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

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Kelly starett Dr Kelly starett is a doctor of physical therapy and one of the world's experts in movement that is he teaches people how to move better for sake of sport for sake of recreational Fitness and and for everyday living today we discussed several important topics including how best to warm up for any and all workouts he also tells us how to improve our movement patterns for cardiovascular exercise for sport for resistance training across the board how to move better and how to improve our range of motion with the minimal amount of time investment we hear a lot about different forms of stretching we hear about Dynamic stretching we hear about passive stretching Dr stared explains how to improve our range of motion across our entire body in the best possible ways as well as how to offset or repair any imbalances that stem from muscular skeletal problems or from neural issues and how to reduce soreness how to improve our posture seated standing and movement-based posture we talk about nutrition so today's episode covers an immense amount of actionable information that I'm certain all of you will benefit from Dr Kelly starett has authored several best-selling books some of which you may have heard of such as Supple Leopard he was was actually one of the first people to become synonymous with the use of a lacrosse ball or foam roller but really even though a lot of people have talked about those what he was really doing there was to emphasize the importance of understanding the relationship between the skeleton the muscles the nervous system and the fascia and today we also talk about fascia which is an incredibly interesting and important topic in addition to Consulting and coaching for various college level and professional athletes and teams Dr Kelly starett and his wife Juliet starett co-own the ready state we provide a link to the ready state in the show note captions there they have a plethora of useful information and actionable protocols I should mention years ago I took one of the courses from the ready State it's a really interesting course that we touch on some of the protocols from today it's all about pelvic floor so whether you're male or female and regardless of age understanding your pelvic floor how to take care of your pelvic floor in the context of exercise posture Etc is vitally important for all sorts of vitally important bodily functions so today we also touch on that by the end of today's episode I'm certain that you will be armed with a number of new highly actionable protocols I should emphasize these protocols take very little time and have an outsized positive effect on your movement your posture and your overall health before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is Maui Nei venison Maui Nei venison is 100% wild harvested venison from the island of Maui and it is the most nutrient-dense and delicious red meat available I've spoken before on this podcast about the fact that most of us should be consuming about one gram of quality protein per pound of body weight every day that protein provides critical building blocks for things like muscle repair and synthesis but it also promotes overall health given the importance of muscle tissue as an organ eating enough quality protein each day is also a terrific way to saave off hunger one of the key things however is to make sure that you're getting enough quality protein without ingesting excess calories Maui 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offering an exclusive discount to all huberman lab listeners with up to $400 off select juv products again that's ju jv.com huberman to get up to $400 off and now for my discussion with Dr Kelly Star at Dr Kelly Star at welcome thank you my friend been wanting to get you on here for a long time for many reasons not the least of which is that you've just pioneered so many areas of Health and fitness that I don't even know where to start frankly but let's jump in with the Big M with movement you're an expert in dissecting complex movement figuring out how people can move better and also figuring out how people who are doing what they think are simple movements are actually making their life either more complex or more painful than it needs to be so you're also known for helping people with so-called Mobility um which of course falls under the umbrella of movement and I can't see somebody do a foam roll or anything with a lacrosse ball where they're loosening up or talking about fascia without also thinking about you so that should frame today's conversation at least partially well to kick things off when you look at how most people sit walk and do their quote unquote exercise resistance training Andor cardiovascular hopefully and cardiovascular training what are some of the most common problems that you see is it imbalance like leaning to one side is it that their bodies are trained into asymmetry is there any way to kind of um you know Mass diagnose everybody all at once in this first question let me uh borrow a couple analogies from one of my favorite people Katie Bowman and first thing is she will point out and it's not a Perfect Analogy so bear with us is this notion of mechano transduction which means that at a cellular level your tissues some of your tissues specifically need mechanical input to express themselves you want a strong tendon how do you get a strong tendon you have to load it right does it do tendon things does it is it lengthening underload does it express shortening under load is do isometric holds so we can start at that level she points out that if you put a a again not a Perfect Analogy but if you put a an orca into captivity over a while that Orca fin will start to fold folded fin syndrome it's nicer than Flopper floppy fin syndrome that's hle and what you're doing is when you alter the environment that this amazing animal lives in it's not swimming it's not fighting it's not hunting you're not loading the base of that Fin and so what happens is that collagen breaks down and we start to see changes in that in that expression of that so what we can start to say is again not romanticizing the P toine era when human beings were paleo and but what is it that we need in our daily dose lives to maintain the Integrity of our tissue systems exposure so that our brain says this is safe so that you actually have tendons and ligaments that can do what tendons and ligaments can do and fascia that is can be springy if borrow another sort of kitty bism if we have a movement language an actual language made up of words how many words are you using today and most of us aren't using that many words so very few words so I sit I stand I walk very slowly I sit I stand I walk very slowly so everything is just in those few and then I go exercise using the same words I'm on the exercise bike right I'm on elliptical which doesn't actually ask me to have any hip extension and suddenly you can see that our movement language which we're really codifying under intensity load right we're coming very competent in these adaptation positions sitting what ends up happening well we start to see that our bodies or adaptation machines and they just begin to adapt and so suddenly what we have is a human body that doesn't Express normative range the brain may not think that that range is even safe and put there then we start to sort of minimize the movement choices that the brain has the movement options that the brain has so really the question is you know what low loads establish things at low loads and low speeds you can get away with everything why because this body is rad and it's designed it's durable It's Not Fragile it's designed to be ridden hard and put away wet for a long time remember when you were 17 we cut off your hand you would grow back the next day right you would think about the Falls you took skating and you'd be like ah that sucked the next day Put Your Shoulder back in you just kind of resawn so what is it that we need to put into our movement diet and then we can start to separate out should that be exercise or should that be movement and now the real filter that we should be beginning these real and Earnest conversations about is what is it in the environment given that I'm a busy working person and maybe I have some agency in the morning and maybe I have some agency in the afternoon but let's take exercise out of it the one hour discreet working on Zone 2 cardio working on right my evidence-based practice what should I be doing the rest of the time so for example one of the things that we're huge fans of the evening is sitting on the ground for 20 to 30 minutes in in what um uh cross layed um squatting yes um long sit side 99 anytime you need to fidget fidget what you'll see is you start to accumulate exposure which I think in my world view is the first order of magnitude in problem solving is how do we have the human be exposed to the thing we're trying to change or improve or restore normative ranges so that would be in the evening just getting down on the floor yeah that that behavior alone cultures that toilet on the ground sleep on the ground we start to see fall risk in our elderly population attenuate to zero approximate zero lower hip OA lower low back OA and it may just be that we're using and touching some shapes and our bodies are saying hey let's just keep that around let's let's let's normalize what the hip should be able to do in terms of you're a connective tissue think about you know the idea here is that we're we're loading you passively actively whatever that you're saying to your brain muscle you know this this is a quote from one of my PT instructors and this is really important if people take this away they should listen to this muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs at no age do you stop adapting at no age do you stop healing those things slow down it's a little bit harder to have the same adaptation we did we weren't in full-fledged puberty but you can always adapt in the first order of business if you spend 20 or 30 minutes sitting on the ground you're going to start to see that my hamstrings start to feel better my hips start to feel a little better because I'm just spending time in these ranges and my body is is going to start to adapt as I increase my movement language would you extend what you just said to um like if somebody has a hardwood floor and maybe a little um low pile rug or something like that and they're going to I don't know watch a podcast or a movie or show in the evening they stretch out and you know like on their on their belly like sort of up up dog or Cobra or whatever it's called so so basically any kind of movement where you're on the ground um any kind of um squatting stret and maybe they start to stretch a bit here and there oh so now we're into the real magic the behavior where are we going to stack these behaviors so if you have to get up and down off the ground plus one right I got to get up and down off the ground every day so if you're an older person who may hasn't gotten off the ground I'm older I'm just talking about over 50 you may not have gotten up and down off the ground for a hundred years you just don't do it anymore right we want to hear why I think MMA is so amazing you have to get up and down off the ground a lot right if you do go to Jets right how about yoga how about Pilates you're like wow there's a lot of time organizing on the ground so a lot of people Ida Ral really said Hey how do we help the person organizing gravity first and foremost right then we have someone like Philip Beach who is this incredible uh he wrote this book on functional embryology which I highly recommend called movement uh muscles and meridians I think muscles and meridians but his hypothesis is that one of the ways that the the body Tunes itself is by being on the ground again restoring native ranges reapproximating joints right kneeling walking and and if and if you just took a step back and said what's it look like for the last 10,000 years you know when have we 10,000 years ago my understanding is that I'm a little fatter your femur is a little longer but we're pretty much the same people maybe I don't digest milk yet maybe that's the understanding but ultimately what behaviors have changed we're off the ground and so this is an easy don't need any equipment can drop this in can answer my emails watch TV that seems like the how we're going to improve and be able to start to untangle this very complex coring not when people have a lot going on I love this um you and as you pointed out sorry the roller is already there so you're sitting there and the roller there another barrier to adherence knocked out so you're like oh might as well just what's stiff today what hurts today how could I have some self- soothing input and when we're working at high levels of performance like the highest levels these range of motion like keeping you being able to access the full sort of Arsenal of what you can do with your body these movement Solutions sort of like eedle portal plus the Olympics right you would see that this is an easy way for our leite athletes to work and integrate without having to do another thing so what I'm getting here is that everybody regardless of age should get down on the ground once a day and get up off the ground at some point you can use whatever you want to help you get up and down off the ground so those of you listening you're like I can't do that um you know there's a a test we we write about in the book um that if you just do crisscross applesauce standing you should be able to lower yourself to the ground and stand back up without using your hands okay so cross cross the feet just for those that are just listening cross the feet yep and then just slowly lower yourself into SE don't collapse just lower yourself to the ground and then without putting your hands down or knee down can you stand back up and should one be able to do with um either foot over the other seems like I should use my left leg and right leg equally right I shouldn't have a good side and a bad side but what's interesting is the data I think is that like it's a nice predictor of all cause mortality morbidity that's fine but what it really hints at is your changes in how your body interacts with the environment that because you've adapted suddenly this skill that you've done 100,000 times 200,000 times of the kids in crisscross applesauce you suddenly are confronted as an adult with a skill you can no longer perform and it doesn't require massive hip range of motion doesn't require full range of motion your ankles it's actually a really fair test but if you're missing some of these end ranges you're going to struggle and it's nice now that I have this like what's the session cost I'm become a I love cycling mountain biking Is My Jam but if I ride my bike a ton my hips get super tight but if I have some assessments just like Vital Signs blood pressure 120 over 80 that's not good blood pressure but it's a nice decent reference now I create some movement minimums that help me understand how my body is interacting with stress environment nutrition exercise etc for some people maybe me uh if I were to you know sit cross-legged on the ground for a bit um and then stand up oh yeah if it hasn't been in a while like kind of like just kind of ache but I consider myself pretty you know pretty mobile once I warm up I can run for an hour and a half jog for an hour and a half once I get warmed up in the gym I can move at what at least for me is is satisfying amounts of weight so I wouldn't say that I'm out of shape I wouldn't say I'm in spectacular shape is it normal for us after a certain age to kind of feel like we Creek or ache as we move in or out of a new movement I mean is that is that does it fit with being still a healthy person or should we just not have any of those kinds of like that was like I got to like that was rough that was super rough yeah maybe you know sitting for 30 minutes and standing up and feeling like you have to kind of open yourself up with a can open so to speak well a couple things there one is you said New Movement so one of the ways we Define best athlete is who's the person who can transfer the skill their current skill set and pick up the new skill the fastest so what I'll say is if you want to test how fit you are how good your program is go and jump someone else's program let me know how that goes can you perform the skills are are you skilled you're not I'm chuckling because I joined Cameron Haynes for his Weight Workout which is you know High repetition circuit work for that went on for about 45 minutes minutes none of the weights were particularly heavy but it's just non-stop I was sore and I normally don't get sore for more than a half day if if at all soreness hasn't really ever been an issue for me I was sore for almost a week and a half maybe two weeks like it was it was insane it was we're GNA this is so good opens up the next thing right uh founder of CrossFit Greg glasman one of my earliest influences coaches says we failed the margins of our experience so what you just saw was hey here is this metabolic pathway range work that I have not inoculated myself to and I think we're at an interesting place where Fitness has become hobby Fitness has become sort of my my personal Pastime and I can go to the gym and I can look jacked you're jacked in tan you're very handsome 49y old but what we start to see is the things that make us look aesthetically pleasing or I'm functional enough isn't the same thing is preparing for sport or transferring to new skill and in fact I would say if I had a a spectrum of activities I'd put like Fitness thing over here like I go to a camp I just do a million reps I Breathe hard it's super fun I'm in I'm in Zumba I like I'm miroring and I have positive regard and I see my friends on the other side we have very much Sports specific training the only goal is to support the sport if you're an elite soccer player we have goals offseason but in the in season it's to support your body to win but one step back from that i' call Sports preparation training which is where we start to see sort of some really pattern interference between what the internet says I should do to have huge quads and the best way to create an elite Sprinter or an elite footballer or right in that Sports preparation training I can be think of it gpp plus looking at positions and how things transfer a France Bosch is a great example of sports preparation training a Dutch thinker his books are great and you'll see understand that really what we're trying to do is in sports preparation is say hey what is this complex system in front of us what's the minimal amount of input so that we can still go and project ourselves into the world through Sport and performance and on the other side suddenly we we do come up confronted with hey I'm doing this thing and I jump in with my friend and I get brutalized which is actually a problem that we have with people really good fit athletes and I throw them into like a group fitness class and they can do so much work that they wreck themselves for weeks and that's probably what happened you're so strong and you know how to just be uncomfortable and you just did this freakish amount of work without giving yourself a chance to adapt and that happens all the time so going back to the um getting down on the ground once a day oh yeah um and then getting up um I'd like to just uh I want to get to Fitness and sports training as as well but um is there another practice or or set of practices related to where we do our profession work yeah so I can stand I have a standing desk I have a drafting table and I'll sit stand I'll stand for a while I'll sit stand for a while sit I have a stool I like to be at a stool that's where my back is not supported um and so I try and Vary it as much as I can and thanks to you I got um thanks to your recommendation that is I bought one of those little um kickstands that goes underneath the desk from Rogue I don't have any Financial relationship to Rogue I sent them you're making tens of dollars on this fidget stand I sent them I sent the money like everyone else would one could probably build one too this is a little fidget stand I love that thing cuz it reminds me to you know to to swing my swing my foot while I'm there while even while I'm standing so so that's what I've done to try and keep some Mobility during the day and I want to double click on that because that's really amazing because what you've done is said hey I can't control this aspect of my envir I have to do some deep work that means I might need to perch or I might have to sit at a conference table and then what we can start to say is well what other choices do I have and and now if we we work with a typical person and you say you have some agency before you leave work and then your agency doesn't return till you get home right what are you going to do during the day to keep the body moving right so that it's easier to escape to your afternoon class I think that's the the thing and what youve just described is what my wife would call A A movement- rich environment how do I pepper the environment with inputs so that I'm not just in a a tiny movement language I love that I want to go back to the sitting on the ground should it be painful should it be sore one aspect of your physiology that will not change doesn't have to change is your range of motion as you get older we should be able to maintain our range of motion so what's interesting is that if we suddenly confronted with tasks that ask us to be in certain positions that we're not comfortable with we're going to be sore you bet you're going to have to squeeze your butt and something you said earlier like once I'm warmed up I love that phrase right once I've had my 27 supplements and my coffee and my activation I've gotten into my sauna I can do anything I feel great the real question is should I have to do all that stuff for high performance absolutely but should I have to do all of this prep to have native range of motion to have Baseline range of motion probably not I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor ag1 ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens ag1 is designed to cover all 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between the gut microbiome and the brain that when I regularly take ag1 which for me means a serving in the morning or midm morning and again later in the afternoon or evening that I have more mental Clarity and more mental energy if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer right now they're giving away five free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman to claim that special offer well as long as we're there I'm just going to tell you what's worked best for me in terms of warming up um and I'd love to know your thoughts um years ago I think it was uh Charles poliquin post or something like that um where it was suggested to do relatively low repetition warm-up love it as opposed to going in and doing you know 15 reps then 10 then eight or whatever it is and I've found over the years what's allowed me to get strongest and stay strongest for me is to sure I'll go in and do the first set of a movement resistance training movement uh maybe eight repetitions just to get some blood flowing and remind my brain practice you know what what the range of motion is right then I'll do maybe just you know five four two repetitions on of subsequent three sets so five four and then two repetition sets with heavier loads and it's just to prepare my nervous system for heavier loads and then when I start my actual quote unquote work sets I can get a lot more real work done and this for me was like spit in the face of everything I had read everything i' had seen that you need to higher repetition warm up and it has allowed me to progress more or less continuously over the decades that I've been training and I'm not a natural athlete I'm just not I've trained for a long long time but I would never fall under what you would call like natural athlete I don't I have a low recovery quotient all that stuff and so for me it was like a shocker but it makes total sense prepare the nervous system for the work you're about to do and don't follow some preconceived idea that you have to do high repetition warmup or even moderate repetition warmup and lo and behold you get much stronger and if you want to grow muscle you can grow more muscle why haven't we heard more about this why don't people in Fitness talk more I know you do and please do talk about the nervous system and the fact that it's not just all about warming up and getting blood flow it's really about preparing the brain and spinal cord and all the stuff in there let's say couple variables there what's your training age right if I'm going to take a beginner and you and the same thing we can make big jumps you and I been we've deadlifted together a decade ago like we can just go know our bodies the patterns are well ingrained our tissues have exposure here right there's some things we can do so I love that you're starting to see that what's the minimal amount of warmup to to do the task and on some days you may be sore may be stiff and he takes a little more time to go get right underneath it one of the things I think we have this opportunity to do is put play back into warm-ups so one of the things is that I I suspect and please correct me if I'm wrong you don't find a lot of joy in do these like wrote a the world's greatest stretch why do the active like it's not that fun so what let me talk about my experience working with a team at at Berkeley I have this shout out to the Women's Water Polo team at Berkeley who are my just total family these women are incredible but I came into the sport and looked around and I saw really ineffective warm-ups that weren't a good useage of time that didn't prepare us to get into a fight in 20 minutes or 30 minutes later so if you went through your warm-up and said I'm going to be in a fight am I prepared for that or not and that's a nice like rubric to say I'm nervous system arousal I have a little sweat on I've practiced right you know you know I've touched some positions and shapes but you know what I see is that there's in the typical training session there's a lot of work to get done so now I think training is become very very dense you know here's this piece here's this piece now I do the successor work I got to hit these these card and so the warmup for me has been one of the last places where I can get you to explore new movements something you saw on the internet play around if you came to my gym you know or we came to my house now I'd be like let's go through the medicine ball for 5 minutes and there's no wrong way but I want you to start to explore speed I want you to explore catch an object and going fast and what we haven't done and I suspect I wouldn't say that your warmup is the best way i' say it's one way to get to the thing that we want faster and potentially you stop doing what didn't work and what didn't serve you which I really want people to understand is that if you're not blind going through some program I want you to say does this serve me because my experience working now 20 years with the best teams and athletes and organizations on the planet is athletes do what work and they stop doing what doesn't work isn't that interesting right so what I love is that you started to get under heavy loads relatively quickly in movements you had real competency and exposure with yes because what we want to do is come back to say what's the least amount of work I can do to have the biggest adaptation and 3 hours in the gym doesn't fit into your life and it doesn't fit into the typical person's life and theoretically you're going to have to go do a sport so you're going to have to recover from this Sport and this training session right you were like hey I can't even hand this high volume you know it's a ding on me too I can't handle the same high volume as my friends can so wasting your time in quotation marks with lots of high volume sets of an empty barbell might have been useful at some point and maybe it doesn't serve you as well now or because you have to put so many plates on that bar that's just that's a warm up by itself right that's not you walked a mile to load those plates no that's not an issue for me but that's a perfect what you just said is a perfect opportunity for me to mention something that I've noticed which prompts a question which is I noticed that I have some asymmetry my right shoulder naturally sits a little lower than my left and whenever I get a little back tweak it's always on the same side etc etc I know this this varies for for everybody and I noticed that I was always um picking up the the weights and racking them because I rerack my weights like a grown-up um racking them on the same side so I've made it a point now to to switch up you know which side I which side of my body I do them great um and notice I'm significantly weaker on one side of my body I mean not to the point where where you know I have to use two different sets of uh dumb or two different dumbbells if I'm doing curls or something but just noticing these natural asymmetry starting to show up because I'm a right-hander or who knows or I I skateboarded so you know I've spent a lot of my life early life with my left foot forward and my right foot pushing and as a consequence there are a lot of asymmetry so what I've tried to do is correct those asymmetries in the between movement movements but also to stagger my stance during curls and then and switch it each each time or maybe even overemphasize the weaker side I have no professional training in any of this I've just found that it's made for better posture more more evenly distributed strength and I must say all of that is based on teachings that I read in your books and through conversations with you about hey we have these natural imbalances and there are little things that we can do that take moments that can correct those imbalances so if if you would could you um sort of expand on the number and type of imbalances that you most commonly see and some ways for people to remedy remedy them excuse me Let's uh if we just took the word imbalance and put it to the side for a second because it's sort of a non-specific term like are we testing your hamstring to your quad like what what what's the ideal ratio here like if you're a professional pitcher I hope your arm right arm looks different than your left arm right but what we can say is number one imbalances don't necessarily cause pain let's let's be clear about that we should be using our time in the gym as training to find deficiencies and blind spots in our patterns in our skill in our you know and our our brains feeling comfortable with a certain movement and what you just hit was that it's boy it's really easy to get a lot of variability just doing the things I want to do anyway so now I'm in a tandem stance I I skate left foot forward right but you know suddenly that's my dominant stance if you're going to ask me to do anything of consequence I'm going to adopt that stance but suddenly I get to have some exposure here so what's the point of the gym what's the point of training just to work on some cardiorespiratory output you know that the science says is it to move into play is it to you know if the brain's a you know problem solving machine let's give it some problems to solve so you suddenly have a new problem to solve and I would even say that weakness isn't even the right idea just like here is a a pattern that I'm not as effective at as efficient at so when we go into the gym sort of with this great curiosity then it's a really rich place and really frankly the only safe place because there isn't contact and Sport and we're not fighting and dancing and moving and and we can really do this controlled formal movement where we can really see inputs and outputs I explained my mother-in-law a long time ago what was happening when we were developing our model to understand movement and I I was and I explained it and she was like Oh you mean it makes the invisible visible that's right is that this is a place to understand how your range of motion is changing how your skills are changing right over the course of a season or the course of you know something going on in your life a season in your life suddenly you're like wow my left hip is a little tight or my left shoulders my internal rotation is going away hard to see when you're swimming really easy to see when we dumbbell snatch right and what we're trying to do then is take the gym not only have it be a stimulus for adaptation but have it be a really great place to uncover changes in my movement changes in expression of that movement and so really what you see again if I just do this one thing over and over again that's patterning that's repetition that's practice right and what you've done is just said hey let me change my brain let me open the door handle with my left side and become coming into the gym with that Curiosity means that we can have seven bottom lines working on your fascia we're working on these Energy Systems we're working on these movement skills but simultaneously we can have fun we can work on understanding our range of I so for me I think it's easier to say let's let's frame Mobility as do here's the my definition do you have access to normative range of motion the range of motion every physician every physical therapist every chiro agrees on shoulder it's 180 degrees of flexion so for those listening This Is Lifting your arm above head so you can bring your your hand basically you know above the the center of your head and what you can see right now is Andrew has his elbow bent his hip head TI to the side is internally rotated he's solving the problem which is what his brain is saying compensation if you want to use the word compensation I want to put that on you but what I'd say is that's an incomplete position doesn't mean you have pain doesn't mean you're not the world champion but it means we may have some latent capacity we could Chase and the next question for me then is what is it that's missing potentially in your training that we're not having this exposure we're not doing enough close grip hanging we're not doing seesaw press right where the arm is straight up we're always gripping on a barbell right I'm not handling enough dumbbells or CLE Bells overhead and then we can say well do I need some position transfer exercises Mobility work to restore that so we can you use it again and then more importantly how does that turn up for you in a way that impacts your sport or your job that's what's really interesting does that make sense yeah so what I'm hearing is that when we go into the gym or wherever we do our resistance training work that we should think about it as a place to yes perform to exceed our previous um you know reps and sets and yeah because that's part of fun and easy to measure hard to see are you getting better at soccer I don't know but I put another K on my bench today like that's fun uh Lex fredman who of course everybody knows from The Lex Freedman podcast um likes to make fun of uh Americans cuz he's Russian but he's actually American now um for being Meatheads because we like to spend so much time in gyms working out as opposed to doing sports and I I assure him that I've also done and do Sports now but uh he likes to make that point and I think I think it's a fair one in that uh well he's a Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy so um in any event um the gym is also a place for diagnosis to to diagnose where we don't have as much range of motion as we could um and you know that's very helpful I think for people to hear because most people are are time limited they don't have if they're getting their you know two or three resistance training workouts per week plus two or three cardiovascular training workouts and they're listening to petera so trying to hang from a bar for you know 90 seconds or more and they're you know doing some farmer carries and they're doing their Zone too and they're throwing on a weight vest I me you know and they got either fidgeting under their desk you know at some point you can start to understand why people are like whoa this is starting to become overwhelming what you're talking about is going and doing your typical workout but paying attention to where some for lack of a better word I'll call them asymmetries or not full range of motion being expressed where that might be happening I love I keep coming back to this but this thing about getting down under the ground for 30 minutes each night while watching TV or while maybe even while eating dinner while talking to your family or partner I think it's fantastic it also gives me an excuse to push the the sofas off to the side of the room because I have this weird uh neuroticism about furniture in the middle of the room so I'm imagining getting mats on down in the down on the floor of the living room and suddenly we're not programming another thing that's I think one of the things that has happened and it's a good thing it's it's a feature of the system strength conditioning the last 20 years has become very sophisticated so Juliet and I my wife and CEO open our gym in 2005 this was the CrossFit gym the that's rightful location 21st CrossFit in the world early but we couldn't buy a kettle bell in San Francisco we had to drive to Santa Cruz that says a lot about San Francisco I can say that because I'm from the bay area but you they there was one place in San Cruz that sold him played against sports that import Ed these Russian kettle bells thank you pav and we had to make this Trek down to buy them so the fitness I think we I bought my first pair of Olympic lifting shoes out of the back of someone's car like a drug deal like Olympic lifting shoes yeah like you just couldn't buy them old shoes no like actually an Olympic lifting shoe with like a heel but like you can buy those at like three different stores in Malibu right now like you go right over there there's it's we have normal you can buy cleall at Target so the the world has become much more sophistic ated um sometimes like overhead Squad is a good example fantastic diagnostic tool tells us a lot so bar held overhead squat down super simple all you have to do is have normal range of motion and your your joints and tissues well it helps jul like to say I was bendy before I was big but you know the idea here though is let's go ahead and also put skill back into this but most people weren't overhead squatting you know at all it wasn't part of their language now everyone knows what an overhead squat is right Dan John CrossFit all the Olympic lifters have been doing this forever but what we are seeing is that the the Natural Evolution of fitness and strength and conditioning is that we've become we've gotten really decorative in our room so we create this room that's just every inch has a knickknack has an assistance this is my tib Rays this is my neck thing it's a very decorative experience and instead of asking what was essential in terms of energy systems and positions that I can train so that I could go use those credits you know for lack of a better word it's Fitness has become very recursive I have this zone two so I can do more zone two so I can more zone two or I have pull-ups because they be get more pull-ups instead of well how did that make you swim what's the minimum amount of time we can spend in the gym so that you can go Express that Lex is right in a sport or an activity and look there are times in your life for the gym is the only thing you got you know Julet and I when we had two kids and a baby or two kids in our our businesses we did the 10 10 10 at 10 which is like 10 air squats 10 cball swings 10 pull-ups at 10 p.m. for 10 minutes and I was like Elite my fitness is Elite you do that every day well I just did it when I could do it right because that's all I could fit in so you know I think what's happened is we have now sold people this idea that Fitness happens in a one-h hour block and if it's not an hour you know then it's not worth doing and if you kept a bar loaded in your garage you could walk out there and do sets in between making dinner you kept a c on your kitchen you could do pavles four swings on the minute for 20 minutes and at least have some exposure loading so a long way around the barn of saying I want to protect your gym time because it's really sacred amazing time where you can have fun explore ranges get strong get jacked feel great about yourself interact with your friends and what I don't want to do is encroach anymore on that magic time because we have a lot to get done in the gym physiologically if we're going to compete against these other teams we're going to beat Stanford we're going to need to really maximize that time in the gym so that means we need to push out some of these other behaviors so we're not stacking them in and they're eroding the time we could be squatting or benching or cleaning or running or sprinting or cutting or playing you mentioned warming up with play which I think is a wonderful concept um and presumably brings about more Dynamic movement 100% um and another reason I like it is that I loathe warming up aside from the types of warm-ups that I just described and I hate it and I'm beginning to realize that um the way I've been training even though it's been um I would I would say useful and and uh successful for where I've been uh I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do heading into the new year this is not like a New Year's episode this this is a you know Evergreen because it's you um but we have a new year coming A lot of people are are going to naturally Mark the time during and after the holidays as a transition point and if one want wanted to start to not necessarily completely re restructure their Fitness but wanted to start incorporating a few things so we've got sitting down in the evening for 30 minutes we've got incorporating play into the warmup what would that look like are we taking a tennis ball and bouncing it off the ground we setting some rule in playing a game sure what if I'm alone am I um am I playing a little little handball type game against the wall absolutely see something on the Internet want to learn a new skill this is the time to put it in uh I'm going to talk about my brilliant friend David W he has something called rope flow that he created and it's just a piece of climbing rope and he will talk about all the things that will do for me I get a thousand PNF patterns I tie my upper body into my lower my upper body into my lower body I get you explain PNF sorry acronym sorry sorry everyone that's a a model of facilitating movement developed at Kaiser Vallejo It Is by not and cabat I think uh maybe I'm getting confused using those and anyway the the bottom line is this how do we help the body restore Movement by using its own positional awareness got it so if you've ever done a hamstring stretch where someone holds you and you resist that contract relax is a style it's a technique born out of PNF got it sorry to interrup okay so he's got these ropes and and so suddenly like I use this with all my teams is suddenly I'm spinning ropes I'm getting thousands of evolutions of the wrist turning the elbow turning the shoulder turning I'm generating speed in weird positions that would be vulnerable and not as effective at high load high stakes I get to twist I can tie my eyes into it I can develop my stance and in five minutes of messing around you're like H I feel good and we've added some speed to that right because a lot of the warm-ups I see people do I'm like hey there was no speed you know what sport is speed and you haven't added any velocity to your training so where are we going to do that I love this um I'm excited to Dave Dave wack does a lot of amazing things his rope is a foundational piece of mind if you work with me and you have shoulder pain and neck pain you're going to get my shoulder spin up or David WX rope flow every day that's part of our our homework what are we going to do to give you exposure and restore what you're supposed to do with your body so walk into the gym use the bathroom hydrate whatever it is you need to do and then five to 10 minutes of some Play Type Dynamic activity throw a medicine ball around jump on a mini trampoline pick up a barbell do a complex do some breath hold work this a perfect place to lay on all the breath hold work I think they call it dry face breath holding right this this Dynamic apnea work where you're basically holding your breath so for example with our teams we try to I try to have this is a magic number seven sort of hypoxic events where we do something on a breathhold until the athlete has a crisis and has to breathe and part of that is I want to get the brain ready for these high CO2 levels right and I want to challenge respiration and it's so easy get on the bike here's something everyone can do for five minutes I want you to take a 10-second inhale on the bike hold your breath as long as you can when the bomb goes off in your face recover nose only start at the next one at the next minute and what you're going to see is wow that was really uncomfortable really psychologically preparing myself to get into a fight that came from the French free divers one of the coaches I was working with was like here's something we used to do with our with our French free divers I was like this is so good McKenzie lar Hamilton Wim hooff the people who've been exposing us to Dynamic apnea work is amazing but that's another example of something I can do instead of mindlessly just being on and I got to get a sweat like let's go ahead and just layer in play and destruction I love it do not lay on the ground of foam roll let me say that again do not lay on the ground FAL that is the worst way to get ready for a fight ever I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors 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plunge but how I how Andrew huberman became associated with cold plunging or buying a gold blung is is wild I mean sure I own one and you know this sort of thing and I think they're great for shifting your state um but it's hardly the Cornerstone of my life or or my um existence but I love it I I use it but I think foam rolling I think looked different enough from what people had not seen before and it you know these things just they have a stickiness to them who who knows why um what is the deal with foam rolling is is there utility to foam rolling absolutely um is there a wrong way to do it no but there's a way that's not a great use of your time okay right so what we're all looking at is we have fin out amount of time and what's my goal to quickly touch my whole body you know what what are we trying to do so if I was using soft tissue mobilization and or using a rooll or or a ball or something what's my goal here well I think in the research is very clear it can help with pain it can restore range of motion again very clear and I want to point out sort of one of my research friends Brent Brook Bush the brook Bush Institute has incredible summaries of muscular skeletal care Brent is a genius and if you go on his site there's a little hourglass and you can search like trigger points and you'll see all of the Deep dive research analysis of the meta research like you you'll be like okay this is really excellent and and it is tricky because you know what doesn't work for my body or wasn't a good use for a time now is useless and it's easy to shout on the internet so what's our goal if I was in pain and I was about to exercise a a quick two or three minute intervention working on let's call it desensitization of the tissues let's let's be mechanism agnostic for a second and say that's a really low level to entry safe highly effective way for you to suddenly feel better so we create a window of opportunity to move that's really cool I love that no physical therapist in the room no one went blind you didn't dislocate right so that could be a really excellent use of some soft tissue work the same way a boxer would go or MMA fighter or the Olympic lifters in China they have people who are giving non-threatening input to the body to tell the brain it's safe or to rehydrate something or get some not again is it just stimulus so that the brain says it's safe sure are we restoring how the tissues slide and glide sure a lot of times I think if you look at any of the mobility work I'll just put r large really comes down to just doing a couple things most of them are just isometrics so we have a lot of isometrics which everyone can agree is good stuff and we do a lot of tempo work that's really just moving slowly through range it just may be that I'm using a different tool to have that isometric stimulus or that that Tempo moving slowly stimulus so we like to say hey let's use mobilizations mobilizing the tissues why are we doing it what are we trying to do well pain is a good reason and again multifactoral highly subjective why do I have pain while I got in a fight with my wife and I didn't eat and I you know twisted my knee back in Vietnam and you know who knows right but what are the inputs that I have to self sooth and desensitize and it turns out a ball and a roller is a really good one so I can use those to help myself feel better did that solve the problem did that solve two weeks of shitty sleep did that solve my poor nutrition and lack of fiber that solve the fact that I don't feel safe in this environment no but it got me a window of opportunity where I can go feel better in my body is anyone against that no okay so what we can also say is hey this would be a great way to do what restore your range of motion a one tool and a system of tools to get you to do what have normative range again right for whatever reason your last are super stiff you're doesn't again it's more complicated than that but sometimes it's not more complicated than that and if I just get you getting some input into there maybe I can restore that range of motion or create a window where you can go use it again lastly I would say is it it's a wonderful tool to decrease Doms delayed onset muscle soreness so in the evening you blew out your quads do a little soft tissue work and what you'll see is maybe that's blood flow maybe it's non-threatening input maybe it's just massage Maybe maybe it's just the parasympathetic input that massage has touch right just downregulates maybe those are the reasons I feel better but the bottom line is is that a good use of your time yes or all techniques on the rul the same no right and I think that's where we've lost our minds is that if you you just rolled up and down in your Cal didn't do anything I'm like yeah well you just what are you doing right what if I rolled side to side and so suddenly we can start to layer in some really complex thinking around this how about this you you have a roller out and I put my calf on there and I start rolling side to side should that be uncomfortable I'm guessing you're going to say no but um any anytime I've used a roller anytime I've used a roller I'm like man that hurts I don't that sucks I well I mean I don't mind it like it's not like the kind of it's not like level level eight pain or anything it's just it's sort of like it feels very localized Even If the roll is a big fat Costello the Bulldog size rollert it feels like someone's kind of kneading down in between my muscle fibers and then I start to think maybe I just have like low fiber density and if I were Mark Bell or something then this would feel comfortable but you know I I always feel like the roller is going down to the boat face of lfd blue fiber density so you know what I think we can do is let's establish some some some guideliner people cuz this is this is one of the ways that we can feel better on our home without bourbon without ibuprofen without THC like we need to give people some tools that don't like that aren't just without having to buy a sauna if you can afford one great but not every I mean this whole thing with sauna love saunas but you know well until very recently in my life like I couldn't afford a sauna until very recently you know even as a 10-year professor at Stanford I'll just say that right you can actually be angry at your parents for not giving you a sauna no you know when I was a kid my dad and I used to go to the Y in the evening sometimes when I was little and I'd shoot baskets or he would he would lift weights Nautilus machines back then and then um we get and then we'd sit in the sauna or there was aot you had a different set of trauma traumatic experience of sitting in the S the why no actually I learned how um I learned how how men uh I learned how men uh over over 40 spoke in 19 855 there you go there you go there you go if everyone had a roller and a ball there was a lot of dysfunction and discomfort we can manage if you push on a tissue we expect that tissue to be painless to compression or un not uncomfortable to compression again don't pain is a weird word I don't want to set that up but you shouldn't be uncomfortable to compression what's nice is that if I push on something all I'm doing is just creating an isometric it's just a vector isometric instead of pulling an isometric through the length of the tissue I'm putting it in a different vector and angle so that would just be one I could start there and if it was uncomfortable well guess what now I can get my my nervous system involved so I can teach my brain that it's safe to create a contraction here so what do I do just Flex Flex it hold it for 4 seconds this is very basic I realize but for many people they're either already foam rolling and doing it incorrectly or they're not foam rolling we want them to do it correctly so if I understand correctly it's quote unquote okay to flex the muscle that you have in contact with the foam roller while you're rolling if I find something that's uncomfortable or stiff or doesn't feel like my other side I'm going to stop found a place to work I'm going to build take a big inhale so I take a 4 second inhale I want to teach myself that I need to be able to breathe in this position my one of my you know friends Greg Cook is like if you can't breathe in position you don't own a position you know that sounds very iang guard too but what we're going to do is we're going to say it's okay to breathe here and I'm going to contract here and then I'm going to slowly relax and soften that's Tempo that's moving slowly and I can handle higher loads and what'll end up happening is if I repeat that cycle two or three times guess what my brain desensitizes that changes range of motion my brain suddenly is like that's not a problem anymore so we just move on and in two or three cycles of that contraction breath hold long exhale that starts to sound familiar right how do I come down long exhales I'm not trying to spin up I'm trying to say this is this is safe I've done that with my breath I've done that with contraction I'm just getting input in just just touch to my body especially on parts that maybe don't bark at me very often right people are shocked to learn that sometimes when they have knee pain how stiff their quads are and we can test it load it feel it palpate it and I'm like those things are just stiff and when we unstiffen them whatever technique you want to use restore sliding surfaces get neural input in there we create range of motion suddenly we change a motion dynamic improved efficiency the brain says hey that's no longer a threat or we're experiencing that as a new pattern or position that' be enough to reduce your pain but pain isn't the only reason we're mobilizing we're mobilizing so that we can reduce session cost so we can work out harder the next day and keep an eye on our minimums of our of our range of motion love this and um another just very basic question because I'll be honest I haven't foam rolled much in my life um and and it doesn't have to be a big fo everyone sometimes those big white those are pool noodles right that's what it was for I think like made in Colleen Texas is like a manufacturing byproduct and someone's like we could put these in the pool and then some physical therapist is like sweet like that thing's way too big and too hard and too square and too soft like there's a whole bunch of things like sometimes you need an elbow sometimes you need a forearm sometimes you need a thumb so you can have much smaller diameter I'm a much bigger fan of smaller diameter rollers I just think they fit your body better thank you for that um also very helpful um let's say I want to quote unquote loosen up or um or move out some potential soreness or soreness from a given U muscle uh like the quadricep does it make sense to start in the middle of that muscle the top like does it can you work above and below the the the knee um are all of those things going to help I realize this is a a much Fuller discussion than we can have in a few minutes like how should I approach I'm like okay you know my my uh quads are a little sore my or my back is sore do I go straight to the back or do I start with another with another body region I don't think it matters what I want interested is inputs and outputs right what I'm really interested in is what did you do to make yourself feel better did you just hope it would just go away and then when day it didn't and then you had to activate the emergency medical system so let's define a couple things what is an injury this is a great question injury for us is there's a clear mechanism of mechanical trauma there's a bone sticking out of your leg Andrew time to go to the hospital injured right you're injured right I heard a snap and a pop yikes I have night sweats dizziness fever vomiting nausea unaccounted for weight loss weight gain changes in my bladder bowel function problem my cough sneeze or swallow those are red flags you're not sore you're sick let me introduce you to the doctor again right if your pain or dysfunction is so bad you can't occupy a role in your family can't occupy a role in society can't occupy a role in the team that's emergency problem that is a medical condition that needs medical so you come in today you tweak your back it may need we need to activate EMS need to go to the hospital we need to get because it's so severe you can't do your job everything else I want to call non-injury I want to be very specific with the language he is we call it an incident it actually comes out of this um sort of language there's a a guy here here's the long way around the barn I read this great book called Deep survival which is Lawrence Gonzalez which is about why people end up in survival situations and it's a literally a lot about like we got away with it for a long time and then I just didn't have a you know I ended up two miles out sea I've done it a million times and this time right that's it but there was a footnote in there from a book called normal accidents by Charles pero who's recently passed on I emailed Charles because I was like this has blown my mind he calls A lot of times will have trivial events in non-trivial systems so he's taking systems think thinking he's looking at complex system organization and his idea is that an accident a normal accident is actually just expression of the system if you gave the system long enough to express itself the inputs and outputs are so tightly coupled that it's difficult to see what causes what and how they influence each other that's the body so your stiff shoulder isn't a problem until you fall in the ice and then that stiff shoulder suddenly can't take over pressure and overhead and you tear your rotator cuff off at high speed you'd say Oh Black Swan event super crazy but that's actually just a normal expression of that shoulder system if we gave it enough time to express itself so he has sort of like incident an accident so an incident is I want us to start to think about incident level problems are pain loss of range of motion numbness tingle we're becoming curious why is the brain sending me the signal it's pain is a request for change so when if we ask our athletic populations I just did this with a hundred kids I'm like how many of you are pain free 100 high school kids two hands go up two high school high school so what we're suddenly realizing is that pain is very much a part of the athletic condition The Human Experience certainly the athletic experience you've been in pain a billion times and still gone out and done the thing so what we we want to do is say pain is not always a medical problem it's a medical problem when the the time we're saying how are you using Fitness training as a scaffolding to understand nutrition hydration soft tissue work desensitization reperfusion of the tissues so that's what we're trying to do in sport and training is Empower people to say what's going on with my body and why don't I feel the way I do or why does something hurt and why can't I remedy that and then when I run out of ideas let me go get some help so the the rolling um we can think of as a way to you know move out soreness prepare us for more work the next day or something like that but is it fair to say that we can also use the roller as a diagnostic tool sure like if I'm feeling like an unusual amount of of um not unusual but let's just say um that I'm feeling like a wuss cuz when I when I lie down on that roller and I kind like you know like slide back and forth like I've seen the videos of you and other folks doing that I'm like man that really hurts does that necessar mean something's wrong okay no it mean it means that for whatever reason those tissues become sensitized and that your brain is interpreting that stiffness as a threat and it's reading it as pain right and some people they don't have that they just their tissues feel like this but they don't have pain when they do that but that's not a normal tissue you should be like layers of warm silk sliding over steel Springs and what you're seeing is that what is that what quality tissue should absolutely that layers silk over steel Springs layers of silk over steel Springs and what we see is that we are loading and training at such high intensity it's in such density now that our tissues get stiff I'm just going to hang stiffness as for whatever reason FIB high fibrotic high density of tissues whatever reason the tissues don't behave the way the joint system should right and that's a problem because my training shouldn't mitigate or attenuate or change my range of motion it can but now how am I keeping an eye on those changes or as you said earlier as I do a sport and I start to do a sport and specialize I'm throwing throwing or I swim or I kick on one side how can I start to identify as my body is changing and adapting that sport so I can drag myself back to a sort of a greater Readiness and that's one of the reasons that that mobilization tool is such a powerful tool again however you want to do it I think it's useful for for us when we have we I came up with this thing called the D2 R2 model because the other Ray was taken R2-D2 so the first order of business is I want to desensitize if something hurts something hurts let's desensitize it I can do that all different ways scraping is powerful desensitization isometrics can be really useful uh rolling bfr can give me desensitization there's so many techniques to make my body restriction yeah Blood Flow Restriction so that no longer I'm my brain is perceiving this as a threat because if you're pain you cannot generate the same amount of force or wattage or output and your brain is going to start to truncate it's going to start to Lop off your movement Solutions right it's just going to happen so we want our we want everyone to be saying hey we don't panic we have pain we just treat it like another diagnostic tool then second d right we desensitize and then we ask is this something that be decongested so decongestion means that often times tissues that are swollen become more easily sensitized tissues that are swollen and congested don't heal as fast if you have a swollen ankle those collagen fibers will not knit together as fast as a right if you have a joint that's swollen or a tissue that's swollen your brain will shut down Force production in and around that joint system is swelling an emergency no is a swollen joint environment really healthy for the the integrity and surface of the joint no we want to manage that but often times when someone comes in and the tissue is congested right just sometimes we say swelling and we think ankle right only capsular but here we have if you've ever flown on an airplane and had cankles those that's congested tissue if we manage that congestion if we move those lymphatics along we muscle contraction drives the lymphatic drainage the the lymph system is the sewage system of the body decongested tissues often express less pain and what we find is that in broken bones or soft tissue injuries if we can better evacuate that swelling better evacuate that congestion not only do we see you now healing at the rate of a human being we're not rate limiting the healing but also we can help you manage that sensitivity then the third one is can we get some blood flow in there like H you said I once I warm up I feel great welcome to the power of blood flow tissues become hydrated we're shifting blood from the stomach all the things that happens right all that Venus return is coming back on board but suddenly we see that if we get something pumped full of blood it tends to be less painful and that's a really easy so if I have an old Orthopedic thing maybe I spend a few few minutes just getting a huge quad pump on the leg extension machine then I go squat heavy right so I have desensitization decongestion reperfusion whatever tool you want to use for these is fair game with me just is how I've come to kind of conceptualize these different tools and the last one is restore do you have full range of motion full normal in that joint yes or no because that's the last thing that we talk about because you're still able to perform your sport at college or do your job but we're not seeing how inaccess your ability to not access that range of motion maybe limiting your movement choice and potentially overloading a tissue and a by making it work in a less effective manner or even just leading to progressively worse and worse posture sure which is probably well Define define posture form me because I think that's a really great place to start right yeah I can Define bad posture as when you catch yourself in a in a reflection and you realize wow I'm starting to I'm starting to look more like a c I love than than a than a not that's so great you the question is is that a matter of Aesthetics or pain well uh certainly for me it's not pain but you know I it's not becoming injury I notice that um it's not becoming I I notice that unless I pay attention to my posture while sitting unless I do a um you know like Bridge my fingers together and pull my my chin back a few times a day that I'm just naturally starting to tip over forward towards my text messages that aren't even in my hands right now and I think this is you know the the younger generation I mean now that I'm 49 I can talk like like that right I mean it's St you the 1900s they are late 1900s exactly they're they're starting to look like a they're shaped like a sea that it's um and I'm a big believer in uh people especially men doing neck work I feel like like if if you especially how about especially people doing that work yeah well here's the thing anytime I I'm happy to go go there with this one um maybe even at the risk of being Politically Incorrect anytime I've suggested that women also do neck workor they say no you should see my goalie daughter because for every pound stronger your neck is your reduction in concussion risk drops huge a pound thank you so we keep the iron neck by the door and she walks in and there's a we have a video in our family where she's doing her iron neck train she looks at me she's like Dad this is why I don't have a boyfriend thank you sorry Caroline but that's the way it goes right cuz she's like look at me I look like an idiot but she loves having a big strong neck that doesn't can take the shot from the ball yeah listen I wish everyone would train their neck I had I had an accident where I fell off a off a roof walked away from it my neck was sore but I heard it and felt it and I was like oh goodness but it was actually from skateboarding stuff and falling and that I started training my neck years ago and realized that wow when I train my neck I'm one of the few people in my TR age cohort that doesn't complain about shoulder pain now maybe I don't have full range of of motion um maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong people but anytime I see a somebody with really broad shoulders where their neck is is really inside of their jawline it looks like a head was placed on the wrong long action fig your body I just want to go over to them and say listen a it's aesthetically ridiculous it it looks like one of those flip books in the kids where you can change the head the body and the and the legs to be different animals um more seriously it's a hazard because it's your upper spine it's clearly not in line with the rest of your your strength profile and the other one is the more incentive based thing is Hey listen if you train your neck everything else gets stronger and your head and your brain is going to be safer and as a neuroscientist they usually listen to the last piece so I I so I'm so glad we're talking about this I I do Bridges I know that they can be risky with tongue in the roof of my mouth I like I do Bridges to the back and then I I do have a four-way neck machine or I use a plate uh Jeff Cavalier's got a great video of how to do this that we can link too how to do it safely you got to you got to close the Chain by having a hand on the ground this kind of thing to do it safely but I've just found that neetwork also serves posture it posture serves the ability to make eye contact when you have those things we call conversations with people in real life and I do think it these things stack up to we won't call it like psychological confidence but the ability to meet somebody you know like firm handshake you know trying to crush the other person's hand look people in the eye stand up straight whatever your height these things really matter in subtle ways or not so subtle ways I think that I do feel like like yes that the younger generation and the older generation they they sort of drop they kind of drop out of certain Elements of Life if you're looking down at the ground at your phone all the time you can't look people in the eye you're posturally not right you're in pain you're not as strong as you could be I mean these things stack up to being um like in a in an aquarium full of fish um you're becoming the fish in the background that's like you know like was kind of sickly and the other fish are getting all the the good stuff and you know if you define posture as like the Latin word route is position so we're really saying is I have good position I have bad position who I have bad position one of the ways I think we've lost the narrative a little bit is we try to give people these extrinsic cues to correct their posture shoulders backing down check your tint like so all of a sudden you're like when am I going to be a human being and how do I practice this when I'm doing a complex skill so the organization of your body the organization of your spine particularly really is a reflection of your movement habits your behaviors your self-identity there's a lot of things in there right you didn't get the job you won the you got the number from Juliet or your sleep deprived you and I'm going to call myself out people are going to do there many times on this podcast when I go and I look at the because I do listen to the podcast trying and see places I can improve Etc um and I'll be like wow my posture I'm like hunched over and I think to myself and I'll go you just reflecting my posture no no and I track my sleep so you know I'll go back and look I'll be like yeah I wasn't sleeping as well those days or or what whatever it is right I I mean I think that we're we are all guilty of not paying enough attention to our posture so what we can do is we could Define posture is there is a median range of the joint positioning where we simultaneously have most access to our physiology right and I'll explain that little more but also those shapes aren't associated with increased pain risk and increased injury risk which is real the research does bear that that there are positions and shapes that lead to less effective movement and more likely to experience pain it's probabilistic it's not guaranteed it's there more likely so one of the things that I I think you could you could understand is hey do you want to have access to all of the Machinery so go ahead and slouch go ahead with me and then just turn over your shoulder how far can you turn yeah now very far now watch this get into a position where you take a huge breath get to the biggest position you take the biggest breath okay so that's a pretty rocking shape now turn your head goes further so by you being queued can you adopt a shape an organization of your trunk that allowed you to ventilate a little bit more effectively you completely change and reorganized your structure which led to an improvement and output so when I'm working with people there's only two things I really can wrap my head around one is do you have normative range of motion yes or no what are the tools we have to restore that and improve that and does that expression give us greater biomotor output because those are objective measures when biom motor output I mean range of motion Force production power right I see that in I can express the phys physiology in a unique way that makes me you know more effective and that is why you'll see suddenly we have this definition that is maintaining the physiology and aspects I'm not going to have as good shoulder flexion with my arm over ah head as when I'm was sitting up taller or in a position where I can take a bigger breath and I think that's what's really great because that gets us away from good posture bad posture into hey that position doesn't serve you as well in these circumstances and in this position I'm working with the par rescue team in the Air Force the number one reason they were having back injuries was getting this litter out of the helicopter because they have a litter the soldiers there with all their gear on they've got a lift from a totally weird flexed position right and this just turns out it's not a really effective posture position shape that transfers to handing this higher loads so what do we do we work on the range of motion we give them skills to try to organize more effectively shape and lo and behold we can reduce injury risk and injury incident in those soldiers right so what we're always thinking about here is let's get away from good and bad and like posture doesn't matter and it also doesn't matter at low load low speed and I want to be very clear about that so you can get away with murder at low velocities and low speeds but speed kills oh everyone's fine but when that speed wobble starts to happen we start to see greater likelihood of deflection from posture your abs don't work as effectively you can't create the same inch abdominal pressure right check check check check check so that's why we always are saying hey is this true that you're saying under high load high speed when there's consequence because maybe this set of conditions Works under these conditions but it doesn't work across all conditions and for me I'm trying to take the best information I have working in sports and performance and trying to transmute that to my family transmute that to my neighborhood and to the kids I'm working with I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors element element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need but nothing you don't that means the electrolytes sodium magnesium and potassium all in the correct ratios but no sugar proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance it's also important that you get adequate electrolytes the electrolytes sodium magnesium and potassium are vital for the functioning of all the cells in your body especially your neurons or your nerve cells drinking element dissolved in water makes it extremely easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes to make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes I dissolve one packet of element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning and I drink that basically first thing in the morning I also drink element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and therefore losing a lot of water and electrolytes they have a bunch of different great tasting flavors of element they have watermelon Citrus Etc frankly I love them all and now that we're in the winter months in the northern hemisphere element has their chocolate medley flavors back in stock I really like the chocolate flavors especially the chocolate mint when it's heated up so you put it in hot water and that's a great way to replenish electrolytes and hydrate especially when it's cold and dry outside when hydration is especially critical if you'd like to try element you can go to drink element.com huberman laab to claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix again that's drink element.com huberman laab to claim a free sample pack as long as we're talking about posture feels like a good transition point to pelvic floor years ago and this is a plug for the the material that you put out online and in books but long before we met um I decided to sign up for your men's pelvic floor course out sold our women's pelvic floor course two to one it was so interesting because you know at that time um one could go online and learn a little bit about pelvic floor everyone and we talked about this um with a couple different guests on this podcast including the um director of M male sexual health um he's an MD PhD or at least an MD as I recall Mike Eisenberg at Stanford we talked about this with Mary CLA Haver and other people in the female health I'm glad we're normalizing this conversation yeah we normalized this conversation you know that the pelvic floor is Rich with vasc for blood flow and neural input for controlling muscles either passively or actively and I'll tell you the number of people I know who have urinary issues sexual dysfunction issues oh um I know because they tell me that they squat heavy in the gym they do their keyles and things like that then I've had guests on like Mike Eisenberg and others and they say um yeah actually um if you have a tight pelvic floor doing kulls is about the worst thing you could ever do for urinary function or um ere erection function that's right you know because you're sending it in the wrong direction you need to learn to relax your pelvic floor then um some women will say and it seems to be women that report this whether or not men just have this but don't report it I don't know I've had people write to me and say yeah you know I'll do um some lower body work in the gym and some urine is sneaking out and it's like well pelvic floor and you had this great course on pelvic floor that taught me among other things um I and I will say I wasn't suffering any of those particular issues but I had prostate pain in my 30s and I was like what's going on when and got my PSA measured perfectly normal thought what's going on started researching online read your work and realized oh I think I might just have tight pelvic floor started doing certain things including you taught me how to sit down and stand up correctly in this video it's like you have to keep your sternum high right you s I think said it was like a stately stately uh let me just there's no wrong way or right way to stand up or sit down everyone but there are ways that reflect increased function especially when you're in a dysfunctional state that right yeah right I don't want to we're not trying to um yet tell people what to do or not to do but it was like wow you know I'm probably hunched over too much I think my hips are back too far when I'm sitting um and maybe I'll move to a standing desk or a sit stand desk which is what I did lo and behold prostate pain goes away yeah you know and had I not found that course I might have gone down the path of medication or something else took care of everything I also I will say the other thing I learned was I I tend to have a slight um anterior pelvic tilt so thinking about the pelvis like a bowl as I understand like if that bowl could be um you know the ridge of that bowl could be parallel to the ground or Tilted forward anterior pelvic tilt or back you know posterior pelvic tilt neutral seems like a good idea but most people tend to have a you know some natural propensity towards one or the other started wearing I pretty much always wore flat shoes Adidas or you know skateboard shoes are pretty flat I lucked out there the shoe game is strong today the shoe game is strong today adidos still wear them every day I love them um or or no shoes yeah you know which is which is great and I noticed okay that corrected some of um some of that prostate pain too um by making oh excuse me what what helped correct it was to make sure that in the gym I did something it turned out to be glute ham raises that would put my P take my pelvis through a a fairly full range of motion from from you know posterior to anterior tilt and I've come to love the glute ham raay we're talking full range glute ham raises as one of the most useful tools just posturally for pelvic floor so not it's stiffness in the system resetting it high neurologic component to actually do the thing one of the things I hinted at earlier is like I've chased biometer output right int abdominal pressure and being able to have a pelvic floor that works for you is part of that system like again we can take the physiology and Goose it up and down what's interesting about I had a a famous friend who was filming a TV show and we're working on his internal rotation of his hip so if you're you imagine someone on your back and I bring your knee to your chest and I swing your foot away from your midline right the femur rolls in that's inter rotation of the femur for everyone and I worked on his intern rotation of his femur and just improved his hip flexion knee to chest just got those things going I get this text that night he's like bro what is up with my boners they're out of control what is going on out of in the in the positive direction and I was like well there's this thing called blood flow and when we improve blood flow turns out re profusion is on the list of things that we Chase so he'd been uh crimping the hose so to speak just stiff right and and I think when we start to see that endopelvic fascia as a system it's so easy for us to be reductionists like I wouldn't even say you had prostate pain I would say you had pain in your prostate area right and in fact that's what was told that prostate region right and and P you're like I don't know where my prostate is okay that's General sense and I I also saw that PSA level was well within normal actually low range and I was like what in the world is going on here and you start you know you can find some pretty scary stuff online about about spinal cord injuries and this kind of thing did what we just talked about um and boom it's never been an issue again we have um all the Olympic lifting gyms even our gym we kept a towel on the platforms so that women particularly would pee themselves when they would receive a heavy clean heavy snatch and we would just wipe it up they'd actually urinate on the platform oh yeah that happens all the time all over the Olympics everywhere you'll see that that is blading continents is not normal right totally normal to poop yourself before a fight that's what animals do totally not normal to pee yourself peeing yourself is a sign of disregulation for sure so what we're as you're seeing is though hey I can't manage this high intraabdominal pressure creating and what ends up happening is we pee ourselves so we can start by saying well are there positions and shapes theoretically I want your public floor to work in all the shapes it's Maxim there'll be some shapes where it just doesn't work as effectively and if you're a man so we're getting into it if you go P you'll see a lot of men will put their hand on the wall and they'll adopt a anterior pelvic tilt to to pee and what they'll do is basically just turn the pelvic floor off and so if you stand up and do a big anti your pelvic tilt your pelvic floor will lose some of its tone and it's easier to initiate a string so anterior pelvic tilt again folks is imagine your pelvis is a bowl you're tilting It Forward like you're going to pour water out of the bowl which is a fair analogy here that's right you're saying ideally they keep a a neutral pelvis and use the force of their of their muscles control their no no I'm saying that if you it's much more difficult to pee in this position where we have high in like high control over these systems and what you'll see is that most people will adopt a shape where they basically inhibit their public Flor so they can pee standing up I can't believe we're going to dissect urine posture urinating urinating posture but I think it's I think it's really important let's contrast that to the famous sculpture of the the boy ping and he's and I like leaning backed leaning back same same posture he's his pelvis is forward and he's leaning back that's the same posture so son will know this right um so um you know when you're a young kid young boy um you can like it almost feels like you can pee over a car if you had to maybe I tried that I'm just saying it was a Volkswagen one right so but here's so is there a proper posture for peeing no no no but initiating a stream maintaining a stream is like that's a sign of sexual health of Functional Health this you're General Health and what's nice now is notice how we got to this very nuanced conversation about a Cal dysfunction about bladder insufficiency about right peeing ourselves we got there through performance by we'll have athletes who literally had a whole bunch of babies suddenly have difficult time creating High inch abdominal tone will jump rope and as soon as and pee and as soon as they come back to a more organized position that allows them to transfer energy more effectively recruit better musculature have better organization ping stops so what we said female athl our women athletes you recommend they jump rope well yeah absolutely eventually I need to challenge that floor that's an easy way to do it but what we see is can you squeeze your butt and jump at the same time and what you'll find is that a lot of people as soon as they adopt this interior pelvic tilt glute goes off and they don't have that glute control so that can be problematic for a whole host of features so imagine I was hoping we're going to get to hip extension eventually but you know what we see is that stiffness in the front of the quads and interior line of fascia stiff front of capsule whatever the mechanism is we do a lot of sitting we're just we're squatters my inability to take my knee behind my hip we call this knees behind butt knees behind butt guy that's what I want to be known as knee but goes behind your butt like you're to lunch that's right sorry Ben um and then what we're you're going to see is a lot of times when we put people in those positions they can't get a good glute squeeze okay could one practice this I'm thinking about it's been a while since I've taken a yoga class and squeeze your butt you would be like yeah I can practice this okay so there's a pose in in yoga and I'm not not an advanced Yogi but I've taken a few yoga classes in my day where you you're on your you're basically um cropped up sitting on your knees soort of like in the C and then yeah High kneeling and then um hard to squeeze your butt there isn't it it's hard to squeeze your butt there and then because of all the forces yanking you interiorly those fascial lines the the quads you're basically in that high kneeling position and because the lower leg is bent behind you you're being dragged forward and it's difficult to squeeze your butt and extend over backwards so there's that do they call it camel pose where you reach back and grab your heels and you're supposed to look up at the ceiling that's a gnarly one it's a gnarly one if you do it in the Bay Area the t-shir will say don't be surprised if some emotions come up no if you do this in Austin Texas they just say it's supposed to hurt keep going I'm just joking here this is like Regional humor but in any event um I think that's actually accurate by the way um but in any event it's it is slightly um unusual for most people who aren't accustomed to it to do that pose again doing that pose bring it up for a reason and if you don't do that pose you might do Kipping pull-ups that's a global extension position all we're doing is taking the spine and putting a huge Global load in it instead of a localized load so an anterior pelvic tilt we might think of localized extension in flexion where I have one or two segments doing the line share we whenever we can prefer to have Global flexion extension because the spine maintains its Integrity a little more effectively so doing things like wheel pose awesome putting your hands up near your ears pushing your feet flat on the ground pushing up into a you know an arc Arc shape on the ground great Diagnostics this should be is this something that most people should be able to do yes can most people probably do it no can we then break down the components of it yeah absolutely even iyangar Yogi Master started to bring in props block and belts because he was seeing that his his students weren't able to achieve some of the base shapes and what they were doing was human Jenga to get into those patterns they were just solving the problem and he was like hold up let's not go around the problem let's support you while we load you and breathe in these these positions and shapes given that most people don't have a ton of time for movement um designated blocks of time for movement um if one were going to do let's say some uh attempt toward wheel pose practice or camel pose practice or um any number of the other things that we're talking about here which are taking the body into positions that it that we're not naturally putting it into given our activities otherwise na um would you suggest doing these at the end of a resistance training workout when does it work for you at some point you need to be exposed in this position when are you going to get exposed to this position if it happens to be able to be clumped in with your training fantastic if it's at home in the evening fantastic if you if you've done Sun salutation before it's old school right it's almost like they were like let's get this system going a little bit so later on the day it's a little bit easier so at some point we need to expose you to some positions we have something called The Hip spin up and typically for my athletic populations my teams especially I'm like hey I want you to do one of three things in the morning got 10 minutes that's all I'm asking 8 to 10 minutes hip spin up shoulder spin up or breath spin up just just do one of those if if your back hurts or knee hurts you get hip spin up if your shoulder or neck hurts you get shoulder spin up and then if not just cycle through those so at least in the morning we're starting to touch some of these crucial shapes that you're never in and if you do the hip spin up and suffer I'm like well that's telling me about your movement history your injury history your movement diet and again nothing that we do on the ready state is related to super natural levels of range of motion just basic range of motion the range of motion again that everyone met learns in med school everyone learns in physical therapy school so what's fun about what you said around this sort of this pelvic floor Health piece is that when we get people doing some mobilization really brought to me really brought my attention of Jill Miller is that we start mobilizing the endopelvic fascia we just land a ball just anywhere from your pubic bone to your D your up to Dio process but particularly belly button South you'll see that none of that should be uncomfortable and one of the reasons we see high incidents of you know pelvic floor dysfunction but also High incidence of sports hernas is that we have a hip that doesn't work very well and ends up dragging that pelvis into positions where it's not muscularly very strong right I can get out of position where I have a lot of good sort of activation or or access to those positions then I have fascia and musculature that's super stiff because every time you do abs you celebrate the stiffness right you do abs you're like oh I'm sore today I'm going to go have some ice cream when's the last time you manage your hamstrings or quads probably yesterday when's the last time you rolled out your abs and your obliques never previous life right previous life before you respond so I think one of the things that we're seeing is again that would be a perfect time to do in the evening don't go to the gym and lay on the kettle bell and be a creepy guy instead pull out that volleyball at home pull that princess ball you got at Walgreens and start having a conversation with your pelvic floor turns out you know your your abdomen the pelvic floor can also be mobilized so we just it's really simple front of your pelvis is your pubic bone that's the front of the pelvic floor the back is your coxic and each is yield to baras your sit bones as the side everything else is your pelvic floor so you can take a ball and just stay away from the holes and if anything hurts to compression you found a problem so you can contract and relax apply that same tissue so I might be on my side I might be rolling with the ball right underneath me you you would just be sitting down on your coffee table and just putting that sitting that ball in and around your pelvis and around your glutes and around your pelvic floor right you might be dangerously close to your grundle you're welcome so the the idea here though is you know often times when we'll have athletes with back pain we're not looking at their pelvic floor or hip pain but you have six short hip rotators right you don't just have a couple rotators you have a huge Rotator cuup of the hip and some of those things are congruent and and kind of part of that pelvic floor so it's that I need to go after my P FL every day because again not let me just add another thing to do your list but if something changes I suddenly wake up and I don't have an erection I suddenly are discovering that I'm peeing myself because I'm an elite cyclist right and something's happening that I'm like oh I don't know what to do here let me start to work on my belly let me see if I can work on restoring my positions and can I do a little pelvic phone immobilization and that's a great place to start and which doctor was involved none Which pelv floor therapist was involved none in fact if you carry that to your your your specialist they're going to be like all right right we get to have the real conversation now because you've already done the other stuff one thing that um frightens me and maybe unnecessarily so is when I see um men in particular doing crunch work like ab work crunching with ankles crossed um a because um people tend to cross the same ankle over the other one they don't they don't symmetrically switch uh uh sides that's good and my um my other understanding is that this can also lead to some pelvic floor issues and asymmetries simple solution could be to not cross the ankles while doing um like repeated contraction work of of the abdominals it might being silly I would put that lower on the list of problems I have right like I think if we went into the world right now and looked at people doing curls you know curl-ups the real thing is is that your only way that you're the abdominals you know am I do I have a bigger range of motion of the trunk there are so many ways to be thinking about what the trunk should be doing and reducing it down to this one curl I think if one of the things that we're looking at like I'd much rather you hang from a bar and curl up yep so this is the this is pretty much I W to say the only ab work I do I do some anti-rotation work by staggering my stance when I do curls or anything else cuz it's a very time efficient way to do it making sure my belly button staying St so you're resisting the temptation to rock from side to side and get the anti- rotation work obviously switching up The Stance but doing what you described hanging from a bar doing Pikes um to me you're also getting grip work just for time efficiency also not just separating the ABS and working with the abdominals with the knee to the chest because that's really what we're seeing is that do you only need your abs working in this position so basically you're reproducing another seated position except you're crunching your chest to your seated knee and that's really what that position is do we do it long what happens if you do it long lever short lever means elbow is bent long lever is the elbow is straight short lever is the knee is bent long lever is the leg is straight so why aren't we working in all those patterns and positions and then being creative there are so many G resources the the kids at um Dave Durante has an free ab workout he's an Olympic gymnist from Stanford Superstar but you can go on to I think it's I said Iron Monkey sorry guys and uh you know what you'll see is um there's so much fun ways to play and think about what the role of the trunk should do and I think we're moving beyond thank goodness this like I have to be a rigid robot all the time and that we need to ask what is the trunk supposed to do a good way of thinking about this and I think you're sit up is a good analogy um really a book that makes the rounds from time to time is a book called the spinal engine by Serge grovy and he really talks about the trunk as a driver of power not just as a chassis of which the big engine moves and that really is a nice conceptual way of simplifying movement but if we Define functional movement most people agree it works in a wave of contraction from trunk to periphery from core to sleeve from axillary skeleton to peripheral skeleton but that means boy there are positions where I'm really effective and can generate a lot of force and there'll be position positions where I can but if my spine can't handle flexion it's not a spine if it can't extension it's not a spine if it can't rotate and be into these complex position shapes I'm like red flag so how are you training that thing and if your only rigid Dogma is straight up and down which is a great reason to do Mobility work is suddenly we can side Bend and we can twist and am I exposing myself to some of those shapes and so we call that work borrowing from one of my Olympic uh friends Stu McMillan spinal engine work putting PVC side bending playing with the different shapes and again if you threw get into the David W ropes if you threw medicine balls you would suddenly see you're like you're right I can't be a rigid piece how am I training the functionality of my trunk Beyond just my six-pack because at you know straight curling will certainly give you six-pack but that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to surf with power run with power punch with power Etc I mean look at what just happened with those fights right with the women you know fighting just the rotational power that they have you can't get that from just cross crunches with your legs so the fight right before the um Tyson Jake Paul fight was arguably the best fight and people had seen it a long long time the spirit of it and just the I mean they were just incredible everyone watches women's sports it was really great so I think what's great now is if we can get people to start to be curious and to play and you know I'm not saying you need 10,000 different movements but instead of just hanging from the bar and doing knees to elbows or toes to Bar what happened if you brought your right foot to your left hand and you started adding in a rotation to that and suddenly you're like I suck at this and ultimately what I want to do is I want to uncover every deficiency in this play because I'm still going to deadlift I'm still going to swing I'm still going to launch I'm do all the things that I know that makes me feel robust and makes me ride my bike better and be a better kayaker but simultaneously there's a lot of play on either side of that I love that you're defining progression as is incorporating these um novel movements exploring dude that's Westside 101 Lou Simmons I mean like hey this week we're squatting with this bar then we're squatting with this bar and then we're changing your height then we're changing your stance I mean Westside barbell has been doing this for ever I didn't realize they did that I knew they were like crazy gnarly like every bar has its own Max right and so what they've done has said hey the squat pattern is the thing we're training but how do we put another twist to the pretzel now the weights in front now the weight's behind now it's out and now it's too deep and now we're box squatting now and like wow you're going to have to be a really confident skilled squatter to handle all that seems like in so many sports not just for resistance training but in so many sports um there's this move uh shift now toward being an ATV an all Trin vehicle like you can't afford to just be good at one thing you know um and the cool thing about it is that you know the more dynamic range that people are expressing the more kind of evolution you see of any kind of sport and I think we're going to see see this with Fitness too I'm realizing this as we have this conversation that what you're really suggesting is that people explore their movement patterns I love this thing that I've heard you say for years and I know McKenzie harps on this too which is Brian Mackenzie that is um you should be able to breathe well in every position it's such a fun test actually it's such an easy test you know squat down like you're going to get something out of the cupboard see if you can take like a full belly breath see if you can get that your belly going out on the inhale there I like to do this test myself every once while hang from the bar I'll you know those Pikes I don't get very many of them admittedly I'm doing like five sets of five occasionally we'll try and twist a little bit and as my grip strength improves slightly maybe I'll be able to get more usually my grip strength smaller legs it would be easier um I'll take that as either a compliment or an insult coming from you Kelly um Kelly's exceedingly strong he deadlifts 600 lbs on the regular he's he's exceedingly strong and he's he has incredible endurance you're actually more of an endurance guy I think this is worth mentioning that you have why I'm not very strong you have you have more of um right but um have you seen my strong friends I'm not I'm not deflecting your physiology is definitely biased towards certain things like unequivocally and what I am not good at is being brutally strong oh I've been training for 20 plus years hard training longer than that 30 years and this is all I can deadlift that's pathetic have you seen my strong friends so what you see is that I've been cramming a square peg into a round hole because I really like it but really I should be probably 190 lb and I should be an aerobic athlete right like if we threw a 100 lb backpack on you and went backpacking you'd be fine you you'd be like a even now in the you you're sitting at somewhere like 240 right you're like 62 you you can go you can go for days like you're naturally an endurance athlete and I think it's worth saying because people are listening Kell a big guy all my training is biased towards you cannot believe how much conditioning I do I am a disciple of Joel Jameson I'm a huge fan of to look at where I'm spending my time in these different heart rate zones and then you know I'm just such a nerd of that because my primary sport is trying to keep up with my wife on the mountain bike I I think this is really important because I think we've been talking a lot about things kind of adjacent to resistance training I think it's a wonderful shift now in in culture that resistance training is being uh used done by by by Young People by older people women and men you know it's fantastic this was not the case 10 years ago this was definitely not the case 20 years ago was like bodybuilders football preseason football players and Military were the only people weight training now it's everywhere um but you're naturally an endurance athlete um I'm guessing that most people I'm assuming is this true fall into the slower twitch kind of more endurance propensity then um I mean how many truly naturally strong fast fiber type people are walking walking around out there if we just took the general that are are sprinters and super springy and you you know who those people are they're mutants you know um I think I was always best at a skilled sport that use conditioning or use strength when I compare myself to my friends who have huge arobic engines it's embarrassing I'm always the weakest fattest slowest smallest person in the room and it is I can't like if you just want to Ego check just come out hang out with me just meet my friends see the people we're working with and you'll see you're like okay genetics is not the same I think we've told a little bit of a lie in the internet sphere that like if you eat this way and you do these you'll be elite and like we can certainly say that you have a training effect for sure and you should do that but that's not the same thing as being a mutant and there are just so mean mutants out there shocking yeah I think I think um it's actually a worthwhile exercise to figure out what one's natural leanings are what do you like to do how about that I just think it's important that we remind ourselves that the whole point of this is to have the most fun and what you'll see he put up a video of some Chinese elementary school kids and the Chinese Olympic lifting team coaches coming and assessing their kids and very quickly they put kids over at squats they had them jump on a single leg they had them do double jumps and they were like you you you have your parents call me right so you can already see that coordination matters wiring matters exp and they were able to say hey these are the things that we think are going to make good Olympic lifters so those kids I think we start to split cohort early on but most important is everyone needs to weightlift period and it's not light to Pink dumbbells it's real heavy weightlifting but how much do you need to do to be better at your sport or to minimize your spine those are the spine changes or or osteopenia or osis those are great conversations but not necessarily conversations about performance right so it's almost like we need to divide this into like Aesthetics and I'm keeping myself intact in versus I want to go to the Olympics because what you're seeing on the world right now is that it everyone's an expert I'm like can I see how you work with 40 athletes can I see how you periodize that can I see how you manage travel and nutrition can I see how you know you were responsible or not responsible for this team having all its members so what we're seeing is that it's a this performance thing is a really big task and it gets confused and water down a little bit by everyone fitnesses well I I squat so I'm an expert too not the same our good friend Kenny Kane taught me something he's sh ke shaking his head the best the best he's a wonderful guy you're not going to find him on social media because a few years ago he just decided to take his gym and and himself off social media he's a very very talented so we're going to give you his phone number we're going to have you call him because he can't DM him very talented uh athlete and wonderful person he taught me something uh say about eight years ago that I've found oh so useful for uh my training longevity my enjoyment of training and it was this very simple 80% of your workouts Andrew he said are going to be at 80% of what you could do that day okay that involves some humility I like to sweat hard I associate intensity with hard work etc he said 10% are going to be at 90% intensity meaning 100% is the most you could give possibly in whatever time is allotted on that day given the Sleep given the nutrition given the life circumstances on that day the Readiness for that day right and then here's where it breaks down a little bit more 5% are going to be at 95% and 5% across the year are going to be maximum 100% everything you can give Do or Die workouts that day and for me last year I believe it was was that was the The Rock carry C cam hand's podcast I gave everything I had had of course had the mountain been a little bit higher I'd like to think I would have gone a little bit further but I gave everything I could because that rock was slippery and it was muddy and my hamstring was out the day when we started that you know I was in pain when we started anyway I think that advice that Kenny gave me was some of the best advice I've ever heard because my tendency would have been and had been to come in and go at 90 95 or 100% every single workout CA PRK Long Way Y and it also brought me to this place where after8 or 10 weeks of training I would get a cold or I'd get some nagging thing a little thing not you know wouldn't put me under but then or I need to take a week off normal accident Theory right so I think um I'd love your thoughts on on Kenny's recommendation for me it's one of the things that I pass along anytime says how about some Fitness advice I say well listen I'm a neuroscientist not a fitness guy but I know a thing or two based on the mistakes I've made here's a great piece of advice that's really helped me 80% of your workouts 80% intensity another 10% at 90% then the 95 you know 5% at 95 and 5% across the year are the all out everything you can give leave it all on the mat type workouts we could start with a simple idea we we say let's be consistent before we're heroic right I if your intensity causes you to not be able to show up for the gym for three days I'm like sweet that was sweet and our ration response to that is sucky right I much rather you be getting more consistent and not blowing yourself out remember that there was a phase where we like you shouldn't be sore when you leave the gym remember that like there people would talk about hey leave some reps in the reserve like show up the next day Grease the groove that's old P Seline stuff I think that's really good advice especially since most people are not 20 most people and when you're 20 you need to go find out what the limits are touch the fence the electric fence once in a while right lick the lick all the doorknobs let's just call it that way but uh you you know what ends up happening is there's a lot of things have to be in place for you to be able to go to the well that many times and what we know now because we have all of this data is that we can make better progress not burning It To The Ground every single time and it's difficult for us because if I'm Just Fitness how do I quantify that right it's easy for us to quantify another kilo or another Watt that's makes it a lot easier and what you'll see is the best practices of these athletes we do spend a lot of 70 to 80% heart rate that's what we call recovery in Joel Jameson language 80 to 90 we're calling that conditioning 90 and above overload but what I think is nice is that that gives me a lot of there are some days where I touch 78 or 80% and it's hard because I'm sleep deprived stressed out my nutrition hasn't been great I'm sleeping in a strange bed right you know traveling whatever so I think what you're seeing is um is something that one of my uh early coaches talked about Mike bergner he says when the frying Pan's hot let's cook and that means I need to know myself and as a coach I need to know you and I'm like Andrew you look great today how do you feel great let's go let's go chase something right and when the frying Pan's hot we cook but the frying pan is not always hot and if you pour in bang energy and Jack 3D and you can't even hear inputs and outputs so I I think you I think that's such solid reasonable advice and really what we're looking at is how can we get you to train much more consistently longer and longer and longer you can only go to the well a few times and what I'll tell you is that is I still love to power clean it's like my favorite thing and that 100 kilo power clean is heavier than it was when I was 40 you know and I want to pretend like that 100 kilo power clean is not a problem but I actually have to progress and get myself there and there are days where I'm like n 80 80 kilos is my jam today so I think that's really good advice and difficult for us to say how are we measuring success in our training subjective experience well no problem let me give you a baby keep this newborn alive and then let's go see how hard your training is the next day you're going to be terrible you haven't slept all night you're stressed right so I think what's nice is having some sub objective measurements around maybe body composition is one of them if that's important to you but are you getting faster over the course of a week what are your testing how do we know inputs and outputs and now we're just doing we're baking a lot we're making a lot of uh suicides right you the old fountain drink where you just makes all the things it's you know they always taste the same at the end like crap but that suicide where you mix all the fountain drinks is a little bit of what we're seeing in that and one way of protecting ourselves is saying hey let's make sure you can train tomorrow suicides I was reflecting on that the other day for some reason why at a wedding or a party young typically it's a y chromosome Associated disorder to feel like you have to mix a bunch of bunch of stuff in then get someone to drink it um non-alcoholic drinks for young kids by the way mixing all the sodas putting M&M just something like all my my my male friends and I think that's what we see a little bit and if you you if you I am a deep coach nerd I love Fitness I love Fitness thing I'll jump into any class anytime like sure let's go let's see you know I it's so fun but I need to see I I do get to watch sort of Trends come and go things get very hot you know they get very popular they and again the fitness has become a hobby it's an amuse and that's okay it's totally okay that JY is a hobby but that doesn't hint about what's the best way to develop capacity Elite capacity long-term longevity capacity it those things almost don't go together let's talk about hip extension oh bless you um as somebody who um doesn't like the elliptical or stationary bike but loves the assault bike I love the assault bike I don't know why um just feels like really good work it is hard work uh but you're not going to find me on Bill made it harder with the Echo Bike thanks for making it worse what the Echo Bike the Rogue Echo Bike is even worse than the assault bike uh the assault Bike by the way folks is the one with the fan and um I'm not sure if they put the fan is for resistance not to not to keep you cool but it has that effect somewhat in the winter you'll know what the fan does U so um the Echo Bike is a harder assault bike it's just like imagine do doing it on fire uphill in the sand with a headwind then you're like okay this is if you can make it worse it's worse if you have one of these I'm going to swing by this winter break and uh and try this thing but I love that because High physiology low skill that's great you just described me in a nutshell I can take anyone not know have to know anything about your range of motion and I can be like who are you physiologically today let me introduce this freakish amount of work in this tiny range of motion that's very safe so we can really touch High intensities very safely there mhm yeah I like it much more than the skier I'll do the skier every once in a while but I I find that the skier if I just sit sit and stand a bunch of times I be like I can just do this for for 15 days you know like is this exercise and I'm like am I doing this right I don't know for some reason doesn't feel like work the assault bike always feels like work always feels like work okay so hip extension the assault bike is not hip extension typically you're you know tend to be people tend to be hunch forward you could get upright right you can still don't have any hip extension so no hip extension let's talk about if I'm squatting and I stand up I'm extending the hip as you stand up right I'm going from flexion to extension yeah one thing that I think for people listening that um at least is helpful for me when when hearing about squatting is to think about um whether or not it's a deadlift or a squat you can imagine taking your hands putting your fingers at your hips and you you know hiding your hands in your in your um in that joint between the femur and your pelvis as you go down right your hands get get tucked into the the fold between between the two and as you stand up it opens so it's hip hinge they typically call it right and I think what you we look at the squat and the lunge is very their cousins and the difference is long lever short lever and typically how you're holding the weight that's the only difference and sometimes UPR torso position but ultimately we're really looking at you know what's happening with the degree of Bend of the of the knee right that's why they're such elegant cousins but if I'm squatting down and I stand up people are like I'm working on extension work on extension all the time I'm like okay now let's continue this extension conversation and bring that knee behind your butt into a lunge and that's hip extension and if there's one thing that I'm seeing across so many of the populations I work with is we're starting to see changes and erosion in this fundamental expression of power the only people we don't see it is our Olympic sprinters they're and and you'll see that Pockets like we work with the All Blacks and we're obsessed on maintaining the hip EXT mention these very strong athletes because it means that they can run faster on the field rugby team those um am I correct in thinking that hip extension we can think of as a um you partially reflecting hamstring function where the hamstring is responsible for bringing the heel up toward the butt but also for bringing the femur back behind the Torso I I realize I'm not using the PT Language by the way the PT is online your community of the pts you guys just crack me up in the field of of uh medicine there's there's an analogous sub specialty of medicine where they have the similar kind of like orneriness and it's being a PT is very competitive and so there's a you don't do this but the PT Community it's like it's some you can make a cart you can make a whole sitcom about this the the attacks often range from significant to like cluster around Petty not because they're not knowledgeable but because there's so much Nuance in this field right and it seems that there are few things that everyone agrees on and then everything else people love to argue in community out of community so anytime I say anything about movement of the body I wanted to just say I realize I'm probably not using the correct I'm going to use that same defense of petty cluster clustering the pettiness I'm sorry all the physical therapists out there I haven't represented you in the way that you would like to be represented I'll say I'm just talking about my own experience differences in nomenclature right and I am trying to be very meticulous in my language today yeah um one of the things that we want to look at is um and this is a Philip Beach muscles Meridian idea is that there are contractual fields and this goes along with if we look at Thomas Meyer's Anatomy trains of seeing the system as a system of system so we start to look at your back and your Erectors and then we tie that into the glutes and then we tie that into the hamstrings and tie the calf it's kind of a almost wraps around the door the bottom of the foot right the planet surface of the foot so suddenly we're we're looking looking at this global system that's designed to create this Mass extension position Locomotion we start to lock some of those pieces down a little bit but one of the things that we've seen is that when you aren't competent in this position your hamstrings for example have to do a lot more work because your butt is no longer working on hip extension your adductors are restricted and they're not bringing you back into flexion so suddenly what we see is that your hamstrings are having to do the work of calf but one your hamstrings are tied all the time you don't have hip extension so a simple test we do is called the couch stretch and all you need to do is face a wall then turn away from the wall so you're kneeling on the ground hands and knees away from the wall you're going to put one of your knees in the corner so your foot is going straight up and down the knee is in the corner of the wall and then I want you to see if you can squeeze your butt in that position still hot hands and KNE except one foot now is kind of in the corner down the wall going toward butt that's position one a lot of people are going to struggle with recruiting and activating their butt in that position because it's what I'm calling positionally inhibited we don't know what the mechanism is so you're getting the knee back behind the Torso much as one would if they if you were sprinting and the rear leg is is really we're just flexing the lower leg we're flexing the lower leg shank right that lower limb second position is to come up into a high kneeling position position so you just bring your knee up and like you're kneeling except that we have a trailing leg now with a leg that's going up the wall so front leg is sort of a right angle right you have foot on the ground right angle that's right rear leg is a knee tucked in the corner at the where the floor meets the the couch um foot is up on the couch nope just on the ground okay and we'll provide a link to it I called the couch dress cuz I created this thing a long time ago and I created it on the couch for my young athlet while they were watching TV right I just needed some hip extension exposure but we can do it on the wall do on the couch ultimately what we try to say is do you have glute squeeze can you take a breath right if your breath starts to get real small in this position I'm like huh so every time your knee comes behind your body you can't breathe anymore H how's that working for you when you run is that good or bad seems to me that your breath should remain pretty constant independent of what your hip does so then we like to see if people can come to a more upright position so that's kind of position three so a little bit more upright torso we're starting to increase hip demands as the Torso comes upright torso is coming upright the knee is moving further away from the chest on that loaded leg and what you'll see is that most people are going to be like wow that's real stiff or I can't even get there or I can't breathe there or I have to Banana back to get there and I certainly can't squeeze my butt there and I want to tell everyone this is a low-level test the real test is your front foot goes up on a 12in to 18inch box so we're not even in the test yet we're with front leg front no front leg just up higher so we Elevate the front leg into what's called a hip lock so that front leg is suddenly taking my pelvis and rotating it posteriorly knee is bringing the running into pelvis pelvis is like tucking and now you're really going to see what's going on with your hip extension so this is the equivalent position more or less of front knee um sprinting like really like like jut it up in the air you know maybe even past the belly button definitely past the belly butt rear rear leg behind you so this is sort of like you know coton mid stride okay that's right and so suddenly we have this nice test that allows us to see in our competency there and I want to remind you if you do the couch stretch and filament your knee is actually in hip extension it's not your knee isn't even behind your butt here it's that hard and I'm still biasing it towards flexion so what we're seeing is that you have a real deficit of hip extension so that's one way to improve it you could just do the test camp out there take some breaths contract relax breathe do your resistant isometrics whatever you want to do there so many ways to J that up rotate side bend the question is how are you now loading that thing in your life so we can put a band on you and get you do some isometric standing but show me in your movement language in the gym how you're reinforcing hip extension so when we were talking about deadlifting with a tandem stance still not hip extension right I'm extending the hip but that trail leg is not rear foot elevated split squat ding ding ding ding we start to get there right bulgarians flipping a tire like any time where I need to be able to a big lunge is a good example forward lunge back lunge tell me about flipping a tire so are you talking about flipping a tire but then at the top of the movement you're doing like a kettle bell swing Where You Buck your hips forward like you're going to try and pee over that Volkswagen pushing over don't try and pee at the top but but you're talking about bucking the hips forward that's right suddenly you're upright and that leg that trailing leg is in extension in a long lever position so we spend a lot of programming one of the best persons at this is France Bosch um I mentioned earlier and he has something I've termed like the Bosch snatch so if you imagine being in a double stance so I'm just like I'm swinging a kettlebell if I took a plate or a dumbbell doesn't matter I'm just going to basically go from a hip hinge and as I go overhead with the weight of the load whatever is appropriate for you I'm going to take my front foot and step it up on a box so all of a sudden I'm going from a flexed position in the hip c-shaped body right or or upright torso but hinged c-shaped right weird C and then havela C and then I'm going to step forward and now I'm going to have that one of those legs is going to be an extension and so suddenly now we're adding speed to this extension because that's not what we do with reverse rear foot elevated split squats we're not loading that in speed so we start at the speed component to what we're doing and suddenly we've discovered another way to challenge our movement it doesn't just always be half heavier it can also be faster so I'm basically if imagine if I was here's a great example I love pressing I think overhead pressing is the bees knees it's one of my non-negotiables we're going to press seesaw press overhead press we're pressing but if I take your front foot and put it up on a box make sure that back foot is straight with all your toes on the ground and press from that position you're going to find out why you don't have any hip extension it's going to be so you won't even think about the weight you'll think about your growing exploding so a lot of you recommend people probe that that mean those mechanics AB with very light dumbbells at first no go press go find out how way you can press overhead and you're going to see that like wow this tandm stance front foot elevated you know press is going to kill you can um there there's a movement I do I'm guessing well I'm curious if it activates hip extension the way I think it does here's here's what I've been doing that I found useful I don't know if it's true or not but what I'll is I'll tie a fairly thick band to a pull-up bar I I'll squat down I'll hold it like I'm holding a like a pole in front of me like a pole carrier in a in a um in a parade or something I'll squat down and I'll jump up and but instead of of um but I'll Buck my hips forward at the top so like feet go out in front it's very unnatural U movement actually as opposed to jumping and putting my toes down pointing my toes down my toes are are kicking forward so I'm trying to mimic the top of a kettle bell swing at thep top of this movement I I would say you know one of the things that is useful for me as I am asked to come and tear through people's programming look for holes in their movement practices we look at fundamental shapes so what's nice is that okay hang on everyone let me let me Define exercise for you let me just I'll just give you a little framework and I'll start by saying something inflammatory the shoulder is not that complicated it doesn't do that many things goes overhead MH goes out to the side goes in the front it goes in the back that's what your shoulder does you can bend the elbow you can twist and all those shapes but those are the four fundamental primary organizations of the shape of the of the shoulder hip has flection extension right really I could I can go laterally but that's just a different kind of squat but really like am I squatting with the foot really narrow or my squat a little bit wider so what we can then do is say in these fundamental bookends these benchmarks this what we call archetype suddenly I can ask well how are you loading your overhead position so if you're always pressing on a bar or pulling on a lat down machine you actually are overhead but you're not in the fullest expression over overhead right which is your arms straight up and down parallel by your ears hands over the top of your head STS over your head right so what we can then do is say well what what tools do you like to use Kettle Bell's great that's one of the reasons k was so great single arm I can't hold it out here it's going to fall I have to finish over my head right dumbbells the same but the kettle bell is ass salt it constrains us to express full overhead motion I can look at do you have enough inter rotation with the Hand by the side are you doing enough pressing like activities chaturanga the finished position of my row right bench press dip running those are all movements where my shoulder comes into extension whether the arm is straight or bent so what's nice now is I can say well am I distracting those tissues or compressing those tissues well you're like well what do you mean I'm like are you pressing or are you doing a pull-up right pressing overhead or doing a pull-up that's compressing or distraction right very simple ways of looking at these movements we can say well how are you coming there did you get there from a snatch or did you get there from a front rack position so we can look at start position finish position and suddenly what you're realizing is you're like oh I'm starting to understand the root movements and root positions that help me improve performance predict future performance and help me get through pain because if I have people not expressing the highest levels expression of the movement that's something we can improve that's technique right it's not just get bigger and stronger it's hey let's be more technically proficient so I have all of these ways of looking at the movement selection choices again what are you comfortable with but then I can challenge it with load make it heavier we can do volume we could add speed we could add cardiorespiratory demand you could do more than five and suddenly you have to do 20 and we have metabol demand in there you and I are competing all of a sudden right now suddenly I go from open Torque to closed torque I go from giving you a barbell to a dumbbell right I go from open chain to closed chain suddenly we're like holy moly block practice random practice I have all the tools for me to understand are you competent putting your arms over your head or are you exposing these shapes under these different domains and I think when we only look at sort of a few ranges of motion and we only look at load as the way then we lose all the opportunity and richness of programming got it well let me come back to um my silly example of the band and the jump thing and say okay so for getting better hip extension which is what I think a lot of people need is what I'm hearing a lot of people are in hip flexion so you're jumping and then coming up yeah I mean or you know we've seen these beautiful images of certainly not me but like um people doing long jump where they're kind of like in a in a ared position something yeah so the idea is with the band it's safe right you know um trying to get the hip into extension or feed out in front of the jumping it's it's a Kipping pullup without a pull-up you're just Kipping on the bar and I don't Kip on my pull-ups by the way um because I'm a time under no I don't Kip on my pull-ups um I don't I train with Ben Bruno from time to time you keep on a pull-up with Ben Bruno there you're never going to hear the end of it ever so I don't but I don't anyway cuz I I'm a I'm aention that's fine I'm going to say that I love stric pull-ups I do more pull and you can imagine but if you can't Kip there's something wrong with you okay got it uh we'll argue about this more offline um but I love to Sprint so um that's hip extension absolutely uh love to Sprint love to Sprint um and I love jumping like I I'm a big believer in this maybe true maybe not true uh idea that as we get older we tend to jump and land less a lot of injuries come from you know lack of Ecentric Lo saying in out of the Soviet system when you stop jumping you start dying mhm you you and the lowest form could be trampolining the highest low another low form jump roping highest form starting to be really powerful I love it I I you're killing it and what's great now is you just made this switch you start describing your training in blocks of positions what position am I training what shape am I reinforcing right that's a really not it's not a muscle remember your muscles are not wired for movement your brain is wired for movement right you can't you don't have any selective control over a single muscle in your body that's a mistake so you're not really working your biceps you're working arm flexion right in a variety of positions this squat exercise biases my quads more but I'm not actually quading right because that's impossible yeah I think that the um the misconception the broad misconception is that resistance training is just to build and strength and muscles in a bodybuilding kind of fashion and no disrespect to the body body builders but we learned a lot but you know we learned a ton and and and yet most people would probably do well to think about functional movements in fact there are a few Instagram accounts that that really like to come after um not just me but a lot of people that um have talked about resistance training at all that talk about functional patterns and I have to say as much as the the messaging sometimes I think is a little bit abrasive I pay attention to these and I have seen some of the before and afters that they'll show for people that will incorporate into their training like a like throwing or or um you know ballistic movements from you know fully stop sprinting out the gate kind of thing and focusing um immensely on balancing the two sides of the body and without ever having done those programs I have to say like yeah like a lot of these people had some pretty dysfunctional patterns and they look like they're doing better and I think it's because I must I have to assume that they're incorporating a much broader uh range of of movements um more hip extension working the two sides of the body all the things that you're talking about all the things that you're talking about and so I think that the bodybuilding piece I think is a great thing for getting people out the gate I always say the amazing thing about resistance training forgive me for going long here but I think this is something that um if somebody is not naturally inclined to exercise or resistance training resistance training is one of the few forms of exercise that because of the blood flow the so-called pump give people a visual and um sens a sensation based window into the progress they might make hell yeah right I mean this is like like going for a run and getting to like at the end of your run you see a little less body fat and then two days later you you you've reduce your body fat percentage right like it gives you a window into your future when you resistance train that way and and a Gateway into a conversation that's very complex this is all I think about and people are like hey I just want to feel better I don't want to get hurt in my calves when I run you're like okay it can be really simple and also you have your right to look jacked and tan I mean you you can be jacked all you want Mark makes this point every single post look I think um there's something that I try we don't ever punch down we just don't you know just point we point to what we do this just our model but any model that someone's on the internet a model has to do three things it has to explain current phenomenon right it has to predict future phenomenon and it has to be easily communicated so let me see your model how it works how does it explain if I do your thing well I get better at this thing right that's the thing I'm interested in right so when I is oh a lot of recursive fun fitness where people feel better but I still have to go over here and squat or I still have to go over here and and and become conditioned but you can see the truth of needing to expose people to bigger ranges of motion and more skilled movement than some of the things we're getting traditionally in the gym right and and I think one of the things that we saw with like a a pivot towards movement culture right kind of coined by you know portal is that what we were seeing is that the gym didn't beget necessarily better movers what we had was people originally doing a skill throwing something running track and field we would train and then go do more of that and then what we did is we took the gym or took the sport skill movement out of it and we just remained in the gym and you can see the reaction to that as well you're not very elegant you can't don't have any mo Moving Solutions you don't for your energy very well you're not you know you're not graceful you can't you have no rhythm so the real key for us is like I think we want to put playback in there and you can see what the reaction is to hey if we're just doing bench press and hack squats maybe that's not making the best mover but it's certainly making a jacked guy who's what we call what is it in that movie hot girl fit where uh you know it's one of the recent movies where the GU uh who's the guy from uh Twisters that incredible actor he was in Top Gun anyway he's swimming and the girl is like hey why are you out of breath he's like I don't do cardio I just do abs and biceps she's like oh my God your hot girl fit like you have this big engine that looks good with noo and I want to make sure that no offense to all the hot girls out there but the idea here is what is it you want to do with your body let's start there and then we can start to say well what do you have access to what's your training age and it's a Nuance conversation it's probably why you should have a coach and develop a coach for the for the rest of your life but let's not pretend that having abs and big biceps is going to make you a good MMA fighter right and you can see why the resistance of hey that made me less athletic we want to be careful of that yeah I like using the resistance training to make me stronger and better at running yes and that's my that's actually that's what's in my mind I only ran cross country one season in high school wasn't very good but it really enjoyed it but I I love running I've been running for a long time and and I'm I'll never be a I ran cross country one year in high school maybe we ran against each other oh no you're a year older than I am so I I I would yeah well I'll tell the story some other time it's not my my stories aren't are relevant here but but I use resistance training to be able to run better faster further without pain for me that is that is what I would hope we look at training for now apply a longevity lens a durability lens right or as Juliet says she's like don't you want to just be able to pop off the couch and go on adventures right I want to have a body that's capable of that I think what we've been pitching in the gym doesn't really do that and even that I just want everyone to hear and double click on what Andrew said that framework is that I now have a third party objective measure does my running get better with my training it's a really great great way to evalue your training am I faster do I feel better it's really worked for me and it keeps me out of um any uh kind of gravitational pull toward just trying to get more weight on the hack squat machine which I enjoy Progressive overload I enjoy doing movements better with more weight Etc but um I find that the gym just becomes this um when it's a closed loop I find becomes this kind of like endless exploration like what am I really also at this age like I want to maintain strength and build some muscle perhaps but mostly you want to get heavier I don't isn't that weird I don't no my goal right now you need as much muscle as you can because winter is coming my goal is to actually get much stronger without getting bigger and and to keep my endurance going I like to do one long Rucker run per week at one shorter run uh one one Sprint type run I just figure like I'll be everyone what you just described for a typical person is doing a long piece a short piece and a high intensity piece that's red that is really that's the crack yeah that's right every week if I'm you know most weeks and then I'll lift you know legs one day you know torso everyone laughs torso what kind of thing is that you know torso including neck and abs that's next let's go flank too you want to get torso on flank really confused work my flank and uh and then I'll do the what could be called distal muscles I'll do an extra workout for for calvs biceps and triceps and forearms and grip strength on Saturday and and that combination of things right this isn't about my training to me meets the demands of life like I can Sprint for the airplane with my luggage and get there and not cough up both lungs I can go backpacking like if you say hey let's go backpacking or grand Canon tomorrow you're gonna carry 75b sack I'll be a little bit sore at night but it'll feel good I'll feel good sore right um we can um go to the gym together and I can put you know what feels to me like a respectable amount of weight on the hack squat we do some fullrange glute ham raises I can hang from a bar but I'm not trying to beat a pull-up record or run a try run a marathon I find that anytime I've gone to the extreme and any one kind of training I end up injured sick and I'm just not interested in that and I like to think I could be wrong I'm projecting here probably that I'm representative of what most people want I also want to be able to overeat a little bit every now and again like thanksgiving's coming a little bit I also want to be able to not have to eat all day and then eat a big dinner and not dissolve into a puddle of my own tears because I'm neurotically worried about something nutrition-based like I tend to I basically skip one meal a day just by virtue of my schedule right it's like non-intentional intermittent fasting and the people who are obsessive about protein will say well gosh that isn't as good but yeah okay so maybe I get a little bit less muscle I'm not doing I don't want to be so neurotic about my training that I'm not focusing on the bigger missions of my life and notice that what you said was I train so I can have fun and I just want to double click on we have sucked the joy and the play and exposure out of training and out of fitness and now it's I have to have this V2 Max so I'll live to 50 and I have to do right and you forgot that we this whole thing is so you can go spend some credits so I like to say the the gym and all that really focused training is spending time on credits but one of my coach friends Nicole Christenson says CrossFit uh roots she's like we don't nature for time stop naturing for time like this we're surfing so we can surf all day and we can surf more waves than the other kids cuz you're not fit enough right I want to go hike and then ride my bike and play and ski do all the things I want to do with my body and that may me I want to hold my kids or I want to do my job in this you know in this Warehouse we're start to train for life in a little bit more simple way and it doesn't feel like this crazy burden and it also happens to be the best tool to understand how you're moving because my expert coaches can watch you run and be like that's what we're working on and I'll go right to the thing right but for the rest of us we need to say wow my shoulder that bench that fly dumbbell bench was a little bit tricky I'm losing sh shoulder extension right or at least I'm touching these shapes and that ends up being a really interesting diagnostic tool where we can really take a shot at improving function and reducing muscular skeletal distress yeah and I and I think this is the this is the template for it yeah enjoying your training and including enjoying training hard is one of the the best things one can do years ago when I was skateboarding I mean I ruined skateboarding for myself because got picked up out of sympathy to be fair by a couple sponsors and then got obsessed with the fact that you know I wasn't progressing then broke my foot and you know pretty soon I didn't hate it I loved it and I loved the community but it turned into something else and had I just St taken a step back from it and said all right I'm decent at this I could get better and I'm just going to focus on doing it for pleasure and make a living some other way I'd probably be doing you know like you know front side inverts and pools now and then and unfortunately I'm not I'm I'm lucky if I get a nice little front side grind on coping but whereas with Fitness resistance training running I I love resistance training running the cup of coffee before my workout tastes 10 times big as I'm going to work out I I love to use it as an opportunity listen to music listen to podcasts there's so much that's in and around it that's still just pure pleasure even on the days when I'm like at 95% of output or 100% of output or 80% of output I'm like I just I'm having so much fun that's right and I can't wait to get back in there so when we're we are looking at Society Health right the first thing we argue instead of saying what's most important we say what is it you want to do and who are your friends are going to do it with and are you going to do it a lot let's start there then we can start to weasle in everything especially with social isolation with sort of lack of community I mean I feel like sport is the last place where people congregate right Sports Sidelines this is the sort of you know lingua franka of the whole you know world I've taught on every continent except Antarctica everyone knows what a push-up is everyone knows what a deadlift is it's not science sorry it's not math that's not the universal language it is bansch press everyone knows and everyone can tell you how much you bench in any language so there are some things there that are Universal and I think when we look at the human as a moving organism then we can really start to not feel crazy about how our world is changing but how do we fight back by setting up more opportunity to to move more and and for me the the whole lens ends up being like we basically we're trying to parse through complex problems so I have a world champion who's injured um two-time world champion isn't able to finish a tour you know the first question I ask them is tell me about your sleep I'm a rough sleeper oh tell me more about that right because I can't even tell your inputs and outputs unless we're getting into sleep then I say well tell me about your nutrition I eat clean great to find that for me I don't even know what that means clean turns out underc calori under nutrition doesn't get enough macros doesn't get enough micros I'm like oh we start to correct that we start to collect sleep when we really start to divide some of the behaviors into for me as a as a 51y old I'm obsessed with my tissues not failing like tearing Achilles is like every physical therapist worst nightmare and I jump rope every day and I have great range I do so many isometrics I'm just not going to tear my achilles now I'm going to tear my kill but I'm not going to tear my so tissue health is part of that so now I have to look at nutrition I I have to look at my blood work and I have to look at my sleep right so that I can really Define some of those things as that creates a Readiness tissue tolerance Health then I can be looking at the other things and that's really as we start to get again the framework of sport or framework of play creates this place where I can suddenly start to understand inputs and outputs and how to take care of this carcass so that I can do what I want with my body which is our new definition of Mobility can I do what I want with my body and can I be painfree am I correct in my very non-scientific assessment of Instagram accounts whereby when I see a 80 to 100 year old person moving well that person tends to be doing something sort of gymnastics related there's this incredible video of a guy Chinese guy very tall Chinese guy doing essentially skin the cat and then into a pull up skin the cat people can look it up um doesn't involve actual cats hopefully um it should uh 85-year-old uh woman sprinting so we're talking gymnastics type movement sprinting movement um rarely sometimes it'll be somebody in a gym lifting a heavy weight but more often than that it's gymnastic type movement pullup dip parallel bar balance beam sprinting is that what got them there or is that just the expression of what genetics do they feel safe show me nutrition show me their training age but what's noticeable there is that we have disciplines that require greater range of motion and skill of body control and high power output right huh so one of the things that we do in our programming for adults is I make you sprint once a week like Sprint because people have not sprinted and I don't mean you can go out and run I don't think you're capable of that but I'm going to put you on a bike I'm going to put you in control and I'm going to see what your Peak wattage is that sprinting so ideally I would love you to be able to do some heel Sprints and repeats but I don't think you have the tissue tolerance or the range of motion for that and I know what the the outcome is going to be but I can put you on a bike and say can we hit this peak wattage and what you just discovered there was hey I still need to maintain my ability to move quickly and have control through great ranges of motion that is a recipe for you know why if you did yoga and did some Sprints you're going to be pretty badass you know that's a pretty good way and why people who just do the elliptical and the little uh little small dumbbells are they're they're fooling themselves it's a lot of busy work there's a lot of busy work out there it makes people feel like they're involved in a program again the way we want to take our feelings out of it how do you progress those pink dumbbells th000 reps is 2,000 reps right show me progression suddenly I can't progress and regress those things the other thing I want to say is like is it making the thing better what are we training for and you know I I think it it feels decorative to have busy work and I do all this prehab corrective exercise I'm like hold up why don't we do the thing we're doing and regress and progress that and ask if you have native range of motion yes or no but you know if we look at the typical person especially someone listening to this podcast they don't have two hours in the gym so if your program is requiring two hours of me I'm out if it requires an hour of me I might be out you know I'm so busy that sometimes I lots of 30 and 40 minute pieces pepper throughout plus a lot of other play and that's good enough so we really do need to look at how people are finding themselves in their environments to ask is this appropriate for you and what's essential and it turns out a lot of this you know 20-some playing around videoing yourself in the gym is great when you have three or four hours in the gym yeah listening to an entire album or podcast or um book chapters in sequence I think is if I may far more valuable than um allowing oneself the opportunity to text and be on social media during a workout because it just becomes a very distracted thing I think that the workout of any kind is also an opportunity for building concentration and one can listen to podcasts or books Etc but or an album sequentially through but I find at least for myself if if I work out in a way that's interrupted by social media or texting or email because it's available there that it carries through into the rest of the day that I'm more distracted I believe you how about that I believe you and that's what's so great is you're like hey that doesn't work for me you know um I find that my best thinking is done under enormous aerobic load like I literally am like oh and I have an often will jump up and write something on the Whiteboard and then go back and do my thing because you know I'm just it creates Flow State and it's and if I'm distracted I can't really hear what's going on and that's there's a time when I want to distract myself you know and there's a time when I want to be amused that's fine you know I've got to two-hour ride getting ready for a 4-day Backcountry ski trip here in February but notice I've already been getting ready for it for in the beginning of November I am ready it's taking me going to ramp up and so much of my training now is is going towards can I successfully do these four hard days the way I want to so some things come down a little bit strength dials down I change my body composition I'd like to be a little bit lighter I'm playing but there's some times where I have to get two and three hours in of steady work done and I'm like headphones you know what I mean so it's okay to be amused you don't have to be a monk doing what you're doing but I really like what you said feels I feel distracted yeah let's use this is let's use it as a concentration time right let's use it as an interaction time I the gym shouldn't be the lonliest place in the world if you're not making eye contact and talking high-fiving get a different gym I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about fascia you and Jill Miller were some of the first people that I ever heard talk about fascia in a um in a in an elaborate way in a way that allowed me to finally understand what this incredible aspect of our physiology um the many things that it's doing I realize this is a vast discussion that we could take several more hours but I'm not a fascia researcher right and yet I think as I recall you're one of the first people to talk about you know that the relationship telling people what that there's fascia that we have this thing called fascia um clearly an important part of our our physiology our ability to move to what extent do you think that um tight fascia quote unquote I'm probably offending many people in this moment tight fascia restricts our movement and that working on fascial release if or or manu mobilization thank you um can allow us to move better maybe better posture maybe even feel better there are a lot of theories um some probably wrong some probably right about what fascia can and can't do for us but what are some things about fascia that you find particularly interesting that you'd like to pass along I think what we should do is if you pull fascia out of the human movement equation human doesn't fails to stop moving right so the recent like we've just discovered fasha like that's not really entirely true um there's an really like 20year old set of videos by a guy who's he describes himself as a Soma uh his name is Gil Headley and he did these live dissections on the YouTube I don't even know if it's still there but he basically did all of this gross anatomy for free on the internet and he describes one of the first people really describe fascia as this sort of incredible you know connective tissue Network that envelops wraps you know stores energy communicates is intentionality in full disclosure I went to school in Boulder and I may have dated a girl who went to raling school and was a roler and Ida Ral was one of the first people to really talk about how can we mobilize fascia with touch so I was introduced to fascia in the 90s when I had raling done on me so when I'm trying to help someone think about pain a restore position and this is overly gross but it'll it'll create a framework for people we ask is this an environmental problem are you poorly hydrated because your tissues need to be hydrated to slide are you inflamed like that's why we talk about nutrition and we talk about sleep okay so we have this environmental piece then I I often will say hey do we have just a movement problem do you just have crappy technique like let's fix the technique first let's get you moving to the highest expression of the movement first hey turn your foot straighter let's let's let recate that joint can we can we have a better organization then we start to say because sometimes it's just a movement problem just you needed some queuing we say is this a joint capsule problem because capsule stiffness The Joint capsule is a bag of connect tissue that surrounds all your joints and it can account for huge chunks of your range of motion limitation so a lot of we do is we after we try to mobilize a joint tissue and again that's my own bias the way I was trained as an Australian trained manual therapist this mland school then we say well is this just a good oldfashioned muscle restriction and we call it muscle Dynamics cuz that includes High tone stress fear but trigar points are well documented phenomenon muscles get stiff they become fibrotic right you could have high tone trying to protect you all those reasons but that still could limit your range of motion and lastly we say sliding surfaces so instead of kind of talking about all the different layers of dermis and skin and fascia we say do the things that slide should are they sliding so if you grab your skin on your forehead it should slide in all the directions notice the skin should slide all the directions over your tendons right if I grab your typical person's Achilles and grab the skin over the Achilles it doesn't budge it's like they have an exoskeleton that's that fascial kind of compartment and it's seized it's adhered it's bound to the underlying surfaces which creates tissue restriction and higher tension so when we're mobilizing these tissues we're trying to keep tissues sliding and gliding that's an easy way of think about it nerves have to run through nerve tunnels taking huge breaths keeps all of those you know aspects of your trunk moving and we just need to be thinking in like a systems approach so sometimes if you went and saw an art practitioner and it didn't solve your problem is this Active Release therapy yeah okay it may not have been a fasal problem right if you went and saw someone who only worked on the muscles it may not have been a muscle problem if you went saw a chiropractor and they worked on your on your joint joint structures right or a good physio it may not be a joint restriction problem if you saw a coach and they couldn't queue you out of it it may not have been a so what we need to do is we recognize that if more squats just solved all the problems wouldn't we have solved all the problems if rolling on a roller had solved all the problems seems like we would have solved all the problems so I think what ends up happening is we want to put fascia equally as an important part of the system and one of the ways that we can directly impact that in a free way at home is to begin a conversation of just some simple myofascial mobilization in fact myofascial means muscle fascial but there are osteop fascial connections does the fascia you Glide over the bone there right we can look at the the the tendonous fascial connections and again do these tissues slide and glide the way they're supposed to slide and glide and that's a much easier way to look at it and I'm going to test and retest not with subjective pain but how is your range of motion and access to your range of motion thank you for that I've um Wanted to try roling for a long time and then a friend of mine who's a former Seal Team operator told me that at some point during the roll thing that he received that they put a glove on and went up his nostril and did some fascial relief on the release excuse me on the inside of his nose and it quote it was the most painful experience he ever had and I was like all right well I don't know if you know anyone in Naval special Warfare but they are they are so soft right I didn't say that Kelly said that um you know who you are my friends but I you know that I I confess um you know it's not like I avoid pain at all costs but that that made me think that um I might not want to do roling I also don't want someone putting their finger up my nose so I'm assuming that I could say hey I want I want try roll thing and I don't need to get because you hear this stuff like oh you know there's all this emotional release which you know there are other ways to get that the um I guess is it always painful is the question does it need to be painful his statement is pretty pretty M so pull let's pull ring out the side because I'm not a raler but let's just say that mobilizing your tissues doesn't have to be painful in fact it's likely that you'll experience some discomfort but let's talk about a couple guideposts for you number one you always have to be able to take a full breath right so if I'm mobilizing you or you're mobilizing yourself and you suddenly stop breathing you're going too deep so an easy way for you is to say hey do I have can I Breathe Here number two I like to have volutional contraction so if I'm mobilizing someone or someone's doing something I should be able to flex them out I should have control over that if the pain or depth or pressure is putting too much load on the system where I literally lose normal muscular control what am I doing right and then you know those two pieces can I take a breath here do I have control here those go a long way to keeping me in the bounds and then we tend to not work on a tissue longer than 5 minutes just because I want to get the rest of it tomorrow and if you give me 10 minutes to work that's incredible we like to put the soft tissue work before we go to bed and what we found was that we had better adherence no one's doing anything productive in then 10 minutes before they go to the bedroom number two like a child when you put a child to bed you're like first do we take a bath and we read the book then we go to bed right your brain is like I know what comes next so if you do this rolling or on your some soft tissue work self massage you are training your brain to know what comes next we find that when people have engaged in massage or self- massage they don't stand up and want to fight anyone they're very relaxed if you've ever gone to a spa and had a massage you don't go out and snatch or get into a fight afterwards you're so chill bro so we found it as a great way to as Jill Miller says switch on the off switch that's a beautiful way of talking about that how do I tell myself to shift out of this you know fight or flight into coming down 5 minutes per body part start anywhere on the leg start any what's stiff what's asking can I breathe can I contract you're going to see that that's a really simple way to start getting same input and not all your tissues are the same if you come to me with knee pain I'm going to want to be able to look at your R your positions but I'm also going to want to be able to stay on your quads I mean my full body weight and if you can't take that I'm calling that incomplete and those people out there who are going to be like whoa that's heavy duty you have not worked with my population who have monster thighs on are thick and fibrotic and it takes real weight so we all have different sensitivities but if I respect your ability to take a breath and contract then all of a sudden we're we're we're upregulating what I recommend is you go to Thailand you get a thae massage from a 65-year-old master woman who is weighs 109 pounds and when she is working on your quads and you tap out she's like no I'm not done here if you felt your quads you're going to realize how low the bar is all right um heat and cold you were one of the first people that told me Hey listen Cold's great cold plunges cold showers are great for shifting your State uh for resilience training um fun it's fun um I swam with L's pool this morning did the breath hold cold lapse it's fun I'm going to put in quotation marks yeah sometimes it's type too fun um it definitely will shift one's state for many hours afterwards for reasons we Now understand but you were one of the first people to point out to me that for injuries often times it's better to profuse the tissue and that heat sometimes perhaps is the more favorable tool if you had to pick one that's right so what you I think even talked about that there is research to show that cold water immersion can attenuate training effects if done in the six to8 hours after hypertrophy and strength training because of its potent anti-inflammatory properties prevents some of the inflammation that would prompt the adaptation response and put simply if your goal is bigger muscles and getting stronger don't do immersion based deliberate cold exposure in the six to eight hours after your training fine to do it on other days fine to do it beforehand in fact athletes at Stanford do that on the basis of a lot of work from Craig heler and others F to not do it at all if you don't want to do it again I'm not a I'm not a um uh I'm not going to die on The Sword of of cold plunging um but it can attenuate or even prevent those adaptations but at other times it's a great tool for reducing inflammation shifting one's mental and physical state in the great Direction look it always sucks to get in the thing the whole point is you feel much better when you get out than you did before you ever got in that's the simplest way to put it I a middle-aged guy who wants to be the best middle-aged mountain biker in my neighborhood is my timing of my plunge going to affect my ability to be that mediocre athlete no so stop people are like when's the optimal time I'm like when's it work for you does is that first thing in the morning Juliet found that if she got hot and plunged in the night she was like woken up and fired up and red she like I'm not going to sleep now and I get hot and cold hot and cold it's like someone hits emergency break right so first of all when does it work for you right second of all if there is a performance concern we try to put it as far away from training as we can that's what we say training in the evening plunge before if you like you train the the morning morning Plunge in the evening like get cold that's cool but what you hinted at is the same reasons why we don't ice injuries because it limits our body's ability to to heal so it rate limits and it might do it by phasal constriction your body eventually your body is going to warm up anyway so one of the things we like to say is your body either heals at the rate of a human being or it heals slower so there's no such thing as a fast healer you're just oh you're really good at healing at the rate of human physiology and the rest of us are doing dumb things that are Li rate limiting our healing nutrition sleep right when we are talking about anyone after surgery or injury our Benchmark in the Line in the Sand is8 hours of laying in bed without looking at your phone that's minimum and I don't care if you're sleeping because resting is the next best thing but I can't actually understand inputs and outputs and let me be super clear if you're trying to grow a body learn a skill change your body composition get stronger heal that all rhymes with eight hours we look seven as our minimum and of course you're human being you're going to get by I was stressed out last night wanted to come on this show with my friend Andrew and do a good job like I didn't get great sleep but I'm a human being I'm still going to show up so what's nice then is we can start to say okay what can we control in terms of managing and upregulating boosting maximal healing rate for humans and it turns out cold water may not be the best icing something might suppress prostag gland in release right which means that you can think of it as you have these circulating stem cells and again sorry everyone get this just very cursory and we need the chemical signalers from the injured damaged tissue to call those things to be but if I ice that and suppress that those some of those cells can go swinging on past there was a great study I saw a million years ago and it looked at ibuprofin usage in Australian military tactical athletes who had bad ankle sprains and those athletes who are given ibuprofen which does the same thing as ice suppresses prostag gland release right cuts off some of those chemal signals were back faster than their counterparts who did not have the ibuprofen but they had chronic ankle instability because they did not have a sufficient healing response because they had shut that healing response down so what we find is look your body will wait until you it warms back up but if you think you're going to do angine neogenesis and make new capillaries and modulate all these things by slapping a non-specific ice pad for a non-specific amount of time over a non-specific tissue you got to be kidding me and so it's really Mickey Mouse does ice help for margaritas that are warm yes open heart surgery yes right waking you up in the morning waking you up in the morning hey I have a kid who needs a placebo I can numb that thing and give my kid some Placebo ice that's great definitely can work for pain control because as soon as you're numb you can't feel anything but what's going to happen when you pull that thing off we're going to come back so we've found that we have much better and again instead of saying that's bad we're turning out and saying we have so many better tools now to manage congestion because that's really what we're trying to do with ice and healing is we're trying to stop swelling right but is swelling a mistake by the body and chances are it's not really a mistake again two and a half million years of evolution this stuff's pretty awesome but what we know is failure to move and evacuate that swelling is a problem so when we get people on non- fatiguing muscle contraction nmes devices like the h-wave or something like that we find that we can actually decongest and keep moving in controlled ways M and we have much better clinical outcomes than we do with we ice what about heating pads hot water bottles sauna do you sit in the sauna yes I do I love the sauna how often are you in the sauna whenever I can you know and sometimes it's short sessions and sometimes it's super hot sessions and sometimes I just get hot and cold a couple times and I try like you said earlier I'm not after some specific adaptation response the Saun is a great way for us to chill out and hang out and sometimes we're bored and we got to make dinner or move on so I you know I try to sauna if there's anything I do I sauna a lot bigger the engine the bigger the braks then it's for me it's such a big break you mentioned leair I've I've seen L Drag The Assault bike into the sauna something most people probably shouldn't do cuz they would die of a hypothermia but we call that Restrepo it's the worst place on Earth it's a it's an interesting tool though the the heat I find that if I get the sauna uncomfortably hot and then force myself to breathe super slowly only through my nose so that I don't actually feel like a burning sensation on the inside of my nostrils and I just do that for um you know 10 15 minutes that it's wonderful stress resilience training how great is that but very different than the cold plunge where you can either muscle through it or distract yourself or whatever in the heat you know your heart rate's going up and there's this temptation to I'm like um to follow that heart rate toward a a more elevated stress State and so I find that you can get very very hot obviously be be safe about this folks um but still maintain a lot of calm and I think it's a wonderful tool but you have to kind of work at it and I enjoy this by the way so people are probably think here you go again like why not just enjoy the sauna um but I like to listen to Gregorian chants or something in there and do this like very like how even and calm can I stay I love at 215 or or 220 um and I wear I wear the cap so those higher Heats don't don't register to the brain you you will drive yourself out eventually your brain is going to just I what's driv drives me out the sa now is I wret I actually like feel like I'm going to vomit because I've gotten so hot my brain stem is like bro you can just override so I'm like got to get it and I get out of the sauna and then you what one of the reasons I love the cold so much we're jump in our C our pool or cold plunges I can get back in the son right right it's the contrast of I try to do it once a week Sonic cold Sonic cold Sonic once a week you know again not training for any specific thing except to be able to go back to joo's house CU I did sauna at joo's house with some family members of HS and friends and I think they wanted to see when I would they want to crush you so they went I think they cranked that thing to like 22230 and they call he got me on this there I ended up down on the floor you know and they were they were teasing me because it's obviously cooler down on the floor than it is up top and so they call that the huberman spot the Wimpy spot but um yeah he's a beast with the song everyone it's not a contest and one it is it it is in the willink household I'll tell you it absolutely one of the things I like about the Heat and the cold is that it it informs me about my Readiness State because just like my CO2 tolerance my breath holds are very short when I'm stressed and under recovered my heat tolerance drops dramatically and so does my cold tolerance it's easier to pick up really fast I start shivering right away I'm like whoa I've been in here for 30 seconds I'm already shivering I'm like huh another piece of day that says maybe I need to make it a 70% day in the gym and move I don't have to take a day off we believe julette and I believe in this thing called desire to train we wake up every day like you probably self-medicated with some exercise as kids right and we we start thinking about what we're going to exercise what are we going to do we're going to run bikes what we do what we lift like wait when we wake up we start thinking about when are we going to do it and we wake up on some days and it's not there and what we ask ourselves is it not there why is it not there is it me I should be there we should go train anyway but we really try to listen to that voice and when there's no desire to train it's really strange how it correlates with crap heat tolerance crap CO2 tolerance crap cold tolerance and I think it's a nice way of understanding yourself from sort of a third- party objective measure especially as you get good at this you're like wow that really sucked today yeah I love that I think um assessing one's degree of kind of forward Center of mass for for effort is is great um I'm borrowing this analogy from somebody else I didn't come up with this um he said you're with all things you're either you know back on your heels flat footed or um forward Center of mass and I think we've heard a lot about you know trying to encourage ourselves to always be forward Center of mass what I'm hearing today is that great to do that sometimes great sometimes to back off but to just explore the full range of um for lack of a better way to put it sort of um emotional range of motion you know yeah and remember ultimately all this is supposed to be additive right and it's supposed to inoculate Me by creating a framework that makes more durable my body in my my my relationships I mean we we didn't even talk about the fact that the sauna is like it's just glue for people it allows people to come together I think one of the things I've noticed with my male friends is that it gives us a place like once a week where we get together because it's so hot we Al we're all super vulnerable and we talk the truth barel we talk with our friends and we kind of share stories and can be talk about our lives and so it creates a framework for that and if that was the benefit of the sauna I'm in just that alone right that my wife and I feel more connected after taking a on together I'm like well who cares about the heat shock proteins and Alzheimer's that's probably important too but I like having a lot of bottom things and I think we it's easy for us to sort of so hyper science and Hyper tactic things that we forget the whole point of the brain is to be around other brains that's it that's why the brain exists and then those brains go do rad in the world together and uh sometimes it's that simple and when we start throwing that filter on it becomes a lot more sustainable I'm not interested in being 110 I'm interested in being durable enough to take the hits on my way to 110 I love that um some of my best friendships have been forged in the SAA and not by pushing ourselves necessarily just come the thing you know it's so cool um I know that some of my uh New Zealand teams have a Cava um they call it recovery and sometimes they'll share have a Cava ceremony and drink a little Cava and then jump in the sauna and boy really binds the boys you know that really creates a down regulation a fact I mean it's so you know I I think again my own bias because I love this stuff is that I think all of it is about physical input so if we took a sort of macro step back what we say is what does your physical practice look like tell me about your physical practice well I get move my body and I try to eat a fruit and some protein before I get out the door and I walk all day long and I try not to sit in one period of place for all long period of time and then I get home and if I'm lucky enough to exercise I do and then I sat on the floor and I roll a little bit but that's a full practice you walked you got sunlight you you know what I mean and that I think is a much better way of thinking about this versus sort of let me add another line of code to your programming where now you're doing three sets of 10 in this thing what are your thoughts on nutrition you seem to be pretty uh balanced about this um before we started recording you were talking about some meatloaf recipes that sound pretty amazing clearly you love food I'm not going to say I'm the best at meatloaf but I maybe seven out of 11 times Bamboo Terrace bench Champion I'm going to get a tattoo but it's fine what uh you enjoy food love food um so you're not you like to eat and um you cook a bit as well um most people feel I think kind of overwhelmed oh yeah at the discussions about nutrition now we're trying to get a gram of protein per pound of body weight which I subscribe to but if I'm supposed to spread that out across the day sometimes I'm doing that sometimes I'm not I like fruits and vegetables did you feel like a failure because you didn't have ground I mean honestly if it can feel for people like oh I didn't do it no I think if people make getting high quality high protein to calorie ratio Foods as the foundation of their diet and then eating some vegetables and eating some fruit whoa bro what about the peels you're going to kill people that I love that Ban's dangerous I'll eat the I'll eat the orange peel if it's a really good orange I will people who know me I'm I've gotten some wide eyes at meals where I'll take the lemons out of my drink I'll just eat the whole thing down I don't care someone will tell me why it's going to kill me but I don't eat the seeds while I eat the peel too um so some vegetables fruit and then some starches you know per energetic requirements Andor real life like I'm not going to stay away from the sourdough bread because I don't need a starch that I have a little bit of it like you know I feel like we've lost our rational approach to eating um because people feel these you know these quantifiable metrics of you know calories and protein they're important clearly but I've always known you to be somebody who's very balanced about the occasional ice cream yes steak but also vegetables I mean a why do you think that theut nurition conversation has gotten so distracted even contentious and B what do you do and you know if you were going to raise a kid you've raised kids if you're going to raise a kid and and say Here's what like balanced nutrition looks like to you okay I'm not calling you nutrition to you how do you see this picture but what I I want to point out is that if we're going to have a conversation remember my my real job day job is high performance I'm going to have to talk about body composition and I'm going to have to talk about fueling do you have enough carbs on board to do what we're going to do are you eating to recover to reduce the session cost right how do we minimize the sort of the physiologic cost of this training this competition and that's all wrapped around nutrition nutrition I already hinted at I'm going to have to talk and ultimately ask you get a blood panel and look at make sure that you have everything on board so that your tissues are tissues and can handle the loading we're prescribing them so I didn't want to get into nutrition at all because it's always about body composition for me and I'm like that's the most boring reason why we uh Sean Stevenson uh wrote a beautiful book about creating a table culture and a culture on eating for your family so for me the functional unit of change is the household that's the place where I want to make and put all my energy and time that's how we'll transform Society one household at a time but sitting down with your kids the research around that eating with your kids like twice or three times a week is phenomenal right like cooking is is beautiful I have to become more nuan because if I have a team I'm working with like uh we had a tournament two weeks ago at Stanford we played four games and the that's four Collegiate nationally ranked teams that were playing like badasses how do I fuel those women how do I get them what do they want to eat what makes them feel good what makes them feel bad how do we balance all of that like I found out that putting food on a table with a tablecloth increased calories again as a high performance for me I'm like how are the ways that I can be thinking about this from a practical standpoint my personal thing is that we focus on trying to create this has been really useful for Julia and I an objective measure 08 to1 grams of protein which means I don't measure anymore I'm per pound of body weight I'm 51 years old per pound of body weight so what does that mean means that I really try to prioritize protein every meal super simple and I try not to eat one protein I try to eat all the proteins right that's probably better I try not to choose personally very fatty proteins because my genetics don't really support it if I want to see triglycerides and and things go through the roof then I'll you know watch me eat eggs and butter and steak like keto gives me diarrhea so what I'll say is I try to go for leaner proteins there and then on the fruits and vegetables because I think we have a real problem with not enough micronutrients again talking about tissue health and definitely not enough fiber those are huge problems and if I get 800 gram of fruits and vegetables this is a a nutrition strategy promoted by our friend e sinowski of at optimiz me nutrition she put this 800 gram challenge based on some research and it changed everything because suddenly I was I was like oh my God I got to eat more food I have to eat more fruits and vegetables and I was stuffing myself with fruits and vegetables getting enough protein that I was like uh I guess there's no room for a cookie you know and what I really liked about that it was agnostic about your cultural preferences it didn't matter if you're a vegan didn't matter if you're vegetarian didn't matter if you were carnivore you want to do carnivore plus berries knock yourself right out it gave people permission to have their food identities but it also the met the minimums and then we can dose up and dose Down based on what your performance needs are and this is 800 gram not of carbohydrate this iseg 800 gram of like four Big Apples gotcha a banana is like 80 to 100 gram okay yeah if you want to be real dangerous you ate eight eight bananas today you could die I mean you could die and um a big salad with you know Les cucumber tomato and probably probably 2 to 300 gram okay so then you you'd also want to get some fruit maybe another maybe some um cruciferous vegetables Etc check this out again I'm just going to do some boy math here Starbucks cookie delicious really 300 c 300 calories I'm going call it delicious right a pound of cherries is 230 calories so eat a pound of cherries and tell me you're like ah I still want something sweet a pound of melon was it like 220 calories a pound of melon so calorically not very dense right but nutritionally super dense so we're end up loading a ton of more food on and it really does prioritize those things and from a performance standpoint one of our friends is this incredible nutritionist at at Michigan football Abigail is amazing there and she will tell me about how she's using nutrition as intervention for sports performance and she'll have men come up to her and say Abigail I pooped today and they're she's like yeah that's great you know you should poop every day and they're like no no you understand I I pooped yesterday too and it's the first time these kids have pooped consecutively they don't poop regularly and I think again if I'm just trying to get out in the weeds and talk about what's normal and not normal we should talk about you didn't eat fiber and she's like wait until you poop twice in one day and they were like that's crazy never in my whole life what was the difference is they started eating fruits and vegetables and fiber and when we start to create those benchmarks it's a lot easier for me to see inputs and outputs and then we can argue about can you choke down 100 grams of carbs an hour because you're my Elite cyclist you know I think you'd be shocked at how my a lot of my athletes have changed their relationship around food because it serves their needs it's not their identity around control and it's something that Julie and I have been very cautious of is if you have two daughters just speaking we're really concerned about creating dysfunctional patterns or relationships to food because in this Fitness space it can be real gnarly yeah I see the progression from you know sitcoms of the type that we grew up on to reality TV shows to social media where social media can do so much good um educationwise Etc connection but it's basically a a reality TV show that everyone's been able to cast themselves in if they want and certain characters are casting their you know physique certain fers are casting their outrageous behavior and you know we's all in this reality TV show called social media I I think that's really the the best way to describe it you know when people start to feel like oh wow the these people are getting attention for this reason or that reason it it um creates a gravitational pull toward people behaving a certain way and then obviously um some of that can be really self-destructive um do you win health I mean this is a great question I ask people so like you shredded Down super dysfunctional eating you can't go out and eat with friends you don't drink anything with calories like it's really gnarly to be hyper lean and then what I'll say is when you took your shirt off did you win Instagram did you win because you got another 6070 years on this planet how does that work we don't really dieet we'll manipulate macros to take weight on put weight off players in season out of season you we'll have we'll have really good athletes say I think I should lose four pounds the next two weeks for this thing and I'm like hold up I'm not going to put you in another stressor when our we're trying to like let's go ahead and talk about body composition after the season but ultimately when we really get people on board with how food has the potential to enrich their relationships how fun it is to cook how fun it is to prep how fun it is to serve other people then we have this really different relationship with fueling and that's that's really remarkable but it is really easy to say I won and I'm like okay so this 90-day fast there are so many Fitness things out there where they start with a fast or brutal calorie restriction and I'm like that's your jam to get people lean fast is just to slam off the calories like we know what's going to happen how many people have done some kind of 30-day 90-day thing and the next day it's like they're off the rails so if you're doing some body recomp and then you're off the rails for me I'm like I don't think that was very good because I got a this is a long season we're playing I think it's I have to be careful here because I realize this gets into some issues when I did an episode about uh anorexia I learned that first of all anorexia has existed for centuries um this idea that it's more prominent now with social media actually the numbers don't bear out um what does bear out is that it is the most deadly the most deadly by far of all the psychiatric illnesses Oh see it leads to death in in in a far greater uh percentage of cases than any other psychiatric illness including bipolar where people often commit suicide a great great much higher percentage of people commit suicide who are bi bipolar Etc so it's it's a really serious thing and yeah we assume that social media has made that worse but there's this now cluster of all these different eating disorders that don't qualify as full-blown anorexia neosa sort of like ADHD now we understand people are having attention deficit issues that might not be clinical ADHD but that cluster around it in like people's adults and children's inability to hold their attention on an idea or topic for any appreciable amount of time so it's a very serious thing I love that today you've talked about enjoying your training like really enjoying your training all aspects the resistance part the cardiovascular part the mobility part you know the in the evening getting down on the floor also enjoying eating with people enjoying the sauna I mean I think you know people see the big guy that you are the the amazing track record you have of working with all these incredible athletes and you're you're quite accomplished athlete yourself and I think this is the first time for me anyway that I realize like you you are thinking about how to make this whole thing pleasurable and mesh it with real life which I'm realizing now shouldn't come as a surprise because you have a family a flourishing family in addition to a flourishing business with the ready State and and so forth I think if there's one message that really comes through over and over again today it's like how can you make Fitness and Nutrition and health part of your life but not let it take over your life or your mind in a way that isn't healthy yeah um thank you for that and if that's coming across at all I think we're we're doing a better job and I would say certainly tempered as I've gotten more reasonable you know I think we get older and you can see a little bit more of the Horizon and you you know you start to wrap your hands around how are we going to solve these problems in these different places and what is sustainable you know I really think that that's you know we see quick inputs and outputs that are high levels of sports performance and simultaneously again I I want to take those lessons and transmute them to my own household in a really sustainable fun way the nutrition piece is such a a dangerous one and young right now jul and I are very obsessed with youth sports and spending time with seeing if we can improve that experience for families so they come out unharmed and you know Red's relative energy deficiency and Sport you know is where we start to see that kids are not eating enough to fuel activity and their growing bod simultaneously and it's really hard on their physiologies and we it starts to show up with loss periods it starts to show up with stress fractures right and we start to see sort of this some de degradation in sort of the the body's tissues but can really crash a lot of problems and you know Stacy Sims is probably the first person to really put it on my radar of hey you're a physio coach I need you to become an expert with the people that you're working with you know are you eating enough support and and I see the some of the elite women I work with Elite women really battle this is what the body I need to get paid and to win World Championships and that's not the body that people want on the Instagram and you know you know should I have a salad after this training I'm like we just played for 3 hours no you're not going to eat a salad like go get this big ass burrito and then we'll talk about your salad next you know so it sounds like the athletes are undereating and my understanding anyway the statistics which I know is confusing but you know potentially not thinking about food at the right times and within the general population of non-athletes especially youth however it seems that people are overc consuming calories so there seems to be two two populations clustering out here we have a this reminds me we have a rule at our our house for dinner we have a three vegetable rule uh this is from a woman we work with Margaret Garvy who cooks a protein whatever that is and has also three vegetables and that's where she starts and we have I had one daughter who is like Gourmet Chef Georgia is just a total badass you know G and then I have Caroline who is the pickiest human being on the like is brown I'm not e you know and and she's getting better but when we had three vegetables suddenly what we saw was that she might eat one right and we could start to have exposure but I think if we crowd out some of the because I we don't want to have a restrictive house right but you know if we crowd out some of the other Foods um we found it was a lot easier for us to say this is what we're eating and we eat this together as a family and then if those other Foods I mean your teenagers are going to leave the house and eat whatever they want just just be clear everybody so you might as well stuff them with the good stuff at home I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about supplements um these days we hear a lot about creatine creatine creatine creatine I I like creatine been taking it for years um we'll occasionally do a wash out where I just kind of let let a bunch of water out of my body why not and then get back to it I I won do it for any specific reason I just do it I travel and forget to bring creatines I'm okay yeah but most of the time I'm taking 5 to 10 grams a day okay um we've heard about the Body Benefits the brain benefits um for athletes and just quote unquote exercisers the typical person listening to this podcast um do you recommend creatine what are what are some of the things that in your household I'm I'm getting this picture and I've been in your home and I I will say that the spirit in your home is a wonderful one um Brian Mackenzie and I showed up more or less unannounced at one point and like the there's it's a it's a delightful thing like people's Spirits are it's a space station it's a it's a space station of stoke and like you want to be part of it you can come in thank you it's a it's a great environment and um it was very warming to see that and and the way that you embrace all these different aspects of life and you're it's busy and it's hectic and it's fun and people care for one another and they're direct with one another but in a way that's really supportive it's really a in my mind a great model for for a home and and it's really uh it stayed with me and it's really a pleasure to reflect on yeah it's a team effort in there for sure so um I'll just ask this what supplements do you think are um if not necessary then highly desirable for most people and then for athletes and maybe because we get this question a lot now especially after Stacy came on the podcast for your the female athletes you work with um in particular are there supplements that um add on to that that initial batch so I think we we can divide these things of like in to food like things right and then sort of performance yeah like whey protein it's just a protein replacement high high quality high protein to calorie ratio that's right and if you don't handle wayy like my athletes I'm like let me introduce you these vegetarian proteins and that's because you're having a hard time timing your meals or just getting enough protein because you sometimes you just don't feel like it so great great utilization there um for Caroline she gets omegas at night cuz she doesn't want to have any accidental fish burp at school she's a teenager so she takes them before she goes to bed and we're really interested in brain health and there's some early research and again not my expertise that I've heard of read about talked to people about that vitamin D creatine and omegas might help attenuate symptoms of concussion if they they get hit right so post pre so those things are on Caroline she gets creatine every day she gets an Omega every day and she gets vitamin D and some of that is probably get S vitamin D during the summer because we I could pull it out but we live in northern climbs and they're indoors and there's good research supplement I think Dan Garner had a great piece just talking about vitamin D supplementation in the military and the decrease of like risk of of of fractures in the foot just with vitamin D so that's the start for me I take a good multi because I'm like I'm just going to cover the basis you know and um then you can look I think the next sort of veillance of interest is have you had a blood panel how are your vitamin B levels is there anything we need to do based on your environment or your genetics and then I think it gets real in the weeds past that and again play around with that uh one of my super smart friends was like I think you should take a Statin a small dose Statin once a week and I was like all right so I was like better take some Cokey 10 with that it's an experiment I'm running right downsides are low I'm getting my blood panels talk to my physician but so CoQ10 is on the menu for me just to make sure I don't have anything and so I think suddenly what we should be looking at is how do I round out my family doesn't eat fish so we're not getting enough s of Megos from those sources and no one will eat Walnuts but I'm the only one to eat Walnuts so you know how do I round out my nutrition with some supplementation and is there a benefit for some other things that with my genetics or with what's going on like J has a mutated mtfhr Gene right and so we are always watching B vitamins for her right so because poor meth right poor methat exactly right J star is his wife that's right sorry jay stizzle CEO you guys have such an awesome relationship you guys have Pok fun in one another you're clearly awesome companions to one another and you do great great work together I am uh the broken anchor of the relationship I like so she is uh you know what's really interesting is I have I'm a little bit like you I think I'm excitable I get obsessed with things it's super fun go down rabbit holes I like to experiment and jar is like the true north like no that sounds fishy we're not doing that you know like I came home one time and I was like you know what this cow's milk is out of here our family is only drinking goat milk I only had the best goat milk I just had the best goat milk and Julet was like sure that's going to and I gave some goat milk to Georgia and she's like hucked it across the room she's a baby and then I the goat milk and like vomited into the sink and I had goat milk on my lip and I and Juliet just is so patient by saying huh I wonder if that's a good idea I wonder if you will will stick around so so she's the rudder she is 100% the rudder she is a three-time world champion everyone she's mut she's a rower at Cal and she is my training partner she's the greatest training partner ever had we use training as another way of spending time together love it thanks for sharing a little bit of the picture of your home it matches exactly my experience um and uh chaos a little bit of chaos and a ton of love and um I've been quoting him a lot lately uh I cannot take any credit for this but Naval who is you know famous on uh various podcasts he says um you know what what are we really shooting for in life it's um a fit energetic body this is nval not me by the way he said fit energetic body a calm mind and resources we got to have resources and a home full love so I don't know from yeah I think that's the list spend the rest of your life working on those and you're going to have a really it's going to be really fun and I I just want to remind people you hear me say it again that they should all be enjoyable and it is fun to track it's also you know which which devices am I wearing right now I'm not wearing a single device you know because I want to feel and sometimes I track and sometimes I don't track and how am I feeling and ultimately everything is really coming down to how do I come to understand my own process and my interaction with the world process I think I'm getting better at 5 wanted of knowing I don't need six cookies and I really need to get more fruits and vegetables and sleep and I don't need a device to tell me that love it well Kelly do starett thank you so much for coming on here today and sharing with us so much wisdom we covered so much you covered so much I mean pelvic floor fascia cold heat movement patterns you give us a ton of practical tools getting down on the floor sit stand and on and on um but a small portal into the vast amount of knowledge you have in that head of yours and I just have to say that you know it's been a delight today because these little bits have come through about who I know you to be in the in the rest of the world this is the real world we just happen to have microphones in front of us the rest of the world and you've been at this a while this business of trying to help people figure out best ways to move how to be a better athlete how to you know improve one's Fitness how to take a rational fun hardworking Approach at times but also fun playful recreational approach to this really key aspect of our health and many key aspects of our health so I just want to thank you for coming here today for doing the work that you do and um you know you are one of the real ones as they say oh my brother thank you so much and and you and you walk the walk you're strong you can go far you have fun doing it you're a great husband and Dad and uh you've been a great friend to me so thanks for coming on here let's get you back again and um just thanks for being you my pleasure anytime and thanks all the uh great huberman uh people that make this thing possible it's it's really a thing thanks my brother thank you thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Kelly starett to learn more about Kelly starett and the work that he does with his wife Juliet starett at the ready State as well as to find links to Dr starett's excellent books please see the show note captions if you enjoyed today's episode with Dr Kelly starett and you'd like to learn more about the science of exercise physiology and the protocols that can best serve you in your Fitness athletic and other goals you can go to hubman lab.com enter the word Fitness and Galpin g p i n into the search function and from there you will find links in all formats YouTube Apple Spotify to the series that we did on exercise with Dr Andy Galpin who is a true World expert in this topic and it covers all the things you could possibly imagine related relateded to fitness and exercise to meet your fitness and exercise goals if you're learning from Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please follow the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Hu Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments for those of you that haven't heard I have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled protocols an operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than 5 years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to Stress Control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substanti for the protocols that are included the book is now available by pre-sale at protocols book.com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body if you're not already following me on social media I am hubman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X formerly known as Twitter threads Facebook and Linkedin and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the 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