10 Vital Moves to Reach Your Body's Full Potential – Kelly Starrett – #1049

To the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Guys, if you don't know who Kelly is, you should. Kelly Starrett is a leading expert on mobility. He was one of the very early guests on the show almost 10 years ago. I've become aware in my journey of biohacking just how important functional movement is. And if you go back to the bulletproof diet, there's even a section on that that says, look, you can eat all the right foods, you can do exercise, that's way more efficient, but if you don't know how to turn on a muscle, it doesn't really matter. Like, you've got to learn how to turn it on. In my case, I have probably some of the worst proprioception that you could find. At least I did. And there's still limitations in it. And what that that is. If you've read Smarter, Not Harder, this is your body's sense of where it is and how it's moving in space. And Kelly has been a leading voice in saying, well, you know, how do you access all of these muscles and all this connective tissue so that you can make it do what you want? And I've learned a lot from Kelly. His first big book was, I believe, Becoming a Supple Leopard. Right. And then there's been a couple more since then, and your new one is really effective. 10 must for mobility is what we're going to be talking about here. So I just, I want to ground our listeners in this understanding that how you move in the world is not. Is probably not the best way or the most efficient way or the way that's going to make you live a long time and have, you know, working hips and knees and ankles and feet and wrists and all the other stuff. So his interventions have been groundbreaking for a lot of people and certainly fascia breaking for others.

Well, even the way you're describing the system now, beyond just muscle and thinking that as an endocrine system, muscle system, which is, you know, you've been on that tip for a long time. But even just the shift that you and I are explaining, talking about connective tissue and fascia, that represents a wholesale sort of acknowledgment and evolution in sort of the readiness of everyone else to start to think about our movement system as a key aspect of our brain.

System, I love it. The brain body interaction there. And even, like your mindset, you know, Built to Move as the name of a book, is. Is awesome. So I. I want to go deep on our interview today so that we can really teach Listeners how to think about this, how you think about this, and kind of maybe some tools that they can use because you go through so much in your book and I'll just say, guys, if you liked smarter, not harder, because it's very like tools. And here's what to do about this centric. You'll find the same kind of thinking in Kelly's book because it's that powerful and there's just so much you can do. It's like, how do I know what problem I have or what I want to improve even if it's not broken? And then what's the right approach for it? So you just have a very systematic perspective on it, which really, really works for the way I do it. And again, this new book is built to move. But if any book by Kelly is going to be very valuable for you.

Well, you, you know, you. Something I've seen in your evolution, which I love, is that, you know, early on, some of your early writing, my early thinking is really high concept, 30,000 foot view, sort of principle based. And I think we have to start there. But fast forward 10 years of data and experience and all of the sort of workings of the, you know, the work you're doing, the people you're doing it with. What you end up with is, as you see in your books, we're seeing more logistics. So we're seeing tactical. What do I do in the morning first? Not like a 200 page treatise on the idea of what you should be doing in the morning. This is the implementation. And I think that's where we're starting to see the evolution of this early wave of thinkers who we are all kind of came to consciousness and to awareness and to our power. A decade plus ago. We might have been working for decades before that, but that's when the Internet kind of really blew up. We could start to really integrate and synthesize. But you're right that we're thinking about this at this sort of really behavioral level and that turns out to be the big lever.

And let's face it, when you came out with your book, when I came out with my early works, people got really mad like that's not how it works. You can't do that. How dare you upgrade your biology and hack yourself and how dare you say my movement isn't functional and all these things. And so you kind of had to explain the thinking and to get the critics and to get sort of the people who had a broken perspective on reality to get them up to speed. And so then like okay, maybe there's a maybe it's possible. And once you have that, then you go, okay, if what I'm saying is possible, here's what to do. Because most people, even listeners, 20% of us are like, tell me everything. And the other 80% are tell me what to do because I have a day job, right? And I think you understand that as well for people too, because we're not all going to be as knowledgeable as you are. I'm not as knowledgeable as you are about functional movement, never will be. So I could call you. Because I could call you, or I could read your book and say, all right, this is what to do. So what's changed? Other than the fact that now we understand functional movement is the real deal, what's changed in fitness over the last 10 years? Like what have you seen in just looking at the world?

That's a wonderful jump off point. Let's talk about fitness as a trillion dollar mega industry that doesn't really serve the people it purports to serve. So we have this fitness industrial complex and if we were running an experiment on society through this, go to Instagram, drop in, try to understand what you're seeing. Try to understand systems, approaches, inputs, outputs. Does it make a better society? EO Wilson talks about the highest calling of science is to serve the humanities. And we've seen and believe for a long time that the highest calling of sports and these high performance environments were to transform community, transmute these ideas into things that made our families more robust. At the heart of upgrade is this idea that you are actually in charge of your own body and that versivise it happens in the household, it doesn't happen at a large institutional level. No one else is coming to save you. So if we said, okay, well if we take that as our premise, we have this trillion dollar industry, what's our third party validation? What's our objective measures? How are we measuring the feel goodness of all the things that we're seeing on the Internet? Obesity, not good. Diabetes, not good. Low back pain, orthopedic surgeries, substance abuse. Choose something acl, injury rates in kids. Choose something you give a crap about. And then let's say, let's look at inputs and let's look at outputs and it looks like everything seems to be trending in the wrong direction. Which means a couple things. One is, are we potentially making type 1 errors in the delivery or in the thinking? Is that the problem or is it the problem that we aren't really meeting people where they Are that, you know, we've done a really good job talking to this 1%, but we've left the 99% people behind in terms of bringing them along with basecamp behaviors. And simultaneously, is there so much change in their environment that they can't adapt as quickly, that the tolerances sort of have just been eroded because we suddenly are driving and we have access to such crappy food and there's so much technology and we're so much sort of sedentary creep. Either way, what we're trying to do is say, hey, look, we've been working alongside the smartest kids on the planet for over a decade, trying to win medals, trying to go faster, trying to get the brain to be a brain more effectively. How can we take those principles and recognize that these are the hinges that open the biggest doors and then go reapply that in a different way? That's what we're trying to do.

I really, really like that. And that definition of biohacking is change the environment around you and inside of you so you have control over your own biology.

Yes.

Just like you said, it starts in your household. It starts in, how do you do your daily practice? And suddenly that gives me control of my biology. It does. And you could do, I don't know, 100 burpees every morning. Is that a good idea?

It certainly could be. The real question now is, well, what's essential and how much? One of the things I really appreciate about your approach to movement is that it's not a doomsday prepping, kind of always scarcity mindset. At some point, you're like, you're fit enough and you're strong enough and your tissues are healthy enough. Let's go do something important with that. Let's go use that time to do something else versus I need more pull ups so I can have more pull ups so I can have more pull ups. I never know what's going to happen. I'm chasing the peloton fitness forever. And what we end up seeing is this really ends up being this recursive cycle where people are never fit enough. Driving versus, hey, the goal of training.