- Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Kelly Starrett. Dr. Kelly Starrett is a doctor of physical therapy and one of the world's experts in movement.

That is, he teaches people how to move better for sake of sport, for sake of recreational fitness, and for everyday living. Today, we discuss several important topics, including how best to warm up for any and all workouts. He also tells us how to improve our movement patterns for cardiovascular exercise, for sport, for resistance training, across the board, how to move better, and how to improve our range of motion with the minimal amount of time investment.

We hear a lot about different forms of stretching. We hear about dynamic stretching. We hear about passive stretching. Dr. Starrett explains how to improve our range of motion across our entire body in the best possible ways, as well as how to offset or repair any imbalances that stem from musculoskeletal problems or from neural issues, and how to reduce soreness, how to improve our posture, seated, standing, and movement-based posture.

We talk about nutrition. So today's episode covers an immense amount of actionable information that I'm certain all of you will benefit from. Dr. Kelly Starrett has authored several best-selling books, some of which you may have heard of, such as "Supple Leopard." He was actually one of the first people to become synonymous with the use of a lacrosse ball or foam roller.

But really, even though a lot of people have talked about those, what he was really doing there was to emphasize the importance of understanding the relationship between the skeleton, the muscles, the nervous system, and the fascia. And today we also talk about fascia, which is an incredibly interesting and important topic.

In addition to consulting and coaching for various college-level and professional athletes and teams, Dr. Kelly Starrett and his wife, Juliette Starrett, co-own "The Ready State." And we provide a link to "The Ready State" in the show note captions there. They have a plethora of useful information and actionable protocols.

I should mention years ago, I took one of the courses from "The Ready State." It's a really interesting course that we touch on some of the protocols from today. It's all about pelvic floor. So whether you're male or female, and regardless of age, understanding your pelvic floor, how to take care of your pelvic floor in the context of exercise, posture, et cetera, is vitally important for all sorts of vitally important bodily functions.

So today we also touch on that. By the end of today's episode, I'm certain that you will be armed with a number of new highly actionable protocols. I should emphasize these protocols take very little time and have an outsized positive effect on your movement, your posture, and your overall health.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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And now for my discussion with Dr. Kelly Starrett. Dr. Kelly Starrett, welcome. - Thank you, my friend. - I've been wanting to get you on here for a long time for many reasons, not the least of which is that you've just pioneered so many areas of health and fitness that I don't even know where to start, frankly.

But let's jump in with the big M, with movement. You're an expert in dissecting complex movement, figuring out how people can move better, and also figuring out how people who are doing what they think are simple movements are actually making their life either more complex or more painful than it needs to be.

So you're also known for helping people with so-called mobility, which of course falls under the umbrella of movement. And I can't see somebody do a foam roll or anything with a lacrosse ball where they're loosening up or talking about fascia without also thinking about you. So that should frame today's conversation at least partially well.

To kick things off, when you look at how most people sit, walk, and do their "exercise," resistance training and/or cardiovascular, hopefully, and cardiovascular training, what are some of the most common problems that you see? Is it imbalance, like leaning to one side? Is it that their bodies are trained into asymmetry?

Is there any way to kind of, you know, mass-diagnose everybody all at once in this first question? - Let me borrow a couple analogies from one of my favorite people, Katie Bowman. And first thing is she will point out, and it's not a perfect analogy, so bear with us, is this notion of mechanotransduction, which means that at a cellular level, your tissues, some of your tissues specifically, need mechanical input to express themselves.

You want a strong tendon? How do you get a strong tendon? You have to load it, right? Does it do tendon things? Is it lengthening under load? Does it shorten under load? Does it do isometric holds? So we can start at that level. She points out that if you put a, and again, not a perfect analogy, but if you put an orca into captivity, over a while, that orca fin will start to fold over.

Folded fin syndrome, it's nicer than floppy fin syndrome. It's hurtful. And what you're doing is when you alter the environment that this amazing animal lives in, it's not swimming, it's not fighting, it's not hunting, you're not loading the base of that fin. And so what happens is that collagen breaks down, and we start to see changes in that, in that expression of that.

So what we can start to say is, again, not romanticizing the Pleistocene era when human beings were paleo, but what is it that we need in our daily dose lives to maintain the integrity of our tissue systems? Exposure, so that our brain says, "This is safe." So that you actually have tendons and ligaments that can do what tendons and ligaments can do, and fascia that is, can be springy.

If, borrow another sort of Katie Bowman-ism, if we have a movement language, an actual language made up of words, how many words are you using today? And most of us aren't using that many words, so very few words. So I sit, I stand, I walk very slowly. I sit, I stand, I walk very slowly.

So everything is just in those few, and then I go exercise using the same words. I'm on the exercise bike, right? I'm on an elliptical, which doesn't actually ask me to have any hip extension. And suddenly you can see that our movement language, which we're really codifying under intensity, load, right?

We're becoming very competent in these adaptation positions, sitting. What ends up happening? Well, we start to see that our bodies are adaptation machines, and they just begin to adapt. And so suddenly what we have is a human body that doesn't express normative range. The brain may not think that that range is even safe and put there.

Then we start to sort of minimize the movement choices that the brain has, the movement options that the brain has. So really the question is, you know, at low loads, let's establish things. At low loads and low speeds, you can get away with everything. Why? 'Cause this body is rad, and it's designed, it's durable, it's not fragile.

It's designed to be ridden hard and put away wet for a long time. Remember when you were 17, would cut off your hand, it would grow back the next day, right? You would. Think about the falls you took skating, and you'd be like, "Oh, that sucked." The next day, you put your shoulder back in, you just kind of respawn.

So what is it that we need to put into our movement diet? And then we can start to separate out, should that be exercise, or should that be movement? And now the real filter that we should be beginning these real and earnest conversations about is, what is it in the environment, given that I'm a busy working person, and maybe I have some agency in the morning, and maybe I have some agency in the afternoon, but let's take exercise out of it.

The one hour discreet, working on zone two cardio, working on writing my evidence-based practice. What should I be doing the rest of the time? So for example, one of the things that we're huge fans of in the evening is sitting on the ground for 20 or 30 minutes. - In what, cross-legged, squatting?

- Yes, long sit, side saddle, 99. Anytime you need to fidget, fidget. What you'll see is you start to accumulate exposure, which I think in my worldview is the first order of magnitude in problem solving is how do we have the human be exposed to the thing we're trying to change or improve or restore normative ranges.

- So that would be in the evening, just getting down on the floor? - Yeah, that behavior alone, cultures that toilet on the ground, sleep on the ground. We start to see fall risk in our elderly populations attenuate to zero, approximate zero. Lower hip OA, lower low back OA, and it may just be that we're using and touching some shapes and our bodies are saying, hey, let's just keep that around.

Let's normalize what the hip should be able to do. In terms of your connective tissue, think about the idea here is that we're loading you passively, actively, whatever, that you're saying to your brain, this is a quote from one of my PT instructors, and this is really important. If people take this away, they should listen to this.

Muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs. At no age, do you stop adapting. At no age, do you stop healing. Those things slow down. It's a little bit harder to have the same adaptation we did. We weren't in full-fledged puberty, but you can always adapt. In the first order of business, if you spend 20 or 30 minutes sitting on the ground, you're gonna start to see that my hamstrings start to feel better.

My hips start to feel a little better because I'm just spending time in these ranges and my body's gonna start to adapt as I increase my movement language. - Would you extend what you just said to, I'm like, if somebody has a hardwood floor and maybe a little low pile rug or something like that, and they're gonna, I don't know, watch a podcast or a movie or a show in the evening, they stretch out and, you know, like on their belly, like sort of up dog or cobra or whatever it's called.

So basically any kind of movement where you're on the ground, any kind of squatting, and maybe they start to stretch a bit here and there. - Oh, so now we're into the real magic, the behavior. Where are we gonna stack these behaviors? So if you have to get up and down off the ground, plus one, right?

I gotta get up and down off the ground every day. So if you're an older person who may hasn't gotten off the ground, I'm older, I'm just talking about over 50, you may not have gotten up and down off the ground for a hundred years. You just don't do it anymore, right?

We wanna hear why I think MMA is so amazing. You have to get up and down off the ground a lot, right? If you go to Jits, right? How about yoga? How about Pilates? You're like, "Wow, there's a lot of time "organizing on the ground." So a lot of people, Ida Rolfe really said, "Hey, how do we help the person organizing gravity "first and foremost," right?

Then we have someone like Phillip Beach, who is this incredible, he wrote this book on functional embryology, which I highly recommend, called "Muscles and Meridians," I think, "Muscles and Meridians." But his hypothesis is that one of the ways that the body tunes itself is by being on the ground.

Again, restoring native ranges, re-approximating joints, right? Kneeling, walking. And if you just took a step back and said, "What's it look like for the last 10,000 years?" You know, when have we, 10,000 years ago, my understanding is that I'm a little fatter, your femur's a little longer, but we're pretty much the same people.

Maybe I don't digest milk yet, maybe that's the understanding. But ultimately, what behaviors have changed were off the ground. And so this is an easy, don't need any equipment, can drop this in, I can answer my emails, watch TV. That seems like how we're going to improve and be able to start to untangle this very complex story, not when people have a lot going on.

- I love this. And as you pointed out, sorry, the roller's already there. So if you're sitting there and the roller's there, another barrier to adherence knocked out. So you're like, "Oh, I might as well just, "what's stiff today? "What hurts today? "How could I have some self-soothing input?" And when we're working at high levels of performance, like the highest levels, these range of motion, like keeping you being able to access the full sort of arsenal of what you can do with your body, these movement solutions, sort of like Ido Portal plus the Olympics, right?

You would see that this is an easy way for our elite athletes to work and integrate without having to do another thing. - So what I'm getting here is that everybody, regardless of age, should get down on the ground once a day and get up off the ground at some point, right?

- You can use whatever you want to help you get up and down off the ground. So for those of you who are listening, you're like, "I can't do that." You know, there's a test we write about in the book that if you just do criss-cross applesauce standing, you should be able to lower yourself to the ground and stand back up without using your hands.

- Okay, so cross the feet, for those that are just listening, cross the feet, and then just slowly lower yourself into a seated- - Don't collapse. Just lower yourself to the ground, and then without putting your hands down or knee down, can you stand back up? - And should one be able to do it with either foot over the other?

- Seems like I should use my left leg and right leg equally, right? I shouldn't have a good side and a bad side. But what's interesting is the data, I think, is that, like, it's a nice predictor of all-cause mortality and morbidity. That's fine. But what it really hints at is your changes in how your body interacts with the environment.

That because you've adapted, suddenly the skill that you've done 100,000 times, 200,000 times as a kid, sitting criss-cross applesauce, you suddenly are confronted as an adult with a skill you can no longer perform. And it doesn't require massive hip range of motion, doesn't require full range of motion in your ankles.

It's actually a really fair test. But if you're missing some of these end ranges, you're gonna struggle. And it's nice now that I have this, like, what's the session cost? I've become a, I love cycling. Mountain biking's my jam. But if I ride my bike a ton, my hips get super tight.

But if I have some assessments, just like vital signs, blood pressure, 120 over 80, that's not good blood pressure, but it's a nice, decent reference. Now I create some movement minimums that help me understand how my body's interacting with stress, environment, nutrition, exercise, et cetera. - For some people, maybe me, if I were to sit cross-legged on the ground for a bit and then stand up, if it hasn't been in a while, I'm like, kind of like, just, kind of ache.

But I consider myself pretty mobile. Once I warm up, I can run for an hour and a half, jog for an hour and a half. Once I get warmed up in the gym, I can move what, at least for me, is satisfying amounts of weight. So I wouldn't say that I'm out of shape.

I wouldn't say I'm in spectacular shape. Is it normal for us after a certain age to kind of feel like we creak or ache as we move in or out of a new movement? I mean, is that, does it fit with being still a healthy person or should we just not have any of those kinds of like, that was like, the guy that like- - Dude, I sat on the ground, that was rough.

- Yeah. - That was super rough. - Yeah, maybe, you know, sitting for 30 minutes and then standing up and feeling like you have to kind of open yourself up with a can opener, so to speak. - Well, a couple of things there. One is that you said new movement.

So one of the ways we define best athlete is who's the person who can transfer the skill, their current skillset, and pick up the new skill the fastest. So what I'll say is, if you want to test how fit you are, how good your program is, go ahead and jump someone else's program.

Let me know how that goes. Can you perform the skills? Are you skilled? You're not kidding. - I'm chuckling 'cause I joined Cameron Haynes for his weight workout, which is, you know, high-repetition circuit work that went on for about 45 minutes. None of the weights were particularly heavy, but it's just nonstop.

I was sore, and I normally don't get sore for more than a half day, if at all. Soreness hasn't really ever been an issue for me. I was sore for almost a week and a half, maybe two weeks, but it was insane. It was, yeah. - This is so good.

It opens up the next thing, right? Founder of CrossFit, Greg Glassman, one of my earliest influences coaches, says, "We fail the margins of our experience." So what you just saw was, hey, here is this metabolic pathway range work that I have not inoculated myself to. And I think we're at an interesting place where fitness has become hobby.

Fitness has become sort of my personal pastime. And I can go to the gym, and I can look jacked. You're jacked and tan. You're very handsome, 49-year-old. But what we start to see is the things that make us look aesthetically pleasing, or I'm functional enough, isn't the same thing as preparing for sport or transferring to new skill.

And in fact, I would say if I had a spectrum of activities, I'd put like fitnessing over here. Like I go to a camp, I just do a million reps. I breathe hard, it's super fun. I'm in Zumba, I'm mirroring, and I have positive regard, and I see my friends.

On the other side, we have very much sports-specific training. The only goal is to support the sport. If you're an elite soccer player, we have goals off season, but in the season, it's to support your body to win. But one step back from that, I call sports preparation training, which is where we start to see sort of some really pattern interference between what the internet says I should do to have huge quads and the best way to create an elite sprinter or an elite footballer, right?

In that sports preparation training, I can be, think of it, GPP plus looking at positions and how things transfer. A Franz Bosch is a great example of sports preparation training. He's a Dutch thinker. His books are great. And you'll see, understand that really what we're trying to do in sports preparation is say, "Hey, what is this complex system in front of us?

"What's the minimal amount of input "so that we can still go and project ourselves "into the world through sport and performance?" And on the other side, suddenly we do come up confronted with, "Hey, I'm doing this thing, "and I jump in with my friend and I get brutalized," which is actually a problem that we have with people, really good fit athletes, and I throw them into like a group fitness class, and they can do so much work that they wreck themselves for weeks.

And that's probably what happened. You're so strong, and you know how to just be uncomfortable, and then you just did this freakish amount of work without giving yourself a chance to adapt. And that happens all the time. - So going back to the getting down on the ground once a day, and then getting up, I'd like to just, I want to get to fitness and sports training as well, but is there another practice or set of practices related to where we do our profession work?

So I can stand, I have a standing desk, I have a drafting table, and I'll sit stand. I'll stand for a while, I'll sit, stand for a while, I'll sit. I have a stool. I like to be at a stool that's where my back is not supported. And so I try and vary it as much as I can.

- Love that. - And thanks to you, thanks to your recommendation that is, I bought one of those little kickstands that goes underneath the desk from Rogue. I don't have any financial relationship to Rogue. I've sent them-- - No, you're making tens of dollars on this fidget stand. - No, I sent them money like everyone else would.

One could probably build one too. This is a little fidget stand. I love that thing. 'Cause it reminds me to swing my foot while I'm there, even while I'm standing. So that's what I've done to try and keep some mobility during the day. - And I want to double click on that because that's really amazing.

'Cause what you've done is said, hey, I can't control this aspect of my environment. I have to do some deep work. That means I might need to perch or I might have to sit at a conference table. And then what we can start to say is, well, what other choices do I have?

And now if we work with a typical person and you say you have some agency before you leave for work and then your agency doesn't return until you get home, what are you gonna do during the day to keep the body moving? So that it's easier to escape to your afternoon class.

I think that's the thing. And what you've just described is what my wife would call a movement-rich environment. How do I pepper the environment with inputs so that I'm not just in a tiny movement language? I love that. I want to go back to the sitting on the ground.

Should it be painful? Should it be sore? One aspect of your physiology that will not change, doesn't have to change, is your range of motion. As you get older. We should be able to maintain our range of motion. So what's interesting is that if we're suddenly confronted with tasks that ask us to be in certain positions that we're not comfortable with, we're gonna be sore.

You bet. You're gonna have to squeeze your butt. And something you said earlier, like once I'm warmed up, I love that phrase, right? Once I've had my 27 supplements and my coffee and my activation, I've gotten to my sauna, I can do anything. I feel great. The real question is, should I have to do all that stuff?

For high performance, absolutely. But should I have to do all of this prep to have native range of motion? To have baseline range of motion? Probably not. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens.

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And I'd love to know your thoughts. Years ago, I think it was a Charles Poliquin poster or something like that, where it was suggested to do relatively low repetition warmup. - Love it. - As opposed to going in and doing 15 reps, then 10, then eight or whatever it is.

And I've found over the years, what's allowed me to get strongest and stay strongest for me is to, sure, I'll go in and do the first set of a movement, a resistance training movement of maybe eight repetitions, just to get some blood flowing and remind my brain. - Practice.

- You know, what the range of motion is right. Then I'll do maybe just, you know, five, four, two repetitions of subsequent three sets. So five, four, and then two repetition sets with heavier loads. And it's just to prepare my nervous system for heavier loads. And then when I start my actual quote-unquote work sets, I can get a lot more real work done.

And this for me was like spit in the face of everything I had read, everything I'd seen that you need to do, higher repetition warmups. And it has allowed me to progress more or less continuously over the decades that I've been training. And I'm not a natural athlete. I'm just not.

I've trained for a long, long time, but I would never fall under what you would call like natural athlete. I don't have a low recovery quotient, all that stuff. And so for me, it was like a shocker, but it makes total sense. Prepare the nervous system for the work you're about to do.

And don't follow some preconceived idea that you have to do high repetition warmup or even moderate repetition warmup. And lo and behold, you get much stronger. And if you want to grow muscle, you can grow more muscle. Why haven't we heard more about this? Why don't people in fitness talk more?

I know you do, and please do. Talk about the nervous system. And the fact that it's not just all about warming up and getting blood flow. It's really about preparing the brain and spinal cord and all this stuff in there. - Yeah, love that. Let's say a couple of variables there.

What's your training age, right? If I can take a beginner and you in the same thing, we can make big jumps. You and I have been, we've deadlifted together a decade ago. Like we can just go. We know our bodies, the patterns are well ingrained. Our tissues have exposure here, right?

There's some things we can do. So I love that you're starting to see that what's the minimal amount of warmup to do the task. And on some days you may be sore, maybe stiff, and it takes a little more time to go, get right underneath it. One of the things I think we have this opportunity to do is put play back into warmups.

So one of the things is that I suspect, and please correct me if I'm wrong, you don't find a lot of joy in doing these like rote A, B, the world's greatest stretch, wah, wah, wah, do the active. Like, it's not that fun. So what, let me talk about my experience working with a team at Berkeley.

I have this shout out to the women's water polo team at Berkeley who are my just total family. These women are incredible. But I came into the sport and looked around and I saw really ineffective warmups that weren't a good use of the time, that didn't prepare us to get into a fight in 20 minutes or 30 minutes later.

So if you went through your warmup and said, "I'm gonna be in a fight." Am I prepared for that or not? And that's a nice like rubric to say, I'm nervous system arousal, I have a little sweat on, I've practiced, right? You know, I've touched some positions and shapes.

But you know, what I see is that there's, in the typical training session, there's a lot of work to get done. So now I think training has become very, very dense. You know, here's this piece, here's this piece, now I do the succession work, I gotta hit these, these cart, and so the warmup for me has been one of the last places where I can get you to explore new movements, something you saw on the internet, play around.

If you came to my gym, you know, or we came to my house now, I'd be like, "Let's go throw the medicine ball for five minutes." And there's no wrong way, but I want you to start to explore speed. I want you to explore catching an object and going fast.

And what we haven't done, and I suspect, I wouldn't say that your warmup is the best way, I'd say it's one way to get to the thing that we want faster and potentially you stop doing what didn't work and what didn't serve you, which I really want people to understand is that if you're not blind going through some program, I want you to say, "Does this serve me?" Because my experience working now 20 years with the best teams and athletes and organizations on the planet is athletes do what work and they stop doing what doesn't work.

Isn't that interesting, right? So what I love is that you started to get under heavy loads relatively quickly in movements you had real competency and exposure with. Yes, because what we wanna do is come back to say, "What's the least amount of work I can do to have the biggest adaptation?" And three hours in the gym doesn't fit into your life and it doesn't fit into the typical person's life.

And theoretically, you're gonna have to go do a sport. So you're gonna have to recover from this sport and this training session, right? You're like, "Hey, I can't even handle this high volume. You know, it's a ding on me too. I can't handle the same high volume as my friends can." So wasting your time in quotation marks with lots of high volume sets of an empty barbell might've been useful at some point and maybe it doesn't serve you as well now.

Or because you have to put so many plates on that bar, that's just, that's a warmup by itself, right? - That's not an issue for me. - So you walked a mile to load those plates. - No, that's not an issue for me, but that's a perfect, what you just said, is a perfect opportunity for me to mention something that I've noticed, which prompts a question, which is I noticed that I have some asymmetry.

My right shoulder naturally sits a little lower than my left, and whenever I get a little back tweak, it's always on the same side, et cetera, et cetera. I know this varies for everybody. And I noticed that I was always picking up the weights and re-racking them, 'cause I re-rack my weights like a grown-up, re-racking them on the same side.

So I've made it a point now to switch up, you know, which side of my body I do them from. - Yeah, yeah, that's great. - And notice I'm significantly weaker on one side of my body. I mean, not to the point where, you know, I have to use two different sets of dumb, or two different dumbbells if I'm doing curls or something, but just noticing these natural asymmetries starting to show up because I'm a right-hander or who knows, or I skateboarded.

So, you know, I've spent a lot of my life, early life, with my left foot forward and my right foot pushing. And as a consequence, there are a lot of asymmetries. So what I've tried to do is correct those asymmetries in the between movement movements, but also to stagger my stance during curls and then switch it each time, or maybe even overemphasize the weaker side.

I have no professional training in any of this. I've just found that it's made for better posture, more evenly distributed strength. And I must say, all of that is based on teachings that I read in your books and through conversations with you about, hey, we have these natural imbalances, and there are little things that we can do that take moments that can correct those imbalances.

So if you would, could you sort of expand on the number and type of imbalances that you most commonly see and some ways for people to remedy them, excuse me. - Let's, if we just took the word imbalance and put it to the side for a second, because it's sort of a nonspecific term, like, are we testing your hamstring to your quad?

Like, what's the ideal ratio here? Like, if you're a professional pitcher, I hope your arm, right arm, looks different than your left arm, right? But what we can say is, number one, imbalances don't necessarily cause pain. Let's be clear about that. We should be using our time in the gym as training to find deficiencies in blind spots, in our patterns, in our skill, in our, you know, in our brains feeling comfortable with a certain movement.

And what you just hit was that it's, boy, it's really easy to get a lot of variability just doing the things I want to do anyway. So now I'm in a tandem stance. I skate left foot forward, right? But, you know, suddenly that's my dominant stance if you're gonna ask me to do anything of consequence, I'm gonna adopt that stance.

But suddenly I get to have some exposure here. So what's the point of the gym? What's the point of training? Just to work on some cardiorespiratory output, you know, that the science says? Is it to move and to play? Is it to, you know, if the brain's a, you know, problem-solving machine, let's give it some problems to solve.

So you suddenly have a new problem to solve. And I would even say that weakness isn't even the right idea. It's just like, here's a pattern that I'm not as effective at, as efficient at. So when we go into the gym sort of with this great curiosity, then it's a really rich place and a really, frankly, the only safe place because there isn't contact and sport and we're not fighting and dancing and moving.

And we can really do this controlled formal movement where we can really see inputs and outputs. I explained to my mother-in-law a long time ago what was happening when we were developing our model to understand movement. And I was, and I explained it and she was like, "Oh, you mean it makes the invisible visible?" That's right.

It's that this is a place to understand how your range of motion is changing, how your skills are changing, right? Over the course of a season or the course of, you know, something going on in your life, a season in your life, suddenly you're like, "Wow, my left hip is a little tight or my left shoulder is, my internal rotation is going away." Hard to see when you're swimming.

Really easy to see when we dumbbell snatch, right? And what we're trying to do then is take the gym, not only have it be a stimulus for adaptation, but have it be a really great place to uncover changes in my movement, changes in expression of that movement. And so really what you see, again, if I just do this one thing over and over again, that's patterning, that's repetition, that's practice, right?

And what you've done is just said, "Hey, let me change my brain. Let me open the door handle with my left side." And coming into the gym with that curiosity means that we can have seven bottom lines. We're working on your fascia. We're working on these energy systems. We're working on these movement skills, but simultaneously we can have fun.

We can work on understanding our range of motion. So for me, I think it's easier to say, let's frame mobility as do you, here's my definition. Do you have access to normative range of motion? The range of motion every physician, every physical therapist, every chiro agrees on. Shoulder, it's 180 degrees of flexion.

- So for those listening, this is lifting your arm above head so you can bring your hand basically, you know, above the center of your head. - And what you can see right now is Andrew has his elbow bent, his head tipped to the side, his internally rotated. He's solving the problem, which is what his brain is saying.

- Compensation, you're better on this side now. - If you want to use the word compensation, I want to put that on you. But what I'd say is that's an incomplete position. Doesn't mean you have pain. Doesn't mean you're not the world champion, but it means we may have some latent capacity we could chase.

And the next question for me then is, what is it that's missing potentially in your training that we're not having this exposure? We're not doing enough close grip hanging, we're not doing seesaw press, right? Where the arm is straight up, we're always gripping on a barbell, right? I'm not handling enough dumbbells or kettlebells overhead.

And then we can say, well, do I need some position transfer exercises, some mobility work to restore that so we can use it again? And then more importantly, how does that turn up for you in a way that impacts your sport or your job? That's what's really interesting. Does that make sense?

- Yeah, so what I'm hearing is that when we go into the gym or wherever we do our resistance training work, that we should think about it as a place to, yes, perform to exceed our previous reps and sets. - That's fun. - Yeah, 'cause that's part of the- - It's fun and easy to measure.

Hardly see, are you getting better at soccer? I don't know. But I put another keel on my bench today. Like, that's fun. - Lex Friedman, who of course everybody knows from the Lex Friedman podcast, likes to make fun of Americans 'cause he's Russian, but he's actually American now, for being meatheads, 'cause we like to spend so much time in gyms, working out as opposed to doing sports.

And I assure him that I've also done and do sports now, but he likes to make that point. And I think it's a fair one in that, well, he's a resilient jujitsu guy. So in any event, the gym is also a place for diagnosis, to diagnose where we don't have as much range of motion as we could.

And that's very helpful, I think, for people to hear, because most people are time limited. They don't have... If they're getting their two or three resistance training workouts per week, plus two or three cardiovascular training workouts, and they're listening to Peter Ortega, so they're trying to hang from a bar for 90 seconds or more, and they're doing some farmer carries, and they're doing their zone two, and they're throwing on a weight vest, and they got either fidgeting under their desk.

At some point, you can start to understand why people are like, "Whoa, this is starting to become overwhelming." What you're talking about is going and doing your typical workout, but paying attention to where some, for lack of a better word, I'll call them asymmetries, or not full range of motion being expressed, where that might be happening.

I love, I keep coming back to this, but this thing about getting down onto the ground for 30 minutes each night while watching TV, or maybe even while eating dinner, or while talking to your family or partner. I think it's fantastic. It also gives me an excuse to push the sofas off to the side of the room, 'cause I have this weird neuroticism about furniture in the middle of the room.

So I'm imagining getting mats down on the floor of the living room. And suddenly, we're not programming another thing that's, I think, one of the things that's happened, and it's a good thing. It's a feature of the system. Strength and energy in the last 20 years has become very sophisticated.

So, Juliette and I, my wife and CEO, opened our gym in 2005. - This was the CrossFit gym at the Presidio. - That's right. - Beautiful location. - 21st CrossFit in the world. But we couldn't buy a kettlebell in San Francisco. We had to drive to Santa Cruz. - That says a lot about San Francisco.

I can say that 'cause I'm from the Bay Area. - But there was one place in Santa Cruz that sold them, Played Against Sports, that imported these Russian kettlebells. Thank you, Pavel. And we had to make this trek down to buy them. So, the fitness, I think we, I bought my first pair of Olympic-lifting shoes out of the back of someone's car, like a drug deal.

- Olympic-lifting shoes? - Yeah, yeah. You just couldn't buy 'em. - Flat-soled shoes. - No, actually, an Olympic-lifting shoe with a heel. But you can buy those at three different stores in Malibu right now. You go right over there. You can buy kettlebells at Target. So, the world has become much more sophisticated.

Sometimes, like, the overhead squat is a good example. Fantastic diagnostic tool. Tells us a lot. - So, bar held overhead. - And squat down. Super simple. All you have to do is have normal range of motion and your joints and tissues. Well, that helps. Juliette likes to say I was bendy before I was big.

But, you know, the idea here, though, is let's go ahead and also put skill back into this. But most people weren't overhead squatting at all. It wasn't part of their language. Now, everyone knows what an overhead squat is, right? Dan John, CrossFit. All the Olympic lifters have been doing this forever.

But what we are seeing is that the natural evolution of fitness and strength and conditioning is that we've become, we've gotten really decorative in our rooms. So, we create this room that's just, every inch has a knick-knack, has an assistance. This is my tib raise. This is my neck thing.

It's a very decorative experience. And instead of asking what was essential in terms of energy systems and positions that I can train so that I could go use those credits. You know, for lack of a better word, fitness has become very recursive. I have this zone two, so I can do more zone two, so I can do more zone two.

Or I have pull-ups because they get more pull-ups. Instead of, well, how did that make you swim? What's the minimum amount of time we can spend in the gym so that you can go express that? Lex is right, in a sport or an activity. And look, there are times in your life where the gym is the only thing you got.

You know, Juliette and I, when we had two kids and a baby, or two kids in our businesses, we did the 10, 10, 10 at 10, which is like 10 air squats, 10 kettlebell swings, 10 pull-ups at 10 p.m. for 10 minutes. And I was like, elite, my fitness is elite.

- Do you do that every day? - Well, I just did it when I could do it, right? Because that's all I could fit in. So, you know, I think what's happened is we have now sold people this idea that fitness happens in a one-hour block. And if it's not an hour, you know, then it's not worth doing.

And if you kept a bar loaded in your garage, you could walk out there and do sets in between making dinner. You kept a kettlebell in your kitchen, you could do povals, four swings on the minute for 20 minutes, and at least have some exposure loading. So a long way around the barn of saying, I want to protect your gym time because it's really sacred, amazing time where you can have fun, explore ranges, get strong, get jacked, feel great about yourself, interact with your friends.

And what I don't want to do is encroach any more on that magic time because we have a lot to get done in the gym physiologically. If we're gonna compete against these other teams, if we're gonna beat Stanford, we're gonna need to really maximize that time in the gym.

So that means we need to push out some of these other behaviors so we're not stacking them in and they're eroding the time we could be squatting or benching or cleaning or running or sprinting or cutting or playing. - You mentioned warming up with play, which I think is a wonderful concept and presumably brings about more dynamic movement.

- 100%. - And another reason I like it is that I loathe warming up aside from the types of warmups that I just described. - I hate it. - And I'm beginning to realize that the way I've been training, even though it's been, I would say useful and successful for where I've been, I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do heading into the new year.

This is not like a new year's episode. This is evergreen because it's you, but we have a new year coming. A lot of people are going to naturally mark the time during and after the holidays as a transition point. And if one wanted to start to, not necessarily completely restructure their fitness, but wanted to start incorporating a few things.

So we've got sitting down in the evening for 30 minutes. We've got incorporating play into the warmup. What would that look like? Are we taking a tennis ball and bouncing it off the ground? We setting some rule in playing a game? - Sure. - What if I'm alone? Am I playing a little handball type game against the wall?

- Absolutely. - Want to see something on the internet? Want to learn a new skill? This is the time to put it in. I'm going to talk about my brilliant friend, David Weck. He has something called rope flow that he created, and it's just a piece of climbing rope.

And he will talk about all the things that will do for me. I get a thousand PNF patterns. I tie my upper body into my lower body. - Could you explain PNF? Sorry, acronym. - Sorry. Sorry, everyone. That's a model of facilitating movement developed at Kaiser Vallejo. It is by Knot and Cabot, I think.

Maybe I'm getting confused in those. And anyway, the bottom line is this. How do we help the body restore movement by using its own positional awareness? - Got it. - So if you've ever done a hamstring stretch where someone holds you and you resist, that contract relax is a style, it's a technique born out of PNF.

- Got it. Sorry to interrupt. - Okay, no problem. Perfect. - So he's got these ropes. - And so suddenly, like I use this with all my teams, is suddenly I'm spinning ropes. I'm getting thousands of evolutions of the wrist turning, the elbow turning, the shoulder turning. I'm generating speed in weird positions that would be vulnerable and not as effective at high load, high stakes.

I get to twist. I can tie my eyes into it. I can develop my stance. And in five minutes of messing around, you're like, "Oh, I feel good." And we've added some speed to that, right? Because a lot of the warmups I see people do, I'm like, "Hey, there was no speed." You know what sport is?

Speed. And you haven't added any velocity to your training. So where are we going to do that? - I love this. I'm excited to. - Dave Weck does a lot of amazing things. His rope is a foundational piece of my, if you work with me and you have shoulder pain and neck pain, you're going to get my shoulder spin up or David Weck's rope flow every day.

That's part of our homework. What are we going to do to give you exposure and restore what you're supposed to do with your body? - So walk into the gym, use the bathroom, hydrate, whatever it is you need to do. And then five to 10 minutes of some play type dynamic activity.

- Throw a medicine ball around, jump on a mini trampoline, pick up a barbell, do a complex, do some breath hold work. This is a perfect place to lay in all the breath hold work. I think they call it dry face breath holding, right? It's this dynamic apnea work where you're basically holding your breath.

So for example, with our teams, we try to, I try to have, this is a magic number, seven sort of hypoxic events where we do something on a breath hold until the athlete has a crisis and has to breathe. And part of that is I want to get the brain ready for these high CO2 levels, right?

And I want to challenge respiration. And it's so easy. Get on the bike. Here's something everyone can do. For five minutes, I want you to take a 10 second inhale on the bike, hold your breath as long as you can. When the bomb goes off in your face, recover nose only.

Start at the next one at the next minute. And what you're going to see is, wow, that was really uncomfortable, really psychologically preparing myself to get into a fight. That came from the French free divers. One of the coaches I was working with was like, here's something we used to do with our French free divers.

I was like, this is so good. McKenzie, Laird Hamilton, Wim Hof, the people who've been exposing us to dynamic apnea work is amazing. But that's another example of something I can do instead of mindlessly just being on and I got to get a sweat. Like let's go ahead and just layer in play and destruction.

- I love it. - Do not lay on the ground in foam roll. Let me say that again. Do not lay on the ground in foam roll. That's the worst way to get ready for a fight ever. - I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function.

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- Worst part of my life. - It became synonymous with you. That's okay. I mean, it's not okay, but it's okay with me. They weren't saying about me, but I was about to say it's okay. Anytime somebody goes public facing and starts to try and educate people, there's certain things that are sticky.

They have high salience. Yes, I like to get into a cold plunge, but how I, how Andrew Huberman became associated with cold plunging or buying a cold plunge is wild. I mean, sure, I own one and this sort of thing. And I think they're great for shifting your state, but it's hardly the cornerstone of my life or my existence, but I love it.

I use it, but I think foam rolling, I think looked different enough from what people had not seen before. And these things just, they have a stickiness to them. Who knows why? What is the deal with foam rolling? Is there a utility to foam rolling? Absolutely. Is there a wrong way to do it?

No, but there's a way that's not a great use of your time. Okay. Right. So what we're all looking at is we have finite amount of time and what's my goal? To quickly touch my whole body? You know, what are we trying to do? So if I was using soft tissue mobilization and or using a roller or a ball or something, what's my goal here?

Well, I think, and the research is very clear, it can help with pain, it can restore range of motion. Again, very clear. And I want to point out sort of one of my research friends, Brent Brookbush, the Brookbush Institute has incredible summaries of musculoskeletal care. Brent is a genius.

And if you go on his site, there's a little hourglass and you can search like sugar points and you'll see all of the deep dive research, analysis of the meta research. Like you'll be like, okay, this is really excellent. And it is tricky because, you know, what doesn't work for my body or wasn't a good use for time now is useless and it's easy to shout on the internet.

So what's our goal? If I was in pain and I was about to exercise, a quick two or three minute intervention working on, let's call it desensitization of the tissues, let's be mechanism agnostic for a second and say that's a really low level to entry safe, highly effective way for you to suddenly feel better.

So we create a window of opportunity to move. That's really cool. I love that. No physical therapist in the room. No one went blind. You didn't dislocate, right? So that could be a really excellent use of some soft tissue work. The same way a boxer would go or an MMA fighter or the Olympic lifters in China, they have people who are giving non-threatening input to the body to tell the brain it's safe or to rehydrate something or get some, again, is it just stimulus so that the brain says it's safe?

Sure. Are we restoring how the tissues slide and glide? Sure. A lot of times I think if you look at any of the mobility work, I'll just put writ large, really comes down to just doing a couple things. Most of them are just isometrics. So we have a lot of isometrics, which everyone can agree is good stuff.

And we do a lot of tempo work. That's really just moving slowly through range. It just may be that I'm using a different tool to have that isometric stimulus or that tempo moving slowly stimulus. So we like to say, hey, let's use mobilizations, mobilizing the tissues. Why are we doing it?

What are we trying to do? Well, pain is a good reason. And again, multifactorial, highly subjective. Why do I have pain? Well, I got in a fight with my wife and I didn't eat and I twisted my knee back in Vietnam and who knows, right? But what are the inputs that I have to self-soothe and desensitize?

And it turns out a ball and a roller is a really good one. So I can use those to help myself feel better. Did that solve the problem? Did that solve two weeks of shitty sleep? Did that solve my poor nutrition and lack of fiber? Did that solve the fact that I don't feel safe in this environment?

No, but it got me a window of opportunity where I can go feel better in my body. Is anyone against that? No, okay. So what we can also say is, hey, this would be a great way to do what? Restore your range of motion. Use a one tool and a system of tools to get you to do what?

Have normative range again, right? For whatever reason, your lats are super stiff. Again, it's more complicated than that, but sometimes it's not more complicated than that. And if I just get you getting some input into there, maybe I can restore that range of motion or create a window where you can go use it again.

Lastly, I would say is that it's a wonderful tool to decrease DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness. So in the evening, you blow out your quads, do a little soft tissue work. And what you'll see is maybe that's blood flow. Maybe it's non-threatening input. Maybe it's just massage. Maybe it's just the parasympathetic input that massage has, touch, right?

Just down-regulates. Maybe those are the reasons I feel better. But the bottom line is, is that a good use of your time? Yes. Are all techniques on the roller the same? No, right? And I think that's where we've lost our minds is that if you just rolled up and down on your calf, didn't do anything.

It's like, yeah, well, you just, what are you doing, right? What if I rolled side to side? And so suddenly we can start to layer in some really complex thinking around this. How about this? You have a roller out and I put my calf on there and I start rolling side to side.

Should that be uncomfortable? I'm guessing you're gonna say no, but anytime I've used a roller, anytime I've used a roller, I'm like, man, that hurts. I don't want to do, that sucks. Well, I mean, I don't mind it. Like, it's not like the kind of, it's not like level eight pain or anything.

It's just, it's sort of like, it feels very localized. Even if the roller is a big fat Costello the Bulldog size roller, it feels like someone's kind of kneading down in between my muscle fibers. And then I started to think maybe I just have like low fiber density. And if I were Mark Bell or something, then this would feel comfortable.

But, you know, I always feel like the roller's going down to the bone. - To the face of LFD, low fiber density. So, you know, what I think we can do is let's establish some guidelines for people. 'Cause this is one of the ways that we can feel better in our home, without bourbon, without ibuprofen, without THC.

Like we need to give people some tools that don't, like that aren't just- - Without having to buy a sauna. If you can afford one, great, but not every, I mean, this whole thing with sauna, love saunas. But, you know, well, until very recently in my life, like I couldn't afford a sauna.

Until very recently, you know, even as a tenured professor at Stanford, I'll just say that, right? - You can actually be angry at your parents for not giving you a sauna. - You know, when I was a kid, my dad, and I used to go to the Y in the evening sometimes, or I was little, and I'd shoot baskets, or he would lift weights, Nautilus machines back then.

- Yeah, get brutally big on those. - And then we'd sit in the sauna, or there was a hot tub. - And you had a different set of trauma, traumatic experiences of sitting in the sauna at the Y. - No, actually, I learned how men, I learned how men over 40 spoke in 1985.

- There you go. - There you go. If everyone had a roller and a ball, there's a lot of dysfunction and discomfort we can manage. If you push on a tissue, we expect that tissue to be painless to compression, or not uncomfortable to compression. Again, pain is a weird word.

I don't want to set that up, but you shouldn't be uncomfortable to compression. What's nice is that if I push on something, all I'm doing is just creating an isometric. It's just a vector isometric. Instead of pulling an isometric through the length of the tissue, I'm putting it at a different vector and angle.

So that would just be one. I could start there, and if it was uncomfortable, well, guess what? Now I can get my nervous system involved. So I can teach my brain that it's safe to create a contraction here. So what do I do? Just flex, flex it, hold it for four seconds.

- This is very basic, I realize, but for many people, they're either already foam rolling and doing it incorrectly, or they're not foam rolling. We want them to do it correctly. So if I understand correctly, it's "okay" to flex the muscle that you have in contact with the foam roller while you're rolling.

- If I find something that's uncomfortable or stiff, or doesn't feel like my other side, I'm going to stop. I found a place to work. I'm going to build, take a big inhale. So I take a four second inhale. I want to teach myself that I need to be able to breathe in this position.

One of my friends, Greg Cook, is like, "If you can't breathe in a position, you don't own a position." You know, that sounds very Iyengar, too. But what we're going to do is we're going to say, "It's okay to breathe here, and I'm going to contract here." And then I'm going to slowly relax and soften.

That's tempo that's moving slowly, and I can handle higher loads. And what'll end up happening is if I repeat that cycle two or three times, guess what? My brain desensitizes that. Changes range of motion. My brain suddenly is like, "That's not a problem anymore." So we just move on.

And in two or three cycles of that contraction, breath, hold, long exhale, that starts to sound familiar, right? How do I calm down, long exhales? I'm not trying to spin up. I'm trying to say, "This is safe." I've done that with my breath. I've done that with contraction. I'm just getting input in, just touch to my body, especially on parts that maybe don't bark at me very often, right?

People are shocked to learn that sometimes when they have knee pain, how stiff their quads are. And then we can test it, load it, feel it, palpate it. And I'm like, "Those things are just stiff." And when we un-stiffen them, whatever technique you want to use, restore sliding surfaces, get neural input in there, we create range of motion.

Suddenly we change a motion dynamic, improve deficiency. The brain says, "Hey, that's no longer a threat," or we're experiencing that as a new pattern or position, that'd be enough to reduce your pain. But pain isn't the only reason we're mobilizing. We're mobilizing so that we can reduce session costs, so we can work out harder the next day and keep an eye on our minimums of our range of motion.

- Love this. And another just very basic question, 'cause I'll be honest, I haven't foam rolled much in my life. - And it doesn't have to be a big foam roller, everyone. Sometimes those big white, those are pool noodles, right? That's what it was for. I think like made in Killeen, Texas is like a manufacturing by-product.

And someone's like, "We could put these in the pool." And then some physical therapist was like, "Sweet." Like that thing's way too big and too hard and too square and too soft. Like there's a whole bunch of things. Like sometimes you need an elbow, sometimes you need a forearm, sometimes you need a thumb.

So you can have much smaller diameter. I'm a much bigger fan of smaller diameter rollers. I just think they fit your body better. - Thank you for that. Also very helpful. Let's say I want to quote unquote loosen up or move out some potential soreness or soreness from a given muscle, like the quadricep.

Does it make sense to start in the middle of that muscle, the top? Like, can you work above and below the knee? Are all of those things gonna help? I realize this is a much fuller discussion than we can have in a few minutes, but like how should I approach it?

I'm like, okay, you know, my quads are a little sore, or my back is sore. Do I go straight to the back or do I start with another body region? - I don't think it matters. What I want interested is inputs and outputs, right? What I'm really interested in is what did you do to make yourself feel better?

Did you just hope it would just go away? And then one day it didn't and then you had to activate the emergency medical system. So let's define a couple of things. What is an injury? This is a great question. Injury for us is there's a clear mechanism of mechanical trauma.

There's a bone sticking out of your leg, Andrew. Time to go to the hospital. - Injured. - Right, you're injured, right? Heard a snap and a pop. - Yikes. - I have night sweats, dizziness, fever, vomiting, nausea, unaccounted for weight loss, weight gain, changes in my bladder, bowel function, problem with coughs, sneezes, or swallows.

Those are red flags. You're not sore, you're sick. Let me introduce you to the doctor again, right? If your pain or dysfunction is so bad you can't occupy a role in your family, can't occupy a role in society, can't occupy a role in the team, that's an emergency problem.

That is a medical condition that needs medical, so you come in today, we tweak your back. It may need, we need to activate EMS. You need to go to the hospital. We need to get, because it's so severe, you can't do your job. Everything else I want to call non-injury.

I want to be very specific with the language used. We call it an incident. It actually comes out of this sort of language. There was a guy, here's the long way around the barn. I read this great book called "Deep Survival" which is Lawrence Gonzales, which is about why people end up in survival situations.

And it's literally a lot about like, we got away with it for a long time. And then I just didn't have a, you know, I ended up two miles out sea. I've done it a million times, and this time, right? That's it. But there was a footnote in there from a book called "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow, who's recently passed on.

I emailed Charles 'cause I was like, this has blown my mind. He calls, a lot of times we'll have trivial events in non-trivial systems. So he's taking systems thinking. He's looking at complex system organization. And his idea is that an accident, a normal accident, is actually just expression of the system if you gave the system long enough to express itself.

The inputs and outputs are so tightly coupled that it's difficult to see what causes what and how they influence each other. That's the body. So your stiff shoulder isn't a problem until you fall on the ice. And then that stiff shoulder suddenly can't take overpressure and overhead, and you tear your rotator cuff off at high speed.

You'd say, oh, black swan event, super crazy. But that's actually just a normal expression of that shoulder system if we gave it enough time to express itself. So he has sort of like incident and accident. So an incident is, I want us to start to think about incident-level problems, are pain, loss of range of motion, numbness, tingle.

We're becoming curious, why is the brain sending me the signals? Pain is a request for change. So if we ask our athletic population, I just did this with 100 kids. I'm like, how many of you are pain-free? 100 high school kids, two hands go up. - Two, high school.

- High school. So what we're suddenly realizing is that pain is very much a part of the athletic condition, the human experience, certainly the athletic experience. You've been in pain a billion times and still gone out and done the thing. So what we wanna do is say, pain is not always a medical problem.

It's a medical problem when? The rest of the time we're saying, how are you using fitness training as a scaffolding to understand nutrition, hydration, soft tissue work, desensitization, reperfusion of the tissues? So that's what we're trying to do in sport and training is empower people to say, what's going on with my body?

And why don't I feel the way I do? Or why does something hurt? And why can't I remedy that? And then when I run out of ideas, let me go get some help. - So the rolling we can think of as a way to move out soreness, prepare us for more work the next day or something like that.

- Sure, love that. - But is it fair to say that we can also use the roller as a diagnostic tool? - Sure. - Like if I'm feeling like an unusual amount of, well, not unusual, but let's just say that I'm feeling like a wuss 'cause when I lie down on that roller and I kinda like slide back and forth, like I've seen the videos of you and other folks doing that, I'm like, man, that really hurts.

Does that necessarily mean something's wrong? - No. - Okay. - No, it means that for whatever reason, those tissues become sensitized and that your brain is interpreting that stiffness as a threat and it's reading it as pain, right? And some people, they don't have that. They just, their tissues feel like this, but they don't have pain when they do that, but that's not a normal tissue.

You should be like layers of warm silk sliding over steel springs. And what you're seeing- - Is that what quality tissue should feel like? - Yeah, absolutely. - Layers of silk over steel springs. - Layers of silk over steel springs. And what we see is that we are loading and training at such high intensity, so such density now that our tissues get stiff.

I'm just gonna hang stiffness as, for whatever reason, high fibrotic, high density of tissues, whatever the reason, the tissues don't behave the way the joint system should, right? And that's a problem because my training shouldn't mitigate or attenuate or change my range of motion. It can, but now how am I keeping an eye on those changes?

Or as you said earlier, as I do a sport and I start to do a sport and specialize, I'm throwing, throwing, or I swim, or I kick on one side, how can I start to identify as my body is changing and adapting that sport so I can drag myself back to a sort of a greater readiness?

And that's one of the reasons that that mobilization tool is such a powerful tool. Again, however you wanna do it. I think it's useful for us when we have, I came up with this thing called the D2R2 model because the other ray was taken, R2D2. So the first order of business is I wanna desensitize if something hurts.

Something hurts, let's desensitize it. I can do that all different ways. Scraping is powerful desensitization. Isometrics can be really useful. Rolling, BFR can give me desensitization. There's so many techniques to make my body-- - Blood flow restriction. - Yeah, blood flow restriction. So that no longer my brain is perceiving this as a threat.

Because if you're in pain, you cannot generate the same amount of force or wattage or output. And your brain is gonna start to truncate. It's gonna start to lop off your movement solutions, right? It's just gonna happen. So we want everyone to be saying, hey, we don't panic when we have pain.

We just treat it like another diagnostic tool. Then second, D, right, we desensitize. And then we ask, is this something that'd be decongested? So decongestion means that oftentimes, tissues that are swollen become more easily sensitized. Tissues that are swollen and congested don't heal as fast. If you have a swollen ankle, those collagen fibers will not knit together as fast as a, right, if you have a joint that's swollen or a tissue that's swollen, your brain will shut down force production in and around that joint system.

Is swelling an emergency? No. Is a swollen joint environment really healthy for the integrity and surface of the joint? No, we wanna manage that. But oftentimes when someone comes in and the tissue is congested, right, just sometimes we say swelling and we think ankle, right, only capsular. But here we have, if you've ever flown on an airplane and had cankles, those, that's congested tissue.

If we manage that congestion, if we move those lymphatics along, we, muscle contraction drives the lymphatic drainage. The lymph system is the sewage system of the body. Decongested tissues often express less pain. And what we find is that in broken bones or soft tissue injuries, if we can better evacuate that swelling, better evacuate that congestion, not only do we see you're now healing at the rate of a human being, we're not rate limiting the healing, but also we can help you manage that sensitivity.

Then the third one is, can we get some blood flow in there? Like you said, once I warm up, I feel great. Welcome to the power of blood flow. Tissues become hydrated. We're shifting blood from the stomach. All the things that happens, right, all that venous return is coming back on board.

But suddenly we see that if we can get something pumped full of blood, it tends to be less painful. And that's a really easy. So if I have an old orthopedic thing, maybe I spend a few minutes just getting a huge quad pump on the leg extension machine, then I go squat heavy.

Right, so now I have desensitization, decongestion, reperfusion. Whatever tool you want to use for these is fair game with me. Just how I've come to kind of conceptualize these different tools. And the last one is restore. Do you have full range of motion, full normal in that joint, yes or no?

'Cause that's the last thing that we talk about because you're still able to perform your sport at college or do your job, but we're not seeing how in excess, your ability to not excess that range of motion may be limiting your movement choice and potentially overloading a tissue by making it work in a less effective manner.

Or even just leading to progressively worse and worse posture. Sure. Which is probably- Well, define posture for me 'cause I think that's a really great place to start, right? Yeah, I can define bad posture as when you catch yourself in a reflection and you realize, well, I'm starting to look more like a C than an R.

That's so great. The question is, is that a matter of aesthetics or pain? Well, certainly for me, it's not pain, but I- It's not becoming injury. I noticed that it's not becoming. I noticed that unless I pay attention to my posture while sitting, unless I do like bridge my fingers together and pull my chin back a few times a day, that I'm just naturally starting to tip over forward towards my text messages that aren't even in my hands right now.

And I think this is the younger generation. I mean, now that I'm 49, I can talk like that, right? I mean, it's striking. Were you born in the 1900s? They are- Late 1900s? Yeah, exactly. That's really my age. They're starting to look like a- They're shaped like a C.

That it's- And I'm a big believer in people, especially men, doing neck work. I feel like if you especially- How about especially people doing neck work? Yeah, well, here's the thing. Anytime- I'm happy to go there with this one, maybe even at the risk of being politically incorrect. Anytime I've suggested that women also do neck work, they say no.

You should see my goalie daughter because for every pound stronger your neck is, your reduction in concussion risk drops huge, a pound. Thank you. So we keep the iron neck by the door and she walks in and we have a video in our family where she's doing her iron neck training.

She looks at me, she's like, "Dad, this is why I don't have a boyfriend." Thank you. Sorry, Caroline. But that's the way it goes, right? 'Cause she's like, "Look at me, I look like an idiot." But she loves having a big, strong neck that can take the shot from the ball.

Listen, I wish everyone would train their neck. I had an accident where I fell off a roof, walked away from it, my neck was sore, but I heard it and felt it. And I was like, "Oh goodness." But it was actually from skateboarding stuff and falling and then I started training my neck years ago and realized that, wow, when I train my neck, I'm one of the few people in my age cohort that doesn't complain about shoulder pain.

Now, maybe I don't have full range of motion, maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong people, but anytime I see somebody with really broad shoulders where their neck is really inside of their jaw line, it looks like a head was placed on the wrong action figure body, I just want to go over to them and say, "Listen, A, it's aesthetically ridiculous.

"It looks like one of those flip books in the kids "where you can change the head, the body and the legs "to be different animals. "More seriously, it's a hazard "because it's your upper spine. "It's clearly not in line "with the rest of your strength profile." And the other one is the more incentive-based thing is, "Hey, listen, if you train your neck, "everything else gets stronger "and your brain is going to be safer." And as a neuroscientist, they usually listen to the last piece.

- Love it, love it. - So I'm so glad we're talking about this. I do bridges. I know that it can be risky. With tongue on the roof of my mouth, I do bridges to the back and then I do have a four-way neck machine or I use a plate.

Jeff Cavalier has got a great video of how to do this that we can link to, how to do it safely. You gotta close the chain by having a hand on the ground, this kind of thing to do it safely. But I've just found that neck work also serves posture.

Posture serves the ability to make eye contact when you have those things we call conversations with people in real life. And I do think these things stack up to we won't call it like psychological confidence, but the ability to meet somebody, like firm handshake, you're not trying to crush the other person's hand.

Look people in the eye, stand up straight, whatever your height. These things really matter in subtle ways or not so subtle ways. I think that I do feel like, yes, that the younger generation and the older generation, that they sort of drop, they kind of drop out of certain elements of life.

If you're looking down at the ground or your phone all the time, you can't look people in the eye. You're posturally not right. You're in pain. You're not as strong as you could be. I mean, these things stack up to being like in an aquarium full of fish. You're becoming the fish in the background that's like, you know, like it was kind of sickly and the other fish are getting all the good stuff.

And you know. If you define posture as like the Latin word root is position. So we're really saying is I have good position, I have bad position. Who brought, I have bad position. One of the ways I think we've lost the narrative a little bit is we try to give people these extrinsic cues to correct their posture.

Shoulders back and down, check your tent. Like, so all of a sudden you're like, when am I going to be a human being? How do I practice this when I'm doing a complex skill? So the organization of your body, the organization of your spine, particularly, really is a reflection of your movement habits, your behaviors, your self-identity.

There's a lot of things in there, right? You didn't get the job. You won the, you got the number from Juliet or you're sleep deprived even. - 100%. - And I'm going to call myself out 'cause people are going to do it. There are many times on this podcast when I go and I look at the, 'cause I do listen to the podcast, try and see places I can improve, et cetera.

And I'll be like, wow, my posture. I'm like hunched over. And I think to myself, and I'll go and I look. - You're just reflecting my posture. - No, no. And I track my sleep. So, you know, I'll go back and look. I'll be like, yeah, I wasn't sleeping as well those days or whatever it is, right?

I mean, I think that we are all guilty of not paying enough attention to our posture. So what we can do is we could define posture as there is a median range of the joint positioning where we simultaneously have most access to our physiology, right, and I'll explain that a little more.

But also those shapes aren't associated with increased pain risk and increased injury risk, which is real. The research does bear that, that there are positions and shapes that lead to less effective movement and are more likely to experience pain. It's probabilistic. It's not guaranteed. There's more likely. So one of the things that I think you could understand is, hey, do you want to have access to all of the machinery?

So go ahead and slouch. Go ahead with me. And then just turn over your shoulder. How far can you turn? - Yeah, not very far. - Now watch this. Get into a position where you take a huge breath. Get into the biggest position where you take the biggest breath.

(inhales) Okay, so that's a pretty rocking shape. Now turn your head. (groans) It goes further. So by you being cued, can you adopt a shape, an organization of your trunk that allows you to ventilate a little bit more effectively? You completely change and reorganize your structure, which led to an improvement in output.

So when I'm working with people, there's only two things I really can wrap my head around. One is, do you have normative range of motion? Yes or no? What are the tools we have to restore that and improve that? And does that expression give us greater biomotor output? 'Cause those are objective measures.

When biomotor output, I mean range of motion, force production, power, right? I see that I can express the physiology in a unique way that makes me more effective. And that is why you'll see suddenly we have this definition that is maintaining the physiology and aspects. I'm not gonna have as good shoulder flexion with my arm over a head is when I'm sitting up taller or in a position where I can take a bigger breath.

And I think that's what's really great 'cause that gets us away from good posture, bad posture into, hey, that position doesn't serve you as well in these circumstances. And in this position, I'm working with the pararescue team in the Air Force. The number one reason they were having back injuries was getting the litter out of the helicopter because they have a litter, the soldiers there with all their gear on, they've got a lift from a totally weird flexed position, right?

And this just turns out it's not a really effective posture position shape that transfers to handle these higher loads. So what do we do? We work on the range of motion. We give them skills to try to organize more effectively in that shape. And lo and behold, we can reduce injury risk and injury incident in those soldiers, right?

So what we're always thinking about here is let's get away from good and bad and posture doesn't matter. And it also doesn't matter at low load, low speed. And I wanna be very clear about that. So you can get away with murder at low velocities and low speeds, but speed kills.

Oh, everyone's fine. But when that speed wobble starts to happen, we start to see greater likelihood of deflection from posture. Your abs don't work as effectively. You can't create the same intra-abdominal pressure, right? Check, check, check, check, check. So that's why we always are saying, "Hey, is this true that you're saying "under high load, high speed "when there's consequence?" 'Cause maybe this set of conditions works under these conditions, but it doesn't work across all conditions.

And for me, I'm trying to take the best information I have working in sports and performance and trying to transmute that to my family, transmute that to my neighborhood and to the kids I'm working with. - I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element.

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Again, that's drinkelement.com/hubermanlab to claim a free sample pack. As long as we're talking about posture, it feels like a good transition point to pelvic floor. Years ago, and this is a plug for the material that you put out online and in books, but long before we met, I decided to sign up for your Men's Pelvic Floor course.

- I sold our Women's Pelvic Floor course two to one. - It was so interesting because, you know, at that time, one could go online and learn a little bit about pelvic floor. Everyone, and we talked about this with a couple of different guests on this podcast, including the director of male sexual health.

He's an MD, PhD, or at least an MD, as I recall, Mike Eisenberg at Stanford. We've talked about this with Mary Claire Haver and other people in the female health domain. - I'm glad we're normalizing this conversation. - Yeah, we normalize this conversation. You know that the pelvic floor is rich with vasculature for blood flow and neural input for controlling muscles, either passively or actively.

And I'll tell you, the number of people I know who have urinary issues, sexual dysfunction issues. I know because they tell me that they squat heavy in the gym, they do their Kegels and things like that. Then I've had guests on like Mike Eisenberg and others, and they say, yeah, actually, if you have a tight pelvic floor, doing Kegels is about the worst thing you could ever do for urinary function or erection function.

You know, because you're sending it in the wrong direction. You need to learn to relax your pelvic floor. Then some women will say, and it seems to be women that report this, whether or not men just have this, but don't report it. I don't know. I've had people write to me and say, yeah, you know, I'll do some lower body work in the gym and some urine is sneaking out.

And it's like, well, pelvic floor. And you had this great course on pelvic floor that taught me among other things. And I will say, I wasn't suffering any of those particular issues, but I had prostate pain in my thirties. And I was like, what's going on? Went and got my PSA measured, perfectly normal.

Thought, what's going on? Started researching online, read your work and realized, oh, I think I might just have tight pelvic floor. Started doing certain things, including you taught me how to sit down and stand up correctly in this video. It's like, you have to keep your sternum high, right?

You sort of, I think you said it was like a stately- - Let me just, there's no wrong way or right way to stand up or sit down, everyone. But there are ways that reflect increased function, especially when you're in a dysfunctional state. - Right, right. Yeah, right, I don't wanna, we're not trying to yet tell people what to do or not to do.

But it was like, wow, I'm probably hunched over too much. I think my hips are back too far when I'm sitting and maybe I'll move to a standing desk or a sit-stand desk, which is what I did. Lo and behold, prostate pain goes away. And had I not found that course, I might've gone down the path of medication or something else, took care of everything.

I also, I will say the other thing I learned was I tend to have a slight anterior pelvic tilt. So thinking about the pelvis, like a bowl, as I understand, like if that bowl could be, the ridge of that bowl could be parallel to the ground or tilted forward, anterior pelvic tilt, or back, posterior pelvic tilt.

Neutral seems like a good idea, but most people tend to have some natural propensity towards one or the other. Started wearing, I pretty much always wore flat shoes. Adidas or skateboard shoes are pretty flat. I lucked out there. - Your shoe game is strong today? - My shoe game is strong today.

Adidas, still wear 'em every day, love 'em. Or no shoes, which is great. And I noticed, okay, that corrected some of that prostate pain too by making, oh, excuse me, what helped correct it was to make sure that in the gym, I did something that turned out to be glute ham raises that would take my pelvis through a fairly full range of motion from posterior to anterior tilt and I've come to love the glute ham raise.

We're talking full range glute ham raises as one of the most useful tools just posturally for pelvic floor. So it's not about having huge hamstrings. - Beautiful, addressing stiffness in the system, resetting it, high neurologic component to actually do the thing. One of the things I hinted at earlier is like I've chased biomotor output, right?

Intra-abdominal pressure and being able to have a pelvic floor that works for you is part of that system. Like, again, we can take the physiology and goose it up and down. What's interesting about, I had a famous friend who was filming a TV show and we were working on his internal rotation of his hip.

So if you imagine someone on your back and I bring your knee to your chest and I swing your foot away from your midline, right? The femur rolls in, that's internal rotation of the femur for everyone. And I worked on his internal rotation of his femur and just improved his hip flexion, knee to chest, just got those things going.

I get this text that night and he's like, "Bro, what is up with my boners? "They're out of control. "What is going on?" - Out of control in the positive direction? - Positive. And I was like, "Well, there's this thing called blood flow. "And when we improve blood flow, "turns out reperfusion is on the list "of things that we chase." - So he'd been crimping the hose, so to speak.

- It's just stiff, right? And I think when we start to see that endopelvic fascia as a system, it's so easy for us to be reductionist. Like, I wouldn't even say you had prostate pain. I would say you had pain in your prostate area. - Right, and in fact, that's what it was still, the prostate region, right?

And because- - So you're like, "I don't know where my prostate is. "Okay, that's pain in my prostate." - Well, I mean, in a general sense, and I also saw that PSA level was well within normal, actually low range. And I was like, "What in the world is going on here?" And you start, you can find some pretty scary stuff online about spinal cord injuries and this kind of thing.

Did what we just talked about, and boom, it's never been an issue again. - We have all the Olympic lifting gyms, even our gym, we kept a towel on the platforms so that women particularly would pee themselves when they would receive a heavy clean, heavy snatch. And we would just wipe it up.

- They'd actually urinate on the platform? - Oh yeah, that happens all the time, all over the Olympics, everywhere. You'll see that. That is bladder incontinence is not normal, right? Totally normal to poop yourself before a fight. That's what animals do. Totally not normal to pee yourself. Peeing yourself is a sign of dysregulation, for sure.

So what we're, as you're seeing is though, hey, I can't manage this high intra-abdominal pressure I'm creating. And what ends up happening is we pee ourselves. So we can start by saying, well, are there positions and shapes? Theoretically, I want your pelvic floor to work in all the shapes.

It's maximally, and there'll be some shapes where it just doesn't work as effectively. And if you're a man, so we're getting into it. If you go pee, you'll see a lot of men will put their hand on the wall and they'll adopt a anterior pelvic tilt to pee. And what they'll do is basically just turn the pelvic floor off.

And so if you stand up and do a big anterior pelvic tilt, your pelvic floor will lose some of its tone and it's easier to initiate a string. - So anterior pelvic tilt, again, folks, is imagine your pelvis is a bowl. You're tilting it forward like you're gonna pour water out of the bowl, which is a fair analogy here.

- That's right. - You're saying, ideally, they keep a neutral pelvis and use the force of their muscles controlling their bladder. - No, no, no. I'm saying that it's much more difficult to pee in this position where we have high control over these systems. And what you'll see is that most people will adopt a shape where they basically inhibit their pelvic floor so they can pee standing up.

- I can't believe we're gonna dissect urine posture, urinating posture, but I think it's really important. Let's contrast that to the famous sculpture of the boy peeing and he's like leaning back, leaning back. - Same posture. His pelvis is forward and he's leaning back. That's the same posture. - So people with sons will know this, right?

So, you know, when you're a young kid, young boy, you can like, it almost feels like you can pee over a car if you had to. Maybe I tried that. - I'm just saying. - It was a Volkswagen. - One car, one car. - Right, right. So, but here's, so is there a proper posture for peeing?

- No, no, no. But initiating a stream, maintaining a stream is like, that's a sign of sexual health, of functional health, it's your general health. And what's nice now is notice how we got to this very nuanced conversation about erectile dysfunction, about bladder insufficiency, about, right, peeing ourselves. We got there through performance, right?

We'll have athletes who literally had a whole bunch of babies, suddenly have difficult time creating high intrapabdominal tone, will jump rope and as soon as, and pee, and as soon as they come back to a more organized position that allows them to transfer energy more effectively, recruit better musculature, have better organization, peeing stops.

So what we suddenly-- - This is female athletes? - Are women athletes, so you recommend that they jump rope. Well, yeah, absolutely. Eventually, I need to challenge that for, that's an easy way to do it. But what we see is, can you squeeze your butt and jump at the same time?

And what you'll find is that a lot of people, as soon as they adopt this anterior pelvic tilt, glute goes off and they don't have that glute control. So that can be problematic for a whole host of features. So imagine, I was hoping we were gonna get to hip extension eventually, but you know, what we see is that stiffness in the front of the quads, anterior line of the fascia, stiff front of the capsule, whatever the mechanism is, we do a lot of sitting, we're just, we're squatters.

My inability to take my knee behind my hip, we call this knees behind butt, knees behind butt guy, that's what I wanna be known as. Knee, but goes behind your butt like you're in a lunge. That's right, sorry, Ben. And then what you're gonna see is a lot of times when we put people in those positions, they can't get a good glute squeeze.

- Okay, could one practice this? I'm thinking about it, it's been a while since I've taken a yoga class. - And squeeze your butt, you would be like, I can practice this. - Okay, so there's a pose in yoga and I'm not an advanced yogi, but I've taken a few yoga classes in my day where you're on your, you're basically propped up sitting on your knees.

So it's sort of like in the camel. - High kneeling. - Yeah, high kneeling. And then- - Hard to squeeze your butt there, isn't it? - It's hard to squeeze your butt there. And then- - Because of all the forces yanking you anteriorly, those fascia lines, the quads, you're basically in that high kneeling position.

And because the lower leg is bent behind you, you're being dragged forward and it's difficult to squeeze your butt and extend over backwards. - So there's that, do they call it camel pose where you reach back and grab your heels and then you're supposed to look up at the ceiling.

- That's a gnarly one. - It's a gnarly one. If you do it in the Bay Area, the teacher will say, "Don't be surprised if some emotions come up." - No, very fair. - If you do this in Austin, Texas, they just say, "It's supposed to hurt, keep going." I'm just joking here.

This is like regional humor. But in any event, I think that's actually accurate by the way. But in any event, it is a slightly unusual for most people who aren't accustomed to it to do that pose. Again, doing that pose, I bring it up for a reason. - And if you don't do that pose, you might do kipping pull-ups.

That's a global extension position. All we're doing is taking the spine and putting a huge global load in it instead of a localized load. So an anterior pelvic tilt, you might think of localized extension and flexion where I have one or two segments doing the lion's share. We, whenever we can prefer to have global flexion extension 'cause the spine maintains its integrity a little more effectively.

- So doing things like wheel pose. - Awesome. - Putting your hands up near your ears, pushing it flat on the ground, pushing up into an arc shape on the ground. - Great diagnostics, awesome. - Is this something that most people should be able to do? - Yes. Can most people probably do it?

No. Can we then break down the components of it? Yeah, absolutely. Even Iyengar, yogi master started to bring in props, blocks and belts because he was seeing that his students weren't able to achieve some of the base shapes. And what they were doing was human Jenga to get into those patterns.

They were just solving the problem. And he was like, hold up, let's not go around the problem. Let's support you while we load you and breathe in these positions and shapes. - Given that most people don't have a ton of time for movement, designated blocks of time for movement.

If one, we're going to do, let's say some attempt toward wheel pose practice or camel pose practice, or any number of the other things that we're talking about here, which are taking the body into positions that we're not naturally putting it into given our activities. - Yeah, great way of saying it, you nailed that.

- Would you suggest doing these at the end of a resistance training workout? - When does it work for you? At some point you need to be exposed in this position. When are you going to get exposed to this position? If it happens to be able to be clumped in with your training, fantastic.

If it's at home in the evening, fantastic. If you've done sun salutation before, it's old school. It's almost like they were like, let's get this system going a little bit. So later on in the day, it's a little bit easier. So at some point we need to expose you to some positions.

We have something called the hip spin up. And typically for my athletic populations, my teams, especially, I'm like, hey, I want you to do one of three things in the morning. You got 10 minutes, that's all I'm asking. Eight to 10 minutes. Hip spin up, shoulder spin up, or breath spin up.

Just do one of those. If your back hurts or knee hurts, you get hip spin up. If your shoulder or neck hurts, you get shoulder spin up. And then if not, just cycle through those. So at least in the morning, we're starting to touch some of these crucial shapes that you're never in.

And if you do the hip spin up and suffer, I'm like, well, that's telling me about your movement history, your injury history, your movement diet. And again, nothing that we do on the ready state is related to supernatural levels of range of motion, just basic range of motion. The range of motion, again, that everyone learns in med school, everyone learns in physical therapy school.

So what's fun about what you've said around this pelvic floor health piece is that when we get people doing some mobilization, really brought to my attention of Jill Miller, is that we start mobilizing the endopelvic fascia. We just land a ball, just anywhere from your pubic bone to up to your diaphragm process, but particularly belly button south, you'll see that none of that should be uncomfortable.

And one of the reasons we see high incidence of pelvic floor dysfunction, but also high incidence of sports hernias is that we have a hip that doesn't work very well and ends up dragging that pelvis into positions where it's not muscularly very strong, right? I can get out of position where I have a lot of good sort of activation or access to those positions.

Then I have fascia and musculature that's super stiff because every time you do abs, you celebrate the stiffness, right? You do abs, you're like, oh, I'm sore today, I'm gonna go have some ice cream. When's the last time you managed your hamstrings or quads? Probably yesterday. When's the last time you rolled out your abs and your obliques?

Never? - Previous life. - Right, previous life before you respawn. So I think one of the things that we're seeing is, again, that'd be a perfect time to do in the evening. Don't go to the gym and lay on the kettlebell and be a creepy guy. Instead, pull out that volleyball at home, pull out that princess ball you got at Walgreens and start having a conversation with your pelvic floor.

Turns out, you know, your abdomen, your pelvic floor can also be mobilized. So we just, it's really simple. Front of your pelvis is your pubic bone, that's the front of the pelvic floor, the back is your coccyx, and each ischial tuberosity or sit bones is the side. Everything else is your pelvic floor.

So you can take a ball and just stay away from the holes, and if anything hurts to compression, you found a problem, so you can contract and relax and apply that same tissue. - So I might be on my side, I might be rolling with the ball right underneath me.

- You would just be sitting down on your coffee table and just putting that, sitting that ball in and around your pelvis and around your glutes and around your pelvic floor, right? You might be dangerously close to your grundle, you're welcome. So the idea here though is, you know, oftentimes when we'll have athletes with back pain, we're not looking at their pelvic floor or hip pain, but you have six short hip rotators, right?

You don't just have a couple rotators, you have a huge rotator cuff of the hip, and some of those things are congruent and kind of part of that pelvic floor. So it's not that I need to go after my pelvic floor every day 'cause again, let me just add another thing to do your list, but if something changes, I suddenly wake up and I don't have an erection.

I suddenly are discovering that I'm peeing myself 'cause I'm an elite cyclist, right? And something's happening that I'm like, "Oh, I know what to do here. Let me start to work on my belly. Let me see if I can work on restoring my positions. And can I do a little pelvic floor mobilization?" And that's a great place to start.

And which doctor was involved? None. Which pelvic floor therapist was involved? None. In fact, if you carry that to your specialist, they're gonna be like, "All right, we get to have the real conversation now 'cause you've already done the other stuff." - One thing that frightens me and maybe unnecessarily so is when I see men in particular doing crunch work, like ab work, crunching with ankles crossed.

A, because people tend to cross the same ankle over the other one. They don't symmetrically switch sides. - That's my good side, bro. - And my other understanding is that this can also lead to some pelvic floor issues and asymmetries. Simple solution could be to not cross the ankles while doing like repeated contraction work of the abdominals.

Am I being silly? - I would put that lower on the list of problems I have. Right? Like, I think if we went into the world right now and looked at people doing curls, curl ups, the real thing is, is that your only way that you're training the abdominals?

You know, do I have a bigger range of motion of the trunk? There are so many ways to be thinking about what the trunk should be doing and reducing it down to this one curl. I think if one of the things that we're looking at, like I'd much rather you hang from a bar and curl up.

- Yep. So this is pretty much, I won't say the only ab work I do. I do some anti-rotation work by staggering my stance when I do curls or anything else, 'cause it's a very time-efficient way to do it, making sure my belly button is staying straight. So you're resisting the temptation to rock from side to side and you get the anti-rotation work, obviously switching up the stance, but doing what you described, hanging from a bar, doing pikes.

To me, you're also getting grip work. - Yes, you're hanging. - But just for time efficiency, it just seems like- - You're also not just separating the abs and working with the abdominals with the knee to the chest. 'Cause that's really what we're seeing is that, do you only need your abs working in this position?

So basically you're reproducing another seated position, except you're crunching your chest to your seated knee. And that's really what that position is. Do we do it long? What happens if you do it long lever? Short lever means the elbow is bent. Long lever is the elbow is straight. Short lever is the knee is bent.

Long lever is the leg is straight. So why aren't we working in all those patterns and positions? And then being creative. There are so many great resources. The kids at Dave Durante has a free ab workout. He's an Olympic gymnast from Stanford, superstar. But you can go on to, I think it's Iron Monkey.

Sorry guys. And what you'll see is there's so much fun way to play and think about what the role of the trunk should do. And I think we're moving beyond, thank goodness, this, like I have to be a rigid robot all the time. And that we need to ask, what is the trunk supposed to do?

A good way of thinking about this. And I think your sit up is a good analogy. Really a book that makes the rounds from time to time is a book called "The Spinal Engine" by Serge Grachovetsky. And he really talks about the trunk as a driver of power, not just as a chassis of which the big engine moves.

And that really is a nice conceptual way of simplifying movement. But if we define functional movement, most people agree it works in a wave of contraction from trunk to periphery, from core to sleeve, from axillary skeleton to peripheral skeleton. But that means, boy, there are positions where I'm really effective and can generate a lot of force and there'll be positions where I can't.

But if my spine can't handle flexion, it's not a spine. If it can't handle extension, it's not a spine. If it can't rotate and be into these complex positioning shapes, I'm like red flag. So how are you training that thing? And if your only rigid dogma is straight up and down, which is a great reason to do mobility work, is suddenly we can side bend and we can twist.

And am I exposing myself to some of those shapes? And so we call that work, borrowing from one of my Olympic friends, Stu McMillan, spinal engine work. Putting PVC, side bending, playing with different shapes. And again, if you get into the David Weck ropes, if you threw medicine balls, you would suddenly see you're like, you're right, I can't be a rigid piece.

How am I training the functionality of my trunk beyond just my six pack? 'Cause straight curling will certainly give you a six pack, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna surf with power, run with power, punch with power, et cetera. I mean, look at what would just happen with those fights, right, with the women fighting, just the rotational power that they have.

You can't get that from just crunches with your legs. - The fight right before the Tyson Jake Paul fight was arguably the best fight and people had seen that a long, long time. The spirit of it and just the, I mean, they were just incredible. - Everyone watch us women's sports.

That was really great. So I think what's great now is if we can get people to start to be curious and to play, and I'm not saying you need 10,000 different movements, but instead of just hanging from the bar and doing knees to elbows or toes to bar, what if you brought your right foot to your left hand and you started adding in a rotation to that and suddenly you're like, I suck at this.

And ultimately what I wanna do is I wanna uncover every deficiency in this play because I'm still gonna deadlift. I'm still gonna swing. I'm still gonna lunge. I'm gonna do all the things that I know that makes me feel robust and makes me ride my bike better and be a better kayaker.

But simultaneously, there's a lot of play on either side of that. - I love that you're defining progression as incorporating these novel movements, exploring. - Dude, that's Westside 101 with Lou Simmons. I mean, like, hey, this week we're squatting with this bar, then we're squatting with this bar, and then we're changing your height, then we're changing your stance.

I mean, Westside Barbell has been doing this forever. - I didn't realize they did that. I knew they were like crazy gnarly, like in there all the time. - Every bar has its own max. Right, and so what they've done is said, hey, the squat pattern is the thing we're training, but how do we put another twist to the pretzel?

Now the weight's in front, now the weight's behind, now it's out, and now it's too deep, and now we're box squatting. I'm like, wow, you're gonna have to be a really competent, skilled squatter to handle all that. - It seems like in so many sports, not just for resistance training, but in so many sports, there's this shift now toward being an ATV, an all-terrain vehicle.

Like, you can't afford to just be good at one thing, you know, and the cool thing about it is that, you know, the more dynamic range that people are expressing, the more kind of evolution you see of any kind of sport, and I think we're gonna see this with fitness too.

I'm realizing this as we have this conversation, that what you're really suggesting is that people explore their movement patterns. I love this thing that I've heard you say for years, and I know McKenzie harps on this too, which is, Brian McKenzie, that is, you should be able to breathe well in every position.

It's such a fun test, actually. It's such an easy test, you know, squat down like you're gonna get something out of the cupboard, see if you can take like a full belly breath there. - How simple is that? - See if you can get your belly going out on the inhale there.

I like to do this test myself every once in a while, hanging from the bar, you know, those pikes. I don't get very many of them. Admittedly, I'm doing like five sets of five. - Awesome. - Occasionally, we'll try and twist a little bit, and as my grip strength improves slightly, maybe I'll be able to get more.

Usually, my grip strength goes first. - If you had smaller legs, it would be easier. (laughing) - I'll take that as either a compliment or an insult coming from you, Kelly. Kelly's exceedingly strong. He deadlifts 600 pounds on the regular. He's exceedingly strong, and he has incredible endurance. You're actually more of an endurance guy.

I think this is worth mentioning, that you have more-- - That's why I'm not very strong. - You have more of a, right, but-- - Have you seen my strong friends? I'm not deflecting. Your physiology is definitely biased towards certain things, like unequivocally, and what I am not good at is being brutally strong.

Oh, I've been training for 20 plus years. Hard training. Longer than that, 30 years, and this is all I can deadlift? That's pathetic. Have you seen my strong friends? So what you see is that I've been cramming a square peg into a round hole because I really like it, but really, I should be at probably 190 pounds, and I should be an aerobic athlete.

- Right, like if we threw a 100-pound backpack on you and went backpacking, you'd be fine. You'd be like, even now, you're sitting at somewhere like 240, right? You're like 6'2". You can go for days. Like you're naturally an endurance athlete. - Absolutely. - And I think it's worth saying, because if people are listening, Kelly's a big guy.

- All my training is biased towards, you cannot believe how much conditioning I do. I am a disciple of Joel Jameson. I'm a huge fan of trying to look at where I'm spending my time in these different heart rate zones, and then I'm just such a nerd of that because my primary sport is trying to keep up with my wife on the mountain bike.

- I think this is really important because I think we've been talking a lot about things kind of adjacent to resistance training. I think it's a wonderful shift now in culture that resistance training is being used, done by young people, by older people, women and men. It's fantastic. This was not the case 10 years ago.

This was definitely not the case 20 years ago. - No, for sure. - It was like bodybuilders, football, pre-season football players in military were the only people weight training. Now it's everywhere. But you're naturally an endurance athlete. I'm guessing that most people, I'm assuming, is this true, fall into the slower twitch, kind of more endurance propensity than, I mean, how many truly naturally strong, fast fiber type people are walking around out there if we just took the general population?

- The ones that are are sprinters and super springy. - And you know who those people are. They're mutants. I think I was always best at a skilled sport that used conditioning or used strength. When I compare myself to my friends who have huge aerobic engines, it's embarrassing. I'm always the weakest, fattest, slowest, smallest person in the room.

If you just want an ego check, just come out and hang out with me. Just meet my friends, see the people we're working with, and you'll see, you're like, okay, genetics is not the same. I think we've told a little bit of a lie in the internet sphere that if you eat this way and you do these, you'll be elite.

And we can certainly say that you have a training effect, for sure, and you should do that, but that's not the same thing as being a mutant. And there are just so many mutants out there. Shocking. - Yeah, I think it's actually a worthwhile exercise to figure out what one's natural leanings are.

- And what do you like to do? - Yeah. - How about that? I just think it's important that we remind ourselves that the whole point of this is to have the most fun. And what you'll see, he put up a video of some Chinese elementary school kids and the Chinese Olympic lifting team coaches coming and assessing their kids.

And very quickly, they put kids over at squats, they had them jump on a single leg, they had them do double jumps, and they were like, you, you, you, have your parents call me. Right, so you can already see that coordination matters, wiring matters, and they were able to say, hey, these are the things that we think are gonna make good Olympic lifters.

So those kids, I think we start to split cohort early on, but most important is everyone needs to weightlift, period. And it's not light, two pink dumbbells, it's real heavy weightlifting. But how much do you need to do to be better at your sport or to minimize your spine?

Those are the spine changes or osteopenia or osteoporosis. Those are great conversations, but not necessarily conversations about performance. Right, so it's almost like we need to divide this into like aesthetics, and I'm keeping myself intact, in versus I wanna go to the Olympics. Because what you're seeing on the world right now is that everyone's an expert.

I'm like, can I see how you work with 40 athletes? Can I see how you periodize that? Can I see how you manage travel and nutrition? Can I see how you were responsible or not responsible for this team having all its members? So what we're seeing is that this performance thing is a really big task, and it gets confused and watered down a little bit by everyone fitnesses.

Well, I squat, so I'm an expert too. Not the same. Our good friend Kenny Kane taught me something. He's shaking his head. The best. The best, he's a wonderful guy. You're not gonna find him on social media because a few years ago he just decided to take his gym and hit himself off social media.

He's a very, very talented trainer. So we're gonna give you his phone number, and we're gonna have you call him because you can't DM him. Very talented athlete and wonderful person. He taught me something, I'd say about eight years ago, that I've found oh so useful for my training longevity, my enjoyment of training, and it was this, very simple.

80% of your workouts, Andrew, he said, are going to be at 80% of what you could do that day. Okay, that involves some humility. I like to sweat hard. I associate intensity with hard work, et cetera. He said 10% are going to be at 90% intensity, meaning 100% is the most you could give, possibly in whatever time is allotted on that day, given the sleep, given the nutrition, given the life circumstances on that day.

The readiness for that day. Right, and then here's where it breaks down a little bit more. 5% are gonna be at 95% and 5% across the year are going to be maximum 100% everything you can give, do or die workouts that day. And for me last year, I believe it was, was that was the Rock Carry Campaigns is podcast.

I gave everything I had. Had, of course, had the mountain been a little bit higher, I'd like to think I would have gone a little bit further, but I gave everything I could because that rock was slippery and it was muddy and my hamstring was out the day when we started.

You know, I was in pain when we started. Anyway, I think that advice that Kenny gave me was some of the best advice I've ever heard because my tendency would have been and had been to come in and go at 90, 95 or 100% every single workout. It got you a long way, that got you a long way.

Yep, and it also brought me to this place where after eight or 10 weeks of training, I would get a cold or I'd get some nagging thing, a little thing, not, you know, wouldn't put me under, but then, or I need to take a week off. Normal accident theory.

Right, so I think I'd love your thoughts on Kenny's recommendation. For me, it's one of the things that I pass along any time, says, "How about some fitness advice?" I say, "Well, listen, I'm a neuroscientist, not a fitness guy, but I know a thing or two based on the mistakes I've made.

Here's a great piece of advice that's really helped me." 80% of your workouts, 80% intensity. Another 10% at 90%, then the 95, you know, 5% at 95, and 5% across the year are the all out, everything you can give, leave it all on the mat type workouts. We could start with a simple idea.

We say, let's be consistent before we're heroic. Right, look, I, if your intensity causes you to not be able to show up for the gym for three days, I'm like, sweet, that was sweet. And our adaptation response to that is sucky, right? I much rather you be getting more consistent and not blowing yourself out.

Remember that, there was a phase where we were like, "You shouldn't be sore when you leave the gym." Remember that? Like, there were people would talk about, "Hey, leave some reps in reserve. Like, show up the next day, grease the groove. That's old Pavel Tsatsalin stuff." I think that's really good advice, especially since most people are not 20.

Most people, and when you're 20, you need to go find out what the limits are, touch the fence, the electric fence once in a while, right? - Lick the, lick this. - Lick all the doorknobs, let's just call it that way. But you know, what ends up happening is there's a lot of things have to be in place for you to be able to go to the well that many times.

And what we know now, because we have all of this data, is that we can make better progress not burning it to the ground every single time. And it's difficult for us because if I'm just fitnessing, how do I quantify that, right? It's easy for us to quantify another kilo or another watt.

That's makes it a lot easier. And what you'll see is the best practices of these athletes, we do spend a lot of 70 to 80% heart rate. That's what we call recovery. In Joel Jameson language, 80 to 90, we're calling that conditioning, 90 and above, overload. But what I think is nice is that that gives me a lot of, there's some days where I touch 78 or an 80% and it's hard because I am sleep deprived, stressed out.

My nutrition hasn't been great. I'm sleeping in a strange bed, right? You know, traveling, whatever. So I think what you're seeing is something that one of my early coaches talked about, Mike Bergner. He says, "When the frying pan's hot, let's cook." And that means I need to know myself.

And as a coach, I need to know you. And I'm like, "Andrew, you look great today. "How do you feel?" "Great, let's go. "Let's go chase something, right?" And when the frying pan's hot, we cook, but the frying pan is not always hot. And if you pour in bang energy and jack 3D, you can't even hear inputs and outputs.

So I think that's such solid, reasonable advice. And really what we're looking at is how can we get you to train much more consistently longer and longer and longer? You can only go to the well a few times. And what I'll tell you is that is, I still love to power clean.

It's like my favorite thing. And that 100 kilo power clean is heavier than it was when I was 40, you know? And I want to pretend like that 100 kilo power clean is not a problem, but I actually have to progress and get myself there. And there are days where I'm like, "Oh, 80 kilos is my jam today." So I think that's really good advice.

And difficult for us to say, "How are we measuring success in our training?" Subjective experience? No, no problem. Let me give you a baby, keep this newborn alive, and then let's go see how hard your training is the next day. You're going to be terrible. You haven't slept all night.

You're stressed, right? So I think what's nice is having some objective measurements around, maybe body composition is one of them, if that's important to you, but are you getting faster over the course of a week? What are you testing? How do we know inputs and outputs? And right now we're just doing, we're baking a lot.

We're making a lot of suicides, right? You know, the old fountain drink where you just mix all the things. It's, you know, they always taste the same at the end, like crap, but that suicide where you mixed all the fountain drinks is a little bit of what we're seeing in that.

And one way of protecting ourselves is saying, "Hey, let's make sure you can train tomorrow." Suicides. I was reflecting on that the other day for some reason, why at a wedding or a party, young, typically it's a Y-chromosome associated disorder to feel like you had to mix a bunch of stuff and then get someone to drink it.

You're not wrong. Non-alcoholic drinks for young kids, by the way, but mixing all the sodas, putting M&M's in. Just something like, "Oh, my male friends are weird kids." - And I think that's what we see a little bit. And if you, I am a deep coach nerd. I love fitness.

I love fitnessing. I'll jump into any class, any time. Like, sure, let's go, let's see. You know, it's so fun, but I need to see, I do get to watch sort of trends come and go. Things get very hot. You know, they get very popular. And again, fitness has become a hobby.

It's an amuse, and that's okay. It's totally okay that gym is a hobby, but that doesn't hint about what's the best way to develop capacity, elite capacity, long-term longevity capacity. Those things almost don't go together. - Let's talk about hip extension. - Oh, bless you. - As somebody who doesn't like the elliptical or stationary bike, but loves the assault bike.

I love the assault bike. I don't know why. Just feels like really good work. - It is hard work. But you're not gonna find me on an elliptical. - Cadian Bill made it harder with the Echo bike. Thanks for making it worse, Cadian Bill. - But what is the Echo bike?

- The Rogue Echo bike is even worse than the assault bike. - The assault bike, by the way, folks, is the one with the fan. And I'm not sure if they put, the fan is for resistance, not to keep you cool, but it has that effect somewhat. - In the winter, you'll know what the fan does.

- So the Echo bike is a harder assault bike? - It's just like, imagine doing it on fire, uphill in the sand with a headwind. Then you're like, okay, this is, if you can make it worse, it's worse. - If you have one of these, I'm gonna swing by this winter break and try this thing.

- But I love that because high physiology, low skill. That's great. - You just described me in a nutshell. - I can take anyone, not have to know anything about your range of motion. I can be like, who are you physiologically today? Let me introduce this freakish amount of work in this tiny range of motion that's very safe.

So we can really touch high intensities very safely there. - Yeah, I like it much more than the skier. I'll do the skier every once in a while, but I find that the skier, if I just sit and stand a bunch of times, I'd be like, I can just do this for 15 days.

Like, is this exercise? And I'm like, am I doing this right? I don't know. For some reason, it doesn't feel like work. The assault bike always feels like work. Always feels like work. Okay, so hip extension. The assault bike is not hip extension. Typically, people tend to be hunched forward.

You can get upright, right? - Still don't have any hip extension. - No hip extension. - Let's talk about if I'm squatting and I stand up, I'm extending the hip. - As you stand up. - Right, I'm going from flexion to extension. - Yeah, one thing that I think for people listening that at least is helpful for me when hearing about squatting is to think about whether or not it's a deadlift or a squat, you can imagine taking your hands, putting your fingers at your hips and hiding your hands in that joint between the femur and your pelvis as you go down, right?

Your hands get tucked into the fold between the two. And as you stand up, it opens. So it's hip hinge, they typically call it, right? - And I think what we look at the squat and the lunge is very, they're cousins. And the difference is long lever, short lever.

And typically how you're holding the weight. That's the only difference. And sometimes upright torso position. But ultimately, we're really looking at what's happening with the degree of bend of the knee, right? That's why they're such elegant cousins. But if I'm squatting down and I stand up, people are like, "I'm working on extension.

"Working on extension all the time. "I'm like, okay, now let's continue "this extension conversation "and bring that knee behind your butt into a lunge." And that's hip extension. And if there's one thing that I'm seeing across so many of the populations I work with is we're starting to see changes and erosion in this fundamental expression of power.

The only people we don't see it as our Olympic sprinters. And you'll see that pockets, like we work with the all blacks and we're obsessed on maintaining the hip extension of these very strong athletes because it means that they can run faster on the field. Rugby team. Rugby team.

Am I correct in thinking that hip extension, we can think of as a partially reflecting hamstring function where the hamstring is responsible for bringing the heel up toward the butt, but also for bringing the femur back behind the torso. I realize I'm not using the PT language. No, no, no, I think what's great is- By the way, the PT's online.

I'm sorry, everyone. The PT community, the PT's, you guys just crack me up. In the field of medicine, there's an analogous subspecialty of medicine where they have the similar kind of like orneriness and it's, being a PT is very competitive. And so there's a, you don't do this, but the PT community, it's like, you can make a cart, you can make a whole sitcom about this.

The attacks often range from significant to like cluster around petty, not because they're not knowledgeable, but because there's so much nuance in this field, right? And it seems that there are a few things that everyone agrees on and then everything else, people love to argue in community, out of community.

So anytime I say anything about movement of the body, I wanted us to just say, I realize I'm probably not using the correct language. Perfect, I'm going to use that same defense of petty clusterness, clustering the pettiness. I'm sorry, all the physical therapists out there, I haven't represented you in the way that you would like to be represented.

I'll say, I'm just talking about my own experience. It's just differences in nomenclature. Right, and I'm trying to be very meticulous in my language today. I appreciate that. One of the things that we want to look at is, and this is a Philip Beach, Muscles Meridians idea, is that there are contractile fields.

And this goes along with, if we look at Thomas Meyer's anatomy trains of seeing the system as a system of systems. So we start to look at your back and your erectors, and then we tie that into the glutes, and then we tie that into the hamstrings and tie the calf.

It's kind of a whole, almost wraps around the door, the bottom of the foot, right? The plantar surface of the foot. So suddenly we're looking at this global system that's designed to create this mass extension position. Locomotion, we start to lock some of those pieces down a little bit.

But one of the things that we've seen is that when you aren't competent in this position, your hamstrings, for example, have to do a lot more work because your butt is no longer working on hip extension. Your adductors are restricted and they're not bringing you back into flexion. So suddenly what we see is that your hamstrings are having to do the work of calf, butt.

And when your hamstrings are tight all the time, you don't have hip extension. So a simple test we do is called the couch stretch. And all you need to do is face a wall, then turn away from the wall. So you're kneeling on the ground, hands and knees away from the wall.

You're gonna put one of your knees in the corner. So your foot is going straight up and down. The knee is in the corner of the wall. And then I want you to see if you can squeeze your butt in that position. Still hands and knees, except one foot now is kind of in the corner, down the wall, going towards your butt.

That's position one. And a lot of people are gonna struggle with recruiting and activating their butt in that position because it's what I'm calling positionally inhibited. We don't know what the mechanism is. - So you're getting the knee back behind the torso much as one would if you were sprinting and the back leg is extended.

- Really we're just flexing the lower leg. We're flexing the lower leg shank, right? That lower limb. Second position is to come up into a high kneeling position. So you just bring your knee up until like you're kneeling, except that we have a trailing leg now with a leg that's going up the wall.

- So front leg is sort of a right angle, right? Your foot on the ground, right angle. Rear leg is a knee tucked in the corner where the floor meets the couch. Foot is up on the couch. - Nope, just on the ground. - Okay. And we'll provide a link to an image of this.

- Yeah, and I called the couch stretch 'cause I created this thing a long time ago and I created it on the couch for my young athletes while they were watching TV, right? I just needed some hip extension exposure. But we can do it on the wall, we can do it on the couch.

Ultimately, what we try to see is, do you have glute squeeze? Can you take a breath, right? If your breath starts to get real small in this position, I'm like, huh. So every time your knee comes behind your body, you can't breathe anymore. How's that working for you when you run?

Is that good or bad? Seems to me that your breath should remain pretty constant independent of what your hip does. So then we like to see if people can come to a more upright position. So that's kind of position three. So a little bit more upright torso. We're starting to increase hip demands as the torso comes upright.

Torso's coming upright. The knee is moving further away from the chest on that loaded leg. And what you'll see is that most people are gonna be like, wow, that's real stiff or I can't even get there or I can't breathe there. I have to banana back to get there.

And I certainly can't squeeze my butt there. And I wanna tell everyone, this is a low level test. The real test is your front foot goes up on a 12 inch to 18 inch box. So we're not even in the test yet. - With front leg extended? - No, front leg just up higher.

So we elevate the front leg into what's called a hip lock. So that front leg is suddenly taking my pelvis and rotating it posteriorly. Knee is running into pelvis. Pelvis is like tucking. And now you're really gonna see what's going on with your hip extension. - So this is the equivalent position more or less of front knee sprinting.

Like really like jutted up in the air, maybe even past the belly button, definitely past the belly button. Rear leg behind you. So this is sort of like a cotton mid stride. - That's right. And so suddenly we have this nice test that allows us to see in our competency there.

And I wanna remind you, if you do the couch stretch and film it, your knee is actually in hip extension. It's not, your knee isn't even behind your butt here. It's that hard and I'm still biasing it towards flexion. So what we're seeing is that you have a real deficit of hip extension.

So that's one way to improve it. You can just do the test, camp out there, take some breaths, contract, relax, breathe, do your resistant isometrics, whatever you wanna do there. So many ways to judge that up, rotate, side bend. The question is, how are you now loading that thing in your life?

So we can put a band on you and get you do some isometric standing, but show me in your movement language in the gym, how you're reinforcing hip extension. So when we were talking about dead lifting with a tandem stance, still not hip extension, right? I'm extending the hip, but that trail leg is not.

Rear foot elevated split squat. Ding, ding, ding, ding. We start to get there, right? Bulgarians flipping a tire. Like anytime where I need to be able to, a big lunge is a good example. Forward lunge, back lunge. Tell me about flipping a tire. So you're talking about flipping a tire, but then at the top of the movement, you're doing like a kettlebell swing where you buck your hips forward, like you're gonna try and pee over that Volkswagen.

You're pushing over. Don't try and pee at the top. That's right. But you're talking about bucking the hips forward. That's right. Suddenly you're upright and that leg, that trailing leg is an extension in a long lever position. So we spend a lot of programming. One of the best persons at this is Franz Bosch.

I mentioned earlier, and he has something, I've termed like the Bosch snatch. So if you imagine being in a double stance, so I'm just like, I'm swinging a kettlebell. If I took a plate or a dumbbell, doesn't matter. I'm just gonna basically go from a hip hinge. And as I go overhead with the weight of the load, whatever's appropriate for you, I'm gonna take my front foot and step it up on a box.

So all of a sudden I'm going from a flexed position in the hip. C-shaped body. Right, or upright torso, but hinged. C-shaped, right? Weird C. And then, Veltica C. And then I'm gonna step forward, and now I'm gonna have that, one of those legs is gonna be an extension.

And so suddenly, now we're adding speed to this extension, 'cause that's not what we do with reverse rear foot elevated split squats. We're not loading that in speed. So we start to add the speed component to what we're doing, and suddenly we've discovered another way to challenge our movement.

It doesn't just always have to be heavier, it can also be faster. So I'm basically, if you imagine if I was, here's a great example. I love pressing. I think overhead pressing is the bee's knees. It's one of my non-negotiables. We're gonna press. Seesaw press, overhead press, we're pressing.

But, if I take your front foot and put it up on a box, make sure that back foot is straight with all your toes on the ground, and press from that position, you're gonna find out why you don't have any hip extension. It's gonna be so, you won't even think about the weight, you'll think about your groin exploding.

So a lot of what-- Do you recommend people probe that? Oh, yes, absolutely. Those mechanics? With very light dumbbells at first. No, go press. Go find out how well you can press overhead, and you're gonna see that, like, wow, this tandem stance front foot elevated press is gonna kill you.

Can, there's a movement I do, I'm guessing, well, I'm curious if it activates hip extension the way I think it does. Here's what I've been doing that I've found useful. I don't know if it's true or not. But what I'll do is I'll tie a fairly thick band to a pull-up bar.

I'll squat down, I'll hold it, like I'm holding like a pole in front of me, like a pole carrier in a parade or something. I'll squat down and I'll jump up, but instead of, but I'll buck my hips forward at the top. So like feet go out in front.

It's very unnatural movement, actually, as opposed to jumping and putting my toes down, pointing my toes down, my toes are kicking forward. So I'm trying to mimic the top of a kettlebell swing at the top of this movement. I would say, you know, one of the things that is useful for me as I am asked to come and tear through people's programming and look for holes in their movement practices, we look at fundamental shapes.

So what's nice is that, okay, hang on, everyone. Let me define exercise for you. Let me just, I'll just give you a little framework. And I'll start by saying, if something inflammatory, the shoulder's not that complicated. It doesn't do that many things. It goes overhead, it goes out to the side, goes in the front, it goes in the back.

That's what your shoulder does. You can bend the elbow, you can twist in all those shapes, but those are the four fundamental primary organizations of the shape of the shoulder. Hip has flexion, extension, right? Really, I could go laterally, but that's just a different kind of squat. But really, like, am I squatting with the foot really narrow or am I squatting a little bit wider?

So what we can then do is say, in these fundamental bookends, these benchmarks, this is what we call archetype. Suddenly I can ask, well, how are you loading your overhead position? So if you're always pressing on a bar or pulling on a laptop machine, you actually are overhead, but you're not in the fullest expression of overhead, right?

Which is your arms straight up and down, parallel by your ears. - Hands over the top of your head. - Stams over your head, right? So what we can then do is say, well, what tools do you like to use? Kettlebells, great. That's one of the reasons kettlebells are so great.

Single arm, I can't hold it out here, it's gonna fall. I have to finish over my head, right? Dumbbell's the same, but the kettlebell is a saw, it constrains us to express full overhead motion. I can look at, do you have enough interrotation with the hand by the side?

Are you doing enough pressing-like activities? Chaturanga, the finished position of my row, right? Bench press, dip, running. Those are all movements where my shoulder comes into extension, whether the arm is straight or bent. So what's nice now is I can say, well, am I distracting those tissues or compressing those tissues?

Well, you're like, well, what do you mean? I'm like, are you pressing or are you doing a pull-up, right? Pressing overhead or doing a pull-up. That's compressing or distraction, right? Very simple ways of looking at these movements. We can say, well, how are you coming there? Did you get there from a snatch or did you get there from a front rack position?

So we can look at start position, finish position. And suddenly what you're realizing is you're like, oh, I'm starting to understand the root movements and root positions that help me improve performance, predict future performance, and help me get through pain. Because if I have people not expressing the highest levels of expression of the movement, that's something we can improve.

That's a technique, right? It's not just get bigger and stronger. It's, hey, let's be more technically proficient. So I have all of these ways of looking at the movement selection choices. Again, what are you comfortable with? But then I can challenge it with load, make it heavier. We can do volume.

We could add speed. We could add cardiorespiratory demand. You could do more than five and suddenly you have to do 20 and we have metabolic demand in there. You and I are competing all of a sudden, right? Now, suddenly I go from open torque to close torque. I go from giving you a barbell to a dumbbell, right?

I go from open chain to close chain. Suddenly we're like, holy moly, block practice, random practice. I have all the tools for me to understand, are you competent putting your arms over your head or are you exposing these shapes under these different domains? And I think when we only look at sort of a few ranges of motion and we only look at load as the way, then we lose all the opportunity and richness of programming.

- Got it. Well, let me come back to my silly example of the band and the jump thing and say, okay, so for getting better hip extension, which is what I think a lot of people need is what I'm hearing. A lot of people are in hip flexion. - So you're jumping and then coming up.

- Yeah, I mean, or, you know, we've seen these beautiful images of certainly not me, but like people doing long jump where they're kind of like in an arched position, something. - Oh, I see what you're saying. - Yeah, so the idea is, because with the band it's safe, right?

You know, trying to get the hip into extension or feet out in front of the jumping. - It's a kipping pull-up without a pull-up. You're just kipping on the bar. - And I don't kip on my pull-ups by the way. Because I'm a time under, no, I don't kip on my pull-ups.

I train with Ben Bruno from time to time. You kip on a pull-up with Ben Bruno there, you're never gonna hear the end of it, ever. So I don't, but I don't anyway, 'cause I'm a time under tension guy. - That's fine. I'm gonna say that I love strict pull-ups.

I do more strict pull-ups than you can imagine, but if you can't kip, there's something wrong with you. - Okay, got it. We'll argue about this more offline. But I love to sprint. So that's hip extension. - Absolutely. - Love to sprint. - You can be. - Love to sprint.

And I love jumping. Like I'm a big believer in this maybe true, maybe not true idea that as we get older, we tend to jump and land less. A lot of injuries come from lack of eccentric load. - There's an old saying out of the Soviet system, when you stop jumping, you start dying.

- I believe that. - And the lowest form could be trampolining. The highest, another low form, jump roping. Highest form, starting to be really powerful. I love it. You're killing it. And what's great now is you just made the switch. We started describing your training in blocks of positions.

What position am I training? What shape am I reinforcing? Right, that's a really not, it's not a muscle. Remember your muscles are not wired for movement. Your brain is wired for movement, right? You can't, you don't have any selective control over a single muscle in your body. That's a mistake.

So you're not really working your biceps. You're working arm flexion, right? In a variety of positions. This squat exercise biases my quads more, but I'm not actually quadding, right? 'Cause that's impossible. - Yeah, I think that the misconception, the broad misconception is that resistance training is just to build and strengthen muscles in a bodybuilding kind of fashion.

And no disrespect to the bodybuilders, but-- - No, we learned a lot. - But we learned a ton and yet most people would probably do well to think about functional movements. In fact, there are a few Instagram accounts that really like to come after, not just me, but a lot of people that have talked about resistance training and all that talk about functional patterns.

And I have to say, as much as the messaging sometimes, I think is a little bit abrasive, I pay attention to these and I have seen some of the before and afters that they'll show for people that will incorporate into their training like throwing or ballistic movements from fully stop sprinting out the gate kind of thing and focusing immensely on balancing the two sides of the body.

And without ever having done those programs, I have to say like, yeah, like a lot of these people had some pretty dysfunctional patterns and they look like they're doing better. And I think it's because I have to assume that they're incorporating a much broader range of movements, more hip extension, working the two sides of the body, all the things that you're talking about, all the things that you're talking about.

And so I think that the bodybuilding piece, I think is a great thing for getting people out the gate. I always say the amazing thing about resistance training, forgive me for going long here, but I think this is something that if somebody is not naturally inclined to exercise or resistance training, resistance training is one of the few forms of exercise that because of the blood flow, the so-called pump, give people a visual and sensation-based window into the progress they might make.

- Hell yeah. - Right, I mean, this is unlike going for a run and getting to like, at the end of your run, you see a little less body fat and then two days later, you've reduced your body fat percentage, right? Like it gives you a window into your future when you resistance train that way.

- And a gateway into a conversation that's very complex. This is all I think about. And people are like, hey, I just want to feel better and I don't want to get hurt in my calves when I run. You're like, okay, it can be really simple. And also you have a right to look jacked and tan.

I mean, you can be jacked all you want. - Mark Bell makes this point every single post. - Look, I think there's something that I try, we don't ever punch down. We just don't, you know, we point to what we do. This is our model. But any model that someone's on the internet, a model has to do three things.

It has to explain current phenomenon, right? It has to predict future phenomenon and it has to be easily communicated. So let me see your model, how it works. How does it explain, if I do your thing, will I get better at this thing, right? That's the thing I'm interested in, right?

So what I see is, oh, a lot of recursive fun fitness where people feel better, but I still have to go over here and squat or I still have to go over here and become conditioned. But you can see the truth of needing to expose people to bigger ranges of motion and more skilled movement than some of the things we're getting traditionally in the gym, right?

And I think one of the things that we saw with like a pivot towards movement culture, right? Kind of coined by Ido Portal is that what we were seeing is that the gym didn't get necessarily better movers. What we had was people originally doing a skill, throwing something, running track and field.

We would train and then go do more of that. And then what we did is we took the gym or took the sports skill movement out of it and we just remained in the gym. And you can see the reaction to that as well. You're not very elegant. You can't, don't have any moving solutions.

You don't transfer your energy very well. You're not, you know, you're not graceful. You can't, you have no rhythm. So the real key for us is like, I think we wanna put playback in there and you can see what the reaction is to, hey, if we're just doing bench press and hack squats, maybe that's not making the best mover, but it's certainly making a jacked guy who's, what we call it, what is it in that movie, "Hot Girl Fit"?

Where, you know, it's one of the recent movies where the guy is, who's the guy from "Twisters," that incredible actor he was in, Top Gun. Anyway, he's swimming and the girl is like, "Hey, why are you out of breath?" He's like, "I don't do cardio. "I just do abs and biceps." She's like, "Oh my God, you're hot girl fit.

"Like you have this big engine that looks good with no-go." And I wanna make sure that, no offense to all the hot girls out there, but the idea here is, what is it you wanna do with your body? Let's start there and then we can start to say, well, what do you have access to?

What's your training age? And it's a nuanced conversation. It's probably why you should have a coach and develop a coach for the rest of your life. But let's not pretend having abs and big biceps is gonna make you a good MMA fighter, right? And you can see why the resistance of, "Hey, that made me less athletic." We wanna be careful of that.

Yeah, I like using the resistance training to make me stronger and better at running. Yes. And that's what's in my mind. Yes. I only ran cross country one season in high school. It wasn't very good, but really enjoyed it. But I love running. I've been running for a long time and I'll never be a- I ran cross country one year in high school.

Maybe we ran against each other. Oh no, you're a year older than I am. So I wanna, yeah, well, I'll tell the story some other time. It's not, my stories aren't relevant here, but I use resistance training to be able to run better, faster, further without pain for me.

That is what I would hope we look at training for. Now apply a longevity lens, a durability lens, right? Or as Juliette says, she's like, don't you wanna just be able to pop off the couch and go on adventures, right? I wanna have a body that's capable of that.

I think what we've been pitching in the gym doesn't really do that. And even that, I just want everyone to hear and double click on what Andrew just said. That framework is that I now have a third party objective measure. Does my running get better with my training? And it's a really great way to evaluate your training.

Am I faster? Do I feel better? It's really worked for me. And it keeps me out of any kind of gravitational pull toward just trying to get more weight on the hack squat machine, which I enjoy progressive overload. I enjoy doing movements better with more weight, et cetera. But I find that the gym just becomes this, when it's a closed loop, I find that it just becomes this kind of like endless exploration of like, what am I really?

Also at this age, like I wanna maintain strength and build some muscle perhaps, but mostly- - Do you wanna get heavier? - I don't. - Isn't that weird? - I don't know. - You need as much muscle as you can because winter is coming. - My goal is to actually get much stronger without getting bigger and to keep my endurance going.

I like to do one long rucker run per week at one shorter run, one sprint type run. I just figure like I'll be- - Everyone, what you just described for a typical person is doing a long piece, a short piece and a high intensity piece. That's right. That is really, that's the crack.

- Yeah, that's what I do every week. If I'm, you know, most weeks and then I'll lift, you know, legs one day, you know, torso. Everyone laughs, torso. What kind of thing is that? You know, torso, including neck and abs. - Let's take it to the next level. Let's go flank too.

You wanna get torso on flank. I'm really confused if I work on my flank. - And then I'll do what could be called distal muscles. I'll do an extra workout for calves, biceps and triceps and forearms and grip strength on Saturday. And that combination of things, right? This isn't about my training.

To me, meets the demands of life. Like I can sprint for the airplane with my luggage and get there and not cough up both lungs. I can go backpacking. Like if you say, hey, let's go backpacking or go Grand Canyon. - You can do that. - Tomorrow, you're gonna carry 75 pounds sack.

- What a great test. - I'll be a little bit sore at night, but it'll feel good. I'll feel good sore, right? We can go to the gym together and I can put, you know, what feels to me like a respectable amount of weight on the hack squat. We do some full range glute ham raises.

I can hang from a bar, but I'm not trying to beat a pull-up record or run a marathon. I find that anytime I've gone to the extreme in any one kind of training, I end up injured, sick, and I'm just not interested in that. And I like to think, I could be wrong, I'm projecting here probably, that I'm representative of what most people want.

I also wanna be able to overeat a little bit every now and again. Like Thanksgiving's coming, a little bit. I also wanna be able to not have to eat all day and then eat a big dinner and not dissolve into a puddle of my own tears because I'm neurotically worried about something nutrition-based.

Like I tend to, I basically skip one meal a day just by virtue of my schedule. It's like non-intentional intermittent fasting. And the people who are obsessive about protein will say, well, gosh, that isn't as good. But yeah, okay, so maybe I get a little bit less muscle. I'm not doing, I don't wanna be so neurotic about my training that I'm not focusing on the bigger missions of my life.

- And notice that what you said was, I train so I can have fun. And I just wanna double-click on, we have sucked the joy and the play and exposure out of training and out of fitness. And now it's, I have to have this VO2 max so I'll live to 150 and I have to do, right?

And you forgot that we, this whole thing is so you can go spend some credits. So I like to say the gym and all that really focused training is spending time on credits. But one of my coach friends, Nicole Christensen says, CrossFit Roots, she's like, we don't nature for time.

Stop naturing for time. Like this, we're surfing so we can surf all day and we can surf more waves than the other kids 'cause you're not fit enough, right? I wanna go hike and then ride my bike and play and ski and do all the things I wanna do with my body.

And that made me wanna hold my kids or I wanna do my job in this warehouse. We're starting to train for life in a little bit more simple way and it doesn't feel like this crazy burden. And it also happens to be the best tool to understand how you're moving.

Because my expert coaches can watch you run and be like, oh, that's what we're working on. And I'll go right to the thing, right? But for the rest of us, we need to say, wow, my shoulder, that bench, that fly dumbbell bench was a little bit tricky. I'm losing some shoulder extension, right?

Or at least I'm touching these shapes. And that ends up being a really interesting diagnostic tool where we can really take a shot at improving function and reducing musculoskeletal distress. And I think this is the template for it. - Yeah, enjoying your training and including enjoying training hard is one of the best things one can do.

Years ago when I was skateboarding, I mean, I ruined skateboarding for myself because got picked up out of sympathy, to be fair, by a couple of sponsors. And then got obsessed with the fact that, you know, I wasn't progressing, then broke my foot. And, you know, pretty soon I didn't hate it.

I loved it and I loved the community, but it turned into something else. And had I just taken a step back from it and said, all right, I'm decent at this, I could get better. And I'm just gonna focus on doing it for pleasure and make a living some other way.

I'd probably be doing, you know, like, you know, front side inverts and pulls now. And unfortunately I'm not. I'm lucky if I get a nice little front side grind on coping. But whereas with fitness, resistance training, running, I love resistance training and running. The cup of coffee before my workout takes 10 times better because I'm gonna work out.

I love to use it as an opportunity to listen to music, listen to podcasts. Like there's so much that's in and around it that's still just pure pleasure. Even on the days when I'm like at 95% of output or 100% of output or 80% of output. I'm like, I just, I'm having so much fun.

- That's right. - And I can't wait to get back in there. - So when we're, we are looking at society health, right? The first thing we argue, instead of saying what's most important, we say, what is it you wanna do? And who are your friends are gonna do it with?

And are you gonna do it a lot? Let's start there. Then we can start to weasel in everything, especially with social isolation, with sort of lack of community. I mean, I feel like sport is the last place where people congregate, right? Sports, sidelines. This is the sort of, you know, lingua franca of the whole world.

I've taught on every continent except Antarctica. Everyone knows what a pushup is. Everyone knows what a deadlift is. It's not science, sorry. It's not math. That's not the universal language. It is bench press. Everyone knows and everyone can tell you how much you bench in any language. So there are some things there that are universal.

I think when we look at the human as a moving organism, then we can really start to not feel crazy about how our world is changing, but how do we fight back by setting up more opportunity to move more? And for me, the whole lens ends up being like, we basically as we're trying to parse through complex problems.

So I have a world champion who's injured, two-time world champion, isn't able to finish a tour. You know, the first question I ask them is, tell me about your sleep. I'm a rough sleeper. Oh, tell me more about that, right? Because I can't even tell your inputs and outputs unless we're getting into sleep.

Then I say, well, tell me about your nutrition. I eat clean. Great, find that for me. I don't even know what that means, clean. Turns out under-caloried, under-nutrition, doesn't get enough macros, doesn't get enough micros. I'm like, oh, we start to correct that. We start to collect sleep. When we really start to divide some of the behaviors into, for me as a 51-year-old, I'm obsessed with my tissues not failing.

Like tearing an Achilles is like every physical therapist's worst nightmare. And I jump rope every day and I have great range. I do so many isometrics. I'm just not gonna tear my Achilles. Now I'm gonna tear my Achilles, but I'm not gonna tear my Achilles. So tissue health is part of that.

So now I have to look at nutrition. I have to look at my blood work and I have to look at my sleep, right? So that I can really define some of those things as that creates a readiness, tissue tolerance, health. Then I can be looking at the other things.

And that's really, as we start to get, again, the framework of sport or framework of play creates this place where I can suddenly start to understand inputs and outputs and how to take care of this carcass so that I can do what I want with my body, which is our new definition of mobility.

Can I do what I want with my body and can I be pain-free? - Am I correct in my very non-scientific assessment of Instagram accounts, whereby when I see a 80 to 100-year-old person moving well, that person tends to be doing something sort of gymnastics related. There's this incredible video guy, Chinese guy, very tall Chinese guy doing essentially skin the cat and then into a pull-up.

Skin the cat, people can look it up. It doesn't involve actual cats, hopefully. It shouldn't. 85-year-old woman sprinting. So we're talking gymnastics type movement. - Didn't stop. - Sprinting movement. Rarely, sometimes it'll be somebody in a gym lifting a heavy weight, but more often than not, it's gymnastic type movement.

Pull-up, dip, parallel bar, balance beam, sprinting. Is that what got them there or is that just the expression of what- - Genetics, do they feel safe? Show me nutrition, show me their training age. But what's noticeable there is that we have disciplines that require greater range of motion and skill of body control and high power output, right?

Huh, so one of the things that we do in our programming for adults is I make you sprint once a week, like sprint, 'cause people have not sprinted. And I don't mean you can go out and run. I don't think you're capable of that. But I'm gonna put you on a bike, I'm gonna put you in control, and I'm gonna see what your peak wattage is, that sprinting.

So ideally, I would love you to be able to do some hill sprints and repeats, but I don't think you have the tissue tolerance or the range of motion for that. And I know what the outcome is gonna be, but I can put you on a bike and say, can we hit this peak wattage?

And what you just discovered there was, hey, I still need to maintain my ability to move quickly and have control through great ranges of motion. That is a recipe for why if you did yoga and did some sprints, you're gonna be pretty badass. You know, that's a pretty good way.

- And why people who just do the elliptical and the little small dumbbells, they're fooling themselves. - It's a lot of busy work. There's a lot of busy work out there. It makes people feel like they're involved in a program. Again, the way we wanna take our feelings out of it, how do you progress those pink dumbbells?

1,000 reps is 2,000 reps, right? Show me progression. Suddenly, I can't progress and regress those things. The other thing I wanna say is like, is it making the thing better? What are we training for? And you know, I think it feels decorative to have busy work, and I do all this prehab corrective exercise.

I'm like, hold up. Why don't we do the thing we're doing and regress and progress that and ask if you have native range of motion, yes or no? But you know, if we look at the typical person, especially someone listening to this podcast, they don't have two hours in the gym.

So if your program is requiring two hours of me, I'm out. If it requires an hour of me, I might be out. You know, I'm so busy that sometimes I eat lots of 30 and 40-minute pieces peppered throughout plus a lot of other play, and that's good enough. So we really do need to look at how people are finding themselves in their environments to ask, is this appropriate for you?

And what's essential? And it turns out a lot of this, you know, 20-something playing around videoing yourself in the gym is great when you have three or four hours in the gym. - Yeah, listening to an entire album or podcast or book chapters in sequence, I think is, if I may, far more valuable than allowing oneself the opportunity to text and be on social media during a workout because it just becomes a very distracted thing.

I think the workout of any kind is also an opportunity for building concentration, and one can listen to podcasts or books, et cetera, or an album sequentially through, but I find, at least for myself, if I work out in a way that's interrupted by social media or texting or email, because it's available there, that it carries through into the rest of the day, that I'm more distracted.

- I believe you. How about that? - I believe you, and that's what's so great, is you're like, "Hey, that doesn't work for me." You know, I find that my best thinking is done under enormous aerobic load. Like, I literally am like, "Oh," and I often will jump up and write something on the whiteboard and then go back and do my thing, 'cause, you know, it creates flow state, and if I'm distracted, I can't really hear what's going on, and there's a time when I wanna distract myself, you know, and there's a time when I wanna be amused, so that's fine.

You know, I've got a two-hour ride, getting ready for a four-day backcountry ski trip here in February, but notice, I've already been getting ready for it in the beginning of November. I am ready, it's taking me, gonna ramp up, and so much of my training now is going towards, can I successfully do these four hard days the way I want to?

So some things come down a little bit, strength dials down, I change my body composition, I'd like to be a little bit lighter, I'm playing, but there's some times where I have to get two and three hours in of steady work done, and I'm like, headphones, you know what I mean?

So it's okay to be amused. You don't have to be a monk doing what you're doing, but I really like what you said. I feel distracted. Yeah, let's use it as a concentration time, right? Let's use this as interaction time. The gym shouldn't be the loneliest place in the world.

If you're not making eye contact and talking, high-fiving, get a different gym. - I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about fascia. You and Jill Miller were some of the first people that I ever heard talk about fascia in an elaborate way, in a way that allowed me to finally understand what this incredible aspect of our physiology, the many things that it's doing.

I realize this is a vast discussion that could take several more hours. - I'm not a fascia researcher. - Right, and yet I think, as I recall, you're one of the first people to talk about the relationship, telling people that there's fascia, that we have this thing called fascia, clearly an important part of our physiology, our ability to move.

To what extent do you think that tight fascia, quote unquote, I'm probably offending many people in this moment, tight fascia restricts our movement and that working on fascial release, or maneuvering fascial-- - How about mobilization? - Mobilization, thank you, can allow us to move better, maybe better posture, maybe even feel better.

And there are a lot of theories, some probably wrong, some probably right, about what fascia can and can't do for us. But what are some things about fascia that you find particularly interesting that you'd like to pass along? - I think what we should do is, if you pull fascia out of the human movement equation, human doesn't, it fails to stop moving, right?

So the recent, like, we've just discovered fascia, we're like, mm, that's not really entirely true. There's a really, like, 20-year-old set of videos by a guy who was, he describes himself as a vasomonaut. His name's Gil Headley, and he did these live dissections on YouTube. I don't even know if he's still there.

But he basically did all of this gross anatomy for free on the internet. And he describes himself as one of the first people to really describe fascia as this sort of incredible, you know, connective tissue network that envelops, wraps, you know, stores energy, communicates, is tensionality. In full disclosure, I went to school in Boulder, and I may have dated a girl who went to rolfing school and was a rolfer.

And Ida Rolf was one of the first people to really talk about how can we mobilize fascia with touch? So I was introduced to fascia in the '90s when I had rolfing done on me. So when I'm trying to help someone think about pain or restore position, and this is overly gross, but it'll create a framework for people, we ask, is this an environmental problem?

Are you poorly hydrated? Because your tissues need to be hydrated to slide. Are you inflamed? Like, that's why we talk about nutrition and we talk about sleep. Okay, so we have this environmental piece. Then I often will say, hey, do we have just a movement problem? Do you just have crappy technique?

Like, let's fix the technique first. Let's get you moving to the highest expression of the movement first. Hey, turn your foot straighter. Let's re-centrate that joint. Can we have a better organization? Then we start to say, 'cause sometimes it's just a movement problem, just you needed some cueing. We say, is this a joint capsule problem?

'Cause capsular stiffness, the joint capsule is a bag of connective tissue that surrounds all your joints, and it can account for huge chunks of your range of motion limitation. So a lot of what we do is we, after we try to mobilize the joint tissue, and again, that's my own bias.

The way I was trained, I was an Australian trained manual therapist, this Maitland school. Then we say, well, is this just a good old-fashioned muscle restriction? And we call it muscle dynamics, 'cause that includes high tone, stress, fear, but trigger points are a well-documented phenomenon. Muscles get stiff, they become fibrotic, right?

You could have high tone trying to protect you, all those reasons, but that still could limit your range of motion. And lastly, we say sliding surfaces. So instead of kind of talking about all the different layers of dermis and skin and fascia, we say, do the things that slide, are they sliding?

So if you grab your skin on your forehead, it should slide in all the directions. Notice that the skin should slide all the directions over your tendons, right? If I grab your typical person's Achilles and grab the skin over the Achilles, it doesn't budge. It's like they have an exoskeleton that's that fascial kind of compartment, and it's seized, it's adhered, it's bound to the underlying surfaces, which creates tissue restriction and higher tension.

So when we're mobilizing these tissues, we're trying to keep tissues sliding and gliding. That's an easy way of thinking about it. Nerves have to run through nerve tunnels. Taking huge breaths keeps all of those, you know, aspects of your trunk moving. And we just need to be thinking in like a systems approach.

So sometimes if you went and saw an ART practitioner and it didn't solve your problem- - This is active release therapy? - Yeah. - Okay. - It may not have been a fascial problem, right? If you went and saw someone who only worked on the muscles, it may not have been a muscle problem.

If you went and saw a chiropractor and they worked on your joint structures, right, or a good physio, it may not be a joint restriction problem. If you saw a coach and they couldn't cue you out of it, it may not have been a... So what we need to do is we recognize that if more squats just solved all the problems, wouldn't we have solved all the problems?

If rolling on a roller had solved all the problems, seems like we would have solved all the problems. So I think what ends up happening is we want to put fascia equally as an important part of the system. And one of the ways that we can directly impact that in a free way at home is to begin a conversation of just some simple myofascial mobilization.

In fact, myofascial means muscle fascial, but there are osteofascial connections. Does the fascia glide over the bone there, right? We can look at the tendinous fascial connections. And again, do these tissues slide and glide the way they're supposed to slide and glide? And that's a much easier way to look at it.

And I'm gonna test and retest, not with subjective pain, but how is your range of motion and access to your range of motion? - Thank you for that. I've wanted to try rolfing for a long time. And then a friend of mine, who's a former SEAL team operator, told me that at some point during the rolfing that he received, that they put a glove on and went up his nostril and did some fascial relief on the release, excuse me, on the inside of his nose.

And quote, it was the most painful experience he ever had. And I was like, all right, well. - I don't even know anyone in Naval Special Warfare, but they're so soft. - Right. I didn't say that, Kelly said that. - You know who you are, my friends. But I confess, it's not like I avoid pain at all costs, but that made me think that I might not wanna do rolfing.

I also don't want someone putting their finger up my nose. So I'm assuming that I could say, hey, I wanna try rolfing and I don't need to get, because you hear this stuff like, oh, there's all this emotional release, which there are other ways to get that. I guess, is it always painful, is the question?

Does it need to be painful? This statement is pretty severe. - Let's pull rolfing outside, 'cause I'm not a rolfer. But let's just say that mobilizing your tissues doesn't have to be painful. In fact, it's likely that you'll experience some discomfort. But let's talk about a couple guideposts for you.

Number one, you always have to be able to take a full breath. So if I'm mobilizing you, or you're mobilizing yourself, and you suddenly stop breathing, you're going too deep. So an easy way for you is to say, hey, can I breathe here? Number two, I like to have volitional contraction.

So if I'm mobilizing someone or someone's doing something, I should be able to flex them out. I should have control over that. If the pain or depth or pressure is putting too much load on the system, where I literally lose neuromuscular control, what am I doing, right? And then those two pieces, can I take a breath here?

Do I have control here? Those go a long way to keeping me in the balance. And then we tend to not work on a tissue longer than five minutes, just because I wanna get the rest of it tomorrow. And if you give me 10 minutes of work, that's incredible.

We like to put the soft tissue work before we go to bed. And what we found was that we had better adherence. No one's doing anything productive in the 10 minutes before they go to the bedroom. Number two, like a child, when you put a child to bed, you're like, first we take a bath, then we read the book, and then we go to bed, right?

Your brain is like, I know what comes next. So if you do this rolling or on your soft tissue work, self-massage, you are training your brain to know what comes next. We find that when people have engaged in massage or self-massage, they don't stand up and wanna fight anyone.

They're very relaxed. If you've ever gone to a spa and had a massage, you don't go out and snatch or get into a fight afterwards. You're so chill, bro. So we found is a great way to, as Jill Miller says, switch on the off switch. That's a beautiful way of talking about that.

How do I tell myself to shift out of this, you know, fight or flight into coming down? Five minutes per body part, start anywhere on the leg, start anywhere stiff, what's asking, can I breathe, can I contract? You're gonna see that that's a really simple way to start getting some input.

And not all your tissues are the same. If you come to me with knee pain, I'm gonna wanna be able to look at your positions, but I'm also gonna wanna be able to stay on your quads. I mean, my full body weight. And if you can't take that, I'm calling that incomplete.

And those people out there who are gonna be like, whoa, that's heavy duty. You have not worked with my population who have monster thighs, are thick and fibrotic, and it takes real weight. So we all have different sensitivities, but if I respect your ability to take a breath and contract, then all of a sudden we're upregulating.

What I recommend is you go to Thailand, you get a Thai massage from a 65 year old master woman who weighs 109 pounds. And when she is working on your quads and you tap out, she's like, no, I'm not done here. You felt your quads, you're gonna realize how low the bar is.

- All right. Heat and cold. You were one of the first people that told me, hey, listen, cold's great. Cold plunges, cold showers are great for shifting your state, for resilience training. - It's fun. - It's fun. - I swam with Laird's pool this morning. Did the breath hold cold laps?

It's fun, I'm gonna put in quotation marks. - Yeah, it's- - Sometimes it's type two fun. - It definitely will shift one's state for many hours afterwards, for reasons we now understand. But you were one of the first people to point out to me that for injuries, oftentimes, it's better to perfuse the tissue and that heat sometimes, perhaps, is the more favorable tool if you had to pick one.

- That's right. So you, I think, have even talked about that there is research to show that cold water immersion can attenuate training effects. - If done in the six to eight hours after hypertrophy and strength training, because of its potent anti-inflammatory properties, prevents some of the inflammation that would prompt the adaptation response.

And put simply, if your goal is bigger muscles and getting stronger, don't do immersion-based deliberate cold exposure in the six to eight hours after your training. Fine to do it on other days, fine to do it beforehand. In fact, athletes at Stanford do that on the basis of a lot of work from Craig Heller and others.

Fine to not do it at all if you don't wanna do it. Again, I'm not a, I'm not a, I'm not gonna die on the sword of cold plunging, but it can attenuate or even prevent those adaptations. But at other times, it's a great tool for reducing inflammation, shifting one's mental and physical state in the right direction.

Look, it always sucks to get in the thing. The whole point is you feel much better when you get out than you did before you ever got in. That's the simplest way to put it. I am a middle-aged guy who wants to be the best middle-aged mountain biker in my neighborhood.

Is my timing of my plunge going to affect my ability to be that mediocre athlete? No, so stop it. People are like, when's the optimal time? I'm like, when's it work for you? Does it, is that first thing in the morning? Juliette found that if she got hot and plunged it in the night, she was like woken up and fired up and ready.

She's like, I'm not going to sleep now. And I get hot and cold, hot and cold, it's like someone hits the emergency brake, right? So first of all, when's it work for you, right? Second of all, if there is a performance concern, we try to put it as far away from training as we can.

That's what we say. Training in the evening, plunge before. If you like, you've trained in the morning, plunge in the evening. Like get cold, that's cool. But what you hinted at is the same reasons why we don't ice injuries, because it limits our body's ability to heal. So it rate limits, and it might do it by phasal constriction.

Your body, eventually your body is going to warm up anyway. So one of the things we like to say is your body either heals at the rate of a human being, or it heals slower. So there's no such thing as a fast healer. You're just, oh, you're really good at healing at the rate of human physiology, and the rest of us are doing dumb things that are rate limiting our healing.

Nutrition, sleep, right? When we are talking about anyone after surgery or injury, our benchmark in the line of the sand is eight hours of laying in bed without looking at your phone. That's minimum. And I don't care if you're sleeping, 'cause resting is the next best thing, but I can't actually understand inputs and outputs.

And let me be super clear. If you're trying to grow a body, learn a skill, change your body composition, get stronger, heal, that all rhymes with eight hours. We look seven as our minimum. And of course you're a human being, you're going to get by. I was stressed out last night and wanted to come on this show with my friend, Andrew, and do a good job.

Like I didn't get great sleep, but I'm a human being, I'm still going to show up. So what's nice then is we can start to say, okay, what can we control in terms of managing and upregulating, boosting maximal healing rate for humans? And it turns out cold water may not be the best.

Icing something might suppress prostaglandin release, right? Which means that you can think of it as you have these circulating stem cells. And again, sorry everyone, get this just very cursory. And we need the chemical signalers from the injured damaged tissue to call those things to be. But if I ice that and suppress that, some of those cells can go swinging on past.

There was a great study I saw a million years ago, and it looked at ibuprofen usage in Australian military tactical athletes who had bad ankle sprains. And those athletes who were given ibuprofen, which does the same thing as ice, suppresses prostaglandin release, right? Cuts off some of those chemical signals, were back faster than their counterparts who did not have the ibuprofen, but they had chronic ankle instability because they did not have a sufficient healing response because they had shut that healing response down.

So what we find is, look, your body will wait until it warms back up. But if you think you're gonna do angiogenesis and make new capillaries and modulate all these things by slapping a nonspecific ice pad for a nonspecific amount of time over a nonspecific tissue, you gotta be kidding me.

And so it's really Mickey Mouse. Does ice help for margaritas that are warm? Yes. Open heart surgery? Yes. Right? - Waking you up in the morning. - Waking you up in the morning. Hey, I have a kid who needs a placebo. I can numb that thing and give my kids some placebo ice.

That's great. Definitely can work for pain control because as soon as you're numb, you can't feel anything. But what's gonna happen when you pull that thing off? We're gonna come back. So we have found that we have much better. And again, instead of saying, that's bad, we're turning out and saying, we have so many better tools now to manage congestion, 'cause that's really what we're trying to do with ice and healing, is we're trying to stop swelling, right?

But is swelling a mistake by the body? And the chances are, it's not really a mistake. Again, two and a half million years of evolution, this stuff's pretty awesome. But what we know is failure to move and evacuate that swelling is a problem. So when we get people on non-fatiguing muscle contraction NMES devices like the H-Wave or something like that, we find that we can actually decongest and keep moving in controlled ways.

And we have much better clinical outcomes than we do if we ice. - What about heating pads, hot water bottles, sauna? Do you sit in the sauna? - Yes, I do. Love the sauna. - How often are you in the saunas? - Whenever I can. And sometimes it's short sessions and sometimes it's super hot sessions.

And sometimes I just get hot and cold a couple of times. And I try, like you said earlier, I'm not after some specific adaptation response. The sauna is a great way for us to chill out and hang out. And sometimes we're bored and we got to make dinner or move on.

So I try to sauna. If there's anything I do, I sauna a lot. Bigger the engine, the bigger the brakes. And for me, it's such a big brake. - You mentioned Laird. I've seen Laird drag the assault bike into the sauna, something most people probably shouldn't do 'cause they would die of hyperthermia.

- We call that Restrepo. It's the worst place on earth. - It's an interesting tool though, the heat. I find that if I get the sauna uncomfortably hot and then force myself to breathe super slowly only through my nose so that I don't actually feel like a burning sensation on the inside of my nostrils.

And I just do that for 10, 15 minutes that it's wonderful stress resilience training. - How great is that? - But very different than the cold plunge where you can either muscle through it or distract yourself or whatever. In the heat, your heart rate's going up and there's this temptation to follow that heart rate toward a more elevated stress state.

And so I find that you can get very, very hot, obviously be safe about this folks, but still maintain a lot of calm. And I think it's a wonderful tool, but you have to kind of work at it. And I enjoy this by the way. So people are probably thinking, here you go again, like why not just enjoy the sauna?

But I like to listen to Gregorian chants or something in there and do this like very like, how even and calm can I stay. - Oh, I love that. - At 215 or 220. And I wear the cap so those higher heats don't register to the brain. - You will drive yourself out.

Eventually your brain is gonna just, what drives me out of the sauna now is I retch. I actually like feel like I'm gonna vomit because I've gotten so hot. My brainstem is like, bro, you can just override. So I'm like, got to get out and I get out of the sauna.

And then one of the reasons I love the cold so much, which I've been our pool or a cold plunges, I can get back in the sauna. - Right, right. It's the contrast of, I try to do it once a week. Sauna cold, sauna cold, sauna cold. Once a week, you know, again, not training for any specific thing, except to be able to go back to Jocko's house 'cause I did sauna at Jocko's house with some family members of his and friends.

And I think they wanted to see when I would tap. - They wanted to crush you. - So they went, I think they cranked that thing to like 220, 230 and they caught, he got me on this. I ended up down on the floor, you know, and they were teasing me 'cause it's obviously cooler down on the floor than it is up top.

And so they call that the Huberman spot, the wimpy spot. But yeah, he's a beast with the sauna. - Everyone, it's not a contest. - It is in the willing household. I'll tell you, it absolutely is. - One of the things I like about the heat and the cold is that it informs me about my readiness state because just like my CO2 tolerance, my breath holds are very short when I'm stressed.

And under recovered. My heat tolerance drops dramatically and so does my cold tolerance. It's easier to pick up really fast. I start shivering right away. I'm like, whoa, I've been in here for 30 seconds. I'm already shivering. I'm like, huh, another piece of data that says maybe I need to make it a 70% day in the gym and move.

I don't have to take a day off. We believe, Juliet and I believe in this thing called desire to train. We wake up every day like you, probably self-medicated with some exercise as kids, right? And we start thinking about what we're gonna exercise. What are we gonna do? We're gonna ride our bikes.

What are we gonna do? What are we gonna lift? Like when we wake up, we start thinking about when are we gonna do it? And we wake up on some days and it's not there. And what we ask ourselves, is it not there? Why is it not there? Is it me?

I should be there. We should go train anyway. But we really try to listen to that voice. And when there's no desire to train, it's really strange how it correlates with crap heat tolerance, crap CO2 tolerance, crap cold tolerance. And I think it's a nice way of understanding yourself from sort of a third party objective measure.

Especially as you get good at this, you're like, wow, that really sucked today. - Yeah, I love that. I think assessing one's degree of kind of forward center of mass for effort is great. I'm borrowing this analogy from somebody else. I didn't come up with this. He said, with all things, you're either back on your heels, flat footed or forward center of mass.

And I think we've heard a lot about, trying to encourage ourselves to always be forward center mass. What I'm hearing today is that great to do that sometimes, great sometimes to back off, but to just explore the full range of, for lack of a better way to put it, sort of emotional range of motion, you know.

- Yeah, and remember, ultimately all this is supposed to be additive, right? And it's supposed to inoculate me by creating a framework that makes more durable my body and my relationships. I mean, we didn't even talk about the fact that the sauna is like, it's just glue for people.

It allows people to come together. I think one of the things I've noticed with my male friends is that it gives us a place like once a week where we get together because it's so hot. We're all super vulnerable. - The truth barrel. - We talk with our friends and we kind of share stories and can we talk about our lives.

And so it creates a framework for that. And if that was the benefit of the sauna, I'm in. Just that alone, right? That my wife and I feel more connected after taking a sauna together. I'm like, oh, who cares about the heat shock proteins and Alzheimer's? That's probably important too.

But I like having a lot of bottom things. And I think it's easy for us to sort of so hyperscience and hyper tactic things that we forget the whole point of the brain is to be around other brains. That's it. That's why the brain exists. And then those brains go do rad shit in the world together.

And sometimes it's that simple. And when we start throwing that filter on, it becomes a lot more sustainable. I'm not interested in being 110. I'm interested in being durable enough to take the hits on my way to 110. - I love that. Some of my best friendships have been forged in the sauna.

- That's true, right? - And not by pushing ourselves necessarily. Just become the thing, you know? - It's so cool. I know that some of my New Zealand teams have a kava. They call it recovery. And sometimes they'll share, have a kava ceremony and drink a little kava and then jump in the sauna.

And boy, it really binds the boys. You know, that really creates a down regulation effect. I mean, it's, so, you know, I think, again, my own bias, because I love this stuff, is that I think all of it is about physical input. So if we took a sort of macro step back, what you say is, what does your physical practice look like?

Tell me about your physical practice. Well, I get up and move my body and I try to eat a fruit and some protein before I get out the door. And I walk all day long. And I try not to sit in one period of place for a long period of time.

And then I get home and if I'm lucky enough to exercise, I do, and then I sat on the floor and I roll a little bit, but that's a full practice. You walked, you got sunlight, you know what I mean? And that, I think, is a much better way of thinking about this versus sort of, let me add another line of code to your programming where now you're doing three sets of 10 in this thing.

What are your thoughts on nutrition? You seem to be pretty balanced about this. Before we started recording, you were talking about some meatloaf recipes that sound pretty amazing. Clearly, you love food. I'm not gonna say I'm the best at meatloaf, but I may be seven out of 11 times bamboo terrace bench champion.

I'm gonna get a tattoo, but it's fine. You enjoy food. I love food. So you like to eat and you cook a bit as well. Most people feel, I think, kind of overwhelmed that the discussions about nutrition. Now we're trying to get a gram of protein per pound of body weight, which I subscribe to.

But if I'm supposed to spread that out across the day, sometimes I'm doing that, sometimes I'm not. I like fruits and vegetables. Do you feel like a failure because you didn't have a gram? I mean, honestly, it can feel for people like, oh, I didn't do it. No, I think if people make getting high quality, high protein to calorie ratio foods as the foundation of their diet, and then eating some vegetables and eating some fruit.

Whoa, bro, what about the peels? You're gonna kill people. And then, I love that spot. Bananas, dangerous, son. I'll eat the orange peel if it's a really good orange. I will. I mean, I've gotten some wide eyes at meals where I'll take the lemons out of my drink, I'll just eat the whole thing down.

I don't care. Someone will tell me why it's gonna kill me, but I don't eat the seeds, but I'll eat the peel too. So some vegetables, fruit, and then some starches per energetic requirements and/or real life. Like, I'm not gonna stay away from the sourdough bread because I don't need a starch there.

I'll have a little bit of it. I feel like we've lost our rational approach to eating because people feel these quantifiable metrics of calories and protein, they're important, clearly. But I've always known you to be somebody who's very balanced about the occasional ice cream, yes, steak, but also vegetables.

I mean, A, why do you think that the nutrition conversation has gotten so distracted, even contentious? And B, what do you do? And if you were gonna raise a kid, you've raised kids. If you were gonna raise a kid and say, "Here's what balanced nutrition looks like to you." Okay, I'm not calling you a nutritionist.

I'm saying to you, how do you see this picture? - Well, what I wanna point out is that if we're gonna have a conversation, remember my real job, day job, is high performance. I'm gonna have to talk about body composition. I'm gonna have to talk about fueling. Do you have enough carbs on board to do what we're gonna do?

Are you eating to recover, to reduce the session cost? How do we minimize the physiologic cost of this training and this competition? And that's all wrapped around nutrition. I already hinted at, I'm gonna have to talk and ultimately ask you to get a blood panel and make sure that you have everything on board so that your tissues are tissues and can handle the loading we're prescribing them.

So I didn't wanna get into nutrition at all because it's always about body composition for me. And I'm like, that's the most boring reason. Like we, Shawn Stevenson, wrote a beautiful book about creating a table culture and a culture around eating for your family. So for me, the functional unit of change is the household.

That's the place where I wanna make and put all my energy and time. That's how we'll transform society, one household at a time. But sitting down with your kids, the research around eating with your kids like twice or three times a week is phenomenal, right? Like cooking is beautiful.

I have to become more nuanced because if I have a team I'm working with, like we had a tournament two weeks ago at Stanford, we played four games and that's four collegiate, nationally ranked teams that were playing badasses. How do I fuel those women? How do I get them?

What do they wanna eat? What makes them feel good? What makes them feel bad? How do we balance all of that? Like I found out that putting food on a table with a tablecloth increased calories. Again, as a high performance for me, I'm like, how are the ways that I can be thinking about this from a practical standpoint?

My personal thing is that we focus on trying to create, this has been really useful for Juliet and I, an objective measure, 0.8 to one grams of protein, which means I don't measure anymore. - Per pound of body weight. - Yeah, I'm 51 years old, per pound body weight.

So what does that mean? It means that I really try to prioritize protein every meal. Super simple. And I try not to eat one protein. I try to eat all the proteins, right? That's probably better. I try not to choose personally very fatty proteins because my genetics don't really support it.

If I wanna see triglycerides and things go through the roof, then I'll, you know, watch me eat eggs and butter and steak, like keto gives me diarrhea. So what I'll say is I try to go for leaner proteins there. And then on the fruits and vegetables, because I think we have a real problem with not enough micronutrients, again, talking about tissue health, and definitely not enough fiber.

Those are huge problems. And if I get 800 grams of fruits and vegetables, this is a nutrition strategy promoted by our friend, E.C. Sienkowski of @OptimizeMeNutrition. She put this 800-gram challenge based on some research, and it changed everything. Because suddenly I was like, "Oh my God, "I gotta eat more food.

"I have to eat more fruits and vegetables." And I was stuffing myself with fruits and vegetables, getting enough protein that I was like, "Oh, I guess there's no room for a cookie." You know, and what I really liked about that, it was agnostic about your cultural preferences. It didn't matter if you were a vegan, didn't matter if you're a vegetarian, didn't matter if you were a carnivore.

You wanna do carnivore plus berries? Knock yourself right out. It gave people permission to have their food identities, but it also met the minimums. And then we can dose up and dose down based on what your performance needs are. - And this is 800 grams, not of carbohydrate. This is 800 grams of- - Of fruits and vegetables.

It's like four big apples. - Gotcha. - A banana is like 80 to 100 grams. - Okay. - Yeah, if you wanna be real dangerous, you ate eight bananas today, you could die. I mean, you could die. - And a big salad with, you know, less cucumber, tomato. - Probably, probably two to 300 grams.

- Okay, so then you'd also wanna get some fruit, maybe another, maybe some cruciferous vegetables, et cetera. - Check this out. Again, I'm just gonna do some boy math here. Starbucks cookie, delicious. - Really? - 300 calories, I'm just gonna call it delicious, right? A pound of cherries is 230 calories.

So eat a pound of cherries and tell me you're like, "Ah, I still want something sweet." A pound of melon, what is it, like 220 calories? A pound of melon? So calorically, not very dense, right? But nutritionally, super dense. So we end up loading a ton of more food on and it really does prioritize those things.

And from a performance standpoint, one of our friends is this incredible nutritionist at Michigan football. Abigail is amazing there. And she will tell me about how she's using nutrition as intervention for sports performance. And she'll have men come up to her and say, "Abigail, I pooped today." And she's like, "Yeah, that's great.

"You know, you should poop every day." And they're like, "No, no, no, you understand? "I pooped yesterday too." And it's the first time these kids have pooped consecutively. They don't poop regularly. And I think, again, if I'm just trying to get out in the weeds and talk about what's normal and not normal, we should talk about you didn't eat fiber.

And she's like, "Wait until you poop twice in one day." And they were like, "That's crazy. "I've never in my whole life." And what was the difference is they started eating fruits and vegetables and fiber. And when we start to create those benchmarks, it's a lot easier for me to see inputs and outputs.

And then we can argue about, can you choke down a hundred grams of carbs an hour? 'Cause you're my elite cyclist. I think you'd be shocked at how a lot of my athletes have changed their relationship around food because it serves their needs. It's not their identity around control.

And something that Julie and I have been very cautious of is if you have two daughters, just speaking, we're really concerned about creating dysfunctional patterns or relationships to food, because in this fitness space, it can be real gnarly. - Yeah, I see the progression from sitcoms of the type that we grew up on to reality TV shows, to social media, where social media can do so much good education-wise, et cetera, connection.

But it's basically a reality TV show that everyone's been able to cast themselves in if they want. And certain characters are casting their physique. Certain viewers are casting their outrageous behavior. And we're all in this reality TV show called social media. - I think that's really the best way to describe it.

- When people start to feel like, oh, wow, these people are getting attention for this reason or that reason, it creates a gravitational pull toward people behaving a certain way. And then obviously some of that can be really self-destructive. - Do you win health? I mean, this is a great question I ask people.

So like you shredded down super dysfunctional eating, can't go out and eat with friends. You don't drink anything with calories. Like it's really gnarly to be hyper lean. And then what I'll say is when you took your shirt off, did you win Instagram? Did you win? Because you got another 60, 70 years on this planet.

How does that work? We don't really diet. We'll manipulate macros to take weight on or put weight off players in season, out of season. You know, we'll have really good athletes say, I think I should lose four pounds the next two weeks for this thing. And I'm like, hold up.

I'm not gonna put you in another stressor when we're trying to like, let's go ahead and talk about body composition after the season. But ultimately when we really get people on board with how food has the potential to enrich their relationships, how fun it is to cook, how fun it is to prep, how fun it is to serve other people, then we have this really different relationship with feeling and that's really remarkable.

But it is really easy to say I won. And now I'm like, okay, so this 90 day fast, there are so many fitness things out there where they start with a fast or brutal calorie restriction. And I'm like, that's your jam to get people lean fast is just to slam off the calories.

We know what's gonna happen. How many people have done some kind of 30 day, 90 day thing and the next day it's like, they're off the rails. So if you're doing some body recomp and then you're off the rails for me, I'm like, I don't think that was very good because this is a long season we're playing.

- I think I have to be careful here because I realized this gets into some issues. When I did an episode about anorexia, I learned that first of all, anorexia has existed for centuries. This idea that it's more prominent now with social media, actually the numbers don't bear out.

What does bear out is that it is the most deadly, the most deadly by far of all the psychiatric illnesses. It leads to death in a far greater percentage of cases than any other psychiatric illness, including bipolar where people often commit suicide, a much higher percentage of people commit suicide who are bipolar, et cetera.

So it's a really serious thing. And yet we assume that social media has made that worse, but there's this now cluster of all these different eating disorders that don't qualify as full-blown anorexia nervosa, sort of like ADHD now, we understand people are having attention deficit issues that might not be clinical ADHD, but that cluster around it and like people's adults and children's inability to hold their attention on an idea or a topic for any appreciable amount of time.

So it's a very serious thing. I love that today you've talked about enjoying your training, like really enjoying your training, all aspects, the resistance part, the cardiovascular part, the mobility part, in the evening, getting down on the floor, also enjoying eating with people, enjoying the sauna. I mean, I think people see the big guy that you are, the amazing track record you have of working with all these incredible athletes and you're quite accomplished athlete yourself.

And I think this is the first time for me anyway, that I realized like you are thinking about how to make this whole thing pleasurable and mesh it with real life, which I'm realizing now shouldn't come as a surprise because you have a family, a flourishing family, in addition to a flourishing business with the ready state and so forth.

I think if there's one message that really comes through over and over again today, it's like, how can you make fitness and nutrition and health part of your life, but not let it take over your life or your mind in a way that isn't healthy? Yeah, thank you for that.

And if that's coming across at all, I think we're doing a better job. And I would say certainly tempered as I've gotten more reasonable. You know, I think we get older and you can see a little bit more of the horizon and you start to wrap your hands around, how are we going to solve these problems in these different places and what is sustainable?

You know, I really think that that's, we see quick inputs and outputs that are high levels of sports performance. And simultaneously, again, I wanna take those lessons and transmute them to my own household in a really sustainable, fun way. The nutrition piece is such a dangerous one. And young right now, Julia and I are very obsessed with youth sports and spending time with seeing if we can improve that experience for families.

So they come out unharmed. And, you know, REDS, Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, you know, is where we start to see that kids are not eating enough to fuel activity and their growing body simultaneously. And it's really hard on their physiologies. And it starts to show up with lost periods.

It starts to show up with stress fractures, right? And we start to see sort of this, some degradation in sort of the body's tissues, but can really crash a lot of problems. And, you know, Stacy Sims is probably the first person to really put it on my radar of, hey, you're a physio coach.

I need you to become an expert with the people that you're working with. You know, are you eating enough support? And I see some of the elite women I work with, elite women, really battle, this is what the body I need to get paid and to win world championships.

And that's not the body that people want on the Instagram. And, you know, should I have a salad after this training? I'm like, we just played for three hours. No, you're not gonna eat a salad. I'm like, go get this big ass burrito. And then we'll talk about your salad next, you know?

- So it sounds like the athletes are under eating. - Yes. - And my understanding anyway, the statistics- - Also under fueling, which I know is confusing, but, you know, potentially not thinking about food at the right times. - And within the general population of non-athletes, especially youth, however, it seems that people are over-consuming calories.

So there seems to be two populations clustering out here. - This reminds me, we have a rule at our house for dinner. We have a three vegetable rule. This is from a woman we work with, Margaret Garvey, who cooks a protein, whatever that is, and has also three vegetables.

And that's where she starts. And I have one daughter who is like a gourmet chef. Georgia is just a total bad-ass, you know, G. And then I have Caroline, who is the pickiest human being on the, like, "Is it brown? I'm not eating." You know, and she's getting better.

But when we had three vegetables, suddenly what we saw was that she might eat one, right? And we could start to have exposure. But I think if we crowd out some of the, 'cause we don't wanna have a restrictive house, right? But, you know, if we crowd out some of the other foods, we found that it was a lot easier for us to say, "This is what we're eating.

And we eat this together as a family." And then if there's other foods, I mean, your teenagers are gonna leave the house and eat whatever they want. Just be clear, everybody. So you might as well stuff 'em with the good stuff at home. - I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about supplements.

These days, we hear a lot about creatine. Creatine, creatine, creatine. I like creatine, been taking it for years. We'll occasionally do a washout where I just kind of let a bunch of water out of my body. Why not? And then get back to it. I don't do it for any specific reason.

I just do it. - I travel and forget to bring creatines. I'm like, "Okay." - Yeah, but most of the time, I'm taking five to 10 grams a day. Okay, we've heard about the body benefits, the brain benefits. For athletes and just "exercisers," the typical person listening to this podcast, do you recommend creatine?

What are some of the things that in your household, I'm getting this picture, and I've been in your home, and I will say that the spirit in your home is a wonderful one. Brian McKenzie and I showed up more or less unannounced at one point, and it's a delightful thing.

Like, people's spirits are up. - It's a space station. It's a space station of stoke. And if you want to be part of it, you can come in. - Thank you. It's a great environment, and it was very warming to see that and the way that you embrace all these different aspects of life.

It's busy, and it's hectic, and it's fun, and people care for one another, and they're direct with one another, but in a way that's really supportive. It's really, in my mind, a great model for a home, and it's really, it stayed with me, and it's really a pleasure to reflect on it.

- High five, J-Star. Yeah, it's a team effort in there for sure. So, I'll just ask this. What supplements do you think are, if not necessary, then highly desirable for most people, and then for athletes? And maybe, 'cause we get this question a lot now, especially after Stacey came on the podcast, for the female athletes you work with in particular, are there supplements that add on to that initial batch?

- So, I think we can divide these things like into food-like things, right? And then sort of performance. - Yeah, like whey protein is just a protein replacement. High quality, high protein to calorie ratio. - That's right, and if you don't handle whey, like my athletes, I'm like, "Let me introduce you to these vegetarian proteins." And that's because you're having a hard time timing your meals or just getting enough protein, 'cause sometimes you just don't feel like it.

So, great, great utilization there. For Caroline, she gets omegas at night, 'cause she doesn't wanna have any accidental fish burp at school. She's a teenager, so she takes 'em before she goes to bed. And we're really interested in brain health. And there's some early research, and again, not my expertise, that I've heard of, read about, talked to people about, that vitamin D, creatine, and omegas might help attenuate symptoms of concussion if they get hit, right?

So, post, pre, so those things are on Caroline. She gets creatine every day, she gets an omega every day, and she gets vitamin D. And some of that is, probably gets enough vitamin D during the summer, 'cause I could pull it out, but we live in northern climes, and they're indoors, and there's good research.

I think Dan Garner had a great piece just talking about vitamin D supplementation in the military and the decrease of risk of fractures in the foot just with vitamin D. So, that's the start for me. I take a good multi, because I'm like, I'm just gonna cover the bases, you know?

And then you can look, I think the next sort of valence of interest is, have you had a blood panel? How are your vitamin B levels? Is there anything we need to do based on your environment or your genetics? And then I think it gets real in the weeds past that.

And again, play around with that. One of my super smart friends was like, I think you should take a statin, a small dose statin once a week. And I was like, all right. So, I was like, better take some CoQ10 with that. It's an experiment I'm running, right? Downsides are low, I'm getting my blood panels, talk to my physician.

But so, CoQ10 is on the menu for me, just to make sure I don't have anything. And so, I think suddenly what we should be looking at is, how do I round out, my family doesn't eat fish, so we're not getting enough sort of omegas from those sources, and no one will eat walnuts, but I'm the only one eating walnuts.

So, how do I round out my nutrition with some supplementation? And is there a benefit for some other things that with my genetics or with what's going on, like JSTAR has a mutated MTHFR gene, right? And so, we're always watching B vitamins for her, right? So, because we know that.

- Poor methylator. - Right, poor methylator, exactly right. - JSTAR is his wife. - That's right, sorry, JSTISL, CEO. - You guys have such an awesome relationship. You guys have poked fun at one another, you're clearly awesome companions to one another, and you do great, great work together. - I am the broken anchor of the relationship, I like to say.

She is, you know, what's really interesting is I have, I'm a little bit like you, I think I'm excitable. I get obsessed with things, it's super fun, go down rabbit holes, I like to experiment. And JSTAR is like the true North, like, no, that sounds fishy, we're not doing that.

You know, like I came home one time and I was like, you know what, this cow's milk is out of here. Our family's only drinking goat milk. I only had the best goat milk, I just had the best goat milk. And Juliet was like, sure, that's gonna last. And I gave some goat milk to Georgia and she's like hucked it across the room, she's a baby.

And then I drank the goat milk and like vomited into the sink and I had goat milk on my lip. And Juliet just is so patient by saying, huh, I wonder if that's a good idea. I wonder if we'll stick around, so. - So she's the rudder. - She is 100% the rudder.

She is a three-time world champion, everyone. She's a rower at Cal and she is my training partner. She's the greatest training partner I've ever had. We use training as another way of spending time together. - I love it. Thanks for sharing a little bit of the picture of your home.

It matches exactly my experience. - Chaos. - And chaos, a little bit of chaos and a ton of love. And I've been quoting him a lot lately. I cannot take any credit for this, but Naval, who's, you know, famous on various podcasts. He says, you know, what are we really shooting for in life?

It's a fit, energetic body. This is Naval, not me, by the way. He said fit, energetic body, a calm mind and resources. We gotta have resources and a home full of love. So I don't know from, you know, that's the list. - Spend the rest of your life working on those and you're gonna have a really, it's gonna be really fun.

And I just wanna remind people, you hear me say it again, that this should all be enjoyable and it is fun to track. It's also, you know, which devices am I wearing right now? I'm not wearing a single device, you know, 'cause I wanna feel and sometimes I track and sometimes I don't track.

How am I feeling? And ultimately everything is really coming down to how do I come to understand my own process and my interaction with the world process? I think I'm getting better at 51 of knowing I don't need six cookies and I really need to get more fruits and vegetables and sleep, and I don't need a device to tell me that.

- Love it. Well, Kelly, Dr. Starrett, thank you so much for coming on here today and sharing with us so much wisdom. We covered so much, you covered so much. I mean, pelvic floor fascia, cold heat, movement patterns. You give us a ton of practical tools, getting down on the floor, sit stand and on and on.

But a small portal into the vast amount of knowledge you have in that head of yours. And I just have to say that, you know, it's been a delight today because these little bits have come through about who I know you to be in the rest of the world.

This is the real world. We just happen to have microphones in front of us, the rest of the world. And you've been at this a while, this business of trying to help people figure out best ways to move, how to be a better athlete, how to, you know, improve one's fitness, how to take a rational, fun, hardworking approach at times, but also fun, playful, recreational approach to this really key aspect of our health and many key aspects of our health.

So I just want to thank you for coming here today, for doing the work that you do. And, you know, you are one of the real ones, as they say. - Oh, my brother, thank you so much. - And you walk the walk. You're strong, you can go far, you have fun doing it.

You're a great husband and dad, and you've been a great friend to me. So thanks for coming on here. Let's get you back again. And just thanks for being you. - My pleasure, any time. And thanks to all the great Huberman, people that make this thing possible. It's really a thing.

Thanks for brother. - Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Kelly Starrett. To learn more about Kelly Starrett and the work that he does with his wife, Juliet Starrett at The Ready State, as well as to find links to Dr. Starrett's excellent books, please see the show note captions.

If you enjoyed today's episode with Dr. Kelly Starrett, and you'd like to learn more about the science of exercise physiology and the protocols that can best serve you in your fitness, athletic and other goals, you can go to hubermanlab.com, enter the word fitness and Galpin, G-A-L-P-I-N into the search function.

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