Dr. Kelly Starrett - On Building a Durable Body for Life & the Power of Daily Movement

It turns out not drinking is a risk factor for Alzheimer's. So let me say that again. Not drinking is a risk factor for Alzheimer's and dementia. And the reason is if you don't drink, you're not likely to have rich social connections. So it was nothing about the alcohol. It was about— turns out that how connected we are as humans is as important as some of these other things that we want to pretend are important. And if you have an auntie or an uncle in your family who is in their 90s, they didn't do high-intensity exercise. They didn't do keto. They didn't do fasting. They didn't play with any of these mitochondrial health supplements. What they had was they kept moving, they had rich interactions, they slept well, they ate whole foods.

Hey there, I'm Claudia von Boeselager, a former investment banker turned entrepreneur, longevity coach, biohacker, and mother of two. Once burnt out and overwhelmed with chronic health issues, I've transformed my life and helped thousands of people do the same. I've even reduced my biological age by 17 years. Yes, I'm 26 again. Now I'm here to share the tools, strategies, and inspiration to help you live healthier, happier, and longer. On this podcast, I interview world-leading experts in health, biohacking, mindset, and performance, and share personal stories and learnings to bring you the latest insights and tips. Think of this as your go-to space for real talk about all things health and optimizing your life. Ready to unlock your best self?

Let's dive in.

Let's dive in. This is the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast.

My guest today is Dr. Kelly Starrett, world-renowned coach, physical therapist, bestselling author, and co-founder of The Ready State, the groundbreaking movement and human performance platform he created with his wife Juliette. Originally launched in 2008 as Mobility WOD, The Ready State helped redefine modern performance therapy and sparked a global movement around self-care, durability, and movement literacy. Kelly has coached and consulted elite performers across nearly every high-stakes arena, from NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB athletes to Olympic gold medalists, Tour de France cyclists, world record holders, CrossFit Games champions, ballet dancers, military teams, and high-performing executives. He's the co-author of multiple bestsellers including Becoming a Supple Leopard, Ready to Run, Built to Move, and Deskbound. His work has been featured on 60 Minutes, The Tim Ferriss Show, Good Morning America, and the Andrew Huberman Podcast. Together, Kelly and Juliet also founded San Francisco's CrossFit, one of the first CrossFit affiliates, and Stand Up Kids, a nonprofit that has brought standing and moving desks to more than 95,000 children across the US. As an athlete, Kelly competed on the US canoe and kayak teams captained the men's whitewater rafting team to 2 national titles and raced in 2 championships. Please enjoy today's conversation. Kelly, welcome back. Last time we spoke, which was episode 113, super excited to have you back on, and we talked about becoming supple, durable humans. What has evolved in your thinking or protocols since then?

That's a wonderful way to start. And what I'll say is I think we need to double down we've, we've seen a shift where suddenly the consciousness has caught fire a little bit. People are interested. I think it would be disingenuine of us to say people weren't interested in their health, but now they're starting to understand that small of these behaviors, nutrition, strength, conditioning, et cetera, et cetera, community are really the backbone of what it means to live a good life all the way to the end, a full life. And the problem I think is that there's so much confusion on the internet. Where someone says, hey, I'm interested in this. And they open the door and it's a huge, vast ocean and they shut the door and they're like, well, which, which pill can I take? Which red bed can I lay in? What's the easiest way? Because that's so confusing. We haven't taught people in systems how to think in systems. And I'll say right now, we are in the middle of a January durability challenge where we have about 2,500 people spending a week inside our program. And it's not very scientific, but it gives us a big dataset of understanding inputs and outputs. And again, we've been doing this for 20+ years and had really good thinking, but sometimes when we actually see where the rubber hits the road, people can't hang from a bar. They struggle with walking. Their sleep, they've really been lying about their sleep. You know, they're like, well, hey, I'm lifting weights. I'm like, actually, you're not lifting weights. You're doing entertainment with some resistance. Right. And there's a dance party going on and, and it feels like work, but it's not really changing your body. Then we add in this complexity of GLP-1s. And the real need to say, hey, for the last 20 years we've said lose body fat. That's the most important thing. So people are finally like, wow, I have this holy grail of losing body fat. And what comes along with it is lean muscle mass plus, you know, bone density. And we're at a crisis right now where people in our age, I'm in my 50s, suddenly are saying, hey, what you said was supposed to work isn't working. I'm going to Peloton. I'm eating salads. I'm restricted. So, um, we're seeing right now, believe it or not, this is going to be a little controversial. We have just reversed our position on alcohol in the United States officially. So one of the things that we've said for a long time is that alcohol is a neurotoxin and it's carcinogenic and it's really gnarly. And we, we have to even go back when we had prohibition in the United States. Prohibition happened at a time where women had no agency. They couldn't vote. They didn't have bank accounts. And there was a real prevalence of alcoholism where women could come home and be battered by a husband who was drunk and had no recourse. And the whole prohibition movement actually came about— is what people want to talk about, is prohibition in the United States— came about as actually a women's movement, as trying to create safety. And what we learned at that time was we actually did create a little bit better society when we got alcohol under control a little bit. So, you know, neither here nor there. I don't think alcohol is the problem or not. But we've come to realize is probably no alcohol is actually good for the body. And I'll say that human beings, it's okay to get out of your brain. And I'm not a teetotaler, and a margarita is proof of intelligent design. So I just want to be very clear. And if you are a Riesling vinter out there, you know where my number is. So, but what we found is that disrupts sleep. It's not great, right? It's, it's hard on our livers, hard on our bodies. Okay. We're still human beings, but the research is actually coming around that it turns out that not drinking is a risk factor for Alzheimer's. So let me say that again. Not drinking is a risk factor for Alzheimer's and dementia. And the reason is if you don't drink, you're not likely to have rich social connections. So it was nothing about the alcohol. It was about, turns out that how connected we are as humans is as important as some of these other things that we want to pretend are important. And if you have an auntie or an uncle in your family who is in their 90s, they didn't do high-intensity exercise. They didn't do keto. They didn't do fasting. They didn't play with any of these mitochondrial health supplements. What they had was they kept moving. They had rich interactions. They slept well. They ate whole foods. And so what we, what we're realizing now, and if come back to your question, I forgot that you actually asked me a question, is that we need to double down on basics and essentials, and we have to do it in a way that fits into someone's busy life. My doctoral work was looking at barriers to adherence. What keeps people from doing what they say they want to do, need to do, we both agree you should do. I looked at back pain in this, and it turns out that when we give people tons of information but don't show them how to implement it, day after day. What we get is these little heroic boosts, boasts, right? Bursts where people are like, hey, I ate this salad 3 days in a row and now it's not working. And what we really need is bone-crushing consistency. And we have to show people how this fits into their busy lives in a way that doesn't overwhelm their busy lives. And that's what we're seeing that we've got to do a better job of, is implementation. When people come into the Starette system, they are shocked at how much movement there is. Walking, sitting on the floor, mobilizing. We haven't even talked about exercising. They're shocked at how many fruits and vegetables, how much fiber they need. And again, this is all what the research says, what the evidence says, not my opinion. They also are shocked that they're not very fit and not very strong. And the programming I do during this 1-week challenge is hard, but really reasonable. But when people can't hang from a bar, you know, don't know how to pick something up, can't press overhead, we really start to see that there's a big gap between what we know works really as well. And those of us who are living this dream and have luckily— you know, I'll say that most of my friends who are in this fitness, strength conditioning, performance world probably all had ADHD, all probably self-medicated with movement, probably like we lucked out early on. We had friends who were nerds, right? And, uh, you figured out like, hey, I like how I feel when I do this. And we figured that early on. And now imagine if you're coming to this for the first time, We have decades of sophistication behind us and we're asking people to catch up. Why can't you do that? And it's our fault because we haven't brought those people along. So that's what we're working on.

So powerful. Love the explanation as well. And, um, I guess so many different points on that too with adherence that I want to still touch on, but maybe just one point around the alcohol, which was really interesting. So just to reiterate that, that it is a neurotoxin, but pick your poison. And I agree with you at the odd margarita or glass of wine. I do still drink, but in general, my alcohol consumption has reduced drastically. The longest running study out of Harvard from 1938, looking at longevity and it's the social interactions, that community. I mean, I'm part Irish and if the pub, they call the extension, the pub or the bar, the extension of the living room. So if you exclude yourself from that, it's almost like you're excluding yourself from society. So I think that that's a really interesting point.

And let me show people an example of how we can not throw out the baby with the bathwater. So ritual and connection is a really important driver. And if you go to Biergarten in Munich, no one has a phone. Everyone's sitting around. Maybe you have a Radler and maybe you drink some of it, but there you're eating fresh vegetables. You're eating food. It's sunshine. It's usually in the evening. And I was working with the German national hockey team. We all go out afterwards after a little training camp. And everyone pulls out a sport beer, which for those of us who don't know, a sport beer is just non-alcoholic beer. And Erdinger sends 10,000 liters of their alcohol-free sport beer to all the Olympics for the Austrian and German athletes, because they recognize that finishing a big competition, finishing big training, going together and breaking bread, having a drink, having a celebration is that social connection. So you can still do that. And we have a lot of friends. It's interesting to see how many of my friends don't drink anymore. And how few of them are going back, but we have alcohol-free beer in our fridge. And, you know, it sometimes after a big bike ride or a big event, when you pop an alcohol-free beer, we realize it's not about the beer at all. It was always about the celebration or the ritual. And that's a way of thinking critically about how we're going to improve our households. And I think it gets lost in the, in the conversation. When we're talking about national programs, global health, this is important, but the functional unit of change is your family. It is your household. It is with your roommates. And that's where we begin all the change in society.

I love that. And, you know, it's all great for the macro level, but looking at that micro level and the day-to-day, starting with oneself, right. And being that role model, implementing change and inspiring those around us. And I guess this is in part with the point with adherence and especially with the cohort that you're seeing now and in the age of AI where there's information overload. What are some of the biggest challenges you see people having with adherence and what are some solutions for people listening that you could maybe recommend?

Yeah. You know, we can talk about how ultra-processed tasty foods are everywhere. I mean, you go to a, you know, a craft store and it's there. It's a gas station. You're in King Coast getting, you know, a copy made of something and you're like, well, let me buy gummy bears. You know, like it's crazy how when we look at willpower, You can say no, say no, say no. And then all of a sudden you're just overwhelmed. Okay, I'll just have one handful of, you know, Sport Gummies. And when we think about adherence, you know, yesterday we did a presentation for an incredible investment group for their health section. And people said, hey, I want to be more energetic. I want to be stronger. I want to be more in my body. And when I say, well, what does that mean today? How do you do that today? Because I think one model that's been really useful for us out of the high performance world, because remember my day job is actually I work in very high-performance environments, universities, NFL, professional teams, military. And if we know we have a Super Bowl, for example, in American football, we can actually work backwards and say, okay, here's the Super Bowl or here's the national championship. What do we need to get done between now and then? What skills do we have? And then all of a sudden you break this up into, okay, well, when's the first game? All right. What do we have to do before the first game? That means that, well, okay, well, I have 5 days before this game. What am I going to get done in this 5 days? And okay, now it's Monday. What do I have to do on Monday? The problem largely with these big aspirational goals, I want to lose weight. I want to feel better. I want to be there for my family, is that we don't make the discrete, concrete, non-heroic, consistent behavior part of the day's plan. And, you know, if you, all of those things that we talked about, you know, for example, something that would change everyone's lives is if they started sitting on the ground for 20 or 30 minutes in the evening, just delete zero equipment required, zero motivation. I'm asking you to watch TV. You're already watching TV. So just sit on the ground, move away from your couch, sit on the floor. And what you're going to see in the course of 20 or 30 minutes is that you're uncomfortable and you have to fidget and you have to long sit and then you have to side saddle and then you sit 90-90 and then you're kneeling. And in that time, we've got 20 or 30 minutes of exposure of end range of your joints and range of your tissues. And I'm starting to tell your brain, these are important positions. You're starting to tell your brain, hey, I need to be able to breathe here and have access to these positions. And what we'll start to see is if you do that 5 days a week, 6 days a week, in 2 weeks, your wattage is going to go up on the bike. Your power is going to go up on your runs. Your lifting is going to improve. Your back will feel better. And the reason is that we have this, we figured out how to have significant exposure to a meaningful change, right? Changing your range of motion of your hips, normalizing your hamstring length and your connective tissue. But simultaneously, we've done it in a way that you don't have to ask yourself to do yet another thing as a busy working person. And that's where we really want to begin to stack behaviors and break down these small consequences or seemingly large consequential, you know, things. Hey, I want to be X. Well, what does that look like today? The second thing I'm going to suggest everyone do is lay in bed for 8 hours without looking at your phone. We are spending so much money and ridiculousness on sleep. Turns out going to bed and getting up at the same time is probably one of the most important things. And number 2, we don't actually care. My wife is a menopausal woman and she's a CEO and a mother of 2 girls and she worries and stresses. Sometimes she wakes up.. And what we've figured out, and we learned this from working with the Navy SEALs and one of their physicians, is that we say that rest is the next best thing to sleep. And so if you want to lose weight, be more energetic, be more powerful, adapt to some heavy training, like win a world championship, sleep is the root variable here. So what I'm suggesting is that you're going to lay in the darkness. And if you wake up, don't panic because you're going to rest and you're going to not look at your phone. You don't need to know what time it is. And you'll just lay there until the alarm goes off. And if you start to train your brain to do that over and over again, your skin will be clearer. You'll have less brain fog. You'll need less caffeine. You'll have more energy. And now we can start to say rinse, wash, repeat, because what we all need is just bone-crushing consistency on these non-essentials. And there'll be times where you lose your mind. You're traveling. You're very busy. You have a baby, you have a sick parent. You're taking care of someone. Don't panic. When we begin to give people what we call base camp, essential behaviors and, and sort of bookends of function, then they start to understand, hey, I'm way below. I haven't eaten any fruits and vegetables today. So tomorrow I wake up and I start again. And the second piece of that, which leads us to, in this battle of adherence, the most successful people we know are masters at starting over every day. Wrecked it yesterday. I'll start over again. Oh, I wasn't able to train this week. I'm just going to go right back and do that terrible run and I'm going to suck at it. I'm not going to worry because I'm going to suck at it. And the ability to start over and recognize that we're not treating— we should not be treating health like a finite game. We should be treating it like an infinite game. And the only way to win an infinite game is to play better and to bring everyone along because you don't know when it's gonna win and what the rules are, who's playing, what the demands are. So all we do is say what we control day after day after day, and pretty soon you get to— you're unrecognizable. And that really is the message here that you have a lot more capacity. You think you're doing a lot of work. It feels like that because your brain is really clever, but you're not.

So powerful, Kelly. And I just think for people, if you're listening to this, you might want to go and hit skip back and re-listen to that. That was really, really profound. So thank you so much for sharing that. And I think this is just a philosophy in general. Like how many people, it's January now, beginning of January as we're recording, set these New Year goals, but they just have the big lofty goal for the year and they don't break it down. And I think it's those micro things. And I love what you were saying with you know, you're sitting in front of the couch, you're watching Netflix anyway, so it's not any extra time. You're not adding something. It's just reframing how you're doing something in a way that's actually beneficial to you. I think Tony Robbins calls it net time, no extra time. It's being smart about your time. And with some of my coaching clients, they're like, oh, I have a super busy schedule, I can't do it. And I'm like, okay, let's start by looking at your screen time on your phone. How many hours a week are you on social media? Okay, 6 hours, cut it by half. That's 3 hours you now have. To do things that are actually good for you. So we all think, oh, I don't have time, I don't have time, but have a look at some of those basics. And I love what you said also around sleep, because I think people are like, 8 hours, don't need 8 hours. But the science is obviously there behind the importance of sleep. And I think just even lying there as the second best thing, I think that's a really great analogy for people to remember too. So, so much wisdom, Kelly. Thank you so much.

I really just want to get to the fun stuff, but we can't get to the fun stuff until we get to some of the basic stuff. And that I think is one of the problems with trying to understand the data stream. There's so much noise in the data that it's really hard for us to see inputs and outputs. It's hard for us to appreciate that what we're doing is making a meaningful change, a real change in the system. There's a wonderful philosopher, a writer named Charles Perrow. He's passed, but he wrote a book called Normal Accidents. And normal accident theory is about complexity in complex systems, and that might be like shipping lanes, air traffic control. I applied it to the human body when I read this book and I reached out to him and I just said, hey, this is probably the most important book I've ever read around thinking about the complexity of humans in their own biology and in their interactive with other humans. And what we often see, and he describes this idea that things that look like black swan events or crazy um, you know, accidents are actually perfect expressions of the system. When the system is tightly coupled, inputs and outputs matter. When the system is sufficiently complex and some of that complexity is hidden from us. And so what looks like a freak accident is actually just a normal expression of the system. If you give the system enough time to express itself. So suddenly what we see is, well, I've always done this and I'll give you an example. There's, um, I worked in professional football. We have a lineman who tweaked his hamstring. He has no hip extension. And during the second play of the game, he had to sprint during an interception and he pulled his hamstring. He's 36. He's one of the best players in the NFL. He's widely regarded as one of the best and he's deeply loved and he works really hard. He's never had a hamstring tweak before. The problem is when you don't have hip extension, your hamstrings have to work like your glutes and, and your hamstrings. So they have to flex the leg, extend the leg, manage. The glutes are supposed to do a lot of that. But if you're missing hip extension, getting your knee behind your butt, because alignment and is basically always in a flexed position, suddenly he's doing something he's not regularly doing. He's huge and powerful. He's 36. And even though he's never had a problem here, eventually we know what happens when people don't have hip extension and sprint, they tweak their hamstrings. So this is an example of something that's infinitely complex, this game, his abilities. And what looks like, wow, that's just totally fluky. What we ask is, is there something we could have done to manage that hamstring early on? And maybe the answer is no. Maybe it is truly a black swan event. But when we begin to bring those pieces down, accept that if I don't walk during the day, if I have caffeine at 4, if I have an alcohol before I go to bed to self-soothe, cuz I'm so stressed, that affects my sleep. And so suddenly we start to see that, oh wow, not eating enough fruits and vegetables affects my sleep quality. And we start to appreciate that this system of our complex biology is tightly interactive and tightly coupled. And one thing affects all things. This is why we don't have to play a perfect game across 10 domains. We have to play a better game across most domains. And what we see is that the body is so resilient and so capable that it will come back again and again and again. So all we have to do is say, well, what can I control today? And how do I put that in the background so I don't actually have to think about it? I want to think about work. I want to think about play. I want to think about art. I want to think about my friendships. I don't want to think about how many grams of fruits and vegetables I'm eating every day. I want that just to be taken care of.

Yeah. To automate it as well. Like set yourself up once and then it's automated, right? Just like a tech system. And I think that's the best way. Because decision fatigue is real, right? We make over— what is the number— like 30,000 decisions in a day, maybe even more.

So if you're not a man, if you're someone else, like my partner Juliette, you're making 70,000 decisions.

Yeah. So the less decisions you can make, the more you can automate things, the better. And especially for the right things so that that's on autopilot, which is amazing. Kelly, you've recently collaborated with Andrew Huberman and those conversations around movement and neuroscience really resonated. What new insights emerged for you by layering mobility on top of brain science? I'm curious.

You know, I think one of the things that we, the way I've been shifting some of my thinking lately to simplify what is very complex, we're in this conversation right now about longevity and it's great. And I'm really, you and I just reconnected at Eudaimonia. It's really amazing to be in that room. That was our dream 20 years ago. Simultaneously, there's no conversation about range of motion or pain in those domains of living forever. Very, very few conversations. And when we get to the brass tacks of it, people are like, well, I can't, I can't do all those things. My knee hurts, my back hurts. And so one of the ways that we, you know, we're stoked that people are talking about range of motion and movement choice and getting out of pain, but we have to view the brain as not wired for optimization. It is wired for survival. And I think when people are nerdy in this, this resonates with them, but let me make it easy for those of us who maybe aren't living in this and reading this every day. You can almost view your brain as seeing the world in two shades. Is this a threat or is this safety? And when we start to see behaviors as threatening, and it doesn't always mean bad because we pay attention. I'm anxious for this big meeting. That's a threat. I might perform better, but things like not eating enough, being constantly underfed, the brain perceives that as a threat. And so one of the things that we can start to do is start to expand that conversation of Well, if I'm not sleeping, that's a threat. My brain is now going to be in a more heightened threat state. And again, the brain is optimized for survival in these things. So one of the things that we really go out of our way to do is signal to the brain it's safe to move, that that pain does not mean damage. It doesn't always mean trauma or injury. Pain is often just a request for change. It's information that your brain is interpreting as threat. And you could be, have terrible, terrible knee pain and a beautiful person that you have a big crush on walks into the room and all of a sudden I get I guarantee you your knee pain goes away right in the middle of the world championship. You don't have a knee pain. And as an allegory for this, um, I hope this isn't the case, but if you've ever been in a fight and actually had to fight someone, the dirty secret of fighting is that you don't actually feel pain in the moment. Your brain says, that's not important information. We'll just neglect that. And so in the middle of the big ski run and the jump in the moment, in the serve and the big, your brain doesn't perceive that as as an issue afterwards. You'll absolutely get that information when you start to be safer again. But what we can start to do is think about, well, hey, how can I tell my brain that this is safe to move? How do I get non-threatening input in? And it turns out movement is one of those very powerful levers we can pull to signal to the brain that this is safe. Plus all of the other essentials of biology, drinking water, eating food, having friends. Those are all signals to the brain that we are healthy in a tribe and safe. But it turns out when we're trying to untangle very specific things, we can apply and think about applying isometrics. So if I, you know, have knee pain and I put you into a position on a ball or a roller or doing something that looks like a pause in the middle of an exercise and hold that for 30 seconds or so, my brain eventually starts to say, well, look, we're here. You're breathing. You're, you know, we're not moving, but we're safe. I can start to unwrap that. A little bit and start to deescalate how I'm perceiving what's going on with the tissues. And so a lot of what we're doing is signaling that safety, safe to move. We move here often. We move at speed here often. The tissues are, you know, healthy enough. I have a friend who just had a knee surgery. He played in the NFL for 10 years. His knee looks like a garbage dump. You cannot believe what the inside of his knee looks like. If I showed you an X-ray, you'd be like, nope, that's not a human being. That is like a collection of Legos inside a bag. And he didn't have any knee pain. His chief complaint was his range of motion. He couldn't bend his knee, couldn't straighten his knee, and that caused these other problems. But his chief complaint wasn't that his knee ached all the time. His chief complaint was my knee won't work right. And when the surgeon went in there, they took some x-rays and they were— and the surgeon went in there, he was shocked. He's like, we should have replaced your knee, not cleaned up your knee because it was the worst thing I've ever seen. And I cannot believe that you didn't have any pain. So John's brain is sufficiently, again, super athlete, collegiate athlete, professional athlete, sufficiently inoculated from interpreting this information from his knee as a threat. Instead, John was like, I got to get this taken care of. Cause I, you know, it's hard for me to do the things I want to do. And when we begin to look at movement practice and exercise and play and warmups as a way of signaling the body is safe, then the brain really starts to let the guard down a little bit. And what's interesting when we look at chronic pain and persistent pain, this is a really useful tool. Pain and movement are in the same pathways in the brain and how useful for that, because if I do that thing and I get experienced discomfort or pain, interpret that as threat, then suddenly my brain doesn't even have to know that that thing that I did caused the pain. It's the shape. That I'm in or the movement that causes the pain. So oftentimes when we have something chronic, I'm afraid of bending over because bending over, I had pain. My brain gets really twitchy about rounding my back. Well, guess what? Your spine is supposed to round. It has to round. It's like, go ahead and do anything interesting. Go ahead and have sex and not round your back. You will see that you're going to round your back on the toilet, washing the dishes. So if you believe And your brain believes that rounding your back is going to be a threat, then you will not engage in that behavior. And that causes a whole host of downstream problems. So what we can start to say is, well, how do we begin to signal to the brain that it's safe to move? What does graded movement, how do we get you out of position? A simple way that everyone might be able to take this very high concept and apply, as we say, and this is not me, this is Iyengar, this is Gray Cook, these are the masters. If you cannot breathe in a position, you don't own a position. So if you find yourself working and you're breath holding, that's a signal to your brain to pay attention because something is going on. You're signaling to your nervous system, I need to create stability and safety here, and that's not breathing. So oftentimes when we get someone in a position of threat, for example, laying on a roller on your quads, if you've ever laid on a roller on your quads, it's very painful. The first thing we do is we, people stop breathing. And they start holding their breath. So how can we begin to untangle some of this very complex human physiology? Well, we come back to the basics. If you can't breathe in a position, you don't own a position. And Iyengar, the yogi master, said nerves are king of the breath. The breath is king of the brain. So how can we signal to the brain that we're safe by using breath? And then how can we trick or signal the breath through inputs through the body? And we can override that consciously because we're extraordinary, extraordinary mammals. And that means suddenly that if I'm stretching— no wonder in yoga they hold us in a position so long. You got to take like 20 breaths. This is so annoying. But they figured out that if I just hold you in this position, which is an isometric, and they make you breathe there for 30 seconds or so, guess what happens? Your brain says, this must be safe. You're breathing. You can hold this position. And that's how we begin to untangle complexity and apply that to human performance, going faster, winning another gold medal in the bobsled. It doesn't matter what the application is. The principles are universal, and that's why it's so important we work in high performance so we can take those lessons and transmute them back to, you know, middle-aged mountain bikers who want to just, you know, shred with their families.

Jumping in quickly, it's Claudia von Boeselager. I absolutely love bringing you these conversations for free each week, and I can do that thanks to the generous support of our sponsors. These are brands I've personally vetted and believe in, and I think you'll love them too. Supporting them means you're also supporting the show. And your own longevity journey. Thanks for supporting them. Now here's today's sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Carole Bike. Did you know that one of the strongest predictors of how long and how well you live is your VO2 max? It's a key indicator of your cardiovascular fitness. The challenge is VO2 max naturally declines by about 10% every decade after age 30. As someone who's always looking for the most efficient ways to optimize my health and longevity, I knew I needed something that fit into my busy schedule. That's where CAROL bike comes in. Backed by published research, this isn't just another stationary bike. CAROL uses AI-powered reduced exertion HIIT, or re-HIIT, to deliver the same cardio benefits as a 45-minute jog in under 5 minutes—just 2 short sprints. Studies show CAROL can improve your VO2 max by 12% in just 8 weeks. Making you up to 10 years fitter. It's truly a game changer. If you want to future-proof your health and longevity without spending hours in the gym, check out carolbike.com/claudia for a $300 discount just for you, dear audience. That's carolbike.com/claudia.

I just wonder around that, Kelly. I have this recurring shoulder thing and comes on and off as well. And I do definitely believe that is part of it is sort of bad habit, but people have back pain, different things. They're like, oh, it's chronic. I've had it so many years. Is it getting in certain positions and then just breathing through it to rewire those neural pathways, essentially to not associate it with pain?

That might be a first order. So the second order might be asking, well, does your shoulder do all the things that a shoulder should do? So if we're driving a car and you can't go into third and your wheel doesn't turn all the way to the left, And your brakes are dodgy. You can still drive that car. You just can't turn all the way to the left. You're going to have to skip 3rd gear and you're going to have to pump the brakes. So that's what's happening with most people's bodies. You know, if I say to someone, let's play this game with you. What is decent blood pressure?

What is normative blood pressure? 120 over 90. I don't know. Mine's particularly low, but something like that.

120 over 80, like, right. So you have a range. Everyone knows that range. What is the normal temperature of a human being?

Uh, in Fahrenheit, about 97, um, 98 degrees. Okay.

97. So very tight little, little, little creature there. What is a low resting heart rate? 40. Okay. So you have some very clear ideas about what normative physiology is and what good physiology is.

How much should your hip move? Good question. I guess if I'm doing a, like a 180.

So you have no fucking idea. This is the—

this is not visualizing myself. That's right.

That's right. This is not your— this is not your deficit. This is the fact that we haven't given people benchmarks around their range of motion. What is normative? What do we expect? And so, you know, all the physios, all the physicians, all the chiros, all the osteos, we all have to memorize what is normative range of motion. And everyone wants to believe that they're a unique snowflake. I know I'm special. I have a special hip and it only does this special hip things. And I have a— yeah, yeah, yeah. Your hips are certain width. Your femur looks a little different. Our squats are going to look different, but the principles are the same. And normative range of motion is going to be universal within about 5 degrees, unless you have a very rare pathology, which is very rare. And the research doesn't support all the things that people want to pretend. So, you know, what we start to see is that, hey, what's normal ankle range of motion? Well, people have no idea. What should you be able to do? Let me tell you. You should be able to squat all the way down with your feet straight and heels on the ground. That's normal. Mm-hmm. And I can quickly do that with people. Hey, put your— and I think you should put your feet together and squat all the way down with your heels on the ground. And, and if you can't, and if you can't, when, if you can't, your blood pressure is high and your resting heart rate is high and your temperature is low or high. And what we suddenly see is if we apply the same thinking to how the body works, then it's not so overwhelming that my shoulder hurts. Instead of saying my shoulder hurts sometimes, what I can ask is, well, what, what movements cause that shoulder pain? Do you have good full start and finish positions in that? And that's really the heart of what mobility is. Mobility is a set of tools that we use to restore normative range of motion and help people get out of pain so they can use their body in the way they want. And it turns out if you can't put your arms over your head, That's incomplete range of motion. And one of the things we can ask now is, well, where are you putting your arms over your head in day to day? No wonder. Have you ever seen someone do downward dog? Downward dog is easy. You just have to have normal range of motion in your hips, 90 degrees, and in your shoulders. Your shoulders have to go over your head. How many people can't do downward dog? Their backs are rounded, their knees are bent, their feet are off the ground. It's insane to watch someone say simultaneously, Do you have normal hip flexion with the leg straight? Do you have normal overhead position with your arms without being able to twist or unwind? And what we see suddenly is that, wow, all of our classic strength and conditioning, Pilates, yoga, classic strength and conditioning. I'm not talking about exercising with pink weights, right? Or like, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about real strength conditioning, strict pressing, bench press, deadlift, squat, lunge. Those things are formal expressions of what the body should be able to do. That's why they're so potent. We're reminding ourselves that the diagnostic tool is the stimulus and the stimulus is the diagnostic tool. But no wonder people are confused. They're like, I went to Body Pump. I don't know why my shoulder hurts. I'm getting strong. I'm like, you didn't even do any shoulderful things. You kept your shoulder in a tiny range of motion and did a freakish amount of work there. And you stayed away from normative end ranges. One of the reasons we put pulling, pull-ups, and, and hanging in our program is that in order to have a neck that works, you have to have a shoulder that works. It's— I don't know if you've noticed this, but your neck is right next to your shoulder and they're somehow deeply connected. And so if we want to improve your thoracic spine or neck, I have to look at your shoulder. And if I want to improve your shoulder, does your thoracic spine move or are you stuck bent all the time because you're bent over your computer or your bike? So what we can begin to ask is, Hey, I'm having pain. Great. Okay. Do you have access to your normal range of motion in that joint or in those positions? And the answer for most people is no. And the easiest thing we can do is start to restore that range of motion because suddenly the brain says, that's new. That's not the position and pain on the situation, the fascial loading, the joint loading, the tension. This is new and it's a clean movement pathway and those clean movement pathways. And when I say clean, I just mean free from the traditional aches and pains that we usually associate with how our body moves. And this is why we have to have put skill into strength and conditioning, why we have to have skilled movement training. And it can't just be about my calves burned and my glutes are burning and I did a bunch of work on the Peloton and I must be fit. That is not the way that we win world championships or run faster or have bodies that just don't hurt.

For your average non-professional athlete person listening that is noticing sort of middle age, things are a bit stiffer. What do you want them to know, Kelly? And I'm 44, but biological age of 26. So I'm like, which one do I go with? But anyway, no, I've got my shoulder out of my head. I used to be a gymnast, so I'm actually hypermobile. So my range of motion is not quite where it used to be as a gymnast, but anyway, working on it. But what for the average office working person, obviously sedentary lifestyle, sitting is the new smoking, right? What is the message you would like them to really understand to realize they have to change ideally today the trajectory because things just get worse and more stiff, et cetera. And where would you have them start on becoming more mobile, becoming more supple? Yeah.

So interesting that our movement pathways and our pain pathways are so tightly connected. Interesting that our lymphatic system, which is the sewage system of the body, it's where we move all the waste, broken down protein, dead cells, all of those things. That's the lymphatic system. We make about 2 or 3 liters of lymphatic fluid every day. It's all recycled. It's filtered. That's also in your movement system. Those lymphatic vessels are in your muscles. So if you don't use or flex your muscles, how do you flush your toilets? How do you move the sewage along the system? That's why we can say things like, well, people who walk 8,000 steps a day have a decrease in all-cause mortality and morbidity of 51%. And if I could take a pill that lessened my likelihood of dying by 50 stinking percent, That's walking 8,000 steps a day. We recently, we just, I mean, yesterday we got an email from one of the people in our challenge and she's like, it's cold outside. And I was like, I know we live in an environment. Do you, have you met a coat? Have you met a hat? Have you met walking sticks? Do you know you can drive to the mall and walk? Like what the key here is that she was a victim of environment. And that's like saying there are all these cookies in my house. No. And I don't want to put that. It's not the idea here though, is that the body is really tolerant until it's not right until we have that normal accident. And when we begin to say, hey, where are we going to control? Notice that I haven't talked about, like, do you need to lift a weight? Yes. Do you need to breathe hard? Yes. Does everyone agree? Yes. Okay. Walking is not exercise. Walking is more important than exercise. And what we found is that if I said get 10,000 steps a day, I get a 65% decrease in all the things that will likely kill me. 8,000 steps is a really reasonable amount of steps. If I go for a quick walk, walk 10 minutes after meals, hey, maybe I take a, a quick call. I'm just a little conscious about it. I can easily hit those 8,000 steps. Last night when we got home, Jill and I just walked around our neighborhood. If you wanna get more sunlight and check this out, you start to see how these all compound. There's a great app called Nature Dose, and it's from a company called NatureQuant, and it's a free app, and you'll download it to your phone. It's called Nature Dose, and they've mapped the entire United States, and the phone will know if you're indoors or outdoors. And turns out, not only should you go outdoors more, that's obvious, human, get the natural light, et cetera, et cetera. But if you want to have a decent civil society, create a civil society, which means you see your neighbors, you're like, what's up? I have a neighbor next door. We kind of battle. We got into a tiff over a fence he didn't want to pay for. I just moved the fence inside my yard. I was like, whatever, Steve. But I see Steve every day because Steve walks his dog and I walk and I'm always like, What's up, Steve? And now Steve and I have this tenuous truce because we have to interact and see each other day after day after day. 'Cause we both go outside, which is a long way of saying the average American is going outside 20 minutes a week. Wow. So if you're not getting sunshine, sunlight, fresh air, I grew up in southern Germany. There's a German tradition where we air out the house every day, right? A couple times a day you open up. Yep. You open up all You open up all— it basically means air, airing, airing, airing. And you open up all the doors and windows and you just get all the crappy air out. You bring all— and it's freezing outside, but you still open up all the doors and windows. And so even then we figured out— and by the way, let's just go a little bit further. What's the German word for 8? 8. What's the German word for night? The letter N and the word 8. Do you see where I'm going with this? People have been very clever for a long time. And what we want to do is go into some of these old traditions and say, why did we figure that out? Fresh air really matters. Going outside, getting sunlight really matters. Being in community really matters. So if you walk that 8,000 steps every day, and you're gonna have to make— you have to be conscious about it. In the winter's time, you're gonna have to suck it up and get cold and walk those 8,000 steps, or go to a mall, or get a walking treadmill. You're gonna have to do something. If you do that, plus sit on the ground, we can begin to have very sophisticated conversations about improving your tissue health, accumulating non-exercise activity fatigue. So you're going to fall asleep. And between walking 8,000 steps, sitting on the ground for 20 or 30 minutes and laying in bed for 8 hours, those are 3 huge fundamental biologic processes. And now I'm going to start to say, well, if you want to change your tissues, probably should eat enough micronutrients, fruits and vegetables, polyphenols, fiber. That's called 800 grams of fruits and vegetables every day. Do you have enough protein? You start to see that, oh, if I want to create a situation where the body's changing, I have to make sure that I'm— my blood pressure is normal. My heart rate is normal. My temperature is normal. And by normal, I mean, these are the things that we've come to understand are endemic and essential to a human being functioning at their top. And that's what we talk about in terms of rinse, wash, repeat. If you're sitting on the ground, we have an app that has 250 follow-along daily videos from 10 to 30 minutes of a ball and a roller. I lead you. I'll teach you how to take care of your body. You can do that., or you can just grab that roller in there and ask yourself what hurts. Put it on what hurts, roll around, make sure you're breathing. Do 5 minutes a side, and you'll start to see that you can make real change in how your body feels. And that will show up day after day after day. Because what we want, what Juliette and I want, is a body that's built for adventure. That you and I, you call me up and say, Kel, we're going on this adventure. And I'm like, I'm in. I have a body that will take it. Maybe I haven't trained for it perfectly, but I am in.. And what we don't want is people's movement language to get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And you're like, no, I don't think I want to ride that bike because it's dangerous. I might fall. I don't think I want to go for that hike because it's dangerous. I might trip. And if you see someone at a hospital, because I've worked in hospitals as a physio, the end of their life, the halls get smaller and smaller and smaller. And pretty soon they're in a room that's smaller and then they're in a room without a window and then the curtains are drawn.. And we're trying to keep that hallway as large and as wide as possible so that you can continue to play and do what you want for the rest of your lives. We are learning in the United States right now that the blue zones, areas of the United States that have the highest sort of success in terms of health and body and adventure are all the mountain towns where people ride their bikes, ski, hike, climb, play, kayak, adventure. And it's gotta be built into the system. And then we're not doing that. We've made exercise. Like a pill that we take in science instead of playing. And we need to get back to playing and then think about, well, I want to play better, so I should train for playing.

I love that. And also in Sardinia, right, it's very mountainous towns and you've got the 80, 90, 100-year-olds going up and down the steps and climbing up every day.

They have to. Social community. Yeah. Yeah. You're like, hey, grandma, you can't— oh my, you can't go up those stairs. If she stops going up the stairs, she's going to die.

Yeah, I know. And speaking of which, I mean, I see with my poor father, 87, he had a bike accident. When he, I had to take him to the ER. Unfortunately, he did break his arm because at age 87, after a 1-hour bike ride at the emergency room, they were like, sorry, how long were you biking? They were shocked. She's like, I can't even do that at the gym. And he's like, yeah, I was still in motion on the bike. Like I did when I was 5 years old and swung my leg around the back and then the pedal tipped the pavement and basically he fell over. You should have seen the faces in the ER in the US. They couldn't believe that an 87-year-old was even riding their bike, let alone for 1 hour, and then in motion was trying to get off the bike. So I've told them next time, just stop the bike and maybe get off.

But no way. No way. Because so what I love about that story is that that's actually a sport injury. That actually is like, that was it. That's a— I'm like, congratulations, you got hurt doing something cool. Not like lifting a weight or training. Like, that was like, I'm like, count it. That's okay.

I love how you can tell him it's a sport injury.

Exactly. It's a legit sport injury. Congratulations, Dad. You know, you didn't, your back just didn't hurt cuz you sneezed. You like, you know, you crashed. That's fun.

Yeah. That's his, that's his German heritage. Exactly. I think, uh, some things will, you'll take to, to the grave with you.

Wer die Wahl hat, hat die Qual, which is a, for everyone else means he who has the choice has the problem. That's what we want.

We want more choice, more problems. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and that's what I see as well is that the, the constraint though in the movement and getting that range of movement. And I think what's great about how communities used to be is it was multi-generational and we had a lot more exposure to older people that gave us then the motivation. I think now things are so siloed. We don't see as many older people. We don't realize what can happen. And I think people forget, like, oh, I'll do it later. And no, you need to start today. Right. And get into that and get that mobility back in as well. So check this out.

You have a monkey bar. So there you go. That's it. You got to hang. Everyone should hang every day, 3 minutes plus breathing. When I was a child growing up in Bavaria, there was a phenomenon called Volksmarch, and it's a very German thing. I don't know if they did in Austria, but basically a town would support a little 5 or 10K walk through the town. You get to show off your town. There's tea waiting for you. There's, you know, Kuchen. There's little cakes, there's things. And when you finish, you get a medal or a pin.. And that metal, I mean, they're cool metals. And then we would go around from town to town on the weekends doing these little marches. And as you said, multi-generational, you walk with your grandma, you walk with your aunties, the whole family's walking together, little kids, no one's in a cart, kids are either being carried or they're walking. And when we make this a cultural phenomenon, when we start to think, how do we structure our environment so that we have these outcomes? It means we need bike We need parks. We have to get into some urban design. And that's what's really fun about this way of thinking is suddenly it opens up how you solve this problem. And it's really, really extraordinary because look, I want you to have as much fun in a body. You know, it was really funny in this call yesterday. People are like, I want to feel strong and I want to feel healthy and alert. I'm like, Julia, I don't think I feel any of those things. And she's like, if the average person dropped into your body, they would explode. You know, I'm like, she's like, I think you feel good all the time and you can't imagine feeling better.

You know, so you're doing splits still, Kelly, right?

Yeah, of course. Who can't do the splits? Everyone does the splits. So, you know, the key here is that it seems very complicated because the processes are very sophisticated, but the operating system is much simpler than that. And if you don't want to eat kale, don't eat kale, but you better eat some strawberries. Or so the bottom line here is as you are working forward on longevity, health, performance, you know, you'll see that the systems are tightly coupled and very simple, but you may need to cut off your caffeine at 10 o'clock in the morning so that you can fall asleep tonight so that you can wake up and feel better, et cetera. And when you rinse, wash, repeat that for decades, you will be different than who you are today.

It's really amazing. Let's talk about whole body systems, breath, lymph, and stress. And so we were talking about before with breathing, lymphatic flow and mobility are inseparable systems. What are some of the biggest ROIs in that? Because I think so many people don't even realize how much that is impacting their day-to-day. And so what are some of the things you would like people to know to get that ROI for breathing, for getting the lymphatic drainage and reducing stress?

Well, here's a good example. One of our friends is the CEO of a company called Pinoy, and it's a portable VO2 max system. And what he wants people to know about VO2 max is it's not just about training your body to work hard. Some of it's genetic, some of it's training, and some of it is mechanic. And we don't realize that a stiff upper back is one of the reasons why you can't take a big breath. So one of the things that we're working on with this breathing, for example, for mobilizing the trunk, is looking at, do you have control all the way in of your breath and all the way out of your breath? And does the trunk move in that system that way? Can I expand maximally? Can I contract maximally? The more efficiently we can get air in and out of the system, we can start to see that your body can actually have access to more oxygen. So a lot of us are breathing into a little steel chamber that's very stiff, and that's going to truncate your VO2 max. Add into the fact that there's this thing called CO2 tolerance, which we've all become obsessed with over the years. So for everyone, here's a primer. Just bear with me. It's not that boring. The way that your body drives your breathing mechanism. So your desire to breathe is not from lack of oxygen. It's from high CO2. So the, the respiration off gas, right? Breathe in oxygen, CO2 comes out. And what we want people to start to do is to get more comfortable handling higher circulating CO2s. So if you get a little burn and you start panting, the— what is happening is you're actually scrubbing off your CO2, right? That makes sense. I'm catching— I'm getting— dumping that CO2 so I don't, I don't have this drive to breathe. Well, it turns out the higher the circulating CO2s that you can tolerate, the more oxygen you can scrub. Off the hemoglobin. So if you want to have actually access to that amazing hemoglobin, all the oxygen bound to it, you have to tolerate high circulating CO2s, which means you need to get comfortable needing to breathe. So no wonder pranayama, all of this breath hold apneic work really makes a difference. The average person exercises and they would struggle to get their oxygen saturation down to 92 or 93. Really struggle. That's 93% oxygen loaded up. Best Tour de France riders will ride down into the 70s. They can scrub off that much oxygen. They're that efficient as aerobic athletes. So one of the things that we do as part of our warmup is we do a lot of CO2 tolerance drills. And you can do that formally like Wim Hof or some of the other— Buteyko breathing or Oxygen Advantage.

Patrick McKeown is a genius, right?

He's been on the podcast a few times. He's a genius. Shout out, all hail the genius. And what I'll say is he has something called the body oxygen level test, which is a really simple way of just saying, hey, what's my blood pressure, but in terms of my ability to handle CO2. And look up the BOLT test from Oxygen Advantage. I'll give you some homework. It's really interesting. And it changes based on your stress, based on your recovery. And so we use our sort of number one, we'll We'll use our ability to look at breath holding on an exhale as insight into our recovery. And number 2 is that we can reset the brain a little bit because remember, breath is king of the brain. We can sort of reclaim some of the function of the brain by resetting the sensitivity of the brainstem to this high circulating CO2. So here's what this means for you. When you're walking or you're on the treadmill, I want you to take a 10-second inhale. And most people can actually inhale for 10 seconds. So don't panic, but that can be trained. You're going to get to 5 seconds and be like, there's no way I get to 10 seconds. Yes, I need you to get to 10 seconds. Once you get to 10 seconds, you're going to hold your breath as long as you can and blow up and just literally keep walking or keep cycling until you feel a small death. And then I just want you to recover. Try to see if you can recover nose only, in and out through your nose. And you'll repeat that every minute. And I want you to do at least 7. What we do with our teams is that we want 7 small deaths before we actually go and play and compete. I want 7 hypoxic events, hypoxic moments where I have to kind of, you know, die a little bit. Hypoxic, uh, you know, small deaths. And what you'll see is suddenly that run is easier, that swim is easier, that, you know, and because part of your VO2 max is your range of motion, how well does your trunk work? And we regularly do this with our athletes. So I have them take a big breath, and put their arms over their head, take another big breath. They can't squat down, take another big breath. They can't. And what we start to see is, boy, those ranges of motion of your rib cage start to be impacted by your crappy range of motion of your shoulders, your crappy range of motion on your, of your hips, so that you're biking with that terrible range of motion of your hips is actually costing your VO2 max, plus you're stiff, plus your CO2 tolerance is awful. So where do we put all this together? In the warmup. In the play, jump rope, exhale all the way, keep jumping until you die. Great. Repeat that 7 times and then you, then go do your workout and try that for a week and see what happens.

Really powerful. I have also the Carrow bike here, which is for VO2 max training and one of my consultancies, Lamar Collective, we represent IHT, intermittent hypoxia training machine. And so literally be lying there. Have you done it? Have you? Yes. Yeah.

Do you do it regularly? No, not that with machine, but I do breathwork.

Breath hold work, hypoxic work every day. Every day. Wow.

Every day. Okay. I need to— it's interesting. So I don't swim very much. My daughter is a water polo player. She'll be swimming at Berkeley next year on the water polo team. Amazing. I travel with the women's water polo team at Berkeley. I'm their high performance coach, but I don't swim a lot. This year I was like, I'm going to swim a little bit more. So we're up at altitude, we're up in Tahoe over the break in the mountains. So it's very high and I jump in and swim and I don't gas out. Why? Because I'm really good at exhaling a long time. The limitations was only that I'm a terrible swimmer, not that, you know, most people are gasping when they breathe, but because I practiced that so much, it was very easy. That part of it was easy because all the time I'm working on dying and holding. And plus it must have been freezing cold water. No, no, this is the pool, but yes, indoor pool, still freezing.

I'm still wimpy. I thought you had jumped into Lake Tahoe. Yeah. And like middle of winter.

And then, I mean, that will also truly create the That will trigger, because nerves are king of the breath, breath is king of the brain.

There you go. Well, this is it as well. So it's just keeping calm and contained as well. Yes. And speaking of kids and your daughter as well, so you and Juliet are raising incredible embodied athletic kids. What movement principles should every parent understand to support healthy development and prevent early orthopedic issues in their kids, especially as more of them are on screens, they're not moving?

It's really the moving, not even the screens. Um, your— we have moved through an era where we did a lot of free play. Free play doesn't exist anymore. I'm just not— and if we had all the tech and all the reasons, we wouldn't free play either, but we were forced to go outside and play. We have to create more free play, and that free play looks a little bit like formal movement training, gymnastics, parkour, messing around, getting kids into places where they can explore their bodies and move. The project that Juliet and I are deep into right now is a book called Outplay, and it's a book about sports performance for 6 to 18-year-olds because we see that sport is the last framework on earth that we think to build a robust system through sort of a robust society through teaching the fundamentals of being human to people. Because sport is that perfect place to learn about all the psychology of sport, disappointment, loss, death, like all the things. Plus, how do I fuel? How do I self-care? How do I train? How do I, you know, delay gratification? All those things. So we think sport is this really wonderful thing. Parents have a terrible job. They become the high-performance directors for their kids and they don't know what to do. And they play, start playing whack-a-mole. They get really crazy in the stands. They're spending all this money and all this time. Their kids aren't getting to play time. We really, like, sports are at a crisis moment. We're starting to see private equity go in and gut sports because they see that there's so much money to be made there. That's all you need to know about the state of sports. So we, the parent, again, all the things we talked about earlier, sleep, nutrition, et cetera, et cetera. Apply them to your kids. The average child's walking 2,000 to 3,000 steps a day. The average child isn't, you know, eating a fruit or vegetable. They don't get enough fiber. They don't sleep 8 hours. So how do you expect this body to grow and become more resilient and durable? So that's, that's one place. The other place is that we have to create, again, opportunities to move and to play and to interact. Kids are not going to want to front squat and do rear foot elevated split squats. That is not a game. That is the worst game I can think of. Up, right? Adults don't want to do it. I know it's good for me, so I'm going to do it, but my kids are like, get lost, Dad, this sucks. I've got a 9, 11-year-old, they'll be like, nope, I'm out, I'm out, Mom. But one of the things we can start to do is say, how do I constrain the environment so that that happens? And that might be throwing a frisbee, going outside and throwing. That might be playing spikeball, that might be playing pickleball, where we need to move and load, and we're missing these crucial movement loading windows. We're starting to see right now, one of our friends, Gabe Merkin— is it Gabe Merkin? Merkin? It's not Merkin, it's another physician, sorry. And he was president of the knee. He was on Arnold's Fitness Council. He was president of the Knee Society, and he's done a lot of ACL repairs on kids. And in the '80s and '90s, when a kid tore his ACL, they would pull out a drill and they would use this real big drill to drill into the bone to set the ACL. Now the bones are so soft that they use a something that looks like a corkscrew and they just turn the, the, the drill by hand. They don't even use a power drill anymore. Because the bones are like soft coconut. So what we see is we're losing mineralization of bone happening in kids. Why? All the energy drinks, lack of micronutrients, lack of loading, et cetera, et cetera. So we're going to see a generation of kids who come up. We're already seeing freakish injuries in kids, torn lats. The ACL epidemic is through the roof. And if we're going to solve those problems, we have to move much further upstream. We don't often have PE, or PE is a half hour, a couple of times a week. It's not sufficient. If you look at the physical education guidelines for what state says all kids need, it's 150 minutes a week of exercise. That's 30 minutes of vigorous exercise a week, 30 minutes a day where the kids are vigorous. That means like above 80% max heart rate. And I'll ask you, do your children meet the government minimums for activity? And you're seeing the answer is no. This is why sport is so important because we have to at least get in some kind of formal way. And so, you know, is your garage set up with a pull-up bar? Can your kids hang? Do you make it a game? How do you model those behaviors for your kids? Do you drag your kids to dance class? You know, we're seeing is that we have to think differently about sport and movement, and we're going to have to bring those kids along and figure out new ways to engage in movement. Sport and activity as a family is the easiest way, but, you know, we have to start to think, well, maybe basketball hoops on the corner are really important, right? Tennis courts are really important. Those multi-gyms that are existing in places are really important. So, you know, if we can get— I think, you know, the number of kids in middle school and high school, boys that I talk to are like, how do I get buff? You know, how much creatine do I need? Kids are interested in their bodies. They don't know how to do it. And we've set up so many frameworks against that. Volleyball is not real fun all the time. Like club volleyball, it's a lot of work. But, you know, club volleyball doesn't feel like— oftentimes it feels like professional sports. And we have just really lost the opportunity to make play safe. And the play is how we learn skills and how we interact and how we discover our bodies. And that can be a lot of things. If I had my way, everyone is in an hour of PE every day. And that PE could be yoga class, it could be dance class, it could be we're playing, you know, tennis. It could be, it could be anything. You have to move for an hour a day. In the UK, you should look up something that's called the Daily Mile, and a lot of the schools there started walking a mile a day because they saw an inactivity piece. Do you need a special certification to take kids on a walk for a mile? No. Do you need to be an elite athlete to walk for a mile? No. Do kids gonna run that and walk that? Yes. But what we start to see is We've got to put in more input into our youth.

And that's a really simple way to think about it. And I think you can make it fun, right? And it becomes a game from being outside. And what I've started to do with mine are some challenges, like we did a charity 5K run and different things. We've been invited to a Murph challenge. Let's see some version of it. And I think it's so, so important to model it, but then also bring your kids in to make it a family thing. So you're kind of ticking a few boxes at the same time.

It has to be that way. My kids fortunately grew up in a gym. They both can Olympic lift and move and exercise. And I have one daughter who does not like to exercise, but she likes to go to yoga class and she likes to go to Pilates class. I'm like, great. That's fine. You know, she doesn't want to breathe hard. I'm like, look, you'll, you know, she's a good athlete, but just doesn't wired. The other child, you know, now knows that if she's going to not die next year at university in this Division I program, she's going to have to go lift some weights and train really hard. And she does. And, you know, she does those things.. You know, however we get there, we get there. And, you know, I want to recognize that not everyone has the high genetic drive to move that I do. I really like to exercise. I love to move. It's really fun. I like to play. I like to compete. Not everyone feels that way, but you have to find something you like to do, and then you have to figure out what's the minimum loading that I need. I think as we kind of hear the message about strength conditioning, what we need to ask is not how much strength conditioning, but how little strength conditioning I can get away with so I can go out and play.

Yeah, here's to more play, more joy, having fun in social contexts, and being outside and doing adventures more often. I'm 100% with you on all these things. So thank you so, so much, Kelly, for coming on today. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you back on. Where can people find you? Where would you like to send them to?

Maybe you can share about the app as well. Yeah, go to the StarrettSystem.com. You can check us out. That's right, 2 R's, 2 T's, Starrett. And you know, if you're looking for mobility programming, You know, we feel like we've been doing this a long time and our content is really good. And that's the Mobility Coach app.

But if you go to thereadystate.com, it's all the resources. Beautiful. Kelly, any parting thoughts or pieces of advice, wisdom asks from my audience today?

More joy. It's not— this is not— we're treating all of these aspects of our humanness like a chore or like some serious final exam. Stop it. Like go cook your friends' dinner, go for a walk, play a game, get some sun, watch the sunrise. Like, it's not that complicated and it should be full of joy.

Love it. Thank you, Kelly, so much for coming on. Thank you to your audience for tuning in.

Yeah, good to see you too. Hi everyone, it's Claudia again. Before you take off, would you like to get a short email from me to you several times a month with top tips, insights, and strategies to help optimize your life, health, and business? This could be interesting posts or articles I've read on life and longevity optimization, cool biohacking or lifestyle products that I've discovered, and other fun things to help you be at your best. It's a very short piece of inspiration for you. So if you want to receive it, check it out by going to llinsider.com. That's llinsider.com.

And leave your email to get the next one.