Introducing Built To Move – 10 Essential Healthy Habits
Full Transcript

Back to Episode

Kelly: [0:00:04] Hey everyone, I’m Dr. Kelly Starrett.

Juliet: [0:00:06] And I’m Juliet Starrett.

Kelly: [0:00:08] And you’re listening to The Ready State Podcast.

[music]

Kelly: [0:00:16] Hey, welcome everyone. I’m sitting here with Juliet and our podcast producer, Lisa, and we’re going to do something a little bit different today. We are going to talk about Built to Move. JStar, what is Built to Move?

Juliet: [0:00:30] Built to Move is our new book, which is coming out on April 4, 2023, and it’s something we’ve been working on for over two years and something we are really excited about.

Kelly: [0:00:40] That’s cute. Two years. We started to get stalked by our agent five years. 

Juliet: [0:00:43] I mean we’ve been working on it for 10 years. It’s been on the mind.

Kelly: [0:00:46] It’s taken us a long time. So what we thought we’d do is something slightly different and that we’d have Lisa, you get to hear Lisa’s voice, you can try to imagine that she’s a seven foot tall person.

Juliet: [0:01:00] Don’t know where you were going with that.

Lisa: [0:01:00] Because I am.

Kelly: [0:01:02] Because she is. So you’re going to hear Lisa and she’s got some questions for us; little bit of an interview. But what we want to do is tee up the reasons, the rationale, why we think this is our best book and why it’s maybe the most important thing that we’ve done to date. Is that right?

Juliet: [0:01:16] And I’d also like to have you guys all shout out to Lisa in the comments wherever you’re listening to this because we roped her into doing this with us and she’s less excited. Am I right on that?

Lisa: [0:01:27] Well, yeah, and as you guys can already see, they don’t need me at all.

Juliet: [0:01:32] That’s not true.

Kelly: [0:01:33] It’s not true.

Juliet: [0:01:33] We need you. 

Kelly: [0:01:34] That’s not true.

Juliet: [0:01:34] And we need your witty banter.

Kelly: [0:01:36] That’s right. That’s right. Okay, so tee us up, Lisa. I’m ready to talk about this thing that I’ve been living. This… I was going to say hell, but that’s not really true.

Juliet: [0:01:44] No, it’s a heaven.

Kelly: [0:01:45] I’m stoked. So we actually did versions of this.

Lisa: [0:01:48] See, they don’t need me, guys.

Kelly: [0:01:50] We started talking about this. I have lectured about this book to the CIA. Small fact.

Juliet: [0:01:55] True fact. 

Lisa: [0:01:56] They can’t talk about it though.

Kelly: [0:01:57] We can’t talk about it though. That’s actually true. To a roomful of people named Kevin, which was really strange.

Lisa: [0:02:04] Smith. Okay, well, first of all, you’ve got to give the people what they want and tell them why BTM. What does it mean? What are you going for?

Juliet: [0:02:13] Well, I think the title is really important and really sums up what we’ve been thinking about and working on for the last bunch of years.

Lisa: [0:02:21] And again, it stands for Built to Move.

Juliet: [0:02:23] Built to Move. But we internally call it BTM.

Lisa: [0:02:26] Actually, Kelly yesterday was like, “What’s BTM?” I was like, okay, Built to Move.

Juliet: [0:02:32] Internally the rest of us call it Built to Move, BTM. 

Kelly: [0:02:35] BTM.

Juliet: [0:02:37] But I think that title is really important to us because sometimes, Kelly more than me, but I think The Ready State, we get pigeonholed into this corner of being the stretching people, the mobility people. And really-

Kelly: [0:02:49] I don’t know how that happened.

Juliet: [0:02:50] I don’t know why anyone-

Lisa: [0:02:52] You stretch very well.

Juliet: [0:02:53] He is very stretchy. But I think at the core of what we’ve done and what The Ready State has always done is movement and trying to highlight the importance of movement in our lives and in people’s lives. And we think it’s sort of this missing pillar of health that’s not talked about enough, which is sort of movement and bodily self-care in the form of mobility and other maintenance.

Kelly: [0:03:15] Movement vital signs.

Juliet: [0:03:16] Movement vital signs. And but what we’ve backed into is realizing that while mobility is a key part of being able to move and move freely for your whole life, there’s all these other factors that are equally as important. It’s a system of systems.

Lisa: [0:03:29] And you’ve chosen the word “built to” so you’re insinuating to all of us that we’re supposed to be able to do these things. And why is this the missing piece?

Kelly: [0:03:37] Can I just be off color and off brand for a second?

Lisa: [0:03:41] That would not be off brand.

Juliet: [0:03:41] Yeah, when has that ever stopped you?

Kelly: [0:03:43] I don’t know if people ever get the unfiltered Kel. Most people get a first pass filter Kel.

Juliet: [0:03:49] And also, who’s Kel?

Lisa: [0:03:51] I call him Kel all the time. 

Juliet: [0:03:51] No, no, no.

Lisa: [0:03:53] No? Okay.

Kelly: [0:03:54] Who is it? Kels? 

Juliet: [0:03:56] Only I get to vote on that and it’s K-e-l-z.

Kelly: [0:04:00] Welcome to Inside Baseball. So I think we are at I’m just going to call peak internet craziness, for lack of a better word, right now. There is more confusion about what you’re allegedly supposed to do every day, what journal, what color turmeric you take.

Juliet: [0:04:18] What diet you’re supposed to follow. 

Kelly: [0:04:20] What blue blocker glasses you’re supposed to wear, how you’re supposed to optimize. What I see is that people are… We see a lot of misplaced precision out there. We’re arguing, for lack of a better phrase, one of the phrases you’ll hear Juliet and I talk about in this book is let’s get everybody to base camp. What are the behaviors that a person should do almost every day that all integrate, that fit into your busy life, that allow you to be 100 years old? And it’s not diet and exercise. There’s the punchline. But the question is, if we’re arguing about what color rope and which macro best fits my climbing style as I go up Everest, no one’s even at Everest base camp. We need to get everyone to base camp first and then we can have the next conversation, but we’ve skipped right over that.

Juliet: [0:05:05] I think also if you look at all of the health metrics, basically any that you could come up with like diabetes or obesity rate-

Kelly: [0:05:14] ACL injuries. Arthritis.

Juliet: [0:05:15] ACL injuries. People are getting worse. We’re getting less and less healthy. And this despite the fact that there is this massive amount of easily accessible health related information out there for people. 

Kelly: [0:05:26] I just saw that the health and wellness industry is a $3 trillion industry right now. So someone’s making some money on this thing for sure.

Juliet: [0:05:33] Well, and I do think for people like us who are always gravitated towards exercise and health and fitness and it’s already part of our habits and our daily lives, we are optimizing and we are getting better and faster and stronger, but we’re the tiniest little piece of the pie.

Kelly: [0:05:50] Speak for yourself there, woman.

Juliet: [0:05:51] Well, we’re the tiniest little piece of the pie. We’re like the one percenters of health and fitness. We’re definitely optimizing and getting better and making improvements.

Kelly: [0:05:58] We’re not leaving anyone behind. We are leaving everyone behind.

Juliet: [0:05:58] And certainly, there’s a lot of amazing innovations and crazy, awesome stuff happening in professional sports and professional athletics, but by and large, for basically everybody else-

Kelly: [0:06:09] In our neighborhood, our families.

Juliet: [0:06:11] In our neighborhood, and all of whom I would say would describe themselves as people who want to be able to move freely until they’re older and want to be able to do the things they want to do physically, and those things are very different. It could be that you want to work on your garden or go on a hike with your friends or you want to be able to lift weights when you’re 70. Everybody has different desires of what they want to do physically when they’re older, but the common thread is that everybody wants to be able to continue to move and be able to do the things they want to do. And we’ve really left all those people totally behind.

Kelly: [0:06:41] In the fitness industry, we allege to minister to those people; we don’t.

Juliet: [0:06:46] We don’t. 

Lisa: [0:06:47] But even working with you guys, I feel like you’ve seen a whole bunch of times athletes that are checking all the boxes. They’re eating right, they’re doing this, they’re doing that, they’re exercising, they’re high-level athletes. But if you ask them, “Well, what’s your sleep data, what’s that look like?” then they can’t even answer that.

Kelly: [0:07:02] You come to a really interesting point, is that this book isn’t about a set of remedial practices at all. We’re not saying, oh, here’s what our Tour de France cyclists are doing or World Champions or Olympians, and then here’s what the rest of us do. We’re talking about the sets, the behaviors, and it’s the first conversation we have with anyone, whether we’re trying to untangle chronic pain or loss of performance, we look at all of these as the first step. Are you appreciating that your body’s a complex system and that if you are drinking a bunch of coffee late at night to get through the day because you’re exhausted from your training or whatever, that’s going to impact your sleep quality? And then all of a sudden, you’re leaning on that THC or that Ambien or that alcohol, and lo and behold you get tired in the morning when you wake up, and the whole cycle starts over and over again. So as we’re trying to untangle complex human performance problems, it turns out these are also the base behaviors for every human being on the planet.

Juliet: [0:07:59] Yeah, and I mean I just want to put a fine point on that, when Kelly goes in and consults with professional teams and professional athletes, these base camp behaviors, in the CIA you just mentioned, I mean these are the base camp behaviors he’s recommending. And what we see is across all professional sports and otherwise, professional athletes and people who use their bodies for a living and describe themselves using the word athlete, they’re not at base camp in many cases. They’ve skipped over and they’re doing a lot of elite behaviors, and they’ve missed a lot of the behaviors in base camp, a lot of vital signs. 

Lisa: [0:08:31] I think it’s important to bring up that this isn’t a theoretical idea that you’ve come up with for the book. When we see Kelly bring in someone to the Cube, he doesn’t start looking at their knee.

Juliet: [0:08:42] Yeah, he doesn’t start doing manual therapy.

Lisa: [0:08:43] He asks them a half hour of questions on their lifestyle.

Kelly: [0:08:47] Yeah, in fact, one of the things I think you and I couldn’t do in Becoming A Supple Leopard and some of our early work is that we had so much ground to cover—people didn’t know how to take care of themselves, they didn’t know how to manage pain, they didn’t know what was normative range of motion, they couldn’t apply movement theory, they couldn’t apply  movement principles to understand how to run better, jump better, et cetera—and so I think even Supple Leopard is 500 pages of movement mechanics, movement theory. But there’s a heart missing in the Leopard, and that heart is how do I live day to day that isn’t my training piece; how do I take care of my body? And do we need another diet book or exercise book? Probably. We’re going to get one for sure. I don’t know if there’s going to be anything that new and innovative in the next decade or so. What we’re going to see is continued iteration where we have to think about the behavior of people in their lives and how we can help them integrate good practices into the workings of their lives. And I think that’s one of the magic pieces that we’ve come up with.

Juliet: [0:09:50] Well, and I think just quickly to add to that, we decidedly are not writing an exercise book. I mean that was the goal. Even though we are lovers of exercise and we do it on the regular and we have our very basic-

Kelly: [0:10:02] Tell people the truth. It’s how you and I cope.

Juliet: [0:10:05] Yeah, exercise is probably our coping mechanism and we’re gym rats and I think it goes back in many generations of people in our families who need to move to cope.

Lisa: [0:10:15] You touched on it a little bit by saying that we’re obviously as a culture not getting any better at lots of things. But why now? Why was this the perfect storm where you guys, as busy as you are, could write a book and are tackling this ridiculous task?

Juliet: [0:10:32] I think there were two big things that happened. I mean one of them was just practically speaking that we used to own a gym and run The Ready State at the same time, so we were running two businesses. And I think part of it was just that you can’t do everything and we’re two humans running two businesses.

Kelly: [0:10:45] I don’t know who needs to hear this.

Juliet: [0:10:46] I don’t know who needs to hear this.

Lisa: [0:10:48] Juliet obviously needs to hear this.

Juliet: [0:10:49] I need to hear that. So we were running two businesses for a really long time. And I think we’d written other books and it definitely was a lot. So we closed down our gym during the pandemic. But I think the second big thing was the pandemic itself. I think that really showed us in very stark terms as a culture and a society that we were very ill prepared to do basic things to take care of ourselves. And I think people saw that we were quarantined, stuck at home. People already weren’t moving enough and then were stuck in their houses and apartments.

Kelly: [0:11:22] People gained, what, five to fifteen pounds or something?

Juliet: [0:11:22] Yeah. There was a lot of weight gain, obviously. Massive amounts of-

Kelly: [0:11:23] Can I put a Dune quote in here?

Juliet: [0:11:26] Yeah. Depression.

Lisa: [0:11:27] Don’t do it.

Kelly: [0:11:30] So there is a scene in Dune, you may have noticed, where the young Paul has to put his hand in the box, right?

Juliet: [0:11:37] Can I just tell you that unfortunately, most people don’t know this.

Kelly: [0:11:41] I’m telling you now.

Lisa: [0:11:42] We three do.

Juliet: [0:11:42] We three do.

Kelly: [0:11:43] So there’s a scene where he’s being tested and she basically makes him think that his hand is burning off. And the crux is if he doesn’t have his consciousness to keep his hand in the box, he just pulls it out like a reflex, she’s going to kill him. So he just has to stand there and if he’s in control of his emotions, he’ll be able to just take it. And it’s all mind control. When he pulls his hand from the box, it’s totally fine. And she says, “Our test is crisis and observation.” And that is the whole aspect of Dune, is that she tested him, and lo and behold, he was able to be human enough to be able to have the skills and the self-control and the self-discipline not to pull his hand from the box. What you’re just describing with the pandemic where we saw real crisis being applied to people’s lives where everything is turned upside down, they’re trying to manage, and we did not have a set of behaviors in place where people knew what to do and could default to them without lots of instruction, without lots of money. A Peloton in your thing was nice, but that doesn’t scale. Food delivery and food prep doesn’t scale. What we saw was that we saw the reaction. Crisis and observation. The observation to your point was, man, we have really poorly prepared people to be human beings in the modern world.

Juliet: [0:12:58] Fact. True fact. And I would just like to add for those of you who are actually still listening to this, if you don’t know already, Kelly is a Dune encyclopedia, and actually, left to his own devices, he would just go become a Dune professor.

Lisa: [0:13:13] And if you haven’t had a chance to, see Bad Lip Reading, Doont, Kelly and I are jealous of you.

Juliet: [0:13:18] Yeah. I mean Lisa and Kelly have watched the Doont-

Kelly: [0:13:24] It’s a Bad Lip Reading.

Juliet: [0:13:30] Are we going to be linking this in the show notes of this?

Lisa: [0:13:33] Obviously. 

Kelly: [0:13:33] Okay, so I think the other elephant in the room, so we see that we’re living through a crisis, and we’re watching people cope in the strategies that they have. They’re reaching for alcohol, they’re reaching for TV. They’re trying to self-soothe. And you and I have really gotten really clear about, hey, these behaviors are coping behaviors. They’re trying to make yourself feel better so you can deal with these stresses, right? The other thing that I think is worth talking about is, don’t take this the wrong way, three-time World Champion, superstar, CrossFit Games athlete-

Lisa: [0:14:05] That’s you, Juliet.

Kelly: [0:14:06] That is you, Juliet. You weren’t ready to write this book in your 30s or in your 20s.

Juliet: [0:14:11] No, I think that’s a really good point. I mean in our 30s and in our 20s, we were trying to be radical.

Lisa: [0:14:15] When I met you, you were just go hard in the paint.

Juliet: [0:14:17] Go hard in the paint.

Lisa: [0:14:18] Consequences be damned.

Juliet: [0:14:19] Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we were.

Kelly: [0:14:22] Little more focused towards performance.

Lisa: [0:14:24] Performance.

Kelly: [0:14:25] How hot can we get this?

Juliet: [0:14:26] Performance. But yeah, I think you’re exactly right. We were just trying… Our focus was athletic performance, our focus was on working with elite athletes and high performers. And man, I think it’s because we’re both approaching 50, we have made a total and complete shift on the way we think about our bodies and our life, and we’re really starting to look to the future to think what do we want to be able to do. And the word we’ve come up with that we’re huge fans of, because we’re not fans of the word longevity, is durability. Tell us what that is, Kels.

Kelly: [0:14:56] Durability is the idea that you are a really robust, extraordinary human that’s self-healing. And bad stuff’s going to happen to you.  You’re going to step off a curb, you’re going to get hit with something heavy, you’re going to get hit with a nasty disease at some point in your life. You’re going to go through unbelievable stress. And a durable person can withstand that additional stress and gnarliness in their life and not lose track of the narrative. And that narrative is I can still be a member of my family, I can still keep my job, I can still be a good partner, still be a good parent. That’s what we’re talking about. And we feel like, I think now you and I have come through, I’ve come through a surgery in the last couple years, you had some trauma.

Juliet: [0:15:43] Just a bit.

Kelly: [0:15:44] Just a bit.

Lisa: [0:15:44] Talk to the cancer.

Juliet: [0:15:44] Just a little bit. Talk to the cancer.

Kelly: [0:15:46] What I think is that one of the things that became very clear was that our experience on the other side of that looked very different than the other people coming in or having a similar experience. And some of that is this happens to be our job so we’re quite good at it. But also, we went in with the longest run up. When I had my knee replaced two years ago, almost two years ago, the surgeons had been really blown away by the outcome. I’m like do you know how long I trained for this? I’ve been training for this surgery for so long. In fact, I almost overtrained because they had a hard time cutting my bones. They couldn’t cut my femur very well. They went through three saw blades.

Lisa: [0:16:21] We saw the video. 

Kelly: [0:16:24] The smoke coming out.

Juliet: [0:16:24] I declined. I’ll be honest, I declined to watch it.

Kelly: [0:16:26] But my point is, man, bone density is something done yesterday. And we have been jumping rope and loading for a long time. And I think what ends up happening is people believe that these practices are super complex, that you have to have a high degree of education to do it. But you and I have really come to realize in our reasonableness that there are a whole bunch of things that you can do every day that work into your busy schedule so it’s not another laundry list of stuff that you have to do as a busy mom, working single dad, that you can do these things. and it’s not diet and exercise, so if you don’t like dieting, we hear you. We don’t either. If you don’t like exercising, I don’t understand you, but I respect that, and that’s not what this book is about.

Lisa: [0:17:10] I think you bring up an interesting point about your surgery and your cancer experience-

Juliet: [0:17:16] Thank you. I think that was a good way of saying it.

Lisa: [0:17:18] Where you guys just really had a lot of health built up in the bank and people looking in on that were like, “Well, I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t heal like that, I couldn’t be back so fast because I’m not like you and I’m not like this.” And looking like that, I was a little offended on your behalf.

Juliet: [0:17:36] Yeah. Yeah. I mean actually a lot of people said that to me. They were like, “Oh, okay, you really healed quickly,” because one of the things I was just so excited about-

Lisa: [0:17:43] Because you’re just like a mutant or something.

Juliet: [0:17:44] I had a total breast reconstruction and six weeks later I did two pullups. But whatever, I did two pullups, which means I was able to put my arm over my head, move my body weight. And that was a cool accomplishment for me to have. But around that and just around my recovery generally, I had a lot of people say to me, “Wow, you really recover so quickly, but you’re obviously special or something.”

Lisa: [0:18:08] Genetically different.

Juliet: [0:18:09] Genetically different.

Kelly: [0:18:09] Can I just step in and say horse crap?

Lisa: [0:18:12] Yeah. Well, that’s the point.

Kelly: [0:18:13] Horse crap.

Juliet: [0:18:13] But I literally am… healing is healing from trauma and nobody is better at it than anybody else. The only difference is I had a lot of credits in the bank. I lift weights, I have some muscle mass, I’ve already developed a practice of movement so it’s natural for me to move, I know how to eat well, I prioritize sleep. There’s just these really basic things I do. None of them are rocket science. But I think you’re right, Lisa, it’s all about I had a bunch of money in the bank of health before I went in to these things.

Kelly: [0:18:46] Habits that you could default to in times of stress.

Juliet: [0:18:48] Yeah, I could default to these habits.

Lisa: [0:18:49] Yeah, and it wasn’t like a new thing you had to start doing. 

Kelly: [0:18:53] When you’re trying to make your way in times of change, you-

Juliet: [0:18:57] I think the other thing too, and I think this is why the title Built to Move is so important too, is that I think one of the things, and this is surgery specific, but one of the things, and I understand why doctors tell people to not move and protect, protect, protect, because they’re construction workers and they don’t want people to fall or have challenges and they have to redo surgeries or whatever. So I understand where doctors are coming from. But I also know in my own experience that the only way to recover well from surgery is to move, move, move, move, keep moving.

Kelly: [0:19:27] And when you say that, that could be squatting to the couch, it could be walking, it could be sitting on the floor. That’s what we mean by moving. You need to move more.

Lisa: [0:19:35] And soon after surgery. Everyone having breast reconstruction is like, “Oh, I can’t lift my hands above my hand.” But I saw you out in the outdoor gym slowly putting a dumbbell up soon after your surgery.

Juliet: [0:19:47] It was like a one-pound dumbbell but it was just slow.

Lisa: [0:19:51] Very slow.

Juliet: [0:19:51] No speed involved. And the other thing is I’m like, hey, I did have breast reconstruction surgery but my legs are fine. I can walk. And I think this is a weird thing that happens to people. They have these surgeries, they’re like, oh, okay, I had this surgery, and my doctor said six weeks, so they legit lay in bed for six weeks. I’m like, no, no, no, your legs worked. Or if you had a knee surgery, your arms worked. You can go do something with your arms.

Kelly: [0:20:11] You either heal at the rate of a human being or you heal slower. I think that’s what people… So if someone’s like, “You’re a fast healer,” you mean human fast?

Lisa: [0:20:20] You’re human fast.

Kelly: [0:20:21] I don’t have any snake blood?

Lisa: [0:20:22] You’re genetically human.

Kelly: [0:20:23] Salamander genes.

Juliet: [0:20:24] Snake mind.

Kelly: [0:20:25] Snake mind. So you have wolf body.

Juliet: [0:20:27] Snake body. What’s that from again?

Kelly: [0:20:29] Jojo.

Juliet: [0:20:30] Oh yeah. 

Kelly: [0:20:32] So the key here is if you can begin to understand how the processes of your body interact. I think that’s the problem. We get an incredible book on sleep from Matthew Walker. It’s a great book on sleep. We get great books and ideas on nutrition but people don’t know, A, how to put the pieces together to a cogent whole, and they don’t appreciate how all of the things interact together into a system. Being barefoot and working on your feet improves your balance. Improving your balance means your brain will be like, hey, you don’t have to be afraid to go hike or step on this bicycle. Because you’re walking more, you accumulate more nonexercise activity that you want to sleep and then you sleep better because you walk more. But you also decongest your tissues so that you have healthier tissues. I mean I’ve answered this question slightly differently over the years, but you’re like, “Kelly, what are you most afraid of?” 

Juliet: [0:21:26] Are you going to actually say what you’re most afraid of or because you’re going to offend someone?

Lisa: [0:21:30] Your feelings?

Kelly: [0:21:31] Feelings used to be one thing.

Juliet: [0:21:33] That’s exactly it, Lisa.

Lisa: [0:21:34] I mean your feelings.

Kelly: [0:21:35] Welcome to my life, everybody. I go to work with my wife and my sisters, who happen to be my wife’s best friends. The thing I’m most afraid of now as an aging man whose brain says go all the time is that I’m going to rip my Achilles off or I’m going to pull a quad tendon or destroy my biceps. I see that all over. The number one worst injury right now, the sport, is pickleball. It is causing more weird arm injuries than I’ve ever seen in any other sport. Why? Because middle aged guys are like I don’t play tennis, but pickleball. And they rip their biceps off or they tear their Achilles. It’s insane. It used to be basketball. Now it’s pickleball. But people don’t understand, the way that you manage a healthy Achilles is you load it all the time. Like I do a little jumping every day, I eat food with collagen in it, I eat fruits and vegetables, I sleep. Those are the behaviors around having tissues that will last a long time. I think we’re seeing a whole bunch of adaptation errors in the body where you can get away with things for a long time until you can’t.

Juliet: [0:22:37] Well, and I would also add, I mean we’ve talked a lot about the lifestyle pieces of Built to Move, but I think the other key piece, and it wouldn’t be a Starrett book without it is, look, if you want to be able to move and do the things you want to do at any age, and obviously what you want to do will change as you age and your desires will change, but you do have to put a little input into your body. And ideally, you do that before you get injured. I mean I think this has been one of our biggest challenges in our own professional lives, is how do we get people to care about taking care of their body until they get injured. And many people will just wait until they’re injured. But man, there’s some super simple things you can do don’t take 20 minutes a day, take 10 minutes a day, to put a little money into your tissue bank of your body so that you can go play pickleball and not rip your bicep off of your arm.

Kelly: [0:23:30] But I still think, and unfairly, a lot of the reasons and rationale for why people should be doing something are couched in. For me, I’m like, hey, I don’t want to injure myself. But that’s not really what it is. It’s that I want to continue to be able to do what I want to do when I want them at a high level for a long time. And I think what we’re saying here is to be durable means that you can go spend a lot of credits out in the wild for the back half, back two-thirds of your life. You and I, right now we have a family member who’s 101 in our lives. We have a mother-in-law who’s 101. 

Juliet: [0:24:09] I think she’s a grandmother-in-law.

Kelly: [0:24:10] Yeah. Grandmother-in-law.

Juliet: [0:24:12] Yeah, I was like wait a second. Wait a second. We’re not that old.

Kelly: [0:24:13] Do the math here.

Lisa: [0:24:13] That’s your other family. 

Kelly: [0:24:16] And she cruises around, is very functional. And so you and I are confronted every day with, wow, we have 50 plus more years on the planet. Forget all the radical interventions, fake organs I’m going to get in 20 years, the things they’re going to grow for me in a lab. We are confronted with the fact that what do you want to be able to do for a long time. And it turns out I worked really hard in our lives to get to this point where we’re just starting to play; we’re about to punk out our little kids and kick them out to college. And you and I are like let’s go hike, let’s go bike, let’s go boat. And I want to be able to do all those things.

Juliet: [0:24:52] Fact, and I think it doesn’t matter if you want to bike or hike or CrossFit or whatever, the things that we like to do, I don’t care who you are, everybody wants to be able to move through their environment.

Kelly: [0:25:03] And pain free.

Juliet: [0:25:03] Whether that’s go to the playground with their grandkids or go for a walk with their friends. I mean everybody has movement goals when they’re older.

Lisa: [0:25:12] Or live independently.

Kelly: [0:25:15] Oh yeah, that’s huge. Totally.

Juliet: [0:25:15] Or independent living goals. I mean we all have those goals. And the key to that is movement. You’re in the sniff the moment you can’t move around anymore.

Kelly: [0:25:21] You can’t get up off the ground, boom, you’re in a skilled nursing facility. That’s a really good point. And the other comeback to Lisa’s point though is if you are a high performer, this book will still speak to you. In fact, one of the reasons we wrote this is that we felt like people became the nodes of change in their communities where they became the health… They got some consciousness, they started exercising, they started eating a little differently. People are like, “Well, dude, your skin looks great, your eyes look clear. How’d you lose all that weight?” And all of a sudden-

Juliet: [0:25:51] Your eyes look clear.

Kelly: [0:25:51] Keep up. And all of a sudden, that person becomes the node. What we wanted to do was write a book that this person could give to every family member who’s not… like I could never do-

Juliet: [0:26:02] You mean giving out a 500-page movement and mobility textbook may not be the best gifting book?

Kelly: [0:26:06] People don’t know that the next edition of Supple Leopard will have a percussion tool built in and a scraping tool.

Juliet: [0:26:15] And it’ll have a handle because you have to carry it around with a handle like a kettle bell because it’s so heavy. 

Kelly: [0:26:20] You have to plug it in and charge it. 

Juliet: [0:26:20] Because by that point, it’ll be 1,200 pages long.

Kelly: [0:26:23] It’ll be hot and you put it on your back. But the idea is imagine if-

Lisa: [0:26:27] I can ruck with it.

Kelly: [0:26:28] Just with the book. It’s like a kettle bell, but a book.

Lisa: [0:26:31] Strap it on. 

Kelly: [0:26:33] That’s a different kind of book. If someone went to their doctor, went to their nurse practitioner and said, “Hey, I really want to get off these blood pressure medicines, where do I begin?” The conversations cannot, do not happen in the hospital, in the doctor’s office. We have to meet people in their homes, in their places of work, and that’s the place where we’re going to see a health revolution. Otherwise, it’s going to be more of the same. 

Juliet: [0:27:00] Fact.

Lisa: [0:27:00] And just helping people understand that you can take a lot of control of your health, that has nothing to do with seeing a doctor if you’ve got a little pain in your knee.

Kelly: [0:27:09] You need to eat more bananas.

Juliet: [0:27:11] And I know we need to wrap this up but I think the point I’d like to make and I cannot emphasize is one of our huge goals with this book was to show and give a lot of examples of how accessible these practices can be in a busy life. And that’s people with little kids and full-time jobs and- 

Kelly: [0:27:27] Taking care of family members.

Juliet: [0:27:27] Because I do thing some of the perception, which probably isn’t totally correct perception, but I think the perception that the internet gives us is that a lot of people that are in our space, in the health and wellness space, that we just work out six hours a day and are in our sauna and ice bath and maybe we send two emails and we do a lot of meal prepping. But what we really wanted to show is that we’re really like most people. We spend most of our days in front of a computer, in an office, in a not very glamorous way, and we really wanted to show people a lot of the habits that we’re suggesting here can be really added into your life without a bunch more time. It’s really almost just a different way of thinking about the time you do have.

Kelly: [0:28:07] Stars, they’re just like us. 

Lisa: [0:28:09] Yeah, well, I do think that’s an interesting point because you guys talk a lot about how much health you do have in the bank and what you’ve been doing your whole lives to prepare for all the things you want to do. But it’s not too late for anybody.

Juliet: [0:28:19] Oh no, you can start with the littlest thing.

Kelly: [0:28:20] And these behaviors are all additive.

Lisa: [0:28:22] And it’s “expand”. Who were we just talking to that said expand?

Kelly: [0:28:24] Perry. We just want to expand.

Lisa: [0:28:26] You don’t have to change.

Kelly: [0:28:27] In this book we have a chapter on nutrition we think is one of our favorite chapters on nutrition of all time. We wrote it. We’ve consumed every nutrition book and seen every fad diet, and guess what? There’s not a single thing we tell you not to eat. We just think you’re actually not even hitting the basics.

Juliet: [0:28:43] I do really like the idea of expanding though versus changing; it’s just expanding.

Kelly: [0:28:47] Expanding. 

Lisa: [0:28:48] So you would say if I found quaaludes I could eat them.

Kelly: [0:28:51] I would say you would expand all the drugs you’re already taking.

Juliet: [0:28:52] You found them in your dad’s basement.

Kelly: [0:28:57] What we’re referring to is this person found a bottle of quaaludes in her grandparent’s basement. And the question at the table is do you just retire on that day?

Juliet: [0:29:04] What do you do? Yeah, what do you do when you find the bottle that says quaaludes?

Lisa: [0:29:07] I think nothing else for the rest of your life. 

Juliet: [0:29:09] Yeah, I think that’s it.

Kelly: [0:29:11] I thought quaaludes were a fake thing.

Lisa: [0:29:13] What? Are you kidding?

Kelly: [0:29:13] I thought that was a thing you just made up. It’s from the ’70s or ’60s.

Juliet: [0:29:15] No. 

Lisa: [0:29:16] What was that other meme? “The only thing I’d use a time machine for would be to go back in time and do quaaludes.” 

Kelly: [0:29:21] I don’t even know. I’m so square.

Juliet: [0:29:23] We need to find that meme right now. 

Kelly: [0:29:25] Thanks, Lisa.

Lisa: [0:29:26] All right, well, should we wrap it up by reiterating the book, when it’s out, where you can find it?

Juliet: [0:29:31] It is Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully. It’s out April 4, 2023. And stay tuned for tons more info in the coming months.

Kelly: [0:29:42] You can actually find it already. The true cover isn’t up, but-

Juliet: [0:29:45] It’s on builttomove.com.

Lisa: [0:29:47] But it has a cover that looks like a-

Kelly: [0:29:49] A stoic by a dictionary.

Lisa: [0:29:52] Yes, it looks like a dictionary from the 1800s. 

Kelly: [0:29:54] That’s right. 

Juliet: [0:29:55] Perfect. 

[music]

Kelly: [0:30:01] Thank you for listening to The Ready State Podcast. If you like what you’re hearing, check out all our episodes here or at thereadystate.com. And be sure to subscribe or leave a review on iTunes to help others find our show. 

Juliet: [0:30:13] Check us out and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @thereadystate.

Kelly: [0:30:17] Until next time, cheers everyone.

[music] 

Back to Episode