Interview with Kelly Starrett on the modern healthy lifestyle

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Hey, this is Mike Matthews from musclefullife. com and in this podcast, I interview Kelly Starrett. You’ve probably heard of Kelly, but if you haven’t, he’s best known for his mobility project, mobilitywad. com and his book, Becoming a Supple Leopard, which is kind of like the Bible of mobility exercises.

Kelly is a physical therapist and he works [00:04:00] with elite athletes all around the world. ranging from professional sports players to endurance runners, cyclists and so forth. In this podcast, we’re going to be talking about the detrimental aspects of sitting too much, which I’ve been reading up on recently.

So I was happy to have someone as knowledgeable as Kelly to come on and talk about it. We’re also going to be talking about some different lifestyle choices that people make that either have profound negative. Consequences or positive consequences, benefits especially over time and kind of how that relates to longevity and just overall health and some simple things that we can do, little changes we can make in our, in our day to day life that can improve our overall wellbeing.

We’re also going to be talking about Kelly’s new book, ready to run, which is coming out in October. And there’s going to, as you’ll see, there are a lot of other little things thrown in your little, little pieces of wisdom from Kelly. So I think you’re going to like the interview. Let’s get to it. Okay, thanks for coming on the podcast, Kelly.

I really appreciate it. Oh, it’s my pleasure. Cool. [00:05:00] Alright, so here’s the first thing that I’m excited to talk to you about. So, you know, a lot of us kind of sit at a desk all day. I mean, you probably don’t, but I do. And a lot of, a lot of the listeners also, you know, we, we sit for at least probably five or six hours a day and then go sometimes in, in some people’s case to come home and then sit even more.

That’s kind of like the standard sedentary life. Ah, totally. Yeah. And, and I guess a fair amount of, of my listeners and my readers and followers are, you know, they’re going to be moving around in terms of going to the gym and doing cardio and stuff like that, but still there’s a lot of sitting. And I think we all know that the human body, like it wasn’t.

Made to just remain seated so much right 

Kelly Starrett: well, you know, here’s the deal You know, it’s easy to say to people, Hey, you know, just, you know, you shouldn’t sit and, you know, and sitting is a skill by the way, right? Cause sometimes you have to sit. It’s, it’s tough to be on an airplane unless you’re flying first class land down, there’s going to be some time, you know, most cars, unless you drive a bread van are are sitting, you know, but [00:06:00] the real issue is that.

You know, we know you’re going to be compromised. You’re gonna be compromised on your cell phone. You’re gonna be compromised on your, your technology is not going away. You’re gonna be forced into these positions. And so we just have a, have to have a plan around that. And two, we sort of need to understand what some of the downstream effects are.

So we’re not surprised when it jumps up and bites us in the butt, you know, and, and you know, the research is really, really clear about. And everyone’s heard this. Yes. Sitting causes cancer and it spikes your blood sugar. And, but you know, there are some real other things that we’re not talking about. You know, the, the orthopedic back pain problem, you know, there’s a half a million spinal surgeries in America every year, half a million.

And you know, in the CDC, the center for disease control, the official position is like back pain is poorly understood. And I have to just say what a bunch of horse crap that is. I mean, we really clearly understand the mechanisms of back pain and back dysfunction, but. The, the problem is, you know, we have this in, we’ve been endowed with this incredible body that just puts up [00:07:00] with our crap for so long, 

you 

Kelly Starrett: know, and, and, and, and everyone knows this.

I mean, everyone has, has can relate to having some friend who is like the greatest athlete all time and smokes once in a while and eats a little chocolate donuts still like is the best in the world. And, you know, the, the key is we confuse this sort of genetic bounty, this inheritance with the fact that that’s optimal and we can, you can buffer it and all of a sudden you can’t buffer it.

And, you know, people are, you know, we work like you with the assumption that people are doing the best they can with the information they have. But once you really start to wrap your head around sitting, then it ends up being, you know, we tell the story, for example, of like, we think this is what. There’s the chief mechanism of childhood obesity, right?

We, you can mandate, go crazy about trying to have people have access to fresh food and you can try to exercise even though there’s no PE money anymore, right? You know, if you stand, we, the research is that [00:08:00] you burn extra 50 to a hundred thousand calories a year standing. So boy, all of a sudden you’ve just taken off.

That’s 33 marathons for my wife, for example, 33 marathons, or you could just stand and okay, so we, we have this childhood obesity thing. Well, you know, if we look at the pelvic floor dysfunction in the United States. Adult diaper industry is a 2 billion problem and you have listeners who have wives and girlfriends and boyfriends and that and, and, you know, it’s certainly bladder incontinence is not just a gender specific issue, but we tend to see it a little bit more in our, in our women athletes.

But what we notice is that, you know, bladder incontinence and exercise is sort of. It’s just taken for granted. Oh, yeah, you’re gonna pee yourself once in a while and and they think we think that that’s normal It’s a two billion dollar adult diaper industry. So what we’re know though is you know, what the heck’s going on?

Well, it turns out we can have this greater conversation around spinal mechanics and that when [00:09:00] you sit You know, like if you pull a bowstring The bow flexes beautifully. But if you stack one end of the bowstring, all of a sudden the bow doesn’t work right. You know, it doesn’t load correctly. Well, that’s one way to think about your spine.

Is that you’re basically putting one end on the ground and it’s designed to be this beautiful bow. And instead, you’re just basically stacking one end. And what you’re going to do is you’re going to get weak areas that tend to hyperflex or overflex. But what we know unequivocally is that when you’re in a good position, Tissues work right.

Musculature works right. The system is set up to work correctly. You don’t have to do a lot of muscle activation. You just need to move. But when you’re in a bad position, you see a lot of what I call positional inhibition. It’s that things just don’t work right. And so, For example, one of the things we know absolutely is that when you sit in a flexed position or that means you just slouch a little bit or if you’re sitting up like you’re like the nun that you’re, you know, Catholic high school did sit up and you just [00:10:00] overextend a little bit.

Like most people sit up. Both of those positions are not optimal positions. They’re sort of putting kinks in the nervous system and big bends around the spine. Well, what we know, for example, is that the pelvic floor Doesn’t activate very well in that position so that when you’re overextended, overflexed your pelvic floor turns off and people can listen to this because.

You know, if you go pee in the bathroom, men standing up peeing, the only way you’ll initiate a stream is that you’ll dump your pelvis forward into an overextension. And that sounds weird that I’ve thought about it, but it’s true. But if you try to maintain neutral pelvis, what you’ll see is that your pelvic floor activates.

It’s actually harder to pee. Most women will pee in a flexed spine position. And so that neutral spine position, again, access to the pelvic floor turns it on, but a flexed one, even dogs kind of tuck under when they pee a little bit, right? And so with the same thing happens with the spine. So we see that, you know, and, and I’ll tell you, remember, I’m a physical therapist.

And so when I deal with pelvic floor dysfunction athletes, the first thing we [00:11:00] have to go after is resetting the relationship of the pelvis. to the, to the leg, pelvis to the spine. And once we neutralize that, then all of a sudden we can actually talk about pelvic floor turning on. Okay, so we see that this pelvic floor problem sitting, not only are we sitting on the coccyx, right?

Which is like the back end of a diamond tent of your pelvic floor. Your pelvic floor is like a diamond and you’re sitting on one end kind of doing wheelies. But the other way that we tension that whole system is through creating rotation through the hip. And so when you stand straight with your feet straight ahead, what automatically happens through the sort of these normal fascial windings, the fascial spiral, the way your connective tissue in your body works, is that when you stand with your feet straight, there’s automatically this normal torsion tone that happens in the pelvic floor.

And that also Makes the pelvic floor stable. And so what we see is that we have a lot of weird dysfunction about the floor turning off because we’re sitting and I can’t actually activate my pelvic floor because I’m sitting down. [00:12:00] I don’t have the torsion through the hip. My spine’s in a bad position.

We’ll spin that up to the diaphragm. All of a sudden the diaphragm is just another, you know, pelvic floor, but upside down there like two halves of an egg. What we know is that when you sit in a flex position over an overextended position, you don’t have access very well to your diaphragm and so you end up stress breathing.

And so suddenly this is an issue of, wow, I’m practicing breathing in a bad position. That’s 10, 000 breaths a day in a wretched bent over position where I’m compromised. Diaphragm gets stiff. As I’m an athlete. How would that 

Mike Matthews: hyper flight, like what, what, what would that position look like? 

Kelly Starrett: If you just, if I just said sit up and you basically took your pelvis and you just tipped it forward a little bit.

Right. 

Yeah. 

Kelly Starrett: Like, like a little banana back. 

Yeah. 

Kelly Starrett: That’s an overextended position. 

Okay. 

Kelly Starrett: If you I want to know what position is straight. If you stand up with your feet underneath you, right, feet straight and you just squeeze your butt as hard as you can, pelvis shouldn’t change positions. And what most people are going to find is that when they squeeze their butt, their pelvis [00:13:00] reorientates itself.

That’s the straight up and down spinal position. I’m doing it. I’m doing it right now. So you stand up, 

squeeze 

Kelly Starrett: your butt and you, you probably were overextended 

and 

Kelly Starrett: your pelvis tipped backwards a little bit, right? When you squeeze your butt. Is that what happened? 

Yeah. That’s what happened. 

Kelly Starrett: Yeah. So what normally happens is that you’re hanging out in a dysfunctional spinal relationship.

That’s your baseline. And that when you reset it with a butt squeeze, which is why we initiate deadlifts with a butt squeeze, squats with a butt squeeze. When we’re in the air, we point our toes and squeeze our butt. I mean that same concept over and over again. Right? But the issue is that most people are sitting in a dysfunctional position and what we know through the brain, right?

If you’ve read Daniel Coyle’s book, you know you know, what you look at is we look at skill acquisition as a complex biologic phenomenon that your brain, when you start to move a certain way and pattern a certain way. So my pelvis overextended gets mapped in my brain is certain, a certain position.

Your brain [00:14:00] is clever in the, what it does is it recognizes, sorry, 

Mike Matthews: he wrote the talent code. I didn’t, that’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. And 

Kelly Starrett: then what we start to see is that the, the, the cells in your brain that are responsible for. for myelination, the Schwann cells come in and they literally reinforce those motor patterns, those physical motor pathways.

And they basically lay another, you know, layer of cement and concrete around that. And so this is why habits are so stinking hard to break when they’re physical because they’ve been wired into your brain hardwired. And so it’s really hard to undo that. So if you’re taking 10, 000 breaths in a day or you’re sitting in a.

14 hours in this wretched position, then what ends up happening is that becomes your default. And so your breathing pattern becomes inefficient. So forget about your ability to stabilize your spine. Forget about your ability to create intra abdominal pressure. Forget about your ability to, you know, have good VO2 max and diaphragm function.

Check this out. Because you’re in this stress breathing pattern. You don’t access [00:15:00] your parasympathetic nervous system very well. And so what we see is that our best, smartest, most badass people on the earth are literally, they’re all go getters, they’re out there working their butts off and they can’t down regulate.

That means they can’t turn off at night. And what we’re seeing is we’re getting caught in this sympathetic loop versus being able to access that parasympathetic turn off, off switch like part of our bodies. And so What we start to see. And if you’ve ever done any measurement around heart rate variability, right, is that I should normally have a lot of variation in my heart rate.

When I breathe in, my heart rate slows down, right? When I breathe out, my heart rate accelerates. And that’s one of the reasons that yogis were holding their fingers is that we know is that they were measuring that change in heart rate. And what we start to see is that people who are breathing in their necks all the time, right?

You know, they get caught and are stressed and drink a ton of caffeine and can’t downregulate and they’re on their phone right before they go to bed. Literally, they’re caught in this sympathetic [00:16:00] loop and their brains think that they’re always in this stress environment. Boom, now we start to see cortisol flip.

So when you know the relationships that came about when they’re like, Hey, you know, sitting position, you know, changes cortisol. Well, this is the mechanism for that. And so, literally, The best thing you can do is understand that boy, sitting has these complex downstream effects. If you’ve ever tried to meditate, how difficult is to sit in a good position for 30 minutes?

It’s almost impossible. So what we found is the best thing you can possibly do is to remove that stimulus. And look at, you know, look at you know, sitting like going drinking with your friends. Is that like, you know, you know, you’re in for three or four tequila shots, right? But at some point you’re like, I gotta, I gotta manage this.

I’m gonna, you know, cause it’s gonna, it’s gonna bite me in the butt tomorrow. And that’s where I think the revolution is. And I’ll tell you, you know, we just bought my wife and I just, just threw down, we feel so strongly this week, converted our daughter’s fourth grade classroom to a standing classroom.

We 

Kelly Starrett: went to the district, [00:17:00] went to the principal, showed them the research, and they were like, we’re in. We’re totally in. And if you’ve read, people probably have read, they’ve read The Sports Gene, another great book you have to read by David Epstein. And brilliant, but there’s a great piece of research in there where they looked at sort of genetic.

predisposition for movement and that the mice, they were, they noticed that some mice were running a mile a day on average. And some mice were running three miles a day and on the treadmill, the mice wheel. And so what they’ve did is they bred those three mile mice. And in a couple of generations, they had seven mile mice.

And then they gave those mice who had this desire to move. They weren’t driven by food or anything, just want to run, run, run, born to run. And they literally give them Ritalin. Boom. They ran one mile. And so what we think is happening is that we’re, we’re giving some of the kids who we think have this high genetic predisposition for movement, we’re giving them ADHD drugs, and we’re literally suppressing their movement desire.

And what we know is there’s a book, another book, I’m going to keep throwing them out there called Raising Cane, which really looks at this, this [00:18:00] division between boys and girls at elementary school, middle school, high school, and boys are getting their butt kicked.

What’s the same reinforcement we’re seeing for adults? Now, we got interested in like sort of the more of a lifestyle components that were noticed that people aren’t sleeping right. They aren’t, they aren’t sleeping, you know, they’re not, they’re, they’re not hydrating. They’re sitting too much. And the reason that was in our face was because.

We were addressing it in our best athletes and you know, I think we’re you know You’ve done such an amazing job on your side of promoting Mobility right which is our language for reclaiming normal position, right? Really? We really push that language We’ve got away from stretching which is just doesn’t even make sense.

Yeah, 

Kelly Starrett: right stretching is a concept out of French hospitals in World War two Dealing with flexion contractures. Literally. That’s where it came from. And what we’re seeing now is, okay, we can be a lot more sophisticated. People are more sophisticated. And so now [00:19:00] they’re eating better. They’re moving better.

They’re, you know, they’re, they’re mobilizing, but we’re still seeing them stuck in these old patterns of lifestyle. And that’s where we’re like, holy crap, let’s, we just got to fix it once and for all. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s awesome. And you know, with that also comes obviously nutrition. I mean, you’re talking with kids where if, if a kid, if his breakfast consists of like 90 grams of sugar, what do you think is going to happen in 30 minutes?

Kelly Starrett: Well, go ahead and go 

Mike Matthews: ahead and give 90 grams of 

Kelly Starrett: sugar to your little dog and then lock your dog in your class, a little tiny room and watch him tear apart the house. I mean, that’s what that is, right? 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. And then see, then, and then comes lunch, which could be more sugar. And then come, you know, as that, that alone could be.

Create a, what would seem like a hyperactive kid when you know, it’s totally, and 

Kelly Starrett: no, just as an end of a couple, but we, we really value the case study and the end of one. We really feel like people should be end of one all the time thinking themselves as the great experiment. And it’s not, it’s not a universal, you know, application of principles are [00:20:00] universal, but the application sometimes is more nuanced.

But what we found is no, I’m a, you know, I’ve been trained in the physiology, I’ve been trained. You don’t have to be trained to walk into a classroom and see the one kid out of 50 who truly may have an ADHD diagnosis. That kid is, you know, like just needs to move to live, but we have a lot of kids who have this high desire to move.

We have a couple friends who they’ve been talked to by the district about their son. And we’re like, hey, hey, you know, don’t put your kids on drugs. Try this first. Just get them a standing desk. You know, like just work it out and, and, and they do. And the kids are like model model citizens. And so we think, we think that there’s this.

Large component of this, the TMJD dysfunction. That’s you 2 and a half hours a day on your cell phone bent over. You know, take a look at carpal tunnel. People are internally rotated, flattening out their carpal tunnels. The same thing happens if, you know, if you walk like a duck, you know, you see that your arches collapse, right?

If you stand like a [00:21:00] duck you basically collapse. Well, imagine As you internally rotate your shoulders to that dreaded kind of slouchy douche baggy shoulder position, we always talk about, well, the same thing happens to the, to the arches in your hands and wrists. You basically flatten those things out.

And so, I mean, just go down the list of problems. And, and what’s interesting is These are the things that get in the way of elite performance and it’s this thing that like this is preventable disease And so so much of this if we just make a little concerted effort to change the shape or change the course You know and everyone listening are having this experience that we see tremendous tremendous changes in their output that they literally start to feel better.

They move better. Everything just starts to upregulate a little bit because we, I really feel like, and most experts will agree that the body is seeking homeostasis, seeking back to where it wants to be. If you just give it a little feed and caring and, and I’ll tell ya, the strength and [00:22:00] conditioning community.

It’s going to be responsible for like really like saving the planet, not medicine, not big business. It’s coaches and seekers like the people listening to this who are like, you know, I can do better. I can take responsibility. That’s the revolution. 

Mike Matthews: And that what I understand how the body actually works and, and it also comes back to the end.

One point you brought up where as you said, yes, the principle is universal. I mean, that applies to. You know, take metabolism when we talk about weight gain, weight loss, our, our metabolisms all run on the same laws, but there is a, some people’s metabolisms are faster than others. You do have to learn what, where your body’s sweet spots are and what you can and can’t do.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah. Yeah. You know, a hundred percent. And you know, we, the more. You know, I’m so lucky that I get behind the scenes everywhere. I see everyone’s dirty laundry. I mean like everyone’s dirty laundry, but also I get to talk to like guys like Ben Greenfield and, and Dave Asprey and Tim Ferriss is a buddy of mine.

And those guys are like, you are like, you know. You know, [00:23:00] collators of information, you know, like your repositories for best practice. And one of the fun things about that is that we’ve seen that everyone ends up really with all of our boats pointed the same direction. And one of the ways that, because, because, you know, we’re all experimenting and ultimately the experiments all sort of yield the same results.

One of the exciting things that we’re, you know, we’ve been advocating for a long time and continue to advocate for is, you know, people have to get a good blood panel. You know, how do we know what we know, you know, and what, and people have been saying this forever about other things. What gets measured gets managed.

Well, we always say great diet and exercise, which diet, which exercise. Okay. We have some good, we have some good templates for that now, but the next piece is how do you measure and truly understand? Well, you’ve got to look at your blood panel and blood chemistry. And to do that, you know, we worked with a company called wellness effects.

Brilliant company really just [00:24:00] got a little bit more sensitive about just not saying, Hey, you’re, you’re, you’re functional, you’re alive, the car’s running, but like what’s going on with the car. And then we’ve recently started working with a company that out of Stanford brilliant physician there, Richard Lee, and it’s called gene solve.

And what they’ve done is basically been able to take this really full blood panel. And genetic testing, I, I’m telling you, it’s like Star Trek, you know, it turns out, for example, so Rob Wolf is a buddy of mine, right? And he was like, hey, we all need to back off on the fish oil. We were going crazy on the fish oil for a while, right?

Okay, yeah. And, and we were all, like, a lot of us were just, you know, dose and dose and dose and then And he was like, hey, you know, once we pulled out all these grains, it turns out we don’t need all this massive amounts of fish oil. 

So 

Kelly Starrett: we all back off on the fish oil because we’re not eating the soy, we’re not eating the grains.

Well, it turns out I have this gene that doesn’t allow me to process omega 3s very well. And so I actually have to double the official or triple it to have it have any effect. But the only way you would [00:25:00] know is this, you know, these, these keys, you know, so this is what’s so interesting, I think is now 

Mike Matthews: I’d like to get that 

Kelly Starrett: test done.

Yeah. Well, you know, we, on our site, we have a free an interview. We did a lecture with Dr. Lee on the website. And it’s about an hour long and it’s really talks about this neuroendocrine axis of looking at testosterone, looking at cholesterol, looking at vitamin D3, looking at cortisol. And you know, just to your point, you don’t have to be an expert in it, but you should understand, you know, everyone understands how the car works.

It’s got a little oil, it’s got some water, but we just don’t even have the basics of that. And then we’re surprised when the engine blows up, you know? 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, I mean, I, I think that there are, of course, the, the, the physiology that, of the body is vast, but there are certain key metrics that anybody can just understand easily, and Keep an eye on and see, I mean, something that you can do, you know, get, get your blood tested.

How often? I mean, [00:26:00] what would you say for the average person that, you know, they, they eat well, they exercise regularly just to kind of make sure that everything is working the way it should be. 

Kelly Starrett: Well, get a, get a baseline start by actually doing the, the test, you know, an example for my wife, for example, is that when we’ve talked about this before, but publicly is that, you know, my wife, we had a daughter who showed up a little early, it’s a little bit of a surprise.

Right. Six weeks early. And Julia had seven blood transfusions during that process. And she, she basically burned out her bone marrow, burned it out. And what we noticed was that her hematocrit was totally low, right? So her capacity to, her ferritin was low, her hematocrit was low, basically hemoglobin is low.

So she, she feels anemic all the time and isn’t able to. She isn’t able to sort of, you know, perform. She feels sluggish. Well, it turns out when we go in to look at her B vitamins like just like in the single digits, which is just so freakish. And when we started asking [00:27:00] that question, what’s going on? You know, it turns out she doesn’t process B vitamins.

And the one of the reasons is that she has this gene called the MTFR gene and which means it doesn’t allow her to process folate very well. And the folate is super important for this B vitamin piece. And so she has this She burns out her bone marrow and then also has this genetic predisposition for not processing B vitamins very well.

It takes us six years to put that together when we should have figured that out day one, right? And so at least, you know, it turns out, for example, I don’t process saturated fats like everyone else does. And so what that means is I can’t eat bacon three times a day. I can’t. My cholesterol will go through the roof.

And believe it or not, we’ve had a lot of really good friends who are excellent, meticulous coaches, but eat in the paleo way and their cholesterol has been 300 or 400. Which is, you know, why we don’t necessarily look at cholesterol as an absolute number anymore. We still look at it as kind of part of the diagnostic.

[00:28:00] What we’re seeing is, man, maybe you don’t need to eat 17 pounds of macadamia nuts and avocado. You know what I mean? You need enough fat, but you can actually moderate the fat. And the only way we know that is to really take a look. So, you know, what’s great is to get a baseline, understand the relationship in your diet and your lifestyle.

That’s how we’re measuring that stuff. And then we tweak up and down accordingly, you know, and that’s, I think we’re just living in this age where we’ve been able to have access to so much extraordinary information and being able to just synthesize this a little bit really means that you can feel better.

You can tack your pain, you can go faster. And you know, the goal is not to be 110 and dead and barely hold on. The goal is to be, you know, 110 and then just flame out. That’s the goal. Totally. Live, live live fast, live strong, live healthy, and then one day you just go to sleep and don’t wake up and that’s it.

That’s right, that’s the, that’s the great death. And so, you know, that’s where I think, you know, it The key here is that [00:29:00] it’s hard to talk to people about longevity. They feel fine. Yeah. Right. 

Mike Matthews: So, you know, it’s so often the future or whatever, who knows? 

Kelly Starrett: Impossible. And, and honestly, I had this conversation with like, you know, world’s best athletes.

The guy’s like, I’m a 23 year old millionaire in the NFL. What are you talking about? You know, I’m the best in the world. You know, I’m like, I won the Cy Young award. You mean, I have this conversation. I’m like, no, imagine if you’re, you’re the best pitcher in the world, but you’re only at 50 percent and then their minds start to explode.

And so the key for this is that we are, we get immediate benefits of performance. Plus we just start putting money in the bank and that’s what’s so extraordinary. You know, we start to make sense of what’s going on and, and it’s, as it’s democratized, prices have come down, suddenly you have access to science fiction.

And, you know, it’s easy. It’s easy. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, that’s awesome. I definitely want to check it out. Gene solved, right? 

Kelly Starrett: Yeah, that means I know and I don’t have any financial relationship right now other than I’m a fan I’m just a user going through this experience and as a 41 year old [00:30:00] male Finding out like boy my vitamin D wasn’t where I thought would be.

Yeah, 

Kelly Starrett: and I was taking the drops Yeah, I just wasn’t taking enough. How much were you 

Mike Matthews: taking? 

Kelly Starrett: No, I was just taking like, you know, casually, you know, I’d be like, Oh, I should probably take five drops here, you know, 5, 000, 

Mike Matthews: 3, 000, but I 

Kelly Starrett: just, I wasn’t leaning on it every day and we were fine. I’m religious 

Mike Matthews: on the vitamin D intake every day.

That’s so good. I, you know, I just, my son, my wife to have everybody like if you, I know some people are like, you know, vitamins, yeah, whatever, there are certain, there are certain ones you have to. Make sure that you’re that you that you get enough of certain other ones you could you probably okay if you eat if you eat Decently, but 

Kelly Starrett: that’s right.

And you know and I put the vitamin D drops out for my girls every day 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, 

Kelly Starrett: no, basically, you know at the at the climate the height that we live We physically cannot get enough vitamin D in the winter. 

Mike Matthews: You can’t. 

Kelly Starrett: You’re just 

Mike Matthews: not exposed to the sun enough. And so, I mean, most people aren’t going to be exposed to sun enough anyway, even I I’m in Florida and if you, I think it would [00:31:00] take, I wrote an article on this and looking at just the simple research of it, it would be, I would need basically like 75 to 80 percent of my body exposed to 20 to 30 minutes of Florida sun a day.

But. You know, I don’t have, I don’t do that. I don’t go out and sunbathe every day. 

Kelly Starrett: Well, can you imagine telling your boss like, Hey, it’s, it’s PTH prime tanning hours. I’ll be outside in my speedo. I mean, 80 percent of my body is garish to most people. People like start at, I don’t want to see 80 percent of you, you know?

So, you know, I think this is where. We start to be able to dial in and really say, Hey, I’m getting enough vitamin D or I’m not getting enough versus just sort of shotgunning it. You know, I guess it, it’s ish. It feels good ish. 

Yeah. Yeah. You know, 

Kelly Starrett: and, and here’s the other piece is that. You know, we know that if you miss, you get a bad night’s sleep, you’re 30 percent I’m in compromise.

You can be pre diabetic, you know, for 24 to 48 hours and you can measure that yourself with a cheap blood meter. 

But 

Kelly Starrett: what I found is that when I was traveling, I started pulling way [00:32:00] back on dessert and I love ice cream, but I literally like, it was like, I am, I’m traveling, there’s no way I can eat dessert.

And I started making a different decision about wine. You know, my good friend, Matt Lalonde out of Harvard, he’s, you know, kind of a, he’s in the, you know, Measured quantified self paleosphere stuff. And he’s like, Kelly, you are going to die. You cannot eat dessert and drink wine when you travel. He’s like, you just, your body is too messed up, bro.

And I was like, no, Matt, I’m Kelly Starrett. The laws of physics don’t apply to me. And of course, as soon as I had to stare down some of those metrics, you know, my cholesterol was low. But we pulled it apart and I had radical inflammatory markers even though I thought I was doing really, I’m not, I’m not a heathen, but like I thought I was doing best practice, but it turns out it’s the lifestyle component pieces that are playing a bigger role than you think.

You know, you’ve got to get seven and a half hours of sleep a night. You’ve got to do it as the baseline. Most people need eight or nine. If you’re training children, ten and a half. Baseline, [00:33:00] right? And if you’re training the way people are training now, that’s a 10 hour piece. You know we work with Alan Lim who’s a, he was a sports performance, sports physiologist, sports performance expert.

And he was, he was with the tour de France. Like he was a team radio shacks. This guy, right? And he invented Scratch Labs as his company, if you’ve ever seen the Scratch hydration stuff. You know, and he’s like, look, you can’t cheat your physiology. You just, there are no shortcuts around it. And, and, you know, we were just, where, where were we, Juliet?

Oh, it was LA. We saw all these testosterone clinics, T clinics everywhere. 

Mike Matthews: Super big right now. 

Kelly Starrett: Oh Lord. Well, it turns out that just pumping people full of tests just basically backfills and floods the system into cortisol, into cholesterol. And like, it’s not just the solution. And what we really have to do is we need to take a much more sophisticated organic look 

saying, 

Kelly Starrett: Hey, you’re eating right.

You’ve got to get enough sleep. You’ve got to drink two to three liters of water a day, and then we can have a conversation about it. You have to 

Mike Matthews: [00:34:00] exercise. I mean, you 

Kelly Starrett: have to, you 

Mike Matthews: know, 

Kelly Starrett: we, we you know, I love to lift weights. I love it. I’m a big strong guy. You know, people don’t realize, but I am six, about six, two, two 35, you know, and I’ve got little abs on the side.

I mean, but the thing is. Juliette and I prior, Juliette is like, if you saw her, this is an example of my wife is that we were out working with the WWE about three weeks ago and all the entertainers like John Cena, like everyone. And as we’re walking in. Some of the fans thought Juliette was one of the divas, right?

She’s so jacked. And you know, they’re like, Charlotte, Charlotte. I’m like, something’s doing right, Juliette, because you look good, right? My 40 year old wife is confused with a diva. And the 41, the issue is, we prioritize our conditioning. above all of the things. Just like you’re saying, you’ve got to suffer a little bit.

If you’re a strength athlete, you can still suffer if you’re a rope, but you’ve got to do some kind of suffering inside something that looks like a movement practice, not just exercise, [00:35:00] but every day you got to suffer. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. And you know, that’s just one of those things. It’s, it’s a basic element of just, it’s probably the healthiest.

thing you can do is just exercise regularly and put your body under that stress regularly. And I would say that probably training your muscles is especially if you look at, you know, going back to longevity where the amount of lean mass that you have in your body is just, it’s just correlated with all cause mortality.

Especially as you start to get older for obvious reasons, like, well, if you’re strong and you’re 75, you’re probably not going to fall and, you know, break your hip. But then also, you know, related to the immune system, the more lean mass you have, the more immune more of a reserve you have for your immune system.

If you ever get sick or, or, or experience a, you know an extreme trauma. So yeah, when I, when I, when I have kind of like simple conversations with people that are new to the whole, cause you know, it’s very confusing and there’s so many, so much contradictory information. You have the balanced nutrition side of things, get them, get the majority of your calories from nutritious foods high protein [00:36:00] dieting wins.

In every way, like, there’s just no arguing that anymore. Use carbohydrates depending on what you do. If you move your body a lot, you need more. If you don’t move your body that much, you don’t need as much. And then exercise and train your muscles. And, you know, it doesn’t have to be hardcore weightlifting.

I mean, I’m like you. I like to lift. I like to lift heavy. I like being strong. I just find it fun. You know, I think you’re, you’re more into Olympic lifts and stuff too as well, right? Well, we like to 

Kelly Starrett: lift and, you know I’m friends with Mark Bell and Jesse Burdick and you know, all the power lifters. I mean, I know all these guys and hang out with them.

And so there’s a little bias towards some heavy squatting. And I, what I love to do, I love deadlift. I love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. So, you know, the key here is. What you’re saying is a movement practice and you have to, you have to put yourself under some kind of load. Even if you’re not push jerking, you better be pressing heavy dumbbells over your head, 

you 

Kelly Starrett: know, 

you 

Kelly Starrett: know, and, and, and you, you can’t actually express good movement patterning unless you’re like doing a little deadlifting, you know here’s an example.[00:37:00] 

Our Evelyn Stevens at our gym. She is the number one road cyclist in America, top five in the world. She’s just won the, this inaugural 17 stage race in former East Germany called the Wolfhardt. And she’s, she’s like. I mean, badass. Right. And you know, this year we had her squatting a ton and she was like, Hey, look, I’m afraid to get big.

And I was like, I know, I know. And we do a lot of rest, but I’m like, we use the squatting to just reclaim good function. You know, my nine year old daughter, overhead squats and front squats, not a lot of weight, but enough to challenge her position, 35 pounds. And so that’s really what I think people are missing is they’re missing that you’re good.

You’re wired this way and you’ve got to do it. All the things that your body is set up to do. So if that’s Pilates, you’re going to hit all the corners. If it’s yoga, you’re going to do all the things your body is supposed to do. That’s why yoga is so difficult for people. But then you’ve got to also breathe hard and lift some heavy weights.

If you’re doing [00:38:00] those things, otherwise, you know, some, some version of Olympic lifting plus some hard running you’re in there. If you do kettlebells. Chances are you’re probably hitting all of those pieces. The pistol is in there, the goblet squats in there, all the snatches are in there. You know, you’re getting pretty full movement patterning.

That’s why guys like Pavel, you know, and cook are all about the kettlebell cause like, Hey, you can swing the rest of your life, you know, but to your point, you’ve got to have a movement practice. I was just lecturing at the Stanford medical school. And their lifestyle class. And I was like, Hey, who here has a movement practice?

And like everyone raised their hands. And I’m like, what are you doing? He’s like, I’m on my bike. I’m like exercise, not a movement practice, you know? And I’m like, what do you do? He’s like, run. I’m like exercise, not a movement practice. The girls raise their hand. She’s like. Pilates. I was like, move it, practice.

Good job. Like, and I think that that’s the, the problem is that we’ve confused exercise. I need to get some exercise 

with, 

Kelly Starrett: I need to practice moving like a human being. And, [00:39:00] and that’s why, you know, part of the mobility. You know, prescription is, you know, people ask us all the time, Hey, can you prescribe a, you know, a general plan for me every day?

I’m like, yeah, you’re responsible for all the ranges of motion and all the tissue health from your head to your feet. So, right. So you know, here’s the 15 minutes today. But then that’s seven times a week that aggregates into 90 minutes a week. And then pretty soon you can start to see how we make changes, but you’ve got to touch all of the corners regularly.

Otherwise they’re gone. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve noticed big changes in my own body over the last four or five years when I started focusing on heavy compound weightlifting. Whereas before in the past when I started working out, it was a lot of isolation stuff and a lot of high reps and body building. Yeah, I didn’t know what I was doing.

Right. So no one 

Kelly Starrett: did. 

Mike Matthews: So, so dicking around with that stuff. And then I make the change four or five years ago, somewhere four years ago. And of course, I mean, my body looks much different now. And I’m, I mean, I’m lifting two to three times the weight that I was able to lift then. But [00:40:00] also my, I’ve become much more flexible.

I mean, my mobility has improved a ton just by doing that. And, and of course doing these exercises with proper form, you know, squat deep make, you know, hit, hit the deadlift correctly bench press correctly, military press correctly, do all these things correctly. And I’ve amazed at how much more functional, I guess you’d say my body is just by doing that.

Kelly Starrett: Well, you know, there’s this idea that You know, people don’t talk about this, but if you move inefficiently Your body, it’s like, it’s like having one of the wheels in your car pointed the wrong direction. And what ends up happening is it creates, you can drive a hundred miles an hour with your handbrake on when your wheels go in the wrong direction, but you start to create, you know, patterns and problems in the car.

And the same thing happens in your body that if you’re running with your feet turned out, you’re going to create sort of tension and connective tissue in your calves and in your hips. that are supporting that movement pattern, which is the inefficient pattern. So you get stiffer and that creates even worse problems.

And [00:41:00] unfortunately, the more efficient you move and the more you really air towards that virtuosity concept, really making sure that, you know, I’m using load and cardiorespiratory demand and speed and metabolic demand. I’m using that to challenge the robustness of my position, 

right? 

Kelly Starrett: You know, Brian McKenzie does this thing where he’s like, Hey, we’re going to go run.

And the second you break technique, you got to walk. And people were like, well, I can’t run very far. I’m like, that’s because you suck that bad at running, you know? And, and people were like, what? But I can still run. I’m like, well, I could still lift this deadlift with a rounded back. Should I continue to do it?

And I think once you sort of understand that we can make this look, if you just need to sweat your balls off. Get on an exercise bike. You’re less likely to hurt yourself and go ahead and make yourself vomit, right? You know or or or drag a sled or or do something that were just the margins for errors You want to just be a piece of meat go be a piece of meat, 

right?

Kelly Starrett: But the rest of the time you’ve got to [00:42:00] be this conscious Technique driven person. And that’s a lifetime’s work. And we know, we always say now we’re like, no, no, no. We play the long game. We’re in it to just be extraordinary. And as you noticed, You know, you came into the game with a huge engine. I’m sure isolation, you know, leg press still meant you could squat a ton, but my squat 

Mike Matthews: was actually terrible because I did this.

I did the standard neglect legs and do half squats and do it all wrong. 

Kelly Starrett: Well, right. You, you were a man who grew up in the eighties and nineties, right? And I think what’s amazing is that when you realize it’s practice. Then you literally can get better and better and better and better. You know, I’m 40 years old, you know, I just cleaned three 70 not long ago.

I dealt with 600 but the things that matter most to me is that I can run a 5k all out. And kill people that I jump into the pool and swim that I can race that I can 

do 

Kelly Starrett: paddleboarding [00:43:00] and I don’t hurt One of the keys I think that we’re helping people understand is the resting state of the human being is pain free And it’s so shocking when you talk to people like oh, it’s totally normal.

I was a you know, I put soccer in college So of course I’m arthritic and I hurt every day and have to take ibuprofen to get up out of bed, you know, you know, you should get out of bed and feel extraordinary. And what’s happening is that that’s not the case. So what’s going on? You’re designed to be ridden hard.

You just can’t ride hard and put yourself away wet every single day. And that’s really the, the secret about the sitting is that that’s what we’re doing. We’re basically taking this extraordinary machine and then just crushing it. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. And back to that, I wanted to actually ask you on the sitting. Okay.

So. Then how do we sit properly? Like what or what can we do? Do we need to get up every so often and stretch or like, 

Kelly Starrett: I think that’s intuitive, you know? For example, I really, when I work with professional football teams, I try to mitigate the amount of sitting they do on the sideline. I tell them to raise the [00:44:00] height of their benches, right?

So that we don’t close the hip down. So there’s a couple of things, you know, that you can understand around the spine is that if you stand up, there’s sort of, yeah. Three components to spinal stabilization. One is the butt sets your pelvis position just like we did before. You just squeeze your butt, right?

That sets that pelvic position. The second is that my abs and spine and the musculature of my trunk then brace that position. So I need to know how to brace without pushing. I’m trying to create a. belt around myself. And if I want to stabilize my spine to make a smaller belt, my abs shouldn’t bulge out like I’m a bodybuilder.

I’m a fat guy. I should be like, my stomach should be flat like a gymnast and the gymnast who are brutally strong. None of them have sort of distended bellies. They’ll have flat bellies, right? You can see that in your head. So You know, if you go to Cirque du Soleil, you’ll see what I’m talking about. All the strong men, all the acrobats all have these rock flat bellies.

Right? Because if you push your belly out, what you’re really doing is creating more space to stabilize. And your abs don’t work really well when they’re in arc. They want to be flat. 

[00:45:00] Right? 

Kelly Starrett: You’re not sucking in or hollowing. We’re stiffening. The third component to that is the torsion that I set in my hips, so that, that slight torque by screwing my hips into the ground.

And by the way, what I just described to you was Tadasana in yoga. I mean, people have thought critically about how to do this for a long time. It gets kind of muddled in the translation, it’s modern, right? But this is the same setup as your deadlift setup. And, and so what ends up happening is, if you sit down, can you squeeze your butt?

Nope. So, can you create torque in your hip? In fact, no. Your legs are out in front of you and they’re loose. The only way you can really tighten up your hip is to sit in full lotus position, right? Or sit like you’re doing a really, really wide box squat, which is almost obscene. You’re like, Hey, take a look at my crotch, you know?

And like, that’s never going to fly on the airplane. And so what we’ve done is we’ve lost two of the three key stabilization principles and techniques and models. That means it’s all on my abs. And so what ends up happening is that just my trunk, now I can brace [00:46:00] that, but basically what’s happening is I’m just going to wobble back and forth over my sit bones, right?

My 

Kelly Starrett: trunk is now connected to my pelvis, but my pelvis isn’t connected to anything. So enter what we call the four horsemen. And the rectus femoris is that quad that crosses the knee and the hip. It gets tight. And I can tell you that a lot of people tell us they get knee pain when they sit down. 

Right.

And it’s actually, there’s a technical term for it in the, in literature called theater sign. And that, that was when people first described it as they were sitting at the theater and their knees would hurt. But that rectus femoris is basically holding your pelvis forward in a kind of a tensioned position.

And while it pulls forward, it’s also pulling on your kneecap. So your knees start to grind into your leg a little bit. Well the iliacus, which is inside your pelvis, right inside your pelvic bowl. blends with the psoas, but inserts inside your leg. And so now you have two big kind of movers that are related to knee to pine, that [00:47:00] kind of pelvis and then inside pelvis to femur.

Those are tight. And then psoas, which is like the quads of your low back, right? Which goes all the way up from sort of L1 all the way to L5. The, it’s the filet mignon of the human being. It goes to your leg inside. Yep. Right? That gets tight. And then in the back you have the QL. 

Mike Matthews: problems squatting. 

Kelly Starrett: Of course.

Well, you know, especially if you’re overextended. And so what ends up happening is that QL gets short in the back because I’m basically going to shorten that down. Now that’s fine when I’m sitting where I’m in an overextended position. I’m not sitting in a flex position. I’m erring towards a more bone on bone position, right?

It’s like the end of the doorjamb. The problem is when I stand up, what happens? Well, my tissues have become adaptively short and stiff. And now I have a whole system that basically is biasing me towards that dumping my pelvis forward position. So I can’t stabilize very well. In fact, I, I’m basically putting a bunch of crazy wires and guidelines on my spine to get stable.

And then when I [00:48:00] stand up, they introduce a ton of sheer load on my back. And so now imagine. If I’m running and when I come down, it can be upwards of four to six times body weight on a single leg, right? And all of that force gets transmitted through a spine and a hip that’s brutally short. And guess what happens?

We wear out the mechanics. Like, it’s just obvious. So, you know, why did I get interested? And sitting because I was having to undo it all the time. And then when my athletes stopped sitting, the stuff went away. 

Mike Matthews: So practically speaking for us, for the people that, you know, work on a computer a lot or whatever, it does boil down to, I mean, what I like to do is probably every 20 or 30 minutes I get up and I do a couple of stretches.

I mean, I get up, I drink a lot of water throughout the day, so I’m, I’m kind of going pee every hour, two hours anyway. So I’m walking around, but I do make a point of just getting up and stretching and not remaining in a, in a seated position for, you know, long, long periods of time. [00:49:00] 

Kelly Starrett: You know, sitting, understanding that when I do sit, I want to sit in a good position so I can still breathe, right?

I’m still organized. Like I was like if I was in Lotus, but the other issue here is that I can, you know, with a, one of the problems with the standing movement and people are on it, they’re getting, they’re getting savvy to it. But one of the problems is that what we’ve advocated for and told people is, Oh, you just need to.

10, 000 desk. And so, you know, people were like, Oh, I need a treadmill desk. And you know, or I need to some high and we’re like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. A cardboard box is cheap covered in some construction paper. Put your kid’s faces on it and set your computer on that cardboard box. And ultimately it’s nice to lean once in a while standing all day long is tough.

You know, what we like people to do is have a bar stool. So that you can lean on the barstool, that leaves your hips open, but then you can also put one foot up on the barstool. You can put your hip on the barstool. So it suddenly creates sort of an environment where you can [00:50:00] constantly be changing positions, and you’re avoiding the dreaded piece.

And then when you actually sit down, it feels amazing. At the end of the night, you down regulate, brrrr, sitting is like, it’s like an ambient. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, I can imagine. I actually want to try. I’m going to try it. I’m going to try a sort of standing set up. I mean, I, when I’m working at home, I usually put, if I’m, you know, put my laptop on the, on the kitchen bar and stand.

And like you said, I mean, after, after a few hours, I’m like, this is actually not so easy. No. And it’s, 

Kelly Starrett: and what you see is that people start to default to their tendencies, which is like one leg turned out. And so you’re always trying to cultivate a good position and remind yourself to come back to that baseline, you know, where we’re, Where you know, just always thinking about, can we get back into good shapes?

And so it’s okay. It’s okay to wander and come back and wander and come back. And you know, the key is to just remove the most noxious aspect of that, which is the full sitting. And I think when, when you do that, it’s, it’s pretty remarkable. You know, you’re, you’re, you’re, do you feel better and you’ll notice that you have less [00:51:00] stiffness in your back.

These are the same, you know, recommendations that we have around like not wearing flip flops, you know, like you can just remove some of the noxious stimuli and lo and behold. You know, the whole, the whole thing up regulates and you start to feel better and you only need to believe you, you don’t take my word for it.

Go see it for yourself. 

Yeah. 

Kelly Starrett: Don’t need a 10, 000 desk. You know, you can get a, you know, get a, go to Ikea and get yourself a little add on to your little table. But you know, it turns out a lot of geniuses like Hemingway. Stood up when they wrote, isn’t that weird? Huh, I didn’t even know that. There was this guy who came to our gym once and he was a sleep researcher.

And they had just kept this guy awake for like six days. Right? I mean whatever it was. 

Mike Matthews: Don’t you die? How is he even alive? Well, 

Kelly Starrett: I mean, they kept him awake as long as people could stay awake, right? So he was delirious. He, well, wait. He didn’t sit down. And so he, the only rules that they kept him upright, 

right?

Kelly Starrett: So after like [00:52:00] three days, something like that, you know, he just took this test and he crushed it. He’s like, I am, he’s getting all cocky. He’s like, I crushing this. And they’re like, okay, now all we want you to do is take the same test, but sit down. And as soon as he sat down, he started to slur. I started to become belligerent and he, he, he accused the testers of drugging him.

Wow. And gassing him like you drugged me and they literally blacked out on his face and the only difference was as soon as he sat down, he triggered the whole thing and the whole thing just fell apart. Wow. That’s really interesting. 

Mike Matthews: I know you got to run in a second, but you have a new book coming out or is it right?

Kelly Starrett: Right. October 21st. It’s called ready to run. And what we saw was that there were excellent, excellent coaches around the technique of running. You know, Dr. Romanoff, Brian [00:53:00] McKenzie’s book is excellent. If you’re a Chi runner, you know, there’s a lot of people doing a good job of educating us on how to run.

But what we saw was that people physically did not have the capacity. to embody the teaching and kept having the problems. So, what we’ve done is, you know, we, we are huge fans of the Bob Crispin Dougal’s book Crispin Dougal, I think, his book Born to Run. And it’s so inspiring. But literally what we saw was that people went out into the world with their new flat shoes.

And by the way, everyone’s shoes should be flat. That’s a given, but you know, they, we think now that you should be in flat shoes all the time. And if your mechanics aren’t perfect, give yourself a little heel, like a little three to four millimeter differential will not wreck you, but you can’t cruise around.

We want you to cruise flat, be flat, be barefoot. But when we looked at sort of the. culture and the environment of supporting runners. What we saw is that runners weren’t wearing compression. They didn’t have healthy tissues. [00:54:00] They didn’t know how to hydrate effectively. They, you know, they didn’t have some baselines.

And what we did is we basically gave people a blueprint to get their tissues strong enough. And ready enough to handle the mechanics of running soundly. And it’s so bad that Chris Powers, who was the, he’s one of the APTA, American Physical Therapy Association stars, right, he’s the head of the USC Physical Therapy Department.

He literally made a position statement where he said, it’s safer to heel strike. Then to run correctly and what he saw was that wasn’t just a person who’s casually throwing that out So what you’re seeing was that people could not run correctly and not get injured That we know that you know 30 million runners in America every year 80 percent of them are injured in a year 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, I mean right into my line of work just emailing with a lot of people I mean, I’m sure you do too.

Kelly Starrett: Well, you know, it’s a disaster. In fact, Juliette and I call it the modern running industrial complex. [00:55:00] You know, because, you know, we’re like, okay, running, running is the skill. It’s the thing that makes us human. You know, you read the story of the human body, you know. That, that great work that just came out a couple years ago about sort of the anthropology of the human body written by the anthropologist out of Harvard.

Okay. 

Kelly Starrett: You’re like, it’s running is the thing that allowed us to hunt, to move. It’s the skill that links nearly every human sport we do. And yet we don’t teach kids to run. Every kid runs perfectly. They run on the ball of their foot. They ran neutral foot, right? No one heel strikes. No child heel strikes as they sprint in the kindergarten, but no one heel strikes until about the first grade.

And all of a sudden we see this divergent motor pattern where half the kids run correctly and half the kids start heel striking. And what you’re seeing is the implication of sitting eight hours a day for nine, 10 months of the year. Plus the, the addition of these high heel shoes, plus no motor practice skills, no move practice skills.

And what ends up happening is we end up sort of cycling down [00:56:00] this pathway of defunct motor patterning. And so, big surprise when you’ve been heel striking for 30 years. Then you got a flat shoe and went to learn to run correctly. You couldn’t handle it. You basically took your big engine and dropped it into a, you go and bent the frame.

The car blew up. Right? Yeah. So I think that’s, what’s so fun about this is we’re saying, Hey, look, we know this is how you’re wired. You should have one skill that allows you to. Run fast and slow because if you take a heel striker, play Frisbee or sprint, they run correctly. You can’t sprint heel striking, right?

You in fact you can’t even heel strike barefoot. I mean, you can for like eight seconds and then you’re going to, you’re going to start shortening your stride and running correctly. And I think that’s, what’s so interesting about the running movement is it’s become such a, a construct of the shoes I’m wearing.

Can you imagine? And we, we feel strong. You should be able to run an issue wearing combat boots. This is how you run. It’s the same technique. 

Yeah. 

Kelly Starrett: Right. Can you imagine telling your sergeant major, like, You know what, sergeant major, I gotta put on my maximal cushion [00:57:00] shoes, and I gotta, you know, With my gel inserts.

Nonsense. And I think that’s the problem, is that, We’ve really lost the idea of, You know, how do we get ready, how do we prepare the tissues, and we have Amazing, amazing interviews with Stacey Sims, who’s the leading hydration researcher out of of Stanford talking about how to really look at, you know, delve deep into your urine.

Are you hydrated? Are you getting enough electrolytes? Are you absorbing the water? You know, where can you wear compression? How does that impact, you know, and just. Developing a practice around actually being ready to run and you know, even just the diaphragm stiffness we see in people. We interviewed Jill Miller, talked about the diaphragm.

You know, we get women who talk about it can’t go run because they have bladder incontinence and you know, we just are seeing that running is a great diagnostic tool. The problem is you can run terribly for decades until you have a problem. And all of a sudden one day you’ve worn a hole in your kneecap, you know, and you’re like, well, I guess, I guess that’s it.

I guess I wasn’t designed to run as, even though I’m a human being. So what we tried to do is just [00:58:00] take all of that, what we think is low hanging fruit, very actionable. We gave people standards. This is what we think you should be. And here’s how you can get there. And remember, you know, Greg Cook is really good at this.

He’s like, Hey, the function movement screen is a way of sort of assessing that you’re not giving up capacity. To get some other capacity, right? People sort of misunderstood the FMS. And, and I think what’s really great is what we’ve done is tried to establish. Movement standards, like, can you get into the bottom position of a pistol?

Well, if you can’t, that’s one of the reasons that your ankles are torched and you have plantar fasciitis and heel problems. So let’s get back to that. And when you’ve just come through a brutal cycle of running, well, I bet you look stiff. So how do you know how stiff you are and how far and what to keep an eye on?

And we’ve just made this like 12 easy steps. I’m, this book is amazing. It’s going to, it’s, you know, it’s really, really good. 

Mike Matthews: That’s awesome. And what’s the title again? It’s called ready to run. Ready to run. Cool. You said it’s out in October, [00:59:00] right? October 21st. You can actually pre order it now. Okay, great.

I’ll, I’ll add it to the to the website. No worries. 

Kelly Starrett: But you know, what we think is that people are already do look, if you’re out there trying to run, you. Kudos to you because you’re doing the hard work. And this is the easy work. You know, let’s, let’s make it so your feet don’t hurt after running. Or, you know, when my wife and I travel, we always run wherever we, you know, when we’re there.

And the idea is, hey, we can You know, we always prioritize conditioning running is the thing that runners, you know, that travelers should be able to do, but boy, sit on an airplane, you have cankles and then you’re going to go load those cankles with a five K. I don’t think so. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, totally. Okay, great.

Well, that’s awesome. This is a lot of great information and I’m going to link that book in, in the post. You know, you got to run to your daughter’s birthday. That’s cool. And anything else that you just want to finish and close off with? Why don’t you, like, where everyone can find you, you know, the standard kind of 

Kelly Starrett: Sure.

Well, you know, our, our site is mobility wad and we [01:00:00] just posted like our 1100th video literally. And you know, there’s, we have a pro version of the site. Don’t let that fool you. We we basically have created a sort of an open source content, but there’s about 600 free videos on there where you can start, you know, you type in, you can use all the search features and start taking a crack at fixing yourself.

It’s very, very simple. We have a book that’s still on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s called Becoming a Supple Leopard, which we really think is like, we tried to make a Betty Crocker cookbook for 

people. 

Kelly Starrett: You know, it’s so simple. 

Yeah. 

Kelly Starrett: And I don’t think people realize that like they really can impact They’re paying and their friends pain and their mom’s pain by just even rolling around on a ball Yes, it’s so low tech and so simple and yeah, it’s really you can really change your ear the quality of your life So check us out a little bit 

Mike Matthews: like what I what I push with mobility is that?

And like it goes back to what you were saying about stretching where I was never much into stretching because it didn’t really serve a purpose. Like, I [01:01:00] don’t care if I can get another inch on this or whatever, but mobility is, is much more purpose driven where I can work on cause I, you know, I’m in the gym, I’m lifting weights.

My, my sport of choice is golf, which is a puts all kinds of weird stresses on the body. And so I, I run into different things. And then I, I mean, I use your book all the time. I find that use your videos. Find, find mobility exercises that I can do that hit spots, work through it, and then immediately see improvements.

As opposed to, you know, stretching a muscle that I can maybe be a little, I can get closer to a split or something, but what does that do for me? 

Kelly Starrett: That’s right. I mean, that’s a hundred percent. Giving it context, and also what we found is that a lot of the athletes I was working with, man, they were stiff.

And you know, you know, you know what doesn’t stretch or doesn’t move is beef jerky. We had to come up with a different plan. You have to chew beef jerky to get any action there. And people were beef jerky ified. So what we noticed was that when we gave people different tools, they made the best solution.

And ultimately, you know where you’re tight and what your problem is. [01:02:00] And as soon as you’re empowered to take a crack at it, it’s remarkable. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, that’s great. All right, awesome. Well, thanks a lot for taking the time, Kelly. I really appreciate it. I’m excited to get this out there. I know that you know, people are going to, this is all what you’re talking about.

Everything is up their alley. 

Kelly Starrett: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate the time. And you know, we always laugh when people are listening to our podcast. I’m like, you can’t get that hour back. You have to learn something from it, please. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. No, tons of good information. So thanks again, Kelly. And I’ll let you know when it’s up.

Please. Cheers. Talk to you soon. Okay. Cool. Hey, it’s Mike again. Hope you liked the podcast. If you did go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. Also, head over to my website at www.

muscleforlife. com where you’ll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you’ll also find a bunch of different articles that I’ve written. I release a new one almost every day, actually. I release kind of like four to six new articles a week. And you can also find my [01:03:00] books and everything else that I’m involved in over at muscleforlife.

com. Alright, thanks again. Bye.