Optimizing Your Body For Functionality | Kelly Starrett | Better Man Podcast Ep. 042

Dean Pohlman: Hey, guys, it’s Dean. Welcome back to the Better Man Podcast. Today, I am joined by, I think, one of the first ever guest on the Better Man podcast for a repeat appearance, the supple, the leopard himself, Kelly Starrett.

Kelly Starrett: It is great to see you.

Dean Pohlman: I’m super excited for you to be here. I haven’t done a podcast interview in four months. I think so if I’m a bit rusty at talking with people, that would that’s going to be that’s going to be like.

Kelly Starrett: I knew it. I knew you. You went to a cave every like quarter and you just disappeared and you come out more handsome and better prepared with big ideas. And meanwhile, the rest of us are just in the factory, and you’ve just come down from the mountaintop. So tell me. You know, I’m glad. I’m glad I can help you break the ice or knock off the rust.

Dean Pohlman: If. If by mountaintop you mean buried in a sea of Google documents, then yes, that is. That is the mountaintop for me.

Kelly Starrett: This would be the same. It used to be called the ping cave. And now it’s the page cave.

Dean Pohlman: Yes, that is that is very accurate. So? So, yeah, we’re here. This is great. I’m really excited to have you back and to talk about all the things that I want to ask somebody in your position. Super successful fitness guy approaching 50. Lots of stuff that I want to ask you about. Let’s talk about life from talking about man’s struggles.

Dean Pohlman: We’re going to talk about fitness or overall health. Also, I want to give you a huge thank you for writing that amazing intro to the Yoga for Athletes book that you helped out with the one that we released a couple of years ago. So thank you again for that.

Kelly Starrett: Of course. My total pleasure. And it’s fun to see that book trickle its way down through the bedrock and finding its purchase amongst a lot of my friends and my friends all know this guy and then they’re like, Whoa, hey, you do know this guy? And I’m like, Yep. Part of the success of being an old guy now is like, You hold the door open for the young. I’m just kidding. Really. It’s it’s anytime you can attach yourself to, like, a rocket ship, you should do that. You are a rocket ship.

Dean Pohlman: Thank you. That’s a it’s a really nice, nice way to say that. But I love, you know, something I think about a lot is, you know, you look at social media, you’re looking at, you know, these young tiktokers putting out whatever they are. And then I’m like, you guys. I mean, you know, Kelly, your TikTok presence isn’t 5 million followers. You know, it’s weird, but like the gosh, I mean, you work with athletes from every single sport, from every major league in the United States. You work you’ve done Premier League stuff, too, right? With football players, you know, so, you know, you look at all of that and you’re like, yeah, he doesn’t have TikTok followers yet, but like, look at all the stuff that he’s done.

Dean Pohlman: And so it’s just awesome for me to be able to, to be able to talk with you. I also want to bring up the request that the third edition of a Leopard include you in a leopard costume on the cover. Oh, I know a few books. Seriously about that yet.

Kelly Starrett: Easy, easy, easy, easy. It’s a lot of you know, we actually are having to source all of that leopard pattern. You can’t buy it from one person because of this, like, man carriage. You know, like most of the time, like, you can’t get it in, like, triple large leopard. So, you know, I’m working on it, but we’ll get there.

Kelly Starrett: You know, you bring up a really just interesting point around fitness and those of us and who is getting their information from TikTok around strength conditioning. I think, you know, it’s really interesting that there are some we you know, we were approached like, hey, really, you’re going to TikTok. So we really made a concerted effort to try to TikTok-ify.

Kelly Starrett: And what we took out of that is, okay, well, we can have better captions and we can have some good music. And, you know, we sharpened up a real game, you know? You know, because like, as every other grown ass man, I wait two weeks, two things got off tick talking on Instagram. That’s how I consume tick tock right via Instagram.

Kelly Starrett: Mm hmm. But you know, what we saw was just that I don’t I don’t think it’s every every forum is the right place. Like TikTok is great for, you know, whole lot of things. And it’s really been helpful for a lot of, you know, like cooking. It’s great, great ideas, simple like my kids, you know, send like I was just in Japan.

Kelly Starrett: They’re like, you have to go to this 7-Eleven and get the sandwich. Right. So it’s really opened the doors for a lot of sort of exploration of the world and even like there’s a tech talk right now about how to shop at Trader Joe’s for college kids and create meals that is really niche, that’s niche, but it’s also really cutting edge that actually solves a problem and improves the planet.

Kelly Starrett: I think when we’re talking about durability, sustainability, how I work these things into my life, I’m not sure that’s the medium for most of us to try to get all our 15 seconds, you know, like I’m look, I love a catfish. Yeah, I really do. But that’s not the place where I’m going for my yoga information.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. I mean, I find the same thing I and I struggle with creating content that’s short because I usually like to explain things. It’s one of the reasons why people I know. It’s one of the reasons why people really like mental yoga, but it’s also like one of my biggest complaints is like, Hey, I’m just trying to do the pose.

Dean Pohlman: Can you shut up and let me do it? I’m like, I mean, I could, but then you wouldn’t know how to do it and you wouldn’t know all these great things that it’s doing for your body. So it’s tough for me to cram something into, like, you know, like.

Kelly Starrett: If you if you came to me and coach, I would actually coach you, you know? I mean, I think that’s what’s really interesting. There’s this idea that I think people want to do it in their homes and they want to hide away their beginner ism. And so much of the power of strength conditioning, the power of training is being in a room and being vulnerable with other people, being being in a team, being being seen, having a real time dialog or a coach sees you and explains what’s going on is teaching you how to fish, the teaching how to move, teaching how to feel so you can go do it by yourself and I think as long as we’re always separating that out, we’re really going to miss one of the big opportunities of training together. And look, without opening up some spiritual can of worms, Buddha, Muhammad Jesus is like, you should be with other people doing this. You know, you should not just be by yourself. You need to be in a room full of other people.

Kelly Starrett: And if we use those as just a breadcrumb, turns out people, the brain needs other brains. And, you know, recently, I don’t know. Did you watch the physical 100 on Netflix That crazy or Korean?

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, the Korean. Yes. I watched like three episodes of that. They just use the same action scenes from six different angles in slow motion for about 30 to 45 seconds.

Kelly Starrett: 100%. And what you can see in the beginning, it’s all about esthetics, right? Who is the most jacked person? And they’re like, Ooh, and the overdubbing is great. It’s like, you know, like, wow, your muscles are really big, you know? And he’s just like, like you would say that to another man, you know, Hey, you know, I really appreciate your muscles.

Kelly Starrett: And what’s it? Forget the story. The punchline, of course, is that the big jacked bodybuilder does not win. Like, you know, the person who has the huge work output wins. But you know, what was interesting to see there is you see how everyone is sort of dancing around and trying to respect each other because they’re Korean and they’re really you see that like there’s honest respect between the athletes.

Kelly Starrett: As soon as they do this dumb thing, which is like, Max hang from a par for time. Oh, yeah, they’re all bonded and they’re in the pool high fiving and talking about it. And it creates an opportunity. They’re like, Wow, I didn’t expect him to be so good. Wow, that was really humbling. And as soon as people have done something together, the whole shift changes. Everything changes. And this is why it’s great that when you’re in a hurry, you can get on your kitchen and swing and kettlebell and do it by yourself. That’s that’s crucial. Like, I don’t need to go drive for an hour, you know, go to a class or an hour, drive back if that’s a 2, 1 hour of training. But a 2 to 3 hour event, that really is not going to be sustainable for me in my life with my family and things I want to do and spend time with my kids as just, hey, I’m on sneak this time.

Kelly Starrett: But when we remove the training with other people, that is an error. And we only need to grab someone from your neighborhood and and two people doing it together, giving each other feedback, creating a training dialog, a conversation, even exposing yourself to humility of men. I sucked at that. Wow. This I don’t rotate my hip doesn’t extend. Wow. You just crushed me on the bike. Whatever it is. That’s how we change society. It’s literally I think the the hyper local position of the garage is how we can really kind of dig ourselves out of this hole.

Dean Pohlman: Mm. Yeah. I mean, we realized that more than ever over the last three years. Hey, hang out with people. It’s good for you.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah. Yeah. You know, and that that really sets us up because, you know, we just saw this big study come out that looked at kids and obesity, Right? And what we found was, wow, it’s really out of control. Like we’re losing grip on this thing with our children. And it should make sense based on we just came out of three years of mixed messaging and again, being apolitical, what we saw was that people didn’t know how to self-soothe.

Kelly Starrett: They they self-soothe with crappy food. We didn’t people know how to eat. I didn’t know how to move. They just, you know, we saw them as an allegory. One of the one of our local coach friends would get on the phone with someone. They were like, okay, I need a full body workout, cardio strength. I have this pink dumbbell that my like ex-girlfriend left and like a green sarabande from physical therapy ready to go.

Kelly Starrett: You know, like, I think maybe we’re going to have incomplete there. But the study comes out and says we’re not doing very well in spite of the fact that we have to talk, in spite of the fact that we have Instagram and we’re wedging more people in at the trough, we have the greatest access to strength conditioning, fitness, wellness, nutrition we’ve ever had, and every single metric that we care about: ACL injury rates in kids, back pain, social isolation, you know, dependency on THC or alcohol, whatever you’re doing to self-soothe, to take that edge off. And really that’s what that is. You know, they’re all trending in the wrong direction. So at some point we’re going to say, okay, we’ve been doing this trillion dollar, trillion dollar experiment for the last 15 years. Ten years. That’s how much true. It’s $1,000,000,000,000 a year is this hyper connected industry where we’re selling fitness as a commodity and it really isn’t serving us.

Kelly Starrett: So I think we’re going to at some point have to be big boys and big girls and say, hey, if it’s not working, what are we going to change?

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, and that’s something that I really like about you guys is that you’re you’re looking at this and a lot of you know, and there’s a lot of people who are doing this as well, but you guys in particular are I think you’re looking at this and thinking, how do we change how do we change how people view fitness and how do we make it relatable to people to make it seem like, hey, like fitness is not this thing That has to be incredibly complicated. It can be something that’s easy enough that everyday people can learn it, and it can also be more easily integrated into your lifestyle.

Kelly Starrett: Has to be.

Dean Pohlman: Use than you think.

Kelly Starrett: Do you think we’ve habituated people to this idea that it’s like fitness has to occur in one hour blocks, Otherwise it’s not, you know, I mean, like I know something that you have done such a good job of is helping people to say, here’s you got 10 minutes, here’s 10 minutes of positioning, work breath, you got 20 minutes. Great. We can actually get a lot of additional work in and restoration of position to improve whatever it is you care about in 20 minutes. I mean, you I’ve. You’ve been beating that drum for a minute, I feel like.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. And pretty much all my workouts that I record, I try to say I try to say, Hey, this is like a 30 minute workout we’re going to do, you know, go through the full routine. But keep in mind that when you know you’re on your own, you don’t have to do this full 30 minute routine to get something out of you know, to get something out of it. Remember, which poses helped you and do those like, you know, once an hour or whenever you when you’re standing in line somewhere, when you’ve got nothing going on, when you’re sitting in front of the TV, at the end of the day, you know, I know that’s something that you also like, like really promoting is, hey, you’re in front of the TV. Like let’s at least do something. Let’s put your body into a position.

Kelly Starrett: Stop Being Reasonable.

Dean Pohlman: Stop Being Reasonable. Yeah. You know, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’m just kind of weird with all this stuff. Like. Like I’ll I’ll go wait in line somewhere and I’ll get into a high lunge. You know, I’ll get into a lunch position, I’ll get my arms overhead, I’ll keep the arms at my side initially. But then like after like 20 seconds of like, okay, no one’s going to yell at me now. Arms up, too.

Kelly Starrett: Mothers are grabbing their children. They’re like, That man is squeezing his glutes and like, it’s move away.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But the but I did want to say about, you know, this whole social media thing is, is and this is the reality for how we put out content too. But everything that we put out, we’re trying to beat the algorithm. You know, we’re putting out things that we know have to be popular with people in order for other people to see it. So, you know, we are creating content and sharing it in a way that, hey, I want this to be helpful for you and I want it to be impactful and really useful information. At the same time. I also have to put it out in a way that is going to attract attention because if I don’t do that, someone else is going to do it and they’re going to put in some really crappy information, but something that grabs a ton of attention.

Dean Pohlman: So we’re competing against that in order to do it. And the goal of that is to always try and get people to say, Hey, I really like that short video. Does he have longer videos? Does he go more in-depth in this content? And then once we bring you in from our like, you know, our outer level of, hey, do you have interest in this? Cool. Come in, come on inside. Then we’ll show you like, hey, here’s the longer content, here’s the more in-depth content. Now that I’ve got your attention, sit still and watch this demonstration for 2 minutes. Instead of being able to swipe away from it. So I just want people to be aware and I’m sure you go through the same thing, but that, you know, that is the reality of looking at fitness content on social media.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah, and I think you can find myself where I’m getting bored sometimes. I’m like, Yep, bored. I mean, like, are you doing this wrong with the elbow? I mean, like three and activate, you know, and we just recently they’re on Instagram. There’s like, they’re like their new thing is pictures. It’s called a carousel. And you put pictures up of like, yeah, okay. So all things in their time. You know, the real question then is, again, we’re trying to compete in this algorithm, but is it working and does it seem to be working? It doesn’t seem to be serving our young kids. It doesn’t seem to be. You know, I’m excited about coming back to a book in this time because it gives people a chance to… You know, one of the things I think mistakes that we make is we think because we’re all sort of interested in this and nerdy and the people who are following man flow get it. They are. They’re like, Oh, okay, I found a thing that allows me to understand myself, gives me movement choice, and actually makes me feel better.

Kelly Starrett: Like people, people, the people who are listening this podcast, we have to do a better job of bringing our neighbors along, our family members along on this journey, aunts and uncles, people that we work with and showing them like, Hey, let’s one of the things that’s been useful for me is to flip this script a little bit and say, okay, all of this has been all of the high performance environments in which I find myself, you know, [New Zealand] All Blacks, National England national soccer team, you know, the 40 Niners NFL. I mean we just we get I get a lot of dirty data right People are like help us solve this problem pro surfers we just see it all. And what we’ve done is try to say what’s essential here, what works under the most time stress conditions and then how do we actually take those lessons and transform society with it?

Kelly Starrett: How can sport and performance become a living laboratory in a test kitchen where we can actually say, Hey, look, we’re not just going to break these bodies and throw them on the pile of dead gladiators for entertainment? And it’s it’s fine entertainment, but also say, hey, we recognize that professional sports binds us. It gives us common cause and informs us about what’s going on.

Kelly Starrett: So, for example, one of the big switches we’ve seen in in nutrition has really come out of professional sports. People don’t think I think recognize this, that we definitely lost our way. We were like Pre-WOD, Powders, active era, and then all of a sudden there was this switch where professional sports professional cycling, everyone premier, football, premier, soccer. They used to, they really started eating whole foods and putting whole foods in front of their athletes. And they saw improved performance because they their whole livelihoods are not only that, but they saw that when people who ate together tended to do better together, ended up being a sort of a net positive social change in the club. And what you’ll see is that all high performance groups that share at least one meal a week together do better.

Kelly Starrett: And if you’re thinking, Well, I wonder if I can have lunch with my coworkers. Yes, you can, Right? If I need to have, you know, lunch with my with my, you know, executive team. Yes, you can. Even here at the Ready State where we have a bunch of remote people, we all get together. Today’s the day where everyone’s in the office and we’re going to have lunch together. And just that act of eating together changes things. And what you’ll find is that our elite military groups eat lunch every day together when there’s a cantina. That’s part of their culture and you don’t sit with not your guys, you sit with your guys, the professional, like premiere, like your time, like Arsenal in those places, Tottenham, those athletes will often eat two or three meals together a day.

Kelly Starrett: And what you get out of that is a lot of conversation, a lot of time talking and we get better micronutrients, we better control macronutrients like they’re able to basically say, Hey, we’ll take care of this. We get all of these things in the background and by the way, for Whole Foods are performance enhancement. So if you all of a sudden you’re seeing and experiencing, you’re like, wow, there’s this really move back to Whole Foods that’s come out of professional sports.

Dean Pohlman: Oh, well, that’s pretty cool. And I actually want to so I have I have questions that I want to ask. So now, now I’m going to get to my questions. I want to make sure I don’t miss out on those. And one of the questions that I have for you has to do with, you know, you’ve worked with so many elite athletes over the years. You know, you’re friends with Kelly Slater. I mean, these are just like this is this is this is awesome stuff. You’ve trained. You’ve trained George St-Pierre, right?

Kelly Starrett: He is a friend. We’ve spent some time together trying to untangle his knee problems.

Dean Pohlman: And it’s just nuts. You’ve worked with, like the best know the the best athletes in the world. And so something that I’ve noticed, though, is that, you know, you started out as mobility WOD And I think that was, you know, call me, you know, I could be wrong, but from my perspective, looking in mobility WOD was geared toward, you know, athletes, toward CrossFit, toward the functional fitness community.

Dean Pohlman: And from what I’ve seen now, mobility WOD became the ready state and you wrote this new book Built to Move and you’ve it seems like you’ve made this this transition to not just working with elite athletes but now also trying to reach everyday people. And I wanted to ask you about where did the motivation for that come from? Or maybe I’m totally wrong and that’s not a transition.

Kelly Starrett: Well, how about this? You know, I think I started writing become a supplement. It’s out ten years next month. April is ten years. Wow. And it was a two year kind of journey before that, right, to write it. So 12 years ago puts me in my thirties. And at that time I’m very focused in my career on how do we go faster, how do we win more world championships, How can I help you to optimize your positions in the expression of those positions in the sports you’re doing?

Kelly Starrett: How do we get people to own their positions in pain more effectively? Right, and sort of start to draw, you know, a bigger circle for the role of the coach in the athlete. You know, the applicants own their 50% and doesn’t have to wait until they’re in pain before they start to restore their range of motion. And so a lot of the mobilizations you see, I saw just something this morning.

Kelly Starrett: This guy was like the top five mobility tricks. And like three of them are right out of a Supple leopard. And this guy has no idea who I am nor where they came from. And that’s the.

Dean Pohlman: Funny thing that.

Kelly Starrett: Go rate. That’s totally funny because the goal is I’m like, that’s so cute. You call it the band double. You even know why it’s called the Couch Stretch. That’s so, so fun. So one of the things that was great there is we are seeing the changes in how those techniques now are being owned by everyone, which is really what the intention was to shift this burden of position into the language of strength and conditioning.

Kelly Starrett: Right. And when we started, remember, the model was train as hard. You can do some yoga. I don’t know how it helps, but apparently it helps right? Oh, you got injured because you physically there was you’re in pain. That’s not that’s not a training problem. That’s a medical problem. But since you don’t have time to go physical therapist, we just don’t use your arms. I mean, that’s literally what the language was. People are left to self-soothe and do whatever they needed to do. And all of a sudden we realized that here we are all these years later, I’m pushing 50. And again, we always knew that the we could understand what was happening because we were working in sport and in strength conditioning to understand we’re working at universities, we’re working at the level of the U.S. Army. We’re working with huge law enforcement, federal agencies. We’re helping these big systems and small groups literally look at their behaviors and say, What can we control in these chaotic environments? We can control the quality of your positions. But we also started to recognize that one of the limiting factors to the whole system is when and where people are going to do this.

Kelly Starrett: So my doctoral work ultimately looked at barriers to adherence like a million years ago. And you know what I ultimately did wait for? It was I made all the people who had low back pain in my cohort that I wrote about keep a training log. That was it. And the physical therapy people in my you know, my university were like, this is crazy, this training log. We actually made people log. And it was really useful because people could track and see that they weren’t doing what they needed to do. And it was a pneumonic for them to be like, Oh, I didn’t do these three things that we both agreed on. But that really started to kind of shape my brain around, Wow. I think we have to look differently around behavior change and when and how we’re going to help people incorporate these things.

Kelly Starrett: We’ve always known that high performance sport was the place where we could understand complex movement phenomenon and simplify it. And then here we are now approaching 50, plus having all of this experience saying, Well, we also know you’re going to need to talk about your sleep, because if you’re in pain trying to change your body composition, trying to lose weight, trying to grow, trying to heal, trying to, you know, learn a new skill, what are you doing? Like, I can’t even see the noise of the data is so dirty because you’re only getting 7 hours or less of sleep. And so we started to recognize that man. You weren’t getting gains. I owned a gym, commercial gym for 17 years. We started to see that you’re okay. You’re not progressing because it’s not us, it’s you. And what you’re doing is lying about your sleep.

Kelly Starrett: And suddenly we can track that and we can say, okay, it’s not good or bad, and if you have a baby, God forbid, you may not sleep for a month or two or a year, that’s going to happen. Or you may have to travel, but we can start to create these sort of guidelines for people that are essential behaviors that facilitate what it is they want to do.

Kelly Starrett: And some of it is, hey, I just want to be less gross. I just don’t want my Achilles to hurt anymore if I go hiking. I want to be able to do X. And originally, when we define mobility, for example, we define mobility as do you have your native range of motion? And if you speak yoga, that’s native range of motion, not super knee. There’s nothing that’s super crazy in yoga. There are some binds that you can only do if you’re a skinny, skinny vegan. That’s true, But all of the foundational yoga positions are absolutely the positions that the body is supposed to be able to. That’s why you suck at that so much because you can’t do it by supposed to do.

Kelly Starrett: Yoga also explains that here are these fundamental positions and also you need to have control in them and you’re able to breathe in them. You need to tell your brain you’re safe and that’s why you hold that downward dog for like 10 minutes and try to breathe in that position. It’s an overhead position. It’s your found. The foundational long lever means leg, a straight, hip flexion position. Those are two fundamental positions for human beings.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. And I love your I love your description of that in the book where you’re like when you are stretching and when you’re in range of motion and you’re stretching and you’re breathing, that is your body saying, Hey, it’s okay, I’m here, we’ll be fine. You hold it, relax. We’ll open up a little bit more.

Kelly Starrett: And as soon as you see that, you’re like, Oh, those yogis are pretty clever. They figured some stuff out. But now we’re want to define mobility as not only do you have any range of motion, can you control it, but also how can you use it in your life and what do you want to do? And I think that’s one of the things that one of our friends, Shawn Pasternak, said recently is he described fit in the current fitness traces like doomsday prepping where you’re never strong enough, you’re never fit enough, you never have enough pull ups.

Kelly Starrett: It’s like it’s like a hoarder scarcity mindset versus I’m training for something. And we forgot because the gym culture and fitness culture and you could even call it physical culture is in of itself identity, identity, politics, entertainment. I’m a peloton-er I follow, you know, a portal. This is my identity and my group. We have signals. If you’re a certain practitioner, you wear certain kinds of shoes, you’re in the airport, you see someone with a rogue shirt and like certain shoes on, you’re like, oh, No Bull’s that guy’s across there. Like you signal to your people, We have these identities. Meanwhile, we have forgotten why we’re training. We are training to do something. And instead we have this this recursive nature of fitness where we’re forgetting that what we’re you know, we’re not doing pull ups for more pull ups. We’re doing more pull ups. So that can be more effective in the pool. Or I can climb or I can finish fall in an outstretched arm not to socket my shoulder because it helps my thoracic spine, whatever it is. But now we can start to have a sort of more rational conversation and it’s totally fine to have like yoga or strength training be your hobby. That’s okay. But don’t pretend that your hobby is the same thing as creating a stable physical practice that looks at all the things.

Kelly Starrett: So we gave this book to, I don’t know, ten world Champions. Maybe. Maybe it’s 11, maybe it’s nine. I don’t remember. But a lot of world champions were given this book and all of them were like, Whoa, I had a couple of blind spots. They’re they’re the best in the world, but weren’t eating enough protein, weren’t walking enough. Oh needed to really change your sleep habits. Right? There are couples, they struggle with some hip flexion and I think when we give people these vital signs, some physical benchmarks, then you can you’re clever enough to start to figure out how to put them into your life and the application of that isn’t next week’s marathon or triathlon or your immediate knee pain. It is. What do you want to do for the next hundred years? And this is the way to get there.

Dean Pohlman: So two things that came out of that. So you were talking about fitness for certain goals, training for something. And that’s a question that I get a lot in my community. People want to have some sort of they want to have some sort of goal. They want to have some sort of, you know, they want to be able to work towards something they want to be gives them motivation, it gives them direction.

Dean Pohlman: And for me, my thought there has always been well, my goal is has always been to just feel as strong and capable as possible so that all of the different things that I do on a day to day basis, I want to feel strong when I need to lift something up. I want to feel I want to feel capable and confident that my body will not get injured when I’m doing certain things, like if I need to get really low on the ground, if I’m playing with my son, if I need to, you know, if I need to get down to the bottom drawer so I can get a heavy pot out of there, I want to I want I want it to be zero effort. I don’t want to be like, oh, I got to make my knee move. I got to be careful with my knee and make sure I don’t go full flexion there. And I got to bend over a little bit with my back so it doesn’t.

Dean Pohlman: But I’m curious for you, in your experience, what are what are goals that people can make for themselves if they’re lacking, you know, if they’re not sure what goals to make for themselves?What are goals that you have found that can help with motivation, that can help with being consistent and doing the different exercises and workouts they need to do to feel. They want to feel the way they want to feel.

Kelly Starrett: I feel like, you know, a lot of people come to fitness, especially in their forties, you know, again, speaking from perspective and the fact that Juliet and I live in a neighborhood with actual people, we have teenage daughters. I talk to a lot of men at school who are, you know, I don’t look like the average bear. You know, and even people come to Juliet and are like, How do I get your arms? And, you know, it’s like, well, you need to start when you were, you know, 14. It’s too late for you, but it’s not too late to improve your function, right? Or you chose the wrong shitty parents. Sorry about that. And the the idea here is for most of us I think people want are interested in fitness because they want to change their body composition or lose weight.

Kelly Starrett: And I don’t think they necessarily want abs. They just want to feel less gross. And any entrance into fitness or into practice or into health is valid and totally good because it’s the it’s the thing that really starts a constellation of behaviors that, you know, over here, like, I want to win another world championship. I’m like, cool, That’s a really great goal. That’s no different than I want to lose some weight. Really isn’t. The difference is what are we doing or how hard do we need to turn a specific lever to have a certain outcome? Because what I want people to get is that underneath both of those requests are the same foundational practices.

Kelly Starrett: Is it useful and helpful to put a big goal on the horizon? Yeah, we just were chatting with our friend Steffi Cohen, who is she only has like 25 all time world records in powerlifting. She was on the national Venezuelan soccer team like she is a freak athlete and now she’s a professional boxer and she’s changing her body composition, changing her strength goals. But she said one of the things that really makes me a good person is the pursuit of some endeavor, the physical endeavor that that really ends up being a crystallizing force that organizes how she trains, what she’s interested in, her lifelong learning, her curiosity and it could be as little as like, Hey, I want to go to this advanced yoga class. What do I need to do to get into that and and thrive and not walk out crippled? It could be a micro was that or it could be. I’m going to do a5k and I want to do it without my knees hurting. Right.

Kelly Starrett: But oftentimes I think in we as as sort of more mature people think, okay, I’m going to retire one day, what I need to do to retire, I need to have a foreign K with this much money and I need to save this much or run a business. And these are my first quarter goals and these are my third quarter goals. Here’s my five year plan. You just work backwards if you work with athletes, that’s literally what we do. What day is the world championship? Okay, What day is the first day of the event? Okay, what do we get? What are we going to try to get done between now and then?

Kelly Starrett: And we literally just block off the number of days and number of weeks and start to say, okay, here are our short term goals and here’s how we’re going to progress until that day, right? So we can apply that same kind of level of organization towards your body. And it’s useful then if you’re already comfortable again with making short term plans. This is how we teach kids in school. We teach them to read and they have to learn this curriculum at this age until they progress. So we do this all the time, but we don’t do it for our health. So if chasing a specific body composition goal is the thing for you, remember you can’t win your health, you can’t win like peak blood flow, boom. I, you know, blood panel, I retire. I took my shirt off on Instagram. I had an AB one day and then I just I won. It’s such a long game and I think it’s useful for us to organize our training and thinking behaviors around an event. As a man that has worked really well for me and let me give an example.

Kelly Starrett: Last year I had a whole bunch of friends. We went into the mountains in Utah and did this like three or four day backcountry ski trip. We get up to touring, we get up to a hut, and then we just did day trips out there. I had bad COVID on a Friday. I tested positive on Saturday, I tested negative on Sunday. I was in the mountains. I don’t know if you had COVID, but it really messed up my car. Aerobic fitness. Oh yeah, altitude carrying a pack in the wilderness. And I was like, Wow, this is my life now. I’m never going to move my legs faster than this ever again. And I had such negative self-talk and I got to the hut and literally laid on the ground and shivered for 3 hours. And I was like, It’s been fine this last year, just like a month ago we went to Japan to Backcountry Ski and I was like, over my dead body. Am I going to be that guy again? And all of a sudden I had this urge to like, I need to do doubles, I need to get my nutrition, I need to make sure I’m.. and it really crystallized for me this drive to do things, a reason to do it.

Kelly Starrett: And I think that’s one of the problems potentially when we’re like fitness people are like, well, I don’t have a reason, you know, I just I don’t want to hurt. Well, that’s good. That can be a good way in, but that’s incomplete. So at some point you should have a rationale. And it is difficult for the typical person, I think, to be thinking in 20, 30, 40 years. But that’s the time scale. And that’s why this book isn’t about diet and exercise. It’s about foundational behaviors of a human being who’s planning on being 100 and functional. And then if you want to layer on fitness on top of it, knock yourself out.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, Yeah. So I, I look through a lot of the so you call them ten vital, vital tests, vital some of the vital signs. And one of them was just it seems so difficult to do like, you know, the mobility test. I’m like, okay, I can do that. I can do that. Yeah, I can lift my arms overhead.

Dean Pohlman: Cool. I mean, I like I got those down, right? I do that stuff every day and then it got to the part on walking and I was like, Oh my God. Okay. So and in the book, there’s a really cool statistic that you bring up talking about the difference between 4000, 8000 steps per day and then 12,000 steps per day. And just for just for reference, about one mile is about 2000 steps. Yeah, right. Okay. So if we’re setting a goal of and you know, you’ve probably heard people say, I’ve got to hit my steps today, I got to hit town 10,000 steps. That means that someone’s walking five miles a day. That’s a that’s a lot of walking.

Kelly Starrett: And then especially all at once, right?

Dean Pohlman: Oh, yeah. Will that be more That would be ridiculous. Right. So and that’s and that’s your point. But I want to I want to I want to bring up the statistic from the book because I think that was so cool. So people do you remember it? Do you want to say it or.

Dean Pohlman: So people who walked comparing people who walked 4000 steps per day versus those who walk 8000 per day and people who walk 8000 steps per day had a 51% chance, 51% lower risk of death from anything, from any cause, whatever. And the people who walked.

Kelly Starrett: Two miles, you had to walk 4000 more steps to reduce your overall mortality by 50%.

Dean Pohlman: That’s nuts. And then the even and if you can walk two more miles, then you reduce your risk of death from all causes by 65%. So if you can walk six miles per day, you are reducing your risk of death by two thirds, which is…

Kelly Starrett: who Cares? Who cares about all that? That seems great, right? Like, I’ll take that. I mean, that’s a great drug, right? And it seems like it’s pretty, pretty simple. If you look at the blue zones, people are obsessed with the blue zones. Right. What what olive oil are they using in the blue zones? Like, you know.

Dean Pohlman: Why does the blue zone.

Kelly Starrett: The blue zones, those areas on the earth where everyone lives to be very old. So you see so cases in like southern Japan.

Dean Pohlman: The Italian Coast.

Kelly Starrett: That’s right. Those blue zones, like what is it about these people? Well, it turns out one of the things that happens there is that their lives are organized around having to move to do things like walk to the store. Oh, you know, I have to go. So they don’t think let’s get our steps in and close the circle on the Apple Watch what they think is, Oh, I’m just getting up and doing my life.

Kelly Starrett: And there’s a lot of movement built in. And that’s really the way to think about some of these behaviors. If I say to you, you have a newborn era, you’re running your own business, you’re you’re trying to also train. I’m like, I want you not to spend time with your family or do the thing that brings you pleasure, like bench pressing or whatever it is, cross fitting. Instead, I want you to walk. You’re like, I’m out, I’m out. And I would be out too. And I’m out. But if we can start to think about what are the reasons, one, why should I walk more? Not about some thing that may or may not happen to me in the future. But we have found that most people in the United States are walking about 3000 or 4000 steps.

Kelly Starrett: They’re just not moving very much. And so really this becomes a surrogate for who’s moving and who’s not moving. And how do we think about getting more movement, total movement in the day? So it doesn’t have to be walking. It just has to be active steps. And most of us actually have a phone that actually tracks our steps in the background all the time.

Kelly Starrett: Your kids have a you know, and you’ll be shocked because if you’re saying that, yeah, it’s walking fine. You look at your kids and they’re walking 3000 steps, you should be like, Oh my God, my little environmental, my environment isn’t facilitating the best growth, the human. And let me give you some crazy reasons you should walk. Who cares about your death? You may or may not die. Number one, we found that working with Delta Force, it’s kind of an armed group. You may have heard of it. They’re not. They have access to all of the technology in the world, all of it, every dollar, every military, every DARPA thing they can do. You know, how they solve sleep. They make their guys walk more.

Kelly Starrett: They put a tracker on them and they have to go 15,000 steps a day. So if you’re having a hard time sleeping, the first intervention that the most elite military group does on the planet is have their soldiers walk more. If you’re falling asleep, having a hard time falling asleep, if you’re having a hard time getting to sleep or feeling sleepy, increase your steps. And what you’ll find is that that total movement in the day actually creates something called sleep stress. And that sleep pressure is another word for it. Sleep pressure actually drives a lot of your need to fall asleep. And remember, if you have little kids, your goal is to crush them during the day. Like you go on vacation, them on the beach, you climb on, the banks, run around, Hey, I’m going to time you on the playground. So. That’s right. And because if I can crush you, you’ll actually fall asleep. You know, you’re had a dog who doesn’t get a walk. I mean, that dog is your body. So what we found is, hey, that’s a really great reason to try to get increase my step count. How about this? It turns out if you do your peloton class three times a week and I just walk 10,000 steps a week, tendencies, ups a day, I will double your calorie burn.

Kelly Starrett: I will crush you on calories. Do you know how many extra cookies and servings of ice cream that is for me. If I just move my body. I’m not talking about training. I’m not talking about watching my nutrition. All nutrition is the same. I burn an exponential amount of more calories a year, even just not sitting at the desk like I burn an additional 170,000 calories just by making different choices at my desk, which means I have a lot more flexibility with my total nutrients. It means I’m like, Oh, I’m having a beer tonight. You know why? Because I crushed you. Because I was just moving. Okay, so maybe that’s not your gym. How about this? You train really hard and we need to decongest your tissues and decongestion means we need to move all of the byproducts of exercise through the lymphatic system. All the broken down proteins, all the cell walls, all the collagen and the normal waste processes is the body that don’t go out to the circulatory system, Go out through the lymphatic system. The lymphatic system is bootstrapped into your muscles. And guess what? It’s not an accident that they call the calf the second heart. And then that calf pumps and moves so much fluid into your system. And guess what? That is called walking. And it’s an easy way to do that. If you want to ride a bike, it’s I’m sure it’s fine, too.

Kelly Starrett: But the idea is we need to get more moving in and we need to do it in ways that facilitate things like getting sunshine on your body. Huberman says We need to get sunlight early in the morning. While going outside is a really nice side effect of trying to get some steps in. How about walking with your partner? That’s easy to do like that. And I often take a little we have a little we walk to the corner and back it’s 1750 steps. It takes us about 17 minutes and we do it after dinner and we see our neighbors. We’re like, Hey, what’s up, neighbor? You’re that dick who won’t share our cost of our fence. But guess what? We live in a civil society, and I have to see that guy and be like, What’s up? Hey, how’s your dog doing? So suddenly in social isolation? It gets me in my neighborhood, it gets me sun gazing, it gets me more movement. It’s Cardioprotective health protective and it’s free and it makes it so that I can burn more calories.

Kelly Starrett: And more importantly, it helps me fall asleep. And also my whatever I care about tends to get better in terms of athleticism. So there’s a whole bunch of reasons. And that’s the problem, is that we tend to see some of these really essential behaviors as isolated and siloed. But no aspect of the system of the body works by itself.

Dean Pohlman: So if I’m sold on the benefits of walking, what have you found in your experience to be the most compliant strategies to walking more? Which strategies, Which plans have worked the best when it comes to people saying, I’m going to walk more by doing this? Which ones have been the most successful?

Kelly Starrett: You know, the the thing to do be thinking to yourself is how do I limit my sedentary time? That’s the way to do it. So some examples. One of our friends who his name is Jim Loesser, and he was the CEO of an ad agency, and he had a policy in his company called Walk Call Click. So the first thing he wanted everyone to do is if they had a question for a teammate or a coworker was to get up and go find that person.

Kelly Starrett: And the second thing he said was, Well, then I want you to call. So you have at least have to talk to a person. And the third choice was email or text. So you can see that in that thing. He’s thinking about the culture. But built into that is, hey, there’s movement. Remember that study that showed why smokers were healthier than the nonsmokers? Because and the further you put the smoking section away from the office, the healthier they got really like because they had to get up and walk around. So it turns out then when you start thinking about, well, where are the places where I can just be moving, not sedentary, we know that we’re trying to limit total sedentary time.

Kelly Starrett: So if it helps for you to think, Well, the way my life works is that I have to be in these meetings or how many agency, maybe I’m just going to go for a ten minute walk after every meal. And that’s an easy way to suddenly get a whole bunch of of steps in without sort of thinking about those are more formal opportunities. If you can take a call walking, do it. If you can take a meeting with someone walking, do it. If you can hook up with your, you know, a family member in the evening, just go walk around the neighborhood with your dog. Do it.

Kelly Starrett: One of our friends, John Berardi, who is a behavior change expert and also the founder of Precision Nutrition, had a really interesting we’ll put a tool where he would have people who are chronically. And the first thing I would say to them is, okay, I need you to drink a glass of water today. And they’d be like, That’s it. And he’s like, Yep, Did you drink one glass of water? Yep. And they’re like, Good. Now this week you drink two glass of water. And he made these small behaviors so accessible and so built in and routinized that they were easy successes. And then he says, I see that what I want to do is go get a rescue dog. So they go out and get a rescue. They’re like, okay, I’ve got this dog and I’m having to walk it three times a day. And you’re like, weird, you know? So what you can see in that behavior, that example is if you can shape your environment to and constrain your behavior so you don’t have to make another choice.

Kelly Starrett: The choice I want you to make is do I watch Mandalorian or I watch The Last of US? Do I watch? Do I, you know, do I eat steak and cook that or am I cooking something else? Like I want you to use your choice power for stuff that actually matters to you. And I don’t want you to have to summon heroic motivation to flush your body. Have you ever flown on an airplane and got cankles? That’s what I’m talking about. Those cankles, those swollen ankles are your lack of flexing your calf and flexing your musculature in your legs. And those tissues start those fluids start to build up in your tissues. So how can you think about, well, maybe I’m on a long commute and that gives me a chance before I go in. I just need to go walk around for a second or I’m just going to stay on this bus or I have an opportunity where I need to do deep focus. And I really know that only way I can do that is to sit down at a desk, do it if otherwise stand up and let’s see if I can, you know, maybe work at a standing station a little more.

Kelly Starrett: And suddenly what you find is that that total movement in the day aggregates into massive amounts of change. And remember, it’s not 10,000 steps. That whole 10,000 step idea, 10,000 is an auspicious Japanese number. So when you shout bonsai, that means like, will you live 10,000 years? You’ll last 10,000 years. So calling it a 10,000 step meter was a clever marketing tool for us to like see 10,000 auspicious. You see there’s that you get all the benefits by hitting that 8000, which is a super reasonable number. And what’s a number that most people can fit in with? Just a little bit of of jiggery into their life?

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I mean, I already I was already thinking about it this morning. Normally my my wife and I have just gotten so used to we could walk to the grocery store. I mean, not really most situations, but there is a small grocery store that’s relatively close to us and we could walk there or we could save 20 minutes and, you know, drive.

Dean Pohlman: So I think that’s that’s the decision for us when it comes down to, you know, if we if we walk or drive, it’s like, yeah, we could walk. But, you know, when we’re on the toddler schedule, it’s like, you know, it’s really difficult to do that. But today I was very proud of myself because I walked my dogs to get their dog bath instead of instead of driving them.

Kelly Starrett: And, and some that’s one of the things that we I love about that is if we give people objective measurements. And so the vital signs we have here all include an objective. It is dispassionate. If I say to you, my blood pressure’s 120 over 80, you’re like, Really? That’s just kind of average. It’s not great. Kelly You could probably do better, but it’s not terrible. And maybe you have high blood pressure, but you know, your family high blood pressure, but now you’re keeping it. So if it starts to drift above 120 over 80, let’s keep an eye on and talk about all the things we can do to try to bring it back down. We know that 120 over 80 isn’t the goal, but now everyone has this clear, vital sign metric of understanding.

Kelly Starrett: Hey, this is something I probably should focus on or I’m crushing this. This isn’t a problem for me and when we do that around these two kind of categories in the book, one is sort of in behavioral vital signs. Walking is a behavior vital sign. And then we have some range of motion movement, vital signs, because what we found in the pandemic, because I’m like, wow, people are checking the respiration rate and their oxygen saturation and their temperature, I’m like, Why can’t squat be or hip extension be a vital sign? Like, why? Why can’t we just expand the concept of the vital sign?

Dean Pohlman: That was that was something that really stuck out to me is we check blood pressure, we check our heart rate, but like we don’t, the biggest question should be what? What’s your sleep like? Do you sleep for 8 hours a night? Like what’s your, you know, body composition instead of BMI? You know, there are there are there are so much I think there are so much more global and easy to track measurements that we can do on a regular basis. Where I read that and I was like, duh, why isn’t that a thing? We should we should be asking that question.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah. And it I mean, how long have we been known each other and how long have you and I’ve been working on these sets of problems and it took me a second until July and I second to figure out that giving people objective standards meant that we could get through some of the bullshit, you know? So, for example, if you come to see me as a physical therapist, originally was my training. You have low back pain. Your first two pieces of homework are to engage in a breathing practice. I need you to have better range of motion and better movement and better signaling your brain that everything’s safe and we see altered breathing and low back pain go together. So I’m going to restore your movement. I’m going to give you something to work on to make you move better through breathing, right?

Kelly Starrett: Not the I’m trying to be in a Zen state, right? None of that stuff, just mechanical breathing. And the second thing going to give you is that’s going to make you walk. And it May 1030 second walks around your island because that’s how bad your back pain is. But you’re going to get all ten and you’re going to walk around the kitchen island holding on, freaking out the whole time. But that’s the game. And then tomorrow it’s going to be 11 and then it’ll be back to nine. And they were doing 15. And then eventually we got 10,000 steps or 12, 12,000 steps. So movement is the goal.

Kelly Starrett: The next thing I’m going to ask you to do is show me your sleep, because I can’t tell what’s happening. And I think so many people feel so frustrated by their bodies, bodies, not you know, I’ve always done this. I always got away with this. You know, we had a family member who was like, you know, Kel, it’s not working for me anymore. I’m always lean, I’m always tiny. I put on muscle fast and I just zip it up for like a week or so, and I’ll be back to my little tiny body and I was like, Well, how old are you? She’s like 51. And I was like, Isn’t that weird that you just skated by your genetics? And all of a sudden it didn’t it didn’t work anymore and she didn’t walk. She wasn’t getting enough sleep and she wasn’t eating enough. She didn’t eat enough food. So I was like, Good, here’s what I want you to do. I need you to hit these protein macros point 7 to 1 gram of protein per pound, body weight, and way more fruits and vegetables. And she was like, It’s so much food. And I was like, God, what’s happening to your body composition and your sleep? She’s like, Well, everything changed I to back up again. So these things which are good for the goose, are good for the gander.

Kelly Starrett: But when we start to say to people, if you want to change a meaningful thing, that’s 8 hours of sleep, I want you to recognize that seven is our survival level. That’s seven. And less means you’re surviving. And there’s plenty of times where if you get seven, you’re like, Dude, I crushed that. I got seven. That’s amazing. Now just notice it’s going to be harder to get ahead of pain, harder to lose weight, harder to grow muscle, harder to learn. What if I’m a growing athlete playing a sport in school? Seems like 8 hours is pretty important for those kids We know now because of all the tracking that most adults lose up to an hour of sleep a night from just waking up, maybe go pee. Maybe you just heard a noise, maybe you have a newborn and you’re just awake. You know, we had a friend who had a baby and he was just getting crushed is like, I’m getting 7 hours of sleep of our standard.

Kelly Starrett: We’re like, Just show us, prove it to us. And he was like, I got four and a half hours of sleep last night. I was like, Well, so you know what’s nice then is that we can say, What can I control here? Was that a choice or was I just bingeing TV? Did I have caffeine at 5:00 at night? Did I drink? Because that’s I am self-soothing. Did I not move very much? Well, those are a lot of things that are going to disrupt my sleep and those are things I want you to have conscious agency about so that you can make a big boy choice. So we just went out to a cool concert and no one to be standing around this place happens to make the coolest, tastiest old fashioned in the whole world.

Kelly Starrett: I don’t drink very much. I have a couple of drinks a month, but this old fashioned is so good. And I was like, Yep, is probably going to mess up my sleep and I’m going to drink this old fashioned for the next three because this bourbon and these things taste so good. But it’s a conscious decision. And I also I know how I’m going to able to get my sleep, but it’s not going to be high quality sleep that’s now a compromise. I’m willing to make for this night. But now when I start to look at those trends, we can really start to understand what’s happening.

Dean Pohlman: Mm hmm. Yeah, I think it’s a I think that’s a really good point. So I wanted I wanted to ask you, I have a couple of other questions here that I want to ask you, and I’ll have to skate by. One thing I do want to commend, though, or I don’t know if too many for me means nothing to you, but I do want to say that I love that you encourage people to be curious about their bodies. It’s something that I it’s something that I try to encourage people to do in the workouts. You know, when I when I say like, hey, at the end of the workout, like, let me know what you thought of the workout. And I love it when people say, Hey, I noticed that, like, my right side is tighter than my left side. Yes, I noticed that. Hey, like my whatever. I notice that my hip is engaging way more than it used to. And I’m like, That’s awesome because I think people need to be curious about their bodies in order to in order to develop interest so that they have long term sustainability so that they actually enjoy what they’re doing. So I saw that in your book, and I just wanted to say I really like that point.

Kelly Starrett: And you know, as I said before, this friend Steffi Cohen was just taking to task because she used to be super big and jacked when she was a powerlifter and now she’s a boxer and she’s changing her body composition, people don’t miss all that muscle. She’s like, Are you kidding? I have a goal. And my goal doesn’t facilitate isn’t as well facilitated when I’m carrying an extra, you know, ten kilos of muscle.

Kelly Starrett: And so I think what’s really fun about this is that this re empowering people means that you can start to experiment with diet, with how much movement, with what it looks like for you, and you can really start to feel like you have some control or that, hey, you know, we’re the way that we talk about it. And you brought up a really nice aspect of empowering people to be curious. So we’re trying to expand your choices. I think the problem is when we’re like fitness. Oh, it means I am going to eat this broccoli and this brown rice. You know, you didn’t need a carb for a bad carb for a year. You only fruits and vegetables and meat for a year. You know what I mean? And that sounds super restrictive until you’re like, have you seen how many vegetables there are? Have so many fruits? There are. Have you seen how many different protein sources that are like you suddenly are like, holy crap, there’s so much to eat. Instead of saying, I want you to eat this broccoli, this brown rice in the sashimi chicken breast, which is just like dog food, you suddenly are like, I want you to explore the world.

Kelly Starrett: And if you, you know, beans are on the table and a white potato is on the table. And if we start to give people these benchmarks around minimums, 800 grams of fruits and vegetables, enough protein to support your tissue health and gut and brain and muscles and activity, suddenly I’m like, however you want to solve that is up to you. And you’re like, I found out that going keto was super awesome. I ate hamburger, Berrys and I’m like, Cool, that’s super cool. Oh, you’re vegan over here. Cool. Turns out most of our vegan or vegetarian athletes don’t have to work a little bit harder on protein. And when they end up having these hot spots and we end up improving their proteins however they want to do that, tofu pea protein doesn’t matter. We’re agnostic. We see that they end up doing better. So now we can start to say, Hey, let’s not take things away from you. Let’s expand how you move and think about your body in the world, and I’ll see you when you’re 100.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, and that’s very much changing, changing the mindset of looking at, like you said, you’re looking at the possibilities instead of thinking of, yes, you’re not. This isn’t part of your optimal choices anymore. But look at this whole world of choices over here that you have.

Kelly Starrett: Well, here’s an example. How’s something didn’t work for me? So turns out to new really good research about intermittent fasting. There’s no magic of intermittent fasting. It turns out it’s just sneaky calorie control predominantly. And we found out. Yeah, that one of the problems with with intermittent fasting was that people lost a lot of lean muscle tissue along with their body.

Kelly Starrett: They lost body fat, but they also lost muscle. And as we know, it is hard to put muscle on. And as we’re rolling into our old age, I want you to hold as much muscle as you can. Right. That’s really the goal we’re seeing with all this ozempic that’s out there right now. You know, people are taking this ozempic. One of the problems with this ozempic is that, yes, you’re losing body fat, but you’re losing a lot of muscle, too. So here I someone’s like, you should try this different fasting. I’m like, cool, that sounds cool. Like be more jacked. Don’t eat like I’m sometimes not hungry in the morning. Well, the problem was for me is that I didn’t eat enough. If I missed breakfast or a feeding in the morning, it jammed me for the rest of the day to try to get enough protein in to support my frame and enough carbohydrate and fruits and vegetables. And so I was under eating chronically. That meant at 4:00, my oftentimes I was under calories for my big workout session and I says my session sucked.

Kelly Starrett: And so to solve that problem, I was like, I need to eat a little protein shake or something late at night. So at 10:00 I’d be like meal. And guess what happens when you go to bed at 10:00 with a full stomach? I don’t sleep very great. You may, but not me at age 50. So here’s what happens with this design of this eating.

Kelly Starrett: I’m not saying it’s not right for you or I’m saying as, Wow, it really jacked me up because I couldn’t get enough calories and I ate too late and it messed up my sleep. So it was a lot easier for me to say, Well, I better prioritize some fruits and vegetables and some protein first thing in the morning. I don’t have to you pancakes. I don’t do that. But if I don’t hit those goals, man, I’m going to be jammed. And that’s again, objective measurements. I think that really helps people say, I was below, but tomorrow I’m going to play again.

Dean Pohlman: Mm hmm. And just to chime in about the eating, enough thing. Just if you’ve seen me, I’m about 180 lb. At my heaviest. I was about 186 lb. I have to eat all the time in order to maintain the size that I do. If I want to have as much muscle as I do when I start doing, you know, if I go down to like two meals a day. I was very lean for a long time. I was about 165 lb. You could you could barely pinch my triceps. I had like 5% body fat at one point. And if you look at my dad, whose genetics I very much share, he’s about 145 lb. He doesn’t lift weights. He does. He does my yoga, but he doesn’t lift weights. So I just I’m saying that because I want you to understand how much effort it might require you to keep on muscle and add muscle. It’s it’s yes, working out, but it is also eating food and eating a lot of food. And that is sometimes it can feel like a part time job at times.

Kelly Starrett: So if you have ever tried to gain weight, it is to 2x more gnarly than losing weight. I’m sorry. It is so it’s a weird it’s a weird thing. You’re so lucky. You’re like, have you ever seen Thor or Brian Hall have to support a 400 lb body? Yeah. So when. When, when, when our friends took. Who does the nutrition for the the mountain. Right Hafthor they took him from flew over 400 lb of 450 lb for the world’s strongest man. Just you know, he’s six, nine, whatever, you know, but he’s a monster. They had to add in three dozen eggs on top of everything else he ate during the day. So just whatever you’re eating today, folks at three dozen eggs, let me know That’s.

Dean Pohlman: No, I’m going to politely pass on that. All right. I have a few questions I want to ask you. And these are going to these are my more more rapid fire questions.

Kelly Starrett: So first, my calves are natty. I have natty calves. This these aren’t implants. I just want to get that on the way.

Dean Pohlman: All right. For all those wondering about Kelly’s calves.

Kelly Starrett: Hashtag natty calves.

Dean Pohlman: It’s to no. All right. Now, I’ve already asked you a lot of the questions because we did this interview before, so I’ve come up with some new questions specifically for you. Oh, I also want to mention that you should definitely go buy this book. It’s now available, Bill, to move by Kelly and Juliet Starrett. And I’ve also met Juliet. She’s amazing. I love her. She’s also way more she’s way easier to reach than Kelly. So if you ever need anything, talk to talk to Juliet. Don’t reach out to Kelly, because he’s he’s he’s a he’s a dreamer. He’s a visionary, but he doesn’t respond to his text messages very fair enough.

Dean Pohlman: All right, so questions. What are your fave favorite mobility tools? Five favorite mobility tools.

Kelly Starrett: One is the ground. The ground. So the very first thing you can do is start using your environment without getting fancy. So if you don’t have anything elevated, pigeon is my go to. If I’m working around, I throw my leg up on the desk and throw my leg up on the counter. Like that is the number one thing that keeps my back from being achy. If I keep my rotation and flexion going in my hips, that crushes. Second, as I sit on the floor a lot and the floor sitting gives me 90, 90, it gives me deep flexion, it gives me long sitting. It just turns out it’s an easy way for me to get a whole bunch of sneaky end range positions. Long, long, static duration positions.

Dean Pohlman: And you Hold it for a long time?

Kelly Starrett: Like, yeah, I was there for a long time.

Dean Pohlman: For four or 5 minutes.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah, for sure. No, no, no. I’ll work with like my leg up on the desk for like 10 minutes. I’m like, oh, I should probably switch legs. And honestly, I feel so much better. So I’m trying to, you know, figure out ways to use my environment to get and again, I’m pretty good at this, but it’s been this is what I know works for my body really well.

Kelly Starrett: The more elevated pigeon I do, the better off I am. Mm hmm. I think everyone on the planet should have some kind of roller, but a smaller roller than you think. Not a huge diameter roller. Not those white roller. So we have a smaller roller because it’s to get into some soft tissues. We have found that if people engage in 10 minutes of soft tissue care, soft massage, soft tissue mobilization, whatever language you want, stimulation before, while they’re watching TV, before they go to bed, they sleep better and we’re more likely to do it.

Kelly Starrett: So that small roller I love sit on your coffee table, Move the crap out of your butt, get your hamstrings, get your abductors. I guarantee you your life will change. Your downward dog will improve. I mean, really, your hip flexion will improve your pelvic floor, improve. You’ll have better boners, like what’s important to you. Blood flow and movement around your pelvis changes everything.

Kelly Starrett: You’re probably going need a ball of some kind, right? Just because I want you to be able to, you know, have some like a harder thumb or elbow into your tissues. And sometimes a roller just doesn’t solve all the problems. You can lay on the roller even, you know, it’d be nice to have like a volleyball like thing, but you can lay on the roller and mobilize your mobilize your pelvis.

Kelly Starrett: Right? It’s really good stuff. And the last one is probably if you had a band, what you can begin to do is begin to bias your tissues and access positions in a very different way, doing some of the banded distraction kind of things that we talked about and popularized and invented in Supple Leppard. You know, over a decade ago, you’ll find that you can you can get a door hook very easily and suddenly or go into your garage and hook it to your squat rack and you can really get a lot done. You just find and find easier isometric positions and shapes that are hard to get, especially if you’re a bigger person.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, and I’m glad you mentioned that, door hook, because a lot of people get hung up on not being able to hook it to something.

Kelly Starrett: Yes.

Dean Pohlman: Door hooks are thing look up.

Kelly Starrett: But if you don’t have a door hook, grab a tennis shoe, put the rubber band, put the shoe in the rubber band, throw the tennis through the band in the door and the tennis shoes on the other side of the door. Then shut the door. Okay. You don’t need anything like it. Put a towel on that and that band will pull through. So it really you can solve this problem. Door hook is elegant, but understand that you can solve that. But just adding those, having the access to those things, a floor table, a ball, small ball roller, you could probably solve 90% of your problems.

Dean Pohlman: All right. Good to know. And that led to another question I do want to ask you, how long should you hold the poses for? Because I notice I read the book and you do mention that I think you’re mentioning that most yoga and Pilates is not sufficient because I’m assuming because they don’t hold the poses for long enough. Or maybe in those or.

Kelly Starrett: Let me let me clarify for everyone here. I am such a proponent of yoga and Pilates, but it’s a movement practice. And I think sometimes we think yoga will solve all our issues, right? Like it just magically restores arranged motion. Like, not really. So ideally you’re working with a person but think about mobilizations as targeted exercises to restore a position that you can then use when you do yoga. At least yoga at least touches of these things that your body is supposed to do. Oh, look, you side bend it, you you flex sideways with your spine, you forward flex, you went to extension, you rotated. I mean, just if I look at like Peloton, I’m like, let’s look at the language of your spine and Peloton. Oh, your back is rounded for the whole time.

Kelly Starrett: And then I come into yoga and I’m like, I had to do all of these things with my back. Yeah, you’re going to use your spine, but that doesn’t mean necessarily you can have access to those positions. So mobilizations can become what we call position transfer exercises. So if we’re doing isometrics and anything, I’m like, hold at least for 30 seconds. Give yourself a chance to take some breaths there to own that position, to feel what’s going on, to sink into it. And it’s not an accident. If you jump into most yoga platforms, there are fundamental shapes. You come back to time and time again based what exercise routine you’re doing, but you know, you’re getting a lot of exposure. But one bout of downward dog for 10 seconds, Come on. Right. You know, that’s like getting touching your toes for 10 seconds.

Dean Pohlman: Nothing. So if you are so if your goal is okay, I definitely need to increase my range of motion. I definitely need to I need to increase flexibility here. What’s your like if you could create your ideal program, How long are you holding those positions for?

Kelly Starrett: How about instead of saying how long because I don’t know your body or my body, right? We have different sort of structures and environments and histories. We say, let’s do something until we make change and then let’s do something until we stop making change. So I can hold this and I’m starting to really get in and then all of a sudden it stops working great.

Kelly Starrett: You’ve maybe have exceeded it right, so work it until you make change and then stop it when you start making change. So if the door starts to open, you’re like, Well, I’m starting to. Okay, okay, hips opening and now I can rotate, but keep doing that until you’re like, okay, it’s and you’ll see that that’s usually somewhere between three and 5 minutes on some of these things. Some of us immediately have access to other things and you’re like, Good, I’ve made change and I start making change. Those are really two solid rules and and those are actually clinical guidelines kind of for as physical therapist, I’m going to work on a tissue until I start to get the change I want. I’m not going to give up on. I’m going to keep working that position. And then when I stop getting gains, that’s maybe all I’m going to get today.

Dean Pohlman: Okay, cool. That’s a lot. I love that answer. So work until you start seeing changes and then stop when you start noticing it’s not working. Not going is.

Kelly Starrett: Another way of saying, you know, if you’re doing soft tissue work, for example, you know, if something feels really good, you’re like, Oh, that’s so good, keep doing that. And then eventually it’s going to feel like beige. It’s going to feel like Switzerland. It’s going to feel like vanilla, pleasant, pleasant pressure. Yeah. And then it stops feeling pleasant. It just feels like pressure. You’ve done, you’ve met, you’ve made all the change. Or check this out, you push on something, it hurts really bad keep working on it till doesn’t hurt. And then you’re like, okay, I made some change and I start making change so you can come out from either side. Those are subjective experiences, pain, pleasure, or objective measurement. Range of motion.

Dean Pohlman: Oscar Cool. Thank you. So I wouldn’t talk about age. You’re turning 50, You’re in your forties now. What is? You’re not 50 yet, but I would love to know what is the biggest change in your fitness that you’ve noticed from when you turn 40 now approaching the end of your forties? And how has that affected how you train or how exercise or how you use your body in general?

Kelly Starrett: I think it can come down to I used to build my hand off and it would grow back in the night. That’s me. Wow. You know, like I was like a salamander. I’d be like I could bury myself in my 20s, and then I’d be like, Oh, fine, you know? And then what I started to realize is that I didn’t recover as fast.

Kelly Starrett: And now I’m like, recognizing that I cannot handle the volume of my younger friends. I cannot I can do it once, you know, and it’s confusing for me. I have this hygiene ethic drive to train. I love like you’re like, we’re doing it and we’re going to go for a run and I’m going lift weights. I’m like, Oh, we’re going to do a great.

Kelly Starrett: Then tomorrow I’m going to be like, Whoa, you know? And you’re like, Let’s do it again. And I’m like, I can’t do it again. And so I have to be dose my volume differently and I have to be more aware of it. I have this thing called my desire to train. And my desire to train is like a screaming bell that goes off every day when I start thinking about what am I going to do today? How am I going exercise? What do I want to work on? And when that bell is not ringing, I suddenly think to myself, Is it me? Maybe I should train? Am I lazy? No, I’m just not motivated. Today. But really the bell is gone. And so this desire to train siren in my brain is really, really potent. And it helps me to understand that readiness. And it really does correlate well with resting heart rate and heart rate variability and recovering. I also cannot skimp on my sleep and it cannot skimp on my nutrition. If I hit those things really well, then I can handle more volume.

Kelly Starrett: So ultimately what we’re trying to help people do is that the world changed in so much that I think everyone’s training pretty hard. A lot of people are. The differences is how will you adapt to the training? So if I’m working with a local university team, a top three team in the country at a sport, they’re all training just as hard as the other teams that are training. So this is Cal and they’re training as hard as USC or UCLA or Stanford. No one’s out training anyone anymore that that ship has sailed. But who can adapt most effectively to the stressors? That is not equal. I have people who eat better, people who recover better, people who engage in in better recovery strategies, people who are less stressed. Those people can handle higher volumes and adapt to the stresses more effectively. That means that they start to walk away from another team doing the same amount of work over the season.

Kelly Starrett: That’s the same thing with you. If you can start to control those things, you can adapt. So I’m in Japan, my friends. We’re doing these huge efforts huge, long days in the mountains, climbing, skiing. It’s huge. We go out, I don’t drink. I mean, we’re and we’re partying. We’re good friends. In Japan. People are drinking two or three beers. I have a nonalcoholic beer. Why? Because I won’t be able to adapt as well as they will the next day if I drink that beer, it doesn’t mean I won’t have a beer. It just means that like, Oh my God, for me having this consciousness of I’m going to have this nonalcoholic beer because I have to sleep. Otherwise, at age 50, the oldest guy on the trip, I’ll be able to keep up.

Kelly Starrett: Does that make sense?

Dean Pohlman: Yes, it.

Kelly Starrett: Does. That is the thing I do way more…

Dean Pohlman: And then also when you when you were talking about that kind of the training bell in your head and it’s not there, do you take the day off? Do you consciously, you know, make do to training decisions day to day or do you stick with your plan?

Kelly Starrett: No, I don’t have to be on a team. So that will be a day off. But what is day off? Me? So it means I means I’m going to increase my steps. It means I’m going to do my soft tissue work. It means I’m going to dial in all these things. It doesn’t mean that I don’t. Do I sit on the couch, I keep the engine idling. I just don’t go smashing myself.

Dean Pohlman: Got it. Okay. Yeah, I love that.

Kelly Starrett: And do I need to exercise? So that mean may mean like, Oh I’m super trashed. I go out and spin for an hour, like talking zone to zone one where I just move or I go for a long walk. My dog, I don’t do nothing. I want people to understand that you don’t have to do nothing. You just don’t need to smash yourself because you’ve already had enough stimulus and you haven’t swallowed that stimulus.

Dean Pohlman: Okay, So you still want to move. You still want to do some foam rolling, you still want to do some stretching and from.

Kelly Starrett: The do some yoga, do some Man Flow [Yoga]. Well, not really. If you’re feeling trashed, do a man flow yoga piece and just be cool. And what you’ll see is you’re like, wow. I was able to actually manage the stress out adaptation because it kept moving and I controlled the other aspects of my physical practice, nutrition, sleep, etc., etc.. And then when I wake up in the morning, that desire to train is back. I’m like, Oh, it’s back.

Dean Pohlman: Do you on those days, do you eat more carbs or do you eat more protein or does it matter?

Kelly Starrett: I eat less carbs, eat the same amount of fruits and vegetables and protein. On those days, I don’t need as much carbohydrate. I’m not fueling what I’m doing. So rice will come out right, Potatoes will come out. Those things will tend to come out. You know, I might be like, I don’t need a cookie tonight, but on those days where I’m smashing myself and going huge in the paint, I’m like, Yeah, cookies on the table.

Dean Pohlman: Cookies on the table. That’s a shirt, cookies on the table. What do you do? So kind of related or unrelated, what do you do when you feel stressed or overwhelmed what’s your like, what’s your go to? Like, let’s say you’re you’re at home and you’re just feeling stressed, overwhelmed. Your kids are in the kitchen, Juliet’s in the kitchen. Everyone’s the kitchen. You’re feeling stressed, overwhelmed. What’s your what do you do?

Kelly Starrett: Well, I think feeling stressed is a normal thing. Mm hmm. How we handle that is I go deeper into my basic physical practice. I walk, I make sure I control my nutrition right. I’m taught when I say nutrition, I just talk about eating more fruits, vegetables, protein. That’s what I mean. I don’t like. It’s not crazy. I just I’m like, Oh, can I control this? And I control what I can control. We know that some soft tissue work can help with Downregulation We’re huge fans of like this breath practice, so I’ll really make sure that I’m keeping an eye on my breathing practice, which can be during my warm up on my bike. It doesn’t have to be a formal breathing practice. It can be when I’m walking.

Kelly Starrett: I have a simple thing I do When I walk, I take a ten second inhale, which usually stumps most people. Most people cannot inhale for 10 seconds. I take a ten second inhale. I then walk as long as I can on a breath hold until I feel like I’m going to pass out. And then I recover nose only until the top of the next minute. And I just keep repeating that cycle and I’m doing this really complex breath practice while I’m walking my dog. Like, that’s super right? Or I’m walking to work or do and suddenly I’ve got, you know, 3 to 5 rounds. If it’s a five minute walk, maybe I did 20 rounds of that like, Holy moly. So the more stressed I am, the more I protect the basics.

Kelly Starrett: The other thing that has been very useful for me is I have a sauna. I’m very lucky that I have a sauna. But getting hot breaks me every time. So what I think is when I’m feeling stressed, I don’t think we can. It doesn’t work for me to try to manage just from top down from the brain. You’re not stressed. It’s all good. Look at your love. That’s not how my brain works. What I do is I default into practice, into physical things, and those things manage my stress.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I think I heard a quote a few day. I was. Instead of use your mind to control your body is use your body to control your mind. Don’t like love it. Oh yeah.

Kelly Starrett: And I think I think I said that nervous thinking of the breath. The breath is king of the brain. And let’s expand that idea into your body can control your mind. I really feel like we went through this phase where it was all top down, top down, top down. It’s all your brain mindset. I’m like, Let’s go from the other side. Let’s meet in the middle there for sure.

Dean Pohlman: It works that way too.

Kelly Starrett: Trust the process, really. Like trust the basics.

Dean Pohlman: Parenting. How do you judge your performance as a parent?

Kelly Starrett: I don’t know. We’ll see. I mean, my kids are.

Dean Pohlman: The end result.

Kelly Starrett: 15 will let you know when they’re 25. For them, it’s the basics. You know, we sit down, we have a lot of we try to eat dinner together every you know, I’m happy to drive my kids to water polo. You know, I think as a parent, it is tricky to say, what are you you know, how well are my kids doing?

Kelly Starrett: And that’s an experiment that’s ongoing. And you’ll nail it sometimes and then you’ll follow up on your face. I mean, maybe it’s grades, maybe it’s service, maybe it’s how they, you know, all of those things are are valuable. Mainly is, you know, for Juliet and I like do we like to be around our kids like our kids. I think that’s you know, we feel like we have good taste and really excellent friends and like, do we? We’re not trying to be best friends with our kids. That’s some weird bullshit. I’m trying to just make sure I’m like, Well, these are people I really like and find interesting.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, Yeah. I think I heard that someone I used to work with said, you know, yes, kids like performing, you know, good grades, all that stuff. But how are your kids when they like, when they just hang out with other people? Are they nice to other people? Do they like do you want them to be around other people or.

Kelly Starrett: How do you interact? How do you interact at home? How do you solve problems at home? How do you talk to each other at home? Like we’re pretty stoic family. My wife and I are pretty stoked people and I think that picks up with our kids. You know, they’re they’re kind and stoked, you know, sometimes, you know, my 14 year old daughter, you know, is, you know, she gets emo and I really want to lift weights and boom, you know, I’m like, oh, you’re a 14 year old girl. We got into an altercation because she didn’t want to get out of the car the other night. They moved practice because she only saw boys. And I’m like, Caroline, you’re like all league goalie. You’re 5’10. You’re just a bad ass. Why don’t you go check, see if there are any women in the pool that are on your team? She’s like, Nope, it’s only boys. I’m not going to, you know? And I was like, What are you trapped in a 14 year old chick girl body? And she’s like, Yes, exactly She’s like my psycho emotional, you know, health is also I feel these pressures. And I was like, okay, that’s valid. She’s like, You do understand because you’re an old man.

Kelly Starrett: I was like, That’s also true. So, you know, it’s it’s okay. My kids are my kids are. You know what? I think you when they present you with a therapy bill in your twenties, that’s all to you. But really, are they doing the things that you do, yes or no? And are you modeling that? I think that’s really crucial.

Dean Pohlman: Hmm. My last parenting slash family question here is how do you consciously think about you time, family time, you and your kids time and you and Juliet time?

Kelly Starrett: Hmm. I think it’s a mistake if you even try to separate those out. Okay. So couple of things. I’m an only child of a single working mother, and now I live in a family full of women. I only have, like, girls, and my wife is a second child, and so I’m never alone. And you know, what I found is, you know, Juliet and I, the most important relationship in the house is Juliet and I and supporting Juliet and Juliet And having time together might be a quick walk to check in with each other. We usually have a feelings meeting once a week where we really formally talk about what’s going on. We all sit down. I think creating a structure where you don’t have to carve these things out, but they happen organically is the way of thinking about it.

Kelly Starrett: You have thumbs, you can be a little bit more intentional. So if you just say, Hey, we’re all having dinner at six, no matter what, everyone’s going to come to the dinner table at six or whatever it is, because life is crazy. Then the structure of dinner gives us a chance to interact and create family time. Juliet and I love to train together. My wife is the greatest training partner I’ve ever had. She is a savage. We I have a rule that I won’t pick up a new sport that my wife. But Juliet, fortunately loves to paddle, is a great stand the paddler loves mountain bike, loves to lift weights. I mean, like my my wife is the greatest training partner I’ve had.

Kelly Starrett: And I feel like those who have real different and divergent interests, I think that’s tricky because you’re you know, you’re creating this alter life. Like if I picked up golf that didn’t involve Juliet, I would have. I don’t enough time in my life for that right now. And doesn’t mean that she won’t go hang out with girls. One of my best friends lives right across the street. It’s the greatest thing that ever happened. Like when he moves in the neighborhood, we become best friends. He and I. He is a great mountain biker. He was a sick college soccer player. Jamieson, shout out. And he also has a sauna. And we love to do these marathon sauna sessions. So every like once a week we get together and and his sauna is 230 to 240 degrees.

Kelly Starrett: And we get cold, we get hot, we talk about our lives. And so the key is that the structure is there that we don’t have to facilitate the thing. We just it just happens. And I think that’s really because I don’t the end of the day, like I have a family and these businesses and I’m not trying to create this, you know, this moment of satori. I’m just going to go sauna because I need to do that.

Dean Pohlman: Hmm. Okay. That’s a great answer. All right. Well, that’s all the questions that I have. And I’m sure I could ask you more questions and we could try.

Kelly Starrett: Well, everyone, I’m sorry that you’ve been listening, Dean and I are friends, and we have so much in common, and You’re saying that, like, you know, our mutual sort of like brotherhood here. So you’ve been party to the conversations that we would have if we were just alone.

Dean Pohlman: It’s true. If we were this calm, if it was just me and you, I would probably just stay on for about 45 more minutes and ask you a few more things about life and and fitness and and protein sources and and saunas. But yeah, we don’t have time for that. So, Kelly, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for answering all the questions guys.

Dean Pohlman: I, I think it’s not even a decision of whether or not to go to go get this book built to move. Kelly How many books have you sold?

Kelly Starrett: Oh, this is our sixth release. How many.

Dean Pohlman: Copies? If you add them all up, do you have, like.

Kelly Starrett: Over a million?

Dean Pohlman: Over million.

Kelly Starrett: So, yeah.

Dean Pohlman: Sold over a million books. This one’s going to be just as good, if not better, than the other ones.

Kelly Starrett: And here, here’s why I think this this book will be good for you, because it will again you to create a language of diagnostics for yourself. Just simple, vital science. But you have you are the person. If you’re listening to us, I guarantee you you’re the person that everyone asks at work, like, what is it you do? How do you look that way?

Kelly Starrett: Why are you that you know, I mean, this book is the way that you can hand as a node is, super node. You can like be like this is for your uncle or this is for your auntie. This is someone who does not like to exercise. This is that guy at work. You’re like, Oh, I heard you on your Oh, you’re really worried about your blood panel or your blood pressure. So I start here, like, that’s literally what we’re trying to do.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, well, I loved it. I think there’s a lot of really great information in there. You can take the whole thing. You can just take a few nuggets out of it. But whatever your fitness level, whatever your fitness goals, this is just going to make things easier. So go pick up a copy. And Kelly, I hope to have you again on here someday.

Kelly Starrett: I want to be the first three-peat guest. It’s great to see you, my friend.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Thanks again for being. And I hope I hope we can get together in person sometime soon. Wouldn’t that be something? Let’s do it. Cool. All right, guys, thanks for listening to the Better Man podcast to go pick up a copy of Built to Move by Kelly and Juliet Starrett, and I’ll see you guys in the next episode.

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