The Optimal Mobility Protocol for a Durable Body | Dr. Kelly Starrett

Posted on May 4th 2026 (11 days)

exercise heat stress cold stress development muscle breathing technique strength performance sleep nutrition

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In this episode, Dr. Rhonda Patrick sits down with Dr. Kelly Starrett to talk about what modern fitness gets right, what it gets wrong, and how to build a body that is durable, adaptable, and useful in real life.

Kelly frames the current moment in fitness as a kind of third wave, where people are finally starting to ask what really matters, instead of getting lost in trends, metrics, and overly decorative systems. For most people, he argues, the goal is not to become better at exercise for its own sake, but to build a body you trust—one that can move well, recover well, and keep doing the things you love for a long time.

The conversation covers pain science and warmups, hip and shoulder mobility, breathing mechanics, training philosophy, recovery tools, desk ergonomics, and the growing problems in youth sports.

How to Deal with Pain

"Pain does not always mean that you are injured. We want everyone to recognize that pain is a request for change."— Kelly Starrett Click To Tweet

Pain does not automatically mean injury. Kelly describes pain as a "request for change" and compares it to a check-engine light. In other words, it is information. It may be asking you to pay attention, but it is not always proof that something is structurally damaged.

Pain is heavily shaped by context, including sleep, stress, training load, nutrition, range of motion, and even whether you properly warmed up or not.

That framework leads into a larger pain-science point: pain is ultimately interpreted by the brain. The tissues send signals, but the brain decides whether those signals are threatening. This means pain can often be modulated—changed, softened, and worked around without pretending it is not real.

In contrast to pain, an injury is usually easier to identify because there is often a clear mechanism, a dramatic loss of function, or obvious medical red flags. If you cannot work, cannot perform your normal role, or you have signs of a true medical problem, that is a different category. But for many nagging shoulder, elbow, knee, or back issues, the body is often asking for better inputs rather than complete shutdown.

Kelly's approach to working through pain includes a few recurring tools, most of which target blood flow, tissue decongestion, and range of motion.

Desensitization

A few of the techniques that Kelly highlights in this episode converging on the goal of reducing the over-sensitivity we perceive as pain include:

Kelly demonstrating a VooDoo floss protocol for the elbow. From Youtube.com/@TheReadyState

Scraping, a soft-tissue technique that uses a tool to apply pressure across the skin and underlying tissue, with the goal of reducing sensitivity and improving how an area feels and moves.
Massage, which applies hands-on pressure to muscles and connective tissue to reduce tension, improve circulation, and calm down sensitive areas.
Cupping uses suction to lift the skin and superficial tissues, which may help reduce local sensitivity and change how tight or "congested" an area feels.
Percussion involves rapid, repeated mechanical pressure (often with a massage gun) to stimulate tissues and temporarily reduce soreness or stiffness. It can be used before movement as a prep tool or after training to help an area feel less irritated.
Isometrics are muscle contractions performed without visible movement at the joint (e.g., holding a squat or pausing in a lunge). They're useful because they can build tolerance, reduce pain sensitivity, and help the brain feel safer in a position without requiring a lot of motion.

Decongestion

Kelly highlights these tools as ways to reduce tissue irritation and improve tissue quality:

Walking is one of the simplest ways to improve circulation, reduce stiffness, and help move fluid through the body after training or long periods of sitting.
Sauna uses heat to increase blood flow, promote relaxation, and help tissues feel less stiff and sensitive.
Compression uses external pressure (through sleeves, boots, or garments) to help move fluid and reduce the feeling of swelling or heaviness in tissues.
NMES refers to neuromuscular electrical stimulation. It uses electrical impulses to create muscle contractions, which can help improve circulation and reduce tissue stagnation.
Lymphatic work refers to techniques that help move lymph fluid through the body, which may reduce swelling and improve how tissues feel. This can include light manual work, movement, or other recovery strategies that support the body's natural drainage system.
VooDoo Floss involves wrapping a thick elastic band around each joint or muscle group while moving it through range of motion (you can find a video demonstration of Kelly using VooDoo Floss on The Ready State YouTube Channel).

Foam rolling

Kelly's take is that foam rolling is useful, but only when used intelligently. He says it can help improve range of motion, increase blood flow, desensitize painful areas, and reduce soreness, but it is not a cure-all. Two questions matter:

1. Can you breathe while doing it?

2. Can you still control the tissue by contracting and relaxing?

If the pressure is so intense that you stop breathing or lose control, it is probably too much. He also prefers a more thoughtful approach rather than endless rolling. Work above and below the painful area, pair the soft tissue work with breathing, and use it as a way to create a window for better movement. Soft tissue work may be especially beneficial in the evening as a "state-change practice," something that can shift the nervous system and help people downregulate.

How (and Why) to Warm Up Properly

"A warm up is about reminding the brain of fundamental movement patterns. We are trying to get hot and sweaty. We are trying to wake up the nervous system."— Kelly Starrett Click To Tweet

Most people have never really been taught what a proper warmup is supposed to accomplish.

Foam rolling. From TheReadyState.com

It is not just about increasing heart rate. A good warmup should help you do several things: feel better, prepare for movement, wake up the nervous system, shift blood flow, and let you assess who you are that day.

Kelly talks about using the warmup to ask simple but important questions:

1. How tired am I?

2. How springy am I?

3. What feels stiff?

4. What feels available?

In that sense, the warmup becomes a self-assessment tool rather than just a ritual. It's a chance to remind the brain of fundamental movement patterns and to safely explore positions and shapes. That is why jumping, rope work, simple cyclical movement, and movement prep that actually resembles the training to come are some of the most effective ways to warm up.

The point of a warmup is not merely "injury prevention." That framing is not very useful or motivating. A better frame is that a proper warmup helps you get more work done, feel less discomfort while doing it, and end the session less stiff afterward. Kelly tries not to give athletes the exact same warmup every day. He likes to keep athletes curious and engaged. The warm up is a place where play and variation still matter.

The Morning Spin-Up

For people who do not have much time, Kelly recommends beginning the day with some kind of "spin-up." He mentions a hip spin-up, shoulder spin-up, or breath spin-up as simple ways to get movement into the body before the day runs away from you. They can be especially helpful on days when a full workout may not happen. The idea is to get some movement, range of motion, and nervous system activation early in the day.

Hip spin-up

The hip spin-up was inspired by yoga's sun salutation (but meant to be more athletic). The purpose is to take the hips through fundamental positions of flexion and rotation, touch end-range tissues, add a few isometric pauses, and make the spin work together with the hips. It requires no equipment, can be scaled, and is meant to be a quick way to check that you're accessing full ranges of motion that your body should be using regularly.

The hip spin-up. From TheReadyState.com

Breath spin-up

The breath spin-up is a short breathing practice meant to mobilize the trunk, wake up the diaphragm (the primary breathing muscle), and shift your state. Breathwork is a way to make the rib cage and trunk more compliant, which can improve the function of your shoulders and help you feel less stiff and more prepared to move. Examples of breath spin-ups include a 10-second inhale followed by a max breath hold and then nose-only recovery breathing, repeated every minute; or a long maximal exhale followed by breathing only as needed while you keep moving.

Shoulder spin-up

The shoulder spin-up is a simple upper-body reset meant to keep the shoulders from getting stiff and neglected, especially in people who sit at desks or lift weights regularly (or both). This can be as simple as moving through fundamental shoulder shapes with arm swings, rotation, and overhead positions. Rope flow is a similar option because it takes the shoulders through lots of diagonal and rotational patterns and works well as fast preparation before training.

The idea is not that any of these spin-ups replaces training, but that it changes the baseline. If you have already moved a little in the morning, moved more during the day, and built in some variability at work, then you are not showing up to your workout going from zero to sixty.

(You can find Kelly's entire 10-minute full-body morning mobility routine on The Ready State website.)

Hip Mobility and the Sit-and-Rise Test

"Your ability to get down onto the floor and back up tells us a lot about your movement choice, your ability to solve movement problems, and your ability to modulate your balance."— Kelly Starrett Click To Tweet

Many people train hard without ever really asking what the hip should be able to do. Kelly points to a few simple standards. Most people should be able to:

Squat with the hip crease below the knee.
Stand on one leg and pull the other knee above ninety degrees.
Get down to the floor and back up again without obvious compensation.

That leads into one of Kelly's core assessments—the sit-and-rise test, which has been associated with longevity and mortality risk. He cites a study published in 2025 in the European Journal of Cardiology that followed 4,282 adults aged 46–75 for a duration of 12.3 years.^[1]

Death rates rose sharply as sit-and-rise scores worsened, from 3.7% among people scoring 10 to 42.1% in the lowest score group (0–4).
Compared with a perfect score, the lowest sit-and-rise test group had a 3.84-fold higher risk of natural-cause death and a 6.05-fold higher risk of cardiovascular death.

Here's how to do it: stand up and cross one foot in front of the other and sit down onto the floor in a cross-legged position without holding onto anything (unless you feel very unsteady). From the same position, rise up off the floor without placing your hands or knees on the floor or using anything for support. For balance, lean forward with your hands outstretched.

Scoring the sit-and-rise test (from Chapter 1 in Built to Move):

Start with 10 points, then subtract one point for each, if you: braced yourself with a hand on the wall or other surface; placed a hand on the ground; touched your knee to the floor; supported yourself on the side of your legs; lost your balance.

10 points is the gold standard. This means you have a good range of motion in your hips and are strong in the other mobility essentials.
7–9 points means that, with a little practice and attaining better balance or hip flexibility, you're close to scoring a perfect 10.
3–6 points means you have a lot of room for improvement. Prioritize the sit-and-rise test, which will help you improve the range of motion in the hips you might be lacking.
0–2 points means getting up and down from the floor is very difficult for you. But that's not a reason to be discouraged. Improve your leg and trunk control as well as balance and hip range of motion by habitually getting up and down from the floor and engaging in targeted mobilization exercises.

How to perform the sit-and-rise test. From TheReadyState.com

The sit-and-rise test is not some magical longevity predictor, but it is a useful proxy. It tells you about movement options, hip flexion, balance, coordination, and your ability to solve movement problems. Simple mobility assessments like this should not sit outside training. They should be part of training. The test can reveal the limitation, and the practice can also become the tool that improves it.

Floor culture

In cultures such as Japan, sleeping on the ground, toileting on the ground, and eating on the ground expose people to positions that much of modern life avoids. These environments may help explain lower fall risk and less osteoarthritis (some studies have observed that rates of hip osteoarthritis are 80–90% lower in older Chinese adults than in white adults from the U.S.)^[2] because the body continues to touch and load important shapes. Floor sitting is one of the simplest ways to restore this in modern life.

Sitting cross-legged, kneeling, side-sitting, or sitting with the legs straight out forces people to access more hip and knee range of motion and practice changing positions. It also keeps the ability to get up and down from the floor alive, which becomes increasingly important with age.

In fact, range of motion is one of the few physical qualities that does not have to decline simply because you age. It will change if you stop using it, but it is not destined to disappear.

Since one of the biggest reasons older adults end up in care settings is the loss of independent "floor transfers," Kelly sees floor sitting as a competence habit. He suggests using family movie time or evenings at home as a chance to sit cross-legged, kneel, side-sit, or rotate among a few different floor postures. You can even work on the floor with the right set up.

Upper-Body Mobility

"People are not very competent putting their arms over their head anymore. But that is because their life does not ask them to do that."— Kelly Starrett Click To Tweet

The lower body has a "built-in decongestion system" because walking moves fluid and blood through the legs easily.

The upper body, by contrast, often stays stuck. People spend hours in a narrow set of positions (e.g., sitting at a desk), and then layer hard upper-body training on top of that. Since the body responds to training by building stronger connective tissue "containers," people can get stiffer and more fibrotic if they never restore range of motion.

Kelly recommends daily shoulder motion in simple forms: arm swings, shoulder spin-ups, rope flow, and time spent in fundamental overhead and rotational shapes. He also emphasizes that trunk and rib mechanics are inseparable from shoulder function. If the rib cage is stiff and the trunk is collapsed, the shoulder blades do not move well, and overhead movement becomes compromised.

Arm circles are part of Kelly Starrett's upper-body mobility routine. From 'Deskbound' (2016)

The shoulder does not need to be thought of as infinitely complicated. It goes overhead, in front, to the side, and behind the body, with rotation layered on top. Internal rotation (moving the shoulder in toward the center of the body) is one of the motions many people lose, especially if the shoulder has to cheat by rolling forward instead of actually rotating well. That compensation can place the biceps, labrum, rotator cuff, and surrounding structures in poor positions.

Frozen shoulder and perimenopause

The musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause is a term introduced by Dr. Vonda Wright and colleagues in 2024 to describe the cluster of musculoskeletal changes that often emerge as estrogen declines during the menopause transition.^[3]

More than 70% of women experience musculoskeletal symptoms during the menopause transition, and about 25% are disabled by them.
The syndrome includes musculoskeletal pain, a loss of lean mass and bone density, osteoarthritis progression, and increased tendon and ligament injury risk, which (unfortunately) are often overlooked or treated as complaints unrelated to menopause.

Dr. Wright and colleagues argue that grouping these symptoms helps clinicians recognize them earlier and manage them more holistically. If tendon pain or a frozen shoulder appears in midlife without an obvious explanation, hormones should be considered part of the story. For some women, the hormonal environment is an essential part of what changed. The conversation should be about both local tissue quality and the broader physiological context.

Breathing and Breath Work

"One of the easiest ways we can change state is by being a little bit more conscientious about our breathing."— Kelly Starrett Click To Tweet

Breathing efficiency is a skill, and many people live in a shallow, limited breathing pattern without realizing it. Breathing mechanics influence trunk mobility, shoulder blade function, performance, and even pain. If the rib cage is stiff and the trunk cannot move well, breathing becomes constrained, and other systems start to suffer with it.

Kelly draws on work from yoga, breath training, and free-diving to make the case that one of the easiest ways to change state is to change how you breathe.

He describes a protocol borrowed from French free divers that involves a ten-second inhale, a maximum breath hold, and then nose-only recovery breathing, repeated every minute.
He also gives a simpler version built around long maximal exhales followed by breathing only as necessary.

These drills help improve CO2 tolerance, expose the nervous system to stress in a controlled way, and encourage fuller use of the trunk and diaphragm (see below for a quick way to assess your own CO2 tolerance).

He says he likes his athletes to have seven hypoxic events before competition, which is his way of helping them rehearse discomfort before it matters. Breathing drills do not have to live in a separate bucket. If you are already on the bike warming up, that can be the place to practice them. If you are walking, you can integrate them there—it's a way to stack behaviors instead of making breathing one more thing on a giant wellness checklist.

Many people think they are limited by strength when in reality they are limited by poor oxygen management and repeated breath-holding. That is why Kelly likes using planks as a simple teaching tool. Most people immediately stop breathing or shift into tiny shallow breaths once the trunk is under load, and that reveals a skill problem. Learning to maintain more complete breathing under load becomes a useful bridge to better bracing and better lifting.

The breath-hold test

In Built to Move, Kelly outlines a simple way to test your CO2 tolerance—the Breath Hold Test or Body Oxygen Level Test (BOLT). The test involves holding your breath until you feel an urgent and compelling need to take in more air. It can give you a fairly good idea of your ability to endure higher CO2 levels and set a benchmark to improve on. The test is simple: 1) inhale normally through your nose while sitting or standing calmly; 2) exhale normally through your nose and pinch your nostrils shut; 3) hold your breath until you feel the need to breathe. Your score is the number of seconds you held your breath:

10 seconds or fewer means your CO2 tolerance is below normal… you need some work to catch up.
10–20 seconds is a good starting place but indicates you might need to work on your ability to deal with discomfort.
20–30 seconds means you're getting close to normal.
30–40 seconds is considered normal.

Why Leisure-Time Activity and 'Play' Matter

"We should train for life. Not live to train."— Kelly Starrett Click To Tweet

Adults do not play enough, and this is a major missing ingredient in modern fitness.

Leisure-time movement—whether it is tennis, pickleball, surfing, cycling, dancing, hiking, or anything else a person actually enjoys—has value beyond calories and heart rate zones. It keeps movement social, skill-based, variable, and intrinsically rewarding.

The gym is not the only place where health happens. In fact, some of the worst forms of specialization happen when exercise gets stripped down into isolated capacity metrics that do not meaningfully connect to how someone lives. Part of the problem with modern exercise culture is that people are training for bone density, VO2 max, or body composition, which all matter, but they forget that exercise used to be connected to something outside the gym.

Kelly wants to reconnect people to the question, "What am I training for?"

In his view, training makes more sense when it serves a sport, a hobby, a life role, or some form of real-world usefulness. Many people have a tendency to treat exercise like a commodity or a checklist that must always be optimized. He is skeptical of rigid models that try to plan every training load weeks in advance despite the fact that real life includes work stress, travel, deadlines, illness, family responsibilities, and changing energy. He would rather people understand relative load, relative readiness, and the context of the day than try to force every session into a perfect plan that no longer fits their life.

Using Hot, Cold, and Movement for Recovery

"Getting really hot once in a while is probably really good for you."— Kelly Starrett Click To Tweet

Movement facilitates recovery. Easy movement like walking improves circulation, helps move waste products, and often makes tissues feel better. Dr. Starrett values that practical experience as much as any theory.

Heat and cold are also powerful recovery modalities.

Sauna, hot tubs, and hot baths are useful as recovery tools, and not just because of their effects on circulation and tissue comfort, but because it also forces people to slow down. Kelly refers to it as an "emergency brake" for high performers who struggle to shift into recovery mode. Even if it is hard to pin down the exact mechanism through which heat exposure works for a given person, if heat makes people feel better, improves blood flow, and supports consistency, that is a meaningful win.

Deliberate heat exposure also increases growth hormone acutely, which raises the possibility that this could support tendons and connective tissue.^[4]

Cold gets a more cautious treatment. Some studies show that cold can blunt exercise adaptations (particularly muscle hypertrophy), which matters if the goal is high-end performance. At the same time, the average person training for health probably shouldn't be too dogmatic about it.^[5]

The broader point is that getting hot and getting cold are both real stressors, and becoming a little more adaptable to both may be useful.

The Problem with Desk Work, and How to Fix It

"The problem with just sitting is that it does not give us a lot of movement choice."— Kelly Starrett Click To Tweet

According to Dr. Starrett, sitting is not inherently bad and standing is not inherently good. The real issue is that humans are designed to move throughout the day, and modern work often traps us in long, unbroken bouts of limited positions. But there are ways to interrupt that.

Sedentary behavior is partly defined by staying below about 1.5 metabolic equivalents (METs; with 1 MET being equal to oxygen consumption or energy utilization at rest). Small changes to one's work environment can shift people out of that category, and one of the biggest changes is a desk setup that creates more movement choice. That can include:

A barstool or perch stool.
Somewhere to put a foot up.
The ability to lean, perch, rotate, or change position rather than simply stand rigidly.

A stool can be used as one option for a standing work station. From 'Deskbound' (2016)

His larger argument is that many of these days should be thought of in terms of inputs. Even if a day is not particularly "exercise heavy," it can still include meaningful movement if it has enough variety. Walking, breathing, sitting on the floor, moving more at work, and doing small bits of mobility can all add up.

(In Deskbound, Kelly and his co-authors provides creative solutions for reducing the amount of time you spend perched on your backside, as well as strategies for transforming your desk into a dynamic, active workstation that can improve your life.)

Movement snacks

Kelly (and his wife Juliet) deserve partial credit for talking about the idea of "movement snacks" well before it became trendy.

Think about daily activity in terms of a movement "vocabulary." If movement were language, how many words are you actually using during the day? Modern life often reduces that vocabulary to sitting, standing, walking a little, and not much else.

Movement snacks are one way of adding more "words" back into the system.

He likes the phrase "never do nothing," borrowed from coach Dave Spitz. The idea is simple but powerful. If the ideal workout is not happening, do something. Walk. Dance for three minutes. Throw a ball. Do a few kettlebell swings. Play with the dog. Get down on the ground and get back up. Sprint the stairs. Insert movement in ways that do not require the perfect plan or the perfect setting.

Research consistently shows that this type of movement is beneficial. Exercise snacks and vigorous intermittent physical activity (VILPA)—short bouts of hard effort spread throughout the day—have been associated with markedly lower cardiovascular, cancer, and all-cause mortality.

For example, in a UK Biobank cohort study of 25,241 non-exercisers followed for about 6.9 years:^[6]

People doing 3 bouts of vigorous activity per day, with each bout lasting about 1–2 minutes, had a 38% to 40% lower all-cause and cancer mortality risk and a 48% to 49% lower cardiovascular mortality risk versus people doing no VILPA.
Doing just 4.4 minutes of VILPA per day was associated with a 26% to 30% lower all-cause and cancer mortality risk and a 32% to 34% lower cardiovascular mortality risk.

But exercise snacks (and any type of movement for that matter) do not need to feel like exercise homework. It's about finding enjoyable, informal ways to add movement into ordinary life.

Nutrition and the '800-gram challenge'

"Humans in America do not eat fruits and vegetables. We like to pretend like we do, but we do not."— Kelly Starrett Click To Tweet

Although nutrition is not the main focus of the episode, Kelly gives a useful snapshot of how he thinks about it: start with what is missing.

One of his clearest targets is getting to 800 grams of fruits and vegetables per day.

This benchmark is associated with work by E.C. Synkowski and is supported by observational research, which has found that risk reductions for cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality occur up to about 800 g/day of combined fruits and vegetables (cancer risk reduction appears to plateau closer to 600 g/day). But most people aren't eating anywhere close to enough fruits and vegetables.^[7]

This target gives people a measurable way to increase nutrient density, fiber, and satiety, while also helping with calorie control in the background. Paired with adequate protein intake, the 800-gram challenge is a way to support connective tissue, muscle, brain function, recovery, and sleep. This helps build a system where people consistently get more of what their body actually needs. Once the basics are covered, the rest becomes easier to navigate.

What does 800 grams of fruits and vegetables look like?

A large apple is 200 grams.
A medium banana is 120 grams.
1 cup of blueberries is 150 grams.
1 large bell pepper is 200 grams.
1 cup of broccoli is 100 grams.
1 cup of spinach is 50 grams.

Youth sports and early specialization

"We need to train parents for the job they are already doing, which is to become the high-performance directors for their families."— Kelly Starrett Click To Tweet

Youth sports have become too expensive, too specialized, too pressure-filled, and too disconnected from what children actually need—Kelly describes the modern system as an "industrial youth sport complex."

Parents are being asked to function as high-performance directors for their families without ever being trained for that role. They are expected to manage sleep, nutrition, recovery, scheduling, psychology, and performance, all while navigating a system that often stops being fun by the time kids reach adolescence. So, how can they manage things better? He offers a few pointers that he uses inside his own family:

Sleep

Kids and teenagers need more sleep, not less, and youth athletes in particular should be thought of as needing at least eight to ten hours. Yet the typical teenager often gets far less, and this is probably one of the biggest hidden drivers of poor adaptation, higher injury risk, and burnout.

Before adding another drill, camp, or training modality, families should ask whether their child is actually sleeping enough.

Fueling

Young athletes are both under-fueled and under-nourished, while relying too heavily on sugar, caffeine, and reactive snack habits. Kelly gives a number of household-level strategies that confront the reality that most families cannot optimize for everything. Among these are:

Making breakfast easier to control (he pre-prepares breakfast for his kids to grab and go).
Building in convenient snacks, and sometimes simply using foods kids will reliably eat after practices or games (he is pro-cereal as a post-practice solution if it gets calories and protein in very quickly).
For picky eaters, he mentions a "three vegetable rule" at dinner: put out three vegetable options and let the child choose.

Movement diversity

Early specialization is already built into the current sports culture, and individual parents often cannot reverse it on their own. But the answer is not more narrow volume. It is making sure kids get movement diversity somewhere. That can mean dance, yoga, gymnastics, martial arts, tumbling, parkour, or basic strength and conditioning. Children need broad movement exposure more than they need extra hyper-specific private lessons.

The problem is that kids no longer spend hours inventing games in the street, climbing, tumbling, and problem-solving physically in the same way previous generations did. This is a real developmental loss, and it's why Kelly values anything that brings back some version of broad, playful, self-organized movement, even if it has to happen through more formal structures now. He strongly favors keeping sport and movement year-round, but not in the sense of year-round specialization. Instead, he wants year-round engagement with movement in some form.

Should children strength train?

Kelly is not opposed to youth strength training, but he does not think the first priority is loading kids heavily. The foundation should be broad motor literacy, not adult-style gym programming scaled down for children.

The first priority is teaching them to move—more crawling, jumping, sprinting, tumbling, climbing, skipping, and body control.
As kids get older, add calisthenics, kettlebell work, barbell instruction, and more formal strength work, especially in middle school and high school.

Rapid-fire questions on youth sports

Q: If you have a 10-year-old soccer player, a 12-year-old swimmer, and a 14-year-old basketball player, what would the first month of training look like for each of them? Would they be similar or different?

A: "They're going to look a lot more similar than they are different. The differences are going to be in load and volume, but the fundamentals are the same. We're doing things like handstands, we're getting upside down, we're doing track-and-field warmups, we're running, jumping, throwing, tumbling. We're making sure they can control their bodies first. That's the base."

Q: What are five exercises or movement practices you would include in almost every youth training program?

A: "I'm less worried about the specific exercises and more about the movement language. But we're jumping and landing—especially on one leg. We're sprinting and accelerating. We're tumbling and getting comfortable being inverted. We're doing basic strength patterns—push, pull, squat, lunge. And we're playing games. If it doesn't look a little bit like play, we're probably missing the point."

Q: What can a parent do at home in 10 minutes a day that would meaningfully improve durability and movement options?

A: "Play a game. That's it. Throw a ball, toss a Frisbee, use a tennis ball, play Spikeball—whatever. You want the eyes, brain, hands, and feet all working together. That's where a lot of this coordination and durability comes from. It doesn't have to be complicated."

Q: What should be removed from a young athlete's program before adding anything new?

"Get rid of the junk. Get rid of the fake sophistication. We've got kids doing all these drills that look science-y but don't actually solve the problem. Too much volume, too much hyper-specific work too early. A lot of kids don't need more—they need better. They need more general movement, not more complicated drills."

Resources

Follow Kelly and Juliet at The Ready State

People mentioned

Zia Rohrbaugh - longtime competitive CrossFit athlete, coach, and owner of CrossFit Counter Culture
Ido Portal - movement teacher and physical culture thinker with a long-running YouTube channel
David Weck - movement inventor, creator of Rope Flow, a rope-based movement practice for coordination, rhythm, rotation, and shoulder mobility, and the force behind WeckMethod on YouTube
Brian Mackenzie - performance coach, breathing educator, and founder of Power Speed Endurance
Laird Hamilton - big-wave surfer, waterman, and host of Camp Laird
Gabby Reece - former pro volleyball player and host of The Gabby Reece Show
Wes Kitts - Olympic weightlifter
Dave Spitz - elite weightlifting coach and founder of Cal Strength
Ben Levine - world-renowned sports cardiologist and FMF guest whose work on exercise and heart aging has shaped many of Rhonda's conversations in this area. See my episode featuring Dr. Benjamin Levine.
Nicole Christensen - longtime CrossFit coach and owner of CrossFit Roots
Dr. Vonda Wright - orthopedic surgeon, leading voice on musculoskeletal aging in women, and host of Hot for Your Health
Katy Bowman - biomechanist and host of The Move Your DNA Podcast
Caleb Marshall - creator of The Fitness Marshall and dance-fitness personality behind its YouTube channel
Andrew Huberman - neuroscientist and host of Huberman Lab. See my episode featuring Dr. Andrew Huberman.
David Epstein - journalist, author of Range, and creator of a YouTube channel that extends many of the same generalist and learning themes
Jeremy Frisch - youth athletic development coach and advocate for play-based training, where kids build athletic skill through games, exploration, and problem-solving rather than overly formal exercise
Erwan Le Corre - founder of MovNat, natural movement educator, and a leading voice on the MovNat YouTube channel
Stuart McMillan - sprint coach and track-and-field performance leader

Books by Kelly and/or Juliet Starrett

Built to Move - a practical guide to everyday mobility, tissue maintenance, and simple movement tests for staying capable
Deskbound - a guide to counteracting the mobility and posture costs of sitting
Becoming a Supple Leopard - a guide to mechanics, mobility, and pain-free performance in training and daily life
Outplay - a guide to helping kids build physical competence through play and varied movement (coming soon)

Books by others

Body by Breath - Jill Miller; a book about how breathing mechanics affect posture, mobility, and tension
The Spinal Engine - Serge Gracovetsky; a book about gait, spinal rotation, and the mechanics of human locomotion
The Comfort Crisis - Michael Easter; a book about how modern comfort reduces challenge, capability, and resilience
Muscles and Meridians - Phillip Beach; a book about fascial lines, gait, and whole-body coordination
The Anxious Generation - Jonathan Haidt; a book about phone-based childhood, social media, and rising anxiety in young people

Apps, programs, and digital resources

Mobility Coach - a place to begin a home mobility practice framed around self-tests, daily mobility work, pain prescriptions, and pre/post-workout mobilizations
Voodoo Floss™ Protocol - follow-along instruction for congestion, swelling, blood-flow work, and simple mobilization techniques using Voodoo Floss
Sit & Rise Protocol - this guide maps onto Kelly's sit-and-rise discussion and focuses on getting down to the floor and back up with confidence
Pain Protocols / Fix Yourself - The Ready State's main library of targeted self-treatment protocols and issue-specific digital guides
The Starrett System - This is Kelly and Juliet's broader 12-week durability, strength, recovery, and longevity program, available in both live cohort and on-demand versions.

^ Soares De Araújo, Claudio Gil; De Souza E Silva, Christina G; Myers, Jonathan; Laukkanen, Jari A; Ramos, Plínio Santos; Ricardo, Djalma Rabelo (2025). Sitting–rising Test Scores Predict Natural And Cardiovascular Causes Of Deaths In Middle-Aged And Older Men And Women European Journal Of Preventive Cardiology , .
^ Nevitt, Michael C.; Xu, Ling; Zhang, Yuqing; Lui, Li-Yung; Yu, Wei; Lane, Nancy E., et al. (2002). Very Low Prevalence Of Hip Osteoarthritis Among Chinese Elderly In Beijing, China, Compared With Whites In The United States: The Beijing Osteoarthritis Study Arthritis & Rheumatism 46, 7.
^ Wright, Vonda J.; Schwartzman, Jonathan; Itinoche, Rafael; Wittstein, Jocelyn (2024). The Musculoskeletal Syndrome Of Menopause Climacteric 27, 5.
^ Leppäluoto, Juhani; Tapanainen, Päivi; Knip, Mikael (1987). Heat Exposure Elevates Plasma Immunoreactive Growth Hormone-Releasing Hormone Levels In Man* The Journal Of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism 65, 5.
^ Piñero, Alec; Burke, Ryan; Augustin, Francesca; Mohan, Adam E.; DeJesus, Kareen; Sapuppo, Max, et al. (2024). Throwing Cold Water On Muscle Growth: A Systematic Review With Meta‐Analysis Of The Effects Of Postexercise Cold Water Immersion On Resistance Training‐Induced Hypertrophy European Journal Of Sport Science 24, 2.
^ Ahmadi, Matthew N; Doherty, Aiden; Gibala, Martin J.; Gill, Jason M. R.; Hamer, Mark; Stamatakis, Emmanuel, et al. (2022). Association Of Wearable Device-Measured Vigorous Intermittent Lifestyle Physical Activity With Mortality Public Health Nutrition 28, 12.
^ Aune, Dagfinn; Giovannucci, Edward; Boffetta, Paolo; Fadnes, Lars Thore; Keum, NaNa; Norat, Teresa, et al. (2017). Fruit And Vegetable Intake And The Risk Of Cardiovascular Disease, Total Cancer And All-Cause Mortality—A Systematic Review And Dose-Response Meta-Analysis Of Prospective Studies International Journal Of Epidemiology 46, 3.

Why pain doesn't always mean you're injured
How to manage persistent pain without stopping training
Does foam rolling really improve pain and mobility?
Can soft tissue work reduce soreness and help you unwind?
Why soreness isn't proof of a good workout
Is neck pain after overhead pressing a mobility issue?
How to test your mobility at home
The Cindy workout and why it works
What your warmup should actually accomplish
Why "don't get injured" is the wrong warmup goal
What if you don't have time to warm up?
How to maintain hip mobility in minutes a day
The sit-and-rise test for hip mobility
Can the sit-and-rise test really predict longevity?
Why fitness doesn't guarantee mobility
Improving shoulder mobility for desk workers
How much shoulder mobility work do you really need?
Can breath holds help prime and reset the nervous system?
How breathing mechanics affect spinal mobility
Do breath holds improve athletic performance?
Fit vs. sport-ready—what's the difference?
How to breathe during heavy lifts
Can planks help you practice better breathing?
Training for life vs. living to train
How should non-athletes think about training?
Why adults need leisure-time activity
What's really behind your nagging pain?
The couch stretch test for hip extension
How to test shoulder internal rotation
Why do perimenopausal women get frozen shoulder?
Can running benefit recovery after lifting?
Heat or cold for recovery—which and when?
Can heat exposure support tendon repair?
How to make desk work less sedentary
Why is sitting on the ground so important?
Why mobility doesn't have to decline with age
The surprising power of "movement snacks"
Why never do nothing beats all or nothing
Is our culture the real barrier to movement?
Why rucking is such an accessible way to train
Are you getting enough time outside?
Why better nutrition starts with what you're missing
What's gone wrong with youth sports?
Why sleep matters for young athletes
How to manage food and sleep around late practices
Should kids avoid specializing in one sport?
Why unstructured play is essential for kids
When should kids start strength training?
Can martial arts build movement skills in kids?
Why do so many kids drop out of sports?
Sleep, fueling, and pain in young athletes
What if your kid is a picky eater?
Handstands, skipping, and the foundations of youth training
Can simple jumping drills reduce ACL injuries in kids?
How 10 minutes of play can build movement skills
What should young athletes remove before adding more?

This timeline is available in markdown format

Rhonda Patrick: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm really excited to be sitting here with Dr. Kelly Starrett, who kind of sounds cheesy, but, like, I mean, this is 10 years in the making. I feel like. I mean, I've known about your work for a very long time, and it really wasn't until I started to get into CrossFit training that it kind of popped back up into my. My head and my world.

Kelly Starrett: Why? Why is that?

Rhonda Patrick: Why is that? I mean. I mean, you're a legend. You're a legend, Kelly. So I'm super excited to have this conversation with you. And we were kind of chatting about where to start because there's. It's a really hard decision, where to start.

Kelly Starrett: There's so many fun things to talk about. Right?

Rhonda Patrick: So many fun things.

Kelly Starrett: And we're in the. We're in what we're calling the beginning of third wave of fitness and strength and conditioning. Like, first wave, you remember, was like, malt nut power bars, bad heart rate monitors. Second wave is just this. This fever dream over the last 20 years of, like, mass integration and technology and YouTube. And now we're finally saying, okay, well, what can we discard? And. And really, what does matter to us? And I think it's really an exciting time, potentially, where we can say, okay, that was some craziness. We live in these very decorative rooms, like your grandma's room with all the doilies. It's, like, oppressive, and you don't know where to start or where to sit. That's where we've just come from. So now how do we take that pastiche of strength, conditioning, fitness, body composition, bodybuilding, and then say, well, what's important for your kids? How do you have this body that you trust doesn't hurt. It's really. It's a good time.

Rhonda Patrick: Yes. What lessons have we learned? A body that doesn't hurt, that's kind of a great place to start. I mean, I have this question about common mistakes that I would say people that are, like myself, you know, we're intelligent, very much committed, motivated exercisers, and yet we still have this pain. And, you know, we're working out with the pain. What are some common mistakes that, you know, myself and others that are, like me, are making?

Kelly Starrett: Let's frame this. First, that pain doesn't always mean you're injured. Right. We want everyone to recognize pain is a request for change. That's a great place to start. And so you can use it a little bit like a check engine light. So when your knee hurts after that run or that thing you did, don't panic. It's giving you. It's asking, hey, pay attention. And that can be modulated by a lot of features that people are starting to get their hands around. Oh, you're super stressed. Went drinking last night, didn't sleep right. How's your nutrition as starters, much less. We even talked about your range of motion, or did you warm up or did you cool down? Did you just redline like an elite athlete? Because we have access to that now and then sit at your desk the rest of the day, sort of not really having a good adaptation response. So when we begin to pull that, I think the first thing we can start to say is, hey, let's become curious. Let's not catastrophize. Cause it really is like what we expect is, I'm gonna have any pain. It's like when I was 15, my back hurts. It must be rabies. It must be, you know, I've tweaked myself in some way that potentially is gonna be really detrimental and never figured out versus, hey, my body's asking for some input. What tools do I have? And when do I even begin to think, do I need help or not? Because when we ask all the people we work with who's pain free, very few hands go up. And so what we have to do is start to say, okay, maybe pain is a part of the human experience. And we really haven't done a good job talking about it. We've got a good job masking it and certainly medicalizing it. But, you know, what about your kids? When your kid comes home after soccer and she has a painful heel or a painful knee, like, where do we begin to not freak out, out and yet self soothe a little bit? I think that's a really wonderful place to start.

Rhonda Patrick: I. For myself, you know, I. I get this sort of nagging pain. I have one in my shoulder, and I have a little bit, like in the tendon in my forearm. And it's not enough that it's like an injury where I can't work out.

Kelly Starrett: That's right.

Rhonda Patrick: But it's enough where I do feel more limited in my workouts. And oftentimes I'll, you know, with. I work with a coach, as, you know, she's amazing. Zia Rohrbaugh. But, you know, she'll say, okay, well, let's, let's do a different movement today because you're feeling a little bit more pain if you're doing, you know, for example, like heavy deadlifts.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick: But, you know, for someone that has their nutrition pretty much dialed in to the. For the most part, and get enough sleep, you know, so, like, some of the pillars of health are there, and yet you still have the pain. Like, where. Where do you start to look like first?

Kelly Starrett: What a great, great entree. And you're like, I think I'm doing it right. So when I work with people who have persistent pain, chronic pain, which, by the way, nearly all of my athlete friends, all of the pros, everyone I've ever worked with, is basically like, I've never been 100%. Maybe when I was 10 years old, I was 100%. Everything else is working around some discomfort or a tweak. And if you ever play a sport, I mean, God forbid you're gonna get tweaked. Right? The gym is actually the safest place on the planet to really control the variables. So what we can start to say is, well, hey, the first order business is, I don't care what it is. I just don't want to have it right. Just get me back to work. And we can do that through a lot of simple tools called desensitization. Because as everyone knows. Thanks. Large part to this podcast, too. Your brain does not. Your brain interprets what's going on with your body. Your elbow isn't screaming pain. Your brain thinks that that is maybe a threat signal. It's interpreting this symptom, this information as threat. And so what we want, because we have seen all the. Where someone's, like, limping around and beautiful people walk by, the limp goes away, you know, and then they're limping again. And so you can really override these things. And if you've ever been in a fight. Have you ever been in a fight,

Rhonda Patrick: like a physical fight?

Kelly Starrett: Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick: No.

Kelly Starrett: Oh, okay. So the dirtiest secret about fighting is you don't feel any pain while you're fighting. Because your brain is like, that's not important right now. You're going to feel pain after the fight, but during the fight, less pain.

Rhonda Patrick: So does the activation of the sympathetic nervous system play a role in that?

Kelly Starrett: Yes. Yes. And so we can override these things. What we try to say is, hey, what are the tools available to you? Could you scrape? Can you cup? Can you massage? Can you do some isometrics? What about some percussion? Are there some simple ways? We're like, okay, feels better. Let's move. And it creates a window of opportunity for us to move, which is the same tools and techniques we use for all of our teams. Right. We're still going to go out and march, when we define injury, which is something clever, it said, hey, it's not so bad that I need to go get help. That's the marker where suddenly I can't occupy my role in my family, can't do my job right. If your back hurts so bad, you're not going to work, that's a medical emergency, right? All the red flags, Night sweats, dizziness, fever, vomiting, nausea. That seems obvious. Your child has a fever. She's not, you know, doesn't need a voodoo floss her knee. Hey, there's a clear mechanism of injury. I tweaked my. I felt a pop. There's a bone sticking out of my leg, stepped off a curb. Okay, Those are clear indicators that I need to activate the emergency, emergency medical system. Everything else is a feature of training and nutrition and sleep. In fact, we want to treat pain just like loss of range of motion, just like loss of force production. It's just another sort of data like, oh, HRV is off little pain. We should see those as similar in terms of the information they give us, right? Except, you know, you can have crappy sleep and poor recovery and still, you know, but that's annoying. So then we can ask, well, hey, is there some decongestion that could happen in these tissues? Well, suddenly we're like, oh, I understand why it's sauna and walking and compression and Normatec boots and maybe I use an NMES device or lymphatic drainage or voodoo floss. There's a lot of things we could do to facilitate moving congestion, moving, swelling up the chain and clearing it. Because a congested tissue, like, you know, someone has OA in their knee osteoarthritis and they haven't done anything. But the knee has reacted to the loading and maybe the nutrition and the sleep and whatever, and now it's swollen. And so what we're thinking is, hey, the typical person can run around with a congested tissue and that congestion can rate limit healing but also limit blood flow. But also it can very much be the driver of sensitivity. So you can sensitize a tissue by having kind of congestion in an old tissue. Then we could ask, well, what about blood flow? Did it get better once you warmed up? Because, yeah, once you start to warm up, starts to feel better. Ah, that's probably not a problem. That's, you know, the brain saying, hey, let's get some, some blood flow. How do we take the garbage out, bring the groceries in? And the last thing we say is, well, what about the range of motion? Because that never gets us checked. Right. Well, I can do what I want to do well enough. But what if it was that you had a big chunk of missing range of motion? Well, suddenly we could improve that. You can improve that while working on these other systems. And by the time we've worked through that little rubric, chances are your brain's like, eh, it's not a problem. Let's go, lift.

Rhonda Patrick: All right. So when it comes to foam rollers, I mean, it's something that I've heard such mixed data and evidence. And I say heard because I haven't really dived into the literature myself to look at what it says. But you've got real world experience. You know the science. Can foam rolling help you work through, you know, a painful point? How do we do it? Like, what should I be doing?

Kelly Starrett: So. So let's start with that foam roller doesn't solve all the problems. If it solved all the problems, there'd be no problems. We've gotten that message. Right. But you may need a smaller ball, you may need something harder, you might need something that fits your body a little differently. There's no. We always talk in a systems approach that if laying on the ground and rolling back and forth, fixed knee cancer, we would have fixed knee rabies already. Like, we would have solved these problems. The research is clear, though, that can help with range of motion, it can help with blood flow, it can help desensitize painful things. And pretty soon, if we haven't defined our terms, it can be a little sticky. So if I have you laying your quad, your quads on a roller and then contract and relax, that's a very sophisticated thing we're doing there. We're teaching your brain it's safe to develop force in this position. But that's just really a sneaky version of an isometric Again, Right. So suddenly we realize that if I give context to some of the soft tissue work I'm doing, instead of just laying down and hoping, I'm pressing, guess I'm a little bit more thoughtful about, hey, I'm going to work above an area of pain. Work below an area of pain. Recognizing that maybe my calves or my quads could be contributing to knee pain. We find that when people get enough of a dose of something, we tend to say, hey, let's limit this to five minutes per muscle system so you don't overdo it. But we can actually get in there long enough that we can make some change that seems to make a difference. If it's so painful that you're not breathing, you're just signaling threat and contracting all the time. That's no good. So one of the things we like to say to people is hey, let's make sure you can take a breath while you're doing that. So there are two kind of rules that you're never going to overdo. It is if you can breathe, it might be really uncomfortable, but you should breathe, breathe. And number two, you should be able to control, you should be able to contract. So if you're overwhelming your nervous system where you can't have any muscle control, maybe that's a little bit too much. And then, you know, keep in mind that there's a lot of bodyworkers in the world. So either they're scamming us because there are so many massage, Thai, massage, shiatsu, like, or there's something to that. And even if we just said, hey, how about the whole thing is just about locus of control that you get home and you're like, something hurts and I have some agency and control over it. Making long term tissue changes. We gotta load, we need to move, we have to, you know. But this is a powerful tool to get out of pain, restore range of motion, right? To improve blood flow, to downregulate. We like to do the soft tissue work in the evening, for example. So number one, we're already sitting on the ground. But if we do engage in 10 minutes of soft tissue work, we found that that had a huge parasympathetic input like a massage. You never gets up off the massage table and is like, let's fight. Just doesn't happen, right? But a little bit of self massage, you're signaling to the brain, it's safe. You're relaxing, you're touching things that are tight or restricted or restoring how tissues are sliding and gliding. And then we'll get the rest of it tomorrow. And what you'll find is that your brain is like, we sit on the ground, then we do the soft tissue, then we go to bed. Now you're starting to be set up habit. Now you start to downregulate your breathing changes. That's really, really powerful. Soft tissue work is one feature of the whole system. It's not the only feature. Isometrics are really powerful. But what's most important is that we have a range of motion we're trying to improve. And we're doing test retest on that range of motion. Did that restore or you mentioned DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness, work out really hard. You went for a run. That running is Getting those tissues sliding and gliding. Right. Just restoring those free nerve endings, getting fascia to move. I submit that. And the research supports that if you do soft tissue work after heavy training, decrease your DOMS. So is that valid to have less soreness and pain after training? Seems good to me. I'll point two resources for you. There's I think it's flexibility research. Incredible Instagram. Follow all of the science, all of the research really, you know, very clear. And then my friend Brent Brookbush, the Brookbush Institute has written and aggregated so much research about the science of all this that I want to talk about how we have integrated the science into actual practice. That's my expertise. But if you really want go to the Brookbush Institute. There's so much research there about, you know, what these things do, how effective they are, inter-rater reliability, et cetera, et cetera.

Rhonda Patrick: Can you tell me about this misconception that you need soreness to have had a good workout?

Kelly Starrett: Oh, right.

Rhonda Patrick: I mean I've, I had that mentality for I don't even know how long. I mean still battle it. I'm still like, when was it?

Kelly Starrett: I'm not sore enough. How about this? You train and you actually felt good and then you could, I mean move you. Everyone who's a beginner, you're going to be sore. Sorry, sorry, not sorry. You know, you're going to get off the toilet and you're going to, you know, you're going to have, you're going to curse out your coach and these squats. Right? But what we start to see is over time that soreness gets in the way of your performance. Right. Decreased force production. The goal is to have this right adaptation response where we can still go out and perform, but not be so brutalized and sore that we're surprised and it diminishes us. So you don't have to get sore, but we want to have enough of a stimulus to disrupt homeostasis. And your mileage may vary based on your nutrition. Recently found out I was needed to get on an iron supplement. Me. Right? Isn't that interesting? Curious. Was not taking enough Omega 3s. You recently were like, hey, probably need up that I was taking my daily dose. My Omega 3 index not sufficient. Get on the iron, get on the Omega 3s. Guess who gets less sore in his training? This guy. Because you know, we can. So there what my point is that there's a lot of things we can do to mitigate soreness, but just we're gonna do A bunch of work until you're sore. And I think that's progress. That's not progress.

Rhonda Patrick: Right. And also, perhaps you're just using, you know, muscle groups that you don't often use. Right. I mean, that's the other thing.

Kelly Starrett: And more importantly, did all that soreness change your bone density? Did you get stronger? Like, what are your metrics? Like, you're just sore. You did a bunch of work and are sore again, there's no. You haven't moved the needle. You've just created a lot of noise.

Rhonda Patrick: Right. Speaking of soreness, the other thing I wanted to ask you about, and this is a problem I've had for many years, but I also know at least two to three other women who have the exact same problem. And no, it's not frozen shoulder. It's overhead weight. So, like having, like, you know, if you're doing a snatch, I guess, right? Or like, doing weight overhead, whether it's dumbbells or a barbell or anything, that's, you know, weight. And it. Having an. Having a neck problem with it, like, not while you're doing it so much, but, like, the next day, that. That's really persistent. So have you. Do you have any. Is this, like, a mobility problem? Do you know what I'm talking about? Have you heard of this?

Kelly Starrett: Well, first of all, let's say that there's very much technique involved with putting weights overhead as effectively and powerfully as we could. I know you have an excellent coach. Number two is that we might become curious about the fact that, hey, I have tissues that are really fibrotic and stiff. Is there anything we could do about that? So if we just played press and guess, traps feel tight afterwards. Like, let's get you on a roller. Let's get you on a ball. Let's start working, see if we can restore motion to these segments and then run our test again. Does it make us feel better? Then we could also ask, do you have full range of motion overhead? And could be that you're working in positions because you have incomplete overhead position. You can still do it, and it doesn't hurt, but you're not doing it as efficiently. And maybe this signal is one of those things that we could improve that.

Rhonda Patrick: Okay. Yeah. I mean, this is something like, even back when, you know, and I believe

Kelly Starrett: in serial anecdotal empiricism, which is what you described.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, it is. And. And it's even with lighter dumbbells, like, if I do, you know, eight. Eight with each hand. So I'm 16 total overhead presses, you know, and it's like I, I've been avoiding the overhead press because of fear of activating. And it is the traps that get sore and sometimes it even spasms. But it's, it's something that I've now two friends, two girlfriends that have the exact same problem where they can't do overhead pressing.

Kelly Starrett: And how reasonable that you're like, hey, I do this exercise and it hurts me or makes me hurt or I don't feel good afterwards. I'm a little afraid of doing that exercise. Very reasonable to me.

Rhonda Patrick: Well, the neck pain, I mean, it'll be, it'll last, it'll affect my sleep. I mean, then it's like this vicious cycle. So, you know, and I've seen a physical therapist about it and it's kind of like, well, is it a compensation thing where you're like, you know, like you were mentioning, maybe I'm not as full range motion and so something else is tightening up or I'm overcompensating in some other way that's not really being beneficial.

Kelly Starrett: An easy way to start. So number one is I would say, hey, let's start getting you some hanging where your arms are parallel over your head and taking some breaths. And do that. And let's see if we start to expose that overhead position. As we get into complex understanding of movement, we look at start position effectiveness and finish position. So if I'm pressing overhead and I'm starting in a less effective position, then it's really difficult for me to end in a great position. Right. That's why that bottom up kettlebell press forces us to be in a good shape as we press overhead. But if I don't have complete overhead position, my overhead position is here where I have to internally rotate. I'll achieve some overhead like shape. But that's not full position. So even if I'm pressing a barbell out here where I'm not anywhere near full overhead position, I would still check this full overhead position. And it could be that we just don't have as efficient access for whatever reason, because you've had this amazing life and now this movement is highlighting something for us that we can become curious about. Because you should be able to.

Rhonda Patrick: I'm able to do pull up assisted pull ups. Doesn't hurt, doesn't flare up. With the, with that hanging, I'm gonna do more of it. I do hang and it feels good.

Kelly Starrett: I like, yeah, if you're doing pull ups, you're hanging already. You're there.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, I do I do pull ups and I don't have that problem. So it's definitely, you know, we can,

Kelly Starrett: we can constrain it. You know, if I have you put your thumbs backwards then the shoulder by necessity is going to be in a mechanically sort of more effective position where I'm going to have better features of stability. The capsule's wound up, the mechanic of pressing is a little bit better and in situation might even have you. You know, when anyone has pain with a problem, an area or movement, there's two things we can always do. We can always pause if I have A painful range or B, I slow down. So we can slow this down a little bit and ask you to show me that you've got control signal that it's safe to the brain, et cetera. Instead of sort of I'm overhead, right. And I didn't really touch some of those overhead shapes and really use it as a diagnostic. But in this situation I'd be really curious. Again, let's look at your range of motion of that shoulder. I bet that there's some rhyming things that maybe I've got a little restricted because I didn't know and I'm doing all the things and now I'm getting this feedback that this position doesn't always feel good. Once in a while is fine, but if it's happening all the time then we can.

Rhonda Patrick: It's happening. Yeah.

Kelly Starrett: Become curious about it.

Rhonda Patrick: How would a person at home like let's, you know, I'm talking about my problem. But other people have started filling the blank problems.

Kelly Starrett: Only there was an app that had all of these simple movement tests you could do at home.

Rhonda Patrick: And that's what. And that's the app that you have. What's the name of that app?

Kelly Starrett: It's called the Mobility Coach.

Rhonda Patrick: The Mobility Coach.

Kelly Starrett: And the reason what we're trying to do is. So let me lay out for you real quick. Built to Move, we've got really simple pedestrian assessments and some range of motion. These are some things, so entre in. The app has really sophisticated self assessments but easy to do, easy to understand. We're going to look at fundamental ranges and you should see it in the context. You'd be like, oh, I understand why we're doing that. Maybe you don't understand why we're looking at rotation in some of these things. But there are components there and that all belongs in the hand of the user. Then we have a whole host of professional courses where we're much more sophisticated about complete incomplete hands on assessing. But we don't need that for the average person. We should be able to know what our movement minimums are and then start to identify opportunities to work and restore those positions. Because that is really part of the conversation that gets lost in search or in service of performance and wattage. We're not looking at. Did you express normative ranges? Even though the classic strength and conditioning really does ask us to have full range of motion. That's why strengthening classic strength conditioning is all the same. Front squat, back, squat, lunge, pull up, bench. Those are all tests. I've been on every continent except Antarctica. Everyone knows what a push up is. That is our universal expression of shoulder extension in a short lever position. Right. I don't need a bunch of tests. I need to see how well and how much range you have in a pushup.

Rhonda Patrick: I love push ups. My. My favorite workout to do anytime I'm traveling is the Cindy workout.

Kelly Starrett: Oh, isn't that so simple? I've done Cindy more than any other workout in the history of the world. Everyone, Cindy is the best workout.

Rhonda Patrick: We should explain what that is to people.

Kelly Starrett: So it's five pull ups, 10 pushups, 15 air squats. You can do it on the minute, you can do it as many rounds as you want. You have 10 minutes, you have 15 minutes. That body weight volume is excellent. Put a bike on it for two minutes, do a round, put a bike on it, do three rounds. We call it Cindy-ish. And pretty soon you can rinse, wash, repeat that combo forever.

Rhonda Patrick: My favorite Cindy-ish workout for me is like, if I'm in my, you know, like I said, I'm traveling, I'm in a hotel, is I'll do the bodyweight squats and then do push ups and then V-ups. There it is.

Kelly Starrett: And what you've just described is in 20 minutes, 20 minutes, right. You've got tons of exposure, no equipment. Wonderful, wonderful.

Rhonda Patrick: This, we have so many different things that you mentioned to get into in terms of range of motion, you know, the, the blood flow, especially with the tendons, you know. Yeah, blood flow, the tendons. But maybe we can start there with this range of motion and warming up, you know, because I mean, so I work with my coach and thankfully, you know, she knows what she's doing. And so if I hadn't had her, I wouldn't really have known the difference between warming up and stretching. I certainly wouldn't really understand what the goal of warming up is. And you're going to educate me even more. But just from learning through experiencing what she tells me to do. I've realized that it's like, okay, first thing, I'm just kind of like, I do two minutes of just getting my heart rate up first thing. So it's either rowing or jumping rope. And then after that two minutes, then we kind of get into more range of motion. You know, if I'm doing arms, I'll do pass throughs with a pole or we'll do, you know, bodyweight squats first if I'm gonna be squatting that day. And then we go barbell only squats. And I eventually, like, you know, gradually get to the weight that I'm eventually gonna do. But I'm warming up. But I wouldn't have known to do all that if I was just kind of working out on my own.

Kelly Starrett: That's crazy. How did we fail, Dr. Patrick? Where you're like, hey, I'm about to go do this crazy thing, and maybe I just spun on the bike for 10 minutes and I looked around. We just haven't really taught people, hey, here's what it looks like. And theoretically, we should have gotten that in high school when we were still engaged in sports, competitive sports, before we all became rec athletes. But what you see is that there's a real opportunity to help people feel better and prepare for the movement. And don't get me wrong, I think you should be able to sprint down the street, grab a baby out of a burning building, and fight off a tiger like that. Probably not the best expression of your physiology in those moments, but we should be able to do those things cold, right? But when we start to look around, we start to see that most people aren't treating their warmup as a chance to feel better. Who am I today as I show up at this gym for this thing? Because your range of motion is a little bit of a moving target, and it's like a credit score, one of our friends says. And so you're sort of touching base with, how tired am I, how springy am I? What's going on? You're getting to know this carcass today, right? And that might mean, hey, you know, I just. You are flying all over the place. Suddenly you're a little bit stiff from that plane ride. Your squatting doesn't feel the same. So we're trying to remind the brain of fundamental movement patterns. We're trying to get hot and sweaty. We're trying to wake up the nervous system. You are doing this jumping, which is activating. You're getting hot and sweaty. You're shifting blood. There's a Lot of things that can happen. But also we see that this is a great opportunity to add in some movement and wait for it play. Right. You can explore positions and shapes safely here. Tell your brain if I end up in this shape later on, it's going to be safe. Some of those pass throughs there, we're starting to see rope flow. Kind of some of these physical culture ideas from people like Ido Portal, Fighting Monkey, we're bringing those things back into our warmups. And a simple way to ask this is if we treated your warm up, your workout like it was a fight. You and I are going to fight. What does our warmup look like? It does not look like I'm laying on the ground doing some foam rolling, right? Like you're jumping rope and getting hot and prepping yourself and doing some hypoxic work and breathing and activating and integrating with the people. You're like, we're about to fight. Like, that's a really nice sort of rubric for am I prepared or have I used this warmup as an opportunity to be like, I am not good today. I'm just going to take it easy. Right. I can use it as a self assessment. So that's what we try to do in the warmup. It sometimes it gets a little bit watered down. As a coach, I try to not do the same warmup every single day. I try to keep my athletes guessing. I want them to be entertained, I want them to be curious. And that's a real opportunity to put some of these things we see on the Internet. Hey, that looks like fun. Let me try that as part of my warmup.

Rhonda Patrick: How much does doing a warmup that's properly a warmup play a role in helping with injury prevention?

Kelly Starrett: Well, I think from a simple idea that we have a chance to prime and remind our brains that movement is a skill. Right. I, I sometimes we have like, we're like, all movement is good, right? It's all like the movement. Optimists are like, it doesn't matter what you do. And we're like, well, from a, from injury, which is not what we're trying to do. We're never on this track of, hey, let's warm up so we don't get injured. I think that's kind of a fool's errand. And like, it's not really inspiring. Don't get injured. Like, well, I'm not injured. You know what's going to happen that I'm going to get injured. Instead we think, hey, we can actually get more work done, we can feel better as we do it, we have less discomfort as we do it. And what we tend to see is we don't get as stiff afterwards. And so oftentimes when we're trying to compress a lot of really dense work into a little time, we don't leave permission for us to really get tissues hyperperfused like blood flow ready to go. If the first motion you do is push the sled and you tear your Achilles, I'm like, well, that tissue wasn't as prepared maybe as it could have been. Maybe we could have missed mitigated some of these aches and tweaks. Maybe some of those insertions of those connective tissues weren't so friable and dry like the rotator cuff, for example. It just takes a minute. It's like hard packed earth. And if you just take a exercise which is like a hoe is blasting on hard back to earth, the water doesn't really soak in. Takes a second for those tissues to really become well perfused. And then you might have better range of motion. And more importantly, you'll have better power, better work tolerance. And then afterwards there's all these models exist already. Like the Soviets used to say, if you leave the gym stiff, you're going to be stiff. I think if we take a look at some of our movement traditions, people have been training and thinking seriously about this for a long time, but we have sucked the joy out of the and the potential out of potentiation out of warmup for sure. But to your point, when we're dripped in sweat. So I coach at Cal Berkeley and I travel with the women's water polo team. So I'm their performance director. And our joke is like, I'm the health coach, right? And sometimes that means I hand out snacks and sometimes that means I'm doing mobility work. I'm helping them manage pain, but I also run the warmups and the sort of amongst other things. And we'll be battling another team. That team has their coats on and they're real stiff and not really trained to each other. Our women are down to their sports bras. We are battling and fighting, ready to go. And I'm like, which team do you want to be part of here, right? And so we can really use that warm up time to connect, play, integrate, have fun and perform better because those tissues are better ready to go.

Rhonda Patrick: I sometimes do a really short. I don't have, if I don't have a lot of time, I'm traveling or I have to get to a podcast or something. And I know I need to get, like, my blood flow up for at least 10 minutes. Like, it's important for me. Love that cognition.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick: You know, it doesn't matter what I do.

Kelly Starrett: Changing your state. I'm transitioning to now going from brain to, you know, meat.

Rhonda Patrick: Right. But sometimes I'll get on my Peloton and I'll do two back to back tabatas. So it's like a. It's a 10 minute, 2 to 1 ratio. 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, 30 second recovery in between. But I don't warm up before I get on that bike, and I do that. And what I'm hearing from you is like, even that type of, you know, hyperperfusion, as you called it, like, where you're getting. All of a sudden you're going from nothing to boom, you're getting that blood flow up, man, you're going hard, needs a warmup.

Kelly Starrett: Well, what we could start to say is, are we trying to meet all of your movement needs? Only by the time we get there. So what we can start to say is, well, what does the rest of the day look like? Because if you're just going from sitting to more sitting, and we have a little, like, that's already great. You're getting your heart rate up, you're starting to breathe. We could, we could put in breath holds there. We could do hypoxic work there. We could, we could, you know, you just taking the resistance out and going fast could be a really great way of, you know, priming yourself the. I think the key here, though, is what if we had a little movement first thing in the morning? What if, like, we do a thing that we kind of give people three options. We're like, hey, as a place to start, I would like you to do the hip spin-up, the shoulder spin-up, or a breath spin-up before you leave the house. Because if the day gets away from you and you can't train or you can't exercise, we want to have said, well, what does a physical day look like for a person? How do we get more movement in throughout the rest of the day instead of just saving it up? Because what I really like to do is recognize that you're a busy working human and that if we had a little bit of hip prep in the morning, we worked at a desk that gave us movement choice. Maybe we sat on the floor, maybe we sat at the computer, we walked around a little bit at lunch. Then by the time I actually got to my workout, I'm not going from zero to 60. I'm going from 40 to 60 because I've prepared my body a little bit more. Maybe that's a great way to sneak it in. And the rest of the thing is, hey, when we have the opportunity to do a better thing, fine. Sometimes I'm at the airport and I grab a fruit bucket, a $17 cup of grapes, and two horrible eggs. That is really not, not great food. But it's gonna do today and now we'll get the rest of it tomorrow. We're not worried about it. The main thing is I love that you are thinking about this as a physical practice. And hey, there's nothing wrong with taking the first five sets under the bar and taking your time and just moving slowly and adding weight. Hey, you don't have. Sometimes when we have time and luxury to play and move and prep, let's do it. If not, let's just be a little bit more conscientious about it.

Rhonda Patrick: Awesome. What is this hip? Like, if you're, if you're drawing. You talked about this hip mobility or hip prep. Like, what, what's, what does that look like?

Kelly Starrett: Well, number one, we wanted something that you could do. Imagine, like again, homage to our, the people who've thought about, critically about some of these things. Yoga has sun salutation and what I thought was, what a great practice. If everyone did sun salutation every single day before they left the house. They've touched them at ranges, they reminded their brain, they had to breathe, they had to rotate, they had a weight bear, they had to move their spines a little bit. Right, that's great. But that sun salutation sometimes comes entrapped in a little bit of too much asana, a little too much spirituality. And sometimes our athletes are like, really? This doesn't feel athletic enough. So I was like, what could we do to sort of simulate that? And that's where I came up with the idea of the hip spin-up, which was fundamental positions of flexion and rotation of the hip. We touch some end range tissues, we throw some isometrics in, we make your spine work with your hips. Just ground based, don't need any equipment, can be scaled and it gives you a touch of like, hey, what is. Am I at least at these full ranges of motion for a second today? Because I think what ends up happening oftentimes is that we can live in a world where we're not asked to actually do all the things our bodies can do. And now we're having to be like, okay, here's your vitamin, here's your X and such to make up for the fact that we're not really doing the things we need to do with our bodies.

Rhonda Patrick: What does a simple hip mobility test look like?

Kelly Starrett: Well, the question here is what should the hip be able to do? Right. And I say hip as in the chain. Right. But that's the big primary engine. The spine is the first engine. But then we have these big primary engines of the hips and shoulders. And what's interesting about that conversation is that if I ask people who are very sophisticated about their running training or their nutrition, I'm like, what should the hip be able to do? What's normal? What's far from normal? What does every physician agree we should be able to do? They have no idea what's normal. Hip flexion, bring your knee to your chest. Well, this was really where we recognized that one of the problems that we had or opportunities we had is to make these range of motion tests part of the training so that I could. The stimulus for adaptation. Exercise was also the diagnostic tool. Right. So I can understand what's going on so easily. We all should be able to hip squat, hip crease below the knee. Right. That's a really simple test. And if you're struggling to do that tells me a little bit about your readiness today. And again, you could be stiff, you could have old injuries, you could have, you know, there's no judgment there. If you stand on one leg, you should be able to pull your other knee up past 90 degrees. And most people would struggle for that. We have a simple test in the last book called the sit and rise test, which everyone has heard of. Now just lower yourself to the ground. Crisscross applesauce. Right. Without falling, and then without putting your knee down or hand down, pop back up. And so what's nice about that is that that's not even a full range of motion test. It's not even. Doesn't require that much strength. But it's a good indicator that you might be missing some hip flexion. Being able to fold forward to shift your weight is really the. The limiter there. So if we can begin to create some. Some fence posts, some guidelines for people to understand what's more normative or not around their own range of motion, then you can keep an eye on it.

Rhonda Patrick: And the sit and rise test, isn't there some data on that with associations and longevity?

Kelly Starrett: Yeah, basically imagine that all of these things are proxies. Right. As you've talked about, like, I don't really care what your grip strength is. I care what you do with that grip strength. But if you're doing a lot of fun stuff with your grip strength, your grip strength is going to be good. So it's a proxy for all these other things. Right. And that test tells us a lot about your movement choice, your ability to solve movement problems, your ability to, you know, modulate your balance. And so it may not be that that's the end all, be all. If you put a hand down, you could probably still be 100. I mean, we probably have some aunties in our who are over 90 who've never done the sit and rise test, never done keto, never went to a high intensity exercise class. But there's something about their lifestyle. We just got back from Japan. We're sleeping on the ground. Cultures that toilet on the ground, sleep on the ground, eat on the ground, fall risk in the elderly drops to almost zero. Osteoarthritis in the hips and low back drops almost zero. There's something about, maybe we should touch these shapes once in a while. And then that makes it so that it's on the map of the brain. We're touching and loading those tissues. The brain doesn't start to pare down some of that movement as irrelevant. So really the question is, what should I do every day? And then now we can ask the next following questions. What are essential movements and strength and conditioning, which is really just a formal movement practice under load.

Rhonda Patrick: Yes. And that is my next question because I recently did this sit and rise test with someone who is in good shape. They work out and I had no problem getting up and doing the sit and rise test. Because you did.

Kelly Starrett: That's right.

Rhonda Patrick: So how can someone be healthy, work out? I mean, you know, when I mean workout, I say, I mean like strength and conditioning both, right. They're, they're doing running, they're doing squats, deadlifts and, and have trouble with a sit and rise test.

Kelly Starrett: It's a great question. What it hints at and what I love is get to a place where you and I have our own ways. We like to train. Right? You just, you have things, you're like, you're a big power cleaner and deadlifter and rower. You're, you know, do these hard things.

Rhonda Patrick: Power cleaning is the hardest thing. I hate doing it, but I do it.

Kelly Starrett: It's almost like it's an Olympic sport and you'll spend the rest of your life working at it. Right.

Rhonda Patrick: Okay.

Kelly Starrett: That aside, so that aside, what we can say is you have your way of training things that we love the Way we like to move our bodies in the sports we play. I actually will take any third party system and thrive there. So if you go to yoga and you get your butt kicked, yoga is not crazy. Yoga is just saying, hey, here's what humans should be able to do with no load. But we're going to hold these isometrics and you have to be able to breathe for a long time. Go to Pilates class. If you're really elite, you'll spank Pilates. You might be sore afterwards because there are some shapes you don't spend a lot of time in that are normative towards Pilates. Right. That are signature Pilates. But ideally we should take whatever you're doing and run it through a blood panel. How do you like to eat? Cool. I believe you. Let's go ahead and check over here. And so that third party validation is a nice test. And what we often see is we've compared sort of the capacity of physiology and we've confused that with choice, skill. Right? Coordination. But I can generate thousands of watts over here, but I'm not very coordinated or because I've generated thousands of watts over here, it's cost me my rotation of my hip or my hip extension. And ultimately you can do that for a while until you want to learn a new skill, until that tissue is somehow a little bit misused because it doesn't have its normal ranges of motion. And I think when we ask people to sort of engage in some baseline testing, then we can start to understand inputs and outputs. And so if I have an elite cyclist, I'm working in the Tour de France, we don't really spend a ton of time in hip extension training. Knee behind the butt, like a lunge. We are in those shapes to make sure that we restore power, keep the hip doing what it needs to do. We don't necessarily have to train in those shapes as heavily as we might with an Olympic sprinter. So but we need to look at where is this person able to put some of these isometrics or some mobility work or some soft tissue work to keep it, you know, the sort of the window open. Because what we're really trying to do for the typical person, again we're all basically rec athletes at some point is we're trying to say, hey, let's maintain as much range as we can. Right, let's. And by that we'll say, how do I maintain movement, choice movement options? How do I pick up a new skill? How do I have a body that's

Rhonda Patrick: free and unencumbered remembered I we covered this hip thing, but I'm. The shoulders is another kind of obsession of mine because I do get some pain and there's a couple of questions I want to ask and one has to do with the obviously the ways to assess shoulder mobility. But the other is like I do work at a desk a lot and we're going to get into desk ergonomics people because that's also an interest of mine as well as I know other people are interested. But what can someone who is, is desk working a lot but also who lifts, you know, what, what's I would say a common problem in those individuals in terms of like their shoulder mobility and what would be a good, you know, ROI in terms of like working your shoulder to reset it?

Kelly Starrett: Yeah, let's take a look and we'll split the upper body from the lower body because it's easy to go for a walk and we can decongest, right. The lymphatics are, are built into our muscle system. The lymphatic system is sewage system of the body and it's bootstrapped into our muscles. And so if we go for a walk, that calf is acting like a second heart. It's pumping. We're dumping all those lymphatics through the groin, through that muscle contraction. And it's easy to say, hey, let's decongest, right? I've just, I ran, I did something and now I'm just going to walk a little bit more in the day. And so one of the reasons, you know, if you fly on an airplane you get cankles, it's lack of movement that's giving you those cankles, right? That's congestion of, of the tissues. Well, it's easy on the. But if I say, hey, I'm going to need you to get on this rower for an hour. You're going to be like, bro, I'm not doing that. Get on this assault bike for an hour. Decongest. What? It's impossible. And so sometimes it's hard to get enough exaggerated cross pattern motion and movement of the upper body to decongest it the way we're working. So what we can say then suddenly is, well, what tools do I have available to me? Well, number one, maybe a little bit of shoulder motion where I'm touching some fundamental shapes during the day. That'd be easy. And that's an easy place to start because it's, you know, for example, it's easy never to have to put your bra on in the back, right? That would be A test of internal rotation and some extension. That aptly scratch test. All the, you know, hey, let's look at the. If you do the FMS test, can you get your hand behind your back? But if you're not practicing and in those shapes ever, it's going to be tricky. And if you start loading the upper body significantly the way you are, the way we're kind of modern training has sort of influenced us. Remember that the first thing the body does after training stimulus is it lays down more collagen. It makes the container stronger to withstand. Now when it starts to put the muscle down inside that, the fascial connective tissue containers are set up first that we have a bigger engine frame, then we can make a bigger engine. So if you don't do anything, you're going to become stiff and fibrotic. Like welcome to being, you know, big squats. I mean they're going to make your quads stiff if you don't, if you don't keep your eye on it. All that running makes your can make your quads very stiff. Right. So suddenly we can ask around the shoulder. Well, let's make sure that we're doing something to keep an eye on this range of motion. And I could hint at. You could do something like the shoulder spin-up in the morning, which is just touching some fundamental shapes with some arm swings. It's very simple. You could do something like David Weck's rope flow, which is super fun and very easy to touch a bunch of shapes. It's basically imagine like PNF patterns which were this kind of model of looking at how we load the shoulder in this rehab that came out, these diagonals and rotation. And if you just spin a rope a whole bunch, you're going to touch a ton of rotation. You're going to be in some of fundamental shapes. It's really fast, it's easy, it's great prep. Or we could go a step further and say, okay, we've trained all day long. Now we're going to hook you up to this very sophisticated neuromuscular device that's going to decongest the tissues. But ultimately we want to remind you that the body is not fragile. It's designed to be loaded and adapt forever. So let's just at the very least keep an eye on our range of motion. And I just came from the airport where I just got to see people put their arms over their head in the scanner and it's sort of a disaster, right? I mean they're just banana back internally rotate like people just don't, aren't very competent putting their arms over their head anymore, but it's because their life doesn't ask them to do that.

Rhonda Patrick: And how often I like, like what? How much time do you think someone should spend like myself who is desk sitting a lot and many of us are and I do work out, you know, but as you said, I'm not doing that throughout the day. So like, you know, is there a couple minutes a day?

Kelly Starrett: Yeah, I think, I think we saw if you started this conversation about and you could say, hey, I think my lower body is the big problem. Let's focus on that for a week. Upper body is, my shoulders are really, that's the thing I want to feel better at. Well, what we could do is almost say, well let's look at a day, right? That's maybe the keystone idea. In the morning, what did you do in the morning? Did you just get up on the laptop right away? Could we go for a 5 minute walk? Could we just get you engage in a breath practice? I mean just getting your rib cage moving through some breathing. Like something even looks like old school Wim Hof style breathing or oxygen advantage? Just getting your trunk moving and the trunk wall a little bit more compliant. You're gonna see your shoulder blades work better and if your shoulder blades work better on your trunk, you're gonna have better arm function. But if my trunk gets stiff because I sit in a C shape and I don't really take any big breaths, then maybe I'm gonna see some decreased function in the shoulder blades. It so a couple minutes of the day in the morning then I'm just gonna worry about, I'm just gonna move as much as I can during the day. That's my goal.

Rhonda Patrick: Is the breath work like, is it equivalent? Like let's say I, I, I do get up and I go for that, let's say short run, you know, two miles.

Kelly Starrett: Awesome.

Rhonda Patrick: Is that doing something similar as the breath work or is there something independent? Because you mentioned the trunk.

Kelly Starrett: Yes. And well I, I think what we haven't helped people understand is that ventilation efficiency is very much a skill. And you, you know, doing some formal, thoughtful, full range of motion of the trunk, full exhale range of motion of the trunk. I would say that most people are probably occupying some mid range in their breathing. They're very shallow breathing, they're stiff, they're just breathing in their available container. If we look at the work. Jill Miller wrote a great book called Body by Breathing. Simple ways to mobilize the trunk. So we actually have better diaphragm function, better pelvic floor function. Brian McKenzie really brought some of the work back into. Hey, let's take a look at this interesting physiology that we can harness. Right, Iyengar. Here we were back at yoga. Nerves are king of the breath. The breath is king of the brain. So one of the easiest ways we can change state is by being a little bit more conscientious about our breathing. But I think you're hinting at like, when and where do I do all this? So one of the things that we love is if you're on the bike and that's part of your warmup, let's just drop in a couple simple breath routine practices that make you have to touch that range of motion.

Rhonda Patrick: Can you give me an example?

Kelly Starrett: Yeah, yeah. This is from the French free divers. I was working with one of their coaches. During a simple warmup, they take a 10 second inhale, which is going to kill the average person. Just that's a long inhale. And then they do a max breath hold on that inhale for as long as they can and then recover nose. Only breathing, which is going to constrain the breath. You're going to have to really be functional on that diaphragm. You're going to have to work harder, you're going to prep that and you repeat that every minute. 10 second inhale, max breath hold, repeat every minute. Another simple example is just, hey, every minute I just want you to exhale as long as you can. Go, go ham as long as you can on an exhale. And when you need to breathe, go ahead and, you know, just keep it moving instead of stopping. So we can almost use some of this hypoxic work where we just put you into a little dynamic apnea where we ask you to work, do a little breath hold of some kind. Suddenly you're gonna have to touch that range of motion. You're gonna have to get caught up. You're breathing all the way out, you're being a little bit more intentional. And then we've already set up your brain to be a little bit more CO2 tolerant. And we've done a couple other things. So the first time that, that lactate starts spiking, CO2 starts to climb, your brain is like, it's fine. We've already done this a bunch.

Rhonda Patrick: So it's like repairing the nervous system.

Kelly Starrett: Oh, I love that. Or reclaiming that because I'm trashed from this, this trip. Or go and drink with my friends or the Big work volume last week or, you know, allows me to reset a little bit. What I think we're really seeing some of the innovation is how do we stack these behaviors. So I'm not giving you another listicle of things you have to do, and that's what we want to do. How do I integrate this into. Oh, you're on the bike. Great. Let's do some breath work on the bike.

Rhonda Patrick: What if you become a little dizzy when you're doing this breath work? Is that a sign of anything or is that normal?

Kelly Starrett: I think if you are holding your breath to the place you're passing out, maybe, you know, take that back a notch. Yeah, right. But if you get a little uncomfortable, that's cool. And if you get a little luminous, just take a second. Like, you know, I think that's the. The word that the yogis would use, Luminous. Right. Your face is tingling. You're like, what's going on? But really you're just changing. Probably what's happening with pH or. Or some aspect of that breathing system is being modulated and you're feeling a little tingly. Totally okay. Unfortunately, those things go away. All the getting high on your own supply that you get from it all just becomes normalized. So I would say one of the reasons we start with breath. Anytime someone has neck pain, any sometimes had mid back pain or low back pain, we teach the breath mechanic first because it's such a powerful way of desensitizing a painful spine or irritated spine. We normalize a lot of motion and around the spine. The. The book that everyone loves to reference is called The Spinal Engine by Gracovetsky. And it's a really like. It's a hard book to read, everyone. It's like gnarly Biomechanics of salamanders side-bending and. But really hints at that this is a really great whip that the. The spine is a powerful engine, an initiator of movement. And that's actually how we define functional movement in the first place. Works of a wave of contraction from trunk to periphery, from core to sleeve, from axial skeleton to peripheral skeleton. And so one of the reasons we take a moment to always organize the trunk into a little bit better position if we can, because it allows us to have better function. Right. So if I'm slouching at my computer, hard to take a big breath there, hard to turn my neck there. If I'm driving in my car or I'm on my bike and I'm like, is there a position here where I could take a bigger breath. Well, suddenly we might not say that that's a good position or a bad position. We're just like, hey, that position doesn't give me access to as much physiology, as much power, as much volume, as much rotation, as much range of motion. So we might make decisions about how we organize the body to maintain the integrity of the breathing movement system. And that's a good indicator of when we start to look at the breath and our ability to take a diaphragm breath, breathe laterally in the ribs, actually get some motion in the upper back and trunk. We suddenly see that we can start to flip on lights in the room that was once dark. And lo and behold, we also got the brain and the mind. Okay, with high CO2s. So, for example, with Berkeley, we try to have seven hypoxic events before we compete. So I want the women I work with to die seven times in a controlled death, right? Like we're going to jump rope and hold our breath and then put a little bit of that hypoxic load on. And then later on we're in the pool doing something of consequence. It's a lot easier.

Rhonda Patrick: Is the response to the hypox, the slight hypoxic event, kind of like an adaptation where you're, you're kind of depriving the tissue of a little bit of oxygen. And therefore it's like, oh, I gotta like make things move faster and better so that that doesn't happen again.

Kelly Starrett: It may there. It's more likely. Cause it would probably. There's probably some systemic like blood flow restriction like thing that happens, right? Like if you can truly desaturate. But for the typical person who says, hey, I want to run a 5K for example, or I'm doing a half marathon or something like that, you know, they tend to over breathe. So they tend. As soon as it gets hard, mouth breathing opens very shallow. And turns out they really can't access all the oxygen on the hemoglobin. And this is. Sorry that everyone. This is a primer on, you know, physiology. But it's the CO2, high levels of CO2 that allow you to strip the oxygen off the hemoglobin. And again, let me point at Buteyko, Oxygen Advantage, Brian. All the people who've been talking about this forever, all the yogis. But if we can get the brainstem to handle high circulating CO2s by practicing exposing that brainstem to these climbing CO2 levels, then we're able to tolerate higher workloads, strip more oxygen off and not quickly scrub, breathe off that. And now we can actually get more work done because it's the CO2 that's triggering the breathing response, right? And we don't sort of realize that that's very trainable and that we can suddenly really get a lot more work done and feel better and less stressed on our bodies if we can handle those high CO2s. But that's uncomfortable.

Rhonda Patrick: So these seven sort of slightly hypoxic events really are just the breath work that you're doing before your competition, 100%.

Kelly Starrett: And then instead of saying, hey, let's lay down, we might do that. You and I put our hands on each other's shoulders, we take a breath in, we breath out, and then you and I wrestle a little bit. And so suddenly now I'm thinking, whoever breathes first loses. We're battling a little bit and doing something dynamic. And then we're both going to have this moment of fugue, right? And that's what we're trying to do, is make it so that when that. That happens, when that first interval hits, you're much more capable.

Rhonda Patrick: I wonder. I used to be a surfer. I no longer am able to call myself that. I mean, I still want to know how to surf.

Kelly Starrett: Always a surfer.

Rhonda Patrick: But, you know, even back in the days when I used to actually go surfing, like, every day, like, I was still terrified every time I'd paddle up, particularly in, like, you know, with the big swell valid. And I'm wondering if. And now it's even worse, like, if I go out, like, a couple times a year, and it's like. It's like, oh, my gosh. It's. It's just. Even though I'm so fit, I mean, I'm not so fit. I just.

Kelly Starrett: You are fit.

Rhonda Patrick: I'm fit, yeah. You know, but it's still, like, paddling is hard and holding my breath and, like, you know, getting bombarded by the waves. I'm wondering if doing some kind of breath work before going out and paddling out, because the fear also gets me right, where it's like, I know it's coming. I know I'm holding my breath for a long period of time, and it's scary, and I don't like it. So I'm wondering if that would Prepare me for 100%.

Kelly Starrett: And let me introduce you to the work of Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reece, who are really the first people who, for me, put this into the language and context of performance, that they, for whatever reason, Laird got onto Wim Hof and recognized that if he trained for these to be able to handle this very dynamic work on a breath hold, that he could get more work done, get held down longer, pop back up, recover faster. And he. So he saw it as a competitive advantage. And then those two cleverly just were like, boy, we can repurpose this into a lot of aspects of our life. And in your experience, what you're actually describing is something that's very common these days, where I have this very fit human who now goes and does a sport that they don't do often, or a sport they used to do, but now they're so fit, and it's easy to overdo it. It's easy not to have that exposure, and it's easy to suddenly maybe recognize that, like, hey, there's some aspect of my training that's not preparing me for this sport. And ideally, I think one of the things that's happened that's interesting is that people are exercising because it's about health. Right? It's my bone density and it's my VO2 max. And. Right. Well, you're athletic and you're doing athlete and you do sports. But we forgot that the reason we used to train was to get better for something, and I think I really want to recouple that. What are you training for? For people. Because ideally, you can't. You still need to go do your sport. We wish we could just be fit and then go do sports. And that's certainly a recipe for overuse, because you can be like, I surf for four hours today. My first time back, you're like, why do my shoulders hurt so bad? Well, you haven't loaded those tissues. You haven't said it's safe to your brain. So you hint at something really important, which is that the brain is really a tool that's designed for safety and survival. It's not designed for optimization. And so when we take this lesson that your brain is really trying to protect you and is like, what's a threat? Not a threat. There's a reason. You're like, I'm a little concerned about being held down. And, like, because you probably did that once or twice, and your brain's like, we're not doing that again. And I see what you're doing. You're dragging us back out. So how do we signal safety to the body? How do we signal safety to the brain? Well, that'd be one way. But suddenly you start to expand that sleep is safety, nutrition is safety. Having access to my range of motion is safety. Right. Things that don't hurt is safe. We can really start to put in a lot of ideas around how do we help the brain optimize for performance through feeling safe and that, you know, having some hypoxic events beforehand can be a really easy way. And you can even do this walking with your dog. I mean, I don't know if you're a psycho like me, but I might walk my dog and be like, if I breathe before that sign, everyone in my family is going to be wiped out by meteor. And I play these games where I'm like, I have to just hold my breath to a certain place. And when you get into the weeds on. Some of the Gracies always were working on breath holds, always interested in this hypoxic work. Because ultimately, as you know, in sports and doing activities, it's this breathing piece that's the limiting factor. So often. Often.

Rhonda Patrick: I'm sorry to take it here, Kelly, but, like, I'm thinking about my heavy lifts now. Like, how I've never really, you know, done. I. I just breathe how I'm supposed. I just breathe how I breathe when I'm lifting.

Kelly Starrett: Breathe early, breathe often. Sounds good.

Rhonda Patrick: Breathe early, breathe often.

Kelly Starrett: No, I mean, that's what we do. Like, I'm just going to bring my skills in and not recognize that, whoa, this breath could be a real opportunity to get better and to learn other skills. You're absolutely right that there's, there's opportunity here.

Rhonda Patrick: So how should I be breathing when I am, you know, I'm doing a heavy squat, front squat, and, you know, I gotta come back up and like, there's, you know, I'm grunt, like, grunting, like, all of that. Like, I'm kind of just, you know, this is all new for me. I've been lifting for about that, I would say the last year and a half, maybe two years now. But, you know, relatively new.

Kelly Starrett: So fun.

Rhonda Patrick: So fun. But also I'm realizing, like, you start to then realize, oh, I can optimize here and I can optimize here and,

Kelly Starrett: you know, maybe even just use a different, different language, that instead of optimize, we're like, well, I can become more skilled. Wow. I think I deadlifted for like 20 years before I actually deadlifted for the first time. I was like, oh, that's what she meant a long time ago. Oh, I think I understand. And sometimes I work out. I'm like, I. I might do something we, we. We love something called an ETOT, which is every 30 seconds you have to do a lift. It's an easy way for adults for me to rate limit my ego, protect myself, put a little cardiorespiratory demand or metabolic demand on my working and. But Sometimes I've done 20 lifts, 20 singles before. I'm like, oh, okay, now I'm connected again. Now it's starting to go. So putting that skill in there is very much the game. And it's okay for us to be skill limited, not be limited by how strong your hips are. Like, like how nice that we have to. We look at all the things and I'm like, well, it looks like the limitation for you is that you're just not very good at this. That's, that's really fun. But in that moment, I'll tell a story about one of our two time Olympians and heavyweights. His name's Wes Kitts, and he's an incredible athlete and an Olympian in Olympic lifting and heavyweights, which are the strongest humans on the planet, right? His coach, Dave Spitz, who's a, is a genius local at Cal Strength was like, hey, can you meet with Wes? He was just at the Pan Am Games, received a heavy clean over 400 and passed out. Out right on stage, pressurizing for the next jerk, right? Put it. Cleaning is getting up to your shoulders. Jerking is probably your head. And I was like, well, that doesn't sound like a good way to win, right? And so Wes came in and what we worked on was him pressurizing under those loads. Could he sequence and take a second and do a little bit more diligence about getting more air in creating this high intra-abdominal pressure? And when we started working on that with him, same drill, same skills, but just. And then also being a little conscientious, he never missed a jerk again. Like set the American record, qualify for the Olympics. So we can, at the highest level, at low level, low speed, walking around, you know the breathing. You can have one lung and still climb Everest. Like, we're so efficient. But on the other hand, when we start to look at, hey, we're going to do these five reps on this squat. I need you to get back to that breath. Your first breath is great. You get back to the top. Can we pressurize again? We pressurize again and suddenly that becomes a skill. Can I breathe while I'm under this load? And if that doesn't sound like something you can relate to, go ahead and do a plank. Because everyone on this call or listening has probably done a plank. And watch what happens when you plank. You stop breathing or you breathe Very shallowly. So show me you can maintain this reference volume, taking these huge breaths in and out while you're doing some of these mundane skills, you're back at yoga again.

Rhonda Patrick: So that. So that is that a good, you know, thing to prep, to practice would be like doing the plank and really just trying to, like, breathe and pressurize, as you call it.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah, yeah. And what you can certainly see is, wow. As soon as it gets a little bit hard, the first thing that goes out is the window. So when I work with coaches and teams or even a group of people, we'll do like you do a little demo. Hey, let's do a squat or do something. And the first thing people do is hold their breath. Why? Because they've created a little stable trunk, requires less skill, less movement control, and they can simplify the system. So if I just hold my breath, then I can do a skill for a while. And what we actually, many of us are doing is going from breath hold to breath hold to breath hold to breath hold when we work. And you're not actually limited by your strength. You're limited by your ability to manage oxygen use because you're not breathing. You're going from breath hold to breath hold. And you'll see it. And actually watch your kids, watch people, like, they literally are existing in a world where they're going from breath hold to breath hold. And oftentimes we're like, oh, that's a curious strategy, giving that we're aerobic animals.

Rhonda Patrick: Right? So just take some time, focus on your breath while you're doing the static hold. I like that.

Kelly Starrett: And super simple.

Rhonda Patrick: Train your. Train your body. Yeah.

Kelly Starrett: And look, if. And we can. We established this way, if we. We lay you down on the ground and I have you take the biggest breath in through your belly, through your ribs, through your chest, through your upper back, we could measure that. Right? But I call that the reference volume because there's no load on your spine. You don't have to do anything. Like, you're out of gravity. We can just like, what's the most air in we can get? And we can practice that. Put your hands here, breathe here. Right. We can measure that then in gravity. I basically want you to be at 90% of that. So now there are all these competing demands on that. But if I suddenly have an idea of how much air I should be able to move in and out, and then I drop down into a plank and I'm at 30% taking these really shallow breaths, you're like, what. What are you Doing, you know, because now, why does your swimming suck? Why does. Right. You can start to see that you're making. You're losing capacity. And again, the reason we're interested in this is that we're interested in training these available capacities in the mundane things that we're already doing. And so with just a few twists to the pretzel, we can really zhuzha up and get even more bang for the buck.

Rhonda Patrick: I'm excited. I'm gonna. We do. I do planks often, you know, mostly at the end of my workout with my coach. And so I'm gonna start practicing.

Kelly Starrett: Oh, it's so fun.

Rhonda Patrick: The breath work.

Kelly Starrett: And you'll be shocked. You're like, wow, I really aren't breathing here. That's what is. And what a great strategy. What a great strategy that our brain goes, this is complicated. This is potentially a little dangerous. We'll just simplify the system. We just have so many wonderful workarounds as the body to maintain capacity, maintain range of motion. Let's keep you in the game. Let's make it so you can still get your hand to your face and you can negotiate the world. Right. We have all of these workarounds.

Rhonda Patrick: It's funny because you mentioned Gabby and Laird, who I've are mutual friends, and I've. Over the years, something has come up every time. But I was supposed to go train with them and do their XPT, the

Kelly Starrett: pool work at the house. Yeah, yeah.

Rhonda Patrick: And I know it's gonna happen one day.

Kelly Starrett: It's a bucket list.

Rhonda Patrick: I'm gonna be more prepared for it.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Rhonda Patrick: Less embarrassed.

Kelly Starrett: And what. What it's really great is I just. I want you to appreciate that when Laird is there, Laird has 17, 20, 100 levels of hell. Like, there's some way to exceed your capacity. Right. And that's what all good training is. We're trying to say, how skilled are you as a mover? And then we're going to add a little bit of construct or constraint to exceed your ability. And then we're going to try to keep you there. That's our hypothesis. We're going to test our hypothesis. Like, that's all we do in exercise. And that might be adding load. That might be adding speed. Hey, did you notice the first time you had to squat after rowing that it was a little bit harder to squat? Breathing real hard makes that skill harder.

Rhonda Patrick: Oh, yeah. When I have. When my coach has. It's like if I design the workouts that we do, like, at. At the end of our session, it's hard after you're doing the rowing and then you have to go right into the squat or God forbid, the cleaning and then doing a front squat.

Kelly Starrett: So what you've just discovered there is that, hey, this movement is a skill. And there are a lot of ways to challenge that skill. I hand you a barbell, I hand you dumbbells, I flip you upside down. Now we're competing. Now there's a little psychology of, hey, I have to do this thing and I'm not sure I can. The imposter voice, the fear voice. Now you're breathing hard now. I have to do 20 reps now. And you see that there are so many ways to manipulate that, that ultimately when we start to view strength conditioning as coordination training with resistance, the resistance is a lot. But if we're just about, we have a lot of choice here to make this hard. But if it's just about capacity, then let's just give you an exercise bike and, and do some dumb work. But it's not. How do we become more skilled? And I guess, I think one of the critiques and a valid critique of the last 20 years of strength conditioning, it's become very capacity based. We're so interested in capacity, but your VO2 Max means nothing unless you can handle and carry that with skill.

Rhonda Patrick: You have this great quote, train for life, don't live to train. Which, I mean, you kind of touched on it a little bit. And we're, we're talking about both ends of the spectrum here. I mean, obviously there are athletes that are training for something, but there's a lot of people listening to this podcast that are not athletes. They're just interested in being healthy.

Kelly Starrett: Let's. Okay then, if that athlete word is not the right word.

Rhonda Patrick: Okay, what is the right word?

Kelly Starrett: What's the right move? Because I think what we, we want to say is that, that everyone needs to move their body. We're getting that message, but we want you to not. I've been saying this lately and it's very unpopular, but pull ups are the worst sport there is. It's. What a terrible sport pull ups are. It's not interesting. No one cares. Like, going from 20 to 25 pull ups is great for you. Did it make you a better swimmer? That make you a better surfer? So ultimately, in this quest for bigger front squats, like, strength is never a weakness. You know, let's slave to like, whoa, whoa, whoa. At what cost to actually. Have you left the house and done a sport? Have you tested your fitness? Have you spent Your fitness credits. We run a program for adults over 40. You know, it's like, what does a strength conditioning, movement, lifestyle program look like for a busy person who's not interested in necessarily, you know, snatching one rep max at the Olympics again? And one of the things that we see there is that people are still treating exercise like a commodity, where it's, I have to do the makeup sets of math homework. If I miss a day, I go back, I'm like, hold up, hold up, hold up. That's not what good, consistent strength conditioning practice looks like at any sport level. If you and I are competing, we had a tournament this weekend, we come back in, we reclaim, right, Your positions. There's actual life going on. Hey, we're working on, you know, what you'll see is that the strength conditioning done by real sports teams changes a lot. Travel, competition, off season, in season. When do we turn up? I can't. I mean, one of my critiques of strength conditioning right now is that, like, if you train kids the way we're training adults who don't do sports or train anyone who's like, adults who don't do sports, you will crush them and they won't be able to do their sport. So if you and I train together, and then you're like, kelly, I wasn't able to surf today because I'm so beat up. I'm like, well, it doesn't matter. It does matter. So ultimately, we're trying to get to a place where we can start to think about this training as having context instead of just being recursive. Hell, where, oh, my VO2 came down or my pull ups came down. I lost some. Yes, you should lose capacity. You went on vacation, right? You did a sport. You did. You hiked the Grand Canyon. Like, of course your pull ups are going to change, come back in and get restarted again. Don't see it as this, like, perfect decorative room which doesn't match your lifestyle, your stress, your nutrition. We, we kind of were like, look what the Soviets are doing. They could, like, you're going to be, be 82.3% of your one rep max on Tuesday, three weeks from now. Are you serious? Like, you don't even know where you are going to be in the world three weeks from now. How could we possibly plan for that? And I don't know if you're going to get sick or your kid's going to get sick or you're going to have a deadline at work or. So let's go ahead and just give ourselves permission what's the goal today? To find relative loads and relative speeds and relative skill and then we'll, we'll go on.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, I think there's a lot of people that, that perhaps don't even play sports. And I mean, adults here, I'm mostly talking about adults that are thinking about these statistics in their head, like, oh, I'm 50 years old, I'm 60 years old, my muscle mass is declining, my strength is declining. You know, my, my cardiorespiratory fitness is declining. And they're scared about that aging process and they're trying to battle it and slow it. And so they're like, well, I need to, you know, put stress on any muscles to get the adaptations. I need to, you know, make sure I'm growing. At the least, maintaining muscle mass, you know, building strength. I need to make sure I'm, you know, keeping my, my, my blood flow going and, you know, making challenging my lungs and my heart. Right. My cardiorespiratory system. And so for them, they're like, you're saying it's the, the, the, the gym is kind of like, like checklists. A checklist. Exactly. It's a checklist. And so, yeah, so how should those people think about training and what types of training should they. I mean, what's their mindset like? And then translate that to action

Kelly Starrett: that is like, here we go, the million dollar question, right? What does it look like, the most important thing? I think let's take another model. Humans in America don't eat fruits and vegetables. We like to pretend like we do, but we don't. No one gets enough fiber. Not 5% of us get enough fiber a day. Okay, so we have what we should do and what we are doing. Right? The most important thing is to find a way that you like to move your body in community. That's the most important thing. How are you? Do you enjoy dance? Let's go dance. So what we need to do first and say is if we just reduce exercise to like this physiologic input so that my heart rate, my blood pressure, I'm exercising, that's a side effect. I want you to exercise so that you can have better communication with your partners, a more fun household that you're in a community, like that's what we were supposed to do. Then we can take a look at that and say, okay, we have a physical practice, movement, practice gameplay, which is really important. Then we can say, what's the minimum dose over here of loading of cardiorespiratory demand and Theoretically, you can do that in an enjoyable way too. You know, you have mentioned CrossFit and for, you know, we discovered CrossFit in 2004. We opened a CrossFit gym in 2005. The model of CrossFit and especially modern, sophisticated CrossFit programming is that there are a lot of needs being met simultaneously. You're going to get strong, you're going to become skilled, you're going to have to do this under a high aerobic demand and metabolic demand. And simultaneously, it's pretty fun. You know, my wife has would describe herself as having exercise add like she doesn't want to do the same thing every single day. Like I could eat the same breakfast for the now to the end of time. She's like, nope, that's not for me. So what we want to do is again go in and say, well, what are the things that you need to do? And now we can start to ask what do you have access to? What's, you know, how, you know, do you have, do you have a weight? Where are you going to do that? How often are you going to do that? And we really end up getting in the weeds very quickly and more importantly into the right conversation. And you know, they sell kettlebells at Target now, you know, and if you just had a kettlebell at home and did some swings, you know, in your kitchen for 10 or 15 minutes, plus went to dance class, plus through a frisbee, you're gonna start to approximate some pretty good, well balanced fitness. And then we can take that. The things that you like to do and the minimums of these things, like we love it. People hang from a bar. If you can hang three minutes a day, work on that's such a great thing to do.

Rhonda Patrick: Why?

Kelly Starrett: Good for your neck, good for your back, good for your shoulders. Right. Just. We tend to find that people who can hang have less shoulder pain, less neck pain, pain.

Rhonda Patrick: Okay.

Kelly Starrett: It's a fundamental position. And what we're really doing, we're hanging three minutes, three minutes in total. What we're really doing when we're hanging is an isometric and we're just telling our brain these are really important positions to be in. And that hanging, really popularized by Ido Portal, was the first reason to be like less aggregate hanging. We start to see that shoulders hurt less, back works better, neck functions more effectively because we're just spending time in these end ranges. You don't like to hang. Let me introduce you to Downward Dog. Downward Dog is another version of spending a lot of time with your Arms over your head. And if you've ever gone to yoga class, you spend like two and a half years in downward dog for a reason, because it's a really important position. So now theoretically, I can take all the things Dr. Patrick does, all things that Dr. Kelly does, and then we can test them and say, who's got the best? And does it get me if my VO2 max has improved a little bit or it's good enough? Isn't that what we want to do? Just discover what's good enough so that we again, can be pain free, have the most movement, choice, play, pick up skills, occupy a role. And then if we want to go to the Olympics, that's a slightly different conversation. But for the average person, we should be able to say, hey, our goal isn't to be so specialized that we're afraid to have a margarita or drink and eat an acai bowl. Right? We want to have tolerance in the system and be amazing. You know, one of my personal, you know, bugaboos is I don't always want to talk about body composition. You know, I really stayed away from nutrition conversations because it was always about losing body fat. I have to talk about it because I want to talk about your tissue health. I want to talk about all the things that are going to allow you to not get injured or tweaked simultaneously. One of my goals is to be less gross for my wife. You know, she is, my wife is the CEO. She has these abs. She's just like superstar, rad woman. And I just, I don't want her to leave me. So I want to be less gross.

Rhonda Patrick: I love Kelly, how you added leisure time activity in that equation. You mentioned dancing or whatever it is you like to do. For me it's tennis because I've had Dr. Ben Levine. Do you know, have you heard of Ben Levine? I mean, he's a rock star in, you know, the exercise physiology world when it comes to cardiovascular health. Right. And his prescription for life. From just decades of aggregating data, looking at individuals from an age range from younger athletes, middle age, older. Really, that is an important part of the equation in addition to the other, the exercise volume and the types of exercise that people are doing, it's gotta be at least an hour a week of leisure time activity in the equation.

Kelly Starrett: Oh, I've never heard a minimum of leisure time activity, but yes, yes, yes, we do not play enough.

Rhonda Patrick: You're right. And you're absolutely right. Especially, I mean, kids play a lot and we're going to get into kids too. But we're both parents, and I'm very interested in that. But adults don't play enough. And even adults that are interested in health and fitness and improving the way they age and feeling better, being more mobile, all of that.

Kelly Starrett: Even.

Rhonda Patrick: Even those adults oftentimes don't have any sort of leisure time activity. I mean, and that could be even riding a bike with a group. I mean.

Kelly Starrett: Oh, that's leisure time activity, right? Oh, yeah. 100.

Rhonda Patrick: You know, tennis. I guess pickleball's making a comeback now. I don't know how you feel about

Kelly Starrett: that, but you know that pickleball will save America.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, I mean, it's. It's. It's. A lot of older people are getting into it. My mom's like, I'm gonna start doing pickleball. So I love that. Leisure time activities back in the equation. Because I feel like we lost that as an adult. As adults, we somehow lost the fun of playing a sport.

Kelly Starrett: I was just in Hawaii this weekend. We were speaking at the University of Hawaii and working with some different. We did a keynote there, and then I worked with the strength conditioning staff. Right. Just had a session with University of Hawaii Athletics. Go Bows. And on the outside wall of the kinesiology department is a sign that's really old from the 70s they hadn't replaced. And it says leisure. Like leisure activity research or leisure activity research, something like that. And Jill and I were like, look at that. They were like, someone was looking at, like, sports and playing sports as a way of getting fit and, like, quantifying that. And we have a really good friend who. Nicole Christensen, CrossFit Roots. She says, hey, my family doesn't nature for time. So any, like, health benefits that we get from riding our bikes or paddling or doing, like, that's just free money because it's in service of our sport. So let's go ahead and get fit for our sport. And so if you're a runner, here's this radical idea. Train for running. Because running is your sport, right? And Pelotoning is a terrible sport. That's just the worst fun, right? And yet, like, we've figured out, hey, I gotta be fit. These are some really efficient ways to do it in my home, et cetera, et cetera. Someone told me this weekend who works at the University of Hawaii Law School, that the treadmill was invented in prison because no one could think of a more demoralizing thing than doing a bunch of work that didn't do anything. I was like, wow, okay, sign me up.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, Pelotons changed my life for the 10 minute blood flow when I am

Kelly Starrett: on the go, I am such a fan of the exercise bike. We can protect people's range of motion. It's what we call high physiology, low skill. Not many people die. Like, your knee doesn't dislocate. Like, you can get a lot of work done really fast on that thing. If we had the exercise bike in every household in America, we would see a lot of changes, comma, you know, I don't know if that scales or it's very egalitarian or even democratizing. Oh, it's. Everyone needs a complex solution to a complex problem.

Rhonda Patrick: Right, Exactly. Well, let's talk a little bit about the healing because, you know, just. I want to. It's something that I'm personally interested in because I do, as I mentioned at the start of this podcast, do have pain. It's not debilitating pain and it usually goes away pretty shortly after whatever, you know, exercise I'm doing. But it's annoying. And I want to know, you know, like, should I be doing things? You mentioned voodoo floss. You know, there's the lacrosse ball. So it's like the tendon. I have these, you know, it's like, it seems as though my nagging pain. I know a lot of people experience this. You know, is there, Is there, You know, what's the science behind this? Is it really just increasing the blood flow to these? Not very well. Could, you know, vascularized tissues?

Kelly Starrett: Yeah, that could be it. It could be that you tweaked yourself a long time. We have a thousand just so stories, right? It's really easy. I think they call it HARKing. Right where you look, right. You look at a data set, afterwards, you're like, oh, here's what I meant to do. So if we're looking at a complex system and we're trying to derive essential information out of that complex complexity, it's important that we take a look at the environment the person lives in. And that maybe is not the first conversation because that's annoying. Hey, my shoulder is killing me. I can't play my game. Tell me about your stress. Like, bro, that's not the place for, Come on, make this stop hurting. Then we can talk about my stress. But we do try to, to create benchmarks and we call them vital signs for those people. Sleep, nutrition, et cetera. Because we do sometimes end up giving an anecdote here. We had a woman at our gym who had a bad ankle sprain, kind of tear in one of her ligaments we had a lot of physios at our gym. She healed back up. We got her back. She's fully returned to play. A couple months later, I walked back into the gym, she's wearing her boot again. And I was like, oh, no, like, you injured yourself again. She's like, I don't know what happened. I just woke up and it started hurting. And what I said to her was, tell me more. And I was like, what's going on? Like, this is not. That's not how the brain works. It's not how your body works. Like, I've seen you move after this thing. She's like, well, my dog just died. And that death was so significant for her that her brain was basically took stock of what was going on with her body, was like, must be the ankle again. So just lowering that sense or raising that sensitivity by that stressful event was enough for her to trigger her brain thinking that that body was unsafe. So as we're working through this and trying to gather information about a complex system and remember, the brain is the most sophisticated structure in the known universe. We can start with saying, well, do you have range of motion here? That's an easy place to start because we can play, press, and guess where I get you to scrape and we mobilize and we can do some isometric. But we could be much more targeted in our approach here. And rarely is it like the tendon, right? We want to see that tendon in a movement system because that tendon oftentimes is just putting up with your crap. It's actually doing the job of like three things. Like, for example, we have a simple test called the couch stretch. Have you ever done the couch stretch? You put your knee in the corner,

Rhonda Patrick: but I've heard about it.

Kelly Starrett: Okay, okay. So it's basically just a real simple assessment of some. Some hip extension that. So if you were kneeling, facing away from the wall, you put your knee in the corner, so your foot is going up the wall, and then you bring your other leg up into a high kneeling position. Right. So you're kind. It's kind of like a lunge, but your leg is really bent and going up the wall. So it's a short lever lunge position. And what we're looking for there is can you get your back upright without banana backing, without just kind of arching? Can you take a breath there and then can you squeeze your butt there, there? And what we often find is that people are so restricted in their quads, they can't even get into that test position. Because they're so restricted for whatever reason, but also it inhibits their ability to squeeze their butt. So what we see is sometimes when people are missing hip extension, because this is really a simple test of looking at what the tissues should be able to do as we move towards extension. Getting that knee behind my butt, like a lunge or a run, that butt gets inhibited because the quads are tight and the pelvis tips over whatever reason, the brain is basically like, we can't fire that glute against this resistance. So we use that as a assessment for, hey, let's spend some time here. Isometrics. We can get your butt practicing that squeezing. So your brain says, oh, in this position, I can do a normal muscular drill, get my butt squeezing when the quads are tight. But that's a good example of why a lot of times people have really strict, stiff hamstrings all the time. Time. They're always sitting in a bent position. And then the hamstring is doing the work of the butt and the hamstring all the time instead of the butt doing its job and the hamstring doing its job together. So it's a good example of sometimes that hamstring pathology could be as a result of working in incomplete positions where a lot of my physiology is sort of what I call positionally inhibited. And the same thing could be true of your shoulders, shoulder.

Rhonda Patrick: So what do we do? So you meant. You mentioned spending some time in the isometric position to help.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah. And for everyone, that just means you're pausing in a position. Right. And making your brain control that position when we stop. So if you're doing a squat and you stop, that's an isometric.

Rhonda Patrick: And so shoulder hanging. I mean, hanging from a bar, would that be considered?

Kelly Starrett: That might be one. Working on overhead position. There would be. We could. We also could take. If you've ever laid like, you could lay on your back, neck, put a lacrosse ball or some kind of ball in your T spine, and put your arm over your head. And one of the ideas that I stole right out of my instruction at physio school is that we mobilize at the position of restriction whenever we can. We want to give context to the tissues that we're mobilizing. So if I'm missing internal rotation. So if I put my arm out to my side. So here's a quick primer for everyone. The shoulder really does four things. I know it seems like it does a lot more, but don't lose the narrative here. You put your arm over Your head, okay, Arm goes out in front, arm goes out to the side, arm goes behind. That's really it. In some version of that, I'm going from position to position. What gets confusing is that the arm can bend and be straight, right? And it can rotate. So suddenly I can get into some very complex positions. But this is just still arm out in of front. Front, right. A plank is training what arm out in front. And we, we have some, we call them archetypes, right? So a push up, the start of a row, start of a bench press. Those are all beginning shapes that are similar. And then we can ask, you know, how am I spending time in these shapes? Do I have any exposure to these shapes or do I even have access to the shape? So if my arm is out, and I should have a rotational window of about 160 degrees degrees, so it's easy to see, harder to see with the arm straight, easier to see when the elbow's bent. So from 90, ARM is parallel to the ground, I should be able to go straight up to 90. That's normal range. If my hand is here, I should be able to get my hand all the way down to my hip if I was laying on the ground without my shoulder coming forward. And that shoulder coming forward is how your body solves the problem if you can't access that position. And that shoulder coming forward suddenly asks that. That deltoid biceps to work really hard. The deltoids like working like a seatbelt trying to squeeze you back. That's potentially the mechanism of injury for biceps tears, for labral tears, puts my rotator cuff at a huge disadvantage. And what we can say is it's not necessarily bad because you have pain. It's less effective if you're trying to access all the wonderful things that your shoulders should be able to do. So now when we give people a few quick tests, you can be like, oh, oh, this must be my internal rotation. And oftentimes when you just restore these fundamental shapes, pain mitigation, we get in the background, right? But more importantly, what can we measure? Power, wattage, poundage. Those are the things that we really keep our eyes on.

Rhonda Patrick: Have you heard? I mean, I know you've heard of it, but what causes women who are perimenopausal to get this frozen shoulder? As you were mentioning, the range back here, like some women.

Kelly Starrett: I'm so glad you brought that up.

Rhonda Patrick: Up.

Kelly Starrett: So one of the things that our industry, physical therapy, everyone all did dirty by women for a long time is we did not recognize what Vonda Wright. Dr. Vonda Wright calls the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause. And that when we suddenly see women in their 40s and 50s who show up with some weird occult tendon thing. Got a weird hot tendon. I want everyone to ask, ask the fundamental question, hmm, I wonder if this is related to my gonads. Right. Which is my ovaries and testes. What is happening? Is there some fundamental change in my biology that has left me? Because you're doing, everything's the same, nutrition's the same, but all of a sudden I woke up and this new body. Absolutely, we should be asking that question. Does this have a hormonal component? Yes, and we want them. We can also work on restoring your range of motion. We could also get blood flow and we could move slower so that it doesn't hurt. While simultaneously, maybe we. We run that down.

Rhonda Patrick: So, so essentially you have to fix the hormone problem.

Kelly Starrett: I would say that for generations, we didn't fix the hormone problem for as long as we've been humans. But now what I would say is we are more aware that this should be a component of care for women who are perimenopausal and menopausal when we're suddenly seeing a culture frozen shoulder. And by the way, frozen shoulder translates in Japanese and Chinese to 50 year old shoulder. Isn't that weird? Yes, that's what it's called. 50 year old shoulder.

Rhonda Patrick: I haven't gotten it yet, but I'm like, I have friends that have it. I'm hearing about it, and now I'm like, scared.

Kelly Starrett: Well, what we can say is, how do we manage range of motion? How do we optimize? What can we control? And oftentimes that's enough. And then we may need to jump on that. But when there are changes in the tissues and there is no parity here, we often have men who come out of being exposed to a lot of head trauma in the military, in professional sports, they've rattled their anterior pituitary through concussions. They don't really make testosterone. They don't really. Plus all the lifestyle things are going on. No growth hormone. Tissues start to fall apart in two seconds. We're like men. Here's some testosterone. You're set. Right? We measured it. You have all these concussion histories. Imagine if we applied the same thing to women. We're like, hey, the system isn't working. And now you're starting to expose yourself to these fundamental changes in your tissues. They're changing because of the lack of estrogen. So Seems like that would be another thing we could look into.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. One other thing I want to touch on, on the sort of healing recovery spectrum is, you know, we're talking about blood flow perfusion. The voodoo floss is like one. One way to get to that. I like to run on days that I'm not lifting. And I find that if I'm really sore, if I did something, if I had. If I've been traveling a week, it's crazy. I'll travel for a week and then I come back and I do squats and I'm like, I'm sore and I'm like, I've been doing these. I can't take a week off. Like, really, I know what, what. But I find that if I go for a run the next day, it is insanely important for my recovery. It really helps.

Kelly Starrett: That's right. That's right. So I don't want to interrupt.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, no, do.

Kelly Starrett: First of all, your experience there is really important. I figured out that if I move after these sessions, I feel better and that works. And I know how to do that. So someone should not come in and say, that's wrong, or let's change that. That bully for you because you're figuring it out that the goal is this constant motion. That's fantastic.

Rhonda Patrick: Right. And I mean, it's probably a lot of things going on, but I feel like blood flow is sure one. Right. You're getting all the goodies to your muscle to recover and your tendons and. And so on. But the other way to do that would be something that I've definitely talked about a lot on this podcast, and I know that you're a fan of, which is deliberate heat exposure through sauna or hot tub, where you're also increasing blood flow. I mean, it's sort of mimicking moderate intensity cardiovascular exercise. So I wanted to get your thoughts on, first of all, using temperature, both hot and then on the opposite end of that would be cold, which causes vasoconstriction. Combining the two, how, how you think about, you know, using that for healing, recovery. And then we can talk about growth hormone too, because I want to bring up something.

Kelly Starrett: I love it. We're huge fans of entertainment of your body. Michael Easter talks about the comfort crisis, just that exposure to those ends making you a little bit more psychologically resilient. How about that? There's probably a ton of really good science. Thank you for showing us all about the sauna exposure. Heat exposure. Simultaneously, I would say that what if the sauna miracle of the sauna was just that you have to chill out and be in there with your partner and there's no phone and there's a community. I it can work on lots of levels. We tend, I think the easiest way of thinking, and I'll borrow this from our friend Larry Gabby, that heating up and cooling down are two of the most expensive things our bodies does. And if we can become a little bit more efficient at it, that's probably a good thing. Getting cold and getting hot might be really great for your range of motion of your vasculature. Just reminding your, you know, all those smooth vessels, this is what it means to get cold and this is what it means to get hot. And you're right. Maybe the fundamental aspect of saunas that we just start moving and pumping and things start, you know, that's great. I'm into it now. We can say, well, how often? When should I can I make it too hot? You actually brought our temperature way down. Thank you very much. We listened and now we're at like 180, not 230. You know, I'm not retching in the sauna anymore, you know, because I'm overheated. But I think, think if we're talking about performance, great research around sauna, we can sauna, sauna, sauna, but it's a stressor and we'll definitely smoke you. We probably tend to use cold a little bit more judiciously because it can blunt adaptation to exercise. Right. Which is not what we're trying to do. And yet simultaneously I would just say, hey, if you're a middle aged rec guy, get cold when it works for you, right? Don't worry about it. If we're trying to win a gold medal, maybe we think about out when we're dosing that exposure of cold so we don't blunt any adaptation. But if we're talking about jumping in some cold water for a minute, that's not the same thing as icing, Right?

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. I also love how you talked about your brain and getting, doing the hard things too. Training our brain, right?

Kelly Starrett: People freak out when I get cold. I'm like, what's wrong with you? It's just cold, you know. And you know, full disclosure, my wife and I were professional river guides and kayakers and paddlers. We've been cold our whole life. It feels like so we're like, oh, this is just like my 20s, you know, being freezing in a river. But I think it's real fun to entertain ourselves a little bit on the side. And I think Maybe we can look at some of those objects as, like, totemic objects that focus other health behaviors. Maybe that's the best, nicest thing about them.

Rhonda Patrick: Right? Yeah. Well, I wanted to bring up growth hormone, because, one, I want to get your input on what I'm going to say, but also because there's not a lot of research on this. There's like, independent research in one area and in the other. And you kind of have to connect the dots, right. Which isn't always great, but it's a start. And so we know that sauna deliberate heat exposure does increase growth hormone. So growth hormone does respond to a stressful type of, you know, stress. Right? So you can do that through exercise, you can do it through deliberate heat exposure, you can do it through, you know, intermittent fasting. All those things have been shown to increase growth hormone. And depending on the temperature and duration, you can get a more robust response. Right. So, like, the longer you do the sauna, the more hot, without going above, you know, 200 degree Fahrenheit, you're gonna get a more robust response with growth hormone. And, you know, the effects of growth hormone, particularly on, like, tendons, making them stronger. I believe that's something that's, you know, known. So my, my idea here is, like, is the. Is using this sauna also potentially helping your tendons because of that growth hormone pulse that you're getting from doing exercise also does elevates growth hormone as well.

Kelly Starrett: If we're managing someone's pain or after injury. Again, I might even say hard for me to measure that growth hormone effect. But what is really useful is that I can get people feel better. We get better blood flow without having to work hard on a tissue that we need to protect temporarily. Right. It's easy to do that in sort of. I don't have to. You know, we're lucky we have a sauna, but maybe you. You have one at home and you don't have to drive. We can have lots of these little sub sort of exposures more often. And ultimately, I think it would be real fun to be like, I got into the. The sauna and look at my skin now. It's amazing, right one time. But it's really the consistency of these exposures. I think we just. It's easy to sort of lose that. We love the sauna because we have a bunch of friends who are maniacs who work really hard. They're at the peak of their power. They're families. And we find it to be the easiest e-brake to yank, to slow them down in the evening, if you get hot and cold a couple times, you're going to fall asleep because it's so exhausting. But what I really like is you start to say, hey, here's a practice that's pretty easy, low skill. And maybe I could really goose my tissue healing times by optimizing. Because now we start to say, well, are you getting enough protein? Are you getting enough sleep? How are we getting that blood moving? And if there's side effects from some of these things, that's really great, I'll take it.

Rhonda Patrick: Right. And the nice thing now is I think there's enough research showing that even getting in a hot tub, hot bath, you could do a hot bath. Most people do have a bathtub at home. You will have to get a little pool thermometer and make sure you're at 104 degree Fahrenheit. So you might have to constantly refill the bath for 20 to stay for it to stay hot for 20 minutes. But it's also more accessible, I think now where it's like, well, people might go, I don't have a sauna and maybe they don't have a gym membership and their gym doesn't have a sauna. So it's nice to know that they can even use their bathtub at home.

Kelly Starrett: Yes, I love that. And the way you're thinking about this is, okay, here's what we think best practice looks like in an elite institution. How do I transmute that to my little home? You know, getting hot really once in a while is probably really good for you.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Let's kind of translate to the opposite of exercising and moving, which is what we're doing now and sitting and what most of us are spending, I would say, the majority of our day doing. I have to admit, I'm selfishly interested in some of the stuff that you talked about in your bestselling book, Supple Leopard. Desk ergonomics and kind of optimizing that because I, as I mentioned to you off camera, embarrassingly, have a standing desk. I mean, I toggle it. Can toggle it up and down. And yet I'm sitting the whole time that I'm working at that desk. Desk. I used it as a standing desk like 10 years ago. Got out of the practice. But before we get to the standing desk, I do want to just mention, you know, there's a lot of people in my, in my life that are affected by sitting at a desk that I care about. And so I want this information to get to them so where do we start?

Kelly Starrett: Let's define the problem, right? It's not sitting as bad. Standing is good. Good, right. We're designed to be in motion throughout the rest of the day for the whole day. I think that's the way you should look at it. And there are absolutely times where it's appropriate to simplify. You have trained your body through high school and college and university and grad school to be able to sit and focus. And that is not a problem. What's a problem is these marathon bouts. So Harvard defines sedentary lifestyle as sitting more than six hours a day and aggravating get. So that's tv, dinner, commuting, right? All the, you know, we're having to sit like this is our organism, you know. And again, we should have a body that's tolerant enough to handle these sitting things without my back hurting, without my hips getting stiff. But what we can start to ask is, okay, is there, are there opportunities where we could break up that sitting into optional, non optional setting? Because remember, the goal is just to move more. Right. So one of the things that's been useful is for us is, you know that data that says walking 8,000 steps a day reduces all-cause mortality by 51%. That's a pretty good bargain. 8,000 steps turns out to be clinically relevant because a lot of people can get that without having to do a big crazy walk. And organize your whole life around walking meetings. You can kind of get that 8,000 steps. So now we've got a benchmark in there where we're instead of saying, don't do this, we're saying, hey, let's do this positive behavior. And that tends to change what's going on with all the sedentary necessary. Oh, gotta walk. And you know, people have been down this road before. You know, the healthiest people in the building were the smokers because they had to get up and walk to the smoke place. Right? And the further away you put that, the healthier they got. But what we can then start to say is, well, okay, I have this desk thing. Are there any modifications to the environment that might allow me to not. Not be as sedentary? So we can look and go further and say, well, what is a sedentary behavior? It's like falling in half below one and a half. Metabolic equivalence. That's really what it is. So you remember the old treadmills, like you can be like watts, calories, mets. A met is like an erg or a watt. It's just a measure of work output. And one and a half metabolic equivalence is a sedentary behavior. So any activity where I have more than one and a half metabolic equivalents, like there's a landmark research that when the Wii came out, remember that PlayStation, the Wii, and they were like Wii Fit. It turns out playing Wii burned as many calories as standing. Right. It wasn't the Wii, it was the. Now we're not sitting and playing. So if we were at a bar stool working, that's still, I can focus. But now I have to do a lot more with my trunk. And Now I'm above 1 1/2 metabolic equivalents. As soon as I got my legs a little bit involved in the conversation, boom. Above one and a half. And not that we need to perseverate on that, but suddenly you could really do, say that those drafters had something going on. So we say it's not a standing workstation until you have a place to put your foot to get you out of this extension. So you need like a stack or something. And two, I want you to have a barstool so that you can sit down, you can perch, you can lean, you can use it as a prop, you can put your foot on it, you can do half, half pigeon pose on it. Right. And all of a sudden you're like, wow, there's a lot of movement choice. I think the problem with just sitting is that we don't have a lot of movement choice here. And as soon as I go from a sitting, traditionally sitting station to a more work friendly position, there's a lot more choice to fidget, move, take a break, step back, et cetera, et cetera. And that suddenly cracks the whole thing open.

Rhonda Patrick: So having that range of movement's really key. And I also have a, A, it's a bar stool chair.

Kelly Starrett: Yes.

Rhonda Patrick: That I don't use anymore, but I still have it.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick: And it's kind of like you sit on it like a saddle. Yes, saddle chair.

Kelly Starrett: Perfect. And you can, you can go down the rabbit hole, you can go to Ikea and get the cheapest barstool you want there. I just want your trunk to have to work.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, you're right.

Kelly Starrett: Right.

Rhonda Patrick: As you're talking about this, I'm sitting

Kelly Starrett: here going, if we, if we. As soon as I sit back, everything turns off. And there's a time for that, you know. Absolutely. Let's go ahead and kick back. Welcome to the couch. Welcome to laying down. But the rest of the time we might even say, well, if we have remote work or I need some work at Home, maybe I sit on the ground. And so suddenly what you're doing, as we come back to kind of a conversation we were having, is what does a day's movement look like? And if I am not able to exercise, could I still say I moved enough during the day, I took care of myself, I was able to put all these things in. Well, I walked, I did some breath, spin up, I moved a little bit more. I was at work, I sat on the ground for 20 or 30 minutes in the evening at home while watching TV and maybe I did a little mobility work. I pulled out a roller and said, what's tight? Look at that day. It's pretty agnostic of exercise, but we put a lot of inputs into the body and sometimes that's what we're trying to do. And since most of us go to work, maybe there's an opportunity to get some more inputs.

Rhonda Patrick: Why is sitting on the ground so important? You talked about this earlier floor sitting and the, in the Japanese culture and Asian cultures where they're, you know, squatting and you've mentioned in your book even like floor sitting is important. So why, why do you think it's so important?

Kelly Starrett: If we look at the number one reason people end up in nursing homes, can't get up and down off the ground independently. So let's practice that, right? So now I have this practice where I have to get up and down off the ground. So. And it's built into something I'm doing. Most of us are watching tv. This is the truth, right? So what we found was that this was a simple behavior to put in where you could be in some of these end range positions that you just don't touch very often. Sit with your legs straight out in front of you. Oh, that's uncomfortable. Sit cross legged. Oh, that's uncomfortable. Now kneel for a while. Oh, that's uncomfortable. Now side saddle, that's uncomfortable. So we can touch a lot of postures. And most important thing, as we already hinted at, is this exposure and consistency. But if you're on the ground or 20 or 30 minutes, the total time we're spending at some of these end ranges of your hip, your knees, a typical person may not actually bend their knee all the way. They don't bend their knee all the way. They kind of sit in a chair, they walk around. But when's the last time your heel touched your butt? And suddenly people are like, I can't kneel. I'm like, well, when did that, when did that happen? When did that change?

Rhonda Patrick: I mean, kids are constantly in that.

Kelly Starrett: Constantly. So. So I think what we found. Philip beach wrote a wonderful book Called Muscles and Meridians. It's a functional embryology. You nerds out there. It's the best book on embryology there is. But he has this hypothesis that it's one of the ways that the body used to tune itself, that we spend time, for example, loading and kneeling on the hip reapproximates the hip into the socket. We get better hip function after that. Right. We have all these mechanics that function better when the hip has sort of better congruency, is better centrated. And all you need to do is sit on the ground or work on the ground or kneel on the ground. And that happens automatically. Most of the time when we're sitting, we're actually sitting on our femurs. We're not even sitting on the part of our pelvis that really handles that weight. The ischial tuberosity is the sit bones. And so his idea is, well, we can get into some of these fundamental shapes and patterns and restorations, doing something we always used to do two and a half million years. I mean, I'm a little fatter, your femur's a little longer. But 10,000 years ago, we're the same person. What's changed? Well, we don't ever get up and down off the ground. Suddenly you're like, oh, that yoga, that mat pilates, those wrestling games. Those things turn out to be hugely important. When am I going to put that in? I'm a busy working person. I can do it in the evening sitting on the ground. And you will see your wattage change.

Rhonda Patrick: You'll see your wattage change.

Kelly Starrett: You'll see your power change as we improve your range of motion and give you more movement choice. You will see anything that you care about improve.

Rhonda Patrick: That's fascinating. Okay, so gotta watch family movie night on the floor.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick: But also, older adults, I mean, this is important because, you know, they're the last person that ever sits on the floor because it's uncomfortable and scary. Yeah. Their back will start to hurt. And so for older adults, really, you know, sitting on the floor sounds like it's even more important because they're probably practicing that getting up. And if they use their hands and. Fine. Totally fine. Yeah.

Kelly Starrett: Turn on your stomach, use your couch, crawl up on the couch, you'll see that. Absolutely. Have this conversation with your parents. Your parents are like, oh, I've been on the ground since Vietnam or since Korea. You know, I mean, like, we don't get on the ground anymore. And it really is. You know, you'll hear people talk about playing with their grandkids, and they're like, wow, you know, it's. It's a lot to be able to get up and down off the ground. And what's interesting is your range of motion is the one part of your physiology that doesn't have to change as you age. Can you imagine if we just said, oh, yeah, everyone gets sick.

Rhonda Patrick: Why is that?

Kelly Starrett: Because it doesn't have to. Why? It's just the one aspect of your movement. Probably going to lose some bone density, probably going to lose some muscle. Unless we're, you know, enhanced. Right. And we have all these. But your range of motion doesn't have

Rhonda Patrick: to change as long as you're allowing. As long as you're practicing it. Right. I mean, like, if you're not practicing

Kelly Starrett: it, then it's going to change. Yeah, yeah. But also remind everyone, muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs. They adapt. And readapt. It's going to be slower than when you were 17, but you. You can reclaim that position and shape. I did a. I did a talk at the Olympic Club in San Francisco, which is kind of a fancy athletic club, and they were like, we want you to talk about mobility and performance. And I was like, great. There's going to be no chairs. And the demographic there was decidedly over 50. And there were so many people who wanted to have a very sophisticated conversation about performance and mobility but couldn't sit on the ground at the end. We had was about an hour long. We're doing lots of demos and things. Probably a third of the room was laying down because they couldn't sit.

Rhonda Patrick: Were they just experiencing pain?

Kelly Starrett: Just uncomfortable. Didn't have access to the range of motion, didn't have to do anything that required that normative range of motion. You know, that's a problem.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah.

Kelly Starrett: And it's not always a problem. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm glad I don't have to kill my own chickens every day. But simultaneously, I may have to be a little bit more intentional about taking my body through its shapes.

Rhonda Patrick: So my mom, she has this condition. It's orthostatic tremor, it's called. And so essentially, she is fine if she walks, if she's moving, if she's sitting, obviously. But if she stands still, her legs will start to shake pretty rapid, and so she can lose her balance really easy. And so she's gotten in the habit of, like. Like, if you watch. If you watch her, like, you know, Go do laundry in the laundry room. She'll. She'll sit down. She will sit down on the floor and do the laundry because she can't stand. And so even though she's, you know, 71 now, she is probably like one of the few older adults that I know that's sitting constantly because she has to. Because of this orthostatic tremor where she stands, you know, she stops getting the output. Yeah, yeah. And so. So I'll tell her to keep working on her.

Kelly Starrett: I love that.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. And she's also the one that gets on the floor and plays with the grandkids because she's used to being on the floor.

Kelly Starrett: She's used to being on the floor.

Rhonda Patrick: She's used to being on the floor.

Kelly Starrett: And again, I think what's wonderful about that is we can say, first of all, we can have, hey, fall prevention mitigation. We could get better. Getting them down off the ground, we can have better, but also gives us more movement, choice. And that's really what gets lost in a lot of this conversation about, is letting people have access to as much physiology so they can problem solve, move in the way they want, pick up new novel skills. You can think of movement, this is Juliet's analogy, is that, you know, when we're young, our hallway is huge, and you have a lot of choice and what you do and, oh, we're going to play basketball, and then we're surfing, and then we're like, doesn't matter. Yoga. Okay, you can do whatever. And as you get older, that hallway potentially gets narrower and narrower until we're, you know, on a walker up and down that hall. And what we're trying to do is say, hey, how do we keep that as wide as possible? And we have to talk about tissue health and some range of motion and, you know, community. And it's a. It's a. It's a conversation about being human. But ultimately, we can have less suffering and still have a body that we can care and. And is built for adventure for as long as we try.

Rhonda Patrick: Right.

Kelly Starrett: And that's. And I think that's, you know, that that context is really matters. I want, you know what's important to you. And again, I think, you know, we wrote Supple Leopard. It came out in 2013. Very much obsessed with winning more Olympics. Like, let's go, world champions. Like, that's what you know. And now I'm like, okay, I'm 52. Maybe this is all about maintaining as much playability as you can, having a body that you can trust and doesn't hurt all the time and you know,

Rhonda Patrick: so that you can enjoy life with your family.

Kelly Starrett: I love that. That's a really great definition of mobility. Can you do you access and do you, can you use that in things that you love to do?

Rhonda Patrick: Well, it's your, it's your quote, train for life. Right. Don't live to train.

Kelly Starrett: Well, you know I do like training. I love training. I'm obsessed with training my wife and I love to train comma but it's always in the context of other things. Right. In service of. And I think that that that's, that's really great. And look no shade if you're the gym is your whole world awesome.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. That's what makes you happy. That's your life. Right.

Kelly Starrett: But let's also now say because this is the only thing I would, I would caution is sometimes that highly decorative room where we're checking off all the things is not the same thing as how do we train a group of people to win an Olympic medal or you know.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah.

Kelly Starrett: Etc. Etc.

Rhonda Patrick: So Kelly, I just also since we're talking about this sedentary time and I mean how, how sedentary time is defined and how that is an independent risk factor for higher all-cause mortality and particularly there's an interesting study that correlates it to cancer, increased cancer risk. I spend a lot of time sitting. A lot of us spend a lot of time sitting. People that listen to this podcast know that I've become over the years really interested in these exercise snacks or actually as you call them, movement snacks. And I just want to take a moment to give you and Juliet props because you guys have been talking about these for, you know, I don't even know how long now. It's been about almost a decade maybe. You've been, you know, it's been quite a few years. You guys were ahead of the curve talking about the importance of, you know, breaking up your day with moving, moving throughout the day and how it's not just about spending that one hour, you know, block of time at the gym. And we're trying to make up, we're trying to comp over, compensate for our modern day lifestyle, which I love.

Kelly Starrett: That's absolutely true.

Rhonda Patrick: But you know, these, there's so much data that has come out even in the last five years and this is where my attention, I really became drawn to this literature where it's undeniable that even people that are taking advantage of everyday life situations so they're not even necessarily doing these structured Exercise movements or these structured exercise snacks where they're getting up and doing body weight squats for two minutes or something like that. They're just going around and you know, they live on the third floor. I'm sorry, they could live on the third floor of the building or they could work on the third floor of a balloon. Either way, they take the stairs to get to that third floor. They don't just take the stairs, they sprint up them. They're, they're really going fast or they're taking time to play tag with their kids or their grandkids or, or you know, sprint around with their new puppy, whatever it is. This is everyday situations. They're, you know, they live in the city and they're not taking Uber, you know, they're, they're walking briskly to get to wherever they need to go shopping or to work. Right. And so people actually live like this. Believe it or not, now it is, it is something that people still do. And, and researchers have studied these people by putting accelerometers on their wrist and studying how, you know, fast that they are, you know, this intentional types of movements that they're getting throughout the day and even, you know, vigorous housework. Right. To some degree people are moving around. If they're, if they're vacuuming really, or mopping or something like that is, I would say more moderate intensity. But, but they can, they can get their heart rate up and they're moving, right? They're moving around. And really, I think the, the data is clear and repeatable where individuals that are doing, you know, these short bursts of exercise, if they're doing three minutes of it, three minute bouts of it three times a day. So a total of nine minutes a day, that's a 50% lower cardiovascular related mortality. 50% lower cardiovascular related. 40% lower all-cause mortality, 40% lower cancer related mortality. And this is even in individuals that don't define themselves or identify as people that actually exercise because they're like, no, I don't go to the gym, I don't exercise. But they do exercise. They just don't realize that they're showing these moments. Right? So you get props because you've been talking about this. You and Juliet both get props. You've been talking about this and really, really emphasizing the importance of movement throughout the day for a long time. So thank you for that public health service. And let's talk about how, you know, some people that perhaps they don't have a puppy or they're not a parent, or they don't live on the third floor of a gym and unfortunately they use Instacart because they need to, you know, work more. Whatever their situation is, they're, they're Deskbound. Right. That's the, the title of one of your best selling books. Right? So how can individuals take time to get up and get these movement snacks, these exercise snacks.

Kelly Starrett: Amen. Word. I love just the framing of this and I suspect part of the problem in us not recognizing that sort of additive movement through the day is that it didn't look like a one hour paid for exercise class which we've trained people to, to do. Right. Oh, I have to be an hour and that means it's a half hour drive to the gym, I have to do an hour, then there's a half hour drive back and that's a two hour endeavor I couldn't block. No, you know, like you said earlier, even some of the sprinting we got people habituated doing on Peloton that was really effective. Like you know, go out and just quickly, you know, is, are you going to go to the Olympics? We're not having that conversation. We're saying how can we put this input in the research right now coming out of the Stanford Lifestyle Medicine Group group is that these movement breaks, movement snacks are even more powerful than we thought. They can actually do a ton in terms of maintaining muscle mass or challenging if we even get into the pain science world, like chronic pain, persistent pain. Walking really fast in your neighborhood is one of the ways that your brain starts to pay attention, puts all those growth factors out there, rewires itself because your brain says, oh, we're walking fast, something's going on. Better make this wiring a little bit more adaptable. So you know what's great about this is that means hey, I have 10 minutes, what could I do? Or I have 20 minutes right when I get home. That can be real work. And we actually apply that even to when we're starting to get our kids doing some strength and conditioning. We can even just like 20 minutes of hey, we got some front squats in. We like, let's go throw the Frisbee. I think if we start to view recreation as again, we'll borrow Katy Bowman, right? Who is just a G. She says, hey, if we took all your movement and made a language out of it, how many words are you using a day? What's your vocabulary? What's your lexicon? And number one, we want to have a huge vocabulary. But two, we actually want to use that vocabulary during the day. And most of Us are getting up, sitting, walking around, sitting, walk around a little more, sit, get into a different car, sit, walk around. That's it. That's the whole day. And then I brought my hand to my face a lot. Right. And so one of the first things we could say is, well, how do I break that up? So I'm just using more movement language in the day. And even just getting up and down off the ground one time starts to blow up in that vocabulary. But to your point, you know, we don't need to obsess on this. Let's find ways to be enjoyable, to go for a walk with our neighbors, to, you know, how can we play more or just monk around more. And suddenly you're revisiting those, those park. You know, I'm sure they have a name where you're at a park. And then there are these workstations. I can't, I can't believe I'm blanking on this, you know, where suddenly you're like, you do some dips, you hang from a bar, you, you know, you touch your toes, you. You bounce from, you know, pole to pole. How do we work that in so it's not another thing a busy working mother has to do do, or a busy working executive person do? And then how do we normalize that so that it's not so weird to. To monk to use your body a little bit more instead of these very formal workout channels?

Rhonda Patrick: I, I find for myself, you know, I have, I have an. A child, I have a puppy. And, And I.

Kelly Starrett: Now there, those are, Those are two different things. Right? I'm just.

Rhonda Patrick: Right, right. Two different things. Two different things. Yes. But I, you know, there's. There's moments in my life in the past where, you know, I, My workload is so high that I find myself, I've found myself in this. I don't have time to go, like, play with puppy. The puppy needs to be played, like this is important. Or, you know, go around, play kick the ball, soccer ball with my son. And now I find myself completely different mentality where it's like, these moments are part of that. You know, I spend an hour in the morning doing my, my workout. Like this is part of it, you know, and it's more motivation for me not. And plus, I enjoy it. And now it's like giving me a re. Like an excuse. It's like, oh, I enjoy it. And it really does add up and matter. And it's part of that fitness equation that's always in the back of my mind. And so I think that it does give people this kind of. They can, like, it's like, oh, finally. I mean, I don't have to always spend an hour in the gym or go for that, like, long run. Why you should be doing those as well. You can have these little movements Now.

Kelly Starrett: I will go further. Not only can you, but that's the secret to be really functional. Look, Juliet and I are like, there's a lot of talk of longevity. I think it's. How long have human beings been on the quest for the fountain of youth? Forever. So I think that's an old trope, an old archetype. But we really want to be durable because what we think is the hits are going to come. You're going to get sick, someone in your family's going to get cancer. You're going to have a deadline. I was skiing with my wife in Japan just three weeks ago. I took a terrific high speed interaction with a rope and I tore my ACL. And so I have a MCL sprain, ACL, torn meniscus. Did you see me? Have I mentioned. No, I'm still walking around, I'm still moving. What can I do? Stay in motion around this, this. And the hits are going to come for us. So how can we prepare the tissues? How do we prepare our brains? And what you're hinting at is something very powerful that constantly being in motion and seeing the opportunities. I'll hint back to our friend Dave Spitz, the Olympic coach. He owned a gym and was suddenly like, I'm out of shape. I don't train. I own this gym. All I do is coach people. So he started doing something called never do nothing, which was one set of bicep curls, one set of squats, one set of push ups, one air chair, one. Like there was something he could do that had net positive input and he got out of that all or nothing. Instead of 90 minutes of Olympic lifting training, I'm going to do something for my body and something that makes me feel fun to move. I think with the greatest secret ever is a gentleman named Caleb Marshall. His YouTube channel is the Fitness Marshall. And if you put on one of his dance routines, you will see very quickly he and the amazing women, Haley and Allison who work with him, you could dance if you did a three or five minute dance on YouTube, free jump on his channel. We use it for warm ups, we use it for fun. But you'll be like, wow, I'm mirroring, I'm touching shapes, I'm moving in ways that are novel. Three minutes you don't have three minutes to do a little dance. I do. I bet you do.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah.

Kelly Starrett: The fitness.

Rhonda Patrick: Marshall, I also love what you're. You're talking about this. You know, there's. There's been a big push over the past. I don't even know how many years now. Maybe 10. This. Go hard, go home. Right? I mean, and. And, like, there's. There's good lessons there too, right? Like, yeah, you got to do it. You got to form the habits. I think the habits is a big part of that, which, you know, something you got to take. You got to take the pieces that work for you. But I think there's also burnout. You know, sometimes, like, you can take it to the extreme, right?

Kelly Starrett: I spoke one time at Strava headquarters, right? We had a podcast there, live podcasts. And I was like, how many people in this office are Consider themselves injured? It was like 95% of the hands went up. Because what does Strava value going faster? Personal PRs. King of the mountain, queen of the mountain. And what we saw was that. That if you're just in service of just elite, bleeding edge high performance, and that's the only thing that you do, that's what we get.

Rhonda Patrick: Well, it sounds like, you know, this, this. This idea of, like, never do nothing. I like it. It's. It's kind of on par with Ben Levine's. Like, you have to make it part of your personal hygiene. Exercise has to be part of your personal hygiene. Something you do every day. You brush your teeth. Why do you brush your teeth? You brush your teeth because you don't want to get cavities. You don't. Your teeth fall out. You. You want good gum health, right? But. And everyone does that. Like, everyone brushes their teeth every day at least once a day. But exercise, in some way, shape or form is something you have to do every day, every day.

Kelly Starrett: And look at the roots of why people wouldn't want to move their bodies. Didn't have access as a kid, didn't come from a family that valued this. My only experience with physical education was PE in the 80s. Like, like, not great, right? And so suddenly you realize that, like, hey, I don't identify as a creative person. Like, I haven't even had the access to move. I'm a woman, I'm not a boy. Like, suddenly we're. You can see that there are a whole lot of reasons that people suddenly get the message where they're like, what do you mean my bone density is bad? What do you mean that I'M losing muscle. What do you mean? I'm pre diabetic. And we're starting to see that in a lot of women in their 50s in our neighborhood who are, they're like, hey, I'm skinny and I've been running or walking, speed hiking forever and calorie restricting because I want to be a certain way that the universe is telling me I need to be for good or for bad. I'm going to say for bad. And lo and behold, it doesn't hold up against that test. Like, hey, we'll take what you're doing and let's third party validate it. And for whatever reason, the messages we got don't comport with what you're saying, which is, hey, how can we engage with each other more and more? How do we change that society? You know, we were just, I mentioned, we were just at University of Hawaii and the Queens grounds there. The Queens park was packed with people just outside walking, throwing, playing soccer. And really this is almost a cultural problem. As long as it's my house and Costco and then work and then that's all I go and see, and then I have some formal thing that I do twice a week, we're never going to solve the problem.

Rhonda Patrick: I was in China last September and you were mentioning these, these sort of playgrounds, these parks where they have all these outdoor.

Kelly Starrett: Oh, China leads the way.

Rhonda Patrick: Oh, yeah. I mean, it's like, it's like mandatory if you're 50, I mean, you're out and, and it's great. And I was walking around with my family and not, you know, there's Tai Chi, a lot of Tai Chi too. And you just see them doing the Tai Chi in the parks and you see them doing, you know, they're, they're doing dips and they're in like we were out there doing it with them and it's like the middle of the day and it's like if you're over. I, I said 50, but like, it's, I actually surprisingly younger than what you would imagine, like if you were here. And that was the thing, which is not. But it should be, but it's, it's, it's true. A cultural, it's a cultural problem where, you know, we're not, we're not valuing the importance of movement, you know, because,

Kelly Starrett: and we haven't constructed society so that, that's easy and valued and there's a premium on it. Right.

Rhonda Patrick: And seriously, that's a whole, that's a harder problem to solve. Obviously, that's Going to involve civil engineers and everyone, everything.

Kelly Starrett: That's right. You're really looking at human environment interaction.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah.

Kelly Starrett: Is there a park? Is there a place to move myself in an urban landscape? Are there sidewalks? How. And suddenly you start to see that, oh, if we're really interested in getting to the bottom and having a population that's healthier and has less strain on the system and less, you know, cardiorespiratory metabolic disease, we have to think differently about all of these things and they need to work on the scale of decades. So we might start by saying, hey, if this is really important to us, I'm not sure we should rip out PE out of the schools.

Rhonda Patrick: Right, right. Yes. I mean also just being outside and that's something that seems to be a message that I keep recurring message I hear you talk about is you know, getting outside and being, being active in some way. Whether it's going for a walk or you're doing interval walking or you're going, you know, to the park and, and playing with kids, puppies, whatever. Being outside. Also there's an added layer, right. You're getting the sunlight, you know, you're getting, you know, that's really important for circadian rhythm, regulation, vitamin D. If you

Kelly Starrett: wanna have a civil society, be civil towards your neighbors. Cause you see em all the time walking.

Rhonda Patrick: Right. You're with people 100%. Yeah.

Kelly Starrett: You know, rucking really had a moment. I don't think we're past peak ruck maybe.

Rhonda Patrick: Okay.

Kelly Starrett: And I love that idea because people suddenly could put a little load through their spines, 10, 15, 20 pounds and walk around the neighborhood again. Everyone can walk. It's suddenly accessible. Maybe you're not a runner, but we could load. And, and don't get me wrong, I'm not saying wearing a six pound weight vest is going to change your bone density issues, but if I need you to work more, carry this pack and your feet are going to get tired

Rhonda Patrick: carrying this pack, I need to start rucking. So I do. Sorry to interrupt you. I do, you know, on weekends part of my, my leisure time is, is hike, is like hiking. I say hiking. It's not like really hard hiking because I'm doing it with my 8 year old. But we, we take our puppy and we, we go out and we do like little short canyon hikes and stuff. Hour, hour and a half sometimes.

Kelly Starrett: Legit.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, legit. But I'm not. And, and I had a conversation with Andrew Huberman the other day and he was like, oh, do you wear a weighted vest? And I Was like damn, why am I not doing that right?

Kelly Starrett: Well it's how easy to slip right in and, and if it's not a weighted vest, wear a backpack. I would say a backpack is even easier and better for your body. You know, you don't have to load accident.

Rhonda Patrick: Like I do that when I go to Disney World and walk.

Kelly Starrett: But like that's right, that's right.

Rhonda Patrick: What, what like let's say I wanted to get the weighted vest perfect. Wait, what weight do you think I should start with?

Kelly Starrett: Yes, start with some. You know, the idea is that hey, let's, you know, don't go to level 12 immediately. Let's say, hey, hey, I, I found a vest I could afford. What does that feel like? Hey, maybe I can have. Maybe I need a couple things, right? Maybe you know, if you just left it by the door and every time you walked out you had to carry that thing around and normalized carrying loads. Coming back to Philip beach, he's like human beings throw, we get up and down off the ground and we carry resources. Like that's really what human beings do and that carrying of resources. And if you're a mother out there carrying your baby around, you're doing it all already, right. Carry that squirmy 10 pound thing around and you're going to be exhausted. But how can we layer in maybe a better thing on top of something you're already doing? And you know the research. If you look at the company NatureQuant and NatureDose, they actually have an app that will can let you know how much time you're spending outside every day and every week. And it will score that based on how rich and green your environment is. So not all time outside is equal. Right. Like being outside in green, seeing far like the parks really does change what's going on with the, the biology. But the average American is spending 20 minutes outside a week.

Rhonda Patrick: Get out.

Kelly Starrett: That's what the data says.

Rhonda Patrick: The average American is spending 20 minutes outside a week. And this is just in any environment, not necessarily nature.

Kelly Starrett: That's right. That's right. They're going from their house to the work to the right. We're just not actually outside. So, so what you start to see are these a lot of these type 1 errors sort of woven into our biology. Like we don't sit on the ground. We're not actually eating fiber and fruits and vegetables. We don't see the sun ever. We don't know our neighbors. What we have is a lot of signaling of a lot of threats to the brain and no wonder. Maybe we're not living as well as we could if we just thought differently about the problems and taught people from much earlier ages. Our hypothesis is, Juliet and I, that sport. And this is Jonathan Haidt, right. The Anxious Generation. He's like, for kids, we really have two solutions, church and sport. And what we feel like is sport is an opportunity to teach all of these things about recovery, nutrition, mindset, as a formal framework, because we're all going to stop doing sports the way we kind of traditionally think about them. We're all going to become recreational athletes eventually. But where and when did you learn all this? Not in how health, not in home ec, but maybe we need to have a kind of health ec, you know, back in our schools and teach kids, hey, walking is great. You know, it's not always about, you know, doing the least cool thing, but. And how do we normalize, you know, more adult recess?

Rhonda Patrick: It's. I like the idea of this app you talked about because, you know, we talk. We. A lot of people measure their screen time a lot. And it's kind of the opposite. Where you're looking at. You're not obviously not going to be.

Kelly Starrett: Screen time's never going away.

Rhonda Patrick: Away. Yeah, it's. That's not going away. It's only gotten worse. Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully we'll swing around and make it better again. I feel like that we're coming to that point now where people are realizing how terrible it is for health. But with the, with the outside time and outdoor time, you know, oftentimes you, when you have data, you can make a behavior change. Right. And so when people start to realize, and I know, like, for example, you know, people think about when they're eating and how much they're eating throughout day. The day. And you ask the average person, they think they're like, oh, no, I definitely eat all my food within 12 hours.

Kelly Starrett: There's no way I'm, like, still eating 22 hours.

Rhonda Patrick: It's like 15 to 20 hours, you know, and. And so it's not until they actually have the data that they realize that they're eating constantly. And so probably something similar with. I bet most people are like, there's no way I'm only getting 20 minutes a week outdoors. There's no way. Right. And. And so it would be. I think it's kind of an interesting concept for people to kind of start paying attention to that, because when you are outside, you know, especially if you're in a natural environment, and that's cool that this app is able to kind of distinguish somewhat between urban and nature because there's even been studies comparing people that exercise in an urban versus natural environment. And when I say studies that are comparing, I mean head to head comparison. This, the study looked at it. So they're doing the same, you know, aerobic walking exercise in either a natural setting or an urban environment. And it's that only in the natural setting that people are having this really profound antidepressant effect. It's affecting their, their, their brain, their mood, their mental health, which is at the core of a lot of our problems as well, health problems included. So I guess where I was going with that is I do like this idea of people kind of paying more attention to how much time they're spending outside.

Kelly Starrett: I, if we're member, I work with a lot of, of fancy sports teams. I spend a lot of time with small organizations like the, you know, different aspects of the government, Navy, the army, everyone's trying to solve these problems. And when it comes down to taking the lessons that we're learning in high performance and transmuting them so we can ultimately have these hyperlocal effects, which means it is the household that is the functional unit of change. And if you want to change your, your whole society, grab up your parents, grab up your in laws, take your kids and you're going to go for a walk in the evening after dinner and that could be five minutes. And that already is a quantum change. That's a three valences away from the old behavior and those small things, you know, https://www.foundmyfitness.com/admin/podcasts/kelly-starrett/edit for decades and decades and bone crushing consistency. I mean, you know, all this talk about sun gazing and circadian, I'm like, when did you go outside? You're not doing that anymore Anyway. So it's very sophisticated and very complex. But anytime we can take that and put it into the lens of when and where and how we're going to do this with my kids or my family, then we really start to win. I like to point towards, hey, let's get more time outside versus limit the scarcity thing. Like for example, when we do talk about nutrition with folks, we have a couple benchmarks. We're like, we want you to eat 800 grams of fruits and vegetables, vegetables every day. It's quantifying. That's right from EC Synkowski, great study. But quantifying the sort of nutrient density of your diet, making sure you get enough fiber and we get a lot of calorie control in the mix there. But it's the first time to people were like, actually you're not eating enough fruit and vegetables. And by the time we add protein in there, we have a lot of calorie control in the mix. But also you're going to be able to keep those muscles and the bone and your connective tissue and your brain. Right. So it's a lot easier for me to say, hey, hey, let's go ahead and focus on this first. And then if there's room for cookies, knock yourself right out.

Rhonda Patrick: Right. How many. What does 800 grams of fruits and vegetables look like for like, like five cups?

Kelly Starrett: Five big cups. A big apple, maybe? You know, you could probably do that in four big apples a day. It's really reasonable. Of course, we love to eat the rainbow. A banana is like 80 to 100 grams. But I'll take, like you're a rutabaga person and you're going to do this all in rutabaga. That's still better than you not doing it in rutabaga.

Rhonda Patrick: It's a, it's a good. This is how I like to think about nutrition as well, is like, what do you need? What does your body need? You need to get the fruits and vegetables for the fiber, for the micronutrients.

Kelly Starrett: Yes.

Rhonda Patrick: I mean, and the, and the, and the balances of them are really important, too. Phytochemicals in them. You need the protein, obviously, for muscle for a lot of. I mean, you need protein for everything. And, you know, the fats come along with that. But yeah, I mean, once you like, like once you meet those, those goals and those needs, your everything else is, like, easy. Like, you don't have to worry about, like, you're not eating the refined sugar. Why? Because you don't need it. It's not part of the equation.

Kelly Starrett: It's so full. And it also represents, you know, look, I, I'm a complete advocate for cookies. Like, I love myself a good cookie, but I will tell you that if that cookie represents the lion's share of my calories for the day, that's different than. And, you know, I've got this really well nourished human who's got his hitting all these things. And again, beans are on the menu. White potatoes are on the menu. Like those, those things count. Lentils. We're in there. So I'm agnostic about your, your family traditions, your religious, cultural traditions. Show me you're getting all the fruits and vegetables and then we can have the next conversation. And because you know what's gonna happen. Your sleep's gonna get better, your connective tissue is gonna better Your gut health's gonna get better. So we start to see the whole, whole system start to change. Now my shoulder doesn't hurt as much anymore. Oh, isn't that weird? You started eating more, sleeping better, shoulder started feeling better too. And you're absolutely right that when we focus on that, then it is less of a problem. And again, for a lot of people who are entry is into nutrition for body composition. If you eat this way, there's a lot of calorie control in the background. You're going to be shocked. And don't worry about the fruit, everyone. You're like, oh, my gosh, these bananas are going to kill me. They're not, not, you know, you're. And you're not eating the bananas. But you know, one of those loaves, I was just passing Starbucks, right? And one of those little piece of lemon loaves is like 430 calories. It's so good. Do you know how much a pound of cherries is or a pound of melons? 230 calories. So go ahead and eat a pound of cherries. Don't do it. You'll have disaster pants. It'll be a disaster. But you'll see that while you can crush the crap out of fruit and have a lot of calorie control plus fiber plus, you know, in the background. And then that's a really nice way of saying, hey, if I, I'm spending, I got to get this much time outside. It automatically limits indoor behavior. Or I've got to get this many steps that automatically limits these, you know, so I don't have to say, don't do this. I'm like, let's get this instead, right?

Rhonda Patrick: Focus on what you need. Focus on what? Like, because I just love it. It's. It's great. A great way to think about it. And also it helps you like the processed food thing, you know, with, with this. I think as people became more educated with the dangers of refined sugars, for example, they didn't, they, they. There was focused on just this refined sugar. It's like this tunnel vision. Refined sugar is bad. And so it's okay to eat these processed foods that are high protein. Protein pretzels, protein pretzels, protein chips.

Kelly Starrett: That's right.

Rhonda Patrick: I mean, like everything, it's. It's protein cinnamon buns with no, with no sugar. But it's like allulose. But, but it's a cinnamon bun. But it's high protein, right? All of it's garbage. It's all garbage.

Kelly Starrett: It's not food. It's a food like thing, you know, and there's times for that. If I'm a high level athlete, I'm gonna have to eat some processed foods because I gotta get these calories in. That's fueling. That's not nutrition. We call that. Those are different, different things. Oh, we're fueling. Let me introduce you to the bagel. We're fueling. Hey, maybe there's less bagels for an average person.

Rhonda Patrick: All right, Kelly? I am. I wanna take this opportunity to talk to you about a topic that, that is of interest to me. I know other folks are interested in as well. I think it's something that's not really discussed enough and that really has to do with youth sports training. Youth. I mean, this is a whole big area and there's a lot of interest, there's a lot of excitement, there's a lot of problems.

Kelly Starrett: Are there?

Rhonda Patrick: I mean, I guess I see them. I see them on the, you know, playing soccer field, for example. I see them arising and you know, even young. In young, young athletes. So maybe we could just start. I mean, actually, where do you want to start? Where do you think is a good start?

Kelly Starrett: Let's call it the industrial youth sport complex. Right? And say that yes, if you have a parent or you're a guardian of a child who plays, you're probably not having the experience with sport that you were hoping to have. It's a lot more complicated. And that we're asking parents and guardians to be sports psychologists, nutrition experts, pseudo physios. Right. You got to do strength conditioning. You're suddenly at performance timing. When do we eat this meal? Between these three. I have a child. Wow. Do we specialize? Do we play multiple games? Do we specialize in two sports simultaneously? How do I manage the crazy parents in the crowd? It's expensive. It's not right where it's not working. Most kids are dropping out at age 13. It's not fun anymore. Youth injuries are through the roof. Like what's happening with sport? And I think what's happening is we need to train parents for the job they're already doing, which is become the high performance directors for their families and begin there to sort of pull at these strings. Because theoretically we all got into sports or got our kids in sports because it was good for them.

Rhonda Patrick: Them.

Kelly Starrett: It taught us rules about working with other people and losing and sacrifice and being coach and taking feedback. But it doesn't feel like a really wholesome experience for everyone anymore, does it?

Rhonda Patrick: How do we, how do we start? By just making training fun for kids.

Kelly Starrett: Oh, well, parents, what is this for you? Is this for your kids first? Right. And there's a direct correlation and I'm going to out everyone here. The more experienced and gnarly an athlete you were, the more chill you are as a parent. And the less experience you had playing college or professional sports, the more hyper aggro you are as a parent for some reason. You know, we just came out of the Olympics and we. There's a lot of talk about Norway, Norway, Norway. What is Norway doing that they've dominated the Winter Olympics and they, they don't keep score with their kids till age 13. They have national programs that work on development. So kids love it and continue to move. You know, for us here, typically the tradition is winning and getting my kid to the next level so she can unlock the scholarship or go to university or be pro. And it's just not, it's not likely. So we, if we're going to tug at this, let's start to say that what can we control at home instead of adding complexity on long term youth athletic development? Does your kid sleep? So we can start there. The golden rule is really, adults need seven to eight hours of sleep. Yes.

Rhonda Patrick: Roughly, yes.

Kelly Starrett: Okay, so what we say in our program is, hey, we want you to be in bed for eight hours without looking at your phone. You're gonna set and then, so if you wake up in the middle of the night, don't panic. You're just gonna lay there and rest. Super cool. There is not a single study that says that a child needs less than 8 to 10 hours hours of sleep. Zero studies say that, like, if you're growing a body, you need more than that. For sure, more than that. So 8 to 10. But if you go into the typical teenager and track them, they're not sleeping eight hours. So we have this fundamental problem where kids are not sleeping, not recovering, not adapting, not growing. And then we're just adding more volume and more complexity on of top, top of a system that's not adapting to the exercise. Then we can go to nutrition and then we can go like, you'll start to see, you're like, oh, it's the same conversation. How do we normalize some of these things and then ask what the next step is?

Rhonda Patrick: I think also something that I've seen is even starting at an early age, 5, 6, 7, like you mentioned, it's not really, there's no focus on development. It's already like, I want my kid to be on the A or B team. And if they're not on the A or B team, then I want them to get there. And how do I train to get them on the A or B team? What's wrong with that mentality?

Kelly Starrett: Well, why does that mentality exist in the first place? I think every parent wants their kid to get playtime and be recognized as the chosen one and not ride the bench. And, you know, there's a lot there. You know, what I can talk about is Juliet and I, we derived a lot of experience and a lot of benefits from sport. So it was really important. We saw, and we're such fans, but we saw there was an opportunity to get our kids some of those same lessons. And so we, number one, we just said, hey, sport is not optional here, but let's define that. You can be in dance, you could be in yoga, you can be in club soccer. You have to find something you want to do. Swim team, what are the local CYO league leagues? What are the options available to us? But you have to choose one of those. So it wasn't optional. You have to move year round and then eventually you'll find the thing that you want to do. We did a lot of sampling of things and you know, I have a daughter who is fully retired. You know, as she's a retired. She's what's called a NARP. Do you know this term?

Rhonda Patrick: No.

Kelly Starrett: Non-athletic, regular person at college. Right. She's not a D1 athlete. She goes to Michigan studying econ but can snatch a barbell cook. Knows how to deal with her stiff quads, knows how to sleep. Right. Just has some tools. She's like, oh, this is how I care for it. And then I have a child who's 5 11, is going to play a goalie at Berkeley next year and she is a monster. Right? So we have one kid who we graduated and retired. We have one kid who we're trying to prep up and the approach is the same. And what we have to ask as parents is what can we control? So I'll give you an example. The sleep thing, I can't. If you want to reduce risk, injury risk sleep, you want to grow and have that kid be better athlete sleep. And what you're really going to see is, wow, we have to have a lot of conversations at our house around tech and bedtime. And it's a. That's going to be a big one.

Rhonda Patrick: But can I pause you there? Because even if you have those conversations, if you have an athlete and they're training late because you have games late, practices are Late. And then they. And let's say they're in school because most kids are in school.

Kelly Starrett: Hard school, hard school.

Rhonda Patrick: And the start time is early and they have homework to do when they get back from their training. What gives?

Kelly Starrett: Well, what you'll see is now we start to say, okay, eight hours is going to be our minimum sleep time. So that means we all agree that we're going to go from 8 or we're going to go to bed at 11 because we're night owls too and we're going to sleep till 7, right? In this situation, then we can at least start to say here is our minimum on that. And when we can steal a half hour here or steal a half hour there, we will. And you're really bringing up the problems with this perfect secret scroll. Youth athletic program. I'm like, it falls apart with when do we eat together as a family? When do I feed my kid a snack? She comes home and we ate dinner at five, you know, but she had practice late and now we got to feed her again. And now like I am pro cereal. Cereal is like a secret post-workout fueling panacea. Kids will eat it. My child can digest milk. So she's got cow milk on there, right? You could choose whatever milk, but I need to get some calories in after that, right? That thing has a little bit of protein. It's not going to be a huge crazy fat meal. It's not going to disrupt your sleep too much. But you started to see, you're like, wow, when are we going to do this? I started making breakfast for my kids. They're in high school that they could take with them. Because when I start to look at my wife, I'm like, hey, wife, you don't eat breakfast. She said, I'm not very hungry in the morning. My kids weren't hungry in the morning, but they were hungry a little bit later. So. So I could wake them up early, force them to eat this meal they didn't want to eat, have this terrible interaction. Or I could have them sleep till 7:20, they run out the door and I now have controlled breakfast. Emergency done, Omegas taken, vitamin D taken. There's a fermented food, then a little yogurt or kefir. There's a protein. Here's an apple cut up. I know my child leaves the house at least with the constructs of things that look like the first meal of the day, plus some snacks later on. And we're rolling there. And so you really have to think, I can't Play the best game. What's the next best game I can play? Where do I have some agency and control? Because it is really tricky and it's going to only get trickier the more serious your kid gets in sport and with the demands of high school and theoretically your kids will need to have friends. Theoretically.

Rhonda Patrick: All right, let's rewind a little bit before high school and talk about early specialization because you were talking about like how important it was to sample everything and you know, like what, what are some of the pros and cons of for example, a child just sticking to one sport after they, you know, started doing it when they were five or whatever.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick: And, and stuck with it and then not really trying, you know, like let's say they're soccer and they never do baseball or basketball or something with their upper body, for example. So what are some of the pros and cons?

Kelly Starrett: Well, I would say number one is the what's the point? Specialization is a, is here and it's real and you're never going to be the one parent who just bucks the whole tradition. And like it's going to take a cabal of parents be like we're not doing this, we're not playing year round. And remember we have, we're aware and we have children in these sports and club goes year round. But we'll pull Caroline out for example and, and say hey, during this time maybe you can do another sport. Maybe for some of these kids the extra sport is yoga or dance or strength and conditioning becomes the extra place to teach movement skills because kids will become hyper specialized very quickly. I'm an outside hitter, I'm a pitcher. I do this one thing and we don't have a chance to develop the motor skills problem solving that happens through a diversity in sampling playing. So what you can do is recognize that hey, I can try not to say okay, I'm going to specialize now in two sports which is how parents solve the problem. Now my kid is a lacrosse specialist and a soccer specialist with camps and both. Right. But we have to look at are there times off how do specialization is going to, is going to. Is a feature of the system. But we have to now look at when and where we're going to put put movement, diversity, other play. And I'll say I'll take specialization over not moving. I think it's important to recognize that free play does not exist anymore. Will not exist anymore. That's a construct of Gen X. We used to play in the street. It just doesn't happen and now we're going to have to have these formal movement programming engagement because that's the only place we're going to get, get that free play in club, soccer club, basketball club, those things. So what can we control? Are we controlling for those things? Are your kids eating enough? Are they sleeping enough? Do you have the skills to protect what you can protect and control? We control so that we can keep the kids moving. And I think Norway has a phrase, it's like the most kids for the longest, that's their goal.

Rhonda Patrick: The most kids for the longest, for the free play, the unstructured play. That was the question I was going to ask you the importance of that. That and I mean it is weird how it doesn't, I mean it doesn't exist anymore. I mean, I guess we're all too afraid of everything because we have all this information and this made us scared of everything. I remember playing for just hours and hours outside in the streets. I mean I, I, you came up with games. You invented, invented games. It was so fun. I mean we had all kinds of crazy games. Now parents have to create these sort of artificial environments that are played out. Dates. Right? And so now play dates are at least my way of like trying to allow my child to get free play. Yes, let's have a play date here. You're in our yard, whatever. Like have at it. Like have fun.

Kelly Starrett: The doors are locked.

Rhonda Patrick: Stay outside, stay outside. They're always outside. What like how is that really, is that really important for, you know, for

Kelly Starrett: athletes, for, for all youth skills are learned best under play conditions. In fact I would go a step further and say that play is the secret sauce to any adult having any fun and sticking to something in the long term. And if you watch a soccer practice, an elite team, it doesn't look like a lot of play. It doesn't look like a lot of fun. And no wonder kids are like this sucks, my friends aren't here. It's not fun. So we really have to think about protecting the sanctity of this play idea and exploration. And you know, David Epstein has a new book coming out about constraints and this constraint led model of how can we create better play through a set of constraints. That's how we problem solve. And you know, you're hinting at, you know, where's play need to happen? Resource. Well, we've just stripped recess like you know, you see the, the playgrounds of the 70s and 80s were kill a child and now they're just like these neat little two foot off the ground round Things, there's no exploration, no. No feedback. You know, think about the number of times you jumped off a swing and you know, peak velocity and peak apex. Right. And just there's no place for kids to get this kind of input. So it's really important that we're looking at, well, wow, tumbling and gymnastics seems to be really important skills. If you could access them. Right. And again, I, and everything I'm going to say I'm just layering on that. Not everyone can afford that or do that. But we have to think differently about what inputs we're having earlier so that we don't have these problems later. Every kid should be required to have PE year round. And that PE could be dance, could be weightlifting, could be yoga, could be. Right. We need that sort of movement literacy, movement competency as part of the things that we value if we're really going to, to get to the bottom of, because it's not here, I would say some controversial. We have PE or we have less red dye number five. I'm going to take PE. It's going to have a bigger impact on the world. Means we're going to have to fund it, we're going to have to play it.

Rhonda Patrick: I'm with you.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah. And so I think it's, you know, we need to work on all these different systems. I'll give you an example. There's a physician we work with who is president of the Knee Society for ACLs. And when kid would tear his ACL or her ACL in the 80s and 90s, they pull out this big drill, drill into the cortical bone. It's very intense. The bones are very hard now. They just core the bone by hand. They just hand turn the drill because the bones are so soft. So we're seeing this demineralization, this less hardening of the bones of children. What is that about?

Rhonda Patrick: Is that why they're breaking their, they're so like more light. The kids are breaking their bones.

Kelly Starrett: Like we're seeing a whole host of injuries that did not exist. Torn Lats, more UCLs, more ACLs. I mean the epidemic of ACL right now is, is its own topic. But when you come underneath that, what we see is didn't have women, didn't have access to movement control overplay, did not have, you know, don't have good nutrition features, aren't sleeping. Right. No off season. Right. Just what you can see is we've set up the, the perfect conditions and this is a normal feature or normal accident given the sort of Errors and the complexity of this person engaging in this play, which was supposed to be fun in the first place.

Rhonda Patrick: And for off season now, off season is now for me at least what I've seen is okay, it's off season, but now we have this other sport too. I mean, and maybe that's fine, but again, going back to the unstructured free play and how important it is, it's

Kelly Starrett: just kids don't do it. Maybe if you surf, maybe if you're into some extreme sports. Skateboarding is a great example of like probably the best pickup basketball. Though there are a couple pockets where that still exists, but mainly there looks like recreational sports. Kid finds a recreational sport. She's a skateboarder, she's skating at the park all the time. That's the best free play there is.

Rhonda Patrick: And some kids even like decide that they don't like to exercise. And.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah, what kid likes to exercise? No one. But you know what kids likes to play tag and, and scramble and climb and play games. Every kid. So I think, imagine if we just took our adult sensibility. Let me introduce you to the Peloton. Johnny, you're 12. Like that sucks. That's a sucky life. I mean that is the, you know, that's not a steer child sport life. And there are mutants out there who, you know, who probably picked up early. But that's not the whole. And I think if we. I'm going to shout out a gentleman named Jeremy Frisch. His you can see how he programs for long term youth athletic development in his community and the number of tag games and diving and problem solving and skills. And you're like, oh, that's PE. It really should look like that.

Rhonda Patrick: What about adding in strength training? Like, at what age is that? Well, I guess I shouldn't say that. Like, what's the readiness? Like, there's a readiness that people can look for.

Kelly Starrett: So I mean, do my kids need to front squat heavy early? Right? This is like, you know, like.

Rhonda Patrick: No, no.

Kelly Starrett: But what we're doing is we're trying to solve with a complex thing, a complex problem with a simple solution. Like our kids need to be jumping and crawling and sprinting. Like you're going to try to replicate sprinting with a child, like in the gym. That's for adults. We can start to layer in formal instruction early. That's what gymnastics and tumbling and parkour looks like. Right. That's why we get our kids into swim teams because there's okay to layer in some technical skills early on as the child moves into sort of middle school, we might start to add in a few things or it looks like, hey, we're doing, working on pull ups or you know, can you control your body weight in space? We don't necessarily, we're not worried about loading children because children are loading themselves themselves. But you know, it's okay to start to say, hey, we also should have some formal movement training on top of this play structure training. And now when you get out there, you'll see that there are lots of people who have good play models. I'll point out Ido Portal, I'll point out GMB Fitness. You know, MovNat, there are so many ways where we can be a little bit more, more formal in our movement play where we're exposing. Erwan Le Corre, who's the originator of MovNat, started to ask people who can do a pull up, how many of you who can do pull ups had a tree in your backyard that you could climb? And there was like a one to one correlation. I grew up climbing, grew up playing, can still do a pull up. So let's think in those terms. How do we change the environment so that there's better exposure? Because what we're seeing is we take just kids don't tumble kids. You know, we, Juliet and I worked at a, we worked field day for our school on middle school and they were like fifth graders who couldn't do a two foot hop. Fifth graders who couldn't do a forward somersault, right. It was shocking to us and we were talking about doing like we were doing the sack race, right. And the kids struggle to have enough hip range of motion to put the sack on. So by the time fifth grade has come around, we're really starting to see these pattern set, set up where we don't have a lot of movement fluency, movement control. Just because the environment isn't asking for it is what.

Rhonda Patrick: How do you feel about jiu-jitsu? Is that something that's incredible online with like the gymnastics? Let's say they don't do gymnastics.

Kelly Starrett: They do lovely, lovely, lovely. I think suspect that if every human had jiu-jitsu, we'd have a better society, right? Because you died 10 times today. I got choked out by this, you know, this old lady choked me out, out. Like that's definitely humbling. You learn how to have contact, that's safe contact and formal contact. You know, there are, there are real clear. This is okay. This is not okay. You learn to what your tolerances are. You tap out, you can, you know, I Mean that would be amazing if we could create and once again you maybe martial arts training or some kind of training that existed for a reason season. So martial arts is another wonderful way to put kids into some, some formal movement skills before we start to just say hey we got to get to

Rhonda Patrick: the gym and some of these, you know, movement skills and working on, I mean, trying to recreate free play essentially in many ways.

Kelly Starrett: That's right. We're trying to recreate free play right

Rhonda Patrick: along with nutrition and you know, trying to really at least get that minimum dose of like eight hours of sleep per night night helps with injury prevention

Kelly Starrett: with kids probably bigger than any other thing. If you, if you are interested in protecting your children so they are less likely to injured sleep would be the number one thing I would lean into.

Rhonda Patrick: But but also more importantly is not more importantly but also equally important would be also, not just you know, training in the sport that they're doing and just adding more volume. And adding more volume. Right. I mean like, does that work for adults? Hell no, it doesn't work for adults.

Kelly Starrett: I know, but it's gonna work for your child who's like, you know, the whole thing is bananas too. And if you're in a sport like it has rink time, your children, your 12 year old's playing at 11 o'clock at night or has, you know, it is anathema to what it means to develop a person who is durable and wants to play and enjoys the game. And you know, those kids are gonna self select eventually. Like Caroline identified that she wanted to play in college and was starting to put in the extra work much earlier.

Rhonda Patrick: Enjoys the game, that's key. So why do 13 year olds on average, is that the drop? 12 to 13 year olds, why do they, why do they. I call it dropout, but it's, they,

Kelly Starrett: they reject it because it's not fun. Like they're, they suddenly aren't with their friends, they don't have a good time anymore. It's not enjoyable. Really becomes about outcome driven. You know, one or zero, I, I won, I have value. We didn't win, it wasn't fun. You know. And one of the great opportunities we have is that where do we train adults to become coaches? So the whole American model is predicated on you being a volunteer coach. And where did you get all that training? Maybe when you were in high school you got, you modeled some behavior from a good coach, but we don't do enough formal coach development. Even how to talk to kids at different times or where and how kids acquire skills and that. Movement theory, motor learning, there's a lot of richness here. But we have to start to level up because right now sometimes we're like, we just need a body. And men particularly are like, well, I played in high school, so I'm a qualified coach. And you're like, that's just insane. Like, you know, you did a sport for four years 100 years ago, and you think you're qualified, qualified to teach this developing person? No. So we can do a lot better.

Rhonda Patrick: I mean, I'm certainly grateful that there's people that volunteer out there, but I can, through experience, tell you, as my child was doing the rec volunteer dad sport versus the actual coach, night and day difference. And I mean, night and day difference.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah. And this is a community level problem. Right. And I think, you know, Juliet and I are deep into a book project called Outplay where we're trying to see if we can straighten what we can control out, because we can't control, you know, private equity is coming into youth sports. That's all you need to know. Right. Oh, this is a for profit venture that we can maximize for efficiency and profit.

Rhonda Patrick: Do you call it the sport industrial

Kelly Starrett: complex, Youth and sport? Yeah, something like that. Right. And what you're seeing is it's very expensive. And is it giving us better outcomes? Do we have kids playing longer? Do we keep all the kids playing? We don't. And you know, at some point, your child, if she is legit, will become a specialist. You know, they, they asked Caroline to be the goalie for a different team, you know, when she was a junior. And I was like, too late. If you want to do this, you're all in on this because that's what it takes to play at these levels. And simultaneously, you know, one of the, I think real opportunities we have to protect kids is to get them a little stronger and a little fitter. And that can be very simple. Classic strength and conditioning. We have a lot of parents who come up to us and say, hey, my daughter's been recruited or my son's been recruited. But the coach is asking him what his front squat is, what his power clean is. What are those things? And we're like, your child's 18 and has never been in a formal strength conditioning program. That's crazy. So we're gonna have to start to add some of that back in as we get into high school so that we can come a little bit more durable. But also, some of those things can happen in your own home.

Rhonda Patrick: What are some of the main I would say important points of you and Juliet's new book Outplay that you could kind of just easy, you know.

Kelly Starrett: Oh well I tell it, you know, without giving the whole thing away. We have real talks. We can establish what the research says about needing something sleep but real tactics about how you're going to solve that sleep problem. The fueling is such a problem. We see hugely under fueled kids who are also malnourished and under fueled. Drinking a lot of energy drinks, eating a lot of reactive snacks. I'm starving, I eat a bag of Doritos. So we're not putting base nutrition on kids who have these growing body needs, needs and then our fueling is really, really tricky. When do we eat as a family? What's the pre-game snack? So we try to really kind of get to the bottom of that. We also try to give parents a simple rubric for helping their kid get out of pain because a lot of times your kid come, you know when we ask. We work with big camps and stuff all the time. And I raise, I'm like 100 kids in here. I'm like who's pain free? And like one hand goes up and that girl's 12 years old and she's wrapped in bubble tape and on drugs obviously because she's the anomaly. And every other hand these kids are like yeah, my shoulder hurts, my back hurts, my knee hurts. And parents head snap around, they're like what is this? And the kids are like you never asked. We just thought it was normal. And for children particularly those things are so superficially myofascial. Typically it's just very simple. Inputs change the range of motion. You know, put a little isometric in there, a little soft tissue. We're back.

Rhonda Patrick: And what about with the nutrition part's interesting because I'm not in the middle school, high school phase yet. I'm in still the picky eater. I mean I guess they continue to be picky eaters but for different reasons. Right. And so how do you solve that problem when the kid doesn't want to eat something?

Kelly Starrett: Well this is ungenerous but we've never seen a kid not eat when they were hungry. Yeah, right, yeah. So some of this is you as an adult. Like we have a three vegetable rule and I have one child who is a gourmet and like started subscription cookie business and loves to cook and eat. And I have another child who loved brown foods and like was very picky. And what we started to do is if we just had three meals, three vegetables, every dinner there's three vegetables, and you can eat any of those three vegetables you want. But there's always three vegetables and everything that we cooked. And when we sit down and this is the meal and there's not a snack right afterwards or a thing like this is what we're eating, then, you know, we have to train our kids. And then there's a place for nutrition on top of that. Like an Emergen-C is very inexpensive. At least you're going to get some vitamins and minerals. Maybe it's the lowest form of that. But you know, that Emergen-C fizzy drink, Caroline has been chugging one of those because at the very least I know she has some vitamin C and some micronutrient in her system when she leaves for school. And our hypothesis is that, hey, if we can control a little bit more in the morning and a little bit in the evening, plus maybe a snack, the rest of it you don't have any control over. So let's control what we can control. A lot of times we have a lot of conversations about when do we eat and how do we fuel. And so we sort of have some, a simple rubric, like three hours out, just regular meal. And. And you can relate to this. You go to a swim meet, kid swims at 25, she gets like a 1000 calorie Jamba Juice or a donut. You're like, dude, your child does not need to eat. Like she ate breakfast. But then on the other hand, we have kids who are playing and playing and playing and don't want to eat because they're nervous, don't have access. Right. In this situation, I'm like, have you met. Met the Uncrustable? Like, this is a powerful, you know, tool. We can get some calories in you to fuel what you're doing. And so on the other hand, we have to like force kids to eat. And, and there are body composition issues there and timing issues there. And how can we think about fueling in a way that's, you know, parents don't go insane.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, I like also the idea of, it's like, this is, this is what we have. You're going to have three vegetables or you're going to be hungry and you'll

Kelly Starrett: wake up talking about breakfast. Yeah, you will.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah.

Kelly Starrett: You know, and so as we notice, though, we're not talking about optimization, we're saying, okay, this is what humans do. And we have to learn and teach that. And here's the framework for that. Right. You know, when we have training table, I will stand, be set up near the, you know, the, the buffet line. I'm like, more rice, more fruit. You know, I got to make these kids eat to support what they're doing in the pool or on, on the field. And it's, it really is fueling is. We see an, an epidemic of under fueling and reliance on caffeine and sugar.

Rhonda Patrick: Wow. So in high school, high school sports, it's real bad. Okay, I have a few rapid fire questions for you on this. So if you have a 10 year old soccer player, you've got a 12 year old swimmer, and you got a 14 year old basketball player, what would the first month of training look like for each of those? Would they be similar? Different? How would they differ?

Kelly Starrett: They differ in terms of, you know, as we've run these programs, they're different in terms of maybe the load or the volume, but not the fundamental skills. And I'll give you an example. We're huge fans of handstands. It's what you mean. Talk about being upside down, learning new skill. Great for shoulders. Kids love it. It's play. You can walk up, we can pike on. There's so many ways a downward dog is a handstand. But that's a great example where everyone gets handstands and even my adults get handstands, right? Because we, we're able to teach and learn in this play. And that's body weight overhead. Now I'm going to put the same body weight overhead on this, you know, strict press and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, what are you doing? But I'm like, handstand is constraint led. No one dies doing a handstand. It's skill based, right? Kids get it. So we can start to do is that, hey, probably if we took the fundamentals of track and field, running, jumping and throwing, that might probably get us 90% of the way, right? Like who? Stuart McMillan, ALTIS track and field has really said, hey, we should really teach people how to skip again. And we now have to program skipping into our adult program. But kids can't skip. So if you did a track and field warmup, threw some medicine balls around, bounce and jumped, rolled, played like all of a sudden that feels like a lot of play and a lot of movement exposure. And then we might say, hey, let's work on this aspect of the barbell, or we're going to teach you a kettlebell swing or basic calisthenics of push ups and lunges and pull up ups. But in a game.

Rhonda Patrick: In a game, yeah.

Kelly Starrett: So body weight control you know, done. And then we remember we can make it hard with breathing, and we can also make it hard with speed, and we can make it hard with. Right. There's so many ways where we can challenge that body weight control stuff without just saying, here, hold this.

Rhonda Patrick: Love it. Okay, next question. What are the five exercises or movement practices you would keep in nearly every youth training pro program?

Kelly Starrett: We need to spend a lot more time jumping on, landing on one leg, leg learning to basically do some tumbling. There's got to be some aerobic training, but again, that can be done with tag and play. You got to have that exposure. You know, we probably don't train sprinting, acceleration through games enough. That's a real opportunity there. You know, it's not about core strength for kids. It's not about, you know, if we look at what the body needs to do. I'm like, here, Dr. Patrick, is a squat for you. But if I had a kid jump from a seated position or do multiple broad jumps, it's that same squat position, same squat mechanic applied at speed load, same shapes, just with a different set of tools. Does that make sense?

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah.

Kelly Starrett: So we can suddenly see that FIFA had recognized that they were having an ACL problem in soccer. It's a problem. And they came up with a really well documented, well validated way of mitigating lower extremity injury in children with some simple hopping, simple neuromuscular control drills on a single leg. And no one does it. And even if you do it well, it still purports to work. So at some point we've got to just have some fundamental movement language where we. We, you know, maybe it's jumping, jumping pause. And we can, hey, push that knee out. Get that foot straighter. Right. Can you take a breath there? And then can we constrain? I. I would submit that if you and I played spike ball, we would touch a thousand shapes and positions that we could not get in a formal movement practice. So more of that, and then it becomes a little bit more formal as we start to get into high school, I think.

Rhonda Patrick: Is there data showing that doing those sort of movements and pro training programs does reduce the ACL?

Kelly Starrett: Oh, yeah. Injuries, like, dramatically. And so that's a thing that we're like, well, who owns that problem? Well, maybe the parent at home. And we have to have coaches who are like, insisting on this work because, you know, they're like, hey, I want to coach. Right. But meanwhile, we have kids who are unprepared to be coached.

Rhonda Patrick: Right. Okay, so what can a parent do at home in 10 minutes? For 10 minutes a day, you're kind of talking about somebody. There's overlap you here. What can a parent do at home in 10 minutes a day that would meaningfully improve durability and movement options in 10 minutes?

Kelly Starrett: You know, I would say you guys need to play a game. You know, so what games are available? One of the things we identified with Caroline as a goalie early on and even in water polo and this came from their coaches. They said, hey, if you're really interested in your daughters being good at water polo, they need to do more long toss. We need to throw a ball. So we went out and we started throwing a baseball, throwing a softball with a mitt smaller than a water polo ball. And we do so much throwing. And even today I see women in the pool who don't cannot throw. They huck, they it's because. And they've never thrown outside the pool ever. So what you can start to see is, hey, what are these fundamental skills? Maybe that's a frisbee. Maybe we go play catch. Maybe it's spike ball. Maybe it's reaction off the wall. We probably need to put figure out ways to play where the brain and the eyes are the limiter and the driver, not necessarily the physiology. That's the piece that we're really needing to lean into now is we've got to get this brain and this eye all working together.

Rhonda Patrick: Right.

Kelly Starrett: We're having to train that now. Like we do a lot of tennis ball work because I need kids to throw and catch and jump and bounce. And there's lots of great examples on the web of all the drills you can do playing around with tennis ball.

Rhonda Patrick: There's so many you can do.

Kelly Starrett: That's right. And it's. I mean it's a tennis ball. There at the local sports store near us, there's thousands of tennis balls. And I just take hundreds at a time.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. And then lastly, what should be removed from a young athletes program before adding anything new?

Kelly Starrett: I would say. Oh, that's a really good question. You know, the sort of junk volume first, if we can. Right. The sophistication that comes along with the trappings of parents feeling like their kid is getting a leg up with sports ladders. We see a lot of agility training, kinds of things that feel sciency but aren't really sciencey.

Rhonda Patrick: Really.

Kelly Starrett: Right. So you know, we see a lot of kids working extra hard on more pitching or more throwing or more hitting. And what kids really need is, you know, gross motor skill development. So I see. I think parents will go down the rabbit hole of more special hyper specialization too early and they'll get more private lessons in this very small thing, because that's what they think. But on the other side, there's so much more, you know, opportunity. We're picking up dimes. We're stepping over cords.

Rhonda Patrick: Great answer.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick: Answer. Love it. Well, Dr. Starrett, Kelly, thank you so much for sharing all this. Like, just vast amounts of very important information. Everything from mobility to injury prevention to moving throughout the day, to helping, you know, train and coach our kids better so that they are able to handle the world.

Kelly Starrett: You know, Able to handle the world. That's it.

Rhonda Patrick: Yes. Yes.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah,

Rhonda Patrick: you have. There's a lot of. You've got many books, you've got a podcast, you've got. I mean, let's. Let's go through. People want to continue to. To listen to. They want to follow you. Work.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick: They want to continue.

Kelly Starrett: And you need to meet my wife. I think that's really important.

Rhonda Patrick: No, for sure. We're going to do that when April, right?

Kelly Starrett: That's right. Please. We just. Everything is at The Ready State. And you can see our coaching platforms, our courses, if you're interested in. Hey, I want to begin a mobility practice. We have an app called Mobility Coach, which is really good. There are self tests in there. If you have a ball and a roller, we can really get you a long way in terms of making your body feel better at home and, you know, way leads to way. There's so much. Any one of those things are in there. Our last book, Built to Move, we wrote as kind of a primer because a lot of us nerds are doing this, but we wanted to bring neighbors and family members and members of our athletic community along. So we kind of wrote a prequel to everything, and I think that's a really nice place to start.

Rhonda Patrick: Well, awesome. Again, thank you so much for joining me today.

Kelly Starrett: This has been a dream. I mean, you have been like the science voice in my head for over a decade. Oh, my gosh.

Rhonda Patrick: Thank you.

Kelly Starrett: Being here is incredible.

Rhonda Patrick: Thank you.

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The Optimal Mobility Protocol for a Durable Body | Dr. Kelly Starrett

This episode is available in a convenient podcast format.

The Omega-3 Supplementation Guide

How to Deal with Pain

Desensitization

Decongestion

Foam rolling

How (and Why) to Warm Up Properly

The Morning Spin-Up

Hip spin-up

Breath spin-up

Shoulder spin-up

Hip Mobility and the Sit-and-Rise Test

Floor culture

Upper-Body Mobility

Frozen shoulder and perimenopause

Breathing and Breath Work

The breath-hold test

Why Leisure-Time Activity and 'Play' Matter

Using Hot, Cold, and Movement for Recovery

The Problem with Desk Work, and How to Fix It

Movement snacks

Nutrition and the '800-gram challenge'

Youth sports and early specialization

Sleep

Fueling

Movement diversity

Should children strength train?

Rapid-fire questions on youth sports

Q: If you have a 10-year-old soccer player, a 12-year-old swimmer, and a 14-year-old basketball player, what would the first month of training look like for each of them? Would they be similar or different?

Q: What are five exercises or movement practices you would include in almost every youth training program?

Q: What can a parent do at home in 10 minutes a day that would meaningfully improve durability and movement options?

Q: What should be removed from a young athlete's program before adding anything new?

Resources

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People mentioned

Books by Kelly and/or Juliet Starrett

Books by others

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