Built To Move — How To Take Care Of Your Body | Dr. Kelly Starrett

Kelly Starrett (0:00)

Your hips are stiff, and you can be like, why didn't anyone tell me? I had all this time, and I was interested in this, and I've been exercising and going to Peloton. What's the problem? The problem is we didn't tell everyone, here's what we should keep an eye on. Here's a simple benchmark, a modern physical. Imagine if your physician asked you to do this during your annual physical.

A physical should actually be not just what's going on with your blood panel and your blood pressure, but how you actually move too.

Michael Gervais (0:34)

Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by training and training a high-performance psychologist.

I'm thrilled to welcome Dr. Kelly Starrett to the podcast for this week's conversation.

Known as a mobility pioneer, Kelly's career as a doctor of physical therapy has led him to some extraordinary places. He shared his health and well-being methods with a vast and varied audience. He's worked with professional athletes, Olympians, elite military personnel, corporations as well. Now, after spending decades consulting and coaching, Kelly has helped to revolutionize the field of performance therapy and self-care. A bestselling author and the co-founder of the mobility training platform, The Ready State. Kelly's work, it offers a comprehensive set of tools and foundational wisdom to optimize movement and to unlock pain-free performance. These are massive abilities for people to unlock here. His newly released book, Built to Move, which he co-wrote with his wife Juliet, guides readers through the 10 essential habits to help you move freely and to live fully. In this conversation, we explore why intentional movement is so important for our well-being over time, how to assess your vital signs for basic movement, and even things like the downfalls to intermittent fasting. So many people are talking about intermittent fasting, and Kelly brings up really important points to make sure we pay attention to. We get into how to enhance your sleep and the benefits of fidgeting.

If you're ready to create your game plan for the long game, this one's for you. So with that, let's get right into this week's conversation with Dr. Kelly Starrett. Kelly, I've been looking forward to sitting down with you for a long time. Your work on social and the way that you convey the importance of healthy mobility and moving and, you know, getting your body dialed in has been awesome to watch. I listen, I learn, and I practice your stuff. So I'm stoked that you're here. You recently just released your book, Built to Move.

Why this book and why now?

Kelly Starrett (2:51)

I thought stretching could really use a facelift.

I think with all of the changes in our lifestyles, being impacted by sleep, inactivity, food choices, the stress, the work, we're starting to see that for us, it's starting to begin to impact our ability to move freely and in a pain-free way. So what we're trying to do with Built to Move is establish some benchmarks and some vital signs that anyone can use to say, hey, how is my lifestyle impacting my way to move through the environment?

Michael Gervais (3:23)

And what are some of the misconceptions and some of the myths surrounding movement that are creating problems for people right now?

Kelly Starrett (3:30)

One is that one-hour exercise three times a week solves all our problems. We want to expand what people think about in terms of how their body moves in their environments to 24 hours. So a physical practice means what happens when I wake up to when I go to bed. We want to start to view exercise as an extracurricular.

So if we can start to empower people on small behaviors that they can integrate into their life, they will feel better and have better access to the range of motion so they can do the things they want to do.

Michael Gervais (3:58)

How did you get into, before we get into the tactics of like what people can do to have a healthier body, because we are professional sitters, how did you get into this space? Like, why this?

Kelly Starrett (4:10)

As long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with performance, exercise, training. I grew up as a single child of a single mother in Germany, and I was exposed to a lot of sports. But I remember clearly, I think the first awareness moment was watching Andre Arnold, who was the World Cup, I was at a ski race camp.

He was diagramming the turn and talking about foot pressure. I remember being like, I was 12, I think, and I was like, this is it. This is the greatest. How can we talk about this and other aspects of my life?