Athletic Fortitude Show
Athletes all over the world endure countless mental physical and psychological adversities over the course of their careers. We are here to bring you the solutions to those adversities with some of the top professional athletes, coaches, and sport and performance psychologists around the world!
Athletic Fortitude Show
World-Class Performance Coaches: How To Build UNBREAKABLE Resilience - Dr. Kelly & Juliet Starrett
Dr. Kelly Starrett Co-Founder, Head Coach and Physical Therapist, Chief Tinkerer, Lover of Dune Kelly is a Doctor of Physical Therapy and is the co-author of the New York Times bestsellers Becoming a Supple Leopard, Ready to Run and Built to Move and the Wall Street Journal bestseller Deskbound. Kelly is also the co-founder and Chief Health Officer of TheReadyState.com and co-founder of San Francisco CrossFit, the 21st CrossFit affiliate. Kelly consults with athletes and coaches from the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB, the US Olympic Team and CrossFit. He works with elite Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard forces, and consults with corporations on employee health and well-being. Dr. Starrett's work is not limited to coaches and athletes; his methods apply equally well to children, desk jockeys, and anyone dealing with injury and chronic pain. He believes that every human being should know how to move and be able to perform basic maintenance on themselves.
Juliet Starrett, J.D. Co-Founder, CEO Juliet Starrett is an entrepreneur, attorney, author, and podcaster.She is the former co-founder and CEO of San Francisco CrossFit, one of the first 50 CrossFit affiliates. Juliet is the co-author of the Wall Street Journal Bestseller, Deskbound and co-host of The Ready State Podcast. Before turning her attention to The Ready State and San Francisco CrossFit full-time, Juliet was a professional whitewater paddler, winning 3 World Championship and 5 national titles. She also had a successful career as an attorney, practicing complex commercial litigation at Reed Smith for nearly eight years.
Chronic pain is a stark reality for many former athletes, but the path to a pain-free state begins with recognizing our right to live without pain and approaching recovery with curiosity rather than fear.
• Acknowledging that pain is a request for change, not a permanent condition
• Breaking the mental cycle of believing pain will always be present
• Prioritizing basic health factors: sleep, nutrition, movement, and emotional security
• Incorporating innovative recovery techniques like H-Wave and Blood Flow Restriction therapy
• Understanding the disconnect between medical treatment and training environments
• Mastering fundamentals before adding trendy wellness practices
• Taking a systems approach to wellness rather than seeking quick fixes
• Creating community and preventing isolation during injury recovery
• Establishing "Base Camp" practices: protein intake, sleep, walking, mobility work
• Building resilience through optimism and positive relationships
Work the plan consistently, knowing that healing takes time but is possible. Your body is incredible and designed to recover when given the right conditions.
And I was talking with one of my buddies who's a seven-year NFL veteran and we were just like talking about the chronic pain that we are like both in from our playing days and it's really hard for other people to relate and they'll be like, oh wait till you're my age and it's like I don't mean to be like rude, but it's like you have no idea, like what we've put our bodies through the broken bones, the surgeries, everything that comes with it but it's the mental wear of the chronic pain. And so, to give you guys a little insight, I've had five knee surgeries. I've had four in the last two years, one major one where they had to fix a cartilage issue and put cartilage in my knee. But I basically been in chronic pain for the last two years and I'm trying to get out of that chronic pain. Um would love to hear any suggestions off the bat.
Speaker 2:Well, I I'll just start because Kelly will have the tactical suggestions, but I would like to say that we feel you as athletes who smashed our bodies in different sports. I've had both had to have both my hips replaced. Kelly had a catastrophic skiing injury, like we. We are on board with you and both have had. Both of us have had bouts of chronic pain as well. So you know, just from a personal standpoint, we feel you.
Speaker 3:Well, I think one of the things that we should establish is what is the resting state of the human being? And that is a pain-free state. So it's crucial that we say, hey, we have the right and the baseline is to be pain-free. It doesn't mean we want to experience pain. I think what we've done is we've set up a society that is so pain adverse and that, like, if your back is ever sore, you're like oh, I must have, you know, spinal cancer and I've herniated 27 discs. I'm like, bro, you're-.
Speaker 2:Right and you need to get like 16 MRIs and C17 specialists.
Speaker 3:And it is certainly a feature of the athletic experience, you know, and I think what we're trying to do is, first and foremost, say that pain is a request for change, and what we want to do and this is tricky because if anyone who's ever had persistent pain or chronic pain, or who has had such severe, acute pain that you think your life is over, it is really difficult to maintain a level of optimism and curiosity about that pain, because what you think is this is the way it's always going to be. I can't bear this and I won't be able to take it if it gets worse. Which is the three questions that we always are like trying to persuade people, and these are from Byron Katie, can you stand this? Yes, you can actually. You can actually make a life and build a life around this. Number two if it gets worse, we can manage that too. And three is that it won't always be like this, but having had this experience ourselves, we can tell you that hard to be stoked, to make love to your partner, hard to be a family person, hard to get up out of bed, and we see that the solutions that we've handed people have been very opiate, heavy, very. Hey, we're going to put you on, you know, gabapentin. We're going to, you're going to be on this morphine it's radio frequency ablation. We're going to basically strip you out of your psyche and your and your person to try to help manage this pain. And and the solutions have been terrible and have destroyed lives.
Speaker 3:So I'm definitely not a chronic pain expert, but we deal with a lot of people with chronic pain and again, this framing is really important is that we're always trying to remind people that the brain is the most sophisticated structure in the known universe and that it is always looking sort of for patterning, and one of the things we have to do is sort of begin to try to strip away or separate out our movement patterns from these pain patterns. So if you're working with us, there's a couple of things that we do, and this this is true for we run. You know we're parts of these big high college camps right at Cal and we'll have a hundred kids in there. I'm like how many of you guys are pain-free and not a single hand goes up right. So we know that it's a part of the human experience, and certainly part of the athletic tradition experience, to have pain. So we're going to be like it's okay.
Speaker 3:But one of the books that we give people is the Body Keeps the Score. You've got to read this book and you got to understand that the brain is so clever at understanding trauma and sort of building up protective mechanisms that get hijacked by our brains. Frankly, doage wrote a book called the Brain that Heals Itself, which I think is hugely important. But then Juliet and I are saying always okay, we've got this intense psychology and there's all the things that can happen there, but are you sleeping? And I know that chronic pain can definitely mess up the sleep quality, but we've got to get you sleeping and that means you can't just be on.
Speaker 3:I mean, you may have to lay in bed for eight hours. It means that you cannot just, you know, get up and watch TV and you know, and not be disciplined about caffeine. And you've got to figure out some movement to do. You've got to eat fruits and vegetables, you've got to get enough fiber and protein. You've got to feel loved and secure. Those are important.
Speaker 3:We've got to get non-exercise activity in to walk throughout the rest of the day, and those things alone create a state where now we can start to layer in some of these other aspects of this piece and you know, it may be on a knee that's had so much trauma that we are going to have to have a knee replacement someday. That's okay, that's the price we paid for glory, and that's okay. That's totally okay, because Lindsey Vonn just had a partial knee replacement. She's out slaying. I have tons of friends who are killing it and it just may be that we've done so much trauma. The last thing I'd say is we absolutely get our butts right in and we talk to our physicians about hormone replacement therapy, especially in people who are menopausal and in people who have experienced a lot of head trauma, whether that's concussion or overpressure or explosion. We rattle that into a pituitary.
Speaker 2:Are you relating to that at all? I've had a number of concussions over here.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 3:You mean you rattle your head into a pituitary.
Speaker 3:You actually don't make growth hormone, you don't make testosterone.
Speaker 3:So we don't think just jamming testosterone into people and then being like good luck is the solution, like we've got to make sure that we're taking a systems approach to this, including acknowledging the psychology of what's happening and sort of some of the training that happens that has, plus the lifestyle, plus the movement.
Speaker 3:And then we do are starting to recognize we do have some really good solutions, and one of those solutions, for example, is this thing we use called H-Wave, and we've been working with this company for over a decade and what it does is allows us to get people off of opiates and have some on-demand pain relief using electricity, so we can run some high frequency voltage through a joint for an hour and then get many hours of relief so that we can go move, so that we can create a window where the brain says this is safe. And so we're looking very much at understanding the pain and not just giving you a talk that like, hey, this is all in your brain at all. It's not. It's. We've got a misperception and I just want everyone to know that hey, this sometimes is the result of being a professional athlete and we haven't prepared people for it and definitely don't sort of empower people to say we're going to need you to be curious and we're going to solve this problem. It's going to take us a while of trial and error.
Speaker 2:I just have to add one thing. I want to emphasize one thing, because Kelly kind of sailed through it, but it is that sort of mantra, almost, of saying to yourself it's not always going to be like this. That has been so helpful to me because, even more than Kelly, I tend to be like a health spiraler. If I have pain or something going on, I'm definitely concluding that like it's the beginning of the end and I'm going to die. Or if I have any kind of orthopedic pain, I am convinced that it is always going to be like this and I'm never going to get to do the things I love out of pain. And we had, we had a situation I I'm. I've never had low back pain, I've only had it once. We did this river trip.
Speaker 3:Imagine your whole life You've never had. I had a little bit of low back pain.
Speaker 2:And I definitely was like, well, I basically went into a mental spiral, decided I had become a low back pain person, that this was my new identity and that I was going to be in chronic low back pain for the rest of my life. And Kelly says this really simple thing to me. He says I don't even know if, like he knew, but he says, well, you know, like 98% of low back pain resolves within six to eight weeks. That's just like the normal time it heals. And literally and so just him saying that to me was already calmed the spiral. And then it literally, like it was almost like a joke like six weeks to the day I was like, oh, I feel perfectly fine, like I'm perfectly fine. So I do think the stories we tell ourselves and, having been someone who's in chronic pain and having mentally spiraled about it, I think that mantra of like it is not always going to be like this is so important.
Speaker 3:I also want to just remind everyone that this is a team sport, that your partner also is living with chronic pain, your children are also living with chronic pain and we want to really wrap our arms around everyone that this is a group effort and that you have to show up and not just put a brave face on, but have these windows where you're like I'm going all in and then I'm going to have to figure out how to self-soothe and calm this down to get out of this.
Speaker 3:And I want to just tell everyone in Antiquals sorry, during the pandemic we lost our gym, right. We were in the Presidio of the United States where we were writing a $25,000 rent check for a building we couldn't occupy, and that was nothing about paying any of the bills or paying our coaches, right. So at the peak of the gym's power we're basically we have to close the gym and it's so stressful, cutting loose all of the people we've worked with for 17 years. I ended up burning a hole in my stomach when I start getting hiccups. And I'm getting six hiccups a minute. For how many days, jay?
Speaker 2:I mean, it was like 12 days.
Speaker 3:It was bad 12 days where they put me on Thorazine, which is an anti-psychotic medicine that didn't even touch it. It's the only meds Like. I mean if you're schizophrenic they're like here's Thorazine. I ended up going on massive amounts of gabapentin, and gabapentin and THC were the things that put the flames out and got me to stop hiccuping. I, we, I went through hypnosis, we try. I mean it was like it was debilitating and you know one of the things that this hypnotist psychologist came over to our house and he took me through this exercise and he said this is really important, and I say it around anyone.
Speaker 3:I'm working with anyone in pain. How do you control a wild bull? And the answer is you put it in a big field. And that pivot for me of recognizing that what I need to do is have a big field, not a little pendant bowl, which is this little switch in my brain that was like, oh, I can make this work. I mean I lost what 13 pounds. I was like I'm going to have to go on disability, I can't make videos anymore, I can't teach anymore. And, of course, right at 13 days is right when the prilosec kicks in and you start to heal. And then for like two years, if I'd get like one hiccup and I've actually injured myself. If I eat dry toast, I'll hiccup, but my whole family's like, no, we're going to do it again. You're going to relapse. So I just want everyone to know that this is going to be a feature of your life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's part of the human experience.
Speaker 3:And it's not you, it's your partner, it's your mom, it's your kid, it's your best friend and you need to show up and make it as a team. Fucking sport.
Speaker 1:A couple of different things I want to unpack, particularly like the psychology piece. So when we're talking about injuries in particular, I always break it down because, like, you have conversations, you have conversations with surgeons and they're like, yeah, there is going to be some pain. I'm like no, no, no, there's a difference. If you're talking to an athlete and you want to uncover, is the pain psychologically created or emphasized more than the pain really is? I compare it to hesitation.
Speaker 1:If I'm an athlete returning to slow down, one of the hardest parts in coming back to tearing the ACL was going out and competing without hesitation. But when I did hesitate I'd feel that pain, and so when I'd converse with my surgeon, that's more of that self-created pain. But if I go out there without hesitation, I'm like no, I trust my leg and this is where I'm at right now and it's like I'll run and jump right now. It's just it's going to feel like someone's stabbing me in the knee. I know that if I could do an intense workout for three to seven days after I'm going to be shut down, it's going to hurt to go down steps, and so that's where, like the communication is where I'm like it's. It's not me inflating the pain in my mind. But it's, how do I psychologically maybe understand that relationship with the pain, knowing, hey, maybe I just simply can't do this again, even though that's not an answer I'm willing to accept right now. But it's that psychological part of the piece.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think one of the problems is we don't have good tools to manage this. Right it's. And the whole culture is hey, we're afraid of pain. Here's Tylenol, here's ibuprofen like, here's bourbon, here's THC, whatever we need to do to take this away. So we don't feel, because, instead of sort of be saying, hey, this is normal and it's our body's, you know defense mechanisms, it's asking for something, and then we use it as a check engine light. Hey, what's going on? So, if your knee is achy, we can be like hey, you know, actually there's a lot of things we can do to desensitize this. This might be hey, we need to look at your hip extension and your quads are tight, right, let's look at your nutrition and you. And what's going on? Do you feel safe? We talked.
Speaker 3:I was at Fort Bragg at a special operations sports medicine convention and a physical therapist said hey, I have a tactical athlete, a warfighter, who is ready to return, has met all the criteria of return to play, return to fight, but still doesn't believe that they're ready. And I was like well, that's incomplete rehab. You have failed the person that there's still hesitation. You have failed that person by making sure that they have not. Their brains are still protecting them for a reason, and what we have to do is be ready to have this conversation. What are your beliefs about this? How are you?
Speaker 3:You know one of the things that we do in our surgery protocols and and our gym someone has a surgery because bad stuff happens.
Speaker 3:You're going to get hit by a car, you're going to twist your ankles, bad stuff's going to happen.
Speaker 3:We never pull someone out of their community, like one of the things that drives me crazy about our current med model, which is usually sort of this traditional sort of medicine model, especially in professional sports, is that there's the physician in the training room and it's real far away from where all the training happens and all the brothers and sisters are, and so one of the things we try to do is to say hey look, we're going to rehab, we've got to babysit these tissues, but you're going to be in the gym and we're going to be well-bodied training. We'll just happen to do the rest of your sort of rehab training in and around your team. We do not pull you out of your community. And you know we there's been a couple of times in our family where we've had catastrophic spiral fractures in our daughters broken ankles and we have seen up front what that means to wrap your arms around, say you're coming with us, and that's very much part of the psychology here we feel like we are experts in three limbs training programming.
Speaker 2:we have trained so many people who have one limb that is non-functional and that certainly does not stop us. We're always like, hey, you have three other limbs, come back to the gym.
Speaker 3:There's so much you can do and there's new technology coming out that we're discovering. For example, I'll give everyone if you're not already on, if you're dealing with some kind of ache or chronic thing, I'm going to introduce you to blood flow restriction therapy right now. So BFR, we work with a company called Suji Tri-Suji that's our BFR cuff and we love them because they're very comfortable and it's biomedical grade compression so we can use them at medical facilities, at university facilities. There it's that legit right, there's usually Delphi is the gold standard, but here we have another biomedical grade comparison.
Speaker 3:But one of the things we discovered it's not just about hypertrophy.
Speaker 3:If we can get that leg pumped full of blood, that limb engorged with blood for five minutes we do 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off for five minutes of anything you can tolerate biking, mini squats, sled drags again, whatever you want we can create a window where then we can have experienced less discomfort, where we can then go train, and a lot of what we're trying to do is signal to the brain that it's safe to load this thing.
Speaker 3:And it may be that you have ranges of sorry, bro, we're not going to full clean anymore on that knee right, like you got some lunging and some things like I want you to spend your credits not in the weight room, like you got some lunging and some things like I want you to spend your credits not in the weight room, I want you to spend your credits playing and you might have 10 credits and sport might require 12 credits. That means we're going to spend all our credits where we are and then we're going to have a strategy to wind that down so we don't keep ringing the bell. So your brain says this is unsafe. No-transcript.
Speaker 1:Do you think that there's a problem with modern medicine in general not trying to get to the root cause of problems?
Speaker 3:Look, let me just say this Any physician I've ever met is encouraging, wants the best for me, full stop. They may not have the training or the tools, number one or the time and the setup may be the wrong setup. So you're going to work with the physician, but you see that physician for 10 minutes. Show me what the rest of this is looking like. And this is why Julia and I spent the best part of 20 years trying to open up, flip over the tables, open up the doors and say, hey, all of this belongs as part of a training conversation and as part of the athlete coach dyad. This is where this belongs, because the physician is, frankly, too far away. If that physician is in your weight room, talking to you, managing you, giving you solutions here's our CBD, here's our scraping, here's our BFR Then the physician would be like, oh, I actually get to practice the way I want to practice. Right, here are all the orthobiologics that I get to try.
Speaker 2:Here are all the techniques Right. This is what we can learn from our blood work, your physician.
Speaker 3:She is just too far away and it's not her fault and she actually feels like I don't have any solutions. I can put a cortisone shot in that for you. I put some hyaluronic acid in that for you. I can do surgery and that's the only thing.
Speaker 2:I got. That's their toolkit. You know, I would add too, in the gym. You know, talking about root cause, I mean presumably when we're, you know, talking about orthopedic injuries. You know, often the root cause is poor mechanics and the place to solve the root cause problem of poor mechanics is the gym. It's not in the doctor's office.
Speaker 3:I mean, if you're missing hip extension, there's no way that knee is going to work like a knee full stop, right, so you can be working on. Look, I was just at an NFL team you can be working on. Look, I was just at an NFL team, one of their all-stars having knee pain after, let's just say, it's the Super Bowl. Because, it's true, managing that tendinopathy, managing that tendinopathy looking at the hip inflection, not looking at the hip in extension. And the only way we're going to restore the function of the body and get out of this knee pain problem is by signaling to the brain. Here are the positions that humans need to have, and if we're just working on that thing in a squat pattern and not a lunge-like shape, we're going to always never challenge the tissues in the way that they need for normative function.
Speaker 3:And again, the physician is too far away from that. The trainer is too far away. The person who spots that is the coach and the athlete has to have some real buy-in here. Can I see how many fruits and vegetables and fiber you ate? Can I see how much sunshine you got? Can I see your meditation? You got to come with this and say I'm bringing my 50% so that I'm ready to receive the other 50%.
Speaker 1:Over the last 10 to 20 years, how has your philosophy changed around mobility and athletic performance and healing some of that pain in general too?
Speaker 3:What would you say?
Speaker 2:Jay, I actually think that our hallmark as a business and a couple and, like you know, people who are putting out information into the world. I don't think our perspective has changed.
Speaker 3:We've doubled down on some things.
Speaker 2:for sure We've doubled down on some stuff and I think we, our interests, have changed. You know, when we started, we were younger, we were focused on trying to help the best athletes be better. You know, we wanted to be really like sick athletes.
Speaker 2:And then we became, suddenly became middle-aged, we started hanging out with people who are middle-aged and we you know, but our interests changed and that that was sort of combined with this giant like fire hose of information that is the internet and Instagram of health and fitness information, which is both a positive and a negative in my view. And so our interest change. Our interest change to being, you know, yes, we still it's sexy and fun to sort of work with the best athletes and try to make them better, but also, how do we expand that and expand that work to try to help everyone feel better in their body?
Speaker 3:How do we take those lessons that we're learning high performance and actually transform our society? How do I apply that to my 16 year old daughter, who's over-trained in her club water polo program? Right, that's you know. Where do we lean in? What technology do we grab? How do we democratize high performance? So I would say, that is where we've you know. Again, it was super cool to say, okay, let's be high nerds here and try to win more world champions, world championships and Olympic medals, but now can we apply those lessons in other places?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think we've also really backed into this lifestyle piece a ton. It started first. Our first foray into talking about lifestyle stuff was actually talking about not sitting that much. You know, we wrote a book Kelly did a talk in 2010 at Google called Deskbound. That sort of spawned our book, Deskbound. That came out in 2014 or 2015. And so our first sort of foray into lifestyle was talking about sitting. Because what we saw is that we had all these people come into our CrossFit gym and then sitting for 12 hours a day, coming into our physical therapy clinic and being curious as to why they had neck pain or low back pain.
Speaker 3:Why that ankle is so congested.
Speaker 2:Right, or why they tore their Achilles off on their little mini around the block run. So that was sort of our first observation how was the environment affecting the human Exactly? So we started seeing it first with sitting and it's. I always think it's so funny because, like lately, that's become back in vogue to talk about it on the on Instagram. Everyone's like you just can't sit all day and I'm like, okay, kelly and I started talking about this in 2010.
Speaker 2:Like, we've been telling everyone you can't like exercise for an hour and sit for 12 hours for like basically since the dawn of time. So that was our first foray, though, into sort of realizing that we couldn't just talk about movement and mechanics, we couldn't just talk about training that, because we have to take a systems approach, we have to talk about these lifestyle pieces, and now you know it's expanded beyond sitting. All the time we talk about nutrition, sleep, you know all the things Kelly mentioned earlier that are more lifestyle focused, and that's part of the reason why we wrote our latest book, built to move is that it obviously has this core. You know it's still. It still includes our sort of core stuff we're into, which is like you got to be able to move your body in certain ways, but none of that works if you don't have these other lifestyle pieces in place, because it's a system.
Speaker 1:So where do you learn from that and what allows you to innovate without losing those core values?
Speaker 3:Well, I'll tell you that all the coaches that I hang out with are intensely curious. I mean, I think that was the we're like. If you want to work with us and be our friend, you better be stoked and you better be curious. Friend, you better be stoked and you better be curious, and that the model is. I'm sure we can integrate this more effectively. I'm sure we can get to the question faster. I'm sure we can be more efficient. I'm sure we can look at how we're going to remove things that don't serve us right. How are we going to help a person in a 24-hour cycle, wrap their arms around all the things that we're doing? And what I'll say is if you're that person, you are you number one. Never, no one exists by themselves.
Speaker 3:So, first of all, it's never just Kelly Starrett, it's always Kelly and Juliet together. That's always it. But then we exist in a community of incredible thinkers and athletes who are constantly talking, constantly innovating and constantly iterating and sharing their information. So you know like it helps if we're friends with Huberman and Dan Garner and you know Andy Galpin, and I mean all the savage athletes that we're part of. And you know if we go and hang out with Kate Courtney who is, you know, world champion, mountain biker and Olympian. You know we're asking her questions about how she solves nutrition and fueling and what is she? What? What's not essential?
Speaker 3:So I think what's happens is that we're in this sort of constant open loop where we are always asking, we go to conferences, we talk to people, we, you know, we'll be at the Stanford conference on aging, here again around with some of the best thinkers and brightest people thinking about the problems of aging population that isn't doing so well. So we're very much in an open loop and I think as soon as you kind of crystallize and say this is the way the world works, you'll stop innovating and you'll stop being relevant. But the rest of it, man, julie and I just feel like shit. We just know enough now to be welcome at the table, thank goodness.
Speaker 2:There's two things I would add to. I mean, you know, we both and I think it's one of the reasons we work well together do have this sort of abundance mindset, especially when it comes to business. You know, we've worked with so many athletes and so many regular people that what we see is an endless amount of work to be done. So we've never taken this territorial approach to our ideas, our concepts. I mean, we do need to pay our mortgage, so we want to make a little bit of money, but we are not territorial. We have a real sort of growth open mindset we don't punch down.
Speaker 2:We feel like the pie is big. There are a lot of people who need help, there's a lot of work to be done and there's a lot of room for a lot of different people in there, and so I think that that sort of openness has been really. I think we both instinctively had that, but I think if we reflect on it, we reflect on it it has really helped us. You know, sort of be in this community for a long time and then speaking to another podcaster. I mean, to me one of the coolest things we do is run our own podcasts and even if nobody else listens to it, it's so cool that we, kelly and I, we're basically in like graduate school all the time because we get this opportunity to speak to and learn from all these experts in their field. We just had Dr Wendy Troxell, a sleep expert, on our podcast and you know, kelly and I are pretty. We know a lot about sleep and a lot of details about sleep and you know, I still learn like 10 new things I didn't know.
Speaker 3:She's an expert in sleeping with a person.
Speaker 2:Sleeping with a person, and so I just think we sort of have this instinctive thing about the pie is large, there's lots of room for lots of us. And then we're lucky to be able to learn from all these awesome humans.
Speaker 3:I want to add one more thing is that we actually work. We don't just talk about it and there's a lot of people who used to be about it and now just talk about it. And we still work. I'm wearing a Cal Berkeley water polo shirt. I work with.
Speaker 3:I'm a certified or a credentialed physical therapist at Cal to work with all the teams. So now I have 800 athletes that I get to innovate with and work alongside their coaches and get texts from the basketball coach and how do we solve these problems. But also I coach a women's team there, the women's water polo team. I'm just on the staff and I just get to be the performance director of their staff and I don't have to be the head coach, I don't have to be the strength coach, I just come in and I get to work and see what it really is like in the trenches, week after week, month after month from years.
Speaker 3:And if you're not actually doing the thing, it's really easy to be like look at how fancy I am. But if you're in doing the thing, you're going to be caught in a loop where all you're doing is trying to problem solve the unique people and help the unique people in front of you and that changes. I mean, if I went to back to school right now, I don't think I'd be a physical therapist, I'd be a performance psychologist. That's what the world needs right now is more performance psychologists.
Speaker 2:And we're always I mean in addition to Kelly coaching at Cal, like we've always been coaching regular people too. We owned a gym for 17 years. With this other program we run, which is more digital now called the Star Ed System, where we've got hundreds of people in there that we're coaching on like a daily, monthly, weekly basis, and so we're in there and we're learning from them. You know, every population that we work with we're like, we're learning. How can we better serve them? How can we make this information more accessible and attainable? What is working, what isn't working. We're always willing to throw out things that aren't working, always willing to throw out things that aren't working. So it's just a sort of deep adaptability and flexibility and, like Kelly said, we're actually out there interacting with regular people who are trying to do stuff. We're not just talking about it.
Speaker 1:And this episode is brought to you by All Black, everything Performance Energy Drink, the official energy drink of the Athletic Fortitude Podcast, available in Walmart, meijer and select GNC franchise locations. One of my favorite things that you said, particularly about people who work with you, is the curiosity piece, because sometimes people will ask me what is my podcast about? And a lot of times they'll say it's things I'm deeply curious about, in particular, the holistic view of what it is to be a mentally healthy and physically healthy athlete while achieving great you know great things. Right, that's like the predominant, but there's so many different things I'm curious about that. I want to learn about that I can apply and I just had to highlight, because that's awesome One thing that you talk about is the range of people that you work with. What and how, maybe, do you bridge the gap between the professional athlete and maybe the construction worker who just wants to be healthy? Like, how do you bridge that gap between the things that you put in practice?
Speaker 2:I'll start with that a little bit. I think what we've learned over the years is that, regardless of whether you are a superstar athlete or like a mom that lives on our block, most people are not doing the basics and they're not doing them well or consistently. And that's literally true for, you know, a 19 year old NFL player, as it is for a 43 year old mom. You know people. You know the data is pretty clear People don't eat fruits and vegetables. Old mom, you know people. You know the data is pretty clear People don't eat fruits and vegetables 85% of people don't need any.
Speaker 3:You know 70 to 80% of people don't move enough. You can't talk about your pissy tendon if you don't have any micronutrients or fiber on board, bro.
Speaker 2:Right. So it's it's different problems and you know certainly they're there. It's it's a little bit about like tightening the screws on the professional athletes and often you know sort of more like regular populations have bigger. You know they have bigger things or more things to work on, but oftentimes it's the same things and the things that you know. Obviously there's talent and some things that you can't put your finger on with professional athletes and you know the most high level athletes. But you know usually what those professional athletes do really well is a few things really consistently and really well. And then even those athletes often have blind spots, things that they just suck at. If it's a 19-year-old NFL player, chances are their diet isn't going to be that awesome. It depends on the athlete and where they are, but it turns out that it's often the same things just at different levels.
Speaker 3:What I'll say is one of my favorite coaches is a guy named Franz Bosch. He's Dutch and he has a saying. He's like there's more variation in waltzing than there is in sprinting, which means that low load and low speeds doesn't really matter. You can get away with murder, you can do anything you want to do. But at high loads, high force, high speeds you start to see the unique physiology of the human, start to unify. We start to see people run the same.
Speaker 3:We really do need full normative range. You know, if we're talking about power, your foot position matters and so what we start to do is the details, which are less important, become more important. So we don't go just general physical preparation training and fitnessing, we do into sports preparation training, which means we really start to care about what's going on with your foot pressure and we start to care about what your shoulder does, so that those things, those skills, can transfer over. And we're a little bit more meticulous about asking why are you doing that? Why is the body making this decision? But otherwise, as Juliet says, principles drive. I mean just because you're a mutant doesn't mean you're a unique snowflake. I mean you're going to get fatty liver and be diabetic just like the rest of us. You can't eat like a spoiled teenager.
Speaker 3:And we are seeing that now that it's about money, there's a much younger generation of people paying attention because they're like, oh, I want to get in this game and get paid because I'm sacrificing so much. One of my favorite favorite hacks is that when we have professional athletes who start to be able to afford it, they buy themselves a personal chef. Boom. First thing. That changes that their food quality. They pay themselves first. That is the mark of a total pro, and at the very least, we have them work with a professional nutritionist.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you feel like this, but Kelly and I, you're a lot younger than us but I think we both feel like obviously we both had some success as athletes but that we could have been so much better in so many ways at 51 years old, which we both are. Now we have way better habits and practices than we did when we were actual serious athletes in our late teens and twenties. And I don't look back on that and say, oh well, you know the system, you know when you're eating your bagels and salad.
Speaker 2:I, I, I lived like my college rowing career, eating like red vines and mochas Um and, you know, zero recovery tools. I mean, I look back and I don't know if you feel like this at all in your career, but you know, we were so unsophisticated, we had so much left in the tank that we could have taken advantage of as athletes and avoided so much injury and just been so much faster and stronger and better in every way If we had just been doing the things that now I was, like you know, boring 50-year-old recreational athletes Kelly and I do on a daily basis.
Speaker 3:I don't know if you feel that I was the first person to make my friends take creatine when I was 23.
Speaker 1:So I laughed, because when I was high school, even college, my predominant diet was like fruity pebbles and like cinnamon toast waffles.
Speaker 3:And you were still fast as Fook.
Speaker 2:You could have been a little faster. That's the thing.
Speaker 1:So like when. So I was really fast, like that was my thing, like I can run, so for whatever reason, I had the worst diet in the world, like my pregame meals were pizza, so terrible diet. But I joke about all the time like I eat so differently now If I only ate like this when I played. But like a huge transition point happened after, like my playing days were done is really when I changed my diet, you know, changed my sleep patterns now kids have interrupted that a little bit but um, changed my sleep pattern, changed everything. The way I train, focus on mobility and the prs that like I hit like I never, like in a million years, would have thought that I would hit. Like I was jumping 38 and a half inches, I was five, nine and able to dunk a basketball. And this didn't happen until after I was done playing. And I would always say, not in a regret way, but a maturity thing, I wish I knew this 5 to 10 years ago.
Speaker 3:And we didn't.
Speaker 2:We didn't know and we didn't apply. We didn't know either.
Speaker 3:We're starting to see organizations start to care about it too. We're starting to see organizations start to care about it too. I'll highlight an incredible organization we work with called the Niners, and a couple of years ago, the owner, jed York, made the investment in bringing in a full-time chef and feeding the team, and you can get three meals a day at the stadium, and that really allowed athletes to stick around. But, more importantly, it solved the problem of culture. People get to eat together and interact, and you can always sit down with a coach and always be with other D-backs, and one of the things that happened was that we started to pick this up early on, I think in 2010,. I was working with Arsenal and the UK and they just started delivering food to their players and there was a big pushback. They're like these 22-year-old millionaires. Why are we delivering dinner? Because when you deliver vegetables and lean proteins and high-quality starches to 22-year-olds, that's what they eat, they eat that yeah.
Speaker 3:Otherwise it's chips, pizza and curry and curry battles. We'll default to our training if you don't know any better. So I think we're seeing organizations start to see it. I want to tell an anecdotal story. We have a physician, dr Nick DiNubili, who has been president of the knee council. He's been on the presidential physical fitness council with Arnold.
Speaker 3:He's a G and he would talk about doing ACL repairs in kids a long time ago 2000s, 90s and he'd have to pull this drill and he'd just drill the crap out of this rock hard bone and then, in the middle of like the 2000s, he started to be able to turn the coring device by hand because the bones were so soft and so he didn't need the drill anymore, like the drill was too much to go through the bone. And so what we're seeing is this systems degradation, where we're suddenly not loading, we're not sleeping, and it's no one's fault Kids aren't insidious, right but the environment is set up to make all these just choices that are harder on the physiology of the human. And so suddenly you're not mineralizing, you don't eat enough to mineralize, you're not loading, you don't sleep and recover, and guess what happens when you tear your ACL. Man, it's not an accident, that that happened and, man, if your bones aren't rock hard, that repair is never going to be the same.
Speaker 3:Saying things like we just came out two weeks ago 23% of kids sleep eight hours or more 23%. The rest of the kids are getting less than eight hours. There's not a single evidence-based journal on the planet, no data point that says that a growing body and it's definitely an athlete is less than eight hours of sleep, especially when you're probably throwing away some of that anyway. So you are basically saying, hey, I'm trying to be elite, I'm trying to manage this pain, but you're not sleeping, you're distracted, your nutrition is shit and what we can say is the human being is so robust and capable that it can still be extraordinary, but you're making it a lot harder.
Speaker 1:So someone like me at one point in my athletic career where I needed to make dramatic change and make it relatively quickly, how can you synthesize a process that doesn't feel overwhelming and can be applied immediately and get those progressions that you need?
Speaker 3:Well, we have synthesized this into a concept called Base Camp. We call it the eight. So who hasn't heard at this point of eating one gram of protein per pound body weight? Thank you, tiktok. I got so many kids at my daughter's high school were like yo, mr Starrett, how do I get gains? How do I have the glutes, mr Starrett? So you know number one. Number two is man. You got to sleep eight hours. You got to be in bed for eight hours, like, and there's no excuse you have to do that. And let me tell you our daughter kids are night owls and there's systemic resistance to this. California is one of the few states that actually passed a law that middle school and high school can't start before 8.30. And a kid getting up at 6 am is the equivalent of an adult waking up at 4 am. Let me just say that again.
Speaker 2:How do you feel as an adult when you wake up at 4 am? You feel like death right.
Speaker 3:And so one of the things we do is with our 16-year-old daughter. She's a night owl. She stays up till about 11, but she sleeps till 7, 15. And I make her breakfast to go. Instead of making her wake up early and eat breakfast, I make her breakfast to go so that we can always. And when she's smoked, she uses a whoop, which really helps tell her when she needs to go to bed. I encourage all our young high school and college athletes to get a whoop, because it really does tell them hey, you're not eating enough and you're not sleeping enough. Exactly right. Whoop has changed the game by changing that behavior. And for our college athletes, they're like man, I had one beer and my HRV sucked and I was like isn't that weird?
Speaker 2:Are we trying to win a national championship right now? Maybe Don't drink right now, let's drink after the season. But I mean just to go back to your question a little bit, I mean we have sort of developed this thing we call base camp, which is lay in bed for eight hours a night, eat 0.8 grams of protein, eat 800 grams of fruits and vegetables, walk 8,000 steps a day, sit on the floor, do some mobility work and go outside. That's our base camp.
Speaker 2:You know you got to do those things, then you can train on top of that From a habit standpoint and and, by the way, these are things that like I don't care whether you're the starting quarterback of the 49ers or you're like a dad, you know um, a retired athlete dad in Pittsburgh Like these are things all humans need to be doing, and I think some people do some of those things you know some, some people do some of those things better.
Speaker 2:I think everybody needs to sort of take an evaluation of like what am I doing well and what am I not doing well in that base camp set of practices and then start with one thing I mean Kelly likes to suggest to people from a sleep perspective, like, imagine you just, if sleep is sort of a difficult area for you and you have a little kid, so you're excused. But generally speaking, if sleep is a difficult area for you, Fred Water had a little kid, so you're excused, but generally speaking if sleep is a difficult Fred Warner had a little kid.
Speaker 3:He's still slaying.
Speaker 2:How about go lay in bed 30 minutes earlier? Have that be a single like. If you learn nothing else, like, go to bed, go lay in bed 30 minutes earlier. If you add that up, what is it In two weeks? You're getting a whole full night of more sleep in two weeks if you just go lay down 30 minutes earlier. So I think that we really overcomplicate a lot of this stuff. I think you just need to lay in bed. You know. You need to eat some food that you like. It needs to have some protein and vegetables. You've got to walk a lot. I don't care if you're training, still you need to walk. You need to move your body a lot.
Speaker 1:You got to sit on the floor.
Speaker 2:Do some mobility work, like you know it. Do some mobility work. It's not that complicated, but I think people do need to take an inventory of what they're doing well and what they're doing poorly, and then just pick one thing and start with that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think, juliet and I feel really strongly that we've created an industry and I think it's like a trillion dollar wellness industry of like what's your morning routine, what's the gimmicks that you do all day long. We want to strip that back. We want you to just be with your family and your friends, go to training and then work this in so that it's not a thing that you have to ever worry about anymore. We're talking about we want you to sit on the floor for 20 or 30 minutes while you watch TV in the night. You can't do that. You don't watch TV for 20 minutes, just sit on the ground. And so what we're always looking at is how do we remove things and how do we make more expansive? Notice that we haven't talked about not eating sugar. We don't care, but show us you've hit your protein minimums and you're getting enough fruits and vegetables, and then that chocolate chip cookie or that ice cream just doesn't matter as much.
Speaker 1:Do you think it's more beneficial to add habits or subtract habits? So I think a good point you just brought up, like do I reduce sugar or do I add protein?
Speaker 2:I think the answer is it depends. I think people are often adding what I think would be like fake health habits. You know they add in. You know I'm not saying these things don't have value, but you know I had a friend who's like I'm so great, I'm waking up at 5.30 every day so that I can do my gratitude journal and do X, y and Z thing, and I was like literally there's no habit or practice that is worth missing an hour of sleep for. Like literally nothing on earth. There is never a reason you should wake up an hour earlier, you should cut out your sleep from eight hours to seven so that you can write in a gratitude journal. That's just one of those things where it's like I have no problem with a gratitude journal, like that's great and you know, some things work better than other people. But I think we're doing a lot of fake stuff and so I think we need to start subtracting the fake stuff and adding in the stuff that actually matters, and it's those things we talked about.
Speaker 3:We went to the YPO, which is the young presence organization big health fitness conference this summer, Huberman's there, jay Shetty Atiyah they're all there, all the gangsters are there, and we talked to so many people whose health practice is laying in a red bed, you know, and then taking a mitochondrial supplement Meanwhile don't load, don't breathe hard, don't eat, don't exercise, can't flex their hips, and we're like, what are you doing? Like, listening to Huberman is not a physical practice. So what we want to do is make sure that we're straight up about you're lying Like. We are at a place now where we're very clear. If you come in, I need to see that you're dealing with these things and you're managing these things.
Speaker 3:Otherwise it's just a bunch of bullshit. And these things and you're managing these things. Otherwise it's just a bunch of bullshit. And you are pretending that you're greatly sophisticated instead of just doing the basics over and over and over and over and over. I mean, if you're going to work with me, we're going to squat every week. You're going to like we're squatting again, yep, and we're going to squat to the end of time. You know, we're just, we're still squatting, because that is one of those basics.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think and what I will say is that there's a lot of this sort of gimmicky stuff in fitness that that's fun.
Speaker 2:Like Kelly and I love to sit in our cold plunge and you know, people send us like random fitness devices, Like we love all this stuff too, and sometimes, you know, for for those of us who are, you know, kind of hitting the basics, it can make this sort of fitness journey more fun and and keep us engaged and entertained. But what I would say is what needs to be stripped out for people is all this fake stuff. And then you're allowed to add those things back in when you're at base camp, when you're checking the box on that list of things we said earlier on a consistent basis, and then you're like, okay, I'm slaying the basics right now and I'm just getting bored and I want little gimmicky thing Like great, let's add in a cold plunge or let's, you know, add in a mitochondrial supplement or whatever.
Speaker 3:But if you don't even talk about your feelings with your friends, you don't have any close relationships. Your partner is like you're a shitty dad. Like sort your house first. Then we can talk about like should you, should you, you know, should you squat or should it be unilateral? Like there's so much misplaced precision in the world. We call it. Like the fitness place is. Really it's an easy place to make progress.
Speaker 3:Bonder chuck is one of the like the most like celebrated track coaches in the history of the world hammer thrower and um, you know, one of the things that bonder Chuck says is like man, it's a lot easier to go in the in the weight room and add a half kilo to the bar and be like I made progress today. He said what you need to do is go throw and like you need to throw more and like go do the hard stuff consistently instead of the things where you feel like I can make you this easy progress, and that literally apply that to all of the things we're talking about here and and I just we want to. We sound negative, but like your body is incredible. Your brain is the most sophisticated structure in the universe attached to a body. That's the most sophisticated thing in the known universe, with these complex psycho-emotional relationships Like this is like to be a human being is the greatest gift on the planet. This is like to be a human being is the greatest gift on the planet.
Speaker 2:Respect yourself and you'll be surprised at how your body can turn and turn and turn and be there for you. I also would just add that you know you've mentioned and we sort of started this conversation about the psychological piece is that if you are doing these basic habits, you actually are creating a ton more capacity as a human because you have sort of fed and nourished the body the way it needs to be, and we are of the mind that that will have significant downstream mental health benefits, that it will have the benefit of having more capacity because you're going to show up and be able to think a clear thought at work and be more creative and innovative.
Speaker 3:Show up for your family after work.
Speaker 2:Show up for your family, be a better partner, Like we think it's it's so, yeah, it's. It's not easy. It's hard to actually consistently do these things, but what it creates is more joy, more capacity, more positive mental health, and throwing away your black spatula is not going to do that for you.
Speaker 1:This is really consistent with a former guest I had. He's the first, and he may still be the only, gold medalist from the US to win like a BMX gold medalist from the US to win a BMX gold medalist in the Olympics and he talks about everyone wants to be great at the 1%, but nobody wants to master the 99%, which are the basics, and that was his competitive advantage. Obviously he had natural talent. You get the point. That's expected.
Speaker 3:If you're at that level, you have the talent or you don't. But what keeps you there is not the same thing as what gets you there, and that we again, our goal is to apply those same lessons to our family and our community. We think the highest calling of sport is to transform society, and that starts with my household. It's like full stop. Transform society, and that starts with my household. It's like full stop. Otherwise, sport is just circus and we're all like, hey, who's got the coolest lion juggling flamethrower thing? That's super cool. But we think that this is the last lab on place. If you want to see all the revolutions in sports, nutrition, right, that's funneled into better nutrition diet. It's all come out of sport. Like you cannot say that. Anything that we're seeing in mainstream media around nutrition, that all was born probably out of, like, the tour de france so you guys talked about this a little bit earlier.
Speaker 1:You've both experienced some serious you know trauma. How has you?
Speaker 3:mean from our families or our niece.
Speaker 1:Both.
Speaker 2:But how has that changed your viewpoint in relationship with resilience?
Speaker 2:I mean, I will say I'm not going to talk about myself.
Speaker 2:I'm going to talk about Kelly for a second, because he's a obviously long time, extremely amazing, sought after, like world-class physical therapist and then he had to have his knee replaced and I think that that was a real sort of like hit to his identity, even though he had to have his knee replaced, by the way, for because of a catastrophic ski crash Um, not because his mobility methods didn't work, as some people on the internet might've suggested, dicks Catastrophic knee crushing incident that resulted seven.
Speaker 2:He was able to manage it for seven years and then had a knee replacement. But I think in my own observation, it has made him a better practitioner and a more empathetic practitioner, because he's actually understood what it took to be able to be resilient and rehab from a really epic knee situation, both having the knee injury and managing it and the chronic pain for seven years, and then also the surgery and the recovery, which was long and tedious. So I think I don't even know if that answers your question, but what I see is that he was, you know, transformed and improved, I think, in his empathy for his own patients after actually having to go through that. Do you agree?
Speaker 3:Well, I don't know if I had what I would say is you weren't unempathetic.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying that, I just think you were able to view it differently.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for sure, and I think one of the things that we're, julie and I, have been huge fans and advocates of is test, retest, share, and when you have come through something that is potentially life altering, and, on the other side, by working the plan, on the other side you're like wow, I came through and if I can do it because I'm not even a mutant like you should see all my mutant friends Like, if I can do it, then I'm sure that you can do it.
Speaker 3:I think that really did give you know credence that, like, what we need to do is work the plan, and when I mean work the plan, I mean you have until the end of your days to work the plan, and some days, you're going to suck at it. You'll have little kids, and they'll wake you up, and you're going to eat a little chicken McNugget once in a while and, a little finish, a little mac and cheese, and that's probably not great for you, but, um, you know, like I think what ends up happening, though, is when you just consistently love to train with people, love to move your bodies, enjoy and play, and put those things first, and you love to cook. We see that cooking and eating together as a competitive advantage, that when you learn to cook and you learn to serve your family and your friends, again I mean come at you, you're unbeatable at that point.
Speaker 2:I'm going to tell you a quick story, real quick too. So when I was 46, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, caught it very, very early phase and had to have a double mastectomy and reconstruction, which is a big back-to-back couple of surgeries. And what I noticed almost immediately after having surgery is that all these people kept coming up to me and saying, oh, like you're just a mutant, I could never heal as quickly as you. And you know, you look perfectly fine and it's three weeks out and, oh my God, you were able to do a pull-up at six weeks out. Like you know, obviously they just sort of like, put me into this bucket of like you're over here, I'm not like you, and I thought that was such an interesting reaction because I am like them. In fact I'm the one who got cancer.
Speaker 2:So, like, what are we even talking about? I'm not super resilient, at least in that respect. But what I did, what I knew, is that I went into that diagnosis being strong and having muscle mass and having eaten some vegetables and fruits and knowing I needed to prioritize my sleep. So right, I had mastered those basics. We talked about going into the surgery and then I, exactly like Kelly said, I worked the plan when I got out of surgery. We just diligently, you know, use the H wave and walked a lot and slept and ate vegetables and like, just did simple stuff worked the plan and worked the plan. So I don't have any kind of superhero healing capacity. I just heal the way, the rate of a normal human. But because I had this resilient physical foundation and because I worked the plan, I was able to have this. What appeared to the whole rest of the world is this insane outcome? I don't think I had an insane outcome.
Speaker 3:I just worked the plan. One of the reasons we like the word durable versus longevity is that, as you've experienced, the hits are going to come and you play a perfect game and you get dealt a bad hand, you get cancer, you're going to get sick, someone in your family is going to get sick. So what we're trying to do is say, hey, how do we create a really, really stable, capable? We create a really, really stable, capable, durable person that can take a hit and that hit isn't just transferred and just destroys all things Suddenly. I don't know how to exercise, I don't know how to eat, all my relationships fall apart. Our contention is that if you're living on this planet long enough, the hits are coming.
Speaker 1:One thing you said early in the show that I love and it applies here at least from the psychological perspective is we're really good at telling ourselves stories, and I've reframed any obstacle that I've gone through.
Speaker 1:As this is a part of my story and if it doesn't have a clear view of what it means, I take it upon me to write it into my own story, Like, okay, I'll give this meaning, I'll define a meeting for X, Y or Z. And I also say that there's two points in my life where I would be at my own version of rock bottom when my career ended and after this major surgery I had, where I'm trying to avoid a knee replacement at a young age because my wife works. So it was at a point where I would be downstairs in a leg machine in the basement for six to eight hours a day because I wasn't allowed to move my leg. I had to have a machine do it for me. And when you sit there alone you guys talk about the relationship piece, like to sit there in isolation in your own thoughts and not be able to do anything is one of the worst, worst mental spaces I had ever been in.
Speaker 1:And so the only thing that I knew how to do is A start storytelling and. B just pick up my phone and just start calling people. Talk to whoever see who's available, build those relationships.
Speaker 3:That's the worst rehab I've ever heard of, by the way. That's terrible.
Speaker 1:Terrible. But so the resilience piece is interesting because there's the physical I call it the physical mental resilience, but then there's the mental, emotional resilience that you have to build with it.
Speaker 3:That's the hard stuff and you know you've got to establish relationships. I mean Juliet and I. You know, about 13 years ago, 14 years ago, juliet was like, hey, I think you need to get into therapy, talk about how messed up your family is and how angry you are, and I was like it's probably a good idea, I want to stay married. And now I have these things called feelings and they're super gnarly and they get in the way all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he was like I learned how to disassociate for so long and it was so convenient because I didn't feel anything he's like now, I feel feelings.
Speaker 3:This is very difficult. What is that feeling? And you're like, you're anxious, and I'm like, oh thanks, I love the old Kelly.
Speaker 1:I'm actually very curious what is your relationship like with your feelings? How do?
Speaker 3:you manage your emotions Well. I tell it, after having a year of counseling for myself, I got real good at being able to let me correct that I'm better at talking about my feelings, you know, and you know, one of the things that I'm just putting forward, without kind of getting into the weeds here, is you better have a plan and you better have some places where you can be vulnerable and places where you can, you know, seek feedback and get feedback. And I don't think we have that. I don't think we create those. You know like, yeah, the guys you played with or you paddled with or you know they're your brothers, have you really had vulnerable moments with them? Can you really talk about struggle?
Speaker 3:And I'll tell you that the research does not support that. You know I have these bros who I do, you know, go to war with comma. They're suffering. I don't know. They've never talked about it. We never create these opportunities where it really gets. So part of you know there's this. I have come to realize that in performance, psych and in sort of team performance, particularly being a member of a group and belonging is a competitive advantage and we have to be very systematic and overt about what that means and how to create those relationships and nurture those relationships. And we as much. I'll point out the amazing work of Brett Bartholomew of Art of Coaching. The amazing work of Brett Bartholomew of Art of Coaching, the amount of time he spends getting people to talk and to do drills where we actually practice that. I just think it's this massively untapped potential to become great.
Speaker 2:I think we also Kelly has gotten better at this as well but I think we both realize, at least from a relationship perspective, that we can't also rely 100. I mean, we're like bros and best friends and could literally just be on a desert island together and never get bored of each other. But I think we also do appreciate and realize that I need to have my own friends and he needs to have his friends, and that we at least need to have that outlet. One of Kelly's best friends lives across the street and they sit in the sauna together and they just talk about whatever they need to talk about. And you know, I think that that outlet for both of us in different ways, is really important.
Speaker 3:And, by the way, today is our 25 year anniversary hanging out. We met the world championships 25 years ago 25 years today in Chile I was a little bit skinnier and I had white, bleached white hair. White hair, yeah.
Speaker 1:My, oh my, how things change. The bleach hair is gone, but the skinny kid is gone.
Speaker 3:When I met Juliet, I weighed 187, and now I'm only 230.
Speaker 1:Let's see when I met my wife, I was 160 pounds. I'm now 180 pounds, so I've gained the weight too. There you go, there you go.
Speaker 2:It's all muscle.
Speaker 1:How do you maintain, then, your resilience when you work with your emotions? How do you continue to maintain a healthy relationship with resilience and continue to build upon it?
Speaker 2:I think we both do have. I am more of a worrier than Kelly and so sometimes it's his burden as my husband to like manage my worrying self, and sometimes I'm annoying. But I think at the root though, we both are ultimately optimistic people at our core and I think we both believe in some way, shape or form, it's going to work out, and I think that that does drive both of us and keep our mental health pretty intact. And I think we also try to bring the energy to the world that we want to experience, which is we're stoked, we have a positive vibe in our household. We try to maintain a positive vibe. Sometimes we go out in the world. It's this weird piece of feedback we get from people at conferences or whatever, and people are like you guys are so stoked and we are like what? That's like?
Speaker 3:a weird thing we're not trying to like love, bomb you no, no, no, we're not putting on an act and we're not some weird fake thing.
Speaker 2:But, like you know, we actually genuinely are like stoked about our kids and our life and our household and our friends and what we get to do for a living, and that's sort of the approach that we take and I think part of that is cultivated. It's not like fake that we're like, okay, I'm going to put on this, I'm going to feel shitty on the inside, but put on the stoke. But I do think we've cultivated like we want to have a household that feels positive and we want to be around people who are positive and we want to be grateful for, like, all the awesome gifts we've had in our life.
Speaker 3:And then we go to bed at the same time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:We get up at the same time, and then we eat some vegetables, which reinforces that. I cannot stress just that sometimes underlying all of this complexity is real, real simple. I mean, if you want to tee up our kids, just ask. We just have a house full of ingredients.
Speaker 2:The thing that when our kids were little, people would say to us like, oh, I don't understand your kids, they don't have tantrums and they're friendly and nice, would say to us like, oh, I don't understand Like your kids, like they don't have tantrums and they're like friendly and nice. And we used to laugh because we don't. We don't think we, we don't think in our think we're, you know, amazing parents. I'm sure we've messed up our kids in myriad of ways. Um, we'll find out. You know, it's an ongoing experiment.
Speaker 2:But one of the things that we did and that we were real militant about when our kids were little was making sure they slept enough and slept in the correct environment, and that we said no to a lot of stuff that was fun, so that our kids could sleep, because we appreciated that, and so that made our lives better, because we would wake up the next day and got to hang out with two little kids who were also stoked, because, guess what, it's a one-to-one. If your kid's having a tantrum on the floor of Safeway, 99%, sure they're under-rested, like kids who are well-rested aren't having tantrums on the floor of Safeway period, like they're just not. So we knew, as we both instinctively knew, as parents, like the number one bang for our buck we could get, as parents, was making sure our kids slept, slept enough, slept at the right time, slept in their own bed. We were militant about that and it reaped massive rewards in terms of our family.
Speaker 3:joy, colin, we could keep talking about this. We're hosting a huge training at our gym here tomorrow and we are feeling under the gun, but I love this conversation so much.
Speaker 1:No, I appreciate you. Last point is that made me feel so good, my wife and I are super militant about when our kids go to sleep.
Speaker 2:We say no to everything. We are the strict parents Keep it up and keep it up and like make sure they keep napping, Keep them napping.
Speaker 1:Good thing. I'm very bullheaded and my wife is too, so peer pressure won't get us out of it. I'll tell you that.
Speaker 2:No, it's fine. Yeah, be okay to say no. I appreciate you guys so much for coming on today oh it's so awesome to talk to you and get to know you a little bit. It's really cool.
Speaker 1:If people want to reach you, they want to get out to you. If you have anything that you want to promote, please take the next 30 seconds to a minute to do so.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, if you want to follow us on Instagram, we're at the Ready State. I'm at Juliette Starrett. We have what we think is a really cool, really inclusive coaching program called the Starrett System and we help people implement those habits and practices we were talking about. That we think are the most essential. So I think that's what we're excited about right now. But, yeah, follow us on Instagram. We're at thereadystatecom and mostly on Instagram. That's where we spend our too much time.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thank you, guys so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, colin, appreciate you guys.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, nice weather out here, see you guys. Thank you.