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When it comes to fitness, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the checklist of things you feel like you are ‘supposed’ to do in order to take care of your body. Chances are, you already have a hectic schedule, and incorporating movement practices into that can sometimes feel like a chore.
On today’s episode, my guests are here to show you an easy, simple, and effective way to incorporate the things you need to do to take care of your body, without all the hassle.
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Key Takeaways
If You Want to Move More:
Don’t get overwhelmed by feeling like you have to add movement to your checklist
Find simple ways to incorporate movement into your daily routine through the Build to Move tips
Remember that consistency is key and embrace the mentality of ‘Never Do Nothing’
About The Ready State
Meet Juliet and Kelly Starrett, founders of The Ready State and co-authors of their newest book, Built to Move. Juliet and Kelly are on a mission to help you live ready and have dedicated themselves to years of figuring out exactly how you can implement these practices within your already busy schedule. They have a human being approach to basic muscle maintenance and believe it is your right as a human being to be able to do what you love with no holding back.
Become a Durable Person
Have you ever heard the old saying, if you have cookies in the house, you are going to eat the cookies? Kelly and Juliet have taken that principle and applied it to their environment so that they can take every opportunity to move. These ‘movement snacks’ are one of the foundational principles they have created to alter habits and encourage movement.
To Juliet and Kelly, becoming a ‘Durable Person’ means taking a systems approach to your health and well-being in order to increase your ability, strength, and longevity. Incorporating these micro-tasks into your daily habits is the first step.
Never Do Nothing
Juliet and Kelly’s mantra is as simple as ‘Never Do Nothing’. They believe that by making small changes in your existing schedule, such as walking instead of driving and moving instead of being still, you can start to see the results you are looking for while also increasing your longevity and overall life enjoyment.
Having an immaculate training program does no good if you are not able to implement it. By getting in where you fit in, you can stop stressing about your fitness checklist and start stacking positive and helpful behaviors into your life.
Are you ready to move more? Share your thoughts about this episode with me in the comments below.
In This Episode
Exploring how The Ready State has changed and grown over time (22:07)
The ten key things that will help you focus on moving the needle the most (31:30)
How to alter your movement habits in a way that will not impact your busyness schedule (38:21)
Small habits that you can easily incorporate into your daily life to see real change (47:16)
The best ways that you can start weaving in movement practices into your life simply without lots of time (55:32)
Quotes
“Somewhere in our lives, we both jointly got the message that people who are great at anything just do the same thing over and over and over. And it’s not to say that they don’t evolve and iterate; they do. But they are kind of doing the same thing over and over and over. And that’s how you become great at something.” (18:03)
“You can feel better, and you have to take this system approach to begin to feel better. And it is actually your right and in your power to do so.” (20:30)
“People know they want and need to be healthy, whatever that means. They want to feel good. And they are struggling to feel like they can get solid, actionable advice.” (30:46)
“You actually think you are working really hard, but you can actually feel better and do even more.” (45:29)
“I live a busy life, and so does everybody else… [But] your body is so tolerant. If you just start to give it the right things, or different inputs or expanding your inputs, you will be shocked at what your body will do for you.” (1:03:04)
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Built to Move with The Ready State w/ The Ready State Transcript
Kelly Starrett
If you’re like many of the athletic people in my community, you are already doing your best to lift weights strength train, getting your cardio and maybe even some walking. But when you think about all the other things you know you need to do to take care of your body, it can become this overwhelming list, where all of a sudden, you start to really feel overwhelmed or resentful of all of these checkboxes that you’re supposed to be able to tick off. Well, my guests on the podcast today are experts in helping people to move freely and live more fully without movement becoming a part time or full time job.
Steph Gaudreau
On this podcast, we’re going to be talking about two really important habits that you can start weaving into the things that you’re already doing to make movement that much more accessible. If you’re an athletic 40, something woman who loves lifting weights, challenging yourself and doing hard shit, the Fuel Your Strength podcast is for you. You’ll learn how to eat, train and recover smarter, so you build strength and muscle, have more energy and perform better in and out of the gym. I’m strength nutrition strategist and weightlifting coach, Steph Gaudreau.
Steph Gaudreau
The Fuel Your Strength podcast dives into evidence based strategies for nutrition training and recovery. And why once you’re approaching your 40s and beyond, you need to do things a little differently than you did in your 20s. We’re here to challenge the limiting industry narratives about what women can and should do in training and beyond. If that sounds good, hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app. And let’s go.
Steph Gaudreau
They’re today’s special guests are no stranger to this podcast, they have been here more than one time. And I’m really excited to welcome them back because not only are they colleagues that I really respect, they’re also friends. And I’m just so excited to welcome back Kelly and Juliet Starrett to the show. Today, they’re going to be talking about their book Built To Move. This is their newest book, it should be coming out soon by the time you listen to this podcast. And if you’re watching me on YouTube, I’m over here lifting up the book for you, you can see it, it’s got a great cover, it’s really eye catching.
Steph Gaudreau
Thanks so much for joining me back on the podcast. I’m so excited that you’re here. And hopefully you are tuning in whether you’re here on your favorite podcast app, go ahead and hit subscribe. Maybe you’re over on YouTube, watching this video, go ahead and subscribe over there and ring the bell for notifications. I’m still getting used to saying that. So thanks for bearing with me. And for all of you who have come over to YouTube, and are enjoying the video recordings of this podcast.
Steph Gaudreau
But what they’re really talking about in this episode with me is how you can start using the environment that’s already around you the habits that you’ve already constructed for yourself, and really weaving in more movement. Weaving in the things that you feel like are just another thing on this long checklist of taking care of your body, and really making it more seamless, easier to integrate without creating this giant as list for yourself and feeling sometimes frankly, resentful about all of the things that were quote unquote supposed to do. So I really excited to dig into this with them, they’re going to be sharing more in depth on a couple of the habits that they cover in built to move. And I think you’re gonna really find that their approach.
Steph Gaudreau
Whether you’re an athletic competitor, or you’re a recreational exercise, or somebody who really likes to be active, you’re going to find their approach is easy to implement, no matter what level of busyness you already have going on in your life. So we’re really so excited. I’m so excited to welcome the strides back to the show. Before we hop into the rest of the episode though, make sure that if you’re like, Okay, I need coaching, I need support with my nutrition with really weaving together nutrition training and recovery for yourself as a over 40 athletic woman, then we want to help you out in Strength Nutrition Unlocked.
Steph Gaudreau
This is going to save you so much time because we are putting together the most important principles and helping you customize your own roadmap if you want to say that for building muscle getting stronger, having more energy, I mean who does not want more energy and really performing better both in and out of the gym. You’re going to get support. You’re going to get community and really amazing more science based evidence backed practices and principles that are easy for you to customize so that they fit you and your life. So if you want to go ahead and check out more about that you can visit StephGaudreau.com/apply and submit an application. We’d love to chat with you more and see if it’s a great fit.
Steph Gaudreau
Alright, without any further ado, let’s go ahead and jump into this episode with Juliet & Kelly Starrett. Welcome back to the podcast.
Kelly Starrett
It feels like a family reunion. Let’s be honest,
Juliet Starrett
Thank you so much. We’re excited to chat you up.
Steph Gaudreau
it it really does. I mean, we were talking off air about us meeting up in Glasgow when we were living there and going to the mobility cert in like 2011. I mean…
Juliet Starrett
Which is basically the dawn of time in the health and fitness world.
Steph Gaudreau
It really is things have changed so much. And I remember very well when I first stumbled upon what you were doing in your garage, and sort of a mobility video a day. And this idea of bringing in, you know, foam rollers or lacrosse balls and like doing shoulder stretches and mobility work and using bands like it was it wasn’t really a thing in the gym at the time. I mean, how do you feel like, Is it is it weird when you take a look back and you think about scooter in the garage. And now like, what The Ready State has become.
Kelly Starrett
Let me frame this for everyone. We went out on a tear and we were going to make a video a day for a year. And now that’s not such a big deal because people make so much content and they film on their phones and you take selfies. So that that has kind of changed a little bit. But I had written a poem a day for a year. And I was like, I think we can do this. And I think Juliet and I were like we committed to trying to do this for the blog. And we call it the mobility project.
Kelly Starrett
Who cares about all that, but I want everyone to know is that we had two children, and Juliet was the at the time you may have been usurped was the world record holder for Internet stretching video cinematography. And it would be 10 o’clock at night, and I’d be passed out because we’ve been coaching all day are teaching and Julia was come home as attorney, she’d be like, wakeup we got to make a video and I’m like, Ah, and like she would we drag ourselves out to the to the garage at 10pm to like make some content. So half of the time, I have no idea even if I’m awake. But we did it.
Juliet Starrett
And what I would add is that I have some skills as a person. But one of them is not being great at filming content, especially back then. I mean, it was just all so new. And you know, I didn’t really know how to use an iPhone. And I, you know, we didn’t we didn’t have any microphone. So the audio quality on our videos was always total shit. But I think that thing that, to me, sort of brings it all back and reminds me just how long ago that was, is how many people actually sometimes get a glimpse of our kids in some of our present day videos.
Juliet Starrett
And I think it’s it actually sort of as a way to remind themselves about how much time has passed because, you know, Georgia and Caroline will be in those videos. And they’re like three and two and five and jumping out of boxes in the background. And you know, now our daughter Georgia is about to go off to college next year, she’s going to turn 18 in April.
Kelly Starrett
Caroline who was a preemie is 5’1’0.
Juliet Starrett
Yeah, so I think, you know, I think we, in some ways, it has gone by so quickly. And then when I think about it from that perspective of like, well, we’ve raised our children in the entire time, since we started making those videos.
Kelly Starrett
And to answer the questions, what I think really remarkable is that when we started this idea, it was a pretty dangerous idea. And that idea was, you should be able to perform basic maintenance on yourself. If you’re in pain, there’s a lot you can do to get out of your pain. There’s a lot you can do to affect your physiology that will affect your brain too. And so we really just said, Hey, look at all these tools that we can democratize that you don’t need to talk to a professional person to be able to say, Hey, I think I can make myself feel better.
Kelly Starrett
And honestly, at the time, we were having a really dis honest conversation about is pain, a medical problem or not. And we were like, sort of not even in the height of the opiate crisis and epidemic. But we told everyone was pain as a medical problem. When we told every coach, you’re not allowed to deal with pain, pain is a medical problem. So people didn’t address it. They kept showing up. And they would have pain running and back pain working and was like, until their pain got so bad that they couldn’t do their job or they had to go take a day off from work. Go see a doctor and we forget MRIs was just like, there were so much low hanging fruit and slack in the system.
Kelly Starrett
We were like, Well, hey, let’s see if we just can move these tools out. But at the same time, you know, we were clever enough To be in a community at the right time where we could transcribe what we knew were not just soft tissue mobilizations, but like when we developed all of the banded distractions and things, that was me trying to make it so that I can remove the physical therapists from the conversation, and we recognize that these things were safe. And that if you could do them in your garage or your gym, you could own your position and own your body. And that, apparently, was a message that really resonated with people because here we are later and, and they were as actually a word.
Juliet Starrett
They were willing to watch our crap videos with horrible audio quality. So I mean, there must have been something to them.
Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, well, I think you know, it just from my perspective, as an athlete going into the gym, and I’ve been an athlete my entire life. And it wasn’t until I really got into that CrossFit space. And first learned about mobility project is was watching your early videos, and starting to take those things into the gym. I mean, I had when I was racing mountain bikes, tremendously bad back pain. I mean, so many things going on with my body. And it was it was sort of like, well, where do you go?
Juliet Starrett
But I mean, I will say, from my outside perspective, you know, I actually think most physical therapists actually haven’t, and the good ones don’t feel threatened at all by the kind of work we’re trying to do. Because I still I don’t think that anything we’ve ever done is cutting them out altogether. There’s definitely a time and a place for professional help and professional assistance. But you know, I think I think there’s probably I don’t know, what would you say? Do you think you made people mad?
Steph Gaudreau
What do you do? And it felt really empowering to say, well, you know, I can at least, like you said, use these things to get into better positions on your position, that sort of thing. And it really did make a big difference for me, personally. So as a coach, did you make people mad, though, along the way, I’m curious, like, where people sort of like, wait a minute, like, why are you taking us out of the equation with this? Or was was was it all really smooth sailing?
Juliet Starrett
I mean, I’ll Kelly should really take this in earnest. But I will say, being on the sidelines of you know, Kelly, being from and trained as a physical therapist, I think he has, you know, he has had moments where he feels a great kinship with the greater physical therapy community and moments where he’s like, I don’t even think I am a physical therapist, like what I do bears no resemblance. So I think, I think it’s been, you know, a really up and down experience for him in terms of sort of his connection to that greater physical therapy community.
Kelly Starrett
I would say that the problem is, oftentimes, people can’t wrap their heads around the two truths about what are we do? One is, our objective measures are, what is it every human being should be able to do with her shoulder, their shoulder? And those things are established not by me, but by physical therapists and physicians and orthopedists and American Academy of Pediatric you know, pediatricians, and what we see is that around the world, everyone agrees, this is how much shoulder range of motion and extension you should have.
Kelly Starrett
This is how much shoulder range of motion putting your arm over your head and fluctuation. So our objective measure always was to take mobilizations, and if you looked at supple leopard, it was the first two thirds of the book is movement and movement theory and how to how to integrate and see this pattern is underneath those things, not just discrete step aerobics that I remember, memorize. But what is the principle say about a better way of higher expression of the movement, and then the back half or a set of tools, which are mobility tools.
Kelly Starrett
And the reason we went to mobility tools as in mobilizations as the composition transfer exercises, was that we found that when people started doing things in greater range of motion, standing up, things that look like real strength conditioning, pull ups, push ups, kettlebell swings, deadlifts, lunges, we didn’t need a lot of corrective exercises. corrective exercise came out of a tradition where people were doing a lot of cable crossovers and a lot of functional things, quote, unquote, functional things bouncing on a physio ball. And they weren’t really exposed themselves to really the language, the formal language, the strength conditioning, and what we found was we had in that language, regression and progression.
Kelly Starrett
So if you couldn’t squat, we didn’t stop squatting and do a bunch of squat like things we just squatted higher or squatted shallower or held you had you hold the weight in a different place more slowly, right? Or move your feet in and out. But we still did this the thing and so what we found was that we had this really powerful tool regression progression. We had an objective set of measurements. Why can’t you do this? Your ankle is supposed to do this. You don’t have any internal rotation. So that really is the first sort of objective and if people didn’t understand that, then that’s our error for not explaining that as well, right?
Kelly Starrett
Because it wasn’t just stretch until you end up stretching, then your legs are behind you. And there’s actually an end range like this is how much you should do. And now we can create vital signs and movement, sort of limitations. Like you don’t need to work on this anymore. But the other part of our equation, which I think confused people was that we were always about bio motor output, which is shorthand for wattage poundage. Can you go faster? And because we were working in communities where people were challenging still are challenging those things. When we found we put people into native ranges and gave them expression, and permission to own what their body should be able to do.
Kelly Starrett
They went faster, they lifted more, they ran further, they were more efficient, they won world records. And that was the two that kind of twin the markers there. Do you have native range, that native range gives you increased wattage, go ahead and come at us, like you don’t like our styles and techniques, that’s fine. But you can’t argue that your shoulder extension is is, you know, incomplete. And so I think those two things, and oftentimes people we were a little ahead of the curve. And so people have come to understand what we meant. It’s just taken a long time for people to understand.
Kelly Starrett
And I’ve even heard really legit strength coaches say things like, Well, I got into jujitsu, I should have paid attention more to my mobility and my range of motion. Now, I didn’t realize it when I was powerlifting. And I think that’s valid, right? You have the power? If you’re like, hey, I don’t it’s not a full range of motion sport. Why am I spending all this time working on my hip rotation when it doesn’t change my my function?
Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, as a jiu jitsu player for the last six years, I can appreciate that quite a bit as well. And I appreciate your candor there. Because I think, you know, you all have been in this space for a long time. And, you know, you’ve really developed this amazing way of communicating what you do, you have such a great library of resources, you have such a great methodology. And you know, when you are on that leading edge of things, sometimes I feel like, it just people don’t always understand they’re not always ready.
Steph Gaudreau
And so I think just kind of from one person who’s been in the space for a really long time to you all, it’s, it’s cool to see how you’ve, you’ve stuck with what you know, to be true, like you’ve adjusted over time. And, you know, if you learn new things, you go there, and you’ve really just also really, I think, stay true to your values to who you are, and to your mission, which is commendable in, in such an industry, especially the online space of this industry, where things come and go and pop up and go away. And to really have that staying power is very impressive.
Juliet Starrett
I was just gonna say, I mean, somehow, as somewhere in our lives, like, we both jointly got the message that people who are great at anything, just do the same thing over and over and over. And it’s not to say that they don’t evolve and iterate, they do. But they’re kind of doing the same thing over and over and over and over. And that’s how you become great at something.
Juliet Starrett
And so, you know, obviously, like, our website looks different. And we have, you know, we provide our products in different ways. And, you know, we’re evolving and iterating what we’re doing and how we’re thinking about things. But I mean, we’ve really been in this exact same lane now for you know, 15 or 20 years. And our core message is, you know, really exactly what Kelly said at the beginning of this, which is, you know, we just want to give people some tools and tricks to be able to take care of their bodies, and that they should be able to do that, that that’s like, you know, a right as a human being. And, you know, that’s been kind of our guiding principle throughout. And, you know, we just, we’ve stayed in our lane.
Kelly Starrett
The thing is, we discovered is that, you know, people are gonna get hot, we heard this great interview, one time someone is describing, you know, people who are hot, it was Jay Z, Jay Z, and he’s like, don’t get confused with excellence is people are hot. So in the last, certainly in the last 10 years, or longer, 15 years, we’ve seen a lot of people get hot, and then they go away. And it’s okay for us to say, Wow, that person is killing it. And really sad. I appreciate that. I hope they can stick around, I hope they have something else to say.
Kelly Starrett
And what we’ve continued to find is that we have a lot more to say. And we have a lot we have really smart, interesting friends. And in this space, as Julia said, there’s a lot of room to expand the message to say, hey, look, I don’t think as we’re learning now that the promise of fitness has really been sort of met, we really, let’s just say how much money and time we’ve all spent in the last decade professionalizing fitness. And if I turn around, we apply the that saying or looking at that filter across humanity. I’m not sure we’ve really served the people we’ve really gotten good at basically creating, like small.
Kelly Starrett
We’re like university faculties fighting over minutia about history. There’s a call to action. There’s a technical term for that called artifacts of scholarship. And what ends up happening is that If the rest of the real meaningful work goes by, and people aren’t, needs aren’t met. So I think what we’re realizing is, hey, performance was so great. And that’s where we learned our craft. But we need to have a bigger conversation about reaching into our neighborhoods and our families and say, hey, look, you can feel better. And you have to take this a systems approach to begin to feel better. And it’s actually your right and in your power to do so.
Juliet Starrett
And we didn’t want, you know, we didn’t want people to get tripped up on the possibility by just saying, like, I don’t relate to the word mobility, it’s still niche, and weird, and I definitely don’t relate to the word WOD. That’s definitely weird. And so it’s just been, it’s been these little baby steps we’re taking to figure out like, how can we cast a wider net, and make some of this work? We’re doing more accessible?
Juliet Starrett
And just to add, I mean, that’s sort of how, you know, again, like Kelly said, we got our roots. And, you know, we’re both professional athletes and working in high performance environments. But sort of every step we’ve taken over the last 10 years is to, to figure out, you know, how can we cast a wider net? How can we bring more people into the tent, so that more people can take advantage of these tools that we’ve been able to create and have access to, by way of having so many amazing friends in the space, you know, and like, our first step of that was actually changing our name from mobility WOD to the ready state, that was a key part of this sort of transformation that we’ve had, because we just felt like mobility WOD was not an open and accessible Word to, you know, the vast majority of humanity.
Steph Gaudreau
I lvoe that. I think it’s amazing. And it’s, I know, it’s not easy, also, and you’re, you’re doing what you’re doing so huge kudos to y’all there. Take me through sort of the Okay, so you have several books, and sort of take me through really quickly, like the progression the the evolution of this, these texts, even to sort of where you’re at now, with the new book built to move like, what how is it? Like if we had to kind of follow the the timeline? What was the idea behind how it’s changed?
Juliet Starrett
Well, one of the things that I’ve been thinking about lately, actually, after Built To Move, as you know, out in the world, is it in many ways, I think that actually is a prequel to becoming a supple leopard. You know, we just weren’t sophisticated enough, and we didn’t have enough like reps and hours and experience in the business to be able to appreciate that, you know, to me becoming a supple leopard is like, you know, is is like the advanced course. And this book is is the prequel to it. So, you know, that’s sort of the way I think about it. What do you think?
Kelly Starrett
First of all, I do not recommend anyone write a book ever.
Steph Gaudreau
Worst. But it’s also yes, you know, I think about just to interrupt you for one second, because, in my mind, Anytime somebody’s like, but you should write a book, and I’ve got a few. So like that scene from Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring. Boromir, they are in Rivendale and they’re about to go out, right? And he’s like, you don’t just walk into Mordor and I’m like, Yeah, you don’t just write a book
Kelly Starrett
One does not!
Juliet Starrett
And we’re huge Lord of the Rings fan, so I couldn’t appreciate that story more.
Steph Gaudreau
Okay, back to you.
Kelly Starrett
This is why I pay attention to them. They speak speak the same language. I think you know, what’s interesting is, you can see that were thinking or performance, the basics, you know, moving into kind of some sports, but also some public health, you know, we’re realizing that, you know, we need to take on what’s deskbound and then we write a book about running, read a book about paddling. And this is actually our sixth book. And we even tried self publishing one, Julie was the publisher.
Juliet Starrett
I strongly do not recommend.
Kelly Starrett
Again, you know, passion project was our love letter to paddling and I think we’ve sold 10s of those books. Such as everyone’s time, shout out to 10s those of you who own it, appreciate you. But what we’ve come to realize is that actually, there was a little bit of a revolution, because everything went online and digital and became so hyper local on people’s phones. But there’s something missing about people who aren’t on the internet. And there are actually a lot of people who aren’t on Instagram.
Kelly Starrett
So we all those of us on Instagram, or like Instagram has this life. And we even felt like oh, those tick tock are like, those are little children over here, and I’m an adult, I wait until memes make it to, you know, Instagram and then I laugh at them. Right. So I think one of the things we realized was that the power in the book, we saw the supple leopard transformed our lives. It became a textbook, it’s, I think it’s sold 750,000 copies. And so you see that thing is out there and still you No people are using it as a base text resource primary source.
Kelly Starrett
And what we did when this book was we were like, well, if people can start to become sophisticated about really nuanced physiology, vital signs, why can’t we take that same concept, and apply it to physicality, apply it to behavior. So what we’ve tried to do in this next book bill to move is say, Look, this is the the the learning manual, this is the place off of which we can create and build the next level. And so if supple leopard is missing a heart, this is it. I mean, this is the one we come up with, like I said, the other day, and a feet feet of fit have a blacked out, I was like, it’s like the Jumanji beating hearts, the drumbeat of the supplement. And the idea here is we need to reach more people. And we need to simplify the message. It’s not diet and exercise. Everyone knows that needs diet and exercise. And yes, we you need to exercise and yes, you should watch what you’re putting in your mouth.
Kelly Starrett
But becoming a supple leopard. Some of the books don’t actually tell you what to do or how to live? Or what do I do first thing in the morning? Or what does it look like in a day, and if I’m a busy person, what’s essential? So one of the things that we figured out, was, again, in this idea of these objectivity, it’s not enough to say it’s good enough we need we recognize, especially in the pandemic that people could be comfortable with, understanding what their respiration rate was, understanding what their oxygen saturation was their temperature, those are all vital signs.
Kelly Starrett
But we realized that that needed to be a component to a bigger whole, and that we needed to take the system’s approach and was the same systems approach that we were taking with all of our elite athletes. So whether we’re doing one offs with the best athletes in the world and talking about fueling, and downregulation are working with, you know, we have two teams right now cruising into, you know, some football, who have done really well with our programming on their athletes, their coaches have all gone through our stuff. What we see is that those lessons we needed to take out and say, Okay, how do we objectify them?
Kelly Starrett
How do we make these measurements that everyone can start to understand or like, Oh, here’s a baseline, and it’s not good or bad, it’s okay, here’s where I am. And now I have some understanding into how my body’s working so that when something pops up, or I have knee pain, or I’m starting to gain body weight, or I’m not sleeping, or I’m stressed or blood counselors, I start to have some measures that I can wrap my hands around, which gives me agency and control. And the book is an easy way to do that, because it’s not online science.
Juliet Starrett
And if I could just add a couple things, I think there were like, sort of a few things that really informed our readiness to be able to write a book like this. The first is, you know, spending, like, I’m sure you do the last 15 years, like self experimenting. You know, like, I am not an expert in any of these things. Other than that, I’ve been in the health and fitness space for a lot of years, and I’ve had access to all the most amazing tools and tricks and coaches and coaching and I’ve been coached.
Juliet Starrett
And you know, we’ve really been experimenting ourselves on ourselves and have come to sort of realize that there’s this core set of behaviors that we do in our own lives, over and over and over and over and over again. And it’s what we think has made us durable humans. The second thing is we while we do have a lot of friends in the health and fitness, wellness space at large, we actually are we’ve got a couple kids, we’re raising them in a community of people, we have friends who are busy working parents are just busy working people who are trying to navigate this. And what we’ve seen happen over the last 10 years is people feeling literally fire hosed with information from our industry. And they don’t know how to make heads or tails of it.
Juliet Starrett
I mean, the amount of conversations I have just among friends, you know, parents have our kids, you know, friends or people in the neighborhood neighbors across the street, you know, they want to know whether they should be keto or paleo or whether it’s time for them to start intermittent fasting, which should I cross it now? Or should I do a 45? Should I hike? Should I do this? You know, Wait, should I should I prioritize sleep? Or is that not really that important? And, you know, wait, what do I do? And oh, yeah, hey, Kelly, I got to come over tonight, because I throughout my back.
Juliet Starrett
And so we’re living in this, you know, like real community where people look to us for advice on these subjects. And so we realize that informally, we’ve been kind of doling out advice over the years, and realizing that everybody is sort of missing what we call these base camp practices that we have so many people we know. And this includes, by the way, a lot of professional athletes and high performers that we work with, you know, they’re like, they’re the the analogy we like to use is they’re actually trying to climb up Everest, but they’ve never made it to Basecamp.
Juliet Starrett
And what I mean by that is, you know, they’re taking like a litany of complicated supplements that they read about on Instagram. And you know, They’re, they’re following some niche diet or, you know, they’re doing some secret squirrel exercise program or whatever. But like, they’re not sleeping at night. And they can’t report the last time they ate a vegetable. And, you know, they keep struggling on and on with shoulder pain all the time that they can’t seem to resolve despite having 57 MRIs. And you know, their doctor saying, Well, you don’t have a catastrophic injury. So you should just stop moving.
Juliet Starrett
And so we’ve, we’ve sort of spent the last 10 years in this universe of like, self experimentation, and then being part of a bigger community of people who know that they want and need to be healthy, whatever that means. They want to feel good. And they’re struggling to feel like they can get solid actionable advice.
Kelly Starrett
You just kill that.
Juliet Starrett
Oh, thanks.
Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, it’s so true. And I get these DMS all the time as well, you know, should I eat 25 grams, or 30 grams of carbs after my workout, and I’m like, Okay, we need to like back it up a second here. There’s a whole lot that is probably more fundamental and important to do consistently, rather than stressing out about those, those tiny little details. And I really love how you have these 10 kind of key things here in the book to really get people focused on the things that are going to move the needle the most.
Kelly Starrett
I’ll just sit down quietly from now on. Well done.
Kelly Starrett
So let me ask you a question. You saw those 10.
Steph Gaudreau
Yeah.
Kelly Starrett
Were there any on there that were surprising to you?
Steph Gaudreau
Oh, I don’t think I would say surprising just what I know of you all in the ready state and all the things that you’ve created content around over the years. But I think one stood out to me as being very underrated by the general public. And this comes down to, you know, anytime somebody comes to me for coaching, and they’re like, I just, you know, I’m ready, I want help like, and we’re talking about systems and structures and habits.
Steph Gaudreau
And the one thing that nobody wants to think about or talk about is the environment. So in not in this list, number nine, where you had creating a movement rich environment. I think that’s hugely overlooked. And I’m wondering if you can say a little bit more about that. What do you mean by that?
Juliet Starrett
I will start by telling you a funny story, because there’s an ongoing fight in our household about who came up with that phrase, although I know, it’s me and not Kelly. Anyway, we’re always like, TM movement, rich environment.
Kelly Starrett
Did you see I didn’t even flinch, I just like she’s gonna take it in this podcast, you can lose the rich environment, she ran with it.
Juliet Starrett
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things we’ve seen, and we talked about it a bit in our book, book, despawn, but maybe not as well as we could have, is that we’ve just set up our environments universally to dissuade enough movement in our days, you know, where, and also technology has been a huge component of that.
Juliet Starrett
I mean, you add on, I mean, you know, we already had a lot of, you know, environmental constraints that encouraged us to not move before technology. And then technology was just like, you know, the final nail in the coffin, you know, and, and it’s difficult, and we were all, you know, maybe less so since COVID, that’s been a positive development, people aren’t commuting as much. So maybe people aren’t spending as much time in their cars.
Juliet Starrett
But I’m not sure that’s actually helped people move more, I think people are like getting up from bed and going directly to their zoom calls in their PJs. But you know, we just haven’t created an environment that that allows for enough movement. And I think what we’ve really realized about ourselves and about humans is that we’re all inherently lazy. And we need to take…
Kelly Starrett
Take it back, we’re not lazy. We’re designed to conserve energy.
Juliet Starrett
Designed to conserve energy. And if we put ourselves in an environment where there’s a comfy couch and a huge bowl of cookies, like, I don’t care who you are, you’re gonna be like, Yes, I am. And yes, I will write and so so we are always trying to do in our own lives and is worked really well for us as this thing we call constraining our environment. And the other thing we do is pepper our environment, there are these like two things we do.
Juliet Starrett
So one example of constraining our environment. As you can see, we have our podcast table here, and it’s a non adjustable standing height table. And, and we have some stools here. So we’re not requiring ourselves to stand 24 hours a day. I’m actually standing right now, Kelly’s sitting. But if…
Kelly Starrett
I’m perching, my feet are on the ground.
Steph Gaudreau
I had no idea, just based on looking at you, by the way that you weren’t sitting.
Juliet Starrett
I’m standing right now. Yeah, I’m standing and so And actually, I have my foot up on on a little bar below the thing, but I’m standing here. But you know, just by having this table here, this is the choice we have. This is where we work. Every desk in our office is standing only. So you can sit at a stool but you’re at least given the option to get up and down and spend 20 minutes 15 minutes of your day standing.
Juliet Starrett
So you’re being given these like, you know constrained choices and the other thing we do about our environs as we pepper our environment like and I’m sure your living room looks like ours. I’m sure you are peppering your environment but like our living room is set up. So that we love to watch Netflix, like we just talked about this before we press record on this, like we love TV and movies and, and, you know, we find that that’s a great way to relax at night.
Juliet Starrett
But if you go into our living room, you’ll see that we have balls and rollers and Norma tech boots and you know, hypervolt and, you know, little pads that you can sit on, so you can spend time sitting on the ground. And in our kitchen, we have slack blocks, because we’re big fans of practicing balance, but we don’t want to have like a balanced practice, per se. And so everywhere you look in our house, they’re like, easy ways.
Kelly Starrett
We have a rad mid century modern house. So we’re clear.
Juliet Starrett
That’s right. No, if you came in, you know, our kids aren’t embarrassed.
Kelly Starrett
The Kabuki pain pill is this huge, gigantic 45 pound steel stainless steel object. It’s like a modern sent mid century object. Well, what’s that I’m like, put it on your quads, tell me what it’s for. You know, it’s just in the living room as an object, and it’s beautiful. So I’m just telling you, you don’t have to suffer.
Juliet Starrett
I mean, this is just a long way around of saying like, everybody knows the the old saying where it’s like, if you have cookies in your house, you’re gonna eat the cookies. Well, we are basically trying to take that same principle and apply it to our environment. So that at every chance, we have to add in little movement, snacks, little balanced practices, a little bit of mobilization, while we’re watching the TV, like, there’s no barrier to us doing that, because we have the tools there, we’ve made it comfortable for ourselves, it’s easy to do our kids do it. And so, you know, that’s, that’s one of the things we’ve been really focused on. So I’m glad you pick that up.
Kelly Starrett
And let me jump in and say that, you know, as a young physio at school, working alongside occupational therapists, when someone had had a stroke, vascular acid accident, and they had sort of diminished capacity on one side, one of the things that I would watch them do is they would actually put a cooking mitt on the less affected side. So right sides affected more effective left sides, let’s say less affected the correct term. And they would put a mitt on the less effective side on the side where people had more dexterity.
Kelly Starrett
And they would make the more effective side do all the work. And so they would take away the option and the choice to be able to grab it with the less affected side. So if you really want to develop your left handedness, just stop using right hand. But in making a non choice put a glove on. So you can’t touch anything but omit not, that’s what I’m talking about. And that really changed and stuck my brain, I was like, Oh, it’s just a lot easier if I don’t have a choice, or make it. So the choice is more in my favor to do a different thing, not a better thing, but a different thing. I expand my choices. And I think the power of this book is not only in for us identifying what clear objective measures are for behavior.
Kelly Starrett
But because as you mentioned earlier, we’re 50 years old, we have two kids, we have a business, we’re not like 20 year old spending Sunday meal prepping, this just doesn’t work for us. And we’ve started to view all of the our behavior modifications through the lens of when and where people gonna be able to do this, how do they fit this in? We saw, because we’ve been in this performance space, I’ve gone into countless professional teams, I mean, just choose the professional team in a sport. And the people before me have come in with these really immaculate programs. And no one doesn’t, because they don’t know how to fit it in. It doesn’t fit into the existing architecture. It’s a whole different language.
Kelly Starrett
So what we’ve tried to do, and as a result, no one does their stuff. And so I learned that lesson early on, if I was going to get people to do my stuff and experience the the beauty and the magic that is my brain. Because that was what I needed to do is say, Well, how can I help you solve your problems in the time that you have allotted for it. And that really changed my perspective about what was essential is not and so if you take this book, you’ll see that we look very clearly at when does an average person a typical person going to have any agency and control over their life? And when do you fit these practices in?
Kelly Starrett
Otherwise, it’s just one more thing I give to a busy working mother. And I’m like, Hey, check this, check this box, the box off the list, right? You know, now you’ve got more things to do.
Juliet Starrett
Like one of the things I think like one of the chapters I like a lot in this book, I like them all, but one of them I like a lot is the balanced chapter. And the reason I think it’s so important is I think sort of intellectually, everybody knows that they want to maintain their balance. And I think everybody is Herpe we stand up. We bike. Everybody’s heard that, like, you know, if you fall down when you’re old, like it’s kind of the beginning of the end, like most people have probably heard that like through some sort of source in their life, right.
Juliet Starrett
So people know that I think sort of people know at a basic level that balance is important and may be naturally through some kind of sport or activity, like we ride our mountain bikes and do some stuff, we naturally get some balanced practice, but most people don’t. But if you again, ask a busy person who has a lot on their plate to be like, Hey, take this one hour balanced class, on top of your workout and the 50 Other things that we in the fitness room prescribe that you do in your day, zero chance that’s going to happen will not happen.
Juliet Starrett
Like that’s going to be the thing that people are, everybody’s got to make a priority list that’s going to be crossed off. But to me, it’s one of the most important things that we want to maintain as we get older. And as I’ve watched my own parents age and sort of sort of thought about what is it that I want to be able to do when I’m, you know, 5560 7580? You know, how do I still want to be able to use my body 78, that’s for men. So one of those, you know, like balances definitely at the top of that list, but it’s not sexy to practice balance.
Juliet Starrett
And so, you know, we’ve tried to do some things in this book that like, incorporate adding a little bit of mini balance practices throughout your day doing things you’re already doing, like putting on your shoes and socks and brushing your teeth and, you know, standing around cooking dinner or doing the dishes. I mean, we’ve tried to really make it so that it’s not just one more thing that you have. Because if we said to 99.9% of people like oh, yeah, balance is important. And if you want to maintain your balance, you need to do this one hour balance class every day, literally people would be like, oh, yeah, no, there’s no way I’m doing that.
Kelly Starrett
And more importantly, we’ve also given you some objectives. And if you can pass these objectives, and you’re thinking to yourself, maybe that’s less of a priority right now, maybe I can put my energy somewhere else. But now because we’ve given you a vital sign. And the vital sign is very clear, the research is very clear. If you can stand on one leg with your eyes closed for 20 seconds, you are at increased fall risk and mortality and morbidity. Like it is real, that that is an easy benchmark.
Kelly Starrett
And it’s also begin to say, well, even practicing the test is going to make you better at the test. But if you didn’t even know it was something to be aware of. And then Juliet says every, like we point out in the book, hey, do you wear shoes, perfect stand on one leg, put a shoe on, stand on the other leg, put your shoes on, let me know how that goes for you, oh, you just did balance every day for the rest of your life. That’s what we’re after. We figure it out.
Kelly Starrett
And it’s the same around here that you have to be consistent before you heroic really, truly I mean, if you if you can start to wrap your head around that and then put this in the background. This is we’re not talking about given a peloton or given up the things you like, we’re just saying, hey, look, let’s create some some touch points that we think and have seen and tested in our world travels and all the things we’re doing that we know make durable people and by durable, we’re talking about people who feel good, and people can do what they want to do. That’s the game. Not necessarily just like prepping with your fitness.
Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, and I’m glad that you have structured the book that way. It’s the thing I hear so much from my clients, the people in my audience, like community members is, yeah, they feel like taking care of their bodies just becomes this extensive to do list. And as much as they like the dopamine of checking off the checkbox.
Steph Gaudreau
Yes, you know, it just ends up being this thing that feels resent like they want to, it’s resentful, you know, it’s like I have to do all these things, in addition to the things that I’m already doing, I already don’t have a lot of time or sort of free time to just relax and people are really kind of stretched to the max these days. And to weave that in. I mean, we we still don’t have a couch, he got rid of our couch, probably 2014 or 15.
Steph Gaudreau
So we still have a couch, we sit on the floor a lot. We’ve made it fairly comfortable to do. So we still have all of our, you know, rollers and our, you know, all of our mobility balls and you know, supernovas and all that stuff on the floor. And it’s just when it’s there. And it’s can be woven into the things that you’re already doing. I feel like it’s less of an ask, I guess, then let me put this just long list of things that you need to do be beyond, you know, you’re trying to exercise trying to eat fairly well, trying to get enough sleep all of those things,
Kelly Starrett
And still trying to be have time to be a human. Yeah, you know, one of the things that we sort of struggle with with two identities. One is we recognize in our high performance environments, some of the university teams are working with, for example, that they’re not out working the competition that ship that narrative that will just outwork everyone, grind everyone, what a bunch of horse crap, that is, that’s totally horse crap. Everyone is working as hard as you’re working.
Kelly Starrett
What we’ve seen is the real advantage, obviously, is talent makes a difference. But besides that, whoever can adapt to doing the most work actually wins. That means that they can handle more work volumes more often more frequently and be fresher. So if everyone’s working the same amount, but you have one set of people who are prioritizing sleep, who give some you’re walking and decongesting, who are kind of taking care of their tissues and eating enough proteins, et cetera, et cetera, we see is that that group does a better job of adapting to the stressors in their world, which means that they can work harder.
Kelly Starrett
And what everyone should hear in this message is, primarily, you actually think you’re working really hard, but you can actually feel better and do even more. And that’s the message that we come in, I’m like, Oh, I know, you think you’re really, really working hard, but you’re not. And as soon as you do these things, you can actually start to work really hard. And that ends up being such a differential. And simultaneously, we really keep an eye on the fact that we want people to be not robots, not athletic robots, that if all you’re doing is counting your pills, and you know, and you got to do 26.2 seconds in your hyperbaric chamber, and then you do this red light therapy, and then you’re a robot, you need to go into your community, hang out with your family be of service and of use, and if all of your thing is is in this, then you’re not really an athlete, right?
Kelly Starrett
You’re you’re you’re a person who’s on an unsustainable quest. And that might be temporarily you can do that. We saw that with some of our best CrossFit athletes. So they just become monks temporarily. And they’re like, Okay, I can’t do that anymore. And I want or I don’t want to do that anymore. But but we’re talking about what does it look like for a long haul. So simultaneously, we think you can work harder, and get more done, if you can adapt to the stresses in your life more effectively through these base camp practices. And simultaneously, we want to bury them into your routine. So no one even knows you’re doing it. You’re just sitting on the coffee table, mobilizing your hamstrings, in the evening, before you go to bed watching TV. That’s the thing we’re talking about. We call hiding the reps.
Juliet Starrett
And I think this is, you know, I think, hopefully, we’ve tried to strike this balance. Well, I mean, you know, as you know, being in this business, you can’t do nothing, right. So doing nothing is not an option, if we, you know, want to be durable humans and feel good. And, you know, not struggle with nagging pain and injury, and you know, all the things we’re hoping to avoid, as, you know, as a motivator to have some kind of like health and wellness practice.
Juliet Starrett
But I also think that so much of it can just be these little things, little moments incorporated into our lives that actually can have, you know, a done consistently can have this massive change. And, you know, so I hope that’s kind of the balance, we’ve struck, like, you can’t read this book and COSMOTE the information, you do actually have to do a few things. But I mean, we have, you know, we have tried so hard to say, hey, look like it’s just these little stalking behaviors you can add into your life.
Juliet Starrett
And I’m sure you’ve seen this, to me, one of the things you see, and I sometimes see it in myself, I mean, it’s I think something we all battle as humans is that you’re like, Well, if I can’t do the whole thing, I’m going to do nothing.
Kelly Starrett
That’s gone, bring out the ice,
Juliet Starrett
Right. And that that is true for movement and exercise. And, you know, all the little things that, you know, we’re suggesting that people do. And so, you know, our very last chapter is the only chapter where we talk about exercise. And thanks to our friend, Dave Spitz, from Cal Strength, we named it Never Do Nothing but I mean, that really is our mantra. And the mantra that we want to have, we hope people take away from this book is never do nothing.
Juliet Starrett
Because, you know, look, if you’ve had a crazy busy day, and we have to travel for work, and you know, sometimes all we literally have is 10 minutes to do something. And so of these 10 practices we’re talking about, like we may get to choose one, but man, again, over a lifetime compounded and some days you’re going to have time to do eight and some days you’ll have time to do 10 but over a lifetime, these little little mini behaviors really do compound to be like massive amounts of money in the bank. It’s like a 401k.
Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, absolutely. Very compounding over time. And I really appreciate that about what y’all do is that reminder that even if you have five minutes, 10 minutes, it’s not wasted. It is it still counts. And I still hear this so often from even you know, everywhere from the recreational exercisers in the community to the more elite or competitive athletes and everyone in between. Is this feeling like we’re never doing enough we’re never good enough we’re not doing it for long enough it’s just like it’s never enough and of course that would be just so demotivating over time that you tend to fall into that black and white thinking of if I can’t do my hour and really go smash it and go hard on back squats today then what you know there’s nothing to do and and I love how you all are taking up the the the torch, I guess to say and the other side of this, which is you know, everything every little bit counts.
Steph Gaudreau
And recently we did a challenge in my group coaching program. I know you all did a walking challenge recently as well. And it was like, just do something intentionally for movement every day. I was like, I don’t care what it is, it could be, you know, little movement snacks, it could be, you go walk for 10 minutes, it could be just do some, I don’t know, foam rolling whatever you want. But people really were like, that helped take the edge off of this constant feeling like I’m never gonna match up, I’m not doing it perfectly enough. And I’m just always falling behind. And that’s no way to look at that.
Kelly Starrett
No, the peloton ad is, you know, I’m not getting cheered on and crushed. And then my life isn’t going to be good, you know, and, like, you do bring up such a wonderful point around this. And I think if, if we can have a baseline on some of these things, then it also recognizes that we’re like, whoa, I’ve just fallen below the baseline. So let me just give you an example. In our own lives, Juliet was just on the East Coast for a work trip. And her sleep wasn’t great.
Kelly Starrett
She flew to Louisiana for a workshop, and she would text me and be like, Wow, my sleep. And the idea here is, for example, one of our vital signs is sleep. And one of the things that we want people to understand is that human beings need seven hours of sleep for survival. That’s our benchmark. And so now you have this threshold where you’re like, Oh, I’m just been falling below the seven a lot, I gotta just prioritize some things better to get above that survival.
Kelly Starrett
And then we think if you want to change your body composition, or grow or get out of pain, or, or learn a new skill, or being developed awesome at your job, you need eight hours of sleep. And so that means that you can start to make big boy and big girl decisions. I’m not gonna get any sleep, but I’m gonna go binge this movie, and that’s totally okay. But now I have a benchmark behavior. So you can come right back onto if you need it.
Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, I love that. I mean, sometimes we stay up late, every once in a while. And I’ve always like, Oh, no, I’m gonna pay for this. I saw a meme about this. today. It was like, the feeling when you stay up late is like Ha ha ha, like, yes. And then the next day, it’s like, oh…
Juliet Starrett
We saw the funny sleep meme recently to where it was like, remember, when you were you know, now it’s like, we have this 27 things we do so we can get a good night’s sleep. But remember, when you were like 25, you could just sort of lay down anywhere and fall asleep. And we long for those days.
Kelly Starrett
But you know what? Yes, you bring up this other thing about the sleep. And one of the things that I really liked about the book is how recursive it is, and how these, these You heard us say it and kind of a offhand way, but these behaviors stack. So one of the things that we know from working with smart elite military units, is that when when you have people with really bad sleep disordered sleep, and they have some of the most disordered sleep in all of our world, in fact, we’ve been in enough places where Ambien is a is literally performance enhancing drugs.
Kelly Starrett
And they’ll take two Ambien sleep for four hours and take two more Ambien and then wake up and then after you take all that Ambien, I don’t know what you do, you have to take a bunch of Adderall. Oh, I’m describing world class pitchers in the Major League Baseball, right? I’m not this isn’t made up. This is firsthand knowledge. But one of the ways that we untangled that was increased step count. And so by increasing people step count. So these are the some of the best freakish people on the planet who are like military ninjas. And what they weren’t falling asleep or getting fatigued, but they were training hard.
Kelly Starrett
But their total activity for the day wasn’t sufficient to induce sleep stress and sleep debt. So they actually felt the pressure to go to sleep. And so by increasing people step count, lo and behold, you’re actually tired enough that you want to go to bed. And that for people were like, Hey, if you have a sleep problem, you guys are walking. And by the way, that starts to mean that you may need to lay off the caffeine a little bit earlier. And so suddenly, you suddenly having these vital signs means you can start to organize some of your behaviors and inputs and outputs aren’t so hidden from you.
Kelly Starrett
And all of these things start to snap together in a really amazing way. For example, go ahead and be sleep deprived, and then close your eyes and stand on one leg. Watch what happens to your mouths. Watch what happens to your ability to make good decisions, like eating fruits and vegetables and protein sources reaching for things that don’t rhyme with fruits and vegetables and protein.
Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, absolutely. Talk to me really quickly about what are some of your favorite ways. So we’re talking about how busy people are? Right? People are so busy and sometimes on Instagram, this makes me want to poke my eyes out. I see people are like 15k steps a day minimum and I’m like, Whoa, we gotta we gotta just Slow the fuck down a little bit here. Like if you have because I don’t know about you all but for me to walk a relatively vigorous like 10k steps is going to be over an hour.
Steph Gaudreau
You know, so we’re talking now about 10 to 20k steps a day, that’s a long period of time. What are some of your favorite suggestions you have for people to start weaving this in? Because I think again, it’s like one of those things people know. Yeah. Okay, my stupid walk for my stupid mental health and like all these other stupid things is stupid walk. I know, it’s good for me. And I, I think people actually do want to do it. But how do you find that time?
Kelly Starrett
Especially if you start with you have to do 10,000 steps. How am I gonna fit that in?
Juliet Starrett
We actually we actually lowered the number to 8000, based on some research that shows that that’s actually an attainable number for the vast majority of people and that you get the same, you know, 10,000 was just an arbitrary number of those created at some point by who knows who, and didn’t really have any meaning. And yes, of course, like if you can, if you have the time and capability in your life to walk 15,000 steps like high 10 to you, but that’s not most people, or eight or 10 isn’t getting you sleeping enough, what we know is that most people are getting like 3000 -8000 might actually be attainable for a lot of people.
Juliet Starrett
And so we really try to give people a lot of strategies and tools and tips to just figure out how to add more steps. And you know, let me tell you how I do it. Because I don’t have an hour on most days, especially not workdays to go for a walk on the weekends, I do try to actually go for a more like an actual walk. But you know, I usually exercise early in the morning. And I actually try to walk around the block after I exercise as a cooldown. So I try to sort of incorporate it into that. And that’s all happening within the one hour, right. So I’m still like under an hour, including my block walk, which is like between six and 800 meters. And it’s probably like 16 or 1700 steps.
Juliet Starrett
Then I tried to take a couple of walking meetings throughout my day, because I’m stuck on zoom all the time. And I’ve learned that, you know, actually, some of those meetings, I don’t need to be on video. And I can just put my headphones on and walk. And actually I find when I’m walking and talking, I’m like my most alert and creative self. So I’m actually better in meetings if I’m walking a little bit. And the other thing we recommend is go take a 10 minute walk actually, after all your meals, I mean, that’s the other thing, you actually can accumulate like 1000 steps in 10 minutes. And as you take some 10 minute walks, after your meals, you take one walking meeting for half an hour, 45 minutes.
Kelly Starrett
And remember, it doesn’t have to be walking, it can also be moving. So if this whole time we’ve been talking, Juliet has been fidgeting and weight bearing. And it’s really so everyone understands about getting your body above one and a half metabolic equivalents. That’s what we found. It’s not sitting versus standing. It’s moving versus not moving weight bearing versus not. And so if you aggregate the walking, plus all the physical not sitting that Juliet’s doing, it really ends up adding up.
Juliet Starrett
Yeah, and we even did this thing where we, we have sort of from our house to the end of the block, we actually measured it one time, it’s 1750 steps. And we often walk that 1750 steps after dinner, because we do have time then and most people have time then it probably takes us what does it take us 15 minutes, the whole thing takes us 15 minutes. And it usually is just the amount we need to kind of put us over the edge, right we do these little like 10 minute walks after we eat, maybe take a walking meeting, maybe I walk afterwards and you know often and then just with all the kind of random walking you’re doing throughout the day, I’m usually at like six maybe 7000 steps, and that one little 1750 step walk is just enough to put me over the edge.
Juliet Starrett
And it’s not a huge time commitment and then it has the side benefit of I feel better after I’ve eaten you know gotten some fresh air we’ve seen a rush air we’ve said hello to our neighbors you know, connected with some humans and you know even those little things that get sound so dumb when you see it but like get to Costco and park farthest away, it’s good for your mental health, you know, you get a few extra steps as you’re walking around Costco meets those kinds of things that like again on any given day isn’t going to change your life. But if you you know aggregate those over weeks and months and a lifetime like it’s a massive amount of additional movement.
Kelly Starrett
And let me let me just take this out of the perception of things people don’t care about. You don’t care about living forever.You don’t you think today I’m gonna be live forever it’s gonna be like today you should care about how much more ice cream you can eat. This is what I care about. And if I notice that if I train really hard and eat Eat decently and move my body I can eat so much more ice cream and nothing changes and I just if you be like this put this into really really clear terms of things people should care about ice cream.
Juliet Starrett
Well and I it’s funny because I wear an aura ring and you know that’s how I track my stuff and I just got one of those like urine recap things you know that’s kind of like funny to look at and I’ve only had the aura ring since September something but it’s like you’ve walked 1,000,250. Some like insane amount of steps and then it’s like that’s the equivalent of running 20 marathons and when I saw that piece of data all I did was think of Kelly because I was like how much ice cream could Kelly eat?
Kelly Starrett
20 marathons worth of ice cream. Your welcome!
Steph Gaudreau
That is a lot of ice cream.
Kelly Starrett
It’s not ice creams, cookies.
Juliet Starrett
He likes cookies.
Steph Gaudreau
Oh, how about ice cream sandwiches?
Kelly Starrett
Sure. love them. Okay, equal opportunity.
Steph Gaudreau
Recently, I was talking about this on my Instagram story. So it’s top of mine. I didn’t start really walking purposefully until April 2021. And I started with 15 minutes at a time, that was my goal was like, in no way kind of get to know the neighborhood, like go around this block and this blog, and so 15 minutes, and it’s taken me almost two years to even just sort of like figure out my day, and like, Where can I really squeak it in here and there, and now I’m, you know, probably between five and eight on most days. And it’s just taken time.
Steph Gaudreau
And I feel like, again, people hear those like big numbers, and they’re like, oh, my gosh, she starts to get stressing out about these things we’re supposed to be doing that are good for us. Right? I was gonna say to, you know, oftentimes after dinner, Rosie and I will walk together, we live, we live obviously, in the same house, we work in the same space that we live, he works from home, I work from home, we’re together a lot, but we’re not always communicating in that time. And then if we sit down and watch a show, or something, or sometimes watching separate shows, we’re not really connecting, right.
Steph Gaudreau
And so that sort of after dinner time, even if it’s a short 15 minute walk, we get to sit and talk about the debt or not sit well I can talk about the day. And that’s just kind of a nice thing, too, is like, if you do have family, if you are trying to connect with people, like that’s a really great time to to do that as well. And to hear build two things into one.
Juliet Starrett
Yeah, and I think it’s just goes back to that, like, good for you for just, you know, trying to work it out. And that’s art, you know, again, like, we’ve said, great, good 8000 to 10,000 steps. And what we really mean by that is man, like never do nothing, like get out there. And you know, and I just again, like Kelly said, I was on this work trip. And I did not have any opportunity to move and I probably got 5000 steps or 4000 steps today be limited opportunity to move.
Juliet Starrett
And, you know, I just, you know, we’re not going to beat myself up and walk though from the hotel. Yeah, I mean, I exactly like I had, I could either get take this little shuttle from the hotel to my, to the meeting place, and I just chose to walk, it was like a nine minute walk. But I just, you know, took these little made these little mini choices. And again, it was just all from the frame of never do nothing. And, and also, you know, now I’m home, and I can sort of get back on my game. And you know, restart the process again. So it’s about like giving myself a little grace, knowing that I, you know, live a busy life, and so does everybody else.
Kelly Starrett
And you’re so tolerant, your body is so tolerant. And so if you just start to give it the right things, or different inputs or expand your inputs, you’ll be shocked at what your body will do for you. I think that so you’re not in a hurry. This is not emergency. But what you’ll find is that, wow, I was able, you know, sitting on the ground or watching TV tonight. last takeaway, please, if you’re just watching TV, and I just sit on the ground in front of your couch, that’s all and when you need to fidget, fidget when you need to sit differently, sit differently, and you’ll be shocked what that does for the range of motion your hips and how better you feel.
Juliet Starrett
The other thing I’ll say just on this walking thing that I recently just read an article in The New York Times called the power of the eight minute phone call. And the sort of premise of the article was that, you know, even though in many ways, we’re like, more connected than we’ve ever been. And we’re all on social media that, you know, we’re obviously actually disconnected. And we’ve all been trained because of robocalls and spam to never answer our phones. So like the phone is just sort of this peripheral thing on our phone, we’re not really using the phone very much the phone part.
Juliet Starrett
And it was just this whole article was just about the power of like, hey, you know, taking these eight, like something about eight minutes, I don’t know why they chose eight minutes, but something about eight minutes calling your friends and people you haven’t connected with a while or your family members and just having a short eight minute phone call. And so that’s another thing that I’ve been doing, where I again, I’m trying to stack these behaviors, as you know, I’ve just go out and go for a 10 minute walk and like check in with my old friends.
Juliet Starrett
And and it’s actually been like, really, like I just have had this really lovely experience of feeling connected to people that, you know, yeah, I saw their photo on Instagram saw that what they did for Christmas, but like, that’s not really true connection, right? I’ve actually had this opportunity to like use that little eight minute, eight minute phone call as a way to get a few steps in and connect with some people. So it’s like a double, double awesome situation.
Steph Gaudreau
So tell me about where can we find the book? What exactly is it going to be out in the world and all of those technical details, we’ll make sure we get them in the show notes.
Juliet Starrett
Oh sure it’s coming out on April 4, 2023. So very soon depending on when you’re listening to the lists are already out. People can learn more about it and buy it from a variety of places at BuiltToMove.com. But it’s available everywhere where you know people buy books. It’s also available in audiobook. Kelly and I are huge fans of audiobooks. So it’s available in audiobook. So anywhere you buy books, including brick and mortar retailers, or just go to BuiltToMove.com.
Steph Gaudreau
Amazing. Last question, how excited are we for the second installment of Dune?
Juliet Starrett
You have no idea. Basically, when it made enough money to warrant a second movie, Kelly was like, I now have a reason for living. That’s how serious it is for him.
Kelly Starrett
Here’s the deal. We have a huge Halloween party every year where our neighborhood is the hood. So we have 3000 to 5000 people in front of our house. We put a keg of beer out and we have a huge cosplay thing that happens. We have a DJ in our garage. Squid games, what do we do last year? Stranger Things. We have dolls hanging, like our street goes all in. But I really am struggling not to bring in 20,000 pounds of sand into my driveway.
Juliet Starrett
Actually, like in a spare time he thinks about how to like how could he bring in like many truckloads of sand and contain the sand and be able to use it for this party and then still be able to remove all the sand later. So you know, it’s a conundrum. Maybe one of your listeners is like, you know has an idea, everybody.
Steph Gaudreau
We’re going to start trading with sandbags. So buy your sandbag and then head over to Kelly & Juliet’s house and fill your sand bag for free.
Juliet Starrett
Exactly like free sand. And so we are really excited. Thank you for asking.
Kelly Starrett
Dune 2023 at our house.
Juliet Starrett
Thank you, I always tell everyone like if you really want to understand Kelly Starrett, you will read Dune. Yeah. So thank you for seeing him.
Steph Gaudreau
Yeah! Well, this has been such a joy to be able to connect with you all I’m so just excited that this book is coming out. I think it’s going to be a wonderful thing for coaches as well. I’m thinking about all my fellow fitness and nutrition coaches, like if you really want to get just like the most like the most fundamental things into people’s hands, give them that manual for life.
Kelly Starrett
You can actually get to the things you want to coach and talk about. You don’t have to do these other things. You’re like, cover this, your physician or physical universe, do this. And then talk to me. We’ll talk about deadlift.
Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, it’s great. So congrats on the book, and hopefully we can connect sometime soon in person again, it’s been too long,
Juliet Starrett
Way too long. Thank you so much for having us.
Steph Gaudreau
Absolutely.
Steph Gaudreau
All right, that was a wrap on this podcast with Kelly and Juliet Starrett of The Ready State. And we talked all about the book Built To Move which should be coming out very, very soon. If not already, you can find that wherever you find books for audiobooks. I’m an audiobook, lover and listener because I listen when I go out and Ruck or walk. And sometimes when I’m meal prepping, even on the weekends, I love to listen as I’m doing those things. So go ahead and check out whatever you like.
Steph Gaudreau
If you like paper books, you like audiobooks, go ahead and grab this book, it is really going to bring it down to brass tacks for you and help you start to implement these things in your life and make it more enjoyable. Instead of feeling like a bunch of drudgery that you can’t stand so no one wants that.
Steph Gaudreau
Remember to head over to the website StephGaudreau.com. There you can find the show notes. And of course, if you’re listening here on YouTube, you can see details underneath the video. If you are a podcast lover, and you’re listening on YouTube, as well go head over to your favorite app and subscribe to the show there. And vice versa. If you are somebody who listens more on podcast apps, head over to YouTube, give us a subscribe and rang the bell for more notifications. Thanks so much for being with me this week. I’m so glad that we were able to bring you this show and welcome the Starrett’s back to the podcast after all of these years. And hopefully we’ll have them back soon. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, stay strong.
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