Built To Move Vital Signs

Built To Move Vital Signs
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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]

Juliet: [0:00:16] Hey everyone, welcome back to this bonus episode.

Kelly: [0:00:19] Bonus.

Juliet: [0:00:20] Bonus episode of The Ready State Podcast where we have our producer Lisa Schwartz here, but not really here, and we’re going to be talking again about our upcoming book Built to Move

Lisa: [0:00:31] So today what I want to talk about is vital signs.

Kelly: [0:00:35] Are you suggesting signs vitale?

Lisa: [0:00:37] Signs vitale. The whole book is structured around the term vital signs and a bunch of vital signs.

Kelly: [0:00:43] What did you even mean when you came up with that term?

Lisa: [0:00:44] What does it mean to you?

Juliet: [0:00:47] Well, I’ll take a swing at this. As everybody knows, when you go to the doctor, they take what are the more traditional vital signs, which are your temperature and your blood pressure. And what else is there?

Kelly: [0:00:58] SaO2.

Juliet: [0:01:00] SaO2. There’s some sort of traditional things that we all know of in medical terms that are vital signs.

Kelly: [0:01:06] And let me just interrupt. Those aren’t ideal; those are sort of base line references.

Juliet: [0:01:10] Yeah. They’re just a baseline reference. You take them every time you go-

Kelly: [0:01:13] Resting heart rate.

Juliet: [0:01:13] To the doctor, for whatever reason. Anyway, we wanted to expand upon the idea of vital signs and include movement as a vital sign. And the quote that you’ve said a ton of times that I always think of, and we might have learned it from our old coach from San Francisco CrossFit, Elena. And I think it’s an old Russian saying that is, “When you stop moving, you start dying.” So with that in mind-

Kelly: [0:01:40] That’s actually not it.

Juliet: [0:01:43] What was the quote? 

Lisa: [0:01:44] When you stop jumping.

Kelly: [0:01:44] Thanks. Thanks for at least one of you actually paying attention to what I’ve been saying for a long time.

Juliet: [0:01:50] Well, if I’ve bastardized the quote, so be it. But the point is, is that we’ve really wanted to make a book that was about the importance of movement and making it prime in your life as important as all these other vital signs.

Kelly: [0:02:04] What’s crucial is, and I don’t think people realize, what we have told people forever is it doesn’t matter. As long as you don’t have any pain, rock on. And then when you have pain, well, here’s some bourbon, good luck with that. Honestly, we’ve been having this really disingenuous conversation about this musculoskeletal system. We’ve said for everyone, forever, pain is a medical problem. And that is absolutely not true. And one of the things that you and I discovered in all the years we’ve been doing this is that if we just wait around for the check engine light to come on, that pain signal, that can be for a thousand different reasons, because I’m super stressed or I have my beliefs about pain or my experience in the past or, again, all of the things that can contribute to the understanding of what’s happening. And what’s happened then is that you and I said, okay, let’s separate pain out. Let’s make it not just about pain all the time because that’s really what the whole medical system is. People go see a physical therapist doctor because they’re in pain, right? They don’t go because I want to improve my squat or I can’t ride my bike or my wattage sucked. And what we have done with these vital signs is given people points of reference around key aspects of their physicality that help them know, hey, I should improve this or I should work on this a little bit. And I think’s really the key. It’s about function, not just about pain, no pain. We’re trying to shift that narrative.

Juliet: [0:03:18] Yeah. And I think the other big part of it is that as we’ve grown older, in our younger years-

Kelly: [0:03:25] Speak for yourself, woman.

Juliet: [0:03:25] We were obsessed with athletic performance and now what we see and when we talk to people that we know that are our age, which is middle age, people are starting to talk about what they want their older years to look like, and usually that involves what people want to be able to do with their bodies when they’re older, and also hopefully keep their mental faculties. But nobody talks about what they want to do when they’re 85 and says, I hope that I’m bedridden and have to be taken care of full time. Most people hope when they’re 85 that they’ll be able to play with their grandchildren or travel, if that’s what they love to do or do their sport or whatever it is. But it really does revolve around being able to remain physically active and being able to move. 

Kelly: [0:04:05] You tightened up a lot of things there because one of the problems is a lot of people have been talking about this for a long time, that we see an environment, person mismatch. The things that help us to become durable and sort of maintain the minimum maintenance on our bodies aren’t necessarily built in. Look, if you were born in the ’70s, you ran around-

Lisa: [0:04:26] I was.

Kelly: [0:04:26] You were kicked out of the house; you drank from the hose. There were some things built into your life that you didn’t have to think about because you were living in the way that the life kind of gave you context. You didn’t ride your electric slide scooter to work, to school. You had to walk to school uphill both ways.

Juliet: [0:04:44] Or pedal your bike with your own two feet.

Kelly: [0:04:47] So what we see suddenly is that some things have change. Do you remember when we all went to school back in the day, when we went on a field trip, you took a soda. Do you remember that?

Juliet: [0:04:56] Oh, I wouldn’t just take a soda, I would take a soda that I would-

Kelly: [0:05:00] This is weird, by the way.

Juliet: [0:05:01] This is weird. I’ll find out who did this. I would literally turn the faucet on as cold as possible, the kitchen sink, and I would make a paper towel wet with cold water and then I would wrap my soda, first the paper towel around the can of soda, and then aluminum foil.

Kelly: [0:05:16] Did you do that, PG?

Juliet: [0:05:17] And it created like a mini cooler.

Lisa: [0:05:19] I don’t feel like that’s scientifically feasible.

Juliet: [0:05:21] You didn’t do that?

Lisa: [0:05:22] As a cooling mechanism for your soda.

Kelly: [0:05:24] It lasted cold for like eight seconds.

Lisa: [0:05:26] For like two minutes.

Juliet: [0:05:27] There’s going to be someone who listens to this podcast who also did that.

Kelly: [0:05:30] I may have wrapped my soda in some aluminum foil. I remember, I have recollection. But the next layer in, did you ever, since you’re so cutting edge, J. My point is, before we got sidetracked with your obsessive compulsive cold drink behavior, is soda was a really special treat and not something we had all the time, not something my parents bought. You washed your teeth, you used to rinse your teeth with soda?

Lisa: [0:05:51] I had soda with breakfast.

Kelly: [0:05:54] Did you really?

Lisa: [0:05:55] Sprite. It’s the lesser soda. 

Juliet: [0:05:59] Okay, well, excepting Lisa.

Kelly: [0:06:00] Never mind. Why are we writing this book again?

Lisa: [0:06:04] For people like me.

Kelly: [0:06:05] What we see though is suddenly access to really highly palatable foods conjoined with the fact that we’re not moving or forced to move, interact, that our sleep has been disrupted, that we’re just seeing this change. We’ve talked about this. I’ve studied some anthropology, some geography, and back in the uni days, believe it or not, I went to university. 

Juliet: [0:06:29] What are you doing calling it uni? 

Kelly: [0:06:30] Uni.

Juliet: [0:06:31] Who even are you?

Lisa: [0:06:33] He’s a physio.

Kelly: [0:06:35] Shoutout Yannic. And one of the things they talked about was how air conditioning fundamentally changed communities in the South because as soon as there was air conditioning, people stopped going out on their porches and hanging out on their screens and interacting in their communities. And air conditioning suddenly kept people in their homes and it changed how communities interacted and how neighborhoods interacted. And I think we can take that same level of a perception of how some of these contrivances and conveniences have fundamentally altered what it meant to be human or how we interact with the environment. And so what ends up happening is people really get far away from what is it my body should be able to do. And I’m not trying to romanticize walking 20 miles to get water from the pump; that’s not what I’m talking about. But there are some things that we should be looking at that human beings have been doing for a long time and giving people reference lines for that I think is actually a really useful idea, is hey, I should work on this a little bit more or I didn’t even know that was a possibility. And it turns out that when we make people, we give people these tools where they can take a crack at improving how they function in the world, we also, they feel better and they’re more durable.

Juliet: [0:07:40] And I think that one last thing, Lisa, I think that the three things I would say about the vital signs is that they’re really centered around how much you move, how well you move, and what lifestyle factors there are in your life that impact your ability to move and keep moving for your whole life.

Lisa: [0:08:00] Well, I do want to go back to how our environments are now structured and how it’s very different. But maybe before we get too far ahead of ourselves, we should actually go through what the vital signs are. There are 10 in the book. So maybe you can run through what they are because I think because you’re known as the movement and mobility people, our listeners might be surprised to learn that these are not all movement practices. They’re not all movement focused.

Kelly: [0:08:21] You know, one of the things that Juliet has always had a penchant-

Juliet: [0:08:35] Did you just say penchant?

Kelly: [0:08:35] For all things nutrition. You were sort of into it.

Juliet: [0:08:38] Always.

Kelly: [0:08:39] Always. And I was always like yeah, yeah, yeah, you should eat a certain way for performance. But I became much more interested in nutrition because I saw it as a limiter for your soft tissue health and I couldn’t talk about having bomb proof soft tissues if you were hypo-hydrated, if you didn’t have enough proteins, if you weren’t getting micronutrients. And so suddenly I was like, well, shoot, I have to become interested in that. And to your point, a little bit of why we became interested in some of these aspects of sort of the centrality of what it means to be human is that we couldn’t have a real conversation about the symptoms about your inability to move the environment or express force or have movement choice unless we were doing these other things. So it’s not like I backed in and wanted to be that guy who was talking about sleep.

Lisa: [0:09:27] Well, and a perfect example is sleep because if you’re talking to someone that’s injured and they’re wanting to recover or maybe it’s not a full-blown injury but they’ve got some-

Kelly: [0:09:35] Or injured.

Lisa: [0:09:37] Or injured. They’re not really going to be recovering if they’re not sleeping and having good sleep quality and good sleep hygiene and habits.

Kelly: [0:09:44] Raise your hand if you’ve been told you should sleep. Raise your hand. Have you ever heard that message before? When was that message first given to you, Juliet? When you were a child, probably.

Juliet: [0:09:50] Yeah, when I was a child, I mean my parents were all about sleep.

Kelly: [0:09:55] What about you, Lisa? When did you realize that you actually were a vampire but you still needed sleep?

Juliet: [0:10:00] But I will say, let me just correct that and say I don’t think it was until almost my 40s though that I really appreciated a more intellectual level how important sleep is.

Lisa: [0:10:10] Well, I don’t think I fully appreciated, because I am a night owl and I’m not a morning person and I just have a bit of a shifted schedule where I just perform better late at night.

Kelly: [0:10:21] No, your genetics are, you’re totally a night owl.

Lisa: [0:10:24] Yeah, but I don’t think I fully appreciated my sleep until I started tracking it, to be honest.

Juliet: [0:10:28] Well, can I give one other example though about how we backed into some of these more lifestyle practice, I mean very similar with our book Deskbound and our recommendations for people around standing and moving at work. We never set out to be we’re going to be the standing desk people. That’s not sexy or awesome. And really the backstory there is we’ve ran a physical therapy clinic forever and Kelly has seen tons of injured athletes of all stripes. And what we realized is we’ve seen so many people who were trying to perform athletically and not really making the connection that they were sitting with all their key joints at 90 degree angles 16 hours of their day and then hoping to perform athletically.

Kelly: [0:11:06] We’re going to get all the emails from physical therapists, “Sitting’s not bad.” And it’s not bad. But the problem is not moving.

Juliet: [0:11:14] Not moving is bad.

Kelly: [0:11:15] And if that behavior, and I think this is really an important idea here: If you’re engaged in a certain behavior in your life and it starts to eat into your vital signs, it starts to degrade or change some of your ability to express something, you should be curious about that. So look, you love running in ski boots. That’s your thing. You’re like mini tramp, ski boots, that’s your jam.

Lisa: [0:11:38] Wow. You don’t know me at all.

Juliet: [0:11:40] He’s gone there. He’s gone there.

Kelly: [0:11:41] You were in a Swiss ski boot cult as a kid. I’m not judging. PG is super weird.

Lisa: [0:11:46] Wow. Those are fighting words.

Kelly: [0:11:39] Point for Star. But the idea is you can do that but if that starts to change your ability to open your hip up or change how you walk, then we have to be curious about that. And I think that people can relate to that. If I watch a bunch of TV at night and it affects my sleep… Remember when you were pregnant watching 24?

Juliet: [0:12:07] Yeah. 

Lisa: [0:12:08] Twenty-four hours a day?

Juliet: [0:12:08] Yeah.

Kelly: [0:12:10] We were watching 24 when it just came out. And were you pregnant with Georgia?

Juliet: [0:12:14] I think it was Caroline. 

Kelly: [0:12:15] And you were like we would watch Kiefer diffuse a nuclear bomb and Juliet and I, our heart rates would be like 160 and we’d be like, “Good night.”

Juliet: [0:12:22] We’d try to lay in bed and my heart rate would be super high and I was like, turns out watching 24 right before I go to bed and I’m pregnant is not a great idea. 

Lisa: [0:12:28] The only thing I took away from that show is when does he go to the bathroom? We’re following 24 hours in a day.

Juliet: [0:12:35] No. I don’t think he ever. They never ate either. They never ate.

Kelly: [0:12:37] That’s a good point.

Juliet: [0:12:38] By the way, that was back in the day when we were receiving our Netflix on CD delivered to us by mail. We could only binge so much.

Kelly: [0:12:47] True. And my point is we can all relate to inputs and outputs, that if you had this input and it changed some aspect of your sleep, you could be like, hmm, maybe we shouldn’t watch 24. But when it comes to some of these other aspects of your bodies, some of the processes are more coupled than hidden from us. They’re so complex. Or it takes a long time to express inputs and outputs. You watched 24, your heart rate was jacked, we didn’t sleep well, we didn’t watch 24, you slept well, you’re like, oh, run an experiment there. So when we can give people these vital signs, then you can make choices about, hey, do I want to drink alcohol tonight because I know it’s going to affect my sleep. And that’s a choice. And that’s not saying I’ll never drink alcohol again. But if I have a huge event coming up or I’m not sleeping and I’m under stress, I now can understand that there are certain behaviors that will interrupt or interfere or degrade or tax my vital signs. Don’t tax my vital signs, bro.

Juliet: [0:13:42] I’m actually going to try to answer Lisa’s actual question.

Kelly: [0:13:47] Don’t be all high and mighty. 

Juliet: [0:13:48] Which was what are the vital signs. So I’ll start. The first vital sign is getting up off the floor. We have a vital sign about breathing. As you alluded to, we have one about nutrition. Sleep. Some of the vital signs are being able to get your body into shapes that you need.

Kelly: [0:14:07] Hip extension.

Juliet: [0:14:07] Hip extension. Being able to put your arms over your head. We have a balance chapter which we think is a very overlooked part of being a durable human. 

Kelly: [0:14:18] Walking.

Juliet: [0:14:18] What am I missing? Walking.

Kelly: [0:14:20] We’ve got how to integrate and shape your work behavior because we’re seeing so many people at work that it’s a big, big idea, an opportunity to improve people’s lives.

Juliet: [0:14:30] And by at work we mean either at work or working at your home, working remotely, whatever that means.

Kelly: [0:14:36] I would argue that most people are in more healthy situations for their body and movement when they work at a job site because they had to walk to the job site, they had to move, they had to-

Lisa: [0:14:48] And they’re not working from their couch.

Kelly: [0:14:49] Yes, on a little tiny laptop.

Juliet: [0:14:49] Yes. Even if it’s just they had to walk from the parking lot to their office and then they go out for lunch.

Kelly: [0:14:56] Which is probably the most compelling reason… All the CEOs are going to be listening to this. It’s about the health of your employees.

Juliet: [0:15:02] Bringing them back to the office.

Lisa: [0:15:02] There’s a vital sign on breathing.

Kelly: [0:15:03] We talked about that.

Juliet: [0:15:04] Breathing. 

Kelly: [0:15:05] Yeah. We can’t talk about… We had a lot of opportunities to say where do we think are the basecamp behaviors.

Juliet: [0:15:15] What do you mean by basecamp? Sorry Lisa.

Kelly: [0:15:18] What I mean is what are the things that people need to do, what access should they have in their physicality to build a platform off of which they can go do whatever they want. Because what you and I have tried to do here is be completely agnostic about the things people want to do in their lives. But what we’ve come to realize, that these behaviors are core principles. We’re not talking about body composition.

Juliet: [0:15:40] Whether you’re a creative or an athlete or a couch potato or whoever you are these are core practices.

Kelly: [0:15:46] We run into a lot of people, even our book, our publisher, they live in New York, they self-describe as not heavy exercisers. And they’re always feeling guilted as, well, I didn’t exercise so I’m a bad person or I’m not on some Keto cleanse juice diet thing so I must-

Juliet: [0:16:04] I’m failing at my health practices.

Kelly: [0:16:06] When they had access to the book, what they realized is, oh, of course you and I think loading is important and putting on muscle’s important. But we had a bunch of women in our lives, until very recently we had three people in our lives who were over 100 years old. And none of them were very strong and none of them played a sport. I’m not talking about you, Lisa.

Juliet: [0:16:25] Oh, I mean none of them would have ever used the word athlete to describe themselves in their life, ever. And still, they lived to be over 100.

Kelly: [0:16:33] So I think when we say basecamp, we have come to realize, and I think this is what’s so seminal about the idea of a vital sign, is this is the set of behaviors off of which I would say, hey, you want to go win an Olympic medal, you need to go do these things.

Juliet: [0:16:48] First. 

Kelly: [0:16:48] And then you can build competence and layer on. So before you climb Everest, let’s get to basecamp. 

Lisa: [0:16:54] Exactly. And not to take away from your genius, because I do feel like you both are super innovative, but this is kind of low-hanging fruit. So that brings me around to the word habit and habits because it’s not like these things are hard, it’s not rocket science.

Kelly: [0:17:14] Who doesn’t know about sleep?

Lisa: [0:17:15] But there’s an element of our environments are not set up for any of these things. We’re not reminded to move because we’re sitting in front of a computer all day. It’s just not top of mind. So let’s talk about the idea of habits and you laying out these very simple things that people will hopefully

Kelly: [0:17:33] Before JStar takes a swing at this, I just want to say that one thing that is remarkable about this book is that we understand how these behaviors are interlinked and they’re what we call, in complex systems, they’re called tightly coupled processes, that your walking affects your ability to sleep.

Juliet: [0:17:51] You’re just trying to sound fancy. What are you even talking about. You’re just trying to sound fancy right now.

Lisa: [0:17:55] His lexicon is tightly coupled.

Juliet: [0:17:58] He’s like, “Tightly coupled.” Tightly coupled behaviors from this book I read.

Kelly: [0:18:00] Everyone, welcome to my life. Have you met my sister Lisa and my wife Juliet and have you met my wife Juliet and wife Lisa? This is it. I’m trapped. Look, at some point, I’ll be able to talk about this in therapy. The point is I think one of the issues when people are presented with this, which Juliet will talk about though, is they don’t understand how all of these pieces fit together. And we’ve done a much better job of explaining why you can’t just pull one of these pieces out and how they layer. So now why you don’t you talk about the 24-hour duty cycle?

Juliet: [0:18:30] I’m going to start by saying a couple more things just generally about habits. I think what we’ve learned over the years is that people know that they should get some exercise.

Kelly: [0:18:40] Stop it. Never heard that before.

Juliet: [0:18:41] And they also know that they probably shouldn’t have a 40-ounce Coke and Doritos for dinner. But that doesn’t actually stop people from doing that. And I think what you said, Lisa, about how our environment is set up to make it really easy for us to make choices that are not good for our health. You think of someone who gets a new job and they’re presented with their desk at their office and it is what it is.

Lisa: [0:19:04] The company brings in lunch and coffee so they’re not walking.

Juliet: [0:19:07] Yeah, they’re not walking.

Kelly: [0:19:08] Your daughter starts a cookie business.

Juliet: [0:19:10] Yeah. That’s our biggest current challenge. So I think one of the reasons we chose these specific vital signs is that they are the things that we’ve been able to make habit in our own life.

Kelly: [0:19:24] Without having to do a whole bunch of crazy stuff.

Juliet: [0:19:25] No, and without having to be training three or four hours a day or only working part time so that we can take care of our super special health habits.

Kelly: [0:19:34] We were in the early biohacking movement. We just had our friends who were there, right? And one of the things that I started to appreciate right away was it seems like there was this being generated of stuff you had to do to optimize. And I was like, wow, I wonder how Juliet’s going to react when I tell a busy working mother, CEO, “Hey, you’re not optimizing. You should follow this checklist and add another 30 things to your day.” You would have killed me if I’d been like, “Hey, I see you’re not…”

Juliet: [0:20:00] Yeah, and what we’ve seen over the years when people ask us, just our friends and neighbors and people ask us for general health advice, often people are asking questions about how to climb Everest. What supplements should I take?

Kelly: [0:20:13] Which color rope is the best way to express my creativity?

Juliet: [0:20:15] People have missed the basics. And what we always have gone back to as we say, are you sleeping, are you moving, are you getting in the sunlight, are you getting some water, are you breathing, are you taking care of your tissues? We always go back to these basic habits. And I think for us also part of the reasons these things have become habits is because we are very clear about our own physical goals. I mean both in the short term and long term. It’s really important for us that we’re able to move and be able to do the things we love for as long as we’re alive. And so we’ve structured our own habits around the things we know we want to be able to do and the practices that will support us being able to do those things.

Kelly: [0:20:57] And when we wrote Supple Leopard, you and I were just in a different part of our lives. Ten years now since we started writing that book. Over 10 years. And the reason we can write this book today and it means a lot to us is we are, one, hyper obsessed with having healthy tissues and maintaining our functionality for the next 50 years, and two, we also are very busy working people. And I think when we’ve been able to parse through what are all the things that the best high performers are doing.

Juliet: [0:21:30] Yeah, what are the non-negotiables for us in our life?

Kelly: [0:21:33] And where do you put that into your day so we’re not giving you’re a list. I think if you read this book, you can just drop it in and we’ve structured it in a way that we solve the problem for the athletes and the coaches and the organizations we were working with. Because we came up with the 24-hour duty cycle I think when I was working with the Marines, the Marine Aviation Weapon Tactical Schools, so I was like, okay, where are we going to figure out where we’re going to drop in these key behaviors. And what we found out was if we didn’t speak in those terms and actually look at where people were going to do this, no one did it. That’s half.

Lisa: [0:22:08] I think what I really like about this book is that these habits, behaviors, it’s all accessible to anyone, whether you’re an athlete with those kind of goals or you’re my mom, it’s accessible, which leads to it being something that could be consistent.

Juliet: [0:22:26] Is actually doable and consistent.

Lisa: [0:22:27] Accessibility and consistency.

Kelly: [0:22:30] Bone crushing consistency.

Juliet: [0:22:31] I mean our book Becoming A Supple Leopard, obviously it was like a 900 pound, 500-million-page textbook, but really, it had a lot of advanced movement and mobility concepts and techniques. The audience for that was largely people who would use the word athletes to describe themselves or coaches, physical therapists, doctors, you name it. I can’t tell you how many chiropractic clinics, doctor’s offices people have said they’ve been into and said, “Oh, I went into my doctor’s office and there was a copy of Supple Leopard in the waiting room.”

Lisa: [0:22:59] Or people that are already in pain and at the end of their rope.

Kelly: [0:23:05] Or I need to win a World Championship, how do I do that?

Juliet: [0:23:08] But it is ultimately not a relatable book for the everyday person. And everybody wants to be durable. And again, going back to what I said earlier, there is literally no one on earth who is going to answer the question what do you want to be able to do when you’re 80 with, “I’m hoping I’m bedridden and can’t move.”

Kelly: [0:23:24] Shoutout Ronnie Coleman. Everyone wants to be a bodybuilder but no one wants to lift no heavy ass weights.

Lisa: [0:23:28] Especially how our lives are organized right now where we’re going to work until we’re like 70. So what do you want to do when you retire? Travel.

Kelly: [0:23:37] Seventy-one.

Lisa: [0:23:38] But now that’s happening not when we’re 50, it’s happening when we’re 70, 75.

Juliet: [0:23:44] Right. And most of us want to be able to play with our grandchildren or take them traveling or just be able to go for a hike or whatever.

Kelly: [0:23:49] Shred. I’m going to outlift my grandchildren.

Lisa: [0:23:50] We’ve said this before but live on our own. I don’t want to be in an assisted living facility because I can’t get up off of the chair.

Juliet: [0:23:59] And I think one key point I wanted to make too is that what we’ve seen going around the world consulting with Olympians and professional athletes of all stripes and elite military units and you name it, is often those folks are also missing the basics. And that’s why we really feel like this book is for everybody. Even people who have read and are aficionados of Supple Leopard or people who would use the word athlete to describe themselves, we see that often the people that fall into that group or use those words to describe themselves, they’re maybe doing one or two of these practices but they’re not doing them all. So it’s still they still haven’t reached basecamp.

Kelly: [0:24:39] If you remember Princess Bride.

Juliet: [0:24:40] Yes. One of the greatest movies ever made.

Kelly: [0:24:43] If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything. And one of the problems this solves is that a lot of people in our vertical are very sophisticated about all of this. They’re tracking and getting stronger and carrying on position and managing their sleep. And you and I have felt like we have left a swath of society behind. And that swath is 99 percent. We’re like we’re good over here, I’m going to keep deadlifting and doing my thing. 

Lisa: [0:25:11] What was that WHO study that just came out?

Juliet: [0:25:14] Yeah, just to tie that up, the WHO just this week that we’re recording this put out their first ever report on physical activity and it’s obviously worldwide. And generally speaking, we’re doing horribly. And it’s not just Americans, that’s the other key thing. We like to focus our attention on America being particularly bad. But it’s worldwide people are not getting enough physical activity. And I mean if you look at the guidelines, I mean it’s not an unreasonable amount of physical activity we’re supposed to be getting and we’re nowhere near that. And kids in particular are bad off.

Kelly: [0:25:50] A lot of our schools are not even in compliance with the legislation about how much exercise. And the question is who owns this, how do you begin this? So one of the things we recognize is we have to be able to help people manage this in their homes on their own. Your physician does not have enough time to talk to you about all this; it’d be great. Your physical therapist can’t talk to you about their sleep if they’re working through a problem. You guys have seen me treat; it’s packed. When I’m working with someone, I have a lot to do. The whole original concept of Mobility WOD, when we made our first video in 2010 on the internet, was to create a resource for the people we were working with so they could come to it or they could have done some things to expand the treatment hour. And one of the things that we’re trying to do here is solve a problem so every physician can give her client or her patient who’s trying to get off meds, who needs to control their blood pressure. Well, the intervention right now from big medicine is, well, we don’t think you’re going to change any aspect of your behavior because it’s so complicated, take this pill because at least it’ll save you.

Lisa: [0:26:57] I think that kind of brings up a good point that I want to go back to of who the book is for and the idea of nodes in the community, which we’ve talked about. I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about on our podcast. But if you are a person that’s doing all of the things but people in your community are coming to you like what should I do with this or what should I do with this, this is the handbook that you can refer people to.

Kelly: [0:27:19] It’s easy. That’s exactly right.

Juliet: [0:27:20] Yeah, and I mean we’ve really tried to encourage people to become the node. We encourage people to get this book and figure out this practice because a lot of this is inclusive of your community. One example I was talking to you about today is my mom who’s 77, almost 78, loves to walk and hike and she felt like she was struggling to find people to do that with. And so she wasn’t walking and hiking as much as she wanted because she didn’t always want to go alone. And so I suggested to her, I was like be a node. And so she started a little walking hiking club for 70s something ladies.

Kelly: [0:27:52] You did not say node.

Juliet: [0:27:53] I didn’t say node. But in my mind, I thought it.

Lisa: [0:27:55] But you meant it.

Juliet: [0:27:56] I meant node. Anyway, so my mom Janet started a little hiking, walking club and it’s the same time, same day, Wednesdays at 10 o’clock every week. And it’s really grown and there’s a group of cool ladies who care about moving their bodies and being outside and having a sense of community and it’s for those people.

Kelly: [0:28:14] Recently I’ve adopted this phrase hyperlocality. Have you heard me say that? And that is-

Juliet: [0:28:18] Fancy.

Kelly: [0:28:21] Tightly coupled. The idea is I think you and I, we’ve worked at levels of, we’ve interacted with Olympic governing body for a country. We work with them. How do we help all the Olympians in an entire country? We worked with populations the size of the Army. How do we improve healthcare there? And what you and I realize is it’s really difficult to make these large changes.

Juliet: [0:28:46] Institutional.

Kelly: [0:28:48] Institutional country level issue. And so suddenly we’re like, oh, it’s about the state. And then we’re like no, no, no, no, it’s about the community. Hold on, it’s about your street. And then pretty soon it’s just about your circle of friends. That idea of if you can be that node in your community it’s because you actually know the demands of the community and what’s going on inside your own home and with your friends. That may be the extent of the influence of our capacities. I think the internet has really confused people around this because it feels like I have to speak to this global audience or I’m a failure when we haven’t transformed our own streets and our own communities. Hyper.

Juliet: [0:29:25] You know, the other thing I wanted to talk about without you asking me a question or just say about the book and the vital signs is that one of the things we’ve tried to do is in addition to making it super accessible and relatable to people who have busy lives is we tried to make it fun. Every chapter has a test and physical practices you can do.

Kelly: [0:29:47] Wait. Those are called objective measures. 

Juliet: [0:29:49] Yeah. And we’re hoping that people can challenge their friends and do it with their parents and their kids and work on the test together and make it a community thing. We’ve tried to make it fun and interesting, get some interesting data about your body.

Kelly: [0:30:03] Totally. Totally. One of the things that I think was a failure around physical therapy particularly is that physical therapy came out with a lot of language which was don’t do this, otherwise you’ll get injured. Don’t round your back because your spine will explode.

Lisa: [0:30:20] You’ll damage your fascia.

Kelly: [0:30:21] You’ll damage your fascia. And how did that work for getting people to quit smoking? Has that worked?

Juliet: [0:30:26] Not yet.

Kelly: [0:30:28] How about drinking? Does anyone think that just drinking a bottle of bourbon. So we’re like don’t drink because 20 years from now you’ll have cirrhosis of the liver. You’re like 20 years?

Juliet: [0:30:36] That doesn’t really work. 

Lisa: [0:30:36] That’s too long.

Kelly: [0:30:38] It’s too long. So I think your premise that when we pointed negative at people, we said don’t do this because, we said don’t eat just greasy hamburgers all the time because sometime in the future you may or may not be here but you may die, that didn’t change anyone’s behavior. And when you made it fun, and it was you because you’re always the fun person.

Juliet: [0:30:57] So fun. 

Kelly: [0:30:58] And we made it about improving people’s choice and functionality and how much better they felt because sometimes we work with people and I’m like, hey, you should do these things because it will help with a lot of things we’re working on. But also, you actually don’t feel good and you’re actually going slow and you suck.

Lisa: [0:31:13] But I think a lot of people don’t know that they don’t feel good.

Kelly: [0:31:15] That’s what I’m saying.

Lisa: [0:31:16] Until they stop doing something.

Kelly: [0:31:17] So when we point positive when we’re like hey-

Juliet: [0:31:19] And that’s why we’ve tried to add some objective measures, right? I mean I think you don’t know until you do these tests. There’s going to be a few readers of this book who get a nine out of ten. But my guess is most people are going to have some challenges with at least some of the tests.

Kelly: [0:31:37] Very few people are going to crush this.

Juliet: [0:31:40] Yeah. And learn a lot about their physical readiness and durability.

Kelly: [0:31:43] When we handed this out to some of our early readers, people who are in the know and have access to all this stuff, they said, “Wow, it really actually changed some of my behaviors.” And we gave it out to some of our-

Juliet: [0:31:54] Yeah, like serious athletes.

Kelly: [0:31:54] World champions who are friends who are like, “Wow, this really felt like it crystallized some of my behaviors and organized things so I could understand what’s important.” And I could also, as you say, even if I pass some of the tests, now at least I know what my blood pressure should be. We all know that, right, 120 over 80 isn’t great blood pressure but at least we know, hey, it’s not a problem. But now we’re like, hey, you can’t do this or you’re not meeting theses goals in the vital signs, hey, be curious about that.

Lisa: [0:32:20] And one more specific question on vital signs and maybe I’m playing dumb here, but is there a hierarchy to the vital signs, is there an order?

Juliet: [0:32:29] I mean I don’t think there is an order. I think that they’re all important.

Kelly: [0:32:32] I feel attacked right now.

Juliet: [0:32:33] I also think- 

Kelly: [0:32:36] I’ll explain that in a second.

Juliet: [0:32:37] To the extent that we’ve tried to make this book as accessible as possible, we do also appreciate that there’s going to be people who do a bit of choose your own adventure where they say, well, okay, I relate to and want to incorporate seven of these ten habits into my life and this works and makes sense and I’m able to do this. And that’s great. Obviously ten out of ten would be great and eleven out of ten with our bonus chapter would be even better. But- 

Kelly: [0:33:02] My book goes to eleven?

Lisa: [0:33:02] Your book goes to eleven. But every one thing someone incorporates makes their life better.

Kelly: [0:33:09] Yeah and the reason I felt attacked is everyone at this place where I work thinks I have monkey brain.

Juliet: [0:33:16] There’s no thinking.

Lisa: [0:33:16] Do we?

Kelly: [0:33:19] Like I said. And when we wrote this, Juliet who was like okay, read page one, do page one, read page two, do page two. That’s how your brain works and maybe why you’re a World Champion and I’m not. That’s fair. However, I feel like you can open this up and be like this piece speaks to me so I’m going to start there. So you really can dive in and start anywhere and a lot of people did, as Juliet says, choose your own adventure. You might think, hey, I might be good at this or I might be interested in this, you can dive right to that chapter. But you have to ultimately appreciate how tightly coupled these systems are. 

Juliet: [0:33:52] Yeah, but I mean it’s true. Or you can do every chapter and if there’s one that you pass with flying colors, it’s not to say that it’s a habit that you throw into the trash, but it certainly doesn’t need to be a focal point.

Kelly: [0:34:04] Maybe I’m on the cookie chapter, is that chapter 12? I’m crushing that chapter.

Lisa: [0:34:08] Exactly.

Juliet: [0:34:09] We all are, unfortunately. 

Lisa: [0:34:10] Okay, well, to wrap this up, maybe let’s tell people again the name of the book and when it comes out and to stay tuned, we’re going to do some more bonus episodes like this.

Juliet: [0:34:21] It is Built to Move. It is available actually for preorder now basically at any retailer that sells books. You can go to builttomove.com to learn more and preorder a copy. It will be live and either in your mailbox or bookstores on April 4, 2023.

Kelly: [0:34:40] Lastly is a piece of homework is if you are looking at your own life, what your non-negotiables? Because a lot of people I don’t think have even thought about the program running in the background. Just think about your non-negotiables. What are the things that you know that you need to touch base with because I don’t think we’ve even given anyone a framework on that but you probably can come up with a couple on your own.

Juliet: [0:35:00] I know you’re talking about physical non-negotiables.

Kelly: [0:35:02] Yeah. physical non-negotiables. I don’t mean I need to be able to run a 12 minute 5K, nothing like that.

Lisa: [0:35:09] But maybe I want to travel when I retire?

Kelly: [0:35:11] Not even that. I think those are the goals we talked about.

Lisa: [0:35:14] We’re wrong. You’re wrong. 

Juliet: [0:35:17] Tell us how we’re wrong.

Kelly: [0:35:20] It’s so difficult to mansplain everything to you two.

Lisa: [0:35:22] Tell us how it’s more basic than we’re even thinking.

Kelly: [0:35:26] No, what I mean was instead of looking at what your goals are, what are your behaviors around your life that you anchor down. You are a really good sleeper; you sleep really well, even though you stay up nights, that’s one of the things that you are really-

Lisa: [0:35:28] That is my superpower.

Kelly: [0:35:39] It’s your superpower.

Lisa: [0:35:40] Very lucky.

Kelly: [0:35:40] So if I asked you to do an inventory, you’d be like, well, I always protect my sleep. Because Juliet and I were freaked out for a while; we were like Lisa goes to bed so late. Then we were like she actually does sleep.

Juliet: [0:35:50] I was actually really worried and then she got a tracker and I was like, okay, I don’t need to worry-

Kelly: [0:35:53] She’s crushing the sleep. 

Juliet: [0:35:55] About her at night.

Kelly: [0:35:55] So that’s what I mean is if you looked at your own things, what are the things you’re doing currently that you’d consider a vital sign yourself?

Lisa: [0:36:07] Well, thanks everybody.

Juliet: [0:36:07] Thanks for inviting us, Lisa.

Lisa: [0:36:10] Oh, you’re so welcome.

Kelly: [0:36:10] Thanks for tolerating me. 

[music]

Kelly: [0:36:16] 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 and leave a review on iTunes to help others find our show.

Juliet: [0:36:28] Check us out and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @thereadystate.

Kelly: [0:36:33] Until next time, cheers everyone.

[music]

 

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