Simple Practice to Improve Flexibility & Range of Motion | Dr. Kelly Starrett & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | When you look at how most people sit, walk, and do their "exercise," resistance training

00:00:12.000 | and/or cardiovascular, hopefully, and cardiovascular training, what are some of the most common

00:00:17.200 | problems that you see?

00:00:18.600 | Is it imbalance, like leaning to one side?

00:00:21.120 | Is it that their bodies are trained into asymmetry?

00:00:24.680 | Is there any way to kind of, you know, mass-diagnose everybody all at once in this first question?

00:00:32.200 | Let me borrow a couple analogies from one of my favorite people, Katie Bowman.

00:00:36.640 | And first thing is, she will point out, and it's not a perfect analogy, so bear with us,

00:00:43.880 | is this notion of mechanotransduction, which means that at a cellular level, your tissues,

00:00:49.720 | some of your tissues specifically, need mechanical input to express themselves.

00:00:52.960 | You want a strong tendon?

00:00:54.680 | How do you get a strong tendon?

00:00:55.680 | You have to load it, right?

00:00:57.160 | Does it do tendon things?

00:00:58.880 | Is it lengthening under load?

00:01:00.480 | Does it express shortening under load?

00:01:02.000 | Does it do isometric holds?

00:01:03.880 | So we can start at that level.

00:01:05.860 | She points out that if you put a—and again, not a perfect analogy, but if you put an orca

00:01:11.040 | into captivity, over a while, that orca fin will start to fold over.

00:01:15.880 | Folded fin syndrome, it's nicer than floppy fin syndrome.

00:01:19.320 | That's hurtful.

00:01:20.800 | And what you're doing is when you alter the environment that this amazing animal lives

00:01:26.080 | in, it's not swimming, it's not fighting, it's not hunting, you're not loading the base

00:01:30.280 | of that fin.

00:01:31.360 | And so what happens is that collagen breaks down, and we start to see changes in that,

00:01:36.200 | in that expression of that.

00:01:37.760 | So what we can start to say is, again, not romanticizing the Pleistocene era when human

00:01:42.520 | beings were paleo, but what is it that we need in our daily dose lives to maintain the

00:01:51.400 | integrity of our tissue systems?

00:01:53.120 | Exposure, so that our brain says, "This is safe," so that you actually have tendons and

00:01:58.280 | ligaments that can do what tendons and ligaments can do, and fascia that can be springy.

00:02:04.840 | If—borrow another sort of Katie Bowman-ism—if we have a movement language, an actual language

00:02:10.440 | made up of words, how many words are you using today?

00:02:13.760 | And most of us aren't using that many words, so very few words.

00:02:16.880 | So I sit, I stand, I walk very slowly, I sit, I stand, I walk very slowly.

00:02:21.980 | So everything is just in those few—and then I go exercise, using the same words, I'm on

00:02:25.960 | the exercise bike, right, I'm on an elliptical, which doesn't actually ask me to have any

00:02:30.160 | hip extension, and suddenly you can see that our movement language, which we're really

00:02:34.400 | codifying under intensity, load, right, we're becoming very competent in these adaptation

00:02:40.280 | positions.

00:02:41.280 | Sitting.

00:02:42.280 | What ends up happening?

00:02:43.280 | Well, we start to see that our bodies are adaptation machines, and they just begin to

00:02:46.680 | adapt.

00:02:47.680 | And so suddenly what we have is a human body that doesn't express normative range.

00:02:53.800 | The brain may not think that that range is even safe and put there.

00:02:57.720 | Then we start to sort of minimize the movement choices that the brain has, the movement options

00:03:02.940 | that the brain has.

00:03:04.320 | So really the question is, you know, at low loads—let's establish things.

00:03:10.100 | At low loads and low speeds, you can get away with everything.

00:03:13.080 | Why?

00:03:14.080 | Because this body is rad.

00:03:15.080 | And it's designed—it's durable, it's not fragile, it's designed to be ridden hard and

00:03:18.660 | put away wet for a long time.

00:03:20.240 | Remember when you were 17, would cut off your hand, it would grow back the next day, right?

00:03:24.560 | You would.

00:03:25.560 | Think about the falls you took skating.

00:03:26.880 | And you'd be like, "Oh, that sucked," and the next day you put your shoulder back in,

00:03:30.120 | you just kind of respawn.

00:03:32.040 | So what is it that we need to put into our movement diet?

00:03:36.760 | And then we can start to separate out, should that be exercise or should that be movement?

00:03:42.240 | And now the real filter that we should be beginning these real and earnest conversations

00:03:46.120 | about is, what is it in the environment, given that I'm a busy working person, and maybe

00:03:51.120 | I have some agency in the morning, and maybe I have some agency in the afternoon, but let's

00:03:54.840 | take exercise out of it.

00:03:56.680 | The one-hour discreet, working on zone two cardio, working on my evidence-based practice,

00:04:02.640 | what should I be doing the rest of the time?

00:04:04.440 | So for example, one of the things that we're huge fans of in the evening is sitting on

00:04:07.240 | the ground for 20 or 30 minutes.

00:04:09.240 | In what?

00:04:10.240 | Cross-legged?

00:04:11.240 | Yes.

00:04:12.240 | Squatting?

00:04:13.240 | Yes.

00:04:14.240 | Long sit.

00:04:15.240 | Side saddle.

00:04:16.240 | 90-90.

00:04:17.240 | Any time you need to fidget, fidget.

00:04:18.240 | And what you'll see is you start to accumulate exposure, which I think in my worldview is

00:04:22.200 | the first order of magnitude in problem-solving is how do we have the human be exposed to

00:04:28.720 | the thing we're trying to change or improve or restore normative ranges.

00:04:34.160 | So that would be in the evening, just getting down on the floor?

00:04:36.480 | Yeah, that behavior alone cultures that toilet on the ground, sleep on the ground.

00:04:42.260 | We start to see fall risk in our elderly populations attenuate to zero, approximate zero.

00:04:48.760 | Lower hip OA, lower low back OA, and it may just be that we're using and touching some

00:04:53.980 | shapes and our bodies are saying, "Hey, let's just keep that around.

00:04:59.100 | Let's normalize what the hip should be able to do."

00:05:01.960 | In terms of your connective tissue, think about the idea here is that we're loading

00:05:07.880 | you passively, actively, whatever, that you're saying to your brain, this is a quote from

00:05:14.600 | one of my PT instructors.

00:05:17.080 | And this is really important.

00:05:18.080 | If people take this away, they should listen to this.

00:05:21.000 | Muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs.

00:05:23.280 | At no age, do you stop adapting?

00:05:24.800 | At no age, do you stop healing?

00:05:26.400 | Those things slow down.

00:05:27.400 | It's a little bit harder to have the same adaptation we did.

00:05:29.920 | We weren't in full-fledged puberty, but you can always adapt.

00:05:33.920 | In the first order of business, if you spend 20 or 30 minutes sitting on the ground, you're

00:05:37.360 | going to start to see that hamstrings start to feel better.

00:05:39.760 | My hips start to feel a little better because I'm just spending time in these ranges and

00:05:44.160 | my body's going to start to adapt as I increase my movement language.

00:05:47.680 | Would you extend what you just said to, like if somebody has a hardwood floor and maybe

00:05:52.560 | a little low-pile rug or something like that, and they're going to watch a podcast or a

00:05:57.280 | movie or a show in the evening, they stretch out on their belly, like sort of up dog or

00:06:03.520 | cobra or whatever it's called.

00:06:05.600 | So basically any kind of movement where you're on the ground, any kind of squatting, and

00:06:12.640 | maybe they start to stretch a bit here and there.

00:06:14.640 | Oh, so now we're into the real magic, the behavior.

00:06:17.720 | Where are we going to stack these behaviors?

00:06:20.200 | So if you have to get up and down off the ground, plus one, right?

00:06:23.120 | I got to get up and down off the ground every day.

00:06:24.840 | So if you're an older person who may hasn't gotten off the ground, I'm older, I'm just

00:06:28.080 | talking about over 50, you may not have gotten up and down off the ground for 100 years.

00:06:31.900 | You just don't do it anymore, right?

00:06:33.720 | We want to hear why I think MMA is so amazing.

00:06:36.960 | You have to get up and down off the ground a lot, right, if you go to Jits, right?

00:06:41.440 | How about yoga?

00:06:42.480 | How about Pilates?

00:06:43.480 | You're like, wow, there's a lot of time organizing on the ground.

00:06:46.440 | So a lot of people, Ida Rolf really said, hey, how do we help the person organizing

00:06:52.560 | gravity first and foremost, right?

00:06:55.640 | Then we have someone like Phillip Beach, who is this incredible, he wrote this book on

00:07:00.540 | functional embryology, which I highly recommend, called Muscles and Meridians, I think, Muscles

00:07:06.080 | and Meridians.

00:07:07.320 | But his hypothesis is that one of the ways that the body tunes itself is by being on

00:07:12.580 | the ground.

00:07:13.580 | Again, restoring native ranges, re-approximating joints, right, kneeling, walking, and if you

00:07:20.640 | just took a step back and said, what's it look like for the last 10,000 years, you know?

00:07:25.600 | When have we, 10,000 years ago, my understanding is that I'm a little fatter, your femur's

00:07:30.360 | a little longer, but we're pretty much the same people.

00:07:32.620 | Maybe I don't digest milk yet, maybe that's the understanding.

00:07:35.180 | But ultimately, what behaviors have changed, we're off the ground.

00:07:39.760 | And so this is an easy, don't need any equipment, can drop this in, I can answer my emails,

00:07:45.800 | watch TV.

00:07:47.520 | That seems like how we're going to improve and be able to start to untangle this very

00:07:52.120 | complex score, not when people have a lot going on.

00:07:54.860 | I love this.

00:07:56.780 | And as you pointed out, sorry, the roller's already there.

00:08:00.600 | So you're sitting there and the roller's there, another barrier to adherence knocked out.

00:08:04.440 | So you're like, oh, I might as well just, what's stiff today?

00:08:06.460 | What hurts today?

00:08:07.460 | How could I have some self-soothing input?

00:08:10.880 | And when we're working at high levels of performance, like the highest levels, these range of motion,

00:08:16.440 | like keeping you being able to access the full sort of arsenal of what you can do with

00:08:20.920 | your body, this movement solutions, sort of like Ido Portal plus the Olympics, right?

00:08:25.920 | You would see that this is an easy way for our elite athletes to work and integrate without

00:08:31.400 | having to do another thing.

00:08:33.360 | So what I'm getting here is that everybody, regardless of age, should get down on the

00:08:37.440 | ground once a day and get up off the ground at some point.

00:08:41.600 | And you can use whatever you want to help you get up and down off the ground.

00:08:45.520 | So for those who are listening, you're like, I can't do that.

00:08:48.920 | You know, there's a test we write about in the book that if you just do crisscross applesauce

00:08:55.520 | standing, you should be able to lower yourself to the ground and stand back up without using

00:09:00.280 | your hands.

00:09:01.280 | Cross the feet just for those that are just listening, cross the feet and then just slowly

00:09:05.080 | lower yourself.

00:09:06.080 | That's right.

00:09:07.080 | Don't collapse.

00:09:08.080 | Just lower yourself to the ground.

00:09:09.520 | And then without putting your hands down or knee down, can you stand back up?

00:09:13.200 | And should one be able to do it with either foot over the other?

00:09:16.720 | Seems like I should use my left leg and right leg equally, right?

00:09:18.960 | I shouldn't have a good side and a bad side.

00:09:21.160 | But what's interesting is the data I think is that, like, it's a nice predictor of all

00:09:25.400 | cause mortality, morbidity.

00:09:27.200 | That's fine.

00:09:28.320 | But what it really hints at is your changes in how your body interacts with the environment.

00:09:34.640 | That because you've adapted, suddenly the skill that you've done 100,000 times, 200,000

00:09:38.480 | times as a kid in crisscross applesauce, you suddenly are confronted as an adult with a

00:09:43.200 | skill you can no longer perform.

00:09:45.680 | And it doesn't require massive hip range of motion.

00:09:47.960 | It doesn't require full range of motion in your ankles.

00:09:50.640 | It's actually a really fair test.

00:09:53.080 | But if you're missing some of these end ranges, you're going to struggle.

00:09:56.560 | And it's nice now that I have this, like, what's the session cost?

00:09:59.880 | I've become a-- I love cycling.

00:10:01.600 | Mountain biking's my jam.

00:10:02.600 | But if I ride my bike a ton, my hips get super tight.

00:10:05.880 | But if I have some assessments, just like vital signs, blood pressure, 120 over 80,

00:10:10.680 | that's not good blood pressure.

00:10:11.680 | But it's a nice, decent reference.

00:10:13.880 | Now I create some movement minimums that help me understand how my body's interacting with

00:10:18.840 | stress, environment, nutrition, exercise, et cetera.

Simple Practice to Improve Flexibility & Range of Motion | Dr. Kelly Starrett & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Chapters