Kelly Starrett - Disrupting The Coaching Profession

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness industry podcast for over three years and running. I am your host, Eric Malzone, and I have the absolute pleasure of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the extremely fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. Please stop by futurefitness.co to subscribe and learn more. To live your healthiest, longest life possible, you need to understand what's going on inside your body. People age at different speeds, and generic annual blood work doesn't properly evaluate your biological age, but Insight Tracker does. Insight Tracker is a truly personalized nutrition and performance system designed to extend your health span and slow down the aging process. Created by leading scientists in aging, genetics, and biometrics, Insight Tracker analyzes your blood, DNA, and fitness tracking data to identify where you're optimized and where you're not. You'll get a daily action plan with personalized guidance on the right exercise, nutrition, and supplementation for your body. Add InterAge 2.0 to any plan to calculate your true biological age and see how you're aging from the inside out. For a limited time, get 20% off the entire Insight Tracker store. Just go to insight tracker.com forward slash future. That's insight tracker.com forward slash future. All right, we are live. I have Kelly Starrett, aka K Star, aka the Supple Leopard, aka the Mwad Deeb of Mobility. And I just made that one up. Kelly, welcome, welcome back, man.

Always a pleasure to hang out with you. Thank you so much. I can't wait to see what we're gonna get up to today, you know?

Yeah, it's gonna be a lot of fun. And you know what? At risk of losing half my audience right off the bat, what did you think about the new Dune movie? Because we haven't talked about it. It came out about a year and a half ago. Scale one to ten. What would you rate it?

Oh, ten for sure. How do you do that? Someone, one of my friends just sent me a first edition copy of the Dune book by Frank Herbert. Wow, you know, it's like 1968 or 1965. And what's interesting in there, and this is notable, hang on, hang in there with me, everyone, if you're not a Dune fan, is in there, I knew he lived in San Francisco, and he wrote Dune in a little house in Petrero Hill. Not that you should know where your author wrote his favorite book or your favorite book. That's creepy. But it says he resides in Fairfax, which is as the crow flies, like 800 meters from me. So it's over this little hill next to us. And I'm like, am I gonna get on my bike and try to find Frank Herbert's house? Yes, I am. And I can't seem to find his actual address in Fairfax. I know the street he was on, but like the greatest my, you know, one of my you know heroes in terms of thinking critically about institutions, institutionalism, you know, the all of the the tropes that Dune brings up, you know, lived, you know, literally like five minutes from me. And I had no idea that you know he'd actually moved to Fairfax. So anyway, shout out to my friends who sent me that book. And uh I'm gonna get on my bike and uh like like Goonies, go find out the treasure.

That sounds like a wonderful adventure, Kelly. Well, you know, like we were discussing prior to this, this is uh this will be episode number 300 for me, right, on this podcast. Man, it's been five years I've been doing this, and I just started because I was curious and want to talk to some friends about some stuff and fitness and see where this whole uh this whole industry is going and what people's thoughts and ideas were. And, you know, I just kept doing it because I really enjoy it. And you, you know, I would say probably when I started my CrossFit journey back in 08, 09, you were just getting started really with your content journey. And here we are 13, 14 years later. And I want to talk about that because I I think it takes a lot to build a base of content like you have, right? And it takes a lot of consistency, a lot of doing things when you don't really want to do it, a lot of coming up with ideas when they may be coming short, and then a lot of times just questioning like, why the hell am I doing this? Right. So I I would be curious just to get your thoughts on what has your content journey been like, and give us some details and we can navigate through that conversation neatly.

And I'll add a thick skin and I'll add, you know, shifting sands where the platform you're on doesn't purport to actually do what you thought it was doing, and the reasons you're doing it have changed. And it takes an order of magnitude, more sophistication, and people to support you. And you have to play this game across five platforms, not Twitter and YouTube, you know. So, you know, I think we started writing for our blog for our gym in about 2005, 2004-2005. So it was a picture, it was it was on blog spot, and you can still go and actually see it. The the bones, the you know, the the remnants of our early thing at San Francisco CrossFit, like dot blogspot.com. These free blog spots. And it was really a place for us to be hyper local. We didn't write anything else except for our members. We took pictures of our members, we talked a little bit about technique, we talked about what we were understanding, and you can really see our nascent understanding what we were doing. And you can kind of see the hero's journey, the humble beginnings. And, you know, when we started making content in earnest for you know the Ready State, which was formerly Mobility Wad, in 2010 is when I decided that I would put up a video a day for a year. And I really did that for my patients and for the athletes who are coming to see me because I needed to serve them and I needed them to have base understanding and have done some homework so they didn't waste their time with me. Because people were flying in and I was beginning to see a lot of you know, world champions, and I was like, hey, it's not a good use of your time to come here for me to tell you your quads are stiff and your knee is missing 50% of its range of motion. I have techniques, but have you even taken a crack at this yourself? Like you can't extend your hip. You have no internal rotation. Like you don't know how to stiffen or organize or squeeze your butt when it matters. So we set up an intention to just make a video a day to serve those people. And let me just remind everyone back in 2010 when we started in earnest on the mobility project, the iPhone did not have a video camera. That's like that, that's a real different thing. That means I had to film it and then download it and then upload it, and I take my phone off the hook and put it in the crate. No, I didn't do that, but that's really a different thing. The other thing that your phone didn't do back then was it didn't automatically publish to YouTube. It didn't publish to Twitter. You couldn't take any of the media on your phone and put it in the internet. So one of the things that happened during this project is I was already in the mindset of I'm gonna make this content on a camera, I'm gonna download it, upload it, write a little paragraph. And I had to write something about it every day for the kind of the blog because our original mobility project was a blog, Mobility Wad, but also then they got published to YouTube. And they got published, we put them on YouTube as almost a side effect. I didn't title them. One point a company that we were working with was trying to help us sort through the problems that we were running into, which is I basically had created like a porn site, an exercise porn site. And there was no architecture in the porn site. In fact, it was my wife when she built our first website, was like, you know, she went there with her genius architect brother, and they were like, Well, who manages large amounts of categorized information? And the only other people who were doing it was porn. So we looked at the porn architecture and we were like, oh, okay, here's how they're doing this. Isn't that interesting? I mean, like, once again, like porn pornography is like VHS, because they chose VHS, everyone's on VHS because they chose, you know, you know, the CD, a certain CD, you know, that that's why we weren't on, you know, the discs, certain discs. So we were the first kind of company in there making content, organizing content. And then one of the interesting things about that is we became one of the very first companies to actually go Web 2.0 to actually ask people to pay for content because it was costing us about $60,000 a year to help people to manage. And suddenly we're like, whoa, are we like what are we doing? You know? So one of the things that happens is that if you start to view, you know, there's an idea that like write a poem a day for a year. And pretty soon you start composing poems in your head about things you see. And it's a and it's a habit where you begin to just see the world and you're like, oh, isn't that interesting? Or I noticed that, or that'll make an interesting piece of pose, prose. And when we started making content around that, but suddenly could publish to YouTube, suddenly could film and publish in one step, we were able to make art and coaching and music and entertainment in one step. And we were transparent for the first time in really real time. If I saw something, I could make a video about it and show up and explain it to the next day. And our model has always been fundamentally based on this idea of test, retest, and share. So, yes, a model, any model should be observable, measurable, and repeatable. You know, that's what science is, right? That we're trying to come up with pattern induction through large data sets. But the way I worked in my coaching career was I would go work with coaches and they teach me something, I'd try it and then iterate on it and feed that back. And we were kind of in this constant feedback loop. And that's what we set out to do. And we set out to say, hey, look, let's see if we can raise the bar. And I didn't realize initially how subversive it really was. We set out to just improve the ball, make coaches a little more effective, and actually have athletes be a little bit more in control and shifting that burden and low-side of control to the athlete. Hey, you need to be prepared for your training. You can't just show up and be like, warm me up, teach me all the skills, like and take care of my body and warm me down and feed me in this time and help me down regulate. Like, I have an hour to do that. We're gonna need to deadlift and warm up and learn some skills and teach and program. And so I needed to shift that burden. And one of the things that we saw that's starting to happen is that we really made a case for people being able to take care of themselves and to do the soft tissue work and even do some very complicated, seemingly heretofore complex behaviors around mobilizing joints or taking a crack at, you know, working on things like your pelvic floor yourself. And what ended up happening, that's highly disruptive because what we did was we pulled out a lot of low-hanging fruit that experts were making their money on. You would go see a physical therapist because you were injured. And I was like, well, is there something we could have done before you had so much pain you had to take a day off from work and go in because you like to deadlift or run? So that was really the beginning of this thing. And now, you know, forward on, I mean, it's thousands of pieces of content. I I just, you know, I what I realized is that in a sh I used to make 10 and 15 minute videos, and then something happened where people were like, I don't want to watch that. And then it was like a three-minute video, and then we were like, okay, and then now it really like the most viewed TikTok videos are 11 seconds. So how do I show a complex systems thinking, systems approach to some very potentially complex human interaction without well, I have to do that over and over and over in this micro-learning environment. So if you if you went to the Ready State right now, one of the things I put up, I think last week was a five-part series about dealing with a high hamstring tendinopathy, which is such a pain in the butt. If you've ever had that, I mean, literally, it is so gnarly. And I talk about lifestyle and I talk about you know health, and I talk about desensitization and restoration of the position and working and all the some potential mechanisms for that. And I had to do that. I'd take all of that information, boil it down to these one-minute sound bites to give the, and for me, I'm like, wow, that's a really high degree of difficulty. And then someone's like, Well, can you do that for your quad ligament? Or can you do that? Does this work on a different tendon? I'm like, okay, tendons are totally different, obviously. Every tendon is so special. And then people are like, you know, what about X? And I'm like, well, did you see the video before, or the video before that, or the video before that? Like, we are. And so I think what's happened now in our content journey is that we'll continue to try to teach, but maybe we're misusing the platform. I don't think these platforms are for teaching anymore. I think they're for outrage and entertainment, or, you know, showing off your abs or cat videos, or you know, I love it. I love I, you know, peruse a lot of kayaking videos, a lot of floods. There's a lot of flooding, and then in my in my feed, and lots of recipes. And though I feel like it's a perfect thing for that, but it's a really difficult thing to explain why the onion does what it does in the pan. It's easier to uh just show it. So we're still coming to grips, and it turns out maybe YouTube is people are going along again, and then also maybe books are where it's at.

Yeah, isn't that funny? It kind of comes back full circle. And oh man, it it reminds me, uh I you're probably familiar with this, the uh Jerry Seinfeld quote he was interviewed years ago, you know, his his process, right? And I look at all these creatives and I'm always inspired, I always pick up something from different people. But his thing was never break the chain, right? Write a joke every day. That was the way he went through his process, right? And I think that's incredibly important for when you're getting started. Like you you said in the beginning, you're like, I'm gonna create a video every day for a year, right? When you're doing that, and I I think this is really important for people who are like, well, should I start creating content? And I always tell people, yes, and pick a you should everybody, I think everybody should create content. Not everybody, but every, you know, most people who who want to make an impact and and start building an audience and see the value in that, you know, you gotta pick a cadence that you know you can pull off for at least a year. Sometimes I even say five. Like podcasting to me is a five-year project. Oh, I like nowadays because it's it's just so many. So how how did you, you know, how did you pick that cadence? And what do you say to people who may be like, Jesus, Kelly, you want me to do one one every day? Like, is that is that necessary to do that?

Yeah, I a couple ideas. One is that the glacial pace is the breakneck pace. So if you want to move your community, and really I again, let me just say that I think you should focus on hyperlocal. You should serve your community. If you run a triathlon club, you know, you run a some kind of book club, something like make it for your friends. You know, you're speak to the 10 people in your circle and they will share it and make it so meaningful and valuable to those people that you care about the most. That's enough. That is why you're doing it, you know. And if it's really good stuff, people will share it. And there's no magic algorithm. Like, how do I get a viral video? Like, we've had some viral videos. Let me tell you about my most viral video. This is a good example. It turns out it's me using a Star Wars drone to pull the tooth out of one of my kids. Super viral. It even got licensed. It's on Today's show, it's on the front page of Reddit, it's on Good Morning America, it's on, like it literally is on, you know, our daughter made like a thousand pounds sterling from it. That's my most successful video. It's just me ripping a tooth out with a little drone from Star Wars. And not any of the things we intended to, you know? And so some of this is, man, it's really cool if you catch lightning in a bottle, but what you'll find out is no one thing changes anything. That's the problem. You think that if I just have the right content and I hack the algorithm, well, what are you gonna do tomorrow? What are you gonna do the day after that? And you know, like people like to give us ideas for videos. I'm like, cool, that's three ideas. Like, I have thousands of ideas I need to get down on paper, and I need content ideas for thousands more. So some of this is you just need to find your voice and serve your people, and that's enough. Stop, stop trying to think at a national level or a global level. You don't need that audience, you need the audience that you are loving. You know, it turns out, as you said, you know, if it's a five-year project, no one thing changes everything. Everything changes the one thing. So you need to write a little bit about it and you need to serve your friends and engage and show your associations. You know, one of the reasons we started our little podcast, and like we're not a podcast company, but we have a podcast because we wanted to show our community our super rad friends. We just have our friends on, and the people were like, How do you know what you know, Kelly? I'm like, well, let me introduce you to my super rock star, brilliant friends. And, you know, Juliet's like, hey, we should tell people about how we know what we know and just let be curious. We're, you know, that's what we're trying to do. So suddenly you have created an ecosystem around that thing. And then maybe, maybe that ends up being a side hustle, or at least at the very least, it's a passion and something you really care about. Because if you're going to be on that cadence of doing something once a week or every other week or every other day, you have to stay on it. I mean, I think we there are coaches who used to work for us who are like, well, I can do what you can do. And we're like, cool, do it. And then they get so hot, and like for a week, they're the they're the, you know, they're they just are the cats meow, and then there's they get tired, or it's really hard, or something came up, or you know, they abandon it and they come back, and then they're thinking, you know, and man, it is really, really tricky to serve an audience forever, and it's not for everyone. So start with the intention of don't be for everyone, be for you and your friends and your your community and be us be a service. I think if you're putting the my notoriety and my success as your goal, that's the wrong goal. The goal is to aggregate information and show your associations and and you know, that's really what you should be doing with this thing and having a great time. Because if you're not amused and if your friends aren't amused, no one's gonna be amused.

That's great advice. And it reminds me, we were joking about how many podcasts there are now. I don't know, two, three million now, something like that on Apple. And the the overwhelming, overwhelming majority of them have like less than five episodes, which means that people get really hot, right? And it bothers me because there's so many great names of podcasts that were taken and never run with. And that's the only thing that annoys me. I mean, I get it. It's it takes it takes a while. And you know, now that we're 17 years later, is it easier for you to create content to come up with ideas, or do you feel like you've kind of exhausted it all, or do you have this constant feedback with your audience that you don't even have to worry about ideas, you just pick the ones that you really like and run with?

Well, you know, it's it's a really good question. So the first aspect of that is I see the world in a way, and I'm trying to explain that to myself and to the people I work with, right? Trying to make it easier for them. So the nature of dialogue with someone on the inner sphere, there's you know, I pay attention. I'm really I'm a coach. I love to coach. I'm obsessed with coaches. I watch what my friends are teaching. One of my good friends right now is the CEO of Altus Track and Field. He's one of the premier, premier and preeminent speed coaches in the world. He's coached Olympic silver medalists in a hundred, like he is the he's the shiz. He happens to be in Arsenal at Manchester, at Crystal Palace, talking about acceleration for soccer athletes, something about which I know nothing. I don't know how to train a soccer athlete to have better sprint mechanics. So everything he puts up, I'm like, oh, he's talking to me. He's doing me a service. He's being as transparent as he can be. So, on the one hand, I am a big fan of talking about what's interested to you and keep doing that. As something comes up, I think the transparency is really great. I think if you can, people can get to know you and see your process. I think it's one of the things that drives me crazy about strength and conditioning and fitness on the internet is that you don't see the dirty, you don't see the broken eggs, you don't see the dirty laundry, you can't see process. You know, I can't even tell if you're an expert or not. You're just in someone else's gym, aiming your phone at you, shouting at the world, telling everyone else they're crap. And there's a couple things that you'll notice is that the best in the world never swoop and poop. They don't talk shit, they don't look down, they don't poke down, they don't punch down. And people who are doing that are trying to get attention. And that it might be rightfully so. And even the guise of research has come around, and people are using research now to beat up other people instead of pointing to their own thing, right? And so one of the things that I think is useful for everyone to keep in mind is something I heard Jay-Z say. And you may have heard me say this before, but he was being interviewed by Oprah, and she said, What's the definition of excellence? And he said, performing at a high level for a long time. So the most important thing you can do if you're making content is start, and you'll watch the videos back. I had to record myself as a young physio student doing subjective examinations with new patients. So, you know, I'm a young physio kid working through, talking to some 70-year-old Cantonese grandma through an interpreter, and I had to listen painfully back for the whole hour about how would I ask differently? What is my meta process? I had to videotape interviews of myself interviewing patients in physical therapy school so I could become a better interviewer, a better listener, a better be meta-aware. So, on the one hand, I'm constantly watching how people teach. I'm obsessed with that. I'm obsessed with the communication, I'm obsessed with, you know, asking better questions and being more curious. But one of the things that I think came up in that interview with Jay-Z was that he said, you know, how do you she said, How do you define excellence? He said, performing at a high level for a long time. So you're gonna not start at a high level, but you're gonna need to practice and practice and practice and practice and practice. But something else he said is don't confuse excellence with getting hot. This is really important because you just mentioned it is that you'll see people get super hot and you're like, Well, what about me? Like, what do I've been doing? They're not better than me. So, why do they get hot? And you can really be jealous and it can be disheartening. And what you need to recognize is, man, it's so awesome to get hot and it feels so good. And then you don't get hot anymore, and everyone forgets about you, and you don't have anything to say. And when someone is hot and watch them and enjoy the hotness on their behalf, like high-five of them psychologically. Dude, you're killing it. Look how popular they are. I'll see you in two years. I'll see you in five years. And there are so many people who came after us and tried to tear us down or use us or, you know, like we'll cherry pick a single video, a single picture from a 500-page textbook that has 10,000 photos in it, and they'll be like, see, you know, and I'm like, wow, that textbook is 13 years old. And, you know, I've been making this content, and I'm so glad you found that as a useful spark for you. But that is not the same thing as excellence. And you can make your case better and better and better. And don't panic when someone gets hot around you. They're just having a moment of success, and that's super cool. That is not the same thing as the reason you're doing it. And I think, you know, the barrier to entry is so low now. It used to be much higher higher, but now you can just have a podcast. Like you have a you have a MacBook and some headphones, and like you're boom, Zencaster, let's let's party. Everyone does this because they're on Zoom all day long, so they think they can just take the next step. Or man, I watch the videos my kids make on TikTok in 10 seconds, clowning me, clowning themselves, clowning their friends. And I'm like, wow, that's I don't need a video editor. I just need my kid to edit some TikTok videos. So in short, you know, serve, hyper-serve your community and be prepared to buckle in. And if you don't think you've got what it takes to just grind away and do your best, you don't have to do it. Just be a consumer. I think that's the other mistake is that everyone thinks they want to be the lead singer of the band. And that's not for everyone. And not everyone sets up with the same communication goals, same excellent goals. You know, and so as you're as you're looking, we want to see dirty laundry, we want to see transparency, I want to see your associations. And if you're shouting at someone else on the internet, I'm probably gonna unfollow you because at this point in my career, I'm like, oh, I know what that is. You don't know what to talk about, so you're gonna shit talk.

Yeah. Oh man, great advice. So I'm gonna shift slightly and talk about the coaching industry. There, there's very few, when I think of coaching, because at heart, a part of me is still a coach, right? I don't do it anymore in practice, but I I still have to coach. I like to coach business owners. I, against my wife's wishes, I randomly coach someone at the gym when I see them moving a certain way. You know, so I always look, and I have certain people that in my mind are kind of like my my coach voice, the people that, you know, James Fitzgerald, you're one of them. A couple others, you know, who I just really hold high as far as the coaching profession because there's you're still to this day pushing forward. So actually, let me start with that. Who who are those voices in your head? Do you have those people who you've seen as like these are some of the biggest influences in my coaching career along the way? And I'm sure you have a ton of them, but maybe just some that come to mind immediately.

Well, you know, I I always wanted a mentor. Like, let me just find a mentor and tuck in, you know? And unfortunately that didn't work. Proximity, et cetera, et cetera. And when I was paddling on the U.S. community kayak team, we had an there's a national team coach and we had our local coach, but my partner and I would travel around and go work with as any coach that would see us, you know, and so we we really created and we also self-coached. We had the the athletes we trained with would coach each other. The feedback loop was constant. And so one of the things that happens, and I can speak to my crosshagin that was so miraculous, is that we were constantly in a coaching feedback loop where we would give each other feedback about the classes that we taught, or I really like that you did that, or man, that didn't look like it worked. No, it didn't, you know, and it was there was no ego involved. It was just like, how do we iterate? What are you thinking about? Hey, how did you solve that problem? And so we always worked in that model at the gym around test, retest, share, feedback, iterate. So all coaches are my coaches. And I've, you know, I even today I probably spend too much time on the internet looking at how people are coaching and why they're making exercise selections and trying to understand what people are doing. That really is the key. I don't, you know, you know, that old trope, like, don't seek what the master sought, seek what they were seeking. You know, and I'm like, well, that's a bunch of shit. But it turns out when you look at someone coaching or or solving a problem, you're like, what problem is this person trying to solve? And then you can disagree with that. That doesn't make that person a fool. It just means that, hey, I would might think, or maybe you don't understand what they're trying to solve, or you're thinking, hey, I see that that's a cool solution, but it doesn't fit into a schema and it's a dead end. And, you know, I think that's what we're seeing a lot on the internet, for example, and coaching is that there are, you know, people, there's just exercise ADD and entertainment. Where now I'm, you know, I'm doing straight leg raise, you know, you know, hip flexor strengthening, and then that goes away for a while. And then it's all about strengthening your tip, and then that goes away for a while. And then, you know, so things have their moment, but it's it's trickier to figure out how that goes into a coach at hole. With that being said, there absolutely are world-class coaches out there who are showing you how to coach and talking about coaching and transparency. One of the most unheralded aspects of this is communication. How do you talk with the people that you're interacting with? How do you manage all these psychoemotional components to this? My mom's a psychologist, has been a professor her whole life. I was a single parent, single child of a single parent working professor. So I sat in my mom's lecture halls and she was often professor of the year at big universities, and she'd have this pack lectures, and she was really a dynamic teacher. I started teaching when I was 14. That's when I first got my first official paid teaching job when I was teaching whitewater kayaking to adults. So I watched a lot and practiced a lot on how to teach. And I had a lot of formal instruction in how to teach also. And one of the things then that that leaves me open to is that someone like Brett Bartholomew of Conscious Coaching fame is really saying, hey, you have enough tactics, but you don't know how to read the room, you don't know how to be inclusive, you don't know how to give feedback, you don't know how to take feedback, you don't, you know, how are you going to be a better communicator? And there are a lot of these skills. I'm not even going to call them soft skills, that's horse shit. Let's call them vital skills that we don't talk about. Like if you can't capture an attention of a class or a client and you know, give them unconditional positive regard and feedback that's appropriate and timely and build progressions and regressions, well, that's how you teach any skill. So suddenly stop talking about deadlifting or bench press or anything else and look at how the best people in the world are teaching anything. And suddenly you have these really important, you know, thinkers and signposts about how to be a more effective communicator. If we peel back a second later, you know, for me, my meager skill set is that I am obsessed with pattern recognition and I'm obsessed with understanding how things relate to each other. That is my like literally my only skill set. And I'm really good at identifying what are excellent cookies and not excellent cookies. But that one piece is means that that's how I conceive the world. And when when I'm working or teaching or thinking, I need to see how it all relates and how it all is connected. And as soon as you take this 30,000-foot view of these things, suddenly you realize, oh, the human brain is the most complicated structure in the universe, the most sophisticated structure in the universe. We have trillions of neural connections because it's all about connecting to people. And suddenly, if you're I'm in the conscious coaching alliance and I see someone talking about doing a drill with a bunch of adults, and they're like, name the five best coaches in your life. And the people do that, and they're like, okay, break down their skills. And there's no technical application skill. There's no, they're really good at talking about foot pressure. It's all about how did you make me feel? Did you believe in me? Did you give me un cause of regard? Did you help me solve my that's all psychoemotional relationships? So ultimately, why are we strength training so you can have abs for Instagram? No, no. You're engaged in this so you can be part of a community, feel connected to other people, and theoretically take that fitness back into the world and actually do something with it, like being a bike club or you know, being a deadlift gang or whatever it is you're doing. But we've lost why we're doing this and we've made it so hyper complex, and we've and and we're arguing about what is the right foot pressure, and you know, is this the right cue for this thing? And at some point you're like, whoa, I think we're missing what it's about, which is ultimately trying to take high-performance environments, that's what strength and conditioning is, the highest levels, which where I work, and transmuting those lessons to transform my community and my society. That is what Eo Wilson defined as the highest calling of science, transform the humanities through hard science. And you may not agree with that. You may think pure science is good for pure science's sake, but I think the reason we try to do science is it tries to make better society and better community and better humans. And for me, that's why strength and conditioning matters so much and why high performance environments, the work I do with the Niners gives me a lot of insight into how we can help high schools and colleges create more durable people who come out of sport intact. So that's where I want to make sure that we're never losing the focus. And this podcast that you have may be the hour once a week or every other week, or whenever it comes out, where people are getting some unconditional positive regard, they're being exposed, they're expanding their mindset. And suddenly what we realized, hold on, when we looked at Khan Academy, one of the reasons the Khan Academy was so effective is that people could study, pause, listen back, do it in a less formal environment where there are less risk. Well, that's good, but then you need to take that forward and actually go try those things in the world. It's not enough to just, you know, consume, consume, consume. You need to go act afterwards. And that's that's why ultimately this whole thing is important because it's how humans are trying to help other humans.

Yeah, that's beautiful, man. It reminds me, I I there's less similarities to what you're saying and what kind of is if I had a religion, it'd be stoic philosophy, right? And it's you it's not enough just to read the philosophy, right? You you have to go out and practice it in real life, which is the hard part. And if anyone knows anything about stoicism, like you're brutal on yourself if you're if you follow Stoic philosophy. It's not easy, right? You're you're really honing how you interact with other people and the world around you and your consciousness and your death and all of these things, right? And it's and that's what's beautiful about coaching, is there's so many philosophies that are so nuanced that goes into being a Greek coach. At the end of the day, you're you're influencing people, right? That that's what you're doing in humanity at a greater level. So it's it's it's a great way to approach it. And I always really appreciate how different coaches have philosophy. Because if you if you're a coach, you don't have a philosophy yet about how you go about things, then you're probably going to get one if you stay on the path, you just don't know what it is yet.

That's that's very true. And you know, you need to inject your personality into it. Because if you're putting up some avatar that isn't sustainable, people will see through it and eventually you'll come to the reckoning that you can't live your avatar and you'll have to do cocaine and you know, give up social media and move to an island. And, you know, like that's it. That's the problem, is that you're seeing the ego self. And I think you're absolutely right around that that notion to talk bulls is not the same thing as to be in the bull ring. So, you know, get home, iterate, sharpen your knives, and go out and practice. And, you know, you we need greater community and we need reasons to belong to each other more than ever before. So, what we're trying to do then is one is for me, you know, as talked about early, part of my mission is to disrupt a field that had medicalized all of the processes, you know, and I remember physical therapists attacking me like, missing internal rotation is not a problem. You're making it a problem. I'm like, well, can I see where you're working? Oh, I see. You're working in a British National Institute of Health system where you don't get paid if someone gets better, you get paid if someone gets better or not. There's always someone in, you're not working on performance. So what we've we've learned a lot is that, man, we don't need to focus just on pain. We need to focus on performance and outcome and durability and tell that message over and over and over and over again, you know, because uh clearly I haven't done a good enough job. Or I'm the wrong messenger. I need a hundred other messengers who look different than me and sound different than me to be able to meet the one. So a lot of my friends, we always say, I'm like, I'll meet you in the middle, because you work on your side, I'll work on my side, and we'll we'll work towards the center and we'll never meet. It's we'll never meet. There's too much work. And conversely, or additionally, I'd add to that that if I apply any rubric or metric of how are we doing, like, really, let's give ourselves a grade as a fitness industry, as a wellness industry. And well, it turns out we're fatter and more diabetic and more depressed. We have more injuries and more surgeries, and we're we're using more alcohol and ACL injury rates and kids are through the roof right now. And I'm like, choose something you give a damn about, and then say, well, how's it working? Well, for me, I would say the indication of the experiment is that we're trending in the wrong direction. So we need to keep asking, maybe, maybe all of a sudden shouldn't it all turn around, but that doesn't seem likely to happen. It seems like we're continuing to progress down where it's more five-hour energy drink, and now I just go keto, and you know, you know, people are it's not working. And what I'll say about you, if you're in the industry, is that we're failing, and I'm failing, and I haven't made the case well enough or figured out how to apply the principles well enough yet. And I may run out of time in my lifetime.

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Such a great question because we're just inundated with awesome tech. So one of the questions I ask fundamentally is does this scale? Tunnel is super cool. I have a tonal in our gym. We I know the the company, you know, they they gave us one, we've played around with it, does some rad stuff. If you can do sled regs in your house with a tunnel, you know, you might go through the wall, but you can definitely do it. The question is, does this for me fundamentally transform society? Well, how many tunnels do I need if I have a class of 30 kids? You know, what if I can't afford a tunnel? What if I don't have a place for a tunnel? What if I can't afford the membership? So suddenly you're like, oh, no wonder Peloton didn't transform society because everyone needs a Peloton in their house, and I need multiple Pelotons in my house because I had there's four of us. And boy, that's there's a big barrier to entry there. So when every house can have a tonal, then and they we give them out for free with like, you know, with trash service, then maybe we're in that direction. I think also it's easy for companies like tonal to silo everyone into their model of thinking. And I think that's reasonable. I want you to speak our language, do our thing. But what if I want to ride my bike and do tonal at the same time? Well, there's not really setup for that. So there's a real opportunity for tech to be more open and not closed. And I think TRX is a great example of this. You know, we came into our TRX class, and TRX is a great tool. No one's afraid of straps. But all of a sudden, the only way you can TRX is to do TRX everything. It's a TRX squad, a TRX lunge, a TRX push-up, a TRX we're out. And you know, what if there's other ways of training? So potentially one of the mistakes with every of these technological things is that you negate a thousand other great tools and a thousand great other methodologies. If you really want to transform society, you'll put a kettlebell or a lump of sandbag in everyone's house and teach them to lift that or swing that. That is something that I actually could scale. Like I can get a burlap bag and fill it with rocks down the street, and I can teach you a lot about how to move and work, right? So ultimately, moving well and moving forever and moving at speed and load is a skilled proposition. So one of the things we want people to do is evaluate is this technology still reflecting my skill ism? Or am I just removing the skill and making it the lowest common denominator, which is a place to start for sure. Look, tonal is super cool. I have friends who've never lifted a weight in their whole lives and they have a tonal and they're like, wow, I deadlift today and front squad today and press today. I'm like, that's super cool. Can you swing, do kettlebell swings on it? Can you can you do a pull-up on it? No, you can't. So there's still some holes in that thing. But what we we want people to do is to not say good, bad, but how useful, how scalable? Does this make me a better coach? How can I track progress and results? One of the great opportunities for tonal, for example, since I'm just beating up on them, is that it actually could measure wattage, could measure foot pounds, it can measure output and speed. But right now it's just a graph that's a dead graph that shows you, oh, look, it went a little higher, went a little lower. Imagine if I was a physio and I wanted to actually, you know, do those things where I could track something or is someone getting faster, or I want to do velocity-based training, and all of a sudden I was like, wow, I can use this tonal movement to assess my velocity-based training because I'm lucky to have more resources, and then I'll make decisions about what I'm doing today. Those are when we're really beginning to understand how to integrate technology to make our jobs better. But the problem is we just keep chasing this next thing. How many, you know, do we need more help with a machine telling me to count my reps? That's less effective, right? I don't need you to time my rest in between sets or, you know, so the question is the super coach is going to look around and say, well, how can I solve this more effectively? How can I increase the density of my time and the stickiness of my behaviors and my interactions? And certainly, if there's a tonal in my hotel, I'm gonna be so stoked because I can deadlift and front squat in my hotel. Are you kidding me? I haven't been able to do that with a set of, except with a set of 50-pound dumbbells for like a hundred years. So ultimately, part of the coach again comes down to what's essential for humans that we need to do. How does this technology help me or hurt me? You know, like a concept two bike is super awesome, a rowing machine is super awesome. You know, we are always looking at how we can scale, how does it be more reproducible, and then there's got to be a Social justice aspect to it. And some tools, suddenly I'm like, oh, I need 50 of these things for my high school gym. Well, that's a non-starter. In fact, I can look at a lot of technology that way. So again, looking at, well, what's another set of tools? It's super cool to have jammers and landmines, but what if I what if I don't have the space for that? What? So this is where I come back to this idea of hyperlocality always rules. So for me, the most important coach is the coach on the ground working with their community. And if you come in and say you have to do it this way, well, they're like, well, I don't have that equipment, or I don't have that person who has that background. And so what we really have this opportunity to do is help help the hyper local coach become super nuanced at understanding the realities of the person in front of them and the complex psychoemotional components to that and the realities of what you're what equipment you have and what they have at home. And then we can say, well, here is a way to make your job better. And hey, there's some technology out there. Evaluate that and see if it fits into that schema, right? That's that's different. The caveat again is wow, I can get access to world-class coaching if I can afford it in my apartment in Brooklyn. That's pretty amazing, right? That's amazing. But what you're seeing is a trend towards entertainment as fitness, high intensity exercise. Look at Apple. You know, they're great coaches on Apple, but it's all high-intensity jazz or size, whether it's got, and I don't want throwing shade at that, right? Look what Amazon did, look what so many fit on. Like, do I need another 10-minute arm blaster? Is that how I make progress? Well, it's good that I'm moving. And so suddenly we are now into the realm of understanding. Well, is this fitness as entertainment? Cool. That's super cool. Like that is a great, instead of going to a movie, I'm gonna go to a spin class. That's I get that. Instead of going to art, I'm gonna go do this thing. But that is not necessarily working, scalable, sustainable, et cetera, et cetera.

Nice. And I I always appreciate how you answer questions, not specifically like most people like, oh, what's what's he gonna say? What's the device that Kelly's using now, right? You you explain the thought pattern behind it all that provides a you know a framework for the code.

And that's probably why I'll never be really successful, because I need, I want you to understand why I think about the way I think about this stuff. And I want everyone to know that I'm I'm obsessed. I'm like, ooh, new toy, let me get that new toy and see how that works. Yeah, yeah, me too. You know, I have all this stuff that I'm constantly testing because I'm like, there's gotta be a better mousetrap. Like, I need to experience it before I say something about it. And that's really, you know, an important piece. I can give you my opinion, but unless I've used it and tell you how I've integrated it and what problems it solved for me, you know, shame on me. You know what my favorite thing to do is with the tonal? Let me let's tell you. I put the handle super low and I get into a wide split stance and I come up on my toe in the front and I do the heaviest, gnarliest isometrics I can. Because all of a sudden I get loaded in position, I hit the straps, boom, I get a hundred plus pounds in each hand, and it like drags me into the bowels of the earth. And I think for loaded isometrics, you can't be that. I think it's the coolest thing ever. So I just want to let people know, man, that is super simple. Because I don't have 100-pound dumbbells. Who's using 100-pound dumbbells? You know what I mean? Like this is you can, if you are clever enough to say, hey, I can solve problems with this, what problem are you trying to solve?

Again, keep that in mind, you know? And that and that's when this stuff gets really interesting, is when you get it into the hands of people who have been doing this for a while and they figure out shit like that. You're like, well, this is this wasn't intended. And when I interviewed Ollie from Tunnel not too long ago, he's he's like, I'm constantly amazed with when people come back to me, like, wait, my machine can do that? That's incredible. I had no idea. And it's uh it's pretty cool.

So off-label use. I want I want everyone, sorry, I want everyone home just to always be thinking off label use. Like I'm a chief tinkerer, I'm all about tinkering. And my friend, I have a lot of friends who send me stuff and they're like, what do you think? I'm like, well, what you thought it did, it doesn't do. But let me show you these 10 things it does. So off-label use is the best thing you can possibly do.

Yeah. So as we wrap this up, I want to kind of bring it back full circle. I mean, we talked about content and you know, the evolution and social media and you know, 11-second videos and all this thing, but you're you're you're relinquishing a book in good old-fashioned paper the next April. So let's let's talk about that and give people uh something to get really excited about.

Juliet and I feel like we are really all good in our industry of talking about what's the fastest way up Everest, what color rope should we wear, what crampons to use, what techniques are you gonna use? And meanwhile, no one's at base camp. And we have left behind everyone. I think in our vertical, people are healthier. I think you know, they're meditating and they're eating better and they're exercising, they have all these tools, and then we've left the rest of the society behind, which is a failure, right? We just so in our vertical, we've gotten really good. We're tracking sleep, you know, we're doing all this stuff, but the you know, people who have you know working jobs and are, you know, slaving away don't don't get it, aren't, aren't, aren't able to do the same thing. So what we've done is Jill and I have taken all of our experience and tried to write a book that's about the 10, what we think is sort of 10 theories, 10 practices around different ideas that would make you a durable, resilient person to be a hundred years old, but doesn't involve diet and exercise. You don't need another diet and exercise book. You need to see how all of these behaviors interact. What we tried to do is write a book, and I think it's our best book. I think it's hands down the best work we've done. It's so accessible. We've given it to all our super friends, you know, like legends, superstars, and they're like, you know, I read the inner intro because I was like, I should just read the intro. And then they're like, holy crap, I read the whole thing. Like, this is so fun. And uh what we've done is said, hey, if you have an auntie or an uncle who wants to get healthier, wants to have less pain, wants to use movement as a vital sign, wants to figure out really sustainable ways and behaviors that integrate into their busy lives, give them this book. It's a book that every physician could give to every patient to say, let's get you off blood pressure medicine. Here, it's too, we don't have time in this office. I want you to read this. If supple leopard is missing something, it's missing how to live a life day to day. And it's what are all the complex psychoemotional behaviors that you need to engage with? Psychoemotional physical behaviors like walking helps you sleep. You know, what are the ways where we can begin to untangle some of that? How do we integrate vision drills and balance drills and breath drills? So, this book, I think, is really a recipe book, a simple sort of ethos system based on all of the experience we've had working with every branch of the government, Fortune 500 companies, every professional sport, the Olympics, and said, hey, by the way, this is the foundation of elite performance, but it's not very sexy. We can't really charge for it, right? Telling you to walk more or sit on the ground or you know, take a look at your hip range of motion, work on your balance and breath, change your head position. We've aggregated that into what we think is the essentials of being a durable person. You know, we have a 101-year-old grandmother in our life right now. And you know, that's insane to live with someone who's she's never exercised in her life. You know what I mean? I'm like, well, how do I get to be a 101 who lives by herself basically and you know, uses a walker sometimes? You know, so we think our premise is that human beings are very durable, very resilient, but we have some of these base processes that are missing. I think that this is gonna help cut through some of the noise. And then you can come in with whatever style you want. Your keto, your carnivore, your vegan, cool. We agree that's totally up to you. But by the way, hit these principles inside that schema, and you'll see that you may not be eating enough protein, you probably don't drink enough water, you don't get enough fruits and vegetables. So what are we talking about again? You know? I love it. And what's the what's the title? It's gonna be called Built to Move. It's put out by Knopf, which, man, they publish like Pulitzer books and you know, National Book Award-winning books and and uh Nobel Prize winner books, and they are serious, serious people. So we are really excited because you know what we're counting on is that forever Juliet and I have believed that if we have a low size, central low size of control, an expert person in their community that has some knowledge about how to solve knee pain or, you know, or deal with some swelling, then they can impact the whole community, whether a coach or not, right? They're the local expert. And what we want to do with this book is help that person continue to change their family. And I think we can do that with this thing. And we're counting on our friends who are interested in their health to say, hey, I know it seems like I'm a crazy person because I walk around with a kettlebell, but read this, and when you're ready to take the next step, I'll be here.

Beautiful. Well, Kelly, man, it's always a pleasure. Thank you for going. People could check you out at thereadystate.com and ReadyState for you know Instagram and all their places, right? Anywhere else you want people to go?

No, I think you know, go to the readystate.com. You know, we have a shameless plug here, but you know, we believe in the subscription model that allows us to scale. If you have pain or want to get out of pain or want to know how to take care of yourself or improve your range of motion or deal with an injury or a problem, it's 15 bucks a month. Like we really try to keep it in a way where we're saying, hey, if we have enough people doing this, we don't have to charge you hundreds of dollars a month. You can really begin to take a crack at fixing yourself. And we have a free trial in there. So you can jump into our free trial, see what ails you. Right now, the trial's two weeks long. Man, you can get a lot of work done. It's like having a physical therapist in your pocket. I lead, man, if you you want to know how to downregulate or use that foam roller, we'll show you. So, you know, go there and understand what we're trying to do there is scale what we think every human being should be able to know on the planet.

Awesome. Well, Kelly, thank you again. Episode number 300. It was an absolute pleasure. You always deliver. I really enjoy our conversations and I walk away learning something. That's why I do this podcast. Honestly, it's very selfish. I like to talk to people like you. I like to learn stuff and uh hopefully people get value out of it. So thank you so much.

And I'm sorry we didn't talk about your shoulder pain, which is all anyone's here for, or why, you know, that's all everyone wants to talk about. So again, it's such a pleasure. And it's really fun to talk about the things I think about. And again, I mean, if this is the allegory for what we talked about today, make content that's about interesting to you. And what we talked about is interesting to me, even if it's not interesting to anyone else. Yeah, right on. Ladies and gentlemen, Kelly Starrett.

Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minnesota. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it, iTunes, Spotify, Castbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it and want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me, simply go to the feature of fitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the Future of Fitness. Have a great day.