Episode 214: How to move freely and live fully: An interview with Juliet Starrett, co-author of “Built to Move”

Download the transcript

Full text below

 

[00:00:00] Dr Mike T Nelson: What’s going on? It’s Dr. Mike T Nelson here back with another Flex Diet podcast, where we talk about all things to increase muscle performance, improve your body composition, and do all of it without destroying your health and in a flexible format. Now today on the podcast, I’ve got my good friend Juliet Starrett.

[00:00:25] Her and Dr. Kelly Starrett wrote a new book called The Built to Move. The essential 10 habits to help you move freely and live fully. And it is, it’s great. I really enjoyed it. I don’t actually get a lot of time to review a lot of books, but when they sent it, I was super excited about getting into it.

[00:00:45] So we talked all about that. Our love for the concept two rower, haha. It’s ingest heart rate variability lessons from elite level athletes all the way down to general population and how they transfer and much more. Just a really fun conversation. Always enjoy talking with her.

[00:01:07] And if you want to see Dr. Kelly Starrett I’ll be presenting with him along with a whole bunch of people from Dr. Allison Brager, Brett Bartholomew, Dr. Mike, Molly, Dan, John, and many others at the Northeast Coaches Summit. This will happen this coming October 21st and 22nd, 2023. This is at Cross for Milford, Connecticut.

[00:01:35] So we’ll include a link there via Conqueror Athlete. So check it out. I think it’s gonna be really fun. I’m super excited to do it. Right now that’s the only seminar that I’m doing this fall due to other projects and a bunch of other stuff that I’ve going on here. So enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Juliet Starrett

[00:01:57] [00:01:58] Dr Mike T Nelson: Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson, and today we have the great Julie stt on the podcast. How are you?

[00:02:08] Juliet Starrett: I’m great. Thanks for having

[00:02:08] Dr Mike T Nelson: me. Yeah, thank you so much. It’s I think the last time we saw you guys in person was probably the Tahoe event, and I know I was on your podcast quite a while back and.

[00:02:18] I think that’s been about it till your book came out. So you’ve been busy.

[00:02:22] Juliet Starrett: I think you’re right. And I think that Tahoe event was pre covid, so it feels like it was in, it was in the before times when, we all got together and did things. Yeah. It feels like the before times. So yeah we were there and then we had you on our podcast, we actually did a whole season about nutrition before we abandoned ship on the idea of doing season based podcasts.

[00:02:41] And so you, you were in that mix.

[00:02:44] Dr Mike T Nelson: Thank you. Why’d you abandon the season based podcast? I’m always curious cuz I started doing that at first too, and I gave it up.

[00:02:50] Juliet Starrett: Yeah. We just found that while we liked the idea in theory to dive deep on a particular subject in this, great universities like health, wellness and fitness, it was really difficult to book the guests in Yeah.

[00:03:02] In, in a, a nice tidy block. And so we found that we also were turning away potential guests. That would’ve been great to talk about general subjects because we were trying to fit everybody into this little bucket of a nutrition for example. And so it ended up just being logistically a pain.

[00:03:18] And then we weren’t, we were passing over people who would be great to talk to who were, in town or available or otherwise would’ve been great guests on our podcast cuz they didn’t quite fit into that. Season thing. So it’s actually been a lot better for us. We’re doing it, we’ve been doing it now I think almost two years, just biweekly.

[00:03:35] And from a scheduling standpoint and generally speaking, it’s worked out great.

[00:03:40] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, I tried doing it for extremely brief period of time, never really amounted to anything. I had some topics and I ended up backfilling a lot of ’em myself, just because, oh, scheduling podcast stuff is tricky as it is, especially when you’re trying to combine both people’s schedules, isn and usually people you want, or, busy people.

[00:03:58] They got a lot of stuff going on like yourself and. It’s hard enough to schedule something, but then when you want a specific topic and you want a couple of specific people and then you can’t get that person during this time, so then you go to this person and that person and this person says, yes, but the time doesn’t work.

[00:04:12] You don’t know when you’re gonna do that topic again. And I was just like, ah, screw this.

[00:04:16] Juliet Starrett: Yeah, we had, we literally had the exact same experience and it’s just been, and we’ve just been able to get on a cadence and really cast a much wider net because, obviously the focus, our focus has been health, wellness, fitness with a bias towards a lot of, we’ve had a lot of coaches on our podcast, every so often we have like someone who’s just like a badass or high performer in their own right.

[00:04:38] Come into our universe that we wanna interview and we’re like, okay like one of my best friends, for example, is this guy Soman Chani, who writes young adult fiction books. He’s written this massive hit called The School for Good and Evil. That was actually released as a Netflix movie last fall, and he obviously does not fit into any health, wellness, fitness bucket.

[00:04:56] Yeah. Other than that, he does enjoy exercising. But, he was someone that was great and so fun and unique for us to interview and, expose him to a totally different audience, but he never would’ve fit into any bucket that Kelly and I would’ve picked,

[00:05:11] Dr Mike T Nelson: yeah. I find myself the same way, like drifting in and out of other topics that are not necessarily the main thing, but if it’s at the same point, if it’s interesting.

[00:05:21] And if it’s somewhat casually related now I’m just like, Screw it, I’ll just do it. And 90% of them turn out to be amazing and really good conversations. And people have a lot of podcasts to pick from and if they didn’t like that one, they can skip it. It’s free, whatever,

[00:05:37] Juliet Starrett: exactly. You can skip through all the ads and skip.

[00:05:39] Exactly. You can just take a little snack of a podcast and be like, this one’s not for me. And there’s so many to choose from now. It really, I don’t know if you feel like that. It feels like a. An explosion of podcasts. I had an interesting conversation with someone recently, and I’d never thought about this this before, but Apple and Spotify and all the platforms who host podcasts, they don’t ever remove, they’re obviously all evergreen forever.

[00:06:03] Someone told me that it would actually be great for all the existing podcasts if you know that if Apple and Spotify and the big podcast people actually had a limit on how long you can have a podcast sitting on their platform unless it’s active. Because someone said, part of the reason it feels so cluttered in the podcast space is there’s, a billion podcasts that stopped and started and then stopped.

[00:06:24] But all those episodes are still out there forever and cluttering the space when people search. And I thought that was interesting, just cuz the barrier to entry to doing a podcast is fairly low. So there’s a lot of them.

[00:06:36] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And you would think that hopefully the algorithms over time would

[00:06:40] push people up, like yourself for doing biweekly or doing a set cadence, you would hope that over time they would push those up to the top. Because yeah, that, that happens with SEO and everything else too. As you guys know, running a business, if you’re not out updating and putting new stuff out, it’s eh, this person doesn’t really exist anymore.

[00:06:57] They’re no

[00:06:58] Juliet Starrett: longer current.

[00:06:59] Dr Mike T Nelson: What have you learned from some of the more, let’s say, advanced athletes you’ve had on your podcast and obviously interactions with that? The general public would be surprised about because I think for a lot of people listening and we have a wide audience, from athletes to coaches to some general population, a lot of times when I talk to more general population, they’re like, oh, all those like crazy shows you do with athletes.

[00:07:22] I just turn them out. Cause I’m not gonna learn anything. I’m not one of them. But to me, like the extremes inform the means, and the means don’t necessarily inform the extremes. So while. Different populations are different. I’d be curious what you think are some lessons that you’ve learned from high level athletes that, just the average person listening could go out and apply right away.

[00:07:43] Juliet Starrett: I think the first thing, and this is related to our book, which I, our book Built to Move, which I know you and I are gonna talk about at length on this podcast, but actually a lot of those lessons we learned that we actually wrote about in Built To Move, come from talking to and working with elite athletes of all levels.

[00:08:00] And I think the thing that. Your listeners would be the most surprised to know is that elite athletes often also skip the basics. Yes. More often than not. More often than not. And I think people think when Kelly or I, or both of us together go in and consult with elite athletes or teams that we know.

[00:08:17] We’ve come in with this like super secret squirrel program where we’re gonna give everybody all this, highly technical stuff and it’s it’s expensive and inaccessible. And oftentimes what we are consulting with athletes about are literally the basics. Are you eating enough protein?

[00:08:34] Are you focusing on your recovering? Are you recovery? Are making sure to put some care and feeding into your soft tissues? Are you sleeping enough? Are you eating enough food? Kelly’s actually working right now with a world champion surfer who is a legend and a present surfer.

[00:08:49] And what Kelly has primarily been focusing on with him is actually in intercession eating. So this guy goes out and this guy goes out and surfs for five hours. And if you contrast a surfer with think about triathletes, like triathletes have become so precise about their eating, the timing, exactly what they’re going to eat.

[00:09:09] They train for what they’re going to eat. So they make sure they can manage what they’re going to eat during their race. It’s become like a like a serious science, and a lot of those longer endurance sports. But if you take some more fringe sports, like surfing, for example, A lot of the athletes actually don’t eat at all during their surfing sessions, so they’ll be out on the water.

[00:09:28] It’s intense. Their heart rates are high, they actually are starting to track things on whoop and ordering and other devices, so they know what their output is and it’s high and a lot, but they’re not drinking any water or ever eating. And it’s an interesting contrast.

[00:09:41] And so we actually just got this athlete to get out of the water at pretty regular interview intervals and drink some water and get some carbohydrate on board. And that simple fix. First of all, he gained five pounds. He said he felt sturdy and stronger. He had way more energy to train. He felt like he recovered better.

[00:10:01] So it, it had this sort of cascading impact. And it was really just this simple piece of feedback. As we were able to come in, he has all these coaches who work with him on surfing technique and the precision around that, and mindset and competition and all those things. But we were able to come in and look at his overall program from 30,000 feet and say, Hey, where are the holes?

[00:10:20] Where are his blind spots? And what we saw in this case was that one of his blind spots was nutrition. So back to your original question, I think a lot of people think that athletes have all those basics dialed and that they’re just, trying to figure out how to make these little micro changes and optimize.

[00:10:34] But it turns out that regular, that every day elite athletes are still struggling to make sure they’re checking the boxes on the basics. And then I think the second big lesson I’ve learned is how. Prime and important mindset is in all competitive athletics. But, I don’t know that I would say that those lessons are just for athletes.

[00:10:57] It seems like it’s for any high performer, whether you’re a high performer in business or in music, or in, in anything where you’re doing thing, doing anything at a high level, I think mindset and, having a little bit of grit and resilience is one of the most important things. So I think that the athletes, the highest performers among us are missing the basics a lot.

[00:11:17] And I think, so much of it comes down to do you have the mental capacity to be able to manage the thing you’re trying to do.

[00:11:24] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, I would agree with that. I’ve told a story in the podcast before, but the first couple consults I did years ago with some pretty high level athletes, they gave me their seven day nutrition report, and I literally thought it was a joke.

[00:11:37] I was like, okay who’s trying to screw with me on this? You don’t really, this isn’t what you really ate for seven days, is it? They’re like,

[00:11:44] Juliet Starrett: yes. You’re like, am I on the show punked right now? Because

[00:11:46] Dr Mike T Nelson: I feel like I’m getting punk. That I was thinking it’s like, where’s the cameras?

[00:11:49] What’s going on? And then you realize that a lot of times they make good performance in spite of what they’re doing. But they can, a lot of times, shocker, they do the basics better and 90% of the time they actually get better too. But sometimes it can be a hard sell.

[00:12:03] Juliet Starrett: Yeah. I’ll tell you a quick story.

[00:12:04] I was a division, I was a rower in high school, and then I was a division one rower at Cal in college. And, I like to say nowadays that I’m like a diet survivor or a diet, diet culture survivor. But I think my first. Entry into diet culture actually happened to unfortunately coincide with being division one rower at Cal in, in the early nineties.

[00:12:26] Oh. Oh. And that was the fat-free diet. Oh no,

[00:12:29] Dr Mike T Nelson: remember that? Oh yes. Unfortunately.

[00:12:32] Juliet Starrett: I’m like, do you remember the fat-free diet? And it was interesting because back in those days there weren’t the strict rules. There are now on for NC two A athletes in terms of how many hours a week they can train.

[00:12:41] Now, of course I am not, I understand that even though there are those rules in place today, it’s often abused. Yeah. But in those days, in the early nineties, we had practice every day from five 30 to eight 30 in the morning. And then we had practice again from 3:00 PM to five in the afternoon. So we were usually on the water rowing in the morning for a couple hours.

[00:12:58] And then we were doing some kind of land training, either weights or running stadiums or running. And it was year round. We were back at school on August 20th and then our season ended at the end of May. And during that time I was like, Literally drinking, I was eating bagels because they were fat free and drinking a lot of mochas and eating red vines because they were also fat free.

[00:13:22] And I look back at my diet and I, again, I think what it shows you is how resilient humans are, right? Like the fact that I was able to manage, I was able to manage and perform at that high level and manage that load of training I think was partly cuz I was 18, between 18 and 20 years old. So at that point in your life, your ability to buffer all things from poor sleep to poor nutrition is much higher.

[00:13:43] But I still look back and I think, man, I could have been so much faster and better and recovered and felt better and so I look back on that time of my life and I think while human beings A, are amazing and B, oh my Lord, I could have been so much better.

[00:13:58] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And if people haven’t done any rowing or even just on their garter or what any type of rowing it’s absolutely abysmal and brutal.

[00:14:05] Like I looked at some of the top level, what. Some of the Scandinavian countries have done, they’ve published some of their stuff on rowing volumes and intensities and what some of their high level rowers have done. And I’m just looking at it and I’m like I would survive two days. I think maybe if that

[00:14:24] Juliet Starrett: right.

[00:14:24] And you’re like, you’re a tall, big person. You would be perfect for rowing. But it’s intense. It’s, the training is intense. And, the thing about it that I look back on, I think a lot of rowers found themselves in rowing in the way that I did. Because, I was a I tried every sport in middle school and elementary school, and I was on every single team, but I wasn’t really that great of an athlete, I’ll be honest.

[00:14:47] And I think like many rowers I found rowing. And rowing is just a, what I would describe as a suffer sport. Now, Of course there’s technique and teamwork and there’s so much beauty involved and there’s so many things I so appreciate about the sport, but like when push comes to shove in a race, it’s about who can out suffer the other.

[00:15:06] Because by that point everyone’s probably pretty on par in terms of technique and knows how to move the boat. But it is interesting cause it seems to attract a certain kind of person who likes that feeling that exercise gives you and the feeling of, training and working hard, but like ultimately maybe isn’t the most skilled athlete in terms of agility and speed and all the things that would make you good at a ball sport for example.

[00:15:29] A lot of rowers share the great ability to suffer and otherwise poor athleticism. I would say

[00:15:35] Dr Mike T Nelson: yeah, because you’re basically only doing proprioception. There’s no hand eye coordination, there’s no nothing else. And it’s a weird thing because there’s very little eccentric compared to a lot of other sports and just that.

[00:15:49] But you, but anyone who’s done it even just urometer, like you have to still create power to do it. So it’s this weird blend of you still have to create power, whether you’re do it on the water or on an erg, but then you have to do it over and over and even just, I have clients do just like a two K on their ergometer and it’s just like an all out max two K in their go.

[00:16:10] It’s just so miserable because the whole world gets to be like the size of a pin and you, on a good day, you can just barely see what your average watts is. And all you hear in your head is If you just win a couple watts, lower it, all the pain would go away.

[00:16:23] Juliet Starrett: No. I can tell you what a mental game that the ERG is, especially the two K erg.

[00:16:27] Yeah, so obviously that’s the distance they use for testing and all rowing programs. And so it’s are you know, are you in or are you out often based on that two K time. And so it really gets burned into your psychological experience of rowing. And obviously because of CrossFit, I’ve been back on the rowing machine for 20 years now and in 2015 my friend Erin Cafaro, who is a two-time Olympic gold medalist in rowing, she created this thing called the Row two K program.

[00:16:51] And it was like an eight week program that you could build up to rowing a two K. And my goal, Was to try to beat my college two K time. Oh. Because I was convinced, at that point that I was like, I think I could do it. Even though I’m in my forties and but I, again, I actually eat food now and sleep and do the, a lot of the things I didn’t do when I was a young rower.

[00:17:12] And so I was like, I could beat my own two K time. I meticulously did the entire row two K program, which was intense and a lot involved, a lot of alone time on the ERG in my garage, like listening to music and podcasts. And then when it came time to do the two k, I couldn’t do it. I was like, I can’t face it.

[00:17:30] I could literally do an 1800, I could do a 1500. And so I was in like totally epic, awesome shape, but I crumbled mentally and I was like, I can’t do, I can’t do the two K test. I got more fit and strong, but I never actually could force myself to do a real two K test again.

[00:17:48] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. That’s where I think the.

[00:17:50] The mental aspect is good and then we’ll transition to talking about the book and how this relates. But I have this rule that if I program a set distance, unless I think I’m going to be mortally injured, I have to finish it. If I’m not sure what I’m gonna do, I can do just row. If I’m not still sure, but I want a goal I’ll put in the time or something like that.

[00:18:14] But for my men mental, because otherwise it’s so easy just to stop, right? Because you’re doing the two K test, you’re three quarters of the way through, it’s absolutely horrible. There’s no way in hell you’re gonna beat your pr. And so at that point you’re just like, what am I doing? This is so stupid.

[00:18:33] I’m not even gonna get a PR out of it. But I found if I just. Never let myself have that mental out because I’m so afraid of once I start stopping that it’s just gonna be, oh, you can make it all go away right now.

[00:18:46] Juliet Starrett: You and I are the same. And let me tell you a story about Kelly and how Kelly and I are different in the way we love to train together, but we definitely have different drives and motivations, and I’m more like you, I have to do things based on some set amount of work, or I have to understand when it’s gonna end.

[00:19:03] Yes. Even if it’s 45 minutes, I can keep going, but as long as I know that I, in 45 minutes, I’m done, or, I’m, I know it’s as many rounds as possible within a set amount of time. I’m great because I think I’ve figured out as an athlete over the years how to like, make sure I’m managing, my.

[00:19:18] Like experience so that I can make it the right amount of time and putting forward the right intensity and, r p e so that I know that I can do, get the most work in the whatever amount of time I’ve set for the workout. Kelly likes to do these workouts and I think he partly does it cuz he knows how much it slays me.

[00:19:33] But he likes to do these workouts. He’s okay, we’re gonna go until you see your wattage starting to drop and then you have to stop or we’re just gonna go until you just don’t feel like you’re performing well anymore. I’m like, what is that? What kind of what are you even talking about? Who does that?

[00:19:50] It’s I, it’s funny cuz I, we just realized that, he can really operate in that sort of having this open-ended workout and focus more on okay, when does my movement quality start to degrade? Or when does my performance start to degrade? Okay, my workout’s over. And man, I, I appreciate that, but I do not do well in that environment.

[00:20:11] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. I find for anything that I have to push hard at, especially on the more endurance side, like I, I’m okay with like power drop offs, but you have to tell me it was a 32nd interval. Don’t tell me, just go as hard as you can until eh, you feel like you’re not doing it as hard anymore. I’m like what the hell’s that doesn’t that makes, am I doing and that doesn’t work for me?

[00:20:31] 60 seconds, 30 seconds. What am I doing? Tell me what to do.

[00:20:36] Juliet Starrett: Yeah, we’re the same.

[00:20:38] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And what I like about the book when I was talking, asking you about the extremes to the general population is as I was reading it, I was actually surprised that I was like, oh, like even I thought of some athletes I’d worked with who like, yeah, should have definitely sent them this book like six years ago to even like family members.

[00:20:59] Yep, they definitely need this. And I was. Kinda surprised at the range that I felt like it, it captured. So pretty much anyone is a human walking around, I think could benefit from it. And I assume that was done on purpose or did the principles just fall out that way and the principles just applied everybody.

[00:21:17] Juliet Starrett: I appreciate you said the word principles because I think, in the work you do, there are some basic principles, especially when it comes to nutrition. Like we do a lot of, yeah. Arguing about around the fringes on nutrition, but like, when push comes to shove, I think anybody who knows anything when it comes to nutrition can agree on the principles at some point, but yeah, I think this, we did do that on purpose to answer your actual question, but I think the, I’ll tell you a little bit about what the influences were. The first is what we talked about a little bit, which is working with a lot of athletes, at a very high level. And then also we owned a CrossFit gym for 16 years.

[00:21:48] So we, we contrasted that with. People who are very athletic, they’re showing up and doing CrossFit on the regular, right? So they’re still at the very athlete, they would probably describe themselves as athletes, they would use that word. So we’re working with that population, people who are into health and fitness or are serious athletes.

[00:22:03] And then simultaneously we are parents raising two kids in a suburban neighborhood in north of San Francisco. And we have occasion to become friends with a lot of our kids’. Parent, the parents of our kids’ friends and are part of this pretty small insular community of people who are professionals.

[00:22:23] A lot of people have big time jobs in advertising, law, tech, you name it. Many of them have to commute to work, obviously fewer now thanks to Covid. But what we saw in that population were a bunch of people who actually really do care a lot about their health and they wanna feel good in their bodies, but they would never use the word athlete to describe themselves and they.

[00:22:46] Often would approach us as Kelly and I describes ourselves as like a node in our community when it comes to all things health, wellness, and fitness. Even though we aren’t experts at all in everything related to health, wellness, and fitness, we’re just the people that have put us in that bucket in our neighborhood and, literally stop by, knock on our door.

[00:23:04] They’re like, Hey, I have back pain. I’m not feeling good in my body. I am thinking of trying intermittent fasting and, wait, I think I have an autoimmune disease. Should I be keto? And so we found ourselves being the node of all the questions from this sort of population of people who are thirties, forties, fifties, age range, but they all share this thing of they’re really time crunch people.

[00:23:27] They’re raising kids, they’re trying to run businesses, or they have full-time jobs, two working parents in the household. And so what we saw is that the fitness business and I think it really exploded for us over the last five years with the, the expansion of Instagram and TikTok and all of these social media channels that people were being fire hosed with information about all things, health, wellness, fitness, and they weren’t quite sure how to discern what was important, what would move the needle for them from a health standpoint.

[00:24:00] And oftentimes we’re getting sidetracked by all the bells and whistles out there in the health and fitness business from, supplements to, a lot of things that Kelly and I enjoy, and you name it. But what we saw in that population is people were either confused or they were skipping over the basics because they were playing with some of the fun tools that are available in the health and fitness business.

[00:24:20] And then we also really sat down and started to realize that the things we were programming for, the more elite people we were working with were the exact same things we were telling our neighbor who knocked on our door with back pain to do. And so we started realizing that, we like to use this phrase base camp.

[00:24:37] And it, and the backstory on that is Kelly and I went through a phase of being like obsessed with all things Everest. And we read every Everest book and watched every Everest thing on. On tv. So I think that’s why the idea of base camp makes sense to us. But I think in writing this book and conceiving of it, even before we ever put a word on page is we talked at our dinner table about how, one of the challenges with higher performers and people who describe themselves as athletes is they often skip over Basecamp.

[00:25:03] There are already trying to, hike through the Khumbu ice fall when they forgot to eat a vegetable. And then the sort of more everyday person is struggling with understanding what information is out there, not sure what to prioritize, and they’re not even at base camp. And so our idea is we need to make sure these high performers have checked the boxes at Basecamp and then.

[00:25:25] Base camp is, on which they could layer on all of this optimization and performance enhancing things they were doing and for the sort of everyday person they needed to get to base camp. And if they were just at base camp, they’re pretty good from a health standpoint, point for life. Like they can play with other some of the other toys that come out there, but ultimately they’re gonna feel good in their bodies and be durable and live as long as they can if they’re just, covering the basics and focusing on the principles.

[00:25:58] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah I love that because it, the basics gets so often skipped over and I get it. Everybody wants to see the new marketing sexy supplement. It’s on a cold plunge combo, whatever. And I like all those things. I think there’s good, I think there’s definitely a place for them, the person’s skipped over it when they’re like, Yeah.

[00:26:20] Should I buy this expensive cold plunge? And you’re like what time did you go to bed? Have you had a green thing? That’s not a skittle lately. They’re like, no, this will solve all my issues. I’m like, no, it’s not. I’m sorry. I, yeah. I wish it was like, I wish, some stuff like that would solve all your issues, but it’s not going to.

[00:26:38] If you like it and you enjoy it and you have the money to do it, great, go for it. I don’t, I like it. Yeah. I think it’s good. But the, it scares me that a lot of people are using those things not as an adjunct, but as a replacement for some of the basics.

[00:26:52] Juliet Starrett: Yeah. The other, th the other thing that influenced me is Kelly and I have had occasion, just because we’re in this business, to be able to test and try out a lot of the sort of concierge medicine platforms out there.

[00:27:02] Which I’m a huge fan of, and I think is probably ultimately where medicine is gonna go, but maybe not for 50 years. Something that is way more personalized and, based on genetics and much more extensive blood work. But I thought what was also interesting about going through a couple of those programs is that even though the base of information was genetics or blood work, the recommendations were still the same.

[00:27:25] It was okay if you wanna change your blood metrics or make sure that, you don’t you hope you don’t express the Parkinson’s gene, if you happen to have that or whatever, is all of these very simple lifestyle things. It’s like you spend tons of money on genetic testing and blood work and all this complicated stuff, which again, I think is cool.

[00:27:45] And I think it’s where medicine is going. I’m a fan of it. But ultimately, often what those physicians are counseling people on are back to these exact basic things that you’re talking to your clients about, that we’re talking to people about and built to move, which is you’ve gotta sleep and. Eat some fruits and vegetables and get up and down off the ground and do some walking and that, ultimately nobody, there’s no one out there that anyone’s watching on the internet and thinking they’re doing some secret squirrel program.

[00:28:12] Like we’re not at that point yet. There’s no injection or supplement or drug or anything that you can use in lieu of doing these basic things.

[00:28:24] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, and obviously I’m biased too. I do some assessments and work with the guys at Rapid Health and very similar. They do a lot of good stuff, a lot of very high end, expensive testing, but it’s all built on a foundation of, we’re looking at metrics for your sleep, your breathing, your exercise.

[00:28:41] Yeah. Dan’s gonna look at your blood work. Andy’s gonna look at this stuff. I’m gonna look at other stuff. Heart rate variability, respiratory, like all of it. But then at the end of the day, then we have to go through the whole process of, okay, what does this look like in an actual daily practice? And it is amazing to me at the end of all this stuff, which God takes forever, but it, you’re back to yeah, there’s some interesting supplements or some stuff we can target here, things that’ll help and, leverage points, but you’re still going to the gym, you’re still exercising.

[00:29:10] Odds are, I probably told you to go to bed earlier. Here’s a routine of breathing to do at night. It’s just it’s still putting in these really basic things because we know that the clients do them, they’re gonna get better results. And that’s the thing that they’re, paying for too.

[00:29:23] It just happens to have everything all together, but it still includes all the basics that they have to do. There’s

[00:29:28] Juliet Starrett: just no way around it. No, there’s really no way around it. And I will say in my case, like I have some weird things. Like I have this thing called the MT H F R G mutation.

[00:29:36] So I don’t process B vitamins very well, so I actually do take B vitamin supplements. Sure. And I can see a direct correlation. I take them and my B vitamin levels are higher, and if I don’t take them, they’re lower. There’s this very direct, there’s this very direct connection. But I think, that’s not as common. And again, I am a fan of supplements, if they’re done in conjunction with all the basics. And I’m definitely a fan of supplements if you have some specific issue like I have where you have a, a methylation issue. But I also think, again, sometimes it’s so easy to be like, I’m gonna take this pill and I’m gonna become superhuman.

[00:30:12] And doesn’t matter that I only slept four hours last night. And it turns out it does matter.

[00:30:17] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Talk to us about sleep. Obviously sleep is gonna be super important. What are some kinda overlooked tips or what do you see where people are dropping the ball on

[00:30:26] Juliet Starrett: sleep? One of the ways I think we are dropping the ball, and I’m gonna include you in this because you are also in the same health wellness, fitness space and is that, I think we think that people are getting the message about sleep because I think we, in our health, wellness, fitness vertical, have gotten the message that it’s important.

[00:30:44] Now, whether or not you’re doing it is one thing, but I think there that, We think everybody’s gotten the message. I don’t think

[00:30:50] Dr Mike T Nelson: so, interestingly, but I would agree with where you’re going.

[00:30:52] Juliet Starrett: Yeah. And I’ll tell you just because this has just happened, but Kelly was on the Chase Jarvis podcast and we posted a clip of the podcast.

[00:31:00] It’s probably 15 seconds long on the Ready State Instagram, and all it is Kelly saying you should sleep seven or eight hours a night. Yeah. And eight hours. He emphasized eight hours. If you wanna lose weight. Put on muscle recover from surgery. He gave these conditions on which you should probably really lean in more to the eight hour timeframe.

[00:31:18] To us, that seems so reasonable because it’s been years and years that we’ve been reading about and talking about the importance of sleep and this idea that, there, there may be like 0.001% of people who have a genetic mutation that allows them to not sleep well. But yeah, that’s basically no one.

[00:31:33] Yeah. But we, first of all, that video has 2 million views right now on the ready stage. Wow. And I don’t know how many comments, but a lot, and, people are probably pissed. They’re pissed. Like they’re so triggered that Kelly would suggest that they sleep seven night hours and how dare you, how dare he?

[00:31:50] We always think that we always tread very lightly when we talk about anything nutrition, because we know that nutrition, it becomes so connected to people’s identity. You know this better than anyone, right? Yeah. So we’re, we always think that we’re gonna step on, we think we’re gonna step on a rake when we talk about anything, nutrition.

[00:32:06] And we honestly didn’t think we were gonna step on a rake at all when we talked about sleep, because to us it’s no. There’s not a lot of, like any, there’s no dispute amongst no. The people who study science that seven or eight hours is what you need. There’s no, it’s not like nutrition where you could maybe get into some arguments about.

[00:32:23] Timing and quality and right. There may be some room for argument there, although again, the principles are probably the same. But in sleep, it’s like there’s not really any dispute by anyone who knows anything or does any research about sleep. So I think what that taught Kelly and I, is that it was just a reminder that.

[00:32:41] We still are sometimes stuck in our own little bubble, and that we have to keep, getting the message out there to a broader community. And that was one of our goals with this book. And, you and I touched on this at the beginning, but I think, we do, I think the other thing we realized Kelly and I together in the pandemic, is that again, we think maybe we’ve made ourselves better.

[00:33:00] Those of us who care about health, wellness and fitness, like we’ve made our little vertical better, we are more optimized, we’re learning more, getting better. But man, we’ve done a horrible job of bringing everybody else along on this journey and making it accessible and teaching them ways to fit it into their lives.

[00:33:16] As far as sleep’s concerned, for me, one of the biggest lessons has and this is where tracking has been interesting for me, but one of the biggest lessons that I think most people don’t realize until they get a tracker is that you actually need to be in bed. For an hour longer than you wanna sleep.

[00:33:32] So if your goal was to sleep seven hours, you actually need to be laying there for eight hours. It’s totally normal and common to lose up to an hour of sleep in what are totally normal wake cycles or needing to get up to use the restroom. And oftentimes you’re not even aware of that. You’re not conscious that you’ve been awake for those periods of time.

[00:33:48] Yeah. And you don’t learn that until you get a tracker and they’re like, what? I went to bed at 11 and I woke up at seven, I only got seven hours of sleep. You feel like, oh my God, I got robbed of an hour of sleep. So I think that’s, for me, has been one of the key learnings of, and one of the most valuable things about actually tracking data.

[00:34:04] And I also think when we were on the Mind Pump Media podcast, one of the hosts said to us that, everybody on Monday is jet lagged. And I’d never thought about it that way. I like that. Me too. And he, and I was like, oh, that makes so much sense to me because we follow these sleep routines during the week and most people are pretty consistent.

[00:34:23] Whenever they go to bed and wake up is pretty consistent, which I do think is important as the consistency. But then on the weekend, we just throw that all away and we stay up till one o’clock in the morning and then we sleep in. And then it’s no wonder that, by Sunday evening you dread go into work the next day and you wake up and maybe don’t feel your best on Monday morning.

[00:34:40] And I’d never really thought about it as being jetlagged, but that’s essentially what it is, right? You’re jet lagged from your weekend. So I think that’s been an in interesting learning for me. But yeah, for me, sleep. Is a, like a keystone habit, I think from all other good habits around our health flow, it has a cascading effect on all of our other habits.

[00:35:01] As if you’re well rested, you’re more likely to eat the next day you’re gonna have more motivation to move and exercise. You’re probably gonna be nicer to the people in your life and have better, happier relationships. And so to me it’s the top of it, everything, all these other behaviors we talk about in terms of taking care of our health flow from a good night of sleep.

[00:35:19] So for me it’s like one of the top things. I’m obsessed with my sleep. I don’t know if you are. Yes, I am. I think it’s I think it’s a natural progression as we get older because we start to really realize how much we need it. But yeah, I think we’re just out there trying to beat the drum and make sure we cast a wide enough net to people that are again, outside this bubble of health, wellness, fitness, that like it is mission critical to get that much sleep.

[00:35:42] And the other interesting thing, That I think, that I learned from Matt Walker’s book, why We Sleep, is How amazing the Brain is and Resilient because as if you get four hours of sleep, it’s like the equivalent of being drunk. You know you’re functioning the next day. But if you get four hours of sleep from multiple nights in a row, your brain actually adapts and.

[00:36:01] But it doesn’t really adapt. It adapts to the point where it’s tricking you into thinking that you’re functioning well. Like someone who got eight hours of sleep, your

[00:36:09] Dr Mike T Nelson: perception gets worse. You don’t know how sleep deprived you are.

[00:36:11] Juliet Starrett: You don’t even know. And so it’s man, it’s one of those ways where I think the human body is so amazing and it’s ability to be resilient and adapt to all of these crappy behaviors we throw at it.

[00:36:22] But to me, that one is so interesting that, you can, so it’s no wonder all these people on Instagram were triggered because they’ve been getting four or five hours of sleep. Their brain has trained them to think that’s sufficient and trained them to think that they’re productive and functioning as well as someone who got eight hours of sleep, which is like completely not true.

[00:36:42] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, that some of my friends are sleep researchers. The running joke is, they have all these people that come up to ’em and wanna, the first thing they wanna do is argue with oh, I’m, I can sleep four hours a night. And this one buddy of mine, he is cool, come into my lab. We’ll have you put you in a dark room during the day.

[00:36:59] No stimulants, no caffeine that day. I’m gonna have you do a boring, repetitive task. And we’re gonna monitor and see, what, how your brain and your reactions are. And he is the handful of people who’ve actually done that, who claim I can sleep four or five hours a night, I’m fine. He’s half of them fell asleep during the study, like 10 minutes in.

[00:37:16] Like they were just destroyed. But again, it’s the perception thing. Like the person’s not lying because to their brain and to them they think it’s entirely possible because they’re doing it. And I’ve done this with clients too. If they go on vacation, I’m like, Hey, I know you make money. Go on a party, do whatever you want.

[00:37:35] And that’s cool. But if you have time, Just go to bed. And even if you go to bed later, pull all the drapes, make it really dark. Sleep in as late as you want. The next day you’re on vacation. You don’t have anything to don’t worry about it. And the handful of people have actually done that and slept for eight to 10 hours for a week.

[00:37:50] Come back and they’re like, Oh my God. I didn’t know how little I feel so amazing now this is so crazy just from sleep. I can’t believe this,

[00:37:57] Juliet Starrett: yeah. They become, convert converts. I’ll, I actually remember when my kids were little, because I, by the way, always like to make the caveat that like, if you have little kids, like all bets are off for you, and you just do, oh, sure.

[00:38:07] You need to weather that storm and then, come back to it when they’re a little older. But I actually distinctly remember after my daughter Georgia was born the first time I slept through the night and I slept about eight hours, I literally felt like I had, I I felt that I was reborn. I’ll never forget the day.

[00:38:25] I remember I went to work and I was like so acutely like creative and aware of what was going on. I felt like I could, feel everything in this amazing way, and that was like from one night of eight hours of sleep after having a baby, yeah.

[00:38:40] Dr Mike T Nelson: It’s always amazing how you adapt. I remember after finishing my PhD, Finally being able to sleep.

[00:38:46] And I was just like, oh my God, this is what good sleep feels like. And then on the reverse of that sometimes when we travel, things get crazy. Like one or two days I’m pretty good at buffering low sleep. Conferences like day three or four, it’s ugh I’m like, oh, this is what most people probably feel like, I forgot how crappy this kind of feels.

[00:39:09] Juliet Starrett: And they feel like that all the time. Yeah. All the time. Yep. Yeah man, I’m so on The sleep. I’m on the sleep thing. One of the things I think that I’m not sure if I did really anything well as a parent, and people always say to Kelly and I like, you guys are such great parents, your kids are such nice kids.

[00:39:25] What’s the secret? And I was like talk to me when my kids are 30, because right now we’re in the middle of an experiment. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. But one thing I think that we really did a good job at was super focusing on their sleep when they were little kids.

[00:39:37] We prioritized it. We made sure they napped enough, and you hear this a ton among. Young parents, my kid just decided to stop napping. I’m like, no they didn’t. Like literally you can go into any book about kids and sleep cycles and there’s this, they all do the same thing.

[00:39:52] They like take two naps and then they go down to one nap and and I’m like, Nope, nope. Nope, your kid, isn’t that a 0.001%? Who doesn’t need a nap at one year old? Like they need a nap but they’re just not getting it. And so we really super prioritize our kids’ sleep. And now I feel proud of the fact that as teenagers, even though they’re teenagers and they definitely have a drive to stay up later, they sleep and they know, they know how to fall asleep and they can sleep long.

[00:40:20] And our little kid, Caroline, is five 10, even though I’m only five six. And I’m like, man, that’s gotta be partly cuz that kid has slept like it was her job in life as a kid and even now. So it’s important.

[00:40:32] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And your thinking about just general movement at night is so key because I remember going to a conference and.

[00:40:39] Another friend of mine’s giving a sleep talk and somebody is Hey, I thought like when your head hits the pillow, like you’re supposed to just be out and not remember anything and just wake up the next day. And she’s no, if that happens, you’re in a coma and that’s really bad. Like you shouldn’t be doing that.

[00:40:57] Yeah, exactly. But a lot of times when we tell clients that I’m perfectly guilty of doing this in the past to sleep more, they think, oh, we have to have this perfect sleep. Our head is the pillow. We’re out. And then we don’t wake up till later. It’s eh, even if that happens, if you’re latency is real short, you’re probably dramatically overtired and you need to sleep even longer.

[00:41:19] And like it shouldn’t feel like a co much shouldn’t feel like your dead. Like some little movement at night. That’s okay. You’re perfectly normal, you’ll be okay.

[00:41:27] Juliet Starrett: Yeah, Kelly worked for this physician for a while as a, he worked as a physical therapist for this physician. And this was the first time knowing him that I realized that, sleep is complicated and it’s exactly what you said.

[00:41:37] You don’t just necessarily fall asleep and sleep straight through. And in fact, most people don’t do that. And he actually had a thing, this physician where he would wake up every night at 2:00 AM and then couldn’t fall back asleep till 4:00 AM And so he said for the first five years it happened to him, he was full of anxiety about it.

[00:41:53] Oh my God, something is wrong with me. And, tried every tool and tactic and, meditation and vibrating pillows and, he was just like trying everything and was like filled with anxiety about thinking he was gonna die young because he had this weird sleep pattern. And he said one day he just realized that maybe.

[00:42:11] Or I don’t know if you realize, but he accepted this is who I am and so now I need to roll with this. And so he actually would still wake up at 2:00 AM and he would get out of bed and he would go into the living room and read for an hour and a half and then fall back asleep. And he allowed him to let go of all that anxiety around not sleeping enough and realizing that, sleep patterns, the amount of sleep we all need total is really not that different, but that sleep patterns can really vary.

[00:42:36] And he still was getting eight hours of sleep and all was said and done, but he had this little wakeful period in the middle of the night and once he just decided it was okay, he wasn’t gonna die and that he had this sort of strategy he could use, which was just to get up, leave the bed and read for an hour and a half, he could always fall back asleep and wake up the next day feeling restful.

[00:42:54] And it was just that decision he made to let go of all the anxiety around it that really changed his life because he no longer was like, oh, I didn’t sleep enough last night. And oh my God, am I gonna be able to function as a surgeon? And all that anxiety that we all know because, probably everybody listening to this has had some sleepless nights and it’s hard to put that, put that part of your brain to rest that you’re gonna be okay.

[00:43:16] If you don’t have that Exactly. Perfect. Nine hours of time where you don’t remember a thing and you’re deeply asleep. Yeah.

[00:43:23] Dr Mike T Nelson: And that’s the catch 22 of monitoring sleep. And I’m a big fan of monitoring. I have a Garmin, I’ve got a Aura watch, I’ve done much of stuff with them. Yeah. And. But you get some clients who are just like, oh, my sleep screwed.

[00:43:37] I’m like, what happened? Oh, last night my deep sleep was 17 minutes less than the night before. I’m like, you’re fine. If people saw my actual sleep scores, they’d probably be like, what’s wrong with this guy? He sleeps forever. His deep sleeps not that amazing. His rems Okay. And he moves around a lot at night.

[00:43:54] Okay. But that’s probably normal for me. And again, it’s just a device that’s monitoring it and you’re just looking at trends over time. Yeah. And it just kinda gets you in the ballpark. It’s not gonna give you every single thing. And then people get hung up on the thing that they’re trying to fix, and I’m like, Bro.

[00:44:10] What time did you go to bed? Like one in the morning. I’m like, you should just try to go to bed a little bit earlier.

[00:44:15] Juliet Starrett: Oh, you’re like half an hour. Just give it a half an hour. Yeah. Yeah. That same surfer that I mentioned that we’ve been working with was I think wearing a whoop, but was traveling for a ara.

[00:44:25] Not a, I keep thinking it’s not a race for an event. Traveling for an event was in Portugal, about to surf. Whoop. He kept waking up and his whoop was in the red every day and Oh, yeah. And he was having massive anxiety like calling Kelly and be like, oh my God. Like I’m not recovered. What do I do?

[00:44:40] Ugh. And Kelly’s take that thing off your body. Stop wearing that. Yeah. Like you are ready, you’re gonna perform well. Your body is resilient and you know you’ve gotten there within enough time to get over the worst of the jet lag, like you’re gonna be okay. And in fact, this device is causing you a level of anxiety that you do not need.

[00:44:59] And he went in and made it into the finals and did completely fine in the event, but just had to take that thing off cuz it was causing him this unnecessary anxiety.

[00:45:10] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. I get the same pushback with hrv. So in, in general, what I do, if I have time a client like gets a red and I know their average has been good.

[00:45:18] The rest of their lifestyle’s good. I’m like, they’re like, oh, what do I do? I’m like, Hey, go to the gym, see if you can get a PR today. I was like, what? You’re crazy. Why did I spend all this money on you? You’re an idiot. I’m like just try it. See what happens. There’s no rush. If it’s not there, it’s not there.

[00:45:31] It’s not a competition day. And most of the time they’re like, oh my God, I got like a huge one RM today. Why did you know that? I’m like, it’s just telling you that your sympathetic stress is higher, and a lot of times your performance will be better on that day. Now, we don’t wanna do this every single day.

[00:45:46] We don’t wanna redline the car to get to the grocery store, but then if it happens to be red the day before their competition, it’s like, Hey, you remember the one time it was red? Like you went to the gym, you got a pr. Everything was cool, right? Oh, okay. Okay.

[00:45:58] Juliet Starrett: Okay. Yeah, that’s, I love that. I love, I’m stealing that Mike.

[00:46:02] Yeah. Because I love that way of thinking about it and framing it for people, because I think you’re right. It’s just in the framing, if you understand what you’re really looking at and realize it’s a snapshot, and you’re, really the ultimate goal with any of these trackers is to get trend probation, and Yep.

[00:46:16] And honestly, I think in many cases, especially with sleep, it’s like you could wear ’em for two weeks and get all the data you need about yourself. And then, I like wearing all these trackers and I love tracking everything I do. It’s fun for me, like a hobby.

[00:46:26] But man, if it ever falls into the place of adding any anxiety to my life, like they’re going in the garbage can immediately.

[00:46:34] Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh yeah. Yeah. It’s if I went out on a bender and went to a concert and stayed out till two in the morning, I don’t expect my HRV to be great the next day. Of course it’s gonna be bad, but that’s okay.

[00:46:45] I made that. Decision that I wanted to see this concert, I wanna do this thing. And that was a higher priority than my little HRV score. And I’m not a competitive athlete. No one’s paying me big money to do tournaments, so whatever,

[00:46:55] Juliet Starrett: Yeah, exactly. You’re like middle aged athlete. Kelly, the one thing I’ve noticed and other people have, again, I’m an N of one, so this is not science, but.

[00:47:03] Obviously alcohol. Everybody who’s wearing a tracker has seen how alcohol impacts it, and I barely drink anyway. I drink like a couple of drinks a year, mostly at like weddings and celebrations. But what I’ve noticed for myself is actually if I eat really close to going to sleep, that’s actually worse on my sleep scores overall than if I have a single drink.

[00:47:24] Yeah. And again, I’m sure that varies person to person, but if I go to bed with a full stomach, it’s just a guarantee that I’m gonna have a crap night’s sleep and it’s hit or miss. If I have a drink and I’m otherwise super well rested and not stressed, I can usually weather that single drink.

[00:47:39] But something about eating right before bed does not do good things for my sleep, I’ll say.

[00:47:45] Dr Mike T Nelson: I’ve seen that like huge variability between some people can eat, go to bed, doesn’t affect ’em, like even types of alcohol make a difference. I was just talking on barbell shrugged about this and then I usually find the limits about, nobody wants to hear this either about stuff that pisses people off, but one to two drinks is usually the limit of what I’ve seen just in the data.

[00:48:04] And if you’ve had four drinks in and your H R V is still good, I’m starting to wonder if you have some other issues.

[00:48:11] Juliet Starrett: Exactly. If you’re that too accustomed to that, if you’re that tolerant to four drinks that it doesn’t impact your H R V, that’s, that’s a red flag I would say. Yeah.

[00:48:19] Dr Mike T Nelson: That.

[00:48:20] As we wrap up tell us a little bit about walking. I think that tends to be. I wouldn’t say another sore spot with general population, but I know when I first started doing, I was a weirdo back in the day, I would send people pedometers to stick on ’em to try to measure walking. And I remember when I got my first smartwatch years ago, I put a little post-it tape over it because I didn’t wanna see, what my step count was, didn’t wear it to the gym, was doing my PhD.

[00:48:45] And I took it off after a day and it said 3000, 200 steps. And I went, oh my God. Oh. And I’m like, oh yeah, I’m just hanging out at home. I was working remotely. Clients were remote and I was writing up my dissertation. So other than walking into the garage, to the gym and getting the mail, like I didn’t get much movement at all.

[00:49:08] And I had, some days were even lower than that. That for me was like a major eyeopener of Ooh, I should get outside.

[00:49:15] Juliet Starrett: Yeah, I, I will say that we, all this serious tracking of H R V and sleep and all this data that you can track, honestly, I still believe the single most important thing that you can track is your steps.

[00:49:25] Totally. Because I’m such an evangelist for getting more movement, and I think especially for people listening to this who are in the athlete set, as this book has gotten out in the world, and, as we were in the CrossFit space for a long time, so there’s been a lot of CrossFit people.

[00:49:36] I think for a, for people who describe themselves as an athlete, even if you’re a recreational athlete the movement, the walking piece has been the biggest eyeopener or blind spot we’ve seen in that group. Interesting. And I get it. I’m, I biased towards doing CrossFit style workouts now.

[00:49:50] I call it CrossFit ish because the amount of modifying I do is so significant that it’s hard for me to actually call it a CrossFit workout. But I do things that look a lot like CrossFit and I get it when you do workouts like that, whatever they are, whether it’s CrossFit or lifting or whatever intense activity you’re doing, you do feel heroic after you’ve done it.

[00:50:06] And you’ve done the thing you’re supposed to do. Everyone’s telling you all over the internet you’ve gotta exercise and you’ve gotta lift weights and you’re doing it, and you’re like, yes, I just checked the box. I’m healthy. I’m in that 1% of people who actually exercise like I’m done here, and then you go sit down for the rest of the day.

[00:50:20] And so we really started seeing this in our. In our CrossFit population. And then we’re simultaneously running a physical therapy clinic for many years inside our gym. And what we saw was all these people who’d come in with a wide array of orthopedic injuries and then once we would delve deep, we again would go back to the basics.

[00:50:36] Are you sleeping? Are you eating any vegetables? Are you doing any of these things? But one of the things we started seeing way back in 2012 is a lot of people, recreational athletes in particular were having these severe orthopedic injuries, tears so confused. What are you talking about? I’ve been running every day for this many days.

[00:50:52] But once we would delve deeper, we’d realize that these people were doing their block of training, but then literally sitting for 16 hours. Yeah. And there’s data out there that says the average American sits nine hours a day. And I call BS on that data because I don’t know when it’s from.

[00:51:05] I would guess it’s more like 14 hours a day average American. And so what we realized is that people were just doing that little, coherent one hour of training, but weren’t getting in enough total movement in their day. And there’s so many reasons why athletes in particular should care. One of them is the lymphatic system, which, you know about and is so important.

[00:51:25] It’s boots, it’s bootstrapped onto your mus, your musculature. And the way it’s basically like the garbage, the garbage disposal of your body and the way that you clear your lymphatic system is by movement. And anybody who’s flown on a plane and gotten off the plane and had cankles yes.

[00:51:42] That are the worst. They look you, you feel bad about yourself, and they look very unsightly and they just don’t feel good. But everyone has experienced kinks. Kinks are the result of sitting in a, in the same position for many hours on a flight and not moving. And the way to get rid of kinks is by walking and moving more.

[00:51:59] And it turns out that, for athletes in particular who wanna show up and be ready the next day to train hard and get the most out of their workout the next day, sitting on the ground or sitting all day at work after a hard training session is actually the worst thing you can do to prepare yourself to train the next day.

[00:52:13] You’ve gotta continue to get in all that non-exercise activity for the rest of the day. So for the athletes that in particular walking is critical to be able to clear out your lymphatic system so that you recovered from the workout you did, and you’re actually ready to show up the next day and get the most out of your workout.

[00:52:30] So it’s super important from a recovery standpoint, there’s all these other benefits. There’s. All of these mental health benefits to walking, there, one of the things we love about walking is that people often do it together. So it’s one of the, especially in this post covid world, where we realize that like a brain, what Kelly always says is like, brains aren’t brains unless they’re around other brains.

[00:52:49] And man, was that highlighted, that was highlighted so hard in the pandemic. We did not fare well. Isolating in our houses like that was not a good experiment. And one of the reasons we like walking is it’s, you get to know your neighbors and you’re outside. You get some, follow humor, benzo invites, get some sunlight on your body, you can recover from your workout.

[00:53:07] It’s really good for your mental health. It’s good for your creativity and your thinking. And there’s just this myriad of reasons why walking is so good for you. And the other thing that I think is important for the athletes that is that, they’re starting to realize now in the research, there’s actually this whole field of sedentary research now.

[00:53:24] There’s a whole like, yeah. Sub-specialty of scientists who just. Study, sedentary, anti exercise. And what they’re starting to realize and what the research is starting to point to is that honestly, the difference between people who suffer or who struggle with their weight their whole life and people who don’t is all of the non-exercise activity.

[00:53:41] And so that’s independent of the exercise, right? So I’m not saying don’t exercise. Anybody who knows me or has been around me knows it. Like I’m a fan. I do it on the regular. It’s I’m sure how I self-soothe. I have fun. I’m a nerd. I love to bike and hike and do all of it. I’m in. And I get all the reasons why we need to have muscle mass on our bodies as we age.

[00:53:59] No one needs to explain that to me. I get it. But that alone, that one hour training block turns out to just not be enough. And the way, one of the ways it’s not enough is for a lifelong of weight control. And the other thing that I would say about. Walking more and just our book in general.

[00:54:16] One of our, one of our sort of motivations in writing it the way we did is that of course anybody can go out and buy 5,000 books on diet and nutrition. Anybody can go out and buy 5,000 books on sleep and breathing and mobility. We obviously wrote one of the biggest books on mobility, but what we didn’t see out there was someone, a voice who said, okay, these are how all these behaviors interact and intertwine with one another, and here’s how you can actually fit them into a busy time crunch life.

[00:54:47] And so I think that was what we really thought was different about this book as it’s comprehensive. So it’s like the one book like you said to your family members, it’s like the one book you can hand around to people and say, Hey, if you need a starting place, start here. Or hey, if you’re an athlete and aren’t getting the gains you wanna see, make sure you’re hitting the basics here.

[00:55:04] One of the things I’ll say about walking because we just finished our conversation about sleeping, is that people don’t realize that total daily movement is really important for their sleep quality. We’ve done a bunch of work consulting with elite military units like the Delta Force and, obviously their men and women get a ton of physical activity, as military people, but I.

[00:55:25] We learned in working with the Delta force that when they have a war fighter who comes in complaining of sleep disturbances. Their first order of prescription for that person is to prescribe them 12 to 15,000 steps a day. They literally hand them the pedometer and they say, great that you are in the gym doing your X, Y, and Z super great super squirrel program, but you actually haven’t moved enough during the day to generate enough sleep pressure to fall asleep at night.

[00:55:55] So here’s the US military that has access to every drug technology. Everything, every could pick up the phone and talk to innumerable sleep researchers who could diagnose every sleep problem known to man. And isn’t it interesting that their first play is, okay, go walk 12 to 15 th steps a day, prove it to us cuz you’re gonna show us you did it.

[00:56:17] So don’t tell us you do. You’re gonna prove it to us with your step count and then do that for two weeks and then come back to us and let us know if you’re still having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. And I think that was, that particular story just shows how we realize that yes, of course sleep is important.

[00:56:33] Yes, of course walking’s important, but how all of these behaviors, connect to one another is also so important.

[00:56:40] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, totally. That reminds me, I was asking my buddy coach Cal Dietz, university of Minnesota wrote Phi Phasic training. Cause I was probably going back a couple years ago now that I said, Hey, What would be like your top super advanced like recovery tip or strategy for your advanced athletes?

[00:56:58] And Cal done a lot of crazy shit, so I’m just curious. And he is do a walk two hours after training. I was like, Really, he is it’s oh yeah it’s crazy. He is I monitored using a microwave, all this other fancy equipment. And he is that is probably like the top thing that they could do.

[00:57:12] I was like, oh, cool. Okay.

[00:57:13] Juliet Starrett: Yeah and I love hearing stories like that, right? Because it seems like, I’m really pleased to see in our space that I think, you and a lot of other people in the nutrition space and in our space, there’s still a lot of crazy talking going on in the health and fitness and wellness space, but I do think there’s this cohort of us that is starting to realize okay, these pri let’s keep talking about the principles and we might need to keep talking about the principles over and over and over again, right?

[00:57:42] But that we just need to keep saying it a thousand times if that’s how many times we have to say it. And it’s, and we keep hearing anecdotes like that where you h have the most legendary coaches and athletes in the world, and you think you’re gonna find out that they’re doing some super secret thing given access to everything in the world, and what they’re doing is walking.

[00:58:04] Yeah. I

[00:58:04] Dr Mike T Nelson: remember asking, talking to John Barardi years ago about this too, and I was asking him, I said why should people walk? Like in, in my head at the time, being an active college student, I was thinking, People are out, moving around because that was my, frame of reference.

[00:58:16] And he’s if you look at the average person who goes into a job is working in an office who exercises intensely for 45 minutes a day, their activity profile would be flat, exercise, extreme flat. I was like, oh

[00:58:32] Juliet Starrett: yeah. And there was just a 2020 study that came out that walking 8,000 steps means a 51% reduction in all cause mortality.

[00:58:41] And if you go up to 12, if you go up to 12,000 steps, that’s a 65% reduction in all co cause mortality. So the way I like to put that to people is, okay, if I could give you a drug that would. Ensure that you have a 51% less chance of dying of a bunch of gnarly diseases, would you take it? And 100% of people would be like, hell yes, I would.

[00:59:02] Oh yeah. And then we’re like, oh, that drug is walking. Yeah. And so I just, I think the other thing I’ll say on walking and what has been an influence on me is, and I’m sure you’ve read about, watched all of the, all of Dan Buttner’s stuff about the Blue Zones. Yeah. And one of the things I find so interesting about the Blue Zones is that in nobody in the Blue Zones is like putting on their tennis shoes and go into Orange Theory.

[00:59:25] Like no one, no. That’s not what they’re doing. And I’m not a Pollyanna, of course, I realize one of the reasons that people in the Blue Zones are moving so much is they’re often living more agrarian type lifestyles where they’re, carrying heavy things and working on farms. And, I’m certainly not pining for that or suggesting everyone should go buy a farm and start farming.

[00:59:41] But I think what it highlights is that, what is so important is this kind of. Natural movement and moving our body as much as we can throughout our days. And unfortunately, because we, our environments aren’t set up to encourage us to move, Kelly and I have found that, intentionally adding, walking into our lives is the best and easiest way to get all that additional move movement.

[01:00:03] And, one thing I will tell people in especially time crunch people, there’s Ugh, I don’t have time to fit in an hour walk in addition to my training. I’m so busy. But I will say, so am I. And I usually keep my training block as sacred. That’s, I love exercising. And so that’s what I keep as sacred and all these other habits I have to fit in peripherally to that. I do things like walk to work and walk to get my groceries and if I’m low on steps at the end of the night, I’ve counted, there’s a 17 minute walk to the end of my block and back at 1,750 steps.

[01:00:32] It takes me about two 20 minutes. So yes. I think as humans these days, unlike people who live in the blue zones or who have more physical jobs, like we do have to be intentional about adding in that movement into our day. But I can tell you from personal experience, it’s totally possible to get 8,000 steps in a day by just, doing a few 10 minute walks here and there and, taking an after dinner walk and just figuring out little ways where you could be like, do I actually need to drive to get my coffee right now?

[01:00:58] If that’s a 10 minute walk, like maybe I should just walk to get my coffee. I think there’s a lot of little micro decisions we can make throughout our days to really make, meet that 8,000 steps and get that 51% lowered all cause mortality number and, and it’s just, it is possible to do it in a busy time crunch life.

[01:01:17] And I am ex, I’m the example of that. Yeah.

[01:01:21] Dr Mike T Nelson: That’s why even when I created the flex diet cert, obviously I’m biased. I have a whole intervention that’s literally just neat. And it’s primarily yeah, you should go walk. Just get up in the morning. You can get, like the humor and get some sunlight in your eyes, regulate your circadian rhythm, build up some sleep pressure.

[01:01:37] Most people feel better especially now, a lot of people work from home, like even did today with one of our employees, I just said, Hey, I don’t have enough steps today. Can we just do our call and I’ll walk around? Or today, the second I walked outside, it rains. So I still have a little more walking to do tonight yet.

[01:01:52] But there are different things I think people can do. You just have to be a little bit more conscious about it. It does take some effort. But those little things throughout the day, parking farther away, all that stuff it does add up over time and does make a difference.

[01:02:06] Juliet Starrett: It does. Just, I’ll give you an example of today we had some early meetings.

[01:02:10] And so actually my morning workout, which is when I usually get my exercise and I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have time to get my workout in. And so this afternoon I’m at my office. It’s about a 45 minute walk back to my house and I told Kelly, I said, Hey, you should just go home and pick up our kid and take your last meeting of the day at home.

[01:02:27] I’m just gonna walk home. Nice. And so the sum total of my movement today is gonna be this 45 minute walk. I do, I already know it’s gonna be about 8,500 steps. So you know I’m gonna be over that sort of minimum. I’m trying to get every day of 8,000 steps. And again, it was just this like slight choice I made okay, it didn’t have time to exercise.

[01:02:43] That happens to people a lot. It happens to anybody who’s busy. I don’t have time for formal exercise, but I also am not gonna never do nothing. So I’m gonna make sure that I just. Figure out a creative way to get in some walking and, I’ll listen to a podcast or a book or, pick up the phone and call a friend I haven’t talked to.

[01:02:59] And so I, I tend to use that time and do more than one thing as well. So I’m a huge fan. I’m an evangelist of walking. Dr. Mike.

[01:03:06] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yes. Awesome. I agree. And my last comment on it is there’s some very interesting studies looking at the Amish culture about how many steps they get and they’ve done some monitoring of that.

[01:03:18] And the short version is shocker. Without technology and doing that type of lifestyle, you move a lot. And if you would see some of the food and nutrition they consume and they actually have body comp data on ’em and they’re all, for the most part, extremely lean. They don’t do formal exercise, they’re not going to the gym.

[01:03:40] And they’re eating meat pies and whatever else. It’s not like they’re trying to eat low calorie or anything like that, or they’re all doing secretly doing keto or anything. It’s the average steps, I think was like 18,000 a day. Not saying everyone needs to do that much. I’m just saying that as an example of people that just move a lot as part of their day and their culture.

[01:04:01] There’s a lot of benefits. So going from 5,000 steps to 6,000 steps a day, if you do that every day over the course of a year, that’s a huge difference compared to what you were doing before.

[01:04:12] Juliet Starrett: Yeah, and I think I just, I wanna put sort of an exclamation point on what you said, because that’s something Kelly and I talk about a lot with all of these behaviors in our book, is that.

[01:04:21] It’s really important to think about them in terms of compounding interest because I think in some ways, we’ve told people unless you can do it for a whole hour, it’s not worth it. So don’t do anything. All or nothing. But it’s all or nothing, and we’ve been saying for years around soft tissue work and mobility work, like nobody wants to mobilize.

[01:04:35] It’s not fun. What we’ve been saying to people for years is, Hey, look, if you do 10 minutes a night, even if it’s six days a week, that’s a whole hour of soft tissue work on your body in a week. And think about that over weeks and months in a lifetime. And the same is true with, nutrition as in sleep and walking.

[01:04:52] And, all of us are gonna have nights where we’re jet lagged or can’t sleep or something’s going on, or we have babies or you name it, right? But it’s again, it’s about looking at the long game in those simple, consistent habits done over the long game as compounding interest.

[01:05:07] Dr Mike T Nelson: My favorite phrase from that is from from James, clear from his atomic habits is never miss twice.

[01:05:13] Like shit’s gonna happen, right? I had that happen yesterday. Didn’t I have a freaking gym in my garage? I can probably walk eight feet and be in my garage. In my garage and train. It didn’t happen. My step count was lower than I wanted, but that’s okay. If that was like the one day out of the whole week or the whole month, I’m good.

[01:05:32] So today I already got my training in, I get to walk in the evening. It’s all good. I think, the analogy I’ve used that I might have stole this from Charles Staley, is people like you’re driving down the road, you get a flat tire, you pull the car over to the road, the normal sane person would go, man, that sucks.

[01:05:49] I got a flat tire. I’m either gonna call someone or I’m gonna figure out how to change it. It sucks, but I’ll get back on the road and get, back on with my day. Like some of the crazy people in fitness and nutrition take the knife out and slash all three other tires and go, I got four flat tires.

[01:06:03] Now I’m just completely screwed. It’s yeah, okay. Like stuff will happen. Just don’t make it worse. Because we all know the people who I get really nervous if someone is like a hundred percent compliant with everything. I tell them, I’m like, you need to back off, have a life like 80, 90%.

[01:06:19] Even if you’re a high level athlete, you’re gonna be good because I know what’s coming. Something’s gonna happen and it’s gonna throw ’em off. And when they’re off, they’re way off. They’re completely off, they’re off, they’re completely off. They’re slashing the other three tires, they’re in the ditch. Like I love

[01:06:34] Juliet Starrett: that.

[01:06:34] I’ve actually heard that James clear quote before, but thank you for bringing it back into my mind cuz I love that. Never missed twice, exactly. Yeah.

[01:06:42] Dr Mike T Nelson: And if you do that so important, you’re good. You’re gonna do So where do people find your book?

[01:06:46] Juliet Starrett: It’s available in pretty much every bookstore and on Amazon.

[01:06:49] Of course, if you wanna learn more about it, you can go to built to move.com. We also have a free 21 Day Built to Move challenge, and it’s free for anyone who signs up. It’s great if you have the book, you’ll get more outta the challenge if you actually own the book and do it concurrently with the book.

[01:07:04] But it, you don’t actually have to have the book to be able to sign up for free. And the goal there is to bring to life some of the vital signs and practices we recommend in the book and the form of video content. And also help you figure out and show you that you can actually fit a lot of these habits into a, again, a busy time crunch life.

[01:07:22] So build to move.com. You can find me on Instagram at Juliet Star.

[01:07:27] Dr Mike T Nelson: Awesome. Thank you so much and thank you so much for writing the book. I know I’m in the process of working on a couple and. People look at it and they go, oh, that’s cool. You wrote a book. I’m like, it’s a pain in the ass.

[01:07:39] Juliet Starrett: Yeah.

[01:07:39] You’re it almost killed me. But thank you.

[01:07:41] Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, thank you so much. So thank you so much for doing it and it’s it’s really good. I would highly recommend everyone just to pick it up if you need just a kind of, a bible for just movement to be a better human. Like definitely get it.

[01:07:53] It’s well worth the money and thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

[01:07:57] [01:07:57] Dr Mike T Nelson: Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Really appreciate it. Huge thanks to Juliet Starrett for the wonderful conversation. Always enjoy learning from her. And if you haven’t checked out their book yet, built to Move. I highly recommend it. You can get it. It’s not very expensive.

[01:08:15] And as I mentioned in the podcast, one of the things that I really enjoyed about it is I felt like I could send it to any one of my more advanced athletes or just my parents or family and friends. And I think all of ’em would get a lot out of it. Which is not something you can say for a lot of books.

[01:08:34] It’s actually, in my opinion, quite tricky to write for that wide range of an audience. But they pulled it off. So we’ll have a link to the book below. They don’t make any money off of the book sales or anything like that. But they did a fantastic job with it, really enjoyed it. And if you want more information about what I’m up to, you can opt into my Insiders newsletter.

[01:08:54] Go to miketnelson.com and there you’ll be able to opt in to the newsletter. That’s where vast majority of my content and everything goes out. Currently. And send me a note. Say you heard me on the newsletter, you subscribed, and I’ll send you a free cool gift. So thanks again, Juliet stt, thank you for listening to the podcast.

[01:09:17] Really appreciate it. If you know someone who may benefit from this conversation please forward the podcast to them. If you wanna see me present in person along with Dr. Kelly stir Dan, John, Brett Bartholomew, and a whole bunch of other superstars we’ll be doing the Northeast Coaches Summit.

[01:09:38] This will be October 21st, 22nd, 2023 Cross for Milford. In Milford, Connecticut. We’ll put a link down here below. This is via Conquer Athlete, or you can go to just conquer athlete.com/necs. I’ll take you directly to the page. Thank you so much for listening. Really appreciate it, and hope to hear from you via the newsletter.

[01:10:07] Thank you for listening. Talk to you all next week.

[01:10:10] OUTTAKES

[01:10:10] Outtakes.

[01:10:13] Juliet Starrett: So before we start, I have to tell you because I know you’re into heavy metal. That we have a videographer who works for us now named Mike, who is, we call him a cinematographer just cuz we prefer that as a title.

[01:10:26] But he came to us having spent his entire career filming heavy metal videos. Oh wow. And he is like super cool and he has the craziest stories. And who was he in the minivan with the other day? Oh. Judas Priest. So he was filming something with Judas Priest. It wasn’t him, it was someone in the band of Judas Priest.

[01:10:47] But anyway, he’s driving around like a month ago in his minivan with the guy from Judas Priest and they’re listening to Steely Dan and the Judas Priest guy Kelly, by the way, his number one favorite band is Steely Dan. Okay. And so anyway, they were, he our cinematographer guy. Mike is this is an altered experience.

[01:11:05] He’s I’m in my minivan driving around with the guitarist from Judas Priest listening to Steely Dan and talking about what a great band, steely Dan is like altered experience. So anyway, I know you’re a heavy metal person, so I thought you’d appreciate that.

[01:11:19] Dr Mike T Nelson: That’s crazy. I think I won’t bore you if I can’t find it right away.

[01:11:23] Oh yeah. Here it’s, I have a signed book from Rob Halford of Judis Priest actually.

[01:11:31] Juliet Starrett: Oh, that’s amazing. I love it. I love it. I love it. Yeah. So if you ever come out here if you ever find yourself in the Bay Area, you have to come up and hang out with us. And then you can go deep with Mike on all things heavy metal.

[01:11:48] Dr Mike T Nelson: That’d be fun. That’s like the two things I, for whatever reason, can memorize pretty fast, is any facts about music that I like. That’s about it. The rest is you have to work at trying to

[01:12:02] Juliet Starrett: memorize. If you have nothing better to do after this, type in Mike Sloat, S L O A t on YouTube, cuz he’s also has a band and he’s a luthier.

[01:12:13] But anyway, he has some really funny videos that he’s in. And then, anyway you would appreciate it. There’s not that many people that I know that would but you would.

[01:12:21] Dr Mike T Nelson: No. Mike Slo. S l o t is that right? S l o a t. S l o A T. Oh, that’s cool. I love it. That’s awesome. Yeah. Funny, huh?