments can do, and fascia that can be springy.

00:08:50 Speaker_01
Borrow another sort of Katie Bowman-ism, if we have a movement language, an actual language made up of words, how many words are you using today? And most of us aren't using that many words, so very few words. So I sit, I stand, I walk very slowly.

00:09:04 Speaker_01
I sit, I stand, I walk very slowly. So everything is just in those few, and then I go exercise using the same words. I'm on the exercise bike, right? I'm on an elliptical, which doesn't actually ask me to have any hip extension.

00:09:16 Speaker_01
And suddenly you can see that our movement language, which we're really codifying under intensity, load, right? We're becoming very competent in these adaptation positions sitting. what ends up happening?

00:09:27 Speaker_01
Well, we start to see that our bodies are adaptation machines and they just begin to adapt. And so suddenly what we have is a human body that doesn't express normative range. The brain may not think that that range is even safe and put there.

00:09:42 Speaker_01
Then we start to sort of minimize the movement choices that the brain has, the movement options that the brain has. So really the question is, You know, at low loads, let's establish things.

00:09:54 Speaker_01
At low loads and low speeds, you can get away with everything. Why? Because this body is rad. And it's designed, it's durable, it's not fragile. It's designed to be ridden hard and put away wet for a long time.

00:10:04 Speaker_01
Remember when you were 17, would cut off your hand? It would grow back the next day, right? You would. Think about the falls you took skating. And you'd be like, oh, that sucked. The next day, you put your shoulder back in, you just kind of respawn.

00:10:16 Speaker_01
So what is it that we need to put into our movement diet? And then we can start to separate out, should that be exercise or should that be movement?

00:10:26 Speaker_01
And now the real filter that we should be beginning these real and earnest conversations about is, what is it in the environment, given that I'm a busy working person, and maybe I have some agency in the morning,

00:10:37 Speaker_01
and maybe have some agency in the afternoon, but let's take exercise out of it. The one hour discreet, working on zone two cardio, working on my evidence-based practice. What should I be doing the rest of the time?

00:10:49 Speaker_01
So, for example, one of the things that we're huge fans of in the evening is sitting on the ground for 20 or 30 minutes.

00:10:53 Speaker_03
In what, cross-legged, squatting?

00:10:57 Speaker_01
Yes. Long sit, side saddle, 90-90. Anytime you need to fidget, fidget.

00:11:02 Speaker_01
And what you'll see is you start to accumulate exposure, which I think in my worldview is the first order of magnitude in problem solving is how do we have the human be exposed to the thing we're trying to change or improve or restore normative ranges.

00:11:18 Speaker_03
So that would be in the evening, just getting down on the floor?

00:11:21 Speaker_01
Yeah, that behavior alone cultures that toilet on the ground, sleep on the ground, we start to see fall risk in our elderly populations attenuate to zero, approximate zero.

00:11:33 Speaker_01
Lower hip OA, lower low back OA, and it may just be that we're using and touching some shapes. And our bodies are saying, hey, let's just keep that around. Let's normalize what the hip should be able to do. In terms of your connective tissue,

00:11:49 Speaker_01
Think about, you know, the idea here is that we're loading you passively, actively, whatever, that you're saying to your brain, you know, this is a quote from one of my PT instructors, and this is really important.

00:12:02 Speaker_01
If people take this away, they should listen to this. Muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs. At no age, do you stop adapting? At no age, do you stop healing? Those things slow down.

00:12:11 Speaker_01
It's a little bit harder to have the same adaptation we did when we weren't in full-fledged puberty. But you can always adapt.

00:12:18 Speaker_01
In the first order of business, if you spend 20 or 30 minutes sitting on the ground, you're going to start to see that my hamstrings start to feel better, my hips start to feel a little better, because I'm just spending time in these ranges and my body's going to start to adapt as I increase my movement language.

00:12:32 Speaker_03
Would you extend what you just said to, like, if somebody has a hardwood floor and maybe a little low-pile rug or something like that, and they're gonna, I don't know, watch a podcast or a movie or a show in the evening, they stretch out and, you know, like on their belly, like sort of up dog or cobra or whatever it's called,

00:12:49 Speaker_03
So basically any kind of movement where you're on the ground, any kind of squatting, and maybe they start to stretch a bit here and there.

00:12:59 Speaker_01
Oh, so now we're into the real magic, the behavior. Where are we gonna stack these behaviors? So if you have to get up and down off the ground, Plus one, right? I got to get up and down off the ground every day.

00:13:09 Speaker_01
So if you're an older person who may hasn't gotten off the ground, and I'm older, I'm just talking about over 50, you may not have gotten up and down off the ground for 100 years. You just don't do it anymore, right?

00:13:18 Speaker_01
We want to hear why I think MMA is so amazing. You have to get up and down off the ground a lot, right? If you go to Jits, right? How about yoga? How about Pilates? You're like, wow, there's a lot of time organizing on the ground.

00:13:31 Speaker_01
So a lot of people, Ida Rolfe really said, hey, how do we help the person organizing gravity first and foremost, right?

00:13:40 Speaker_01
Then we have someone like Philip Beach, who is this incredible, he wrote this book on functional embryology, which I highly recommend, called Muscles and Meridians, I think, Muscles and Meridians.

00:13:51 Speaker_01
But his hypothesis is that one of the ways that the body tunes itself is by being on the ground. restoring native ranges, re-approximating joints, right, kneeling, walking.

00:14:04 Speaker_01
And if you just took a step back and said, what's it look like for the last 10,000 years? You know, when have we, 10,000 years ago, my understanding is that I'm a little fatter, your femur's a little longer, but we're pretty much the same people.

00:14:17 Speaker_01
Maybe I don't digest milk yet, maybe that's the understanding, but ultimately, what behaviors have changed, we're off the ground. And so this is an easy, don't need any equipment, can drop this in, I can answer my emails, watch TV.

00:14:32 Speaker_01
That seems like how we're going to improve and be able to start to untangle this very complex scoring knot when people have a lot going on.

00:14:39 Speaker_03
I love this.

00:14:40 Speaker_01
And as you point out, sorry, the roller's already there. So you're sitting there and the roller's there, another barrier to adherence knocked out. So you're like, oh, I might as well just, what's stiff today? What hurts today?

00:14:51 Speaker_01
How could I have some self-soothing input? And when we're working at high levels of performance, Like the highest levels.

00:14:59 Speaker_01
These range of motion, like keeping you being able to access the full sort of arsenal of what you can do with your body, these movement solutions, sort of like Ido Portal plus the Olympics, right?

00:15:10 Speaker_01
You would see that this is an easy way for our elite athletes to work and integrate without having to do another thing.

00:15:17 Speaker_03
So what I'm getting here is that everybody, regardless of age, should get down on the ground once a day and get up off the ground at some point.

00:15:26 Speaker_01
You can use whatever you want to help you get up and down off the ground. So for those of you listening, you're like, I can't do that.

00:15:33 Speaker_01
You know, there's a test we write about in the book that if you just do crisscross applesauce standing, you should be able to lower yourself to the ground and stand back up without using your hands.

00:15:45 Speaker_03
Okay, so cross the feet, just for those that are just listening, cross the feet. Yep. And then just slowly lower yourself into a seated.

00:15:51 Speaker_01
Don't collapse, just lower yourself to the ground. And then without putting your hands down or knee down, can you stand back up?

00:15:57 Speaker_03
And should one be able to do it with either foot over the other?

00:16:01 Speaker_01
Seems like I should use my left leg and right leg equally, right? I shouldn't have a good side and a bad side. But what's interesting is the data, I think, is that it's a nice predictor of all-cause mortality and morbidity. That's fine.

00:16:12 Speaker_01
But what it really hints at is your changes in how your body interacts with the environment. That because you've adapted, suddenly the skill that you've done 100,000 times, 200,000 times as a kid, sitting crisscross applesauce,

00:16:25 Speaker_01
you suddenly are confronted as an adult with a skill you can no longer perform. And it doesn't require massive hip range of motion, doesn't require full range of motion in your ankles. It's actually a really fair test.

00:16:37 Speaker_01
But if you're missing some of these end ranges, you're gonna struggle. And it's nice now that I have this, like, what's the session cost? I've become a, I love cycling, mountain biking's my jam, but if I ride my bike a ton, my hips get super tight.

00:16:50 Speaker_01
But if I have some assessments, just like vital signs, Blood pressure, 120 over 80, that's not good blood pressure, but it's a nice, decent reference.

00:16:58 Speaker_01
Now I create some movement minimums that help me understand how my body's interacting with stress, environment, nutrition, exercise, et cetera.

00:17:07 Speaker_03
For some people, maybe me, if I were to sit cross-legged on the ground for a bit and then stand up, if it hasn't been in a while, I'm like kind of like just kind of ache, but I consider myself pretty, you know, pretty mobile.

00:17:22 Speaker_03
Once I warm up, I can run for an hour and a half, jog for an hour and a half. Once I get warmed up in the gym, I can move what at least for me is satisfying amounts of weight. So I wouldn't say that I'm out of shape.

00:17:32 Speaker_03
I wouldn't say I'm in spectacular shape. Is it normal for us after a certain age to kind of feel like we creak or ache as we move in or out of a new movement? I mean, is that, does it,

00:17:45 Speaker_03
fit with being still a healthy person, or should we just not have any of those kinds of like, oh, that was like the guy that like- Dude, I sat on the ground, that was rough. That was super rough.

00:17:54 Speaker_03
Yeah, maybe, you know, sitting for 30 minutes and standing up and feeling like you have to kind of open yourself up with a can opener, so to speak.

00:18:00 Speaker_01
A couple things there. One is that you said new movement. So one of the ways we define best athlete is who's the person who can transfer the skill, their current skill set, and pick up the new skill the fastest.

00:18:11 Speaker_01
So what I'll say is, if you want to test how fit you are, how good your program is, go ahead and jump someone else's program. Let me know how that goes. Can you perform the skills? Are you skilled?

00:18:21 Speaker_03
I'm chuckling because I joined Cameron Haynes for his weight workout, which is high repetition circuit work that went on for about 45 minutes. None of the weights were particularly heavy, but it's just nonstop.

00:18:33 Speaker_03
I was sore, and I normally don't get sore for more than a half day, if at all. Soreness hasn't really ever been an issue for me. I was sore for almost a week and a half, maybe two weeks.

00:18:42 Speaker_01
But it was insane. This is so good. It opens up the next thing, right? Founder of CrossFit, Greg Glassman, one of my earliest influences coaches says, we fail the margins of our experience.

00:18:55 Speaker_01
So what you just saw was, hey, here is this metabolic pathway range work that I have not inoculated myself to. And I think we're at an interesting place where fitness has become hobby. Fitness has become sort of my personal pastime.

00:19:14 Speaker_01
And I can go to the gym, and I can look jacked. You're jacked and tan. You're very handsome, 49-year-old. But what we start to see is the things that make us look aesthetically pleasing or functional enough

00:19:28 Speaker_01
isn't the same thing as preparing for sport or transferring to new skill. And in fact, I would say if I had a spectrum of activities, I'd put like fitnessing over here. Like I go to a camp, I just do a million reps. I breathe hard. It's super fun.

00:19:41 Speaker_01
I'm in Zumba. I'm like, I'm marrying and I have positive regard and I see my friends. On the other side, we have very much sports specific training. The only goal is to support the sport.

00:19:52 Speaker_01
If you're an elite soccer player, we have goals off season, but in the season, it's to support your body to win.

00:19:58 Speaker_01
But one step back from that I call sports preparation training, which is where we start to see sort of some really pattern interference between what the internet says I should do to have huge quads and the best way to create an elite sprinter or an elite footballer, right?

00:20:14 Speaker_01
In that sports preparation training, I can be, think of it, GPP plus looking at positions and how things transfer. Franz Bosch is a great example of sports preparation training. He's a Dutch thinker. His books are great.

00:20:27 Speaker_01
And you'll see, understand that really what we're trying to do in sports preparation is say, hey, what is this complex system in front of us?

00:20:34 Speaker_01
What's the minimal amount of input so that we can still go and project ourselves into the world through sport and performance?

00:20:41 Speaker_01
And on the other side, suddenly we do come up confronted with, hey, I'm doing this thing and I jump in with my friend and I get brutalized. which is actually a problem that we have with people, really good fit athletes.

00:20:53 Speaker_01
And I throw them into like a group fitness class and they can do so much work that they wreck themselves for weeks. And that's probably what happened. You're so strong and you know how to just be uncomfortable.

00:21:05 Speaker_01
And you just did this freakish amount of work without giving yourself a chance to adapt. And that happens all the time.

00:21:10 Speaker_03
So, going back to the getting down on the ground once a day and then getting up, I'd like to just – I want to get to fitness and sports training as well, but is there another practice or set of practices related to where we do our Profession work.

00:21:30 Speaker_03
Yeah, so I can stand. I have a standing desk. I have a drafting table and I'll sit stand I'll stand for a while sit stand for a while sit. I have a stool.

00:21:38 Speaker_03
I like to be at a stool That's where my back is not supported And so I try and vary it as much as I can that I

00:21:45 Speaker_03
And thanks to you, I got, thanks to your recommendation, that is, I bought one of those little kickstands that goes underneath the desk from Rogue. I don't have any financial relationship to Rogue.

00:21:55 Speaker_03
I sent them- No, you're making tens of dollars on this fidget stand. No, I sent them money like everyone else would. One could probably build one too. It's this little fidget stand.

00:22:03 Speaker_03
I love that thing because it reminds me to swing my foot while I'm there, even while I'm standing. So that's what I've done to try and keep some mobility during the day.

00:22:12 Speaker_01
And I want to double click on that, because that's really amazing. Because what you've done is said, hey, I can't control this aspect of my environment. I have to do some deep work.

00:22:20 Speaker_01
That means I might need to perch, or I might have to sit at a conference table. And then what we can start to say is, well, what other choices do I have?

00:22:27 Speaker_01
And now, if we work with a typical person, and you say you have some agency before you leave for work, and then your agency doesn't return until you get home, what are you going to do during the day to keep the body moving, right?

00:22:40 Speaker_01
So that it's easier to escape to your afternoon class. I think that's the thing. And what you've just described is what my wife would call a movement-rich environment.

00:22:49 Speaker_01
How do I pepper the environment with inputs so that I'm not just in a tiny movement language? I love that. I wanna go back to the sitting on the ground. Should it be painful? Should it be sore?

00:23:02 Speaker_01
One aspect of your physiology that will not change, doesn't have to change, is your range of motion. as you get older. We should be able to maintain our range of motion.

00:23:12 Speaker_01
So what's interesting is that if we're suddenly confronted with tasks that ask us to be in certain positions that we're not comfortable with, we're going to be sore. You bet. You're going to have to squeeze your butt.

00:23:22 Speaker_01
And something you said earlier, like once I'm warmed up, I love that phrase. Right? Once I've had my 27 supplements and my coffee and my activation, I've gotten to my sauna, I can do anything. I feel great.

00:23:33 Speaker_01
The real question is, should I have to do all that stuff for high performance? Absolutely. But should I have to do all of this prep to have native range of motion, to have baseline range of motion? Probably not.

00:23:47 Speaker_03
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00:24:01 Speaker_03
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00:24:14 Speaker_03
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00:24:27 Speaker_03
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00:24:34 Speaker_03
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00:24:42 Speaker_03
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00:24:47 Speaker_03
I also notice, and this makes perfect sense given the relationship between the gut microbiome and the brain, that when I regularly take AG1, which for me means a serving in the morning or mid-morning and again later in the afternoon or evening, that I have more mental clarity and more mental energy.

00:25:01 Speaker_03
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00:25:12 Speaker_03
Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim that special offer. Well, as long as we're there, I'm just gonna tell you what's worked best for me in terms of warming up. And I'd love to know your thoughts.

00:25:26 Speaker_03
Years ago, I think it was a Charles Poliquin poster or something like that, where it was suggested to do relatively low repetition warmup. Love it. As opposed to going in and doing, you know, 15 reps, then 10, then eight or whatever it is.

00:25:42 Speaker_03
And I've found over the years, what's allowed me to get strongest and stay strongest for me,

00:25:48 Speaker_03
is to, sure, I'll go in and do the first set of a resistance training movement, maybe eight repetitions, just to get some blood flowing and remind my brain what the range of motion is right.

00:26:00 Speaker_03
Then I'll do maybe just five, four, two repetitions of subsequent three sets. So five, four, and then two repetition sets with heavier loads. And it's just to prepare my nervous system for heavier loads.

00:26:15 Speaker_03
And then when I start my actual quote unquote work sets, I can get a lot more real work done. And this for me was like spit in the face of everything I had read, everything I'd seen that you need to do higher repetition warmups.

00:26:27 Speaker_03
And it has allowed me to progress more or less continuously over the decades that I've been training. And I'm not a natural athlete. I'm just not.

00:26:36 Speaker_03
I've trained for a long, long time, but I would never fall under what you would call like natural athlete. I have a low recovery quotient, all that stuff. And so for me, it was like a shocker, but it makes total sense.

00:26:46 Speaker_03
Prepare the nervous system for the work you're about to do. And don't follow some preconceived idea that you have to do high repetition warmup or even moderate repetition warmup. And lo and behold, you get much stronger.

00:26:56 Speaker_03
And if you want to grow muscle, you can grow more muscle. Why haven't we heard more about this? Why don't people in fitness talk more? I know you do, and please do.

00:27:04 Speaker_03
Talk about the nervous system and the fact that it's not just all about warming up and getting blood flow. It's really about preparing the brain and spinal cord and all the stuff in there.

00:27:15 Speaker_01
Let's say a couple of variables there. What's your training age, right? If I'm going to take a beginner and you in the same thing, we can make big jumps. You and I have been, we've deadlifted together a decade ago. Like we can just go.

00:27:26 Speaker_01
We know our bodies, the patterns are well ingrained. Our tissues have exposure here, right? There's some things we can do. So I love that you're starting to see that what's the minimal amount of warmup to do the task.

00:27:40 Speaker_01
And on some days you may be sore, maybe stiff, and it takes a little more time to go, get right underneath it. One of the things I think we have this opportunity to do is put play back into warmups.

00:27:52 Speaker_01
So one of the things is that I suspect, and please correct me if I'm wrong, you don't find a lot of joy in doing these like rote, A, B, the world's greatest stretch, wah, wah, wah, do the active, like, it's not that fun.

00:28:06 Speaker_01
So what, let me talk about my experience working with a team at Berkeley. I have this shout out to the women's water polo team at Berkeley who are my just total family. These women are incredible.

00:28:18 Speaker_01
But I came into the sport and looked around and I saw really ineffective warmups that weren't a good use of the time, that didn't prepare us to get into a fight in 20 minutes or 30 minutes later.

00:28:31 Speaker_01
So if you went through your warmup and said, I'm going to be in a fight, Am I prepared for that or not? And that's a nice rubric to say I'm nervous system arousal. I have a little sweat on. I've practiced. I've touched some positions and shapes.

00:28:49 Speaker_01
But what I see is that in the typical training session, there's a lot of work to get done. So now I think training has become very, very dense. You know, here's this piece, here's this piece. Now I do the succession work.

00:29:03 Speaker_01
I got to hit these, these cards. And so the warmup for me has been one of the last places where I can get you to explore new movements, something you saw on the internet, play around.

00:29:14 Speaker_01
If you came to my gym, you know, or we came to my house now, I'd be like, let's go throw the medicine ball for five minutes. And there's no wrong way, but I want you to start to explore speed. I want you to explore catching an object and going fast.

00:29:26 Speaker_01
And what we haven't done, and I suspect I wouldn't say that your warm-up is the best way, I'd say it's one way to get to the thing that we want faster, and potentially you stop doing what didn't work and what didn't serve you.

00:29:41 Speaker_01
Which I really want people to understand is that if you're not blind going through some program, I want you to say, does this serve me?

00:29:49 Speaker_01
Because my experience working now 20 years with the best teams and athletes and organizations on the planet is athletes do what work and they stop doing what doesn't work. Isn't that interesting?

00:29:58 Speaker_01
So what I love is that you started to get under heavy loads relatively quickly in movements you had real competency and exposure with.

00:30:06 Speaker_01
Yes, because what we want to do is come back to say, what's the least amount of work I can do to have the biggest adaptation? And three hours in the gym doesn't fit into your life. And it doesn't fit into the typical person's life.

00:30:18 Speaker_01
And theoretically, you're gonna have to go do a sport. So you're gonna have to recover from this sport and this training session, right? You're like, hey, I can't even handle this high volume. You know, it's a ding on me too.

00:30:30 Speaker_01
I can't handle the same high volume as my friends can. So wasting your time in quotation marks with lots of high volume sets of an empty barbell might've been useful at some point, and maybe it doesn't serve you as well now.

00:30:42 Speaker_01
Or because you have to put so many plates on that bar, that's just, that's a warmup by itself, right? That's not an issue for me. So you walked a mile to load those plates.

00:30:49 Speaker_03
No, that's not an issue for me, but that's a perfect, what you just said is a perfect opportunity for me to mention something that I've noticed, which prompts a question, which is, I noticed that I have some asymmetry.

00:30:59 Speaker_03
My right shoulder naturally sits a little lower than my left. And whenever I get a little back tweak, it's always on the same side, et cetera, et cetera. I know this varies for everybody.

00:31:07 Speaker_03
And I noticed that I was always picking up the weights and re-racking them. because I re-rack my weights like a grownup, re-racking them on the same side. So I've made it a point now to switch up, you know, which side of my body I do them from.

00:31:22 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, that's great.

00:31:23 Speaker_03
And notice I'm significantly weaker on one side of my body.

00:31:26 Speaker_03
I mean, not to the point where, you know, I have to use two different sets of, or two different dumbbells if I'm doing curls or something, but just noticing these natural asymmetries starting to show up because I'm a right-hander or,

00:31:37 Speaker_03
who knows, or I skateboarded. So, you know, I've spent a lot of my life, early life, with my left foot forward and my right foot pushing. And as a consequence, there are a lot of asymmetries.

00:31:47 Speaker_03
So, what I've tried to do is correct those asymmetries in the between movement movements, but also to stagger my stance during curls and then switch it each time, or maybe even overemphasize the weaker side.

00:31:58 Speaker_03
I have no professional training in any of this. I've just, found that it's made for better posture, more evenly distributed strength.

00:32:06 Speaker_03
And I must say all of that is based on teachings that I read in your books and through conversations with you about, here we have these natural imbalances and there are little things that we can do that take moments that can correct those imbalances.

00:32:18 Speaker_03
So if you would, could you sort of expand on the number and type of imbalances that you most commonly see and some ways for people to remedy them, excuse me.

00:32:28 Speaker_01
Let's, if we just took the word imbalance and put it to the side for a second, because it's sort of a non-specific term. Like, are we testing your hamstring to your quad? Like, what's the ideal ratio here?

00:32:38 Speaker_01
Like, if you're a professional pitcher, I hope your right arm looks different than your left arm, right? But what we can say is... Number one, imbalances don't necessarily cause pain. Let's be clear about that.

00:32:53 Speaker_01
We should be using our time in the gym as training to find deficiencies and blind spots in our patterns, in our skill, in our brains feeling comfortable with a certain movement.

00:33:10 Speaker_01
And what you just hit was that it's, boy, it's really easy to get a lot of variability just doing the things I want to do anyway. So now I'm in a tandem stance. I skate left foot forward, right? But suddenly, that's my dominant stance.

00:33:23 Speaker_01
If you're going to ask me to do anything of consequence, I'm going to adopt that stance. But suddenly, I get to have some exposure here. So what's the point of the gym? What's the point of training?

00:33:32 Speaker_01
just to work on some cardiorespiratory output that the science says? Is it to move into play? If the brain's a problem-solving machine, let's give it some problems to solve. So you suddenly have a new problem to solve.

00:33:46 Speaker_01
And I would even say that weakness isn't even the right idea. It's just like, here is a pattern that I'm not as effective at, as efficient at. So when we go into the gym sort of with this great curiosity, then it's a really rich place

00:34:01 Speaker_01
And really, frankly, the only safe place because there isn't contact in sport and we're not fighting and dancing and moving and we can really do this controlled formal movement where we can really see inputs and outputs.

00:34:15 Speaker_01
I explained my mother-in-law a long time ago. what was happening when we were developing our model to understand movement. And I was, and I explained it and she was like, oh, you mean it makes the invisible visible?

00:34:25 Speaker_01
That's right, is that this is a place to understand how your range of motion is changing, how your skills are changing, right?

00:34:32 Speaker_01
Over the course of a season or the course of, you know, something going on in your life, a season in your life, suddenly you're like, wow, my left hip is a little tight or my left shoulder is, my internal rotation is going away.

00:34:41 Speaker_01
Hard to see when you're swimming, really easy to see when we dumbbell snatch.

00:34:45 Speaker_01
And what we're trying to do then is take the gym, not only have it be a stimulus for adaptation, but have it be a really great place to uncover changes in my movement, changes in expression of that movement.

00:34:57 Speaker_01
And so really what you see, again, if I just do this one thing over and over again, That's patterning, that's repetition, that's practice, right? And what you've done is just said, hey, let me change my brain.

00:35:09 Speaker_01
Let me open the door handle with my left side. And coming into the gym with that curiosity means that we can have seven bottom lines. We're working on your fascia. We're working on these energy systems. We're working on these movement skills.

00:35:21 Speaker_01
But simultaneously, we can have fun. We can work on understanding our range of motion. So for me, I think it's easier to say, let's frame mobility as, here's my definition. Do you have access to normative range of motion?

00:35:38 Speaker_01
The range of motion every physician, every physical therapist, every chiro agrees on. Shoulder. It's 180 degrees of flexion.

00:35:44 Speaker_03
So for those listening, this is lifting your arm above head so you can bring your hand basically, you know, above the center of your head.

00:35:53 Speaker_01
And what you can see right now is Andrew has his elbow bent, his head tip to the side, his internally rotated. He's solving the problem, which is what his brain is saying. It's compensation.

00:36:04 Speaker_01
If you wanna use the word compensation, I wanna put that on you. But what I'd say is that's an incomplete position. Doesn't mean you have pain, doesn't mean you're not the world champion, but it means we may have some latent capacity we could chase.

00:36:16 Speaker_01
And the next question for me then is, what is it that's missing potentially in your training that we're not having this exposure? We're not doing enough close grip hanging, we're not doing seesaw press, right?

00:36:27 Speaker_01
Where the arm is straight up, we're always gripping on a barbell. I'm not handling enough dumbbells or kettlebells overhead.

00:36:32 Speaker_01
And then we can say, well, do I need some position transfer exercises, some mobility work to restore that so we can use it again? And then more importantly, how does that turn up for you in a way that impacts your sport or your job?

00:36:45 Speaker_01
That's what's really interesting. Does that make sense?

00:36:47 Speaker_03
Yeah, so what I'm hearing is that when we go into the gym or wherever we do our resistance training work, that we should think about it as a place to, yes, perform, to exceed our previous reps and sets.

00:36:59 Speaker_01
That's fun. Yeah, because that's part of the- It's fun and easy to measure. Are you getting better at soccer? I don't know. But I put another keel on my bench today.

00:37:06 Speaker_03
That's fun.

00:37:08 Speaker_03
Lex Friedman, who, of course, everybody knows from the Lex Friedman podcast, likes to make fun of Americans because he's Russian, but he's actually American now, for being meatheads, because we like to spend so much time in gyms, working out, as opposed to doing sports.

00:37:21 Speaker_03
And I assure him that I've also done and do sports now, but he likes to make that point. And I think it's a fair one in that, well, he's a Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy. So in any event,

00:37:34 Speaker_03
The gym is also a place for diagnosis, to diagnose where we don't have as much range of motion as we could. And that's very helpful, I think, for people to hear, because most people are time limited. They don't have... If they're getting their

00:37:51 Speaker_03
two or three resistance training workouts per week, plus two or three cardiovascular training workouts.

00:37:55 Speaker_03
And they're listening to Peter Ortega, so they're trying to hang from a bar for 90 seconds or more, and they're doing some farmer carries, and they're doing their zone two, and they're throwing on a weight vest, and they're fidgeting under their desk.

00:38:07 Speaker_03
At some point, you can start to understand why people are like, whoa, this is starting to become overwhelming. What you're talking about is going and doing your typical workout, but paying attention to where some,

00:38:19 Speaker_03
for lack of a better word, I'll call them asymmetries, or not full range of motion being expressed, where that might be happening.

00:38:26 Speaker_03
I love, I keep coming back to this, but this thing about getting down onto the ground for 30 minutes each night while watching TV, or while, maybe even while eating dinner, or while talking to your family or partner, I think it's fantastic.

00:38:37 Speaker_03
It also gives me an excuse to push the sofas off to the side of the room, because I have this weird neuroticism about furniture in the middle of the room. So I'm imagining getting mats down on the floor of the living room.

00:38:48 Speaker_01
And suddenly, we're not programming another thing that's, I think, one of the things that's happened. And it's a good thing. It's a feature of the system. Strength conditioning in the last 20 years has become very sophisticated.

00:39:02 Speaker_01
So Juliette and I, my wife and CEO, opened our gym in 2005.

00:39:10 Speaker_03
This was the CrossFit gym at the Presidio.

00:39:12 Speaker_01
That's right. Beautiful location. 21st CrossFit in the world, early. But we couldn't buy a kettlebell in San Francisco. We had to drive to Santa Cruz.

00:39:20 Speaker_03
That says a lot about San Francisco. I can say that because I'm from the Bay Area.

00:39:23 Speaker_01
But there was one place in Santa Cruz that sold them, Played Against Sports, that imported these Russian kettlebells. Thank you, Pavel. And we had to make this trek down to buy them.

00:39:33 Speaker_01
So the fitness, I think we, I bought my first pair of Olympic lifting shoes out of the back of someone's car, like a drug deal. Olympic lifting shoes? Yeah. Like you just couldn't buy them. Flats old shoes.

00:39:42 Speaker_01
No, I'm like actually an Olympic lifting shoe with like a heel But like you can buy those at like three different stores in Malibu right now like you go right over there There's it's we've normal you can buy kettlebells at Target.

00:39:54 Speaker_01
So the world has become much more sophisticated Sometimes like the overhead squat is a good example Fantastic diagnostic tool, tells us a lot. So bar held overhead. And squat down, super simple.

00:40:07 Speaker_01
All you have to do is have normal range of motion and your joints and tissues. And be you. Well, that helps. Juliette likes to say I was bendy before I was big. But the idea here though is, let's go ahead and also put skill back into this.

00:40:20 Speaker_01
But most people weren't overhead squatting you know, at all. It wasn't part of their language. Now everyone knows what an overhead squat is, right? Dan John, CrossFit, all the Olympic lifters have been doing this forever.

00:40:31 Speaker_01
But what we are seeing is that the natural evolution of fitness and strength conditioning is that we've become, we've gotten really decorative in our rooms. So we create this room that's just, every inch has a knick-knack, has an assistance.

00:40:47 Speaker_01
This is my tib raise, this is my neck thing. It's a very decorative experience. And instead of asking what was essential in terms of energy systems and positions that I can train so that I could go use those credits.

00:40:59 Speaker_01
You know, for lack of a better word, fitness has become very recursive. I have this zone two, so I can do more zone two, so I can do more zone two. Or I have pull-ups because they get more pull-ups. Instead of, well, how did that make you swim?

00:41:12 Speaker_01
What's the minimum amount of time we can spend in the gym so that you can go express that? Lex is right. In a sport or an activity, And look, there are times in your life where the gym is the only thing you got.

00:41:23 Speaker_01
You know, Juliet and I, when we had two kids and a baby, or two kids in our businesses, we did the 10, 10, 10 at 10, which is like 10 air squats, 10 kettlebell swings, 10 pull-ups at 10 p.m. for 10 minutes. And I was like, elite, my fitness is elite.

00:41:36 Speaker_03
You do that every day?

00:41:37 Speaker_01
Well, I just did it when I could do it, right? Because that's all I could fit in. So, you know, I think what's happened is we have now sold people this idea that fitness happens in a one-hour block, and if it's not an hour,

00:41:50 Speaker_01
you know, that it's not worth doing. And if you kept a bar loaded in your garage, you could walk out there and do sets in between making dinner.

00:41:58 Speaker_01
You kept a kettle on your kitchen, you could do pavos, four swings on the minute for 20 minutes, and at least have some exposure and loading.

00:42:06 Speaker_01
a long way around the barn of saying, I want to protect your gym time because it's really sacred, amazing time where you can have fun, explore ranges, get strong, get jacked, feel great about yourself, interact with your friends.

00:42:18 Speaker_01
And what I don't want to do is encroach anymore on that magic time because we have a lot to get done in the gym.

00:42:24 Speaker_01
Physiologically, if we're going to compete against these other teams, if we're going to beat Stanford, we're going to need to really maximize that time in the gym.

00:42:31 Speaker_01
So that means we need to push out some of these other behaviors so we're not stacking them in and they're eroding the time we could be squatting or benching or cleaning or running or sprinting or cutting or playing.

00:42:41 Speaker_03
You mentioned warming up with play, which I think is a wonderful concept and presumably brings about more dynamic movement. And another reason I like it is that I loathe warming up, aside from the types of warm-ups that I just described. I hate it.

00:42:58 Speaker_03
And I'm beginning to realize that the way I've been training, even though it's been, I would say, useful and successful for where I've been, I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do heading into the new year. Love it.

00:43:11 Speaker_03
This is not like a New Year's episode. This is, you know, evergreen because it's you. But we have a new year coming. A lot of people are going to naturally mark the time during and after the holidays as a transition point.

00:43:26 Speaker_03
if one wanted to start to not necessarily completely restructure their fitness, but wanted to start incorporating a few things. So we've got sitting down in the evening for 30 minutes. We've got incorporating play into the warmup.

00:43:39 Speaker_03
What would that look like? Are we taking a tennis ball and bouncing it off the ground? Are we setting some rule in playing a game? Sure. What if I'm alone? Am I playing a little handball type game against the wall?

00:43:49 Speaker_01
Absolutely. See something on the internet, want to learn a new skill, this is the time to put it in. I'm going to talk about my brilliant friend David Weck. He has something called Rope Flow that he created, and it's just a piece of climbing rope.

00:44:03 Speaker_01
And he will talk about all the things that will do for me. I get a thousand PNF patterns. I tie my upper body into my lower body.

00:44:12 Speaker_03
Could you explain PNF? Sorry, acronym.

00:44:14 Speaker_01
Sorry, everyone. That's a model of facilitating movement developed at Kaiser Vallejo. It is by Knott and Cabot, I think. Maybe I'm getting confused in those. Anyway, the bottom line is this.

00:44:29 Speaker_01
How do we help the body restore movement by using its own positional awareness? So if you've ever done a hamstring stretch where someone holds you and you resist, that contract relax is a style, it's a technique born out of PNF. Got it.

00:44:44 Speaker_01
Sorry to interrupt.

00:44:44 Speaker_03
No problem. Perfect. So he's got these ropes.

00:44:46 Speaker_01
And so suddenly, like I use this with all my teams, is suddenly I'm spinning ropes. I'm getting thousands of evolutions of the wrist turning, the elbow turning, the shoulder turning.

00:44:59 Speaker_01
I'm generating speed in weird positions that would be vulnerable and not as effective at high load, high stakes. I get to twist. I can tie my eyes into it. I can develop my stance. And in five minutes of messing around, you're like, oh. I feel good.

00:45:15 Speaker_01
And we've added some speed to that, right? Because a lot of the warmups I see people do, I'm like, hey, there was no speed. You know what sport is? Speed. And you haven't added any velocity to your training. So where are we gonna do that? I love this.

00:45:27 Speaker_01
I'm excited to... Dave Weck does a lot of amazing things. His rope is a foundational piece of my... If you work with me and you have shoulder pain and neck pain, You're gonna get my shoulder spin up or David Weck's rope flow every day.

00:45:41 Speaker_01
That's part of our homework. What are we gonna do to give you exposure and restore what you're supposed to do with your body?

00:45:47 Speaker_03
So walk into the gym, use the bathroom, hydrate, whatever it is you need to do, and then five to 10 minutes of some play type dynamic activity.

00:45:53 Speaker_01
Sure, throw a medicine ball around, jump on a mini trampoline, pick up a barbell, do a complex, do some breath hold work. This is a perfect place to lay in all the breath hold work. I think they call it dry face breath holding, right?

00:46:06 Speaker_01
It's this dynamic apnea work where you're basically holding your breath. So for example, with our teams, I try to have, this is a magic number, seven,

00:46:16 Speaker_01
sort of hypoxic events where we do something on a breath hold until the athlete has a crisis and has to breathe. And part of that is I want to get the brain ready for these high CO2 levels, right? And I want to challenge respiration. And it's so easy.

00:46:32 Speaker_01
Get on the bike. Here's something everyone can do. For five minutes, I want you to take a 10-second inhale on the bike. Hold your breath as long as you can. When the bomb goes off in your face,

00:46:44 Speaker_01
recover nodes only, start at the next one at the next minute. And what you're going to see is, wow, that was really uncomfortable, really psychologically preparing myself to get into a fight. That came from the French freedivers.

00:46:55 Speaker_01
One of the coaches I was working with was like, here's something we used to do with our French freedivers. I was like, this is so good. Mackenzie, Laird Hamilton, Wim Hof, the people who've been exposing us to dynamic apnea work is amazing.

00:47:08 Speaker_01
But that's another example of something I can do instead of mindlessly just being on and I gotta get a sweat. Like, let's go ahead and just layer in play and destruction. I love it. Do not lay on the ground a foam roll. Let me say that again.

00:47:22 Speaker_01
Do not lay on the ground a foam roll. That's the worst way to get ready for a fight ever.

00:47:26 Speaker_03
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00:47:35 Speaker_03
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00:47:53 Speaker_03
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00:48:03 Speaker_03
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00:48:13 Speaker_03
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00:48:35 Speaker_03
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00:48:43 Speaker_03
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00:48:54 Speaker_03
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00:49:07 Speaker_03
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00:50:31 Speaker_03
Again, that's 8sleep.com slash Huberman. Somehow, and we could talk about how, it's not a coincidence, you became synonymous with foam rolling. It became synonymous with you. That's okay. I mean, it's not okay. It's okay with me.

00:50:48 Speaker_03
They weren't saying about me, but I was about to say it's OK, you know, anytime somebody goes public facing and starts to try and educate people, you know, there's certain things that are sticky.

00:50:58 Speaker_03
They have like high salience, like, yes, I like to get into a cold plunge. But how I, how Andrew Huberman became associated with cold plunging or buying a cold plunge is wild. I mean, sure, I own one and, you know, this sort of thing.

00:51:09 Speaker_03
And I think they're great for shifting your state. It's hardly the cornerstone of my life or my existence, but I love it. I use it, but I think foam rolling, I think looked different enough from what people had not seen before.

00:51:25 Speaker_03
And it, you know, these things just, they have a stickiness to them. Who knows why? What is the deal with foam rolling? Is there a utility to foam rolling? Absolutely. Is there a wrong way to do it?

00:51:38 Speaker_01
No, but there's a way that's not a great use of your time.

00:51:41 Speaker_03
Okay.

00:51:42 Speaker_01
Right? So what we're all looking at is we have a finite amount of time. And what's my goal? To quickly touch my whole body? You know, what are we trying to do?

00:51:51 Speaker_01
So if I was using soft tissue mobilization or using a roller or a ball or something, what's my goal here? Well, I think the research is very clear, it can help with pain, it can restore range of motion. Again, very clear.

00:52:06 Speaker_01
And I want to point out sort of one of my research friends, Brent Brookbush, the Brookbush Institute has incredible summaries of musculoskeletal care. Brent is a genius.

00:52:17 Speaker_01
And if you go on his site, there's a little hourglass and you can search like trigger points. And you'll see all of the deep dive research, analysis of the meta research. You'll be like, okay, this is really excellent.

00:52:29 Speaker_01
And it is tricky because what doesn't work for my body or wasn't a good use for a time now is useless and it's easy to shout on the internet. So what's our goal? If I was in pain and I was about to exercise,

00:52:41 Speaker_01
a quick two or three minute intervention working on, let's call it desensitization of the tissues, let's be mechanism agnostic for a second, and say that's a really low level to entry, safe, highly effective way for you to suddenly feel better so we create a window of opportunity to move.

00:53:01 Speaker_01
That's really cool, I love that. No physical therapist in the room, no one went blind, you didn't dislocate, right? So that could be a really excellent use of some soft tissue work.

00:53:11 Speaker_01
The same way a boxer would go or an MMA fighter or the Olympic lifters in China, they have people who are giving non-threatening input to the body to tell the brain it's safe or to rehydrate something or get some, again, is it just stimulus so that the brain says it's safe?

00:53:27 Speaker_01
Sure. Are we restoring how the tissues slide and glide? Sure. A lot of times I think if you look at any of the mobility work, I'll just put writ large, really comes down to just doing a couple things. Most of them are just isometrics.

00:53:42 Speaker_01
So we have a lot of isometrics, which everyone can agree is good stuff, and we do a lot of tempo work. It's really just moving slowly through range.

00:53:50 Speaker_01
It just may be that I'm using a different tool to have that isometric stimulus or that tempo moving slowly stimulus. So we like to say, let's use mobilizations. mobilizing the tissues, why are we doing it? What are we trying to do?

00:54:06 Speaker_01
Well, pain is a good reason. And again, multifactorial, highly subjective, why do I have pain? Well, I got in a fight with my wife and I didn't eat and I twisted my knee back in Vietnam and who knows, right?

00:54:20 Speaker_01
But what are the inputs that I have to self-soothe and desensitize? And it turns out a ball and a roller is a really good one. So I can use those to help myself feel better. Did that solve the problem? Did that solve two weeks of shitty sleep?

00:54:32 Speaker_01
Did that solve my poor nutrition and lack of fiber? Did that solve the fact that I don't feel safe in this environment? No. But it got me a window of opportunity where I can go feel better in my body. Is anyone against that? No. Okay.

00:54:43 Speaker_01
So what we can also say is, hey, this would be a great way to do what? Restore your range of motion. A one tool and a system of tools to get you to do what, have normative range again, right?

00:54:54 Speaker_01
For whatever reason, your lats are super stiff, your, doesn't, again, it's more complicated than that, but sometimes it's not more complicated than that.

00:55:02 Speaker_01
And if I just get you getting some input into there, maybe I can restore that range of motion or create a window where you can go use it again. Lastly, I would say is that it's a wonderful tool to decrease DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness.

00:55:15 Speaker_01
So in the evening, you blow out your quads, do a little soft tissue work, and what you'll see is maybe that's blood flow, maybe it's non-threatening input, maybe it's just massage, maybe it's just the parasympathetic input that massage has, touch, right, just downregulates.

00:55:31 Speaker_01
Maybe those are the reasons I feel better. But the bottom line is, is that a good use of your time? Yes. Are all techniques on the roller the same? No. Right?

00:55:40 Speaker_01
And I think that's where we've lost our minds, is that if you just rolled up and down on your calf, didn't do anything. I'm like, yeah, well, you just, what are you doing? Right? What if I rolled side to side?

00:55:50 Speaker_01
And so suddenly we can start to layer in some really complex thinking around this. How about this? You have a roller out and I put my calf on there and I start rolling side to side. Should that be uncomfortable?

00:56:04 Speaker_03
I'm guessing you're going to say no, but Anytime I've used a roller anytime I've used a roller I'm like, man, that hurts.

00:56:15 Speaker_01
That hurts. I don't like it, that sucks.

00:56:17 Speaker_03
Well, I mean, I don't mind it. Like, it's not like the kind of, it's not like level eight pain or anything. It's just, it's sort of like, it feels very localized. Yeah. Even if the roller is a big, fat Costello the Bulldog size roller. Totally, totally.

00:56:29 Speaker_03
It feels like someone's kind of kneading down in between my muscle fibers. And then I started to think, maybe I just have like low fiber density. And if I were Mark Bell or something, then this would feel comfortable.

00:56:39 Speaker_03
But you know, I always feel like the roller's going down to the bone.

00:56:42 Speaker_01
You can really mount the face of LFD. Low fiber density. So, you know what, I think what we can do is let's establish some guidelines for people.

00:56:51 Speaker_01
Because this is one of the ways that we can feel better in our home without bourbon, without ibuprofen, without THC. Like we need to give people some tools that don't, like that aren't just- Without having to buy a sauna, if you can afford one, great.

00:57:03 Speaker_03
But not every, I mean, this whole thing with sauna, love saunas. But, you know, well, until very recently in my life, I couldn't afford a sauna. Until very recently, you know, even as a tenured professor at Stanford, I'll just say that, right?

00:57:15 Speaker_01
You can actually be angry at your parents for not giving you a sauna.

00:57:18 Speaker_03
You know, when I was a kid, my dad and I used to go to the Y in the evening sometimes when I was little and I'd shoot baskets or he would lift weights, nautilus machines back then. Yeah. And then... Get brutally big on those.

00:57:29 Speaker_01
And then we'd sit in the sauna.

00:57:30 Speaker_03
Or there was a hot tub or something.

00:57:31 Speaker_01
And you had a different set of traumatic experiences of sitting in the sauna.

00:57:35 Speaker_03
No, actually, I learned how men over 40 spoke in 1985. There you go. There you go.

00:57:51 Speaker_01
If everyone had a roller and a ball, there's a lot of dysfunction and discomfort we can manage. If you push on a tissue, we expect that tissue to be painless to compression, or not uncomfortable to compression. Again, pain is a weird word.

00:58:06 Speaker_01
I don't want to set that up. But it shouldn't be uncomfortable to compression. What's nice is that if I push on something, all I'm doing is just creating an isometric. It's just a vector isometric.

00:58:15 Speaker_01
Instead of pulling an isometric through the length of the tissue, I'm putting it at a different vector and angle. So that would just be one. I could start there. And if it was uncomfortable, well, guess what? Now I can get my nervous system involved.

00:58:27 Speaker_01
So I can teach my brain that it's safe to create a contraction here. So what do I do? Just flex. Flex it. Hold it for four seconds.

00:58:34 Speaker_03
This is very basic, I realize. But for many people, they're either already foam rolling and doing it incorrectly, or they're not foam rolling, and we want them to do it correctly.

00:58:42 Speaker_03
So if I understand correctly, it's, quote unquote, OK to flex the muscle that you have in contact with the foam roller while you're rolling.

00:58:50 Speaker_01
If I find something that's uncomfortable or stiff or doesn't feel like my other side, I'm going to stop. I found a place to work. I'm going to build, take a big inhale. So I take a four-second inhale.

00:59:04 Speaker_01
I wanna teach myself that I need to be able to breathe in this position. One of my friends, Greg Cook, is like, if you can't breathe in a position, you don't own a position. That sounds very Iyengar, too.

00:59:15 Speaker_01
But what we're gonna do is we're gonna say it's okay to breathe here, and I'm gonna contract here. And then I'm gonna slowly relax and soften. That's tempo that's moving slowly, and I can handle higher loads.

00:59:27 Speaker_01
And what'll end up happening is if I repeat that cycle two or three times, guess what? My brain desensitizes that. changes range of motion, my brain suddenly is like, that's not a problem anymore. So we just move on.

00:59:38 Speaker_01
And in two or three cycles of that contraction, breath hold, long exhale, that starts to sound familiar, right? How do I calm down, long exhales? I'm not trying to spin up. I'm trying to say this is safe. I've done that with my breath.

00:59:54 Speaker_01
I've done that with contraction. I'm just getting input in, just touch to my body, especially on parts that maybe don't bark at me very often. People are shocked to learn that sometimes when they have knee pain, how stiff their quads are.

01:00:09 Speaker_01
And then we can test it, load it, feel it, palpate it. And I'm like, those things are just stiff.

01:00:14 Speaker_01
And when we un-stiffen them, whatever technique you want to use, restore sliding surfaces, get neural input in there, we create range of motion, suddenly we change a motion dynamic.

01:00:26 Speaker_01
improved efficiency, the brain says, hey, that's no longer a threat or we're experiencing that as a new pattern or position, that'd be enough to reduce your pain. But pain isn't the only reason we're mobilizing.

01:00:36 Speaker_01
We're mobilizing so that we can reduce session costs, so we can work out harder the next day and keep an eye on our minimums of our range of motion.

01:00:47 Speaker_03
I love this. And another just very basic question, because I'll be honest, I haven't foam rolled much in my life.

01:00:53 Speaker_01
And it doesn't have to be a big foam roller, everyone. Sometimes those big white, those are pool noodles, right? That's what it was for. I think like made in Killeen, Texas is like a manufacturing byproduct. And someone's like, we could

01:01:06 Speaker_01
put these in the pool, and then some physical therapist is like, sweet. Like, that thing's way too big, and too hard, and too square, and too soft. Like, there's a whole bunch of things.

01:01:14 Speaker_01
Like, sometimes you need an elbow, sometimes you need a forearm, sometimes you need a thumb. So you can have much smaller diameter. I'm a much bigger fan of smaller diameter rollers. I just think they fit your body better.

01:01:25 Speaker_03
Thank you for that, also very helpful. Let's say I want to quote, unquote, loosen up or move out some potential soreness or soreness from a given muscle, like the quadricep. Does it make sense to start in the middle of that muscle, the top?

01:01:44 Speaker_03
Can you work above and below the knee? Are all of those things going to help? I realize this is a much fuller discussion than we can have in a few minutes, but how should I approach it? Okay, my quads are a little sore or my back is sore.

01:01:57 Speaker_03
Do I go straight to the back or do I start with another body region?

01:02:01 Speaker_01
I don't think it matters. What I'm interested in is inputs and outputs, right? What I'm really interested in is what did you do to make yourself feel better? Did you just hope it would just go away?

01:02:11 Speaker_01
And then one day it didn't and then you had to activate the emergency medical system. So let's define a couple things. What is an injury? This is a great question. Injury for us is there's a clear mechanism of mechanical trauma.

01:02:25 Speaker_01
There's a bone sticking out of your leg, Andrew. Time to go to the hospital. Injured. Right, you're injured, right? Heard a snap and a pop. Yikes.

01:02:33 Speaker_01
I have night sweats, dizziness, fever, vomiting, nausea, unaccounted for weight loss, weight gain, changes in my bladder, bowel function, problem with coughs, sneezes, swallows. Those are red flags. You're not sore, you're sick.

01:02:45 Speaker_01
Let me introduce you to the doctor again, right? If your pain or dysfunction is so bad you can't occupy a role in your family, can't occupy a role in society, can't occupy a role in the team, that's an emergency problem.

01:03:00 Speaker_01
That is a medical condition that needs medical. So you come in today, we tweak your back, we need to activate EMS. You need to go to the hospital. Because it's so severe, you can't do your job. Everything else I want to call non-injury.

01:03:13 Speaker_01
I want to be very specific with the language used. We call it an incident. It actually comes out of this sort of language. There was a guy, here's the long way around the barn. I read this great book called Deep Survival.

01:03:27 Speaker_01
which is Lawrence Gonzales, which is about why people end up in survival situations. And it's literally a lot about, like, we got away with it for a long time, and then I just didn't have a, you know, I ended up two miles out sea.

01:03:38 Speaker_01
I've done it a million times, and this time, right, that's it. But there was a footnote in there from a book called Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow, who's recently passed on. I emailed Charles because I was like, this has blown my mind.

01:03:50 Speaker_01
He calls a lot of times we'll have trivial events in non-trivial systems. So he's taking systems thinking, he's looking at complex system organization.

01:04:01 Speaker_01
And his idea is that an accident, a normal accident, is actually just expression of the system if you gave the system long enough to express itself.

01:04:11 Speaker_01
The inputs and outputs are so tightly coupled that it's difficult to see what causes what and how they influence each other. That's the body. So your stiff shoulder isn't a problem until you fall on the ice.

01:04:23 Speaker_01
And then that stiff shoulder suddenly can't take overpressure and overhead, and you tear your rotator cuff off at high speed. You'd say, oh, black swan event, super crazy.

01:04:32 Speaker_01
But that's actually just a normal expression of that shoulder system if we gave it enough time to express itself. So he has sort of like incident and accident.

01:04:45 Speaker_01
So an incident is I want us to start to think about incident level problems, our pain, loss of range of motion, numbness, tingle. We're becoming curious, why is the brain sending me the signals? Pain is a request for change.

01:04:59 Speaker_01
So if we ask our athletic population, I just did this with 100 kids, I'm like, how many of you are pain free? 100 high school kids, two hands go up. Two. High school. High school.

01:05:08 Speaker_01
So what we're suddenly realizing is that pain is very much a part of the athletic condition, the human experience, certainly the athletic experience. You've been in pain a billion times and still gone out and done the thing.

01:05:20 Speaker_01
So what we want to do is say pain is not always a medical problem. It's a medical problem when?

01:05:25 Speaker_01
The rest of the time, we're saying, how are you using fitness training as a scaffolding to understand nutrition, hydration, soft tissue work, desensitization, reperfusion of the tissues?

01:05:39 Speaker_01
So that's what we're trying to do in sport and training is empower people to say, what's going on with my body? And why don't I feel the way I do? Or why does something hurt? And why can't I remedy that?

01:05:50 Speaker_01
And then when I run out of ideas, let me go get some help.

01:05:54 Speaker_03
So the rolling we can think of as a way to move out soreness, prepare us for more work the next day or something like that. But is it fair to say that we can also use the roller as a diagnostic tool? Sure.

01:06:08 Speaker_03
Like if I'm feeling like an unusual amount of, well, not unusual, but let's just say that I'm feeling like a wuss.

01:06:16 Speaker_03
Cause when I, when I lie down on that roller and I kind of like, you know, like slide back and forth, like I've seen the videos of you and other folks doing that, I'm like, man, that really hurts. Does that necessarily mean something's wrong? No. Okay.

01:06:27 Speaker_01
No, it means, it means that, for whatever reason, those tissues become sensitized. And your brain is interpreting that stiffness as a threat. And it's reading it as pain. Right? And some people, they don't have that.

01:06:42 Speaker_01
They just, their tissues feel like this, but they don't have pain when they do that. But that's not a normal tissue. You should be like layers of warm silk sliding over steel springs.

01:06:51 Speaker_03
And what you're seeing... Is that what quality tissue should feel like?

01:06:53 Speaker_01
Yeah, absolutely.

01:06:55 Speaker_03
Layers of silk over steel springs.

01:06:56 Speaker_01
Layers of silk over steel springs. And what we see is that we are loading and training at such high intensity, so such density now, that our tissues get stiff. I'm just going to hang stiffness as, for whatever reason, high fibrotic,

01:07:11 Speaker_01
Density of tissues whatever the reason the tissues don't behave the way the joint system should Right, and that's a problem because my training shouldn't mitigate or attenuate or change my range of motion It can but now how am I keeping an eye on those changes or as you said earlier?

01:07:31 Speaker_01
as I do a sport and I start to do a sport and specialize, I'm throwing, throwing, or I swim, or I kick on one side, how can I start to identify as my body is changing and adapting that sport so I can drag myself back to sort of a greater readiness?

01:07:48 Speaker_01
And that's one of the reasons that that mobilization tool is such a powerful tool. Again, however you want to do it. I think it's useful for us when we have, I came up with this thing called the D2R2 model because the other ray was taken, R2D2.

01:08:02 Speaker_01
So the first order of business is I want to desensitize if something hurts. Something hurts, let's desensitize it. I can do that all different ways. Scraping is powerful desensitization. Isometrics can be really useful.

01:08:15 Speaker_01
Rolling, BFR can give me desensitization. There's so many techniques to make my body- Blood flow restriction. Yeah, blood flow restriction. So that no longer my brain is perceiving this as a threat.

01:08:24 Speaker_01
Because if you're in pain, you cannot generate the same amount of force or wattage or output, and your brain is going to start to truncate. It's going to start to lop off your movement solutions, right? It's just going to happen.

01:08:34 Speaker_01
So we want everyone to be saying, hey, we don't panic when we have pain. We just treat it like another diagnostic tool. Then second D, we desensitize. And then we ask, is this something to be decongested?

01:08:47 Speaker_01
So decongestion means that oftentimes tissues that are swollen become more easily sensitized. Tissues that are swollen and congested don't heal as fast. If you have a swollen ankle, those collagen fibers will not knit together as fast as a, right?

01:09:02 Speaker_01
If you have a joint that's swollen or a tissue that's swollen, your brain will shut down force production in and around that joint system. Is swelling an emergency? No.

01:09:12 Speaker_01
Is a swollen joint environment really healthy for the integrity and surface of the joint? No. We want to manage that.

01:09:19 Speaker_01
But oftentimes when someone comes in and the tissue is congested, right, just sometimes we say swelling and we think ankle, right, only capsular. But here we have, if you've ever flown on an airplane and had cankles, that's congested tissue.

01:09:35 Speaker_01
If we manage that congestion, if we move those lymphatics along, muscle contraction drives the lymphatic drainage, the lymph system is the sewage system of the body, decongested tissues often express less pain.

01:09:48 Speaker_01
And what we find is that in broken bones or soft tissue injuries, if we can better evacuate that swelling, better evacuate that congestion, not only do we see you're now healing at the rate of a human being, we're not rate limiting the healing,

01:10:00 Speaker_01
but also we can help you manage that sensitivity. Then the third one is, can we get some blood flow in there? Like you said, once I warm up, I feel great. Welcome to the power of blood flow.

01:10:10 Speaker_01
Tissues become hydrated, we're shifting blood from the stomach, all the things that happens, right? All that venous return is coming back on board. But suddenly we see that if we can get something pumped full of blood, it tends to be less painful.

01:10:21 Speaker_01
And that's a really easy, so if I have an old orthopedic thing, maybe I spend a few minutes just getting a huge quad pump on the leg extension machine, then I go squat heavy. So now I have desensitization, decongestion, reperfusion.

01:10:34 Speaker_01
Whatever tool you want to use for these is fair game with me. Just how I've come to kind of conceptualize these different tools. And the last one is restore. Do you have full range of motion, full normal in that joint, yes or no?

01:10:45 Speaker_01
Because that's the last thing that we talk about because you're still able to perform your sport at college or do your job, but we're not seeing how

01:10:54 Speaker_01
in excess, your ability to not excess that range of motion, maybe limiting your movement choice and potentially overloading a tissue by making it work in a less effective manner.

01:11:03 Speaker_03
Or even just leading to progressively worse and worse posture, which is probably- Well, define posture for me.

01:11:10 Speaker_01
Because I think that's a really great place to start, right? Yeah.

01:11:12 Speaker_03
I can define bad posture as when you catch yourself in a reflection and you realize, wow, I'm starting to look more like a C than a not.

01:11:20 Speaker_01
That's so great. The question is, is that a matter of aesthetics or pain?

01:11:24 Speaker_03
Well, certainly for me, it's not pain, but you know, I- It's not becoming injury. I noticed that it's not becoming. I noticed that unless I pay attention,

01:11:35 Speaker_03
to my posture while sitting, unless I do, you know, like bridge my fingers together and pull my chin back a few times a day, that I'm just naturally starting to tip over forward towards my text messages that aren't even in my hands right now.

01:11:49 Speaker_03
And I think this is, you know, the... The younger generation, I mean now that I'm 49, I can talk like that, right? I mean, it's striking.

01:11:57 Speaker_00
Were you born in the 1900s?

01:11:58 Speaker_03
They are. Late 1900s?

01:12:00 Speaker_00
Yeah, exactly.

01:12:01 Speaker_03
They're starting to look like a, they're shaped like a C. And I'm a big believer in people, especially men, doing neck work. I feel like, especially if- How about especially people doing neck work?

01:12:13 Speaker_03
Yeah, well, here's the thing every anytime I'm happy to go go there with this one Maybe even at the risk of being politically incorrect anytime.

01:12:21 Speaker_01
I've suggested that women also do neck work They say no you should see my goalie daughter because for every pound stronger your neck is your reduction in Concussion risk drops huge a pound.

01:12:34 Speaker_01
Thank you So we keep the iron neck by the door and she walks in and there's a we have a video in our family Where she's doing her iron neck training. She looks at me. She's like dad. This is why I don't have a boyfriend Thank you.

01:12:44 Speaker_01
Sorry, Caroline, but that's the way it goes, right? Cause she's like, look at me, I look like an idiot, but she loves having a big strong neck that doesn't, can take the shot from the ball. Yeah.

01:12:52 Speaker_03
Listen, I wish everyone would train their neck. I had an accident where I fell off a roof, walked away from it. My neck was sore, but I heard it and felt it. And I was like, oh goodness. But it was actually from skateboarding stuff and falling.

01:13:04 Speaker_03
And then I started training my neck years ago and realized that, wow, when I trained my neck, I'm one of the few people in my age cohort that doesn't complain about shoulder pain.

01:13:13 Speaker_03
Now, maybe I don't have full range of motion, maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong people, but anytime I see somebody with really broad shoulders, where their neck is really inside of their jawline, it looks like a head was placed on the wrong action figure body, I just want to go over to them and say,

01:13:28 Speaker_03
Listen, A, it's aesthetically ridiculous. It looks like one of those flip books in the kids where you can change the head, the body, and the legs to be different animals. More seriously, it's a hazard because it's your upper spine.

01:13:41 Speaker_03
It's clearly not in line with the rest of your strength profile. And the other one is the more incentive-based thing is, hey, listen, if you train your neck, everything else gets stronger and your brain is going to be safer.

01:13:51 Speaker_03
And as a neuroscientist, they usually listen to the last piece. So I'm so glad we're talking about this. I do bridges. I know that it can be risky with tongue in the roof of my mouth. I do bridges to the back.

01:14:02 Speaker_03
And then I do have a four-way neck machine or I use a plate. Jeff Cavalier has got a great video of how to do this that we can link to, how to do it safely. You gotta close the chain by having a hand on the ground, this kind of thing to do it safely.

01:14:12 Speaker_03
But I've just found that neck work also serves posture. Imposture serves the ability to make eye contact when you have those things we call conversations with people in real life.

01:14:24 Speaker_03
And I do think these things stack up to, we won't call it like psychological confidence, but the ability to meet somebody, you know, like firm handshake, you know, trying to crush the other person's hand, look people in the eye, stand up straight, whatever your height.

01:14:35 Speaker_03
These things really matter. in subtle ways or not so subtle ways. I think that I do feel like, yes, that the younger generation and the older generation, they sort of drop, they kind of drop out of certain elements of life.

01:14:49 Speaker_03
If you're looking down at the ground or your phone all the time, you can't look people in the eye, you're posturally not right, you're in pain, you're not as strong as you could be.

01:14:56 Speaker_03
I mean, these things stack up to being like in an aquarium full of fish. You're becoming the fish in the background that's like, you know, like it was kind of sickly. And the other fish are getting all the good stuff. And, you know.

01:15:09 Speaker_01
If you define posture as like the Latin word root is position. So we're really saying is I have good position, I have bad position. I have bad position.

01:15:20 Speaker_01
One of the ways I think we've lost the narrative a little bit is we try to give people these extrinsic cues to correct their posture. Shoulders back and down, check your tent. So all of a sudden you're like, when am I going to be a human being?

01:15:33 Speaker_01
How do I practice this when I'm doing a complex skill? So the organization of your body, the organization of your spine, particularly, really is a reflection of your movement habits, your behaviors, your self-identity.

01:15:45 Speaker_01
There's a lot of things in there, right? You didn't get the job. You won the, you got the number from Juliette. Right, or you're sleep deprived even.

01:15:53 Speaker_03
And I'm gonna call myself out, because people are gonna do it. There are many times on this podcast when I go and I look at the, because I do listen to the podcast, try and see places I can improve, et cetera. And I'll be like, wow, my posture.

01:16:03 Speaker_03
I'm like hunched over. And I think to myself, and I'll go and I look.

01:16:06 Speaker_01
You're just reflecting my posture.

01:16:07 Speaker_03
No, and I track my sleep. So, you know, I'll go back and look. I'll be like, yeah, I wasn't sleeping as well those days, or whatever it is, right? I mean, I think that we are all guilty of not paying enough attention to our posture.

01:16:18 Speaker_01
So what we can do is we could define posture as there is a median range of the joint positioning where we simultaneously have most access to our physiology, right, and I'll explain that a little more, but also those shapes aren't associated with increased pain risk and increased injury risk, which is real.

01:16:40 Speaker_01
The research does bear that, that there are positions and shapes that lead to less effective movement and are more likely to experience pain. It's probabilistic. It's not guaranteed. It's more likely.

01:16:53 Speaker_01
So one of the things that I think you could understand is, hey, do you want to have access to all of the machinery? So go ahead and slouch. Go ahead with me. And then just turn over your shoulder. How far can you turn? Yeah, not very far. Now watch this.

01:17:06 Speaker_01
Get into a position where you take a huge breath. Get in the biggest position when you take the biggest breath. Okay, so that's a pretty rocking shape. Now turn your head. It goes further. So by you being cued, can you adopt a shape?

01:17:23 Speaker_01
an organization of your trunk that allowed you to ventilate a little bit more effectively, you completely changed and reorganized your structure, which led to an improvement in output.

01:17:34 Speaker_01
So when I'm working with people, there's only two things I really can wrap my head around. Do you have normative range of motion? Yes or no. What are the tools we have to restore that and improve that?

01:17:44 Speaker_01
And does that expression give us greater biomotor output? Because those are objective measures. When biomotor output, I mean range of motion, force production, power, right?

01:17:53 Speaker_01
I see that I can express the physiology in a unique way that makes me more effective. And that is why you'll see suddenly we have this definition that is maintaining the physiology and aspects. I'm not gonna have as good shoulder flexion

01:18:08 Speaker_01
with my arm over my head is when I'm sitting up taller or in a position where I can take a bigger breath.

01:18:14 Speaker_01
And I think that's what's really great, because that gets us away from good posture, bad posture, into, hey, that position doesn't serve you as well in these circumstances. And in this position, I'm working with the pararescue team in the Air Force.

01:18:28 Speaker_01
The number one reason they were having back injuries was getting the litter out of the helicopter. because they have a litter, the soldiers there with all their gear on. They've got a lift from a totally weird flexed position, right?

01:18:43 Speaker_01
And this just turns out it's not a really effective posture, position, shape that transfers to handling these higher loads. So what do we do? We work on the range of motion. We give them skills to try to organize more effectively in that shape.

01:18:56 Speaker_01
And lo and behold, we can reduce injury risk and injury incident in those soldiers, right? So what we're always thinking about here is let's get away from good and bad and posture doesn't matter. And it also doesn't matter at low load, low speed.

01:19:11 Speaker_01
And I want to be very clear about that. So you can get away with murder. at low velocities and low speeds, but speed kills. Oh, everyone's fine. But when that speed wobble starts to happen, we start to see greater likelihood of deflection from posture.

01:19:28 Speaker_01
Your abs don't work as effectively. You can't create the same intra-abdominal pressure, right? Check, check, check, check, check. So that's why we always are saying, hey, is this true?

01:19:37 Speaker_01
that you're saying under high load, high speed, when there's consequence, because maybe this set of conditions works under these conditions, but it doesn't work across all conditions.

01:19:47 Speaker_01
And for me, I'm trying to take the best information I have working in sports and performance and trying to transmute that to my family, transmute that to my neighborhood and to the kids I'm working with.

01:19:58 Speaker_03
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01:20:06 Speaker_03
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01:20:14 Speaker_03
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01:20:21 Speaker_03
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01:20:28 Speaker_03
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01:20:35 Speaker_03
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01:20:45 Speaker_03
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01:20:54 Speaker_03
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01:21:06 Speaker_03
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01:21:18 Speaker_03
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01:21:33 Speaker_03
As long as we're talking about posture, it feels like a good transition point to pelvic floor.

01:21:39 Speaker_03
Years ago, and this is a plug for the material that you put out online and in books, but long before we met, I decided to sign up for your men's pelvic floor course. Oh, yeah. Outsold our women's pelvic floor course two to one.

01:21:52 Speaker_03
It was so interesting because, you know, At that time, one could go online and learn a little bit about pelvic floor. Everyone, and we talked about this with a couple of different guests on this podcast, including the director of male sexual health.

01:22:06 Speaker_03
He's an MD, PhD, or at least an MD, as I recall, Mike Eisenberg at Stanford. We've talked about this with Mary Claire Haver and other people in the female health domain.

01:22:13 Speaker_00
I'm glad we're normalizing this conversation.

01:22:15 Speaker_03
Yeah, we normalize this conversation. You know that the pelvic floor is rich with vasculature for blood flow and neural input for controlling muscles, either passively or actively.

01:22:25 Speaker_03
I'll tell you, the number of people I know who have urinary issues, sexual dysfunction issues, I know because they tell me that they squat heavy in the gym, they do their Kegels and things like that.

01:22:41 Speaker_03
Then I've had guests on like Mike Eisenberg and others and they say, Yeah, actually, if you have a tight pelvic floor, doing Kegels is about the worst thing you could ever do for urinary function or erection function. That's right.

01:22:56 Speaker_03
Because you're sending it in the wrong direction, you need to learn to relax your pelvic floor. Then some women will say, and it seems to be women that report this, whether or not men just have this but don't report it, I don't know.

01:23:07 Speaker_03
I've had people write to me and say, yeah, you know, I'll do some lower body work in the gym and some urine is sneaking out. And it's like, well, pelvic floor. And you had this great course on pelvic floor that taught me among other things.

01:23:19 Speaker_03
And I will say, I wasn't suffering any of those particular issues, but I had prostate pain. in my 30s. And I was like, what's going on? Went and got my PSA measured.

01:23:28 Speaker_00
Perfectly normal.

01:23:29 Speaker_03
Thought, what's going on? Started researching online, read your work and realized, oh, I think I might just have tight pelvic floor. Started doing certain things, including you taught me how to sit down and stand up correctly.

01:23:41 Speaker_03
In this video, it was like, you have to keep your sternum high, right?

01:23:45 Speaker_01
I think you said it was like a stately- Let me just, there's no wrong way or right way to stand up or sit down, everyone. But there are ways that reflect Increased function, especially when you're in a dysfunctional state. Mm-hmm, right, right.

01:23:59 Speaker_03
Yeah, right I don't want to we're not trying to Yet tell people what to do or not to do but it was like wow, you know, I'm probably hunched over too much I think my hips are back too far when I'm sitting and

01:24:10 Speaker_03
Maybe I'll move to a standing desk or a sit-stand desk, which is what I did. Lo and behold, prostate pain goes away. And had I not found that course, I might have gone down the path of medication or something else. Took care of everything.

01:24:23 Speaker_03
I will say the other thing I learned was I tend to have a slight anterior pelvic tilt. So thinking about the pelvis like a bowl, as I understand, like that bowl could be the

01:24:33 Speaker_03
The ridge of that bowl could be parallel to the ground or tilted forward, anterior pelvic tilt, or back, posterior pelvic tilt. Neutral seems like a good idea, but most people tend to have some natural propensity towards one or the other.

01:24:45 Speaker_03
Started wearing, I pretty much always wore flat shoes. Adidas or skateboard shoes are pretty flat. I lucked out there. Your shoe game is strong today. My shoe game is strong today. Adidas, still wear them every day. I love them. Or no shoes, which is great.

01:25:00 Speaker_03
I noticed, okay, that corrected some of that prostate pain, too, by making – oh, excuse me.

01:25:05 Speaker_03
What helped correct it was to make sure that in the gym I did something that turned out to be glute ham raises that would put my – take my pelvis through a fairly full range of motion from, you know – I love that. Posterior to anterior tilt.

01:25:19 Speaker_03
And I've come to love the glute ham raise. We're talking full range glute ham raises as one of the most useful tools, just posturally for pelvic floor. So it's not about having a few hamstrings.

01:25:29 Speaker_01
Beautiful, addressing stiffness in the system. Right. Resetting it, high neurologic component to actually do the thing. One of the things I hinted at earlier is like, I'm Chase Biomotor Output, right?

01:25:40 Speaker_01
Intra-abdominal pressure and being able to have a pelvic floor that works for you is part of that system. Like again, we can take the physiology and goose it up and down.

01:25:49 Speaker_01
What's interesting about, I had a famous friend who was filming a TV show and we were working on his internal rotation of his hip. So if you imagine someone on your back and I bring your knee to your chest and I swing your foot away

01:26:03 Speaker_01
from your midline, right? The femur rolls in, that's internal rotation of the femur for everyone. And I worked on his internal rotation of his femur and just improved his hip flexion, knee to chest, just got those things going.

01:26:15 Speaker_01
I get this text that night and he's like, bro, What is up with my boners? They're out of control. What is going on? Out of control in the positive direction? Positive.

01:26:26 Speaker_03
Okay.

01:26:26 Speaker_01
And I was like, well, there's this thing called blood flow. And when we improve blood flow, turns out reperfusion is on the list of things that we chase. So he'd been crimping the hose, so to speak. It's just stiff, right?

01:26:38 Speaker_01
And I think when we start to see that, endopelvic fascia is a system where it's so easy for us to be reductionist. Like, I wouldn't even say you had prostate pain. I would say you had pain in your prostate area. Right.

01:26:50 Speaker_03
And in fact, that's what was told, the prostate region, right?

01:26:54 Speaker_01
And because- So you're like, I don't know where my prostate is.

01:26:55 Speaker_03
Okay, that's- Well, I mean, in a general sense, and I also saw that PSA level was well within normal, actually low range. And I was like, what in the world is going on here? And you start, you can find some pretty scary stuff online about

01:27:07 Speaker_03
spinal cord injuries and this kind of thing, did what we just talked about and boom, it's never been an issue again.

01:27:14 Speaker_01
We have all the Olympic lifting gyms, even our gym, we kept a towel on the platforms so that women particularly would pee themselves when they would receive a heavy clean, heavy snatch. And we would just wipe it up.

01:27:29 Speaker_01
They'd actually urinate on the platform. Oh, yeah, that happens all the time. All over the Olympics, everywhere. You'll see that. That is bladder incontinence is not normal, right? Totally normal to poop yourself before a fight. That's what animals do.

01:27:42 Speaker_01
Totally not normal to pee yourself. Peeing yourself is a sign of dysregulation, for sure. And so what you're seeing is, though, hey, I can't manage this high intra-abdominal pressure I'm creating. And what ends up happening is we pee ourselves.

01:27:57 Speaker_01
So we can start by saying, well, are there positions and shapes? Theoretically, I want your pelvic floor to work in all the shapes. It's maximum. And there'll be some shapes where it just doesn't work as effectively.

01:28:06 Speaker_01
And if you're a man, since we're getting into it, if you go pee, you'll see a lot of men will put their hand on the wall, and they'll adopt an anterior pelvic tilt to pee. And what they'll do is basically just turn the pelvic floor off.

01:28:20 Speaker_01
And so if you stand up and do a big anterior pelvic tilt, your pelvic floor will lose some of its tone and it's easier to initiate a string.

01:28:27 Speaker_03
So anterior pelvic tilt again, folks, is imagine your pelvis is a bowl, you're tilting it forward like you're going to pour water out of the bowl, which is a fair analogy here. That's right. You're saying ideally they keep a neutral.

01:28:38 Speaker_03
pelvis and use the force of their muscles controlling their bladder?

01:28:41 Speaker_01
No, no, no. I'm saying that it's much more difficult to pee in this position where we have high control over these systems.

01:28:50 Speaker_01
And what you'll see is that most people will adopt a shape where they basically inhibit their pelvic floor so they can pee standing up.

01:28:56 Speaker_03
I can't believe we're gonna dissect urine posture, urinating posture, but I think it's really important. Let's contrast that to the famous sculpture of the boy peeing and he's like leaning back, leaning back.

01:29:11 Speaker_01
Same posture. His pelvis is forward and he's leaning back. That's the same posture.

01:29:15 Speaker_03
So people with sons will know this, right? So, you know, when you're a young kid, young boy, You can like, it almost feels like you can pee over a car if you had to. Maybe I tried that.

01:29:31 Speaker_01
I'm just saying. It was a Volkswagen.

01:29:33 Speaker_03
Right, right. So, but here's, so is there a proper posture for peeing?

01:29:37 Speaker_01
No, no, no. But, initiating a stream, maintaining a stream is, like, that's a sign of sexual health, of functional health. It's your general health.

01:29:49 Speaker_01
And what's nice now is notice how we got to this very nuanced conversation about erectile dysfunction, about bladder insufficiency, about, right, peeing ourselves. We got there through performance.

01:30:02 Speaker_01
We'll have athletes who literally had a whole bunch of babies, suddenly have difficult time creating high intra-abdominal tone, will jump rope and pee, and as soon as they come back to a more organized position that allows them to transfer energy more effectively, recruit better musculature, have better organization, peeing stops.

01:30:22 Speaker_01
So what we suddenly- Is this female athletes? Are women athletes- So you recommend that they jump rope? Well, yeah, absolutely. Eventually. I need to challenge that floor. That's an easy way to do it.

01:30:30 Speaker_01
But what we see is, can you squeeze your butt and jump at the same time? And what you'll find is that a lot of people, as soon as they adopt this anterior pelvic tilt, glute goes off and they don't have that glute control.

01:30:43 Speaker_01
So that can be problematic for a whole host of features. So imagine I was hoping we were going to get to hip extension eventually.

01:30:49 Speaker_01
But, you know, what we see is that stiffness in the front of the quads, anterior line of the fascia, stiff front of the capsule, whatever the mechanism is. We do a lot of sitting. We're just, we're squatters.

01:31:01 Speaker_01
My inability to take my knee behind my hip, we call this knees behind butt, knees behind butt guy. That's what I want to be known as. Knee goes behind your butt like you're at a lunch. That's right. Sorry, Ben.

01:31:13 Speaker_01
And then what you're going to see is a lot of times when we put people in those positions, they can't get a good glute squeeze.

01:31:18 Speaker_03
Okay, could one practice this? I'm thinking about, it's been a while since I've taken a yoga class.

01:31:21 Speaker_01
If you stood up right now and squeezed your butt, you would be like, yeah, I can practice this.

01:31:25 Speaker_03
Okay, so there's a pose in yoga, and I'm not an advanced yogi, but I've taken a few yoga classes in my day, where you're basically propped up, sitting on your knees. High kneeling. Yeah, high kneeling. Hard to squeeze your butt there, isn't it?

01:31:40 Speaker_03
It's hard to squeeze your butt there.

01:31:42 Speaker_01
Because of all the forces yanking you interiorly.

01:31:46 Speaker_01
Those fascia lines, the quads, you're basically in that high kneeling position and because the lower leg is bent behind you, you're being dragged forward and it's difficult to squeeze your butt and extend over backwards.

01:31:58 Speaker_03
So there's that, do they call it camel pose where you reach back and grab your heels and you're supposed to look up at the ceiling? That's a gnarly one. It's a gnarly one.

01:32:04 Speaker_03
If you do it in the Bay Area, the teacher will say, don't be surprised if some emotions come up. If you do this in Austin, Texas, they just say it's supposed to hurt. Keep going. I'm just joking here. This is like regional humor.

01:32:16 Speaker_03
But in any event, I think that's actually accurate, by the way. But in any event, it is slightly unusual for most people who aren't accustomed to it to do that pose. Again, doing that pose, I bring it up for a reason.

01:32:32 Speaker_01
And if you don't do that pose, you might do kipping pull-ups. That's a global extension position. All we're doing is taking the spine and putting a huge global load in it instead of a localized load.

01:32:41 Speaker_01
So an anterior pelvic tilt, you might think of localized extension and flexion where I have one or two segments doing the lion's share.

01:32:49 Speaker_01
Whenever we can, prefer to have global flexion and extension because the spine maintains its integrity a little more effectively.

01:32:56 Speaker_03
So, doing things like wheel pose. Awesome. Putting your hands up near your ears, pushing it flat on the ground, pushing up into an arc shape on the ground.

01:33:07 Speaker_01
Great diagnosis.

01:33:08 Speaker_03
Is this something that most people should be able to do?

01:33:12 Speaker_01
Yes. Can most people probably do it? No. Can we then break down the components of it? Yeah, absolutely.

01:33:18 Speaker_01
Even Iyengar, yogi master, started to bring in props, blocks and belts, because he was seeing that his students weren't able to achieve some of the base shapes. And what they were doing was human jenga to get into those patterns.

01:33:33 Speaker_01
They were just solving the problem. And he was like, hold up, let's not go around the problem. Let's support you while we load you and breathe in these positions and shapes.

01:33:42 Speaker_03
given that most people don't have a ton of time for movement, designated blocks of time for movement, if one, we're going to do, let's say, some attempt toward wheel pose practice or camel pose practice or any number of the other things that we're talking about here, which are taking the body into positions that we're not naturally putting it into given our activities, sport or otherwise.

01:34:06 Speaker_01
Yeah. Great way to say that.

01:34:06 Speaker_03
You nailed that. Would you suggest doing these at the end of a resistance training workout?

01:34:11 Speaker_01
Sure. When does it work for you? At some point, you need to be exposed in this position. When are you going to get exposed to this position? If it happens to be able to be clumped in with your training, fantastic.

01:34:20 Speaker_01
If it's at home in the evening, fantastic. If you've done sun salutation before, it's old school. Right? It's almost like they were like, let's get this system going a little bit. So later on in the day, it's a little bit easier.

01:34:32 Speaker_01
So at some point, we need to expose you to some positions. We have something called the hip spin up. And typically for my athletic populations, my teams, especially, I'm like, hey, I want you to do one of three things in the morning. You got 10 minutes.

01:34:44 Speaker_01
That's all I'm asking. Eight to 10 minutes. hip spin-up, shoulder spin-up, or breath spin-up. Just do one of those. If your back hurts or knee hurts, you get hip spin-up. If your shoulder or neck hurts, you get shoulder spin-up.

01:34:56 Speaker_01
And then if not, just cycle through those. So at least in the morning, we're starting to touch some of these crucial shapes that you're never in. And if you do the hip spin-up and suffer, I'm like, well,

01:35:07 Speaker_01
That's telling me about your movement history, your injury history, your movement diet. And again, nothing that we do on the ready state is related to supernatural levels of range of motion, just basic range of motion.

01:35:21 Speaker_01
The range of motion, again, that everyone learns in med school, everyone learns in physical therapy school. So what's fun about what you've said around this sort of,

01:35:30 Speaker_01
this pelvic floor health piece, is that when we get people doing some mobilization, really brought to me, really brought to my attention of Jill Miller, is that we start mobilizing the endopelvic fascia.

01:35:41 Speaker_01
We just land a ball, just anywhere from your pubic bone to your up to your diphoid process, but particularly belly button south, you'll see that none of that should be uncomfortable.

01:35:50 Speaker_01
And one of the reasons we see high incidence of pelvic floor dysfunction, but also high incidence of sports hernias,

01:35:58 Speaker_01
is that we have a hip that doesn't work very well and ends up dragging that pelvis into positions where it's not muscularly very strong, right? I can get out of position where I have a lot of good sort of activation or access to those positions.

01:36:12 Speaker_01
Then I have fascia and musculature that's super stiff because every time you do abs, you celebrate the stiffness, right? You do abs, you're like, oh, I'm sore today, I'm gonna go have some ice cream.

01:36:22 Speaker_01
When's the last time you managed your hamstrings or quads? Probably yesterday. When's the last time you rolled out your abs and your obliques Never? Previous life. Right, previous life before you respawn.

01:36:32 Speaker_01
So I think one of the things that we're seeing is, again, that'd be a perfect time to do it in the evening. Don't go to the gym and lay on the kettlebell and be a creepy guy.

01:36:40 Speaker_01
Instead, pull out that volleyball at home, pull out that princess ball you got at Walgreens, and start having a conversation with your pelvic floor. Turns out, you know, your abdomen, the pelvic floor, can also be mobilized. So it's really simple.

01:36:55 Speaker_01
Front of your pelvis is your pubic bone. That's the front of the pelvic floor. The back is your coccyx. And each ischial tuberosity or sit bones is the side. Everything else is your pelvic floor. So you can take a ball and just stay away from the holes.

01:37:09 Speaker_01
And if anything hurts to compression, You found a problem, so you can contract and relax and apply that same tissue.

01:37:16 Speaker_03
So I might be on my side, I might be rolling with the ball right underneath me.

01:37:20 Speaker_01
You would just be sitting down on your coffee table and just putting that, sitting that ball in and around your pelvis and around your glutes and around your pelvic floor, right? It might be dangerously close to your grundle, you're welcome.

01:37:33 Speaker_01
So the idea here, though, is oftentimes when we'll have athletes with back pain, we're not looking at their pelvic floor or hip pain, but you have six short hip rotators, right? You don't just have a couple rotators.

01:37:46 Speaker_01
You have a huge rotator cuff of the hip, and some of those things are congruent and kind of part of that pelvic floor. So it's not that I need to go after my pelvic floor every day, because again, let me just add another thing to do your list.

01:37:57 Speaker_01
But if something changes, I suddenly wake up and I don't have an erection. I suddenly are discovering that I'm peeing myself because I'm an elite cyclist, right? And something's happening that I'm like, oh, I know what to do here.

01:38:08 Speaker_01
Let me start to work on my belly. Let me see if I can work on restoring my positions. And can I do a little pelvic floor mobilization? And that's a great place to start. And which doctor was involved? None. which pelvic floor therapist was involved, none.

01:38:19 Speaker_01
In fact, if you carry that to your specialist, they're gonna be like, all right, we get to have the real conversation now, because you've already done the other stuff.

01:38:28 Speaker_03
One thing that frightens me, and maybe unnecessarily so, is when I see men, in particular, doing crunch work, like ab work, crunching, with ankles crossed. A, because people tend to cross the same ankle over the other one.

01:38:49 Speaker_03
They don't symmetrically switch That's my good side, bro. And my other understanding is that this can also lead to some pelvic floor issues and asymmetries.

01:39:01 Speaker_03
Simple solution could be to not cross the ankles while doing repeated contraction work of the abdominals. Am I being silly?

01:39:10 Speaker_01
I would put that lower on the list of problems I have, right? I think if we went into the world right now and looked at people doing curls, curl ups, the real thing is, is that your only way that you're training the abdominals?

01:39:26 Speaker_01
Do I have a bigger range of motion of the trunk? There are so many ways to be thinking about what the trunk should be doing and reducing it down to this one curl.

01:39:35 Speaker_01
I think if one of the things that we're looking at, like I'd much rather you hang from a bar and curl up.

01:39:42 Speaker_03
Yeah. So this is pretty much, I won't say the only ab work I do, I do some anti-rotation work by staggering my stance when I do curls or anything else, because it's a very time-efficient way to do it, making sure my belly button is staying straight.

01:39:53 Speaker_03
So you're resisting the temptation to rock from side to side and you get the anti-rotation work, obviously switching up the stance. But doing what you described, hanging from a bar, doing pikes.

01:40:03 Speaker_01
To me, you're also getting grip work, but just for time efficiency, it just seems like- You're also not just separating the abs and working with the abdominals with the knee to the chest, because that's really what we're seeing is that, do you only need your abs working in this position?

01:40:18 Speaker_01
So basically, you're reproducing another seated position, except you're crunching your- chest to your seated knee. And that's really what that position is. Do we do it long? What happens if you do it long lever? Short lever means the elbow is bent.

01:40:32 Speaker_01
Long lever is the elbow is straight. Short lever is the knee is bent. Long lever is the leg is straight. So why aren't we working in all those patterns and positions? And then, being creative. There are so many great resources.

01:40:44 Speaker_01
The kids at Dave Durante has a free ab workout. He's an Olympic gymnast from Stanford, superstar. But you can go on to, I think it's Iron Monkey. Sorry, guys. And what you'll see is

01:40:58 Speaker_01
There's so much fun ways to play and think about what the role of the trunk should do. And I think we're moving beyond, thank goodness, this, like, I have to be a rigid robot all the time, and that we need to ask, what is the trunk supposed to do?

01:41:14 Speaker_01
A good way of thinking about this, and I think your sit-up is a good analogy, Really, a book that makes the rounds from time to time is a book called The Spinal Engine by Serge Grachovetsky.

01:41:27 Speaker_01
He really talks about the trunk as a driver of power, not just as a chassis off of which the big engine moves. That really is a nice conceptual way of simplifying movement.

01:41:39 Speaker_01
If we define functional movement, most people agree it works in a wave of contraction from trunk to periphery, from core to sleeve, from axillary skeleton to peripheral skeleton.

01:41:48 Speaker_01
But that means, boy, there are positions where I'm really effective and can generate a lot of force, and there'll be positions where I can't. But if my spine can't handle flexion, it's not a spine. If it can't handle extension, it's not a spine.

01:42:00 Speaker_01
If it can't rotate and be in these complex positions and shapes, I'm like red flag. So how are you training that thing?

01:42:06 Speaker_01
And if your only rigid dogma is straight up and down, which is a great reason to do mobility work, is suddenly we can side bend and we can twist. And am I exposing myself to some of those shapes?

01:42:18 Speaker_01
And so we call that work, borrowing from one of my Olympic friends, Stu McMillan, spinal engine work. putting PVC, side bending, playing with the different shapes.

01:42:28 Speaker_01
And again, if you get into the David Weck ropes, if you threw medicine balls, you would suddenly see you're like, you're right, I can't be a rigid piece. How am I training the functionality of my trunk beyond just my six pack?

01:42:40 Speaker_01
Because straight curling will certainly give you a six pack. But that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to surf with power, run with power, punch with power, et cetera. I mean, look at what just happened with those fights, right?

01:42:52 Speaker_01
With the women fighting, just the rotational power that they have. You can't get that from just crunches with your legs.

01:42:58 Speaker_03
So the fight right before the Tyson-Jake Paul fight was arguably the best fight, and people had seen that a long, long time. The spirit of it and just the, I mean, they were just incredible.

01:43:09 Speaker_01
Everyone watch us, Women's Sports. That was really great.

01:43:12 Speaker_01
So I think what's great now is if we can get people to start to be curious and to play and, you know, I'm not saying you need 10,000 different movements, but instead of just hanging from the bar and doing knees to elbows or toes to bar, what if you brought your right

01:43:27 Speaker_01
foot to your left hand, and you started adding in a rotation to that, and suddenly you're like, I suck at this.

01:43:33 Speaker_01
And ultimately what I want to do is I want to uncover every deficiency in this play, because I'm still going to deadlift, I'm still going to swing, I'm still going to lunge, I'm going to do all the things that I know that makes me feel robust and makes me ride my bike better and be a better kayaker, but simultaneously there's a lot of play on either side of that.

01:43:50 Speaker_03
I love that you're defining progression as incorporating these novel movements, exploring.

01:43:57 Speaker_01
Dude, that's West Side 101 with Lou Simmons. I mean, like, hey, this week we're squatting with this bar, then we're squatting with this bar, and then we're changing your height, then we're changing your stance.

01:44:06 Speaker_01
I mean, West Side Barbell has been doing this forever.

01:44:09 Speaker_03
I didn't realize they did that. I knew they were, like, crazy gnarly, like, in there all the time.

01:44:13 Speaker_01
Every bar has its own max, right? And so what they've done is said, hey, the squat pattern is the thing we're training, but how do we put another twist to the pretzel?

01:44:22 Speaker_01
Now the weight's in front, now the weight's behind, now it's out, and now it's too deep, and now we're box squatting. I'm like, wow, you're gonna have to be a really competent, skilled squatter to handle all that.

01:44:31 Speaker_03
It seems like in so many sports, not just for resistance training, but in so many sports, there's this shift now toward being an ATV, an all-terrain vehicle. Like you can't afford to just be good at one thing, you know?

01:44:44 Speaker_03
And the cool thing about it is that, you know, the more dynamic range that people are expressing, the more kind of evolution you see of any kind of sport. And I think we're gonna see this with fitness too.

01:44:53 Speaker_03
I'm realizing this as we have this conversation, that what you're really suggesting is that people explore their movement patterns.

01:44:59 Speaker_03
I love this thing that I've heard you say for years, and I know Mackenzie harps on this too, which is, Brian Mackenzie, that is, you should be able to breathe well in every position. It's such a fun test, actually. It's such an easy test.

01:45:10 Speaker_03
You know, squat down like you're going to get something out of the cupboard. See if you can take like a full belly breath there.

01:45:14 Speaker_00
How simple is that?

01:45:15 Speaker_03
See if you can get your belly going out on the inhale there. I like to do this test myself every once in a while, hanging from the bar, you know, those pikes. I don't get very many of them. Admittedly, I'm doing like five sets of five.

01:45:25 Speaker_01
Awesome.

01:45:25 Speaker_03
Occasionally, we'll try and twist a little bit. And as my grip strength improves slightly, maybe I'll be able to get more. Usually, my grip strength goes first.

01:45:31 Speaker_01
If you had smaller legs, it would be easier.

01:45:34 Speaker_03
I'll take that as either a compliment or an insult coming from you, Kelly. Kelly's exceedingly strong. He deadlifts 600 pounds on the regular. He's exceedingly strong. And he has incredible endurance. You're actually more of an endurance guy.

01:45:47 Speaker_03
I think this is worth mentioning. That's why I'm not very strong. You have more of a... Right, but... Have you seen my strong friends?

01:45:55 Speaker_01
I'm not deflecting. Your physiology is definitely biased towards certain things. Like, unequivocally. And what I am not good at is being brutally strong. Oh, I've been training for 20 plus years. Hard training. Longer than that, 30 years.

01:46:12 Speaker_01
And this is all I can deadlift? That's pathetic. Have you seen my strong friends? So what you see is that I've been cramming a square peg into a round hole because I really like it.

01:46:21 Speaker_03
But really I should be a probably 190 pounds and I should be an aerobic athlete right like if we threw a hundred pound Backpack on you and went backpacking you'd be fine. You'd be like even now in the You're sitting at somewhere like 240 right?

01:46:36 Speaker_03
You're like six to you. You can go you can go for days. I Like you're naturally an endurance athlete. Absolutely.

01:46:42 Speaker_01
And I think it's worth saying because if people are listening, Kelly's a big guy. All my training is biased. You cannot believe how much conditioning I do. I am a disciple of Joel Jameson.

01:46:50 Speaker_01
I'm a huge fan of trying to look at where I'm spending my time in these different heart rate zones. And then, you know, I'm just such a nerd of that because my primary sport is trying to keep up with my wife on the mountain bike.

01:47:03 Speaker_03
I think this is really important because I think we've been talking a lot about things kind of adjacent to resistance training I think it's a wonderful shift now in in culture that resistance training is being Used done by yeah by young people by older people women and men, you know, it's fantastic This was not the case 10 years ago.

01:47:21 Speaker_03
This was definitely not the case 20 years ago. No It was like bodybuilders, football, preseason football players in military were the only people weight training. Now it's everywhere. But you're naturally an endurance athlete.

01:47:34 Speaker_03
I'm guessing that most people, I'm assuming, is this true, fall into the slower twitch kind of more endurance propensity than, I mean, how many truly naturally strong fast fiber type people are walking around out there if we just took the general population?

01:47:49 Speaker_01
sprinters and super springy, and you know who those people are. They're mutants. You know, I think I was always best at a skilled sport that used conditioning or used strength.

01:48:04 Speaker_01
When I compare myself to my friends who have huge aerobic engines, it's embarrassing. I'm always the weakest, fattest, slowest, smallest person in the room.

01:48:13 Speaker_01
And it is, I can't, like, if you just wanna ego check, just come out and hang out with me, just meet my friends, see the people we're working with. And you'll see, you're like, okay, genetics is not the same.

01:48:23 Speaker_01
I think we've told a little bit of a lie in the internet sphere that like, if you eat this way and you do these, you'll be elite.

01:48:29 Speaker_01
And like, we can certainly say that you have a training effect for sure, and you should do that, but that's not the same thing as being a mutant. And there are just so many mutants out there. Shocking.

01:48:41 Speaker_03
Yeah, I think it's actually a worthwhile exercise to figure out what one's natural leanings are.

01:48:48 Speaker_01
What do you like to do? How about that? I just think it's important that we remind ourselves that the whole point of this is to have the most fun. And what you'll see, he put up a video of

01:49:02 Speaker_01
some Chinese elementary school kids, and the Chinese Olympic lifting team coaches coming and assessing their kids.

01:49:10 Speaker_01
And very quickly, they put kids over at squats, they had them jump on a single leg, they had them do double jumps, and they were like, you, you, you. Have your parents call me.

01:49:19 Speaker_01
So you can already see that coordination matters, wiring matters, and they were able to say, hey, these are the things that we think are going to make good Olympic lifters. So those kids, I think we start to split cohort early on.

01:49:31 Speaker_01
But most important is everyone needs to weightlift, period. And it's not light, two pink dumbbells. It's real heavy weightlifting. But how much do you need to do? to be better at your sport or to minimize your spine.

01:49:43 Speaker_01
Those are the spine changes or osteopenia or osteoporosis. Those are great conversations, but not necessarily conversations about performance.

01:49:52 Speaker_01
So it's almost like we need to divide this into aesthetics and I'm keeping myself intact versus I want to go to the Olympics. What you're seeing on the world right now is that everyone's an expert. I'm like, can I see how you work with 40 athletes?

01:50:07 Speaker_01
Can I see how you periodize that? Can I see how you manage travel and nutrition? Can I see how you were responsible or not responsible for this team having all its members?

01:50:16 Speaker_01
So what we're seeing is that this performance thing is a really big task, and it gets confused and watered down a little bit by everyone in fitness says, well, I squat, so I'm an expert too. Not the same.

01:50:29 Speaker_03
Our good friend, Kenny Kane, taught me something. He's shaking his head. The best. He's a wonderful guy. You're not going to find him on social media because a few years ago, he just decided to take his gym and himself off social media.

01:50:43 Speaker_03
He's a very, very talented trainer.

01:50:44 Speaker_01
So we're going to give you his phone number. We're going to have you call him because you can't DM him.

01:50:48 Speaker_03
Very talented athlete and wonderful person. He taught me something, I'd say about eight years ago, that I've found oh so useful for my training longevity, my enjoyment of training. And it was this, very simple.

01:51:04 Speaker_03
80% of your workouts, Andrew, he said, are going to be at 80% of what you could do that day. okay, that involves some humility, I like to sweat hard, I associate intensity with hard work, et cetera.

01:51:17 Speaker_03
He said 10% are going to be at 90% intensity, meaning 100% is the most you could give, possibly in whatever time is allotted on that day, given the sleep, given the nutrition, given the life circumstances on that day.

01:51:30 Speaker_01
The readiness for that day.

01:51:30 Speaker_03
Right. And then Here's where it breaks down a little bit more. 5% are going to be at 95% and 5% across the year are going to be maximum 100% everything you can give, do or die workouts that day.

01:51:45 Speaker_03
And for me last year, I believe it was, was that was the the rock carry campaigns as podcast. I gave everything I had.

01:51:52 Speaker_03
had of course had the mountain been a little bit higher i'd like to think i would have gone a little bit further but i gave everything i could because that rock was slippery and it was muddy and my hamstring was out the day when we started that you know i was in pain when we started anyway i think that advice

01:52:09 Speaker_03
that Kenny gave me was some of the best advice I've ever heard because my tendency would have been and had been to come in and go at 90, 95, or 100% every single workout. Sure, sure. It got you a long way. Caffeine, pre-workout, et cetera.

01:52:22 Speaker_03
That got you a long way. Yep, yep. And it also brought me to this place where after eight or 10 weeks of training, I would get a cold or I'd get some nagging thing, a little thing, not, you know, it wouldn't put me under, but then

01:52:34 Speaker_03
or that I need to take a week off. Normal accident theory. Right. So I think, I'd love your thoughts on Kenny's recommendation. For me, it's one of the things that I pass along anytime says, how about some fitness advice?

01:52:45 Speaker_03
I say, well, listen, I'm a neuroscientist, not a fitness guy, but I know a thing or two based on the mistakes I've made. Here's a great piece of advice that's really helped me.

01:52:52 Speaker_03
80% of your workouts, 80% intensity, another 10% at 90%, then the 95, you know, 5% at 95 and 5% across the year are the all out, everything you can give, leave it all on the mat type workouts.

01:53:04 Speaker_01
We could start with a simple idea. We say, let's be consistent before we're heroic. If your intensity causes you to not be able to show up for the gym for three days, I'm like, sweet. That was sweet. And our adaptation response to that is sucky, right?

01:53:19 Speaker_01
I much rather you be getting more consistent and not blowing yourself out. Remember that there was a phase where we were like, you shouldn't be sore when you leave the gym. Remember that?

01:53:27 Speaker_01
Like there were people would talk about, hey, leave some reps in reserve, like show up the next day, grease the groove. That's old Pavel Tsatsalin stuff. I think that's really good advice, especially since most people are not 20.

01:53:40 Speaker_01
Most people, and when you're 20, you need to go find out what the limits are, touch the fence, the electric fence once in a while, right? Lick the- Lick all the doorknobs, let's just call it that way.

01:53:50 Speaker_01
But what ends up happening is there's a lot of things have to be in place for you to be able to go to the well that many times. And what we know now, because we have all of this data, is that we can make better progress

01:54:05 Speaker_01
not burning it to the ground every single time. And it's difficult for us because if I'm just fitnessing, how do I quantify that, right? It's easy for us to quantify another kilo or another watt. That makes it a lot easier.

01:54:19 Speaker_01
And what you'll see is the best practices of these athletes, we do spend a lot of 70 to 80% heart rate. That's what we call recovery. In Joel Jameson language, 80 to 90, we're calling that conditioning, 90 and above, overload.

01:54:34 Speaker_01
But what I think is nice is that that gives me a lot of, there's some days where I touch 78 or 80% and it's hard because I am sleep deprived, stressed out, my nutrition hasn't been great, I'm sleeping in a strange bed, traveling, whatever.

01:54:48 Speaker_01
So I think what you're seeing is something that one of my early coaches talked about, Mike Bergner, he says, when the frying pan's hot, let's cook. And that means I need to know myself. And as a coach, I need to know you.

01:55:01 Speaker_01
And I'm like, Andrew, you look great today. How do you feel? Great, let's go. Let's go chase something, right? And when the frying pan's hot, we cook, but the frying pan is not always hot.

01:55:10 Speaker_01
And if you pour in bang energy and jack 3D, and you can't even hear inputs and outputs. So I think that's such solid, reasonable advice.

01:55:20 Speaker_01
And really what we're looking at is how can we get you to train much more consistently longer and longer and longer? You can only go to the well a few times. And what I'll tell you is that I still love to power clean. It's like my favorite thing.

01:55:33 Speaker_01
And that 100 kilo power clean is heavier than it was when I was 40, you know? And I want to pretend like that 100 kilo power clean is not a problem, but I actually have to progress and get myself there.

01:55:46 Speaker_01
And there are days where I'm like, oh, 80 kilos is my jam today. So I think that's really good advice. And difficult for us to say, how are we measuring success in our training? Subjective experience? No, no problem.

01:56:00 Speaker_01
Let me give you a baby, keep this newborn alive, and then let's go see how hard your training is the next day. You're going to be terrible. You haven't slept all night, you're stressed, right?

01:56:08 Speaker_01
So I think what's nice is having some objective measurements around, maybe body composition is one of them, if that's important to you, but are you getting faster over the course of a week? What are your testing? How do we know inputs and outputs?

01:56:22 Speaker_01
And right now we're just doing, we're baking a lot. We're making a lot of suicides, right? The old fountain drink where you just mix all the things.

01:56:30 Speaker_01
They always taste the same at the end like crap, but that suicide where you mixed all the fountain drinks is a little bit of what we're seeing in that. And one way of protecting ourselves is saying, hey, let's make sure you can train tomorrow.

01:56:42 Speaker_03
Suicide, I was reflecting on that the other day for some reason, why at a wedding or a party, young, typically it's a Y chromosome associated disorder to feel like you had to mix a bunch of stuff and then get someone to drink it. You're not wrong.

01:56:54 Speaker_03
Non-alcoholic drinks for young kids, by the way. I've never done that.

01:56:57 Speaker_01
Mixing all the sodas, putting M&M's in.

01:56:59 Speaker_03
Just something like, oh, my male friends are wicked.

01:57:01 Speaker_01
And I think that's what we see a little bit. And if you... I am a deep coach nerd. I love fitness. I love fitnessing. I'll jump into any class anytime. Like, sure, let's go. Let's see. You know, it's so fun.

01:57:16 Speaker_01
But I need to see, I do get to watch sort of trends come and go. Things get very hot. You know, they get very popular. And again, fitness has become a hobby. It's an amuse. And that's okay.

01:57:28 Speaker_01
It's totally okay that gym is a hobby, but that doesn't hint about what's the best way to develop capacity, elite capacity, long-term longevity capacity. Those things almost don't go together.

01:57:41 Speaker_03
Let's talk about hip extension. Oh, bless you. As somebody who doesn't like the elliptical or stationary bike, but loves the assault bike. I love the assault bike. I don't know why. It just feels like really good work. It is hard work.

01:57:57 Speaker_03
But you're not going to find me on an elliptical.

01:57:59 Speaker_01
Cadian Bill made it harder with the Echobike. Thanks for making it worse, Cadian Bill. What is it, the Echobike? The Rogue Echobike is even worse than the assault bike.

01:58:06 Speaker_03
The Assault bike, by the way, folks, is the one with the fan. And I'm not sure if they put... The fan is for resistance, not to keep you cool, but it has that effect somewhat. In the winter, you'll know what the fan does.

01:58:17 Speaker_03
So, the Echo bike is a harder Assault bike.

01:58:20 Speaker_01
It's just like, imagine doing it on fire, uphill in the sand with a headwind. Then you're like, okay, if you can make it worse, it's worse.

01:58:28 Speaker_03
If you have one of these, I'm going to swing by this winter break and try this thing.

01:58:32 Speaker_01
But I love that because... high physiology, low skill.

01:58:37 Speaker_03
That's great. You just described me in a nutshell.

01:58:40 Speaker_01
I can take anyone, not have to know anything about your range of motion, and I can be like, who are you physiologically today? Let me introduce this freakish amount of work in this tiny range of motion that's very safe.

01:58:51 Speaker_01
So we can really touch high intensities very safely there.

01:58:56 Speaker_03
Yeah, I like it much more than the skier. I'll do the skier every once in a while. But I find that the skier, if I just sit and stand a bunch of times, I'll be like, I can just do this for 15 days. You know, it's like, is this exercise?

01:59:08 Speaker_03
And I'm like, am I doing this right? I don't know. For some reason, it doesn't feel like work. The assault bike always feels like work. Always feels like work. It's always there for you. OK, so hip extension. The assault bike is not hip extension.

01:59:18 Speaker_03
Typically, people tend to be hunched forward. You can get upright.

01:59:22 Speaker_01
Still don't have any hip extension. No hip extension. Let's talk about if I'm squatting and I stand up, I'm extending the hip.

01:59:29 Speaker_03
as you stand up, right? I'm going from flexion to extension.

01:59:32 Speaker_03
Yeah, one thing that I think for people listening that at least is helpful for me when hearing about squatting is to think about whether or not it's a deadlift or a squat, you can imagine taking your hands, putting your fingers at your hips and hiding your hands in that joint between the femur and your pelvis as you go down, right?

01:59:49 Speaker_03
Your hands get tucked into the fold between the two and as you stand up, it opens. So it's hip hinge, they typically call it, right?

01:59:56 Speaker_01
And I think what you, we look at the squat and the lunge as very, they're cousins, and the difference is long lever, short lever. And typically how you're holding the weight, that's the only difference.

02:00:07 Speaker_01
And sometimes upright torso position, but ultimately we're really looking at, you know, what's happening with the degree of bend of the knee, right? That's why they're such elegant cousins.

02:00:18 Speaker_01
But if I'm squatting down and I stand up, people are like, I'm working on extension, working on extension all the time. I'm like, okay, now let's continue this extension conversation and bring that knee behind your butt into a lunge.

02:00:29 Speaker_01
And that's hip extension. And if there's one thing that I'm seeing across so many of the populations I work with, is we're starting to see changes and erosion in this fundamental expression of power.

02:00:42 Speaker_01
The only people we don't see it as are Olympic sprinters.

02:00:45 Speaker_01
And you'll see the pockets, like we work with the All Blacks, and we're obsessed on maintaining the hip extension, these very strong athletes, because it means that they can run faster on the field.

02:00:56 Speaker_03
Rugby team. Rugby team. Am I correct in thinking that hip extension, we can think of as a

02:01:06 Speaker_03
you're partially reflecting hamstring function, where the hamstring is responsible for bringing the heel up toward the butt, but also for bringing the femur back behind the torso. I realize I'm not using the PT language. By the way, the PT is online.

02:01:19 Speaker_03
I'm sorry everyone. of the PTs that you guys just crack me up. In the field of medicine, there's an analogous subspecialty of medicine where they have the similar kind of like orneriness and it's, being a PT is very competitive.

02:01:33 Speaker_03
And so there's a lot, you don't do this, but the PT community, it's like, you can make a cart, you can make a whole sitcom about this.

02:01:40 Speaker_03
The attacks often range from significant to like cluster around petty, not because they're not knowledgeable, but because there's so much nuance in this field. Right?

02:01:50 Speaker_03
And it seems that there are a few things that everyone agrees on, and then everything else, people love to argue in community, out of community.

02:01:57 Speaker_03
So, anytime I say anything about movement of the body, I want us to just say, I realize I'm probably not using the correct language.

02:02:04 Speaker_01
Perfect. I'm going to use that same defense of petty clusterness, clustering the pettiness. I'm sorry, all the physical therapists out there, I haven't represented you in the way that you would like to be represented.

02:02:14 Speaker_01
I'll say, I'm just talking about my own experience.

02:02:16 Speaker_03
It's just differences in nomenclature.

02:02:17 Speaker_01
Right. And I'm trying to be very meticulous in my language today. I appreciate that. One of the things that we want to look at is, and this is a Philip Beach, Muscles Meridians idea, is that there are contractile fields.

02:02:31 Speaker_01
And this goes along with, if we look at Thomas Meyer's anatomy trains of seeing the system as a system of systems. So we start to look at your back and your erectors.

02:02:41 Speaker_01
And then we tie that into the glutes, and then we tie that into the hamstrings to tie the calf. It almost wraps around the bottom of the foot, the plantar surface of the foot.

02:02:50 Speaker_01
So suddenly, we're looking at this global system that's designed to create this mass extension position. Locomotion, we start to lock some of those pieces down a little bit.

02:03:03 Speaker_01
But one of the things that we've seen is that when you aren't competent in this position, your hamstrings, for example, have to do a lot more work because your butt is no longer working on hip extension.

02:03:15 Speaker_01
Your adductors are restricted and they're not bringing you back into flexion. So suddenly what we see is that your hamstrings are having to do the work of calf, But when your hamstrings are tight all the time, you don't have hip extension.

02:03:29 Speaker_01
So a simple test we do is called the couch stretch. And all you need to do is face a wall and turn away from the wall. So you're kneeling on the ground, hands and knees away from the wall. You're going to put one of your knees in the corner.

02:03:44 Speaker_01
So your foot is going straight up and down. The knee is in the corner of the wall. And then I want you to see if you can squeeze your butt in that position.

02:03:50 Speaker_01
Still hot hands and knees, except one foot now is kind of in the corner, down the wall, going towards your butt. That's position one.

02:03:57 Speaker_01
And a lot of people are going to struggle with recruiting and activating their butt in that position because it's what I'm calling positionally inhibited. We don't know what the mechanism is.

02:04:07 Speaker_03
So you're getting the knee back behind the torso. Yeah. Much as one would if you were sprinting and the rear leg is extended.

02:04:13 Speaker_01
Similar, but really we're just flexing the lower leg. We're flexing the lower leg shank, right? That lower limb. The second position is to come up into a high kneeling position.

02:04:22 Speaker_01
So you just bring your knee up until like you're kneeling, except that we have a trailing leg now with a leg that's going up the wall.

02:04:29 Speaker_03
So front leg is sort of a right angle, right? Yeah. Your foot on the ground, right angle.

02:04:33 Speaker_01
That's right.

02:04:33 Speaker_03
Rear leg is a knee tucked into the corner where the floor meets the couch. Foot is up on the couch?

02:04:42 Speaker_01
Nope, just on the ground.

02:04:43 Speaker_03
Okay, and we'll provide a link to an image of this.

02:04:45 Speaker_01
Yeah, and I called the couch stretch because I created this thing a long time ago, and I created it on the couch for my young athletes while they were watching TV, right? I just needed some hip extension exposure.

02:04:55 Speaker_01
But we can do it on the wall, we can do it on the couch. Ultimately, what we try to see is, do you have glute squeeze? Can you take a breath? If your breath starts to get real small in this position, I'm like, huh.

02:05:06 Speaker_01
So every time your knee comes behind your body, you can't breathe anymore? How's that working for you when you run? Is that good or bad? Seems to me that your breath should remain pretty constant, independent of what your hip does.

02:05:15 Speaker_01
So then we like to see if people can come to a more upright position. So that's kind of position three. So a little bit more upright torso. We're starting to increase hip demands as the torso comes upright.

02:05:28 Speaker_01
Torso's coming upright, the knee is moving further away from the chest on that loaded leg.

02:05:32 Speaker_01
And what you'll see is that most people are gonna be like, wow, that's real stiff, or I can't even get there, or I can't breathe there, or I have to banana back to get there. And I certainly can't squeeze my butt there.

02:05:40 Speaker_01
And I wanna tell everyone, this is a low level test. The real test is your front foot goes up on a 12 inch to 18 inch box. So we're not even in the test yet.

02:05:50 Speaker_03
With front leg extended?

02:05:52 Speaker_01
No, front leg just up higher. So we elevate the front leg into what's called a hip lock. So that front leg is suddenly taking my pelvis and rotating it posteriorly.

02:06:04 Speaker_01
Knee is running into pelvis, pelvis is like tucking, and now you're really gonna see what's going on with your hip extension.

02:06:10 Speaker_03
So this is the equivalent position, more or less, of front knee sprinting, like really, like, jutted up in the air, you know, maybe even past the belly button, definitely past the belly button, rear leg behind you.

02:06:24 Speaker_03
So this is sort of like, you know, caught in mid stride.

02:06:27 Speaker_01
That's right. And so suddenly we have this nice test that allows us to see in our competency there. And I want to remind you, if you do the couch stretch and filament, your knee is actually in hip extension. Your knee isn't even behind your butt here.

02:06:39 Speaker_01
It's that hard, and I'm still biasing it towards flexion. So what we're seeing is that you have a real deficit of hip extension. So that's one way to improve it.

02:06:49 Speaker_01
You could just do the test, camp out there, take some breaths, contract, relax, breathe, do your resistance isometrics, whatever you want to do there. So many ways to zhuzh that up, rotate, side bend.

02:07:01 Speaker_01
The question is, how are you now loading that thing in your life? So we can put a band on you and get you to do some isometric standing, but show me in your movement language in the gym how you're reinforcing hip extension.

02:07:15 Speaker_01
So when we were talking about deadlifting with a tandem stance, still not hip extension. I'm extending the hip, but that trail leg is not. Rear foot elevated split squat. Ding, ding, ding, ding. We start to get there, right? Bulgarians, flipping a tire.

02:07:29 Speaker_01
Like any time where I need to be able to, a big lunge is a good example. Forward lunge, back lunge.

02:07:35 Speaker_03
Tell me about flipping a tire. So you're talking about flipping a tire, but then at the top of the movement, you're doing like a kettlebell swing where you buck your hips forward.

02:07:42 Speaker_01
Like you're gonna try and pee over that Volkswagen. You're pushing over.

02:07:45 Speaker_03
Don't try and pee at the top.

02:07:46 Speaker_01
But you're talking about bucking the hips forward. That's right. Suddenly you're upright and that leg, that trailing leg is in extension in a long lever position. So we spend a lot of programming. One of the best persons at this is Franz Bosch.

02:08:00 Speaker_01
I mentioned earlier, and he has something I've termed like the Bosch snatch. So if you imagine being in a double stance, So I'm just like I'm swinging a kettlebell. If I took a plate or a dumbbell, it doesn't matter.

02:08:14 Speaker_01
I'm just going to basically go from a hip hinge, and as I go overhead with the weight of the load, whatever is appropriate for you, I'm going to take my front foot and step it up on a box.

02:08:24 Speaker_01
So all of a sudden, I'm going from a flexed position in the hip.

02:08:28 Speaker_03
C-shaped body.

02:08:29 Speaker_01
Right, or upright torso, but hinged. C-shape, right? Weird C. And then, Havel took a C. And then I'm gonna step forward, and now I'm gonna have that, one of those legs is gonna be an extension.

02:08:41 Speaker_01
And so suddenly, now we're adding speed to this extension, because that's not what we do with reverse rear foot elevated split squats. We're not loading that in speed.

02:08:49 Speaker_01
So we start to add the speed component to what we're doing and suddenly we've discovered another way to challenge our movement. It doesn't just always have to be heavier, it can also be faster.

02:08:59 Speaker_01
So I'm basically, if you imagine if I was, here's a great example, I love pressing, I think overhead pressing is the bee's knees, it's one of my non-negotiables. We're gonna press, seesaw press, overhead press, we're pressing.

02:09:10 Speaker_01
But if I take your front foot and put it up on a box, make sure that back foot is straight with all your toes on the ground and press from that position, you're gonna find out why you don't have any hip extension.

02:09:20 Speaker_01
It's gonna be so, you won't even think about the weight, you'll think about your groin exploding.

02:09:25 Speaker_03
So a lot of what- Do you recommend people probe that, those mechanics?

02:09:28 Speaker_01
Oh yes, absolutely.

02:09:29 Speaker_03
With very light dumbbells at first.

02:09:30 Speaker_01
No, go press, go find out how well you can press overhead and you're gonna see that like, wow, this tandem stance front foot elevated. Press is going to kill you.

02:09:39 Speaker_03
There's a movement I do. I'm guessing – well, I'm curious if it activates hip extension the way I think it does. Here's what I've been doing that I found useful. I don't know if it's true or not.

02:09:50 Speaker_03
But what I'll do is I'll tie a fairly thick band to a pull-up bar. I'll squat down, I'll hold it, like I'm holding like a pole in front of me, like a pole carrier in a parade or something.

02:10:02 Speaker_03
I'll squat down and I'll jump up, but instead of, but I'll buck my hips forward at the top. So, like feet go out in front.

02:10:11 Speaker_03
It's very unnatural movement actually, as opposed to jumping and putting my toes down, pointing my toes down, my toes are kicking forward. So, I'm trying to mimic the top of a kettlebell swing at the top of this movement.

02:10:22 Speaker_01
I would say one of the things that is useful for me as I am asked to come and tear through people's programming and look for holes in their movement practices, we look at fundamental shapes. So what's nice is that, okay, hang on everyone.

02:10:40 Speaker_01
Let me define exercise for you. I'll just give you a little framework. And I'll start by saying, something inflammatory, the shoulder's not that complicated. It doesn't do that many things.

02:10:51 Speaker_01
It goes overhead, goes out to the side, goes in the front, it goes in the back. That's what your shoulder does. You can bend the elbow, you can twist in all those shapes, but those are the four fundamental primary organizations of the shoulder.

02:11:06 Speaker_01
Hip has flexion, extension, right? Really, I could go laterally, but that's just a different kind of squat. But really, like, am I squatting with a foot really narrow or am I squatting a little bit wider?

02:11:18 Speaker_01
So what we can then do is say in these fundamental bookends, these benchmarks, this is what we call archetype. Suddenly, I can ask, well, how are you loading your overhead position?

02:11:30 Speaker_01
So if you're always pressing on a bar or pulling on a lat down machine, you actually are overhead, but you're not in the fullest expression of overhead, right? Which is your arms straight up and down parallel by your ears.

02:11:43 Speaker_01
Hands over the top of your head. Stams over your head. Right, so what we can then do is say, well, what tools do you like to use? Kettlebells, great. That's one of the reasons kettlebells are so great.

02:11:52 Speaker_01
Single arm, I can't hold it out here, it's going to fall. I have to finish over my head. Right, dumbbells the same, but kettlebells, it constrains us to express full overhead motion.

02:12:02 Speaker_01
I can look at, do you have enough interrotation with the hand by the side? Are you doing enough pressing-like activities? Chaturanga, the finished position of my row, right?

02:12:11 Speaker_01
Bench press, dip, running, those are all movements where my shoulder comes into extension, whether the arm is straight or bent. So what's nice now is I can say, well, am I distracting those tissues or compressing those tissues?

02:12:24 Speaker_01
Well, you're like, well, what do you mean? I'm like, are you pressing or are you doing a pull-up, right? Pressing overhead or doing a pull-up? That's compressing or distraction, right? Very simple ways of looking at these movements.

02:12:35 Speaker_01
We can say, well, how are you coming there? Did you get there from a snatch or did you get there from a front rack position? So we can look at start position, finish position.

02:12:42 Speaker_01
And suddenly what you're realizing is you're like, oh, I'm starting to understand the root movements and root positions that help me improve performance, predict future performance and help me get through pain.

02:12:53 Speaker_01
Because if I have people not expressing the highest levels of expression of the movement, that's something we can improve. That's technique, right? It's not just get bigger and stronger. It's, hey, let's be more technically proficient.

02:13:04 Speaker_01
So I have all of these ways of looking at the movement selection choices. Again, what are you comfortable with? But then I can challenge it with load, make it heavier. We can do volume. We could add speed. We could add cardiorespiratory demand.

02:13:18 Speaker_01
You could do more than five, and suddenly you have to do 20, and we have metabolic demand in there. You and I are competing all of a sudden, right? Now, suddenly, I go from open torque to closed torque.

02:13:28 Speaker_01
I go from giving you a barbell to a dumbbell, right? I go from open chain to closed chain. Suddenly, we're like, holy moly, block practice, random practice.

02:13:37 Speaker_01
I have all the tools for me to understand, are you competent putting your arms over your head or are you exposing these shapes under these different domains?

02:13:46 Speaker_01
And I think when we only look at sort of a few ranges of motion and we only look at load as the way, then we lose all the opportunity and richness of programming.

02:13:56 Speaker_03
Got it. Well, let me come back to my silly example of the band and the jump thing and say, okay, so for getting better hip extension, which is what I think a lot of people need is what I'm hearing. A lot of people are in hip flexion.

02:14:08 Speaker_01
So you're jumping and then coming up.

02:14:10 Speaker_03
Yeah. I mean, or, you know, we've seen these beautiful images of certainly not me, but like people doing long jump where they're kind of like in a, in a, arched position, something. Oh, I see what you're saying.

02:14:19 Speaker_03
Yeah, so the idea is because with the band it's safe, right? You know, trying to get the hip into extension or feet out in front of the jumping.

02:14:28 Speaker_01
It's a kipping pull-up without a pull-up.

02:14:29 Speaker_03
You're just kipping on the bar. And I don't kip on my pull-ups, by the way. Because I'm a time under, no, I don't kip on my pull-ups. I train with Ben Bruno from time to time.

02:14:40 Speaker_03
You kip on a pull-up with Ben Bruno there, you're never gonna hear the end of it, ever. So I don't, but I don't anyway, because I'm a time under tension guy.

02:14:48 Speaker_01
That's fine, I'm gonna say that I love strict pull-ups. I do more strict pull-ups than you can imagine. But if you can't kip, there's something wrong with you.

02:14:54 Speaker_03
Okay, got it. We'll argue about this more offline. But I love to sprint. So that's hip extension.

02:15:02 Speaker_00
Absolutely.

02:15:02 Speaker_03
I love to sprint, love to sprint. And I love jumping. Like I'm a big believer in this maybe true, maybe not true idea that as we get older, we tend to jump and land less. A lot of injuries come from, you know, lack of eccentric load.

02:15:17 Speaker_01
There's an old saying out of the Soviet system, when you stop jumping, you start dying. I believe that. And the lowest form could be trampolining. Another low form, jump roping. Highest form, starting to be really powerful. I love it. You're killing it.

02:15:34 Speaker_01
And what's great now is you've just made this switch where you start describing your training in blocks of positions. What position am I training? What shape am I reinforcing? That's a really, it's not a muscle. Remember, your muscles,

02:15:50 Speaker_01
are not wired for movement. Your brain is wired for movement, right? You don't have any selective control over a single muscle in your body. That's a mistake. So you're not really working your biceps, you're working arm flexion, right?

02:16:02 Speaker_01
In a variety of positions. This squat exercise biases my quads more, but I'm not actually quadding, right? Because that's impossible.

02:16:10 Speaker_03
Yeah, I think that the broad misconception is that resistance training is just to build and strengthen muscles in a bodybuilding kind of fashion. And no disrespect to the bodybuilders, but- No, we learned a lot.

02:16:22 Speaker_03
But we learned a ton, and yet most people would probably do well to think about functional movements.

02:16:28 Speaker_03
In fact, there are a few Instagram accounts that really like to come after not just me, but a lot of people that have talked about resistance training and all that talk about functional patterns.

02:16:38 Speaker_03
And I have to say, as much as the messaging sometimes I think is a little bit abrasive, I pay attention to these and I have seen some of the before and afters that they'll show for people that

02:16:47 Speaker_03
will incorporate into their training like throwing or ballistic movements from fully stopped sprinting out the gate kind of thing and focusing immensely on balancing the two sides of the body.

02:17:00 Speaker_03
And without ever having done those programs, I have to say like, yeah, like a lot of these people had some pretty dysfunctional patterns and they look like they're doing better.

02:17:07 Speaker_03
And I think it's because I have to assume that they're incorporating a much broader uh, range of movements, um, more hip extension, working the two sides of the body, all the things that you're talking about, all the things that you're talking about.

02:17:23 Speaker_03
And so I think that the bodybuilding piece I think is a great thing for getting people out the gate. I always say the amazing thing about resistance training, forgive me for going long here, but I think this is something that, um,

02:17:33 Speaker_03
If somebody is not naturally inclined to exercise or resistance training, resistance training is one of the few forms of exercise that, because of the blood flow, the so-called pump, give people a visual and sensation-based window into the progress they might make.

02:17:50 Speaker_03
Right, I mean, this is unlike like going for a run and getting to like, at the end of your run, you see a little less body fat, and then two days later, you've reduced your body fat percentage, right?

02:17:58 Speaker_03
It gives you a window into your future when you resistance train that way.

02:18:01 Speaker_01
And a gateway into a conversation that's very complex. This is all I think about. And people are like, hey, I just want to feel better, and I don't want to get hurt in my calves when I run. You're like, OK, it can be really simple.

02:18:12 Speaker_01
And also, you have a right to look jacked and tan. I mean, you can be jacked all you want. And Mark Bell makes this point every single post. Look, I think... There's something that I try, we don't ever punch down.

02:18:23 Speaker_01
We just don't, you know, just point, we point to what we do. This is our model. But any model that someone's on the internet, a model has to do three things. It has to explain current phenomenon, right? It has to predict future phenomenon.

02:18:37 Speaker_01
and it has to be easily communicated. So let me see your model, how it works. How does it explain, if I do your thing, will I get better at this thing, right? That's the thing I'm interested in, right?

02:18:50 Speaker_01
So what I see is, oh, a lot of recursive, fun fitness where people feel better, but I still have to go over here and squat, or I still have to go over here and become conditioned. But you can see the truth of needing to expose people

02:19:05 Speaker_01
to bigger ranges of motion and more skilled movement than some of the things we're getting traditionally in the gym, right?

02:19:13 Speaker_01
And I think one of the things that we saw with like a pivot towards movement culture, right, kind of coined by Idol Portal, is that... What we were seeing is that the gym didn't get necessarily better movers.

02:19:27 Speaker_01
What we had was people originally doing a skill, throwing something, running track and field. We would train and then go do more of that.

02:19:36 Speaker_01
And then what we did is we took the gym or took the sports skill movement out of it and we just remained in the gym. And you can see the reaction to that as well. You're not very elegant. You can't, don't have any movement solutions.

02:19:49 Speaker_01
You don't transfer your energy very well. You're not, you know, you're not graceful. You can't, you have no rhythm.

02:19:55 Speaker_01
So the real key for us is like, I think we want to put playback in there and you can see what the reaction is to, hey, if we're just doing bench press and hack squats, maybe that's not making the best mover, but it's certainly making a jacked guy who's, what we call, what is it in that movie, Hot Girl Fit?

02:20:14 Speaker_01
where, you know, it's one of the recent movies where the guy is, who's the guy from Twisters, that incredible actor he was in, Top Gun. Anyway, he's swimming and the girl is like, hey, why are you out of breath?

02:20:26 Speaker_01
He's like, I don't do cardio, I just do abs and biceps. She's like, oh my God, you're hot girl fit. Like you have this big engine that looks good with no go.

02:20:35 Speaker_01
And I wanna make sure that, no offense to all the hot girls out there, but the idea here is, what is it you wanna do with your body Let's start there, and then we can start to say, well, what do you have access to? What's your training age?

02:20:48 Speaker_01
And it's a nuanced conversation. It's probably why you should have a coach and develop a coach for the rest of your life. But let's not pretend having abs and big biceps is gonna make you a good MMA fighter, right?

02:21:00 Speaker_01
And you can see why the resistance of, hey, that made me less athletic, we wanna be careful of that.

02:21:05 Speaker_03
Yeah, I like using the, resistance training to make me stronger and better at running.

02:21:12 Speaker_01
Yes.

02:21:13 Speaker_03
And that's my- That's training. That's what's in my mind. Yes. I only ran cross country one season in high school. Wasn't very good, but really enjoyed it. But I love running.

02:21:22 Speaker_03
I've been running for a long time and I'll never be a- I ran cross country one year in high school. Maybe we ran against each other. Oh, no, you're a year older than I am. So I want to, yeah, well, I'll tell the story some other time.

02:21:34 Speaker_03
My stories aren't relevant here. But I use resistance training to be able to run better, faster, further without pain for me.

02:21:43 Speaker_01
That is what I would hope. we look at training for, now apply a longevity lens, a durability lens, right? Or as Juliette says, she's like, don't you want to just be able to pop off the couch and go on adventures, right?

02:21:58 Speaker_01
I want to have a body that's capable of that. I think what we've been pitching in the gym doesn't really do that. And even that, I just want everyone to hear and double click on what Andrew just said, that framework is that I now have a third

02:22:11 Speaker_01
party objective measure, does my running get better with my training? And it's a really great way to evaluate your training.

02:22:18 Speaker_03
Am I faster? Do I feel better? It's really worked for me and it keeps me out of any kind of gravitational pull toward just trying to get more weight on the hack squat machine, which I enjoy progressive overload.

02:22:30 Speaker_03
I enjoy doing movements better with more weight, et cetera. But I find that the gym just becomes this when it's a closed loop, I find that it just becomes this kind of like endless exploration of like, what am I really?

02:22:46 Speaker_03
Also at this age, like I want to maintain strength and build some muscle perhaps, but mostly- Do you want to get heavier? I don't. Isn't that weird? I don't, no.

02:22:52 Speaker_01
Michael, right now- You need as much muscle as you can, because winter's coming.

02:22:57 Speaker_03
My goal is to actually get much stronger without getting bigger and to keep my endurance going. I like to do one long rucker run per week, one shorter run, one sprint type run.

02:23:07 Speaker_01
I just figure like I'll be- Everyone, what you just described for a typical person is doing a long piece, a short piece, and a high intensity piece. That's right. That is really- That's the goal. That's the crack.

02:23:20 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's what I do every week if I'm, you know, most weeks. And then I'll lift, you know, legs one day, you know, torso, everyone laughs, torso, what kind of thing is that, you know, torso, including neck and abs.

02:23:28 Speaker_01
Let's take it next level, let's go flank too. You want to get torso on flank, I'm really confused.

02:23:33 Speaker_03
And then I'll do the, what could be called distal muscles. I'll do an extra workout for calves, biceps, and triceps and forearms and grip strength on Saturday.

02:23:41 Speaker_03
And that combination of things, right, this isn't about my training, to me, meets the demands of life. Like I can sprint for the airplane with my luggage. and get there and not cough up both lungs. I can go backpacking.

02:23:54 Speaker_03
Like if you say, hey, let's go backpacking or Grand Canyon tomorrow, you're gonna carry 75 pounds sack. I'll be a little bit sore at night, but it'll feel good. I'll feel good sore, right? We can go to the gym together and I can put,

02:24:07 Speaker_03
you know, what feels to me like a respectable amount of weight on the hack squat. We do some full range glute ham raises. I can hang from a bar, but I'm not trying to beat a pull-up record or run a marathon.

02:24:17 Speaker_03
I find that anytime I've gone to the extreme in any one kind of training, I end up injured, sick, and I'm just not interested in that.

02:24:25 Speaker_03
And I like to think, I could be wrong, I'm projecting here probably, that I'm representative of what most people want. I also want to be able to overeat a little bit every now and again, like Thanksgiving's coming a little bit.

02:24:34 Speaker_03
I also want to be able to not have to eat all day and then eat a big dinner and not dissolve into a puddle of my own tears because I'm neurotically worried about something nutrition-based.

02:24:43 Speaker_03
Like I tend to, I basically skip one meal a day just by virtue of my schedule. It's like non-intentional intermittent fasting.

02:24:50 Speaker_03
And the people who are obsessive about protein will say, well, gosh, that isn't as good, but yeah, okay, so maybe I get a little bit less muscle.

02:24:56 Speaker_03
I'm not doing, I don't want to be so neurotic about my training that I'm not focusing on the bigger missions of my life.

02:25:01 Speaker_01
And notice that what you said was, I train so I can have fun. And I just want to double click on, we have sucked the joy and the play and exposure out of training and out of fitness.

02:25:17 Speaker_01
And now it's, I have to have this VO2 max, so I'll live to 150 and I have to do, right. And you forgot that we, This whole thing is so you can go spend some credits.

02:25:27 Speaker_01
So I like to say the gym and all that really focused training is spending time on credits. But one of my coach friends, Nicole Christensen says, CrossFit Roots, she's like, we don't nature for time. Stop naturing for time.

02:25:40 Speaker_01
Like this, we're surfing so we can surf all day and we can surf more waves than the other kids because you're not fit enough. I want to go hike and then ride my bike and play and ski and do all the things I want to do with my body.

02:25:52 Speaker_01
And that may mean I want to hold my kids or I want to do my job in this warehouse. We start to train for life in a little bit more simple way. And it doesn't feel like this crazy burden.

02:26:03 Speaker_01
And it also happens to be the best tool to understand how you're moving. Because my expert coaches can watch you run and be like, oh, that's what we're working on. And I'll go right to the thing, right?

02:26:15 Speaker_01
But for the rest of us, we need to say, wow, my shoulder, that bench, that fly dumbbell bench was a little bit tricky. I'm losing some shoulder extension, right? Or at least I'm touching these shapes.

02:26:26 Speaker_01
And that ends up being a really interesting diagnostic tool where we can really take a shot at improving function and reducing musculoskeletal distress. And I think this is the template for it.

02:26:38 Speaker_03
Yeah, enjoying your training and including enjoying training hard is one of the best things one can do.

02:26:43 Speaker_03
Years ago when I was skateboarding, I mean, I ruined skateboarding for myself because got picked up out of sympathy, to be fair, by a couple sponsors and then got obsessed with the fact that, you know, I wasn't progressing, that broke my foot.

02:26:55 Speaker_03
And, you know, pretty soon, I didn't hate it, I loved it and I loved the community, but it turned into something else. And had I just taken a step back from it and said, all right, I'm decent at this, I could get better,

02:27:05 Speaker_03
And I'm just going to focus on doing it for pleasure and make a living some other way. I'd probably be doing, you know, like, you know, frontside inverts and pulls now and unfortunately I'm not.

02:27:15 Speaker_03
I'm lucky if I get a nice little frontside grind on coping. But whereas with fitness, resistance training, running, I love resistance training and running. The cup of coffee before my workout tastes 10 times better because I'm going to work out.

02:27:26 Speaker_03
I love to use it as an opportunity to listen to music, listen to podcasts. There's so much that's in and around it that's still just pure pleasure, even on the days when I'm like at 95% of output or 100% of output or 80% of output.

02:27:39 Speaker_03
I'm like, I just, I'm having so much fun.

02:27:41 Speaker_01
That's right.

02:27:42 Speaker_03
And I can't wait to get back in there.

02:27:45 Speaker_01
So when we're, we are looking at society health, right? the first thing we argue, instead of saying what's most important, we say, what is it you want to do? And who are your friends are going to do it with? And are you going to do it a lot?

02:27:59 Speaker_01
Let's start there. Then we can start to weasel in everything, especially with social isolation, with sort of lack of community. I mean, I feel like sport is the last place where people congregate, right?

02:28:10 Speaker_01
Sports, sidelines, this is the sort of, you know, lingua franca of the whole world. I've taught on every continent except Antarctica. Everyone knows what a push-up is. Everyone knows what a deadlift is. It's not science. Sorry. It's not math.

02:28:24 Speaker_01
That's not the universal language. It is bench press. Everyone knows. And everyone can tell you how much you bench in any language. So there are some things there that are universal. I think when we look at the human as a moving organism,

02:28:39 Speaker_01
then we can really start to not feel crazy about how our world is changing, but how do we fight back by setting up more opportunity to move more?

02:28:49 Speaker_01
And for me, the whole lens ends up being like, we basically, we're trying to parse through a complex problem. So I have a world champion who's injured, two-time world champion, isn't able to finish a tour.

02:29:02 Speaker_01
The first question I ask them is, tell me about your sleep. I'm a rough sleeper. Oh, tell me more about that, right? Because I can't even tell your inputs and outputs unless we're getting into sleep. Then I say, well, tell me about your nutrition.

02:29:14 Speaker_01
I eat clean. Great, find that for me. I don't even know what that means, clean. Turns out under-caloried, under-nutrition, doesn't get enough macros, doesn't get enough micros. I'm like, oh, we start to correct that. We start to collect sleep.

02:29:26 Speaker_01
When we really start to divide some of the behaviors into, for me as a 51-year-old, I'm obsessed with my tissues not failing. Like tearing an Achilles is like every physical therapist's worst nightmare.

02:29:37 Speaker_01
And I jump rope every day, and I have great range, I do so many isometrics. I'm just not gonna tear my Achilles. Now I'm gonna tear my Achilles, but I'm not gonna tear my Achilles. So tissue health is part of that.

02:29:48 Speaker_01
So now I have to look at nutrition, I have to look at my blood work, and I have to look at my sleep, right?

02:29:53 Speaker_01
So that I can really define some of those things as that creates a readiness, tissue tolerance, health, then I can be looking at the other things. And that's really, as we start to get, again, the framework of sport or framework of play

02:30:07 Speaker_01
creates this place where I can suddenly start to understand inputs and outputs and how to take care of this carcass so that I can do what I want with my body, which is our new definition of mobility.

02:30:17 Speaker_01
Can I do what I want with my body and can I be pain-free?

02:30:20 Speaker_03
Am I correct in my very non-scientific assessment of Instagram accounts whereby when I see a 80 to 100 year old person moving well, that person tends to be doing something sort of gymnastics related?

02:30:38 Speaker_03
There's this incredible video of a guy, a Chinese guy, a very tall Chinese guy doing essentially skin the cat and then into a pull-up. Skin the cat, people can look it up. Doesn't involve actual cats, hopefully. Shouldn't. 85-year-old woman sprinting.

02:30:54 Speaker_03
So we're talking gymnastics type movement. Didn't stop. Sprinting movement. Rarely, sometimes it'll be somebody in a gym lifting a heavy weight, but more often than not, it's gymnastic type movement, pull-up, dip, parallel bar, balance beam, sprinting.

02:31:12 Speaker_03
Is that what got them there? Or is that just the expression of what- Genetics, do they feel safe?

02:31:18 Speaker_01
Show me nutrition, show me their training age. But what's noticeable there is that we have disciplines that require greater range of motion and skill of body control and high power output. Right? Huh?

02:31:31 Speaker_01
So one of the things that we do in our programming for adults is I make you sprint once a week, like sprint, because people have not sprinted. And I don't mean you can go out and run. I don't think you're capable of that.

02:31:41 Speaker_01
But I'm going to put you on a bike. I'm going to put you in control. And I'm going to see what your peak wattage is, that sprinting.

02:31:48 Speaker_01
So ideally, I would love you to be able to do some hill sprints and repeats, but I don't think you have the tissue tolerance or the range of motion for that.

02:31:54 Speaker_01
And I know what the outcome is going to be, but I can put you on a bike and say, can we hit this peak wattage?

02:32:00 Speaker_01
And what you just discovered there was, hey, I still need to maintain my ability to move quickly and have control through great ranges of motion.

02:32:07 Speaker_01
That is a recipe for, you know, why if you did yoga and did some sprints, you're going to be pretty badass. You know, that's a pretty good way.

02:32:17 Speaker_03
And why people who just do the elliptical and the little small dumbbells, they're fooling themselves.

02:32:23 Speaker_01
It's a lot of busy work. There's a lot of busy work out there. It makes people feel like they're involved in a program. Again, the way we want to take our feelings out of it. how do you progress those pink dumbbells? 1,000 reps is 2,000 reps, right?

02:32:37 Speaker_01
Show me progression. Suddenly I can't progress and regress those things. The other thing I wanna say is like, is it making the thing better? What are we training for?

02:32:46 Speaker_01
And I think it feels decorative to have busy work and I do all this prehab corrective exercise. I'm like, hold up, why don't we do the thing we're doing and regress and progress that and ask if you have native range of motion, yes or no?

02:33:00 Speaker_01
But, you know, if we look at the typical person, especially someone listening to this podcast, they don't have two hours in the gym. So if your program is requiring two hours of me, I'm out. If it requires an hour of me, I might be out.

02:33:11 Speaker_01
You know, I'm so busy that sometimes I eat lots of 30 and 40 minute pieces, pepper throughout, plus a lot of other play, and that's good enough.

02:33:19 Speaker_01
So we really do need to look at how people are finding themselves in their environments to ask, is this appropriate for you and what's essential?

02:33:27 Speaker_01
And it turns out a lot of this, you know, 20-something playing around, vidding yourself in the gym is great when you have three or four hours in the gym.

02:33:35 Speaker_03
Yeah, listening to an entire album or podcast or book chapters in sequence, I think is, if I may, far more valuable than allowing oneself the opportunity to text and be on social media during a workout, because it just becomes a very distracted thing.

02:33:53 Speaker_03
I think the workout of any kind is also an opportunity for building concentration. And one can listen to podcasts or books, et cetera, but

02:34:02 Speaker_03
or an album sequentially through, but I find, at least for myself, if I work out in a way that's interrupted by social media or texting or email, because it's available there, that it carries through into the rest of the day, that I'm more distracted.

02:34:18 Speaker_03
I believe you.

02:34:19 Speaker_01
How about that? I believe you. And that's what's so great is you're like, hey, that doesn't work for me. I find that my best thinking is done under enormous aerobic load.

02:34:31 Speaker_01
I literally am like, oh, and I often jump up and write something on the whiteboard and then go back and do my thing because it creates flow state. And if I'm distracted,

02:34:41 Speaker_01
I can't really hear what's going on and that's there's a time when I want to distract myself, you know, and there's a time when I want to be amused. That's fine. You know, I've got a two-hour ride.

02:34:49 Speaker_01
I'm getting ready for a four-day backcountry ski trip here in February. But notice I've already been getting ready for it in the beginning of November. I am ready. It's taking me, gonna ramp up.

02:35:02 Speaker_01
And so much of my training now is going towards, can I successfully do these four hard days the way I want to? So, some things come down a little bit. Strength dials down. I change my body composition. I'd like to be a little bit lighter. I'm playing.

02:35:13 Speaker_01
But there's some times where I have to get two and three hours in of steady work done. And I'm like, headphones. You know what I mean? So, it's okay to be amused. You don't have to be a monk doing what you're doing. But I really like what you said.

02:35:26 Speaker_01
I feel distracted. Yeah, let's use this as a concentration time. All right, let's use this interaction time. The gym shouldn't be the loneliest place in the world. If you're not making eye contact and talking, high-fiving, get a different gym.

02:35:38 Speaker_03
I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about fascia.

02:35:41 Speaker_03
You and Jill Miller were some of the first people that I ever heard talk about fascia in an elaborate way, in a way that allowed me to finally understand what this incredible aspect of our physiology, the many things that it's doing.

02:35:55 Speaker_03
I realize this is a vast discussion that could take several more hours, but- I'm not a fascia researcher. Right.

02:36:02 Speaker_03
As I recall, you're one of the first people to talk about the relationship, telling people that there's fascia, that we have this thing called fascia, clearly an important part of our physiology, our ability to move.

02:36:14 Speaker_03
To what extent do you think that... tight fascia, quote unquote, I'm probably offending many people in this moment, tight fascia restricts our movement and that working on fascial release or maneuvering fascial- How about mobilization?

02:36:28 Speaker_03
Mobilization, thank you, can allow us to move better, maybe better posture, maybe even feel better. And there are a lot of theories, some probably wrong, some probably right about what fascia can and can't do for us.

02:36:40 Speaker_03
But what are some things about fascia that you find particularly interesting that you'd like to pass along?

02:36:45 Speaker_01
I think what we should do is if you pull fascia out of the human movement equation, the human doesn't, it fails to stop moving, right? So the recent, like we've just discovered fascia, right? That's not really entirely true.

02:36:58 Speaker_01
There's a really like 20 year old set of videos by a guy who was, he describes himself as a somonaut. His name's Gil Headley, and he did these live dissections on YouTube. I don't even know if it's still there.

02:37:10 Speaker_01
But he basically did all of this gross anatomy for free on the internet.

02:37:14 Speaker_01
And he describes, one of the first people to really describe fascia as this sort of incredible, you know, connective tissue network that envelops, wraps, you know, stores energy, communicates, is tensionality.

02:37:29 Speaker_01
In full disclosure, I went to school in Boulder, and I may have dated a girl who went to rolfing school and was a rolfer. And Ida Rolf was one of the first people to really talk about how can we mobilize fascia with touch.

02:37:41 Speaker_01
So I was introduced to fascia in the 90s when I had rolfing done on me.

02:37:47 Speaker_01
So when I'm trying to help someone think about pain or restore position, and this is overly gross, but it'll create a framework for people, we ask, is this an environmental problem? Are you poorly hydrated?

02:37:57 Speaker_01
Because your tissues need to be hydrated to slide. Are you inflamed? That's why we talk about nutrition and we talk about sleep, because we have this environmental piece. Then I often will say, hey, do we have just a movement problem?

02:38:09 Speaker_01
Do you just have crappy technique? Like, let's fix the technique first. Let's get you moving to the highest expression of the movement first. Hey, turn your foot straighter. Let's re-centrate that joint. Can we have a better organization?

02:38:23 Speaker_01
Then we start to say, because sometimes it's just a movement problem, just you needed some cueing. We say, is this a joint capsule problem?

02:38:28 Speaker_01
Because capsular stiffness, the joint capsule is a bag of connective tissue that surrounds all your joints, and it can account for huge chunks of your range of motion limitation. So a lot of what we do is we try to mobilize the joint tissue.

02:38:39 Speaker_01
And again, that's my own bias. The way I was trained, I was an Australian trained manual therapist at this Maitland school. Then we say, well, is this just a good old-fashioned muscle restriction?

02:38:48 Speaker_01
And we call it muscle dynamics, because that includes high tone, stress, fear. But trigger points are a well-documented phenomenon. Muscles get stiff. They become fibrotic, right? You could have high tone trying to protect you, all those reasons.

02:39:01 Speaker_01
But that still could limit your range of motion. And lastly, we say sliding surfaces. So instead of kind of talking about all the different layers of dermis and skin and fascia, we say, do the things that slide, are they sliding?

02:39:14 Speaker_01
So if you grab your skin on your forehead, it should slide in all the directions. Notice that the skin should slide all the directions over your tendons, right? If I grab your typical person's Achilles

02:39:26 Speaker_01
and grab the skin over the Achilles, it doesn't budge. It's like they have an exoskeleton that's that fascial kind of compartment, and it's seized. It's adhered.

02:39:37 Speaker_01
It's bound to the underlying surfaces, which creates tissue restriction and higher tension. So when we're mobilizing these tissues, we're trying to keep tissues sliding and gliding. That's an easy way of thinking about it.

02:39:48 Speaker_01
Nerves have to run through nerve tunnels. Taking huge breaths keeps all of those, you know, aspects of your trunk moving. And we just need to be thinking in like a systems approach.

02:40:00 Speaker_01
So sometimes if you went and saw an ART practitioner and it didn't solve your problem.

02:40:06 Speaker_03
This is active release therapy?

02:40:07 Speaker_01
Yeah.

02:40:08 Speaker_03
Okay.

02:40:08 Speaker_01
It may not have been a fascial problem, right? If you went and saw someone who only worked on the muscles, it may not have been a muscle problem.

02:40:16 Speaker_01
If you went and saw a chiropractor and they worked on your joint structures, right, or a good physio, it may not be a joint restriction problem.

02:40:23 Speaker_01
If you saw a coach and they couldn't cue you out of it, it may not have been a... So what we need to do is we recognize that if more squats just solved all the problems, wouldn't we have solved all the problems?

02:40:32 Speaker_01
If rolling on a roller had solved all the problems, seems like we would have solved all the problems. So I think what ends up happening is we want to put fascia equally as an important part of the system.

02:40:41 Speaker_01
And one of the ways that we can directly impact that in a free way at home is to begin a conversation of just some simple myofascial mobilization. In fact, myofascial means muscle fascial. But there are osteofascial connections.

02:40:57 Speaker_01
Does the fascia glide over the bone there, right? We can look at the tendinous fascial connections. And again, do these tissues slide and glide the way they're supposed to slide and glide? And that's a much easier way to look at it.

02:41:10 Speaker_01
And I'm going to test and retest, not with subjective pain, but how is your range of motion and access to your range of motion.

02:41:17 Speaker_03
Thank you for that. I've wanted to try rolfing for a long time.

02:41:21 Speaker_03
And then a friend of mine, who's a former SEAL team operator, told me that at some point during the rolfing that he received, that they put a glove on and went up his nostril and did some fascial release on the inside of his nose.

02:41:37 Speaker_03
And quote, it was the most painful experience he ever had. And I was like, all right, well,

02:41:43 Speaker_01
I don't know if you know anyone in Naval Special Warfare, but they're so soft.

02:41:47 Speaker_03
Right.

02:41:48 Speaker_01
I didn't say that. Kelly said that. You know who you are, my friend.

02:41:52 Speaker_03
But I confess, it's not like I avoid pain at all costs, but that made me think that I might not want to do roll thing. I also don't want someone putting their finger up my nose. So I'm assuming that I could say, hey, I want, I want to try roll thing.

02:42:09 Speaker_03
And I don't need to get, because you hear this stuff like, oh, you know, there's all this emotional release, which, you know, there are other ways to get that. The, um, I guess, is it always painful is the question.

02:42:20 Speaker_01
Does it need to be painful?

02:42:21 Speaker_03
His statement is pretty severe.

02:42:22 Speaker_01
Let's pull Rolfing on the side because I'm not a Rolfer. But let's just say that mobilizing your tissues doesn't have to be painful. In fact, it's likely that you'll experience some discomfort. But let's talk about a couple guideposts for you.

02:42:35 Speaker_01
Number one, you always have to be able to take a full breath. So if I'm mobilizing you or you're mobilizing yourself and you suddenly stop breathing, you're going too deep. So an easy way for you is to say, hey, can I breathe here?

02:42:48 Speaker_01
Number two, I like to have volitional contraction. So if I'm mobilizing someone or someone's doing something, I should be able to flex them out. I should have control over that.

02:42:56 Speaker_01
If the pain or depth or pressure is putting too much load on the system where I literally lose neuromuscular control, what am I doing? Right. And then, you know, those two pieces, can I take a breath here? Do I have control here?

02:43:08 Speaker_01
Those go a long way to keeping me in the bounds. And then we tend to not work on a tissue longer than five minutes just because I want to get the rest of it tomorrow. And if you give me 10 minutes of work, That's incredible.

02:43:21 Speaker_01
We like to put the soft tissue work before we go to bed. And what we found was that we had better adherence. No one's doing anything productive in the 10 minutes before they go to the bedroom.

02:43:30 Speaker_01
Number two, like a child, when you put a child to bed, you're like, first we take a bath, then we read the book, and then we go to bed, right? Your brain is like, I know what comes next.

02:43:40 Speaker_01
So if you do this rolling or on your soft tissue work, self-massage, You are training your brain to know what comes next. We find that when people have engaged in massage or self-massage, they don't stand up and want to fight anyone.

02:43:53 Speaker_01
They're very relaxed. If you've ever gone to a spa and had a massage, you don't go out and snatch or get into a fight afterwards. You're so chill, bro. So we found it's a great way to, as Jill Miller says, switch on the off switch.

02:44:05 Speaker_01
That's a beautiful way of talking about that. How do I tell myself to shift out of this, you know, fight or flight into coming down? Five minutes per body part. Start anywhere on the leg. Start anywhere. What's stiff? What's asking? Can I breathe?

02:44:19 Speaker_01
Can I contract? You're going to see that that's a really simple way to start getting some input. And not all your tissues are the same.

02:44:26 Speaker_01
If you come to me with knee pain, I'm going to want to be able to look at your positions, but I'm also going to want to be able to stay on your quads. I mean, my full body weight. And if you can't take that, I'm calling that incomplete.

02:44:38 Speaker_01
And those people out there who are going to be like, whoa, that's heavy duty. You have not worked with my population. who have monster thighs, are thick and fibrotic, and it takes real weight.

02:44:48 Speaker_01
So we all have different sensitivities, but if I respect your ability to take a breath and contract, then all of a sudden, we're upregulating.

02:44:57 Speaker_01
What I recommend is you go to Thailand, you get a Thai massage from a 65-year-old master woman who weighs 109 pounds, and when she is working on your quads and you tap out, she's like, no, I'm not done here.

02:45:09 Speaker_01
If you felt your quads, you're gonna realize how low the bar is.

02:45:14 Speaker_03
All right. Heat and cold. You were one of the first people that told me, hey, listen, cold's great. Cold plunges, cold showers are great for shifting your state, for resilience training. It's fun. It's fun. I swam with Laird's pool this morning.

02:45:32 Speaker_01
Did the breath hold? Cold laps, it's fun. I'm going to put in quotation marks.

02:45:35 Speaker_03
Yeah.

02:45:35 Speaker_01
Sometimes it's type two fun.

02:45:38 Speaker_03
It definitely will shift one's state for many hours afterwards for reasons we now understand. But you were one of the first people to point out to me that

02:45:47 Speaker_03
For injuries, oftentimes, it's better to perfuse the tissue, and that heat sometimes, perhaps, is the more favorable tool if you had to pick one. That's right.

02:45:59 Speaker_01
So you, I think, have even talked about that there is research to show that cold water immersion can attenuate training effects.

02:46:09 Speaker_03
if done in the six to eight hours after hypertrophy and strength training, because of its potent anti-inflammatory properties, prevent some of the inflammation that would prompt the adaptation response.

02:46:21 Speaker_03
Put simply, if your goal is bigger muscles and getting stronger, don't do immersion-based deliberate cold exposure in the six to eight hours after your training. Fine to do it on other days, fine to do it beforehand.

02:46:34 Speaker_03
In fact, athletes at Stanford do that on the basis of a lot of work from Craig Heller and others. It's fine to not do it at all if you don't want to do it.

02:46:41 Speaker_03
Again, I'm not going to die on the sword of cold plunging, but it can attenuate or even prevent those adaptations. But at other times, it's a great tool for reducing inflammation, shifting one's mental and physical state. Great direction.

02:46:58 Speaker_03
Look, it always sucks to get in the thing. The whole point is you feel much better when you get out than you did before you ever got in. That's the simplest way to put it.

02:47:05 Speaker_01
I'm a middle-aged guy who wants to be the best middle-aged mountain biker in my neighborhood. Is my timing of my plunge going to affect my ability to be that mediocre athlete? No. So stop it. People are like, when's the optimal time?

02:47:21 Speaker_01
I'm like, when's it work for you? Is that first thing in the morning? Juliet found that if she got hot and plunged it in the night, she was like, woken up and fired up and ready. She's like, I'm not going to sleep now.

02:47:33 Speaker_01
And I get hot and cold, hot and cold. And it's like someone hits the emergency brake, right? So first of all, when's it work for you? Second of all, if there is a performance concern, we try to put it as far away from training as we can.

02:47:44 Speaker_01
That's what we say. Training in the evening, plunge before. If you train in the morning, plunge in the evening. Get cold, that's cool. But what you hinted at is the same reasons why we don't ice injuries, because it limits our body's ability to heal.

02:47:59 Speaker_01
So it rate limits, and it might do it by phasal constriction. Your body, eventually your body's gonna warm up anyway. So one of the things we like to say is your body either heals at the rate of a human being, or it heals slower.

02:48:12 Speaker_01
So there's no such thing as a fast healer. You're just, oh, you're really good at healing at the rate of human physiology, and the rest of us are doing dumb things that are rate limiting our healing. Nutrition, sleep, right?

02:48:23 Speaker_01
When we are talking about anyone after surgery or injury, Our benchmark in the line of the sand is eight hours of laying in bed without looking at your phone. That's minimum. And I don't care if you're sleeping, because resting is the next best thing.

02:48:37 Speaker_01
But I can't actually understand inputs and outputs. And let me be super clear. If you're trying to grow a body, learn a skill, change your body composition, get stronger, heal, that all rhymes with eight hours. We look seven as our minimum.

02:48:52 Speaker_01
And of course, you're a human being. You're going to get by. I was stressed out last night and wanted to come on this show with my friend Andrew and do a good job. Like I didn't get great sleep, but I'm a human being, I'm still gonna show up.

02:49:02 Speaker_01
So what's nice then is we can start to say, okay, what can we control in terms of managing and upregulating and boosting maximal healing rate for humans? And it turns out cold water may not be the best.

02:49:16 Speaker_01
Icing something might suppress prostaglandin release, right? Which means that you can think of it as you have these circulating stem cells, and again, sorry everyone, I get this just very cursory.

02:49:26 Speaker_01
And we need the chemical signalers from the injured damaged tissue to call those things to be. But if I ice that and suppress that, some of those cells can go swinging on past. There was a great study I saw a million years ago.

02:49:40 Speaker_01
And it looked at ibuprofen usage in Australian military tactical athletes who had bad ankle sprains.

02:49:48 Speaker_01
And those athletes who were given ibuprofen, which does the same thing as ice, suppresses prostaglandin release, cuts off some of those chemical signals, were back faster.

02:49:59 Speaker_01
than their counterparts who did not have the ibuprofen, but they had chronic ankle instability because they did not have a sufficient healing response because they had shut that healing response down.

02:50:10 Speaker_01
So what we find is, look, your body will wait until it warms back up, but if you think you're going to do angiogenesis and make new capillaries and modulate all these things by slapping a nonspecific ice pad for a nonspecific amount of time over a nonspecific tissue, you've got to be kidding me.

02:50:28 Speaker_01
And so it's really Mickey Mouse. Does ice help for margaritas that are warm? Yes. Open heart surgery? Yes, right? Waking you up in the morning. Waking you up in the morning. Hey, I have a kid who needs a placebo.

02:50:39 Speaker_01
I can numb that thing and give my kid some placebo ice. That's great. definitely can work for pain control, because as soon as you're numb, you can't feel anything. But what's going to happen when you pull that thing off? We're going to come back.

02:50:50 Speaker_01
So we have found that we have much better.

02:50:52 Speaker_01
And again, instead of saying, that's bad, we're turning out and saying, we have so many better tools now to manage congestion, because that's really what we're trying to do with ice and healing, is we're trying to stop swelling, right?

02:51:06 Speaker_01
But is swelling a mistake? by the body, the chances are it's not really a mistake. Again, two and a half million years of evolution, this stuff's pretty awesome. But what we know is failure to move and evacuate that swelling is a problem.

02:51:19 Speaker_01
So when we get people on non-fatiguing muscle contraction NMES devices like the H-Wave or something like that, we find that we can actually decongest and keep moving in controlled ways and we have much better clinical outcomes than we do if we ice.

02:51:34 Speaker_03
What about heating pads, hot water bottles, sauna? Do you sit in the sauna?

02:51:38 Speaker_01
Yes, I do.

02:51:39 Speaker_03
I love the sauna. How often are you in the sauna?

02:51:41 Speaker_01
Whenever I can, you know, and sometimes it's short sessions and sometimes it's super hot sessions and sometimes I just get hot and cold a couple times and I try, like you said earlier, I'm not after some specific adaptation response.

02:51:54 Speaker_01
The sauna is a great way for us to chill out and hang out and sometimes we're bored and we got to make dinner and move on. So, you know, I try to sauna. If there's anything I do, I sauna a lot. Bigger the engine, the bigger the brakes.

02:52:06 Speaker_01
And for me, it's such a big brake.

02:52:08 Speaker_03
You mentioned Laird. I've seen Laird drag the assault bike into the sauna, something most people probably shouldn't do because they would die of hyperthermia. Most people should not do that.

02:52:17 Speaker_01
We call that Restrepo. It's the worst place on earth.

02:52:21 Speaker_03
It's an interesting tool, though, the heat. I find that if I get the sauna uncomfortably hot,

02:52:27 Speaker_03
and then force myself to breathe super slowly only through my nose so that I don't actually feel like a burning sensation on the inside of my nostrils and I just do that for 10-15 minutes that it's wonderful stress resilience training.

02:52:43 Speaker_01
How great is that?

02:52:43 Speaker_03
But very different than the cold plunge where you can either muscle through it or distract yourself or whatever.

02:52:49 Speaker_03
In the heat, you know, your heart rate's going up and there's this temptation to follow that heart rate toward a more elevated stress state. And so I find that you can get

02:53:01 Speaker_03
very, very hot, obviously be safe about this, folks, but still maintain a lot of calm. And I think it's a wonderful tool, but you have to kind of work at it.

02:53:11 Speaker_03
And I enjoy this, by the way, so people are probably thinking, here you go again, like, why not just enjoy the sauna?

02:53:15 Speaker_03
But I like to listen to Gregorian chants or something in there and do this, like, very, like, how even and calm can I stay at 215 or 220? And I wear the cap so those higher heats don't register to the brain.

02:53:29 Speaker_01
You will drive yourself out. Eventually your brain is gonna just, what drives me out of the sauna now is I retch. I actually feel like I'm gonna vomit because I've gotten so hot. My brainstem is like, bro, you can just override.

02:53:42 Speaker_01
So I'm like, gotta get out, and I get out of the sauna. And then one of the reasons I love the cold so much, which I'm in our pool or our cold plunge, is that I can get back in the sauna.

02:53:51 Speaker_03
Right, right. It's the contrast. I try to do it once a week, sauna cold, sauna cold, sauna cold.

02:53:56 Speaker_01
Oh, I think that's so great.

02:53:56 Speaker_03
Once a week. You know, again, not training for any specific thing except to be able to go back to Jocko's house, because I did sauna at Jocko's house with some family members of his and friends. And I think they wanted to see when I would tap.

02:54:08 Speaker_01
They wanted to crush you.

02:54:09 Speaker_03
So they went, I think they cranked that thing to like 220, 230. And they caught, he got me on this. I ended up down on the floor.

02:54:18 Speaker_03
You know and they were they were teasing me because it's obviously cooler down on the floor than it is up top and so they call that the huberman spot the wimpy spot, but um Yeah, he's a beast with the song everyone.

02:54:29 Speaker_01
It's not a contest And what it is it is in the willing household i'll tell you it absolutely one of the things I like about the heat and the cold is that it informs me about my readiness state.

02:54:41 Speaker_01
Because just like my CO2 tolerance, my breath holds are very short when I'm stressed and under-recovered. My heat tolerance drops dramatically and so does my cold tolerance. It's easier to pick up really fast. I start shivering right away.

02:54:55 Speaker_01
I'm like, whoa, I've been in here for 30 seconds. I'm already shivering. I'm like, huh, another piece of data that says maybe I need to make it a 70% day in the gym and move. I don't have to take a day off.

02:55:05 Speaker_01
We believe, Juliette and I believe in this thing called desire to train. We wake up every day like you, probably self-medicated with some exercise as kids, right?

02:55:15 Speaker_01
And we start thinking about what we're going to exercise, what are we going to do, where are we going to ride our bikes, where are we going to lift? Like, right when we wake up, we start thinking about when are we going to do it?

02:55:23 Speaker_01
And we wake up on some days and it's not there. And what we ask ourselves, is it not there? Why is it not there? Is it me? I should be there. We should go train anyway. But we really try to listen to that voice.

02:55:32 Speaker_01
And when there's no desire to train, it's really strange how it correlates with crap heat tolerance, crap CO2 tolerance, crap cold tolerance.

02:55:39 Speaker_01
And I think it's a nice way of understanding yourself from sort of a third party objective measure, especially as you get good at this. You're like, wow, that really sucked today.

02:55:47 Speaker_03
Yeah, I love that. assessing one's degree of kind of forward center of mass for effort is great. I'm borrowing this analogy from somebody else. I didn't come up with this.

02:55:58 Speaker_03
He said with all things, you're either back on your heels, flat-footed, or forward center of mass. And I think we've heard a lot about trying to encourage ourselves to always be forward center of mass.

02:56:09 Speaker_03
What I'm hearing today is that great to do that sometimes. great sometimes to back off, but to just explore the full range of, for lack of a better way to put it, sort of emotional range of motion, you know?

02:56:23 Speaker_01
Yeah, and remember, ultimately all this is supposed to be additive, right? And it's supposed to inoculate me by creating a framework that makes more durable. my body and my relationships.

02:56:36 Speaker_01
I mean, we didn't even talk about the fact that the sauna is like, it's just glue for people. It allows people to come together.

02:56:42 Speaker_01
I think one of the things I've noticed with my male friends is that it gives us a place like once a week where we get together because it's so hot. We're all super vulnerable. The truth barrel.

02:56:52 Speaker_01
We talk with our friends and we kind of share stories and can we talk about our lives. And so it creates a framework for that. And if that was the benefit of the sauna, I'm in. Just that alone, right?

02:57:03 Speaker_01
That my wife and I feel more connected after taking a sauna together. I'm like, well, who cares about the heat shock proteins and Alzheimer's? That's probably important too. But I like having a lot of bottom things.

02:57:15 Speaker_01
And I think it's easy for us to sort of so hyperscience and hyper-tactic things that we forget the whole point of the brain is to be around other brains. That's it. That's why the brain exists. And then those brains go do rad shit in the world together.

02:57:30 Speaker_01
And sometimes it's that simple. And when we start throwing that filter on, it becomes a lot more sustainable. I'm not interested in being 110. I'm interested in being durable enough to take the hits on my way to 110.

02:57:40 Speaker_03
I love that. Some of my best friendships have been forged in the sauna.

02:57:44 Speaker_01
That's true, right?

02:57:44 Speaker_03
And not by pushing ourselves necessarily. No. Just become the thing, you know?

02:57:49 Speaker_01
It's so cool. I know that some of my New Zealand teams have a kava. They call it recovery. And sometimes they'll share, have a kava ceremony and drink a little kava and then jump in the sauna. And boy, it really binds the boys.

02:58:04 Speaker_01
You know, that really creates a downregulation effect. I mean, it's so, you know, I think Again, my own bias, because I love this stuff, is that I think all of it is about physical input.

02:58:18 Speaker_01
So if we took a sort of macro step back, what you say is, what does your physical practice look like? Tell me about your physical practice.

02:58:25 Speaker_01
Well, I get up and move my body, and I try to eat a fruit and some protein before I get out the door, and I walk all day long, and I try not to sit in one place for a long period of time, and then I get home, and if I'm lucky enough to exercise, I do, and then I sat on the floor, and I roll a little bit.

02:58:40 Speaker_01
That's a full practice. You walked, you got sunlight, you know what I mean?

02:58:44 Speaker_01
And that I think is a much better way of thinking about this versus sort of, let me add another line of code to your programming where now you're doing three sets of 10 in this thing.

02:58:55 Speaker_03
What are your thoughts on nutrition? You seem to be pretty balanced about this. Before we started recording, you were talking about some meatloaf recipes that sound pretty amazing.

02:59:06 Speaker_01
Clearly, you love food. I'm not going to say I'm the best at meatloaf, but I may be 7 out of 11 times Bamboo Terrace bench champion. I'm gonna get a tattoo, but it's fine.

02:59:17 Speaker_03
You enjoy food. I love food. So you like to eat and you cook a bit as well. Most people feel, I think, kind of overwhelmed. Oh, yeah. discussions about nutrition. Now we're trying to get a gram of protein per pound of body weight, which I subscribe to.

02:59:33 Speaker_03
But if I'm supposed to spread that out across the day, sometimes I'm doing that, sometimes I'm not. I like fruits and vegetables.

02:59:38 Speaker_01
Did you feel like a failure because you didn't have a gram? I mean, honestly, it can feel for people like, oh, I didn't do it.

02:59:45 Speaker_03
No, I think if people make getting high quality, high protein to calorie ratio foods as the foundation of their diet, and then eating some vegetables and eating some fruit. Whoa, bro.

02:59:56 Speaker_01
What about the peels? You're going to kill people. And then I love that. That's dangerous.

03:00:01 Speaker_03
I'll eat the orange peel if it's a really good orange. I will. People who know me, I've gotten some wide eyes at meals where I'll take the lemons out of my drink. I'll just eat the whole thing down. I don't care.

03:00:09 Speaker_03
Someone will tell me why it's going to kill me, but I don't eat the seeds, but I'll eat the peel too. So some vegetables, fruit, and then some starches, you know, per energetic requirements and or real life.

03:00:22 Speaker_03
Like I'm not gonna stay away from the sourdough bread because I don't need a starch that I don't have a little bit of it.

03:00:26 Speaker_03
Like, you know, I feel like we've lost our rational approach to eating because people feel these, you know, these quantifiable metrics of, you know, calories and protein, they're important clearly, but I've always known you to be somebody who's very balanced about,

03:00:41 Speaker_03
the occasional ice cream, yes, steak, but also vegetables. I mean, A, why do you think that the nutrition conversation has gotten so distracted, even contentious? And B, what do you do? And if you were gonna raise a kid, you've raised kids.

03:00:57 Speaker_03
If you were gonna raise a kid and say, here's what like balanced nutrition looks like. to you, okay? I'm not calling you a nutritionist. I'm saying to you, how do you see this picture?

03:01:06 Speaker_01
What I want to point out is that if we're going to have a conversation, remember my real job, day job, is high performance. I'm going to have to talk about body composition. I'm going to have to talk about fueling.

03:01:15 Speaker_01
Do you have enough carbs on board to do what we're going to do? are you eating to recover, to reduce the session costs, right? How do we minimize the sort of the physiologic costs of this training and this competition?

03:01:26 Speaker_01
And that's all wrapped around nutrition.

03:01:28 Speaker_01
I already hinted at, I'm gonna have to talk and ultimately ask you to get a blood panel and make sure that you have everything on board so that your tissues are tissues and can handle the loading we're prescribing them.

03:01:38 Speaker_01
So I didn't wanna get into nutrition at all because it's always about body composition for me. And I'm like, that's the most boring reason.

03:01:47 Speaker_01
Like we, Shawn Stevenson, wrote a beautiful book about creating a table culture and a culture around eating for your family. So for me, the functional unit of change is the household. That's the place where I wanna make and put all my energy and time.

03:02:03 Speaker_01
That's how we'll transform society, one household at a time. But sitting down with your kids, the research around eating with your kids like twice or three times a week is phenomenal, right? Like cooking is beautiful.

03:02:15 Speaker_01
I have to become more nuanced because if I have a team I'm working with, like we had a tournament two weeks ago at Stanford. We played four games and that's four collegiate nationally ranked teams that were playing badasses. How do I fuel those women?

03:02:36 Speaker_01
How do I get them? What do they want to eat? What makes them feel good? What makes them feel bad? How do we balance all of that? I found out that putting food on a table with a tablecloth increased calories.

03:02:49 Speaker_01
Again, as a high performance, for me, I'm like, how are the ways that I can be thinking about this from a

03:02:56 Speaker_01
practical standpoint, my personal thing is that we focus on trying to create, this has been really useful for Julia and I, an objective measure, 0.8 to one grams of protein, which means I don't measure anymore. Per pound of body weight.

03:03:08 Speaker_01
I'm 51 years old, per pound body weight. So what does that mean? It means that I really try to prioritize protein every meal, super simple. And I try not to eat one protein, I try to eat all the proteins, right? That's probably better.

03:03:18 Speaker_01
I try not to choose personally very fatty proteins because my genetics don't really support it. If I want to see triglycerides and things go through the roof, then I'll, you know, watch me eat eggs and butter and steak. Like keto gives me diarrhea.

03:03:31 Speaker_01
So what I'll say is I try to go for leaner proteins there. And then on the fruits and vegetables, because I think we have a real problem with not enough micronutrients, again, talking about tissue health, and definitely not enough fiber.

03:03:44 Speaker_01
Those are huge problems. And if I get 800 grams of fruits and vegetables, this is a nutrition strategy promoted by our friend E.C. Sienkowski at Optimize Me Nutrition. She put this 800-gram challenge based on some research.

03:03:58 Speaker_01
And it changed everything because suddenly I was like, oh my God, I got to eat more food. I have to eat more fruits and vegetables.

03:04:04 Speaker_01
And I was stuffing myself with fruits and vegetables, getting enough protein that I was like, I guess there's no room for a cookie. And what I really liked about that, it was agnostic about your cultural preferences.

03:04:16 Speaker_01
It didn't matter if you're a vegan, didn't matter if you're a vegetarian, didn't matter if you're a carnivore. You want to do carnivore plus berries, knock yourself right out.

03:04:22 Speaker_01
It gave people permission to have their food identities, but it also met the minimums. And then we can dose up and dose down based on what your performance needs are.

03:04:33 Speaker_03
And this is 800 grams, not of carbohydrate. This is 800 grams.

03:04:37 Speaker_01
It's like four big apples.

03:04:39 Speaker_03
Gotcha.

03:04:39 Speaker_01
A banana is like 80 to 100 grams. Okay. Yeah, if you want to be real dangerous, you ate eight bananas today, you could die. I mean, you could die.

03:04:47 Speaker_03
And a big salad with, you know, lettuce, cucumber, tomato.

03:04:51 Speaker_01
Probably two to 300 grams.

03:04:54 Speaker_03
Okay, so then you'd also wanna get some fruit, maybe some cruciferous vegetables, et cetera.

03:05:00 Speaker_01
Check this out. Again, I'm just gonna do some boy math here. Starbucks cookie, delicious. Really? 300 calories, I'm just gonna call it delicious, right? A pound of cherries is 230 calories.

03:05:13 Speaker_01
So eat a pound of cherries and tell me you're like, ah, I still want something sweet. A pound of melon, what is it, like 220 calories? A pound of melon? So calorically, not very dense, but nutritionally super dense.

03:05:26 Speaker_01
So we end up loading a ton of more food on, and it really does prioritize those things. And from a performance standpoint, one of our friends is this incredible nutritionist at Michigan football. Abigail is amazing there.

03:05:41 Speaker_01
And she will tell me about how she's using nutrition as an intervention for sports performance. And she'll have men come up to her and say, Abigail, I pooped today. And she's like, yeah, that's great. You know, you should poop every day.

03:05:55 Speaker_01
And they're like, no, no, you understand, I pooped yesterday too. And it's the first time these kids have pooped consecutively. They don't poop regularly.

03:06:04 Speaker_01
And I think, again, if I'm just trying to get out in the weeds and talk about what's normal and not normal, we should talk about you didn't eat fiber. And she's like, wait until you poop twice in one day. And they were like, that's crazy.

03:06:17 Speaker_01
I've never in my whole life. And the difference is they started eating fruits and vegetables and fiber. And when we start to create those benchmarks, it's a lot easier for me to see inputs and outputs.

03:06:27 Speaker_01
And then we can argue about, can you choke down 100 grams of carbs an hour because you're my elite cyclist? I think you'd be shocked. and how a lot of my athletes have changed their relationship around food because it serves their needs.

03:06:42 Speaker_01
It's not their identity around control.

03:06:44 Speaker_01
And it's something that Julie and I have been very cautious of, because if you have two daughters, speaking, we're really concerned about creating dysfunctional patterns or relationships to food, because in this fitness space, it can be real gnarly.

03:06:57 Speaker_03
Yeah, I see the progression from, you know, sitcoms of the type that we grew up on to reality TV shows to social media where social media can do so much good, um, education wise, et cetera, connection.

03:07:11 Speaker_03
But it's basically a reality TV show that everyone's been able to cast themselves in if they want. And certain characters are casting their,

03:07:21 Speaker_03
you know physique certain figures are casting their outrageous behavior and you know we're all in this reality tv show called social media i think that's really the best way to describe it you know when people start to feel like oh wow these people are getting attention for this reason or that reason it it um creates a gravitational pull toward people behaving a certain way and then obviously um some of that can be really self-destructive um do you win

03:07:44 Speaker_01
Health, I mean, this is a great question. I ask people so like you shredded down super dysfunctional eating Can't go out and eat with friends.

03:07:52 Speaker_01
You don't drink anything with calories Like it's really gnarly to be hyper lean and then what I'll say is when you took your shirt off Did you win Instagram? Did you win because you got another 60 70 years on this planet? How does that work?

03:08:06 Speaker_01
We don't really diet. We'll manipulate macros to take weight off or put weight off players in season, out of season. We'll have really good athletes say, I think I should lose four pounds the next two weeks for this thing. And I'm like, hold up.

03:08:18 Speaker_01
I'm not going to put you in another stressor when we're trying to like, let's go ahead and talk about body composition after the season. But ultimately,

03:08:28 Speaker_01
when we really get people on board with how food has the potential to enrich their relationships, how fun it is to cook, how fun it is to prep, how fun it is to serve other people, then we have this really different relationship with feeling, and that's really remarkable.

03:08:45 Speaker_01
But it is really easy to say, I won. And now I'm like, okay, so this 90-day fast, there are so many fitness things out there, where they start with a fast or brutal calorie restriction. And I'm like, that's your jam to get people lean fast?

03:09:01 Speaker_01
It's just to slam off the calories? Like, we know what's gonna happen. How many people have done some kind of 30-day, 90-day thing, and the next day, it's like, they're off the rails.

03:09:10 Speaker_01
So if you're doing some body recomp, and then you're off the rails, for me, I'm like, I don't think that was very good, because this is a long season we're playing.

03:09:19 Speaker_03
I think I have to be careful here because I realize this gets into some issues. When I did an episode about anorexia, I learned that, first of all, anorexia has existed for centuries.

03:09:30 Speaker_03
This idea that it's more prominent now with social media, actually the numbers don't bear out. What does bear out is that it is the most deadly, the most deadly by far of all the psychiatric illnesses.

03:09:42 Speaker_03
It leads to death in a far greater percentage of cases than any other psychiatric illness, including bipolar, where people often commit suicide, a much higher percentage of people commit suicide who are bipolar. et cetera.

03:09:57 Speaker_03
So it's a really serious thing. And yet we assume that social media has made that worse. But there's this now cluster of all these different eating disorders that don't qualify as full-blown anorexia nervosa, sort of like ADHD now.

03:10:11 Speaker_03
We understand people are having attention deficit issues that might not be clinical ADHD, but that cluster around it. And like people's adults and children's inability to hold their attention on an idea or a topic for any appreciable amount of time.

03:10:23 Speaker_03
So it's a very serious thing. I love that today,

03:10:26 Speaker_03
you've talked about enjoying your training, like really enjoying your training, all aspects, the resistance part, the cardiovascular part, the mobility part, you know, in the evening, getting down on the floor, also enjoying eating with people, enjoying the sauna.

03:10:40 Speaker_03
I mean, I think, you know, people see the big guy that you are, the amazing track record you have of working with all these incredible athletes, and you're a quite accomplished athlete yourself.

03:10:49 Speaker_03
And I think this is the first time for me anyway that I realized like you are,

03:10:54 Speaker_03
thinking about how to make this whole thing pleasurable and mesh it with real life, which I'm realizing now shouldn't come as a surprise because you have a family, a flourishing family, in addition to a flourishing business with the ready state and so forth.

03:11:07 Speaker_03
I think if there's one message that really comes through over and over again, it's like, how can you make fitness and nutrition and health part of your life, but not let it take over your life or your mind in a way that isn't healthy?

03:11:22 Speaker_01
Yeah, thank you for that. And if that's coming across at all, I think we're doing a better job. And I would say, certainly tempered as I've gotten, more reasonable. I think we get older and you can see a little bit more of the horizon.

03:11:34 Speaker_01
And you start to wrap your hands around, how are we going to solve these problems in these different places? And what is sustainable? I really think that that's... We see quick inputs and outputs that are high levels of sports performance.

03:11:49 Speaker_01
And simultaneously, again, I want to take those lessons and transmute them to my own household in a really sustainable, fun way. The nutrition piece is such a dangerous one.

03:12:02 Speaker_01
And young right now, Julie and I are very obsessed with youth sports and spending time with seeing if we can improve that experience for families so they come out unharmed.

03:12:12 Speaker_01
And REDS, Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, is where we start to see that kids are not eating enough to fuel activity and their growing body simultaneously. And it's really hard on their physiologies. And it starts to show up with lost periods.

03:12:27 Speaker_01
It starts to show up with stress fractures. And we start to see some degradation in the body's tissues, but can really crash a lot of problems. And Stacey Sims is probably the first person to really put it on my radar.

03:12:41 Speaker_01
hey, you're a physio coach, I need you to become an expert with the people that you're working with. Are you eating enough support?

03:12:49 Speaker_01
And I see some of the elite women I work with, elite women, really battle, this is the body I need to get paid and to win world championships, and that's not the body that people want on the Instagram. And should I have a salad after this training?

03:13:03 Speaker_01
I'm like, we just played for three hours. No, you're not gonna eat a salad. I'm like, go get this big-ass burrito, and then we'll talk about your salad next.

03:13:10 Speaker_03
So it sounds like the athletes are under-eating. Yes.

03:13:13 Speaker_01
And my understanding anyway, the statistics seem to be- Also under-fueling, which I know is confusing, but potentially not thinking about food at the right times.

03:13:23 Speaker_03
And within the general population of non-athletes, especially youth, however, it seems that people are over-consuming calories. So there seems to be two populations clustering out here.

03:13:34 Speaker_01
This reminds me, we have a rule at our house for dinner. We have a three-vegetable rule. Uh, this is from a woman we work with, Margaret Garvey, who cooks a protein, whatever that is, and has also three vegetables. And that's where she starts.

03:13:47 Speaker_01
And we have, I have one daughter who is like a gourmet chef, Georgia is just a total badass, you know, gee. And then I have Caroline, who is the pickiest human being on the, like, isn't brown, I'm not eating, you know.

03:13:58 Speaker_01
And she's getting better, but when we had three vegetables, suddenly what we saw was that she might eat one, right? And we could start to have exposure. But I think if we crowd out some of the, because we don't wanna have a restrictive house, right?

03:14:12 Speaker_01
But if we crowd out some of the other foods, we found that it was a lot easier for us to say, this is what we're eating and we eat this together as a family.

03:14:21 Speaker_01
And then if there's other foods, I mean, your teenagers are gonna leave the house and eat whatever they want. Just be clear, everybody. You might as well stuff them with the good stuff at home.

03:14:31 Speaker_03
I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about supplements. These days we hear a lot about creatine, creatine, creatine, creatine. I like creatine, been taking it for years.

03:14:41 Speaker_03
Will occasionally do a washout where I just kind of let a bunch of water out of my body. Why not? And then get back to it. I don't do it for any specific reason. I just do it.

03:14:48 Speaker_01
I travel and forget to bring creatine. So I'm like, okay.

03:14:50 Speaker_03
Yeah, but most of the time I'm taking five to 10 grams a day. Okay. We've heard about the body benefits, the brain benefits for athletes and just, quote unquote, exercisers, the typical person listening to this podcast. Do you recommend creatine?

03:15:04 Speaker_03
What are some of the things that in your household, I'm getting this picture, and I've been in your home, and I will say that the spirit in your home is a wonderful one.

03:15:13 Speaker_03
Brian McKenzie and I showed up more or less unannounced at one point, and it's a delightful thing. People's spirits are up.

03:15:20 Speaker_01
It's a space station. It's a space station of stoke. You want to be part of it, you can come in.

03:15:25 Speaker_03
Thank you. It's a great environment. And it was very warming to see that, and the way that you embrace all these different aspects of life.

03:15:33 Speaker_03
And it's busy, and it's hectic, and it's fun, and people care for one another, and they're direct with one another, but in a way that's really supportive. It's really, in my mind, a great model for a home.

03:15:43 Speaker_03
And it stayed with me, and it's really a pleasure to reflect on it.

03:15:46 Speaker_01
High five, J-Star.

03:15:47 Speaker_03
Yeah. It's a team effort in there, for sure. So I'll just ask this. What supplements do you think are, if not necessary, then highly desirable for most people?

03:16:00 Speaker_03
And then for athletes, and maybe because we get this question a lot now, especially after Stacey came on the podcast, for the female athletes you work with in particular, are there supplements that add on to that initial batch?

03:16:12 Speaker_01
So I think we can divide these things into food-like things, right? And then sort of performance.

03:16:19 Speaker_03
Yeah, like whey protein is just a protein replacement. High quality, high protein to calorie ratio.

03:16:26 Speaker_01
That's right. And if you don't handle whey, like my athletes, I'm like, let me introduce you to these vegetarian proteins.

03:16:31 Speaker_01
And that's because you're having a hard time timing your meals or just getting enough protein, because sometimes you just don't feel like it. So great, great utilization there.

03:16:40 Speaker_01
For Caroline, she gets omegas at night, because she doesn't want to have any accidental fish burp at school. She's a teenager, so she takes them before she goes to bed. And we're really interested in brain health.

03:16:54 Speaker_01
And there's some early research, and again, not my expertise that I've heard of, read about, talked to people about, that vitamin D, creatine, and omegas might help attenuate symptoms of concussion. if they get hit, right?

03:17:08 Speaker_01
So post, pre, so those things are on Carolyn.

03:17:11 Speaker_01
She gets creatine every day, she gets an omega every day, and she gets vitamin D. And some of that is, probably gets enough vitamin D during the summer, because I could pull it out, but we live in northern climes, and they're indoors, and there's good research.

03:17:26 Speaker_01
I think Dan Garner had a great piece just talking about vitamin D supplementation in the military and the decrease of risk of fractures in the foot just with vitamin D. So that's the start for me.

03:17:38 Speaker_01
I take a good multi because I'm like, I'm just gonna cover the basis, you know, and Then you can look I think the next sort of valence of interest is have you had a blood panel how your vitamin B levels well

03:17:51 Speaker_01
Is there anything we need to do based on your environment or your genetics? And then I think it gets real in the weeds past that. And again, play around with that.

03:18:01 Speaker_01
One of my super smart friends was like, I think you should take a statin, a small dose statin once a week. And I was like, all right. So I was like, better take some CoQ10 with that. It's an experiment I'm running, right? Downsides are low.

03:18:16 Speaker_01
I'm getting my blood panels, talk to my physician. But so CoQ10 is on the menu for me, just to make sure I don't have anything. And so I think suddenly what we should be looking at is how do I round out

03:18:28 Speaker_01
My family doesn't eat fish, so we're not getting enough of some omegas from those sources. And no one will eat walnuts, but I'm the only one who eats walnuts. So, you know, how do I round up my nutrition with some supplementation?

03:18:39 Speaker_01
And is there a benefit for some other things that, with my genetics or with what's going on, like JSTAR has a mutated MTHR gene, right? And so we are always watching B vitamins for her. Poor methylator. Right, poor methylator.

03:18:57 Speaker_03
Jay Starr is his wife.

03:18:58 Speaker_01
That's right, sorry. Jay Stizzle, CEO.

03:19:01 Speaker_03
You guys have such an awesome relationship. You guys poke fun at one another. You're clearly awesome companions to one another and you do great, great work together.

03:19:10 Speaker_01
I am the broken anchor of the relationship, I like to say. She is, you know, what's really interesting, is I have, I'm a little bit like you, I think I'm excitable. I get obsessed with things. It's super fun. Go down rabbit holes. I like to experiment.

03:19:25 Speaker_01
And J-Star is like the true North, like, no, that sounds fishy. We're not doing that. You know, like I came home one time and I was like, you know what? This cow's milk is out of here. Our family's only drinking goat milk. I only had the best goat milk.

03:19:38 Speaker_01
I just had the best goat milk. And Juliet was like, sure, that's gonna last. And I gave some goat milk to Georgia and she's like hucked it across the room. She's a baby.

03:19:46 Speaker_01
And then I drank the goat milk and like vomited into the sink and I had goat milk on my lip. And Juliet just is so patient by saying, huh, I wonder if that's a good idea. I wonder if we'll stick around. So she's the rudder. She is 100% the rudder.

03:19:59 Speaker_01
She is a three-time world champion, everyone. She's a rower at Cal, and she is my training partner. She's the greatest training partner I've ever had. We use training as another way of spending time together.

03:20:09 Speaker_03
I love it. Thanks for sharing a little bit of the picture of your home. It matches exactly my experience. Chaos. And chaos, a little bit of chaos and a ton of love. And I've been quoting him a lot lately.

03:20:23 Speaker_03
I cannot take any credit for this, but Naval, who is, you know, famous on various podcasts, he says, you know, what are we really shooting for in life? It's a fit,

03:20:36 Speaker_03
energetic body, this is Naval, not me, by the way, he said fit energetic body, a calm mind, and resources, we gotta have resources, and a home full of love. So, I don't know, from, you know, that's the list.

03:20:52 Speaker_01
Spend the rest of your life working on those and you're gonna have a really, it's gonna be really fun. And I just wanna remind people, you hear me say it again, that they should all be enjoyable. And it is fun to track.

03:21:03 Speaker_01
And it's also, you know, which devices am I wearing right now? I'm not wearing a single device, you know? Because I want to feel and sometimes I track and sometimes I don't track. How am I feeling?

03:21:14 Speaker_01
And ultimately everything is really coming down to how do I come to understand my own process and my interaction with the world process?

03:21:22 Speaker_01
And I think I'm getting better at 51 at knowing I don't need six cookies and I really need to get more fruits and vegetables and sleep. And I don't need a device to tell me that.

03:21:32 Speaker_03
Love it. Well, Kelly, Dr. Starrett, thank you so much for coming on here today and sharing with us so much wisdom. We covered so much. You covered so much. I mean, pelvic floor fascia, cold heat, movement patterns.

03:21:47 Speaker_03
You give us a ton of practical tools, getting down on the floor, sit stand, and on and on. But a small portal into the vast amount of knowledge you have in that head of yours. And I just have to say that, you know, it's been a delight today because

03:22:02 Speaker_03
these little bits have come through about who I know you to be in the rest of the world. This is the real world. We just happen to have microphones in front of us, the rest of the world. And you've been at this a while, this business of trying to help.

03:22:15 Speaker_03
People figure out best ways to move, how to be a better athlete, how to improve one's fitness, how to take a rational, fun, hardworking approach at times, but also fun, playful, recreational approach to this really key aspect of our health and many key aspects of our health.

03:22:33 Speaker_03
So I just want to thank you for coming here today, for doing the work that you do. You know, you are one of the real ones, as they say.

03:22:41 Speaker_02
Oh, my brother.

03:22:41 Speaker_03
Thank you so much. And you walk the walk. You're strong. You can go far. You have fun doing it. You're a great husband and dad. And you've been a great friend to me. So thanks for coming on here. Let's get you back again. And just thanks for being you.

03:22:56 Speaker_01
My pleasure. Anytime, and thanks to all the great Huberman people that make this thing possible. It's really a thing. Thanks, my brother.

03:23:04 Speaker_03
Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Kelly Starrett.

03:23:08 Speaker_03
To learn more about Kelly Starrett and the work that he does with his wife, Juliette Starrett, at The Ready State, as well as to find links to Dr. Starrett's excellent books, please see the show note captions.

03:23:18 Speaker_03
If you enjoyed today's episode with Dr. Kelly Starrett, and you'd like to learn more about the science of exercise physiology and the protocols that can best serve you in your fitness, athletic, and other goals, you can go to hubermanlab.com, enter the word fitness and Galpin, G-A-L-P-I-N, into the search function.

03:23:35 Speaker_03
And from there, you will find links in all formats, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, to the series that we did on exercise with Dr. Andy Galpin, who is a true world expert in this topic. And it covers all the things you could possibly imagine

03:23:46 Speaker_03
related to fitness and exercise to meet your fitness and exercise goals. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.

03:23:57 Speaker_03
In addition, please follow the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. Please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode.

03:24:09 Speaker_03
That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube.

03:24:20 Speaker_03
I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols, An Operating Manual for the Human Body.

03:24:29 Speaker_03
This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep,

03:24:38 Speaker_03
to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com.

03:24:52 Speaker_03
There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body.

03:25:01 Speaker_03
If you're not already following me on social media, I'm HubermanLab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, formerly known as Twitter, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

03:25:11 Speaker_03
And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the HubermanLab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the HubermanLab podcast.

03:25:20 Speaker_03
Again, that's HubermanLab on all social media platforms.

03:25:24 Speaker_03
If you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, our Neural Network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as protocols in the form of brief one to three page PDFs.

03:25:36 Speaker_03
Those one to three page PDFs cover things like deliberate heat exposure, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol. We also have protocols for optimizing your sleep, dopamine, and much more.

03:25:46 Speaker_03
Again, all available, completely zero cost. Simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab, scroll down to newsletter and provide your email. We do not share your email with anybody.

03:25:56 Speaker_03
Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Kelly Starrett. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.