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

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Kelly Starrett. Dr. Kelly Starrett is a doctor of physical therapy and one of the world's experts in movement. He teaches people how to move better for the sake of sport, recreational fitness, and everyday living.

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

Dr. Kelly Starrett has authored several best-selling books, some of which you may have heard of, such as "The Supple Leopard." He was actually one of the first people to become synonymous with the use of a lacrosse ball or foam roller. But really, even though a lot of people have talked about those, what he was really doing there was to emphasize the importance of understanding the relationship between the skeleton, the muscles, the nervous system, and the fascia. Today, we also talk about fascia, which is an incredibly interesting and important topic. In addition to consulting and coaching for various college-level and professional athletes and teams, Dr. Kelly Starrett and his wife, Juliet Starrett, co-own The Ready State. We provide a link to The Ready State in the show note captions. They have a plethora of useful information and actionable protocols.

I should mention that years ago, I took one of the courses from The Ready State. It's a really interesting course that we touch on some of the protocols from today. It's all about the pelvic floor. So whether you're male or female and regardless of age, understanding your pelvic floor and how to take care of it in the context of exercise, posture, etc., is vitally important for all sorts of bodily functions. So today, we also touch on that. By the end of today's episode, I'm certain that you will be armed with a number of new, highly actionable protocols. I should emphasize that these protocols take very little time and have an outsized positive effect on your movement, posture, and overall health.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Maui Nui Venison. Maui Nui Venison is 100% wild-harvested venison from the island of Maui, and it is the most nutrient-dense and delicious red meat available. I've spoken before on this podcast about the fact that most of us should be consuming about one gram of quality protein per pound of body weight every day. That protein provides critical building blocks for things like muscle repair and synthesis, but it also promotes overall health. Given the importance of muscle tissue as an organ, eating enough quality protein each day is also a terrific way to stave off hunger.

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And now for my discussion with Dr. Kelly Starrett. Dr. Kelly Starrett, welcome! Thank you, my friend. I've been wanting to get you on here for a long time for many reasons, not the least of which is that you've just pioneered so many areas of health and fitness that I don't even know where to start, frankly. But let's jump in with the big M—movement. You're an expert in dissecting complex movement, figuring out how people can move better, and also figuring out how people who are doing what they think are simple movements are actually making their life either more complex or more painful than it needs to be.

You're also known for helping people with so-called mobility, which, of course, falls under the umbrella of movement. I can't see somebody do a foam roll or anything with a lacrosse ball where they're loosening up or talking about fascia without also thinking about you. So that should frame today's conversation at least partially. Well, to kick things off, when you look at how most people sit, walk, and do their "exercise"—resistance training and/or cardiovascular training—what are some of the most common problems that you see? Is it imbalance, like leaning to one side? Is it that their bodies are trained into asymmetry? Is there any way to kind of mass diagnose everybody all at once in this first question?

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

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

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

So what is it that we need to put into our movement diet? Then we can start to separate out: should that be exercise, or should that be movement? Now, the real filter that we should be beginning these real and earnest conversations about is, what is it in the environment, given that I'm a busy working person, and maybe I have some agency in the morning and maybe I have some agency in the afternoon? But let's take exercise out of it—the one-hour discreet working on Zone 2 cardio, working on my evidence-based practice. What should I be doing the rest of the time?

For example, one of the things that we're huge fans of in the evening is sitting on the ground for 20 to 30 minutes in what—cross-legged, squatting, long sit, side sit—anytime you need to fidget, fidget. What you'll see is you start to accumulate exposure, which I think in my worldview is the first order of magnitude in problem-solving: how do we have the human be exposed to the thing we're trying to change or improve or restore normative ranges? So that would be, in the evening, just getting down on the floor.

Yeah, that behavior alone cultures that toilet on the ground, sleep on the ground. We start to see fall risk in our elderly population attenuate to zero—approximate zero. Lower hip OA, lower low back OA. It may just be that we're using and touching some shapes, and our bodies are saying, "Hey, let's just keep that around. Let's normalize what the hip should be able to do." In terms of your connective tissue, think about the idea here: we're loading you passively, actively, whatever. You're saying to your brain, "Muscle..." You know, this is a quote from one of my PT instructors, and this is really important. If people take this away, they should listen to this: muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs. At no age do you stop adapting. At no age do you stop healing. Those things slow down; it's a little bit harder to have the same adaptation we did when we weren't in full-fledged puberty. But you can always adapt.

In the first order of business, if you spend 20 or 30 minutes sitting on the ground, you're going to start to see that my hamstrings start to feel better, my hips start to feel a little better because I'm just spending time in these ranges, and my body is going to start to adapt as I increase my movement language. Would you extend what you just said to, like, if somebody has a hardwood floor and maybe a little low-pile rug or something like that, and they're going to, I don't know, watch a podcast or a movie or show in the evening, they stretch out and, you know, like on their belly, like sort of up dog or cobra or whatever it's called?

So basically, any kind of movement where you're on the ground—any kind of squatting, stretching—maybe they start to stretch a bit here and there. Oh, so now we're into the real magic—the behavior. Where are we going to stack these behaviors? So if you have to get up and down off the ground, plus one, right? I got to get up and down off the ground every day. So if you're an older person who maybe hasn't gotten off the ground—I'm older; I'm just talking about over 50—you may not have gotten up and down off the ground for a hundred years. You just don't do it anymore, right?

We want to hear why I think MMA is so amazing. You have to get up and down off the ground a lot, right? If you do go to jiu-jitsu, right? How about yoga? How about Pilates? You're like, "Wow, there's a lot of time organizing on the ground." So a lot of people, I’d really say, "Hey, how do we help the person organizing gravity first and foremost?" Right? Then we have someone like Philip Beach, who is this incredible—he wrote this book on functional embryology, which I highly recommend, called "Movement, Muscles, and Meridians." I think "Muscles and Meridians," but his hypothesis is that one of the ways that the body tunes itself is by being on the ground again, restoring native ranges, re-approximating joints, right? Kneeling, walking.

If you just took a step back and said, "What's it look like for the last 10,000 years?" You know, when have we—10,000 years ago, my understanding is that I'm a little fatter, your femur is a little longer, but we're pretty much the same people. Maybe I don't digest milk yet; maybe that's the understanding. But ultimately, what behaviors have changed? We're off the ground. This is an easy, don't-need-any-equipment way to drop this in. I can answer my emails, watch TV. That seems like how we're going to improve and be able to start to untangle this very complex core. Not when people have a lot going on.

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

So what I'm getting here is that everybody, regardless of age, should get down on the ground once a day and get up off the ground at some point. You can use whatever you want to help you get up and down off the ground. So those of you listening, you're like, "I can't do that." You know, there's a test we write about in the book that if you just do crisscross applesauce standing, you should be able to lower yourself to the ground and stand back up without using your hands.

Okay, so cross the feet, just for those that are just listening—cross the feet, yep—and then just slowly lower yourself into a seat. Don't collapse; just lower yourself to the ground. Then, without putting your hands down or knee down, can you stand back up? Should one be able to do this with either foot over the other? It seems like I should use my left leg and right leg equally, right? I shouldn't have a good side and a bad side. But what's interesting is the data, I think, is that it's a nice predictor of all-cause mortality and morbidity. That's fine, but what it really hints at is your changes in how your body interacts with the environment. Because you've adapted, suddenly this skill that you've done 100,000 times, 200,000 times as a kid in crisscross applesauce, you suddenly are confronted as an adult with a skill you can no longer perform.

It doesn't require massive hip range of motion; it doesn't require full range of motion in your ankles. It's actually a really fair test, but if you're missing some of these end ranges, you're going to struggle. It's nice now that I have this, like, "What's the session cost?" I've become a—I love cycling; mountain biking is my jam. But if I ride my bike a ton, my hips get super tight. But if I have some assessments, just like vital signs—blood pressure 120 over 80—that's not good blood pressure, but it's a nice decent reference. Now I create some movement minimums that help me understand how my body is interacting with stress, environment, nutrition, exercise, etc.

For some people, maybe me, if I were to sit cross-legged on the ground for a bit and then stand up, oh yeah, if it hasn't been in a while, like kind of like just kind of ache. But I consider myself pretty mobile. Once I warm up, I can run for an hour and a half, jog for an hour and a half. Once I get warmed up in the gym, I can move at what, at least for me, is satisfying amounts of weight. So I wouldn't say that I'm out of shape; I wouldn't say I'm in spectacular shape. Is it normal for us after a certain age to kind of feel like we creak or ache as we move in or out of a new movement? I mean, does that fit with being still a healthy person, or should we just not have any of those kinds of—like, "That was rough. That was super rough"?

Yeah, maybe. You know, sitting for 30 minutes and standing up and feeling like you have to kind of open yourself up with a can opener, so to speak. Well, a couple of things there. One is you said "new movement." So one of the ways we define the best athlete is who's the person who can transfer their current skill set and pick up the new skill the fastest. So what I'll say is if you want to test how fit you are, how good your program is, go and jump into someone else's program. Let me know how that goes. Can you perform the skills? Are you skilled?

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

This is so good. It opens up the next thing, right? The founder of CrossFit, Greg Glassman, one of my earliest influences, coaches, says we fail at the margins of our experience. So what you just saw was, "Hey, here is this metabolic pathway range work that I have not inoculated myself to." I think we're at an interesting place where fitness has become hobby. Fitness has become sort of my personal pastime, and I can go to the gym, and I can look jacked. You're jacked and tan; you're very handsome, 49-year-old. But what we start to see is the things that make us look aesthetically pleasing or functional enough isn't the same thing as preparing for sport or transferring to a new skill.

In fact, I would say if I had a spectrum of activities, I'd put fitness over here—like I go to a camp, I just do a million reps, I breathe hard, it's super fun, I'm in Zumba, I like mirroring, and I have positive regard, and I see my friends—on the other side, we have very much sports-specific training. The only goal is to support the sport. If you're an elite soccer player, we have goals in the offseason, but in the in-season, it's to support your body to win. But one step back from that, I’d call sports preparation training, which is where we start to see some really pattern interference between what the internet says I should do to have huge quads and the best way to create an elite sprinter or an elite footballer.

Right in that sports preparation training, I can think of it as GPP plus looking at positions and how things transfer. Frans Bosch is a great example of sports preparation training—a Dutch thinker; his books are great. You'll see that really what we're trying to do in sports preparation is say, "Hey, what is this complex system in front of us? What's the minimal amount of input so that we can still go and project ourselves into the world through sport and performance?" On the other side, suddenly we do come up confronted with, "Hey, I'm doing this thing, and I jump in with my friend, and I get brutalized," which is actually a problem that we have with people who are really good fit athletes. I throw them into a group fitness class, and they can do so much work that they wreck themselves for weeks, and that's probably what happened.

You're so strong, and you know how to just be uncomfortable, and you just did this freakish amount of work without giving yourself a chance to adapt, and that happens all the time. So going back to the getting down on the ground once a day—oh yeah, and then getting up—I’d like to just—I want to get to fitness and sports training as well, but is there another practice or set of practices related to where we do our professional work?

Yeah, so I can stand. I have a standing desk; I have a drafting table. I'll sit, stand; I'll stand for a while, I'll sit, stand for a while, sit. I have a stool; I like to be at a stool. That's where my back is not supported. So I try and vary it as much as I can. Thanks to you, I got—thanks to your recommendation, that is—I bought one of those little kickstands that goes underneath the desk from Rogue. I don't have any financial relationship to Rogue; I sent them—you're making tens of dollars on this fidget stand. I sent them—I sent the money like everyone else would. One could probably build one too. This is a little fidget stand. I love that thing because it reminds me to swing my foot while I'm there, even while I'm standing.

So that's what I've done to try and keep some mobility during the day. I want to double-click on that because that's really amazing because what you've done is said, "Hey, I can't control this aspect of my environment. I have to do some deep work. That means I might need to perch, or I might have to sit at a conference table." What we can start to say is, "Well, what other choices do I have?" Now, if we work with a typical person and you say you have some agency before you leave work, and then your agency doesn't return until you get home, right? What are you going to do during the day to keep the body moving, right, so that it's easier to escape to your afternoon class? I think that's the thing.

What you've just described is what my wife would call a movement-rich environment. How do I pepper the environment with inputs so that I'm not just in a tiny movement language? I love that. I want to go back to the sitting on the ground. Should it be painful? Should it be sore? One aspect of your physiology that will not change, doesn't have to change, is your range of motion as you get older. We should be able to maintain our range of motion.

So what's interesting is that if we suddenly confront tasks that ask us to be in certain positions that we're not comfortable with, we're going to be sore. You bet you're going to have to squeeze your butt. Something you said earlier, like, "Once I'm warmed up." I love that phrase, right? Once I've had my 27 supplements and my coffee and my activation, I've gotten into my sauna, I can do anything. I feel great. The real question is, should I have to do all that stuff for high performance? Absolutely. But should I have to do all of this prep to have native range of motion, to have baseline range of motion? Probably not.

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Well, as long as we're there, I'm just going to tell you what's worked best for me in terms of warming up, and I'd love to know your thoughts. Years ago, I think it was Charles Poliquin's post or something like that, where it was suggested to do relatively low-repetition warm-ups. Love it! As opposed to going in and doing, you know, 15 reps, then 10, then eight, or whatever it is. I've found over the years what's allowed me to get strongest and stay strongest for me is to—sure, I'll go in and do the first set of a movement, a resistance training movement—maybe eight repetitions just to get some blood flowing and remind my brain, practice, you know, what the range of motion is, right? Then I'll do maybe just, you know, five, four, two repetitions on subsequent three sets—so five, four, and then two repetition sets with heavier loads.

It's just to prepare my nervous system for heavier loads, and then when I start my actual "work sets," I can get a lot more real work done. For me, this was like spitting in the face of everything I had read, everything I had seen—that you need to do a higher repetition warm-up. It has allowed me to progress more or less continuously over the decades that I've been training. I'm not a natural athlete; I'm just not. I've trained for a long, long time, but I would never fall under what you would call a natural athlete. I don't—I have a low recovery quotient, all that stuff. For me, it was like a shocker, but it makes total sense: prepare the nervous system for the work you're about to do and don't follow some preconceived idea that you have to do high-repetition warm-up or even moderate-repetition warm-up. Lo and behold, you get much stronger, and if you want to grow muscle, you can grow more muscle.

Why haven't we heard more about this? Why don't people in fitness talk more? I know you do, and please do talk about the nervous system and the fact that it's not just all about warming up and getting blood flow; it's really about preparing the brain and spinal cord and all the stuff in there.

Let's say a couple of variables there. What's your training age? Right? If I'm going to take a beginner and you and the same thing, we can make big jumps. You and I have been— we've deadlifted together a decade ago. We can just go know our bodies; the patterns are well ingrained; our tissues have exposure here, right? There's some things we can do. So I love that you're starting to see that what's the minimal amount of warm-up to do the task? On some days, you may be sore, may be stiff, and it takes a little more time to go get right underneath it.

One of the things I think we have this opportunity to do is put play back into warm-ups. So one of the things is that I suspect—and please correct me if I'm wrong—you don't find a lot of joy in doing these, like, rote, the world's greatest stretch. Why do the active? Like, it's not that fun. So let me talk about my experience working with a team at Berkeley. I have to shout out to the Women's Water Polo team at Berkeley, who are my total family. These women are incredible. But I came into the sport and looked around, and I saw really ineffective warm-ups that weren't a good usage of time, that didn't prepare us to get into a fight 20 or 30 minutes later.

So if you went through your warm-up and said, "I'm going to be in a fight. Am I prepared for that or not?" That's a nice rubric to say, "I'm nervous system arousal. I have a little sweat on; I've practiced, right? You know, I've touched some positions and shapes." But you know what I see is that in the typical training session, there's a lot of work to get done. So now I think training has become very, very dense. You know, here's this piece, here's this piece. Now I do the successor work; I got to hit these cards. The warm-up for me has been one of the last places where I can get you to explore new movements. Something you saw on the internet, play around.

If you came to my gym, you know, or we came to my house, now I'd be like, "Let's go through the medicine ball for five minutes." There's no wrong way, but I want you to start to explore speed. I want you to explore catching an object and going fast. What we haven't done—and I suspect—I wouldn't say that your warm-up is the best way. I'd say it's one way to get to the thing that we want faster, and potentially you stop doing what didn't work and what didn't serve you, which I really want people to understand is that if you're not blind going through some program, I want you to say, "Does this serve me?"

Because my experience working now 20 years with the best teams and athletes and organizations on the planet is athletes do what works, and they stop doing what doesn't work. Isn't that interesting? Right? So what I love is that you started to get under heavy loads relatively quickly in movements you had real competency and exposure with. Yes, because what we want to do is come back to say, "What's the least amount of work I can do to have the biggest adaptation?" Three hours in the gym doesn't fit into your life, and it doesn't fit into the typical person's life. Theoretically, you're going to have to go do a sport, so you're going to have to recover from this sport and this training session.

Right? You were like, "Hey, I can't even handle this high volume." You know, it's a ding on me too; I can't handle the same high volume as my friends can. So wasting your time, in quotation marks, with lots of high-volume sets of an empty barbell might have been useful at some point, and maybe it doesn't serve you as well now. Or because you have to put so many plates on that bar, that's just—that's a warm-up by itself, right? That's not—you walked a mile to load those plates. No, that's not an issue for me, but that's a perfect opportunity for me to mention something that I've noticed, which prompts a question, which is I noticed that I have some asymmetry. My right shoulder naturally sits a little lower than my left, and whenever I get a little back tweak, it's always on the same side, etc., etc.

I know this varies for everybody, and I noticed that I was always picking up the weights and racking them because I re-rack my weights like a grown-up, racking them on the same side. So I've made it a point now to switch up, you know, which side I do them. Great! I notice I'm significantly weaker on one side of my body. I mean, not to the point where, you know, I have to use two different sets of dumbbells if I'm doing curls or something, but just noticing these natural asymmetries starting to show up because I'm a right-hander, or who knows? Or I skateboarded, so, you know, I've spent a lot of my early life with my left foot forward and my right foot pushing.

As a consequence, there are a lot of asymmetries. So what I've tried to do is correct those asymmetries in between movements, but also to stagger my stance during curls and then switch it each time or maybe even overemphasize the weaker side. I have no professional training in any of this; I've just found that it's made for better posture, more evenly distributed strength. I must say all of that is based on teachings that I read in your books and through conversations with you about, "Hey, we have these natural imbalances, and there are little things that we can do that take moments that can correct those imbalances."

So if you would, could you sort of expand on the number and type of imbalances that you most commonly see and some ways for people to remedy them? Excuse me. Let's, if we just took the word "imbalance" and put it to the side for a second because it's sort of a non-specific term. Like, are we testing your hamstring to your quad? What's the ideal ratio here? If you're a professional pitcher, I hope your right arm looks different than your left arm, right? But what we can say is, number one, imbalances don't necessarily cause pain. Let's be clear about that.

We should be using our time in the gym as training to find deficiencies and blind spots in our patterns, in our skill, in our, you know, and our brains feeling comfortable with a certain movement. What you just hit was that it's really easy to get a lot of variability just doing the things I want to do anyway. So now I'm in a tandem stance. I skate left foot forward, right? But, you know, suddenly that's my dominant stance. If you're going to ask me to do anything of consequence, I'm going to adopt that stance. But suddenly I get to have some exposure here.

So what's the point of the gym? What's the point of training? Just to work on some cardiorespiratory output? You know, does the science say, "Is it to move into play?" If the brain's a problem-solving machine, let's give it some problems to solve. So you suddenly have a new problem to solve. I would even say that weakness isn't even the right idea. Just like, "Here is a pattern that I'm not as effective at, as efficient at."

So when we go into the gym sort of with this great curiosity, then it's a really rich place and really, frankly, the only safe place because there isn't contact in sport, and we're not fighting and dancing and moving. We can really do this controlled formal movement where we can really see inputs and outputs. I explained to my mother-in-law a long time ago what was happening when we were developing our model to understand movement, and I explained it, and she was like, "Oh, you mean it makes the invisible visible?" That's right!

This is a place to understand how your range of motion is changing, how your skills are changing, right, over the course of a season or the course of, you know, something going on in your life—a season in your life. Suddenly you're like, "Wow, my left hip is a little tight," or "My left shoulder's—my internal rotation is going away." Hard to see when you're swimming; really easy to see when we dumbbell snatch, right? What we're trying to do then is take the gym not only to have it be a stimulus for adaptation but have it be a really great place to uncover changes in my movement, changes in the expression of that movement.

So really what you see, again, if I just do this one thing over and over again, that's patterning; that's repetition; that's practice, right? What you've done is just said, "Hey, let me change my brain. Let me open the door handle with my left side." Coming into the gym with that curiosity means that we can have seven bottom lines—working on your fascia, we're working on these energy systems, we're working on these movement skills—but simultaneously we can have fun. We can work on understanding our range of motion.

So for me, I think it's easier to say, "Let's frame mobility as—here's my definition—do you have access to normative range of motion?" The range of motion every physician, every physical therapist, every chiro agrees on. Shoulder: it's 180 degrees of flexion. So for those listening, this is lifting your arm above your head. You can bring your hand basically, you know, above the center of your head. What you can see right now is Andrew has his elbow bent, his hip head tilted to the side, is internally rotated. He's solving the problem, which is what his brain is saying—compensation.

If you want to use the word compensation, I want to put that on you. But what I'd say is that's an incomplete position. It doesn't mean you have pain; it doesn't mean you're not the world champion, but it means we may have some latent capacity we could chase. The next question for me then is, what is it that's missing potentially in your training that we're not having this exposure? We're not doing enough close-grip hanging; we're not doing seesaw press, right, where the arm is straight up. We're always gripping on a barbell, right? I'm not handling enough dumbbells or kettlebells overhead.

Then we can say, "Well, do I need some position transfer exercises, mobility work to restore that so we can use it again?" More importantly, how does that turn up for you in a way that impacts your sport or your job? That's what's really interesting. Does that make sense?

Yeah, so what I'm hearing is that when we go into the gym or wherever we do our resistance training work, that we should think about it as a place to, yes, perform, to exceed our previous, you know, reps and sets. Because that's part of fun and easy to measure. Hard to see: are you getting better at soccer? I don't know, but I put another K on my bench today. Like, that's fun. Lex Fridman, who of course everybody knows from The Lex Fridman Podcast, likes to make fun of Americans because he's Russian, but he's actually American now. For being meatheads, because we like to spend so much time in gyms working out as opposed to doing sports.

I assure him that I've also done and do sports now, but he likes to make that point, and I think it's a fair one in that, well, he's a Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy. So, in any event, the gym is also a place for diagnosis—to diagnose where we don't have as much range of motion as we could. You know, that's very helpful, I think, for people to hear because most people are time-limited. They don't have—if they're getting their, you know, two or three resistance training workouts per week, plus two or three cardiovascular training workouts, and they're listening to Peter, so trying to hang from a bar for, you know, 90 seconds or more, and they're, you know, doing some farmer carries and they're doing their Zone 2 and they're throwing on a weight vest.

I mean, you know, at some point, you can start to understand why people are like, "Whoa, this is starting to become overwhelming." What you're talking about is going and doing your typical workout but paying attention to where some, for lack of a better word, I'll call them asymmetries or not full range of motion being expressed, where that might be happening.

I love—I keep coming back to this, but this thing about getting down on the ground for 30 minutes each night while watching TV or while maybe even while eating dinner, while talking to your family or partner, I think it's fantastic. It also gives me an excuse to push the sofas off to the side of the room because I have this weird neuroticism about furniture in the middle of the room. So I'm imagining getting mats down in the living room, and suddenly we're not programming another thing.

I think one of the things that has happened—and it's a good thing; it's a feature of the system—strength conditioning the last 20 years has become very sophisticated. So Juliet and I, my wife and CEO, opened our gym in 2005. This was the CrossFit gym—the 21st CrossFit in the world early. But we couldn't buy a kettlebell in San Francisco. We had to drive to Santa Cruz. That says a lot about San Francisco. I can say that because I'm from the Bay Area. But you—there was one place in Santa Cruz that sold them, played against sports that imported these Russian kettlebells. Thank you, Pav.

We had to make this trek down to buy them. So the fitness, I think we—I bought my first pair of Olympic lifting shoes out of the back of someone's car, like a drug deal. Like Olympic lifting shoes? Yeah, like you just couldn't buy them. Old shoes? No, like actually an Olympic lifting shoe with like a heel. But like you can buy those at like three different stores in Malibu right now. Like you go right over there; it's—we have normal. You can buy kettlebells at Target.

So the world has become much more sophisticated. Sometimes, like overhead squat is a good example—a fantastic diagnostic tool. It tells us a lot. So bar held overhead, squat down—super simple. All you have to do is have normal range of motion in your joints and tissues. Well, it helps. Juliet likes to say, "I was bendy before I was big." But you know, the idea here, though, is let's go ahead and also put skill back into this. But most people weren't overhead squatting, you know, at all. It wasn't part of their language. Now everyone knows what an overhead squat is, right? Dan John, CrossFit, all the Olympic lifters have been doing this forever.

But what we are seeing is that the natural evolution of fitness and strength and conditioning is that we've become—we've gotten really decorative in our room. So we create this room that's just every inch has a knickknack, has an assistance. This is my tib raises; this is my neck thing. It's a very decorative experience. Instead of asking what was essential in terms of energy systems and positions that I can train so that I could go use those credits, you know, for lack of a better word, it's fitness has become very recursive.

I have this Zone 2 so I can do more Zone 2 so I can do more Zone 2, or I have pull-ups because they beget more pull-ups. Instead of, "Well, how did that make you swim?" What's the minimum amount of time we can spend in the gym so that you can go express that? Lex is right—in a sport or an activity. Look, there are times in your life where the gym is the only thing you got. You know, Juliet and I, when we had two kids and a baby or two kids in our businesses, we did the 10-10-10 at 10, which is like 10 air squats, 10 kettlebell swings, 10 pull-ups at 10 p.m. for 10 minutes. I was like, "Elite! My fitness is elite!" You do that every day? Well, I just did it when I could do it, right? Because that's all I could fit in.

So, you know, I think what's happened is we have now sold people this idea that fitness happens in a one-hour block, and if it's not an hour, you know, then it's not worth doing. If you kept a bar loaded in your garage, you could walk out there and do sets in between making dinner. You kept a kettlebell in your kitchen; you could do Pavel's four swings on the minute for 20 minutes and at least have some exposure loading.

So a long way around the barn of saying I want to protect your gym time because it's really sacred, amazing time where you can have fun, explore ranges, get strong, get jacked, feel great about yourself, interact with your friends. What I don't want to do is encroach anymore on that magic time because we have a lot to get done in the gym physiologically. If we're going to compete against these other teams, we're going to beat Stanford, we're going to need to really maximize that time in the gym. So that means we need to push out some of these other behaviors so we're not stacking them in, and they're eroding the time we could be squatting or benching or cleaning or running or sprinting or cutting or playing.

You mentioned warming up with play, which I think is a wonderful concept, and presumably brings about more dynamic movement. 100%. Another reason I like it is that I loathe warming up, aside from the types of warm-ups that I just described. I hate it, and I'm beginning to realize that the way I've been training, even though it's been, I would say, useful and successful for where I've been, I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do heading into the new year. This is not like a New Year's episode; this is a, you know, evergreen because it's you. But we have a new year coming. A lot of people are going to naturally mark the time during and after the holidays as a transition point.

If one wanted to start to not necessarily completely restructure their fitness but wanted to start incorporating a few things—so we've got sitting down in the evening for 30 minutes, we've got incorporating play into the warm-up. What would that look like? Are we taking a tennis ball and bouncing it off the ground? Are we setting some rule in playing a game? Sure! What if I'm alone? Am I playing a little handball-type game against the wall? Absolutely! See something on the internet? Want to learn a new skill? This is the time to put it in.

I'm going to talk about my brilliant friend David W. He has something called rope flow that he created, and it's just a piece of climbing rope. He will talk about all the things that will do for me. I get a thousand PNF patterns; I tie my upper body into my lower, my upper body into my lower body. I get—you explain PNF. Sorry, acronym—sorry, everyone. That's a model of facilitating movement developed at Kaiser Vallejo. It is by Knott and Kabat, I think. Maybe I'm getting confused using those. Anyway, the bottom line is this: how do we help the body restore movement by using its own positional awareness?

Got it. So he's got these ropes, and suddenly, like, I use this with all my teams. Suddenly, I'm spinning ropes; I'm getting thousands of evolutions of the wrist turning, the elbow turning, the shoulder turning. I'm generating speed in weird positions that would be vulnerable and not as effective at high load, high stakes. I get to twist; I can tie my eyes into it; I can develop my stance. In five minutes of messing around, you're like, "Huh, I feel good." We've added some speed to that, right? Because a lot of the warm-ups I see people do, I'm like, "Hey, there was no speed." You know what sport is? Speed! And you haven't added any velocity to your training.

So where are we going to do that? I love this. I'm excited to—David Wack does a lot of amazing things. His rope is a foundational piece of mine. If you work with me and you have shoulder pain and neck pain, you're going to get my shoulder spin-up or David W's rope flow every day. That's part of our homework. What are we going to do to give you exposure and restore what you're supposed to do with your body?

So walk into the gym, use the bathroom, hydrate, whatever it is you need to do, and then five to ten minutes of some play-type dynamic activity. Throw a medicine ball around, jump on a mini trampoline, pick up a barbell, do a complex, do some breath-hold work. This is a perfect place to lay on all the breath-hold work. I think they call it dry face breath-holding, right? This dynamic apnea work where you're basically holding your breath.

So, for example, with our teams, we try to—I try to have this as a magic number—seven sort of hypoxic events where we do something on a breath hold until the athlete has a crisis and has to breathe. Part of that is I want to get the brain ready for these high CO2 levels, right? I want to challenge respiration, and it's so easy. Get on the bike. Here's something everyone can do for five minutes. I want you to take a 10-second inhale on the bike, hold your breath as long as you can. When the bomb goes off in your face, recover nose only. Start at the next one at the next minute, and what you're going to see is, "Wow, that was really uncomfortable."

Really psychologically preparing myself to get into a fight. That came from the French free divers. One of the coaches I was working with was like, "Here's something we used to do with our French free divers." I was like, "This is so good!" McKenzie Lar Hamilton, Wim Hof, the people who've been exposing us to dynamic apnea work is amazing. But that's another example of something I can do instead of mindlessly just being on. I got to get a sweat. Let's go ahead and just layer in play and destruction.

I love it! Do not lay on the ground and foam roll. Let me say that again: do not lay on the ground and foam roll. That is the worst way to get ready for a fight ever. I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function. I recently became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. While I've long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood, urine, and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health, my hormone status, my immune system regulation, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral status, and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality.

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Like, yes, I like to get into a cold plunge, but how Andrew Huberman became associated with cold plunging or buying a cold plunge is wild. I mean, sure, I own one, and you know, this sort of thing. I think they're great for shifting your state. But it's hardly the cornerstone of my life or my existence. But I love it; I use it. But I think foam rolling looked different enough from what people had not seen before, and it—you know, these things just—they have a stickiness to them. Who knows why?

What is the deal with foam rolling? Is there utility to foam rolling? Absolutely! Is there a wrong way to do it? No, but there's a way that's not a great use of your time, okay? So what we're all looking at is we have a finite amount of time, and what's my goal? To quickly touch my whole body? You know, what are we trying to do? So if I was using soft tissue mobilization and/or using a roller or a ball or something, what's my goal here? Well, I think in the research, it's very clear it can help with pain; it can restore range of motion—again, very clear.

I want to point out sort of one of my research friends, Brent Brookbush. The Brookbush Institute has incredible summaries of musculoskeletal care. Brent is a genius, and if you go on his site, there's a little hourglass, and you can search like trigger points, and you'll see all of the deep-dive research analysis of the meta-research. You'll be like, "Okay, this is really excellent." It is tricky because, you know, what doesn't work for my body or wasn't a good use of time now is useless, and it's easy to shout on the internet.

So what's our goal? If I was in pain and I was about to exercise, a quick two or three-minute intervention working on, let's call it desensitization of the tissues—let's be mechanism agnostic for a second and say that's a really low level to entry, safe, highly effective way for you to suddenly feel better. So we create a window of opportunity to move. That's really cool! I love that. No physical therapist in the room, no one went blind, you didn't dislocate, right?

So that could be a really excellent use of some soft tissue work, the same way a boxer would go or an MMA fighter or the Olympic lifters in China. They have people who are giving non-threatening input to the body to tell the brain it's safe or to rehydrate something or get some—not again, is it just stimulus? So that the brain says it's safe? Sure! Are we restoring how the tissues slide and glide? Sure! A lot of times, I think if you look at any of the mobility work, I'll just put it large—really comes down to just doing a couple of things. Most of them are just isometrics.

So we have a lot of isometrics, which everyone can agree is good stuff, and we do a lot of tempo work. That's really just moving slowly through range. It just may be that I'm using a different tool to have that isometric stimulus or that tempo moving slowly stimulus. So we like to say, "Hey, let's use mobilizations—mobilizing the tissues." Why are we doing it? What are we trying to do? Well, pain is a good reason. Again, multifactorial, highly subjective. Why do I have pain? Well, I got in a fight with my wife, and I didn't eat, and I twisted my knee back in Vietnam, and you know, who knows, right?

But what are the inputs that I have to self-soothe and desensitize? It turns out a ball and a roller is a really good one. So I can use those to help myself feel better. Did that solve the problem? Did that solve two weeks of shitty sleep? Did that solve my poor nutrition and lack of fiber? Did that solve the fact that I don't feel safe in this environment? No, but it got me a window of opportunity where I can go feel better in my body. Is anyone against that? No?

Okay, so what we can also say is, "Hey, this would be a great way to do what? Restore your range of motion." One tool in a system of tools to get you to do what? Have normative range again, right? For whatever reason, your lats are super stiff. Your—again, it's more complicated than that, but sometimes it's not more complicated than that. If I just get you getting some input into there, maybe I can restore that range of motion or create a window where you can go use it again. Lastly, I would say it's a wonderful tool to decrease DOMS—delayed onset muscle soreness.

So in the evening, you blew out your quads, do a little soft tissue work, and what you'll see is maybe that's blood flow, maybe it's non-threatening input, maybe it's just massage. Maybe it's just the parasympathetic input that massage has—touch, right? Just downregulates. Maybe those are the reasons I feel better, but the bottom line is, is that a good use of your time? Yes! Are all techniques on the roller the same? No! And I think that's where we've lost our minds is that if you just rolled up and down in your calf and didn't do anything, I'm like, "Yeah, well, you just—what are you doing?"

Right? What if I rolled side to side? Suddenly we can start to layer in some really complex thinking around this. How about this: you have a roller out, and I put my calf on there, and I start rolling side to side. Should that be uncomfortable? I'm guessing you're going to say no, but anytime I've used a roller—anytime I've used a roller, I'm like, "Man, that hurts! I don't—that sucks!"

Well, I mean, I don't mind it. It's not like the kind of—it's not like level eight pain or anything. It's just—it's sort of like it feels very localized. Even if the roll is a big fat Costello, the Bulldog-sized roller, it feels like someone's kind of kneading down in between my muscle fibers. Then I start to think maybe I just have low fiber density, and if I were Mark Bell or something, then this would feel comfortable. But, you know, I always feel like the roller is going down to the boat face of low fiber density.

So you know what I think we can do is let's establish some guidelines for people because this is one of the ways that we can feel better on our own without bourbon, without ibuprofen, without THC. We need to give people some tools that don't—like, that aren't just without having to buy a sauna. If you can afford one, great! But not every—I mean, this whole thing with sauna—I love saunas, but you know, until very recently in my life, like, I couldn't afford a sauna until very recently, you know, even as a 10-year professor at Stanford. I'll just say that, right?

You can actually be angry at your parents for not giving you a sauna. No, you know, when I was a kid, my dad and I used to go to the Y in the evening sometimes when I was little, and I'd shoot baskets, or he would lift weights—Nautilus machines back then—and then we’d sit in the sauna. Or there was a lot—you had a different set of trauma, traumatic experience of sitting in the sauna.

No, actually, I learned how men— I learned how men over 40 spoke in 1985. There you go! There you go! If everyone had a roller and a ball, there was a lot of dysfunction and discomfort we can manage. If you push on a tissue, we expect that tissue to be painless to compression or not uncomfortable to compression. Again, pain is a weird word; I don't want to set that up. But you shouldn't be uncomfortable to compression.

What's nice is that if I push on something, all I'm doing is just creating an isometric. It's just a vector isometric. Instead of pulling an isometric through the length of the tissue, I'm putting it in a different vector and angle. So that would just be one; I could start there. If it was uncomfortable, well, guess what? Now I can get my nervous system involved, so I can teach my brain that it's safe to create a contraction here.

So what do I do? Just flex, flex it, hold it for four seconds. This is very basic, I realize, but for many people, they're either already foam rolling and doing it incorrectly or they're not foam rolling. We want them to do it correctly. So if I understand correctly, it's quote-unquote okay to flex the muscle that you have in contact with the foam roller while you're rolling. If I find something that's uncomfortable or stiff or doesn't feel like my other side, I'm going to stop.

I found a place to work. I'm going to build, take a big inhale. So I take a four-second inhale. I want to teach myself that I need to be able to breathe in this position. One of my, you know, friends, Greg Cook, is like, "If you can't breathe in position, you don't own a position." You know, that sounds very Yangar too, but what we're going to do is we're going to say it's okay to breathe here, and I'm going to contract here, and then I'm going to slowly relax and soften.

That tempo—that's moving slowly. I can handle higher loads, and what'll end up happening is if I repeat that cycle two or three times, guess what? My brain desensitizes that, changes range of motion. My brain suddenly is like, "That's not a problem anymore." So we just move on, and in two or three cycles of that contraction, breath hold, long exhale—that starts to sound familiar, right? How do I come down? Long exhales. I'm not trying to spin up; I'm trying to say this is safe. I've done that with my breath; I've done that with contraction. I'm just getting input in—just touch to my body, especially on parts that maybe don't bark at me very often, right?

People are shocked to learn that sometimes when they have knee pain, how stiff their quads are. We can test it, load it, feel it, palpate it, and I'm like, "Those things are just stiff." When we unstiffen them, whatever technique you want to use, restore sliding surfaces, get neural input in there, we create range of motion. Suddenly, we change a motion dynamic, improve efficiency. The brain says, "Hey, that's no longer a threat," or we're experiencing that as a new pattern or position. That would be enough to reduce your pain.

But pain isn't the only reason we're mobilizing. We're mobilizing so that we can reduce session cost, so we can work out harder the next day and keep an eye on our minimums of our range of motion. Love this! And another just very basic question because I'll be honest, I haven't foam rolled much in my life, and it doesn't have to be a big foam roller. Everyone—sometimes those big white—those are pool noodles, right? That's what it was for, I think, like made in Colleen, Texas, is like a manufacturing byproduct, and someone's like, "We could put these in the pool."

Then some physical therapist is like, "Sweet! Like that thing's way too big and too hard and too square and too soft." Like there's a whole bunch of things. Sometimes you need an elbow; sometimes you need a forearm; sometimes you need a thumb. So you can have much smaller diameter. I'm a much bigger fan of smaller diameter rollers. I just think they fit your body better. Thank you for that! Also very helpful.

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

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

I have night sweats, dizziness, fever, vomiting, nausea, unaccounted for weight loss, weight gain, changes in my bladder, bowel function—problem! My cough, sneeze, or swallow—those are red flags. You're not sore; you're sick. Let me introduce you to the doctor again, right? If your pain or dysfunction is so bad you can't occupy a role in your family, can't occupy a role in society, can't occupy a role in the team, that's an emergency problem. That is a medical condition that needs medical attention.

So you come in today; you tweak your back. It may need—we need to activate EMS; we need to go to the hospital; we need to get—because it's so severe you can't do your job. Everything else I want to call non-injury. I want to be very specific with the language. We call it an incident. It actually comes out of this sort of language. There's a guy—here's the long way around the barn. I read this great book called "Deep Survival," which is Lawrence Gonzalez, which is about why people end up in survival situations. It's literally a lot about, like, we got away with it for a long time, and then I just didn't have a—you know, I ended up two miles out to sea. I've done it a million times, and this time, right? That's it.

But there was a footnote in there from a book called "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow, who's recently passed on. I emailed Charles because I was like, "This has blown my mind." He calls a lot of times we'll have trivial events in non-trivial systems. So he's taking systems thinking; he's looking at complex system organization. His idea is that an accident—a normal accident—is actually just an expression of the system. If you gave the system long enough to express itself, the inputs and outputs are so tightly coupled that it's difficult to see what causes what and how they influence each other. That's the body.

So your stiff shoulder isn't a problem until you fall on the ice, and then that stiff shoulder suddenly can't take over pressure and overhead, and you tear your rotator cuff off at high speed. You'd say, "Oh, Black Swan event! Super crazy!" But that's actually just a normal expression of that shoulder system if we gave it enough time to express itself. So he has sort of like incident and accident. So an incident is—I want us to start to think about incident-level problems: pain, loss of range of motion, numbness, tingle. We're becoming curious: why is the brain sending me the signal? It's pain; it's a request for change.

So when we ask our athletic populations, I just did this with a hundred kids, I'm like, "How many of you are pain-free?" 100 high school kids—two hands go up. Two high school kids! So what we're suddenly realizing is that pain is very much a part of the athletic condition, the human experience, certainly the athletic experience. You've been in pain a billion times and still gone out and done the thing. So what we want to do is say pain is not always a medical problem; it's a medical problem when the time we're saying, "How are you using fitness training as a scaffolding to understand nutrition, hydration, soft tissue work, desensitization, reperfusion of the tissues?"

So that's what we're trying to do in sport and training is empower people to say, "What's going on with my body, and why don't I feel the way I do, or why does something hurt, and why can't I remedy that?" And then when I run out of ideas, let me go get some help. So the rolling, we can think of as a way to, you know, move out soreness, prepare us for more work the next day or something like that. But is it fair to say that we can also use the roller as a diagnostic tool?

Sure! Like if I'm feeling like an unusual amount of, um—not unusual, but let's just say that I'm feeling like a wuss because when I lie down on that roller and I kind of, like, you know, slide back and forth, like I've seen the videos of you and other folks doing that, I'm like, "Man, that really hurts." Does that necessarily mean something's wrong?

Okay, no! It means that for whatever reason, those tissues become sensitized and that your brain is interpreting that stiffness as a threat, and it's reading it as pain, right? And some people, they don't have that; they just—their tissues feel like this, but they don't have pain when they do that. But that's not a normal tissue. You should be like layers of warm silk sliding over steel springs. What you're seeing is that what is that? What quality tissue should—absolutely! That layers silk over steel springs.

What we see is that we are loading and training at such high intensity and in such density now that our tissues get stiff. I'm just going to hang stiffness as for whatever reason, high fibrotic, high density of tissues—whatever reason, the tissues don't behave the way the joint system should, right? And that's a problem because my training shouldn't mitigate or attenuate or change my range of motion. It can, but now how am I keeping an eye on those changes? Or, as you said earlier, as I do a sport and I start to do a sport and specialize, I'm throwing, throwing, or I swim, or I kick on one side.

How can I start to identify as my body is changing and adapting to that sport so I can drag myself back to a sort of a greater readiness? And that's one of the reasons that that mobilization tool is such a powerful tool. Again, however you want to do it, I think it's useful for us. When we have—we—I came up with this thing called the D2R2 model because the other R2 was taken—R2-D2. So the first order of business is I want to desensitize. If something hurts, something hurts. Let's desensitize it. I can do that all different ways: scraping is powerful, desensitization, isometrics can be really useful, rolling, BFR can give me desensitization.

There's so many techniques to make my body restriction—yeah, blood flow restriction—so that no longer my brain is perceiving this as a threat because if you're in pain, you cannot generate the same amount of force or wattage or output, and your brain is going to start to truncate; it's going to start to lop off your movement solutions, right? It's just going to happen. So we want our—we want everyone to be saying, "Hey, we don't panic. We have pain; we just treat it like another diagnostic tool."

Then the second D, right? We desensitize, and then we ask, "Is this something that can be decongested?" So decongestion means that oftentimes tissues that are swollen become more easily sensitized. Tissues that are swollen and congested don't heal as fast. If you have a swollen ankle, those collagen fibers will not knit together as fast as a—right? If you have a joint that's swollen or a tissue that's swollen, your brain will shut down force production in and around that joint system. Is swelling an emergency? No. Is a swollen joint environment really healthy for the integrity and surface of the joint? No. We want to manage that.

But oftentimes when someone comes in and the tissue is congested, right? Just sometimes we say swelling, and we think ankle, right? Only capsular. But here we have—if you've ever flown on an airplane and had cankles, that's congested tissue. If we manage that congestion, if we move those lymphatics along, muscle contraction drives the lymphatic drainage. The lymph system is the sewage system of the body. Decongested tissues often express less pain, and what we find is that in broken bones or soft tissue injuries, if we can better evacuate that swelling, better evacuate that congestion—not only do we see you now healing at the rate of a human being, we're not rate-limiting the healing, but also we can help you manage that sensitivity.

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

So I have desensitization, decongestion, reperfusion—whatever tool you want to use for these is

enjoyed it for what it was, I would have had a much better experience. The same goes for training; if we can keep the joy in it, we can maintain a healthy relationship with our bodies and our fitness.

Ultimately, the goal is to find a balance that allows us to enjoy life while also being physically capable. Whether it's running, lifting, or just playing with our kids, the ability to move well and feel good in our bodies is what truly matters. So, let's focus on incorporating a variety of movements, maintaining functional strength, and most importantly, having fun along the way.

St. took a step back from it and said, "All right, I'm decent at this. I could get better, and I'm just going to focus on doing it for pleasure and make a living some other way." I'd probably be doing, you know, like frontside inverts and pools now and then, and unfortunately, I'm not. I'm lucky if I get a nice little frontside grind on coping. But whereas with fitness, resistance training, and running, I love resistance training. Running with a cup of coffee before my workout tastes ten times bigger as I'm going to work out. I love to use it as an opportunity to listen to music, listen to podcasts. There's so much that's in and around it that's still just pure pleasure. Even on the days when I'm at 95% of output or 100% of output or 80% of output, I'm like, "I'm just having so much fun." That's right, and I can't wait to get back in there.

So when we are looking at societal health, right, the first thing we argue instead of saying what's most important is, "What is it you want to do, and who are your friends who are going to do it with? Are you going to do it a lot?" Let's start there. Then we can start to weasel in everything, especially with social isolation and the lack of community. I mean, I feel like sport is the last place where people congregate, right? Sports sidelines—this is the sort of lingua franca of the whole world. I've taught on every continent except Antarctica. Everyone knows what a push-up is; everyone knows what a deadlift is. It's not science; sorry, it's not math. That's not the universal language; it is bench press. Everyone knows, and everyone can tell you how much you bench in any language. So there are some things there that are universal, and I think when we look at the human as a moving organism, then we can really start to not feel crazy about how our world is changing. But how do we fight back? By setting up more opportunities to move more.

For me, the whole lens ends up being like we basically try to parse through complex problems. So I have a world champion who's injured—a two-time world champion who isn't able to finish a tour. You know, the first question I ask them is, "Tell me about your sleep." "I'm a rough sleeper." "Oh, tell me more about that," right? Because I can't even tell your inputs and outputs unless we're getting into sleep. Then I say, "Well, tell me about your nutrition." "I eat clean." "Great, define that for me." I don't even know what that means. Clean turns out to be under-caloric, under-nutrition; they don't get enough macros, they don't get enough micros. I'm like, "Oh, we start to correct that." We start to collect sleep, and we really start to divide some of the behaviors. For me, as a 51-year-old, I'm obsessed with my tissues not failing. Like, tearing an Achilles is like every physical therapist's worst nightmare. I jump rope every day, and I have great range. I do so many isometrics; I'm just not going to tear my Achilles. Now, I might tear my calf, but I'm not going to tear my Achilles. So tissue health is part of that. Now I have to look at nutrition, I have to look at my blood work, and I have to look at my sleep, right? So that I can really define some of those things as that creates a readiness, tissue tolerance, health. Then I can be looking at the other things, and that's really as we start to get, again, the framework of sport or the framework of play creates this place where I can suddenly start to understand inputs and outputs and how to take care of this carcass so that I can do what I want with my body, which is our new definition of mobility: can I do what I want with my body, and can I be pain-free?

Am I correct in my very non-scientific assessment of Instagram accounts whereby when I see an 80 to 100-year-old person moving well, that person tends to be doing something sort of gymnastics-related? There's this incredible video of a tall Chinese guy doing essentially a skin-the-cat and then into a pull-up. Skin the cat—people can look it up—doesn't involve actual cats, hopefully. It should. An 85-year-old woman sprinting. So we're talking gymnastics-type movement, sprinting movement. Rarely, sometimes it'll be somebody in a gym lifting a heavy weight, but more often than that, it's gymnastics-type movement: pull-up, dip, parallel bar, balance beam, sprinting. Is that what got them there, or is that just the expression of what genetics do? Do they feel safe? Show me nutrition; show me their training age. But what's noticeable there is that we have disciplines that require greater range of motion and skill of body control and high power output, right?

So one of the things that we do in our programming for adults is I make you sprint once a week. Like, sprint! Because people have not sprinted. And I don't mean you can go out and run; I don't think you're capable of that. But I'm going to put you on a bike, I'm going to put you in control, and I'm going to see what your peak wattage is at sprinting. So ideally, I would love you to be able to do some hill sprints and repeats, but I don't think you have the tissue tolerance or the range of motion for that, and I know what the outcome is going to be. But I can put you on a bike and say, "Can we hit this peak wattage?" And what you just discovered there was, "Hey, I still need to maintain my ability to move quickly and have control through great ranges of motion." That is a recipe for, you know, why if you did yoga and did some sprints, you're going to be pretty badass. You know, that's a pretty good way. And why people who just do the elliptical and the little small dumbbells are fooling themselves—it's a lot of busy work. There's a lot of busy work out there that makes people feel like they're involved in a program. Again, the way we want to take our feelings out of it: how do you progress those pink dumbbells? 2,000 reps is 2,000 reps, right? Show me progression. Suddenly, I can't progress and regress those things.

The other thing I want to say is, like, is it making the thing better? What are we training for? And, you know, I think it feels decorative to have busy work. I do all this prehab corrective exercise. I'm like, "Hold up, why don't we do the thing we're doing and regress and progress that?" And ask if you have native range of motion, yes or no. But, you know, if we look at the typical person, especially someone listening to this podcast, they don't have two hours in the gym. So if your program is requiring two hours of me, I'm out. If it requires an hour of me, I might be out. You know, I'm so busy that sometimes I have lots of 30- and 40-minute pieces peppered throughout, plus a lot of other play, and that's good enough. So we really do need to look at how people are finding themselves in their environments to ask, "Is this appropriate for you, and what's essential?" And it turns out a lot of this, you know, 20-some playing around, videoing yourself in the gym is great when you have three or four hours in the gym.

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

I believe you. How about that? I believe you. And that's what's so great is you're like, "Hey, that doesn't work for me." You know, I find that my best thinking is done under enormous aerobic load. Like, I literally am like, "Oh," and I often will jump up and write something on the whiteboard and then go back and do my thing because, you know, it creates flow state. And if I'm distracted, I can't really hear what's going on. And there's a time when I want to distract myself, you know, and there's a time when I want to be amused. That's fine. You know, I've got a two-hour ride getting ready for a four-day backcountry ski trip here in February, but notice I've already been getting ready for it since the beginning of November. I am ready. It's taking me going to ramp up, and so much of my training now is going towards, "Can I successfully do these four hard days the way I want to?" So some things come down a little bit; strength dials down, I change my body composition. I'd like to be a little bit lighter. I'm playing, but there are some times where I have to get two and three hours in of steady work done, and I'm like, "Headphones," you know what I mean? So it's okay to be amused; you don't have to be a monk doing what you're doing. But I really like what you said: "I feel distracted." Yeah, let's use this as a concentration time, right? Let's use it as an interaction time. The gym shouldn't be the loneliest place in the world. If you're not making eye contact and talking, high-fiving, get a different gym.

I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about fascia. You and Jill Miller were some of the first people that I ever heard talk about fascia in an elaborate way, in a way that allowed me to finally understand what this incredible aspect of our physiology is and the many things that it's doing. I realize this is a vast discussion that we could take several more hours, but I'm not a fascia researcher, right? And yet I think, as I recall, you're one of the first people to talk about, you know, that the relationship—telling people that there's fascia, that we have this thing called fascia—clearly an important part of our physiology, our ability to move. To what extent do you think that "tight fascia," quote unquote—I'm probably offending many people in this moment—restricts our movement and that working on fascial release or manual mobilization can allow us to move better, maybe better posture, maybe even feel better? There are a lot of theories—some probably wrong, some probably right—about what fascia can and can't do for us. But what are some things about fascia that you find particularly interesting that you'd like to pass along?

I think what we should do is, if you pull fascia out of the human movement equation, humans fail to stop moving, right? So the recent, like, "We've just discovered fascia"—that's not really entirely true. There's a really, like, 20-year-old set of videos by a guy who describes himself as a soma. His name is Gil Headley, and he did these live dissections on YouTube. I don't even know if it's still there, but he basically did all of this gross anatomy for free on the internet, and he describes one of the first people to really describe fascia as this sort of incredible connective tissue network that envelops, wraps, stores energy, communicates, and has intentionality. In full disclosure, I went to school in Boulder, and I may have dated a girl who went to a raling school and was a roler. Ida Ral was one of the first people to really talk about how can we mobilize fascia with touch. So I was introduced to fascia in the '90s when I had raling done on me.

So when I'm trying to help someone think about pain, restore position—and this is overly gross, but it'll create a framework for people—we ask, "Is this an environmental problem? Are you poorly hydrated?" Because your tissues need to be hydrated to slide. "Are you inflamed?" Like, that's why we talk about nutrition, and we talk about sleep. Okay, so we have this environmental piece. Then I often will say, "Hey, do we have just a movement problem? Do you just have crappy technique? Let's fix the technique first. Let's get you moving to the highest expression of the movement first. Hey, turn your foot straighter. Let's let recate that joint. Can we have a better organization?" Then we start to say, because sometimes it's just a movement problem; you just needed some queuing. We say, "Is this a joint capsule problem?" Because capsule stiffness—the joint capsule is a bag of connective tissue that surrounds all your joints, and it can account for huge chunks of your range of motion limitation. So a lot of what we do is, after we try to mobilize a joint tissue—and again, that's my own bias, the way I was trained as an Australian-trained manual therapist—then we say, "Well, is this just a good old-fashioned muscle restriction?" And we call it muscle dynamics because that includes high tone, stress, fear, but trigger points are a well-documented phenomenon. Muscles get stiff; they become fibrotic, right? You could have high tone trying to protect you—all those reasons—but that still could limit your range of motion.

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

So sometimes if you went and saw an ART practitioner and it didn't solve your problem, is this Active Release therapy? Yeah, okay, it may not have been a fascial problem, right? If you went and saw someone who only worked on the muscles, it may not have been a muscle problem. If you went and saw a chiropractor and they worked on your joint structures, right, or a good physio, it may not be a joint restriction problem. If you saw a coach and they couldn't cue you out of it, it may not have been a... So what we need to do is recognize that if more squats just solved all the problems, wouldn't we have solved all the problems? If rolling on a roller had solved all the problems, seems like we would have solved all the problems.

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

Thank you for that. I've wanted to try rolling for a long time, and then a friend of mine, who's a former SEAL Team operator, told me that at some point during the rolling that he received, they put a glove on and went up his nostril and did some fascial release on the inside of his nose, and it, quote, "was the most painful experience he ever had." And I was like, "All right, well, I don't know if you know anyone in Naval Special Warfare, but they are so soft," right? I didn't say that; Kelly said that. You know who you are, my friends. But I confess, you know, it's not like I avoid pain at all costs, but that made me think that I might not want to do rolling. I also don't want someone putting their finger up my nose. So I'm assuming that I could say, "Hey, I want to try rolling, and I don't need to get..." Because you hear this stuff like, "Oh, you know, there's all this emotional release," which, you know, there are other ways to get that. The, I guess, is it always painful is the question? Does it need to be painful? His statement is pretty...

So let's pull rolling out to the side because I'm not a roller, but let's just say that mobilizing your tissues doesn't have to be painful. In fact, it's likely that you'll experience some discomfort. But let's talk about a couple of guideposts for you. Number one, you always have to be able to take a full breath, right? So if I'm mobilizing you or you're mobilizing yourself and you suddenly stop breathing, you're going too deep. So an easy way for you is to say, "Hey, can I breathe here?" Number two, I like to have volitional contraction. So if I'm mobilizing someone or someone's doing something, I should be able to flex them out. I should have control over that. If the pain or depth or pressure is putting too much load on the system where I literally lose normal muscular control, what am I doing, right? And then, you know, those two pieces: "Can I take a breath here? Do I have control here?" Those go a long way to keeping me in the bounds.

And then we tend to not work on a tissue longer than five minutes just because I want to get the rest of it tomorrow. And if you give me ten minutes to work, that's incredible. We like to put the soft tissue work before we go to bed, and what we found was that we had better adherence. No one's doing anything productive in then ten minutes before they go to bed. Number two, like a child, when you put a child to bed, you're like, "First, do we take a bath and we read the book, then we go to bed?" Right? Your brain is like, "I know what comes next." So if you do this rolling or some soft tissue work, self-massage, you are training your brain to know what comes next. We find that when people have engaged in massage or self-massage, they don't stand up and want to fight anyone; they're very relaxed. If you've ever gone to a spa and had a massage, you don't go out and snatch or get into a fight afterward; you're so chill, bro.

So we found it as a great way to, as Jill Miller says, "switch on the off switch." That's a beautiful way of talking about that. How do I tell myself to shift out of this, you know, fight or flight into coming down? Five minutes per body part—start anywhere on the leg. Start anywhere. What's stiff? What's asking? Can I breathe? Can I contract? You're going to see that that's a really simple way to start getting the same input. And not all your tissues are the same. If you come to me with knee pain, I'm going to want to be able to look at your R positions, but I'm also going to want to be able to stay on your quads. I mean, my full body weight. And if you can't take that, I'm calling that incomplete. And those people out there who are going to be like, "Whoa, that's heavy duty," you have not worked with my population who have monster thighs that are thick and fibrotic, and it takes real weight. So we all have different sensitivities, but if I respect your ability to take a breath and contract, then all of a sudden, we're upregulating.

What I recommend is you go to Thailand and get a Thai massage from a 65-year-old master woman who weighs 109 pounds. And when she is working on your quads and you tap out, she's like, "No, I'm not done here." If you felt your quads, you're going to realize how low the bar is.

All right, heat and cold. You were one of the first people that told me, "Hey, listen, cold's great. Cold plunges, cold showers are great for shifting your state, for resilience training." Fun, it's fun. I swam with L's pool this morning, did the breath hold, cold laps. It's fun. I'm going to put in quotation marks, "Yeah, sometimes it's type too fun." It definitely will shift one's state for many hours afterward for reasons we now understand. But you were one of the first people to point out to me that for injuries, oftentimes it's better to profuse the tissue and that heat sometimes, perhaps, is the more favorable tool. If you had to pick one, that's right.

So what you—I think even talked about—that there is research to show that cold water immersion can attenuate training effects if done in the six to eight hours after hypertrophy and strength training because of its potent anti-inflammatory properties. It prevents some of the inflammation that would prompt the adaptation response. And put simply, if your goal is bigger muscles and getting stronger, don't do immersion-based deliberate cold exposure in the six to eight hours after your training. Fine to do it on other days; fine to do it beforehand. In fact, athletes at Stanford do that on the basis of a lot of work from Craig Heller and others. If you don't want to do it at all, if you don't want to do it again, I'm not a—I'm not a—I'm not going to die on the sword of cold plunging. But it can attenuate or even prevent those adaptations. But at other times, it's a great tool for reducing inflammation, shifting one's mental and physical state in the great direction.

Look, it always sucks to get in the thing. The whole point is you feel much better when you get out than you did before you ever got in. That's the simplest way to put it. I, a middle-aged guy who wants to be the best middle-aged mountain biker in my neighborhood, is my timing of my plunge going to affect my ability to be that mediocre athlete? No. So stop. People are like, "When's the optimal time?" I'm like, "When's it work for you?" Is that first thing in the morning? Juliet found that if she got hot and plunged in the night, she was like, "Woken up and fired up and red." She was like, "I'm not going to sleep now." And I get hot and cold, hot and cold. It's like someone hits the emergency brake, right?

So first of all, when does it work for you? Right? Second of all, if there is a performance concern, we try to put it as far away from training as we can. That's what we say: train in the evening, plunge before if you like. You train in the morning, morning plunge in the evening—like, get cold. That's cool. But what you hinted at is the same reasons why we don't ice injuries because it limits our body's ability to heal. So it rate limits, and it might do it by phasal constriction. Your body—eventually, your body is going to warm up anyway. So one of the things we like to say is your body either heals at the rate of a human being or it heals slower. So there's no such thing as a fast healer; you're just really good at healing at the rate of human physiology, and the rest of us are doing dumb things that are rate-limiting our healing: nutrition, sleep.

Right? When we are talking about anyone after surgery or injury, our benchmark in the line in the sand is eight hours of laying in bed without looking at your phone. That's minimum. And I don't care if you're sleeping because resting is the next best thing. But I can't actually understand inputs and outputs. And let me be super clear: if you're trying to grow a body, learn a skill, change your body composition, get stronger, heal—that all rhymes with eight hours. We look at seven as our minimum. And of course, you're a human being; you're going to get by. I was stressed out last night, wanted to come on this show with my friend Andrew and do a good job. Like, I didn't get great sleep, but I'm a human being; I'm still going to show up.

So what's nice then is we can start to say, "Okay, what can we control in terms of managing and upregulating, boosting maximal healing rate for humans?" And it turns out cold water may not be the best. Icing something might suppress prostaglandin release, right? Which means that you can think of it as you have these circulating stem cells. And again, sorry everyone, get this just very cursory. And we need the chemical signalers from the injured, damaged tissue to call those things to be. But if I ice that and suppress that, some of those cells can go swinging on past. There was a great study I saw a million years ago, and it looked at ibuprofen usage in Australian military tactical athletes who had bad ankle sprains. And those athletes who were given ibuprofen, which does the same thing as ice, suppresses prostaglandin release, right? Cuts off some of those chemical signals, were back faster than their counterparts who did not have the ibuprofen, but they had chronic ankle instability because they did not have a sufficient healing response because they had shut that healing response down.

So what we find is, look, your body will wait until you warm back up. But if you think you're going to do angiogenesis and make new capillaries and modulate all these things by slapping a non-specific ice pad for a non-specific amount of time over a non-specific tissue, you got to be kidding me. And so it's really Mickey Mouse. Does ice help for margaritas that are warm? Yes. Open heart surgery? Yes. Right? Waking you up in the morning? Waking you up in the morning? Hey, I have a kid who needs a placebo. I can numb that thing and give my kid some placebo ice; that's great. It definitely can work for pain control because as soon as you're numb, you can't feel anything. But what's going to happen when you pull that thing off? We're going to come back.

So we've found that we have much better—and again, instead of saying that's bad, we're turning out and saying we have so many better tools now to manage congestion because that's really what we're trying to do with ice and healing: we're trying to stop swelling, right? But is swelling a mistake by the body? And chances are it's not really a mistake. Again, two and a half million years of evolution—this stuff's pretty awesome. But what we know is failure to move and evacuate that swelling is a problem. So when we get people on non-fatiguing muscle contraction, NMES devices like the H-wave or something like that, we find that we can actually decongest and keep moving in controlled ways, and we have much better clinical outcomes than we do with ice.

What about heating pads, hot water bottles, sauna? Do you sit in the sauna? Yes, I do. I love the sauna. How often are you in the sauna? Whenever I can. You know, and sometimes it's short sessions, and sometimes it's super hot sessions, and sometimes I just get hot and cold a couple of times. And I try, like you said earlier, I'm not after some specific adaptation response. The sauna is a great way for us to chill out and hang out. And sometimes we're bored, and we got to make dinner or move on. So I, you know, I try to sauna. If there's anything I do, I sauna a lot.

Bigger the engine, the bigger the brakes. Then it's, for me, it's such a big break. You mentioned Laird. I've seen Laird drag the assault bike into the sauna—something most people probably shouldn't do because they would die of hypothermia. But we call that Restrepo; it's the worst place on Earth. It's an interesting tool, though. The heat, I find that if I get the sauna uncomfortably hot and then force myself to breathe super slowly only through my nose so that I don't actually feel like a burning sensation on the inside of my nostrils, and I just do that for, you know, 10, 15 minutes, that it's wonderful stress resilience training. How great is that? But very different than the cold plunge where you can either muscle through it or distract yourself or whatever. In the heat, you know, your heart rate's going up, and there's this temptation to—I'm like—to follow that heart rate toward a more elevated stress state.

And so I find that you can get very, very hot—obviously, be safe about this, folks—but still maintain a lot of calm. And I think it's a wonderful tool, but you have to kind of work at it. And I enjoy this, by the way. So people are probably thinking, "Here you go again, like why not just enjoy the sauna?" But I like to listen to Gregorian chants or something in there and do this like very, like, how even and calm can I stay? I love it at 215 or 220. And I wear the cap so those higher heats don't register to the brain. You will drive yourself out eventually; your brain is going to just... What drives me out of the sauna is I actually feel like I'm going to vomit because I've gotten so hot. My brain stem is like, "Bro, you can just override." So I'm like, "Got to get it." And I get out of the sauna, and then you—what one of the reasons I love the cold so much is we jump in our pool or cold plunges. I can get back in the sauna, right? It's the contrast of—I try to do it once a week: sauna, cold, sauna, cold, sauna, once a week. You know, again, not training for any specific thing except to be able to go back to Ju's house.

I did sauna at Ju's house with some family members of HS and friends, and I think they wanted to see when I would—they wanted to crush you. So they went, I think they cranked that thing to like 222, 230, and they called it the "Huberman spot," the "wimpy spot." But, yeah, he's a beast with the sauna, everyone. It's not a contest. And one, it is in the Willink household, I'll tell you. It absolutely is. One of the things I like about the heat and the cold is that it informs me about my readiness state because, just like my CO2 tolerance, my breath holds are very short when I'm stressed and under-recovered. My heat tolerance drops dramatically, and so does my cold tolerance. It's easier to pick up really fast. I start shivering right away. I'm like, "Whoa, I've been in here for 30 seconds; I'm already shivering." I'm like, "Huh." Another piece of the day that says maybe I need to make it a 70% day in the gym and move. I don't have to take a day off.

We believe, Juliette and I believe in this thing called desire to train. We wake up every day like you probably self-medicated with some exercise as kids, right? And we start thinking about what we're going to exercise. What are we going to do? We're going to run, bike, what we do, what we lift. Like, wait, when we wake up, we start thinking about when are we going to do it. And we wake up on some days, and it's not there. And what we ask ourselves is, "Is it not there? Why is it not there? Is it me? I should be there. We should go train anyway." But we really try to listen to that voice. And when there's no desire to train, it's really strange how it correlates with crap heat tolerance, crap CO2 tolerance, crap cold tolerance. And I think it's a nice way of understanding yourself from sort of a third-party objective measure. Especially as you get good at this, you're like, "Wow, that really sucked today."

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

Yeah, and remember, ultimately, all this is supposed to be additive, right? And it's supposed to inoculate me by creating a framework that makes more durable my body and my relationships. I mean, we didn't even talk about the fact that the sauna is just glue for people. It allows people to come together. I think one of the things I've noticed with my male friends is that it gives us a place, like once a week, where we get together because it's so hot. We are all super vulnerable, and we talk the truth. We talk with our friends, and we kind of share stories and can talk about our lives. And so it creates a framework for that. And if that was the benefit of the sauna, I'm in just that alone, right? That my wife and I feel more connected after taking a sauna together. I'm like, "Well, who cares about the heat shock proteins and Alzheimer's? That's probably important too." But I like having a lot of bottom things, and I think it's easy for us to sort of hyper-science and hyper-tactic things that we forget the whole point of the brain is to be around other brains. That's it. That's why the brain exists. And then those brains go do rad things in the world together. And sometimes it's that simple. And when we start throwing that filter on, it becomes a lot more sustainable.

I'm not interested in being 110; I'm interested in being durable enough to take the hits on my way to 110. I love that. Some of my best friendships have been forged in the sauna, not by pushing ourselves necessarily, just coming together. The thing, you know, it's so cool. I know that some of my New Zealand teams have a kava. They call it recovery, and sometimes they'll share, have a kava ceremony and drink a little kava and then jump in the sauna. And boy, it really binds the boys, you know? That really creates a down-regulation effect. I mean, it's so... You know, I think, again, my own bias because I love this stuff is that I think all of it is about physical input. So if we took a sort of macro step back, what we say is, "What does your physical practice look like? Tell me about your physical practice."

"Well, I get to move my body, and I try to eat a fruit and some protein before I get out the door, and I walk all day long, and I try not to sit in one place for long periods of time. And then I get home, and if I'm lucky enough to exercise, I do. And then I sat on the floor, and I roll a little bit." But that's a full practice. You walked, you got sunlight, you know what I mean? And I think that is a much better way of thinking about this versus sort of, "Let me add another line of code to your programming where now you're doing three sets of ten in this thing."

What are your thoughts on nutrition? You seem to be pretty balanced about this. Before we started recording, you were talking about some meatloaf recipes that sound pretty amazing. Clearly, you love food. I'm not going to say I'm the best at meatloaf, but I maybe seven out of eleven times. Bamboo Terrace bench champion, I'm going to get a tattoo, but it's fine. What? You enjoy food, love food. So you're not—you like to eat, and you cook a bit as well. Most people feel, I think, kind of overwhelmed at the discussions about nutrition. Now we're trying to get a gram of protein per pound of body weight, which I subscribe to. But if I'm supposed to spread that out across the day, sometimes I'm doing that, sometimes I'm not. I like fruits and vegetables. Did you feel like a failure because you didn't have ground? I mean, honestly, it can feel for people like, "Oh, I didn't do it."

No, I think if people make getting high-quality, high-protein-to-calorie-ratio foods as the foundation of their diet and then eating some vegetables and eating some fruit—whoa, bro, what about the peels? You're going to kill people. I love that. Ban's dangerous. I'll eat the orange peel if it's a really good orange. I will. People who know me, I've gotten some wide eyes at meals where I'll take the lemons out of my drink. I'll just eat the whole thing down. I don't care. Someone will tell me why it's going to kill me, but I don't eat the seeds while I eat the peel too. So some vegetables, fruit, and then some starches, you know, per energetic requirements and/or real life. Like, I'm not going to stay away from the sourdough bread because I don't need a starch. I have a little bit of it. Like, you know, I feel like we've lost our rational approach to eating because people feel these, you know, these quantifiable metrics of, you know, calories and protein. They're important, clearly.

But I've always known you to be somebody who's very balanced about the occasional ice cream, yes, steak, but also vegetables. I mean, why do you think that the nutrition conversation has gotten so distracted, even contentious? And B, what do you do? And, you know, if you were going to raise a kid—you've raised kids—if you're going to raise a kid and say, "Here's what balanced nutrition looks like to you." Okay, I'm not calling you nutrition to you. How do you see this picture?

But what I want to point out is that if we're going to have a conversation, remember my real job, day job, is high performance. I'm going to have to talk about body composition, and I'm going to have to talk about fueling. Do you have enough carbs on board to do what we're going to do? Are you eating to recover to reduce the session cost, right? How do we minimize the sort of the physiologic cost of this training, this competition? And that's all wrapped around nutrition. Nutrition—I already hinted at, I'm going to have to talk and ultimately ask you to get a blood panel and look at it, make sure that you have everything on board so that your tissues can handle the loading we're prescribing them.

So I didn't want to get into nutrition at all because it's always about body composition for me, and I'm like, "That's the most boring reason why we..." Sean Stevenson wrote a beautiful book about creating a table culture and a culture on eating for your family. So for me, the functional unit of change is the household. That's the place where I want to make and put all my energy and time. That's how we'll transform society, one household at a time. But sitting down with your kids—the research around that, eating with your kids like twice or three times a week is phenomenal, right? Like cooking is beautiful. I have to become more nuanced because if I have a team I'm working with, like we had a tournament two weeks ago at Stanford. We played four games, and that's four collegiate nationally ranked teams that we're playing like badasses. How do I fuel those women? How do I get them? What do they want to eat? What makes them feel good? What makes them feel bad? How do we balance all of that?

Like, I found out that putting food on a table with a tablecloth increased calories. Again, as a high performer for me, I'm like, "How are the ways that I can be thinking about this from a practical standpoint?" My personal thing is that we focus on trying to create—this has been really useful for Julia and me—an objective measure of 0.8 to 1 grams of protein, which means I don't measure anymore. I'm per pound of body weight. I'm 51 years old, per pound of body weight. So what does that mean? It means that I really try to prioritize protein every meal. Super simple. And I try not to eat one protein; I try to eat all the proteins, right? That's probably better. I try not to choose, personally, very fatty proteins because my genetics don't really support it. If I want to see triglycerides and things go through the roof, then I'll, you know, watch me eat eggs and butter and steak. Like, keto gives me diarrhea.

So what I'll say is I try to go for leaner proteins there. And then on the fruits and vegetables, because I think we have a real problem with not enough micronutrients—again, talking about tissue health—and definitely not enough fiber. Those are huge problems. And if I get 800 grams of fruits and vegetables—this is a nutrition strategy promoted by our friend E. Sinowski at Optimize Me Nutrition. She put this 800-gram challenge based on some research, and it changed everything because suddenly I was like, "Oh my God, I got to eat more food. I have to eat more fruits and vegetables." And I was stuffing myself with fruits and vegetables, getting enough protein that I was like, "I guess there's no room for a cookie."

You know, and what I really liked about that was it was agnostic about your cultural preferences. It didn't matter if you're a vegan; it didn't matter if you were vegetarian; it didn't matter if you were carnivore. You want to do carnivore plus berries? Knock yourself right out. It gave people permission to have their food identities, but it also met the minimums. And then we can dose up and dose down based on what your performance needs are. And this is 800 grams—not of carbohydrate; this is 800 grams of like four big apples.

Gotcha. A banana is like 80 to 100 grams. Okay, yeah. If you want to be real dangerous, you eat eight bananas today, you could die. I mean, you could die. And a big salad with, you know, less cucumber, tomato, and probably 2 to 300 grams. Okay, so then you'd also want to get some fruit, maybe another, maybe some cruciferous vegetables, etc. Check this out. Again, I'm just going to do some boy math here. Starbucks cookie—delicious, really—300 calories. I'm going to call it delicious, right? A pound of cherries is 230 calories. So eat a pound of cherries and tell me you're like, "Ah, I still want something sweet." A pound of melon was like 220 calories, so calorically not very dense, right? But nutritionally super dense. So we end up loading a ton of more food on, and it really does prioritize those things.

And from a performance standpoint, one of our friends is this incredible nutritionist at Michigan football. Abigail is amazing there, and she will tell me about how she's using nutrition as intervention for sports performance. And she'll have men come up to her and say, "Abigail, I pooped today." And they're—she's like, "Yeah, that's great. You know, you should poop every day." And they're like, "No, no, you understand. I pooped yesterday too." And it's the first time these kids have pooped consecutively. They don't poop regularly. And I think, again, if I'm just trying to get out in the weeds and talk about what's normal and not normal, we should talk about you didn't eat fiber. And she's like, "Wait until you poop twice in one day." And they were like, "That's crazy! Never in my whole life!"

What was the difference? They started eating fruits and vegetables and fiber. And when we start to create those benchmarks, it's a lot easier for me to see inputs and outputs. And then we can argue about, "Can you choke down 100 grams of carbs an hour because you're my elite cyclist?" You know, I think you'd be shocked at how a lot of my athletes have changed their relationship around food because it serves their needs. It's not their identity around control. And it's something that Julie and I have been very cautious of is if you have two daughters—just speaking—we're really concerned about creating dysfunctional patterns or relationships to food because in this fitness space, it can be real gnarly.

Yeah, I see the progression from, you know, sitcoms of the type that we grew up on to reality TV shows to social media, where social media can do so much good—education-wise, etc.—connection. But it's basically a reality TV show that everyone's been able to cast themselves in if they want, and certain characters are casting their, you know, physique. Certain figures are casting their outrageous behavior. And, you know, we all in this reality TV show called social media. I think that's really the best way to describe it. You know, when people start to feel like, "Oh, wow, these people are getting attention for this reason or that reason," it creates a gravitational pull toward people behaving a certain way. And then, obviously, some of that can be really self-destructive.

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

But ultimately, when we really get people on board with how food has the potential to enrich their relationships, how fun it is to cook, how fun it is to prep, how fun it is to serve other people, then we have this really different relationship with fueling. And that's really remarkable. But it is really easy to say, "I won," and I'm like, "Okay, so this 90-day fast—there are so many fitness things out there where they start with a fast or brutal calorie restriction." And I'm like, "That's your jam to get people lean fast is just to slam off the calories." Like, we know what's going to happen. How many people have done some kind of 30-day, 90-day thing, and the next day it's like they're off the rails?

So if you're doing some body recomp and then you're off the rails, for me, I'm like, "I don't think that was very good because I got to—this is a long season we're playing." I think it's—I have to be careful here because I realize this gets into some issues. When I did an episode about anorexia, I learned that, first of all, anorexia has existed for centuries. This idea that it's more prominent now with social media—actually, the numbers don't bear out. What does bear out is that it is the most deadly, the most deadly by far of all the psychiatric illnesses. Oh, see, it leads to death in a far greater percentage of cases than any other psychiatric illness, including bipolar, where people often commit suicide—a great, great, much higher percentage of people commit suicide who are bipolar, etc. So it's a really serious thing.

And yeah, we assume that social media has made that worse, but there's this now cluster of all these different eating disorders that don't qualify as full-blown anorexia. It's sort of like ADHD. Now we understand people are having attention deficit issues that might not be clinical ADHD, but that cluster around it in like people's adults and children's inability to hold their attention on an idea or topic for any appreciable amount of time. So it's a very serious thing.

I love that today you've talked about enjoying your training—like really enjoying your training—all aspects: the resistance part, the cardiovascular part, the mobility part, you know, the in the evening getting down on the floor, also enjoying eating with people, enjoying the sauna. I mean, I think, you know, people see the big guy that you are, the amazing track record you have of working with all these incredible athletes, and you're quite an accomplished athlete yourself. And I think this is the first time for me, anyway, that I realize you are thinking about how to make this whole thing pleasurable and mesh it with real life, which I'm realizing now shouldn't come as a surprise because you have a family—a flourishing family—in addition to a flourishing business with The Ready State and so forth.

I think if there's one message that really comes through over and over again today, it's like how can you make fitness and nutrition and health part of your life but not let it take over your life or your mind in a way that isn't healthy?

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

The nutrition piece is such a dangerous one, and young right now, Jul and I are very obsessed with youth sports and spending time with seeing if we can improve that experience for families so they come out unharmed. And, you know, RED-S—relative energy deficiency in sport—you know, is where we start to see that kids are not eating enough to fuel activity and their growing bodies simultaneously. And it's really hard on their physiologies, and we—it starts to show up with lost periods; it starts to show up with stress fractures, right? And we start to see sort of this degradation in sort of the body's tissues, but it can really crash a lot of problems.

And, you know, Stacy Sims is probably the first person to really put it on my radar of, "Hey, you're a physio coach; I need you to become an expert with the people that you're working with. You know, are you eating enough support?" And I see some of the elite women I work with—elite women really battle this. This is what the body I need to get paid and to win world championships, and that's not the body that people want on Instagram. And, you know, should I have a salad after this training? I'm like, "We just played for three hours. No, you're not going to eat a salad. Like, go get this big-ass burrito, and then we'll talk about your salad next."

You know, so it sounds like the athletes are undereating, and my understanding, anyway, the statistics, which I know is confusing, but, you know, potentially not thinking about food at the right times. And within the general population of non-athletes, especially youth, however, it seems that people are over-consuming calories. So there seems to be two populations clustering out here. We have a—this reminds me—we have a rule at our house for dinner: we have a three-vegetable rule. This is from a woman we work with, Margaret Garvey, who cooks a protein, whatever that is, and has also three vegetables, and that's where she starts.

And I had one daughter who is like a gourmet chef—Georgia is just a total badass, you know, G—and then I have Caroline, who is the pickiest human being on the—like, "It's brown; I'm not eating it." You know? And she's getting better, but when we had three vegetables, suddenly what we saw was that she might eat one, right? And we could start to have exposure. But I think if we crowd out some of the—because we don't want to have a restrictive house, right? But, you know, if we crowd out some of the other foods, we found it was a lot easier for us to say, "This is what we're eating, and we eat this together as a family." And then if those other foods—I mean, your teenagers are going to leave the house and eat whatever they want, just to be clear, everybody. So you might as well stuff them with the good stuff at home.

I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about supplements. These days we hear a lot about creatine, creatine, creatine. I like creatine; I've been taking it for years. We'll occasionally do a washout where I just kind of let a bunch of water out of my body. Why not? And then get back to it. I won’t do it for any specific reason; I just do it. I travel and forget to bring creatine, and I'm okay. But most of the time, I'm taking 5 to 10 grams a day.

Okay. We've heard about the body benefits, the brain benefits for athletes and just, quote-unquote, exercisers—the typical person listening to this podcast. Do you recommend creatine? What are some of the things that, in your household—I'm getting this picture, and I've been in your home, and I will say that the spirit in your home is a wonderful one. Brian Mackenzie and I showed up more or less unannounced at one point, and like, there's—it's a delightful thing. Like, people's spirits are—it's a space station. It's a space station of stoke, and like, you want to be part of it. You can come in.

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

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

So I think we can divide these things into food-like things, right? And then sort of performance. Yeah, like whey protein—it's just a protein replacement, high-quality, high-protein-to-calorie ratio. That's right. And if you don't handle whey, like my athletes, I'm like, "Let me introduce you to these vegetarian proteins." And that's because you're having a hard time timing your meals or just getting enough protein because you sometimes you just don't feel like it. So great, great utilization there.

For Caroline, she gets omegas at night because she doesn't want to have any accidental fish burp at school. She's a teenager, so she takes them before she goes to bed. And we're really interested in brain health, and there's some early research—and again, not my expertise—that I've heard of, read about, talked to people about—that vitamin D, creatine, and omegas might help attenuate symptoms of concussion if they get hit, right? So post-pre. So those things are on Caroline. She gets creatine every day; she gets an omega every day, and she gets vitamin D. And some of that is probably get S vitamin D during the summer because I could pull it out, but we live in northern climates, and they're indoors, and there's good research on supplementation.

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

One of my super smart friends was like, "I think you should take a statin, a small dose statin once a week." And I was like, "All right." So I was like, "Better take some CoQ10 with that." It's an experiment I'm running, right? Downsides are low; I'm getting my blood panels, talk to my physician. But so CoQ10 is on the menu for me just to make sure I don't have anything. And so I think suddenly what we should be looking at is how do I round out my family? Doesn't eat fish, so we're not getting enough omegas from those sources, and no one will eat walnuts, but I'm the only one to eat walnuts.

So, you know, how do I round out my nutrition with some supplementation? And is there a benefit for some other things that, with my genetics or with what's going on? Like, Jay has a mutated MTHFR gene, right? And so we are always watching B vitamins for her, right? So because poor meth—right? Poor methylation, exactly right. Jay Starett is his wife, that's right. Sorry, Jay Starett, CEO. You guys have such an awesome relationship. You guys poke fun at one another; you're clearly awesome companions to one another, and you do great, great work together.

I am the broken anchor of the relationship, I like to say. She is, you know, what's really interesting is I have—I'm a little bit like you. I think I'm excitable; I get obsessed with things. It's super fun to go down rabbit holes. I like to experiment, and Juliette is like the true north, like, "No, that sounds fishy; we're not doing that." You know, like I came home one time, and I was like, "You know what? This cow's milk is out of here. Our family is only drinking goat milk." I only had the best goat milk. I just had the best goat milk, and Juliette was like, "Sure, that's going to..." And I gave some goat milk to Georgia, and she's like, "Hucked it across the room." She's a baby. And then I—the goat milk—and like vomited into the sink, and I had goat milk on my lip. And Juliette just is so patient by saying, "Huh, I wonder if that's a good idea. I wonder if you will stick around."

So she's the rudder. She is 100% the rudder. She is a three-time world champion, everyone. She's a rower at Cal, and she is my training partner. She's the greatest training partner I've ever had.

We use training as another way of spending time together. Love it. Thanks for sharing a little bit of the picture of your home. It matches exactly my experience. And chaos—a little bit of chaos and a ton of love. And I've been quoting him a lot lately. I cannot take any credit for this, but Naval, who is, you know, famous on various podcasts, he says, "What are we really shooting for in life? It's a fit, energetic body." This is Naval, not me, by the way. He said, "Fit, energetic body, a calm mind, and resources." We got to have resources and a home full of love.

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

Love it. Well, Kelly Starrett, thank you so much for coming on here today and sharing with us so much wisdom. We covered so much. You covered so much. I mean, pelvic floor, fascia, cold, heat, movement patterns. You give us a ton of practical tools—getting down on the floor, sit, stand, and on and on—but a small portal into the vast amount of knowledge you have in that head of yours. And I just have to say that, you know, it's been a delight today because these little bits have come through about who I know you to be in the rest of the world. This is the real world; we just happen to have microphones in front of us. The rest of the world, and you've been at this a while—this business of trying to help people figure out the best ways to move, how to be a better athlete, how to, you know, improve one's fitness, how to take a rational, fun, hardworking approach at times, but also a fun, playful, recreational approach to this really key aspect of our health and many key aspects of our health.

So I just want to thank you for coming here today, for doing the work that you do, and you are one of the real ones, as they say.

Oh, my brother, thank you so much. And you walk the walk; you're strong, you can go far, you have fun doing it, you're a great husband and dad, and you've been a great friend to me. So thanks for coming on here. Let's get you back again, and just thanks for being you.

My pleasure. Anytime. And thanks to all the great Huberman people that make this thing possible. It's really a thing.

Thanks, my brother.

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

If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast on both Spotify and Apple, and on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. Please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments.

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

If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.

If you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, our Neural Network newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as protocols in the form of brief one to three-page PDFs. Those one to three-page PDFs cover things like deliberate heat exposure, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol; we also have protocols for optimizing your sleep, dopamine, and much more. Again, all available completely zero cost. Simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab, scroll down to newsletter, and provide your email. We do not share your email with anybody.

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