Kelly Starrett: Stepping Into The Gap

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness industry podcast for over two years and running. It is 2021, and I am your host, Eric Malzone. I have the absolute pleasure of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. Stop by futurofitness.co to subscribe and learn more. This show is brought to you by Level 5 Mentors, guiding entrepreneurs to achieve the highest levels of freedom in five critical areas: time, money, relationships, health, and purpose. So here's the deal: entrepreneurs and business owners undoubtedly walk a different path, which means they need a different set of metrics. The great news is that level five mentors has actually quantified it. Yep, that's right. If you go to level5mentors.com forward slash survey, you can take the freedom assessment, get your personal score, and see how you are stacking up. That's level5mentors.com forward slash survey. And don't worry, it's free. This episode is also brought to you by Morpheus, the world's first and only fitness intelligence platform built by coaches for coaches. Look, there is a ton of fitness and health data being collected on you and your clients, but are you leveraging it? And perhaps more importantly, are you saving yourself time and making more money because of it? Well, I'll answer that question for you. You're not, because you can until now. Morpheus arms coaches with accessible, intelligent, communicable client insights to save coaches time and ultimately increase your value and earn more money. By collecting lifestyle data from 90% of the current wearable market and combining that data with cutting-edge proprietary technology, Morpheus provides an accurate and reliable recovery score for all of your clients served up on a simple and elegant dashboard. No more guessing, just the real, honest data alongside the insights from Morpheus into what to actually do with it. In the gym, in a home, outdoors, with personalized heart rate zones for each individual client. Combined with custom alerts, in-app messaging, and other amazing features, this is the ultimate coaching machine. Go to trainwithmorpheus.com to learn more. That's train with Morpheus M-O-R-P-H-E-U-S.com. Please go check out our wonderful sponsors. And if you get value out of this show, I ask you to do three things. Please go subscribe, give us a favorable rating, and share this episode on social media or wherever you like to go chat with friends. I am your host, Eric Malzone, and once again, welcome to the future of fitness. Kelly Starrett, welcome to the future of fitness. Oh, nice to hear you again, see you again, be with you again. Yeah, I agree. And there's so many things we could talk about with you, Kelly. But I think, as I was telling you pre-recording, I would like to start off with a story because I came uh across your path back in circa 08. So this was back in San Francisco. I was living there doing a mundane, horrible sales job. And uh a friend of mine said, Hey, you should try this thing called CrossFit. So I did, I joined one that was just closest to me. It wasn't your gym, unfortunately, which bad move, Eric, back then in hindsight.

Just for everyone listening, in 2008, no one knew anything about anything.

Yeah, yeah.

So you know what you were like was Olympic lifting.

That sounds fun.

Yeah.

So what happened was I started training, I started doing CrossFit. I got my, as everyone said back then, I got my butt kicked and I really liked it. And then I started looking around. I heard about this thing called Weightlifting Wednesday at San Francisco CrossFit. So I'm like, oh, I'll pop in there. And I I remember that because I walk in and this gentleman named Carl who greets me. He's like, hey, I'm Carl. What's your name? And I'm like, wow, that was one hell of a welcoming and super friendly. He's like oh yeah, weightlifting Wednesday is over there. You know, that's Kelly introduce me to you. And I knew within two minutes of us working and warming up that you knew what you were talking about. And not too many people really knew what they were talking about when it came to Olympic weightlifting. And I got to, since that point, I got to be introduced to, I believe you called it the bringer, which was your elbow during a physical therapy session that was uncomfortable but effective, right? You helped me out during a competition at the NorCal Masters when I blew out both my quads and couldn't compete. And you're like, hey, try these crazy bands on your legs. And you've always been someone who, when I've needed some help, when I blew out my back, you were able to refer me to someone. So I I have a lot of appreciation for what you do, and I've been able to see your meteoric rise, not to any to discredit any amount of extremely hard work that you did to get to where you are. So it's a pleasure for me to recap all of that now and then see where you're at now and how far you've come, man. So congratulations on everything you've done. You've created quite a bit of influence and helped a lot of people.

Let me just say, first of all, thank you for sticking with us when we didn't know crap about crap back in the dark ages of all of this, where we were just trying to get our legs. And really, what you figured out early on when you came to our gym was man, we weren't very talented, and we certainly didn't have the facilities, but we were cheerful. Yeah. And what we realized was early on that if we were transparent in we we were coaching to Carl was a national champion gymnast, and we did have some talent there, and I was a physio and et cetera, et cetera. But what we realized early on is that if community and how people interacted, and if being transparent in that process, that we brought you into the process, right? That okay, this is what we're learning, here's what we figured out this week. And I think that people really could appreciate that we didn't set ourselves up as the experts. We set ourselves up as welcome and that we're gonna be the most cheerful, fun people you've been around. And that really, you know, there is something to that. And secondly, I'll just say for Druid and I, it certainly doesn't feel meteoric. I don't know how meteoric you can say if we've been doing this for 15 years, and before that, and the amount of number of the Ready State, aka Mobility Wad started as a mobility project in 2010. But I've been teaching a course since 2008. And man, I if 10 years is hashtag breakout success, overnight sensation, and I'm best new artist, then uh I'll take it. But it doesn't feel New York, it feels like just grinding, and now I just have a big ditch.

Yeah, interesting. What's the the cliched phrase, an overnight success built over 10 years or something like that?

Yeah, certainly it doesn't feel it feels like work and it feels like just decade plus of helping people and working along people and paying attention and hashtag blessed, humbled. The joke here is we are Juliet and I are obsessed. And the good news is that we found an obsessed community of people who were like-minded, who were open, who were who were into it. And then we early on figured out that if we could help people meet their needs, satisfy the things that they cared about, that was a good business, right? Taking away someone's pain that's keeping them from deadlifting, that's a good business. Helping someone change their body composition, good business. All you have to do is be an obsessed community and apply that low grade obsession without burning out, without dying, without going under and just rinse, wash, repeat for a decade and let me know how that goes to you. And so many other things. We say forever, you got to be consistent before you're heroic.

Yeah. It's I reflect on that because I started this podcast three and a half years ago when I left, basically when I left California and over traveling a bit. And I committed to 10 years on this thing. And now it's probably the last year. Finally, I was starting to see some good traction on it, but it took a little while and it's far from where I want it to be. But it's a grind, man, and you just got to stay consistent with it. I do a record at least a recording every week, and I have for three years, and I won't break that chain. I'm curious, we can get into it. I really want eager to get into what you're doing now, but you you mentioned not burning out. How, with all of the things that you do, seemingly from the outside, writing and tons of media and content creation and out there coaching and working with professional teams and being on 60 minutes and all these different things that you do, how have you avoided burnout or have you avoided burnout?

I I would say that there's definitely been times where we have exceeded the bingo mark on the tank. There's not enough gas to get back. Where in the early days, Julia it's interesting for people who don't know. In November, we closed our gym of 15 years. We are located in San Francisco in the Presidio and some of the highest rent in the world. And the Presidio is a government agency that just had zero wiggle room, did not work with us, closed down, couldn't have people in our gym in the most restrictive city in the United States in terms of COVID. We just we made it for nine months, 10 months, as long as we could, and then realized just that we were standing in showers, ripping up $20 bills. Just there was no end to when we could get out. So we closed the gym. But right now, this is the first time Juliet and I have had one job in over 15 years. And there were times where Juliet had three jobs: attorney, running the Ready State, running the gym, also being CEO of all those things, and plus kids, et cetera. So there's some notion here that like there is balance, or you didn't burn out. I think we've both gone through terrible burnout, stressed out, horrific, because life is happening on top of that. But we have figured out on the process, especially because we were lucky enough to work together, that there have to be things that we do that are non-negotiable. Like one of them is our sleep. We just do not mess around with our sleep. We like to recreate and play together. And then a few years ago, maybe 2013, really we started running everything through this filter, which really helped our family. Does this get our family closer to spending more time together playing and having fun and adventure? Or does this decision take us away from that? Because early on, there is this idea that you need to say yes to everything. And if you're a young coach, yes. Juliet did a she because she's a world champion CEO woman, she's a little bit of a uh unicorn, and she gives some speaks at universities and athletes. And there was a group of graduating senior Division I athletes, she was talking to women, and they the a lot of the advice from some of the other women in there were like, you make sure you take care of yourself and have self-time. Juliet walked in there and was like, screw that. This is if you want to get ahead in this world, you need to work and be the first one there and the last one to leave and be willing to put in the effort, and then you'll be able to find some balance. But if you expect to ditch at three o'clock and go to yoga, you will never ever have the kind of life you want. And she points to them saying, Was this how you got to become a Division I athlete? You just did the minimum and just skipped out of practice, and everyone's oh, yeah. So at some point, there is a grind, there it's unsustainable. When you take off in an airplane, you put the throttle down, and it takes a lot of thrust to get that thing up in the air. But once you're up in the air, then you can throttle back. And then you can, and in that moment is a moving target. That moment is conscious, unconscious, where you're like, whoa, we're super over the line here, we're super burned out, we're working too much. Then you just readjust. Ultimately, I think I'm fortunate that my wife and I have what we call very high work pain tolerance. We're both products of, we grew up in the 70s of divorced parents. And I think we've we coped with some of that stress and divorce and uncertainty by becoming a little bit more driven than the average person. And then simultaneously, we have Juliet and I have strong practices around the sauna, and we have a feelings meeting, and we try to really stay in touch with each other around that because you will burn out and you have to see that as a feature, not a bug. You will get to a place where you're like, I'm working too hard. How am I going to back this off? Or I actually have additional capacity. And I think a lot of people feel like they're suffering because they're not managing their sleep, they're not exercising, they're not building relationships and networks, and it does feel like it's unsustainable. And we want you to appreciate it is unsustainable. If you're going out there to start a business, Juliette says this well, entrepreneurship and business isn't for everyone. Really, like it's we really worship entrepreneurship, but it's not not everyone has the just the risk tolerance or the uncertainty tolerance or the bullshit tolerance to just manage that. And sometimes people are just really great captains. They just they are the people who show up and can grind away, and you just they just need direction, but they can't be the entrepreneur.

Yeah, that is spot on. And I the plane analogy is really powerful. And one actually to add on a layer to that plane analogy, one I have heard and reference all the time is that once you do take off, as long as if you know you're going from San Francisco to Boston, when that plane lifts off and it's in the air and the statistic differs all the time depending on who's telling the story, but what percentage of that time is that plane actually on course? And the answer is about eight percent of the time, which means 92% of the time course correcting. And that's normal too, right? Is you're never where you want to go, but the way you get there is never going to be the way you thought it would be. And that's because it's unpredictable. And I think that's something that entrepreneurs need to really accept and adopt as well.

And if we just go back, you and I have known each other for you know a long time now. And if you look at what fitness was in 2008, it really was nascent and emergent. I mean, look, people have been in fitness communities forever, Pilates, yoga, small jazzer size, people have been realizing, but all of a sudden we got very sophisticated late uh aughts in 2000s, and suddenly you can buy now kettlebells at Target and Olympic lifting shoes at Big Five, and you're like, whoa, what's what's happening? Something is something has changed. When we opened the gym, we had to drive to Santa Cruz to buy kettlebells that played against sports, those known places in the Bay Area. So it was a two-hour drive to buy kettlebells. It's I want people to appreciate that when we started this thing, for example, we had an outdoor gym. We didn't have walls, we had a gigantic uh porta potty that we dressed up and we we told the story about how awesome it was to be outside, and we froze our butts off and it was gnarly. And you can't do that today. You just can't, you have to when we first opened up, you just put your check in the box for the month. You put your check in the box, good, here we go. And and uh everyone has become more sophisticated, and that's not necessarily good because there's so much noise, but also it you have to be appreciative that the growth, for example, I think our we had an internship program at our facility for a long time, and coaches had a lot of hours to get through as members, as part of our intern process, the go through, and so by the time they actually put them on the floor, they were really competent coaches, much better coaches than ever we were as full-bledged independent coaches earn the day because they had the benefit of seeing all this information, having a flight path, things were set up. But people don't realize, for example, like in the CrossFit Level 2 courses was organized around how we ran our classes at San Francisco CrossFit. Here's how we get people together, here's how we can warm them up, here's the skill, here we pull people back together. And this is a long way of saying that in this process of business building or you're an independent coach, be prepared to have to do a lot of kind of growing. And also, to your point, that part of the process is that you need to be really meta-aware of the fact that this is a long game. You will not win business, you will not win your health, you will not have a moment where you're like, nailed it, I won with this client. It just doesn't feel like that. And and what you end up doing if you feel that way is that you're gonna feel like, you know, you're gonna feel crazy because all you keep doing is playing whack-a-mole and you think that you're failing somehow because these different challenges come up. And instead, what you need to say is this is the game where I just keep playing and the keep everyone playing, keep every and you just have to keep having these gnarly conversations with yourself and the people you work with and the people you serve. And that's the feature of it. That is the game.

It's great insights, man. Challenges are one thing run of the mill, but 2020 was like you said, you faced it with having to face with the really hard decision to shut down an institution in San Francisco CrossFit. And 2020 has been a really hard year for many in the fitness industry. It's been an amazing year for a lot of other people uh in the fitness and health industry. Tell me about your 2020. We talked about the gym, but how about the other side of things, Ready State, and how has that been affected?

As you may guess, having a digital business for 10 years when everything closed down was not a bad place to be. And you know, what we saw was a thousand businesses, 10,000 businesses suddenly trying to pivot and get online and re and build that infrastructure and build that continuity and build those resources. And man, that is a gigantic lift. But it's just one of the things that I'll tell you is that if you see anyone dogging anyone on the internet, they those people are pretenders. Like anyone who runs a real business will never talk shit or point at or be negative towards other ones' business. They'll point at what they like, but there's it's so complicated that even like our competitors, Julie and I have a lot of respect for people who try to compete with us because we're like, we know how gnarly it is. And just to get people's attention and serve them and keep them around, and there's just a ton of things that you have to be really adroit at in terms of digital marketing and your content service, how you're managing your client. It's just really like a sophisticated. Our team has grown from Juliet and I, where Juliet used to be the reigning internet world champion video stretching, stretching video queen. Like no one had more internet stretching video cinematography than Juliet, to now she runs a huge team full of several agencies, plus, I think on our regular calls, there's 11 of us now on our regular team Zoom calls. And so, in order to play now, there is a level of sophistication, and I'll just even say complexity, which isn't necessarily great, but that's the game. And if you want to get people's attention and stick around and be able to serve this, you're gonna just have to really speak HTML and content delivery, and it's complicated. We just launched a digital version of our 102 assessment course, which is our level two course. We have a 101, which is our sort of intro into how we think in our systems approach to restoring movement of the body. And then this level two is really a hardcore assessment coach course, and how we are trying to shift who owns pain into the domain of the trainer and coach. So, how do we empower them to be our sort of combat medics? We say, nope, that's a heart attack. Nope, you've got knee rabies, or nope, your just knee is sore after running. Let's fix that, let's help you manage that. And this is a six-week course. We've got people from all over the country, all over the world jumping in. And what's amazing is the technology that allows us to interact and the forums and the drips and the housing and the I mean, it is just a gigantic lift. And what's crazy that we can do that now, but only because we've got all of this year of these decades of experience, and I can focus on what I can do, which is chief content creator, because my wife happens to have this beautiful mind CEO brain that just I just don't have. And I think one of the things that happens with all small businesses, particularly, is that the original sort of I have a good idea, that's great for two seconds, but has nothing to do with your success. Your success is can I get that idea and that thing into the hands of people? And that means you may not have that skill set, you may have to find someone. So that's why I recommend everyone marries my wife.

Yeah, and I agree. Ideas are easy, right? Execution is the dictator of success in almost every circumstance. And it's hard. I'm working with the team at Morpheus now. We're early and have some influence behind Joel Jameson and his work, but there's a lot to be done. And right now, probably early on, everyone's wearing a lot of hats, man. Um every day has a new challenge.

That's right. And Joel Jameson is such a great example of first to market in HRV. People forgot that Joel Jameson also happens to be a really great coach, but he got known for this thing. And all of a sudden, now I'm like, who else does HRV? Who doesn't do HRV? And that's a great case of someone who helped create an entire field of understanding strain and educating. And then all of a sudden, people were like, I can draft Joel and slingshot around and use all that work. And it's complicated. That guy is such a brain and a savage, and his team's a savage, and it's hard to stay at the top. It's really hard to continue to innovate, not just for innovation's sake, but just to continue. To progress. And one of the things that I think I just people can't hear enough is that there is no substitute for being in one place and doing a really good job for a really long time. Like seeds that you plant and friendships that you have and helping people out and giving them a little bump here, a little nudge there, opening a door, all of that will come back to you. And but you just can't possibly see it or understand what's coming down the pipe. Some of the young lieutenants I work with in the military now are majors and lieutenant colonels, and they're in charge of the whole thing. But we worked with them almost 15 years ago. Now they're the bosses. And now apply that to every young intern who now is the head strength coach at Stanford or the right. And you just have to see and appreciate that, you know, you have to be excellent and really useful and assist your friends who are doing their stuff, and then rinse, wash, repeat for a decade, and you'll see that you have a pretty amazing network.

Yeah. That's a really key point. And a lot of people don't. Have you ever read the book The Go Giver by Bob Berg? No. Okay. I'll send you one. It it basically that it's be someone of value, expect nothing in return, just keep giving. And in this weird, magical way that nobody seems seems to be able to explain or truly understand, it comes back and it takes faith, really, that by doing all these little things, helping a lot of people along the way, always being willing to give something, it does come back. But it's just it's a hard thing to put faith on, especially early on until you start to see it happening.

And it's there's no ROI on being right, being part of a community. And I think that's really what this is. I wish I'd had a I always say that I wish I'd had a master, a mentor. Like who's my sensei? And uh turns out that is really an old way of thinking. And the what you have to be doing is creating a network of support and a network of where people, what's in NASCAR? Like we car goes this fast, three cars go much faster, and they take turns drafting. This is why we draft in all races, and being able to go together as a group really does make a difference. And then and you'll also see that you can be inspired and informed and under sort, understand what's best practice, and it ends up being an almost emergent phenomenon. But if you're thinking you're gonna do it alone and not pay attention, not be a part of a network, you're gonna just you'll flash out. And that's what we see a lot of small businesses do. You know, it's just so difficult to grow sustainably, create value and wealth, and then continue to just be relevant. Man, that's you're lucky. Some of that's just luck.

Yeah, yeah, a good portion of it's luck. We were talking before uh the recording, Kelly. I you mentioned stepping into the gap. And I like to get more clarity on what you mean by that. What is the gap? How are you stepping into it? Give us some insights on on what your what's your thought process is behind that.

One of the things that uh my Juliet gives me a lot of grief for having how my brain works. She's like, if you were a if just if you had a demon, like a like in the golden compass, you'd be a bird. You'd be like an eagle. Your head's always in the clouds. And really, I I am I see relationships and patterns. And one of the things that Juliet and I have become very interested in over the last decade is more and more of sort of public health, public wellness. Because what we've found is fitness is really amazing. This is our Juliet and I love to train. I met my wife at the World Championships for whitewater paddling. She was on the national team. I was on the national team. We this is who we are. We love to play, race, and compete and train. And but fitness is very recursive and it is a small echo chamber. And what you have right now is okay, let's just say in the last 10 years, we've had the most sophisticated progressive fitness training we've ever seen in the world. I think we can all agree on that. Yeah, and now I'll say, okay, let's apply that to actually something that matters. How is our obesity rate? Mmm, through the roof. How's our diabetes rate through the roof? How about orthopedic surgeries? How about low back pain? How about absenteeism? How about choose something you care about? ACL tears and girls. Okay, what you can see is that let me give it, let me give fitness a grade, D. And we get a D because some of us are trying and working in public health. Maybe it's really a D minus, which is not great. And so what we haven't done a great job of is appreciating the application and really saying, look, we're really good. If you're a woke middle class person, chances are you're going to the gym and you're in a fitness community, and then like down the street, it's not going so well. And we're contending with a lot of variables that are making it more difficult to be successful humans in terms of alcohol and THC and opiates and porn and Netflix and sedentary behavior and all these things that just make us easy. We're wired for all of that stuff. Like that, what I mean, whether you ascribe to that stuff or not, you're just self-soothing, and these things are highly addictive. Your phone is methadone, right? And purposely, so what we suddenly see is this gigantic mismatch between environment and organism, which many people have talked about for a long time. But one of the things that we're trying to do and consistently do is say, oh, look, here's what we've learned in sport and fitness. And what we this we know is the best expression of human movement, human physiology, human performance. How do why are Julian and I obsessed with sleep and nutrition? Because that's the only way we can get the most out of the human being. Like, why does it we think you need to be safe and be part of a tribe? Well, I can't actually, you can't actually ride your bike the fastest unless you're part of a team. If we know what we know, and there's a great coach from the Netherlands named Franz Bosch who says there's more variation in waltzing than there is in sprinting. And his point is that at the time when we start adding speed, load, intensity to our movements, we quickly understand what does and does not work and what environmental processes do not work. So we end up with a really nice test. It's like that IKEA machine that tests the chair 10,000 times, 20,000 times, one million times. That's our that's sport and lab. That's how we come to understand what we know about the human to the really much more than when we aren't in these high-intensity environments or high performance environments. But if we don't apply those lessons to actual people, then sport is just circus. It's just entertainment. And let's nail it for what it is. Let's call it. Man, I just like to look good with my abs on Instagram, and that's fine. Or I'm entertained by these football players, and when their bodies break, we'll just throw them on the heap of broken gladiators, and that's fine. And we fetishize sports. Well, let's fetishize sports and actually have that means something. So, one of the things that we can start to untangle is we see movement, and something we've been banging with the drum on for over a decade now, is that movement health is a pillar of fitness and not how hard you worked. Did you do Zumba and sweat? That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about you don't have your basic primal range of motion and you can't express that. And when we start to lay over bigger thinking, like you look at what Yuvol Harari has done with his book Sapiens or Homodeus, we're going to be 110 years old. We just saw a statistic on 60 Minutes that I think it's all the fifth graders who are alive today, or 50% of the fifth graders are gonna be 105. So think about how many kids are gonna be 105 years old in just a few years. And the reason that matters is we are playing this game like we don't have 105 years to last in this body. We're playing like we're out my back when I was 35, I stopped running, I'm obese, I'm diabetic, right? We're not moving around, our balance is awful. And suddenly it we are gonna you know be staring at a gigantic health crisis around our inability to move. We're basically becoming wally in that movie. And what we're trying to do is do a better job of saying, hey, let's establish some movement vital signs, some movement minimum, so we can begin a real concerted effort around musculoskeletal health in the context of what we expect and what real people's lives look like, which means we fundamentally have to alter the environment if we're gonna have a different outcome. You know, we can't, you know, we're gonna have to make kids if you learn like there's no driving your kid to school if you live within a mile of school, right? You like we need to have moving desks, moving situations. We need to make it so it's impossible to bring sodas onto campus. We there's no snacking. We're gonna have a radical transformation of society, otherwise, we're going to see the de-evolution of the person in society, and that's gonna we're gonna just need more friends. And and honestly, this is what we're gonna be obsessed with these days.

That's no small undertaking, right?

It's just maybe my life's work.

Yeah, yeah, it is. I think I look at all these, I believe everything in as far as statistics and all that stuff, and I I think everybody sees it, right? And but it's like that's my concern, and I think like most people is are we too far down the path? Like, how do we get these sweeping changes? I I would love to see everything that you're you're talking about. I think you can create influence to happen, especially on a local level, but how do we start to get it? How do we get it everywhere? How does that how does that swing and how do we get out of this really dangerous uh motion that's been set for especially Western society?

The first thing we have to do is stop lecturing people. We can't talk if you're if you when we when I went to high school, the chance of us being diabetic was one in four thousand. One in four thousand. And now your chance of being diabetic as a kid is one in four, independent of how much your parents make, what school they went to, the color of their skin, one in four chances. If you're a black woman, it's two out of three. If you're a Latinx man, it's two out of three. But we can't talk about diabetes until we talk about systemic racism and food deserts. And right, like we can't, we it's a much more nuanced, complex conversation if we're going to you know fundamentally transform and and look at this as look, people want to need to rescue themselves, but people are products of their environment and their systems. And where are we going to have these interventions? Juliet and I come have come strongly to believe that some of these interventions have to begin in elementary school. That's where we're going to, and we know there's my girls. There's a couple shows that they watch on Netflix that Juliet and I cringe, but we talk a lot about one of those called like my 600-pound sisters, or was it 600-pound life, where there's they're watching these reality shows about people really struggling with food addiction, with being overweight, with really compromised societal structural supports. And that if we're going to make these changes, we are gonna have to think about one, we may not catch everyone in time, which is too bad for us. Shame on us. Like we there's a generation of people who have suffered because we sell fast food and fast food is cheap. And Marie Antoinette's let them eat cake, and then that's what we did with people of lower socioeconomic means. We let them lay cake, it's cheap. And suddenly it is complex. We're looking at, Jason, we cracked that door. We're looking, for example, at this negativity towards meat, right? Meat is one of the most nutrient-dense, low-calorie foods you can put in. Even I'm talking about the big five-pound mega factory farmed meat. Turns out that's still healthier than any processed food, right? And you're gonna fill people up and it's nutrient dense, and for poor kids, it makes a huge difference. And the research is super clear on that. But as long as upper middle class white people tell people, hey, this you should be vegan and plant-based, that's a really elitist approach to nutrition. Where you're saying the New York schools, you pull out there's like Meatless Friday, and we're like, oh, okay. So now you just pulled out the most nutrient-dense, low-calorie food in a kid who may be only getting their chief food source at school, and you're telling them that they can't afford meat. Meanwhile, eat this hyper-processed plant burger. And again, you can do whatever you want, but the complexity of the messaging that we're sending people is real, and we're gonna have to get back to some of these basics, which means we may need to start much earlier and appreciate that some of our interventions are gonna be too late, and we're gonna have to have a presidential physical fitness council that is much more aggressive. We're gonna have to have standards of exercise. We're gonna we're gonna have to really rethink this and maybe put our chief focus on children and starting there so we can teach kids how to eat and teach kids how to take care of their bodies. And that may be you have something called the daily mile at school where kids just walk a mile. All of these motion activity trackers are great, but if you don't actually move and track your body, then you know it's all not. And I think this is where there are some really simple interventions where we can make some radical changes in society, and uh, but we're gonna have to think differently about where that happens. So simultaneously, the grassroots model matters, right? Not lecturing people, but giving people a better choice. Diabetes sucks. Like needles suck, your peripheral neuropathy sucks, your quality of life isn't good. People who are type 2 diabetic wish they could reverse that. Instead, we're selling more people more drugs, we're not really talking about the root of this. And if you're 12 years old or an eight-year-old, and you're you're just being flooded, you just have to appreciate that we're gonna have to do something different. Otherwise, all of this fitness, wellness, it's just total bullshit.

It's fascinating to hear because I I had Rob Wolf on the podcast just a couple weeks ago and kind of hearing his journey. And I think it's it's not uncommon for maybe people within the fitness profession to get in, learn a little bit of knowledge, become very dangerous, learn more knowledge, lose confidence, and then really focus on maybe becoming a performance expert or whatever it may be. And then after a certain amount of time, it tends to come back to wait a minute, we completely get over the fundamentals of why we're doing this, right?

Rob and Nick have become the most reasonable voices in nutrition there are. It's really like we've known Rob from when we started this thing in 2005. Rob was at my first level one CrossFit, sir. That's when I met Rob on the airplane before I even touched down in San Diego. So and I've been following Rob before that. And now Rob's like, yeah, we really should eat some food, and maybe you're not really do great with that. Your body will tell you really their approach, even though they have complete sophistication, and you really, if you have something going on, listen to their podcast, simultaneously, the level of simplicity, simplexity is the word for it. Well, we see it, we call it informed simplicity. And the idea is eventually you begin to see the big building blocks, the essential pieces, and you begin to see that you can create real complexity out of simple programs and simple processes. Yeah. And that's really, you know, the informed simplicity. If you Google that, you'll be like, oh, that makes perfect sense. So what are the building blocks? Well, for example, if we're going to get ahead of pain and chronic pain, persistent pain in America, then we have to talk about sleep. And I don't fortunately, like Rob is a nutrition biochemist nerd. Like all that stuff does not interest me at all. I have to be competent in it so I can talk about performance with my athletes, but I'll and also, but I have to be competent in it so I can talk about tissue health. But then I'm like, my friend over there, he does all the heavy lifting. I mean, he just made a documentary in Sacred Cow and the book Sacred Cow, Dan Rogers, is fantastic. And that's a big mass market approach. It's not paleo, it's just saying, hey, let's rethink our supply systems and regenerative agriculture practices if we're going to get out of this thing. And simultaneously, this notion that we can have these conversations yet people aren't sleeping. I can't even, I don't even know what to work on. You're asking me how many times a week you should squat, but you only sleep six and a half hours a night, and that sleep is messed up. So, how are we going to begin to really untangle this Gordian knot? We need to pull one big strand at a time. And one of the big strands is, well, are you moving? Do you actually flex your hip enough? Did you walk eight to ten thousand, twelve thousand steps a day? If you're not sleeping, let's start there. If you're in chronic pain, let's control your sleep and get you moving more, and then we can talk about what's next.

Yeah, it's and that was when we when I wrapped up the interview with Rob, basically it was like, What which he's people need to sleep more. That was it. That was like the summation of so many years, right? So people need to sleep more, and then everything else is it depends. It depends too, it's complicated.

I like that, yeah. Which I really like because depends doesn't land you anywhere, but it's caught it's complicated, means that yes, there's an answer, but it's more nuanced and you're gonna need more information.

Yeah. Yeah, and I'm reading Sacred Cow right now. So it's uh it's opening my eyes to a lot of things and the Meatless Mondays and all this stuff that I've heard about so many times. And I've coming spending now, I live in Montana, but spending a lot of most of my life in California and just getting time away from maybe especially the Bay Area or the Central Coast or where I was and being having more time here to okay, experience maybe a little bit different culture for a while and gain some time to think. It's interesting how I've grown or I've changed my opinions on things based on, and I've realized, hey, maybe I wasn't saying the right things. And that's part of the journey of the coach, too, right? Is that you you look back, you're like, oh god, man, wish I wasn't preaching that. But here we are. So being open to being wrong and correcting yourself and constantly be learning is really important. One question I want to tackle before our time's up here, Kelly, is we we talk about the intersection of kind of technology and health. And are we over is it too much tech? What tech is valuable? No tech, like what where are you on this continuum or this spectrum of how useful is tech moving forward?

Let me consult my phone to tell you so I can see how it I'm supposed to answer and feel about this question. Look, I two kind of competing variables. What gets measured gets managed. We don't know what we don't know. But the idea is to bring consciousness and behavior change through awareness. That's the long-term goal. Behavior change is everything. And let's appreciate that lots of different approaches work. My wife loves, she wears a whoop, she has an Apple Watch, she likes to look at steps and quality of sleep. I wear an analog watch and basically know how much I slept because I slip next to my wife. I just not into tracking. I don't track, I'm just not into it. And yet, there are times where I do pay attention, very much pay attention to some of these things. But what I've when I was working with training up for paddling the Molokai solo, where you paddle from Molokai to Oahu, it's a 50k open ocean race by yourself. I was using a heart rate variability, an old one called the Omega Wave. And my coach at the time would say, before you get a score, come up with your own subjective score. And 99.9% of the time, my subjective score was correct. And let me give you a sort of dangerous case study on this. Because a lot of people, I think, what it does is it creates interest and adherence, and people are right. You can, you know, one of the powerful, most powerful aspects of Whoop, which is a great heart rate monitor, heart rate variability tracker, sleep tracker, is that you can create teams and be accountable to other people and talk about this as a it's not a private thing. Suddenly you're in a team and we can see, like Jewett's on a team with a bunch of our staff, and she can be like, wow, look at that. What are you doing to get so much sleep? Your heart rate availability is through the roof. Like, what is going on? And that really does help people to be in a tribe. But once again, there it is, tribe community, right? But one of our elite cyclists we work with, and I know she is a world champion and will be Olympian and is a World Cup winner. The week, the day before, the morning of the race, where she has to beat a couple people to win the overall World Cup World Championship title. Her whoop tells her she's had a crappy score. She gets she gets a red. And she's she's so self-aware and so used to it, she's like, that's wrong. I feel great today. I'm gonna win. And she goes out and wins. And then she calls up whoop and she's like, she's something's wrong with your algorithm. And they're like, No, it's not, it's you. And she's like, nope, something's wrong with your algorithm. I was ready to go, I could feel ready to go, and I won. And she was ignoring that red score. Turns out she was correct. The the algorithm was off, and there was a weird thing there, and it gave her bad information. So, what happens if she takes information? She's now relying on that information to feel the way she feels. Well, I'm red today. I hope I do well. Thank goodness that is a pretty in-tuned person. And so the one key is these things are supposed to free us up. Every once in a while, you'll see that a lot of people end up weighing and measuring food because they have no idea how much they're eating. And look, weighing and measuring food is a fast track to some eating dysfunction, right? Dysfunctional eating, control problems. But if you don't know how many carbohydrates you're eating and you're trying to change some aspect of your health, you're gonna have to be aware for a while to see that. When there are ways like Isin Sinkowski of the 800 gram challenges, hey, let's do this first. We have a rough calculation of how much protein you need based on your weight. And why don't you just see if you can eat 800 grams of vegetables and fruits a day? And we've never seen anyone get fat eating apples. We just that doesn't happen. And if you're super diabetic, maybe it's you don't need to eat 100 bananas. Fruits and vegetables are not the problem in society. And if you look, you have rural sensitivity, carnivore, plant paradox, those animal-based things. You even in an animal-based diet, like with carnivore MD, there are still lots of fruits that are not gnarly on your system. And but what we see is that people are not eating any of those things. So what she has done in this behavior change is add things to your behavior, not restrict things. We're starting, I just even heard Rob talk about this. I heard someone else talk about this recently. Maybe we should focus a little bit less on fat loss and a little bit more on muscle gain. And that's a rule, those things tend to go hand in hand. And if we put more muscle on people, it turns out they're more metabolically active, et cetera, et cetera. Like their immune system measures of health, all things go up. And in order to do that, you end up looking at all the things. But we don't focus on taking away fat, we focus on putting on muscle. We focus on adding nutrient-dense food to your diet, more protein, better cow. We focus on putting more nutrient-dense foods into your diet, vegetables and proteins, vegetables and fruits, and all of a sudden there's just not as much room for cake and crap, right? Frappuccinos, because you're just stuffed having to eat all these foods. And that's how we change behavior is that we make it easier for people because we appreciate that the human being is you have X amount of will. One of the things, for example, that Julian and I are big fans of, just sitting on the ground. You know, like you want to change your hip range of motion, just start watching TV sitting on the ground. You can lean up against your couch. Every time you need to fidget, that's a point. It's great. You move as much as you can, sit cross-legged, long sit, side sit, saddle sit, 90-90, whatever it is. And you just spent an hour or two working on your hip range of motion without having to do any hip range of motion.

I love that.

And those are the kinds of interventions. Like Juliet's standing at her workstation right now, and she doesn't have to worry about getting steps or moving her body or falling, getting her metabolic basal metabolic rate above one and a half metabolic equivalence. Why? Because she's just working in her standing station. And when we constrain the environment, Rob is, I'm quoted in Rob's original book, The Paleo Solution, by saying, look, if you don't want to have cookies, you don't want to eat cookies, don't have cookies in the house. It's that simple. And sometimes we we forget that, right? Because I'm that person. If there's a bunch of cookies in the house, I'm gonna eat the cookies. So I just try not to have cookies in the house. That's why my daughter has become a group star baker. And just to sabotage her dad. And um but to the point is these fundamental processes helps sometimes to be aware. And once we come back to the sleep, one of the Juliet has been on her sleep forever and ever. We respect our sleep. But Juliet has figured out in this COVID year that if she needed to get as a like we grabbed this from Kirk Parsley. We want everyone to appreciate that seven hours is our base minimum for sleep. Like you look, of course, you can do well on four for a while until you can't, until you have a heart attack, like Bill Clinton. You can do really well, but not make the kind of gains you could if you got a little more sleep, right? You couldn't change your body composition. You're not gonna resolve some of those difficult health issues. Like, imagine just some of the base processes. If we just got stagnation gone, circulation more, walking more, and slept more. There's a lot of robustness built in the system we're not tapping into. But what Juliet figured out was in order for her to get seven hours of sleep as a baseline, that wasn't going to bed at 11, getting up at six. That she actually needed to be in bed for eight hours in order to get seven hours of sleep. And if that's our cutoff for minimum threshold, our recommendation is to get the eight. If you're trying to change your body composition, unravel chronic pain or persistent pain, improve your performance, grow as a human being, you need eight is our minimum. You may need to be in bed for nine hours. And we learned that because we were tracking the sleep, and Juliet figured out that it was totally normal for her to have an hour of kind of junk lost sleep in there, tossing and turning, getting up, falling asleep. And that was okay. That's part of the process. But what we were seeing was man, that go to bed at seven or go to bed at 11, get up at seven. Oh, that's eight hours of sleep. No, it's not, you're in the sevens. Yeah, we only know that because we tracked.

Yeah.

Man, Kelly, I I would love to sit here all day and ask you questions. I'm so sorry, everyone. Welcome. Well, like you see, why Joe's like your brain is you know that's funny because my I have a brain that that works quite off. I'm always thinking of ideas. And I asked my wife once, I'm like, what you didn't I mentioned some offline idea I had about a business, and she said, What? Where do you come up with this shit? I'm like, I just think about it all day. You don't think about this stuff all day? She's like, No.

No, my wife, my wife is thinking about where our kids need to be and paying bills and running the business, and and she's she's screwed me up to be a savant. And we do have a joke. Oh, Joe Falls, that business idea 5274. I'm sure that's a good one. I'm like, no, no, we're gonna have our own tequila brand. She's like, that's great.

That's awesome. Well, Kelly, where uh where do people go, man? Where do you send them online? Give us a good.

We are at the ready state. And if you come in to our world, we have a two-week free membership where you can be on ramped and we'll teach you how the basics of how to self-soothe and take care of yourself and think about restoring your position. And uh, if nothing else, what we really tried to do is in that two weeks give people a crash course, a primer in how we think, so that you can then come in, dip in, improve your life a little bit. On the socials, we're at the ready state, and uh come check us out. We that we have a ton of offerings from protocols around a specific problem to helping you manage persistent chronic pain to downregulation to falling asleep at night, to improving your position and mechanics. It's all the same. And uh, we're seeing that people are becoming a lot more sophisticated about it and we're thrilled. We have a lot of work to do, but we're at the ready state. Awesome.

And then the assessment, the 102 course, that'll be found there as well.

And our 101, 102 course. And what we're we're starting to see is that people are like realize, I think, I don't think this is working as well as I thought it was working before. So we maybe need to ask, I don't wait till I'm broken. I blow up my engine and take to my mechanic. That's what we're doing with our physicians. We're asking our physicians to step in to complex psychoemotional behavior movement systems in six minutes. Like your she doesn't have a your physician doesn't have a chance to watch you run or talk about your warm-up or cooldown or strength training or movement quality. Quit quit using your physician the wrong way.

Yeah, fantastic. Kelly, man, thank you for all the the help along the way, direct and indirect in in my coaching and business career. It's been you've been very influential. And I know a lot of people out there share the same sentiment. It's a pleasure to get you on the show, man. It's a lot of fun.

Nice to hear your voice again, my friend. And uh congratulations up there in Montucky. I know it's very warm up there this time of year. Yeah, we're looking at 14 degrees today.

Same thing. Ladies and gentlemen, Kelly Starrett. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This was your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minutes. 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. We 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 futureoffitness.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.