yesterday we didn't sprint but we did a lot of skipping let's talk about skipping and yes i'm talking about skip skip skip this okay this thing i'm not gonna sing the rest of that skipping is such a natural movement for people most people and it feels so damn good and it's actually a bit more taxing than people believe and i came out of that workout skipping yesterday from skipping yesterday feeling like my hips were nice and open tons of extension my posture is up i feel like i grew an inch i i was strong in the gym this morning i just feel incredible what is it about skipping and why do you have sprinters skip so much we skipped a lot because the reality is you could not sprint and that is the reality for almost everybody because we stopped sprinting when we're whatever age some people stop sprinting at 15 sometimes some people it's 20.

but very few people are actually sprinting through their 20s and next to nobody is sprinting through their 30s so we know that the movement of sprinting or running fast and we kind of know what what this does and why this is good for you right we know that yeah moving our body intensively with intensity is probably something we should be able to do for as long as we possibly can but we can't because typically we've still got pretty good engines into our 30s and 40s and 50s but we don't have the bodies to be able to handle the stresses and the forces that this engine could put into the body so our tissue and our joints just is not able to handle all of these forces if you were to go out and sprint yesterday even if we did you know we ended up warming up for how long an hour and a half warm-up if we did a let's say a real proper warm-up we warmed up for 30 minutes and then i just said andrew i want you to sprint as fast as you possibly can for 50 meters that's not going to end well for most people maybe you could get through it yesterday but for most people that wouldn't end well you end up with a pull or a extra strain or a couple days of just feeling not well because we just don't do that and we don't have the tissue capacity to be able to handle that anymore or the joint capacity you know there's so many people assuming they they have to run really quickly somewhere and they just didn't know that they had to do it or they're playing backyard basketball or football and they tweak a hamstring or tweak a calf or something even worse right it happens all the time we just do not have the tissue capacity anymore to handle those forces so what do we do instead and i i typically recommend two activities one is running up hills there's a lot less stress on the tissue and the joint system by sprinting up a hill than there is on sprinting on a straightaway but second i think more important is actually skipping and i and i'm with you i don't know why we stop skipping i think it's associated with uh only childlike behavior but that's like saying jump rope is only associated with childlike behavior and i'm a big believer in skipping rope we'll talk about skipping rope but i think that's it um yeah i mean maybe this conversation or this portion of the conversation could be titled you know um let's normalize skipping yeah for adults absolutely it felt awesome yeah you can cover a lot of ground quickly heart rate gets up but not to an outrageous degree you're not sucking for air but it does feel a little silly if you're not on a track but you've mentioned uh you've what's the longest distance you've ever skipped 10 miles did you get some funny looks i got a few nice and you're a real tall guy you're 6'3 so you can't really uh hide no uh very easily that was in the park so there wasn't a lot of people okay but i skipped for uh 20 minutes every morning on the roads i get a few honks that's okay i mean they could be honks of approval could well be yeah or something else but you think about it like it's you you're actually taxing the coordination patterns and the tissue and the joints in pretty similar ways as if we were going to sprint we're working on pushing the knee behind the hip getting into this knee behind butt pattern this hip extension pattern which is so important and i know this is a a topic of conversation that you had with kelly when kelly was on here the importance of getting your knee behind your butt and finding and searching for opportunities to do that more often because we lose that so easily so skipping allows us to do that secondary to that is the coordination aspect between how we coordinate the flexion extension at the ankle the flexion extension at the knee and the flexion extension at the hip and we do that in a very similar way as sprinting where each of them stiffen at this at this time that is um uh considered throughout the entirety of the system where it's just like the spring the leg acts as a spring where if you think about when we jog when we run we're kind of running on our ankles and knees a little bit we don't feel like we're really using our hips when you're running a 10 minute mile it's all it's a lot of stress through the foot it's a lot of stress through the calves and by the way i'm not anti-running or anti-jogging i jog and i run and i still do all that stuff i'm not saying now stop doing all that and just go and skip i'm just saying find some opportunities to also skip because skipping where ashley can tax the system in very similar ways as pretty high intensity sprinting i want to hover a little bit on knee behind butt so knee behind kelly starrett shout out kelly starrett i mean if you think about this folks like knee behind butt means into extension so the hips are opening so to speak i know in yoga they say hip opening means a different thing but hip extension generally means posture is more elevated chin away from chest generally i mean you could get knee behind butt with your chin down but it's tougher just the sternum comes up kind of naturally puts us into external rotation so think thumbs out to the side like the fawns as opposed to inward and then you think about the the typical sitting standing walking jogging pattern of everybody yeah especially if you're a commuter um doesn't matter if you're on a subway bus um car or otherwise or plane you're you're folded in and so what i'm starting to realize is that knee uh knee behind butt ankle elevated sternum up i mean these are the hallmarks of locomotion yeah and so it's interesting that walking well jogging in particular seems to follow this kind of like forward folded kind of like almost like falling forward kind of thing i'm not trying to beat up on jogging because i also like to jog but i wonder if minute for minute skipping would be a much better activity than jogging for people who want to elevate their heart rate you know all the standard general adaptations that occur with exercise improved insulin regulation etc etc um do you think for the person who has not skipped in a while to go out and skip for a couple minutes is the way to do it or should they skip for a lap and then walk a lap what would be the way to break into this yeah i think i think probably the the worst thing to do is go out for a 10 mile skip don't do that i think we start off with like a 30 second skip 30 second jog 30 second skip 30 second jog or 30 second skip followed by a 30 second walk and the difference is you'll feel this right if you think about when you skip and we talked about this a lot yesterday i was asking you to be expressive express yourself think about what your posture is and how you're holding yourself you don't really feel you don't seem to think about those things when you jog you just jog and as you said you're kind of closed and small and short and you're just trying to get through it right the heart rate gets up to whatever it is and yeah you get some good exercise but skipping here's your opportunity to truly express yourself be big and free and open and bouncy and rhythmical all of these things that were at one point in our lives pretty important to us and we lose and that's what's that's is what we get from sprinting right the best sprinters are the ones who can express themselves truly maximally like totally let go and it doesn't have to be like massively powerful like the skips that we were doing yesterday were what we call low amplitude skips where we're just sort of skipping back and forth but you're still asking you to be tall and expressive and swing and be stiff on the ground and i feel like like there's as i said there's so many different benefits to this whether it's just been the plyometric benefit whether it's the fascial benefit whether it because this is such a a cross-body coordinative aspect there's all sorts of brain benefits to that as you know it's uh i mean it's just it's just there's so much more benefits to skipping than there is to just jogging so the on-ramp for me when i talk to people about the benefits of skipping is just to put it in their jogs so i was talking to one of your photographers yesterday and said how do i do this i usually jog and i i'm going like 10 minute mile pace i said well next time you jog just in you know go for your jogs you know go for about a mile or so when you're doing a typical jog and then just go back and forth between skipping and jogging every 30 seconds or so and i guarantee you that you will feel better with every skip that you do every single one because there's this again the self-organizing coordinative aspect to it where you start feeling a little bit more bouncy a little lighter a little bit more coordinated a little bit more rhythmic which feeds your jogging so for me that's probably the best on-ramp is just to work it into your current jogs and then from there start getting a little bit more powerful with it a little bit more expressive with it now we start driving the thigh up and back and get again a little a little bit more hip extension start being you know now we can start talking about skips for distance where you're trying to say okay from here that tree that's 50 meters away how many steps do i need to take to get to that 50 meter away tree so doing things like that yeah i'm fascinated by activities both physical and mental that facilitate the transition into a more difficult activity physical or mental i started to think about this when i started working on my book in earnest it's very hard to just jump into writing but i noticed that if i did some drawing listen to a lecture while i was drawing and i do anatomical drawings very easy to transition into writing i enjoy drawing i'm not trying to accomplish much with it but it's a very natural activity for me and just very easy to drop into a deep groove for writing for hours really and then i started talking to a musician friend of mine who he's a songwriter very accomplished songwriter and he does the same and then i saw a post from joanie mitchell that she would paint before she would sing and i think these transition activities that are natural for us that don't feel as constricted by distance over time or you know sometimes i put my drawings on social media but they're really for me their way of kind of thinking about the biology from a circuit standpoint it is very personal and kind of abstract um as you talk about skipping it seems a little bit the same where you know skipping we're not necessarily trying to become the fastest skipper in the world or beat our yesterday's skipping time we're just trying to skip with more as you said more expression more enjoyment but perhaps it sounds like indeed it can help transition into a faster gate with what we're doing for jogging or for running or transition us right into into sprinting and i think that these um transition points for physical and mental activities are very important because these days there's so many tools and protocols you know dare i say and people start to feel like oh i have to do all of these things how would i do this right how am i supposed to meditate and get sunlight and do you know i already exercising a ton now i mean now you want me to skip the way you describe it is completely different it's saying no you're still doing your cardio quote unquote but maybe you do your zone two cardio and you incorporate some skipping which will make your zone two faster for you yeah or your your your high intensity interval training more um you'll feel more pliable yeah more explosive mike that yeah i think that's that's part of it i think step one is incorporating in so you can actually be comfortable skipping and step two is now can we add a little bit more speed force velocity to that skip where it becomes in and of itself a workout where you're skipping as hard as you can for 50 meters and walking back and doing that 10 to 15 times is that would you consider that a solid workout for skipping that would be a great skipping workout skipping 50 meters walking back yeah doing that 10 to 15 times yeah because that's that is safe if you warm up i'm not saying go out and do a maximal effort skip for 50 meters without doing a warm-up do a good warm-up first that includes some low amplitude skips and maybe some jogs and some stretches do that for 10 or 15 minutes and then do some maximal amplitude skips or over 50 meters that's a great workout in and of itself like a lot a lot of really beneficial plyometric work being done there