Claudia von Boeselager (01:31)
My guest today is Dr. Kelly Starrett, world renowned coach, physical therapist, bestselling author and co-founder of The Ready State, the groundbreaking movement and human performance platform he created with his wife, Juliet. Originally launched in 2008 as Mobility WOD, The Ready State helped redefine modern performance therapy and sparked a global movement around self-care, durability and movement literacy.

Kelly has coached consulted elite performers across nearly every high stakes arena from NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB athletes to Olympic gold medalists, Tour de France cyclists, world record holders, CrossFit Games champions, ballet dancers, military teams, and high performing executives. He's the co-author of multiple bestsellers, including Becoming a Supple Leopard, Ready to Run, Built to Move, and Desk Bound.

His work has been featured on 60 Minutes, The Tim Ferriss Show, Good Morning America, and the Andrew Huberman podcast. Together, Kelly and Juliet also founded San Francisco's CrossFit, one of the first CrossFit affiliates and Stand Up Kids, a nonprofit that has brought standing and moving desk to more than 95,000 children across the US. As an athlete, Kelly competed on the US canoe and kayak teams, captained the men's whitewater rafting team to two national titles,

and raced in two world championships. Please enjoy today's conversation.

Claudia von Boeselager (02:58)
Kelly, welcome back. Last time we spoke, which was episode 113, we're now on over 240. So super excited to have you back on. And we talked about becoming supple, durable humans. What has evolved in your thinking or protocols since then?

Dr. Kelly Starrett (03:05)
Wow.

It's such that's a wonderful way to start. And what I'll say is, I think we need to double down. We've we've seen a shift where suddenly the consciousness has caught fire a little bit, people are interested. I think it was to be disingenuine of us to say people weren't interested in their health. But now they're starting to understand that small of these behaviors, nutrition, strength, conditioning, etc, etc. Community.

are really the backbone of what it means to live a good life all the way to the end, a full life. And the problem I think is that there's so much confusion on the internet where someone says, hey, I'm interested in this and they open the door and it's a huge vast ocean and they shut the door. And they're like, well, which, pill can I take? Which red bed can I lay in? What's the easiest way? Because that's so confusing. We haven't taught people in systems.

how to think in systems. And I'll say right now we are in the middle of a January durability challenge where we have about 2,500 people spending a week inside our program. And it's not very scientific, but it gives us a big data set of understanding inputs and outputs. And again, we've been doing this for 20 plus years and had really good thinking. But sometimes when we actually see where the rubber hits the road, people can't hang from a bar. They struggle with walking.

their sleep, they've really been lying about their sleep. You know, they're like, well, hey, I'm lifting weights. I'm like, actually, you're not lifting weights, you're doing entertainment with some resistance, right? And there's a dance party going on. And it feels like work, but it's not really changing your body. Then we add in this complexity of GLP-1s and the real need to say, hey, for the last 20 years, we've said lose body fat. That's the most important thing.

So people are finally like, wow, I have this holy grail of losing body fat. And what comes along with it is lean muscle mass plus bone density. And we're in a crisis right now where people in our age, in my 50s, suddenly are saying, hey, what you said was supposed to work isn't working. I'm going to Peloton. I'm eating salads. I'm restricted. We're seeing right now, believe it or not, this is going to be little controversial.

we have just reversed our position on alcohol in the United States. Officially. So one of the things that we've said for a long time is that alcohol is a neurotoxin and it's carcinogenic and it's really gnarly and we have to even go back when we had prohibition in United States. Prohibition happened at a time where women had no agency. they couldn't vote. They didn't have

bank accounts, and there was a real prevalence of alcoholism where women could come home and be battered by a husband who was drunk and had no recourse. And the whole prohibition movement actually came about, is what people want to talk about, is prohibition in the States, came about as actually a women's movement, as trying to create safety. And what we learned at that time was we actually did create a little bit better society when we got alcohol under control a little bit. So,

you know, neither here there. I don't think alcohol is the problem or not. But we've come to realize is probably no alcohol is actually good for the body. And I'll say that human beings, it's okay to get out of your brain. And I'm not a teetotaler and a margarita is proof of intelligent design. So I just want to be very clear. And if you are a Riesling, vinter out there, you know where my number is. So but what we found is that it disrupts sleep. It's not great, right? It's hard on our livers, hard on bodies. Okay, we're still human beings.

But the research is actually coming around that it turns out that not drinking is a risk factor for Alzheimer's. So let me say that again, not drinking is a risk factor for Alzheimer's and dementia. And the reason is if you don't drink, you're not likely to have rich social connections. So was nothing about the alcohol. was about, turns out that how connected we are as humans is as important.

as some of these other things that we want to pretend are important. And if you have an auntie or an uncle in your family who is in their 90s, they didn't do high intensity exercise, they didn't do keto, they didn't do fasting, they didn't play with any of these mitochondrial health supplements. What they had was they kept moving, they had rich interactions, they slept well, they ate whole foods. And so what we're realizing now, and to come back to your question, I forgot that you actually asked me a question, is that we need to double down

on basics and essentials. And we have to do it in a way that fits into someone's busy life. My doctoral work was looking at barriers to adherence. What keeps people from doing what they say they want to do, need to do, we both agree you should do. I looked at back pain in this. And it turns out that when we give people tons of information, but don't show them how to implement it day after day, what we get is these little heroic

boosts, boasts, right, bursts where people are like, hey, I ate this salad three days in a row and now it's not working. And what we really need is bone crushing consistency. And we have to show people how this fits into their busy lives in a way that doesn't overwhelm their busy lives. And that's what we're seeing that we've got to do a better job of is implementation. When people come into the Starrett system, they are shocked at how much movement there is walking, sitting on the floor, mobilizing. We haven't even talked about exercising.

They're shocked at how many fruits and vegetables, how much fiber they need. Again, this is all what the research says, what the evidence says, not my opinion. They also are shocked that they're not very fit and not very strong. And the programming I do during this one week challenge is hard, but really reasonable. But when people can't hang from a bar, you know, don't know how to pick something up, can't press overhead, we really start to see that there's a big gap between what we know works really well.

And those of us who are live in this dream and have luckily, you you know, I'll say that most of my friends who are in this fitness, strength, conditioning, performance world, probably all had ADHD, all probably self medicated with movement, probably like we lucked out early on, we had friends who were nerds, right? And you figured out like, hey, I like how I feel when I do this. And we figured that early on. And now imagine if you're coming to this for the first time, we have a

Claudia von Boeselager (08:57)
Nice.

.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (09:09)
decades of sophistication behind us and we're asking people to catch up. Why can't you do that? And it's our fault because we haven't brought those people along. So that's what we're working on.

Claudia von Boeselager (09:17)
So powerful. Love the explanation as well. And I guess so many different points on that too with adherence that I want to still touch on, but maybe just one point around the alcohol, which was really interesting. I think just to kind of reiterate that, that it is a neurotoxin and it's a, but pick your poison. And I agree with you at the odd margarita or glass of wine. I do still take, but in general, my alcohol consumption has reduced drastically.

But it is the longest running study out of Harvard from 1938 is when it began and looking at ⁓ longevity and it's the social interactions that community as well. very rightly so. mean, I'm part Irish and if the pub, they call the extension the pub or the bar, the extension of the living room. So if you exclude yourself from that, it's almost like you're excluding yourself from society. So I think that that's a really interesting point. I'd love.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (10:04)
And let me show people an example

of how we can not throw out the baby with the bathwater. So ritual and connection is a really important driver. And if you go to Biagotten in Munich, no one has a phone, everyone's sitting around. Maybe you have a rodler and maybe you drink some of it, but you're eating fresh vegetables, you're eating food, it's sunshine, it's usually in the evening.

I was working with the German national hockey team. We all go out afterwards after a little training camp, and everyone pulls out a Sportbier which for those of us who don't know a Sportbier is just non alcoholic beer. And Erdinger sends 10,000 liters of their alcohol free Sportbier to all the Olympics for the Austrian German athletes because they recognize that finishing a big competition, finishing big training, going together and breaking bread,

having a drink, having a celebration is that social connection. So you can still do that. And we have a lot of friends, it's interesting to see how many of my friends don't drink anymore, and how fewer than are going back. But we have alcohol free beer in our fridge. And you know, it sometimes after a big bike ride or a big event, when you pop an alcohol free beer, we realize it's not about the beer at all. It was always about the celebration or the ritual. And that's a way of thinking critically about

how we're going to improve our households. And I think it gets lost in the conversation when we're talking about national programs, global health. This is important. But the functional unit of change is your family. It is your household. is with your roommates. And that's where we begin all the changes to society.

Claudia von Boeselager (11:47)
I love that. And, know, it's all great for the macro level, but looking at that micro level and the day to day, starting with oneself, right? And being that role model, implementing change and inspiring those around us as well. And I guess this is a part with the point with adherence and especially with the cohort that you're seeing now and in the age of AI where there's information overloads. What are some of the biggest challenges you see people having with adherence and what are some solutions for people listening that you could maybe recommend?

Dr. Kelly Starrett (12:12)
Hmm.

Yeah, you know, we can talk about how ultra processed tasty foods are everywhere. I you go to a, you know, a craft store and it's there. It's a gas station. You're in King Coast getting, you know, a copy made of something and you're like, let me buy gummy bears, you know, like, it's crazy how when we look at willpower, you can say no, say no, say no. And then all of sudden you're just overwhelmed. Okay, I'll just have

you know, one handful of, you know, sport gummies. And the, when we think about adherence, you know, yesterday we did a ⁓ presentation for an incredible investment group full in their health section. And people said, Hey, I want to be more energetic. I want to be stronger. I want to be more in my body. And when I say, well, what does that mean today? How do you do that today? Because I think one model that's been really useful for us

out of the high performance world. Because remember, my day job is actually I work in very high performance environments, universities, NFL, professional teams, military. And if we know we have a Super Bowl, for example, in American football, we can actually work backwards and say, okay, here's the Super Bowl, or here's the national championship. What do we need to get done between now and then? What skills do we have?

And then all of sudden you break this up into, well, when's the first game? All right, what do we have to do before the first game? And that means that, well, okay, well, I have five days before this game. When am I gonna get done in this five days? And okay, now it's Monday. What do have to on Monday? The problem, largely with these big aspirational goals, I wanna lose weight, I wanna feel better, I wanna be there for my family, is that we don't make the discrete, concrete, non-heroic, consistent behavior part of the day's plan.

And you know, if you all of those things that we talked about, you know, for example, something that would change everyone's lives is if they started sitting on the ground for 20 or 30 minutes in the evening. This is the lead zero equipment required, zero motivation. I'm asking you to watch TV. You're already watching TV. So just sit on the ground, move away from your couch, sit on the floor. And what you're going to see in the course of 20 or 30 minutes is that you're uncomfortable and you have to fidget and you have to long sit and you have to side saddle. And then you sit 90 90 and then you're kneeling.

And in that time, we've got 20 or 30 minutes of exposure of end range of your joints and range of your tissues. And I'm starting to tell your brain, these are important positions. You're starting to tell your brain, hey, I, you know, need to be able to breathe here and have access to these positions. And what we start to see is if you do that five days a week, six days a week, in two weeks, your wattage is going to go up on the bike, your power is going to go up on your runs.

your lifting is going improve, your back will feel better. And the reason is that we have this, we figured out how to have significant exposure to meaningful change, right? Changing your range of motion of your hips, normalizing your hamstring length and your connective tissue. But simultaneously, we've done it in a way that you don't have to ask yourself to do yet another thing as a busy working person. And that's where we really want to begin to stack behaviors and break down these small

consequence or seemingly large consequential, you know things. Hey, I want to be X. Well, what does that look like today? The second thing I'm going to suggest everyone do is lay in bed for eight hours without looking at your phone. We are spending so much money and ridiculousness on sleep. Turns out going to bed and getting up at the same time is probably one of the most important things. And number two, we don't actually care. My wife is a menopausal woman and she's a CEO and a mother of two

girls and she worries and stresses. Sometimes she wakes up. And what we've figured out and we learned this from working with the Navy SEALs and one of their physicians is that we say that rest is the next best thing to sleep. And so if you want to lose weight, be more energetic, be more powerful, adapt to some heavy training, like win a world championship, sleep is the root variable here. So what I'm suggesting is that you're going to land in the darkness. And if you wake up, don't panic because you're going to rest.

and you're going to not look at your phone. You don't need to know what time it is. And you'll just lay there until the alarm goes off. And if you start to train your brain to do that over and over again, your skin will be clear. You'll have less brain fog. You'll need less caffeine. You'll have more energy. And now we can start to say rinse, wash, repeat, because what we all need is just bone crushing consistency on these non-essentials. And there'll be times where you lose your mind. You're traveling. You're very busy. You have a baby, a sick parent.

you're taking care of someone don't panic. When we begin to give people what we call base camp, essential behaviors, and and sort of book ends of function, then they start to understand, hey, I'm way below I haven't eaten any fruits and vegetables today. So tomorrow I wake up and I start again. And the second piece of that, which leads us to in this battle of adherence, the most successful people we know, our masters at starting over every day. Wrecked it yesterday, I'll start over again. I wasn't able to train this week.

I'm just gonna go right back and do that terrible run and I'm gonna suck at it. I'm not gonna worry because I'm gonna suck at it. And the ability to start over and recognize that we're not treating, we should not be treating health like a finite game. We should be treating it like an infinite game. And the only way to win an infinite game is to play better and to bring everyone along because you don't know when it's gonna win and what the rules are, who's playing, the demands are. So all we do is say what can we control day after day after day.

And pretty soon you get to your unrecognizable. And that really is the message here that you have a lot more capacity. You think you're doing a lot of work. It feels like that because your brain is really clever, but you're not.

Claudia von Boeselager (17:44)
So powerful, Kelly. And I just think for people, if you're listening to this, you might want to go and hit, skip back and re-listen to that. That was really, really profound. So thank you so much for sharing that. And I think this is just a philosophy in general, like how many people, it's January now, beginning of January is a recording set these new year goals, but they just have the big lofty goal for the year and they don't break it down. And I think it's those micro things. And I love what you were saying with...

Dr. Kelly Starrett (17:50)
Hahaha

Claudia von Boeselager (18:08)
You you're sitting in front of the couch, you're watching entertainment or whatever it is, Netflix anyway. So it's not any extra time. You're not adding something. It's just reframing how you're doing something in a way that's actually beneficial to you. think Tony Robbins calls it net time, no extra time. It's, know, being smart about your time. And with some of my coaching clients, they're like, oh, I have a super busy schedule. I can't do it. I'm like, okay, let's start by looking at your screen time on your phone.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (18:18)
That's right.

Claudia von Boeselager (18:31)
How many hours week are you on social media? Okay, six hours, cut it by half. That's three hours you now have to do things that are actually good for you. So we all think, I don't have time, I don't have time, but have a look at some of those basics. And I love what you said also around sleep, because I think people like eight hours don't need eight hours, but the science is obviously there behind the importance of sleep. And I think just even lying there is the, as the second best thing. I think that's a really great analogy for people to remember too. So.

So much wisdom, Kelly. Thank you so much.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (19:01)
I really just want

to get to the fun stuff, but we can't get to the fun stuff until we get to some of the basic stuff. And that I think is one of the problems with trying to understand the data stream. There's so much noise in the data that it's really hard for us to see inputs and outputs. It's hard for us to appreciate that what we're doing is making a meaningful change, a real change in the system. There's a wonderful philosopher.

Claudia von Boeselager (19:08)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (19:25)
a writer named Charles Perrow, he's passed, but he wrote a book called Normal Accidents. And normal accident theory is about complexity in complex systems. And that might be like shipping lanes, air traffic control. I applied it to the human body when I read this book and I reached out to him and I just said, hey, this is probably the most important book I've ever read around thinking about the complexity of humans in their own biology and in their interactive with other humans.

And what we often see and he describes this idea that things that look like black swan events or crazy, you know, accidents are actually perfect expressions of the system. When the system is tightly coupled inputs and outputs matter, when the system is sufficiently complex, and some of that complexity is hidden from us. And so what looks like a freak accident is actually just a normal expression of the system. If you give the system enough time to express itself.

So suddenly what we see is, I've always done this. And I'll give you an example. There's a, worked in professional football. We have a lineman who you tweaked his hamstring. He has no hip extension. And during the second play of the game, had to sprint during an interception and he pulled his hamstring. He's 36. He's one of the best players in the NFL. He's, he's widely regarded as one of the best and he's deeply loved and he works really hard.

He's never had a hamstring tweak before. The problem is when you don't have hip extension, your hamstrings have to work like your glutes and your hamstrings. So they have to flex the leg, extend the leg, manage. The glutes are supposed to do a lot of that. But if you're missing hip extension, getting your knee behind your butt, because alignment is basically always in a flexed position, suddenly he's doing something he's not regularly doing. He's huge and powerful. He's 36.

And even though he's never had a problem here, eventually we know what happens when people don't have hip extension and sprint. They tweak their hamstrings. So this is an example of something that's infinitely complex. This game, his abilities, and what looks like, wow, that's just totally fluky. What we ask is, is there something we could have done to manage that hamstring early on? And maybe the answer is no. Maybe it is truly a Black Swan event, but

When we begin to bring those pieces down, accept that if I don't walk during the day, if I have caffeine at four, if I have an alcohol before I go to bed to self soothe because I'm so stressed, that affects my sleep. And so suddenly we start to see that, wow, not eating enough fruits and vegetables affects my sleep quality. And we start to appreciate that this system of our complex biology is tightly interactive and tightly coupled.

And one thing affects all things. This is why we don't have to play a perfect game across 10 domains. We have to play a better game across most domains. And what we see is that the body is so resilient and so capable that it will come back again and again and again. So all we have to do is say, what can I control today? And how do I put that in the background? So I don't actually have to think about it. I want to think about work. I want to think about play. I want to think about art. I want to think about my friendships.

I don't want to think about how many grams of fruits and vegetables I'm eating every day. I want that just to be taken care of.

Claudia von Boeselager (22:35)
Yeah, to automate it as well. Like set yourself up once and then it's automated, right? Just like a tech system. And I think that's the best way because decision fatigue is real, right? We make over what is the number? Like 30,000 decisions in a day, maybe even more. if whatever you can automate.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (22:37)
Yes.

100%.

And if you're not

a man, if you're someone else, like my partner, Juliette, you're making 70,000 decisions.

Claudia von Boeselager (22:55)
Yeah, so the less decisions you can make, the more you can automate things, the better, and especially for the right things, so that that's on autopilot, which is amazing. And Kelly, you've recently collaborated with Andrew Huberman and those conversations around movement and neuroscience really resonated. What new insights emerge for you by layering mobility on top of brain science? I'm curious.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (23:04)
Yeah.

You know, I think one of the things that we, the way I've been shifting some of my thinking lately to simplify what is very complex. We're in this conversation right now about longevity and it's great. I'm really, you and I just reconnected at eudaimonia. It's really amazing to be in that room. That was our dream 20 years ago. Simultaneously, there's no conversation about range of motion or pain in those.

domains of living forever. Very, very few conversations. And when we get to the brass tacks of it, people are like, well, I can't, I can't do all those things. My ears, my back hurts. And so one of the ways that we, you know, we're stoked that people are talking about range of motion and movement choice and getting out of pain. But we have to view the brain as not wired for optimization. It is wired for survival. And I think when people are nerdy in this,

this resonates with them, but let make it easy for those of us who maybe aren't living in this and reading this every day. You can almost view your brain as seeing the world in two shades. Is this a threat or is this safety? And when we start to see behaviors as threatening, and it doesn't always mean bad because we pay attention, I'm anxious for this big meeting, that's a threat. I might perform better. But things like not eating enough, being constantly

underfed, the brain perceives that as a threat. And so one of the things that we can start to do is start to expand that conversation of, if I'm not sleeping, that's a threat. My brain is now going to be in a more heightened threat state. Again, the brain is optimized for survival in these things. So one of the things that we really go out of our way to do is signal to the brain, it's safe to move. That pain does not mean damage. It doesn't always mean trauma or injury.

pain is often just a request for change. It's information that your brain is interpreting as threat. And you could be have terrible, terrible knee pain and a beautiful person that you have a big crush on walks into the room. And all of a sudden, I guarantee you, your knee pain goes away. Right in the middle of the world championship, you don't have a knee pain. And as an allegory for this, I hope this isn't the case, but if you've ever been in a fight and actually had to fight someone.

⁓ The dirty secret of fighting is that you don't actually feel pain in the moment. Your brain says, that's not important information. We'll just neglect that. And so in the middle of the big ski run and the jump in the moment in the serve and the big, your brain doesn't perceive that as, an issue afterwards, you will absolutely get that information when you start to be safer again. But what we can start to do is think about, well, Hey,

Claudia von Boeselager (25:39)
you

Dr. Kelly Starrett (25:45)
how can I tell my brain that this is safe to move? How do I get non-threatening input in? And it turns out movement is one of those very powerful levers we can pull to signal to the brain that this is safe. Plus all of the other essentials of biology, drinking water, eating food, having friends. Those are all signals to the brain that we are healthy, in a tribe, and safe. But it turns out when we're trying to untangle very specific things, we can apply and think about applying isometrics.

So if I have knee pain and I put you into a position on a ball or a roller or doing something that looks like a pause in the middle of an exercise and hold that for 30 seconds or so, my brain eventually starts to say, well, look, we're here. You're breathing. You're you know, we're not moving, but we're safe. I can start to unwrap that a little bit and start to deescalate how I'm perceiving what's going on with the tissues.

And so a lot of what we're doing is signaling that safety is safe to move. We move here often. We move at speed here often. The tissues are, you know, healthy enough. I have a friend who just had a knee surgery. He played in the NFL for 10 years. His knee looks like a garbage dump. You can't not believe what the inside of his knee looks like. If I showed you an x-ray, you'd be like, no, that's not a human being. That is like a collection of Legos inside a bag. And

He didn't have any knee pain. His chief complaint was his range of motion. He couldn't bend his knee. He couldn't straighten his knee. That caused these other problems. But his chief complaint wasn't that his knee ached all the time. His chief complaint was, knee won't work right. And when the surgeon went in there, they took some x-rays and the surgeon went in there, he was shocked. He's like, we should have replaced your knee, not cleaned up your knee, because it was the worst thing I've ever seen. And I cannot believe that you didn't have any pain. So John's brain,

is sufficiently again, super athlete, collegiate athlete, professional athlete, sufficiently inoculated from interpreting this information from his knee as a threat. Instead, John was like, I got to this taken care of because like, you know, it's hard for me to do the things I want to do. And when we begin to look at movement practice and exercise and play and warm ups as a way of signaling the body is safe, then the brain

really starts to let the guard down a little bit. And what's interesting, when we look at chronic pain and persistent pain, this is a really useful tool. Pain and movement are in the same pathways in the brain. And how useful for that? Because if I do that thing and I get experienced discomfort or pain, interpret that as threat, then suddenly my brain doesn't even have to know that that thing that I did caused the pain. It's the shape that I'm in or the movement that causes the pain.

So oftentimes when we have something chronic, I'm afraid of bending over because bending over I had pain. My brain gets really twitchy about rounding my back. Well, guess what? Your spine is supposed to round. It has to round. It's like go ahead and do anything interesting. Go ahead and have sex and not round your back. You will see that you're going to round your back on the toilet, washing the dishes. So if you believe and your brain believes that rounding your back is going to be a threat,

then you will not engage in that behavior and that causes a whole host of downstream problems. So what we can start to say is, well, how do we begin to signal to the brain that it's safe to move? What does graded movement? How do we get you out of position? A simple way that everyone might be able to take this very high concept and apply it as we say, and this is not me, this is Iyengar, this is Greg Cook, these are the masters. If you cannot breathe in a position, you don't own a position.

So if you find yourself working and you're breath holding, that's a signal to your brain to pay attention because something is going on. You're signaling to your nervous system, I need to create stability and safety here and that's not breathing. So oftentimes when we get someone in a position of threat, for example, laying on a roller on your quads, if you've ever laid on a roller on your quads, it's very painful. The first thing we do is people stop breathing, and they start holding their breath.

So how can we begin to untangle some of this very complex human physiology? Well, we've come back to the basics. If you can't breathe in a position, you don't own a position. In Iyengar, the yogi master said, nerves are king of the breath. The breath is king of the brain. So how can we signal to the brain that we're safe by using breath? And then how can we trick or signal the breath?

through inputs through the body. And we can override that consciously because we're extraordinary, extraordinary mammals. And that means suddenly that if I'm stretching, no wonder in yoga, they hold us in a position so long, you got to take like 20 breaths. This is so annoying. But they figured out that if I just hold you in this position, which is an isometric, and they make you breathe there for 30 seconds or so, guess what happens? Your brain says, this must be safe. You're breathing, you can hold this position. And that's how we begin to untangle complexity and apply that to

human performance, going faster, winning another gold medal in the bobsled, you know, like it doesn't matter what the application is. The principles are universal. And that's why it's so important we work in high performance. So we can take those lessons and transmute them back to, you know, middle aged mountain bikers who want to just shred with their families.

Claudia von Boeselager (32:37)
I just wonder around that Kelly, like let's say people, and I have, you know, this reoccurring shoulder thing and comes on and off as well. And I do definitely believe that is part of it is sort of bad habit, but people have back pain, different things. like, it's chronic. I've had it so many years. Is it getting in certain positions and then just breathing through it to rewire those neural pathways essentially to not associate it with pain?

Dr. Kelly Starrett (32:59)
that might be a first order. So the second order might be asking, well, does your shoulder do all the things that a shoulder should do? So if we're driving a car and you can't go into third and your wheel doesn't turn all the way to the left and your brakes are dodgy, you can still drive that car. You just can't turn all the way to left. You're gonna have to skip third gear and you're gonna have to pump the brakes. So that's what's happening with most people's bodies. You know, if I say to someone, let's play this game with you, what is

Claudia von Boeselager (33:19)
to do the work around.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (33:25)
Decent blood pressure. What is normative blood pressure?

Claudia von Boeselager (33:28)
120 over 90. I don't know mine is particularly low but something like that.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (33:30)
Yeah, perfect. 120

over 80, like right. So you have a range, everyone knows that range. What is the normal temperature of a human being?

Claudia von Boeselager (33:38)
in Fahrenheit about 97, 98 degrees, 97.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (33:42)
Okay, so

very tight little creature there. What is a low resting heart rate?

Claudia von Boeselager (33:49)
40.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (33:50)
Okay, so you have some very clear ideas about what normative physiology is and what good physiology is. How much should your hip move?

Claudia von Boeselager (33:58)
Good question, I guess if I'm doing a like a 180 degrees. I'm visualizing myself to ⁓ less than 180.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (34:00)
Hahaha

So you have no fucking idea. this is the this is not. That's right. That's right. This is not your this is not

your deficit. This is the fact that we haven't given people benchmarks around their range of motion. What is normative? What do we expect? And so, you know,

Claudia von Boeselager (34:16)
Benchmark.

Mm-hmm. ⁓

Dr. Kelly Starrett (34:22)
all the physios, all the physicians, all the chiro's, all the us, we all have to memorize what is normative range of motion and everyone wants to believe that they're a unique snowflake. I know I'm special. I have a special hip and it only does the special hip things and I have a yeah, yeah, your hips are certain width, your femur looks a little bit, our squats are gonna look different but the principles are the same and normative range of motion is gonna be universal within about five degrees unless you have a very rare pathology.

which is very rare. And the research doesn't support all the things that people want to pretend. So, you know, what we start to see is that, hey, what's normal ankle range of motion? Well, people have no idea. What should you be able to do? Let me tell you, you should be able to squat all the way down with your feet straight and heels on the ground. That's normal. And I can quickly do that with people. Hey, put your and I think you should put your feet together and squat all the way down with your heels on the ground. And when I when if you can't,

Claudia von Boeselager (35:05)
Mm-hmm.

Ooh, wow. And if you can't, and if you can't.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (35:16)
your blood pressure is high and your resting heart rate is high and your temperature is low or high. And what we suddenly see is if we apply the same thinking to how the body works, then it's not so overwhelming that my shoulder hurts. Instead of saying my shoulder hurts sometimes, what I can ask is, well, what movements cause that shoulder pain? Do you have good full start and finish positions in that? And that's really the heart of what mobility is. Mobility is a set of tools that we use

to restore normative range of motion and help people get out of pain so they can use their body in the way they want. And it turns out if you can't put your arms over your head, that's incomplete range of motion. And one of the things we can ask now is, well, where are you putting your arms over your head in day to day? No wonder. Have you ever seen someone do downward dog? Downward dog is easy. You just have to have normal range of motion in your hips, 90 degrees, and in your shoulders. Your shoulders have to go over your head.

How many people can't do downward dog? Their backs are rounded, their knees are bent, their feet are off the ground. It's insane to watch someone say simultaneously, do you have normal hip flexion with the legs straight? Do you have normal overhead position with your arms without being able to twist or unwind? And what we see suddenly is that, wow, all of our classic strength and conditioning, Pilates, yoga.

classic strength and conditioning. I'm not talking about exercising with pink weights, right? Or like, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about real strength, conditioning, strict pressing, bench press, deadlift, squat, lunge. Those things are formal expressions of what the body should be able to do. That's why they're so potent. We're reminding ourselves that the diagnostic tool is the stimulus and the stimulus is the diagnostic tool.

But no wonder people are confused. Like I went to body pump. I don't know why my shoulder hurts. I'm getting strong. I'm like, you didn't even do any shoulder full things. You kept your shoulder in a tiny range of motion and did a freakish amount of work there and you stayed away from normative end ranges. One of the reasons we put pulling pull ups and hanging in our program is that in order to have a neck that works, you have to have a shoulder that works. It's I don't know if you've noticed this.

but your neck is right next to your shoulder and they're somehow deeply connected. And so if we want to improve your thoracic spine or neck, I have to look at your shoulder. And if I want to improve your shoulder, does your thoracic spine move or are you stuck bent all the time because you're bent over your computer or your bike? So what we can begin to ask is, hey, I'm having pain. Great. Okay. Do you have access to an orbit of range of motion in that joint or in those positions? And the answer for most people is no. And the easiest thing we can do

Claudia von Boeselager (37:25)
you

Dr. Kelly Starrett (37:49)
is start to restore that range of motion. Because suddenly the brain says, ⁓ that's new, that's not the position in pain and the situation, the fascial loading, the joint loading, the tension, this is new and it's a clean movement pathway and those clean movement pathways. And when I say clean, I just mean free from the traditional aches and pains that we usually associate with how our body moves. And this is why we have to have put skill into strength and conditioning. Why we have to have skilled movement training.

And it can't just be about, calves burned and my glutes are burning and I did a bunch of work on the Peloton and I must be fit. That is not the way that we win world championships or run faster or have bodies that just don't hurt.

Claudia von Boeselager (38:31)
For your average non-professional athlete person listening that is noticing sort of middle age, things are bit stiffer. What do you want them to know, Kelly? I'm 44, but biological age of 26. So I'm like, which one do I go with? anyway, now I've got my shoulder, got over my head. I used to be a gymnast, so I'm actually hypermobile. So my range of motion is not quite where it used to be as a gymnast, but anyway, working on it. But what for the,

Dr. Kelly Starrett (38:43)
Hahaha

Claudia von Boeselager (38:55)
average office working person, obviously sedentary lifestyle, sitting is the new smoking, right? What is the message you would like them to really understand to realize they have to change ideally today the trajectory because things just get worse and more stiff, et cetera. And where would you have them start on becoming more mobile, becoming more supple?

Dr. Kelly Starrett (39:17)
Yeah.

So interesting that our movement pathways and our pain pathways are so tightly connected. Interesting that our lymphatic system, which is the sewage system of the body, it's where we move all the waste, broken down protein, dead cells, all of those things. That's the lymphatic system. We make about two or three liters of lymphatic fluid every day. It's all recycled. It's filtered. That's also in your movement system. Those lymphatic vessels are in your muscles. So if you don't

use or flex your muscles, how do you flush your toilets? How do you move the sewage along the system? That's why we can say things like, well, people who walk 8000 steps a day have a decrease in all cause mortality and morbidity of 51%. And if I could take a pill that lessen my likelihood of dying by 50 stinking percent, that's walking 8000 steps a day. We recently we just mean yesterday, we got an email from one of the people in our challenge and she's like, it's

cold outside. And I was like, I know, we live in an environment. Do you have you met a coat? Have you met a hat? Have you met walking sticks? Do know you can drive to the mall and walk like what the key here is that she was a victim of environment. And that's like saying, there are all these cookies in my house. No, and I don't want to put that it's not the ID here though, is that the body is really tolerant until it's not right until we have that normal accident. And

Claudia von Boeselager (40:17)
you

Dr. Kelly Starrett (40:36)
when we began to say, where are we going to control? Notice that I haven't talked about like, do you need to lift weight? Yes. Do you need to breathe hard? Yes. Does everyone agree? Yes. Okay. Walking is not exercise. Walking is more important than exercise. And what we found is that if I said get 10,000 steps a day, I get a 65 % decrease in all the things that will likely kill me. But 8,000 steps is really reasonable amount of steps. If I go for a quick walk, walk 10 minutes after meals,

Hey, maybe I take a quick call. I'm just a little conscious about it. I can easily hit those 8,000 steps. Last night when we got home, Julie and I just walked around our neighborhood. If you want to get more sunlight and check this out, you start to see how these all compound. There's a great app called Nature Dose and it's from a company called Nature Quant and it's a free app and you will download it to your phone. It's called Nature Dose and they've mapped the entire United States and the phone will know if you're indoors or outdoors.

Claudia von Boeselager (41:30)
Mm.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (41:30)
And turns out

not only should you go outdoors more, that's obvious. Huberman get the get the natural light, etc, etc. But if you want to have a decent civil society, create a civil society, which means you see your neighbors, you're like, what's up, I have a neighbor next door. We kind of battle with that we got into a tiff over a fence he didn't want to pay for I just moved the fence inside my yard. I was like, whatever, Steve. But I see Steve every day because Steve walks his dog and I walk and I'm always like, What's up, Steve?

And now Steve and I have this tenuous truce because we have to interact and see each other day after day after day because we both go outside, which is a long way of saying the average American is going outside 20 minutes a week. So if you're not getting sunshine, sunlight, fresh air, I grew up in southern Germany. There's a German tradition where we air out the house every day, right? A couple times a day you open up. Yep, you open up all you open up all its base basically means

Claudia von Boeselager (42:19)
Lüften, known as Lüften.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (42:24)
air, airing and airing and you open up all the doors and windows and you just get all the crappy air out and bring all and it's freezing outside but you still open up all the doors and windows. And so even then we figured out and by the way, let's just go a little bit further. What's the German word for eight?

Claudia von Boeselager (42:25)
Airing, exactly.

For eight, eight, mm-hmm.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (42:41)
What's

the German word for night?

Claudia von Boeselager (42:43)
Nah.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (42:43)
the letter N and the word eight. Do you see where I'm going with this? People have been very clever for a long time. And what we want to do is go into some of these old traditions and say, why did we figure that out? Fresh air really matters. Going outside, getting sunlight really matters. Being in community really matters. So if you walk that 8,000 steps every day and you're going to have to make, you have to be conscious about it. In the winter's time, you're going to have to suck it up and get cold and walk those 8,000 steps.

or go to mall or get a walking trip, you're have to do something. If you do that, plus sit on the ground, we can begin to have very sophisticated conversations about improving your tissue health, accumulating non exercise activity fatigue, so you're going to fall asleep. And between walking 1000 steps sitting on the ground for 20 or 30 minutes and laying in bed for eight hours. Those are three huge fundamental biologic processes.

And now I'm going to start to say, well, if you want to change your tissues, probably should eat enough micronutrients, fruits and vegetables, polyphenols, fiber. That's called 800 grams of fruits and vegetables every day. Do you have enough protein? You start to see that, if I want to create a situation where the body's changing, I have to make sure that my blood pressure is normal, my heart rate is normal, my temperature is normal. And by normal, I mean, these are the things that we've come to understand are endemic.

and essential to a human being functioning at their top. And that's what we talk about in terms of rinse, wash, repeat. If you're sitting on the ground, we have an app that has 250 follow along daily videos from 10 to 30 minutes of a ball on a roller, I lead you, I'll teach you how to take care of your body. You can do that. Or you can grab that roller in there and ask yourself what hurts. Put it on what hurts roll around, make sure you're breathing. Do five minutes aside.

And you'll start to see that you can make real change in how your body feels. And that will show up day after day after day. Because what we want, what Juliet and I want, is a body that's built for adventure. That you and I, you call me up and say, Kel, we're going on this adventure. And I'm like, I'm in. I have a body that will take it. Maybe I haven't trained for it perfectly, but I am in. And what we don't want is people's movement language to get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.

And you're like, no, I don't think I want to ride that bike because it's dangerous. I might fall. I don't think I want to go for that hike because it's dangerous on my trip. And if you see someone at a hospital, because I've worked in hospitals as a physio, the end of their life, the halls get smaller and smaller and smaller. And pretty soon they're in a room that's smaller. And then they're in a room without a window. And then the curtains are drawn. And we're trying to keep that hallway as large and as wide as possible so that you can continue to play and do what you want.

for the rest of your lives. We are learning in the United States right now that the blue zones, areas of the United States that have the highest sort of success in terms of health and body and adventure are all the mountain towns where people ride their bikes, ski, hike, climb, play, kayak, adventure. And it's got to be built into the system. And then we're not doing that. We've made exercise like a pill that we take in science instead of playing. And we need to get back to

playing and then think about, well, I want to play better so I should train for playing.

Claudia von Boeselager (45:53)
I love that. And also in Sardinia, right? It's very mountainous towns and you've got the 80, 90, 100 year olds going up and down the steps and climbing up every day and social community. Yeah, they have to.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (46:01)
They have to. Yeah, you're like, hey, Grandma,

can't go up those stairs. If she stops going up the stairs, she's going to die.

Claudia von Boeselager (46:07)
Yeah, I know. And speaking of which, I mean, I see with my poor father, age 87, he had a bike accident. So when I had to take him to the ER, unfortunately, he did break his arm because at age 87, after a one hour bike ride at the emergency room, they were like, sorry, how long were you biking? They were shocked. She's like, I can't even do that at the gym. And he's like, yeah, I was still in motion on the bike like I did when I was five years old.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (46:27)
Yes.

Claudia von Boeselager (46:32)
and swung my leg around the back and then the pedal tipped the pavement and basically he fell over. You should have seen the faces in the ER in the US. They couldn't believe that an 87 year old was even riding their bike, let alone for one hour and then in motion was trying to get off the bike. So I've told him next time to stop the bike and maybe get off, but he's like...

Dr. Kelly Starrett (46:50)
No way. No way. so

what I love about that story is that that's actually a sport injury. That actually is like that wasn't that's an I'm like, congratulations, you got hurt doing something cool. Not like lifting a weight or or training like that was like, I'm like, count it. That's okay. You know, it's a legit sport injury. Congratulations, dad. You know, you didn't your back just didn't hurt because you sneezed you like you know, you crashed. That's fun.

Claudia von Boeselager (46:57)
That's true, I'll tell them.

I love it, I'm gonna tell them it's a sport injury, exactly.

I know, in motion.

Yeah,

that's his German heritage as well. So yeah, exactly. think some things you'll take to the grave with you,

Dr. Kelly Starrett (47:24)
Vedi val

hat hatikval, which is a, for everyone else means he who has the choice has the problem. That's what we want. We want more choice, more problems.

Claudia von Boeselager (47:30)
yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's what I see as well is that the constraint though in the movement as well and getting that range of movement. And I think what's great about how communities used to be is it was multi-generational and we had a lot more exposure to older people that gave us then the motivation. I think now things are so siloed. We don't see as many older people.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (47:45)
Yes.

Claudia von Boeselager (47:52)
We don't realize what can happen. And I think people forget, you're like, I'll do it later. And no, you need to start today. Right. And I'm getting into that and get that mobility back in as well. So I do have a monkey bar, so I'm going to be hanging.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (48:00)
Check this out. There you go. That's it. You gotta hang. Everyone should hang every

day. Three minutes plus breathing. When I was a child growing up in Bavaria, there was a phenomenon called Volksmarch. And it's a very German thing. I don't know if they did Austria. But basically, a town would support a little five or 10K walk through the town. You get to show off your town. There's tea waiting for you. There's, you know, kuchen. There's little cakes. There's things.

And when you finish, you get a medal or a pin. And that medal, I mean, they're cool medals. And then we would go around from town to town on the weekends doing these little marches. And as you said, multi-generational, you walk with your grandma, you walked with your aunties, the whole family's walked together, little kids, no one's in a cart. Kids are either being carried or they're walking. And when we make this a cultural phenomenon, when we start to think, how do we structure our environment?

so that we have these outcomes. It means we need bike paths, we need parks, we have to get into some urban design. And that's what's really fun about this way of thinking is suddenly it opens up how you solve this problem. And it's really, really extraordinary because look, I want you to have as much fun in a body. know, it was really funny in this call yesterday, people were like, I want to feel strong and I want to feel healthy and alert. I'm like, Julia, I don't think I feel any of those things. And she's like,

If the average person dropped into your body, they would explode. You know, I'm like, she's like, I think you feel good all the time. And you can't imagine feeling better, you know, so yeah, of course, who can't do the splits, everyone does the splits. So, you know, the key here is that it seems very complicated because the processes are very sophisticated. But the operating system is much simpler than that. And if you don't want to eat kale, don't eat kale, but you better eat some strawberries.

Claudia von Boeselager (49:22)
You

You're doing splits still, Kelly, right? If I'm not mistaken, I mean, you're my hero.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (49:47)
So the bottom line here is as you are working forward on longevity, health performance, you'll see that the systems are tightly coupled and very simple, but you may need to cut off your caffeine at 10 o'clock in the morning so that you can fall asleep tonight so that you can wake up.

and feel better, et cetera, And when you rinse, wash, repeat that for decades, you will be different than who you are today. It's really amazing.

No.

Claudia von Boeselager (50:18)
Let's talk about whole body systems, breath, lymph and stress. And so we were talking about before with breathing, lymphatic flow and mobility are inseparable systems. What are some of the biggest ROI's in that? Because I think so many people don't even realize how much that is impacting their day to day. And so what are some of the things you would like people to know on to get that ROI for breathing, for getting the lymphatic drainage and reducing stress?

Dr. Kelly Starrett (50:35)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Well, here's a good example. One of our friends is the CEO of a company called Pinoy and it's a portable VO2 max system. And what he wants people to know about VO2 max is it's not just about training your body to work hard. Some of its genetic, some of its training and some of it is mechanic.

And we don't realize that a stiff upper back is one of the reasons why you can't take a big breath. So one of the things that we're working on with this breathing, for example, for mobilizing the trunk is looking at do you have control all the way in of your breath and all the way out of your breath? And does the trunk move in that system? That way, can I expand maximally? Can I contract maximally?

the more efficiently we can get air in and out of the system, we can start to see that your body can actually have access to more oxygen. So a lot of us are breathing into a little steel chamber that's very stiff, and that's going to truncate your VO2 max. Add into the fact that there's this thing called CO2 tolerance, which we've all become obsessed with over the years. So for everyone, here's a primer. Just bear with me. It's not that boring. The way that your body

drives your breathing mechanism. So your desire to breathe is not from lack of oxygen, it's from high CO2. So the respiration off gas, right? You breathe in oxygen, CO2 comes out. And what we want people to start to do is to get more comfortable handling higher circulating CO2s. So if you get a little burn and you start panting,

But what is happening is you're actually scrubbing off your CO2, right? That makes sense. I'm catching, I'm dumping that CO2 so I don't have this drive to breathe. Well, it turns out the higher the circulating CO2s that you can tolerate, the more oxygen you can scrub off the hemoglobin. So if you want to have actually access to that amazing hemoglobin, all the oxygen bound to it, you have to tolerate high circulating CO2s, which means you need to get comfortable

needing to breathe. So no wonder pranayama, all of this breath hold apnic work really makes a difference. The average person exercises and they would struggle to get their oxygen saturation down to 92 or 93 really struggle. That's 93 % oxygen loaded up. Best Tour de France riders will ride down into the 70s. They can scrub off that much oxygen that efficient as aerobic athletes. So one of the things that we do is part of our warmup.

as we do a lot of CO2 tolerance drills. And you can do that formally like Wim Hof or some of the other butraco breathing or oxygen advantage. Patrick McEwen is a genius, right? But he's a genius. Shout out, I'll hail the genius. ⁓ And what I'll say is, he has something called the body oxygen level test, which is a really simple way of just saying, hey, what's my blood pressure, but in terms of my ability to handle CO2s. ⁓

Claudia von Boeselager (53:24)
He's been on the podcast a few times, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (53:40)
and look up the Bolt test from Oxygen Advantage. I'll give you some homework. It's really interesting. And it changes based on your stress, based on your recovery. And so we use our sort of, number one, we'll use our ability to look at breath holding on an exhale as insight into our recovery. And number two is we can reset the brain a little bit, because remember, breath is king of the brain.

we can sort of reclaim some of the function of the brain by resetting the sensitivity of the brainstem to this high circulating CO2. So here's what this means for you. When you're walking or you're on the treadmill, I want you to take a 10 second inhale. And most people can actually inhale for 10 seconds. So don't panic, but that can be trained. You're gonna get to five seconds and be like, there's no way I get to 10 seconds. Yes, I need you to get to 10 seconds. Once you get to 10 seconds, you're going to

Hold your breath as long as you can and blow up. And just literally keep walking or keep cycling until you feel a small death. And then I just want you to recover. Try to see if you can recover nose only. In and out through your nose and you'll repeat that every minute. And I want you to do at least seven. What we do with our teams is that we want seven small deaths before we actually go and play and compete. I want seven hypoxic events, hypoxic moments where I...

have to kind of die a little bit, hypoxic, small deaths. And what you'll see is suddenly that run is easier, that swim is easier, that, and because part of your VO2 max is your range of motion, how well does your trunk work? And we regularly do this with our athletes. We have them take a big breath and put their arms over their head and take another big breath. can't squat down, take another big breath, they can't. And what we start to see is, boy, those...

ranges of motion of your rib cage start to be impacted by your crappy range of motion of your shoulders, your crappy major motion of your hips so that you're biking with that terrible range of motion of your hips is actually costing your VO2 max plus your stiff plus your CO2 tolerance is awful. So where do we put all this together in the warm up in the play jump rope, exhale all the way, keep jumping until you die. Great, repeat that.

seven times and then then go do your workout and try that for a week and see what happens.

Claudia von Boeselager (55:52)
Really powerful. have also the Carol bike here, which is revealed to max training and one of my consultancy Lumara collective. represent IHT intermittent hypoxia training machine. so literally be lying there. Have you done it? Have you tried? Yeah. Do you do it regularly?

Dr. Kelly Starrett (56:03)
Woo. Yes.

No, not that with machine, but I do breath, breath hold work hypoxic work every day. Every day. It's interesting. So I don't swim very much. My daughter is a water polo player. She'll be swimming at Berkeley next year on the water polo team. I travel with the women's water polo team at Berkeley. I'm their high performance coach, but I don't swim a lot. This year I was like, I'm going to swim a little bit more. So we're up at altitude or up in Tahoe over the break in the mountains. So it's very high and I jump in and swim and I don't

Claudia von Boeselager (56:11)
Holderwick. Every day, wow. Okay, I need to my game,

Amazing.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (56:35)
gas out. Why? Because I'm really good at exhaling a long time. The limitations was only that I'm a terrible swimmer. You know, most people are gasping when they breathe, because I practice that so much. It was very easy. That part of it was easy because all the time I'm working on dying and

Claudia von Boeselager (56:52)
And plus it must have been freezing cold water.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (56:54)
No, no, this is the pool. But yes, indoor pool still freezing. I'm still wimpy. No.

Claudia von Boeselager (56:56)
the pool. Okay. I thought you jumped into Lake Tahoe. I'm like middle

of winter. And then I mean, that will also trigger things.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (57:03)
that will trigger because nerves are king

of the breath breath is king of the brain there you go

Claudia von Boeselager (57:07)
Well, this is it as well. it's just keeping calm ⁓ and contained as well. And speaking of kids and your daughter as well. So you and Juliet are raising incredible embodied athletic kids. What movement principles should every parent understand to support healthy development and prevent early orthopedic issues in their kids, especially as more of them are on screens? They're not moving. What do you want to know?

Dr. Kelly Starrett (57:10)
Yes, yes.

Mmm.

Yeah.

It's really the moving,

not even the screens. We have moved through an era where we did a lot of free play. Free play doesn't exist anymore. Just not. And if we had all the tech and all the reasons, we wouldn't free play either. But we were forced to go outside and play. We have to create more free play. And that free play looks a little bit like formal movement training. Gymnastics, parkour, messing around, getting kids into places where they can explore their bodies and move.

The project that Julia and I are deep into right now is a book called Outplay. And it's a book about sports performance for six to 18 year olds, because we see that sport is the last framework on earth that we think to build a robust system through sort of a robust society through teaching the fundamentals of being human to people. Because sport is that perfect place to learn about all the psychology of sport, disappointment, loss, death, like all the things.

Plus, how do I fuel? How do I self care? How do I train? How do I, you know, delay gratification, all those things. So we think sport is this really wonderful thing. Parents have a terrible job. They become the high performance directors for their kids and they don't know what to do. And they play, start playing whack a mole. They get really crazy in the stands. They're spending all this money and all this time. Their kids aren't getting to play time. We really like sports are at a crisis moment. We're starting to see private equity go in.

and gut sports because they see that there's so much money to be made there. That's all you need to know about the state of sports. we, the parent, again, all the things we talked about earlier, sleep, nutrition, et cetera, et cetera, apply them to your kids. The average child's walking two to 3000 steps a day. The average child isn't, you know, eating a fruit or vegetable. They don't get enough fiber. They don't sleep eight hours. So how do you expect this body to grow and become more resilient and durable? So that's, that's one place.

The other place is that we have to create again opportunities to move into play and to interact. Kids are not going to want to front squat and do rear foot elevated split squats. That is not a game. That is the worst game I can think of, right? Adults don't want to do it. I know it's good for me, so I'm going to do it, but my kids are like get lost at this sucks, but. No, I'm out. I'm out mom, but one of the things we can start to do is say how do I constrain the environment?

Claudia von Boeselager (59:33)
I've got a 9-11 year old, they'll be like,

Dr. Kelly Starrett (59:41)
so that that happens. And that might be throwing a frisbee, going outside and throwing, that might be playing spike ball, that might be playing pickle ball, where we need to move and load, and we're missing these crucial movement loading windows. We're starting to see right now, one of our friends, Gabe Merkin, is it Gabe Merkin? Merkin, it's not Merkin, it's another physician, sorry. And he was president of the knee, he was on Arnold's,

fitness council, he was president of the knee society. He'd done a lot of ACL repairs on kids. In the 80s and 90s, when a kid tore his ACL, they would pull out a drill and they would use this real big drill to drill into the bone to set the ACL. Now the bones are so soft that they use something that looks like a corkscrew and they just turn the drill by hand. They don't even use a power drill anymore because the bones are like soft coconut. So,

What we see is we're losing mineralization of bone happening in kids. Why? All the energy drinks, lack of micronutrients, lack of loading, et cetera, et cetera. So we're going to see a generation of kids who come up. We're already seeing freakish injuries in kids, torn lats, the ACL epidemic is through the roof. And if we're going to solve those problems, we have to move much further upstream. We don't often have PE or PE is a half hour, a couple of times a week. It's not sufficient.

If you look at the physical education guidelines for what the state says all kids need, it's 150 minutes a week of exercise. That's 30 minutes of vigorous exercise a week, 30 minutes a day where the kids are vigorous. That means like above 80 % max heart rate. And I'll ask you, do your children meet the government minimums for activity? And you're seeing the answer is no. This is why sport is so important.

because we have to at get in some kind of formal way. And so, you know, is your garage set up with a pull-up bar? Can your kids hang? Do you make it a game? How do you model those behaviors for your kids? Do you drag your kids to dance class? You know, we're seeing is that we have to think differently about sport and movement, and we're gonna have to bring those kids along and figure out new ways to engage in movement. Sport and activity as a family is the easiest way.

But we have to start to think, well, maybe basketball hoops on the corner are really important, right? Tennis courts are really important. Those multi-gyms that are existing in places are really important. if we can get, I think the number of kids in middle school and high school, boys that I talk to are like, Kel, how do I get buff? How much creatine do I need? Kids are interested in their bodies. They don't know how to do it. And we've set up so many frameworks against that.

volleyball is not real fun all the time. Like club volleyball, it's a lot of work. if you have, yeah, but I mean, but you know, club volleyball doesn't feel like oftentimes it feels like, you know, professional sports. And we have just really lost the opportunity to make play safe. And the play is how we learn skills and how we interact and how we discover our bodies. And that can be a lot of things. If I had my way, everyone is in an hour of P, everyone's in an hour of P every day. And that P could be yoga class.

Claudia von Boeselager (1:02:23)
I like volleyball, but yeah.

Yeah, what's your ideal scenario, Kelly? Okay.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (1:02:47)
It could be dance

class. It could be, we're playing tennis. could be anything. You have to move for an hour a day. In the UK, you should look up something that's called the Daily Mile. And a lot of the schools there started walking a mile a day because they saw an inactivity piece. Do you need a special certification to take kids on a walk for a mile? No. Do you need to be an elite athlete to walk for a mile? No. Do kids gonna run that and walk that? Yes. But what we start to see is we've got to put in more

Claudia von Boeselager (1:02:56)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (1:03:13)
input into our youth and that's a really simple way to think about it.

Claudia von Boeselager (1:03:16)
And I think you can make it fun, right? And it becomes a game from being outside. And what I've started to do with mine are some challenges, like we did a charity 5K run and different things. We've been invited to a Murph challenge. Let's see some version of it. And I think it's so, so important to model it, but then also bring your kids in to make it a family thing. So you're kind of ticking a few boxes at the same time.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (1:03:37)
It has to be that way. My kids fortunately grew up in a gym. They both can Olympic lift and move and exercise. And I have one daughter who does not like to exercise, but she likes to go to yoga class and she likes to go to Pilates class. I'm like, great. That's fine. She, know, she doesn't want to breathe hard. I'm like, look, you'll, know, she's a good athlete, but just doesn't wired the other child, you know, now knows that if she's going to not die next year at university in this division one program,

She's gonna have to go lift some weights and train really hard and she does. And you she does those things. you know, however we get there, we get there. And you know, I want to recognize that not everyone has the high genetic drive to move that I do. I really like to exercise. I love to move. It's really fun. I like to play. I like to compete. Not everyone feels that way, but you have to find something you like to do. And then you have to figure out what's the minimum loading that I need. I think as

Claudia von Boeselager (1:04:13)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (1:04:27)
we kind of hear the message about strength conditioning. What we need to ask is not how much strength conditioning, but how little strength conditioning I can get away with so I can go out and play.

Claudia von Boeselager (1:04:35)
Yeah, here's to more play, more joy, having fun and social context and being outside and doing adventures more often, I'm a hundred percent with you on all these things. So thank you so, so much, Kelly, for coming on today. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you back on. So great to be connected to Eudemonia Where can people find you? Where would you like to send them to? Maybe you can share about the app as well.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (1:04:41)
Yes.

Yeah, go to the Starrett system.com. You can check us out. That's right, two Rs, two Ts, Starrett. And you know, if you're looking for mobility programming, you know, our we feel like we've been doing this a long time and our content is really good. And that's the Mobility Coach app. But if you go to the readystate.com, it's all the resources.

Claudia von Boeselager (1:04:58)
So S-T-A-R-R-E-T-T, just so people get the spelling right.

Beautiful. Kelly, any parting thoughts or pieces of advice, wisdom asks from my audience today? Yes.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (1:05:25)
more joy. It's not,

this is not, we're treating all of these aspects of our humanness, like a chore or like some serious final exam. Stop it. Like go cook your friend's dinner, go for a walk, play a game, get some sun, watch the sun. Like it's not that complicated and it should be full of joy.

Claudia von Boeselager (1:05:42)
Love it. Thank you, Kelly, so much for coming on. Thank you to your audience for tuning in. Yeah, good to see you too.

Dr. Kelly Starrett (1:05:44)
Thank you, great to see you.