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TMHS 675: Secret Mobility Exercises To Upgrade Your Body & Performance – With Juliet & Kelly Starrett

Longevity is a popular topic in the health and wellness space. But what’s often overlooked is the quality of that lifespan. Living longer can be incredible, but only when the body and mind are healthy, strong, and resilient. That’s why I love the book Built to Move by Kelly and Juliet Starrett.

Built to Move is a guide to implementing movement practices that will improve your quality of life, mobility, and overall function. No matter your fitness level or income, Built to Move provides a simple and accessible guide to moving your body better. In this interview, you’re going to hear some of the main mobilization practices from the book and how you can easily add them into your life.

You’ll hear about the incredible benefits of sitting on the floor, walking, hip extensions, and so much more. We can all benefit from more mobility and functionality in our daily lives, and I hope this interview inspires you to live a full life doing the things you enjoy with the people you love. Please enjoy this interview with the amazing Kelly and Juliet Starrett!

In this episode you’ll discover:

  • The surprising health benefits of sitting on the floor.
  • An important distinction between longevity and durability.
  • How our modern environment limits our movement patterns.
  • What marathon sitting is.
  • The interesting field of sedentary biology.
  • How to encourage your body to crave certain movements.
  • What it means to create a movement rich environment.
  • The importance of having awareness and agency over your movements.
  • What it means to be durable.
  • The definition of positional inhibition.
  • How to improve the posture of your neck, shoulders, and back.
  • The number of steps you should take daily to increase your longevity.
  • A necessary behavior for creating sleep pressure.
  • The most simple and accessible way to add movement into your day.
  • How walking can aid in neuroplasticity.

Items mentioned in this episode include:

Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Model Health Show. If you haven’t done so already, please take a minute and leave a quick rating and review of the show on Apple Podcast by clicking on the link below. It will help us to keep delivering life-changing information for you every week!

Transcript:

SHAWN STEVENSON: Welcome to The Model Health Show. This is fitness and nutrition expert Shawn Stevenson, and I'm so grateful for you tuning in with me today. Did you know that there is a specific movement test that's correlated with how long you're going to live? Being able to do this specific test will inform you of how long your lifespan is going to be and your health span. So, we don't want to just increase our lifespan, we want to increase our health span. This is being able to be functional and healthy and free from disease and degradation as long as possible. That's really the mission, it's to increase our health span. And here's the most important part of this equation is that life is movement. If we're looking at what's alive in biology, we're seeing things that are in action, we're seeing movement take place. When death sets in, we're talking about the ceasing of movement, the ceasing of activity. And so being that life is movement, to find a test that we all can do that's correlated with our lifespan, it should actually make a lot of sense.

 

And today we're going to be talking about what that movement test is and how we can improve our performance on that movement test, plus so much more. We're going to be hearing from some individuals that have literally changed my life. The things that I've learned from our special guests, I use in my life personally every single day. Two of the smartest human beings that I've ever met personally, and to be able to have this information that you're going to get access to today, to really help improve our mobility and our functionality in our day-to-day life so we could just show up better in life, to show up better in our relationships, to show up better in our work performance and so much more. It's so important.

 

And that's what it's really all about. At the end of the day, we want to be able to do the things that we want to do and to learn these simple accessible keys to improving our mobility. By the way, this is coming from the people who put the term mobility into popular culture. That's who we have today. Our mobility was not a thing until our special guests actually helped package that up and create the Mobility WOD or Mobility Workout of the Day. They are the inventors of said principle. Now this of course is so integrated into our culture. We've got mobility being talked about over here and over there, and this is wonderful because it's become a part of our popular lexicon in the health space, let's be clear. The average person might not have this being a part of their vocabulary. So we want to teach this information, we want to exude it, obviously be the model but also helping people to learn this language, and most importantly, becoming more physically literate, being able to not just know terminology, but know movements, know movement practices that help to keep our tissues supple and functional again so we can do the things that we want to do, to be able to do the things that we love for as long as possible. And that is possible.

 

So again, I'm really, really excited about this episode. Now, another common barrier of entry to becoming more physically literate and to "exercise" is accessibility to gyms, accessibility to workout equipment. Obviously, if you have a body, you have a gym. If you have a body, there's so much that you could do. The human body is so remarkable in its ability to absorb these nutrient inputs, just from moving your body in creative ways. However, there are wonderful companies that are taking action to make creative movement more accessible with very simple fitness tools that actually have been utilized for centuries. And so, it's time honored, ancient wisdom, modern application, and I'm talking about the fitness tools from Onnit. Onnit is the premier place to get access to steel clubs, steel maces, primal kettlebells, battle ropes, and so much more to up-level our fitness no matter where we are in the world.

 

My oldest son, Jorden, is a personal trainer and he's traveling from client to client, and he's picking up and taking my pieces of equipment by the way, he needs to get his own, he's taking my pieces of equipment to his class no matter where they are. Whether it's him throwing the battle rope into his trunk or grabbing a couple of the primal bells with steel clubs and maces, he's utilizing these tools with his clients because they're so easy to travel with, they're so easy to utilize when talking about adding in. Of course, we've got so much we could do with our bodies but now we can add in another 100 different exercises by utilizing some of these different tools. And they are wonderful for improving our mobility, improving our body's ability to function through a variety and ranges of motion. So this is dramatically decreasing our susceptibility to injury and that's what's so important as well, because it's not just being able to do the things that we want to do, it's also preventing fast degradation and if an injury should occur, if something ever happens, people who are more functional, people who have more muscle, people who have practiced improving their mobility, really training for those abnormal things that can happen in day-to-day life, they recover far faster. And this is just the facts.

 

So, you want to take action now to become more resilient, to become more physically literate, and I absolutely love Onnit for utilizing these tools. Go to onnit.com/model. That's O-N-N-I-T.com/model. Definitely check out their steel maces. It's one of my favorite fitness tools. Again, it's been utilized for centuries and being able to do a wide variety of upper body and lower body movements. I also, fun fact, I give steel maces as gifts all the time for my friends and family. I actually just got one recently for a repeat guest here on The Model Health Show, Michael Beckwith, for his birthday, and it's just again giving that gift that just keeps on giving, giving the gift of fitness. And also, by the way, don't forget, Onnit is also a world class premier organization when it comes to human health and performance supplements and foods. Their Shroom TECH Sport pre-workout is based on all Earth grown nutrients, and it was a subject of a double-blind, placebo-controlled, 12-week clinical trial performed at Florida State University.

 

And the researchers found that college men were put through a variety of fitness tests by utilizing the Shroom TECH Sport, they were found to have an increase in their bench press reps by 12% versus the placebo group. They were found to increase their combined bench press and back squat reps increased by 7% versus a placebo group, so their superset performance, they were found to have increased cardiovascular performance by 8.8% versus the placebo. So there's something really remarkable about it, and by the way, it's based on some EGCG compounds from green tea and also Cordyceps medicinal mushrooms. So again, it's been utilized for centuries and also Onnit took it a step further to put their pre-workout supplement through clinical trials to prove their effectiveness. Go to onnit.com/model, that's O-N-N-I-T.com/model, you get 10% off store wide exclusively via this partnership with The Model Health Show. So definitely take advantage. On that note, let's get to the Apple Podcast review of the week.

 

ITUNES REVIEW: Another five-star review titled “muscle brain connection” by VSC. “Truly a great listen. So informative. Thank you for all your dedication to help, 70 here, but you're never too old to be young.”

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: That is an absolute fact, and you are proof of it. And that's what this is all about. Thank you so much for sharing your voice over on Apple Podcast, and if are yet to do so, please pop over to Apple Podcasts and leave a review for The Model Health Show. And on that note, let's get to our special guests and topic of the day. Our guest today are Juliet Starrett and her husband Dr. Kelly Starrett. Dr. Kelly Starrett is the New York Times bestselling author of Becoming a Supple Leopard, Ready To Run, and the Wall Street Journal bestseller Deskbound. He is also the co-founder of The Ready State, and the co-founder of San Francisco CrossFit. He consults with athletes and coaches from the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB, the US Olympic Team, elite Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard forces, and consults with corporations on employee health and well-being. Juliet Starrett Esquire is an entrepreneur, attorney, author, and podcast host. She is the co-founder and CEO of The Ready State, the former co-founder and CEO of San Francisco CrossFit and she's also the co-author of the Wall Street Journal best-selling book Deskbound. Juliet was a professional whitewater paddler, winning three world championships and five national titles. Wow. This combination here of experience and intelligence and empowerment is truly remarkable. Let's jump into this conversation with Juliet Starrett and Dr. Kelly Starrett. So, you both just celebrated your birthdays?

 

KELLY STARRETT: Coming up.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Okay.

 

KELLY STARRETT: We'll turn 50.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: 50th.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah, both of us this year.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: When is your birthday?

 

KELLY STARRETT: That's how long we have known each other.

 

JULIET STARRETT: My birthday's April 22nd, and he's September 28th.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Okay.

 

KELLY STARRETT: But I'm more mature.

 

JULIET STARRETT: And it's our 20th wedding anniversary in September.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Oh wow. This is a milestone year.

 

JULIET STARRETT: So, it's like 2023 is a huge year.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Wow. That's so awesome. Yeah. But collectively when you said we're... You were joking. We're 100 years old or whatever. Yeah. This is 100 years of wisdom sitting in front of you right now. And like I shared with you guys, I read your book cover to cover, and I loved every second of it. I felt like I could not, I couldn't not read it because it was just so ripe with insight, but also value but also just like so practical. And for a lot of people listening, their mission is to not just be healthy, but to experience that longevity health span. And so, one of the things that really stood out to me, and here's the confession, by the way, a lot of the things that you were talking about I was already doing on accident, and I'm just like, wow, that's so... I'm more awesome now that I got the certified stamp from you two. One of the things you talk about in the book is that we need to spend more time sitting on the floor. Talk about that. Why does that matter?

 

JULIET STARRETT: I mean, we started the book, that's chapter one, we started that for a reason. In part because we love the tests that's associated with it and the test that's associated with that chapter is you just get up and down off the floor without putting your hands...

 

KELLY STARRETT: Crisscross applesauce.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Crisscross applesauce. And the backstory on that test is there was a study done some years ago that people who could get up and down off the floor without putting their hands down lived longer and...

 

KELLY STARRETT: Lived better.

 

JULIET STARRETT: And lived better, which I think is what we're all really looking for. And so what we realized is that people don't sit on the ground enough. In our culture, we're always chair bound. We're driving, commuting, sitting in chairs at our offices. Our whole environment is set up to be sitting in chairs all the time. And so, we've literally lost the ability to both get up and down off the ground and sit comfortably on the floor. I mean, it's really interesting when we suggest to people like, "Well, okay, well, you need to start this test by being crisscross applesauce," and a lot of people go, "Crisscross applesauce, well, we can't sit like that." And so it's just an ability that we've really lost. It's so fundamental as humans. And what we've recommended to people is that they just had more sitting on the floor while they're watching Netflix, which is something that we know everybody's doing at least three hours of a day. And so, we just think it's so fundamental as a human to be able to get up and down off the ground.

 

JULIET STARRETT: And also, it makes us more durable, and I think the word we like and we're fans of all things longevity, and obviously this book is connected to that. But I think the word we prefer is durability because really Kelly and I don't care if we live to be 100. We want to live as long as we live but feel good for as long as possible and then just like fall off a cliff and die. That's our goal. Like we just kind of want to be like this and then fall off the cliff and die and feel as good as we can and live independently and be able to move with our body and hopefully keep our mental acuity. That's really our goal. And to us that's more durability because if that means we live to be 85 or 90, like great, we would rather feel good and then just fall off the cliff. So, I think that sitting on the ground thing is so fundamental to this book and it seems so straightforward, but really is strangely revolutionary since we never do it.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: When I saw the going off the cliff, I pictured you both your faces on some living bodies and going off that cliff happily.

 

KELLY STARRETT: We're like this. Go ahead put your hat on. There we go. Juliet will be driving.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Listen, this is so simple, but... I actually want to share this. I noted this, you just mentioned the studies. This was published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, and they revealed that this simple act, this simple test was correlated with how long people lived. And you also share, because if it's a concern of being able to sit cross legged on the floor, you share a variety of mobilization exercises throughout the book and in particular in this chapter, and habits that we can use to improve performance on this particular test. Just to share with you guys, I have my 11-year-old son do it which you would see him and think, "Oh, this kid isn't flexible." He did it easily, easily, easily. For me, it wasn't super easy. I could do it. But it wasn't just like, is graceful.

 

JULIET STARRETT: You felt a little creaking as you were standing up.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I mean, just to see how is like he's... It was like he was flying just the way he did it so easily. But you mentioned... You talk about these mobilizations. The 90/90 sitting, cross legged sitting in of itself, leg up one leg up sitting, hip opener exercises. Can you talk about some of these things?

 

KELLY STARRETT: The first order of business for anything is to do the thing you want to get better at, not to correlate, not a test for it. So, this first opening chapter is a little sneaky because what we do is we get people in with something that they can wrap their heads around, which is most people do this. I watch kids do it sitting on the ground and quickly you're confronted with, wow, I really struggle with that, or that was harder than I thought, and it's a nice test 'cause it illuminates this idea that, hey, we're not interested in gymnasts level mobility. We're interested in this central idea of can you move and own your way through your world? What is it you want to do? And a lot of times because the body is so durable and because our world is shaped a certain specific way, we're not really confronted with limitations until you go to yoga and you're like, "Wow, I can't do that," or "I want to learn new skill and that was really challenging, keeping my arms overhead and we're going climbing today."

 

So, one of the things that we try to do with this book is create this language of vital signs, because you're not going to die tomorrow if you can't get up off the ground. That's not what it is. But it helps you to begin to establish some benchmarks around how you move and some of your other behaviors. And the follow up to that is the first order of business to get better at this is to sit on the ground, and we're realizing that instead of applying some fancy tool, or here's our 10-day optimized sit on the ground program, we're in front of the TV, let's see if we can work this into your life where we can begin to work on your hip range of motion in the background. The mobilizations in there are something we call position transfer exercises. They're just sneaky ways to give you a window of opportunity so that you can move more freely and, in this situation, the expression of mid-range, hip-range of motion and flexion is getting up and down off the ground. So, we've got some tools in there to help you restore those positions. But the first thing is knowing that, hey, that was a little bit trickier than I thought. Maybe I should spend some more time doing it. Or, B, I crushed that, don't need to worry about it because I sit on the ground all the time and you know me yoga, my hip range of motion is good.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Well, and also some of those positions you mentioned like 90/90 sitting and long sit, for most people who don't spend a lot of time sitting on the floor, they will naturally need to change positions. For most people sitting cross legged for an hour is not possible, like most of us who have spent a lot of time sitting, it's just not possible or comfortable to sit that long. So, the cool thing is your body will actually kind of give you these cues to move and you're like, "Alright, well, I'm no longer comfortable sitting cross-legged, so I'm going to move to 90/90 or I'm going to move to long sit." And if you just watch someone sort of practice sitting on the ground, it's actually subconscious, you naturally just move from position to position, and so without even thinking about it, you're getting all this work on your hip range of motion, and most of it is just subconscious and the only real conscious thing you've done is decided to sit on the floor versus sit on the couch.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: So brilliant. One of the things that I was accidentally doing until I got you guys' certified stamp of approval, is if I'm sitting on the floor, I would naturally go into that 90/90 position after a while, I would naturally kick one foot up on my knee and I'm just like, "These are pictures of me, they've been spying, this is incredible."

 

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah, like, "I'm doing this."

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I didn't think about it as being like a transfer kind of exercise or just lining up my mind and body to do this activity, which for whatever reason, I contacted you actually a couple of years ago, when I got injured and I just started sitting on the floor more. Maybe it was because of the excessive comfiness of the couch that I was laying on...

 

KELLY STARRETT: That was so reasonable, right?

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: 'Cause I was like couch bound, just going through that kind of that pain sequence, but once I kind of got up and moving around again, I wanted to spend more time on the floor.

 

KELLY STARRETT: There's a great writer named Phillip Beach who wrote a great book called Muscles and Meridians. And he, in there, describes sort of it's a book about embryology of the human being but functional embryology. I know that's pretty nerdy, but.

 

JULIET STARRETT: What is functional embryology?

 

KELLY STARRETT: But in their understanding sort of what our development says about us. But one of the things he points out is that it's one of the ways the body can tune itself. We're touching positions and shapes and loading connective tissue, and it's all passive. And because it's done... It's run as a sort of an exercise program in the background of just dealing. And traditionally Juliet will tell you, I just recently had this crazy experience where if I couldn't do that, I don't know what I would've done. But one of the things that we see is that the environment in which we currently reside, it's really modernized in the last 150 years. But before that, we used to just do a lot more with our bodies. And I'm not trying to romanticize our paleolithic selves and hunting and gathering, that's not what I'm saying. But it does hint at we have changed our world in such a way that sometimes our tissues don't get exposed.

 

And there's really complex things that happen. So, if you sit on the ground that 90/90, you're working some of the connective tissue that connects your femur, your leg to your pelvis, that changes how your pelvic floor works. That changes some of the loads to... You're putting some great flexion load into your lumbar, you're taking that hip into full flexion or knee to chest. So, you're starting to use the full language of the body, and you don't have to be an expert at it. Just sit in front of the TV for a while when you get a little fidgety. Know that in the background, amazing processes are happening.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Let's talk specifically about chair sitting, as we're sitting in chairs, hanging out with each other, which you said this term that is just burned into my mind now. Marathon sitting. Right? So, we spend an insane amount of time in our culture just sitting in a chair.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Sure.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: What's happening in our bodies, like our biomechanics, when we spend a lot of time sitting in a chair?

 

JULIET STARRETT: Well, I'll just start by saying Kelly can talk about the specifics, but I'll start by saying just to sort of define marathon sitting. I think what we've learned with the research is that if you sit for short periods of time and get up and continue moving around and sit back down, that's actually completely fine. Like we've never set out to demonize sitting and sitting's awesome and we do plenty of it. But what you do see is people are sitting in a chair and often doing that for five, six, eight longer, even longer sometimes without actually moving at all. And Kelly's obsessed with the lymphatic system, which is basically the sewage system of the body.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Isn't every middle-aged man?

 

JULIET STARRETT: And so one of the things that happens when we sit is that the way that you clear your lymphatic system, you clear the waste out of your body, is through movement. So...

 

KELLY STARRETT: Specifically, muscle contraction.

 

JULIET STARRETT: One of the things we like to talk about is like have you ever been on a flight and then you get to wherever you're going, and you have cankles? Have you ever gotten cankles?

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I can't say that I have but I've seen them. I've seen 'em on the streets.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Oh yeah. I've read about it. I've read about it.

 

JULIET STARRETT: You've seen cankles, you've seen cankles. But that's just a function of sitting in an airplane and not moving enough for long periods of time. Like sitting on a five- or six-hour flight is like the perfect example of marathon sitting. And one of the downstream negative consequences is that you're not moving and you're not flushing your system. You're not getting the garbage out of your body. And then the other thing I'll say, and Kelly can talk about the technical terms about this, but I mean, then you're sitting all the time with all of your joints at 90-degree angles. And we're not meant to be at 90-degree angles with our joints all the time. And so, I think a lot of people don't make the connection between low back pain and general stiffness and other issues they have, with just bouts of marathon sitting.

 

KELLY STARRETT: And what you start to play around with is there's a whole new field called sedentary biology where we're starting to understand a little bit about what happens to our physiology, our normal processing of our bodies when we don't move. So, we can define not sitting versus standing, but we can define sedentary behavior in a very scientific and very specific way. If you ever remember the old StairMaster machines from like the '90s.

 

JULIET STARRETT: I love those things.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Or early 2000s. For those of you out there or from the '90s.

 

JULIET STARRETT: That was me.

 

KELLY STARRETT: There was a metric on there that you could use which was Mets. Do you remember Mets? And you'd be like, "I don't know how many Mets is, but I'm killing the Met game right now." Right? You'd just jack it up all the mets. That's a metabolic equivalent. That's how much energy it takes kind of for a human being to run. And so, what we've... They have defined at Harvard as sedentary behavior is falling below one and a half metabolic equivalence. And it turns out sitting immediately really starts to truncate how much energy we're using. So we fall below that one and a half metabolic equivalence and then our physiology starts to get weird. We start not being able to burn sugar and we start to do things strangely and things are not moving and working as well as they can. So really, it's not ever about sitting versus standing. It's about...

 

JULIET STARRETT: Not moving.

 

KELLY STARRETT: "Hey, how do I limit this below one and a half metabolic equivalence?" So again, man, if you're exhausted, dang I feel so good to take it off, but maybe you could get more movement in. And what the research has defined is let's try to limit an aggregate that total amount of time below one and a half metabolic equivalence to six hours. So, you have sort of six hours of coins you can put into whatever machine you want. This is my commute, this is my dinner time, this is hanging out. And maybe we can try to limit that because it really makes it more difficult for us to do the things we want to do. "Hey, I want to change my body composition." Well, that's going to make that more difficult. "I want to be more awesome at sprinting." Well, that's going to make that more difficult. "I want to have healthier tissues. I want to have more clarity in my brain." It makes that more difficult. So again, that allows us to expand. And when we empower people with that idea, they say, "Hey, wow, I really been sitting a long time, let me see if I can limit that in whatever way I want."

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. So, can we talk about this interaction with the chair itself pressing up against, or us our weight pressing up against the chair and the intermingling going on with our hamstrings versus when we are being a little bit more, dare I say, natural sitting on the floor?

 

JULIET STARRETT: I'm just going to cue you up to say panini.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Panini.

 

JULIET STARRETT: And then you take it away.

 

KELLY STARRETT: We'll do a couple experiments here. One is your butt and hamstrings are actually non-weight bearing surfaces. If you actually sit on the ground, you're sitting on your ischial tuberosities, the bottom of your pelvis is kind of bony and set up for it. Right? And when we're sitting in the chair, we're not actually sitting on the bony structures of our pelvis. We're sitting on all the soft tissue structures. So, if you imagine high pressure, I'm like 106 kilos, I weigh... You know what? My temperature is of certain amount. That's how you make panini. High pressure, high temperature. I mean, you get grilled cheese. So, if you're worried about your hamstring range of motion, maybe you shouldn't make grilled cheese sandwiches out of your hamstrings. We could also do another experiment. I said this in a long, long time. Bear with me. Think of the most beautiful person you could think of. Got it in your head.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Got it.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Like for me like Chris Pine and Chris Hemsworth have a baby and that baby boy grows up to marry Brad Pitt and they have a baby. Right? You can see that's a beautiful person.

 

JULIET STARRETT: What about Kate?

 

KELLY STARRETT: Kate's in there too. And if you think of that person's butt, what does it look like?

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Wow.

 

KELLY STARRETT: It's gorgeous, right? Now think about your palm of your hand. And your hand is a weight bearing surface and it's the connective tissues gnarly. And now think if that butt of that person looked like the palm of your hand. It is not. So, what you're seeing is we have certain areas of the body that are really good at weight bearing, like your feet, your hands, these sit bones. And then we have areas that aren't. It's such a problem when people sit for a long time, like the Aeron chair, right? That really expensive chair by Herman Miller. They invented that chair working with people who were in wheelchairs who had diabetic ulcers. So, what was happening was that people would get these pressure ulcers when they had to sit in a wheelchair for a long period of time. So, they invented this fabric that allowed to unload the connective tissue. Well, that's a small-scale model of us all the time, sitting on tissues. They're not getting good blood flow; we're not pumping the garbage out.

 

Do you need to be worried about... I don't know if I'm making this doom and gloom, but that's just some... A snapshot of sort of, "Hey, long, long periods of time, that's probably not great." Then you add in, we're not really having access to all the mechanisms that stabilize our spines. So, we can't really connect your pelvis to your hips very well. We can't use your glutes; we can't use the rotators. We can't stabilize. So, you end up using a whole bunch of other things to keep yourself upright and that's fine until you go stand up. And then when you realize you, you're like, "Oh my," get out of that chair. And you're a little creaky. That's your body. Not really just immediately giving you access to your full range of motion.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: There's a quote from your book. It says, "Once you start sitting on the floor and standing more, you'll find that it not only feels natural but that you'll crave it." And when I read that, I was like, "That is my exact experience. My body tells me I'm craving." I was just sitting with my wife last night and you've got like a sectional couch that latches together. She's got her area, my youngest son calls it the queendom spot.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Yes. Yes.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Right? And so, I have to ask permission to come sit by her over here because it's just a thing. And so, I'm sitting there and she's coming to kind of get in the nook on my left side. And she's laying there for a bit. And the reason she doesn't like to get comfortable in there 'cause she knows I'm going to get up. And so, after a certain amount of time, I just felt my body's just like, "Go sit on the floor. What are you doing? Go sit on the floor." And also, one of the things that starts to happen, which, because I was talking to you guys today is the first time I'm saying the words out loud, while we were sitting there, watching whatever show it was maybe like 5, 10 minutes into it, my leg starts doing this. Like my legs just starts bouncing up and down, and I don't know that I'm doing it, but all of a sudden, she grabs my leg and like silences my leg and I felt like, "Get your hands off me."

 

KELLY STARRETT: You can't contain me.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're like, "I need to move."

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: She's like, "Stop!" I'm like, "Babe, I'm just expressing myself... I said something, but I knew what it was just like I wanted to, to move, I wanted to change positions, but she was comfortable and the whole thing. And so literally once you start getting these movement inputs, your body starts to crave them. It'll tell you. But there's something really seductive about sitting in a chair where a lot of stuff starts turning off and...

 

KELLY STARRETT: Perfect. That's what we should be doing. Let's sit down to turn stuff off. That's great.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Exactly right.

 

KELLY STARRETT: That's the right time in application. I've been on my feet all day, it's time to change gears. I need to relax. What's that look like as a kind of conscious strategy?

 

JULIET STARRETT: Well, and I think, you know... Like one of the ways, I know that I've shifted over into that crave way is that, way back in the day, I used to be able to sit on a flight and I mean I didn't find it to be comfortable, but I wasn't dying and now I'm dying on a flight...

 

KELLY STARRETT: Is that because you have OCS?

 

JULIET STARRETT: I might have OCS, but I mean, I just... But while I'm sitting there, it's not about... It's not that I'm physically uncomfortable sitting, it's that I literally want to jump out of the chair and move around.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Yeah.

 

JULIET STARRETT: And I struggle with that. And in a way I think that's a positive thing because to me...

 

KELLY STARRETT: You become an 11-year-old boy.

 

JULIET STARRETT: That to me, that tells me that I've shifted over to that exact thing you talk about in the book, which is really craving, wanting to keep moving, moving my body into different positions. And ultimately that's the goal. And I think people listening to this actually can get to that place. I mean, I think maybe people will think, "Oh, look at those are the fitness guys and of course they crave movement or something," but I mean, I think it's really possible for people to practice some of these things. Practice sitting on the ground, practice standing a little more at the office, standing a little more throughout the day. And then I really do think your body starts to really crave that feeling. And then that's when you know you've won.

 

KELLY STARRETT: So, we can also throw another wrench in that and say everything we do has a cost on the body. And that's not negative. If I exercise, exercise actually makes me weaker, right? I do a bunch of reps, or I go for a run or do something, and I get tired, I get fatigued, my body adapts to that stress and I become a more effective person. Right? The idea is adaptation to the stress. So, one of the things that we do in our sort of professional life when we're working with high level performers is that we look at their session or the training session or the competition session and we can sort of assign a competition cost or a session cost to that. And you can look at that. If you look at resting heart rate the next day and people are like, "Okay, you have a high resting heart rate, we can tell that you're under recovered from that big effort," right?

 

You're living under a whole lot of stress. Your sleep was a little bit fragmented. We can see the cost of that stress. Well, we can also do that with movements. So, if I have you, I'm training you as an athlete and I have you do a bunch of heavy legworks, but then you suck in your sport training the next day, that's a session cost. So how do I reduce the session cost? Well, if you do a lot of sitting, the session cost will be that you're going to not be as effective at extending your hip or getting into a lunge shape or doing a Bulgarian split squat or realizing that your quads are a little stiff when you go into a little lunge or you go to yoga and warrior one and you're like, "Whoa, this is really difficult."

 

And so, what we can start to see is that "Hey, this sitting, well, doesn't cause anyone to die right away, may impact my ability to continue to move as effectively in my environment." And that's where we can start to be a little bit more nuanced. Especially when you have a vital sign. Especially when you have a way of quick checking in with yourself around, "Oh, how am I doing? I've had to do a lot of travel. We flew on an airplane, we had to drive around LA," like I guarantee you tonight if I do my session cost test on the couch stretch, one of this hip extension chapter, I'm going to suck at it. And then what I'd say to myself is, "Oh, need to spend some time here."

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. So, this is so good. So good. You really outline, again, there's particular mobilization exercise that you give people, but you said it to start things off, the most important thing if we want to improve our ability to sit on the ground, is sitting on the ground.

 

KELLY STARRETT: That's right.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Right? And with that said, one of the most obvious but not obvious things for us to do is to incorporate some rotational factors into this, right? So going from sitting in the chair to standing to sitting on the ground to kneeling, adding in and creating an environment, and this is another chapter in the book, another vital sign. You talk about creating a movement-rich environment. Let's talk about that.

 

JULIET STARRETT: So, TM by the way. We have an ongoing debate on who created that phrase, but.

 

KELLY STARRETT: She just claimed...

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You guys have created so much stuff...

 

KELLY STARRETT: She claimed that one at one point.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Let's just get it out here. WOD, Mobility WOD. You've put so much into public consciousness, right? And you see these things replicated today.

 

KELLY STARRETT: It's cool.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And I know it's like you got these babies out in the world, it's like, "I didn't know I had these babies out here." You're kind of like, who's got a lot of babies they don't know about? Maybe Chuck Berry or something. I don't know. Anyways.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Definitely Chuck Berry.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Back to movement-rich environment.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Anyway. Back to movement-rich environment. I think one of the things that we love about that phrase and generally is that and let me tee this up a little bit. Contrary to what people may think because we're in the health and fitness business, we are busy working parents who are often really time crunched. And maybe at the most we have an hour a day to get in our workout. And then anything else we do for our health has to be sprinkled into what we're already doing. Whether that's hanging out with our kids, working, sitting in front of the tv, watching TV at night. I mean, we really have had to figure out ourselves in our own life how we can add all of these things into our life. Because...

 

KELLY STARRETT: And trust me, I'm trying to offload my schedule so that I can journal and meditate and gratitude practice and sauna and ice and food prep in the morning for myself.

 

JULIET STARRETT: For himself.

 

KELLY STARRETT: But it's not working very well.

 

JULIET STARRETT: And one of the things I see is we have a lot of friends who are busy working parents, and they don't have time to do those things in the morning. They've got to get up and get their kids fed and breakfast and lunch...

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Something's got to give.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Out the door and something's got to give. Something's got to give.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Something's got to give and will give.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Right? And so, we approach this with this idea that maybe everybody has an hour a day and most people, at least in our case, we want to use that hour a day to exercise.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Or do what we want to do.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Or do what we want to do. Mountain bike or whatever.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Skateboard, whatever.

 

JULIET STARRETT: And so, people do not have a lot of discretionary time to add in all these behaviors that they may know. In this case, in our book, I'm sure a lot of people know four or five of the chapters, they're supposed to be doing something, but they don't really know how to do it. They don't know how to measure it. There's no objective measure. They can't figure out how to fit it into their lives. One of the things I like about creating a movement-rich environment is this idea that we have that's worked so effectively in our own life is that it's all about constraining your own environment. Or the other phrase we use is peppering your environment. So, if you look at our living room, for example, it's like a mobility tool paradise.

 

KELLY STARRETT: And don't get wrong, it doesn't look junky like you have a mid-century, modern cool house.

 

JULIET STARRETT: We can still have guests over and we don't look like weird hippies. But easy access are simple ways to help us sit on the floor comfortably. Access to mobility tools, percussion tools, heavy objects we can put on our quads while we're watching tv. We just make it easy for ourselves because often as time crunch people, we don't even have the mental capacity to make another decision. It just has to be presented to us. It has to be there in our environment. Another example is that our office has all of the places to work our standing desks. Now that all those desks also have a stool associated with them. So, if you're tired or sick or just having a tough day and you want to sit for the whole day, you can. But the default is to be standing. And we give people a lot of movement option.

 

The other thing we do is keep a lot of little toys and balance toys and slant boards around, not just around our office, but around our house. And we just are trying to make it super easy to make the right decision. I mean, what Kelly likes to say is he's like, "Look, if I have cookies in the house, I'm going to eat cookies." If my only option in my environment is chairs and couches and I'm set up to work that way and I'm set up to enjoy TV that way and everything I do is chair based, then that's what I'm going to do. But if we can just do these little simple things to create an environment where we can move more in little micro ways, it just adds up over time. And it's also realistic for normal people who are busy, and time crunched.

 

KELLY STARRETT: And we saw this crazy thing happen in the pandemic, which we can talk about more, where fitness is this trillion-dollar industry now. And we are getting really good and very sophisticated in certain verticals. And if we really look at how the rest of our family, our neighbors are doing, it's not great. Increased depression, substance abuse, low back pain, surgeries. I mean, just choose something that you care about, ACL rates in kids skyrocket. I mean, just there's something there. So, for us, what we learned is, wow, that's a bummer. And our experiment for the last decade in fitness hasn't been great. Right?

 

juliet STARRETT: Well, we've made ourselves way more optimized.

 

KELLY STARRETT: We haven't brought everyone along with us, which is a thing that we need to do a better job of is bring everyone along. And one of the things you can see in the pandemic with people working at home on their laptops was that their home environment was for living. And it wasn't built for being on Zoom all day long. And so, you sat on your couch, you sat in your dining room, and suddenly we had sort of a really insidious environment-person mismatch. People didn't have a monitor, they didn't have the right seating, they didn't have movement choice. So, they ended up kind of defaulting to what their environment said. And that should make sense to us. But as an allegory for sort of understanding the influence of this sort of insidious choice on how much you move in your environment and how you interact with your environment, we want to try to put more agency back and awareness. And if you don't know, well, now you know. And what we can see is this movement-rich environment means it's up to you. And it doesn't have to be expensive, but just giving yourself choice so that you don't have to make a heroic decision at the end of the day when you are cooked. 'Cause when I'm smoked, I'm smoked, that's it, I'm done. I'm not going to get on the ground and do some...

 

JULIET STARRETT: You're not going to like get in the car at 8:00 PM and go to an eight-hour... Like a one-hour balance class?

 

KELLY STARRETT: It's not going to happen.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Right? But you know you need to practice your balance. So how do you fit that in?

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: It seems so obvious again, and so again, accidentally I have this, my side of the couch, the kingdom spot maybe. My son doesn't call it that. I don't get a fancy name for where I really sit.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Throne. Throne is fun.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: But there's a roller there, there's two actually. There's a big one. There's a little one.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Yes.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: There's a bunch of different, what are these called? Therapy balls, small ones.

 

KELLY STARRETT: And this is right there.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: They're right there sitting by the couch. Right? And I got 'em actually there in a birthday bag. Somebody gave me a birthday present, and I kept the little bag, and I got balls in there. And I added in a belt for me to do the hamstring stretch that you have in the book.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Perfect.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: It's in that bag right there. I've got the Thera gun. Like it's all there, it's right there. And also sitting right on the arm of the couch, I've got like grip strengtheners and all this kind of stuff because grip strength correlated with longevity. I was like, "Hey, this, let me put that around so I'll just pick it up and play with it."

 

KELLY STARRETT: We had a bunch of Hypervolts, just percussion from Hyperice, at our gym and we just put 'em on the counter because sometimes you're like, "I don't know when I'm going to fit this in or how to work this in my class." And what we watched was people grabbing that thing when they saw it kind of being aware and then putting it on their bodies.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yep.

 

KELLY STARRETT: And one of the things that we've taken from that watching is that if you just make it available, so we have a couple of those next to the couch. They're cool, they're hitting out of the way. But our children are like, they're watching TV and chilling at the end of the evening and all of a sudden, they're getting some input in. Now is some kind of percussion device going to solve all your movement related problems? No. But nor should you be thinking that it is. But if you can make yourself, feel better quickly or touch a sore spot or bring some blood flow or just massage your hands, if you do that on the regular, you're going to be shocked at how much better you start feeling. So, we see it as an important tool. As you said, I get this trigger and I'm like, "Oh, there it is." I didn't have to think about it. And then I can just be doing something. Some of our favorite work has come about where I've solved problems like complex hamstring tendinopathies, 'cause I'm sitting watching TV on my coffee table, rolling out my hamstrings and butt with a roller and I'm like, "Oh, this is a good idea. I should try." So just keep in mind that we're trying to make it easier because what we see is that that consistency and barrier to entry of the long haul, that wins.

 

JULIET STARRETT: And the other thing is it's we obviously have specific mobilizations and tactics, but I think what people will realize when they start to have their by-the-couch toolkit or their toolkit at their office or wherever they have it, is that at first you need a little bit of instruction on sort of like how to begin and what to do. But I think people then also start to, once you've done it a little bit, you start to instinctively know like, "Oh, this part of my body's bugging me a little bit. When I was doing something today, my shoulder bothered me so I should spend a time there." And you actually just start to have a bit of awareness about what's going on in your body. And then you just, again, you crave it. You naturally want to put a ball or roller or do a percussion device and it's just second nature. Again, it's not a heroic decision you have to make at the end of a long, busy day.

 

KELLY STARRETT: So, check this out. Everyone here has had stiff calves, tight calves, did a bunch of walks and your calves, you just instinctly do that bend over, touch your toes, stretch your calf, put your leg up on a curb. Everyone can relate to, hey, I need to move this thing or stretch this thing. I think everyone like ever had sore quads. What'd you do? You stretched and you got a massage. And what'd you do for your sore abs? Nothing. You have never, ever treated your abs and your trunk the way you treated your glutes or pigeon pose or your triceps. And one of the things we see is that a lot of people struggle with low back dysfunction or back pain, or just my back doesn't feel good. And one of the things that we perfect time is at work, take up, pull up your dress, lay on... No, you're never going to do that at work. But at home you can be chilled out telling your body, this isn't... You're safe here. And you can start to roll with your feet up on the couch, kind of laying on your back 90/90. You know what I mean? Just that recovery position. Sneak that ball into your low back, sneak that ball into your trunk, get on your stomach on the roller.

 

And suddenly if you have a set of tools, and we do this in our first aid kit in there, then you can start applying that up and down your body. And your trunk isn't some miracle weird tissue system that doesn't obey the laws of every other tissue system in your body. But think about the number of crunches you've done, and your abs are kind of sore and you're stoked 'cause you know you're going to have a six-pack tomorrow, right? And you do nothing for it. You just hope it gets stiffer and gnarlier. So again, what's great is if you're already sitting on the ground, it's easier to lay down or it's easier to, you know? So how can we be thinking in those terms around these are the benchmarks around inputs that I can feel better and be a better member of my community. And I know how to put out a fire when it comes because that is the definition of durable. Being able to take the hit, not avoid the hit.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Absolutely. Absolutely. You also dedicate a vital sign to hip extension, which we'll save that. I want to make sure everybody picks up a copy because it was kind of like one of those things where if you got to... If you're pulling my leg on what is most important, which you set it up saying there's nothing that's more important than anything else when it comes to mobility, but hip extension is super important. But I want people to read that chapter. But in it you have a sidebar about the booty, right? And I think it's titled like the Rear View, right? And you mentioned something along the lines of our butts are sleepy, all right? Our butt cheeks are sleeping on the job. And you kind of give a command or a cue for us to check in with our butt through the day and fire those glutes.

 

KELLY STARRETT: We can do it right now, want to do it together?

 

JULIET STARRETT: I just want to... Can I just interject and say that if like...

 

KELLY STARRETT: Squeeze your butt.

 

JULIET STARRETT: If Kelly's name had a subtitle, it would be Kelly Starrett Hip Extension. Because he's really excited about it these days.

 

KELLY STARRETT: I may or may not also own already on Instagram, Knees Behind Butt Guy. Trying to get you into hip extension. Look, what you're hinting at us a really interesting phenomenon where if you lose connection or we're not using it, we can see decrease in function around muscles and movements more importantly. And this hip extension chapter, one of the things that happens when we lose the ability to get into a lunge shape. So walking is a little mini lunge shape. A big lunge, formal lunge is a big extended version of that. If you've ever seen someone...

 

JULIET STARRETT: Like running is like a mid-lunge.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Yeah. Yeah. And if you've ever seen someone sprint that is lunging, lunge form, that hip extension. And one of the things we see is if you cannot get into that position for whatever reason, we don't know if your hips are stiff or your quad's stiff. You don't never there, if you can't get in that position, oftentimes what we see is you can't also squeeze your butt as effectively. And in fact, in that position, particularly your glutes become very difficult to find. We call it positional inhibition, which means I'm in this position and it's my inability to be strong in this position that has shut my butt off from my ability to recruit that glute squeeze. And what we know is that when we start reconnecting the dots for people, things like low back pain starts to get better, right? We got a big engine starting to help me manage that a little bit.

 

When we start to see people working on their hip extension, guess what? Your knees have to work when your legs behind your body. And because we spend so much time not in that position, we see that it's a... Ends up being a blind spot for a lot of people. We have a couple new products on the market that we're... Tools for us. And one of them is a Bulgarian Split Squat Pad. So, if you've ever done a Bulgarian split squat, it's where you basically get into a lunge shape and then you go up and down and it is gnarly. No one likes to do it...

 

JULIET STARRETT: But your rear foot is elevated.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Rear foot is elevated, a rear foot elevated split squat. But it is such a good movement. And again, no one likes to do 'em. Why? 'Cause that's a position we suck. Meanwhile, we also made this thing for better booty thrusts or hip thrusts. You lay down on the bar, you can just do this beautiful hip thrusts. I'm so proud of this thing. It sells 10:1. Why? Because everyone loves the booty thrust 'cause you can feel your booty. Guess who loves to get into the split lunge position. Zero people.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Well, a few people do.

 

KELLY STARRETT: It's like I made like here's some really toxic, gnarly vegetables that are really good for you, eat those. Like no one wants those. Like give me the cookies. I want the booty; I want the hip flexion.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Back to the movement-rich environment and standing a little bit though, I mean we do actually talk about just like being conscious of squeezing your butt throughout the day.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah.

 

JULIET STARRETT: And you can do that while you're standing. So, it's again, it's actually for me become something that's subconscious, but I'm always playing with my foot position, squeezing my butt throughout the day when I'm standing. And then obviously when I get tired, I will take a seat. But it's just being conscious of making sure to keep those things active and going and aware that the 90-degree angle is not great.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Let me ask you this. When you exercise, do you do it first thing in the morning or do you work in it around all the other day job you have?

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: It's in the morning. Not first thing, but it is definitely in the early part of the day.

 

JULIET STARRETT: One of the things that we see, if you have a movement, you change your environment to be more conducive to moving more is that you're more able to be warmed up for your workout. So, if you work out at lunch and you've been sitting all day, it's going to take you a little while to get air, all the lights on in the house, get the diesel running and warmed up. But if you've been moving more, squeezing your butt, working on your balance, changing your position, fidgeting, you're going to be able to slip right into that quick 30-minute Peloton, that hour-long CrossFit class, whatever it's you want to do, you'll find that you can be better prepared more quickly. And then on the other side of that, we see that you can continue to decongest and you don't have to do as long a warm down because you're constantly moving versus if you want to feel the recipe for getting old, do some gnarly, gnarly workout, then sit in a chair for an hour and let me tell you how you feel when you wake up. You stand up from that, you're going to feel terrible.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: So, you share in the book some really sobering news that...

 

 

KELLY STARRETT: Sorry buddy.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: No, this is, listen, this is important. I don't know if anybody else is going to ask you about this. Number one, you share that having a weak booty is associated with a variety of injuries.

 

KELLY STARRETT: I'm sorry.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: With that said, you also briefly, I think people could even miss it, mention booty implants. All right? Now I'm curious from your professional opinion, I want to talk about butt implants. Being that this system is so intelligent in informing all of this connective tissue and all of this musculature, when we throw in some booty implants, are there any potential ramifications with kind of throwing off this intelligence of the system?

 

KELLY STARRETT: First of all, the internet thinks that I have calf implants 'cause my calves are so amazing. These are not implants.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: These calves are moving right here.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Hashtag natty calves. I've been dying to drop that. You know what? What I think is interesting is that how amazing that we intuitively know a strong righteous butt is so good, but we don't know how to grow it or work on it. So, we'll just augment it. There's a whole bunch of funny things that happen. Your body is an incredible system of systems and we've run this experiment in other parts of the body that when you change your leverages, you change your fascia connective tissue, there are always unintended consequences. We can basically make a flat statement is that you cannot cheat your physiology. There's going to be inputs and outputs, there are going to be unintended consequences. If you go only drink vodka for the next two days, I guarantee you there's going to be a consequence for that. Right? And if you think you can cheat or shortcut, you cannot. You may not have to pay a big gnarly price, but it will impact your performance a little bit. So, surgeries, gnarly booty implants tell me that you're not willing to really work for the booty. You haven't earned the booty. 'Cause, and speaking as a man, a White man with a big booty I'm proud of my booty.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah. I mean, as someone who's had to have quite a few surgeries in my life, I'm always like, "Man, wouldn't you just rather deadlift or something?" Like it's really hard for me to understand.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Especially when you can just squeeze your butt.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Speaking of being a white man with a big booty, before we got started, we were talking about your highlight reel of times you've blown your pants out because of the sheer girth of your quads and your butt.

 

KELLY STARRETT: It's real.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. You're out here just... And sometimes the pants blowout has happened when you've been commando apparently as well, so.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Early on I wasn't...

 

JULIET STARRETT: Oh yeah. Oh yeah, he learned his lesson though.

 

KELLY STARRETT: It was a new phenomenon. Look, shout out to all of the people who brought in elastic materials. I think that's... Yeah. The big problem was... A different sex made that possible and cool for men to have stuff that stretches.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah, I mean they made... They started making women's clothing stretchy long before men's, right? There was this period where your jeans were still like actually jeans and actual board shorts had no stretchiness whatsoever. That was really the dark time for him. Dark time of butt blowout.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: That was the Middle Ages.

 

KELLY STARRETT: When I work out, I still pull my shorts up high because it used to be that the stiff shorts that didn't move would bind you, right? They were like wearing an exoskeleton. But if you pull 'em up over your quads, to the right height so everyone could see the glory of your quads, then they also weren't limited by the shorts. Now it's just a habit. Now it's just it's a flex.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: They also hiked those shorts up to twerk as well, you know what I saying? So, you ain't gotta...

 

KELLY STARRETT: Hey, I'm not judging.

 

JULIET STARRETT: What I've needed them for.

 

KELLY STARRETT: I'm not judging. I'm here for the twerkers.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Got a quick break coming up. We'll be right back. When people see you, the first thing that they see is your skin. We truly do wear so much of what's happening internally on the surface of our skin. And it just makes sense because our skin is a protection around what's happening internally. But also, our skin is a huge component of our nervous system. When we are fertilized at the very beginning of our lives, the egg meets the sperm, one of the first things that develops is our nervous system and the outermost expression, the seeds of our skin being developed. And again, that makes sense because our skin helps us to sense and to modulate what's happening in the world around us. Right? We don't all have to have spidey senses to understand that our skin is picking up information from our environment and distributing that information to our brain and nervous system.

 

But what's happening with our brain and nervous system moves outward to our skin as well. It's a deeply intimate connection. And this speaks to how stress can impact our skin health, but also how we're building our skin from the inside out. Now if we want healthier skin, our obsession as a society has been about topical treatments, trying to move things from the outside in. But the reality is, to really make big changes with our skin health we need to work from the inside out. And this starts with things that are nutritive and nourishing to our skin, but also nourishing to our nervous system. A randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial published in the journal Complementary Therapies in Medicine utilized green tea extracts for four weeks. And at the conclusion of the study, participants showed a significant reduction in acne precursors and skin irritation versus a placebo group.

 

Again, this is a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial demonstrating something remarkable about green tea. Another study, and this was a meta-analysis of 20 studies demonstrating that compounds in green tea have been shown to be effective in treating and reducing acne, dermatitis, keloids, and rosacea among other skin issues. There's something really interesting about green tea. Part of it is the phytonutrient concentration found in green tea. And another part of it is the impact that it has on calming and supporting our nervous system. Green tea is incredibly rich in L-theanine. A research published in the journal Brain Topography found that L-theanine intake increases the frequency of our alpha brainwaves indicating reduced stress, enhanced focus and even increased creativity.

 

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So obviously you don't leave out any really important aspect of mobility in the book and it's so interesting to be able to cover so much ground in something that is so concise. It's really wonderful. With that said, there's some upper body inputs as well, but even as I say that, when we start separating ourselves, like the upper body isn't disconnected from a low, it's a body.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah, it's a system.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: But in particular, you really highlight something you guys call is Future-proofing your Neck and Shoulders. What's going on with our neck and shoulders today?

 

JULIET STARRETT: Well, I mean, the sitting situation is not helping our neck and shoulders and it... We're all here trying to sit with our best possible posture, but it's just hard to adopt a great and functional posture when we're sitting. And then I think the compounding factor is our use of phones.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Let me jump in there because everyone on the internet is going... The physical therapies can be triggered around, there's no such thing as bad posture, right? So, let's just say that there are...

 

JULIET STARRETT: Whatever.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Positions that aren't as effective as other positions.

 

JULIET STARRETT: That aren't as ideal as other positions.

 

KELLY STARRETT: There's no bad position.

 

JULIET STARRETT: No bad positions.

 

KELLY STARRETT: There's just less effective positions. That's really important. 'Cause we don't want to scare anyone or do that, right? That's not what we're trying to do here.

 

JULIET STARRETT: But I will say because I'm not a physical therapist, so I can say this, that I think a compounding factor is our use of technology. So, we're hunched over on our phones. I mean, it would be great if we were all holding our phones in front of our faces like this. But the reality is no one's doing that. And then you add the computer element and we're all just spending a lot of our time with our shoulders forward and our neck forward on our head. And...

 

KELLY STARRETT: And we can use that session cost idea to say, "Well, you've been here, can you put your arms over your head? Can you express normal range of motion in another shape?" And suddenly you can see the cost of this C shape.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Like one of the mobilizations, we prescribe in this chapter is a T-spine mobilization, where you put a ball or roller in the upper part of your back. And for me that is one of the mobilizations that feels the best. And that also tells me that I'm spending a lot of time on my laptop with my shoulders forward. And so, it's just the way I think about it is, okay, well, if I'm going to spend a lot of time in this forward position, then I need to spend some time in the opposite position, right? So, if I'm going to be internally rotated, I need to practice externally rotating my shoulders. And when we had our in-house physical therapy clinic, we see a ton of people, we saw a ton of people with neck and shoulder problems and in many cases very debilitating.

 

You know, people who had to have like cervical spine surgery and the reasons for those were complex and many and some were injuries, and some were long-term disuse, and you name it. But I mean it's a serious problem and really can sideline a lot of people from being able to do the things they love to do. And there are some really simple tools that people can do to just sort of protect their neck and shoulders and, again, all things that could be done with their toolkit in front of their TV at night.

 

KELLY STARRETT: And if you take this, no body system works by itself, right? So, we've kind of hinted at before that potentially if you're missing hip range of motion that can impact your lower back. And you can imagine it's just the tail wagging the dog, right? My hips are connected to my pelvis, which is connected to my spine and my, the musculature that moves my legs is also attached to the spine sometimes. So, you can make that psychological leap that those things are systems, the femur, the pelvis, and the lumbar. So, we should be looking at the function of them all if we're going to try to improve how the whole thing works. Well, the same thing is true for your neck, your shoulder, and your upper back. That creates a really system, where if I'm always in a rounded position, that's going to mean that my body has to balance out that curve somewhere, and so I start to change my neck position.

 

So, if you're slouching right now, 'cause it feels good for me to slouch, I'm just going to slouch away, but then I went ahead and turned my neck, that's as far as I can turn my head. And that's fine. And it's not about pain or no pain. I want to be clear about that. We're not talking about just pain, no-pain. We're talking about how do we maintain your function. But if all of a sudden, I have you just say, get into a position where you can take a big breath. So, you just made a correction or an organization to your body where you improved your physiology. Why? Because in this C-shaped position, you couldn't take a big breath. I asked you to get into a position where you can take a bigger breath and you corrected internally without being cued, without doing chin tucks, without getting into shavasana. You just were like, okay. So, in that position, hints at greater physiology 'cause you can ventilate more effectively.

 

So suddenly I'm like, now look over your shoulder and all of a sudden you can turn your head around an exorcist style because you are put yourself into position where you have better access. And that's really what Juliet's hinting at. But because these things are so interconnected, if I have you collapse again and just feel so good, we're just hanging out here and I say take a big breath, you're going to take a big breath up in your neck. Because the way we've been sitting sort of inhibits our diaphragms, inhibits our pelvic floor, inhibits a lot of the musculature we use to just move air in and out to ventilate. And so, what you'll do is you'll pick up, because you're a surviving machine, you'll just start ventilating where you rest you can, and that tends to be neck. So now I'm using my neck to breathe, which isn't my primary engine. My primary engine's my diaphragm. But if I'm using my neck to breathe because I'm in a position where I can't access my diaphragm...

 

JULIET STARRETT: That's the only way you can breathe.

 

KELLY STARRETT: That's the only way you can breathe, then that's a learned position. Plus, I spend tons of time sitting in that position. I'm only breathing in my neck. So, if I'm using these little, tiny neck muscles to try to yank on my spine so I can breathe, they're going to become tight because they're worked and they're going to become tonic. And that could also be one of these complex pieces of machinery that makes me mouth breathe. That makes me, and you start to see the follow along...

 

JULIET STARRETT: And it's also stress breathing, right?

 

KELLY STARRETT: It's also stress breathing.

 

JULIET STARRETT: When you're stressing in this part. When you're breathing in this part is stressful.

 

KELLY STARRETT: You know that if you're breathing through your mouth and using your neck, your cortisol is higher, your brain thinks that's more of a threatened position. If you're being chased by cocaine bear, I want you to breathe through your neck and mouth. Right? You ought to use it all. But the rest of the time, if I'm just on the, answering my emails, that should not be a stressful situation. So as Juliet points out that there are positions that are more effective and they have these interesting ripples down the line that influence how I feel, the efficiency, what's going on with my brain, the messages that my brain is interacting with my body. And all we said was, hey, can you take a bigger breath in that position? Or maybe let's choose a shape that gives you better agency over your body, that's a powerful mission.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Absolutely. It's so fascinating that we have this symptom, right? And we tend to think that that's the thing and you really highlight how if we're having neck issues, that it could be something located in your back, in your shoulders. And so, I was kind of pleasantly surprised to see those mobilizations focused on those other areas. And so again, a lot of people are suffering because neck stuff can throw off everything.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Oh it's... Yeah.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Same thing with back stuff.

 

KELLY STARRETT: I ended my pad on my professional paddling career on the USA Canoe/Kayak Team with a neck injury. That was of my own making. I just want everyone to know, I didn't get hit. I literally created this overuse injury that injured my central nervous system, my neck, and I couldn't turn my head and I was in pain. And that ended my professional career. So, I understand the realities of that. And when I got injured, rumor injury, can't do my job, I went down the rabbit hole, physical therapy, chiro, acupuncture, give me the drugs, whatever I need to do to get this done so I can go back to my life without looking at any of the things that was contributing or causing that my body to react in that first place.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. And so again, we've got mobilizations in the book, but I got a question for you about strengthening the neck. And I'm thinking of this, I'm thinking of my oldest son Jordan, right? So, he's 22, he's got this thick, strong neck. Matter of fact, we got names for him. I call him, what's up Neckolas? Or Old Saint Neck? Or I bet you used to watch Nickelodeon or I'm always messing with him about it, but he's got this thick, strong, beautiful neck. It just seems like he's much more resilient from a possible problem. Just because of the sheer, size of his neck. And I can't point to anything specifically that he's done. Neither can he in the development of his neck except the fact that maybe, he played football, so maybe he is carrying that helmet around and adding some additional...

 

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah, that could be it.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Weight to it.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: So, I don't know, but I obviously there are much safer and smarter ways to make our neck stronger.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Oh, but grandma, your neck hurts? Football. You are really hitting at something that I think is important. We know in the neck, high performance members our background and if we can get the neck one pound stronger, the decreases in head trauma reactions to head trauma like concussions really diminish very quickly in big steps. What attaches to your neck? I don't, something runs with shoulder. So, if I can put your body into a better position, an organization where my neck musculature works more effectively and it does in these shapes, I can test stronger. That tells me a lot about, hey, this is a better shape that translates to better function. But also, we can look at your shoulders and these are your traps, right? So, you're looking at his neck, but you're also looking at his traps.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Right. Yeah.

 

KELLY STARRETT: And the traps are attached to the shoulder. And how do we train traps? We move our arms around. And so, one of the things that gets always missed when we're talking about pain in any part of the body is looking at range of motion. And oftentimes we don't because it hurts to do that. Like when I put my arm over a head, it hurts. Okay, let's not do that ever again. And one of the things we are trying to say is we should be looking at restoring your range of motion as a one of the first things that I can do in my own home safely, effectively. And remember how we did that? We just started spending time in those positions. So, if I have a hard time putting my arms over my head, I could do downward dog or I could grab my sink or grab my wall and start to spend some time with those arms in that end range position. And what I'll see is better shoulder function, better neck function, better thoracic spine function, and the system starts to work in concert. And then you can start layering on neck strengthening, shoulder strengthening on top of it. But there's a lot we can do immediately to just start to think about putting myself into positions that allow me to be durable and robust.

 

JULIET STARRETT: And you're so right about having a strong neck being so protective. I mean, our 14-year-old daughter is a water polo goalie and it's sort of a high-risk concussion environment and her coach has her wear this weird helmet thing and there's all these concussion protocols, but we're really focused because we know on making sure she has strong shoulders and a strong neck because we're convinced that, and she's already taken some huge hits, like hits we think some other kid would've already gotten a concussion and we just feel like we were trying to sort of future-proof her from a concussion standpoint by making sure she has strong neck and strong shoulders.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. You know, something just to share personally, I had some funky stuff going on with the shoulder and also the neck on that side, but just carrying things really helped. It was kind of medicine, carrying things and doing a little bit of shrugging, which I had kind of shrugged off for years. You know?

 

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah. 'Cause it wasn't functional.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: But getting, you said the most important thing, which was getting in position even as I'm doing the thing, where's my head placement? Right? And just giving these little inputs and it's just like, it was like nourishing, it was like medicine for those things.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Well, the other thing I'll say is, Kelly always gets worried about me like falling on the rail of the physical therapist. But I mean, the position that we assume all the time is the position that we're practicing. And nobody thinks about it like that. If you're just sitting here with your shoulders forward and your head...

 

KELLY STARRETT: Practice makes permanent, baby, you've listening.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah, forward head on neck. If you're just that, you don't think about it that way because it's a subconscious thing you're doing while you're working on your computer or you're being on your phone, but really what you're doing is practicing a position. And if you want to practice that position, that's fine, but then you've got to put some input in your body to sort of undo that practice.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Rewire the practice, right?

 

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: One of my favorite sections of the book is when you're talking about importance of walking, it's called Walk This Way, shout out to Aerosmith. I don't know if that was on purpose.

 

JULIET STARRETT: It was.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Okay.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Shout out.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Of course.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Showing our age.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And so, you detailed how the amount of steps that you actually take each day is deeply connected to our lifespan. And we often don't think about this because we "work out" that that is not set aside in a sense because we're probably going to be walking around, moving around while we're working out. But that doesn't insulate you for your body's requirement and your DNA's requirement for you to actually walk and to put these steps in.

 

KELLY STARRETT: So, when we opened the gym in 2005, when I went to physio school, I was like, "We're going to corner the world on walking. We're going to make walking... " That was not...

 

JULIET STARRETT: So sexy.

 

KELLY STARRETT: That was not what I wanted to be known for.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: It's a hard sale back then.

 

JULIET STARRETT: But we've now become obsessed with walking for a variety of reasons. I mean, you hit on it a little bit. I will go back and say that the 10,000 steps concept was invented by a Japanese pedometer company in the '60s.

 

KELLY STARRETT: And 10,000 is not an auspicious number in Japan maybe last 10,000 years, when you shout Bonsai, that's 10,000 years when you... So, you can see why that marketing worked really well because we were capturing this magical number.

 

JULIET STARRETT: But what's happened since then though, is there has been a ton of research that has filled that in and shown that basically the more steps you take a day, the longer you will live and the fewer chronic illnesses you will suffer.

 

KELLY STARRETT: That means I just always need to max up my steps or is there a minimum?

 

JULIET STARRETT: No. The minimum we say is 8,000. The reason we say that is that the average American gets about 3,000 steps. And we've also read that it's actually possible for people to get up to 8,000 steps. Anything above 8,000 is like gold. That's great. Like if you have a life that allows you to be able to walk 16,000 steps a day, like more power to you, that's definitely going to help your longevity. But there's so many other things about walking that are so awesome. We talked a little bit about the lymphatic system and about how walking is the perfect way to recover from workouts and it's the first thing that we suggest people do who come to us with low back pain or postsurgical. Because the best thing you can do post-surgery is just to walk and just keep everything... Get the garbage out of your body. But there's all these other sort of like fluffier things about walking that we like so much. I mean, we talked about this earlier, everybody's talking about it online, but you need to get a little bit of sunlight on your body. Sometimes you need to get a little direct sun. One of the best ways to do that is to...

 

KELLY STARRETT: The Model Health Show says...

 

JULIET STARRETT: The Model...

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's right.

 

JULIET STARRETT: The Model Health Show says you need to get some sun on your body. So, you, it has a side benefit if you get some sun on your body. It can also be really social because what we learned in the pandemic is how lonely people are and how depressed and kids aren't doing well from a mental health standpoint. People are feeling, even though we're more and more connected online, people are feeling more and more disconnected. And so, walking is the perfect way to just have simple connection with people. And so, it's just this like moment...

 

KELLY STARRETT: And you can be like this, "What's up? I hate that guy." "But he's my neighbor. What's up?" I now live in a community.

 

JULIET STARRETT: And we're fine. We're fine if you treadmill walk. Like if it's, if you live in Buffalo, New York and you need to walk on a treadmill in the winter, that's totally fine.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Walk in the mall.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Walk in the mall. Exactly. I mean, there's a lot of empty malls out there, you can walk in, it doesn't matter even if it's just walking around the block. I mean, one of the things I've done is I've figured out like five places in my neighborhood that are little routes that are just leaving from my front door walking around the neighborhood and it's like, I know from my house to the end of the block it's 1,750 steps. If I go from my house down this little mini loop, it's 3,000 steps. And so, if I just need to fit in some walking, I've sort of set it up for myself and you get your hip into extension. Speaking of Kelly's obsession with hip, hip extension, it's good for the soul, it's good for the community.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Check this out. We were working with an elite military force in the army called Delta. And when they have a lot of disordered sleep, and they do, one of the things that they started prescribing for all of their soldiers, war fighters was walking.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Walking.

 

KELLY STARRETT: So, you have all the technology in the world available to you and the thing that's handed out is walking 12,000-15,000 steps a day. So, if you're listening to this, hear this, if you have a hard time falling asleep or sleeping, one of the ways that we would help you with that is say, hey, let's see if we get you to move more in the day to accumulate enough non-exercise activity that you actually have sleep stress. So that, or it's actually called sleep pressure, so that you actually want to go to sleep. You actually have to move more in order to be fatigued enough. And if you're in on deadlines and you're sitting and you're in board meetings, you can't move and you're on Zoom and you have a hard time falling asleep, one of the reasons is you didn't move. So as Juliet says, it's one of these things that makes a huge, huge difference on so many levels. And for us, again, we're like sort of obsessed with performance.

 

And one of the things we notice when we give this book to our athlete friends, like world champion friends are like, "Wow, I don't walk enough. And when I started walking, my knees felt better. I recovered from my workouts more effectively."

 

JULIET STARRETT: That felt better.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Zone two, we also found that the walking is a perfect time to do all these crazy breath drills. You can do all the eye movement tracking stuff you want. You can just call checking out your neighbors, right? Where you just, your eyes track. You can look far, you can look close.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah.

 

KELLY STARRETT: You can start doing breath holds. There's so many ways where you can turn that thing up and make it interesting. Plus, we have so many friends who're like, "I'm not running. Over my dead body. I'm not ever running." We're like, "Great. Have you met the backpack that weighs 10 pounds?" And suddenly you have a really and meaningful way to load your spine and load your tissues. It's called rucking. Welcome to walking. It is the future.

 

JULIET STARRETT: When I think one of the things, we have done a good job of in the health and fitness business is tell people they should exercise...

 

KELLY STARRETT: Nailed it.

 

JULIET STARRETT: And they are. They're spending trillions of dollars on gym memberships and apps, and you name it. But that's not working. Like the data has out like people really didn't go to the gym that much until starting in the early 90s. Like it just gym culture wasn't a thing. And we've all been now going to the gym and following the rule that we should exercise for X amount of time a day and x amount of time per week. And what we see is that obesity rates are rising, and diabetes rates are rising. And it's not... That alone isn't working.

 

So, we of course, are gigantic fans of exercise, we're exercisers, we love exercise, but what we see is that people aren't getting enough total movement in their day, and it has all these unintended downstream consequences if your body doesn't feel as good, you can't move this freely, you potentially don't sleep as well. And there are lots of other ways to get non-exercise activity, that could be gardening, there's lots of ways to keep moving more besides just walking, but what we've found is that's the simple and most accessible way for people just add in more moving in their day.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. One of the things I say is that can we squat with 500 pounds on your back? Yeah, it's a thing we can do. Are we designed to do it per se, and to do it in this kind of repetitive fashion? There are so many cool things that we can do when we get great benefit from them, the thing that we're designed to do, our genes expect us to walk. It's an essential movement input that I believe, and you guys know this, it activates so many beneficial things in our bodies, and I want to share a direct quote from the book, which I love this book, by the way. The quote is "walking, put your hips into extension, lengthens the tissues that are shortened by sitting, by the way, and puts the body back into biomechanical balance." It's medicine. Walking is medicine, and you're just really bringing it right in our faces. If you want to feel good, if you want to get your body in sync, get these steps and walk, it's something so nourishing about it.

 

KELLY STARRETT: We're hearing a lot these days about this phenomenon called neuroplasticity. People are starting to get into the neurobiology, we used to think that the brain couldn't rewire itself, and now we're like, "Oh my gosh, the brain re-wires itself and continues to grow and learn and rewire-itself through your whole life span. That's pretty amazing." That's changed in the last 20 years. One of the easiest ways to rewire your brain and create the opportunities to rewire our brain is through walking fast. As soon you just walk a little bit faster than a normal kind of gait, your brain starts to be like, why is this person walking fast. I should pay attention to what's going on here. So, if you're trying to change some aspect, it creates this window of opportunity where you might be able to rewire pain pathways or you might be able to... Remember neurons that fire together, wire together, neurons that fire at wire apart. So, if I'm trying to change a behavior, if I create an opportunity where my brain is more likely to do that, I'm down with that. What does that look like? Walking fast. And that's pretty radical. That's a radical idea.

 

JULIET STARRETT: I love this book called Spark! By a guy named John Ratey and he says, "Exercise and walking is like miracle grow for the brain." And if we all look forward into how we want our old age to be, we want two things. We want to be able to move our body and we want to be able to use our minds, we want to stay mentally acute. And so, walking and exercise is just insurance, it's just an insurance policy for being able to... Hopefully be able to move our bodies and use our minds.

 

KELLY STARRETT: Check this out. We're talking like in our 40s, we're almost 50, take these same things we're talking about and just apply this filter to your children. What we see is that your kids all have a motion trucker on their phone, pull up their phone and look at how much they're moving. And on a rainy day, you'll be shocked to see how little they're moving. And so, if you take any of these lessons in the book, in these vital signs, I think you can start to say, "Well, this is good for me and it's good for this world champion, how does my child do?" Oh, we just saw some data that came out very recently a couple of days ago, kids don't eat vegetables, they don't eat fruits.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Like 25% of the kids hadn't eaten a single vegetable in the last week.

 

KELLY STARRETT: I think it was like 50% of vegetables, 25% of fruits, bananas. Suddenly we're seeing... If we looked at walking and moving as a nutrient, we're depriving our kids and we're asking them to grow, then we'll start to ask, "Hey." One of my friends wrote this really cool book about sleep I don't know if you know. Apply those lessons to a growing learning body and then look at how extraordinary we are in spite of all those things. We're just... We really throw this wet blanket over so much potential inadvertently because it's convenient or we didn't know. So, if we can get people to be more comfortable with these ideas of having benchmarks, then you can start making different decisions about the things you're doing the day. 'Cause if your blood pressure is over 120/80, you don't freak out, you're like, oh, I should pay attention to that. And that's what we're trying to do here. 120/80 is not good blood pressure, it's just a mark where we know that you should start paying attention to it, right?

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You just really opened up something for me, and it's the fact that the human body is... We're incredible, it's so incredible, it can be put under so much adversity and abnormal conditions, and we can do all these crazy things to our bodies and still show up. We might not feel the best, but we keep trucking along. What if we stack conditions in our favor so we could feel really awesome most of the time? And also you have a tool kit in the book, if problems come about, which they will, without a doubt and you helped me so much just mentally, because the body follows the mind, and I was dealing with this health issue a couple of years ago, and I was explaining the scenario to you and I got some words of encouragement, some things to do, but then you also... Before we got out of the phone, he was like, "Just remember, it's not a straight line." Because I was... Every time I would get a little bit better, I would look for a problem. I'm like, "Oh f*ck, I'm going backwards, like I did this thing." That's right. It's not a straight line. I'm still moving forward.

 

And so, you've been dropping gems for years, right? And it's filtered its way through so many other people who are making an impact on the lives of others, you two are awesome coming together and creating this book. It's amazing. Can you let everybody know where they can pick up the book and also just get more into your work.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Sure. You can learn more and buy the book at builttomove.com and where I'm @julietstarrett on Instagram, and Kelly and our company are @thereadystate on all the socials across all channels.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: If you're not following The Ready State, what do you doing?

 

JULIET STARRETT: What are you even doing?

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Build to Move anywhere books are sold, but specifically hit the website is...

 

JULIET STARRETT: Builttomove.com.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Builttomove.com.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Or anywhere you buy a book.

 

KELLY STARRETT: And literally, one of the things I just want to say is that you are listening to the show, you are so far ahead of so many people who don't have it. It's true. I have really ninja sophisticated friends listen to show, and we want you to find your blind spots because we know you're doing it, and so can we pick up some spots where we're like, "I can improve on that." And simultaneously, we want to create a resource where you could reach to your neighbor or into an uncle who feel... Don't identify with that culture, don't identify with exercise, but really want to take their health and life over. This is one of those places where you can start because it's so accessible.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. You've created something that it stretches beyond... I'm being 100% honest here, and you know this, there are very few books that span across the entire demographic of humanity. This is one of those books, no matter where you are on a spectrum, you're going to get some value from this. And it's approachable, but also if we just want to know stuff, we want to be the smarty pants, you're going to pick up some stuff from it.

 

KELLY STARRETT: It is pretty sophisticated. Every time I have to read it, and I've read it a lot now, I'm like, "Wow, that's a good idea, who wrote this?"

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: It's sophisticated, but yet delivered in simplicity. And there's these great drawings in the book, like literally you're holding our hand and you're nailing on so many aspects of how we learn. It's like this visual cue, and also, it's just like we're doing the exercises, it's difficult to not do this stuff as you're reading, which a lot of books, they don't make you feel like that. This one does. I want to... Okay, I got to do this test, so I'm doing the test and then my son walks in and his like, "Do this with me." And so, it's inviting and it's inclusive, and you had one other thing you wanted to share?

 

JULIET STARRETT: Well, I was just going to say, I just want to thank you for all the work you've been doing for so long and casting a really wide net and bringing so many people in and giving so much good advice and talking to so many cool people. So, it's just really awesome what you're doing. I want to shout you out.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I receive all that. Thank you so much. This is the love that's going on right now. Built to Move, pick it up anywhere books are sold, go to builttomove.com. I appreciate you two you two are the best seriously.

 

JULIET STARRETT: Thank you so much.

 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Kelly and Juliette Starrett everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in to show today. I hope you got a lot of value out of this. Remember, life is movement. There's principles in physics. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Objects at rest tend to at rest. It's just getting that momentum going, get up, get moving. Make it a family adventure, make it a family culture, to imbue more movement into the fabric that unite your family. Truly families that train together, remain together. All right. It's just finding creative ways to bring not just our nuclear family, but our communities. There's so much that we can do to add in these moving practices, whether it's simply having a practice of things like walking meetings and or practices of finding family vacations and adventures and "things to do in your free time, find things that involve more movement." I'm telling you, it's one of the greatest investments in your family's physical health, but also mental health as well, and that just can't be stated enough.

 

So again, we have the power here in this situation to transform our family's culture. It's going to be difficult to transform the culture in our society at large, but it starts with us, it starts with us being the model, for ourselves for our children, and again, that starts to stretch out to our neighborhoods, to our communities, who knows we might be able to turn this thing around a lot faster than it's being prophesied. And I believe that we can. It's going to take a miracle, but I believe that we can. And as always, if you enjoy this episode, please share this out with your friends and family, it is so important to keep this conversation to provide that education put into people's hands, put into their ears, put into their hearts, so we can, again, add another layer of momentum. Keep the ball moving forward. So, you can share this out directly from the podcast app that you're listening on, and of course, take a screenshot of this episode, tag me, I'm at Show and Model and tag The Ready State on Instagram. That's where you're going to find Kelly and Juliette. I love them, I love... They have some of the best content on social media, I'm not just saying that I love following them.

 

All of their posts, I'm into it. You know how you scroll and it's like, whatever, but when I see something from Kelly and Juliette, I stop, and I pay attention. Because what they've already delivered to my life is priceless. So definitely check them out. Again, take a screenshot tag me @shawnmodel, @thereadystate and I appreciate that so much. We've got some epic master classes and world class guests come in for you very, very soon so make sure to stay tuned. Take care. Have an amazing day. I'll talk to you soon.

 

And for more after the show, make sure to head over to themodelhealthshow.com. That's where you can find all of the show notes, you can find transcriptions, videos for each episode, and if you got a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well. And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome, and I appreciate that so much. And take care, I promise to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great content to help you transform your life. Thanks for tuning in.

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