Dr. Kelly Starrett: How to Improve Your Mobility, Posture & Flexibility

Andrew Huberman: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

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I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Kelly Starrett. Dr. Kelly Starrett is a Doctor of Physical Therapy and one of the world's experts in movement. That is, he teaches people how to move better for the sake of sport, for the sake of recreational fitness and for everyday living.

Today we discuss several important topics, including how best to warm up for any and all workouts. He also tells us how to improve our movement patterns for cardiovascular exercise, for sport, for resistance training, across the board, how to move better and how to improve our range of motion with the minimal amount of time investment. We hear a lot about different forms of stretching. We hear about dynamic stretching, we hear about passive stretching. Dr. Starrett explains how to improve our range of motion across our entire body in the best possible ways, as well as how to offset or repair any imbalances that stem from musculoskeletal problems or from neural issues and how to reduce soreness, how to improve our posture, seated, standing and movement-based posture. We talk about nutrition. So today's episode covers an immense amount of actionable information that I'm certain all of you will benefit from.

Dr. Kelly Starrett has authored several bestselling books, some of which you may have heard of, such as "Supple Leopard." He was actually one of the first people to become synonymous with the use of a lacrosse ball or foam roller. But really, even though a lot of people have talked about those, what he was really doing there was to emphasize the importance of understanding the relationship between the skeleton, the muscles, the nervous system and the fascia. And today we also talk about fascia, which is an incredibly interesting and important topic.

In addition to consulting and coaching for various college level and professional athletes and teams, Dr. Kelly Starrett and his wife, Juliet Starrett, co-own The Ready State. We provide a link to The Ready State in the show note captions. There they have a plethora of useful information and actionable protocols. I should mention years ago I took one of the courses from The Ready State. It's a really interesting course that we touch on some of the protocols from today. It's all about pelvic floor. So whether you're male or female and regardless of age, understanding your pelvic floor, how to take care of your pelvic floor in the context of exercise, posture, et cetera is vitally important for all sorts of vitally important bodily functions.

So today we also touch on that, and by the end of today's episode, I'm certain that you will be armed with a number of new, highly actionable protocols. I should emphasize these protocols take very little time and have an outsized positive effect on your movement, your posture and your overall health. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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And now for my discussion with Dr. Kelly Starrett. Dr. Kelly Starrett, welcome.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Thank you, my friend.

Andrew Huberman: I've been wanting to get you on here for a long time for many reasons, not the least of which is that you've just pioneered so many areas of health and fitness that I don't even know where to start, frankly. But let's jump in with the big M, with movement. You're an expert in dissecting complex movement, figuring out how people can move better and also figuring out how people who are doing what they think are simple movements are actually making their life either more complex or more painful than it needs to be. So you're also known for helping people with so-called mobility, which of course falls under the umbrella of movement. And I can't see somebody do a foam roll or anything with a lacrosse ball where they're loosening up, or talking about fascia without also thinking about you. So that should frame today's conversation at least partially well.

To kick things off, when you look at how most people sit, walk and do their "exercise resistance training" and/or cardiovascular, hopefully, and cardiovascular training, what are some of the most common problems that you see? Is it imbalance, like leaning to one side? Is it that their bodies are trained into asymmetry? Is there any way to kind of mass diagnose everybody all at once in this first question.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Let me borrow a couple analogies from one of my favorite people, Katy Bowman. And first thing is, she will point out, and it's not a perfect analogy, so bear with us. It's this notion of mechanotransduction, which means that at a cellular level, your tissues, some of your tissues specifically need mechanical input to express themselves. You want a strong tendon. How do you get a strong tendon? You have to load it, right? Does it do tendon things? Is it lengthening under load? Does it express shortening under load? Is it isometric holds? So we can start at that level. She points out that if you put a, and again, not a perfect analogy, but if you put an orca into captivity, over a while, that orca fin will start to fold over. Folded fin syndrome — it's nicer than floppy fin syndrome. That's hurtful. And what you're doing is when you alter the environment that this amazing animal lives in, it's not swimming, it's not fighting, it's not hunting. You're not loading the base of that fin. And so what happens is that collagen breaks down and we start to see changes in that, in that expression of that.

So what we can start to say is again, not romanticizing the Pleistocene era when human beings were paleo, but what is it that we need in our daily lives to maintain the integrity of our tissue systems? Exposure, so that our brain says this is safe. So that you actually have tendons and ligaments that can do what tendons, ligaments can do, and fascia that is, can be springy. If, to borrow another sort of Katy Bowmanism, if we have a movement language, an actual language made up of words, how many words are you using today? And most of us aren't using that many words. So very few words. So I sit, I stand, I walk very slowly. I sit, I stand, I walk very slowly. So everything is just in those few. And then I go exercise using the same words. I'm on the exercise bike, right? I'm on an elliptical, which doesn't actually ask me to have any hip extension. And suddenly you can see that our movement language, which we're really codifying under intensity, load, right? We're becoming very competent in these adaptation positions, sitting, what ends up happening?

Well, we start to see that our bodies are adaptation machines, so they just begin to adapt. And so suddenly what we have is a human body that doesn't express normative range; the brain may not think that that range is even safe and put there. Then we start to sort of minimize the movement choices that the brain has, the movement options that the brain has. So really the question is, you know, at low loads, let's establish things. At low loads and low speeds, you can get away with everything. Why? Because this body is rad. And it's designed, it's durable, it's not fragile. It's designed to be ridden hard and put away wet for a long time. Remember when you were 17, you would cut off your hand, it would grow back the next day? You would think about the falls you took skating and you'd be like, oh, that sucked. The next day you put your shoulder back in, you just kind of respond.

So what is it that we need to put into our movement diet? And then we can start to separate out, should that be exercise or should that be movement? And now the real filter that we should be beginning these real and earnest conversations about is what is it in the environment? Given that I'm a busy working person, and maybe I have some agency in the morning, and maybe I have some agency in the afternoon, but let's take exercise out of it. The one-hour, discrete, working on zone-two cardio, working all right by evidence-based practice. What should I be doing the rest of the time? So for example, one of the things that we're huge fans of in the evening is sitting on the ground for 20 or 30 minutes.

Andrew Huberman: In what? Cross-legged? Squatting?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yes, long sit, side saddle, 99. Anytime you need to fidget, fidget, and what you'll see is you start to accumulate exposure, which I think in my worldview is the first order of magnitude in problem solving is how do we have the human be exposed to the thing we're trying to change or improve or restore normative ranges.

Andrew Huberman: So that would be in the evening, just getting down on the floor.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yeah, that behavior alone... cultures that toilet on the ground, sleep on the ground, we start to see fall risk in our elderly populations attenuate to zero, approximate zero. Lower hip OA, lower low back OA, and it may just be that we're using and touching some shapes and our bodies are saying, hey, let's keep that around, let's normalize what the hip should be able to do. In terms of your connective tissue, think about, you know, the idea here is that we're, we're loading you passively, actively, whatever, that you're saying to your brain, muscle, you know... this is a quote from one of my PT instructors, and this is really important. If people take this away, they should listen to this. Muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs. At no age do you stop adapting, at no age do you stop healing, those things slow down, it's a little bit harder to have the same adaptation we did. We weren't in full-fledged puberty, but you can always adapt. In the first order of business if you spend 20 or 30 minutes sitting on the ground, you're going to start to see that hamstrings start to feel better, my hips start to feel a little better because I'm just spending time in these ranges and my body's going to start to adapt as I increase my movement language.

Andrew Huberman: Would you extend what you just said to, like if somebody has a hardwood floor and maybe a little low pile rug or something like that, and they're going to, I don't know, watch a podcast or a movie or a show in the evening, they stretch out in, you know, like on their, on their belly, like sort of up dog or cobra or whatever it's called.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Sure, sure,

Andrew Huberman: So, basically any kind of movement where you're on the ground, any kind of squatting, and maybe they start to stretch a bit here and there.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Oh, so now we're into the real magic, the behavior. Where are we going to stack these behaviors? So, if you have to get up and down off the ground plus one, right, I got to get up and down off the ground every day. So if you're an older person who maybe hasn't gotten off the ground, and I'm older, I'm just talking about over 50, you may not have gotten them down off the ground for a hundred years, you just don't do it anymore, right. We want to hear why I think MMA is so amazing — you have to get up and down off the ground a lot, right. If you do go to jits, right. How about yoga? How about pilates? You're like, wow, there's a lot of time organizing on the ground.

So a lot of people, Ida Rolf, really, said, hey, how do we help the person organizing gravity first and foremost, right. Then we have someone like Phillip Beach, who is this incredible, he wrote this book on functional embryology, which I highly recommend, called "Muscles and Meridians," but his hypothesis is that one of the ways that the body tunes itself is by being on the ground again, restoring native ranges, re-approximating joints, kneeling, walking, and if you just took a step back and said, what's it looked like for the last 10,000 years? You know, when have we, 10,000 years ago, my understanding is that I'm a little fatter, your femur's a little longer, but we're pretty much the same people, maybe I don't digest milk yet, maybe that's the understanding, but ultimately what behaviors have changed? We're off the ground. And so this is an easy, don't need any equipment, can drop this in, I can answer my emails, watch TV, that seems like the how we're going to improve and be able to start to untangle this very complex corridor, not when people have a lot going on.

Andrew Huberman: I love this. Um, you know, and as you pointed out--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --And, as you pointed out, sorry... the roller's already there. So, you're sitting there and the roller's there. Another barrier to adherence knocked out. So you're like, oh, I might as well just, what's stiff today? What hurts today? How could I have some self-soothing input, and when we're working at high levels of performance, like the highest levels, these range of motion like keeping you being able to access the full sort of arsenal of what you can do with your body, this movement solution's sort of like Ido Portal plus the Olympics, right? You would see that this is an easy way for our elite athletes to work and integrate without having to do another thing.

Andrew Huberman: So what I'm getting here is that everybody, regardless of age, should get down on the ground once a day.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Hundred percent.

Andrew Huberman: And get up off the ground at some point.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: You can use whatever you want to help you get up and down off the ground, so those of you listening, you're like, I can't do that, you know, there's a test we write about in the book that if you just do crisscross applesauce standing, you should be able to lower yourself to the ground and stand back up without using your hands.

Andrew Huberman: Okay, so cross the feet, just for those that are just listening, cross the feet.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yep.

Andrew Huberman: And then just slowly lower yourself into seated position?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's right, don't collapse, just lower yourself to the ground, and then without putting your hands down or knee down, can you stand back up?

Andrew Huberman: And should one be able to do it with either foot over the other?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Seems like I should use my left leg and right leg equally, right. I shouldn't have a good side and a bad side. But what's interesting is the data I think is that it's a nice predictor of all causes mortality, morbidity, that's fine. But what it really hints at is your changes in how your body interacts with the environment. That, because you've adapted suddenly the skill that you've done 100,000 times, 200,000 times as a kid in crisscross applesauce, suddenly are confronted as an adult with a skill you can no longer perform. And it doesn't require massive hip range of motion, it doesn't require full range of motion in your ankles. It's actually a really fair test. But if you're missing some of these end ranges, you're going to struggle.

And it's nice, now that I have this, like, what's the session cost? I've become a... I love cycling, mountain biking is my jam. But if I ride my bike a ton, my hips get super tight, but if I have some assessments just like vital signs, blood pressure 120 over 80, that's not good blood pressure, but it's a nice decent reference. Now I create some movement minimums that help me understand how my body is interacting with stress, environment, nutrition, exercise, et cetera.

Andrew Huberman: For some people, maybe me, if I were to, you know, sit cross-legged on the ground for a bit and then stand up.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Oh yeah.

Andrew Huberman: If it hasn't been in a while, like kind of like, just kind of ache. But I consider myself pretty, you know, pretty mobile. Once I warm up, I can run for an hour and a half, jog for an hour and a half. Once I get warmed up in the gym, I can move what, at least for me, is satisfying amounts of weight. So I wouldn't say that I'm out of shape, I wouldn't say I'm in spectacular shape. Is it normal for us after a certain age to kind of feel like we creak or ache as we move in and or out of a new movement? I mean, does it fit with being still a healthy person or should we just not have any of those kinds of like, that was like, I stretched that one.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Dude, I sat on the ground, that was rough, that was super rough.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, maybe, you know, sitting for 30 minutes and standing up and feeling like you have to kind of open yourself up with a can opener, so to speak.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Well, a couple things there, one is, you said new movement. So one of the ways we define best athlete is who's the person who can transfer the skill, their current skill set and pick up the new skill the fastest. So what I'll say is if you want to test how fit you are, how good your program is, go ahead and jump someone else's program, let me know how that goes, can you perform the skills? Are you skilled?

Andrew Huberman: I'm chuckling 'cause I joined Cameron Hanes for his weight workout, which is, you know, high-repetition circuit work that went on for about 45 minutes. None of the weights were particularly heavy, but it's just nonstop. I was sore and I normally don't get sore for more than a half day, if at all. Soreness hasn't really ever been an issue for me. I was sore for almost a week and a half, maybe two weeks. But it was, it was insane.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: This is so good, it opens up the next thing right? Founder of CrossFit, Greg Glassman, one of my earliest influence coaches, says we failed the margins of our experience. So what you just saw was, hey, here is this metabolic pathway range work that I have not inoculated myself to. And I think we're at an interesting place where fitness has become hobby. Fitness has become sort of my personal pastime. And I can go to the gym and I can look jacked. You're jacked and tan, you're very handsome 49-year-old. But what we start to see is, the things that make us look aesthetically pleasing or functional enough isn't the same thing as preparing for sport or transferring to a new skill, and in fact I would say if I had a spectrum of activities I'd put like fitnessing over here, like I go to a camp, I just do a million reps, I breathe hard, it's super fun, I'm in Zumba, like I'm mirroring, and I have positive regard and I see my friends.

On the other side, we have very much sports-specific training. The only goal is to support the sport. If you're an elite soccer player, we have goals off season, but in the in season it's to support your body to win. But one step back from that, I call sports-preparation training, which is where we start to see sort of some really pattern interference between what the internet says I should do to have huge quads and the best way to create an elite sprinter or an elite footballer, right? In that sports preparation training, I can be, think of it GPP plus looking at positions and how things transfer.

Frans Bosch is a great example of sports-preparation training. He's a Dutch thinker, his books are great, and you'll understand that really what we're trying to do in sports preparation is say, hey, what is this complex system in front of us? What's the minimal amount of input so that we can still go and project ourselves into the world through sport and performance. And on the other side, suddenly, we do come up confronted with, hey, I'm doing this thing and I jump in with my friend and I get brutalized. Which is actually a problem that we have with people, really good fit athletes, and I throw them into a group fitness class and they can do so much work that they wreck themselves for weeks. And that's probably what happened. You're so strong and you know how to just be uncomfortable and you just did this freakish amount of work without giving yourself a chance to adapt. And that happens all the time.

Andrew Huberman: So going back to the, getting down on the ground once a day and then getting up. I'd like to just, I want to get to fitness and sports training as well. Is there another practice or set of practices related to where we do our profession work?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: So I can stand. I have a standing desk. I have a drafting table and I'll sit, stand. I'll stand for a while. I'll sit, stand for a while, sit. I have a stool, I like to be at a stool, that's where my back is not supported. And so I try and vary it as much as I can.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Love that.

Andrew Huberman: And thanks to you, I got, thanks to your recommendation, that is, I bought one of those little kickstands that goes underneath the desk from Rogue. I don't have any financial relationship with Rogue.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: You're making tens of dollars on this fidget stand right there.

Andrew Huberman: No, l, l sent the money like everyone else would. One could probably build one too. This is a little fidget stand. I love that thing because it reminds me to, you know, to swing my foot while I'm there, even while I'm standing. So that's what I've done to try and keep some mobility during the day.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: And I want to double-click on that because that's really amazing because what you've done is said, hey, I can't control this aspect of my environment, I have to do some deep work. That means I might need to perch or I might have to sit at a conference table. And then what we can start to say is, well, what other choices do I have? And now if we work with a typical person and you say you have some agency before you leave for work and then your agency doesn't return till you get home, right? What are you going to do during the day to keep the body moving? So that it's easier to escape to your afternoon class. I think that's the thing. And what you've just described is what my wife would call a movement-rich environment. How do I pepper the environment with inputs so that I'm not just in a tiny movement language? I love that.

I want to go back to the sitting on the ground, should it be painful? Should it be sore? One aspect of your physiology that will not change, doesn't have to change, is your range of motion as you get older. We should be able to maintain our range of motion. So what's interesting is that if we're suddenly confronted with tasks that ask us to be in certain positions that we're not comfortable with, we're going to be sore, you bet. You're going to have to squeeze your butt. And something you said earlier, like, once I'm warmed up, I love that phrase, right? Once I've had my 27 supplements and my coffee and my activation, I've gotten to my sauna, I can do anything, I feel great. The real question is, should I have to do all that stuff? For high performance? Absolutely. But should I have to do all of this prep to have native range of motion, to have baseline range of motion? Probably not.

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As long as we're there, I'm just going to tell you what's worked best for me in terms of warming up and I'd love to know your thoughts. Years ago, I think it was a Charles Poliquin post or something like that where it was suggested to do relatively low repetition warmup.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Love it.

Andrew Huberman: As opposed to going in and doing, you know, 15 reps, then 10, then eight or whatever it is. And I've found over the years what's allowed me to get strongest and stay strongest for me is to, sure I'll go in and do the first set of a movement, a resistance-training movement, maybe eight repetitions just to get some blood flowing and remind my brain, you know, what the range of motion is, right?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Practice. Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew Huberman: Then I'll do maybe just, you know, five, four, two repetitions, on subsequent three sets, so five, four and then two repetition sets with heavier loads. And it's just to prepare my nervous system for heavier loads. And then when I start my actual "work sets," I can get a lot more real work done. And this for me was like spit in the face of everything I had read, everything I'd seen that you needed a higher repetition warmup. And it has allowed me to progress more or less continuously over the decades that I've been training. And I'm not a natural athlete. I'm just not. I've trained for a long, long time, but I would never fall under what you would call a natural athlete. I don't have a low recovery quotient, all that stuff.

And so for me it was like a shocker, but it makes total sense. Prepare the nervous system for the work you're about to do and don't follow some preconceived idea that you have to do high repetition warmup or even moderate repetition warmup, and lo and behold, you get much stronger and if you want to grow muscle, you can grow more muscle. Why haven't we heard more about this? Why don't people in fitness talk more? I know you do. And please do. Talk about the nervous system and the fact that it's not just all about warming up and getting blood flow, it's really about preparing the brain and spinal cord and all the stuff in there.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yeah, love that. Let's say a couple variables there. What's your training age, right? If I'm going to take a beginner and you in the same thing, we can make big jumps. You and I have been, we've deadlifted together a decade ago, like, we can just go. We know our bodies, the patterns are well ingrained. Our tissues have exposure here, right? There's some things we can do, so I love that you're starting to see that, what's the minimal amount of warmup to do the task. And on some days you may be sore, maybe stiff, and it takes a little more time to go get right underneath it.

One of the things I think we have this opportunity to do is put play back into warmups. So one of the things is that I suspect, and please correct me if I'm wrong, you don't find a lot of joy in doing these, like rote A, B, the world's greatest stretch, why, do the active...  Like, it's not that fun. So, let me talk about my experience working with a team at Berkeley. I have this shout-out to the women's water polo team at Berkeley, who are my just total family, these women are incredible. But I came into the sport and looked around and I saw really ineffective warmups that weren't a good use of the time, that didn't prepare us to get into a fight in 20 minutes or 30 minutes later. So if you went through your warmup and said, I'm going to be in a fight, am I prepared for that or not? And that's a nice, like, rubric to say, I'm nervous system arousal, I have a little sweat on, I've practiced, right? You know, I've touched some positions and shapes.

But, you know, what I see is that there's, in the typical training session, there's a lot of work to get done. So now I think training has become very, very dense. You know, here's this piece, here's this piece. Now I do the successor work, I gotta hit these cards. And so the warmup for me has been one of the last places where I can get you to explore new movements, something you saw on the internet, play around. If you came to my gym, you know, or we came to my house, now I'd be like, let's go throw the medicine ball for five minutes. And there's no wrong way. But I want you to start to explore speed. I want you to explore catch an object and going fast.

And what we haven't done, and I suspect, I wouldn't say that your warmup is the best way, I say it's one way to get to the thing that we want faster and potentially you stop doing what didn't work and what didn't serve you, which I really want people to understand is that if you're not blind going through some program, I want you to say, does this serve me? Because my experience working now 20 years with the best teams and athletes and organizations on the planet is athletes do what works and they stop doing what doesn't work. Isn't that interesting? right? So what I love is that you started to get under heavy loads relatively quickly and movements you had real competency and exposure with. Yes, because what we want to do is come back to say what's the least amount of work I can do to have the biggest adaptation? And three hours in the gym doesn't fit into your life and it doesn't fit into the typical person's life. And theoretically you're going to have to go do a sport. So you're going to have to recover from this sport and this training session. You were like, hey, I can't even handle this high volume. You know, it's a ding on me too, I can't handle the same high volumes, my friends can. So, "wasting your time" with lots of high-volume sets of an empty barbell might have been useful at some point, and maybe it doesn't serve you as well now or because you have to put so many plates on that bar. That's just, that's a warmup by itself, right?

Andrew Huberman: That's not an issue for me.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: You walked a mile to load those plates.

Andrew Huberman: No, that's not an issue for me, but that's perfect, what you just said is a perfect opportunity for me to mention something that I've noticed which prompts a question which is I noticed that I have some asymmetry, my right shoulder naturally sits a little lower than my left and whenever I get a little back tweak it's always on the same side, etc., etc. I know this varies for everybody and I noticed that I was always picking up the weights and re-racking them because I re-rack my weights like a grown up, re-racking them on the same side. So I've made it a point now to switch up, you know which side of my body I do them from.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yeah, that's great.

Andrew Huberman: And notice I'm significantly weaker on one side of my body. I mean not to the point where, you know, I have to use two different sets of dumbbells or two different dumbbells if I'm doing curls or something, but just noticing these natural asymmetries starting to show up because I'm a right hander or who knows, or I skateboarded, so, you know, I've spent a lot of my life, early life with my left foot forward and my right foot pushing, and as a consequence there are a lot of asymmetries. So what I've tried to do is correct those asymmetries in the between movement movements, but also to stagger my stance during curls and then, and switch it each time or maybe even overemphasize the weaker side.

I have no professional training in any of this. I've just found that it's made for better posture, more, more evenly distributed strength. And I must say all of that is based on teachings that I read in your books and through conversations with you about, hey, we have these natural imbalances and there are little things that we can do that take moments that can correct those imbalances. So if you would, could you sort of expand on the number and type of imbalances that you most commonly see and some ways for people to remedy them?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Let's uh, if we just took the word imbalance and put it to the side for a second because it's sort of a nonspecific term. Like are we testing your hamstring to your quad? Like what, what's the ideal ratio here? Like if you're a professional pitcher, I hope your arm, right arm looks different than your left arm, right? But what we can say is, number one, imbalances don't necessarily cause pain. Let's, let's be clear about that. We should be using our time in the gym as training to find deficiencies and blind spots in our patterns, in our skill, in our, you know, in our brain's feeling comfortable with a certain movement, and what you just hit was that it's, boy, it's really easy to get a lot of variability just doing the things I want to do anyway. So now I'm in a tandem stance. I skate left foot forward, right. But you know, suddenly that's my dominant stance, if you're going to ask me to do anything of consequence, I'm going to adopt that stance. But suddenly I get to have some exposure here.

So what's the point of the gym? What's the point of training? Just to work on some cardiorespiratory output that the science says? Is it to move into play? If the brain's a problem-solving machine, let's give it some problems to solve. So you suddenly have a new problem to solve. And I would even say that weakness isn't even the right idea. Just like here is a pattern that I'm not as effective at, as efficient at. So when we go into the gym, sort of with this great curiosity, then it's a really rich place and a really, frankly, the only safe place because there isn't contact in sport and we're not fighting and dancing and moving and we can really do this controlled formal movement where we can really see inputs and outputs.

I explained to my mother-in-law a long time ago what was happening when we were developing our model to understand movement. And I was, and I explained it and she was like, oh, you mean it makes the invisible visible? That's right, is that this is a place to understand how your range of motion is changing, how your skills are changing, right? Over the course of a season or the course of, you know, something going on in your life, a season in your life, suddenly you're like, wow, my left hip is a little tight or my left shoulder is, my internal rotation is going away. Hard to see when you're swimming, really easy to see when we dumbbell snatch, right? And what we're trying to do then is take the gym, not only have it be a stimulus for adaptation, but have it be a really great place to uncover changes in my movement, changes in expression of that movement.

And so really what you see, again, if I just do this one thing over and over again, that's patterning, that's repetition, that's practice, right? And what you've done is just say, hey, let me change my brain, let me open the door handle with my left side and coming into the gym with that curiosity means that we can have seven bottom lines. We're working on your fascia, we're working on these energy systems, we're working on these movement skills, but simultaneously we can have fun, we can work on understanding our range of motion. So for me I think it's easier to say let's frame mobility as, here's my definition: do you have access to normative range of motion? The range of motion every physician, every physical therapist, every chiro agrees on. Shoulder, it's 180 degrees of flexion.

Andrew Huberman: So for those listening, this is lifting your arm above head so you can bring your hand basically, you know, above the center of your head.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: And what you can see right now is Andrew has his elbow bent, his head tipped to the side, is internally rotated. He's solving the problem, which is what his brain is saying, right?

Andrew Huberman: Compensation.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: If you want to use the word compensation, I want to put that on you. But what I'd say is that's an incomplete position. Doesn't mean you have pain, doesn't mean you're not the world champion, but it means we may have some latent capacity we could chase. And the next question for me then is, what is it that's missing potentially in your training that we're not having this exposure? We're not doing enough close grip hanging, we're not doing seesaw press, right? Where the arm is straight up, we're always gripping on a barbell, right? I'm not handling enough dumbbells or kettlebells overhead. And then we can say, well, do I need some position transfer exercises, some mobility work to restore that so we can use it again, and then more importantly, how does that turn up for you in a way that impacts your sport or your job? That's what's really interesting. Does that make sense?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. So what I'm hearing is that when we go into the gym or wherever we do our resistance training work, that we should think about it as a place to, yes, perform to exceed our previous, you know, reps and sets and weight. Yeah, 'cause that's part of the fun.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Fun and easy to measure, hard to see. Are you getting better at soccer? I don't know, but I put another keel on my bench today, like, that's fun.

Andrew Huberman: Lex Fridman, who of course everybody knows from the Lex Fridman podcast, likes to make fun of Americans, because he's Russian, but he's actually American now, for being meatheads, because we like to spend so much time in gyms working out as opposed to doing sports. And I assure him that I've also done and do sports now. But he likes to make that point, and I think it's a fair one, in that, well, he's a Brazilian jiujitsu guy.

So in any event, the gym is also a place for diagnosis, to diagnose where we don't have as much range of motion as we could. And, you know, that's very helpful, I think, for people to hear, because most people are time limited. They don't have... if they're getting their two or three resistance training workouts per week, plus two or three cardiovascular training workouts, and they're listening to Peter or Tia, so they're trying to hang from a bar for 90 seconds or more, and they're, you know, doing some farmer carries, and they're doing their zone 2, and they're throwing on a weight vest. I mean, you know, and they got either fidgeting under their desk, you know, at some point you can start to understand why people are like, whoa, this is starting to become overwhelming. What you're talking about is going and doing your typical workout, but paying attention to where some, for lack of a better word, I'll call them asymmetries or not full range of motion being expressed where that might be happening. I love, I keep coming back to this, but this thing about getting down onto the ground for 30 minutes each night while watching TV or while, maybe even while eating dinner while talking to your family or partner.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I think it's fantastic. It also gives me an excuse to push the sofas off to the side of the room because I have this weird neuroticism about furniture in the middle of the room. So I'm imagining getting mats down on the floor of the living room.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: And suddenly we're not programming another thing that's, I think, one of the things that has happened, and it's a good thing, It's a feature of the system. Strength conditioning in the last 20 years has become very sophisticated. So Juliet and I, my wife and CEO, opened our gym in 2005.

Andrew Huberman: This was the CrossFit gym at San Francisco Presidio?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's right, San Francisco.

Andrew Huberman: Beautiful location.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Twenty-first CrossFit in the world, early. But we couldn't buy a kettlebell in San Francisco. We had to drive to Santa Cruz.

Andrew Huberman: That says a lot about San Francisco. I can say that because I'm from the Bay Area.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: But there was one place in Santa Cruz that sold them, Play It Again Sports, that imported these Russian kettlebells. Thank you, Pavel. And we had to make this trek down to buy them. So the fitness, I think we, I bought my first pair of Olympic lifting shoes out of the back of someone's car, like a drug deal?

Andrew Huberman: Olympic lifting shoes?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yeah, like, you just couldn't buy them.

Andrew Huberman: Flat sole shoes?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: No, like, actually an Olympic lifting shoe with, like, a heel. But, like, you can buy those at, like, three different stores in Malibu right now. Like, you go right over there... we have normal...You can buy kettlebells at Target. So the world has become much more sophisticated. Sometimes, like, the overhead squat is a good example. Fantastic diagnostic tool. Tells us a lot.

Andrew Huberman: So bar held overhead, squat down.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Super simple. All you have to do is have normal range of motion and... in your joints and tissues. Well, it helps. Juliet likes to say, I was bending before I was big. But, you know, the idea here, though, is, let's go ahead and also put skill back into this. But most people weren't overhead squatting, you know, at all. It wasn't part of their language. Now everyone knows what an overhead squat is, right? Dan John, CrossFit, all the Olympic lifters have been doing this forever. But what we are seeing is that the natural evolution of fitness and strength conditioning is that we've become, we've gotten really decorative in our room. So we create this room that's just every inch has a knick knack, has an assistance. This is my tib raise, this is my neck thing. It's a very decorative experience. And instead of asking what was essential in terms of energy systems and positions that I can train so that I could go use those credits, you know, for lack of a better word, it's. Fitness has become very recursive. I have this zone 2 so I can use more zone 2, so I can do more zone 2. Or I have pull-ups because they beget more pull-ups instead of, well, how did that make you swim? What's the minimum amount of time we can spend in the gym so that you can go express that, Lex is right, in a sport or an activity? And, and look, there are times in your life where the gym is the only thing you got. You know, Juliet and I, when we had two kids and a baby or two kids in our businesses, we did the 10-10-10 at 10, which is like 10 air squats, 10 kettlebell swings, 10 pull-ups at 10pm for 10 minutes. And I was like, elite

Andrew Huberman: You do that every day?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Well, I just did it when I could do it right because that's all I could fit in. So I think what's happened is we have now sold people this idea that fitness happens in a one-hour block. And if it's not an hour, you know, then it's not worth doing. And if you kept a bar loaded in your garage, you could walk out there and do sets in between making dinner. You kept a kettlebell in your kitchen. You could do Pavel's four swings on the minute for 20 minutes and at least have some exposure loading. So a long way around the barn of saying, I want to protect your gym time because it's really sacred, amazing time where you can have fun, explore ranges, get strong, get jacked, feel great about yourself, interact with your friends. And what I don't want to do is encroach any more on that magic time because we have a lot to get done in the gym. Physiologically, if we're going to compete against these other teams, if we're going to beat Stanford, we're going to need to really maximize that time in the gym. So that means we need to push out some of these other behaviors. So we're not stacking them in and they're eroding the time. We could be squatting or benching or cleaning or running or sprinting or cutting or playing.

Andrew Huberman: You mentioned warming up with play, which I think is a wonderful concept and presumably brings about more dynamic movement.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: A hundred percent.

Andrew Huberman: And another reason I like it is that I loathe warming up, aside from the types of warmups that I just described.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: And I hate it.

Andrew Huberman: And I'm beginning to realize that the way I've been training, even though it's been, I would, I would say useful and, and successful for where I've been. I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do heading into the new year. This is not like a New Year's episode. This, this is a, you know, evergreen because it's you. But we have a new year coming. A lot of people are going to naturally mark the time during and after the holidays as a transition point. And if one wanted to start to not necessarily completely restructure their fitness, but wanted to start incorporating a few things. So we've got sitting down in the evening for 30 minutes. We've got incorporating play into the warmup. What would that look like? Are we taking a tennis ball and bouncing it off the ground? We setting some rule in playing a game?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Sure.

Andrew Huberman: What if I'm alone? Am I playing a little handball-type game against the wall?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Absolutely. See something on the internet. Want to learn a new skill? This is the time to put it in. I'm going to talk about my brilliant friend David Weck. He has something called rope flow that he created, and it's just a piece of climbing rope. And he will talk about all the things that it will do. For me, I get a thousand PNF patterns. I tie my upper body into my lower. My upper body into my lower body.

Andrew Huberman: Could you explain PNF? Sorry. Acronym.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Sorry, everyone. That's a model of facilitating movement developed at Kaiser Vallejo. It is by...  Knott and Kabat, I think. Maybe I'm getting confused in those. And anyway, the bottom line is this. How do we help the body restore movement by using its own positional awareness?

Andrew Huberman: Got it.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: So if you've ever done a hamstring stretch where someone holds you and you resist, that contract, relax is a style. It's a technique born out of PNF.

Andrew Huberman: Got it. Sorry.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Okay. No problem. Perfect.

Andrew Huberman: Okay. So he's got these ropes and, and.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: So suddenly, like I use this with all my teams, suddenly I'm spinning ropes. I'm getting thousands of evolutions of the wrist turning, the elbow turning, the shoulder turning. I'm generating speed in weird positions that would be vulnerable and not as effective at high load, high stakes. I get to twist, I can tie my eyes into it, I can develop my stance. And in five minutes of messing around, you're like, oh, I feel good. And we've added some speed to that, right? Because a lot of the warmups I see people do, I'm like, hey, there was no speed. You know what, sport is speed and you haven't added any velocity to your training. So where are we going to do that?

Andrew Huberman: I love this. I'm excited to--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Dave Weck does a lot of amazing things. His rope is a foundational piece of my... If you work with me and you have shoulder pain and neck pain, you're going to get my shoulder spin up or David Weck's rope flow every day. That's part of our homework. What are we going to do to give you exposure and restore what you're supposed to do with your body?

Andrew Huberman: So walk into the gym, use the bathroom, hydrate, whatever it is you need to do. And then five to 10 minutes of some play-type dynamic activity.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Throw a medicine ball around, jump on a mini trampoline, pick up a barbell, do a complex, do some breath-hold work. There's a perfect place to lay on all the breath-hold work. I think they call it dry face breath holding, is this dynamic apnea work where you basically are holding your breath. So for example, with our teams, we try to, I try to have — this is a magic number — seven sort of hypoxic events where we do something on a breath hold until the athlete has a crisis and has to breathe. And part of that is I want to get the brain ready for these high CO2 levels, right. And I want to challenge respiration. And it's so easy. Get on the bike. Here's something everyone can do for five minutes. I want you to take a 10-second inhale on the bike. Hold your breath as long as you can. When the bomb goes off in your face, cover nose only. Start at the next one, at the next minute and what you're going to see is, wow, that was really uncomfortable. Really psychologically preparing myself to get into a fight. That came from the French free divers. One of the coaches I was working was like, here's something we used to do with our French free divers. I was like, this is so good. Mackenzie, Laird Hamilton, Wim Hof, the people who've been exposing us to dynamic apnea work is amazing, but that's another example of something I can do instead of mindlessly just being on and I gotta get a sweat. Like let's go ahead and just layer in play and destruction.

Andrew Huberman: I love it.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Do not lay on the ground and foam roll. Let me say that again. Do not lay on the ground and foam roll. That is the worst way to get ready for a fight ever.

Andrew Huberman: I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function. I recently became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. While I've long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood, urine and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health, my hormone status, my immune system regulation, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral status, and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality. Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers, key to physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors on your results. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had too high levels of mercury in my blood. This was totally surprising to me. I had no idea prior to taking the test. Function not only helped me detect this, but offered medical doctor-informed insights on how to best reduce those mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption, because I had been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC, N-acetyl cysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification and worked to reduce my mercury levels. Comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health, and while I've been doing it for years, I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive. I've been so impressed by Function, both at the level of ease of use that is getting the test done, as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are, that I recently joined their advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try Function, go to functionhealth.com/huberman. Function currently has a waitlist of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman Lab listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman to get early access to Function.

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Somehow, and we could talk about how, it's not a coincidence you became synonymous with foam rolling. It became synonymous with you. That's okay. I mean it's not okay. It's okay with me. They weren't saying about me, but I was about to say it's okay. Anytime somebody goes public facing and starts to try and educate people, you know people, there's certain things that are sticky, they have like high salience. Like yes, I like to get into a cold plunge, but how I, how Andrew Huberman became associated with cold plunging or buying a cold plunge is wild. I mean, sure, I own one and you know this sort of thing and I think they're great for shifting your state. But it's hardly the cornerstone of my life or my existence. But I love it. I use it, but I think foam rolling looked different enough from what people had not seen before. And it, you know, these things just, they have a stickiness to them. Who knows why? What is the deal with foam rolling? Is there a utility to foam rolling?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman: Is there a wrong way to do it?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: No, but there's a way that's not a great use of your time.

Andrew Huberman: Okay.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: So what we're all looking at is we have a finite amount of time and what's my goal? To quickly touch my whole body? You know, what are we trying to do? So if I was using soft tissue mobilization and, or using a roller or a ball or something, what's my goal here? Well, I think the research is very clear. It can help with pain, it can restore range of motion. Again, very clear. And I want to point out one of my research friends, Brent Brookbush. The Brookbush Institute has incredible summaries of musculoskeletal care. Brent is a genius and if you go on his site, there's a little hourglass and you can search like trigger points and you'll see all of the deep-dive research, analysis of the meta research. You'll be like, okay, this is really excellent.

And it is tricky because what doesn't work for my body or wasn't a good use for time now is useless. And it's easy to shout on the internet. So what's our goal? If I was in pain and I was about to exercise, a quick two or three-minute intervention, working on, let's call it desensitization of the tissues. Let's, let's be mechanism agnostic for a second and say that's a really low level into entry safe, highly effective way for you to suddenly feel better. So we create a window of opportunity to move. That's really cool. I love that. No physical therapist in the room. No one went blind. You didn't dislocate, right. So that could be a really excellent use of some soft tissue work. The same way a boxer would go or an MMA fighter or the Olympic lifters in China, they have people who are giving nonthreatening input to the body to tell the brain it's safe or to rehydrate something or get some again. Is it just stimulus so that the brain says it's safe? Sure. Are we restoring how the tissues slide and glide? Sure.

A lot of times I think if you look at any of the mobility work, I'll just put, writ large, really comes down to just doing a couple things. Most of them are just isometrics. So we have a lot of isometric which everyone can agree is good stuff. And we do a lot of tempo work that's really just moving slowly through range. It just may be that I'm using a different tool to have that isometric stimulus or that tempo moving slowly stimulus. So we like to say hey, let's use mobilizations, mobilizing the tissues. Why are we doing it? What are we trying to do? Well, pain is a good reason and again, multifactorial, highly subjective. Why do I have pain while I got in a fight with my wife and I didn't eat and I, you know, twisted my knee back in Vietnam and you know, who knows, right? But what are the inputs that I have to self-soothe and desensitize? And it turns out a ball and a roller is a really good one. So I can use those to help myself feel better. Did that solve the problem? Did that solve two weeks of shitty sleep? Did that solve my poor nutrition and lack of fiber? Did that solve the fact that I don't feel safe in this environment? No, but it got me a window of opportunity where I can go feel better in my body. Is anyone against that?

No. Okay, so what we can also say is, hey, this would be a great way to do what? Restore your range of motion. One tool in a system of tools to get you to do what? Have normative range again, right? For whatever reason, your lats are super stiff, your... doesn't... Again it's more complicated than that. But sometimes it's not more complicated than that. And if I just get you getting some input into there, maybe I can restore that range of motion or create a window where you can go use it again.

Lastly, I would say that it's a wonderful tool to decrease DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness. So in the evening you blow out your quads, do a little soft tissue work and what you'll see is maybe that's blood flow, maybe it's nonthreatening input, maybe it's just massage, maybe it's just the parasympathetic input that massage has. Touch, right, just downregulate. Maybe those are the reasons I feel better. But the bottom line is, is that a good use of your time? Yes. Are all techniques on the roller the same? No. Right. And I think that's where we've lost our minds is that if you, you just rolled up and down on your calf, didn't do anything, I'm like yeah, well you just, what are you doing? What if I rolled side-to-side, and so suddenly we can start to layer in some really complex thinking around this. How about this, you, you have a roller out and I put my calf on there and I start rolling side-to-side. Should that be uncomfortable?

Andrew Huberman: I'm guessing you're going to say no, but anytime I've used a roller, anytime I've used a roller, I'm like, man, that hurts.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I don't like it, that sucks. [laughs]

Andrew Huberman: Well, I mean I don't mind it like, it's not like the kind of, it's not like level, level 8 pain or anything. It's just, it's sort of like, it feels very localized. Even if the roller is a big, fat Costello, the bulldog-size roller.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Totally, totally.

Andrew Huberman: It feels like someone's kind of kneading down in between my muscle fibers, and then I start to think maybe I just have like low fiber density, and if I were Mark Bell or something then this would feel comfortable. But you know, I, I always feel like the rollers going down to the bone.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --face of LFD, low fiber density. So you know what I think we can do is let's establish some guidelines for people because this is, this is one of the ways that we can feel better in our home without bourbon, without ibuprofen, without THC. Like we need to give people some tools that don't... like that aren't just--

Andrew Huberman: --without having to buy a sauna if you can afford one. Great. But not everyone, I mean this whole thing with saunas. But doesn't, you know. Well, until very recently in my life, like I couldn't afford a sauna until very recently. You know, even as a tenured professor at Stanford. I'll just say that.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: You can actually be angry at your parents for not giving you a sauna.

Andrew Huberman: No. You know, when I was a kid, my dad and I used to go to the Y in the evening sometimes when I was little and I'd shoot baskets or he would, he would lift weights. Nautilus machines back then.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yeah. And then get brutally--

Andrew Huberman: And then we'd sit in the sauna or there was a hot--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --you had a different set of trauma, traumatic experiences of sitting in the sauna?

Andrew Huberman: No, actually I learned how. I learned how to make eye contact. I learned how men over, over 40 spoke in 1985. There you go, there you go, there you go.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: If everyone had a roller and a ball, there was a lot of dysfunction and discomfort. We can manage. If you push on a tissue, we expect that tissue to be painless to compression or not uncomfortable to compression again. Pain is a weird word. I don't want to set that up. But you shouldn't be uncomfortable to do compression. What's nice is that if I push on something, all I'm doing is just creating an isometric, it's just a vector isometric. Instead of pulling an isometric through the length of the tissue, I'm putting it at a different vector and angle. So that would just be one. I could start there. And if it was uncomfortable, well, guess what? Now I can get my nervous system involved so I can teach my brain that it's safe to create a contraction here. So what do I do? Just flex, flex, hold it for four seconds.

Andrew Huberman: This is very basic, I realize, but for many people, they're either already foam rolling and doing it incorrectly or they're not foam rolling. We want them to do it correctly. So if I understand correctly, it's "okay" to flex the muscle that you have in contact with the foam roller while you're rolling.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: If I find something that's uncomfortable or stiff or doesn't feel like my other side, I'm going to stop. I found a place to work. I'm going to build technical... a big inhale, so I take a 4-second inhale. I want to teach myself that I need to be able to breathe in this position. My, one of my, you know, friends, Greg Cook, is like, if you can't breathe in a position, you don't own a position. You know, that sounds very Iyengar too, but what we're going to do is we're going to say it's okay to breathe here and I'm going to contract here and then I'm going to slowly relax and soften. That's tempo, that's moving slowly. And I can handle higher loads.

And what will end up happening is if I repeat that cycle two or three times, guess what? My brain desensitizes, that changes range of motion. My brain suddenly is like, that's not a problem anymore. So we just move on. And in two or three cycles of that contraction, breath hold, long exhale. That starts to sound familiar, right? How do I calm down? Long exhales. I'm not trying to spin up, I'm trying to say this is safe. I've done that with my breath, I've done that with contraction. I'm just getting input in, just touch to my body, especially on parts that maybe don't bark at me very often. People are shocked to learn that sometimes when they have knee pain, how stiff their quads are. And then we can test it, load it, feel it, palpate it. And I'm like, those things are just stiff. And when we unstiffen them, whatever technique you want to use, restore sliding surfaces, get neural input in there, we create range of motion. Suddenly we change a motion dynamic. Improved efficiency. The brain says, hey, that's no longer a threat. Or we're experiencing that as a new pattern or position. That'd be enough to reduce your pain. But pain isn't the only reason we're mobilizing. We're mobilizing so that we can reduce session cost, so we can work out harder the next day and keep an eye on our minimums of our range of motion.

Andrew Huberman: Love this. And another just very basic question, because I'll be honest, I haven't foam rolled much in my life.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: And it doesn't have to be a big foam roll. Everyone, sometimes those big white... those are pool noodles, right? That's what it was for. I think, like made in Killeen, Texas, as like a manufacturing byproduct. And someone's like, we could put these in the pool. And then some physical therapist was like, sweet, like, that thing's way too big and too hard and too square and too soft. Like, there's a whole bunch of things. Like, sometimes you need an elbow, sometimes you need a forearm, sometimes you need a thumb. So you can have much smaller diameter. I'm a much bigger fan of smaller diameter rollers. I just think they fit your body better.

Andrew Huberman: Thank you for that. Also very helpful. Let's say I want to "loosen up" or move out some potential soreness or soreness from a given muscle, like the quadricep. Does it make sense to start in the middle of that muscle, the top? Can you work above and below the knee? Are all of those things going to help? I realize this is a much fuller discussion than we can have a few minutes, but, like, how should I approach it? I'm like, okay, you know, my quads are a little sore, or my back is sore. Do I go straight to the back or do I start with another, with another body region?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I don't think it matters. What I want, interested in, is inputs and outputs, right? What I'm really interested in is what did you do to make yourself feel better? Did you just hope it would just go away and then one day it didn't and then you had to activate the emergency medical system. So let's define a couple things. What is an injury? This is a great question. Injury for us is, there's a clear mechanism of mechanical trauma. There's a bone sticking out of your leg. Andrew, time to go to the hospital. Injured, right? You're injured, right? I heard a snap and a pop.

Andrew Huberman: Yikes.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I have night sweats, dizziness, fever, vomiting, nausea, unaccounted for weight loss, weight gain, changes in my bladder, bowel function problem, my cough, sneeze or swell, those are red flags you're in. Not sore, you're sick. Let me introduce you to the doctor again, right? If your pain or dysfunction is so bad you can't occupy a role in your family, can't occupy a role in society, can't occupy a role in the team, that's  an emergency problem. That is a medical condition that needs medical. So you come in today, you tweaked your back. It may need, we need to activate EMS, need to go to the hospital, we need to get... Because it's so severe you can't do your job. Everything else I want to call noninjury. I want to be very specific with the language I use. We call it an incident. It actually comes out of this sort of language.

There's a guy, here's the long way around the barn. I read this great book called "Deep Survival," which is by Laurence Gonzalez, which is about why people end up in survival situations. And it's literally a lot about... we got away with it for a long time and then I just didn't have a... I ended up two miles out to sea. I've done it a million times and this time, right, that's it. But there was a footnote in there from a book called "Normal Accidents," by Charles Perrow, who's recently passed on. I emailed Charles because I was like, this has blown my mind. He calls a lot of times we'll have trivial events in nontrivial systems. So he's taking systems thinking. He's looking at complex system organization. And his idea is that an accident, a normal accident is actually just expression of the system. If you gave the system long enough to express itself, the input and outputs are so tightly coupled that it's difficult to see what causes what and how they influence each other. That's the body.

So your stiff shoulder isn't a problem until you fall on the ice. And then that stiff shoulder suddenly can't take over pressure and overhead and you tear your rotator cuff off at high speed. You'd say, oh, black swan event. Super crazy. But that's actually just a normal expression of that shoulder system. If we gave it enough time to express itself. So he had a sort of, like, incident and accident. So an incident is. I want us to start to think about incident level problems. Our pain, loss of range of motion, numbness, tingle. We're becoming curious. Why is the brain sending me the signals? Pain is a request for change. So when we ask our athletic population, I just did this with a hundred kids, I'm like, how many of you are pain free? One hundred high school kids. Two hands go up. Two.

Andrew Huberman: High school.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: High school. So what we're suddenly realizing is that pain is very much a part of the athletic condition. The human experience, certainly the athletic experience. You've been in pain a billion times and still gone out and done the thing. So what we want to do is say, pain is not always a medical problem. It's a medical problem when... The rest of the time we're saying, how are you using fitness training as a scaffolding to understand nutrition, hydration, soft tissue work, desensitization, reperfusion of the tissues. So that's what we're trying to do in sport and training, is empower people to say, what's going on with my body and why don't I feel the way I do? Or why does something hurt and why can't I remedy that? And then when I run out of ideas, let me go get some help.

Andrew Huberman: So the rolling we can think of as a way to move out soreness, prepare us for more work the next day, or something like that. But is it fair to say that we can also use the roller as a diagnostic tool?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Sure.

Andrew Huberman: Like, if I'm feeling like an unusual amount of, not unusual, but let's just say that I'm feeling like a wuss. Because when I, when I lie down on that roller and I like, you know, like slide back and forth like, I've seen the videos of you and other folks doing that, I'm like, man, that really hurts. Does that necessarily mean something's wrong?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: No, okay, so it means, it means that, for whatever reason, those tissues have become sensitized and that your brain is interpreting that stiffness as a threat and it's reading it as pain. And some people, they don't have that. They just, their tissues feel like this, but they don't have pain when they do that. But that's not a normal tissue. You should be like layers of warm silk sliding over steel springs.

Andrew Huberman: And what you're seeing is what quality tissue should be.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew Huberman: Layers of silk over steel springs.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Layers of silk over steel springs. And what we see is that we are loading and training at such high intensities and such density now that our tissues get stiff, I'm just going to hang stiffness as, for whatever reason, high fibrotic, high density of tissues, whatever reason, the tissues don't behave the way the joint system should. And that's a problem because my training shouldn't mitigate or attenuate or change my range of motion. It can, but now how am I keeping an eye on those changes? Or as you said earlier here, as I do a sport and I start to do a sport and specialize, I'm throwing, throwing, or I swim or I kick on one side, how can I start to identify as my body is changing and adapting that sport so I can drag myself back to a sort of a greater readiness? And that's one of the reasons that that mobilization tool is such a powerful tool. Again, however you want to do it, I think it's useful for us when we have... I came up with this thing called the D2R2 model because the other ray was taken by R2D2. So the first order of business is I want to desensitize if something hurts. Something hurts, let's desensitize it. I can do that in all different ways. Scraping is powerful. Desensitization, isometrics can be really useful. Rolling, BFR can give me desensitization. There's so many techniques to make my body--

Andrew Huberman: Blood flow restriction.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yeah, blood flow restriction. So that no longer my brain is perceiving this as a threat. Because if you're in pain, you cannot generate the same amount of force or wattage or output. And your brain is going to start to truncate, it's going to start to lop off your movement solutions. It's just going to happen. So we want our, we want everyone to be saying, hey, we don't panic, we have pain, we just treat it like another diagnostic tool.

Then second D. We desensitize. And then we ask, is this something that can be decongested? So decongestion means that oftentimes tissues that are swollen become more easily sensitized. Tissues that are swollen and congested don't heal as fast. If you have a swollen ankle, those collagen fibers will not knit together as fast... If you have a joint that's swollen or a tissue that's swollen, your brain will shut down force production in and around that joint system. Is swelling an emergency? No. Is a swollen joint environment really healthy for the integrity and surface of the joint? No. We want to manage that. But oftentimes when someone comes in and the tissue is congested, right, just sometimes we say swelling and we think ankle, only capsular. But here we have. If you've ever flown on an airplane and had cankles, that's congested tissue. If we manage that congestion, if we move those lymphatics along, muscle contraction drives the lymphatic drainage. The lymph system is the sewage system of the body. Decongested tissues often express less pain.

And what we find is that in broken bones or soft tissue injuries, if we can better evacuate that swelling, better evacuate that congestion, not only do we see you now healing at the rate of a human being, we're not rate limiting the healing, but also we can help you manage that sensitivity.

Then the third one is, can we get some blood flow in there? Like you said, I, once I warm up, I feel great. Welcome to the power of blood flow. Tissues become hydrated, we're shifting blood from the stomach. All the things that happen, right? All that venous return is coming back on board. But suddenly we see that if we get something pumped of blood, it tends to be less painful. And that's really easy. So if I have an old orthopedic thing, maybe I spend a few minutes just getting a huge quad pump on the leg extension machine. Then I go squat heavy, right?

So now I have desensitization, decongestion, reperfusion. Whatever tool you want to use for these is fair game with me, just as how I've come to kind of conceptualize these different tools. And the last one is restore. Do you have full range of motion, full normal in that joint, yes or no? Because that's the last thing that we talk about. Because you're still able to perform your sport at college or do your job, but we're not seeing how in excess your ability to not access that range of motion may be limiting your movement choice and potentially overloading a tissue by making it work in a less effective manner.

Andrew Huberman: Or even just leading to progressively worse and worse posture, which is probably--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --well, define posture for me because I think that's a really great place to start. Right?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. I can define bad posture as when you catch yourself in a reflection and you realize, wow, I'm starting to. I'm starting to look more like a C--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --I love it--

Andrew Huberman: --than an I.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's so great. You know, the question is, is that a matter of aesthetics or pain?

Andrew Huberman: Well, certainly for me it's not pain, but, you know, I--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --it's not becoming injury--

Andrew Huberman: --it's not becoming. I notice that unless I pay attention to my posture while sitting, unless I do a, you know, like, bridge my fingers together and pull my chin back a few times a day, that I'm just naturally starting to tip over forward towards my text messages that aren't even in my hands right now. And I think this is, you know, the younger generation. I mean, now that I'm 49, I can talk like that, right? I mean, it's striking.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Were you born in the 1900s?

Andrew Huberman: The late 1900s.

Yeah, exactly. [laughs]

Dr. Kelly Starrett: You're an old man. [laughs]

Andrew Huberman: They're starting to look like they're shaped like a C. And I'm a big believer in people, especially men, doing neck work. I feel like, like if, if you. Especially if--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --how about especially people doing neck work.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Well, here's the thing. Anytime... I'm happy to go there with this one. Maybe even at the risk of being politically incorrect, anytime I've suggested that women also do neck work, they say no.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: You should see my goalie daughter. Because for every pound stronger your neck is, your reduction in concussion risk drops huge. A pound.

Andrew Huberman: Thank you.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: So we keep the iron neck by the door and she walks in and there's a... We have a video in our family where she's doing her iron neck training. She looks at me, she's like, Dad, this is why I don't have a boyfriend. Thank you. Sorry, Caroline, but that's the way it goes, right? Because she's like, look at me. I look like an idiot. But she loves having a big strong neck that doesn't... can take the shot from the ball.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, listen, I wish everyone would train their neck. I had an accident where I fell off a roof, walked away from it. My neck was sore, but I heard it and felt it and I was like, oh, goodness. But it was actually from skateboarding stuff and falling and that I started training my neck years ago and realized that, wow, when I train my neck, I'm one of the few people in my age cohort that doesn't complain about shoulder pain. Now maybe I don't have full range of motion. Maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong people. But anytime I see somebody with really broad shoulders, shoulders where their neck is really inside of their jawline, it looks like a head was placed on the wrong action figure body. I just want to go over to them and say, listen--

A, it's aesthetically ridiculous. It looks like one of those flip books in the kids where you can change the head, the body and the legs to be different animals. More seriously, it's a hazard because it's your upper spine. It's clearly not in line with the rest of your strength profile. And the other one is the more incentive-based thing is, hey, listen, if you train your neck, everything else gets stronger and your brain is going to be safer. And as a neuroscientist, they usually listen to the last piece. I might. So I'm so glad we're talking about this. I do bridges. I know that it can be risky with tongue in the roof of my mouth. I like, I do bridges to the back. And then I do have a four-way neck machine or I use a plate. Jeff Cavaliere's got a great video of how to do this that we can link to. How to do it safely. You gotta, you gotta close the chain by having a hand on the ground, this kind of thing, to do it safely.

But I've just found that neck work also serves posture. Posture serves the ability to make eye contact when you have those things we call conversations with people in real life. And I do think it, these things stack up to, we won't call it psychological confidence, but the ability to meet somebody, you know, like a firm handshake, you're not trying to crush the other person's hand. Look people in the eye, stand up straight. Whatever your height, these things really matter. In subtle ways or not so subtle ways. I think that I do feel like, yes, that the younger generation and the older generation, that they sort of drop, they kind of drop out of certain elements of life. If you're looking down at the ground or your phone all the time, you can't look people in the eye. You're posturally not right, you're in pain, you're not as strong as you could be. I mean these things stack up to being like in an aquarium full of fish, you're becoming the fish in the background that's like, you know, like it was kind of sickly and the other fish are getting all the good stuff.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: If you define posture as like, the Latin word root is position. So we're really saying, I have good position, I have bad position. One of the ways I think we've lost the narrative a little bit is we try to give people these extrinsic cues to correct their posture. Shoulders back and down, check your tent, legs. So all of a sudden you're like, when am I going to be a human being? How do I practice this when I'm doing a complex skill? So the organization of your body, the organization of your spine particularly really is a reflection of your movement habits, your behaviors, your self-identity. There's a lot of things in there, right? You didn't get the job [slouches forward], you won the, got the number from Juliet [sits up straight], or--

Andrew Huberman: You're sleep deprived, you've been--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --or--

Andrew Huberman: --and I'm gonna call myself out because people are gonna do it. There are many times on this podcast when I go and I look at the... Because I do listen to the podcast, trying to see places I can improve, etc, and I'll be like, wow, my posture. I'm like hunched over. And I think to myself--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Are you just reflecting my posture?

Andrew Huberman: No, no. And I track my sleep. So, you know, go back and look. I'll be like, yeah, I wasn't sleeping as well those days, or whatever it is. I mean, I think that we are all guilty of not paying enough attention to our posture.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: So what we can do is we could define posture as there is a median range of the joint positioning where we simultaneously have most access to our physiology. And I'll explain that a little more. But also, those shapes aren't associated with increased pain risk and increased injury risk, which is real. The research does bear that, that there are positions and shapes that lead to less effective movement, are more likely to experience pain. It's probabilistic. It's not guaranteed. It's more likely. So one of the things that I think you could understand is, hey, do you want to have access to all of the machinery? So go ahead and slouch. Go ahead with me and then just turn over your shoulder [slouches forward and turns head to the right]. How far can you turn?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, not very far.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Now watch this. Get into a position where you take a huge breath. Get to the biggest position when you take the biggest, biggest breath. [both take a breath and sit up straight] Okay, so that's a pretty rocking shape. Now turn your head. [Starrett turns head further to right] It goes further. So by you being cued, can you adopt a shape, an organization of your trunk that allowed you to ventilate a little bit more effectively? You completely changed and reorganized your structure, which led to an improvement in output. So when I'm working with people, there's only two things I really can wrap my head around. One is, do you have normative range of motion? Yes or no? What are the tools we have to restore that and improve that? And does that expression give us greater biomotor output?

Because those are objective measures when biomotor output, I mean range of motion, force production power. Right, I see that. And I can express the physiology in a unique way that makes me, you know, more effective. And that is why you'll see suddenly we have this definition that is maintaining the physiology and aspects. I'm not going to have as good shoulder flexion with my arm over a head as when I'm sitting up taller or in a position where I can take a bigger breath. And I think that's what's really great because that gets us away from good posture, bad posture, into, hey, that position doesn't serve you as well in these circumstances.

And in this position... I'm working with the pararescue team in the Air Force. The number one reason they were having back injuries was getting this litter out of the helicopter is... because they have a litter. The soldiers there with all their gear on, they've got a loop lift from a totally weird flexed position. And this turns out that's not a really effective posture position shape that transfers to handling these higher loads. So what do we do? We work on the range of motion, we give them skills to try to organize more effectively in that shape. And lo and behold, we can reduce injury risk and injury incident in those soldiers. So what we're always thinking about here is let's get away from good and bad, and like posture doesn't matter. And it also doesn't matter at low load, low speed.

And I want to be very clear about that. So you can get away with murder at low velocities and low speeds, but speed kills. Oh, everyone's fine. But when that speed wobble starts to happen, we start to see greater likelihood of deflection from posture. Your abs don't work as effectively. You can't create the same intra-abdominal pressure. Check, check, check, check, check. So that's why we always are saying, hey, is this true that you're saying under high load, high speed when there's consequence? Because maybe this set of conditions works under these conditions, but it doesn't work across all conditions. And for me, I'm trying to take the best information I have working in sports and performance and trying to transmute that to my family, transmute that to my neighborhood and to the kids I'm working with.

Andrew Huberman: I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need but nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes sodium, magnesium and potassium are vital for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking LMNT dissolved in water makes it extremely easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of element in about 16-32 oz of water when I wake up in the morning. And I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I also drink LMNT dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and therefore losing a lot of water and electrolytes. They have a bunch of different great tasting flavors of LMNT. They have watermelon, citrus, etc. Frankly, I love them all. And now that we're in the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, LMNT has their Chocolate Medley flavors back in stock. I really like the chocolate flavors, especially the chocolate mint when it's heated up. So you put it in hot water and that's a great way to replenish electrolytes and hydrate, especially when it's cold and dry outside when hydration is especially critical. If you'd like to try LMNT, you can go to drinklmnt.com/hubermanlab to claim a free LMNT sample pack with the purchase of any LMNT drink mix. Again, that's drinklmnt.com/hubermanlab to claim a free sample pack.

As long as we're talking about posture, it feels like a good transition point to pelvic floor. Years ago. And this is a plug for the material that you put out online and in books. But long before we met, I decided to sign up for your men's pelvic floor--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --oh yeah--

Andrew Huberman: --course--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --outsold our woman's pelvic floor course, two to one.

Andrew Huberman: It was so interesting because, you know, at that time one could go online and learn a little bit about pelvic floor. Everyone. And we talked about this with a couple different guests on this podcast, including the Director of Male Sexual Health. He's an M.D., Ph.D., or at least an M.D., as I recall. Mike Eisenberg at Stanford. We've talked about this with Mary Claire Haver and other people in the female health domain.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I'm glad we're normalizing this conversation.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, we normalize this conversation. You know that the pelvic floor is rich with vasculature for blood flow and neural input for controlling muscles either passively or actively. And I'll tell you the number of people I know who have urinary issues, sexual dysfunction issues. I know because they tell me that they squat heavy in the gym, they do their Kegels and things like that. Then I've had guests on, like Mike Eisenberg and others, and they say, yeah, actually, if you have a tight pelvic floor, doing Kegels is about the worst thing you could ever do for urinary function or erection function.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's right.

Andrew Huberman: You know, because you're sending in the wrong direction. You need to learn to relax your pelvic floor. Then some women will say, and it seems to be women that report this. Whether or not men just have this but don't report it I don't know. I've had people write to me and say, yeah, you know, I'll do some lower body work in the gym and some urine is sneaking out. And it's like, well, pelvic floor. And you had this great course on pelvic floor that taught me, among other things, and I will say I wasn't suffering any of those particular issues, but I had prostate pain in my 30s and I was like, what's going on? Went and got my PSA measured.

Perfectly normal.

Thought, what's going on? Started researching online, read your work, and realized, oh, I think I might just have tight pelvic floor. Started doing certain things, including you taught me how to sit down and stand up correctly in this video. It's like you have to keep your sternum high. I think you said it was like a stately--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Let me just... there's no wrong way or right way to stand up or sit down everyone. But there are ways that reflect increased function, especially when you're in a dysfunctional state.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, right. I don't want to... we're not trying to — yet — tell people what to do or not to do, but it was like, wow, you know, I'm probably hunched over too much. I think my hips are back too far when I'm sitting. And maybe I'll move to a standing desk or a sit-stand desk, which is what I did. Lo and behold, prostate pain goes away. You know, and had I not found that course, I might have gone down the path of medication or something else. Took care of everything. I also, I will say the other thing I learned was I had, I tend to have, a slight anterior pelvic tilt. So thinking about the pelvis, like a bowl, as I understand, like, if that bowl could be, you know, the ridge of that bowl could be parallel to the ground or tilted forward. Anterior pelvic tilt or back, you know, posterior pelvic tilt. Neutral seems like a good idea. But most people tend to have, you know, some natural propensity towards one or the other. Started wearing, I pretty much always wore flat shoes, Adidas or, you know, skateboard shoes are pretty flat. I lucked out there.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Shoe game is strong today.

Andrew Huberman: The shoe game is strong today. Adidas. Still wear them every day. I love them. Or no shoes.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: You know, which is great. And I noticed, okay, that corrected some of that prostate pain too, by making. Oh, excuse me, what helped correct it was to make sure that in the gym, I did something that turned out to be glute ham raises that would take my pelvis through a fairly full range of motion from, you know, posterior to anterior tilt. And I've come to love the glute ham raise. We're talking full range glute ham raises as one of the most useful tools just posturally for pelvic floor. So not like it's for huge hamstrings--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --beautiful for stiffness in the system. Resetting, high neurologic component to actually do the thing. One of the things I hinted at earlier is like, I've chased biomodal output, right? Intra-abdominal pressure and being able to have a pelvic floor that works for you is part of that system. Like, again, we can take the physiology and goose it up and down. What's interesting about... I had a famous friend who was filming a TV show and we were working on his internal rotation of his hip. So if you're.... you imagine someone on your back and I bring your knee to your chest and I swing your foot away from your midline, right? The femur rolls in. That's internal rotation of the femur for everyone. And I worked on his internal rotation of his femur and just improved his hip flexion, knee to chest. Just got those things going. I get this text that night, and he's like, bro, what is up with my boners? They're out of control. What is going on?

Andrew Huberman: Out of control in the positive direction, okay.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: And I was like, well, there's this thing called blood. Blood flow. And when we improve blood flow, turns out reperfusion is on the list of things that we chase.

Andrew Huberman: So he had been crimping the hose, so to speak, stiff, right?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: And I think when we start to see that endopelvic fascia as a system, it's so easy for us to be reductionist. Like, I wouldn't even say you had prostate pain. I would say you had pain in your prostate area.

Andrew Huberman: Right? And in fact, that's what was told, the prostate region, right. And because PSA--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --so you're like, I don't know where my prostate is. Okay?

Andrew Huberman: That's a general sense. And I. I also saw the PSA level was well within normal, actually low range. And I was like, what in the world is going on here? And you start, you know, you can find some pretty scary stuff online about. About spinal cord injuries and this kind of thing. Did what we just talked about, and boom, it's never been an issue again.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: We have all the Olympic lifting gyms, even our gym, we kept a towel on the platforms so that women particularly would pee themselves when they would receive a heavy, clean, heavy snatch. And we would just wipe it up.

Andrew Huberman: They'd actually urinate on the platform.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Oh, yeah, that happens all the time, all over the Olympics, everywhere. You'll see that, that is, bladder incontinence is not normal. Totally normal to poop yourself before a fight. That's what animals do. Totally not normal to pee yourself. Peeing yourself is a sign of dysregulation for sure. So what, as you're seeing is, though, hey, I can't manage this high intra-abdominal pressure I'm creating. And what ends up happening is we pee ourselves. So we can start by saying, well, are there positions and shapes? Theoretically, I want your pelvic floor to work in all the shapes. Its maximum. And there'll be some shapes where it just doesn't work as effectively. And if you're a man, so we're getting into it, if you go pee, you'll see a lot of men will put their hand on the wall and they'll adopt an anterior pelvic tilt to pee. And what they'll do is basically just turn the pelvic floor off. And so if you stand up and do a big anterior pelvic tilt, your pelvic floor will lose some of its tone, and it's easier to initiate.

Andrew Huberman: So anterior pelvic tilt again, folks, is. Imagine your pelvis is a bowl. You're tilting it forward like you're going to pour water out of the bowl, which is a fair analogy here.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's right.

Andrew Huberman: You're saying, ideally, they keep a neutral pelvis and use the force of their muscles controlling their bones.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: No, I'm saying that it's much more difficult to pee in this position where we have high control over these systems. And what you'll see is that most people will adopt a shape where they basically inhibit their pelvic floor so they can pee standing up.

Andrew Huberman: I can't believe we're gonna dissect urine posture, urinating posture. But I think it's really important. Let's contrast that to the famous sculpture of the boy peeing. And he's like leaning back. Leaning back.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Same posture. His pelvis is forward and he's leaning back. That's the same posture.

Andrew Huberman: So same. Or people with sons will know this. Right? So you know, when you're a young kid, young boy, you can like, it almost feels like you can pee over a car if you had to. Maybe I tried that. I'm just saying it was a Volkswagen, right? So is there a proper posture for people?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: No, no, no. But initiating a stream, maintaining a stream is like, that's a sign of sexual health, of functional health as your general health. And what's nice now is notice how we got to this very nuanced conversation about erectile dysfunction, about bladder insufficiency, about peeing ourselves. We got there through performance, by... we'll have athletes who literally had a whole bunch of babies suddenly have a difficult time creating high intra-abdominal tone, will jump rope. And as soon as NP and as soon as they come back to a more organized position that allows them to transfer energy more effectively, recruit better musculature, have better organization. Organization. Peeing stops. So what we suddenly--

Andrew Huberman: --Female athletes?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Our women athletes.

Andrew Huberman: So you recommend that they jump rope?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Well, yeah, absolutely. Eventually I need to challenge that floor. That's an easy way to do it. But what we see is can you squeeze your butt and jump at the same time? And what you'll find is that a lot of people, as soon as they adopt this into your pelvic tilt, glute goes off. And they don't have that glute control. So that can be problematic for a whole host of features. So imagine, I was hoping we were going to get to hip extension eventually. But you know what we see is that stiffness in the front of the quads, anterior line of the fascia, stiff front of capsule. Whatever the mechanism is, we do a lot of sitting. We're just, we're squatters. My inability to take my knee behind my hip. We call this knees behind butt. Knees behind butt guy, that's what I want to be known as, knee goes behind your butt like you're in a lunge. That's right. Sorry, Ben Patrick. And then what we're going to. You're going to see is a lot of times when we put people in those positions, they can't get a good glute squeeze.

Andrew Huberman: Okay. Could one practice this? I'm thinking it's been a while since I've taken a yoga class--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Sure, if you stood up right now and squeeze your butt. You would be like, yeah, I can practice this.

Andrew Huberman: Okay, so there's a pose in yoga, and I'm not an advanced yogi, but I've taken a few yoga classes in my day where you're on your... you're basically propped up, sitting on your knees. So it's sort of like in the camera, high kneeling and then. Yeah, high kneeling and then hard to--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --squeeze your butt there, isn't it?

Andrew Huberman: It's hard to squeeze your butt there.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: And then because of all the forces yanking you into, anteriorly, those fascia lines, the quads, you're basically in that high kneeling position. And because the lower leg is bent behind you, you're being dragged forward. And it's difficult to squeeze your butt and extend over backwards.

Andrew Huberman: So there's that. Do they call it camel pose where you reach back and grab your heels and you're supposed to look up at the ceiling.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's a gnarly one.

Andrew Huberman: It's a gnarly one. If you do it in the Bay Area, the T-shirt will say, don't be surprised if some emotions come up. No, if you do this in Austin, Texas, they just say it's supposed to hurt. Keep going. I'm just joking here. This is like regional humor. But in any event, I think that's actually accurate, by the way. But in any event, it's. It is slightly unusual for most people who aren't accustomed to it to do that pose again, doing that pose, I bring it up for a reason.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: And if you don't do that pose, you might do Kipping pull-ups. That's a global extension position that all we're doing is taking the spine and putting a huge global load in it instead of a localized load. So an anterior pelvic tilt. We might think of localized extension inflection where I have one or two segments doing the lion's share. We, whenever we can, prefer to have global flexion extension because the spine maintains its integrity a little more effectively.

Andrew Huberman: So doing things like wheel pose.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Awesome.

Andrew Huberman: Putting your hands up near your ears, pushing it. Feet flat on the ground, pushing up into a, you know, an arc. Arc shape on the ground.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Great diagnostics.

Andrew Huberman: This should be. Is this something that most people should be able to do?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yes. Can most people probably do it? No. Can we then break down the components of it? Yeah, absolutely. Even the Iyengar yogi master started to bring in props, blocks and belts because he was seeing that his students weren't able to achieve some of the base shapes. And what they were doing was human Jenga to get into those patterns. They were just solving the problem. And he was like, hold up. Let's not go around the problem. Let's support you while we load you and breathe in these. These positions and shapes.

Andrew Huberman: Given that most people don't have a ton of time for movement, designated blocks of time for movement, if one were going to do, let's say, some attempt toward wheel pose practice or camel pose practice, or any number of the other things that we're talking about here, which are taking the body into positions that it. That we're not naturally putting it into, given our activities.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yeah, great way to otherwise nail that.

Andrew Huberman: Um, would you suggest doing these at the end of a resistance training workout?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: When does it work for you? At some point, you need to be exposed in this position. When are you gonna get exposed to this position? If it happens to be able to be clumped in with your training, fantastic. If it's at home in the evening, fantastic. If you have, you've done sun salutation before, it's old school, right? It's almost like they were like, let's get this system going a little bit so later on in the day it's a little bit easier.

So at some point, we need to expose you to some positions. We have something called the hip spin up. And typically for my athletic populations, my teams especially, I'm like, hey, I want you to do one of three things in the morning. Got 10 minutes? That's all I'm asking. Eight to 10 minutes. Hip spin up, shoulder spin up, or breath spin up. Just. Just do one of those. If your back hurts or knee hurts, you get hip spin up. If your shoulder or neck hurts, you get shoulder spin up. And then if not, just cycle through those. So at least in the morning, we're starting to touch some of these crucial shapes that you're never, ever in. And if you do the hip spin up and suffer, I'm like, well, that's telling me about your movement history, your injury history, your movement diet. And again, nothing that we do on The Ready State is related to supernatural levels of range of motion. Just basic range of motion, the range of motion, again, that everyone learns in med school, everyone learns in physical therapy school.

So what's fun about what you've said around this sort of this pelvic floor health piece is that when we get people doing some mobilization, really brought to me, really brought my attention to Jill Miller, is that we start mobilizing the endopelvic fascia, we just land a ball just anywhere from your pubic bone to your diaphragm process, but particularly belly button south, you'll see that none of that should be uncomfortable. And one of the reasons we see high incidence of pelvic floor dysfunction, but also high incidence of sports hernias, is that we have a hip that doesn't work very well and ends up dragging that pelvis into positions where it's not muscularly very strong, right? I can get out of position where I have a lot of good sort of activation or access to those positions. Then I have fascia and musculature. That's super stiff. Because every time you do abs, you celebrate the stiffness, right? You do abs, you're like, oh, I'm sore today. I'm gonna go have some ice cream. When's the last time you managed your hamstrings, your quads? Probably yesterday. When's the last time you rolled out your abs and your obliques? Never.

Andrew Huberman: Previous life, right?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Previous life, before you respond, so I think one of the things that we're seeing is, again, that'd be a perfect time to do in the evening. Don't go to the gym and lay on the kettlebell and be a creepy guy. Instead, pull out that volleyball at home, pull that princess ball you got at Walgreens, and start having a conversation with your pelvic floor. Turns out, you know, your abdomen, the pelvic floor can also be mobilized. So we just... it's really simple. Front of your pelvis is your pubic bone. That's the front of the pelvic floor. The back is your coccyx. And each ischial tuberosity, your sit bones, is the side. Everything else is your pelvic floor. So you can take a ball and just stay away from the holes. And if anything hurts to compression, you found a problem. So you can contract and relax and apply that same tissue.

Andrew Huberman: So I might be on my side. I might be rolling with the ball right underneath me.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: You would just be sitting down on your coffee table and just putting that, sitting that ball in and around your pelvis and around your glutes and around your pelvic floor, right? You might be dangerously close to your grundle. You're welcome. So the idea here, though, is, you know, oftentimes when we'll have athletes with back pain, we're not looking at the pelvic floor or hip pain. But you have six short hip rotators, right? You don't just have a couple rotators. You have a huge rotator cuff of the hip. And some of those things are congruent and kind of part of that pelvic floor. So it's not that I need to go after my pelvic floor every day because again, let me just add another thing to your list. But if something changes, I suddenly wake up and I don't have an erection. I suddenly am discovering that I'm peeing myself because I'm an elite cyclist. And something's happening that I'm like, oh, I know what to do here. Let me start to work on my belly. Let me see if I can work on restoring my positions and can I do a little pelvic floor mobilization? And that's a great place to start. And which doctor was involved? None. Which pelvic floor therapist was involved? None. In fact, if you carry that to your, your, your specialist, they're going to be like, all right, we get to have the real conversation now because you've already done the other stuff.

Andrew Huberman: One thing that frightens me and maybe unnecessarily so is when I see men in particular doing crunch work, like ab work, crunching with ankles crossed. A, because people tend to cross the same ankle over the other one. They don't, they don't symmetrically switch sides.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's not good, bro.

Andrew Huberman: And my other understanding is that this can also lead to some pelvic floor issues and asymmetries. Simple solution could be to not cross the ankles while doing like repeated contraction work of the abdominal. Am I being silly?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I would put that lower on the list of problems I have. Like I think if we went into the world right now and looked at people doing curls, you know, curl ups. The real thing is, is that your only way that you're training the abdominals, you know, am I, do I have a bigger range of motion of the trunk? There are so many ways to be thinking about what the trunk should be doing and reducing it down to this one curl. I think, if one of the things that we're looking at like I'd much rather you hang from a bar and curl up.

Andrew Huberman: Yep. So this is pretty much, I won't say the only ab work I do, I do some antirotation work by staggering my stance when I do curls or anything else. 'Cause it's a very time efficient way to do it. Making sure my belly button is staying straight. So you're resisting the temptation to rock from side to side and get the antirotation work. Obviously switching up the stance but doing what you describe, hanging from a bar doing pikes. To me, you're also getting grip work just for time, efficiency.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: You're also not just separating the abs and working with the abdominals, with the knee to the chest. Because that's really what we're seeing is that do you only need your abs working in this position? So basically you're reproducing another seated position, except you're crunching your chest to your seated knee. And that's really what that position is. Do we do it long? What happens if you went long lever? Short lever means the elbow is bent. Long lever is the elbow straight. Short lever is the knee is bent. Long lever is the leg is straight. So why aren't we working in all those patterns and positions and then being creative? There are so many great resources. The kids at... Dave Durante has a free ab workout. He's an Olympic gymnast from Stanford. Superstar. But you can go on to, I think it's Iron Monkey. Sorry, guys. And what you'll see is there's so much fun way to play and think about what the role of the trunk should do. And I think we're moving beyond, thank goodness, this, like, I have to be a rigid robot all the time. And that we need to ask, what is the trunk supposed to do? A good way of thinking about this, and I think your sit up is a good analogy. Really.

A book that makes the rounds from time to time is a book called "The Spinal Engine," by Serge Gracovetsky. And he really talks about the trunk as a driver of power, not just as a chassis off of which the big engine moves. And that really is a nice conceptual way of simplifying movement. But if we define functional movement, most people agree it works in a wave of contraction from trunk to periphery, from core to sleeve, from axillary skeleton to peripheral skeleton. But that means, boy, there are positions where I'm really effective and can generate a lot of force, and there'll be positions where I can't. But if my spine can't handle flexion, it's not a spine. If it can't do extension, it's not a spine. If we can't rotate and be into these complex position shapes, I'm like, red flag.

So how are you training that thing? And if your only rigid dogma is straight up and down, which is a great reason to do mobility work, because suddenly we can side bend, and we can twist and am I exposing myself to some of those shapes? And so we call that work. Borrowing from one of my Olympic friends, Stu McMillan, spinal engine work, putting PVC side bending, playing with the different shapes. And again, if you get into the David Weck ropes, if you threw medicine balls, you would suddenly see, you're like, you're right, I can't be a rigid piece. How am I training the functionality of my trunk beyond just my six pack? Because straight curling will certainly give you a six pack, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to surf with power, run with power, punch with power, etc. I mean, look at what just happened with those fights, right? With the women fighting. Just the rotational power that they have. You can't get that from just crunches with your legs.

Andrew Huberman: The fight right before the Tyson-Jake Paul fight was arguably the best fight and people had seen in a long, long time the spirit of it. And just the, I mean, they were just incredible.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Everyone watches women's sports. It was really great. So I think what's great now is if we can get people to start to be curious and to play. And, you know, I'm not saying you need 10,000 different movements, but instead of just hanging from the bar and doing knees to elbows or toes to bar, what happen if you brought your right foot to your left hand and you started adding in a rotation to that, and suddenly you're like, I suck at this. And ultimately, what I want to do is I want to uncover every deficiency in this play, because I'm still going to deadlift, I'm still going to swing, I'm still going to lunge. I'm doing all the things that I know that makes me feel robust and makes me ride my bike better and be a better kayaker. But simultaneously, there's a lot of play on either side of that.

Andrew Huberman: I love that you're defining progression as incorporating these novel movements, exploring--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --Dude, That's Westside 101, Lou Simmons. I mean, like, hey, this week we're squatting with this bar, then we're squatting with this bar, and then we're changing your height, then we're changing your stance. I mean, Westside Barbell has been doing this forever.

Andrew Huberman: I didn't realize they did that. I knew they were, like, crazy gnarly.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Like, every bar has its own max, right? And so what they've done is said, hey, the squat pattern is the thing we're training. But how do we put another twist to the pretzel? Now the weight's in front, now the weight's behind. Now it's out, and now it's too deep. And now we're box squatting now, and like, wow, you're gonna have to be a really competent, skilled squatter to handle all that.

Andrew Huberman: Seems like in so many sports, not just for resistance training, but in so many sports there's this move shift now toward being an ATV, an all trained vehicle like you. You can't afford to just be good at one thing, you know. And the cool thing about it is that, you know, the more dynamic range that people are expressing, the more kind of evolution you see of any kind of sport. And I think we're going to see this with fitness too. I'm realizing this as we have this conversation that what you're really suggesting is that people explore their movement patterns. I love this thing that I've heard you say for years and I know Mackenzie harps on this too, which is Brian MacKenzie. That is, you should be able to breathe well in every position. It's such a fun test, actually it's such an easy test. You know, squat down like you're going to get something out of the cupboard. See if you can take like a full belly.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: But simple as that.

Andrew Huberman: See if you can get your belly going out on the inhale there. I like to do this test myself every once in a while hanging from the bar. I'll, you know those pikes, I don't get very many of them admittedly. I'm doing like five sets of five.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Awesome.

Andrew Huberman: Occasionally will try and twist a little bit and as my grip strength improves slightly, maybe I'll be able to get more. Usually my grip strength goes further--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: If you had smaller legs it would be easier.

Andrew Huberman: Um, I'll take that as either a compliment or an insult coming from you. Kelly. Um, Kelly's exceedingly strong. He deadlifts 600 pounds on the regular. He's exceedingly strong and he has incredible endurance. You're actually more of an endurance guy. I think this is worth mentioning that you would have.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's why I'm not very strong.

Andrew Huberman: You have, you have more of--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --I'm. Right. But have you seen my strong friends? I'm not deflecting. Your physiology is definitely biased towards certain things like, unequivocally, and what I am not good at is being brutally strong. Oh, I've been training for 20-plus years, hard training longer than that. Thirty years. And this is all I can deadlift. That's pathetic. Have you seen my strong friends? So what you see is that I've been cramming a square peg into a round hole because I really like it. But really I should be at probably 190 pounds. And I should be an aerobic athlete, right?

Andrew Huberman: Like if we threw a hundred-pound backpack on you and went backpacking, you'd be fine. You'd, you'd be like, even now in the, you, you're sitting at somewhere like 240, right? You're like 6' 2". You, you can go, you can go for days. Like you're naturally an endurance athlete. Absolutely. And I think it's worth saying because if people are listening, Kelly's a big guy.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: All my training is biased towards, you cannot believe how much conditioning I do. I am a disciple of Joel Jameson. I'm a huge fan of trying to look at where I'm spending my time in these different heart rate zones. And then, you know, I'm just such a nerd because my primary sport is trying to keep up with my wife on the mountain bike.

Andrew Huberman: I think this is really important because I think we've been talking a lot about things kind of adjacent to resistance training. I think it's a wonderful shift now in, in culture, that resistance training is being used, done by, by, by young people, by older people, women and men. You know, it's fantastic. This was not the case 10 years ago. This was definitely not the case 20 years ago.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: No, for sure.

Andrew Huberman: It was like bodybuilders, football, preseason football players, in the military were the only people. Weight training, now it's everywhere. But you're naturally an endurance athlete. I'm guessing that most people, I'm assuming is this true, fall into the slower twitch, kind of more endurance propensity than. I mean, how many truly naturally strong, fast fiber type people are walking, walking around out there? If we just took the general--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: The ones that are, are sprinters and super springy. And you know who those people are? They're mutants. You know, I think I was always best at a skilled sport that uses conditioning or uses strength. When I compare myself to my friends who have huge aerobic engines, it's embarrassing. I'm always the weakest, fattest, slowest, smallest person in the room. And it is, I can't, like, if you just want an ego check, just come out and hang out with me. Just meet my friends, see the people we're working with, and you'll see you're like, okay, genetics is not the same. I think we've told a little bit of a lie in the internet sphere that like, if you eat this way and you do these, you'll be elite. And like, we can certainly say that you have a training effect for sure and you should do that. But that's not the same thing as being a mutant. And there are just so many mutants out there. Shocking.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. I think it's actually a worthwhile exercise to figure out what one's natural leanings are.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: What do you like to do? How about that? I just think it's important that we remind ourselves that the whole point of this is to have the most fun. And what you see, he put up a video of some Chinese elementary school kids and the Chinese Olympic lifting team coaches coming and assessing their kids. And very quickly, they put kids over at squats. They had them jump on a single leg. They had them do double jumps. And they were like, you, you, you have your parents call me, right? So you can already see that coordination matters, wiring matters. And they were able to say, hey, these are the things that we think are going to make good Olympic lifters. So those kids, I think we start to split cohorts early on. But most important is everyone needs to weight lift, period. And it's not light, two pink dumbbells. It's real heavy weight lifting. But how much do you need to do to be better at your sport or to minimize your spine? Those are the spine changes or osteopenia or osteoporosis. Those are great conversations, but not necessarily conversations about performance. So it's almost like we need to divide this into aesthetics, and I'm keeping myself intact. I want to go to the Olympics. Because what you're seeing in the world right now is that everyone's an expert. I'm like, can I see how you work with 40 athletes? Can I see how you periodize that? Can I see how you manage travel and nutrition? Can I see how you know you were responsible or not responsible for this team having all its members? So what we're seeing is that it's a... this performance thing is a really big task, and it gets confused and watered down a little bit by everyone. Fitness says, well, I, I squat, so I'm gonna be an expert, too. Not the same.

Andrew Huberman: Our good friend Kenny Kane taught me something. He's shaking. Kelly's shaking his head. The best. The best. He's a wonderful guy. You're not going to find him on social media because a few years ago, he just decided to take his gym and himself off social media. He's very, very talented.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: So we're going to give you his phone number. We're going to have you call him because you can't DM him.

Andrew Huberman: Very talented athlete and wonderful person. He taught me something, say about eight years ago that I've found oh so useful for my training, longevity, my enjoyment of training. And it was this very simple, 80% of your workouts, Andrew, he said, are going to be at 80% of what you could do that day. Okay, that involves some humility. I like to sweat hard. I associate intensity with hard work, etc. He said 10% are going to be at 90% intensity, meaning 100% is the most you could give possibly in whatever time is allotted on that day, given the sleep, given the nutrition, given the life circumstances on that day, the readiness for that day. And then here's where it breaks down a little bit more. Five percent are going to be at 95% and 5% across the year are going to be maximum 100%. Everything you can give do or die workouts that day. And for me last year, I believe it was "The Rock Carry," Cameron Hanes's podcast. I gave everything I had. Of course, had the mountain been a little bit higher, I'd like to think I would have gone a little bit further. But I gave everything I could because that rock was slippery and it was muddy and my hamstring was out the day when we started that, you know, I was in pain when we started. Anyway, I think that advice that Kenny gave me was some of the best adventure advice I've ever heard because my tendency would have been and had been to come in and go at 90, 95 or 100% every single workout. Caffeine, preworkout. Yep. And it also brought me to this place where after eight or ten weeks of training, I would get a cold or I'd get some nagging thing, a little thing, not, you know, it wouldn't put me under, but then, or I need to take a week off.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Normal accident theory. Right.

Andrew Huberman: So I think I'd love your thoughts on Kenny's recommendation. For me. It's one of the things that I pass along anytime, says, how about some fitness advice? I say, well, listen, I'm a neuroscientist, not a fitness guy, but I know a thing or two based on the mistakes I've made. Here's a great piece of advice that's really helped me. Eighty percent of your workouts, 80% intensity, another 10% at 90%, then the 95, 5% at 95, and 5% across the year are the all-out, everything you can give, leave it all on the mat type workouts.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Let me start with a simple idea. We say, let's be consistent before we're heroic, right? If your intensity causes you to not be able to show up for the gym for three days, I'm like, sweet, that was sweet. And our adaptation response to that is sucky. I much rather you be getting more consistent and not blowing yourself out. Remember that there was a phase where we were like, you shouldn't be sore when you leave the gym. Remember that? Like, there are people who would talk about, hey, leave some reps in reserve, like, show up the next day. Grease the groove. That's old Pavel Tsatsouline stuff. I think that's really good advice, especially since most people are not 20. Most people. And when you're 20, you need to go find out what the limits are. Touch the fence, the electric fence once in a while, right?

Andrew Huberman: Lick the... [laughs]

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Lick all the doorknobs. Let's just call it that way. But what ends up happening is there's a lot of things that have to be in place for you to be able to go to the well that many times. And what we know now, because we have all of this data, is that we can make better progress not burning it to the ground every single time. And it's difficult for us because if I'm just fitnessing, how do I quantify that, right? It's easy for us to quantify another kilo or another watt. That makes it a lot easier. And what you'll see is that the best practices of these athletes, we do spend a lot of 70 to 80% heart rate. That's what we call recovery. In Joel Jameson language, 80 to 90, calling that conditioning 90 and above overload. But what I think is nice is that that gives me some days where I touch 78 or 80% and it's hard because I am sleep deprived, stressed out, my nutrition hasn't been great. I'm sleeping in a strange bed, right? You know, traveling, whatever.

So I think what you're seeing is something that one of my early coaches talked about, Mike Berger, he says, when the frying pan's hot, let's cook. And that means I need to know myself. And as a coach, I need to know you. And I'm like, Andrew, you look great today. How do you feel? Great. Let's go. Let's go chase something, right? And when the frying pan's hot, we cook. But the frying pan is not always hot. And if you pour in bang energy and jacked 3D and you can't even hear inputs and outputs. So I think that's such solid, reasonable advice. And really, what we're looking at is how can we get you to train much more consistently. Consistently longer and longer and longer. You can only go to the well a few times and what I'll tell you is that as I still love to power clean, it's like my favorite thing and that 100-kilo power clean is heavier than it was when I was 40, you know. And I want to pretend that a 100-kilo power clean is not a problem, but I actually have to progress and get myself there. And there are days where I'm like, oh, 80 kilos is my jam today. So I think that's really good advice and difficulty for us to say how are we measuring success in our training? Subjective experience. No, no problem. Let me give you a baby, keep this newborn alive and then let's go see how hard your training is the next day. You're going to be terrible. You haven't slept all night, you're stressed, right?

So I think what's nice is having some subobjective measurements around. Maybe body composition is one of them if that's important to you. But are you getting faster over the course of a week? What are you testing? How do we know inputs and outputs and right now we're just doing, we're baking a lot, we're making a lot suicides, right? You... the old fountain drink where you just mix all the things — it's, you know, they always taste the same at the end, like crap. But that suicide where you mixed all the fountain drinks is a little bit of what we're seeing in that. And one way of protecting ourselves is saying hey, let's make sure you can train tomorrow.

Andrew Huberman: Suicides. I was reflecting on that the other day for some reason. Why at a wedding or a party, young, typically it's a Y chromosome-associated disorder to feel like you had to mix a bunch of, bunch of stuff and then get someone to drink it.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: You're not wrong.

Andrew Huberman: Nonalcoholic drinks for young kids by the way. But mixing all the sodas, putting M&Ms so something like all my male friends--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --And I think that's what we see a little bit. And if you, I am a deep coach nerd. I love fitness. I love fitness. Saying I'll jump into any class anytime. Like sure, let's go, let's see. You know, I, it's so fun but I need to see. I do get to watch sort of trends come and go. Things get very hot, you know, they get very popular. And again, the fitness has become a hobby. It's an amusement. And that's okay. It's totally okay that gym is a hobby. But that doesn't hint about what's the best way to develop capacity. Elite capacity, long-term longevity capacity. Those things almost don't go together.

Andrew Huberman: Let's talk about hip extension.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Oh, bless you.

Andrew Huberman: As somebody who doesn't like the elliptical or stationary bike, but loves the assistance assault bike, I love the assault bike. I don't know why, it just feels like really good work. It is hard work, but you're not gonna find me on--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --Katie and Bill made it harder with the Echo bike. Thanks for making it worse.

Andrew Huberman: What is it? The Echo bike.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: The Rogue Echo bike is even worse than the assault bike.

Andrew Huberman: The assault bike, by the way, folks, is the one with the fan. And I'm not sure if they put, the fan is for resistance, not to keep you cool. But it has that effect somewhat.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: In the winter you'll know what the fan does.

Andrew Huberman: So the Echo bike is a harder assault bike.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: It's just like, imagine doing it on fire, uphill in the sand with a headwind. Then you're like, okay, this is if you can make it worse.

Andrew Huberman: It's worse if you have one of these. I'm going to swing by this winter break and try this thing.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: But I love that because high physiology, low skill. That's great.

Andrew Huberman: You just described me. In a nutshell.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I can take anyone, not have to know anything about your range of motion. I can be like, who are you physiologically today? Let me introduce, produce this freakish amount of work in this tiny range of motion that's very safe. So we can really touch high intensities very safely there.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I like it much more than the skier. I'll do the skier every once in a while, but I find that the skier, if I just sit, sit and stand a bunch of times, I'd be like, I can just do this for 15 days, you know, I was like, is this exercise? And I'm like, am I doing this right?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I don't know.

Andrew Huberman: For some reason it doesn't feel like work. The assault bike always feels, always feels like work. Okay, so hip extension. The assault bike is not hip extension. Typically you're, you know, tend to be, people tend to be hunch forward. You can get upright, right. You can sit still.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Don't have any hip extension.

Andrew Huberman: So no hip extension.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Let's talk about if I'm squatting and I stand up, I'm extending the hip.

Andrew Huberman: As you stand up, right?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I'm going from flexion to extension.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. One thing that I think for people listening, that at least is helpful for me when hearing about squatting is to think about whether or not it's a deadlift or a squat. You can imagine taking your hands, putting your fingers at your hips and, you know, hiding your hands in your, in your, in that joint between the femur and your pelvis. As you go down, right? Your hands get tucked into the fold between the two. And as you stand up, it opens. So it's hip hinge, they typically call it.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: And I think what you, we look at the squat and the lunge is very... they're cousins. And the difference is long lever, short lever, and typically how you're holding the weight. That's the only difference. And sometimes upright torso position. But ultimately we're really looking at, you know, what's happening with the degree of bend of the, of the knee, right? That's why they're such elegant cousins. But if I'm squatting down and I stand up, people are like, I'm working on extension. Work on extension all the time. I'm like, okay, now let's continue this extension conversation and bring that knee behind your butt into a lunge. And that's hip extension. And if there's one thing that I'm seeing across so many of the populations I work with is we're starting to see changes and erosion in this fundamental expression of power. The only people we don't see it in is in our Olympic sprinters. There are, and you'll see that pockets like we work with the All Blacks and we're obsessed on maintaining the hip extension of these very strong athletes because it means that they can run faster on the field--

Andrew Huberman: --Rugby team for those. Am I correct in thinking that hip extension we can think of as a partially reflecting hamstring function where the hamstring is responsible for bringing the heel up toward the butt, but also for bringing the femur back behind the torso? I realize I'm not using the PT language, by the way. The PTs online. I'm sorry, everyone. Your community of the PTs, you guys just crack me up. In the field of medicine, there's an analogous subspecialty of medicine where they have the similar kind of orneriness. And being a PT is very competitive. And so there's a, you don't do this, but the PT community, it's like it's some, you can make a cartoon, you can make a whole sitcom about this. The attacks often range from significant to like cluster around petty. Not because they're not knowledgeable. But because there's so much nuance in this field, right? And it seems that there are a few things that everyone agrees on and then everything else. People love to argue in community, out of community. So anytime I say anything about movement or the body, I wanted to just say I realize I'm probably not using the correct language, perfect language.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I'm going to use that same defense of petty clusterness, clustering the pettiness. I'm sorry, all the physical therapists out there. I haven't represented you in the way that you would like to be represented. I'll say I'm just talking about my own experience.

Andrew Huberman: It's just differences in nomenclature.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Right, and I am trying to be very meticulous in my language today. One of the things that we want to look at is, and this is a Phillip Beach muscles meridians idea, is that there are contractual fields. And this goes along with, if we look at Thomas Myers anatomy trains of seeing the system as a system of systems. So we start to look at your back and your erectors and then we tie that into the glutes and then we tie that into the hamstrings to tie the calf. It's kind of a whole, almost wraps around the door, the bottom of the foot, the plantar surface of the foot. So suddenly we're looking at this global system that's designed to create this mass extension, position, locomotion. We start to lock some of those pieces down a little bit.

But one of the things that we've seen is that when you aren't competent in this position, your hamstrings, for example, have to do a lot more work because your butt is no longer working on hip extension. Your adductors are restricted and they're not bringing you back into flexion. So suddenly what we see is that your hamstrings are having to do the work of the calf. But no wonder your hamstrings are tied all the time. You don't have hip extension. So a simple test we do is called the couch stretch. And all you need to do is face a wall, then turn away from the wall so you're kneeling on the ground, hands and knees away from the wall. You're going to put one of your knees in the corner so your foot is going straight up and down. The knee is in the corner of the wall. And then I want you to see if you can squeeze your butt in that position. Still hot. Hands and knees, except one foot now is kind of in the corner down the wall going towards your butt. That's position one. And a lot of people are going to struggle with recruiting and activating their butt in that position because it's what I am calling positionally inhibited. We don't know what the mechanism is.

Andrew Huberman: So you're getting the knee back behind the torso, much as one would if you were sprinting. And the rear leg is really--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --we're just flexing the lower leg. We're flexing the lower leg shank, right. That lower limb. The second position is to come up into a high-knee kneeling position. So you just bring your knee up and so like you're kneeling, except that we have a trailing leg now with a leg that's going up the wall.

Andrew Huberman: So front leg is a sort of a right angle. Right. Your foot on the ground. Right angle.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's right.

Andrew Huberman: Rear leg is a knee tucked in the corner. That's exactly right at the foot where the floor meets the couch. Foot is up on the couch.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Nope, just on the ground.

Andrew Huberman: Okay. And we'll provide a link to it.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: And I call it the couch stretch because I created this thing a long time ago. And I created on the couch for my young athletes while they were watching TV. Right. I just needed some hip extension exposure. But we can do it on the wall. You can do it on the couch. Ultimately, what we try to see is do you have glute squeeze? Can you take a breath? If your breath starts to get real small in this business, I'm like, huh? So every time your knee comes behind your body, you can't breathe anymore. How's that working for you when you run, is that good or bad? Seems to me that your breath should remain pretty constant independent of what your hip does. So then we like to see if people can come to a more upright position. So that's kind of position three. So a little bit more upright torso. We're starting to increase hip demands. As the torso comes upright, torso is coming upright. The knee is moving further away from the chest on that loaded leg. And what you'll see is that most people are going to be like, wow, that's real stiff. Or I can't even get there. Or I can't breathe there. I have to banana back to get there. And I certainly can't squeeze my butt there. And I want to tell everyone this is a low level test. The real test is your front foot goes up on a 12-inch to 18-inch box. So we're not even in the test yet.

Andrew Huberman: We're in with front leg extended.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: No, front leg just up higher. So we elevate the front leg into what's called a hip lock. So that front leg is suddenly taking my pelvis and rotating it posteriorly. Knee is bringing the running into pelvis. Pelvis is like tucking. And now you're really going to see what's going on with your hip extension.

Andrew Huberman: So this is the extra equivalent position, more or less of front knee sprinting, like really like, like jutted up in the air, you know, maybe even past the belly button. Definitely past the belly button. Rear leg behind you. So this is sort of like, you know, caught in midstride.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Okay, that's right. And so suddenly we have this nice test that allows us to see in our competency there. And I want to remind you, if you do the couch stretch and film it, your knee is actually in hip extension. It's not, your knee isn't even behind your butt here. It's that hard. And I'm still biasing it towards flexion. So what we're seeing is that you have a real deficit of hip extension. So that's one way to improve it. You can just do the test — camp out there, take some breaths, contract, relax, breathe. Do your resistance isometrics, whatever you want to do. There are so many ways to judge that. Up, rotate, side bend. The question is, how are you now loading that thing in your life? So we can put a band on you and get you to do some isometric standing. But show me in your movement language in the gym how you're reinforcing hip extension. So when we were talking about deadlifting with a tandem stance, still not hip extension, right? I'm extending the hip, but that trail leg is not. Rear foot elevated. Split, squat, ding, ding, ding, ding. We start to get there, right? Bulgarians. Flipping a tire, like any time where I need to be able to. A big lunge is a good example. Forward lunge, back lunge.

Andrew Huberman: Tell me about flipping a tire. So are you talking about flipping a tire, but then, then at the top of the movement, you're doing like a kettlebell swing where you buck your hips forward like you're going to try and pee over that Volkswagen pushing over--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --don't--

Andrew Huberman: --don't try and pee at the top, but you're talking about bucking the hips forward.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's right. Suddenly you're upright. And that leg, that trailing leg, is an extension in a long lever position. So we spend a lot of time programming. One of the best persons at this is Frans Bosch, I mentioned earlier, and he has something I've termed like the Bosch Snatch. So if you imagine being in a double stance. So I'm just like I'm swinging a kettlebell. If I took a plate or a dumbbell, doesn't matter. I'm just going to basically go from a hip hinge and as I go overhead with the weight of the load, whatever's appropriate for you. I'm going to take my front foot and step it up on a box. So all of a sudden I'm going from a flexed position in the hip.

Andrew Huberman: C-shaped body, right?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Or upright torso but hinged. C-shaped, right. Weird C and then Helvetica C. And then I'm going to step forward and now I'm going to have that one of those legs is going to be an extension. And so suddenly now we're adding speed to this extension because that's not what we do with reverse rear foot-elevated split squats. We're not loading that in speed. So we start to add the speed component to what we're doing and suddenly we've discovered another way to challenge your movement. It doesn't just always be half heavier, it can also be faster. So I'm basically if, imagine if I was--

Here's a great example. I love pressing. I think overhead pressing is the bee's knees. It's one of my nonnegotiables. We're going to press, seesaw press, overhead press for pressing. But if I take your front foot and put it up on a box, make sure that back foot is straight with all your toes on the ground and press from that position. You're going to find out why you don't have any hip extension. It's going to be so you won't even think about the weight. You'll think about your groin exploding.

Andrew Huberman: So a lot of people recommend probing that mechanic, those mechanics with very light dumbbells.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: No go press, go find out how well you can press over and you're going to see that like wow, this tandem stance, front foot elevated, you know, press is going to kill.

Andrew Huberman: You can, there's a movement I do, I'm guessing. Well, I'm curious if it activates hip extension the way I think it does. Here's what I've been doing that I found useful. I don't know if it's true or not but what I'll do is I'll tie a fairly thick band to a pull-up bar. I'll squat down, I'll hold it like I'm holding a, like a pole in front of me like a pole carrier in a, in a, in a parade or something. I'll squat down and I'll jump up and, but instead of, but I'll buck my hips forward at the top. So like feet go out in front. It's very unnatural movement actually, as opposed to jumping and putting my toes down, pointing my toes down, my toes are kicking forward.

So I'm trying to mimic the top.

Of a kettlebell swing at the top of this movement.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I would say, you know, one of the things that is useful for me as I am asked to come and tear through people's programming, look for holes in their movement practices. We look at fundamental shapes. So what's nice is that. Okay, hang on everyone, let me define exercise for you. Let me just, I'll just give you a little framework and I'll start by saying if something is inflammatory. The shoulder is not that complicated. It doesn't do that many things. Goes overhead, goes out to the side, goes in the front, it goes in the back. That's what your shoulder does. You can bend the elbow, you can twist in all those shapes.

But those are the four fundamental primary organizations of the shape of the shoulder. Hip has flexion, extension, right? Really I could, I can go laterally, but that's just a different kind of squat. But really like am I squatting with a foot really narrow or am I squatting a little bit wider? So what we can then do is say in these fundamental bookends, these benchmarks, this is what we call archetype. Suddenly I can ask, well, how are you loading your overhead position? So if you're always pressing on a bar or pulling on a lat down machine, you actually are overhead. But you're not in the fullest expression of overhead, right? Which is your arms straight up and down parallel by your ears, hands over.

Andrew Huberman: The top of your head, over your head, right.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: So what we can then do is say, well, what, what tools do you like to use? Kettlebells. Great. That's one of the reasons kettles are so great. Single arm. I can't hold it out here. It's going to fall. I have to finish over my head, right? Dumbbells, the same, but the kettlebells assault. It constrains us to express full overhead motion. I can look at, do you have enough inter-rotation with the hand by the side? Are you doing enough pressing-like activities? Chaturanga. The finish position of my rock row, right? Bench press, dip, running. Those are all movements where my shoulder comes into extension, whether the arm is straight or bent.

So what's nice now is I can say, well, am I distracting those tissues or compressing those tissues. Well, you're like, well, what do you mean? I'm like, are you pressing? Are you doing a pull-up? Pressing overhead or doing a pull-up that's compressing or distraction. Very simple ways of looking at these movements. We can say, well, how are you coming there? Did you get there from snatch or did you get there from a front rack position? So we can look at start position, finish position. And suddenly what you're realizing is you're like, oh, I'm starting to understand the root movements and root positions that help me improve performance, predict future performance and help me get through pain. Because if I have people not expressing the highest level expression of the movement, that's something we can improve. That's technique, right? It's not just get bigger and stronger, it's hey, let's be more technical, technically proficient.

So I have all of these ways of looking at the movement selection choices. Again, what are you comfortable with? But then I can challenge it with load, make it heavier. We can do volume, we could add speed, we could add cardiorespiratory demand. You could do more than five and suddenly you have to do 20. And we have metabolic demand in there. You and I are competing, all of a sudden, right now, suddenly I go from open torque to close torque. I go from giving you a barbell to a dumbbell, right? I go from open chain to closed chain. Suddenly we're like, holy moly. Block practice, random practice. I have all the tools for me to understand. Are you competent putting your arms over your head or are you exposing these shapes under these different domains? And I think when we only look at sort of a few ranges of motion and we only look at load as the way, then we lose all the opportunity and richness of programming.

Andrew Huberman: Got it. Well, let me come back to my silly example of the band and the jump thing and say, okay, so for getting better hip extension, which is what I think a lot of people need, is what I'm hearing. A lot of people are in hip flexion.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: So you're jumping and then coming up.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I mean, or, you know, we've seen these beautiful images of certainly not me, but like people doing long jump where they're kind of like in a, in an armed position, something. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. So the idea is because with the band it's safe, right? You know, trying to get the hip into extension or feet out in front of the jumping, it's a--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --Kipping pull-up without a pull-up. You're just Kipping on the bar.

Andrew Huberman: And I don't Kip on my pull-ups, by the way, because I'm a time under. No, I don't Kip on my pull-ups. I do. I train with Ben Bruno from time to time. You Kip on a pull-up with Ben Bruno there, you're never going to hear the end of it ever. So I don't. But I don't anyway, because I, I'm a time. I'm a time under attention guy.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I. That's fine. I'm going to say that I love strict pull-ups. I do more strict pull-ups than you can imagine. But if you can't Kip, there's something wrong with you.

Andrew Huberman: Okay, got it. We'll argue about this more offline. But I love to sprint. So that's hip extension.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman: Love to sprint. And I love jumping. Like, I'm a big believer in this maybe true, maybe not true idea that as we get older, we tend to jump and land less. A lot of injuries come from lack of eccentric load--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --There's a saying out of the Soviet system, when you stop jumping, you start dying. I believe that. And the lowest form could be trampolining. The highest low, another low form, jump roping. Highest form starts to be really powerful. I love it. You're killing it. And what's great now is you just made this switch where you started describing your training in blocks of positions. What position am I training? What shape am I reinforcing? That's really not, it's not a muscle. Remember, your muscles are not wired for movement. Your brain is wired, required for movement, right? You can't, you don't have any selective control over a single muscle in your body. That's a mistake. So you're not really working your biceps, you're working arm flexion, right? In a variety of positions. This squat exercise biases my quads more. But I'm not actually squatting, right, because that's impossible.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I think that the, the misconception, the broad misconception is that resistance training is just to build and strengthen muscles in a bodybuilding kind of fashion. And no disrespect to the bodybuilders, but.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: No, we learned a lot.

Andrew Huberman: But, you know, we learned a ton. And yet, most people would probably do well to think about functional movements. In fact, there are a few Instagram accounts that really like to come after not just me, but a lot of people that have talked about resistance training at all, that talk about functional patterns. And I have to say as much as the, the messaging sometimes I think is a little bit abrasive, I pay attention to these and I have seen some of the before and afters that they'll show for people that will incorporate into their training, training, like throwing or you know, ballistic movements from, you know, fully stopped sprinting out the gate kind of thing and focusing immensely on balancing the two sides of the body.

And without ever having done those programs, I have to say, like, yeah, like a lot of these people had some pretty dysfunctional patterns and they look like they're doing better. And I think it's because I must, I have to assume that they're incorporating a much broader range of movements, more hip extension, working the two sides of the body, all the things that you're talking about.

And so I think that the bodybuilding piece I think is a great thing for getting people out the gate. I always say the amazing thing about resistance training, forgive me for going long here, but I think this is something that if somebody is not naturally inclined to exercise or resistance training. Resistance training is one of the few forms of exercise that because of the blood flow, the so-called pump, gives people a visual and sensation, a sensation-based window into the progress they might make.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Hell yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Right? I mean this is unlike going for a run and getting to like at the end of your run you see a little less body fat and then two days later you, you've reduced your body fat percentage, right? Like it gives you a window into your future when you resistance train that way.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: And, and a gateway into a conversation that's very complex. This is all I think about. And people are like, hey, I just want to feel better and I don't want to get hurt in my calves when I run. You're like, okay, it can be really simple. And also you have your right to look jacked and tan. I mean you can be jacked all you want.

Andrew Huberman: Mark Bell makes this point every single post.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Look, I think there's something that I try, we don't ever punch down. We just don't, you know, just point, we point to what we do. This is our model. But any model that someone's on the internet, a model has to do three things. It has to explain current phenomena, right? It has to predict future phenomena and it has to be easily communicated. So let me see your model, how it works, how does it explain? If I do your thing, will I get better at this thing? Right? That's the thing I'm interested in, right? So what I see is, oh, a lot of recursive fun fitness where people feel better, but I still have to go over here and squat or I still have to go over here and become conditioned. But you can see the truth of needing to expose people to bigger ranges of motion and more skilled moves, movement than some of the things we're getting traditionally in the gym, right?

And I think one of the things that we saw with, like, a pivot towards movement culture, right, kind of coined by Ido Portal, is that what we were seeing is that the gym didn't beget necessarily better movers. What we had was people originally doing a skill, throwing something, running track and field. We would train and then go do more of that. And then what we did is we took the gym or took the sports skill movement out of it and we just remained in the gym. And you can see the reaction to that as well. You're not very elegant. You can't, don't have any movement solutions. You don't transfer your energy very well. You're not, you know, you're not graceful. You can't, you have no rhythm.

So the real key for us is like, I think we want to put play back in there and you can see what the reaction is to, hey, if we're just doing bench press and hack squats, maybe that's not, maybe making the best mover, but it's certainly making a jacked guy who's what we call, what is it in that movie, hot girl fit,"Hot Girl Fit," where you know, it's one of the recent movies where the guy is, who's the guy from Twisters, that incredible actor. He was in Top Gun. Anyway, he's swimming and the girl is like, hey, why are you out of breath? He's like, I don't do cardio, I just do abs and biceps.

She's like, oh my God, you're hot girl fit. Like you have this big engine that looks good with no go. And I want to make sure that no offense to all the hot girls out there, but the idea here is what is it you want to do with your body? Let's start there and then we can start to say, well, what do you have access to? What's your training age? And it's a nuanced conversation. It's probably why you should have a coach and develop a coach for the rest of your life. But let's not pretend having abs and big biceps is going to make you a good MMA fighter, right? And you can see why the resistance of, hey, that made me less athletic. We want to be careful of that.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. I like using resistance training to make me stronger and better at running.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yes.

Andrew Huberman: And that's my, that's actually training. That's what's in my mind.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yes.

Andrew Huberman: I only ran cross country one season in high school. Wasn't very good, but really enjoyed it. But I love running. I've been running for a long time and, and I'm, I'll never be a--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --I ran cross country one year in high school.

Andrew Huberman: Maybe we ran against each other. Oh no, you're a year older than I am. So I want to--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Well, I'll tell the story some other time. It's not. My stories aren't relevant here. But I use resistance training to be able to run better, faster, further without pain.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: For me, that is what I would hope we look at training for. Now apply a longevity lens, a durability lens. Or as Juliet says, she's like, don't you want to just be able to pop off the couch and go on adventures? I want to have a body that's capable of that. I think what we've been pitching in the gym doesn't really do that. And even that I just want everyone to hear and double-click on what Andrew said. That framework is that I now have a third-party objective measure. Does my running get better with my training? It's a really great way to evaluate your training. Am I faster? Do I feel better?

Andrew Huberman: It's really worked for me and it keeps me out of any kind of gravitational pull toward just trying to get more weight on the hack squat machine, which I enjoy. Progressive overload. I enjoy doing movements better with more weight, etc. But I find that the gym just becomes this, when it's a closed loop, I find it becomes this kind of like endless exploration of like what am I really also at this age, like I want to maintain strength and build some muscle. Perhaps, but most--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --do you want to get heavier?

Andrew Huberman: I don't.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Isn't that weird?

Andrew Huberman: I don't. No. My goal right now--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --You need as much muscle as you can because winter's coming.

Andrew Huberman: My goal is to actually get much stronger without getting bigger and, and to keep my endurance going. I like to do one long rucker run per week. At one shorter run, one. One sprint-type run. I just figure like I'll be everyone.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: What you just described for a typical person is doing a long piece, a short piece and a high intensity piece. That's rad. That is, that's the crack.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. That's what I do every week if I'm, you know, most weeks. And then I'll lift, you know, legs one day. You know, torso. Everyone laughs. Torso. What kind of, you know, torso, including neck and abs.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Let's take a next level. Let's go flank too. You want to get torso and flank really confused.

Andrew Huberman: And then I'll do the, what could be called distal muscles. I'll do an extra workout for, for calves, biceps and triceps and forearms in grip strength on Saturday and that combination of things. This isn't about my... training to me meets the demands of life. Like I can sprint for the airplane with my luggage and get there and not cough up both lungs. I can go backpacking. Like if you say, hey, let's go backpacking or Grand Canyon tomorrow; you're going to carry 75-pound sack--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --what a great--

Andrew Huberman: --I'll be a little bit sore at night, but it'll feel good. I'll feel good sore. We can go to the gym together and I can put, you know, what feels to me like a respectable amount of weight on the hack squat. We do some full range glute ham raises. I can hang from a bar, but I'm not trying to beat a pull-up record or run a marathon. I find that anytime I've gone to the extreme in any one kind of training, I end up injured, sick, and I'm just not interested in that. And I like to think I could be wrong. I'm projecting here probably that I'm representative of what most people want. I also want to be able to overeat a little bit every now and again, like Thanksgiving's coming a little bit. I also want to be able to not have to eat all day and then eat a big dinner and not dissolve into a puddle of my own tears because I'm neurotically worried about something nutrition based. Like I tend to, I basically skip one meal a day just by virtue of my schedule.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's right.

Andrew Huberman: It's like nonintentional intermittent fasting. And the people who are obsessive about protein will say, well gosh, that isn't as good. But yeah, okay, so maybe I get a little bit less muscle. I'm not doing, I don't want to be so neurotic about my training that I'm not focused on the bigger missions of my life.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: And notice that what you said was I train so I can have fun and I just want to double-click on that. We have sucked the joy and the play and exposure out of training and out of fitness. And now it's, I have to have this VO2 max so I'll live to 150 and I have to do, right? And you forgot that we, this whole thing is so you can go spend some credits. So I like to say the gym and all that really focused training is spending time on credits. But one of my coach friends, Nicole Christensen, says — CrossFit Roots. She's like, we don't nature for time. Stop naturing for time like this. We're surfing, so we can surf all day and we can surf more waves than the other kids because they're not fit enough, right? I want to go hike and then ride my bike and play and ski and do all the things I want to do with my body.

And that made me, I want to hold my kids or I want to do my job. And this, you know, in this world warehouse, we start to train for life in a little bit more simple way, and it doesn't feel like this crazy burden. And it also happens to be the best tool to understand how you're moving, because my expert coaches can watch you run and be like, oh, that's what we're working on. And I'll go right to the thing, right? But for the rest of us, we need to say, wow, my shoulder, that bench, that fly dumbbell bench was a little bit tricky. I'm losing some shoulder, shoulder extension, right? Or at least I'm touching these shapes. And that ends up being a really interesting diagnostic tool where we can really take a shot at improving function and reducing musculoskeletal distress. And I think this is the template for it.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Enjoying your training and including enjoying training hard is one of the best things one can do. Years ago, when I was skateboarding, I mean, I ruined skateboarding for myself because got picked up, out of sympathy, to be fair, by a couple sponsors and then got obsessed with the fact that, you know, I wasn't progressing, that broke my foot, and, you know, pretty soon I didn't hate it. I loved it and I loved the community, but it turned into something else. And had I just taken a step back from it and said, all right, I'm decent at this, I could get better, and I'm just going to focus on doing it for pleasure and make a living some other way, I'd probably be doing, you know, like, you know, front side inverts in pools now.

And unfortunately, I'm not. I'm lucky if I get a nice little frontside grind on coping. But whereas with fitness, resistance training, running, I love resistance training and running. The cup of coffee before my workout tastes 10 times better because I'm going to work out. I love to use it as an opportunity to listen to music, listen to podcasts. There's so much that's in and around it that's still just pure pleasure. Even on the days when I'm like, at 95% of output or 100% of output or 80% of output, I'm like, I just, I'm having so much fun.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's right.

Andrew Huberman: And I can't wait to get back in there.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: So when we are looking at society, health, right, the first thing we argue, instead of saying what's most important, we say, what is it you want to do and who are your friends you're going to do it with and are you going to do it a lot? Let's start there. Then we can start to weasel into everything, especially with social isolation, with sort of lack of community. I mean, I feel like sport is the last place where people congregate, right? Sports sidelines. This is the sort of, you know, lingua franca of the whole, you know, world. I've taught on every continent except Antarctica. Everyone knows what a push-up is, everyone knows what a deadlift is. It's not science, sorry, it's not math. That's not the universal language. It is bench press. Everyone knows. And everyone can tell you how much you bench in any language.

So there are some things there that are universal. And I think when we look at the human as a moving organism, then we can really start to not feel crazy about how our world is changing. But how do we fight back? By setting up more opportunity to move more. And for me, the whole lens ends up being basically as, we're trying to parse through complex problems. So I have a world champion who's injured, two-time world champion, isn't able to finish a tour. You know, the first question I ask them is, tell me about your sleep. I'm a rough sleeper. Oh, tell me more about that. Right? Because I can't even tell your inputs and outputs unless we're getting to sleep. Then I say, well, tell me about your nutrition. I eat clean. Great. Define that for me. I don't even know what that means. Clean. Turns out under calorie, under nutrition doesn't get enough macros, doesn't get enough micros. I'm like, oh, we start to correct that. We start to collect sleep.

When we really start to divide some of the behaviors into, for me, as a 51-year-old, I'm obsessed with my tissues, not failing. Like tearing Achilles is like every physical therapist's worst nightmare. And I jump rope every day and I have great range. I do so many isometrics. I'm just not going to tear my Achilles. Now I'm going to tear my Achilles — but I'm not going to tear my Achilles. So tissue health is part of that. So now I have to look at nutrition, I have to look at my blood work and I have to look at my sleep so that I can really define some of those things as that creates a readiness, tissue, talent, tolerance, health. Then I can be looking at the other things. And that's really as we start to get again. The framework of sport, or framework of play creates this place where I can suddenly start to understand inputs and outputs and how to take care of this carcass so that I can do what I want with my body, which is our new definition of mobility. Can I do what I want with my body and can I be pain free?

Andrew Huberman: Am I correct in my very nonscientific assessment of Instagram accounts whereby when I see a 80-to-100-year-old person moving, well, that person tends to be doing something sort of gymnastics related. There's this incredible video of a guy, a Chinese guy, very tall Chinese guy, doing essentially skin the cat and then into a pull-up skin the cat, people can look it up, doesn't involve actual cats. Hopefully it shouldn't. Eighty-five-year-old woman sprinting. So we're talking gymnastics-type movement, Sprinting movement, rarely. Sometimes it'll be somebody in a gym lifting a heavy weight, but more often than not it's gymnastic-type movement, pull-up, dip, parallel bar, balance beam, sprinting. Is that what got them there or is that just the expression of what genetics do?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Genetics, do they feel safe. Show me nutrition, show me their training age. But what's not noticeable there is that we have disciplines that require greater range of motion and skill, body control and high power output. Right? So one of the things that we do in our programming for adults is I make you sprint once a week, like sprint, because people have not sprinted. And I don't mean you can go out and run, I don't think you're capable of that. But I'm gonna put you on a bike, I'm gonna put you in control and I'm gonna see what your peak wattage is that sprinting. So ideally I would love you to be able to do some hill sprints and repeats, but I don't think you have the tissue tolerance or the range of emotion for that. And I know what the outcome is going to be. But I can put you on a bike and say, can we hit this peak wattage? And what you just discovered there was, hey, I still need to maintain my ability to move quickly and have control through great ranges of motion. That is a recipe for, you know, why if you did yoga and did some sprints, you're going to be pretty badass. You know, that's a pretty good way.

Andrew Huberman: And why people who just do the elliptical and the little, small dumbbells are, they're fooling themselves.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: It's a lot of busy work. There's a lot of busy work out there. It makes people feel like they're involved in a program and again, the way we want to take our feelings out of it. How do you progress those pink dumbbells? A thousand reps, is 2000 reps, right? Show me progression. Suddenly I can't progress and regress those things. The other thing I want to say is like, is it making the thing better? What are we training for? And you know, I think it feels decorative to have busy work. And I do all this prehab corrective exercise. I'm like, hold up, why don't we do the thing we're doing and regress and progress that and ask if you have native range of motion. Yes or no?

But you know, if we look at the typical person, especially someone listening to this podcast, they don't have two hours in the gym. So if your program is requiring two hours of me, I'm out. If it requires an hour of me, I might be out. You know, I'm so busy that sometimes I need lots of 30- and 40-minute pieces peppered throughout, plus a lot of other play, and that's good enough. So we really do need to look at how people are finding themselves in their environments to ask, is this appropriate for you and what's essential? And it turns out a lot of this, you know, 20-something playing around videoing yourself in the gym is great when you have three or four hours in the gym.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Listening to an entire album or podcast or book chapters in sequence I think is, if I may, far more valuable than allowing oneself the opportunity to text and be on social media during a workout, because it just becomes a very distracted thing. I think the workout of any kind is also an opportunity for building concentration. And one can listen to podcasts or books, etc., etc., or an album sequentially through. But I find, at least for myself, if I work out in a way that's interrupted by social media or texting or email, because it's available there, that it carries through into the rest of the day, that I'm more distracted.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I believe you.

Andrew Huberman: How about that?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I believe you. And that's what's so great, is you're like, hey, that doesn't work for me. You know, I find that my best thinking is done under enormous aerobic load. Like I literally am like, oh, and I often will jump up and write something on the whiteboard and then go back and do my thing because, you know, I just. It creates flow state and it's... and if I'm distracted, I can't really hear what's going on. And that's... there's a time when I want to distract myself, you know, and there's a time when I want to be amused. That's fine.

You know, I've got to do a two-hour ride. I'm getting ready for a four-day backcountry ski trip here in February. But notice I've already been getting ready for it in the beginning of November. I am ready. It's taking me gonna ramp up. And so much of my training now is going towards can I successfully do these four hard days the way I want to. So some things come down a little bit. Strength dials down. I change my body composition. I'd like to be a little bit lighter. I'm playing, but there's some times where I have to get two and three hours in of steady work done. And I'm like, headphones, you know what I mean? So it's okay to be amused. You don't have to be a monk doing what you're doing. But I really like what you said. Feels. I feel distracted. Yeah. Let's use this as, let's use it as a concentration time. Right. Let's use this interaction time. The gym shouldn't be the loneliest place in the world. If you're not making eye contact and talking, high-fiving, get a different gym.

Andrew Huberman: I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about fascia. You and Jill Miller were some of the first people that I ever heard talk about fascia in an elaborate way, in a way that allowed me to finally understand what this incredible aspect of our physiology, the many things that it's doing. I realize this is a vast discussion that we could take several more hours.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: But you're not a fascia researcher.

Andrew Huberman: Right. And yet I think, as I recall, you're one of the first people to talk about, you know, the relationship, telling people that there's fascia, that we have this thing called fascia, clearly an important part of our physiology, our ability to move. To what extent you think that "tight fascia," I'm probably offending many people in this moment. Tight fascia restricts our movement and that working on fascial release or maneuvering, mobilization, thank you, can allow us to move better, maybe better posture, maybe even feel better. There are a lot of theories, some probably wrong, some probably right, about what fascia can and can't do for us. But what are some things about fascia that you find particularly interesting that you'd like to pass along?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I think what we should do is if you pull fascia out of the human movement equation, the human doesn't. It fails to stop moving.

Andrew Huberman: Right.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: So the recent, like we've just discovered fascia, right? That's not really entirely true. There's a really like 20-year-old set of videos by a guy who's, he describes himself as a somanaut. His name's Gil Hedley and he did these live dissections on YouTube. I don't even know if he's still there, but he basically did all of this gross anatomy for free on the internet. And he describes... one of the first people to really describe fascia as this sort of incredible connective tissue network that envelops, wraps, stores energy, communicates, is tensionality.

In full disclosure, I went to school in Boulder and I may have dated a girl who went to Rolfing school and was a Rolfer. And Ida Rolf was one of the first people to really talk about how we can mobilize fascia with touch. So I was introduced to fascia in the 90s when I had Rolfing done on me. So when I'm trying to help someone think about pain or restore position and this is overly gross, but it'll create a framework for people, we ask, is this an environmental problem? Are you poorly hydrated because your tissues need to be hydrated to slide? Are you inflamed? Like, that's why we talk about nutrition and we talk about sleep.

Okay, so we have this environmental piece. Then I often will say, hey, do we have just a movement problem? Do you just have crappy technique? Like let's fix the technique first. Let's get you moving to the highest expression of the movement first. Hey, turn your foot straighter. Let's, let's, let's recentrate that joint. Can we, can we have a better organization? Then we start to say, because sometimes it's just a moving problem, just you needed some cueing. We say, is this a joint capsule problem? Because of capsular stiffness, the joint capsule is a bag of connective tissue that surrounds all your joints and it can account for huge chunks of your range of motion limitation. So a lot of what we do is we, after we try to mobilize the joint tissue. And again, that's my own bias. The way I was trained as an Australian-trained manual therapist, this Maitland school. Then we say, well, is this just a good old-fashioned muscle restriction? And we call it muscle dynamics because that includes high tone, stress, fear. But trigger points are a well-documented phenomenon. Muscles get stiff, they become fibrotic. Right. You could have high tone trying to protect you, all those reasons, but that still can limit your range of motion. And lastly, we say sliding surfaces.

So instead of kind of talking about all the different layers of dermis and skin and fascia, we say, do the things that slide should? Are they sliding? So if you grab your skin on your forehead, it should slide in all the directions. Notice that the skin should slide all the directions over your tendons. Right. If I grab your typical person's Achilles and grab the skin over the Achilles, it doesn't budge. It's like to have an exoskeleton that's that fascial kind of compartment. And it's seized, it's adhered, it's bound to the underlying surfaces, which creates tissue restriction and higher tension. So when we're mobilizing these tissues, we're trying to keep tissues sliding and gliding. That's an easy way of thinking about it. Nerves have to run through nerve tunnels. Taking huge breaths keeps all of those, you know, aspects of your trunk moving. And we just need to be thinking in like a systems approach. So sometimes if you went and saw an ART practitioner and it didn't solve your problem--

Andrew Huberman: --this is Active Release Therapy?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Okay.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: It may not have been a fascial problem. Right. If you went and saw someone who only worked on the muscles, it may not have been a muscle problem. If you went and saw a chiropractor and they worked on your, on your joint structures, right? Or a good physio, it may not be a joint restriction problem. If you saw a coach and they couldn't cue you out of it, it may not have been a... so what we need to do is we recognize that if more squats just solved all the problems, wouldn't we have solved all the problems if rolling on a roller had solved all the problems? Seems like we would have solved all the problems.

So I think what ends up happening is we want to put fascia equally as an important part of the system, and one of the ways that we can directly impact that in a free way at home is to begin a conversation of just some simple myofascial mobilization. In fact, myofascial means muscle fascial, but there are osteofascial connections. Does the fascia glide over the bone there? Right. We can look at the tendonous fascial connections. And again, do these tissues slide and glide the way they're supposed to slide and glide? And that's a much easier way to look at it. And then I'm going to test and retest. Not with subjective pain, but how is your range of motion and access to your range of motion?

Andrew Huberman: Thank you for that. I've wanted to try Rolfing for a long time. And then a friend of mine who's a former Seal team operator told me that at some point during the Rolfing that he received that they put a glove on and went up his nostril and did some fascial release, excuse me, on the inside of his nose and quote, it was the most painful experience he ever had. And I was, like, all right, well, I--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --I don't know if you know anyone in Naval Special Warfare, but they're so soft.

Andrew Huberman: They're so soft, right? I didn't say that. Kelly said that.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: You know who you are, my friends.

Andrew Huberman: But you know, that I confess, you know, it's not like I avoid pain at all costs, but that. That made me think that I might not want to do Rolfing. I also don't want someone putting their finger up my nose. So I'm assuming that I could say, hey, I want to try Rolfing, and I don't need to get, because you hear this stuff like, oh, you know, there's all this emotional release, which, you know, there are other ways to get that. I guess, is it always painful is the question? Does it need to be painful? His statement is pretty simple.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: So let's pull Rolfing outside, because I'm not a Rolfer. But let's just say that mobilizing your tissues doesn't have to be painful. In fact, it's likely that you'll experience some discomfort. But let's talk about a couple guideposts for you. Number one, you always have to be able to take a full breath, right? So if I'm mobilizing you or you're mobilizing yourself and you suddenly stop breathing, you're going too deep. So an easy way for you is to say, hey, do I have, can I breathe here?

Number two, I like to have volitional contraction. So if I'm mobilizing someone or someone's doing something, I should be able to flex them out. I should have control over that. If the pain or depth or pressure is putting too much load on the system, where I literally lose neuromuscular control, what am I doing, right? And then, you know, those two pieces, can I take a breath here? Do I have control here? Those go a long way to keeping me in the bounds. And then we tend to not work on a tissue longer than five minutes just because I want to get the rest of it tomorrow. And if you give me 10 minutes of work, that's incredible. We like to put the soft tissue work before we go to bed.

And what we found was that we had better adherence. No one's doing anything productive in the 10 minutes before they go to the bedroom. Number two, like a child, when you put a child to bed, you're like, first we take a bath, then we read the book and then we go to bed, right? Your brain is like, I know what comes next. So if you do this rolling or on your... some soft tissue work, self-massage, you are training your brain to know what comes next. We find that when people have engaged in massage or self-massage, they don't stand up and want to fight anyone. They're very relaxed. If you've ever gone to a spa and had a massage, you don't go out and snatch or get into a fight afterwards. You're so chill, bro.

So we found a great way to, as Jill Miller says, switch on the off switch. That's a beautiful way of talking about that. How do I tell myself to shift out of this, you know, fight-or-flight into coming down. Five minutes per body part. Start anywhere on the leg, start anywhere stiff. What's asking? Can I breathe? Can I contract? You're going to see that that's a really simple way to start getting the same input and not all your tissues are the same. If you come to me with knee pain, I'm going to want to be able to look at your range, your positions. But I'm also going to want to be able to stay on your quads. I mean my full body weight. And if you can't take that, I'm calling that incomplete. And those people out there who are going to be like, whoa, that's heavy duty. You have not worked with my population who have monster thighs on are thick and fibrotic and it takes real weight. So we all have different sensitivities. But if I respect your ability to take a breath and contract, then all of a sudden we're upregulating. What I recommend is you go to Thailand, you get a Thai massage from a 65-year-old master woman who weighs 109 pounds and when she is working on your quads and you tap out and she's like, no, I'm not done here. If you felt your quads, you're going to realize how low the bar is.

Andrew Huberman: All right. Heat and cold. You were one of the first people that told me, hey listen, cold's great. Cold plunges, cold showers are great for shifting your state, for resilience training. It's fun.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I swam with Laird's pool this morning. Did the breath hold, cold laps. It's fun. I'm gonna put in quotation marks.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, it's, sometimes it's type 2 fun. It definitely will shift one's state for many hours afterwards for reasons we now understand. But you were one of the first people to point out to me that for injuries oftentimes it's better to perfuse the tissue and that heat sometimes perhaps is the more favorable tool if you had to pick one.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's right. So what you, I think, have even talked about that. There is research to show that cold water immersion can attenuate training effects.

Andrew Huberman: If done in the six to eight hours after hypertrophy and strength training because of its potent anti-inflammatory properties, prevent some of the inflammation that would prompt the adaptation response. And put simply, if your goal is bigger muscles and getting stronger, don't do immersion-based deliberate cold exposure in the six to eight hours after your training, fine to do it on other days, fine to do it beforehand. In fact, athletes at Stanford do that on the basis of a lot of work from Craig Heller and others — fine to not do it at all if you don't want to do it again.

I'm not going to die on the sword of cold plunging, but it can attenuate or even prevent those adaptations. But at other times it's a great tool for reducing inflammation, shifting one's mental and physical state in the great direction. Look, it always sucks to get in the thing. The whole point is you feel much better when you get out than you did before you ever got in. That's the simplest way to put it.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I'm a middle-aged guy, a guy who wants to be the best middle-aged mountain biker in my neighborhood. Is my timing of my plunge going to affect my ability to be that mediocre athlete? No. So stop it. People are like, when's the optimal time? I'm like, when's it work for you? Does it work first thing in the morning? Juliet found that if she got hot and plunged it in the night, she was like woken up and fired up and ready. She's like, I'm not going to sleep now. And I get hot and cold, hot and cold and it's like someone hits the emergency break, right? So first of all, when's it work for you?

Second of all, if there is a performance concern, we try to put it as far away from training as we can. That's what we say. Training in the evening, plunge before. If you like, you've trained in the morning, plunge in the evening, like get cold. That's cool. But what you hinted at is the same reasons why we don't ice injuries. Because it limits our body's ability to heal. So it rate limits and it might do it by vasoconstriction. Your body, eventually your body is going to warm up anyway. So one of the things we like to say is your body either heals at the rate of a human being or it heals slower. So there's no such thing as a fast healer. You're just, oh, you're really good at healing at the rate of human physiology. And the rest of us are doing dumb things that are rate limiting our healing. Nutrition, sleep. Right — when we are talking about anyone after surgery or injury, our bench mark in the line in the sand is eight hours of laying in bed without looking at your phone. That's minimum. And I don't care if you're sleeping because resting is the next best thing. But I can't actually understand inputs and outputs.

And let me be super clear, if you're trying to grow a body, learn a skill, change your body composition, get stronger, heal, that all rhymes with eight hours, we look at seven as our minimum. And of course you're a human being, you're going to get by. I was stressed out last night, wanted to come onto this show with my friend Andrew and do a good job. Like, I didn't get great sleep, but I'm a human being, I'm still going to show up. So what's nice then is we can start to say, okay, what can we control in terms of managing and upregulating, boosting, maximal healing rate for humans? And it turns out cold water may not be the best. Icing something might suppress prostaglandin release, right? Which means that you can think of it as you have these circulating stem cells. And again, sorry everyone, get that this is just very cursory. And we need the chemical signalers from the injured damaged tissue to call those things to be.

But if I ice that and suppress that, some of those cells can go swinging on past. There was a great study I saw million years ago and it looked at ibuprofen usage in Australian military tactical athletes who had bad ankle sprains. And those athletes who were given ibuprofen, which does the same thing as ice, suppresses prostaglandin release, right? Cuts off some of those chemical signals — were back faster than their counterparts who did not have the ibuprofen, but they had chronic ankle instability because they did not have a sufficient healing response because they had shut that healing response down. So what we find is, look, your body will wait until it warms back up. But if you think you're going to do angiogenesis and make new capillaries and modulate all these things by slapping a nonspecific ice pad for a nonspecific amount of time over a nonspecific tissue. You gotta be kidding me. And so it's really Mickey Mouse. Does ice help for margaritas that are warm? Yes. Open heart surgery? Yes. Right.

Andrew Huberman: Waking you up in the morning.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Waking you up in the morning. Hey, I have a kid who needs a placebo. I can numb that thing and give my kids some placebo ice. That's great. Definitely can work for pain control because as soon as you're numb you can't feel anything. But what's going to happen when you pull that thing off? We're going to come back. So we have found that we have much better. And again, since setting, instead of saying that's bad, we're turning out and saying we have so many better tools now to manage congestion because that's really what we're trying to do with ice and healing, is we're trying to stop swelling, right? But is swelling a mistake by the body? And the chances are it's not really a mistake. Again, two and a half million years of evolution, this stuff's pretty awesome. But what we know is failure to move and evacuate, that swelling is a problem. So when we get people on nonfatiguing muscle contraction NMES devices like the H wave or something like that, we find that we can actually decongest and keep moving in controlled ways. And we have much better clinical outcomes than we do if we ice.

Andrew Huberman: What about heating pads, Hot water bottles?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Sauna.

Andrew Huberman: Do you sit in the sauna?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yes, I do. I love the sauna.

Andrew Huberman: How often are you in the sauna?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Whenever I can. You know, and sometimes it's short sessions and sometimes it's super hot sessions, and sometimes I just get hot and cold a couple times. And I try, like you said earlier, I'm not after some specific adaptation response. The sauna is a great way for us to chill and hang out. And sometimes we're bored and we gotta make dinner or move on. So I, you know, I try to sauna. If there's anything I do, I sauna a lot. Bigger the engine, the bigger the brakes, then it's for me, it's such a big brake.

Andrew Huberman: You mentioned Laird. I've seen Laird drag the assault bike into the sauna, something most people probably shouldn't do because they would, most people, die of hyperthermia, but--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: --We call that Restrepo, it's the worst place on earth.

Andrew Huberman: It's an interesting tool, though, the heat. I find that if I get the sauna uncomfortably hot and then force myself to breathe super slowly only through my nose so that I don't actually feel like a burning sensation on the inside of my nostrils, and I just do that for 10, 15 minutes, that it's wonderful stress-resilience training.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: How great is that?

Andrew Huberman: But very different than the cold plunge where you can either muscle through it or distract yourself or whatever. In the heat, you know, your heart rate's going up and there's this temptation to, like, to follow that heart rate toward a more elevated stress state. And so I find that you can get very, very hot, obviously be, be safe about this, folks, but still maintain a lot of calm. And I think it's a wonderful tool, but you have to kind of work at it. And I enjoy this, by the way. So people are probably thinking, here you go again. Like, why not just enjoy the sauna? But I like to listen to Gregorian chants or something in there and do this like, very, like how, how even and calm can I stay?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Oh, I love that.

Andrew Huberman: At 215 or 220. And I wear the cap so those higher heats don't register to the brain.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: You will drive yourself out, eventually. Your brain is going to... Just what's drives me out of the sauna now is I retch. I actually feel like I'm going to vomit because I've gotten so hot. My brain stem is like, bro, you can just override. So I'm like got to get out. And I get out of the sauna. And then one of the reasons I love the cold so much. We'll jump in our cold, our pool or our cold plunges. I can get back in the sauna, right?

Andrew Huberman: Right. It's the contrast of I try to do it once a week. Sauna, cold, sauna. Once a week. It, you know. Again, not training for any specific thing except to be able to go back to Jocko's house. 'Cause I did sauna at Jocko's house with some family members of his and friends. And I think they wanted to see when I would... Dr. Kelly Starrett: They wanted to crush you. Andrew Huberman: So they went. I think they cranked that thing to like 220 to 30. And they called. He got me on this there. I ended up down on the floor, you know. And they were, they were teasing me because it's obviously cooler down on the floor than up top. And so they call that the Huberman spot. The wimpy spot. But yeah, he's a beast with the sauna.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Everyone, it's not a contest.

Andrew Huberman: And what it is, it is in the Willink household. I'll tell you, it absolutely is.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: One of the things I like about the heat and the cold is that it informs me about my readiness state because just like my CO2 tolerance, my breath holds are very short. When I'm stressed and underrecovered, my heat tolerance drops dramatically and so does my cold tolerance. It's easier to pick up really fast. I start shivering right away. I'm like whoa, I've been in here for 30 seconds. I'm already shivering. I'm like huh. Another piece of data that says maybe I need to make it a 70% day in the gym and move. I don't have to take a day off. Juliet and I believe in this thing called desire to train. We wake up every day like you, probably self-medicated with some exercise as kids, right?

And we start thinking about what we're going to exercise. What are we going to do? We're going to ride our bikes. What are we going to do? What are we going to lift? Like wait, when we wake up, we start thinking about when are we going to do it. And we wake up on some days and it's not there. And what we ask ourselves is it's not there, why is it not there? Is it me? I should be there. We should go train anyway. But we really try to listen to that voice. And when there's no desire to train, it's really strange how it correlates with crap heat tolerance, crap CO2 tolerance, crap cold tolerance. And I think it's a nice way of understanding yourself from sort of a third-party objective measure. Especially as you get at this, you're like wow, that really sucked today.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I love that. I think assessing one's degree of kind of forward center of mass for effort is great. I'm borrowing this analogy from somebody else. I didn't come up with this. He said you're with all things. You're either, you know, back on your heels, flat footed or forward center of mass. And I think we've heard a lot about, you know, trying to encourage ourselves to always be forward center of mass. What I'm hearing today is that it's great to do that sometimes, great sometimes to back off, but to just explore the full range of, for lack of a better way to put it, sort of emotional range of motion, you know.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yeah, and remember ultimately all this is supposed to be additive, right? And it's supposed to inoculate me by creating a framework that makes more durable my body and my relationships. I mean we, we didn't even talk about the fact that the sauna is like, it's just glue for people. It allows people to come together. I think one of the things I've noticed with my male friends is that it gives us a place like once a week where we get together because it's so hot. We also, we're all super vulnerable and--

Andrew Huberman: --The truth barrel.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: We talk with our friends and we kind of share stories and can talk about our lives. So it creates a framework for that. And if that was the benefit of the sauna, I'm in just that alone, right? That my wife and I feel more connected after taking one together. I'm like, well who cares about the heat shock proteins and Alzheimer's. That's probably important too. But I like having a lot of bonding things. And I think we, it's easy for us to sort of so hyperscience and hypertactic things that we forget. The whole point of the brain is to be around other brains. That's it. That's why the brain exists. And then those brains go do rad shit in the world together. And sometimes it's that simple. And when we start throwing that filter on it becomes a lot more sustainable. I'm not interested in being 110, I'm interested in being durable enough to take the hits on my way to 110.

Andrew Huberman: I love that some of my best friendships have been forged in the saunas.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's true, right.

Andrew Huberman: And not by pushing ourselves necessarily, just, just become the thing, you know.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: It's so cool. I know that some of my New Zealand teams have a kava. They call it recovery and sometimes they'll share, have a kava ceremony and drink a little kava and then jump in the sauna and boy, it really binds the boys. You know, they really create a downregulation effect. I mean, it's so, you know, I think again, my own bias, because I love this stuff, is that I think all of it is about physical input. So if we took a sort of macro step back, we can say is, what is your physical practice look like? Tell me about your physical practice. Well, I get up, move my body and I try to eat a fruit and some protein before I get out the door. And I walk all day long and I try not to sit in one place for a long period of time. And then I get home and if I'm lucky enough to exercise, I do. And then I sat on the floor and I rolled a little bit. But that's a full practice. You walked, you got sunlight, you. You know what I mean? And that I think is a much better way of thinking about this versus sort of let me add another line of code let-me-add-another-line-of-code tier programming where now you're doing three sets of ten in this thing.

Andrew Huberman: What are your thoughts on nutrition? You seem to be pretty balanced about this. Before we started recording, you were talking about some meatloaf recipes that sound pretty amazing. Clearly you love food.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I'm not gonna say I'm the best at meatloaf, but I may be 7 out of 11 times Bamboo Terrace bench champion. I'm gonna get a tattoo, but it's fine.

Andrew Huberman: What, you enjoy food?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I love food.

Andrew Huberman: So, you know, you like to eat and you cook a bit as well. Most people feel, I think, kind of overwhelmed by the discussion about nutrition. Now we're trying to get a gram of protein per pound of body weight, which I subscribe to, but if I'm supposed to spread that out across the day, sometimes I'm doing that, sometimes I'm not. I like fruits and vegetables.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Did you feel like a failure because you didn't have. I mean, honestly, if it can feel for people like, oh, I didn't do it.

Andrew Huberman: No, I think if people make getting high quality, high protein-to-calorie ratio foods as the foundation of their diet, and then eating some vegetables and eating some fruit.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Whoa, bro, what about the peels? You're going to kill people.

Andrew Huberman: And then I, I love that.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's dangerous.

Andrew Huberman: I'll eat the whole, I'll eat the orange peel. If it's a really good orange, I will. People who know me, I'm. I've gotten some wide eyes at meals where I'll take the lemons out of my drink. I'll just eat the whole thing down. I don't care. Someone will tell me why it's going to kill me. But I don't eat the seeds, but I'll eat the peel, too. So some vegetables, fruit, and then some starches. You know, per energetic requirements and/or real life. Like, I'm not gonna stay away from the sourdough bread because I don't need a starch that I don't have a little bit of it. Like, you know, I feel like we've lost our rational approach to eating because people feel these, you know, these quantifiable metrics of, you know, calories and protein. They're important, clearly. But I've always known you to be somebody who's very balanced. Balanced about the occasional ice cream. Yes, steak, but also vegetables. I mean, A, why do you think that the nutrition conversation has gotten so distracted, even contentious? And B, what do you do? And, you know, if you were going to raise a kid, you've raised kids. If you're going to raise a kid and say, here's what, like, balanced nutrition looks like to you, okay, I'm not calling you nutritionist. I'm saying to you, how do you see this picture?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: What I want to point out is that if we're going to have a conversation, remember, my real job, day job is high performance. I'm going to have to talk about body composition, and I'm going to have to talk about fueling. Do you have enough carbs on board to do what we're going to do? Are you eating to recover to reduce the session cost? How do we minimize the sort of the physiologic cost of this training and this competition, and that's all wrapped around nutrition. Nutrition I already hinted at. I'm going to have to talk and ultimately ask you to get a blood panel and look at, make sure that you have everything on board so that your tissues are tissues and can handle the load or prescribing them. So I didn't want to get into nutrition at all because it's always about body composition for me. And I'm like, that's the most boring reason.

Sean Stevenson wrote a beautiful book about creating a table culture and a culture on eating for your family. So for me, the functional unit of change is the household; that's the place where I want to make and put all my energy and time. That's how we'll transform society one household at a time. But sitting down with your kids, the research around eating with your kids like twice or three times a week is phenomenal, right? Like, cooking is beautiful. I have to become more nuanced because if I have a team I'm working with, like we had a tournament two weeks ago at Stanford. We played four games and the... that's four collegiate, nationally ranked teams that were playing badasses. How do I fuel those women? How do I get them? What do they want to eat? What makes them feel good? What makes them feel bad? How do we balance all of that? Like, I found out that putting food on a table with a tablecloth increased calories, again, as a high performance for me. I'm like, how are the ways that I can be thinking about this from a practical standpoint? My personal thing is that we focus on trying to create. This has been really useful for, for Juliet and I. An objective measure, 0.8 to 1 grams of protein, which means I don't measure anymore.

Andrew Huberman: I'm... per pound of body weight.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I'm 51-years-old — per pound body weight. So what does that mean? It means that I really try to prioritize protein every meal. Super simple. And I try not to eat one protein. I try to eat all the proteins. Right? That's probably better. I try not to choose personally very fatty proteins because my genetics don't really support it. If I want to see triglycerides and things go through the roof, then I'll watch me eat eggs and butter and steak — like keto gives me diarrhea. So what I'll say is I try to go for leaner proteins there, and then on the fruits and vegetables because I think we have a real problem with not enough micronutrients. Again, talking about tissue health, and definitely not enough fiber. Those are huge problems. And if I get 800 grams of fruits and vegetables.

This is a nutrition strategy promoted by our friend EC Senkowski at OptimizeMe Nutrition. She put this 800-gram challenge based on some research, and it changed everything. Because suddenly I was like, oh my God, I gotta eat more food. I have to eat more fruits and vegetables. And I was stuffing myself with fruits and vegetables, getting enough protein that I was like, I guess there's no room for a cookie. And what I really liked about that it was agnostic about your cultural preferences. It didn't matter if you were vegan, didn't matter if you're vegetarian. Didn't matter if you were carnivore. You want to do carnivore plus berries, knock yourself right out. It gave people permission to have their food identities, but it also met the minimums. And then we can dose up and dose down based on what your performance needs are.

Andrew Huberman: And this is 800 grams, not of carbohydrate. This is eight fruits and vegetables. 800 grams of--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: It's like four big apples.

Andrew Huberman: Gotcha.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: A banana is like 80 to 100 grams. Okay, yeah. If you want to be real dangerous. You ate eight. Eight bananas today. You could die. I mean, just. You could die.

Andrew Huberman: And a big salad with, you know, lettuce, cucumber, tomato, and probably.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Probably 2 to 300 grams.

Andrew Huberman: Okay, so then you'd also want to get some fruit, maybe another. Maybe some cruciferous vegetables, etc.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Check this out again. I'm just going to do some boy math here. Starbucks cookie. Delicious.

Andrew Huberman: Really?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Three hundred calories. I just call it delicious. Right? A pound of cherries is 230 calories. So eat a pound of cherries and tell me you're like, ah, I still want something sweet. A pound of melon. Was it like 220 calories? A pound of melon. So calorically not very dense. Right. But nutritionally super dense. So we end up loading a ton of more food on. And it really does prioritize those things. And from a performance standpoint, one of our friends is this incredible nutritionist at Michigan football. Abigail is amazing there, and she will tell me about how she's using nutrition as intervention for sports performance. And she'll have men come up to her and say, Abigail, I pooped today. And she's like, yeah, that's great. You should poop every day. And they're like, no, you understand. I pooped yesterday, too, and it's the first time these kids have pooped consecutively. They don't poop regularly.

And I think, again, if I'm just trying to get out in the weeds and talk about what's normal and not normal, we should talk about, you didn't eat fiber. And she's like, wait until you poop twice in one day. And they were like, that's crazy. I've never in my whole life. And what was the difference is they started eating fruits and vegetables and fiber. And when we start to create those benchmarks, it's a lot easier for me to see inputs and outputs. And then we can argue about, can you choke down 100 grams of carbs an hour because you're my elite cyclist. You know, I think you'd be shocked at how my, a lot of my athletes have changed their relationship around food because it serves their needs. It's not their identity around control. And something that Julie and I have been very cautious of because if you have two daughters, just speaking... We're really concerned about creating dysfunctional patterns or relationships to food because in this fitness space it can be real gnarly.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I see the progression from, you know, sitcoms of the type that we grew up on to reality TV shows to social media where social media can do so much good, education wise, etc., connection. But it's basically a reality TV show that everyone's been able to cast themselves in if they want. And certain characters are casting their physique, certain figures are casting their outrageous behavior, and we're all in this reality TV show called social media.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I think that's really the best way to describe it.

Andrew Huberman: When people start to feel like, oh, wow, these people are getting attention for this reason or that reason, it creates a gravitational pull toward people behaving a certain way. And then obviously some of that can be really self-destructive. Um, do you win health?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I mean, this is a great question I ask people. So, like, you shredded down, super dysfunctional eating. You can't go out and eat with friends. You don't drink anything with calories. Like, it's really gnarly to be hyperlean. And then what I'll say is, when you took your shirt off, did you win Instagram, did you win because you got another 60, 70 years on this planet. How does that work? We don't really diet. We'll manipulate macros to take weight off, to put weight off. Players in season, out of season, you will have, we'll have really good athletes say, I think I should lose 4 pounds the next two weeks for this thing. And I'm like, hold up, I'm not going to put you in another stressor. When we're trying to like, let's go ahead and talk about body composition after the season.

But ultimately, when we really get people on board with how food has the potential to enrich their relationships, how fun it is to cook, how fun it is to prep, how fun it is to serve other people, then we have this really different relationship with fueling. And that's, that's really remarkable. But it is really easy to say, I won. And now I'm like, okay, so this 90-day fast, there are so many fitness things out there where they start with a fast or brutal calorie restriction. And I'm like, that's your jam to get people lean fast. It's just to slam off the calories. Like we know what's going to happen. How many people have done some kind of 30-day, 90-day thing and the next day it's like they're off the rails. So if you're doing some body recomp and then you're off the rails. For me I'm like, I don't think that was very good because I got a, this is a long season we're playing.

Andrew Huberman: I think it's. I have to be careful here because I realize this gets into some issues. When I did an episode about anorexia, I learned that first of all, anorexia has existed for centuries. This idea that it's more prominent now with social media, actually the numbers don't bear out. What does bear out is that it is the most deadly, the most deadly by far of all the psychiatric illnesses.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Oh, interesting.

Andrew Huberman: It leads to death in a far greater percentage of cases than any other psychiatric illness, including bipolar, where people often commit suicide. A much higher percentage of people commit suicide who are bipolar, etc. So it's a really serious thing and yet we assume that social media has made that worse. But there's now this cluster of all these different eating disorders that don't qualify as full-blown anorexia nervosa. Sort of like ADHD. Now we understand people are having attention deficit issues that might not be clinical ADHD but that cluster around it. And like people's, adult's and children's inability to hold their attention on an idea or topic for any appreciable amount of time. So it's a very serious thing. I love that today you've talked about enjoying your training, like really enjoying your training. All aspects, the resistance part, the cardiovascular part, the mobility part, you know, the in the evening, getting down on the floor. Also enjoying eating with people, enjoying the sauna. I mean, I think, you know, people see the big guy that you are, the amazing track record you have of working with all these incredible athletes and you're quite an accomplished athlete yourself. And I think this is the first time for me anyway that I realized like you are thinking about how to make this whole thing pleasurable and mesh it with real life, which I'm realizing now shouldn't come as a surprise because you have a family, a flourishing family in addition to a flourishing business with The Ready State and, and so forth. I think if there's one message that really comes through over and over again. It's like, how can you make fitness and nutrition and health part of your life but not let it take over your life or your mind in a way that isn't healthy?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Yeah, thank you for that. And if that's coming across at all, I think we're, we're doing a better job and I would say certainly tempered as I've gotten more reasonable. You know, I think we get older and you can see a little bit more of the horizon and you, you know, you start to wrap your hands around how are we going to solve these problems in these different places and what is sustainable? You know, I really think that that's, you know, we see quick inputs and outputs that are high levels of sports performance. And simultaneously, again I want to take those lessons and transmute them to my own household in a really sustainable, fun way.

The nutrition piece is such a dangerous one and young right now. Juliet and I are very obsessed with youth sports and spending time with seeing if we can improve that experience for families so they come out unharmed. And you know, REDS, relative energy deficiency in sport, you know, is where we start to see that kids are not eating enough to fuel activity and their growing body simultaneously, and it's really hard on their physiologies. And it starts to show up with lost periods, it starts to show up with stress fractures. Right. And we start to see sort of this, some degradation in sort of the body's tissues, but can really cause a lot of problems. And you know, Stacy Sims is probably the first person to really put it on my radar of hey, you're a physio coach. I need you to become an expert with the people that you're working with. You know, are you getting enough support? And I see some of the elite women I work with, elite women really battle. This is what the body I need to get paid and to win world championships. And that's not the body that people want on Instagram. And you know, you know, should I have a salad after this training? I'm like, we just played for three hours. No, you're not going to eat a salad. Like go get this big-ass burrito and then we'll talk about your salad next, you know?

Andrew Huberman: So it sounds like the athletes are undereating and from my understanding anyway, the statistics...

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Also underfueling. Which I know is confusing. But you know, potentially not thinking about food at the right times.

Andrew Huberman: And within the general population of nonathletes, especially youth, however, it seems that young people are overconsuming calories. So there seems to be two populations clustering out.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Here we have a, this reminds me, we have a rule in our house for dinner. We have a three-vegetable rule. This is from a woman we work with, Margaret Garvey, who cooks a protein, whatever that is, and has also three vegetables. And that's where she starts. And I had one daughter who is like a gourmet chef. Georgia is just a total badass, you know, G. And then I have Caroline, who is the pickiest human being on the planet. Like, it's brown. I'm not eating it, you know, and she's getting better. But when we had three vegetables, suddenly what we saw was that she might eat one. Right. And we could start to have exposure. But I think if we crowd out some of them, because we don't want to have a restrictive house. Right? But, you know, if we crowd out some of the other foods, we found that it was a lot easier for us to say, this is what we're eating, and we eat this together as a family. And then if those other foods, I mean, your teenagers are going to leave the house and eat whatever they want. Just, just be clear, everybody. So you might as well stuff them with the good stuff at home.

Andrew Huberman: I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about supplements. These days we hear a lot about creatine. Creatine, creatine, creatine. I like creatine. Been taking it for years. We'll occasionally do a wash out where I just kind of let a bunch of water out of my--

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Why not?

Andrew Huberman: And then get back to it. I don't do it for any specific reason. I just do it.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I travel and forget to bring creatine.

Andrew Huberman: So I'm like, okay, yeah, but most of the time I'm taking five to ten grams a day. Okay. We've heard about the body benefits, the brain benefits. For athletes and just "exercisers," the typical person listening to this podcast. Do you recommend creatine? What are, what are some of the things that in your household, I'm getting this picture and I've been in your home and I will say that the spirit in your home is a wonderful one. Brian MacKenzie and I showed up more or less unannounced at one point. And like, there's, it's. It's a delightful thing, like people's spirits are up.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: It's a space station. It's a space station of stoke. And like, you want to be part of it, you can come in.

Andrew Huberman: Thank you. It's a great environment, and it was very warming to see that. And the way that you embrace all these different aspects of life and your... it's busy and it's hectic and it's fun and people care for one another and they're direct with one another, but in a way that's really supportive. It's really, in my mind, a great model for a home. And it really stayed with me, and it's really a pleasure to reflect on.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: High five J Star.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, it's a team effort in there for sure. So I'll just ask this. What supplements do you think are, if not necessary, then highly desirable for most people and then for athletes and maybe because we get this question a lot now, especially after Stacy came on the podcast, for your, the female athletes you work with in particular. Are there supplements that add on to that initial batch?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: So I think we. We can divide these things of, like, into food-like things, right. And then sort of perform--

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, like whey protein. It's just a protein replacement. High, high-quality, high protein-to-calorie ratio.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's right. And if you don't handle whey, like my athletes, I'm like, let me introduce you to these vegetarian proteins. And that's because you're having a hard time timing your meals or just getting enough protein because you, sometimes you just don't feel like it. So great, great utilization there. For Caroline, she gets omegas at night because she doesn't want to have any accidental fish burp at school. She's a teenager, so she takes them before she goes to bed. And we're really interested in brain health, and there's some early research and again, not my expertise that I've heard of, read about, talked to people about that vitamin D, creatine and omegas might help attenuate symptoms of concussion if they get hit, right? So post, pre. So those things are on Caroline. She gets creatine every day. She gets an omega every day, and she gets vitamin D. And some of that is. Probably gets enough vitamin D during the summer because we, I could pull it out, but we live in northern climes and they're indoors, and there's good research supplement.

I think Dan Garner had a great piece just talking about vitamin D supplementation in the military and the decrease of, like, risk of fractures in the foot just with vitamin D. So that's the start for me. I take a good multi because I'm like, I'm just gonna cover the bases, you know, and then you can look... I think the next sort of valence of interest is, have you had a blood panel? How are your vitamin B levels? Is there anything we need to do based on your environment or your genetics? And then I think it gets real in the weeds, past that and again, play around with that.

One of my super smart friends was like, I think you should take a statin, a small-dose statin once a week. And I was like, all right. So I was like, better take some CoQ10 with that. It's an experiment I'm running. Right. The downsides are low. I'm getting my blood panels. Talk to my physician. But so CoQ10 is on the menu for me just to make sure I don't have anything. And so I think suddenly what we should be looking at is how do I round out? My family doesn't eat fish, so we're not getting enough sort of omegas from those sources. And no one will eat walnuts. But I'm the only one eating walnuts. So, you know, how do I round out my nutrition with some supplementation. And is there a benefit for some other things that, with my genetics or with what's going on? Like, J Star has a mutated MTFHR gene. Right. And so we are always watching B vitamins for her. Right.

Andrew Huberman: Because methylator?

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Right. Poor methylator. Exactly.

Andrew Huberman: J Star is his wife.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's right. Sorry. J. Stizzle, CEO.

Andrew Huberman: You guys have such an awesome relationship. You guys have poked fun at one another. You're clearly awesome companions to one another, and you do great, great work together.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: I am the broken anchor of the relationship. I like, so she is, you know what's really interesting is I have, I'm a little bit like you. I think I'm excitable. I get obsessed with things. It's super fun. Go down rabbit holes. I like to experiment. And J Star is like, the true north. Like, no, that sounds fishy. We're not doing that. I came home one time, and. And I was like, you know what? This cow's milk is out of here. Our family is only drinking goat milk. I only had the best goat milk. I just had the best goat milk. And Juliet was like, sure, that's gonna last. And I gave some goat milk to Georgia, and she's like, hucked it across the room. She's a baby. And then I drank the goat milk and, like, vomited into the sink, and I had goat milk on my lip. And I, and Juliet just is so patient by saying, huh, I wonder if that's a good idea. I wonder if you will stick around.

Andrew Huberman: So she's the rudder.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: She is 100% the rudder. She is a three-time world champion, everyone. She's, she's a rower at Cal and she is my training partner. She's the greatest training partner I've ever had. We use training as another way of spending time together.

Andrew Huberman: I love it. Thanks for sharing a little bit of the picture of your home. It matches exactly my experience. Chaos and chaos. A little bit of chaos and a ton of love. And I've been quoting him a lot lately. I cannot take any credit for this, but Naval, who is, you know, kind of famous on various podcasts, he says, you know what, what are we really shooting for in life? It's a fit, energetic body. This is Naval, not me, by the way. He said fit, energetic body, a calm mind and resources. We gotta have resources and a home full of love. So I don't know. Yeah, I think that's the list.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: Spend the rest of your life working on those and you're gonna have a really, it's gonna be really fun and I, I just want to remind people, you hear me say it again, that they should all be enjoyable and it is fun to track. And it's also, you know, which, which devices am I wearing right now? I'm not wearing a single device, you know, because I want to feel and sometimes I track and sometimes I don't track and how am I feeling? And ultimately everything is really coming down to how do I come to understand my own process and my interaction with the world process. And I think I'm getting better at 51 of knowing I don't need six cookies and I really need to get more fruits and vegetables and sleep and I don't need a device to tell me that.

Andrew Huberman: Love it. Well, Kelly, Dr. Starrett, thank you so much for coming on here today and sharing with us so much wisdom. We covered so much. You covered so much. I mean, pelvic floor, fascia, cold, heat, movement patterns. You give us a ton of practical tools; getting down on the floor, sit, stand, and on and on. But a small portal into the vast amount of knowledge you have in that head of yours. And I just have to say that, you know, it's been a delight today because these little bits have come through about who I know you to be in the rest of the world. This is the real world. We just happen to have microphones in front of us. The rest of the world. And you've been at this a while. This business of trying to help people figure out best ways to move, how to be a better athlete, how to, you know, improve one's fitness, how to take a rational, fun, hardworking approach at times, but also fun, playful, recreational approach to this really key aspect of our health and many key aspects of our health. So I just want to thank you for coming here today, for doing the work that you do and you know, you are one of the real ones, as they say. Oh my brother, thank you. Thank you so much. And you walk the walk. You're strong, you can go far, you have fun doing it. You're a great husband and dad and you've been a great friend to me. So thanks for coming on here. Let's get you back again. And just thanks for being you.

Dr. Kelly Starrett: My pleasure, anytime. And thanks to all the great Huberman people that make this thing possible. It's really a thing. Thanks, my brother.

Andrew Huberman: Thank you.

Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Kelly Starrett. To learn more about Kelly Starrett and the work that he does with his wife, Juliet Starrett, at the Ready State, as well as to find links to Dr. Starrett's excellent books, please see the show note captions. If you enjoyed today's episode with Dr. Kelly Starrett and you'd like to learn more about the science of exercise physiology and the protocols that can best serve you in your fitness, athletic and other goals, you can go to hubermanlab.com, enter the word "fitness" and "galpin," G-A-L-P-I-N into the search function and from there you will find links in all formats; YouTube, Apple, Spotify, to the series that we did on exercise with Dr. Andy Galpin, who is a true world expert in this topic, and it covers all the things you could possibly imagine related to fitness and exercise to meet your fitness and exercise goals.

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For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body." This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience, and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body."

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Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Kelly Starrett. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

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