Future-Proof Your Body: Become Durable, Mobile, and Pain-Free with Dr. Kelly Starrett

Michael Gervais (0:00)

Today, we're digging deep into the Finding Mastery Podcast Vaults for another of our favorite episodes.

Kelly Starrett (0:05)

I think that every human being should know how to take care of themselves. When your knee hurts, you don't have to freak out and get an MRI. If you get a fever, you're like, here's some Tylenol. Your back hurts and you're like, must be rabies.

Michael Gervais (0:18)

What if one of the keys to sustaining high performance wasn't about going harder, but learning how to recover smarter and move better every single day? Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. This week, we are pulling one from the Finding Mastery Vaults. It's a conversation I had with Dr. Kelly Starrett, performance coach to some of the world's top athletes, Olympians, elite military personnel and corporations.

Kelly Starrett (0:43)

The people who can adapt to these higher workloads, reduce the session cost over time, those people actually make more progress because they can work harder at higher intensities longer and be fresher.

Michael Gervais (0:54)

We originally recorded this in the summer of 2023 Back in our old Mastery Lab studio. Now in a time when burnout, physical stagnation and chronic stress are on the rise, this conversation feels even more relevant today. Kelly's work bridges that gap between elite performance and everyday movement.

Kelly Starrett (1:13)

The number one reason people end up in nursing homes is they can't get above the ground independent. Whoa, I think you should be able to squat with your feet forward and your heels on the ground as to grass.

Michael Gervais (1:22)

As to grass. As you listen, notice how Kelly reframes recovery and mobility as essential daily habits, not extras.

Kelly Starrett (1:30)

Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. And I'm like, well, what are you practicing for hours and hours and hours? Mouth breathing? Are you slunched over? Are you taking shallow, non-diaphragmatic breaths?

Michael Gervais (1:40)

This was a good one now. Let's jump back in with 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 released your book, Built to Move. Why this book and why now?

Kelly Starrett (2:13)

I thought stretching could really use a facelift. I think with all of the changes in our lifestyles, being impacted by sleep, inactivity, the 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 (2:45)

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

Kelly Starrett (2:53)

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 (3:21)

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 (3:32)

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 like I think the first awareness moment was watching a Andre Arnold who was the World Cup, I was at a ski race camp. He was diagramming the term and talking, the turn and talking about foot pressure. And 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? Full disclosure, everyone, my mom is a psychologist. And I think I had a little bit too much awareness of, of my own process and awareness. But I really came to understand pattern recognition and understanding how things fit together. Like I was obsessed with Legos. I could stare at 10,000 pieces and find the piece. And I think all of those things started coming together in terms of understanding and then getting, having some success with sports that I could as a as a youngster as a youngster as as understanding my body as a way of coming to understand the world in my own brain a little bit through stress, through sports, through kayaking, through skiing, through mountain biking, all the things we did. And it's interesting, I became a professional paddler and then injured myself, paddler meaning whitewater slalom. So in the Olympics where they hang the gates over, I paddled myself right out of a job with an overuse injury, one that was completely of my making. The old model was work till you break and then we'll back off. We'll go a little further. Literally was the old model and I broke. And at that moment, I sort of had an existential crisis that I wasn't probably a very good paddler relative to the world champions at the time. But B, what I saw was, hey, this isn't working for me. And I started asking a lot of other questions, sort of applying the same rubric. And I remember pointing and being like, well, did you know this was going to happen? And they're like, well, we anticipated it would happen. And that's really frustrating. And that really sent me on this path of ultimately trying to understand what was going on by going to physio school.