00:00:00.120 — 00:00:11.840 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Kelly and Juliet, the star. I would say that you don’t need an introduction, but I’m going to give you one. I have been listening to both of you for years.

00:00:11.880 — 00:00:13.640 · Kelly Starrett

You don’t get that time back. I’m so sorry.

00:00:13.680 — 00:00:42.000 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Uh, well, I consider it an investment. And an investment. You are both incredibly humble. But when I think about the concept of movement as medicine, I don’t want to put any pressure here. But you both were visionaries. And I say you both because your, uh, your a physical therapist or extraordinary wife, CEO and lawyer.

Just. And also both so athletic and parents tremendous amount of respect because it’s not easy.

00:00:42.120 — 00:00:58.680 · Juliet Starrett

Well thank you so much for having us. And it’s long overdue. And we’re just so delighted to be here. And we feel the same about you. I mean, we love that we’ve been sort of following each other in the background. Um, and, you know, it took us a bit too long to get together, but we’re so happy to be here.

00:00:58.680 — 00:01:04.470 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Never again. Because we’re about to shorten that. Holy moly. Uh, we’re we’re gonna listen.

00:01:04.589 — 00:01:36.390 · Kelly Starrett

Let me just say, uh. Of course we are. So. It’s so fun to do what we do. We love it. And we’re standing on the shoulders of giants. All of us, of course. But one of the things I respect about you so much in this community and the place you work, is that you show your work. You have this this track record of clear. You’re not just a video yourself deadlifting in a commercial gym.

So I just want to say that it’s time for everyone know if you’re following, listen to someone know what their bona fides are. Let’s let’s talk about the resumes. Let me see your inputs and outputs. And you’ve been doing that really well.

00:01:36.430 — 00:02:33.340 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Why thank you. Um, you don’t know this about me yet, but I will take compliments and gifts. So, uh, notice that I spent a lot of time really thinking about this episode because throughout your career, and I would say throughout all of our lives, there’s this idea of performance in the beginning, and we think about, um, you know, how do we build stronger glutes so that we can run faster or jump higher, or we we just evolve as we also get older.

And selfishly, as I look back and I think about all my injuries, I think, what is the landscape showing us now? And you wrote, you know, the first book is Supple Leopard, which, by the way, I’m sure people are still reading it there. And as I think about as we age, how has your thoughts transformed? I guess is the best way to say it.

As you’ve gotten older and you guys have worked with so many elite people and yet we’re all aging.

00:02:33.460 — 00:03:31.180 · Juliet Starrett

Yeah, I mean, we I think probably like you in our 20s and 30s were really focused on working with high performers to make them like, you know, just two seconds faster. And how can we make someone, you know, lift just a little bit more like working at the margins of performance? Um, and then I don’t know if it’s because we aged or or, you know, sort of what the transition was, but we sort of stopped caring as much about that, about like making the best better.

And we really started wanting to expand our work and our thinking to, you know, how do we make everyday people feel and be more healthy, and especially in this sort of aging phase of our lives like 40s, 50, 60, 70s. And so that’s been what we’ve we care more about now. How do we live? Well, how do we enjoy life?

How do we make sure that we’re, you know, involved in health practices that aren’t our entire identity but work? So I think that’s where we’ve been. We’ve had a big shift, I think in ten.

00:03:31.180 — 00:04:24.770 · Kelly Starrett

Years, if I might add, that one thing is that I think we’re lucky that we came out of a performance lens. And first and foremost, if the highest calling of science is to transform the humanities, right, the highest calling of strength conditioning, high performance has transformed our communities. And so if we say fitness but writ large, that is really high performance communities.

How Have we taken the next step and actually applied those lessons towards our families, towards our communities, towards our institutions, to our, you know, our our schools? And I would I would posit that that high performance still is sexy and in the domain of, you know, of our Olympians and all the people going fast and and taking chances.

But we have to do a better job of taking those lessons back. And more importantly, the reason that high performance should matter to anyone listening because they’re like, I’m just I’m a middle aged guy. I’m married to a three time world champion, but I just want to be less gross than my wife.

00:04:24.810 — 00:04:27.050 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Three time world champion paddler.

00:04:27.090 — 00:04:58.640 · Kelly Starrett

So, you know, the I think the idea is if we can’t take those lessons and transmute them over, then all of this is just circus. And let’s just treat it like circus. Your child wants to be an athlete. Like, well, we’ll break or break her in college and hopefully she’ll get an effect 16 times. And or how do we say first principles that we’ve learned by working high performance.

And I think this is really important because a lot of things work and at low loads and low speeds and low consequence. You can get away with murder. You can eat little chocolate donuts, you can smoke a cigarette.

00:04:58.640 — 00:04:59.720 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

I was just saying that right before.

00:04:59.720 — 00:05:21.960 · Kelly Starrett

We started, obviously. And but at high performance, we see that things really do start to change and we can really start to see inputs and outputs and those things, those first principles really matter. And that means we have a clear understanding of what we should care about. And what we might say is that’s totemic.

It’s fun and it’s entertaining, but it’s not the thing.

00:05:22.440 — 00:06:11.070 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

You know, when you say first principles and then the things that we should care about, that is very valuable, especially with this landscape as it accelerates, as the the volume of information and through the lens of, for example, nutrition, we have to have a particular nutrition plan because we’re trying to get certain vitamins and minerals.

When people choose to have certain behaviors like eat, say, highly processed foods, we know that there are a handful of Deficiencies that we have to make up for. Perhaps a woman needs more iron or B12 or zinc, and they’ve just got me thinking about training and movement. We are in an artificial world where now we have to have exercise programs, probably do things for deficiencies.

00:06:11.110 — 00:06:11.990 · Kelly Starrett

Great analogy.

00:06:11.990 — 00:06:13.950 · Juliet Starrett

Yeah, that is such a great analogy.

00:06:13.990 — 00:06:25.390 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

As I think about it, if we were to just take a step back and think about how far we are removed and the idea that we have to have exercise prescriptions.

00:06:25.430 — 00:06:28.470 · Kelly Starrett

You mean to support muscles that don’t need in my day to day work because I don’t believe it.

00:06:28.710 — 00:06:29.430 · Juliet Starrett

Right? Or just.

00:06:29.470 — 00:06:44.510 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Yeah, but I need help to understand. Well, what is it that we need to be doing? And and again, if we can compare this to a nutrition plan, how does it look like. Because it’s it’s artificially influenced.

00:06:44.550 — 00:06:46.030 · Kelly Starrett

Absolutely. It really is. Peggy swain.

00:06:46.030 — 00:08:21.140 · Juliet Starrett

Yeah. I mean, you know, we, uh, one of our mentors or, you know, people that we love. As Katie Bowman, and she talks a lot about how we all have adopted this very small movement diet and that just like nutrition, we need to expand our movement diet to include so many different things. And I think most people are just doing, you know, their peloton and maybe like doing some bicep curls.

But, you know, we really appreciate her point of view that you have to expand your movement, diet and put your body through all sorts of shapes and positions. And that’s actually how we judge other people’s strength and conditioning programs is, you know, are you touching all the shapes and positions that the human body should be doing, you know?

Are you, uh, you know, practicing, you know, power and agility and balance and speed. Um, is it fun? I mean, I think this is one of our latest things is, you know, we feel like somehow this longevity world has gotten so prescriptive that we, like, forgot that it’s fun and that, you know, adults should be playing and having fun.

Um, and so, you know, I just think we have to expand our idea of what movement means. And, you know, we’re as we talked about earlier, we’re starting to work on this book about young athletes. And there’s this idea of youth athletic development. And it is it’s it’s kind of crazy to think about that. We’re in this world where kids who should be theoretically outside, just free playing and climbing trees and running around.

Um, we now actually need to think about putting kids into structured programs so that they can get that kind of youth athletic development, because they’re not getting it just by going outside.

00:08:21.180 — 00:08:39.140 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

You know, you said something and you said should do movements. You should do. I have no idea what those are. I mean, I can regurgitate and say I should do a push pull, I should be able to do a hinge and a squat. But but should I? I have no

00:08:40.620 — 00:08:43.020 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

basis for those for those thoughts.

00:08:43.060 — 00:08:51.370 · Kelly Starrett

Let’s explain it for everyone a little bit. Just break that because it really does feel overwhelming. You step into this door, you open it up. There’s like 10,000 ninjas training and you’re like, nope. We shut this door.

00:08:51.410 — 00:08:52.690 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Like, I’m gonna go to the next one.

00:08:52.690 — 00:09:21.210 · Kelly Starrett

Yeah. And it really is confusing. So I think, um, one of the things that we can do is just start to say, what are the essential needs of the human right? And specifically, we know that you should walk a lot. And the reason is we want you to decongest your body. We want you to get sunshine. We want to be interactive.

You you know, the average American is going outside 20 minutes a week, a week outside. So walking solves a lot of problems. In fact, we would put walking as not exercise. Not because it’s not good for.

00:09:21.210 — 00:09:22.010 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

You, I agree.

00:09:22.010 — 00:09:23.690 · Kelly Starrett

But because it’s so vital.

00:09:23.730 — 00:09:24.530 · Juliet Starrett

Yeah, it’s so essential.

00:09:24.730 — 00:09:29.650 · Kelly Starrett

Like you’re like us. Sleep’s not optional. Walking is not optional. And we’re not saying you have to walk like means your main thing.

00:09:29.690 — 00:09:33.930 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

And it’s not exercise. It won’t maintain the muscle mass and type that you need.

00:09:33.970 — 00:09:43.850 · Kelly Starrett

It’s why are you using walking to maintain your muscle mass right. That’s right. That’s like I’m trying to go to Pilates to get jacked and go the Olympics. Wrong use of plies like stop, stop trying to do that.

00:09:43.890 — 00:09:47.040 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

It’s very offensive to people I would like to go on record of saying that.

00:09:47.200 — 00:11:07.670 · Kelly Starrett

It is offensive, and I don’t mean that. One of the reasons it will suck is to say, as we come back to the conversation or the question, we have a formal movement language in Pilates that touches all of the spine shapes, the shoulder shapes, the hip shapes. And no wonder that practice has lasted, because it’s basically a language of movement that expresses all of the shapes and things that the body needs to do and not.

How weird that Joseph Pilates was like a dancer and a teacher and go to yoga and all of a sudden you’re like, oh, what do you mean? You have to have long lever control. You have to be able to, you know, express normal range. You don’t actually have to have crazy range of motion to go to yoga. If you think your program is elite, go to yoga and jump in.

And if you suffer, I can tell you you have some blind spots in your program. You might be really good on a walk, bike and doing thrusters, but chances are rotation and movement solutions. So what we get with modern strength conditioning is a formal, loaded movement language that touches should be touching all the things that a human should do, right?

And that means, like, let’s talk about the shoulder. Shoulder does four things. And really people are like, whoa, hold up. And it gets complicated because the elbow bends and straightens and the shoulder rotates, but the arm goes in front of you, goes over your head, goes out to the side and goes behind you.

That’s it. That’s a dip. That’s a push up. That’s a plank. That’s the stop. And suddenly you put.

00:11:07.670 — 00:11:08.430 · Juliet Starrett

In your luggage and.

00:11:08.630 — 00:11:30.550 · Kelly Starrett

You have a so you have a formal movement language in the gym and a diagnostic language to allow us to see if you have access to native positions, because the the stimulus for adaptation is also the diagnostic tool. And so when you say, hey, what should I be doing? Well, we can, as Juliet said, how do you put your arms over your head?

How do you like to put your arms over your head? Because if you’re not doing that, you’re not going to have that capacity.

00:11:30.550 — 00:11:38.150 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

And no one would say signing up, but do we need to continue to do that? Is there utility in movements like that.

00:11:38.190 — 00:11:52.460 · Kelly Starrett

So you can so if we say overhead, does that mean you need heavy jerks? Well maybe it means you can hang. Maybe you need to do downward dog, right? There’s so many ways to put your arm over. Do you swim? Okay, so now there’s ways where we can be exposing the position.

00:11:52.460 — 00:12:03.900 · Juliet Starrett

Each one of those movements, each one of those four shoulder positions, there’s a thousand different ways that you can practice those. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be like a heavy jerk or some sort of movement that maybe some people can’t relate to.

00:12:03.940 — 00:12:24.780 · Kelly Starrett

But suddenly we have a root movement language that’s a diagnostic language that helps us understand why you may be in pain, why you’re losing the world championship, why you’re leaking. You know, I mean, the efficiency of the economy. We never, ever put range of motion and movement choice into the language of diagnostics of any of this health piece we’ve been trying, and we’re doing a terrible job.

00:12:24.820 — 00:12:25.020 · Juliet Starrett

Yeah.

00:12:25.020 — 00:12:34.300 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

What do you mean, diagnostics? In terms of adding in diagnostics, are you talking about, like, the Favre test or some kind of okay, talk to.

00:12:34.820 — 00:13:24.220 · Kelly Starrett

Go ahead. Well, for example, we asked people like, well, how much should your knee bend if you if you bring your hip up, what’s normal hip range of motion. People are like, I have no idea on my but you can tell me how many grams of creatine you should have. So what we see is we haven’t trained people to understand their movement minimums.

What is normal in the language of something that they already do. So that’s an air squat. So you should be able to, you know, squat easily crease below your knee. Right. And you should be able to say, as my range of motion changes as I age, get injured, get tweaked, jump on an airplane, whatever. I’m doing something that I really love to do.

Now I can come back and have a baseline rooted in not a fancy diagnostic language, a physical therapy or medicine, but in the language that we use, which everyone understands. We’ve taught on all the continents except Antarctica. Everyone knows what bench press is a pushup, everyone. So I assume that our diagnostic for shoulder.

00:13:24.220 — 00:14:04.050 · Juliet Starrett

Extension, I mean, Kelly makes a good point. Like we’ve been in we he’s kind of joking. Like we’ve been trying we’ve been doing a bad job, but we have been trying for almost 20 years, as you know, to get people to care about this like idea of your, you know, caring about your range of motion, this diversity of movement in your body.

And, you know, the two reasons I think people should care is, number one, if you retain your full range of motion, you can be a way more badass athlete across any sport and any movement. Number one, and that that does people do care about that performance basically. But then also that, you know, people don’t think about lack of range of motion as a pain generator or the cause of their pain.

00:14:04.250 — 00:14:04.850 · Kelly Starrett

And hone it to.

00:14:04.850 — 00:14:47.640 · Juliet Starrett

It or component to it. And, you know, I think you understand as well. You know, once you get into your 40s, 50s and 60s, you know, we all are dealing with aches and pains and weird little musculoskeletal tweaks. I mean, half of my female friends have frozen shoulder, um, you know, it just starts to become part of life.

You know, when we’re in our 20s and 30s are like plastic, you know, we can tweak ourselves, and then we’re back in the gym. No problem. Two weeks later and you just start to see as we age, um, this muscular, these musculoskeletal injuries and pains that often don’t require going to a physician because they’re not, you know, your bone isn’t sticking out of your leg.

Um, but they really can be pain generators. And no one ever talks about restoring your range of motion as a way to get out of pain.

00:14:47.680 — 00:14:51.360 · Kelly Starrett

And who owns that? Yeah. And where do you do it? Those are the questions, right?

00:14:51.400 — 00:14:51.840 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

What do you.

00:14:51.840 — 00:15:04.000 · Kelly Starrett

Do? Right. What do you do? You know, as Juliet says, um, you know, I would posit that we’ve in the last 20 years, we’re going to call our wave second wave physical therapy, not physical therapy. Second wave.

00:15:04.160 — 00:15:04.560 · Juliet Starrett

Fitness.

00:15:04.560 — 00:15:15.120 · Kelly Starrett

Or fitness? Right. First wave is like molten power bars. Heart monitor. You remember those days? I do. Right. Tudor Pompa has this book on Plato’s or Donald Chew. Like, there’s just.

00:15:15.160 — 00:15:16.360 · Juliet Starrett

Metallic tasting protein.

00:15:16.520 — 00:15:17.240 · Kelly Starrett

100%.

00:15:17.240 — 00:15:18.080 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

And I’ve got some of those.

00:15:18.120 — 00:16:53.790 · Kelly Starrett

You did the best you could. You got a book. You. Maybe you had an Olympic lifting career. Maybe you were a track and field athlete. You lucked out. Fast forward 20 years and we have all the data, all the experience, all of the, you know, crazy things. Do we not know how to put muscle on people? We are so good at posting muscle on people.

And we got to a place where Fitness and the body. It’s a totally good reason to get jacked and tan to improve your health. But we also want to remind you that fitness is not the same thing as performance. Fitness thing is not the same thing as I’m going to take this body that I’ve created in the gym that looks great, but maybe gets a little stiff, and I’m going to just throw someone under the bus here.

I’ve never met him, but he is amazing. Larry Wheels is one of the strongest, freakiest people in the whole world. Like he is just a mutant. But if you watched some of the old footage of him sprinting, you can say, oh, you don’t get something for nothing that maybe we can. We’re losing some of our athleticism, our movement choices, by being squatting 700, 800, 900 pounds.

So the question is, what is what is it you want to do with your body? And then what is the minimum training effect that supports that? But we want to give people back to the thing, not training for the thing. And I think we forgot for a minute because the gym is so miraculous in so many ways culture, training, fun, empowerment, right?

Bone density. But we were used to be training for something. So how do we know that this training is not just recursive? And I’m going to say something dangerous. Pull ups are a terrible sport. I love pullups, I do too, but it’s not a fun. It’s not a fun sport. It’s not a fun sport. In fact, I use pull ups to be good at a sport, right?

So we can give that to those.

00:16:53.990 — 00:17:02.470 · Juliet Starrett

One other thing I want to say here too, is we all are focused in this age that we’re in on our longevity. And longevity is a hot topic, but.

00:17:02.510 — 00:17:04.069 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

It does need a rebrand anyway.

00:17:04.390 — 00:17:06.230 · Juliet Starrett

Because we’re over that word. Yeah, we’re over.

00:17:06.230 — 00:17:06.589 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

That word.

00:17:06.829 — 00:17:08.990 · Kelly Starrett

Right? We’re not gonna be 140 and super skinny.

00:17:09.030 — 00:17:10.430 · Juliet Starrett

It’s a triangle.

00:17:10.470 — 00:17:10.990 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

It is.

00:17:11.189 — 00:17:40.580 · Juliet Starrett

It is strength, conditioning and mobility. And 90% of the 90% of people, even people who care about this and are focused on it, are missing that third piece of the triangle, the mobility piece. And we get it. It’s like we’re all exhausted. And the last thing you want to do is, you know, take, you know, you want to use your limited time to train and get strong and get jacked and tanned and you, and it’s more fun.

And you really don’t want to use the limited time you have to work on your mobility. But it is an important component of it. And I think.

00:17:40.620 — 00:17:42.500 · Kelly Starrett

In mobility, you mean your positions.

00:17:42.500 — 00:17:57.260 · Juliet Starrett

Your positions. It’s equally as important as your strength and your cardiovascular, you know, fitness. And I think it’s just, you know, this is the corner of that triangle that we’ve been trying to fill for a long time, and it’s very hard to get people to care.

00:17:57.300 — 00:17:59.060 · Speaker 4

I have a bravo a.

00:17:59.100 — 00:18:11.459 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Handful of questions. As a physician, I think I don’t even think in terms of performance. I think about in terms of outcomes. And when I

00:18:12.540 — 00:18:23.380 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

think about mobility, which, by the way, when I was in my 20s, several uppers, a great title because you don’t know, you don’t have to stretch. You’re just there’s no warm up. And then all of a sudden.

00:18:23.380 — 00:18:25.740 · Kelly Starrett

You know, you cut off your hand and it grows back, grows.

00:18:25.980 — 00:18:27.500 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

And then all of a sudden.

00:18:27.620 — 00:18:28.940 · Juliet Starrett

Yeah, then one day.

00:18:28.980 — 00:18:57.250 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Then one day, I, am like, oh well, this hurts. And I think I’ve got some plantar fasciitis and it’s like overnight. But I never thought about because as you know, my body, I’m hyper mobile. I quote mobility is probably different than flexibility. You’re going to help clear up the confusion. But what I’m saying is I can go and quote, get strong.

I can lift some weights, do some terrible form, pull up.

00:18:57.290 — 00:19:01.410 · Kelly Starrett

Oh, I’m married to a woman who’s in her 50s who has apps like it’s annoying.

00:19:01.690 — 00:19:30.760 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

She is amazing. And yes, she is amazing. And I, um, would say that you’ve had an unfair advantage, both of you, together as a collective unit, right? Is that there’s a bit of an unfair advantage there. But outcomes, if we want people to care about mobility, which I think you guys have done a great job at rebranding mobility, then what is the outcome?

You said frozen shoulder. You were talking about an airplane. I don’t know what happened to me. I’m on an airplane for an hour and.

00:19:31.160 — 00:19:33.880 · Juliet Starrett

You’re in my pain. Every. Everything hurts. Yep.

00:19:33.960 — 00:20:03.360 · Kelly Starrett

So, uh, you know, the idea here, first and foremost is when we wrote Supple Leopard, we were like, there’s two objective measures here that we can wrap our heads around. And this is important. Objective number one is the range of motion that you learned in school, that I learned in school, that every provider.

This is what the shoulder should do within probably 3 to 5 degrees. And I wish we could we can talk about everyone’s unique, special hip. You know, I apologize.

00:20:03.600 — 00:20:03.760 · Speaker 4

For.

00:20:04.080 — 00:22:18.510 · Kelly Starrett

Sure. Yeah. Yeah, sure. So when we actually see changes, maybe there’s some little things that are a little bit different. But generally we can say this is what the body should be able to do. And then we can take the step there and go, okay, what do those positions look like when you put them together? I can look at your dorsiflexion, but I need to look at your dorsiflexion.

You’re being able to flex your ankle when your hip isn’t extended. And we look at your dorsiflexion when you’re stepping in the context of things that are actually no one cares what their reflection they care about what that dorsiflexion gets them. So you’re absolutely right to say, how do we get people to care?

Number one is that we had an objective measure saying, let’s just get to baseline. So some of Leppard’s about getting to baseline. But the first part of the book is about using the language of strength conditioning as a diagnostic tool. And the second thing that we can wrap our head around in terms of objectives is performance.

It’s output, it’s increased wattage, it’s increased poundage. It’s increased not pain. Pain we get in the bargain when we have healthier tissues. And this is why the overlap of everything that we’re doing with you is that like, I’ll be honest, as a physio, the last thing I wanted to do is get a nutrition y, because I didn’t want to have infinite conversations about body composition with every single person, right?

The only conversation they were interested in was body composition, and the only conversation I was interested in is your tissues are so crappy performance. Yeah. You can’t take this load like, no wonder you’re gross. I mean, your tissues are tacked down, you’re dehydrated, you don’t get enough fruits and veggies like there’s no fiber in your diet.

Your Juliet think thankfully kind of brought this took took on that burden. But those two things, you know, we see that people are going to care about their range of motion when they again stop being able to do the things they want to do. Suddenly my I can’t ride my bike, I can’t run, I can’t do the thing that I love.

Okay, now we got you. Yeah, I lost. What was that thing again? Right. I tore my second ACL. What was that thing again you were talking about? So it’s okay for us to be realize that we had a lot of tolerance in the system, and we can use that tolerance. But if we always are keeping our eye on our output and performance, then we get a lot of these bargains in the deal.

But, you know, to your point, no one cares about their hamstring range of motion or their hip range of motion or hip extension until their back hurts. And so let’s go ahead and use that as a weigh in. Right. Suddenly I’m like, oh, this is I feel really stiff and I don’t like the way that feels is injury.

00:22:19.510 — 00:22:25.100 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

You know, as I all of largely all of our friends are pretty athletic. All of all of them.

00:22:25.100 — 00:22:26.460 · Kelly Starrett

I’m the least athletic person.

00:22:26.500 — 00:22:27.260 · Speaker 4

Yeah, yeah, yeah, well.

00:22:28.820 — 00:22:48.740 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

They all have pain. Every single one of them has pain. And then I think about potentially, is there a way that they manage their shoulder and their hip and their knee and their ankle. And you do all of these things which I want to know what these are, or is there an inevitable part of the aging process that we come to accept?

00:22:48.780 — 00:23:05.660 · Juliet Starrett

You know, I’ll start here and say that I do think, especially if you are using your body as in midlife, to older person, some musculoskeletal pain is inevitable. Like, I don’t think we can avoid that. I think, you know, and I don’t think you can, even if you sit in a La-Z-Boy for the rest of.

00:23:05.660 — 00:23:09.660 · Speaker 4

Your life, that doesn’t mean you’re going to have every day, and it doesn’t mean it’s always it doesn’t need to be.

00:23:10.060 — 00:23:12.500 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

In terms of expectations. But I want to get clear on I think.

00:23:12.500 — 00:23:33.170 · Juliet Starrett

It’s important to create that expectation. And we have this idea we teach in our 101 course, and Kelley calls it the i3 model. But I’m going to simplify it to the I2 model where it’s like this sort of mental framework we hope people can take on, which is do I have an injury or am I experiencing an incident? And an injury is like a bonus sticking out of your leg or you know.

00:23:33.210 — 00:23:33.730 · Speaker 4

It’s.

00:23:33.930 — 00:23:35.930 · Kelly Starrett

A physician, night sweats, fever, vomiting, nausea?

00:23:35.970 — 00:23:36.370 · Speaker 4

You’re ill.

00:23:36.370 — 00:23:38.090 · Juliet Starrett

You need to go see an actual physician.

00:23:38.370 — 00:23:40.050 · Kelly Starrett

You’re hurt so bad you can’t do your job.

00:23:40.290 — 00:25:08.040 · Juliet Starrett

That is an injury. But an incident is everything else that we experience as a as a, you know, a human. And we seem to maybe those of us who are athletic tend to experience it more often. We tend to have more musculoskeletal pain and little tweaks and pains and injuries. But framing it that way for ourselves, because what we see often is that the moment people feel like the slightest pain, they just initiate this like medical cascade, where they’re getting MRI as an imaging and seeing doctors and spending tons of money and tons of time on things that we think when you have an incident, you should be able to manage it on your own.

In most cases, if you have the right tools. And that’s really where our work has been for the last 20 years is how do we give people the tools to manage what we think are inevitable incidents? If you’re using your body, and especially as we age, these are inevitable incidents. But what are the tools that you can deploy?

And then if you’ve actually tried to use those tools and then go to your physician or physical therapist and say, okay, you know, I, I can’t. My shoulder hurts when I put it in front of me. My shoulder hurts when I deadlift or kettlebell swing. Um, I’ve tried to do, you know, this mobilization and I’ve done this, this and this, you know, modality to try to work on myself, but I can’t actually get past it.

That’s a great time to go see your physician or your physical therapist for sort of common musculoskeletal pain. Um, but we see that people don’t have those tools, so they immediately initiate this MRI, medical cascade doctors or, um.

00:25:08.200 — 00:25:08.360 · Kelly Starrett

Or.

00:25:08.360 — 00:25:08.800 · Speaker 4

Heard of.

00:25:08.800 — 00:25:11.920 · Juliet Starrett

Or they cover it up with, you know, NSAIDs or.

00:25:12.160 — 00:25:12.640 · Speaker 4

Bourbon.

00:25:12.640 — 00:25:34.510 · Juliet Starrett

Bourbon or weed or whatever, you know, thing we’re using these days. And we think that people really can take care of so much of this on their own, just given a few tools and really avoid this whole medical cascade, you know, constant use of Advil bourbon and and actually take a chance at, you know, working on these incident level musculoskeletal.

00:25:34.630 — 00:25:41.230 · Kelly Starrett

And let me just add let’s go a step further. Let’s normalize that. Your body’s going to be discomfort. Yeah I think we resting.

00:25:41.390 — 00:25:41.790 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

My friend.

00:25:41.830 — 00:27:36.380 · Kelly Starrett

Resting state of the human being is pain free. That’s we all should be paying for you. That’s resting state. But pain is such a normal part of the human experience. We want to remind everyone pain is a request for change. There can be real tissue damage and trauma that happens in pathology. But when we step into a room full of 100 high school water polo players and I say, how many of you are pain free?

And no hand goes up and you’re like, wait, wait, you’re teenagers? What do you mean? And they’re like, yeah, my knee hurts, my elbow hurts, my back hurts, my shoulder hurts. And what we find is that it is a very typical experience, especially in people who are very athletic. And of course, it’s across the regular population.

You know, this, this thing. But if we frame it differently and say, hey, this is it could be a diagnostic tool. It can get you curious. Hey, my body is telling me something. And what we’ve said for, you know, thank you. Sacklers is. No, we don’t want you to feel that. Well, let’s let’s just cover up that check engine line with a black piece of tape, because we don’t want you to be in any pain.

Instead of saying, hey, what does that mean? And then, more importantly, what can you do about it? Because we know it’s complicated. You don’t sleep, you’re super stressed the way your family believed about pain, your experience as a kid. You know, you all are superstar athletes and Juliet was a state champion rower.

So imagine being in high school being able to suffer in a two K. No. You’re welcome. No one knows that. And I think what it’s interesting is that imagine that you’re 17 and you’re like, oh yeah, my body goes on fire all the time. That’s called racing. It’s my sport. And then all of a sudden your knee hurts. You’re like, it’s not a big deal.

I’m not on fire. Like in my sport, we have a family that says, oh, lay down, let’s, let’s. Is there a soft tissue restriction? Did you drink any water? And now we can start to build a layer where people are saying, oh yeah, of course it. My knee hurts. I just went a marathon or I went for a big hike and I was cold or I’m a busy, professional person, I, I had to work in this workout and then go sit at my desk.

So I’m not freaked out when my back hurts because I have a plan.

00:27:36.380 — 00:27:51.460 · Juliet Starrett

It’s such a mindset shift. I mean, I think anytime we experience pain, if we don’t have a framework for it, we just people catastrophes. And then, you know, I don’t I, I’m sure we’ve all done this. But you know, I had a period of low back pain a few years ago. And I sort of remember.

00:27:51.500 — 00:28:03.020 · Kelly Starrett

We pulled a very heavy raft down on a river and it gets high winds. And Juliet basically rode herself. Yeah, yeah. Rode herself like after 40 hours of, like, slugging against this headache.

00:28:03.020 — 00:28:33.050 · Juliet Starrett

Her body had a low moment of being like, oh, okay, I’m a back pain person. Like I sort of took it on as my identity. Like, this is who I am now. And Kelly had to sort of take me out of that might. It was just a mindset. And he said, hey, most back pain resolves on its own in 6 to 8 weeks, and literally at six weeks to the day, I was like, perfectly fine.

And it was just a mindset ship I shipped. I could have spent that whole six weeks, you know, in and out of doctor’s offices and freaking out. Instead, I just worked the plan. I did the things that I knew how to do to manage it.

00:28:33.250 — 00:28:34.970 · Kelly Starrett

And you did not do anything. You do.

00:28:34.970 — 00:28:44.490 · Juliet Starrett

A lot. I didn’t just wait. I had tools and strategies, but I didn’t just wait. And I had shifted my mindset and and, you know, lo and behold, I did not become a back pain person.

00:28:44.530 — 00:29:36.440 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

First of all, I’d be really bad for your brand, um, to bring me a back pain person. But you both said something early on in this conversation. What the human body should do. Now, I can’t help but bring it back to the lens at which I think about things, which is through nutrition and medicine. And there are core fundamental macronutrient needs.

However, it’s extremely variable. It is person dependent. This person can do well on a vegetarian diet. This person can do well on a carnivore diet. They can quote optimize. I wonder, as I sit here, a five foot one totally jacked and then say my husband who is double my size. His movement requirements, I just have to go back to that should be able to do.

00:29:36.480 — 00:30:03.000 · Kelly Starrett

Again how you want to eat, move like, eat, sleep, live your life. We want you to do that. We really try to be agnostic about the way you move. What I can say is, hey, however you’re working out, living your optimized, perfect life, let’s just take that and we’ll test it. We’ll drop it in and say, we’ll do. Is your movement practice?

Does it have enough internal rotation of the shoulder?

00:30:03.000 — 00:30:22.270 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

And by the way, if you guys have not had the bill to move, there’s ten vital signs that people can look at. And you have a whole host of of tools and diagnostics. Take me through the and I hate to say average, but a common scenario of the reality of what.

00:30:22.310 — 00:30:22.870 · Kelly Starrett

We do it.

00:30:23.030 — 00:30:26.910 · Juliet Starrett

Okay, so you just queued up Kelly to talk about his literal favorite subject of all time.

00:30:26.950 — 00:30:27.510 · Kelly Starrett

It’s a drinking.

00:30:27.510 — 00:30:39.030 · Juliet Starrett

Game, and we talk about it at the dinner table and at every party we go to. And that is basically humanity’s lack of hip extension. And I think that’s the perfect example.

00:30:39.070 — 00:30:41.390 · Kelly Starrett

Getting your knee right behind your butt.

00:30:41.750 — 00:30:51.910 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Wait, you have to. Okay. If you guys are watching this, he is not demonstrating. Please help the listener who is also you’re not doing hip, but.

00:30:51.950 — 00:30:54.630 · Kelly Starrett

Who cares about hip extension. Like like like.

00:30:54.670 — 00:30:55.270 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

What even.

00:30:55.310 — 00:31:10.750 · Kelly Starrett

Is exactly. What is that? So if we look at how your leg moves on your pelvis, when your leg goes behind your pelvis, like walking or lunging or running or sprinting, right? That is hip extension. And what we.

00:31:10.830 — 00:31:11.430 · Juliet Starrett

Behind.

00:31:11.790 — 00:31:12.790 · Kelly Starrett

Me behind, but in fact.

00:31:12.950 — 00:31:18.790 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Not sitting on your. You know, we’re not using you behind, but I’m thinking about sitting on my knees.

00:31:18.830 — 00:31:36.350 · Kelly Starrett

That’s a flexion position. That’s basically a squat. If you’re kneeling down, if your knees in front of your hip like you’re going upstairs, that is a squat shape. And suddenly you can be, oh, hey, well, how am I training squat. How much time am I spending in this hip flexion knee towards my chest position?

00:31:36.390 — 00:31:43.630 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Give me an example of other ways that someone. Okay. You said walking. All of those movements. Is there a static position.

00:31:43.670 — 00:31:44.270 · Juliet Starrett

Someone okay.

00:31:44.710 — 00:31:45.870 · Kelly Starrett

Like that so suddenly.

00:31:45.870 — 00:31:48.670 · Juliet Starrett

Lunge isometric or a Bulgarian split squat?

00:31:48.710 — 00:32:39.860 · Kelly Starrett

Why do we spend so much time and we’re in chaturanga and stepping back. If you go to yoga, you’re going to see how much time you get into this knee behind. But position this splits like position this long lever lunge shape. We always think about it as it’s a one legged squat, but really we’re taking and getting into a tandem stance.

And if you suddenly if you’re pressing over your head and you put your front foot up on a box, that’s another way of loading that back leg. Well, it turns out that one of the things that’s useful for us to understand is that our body is going to solve a set of problems, however, it’s we’re designed for movement solutions.

You are designed to move through the environment, carry resources back to your tribe, get up and down off the ground, reproduce and fight and run. And so.

00:32:40.220 — 00:32:42.540 · Juliet Starrett

You’re saying that we’re like adaptation machines.

00:32:42.580 — 00:32:43.340 · Kelly Starrett

100%?

00:32:43.380 — 00:32:43.740 · Juliet Starrett

Yeah.

00:32:43.780 — 00:33:28.370 · Kelly Starrett

And when we see that as adaptation machines trying to do these things, our body for example, this this is a good example. No matter how bad your posture is and don’t I just mean the truth. With posture being bad, I’m still likely going to get my hands to my face. The body is designed in a way through evolution that getting feeding myself is very important.

And so when I innocently rotate the shoulder, I flex. Even when people have flexion contractures or we see, you know, head trauma and someone ends up, you know, after a stroke, we see that these internally rotated sort of flex positions. The default is always I have space, I have space, I have space because it’s so important to bring our hand to our.

00:33:28.410 — 00:33:35.890 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Solving a problem, which is why you see more frequent internal rotation. Your friends with the frozen shoulder, they still have to figure out how to.

00:33:35.930 — 00:34:22.000 · Kelly Starrett

They will continue to solve and at low speed. It doesn’t matter if you turn your foot out when you walk, because when you turn your foot out when you walk, your ankle is not really walking like an ankle. Your big toe doesn’t really work anymore. But at low speeds, low loads, it doesn’t matter. When you land with that foot out in front of you, it’s just a less stable, less effective position.

Doesn’t mean it’s not a position. We need to be able to adapt as I walk through a rocky surface and I have to be creative, and I have to pick up this plant in a weird position or play a sport, but at high speeds and high loads when that foot, or do a billion repetitions where that foot is in the back, some may have a bunion.

Suddenly I misusing or misappropriating my tissues in a way that may cause pain, may not cause pain, but certainly will lead to a decrease in function.

00:34:22.040 — 00:34:42.760 · Juliet Starrett

Let me just say this though, because Kelly is always like remiss to connect range of motion and pain. But I will say in 100% of the people who come and fly across the country and spend tons of money to see Kelly for their low back pain, 100% of them are missing hip extension. That’s hands down 100%.

00:34:42.960 — 00:34:43.919 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Bold statement.

00:34:44.159 — 00:36:09.270 · Kelly Starrett

So and how about this. So again is we’re solving the problem in any way a lot of times we can get away with it. You can do the wrong thing for the wrong reason. And you can still win a world championship. You can still carry a heavy ruck, you can still go super fast. And then one day your brain says, oh, we’re sleep deprived.

The tissues become sensitized. I’m not. I’m not digging this. And you’re like. But I’ve always done it this way, and suddenly I have to do it a different way. Well, if we’re always working towards restoring movement solutions, giving people back their native range of motion, then we start to unload tissues that maybe are working double overtime.

So your knee is a pretty simple joint, rotates and it flexes, but it puts up with a lot of crap from your ankle and your hip. And so when you have knee pain, rarely is it the knees of the problem when we start looking upstream. Oh, those tissues are super stiff and fibrotic and you don’t have any hip extension and you don’t have any internal rotation.

So your knee is like, bro, I can’t do this all. And for example, this is the number one reason why we see people with elbow pain. They stop losing the ability to rotate at the shoulder. They have to do all the rotation here. And that elbow is just sort of caught in the middle of a family custody battle. And so ultimately you can say, hey, that we can wait around till we have a problem, or we can say, hey, good technique will require that I’m exposing my tissues in these movements in the shape of the movement language.

00:36:09.270 — 00:36:49.629 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

You have worked with and do work with very elite individuals. Yes, we can all agree. Oh yeah, they are probably tools. Their bodies are tools for that specific outcome that support one of the other initiatives that you guys have. You have two initiatives is you want to, as you’re working on your next book, be able to get to the kids earlier.

I’m assuming it’s because you want to build strong adults. They have a certain need. I’m sure, to be a well-rounded athlete. Athletes not even the right word, right? But you’re also addressing the

00:36:50.710 — 00:37:15.060 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

majority of the population, which they are sedentary. They need morality. How do we determine what they need to work on whether is there a difference between a man versus a woman in to prevent these problems? At 35, who’s been doing a baseline fitness program, that is.

00:37:15.100 — 00:37:17.100 · Kelly Starrett

That’s very generous. Baseline fitness program. Yes.

00:37:17.300 — 00:37:40.900 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Well, the data would suggest that most individuals are not meeting the minimum requirements to not be worse than yesterday, the two days a week. They just change the basis on guidelines, but two days a week of resistance training. But as we try to reach, we you and I both have the same goal. We believe I don’t want to put words in your mouth that we can build more resilient humans, stronger.

00:37:40.940 — 00:37:43.340 · Kelly Starrett

Having better society, better communities, better families.

00:37:43.540 — 00:37:44.140 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Yes, sir.

00:37:44.180 — 00:37:48.620 · Kelly Starrett

Let’s let’s put off a lot of dysfunction that is preventable.

00:37:48.660 — 00:38:02.010 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

But what is it? Hip extension. You’ve told me that there’s the lunge and the walk and then the sprint, but I don’t know how to get there. As someone is listening to this, what do they need to do? Is hip extension number one?

00:38:02.050 — 00:38:23.810 · Kelly Starrett

Check this out. The first order of business is exposure. When and where can a busy working person start to untangle this? And we have found in our experience in 20 years of working with the superstars and working with all the branches of the government and all the C-suite, is that we’re like, well, I think you should sit on the ground in the evening for 20 or 30 minutes.

Let’s start.

00:38:23.810 — 00:38:25.370 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

There. I wasn’t expecting that.

00:38:25.370 — 00:38:31.170 · Kelly Starrett

And the reason is that I’m going to get 20 or 30 minutes of end range exposure, and there’s no wrong way to sit on the ground.

00:38:31.210 — 00:38:35.890 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

And what do you mean, end range exposure? On my butt, on my hip. Do I sit cross-legged?

00:38:35.930 — 00:39:39.320 · Juliet Starrett

Yes. I mean yes to all of the above. I mean, the goal with that 30 minutes of floor sitting is to, like, change positions when you feel like you need to. So if you’re sitting 90, 90 or kneeling or long sitting with your legs out in front of you, if you’re super uncomfortable and need to lean against your couch at the beginning, that’s fine.

Sitting cross-legged, it is great. But the goal is, you know, we always have this phrase like, you know, the best position is your next position. So moved. Move throughout whatever positions you feel comfortable, and you’ll naturally do that. I mean, we actually had this. Kelly spoke at the Olympic Club in San Francisco, which is this sort of fancy, like OG gym.

And, you know, he at the beginning of it, he had everybody clear out all the plastic chairs and this like giant meeting hall and said, hey, I’m going to be speaking for an hour. I’d like you all to sit on the floor. And I mean, you’ve never seen people look more stiff and be more nervous and uncomfortable than doing this thing where, you know, if you have little kids, I mean, little kids are up and down off the floor hundreds of times a day.

Everybody’s sitting on the floor all day at school. It’s this movement we do as humans that we’ve really lost. And so to watch all these people.

00:39:39.360 — 00:39:40.360 · Kelly Starrett

Having to lay down, you know.

00:39:40.760 — 00:39:50.280 · Juliet Starrett

Between their 30s and 70s and, you know, at the end, half the room was laying down on the ground because they could no longer comfortably sit on the floor. And so we just.

00:39:50.640 — 00:39:51.600 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Stomach or on.

00:39:51.600 — 00:39:57.630 · Juliet Starrett

Their backs or stomachs or sides, because just sitting on the floor cross-legged or even long sitting was too uncomfortable for them.

00:39:57.670 — 00:39:58.910 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Different than sitting in a chair?

00:39:58.950 — 00:40:31.310 · Juliet Starrett

Yes. So different from sitting in a chair, which we’re so accustomed to doing and do all the time as sedentary humans. And you know, what we love about this floor sitting thing is, you know, we know the data show that average Americans across all socioeconomic classes are watching three hours a day of television.

So we just say, hey, sit on the floor for 30 minutes a day, 30 minutes of that, three hours that you’re scrolling on your phone or on your iPad or watching TV. Just sit on the floor for 30 minutes a day and people will be shocked at how much better their hips and low back and knees.

00:40:31.350 — 00:40:35.950 · Kelly Starrett

Oh, our elite cyclists are like. My wattage went up because I sat on the ground and I was like, what? Who knew?

00:40:35.990 — 00:41:48.630 · Juliet Starrett

And you know, the other thing that we love about this simple practice is that you actually have to get up and down off the ground at least once a day in order to do that. And the other story I love to tell is we were on a podcast with a friend of ours, and he was talking about how he just had a new baby, and his mother and his mother in law came to visit and help, and his mother had gotten super stiff and been very sedentary and couldn’t get down on the ground to interact with their baby daughter.

And his mother in law had been working on her range of motion and mobility, and had always been super active, and she was able to get up and down comfortably off the ground, on the ground, sit on the ground. And he said he watched his mother in law have this much richer experience interacting with her granddaughter than his own mother, who just was kind of stuck, could only interact with the baby sort of, when it was sort of handed to her in a couch.

And these women were both in their 60s, you know, they were not in their 80s. They were in their 60s. And he said it was just this stark thing. And it’s like, you know, nobody in their 30s is necessarily going to be able to care about being able to sit on the floor and interact with their grandchild. But like those of us in our 40s and 50s, like we can see a future of that.

Um, and so this floor sitting piece is just this simple and amazing tool that everybody should be doing every day.

00:41:48.670 — 00:42:54.650 · Kelly Starrett

And it’s like saying, let’s start here. Did you eat any fruit today? Let’s eat one piece of fruit today. So now we have a behavior in the evening. Doesn’t push out any other behaviors. You can do it while you’re doing something else. And now we can have the next conversation. Anything saw. Is there a ball on a roller near you on the floor right now?

We can begin to start to say, hey, the number one thing is not to add in some complex mobility solution. We have all those tools. We can do that. But to get you spending time in these shapes, it’s not that we’re not squatting. It’s not we got to spend more time squatting, right? Like people are squatting all day long.

We recognize that these fundamental shapes increase our movement language, increase our movement options. And it seems very low tech. But that single behavior starts to do a whole lot of things. If you begin to do ten minutes of soft tissue work, you’re likely to fall asleep a little faster because you’ve just had some soft like massage.

You just rolled out your quads and now you feel sleepy. And then your brain says, oh, I know what happens next. I go to the bedroom, I fall asleep. We find the people who do soft tissue work. Fall asleep or stay asleep longer.

00:42:54.690 — 00:43:05.650 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Soft tissue work defined as rolling. Sure. What are the. Yeah, we said sure, which means. Yeah, it’s. There’s probably only one way to do it wrong. Well, not do it.

00:43:05.690 — 00:43:13.850 · Kelly Starrett

Or not get a good enough exposure. So when people say like foam rolling X, I’m like, what do you mean when you say foam rolling? Because I’ll tell you what I mean.

00:43:13.890 — 00:43:15.850 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

What do you mean? Because that’s a very hot topic.

00:43:15.850 — 00:43:16.770 · Kelly Starrett

Yeah. That’s right.

00:43:16.810 — 00:43:42.490 · Juliet Starrett

Well, well, I can tell you what we see by the way, unfortunately talks about this. You know, the amount of times we go into a gym and see, like all people seem to only really foam roll their cats, like they don’t really do anything. Like, you go into a gym a lot and you see the, like mobility room and you see the white, you know, og like 90s foam roller and they’re just like foam rolling their calves like up and down.

That’s what they’re doing. Like that is what mobility means for most people. But there’s so much more to it.

00:43:42.530 — 00:44:29.600 · Kelly Starrett

Well, first of all, let’s give the credit that locally here in Killeen, Texas, is where those foam molars were made. And they were like originally like pool noodles or like a side effect of some industrial process. And someone was like, oh, we can roll on these. And so if you’re rolling on a pool noodle and it’s too painful and it doesn’t make change, I’m like, yeah, it’s probably because let’s add some sophistication.

How do we get your brain involved? You know, can we you know, these tissues all have these viscoelastic properties, which means that it takes a little time for tissues to melt and sag and adapt. If you put pressure on any part of your body and it’s uncomfortable, you found a place to work. We don’t know why you’re sensitized.

Stiff, poor tissue health. You just ran a marathon.

00:44:29.760 — 00:44:30.640 · Juliet Starrett

Yourself in the gym.

00:44:30.680 — 00:44:56.760 · Kelly Starrett

Smash. It doesn’t matter. But what we find is that if you put some pressure on a tissue and it hurts, we’re like, okay, that’s great. We can work on that. That’s a place to begin. And so what we’ll say is resting state of the human being. Your tissues should be not uncomfortable to compression. So if you’re not uncomfortable it should just be like pressure, right?

And that is how low the bar is. Because if I lay most people down, they’re like, oh, this is pay.

00:44:57.040 — 00:44:59.080 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

So you ate our house yesterday.

00:44:59.160 — 00:46:35.150 · Kelly Starrett

Yeah, exactly. And I’ll I’ll tell people that. Yeah. Welcome to the game. Human beings are massaging and working on other human beings for as long as they’ve been human beings. We just think that you can’t always have someone in your house to put their hands on you. We teach families how to work on each other.

At Berkeley, I teach the teams I work with, how those athletes all work on each other. They’re very sophisticated about. They live together, they train together. They can work and mobilize. So this is not skilled. You don’t need a PhD in this. So first of all, resting state is pain free. Second of all, you should.

If you’re rolling on something, you should be able to take a breath. If you start holding your breath, you’re going too deep, tells us you’re in threat and you should be able to contract underneath the roller. So if it’s so painful that you blacked out and you have lost neuromuscular control, maybe that’s too deep.

And what we’ll say is five minutes of muscle group. Let’s work side to side because we’re not just interested in the muscle. We’re interested in how the muscle is interacting with the connective tissue, interacting with the neighbors. And so I can just think about, can I restore these sliding surfaces?

The second I find something that’s painful, I can desensitize it with an isometric. I just contract into there. That’s an isometric. Anyone believe in the power of isometric? Yeah, right. So now that foam roller becomes a breath piece isometric piece I’m restoring blood flow. I’m changing how the tissues are dynamic, and that’s all in my living room.

If I have knee pain, I can work upstream on my quads, downstream on my calf. And so that simple rubric of upstream downstream suddenly means, well, maybe I can take a crack at changing some aspect of my movement system that my brain is thinking, and.

00:46:35.230 — 00:47:21.780 · Juliet Starrett

I just have to, like, double click on the upstream downstream thing. I think it’s one of the most important, you know, tactics that we give to people because you really can tackle any part of your body If you sort of say, okay. I’ve got a little bit of knee pain or my shoulders hurting. Upstream. Downstream.

Like. What is upstream and downstream on my shoulder? You know, it is my traps and my lats and, you know, my biceps and any part of the back of my shoulder. You can really. You don’t need to even know what any of these muscles are. You can just be like, okay, my shoulders here, I’m going to work. I’m going to put a ball or a roller upstream on my shoulder or downstream of my shoulder.

You don’t need to have any medical or physical therapy education. You can just sort of, you know, press play to begin, like Kelly said, and really alleviate a lot of this common musculoskeletal pain, these sort of incident level issues that we talked to.

00:47:21.820 — 00:47:24.260 · Kelly Starrett

And notice that Juliet’s not even talking about position.

00:47:24.420 — 00:47:25.500 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

I was wondering, right.

00:47:25.500 — 00:47:45.850 · Kelly Starrett

This is this is very sophisticated pressing guess which if we’re down with pressing guess which is most people I don’t know what it’s like when you push on something. Right. As soon as we start saying, well, here’s a minimum position, what’s normal? And then all of a sudden you start to put context to the mobilization in physiotherapy, we say, let’s mobilize at the position of restriction.

So if you’re trying to improve your.

00:47:46.050 — 00:47:48.330 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Mobilize at the position of restriction.

00:47:48.330 — 00:48:20.770 · Kelly Starrett

So if you’re trying to put your arm over your head, put your arm over your head and work on the tissues in this arm overhead position, and suddenly you’re just giving context to the connective tissue and the fascia and the joint capsule and the musculature and the brain, and even just, you know, if you lay it on lacrosse ball somewhere between your shoulder blade and your spine and put your arm over your head, and you just took some breaths there, your brain is like, oh, look, this is a position that’s safe.

You can breathe here. You can take pressure here. And now we begin to seemingly radically untangle what looks like really complex problems.

00:48:20.770 — 00:48:29.890 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

The first thing that you told me is that people could take hip extension, sit on the floor 20 or 30 minutes a day. So let’s.

00:48:29.890 — 00:48:30.370 · Juliet Starrett

Say 30.

00:48:30.370 — 00:48:31.250 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Minutes, 30 minutes.

00:48:31.490 — 00:48:31.810 · Juliet Starrett

Or so.

00:48:31.970 — 00:48:32.290 · Kelly Starrett

To do it.

00:48:32.290 — 00:48:33.610 · Juliet Starrett

You’re so minute. They have time.

00:48:33.810 — 00:48:36.010 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Uh, we do have to elevate standards.

00:48:36.010 — 00:48:48.080 · Kelly Starrett

Here’s a simple test people could do for their hip extension. It’s called the couch test. On your hands and knees. You’re going to back your knee into the corner of the wall. very simple. So your your shin is going up the wall, the couch stretch. Oh yes.

00:48:48.080 — 00:48:49.640 · Juliet Starrett

So your chest and the stretch.

00:48:49.800 — 00:49:40.920 · Kelly Starrett

So your your knees in the corner. Your foot is up the wall. All I need to do is can you squeeze your butt in that position. And what you see, strangely, is that when your quads are really restricted, you can talk about the interior line. If you want. You can look at the fascia, you can look the high hip flexors, the low hip flexors.

If you’re struggling for this position, it’s probably hard for you to squeeze your butt. That means when you’re at anytime your knee comes behind your body, sprinting, lunging your butt doesn’t work very well, becomes positionally inhibited, and so suddenly your hamstrings have to do the work of your glutes and your hamstrings.

And you can see this when people do hip thrusts, for example, we suddenly see that you should be able to put your knee in the corner, bring your other leg up into a high, kneel and easily get your back to the wall and breathe and squeeze your butt. And that is normal easily.

00:49:40.920 — 00:49:45.280 · Juliet Starrett

And I just want to set the stage. For most people, this test is really hard.

00:49:45.320 — 00:49:50.920 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

It’s hard. I mean, it’s hard for me. I have glute amnesia. I do, but I really do.

00:49:51.080 — 00:49:51.440 · Juliet Starrett

Yeah.

00:49:51.720 — 00:49:52.720 · Kelly Starrett

We stiffer your quads.

00:49:52.720 — 00:50:57.470 · Juliet Starrett

Are you know, we are living in an environment that is causing us to be in flex positions all the time. We’re sitting. We’re sitting on our bikes, you know, we’re sitting in the car. We’re sitting for most of our lives. And the couch, the couch test or stretch is the exact opposite of this position. So. So for Kelly, who, like you, is hyper mobile or at least extremely mobile, and the rest of us mere mortals, from a mobility standpoint, the couch test is really difficult.

I am naturally so stiff. I’m like the stiff. I was like, I swear I came out like born. I was just stiff. And Kelly is so mobile. And so I always tried to be like the real person here and say, hey, this is really difficult, but you can improve. And what’s cool about the couch test is that the practice is the same thing as the test.

And you know here you already are sitting on your the floor for 30 minutes and your back is on the couch, and you could just take a few of those minutes to just do the couch stretch as part of your 30 minutes of floor sitting. And you know, the practice and the test are the same and you can improve.

00:50:57.510 — 00:51:19.750 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Will you then improve your analysis to performance? If I am doing this and I’m on amnesia, seeing my body and my glutes, will I then be able to, when I’m asked to go into the gym to do a Bulgarian split squat or a regular squat? Now I’ll be able to recruit that tissue.

00:51:19.790 — 00:51:31.190 · Kelly Starrett

Yes, and that’s the thing you should care about. Why do I care about this? It allows me to improve my performance by normalizing my native range of motion. Do we have standards and blood panels?

00:51:31.390 — 00:51:32.070 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

We do.

00:51:32.190 — 00:51:34.670 · Kelly Starrett

So why don’t we have standards in range of motion?

00:51:34.670 — 00:52:00.860 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

I’m going to throw something else out there. I was thinking about this. I was hoping we were going to just touch on Bloods I for the longest time. And again we have a medical practice. I would tell a telehealth practice I still see patients. It’s called strong medical by the way. And over the years we’ve looked at blood panels, obviously patterns.

And then, you know, somewhere along in your career you go, Tang,

00:52:02.220 — 00:52:24.340 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

maybe it’s actually the metabolomics, maybe it’s yes, there’s the blood panel, but then maybe it’s the byproducts of what those blood panels represent. And again, I, I believe that that is the next thing that we look at our triglycerides and we look at our standardized, I’m going somewhere with this because it relates to movement.

00:52:24.380 — 00:52:25.020 · Kelly Starrett

Yes.

00:52:25.060 — 00:52:42.330 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Yeah. You’re you’re picking up what I’m laying down blood panel. That is the obvious I get that and then the flash of insight comes in. Maybe it’s actually the byproducts and not what we’re looking at, but perhaps what we’re looking at reflects the metabolomics that we are yet to be testing.

00:52:42.330 — 00:53:24.010 · Kelly Starrett

Correct. So all the things we’re talking about is if you had used your body in a way, you just had to go up and down stairs more. You had to get up off the ground. You had to carry things. I’m not saying we should have some romantic, you know, ideal. Like we all go to the farm again. It’s not practical, but what we can start to say is, what are you doing with your body every day?

And what we see is it’s very much use it or lose it in your body. Use it or lose it. If you don’t put your arms over your head, don’t be surprised when it’s hard to put your arms over your head. Right. Um, a good example of this. A good proxy for what we’re talking about is pickleball. We are such fans. Pickleball and spike ball are the two most important things.

00:53:24.450 — 00:53:25.250 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

I’ve never even heard.

00:53:25.250 — 00:53:28.370 · Kelly Starrett

About. Oh. You’ll see. Yeah. Spike ball for your kids.

00:53:28.410 — 00:53:29.410 · Juliet Starrett

It’s like a game you play in the.

00:53:29.410 — 00:54:34.360 · Kelly Starrett

Park is the most radical short game changing direction, hand-eye coordination, teamwork like you’ll be in shapes playing pickleball or playing spike ball that you’re like, I can’t do that in the gym. Precisely. So if you get injured playing pickleball, how good was your training program? That swinging a little plastic mid hitting a wiffle ball tore your biceps tendon.

What. So we have this nice test I have tissues that have not been prepared I have not you know, I’m doing my peloton. I don’t understand why tore my Achilles, you know, fracture my tibial plateau. I don’t understand. And so what you’re really saying in the blood panel is that it tells us about the human and the function and the reality of the human.

Are you breathing hard? Are you lifting weights? Do you sleep? Do you feel loved? All those things. And we can say, yeah, just take more vitamin D, right? Do more couch stretch. But I can really ask. I’m like, that’s the lowest form, you know, how do we integrate this into your life so you never have to do this stuff?

That’s really our goal.

00:54:34.600 — 00:55:11.600 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

That’s. That sounds complicated, right? The idea that we are so good physically that we don’t have to make up for our limitation, our movement limitations as humans. Is it person dependent, or do you feel confident saying, I want you to be able to put your hands over your head. I want you to be able to do all of these movements.

Confident that everybody should be able to do these ten movements and that these ten movements should be trained. Because also the idea of foam rolling is to identify patterns of restriction.

00:55:11.600 — 00:55:12.560 · Kelly Starrett

Or get out of pain.

00:55:12.680 — 00:55:19.120 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Or get out of pain. And then the next component to that is is what what’s after that?

00:55:19.160 — 00:56:17.150 · Juliet Starrett

We haven’t talked about Bill to move our book, but when when we wrote Supple Leopard, you know, it’s like a 500 page thick textbook with like photos of Kelly who looks like a child, by the way, as a side note, yeah, most people don’t read it, they use it as like a coffee table book or a place to put their laptop just to raise it up and make it a standing desk, because it’s so complicated.

So we want it to base. We actually think of Built to Move almost as like a prequel to Supple Leopard, because we wanted to create this book that was actually accessible, that you could hand your neighbor and your friends. And so it was worth talking about how do we expand this conversation to like, regular people who aren’t training, you know, as much as we we and our families are training, we pick these vital signs and we love the word vital signs because we’re like, hey, in the pandemic, everyone was like, you know, telling us their various vital signs that were sort of complicated and medical.

And we thought, well, why can’t we have movement related vital signs? So we have a variety of vital signs in the book. Some are more lifestyle related nutrition focus, but we do.

00:56:17.190 — 00:56:17.990 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Have in there.

00:56:17.990 — 00:56:54.500 · Juliet Starrett

Some movement specific vital signs. And I would say, um, everybody should test themselves on those basic movement vital signs, just in the same way that you would test your blood pressure, um, And then work to improve those. You don’t have to already, you know, show up and be perfect at couch stretch. But I do think we should all be working towards those positions and that everybody can.

And they’re just simple tests and simple practices in this book that everybody can do. Um, you know, the couch stretches. Couch test is one of those tests. Getting up and down off the ground is one of those tests. Um, you know, we have a balance test in there.

00:56:54.540 — 00:56:55.340 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

What is the balance?

00:56:55.460 — 00:58:09.930 · Juliet Starrett

The balance test is the sole. Um, it’s. I’m sure you’ve heard of it, but for those who haven’t, it’s standing on one leg, eyes closed. Um, and the idea is that you stand on one leg, eyes closed for 20s, and, and you get a score based on how many times you have to touch your toes. And when people don’t realize is almost all of us can stand there with our eyes open and we think we’re, like, crushing balance.

And we’re so good at this. But the moment we take close our eyes and remove that visual piece of it, um, we all of a sudden you start. We do this in conferences. We see people like, you know, wheeling their arms in the in the air. And it becomes a really difficult test for most people. And, you know, just like all of these mobility pieces we’ve been talking about balance this also such a use it or lose it.

And it’s such a simple test that you can do. And and then the way that we practice it is we stand on one leg every night and morning when we brush our teeth. So again, you don’t need to go to a balanced class and add one more thing to your longevity listicle, but it is something that we think you should test as a vital sign on the regular.

Like where are you with balance? Um, you know, the number one reason people end up in nursing homes is they’ve fallen. So we do think it’s important. And also young people, it’s the number one reason that young people actually go to the ER two is falls. Um, so everybody thinks it’s just like an old person thing.

But young people.

00:58:09.970 — 00:58:19.850 · Kelly Starrett

We can wait. We can wait around to have scurvy and then say, well, you should probably take some vitamin C, right? Yeah. Or we can wait till you have scurvy and we just wait around till everyone else scurvy, and then we’re like, okay, well.

00:58:19.850 — 00:58:20.730 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

That’s where we are right now.

00:58:20.770 — 00:58:21.210 · Kelly Starrett

That’s right.

00:58:21.490 — 00:58:44.320 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

And the ten vital signs for the listener or viewer, I’ll just mention them. Sit and stand. Test your breathing. You have hip extension squatting. You talk about nutrition. You have shoulder rotation, which, um, I definitely want to touch on walking sleep. And then you’ve got active recovery tissue work.

Don’t miss anything.

00:58:44.520 — 00:59:15.440 · Kelly Starrett

No. And ideally what we’ve done here is said, hey, look, we can have the next conversation about exercise, but let’s create sort of a non-technical, well evidenced set of behaviors that everyone could wrap their head around very quickly and also just say, hey, how about this? I say, you can wait around until scurvy, or you can eat some vitamin C, right?

Oh, or I can eat fruits and vegetables. Right. And suddenly you’re like, okay, we’ve actually solved this by going upstream to the diet problem.

00:59:15.480 — 00:59:18.760 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

How would you define mobility versus flexibility?

00:59:18.880 — 01:00:04.120 · Juliet Starrett

Well, so Kelly gave I think earlier when he was talking about range of motion our sort of supple leopard Uber technical definition, but we’ve realized we needed to expand it because, again, we want people to care. And so our new definition of mobility is the ability to move freely through your environment without pain.

And maybe most importantly, do the things you want to be able to do with your body. So we all have different things we want to do. Some people want to play pickleball. Some people just want to be able to walk with their grandchildren around Disneyland for the day. We all have movement goals. Even the sedentary among us have some movement goals.

Um, and so mobility is what’s going to give you access to be able to do the things that you love.

01:00:04.160 — 01:00:29.310 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

You left a perfect opening to where I was hoping we could get to mobility and muscle mass. Um, they, I’m assuming, are connected. There seems to be this accelerated loss of muscle, whether it’s aging or inactivity. What is the relationship between mobility and muscle and muscle mass.

01:00:29.350 — 01:00:42.590 · Kelly Starrett

I would say if we have to go upstream and look at if you have a body that’s not in pain and that feels good, that you want to go move, it’s going to be a lot easier to maintain that muscle mass. Right. Because now we have the root.

01:00:42.590 — 01:00:43.630 · Juliet Starrett

And is out of pain too.

01:00:43.910 — 01:01:14.270 · Kelly Starrett

That’s right. I think I may mention that we have now all the, the, the components that would set us up to be able to go move ourselves. What we see is that most people’s movement when they’re children, we talked earlier about being young and fab and being able to whatever we want, their body, our movement hall is huge, like a big hospital double double pathway.

And as we get older, potentially that movement’s hallway pathway choices get smaller and smaller and smaller. Oh, I can’t do that. I don’t go walking around hand swing.

01:01:14.670 — 01:01:20.150 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

But that’s through activity. That’s through choice of not doing it. Not because there’s some potentially.

01:01:20.190 — 01:01:34.580 · Kelly Starrett

Right. Maybe I got injured or maybe I hurt my hip, or maybe my torn ACL in college. And now I know I’m really afraid to go play. You know, in this fantasy kickball league, whatever it is, the key here is you range of motion doesn’t have to change as you age. That’s really.

01:01:34.580 — 01:01:35.300 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Doesn’t have to.

01:01:35.300 — 01:01:35.820 · Juliet Starrett

Change.

01:01:35.940 — 01:01:46.060 · Kelly Starrett

No, it’s one of the aspects that is it’s going to be slower to adapt because as we get older, it takes a little bit more loud signal for us to hear those things. Probably.

01:01:46.140 — 01:01:48.100 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Right. How do you define adaptation?

01:01:48.300 — 01:02:29.930 · Kelly Starrett

Just your ability to respond to a stimulus. So if you have a muscle strain and you’re older, we always like to say you’re going to heal up the rate of a human being or slower, like there’s no fast healer. You’re just like, this is the tissue physiology. So as you get older and you’re not sleeping and don’t have the nutrition and etcetera, etcetera, your ability to adapt to a stimulus is less.

You’re going to be sore, you’re not going to get the gains everyone else gets. You know, Juliet has this incredible genetics where, you know, we do something? It’s like she eats the entire apple and I get a bite of the apple. Even though we both have an apple. Juliet is like, burn. And I’m like, I guess I need six apples to eat.

That’s one apple.

01:02:30.330 — 01:02:31.490 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

You just want to kill those people.

01:02:31.490 — 01:03:08.770 · Kelly Starrett

You’re like, 100% okay. So I think what we can start to say is you don’t have to lose your ability to move. If you maintain your ability to move, it’s going to be a lot easier to jump, lift heavy loads, not be afraid to, you know? Hey, I can’t bend my knees, Kelly. I mean, I put up something recently on the Insta and something about jumping and people were like, what if?

And I got a list of probably 50 comments while I have this and I have this and I have this, and you know, we’re like, we need to be clever enough to help people maintain their range of motion and tissue health so they can continue to load in the way that makes sense for them so they can.

01:03:08.810 — 01:03:15.010 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

But it’s fair to say if you lose mobility, then yes, you’re probably going to lose muscle.

01:03:15.250 — 01:03:20.920 · Kelly Starrett

I would say that’s your and your choices of what I guess I can do with the leg extension machine as my own movement.

01:03:20.920 — 01:03:25.280 · Juliet Starrett

Choice gets so narrowed that to me, muscle loss is inevitable.

01:03:25.320 — 01:03:26.759 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Does that then

01:03:28.280 — 01:03:29.800 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

affect patterns?

01:03:29.840 — 01:03:30.400 · Kelly Starrett

Oh yeah.

01:03:30.440 — 01:04:34.880 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

I right now the landscape really is still in isolation. Not for you guys, but you go and you go to do a bicep curl or tricep extension or isolated resistance training activities, which I think are very valuable. Yeah. Um, but it’s not thinking about terms of patterns, of patterns of movement. You know, this is, you know, I worry about my kids, and I’m hearing you talk about adaptation, about the things that we lose, being able to sit on the floor, being able to lift our arms overhead and these vital signs and accelerate that to an earlier generation, our children.

Well, you know, even earlier. Right. Five, six what becomes normal? Because again, you guys are moving into the era of you want to help younger athletes, what do they need to? How do they need to start implementing this? Because they’re already sitting on the floor. Yeah, right. They’re already I mean, they’re not rolling around, but they’re there comes a an inflection point.

01:04:34.920 — 01:04:58.960 · Kelly Starrett

We when we wrote, uh, ready to run, we had a daughter who was in kindergarten at the time, and all the kindergartners run like Usain Bolt. All of them. They fall, they’re on the ball, their foot midfoot, like they’re all sprinters. They all like, get out of the pool and they sprint. And then the first grade half the cohort starts heel striking halfway through the school year.

So they change fundamentally change a primary motor pattern starting.

01:04:59.000 — 01:04:59.360 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Why does that.

01:04:59.360 — 01:05:04.800 · Kelly Starrett

Happen? What’s the behavior that changed when they start to do in the first grade that grew and starts sitting in.

01:05:04.800 — 01:05:06.240 · Juliet Starrett

Desk, starts sitting all the time?

01:05:06.680 — 01:05:09.840 · Kelly Starrett

They’re not on the ground kindergartners. They’re not working on it.

01:05:09.840 — 01:05:13.320 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

So suddenly it really hurts my heart. I’m gonna make my kids sit on the floor, okay?

01:05:13.480 — 01:05:47.510 · Kelly Starrett

Whenever we can. And look, we all, like you can say, well, I came out of a tradition of X and such, and what we can start to say is, well, that may be true. You did a lot of sitting, but what happened in the rest of your day. Right. And what we see is free play experimenting all. And all of that is gone. And we now are recognizing that long term athletic development movement, development probably has to be a little bit more formal.

I need to take my kid to the gymnastics. We got to go put in, you know, parks that look like we had in the 1970s where you could go up the slide and die, right? Not the sanitized.

01:05:47.510 — 01:05:49.030 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

No, because they still have those.

01:05:49.150 — 01:06:04.790 · Kelly Starrett

Exactly. And so what you can start to see is I’m going to have to avail myself of as many opportunities to get my kid moving, probably in more formal movement environments like basketball or a soccer league or something. You know, I’m surprised.

01:06:05.230 — 01:06:11.990 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

I’m learning. I’m surprised to hear you guys say this. I thought that you were going to say we’re specializing kids too early.

01:06:12.030 — 01:06:12.510 · Kelly Starrett

We are.

01:06:12.550 — 01:06:13.830 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Yeah, we are, we are.

01:06:14.150 — 01:06:29.420 · Juliet Starrett

We are. I mean, I think our philosophy is getting. You know, get your kids into. And I think what our focus was when our kids were little was getting them into like, what we’d call a movement practice. So a martial art, gymnastics, something where they’re really learning how to move their bodies.

01:06:29.460 — 01:06:36.700 · Kelly Starrett

And also a course we have a 511 monster dance. She was the worst, biggest dancer there was in ballet, but she was in ballet.

01:06:36.740 — 01:07:41.250 · Juliet Starrett

Yeah. So dance, gymnastics, a martial art, like any kind of movement. Practice. Um, and then maybe if they also want to do a sport, a sport as well, I think the, you know, if we wanted to be living in the ideal world, it would, you know, go back to when we were kids where you just went outside and free played. But we also live in reality.

Like, that’s not what kids do these days. They aren’t free playing. And so, you know, we do believe that we should get kids into, you know, movement practices when they’re little and have them play lots of different sports and encourage that as parents. I mean, I think one of the greatest gifts you can give to your kid as a parent is encouraging them to find a way they love to move, because I really believe all human beings, even the most sedentary among us, like have a way they would enjoy moving their body.

But maybe they never discovered that. And so our philosophy as parents was help our kids discover a way to move their bodies that they enjoy and feels good to them, because then when they go into adulthood, they know if I swim, I know I feel good or if I play the sport, I know I feel good. But for them, connecting movement to their well-being.

01:07:41.290 — 01:07:41.810 · Kelly Starrett

And play.

01:07:41.810 — 01:07:47.010 · Juliet Starrett

And play was so important for us. And so, so, you know, we are not fans of specializing.

01:07:47.050 — 01:07:50.130 · Kelly Starrett

No kid wants to do Bulgarian split squats and bikes like what.

01:07:50.250 — 01:07:51.130 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

My son does.

01:07:51.130 — 01:07:53.450 · Kelly Starrett

Right away. Normal children.

01:07:53.450 — 01:07:54.810 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

He’s training for the Seal teams.

01:07:56.050 — 01:08:18.080 · Kelly Starrett

Okay, so we gotta wait. That’s not that’s not wrong. Um, I’ll hint at. For example, we have a friend who runs a dancing thing called the Fitness Marshall. And Caleb has three, two other friends, and they just do choreograph dances to popular music and you can go on YouTube. They have millions of followers.

Pick a song and then dance as a family.

01:08:18.120 — 01:08:19.040 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

So what is it called?

01:08:19.080 — 01:08:19.520 · Juliet Starrett

Fitness.

01:08:19.520 — 01:08:20.240 · Kelly Starrett

Martial fitness.

01:08:20.319 — 01:08:24.640 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

I don’t know what you guys just opened up. It is guys, I’m changing over my content.

01:08:25.000 — 01:09:20.680 · Kelly Starrett

So suddenly, if the whole family is mimicking rhythm, putting in sort of coordination, not obsessing about capacity, which is an adult obsession and certainly a construct of where we’ve been for the last 20 years, which is as long as they put up more watts, I’m healthier. As long as I put out more watts or another kilo, I’m a better athlete.

And we know that that’s not true, right? We’re just we’re just obsessed. Look, if we just thought the, you know, the rogue echo bike and thruster solves all the problem, we would just do that, right? I mean, the rogue echo bike is low skill, high physiology. It’s going to kill you, but it’s not going to make you better at dancing.

Turning the corner, cutting, throwing a frisbee, playing an actual sport. Learning a new sport. So, so for our children, I think if you were like, well, I don’t know what I can do. You can start by wrestling with your kids on the, on the carpet, just that, like, let’s start that.

01:09:20.680 — 01:10:58.150 · Juliet Starrett

And then I got one other quick story to tell you. When my kids were in elementary school, I started this thing called the Walking School Bus in my neighborhood. And honestly, if someone were to ask me like, what’s a public health intervention you would do? Like if I were in charge, I would literally eliminate the drop off lane.

Like, I think the drop off lane is like one of the worst things we’ve done. You know, most people still live within 1 or 2 miles of their kids elementary school. Um, and yet we’ve created this we’ve changed the whole environment of the front of elementary schools, where it’s like all about the drop off line, and everybody’s driving their kids, but they live close enough to walk.

But in many cases, parents are jammed by schedules or timing or they’re afraid to have their kid walk alone, understandably. Um, and so we did this thing where we said, at 755, every single morning, rain or shine, we will. We Kelly and Juliet will be standing at this corner, And you get your kid to this corner.

Whether you drive them or walk them there or join us. And we will walk them to school a mile and a mile. It was like a mile and a quarter. And we walk them to elementary school. And we did that for both of our kids. And some days we’d have 50 kids walking with us to school. And then the parents started walking with us, and we had a parent report that she lost like 25 pounds because she had been sedentary before.

And she just joined us every day on the walking school bus. And it like, changed her life. But, you know, that’s like a simple thing. You know, we and the only change we had to make in a family is we did have to wake up ten minutes earlier like we had to instead of waking up at seven, we had to set the alarm for 650 in order to get everybody ready and walk to school.

And what was awesome for us is like, by the time we started our workday, we’d already gotten, we’d walk there and back, so we’d gotten like 5000 steps. Um, but it’s this simple thing that, you know, most people live close enough to their kids elementary school that they can walk with their kid to school.

01:10:58.150 — 01:11:40.100 · Kelly Starrett

And the research says that kids are probably getting 2 to 3000 steps a day, not that minimum eight. So if you can give everyone in your family a pill reduces all cause mortality. It’s walking a thousand steps right by 50%. And here we are just saying that, man, our kids aren’t moving enough. And if we’re going to and you hinted at looking down, we’re like, I’m looking at your blood panel, but I actually need to turn around and look at you.

And I need to look at what your family and I need to understand you for the last ten, 20, 30 years. And what we’re coming up against now is we’ve really removed the need for move, for moving play. You can hyper processed food, sedentary ness, sleep degradation. It’s sort of a perfect storm.

01:11:40.140 — 01:11:47.700 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Are we overcomplicating it? As I as I’m sitting here thinking, um, am I overcomplicating the idea that

01:11:48.820 — 01:12:14.490 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

I, I think in a very structured way, I think, okay, I need to do rotation, rotational movement. I probably need to do rotational movement 3 or 4 days a week because I just don’t want to get it. And it’s just my brain. Right? Because I’m not telling anyone else what to do. I’m not the expert when it comes. I mean, I’m sitting here with you guys, but I think I need to do some rotation.

I need to hang overhead. I need to be able to jump. I started adding in don’t cringe broad jumps.

01:12:14.530 — 01:12:14.930 · Kelly Starrett

Oh no.

01:12:15.130 — 01:12:16.570 · Juliet Starrett

We have jumps in our program.

01:12:16.610 — 01:12:16.970 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Okay.

01:12:17.010 — 01:12:19.370 · Kelly Starrett

In fact, we do. Seated. Yeah, yeah. We’re so into it.

01:12:19.410 — 01:12:19.730 · Juliet Starrett

We’re into.

01:12:19.730 — 01:13:05.330 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

It. Okay. Oh, cool. Uh, I just made that up. I didn’t I didn’t think about I again, I’ve got two little kids. I’m not moving as much as I need to be. I don’t even know what optimal movement time people will say will just move us as much as you can. Um, yes. But I’m sure that there has to be, as humans evolve, an adaptation, a brain adaptation.

I’m sure that the the grand human design was that we were going to get smarter and become more efficient. And there’s alternatively ways I’m sure that we can adapt anyway. Rotation jumping. I think I should be able to hang overhead. I think it should be able to push up, do a push up. I like those, don’t take those away from me, but probably squat hinge.

Right. These.

01:13:05.370 — 01:13:57.610 · Kelly Starrett

Well, what you’re starting to say is, if anyone who’s a coach is listening, what are your non-negotiables as a coach? So if you work with us and we have an adult training program, you’ll see that Kelly Starrett and Juliet Star believe in the sanctity of pull ups. And you may start by we’re going to get you hanging a lot, and then we’re gonna use a bang hanging and we’re maybe jumping up and moving.

But pull ups are non-negotiable for me because people who pull up have healthier necks, have less back pain, have competency overhead, we have less shoulder dysfunction. And that means just as a coach, the terminal idea is, well, I need to make sure that you’re spending time in this position because it translates to too many other things.

The pull up is so easy to do. So you’re going to see pull ups in my program. What you just started to hint at is, how do I want to expose my body to these fundamental shapes? So lunging is a fundamental shape, right? Getting you that knee behind your butt. However you want to do that, what do you what do you have?

01:13:57.610 — 01:14:00.890 · Juliet Starrett

Squatting is a fundamental shape, but there’s a thousand ways you can.

01:14:01.130 — 01:14:02.760 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

You agree that the.

01:14:02.960 — 01:14:42.160 · Kelly Starrett

The way you’re thinking is cool? Well, that’s not that’s a great starting place, but that doesn’t tell you what the shape looks like. Do you mean people will push pull. Hinge is saying protein, fat carbohydrate. We all agree. Perfect. Do I need some vitamins in there? Sure. Okay. But that’s what the list you gave me.

What does it look like in terms of how you are bringing your shoulder behind your body? Well, that could be rowing or push ups or bench press or running or, you know, you can see dips. There’s so many things where I have to get my elbow behind me, pushing up off the chair. As an example of what that looks like in a terminal place, you said I believe in push ups because.

01:14:42.240 — 01:14:42.440 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

I.

01:14:42.440 — 01:14:52.960 · Kelly Starrett

Like them well. And guess what? That pushup is taking that shoulder into fundamental, important positions of shoulder extension. So no wonder that chaturanga and yoga is such a powerful thing.

01:14:53.000 — 01:14:58.760 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

I do have shoulder problems. My right shoulder bothers me only since actually fixing my hip.

01:14:59.160 — 01:15:00.950 · Kelly Starrett

So because you have a bigger range of motion.

01:15:00.950 — 01:15:10.390 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

They’re crazy. And so now my Rachel is, would you rather have me do something that hurts and maybe not is perfect. Versus finding a different way to.

01:15:10.430 — 01:15:10.870 · Juliet Starrett

Push.

01:15:11.110 — 01:15:13.270 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Or restricting. Yes. To which.

01:15:13.270 — 01:15:21.350 · Kelly Starrett

So what we can start to say is, should you be able to do push up pain free? Yes. No. You’re the best, the greatest tool. Test retest. So we make a change where.

01:15:21.350 — 01:15:27.070 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

You would rather have me do the push up than do it. Than be pain free versus not doing it.

01:15:27.110 — 01:16:02.780 · Kelly Starrett

Well, what I’d say is you need to do push ups. We need to figure out why your shoulder hurts and push ups. That’s the thing. So suddenly it’s going to be normal that you go through your life on less than your shoulder. Hurts a little bit. That’s okay. But now we can start to say, I wonder why my shoulder hurts.

It’s because my my spine is stiff. Is it because I don’t have any extension? Because I don’t have any internal rotation? Have. Have I just even talked to my pack? So can you make the the case in your head like, hey, my quads are really stiff, I have knee pain, my triceps are really stiff. I wonder why I have shoulder pain.

I mean, it’s almost like they’re connected.

01:16:02.820 — 01:16:19.740 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Because as people are listening to this, they’re thinking, well, I have shoulder pain and, you know, they have all. I’m assuming have experienced these things and they want everyone else. Exactly. And they want to know, should I stop? Do I have to solve it? Do I need to find a different way to do it? Or.

01:16:19.820 — 01:16:48.420 · Kelly Starrett

We believe in regression and progression in our practice and the way we work with a lot of athletes, we don’t use a lot of corrective exercises. Corrective exercises absolutely work, but there tend to be in the domain of rehab. I’m doing this exercise because you cannot squat yet, so I’m going to use a surrogate for squatting to get those hips like.

And so what we suddenly see is that people are doing a collection of, of corrective exercises like clamshells all the time. I’m like, I don’t know, what’s the word for clamshell? I don’t mind.

01:16:48.580 — 01:16:49.140 · Juliet Starrett

I’ll use.

01:16:49.140 — 01:16:53.020 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Hates clamshell weight. And now I’m really offended here. Really? No clamshell.

01:16:53.020 — 01:16:55.300 · Kelly Starrett

Do you want to do clamshells? You know, knock yourself right out.

01:16:55.660 — 01:16:57.170 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Are they going to work? Is going to.

01:16:57.210 — 01:17:02.610 · Kelly Starrett

Help. No, it’s going to babysit a tissue temporarily so that I can have that.

01:17:02.610 — 01:17:04.050 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

So again, my day.

01:17:04.090 — 01:17:32.930 · Kelly Starrett

What I really like, if you want to do clamshells, keep doing it. So the key here is that we want to say, hey, if I here’s the fundamental shape that my body should be able to access. The movement language of the gym is really easy for everyone to understand. And if I can’t, maybe I can use a position transfer exercise and a position transfer exercise is a mobilization.

Have you ever rolled on a foam roller to improve your how your knee moves? That’s a position transfer exercise. A mobilization.

01:17:32.970 — 01:17:33.370 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Okay.

01:17:33.410 — 01:17:36.330 · Kelly Starrett

Is targeted to restore a position.

01:17:36.690 — 01:17:46.770 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

A mobilization okay when JJ comes over and grabs underneath my scapula and is doing this thing to, I don’t know, really doesn’t feel so great.

01:17:47.210 — 01:17:49.610 · Kelly Starrett

Restoring how you scapula is working with your.

01:17:49.610 — 01:17:52.450 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Body. But then I can move better. Yes, yes. Okay.

01:17:52.490 — 01:18:05.970 · Kelly Starrett

That’s the key. What we’d like to do is get to a place where you have a basic working knowledge of, of your body so that you’re like, my knee hurts or my back hurts. I jump into couch stretch and you’re like, wow, my back feels better, or my knee feels better.

01:18:06.130 — 01:18:06.530 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

By the.

01:18:06.530 — 01:18:14.650 · Juliet Starrett

Way. Yeah. And this is what we do with our program. You know, we have people that are from 35 all the way up to 70. So it is remote.

01:18:14.650 — 01:18:15.690 · Kelly Starrett

But weekly coaching.

01:18:15.690 — 01:19:25.960 · Juliet Starrett

But the thing is, is, you know, going back to what I said about this longevity, we need a new word triangle is that we don’t see how you can have a real strength and conditioning program without this mobility piece, because inevitably, as we’ve talked about, people are going to experience these incidents, these little musculoskeletal aches and pains and injuries, and they may have to go through a period of modifying.

And we’re all about that. I mean, one of the things we we say in our program and work really hard to train people is that we feel like we failed them if we haven’t trained them how to modify, like we want people who’ve joined our program to join any other strength and conditioning program and walk into the gym and say, okay, today we have pull ups and I can’t do a pull up, but I know how to modify.

So I’m going to hang the band and I’m going to just hang there. So that’s part of our program. Part of our program isn’t just giving you a strength conditioning program. Part of us is part of it is educating people how to understand how to modify based on their limitations, where they are their body, and then also include this mobility slash position transfer expert, um, position transfer exercise program into the it’s it’s built in it’s enmeshed with the program.

01:19:25.960 — 01:19:33.640 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

You guys have built a company together. You’ve many companies written books. You’ve been married for decades, decades.

01:19:33.720 — 01:19:35.440 · Juliet Starrett

25 years, almost.

01:19:35.480 — 01:19:52.080 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Two decades. Two daughters. Is there one thing that you guys disagree on that perhaps, again, maybe that you still disagree on in health and movement longevity? There’s some genuine difference of perspectives.

01:19:52.120 — 01:19:55.070 · Juliet Starrett

We’ve been asked that question before and that’s an awesome question.

01:19:55.110 — 01:20:00.030 · Kelly Starrett

J star I met. It’s important to understand I met her at the World Championships in Chile.

01:20:00.070 — 01:20:00.750 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Did you call her J.

01:20:01.030 — 01:20:04.430 · Kelly Starrett

J star stars. J stars, if you’re in there.

01:20:04.470 — 01:20:11.510 · Juliet Starrett

Quick side note I was just with our mutual friend Vonda Wright, and she found out my nickname was J. Star. And she’s like, what.

01:20:11.550 — 01:20:11.990 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

I.

01:20:12.150 — 01:20:12.710 · Juliet Starrett

Mean? Yeah.

01:20:12.710 — 01:20:14.629 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

So I’m going to use it on

01:20:15.630 — 01:20:16.590 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

day one.

01:20:16.910 — 01:20:58.660 · Kelly Starrett

It’s class five. It’s a huge competition. World championships. I know a lot about Juliette. She’s on the women’s team. I’m on the men’s team. We’re competing. That should be the basis for understanding why we’re still together. We both love to play. We don’t pick up new sports without the other person.

We really love to travel and be together. We’re very simpatico in the way we see the world. And I think some of that we got really lucky because once you’re at the World Championships, I can make a lot of sort of inferences about who you are, what you like to do, your train, your play, your competition. So I would say the one.

One thing that comes to mind is that I like to sometimes program open pieces.

01:20:58.700 — 01:20:59.740 · Juliet Starrett

This is a good one.

01:21:00.260 — 01:21:02.420 · Kelly Starrett

So this seems like I’m answering a question.

01:21:02.460 — 01:21:03.580 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

I don’t even know what that means.

01:21:03.620 — 01:21:04.660 · Kelly Starrett

So what it means is I.

01:21:04.660 — 01:21:04.980 · Juliet Starrett

Don’t think.

01:21:04.980 — 01:21:17.460 · Kelly Starrett

You’d like. I don’t know how much volume we need today, but we’re going to go and tell wattage collapses and tell technique drops and tell all of a sudden we can tell you’ve had enough stimulus. And I have a.

01:21:17.460 — 01:21:17.820 · Juliet Starrett

Range.

01:21:18.220 — 01:21:28.100 · Kelly Starrett

Because I’ve been coaching for a long time. But Juliet’s like, no, no, no. I need to know how many rounds I’m doing, how reps I’m doing. I’m like, no, no, no, no, I don’t know. Because who showed up today. So I love to program these open pieces.

01:21:28.140 — 01:22:09.410 · Juliet Starrett

And he likes to program these workouts where you just you have to be self-aware enough to be like, okay, I now see that I’m sucking. So my workout is over. And that goes against like. Like I am definitely much more of a rule follower. And I also want to know how to like, manage my energy in a workout. So if I don’t know how long it’s going to go, then I don’t know how hard to push.

And so it just it goes against my Constitution as a person. So we don’t agree on that. I’ll add one to, you know, Kelly loves to use the one place we disagree is he always loves to talk about how you should have this normal range of motion. And I always think it’s mean. I’m always like, you’re so mean because he has this mobility privilege.

He is just naturally very mobile.

01:22:09.410 — 01:22:09.970 · Kelly Starrett

I never work.

01:22:09.970 — 01:22:29.410 · Juliet Starrett

On it and he does also work on it. I give him credit. He he works on it and maintains it, but he’s naturally very mobile. Um, and I, we disagree on what normal is because as a more stiff person, I, I want to be normal too. And most people want to be normal. So I think we always disagree on what is normal when it comes to arranging.

01:22:29.450 — 01:23:57.480 · Kelly Starrett

Maybe I said normative today for this reason. Right. What are our reference ranges? No, I you know, um, I think you if you’re going to be in partnership with someone for decades, especially working together, and we have real different roles. Um, Juliet’s the boss and the brains. Um, we have to be really delighted.

And, you know, a trained we just have to be in that because it’s too complicated, it’s too messy. There’s so much going on. And um, but I think if you understand the first and foremost that Juliet, I really like to play together. That’s that’s the thing. Then everything else is just, you know, I don’t think we have fundamental differences.

Juliet will always want to default to eating vegetables whenever she can, and that’s less of a priority for me. Sometimes I’ll say that one of the biggest upgrades you can do for your physical practice, whatever you like to do, is take the first 15 or 20 minutes of your warm up and play. So you’re like, hey, I need some more rotation.

So recently I was just hanging out with a bunch of coaches. They do their formal, some kids are doing their formal. Like I pull my knee to my chest, do my ace skips like I’m getting ready for the NFL. And I was like my other friend. And I was like, hey, grab a medicine ball and this huge field. And all we started doing was throwing the medicine ball at each other.

And as many different crazy ways, he and I are drenched in sweat and had to bend over, squat, throw, rotate, fun. And our friends were like, hey, that looks like a lot more fun! And I was like, yes, well.

01:23:57.560 — 01:24:34.640 · Juliet Starrett

And one other quick story about that. Kelly and I always travel with the Frisbee, like I actually have a Frisbee in my suitcase right out there. And it’s one of our favorite ways to warm up will be in, you know, it’s so boring. You’re in a hotel gym that’s like a teeny little square, and we’ll just go out in front of the hotel and we’ll throw Frisbee for ten minutes, and we get some rotation and fun, and we run and cut and, um, you know, we just always have a Frisbee with us because we’re like, hey, we, you know, we have this weird idea as adults that, like, playing is for kids.

But we think the warm up for those of us who love to go to the gym, the warm up is the place where you’ve got to throw in some play and experimentation and just actually make it fun.

01:24:34.640 — 01:24:38.080 · Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

And you’re bringing it back. Oh, play. Well done.