Totul despre mișcare și mobilitate | BOABE DE CUNOAȘTERE | cu Kelly & Juliet Starrett

We have all these wellness industries that are thriving, but still people get sick.

The business keeps getting bigger and bigger and more people are spending more and more money on their health, fitness and wellness. And yet by. By literally any metric you could look at in terms of our overall well being, it's. It's not trending well.

Why should I care?

Pain is a request for change.

There are times in our day where we really do have control of how we operate and how we take care of our.

Is there a difference between exercise and movement?

Human beings need to move. We need to move a lot. And often. 10,000 steps a day is sort of a myth.

You use your body in the ways that you want.

And now Once I reached 40, I noticed that only like 10% of my friends could still run.

How can I change that?

One of the most important lessons we learned as athletes.

No prim. She removes. She Ramon. She despised us. Kelly started. She, Juliet started. To move. Alpha spooce, The exercise, Stretching, Mobilitate. So, Juliet, Kelly, hello and welcome to my podcast. Thank you so much for accepting and taking your time.

We're honored to be here. Thank you for having us.

So I, I want to tell you that I, I've. I've read this book which, which is published here in Romania. I, I started reading it on a chair and I moved to. On the, on the floor from the first pages and in it, it was a bit painful at the first, but it, it's starting to, to feel more comfortable. And I started to think about what you mentioned in the book and about the fact that we have all this wellness industries that are thriving, but still people get sick, so we are doing something bad. And here you come with this mobility approach. Can you tell us more about that and about this idea of mobility? What? Because when you hear that, this book about mobility, you think like, whoa, why, why do I need that?

Yeah, why should I care? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll let. Well, I'll do. I'll just sort of double click on what you said, and then I'll let Kelly talk about mobility. But you're right. I mean, one of the. There were a variety of reasons why we wanted to write this book, but one of them was that we've, we have been working in the health fitness longevity business for the last 20 years, and we see exactly what you're talking about. You know, the business keeps getting bigger and bigger and more. People are spending more and more money on their health, fitness and wellness. And yet by literally any metric you could look at in terms of our Overall well being, it's not trending well, especially not in the US I don't have Romanian data, although my guess is it's similar. People are more overweight, more stressed, more chronic pain. I mean, really, by any metric you look at to measure well being, we're not doing well. And so there's this real disconnect for Kelly and I because there's more and more information, more and more access to information, and yet it is not working. You know, people are joining gyms, they are trying to exercise, they're trying to follow all this advice, and it's, it's not, it's not moving the needle. So you really hit on one of the main reasons why we wrote this book. And then I'll let Kelly actually, you know, talk about why people should care about their mobility.

Yeah, I mean, until I read this book, I was, I was not even stretching. I mean, why should I care? Like, I go to gym, I, I can push a lot, I can swim, I can walk. Why should I care? But it seems that I, I have to care. Right.

Well, let's think of it this way when. Let's define mobility first for people.

Yeah.

What we mean, we wrote another book maybe over 10 years ago, and when we said mobility, we really said is, here are the technical aspects of your range of motion. The range of motion that every doctor, every physical therapist, every coach says that every human being has. And then we were interested in the movement control of that range of motion. So very technical. Fast forward another decade. And what we really mean is, can you do with what your body, with what you want to do, can you use your body in the ways that you want and can you do it in a pain free way? So it really is, ends up being a very personal idea. And just the way we have become very comfortable with the ideas of benchmarks or vital signs. Everyone knows that 120 over 80, it's not good blood pressure, but it's a normal blood pressure. And then that's the point where we said, hey, we should pay attention a little bit more or we know what your temperature should be. So people are very sophisticated about some of the very basic vital signs of human beings. And in the pandemic, Juliet, I noticed that people were adding comfort to other vital signs like oxygen saturation and, you know, aspects like that. And one of the things that we said, well, why don't we have a set of behavioral vital signs around things that we know now from the evidence, from the clinical experience, from the research that says, here's what Human beings really need in terms of movement and sleep and nutrition, some benchmarks that we know. And then let's also apply that same thinking to some simple ways of moving your body. Body. And, you know, if I said to a person, what, what's normal blood pressure? Like 120 over 80. That's good. And I'm like, how much should your hips move? And they have no idea. So what you hinted at in the beginning is a really important concept, which is most important, I think, to this whole conversation, which has become very complex around longevity. You know, people are thinking, I just take this pill and I do this red light and I'll live to be a thousand years old. But really, we want to ask, where in your daily work where you're so busy, are you going to put these essential behaviors that help your body do what we know it needs to do, the same thing it's needed to do for the last 10,000 years? Because it really hasn't changed much in 10,000 years, but certainly in over two and a half million years. And one of the things you discovered was, well, I can sit on the ground and I can read while I'm sitting on the ground. And sitting on the ground, it's one of the best ways to improve the choices, the range of motion, the function, the exposure of what your hips should be able to do.

And I'd love to just sort of add a visual here for people that we love to talk about. But if you think about your mobility as a wide, like a triple wide hallway, that's what your mobility is like 20 twenties, you can pick up new sports, you can do whatever you want physically. You know, you can put on muscle mass. When your friends invite you to go climb a mountain, you're like, yes, I definitely want to do that. I have the physical capability to do that. You have all this sort of physical flexibility at that age. But for any of us who are not 20, we start to see that hallway begin to narrow as we get older. One of the most classic examples I see in my community is that when I was 20, everybody I knew was like a jogger or a runner. They would do that as exercise. And now, Once I reached 40, I noticed that only like 10% of my friends could still run because they, they'd all had injuries. Running hurt their bodies too much. They felt like it was too much load, so they cut running out and switched to biking, for example. Um, but I think everybody listening to this can relate to this idea that you start to sort of have this hallway become Restricted. And the worst case scenario is that you get to be 70 or 80 and your movement choice and, and movement capability so limited that you can't move around. You know, you have to go into a hospital or a skilled nursing facility.

Can't get up off the ground.

Can't get up off the ground. You know, you know, you suffer from a fall which is sort of the beginning of the end. I mean the number one leading cause of death over injury related cause of death in the United States over 65 is false. So you know, so our point of view is yes, it's really hard to get people to care, but it is a bit of a use it or lose it scenario. And if you want to be able to keep moving and keep that hallway wide open for as long as you're alive, to be able to keep moving your body, you know, unfortunately you have to care about your mobility.

Yeah, that's true. And you know what, what I've noticed in, in my work is that people usually don't care how they are going to feel in 30, 40 years. They don't care. They usually want to feel good now. So I think that mobility is one of those keys, one of those key aspects about feeling good now. And I, I would like to start with this sitting, because you mentioned sitting. That is one of the most like normal things to do and to improve mobility. Sitting on the ground. Can we dive inside that and can you explain us why is that good for us? Like how many people does that on, on, on, on the planet and why the chair is not so good for us? I read that in the book sitting on the Chair and then I, yeah, I've sat down on the ground.

The first of all is think this way is the first. If you weren't eating a good diet, the first thing we would do is start feeding you better food. We would get you more fruits and vegetables, we get you more fiber, we get more protein.

Right.

The first thing we would do if you were weak was we would begin to lift weights. And so if the first thing we want to do to change your range of motion is we need to spend time in, in these ranges of motion, in these critical positions that do things like allow our femurs, our legs to connect better to our pelvis.

Right.

Because we have better access to the rotation. When you sit cross legged, for example, you know, when you're sitting on the ground with your legs crossed, you're putting a lot of external rotation into the femur. And it's that rotational component that allows your pelvis to become stable on your, on your leg. So if you don't have access to that rotation, that makes it very difficult for your body to create a good stable spine, Unstable pelvis, unstable femur. So one of the first things we want to do is start saying, hey, instead of adding in another complex behavior onto a complex system, let's have a really simple behavior onto a complex system so we can see inputs and outputs. And spending 20 or 30 minutes a day sitting on the ground, you'll find that you can't sit. Crisscross applesauce, what we call it cross legged. You'll have to put your legs out in front of you and suddenly. Now we're loading that, we call it long lever, where the leg is straight. We're loading the connective tissue, the fascia, we're loading the muscles and we're putting the body into fundamental positions that do things that allow us to have less tension in other shapes or allow us to expose sort of key end range positions so that when we need to step up or step down or get up off the, or we want to lift or play sports or for example, I can tell you that we had some very high level cyclists begin to sit on the ground. And they found that their wattage improved as their positions improved. So they were sitting on the ground, which made it easier for their bodies to say, this is an important position we're loading and spending time here. This is an effortless shape to get into. That transferred into efficiency and economic pedaling, which allowed them to adopt more arrow positions and generate more wattage on the bike. And all they had to do was sit on the ground. But sitting on the ground, change their native range of motion. By improving their native range of motion, they were able to improve their wattage. And that's really one of the things that happens when we begin to take the body and expose it to the things it needs.

The other thing that I would, I'd sort of like to answer the second part of your question. And that is, you know a little bit about the chair and sitting. One of the things we know well is there still are a lot of cultures on earth that don't use the chair as their primary way of spending time. There's still a lot of cultures like Japan where people are sitting on the floor, toileting on the floor, sitting on the ground. And many other cultures around the world are similar. In those cultures, those people experience far fewer orthopedic injuries and joint replacements and a lot of the sort of pain and nagging sort of Physical challenges that we experience in cultures where we're sitting in chairs all the time. So I think that's really, that's another important why for people now, because I agree with you, it's hard to, it's hard to care about this delayed gratification of being able to move when you're 70, especially if you're listening to this at 30. But people at 30, you know, often are injured. And you know, when we go and speak around the world and ask people in big groups to raise their hands if they're in pain, a lot of people are raising their hands. Even younger people are experiencing sort of nagging pain, persistent injury. And you know, certainly we're not going to go so far as to say all that is caused by sitting, but what we are going to say is that, you know, spending 10, 12, 16 hours a day in this position with all of your joints at a 90 degree angle like most Americans are doing, and then getting up out of the chair and trying to be athletic or do other things is not a recipe for, definitely not a recipe for high performance and is also not a recipe for sort of feeling good and, you know, not experiencing, you know, nagging pain and injury. So, so, you know, one of the reasons we love this idea of sitting on the floor is it's so simple and yet so effective. And I don't know what the data is in Romania, but in the United States the data shows people are watching three hours a day of television. And so one of the reasons sitting on the floor is so great is because people actually have time to do it. And our recommendation is take one of those, take a half an hour out of one of those three hours in which you're watching TV and get off of your couch or your chair and just get down on the floor and just spend a little time there. Or for those, those folks who are lucky enough to work from home, we also, you know, you can spend part of your day sitting on the ground versus sitting in a desk.

And you know, one of the things that I think is difficult, there are two pieces here around range of motion. I want people to understand is that when someone has pain, remember, I'm a physio, I'm a physiotherapist. I talked to a lot of people who are in pain and I talked to a lot of people, athletes who have pain, that's limiting their performance. We want everyone to know that the resting state of the human being is pain free. That's how your body should be. Pain is a request for Change. We want people to understand that pain does not necessarily mean tissue damage, doesn't mean injury or trauma. Right? Certainly if there's a bone sticking out of your leg or you have a femur maybe, or have a fever, go talk to your doctor. But the rest of the time, we should use that pain as a check engine light. And saying, what is it about my environment, my nutrition, my stress, my sleep, my hydration, all those things that make a body more tolerant, a brain less likely to be sensitive to pain. But the thing that no one talks about is range of motion when it relates to pain. So if you're having shoulder pain and you can't put your arm over your head, I wonder why those things are connected. Or that if you can't squat all the way down or you can't flex your leg all the way so that your heel touches your butt when you sit, that's an indicator that you're missing key ranges of motion. And one of the easiest things you can do to make yourself feel better, to make it easier to move, to make it so that you have less pain potentially, is to restore your range of motion. So what we have to do is begin to say, let's not only talk about range of motion when we're injured and we're at the doctor's office, but how do we make position and, and positional quality part of the training, practice, experience? And if you're in gymnast gymnastics, if you're in Olympic lifting, both are big, big Romanian traditions. You have full range of motion because your sport requires you to have full range of motion. And you're. So the daily drills of being those athletes in those situations means that you have to move in a certain way. The rest of us don't. I don't have to put my arms over my head day to day. I just have to get my hands to my face and I have to be able to, you know, cook dinner. Otherwise I'm good. And so what we're realizing is that a movement practice is probably important in terms of making sure that you have control on or exposing your tissues and your joints and your movement system to the normal range of motion that every human being should have. And then simultaneously, you're getting stronger bones and stronger muscles, and. And you're having friends and you breathe hard and do all the things that we get for exercise.

So is there a difference between exercise and movement? And why does it matter for. For health?

I'll take a swing at that. In some ways, yes and no. And. And I'll explain that you know, we consider walking a sort of movement and non, non, non exercise activity, if you will. But technically speaking, walking is still exercise. So I just, I want to make that clear.

But what we, but we make it, it's so important to the human being. It's like breathing is exercise.

Exactly.

Breathing is not exercise. Breathing is breathing. Walking is as important as breathing.

Exactly. So what we noticed years ago, we owned a gym for many years, and what we noticed is that many of our members would come in and, you know, work out really hard for a whole hour, but then probably go and spend the remainder of their day pretty sedentary. And some research actually started coming out that if you work out for an hour a day, but then sit for your remaining waking hours of the day, it effectively cancels out the workout you did. And I think what that tells us is that human beings need to move. We need to move a lot and often, and that doing one hour of a workout in a day is great. We need to do that. Like Kelly said, we need to lift weights and we need to breathe hard. We need to sort of put ourselves into those positions, but we also also need to be moving around a lot throughout our day. And what we think is the simplest and most human way to do that is by doing a lot of walking. And so we prescribe that everybody in this book walk 8,000 steps a day. And we consider that a form of what's, what's technically known as non exercise activity. But, you know, people, we can mince words, you know, so we've had people ask us in, you know, seminars and book talks like, well, doesn't walking count as exercise? And technically, yes, but the way that we think about it is for us, the exercises is more formal. It's where we breathe hard, lift weights, try to get stronger, try to, you know, increase our cardio, you know, our cardio and all those things. But walking is what human beings need to be doing and human beings need to be moving a lot. And so that's sort of the differentiation for us.

How would you approach walking? Is it just. You said 10,000 steps?

Yeah, we actually say 8,000, 8,000. The reason it's an important distinction is that 10,000 steps a day is sort of a myth and actually came from. It ultimately is a myth. It was sort of created as a marketing campaign and not based on any real science. But there is really good data to show that Those who walk 8,000 steps a day compared to those who walk 4,000 steps a day, have a 51% lower. All cause Mortality, which to me is significant. What it says is that again, human beings need to be moving all the time. The other reason that we recommend 8,000 versus 10,000 is we have learned in our own practice and for context, you know, we both work full time running a company and we have a pretty busy time crunch life. We're also raising two kids and we found that 8,000 is a realistic amount of steps in movement to get in a day, especially amid a time crunch life. And I'll tell you that we don't necessarily get all those 8,000 steps by going out for a one hour walk. You know, we walk our dog in the morning, in the evening, we try to take little walks after we eat, or we take walking meetings during the workday. So we just try to figure out small ways to accumulate more movement throughout our day. And, and 8,000 is sort of the target number. Obviously more steps is better. You know, for anyone who wants to get 10 or 12 or 16, like, great. More movement is always better. But 8,000 we think is the benchmark.

Yeah. And you, I love the way that you, you don't say that you want to make them in like one session and you split them on like in a, in different times. And this is, this is study. I'm gonna send you a link. I'm gonna leave it down in the, in the description of this podcast. I saw it just today and I was so astonished because in that study it seems that it's, it's made on diabetic patients and it seems that it's much better for them to make 10 body weight squats every 45 minutes to maintain their, their blood sugar, then just like one walk of 30 to 45 minutes. So if you just walk one time a day for 45 minutes, your blood sugar gonna go down and then it's going to rise. But just take it making like 10 squats every 45 minutes, it's much more effective. But my question is, how can you implement this kind of stuff in your life, like move every 45 minutes, every hour? Well, I mean, you can put a reminder in your phone. Yeah, but ultimately you're gonna forget about it.

That's right.

You're gonna go for that project and you're gonna sit on the, on the, that's what, what happens to me. Like I gonna sit, I'm gonna write, I'm gonna record and I, I'm gonna find out in eight hours that I didn't move.

So, you know, what you hint at is sort of the really important connection between the environment and the person. And we actually call this environmental constraint, is that we actually don't want you to have to make another choice or to have to have a piece of tech that reminds you that, you know, to move. That's. That's crazy. Instead, it would be better to set up your. Shape, your world, so. So that you end up doing a thing that's better for you than worse for you. So, for example, everyone can relate to this. We come in, in the morning, and I bring 10 cakes and lots of snacks and cookies and sweets, and I just put them on the table in front of you. You're gonna eat those all day long, right? You just. It's there. It's so convenient. You'll taste them. It's a lot easier to come into the. Say if there's no cake. I'm not gonna eat cake. Right? And if I bring in fruits and vegetables all day long and it's cut up and there's a little. You'll eat fruits and vegetables all day long. Pickles, all the. All the good things. Nuts. So what we find is that if we can set your world up so you don't have to make a choice, then you don't have to do it. You can spend your willpower doing something else. If on your calendar it says, take walking meeting, and it's easy to do that, you'll do that. Juliet and I are both at standing desks right now. Juliet is perching. I'm perching. My feet are on the floor. Juliet's feet are on. Often she does these talks standing, but coming into an environment where I have movement choice so that I don't have to stand up in my suit and do 10 squats in the middle of the meeting, that's never gonna happen. Excuse me, I'm. I'm in the middle of a lecture. I'll have to do these squats. So the problem is what that. What that study tells us is that incorporating big muscle groups, making them work, sucks up a lot of carbohydrates, sucks up a lot of sugar. That's what that tells us, right? And that doing that more often, engaging these big muscle groups more often. Well, if you were a busy person working on the ground, toileting on the ground, you would get up and down a whole bunch of times during the day. In an hour, you'd get up and down constantly. And you wouldn't have to do squats, right? You would have. Your environment would set you up for that. So if I am worried about sitting, the first thing I'm going to do is say, hey, let me give myself a choice so that it's easier to not make a choice. So I'm at a standing desk now, and I'm leaning up against a bar stool. Now I'm standing. Now I'm leaning. My feet are on the ground. And now I need to do some deep work. I'm going to sit, and then after a while, I can fidget. And here I'm standing again. And what I've done is just shape the world so that I don't have to make another choice. And I think the thing that you talked about, both of you talked about, is that it's difficult sometimes when you're young to care about these things. But what we start to see is movement. Choice goes down, range of motion goes down, and it's hard to see inputs and outputs. You can do a lot of heavy drinking very early in your life, and you can show up the next day. It's probably not very good for you. It causes a lot of problems with your heart and your blood vessels. But you can drink and still win a world championship the next day. Suddenly, when you're 40 and 50, you probably can't drink because the next day and the next week, you're going to be destroyed. But you know what you start to see is that you lose this tolerance. And it's hard for us to keep in mind that we're young and fabulous and we're going to live to be 110 years old. So what we want to do is not have to make that choice, is that if we can start to shape the world in such a way that habits become behaviors, that the world is set up for me to make a better decision, then I'll automatically do that. And then we let that run for 10 and 20 and 30 and 40 and 50 years. And you'll be surprised at how you really start to change from the people who don't.

The other thing is, I think that what that study tells me is that we need to move often. And that also it sort of confirms what other studies have shown, is that sitting in and of itself isn't bad. It's that marathon bouts of sitting, so sitting for long periods of time and not moving are what is bad. And so I think just interrupting that with 10 squats or a little bit of a walk makes a lot of sense logically to me, based on all the other studies. And I also am a realist, right? Like, we also work and have kids and have busy days, and we have moments where we get you Know, stuck, focused on a project. And I think, you know, we're both former athletes, and one of the most important.

You're still a current athlete.

Current athlete.

Got a big race next week.

You're right. Current. We're athletes. We consider ourselves athletes. And I think one of the most important lessons we learned as athletes is this idea of controlling what you can control. And for that reason, we consider the morning before you go to work and the evening when you get home from work to be the most important times where you can take control of your health. Because we get it. You may have days where you lose control and you have to eat a bar for lunch, and you've probably sat for a few too many hours. But what you can control is how do you take care of your body before you leave for work, and how do you take care of your body when you get home from work? And so, you know, yes, obviously, I'm not recommending sitting continuously without moving for eight hours, but if that's how your day went, then, you know, you might have to come home and, you know, go for a little bit of a walk and go for a walk before you leave for work in the morning and just figure out the ways you can fit it in. But, you know, there are times in our day where we really do have control of how we. How we operate and how we take care of our body. And it's when. And we really need to double down on those times so that on the days where we do have, you know, deep work days, where we just don't move enough during the day, we make sure to get enough movement around the edges.

By the way, how did you move from, like, training best world's athletes to.

Telling people to sit on the floor?

Yeah, exactly. Yes.

One of the things that, you know.

I think, believe us, we've asked ourselves that question as well.

Juliet and I were professional athletes, and one of the things that we started to recognize early on was that we felt like the highest calling of sport was to transform our society, to transform our families and our households. And one of my favorite coaches is Franz Bosch. He's a Dutch coach, and he says there's more variation in waltzing than there is in sprinting, which tells us that at low loads, low speeds, low stress, low consequence, you can do whatever you want. You can have a cigarette once in a while, you can drink some vodka, you can eat little cakes, you don't have to move. But as soon as the stress is on, as soon as you have to run fast, as soon as you have to go. What we start to see is the practices really start to look very similar because we're starting to figure out these are the essential behaviors that allow human beings to do the most work and be the most extraordinary. And what we've. Juliet and I have always felt like is if we could take those lessons that we're learning in high performance and we could actually apply them to the rest of our lives, then sport became the ultimate laboratory, the ultimate testing ground where we could understand inputs and outputs. How did we get to 8,000 steps through sport? How do we get to our pro protein recommendations and sleep through sport? How do we get through range of motion by understanding the physicality of strength and conditioning? That's. That's how we know what we know. And so it's not. We're coming from public health saying, hey, we're just coming from this high performance saying, whoa, look at what we've learned here. Let's apply that to our household.

Yeah. And I mean, just to emphasize it, the same things that we recommend and Built to Move are the things that we recommend to the best athletes and teams. And one example I'll give you is that, you know, we notice that a lot of regular people, but, you know, athletes sometimes want to jump over these basics because they have access to all of the fanciest tools and technologies out there, you know, from, like, you know, Normatec boots to ice pads to saunas to all sorts of crazy technology. All of which, by the way, we're fans of and think are awesome, but not at the expense of making sure you've checked the box on the basics. So what we saw when we went in to work with teams and organizations and athletes is that a lot of these athletes as well, have skipped over these basic fundamental principles that they need to, you know, check those boxes on in order to be the best. And then on top of that, they can add supplementation and technology and all these other cool tools. That's what, you know, elite athletes and teams get to do. But what we realize is those same fundamental practices that we are going in and recommending are also the same practices that can just make our neighbors and our mom and our dad and, you know, the people who come to our gym just feel better in their bodies and feel like they have again, like Kelly said, like they're playing offense on their health versus playing defense.

Speaking about, I mean, I don't want to ask you to resume your book in 10 minutes, but speaking about these things that top athletes has to do as well as, like, normal People, what are those good things that we all have to do on the daily basis?

The essentials are that all human beings need to be at least laying in bed for eight hours a night. Sleep is, is a keystone and super critical behavior.

And if you can't sleep for 8 hours, we just need to lay there bed for 8 hours, not looking at your phone.

Yeah. And so, you know, sleep and rest is, is, you know, maybe all of these other good behaviors stem from good. A well rested human. So that's critical.

From a healthy brain to recovering your tissues.

Everything, everything that sleep does for us is, is, you know, leads to all these other good.

If you're in pain, you have to sleep.

Yeah, you, you know, we recommend people need to eat enough protein and enough fruits and vegetables every single day. As we've talked about at length here, you've got to move your body a lot and often throughout the day. Again, our recommendation is through walking, but there's lots of ways to do that. As we've also discussed. You know, we're sit on the floor 30 minutes a day. You know, if everybody ends this podcast with no other information other than remembering to sit on the floor for 30 minutes a day, like we've done our job. And then the other thing I think that gets lost and isn't necessarily prescribed in this book, but we are such fans of, is that people need to go outside and play and interact with people.

In the United States. There's good data that supports that the average American is going outside only for 120 minutes a week. And we know from the research that the sunlight and fresh air and exposure.

To nature and spending time with people.

Outside, this is one of the reasons we're such fans of walking. If you just walking inside of a treadmill, that's like the worst form of walking. That's the dirtiest walking.

That's like a C. You get a C on that.

Instead, what we want is that we need people to interact with other humans. We need you to get sunshine. We need to get sunrise and sunset and bright light. And it's really just as a reminder that it's very. The human being is a very sophisticated organism. The human brain is the most complex structure. It's in the known universe attached to a body that is equally as complex in a psycho emotional complex set of relationships with other brains. And that means we need to be around other brains, we need to play. And Juliet says it again is like, you know, how do we say this is essential to being a human being? And then we can start to ask, well, how are you moving your body? Are you working on balance all these other pieces?

And the last thing I'll add is that, you know, there is so much attention these days on longevity and people are consuming tons of information and podcasts and Instagrams and they're really like, you know, it's, it. I feel that it's a bit of information overload at this point. But, you know, we're recommending that people always default to these basics. And again, you can always add on fancy things on top of the basics, but that the default needs to be the basics and that, you know, it's not necessarily sexy on Instagram, but the basics work, you know, the fundamentals work, and they work by just radical consistency. Like Kelly calls it bone crushing consistency. You know, if you do those five things I just mentioned with bone crushing consistency, you know, you're gonna go a long way towards playing offense versus playing defense in your body.

You won't be recognizable to your friends.

Yeah.

And those five things are sleep, move, sit on the floor, play outside with.

People and eat protein and fruits and vegetables.

How much? How much? About how much protein? How much?

Well, thanks for asking.

One of the things that we know, particularly in Western societies, is that we're eating fewer fruits and vegetables. And what. When we hear fruits and vegetables, don't think gross. Fruits and vegetables that you don't like. Right. What we say is we need the micronutrients, all the vitamins and minerals, and we need the fiber in those things and those. That's irrecontrovertible. Like, you cannot not do those things. If you want, we talk to people who probably haven't had vitamin C in two days.

Right.

Whatever vitamin C is in hamburgers they get. Right? Right. Or pizza. And there's just not a lot of vitamin C there. So if you don't have vitamin C, there's a. Vitamin C does a lot for your body, but one of the things it does is it really helps you use the collagen and proteins to make connective tissue. So if you don't have good vitamin C, you're not going to have good connective tissue. So I can't even talk about your Achilles pain or your elbow pain, your junky tissues, if you're not getting vitamin C. So we recommend you 800 grams of fruits and vegetables every day, and you can do that any way you want. You don't like vegetables? Fine. Don't eat vegetables. Only eat apples. If you love rutabaga or love some obscure Romanian borscht soup that you're like, cabbage is my jam. Then go ahead and eat 800 grams of cabbage. Yeah, it is a good soup. I'm saying I love it. But my point is we don't really care. What we care is that you're eating this, getting enough fiber, micronutrients, and then the protein we want you. And this is going to be confusing for your listeners. We say 0.8 grams per pound body weight. That's how we think here. We're going to have to convert that, mix those. But that's a reasonable amount of protein. So I am about 109 kilos and I need to get between 175 and 220 grams of protein a day. For example. Example.

And I would just add that. I think everybody listening to this knows they need to eat fruits and vegetables. Like, I think, you know, we've all heard that over our lifetime. But I think the question is how much? And that's what we love about this 800 gram line, is that there's a clear line. And yes, you might need to measure for two or three days, but once you measure for two or three days and just get an idea of how much fruits and vegetables 800 grams is, then you're rolling. Then you can just make sure that you incorporate some fruits and vegetables at each one of your meals. And it doesn't need to be a prison of weighing and measuring for your whole life.

And this is, this is, I think, crucial. A half kilo of melon. Think about that. A half a kilo of cherries, A half kilo of some fruit is about 230 calories. So one of the reasons we love this is if you eat a half a kilo of melon here.

That's true.

You're gonna be full. You're gonna be like, I can't eat any more melon. I'm so disgusted with myself. But you've had 200 calories of melon. Meanwhile, a cookie is like 320 calories. And it, you know, like you can crush. I would never stop at one cookie. I would only eat three cookies. So, you know, suddenly I'm at a thousand calories. Or I can go ahead and eat 2 kilos of melon and try to get up there and it's going to be, that's an insane amount of fruit. And so what we love about this is not only do we end up getting more fiber and micronutrients, but we push out sort of room for the bad things or the things that are still fun because we're human beings, we love these things. But what we don't say is, let's restrict. What we say is, let's go ahead and make sure you're hitting these minimums in protein and fruits and vegetables, and then if you have room on the, on the other side, I guarantee you'll be fine.

And I think, you know, we've heard from some people where they're like, well, I don't want to ever have to weigh and measure. And we have some ideas in the book about how you can just get a visual image of it. And, you know, other people have said, oh, well, that's just weird. Like, my grandparents didn't have to weigh and measure their food. But, you know, our food environment is completely different. Our food environment is weird now, you know, especially here in the U.S. i mean, the amount of, you know, fast food and processed food that's available and in our faces all the time is crazy. And I don't know if it's the same or as bad there, but we just, we don't live in a normal food environment anymore. We don't live in the same food environment that our grandparents lived in. And so unfortunately, we have to meet that with a little more attention to making sure we get those protein and fruits and vegetables. Minimums.

Was. Was the best sources of protein you recommend?

No, Nope, nope. Whatever you like.

Whatever you like. So if you're vegan, that's okay. You're vegetarian, you only eat cows, you, you. But we, you know, yeah, I mean.

Fish, chicken, meat, protein powder, whatever works for you.

We tell everyone, and probably everyone has heard this old saying, eat the rainbow. So we're trying to get as many different kinds of fruits and vegetables as we can in different colors of fruits and vegetables. Right. And we like the same idea towards proteins. If you only have one protein source, that's fine. You're. You're a human being. That's better than nothing. Maybe that's what you can afford. But we'd rather you eat a diverse number of protein sources. And, you know, built into that is the opportunity to eat skin and connective tissue and bone marrow and organ meats and all of the things that human beings have been eating forever that help us have tissues that are really strong.

Good. And I have, like, one more question for you regarding the breeding. You have a chapter about breeding.

It.

What I was, like, stunned by, but by your example of, like, trying to stay like that and try to take a full breath, you. You can do that. So if you say, if you stay like in the correct posture. Yeah. Then you can breathe normally.

Well, how? Let me say that there's no correct posture. So posture, the Latin word root of posture just means position. And ultimately what we like to say is there are positions that are more effective and less effective. There are positions that allow for better expression of the physiology and less expression. So if I'm slouched, it's really hard to take a big breath. And so a position where I organize myself, where I can take a bigger breath is a more effective position at not having high CO2s, of being able to turn my head, of being able to create more musculature. Sort of recruitment.

Right.

That allows me to create higher pressures, that solves more problems. So what you see is that oftentimes we adopt shapes through habit or through the environment that really limit the expression of the physiology. In this case, taking a big breath. And that has huge implications on the brain. It has huge implications on how stiff we get and how effective it is to ventilate. If you go to the hospital and spend time there, they're going to give you a device that forces you to breathe out. Why is that? Because when people are in the hospital, they don't have to breathe hard. They're in positions. We have to get them to breathe, otherwise they get pneumonia. So imagine what subclinical pneumonia looks like. It looks like I'm slouched and I just live in this little world and I take these little breaths and then when I want to go take something else, I want to take these big breaths or swim or run. I've trained myself not to have access.

How can we approach like breathing? What should a normal person do about breathing to get a better health?

Do it.

Where to start? You have some examples of breathing in the morning. You have some examples of walking and taking your breath and then breathing out. What would you recommend?

Well, first of all, we have this thing called a Breath spin up, a video that we can send you a link to and you can put in the show notes. So I think that would be a place for people to start like a morning breath Spin up, which is just a great follow along video that Kelly has and I think is great. And I think the other simple thing that people can think about is to keep their mouth shut and breathe through their nose as often as possible, especially during aerobic exercise. There's a book that we highly recommend and I don't know if it's been translated into Romanian, but it's called Breath by a guy named James Nestor and.

It is it is translated.

Yeah. And it's a, it's a pretty quick read and an amazing book. And you know, again, if you. There's no way to read that book and not become very conscious of making sure that you're breathing through your nose as often as possible. And one place to bring attention to that, if you are at, if you are adding in a bunch of walking to your day, is to bring some attention to breathing through your nose while you're walking.

You should be able to breathe in and out through your nose easily while you're walking. Even walking upstairs, there's an old yogi master named Iyengar who says the nerves are king of the breath and the breath is king of the brain. So there's not an accident that we spend a lot of time talking about managing stress and downregulation of the body through breath practice. Well, Juliet and I are just saying, well, hey, your body organization is going to make that easier. And why don't we practice making the breath more effective just by breathing through the nose day to day? So if you find yourself mouth breathing, just shut your mouth, breathe through your nose and do the best you can to make that your default. Even during exercise.

Even during, during the exercise, yeah. Because when I run, I start to breathe with, with my mouth. How can I change that? Is it possible to change that?

It is what we will do. What we say is we borrow something from our friend Rob Wilson called the Breathing gears. And it's, we say as often as you can, it's nose in, nose out, and you have to work really hard at that. Then we go in through the nose, out through the mouth. Then when it gets really bad, it's mouth, mouth. But then as soon as we can, we're back to right and then recovering, shutting the mouth, going nose, nose. Yeah.

One of Kelly's favorite things to program is like these horrible bike intervals where you just, you know, bleed through the eyes and sprint for a minute on the bike. And then, you know, that's always mouth, mouth breathing. But then the moment you're on your one minute off, you know, that's a time to either go nose, mouth or try to get to nose nose during that recovery. So that's a way to think about incorporating it into training.

And for everyone who knows, you know, obviously this book Breath by James Nestor, but people like the company Oxygen Advantage has been talking about the complex physiology of the breath for a long time. One of the things we're trying to do is make the body more CO2 tolerant. So the CO2 is the gas. That's the byproduct of this oxygen. And the idea here is that if you start breathing through your nose, you're going to get your brain more comfortable with higher CO2 levels, which means you're going to be less twitchy, but you also will be able to access the oxygen on your hemoglobin. So, in short, this breathing is simple practice, but the downstream effects of the physiology are immense.

Yeah. Is it, is it much more efficient to breathe through your nose when you're doing exercise for your breathing? I mean, is it making the sports more efficient?

Yes, ultimately.

The example that we always like to give is when Kipchoge ran the under two hour marathon. You know, we watched him go the last, what, like 200 meters? I mean, we didn't watch the whole race, but the last 200 meters, that is all over the Internet. He's running the end of that race, the fastest marathon in human history. And his mouth is closed.

Yeah, that's a nice example. Yeah. I have just one question, one more minute. What's. What would you add to your book if you would write it now? Is it anything that came to your mind after you published it, that you would like to be there?

You know, we put a little afterward about it. We specifically didn't want to include formal exercise in this book because we wanted to. We didn't want this book to just get dropped in as like a fitness book in categories. We really wanted to bring attention to some other parts of well being that were separate and apart from exercise. But I think, you know, we might actually add, were we to do it over, we might add a chapter that said, hey, you know, you've got to breathe hard and weightlift, like those are the two things you've got to do. For us, those were kind of a given, but yeah, if we were to add a chapter, I think that would be it.

Yeah. Cool. Kelly, Juliet, thank you so much for, for taking your time and coming here to Romanian podcast to Romanian people. And it would be really nice to, to have you here in Romania to a conference.

Yeah, we'd love to come. We'd love to come. And thank you so much for having us. We know it's late your time, so we're grateful for you accommodating our schedule.

Yeah, that's cool. Okay, thank you so much and see it around.

Okay, take care. Thank you.

Bye.