652: Built to Move: 10 Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully With Juliet and Kelly Starrett

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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from WellnessMama.com, and I am here today with two friends of mine whose work I have loved and used for a very long time. This podcast is all about being built to move and the ten essential habits that help us move more freely and live more fully. And I’m here with Juliet and Kelly Starrett, who, like I mentioned, are friends of mine and also people whose research and work I value very much. Juliet is an entrepreneur, an attorney, an author and a podcaster, as well as the co-founder and CEO of The Readystate.com, which has revolutionized how a lot of athletes think about human movement and athletic performance, as well as the former CEO of San Francisco CrossFit, which was one of the first 50 CrossFit affiliates. She’s also the co author of the Wall Street Journal Bestseller Deskbound and co-host of The Ready State Podcast. And before turning her attention to The Ready State and CrossFit full time, she had a successful career as an attorney practicing complex commercial litigation.

And she’s here with her husband, Dr. Kelly Starrett, who is a doctor of physical therapy and the co-author as well of Becoming a Supple Leopard and Ready to Run and The Wall Street Journal Bestseller Deskbound. Kelly is also the co-founder and CEO of The Ready State and co-founder of San Francisco CrossFit as well. And he consults with athletes and coaches from the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, MLB, and the US. Olympic team, as well as CrossFit athletes. And he works with elite Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard forces and consults with corporations on employee health and well-being. And his work is not limited to coaches and athletes. His methods apply equally well as we talk about today, to moms, to children, and to anyone dealing with injury or chronic pain. And he believes that every human being should know how to move and be able to perform basic human maintenance on themselves. And that’s what we talk about today.

We start off with a really fun and exciting story of how Juliet survived a run in with a hippo, which is the most dangerous animal on earth after the mosquito. We talk about their journey into the work they do now in the world of movement, including the ten key techniques to enhance our capacity for movement. Why something as simple as the ability to get up and down off the floor without putting a hand or a knee down is correlated with living longer and having fewer health issues. They talk about objective health benchmarks that are missing in the broader conversation of movement and how to benefit from them. We talk about the ten vital signs of movement and how to know if you are doing these well and how this book stemmed from their work with elite performers and figuring out what works best. We talk about what mobility actually is and why it is not exercise. We talk about the real story about sitting and why it isn’t bad, but how we can do it better. We talk about how consistency trumps heroism as well as many other things in this very informative episode that I enjoyed very much. So let’s join Juliet and Kelly. Kelly and Juliet, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

Juliet: Thank you so much for having us, Katie.

Kelly: So nice to see you.

Katie: Well, it is an honor to get to chat with both of you. I think, Kelly, I first encountered your work through becoming a supple leopard, which I still have on my shelf and is a movement bible of sorts, and I love it. And we’re going to get to talk about movement in a lot of different ways today. But before we jump into that, Juliet, I have a note that you were attacked by a hippo. And this is relevant to my family right now because we had a big debate the other night at dinner about the most dangerous animals, which turns out mosquitoes are actually the top of the list. But beyond mosquitoes, hippos are up there and kind of ranked as the one we don’t want to get in a fight with. So I want to hear this story.

Juliet: Sure. I mean, I’ll give you a Reader’s Digest version because the whole story could probably take over the entire podcast, but quick backstory. I used to be and this is how I met Kelly, actually. But we used to be extreme whitewater paddlers, which is an extremely fringe sport in the United States, but actually quite a thing in other countries. And so we both fell into this. We had been river rafting guides. I had been a D1 rower in college. We fell into this weird fringe sport that gave us the opportunity to travel all over the world and see these cool rivers in our 20s and try our hat of being professional athletes. And so we were involved in this kind of strange thing. But that brought me in 1997 to the World Championships on the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe. And because we had all traveled all the way there two weeks early to train, and the event itself was a week, we decided, hey, we’re all the way in Africa. Let’s stay a little longer and do some sightseeing. And so we went on a five day canoe safari.

Kelly: I have to jump in. I have paddled a Zambiezi, and a canoe safari is the last thing I would ever do.

Juliet: Yeah, well, I mean, I didn’t know it was 1997 and there was no internet as like point of context. But anyway, we go, my mom, by the way, just for color. My mom was on the trip. She had actually come down to watch the World Championships. And this was supposed to be this relaxing float, no rapids, you’re just floating through like easy river and seeing the sights of Africa and seeing wildlife. And this is how this thing was kind of sold to us. And we got a little concerned when we arrived at the shore of the river. And the entire safety talk done by the guide was all about hippos and crocodiles and him showing all the various weaponry, including multiple, like a rifle, multiple guns, and all the ways that he was set up to defend us against all these creatures out here in the wilderness. And so we were definitely worried. And while we did see some amazing sights and amazing wilderness, we were gripped the whole time because the river gets camping. We’re camping, like, on these weird little islands.

Kelly: Did you have a satellite phone?

Juliet: No satellite phone. There was no satellite phones. It was 1997, men. This was, like, remote. Like, we are out there, and on day three, we arrive at this. The river itself is about a mile wide, but it became super channelized. And our guide literally says to us, hey, guys, we’ve got two options here. We can either go to Hippo City or the Hippo Bronx. And I’m in the background like, Hippo City, that sounds way better. I definitely don’t want to go to the Hippo Bronx, but I got out-voted by my crazy teammates who are all like, hippo Bronx, hippo Bronx. And so we cruise into this channel, and we are all dead. Like, you could have heard a pin drop out there. The only sound is like the sound of people’s paddle strokes in the water. Like nobody’s talking. Everybody is gripped because as we pull into the channel, we see hundreds of hippos. We can see the channel is packed. And so we’re trying to sort of stay in the current and avoid these big pods of hippos. And the next thing I know, with no prior warning, no wake, no nothing, we are being thrown, like 12ft in the air. And we knew immediately that we’d been attacked by a hippo. And the last thing I saw, because I was paddling on that side, was looking down into this huge hippo mouth because it attacked the canoe right where I was sitting. And it was actually good that it came with such speed and force, because we were knocked like 12ft in the air and then landed in the water. So when he came to chomp down or she came to chomp down on the canoe, I was already out. And what the guide had told us is that hippos are very vegetarians, but they’re extremely pissed and territorial. So the goal was to get away from the canoe as soon as possible. And so I think we were already swimming in the air, like, doing our swim strokes in the air. Like, we knew immediately. This was one of my teammates. Thankfully, my mom was in a different canoe, and we had about 50 meters to swim to an island on the river. And I can tell you that that was the total sketchiest moment of my entire life, because I knew that there were 100 other hippos in the water right around there. I knew that one was already mad as it had already attacked us. We’d seen 20 foot crocodiles in prior days. Swimming in the river was bad and we did not know if the next feeling we were going to feel was being grabbed and pulled under and drowned. And then, sort of comically, we got to the shore and not comically, thankfully, we got to the shore, but then we get to this island, which is covered in Cape Buffalo. And Cape Buffalo also charge and attack humans. And again, they don’t want to eat you like a lion, but they’re very territorial. So we had Cape Buffalo on the island. Our guide tracked down our canoe and repaired the two huge holes where I was sitting with tupperware lids, and we had to continue canoeing for three more days.

Kelly: That’s my woman.

Juliet: The lesson learned is you should pay attention to what local culture does, because if you notice, Zimbabweans don’t go near the shore and they don’t go on canoe safaris, and there’s a reason for that.

Katie: Wow, that is quite the incredible story. I’m very glad you made it to the island and made it through, but you have quite the story to tell. That’s incredible. And you guys are well known for your work related to movement, and I’m excited to get to learn from you on that today because it’s relevant to my own personal journey as well. I guess to start, let’s start a little broad, maybe give a little bit of background in the work that you guys do and maybe also start with the ten key techniques that I know you go into in this book.

Kelly: Well, I’ll tell you, we both were movers. We both love to train. We met at the World Championships for Whitewater Paddling and Juliet back in 2000, became the greatest training partner I ever had. And we were both loved to spend time in the outdoors. We did multiple outdoor sports. We also loved to train. But we were of an age where the model was, and we’re turning 50 this year, but the model used to be, work as hard as you can and maybe you don’t get hurt. And if you get hurt, we’ll just back off, wait a little while, and then we’ll get a little bit further next time. That was honestly the sort of the medical model at the time.

And in performance, we talked about technique as it related to lifting more weight or running a faster river, or going faster, but everything was driven by the clock, really was. I think people this notion, a very modern notion that we can look at your position and mechanics are really just a recent sort of iteration of the training experience. Meanwhile, we decide that I moved to the city, followed Juliet after meeting her in Chile, and we love to go train at the gym. And we discover CrossFit. And it’s there are five CrossFits in the world. And the reason it became so meaningful to us was that one, we were suddenly getting all the beginner gains. You couldn’t buy a kettlebell in San Francisco. Just so you know, no one had a kettlebell. Maybe you heard about it from Pavel if you were in some nerd, like, deep culture, but we weren’t very competent in Olympic lifting. I was working with an Olympic lifting coach in South San Francisco. We knew nothing about basics of tumbling and gymnastics, and we found out that when the intensity was higher, we weren’t as good as we thought we were. Remember world champion. Three times national champion. Like, we’re good athletes.

And suddenly we realized, wow, this is really fun. And it felt a lot like sporting. It felt like we were on a team. And every single day we sort of were nervous about would be able to complete this. And at the time, you have to understand that the world hadn’t blown up yet. It wasn’t ubiquitous. You weren’t seeing buying kettlebells at Walmart. I mean, the world has really changed. And at the same time, I started physical therapy school. Juliet was a first year attorney. She’s putting me through PT school. We start the gym the beginning of my second year of physio school. And we did so just because we wanted to have a great space for our friends. And we didn’t set out to start a business. We set out to sort of create a solution for us that felt like training and was really interesting and really centered around community. We love to train with our friends, and we started training with our friends in our backyard and what we found, because now we’ve taught on every continent except Antarctica.

And we know that everywhere on the planet, everyone knows what a push up is. In fact, the universal language in the world is actually food and training. Those two things everyone can wrap their heads around. Whether you’re running or jogging or lifting weights or deadlifting, you can go to any planet. And everyone knows these fundamentals of how people train and eat. And so here we have these two huge kind of cultural pieces, and for us, it was a way of getting better at our sport. We loved the training. It felt new and exciting. And all of a sudden, I’m in physio school and we’re running a gym, and we really start to see that there are some connections between position, pain, and loss of power. That when we started improving people’s root shapes, restoring their native range of motion. They got out of pain, and those people ended up being super durable, and they went faster and lifted more. And that was really the beginning of sort of the whole thing.

Katie: Yeah, I love that. And like I said, I’m familiar with your work as well. I actually did encounter Pavel many years ago because my brother in law was into that world and got kettlebell certified long before it was popular. I love that we can buy them in Walmart now, but I parallel that to my journey in the health world. As well, and how when I started writing about this stuff and reading about this stuff, I was buying grass fed meat from the back of a truck from an Amish farmer that was probably technically on the black market and illegal and it’s changed so much since then. I love that these things are now much more part of the mainstream conversation.

And I think when it comes to movement, you guys really are shaping and leading that conversation, which I think is awesome because your message is so important. I also love just a little bit of a language, note how you guys refer to it as training instead of just exercising or working out. I think that Mindset shift is a really key piece as well. And in the last couple of years, I’ve even started to try to shift and think of myself as an athlete versus just going to the gym to work out. And focusing on that training, which is really fun and also helps with the consistency and the movement toward a goal versus just, I’m going to go do some things at the gym for 45 minutes, or whatever. And I would love to go a little bit deeper into maybe the dynamics of some of this, because I think that conversation does get a little convoluted and most people just think of sort of exercise as a big umbrella term and don’t really get to go deeper into the nuance of movement and the different types and why they’re important.

Kelly: I love what you’re doing there by describing yourself as an athlete because the idea is that you’re theoretically training for something. And I think one of the problems is that the only thing we’ve sort of told people to care about is their body composition and their weight. And that’s the key driver for most people. And we’re sort of like, yeah, metabolic health and you have bone density, but those really aren’t the reasons why people think they should exercise. It really have been sold about weight loss control. And the problem with that is that we miss all the reasons to train with friends, to find something that you love, experience, and then all the ancillary things.

So you may be training to be a more durable father or a more durable mother. You may be training so that you can play with your kids on the floor when you’re in your 60s or when you have an opportunity. We’re parents of two daughters, and suddenly we’re having a little bit more time in our lives because we have these kids that just don’t require such little kid attention all the time. Means that we might be able to go mountain biking, and that means that we want to be prepared so that we can use our bodies the way we want to in the time that we want to.

Katie: Yeah, I love that concept of training for something, and I think for a lot of the people listening. It might be similar to me where I’m truly trying to train to keep up with my kids because now that I have teenagers, they surpass me in a lot of areas of physical movement and it’s really fun because we get to do those things together. And I mentioned before we started recording, they’ve even now gotten me into pole vaulting as an adult after six babies. And it’s been such a fun journey and a really cool connection point for them. And I think that’s for a lot of parents listening. And the goal is to be able to keep up with our kids or stay active when we have grandkids one day and also just to have healthy movement patterns as we age. It’s been a fun journey. I’m realizing, I think that actually can improve with each decade of life, or at least that. Oh yes, my goal, like I feel much more fit and healthier than I did in my 20s, for instance. And so I’m excited for my 40s and what that will look like.

But I also think you’re right that so many people you maybe get into it because of the weight side or the body composition side, but if you can kind of get bitten by the bug of training and doing it for working toward a goal, it’s so much easier to stay consistent. And I know there’s a lot of directions we can go on specific ways to do that. I would love to start by talking about you use the example of being able to get up off the floor unassisted as a metric. So explain what you mean by that and why that is a valuable tool.

Juliet: Sure. So there was a study that came out some years ago that showed that people who could get up and down off the floor without putting a hand or knee down, that the ability to do that was correlated with living longer and having fewer chronic diseases and other health issues. We loved starting the book with this test and what I’ll do is give a little bit of backstory. One of our goals in writing this book was to actually give some objective health benchmarks, which we feel like has been really missing in our broader health community. And part of the reason why we use the word vital signs to describe these benchmarks, because during the pandemic, what we noticed is that everybody started tracking all these things like sao two regular people who don’t use the word athlete to describe themselves or maybe do, but would be like light exercisers started tracking all these metrics.

And we thought to ourselves, if people can track those basic health metrics, then why aren’t there other benchmarks for health and movement? And the thing that we have focused on and our life’s work has been about, is about helping people move better and be able to do the things they want to do for as long as possible. So why aren’t there objective health metrics that people can keep an eye on so that when they turn 65 and want to sit on the floor and play with their grandchildren, that’s not an ability that they’ve lost because they haven’t kept an eye on it?

Kelly: Or let me just throw in that you love to ride your bike or go to Peloton or spin class and you wonder why your back hurts, but no one has ever showed you that you’re missing hip range of motion, and that makes you a less effective cyclist. But getting down up and down off the ground is an easy test that you can figure out whether you have just the language of movement to do these other things.

Juliet: And the important thing is that this test doesn’t require the most extreme range of motion. It’s really a midline range of motion that it requires to be able to do this test.

Kelly: It can be about strength because little kids do it, right?

Juliet: No. And little you can see little babies do it. The other thing we love about this test is that it’s fun to do. It’s fun to get your friends and family to do it. It is really easy to see your results. And also it’s also ultimately very improvable with some really simple things to do. And so we were huge fans, and that’s why we want to start the book. And I don’t want to go into sort of the things you can do to improve it unless you’re ready for that. But we thought it was the perfect objective measure to start this book and sort of get people to get a little eye on where their body is.

Kelly: And let me jump in and say that one of the things I want everyone to understand is that it’s a vital sign. If I said your blood pressure is 120 over 80, you’d be like, that’s fine. It’s not great blood pressure, but it’s also not like, I need to freak out blood pressure. It gives us a reference to say, hey, I’m doing okay, or I should pay attention to this. And by giving people permission to have a range, it’s not good or bad or elite. It’s, hey, this should maybe pop on your radar a little bit, and we’ll show you how you can integrate this in your life. Because we feel like there’s good science behind this and good rationale and logic behind this, that if we can get you to improve these things, you’ll see improvements in how your body functions and more importantly, how well it functions in the long haul. And so that’s what’s really nice about having this vital sign, is that we’re just saying, hey, if you struggle a little bit, let’s work on a little bit. And if it was easy, then something we don’t need to worry about. And that gives people now a reason and a rationale to think about why they’re doing something.

Katie: Yeah, I would love to delve a little deeper into those vital signs, maybe with just walk us through a few of them. I know there’s much more in the book than we can cover in a 1 hour podcast, but just maybe a few of them with examples, because I think you’re right, having this benchmark and something tangible makes the whole process more fun and your ability to make improvement in each of those areas much more tangible as well.

Juliet: Sure. I mean, I think we sort of categorize the vital signs in two buckets. The first is what we describe as like the movement buckets. Can your body move in the shapes that it should be able to move in order to be able to do the things you may want to do in life, whether that’s now or in the future?

Kelly: How do you maintain your movement options?

Juliet: Yea. And then number two is what we call more like lifestyle metrics. And those things include sleep, nutrition, movement, creating a movement rich environment, balance, breathing. So we’ve sort of combined these ten things. And what I will say is, as you know, Katie, we spent years working in high performance with high level athletes and consulting with teams all over the world. But one of the questions we would talk about at our dinner table is, like, how do we take the lessons we learned in those environments and apply them to everyone? And also, what simple things are working in those environments that we can spin down and apply to everybody? And the other thing about these ten vital signs we chose is that after years of being in this business and using ourselves as test dummies for everything and we have access, like you do, to all the bells and whistles that are out there in the health and fitness world. We really sat there and said, what are the levers that we’re pulling that we think have the biggest impact on our health?

And it turns out that those levers really are the basics. And I think a lot of us that are in this business have really realized that, yes, there’s a lot of optimizing we can do, but that the first level, is we all need to be working and focus on the basics and then we can spin up or spin down from there.

Katie: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought that up, because I’ve had a similar sort of evolution in my work as well, more in the nutrition and genetic side, realizing that while it can be really fun to get in the trends of all these biohacking devices or fancy supplements, that the 80% results come from those daily habits and foundational things that we do. And I think if you get those dialed in, any of the more fancy stuff you want to do becomes more effective. And if you don’t have those dialed in, you could spend a lot of money and time on things that are not going to work as well as they could.

And another important distinction I think you guys make that we touched on a little bit is the difference between the movements you guys are talking about and just exercise. Because I think people listening might be thinking, oh, I get mobility, I get movement through yoga, through Pilates, through a spin class, or whatever it may be. And I love how you guys really break down that these are different sort of categories. And while they are both great, just doing a yoga class may not be hitting all of the right benchmarks you’re trying to hit for longevity, for movement as you age. So can you kind of break down that difference of exercise versus what we’re talking about?

Kelly: One of the things that we I think is useful is we can say especially in the last ten years, but let’s just expand it to 1520 years. We suddenly have been running this annual trillion dollar experiment where fitness we sell things, we’ve commoditized it. You can go on Instagram and basically search physical therapy on TikTok. What we’ve seen is that people are very confused generally about what’s essential and how do I work that into my life. So if we had to ask ourselves when we’ve this trillion dollar experiment, how’s it going? What we see is that, boy, we really have left people behind. And that if we look at any metric that you care about ACL injury rates in teenagers, for example, is terrible right now, trending in the wrong direction, low back pain, surgeries, substance abuse, depression, isolation. You can almost choose some metric of human being and say, well, how’s our fitness experiment going? And so what we’ve tried to do here?

Juliet: Well, the answer is not well.

Kelly: And so I think one of the reasons that we’ve chosen these pieces is that it really ends up creating this one template that Juliet said has been the basis for elite performance in all the teams we work with. And the second piece is that I think what’s hidden from people is that how all of the body systems work together. So it’s not cardio, it’s not just separated or I went to my Pilates class and I checked the box twice a week. I think that’s an incomplete way of looking and understanding what’s going on. And so I think what ends up happening is that we’ve said to people exercise is important. I think we’ve heard that message and people have heard that and they are trying to exercise.

But what we’re seeing is that the rest of the behaviors that make us day to day human beings maybe aren’t sufficient to then have that 1 hour or 2 hours or 3 hours a week sort of meet all our vitamin needs. It’s like we’re going to a Pilates class and we’re saying, well, I took my Pilates vitamin and we’re fans of Pilates don’t get us wrong. But that doesn’t quite meet the needs of walking enough. And if we use that walking as an example, one of the reasons we see that walking is so important is that it helps us accumulate enough non exercise activity that we fall asleep. It helps us decongest our tissues and move the sewage through the Lymphatic system through. It allows us to get sunlight on our face and see our neighbors. It allows us it’s super accessible. It allows us to help manage chronic pain and persistent pain. It’s an easy way to sort of layer in all these other aspects.

Walking itself, though, as exercise. That’s almost the least of the reasons why we want you to do it. And what ends up happening, though, is if we just sell this 1 hour package class, we’re really missing the opportunities for understanding how a person can live their life in a reasonable way and where they can have agency and control. And what we find is especially the times of your life. Let’s say you have, I don’t know, two to six children, right? You’re on this call. There are going to be times in your life where you have zero time to exercise, your life gets away from you. So what we’ve told people is, well, you’re bad and you might as well give up because you couldn’t go to your 1 hour intense exercise class. So instead, now we’re saying, hey, being a human being and creating a physical practice actually starts in the morning and it ends in the evening when you go to bed and is part of your sleep as part of that. And if you covered those basics, you can then look at exercise as a nice to have Add on, but it doesn’t really talk about all the other pieces that are crucial to being a durable sort of human who feels good in her environment.

Juliet: And I would just add that we talked a lot about whether or not to include exercise as a vital sign. And as I’m sure you know, we love exercise, we’re fans. But what we realized is that of all the messages out there, people have gotten the message to exercise. They do largely seem to be able to block out an hour of their day to get some kind of exercise in. But what people aren’t doing is caring for the other 23 hours of the day and checking those boxes.

And one of the things that was really important to me in this book is that I am a really busy working mom raising two kids. And even though I’m in the health and fitness space, I spend the vast majority of my time at my computer and I don’t have a lot of time to fit in a lot of stuff. I’m sure you have felt this, Katie, but the thing that makes me tweak is when people are like, let me talk to you about my morning routine where I journal and do all these things. I’m like, no, if you have kids, you’re not journaling and saunaing and meditating for 3 hours like you’re making lunches and organizing kids and getting people dressed or in your case, starting school, whatever it is. My morning is not my own to do my own health care practices, largely.

And so one of the big focuses for us on this book and with all of these practices are what can people actually do? How do we shift the mentality that fitness has to happen in these 1 hour blocks? Like Kelly said, I think we’ve done a disservice to people. We’ve told people, well, if you do this 1 hour Pilates Yoga CrossFit Orange Theory class, you’ve checked the box, you’re healthy, like, you’ve done the things right. And then we’ve also told them, unless you can actually dedicate a whole hour to it, it doesn’t really matter. And what we’ve found is there are so many little things that you can do for three minutes, five minutes, ten minutes that you can sprinkle throughout your day that really move the needle a lot in terms of your especially when.

Kelly: We aggregate that over a week, a month, a year. It’s insane.

Juliet: Yeah. So Kelly used to have this workout when our kids were little, called the 1010 at ten.

Kelly: This is Elite Fitness.

Juliet: Elite Fitness. It was ten air squats, ten push ups. Ten what was it, like pull ups or something? Ten things. Ten of three different movements. Ten things. All like body weight movements for ten minutes at 10:00 p.m.. Because that’s where we were in our life, raising two little kids. We had just started two businesses, and that’s what we had to fit into our life. But it turned out that for that period, that was at least enough to kind of keep a base level of fitness in Kelly. And he had some other health practices that he sprinkled throughout his day.

Kelly: Like drinking lots of coffee.

Juliet: Yeah, like drinking lots of coffee. But I think what we really wanted to do with this book is say, hey, there are some simple things you can do to move the lever of your health to feel good now and to feel good in ten years and 25 years. That isn’t fitness to being a person. We didn’t want this book to go into the exercise category at the bookstore. We really wanted this to be like a holistic health book and give people some really simple benchmarks that they can come back to time and time again to ask themselves, how am I doing? Is my body moving the way it should move? Am I eating enough fruits and vegetables? Am I really maintaining my sleep? Am I moving enough throughout my day? Really basic stuff.

Katie: Yeah. What I love about this approach is it incorporates a couple of concepts that I think of in health and also in business and in other aspects of life. The ideas of compounding, which is, like you mentioned, things that build up over time. And I think that is valuable in, of course, finances. People have heard of compounding and finances, but this also applies in relationships and the time and attention you put to relationships. It applies to nutrition and it applies to overall health in so many ways. And I think it makes it more manageable rather than this big, huge thing we have to fit in and get perfect. This is small things that add up and improve even more over time with a compounding effect.

And also I really thought of the idea of habit stacking when I was reading the book, that these are things that can kind of bolt on to things we’re already doing to make them become habits more easily, which is a big hurdle for, I think, a lot of people. And I also thought about my kids a lot in reading it, and I would guess you guys thought about your kids and wrote it with that in mind as well. These are things that can be incorporated into a family culture because just like I want to stay healthy and fit as I age, I also now have kids who are competing at a pretty high level of athletics and injury proofing is something I think about often with them. And we’re very intentional about recovery and refeeding and sleep because of that. But I was taking so many notes reading this book for that reason as well. So I would love to maybe talk about like I know this isn’t a direct focus of the book, but how do we incorporate this into a family culture? And also, maybe as a side note, I don’t actually know the answer to this, but I know when I do consistently the things you guys talk about and the things I learned in Becoming a Supple Leopard, my HRV is consistently higher. So there’s something, nervous system and deeper happening within the body as well that I don’t even know what the reason is, but I see the profound effect of this in the metrics I’m tracking.

Kelly: And we shouldn’t know necessarily why some of your metrics of recovery, but what we can say is these are the principles that govern increased physiology, that allow you to have clear brain and work harder.

One of the things that we kind of kid around a lot is that people really feel like they’re maxed. They believe they’re maxed, and we’re like, actually, you’re just jet lagged on Monday because you stayed up late and you have not been eating well and you haven’t been walking or moving your body and you think you’re working as hard as you can and feel as good as you can, but you can actually work harder. And more importantly, you can actually feel better and you brought up something so important. I think when we give people objective measures, then we can start to make decisions about the things that are going to affect those objective measures.

And so you have this nice very technical thing, heart rate variability which allows us to say kind of peek under the hood and say, hey, how well am I recovering? Well, the thing is that that’s what we call a lagging indicator. It tells you about after the fact. And ideally when we have these objectives, then what we can start to say is hey, we know that this is what is required to be a rested human being. And one of the things that you bring up is if you are struggling with this book or these concepts in your own life because you’re harried and busy and no one’s ever shown you how you can integrate it into your life through sort of simple behavioral mindset shifts, apply the same rules to your kids. And a really good one, for example, is the sleep.

So we didn’t set out to become sleep experts. In fact, we had two little sleep terrorists in our house called children and they just highly disrupted our sleep for years and years and years. And so instead we started to kind of back into sleep because we realized from my physical therapy side self was that if I had people managing pain, it was a lot more difficult for me to help them manage their pain if they got less than 8 hours of sleep. If they were at 7 hours of sleep and less, we saw that that became another stressor to the body, a stressor to the brain. And what we saw was delayed healing times. And now the research is clear. You’re not going to be able to learn as quickly, grow as quickly, change your body composition as quickly, get out of pain as quickly. And so giving people those benchmarks means that suddenly what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. And we’re always looking at behaviors and things I can do in my life that sort of transition from I’m in pain, I need to heal to I want to win a world championship or I want my kid to peak on the SAT or some track meet what are the same behaviors?

And it turns out they’re the same things. Getting that 8 hours plus. Which means you may need in bed for 9 hours to get 8 hours of sleep. That’s one of those golden metrics. Now that you can start to decide. Well, hey, maybe I’m not going to binge this last episode of The Last of Us or the Rest of us, whatever it is, I’m going to instead make decisions about the drinking I’m going to do or when I have my caffeine, or when we’re eating. Because I need to protect this. Because these things are valuable to me.

Juliet: And I’ll just talk a little bit about the kids side because I know there was questions about kids in there. But first what I want to say is I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this compounding idea. Obviously, we cut our teeth in this business being like the movement and mobility experts. And I think at some point we should actually define what we think mobility is because I think it’s a very misunderstood term, but we can get to that later.

But what I want to move to is the kid thing. So we are huge fans of modeling in our own house. We care a lot about movement and we care a lot about sleep. We’ve really protected our kids sleep for most of their life. And so what we’ve done in our house and this isn’t just for our kids, which I think is important for anyone listening to this, is we’ve worked our hardest to create what we call a movement rich environment around our house, which it gives everybody in the house, including us, kids and adults alike, simple opportunities without having to rely on willpower or motivation to be able to make choices, to move a little bit more, to work on our mobility before we go to sleep, to hang on a pull up bar, practice our balance. We’ve worked really hard to set up our environment. So those things are easy. Those are easy choices for us to make, to do, not only for ourselves, but for our kids.

I think that’s what’s been so critical for us in terms of being able to keep a lot of these habits alive and keep doing them. Again, as busy working parents is we’ve set up the environment. Our kids see that our environment is set up this way. They see that we’ve prioritized movement in our lives in macro and micro ways. Again, we have like a pegboard in our garage. And I tell you, every kid, when the garage door opens, every kid who comes through our garage is drawn to the pegboard and wants to hang from it. And that’s just a little two or three minute exposure. They get to a little bit of movement because it’s there. They didn’t have we don’t have a…..

Kelly: Tree they can climb.

Juliet: Yeah, they don’t have to say, I’m going to go practice my pegboarding right now. They just do it naturally. So we’ve worked super hard for adults and kids alike to try to really get people to think about their environment and making sure they’re setting up their environment to encourage mobility, better sleep, better eating. Because again, we’ve all learned in this business we cannot expect people to rely on motivation and willpower. We can’t expect that.

Katie: I love the idea of movement rich environment so much and I think we’re so aligned in this. Actually, my kids have been my best teachers of this and realizing that if you put it in the way, they remind me to do it by doing it themselves. And so our house definitely does not look like a magazine, but it’s very movement rich in that there’s a climbing hangboard in the kitchen. There are rings in everybody’s gymnastics rings in everybody’s rooms. There’s a gymnastics stall wall in the guest room. There’s a gymnastics track down our hallway. Like, it’s not at all a house that you would take pictures of to look pretty. But there’s always movement happening.

We even on and off have a rebounder as a coffee table instead of a table. So if anybody’s even just watching sports, they’re bouncing the whole time. And because those things are there, we just are more likely to use them than if we had to go to the gym to find things to move on. And I think kids just naturally are inclined to that. So if you have kids around, they will be your best teachers. And that if you just put anything in their way. And so I love how you guys explain that concept as well. I do think it makes sense I should have done this at the beginning. But to define what you mean by mobility, because that’s a great point, and I think often people do confuse that with just an exercise class or Pilates or yoga or something that they think of in the broad context of mobility. But maybe define what you mean by mobility and also maybe introduce the concept of rewilding the body. Because you guys talk about this, and I love that concept.

Juliet: Sure, I’ll start a little bit, and then Kelly can add the technical flare to mobility. But to me, what mobility is, is the ability to move freely with little to no pain and be able to do the things you want to do with your body, whatever that means to you. So if you want to be 75 and riding your mountain bike, great. If you want to be 75 and just be able to walk around Disneyland with your kids, great. Whatever kind of movement you want to do to have mobility means you can do what you want to do freely with your body. And one point of fact, the mobilizations, and we do prescribe mobilizations in this book, that’s sort of a different concept. Mobilizations are tools that we develop to actually help people be able to restore their mobility so they can do the things they want to do.

Kelly: I think what we can say is your body has very specific things it’s supposed to do as a human being. And everyone agrees that you should be able to put your arms straight up over your head with your arms straight in, arms parallel, thumbs backwards. Like that’s what we’d call normative or normal range of motion. And everyone would agree that the problem with that is that no one really cares if they have normal range of motion. It’s like my blood pressure is a little bit wonky, but I still crushed you today in the workout and has a better pole vulture than you. It doesn’t matter my blood pressure, it’ll matter someday. And what we sometimes can’t see is how not having access to these positions causes us to be less effective and theoretically takes away our movement choice and potentially sets us up for painful situations where we’re working in less effective ways. So if you’re saying to me it doesn’t really matter, but I’m like, well, you want to swim one day, then you’re going to need to put your arms over your head. You want to do a handstand one day, those things are going to become hugely important. So what’s interesting is that when we look at like yoga or Pilates, Joseph and Joseph, Pilates, and the whole sort of movement of yoga, what they found was let’s create a movement practice that touches these core shapes and sort of native ranges of motion in your body.

So what those practices are, are ways of doing these sort of fundamentals around putting arms over your head or taking your hip into extension so your knee is behind your butt or getting into a squat. And what’s cool about that is, theoretically, if you’re doing those things, you’re at least touching that. You’re using those words, you’re touching that range of motion, you’re kind of keeping it in the brain.

But the problem for most of us is that we don’t have a very big movement language day to day. We kind of get up out of bed, we sit on the couch, we sit on the car, we sit at the table, and then we walk around a little bit. There’s no accident that if you go to a yoga class and you’re like, we do a lot of downward dog, why are we doing so much downward dog? Well, it turns out those people figured out a long time ago that being able to put your arms over your head was really important for the health of your neck, the health of your shoulders, to be able to take a big breath.

And again, there’s a compounding idea that, wow, it’s not just putting my arms over my head, but putting my arms over my head gives me access to a whole lot of other movement choices. And it helps me then to go out into the world and as Juliet says, do the things I want to do. So ultimately, we can kind of come up with a more technical definition of mobility, which is, can my body do what it was designed to do, what everyone agrees it should be able to do? And do I have control through those things? Ideally, what we’re seeing is if we can help people recover those native ranges and have access to what their body should be able to do, they tend to feel better with less pain and have more movement choice.

Katie: Yeah, that’s important context. And I know from trying some of these things firsthand, the beautiful thing is, even if you don’t have the best movement ability in some of these areas, the body adapts so quickly. I’m continuously amazed by just how fast and how well our body can adapt. And I think of it I had another podcast guest who spoke of this in relation to other aspects of health, but she just basically said, especially with autoimmunity and things, people tend to get this mindset of, like, my body is attacking itself. My body’s out to get me. And she’s like, no, if your body wanted to kill you, it could do it instantly. Your body is always your friend.

Your body is always on your team, and it wants to move toward the best health. It wants to move toward healing. And it very quickly if you just give it the basic foundational tools. And I feel like this is what you guys are giving people when it comes to movement.

And another thing I want to address, because we touched on it with those of us who have to sit and work in front of computers like we’re doing right now, is we do know that we sit more than we used to as humans right now. And we’ve probably all heard that sitting is the new smoking and that this is not ideal, but I know it also extends far beyond that from what you guys talk about in the book, and how it can limit range of motion over time and lead to injuries. You may not connect to sitting. And I also know from your work that there are also some easy things we can do that are not hour long fitness classes that can help repattern that and undo some of that damage. So can you talk about sitting and maybe the antidote to sitting?

One of the ways to think about it’s, not sitting is bad, and standing is good. If you’ve ever had to stand at work all day, you’re like, this sucks. I’d like to sit down. It’s really about moving versus not moving. And when we get into the sort of brass tax of that, Harvard defines a sedentary behavior as falling below a certain metabolic equivalent, which is, if you went on the Stairmasters in the 90s, you were like, what’s a met? And you’d push up the Mets. The met was a measurement of work, like an ERG or a watt. And what they’ve decided was that one and a half metabolic equivalent is where your body starts to do different things physiologically. You don’t burn fat as well, your circulation slows down, your brain starts to kind of get sleepy. And so what we can start to say is, okay, well, if that’s the cut off, well, what behaviors allow me to stay above that one and a half cut off so I can start to think about, well, hey, I probably should limit the total time I’m sedentary.

And if you’re a working, busy person on your feet all day. Sit down, it feels great. Take a rest. That’s totally what we’re saying. But simultaneously, what most of us are experiencing is that inadvertently, we’re doing a lot of not moving. We’re below that one and a half metabolic equivalence. And so, as Juliet said earlier, if I can start to think about shaping my life a little bit, I have, like, all our desks here at the office are standing desk. I’m sitting on a stool right now with my feet on the ground so that we’re at the same height, but Juliet’s standing. But what’s happening is, even with my perching against the stool, my feet on the ground, I’m above one and a half metabolic equivalents. Everyone has a movement choice instead of only being shuttled into a certain position, because that’s the only position I’ve set myself up for. So suddenly, now we can start to ask, well, is it really that bad? Well, we can say, well, what’s its impact on your ability to move? And I think we took this right out. Again, a page of high performance. It’s called session cost. So if you do a really hard training session, I can measure you the next day. And if you’re stiff or slow or sore.

Juliet: Or your heart rate variability is down.

Kelly: Or your heart rate resting, heart rate is up, all of those things are the cost of the work that you did the day before. So we can start to apply that thinking and that math to, well, everything we do sort of has a session cost. And one of the session costs of sitting a long time is that it potentially limits our access to full ranges of motion. So we can do this test.

Everyone who’s listening to this, just slouch. Let your back round, let your head go forward. It feels so good. You can open your mouth if you want, and then in that slouch position, go ahead and just look over your right shoulder as far as you can, and what you’ll see is you’re like, okay, now if I say, get into a position where you can take a bigger breath. So now everyone will sit up. I didn’t say sit up. But everyone intuitively knows they can take a better breath here. And I say, now turn and look over your shoulder. Everyone can turn their heads further. And that’s an indicator that if I do a lot of sitting and I get stiff in my upper back, it may limit my neck position. That’s the session cost.

And if I have limited range of my neck, makes driving a little trickier. It makes my shoulders function less. If we apply that downstream, suddenly we see that you can’t get into a lunge like shape, or some of the tissues make it difficult for you to squeeze your butt because your quads have adapted to this position. So again, what you’re seeing is we’re not saying sitting is bad. We’re saying, hey, you’re designed to be in motion all day long. That’s really important for me. It’s important because I can burn more calories to eat more ice cream. That’s the only reason I try to do it. But also we see that if this is the only way you move, it may implicate or cost on the other side of the things you want to do, like go hike or run.

Juliet: The other two quick stories. We used to have a physical therapy clinic in our gym, and we would often play this game with people who were waiting to see one of our Kelly or one of our physical therapists. They would be sitting in our waiting room and almost to a T, based on people’s sitting position and how they were holding and looking at their phone, we could say to each other, that person is 100% here for neck or shoulder pain. Like, we could just literally look at them in advance and be like, that person’s here for neck or shoulder pain. They’re practicing a position all day that’s not conscious. They’re not consciously practicing a position like you would practice a pole vault. But unconsciously they are practicing a position where their head is forward on their neck, their shoulders are forward. It would just be a position that we could see from a mile away and be like, oh, $100 is that person is here for neck pain.

Kelly: And it’s not because you’re on your phone rounded that’s causing you the pain that’s important. You may be stiff, but ultimately it’s limiting what you can do. And that’s fine when you’re 26. It becomes less fine when you’re trying to be durable and functional. We always have this idea that the person I’m going to be tomorrow is going to have more agency, more self discipline, more control. That is a farce. The time is now, and the way to do it is to not have to make a decision about it, to set up your environment, set up your house. And you said something really, I think, interesting that your house doesn’t look like it could be in a magazine, but it looks like a house that’s designed to raise children who move well because the rest of their environment often potentially doesn’t support that. Traditional schools don’t support it. Sometimes traditional sports don’t support it. So where are we going to get this learning, this message, these exposures, this stimulus? It has to be in the household. That’s why we’ve come to believe that the household is the functional unit of change.

Katie: 100% in alignment about that. I long ago reconciled that my house is just going to have footprints and hand prints all over the walls, and I’ll paint it when the kids are grown. And that’s awesome. But especially, and I know you guys can probably speak to this better than I can, but especially with this movement of kids getting into more specialized sports earlier and doing the same movements over and over. I realized early on I need to make sure they’re getting other movements in balance so that they’re not. We hear of the kids who get into baseball early and end up with elbow injuries at very young ages because they’re doing one movement over and over and over, and they’re not maybe necessarily adapting to those others. And so with my kids pole vaulting, I’m realizing they’re doing an awesome sprinting, physically demanding movement, which is great, but if they’re not getting other movement patterns, I would think that actually makes them more likely to get injured because they’re doing this one thing so much.

And so I feel like you guys talk about so beautifully, making the environment set up for that makes that process easier, rather than me trying to constantly remind them to do other forms of movement.

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And along that line, I know, Kelly, you talk a lot about hip extension and it having a huge impact for functioning of our whole entire body. And you can explain this better than I can, but I didn’t want to miss the chance to talk to you about that on this podcast. So can you explain a little more in depth about hip extension and mobility?

Kelly: So just to define that for everyone.

Juliet: Can I just say that my latest thing is I feel like if Kelly’s name had a subtitle, it would be “Kelly Starrett, hip Extension or Knees behind Butt”.

Kelly: Yes. So hip extension, I think, is confusing. There’s one thing is if you’re in a squat position and you’re standing up, that movement is called extension of the hip. But hip extension means actually getting to a position that looks like sprinting or lunging or Warrior One in yoga, right. Is that when you step out or stepping into Chaturanga, you’re in this big lunge position, but your knee really is behind your butt. Knee is behind your butt.

Juliet: A visual that’s hip extension.

Kelly: That’s right. And one of the things that we have noticed is that because we’re spending a lot more time in this flexed sitting position and we’re exercising in those positions where the knee doesn’t come behind the butt very much, that skill, as Juliet says, becomes sort of truncated. It decays a little bit, and then it becomes a little bit more tricky. Because one of the things we have observed for over a decade is that when people cannot get into good hip extension or their tissues don’t allow them to do that, their butts don’t work very well.

So you can do all the Glute activation exercises, but one of the reasons we’re saying your Glutes aren’t as effective as they are is because you don’t have access to this hip extension position. And the Glute’s primary job is to extend the hip.

Here’s a metaphor. We recently have created two sort of gym products. One of them is a split squat pad. So that allows you to do a lunge, an elevated rear foot. Lunge, which is a Bulgarian split squat. And we also created a pad that snaps onto a barbell that allows you to do hip thrust. Well, the hip thrust is easy to do, the split squat is hard to do, and no one likes it. Doing it’s like eating, like, kale juice. No one like, don’t give me the kale juice, give me the donuts.

And what we see is that those things really are an interesting metaphor for we’re really not competent at this hip extension. So suddenly people are like, well, I don’t know, I have back pain or why my knee hurts. And we’re like, well, we’re not sure either. But I also noticed that you can’t extend your hip and you can’t squeeze your butt when your hips and extension. So that’s something we can control. And I think that’s one of the things that we’re really hoping to help people understand here is that even if the processes are hidden from you, you can now have a benchmark or a vital sign that if your back hurts, you can say, well, I haven’t checked my hip extension. Oh my gosh. My hip extension is a little bit limited with this simple test we call the couch stretch.

And lo and behold, it also made my knee feel better and I was able to run faster and lunge. And again, it’s just about returning your body to the state in which it is. You should be able to do these things. So somehow, in the language of all the complexity of pain and performance, we’ve stripped out range of motion out of here. And so when we give people these vital signs, especially around this hip extension, lo and behold, it really does transform people’s lives. It’s easy to do.

Juliet: Importantly, if people come to see Kelly with low back pain, he prescribes two things at the beginning. The first is he teaches them how to breathe. And number two, he prescribes them to do more walking. And part of the reason for that is walking is hip extension.

And his hypotheses with almost every low back pain person he sees is that they are missing hip extension. And walking is a simple way to get more hip extension into your day. So people are spending tons of money on physical therapy and images and who knows what. And it oftentimes could be as simple as learning how to breathe and doing more walking and a little bit of couch stretching. And that might be the magic pill.

Katie: Yeah, I have a firsthand experience with this where I love things like doing split squats with a barbell, and I love doing hip thrusts. And I can now do like two X my body weight in split squats and three X my body weight in hip thrusts, and I love them. And so I want to just keep doing those.

And Bulgarian split squats were my nemesis for a long time, and I would try to just avoid them. But I realized what I needed to do was get better about that movement without weight at first and rehabilitate that movement pattern. And now I’m stronger in my lifts as a result of it. But I had to really put an emphasis on that for a little while because that was a deficit for me. And Juliet, you mentioned the breath work side, and I want to make sure we touch on this a little bit, too, because I think often people don’t necessarily think of that in relation to movement and mobility. And I love how you guys tie this in. So maybe just explain the breathwork component.

Juliet: Well, I’ll just start by saying it’s so critical to us that in every one of the movement assessments or benchmarks that we have, we aren’t just asking people to test whether or not they can get into the position, but we actually ask of them that they get into the position and then are able to breathe in the position. Because as Kelly always likes to say, if you can’t breathe in a position, you don’t own the position. So we really think it we actually have a whole chapter on breathing and CO2 tolerance, but we see this breathing piece as something that’s important in all of our movement assessments or benchmarks.

And one of the things we love about breathing or adding and breathing into our lives is, again, we don’t have time. Kelly and I, working parents, we do not have time to go to a 1 hour breathing class. We do not have time to wake up in the morning and spend an hour doing Wim HOF breathing like we’d love to, but we don’t have time right now in our busy lives. So what we’ve figured out how to do is realize that it’s a priority for us and figure out ways we can fit it into our lives that work. And so one of the things we do is we add in a breathing practice into our warm ups, and oftentimes that’s just some nose only breathing while we’re getting hot and sweaty, jump, Roping or riding the bike. And then we also have these breathing practices built into the mobility work we do, which oftentimes is ten minutes at night while we’re watching Netflix and we’re working on our soft tissue work and practicing some breathing as part of that.

Kelly: And one of the reasons we’re trying to do that is we’re trying to get the brain to appreciate that it’s safe to move in these positions. And one of the things that people don’t realize is that breathing through your mouth or breathing shallowly or holding your breath when you get into a vulnerable position is a good indicator of your brain that you don’t trust the shape and that you don’t have access or control in this shape.

So the next time you’re like, I do this all the time. I’m folding over, I do the laundry in the house, I’m folding over, doing the laundry, moving the laundry from our low machine to our high machine. And I’m like, why am I holding my breath? This shirt does not weigh 50lbs. I should be able to breathe as I’m hinging over. And so I just remind myself, hey, as I’m doing these shapes, let me just make sure that I can continue to breathe and tell my brain it’s okay to be here.

We also found that breathing was a really effective way to help people manage pain. And so when they had a painful situation, or of course, we understand with stress can be very useful to take long exhales. But one of the things box breathe. But one of the things we found out was really useful was that if we had someone get on their roller at night. So remember, one of the things we started with was saying, hey, you should be able to get up and off the ground. One of the easiest ways to work on that is to actually sit on the ground while you’re watching TV tonight, hanging out, just sit on the floor. If your coffee table is the height of a rebounder, then you’re going to sit on the floor. That low height to use that thing.

But you can put a roller right next to you or a ball, and then suddenly you’re like, oh, hey, look at that. So now I’m getting this little ten minutes of soft tissue work as I’m sitting on the ground. And I didn’t have to do something or schedule a massage or go into the gym. It’s just right there. And one of the things we found was that when people were rolling, they could start asking themselves, well, what’s tight or what feels sore? What feels like could use a massage from the day. So I’m like, wow, my feet are killing me. Great, let’s work on the feet for ten minutes. My quads or my knees were hurting. Great. Let’s go ahead and work above the knee or below the knee.

But when you found something you pushed on with a roller or a ball, and it’s uncomfortable to compression, you found the spot where you can improve the system. And it simply may be improving blood flow. It may be signaling to your brain that it’s okay to move here. It may be that you’re restoring range of motion, you’re restoring your slight. It could be working on all these levels. But if you take a four second inhale, contract your muscles over the roller of the ball for 4 seconds, that’s called an isometric. And then an eight second exhale as you relax. Juliet points out that’s a breathing practice that’s down regulation meditation. And we just address trigger points. And we got you to that knee or that quad or that hip to hurt less. And in ten minutes, times five to seven times a week, you can radically make yourself feel better. And as you pointed out early on, muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs. If we constantly signal them that movement and range is important, they will be there for us. Your range of motion is the one aspect of your body that doesn’t have to change as you get older. It is not written anywhere that your hips have to get stiff as you get older. You may need some more work than you did when you were a toddler. You may need to practice a little more, but there’s no reason why you should ever not be able to get up off the ground.

Katie: Yeah, and you mentioned toddlers. I’ve consistently seen with my kids that toddlers are the best movement teachers and they get all of these things you talk about perfectly, like they’re toddler joints.

Kelly: It’s my dream. Toddler joints.

Juliet: Yeah, that’s what we dream of as toddler joints.

Katie: I love that, and I wish we had all day to talk because I know there’s ten more direct sections at least we could go and get very nuanced on. But I would encourage people definitely to get the book because like I said, there’s so much more in there. I love how practical you guys make it, and I definitely took so many notes underlined so many things in the book, so that will be linked in the show notes. You guys, please check it out. But a couple last questions I love to ask toward the end of interviews. The first being if there’s a book or number of books that have profoundly impacted your life, and if so, what they are and why.

Juliet: I’ll just start by saying I actually read The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg years ago when it came out. And I know everybody’s all hot to trot about atomic habits, but I read The Power of Habit right around the time I was also doing a lot of nutrition education. And I think that apropos to Built To Move, that book had one of the biggest impacts on me because it was when I really started thinking about okay, this is all well and good to have these ideas that we can do for our health and fitness. But if we can’t actually do them, if we can’t figure out ways to fit into our lives, then it’s just show. And so I think that book really influenced my own thinking so deeply on how do we make these things that we are proposing and built to move, or generally speaking, in the health and fitness world, how do we make these things doable by people, given our time constraints and our busy lives and the fact that technology is not going away? So I would say that was a big influence for me book wise.

Kelly: Love it. I’m going to give two. One is a book I read in physio school called The Checklist Manifesto, which was a simple way of just making sure that you didn’t assume that the basics are being handled. And it really ends up seeing that we think suddenly, well, it doesn’t really matter. Cut the corners a little bit, but just doing the basics, make sure that the system works and you don’t have to think about it. So that was a really, I think, important way of kind of just checking the boxes of what’s essential and working there. And then of course, I would be remiss if I did not mention the book Dune. It is my favorite all time read.

Juliet: We have a Dune poster behind us right now.

Kelly: If you understood that it’s about the hero’s journey and then it’s about deep ecology, it’s about the dangers of charismatic leadership. And then recently I read it again and I’m like, oh, it’s about how we have to think about our institutions more critically and that we have a lot more power to make our communities better. That really kind of keeps coming back to me every time I read it again. It’s the book I’ve read the most and every single time I’m like, wow, how did I miss that the first time?

Katie: I love it. Those will all be linked in the show notes as well for you guys listening. And lastly, any parting advice for the listeners today that could be related to movement and everything we’ve talked about, or entirely unrelated life advice?

Juliet: I would just say I hope everyone listening to this remembers that health and fitness doesn’t need to be done in 1 hour blocks, that there are a thousand things you can do as part of a busy working parent life who feels time crunched. And that these little ten minute inputs going back to what we talked about with compounding walk after a meal, really add up in terms of how you feel now, how you are going to feel, how your body is going to work, how many movement options you’re going to have in your life. And so I challenge people to sort of ask themselves, like, how can I rethink my time and make sure that I’m using these little windows of time, I’m stacking habits and just fitting these little practices into my normal day without blowing up my life.

Kelly: And I think a nice piece of that is something we discovered. Owning a gym for a decade and a half was that consistency trumps heroism that we all want, the drastic I’m on a juice cleanse, the six week squat program. If you breathe hard, eat right, practice sleep, and are consistent for long periods of time, that always wins. It always wins. And in ten years when you’re at school, you’re going to look around, you’ll be like, wow, you guys did not practice your sleep regularly. You’re going to look around and realize that a lot of you’re going on vacations and doing things and trusting your body in a way that other people don’t feel like they can and you didn’t do anything heroic you just were consistent.

Katie: I love it. And on that note, I am going to get to finish up podcast today and go do Mondays are My Sprint Day. So I’m excited and I’ll yes, but I love so much the work that you guys are doing and cannot recommend the book highly enough. I loved getting to read an advanced copy of it. I’ve followed your work for a long time and I’m so grateful to you for spending the time today and educating us. So thank you for being here.

Juliet: Thank you so much for having us.

Kelly: Thank you so much.

Katie: And thanks, as always, to all of you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy and your attention with us today. We’re so grateful that you did and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama Podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.