Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2042: The Essential Habits You Need to Move Freely & Live Fully With Kelly & Juliet Starrett
Episode Date: March 30, 2023In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin speak with movement specialists Kelly and Juliet Starrett. The politicization of health & fitness. (2:12) The biggest problem with the fitness space. (10:52) T...he universal language of strength training. (15:17) The importance of tracking your vital signs. (20:29) How to combat being jet lagged on Monday. (24:39) Taking the systems approach with their clients. (30:09) Balancing beliefs and rituals with high-level athletes. (34:23) The ultimate performance hack for athletes. (39:00) How do you feel? Managing data points. (42:12) Why you should be in bed for 9 hours. (51:50) The depressant/stimulant cycle. (54:54) #LittleDoses. (1:02:30) Making walking ‘rad’ again. (1:11:38) Adding balance into your life. (1:24:43) Our poor relationship with inputs/outputs of feeling things. (1:34:04) Taking pain off the output table. (1:40:18) Who did they write the book for? (1:43:58) What tools & hacks do they back? (1:45:15) How do you ‘win’ health? (1:50:03) Related Links/Products Mentioned Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully Visit MASSZYMES by biOptimizers for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Promo code MINDPUMP10 at checkout** March Promotion: “Time-crunch Bundle” (MAPS 15 Minutes, MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Prime + Eat for Performance eBook ALL for only $99.99!! Association of Grip Strength With Risk of All-Cause Mortality, Cardiovascular Diseases, and Cancer in Community-Dwelling Populations: A Meta-analysis of Prospective Cohort Studies Mind Pump #1345: 6 Ways To Optimize Sleep For Faster Muscle Gain And Fat Loss Becoming a Supple Leopard 2nd Edition: The Ultimate Guide to Resolving Pain, Preventing Injury, and Optimizing Athletic Performance Mind Pump #1927: Performance Training Secrets From A Top NBA Trainer With Cory Schlesinger What is NEAT and Why Should You Care About it? - Mind Pump Blog Exercise interventions for the prevention of depression: a systematic review of meta-analyses Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain – Book by John Ratey New pediatric guidelines on obesity in children and teens Do You Have Enough Balance to Pass This 60-Second 'Old Man Test'? 800g Challenge | Fruit & Vegetable Diet Plan Mind Pump #1825: Man Cheats Death & Builds Cold Plunge Business Visit SleepMe for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources Featured Guest(s)/People Mentioned Kelly Starrett (@thereadystate) Instagram Juliet Starrett (@julietstarrett) Instagram Andrew Huberman, Ph.D. (@hubermanlab) Instagram Andy Galpin (@drandygalpin) Instagram Eric Cressey (@ericcressey) Instagram Stuart McMillan (@StuartMcMillan1) Twitter Dan Pfaff (@simplifaster) Instagram Coach Burgener (@mikeburgener) Instagram Kate Courtney (@kateplusfate) Instagram Mark Bell (@marksmellybell) Instagram Katy Bowman (@nutritiousmovement) Instagram Chris Hinshaw (@aerobiccapacity) Instagram Joe DeFranco (@defrancosgym) Instagram Justin Brink DC (@dr.justinbrink) Instagram EC Synkowski (@optimizemenutrition) Instagram Ryan Duey (@ryanaduey) Instagram Wim Hof (@iceman_hof) Instagram
Transcript
Discussion (0)
If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go.
Mind, hop, mind, hop with your hosts.
Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews.
You just found the world's most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast.
This is Mind Pump.
Alright, today's episode is an awesome one.
We talk about the essential habits you need to move freely and to live fully.
And this is with two Titans in the fitness space.
Kelly, Starrette and his wife, Juliet, Starrette, they're both exceptional coaches and trainers.
They've worked with professional athletes, high level performers.
They know movement and performance better than almost anybody I can think of.
So it's a real pleasure having them on the show.
We had great conversation.
If you wanna learn about fitness,
you wanna learn about movement,
you're gonna love this episode.
By the way, the book they just came out with
is called Built to Move,
the 10 Essential Habits,
to help you move freely and live fully.
Now, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor,
Mass Zimes.
These are digestive enzymes that help you
break down the food that you eat to get them
to the target tissues you want.
Okay, so if you had a high protein diet,
taking digestive enzymes can help break down
that protein into amino acids, which can help you
recover and build muscle.
It also helps break down carbohydrates, fats,
but Mass Zimes is a digestive enzyme specifically
for people who are interested in athletic performance
Muscle building and fat loss. These are the digestive enzymes that I use go check them out go to mass
Zimes dot com that's M a s s z y M e s dot com forward slash mind pump
Then use the code mind pump 10 for 10% off your order also. There's only two days left with our huge workout program
Also, there's only two days left with our huge workout program sale. So this is a bundle that we put together that includes a few different programs, maps,
15 minutes, maps anywhere, maps prime, and our ebook eat for performance.
All of this is in the time crunch bundle and all of it is discounted over $200 off, so
you can get all of it for only $99.99.
Again, there's only two days left for this, so if you're interested, go to mapsmarch.com right now
and get yourself signed up.
All right, here comes a show.
There's always been a little of that, right?
Like, I'm keto, I'm paleo, all right.
But now it's, oh, you eat meat,
you hate the earth, you wanna kill everybody.
You're immoral if you eat a particular way.
So that's been politicized.
Jim's now, I don't know you guys are seeing all the articles, because they're starting, the machine's starting now,
calling it toxic masculinity,
it's white shaming. It's white shaming.
It's flat shaming, the white supremacist roots of fitness.
It's one of the most unexcepting places as a Jim,
which is the biggest lie of over here.
I've never been in a place more accepting the Jim
in my entire life, if you're obese.
It's by far the most life if you're obese.
It's by far the most accepting place you could be.
So, and I see that,
we're seeing the pieces coming out.
It's fat shame.
You want to lose weight
because you're fat shaming yourself.
So, that's the political machine behind it.
It has this real opportunity for this phenomenon
we call hyper locality,
that the problem is this sort of decentralized amorphous,
we think can't wrap our head around,
the solution is your garage, the solution is your friends
coming to your house to lift weights and democratize that.
And to really empower people and families
and those low-calities, you know,
you know, because we're friends, what my life demand is,
I mean, you can swing over to my house at 8.30,
and we can bench or run the block or carry stuff.
That is how we dig ourselves out of this.
It's not, if we keep waiting for them,
magic, government, fairy, institution, level,
problem, state level, it's too far away.
It's too complicated.
There's nothing they can do.
The only thing, because I've talked to length about this
under the podcast, the only thing that I think government
could do that could possibly help,
and this is just, if you look at the data,
people that live in cities that were built
before the automobile became the part of our lives,
people tend to be leaner, lighter, healthier,
because you guys live in a walking distance. people tend to be leaner, lighter, healthier because it's,
you know, you guys, you guys, you guys live in this
walking distance.
Yeah, you don't, you, you're owning a car in an old city
is just, it doesn't make sense.
You walk everywhere.
So really, the only thing I think they could do
is just change the way that they create towns.
So move away from the suburban.
This is how we, yeah, yeah, yeah.
In environmental constraint.
Yeah.
And you're nailing it.
Yeah, that's the only thing.
Everything else isn't gonna happen.
That's super optimistic though. I don't, I just don't think that's, I don't, I don't see us going that direction. Yeah, that's the only thing. Everything else isn't gonna happen. That's super optimistic though.
I don't think that's, I don't see us going that direction.
No, I don't think we would either.
I just think there's scooters on every block now.
You know what I'm saying?
I think we're moving the opposite direction.
And I think what we've proven as species is that
we need to push it to the most fucked up level
before we come back the other direction.
And the scary part is we may not be there yet.
Yeah.
Like all of us think we are because we're in our little bubble of health and fitness.
I don't think if we're waiting to hit the bottom, we're not there yet.
Yeah, we're not.
No.
For us, we think so because we understand this is important in our lives and our family's
lives and we see how extreme the outside is.
But everybody else don't see it that way.
Everybody else ain't paying attention yet like that.
Yeah.
The other thing is our space
isn't done a really good job of communicating
the value of a healthy lifestyle
because we continue to focus on the aesthetics.
It continues to be sold by how you look.
And that's such a, you guys know this,
you guys know this better than almost anybody.
If I were to ask you the top five reasons
why you continue to exercise and eat right,
I bet you the way you look doesn't make the top five.
You've been doing it for a long time.
After you do it for years and years and years.
I had to abandon the fact that I won't have that.
I'm not gonna win this.
I'm not gonna win this.
I gave up on that long time.
But you get what I mean.
You 100% get what I mean.
And when I trained clients,
I truly became successful as a trainer
when I was able to teach them how to learn
all the other values.
And then they really became consistent.
If it was all about the scale and how you looked,
and if we keep selling it that way,
it's not gonna run.
No, most people just wanna be able to move their body
through space and be out of pain.
I mean, that would top most people's lists that I know.
Mental health, by salad.
Right. The reason you're right, the reason people are interested in nutrition is we can
say body composition, but that's not true. It's weight loss.
Yeah. What I'm doing, I've always done and suddenly it's not working.
But for most people, it's not even body composition. It's like they don't just want to feel gross.
They're not seeking the aesthetic that we in the fitness business think people want.
They're not seeking like the shredded abs and the beauty.
They just want to feel not gross and feel good and be able to do the things they want to do.
You know, not like have abs.
They don't care.
Most people don't care.
I think you're with that.
Yeah.
But do you think, um, do you think that's the reason?
I mean, it's so easy for us because, you know, surgery, injury, we're like, you need
you a certain way.
We in micro-neutral and some board.
We've got to get all these things.
If we're talking about fueling,
like we talk to people about fueling.
You know, how do you fuel for this world championship
or this event, or, but the real reason
that we have so many conversations with people
is, you know, calorie loss.
How do I restrict calories?
How have I something calorie to that?
Yeah, well, if you, so,
Don't you think it starts though
with the place they're coming from?
Like even, like you made the point about feeling not gross.
I think at the root, that's even the wrong place
to come from, right?
Instead of it being like, I want to take care of myself
because I love myself, it's because I've allowed myself
to get so gross, I just don't want to be gross.
And so we still are negative.
Right, still negative.
And so even if that's enough to get you
started in the right direction,
if you don't evolve past that you'll eventually
Our hypothesis oftentimes is you think you're working really hard. You're not
You're just actually working medium hard, but you're under rested your sleep is crap
You don't eat your stress case. You don't move your body and so you actually feel like you're maxed out and so oftentimes
As we're working with some really good fancy teams
like you're maxed out. And so oftentimes, as we're working with some
really good fancy teams, one of our propositions
to your point is that we're like, actually,
let's point positive, you can work harder,
you can handle higher volumes, you can do more work
and adapt to that stress more effectively,
which means that's a competitive advantage.
It's not like don't do this because you may get
some disease in the future, it's do this
because you'll feel better and be be back at your family
and like you're not blown out at five minutes on the sleep on the weekends you have energy
to play with your kids.
Yeah, the big problem is we've taken the formula and we twisted it, right?
So the reason why we consider someone to look good is because evolutionarily it meant something
and meant they were healthy.
What we've done is we've taken the side effect of health
and made that the primary effect.
I wanna look good.
I wanna, this is how I want my body to look.
This is how I wanna appear.
When in reality, you'll get there if you just become healthy.
That's the side effect of good health.
That's not the primary effect.
It's like we're hitting our head and against the wall
and we're taking ibuprofen to stop the headache.
You know, you could stop the headache,
you could just stop banging your head against the wall.
So the way that we communicate it in our space
is not helping because we continue to focus on the side effect.
Look good, have sculpted arms, have sculpted abs,
you know, whatever.
But the reality is, look, you'll get that.
That'll all happen if you just get healthy.
Oh, and by the way, you'll get that and it'll stay with you forever because if you chase that side effect, eventually you
lose that whatever side effect is and you'll lose your health, you'll have none of it.
So that's what, okay, so that's the marketing side, right? The side that is, you know, pushing
sex and which, I don't think that'll, that monster ever in. But then there's even, I think,
a problem with the people that have good information and over communicating
and like our space turning this into a pissing contest, you know, who's smarter, who science
is more act and it's like, I think we're battling amongst each other and speaking to our
peers.
Meanwhile, we're losing the majority that's like, they just need some basic information
to move them in the right direction and here we all are as the leaders in the space fighting over whose dogma is more right.
It's like, man, that's, we're losing so many people.
Yeah, you know, I know it's interesting.
One of the most effective things I ever said, I'll say it now in the show that I figured
out as a trainer after 10 years.
Okay.
How to get people to train with the right intensity, how to get people to train properly.
I'm talking about the average person, right?
So not high level athletes is,
I would, I realized that strength training is a skill.
And so I said, you know what,
just go to the gym and practice getting better
at the skill of squatting.
Practice getting better at the skill of pressing and rowing.
Don't worry about hammering your legs,
don't worry about blasting your shoulders.
Just get good at these skills.
And lo and behold, my clients were training
with the proper intensity.
The form was always good.
They were always focused on getting better at the skill.
And their bodies responded phenomenally
versus the whole, you know, you gotta feel it here,
make yourself sore, get blasted, get sore,
you know, get sweaty or whatever.
That small little thing right there
made such a big difference.
Nobody communicates it that way. You guys are smiling, because you know exactly get sweaty or whatever. That small little thing right there made such a big difference. Nobody communicates it that way.
You guys are smiling,
because you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Yeah, you know what I'm like, you're like,
you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like,
you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like,
you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like,
you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like,
you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like,
you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like,
you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like,
you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like,
you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like,
you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like,
you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like,
you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like,
you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like,
you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, so hard to make change. Second is we want to own what is our part of the confusion?
What part did we create?
How are we contributing to this chaos?
And then how do we get with our friends to sort of say,
okay, okay, okay.
You know, not mutually assured destruction,
but like we've got to reach back.
You know, I was just talking to someone the other day about,
I mean, do you really want to jam back into the trough?
Like we're all on the trough.
Like here's this fitness pie, right?
And I'm like, there's all these open fields
and there's this gold bars laying on the ground.
Why don't we bring people in?
How do we do that?
And how do we take fitness
and not just abandon the experiment?
Because it has been 15 years, you guys, eight years in,
think about how the thing that you said
was just so reasonable.
Strength training is a skill.
Why don't we treat this as a skill?
A really durable and transient skill.
You know, the first time I realized what you just said,
so we were all part of 24 fitness during its heyday of growth.
Late 90s, early 2000s, right?
They kind of were the, you know,
there were other companies I think that,
that started with the first one.
They were the first one to reach a billion dollars.
Yeah, but they were the first ones to really show how you build a business, I guess, around
around fitness. So we were around that. And I remember looking at statistics of members,
there was like a, you know, the kind of members you get. And they would, the average member would
sign up at one place and then they'd go to another place. And so you didn't have fighting for
the same members, but there was just like chunk of the population that never worked out and never went to gyms.
And then a company, and you guys remember this company came out.
It was the circuit training one for women only.
Curves.
Curves comes out, okay.
Numatic shitty equipment, it was like six pieces of equipment in a circle.
And curves comes out and explodes.
Now it obviously tanked because a bunch of non-fitness people ended up buying the franchises
and we don't have to go into the business, but they exploded. I remember seeing that and going,
you know what they did, they just tapped into people that all of us couldn't touch. They literally
tapped into a percentage of population that wasn't interested, that wasn't being communicated to,
that felt uncomfortable for whatever reason, and then curves comes out and says, hey, you know,
come in here.
We're cool.
What if we're rare and it's super accessible.
And if the planet is the same thing.
You can feel comfortable in here.
It did.
Yeah.
So whenever they're doing the wrong,
fine, but one thing they did right is they got.
That's a, I mean, go back to your,
your, your trough analogy.
That's the biggest problem in our space.
I mean, we saw that when we came in.
We came in, we looked at the,
the leaders in our space and in the podcasting
and social media,
they're all communicating to their peers.
And when we all look back at the 20 years of training clients
and we go like none of my clients
would even be drawn to any of that information
or wanna listen to any of that stuff.
It's like we're so worried about what my peers
are gonna think about how I communicate something
like oh, he's not very smart. He's saying, like, so we're so concerned about what the rest
of us, so they're all in this room, think of each other versus really trying to go help
the people that aren't even motivated to get out and take a fucking walk.
I mean, we've done such a good job of like making our little, you know, what I was like to
say is like, we're all in this little vertical and we've made each other way better. I mean,
walk in the door and it's like,
your gym looks like our gym
and we all have a cold plunge in a sauna
and take the right supplements.
And, you know, we were always like adapting our training
to whatever the latest thing is and we're jacked
and we're tan and, you know, like, we've done it all.
And I even look back to when I was a college athlete
and professional athlete and I'm like, man,
if I knew then what I knew what I know now
and could have applied that to my like 22 year old body, like, man, Sky I knew then what I knew what I know now and could have applied that to my
like 22 year old body, like man, sky would have been the limit. So I mean, you know, and Kelly's
also working with the Cal Women's Water Polo team right now. And it's cool to watch him
work with a program and be able to apply all this sophistication in a program where I
was a rower at Cal not a water polo player, but to think, man, if we could have all that
information and apply it to these, you know, 18 to 24-year-olds, but I mean, what we see, we live in this
like little suburban community in Marin County, and the people in that community, I would describe
as like professionals raising kids, and they all share that they want to be healthy.
But like, we've completely lost them.
Like, they are like, what are you guys even talking about?
What, like, I've heard of the liver king.
What is going on over here?
Like, who should I be following?
Hubert Mint told me not to drink coffee for 90 minutes.
What do I do?
We've left those people completely behind.
Yeah, no, so you're sober.
Now, just to say, just to make it so,
we're not just super negative.
There are some positive.
I have to say, there are some positive.
I just read an article, some of the largest gym chains in
America are changing how the footprint of their gyms are looking now.
They're investing less in the cardio areas and putting more and more in the free weight
areas, which is phenomenal.
You guys know, I mean, gyms, when I was running gyms, like all the money went to the cardio,
they're a little tiny free weight area, one squat rack and a 40,000 square foot gym had dust on it.
Now they're investing more in a free weight area
and women for the first time were seeing them lift weights
at rates that are starting in some places to match the men.
Now when I started working in gyms,
you didn't see a single woman in the free weight area.
Now you're starting to see women lift weights.
So those are two pods.
So not to be the turd and the punch bowl,
but, you know, back to her point though,
all that is is the market is responding
to the small percentage of people
that already come to gyms.
The people that all come to the gyms
and work out are saying,
hey, we want more squat racks.
Hey, we want a functional area now.
It's a change.
And it's still missing the fucking 90% there.
Yeah, the slow blade penetrates the shield, right?
Like it takes a minute to see all that.
You know, we still feel like I've spoken on every con
and accept Antarctica and turns out.
Is that true?
Yeah.
Turns out everyone knows what a push up is.
Yeah.
Everyone.
I was in Russia before they invaded Ukraine.
Like the three months before I went out to work with some strength coaches, this incredible
strength coach community, incredible, and everyone we could brag about delifting.
We had this universal language of food, nutrition, of recovery, of training.
And that's a universal language. It's the only,. And that's a universal language.
It's the only, like math is not a universal language.
Science is not a universal language.
We like pretend that it is.
The universal language is straight training.
And I can make certain assumptions about you all
because of the way you eat and the way you train.
And it gives us real commonality.
And I think sports, it's really interesting.
Sports, we have a complicated relationship
with professional sports, because we fetishize
professional sports, we take those bodies,
we break them, we throw them on the pile, right?
Everyone gets billions of dollars, it's super weird.
But we're seeing that at the top,
like with this last year we worked with,
last couple of years, we've worked with
English National Soccer Team, pretty good soccer team.
Those players now are doing all the things
we're talking about because it means millions of dollars,
hundreds of millions of dollars to them.
And guess what?
Because they do it, the kids underneath them do it.
They all blacks do a certain thing.
That's a good point.
We work with the all blacks, all the sudden we see
all the local rugby clubs, all of them do this.
So it is a way for us to be sneaky and filter down.
It's just gonna, we're gonna miss a lot of people in there.
Yeah, there's been some positive changes for sure.
I'm not that old, but I remember when strength training
wasn't even recommended for certain sports.
Made you a stiff, that's what they said.
Made you a muscle bounce, right?
Yeah, muscle bounce.
Yeah, it was crazy.
Now, I'll find me a single sport
that doesn't utilize strength training.
You can't.
Well, you can't find it.
Yeah, I mean, for me, it's just like going back
to the value of sports, and especially with children like I, what I've noticed is the biggest deficit I've ever seen in kids enrolling
for sports, you know, post pandemic or even like going into a pandemic. And for me, that, that to me
is a signal that, you know, we really put a lot more effort into the emphasis on like getting kids
to move and really building that, at that level,
for us to make any kind of movement
and change going forward.
There used to be this whole idea
and so talking about government
and coming in of presidential sort of standards
and this was a whole cultural kind of movement
of like, hey, we all needed pay attention to this
and have some kind of standardization here
for kids to learn about how to move and how to like apply fitness in their life and I
just feel like that's just been removed from the culture.
They can remove that, didn't they?
It's not an emphasis.
Like it's just really not something that is is talked about.
Yeah, they change the standards for things like the mile and pull ups and push up.
Well, in so many schools don't even have PE at all.
No, it makes sense.
Except for the president's physical fitness test,
which I used to crush the flexed army.
By the way, do you guys remember that?
I do.
I was just flexed.
You see three companies.
I was like flexing.
I was like flexing.
I was like flexing.
But anyway, but yeah, I mean, there's not even PE
in California, in California,
but it's almost like unless the parents pay for it.
And fitness isn't even their word.
Like, what is it that's required for a healthy population?
The presidential physical fitness test came about
because the present at the time was like holy crap,
we're not ready to go to war.
We have this looming war with the Russians.
So we better do something.
So I think we can expand that and just say,
hey, if all kids have to go to school,
then aren't we responsible for teaching fundamentals
to kids in those places how to eat, how to cook,
how to like, self-sue,
why do you go?
Well, this is what I love about your guys is,
you know, expanding the vital science concept.
I think that's a brilliant approach to teaching
the younger generation like it's more than just,
you know, going any getting into the potential.
We need to pay attention to.
Yeah, and I think that's a big area that
we're missing. So, I mean, let's talk about that a little bit.
Let's talk about how you guys have expanded what, you know,
the quote unquote, vital signs are that the doctor normally checks
when you talk about what motivated you, right? This, your latest
book and kind of what it's about. I'll start on the vital
science thing. I mean, we, I think, saw in the pandemic that everybody we knew was not just tracking their blood pressure,
but all these other like high-tech metrics like SEO2.
And they were able to track all these more technical things
with trackers and respiration rate,
and tracking their whoop to see if they were about to get COVID.
And we thought to ourselves like,
man, why don't we have some objective measures
of movement and health that everybody can track
that are easy to understand?
Why don't those exist?
Like why can't we just make an objective measure
of can you get up and down off the ground?
Or I think by and large when it comes to nutrition
and this is a third rail,
we could spend an hour
just talking about nutrition,
but people know they should eat some fruits and vegetables
and probably know they should eat some protein,
but no one's ever said, this is how much you should eat.
Like eat this much, and you'll feel healthy.
And so I think we just started,
the pandemic really sort of brought that part of the book
into focus for us and we were like,
people could really just use an objective measure
and something to just keep an eye on, right?
Like if you see your blood pressure as 120 over 80, that's not necessarily good blood pressure,
but it's not bad blood pressure.
But if it goes up to 130, then you think to yourself, hmm, that's something I should keep
an eye on.
And that's kind of the mentality that we're hoping to instill in people is like, hey, this
is something to keep an eye on.
And I have some basic objective measure. And I can work from there and sort of scale up
and scale down depending on where I land.
You mentioned getting up off the floor without help
or like they use, they'll show an metric of like grip strength.
Grip strength, yeah.
Those single, a lot of people don't know this.
Those single tests right there
will are better predictors of all cause mortality
than almost any other single metric.
So you go get blood pressure, you get blood lipids,
you can get this, that, the other.
Or they can test your grip strength,
which is great proxy for overall body strength,
or just can you get up a floor.
And no one just has big grip strength
without actually doing something.
That's why people, yeah, I have to say that
because I'm crushing it.
That's a slurpee.
Yeah.
I say that because people,
I would tell you about the grip, right?
It just usually tells you if you're strong.
That's right.
And if they can, with that right there,
they can predict your all cause mortality
better than almost any other single metric.
What a cheap, easy, simple way to test your health.
Not not saying it's the only metric, but-
And that yellow green, right?
Like, not, you need to freak out and reorganize,
but now you're like, oh, I don't need to worry about that.
Hey, I've checked that in.
You know, blood pressure you get measured at the grocery store if like, oh, I don't need to worry about that. Hey, I've checked that in.
Blood pressure, you get measured at the grocery store
if you want.
Stick your arm in the cuff.
So I mean, as a kid, I check my blood pressure
like six times a week.
For fun.
Yeah, because I had that arm,
did you throw out your arm into?
Remember that?
Oh, yeah, let's go.
Let's go.
So, here we are suddenly saying, okay,
we believe that sports,
because remember, this is where we're sort of coming from,
sports, high performance environments.
And we've always said that those places
felt like laboratories for us.
That's how we can know what we know.
And that we can actually see people
under the most stress and the nervous conditions.
And how can we tweak that?
And once again, sports shows us about nutrition.
Like, I think a lot of this whole
food nutrition people come back around has come out of athletes and teams and, you know,
sports stars eating better and influencing backwards. I think that we can't diminish that enough.
But if that's really the truth, then we should be able to say, hey, look, what are the best practices
and how do we apply that in your crazy life?
Because these athletes, you know, I just got a text from a superstar who's sleep deprived,
in Portugal, trying to get his clock turned around so he can win another world championship.
Right?
That's this morning.
He's like, what else can I do?
You know, like, and wow, I think I can take those lessons from this guy and be like, hey,
I know you have to be on a red eye, but I want you to come back and tack to your family.
So where are the places where we can lean in
to some of these things and actually apply those lessons
to the rest of us?
That makes sport the greatest living laboratory
of a common language on the planet.
That's a wonderful way of explaining that.
So let's stick to that for a second.
So a lot of people don't realize
they're jet lagged every Monday
because they wake up and go to bed.
They wake up and go to bed at the same time
then come Friday night.
I'm gonna go to bed late, I'll sleep in.
I'll go to bed late, sleep in.
Monday comes around.
They're jet lagged, I don't realize why people
have such a tough time waking up on Monday.
What are some of those things they can do
that can help them bounce back?
That's like, that just blew my mind, the jet lag on Monday.
Reference, I was like, oh my God, I'm gonna,
I have to steal that.
I'm gonna have to steal that.
That's so good.
At least three times.
Yeah, that's amazing.
So I was like, I was like,
well, I've never heard that,
and that's the best way of putting it.
Yeah, so, so as sides going to bed
and waking up at the same time every day,
which would be the old, I mean, that's what you're,
that's the best thing to do.
What are some things someone can do come Monday when?
How about flip this on its head and start to say, what are the things that we know to be true about
feeling the best and more importantly, expression of the best, not this subjective. Like,
we believe in this idea that if athletes feel better, they tend to perform better, right?
You know, like, I believe that I feel better, right? That, you know, I have been a physician. It doesn't matter. Or belief effects. Yeah.
And I'm placebo. And so we can start with that. And we can also say, well, what are the
objective measures? You know, like, supplement is a good example of range of motion, not
really debatable. Like everyone agrees that your shoulders should do a certain amount
of things. And then the expression of that was biomotor output.
The reason we gave a crap about your range of motion
is that we could thought you could bench more
and squat more and run more and play more.
That's the expression.
So what are the behaviors that allow you
to have these objective measures that come?
And it turns out that when you do that,
you end up backing into the exact same things
that we're talking about.
What can I do?
Well, did you get more or less than seven hours of sleep?
So seven hours of sleep, for example,
is this objective measure that means that's survival.
If you're just trying to deal, that's survival.
And seven hours, we find to be that line in the sand.
If you're trying to change your body composition,
grow, learn, build muscle, build muscle,
that's eight hours.
And what we've learned from all these tracking devices that you might need to be in bed
for nine hours to get eight hours to sleep.
So what you can do, first of all, is it doesn't matter what crazy thing you're doing on the
weekend, can you protect this window of first principles?
And those first principles are, well, dig it, fruits and vegetables. Did you move your body? You know, and what we find is that that idea on the weekend waking up, you know jet lagged
that's having kids that's a deadline that's gonna happen to you a lot and it turns out you're
super durable and can buffer that you're just gonna suck at work. You're gonna suck in your family
and you can you can buffer that for a few times. The the key here is running the best you can every day with these key principles. And it turns out
you'll have enough kind of capacity to be in a better situation on Monday. So that if you decide
to have a drink, good for you, it's your weekend. It's totally your thing with your rested, but
know that's going to mess up your sleep. What do you think the threshold of that is,
where does it become chronic and bad for you,
and where is it, where is it okay,
allowing that kind of stress, right?
The kids, or the, I didn't get very good sleep,
so I next day I hop up, there's obviously a amount of that
that is, or for a doctor, any galpin talks about this.
You know, there's some benefits to being able to be resilient
enough to handle that.
Oh, I only had four nights of sleep,
yet I still got up, I did the things.
At what point do you tip over to where that's so bad
and negative and chronic?
I mean, there's gotta be a part of it that's okay
or tolerable, and then there's gotta be a line
where it becomes.
Yeah, I mean, I would just say,
I don't know if we have a way to quantify that,
but I think one of the lenses through which we wrote this book is like we are, we're not the fitness people who are spending
four hours on the weekend, meal prepping, and you know, getting up and spending three hours
journaling and taking care of ourselves like kids. Like we have kids, like our mornings revolve
around getting up early and getting kids off to school, and we spend the vast majority of our
day sitting in front of a computer.
We have to travel a lot for work
so we get crunched from a sleep standpoint.
And so we really tried to write this book from that lens
of like, hey, we're not over here
just taking care of our bodies 24 hours a day.
Like we're actually in it like you guys are.
And we're trying to figure out what strategies
can actually work in a time crunch life.
And so, I don't know if I'd be able to quantify
like when it's tip too far,
but I mean, I think the way we've approached it
in our life is realizing that we are gonna have
those stressors, I think if you have a newborn,
like the first year of your kids life,
like all bets are off, like you just do literally
whatever you can in that first year of your kids life
and like good luck to you.
Yeah.
You know, just work around the edges.
Like when our kids were a little Kelly invented this workout called the 10, 10, 10, 10 at 10.
And it was 10 squats, air squats, 10 push-ups, 10 pull-ups for 10 minutes at 10 p.m.
Crochet here.
Because that was what we were able to fit in with like two little kids in our house right like,
like, you know, but I mean, I think what we're trying to teach people is to say, okay, everybody's going
to go through these periods of travel and stress and their ways to minimize it in the
moment.
And then when you get back home and you can control your environment more, like that's
when you have to be extra on controlling your environment, which is why we created this
whole 24 hour duty cycle concept.
You know, when you're home, you can control the things you can control.
When you're traveling, you can control the things you can control, but those things are different.
What are some of the biggest things that you guys have seen with some, because you guys have
trained some incredible athletes. And like, you guys really made a great example of how
it's such a great lens to look through how we can apply things to the general population,
because you're dealing with people where you can make small tweaks and you can see performance outputs, objective
performance outputs.
We see inputs and outputs.
Right.
So, what are some of the, like, when you get a high level athlete, first off, they're not
coming to you, never having been trained, never having worked with anybody.
They're already high level.
So it's harder for people to know this as trainers, some of the hardest people to train or work with are people at that level because, I mean, you're already kicking
ass like, okay, what else can I do? Right? It's just like the little dial turns.
Yeah, it's like level. It's like number one. Don't screw them up, right? And number two,
is there commonalities or they all so unique? Yeah, we're some of the big things that you
guys have seen. You know, it's work, we're invited in sometimes to help with a certain specific problem.
Like English and Afsal soccer team, their strength in the Asian coach, Dr. Ben Rosemblatt
is a G. He is just a super bad ass, very sophisticated, but he wanted better solutions for the
athletes to care for themselves when they're away from the club.
So we help them with that piece, right?
And then we, there's a million other conversations that help to support.
But oftentimes, I think what we're always missing is we're looking show me the one thing. What's the supplement?
I take what's the one thing and by the way, so quick side story the number one thing
that like causes Kelly to lose his mind and people ask him this question all the time is there like Kelly?
Starrett. What is the one?
I should give you the magic trick.
And it's like, I just sit there as like a viewer of his,
like, and he literally like, like, red starts to come up.
You've got to have like a terrible generic answer.
And then he's like, yeah, you get a certain,
he starts to be like a side twitch, you know?
And like, he's trying to figure out how we can like,
both be nice and then like,
flush the person.
So anyway, sorry, I know.
With the best fabric. You're trying to thought, yeah.
Exactly.
I think that's a trainer that was the word.
What is the best exercise for your body?
What is the one?
What is the one?
What do you want to do?
It's difficult for us always thinking in this systems approach.
So, you know, what's less important or more important
your sleep or your nutrition or quality of your movement
or your belief or the team that you're with,
or the people, or like, which one of those things
you want to write off, you know?
So as we come in, we're always taking this system's approach.
And what you can actually see in the book, for example,
is that we sort of divide things.
We have some movement behaviors that we think
we should be putting on your radar,
your ability to flex your hip,
AKA get up and off the ground or squat,
your ability to extend your hip, AKA get up and out of the ground or squat, your ability to extend your hip,
like lunge or walk or run.
These are fundamental things that maybe you can't know
how they impact how your back hurts
or potentially how your knees hurt after you run or stand.
And so what we need to put them on people's radars first,
this is important because you're gonna use these things.
So as we come in and try to untangle these things, we do also have these conversations
about making sure that we're covering the basis, the basics, and that might be fueling.
You know, we have, I've worked into enough teams where I'm like, hey, this is super sophisticated,
but that athlete didn't eat breakfast. And then she trained and the weight room for an hour,
had 30 minutes to get to the pool,
did two hours of elite training, and still hasn't eaten a calorie. So,
who cares? What are we talking about? This is all bullshit, until that athlete eats. So now we
get to the question, well, why isn't the athlete? Does she not know? She needs to eat. And it turns out,
well, when she ate what you gave her, if it made her feel sick and she didn't perform very well. Okay. So now what's the next step? Well, what is it you can eat? Can you drink
something? Could we like, can we have a snack of a little thing? What we have to do is
really always come into and understand the person in their environment. And then we can
start to see that means this thing where we're all talking or I'm working with
a coach or I get this individualized training, even at a teacher classroom level, if we can
teach 18 to 24 kids, that person could still be talking about lunch and all these other
things.
We need to understand at that person in their environment level, what is the greatest
limitation?
How do you guys balance with athletes?
Because you're, I mean, you're right.
I mean, all these things, please.
And then also you can miss your hip extension.
You can't put your arm over the toes.
Right, yeah, yeah.
You guys are, I mean, there's so many things
play a role in high performance.
How do you balance belief and, you know,
for lack of a better term superstition?
And I say that because athletes can be some of the most,
like, I have to wear these socks.
I have to do this this way.
This is the meal I eat before big-
But it's ritualistic.
Yeah, ritualistic.
How do you balance that with like,
okay, I know you're six piece nugget
and skittles before your game is what you always eat
and always makes a performance,
but actually it's not.
But if I change that,
now you're gonna think you're gonna do worse,
which maybe will make it worse.
Right, right, right, right.
It may become a prophecy.
How do you balance that out working with people at this level?
I remember working with a professional team
and this pitcher, I think it was the twins.
This pitcher just had some success chewing gum.
And it became this thing and people were sending gum
and like he threw a gum and I was like,
I've seen this before with the sniper, right?
With Kylee shooting well, he said gum in his his mouth, well, it turned out when he put
a piece of gum in his mouth,
he said, it's John in a different position,
changed all his mechanics, he relaxed.
Yeah, he threw better.
And I'm like, yeah, if he's ever seen
Steph Curry, she wanted his mouthpiece,
that's what that's about, right?
Like, he literally does a lot to put the John
to a more functional position.
The key is that guy believes that this gum does that.
That's not a living factor for me.
So the quirkiness that gets you into the mindset,
that's cool.
So what we've tried to do with our professional teams,
is we never take things away.
We expand.
Oh, I see.
Yeah.
So if you're eating, and I think was Cressy,
who said this once, air Cressy once, he's like,
look, my kids are getting fruits and vegetables
and enough protein, that piece is not a problem.
It's not the limiting factor.
It's not the limiting factor.
If a cookie is the thing that allows you to come home
at night and be intact and survive,
that is not the limiting factor.
Yes, if you're trying to change by composition
or compete in a certain way,
but when we start to cover basics,
and a basic was, we were working with an elite army group called Delta Force.
And they have a problem with sleep because they do a lot of things at night.
The rest of the world works during the day.
There's always, and I don't know if you know, that's kind of a high stress environment,
right?
Yeah, I get a little bit.
Might be a little bit.
Yeah.
Ken always control what you're eating.
Ken always get your meal prepped meal, right?
You're eating.
And so what they found was, hey, how do we expand?
So if guys had sleep disproblems or dysfunctional sleep,
the first thing they did was give them 12 to 15,000 steps.
So that's their sophisticated.
We have access to all the technology in the world.
Let's make sure that you're covering the basics and the basics is,
let's give you more non-exercise activity to de-conjust, to accumulate enough fatigue during the day
that you actually fall asleep.
In the end of training.
Interesting.
You know what's funny about what you just said?
You're probably going to go there.
I guess.
You know we figured that out with clients.
Yes.
Even if you're trying to lose 50 to 100 pounds,
I stopped looking at diets and taking away,
and instead, yeah.
What'd you add?
So I look at the diet.
So if I have somebody who, let's say, is 100 pounds overweight, and I look and instead of doing that. What do you have? So I look at the diet. So if I have somebody who let's say is,
you know, a hundred pounds overweight and I look and I go,
well, she's under consuming protein,
she's not getting enough healthy fats,
she's not getting it.
Like, I look at that and I go, instead of me saying,
no more McDonald's, I go,
this is what I want you to add into your diet every day.
It worked better.
Unbelievable.
Yeah, I mean, that's exactly what we were,
we were, exactly what we were trying to do with this book
is like turn it into being about expansion
and not restrictions.
Psychologically.
Psychologically, because I think that,
again, when we talk about this population,
it's not in our vertical,
like all that they think they've been told
is like restrict, restrict, road,
restrict everything, restrict fun.
You know what I mean?
I think this often means for people like,
you know, most people I know still want to be able to go out
to a restaurant with their friends
or have a glass of wine every so often,
and if you're like, stop doing all that,
that's the only path to being healthy.
They're just gonna be like, peace out.
I'm not interested.
You know why I like talking with people like you guys,
because you worked with people in the real world
for so long that it's not just about what the data
and the science says, you've learned how to work
with the most important factor,
which is human psychology and behavior,
which so-
The most important factor.
Let's circle that.
Yes.
And like, exclamation highlight it and say that
any intervention you have going forward,
if you're listening to this,
has to be done through the lens of behavior modification
and behavior change.
That is the thing.
And if you're not looking at,
if you're thinking just it's another set on the,
you know, or some velocity, you're missing it all.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If we were robots, it would be great.
Just put it in some of your books.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Give me the pellet, I'll eat the pellet.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the mush, just eat the mush
and you'll be fine.
So back to the athletes,
what's the thing that you see,
not the magic bullet, anything like that, but what's the most common challenge that you see with athletes where you go,
okay, this is something that we can almost reliably see among all these people.
Typically, is it sleep?
Is it diet?
I mean, I'm guessing here.
Are there commonalities that you tend to see?
I mean, we do see a lot in diet, especially with young professional athletes.
I mean, I think because the body is so durable that young athletes really can get away with,
you know, they don't see body composition issues.
And often don't see performance issues, right?
And when you're, you know, you're a professional athlete making millions of dollars
and you're between the age of 18 and 22, like you were not thinking about whether you can
get up and off, down off the ground when you're 75.
That is not part of your capitalist.
And then you can even example to highlight this.
Working with Arsenal, and they started delivering meals
to their nine to actually two millionaires.
Because they realized if they just left them home,
yeah, they just left them home to like order door dash,
they would order pizza and french fries for dinner,
but if they actually just had a meal delivered to them
that included a nice mix of protein and vegetables.
They would eat it and they just wouldn't eat all
that other junk, they just needed to make it that simple
for those professional athletes.
And we've seen that across so many professional teams.
Is that successful?
Was it successful?
Yeah, successful.
And I'm gonna spill some tea here, as a spilt tea.
The Niners is a team we work with
and they are an incredible organization
and really trying to take better care
of their athletes and really asking really difficult questions. Their staff is really extraordinary.
And in this last offseason, they hired a full-time chef at the facility for all of their players
to come and get their meals year-round at the training facility. So you're thinking to yourself,
this is super cool because now I can feed the athletes
and I can keep an eye on them, right?
They're around, but how about this for a performance hack?
All the best teams organizations we know
eat together at least once a week.
And when they eat together once a day,
it really changes things, gives us a chance.
So watch any of the Amazon prime documentaries about soccer. How many meals do they eat
together? Breakfast, yeah. And what you end up doing there is
you end up getting all of these ancillary benefits. I feel
less social isolation. You and I can have difficult
conversations. You know, you brought something up, I think, is
really important. I'm not a huge fan of periodization
necessarily. Like there are going huge fan of periodization necessarily.
Like there are gonna be times in your life,
and here's why, don't get me to help you
get killed by all the elements of this.
That was a TikTok clip right there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're gonna clip that in your blood.
Kelly sorry, it says periodization doesn't work.
Well, it's not that out, just cut that one.
I can't stop.
Control all the variables really in this clean environment,
you know, front squad, you know,
clean, snatch, control, you eat, I squad, you know, clean snatch, control, you
eat, I can tell you what drugs to take, right, control thing, then I can really manipulate
this volume and intensity.
Go ahead and jump on an airplane, go ahead and get, you know, sick or have a, periodization
is going to happen for you.
You go into a wedding, how dare you go be a member of your society, that's forced periodization. So we see that there's gonna be,
for the average person, there's gonna be enough
sort of variability in what's going on in their life
that we just come right back into the base.
I wanna tell you guys I love this.
So what's becoming popular a little bit in our space
are workouts designed for women
that are organized based on their cycle.
Okay, so when you're ovulating,
these hormones are high, these hormones low,
this is when you're in ten cities,
at this particular, when you're in mencise,
then you train this way, when you're out,
and so women are writing it,
oh my god, this is working so great for me.
I feel amazing because it's,
it's training according to my hormones,
and I'm like, actually, no, it's working
because for the first time in your training career,
you're actually training with higher and lower intensities
where it's before you always hammer yourself
and stuff that you do.
Right, right, right, right, before you were just running.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just like doing cardio.
I'm not gonna get it.
And if you hear this, hang on a second,
before you just see freak out and say
that there's no science there,
we know that there are times you're gonna be able
to generate more force or less force.
Come on, go ahead and play a professional sport.
Let me know how precious you are because we're playing on Sunday no matter what.
Talk to my major league soccer, you know, women, and they're gonna be like, yeah, it doesn't
matter.
I may be back off some intensity on those days or I didn't great, but I'm still got to
show up and good to go no matter what, whatever my side was.
And now my point with that is that not that it didn't play a role, but when you take everything, your sleep, your diet,
your stress, like when I train clients,
okay, I'll factor that in, but I'm gonna ask you how you feel,
because you might just feel great, you might feel bad,
you might have had bad sleep, you might be stressed out.
How dare you, you might have suffered.
How dare you actually try to feel your feelings?
Exactly.
Storm and Millen is the CEO and head coach
for Altus Track and Field.
And he and Dan Faff are two of the greatest
track and field coaches ever.
And Stu is one of my like mentors, best friends,
his colleague, and I learned so much.
One of their assessments is how the athlete walks
into the track.
Yeah.
Do they hop over the fence?
Or do they walk around the fence?
The fence is like a foot and a half high.
And he doesn't let them know either.
He just doesn't know.
He just doesn't deserve that.
That's awesome.
And exactly what you're saying is so important.
How do you feel today?
I'm feeling a little smoked.
You know, we were, Juliet is a three time world champion
white water powder.
I used to do a lot of racing.
We would get to a big rapid, a big class by rapid.
And we made this decision.
We're gonna see how we feel when we get there.
Always, like, are you gonna run the rapid? Are you gonna run the shit today? And we would say to ourselves see how we feel when we get there. Always, like, are you gonna run the rapid,
you're gonna run the shit today,
and we would say to ourselves,
let's decide when we get there,
because you could be having a crap day, you get there,
and you've already decided, but you feel great,
and you've already decided,
or you could be thinking, today's the day I'm doing it,
and then you get there and you suck,
and you're like, you know,
so we started making this decision,
how do I feel when I get there?
And a lot of the subjective training,
I've talked to Mike Berner,
who is like my Olympic-lifting sensei,
and he has had athletes, PR, on like heavy squats,
and he's an Olympic-lifting coach,
at the end of a session, where they're most smoked,
it doesn't make sense, but all the, the frying pans hot,
let's cook.
And so the thing you said, how do I feel today?
Let me start moving and start to get to know myself,
and then I'll make some difference.
How do you navigate around HRB?
Oh yeah.
In terms of this new technology that people are paying attention to,
and are you playing this with athletes?
Is it valuable?
Is it just something that's kind of like data points
that you're in trouble with?
Well, I would say for us, the most revolutionary thing that's
happened in our own training is once we turn 40, we actually were able to
tap into this thing we've been talking about, which is feelings.
And more than any other device or anything, we actually have been able to
ask ourselves now that we're old and mature, is what is my desire to train?
And then we actually work,
we work our don't based on how we feel.
You know why, because it matters.
It matters.
And if we lack,
because we're both very motivated trainers,
we'd love to work out and we always want to move.
So we really have tried to listen to that voice
that's saying, I don't actually feel that well.
And on those days, we just walk.
You know, you'll see we're both wearing an aurora ring.
I went through a long phase of wearing a hoop.
The story that we do love to tell about the hoop
is we work with this professional cyclist
whose local name Kate Courtney.
She's a mountain biker world champion.
And the morning that she won one of our world champion.
And a complete athlete.
Complete athletes.
A complete athlete.
She is total complete, amazing athlete.
And she's like an example, by the way,
of everything that's positive that's happened
in the health and fitness business and
and and terms of like optimization and you know turning making professional athletes better like she is the epitome of that.
But she woke up on the morning of her world championship and she had like a 12 in terms of her
recovery score on her roof like deep red like the worst red you can get. And she actually had the wherewithal to be like that's actually incorrect.
the worst red you can get. And she actually had the wherewithal to be like, that's actually incorrect. That's not how I feel. I feel great. She went out, destroyed everybody, won a world
championship that day. And then she called Woop and said, Hey, your algorithm is wrong.
And Woop was like, No, it's not. And she's like, Yes, it is. And then they went back and like,
did their secret swirl squirrel stuff. And they're like, You're right, the algorithm was wrong.
Yes. So let me ask you this, because so this is huge, right?
Because how you subjectively feel definitely matters, regardless of data points, because
they're all important data points matter too.
But so regardless if it's true or not.
Yeah, it's objectively because of the feelings.
Right.
So, but now here's the challenge.
The challenge, especially I would say with athletes, probably, I'm sure you see this
with athletes as well, is that they don't know how they feel necessarily, because athletes tend to be like, well, I'm
going to run through this wall no matter what.
Now the average person just is so disconnected from their body.
I don't know if that's true.
I would think the opposite.
I would think your athletes are probably more into, no?
We're seeing a generation of athletes for sure, and people who are getting more into
it.
So, like the early Omega Wave came out with like the first HRV, and I, I experimented this,
I'm, I'm training.
Oh, can I tell this right now?
I'm training from Mala Kai, which is like this open ocean channel racing.
It's like a big 50K open ocean pad.
That's what I'm training for.
Remember, I'm a middle-aged bro.
I'm like, I'm not going to be fast.
Okay, so we have like a, we have like a, we have like a,
like a six year old and a three year old this time.
And so you guys know,
like the mornings are kind of crazy.
And you know, we both work.
So we've got to get our kids like fed and lunched and dressed
and you know,
they're still at that phase where like we have to tie their shoe.
You know, it's like high maintenance mornings.
You know, there's no like,
taking care of Kelly and Juliet mornings.
So Kelly gets this like early iteration
HR heart rate variability device and he the way that it worked is he had to wake up be up and standing around for 15 minutes
And then he had to go back and lay in bed for 30 minutes and attach all these like nodes to his body
Twice of them is he attached all these nodes to his body and then just go lay there quietly and if like anyone
Disrupted him it would it would mess up his data
And finally I was like finally I was like was like, that thing's going in the garbage.
You need to show up as a dad.
And you're like, don't talk to me, you're standing to data.
He's like, no, Georgia, I can't tie your shoe.
I'm dragging my heart rate very, very, very, so with,
I mean, we were like, that thing's out.
So I mean, obviously it's evolved so much to the point
where you can just have this passive ring on your hand.
But I mean, I think the things that we use it for is sleep
Like we really do think these seven and eight hour minimums are like that's a real deal
And so we you know people one of the things like the most important things that we've learned from tracking our stuff is that you actually need to be
Laying in bed for a full hour longer than you're actually trying to get sleep right because we lose and everybody naturally
Who loses almost an hour of sleep?
Just by waking up and getting up to go the
bathroom and, and, and these little wake cycles that we're not even aware of as
we woken up. And so that was, that really transformed our own behavior because
we realize if we want to get out of sleep, we need to be laying there for nine
hours. So that was a big, you know, that was a big piece of data we got thanks
to having a device like this and super helpful. But what we say to people is
like, you know, they're like, oh yeah, I'm getting at hours of sleep
and we're like, prove it, because you can.
You know, it's really accessible now.
Like, show us.
Are you getting at hours of sleep?
Especially when we came out of,
remember, originally a physical therapist, right?
Which is sort of this arcane study of pain
and low-level exercise.
That's really what physical therapy is.
It's like a lot of banded.
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff like that.
And I think physical therapy has immense possibility,
but currently it's not living up to what.
I think what we're seeing is really good coaches
and performance coaches can just have just taken over
a big chunk of physical therapy.
But one of the things that we're seeing is
I started caring about sleep and chronic pain
and persistent pain.
And I started seeing this association
because I noticed in high performance
that if you didn't sleep, you didn't do really well.
You started outpaced me in the gym
because you were getting an extra half hour of sleep.
So we started to see that that mattered
in terms of this objective measurement of output
that we really start to see trends.
Remember, the scientific method Sir Francis Bacon
is induction through large data sets.
That's what it is.
It's pattern recognition across huge amounts of data.
And suddenly we're having access to these different data sets.
So we get interested in sleep
because we notice that our athletes don't do well,
they don't sleep no No shit, right?
That the research is that it meant kids who get less sleep,
by the way, we still have this room.
Kids who get less sleep are more prone to injury.
And guess what?
We see that around finals,
that the injury rates spike in high school kids
when they get one an hour sleep.
I don't know.
Right?
Right, so on and on and on.
So we are suddenly like, well,
if it's good for the goose, it's probably good for this other thing, which is attached
to the human being. And this subjective feeling that you have is very much attached to what's
happening. So we can suddenly start to become interested in some of these other aspects,
whether it's changing your body composition or winning a world championship or getting out of pain,
we find that this is sort of a double, double door that opens both ways.
Yeah, so, so sleep such a big deal. First off, it's considered cruel and unusual punishment to
in war. Are you saying have a baby? No, yeah, that's what we said when we had a baby.
We're like, this is actual torture, by the Geneva Convention.
Yes, oh, it's terrible.
It'll drive you, I mean, literally, I think three
or four days of no sleep,
like some majority of people will start
to get mental, like insanity, symptoms and stuff.
But I think it's probably a big deal
because if you lack sleep for most of human evolution,
for most of the time humans have been on Earth,
it meant you probably couldn't find food
or it probably meant you weren't safe.
So it's like one of the loudest stress signals
you could possibly send your body.
And when your body is stressed,
what it does is it tries to protect itself.
How does it protect itself? Lower my caloric needs.
So muscle's gone. We know this. Hormones change.
You're not anabolic.
You lose vitality because, God forbid, you procreate.
You're not going to be able to support anything.
And let's store more body fat.
That's a wonderful way to ensure ourselves against this potential stress.
But you're assuming that all three of those things are important.
Those are important to most people.
I'm selling why you probably need to get more stuff.
So what you're saying, I love what you said, by the way, is if you want eight hours of
sleep, you should probably schedule nine hours.
So go to bed and then wake up nine hours later
and you'll get the eight hours of sleep.
And so many people are like,
I see bad hours, I want to bed at 10 and I woke up at 6,
we're like, no, you didn't, it's seven hours.
Yeah.
I would add something to that and curious if you guys would too,
is because I think it's so interesting how our society
has built this, oh, I mean, there's books
that have sold millions of dollars around morning routines.
Nobody talks about night routines.
Night routines.
Yet, ironically, we all know that sleep is the one of the most important things, but yet
we haven't made that popular.
We haven't made it a thing to consistently go to bed at the same time, or maybe turn
off your tech, or not stare at your phone inside your bed, or like...
Yeah, I mean, we mentioned it earlier,
but we really are such fans of this 24 hour duty cycle.
And we are fans of a morning routine,
but maybe not in the way that like most tech
bros are morning routine.
Like we think that's like a great time to control
some really simple things like dewey breakfast
and does it involve protein and micronutrients.
Like that's kind of what a morning routine is for us.
Like leave the house having some good nutrients on board.
It's kind of like awesome you won the morning routine.
But man, we talked so much in our book about the evening is such an important time to
control your life.
And you know, we know from data that people are watching three hours a night of TV, like
on average, this is everybody, this is across cohorts, across classes, this is everybody,
you know, mandos back on.
So everybody's watching TV. And so we've really tried to create this, you know, Mando's back on. So everybody's watching TV.
And so we've really tried to create this, you know,
so many of the practices that we include in this book
are things that you can literally do
on your living room floor while you're watching Netflix
at night.
And, and, you know, same thing was prepping up for sleep.
We mean a lot of the mobilizations
that we prescribe for people are actually really down
regulatory.
They actually really are, you know,
in addition to having all these other sort of benefits
in terms of your movement, they really actually
kind of are one other tool in the toolkit
to just kind of bring yourself down.
I've been to that a little bit.
So up regulatory would be,
I'm getting my CNS fired up,
I'm getting my energy levels up.
Down regulatory is I'm taking my body,
calming it down, relaxing.
How do you differ, like what is doing what?
What do you mean by down regulatory stuff before bed?
Can you give us some examples?
Yeah, I mean, what we've seen is this,
I mean, and I'll let Kelly answer that,
but I think we've seen just everybody,
and we're not excluded from it.
We love coffee, but what we've seen in,
our regular populations and and professional athletes
is just this depressed and stimulant cycle, right?
People are waking up and having 25 cups of coffee,
and then at night they're either drinking, smoking weed,
or taking an ambi into go to bed.
At the breaks.
Yeah, to hit the breaks.
And so, you know, I'll let you talk a little more
about the down regulations.
I think the present stimulant cycle is really important
because, you know, what we want to reframe this is
is that no aspect of your system,
no body system works by itself.
So sleep is not just a thing that happens.
It's a thing that gets planned for and set up during the day.
We already talked about walking more, moving more,
creating enough non-exercise activity load.
It's called sleep stress.
And then that puts you into more of a likelihood of going to bed.
But you can get all fancy with your glasses and do all of that.
But it turns out, for example, one of the big problems we find is that people are going for that late afternoon caffeine bump. It's a big issue. And so they have, and why they do it because they feel
like acid four o'clock. I've got to go home and make dinner and full laundry and be, and like,
be a person. And all of a sudden, I hit that. And we know that, man, late caffeine, if you're a fast caffeine metabolizer, it's going to affect the quality of your sleep.
I find it after noon. Yeah, I break.
I want one or two o'clock and even that's question. Yeah, that's flirting with it. I feel like
you guys have OCS. We'll tell you what OCS is later.
We call it old cat syndrome. If it's old cat and just just starting to fall off and go wrong with
them and we're like, oh, it's nothing wrong. He's just got old cats in front of him. So, it's like,
OCS, is that your problem? So, if suddenly we can start to organize behaviors during
the day, I can make decisions about what's going on in my life that will impact my sleep.
Am I going to have a drink? Because I know that that drink is going to mess up my sleep.
But I can make that decision,
be like, I'm a big boy, I'm going to make that decision. It's not going to be hidden from me,
and it's not going to be the only way I can hit the brakes. So here's an example. We are working
with someone in our neighborhood who got some blood work, which is oftentimes the way that people,
middle-aged people come to their senses about what they've been doing isn't working,
because that blood is really what's going on underneath the hood, right? You can't
can't cheat your physiology. And some signs and symptoms prediabatic and some really altered blood,
right, lipids, blood sugars, the whole thing. So the first question we ask is not
diabet, like tell us about your day. You know, how do you cope? Yeah, it was, you know,
I'm super stressed, you know, well, how do you cope? Yeah, it's what you're, you know. You know, I'm super stressed.
You know, well, how do you deal with the stress?
I drink a bottle of wine a night and sometimes too.
I'm like, okay, tell me more about that.
Well, if I don't drink this wine, I can't go to sleep.
And if I can't go to sleep, I'm wrecked tomorrow.
So what we've given is this person,
the only strategy available to them,
which is here you need to drink.
That's hitting the break.
So we can't even understand what's going
with her choices and her blood work until we understand what's happening with the blood panel
until we really understand why are you so stressed and why don't you have any of these other tools.
So one of the things we found is we were working with athletes trying to reduce the session cost
is what we call it. If you have a big, heavy training day or training load or competition day,
we're trying to diminish its effect on your performance the next day. We know there's
going to be some degree of performance. We do something really heavier, go long. We know
the next day, we're probably not going to get the same ghost signal, right? But there
are a whole bunch of behaviors we can put in there, nutrient timing, hydration, sleep,
done regulation, that diminished that session cost.
So a weekend could be a good session cost. What's the cost of your weekend? Monday morning,
you pay for that session. So how do we look so we can take that and strip it out of it?
One of the things we found was we're working with athletes on recovery or tissue position or
pain. When we start shifting soft tissue mobilization or any of those practices or isometrics or whatever
going for some of those classic recovery techniques. In the evening, we saw adherence go through
the roof because athletes were like, oh yeah, I didn't want to lay down at the gym. I didn't want to
lay down on my class. I didn't want to impact my workout. And I didn't want to take away. That's
right. I didn't want to take away from the thing I love by rolling.
We're like, yeah, don't do that.
Why don't you do this in the evening?
And what we found is that our athletes fell asleep faster
and stayed asleep longer.
And they started creating a routine.
And then we were like, well, if the roller's right next to the couch,
then you're already sitting there like, oh, look, roller.
And you didn't have to make another decision.
There's that behavior that you were talking about early on.
So that's how we can begin to think.
And suddenly, you're like, well,
there's a whole constellation of things I do unconsciously
or consciously, I'm not gonna have that caffeine after four
that gets me to where I go.
But we've seen that this, as Juliet said,
wine, coffee, four hour energy, ambient, that's real.
And we, Adderall and ambient used to be
the dirtiest secrets in pro sports.
You know, the amount of Adderall that some of our pictures were taking in the World Series
was insane, like 30 milligrams of Adderall, which is 10, 10, 10.
Wow.
And you how you sleep after 30 milligrams of Adderall?
Not too ambient.
Not too much.
And then after you take two ambient, you know how you wake up in the morning?
Adderall.
Yeah.
And so we get caught in this cycle.
And even our tour to France cyclists would come off tour and and have to unscrew themselves from all the sleeping pills there
But I mean that's that's what professional athletes may be doing
But I mean you just take that down to like parents in our neighborhood, right? And they're they're doing effectively the same thing with
caffeine and
You know wine or wheat, right? Like it's you know, it's that's it's super common
So I love your so so what I found for myself,
I'd love your opinion on this.
So I found that if I do static stretching at night,
so static stretching, it's got some value, you know, a ton.
No, it's a,
well, but I noticed that because static stretching
essentially tells us CNS to chill, right?
If you do it right, that's the muscle link.
It's easy to do.
Right, so I noticed if I do that at night,
I sleep way better.
So that would be an example of kind of what you guys are talking about.
And the adherence was higher because I'm watching TV, get on the floor, do some static
stretching, this feels real good actually.
Yeah, and I mean, that's something we are literally obsessed with is like, how can we help
people not have to make one more heroic decision to do something in their day? Because that's
what we've seen in our sort of like regular
person population.
Like, people maybe have that one hour
where they wanna work out and that hour is sacred to them
and the rest of their day is like chaos.
And they literally cannot be,
you know, they cannot summon more willpower or motivation
to like do extra things.
And I think that's one of the reasons
we've left people behind is that I think we've trained people to think
if they're going to do anything for the health and fitness
that has to happen in a one hour block, like a class.
And so if you're going to work on your flexibility or mobility,
well, if you haven't driven to your stretch class
and gone to your stretch class for an hour,
and so people think, well, there's nothing I can do.
And so we're trying to really help people say, hey,
look, if you make it super easy for yourself,
to pepper your whole living room with a bunch of easy tools to,
you know, make it easier on that night when you just can't make one more decision to actually
sit there and do a little stretching, have a mat there, have some mobility tools nearby.
Like not heroic, just sit on the floor and roll your quads for 10 minutes. Like, you know,
if you do that for 10 minutes a night, that's 70 minutes a week that you've done a little soft tissue work on your body. If you aggregate over a year, think about how
impactful that comes.
I would even argue, and I would love your guys' opinion on this. I would even argue that
doing it spread out that way in small doses, besides the adherence, which is a huge, I don't
want to describe that's huge. A subpar workout done consistently will outperform an excellent
workout done inconsistently, right?
But let's just say that that's controlled for it.
Here, it's as great on both ends.
I've noticed with myself and with clients
that breaking things up into small doses
seems to produce better results anyway.
And I've experimented this with myself
where rather than doing 20 sets in one workout,
if I have all day, I'll do five sets, two hours later,
do the five sets, two hours later, do the five sets.
At the end of the day, same total volume,
but I felt much better and I saw better adaptations.
Are you noticing anything like that with athletes
where you're giving them small doses of training?
Oh yeah, microdose.
And you know, it's some of it, I think,
falls into the line of, well, when are you gonna get this done?
So, you know, what is the best effect?
Well, I need to understand, how stiff are you?
What are your time demands?
You know, what's your training?
There's a lot of features before I say, this is better.
But what we see is you probably increased your total volume,
your frequency, your exposure.
And, theoretically, when we're talking about soft tissue
or positions, we're more closely
conjoining what's actually happening.
Where you're like, end of the day,
I'm like, what hurts, what's stiff?
What feels worked.
And now I can, and do that.
Ultimately, one of the best models we've seen,
again, coming back to Altus Track and Field,
is that the treatment table is right next to the track.
So the athlete sprints, world class sprinter,
gold medalist sprinter,
and then they come right next to the track.
How'd you feel?
And then we can do some inputs.
And then we go do it again.
And that's what we're trying to do, ultimately,
is look at everyone's day and say,
well, let's tune up and tune down.
And something that you can't keep hitting,
but maybe hasn't.
We haven't pulled out yet is we have this real opportunity for people to sort of get
this 24 hour cycle in and play a physical practice game that isn't training because you
may not have the time to go to your class today.
You may only need a resistance train three times a week
as a middle-aged guy.
But if I did all of these other things during the day,
I actually have a pretty good set of inputs.
I ate a mount, I worked on my range of motion,
I walked, I slept, I dealt with my creaky knee.
I mean, like, there's so much that can happen
that's independent of this exercise
or this resistance training.
That means if your day gets away from you
or you're gnarly and you're traveling
and you don't have the resources,
you can still have so much input
to care and feed for your body
that has nothing to do with exercise.
So that when it's time to get back online, you can.
So this isn't about the performance side of the little doses, but yesterday we had a day,
a little dose of hashtag. Little doses. But I mean, I'm a huge fan of little doses obsessed with walking.
I think that's the way to get walking into your life as little doses.
But we had a day yesterday, for example, where we, we, this isn't just like, we,
we didn't choose not to have time. Like we just never had time to train at all during the day.
And even really moved that much, just the way our schedule worked out.
But we got home and one of the things
we really value as parents is actually cooking dinner
and sitting down at dinner with our kids.
So it's like something that we sort of block
that time out and like this is what we do.
But we both didn't feel like we had enough time to move.
So we literally brought some kettlebells
into the kitchen and like every 10 minutes
we each did 10 kettlebell swings,
you know, it took us like an hour or so to cook dinner.
Then we do dishes.
And then you do some dishes.
So we just figured out ways to add movement to our eyes.
Can I tell you how we've applied that?
Let me tell you the coolest workout you can do.
You ready?
You front squat and then you throw knives.
That's my 14 year old favorite workout.
Can we go out and throw knives in front of us?
That sounds so big.
Yeah, that sounds awesome. Okay of us. That sounds so pretty. I'm like, okay.
That sounds really cool.
You know how I try to sell the mini walks?
It was such a big hack.
All of us in here are all married with kids is,
that became one of the best times for me and my wife to connect.
Yes.
You be, if you're married with kids and you got stuff going on,
like, let's be honest, how often do you and your wife
not talk about business, not talk about the kids
and just actually disconnect and be with each other?
Like, whoa, what a great hack.
I can go do this 10, 15 minute walk, put my phone,
leave my phone and I got this one-on-one time
with my wife, what it did for our relationship?
Forget what it did for the health,
which we all know the benefits of that.
But what it did for our relationship,
which is also part of that sphere
that I don't think we talk about enough too,
is our relationship with our spouse,
our relationship with our family, our friends.
Like what a way to kind of double hack that, right?
Oh, it's the best.
Like we have this old watt,
we can walk from our house to the end of the block,
and it's like, it takes 17 minutes,
and we do it often after dinner,
and we'll do it all weather, like rain, shine,
if it's raining, we just get an umbrella,
the two of us walk no phones.
We have a chance to kind of decompress, check in on how we're...
I'm trying to control my post-prandial glycosuria.
Whatever it is, whatever it is.
And then, you know, it's 1750 steps
because I measured it one time.
So if I'm like just trying to get over the hump
of collecting enough steps for the day,
I'm like, sweet, check two boxes.
Like, important, disconnected connection
with my main number one person, and I'm like, sweet, check two boxes. Like, important disconnected connection
with my main number one person, and I walked more.
Yeah, I got, I got, that's how I got clients
to do 30 minutes of walking a day.
It's instead of saying walk for 30 minutes.
I can't hate you 10 minutes after breakfast,
let's just get to your room.
Yeah, and they did every single time.
And you can sell it however you want.
We're gonna help you control your blusher.
Oh, I'm in.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I want you to go spend 10 minutes with your wife.
Oh, I'm in.
Yeah. You know, I always think about our friend Mark Bell who you guys know, you know, he
was 330 pounds, you know, world champion power lifter and decided he wanted to change his
body. And the first thing he did was take these little 10 minute walks. I don't know if you
guys remember, he's now training for the Boston marathon. So those 10 minute walks seem
a long time ago, but that was 10 years ago. He started doing that, you know, and now he
weighs like 230 pounds,
and he literally just started small
by taking these little 10 minutes.
And when he started, he could barely walk 10 minutes
and he would do like three 10 minute walks a day.
And so, if you're just thinking,
what do you care about?
So, we worked on like this notion of just
sedentary behaviors of work.
Like we really tried to take a swing of that.
We were doing Google talks around synch to desk
and just trying to reshape our environment, right?
We worked in our daughter's schools
and we flipped it into the first all-standing
moving school in the world.
Juliett realized that if she just stood and perched
at her desk, didn't sit in a traditional desk,
but just changed her environment.
She burned 100,000 calories a year.
100, that's what, 23 marathons.
Something like that.
I like way J star by like a hundred pounds.
So I just was like, okay, let's add 70,000 calories
over there.
Do you know how much ice cream 170,000 calories that is?
I mean, talk about expansion, you guys.
Dude, that means I could eat 170,000 calories
because Kelly does love cookies.
And I don't have to do shit to account for that.
That's just in the balance.
And I love this idea of getting something from nothing.
I want beginner gains all day long.
I want, I want to be like, oh, I did this
and my skin got better.
Like I don't care what the mechanism is.
Give me the results.
And I'll stick with it for you.
You know why I like walking and why I hate running
is because, not because running's bad
and walking's right necessarily,
but because the average person has forgot how to run,
they forgot, they lost the skill how to run.
Everybody stops running around,
when I'm 11 years old, 12 years old, they just stop.
So, and then 30, they're like, I'm gonna start running again.
And nobody goes, I need to relearn how to run.
They just go run hard and work themselves.
But everybody's still, and I say still,
because I think we're getting to Wally pretty soon,
like the cartoon that animation. But still, the I say still, because I think we're getting to Wally pretty soon, like the cartoon, the animation.
But still, the average person knows how to walk.
They at least know how to walk.
That's why I like it so much.
Because you can walk, and you're probably not gonna hurt yourself,
but if I tell you to run, it's gonna take us a year
to get you to reload.
You just did something, it's so savvy,
is that you invited everyone who doesn't identify
as a runner to move their bodies.
And one of the things that we're always trying to tell people
is like, look, there are these processes in your body
that you cannot ignore.
And one of them is your lymphatic system.
Your lymphatic system is the sewage system for your body.
And you make about four to six liters of lymph every day.
And that lymphatic system is carrying all the broken down
proteins, all the dead cells,
all the turnover that happens all the time.
That's why we're eating a certain way, right?
And if you don't contract your muscles, that sewage stays in your system and doesn't
get pumped out through lymphatic system, which is bootstrapped into your movement system.
So look at what we've done already just in this elite talk about walking.
We've given you a reason to burn more calories,
talk to your loved one, fall asleep,
can just clear your lymphatics, like holy crap.
It's almost like you are designed.
And a little son on your body.
That's right, so we went outside,
you saw your neighbors, you created a civil society,
it was up, you're dick.
I still saw you, and if I just saw you, I'm like, you're never too late.
Right?
I'm like, I saw you lurking in the window.
That's right.
So, I think we can really start to say is what are first principles.
Now, now we can have the next conversation, how much walking is enough, right?
And I think, you know, we use this analogy, you just threw out Wally, which is we feel.
Yeah, we've been obsessed with that.
We've obsessed with that.
That vision.
There was a local place that I used to have killer whales
and captivity to remember tillicum.
Yeah.
Right, the killer whale blackfish.
Well, one of our friends has this great concept,
Katie Bowman, and I call this the Bowman's Orca.
She points out that when you put orcas and captivity,
their fins fold over, folded fins in drum. They're like, the Bowman's Orca. She points out that when you put orcas in captivity, their fins fold over, folded fin syndrome.
They're like, oh, it's folded fin.
And what ends up happening is you've changed
the fundamental behaviors of the orca.
The orca doesn't fight, a fight, hunt, swim, play,
it doesn't do orcas shit.
It's kind of hangs out the surface.
And so that orca fin isn't loaded regularly for decades.
It's not loaded.
So the collagen starts to break down.
Then because it's spending all this time at the surface, it's always subjected to a greater
gravitational load because it's not swimming deep and doing its deep hunts.
So you change the behavior, change the loading.
What do you get?
Weak feet, poor killies.
You don't load the tissues.
If you want to have a strong body, you have to essentially load,
concentric load, isometric load,
that's what your body is built for.
Walking is the easiest way to start to load
your bones and tissues.
Well, and for those people who don't think
that walking is rad enough,
like put on a heavy backpack,
but we're such huge fans of rucking
and do it as often as we can.
So I'm like, hey, if you want to upgrade your walking,
then put 30 pounds on your back and go.
But, you know, along those lines,
I think we've done a disservice.
I did this as a trainer.
So it was a big mistake I made,
which I was a fitness guy, right?
So, you know, when I talked to a potential client,
like, what do you do for exercise?
I walk and scoff.
Yeah.
Walk, that's not a workout.
Like, what a terrible message I was calling clients.
You got that from somewhere.
That's just giving me, we all came from some tradition and we got to break this cycle. Like what a terrible message I was telling clients. You got that from somewhere. Just give me a minute.
We all came from some tradition and we got to break this cycle.
Yeah, and so I mean walking is in my opinion,
one of the most valuable forms of activity for two reasons.
It's accessible to most people.
You don't need equipment.
You go outside, do your thing, whatever.
And most people can do it.
You don't need to learn a skill to do it.
You're probably not gonna hurt yourself.
And it's relatively easy so people can adhere to it.
And that makes it so valuable.
I can't think of another form of exercise
that hits those things.
Well, you know, the society loves inclusiveness.
So it's like one of the most inclusive thing.
It is.
It is.
It's as inclusive as you can.
Talk about the walking school bus.
So progressive.
So one of this, because I'm sort of obsessed with kids' health, like you guys are like, I was like, I was like, I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like,
I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like,
the drop off lane is like the saddest place on earth.
Like, it's so sad, like, you, and volunteering
at the drop off lane is like, the single worst job,
you cannot, you have to open people's gross cars,
and, you know, kids are crying and parents are yelling,
it's like the worst experience ever, the drop off lane.
So, so, but we were in that, we were, you know,
getting up, rushing, sitting in traffic,
getting our kids in the drop off lane, having this sort of negative experience,
basically kicking our kid out the car door
and driving off with the door still open.
And then meanwhile, we had started talking to adults
about maybe trying to move more during their work day
and maybe consider having a standing desk
and trying to incorporate more movement in their life.
And we're like, well, we're literally packing our kids
in the car, driving them a mile and a half to school,
sitting in the drop off.
I'm like, we're, you know, and so, so we, so I had done some research and found this idea
of the walking school bus.
And one of the reasons, so, so in the 70s, something like 75% of kids, 70s and 80s, like when
I was a kid, 75% of kids walked or bike to school.
Yeah.
And that was the norm.
And now it's like 15%.
Yeah, it's a complete flip.
But interestingly, kids haven't moved farther away
from their local school, especially in elementary school.
And we leave those.
Can never Van Windas win a way too?
Yeah, it's like, it's like,
we still live the same distance by and large
as we did from our,
at least elementary school, right?
So we've had this wholesale change in behavior.
And one of the things is that people are afraid
of their kid walking to school by themselves.
So the walking school bus idea is that, you know, we just, we said to people in our school
district, like Kelly and I will be standing on this corner at 750 in the morning, five
days a week, rain or shine.
So if you want to leave your kid here to walk with us, we'll make sure they make it to school
safety.
Right, great idea.
And we did that for 10 years at our elementary school.
Really?
And it's a mile and a half.
So, and we, by the way, were able to do that
and still be at our office by 9 a.m.
because there were people who were like,
I have a job, I can't do that.
I'm like, why have a job too?
Actually, and I still make it.
It's okay, and we'll take your kids.
But one sort of health benefit is,
Kelly and I, the there back,
we would get back from walking to school
by 8.20 in the morning
and we would already have accumulated like 5,500 steps.
Our kids had gotten some steps,
but forget about all the fitness stuff.
We had this really special time as a family to connect
and talk and again, disconnected and we would pick flowers
and look at worms and the gutter.
But dad came up to me and he's like,
dude, change my life, lost 30 pounds.
We're doing what? What'd you do?
I'm like, tell me, he's like,
walk my kid to school.
Yeah, and then it had to walk.
It had this crazy community benefit
because parents first would just drop their kids off of us,
but then they're like, hey, that looks kind of fun.
So then the parents parked their car at the corner
and join us.
And so we've created community and made all these friends
and got kids moving.
And the way that we
could walk we entered the school from the backside of the school through this like beautiful field
with flowers and we completely avoided the chaos of the draw and the of the drop off lane and we knew
it was good for our kids we knew we were setting up our kids to start their school day like feeling
alert and ready to learn but forget about our kids like we felt so much better like we weren't
jumping in the car and getting kids in car seats
and chucking them out the drop off lane.
And just for us, the way to start the day,
was it was dramatic.
You know what, there's a lot of things
I love about that.
That's amazing.
I just read a meta analysis
and had a realization about two weeks ago.
I'd love your guys' opinion on this.
I don't know if you guys saw this.
They did this huge meta analysis on exercise and depression and anxiety. And now they're
considering exercise as a potential, finally, first line treatment. This is the medical
community. They're considering as a first line treatment now for depression and anxiety,
because they're seeing that it's as effective or more effective than talk therapy and
medication. Let's reinies out those things.
There's this guy who wrote this book, John Raidi,
he's from Harvard, he wrote a book called Spark,
and he's like, exercise is miracle, grow for the brain.
Yeah, so I saw this meta-analysis,
and I've already known this as well,
but I see this on like, wow, they're considering this
as a thing.
Simultaneously, the thought popped into my head that
anxiety and depression are at all-time highs among adolescents and teenagers.
And we're blaming social media.
We're blaming the internet.
But could it just simply be that they're just not moving?
Because they're not, they're not moving.
Also.
Yeah.
And what could we control?
I mean, have you tried to rip the hand, the phone out of your,
oh yeah, I was saying.
Well, you've seen so many things.
Along those lines, and what you said that I wanted to add that I think is so important
because we get to sell a lot because we're all fathers and and we have people that are
obviously interested in health and fitness and they see these problems with their kids and
they're always want to ask, you know, what should we do or what should we tell them to do or
whatever. The most powerful thing about what you guys did was you did it. You did it, you led by example,
and that kids learned that way.
It's not telling,
okay, I can see a ton of parents being like,
oh, yeah, I'm gonna drop my fucking kid off,
like a mile and a half away from school now
and tell them to go walk.
The powerful thing was mom and dad getting out
and doing that and leading by example.
And that's the same thing when it goes to get your kids
to eat better, to exercise.
Yeah, you want your kid to get healthier, you get the pains to get.
You got to do it with them.
That's right.
The behavior change in our family was pretty minor.
We literally had to wake up 10 minutes earlier to make this walk after.
That was it.
We did actually have a talk where we're like, okay, we now have to set our alarm for like
6.40 instead of 6.50 or whatever the time was.
10 minutes, that was the only thing we really had to modify as a family.
We still did everything else in the same and we did it together.
We're talking, what's interesting, you bring this really up.
We're talking about all the things that we think we want you to do so that you can be
a hundred years old and functional and durable.
Take the hits.
You're going to have injury, you're going to have trauma, you're going to have stress.
How do we create capacity to handle those things and still roll?
So we're talking about all these things.
And at the time, I was saying, I'm like, okay, now I'll climb to your kids.
You saw that big study that just came out about obesity and children, right?
And it turns out also 56% of those kids didn't need a vegetable last week. And 35% of those kids didn't need a vegetable last week.
And 35% of those kids didn't eat a fruit last week.
So I can't say that not eating fruits and vegetables caused this,
but it's not weird that we have an empty epidemic and we don't eat food.
So what's really interesting about all the things we're talking about here,
just a plum to your kids, to your kids sleep, your kids growing.
How about how much movement they had?
We did this project with Nike a million years ago.
Remember the fuel band?
I helped kill the fuel band you all.
I went up there and I was like,
I don't think this is doing what you think it's doing.
The game was a whole bunch of fuel bands,
and I was like, cool, kids, here's some fuel bands.
No, and what we saw was that our kids were walking
two or three thousand steps a day.
They weren't moving.
And it was rainy, it was less. So, you know, what we found, and we even just right before
the pandemic, we're doing a big piece of research with Cal Berkeley about this. And what we're seeing
is that we haven't created an environment where the person, the child, has to do the right things
without even knowing it, right? Because they get dropped off, because there's not PE, because we're
asking them to sit and focus, because they go home, because they have shitty off, because there's not PE, because we're asking them to sit and focus,
because they go home, because they have shitty food choices,
they don't even have a agency.
So we really have to use these thumbs and start to shape
the decisions we're making.
And that is the best use of a local school government, right?
Well, thinking at that level.
One story I want to tell you guys,
it drove me bonkers as a mom,
like I sat in 50 PTA meetings and this like still to the stay slays me that I was I was able to make no change in this
But I need to get a lift something heavy. I tell her that I'm like tell me that story at our kids school
And I don't know if this is the same for your kids school at least elementary school when it was raining
They were kept inside for p um recess. Yeah, and this drove me insane
And I think part of it is I grew up in Colorado in a snowy climate and we actually would put on,
at recess, we would put back on all of our snow gear
that we'd walk to school in in the snow.
And we would go outside and play in the snow.
And it just, you know, and this is all based on some
like societal myth that you get a cold from being cold
or that you get a cold from being wet.
And a lot of this was, and what was interesting to me
is this seems so straightforward.
I was like, the kids need to go outside,
rain or shine, like let the kids play outside,
kids like to play in rain, but there actually was
a lot of parent pushback.
Parents were actually worried their kids were gonna get a cold
or they were actually worried it was dangerous for them
to play in the rain.
And I was like, I finally just threw my arms up
after 10 years, I was like, but it's little things like that, right?
You've been brainwashed for so many decades around that.
That's actually a small argument in our house
because my wife has been brainwashed by her family
and their parents' parents that I'm always
like pushing my kid out barefoot in the dirt.
And dirty, man.
She's like, oh my God, come at me.
You're really cold.
Oh yeah.
And I'm like, yeah, we want him to be able to acclimate
to all these different types of environment.
If you keep him in the 70 degree temperature house
year-round all the time, the Suzy has to be out in 55 one day.
You should have got that.
You should have got that.
And Caroline was born.
She's our 14 year old 510 supergoly, right?
She's a mutant and she was a preemie.
And Juliet at UCSF, pretty good hospital,
and we're being discharged.
She's said, we're three weeks in the NICU with that kid.
And Juliet has done this heroic job
getting our kid breastfeeding and have that kid
have access to breast milk.
And as they push us out the door,
kids breastfeeding, they're like,
give your kid these vitamins.
And I was like, what? And they were like, yeah, you got these kid these vitamins. And I was like, what?
And they were like, yeah, you got these vitamins are crucial.
And I was like, look at me in the eye
and tell me breast milk is incomplete nutrition for you.
So I was like, I dare you.
And they all got all twitching.
And I was like, what's the real problem?
And they were like, well, I was like, what's the real problem?
Women in San Francisco weren't exposed to sunlight.
Yeah.
They got them outside.
So I was like, wait a minute.
So I'm like, so if I get my kid in the sun,
I don't have to give her these nasty ass vitamins.
And they were like, yes, but that won't happen.
So it's easier to put, you give your kid statins now.
And these like these drugs are gonna strip, like,
at some point you start to see the madness
of what's going on.
If there's a solution, be outside,
let's get some sunlight on your eyes.
It's really crucial that we start to think differently
to society about this.
And I do think that you, as you point out,
these vital signs are a simple way
to put them on people's radar.
And then we'll see how it goes in 10 years.
I mean, maybe this is all horseshit.
Can we go through some more of these vital signs?
What are some more that you've identified that are?
There's 10, right?
Yeah, there's 10.
You know, we talked about a lot of the movement ones,
hip extension getting up and down off the floor,
being able to put your shoulders over your head.
One of the ones we haven't talked about that I am focused
on is balance.
Balance is one of those things that like, again,
who's got time for that?
Like who's seriously like you're gonna be like,
oh hey, you just want to meet me up at a balanced for that? Like who's seriously like you're gonna be like, oh hey, you just want to meet me up?
You want to meet up at a balanced class tonight at 7 p.m. You're gonna be like, again, I thank you.
I wouldn't be watching the Mandalorian like no, thank you, right?
But for me it first came on to my radar screen. My mom is now 77, but when she was about 67 so 10 years ago
I realized that she could no longer ride a bike
that she had lost.
And she, by the way, is fit and healthy and works out
and she used to come to our CrossFit gym.
And so she's like doing the things, right?
But she hadn't really ever done anything
where she practiced her balance.
And she actually lost enough of her balance
that at 67, she didn't feel comfortable riding a bike anymore,
like just on a street, you know, not mountain biking.
Just on a beach, she just felt a little too timorous on a bike.
And so for me, that was a sort of important moment
because I was probably at that point in like my late 30s.
And that was sort of a lipo moment for me where I was like,
hey, if you wanna be able to do things
when you're older, you actually have to practice those things
and balance is one of those things.
But again, as a busy working mom,
I'm not gonna go to a balanced class
and I'm not gonna spend a bunch of time working on my balance.
And so we think it's critical.
We also know that people have to prioritize
certain things in their life.
And so we've just tried to figure out ways to add balance
into our lives.
And one of the things we love is our friend Chris Hinsha
created this thing called Old Man Balance Test.
Have you guys seen this?
We'll try it.
So he first of all created this to have a test
that he could win against his own children.
Like that was sort of the look of it.
He was like, what can I do?
How can I crush my own kids at something?
And so he created the old men balance test.
And the idea is that you have your shoes and socks with your shoes untied on the floor
and you stand on one leg.
And on one leg you reach down and pick up your sock and put it on.
And you reach down and put on your shoe and tie your shoe and put it on without ever
putting that particular foot down.
And then you switch sides.
Well, so this is now how I put on my shoes and socks
every single day.
I'll put my shoes on anyway.
I have to do that anyway, so it's just something
that I do in my normal life.
And it's also fun and it is, you know,
like you guys should all go home and have your kids do it
and your spouses do it.
And it's like, it's also just a fun test to do.
Smash yourself in the gym next morning,
get up out of bed, drink this drink.
And you know, I'm Kelly.
You're not.
A lot of the tests in this book,
I think bring up for me often,
sort of bringing awareness to what Kelly called session cost
and that's sort of a technical term.
But what I've noticed is when I'm low on sleep,
if I haven't eaten well, if I've been traveling,
if I haven't been able to do enough soft tissue work,
I see in the morning the session cost
of those poor behaviors in trying to do
the Old Man balance test when I put my shoes on.
Right, so if I'm like on my stuff
and I've been working on everything, I feel good,
I'm well rested, it's like the Old Man balance test
is like a breeze for me.
And if I've gotten like six enough hours of sleep
and traveling, I try to do it the other day,
we were in LA traveling, try to do it in the hotel room,
and my account was...
She not looks like a one-room max deadlift.
Yeah, and I almost fell over.
Don't!
You know, one of the things that we're obsessed with
is trying to have this through line of things
that are important from a beginner,
or someone who's just interested in
turn their health around all the way to my Olympians.
And if you work with any coach on the plant,
we're gonna talk about your feet eventually.
We're gonna get to your feet, your feet are weak,
you're all wearing flat shoes, flat shoes, flat shoes,
flat shoes, why did you choose those flat shoes?
Cause they look good on camera.
No, because you like figured it out.
Well, it's an andor, it's an andor.
You can look cute.
And also, but the idea is that we found that
working on foot strength and
Balance in our lead athletes ended up improving their performance
You know we work with this really good surfer and he is obsessed with his feet and it turns out his feet are his money
It's where he connects the ocean to his soul through his feet and we have seen that when we improve ankle range of motion and even perception of people's
feet, their performance goes, but when are you going to do it?
When it goes away.
And what's interesting is that we have two tests in the book, this old man balance test,
which is a dynamic balance test.
Anyone can do.
We also have a simple one for me.
I mean, anyone can do the soul.
Now I challenge people to do it.
Standing one leg eyes closed. And as soon as we take that visual field
of all, you need to just stand on one foot for 20 seconds. Don't put your
foot down. And as soon as I take your vision away, you can see why you're more
likely to fall at night. Why people fall in snowstorms in Norway. And why people fall in crowds when we take that visual system away.
And it's a reminder that, hey, maybe I need to spend
more time on like, and also when you're like,
oh shit, the yogis, if you're gonna go to yoga class,
you spend like two hours on one foot.
You know what's cool about this?
It reminds me that our bodies are like efficiency machines.
So, your body will never be,
never do what it doesn't think it needs to.
It'll get rid of anything it thinks it has no use for
because it costs energy to maintain that.
Your body's always trying to become more efficient.
So the minute you stop practicing anything,
your body will start to unlearn it and get rid of it.
And it doesn't just happen,
people think it happens into the body,
like oh, I lose muscle.
It turns it out.
Your brain actually starts to make those disconnections
and gets rid of things so that you now become more efficient,
right?
Because you only need to do this.
We're going to get you good at just doing this.
I remember, first time when we interviewed Joe DeFranco,
great coach and trainer.
And he's like, yeah, everybody should be doing
explosive movements.
I'm like, what about old people?
Well, I mean, modify it, it goes, but but second you stop doing it, you'll stop being able
to do it.
And I'm like, oh, yeah, that's what I want to jump.
It's not saying when you stop jumping, you start dying.
Yes.
And then I thought about all the clients that had over the age of 50 and they couldn't even
jump in place.
We start, we start seeing this on injury and surgery because we see a lot of surgery, ACLs,
ankle, knees, hips, right?
And we're starting to be of an age where our friends who
paid these prices as professional athletes, you know,
who are now starting to be creeping to 50, they're
starting to get a lot of things replaced.
Like we just didn't do a good job by them.
We learned a lot from them.
But when we work with people who have had these
surgeries, any surgery, even a young person, the first
thing that I show them,
I'm like, look at your difference between standing
on your surgical leg and your non-surgery leg.
And they're like, holy crap, and I'm like,
what are we talking about?
You're talking about going back to your sport
or running and you can't stand on one leg.
And now I'm like, okay, let's hop on one leg.
And it is a clear red flag.
So if you're listening to this
and you know, and someone of your family's had surgery,
have them stand on one leg and be shocked
at how we have failed them.
Yeah, you know what I like about what you guys are saying too,
is that if you incorporate, and we did this as trainers,
and you guys just did this with that old man,
balanced exercise, if you could practice things
during normal routines, washing the dishes,
non-invasive bathroom, brushing your teeth,
hiding the rest.
Yeah. That is the most effective way
to make something work because if you put your shoes
on every day, which you probably do,
you just do that, well guess what you're doing,
you're doing your balance exercise.
You don't need to do anything.
You gotta do nothing.
And it's an everyday type of thing.
I love that.
You know, I pissed off my wife's family
when we had my son because I wouldn't let him wear shoes
for like the first two years of his life.
So dangerous.
I mean, walking on gravel and all of that
and everybody just, raining outside the amount,
I'm f- no shoes on my son.
My son on my house.
Meanwhile, you could have been like,
here's the American Academy of Pediatrics
who says the best shoe you should wear as no shoes.
No shoes.
I am science.
By the way, that wasn't like that for a long time.
For a long time, they were telling parents
to put hard, sold shoes.
And that's a good place to start for the listener.
And I remember this for me.
I actually, this wasn't until maybe eight, nine years ago
when I had a PT break me down.
And we were actually assessing my squat.
And I'm like, I already been a trainer for over 10 years.
So I feel like I kind of know my shit.
And he's like, it your feet, make my feet.
I wasn't even thinking to look in that direction,
broke that down, and then I went on this kick,
and I mean completely changed my squat,
got rid of my brositis and my hips,
and it all came from, and I started with just one,
every time I came in the house now,
I took my shoes off, got barefoot.
So why do I need to wear shoes in my house?
Anyways, keep my carpets cleaner that way.
Get barefoot right away, walk out on the grass, do those 10 minute walks we talk about.
I would do it barefoot.
I just started with that and then started to build it into my training sessions and made
a world of a difference just by learning to get reconnected to this, this, this feet that
I want 7,000 nerve endings in it.
Well, just.
We put these massive casts on.
How simple is it as a practice that it can be so background in your life, but so impactful
to literally just take your shoes off and be barefoot in your house?
You know, hi, sell this to people because you'll tell people in the, what are you talking
about?
I'll say, imagine if ever since you were a child, you always wore gloves.
Yeah, snow gloves.
So you did, you can still handle things,
but you didn't feel and touch them.
So that's what we do to our feet.
Even just putting socks on.
You're not all the connections
and they go from the brain to the feet.
They're all numb down and nullified almost
because you just even keep swearing socks.
And then when I say it like that, people kind of get like,
oh, that makes a lot of sense.
Just walk around barefoot.
There's a big chunk of your brain that is wired for your foot.
Yeah.
The sensory motor cortex is what's called.
But you can see the old drawings of the homunculus.
Like your genitals take a massive part of your brain.
Your lips and face, massive part of your brain.
Hands, like your kneecaps, nothing.
Like your elbow, it's nothing.
But your feet is almost as much real estate as your hands.
So that's pretty shocking.
And when you start to think, well, why is it my feet are so sensitive?
Well, you need to really be able to walk around the environment, get up and down off the
ground, hunt, reproduce, bring resources back.
That's all driven through the feet.
And you're really bringing up a good point.
And one that we can take a step further, one of the rationales where we're seeing
these increases in so much pain for people
is it's a lack of input into the body
that we're just not getting cold, hot,
walking on surfaces, feeling what's going on
and our brains start to potentially sometimes
start to interpret what's the signals we're getting
from our body as differently.
You can relate to this if you've ever had something hurt and then you lay down at night
and then your shoulder really starts to hurt at night like what's going on?
What is it wrong with this bed?
It's because you're not moving anymore and the only input you're getting is that shoulder.
We have a poor relationship with inputs and outputs and feeling things.
Like exercise, I'd say this on the show all the time.
You know, you get a new client, they do an extra side
and I remember I had this one lady first of like,
first of your training, she's doing tricep press down.
She let go of the bar, wait, you know, slammed.
I'm like, what happened?
She's like, I think I hurt myself.
And I had her explain what was going on.
I'm like, oh, you felt your tricep burning.
You just don't have a relationship with panes,
where you understand, or discomfort.
We're just comfortable., discomfort, uncomfortable.
Right, so you can't develop a full, proper relationship
because you don't have these inputs.
So it's like you cover your body
and you don't allow your body to feel the thing.
You have an incomplete relationship.
So you can't possibly be in your body
without those inputs.
We have the same issue for sport.
We have the same issue with nutrition. We have the same issue with nutrition.
Our body has all these great things,
feedback when you eat something
that your body doesn't agree with.
Yeah, we've learned to totally ignore that.
Just regard that.
Yeah, it does, right?
Yeah.
Going all the way back to what we talked about earlier,
how we said that we would,
even with a fat loss client,
we would add to the diet.
And part of that process,
would you add these things you
know their body needed, whether it be fiber or more protein or whatever water, whatever
it may be that you knew as a coach that they were lacking.
Then the next step is getting the feet, asking them, how did you feel today?
How did you feel last night when you guys have become so reasonable?
I'm feeling to talk, you guys.
Very in touch.
But I mean, we have to retrain them,
how to become aware.
It's mind blowing, how many clients I've had
that have like, eat these foods
and think that they're, it's okay.
And then they have explosive diarrhea like.
But they don't make the connection.
Yeah, they don't make, they have no idea that it's like,
it's just like, oh, it's one of those bad days
that I'm shitting like this.
It's like, or maybe it was the food that you ate.
It's like, for sure. We the food that you ate. You might have to.
I'm like, first of all, for shitting.
We haven't really done a four jobs.
This is helping people interpret what's going on there,
but I guess that's it.
100% yes.
And to take it a step further, I'll give the silver bullet,
even though I know that there really isn't one,
but as close as you can get to the obesity epidemic,
is people are eating foods that are designed
to make you overeat.
So they just don't have any connection to what satiety
is supposed to feel like.
And now we've got really good studies at show
that people eat a five to 600 more calories a day
when they eat these hyper-palatable, heavily processed foods.
But isn't a banana have too much sugar?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's why you're obesity too many, many, many.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, you know, we, one of the things that were fans of
this thing called, from our friend, EC St. Kowsky,
it's, she kind of came up with this idea called
the 800 gram challenge.
800 grams of fruits and vegetables every day.
So we have this experience.
And speaking of science,
there was a study that came out,
this is what it's based on,
that people who ate 800 grams of fruits and vegetables
lived longer and had fewer chronic diseases
and all cause mortality, right?
So, but it was really the first time
that someone ever said,
this is the amount.
Like not just some, this is the-
I need for it to be possible.
Yeah, yeah, I left.
I squatted last month, you know.
And so what we see is that when people do that,
they get more fiber, right?
They get more micronutrients.
They're high satiety, they feel full.
And all of a sudden I'm like, you dude,
did you eat a pound of cherries?
That's 230 calories.
Yeah, I mean like, you dude, did you eat a pound of cherries? That's 230 calories. Yeah, I mean, like,
what a second pound.
They start to naturally push out the,
the rhubarb tart, the Doritos,
I mean, because they're focused on,
this is why this strategy is so powerful for other coaches
that are listening, is like teaching them to go after foods,
that benefit them, and instead of telling them
they can't have something, what naturally happens
is they end up restricting from those in order to hit
those targets. And then you play that psychological game of,
I'm not telling you you can't do those things. I'm just telling you to go do this
for me and see how you feel.
And to chicken breast. And then you'd be like, let me see how much room there is for
that bag. So there's, you know, five or six people were working directly with
at our publishing company for this book. And, you book and they would all not describe themselves as athletes.
Or people who are in the diet culture.
They're not in the diet culture, but they,
even the word they use, they said,
hey, we've been following your recommendations
in the nutrition chapter, the vitals,
protein and micronutrient vital signs in this chapter.
And they're like, wow, it's the first time
I've been following a diet that feels expensive.
And exactly what you're saying.
They're like, well, we just are finding ourselves
not wanting to eat all this crap food.
And also not feeling that 4 p.m. slump is much, right?
Because they've really fed themselves
in practice a lot.
Or not eating this way where I'm like,
I can't eat with my kids because I'm out of my eating window.
Yeah, right?
It really changes all of these relationships.
Or I actually can go out to dinner.
I just need to be mindful of making sure
that I eat some protein and vegetables in that dinner.
You know, it's funny,
if you look at like the bro science that's out there,
and now the way that the bro's explained it, it's all wrong,
but there's sometimes there's truth in what they advocate for,
like drinking a gallon of water,
you know, bodybuilder, drink a gallon of water every day.
When you get my clients to drink a gallon of water every day, they wouldn't drink soda,
they wouldn't drink other calorie-containing foods, and they'd get up and move more to
pee more. And this is just I noticed with the trackers and so they're like, what's this magic
about the gallon of water? You're not doing other stuff. And you're moving more. That's
all it is.
You know, all of these things are interesting that we're talking about, but if you came
to me to talk about chronic pain or persistent pain, because you know, back hurts or it's limiting, these are all the things we talk about.
You know, I mean, this is the basis.
And one of the things that we kind of are all tip-toeing around is how do we measure inputs
and outputs?
And we want to take pain off the output table.
Pain is a request for change.
Pain is your brain interpreting what's going on with your body.
And if you want to be more sensitive to pain, be sleep deprived, be highly inflamed, go drink a
much alcohol, be a stress case, a guarantee, your brain is going to be more twitchy.
Okay, so let's go into that for a second, because I used to train a lot of doctors in
surgeons at one point. I had a gym next to hospital, and one of the doctors I had was a pain specialist.
And we got on the conversation around treating pain. And he said, it's one of the doctors that had was a pain specialist. And we got on the conversation around treating pain.
And he said, it's one of the most difficult things
to treat because there's this objective,
physiological thing that's happening.
But then there's also this perception,
there's subjective perception of pain.
And he explained to how he would have one person
in an MRI look identical to the other person,
one person's like, oh my god, this hurts so bad.
This other person doesn't.
Or when they operate on a kid, for example,
and the kid's not supposed to know,
they don't know they're supposed to be in bed
and hurt and they want to jump out of bed and go play.
Whereas you give that to an adult,
like give me all the pain meds.
Whatever.
So he says, this perception of pain
is something that we lack working on and treating,
but we should focus on because it makes such a big difference.
And you just mentioned that with lack of sleep.
Lack of sleep, you're more sensitive to the pain.
Maybe the physiological, whatever was wrong
with your back is still there,
but you just see it worse.
You're more of a perception as high as you.
The two things that we hand anyone who's in chronic pain
is we control your sleep and we get you to walk more.
We need more movement, non-threatening input into the body.
Those are the first two places.
And if you're in bad backpanks, everyone here
has tweaked their back before, that may be a 30, 30-second loops
around your kitchen island.
That's what you got today, right?
Tomorrow's going to be 31.
And then we're going to go to two laps in a row.
But we really have to start untangling that
and start to appreciate that, for us, we said,
biomotor output was the thing.
That's the thing we could hang our hats on
and supple that we do.
You have full range of motion
and you want a world championship
because you could go faster, move more weight.
And so this pain piece,
we're trying to get people to appreciate pain
does not mean damage, pain does not mean injury,
pain is a request for change.
Clearly, if you got a fever
and there's a bone sticking out of your leg,
something's up.
If you can't,
that would be an injury. Yeah, it would be an injury. Yeah, when you make the case that chronic pain is on is always weakness, right?
Isn't that like really what could be I mean when is when is chronic pain not an example?
First is a cute, right? Yeah, you know, I'm not talking about acute injuries whenever someone has chronic pain
We're gonna see detrained. We're gonna see down regulation the system. 100 weakness somewhere, right?
We can this somewhat breathing nutrition sleep, but the thing gets starts to be, you know, a self-fulfilling
prophecy.
I'm in pain, can't sleep.
Can't sleep, don't move.
Don't move.
Eat more crap, right?
Positive feedback loop.
Right.
It is really a feedback loop.
And if we can start to change that relationship and start to expose people to uncover your
son is walking around on, you know, gnarly surfaces and it's like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh himself and be like, ah, I'm drowning in this pain. You know, for her, she's like, it's Tuesday at four
o'clock. I can handle that. And so we really do start to say, hey, we need some inputs
into this system. So we can start to un-unwally ourselves.
Who did you write the book for? Who is your avatar?
Um, man, I mean, I think it's for
exorcizers and non-exercisers. I mean, you know it's for exorcizers and non-exercizers.
I mean, obviously that means everybody.
But what we saw working with professional athletes and high performers is that those
people maybe got like three or five out of the 10 vital signs that they had some things
going for them that's still quite a few blind spots.
And then, the other population are sort of this avatar
of the person who cares about their health,
but is really time crunching their life
or at least perceives themselves to be time crunched
and feels fire-host and overwhelmed by information
from the fitness business and isn't sure which way is up.
And so, it is for people who care about their health.
I mean, this book was not written for the die hard couch potato.
That's that book.
We can't move you.
Yeah, we don't know how to reach into that audience.
But for people who care about their health,
who are sort of interested, curious about longevity,
who want to feel better in their bodies.
And for those people, we want to prove
that the last decade, particularly in sports and science and sports science and poor performance actually mattered.
Yeah, all this hacking we've been doing on ourselves, like we wanted to say, hey, we've
actually learned some things that we can translate to other people.
Let's, let's talk about some of this because we have done, I think, a really good job of
laying the foundation of like the big rocks, right?
No one really, I mean, we've mentioned the aura ring and whoop and some of these cool tools,
but for the most part, I think we've really laid down the foundation of like the big rocks, right? No one really, I mean, we've mentioned the aura ring and whoop and some of these cool tools, but for the most part, I think we've really laid down
the foundation of like the shit that really moves the needle,
what matters most first before we start stacking on
all these cool toys.
But I would love to hear because you guys are both athletes
at the core, worked with all kinds of professional athletes.
So I imagine you've probably messed with damn near every
red light, cold plunge sauna
whoop every toy that's out there. What are some of the ones you like and why?
Like what like I know you I know you guys are big fans of Ryan and the cold plunge
We have the same cold plunge here. It's been actually life-changing for me to yeah
So it's been a big thing for me
So what are some things that you guys have toyed around with that you guys
that really like as far as some of the tools and hacks on top of what we've laid already
as far as the foundation?
I mean, I think for me, I would share what you said about the plunge. For me, it would
be the combination, it would be the sauna and the plunge. I mean, those two things in
combination. And one of the side benefits of the sauna in particular,
and the plunge, is that we've turned it
into like a community function.
So talking about that time with your wife
where you have this unencumbered,
undisconnected time to connect with other people,
we invite people over to sit with us in the sauna
and the sauna's become like part of almost every dinner party
we have, like most people come to dinner
or like, hey, show up at four o'clock for dinner on Saturday.
We're gonna drive you to the show.
And then we're gonna sit in the psalm and we're gonna go back and forth between the plunge
and the psalm, and, you know, man, we've had some of the best connections and conversations
with our friends and family and with each other just sitting in the psalm.
So, and that's not to mention all of the reasons we know from science, why both those things
are really good for us.
But those two things I would say have been, you know, the most fun.
We've been the most consistent in doing them and incorporating them into our lives.
And just like, it's been a net positive, the plunge and the sauna.
I tend to be a little more of a luteite sometimes around some of this tech.
It's fun to see it, you know, how useful is it? And I always ask the question, does it scale? How, you know, does it work
at one person? Do I need 20, 40 of these 10 dough units? Because I have a bunch of kids. So suddenly,
some technology is great, but it's less effective. I think for me, the bedrock to being 100
years old and rad is sleep. That is the thing that I protect against, worry about,
sess on. And there's this thing called, our friends made by SleepMeg called a doc pro.
It used to be called a chili pad. We were okay. We were. We talk about one of the hacks.
Oh my god. Chains are like, and I love like saving marriage. My wife is at 85 degrees. I'm at 55
degrees. So we don't have the fight to mature the house. So it's made our marriage better. I love like saving my life. Married, my wife is at 85 degrees, I'm at 55 degrees,
so we don't have to fight for the temperature in the house.
So it's made our marriage better and my sleep better.
You can see suddenly we've given people as a filter
to sort of understand all of these things.
Is this, you know, like people are like,
what do you think about which of the best protein?
I'm like, well, it's the whole food.
And if you can't get whole food,
then let's add a protein shake in there
so you hit your protein minimums.
And so some of the people are like,
oh, okay, it doesn't matter what protein I have,
I'm just like, yeah, I wanna get you up to this minimum.
So when you start to view it through those lenses,
then suddenly my eye mask, for me, is really important.
I've trained myself to see if I'm on the eye mask
because my flashing toothbrush light will wake me up
in the night or my daughter's leaving a TV on
or something that wakes me up, but that eye mask is it's one of those pieces but it's all filtered around how do I get a better
result from the sleep. Yeah I have one of those. I tell you guys a quick story about the chili pad.
Princess masks. I tell you guys a quick story about the chili pad. So you know there's that
section in between like his and hers and it's we, we call it the DMZ, like between North and South Korea, right?
It's like the DMZ.
The DMZ, yeah, so that's like the DMZ.
And we have this, I think we've mentioned it a few times
because he's really impactful in our life,
but we have this 15 year old Geriatric Cat
who's just like, he's like a maddled man all the time.
But one of the things we're convinced he does on purpose
is he gets up on our doc prose.
Like a nose. And every so often, he turns up our doc prose
to 115 degrees in the middle of the night.
He can turn it up on his pot.
He can turn it up with a stonk, a stance on it.
And so that's the only time you'll find me over
in the DMZ is that sometimes the act of reaching over
to turn it back down is too much.
So it's just easier to move into the DMZ,
but otherwise we're like in our own little universe.
We call that the sex zone for our house.
It's the only place where sex is happening.
It happened over in Norway.
It's still over there.
It happened over there.
Yeah, Jamaica, it's way too fucking hot.
That's the sex zone right there.
I think, you know, how are we helping people identify, you know, what is successful?
How do you win health?
I think it's a good question, right?
Because that's how we're playing this game.
You know, you're just going to win, you win fitness, and that's how we've kind of presented
it.
Three tips.
You took your shirt off, you had the, the bro, all your, you know, the thirst trap, you
know, and then you just retire and you walk away
you know so I think you know things should be tracking in your blood panel you know you should be
feeling better you should be able to do the things you want to do and these objective measurements in
the book really do give you ways to have clear lines of above and below and they're they're pretty
reasonable but I think that's really the question is,
how do we know what's working?
Well, we've established some benchmarks for you,
but also what's important to you?
And are you better able to do the things you care about?
Because that's really quality.
That's ultimately how we sell
for nutrition to people, right?
They're like, wow, I was able to do more work
and my bi-composition changed.
What is it you are saying?
You know, give me more of that. Well, and our feeling composition changed. What is it you were saying? Give me more.
Well, and our feeling on all this technology and tools
is we love them and we're users of them,
but our sort of general view out into the public
is like, do the basics first.
The cake, maybe wait to spend your hard earned money
on a doc pro or chili pad,
until you've at least tried to get eight hours of sleep.
Like, are you laying in bed for nine hours
to get out or sleep?
Let's do the basics first. And then once you've checked the tried to get it hours of sleep. Like, are you laying in bed for nine hours to get out of your sleep? Let's do the basics first.
And then once you've checked the box on the basics,
like then it's a time when you can go explore
some of this more complicated, optimizing fitness stuff.
I want to call on everyone who,
if you're listening to my pump,
you're interested in all of this.
This is your jam.
It's a hobby, you're a dilatant, you're interested,
you're listening to this, you'll listen to your guests,
and then track them down.
But you are an important node in your family
because you have family members who are overweight
or on blood pressure medicine.
And the only person they're gonna listen to is you.
They're not getting, the physician is not set up for it.
The physician has six to eight minutes
to help someone untangle a common problem. Right? That's incomplete. And so we think that if we can sort of deputize
our fitness, health, performance, friends to say, hey, look, this is for the neighbor.
This book is for my auntie. This is for, you know, the person who I work with. I think
we can really start to sort of leverage the potential of all of this experiment that
we've all been part of.
Totally agree.
I love all the tech things that enhance the core things that we talk about, which is
also why I brought that up and I loved the way you answered it because what you didn't
do is you didn't spout off the science that's connected to recovery from like the, like
he chocked proteins.
And it's like, there there's like there's a movement
Right now
I don't know if you guys see it in our community in this fitness community right now that is you know because the course
Of course the cold plunge is taking off in the last you know a couple years
It's getting huge and now it's become very trendy. Thank you
And now there's counter the counter message of like well the science says that when it comes to recovery and muscle
They're gonna build as much muscle. Yeah, you won't build as much,
so it's like, stop.
First of all, you guys are arguing.
My legs, bro, stop.
Yeah, you're arguing over the wrong things.
You did.
I left 225.
Yeah, and so I love the way you guys even communicate
those tools is if it's enhancing my sleep,
if it's enhancing my relationship with my spouse,
if it's enhancing the way I make better choice around food,
my foot, I mean, those are the stuff that I love.
And then, and you have to decide for yourself,
is this, you know, over complicating my fitness journey,
or is it enhancing it and improving it?
And if it's hitting on those core things
that we've talked about the, you know,
the first hour and a half, like, to me, like,
that's, that's those things are valuable.
Here's why I think you, yeah,
when you guys have written so valuable,
it's because you're both really obviously
very, very smart people,
but for a long time,
you've worked with everyday regular people.
So you know what the books and the literature says,
but you know it works in real life and how to apply it.
And if you don't have both of those, it just doesn't work.
So really appreciate you guys coming on the show.
Do a good job with that.
I just thought it was so funny.
Absolutely.
Yeah, good nerds.
Yeah. You're good. Likewise. Although I think guess I'm having a nice, absolutely great job. Yes, good guys. Yeah, good guys.
Yeah.
Likewise.
Although, I think, so I think we did a very good job.
I mean, no, I don't think that we talked over.
We didn't argue and debate studies.
I mean, sometimes I feel like that's what our space loves to do.
You know, is they love to get in a debate of,
it's an artifacts of scholarship.
That's a feature.
Yeah.
But it's not the only feature.
It's not the only important feature.
100%. Thanks again, guys. Thank you guys only feature. It's not the only important feature.
100% thanks again guys. Thank you guys so much.
Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body,
dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance,
check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at Mind Pump Media dot com.
The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballac, maps performance and maps aesthetic.
Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically
transform the way your body looks, feels and performs.
With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Superbumble is like having
Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal
trainers, but at a fraction of the price.
The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can get it now plus other valuable
free resources at MindPumpMedia.com.
If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review
on iTunes
and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family.
We thank you for your support and until next time, this is Mind Pump.