#111 The Optimal Mobility Protocol for a Durable Body | Dr. Kelly Starrett

0:00Hello friends, today my guest is Dr. Kelly Starrett, a remarkable person I've admired for a very long time and someone who's truly reshaped the way we think about movement, pain, and physical resilience. Kelly is not only a doctor of physical therapy, he's a celebrated movement expert, a coach, but also a best-selling author who's inspired countless people from professional athletes to everyday individuals to reclaim and maintain their mobility and physical durability over a lifetime. Kelly is the co-founder and chief health officer of The Ready State,

0:33co-founder of San Francisco CrossFit, and author of some influential books including Becoming a Supple Leopard, Ready to Run, Deskbound, and Built to Move. But beyond all of these accomplishments, what's drawn me to Kelly's work for years is his rare gift for taking complex movement science and translating it into practical, actionable guidance that just makes sense. He has been a tireless advocate for the idea that mobility isn't just an accessory to our training, it's foundational for how we move, how we recover, adapt, and continue enjoying the things we love

1:09as we age. And that perspective shines throughout this conversation. This was a deeply enjoyable and insightful conversation and one I've genuinely been looking forward to for years. In this episode, you will learn why pain does not always mean injury and how to think more intelligently about nagging pain that shows up during training, what a warm-up should actually accomplish, and why the goal is not just avoiding injury, but improving tissue readiness, movement quality, and performance. How to assess and

1:41improve hip and shoulder mobility, including simple at-home tests that can reveal missing range of motion. Why breathing mechanics matter for spinal movement, force production, pain modulation, and athletic performance. How movement snacks, walking, floor sitting, and better desk setups can help offset the cost of a sedentary life. How to think about blood flow, heat exposure, cold exposure, and simple self-care tools for recovery. Why Kelly's framework, Train for Life, Don't Live to Train, may be one of the most

2:16useful ideas for anyone who wants to stay strong, stay capable, and physically independent as they age. And we also discuss what's gone wrong in youth sports, from over-specialization and under-recovery, to sleep deprivation, poor fueling, and the disappearance of free play, and what parents can do about it, and so much more. Before we dive in, if you haven't already downloaded my free How to Train According to the Expert's Guide, this is a great companion to today's episode.

2:46It distills insights from more than 100 conversations with leading exercise scientists into practical evidence-based protocols for strength, hypertrophy, cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, and even sauna use. You can download it right now for free at howtotrainguide.com. Once again, that's howtotrainguide.com. And if you value this podcast and want to support rigorous, independent health and performance content, please consider becoming

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4:21all of those who support. You can find out more about becoming a Found My Fitness premium member and supporting the show and getting all these perks at foundmyfitness.com forward slash premium. Once again, that's foundmyfitness.com forward slash premium, P-R-E-M-I-U-M. And now, on to the podcast with Dr. Kelly Starrett. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm really excited to be sitting here with Dr. Kelly Starrett, who kind of sounds cheesy, but like, I mean, this is 10 years in the

4:56making, I feel like. I mean, I've known about your work for a very long time. And it really wasn't until I started to get into CrossFit training that it kind of popped back up into my head and my world. Why is that? Why is that? I mean, you're a legend. You're a legend, Kelly. So, I'm super excited to have this conversation with you. And we were kind of chatting about where to start because it's a really hard decision where to start having a conversation. There's so many fun things to talk about, right?

5:27So many fun things. And we're in what we're calling the beginning of third wave of fitness and strength and conditioning. Like, first wave, you remember, was like, nut, malt, malt, nut power bars, bad heart rate monitors. Second wave is just this fever dream over the last 20 years of like, mass integration and technology and YouTube. And now we're finally saying, okay, well, what can we discard? And really, what does matter to us? And I think it's really an exciting time, potentially, where we can say, okay, that was

5:58some craziness. We live in these very decorative rooms, like your grandma's room with all the doilies. It's like oppressive and you don't know where to start or where to sit. That's where we've just come from. So now, how do we take that pastiche of strength, conditioning, fitness, body composition, bodybuilding, and then say, well, what's important for your kids? How do you have this body that you trust doesn't hurt? It's really, it's a good time. Yes. What lessons have we learned? A body that doesn't hurt. That's kind of a great place to start.

6:28I mean, I have this question about common mistakes that I would say people that are like myself, you know, we're intelligent, very much committed, motivated exercisers, and yet we still have this pain and, you know, we're working out with the pain. What are some common mistakes that, you know, myself and others that are like me are making? Let's frame this first, that pain doesn't always mean you're injured, right? We want everyone to

7:00recognize pain is a request for change. That's a great place to start. And so you can use it a little bit like a check engine light. So when your knee hurts after that run or that thing you did, don't panic. It's giving you, it's asking, hey, pay attention. And that can be modulated by a lot of features that people are starting to get their hands around. Oh, you're super stressed. Went drinking last night? Didn't sleep, right? How's your nutrition? As starters, much less, we even talked about your range of motion or did you warm up or did you cool down? Did you just redline like an elite athlete?

7:30Because we have access to that now and then sit at your desk the rest of the day. It's sort of not really having a good adaptation response. So when we begin to pull with that, I think the first thing we can start to say is, hey, let's become curious. Let's not catastrophize. Because it really is like, what we expect is I'm going to have any pain. It's like when I was 15, my back hurts. It must be rabies. It must be, you know, I've tweaked myself in some way that potentially is going to be really detrimental and never, never figured out. Versus, hey, my body's asking for

8:04some input. What tools do I have? And when do I even begin to think, do I need help or not? Because when we ask all the people we work with, who's pain-free? Very few hands go up. And so what we have to do is start to say, okay, maybe pain is a part of the human experience. And we really haven't done a good job talking about it. We've done a good job masking it and certainly medicalizing it. But, you know, what about your kids when your kid comes home after soccer and she has a painful heel or a painful knee? Like, where do we begin to not freak out and yet self-soothe a little bit? I think that's a really wonderful place to start.

8:37I, for myself, you know, I get this sort of nagging pain. I have one in my shoulder and I have a little bit like in the tendon in my forearm. And it's not enough that it's like an injury where I can't work out. That's right. But it's enough where I do feel more limited in my workouts. And oftentimes I'll, you know, I work with a coach, as you know, she's amazing, Zia Warbaugh. She's amazing. But, you know, she'll say, okay, well, let's do a different movement today because you're feeling a little bit more pain if you're doing, you know, for example, like heavy deadlifts.

9:08Yeah. But, you know, for someone that has their nutrition pretty much dialed in for the most part and get enough sleep, you know, so like some of the pillars of health are there and yet you still have the pain. Like, where do you start to look like first? What a great, great entree. And you're like, I think I'm doing it, right? So when I work with people who have persistent pain, chronic pain, which is by the way, nearly all of my athlete friends, all of the pros, everyone I've ever worked with is basically like, I've never been a hundred percent. Maybe when I was 10 years old, I was a hundred percent.

9:40Everything else is working around some discomfort or a tweak. And if you ever play a sport, I mean, God forbid, you're going to get tweaked, right? The gym is actually the safest place on the planet to really control the variables. So what we can start to say is, well, hey, the first order of business is, I don't care what it is. I just don't want to have it, right? Just get me back to it. And we can do that through a lot of simple tools called desensitization. Because as everyone knows, thanks large part to this podcast too, your brain does not,

10:13your brain interprets what's going on with your body. Your elbow isn't screaming pain. Your brain thinks that that is maybe a threat signal or it's interpreting this symptom, this information as threat. And so what we want, because we have seen all the time where someone's like limping around and beautiful people walk by, the limp goes away, you know, and then they're limping again. And so you can really override these things. And if you've ever been in a fight, have you ever been in a fight? Like a physical fight? Yeah. No. Oh, okay. So the dirtiest secret about fighting is you don't

10:44feel any pain while you're fighting. Because your brain is like, that's not important right now. You're going to feel pain after the fight, but during the fight, less pain. So does activation of the sympathetic nervous system play a role in that? Yes. Yes. And so we can override these things. What we try to say is, hey, what are the tools available to you? Could you scrape? Can you cup? Can you massage? Can you do some isometrics? What about some percussion? Are there some simple ways where you're like, okay, it feels better. Let's move. And it creates a window of opportunity for us to move, which is the same tools and techniques we use for all of our teams, right? We're still going to go out and march. When we define injury,

11:19which is something clever, you said, hey, it's not so bad that I need to go get help. That's the marker where suddenly I can't occupy my role in my family, can't do my job, right? If your back hurts so bad, you're not going to work, that's a medical emergency, right? All the red flags, night sweats, dizziness, fever, vomiting, nausea, that seems obvious. Your child has a fever. She's not, you know, doesn't need a voodoo floss or knee. Hey, there's a clear mechanism of injury. I tweaked my, I felt a pop. There's a bone sticking out of my leg, stepped off a curb. Okay. Those are clear indicators that I need to activate the emergency medical system. Everything else is a

11:55feature of training and nutrition and sleep. In fact, we want to treat pain just like loss of range of motion, just like loss of force production, just another sort of data like, oh, HRV is off, a little pain. We should see those as similar in terms of the information they give us, right? Except, you know, you can have crappy sleep and poor recovery and still, you know, but that's annoying. So then we can ask, well, hey, is there some decongestion that could happen in these tissues? Well, suddenly we're like, oh, I understand why it's sauna and walking

12:27and compression and Normatec boots. And maybe I use an NMES device or lymphatic drainage or voodoo floss. There's a lot of things we could do to facilitate moving congestion, moving swelling up the chain and clearing it because a congested tissue, like, you know, someone has OA in their knee, osteoarthritis, and they haven't done anything, but the knee has reacted to the loading and maybe the nutrition and the sleep and whatever. And now it's swollen. And so what we're thinking is, hey, the typical person can run around with a congested tissue and that congestion can really

13:02limit healing, but also limit blood flow. But also it can very much be the driver of sensitivity. So you can sensitize a tissue by having kind of congestion in an old tissue. Then we could ask, well, what about blood flow? Did it get better once you warmed up? Because yeah, once you start to warm up, it starts to feel better. Ah, that's probably not a problem. That's, you know, the brain saying, hey, let's get some blood flow. How do we take the garbage out, bring the groceries in? And the last thing we say is, well, what about the range of motion? Because that never gets checked, right? Well, I can do what I want to do well enough. But what if it was that

13:37you had a big chunk of missing range of motion? Well, suddenly we could improve that. You can improve that while working on these other systems. And by the time we've worked through that little rubric, chances are your brain's like, nah, it's not a problem. Let's go lift. All right. So when it comes to foam rollers, I mean, it's something that I've heard such mixed data and evidence. And I say heard because I haven't really dived into the literature myself to look at what it says, but you've got real world experience. You know, the science.

14:09Can foam rolling help you work through, you know, a painful point? How do we do it? Like, what should I be doing? So let's start with that foam roller doesn't solve all the problems. If it solved all the problems, there'd be no problems. We've gotten that message, right? But you may need a smaller ball. You may need something harder. You might need something that fits your body a little differently. There's no, we always talk in a systems approach that if laying on the ground and

14:41rolling back and forth, fixed knee cancer, we would have fixed knee rabies already. Like we would have solved these problems. The research is clear though, that can help with range of motion. It can help with blood flow. It can help desensitize painful things. And pretty soon, if we haven't defined our terms, it can be a little sticky. So if I have you laying your quad, your quads on a roller and then contract and relax, that's a very sophisticated thing we're doing there. We're

15:12teaching your brain it's safe to develop force in this position, but that's just really a sneaky version of an isometric again, right? So suddenly we realize that, you know, if I give context to some of the soft tissue work I'm doing, instead of just laying down and hoping I'm pressing guess, I'm a little bit more thoughtful about, hey, I'm going to work above an area of pain, work below an area of pain, recognizing that maybe my calves or my quads could be contributing to knee pain. We find that when people get enough of a dose of something, we tend to say, hey, let's limit

15:46this to five minutes per muscle system. So you don't overdo it, but we can actually get in there long enough that we can make some change. That seems to make a difference. If it's so painful that you're not breathing, you're just signaling threat and contracting all the time. That's no good. So one of the things we like to say to people is, hey, let's make sure you can take a breath while you're doing that. So the two kind of rules that you're never going to overdo it is if you can breathe, it might be really uncomfortable, but you should breathe. And number two, you should be able to control. You should be able to contract. So if you're overwhelming your nervous system where you

16:19can't have any muscle control, maybe that's a little bit too much. And then keep in mind that there's a lot of body workers in the world. So either they're scamming us because there's so many massage, Thai massage, shiatsu, or there's something to that. And even if we just said, hey, how about the whole thing is just about loci of control, that you get home and you're like something hurts and I have some agency and control over it. Making long-term tissue changes, we got to load,

16:50we need to move, we have to, you know, but this is a powerful tool to get out of pain, restore range of motion, right? To improve blood flow, to down-regulate. We like to do the soft tissue work in the evening, for example. So number one, we're already sitting on the ground, but if we do engage in 10 minutes of soft tissue work, we found that that had a huge parasympathetic input, like a massage. You never gets off the massage table and is like, let's fight. It just doesn't happen, right? But a little bit of self-massage, you're signaling to the brain it's safe, you're relaxing, you're touching

17:24things that are tight or restricted or restoring how tissues are sliding and gliding, and then we'll get the rest of it tomorrow. And what you'll find is that your brain is like, we sit on the ground, then we do the soft tissue, then we go to bed. Now you're starting to be set up a habit. Now you start to down-regulate your breathing changes. That's really, really powerful. Soft tissue work is one feature of the whole system. It's not the only feature. Isometrics are really powerful, but what's most important is that we have a range of motion we're trying to improve,

17:56and we're doing test-retest on that range of motion. Did that restore? Or you mentioned DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness, work out really hard, you went for a run. That running is getting those tissues sliding and gliding again, right? Just restoring those free nerve endings, getting fascia to move. I submit that, and the research supports that if you do soft tissue work after heavy training, decrease your DOMS. So is that valid to have less soreness and pain after training? Seems good to me. I like that. I'll point two resources for you. I think it's flexibility research,

18:31incredible Instagram follow, all of the science, all of the research, really very clear. And then my friend Brent Brookbush, the Brookbush Institute, has written and aggregated so much research about the science of all this that I want to talk about how we have integrated the science into actual practice. That's my expertise. But if you really want, go to the Brookbush Institute. There's so much research there about what these things do, how effective they are,

19:04inter-rater reliability, et cetera, et cetera. Can you tell me about this misconception that you need soreness to have had a good workout? Oh, right? I mean, I had that mentality for I don't even know how long. I mean, I still battle it. I'm still like, well, I'm not sore enough. How about this? You train and you actually felt good. And then you could, I mean, move you, everyone who's a beginner, you're going to be sore. Sorry. Sorry, not sorry. You know, you're going to get off the toilet and you're going to, you know, you're going

19:34to have, you're going to curse out your coach and these squats. Right. But what we start to see is over time, that soreness gets in the way of your performance, right? Decreased force production. The goal is to have this right adaptation response where we can still go out and perform, but not be so brutalized and sore that we're surprised and it diminishes us. So you don't have to get sore, but we want to have enough of a stimulus to disrupt homeostasis. And your mileage

20:06may vary based on your nutrition. I recently found out, um, I was needed to get on an iron supplement. Me, right. Isn't that interesting? Curious. Was not taking enough omega threes. You, you recently were like, Hey, probably need up that. I was taking my daily dose, my omega three index, not sufficient. Get on the iron, get on the omega threes. Guess who gets less sore in his training? This guy, because, uh, you know, we can, so there's what my point is that there's a lot of things we can do to mitigate soreness, but just, we're going to do a bunch of work until you're sore.

20:39And I think that's progress. That's not progress. Right. And also perhaps you're just using, you know, muscle groups that you don't often use. Right. I mean, that's the other thing. Um, and, and more importantly, did all that soreness change your bone density? Did you get stronger? Like what, what are your metrics? Like you're just sore. You did a bunch of work in our sore. Again, there's no, you haven't moved the needle. You've just created a lot of noise. Right. Uh, speaking of soreness, the other thing I wanted to ask you about, and this is a problem I've had for many years, but I also know at least two to three other women who have the exact

21:13same problem and know it's not frozen shoulder. It's overhead weight. So like having like, you know, if you're doing a snatch, I guess, right. Or like doing weight overhead, whether it's dumbbells or a barbell or anything that's, you know, weight and it having, and having a neck problem with it, like not while you're doing it so much, but like the next day that that's really persistent. So, um, have you, do you have any, is this like a rate, a mobility problem? Do you

21:45know what I'm talking about? Have you heard of this? Well, first of all, let's say that there's very much technique involved with putting weights overhead as effectively and powerful as we could. I know you have an excellent coach. Number two is that we might become curious about the fact that, Hey, I have tissues that are really fibrotic and stiff. Is there anything we could do about that? So if we just played press and guess traps, feel tight afterwards. Like let's get you on a roller. Let's get you on a ball. Let's start working and see if we can restore motion to these segments and,

22:16and then run our test again. Does it make us feel better? Then we could also ask, do you have full range of motion overhead? And it could be that you're working in positions because you have incomplete overhead position. You can still do it and it doesn't hurt, but you're not doing it as efficiently. And maybe this signal is one of those things that we can improve that. Okay. Yeah. I mean, this is something like even back when, you know, and I believe in serial anecdotal empiricism, which is what you described. Yeah, it is. And, and it's even with lighter

22:47dumbbells. Like if I do, you know, eight, eight with each hand. So I'm 16 total overhead presses, you know, and it's like, I, I've been avoiding the overhead press because of fear of activating. And it is the traps that get sore. And sometimes it even spasms, but, um, it's, it's something that I've now two friends, two girlfriends that have the exact same problem where they can't do overhead presses. And how reasonable that you're like, Hey, I do this exercise and it hurts me or makes me hurt or I don't feel good afterwards. I'm a little afraid of doing that exercise. That seems very

23:19reasonable to me. Well, the neck pain, I mean, it'll be, it'll last, it'll affect my sleep. Yeah. I mean, then it's like this vicious cycle. So, you know, and I've seen a physical therapist about it and it's kind of like, well, is it a compensation thing where you're like, you know, like you're mentioning, maybe I'm not as full range of motion. And so something else is tightening up or I'm overcompensating in some other way. That's not really being beneficial. An easy way to start. So number one, as I would say, Hey, let's start getting you some hanging where your arms are pale over your head and taking some breaths and do that. And let's see if we start

23:51to expose that overhead position. As we get into complex understanding of movement, we look at start position effectiveness and finish position. So if I'm pressing overhead and I'm starting in a less effective position, then it's really difficult for me to end in a great position, right? That's why that bottom up kettlebell press forces us to be in a good shape as we press overhead. But if I don't have complete overhead position, my overhead position is here where I have to internally rotate a little bit, I'll achieve some overhead like shape, but that's not full position. So even if I'm pressing

24:27a barbell out here where I'm not anywhere near full overhead position, I would still check this full overhead position. And it could be that we just don't have as efficient access for whatever reason, because you've had this amazing life. And now this movement is highlighting something for us that we can become curious about because you should be able to press overhead. I'm able to do pull-up, assisted pull-ups, doesn't hurt, doesn't flare up with the hanging. I'm going to do more of it. I do hang and it feels good. I like it. Yeah, well, if you're doing pull-ups, you're hanging already.

24:58You're there. Yeah, I do pull-ups and I don't have that problem. So it's definitely... We can constrain it. If I have you put your thumbs backwards, then the shoulder by necessity is going to be in a mechanically sort of more effective position where I'm going to have better features of stability. The capsules wound up, the mechanic of pressing is a little bit better. And in this situation, I might even have you... When anyone has pain with a problem, an area or a movement, there's two things we can always do. We can always pause if I have a painful range or B,

25:31I slow down. So we can slow this down a little bit and ask you to show me that you've got control, signal that it's safe to the brain, et cetera, instead of sort of I'm overhead, right? And I didn't really touch some of those overhead shapes and really use it as a diagnostic. But in this situation, I'd be really curious. Again, let's look at your range of motion of that shoulder. I bet that there's some rhyming things that maybe I've got a little restricted because I didn't know and I'm doing all the things. And now I'm getting this feedback that this position doesn't always feel good. Once in a while is fine, but if it's happening all the

26:02time, then we can... It's happening, yeah. And I'm curious about it. How would a person at home, like, let's, you know, I'm talking about my problem, but other people have that are filling the blank problems. Only there was an app that had all of these simple movement tests you could do at home. And that's the app that you have. What's the name of that app again? It's called the Mobility Coach. The Mobility Coach. And the reason what we're trying to do is, so let me, I'll lay out for you real quick. Built to move, we've got really simple pedestrian assessments and some range of motion. These are some things. So Entree In. The app has

26:36really sophisticated self-assessments, but easy to do, easy to understand. We're going to look at fundamental ranges and you should see it in the context. You'd be like, oh, I understand why we're doing that. Maybe you don't understand why we're looking at rotation in some of these things, but there are components there and that all belongs in the hand of the user. Then we have a whole host of professional courses where we're much more sophisticated about complete, incomplete, hands-on assessing, but we don't need that. For the average person, we should be able to know what our movement minimums are and then start to identify opportunities

27:10to work and restore those positions. Because that is really part of the conversation that gets lost in search or in service of performance and wattage. We're not looking at, did you express normative ranges? Even though the classic strength and conditioning really does ask us to have full range of motion. That's why classic strength and conditioning is all the same. Front squat, back squat, lunge, pull-up, bench. Those are all tests. I've been on every continent except Antarctica. Everyone knows what a push-up is. That is our universal expression of shoulder extension in a

27:46short lever position, right? I don't need a bunch of tests. I need to see how well and how much range you have in a push-up. I love push-ups. My favorite workout to do anytime I'm traveling is the Cindy workout. Oh, isn't that so simple? I've done Cindy more than any other workout in the history of the world, everyone. Cindy is the best workout. Maybe we should explain what that is to people. So it's five pull-ups, 10 push-ups, 15 air squats. You can do it on the minute. You can do it as many rounds as you want. You have 10 minutes. You have 15 minutes. That body weight volume is excellent.

28:18Put a bike on it for two minutes. Do a round. Put a bike on it. Do three rounds. We call it Cindy-ish. And pretty soon you can rinse, wash, repeat that combo forever. My favorite Cindy-ish workout for me is like if I'm in my, you know, like I said, I'm traveling, I'm in a hotel, is I'll do the body weight squats and then do push-ups and then V-ups. And there it is. Killing it. And what you've just described is in 20 minutes. 20 minutes, right. You've got tons of exposure, no equipment. Wonderful, wonderful.

28:48This, we have so many different things that you mentioned to get into in terms of range of motion, you know, the blood flow, especially the tendons, you know, not a lot of blood flow at the tendons, but maybe we can start there with this range of motion and warming up, you know, because I mean, so I worked with my coach and thankfully, you know, she knows what she's doing. And so if I hadn't had her, I wouldn't really have known the difference between warming up and stretching. I certainly wouldn't really understand what the goal of warming up is. And you're going to educate me even more,

29:23but just from learning through experiencing what she tells me to do, I've realized that it's like, okay, first thing, you know, I'm just kind of like, I do two minutes of just getting my heart rate up first thing. So it's either rowing or jumping rope. And then after that two minutes, then we kind of get into more range of motion. You know, if I'm doing arms, I'll do pass-throughs with a pole or we'll do, you know, body weight squats first, if I'm going to be squatting that day. And then we go barbell only squats. And I eventually like, you know, gradually get to the

29:54weight that I'm eventually going to do, but I'm warming up, but I wouldn't have known to do all that if I was just kind of working out on my own. That's crazy. How did we fail Dr. Patrick, where you're like, Hey, I'm not, I'm about to go do this crazy thing. And maybe I just spun on the bike for 10 minutes. I looked around. We just haven't really taught people, Hey, here's what it looks like. And theoretically we should have gotten that in high school when we were still engaged in sports, competitive sports before we all became rec

30:25athletes. But what you see is that there's a real opportunity to help people feel better and prepare for the movement. And don't get me wrong. I think you should be able to sprint down the street, grab a baby out of a burning, you know, building and fight off a tiger like that. Probably not the best expression of your physiology in those moments, but we should, we should be able to do those things cold. Right. But when we start to look around, we start to see that most people aren't treating their warmup as a chance to feel better. Who am I today? As I show up at this gym for this thing,

31:03because your range of motion is a little bit of a moving target and it's like a credit score. One of our friends says, and so you're sort of touching base with how tired am I? How springy am what's going on? You're getting to know this carcass today, right? And that might mean, hey, you know, I just, you are flying all over the place. Suddenly you're a little bit stiff from that plane ride. You, you're squatting doesn't feel the same. So we're trying to remind the brain of fundamental movement patterns. We're trying to get hot and sweaty. We're trying to wake up the

31:33nervous system. You are doing this jumping, which is activating. You're getting hot and sweaty. You're shifting blood. There's a lot of things that can happen, but also we see that this is a great opportunity to add in some movement and wait for it. Play, right? You can explore positions and shape safely here. Tell your brain, if I end up in this shape later on, it's going to be safe. Some of those pass through, pass throughs there. We're starting to see rope flow, kind of some of these physical culture ideas from people like Ido Portal, Fighting Monkey. We're bringing those

32:07things back into our warmups. And a simple way to ask this is, if we treated your workout like it was a fight, you and I are going to fight, what does our warmup look like? It does not look like I'm laying on the ground doing some foam rolling, right? Like you're jumping rope and getting hot and prepping yourself and doing some hypoxic work and breathing and activating and integrating with the people you're, like we're about to fight. Like that's a really nice sort of rubric for, am I prepared or have I used this warmup as an opportunity to be like, I am not good today.

32:39I'm just going to take it easy, right? I can use it as a self-assessment. So that's what we try to do in the warmup. Sometimes it gets a little bit watered down. As a coach, I try to not do the same warmup every single day. I try to keep my athletes guessing. I want them to be entertained. I want them to be curious. And that's a really opportunity to put some of these things we see on the internet. Hey, that looks like fun. Let me try that as part of my warmup. How much does doing a warmup that's properly a warmup play a role in helping with injury

33:10prevention? Well, I think from a simple idea that we have a chance to prime and remind our brains that movement is a skill, right? Sometimes we have like, we're like, oh, movement is good, right? It's all like the movement optimists are like, it doesn't matter what you do. And we're like, well, from injury, which is not what we're trying to do. We're never on this track of, hey, let's warm up so we don't get injured. I think that's kind of a fool's errand. And like, it's

33:41not really inspiring. Don't get injured. I'm like, well, I'm not injured. What's going to happen that I'm going to get injured? Instead, we think, hey, we can actually get more work done. We can feel better as we do it. We'd have less discomfort as we do it. And what we tend to see is we don't get as stiff afterwards. And so oftentimes when we're trying to compress a lot of really dense work into a little time, we don't leave permission for us to really get tissues hyperperfuse, like blood flow ready to go. If the first motion you do is push the sled and you tear your Achilles, I'm like, well, that tissue

34:15wasn't as prepared maybe as it could have been. Maybe we could have mitigated some of these aches and tweaks. Maybe some of those insertions of those connective tissues weren't so, you know, friable and dry. Just like the rotator cuff, for example, it just takes a minute. It's like hard packed earth. And if you just take a, you know, exercise, which is like a hose blasting on hard packed earth, the water doesn't really soak in. It takes a second for those tissues to, you know, to really become well perfused. And then you might have better range of motion. And more important, you'll have better

34:45power, better work tolerance. And then afterwards, there's all these models that exist already. Like the Soviets used to say, if you leave the gym stiff, you're going to be stiff. I think if we take a look at some of our movement traditions, people have been training and thinking seriously about this for a long time, but we have sucked the joy out of the, and the potential out of, potentiation out of warm-up for sure. But to your point, when we're dripped in sweat. So I coach at Cal Berkeley and I travel with the women's water polo team. So I'm their performance director. And our joke is like,

35:19I'm the health coach, right? And sometimes that means I hand out snacks. And sometimes that means I'm doing mobility work. I'm helping them manage pain, but I also run the warm-ups and the sort of amongst other things. And we'll be battling another team. That team has our coats on and they're real stiff and not really trained to each other. Our women are down to their sports bras. We are battling and fighting, ready to go. And I'm like, which team do you want to be part of here? Right? And so we can really use that warm-up time to connect, play, integrate, have fun, and perform better

35:54because those tissues are better ready to go. I sometimes do a really short, I don't have, if I don't have a lot of time, I'm traveling or I have to get to a podcast or something. And I know I need to get my blood flow up for at least 10 minutes. It's important for me. I love that. Cognition. Yeah. It doesn't matter what I do. Changing your state. I'm transitioning into now going from brain to meat. Right. But sometimes I'll get on my Peloton and I'll do two back-to-back Tabata. So it's a 10-minute

36:26two-to-one ratio, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, 30-second recovery in between. But I don't warm up before I get on that bike and I do that. And what I'm hearing from you is like, even that type of, you know, hyperperfusion, as you called it, like where you're getting all of a sudden, you're going from nothing to boom, you're getting that blood flow up, man. You're going hard. Needs a warm-up. Well, what we could start to say is, are we trying to meet all of your movement needs only by the time we get there? So what we can start to say is, well, what does the rest of

36:58the day look like? Because if you're just going from sitting to more sitting and we have a little, like, that's already great. You're getting your heart rate up. You're starting to breathe. We could put in breath holds there. We could do hypoxic work there. We could, you know, you just taking the resistance out and going fast could be a really great way of, you know, priming yourself. The, I think the key here though, is what if we had a little movement first thing in the morning? What if a, like we do a thing that we kind of give people three options. We're like, Hey, as a place to start, I would like you to do the hip spin up, the shoulder spin up,

37:32or a breath spin up before you leave the house. Because if the day gets away from you and you can't train or you can't exercise, we want to have said, well, what does a physical day look like for a person? How do we get more movement in throughout the rest of the day instead of just saving it up? Because what I really like to do is recognize that you're a busy working human. And then if we had a little bit of hip prep in the morning, we worked at a desk that gave us movement choice. Maybe we sat on the floor. Maybe we sat at the computer. We walked around a little bit at lunch. Then by the time I

38:04actually got to my workout, I'm not going from zero to 60. I'm going from 40 to 60 because I've prepared my body a little bit more. Maybe that's a great way to sneak it in. And the rest of the thing is, Hey, when we have the opportunity to be, do a better thing, fine. Sometimes I'm at the airport and I grab a fruit, you know, bucket, you know, a $17, you know, cup of grapes and two horrible eggs. Like that is really not great food, but it's going to do today. And now we'll get the rest of it tomorrow. We're not worried about it. The main thing is I love that you are thinking about this

38:36as a physical practice and Hey, there's nothing wrong with taking the first five sets under the bar and taking your time and just moving slowly and adding weight. Hey, you don't have, sometimes when we have time and luxury to play and move and prep, let's do it. If not, let's just be a little bit more conscientious about it. Awesome. Um, what is this hip? Like if you're, if you're drunk, you're talking about this hip mobility or hip prep, like what, what's, what does that look like? Well, number one, we wanted something that you could do. Imagine like, again, homage to our,

39:09the people who've thought about critically about some of these things, uh, yoga has sun salutation. And what I thought was what a great practice. If everyone did sun salutation every single day, before they left the house, they've touched them on ranges. They reminded their brain, they had to breathe, they had to rotate, they had to weight bear, they had to move their spines a little bit. Right. That's great. But that sun salutation sometimes comes entrapped in a little bit of too much asana, a little bit too much spirituality. And sometimes our athletes are like, really,

39:39this doesn't feel athletic enough. So I was like, what can we do to sort of simulate that? And that's where we, I came up with the idea of the hip spin up, which was fundamental positions of flexion and rotation of the hip. We touch some end range tissues. We throw some isometrics in, we make your spine work with your hips, just ground-based, don't need any equipment, can be scaled. And it gives you a touch of like, Hey, what is, am I at least at these full ranges of motion for a second today? Because I think what ends up happening oftentimes is that we can live in a world where

40:11we're not asked to actually do all the things our bodies can do. And now we're having to be like, okay, here's your vitamin, here's your X and such to make up for the fact that we're not really doing the things we need to do with our bodies. What is a simple hip mobility test look like? Well, the question here is, you know, what should the hip be able to do, right? And I say hip as in the chain, right? But that's the big primary engine. The spine is the first engine, but then we have

40:42these big primary engines of the hips and shoulders. And what's interesting about that conversation is that if I ask people who are very sophisticated about their running training or their nutrition, I'm like, what should the hips be able to do? What's normal? What's far from normal? What does every physician agree we should be able to do? They have no idea. What's normal hip flexion, bringing your knee to your chest? Well, this was really where we recognized that one of the problems that we had or opportunities we had is to make these range of motion tests part of the training

41:13so that I could, the stimulus for adaptation exercise was also the diagnostic tool, right? So I can understand what's going on. So easily we all should be able to hip squat, hip crease below the knee, right? That's a really simple test. And if you're struggling to do that, tells me a little bit about your readiness today. And again, you could be stiff, you could have old injuries, you could have, you know, it doesn't, there's no judgment there. If you stand on one leg, you should be able to pull your other knee up past 90 degrees. And most people would struggle for that. We have a simple

41:46test in the last book called the sit and rise test, which everyone has heard of now. Just lower yourself to the ground, crisscross applesauce, right? Without falling. And then without putting your knee down or hand down, pop back up. And so what's nice about that is that that's not even a full range of motion test. It's not even a, doesn't require that much strength, but it's a good indicator that you might be missing some hip flexion. Being able to fold forward to shift your weight is really the limiter there. So if we can begin to create some, some fence posts, some guidelines for people

42:20to understand what's more normative or not around their own range of motion, then you can keep an eye eye on it. And the, the sit and rise test, isn't there some data on that with associations and longevity? Yeah. Basically imagine that all of these things are proxies, right? As you've talked about, like, I don't really care what your grip strength is. I care what you do with that grip strength. But you're, if you're doing a lot of fun stuff with your grip strength, your grip strength is going to be good. So it's a proxy for all these other things, right? And that test tells us a lot about your movement choice, your ability to solve movement problems, your ability to, you know,

42:53modulate your, your balance. And so it may not be that that's the end all be all. If put a hand down, you could probably still be a hundred. I mean, we probably have some aunties in our lives who are over 90, who've never done the sit and rise test, never done keto, never went to a high intensity exercise class, but there, there's something about their lifestyle. We just got back from Japan. We're sleeping on the ground, cultures that toilet on the ground, sleep on the ground, eat on the ground, fall risk in the elderly, drops to almost zero. Osteoarthritis in the hips

43:25and low back drops almost zero. There's something about maybe we should touch these shapes once in a while. And then that makes it so that it's on the map of the brain. We're touching and loading those tissues. They, the brain doesn't start to pare down some of that movement as, as irrelevant. So really the question is what should I do every day? And then now we can ask the next following questions. What are essential movements and strength and conditioning, which is really just a formal movement practice under load. Yes. And that, that, that is my next question because I recently did this sit and rise test with someone who is in good shape. They work out and

44:00I had no problem getting up and doing the sit and rise test and they did. That's right. So how can someone be healthy workout? I mean, you know, when I mean workout, I say, I mean, like strength and conditioning both right there. They're doing running, they're doing squats, deadlifts and, and have trouble with a sit and rise test. It's a great question. What it hints at, and what I love is get to a place where you and I have our own ways we like to train, right? You just, you have things, you're like, you're a big power

44:31cleaner and deadlifter and rower. You're, you know, do these hard things. Power cleaning is the hardest thing. I hate doing it, but I do it. It's almost like it's an Olympic sport and you'll spend the rest of your life working at it, right? Okay. So that aside, what we can say is you have your way of training. I weigh things that we love with the way we like to move our bodies in the sports we play. I actually will take any third party system and thrive there. So if you go to yoga and you'll get your butt kicked, like yoga is not crazy. Yoga is just saying, Hey, here's what

45:03humans should be able to do with no load, but we're going to hold these isometrics and you have to be able to breathe for a long time. Go to Pilates class. If you're really elite, you'll, you'll spank Pilates. You might be sore afterwards because there are some shapes you don't spend a lot of time in that are normative towards Pilates, right? That are signature Pilates. But ideally we should take whatever you're doing and run it through a blood panel. How do you like to eat? Cool. I believe you. Let's go ahead and check over here. And so that third party validation is a nice test. And what we often see is we've compared, uh, sort of the capacity of physiology and we've confused that with

45:38choice, skill, right? Coordination, but I can generate thousands of Watts over here, but I'm not very coordinated or because I've generated thousands of Watts over here. It's cost me my rotation of my hip or my hip extension. And ultimately you can do that for a while until you want to learn a new skill until that tissue is somehow a little bit misused because it doesn't have its normal ranges of motion. And I think when we ask people to sort of engage in some baseline testing, then we can start

46:12to understand inputs and outputs. And so if I have an elite cyclist, I'm working in the Tour de France. We don't really spend a ton of time in hip extension training knee behind the butt, like a lunge. We are in those shapes to make sure that we restore power, keep the hip doing what it needs to do. We don't necessarily have to train in those shapes as heavily as we might with an Olympic sprinter. So, but we need to look at where's this person able to put some of these isometrics or some mobility work or some soft tissue work to keep it, you know, the sort of the window open. Because what

46:45we're really trying to do for the typical person, again, we're all basically rec athletes at some point, is we're trying to say, let's maintain as much range as we can, right? Let's, and by that we'll say, how do I maintain movement choice, movement options? How do I pick up a new skill? How do I have a body that's free and unencumbered? I, we covered this hip thing, but I'm, the shoulders is another kind of obsession of mine because I do get some pain there. And there's a couple of questions I want to ask. And one has to do with the, obviously the, the ways to assess shoulder mobility, but the other is like, you know, I do

47:21work at a desk a lot and we're going to get into desk ergonomics people, because that's also an interest of mine as well as I know other people are interested, but what can someone who is desk working a lot, but also who lifts, you know, what, what's, I would say a common problem in those individuals in terms of like their shoulder mobility and what would be a good, you know, ROI in terms of like working your shoulder to reset it? Yeah. Uh, let's take a look and we'll split the upper body from the lower body. Cause it's easy

47:53to go for a walk and we can decongest, right? The lymphatics are built into our muscle system. The lymphatic system is suede system of the body and it's bootstrapped into our muscles. And so if we go for a walk, that calf is acting like a second heart, it's pumping, we're dumping all those lymphatics through the groin, through that muscle contraction. And it's easy to say, Hey, let's decongest, right? I've just, I, I ran, I did something and now I'm just going to walk a little bit more in the day. And so one of the reasons, you know, if you fly on an airplane, you get cankles, it's lack of movement that's giving you those cankles, right? That's congestion

48:24of the tissues. Well, it's easy on the, but if I say, Hey, I'm going to need you to get on this rower for an hour, you're going to be like, bro, I'm not doing that. Get on this assault bike for an hour and decongest. What? It's impossible. And so sometimes it's hard to get enough exaggerated cross pattern motion and movement of the upper body to decongest it the way we're working. So what we can say then suddenly is, well, what tools do I have available to me? Well, number one, maybe a little bit of shoulder motion where I'm touching some fundamental shapes during

48:55the day, that'd be easy. And that's an easy place to start because it's, you know, for example, it's easy never to have to put your bra on on the back, right? That would be a test of interrotation and some extension that aptly scratch test, all the, the, you know, Hey, let's look at the, if you do the FMS test, can you get your hand behind your back? But if you're not practicing and in those shapes ever, it's going to be tricky. And if you start loading the upper body significantly, the way you are, the way, the way we're kind of modern training

49:26has sort of influenced us. Remember that the first thing the body does after training stimulus is it lays down more collagen. It makes the container stronger to withstand. Now when it starts to put the muscle down inside that, the, the fascial connective two-shape containers are set up first that we have a bigger engine frame than we can make a bigger engine. So if you don't do anything, you're going to become stiff and fibrotic, like welcome to being, you know, big squats. I mean, they're going to make your quads stiff if you don't, if you don't keep your eye on it, all that

50:00running makes your, can make your quads very stiff, right? So suddenly we can ask around the shoulder, well, let's make sure that we're doing something to keep an eye on this range of motion. And I could hint at, you could do something like the shoulder spin up in the morning, which is just touching some fundamental shapes with some arm swings. It's very simple. You could do something like David Weck's rope flow, which is super fun and very easy to touch a bunch of shapes. It's basically imagine like PNF patterns, which were this kind of model of looking at how we load

50:32the shoulder in this rehab that came out, these diagonals and rotation. And if you just spin a rope, a whole bunch, you're going to touch a ton of rotation. You're going to be in some of fundamental shapes. It's really fast. It's easy. It's great prep. Or we could go a step further and say, okay, we, we've trained all day long. Now we're going to hook you up to this very sophisticated neuromuscular device. That's going to decongest the tissues. But ultimately we want to remind you that the body is not fragile. It's designed to be loaded and adapt forever. So let's just at the

51:06very least keep an eye on our range of motion. And I just came from the airport where I just got to see people put their arms over their head in the scanner and it's sort of a disaster, right? I mean, they're just banana back, internally rotate. Like people just don't, aren't very confident in putting their arms over their head anymore, but it's because their life doesn't ask them to do that. And how often I like, like what, how much time do you think someone should spend like myself who is desk sitting a lot and many of us are, and I do work out, you know, but as you said, I'm not doing that throughout the day. So like, you know, is there a couple minutes a day?

51:38Yeah. I think, I think we saw if you started this conversation about when you could say, Hey, I think my lower body is the big problem. Let's focus on that for a week. Upper body is my shoulders are really, that's the thing I want to feel better at. Well, what we could do is almost say, well, what's, let's look at a day, right? That's maybe the, the keystone idea. And the morning, what, what did you do in the morning? Did you just get up on the laptop right away? Could we go for a five minute walk? Could we just get you engaged in a breath practice? I mean, just getting your rib cage moving through some breathing, like something even looks like old

52:11school Wim Hof style breathing or oxygen advantage, just getting your trunk moving and the, the trunk wall a little bit more compliant. You're going to see your shoulder blades work better. And if your shoulder blades work better on your trunk, you're going to have better arm function. But if my trunk gets stiff because I sit in a C shape and I don't really take any big breaths, then maybe I'm going to see some decreased function in the shoulder blade. So a couple minutes of the day in the morning, then I'm just going to worry. I'm just going to move as much as I can during the day. That's my goal. Is the breath work like, is it equivalent? Like, let's say I do get up and I go for that. Let's

52:48say short run, you know, two miles. Awesome. Is that doing something similar as the breath work or is there something independent? Because you mentioned the trunk. Yes. Well, I think what we haven't helped people understand is that ventilation efficiency is very much a skill and you, you know, doing some formal, thoughtful, full range of motion of the trunk, full exhale range of motion of the trunk. I would say that most people are probably occupying some

53:19mid range in their breathing. They're very shallow breathing. They're stiff. They're just breathing in their available container. If we look at the work, Jill Miller wrote a great book called Body by Breath, simple ways to mobilize the trunk. So we actually have better diaphragm function, better pelvic floor function. Brian McKenzie really brought some of the work back into, hey, let's take a look at this interesting physiology that we can harness, right? Iyengar, here we were back at yoga. Nerves are king of the breath. The breath is king of the brain. So one of the easiest ways we can change state is by being a little bit more conscientious about our

53:52breathing. But I think you're hinting at like, when and where do I do all this? So one of the things that we love is if you're on the bike and that's part of your warmup, let's just drop in a couple simple breath routine practices that make you have to touch that range of motion. Can you give me an example? Yeah, yeah. This is from the French free divers I was working with, one of their coaches. During a simple warmup, they take a 10 second inhale, which is going to kill the average person. That's a long inhale. And then they do a max breath hold on that inhale for as long as they can.

54:22And then recover nose only breathing, which is going to constrain the breathing. You're going to have to really be functional on that diaphragm. You're going to have to work harder. You're going to prep that. And you repeat that every minute. 10 second inhale, max breath hold, repeat every minute. Another simple example is just, hey, every minute, I just want you to exhale as long as you can. Go ham as long as you can on an exhale. And when you need to breathe, go ahead and just keep it moving instead of stopping. So we can almost use some of this hypoxic work where we just put you

54:56into a little dynamic apnea where we ask you to work, do a little breath hold of some kind. Suddenly, you're going to have to touch that range of motion. You're going to have to get caught up. You're breathing all the way out. You're being a little bit more intentional. And then we've already set up your brain to be a little bit more CO2 tolerant. And we've done a couple other things. So the first time that lactate starts spiking, CO2 starts to climb, your brain is like, it's fine. We've already done this a bunch. So it's like preparing the nervous system. Oh, I love that. Or reclaiming that because I'm trashed from this trip or going to drink with my

55:30friends or the big work volume last week. It allows me to reset a little bit. What I think we're really seeing some of the innovation is how do we stack these behaviors so I'm not giving you another listicle of things you have to do. And that's what we want to do. How do I integrate this into your air on the bike? Great. Let's do some breath work on the bike. What if you become a little dizzy when you're doing this breath work? Is that a sign of anything or is that normal? I think if you are holding your breath to the place you're passing out,

56:04maybe take that back a notch. But if you get a little uncomfortable, that's cool. And if you get a little luminous, just take a second. I think that's the word that the yogis would do is luminous. Your face is tingling. You're like, what's going on? But really, you're just changing probably what's happening with pH or some aspect of that breathing system is being modulated and you're feeling a little tingly, totally okay. Unfortunately, those things go away. All the getting high on your own supply that you get from, it all just becomes normalized. So I would say one of the reasons

56:41we start with breath, anytime someone has neck pain, anytime someone has mid-back pain or low back pain, we teach the breath mechanic first because it's such a powerful way of desensitizing a painful spine or irritated spine. We normalize a lot of motion around the spine. The book that everyone loves to reference is called The Spinal Engine by Grakovetsky. And it's a really like, it's a hard book to read everyone. It's like gnarly biomechanics of salamanders, side mending. But really hints at that this is a really great whip, that the spine is a

57:18powerful engine and initiator of movement. And that's actually how we define functional movement in the first place. Works of a wave of contraction from trunk to periphery, from core to sleeve, from axillary skeleton to peripheral skeleton. And it's one of the reasons we take a moment to always organize the trunk into a little bit better position if we can, because it allows us to have better function, right? So if I'm slouching at my computer, hard to take a big breath there, hard to turn my neck there. If I'm driving in my car or I'm on my bike and I'm like, is there a position here where I could take a bigger breath? Well, suddenly we might not say that

57:51that's a good position or a bad position. We're just like, hey, that position doesn't give me access to as much physiology, as much power, as much volume, as much rotation, as much range of motion. So we might make decisions about how we organize the body to maintain the integrity of the breathing movement system. And that's a good indicator of when we start to look at the breath and our ability to take a diaphragm breath, breathe laterally in the ribs, actually get some motion in the upper back and trunk.

58:23We suddenly see that we can start to flip on lights in the room that was once dark. And lo and behold, we also got the brain and the mind okay with high CO2s. So for example, with Berkeley, we try to have seven hypoxic events before we compete. So I want the women I work with to die seven times in a controlled death, right? Like we're going to jump rope and hold our breath and then put a little bit of that hypoxic load on. And then later on, we're in the pool or doing something of consequence. It's a lot easier.

58:55Is the response to the slight hypoxic event kind of like an adaptation where you're kind of depriving the tissue of a little bit of oxygen and therefore it's like, oh, I got to like make things move faster and better so that that doesn't happen again? It may there, it's more likely because there's probably some systemic like blood flow restriction like thing that happens, right? Like if you can truly desaturate, but for the typical person who says, hey, I want to run a 5k, for example, or I'm doing a half marathon or something like that,

59:29you know, they tend to over breathe. So they tend to, as soon as it gets hard, mouth breathing opens, it's very shallow. And it turns out they really can't access all the oxygen on the hemoglobin. And this is, sorry, everyone, this is a primer on, you know, physiology, but it's the CO2, high levels of CO2 that allow you to strip the oxygen off the hemoglobin. And again, let me point at Butreyko, Oxygen Advantage, Bramkins, all the people who've been talking about this forever, all the yogis. But if we can get the brainstem to handle high circulating CO2s by practicing,

1:00:05exposing that brainstem to these climbing CO2 levels, then we're able to tolerate higher workloads, strip more oxygen off and not quickly scrub, breathe off that. And now we can actually get more work done because it's the CO2 that's triggering the breathing response, right? And we don't sort of realize that that's very trainable and that we can suddenly really get a lot more work done and feel better and less stress on our bodies if we can handle those high CO2s, but that's uncomfortable. So these seven sort of slightly

1:00:36hypoxic events really are just the breath work that you're doing before your competition. 100%. And then instead of saying, hey, let's lay down, we might do that. You and I put our hands on each other's shoulders. We take a breath in, we breath out, and then you and I wrestle a little bit. And so suddenly now I'm thinking whoever breathes first loses. We're battling a little bit and doing something dynamic. And then we're both going to have this moment of fugue, right? And that's what we're trying to do is, is make it so that when that happens, when that first interval

1:01:08hits, you're much more capable. I wonder, I used to be a surfer. I no longer am able to call myself that. I mean, I still want to surf how to surf. Always a surfer. But, you know, even back in the days when I used to actually go surfing, like every day, like I was still terrified every time I'd paddle up, particularly in like, you know, with the big swell. Valid. And I'm wondering if, and now it's even worse, like if I go out like a couple times a year and it's like, it's like, oh my gosh, it's just, even though I'm so fit, I mean, I'm

1:01:39not so fit. I just- You're fit. You're very fit. I'm fit. Yeah. You know, but it's still like paddling is hard and holding my breath and like, you know, getting bombarded by the waves. I'm wondering if doing some kind of breath work before going out and paddling out, because the fear also gets me, right? Where it's like, I know it's coming. I know I'm holding my breath for a long period of time and it's scary and I don't like it. So I'm wondering if that would prepare me for- A hundred percent. And let me introduce you to the work of Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reese,

1:02:10who are really the first people who, for me, put this into the language and context of performance that they, for whatever reason, Laird got onto Wim Hof and recognized that if he trained for these, to be able to handle this very dynamic work on a breath hold, that he could get more work done, get held down longer, pop back up, recover faster. And so he saw it as a competitive advantage. And then those two cleverly just were like, boy, we can repurpose this into a lot of aspects of

1:02:40our life. And in your experience, what you're actually describing is something that's very common these days where I have this very fit human who now goes and does a sport that they don't do often or a sport that you used to do, but now they're so fit and it's easy to overdo it. It's easy not to have that exposure and it's easy to suddenly maybe recognize that like, hey, there's some aspect of my training that's not preparing me for this sport. And ideally, I think one of the things that's happened that's interesting is that people are

1:03:13exercising because it's about health, right? It's my bone density and it's my VO2 max. Well, you're also athletic and you do an athlete and you do sports, but we forgot that the reason we used to train was to get better for something. And I think I really want to recouple that. What are you training for for people? Because ideally, you still need to go do your sport. We wish we could just be fit and then go do sports. And that's certainly a recipe for overuse because you can be like, I surf for four hours today, my first time back. You're like, why did my shoulders hurt so bad?

1:03:45Well, you haven't loaded those tissues. You haven't said it's safe to your brain. So you hint at something really important, which is that the brain is really a tool that's designed for safety and survival. It's not designed for optimization. And so when we take this lesson that your brain is really trying to protect you and it's like, what's a threat, not a threat? There's a reason you're like, I'm a little concerned about being held down and like, because you probably did that once or twice. And your brain's like, we're not doing that again. And I see what you're doing. You're dragging us back out. So how do we signal safety to the body?

1:04:20How do we signal safety to the brain? Well, that'd be one way, but suddenly you start to expand that sleep is safety. Nutrition is safety. Having access to my range of motion is safety, right? Things that don't hurt is safe. We can really start to put in a lot of ideas around how do we help the brain optimize for performance through feeling safe. And that, you know, having some hypoxic events beforehand can be a really easy way. And you can even do this walking with your dog. I mean, I don't know if you're a psycho like me, but I might walk my dog and be like, if I breathe before

1:04:51that sign, everyone in my family is going to be wiped out by a meteor. And I play these games where I'm like, I have to just hold my breath to a certain place. And when you get into the weeds on the, some of the Gracies always were working on breath holds, always interested in this hypoxic work, because ultimately, as you know, in sports and doing activities, it's this breathing piece. That's the limiting factor. So often. I'm sorry to take it here, Kelly, but like, I'm thinking about my heavy lifts now, like how I've never really, you know, done. I just breathe

1:05:25how I'm supposed to. I just breathe how I breathe when I'm lifting. Breathe early, breathe often. Sounds good. Breathe early, breathe often. No, I mean, that's what we do. I'm just going to bring my skills in and not recognize that, whoa, this breath, it could be a real opportunity to get better and to learn other skills. You're absolutely right that there's, there's opportunity here. So how should I be breathing when I am, you know, I'm, I'm doing a heavy squat, front squat, and, you know, I got to come back up and like, there's, you know, I'm grunt, like grunting, like all of that. Like, I'm kind of just, you know, this is all new for me. I've been lifting for about

1:05:59that, I would say the last year and a half, maybe two years now. But, you know, relatively new. So fun. So fun. But also I'm realizing, like, you start to then realize, oh, I can optimize here and I can optimize here. And, um, you know, maybe even just use a different, different language that instead of optimize, we're like, well, I can become more skilled. Wow. I think I deadlifted for like 20 years before I actually deadlifted for the first time. I was like, oh, that's what she meant a long time ago. Oh, I think I understand. And sometimes I work out. I'm like, I might do something. We, we, we love something called an E-top, which is every 30 seconds you have

1:06:33to do a lift. It's an easy way for adults, for me to rate limit my ego, protect myself, put a little cardiorespiratory demand or metabolic demand on my working. And, but sometimes I've done 20 lifts, 20 singles before I'm like, oh, okay, now I'm connected again. Now it's starting to go. So putting that skill in there is very much the game. And it's okay for us to be skill limited, not be limited by how strong your hips are. Like, like how nice that we have to, we look at all the things and I'm like, well, it looks like the limitation for you is that you're just not very good at this. That's really fun. But in that moment, I'll

1:07:07tell a story about, um, one of our two time Olympians and heavyweights, his name's Wes Kitt and he's an incredible athlete and an Olympian in Olympic lifting and heavyweights, which are the strongest humans on the planet, right? His coach, Dave Spitz, who's a, is a genius local at Cal Strength was like, Hey, um, can you meet with Wes? He was just at the Pan Am games, received a heavy clean over 400 and passed out, right? On stage pressurizing for the next jerk, right? Put it cleaning is getting up to your shoulders, jerking is pro over your head.

1:07:39And I was like, well, that doesn't sound like a good way to win. Right. And so Wes came in and what we worked on was him pressurizing under those loads. Could he sequence and take a second and do a little bit more diligence about getting more air and creating this high intra-abdominal pressure. And when we started working on that with him, same drill, same skills, but just, and then also being a little conscientious, he never missed a jerk again, like set the American record, qualified for the Olympics. So we can, at the highest level, at low level, low speed walking around, you know,

1:08:14the breathing, you can have one lung and still climb Everest. Like we're so efficient. But on the other hand, when we start to look at, Hey, we're going to do these five reps on this squat. I need you to get back to that breath. Your first breath is great. You get back to the top. Can we pressurize again? Can we pressurize again? And suddenly that becomes a skill. Can I breathe while I'm under this load? And if that doesn't sound like something you can relate to, go ahead and do a plank because everyone on this call or listening has probably done a plank and watch what happens when

1:08:45you plank, you stop breathing or you breathe very shallowly. So show me, you can maintain this reference volume, taking these huge breaths in and out while you're doing some of these mundane skills. You're back at yoga again. So that, so that, is that a good, uh, you know, thing to prep to practice would be like doing the plank and really just trying to like breathe and pressurize as you call it. Yeah. Yeah. And what you can certainly see is, um, wow. As soon as it gets a little bit hard, the first thing that goes out is the window. So when I work with, uh, coaches and teams, or even a group of people will

1:09:18do like you do a little demo, Hey, let's do a squat or do something. And the first thing people do is hold their breath. Why? Because they've created a little stable trunk, requires less skill, less movement control, and they can simplify the system. So if I just hold my breath, then I can do a skill for a while. And what we actually, many of us are doing is going from breath hold to breath hold to breath hold to breath hold when we work. And you're not actually limited by your strength. You're limited by our ability to manage oxygen use because you're not breathing. You're going from breath hold to breath hold and you'll see it. And actually watch your kids, watch people

1:09:50like they literally are existing in a world where they're going from breath hold to breath hold. And oftentimes we're like, Oh, that's a curious strategy, given that we're aerobic animals. Right. So just take some time, focus on your breath while you're doing a static hold. I like that. And super simple. Train your, train your breath. Yeah. And look, if we can, we establish it this way. If we, if we lay you down on the ground and I have you take the biggest breath in through your belly, through your ribs, through your chest, through your upper back, we could measure that. Right. But I call that the reference volume because there's no load

1:10:21on your spine. You don't have to do anything like you're out of gravity. We can just like, what's the most air in we can get? And we can practice that. Put your hands here, breathe here. Right. We can measure that. Then in gravity, I basically want you to be at 90% of that. So now there are all these competing demands on that. But if I suddenly have an idea of how much air I should be able to move in and out, and then I dropped down into a plank and I'm at 30% taking these really shallow breaths, you're like, what are you doing? You know, because now why does your swimming suck? Why does, right? You can start to see that you're making, you're losing capacity.

1:10:56And again, the reason we're interested in this is that we're interested in training these available capacities in the mundane things that we're already doing. And so with just a few twists to the pretzel, we can really zhuzh up and get even more bang for the buck. I'm excited. I'm going to, we do, I do planks often, you know, mostly at the end of my workout with my coach. And so I'm going to start practicing. Oh, it's so fun. The breath work. And you'll be shocked. You're like, wow, I really aren't breathing here. That's what is, and what a great strategy. What a great strategy that our brain goes, this is complicated.

1:11:28This is potentially a little dangerous. We'll just simplify the system. We just have so many wonderful workarounds as the body to maintain capacity, maintain range of motion. Let's keep you in the game. Let's make it so you can still get your hand to your face and you can negotiate the world, right? We have all of these workarounds. It's funny because you mentioned Gabby and Laird, who I've, are mutual friends. And I've, over the years, something has come up every time, but I was supposed to go train with them and do their their, um, XPT.

1:12:01The pool work at the house. The pool work at the house. Yeah, yeah. And, uh, I know it's going to happen one day. It's a bucket list item. I'm going to be more prepared for it. Oh, yeah, yeah. For sure. Less than fair. And what, uh, what's really great is I just, I want you to appreciate that when Laird is there, Laird has 17, 20, 100 levels of hell. Like there's some way to exceed your capacity, right? And that's what all good training is. We're trying to say, how skilled are you as a mover? And then we're going to add a little bit of construct or constraint to exceed your ability.

1:12:36And then we're going to try to keep you there. That's our hypothesis. We're going to test our hypothesis. Like that's all we do in exercise. And that might be adding load. That might be adding speed. Hey, did you notice the first time you had to squat after rowing that it was a little bit harder to squat? Breathing real hard makes that skill harder. Yeah. When I have, when my coach has, it's like if I design the workouts that we do, like the, at the end of our session, um, it's hard after you're, after you're doing the rowing and then you have to go right into the squat or look out for the cleaning and then doing a front

1:13:07squat. So what you've just discovered there is that, Hey, this movement is a skill. And there are a lot of ways to challenge that skill. I hand you a barbell, I hand you dumbbells. I flip you upside down. Now we're competing. Now there's a little psychology of, Hey, I have to do this thing. And I'm not sure I can. I'm the, the imposter voice, the fear voice. Now you're breathing hard. Now I have to do 20 reps now. And you see that there are so many ways to manipulate that, that ultimately when we start to view strength conditioning as coordination

1:13:41training with resistance, the resistance is a lot, but if we're just about, we have a lot of choice here to make this hard, but if it's just about capacity, then let's just give you an exercise bike and do some dumb work, but it's not, how do we become more skilled? And I guess, I think one of the critiques and a valid critique of the last 20 years of strength and conditioning, it's become very capacity based. We're so interested in capacity, but your VO two max means nothing

1:14:13unless you can handle and carry that with skill. You have this great quote, train for life. Don't live to train, which I mean, you kind of touched on it a little bit and we're, we're talking about both ends of the spectrum here. I mean, obviously there are athletes that are training for something, but there's a lot of people listening to this podcast that are not athletes. They're just interested in being healthy. Let's okay. Then if that athlete word is not the right word. Okay. What is the right word? What is the right move? Because I think what we, what we want to say

1:14:47is that everyone needs to move their body. We're getting that message, but we want you to not, I'm, I've been saying this lately and it's very unpopular, but pull-ups are the worst sport there is. It's what a terrible sport pull-ups are. That's not interesting. No one cares. Like going from 20 to 25 pull-ups is great for you. Did it make you a better swimmer? Did it make you a better surfer? So ultimately in this quest for bigger front squats, like strength is never a weakness, you know, let's slave to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. At what cost to actually, have you, have you left

1:15:20the house and done a sport? Have you tested your fitness? Have you spent your fitness credits? We run a program for adults over 40. You know, it's like, what does a strength conditioning movement lifestyle program look like for a busy person who's not interested in necessarily, you know, snatching one rep max at the Olympics again. And one of the things that we see there is that people are still treating exercise like a commodity where it's, I have to do the makeup sets of math homework. If I miss a day, I go back. I'm like, hold up, hold up, hold up. That's not what

1:15:55good consistent strength conditioning practice looks like at any sport level. If you and I are competing, we had a tournament this weekend. We come back in, we reclaim, right? Your positions. There's actual life going on. Hey, we're working on, you know, what you'll see is that the strength conditioning done by real sports teams changes a lot. Travel, competition, off season, in season, when do we turn up? I can't, I mean, one of my critiques of strength conditioning right now is that like, if you train kids the way we're training adults who don't do sports or train anyone who's

1:16:28like adults who don't do sports, you will crush them and they won't be able to do their sport. So if you and I train together and then you're like, Kelly, I wasn't able to surf today because I'm so beat up. I'm like, well, it doesn't matter. It does matter. So ultimately we're trying to get to a place where we can start to think about this training as having context instead of just being recursive hell where, oh, my VO2 came down or my pull-ups came down. I lost some capacity. Yes, you shouldn't lose capacity. You went on vacation, right? You did a sport. You did, you hiked the Grand

1:16:58Canyon. Like, of course your pull-ups are going to change. Come back in and get restarted again. Don't see it as this like perfect decorative room, which doesn't match your lifestyle, your stress, your nutrition. We kind of, we're like, look what the Soviets are doing. They could like, you're going to be 82.3% of your one rep max on Tuesday, three weeks from now. Are you serious? Like, you don't even know where you are going to be in the world three weeks from now. How could we possibly plan for that? And I don't know if you're going to get sick or your kids are going to get sick or you're going to have a deadline at work or, so let's go ahead and just give ourselves permission. What's the goal today to find relative loads and relative

1:17:32speeds and relative skill? And then we'll, we'll go on. Yeah. I think there's a lot of people that perhaps don't even play sports. And I mean, adults here, I'm mostly talking about adults that are thinking about these statistics in their head, like, Oh, I'm 50 years old. I'm 60 years old. My muscle mass is declining. My strength is declining. You know, my, my cardiorespiratory fitness is declining and they're scared about that aging process and they're trying to battle it and slow it. And so they're like, well, I need to,

1:18:09you know, put stress on any muscles to get the adaptations. I need to, you know, make sure I'm growing at the least, maintaining muscle mass, you know, building strength. I need to make sure I'm, you know, keeping my, my, my blood flow going and, and, you know, making challenging my lungs and my heart, right. My cardiorespiratory system. And so for them, they're, like you're saying, it's the, the, the, the gym is kind of like checklist, a checklist. Exactly. It's a checklist. And, and so, yeah, how, so how should those people think about training and what types of training

1:18:43should they, I mean, how, what's their mindset like, and then translate that to, to action?

1:18:50Ooh, that is like, here, here we go. The million dollar question, right? What does it look like? The most important thing, I think let's, let's take another model. Humans in America don't eat fruits and vegetables. We like, we like to pretend like we do, but we don't, we don't, no one gets enough fiber, not 5% of us get enough fiber today. Okay. So, so we have, we have what we should do and what we are doing, right? The most important thing is to find a way that you like to move your body in community. That's the most important thing. How are you, do you enjoy dance? Let's go

1:19:23dance. So what we need to do first and say is if we just reduce exercise to like this physiologic, you know, input so that my heart rate, you know, my blood pressure, I'm, I'm exercising my, that's a side effect. I want you to exercise so that you can have better communication with your, partners, a more fun household that you're in a community. Like that's what we were supposed to do. Then we can take a look at that and say, okay, we have a, we have a physical practice, movement practice, game play, which is really important. Then we can say, what's the minimum

1:19:56dose over here of loading of cardiorespiratory demand. And theoretically you can do that in an enjoyable way too. You know, you have mentioned CrossFit and for, you know, we discovered CrossFit in 2004, we opened a CrossFit gym in 2005. Um, the model of CrossFit and especially modern sophisticated CrossFit programming is that there are a lot of needs being met simultaneously. You're going to get strong. You're going to become skilled. You're going to have to do this under a

1:20:27high aerobic demand and metabolic demand. And simultaneously it's pretty fun. You know, my wife has would describe herself as having exercise ADD. Like she doesn't want to do the same thing every single day. Like I can eat the same breakfast for the now to the end of time. She's like, nope, that's not for me. So what we want to do is again, go in and say, well, what, what are the things that you need to do? And what now we can start to ask, what do you have access to? What's, you know, how, you know, do you have, do you have a weight? Where are you going to do that? How often

1:20:59are you going to do that? And we really end up getting in the weeds very quickly and more importantly, into the right conversation. And, you know, they sell kettlebells at Target now, you know, and if you just had a kettlebell at home and did some swings, you know, in your kitchen for 10 or 15 minutes, plus went to dance class, plus through a Frisbee, you're going to start to approximate some pretty good, well-balanced fitness. And then we can take that, the things that you like to do and the minimums of these things. Like we love it. People hang from a bar. If you can hang three

1:21:31minutes a day, work on, that's such a great thing to do. Why? Good for your neck, good for your back, good for your shoulders, right? Just, we just, we tend to find that people who can hang have less shoulder pain, less neck pain. Okay. It's a fundamental position. And what we're really doing, we're hanging. Three minutes. Three minutes in total. What we're really doing when we're hanging is an isometric. And we're just telling our brain, these are really important positions to be in. And that hanging really popularized by Ito Portal was the first person to be like,

1:22:02let's aggregate hanging. We start to see that shoulders hurt less, back works better, neck functions more effectively because we're just spending time in these end ranges. You don't like to hang? Let me introduce you to downward dog. Downward dog is another version of spending a lot of time with the arms over your head. And if you've ever gone to yoga class, you spend like two and a half years in downward dog for a reason, because it's a really important position. So now theoretically I can take all the things Dr. Patrick does, all things that Dr. Kelly does, and then we can test them and say, who's got the best? And does it get me, if my VO2 max has

1:22:38improved a little bit, or it's good enough? Isn't that what we want to do? Just discover what's good enough so that we, again, can be pain-free, have the most movement choice, play, pick up skills, occupy our role. And then if we want to go to the Olympics, that's a slightly different conversation. But for the average person, we should be able to say, hey, our goal isn't to be so specialized that we're afraid to have a margarita or drink and eat an acai bowl, right? Like we want to have tolerance in the system and be amazing. You know, one of my personal, you know, bugaboos is I don't

1:23:09always want to talk about body composition. You know, I really stayed away from nutrition conversations because it was always about losing body fat. I have to talk about it because I want to talk about your tissue health. I want to talk about all the things that are going to allow you to not get injured or tweaked. Simultaneously, one of my goals is to be less gross for my wife. You know, she is, my wife is the CEO. She has these abs. She's just like superstar rad woman. And I just, I don't want her to leave me. So I want to be less gross. I love, Kelly, how you added leisure time activity in that equation. You mentioned dancing or whatever it

1:23:43is you like to do. For me, it's tennis. Because I've had, I've had Dr. Ben Levine. Do you know, have you heard Ben Levine? I mean, he's a rock star in, you know, the exercise physiology world when it comes to cardiovascular health, right? And his prescription for life from just, you know, decades of aggregating data, you know, looking at individuals from an age range, from, you know, younger athletes, middle-aged, older. Really, that is an important part of the equation in

1:24:14addition to the other, you know, the exercise volume and the types of exercise that people are doing. It's got to be at least an hour a week of leisure time activity in the equation. I've never heard a minimum of leisure time activity, but yes, yes, yes, we do not play enough. You're right. And you're absolutely right. Especially, I mean, I mean, kids play a lot and we're going to get into kids too, but we're both parents and I'm very interested in that, but adults don't play enough. And even adults like that are interested in health and fitness and

1:24:45improving the way they age and feeling better, being more mobile, all of that, even those adults oftentimes don't have any sort of leisure time activity. I mean, and that could be even riding a bike with a group. I mean- Oh, that's leisure time activity. Right. Oh yeah, 100%. You know, tennis, I guess pickleball's making a comeback now. I don't know how you feel about that, but you know, that's- Pickleball will save America. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's a lot of older people are getting into it. My mom's like, I'm going to start doing pickleball. So I love that leisure time activities back in the equation because I feel like we lost that as an adult, as adults, we, we, we somehow lost the fun of,

1:25:19you know, playing a sport. I was just in Hawaii this weekend. We were speaking at the university of Hawaii and working with some different, we did a keynote there. And then I worked with the strength and conditioning staff, right. Just had a, had a session with a university of Hawaii athletics, go bows. And, um, on the, the outside wall of the kines department is a sign that's really old from the seventies. They didn't replace it. It says leisure, like leisure activity research or leisure activity research, something like that. And Jill and I were like, look at that. They were like,

1:25:50someone was looking at like sports and playing sports as a way of getting fit and like quantifying that. And we have a really good friend who, uh, Nicole Christensen, CrossFit roots. She says, Hey, my family doesn't nature for time. So any like health benefits that we get from riding our bikes or, or paddling or doing it like that's just free money because it's in service of our sport. So let's go ahead and get fit for our sport. And so if you're a runner, here was this radical idea, train for running because running is your sport, right. And Pelotoning is a terrible sport. I mean,

1:26:26that's just the worst fun. Right. And, and yet like we've figured out, Hey, I gotta be fit. There's just some really efficient ways to do it in my home, et cetera. Someone told me this weekend who works at the university of Hawaii law school, that the treadmill was invented in prison because no one could think of a more demoralizing thing than doing a bunch of work that didn't do anything. I was like, wow. Okay. Sign me up. Yeah. Uh, Pelotons changed my life for the 10 minute blood flow

1:26:59when I am on the go. I am such a fan of the exercise bike. We can protect people's range of motion. It's what we call high physiology, low skill. Not many people die. Like your knee doesn't dislocate.