SHAWN STEVENSON: The human body is incredibly dynamic. It can do a lot of stuff, but over time, especially in our modern society. Our bodies have become more and more stiff, painful, and we've had a dramatic reduction in our mobility. And so on this episode, we're going to be talking about, how do we get our bodies out of pain? How do we bring back that mobility? How do you bring back more vitality in our bodies, in our tissues? And we've got an absolute world expert here to really unpack so many of these things and to help us to get out of pain. And also share potentially what's the number one stretch. 

If there was one, if there was one stretch above all others, what would it be? The stretch that addresses the number one pain point in the world today. The physical pain that's behind most disabilities and loss of work today. What stretch would be the one to address it? Now, of course, there are many different stretches and many different body parts to show attention to. We're going to talk about all that today. So this is absolutely powerful. Very excited to share this with you. And I promise you, you're going to walk away today with some very specific things that you're going to start to implement in your life. It really is that insightful, but also inspiring. And by the way, if there is one category of nutrients that is most associated with reducing pain with ensuring functionality, it's electrolytes.

In fact, a study that was published in the Journal of Athletic Training found that when individuals were getting in their electrolytes during their training session, they were able to train longer. They were able to exercise more to get more out of their training session. And they had a significant reduction in pain, things like muscle cramping, our muscles are literally operating with these electrical impulses and those electrical impulses are controlled by electrolytes. We have a sodium potassium pump that is controlling a lot of our cellular activity, but in particular, there's a certain combination of electrolytes that are most indicative of our performance. That's sodium, potassium, and magnesium. Magnesium is critical for proper muscle function for relaxation of our muscles. 

As a matter of fact magnesium is responsible for almost 700 things in the human body that has now been affirmed, all right. It does a lot But this is why we can become deficient in magnesium so easily because it's doing so much and it is one of the most important minerals for addressing stress. And as we live in a very stressful environment. So we need to proactively get in great food sources of magnesium. But, again, through electrolyte supplementation with sodium, potassium, and magnesium in the right ratios, we can really get some incredible benefits with our fitness and also our cognitive function.

The electrolyte supplement that I've been utilizing for years now that I absolutely love. I travel with it. I utilize it pretty much daily, especially when I'm training. If you're going to look in my water bottle, you're going to find the electrolytes from LMNT. Go to drinklmnt.com/model. That's drinkL M N T.com/model. And you're going to get a free sample pack with every electrolyte purchase. Alright, they got a wide variety of flavors, by the way. There's no artificial dyes, there's no sugar, and there's none of that bull jive. All right, to quote Shannon Sharp, by the way, there's none of that bull jive that you find in other supplements, all right?

Just the very best electrolytes and ratios that are based on hundreds of thousands of data points from real people. My wife loves the chocolate salt and there's a variety of chocolate sauce that they have, by the way. They got a caramel chocolate caramel salt that's pretty fire. But I'm a big fan of grapefruit salt and the watermelon salt. Everybody loves that one. It's just amazing. But there's great variety to try and by the way, you get to try all the flavors when you make any electrolyte purchase. You're going to get a sample pack of all the different flavors. So it's pretty cool. And also they got a new Sparkling electrolyte performance water as well that I keep in my refrigerator. It's great to have a nice bubbly drink, but it's a performance beverage, right? And if you get any of the sparkling electrolyte waters, you also get that free sample pack. So again, go to drinkLMNT.com/model and hook yourself up, make sure that you're fueling your performance. And now let's get to the Apple Podcast Review of the week.

ITUNES REVIEW: Another five star review titled, "inspiring" by Harajuku Leva. I've been a long time listener to the Model Health Show and have listened to every single episode. Shawn makes it so easy to learn about health. and inspires you to take those steps in bettering your health. I've made so many great changes in mine and my husband's lives thanks to Shawn. My immigrant mom, who's usually set in her ways when it comes to food and nutrition, has made some great changes with the tips I've shared with her from Shawn as well. I share the podcast with anyone who will listen because I feel that everyone can learn from it. Thank you, Shawn, for inspiring us to better our lives and giving us the information in ways that make it understandable and easy to learn.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Wow. Thank you so much. I am truly honored. This really does make it all worth it. It's moments like this and hearing this feedback. Thank you so much. I really do appreciate that. And if you have to, please pop over to Apple Podcasts and leave a review for the Model Health Show. It really does mean a lot just to help to get the podcast into more hands and hearts. And again, I appreciate that so much. And now let's get to our special guest and topic of the day.

Juliette Starrett is a lifelong athlete, New York Times best selling author, former attorney, and one of the top wellness experts on the planet. Juliette and her husband, Kelly Starrett, are pioneers in mobility training, literally creating the mobility wad that has impacted the lives of millions of people. They're the go to trainers for pro athletes, Olympians, and Navy SEALs. And they are the creators of the ready state getting you ready for all areas of fitness in your life. Let's dive in this conversation with the one and only juliet star red I've got to say this your book built to move literally sits on the arm of my couch.

JULIET STARRETT: Yes.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Forever. It's just sitting there. It's a staple in my living room. I see this book every day and it's this subtle reminder to move, to give my body certain inputs. And it's been a game changer for myself and many people. And of course there were already a lot of good things I was doing. But it just really helped to cement some things and also to add in some different things that I've implemented now in my life and we're going to talk about all those things. But I want to talk about how we got here. Because we're experiencing and this isn't talked about enough epidemic levels of pain. Epidemic levels of Dysfunction. And an inability to move, like we're losing the ability to do a lot of basic movements. What is going on? Why is this happening to us as a species?

JULIET STARRETT: I think it's, like most things, multifactorial. But I would go back to a subject I'm particularly interested in now and go all the way back to kids. And I know this is a subject that's near and dear to your heart, in Eat Smarter Family Cookbook, I feel like you, you talk about a lot of the data around this. But, I mean, the reality is our kids aren't moving, and they're not doing traditional physical education in schools. I think kids and adults alike are prone to really seriously sedentary lifestyles these days. And the reality is that if we don't move and move our bodies in a lot of different ways a lot throughout the day.

The result actually is pain and stiffness and general discomfort with moving and then it becomes like it becomes a self feeding situation where we just, we stop moving and then it doesn't feel good to move. And I don't have the exact data at my hands, but you and I have talked about low back pain. Low back pain is a huge problem across this country and I mean, we probably get just into the ready state two or three emails a day with people suffering from chronic low back pain, for a variety of reasons. And the biggest issue is that anytime people experience pain or a lot of times when people experience pain, it pulls them out of the ability to move their bodies.

And that's, that has a lot of downstream impacts. I mean, one of the biggest downstream impacts is that for most of us, what we like to do, like I always like to say, is that human beings do two things together. We eat together and we move together. If when and if people are in pain you take out the move together piece, then all of a sudden we're ripped out of our training community or our pickleball community or the community with whom we go for a walk on the weekend. And so it has this huge downstream mental health impact and I think you know.. We're struggling at this point to figure out how we can find reasonable and consistent ways to help people move their bodies more when we live in an environment that is encouraging us not to move. We have technology creep. All of our environments are have set up for us to not move and be on devices or computers all day long. And the downstream impact is we're in a lot of pain. We don't feel good in our bodies. It encourages us not to move. And then we're taken out of our communities and then it further impacts our mental health.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Oh my gosh. That's something that again, I don't think we think about and how we lose community. When we experience, you know an injury or something like that a setback and the community helps us to get well

JULIET STARRETT: Yes.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Right not let alone the movement but the community aspect.

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah, so when we owned a gym as you know for almost 20 years. And we joke around that we feel like we became specialists in three limbed training. Because of course in that many years you have people who have injuries or you know, they fall on their skateboard. I mean you name it. We had every type of injury. Joint replacements, catastrophic injuries, ACL tears. I mean, every injury you can think of under the sun, our members had. And what we would always tell them is just show up anyway. We will find a way to help you move your body in ways that will protect your surgery, if you've just had surgery, or work around pain if you're having pain. We really felt like the worst case scenario when our members would get injured was for them to stop coming. And so we actually became experts at it like Kelly and I could Kelly and I could write 50 workouts for someone to do with three limbs today, right?

And our thinking was, I think, really valuable. I think it helped people get beyond. I help, I think it helped people recover faster because they stayed connected to their community. I think it helped them recover faster because movement is medicine. Movement is the best way to, flush, flush out swelling and all the attendant things that come with surgery. And we always just encourage people to keep on moving as in pain free ranges. Of course, we were encouraging people to go out of pain free ranges, but keep moving in pain free ranges.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Yeah. Now here's one of the biggest takeaways that I want everybody to have from today. We now have sound date on this. You guys knew this long before the peer reviewed community. The academics publish the data, but we know that movement helps us to heal faster.

JULIET STARRETT: Yes. Yes. And thank you for saying that. This is a bit of a non sequitur, but Kelly and I have been suggesting that people don't sit as much, starting back in 2010, and now the research is starting to catch up with that, which is great news, right? You don't want the opposite to happen. You don't want to be espousing some idea and then have the research come out and show you that you were totally wrong and have to walk that back. But to me, it just, it made such obvious sense to us. And I think because we were owning a gym and then we also owned a physical therapy clinic. And so we were seeing people come in the door. And the reason we started talking about not sitting so much, is that we started to make this connection between seeing a lot of people who were literally living their lives in this position that you and I are sitting, where all their joints are at 90 degree angles, for 10, 12, 16 hours a day.

And then confused as to why when they got up to go for a quick run, their Achilles tore off their body or that they had low back pain or a myriad of other injuries. And so for us, because we were able to see so many patients in a clinical setting, we were able to make that connection and just say, Hey, maybe this environment that we've created where we're sitting all the time is not conducive to recovery to having bodies that are supposed to do what bodies are supposed to do. I mean, we haven't evolved as humans to the point where we can sit like this and not have it have a negative impact. And that's where we are. And fortunately, we started talking about this in 2010, and fortunately, since then, there have been massive numbers of peer reviewed studies that have come out to support that it's not great to be sitting all the time, both from a pain standpoint, but also just from the movement standpoint.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Another big takeaway is the human body is incredibly adaptable. It adapts to the environment and it adapts to the conditions you place on it. And so we become world class chair sitters.

JULIET STARRETT: Exactly.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Try to do something else outside of that.

JULIET STARRETT: Right.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Surprise.

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah surprise Yeah, exactly. Got your achilles.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Got your nose!

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah, exactly. And so exactly, I mean we are adaptability machines. And if we practice sitting 12 14 16 hours a day and we don't ever take our joints through their full ranges of motion, then we can't be surprised when we have downstream impacts of that. Now what I will say is, we sometimes have been put into this box of you guys are against sitting or we've been at the airport and had people come up to us and be like, I got you guys sitting. And that's really not what we've tried to say at all. And we also appreciate that oftentimes sitting isn't a choice in our world.

We have to sit on planes. There's people who have jobs that require them to sit. But I think even just bringing some mindfulness to the idea that we weren't meant to be in this position all the time. I always like to think to myself, my next position is my best position. When I'm working. And if you had a little all day time lapse camera following me throughout my workday, for example, you'd see that I assume 50 different positions. I sit on the floor. I stand. I fidget. I swing my bar on, swing my foot on something called a fidget bar. I stand on a balance board. I take walking meetings. I'm trying to always be in my next position because I feel like that's the best way to give my own body the input it needs to retain some of those native capabilities.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, and speaking, that was a great term, native capabilities and things that we really evolved doing that are a big part of what kind of what our genes expect, right? Because there's a certain form of sitting that humans have been doing forever, like forever, thousands and thousands of years. Toilets, chairs, all these things are relatively newer inventions and humans. Of course, you find a comfy place to sit. Maybe you sit on a log, maybe you sit on a nice little flat stone. But we've been sitting on the ground since the beginning. And this is one of the things we talk about. You don't just talk about not sitting, it's just, Hey, how about we get this input of sitting on the ground more often. And that's one of the things, the real big changes because I was already. Dabbling in that I'd sit on the ground from time to time.

But now it's just like when I come into my living room, that's where I sit on the ground. My wife has her comfy place on the couch. I'm sitting on the ground sometime and I'll come up and snuggle with her a little bit, but she knows right cuz I'm gonna start to.. She knows that I'm gonna start to fidget after a little while I'm gonna want it because your body starts to crave sitting on the ground ironically and it's, and here's the thing, when you're sitting on the ground, you can change the way you're sitting. And that was one of the coolest things about Build2Move is that you guys shared these different inputs like the 90 90 sitting and like just sitting with one leg extended outwards and because your body will tell you. But the other thing is, and that was a big revelation, we become conditioned. We basically create like a whole body callus on with comfort, right? Because the discomfort from sitting is supposed to be a cue. It's supposed to be a cue to move our position. But if you're sitting in a Lazy Boy, Alright, it's called Lazy Boy. Don't get that cue.

JULIET STARRETT: Nope. First of all, I have to go back to what you said at the very beginning that our hope in writing that book was that It would do exactly what you've said, which is sit on your coffee table or on the side of your couch and kind of just be the book where every so often you go back, maybe you retest yourself on one of the things you're like, Oh, treat it like an at home physical. You're like, I'm just, let's see where I'm at. Have I, maybe I haven't been sitting on the floor as much as I should have lately. Maybe I should run a couple tests and see how I feel. Try the sit and rise test. Just run myself through a few of the tests. I mean, that was our goal.

So the fact that you are using the book that way. First of all, it makes me so happy and on to sitting on the floor. I mean, I know you share a fandom with Katie Bowman as we do. I know you've had her on the podcast multiple times. And Kelly and I really have to give her a lot of credit for really teaching us the value of sitting on the floor and all of the different positions in which you can sit on the floor. But for me, I mean, look, I think we've told you this before. What we do in our day job is try to help people with their mobility, and it's hard to get people to care about mobility. If you are a busy person, and you know you have a laundry list of health things you need to do, for 90 percent of people, taking care of your mobility is usually going to be the thing that gets crossed off the list if you run out of time.

And we appreciate that's the reality. It's not fun, it kind of hurts to put a ball into the parts of your body that hurt a lot, but what is easy to do is sit on the floor. And that's why I love it as a mobility practice, or just a practice if you want to think about it that way. The data shows that we're all watching three hours of television a day. So we have time to sit on the floor and in those three hours, or if you're a two hour kind of person, sit on the floor for half an hour and then sit on the couch for 90 minutes. But what I love about is it feels so good. I think for anyone who suffered with low back pain, like I know you have, Shawn, it really can make a huge difference in how your low back feels, how mobile your hips are. And then it just does that wonderful thing of giving you this opportunity to practice getting up and down off the ground. Which I think we've all learned is so important, especially as we age. So I just cannot emphasize how awesome trying to add in the practice of sitting on the ground for 30 minutes a day. Whether that's at night when you watch tv the way you do it. I try to sprinkle it into my workday because I'm often on my computer. So I try to get in, you know I'm at my standing desk and then I sit at my coffee table for a little while. But man, I mean 30 minutes a day is the way.

SHAWN STEVENSON: That was a mandalorian bar right there. All right. It is the way.

JULIET STARRETT: It is the way.

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's, you mentioned, the low back stuff, that's what got me into this field in the first place. I was 20 years old and diagnosed with severe degeneration of L4, L5, S1, they're both herniated, and I was just given standard of care, right? Here's some NSAIDs, here's some different drugs for you to enjoy. And here's a prescription for sitting. Here's a prescription for bed rest. Here's a prescription to not move. Literally, I wrote to give to my job. Don't do anything. Just sit. And so I sat. And I sat for two years.

JULIET STARRETT: How'd that go?

SHAWN STEVENSON: And I did everything. Woo! I did everything. Oh, first of all, let's talk about my couch. Let's talk about how it went for my little loveseat. My little cheap ass little love seat that I had in Ferguson, Missouri. If you got a couch, you can carry it by yourself. It's not a couch, right? It's just an ouch.

JULIET STARRETT: Yes.

SHAWN STEVENSON: It's an ouch. The C isn't even on there.

JULIET STARRETT: Yep.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Over time, me sitting there. My ass broke through the wood, all right? And when I met my wife, when I met Anne, she came to my house, I had a pillow under that cushion to keep it level, all right? So this is, but this after..

JULIET STARRETT: And was she like, what are you doing with this couch? I mean, did she immediately call you out on it?

SHAWN STEVENSON: I'm saying like, I don't know why she messed with me to be honest, at this point I transformed my house. She met me at the gym. She met me working at the university gym, but for those two years, I just, not only did my spine atrophy, but everything else, all my, my, just, this is the big thing. 

Literally, the big thing was that I gained all this weight because I still had the same input of nutrition, but now I'm not moving at all. And so that was really my catalyst for getting into this field was the big solution for me was smart movement. It was a smart movement, changing what I'm making my tissues out of course, and giving my body real recovery. Because I wasn't sleeping well, because I wasn't doing anything. I'm just like staring at the screen, playing video games, watching movies all day, and doing everything that I can to not stand up. Because it was painful. Yep. It was painful to stand up. And what you've done, and I just want to recap this. You guys became experts at helping people to, regardless of what's going on, to be able to do something.

JULIET STARRETT: Yep.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Because, truly, if you don't move it, you lose it.

JULIET STARRETT: One point I want to make here is first of all, how crazy is it that was the standard of care? I mean, thank God, I think even in a more traditional medical environment now, that would not be the advice that you would get. I mean, maybe in some places, but hopefully we've moved beyond that. But what I love to tell people is there are clients who will fly across the world. and pay a lot of money to see my husband, Kelly Starrett, for low back pain. And I think people would be surprised to learn that his, the things that he does with them are to teach them how to breathe. He prescribes walking, and he teaches them how to mobilize their hips and encourages them to sit on the floor. And so, I think maybe people would think that, because he's Kelly Starrett, he's going to clap his hands together and do some kind of super secret amazing thing that only Kelly Starrett can do, but he doesn't. It's this basic program of teaching people how to breathe, walking more and learning how to mobilize their hips that are the base of his low back program. And those are simple things. Those are simple things you can do without flying across the country and paying Kelly Starrett lots of money. Anybody can do those things.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, I love that. And let's talk about that a little bit. Let's talk about it's all in the hips. It's all in the hips. That's from Happy Gilmore. Apparently there's another one coming. They're making a new Happy Gilmore.

JULIET STARRETT: No way.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah apparently. That's the word on the street and he's big with the cameos by the way So he's got some great people who are gonna be in the film. But anyways, it's all in the hips. One of the things that I do here even at the studio, I got my little office over here. And obviously, when I'm doing solo shows, I'm standing, all right, there's my standing set right over there.

JULIET STARRETT: I see it and I'm like, I see you. I see you standing there.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And I've been doing this since day one of the Model Health Show. Yeah. Day one, 11 years ago, St. Louis, Missouri, iHeartRadio, I was standing, all..

JULIET STARRETT: Why, do you think that's, I mean, let me ask you, why were you doing that? Was it because you had this experience with low back pain and you learned that what do you think, what was the reason for that? Why did you choose to do that?

SHAWN STEVENSON: There is some intuition there, for sure. And for me, and let me tell you the intuition part, was me being able to emote to speak fully was standing, right? I wanted to be, I wanted to be mobile. I wanted to be able to fully express myself from a power position and, but also the study, research coming across people like you, like Kelly, and just learning how I can get this input because I'm about to be filming. Maybe it might be three hours and what if I can spend some of this time in a different position than just sitting, right? So that was a big part of it. And here, again, in my office. Rather than, sitting on the floor per se, I'll kneel at my, I've got like a, the table is smaller. And so I'll get into a one knee, get on one knee like high school football practice, right? Take a knee.

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah. Yes. Take a knee and do your work like that. Yeah. We just had, we just were hosting a course at our office and we had 25 participants and for two days they were mostly sitting on the floor. And, but for a lot of the participants, actually, they said at the end that the most difficult part of the weekend was actually sitting on the floor for that many hours in a row, because we just don't practice it very often. And by contrast, we had a coach who'd flown in for the course from Tokyo and he's part of a culture where they practice sitting on the floor all the time in a myriad ways.

And he actually could sit and kneel on a hard concrete floor all day and was comfortable and we were all just in awe of him. But what I loved about it was realizing this old adage that like practice makes permanent. Like we can all get there, we can get to the point where we can sit on a hard concrete floor for half an hour and we're not dying. And I think we can get there by just doing this simple practice of, thinking about changing our positions and focusing on sitting on the floor.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. All right. Let's talk about that hip mobility, right? Would that kneeling position, for example, be something that can give me a little bit of input for my hips?

JULIET STARRETT: Yes. What that is akin to, which is a stretch I know that you know that we're famous for, which is the couch, we call it the couch stretch. Although to correctly do the couch stretch you do it against the wall, but effectively what you're doing in that sort of like football kneeling position is you're putting your hip into extension, which is the opposite of what we're doing right now. Which is keeping our hips in flexion. And in this flex position is how our hips are spending most of their days and nights. Because again, most of us are sitting and commuting and doing all these things. And so what we see in our athletes and going all the way down to youth athletes, we find it really shocking is how much hip extension people are missing because we are spending so much time in a flex position.

One of the questions that makes Kelly have like fire fly out of his ears is people always want to know they say, Hey, Kelly, what's the one mobilization I should do? And he can't answer that question because he's the human body is the most complex system in the known universe, and I can't just reduce my lifetime of work to this one move. But I would say that if you are going to do one, like the one mobilization to rule them all, it's the couch stretch. Because to me, it's the antidote to our, the sort of ills of modern living, which is sitting and not moving enough. And it's the thing we notice people are missing the most, depending on people's backgrounds and histories. People sometimes have missing shoulder and ankle mobility and other issues, but hip extension seems to be universal.

And the way to test it is to actually do the couch stretch. You can learn a lot about where you are from a hip extension standpoint. And the other, we also really recommend the couch stretch to youth athletes because what happens to kids is that they, as from having kids is that they have, they don't just grow. I mean they do grow slowly, but then they have these big growth spurts and all of a sudden all of their muscles and tendons. Tendons and ligaments and every part of their body is on tension because they've grown quickly. And one of the biggest things we see is a real struggle to do the couch test couch stretch in youth athletes and It's the number one. If a kid in our neighborhood is injured and comes over to see us, nine times out of 10, they have little to no hip extension. It is either causing pain or limiting their performance more often, limiting their performance. And again, it's something you can do five minutes aside every day in front of your couch on a wall. I see you guys have your mobility set up out here, the couch stretches the way.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Now, make sure that you check out the video version of this episode because you'll be able to see the couch stretch in action. 

And, again, just to get those mental cues and this is such an important ingredient and one of those things that it's like an antidote to a lot of the things, the behaviors that we have right now. It was so cool because you said, one mobility to rule them all. That's a Lord of the Rings reference right there, right?

JULIET STARRETT: It's one of my favorite books of all time.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Last night, I was watching Rings of Power on Amazon.

JULIET STARRETT: I'm watching that too.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Sitting on the floor.

JULIET STARRETT: Yes, I want to, I'm fist bumping you from afar over here.

SHAWN STEVENSON: From afar.

JULIET STARRETT: I've been watching that show too, sitting on the floor in my living room.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Apparently it's the most expensive show ever created.

JULIET STARRETT: I mean, can you see it has 17 plot lines? And even if you watch it straight through, it's kind of hard. Oh, you're like, Oh yeah, I forgot about this plot line. And there's that plot line. But yeah, so I mean, Lord of the Rings is one of the only book series. I've read more than once in my life. I've read single books more than once, but I read the Lord of the Rings first, when I was about your son's age and then again in my twenties and then again in my early forties. So I love Lord of the Rings.

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's awesome. That's powerful. I see. I knew we were besties. All right. Okay. Now with this being said, that floor sitting also comes with a very powerful buy-in for people, which is, it's one of the things that is most noted, again, strongly associated with longevity. And this particular study, it made the rounds. I was one of the first people, as soon as it was published, shouting this from the rooftops, shouting it from Mordor. All right. This was published in the European Journal of Preventative Cardiology. And the title of the study is ability to sit and rise from the floor as a predictor of all cause mortality. Again, this is one of the things most associated with how long you're going to live. The ability to get down and get up from the floor.

JULIET STARRETT: Yep. Yeah, so in our book we call this a sit and rise test and we open our book with this for a reason and that is because again, we appreciate and understand lives are crazy and your ability to move and your mechanics and mobility often are the thing that get crossed off the list and we respect that. But it becomes more and more important as we age because as the leading cause of death over age 65 in an injury related cause of death over age 65 is false. And anybody who has an older person in their life who's fallen knows that, It is a serious issue. And often people live only live two years after a major fall if they fall over 65 years old. And there's a variety of reasons for that, balance, loss of balance, lack of strength, lack of mobility. There's a lot of reasons that are, that, that's an issue. Falls are an issue. But one of the best ways. to make sure you don't become one of those statistics is to practice getting up and down off the floor.

It's a critical skill and it really is a skill that you see the 90 year olds who are crushing it are able to do. And let me tell you how to do the test. If you're listening to this, you stand in a comfortable place in a place where if you fall backwards a little bit you have a safe place to land. So we like to do it on our living room because we have a pretty thick, comfortable carpet there, but you cross your legs, you cross your ankles and you under control, try to lower yourself to the ground without putting a knee or hand on the ground and then do the reverse, which is from a cross legged position.

You stand back up without putting a knee or hand on the ground. And they scored it out of 10 points and anything over an eight out of 10 was good. You were good. And an 10 means you could actually put one knee and one hand down, a couple points of contact, which is I think when we first started talking about the test, we didn't emphasize enough, your all cause mortality is only increased if you get less than an 8 out of 10. So we had a lot of people coming and saying, Oh my God, I'm so close. I can do it with one hand or I can do it with one knee. That's fine. And the goal is to do it without a hand or a knee. But again, we should just call this episode The Wonders of Sitting on the Floor because, one of the reasons that we are fans of sitting on the floor is that it does force you to do this thing that, that we've really lost as humans, which is the ability to get up and down off the ground.

It forces you to have a little bit of strength, a little bit of mobility. It helps you practice your balance. And all of those things are going to help you be a more durable person as you age, which for me is really the goal is how to be a durable, fall proof human as I age because the last thing I want to do is have some kind of fall and then have that be the end. Just because I didn't practice getting up off the ground and kind of keeping that on my balance and mobility, you know at this age I'm 50. And the way to get better at this test is to do the test which is to lower yourself to the ground once or twice a day and then practice sitting on the floor because what this test is really is showing is whether or not you have Hip range of motion.

And by the way, you don't have to have a full hip range of motion to be able to do this test. I have super tight hips unlike my husband who's built like Gumby. I Struggle more I have tight hips. I really have to work on it and when we first started writing this book and when I first read the study I think I probably read it, seven years ago when it first came out like you did I couldn't do the test. It actually took some real attention to doing the couch stretch on the regular. Sitting on the floor and practicing getting up and down before I was able to comfortably do it.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Got a quick break coming up. We'll be right back.

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SHAWN STEVENSON: Mentioning how dangerous it is in, quote senior years for somebody to experience a fall. The number one determinant of survivability of a fall is your level of fitness coming into the fall. All right. That's the number one determinant. And again, we've got data on this. It seems logical, but truly if we are active. If we are strength training regularly, if we're sitting on the floor, if we are adaptable and you fall, you just get up. But if you're, again, we have a very, today, especially in we'll say our I don't even want to say civilized. In our society, in our modern society, we are becoming very obviously very sedentary, right? But we're also especially as time goes on each decade, we're just doing less and less.

We're becoming far less mobile and far less active. But other cultures around the world where you mentioned somebody being in their 90s and crushing it, where it's just a part of the culture to continue to move. And you see dramatically lower rates of all manner of loss of dysfunction, but also survivability of falls and things like that. You just don't see these dramatic outcomes, right? But here's the key: we're taking away inputs. And what I mean by that is, once we get to a certain age, we stop playing.

JULIET STARRETT: Yes. I mean, we are obsessed with this topic. I'm gonna, you just, wind me up on this. I'm so excited. Coincidentally, Kelly and I had this weird occasion where we were actually looking back at old CrossFit, early CrossFit programming and training, like I'm talking 2003 to 2005, and Love it or hate CrossFit. But early CrossFit and the early CrossFit philosophy was all about actually training in the gym so that you could go do a sport. And that idea really got lost when CrossFit became a competitive sport, and people were spending so much time in the gym. And I think we're having a similar situation where I think it's amazing that we have this access to so much information now about our health and longevity.

It's hot. Everybody's talking about it. People are spending millions and millions of dollars to try to figure out if they can just live a little bit longer. And I think there's a lot of really cool people doing very innovative and cool work in technology and blood work like we've talked about and so many areas to try to improve the human condition. But what I worry about a little bit is that in some ways it feels like it's become so prescriptive and so clinical that like we've forgotten that we're supposed to have fun and play as humans. And, if our days just look like we've got to wake up and have our one shot of espresso and journal and make sure we sit in our infrared sauna and get 45 minutes of sunlight. And then make sure we eat the perfect macro controlled meal. And then we go and, three days a week we strength train and three days a week we do high intensity interval training and then we take exactly the right package of supplements. And we do all the things that we're being told to do and again some of those things may or may not help us With our longevity, I think the jury's out.

I think we're kind of in this sort of brave new world. But what I can tell you I see it doing in a lot of the people I know who are really focused on this is they don't play anymore. And man, it's so important as humans. We connect with one another through play. And it's important for our mental health, and I think it's important it's also, even some of these things we're talking about we're sitting on the floor, we're doing the couch stretch another way to take our joints through full range of motion is by playing. By doing different sports, by joining a pickleball league, or learning how to mountain bike, or hiking on uneven surfaces, or, playing basketball. I mean, There's a thousand ways that we can play, but I do really feel like we've lost that narrative in this sort of prescriptive world of longevity. 

And we've got to bring that back into the mix and I, and my strategy as a parent and I suspect it is your strategy as a parent is to model behaviors I want my kids to do and one of those is playing. And so we have peppered our household always. 

If you come over to our house, we have frisbees and skateboards and balance boards and a slackline in the backyard and Kelly has this whole quiver of bows and arrows and we have a pool and when our kids were little, we had a trampoline. And we actually prescribe the people who come work with us for coaching to get out of the gym and go pick up a sport or take a hike or be outside or play because I think it's so important for our psyches as humans and such an important way to connect. And we kind of forgot about it.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Oh, wow. Thank you for sharing that because it's just, it's not just the physical activity, it's the psychological aspect of it as well. And really all of our actions are influenced by our psychology in the first place. It's like the first ingredient. And there's that wise quote that says, we don't stop playing because we get old. We get old because we stop playing.

JULIET STARRETT: Yes. Hear. Yeah. Yes. It's so important. I think we've got to get people outdoors and connecting with other humans and moving together and look, I think you're like me. I love the gym. Like I'm a gym rat. I started lifting weights when I was in junior high and was a professional athlete, and I've spent a lifetime in the gym. I like the gym and I think the gym is fun, but I don't know if it's as fun as the mountain bike club I created with my friends where we connect every Saturday and go ride up some mountain and see beautiful scenery and laugh and tell jokes and make connections. There's just something about getting outside and playing with others, that is, it's different than the gym.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. They're, they based the movie around that statement, by the way. I think the movie is called tag, but it has the guy who plays Hawkeye in Marvel, Jeremy Renner.

JULIET STARRETT: Oh yeah. He's awesome.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And so basically these, this group of friends is playing a game of endless tag since they were children. All right. And so you're it, basically. And but one of them is like a master of this. Like he's the one that never gets it. He never gets tagged. And..

JULIET STARRETT: Is that the Jeremy Renner character?

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yes. Yeah, of course. Yes, he's. He's got all, he's John Wick of tag, right? But with that being said, you know these games and I'm just thinking about there was Something sent home with my son from his school that's got all the events that are coming up at the school and they got pictures of the kids. And there's one where the kids are like running out of a building. They're just in so much joy like this. There's running activity and I'm just looking at there's probably 10 kids you could see and then there's some kind of off in the background, but their mouths are open. There's joy on their face. And I'm just thinking about when they will stop doing that.

When will they stop doing that? Because that, what they're doing, that activity of just moving fast, for example, we need that. Once you stop moving fast that can be something that is really tied to aging. It's like a "slowing down process". Yeah, but there's a moment usually that happens when we stop moving fast. We stop taking risk because even moving fast you could fall you could you know, you can get injured whatever. But you can also have a sh*t load of fun. But here's the thing: you're much more acclimated to moving fast if you keep moving fast.

JULIET STARRETT: Right. It's interesting you say that because my mom is turning 80 this year and I just noticed that she started walking a lot slower. And then I'm wondering if that study that you're referencing is the same one that just crossed my eye, but it basically said that often slow walking is a precursor to dementia as we age and so I said to my mom I was like mom You got to make sure you're walking faster. And so she actually has been reporting to me that you know she goes on her weekly hikes and she's like I'm actually making a conscious decision to make sure that I'm walking faster that I'm not doing it being so careful not to fall that I'm just have, she's like really trying not to adopt this slow walking.

The other study that crossed my eye just in the past week was a study that showed that in men which, as we've talked about, most of the studies are in men just being stiff in the body is correlated with living less long. And I thought that was interesting because again, one of the things we've been trying to do for so many years is just help people, like we like to say de stiffify, right? And I think everybody experiences it, just living life and raising kids and working a crazy job, you just do start to feel as we age, I think we all start to feel our bodies getting more and more stiff. And the goal ultimately is to try to become and try to put a little input into the body so that we stay as supple as possible. And look, we're realistic, like aging is real. We're maybe not going to be as supple as we were when we were 12, but it is possible to regain that. And, one of the things that we like to tell everybody is. Unlike age related bone loss and muscle loss, which, to a certain extent is inevitable, obviously we can do a lot to slow that down, but you don't have to actually lose your mobility. 

Your mobility is something that you can keep and maintain until the day you die, and it's something that you can get back if you've lost. And so it's this sort of beacon in this unit, in this aging department that is really something we can make a big difference on. But I mean, I don't even know why I started talking about being supple. I mean, how can we bottle the experience that kids are having when they're playing like that and bring it to, it's if we could have a pill and give it to adults that experience they're having that you saw in that photo that was captured. But I think part of it is just reintroducing play into our lives and prioritizing that. And making that as much of a priority as our two days a week of strength training and two days a week of high intensity interval training.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Yeah. We have a culture where it's like playtime's over, right? So I'm thinking now, okay, got another movie reference. The Last Dragon.

JULIET STARRETT: Oh, I didn't see that.

SHAWN STEVENSON: So this is iconic. This is Barry Gordy produced, right? It's a karate kung fu flick from like the eighties, and Bruce Leroy is the main character and I believe it's probably the late eighties when it came out. But anyways. When he's facing off against the, the villain in the film shows enough. All right. He's play time's over boy. So because he's Bruce Leroy, he's got this vitality, this spirit of play and practice. But of course he does take it serious because he wants to get the glow. He wants to become a master. In our culture we have this idea, like it's time to stop playing and get serious. And there's this teacher and my mother in law is probably listening right now, it's a meditation teacher from back in the day. He said that seriousness is a sickness.

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Seriousness is a sickness. And of course there's a time and a place for us to be serious. Absolutely. But when we make that habitual, we stop enjoying life in the moment and all the cascade of opportunities there and being more playful and these things tend to be again associated with vitality and youth, right? But these things are also a choice. And so I want to encourage us wherever we are to pick up some of these things and start to add them in, intentionally, right? A little bit of play. But also moving fast and there's so many ways to go about this. This doesn't have to be by you just, okay, I'm gonna Forrest Gump this and I'm just gonna start running outside, right? It's what's appropriate for you. This might be grabbing a battle rope and doing a little bit with the battle rope. This might be a ski erg. This might be hopping on a stationary bike. This might be jumping rope, but find something where you can get a fast input to tell your body I want to go fast. All right. I'm the fast and the furious.

JULIET STARRETT: I think it's so important too to remind everybody that I mean you and I come from physical culture. We love to train, that's where we are professionally, but there's so many ways to play. Also that and one example I'll give you is that, we are in this social media world that we're all in and we have to be in, maybe begrudgingly in some cases, right? But it's how things are done now. If you have a company or you want to market anything, you've got to be on social media. And, but it's hard to constantly produce content and it's hard to get excited about it. And often you have, or not often, but sometimes you have negative interactions with people.

But one of the ways that we've tried to incorporate play into our workday is that we film a couple of days a week and we have this thing called one bad idea a week. And it's where we film a totally ridiculous video and we're not selling anything. We're not probably helping anyone get better or feel better. We're not helping them with their mobility or their pain. We're not teaching them anything. We just are literally making this video for ourselves because it's playful. It's fun to do with our staff. We laugh. We imitate 80s video. I mean, it's just this really fun way to incorporate play into our workday.

And so I just, I think it's important for people listening to this, that, again, our context is always play. Like you have to go out and take up a sport, but there's so many other ways to include play in your life that aren't actually physical like they don't involve a physical activity and you know for us. That's one of the things is we're always trying to figure out. Okay, how do we incorporate play in our place of work because you're right. I mean, you know in the end, like we, we want to make sure that the people who we work with are fun. We want to laugh at the office. We want to make sure it's playful. And that's just one way we add that into our life is one bad idea a week.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, and sometimes those quote bad ideas turn into good ideas. I mean because I'm sure that I've seen some of those videos that are like What were they thinking? This is awesome. Yeah.

JULIET STARRETT: I mean, that's exactly it. And, we sometimes really age ourselves because we think something is so hilarious, and we just did this like a Californian skit. We imitated the Saturday Night Live Californian skit. And you could see that, yeah. What are you doing here? That thing.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Go down the 101 to the 405.

JULIET STARRETT: Yes. Yes, we just, I'm gonna show you it after this, but we just did that and I would say that maybe, anyone under 40 didn't really get it. Maybe under 35 didn't really get it. But it was fine because again, we just it's our way of adding play into our workday

SHAWN STEVENSON: Those though those that do get it. It's for them.

JULIET STARRETT: Yes, and I believe adding play into our workday has this secret health benefit. Because I really believe that a playful spirit is going to be a spirit that lives long. And there's going to be no scientific study that probably can ever come out to prove that right. But I really believe that it's important to play and not be so serious all the time.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Shout out to the Joker.

JULIET STARRETT: Seriously.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Shout out to the Joker. Why so serious?

JULIET STARRETT: Why so serious?

SHAWN STEVENSON: All right. You mentioned the pace of walking earlier. And Funny enough, I remember this there's obviously it's a big part of our culture now high intensity interval training, but one of the premier studies on hit was actually done with intermittent walking, right? Changing your pace of walking, right? And I'm a big fan of even making your walk creative, right? So maybe you're walking and then you find something to balance on your walk, or, maybe you find a stick or something, that you could just start playing with swinging around, whatever, just like. Turning you could turn your walk into an adventure and the funny thing is like even in my neighborhood. I end up finding a whole house that i've walked past.

JULIET STARRETT: You've never noticed.

SHAWN STEVENSON: 50 times and I just might be walking with my son or something like, have you noticed this house before? He's nah, like where was this house at? Cause again, we might've been every time you walk down that block looking at the other house on the other side. And so you miss this little gem of experience.

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah. We actually talk about that in built to move. I mean, I can't even remember what we call it. I don't know if it's upgraded walking, we first of all encourage people to maybe sometimes take a walk without your headphones. 

Although I'm pro, I mean I walk with my headphones and again I'm all about walking in any way that's great. But yeah, I mean we suggest that people practice nose only breathing while they're walking. Or even breath holds while they're walking on uneven surfaces. We've recommended for years the idea of going for a barefoot walk on Saturdays and, this really tweaks people because they're worried about safety and going outside.

But, talk about, the, one of the best ways to build strong feet is to just spend time barefoot and spend time barefoot walking on uneven surfaces. So obviously only do this if this is a, you can do it in a safe place. We just have this little 600 meter loop right by our house and once or twice a week we just take our shoes off and we just walk around that 600 meter loop without our shoes on. And there's just a lot of different ways You can think about an approach walking and making, and make walking more fun and interesting and get some additional input. Like I love to practice breathing while I'm walking. I really do believe in the power of breath, but I in terms of my life, a breath practice seems to be one of those things that I cross off the list if I have a busy day.

It's like in my list of the seven health practices I'm going to do every day. That's probably going to be the last. But not if I do it while I'm walking. I really focus on nose breathing or, different, I'll even box breathe if I feel stressed. But that's one of the places where I layer in a breathing practice because I'm always going to be walking anyway. So there's so many ways that you can upgrade your walking to make it more interesting and more fun and more playful.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Love it. Love it. All right. There's something you mentioned earlier and I want to ask you more about it. You mentioned putting a ball, right? So a lacrosse ball, for example, into our tissues. Why on earth would we want to do that? Let's talk about that.

JULIET STARRETT: I mean, it, our body is covered in this layer of fascia, and here's how I know that it's gone mainstream. The only people talking about fascia were Jill Miller, who you've had on this podcast many times, and also my husband, Kelly Starrett, starting in 2011. But there was just an article in the New York Times about the miracle that is fascia. And I thought, okay, if it's in the New York Times now it's become mainstream, like fascia's no longer just a thing. It's this niche thing that Jill Miller and Kelly Starrett talk about.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Fascia is fashionable.

JULIET STARRETT: Fascia is fashionable because it showed up in the New York Times. What we love about the lacrosse ball is first of all, it's $2.99 at your local Big Five or wherever you can get mobility. You do not need to go spend 150 on the latest, greatest fancy mobility tools. But it's amazing just putting a little input into your body, into your muscles and your tissues and your fascia. It's amazing how much better you can make yourself feel. Whether that's from a pain standpoint or just a stiffness standpoint. And the other thing we love about it is it can be really choose your own adventure. Once you get some sort of basic tactics and you learn how to do some of the basic things, like one of the things we teach people to do who are just new to a mobility practice is what we call contract and relax. 

So you put the ball into a stiff place on your body. You contract on the ball for four seconds, hold your breath and then you exhale and you find that you can actually, get some room and start to move past the discomfort or pain you might feel wherever that ball is. And so there's a contract relax.

There's different ways that you can scrub the ball on your tissues. We have all sorts of tools and tactics for using a lacrosse ball, but I think there is so much we can do to take control of how our body feels. And we found that the lacrosse ball is one of the most useful tools and accessible to pretty much anyone. And that you can just put in different parts of your body that feel stiff or painful and just start to make change. You can really make it and, what we love about it is our whole mission from the very beginning is to empower people to take care of their own body. I mean when Kelly's book Supple Leopard came out, it was all about him saying wait a second like being able to take care of your body is like a right and it shouldn't be left for Practitioners like PTs and chiros and physicians and of course there's times and places for all those people. We all use them and we're fans. But so much of making our body feel better can be done with a lacrosse ball. Sitting on our living room floor while we're watching the rings of power.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Love it. I love it so much. It's so awesome and of course, there's, we have the balls right by the couch as well.

JULIET STARRETT: You've got to make it easy for yourself. Yeah, that's the thing. You've got to make it easy. If it's not sitting right there, you're not going to do it.

SHAWN STEVENSON: I've got a roller right there as well. That's another way we can get pressure on parts.

JULIET STARRETT: Pressure on parts. And it's, people are surprised to learn that. That it really makes a difference. We actually just put out this thing called the foam rolling protocol on our website, which anyone can go get. It's free. And the reason I'm mentioning this website, it's thereadystate.com. And I can give you guys the exact link to the foam rolling protocol, but we put it out there because what we realized is that and saw was we would go to the gym and we would see a lot of people just. Just putting it, like the classic scenario with the foam rollers, people put it on their calf and they just kind of go up and down.

And we are of the mind that there's some tech, and then often those people abandon it because they're like that didn't really work for me. And what we realized, and you'd be shocked that we just realized this because, we've been in this business for a while. We realized that we employ and use technology. Some pretty simple techniques to make foam rolling really work, and often they're the opposite. People often just roll up and down on their calf, right? But often a more effective way is to roll side to side on your calf and that you're actually going to make a bigger difference. We call that scrubbing.

So you can scrub your calf on a foam roller and then really start to feel a difference. So there is some technique involved and so we finally just decided, hey, let's just throw this thing out into the universe, this foam rolling protocol. It's four videos. It would take anybody watching 20 minutes to just get a little bit of technique involved. I know a lot of people listening to this are like us. They have a foam roller and a couple balls sitting on their living room floor. And there's just a lot you can do to feel less stiff, to help yourself get out of some nagging pain and injury and just feel like you can move more freely by just spending 10 minutes working on some tissues.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, and that's the big thing that I really, the gift that I have of having you in my life. And even for us virtually, even before we met, just being able to get these little insights like, Massaging sideways instead of, front and back is just Oh, like that's so obvious. Why didn't I think of that?

JULIET STARRETT: Once you start doing it, you really know, Oh, you're like, Oh, actually I can really feel this is making a difference. And wow, I actually noticed my calf feels less, less stiff now, and then because we're humans, we were it's.. We had Michael Easter on our podcast talking about the scarcity brain. And it's the way that our brains work, it's like almost like gambling, right? If you go up and down on the roller and you don't do anything, you're just going to throw the roller in the trash. But if you get a little bit of positive input, if you get a little bit of money in gambling, you're just going to keep doing it. And it's the same with this input into the body. The other thing that I would love to tell people about is this idea of working upstream and downstream of your main joints. To me, this has been one of the most important and simple things that anybody can do is that if you have pain in an area. Any area of your body, we want to think about is maybe not working on that spot with a lacrosse ball or foam roller, but actually working upstream and downstream.

So if you have knee pain, for example, it could be that your quads are so stiff that they're pulling on your knee. And that's why you have knee pain, or it could be that your calves or your shin are super stiff and they're pulling on your knee in that direction. Same goes with your ankle, you can work on your foot and toes and your calf. Same goes for your hip, right? If you have hip pain or hip stiffness, chances are your quads and hamstrings are tight. Chances are your low back is stiff, chances are your core is stiff. So I think it works for any part of the body and it really, you don't. 

Need to go see somebody to learn how to do this if you've got those basic tools in your house And you think to yourself, hey, my knees feeling a little stiff or my knee feels a little tweaked. You know what I want people to do is think okay, my first order of business. Before I call my chiropractor or my physical therapist or my physician is, hey, why don't I put a little bit of Input in my body upstream and downstream of the tissue that's bothering me and just see if I can make some change. Because man, those are the patients we love to get in our clinic. We do get these people in our clinic that come in and they say okay guys. So my knees been bothering me and I thought maybe it was my tight hamstring. So I did some hamstring lockouts and I you know I foam rolled my quads and I did the couch stretch and then I did this and you know I worked on my shins and I still can't quite get relief. And so that's why I'm in here to see you like Ideal patient to pay us a lot of money to come in, right?

This is someone who said hey, they obviously feel empowered to take a crack at working on their own bodies. Which is what we're trying to help people do is say hey You know being in pain and having nagging pain and injury is totally normal. It's part of the human condition. It doesn't mean something's wrong, and it actually often doesn't mean you're injured. It just could mean that you moved in a strange way. And it also means that you can do a lot to make your own body feel better on your living room floor. And, I mean, honestly, if you break down what our mission has been as humans since the very beginning is to empower people to do just that, just to take care of their own bodies so that you're not always walking around in pain and confused about why your knee hurts or your shoulder hurts and realizing that you really can make a difference with some simple tools and tactics.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And what greater gift is that because we live in these bodies. Everybody listening, you live in your body 24/7. So having a little bit of expertise on you is going to be helpful in all levels of your life. And so speaking of inputs, the inputs from you today have been phenomenal. All right. I'm so grateful for this conversation and you mentioned the foam roller protocol. So we're going to put that for everybody in the show notes to make sure everybody gets access to that. But is there anything else? That you can share as far as resources, obviously, on social media, your social media. I love it. I just love it. So can you share social media and anywhere else that people can get connected to you in your work?

JULIET STARRETT: Sure. So if anyone's interested in our book, you can go to BuiltToMove.com, but on social media, we are @TheReadyState and I am @JulietStarrett. Those are the, and we spend most of our time on Instagram. So if you really want to follow us on Instagram, You know in the place where we spend most of our time Instagram is the place. And that's where to see what's going on. We also have a newsletter that we're really proud of called the ambush that we put out every Friday and it's free and it's called the ambush and you can I'll send you a link where you can sign up for that. But it's the ready state slash ambush I think and it's just where Kelly and I try to share Interesting research that we're coming up and it's coming across our eyes that we found. We love to talk about books. We're reading tv shows. We're watching, places we're going, things we're excited about. So it's just it's the place where Kelly and I endeavor to share everything that's going on in our minds that we're excited about. So that would be the other place I'd send people.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Awesome. And of course you've got some massive Best selling books as well. You mentioned becoming a supple leopard, which I've been to several physical therapist offices and see. I've seen that book in multiple physical therapy offices across the country just going to see friends. And sometimes, if i'm going to get some stuff done and also of course built to move is the most recent book and this is the one that is literally except I brought it in here today because you're coming in but it's and I took it from the arm of my couch Which is where it's always sitting.

It's just that grateful. It's that friendly reminder and also again, there's those little Resources in there that I might have forgotten about oh, you know let me just pick this book up and give it a quick because this book is one of those things that makes every part of your life better, right? So, you guys are amazing. You're amazing. This was just awesome. I appreciate you.

JULIET STARRETT: Yeah, and I just want to say thank you so much for having me on and you have just been this rad consistent amazing voice in our space for so long and also giving voice to so many people in the space for so long. And I am such a fan so grateful for your work. Keep it, keep it up. Like we're all here for it

SHAWN STEVENSON: Let's go. I received that. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Juliet Starrett everybody. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. Remember this tenet. Life is movement. Life is movement. And on the other side of that, if we're looking at life ceasing, it is the cessation of movement. It is the decline. It is when things are no longer moving when you know the story is over. So keep moving. Keep living, keep investing in your movement, thus investing in life. 

That's why conversations like this are so important, but more so what we do with information like this. So please take some of these insights, at least one of the insights that you got from today's episode and put it into play today. All right, put it into play today, even if it's just employing the couch stretch, which again, if there was one stretch to rule them all, if you really wrangled them down and got them to say, hey, what is a stretch that can potentially be the most beneficial in addressing specifically the number one cause of missed work when it comes to a physical ailment?

When it comes to a physical ailment, the number one cause of pain and of disability. When it comes to physical ailments, by the way, because the number one disability in the United States, again, this is according to the NIH now, is depression. Alright, but physical ailments, cause that's often tied to mental health, but mental and physical health, by the way, they're one in the same. So I'm even struggling to say and separate them. But just for the intents and purposes of this conversation, if we're looking at the number one physical ailment causing missed work, it is low back pain and the couch stretch. It's one of those things we can implement. Again, you don't have to even leave the couch per se and getting some great inputs and helping to address. These imbalances that we're just picking up in our society today, we're often chair bound and we're often lacking in these different inputs But whatever it might be, whatever really spoke to you put into play for yourself. Put play into play for yourself.

And I appreciate you so much for tuning into this episode. We got some amazing master classes And world class guests coming your way very soon. So make sure to stay tuned, take care, have an amazing day, and I'll talk with 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've 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.