Written by Christopher Kelly
Dec. 18, 2014
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Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly and today I'm joined by Dr. Kelly Starrett. Now, for most people I don't think Kelly's going to need much of an introduction, but just in case I'll tell you about Kelly. He's a coach. He's a physical therapist. He's an author, speaker, creator of the blog MobilityWOD.com. He's a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Becoming a Supple Leopard. He started his own physical therapy practice at San Francisco CrossFit, one of the first 50 CrossFit affiliates.
And now, together with TJ Murphy he's the author of the new book Ready to Run. Hi, Kelly. Thanks for coming on.
Kelly: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you.
Christopher: So tell me, what led to you wanting to write the book in the first place? What was the problem that you saw?
Kelly: Are you talking about Ready to Run?
Christopher: I'm talking about Ready to Run. Sorry. Yeah, I should make that clear.
Kelly: Well, the short story is as we have evolved as a community of sort of people who are interested in sort of thriving -- I mean everyone who is listening is clearly part of this sort of epoch in which we find ourselves. It's sort of a revolution. And I think internet, better media resources, just the way we're connecting, I think we have been able to, if we're looking out from space, I think what was happening in the strength conditioning, nutrition and lifestyle sphere looks a lot like an emergent phenomenon. It looks like ants working independently towards the same goal of building sort of the ant superstructure.
That superstructure is really sort of better human health, better self-actualization through our work and how we feel and eradicating pain and so many of the preventable diseases that sort of plague us. And really those preventable diseases if there's not a significant genetic component or congenital problem then a lot of them are just errors in our lifestyle, in our nutrition, in our sleep, how we're moving.
And so as we organize around that one of the things that we can start to do is say, "Okay, we sort of hacked these principles." And hack is not the right word. We discovered the principles and reframe them and cast them into modern language with sort of modern sensibilities and solutions, right, because people have been working on the problems of the human condition for as long as there have been people. I mean the Ayurvedic tradition, that wasn't a bunch of kids messing around wasting your time. That was people thinking very critically about problems that they were seeing around physiology at the time expressed in the language at the time.
And we could say the same thing about yoga or Pilates or any modern strength conditioning that we come seen. As a physio I own a gym called San Francisco CrossFit and we've been around for -- we're in our tenth year. We've done well over we estimate 120,000 athlete hours at our gym which is a freakish amount of [0:02:50] [Indiscernible].
That's so much. One of the things that we start to see if my skillset, my best kind of superpower, is I'm really good at spotting patterns and it helps when I have -- Brian McKenzie is a good friend of mine of CrossFit Endurance, Nicolas Romanov the kind of the originator of the Pose Method and thinking one of the -- sort of most sophisticated exercise science about running is a dear friend and mentor.
And so I have these guys in my periphery, right, but also I am an athlete and I'm interested in the saying what are the baselines of human function? Like what does it mean? What should I be able to do? And one of those like core concepts besides, hey, I should know how to eat and I should know how to sleep and things that we sort of take granted. I mean who taught you to sleep? Well, hopefully someone taught you good sleep hygiene, but most of us have discovered that, wow, we have terrible sleep hygiene.
We had televisions in our rooms and we brought our iPhone, and we don't go to sleep at the same time and had coffee and alcohol at night. And it's too hot and my sleep quality is poor and so okay, we've gotten better over that. The nutrition aspect obviously has been a disaster until really recently and what's happened then is we start to kind of bear down on what are the things that we should be able to do and those core concepts.
One of those at the heart of it is running and running is the skill honestly that makes us human. It is the thing that we evolve to do and that was to hunt and run and move and locomote and that's why we have these upright torsos and why we have these amazing heel cords and if you look at sort of the science and literature around this right now -- great book called -- it's called the Story of the Human Body by Lieberman fantastic sort of paleologic, anthropologic sort of treatment of understanding how we evolve to look the way we do. It's a great story.
And then you read The Sports Gene by David Epstein and you really are sort of --and then you reborn to run and you really are kind of left with this well, we're designed to be able to do this. In fact, we're the only animal that's really, really designed to run long distances, really long distances. And then you start, okay, if that's a core value, and by the way, running, if you don't even think of yourself as a runner, but you go play Frisbee, you're a runner.
[0:05:17]
If you play soccer or football you're a runner. If you play a little pickup basketball you're a runner. If your kids sprint to the playground they're runners. So what's interesting is that we don't sort of see running as sort of the skill that ties so many of our sports together. Even, hey, I'm a swimmer, but I run for swimming, right, to condition. Well, then you're a runner.
And one of those things is I'm like who taught you to run? And so let's -- this is for you. Who taught you to run?
Christopher: I think it was a duck actually.
Kelly: So what's amazing is that this is the typical answer is that people have been a little bit shocked to realized, well, no one taught how to run. We teach how to pick things up and we teach people how to do pull ups and all the skills that we mean how long did you work on your handwriting, but here's this one skill that is so robust in the design of humans that we sort of take it for granted and thank goodness our bodies are so robust because imagine if you had such a sensitive little ankle or knee and it couldn't handle the literally thousands and millions and tens of millions of oscillations, duty cycles.
We would see really insignificant problems in our ability to reproduce in terms of moving around. I mean the system is bad ass. And so when you sort of -- we haven't sort of given running the credit or the skill or we haven't nurtured it environmentally that allows it to sort of thrive. And what I'm saying is that every kindergartener, right, every preschool age kid runs immaculately.
They run like you say boat, they fall, their spines are neutral. They pull really hard. They land on the correct part of their foot and they do that effortlessly. And whether they have shoes on or whether they're barefoot the running technique remains stable and static. And what ends up happening I've noticed just from observation data is that about in the first grade and I have a couple of daughters and about the first grade half the cohort, about halfway through the years start to heel strike.
And what we notice is that heel strike and we know is a disaster and it's an actual complete and artifact of the fact that we have some environmental load that we introduced ourselves and that our estimation it's sitting in sort of lack of physical development. We're not sleeping on the ground anymore. We're not toileting on the ground anymore. We're not hiking. We're not hiking. We're not squatting. We always sit in these chairs or some in the loo.
And so we've lost a lot of some of the innate mechanics that really kind of nurtured this. All of a sudden, we look at running and people sort of fall into two cohorts. One is they stop running because they find it to be not enjoyable at all, which is really amazing.
Christopher: That's me, yeah.
Kelly: Well, because you're like, "Ah, this doesn't feel good or I just suffer. Body hurts afterwards." And what point does a child because you remember you hated running. Do you remember that?
Christopher: No. I don't actually. I think I got into cycling a very young age for this it's that reason. I just never went back.
Kelly: Yeah. Well, it turns out that you've self-selected because something happened in your technique, on your capacity and running didn't feel good and intrinsically you knew that. And so you start to self-select out, but all children they book and they look. They spring everywhere. I have one daughter only runs places. I mean she is literally and she made me like she is the best running mechanics I've ever seen. I just hope we don't mess it up.
But to get sort of further on is that we either have a cohort where half of us stop running because it doesn't feel good and I started to developing the first time I developed knee pain I was I think as a sophomore in high school. And so second year of high school and my knee blew up playing football and it was very strange and of course my father was a physician and I saw the other physicians and I had some plaque in my knee that was a problem and something and then it went away and I played football and was fine and then when I would jog I would have this whole knee pain.
So from 18 on when I jogged you ran for fitness I had knee pain. When I sprinted I didn't have knee pain which is -- which we'll get to in a second. And one of the things that we see is in that cohort that continues to run we -- those people who run beautifully are fast, are efficient. They tend to be in the front of the five K packs. They run beautifully and they've discovered this innate human correct mechanic which there's no debate about which is the best technique. There's only one place to strike and that is simply just as a diversion if the people listening want to know how to run correctly just take your shoes off, be barefoot, go jog or run slow or fast. It doesn't matter.
[0:10:09]
The technique is stable, independent of speed. Just jog a little bit on some concrete. I'm not saying run a five K. Just jog 100 meters and then walk back and then jog another. And you'll see a couple of things. One is that your stride will shorten immensely. You will spend a lot less time on the ground. Two is that your stride frequency will increase because you'll start landing and tapping into the normal elastic mechanics of your body.
So you end up realizing that your heel cord does store about 70% of that elastic energy. And so you'll start to shorten your stride. Your stride rate will go up. You'll stop striking the ground so hard. You land very, very sort because otherwise you'll be crushing your feet and so you get immediate feedback about each step that you feed forward into your next step. You'll realize that you cannot heel strike, you cannot over stride. You can't run terribly. You can't walk like a duck and run like a duck.
You can't run slow and it's really remarkable how sensitive the system is at immediate feedback. So as an aside, that's the correct running. But what we see is that those of us who do learn to run and run in spite of that heel striking or with less technique or in spite of our sort of mechanical problems that we start to aggregate because we're not moving correctly, that there are these environmental loads imposed upon us. And what we start to see is that in a lifetime of running and then America if we classify runners as people who run casually three times a week 80% of those people are injured in a year, 80%.
And that is such a high injury rate that you have to really make a compelling reason that this is a safe sport. This is ridiculous. So what's happened, I think, is that when we ask people even today and you're probably guilty of this as I am is that when people do a race we ask them, "Oh, you run a half marathon? That's fantastic." Do we ask them how did you run? How was your technique?
No, we don't ask them that. What we ask them is how far did you race and how fast did you run? And so what we've removed is a complete sort of respect for the qualitative aspect of the running, the skill. And the problem is that human beings are so resilient and were so over engineered. What do I mean? Well, if you're a busy person you'll take easily take 10,000 steps a day, 10,000 steps that's 70,000 steps a week. In a month that's quarter million steps. Do the math here and in four months you are at a million steps. That's four million steps a year, just four million loads a year on your lower legs.
And you can see that is like that's the clicker of the duty cycles. And if you go run 400 meters has about 420 to 440 steps every 400 meters at two or three times body weight. That's 400 meters and you've just loaded your right ankle on a crappy position 200 plus times at two times body weight. Oh, my gosh, can you see how that's a recipe for disaster?
So what we thought was, "Well, hey, there are some really excellent books around running technique out there. Let's go ahead and make, create a ready state for people where we can get back to the joy of running and really respect people's time given that we're modern humans." Right now I'm doing this podcast and I'm sitting on the floor and I'm sitting cross-legged and then I'll squat a little bit, but I'm not in a chair. I'm using this time so sort of open up my hips and be ready for the rest of the day.
But as a modern human sometimes I'm stuck. I'm going to be flying to phoenix on an airplane and in a car on Thursday and it's going to trash me. So we have to be realist about it's really weird to eat on the ground at restaurants. It's hard to stand in the airplane all the time. I'm going to be a realist. So how do we one recognize that we're in a compromised positions all the time, recognize that we don't have full capacity and recognize that we're making errors around the actual skill like warm up and cool down and how we down regulate and how we drink to prepare our tissues.
And so what we did was we really tried to create a simple blueprint based on the techniques and theory of Supple Leopard, but just applicable to the runner. So you don't need to know how -- what the technology is in the iPhone. You need to know how to turn the iPhone on and off. You need to know how to charge it and make sure that you can operate the software.
Well, that's what we try to do this by giving people really simple templates just 12 standards and it's yes or no. I mean there are full range of motion or I'm not. I'm a normal human with normal capacities or I'm not. And here's an example for people who are listening. If you just put your feet together and squat down on the ground you should be able to squat all the way down like you're taking a poo in the woods or having dinner in Thailand. And you should be able to do that with your heels on the ground.
[0:15:02]
And if you can't do that you're missing full range of motion in your ankles and full range of motion in your hips and what are we even talking about. That's like, well, my car only turns halfway to the left so every once in a while I get into an accident. Of course you get an accident. You need your steel wheel to work in all directions.
And when we start taking those problems off the table then we create a ready state where people can then go learn the techniques of running. They can start to experiment with making this a skilled activity not just how much can I suffer. And if you just want to suffer go to your local spin class, takes no technique. You can be like -- you're like a piece of meat hanging on a bike. And you're like it's not like mountain biking or road bike. It was nothing.
You would just be on a spin bike and then pedal until you throw up. Like you can do that and have a cardiorespiratory metabolic wallop, but it's not skilled. The problem is running is a skilled activity and if you can see what I see when I see people run it's like watching people drive drunk with a blindfold on. That's how that is. So that's what we try do.
Christopher: That's cool. Yeah. So I bought the original book. It appealed to me greatly. I knew that I was kind of in trouble with some sort of my niggling pains I had just from walking around when I wasn't on the bike and I bought Becoming a Supple Leopard and to be honest I was slightly overwhelmed by it. I'm sure you've heard this from other people. It's a comprehensive manual to say the least and I think the reason I became I overwhelmed was because I didn't really have any feedback.
So I tried doing some of the exercises in there, some of the routines and some of the mobilization stuff and I wasn't really sure if was doing it right. It was this kind of -- so without that feedback part I was slightly overwhelmed, but I didn't get that feeling at all with Ready to Run. It's like you say it's more like a user manual for an iPhone. It's almost much more manageable I would say.
Kelly: Yeah. I needed to put out the manifesto and the theory so you understand how your body is supposed to function theoretically and then how that expresses in these very formal movements like classical ballet. We've just given you the very formal movements of expression of how your body is supposed to work. So you do not talk about doing a push up because you don't pushups, but being able to keep your spine straight and your head in line and have your hands you know it looks like the bottom of Chaturanga in yoga.
You have to get off the ground with your forearms vertical. Like do that in a position in a way that doesn't hurt your shoulders. Getting up off the ground is not an exercise. That's getting up off the ground. But the formal expression of getting up off the ground is a pushup. Does that make sense?
Christopher: It does, yeah.
Kelly: And you can change that into the downward dog and you can do Chaturanga and do all these other things, but it's crucial to understand that we have to make the formal standards so that people can see yes or no I can do that. I can't do that. And it's crucial because we have not really nudged the needle on any of the sports injuries. In fact, there are more people exercising today than there ever have been, right, because we're realizing we're not as physical as we used to be.
We're not engaged in [0:18:11] [Indiscernible] all day long. We need to do this as sort of an antidote to being human, but the problem is we are smoking our shoulders. Hey, I go and swim because it's easy on my back and now I've impinged my shoulder and well I have no idea why and now let me just go down this rabbit hole of seeing physicians and chiros and physios and the thing we want people to do is to be able to take a crack at it and if you have never want to ball or try to open up your hip or understand how stiff thoracic spine affects your behavior or posture or overhead position or your breathing mechanics then shame on you because the problem is we have not been given this as sort of an embodiment of this is the baseline of what it means to be human and to be able to do basic maintenance on myself.
Christopher: This is a really important point. So I found this with other areas too that there's no one that cares more about this than you do; and although you can get help with it for sure, you can't outsource it completely, like basically it's your responsibility.
Kelly: Well, you're really hitting on something. One of my coaches was just down in New Zealand teaching, and some physio sort of freaked out down there on him. They're like, "You're teaching physio. And we're like not really. We're teaching the things that every human should be able to do." And he's like so if you have knee pain after a run or you've just sat on a long airplane and you're in Chicago and you need to go for a jog without knee pain, well this physio was basically saying that you should go see a physio.
And I'm like, "Well, let's just examine that model for a second." So I have to get a referral from my physician and then I have to -- which is a day off from work and then I have to go see a physio and currently right now in the United States in San Francisco in order to see a physio at Kaiser which is a big HMO I have to wait five weeks for an evaluation, five weeks.
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For some of the bigger hospitals around here it's ten weeks. I know because I know all the physios there. So I'm either waiting five weeks for my knee pain or ten weeks for my knee pain. And if you take a day off from work, go see a physio and that physio tells you that your quads are stiff and that they show you something that you could have done day one to ameliorate and attenuate all of this pain and dysfunction then that is the worst, worst use of health care dollars, of your time and your physio's time and your physician's time. They have real problems to solve and shame on us for not having a basic cookbook like Betty Crocker to be able to do, oh, knee pain.
I'm going to do these three things. And that's a good starting point. We should be able to have a discussion and a language about that and we select things that are very safe. Why? Well, let me tell you. We have seen 120,000 athlete hours at our gym. On our website MobilityWOD, remember we've been teaching this course for half decade and on our course our MobilityWOD we've put up maybe 1,200 videos so far. YouTube alone has some like 30 million views of episodes and the feedback is that when you try to fix these things your face doesn't explode.
What happens is we start to re-empower people. In the military it's even worse. There are typically one physical therapist for 5,000 soldiers. Now, think about that. One physio: 5,000 soldiers. That's how it is in Afghanistan and that's how it is on the East Coast that's one of the biggest military bases. There are literally five physical therapists for 26,000 soldiers. In the Army, there are a million non-combat related orthopedic injuries every year, non-combat related. That's knee pain, plantar fasciitis, herniated disk, back pain, neck pain, the results of 55 million [0:21:52] [Indiscernible].
When we go down the line of the intro statistics, women are tearing their ACLs five times the rate of men. How are we doing as a physio community? I'll tell you how we're doing. We should be fired because we have not empowered people to understand how to move and then to perform the basic maintenance. And then when you are over your head or you need real help or a really difficult problem come see a professional person.
We believe that people are sophisticated enough that they can take a little piece of floss and jam it into your gums and floss. That's you bleed sometimes when you do that. Oh, god, I'm bleeding from the mouth. You don't see your dentist every time you need to floss. So we want to develop a sort of a core physical literacy about how do I sit, how do I stand, how do I know when I'm stiff, what's normal and not normal. And then when we do that so even if you just have the experience of noodling around a little bit then you -- it begins an exploration. It begins a conversation and there's some very, very low level things.
And when we find is imagine this, we program on our website MobilityWOD.com we do a daily RX. It's a ten or 15 minute intervention every day. I'm programming it for you where I take you on an adventure on your body and here's the problem is that people are busy. And but I know you have ten or 15 minutes a day and if I -- you have to watch a two or three minute video and then do ten minutes of work a day.
If it's snowing out and it's going to snow for an inch an hour, I can go out with a broom every hour and sweep off the snow. No problem. I don't even need a shovel. But if I wait until 24 hours I'm going to have two feet of wet snow on my porch and I guarantee you I'm not going to be able to move that with a brush and that's the current problem is that we're waiting for our engines to breakdown. We're waiting until we literally wear a hole in the bone. We're waiting until something catastrophically fails before we go in and get help and that's way, way too late because we cannot use pain as the only indicator of wellness and position.
And unfortunately, your health care is only dictated by function, i.e. can you function in your normal life, not functional optimally. Remember, when someone says functional as a physical therapist I mean you can get off the loo, right, and you can do your bra and you could feed yourself. You are functional. Good job, kid, right and it doesn't hurt, perfect. Well, I can guarantee you that no pain and functional does not get me to the Olympics.
It does not get me to be able to swim or function or teach me how to lift my kids or and we go down this rabbit hole of saying, "Well, if it doesn't hurt it must be okay and that's ridiculous." That's saying, "Well, I drive drunk and I haven't killed anyone yet. So it must be okay. And that's what we're doing with our bodies.
Christopher: Yeah, absolutely. I'm totally sold on it and I realize as well that this was in the book Ready to Run. I don't consider myself to be a runner even though I do cycle cross which has some running in it.
Kelly: Oh, you're runner. What are you talking about?
Christopher: Yes.
Kelly: No, you run. You're able to bike on your shoulder --
Christopher: Yeah. So I've definitely had some problems in the 15 or 16 steps per lap that I have to get off the bike, but I identify straight away that you are picking up on some things here that apply to all people, whether they consider themselves a runner or not. And you identified these 12 standards which I thought were really interesting and I'm not sure we'll have time to get to them all, but let's try to start with the neutral feet. What does it mean to have neutral feet?
[0:25:30]
Kelly: Well, imagine -- let's keep with the car analogy. And one of the things that I want people to understand is that we have sort of some idea that I have to create like an hour a day of like perfect movement practice. Like there's I do exercise and then I have this Pilates like experience. And that's really far from the truth. What we need -- we understand that you're going to have this if you're lucky you can carve out a golden hour of training three to five times a week. That's amazing.
But a lot of the things that we're doing or a lot of the problems that we see show up are function of sort of the environmental low. So if I'm always wearing a high heel shoe that means a shoe with any differential. That means from the heel is higher than the toe and most people are cruising regularly with differential of over a centimeter which is a lot. That's a lot of differential. That means I'm shorten my heel cords and I've tipped my center of mass forward over my six foot one frame over a centimeter which means as I tip the whole stick forward a centimeter at the heel I actually translate my whole head forward by about two or three centimeters and then I'm going to have to compensate in my low back, et cetera, et cetera.
So one of the things that we can say is let's create a ready state and one of the best things you can do is practice by walking with your feet straight and here's why that's important. The way my body is designed is that and the way that the movements reflect that is that good movement integrates all of the body's systems, the stability of the joint, the function of the musculature, the function of the fascia and connective tissue.
The way I'm designed optimally to move and when I stay with my feet straight one of the things that automatically happens is that my -- I start to create a passive torsion or a torque from the hip all the way to the foot and what do I mean? Well, if you lay on the ground, right, like you're at the pool where do your feet go when you lay down?
Christopher: I'm not sure what you mean.
Kelly: So if you laid down on the bed, right, and you put your feet out what happens to your legs and your feet when you relax? They turn out, right?
Christopher: Oh, of course. Yeah, so the kind of accidental rotation.
Kelly: Yeah, yeah. And what do you? It's really a pain in the butt when you try to get a sun tan isn't it because you're always burning and you're always wishing and I've had more physical therapy patient ask me if I could fix that. Well, the reason your legs do that is they're unwinding because your foot is not connected to the ground and that unwinding of the leg is the same mechanical tension that if your feet are straight you're automatically winding up and that winding create stability in your ankle, your foot, your knee, your hip, your back because the way the system is designed is that when the foot is straight it automatically start to tap into this passive structures that support me and give me mechanical grounding. Does that make sense?
Christopher: It does, yeah.
Kelly: And in yoga they call that tadasana. That's what it's called and so like there's a fancy name for standing like a human being. Well, one of the important piece is that as soon as you take a step and remember whether I'm a runner or not I'm walking around all the time and as soon as I take a step if my foot is straight then the plantar mechanism, the plantar fascia works, my big toe works, my ankle works correctly. My knee is hinging correctly, right, and the hip becomes stable at the end of the stride.
So as my foot is coming behind me, right, the hip is stable. If I turn my feet out I certainly like that like a ballet dancer and not collapse my arches and I can be in a good position and I can work really hard because there's an aesthetic to that in dance not in normal function. But the second I take a step I have created a problem like a bunion. That's the mechanism for bunions on people's toes because I'm walking through the joint around the joint basically and not using the big toe correctly.
My plantar fascia is twisted. My heel cord doesn't work correctly. I've collapsed my ankle. My knee is now not stable. It's what we can an open position which is the same position people turn the meniscus in and their ACL and the hip is non-stable. And because I've made the hip unstable I've also made it more difficult for me to stabilize my back. And so now I've reinforced that pattern how many tens of millions of times.
And so one of the things that can happen especially if I'm running and if we exacerbate that, right, I can walk however I want pretty much for life and sometimes I get plantar fasciitis and sometimes my heel core ruptures and sometimes I get big toe pain.
[0:30:05]
But sometimes not, but as soon as I accelerate speed onto that it's like having my wheels of my car pointed in different directions and can you imagine I can drive a little bit slow like that, but at high speed that becomes catastrophic. And you're -- what I'm asking you to do is have the car tires -- your feet pointed straight forward when you're driving and that's very easy to do. But what you're going to find is that you practice these other positions and your tissues reflect these other positions.
So it can get you straight all the time then your body is going to start to remap and remold that. And of course there are some very, very rare situations when someone has chronic dysplasia of the hip. Their hip acetabulum didn't from and they externally rotate, but we still are trying to get them as straight as possible while we're maintaining as much stability as possible. So if you're that one percent of the one percent with chronic hip dysplasia you're not normal to begin with. Normal function is your feet should be straight.
Christopher: Okay. So that's the first takeaway is my feet should be straight like the alignment of the car. That's something you can check --
Kelly: And you could just do that. That's not even exercising. That's practicing -- that's just like being an organized human being. And it matters because if I'm asked to jump or cut because remember a lot of the training that we're doing is training for something else. So if I need to change directions in a sport, but I practice running like a duck well that becomes my normal default pattern. That's the learned motor prep so that when I default when I'm tired or stressed my feet are going to turn out.
And so what ends up happening is that sets me up for all kinds of cutting, planting injuries, jumping, landing injuries. Your feet have to be straight.
Christopher: Got it. Okay. So what does it mean to have a supple thoracic spine?
Kelly: Well, what we're seeing is that most of us and this is the research. This is my research are spending two and a half hours on our smart phones and we're pretty much attached to the computer plus we do a lot of sitting, et cetera, et cetera. And what ends up happening is the thoracic spine, the area of your ribs becomes sort of flexed a little bit, stuck forward and then stiff.
And what we're seeing is that when you're stiff there you're going to have to make a compensation somewhere else while you run, but also that negates the breathing efficiency and capacity of your diaphragm because your rib cage, at the bottom of that rib cage is your diaphragm and if it's stuck flexed the diaphragm doesn't work very well. In fact its attachments don't work very well.
It's difficult for you to stabilize your spine because the trunk musculature is compromised because you have forward head on neck because if you round your upper back where does your head go? It goes forward and so now I've introduced a gigantic load on my cervical spine. I can't even balance that. I'm stuck out forward. My shoulders then don't work because your shoulders are like big engines hanging on a frame of a car and as soon as that you're stuck bent it's toast.
So making sure that I have breathing mechanics and I can get into proper spinal alignment and easy thoracic walling, you roll on wine bottle. You can roll on a foam roller. You can roll on anything even a ball or cricket ball, lacrosse ball mobilizing this thoracic joints really help us to improve that global position and universally nearly everyone I meet is stiff in the thoracic spine.
Christopher: Oh, wow. Okay. It makes sense though because everybody is doing the same things. Everybody's got a phone. Everybody's, yeah, exactly the same.
Kelly: Well, so let's say you're a swimmer. If you're stuck try putting your arms over your head. You can't. And so catch every time you glide your shoulder is in a bad position. You're basically then having to break at the low back and now we're basically dragging our feet at the bottom of the pool.
Christopher: Okay. So what about efficient squatting technique? What is an efficient squatting technique and how do I know if I have one?
Kelly: Well, squatting, well, people are like, "I don't squat." Well, you squat the loo. We probably if we looked at the amount of squatting you did in a day it's probably on the order of magnitude of 50 to 100 squats a day. From the edge of the bed for the morning that's one squat. Your morning tinkle that's two squats, sit down and have a coffee that's three squats, get up and sit back down that's four squats, get in the car five squats. You see where I'm going? That's a lot of squatting.
And so squatting this isn't my language, but it's the way that we lower our center of gravity and get to the ground. We squat. That's how we do it. It's as normal a function as the thing that we're designed to do. That's one of the reasons we have a big strong butt. So but once again who taught you to squat? No one and when you have knee pain one of the culprits of that knee pain is that you don't know how to squat and you're squatting all the time.
[0:35:05]
So what we try to teach people is one of the things that we're doing with squatting is basically we're taking that hip into flexion. So imagine if you're running there's a component where that leg is basically driving up, right, into that pulling position and you're landing in a mini squat. It's just a high squat. That's what the bottom or the top portion of that loading sequences of the run. If you jump down and it was really high you're just landing a deeper version of that squat.
So teaching a formal version of that is crucial because it reinforces my hip stability through a range of motion. It teaches the motor control around creating a stable hip and it also develops capacities around glutes and hamstrings and quads. Remember, your body isn't wired for musculature. It's wired for movement and this crucial movement what we see is it reinforces full ankle range of motion. It reinforces full hip range of motion. It makes sure that I can do the things that I can do while I'm training.
So it's vital and what we find is that people who cannot squat or do not have a full range of motion squat also the people that are injured and is one of the first things we have to reestablish as we get them out of that hole. And cyclist are the worst.
Christopher: Oh, really? Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. So I want to -- that's kind of one of my goals right now is to get into some strengths training now I'm not racing anymore and squats are obviously one of the main things I should probably be doing, but I'm terrified that my technique is terrible.
Kelly: Well, how many people injure themselves air squatting? No one. It doesn't happen because it's your body weight and that's a great place to start and that's what we teach everyone with that basic body weight squat. You can make some errors as you improve. The first thing we all want to do because we have egos is put a bunch of load on it. But we don't need to do that.
What we need to do is teach ourselves the air squat first definitely to our children. The squatting program on there just as baseline is we do a Tabata squat and everyone who know the Tabata Interval by Izumi Tabata it's 20 seconds of work, ten seconds of rest and then you do that eight interval. It's like eight to ten times. So it takes about four minutes. Well, what I suggest is that you should be able to get your hip creased below your knee without reversing your back, without your knees wobbling back and forth, right, with your ankles collapsing and should be able to perform about ten of those squats in 20 seconds.
And you should be able to do that for eight rounds. And that seems like a lot, but I'm telling you that's the rehab protocol I have for people who've torn their ACL that that's the baseline function for someone who has a brand new like knee surgery on their knee. So it's very, very low, low level. And remember these baselines are kind of guide post that if you don't have a squat you should be developing your squatting and you really do also bring up an interesting question, how strong do I need to be in a run?
Well, I'll tell you. My six year old is not very strong, but she can blaze some 400 meters pretty well. So you don't have to be that strong to run. You need to be strong enough to be able to maintain your position and that depends on your speed and your capacity to develop speed, right, and also depends on how long you're running. What we've seen is that people are trying to run faster, but don't have the sort of indigenous mechanics to be able to explode. It's not an accident that sprinters all have big muscles, right, because they're running fast and the five K-ers don't look as muscular.
So if I'm trying to run faster I need to get stronger and if I'm trying to run longer I need to look more like Dean Karnazes or Rich Wall. I need to have some muscles.
Christopher: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And then so what about my hips? What does it mean to have hip flexion and hip extension?
Kelly: Well, look at the corners of the running. So running is sort of a -- it feels very complicated for people, but look at the ends. So with my -- like if I'm -- my right knee is coming up, right, that's hip flexion and that's the bottom position of the squat and then at the end of the run where my foot is down my leg is behind me. My trailing leg and that's hip extension.
I can guarantee you that I can pull any runner off the streets and that runner is missing both hip flexion and hip extension. I.e. not super normal crazy amounts, but baseline amounts like as in the established normal ranges of motion by the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons or the American Academy of Family Practitioners or any of the Norkin and White physical therapy models. These are the things that humans should be able to do, yes or no, right, and it's bright line there.
It's not well, I can ish do it. I kind of do it. I can fake it. You have to have this indigenous range of motion in order to be able to function normally and what we're seeing is that people are compensating around problems. My wife and I are on a walk while our kids are at gymnastics yesterday and we watched this --
Christopher: That must be so -- I have to say this would be so much fun for you to watch people walk around the shopping mall or an airport or something.
Kelly: Well, I'm always entertained and I haven't been caught yet taking photos and videos, but sometimes it's pretty flagrant. I'm like, "Oh, we got to get a picture of that." And what you're seeing is and remember this isn't because people are asses. This is people working it out and basically we're leveraging our genetics. No one has taught these people what we know to be the correct physiology. Most of these people don't have a moving practice like CrossFit, like yoga, like Pilates.
[0:40:43]
These are all movement practices. If you do a lot of the kettlebell work, you probably are in pretty complete movement practice. You're making the joints do the things they need to do, but people are confusing exercise with movement practice.
Biking, my wife and I do a ton of mountain biking. We're huge fans. I love the Tour de France. Evelyn Stevens is the number one American cyclist, trains at our gym. We think she is just the bomb, right? And but that is not a movement practice. That is exercise or it's a sport and the mistake is I'm deriving all the things that I need doing my sport. It's like well, I love meat. Meat is good for me so I only eat meat and lo and behold I stopped going to the bathroom.
You need other things and I think that's crucial about that. So teaching people and reinforcing the patterns around this and remember this is not a book about strength conditioning. This is a book about position. So my hypothesis is look, let's get you back towards these baselines while you'd work on these other things and I don't care how you do it. All roads lead to Rome. I mean there are some paths that are more efficient, but at least show me that you can do these things and we can create that ready state again where you were able to go run pain free and then you can have a conversation about being stronger.
But like you say I need to be stronger and I'm always like, "Well, how strong?" because I know the strongest men and women in the world they're not strong enough. I know the fittest athletes in the world and they're not fit enough. So getting stronger and getting fitter is not just a solution.
Christopher: Definitely. Yeah, so we already talked about ankle range of motion and so do you think it's sufficient then just to be able to get down into that squat with your feet together? Is that -- that's enough? I know --
Kelly: Yeah, that's one. I mean it doesn't anything necessarily about the stiffness of your calves or your feet, but your feet can still be stiff. But you can get to that range of motion, but that's a good baseline. And more importantly it helps you establish what's normal and not normal and can I get there, right, because it's a moving target.
And the other thing is being able to sit with your feet together like your -- in like karate class being able to sit with your feet together with your toes totally pointed like you're kneeling, but flat. A lot of people can't do that anymore and that's an indicator that you're missing full knee flexion and that your ankles are still stiff. So you got to have full range of motion on both sides. And what we've done is taken positions that mimic the end ranges of the moving mechanic of running.
Christopher: Okay. And then warming up and cooling down is something that I was really interested in. So I mean most people know that they should be doing it, but they don't see it as important enough to actually do it. So…
Kelly: Yeah. Well, so here's this idea. I work with a lot of professional teams like more professional teams that you can shake a stick at. If you name a sport I probably talked to one of their coaches or worked with their players, athletes and that's fun because I get to go behind the scenes and see everyone's dirty work. But there's this -- their dirty laundry. There's this idea in professional sports for example that professional athletes have an unlimited amount of time to train and stretch and mobilize and get massages and I can tell you that is as far from the truth as you can imagine.
The time demands and travel loads and practice demands in athletes are really, really high. And so these athletes are very, very compressed and they still need to be like husbands and wives. They still have to have a life too. And so one of the things that this one American football team asked me to, they said, "Hey, we want you to evaluate our warm up." And I was like, "Great. How long is it?"
They're like, "You don't need to see it?" I was like, "No, tell me how long it is." And they're like, "Eight minutes." I was like, "Incomplete." You cannot get a football player who weighs 300 pounds ready to hit another 300 pound man in eight minutes. You can't do it. So what we have to do that's eight minutes is a long enough to get hot and sweaty, but it's not long enough to make sure that I've warmed up all the joints.
So what we have to do is create a more ready state so that in a five or seven minute quick plays I can get -- I can shift the blood from my stomach to my tissues. I can let the joints and tissues start to perfuse. I can start to shift blood out of the venous system back into the sort of the muscular system. I can start to like shift that load back into my heart. It just takes a while to sort of up-regulate the how your energy systems are working.
It just takes a while to shift the gear. Don't confuse that though because if you need to sprint away from a bear you can do it. Okay. But the fact is we confuse what is functional from what is optimal and if we get people warming up what they realize that they don't ever get that second wind because I call second wind first warmup. Once you're warmed up you should be ready to go.
[0:45:31]
The second thing is people aren't cooling down. So horse racing is very, very old. No horse race on the planet runs the race and then takes the horses to the barn. That is the fastest way to kill a horse. Everyone will tell you that. Yet you're not a horse. You're even more sophisticated and special and yet you come blazing in, hit the brakes and are done instead of letting your body down regulate, shift that blood back in, keep moving those fluids around and that not only do most of us sort of don't cool down.
But most of us to sit and then that just lets everything just sort of stagnate and then we start to see a much different tissues so one of the things that we like about standing for example at our desks is that this allows us to sort of continue to be in constant motion instead of going to right to that sitting air.
Christopher: Yeah. Normally I go straight to the kitchen and start taking that pot so that's my cool down.
Kelly: Exactly. Well, this is a good example. One of my athletes is an Olympic rower. She's a two-time gold medalist and she set American history, made American history by winning the first ever gold medal in the women's pair. And she came in just set American history, gold medal world championships, high-fived her coach, got a shake and a banana and went back out and cooled down like back in the water.
They were the only pair that went back out and did some rowing. They rowed for the ten minutes. If you look at like Michael Phelps, he warms up and cools down like two or three times the distance of -- he gets this gold medal, he's in the warm down pool. And I think it's crucial to understand that best practices are I should be warming up and cooling down and then I should create a lifestyle that sort of keeps me moving. I want to keep the engine constantly idling. I don't want to turn it off and turn it back on.
Christopher: Yeah, it's interesting actually. I've seen that and sort of learned to understand it as I've moved up through the categories with the bike racing. So in the beginning like none of the beginners they literally they just get out of the car and get straight onto the biking and race and then you see the guys that here in northern California there's all kinds of national and even world champions in cycle cross and yeah you see them like how long they spend.
They'll probably ride for longer than the length of the race because the race is only 45 to 60 minutes and then afterwards that's a really good trick actually to -- after you're done if you need a drink or something because your mouth is dry then go and get that and if you want to eat a banana or something, that's fine, and then go and do the cool down afterwards. You're not so motivated to stop.
Kelly: Yeah. Well, it makes the difference because we're not just looking at today. We're looking at tomorrow and that's the problem. If you're retiring today then hang it up. Don't worry about it, but we're not. We're interested in these races are also interesting stimulus for adaptation. These races should be making me a better athlete and so I'm really training the race and the training like I'm getting ready for tomorrow. I'm getting ready for tomorrow and what's the best way to do that?
If we look at Tour de France and I've the good luck of working with some Tour de France riders and Allen Lim and Stacy Sims. They -- how long do those Tour de France guys warm up before they go ride?
Christopher: Oh, yeah, I don't know. I mean it would probably be an hour I would have thought.
Kelly: They are spending a lot of time and that's dealing with muscle stiffness and getting them hot and sweaty so when it's time to go they can go and then one of the problems that we have in the Tour de France that we have to overcome and have overcome with tricky tools is a lot of times they get right back on the bus and they can't cool down. They're gone and then like they are freaking out and we are using a lot of tools to be able to sort of just keep cycling that congestion.
But if we can get you to cool down even a little bit it makes a huge difference. Otherwise, your body says, "Okay, we've got to stop and go. We're going to become really stiff as a result to try to protect ourselves." And that's what we want to prevent from happening.
Christopher: And then where does compression fit into this? It was just something that I used to do and then I went with it, so I didn't really notice any difference. You know these things to work then, the compression socks.
Kelly: Oh, big time. If you're constantly moving after you work on your stand-up desk and constantly in motion you probably are decongesting your limbs automatically. So when I say that, remember that your lymphatic system is a passive mechanical system and your lymphatic system is what's removing the congestion and swelling and sort of and it's bringing the garbage out of your system.
So if you had a swollen ankle, for example, that swelling doesn't come out of your veins and arteries. It comes out of your lymphatic system and lymphatic system -- so if you've ever flown in an airplane and had cankles or puffy feet, right, that's a failure of you to evacuate your lymphatic system, and the system just starts to congest, which is a mechanism for a lot of the deep vein thrombosis problems we have with people.
[0:50:30]
They sit and sit and sit and sit and sit and their body becomes congested, and boom, they have a clot. But what's happening is when you move a little bit then the muscle contraction of normal activity is what decongestion is. So when you hear Dr. Andy Walls say, "Hey, we should go walking," well, walking is probably not even the cross pattern motion. It's probably this low level muscle contraction that's causing me to decongest my tissues, right, to deal with the fact that I'm a little bit congested or I'm swollen or had some post exercise edema which happens.
And when we get you back on the bike that's one of the things we're dealing with and one of the easy hacks which is very simple is throwing on a pair of compression socks when you're done and it does prevent by making that a smaller space we don't see fluid congest. And don't take my word for it. If you don't feel a difference ditch the socks, but I will tell you that 100% of my teams are required to travel in compression especially after they race. It's so easy.
Christopher: Yeah, I agree with that. And so even though it's not -- I mean so when you say passive system it means it's not pumped like your blood.
Kelly: That's right. So it's not as good. It's an autogenic. It's a passive system. So it's just squeezing and that's good. It does make a difference and the research is good behind it, but it's not as effective as like actually walking or riding a bike or doing some easy. So I have a lot of my athletes in the evening in multiple beds and like you got to go for a walk before you go to bed. You got to get up and go for a walk.
We need to get you moving and decongesting those tissues. And then there are great devices like the Marc Pro which allows us to decongest the tissue with electricity by getting this non-fatiguing muscle contraction. I can basically pump all the congestion out of my body.
Christopher: Okay. Yeah. I know Marc Pro because they sponsor a local bike team and they're all extremely fast. So I don't know if that's a connection or not. It might be. It might not. So tell me about hot spots. What is a hot spot?
Kelly: Well, when you are having a painful area in your body, it's good to understand that what your body is telling you is that part of your mechanics are off. Something is off about your mechanics and what we're doing is we're getting immediate cues about our muscular mechanical bony fascia mechanical system when we have pain. And so people instead take some ibuprofen and just gut it out or suck it up or try to block that. But that's my coaching. Something is wrong with my technique.
And what's happening is that your body is giving you a cue by pain that your biomechanics are off. Remember, the resting state of the human being is pain free. And the problem is waiting for pain to happen is that one is that when I start moving I can actually can't hear the pain signal in my brain. My brain gets confused by the movement signal, which are in the same pathway in the brainstem and so I can't hear the pain signal until I stop moving.
And if you ever injured yourself and you lay down in bed and your shoulder starts throbbing, your ankle starts throbbing that's a good example of what I'm talking about because you're not moving all of a sudden the only input your brain is getting is from your injury. The other problem is that as soon as the adrenaline is running you can't hear anything. I mean if you've ever been in a fight, you know what I'm talking about, because the dirty secret about fighting is it doesn't hurt until much afterwards, and it hurts terribly. But you can get punched in the face and shock and the adrenaline is going and you don't even feel it.
And I think that's crucial piece and the other problem is that we're all sickos. I mean people can suffer. We are so good at suffering and so when you combine those things often times we don't hear the pain message until we're actually deep into injury. But what we want you to do is recognize that, hey, if you're running and your foot starts turning, hey, stop. Think about that.
Is there something wrong with your technique, right? Is there something you can change? Can you change? Can you roll out? Can you change your technique? Can you open up your hips? Is there something you can do or even do afterwards to tell us to ameliorate that problem and that problem could be upstream or downstream.
So what I'm saying if we have knee pain that can be coming from tight quads or a short hips, but also if you come downstream from your tight calf or restricted ankle range of motion. And so if I don't -- necessarily where the rats gets isn't always where they chew and I can let my technique errors really start to be educational systems because maybe your calf doesn't hurt ever. Your calves or ankles never hurt, but until your knee stars to hurt you're like, "Oh, my gosh. I had no idea how still my ankle were or calves were.
[0:55:09]
And so dealing with your hot spot that's the original piece we need to get rid of all those biomechanical errors because can you imagine, I mean you know we cannot injure ourselves and then ignore that because then we know what that happens and if you've got a race coming up next week and you're fighting for world champion of the world and the love of a beautiful woman. Well, you're a big boy. You're going to have to decide if you're going to race with that injury or not.
But the rest of us are training and training is about self-actualization. It's about optimization. It's about getting data about myself from the movements. Am I moving efficiently? By the definition we say you got to come out unharmed from all of these movements and so if I'm injured or have a little kind of niggly area that's great. That tells me about something and allows me to address it.
Christopher: Okay. So with your message then to be a runner listening to this now if they're hurting in some way, if they've got one of these hotspots they should just stop what they're doing and do some of the mobilization work or other techniques that you describe in your book rather than to continue on.
Kelly: Let's flip it around. Does it make sense that if you're injured you should go out and continue to do the things that's injuring you?
Christopher: No, it doesn't make any sense at all.
Kelly: Well, you know, and I think unfortunately our physicians have gotten sort of a bad rep sometimes and you know they explicitly you go to your physician because that knee hurts a little bit. If your joint is swollen this is a big deal. You know you wake up in the morning and your knee is swollen. Something is going on with your mechanics and we have an issue and we take swollen joints very seriously because that swelling in the joint is really destructive on all the articular cartilage and all the meniscus. It really just degrades inside of the joint.
We take swelling of the joint very seriously. You know the joint effusion or tissue injury really shuts down how the body functions there and so we're not going to get a good optimal system. And if you have a little knee pain, it's a little stiff, a little knee pain, you ignore it, it kind of goes away and if you keep doing that eventually you're going to have a problem.
And I see a lot of cases what we call chondromalacia patella which a softening behind the knee cap. And that usually happens because the tissue is over tension like a hinge on an old house that's too tight and over a long decade you'll see a little pile of hinge dust underneath the hinge. Well, that's what's going on your knee and so if you go see your doctor she's like, "Hey, I notice that you wore a hole in this bone that was designed to be 110 years old. That's a problem. You should probably stop running."
You're like, "How dare you tell me to stop running. I'm a runner like you're the worst doctor ever." And the doctor's like, "Whoa, jackass, you just blew a hole in your bone because you didn't listen to the message and this part of the problem with icing, this is part of the problem with taking pain medicine. I mean you're taking pain medicine so that you can run. That doesn't make much sense and I'm sorry that your ego takes the hit. You're not going to be able to do that long day.
Remember, this is a skilled activity and we should be able to build the tolerance and build the capacity to do that. I know you can do it in a time of stress and war and you can run nine miles on a broken leg, but that's not the point.
Christopher: Yeah, I agree completely. It's a little bit harder for me to understand because as a cyclist you tend -- when you have an accident like a really big one like I fell and broke my wrist earlier and that's kind of the first thing ever and the only thing that ever goes wrong it's unusual to get this kind of like sort of too much use injuries or poor skill you know.
Kelly: Well, and sometimes in cycling it is true except I do end up seeing a lot of cyclist with low back problems because basically they're missing hip flexion. I end up seeing a ton of cyclist who have hip replacements and they're basically ride their hips into the ground, collapse the ankle. It's a disaster. I mean Floyd Lance is a good example. That's a preventable problem. Floyd did not have to have his hips replaced if he had full range of motion in the tissue, but he did exactly what he knew to do and what exactly what his coaches told him to do you know.
I think Lance Armstrong is an amazing example of really good indigenous mechanics, but he was an athlete before he became a cyclist. And he was an excellent runner and did all these things and he's strong.
Christopher: Yeah. I agree. And then finally I wanted to talk to you about hydration. I thought this point was particularly interesting and I must admit I have -- I've been doing all of these stuff in the back of the book and there's a little plan, a little day planner at the back of the book and I've been doing all of it even though the hydration part was kind of very much counter to what I previously believed. So I thought that it was best just to follow your thirst and there wasn't really a need to hydrate any more than that.
And I think that kind of understanding really came from reading Tim Noakes' book Waterlogged.
Kelly: Yeah, which was terrible.
Christopher: Oh, really?
Kelly: Yeah, that's really bad science. And look, I think for the average person if you're you know remember why you're getting thirsty.
Christopher: Well, yeah, because you're getting dehydrated I guess.
Kelly: Okay, so right and that it's a big lie between when you're thirsty and what your actual fluid load is and here's the other piece of this. This is not me as a human being going around. I'm talking about being an athlete.
[1:00:18]
So remember that all of your articular cartilage in your joints is comprised mostly of water. In fact, if you take glucosamine, right, the glucosamine is a salt. It's called glycosaminoglycan and the proposed mechanism for that salt is that it enters the articular cartilage of your knee or of your joint and then that salt pulls more water in which makes that tissue more sort of robust to deformation and compression.
So all your ligaments, all your tendons, all your disk comprise of water and if you're slightly dehydrated these tissues become more friable. We know for example that if you're one or two percent dehydrated we can see a huge decrease in just your VO2 output, right, because remember the thick equation, the cardiac output equation there is a stroke volume component. And if my blood plasma is low because I'm dehydrated then I can't pump as much blood volume through my system and I'm going to see total VO2 output plus thermoregulation becomes wonky, protein genesis is off. I can't even heal what's going on.
I mean it is a mental clarity and focus. If my job, my sport actually requires me to make decisions and not to be a piece of meat then I'm you know we're going to see a whole cascade of events. The issue here is and what Tim was saying is true in the idea of we do not need to drink as much water as we were drinking. What people were doing were just blowing out their electrolytes. And so what we're telling people to do is absorb the water you're drinking. This is why animals always eat and then drink with the eating.
Have you noticed that pattern? Well, one of the things is you need to be able to absorb the water and if that water has no salts in it, right, or you're not drinking while you eat then you're not actually going to absorb it. You're going to bolus your kidneys and pee it out. So if you have to go to the bathroom all the time that's a pretty good indicator that you're blowing out your electrolytes and what we're asking people to do is go ahead and drop a pinch of sea salt in their water. That'll make a huge difference and people aren't even replacing their electrolytes.
The cleaner we've eaten we've actually removed all these salts out of our system. I'm drinking enough water, but I'm not replacing my electrolytes and that's causing a whole host of problems. But the most of which is that you can -- I say a rough guideline women drink two liters of water a day, but absorb that water with some electrolytes. Men three liters of water you're good to go. Then treat your hydration around your sport as a separate component to that.
Christopher: Right. And then you can actually quantify. I like this idea. I bought some of the pee strips from Abelson. Yeah, it's so cheap. They cost almost nothing and yeah I must admit that I was definitely -- I can't remember the exact numbers. But I was -- I guess one point something in it and I was tending towards sort of 15 almost 20 and that was just following my thirst rather than taking kind of a more specific recommendation to drink more.
Kelly: Well, remember, we're trying to create a ready state so that you can go out and quickly flash these workouts. And you know the water is a big deal and what's great about where we live in northern California is you know this isn't just me. This is Stacy Sims who is the inventor of Osmo and probably the preeminent thinker about sports hydration in the world right now.
And you know she's out of Stanford and it's just like brilliant mad scientist and her company and products reflect that and I don't have a relationship financially with her so I can just unequivocally tout how awesome she is. But you know the heavy lifting and hard work has been done for us and these guidelines are for people to understand, come out of sort of the highest formula one level thinking at the highest cardiac outputs aerobic demands we've ever seen and what we can do is take that those lessons of sport and spin them backwards to the rest of us mere mortals.
In fact, if we don't do that, if we don't take the lessons of sport and spin backwards and sport this might as well be just circus. But it's not. It's about physical human self-actualization and we should be able to take those lessons and spin them backwards in all aspects and we should do the same thing with hydration. It's pretty remarkable. When you start up regulating your water, it's pretty bad ass.
My wife and I did a brutal 30-minute piece yesterday and just some calisthenics and some watt biking. It's a gnarly 30-minute piece. And I drank some water. I threw some [1:04:49] [Indiscernible] down afterwards. And then had to go pick up my daughters and got busy. Later on that night I pulled my socks off and I had huge rings around from where my sock was compressing my ankle.
[1:05:02]
Christopher: Yeah, I know that.
Kelly: And then yeah, that's a dead giveaway. That's called pitting edema and that means that I'm dehydrated and still swollen. That's a horrible issue and I think when people realize how bad it is they're really shocked and also you don't have to drink a gallon a day. That is a bullshit number.
Christopher: Right, yeah. I should probably make clear actually that you know what I was doing before I read Tim Noakes' book was starting a race with like over two liters of 6% carbohydrates solutions.
Kelly: Yeah, that's no good. That's no good. What we want people to do and this is actually Stacy's guidelines and what's fun right now is the will performance in sports nutrition is this. Ready? Eat food. Your body handles food great. And the food Allen Lim's written a couple of great books, Feed Zone Portables. It's such a good book about like make some rice, mash in with a banana, a little like maple syrup. Like that makes this little tasty peanut butter rice banana ball and like eat that instead of a Bonkers bar.
Eat real food you know. Have an egg and some rice and some cheese on your ride. Like it really is, you know, eat a Panini you know and use the emergency food bar thing as a calorie. Let's stop drinking our calories. What we need to do is look at hydration separately and then food as a separate issue and one of the biggest mistakes is that we're all drinking our hydration and that actually tends to dehydrate us.
Christopher: Yeah. Exactly. So I definitely had that problem with the gels in particular. They're incredibly dehydrated and they make you enormously thirsty just because you have to rehydrate.
Kelly: Yeah, yeah. Well, check this out. So I ran an ultramarathon and I'm a big guy just for people listening. I'm like 235 pounds and I look like a footballer, but I'm an endurance athlete. And I was pretty sure I'm the biggest guy that ever ran this ultra and you know I had never run an ultra before. I have done paddle races. I have done like 100 mile bike rides. I have hiked the Himalaya, no problem. But running for eight and a half hours it turns out I could not eat anything and run up and down. It was really hard for me.
And I got into the gel goo cycle, right, and literally bonked every 20 minutes and cramped like a mow. I mean I cramped so bad because I was behind on electrolytes and kept pulling that out and wasn't ahead. And it really was about me for eight and half hours triaging bonking and cramping which was I was like, "Wow, I can do this for another eight hours."
Christopher: That sounds awesome. Well, Kelly, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. The book that we've been talking about is called Ready to Run and it's out now. It's a fantastic book. I really, really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed the appearance of it as well. It's like beautifully laid out.
Kelly: And I've just been talking about -- I want to just shout out my co-writer and the guy who kind of writes from this runner's perspective is a guy named TJ Murphy who's one of the most prolific writers. He started Inside Triathlon magazine, you know that beautiful you know cup. That's him and he was like an editor for Runner's World and he is a brilliant, brilliant runner and he is like the embodiment. He's like the rain man of running statistics and coaches and techniques and he's been around forever and has seen it all.
He started Competitor Magazine and be able to have his voice in there and be able to kind of lay out the history. I mean TJ Murphy is brilliant. In fact, if you're -- I don't know if this going up. But we'll be at -- it'll probably be too late, so I won't mention it. But you know looking up TJ Murphy his blog is the Burning Runner and he's at Burning Runner on Twitter and he's just such a brilliant, brilliant co-writer and I really you know I just -- I don't have the sort of decades of embodied experience and knowledge that he had. It was really fun to be able to tap into that.
Christopher: Yeah, it's cool actually. It's a bit like an interview you know it's just one person speaking it's a lot less interesting. When you've got two voices it's pretty cool.
Kelly: Yeah and especially since you know he knows everyone and was that broken runner. You know that was his experience you know. He was part of the old model which is it's just more volume, baby. And that works, right, until it doesn't work.
Christopher: Exactly, yeah. Excellent. So I guess the other place MobilityWOD.com is the place to find an enormous number of videos. It's extraordinary and then you can like you say follow along each day and actually do something practical which I think is very cool.
Kelly: Thank you.
Christopher: Excellent. Okay, well, thanks for your time then, Kelly.
Kelly: Pleasure. Cheers, you guys.
Christopher: Bye-bye.
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