Kelly Starrett - The Performance Paradigm

In this conversation, Beau and Kelly discuss the evolving landscape of health and wellness, emphasizing the importance of community engagement, environmental factors, and the need for behavior change. It highlights the significance of nutrition, the role of youth sports, and the necessity for structural changes to promote better health outcomes. The discussion also touches on the adaptability of humans and the importance of making small, impactful changes in daily life. Ultimately, the conversation serves as a call to action for individuals and communities to take charge of their health and well-being.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Current Endeavors

00:39 Shifts in Consciousness and Health Practices

03:51 Population Health and Community Engagement

06:35 The Role of Change Agents in Health

09:27 Understanding Human Complexity and Health

11:47 Nutrition and Environmental Mismatches

16:26 Streamlining Health Choices

20:05 Cultural Shifts and Behavior Change

27:27 Grassroots Change in Health Awareness

30:14 The Importance of Nutrition and Sleep for Kids

33:03 Reconceptualizing Youth Sports

37:39 Small Changes for Big Impact

42:45 Evolving Perspectives on Health Practices

49:39 The Complexity of Health Research

Transcript

Beau Beard (00:01.425)

So yeah, it's good to virtually meet you. I know we've never met but I followed your work for a long time so that's why want to have you on the show and I'm going to go ahead and start recording because we always start talking and then you wish you would have recorded some of the jibber-jabber up front. Are we on video too or is it just audio? I won't use the video. We tried it before and everybody bitched and moaned because they're like do split screen it's weird we don't like it. like cool let's just listen to it then. So yeah no video.

Pick your nose and do whatever you So yeah, we're gonna dive in man. You ready? Do it. So I don't think the guest today needs much of introduction, at least if you're in my field, he doesn't. So I'm not gonna have him walk us down his storied past of where he is today, but I do wanna hear what you are doing as of the past few months, because I know you're always involved in different things. So if you can just give us a brief hello, tell us what you've been up to, what's going on, what's...

putting a fire to your feet every morning when you get out of bed? Well, thank you so much for having me. We're doing two things. One, think we've seen a wholesale shift in people's consciousness. We've hit a tipping point. Internet, general fitness community. think I'm watching people do behavior changes in my community around their nutrition. We're seeing Matt Walker and his book on sleep has been changed.

game changer for people. So the next piece I think is really for us continues to be about how do we better serve? How do we stream our own information and contents? We're in the middle of a gigantic redesign with our ecosystem because when we started this thing, for example, we didn't think we'd make 5,000 videos without we make a couple of videos. And now we have like the library of Alexandria, which is a little bit confusing for people. Don't let it burn down, man. I know. The scrolls are stuffed in the rabbit holes.

And, um, but really we're really looking at a population health issue. How, how do we take what we are understanding to be much better practices in let's call it the health and wellness space industry. And then how do we actually get those things into the people's hands that need it? So for a long time, for example, we've always taken this approach that, you know, sports and high performance environments was our laboratory to take those concepts so that we could spin them back.

Beau Beard (02:27.672)

Cause we really pressure tested, you know, as, as a diversion in physical therapy, there's a definitely a bigger push to treat the whole person again. Right. And, and there's been a real resurgence in thinking and talking about things like chronic pain by making mentioning that we've got to look at the whole person. Biopsycho and social, how's that person's stress? How's their role in their environment and community? How did they.

How they think, are their preconceived notions? Have we medicalized? You really common human processes. But what's interesting is that, you know, that approach is vital and important because it pulls us out of the old, you know, it's all mechanics. You know, your posture sucks, that's why your neck hurts, you know? And understanding that humans are really, really resilient and adaptable people. But if you're a coach or have ever worked in...

a group setting or dynamic and performance, you've had to talk about your nutrition and sleep and stress and do my athletes feel supported and loved? Otherwise we couldn't get those things out of them. And so on the one hand, I'm like, Hey, once again, look what we've already learned in high performance society, high performance environments, whether we're talking the military, where we're talking, you know, NFL, if we're looking at basketball or, or Olympic athletes.

And what we should continue to do is take those lessons because there really are stress tested around what we think are the most durable shapes, what are best eating practices, how do we get go from high stress to recovery back to high stress again? How do we manage that? And we're starting to see those practices bleed into the great society. And so one of the things that we're continuing to work on is, okay, we think we have a much better hold, a much more cogent

model about what is sustainability for an average person in a busy life. And now let's go ahead and take those practices and make sure that we're actually giving them to people who don't self identify as fitness junkies or athletes, right? That means my mother-in-law, that means my children. And so, you know, we're, we, we have a nonprofit called Stand Up Kids. We've been doing it for about seven years now. We're in our seventh year and it's a, we try to get kids out of sedentary desks.

Beau Beard (04:45.208)

traditional work desks at school into much more dynamic environments where they can sit on the ground and work, where they can have a desk in space that's heightened for them for standing. It's individually adjusted in place to put their foot. They can perch, they can fidget, right? Re-imagining the environment. And right now we're engaged in some long-term research with UCSF over a two-year study trying to say, hey, look, we're figuring out that there's definitely a mismatch between sort of the modern environment and who we are as

people. And the problem is that we're so durable and we're such extraordinary people and such an extraordinary organism that we can buffer a lot. But we have to do a, we have to do kind of a couple things. The one hand is we have to say, okay, most of us are probably going to be a hundred years old. mean, if you ascribe to you vault Harari modern medicine, you're probably 120 years old if you're in this generation and

who we are for this back half of the 40, 50, 60, 70 years we have left really is gonna come to matter even more. And what it means is that we need to start kind of playing in this long game and we're seeing the complex interaction of sedentaryness and stress and poor sleep habits and sleep density. We're seeing even the dyes and perfumes. There's some new research that really the dyes and perfumes that we're using are hugely endocrine disruptive and that they're part of the

part of the problem. It's not just the problem, part of the problem of this whole complex in Mail. You know, I just ran in my community. have a couple of friends whose kids have tried to commit suicide. They're 13 and 14 years old. And we know that kids suicide rates are up 50 % under 18 in the last, you know, three or four years. So there's something going on with this sort of modern age. And I'm not saying we should pine for the Paleolithic age, but

We've got to come back to what our first principles and what we're spending a lot of our time now is working at a population health level to try to streamline it and make it easier and more digestible for people so they can be a hundred years old because that's our birthright. know, first of all, I think Kelly employed some spies because he's literally checking off questions on my list as we go. But what I, what I kind of postulated this podcast to be about was kind of the future of health, not healthcare. and,

Beau Beard (07:05.9)

The first thing that we have to touch on before I want to unpack this thought of moving back to a time versus moving forward in time and adaptation and evolution. But what we have to unpack is you're a change agent within our field and then within the greater healthcare field overall and then within hopefully the just human population is these ideas, you know, matriculate and percolate into other areas. But why sometimes I ask myself this question. I want to know if you feel this way ever.

Sometimes when we're in the athletic realm, it seems kind of for not right we we're getting these athletes to do things that are very specific for them which they get an enjoyment out of and it is sometimes in the vein of health but then we talk about hey I'm trying to get somebody to stop using this perfume in our first world country to have a non-endocrine issue when somebody you know in Bangladesh can't even you know a Can't even get their hands on perfume let alone clean water. So do you ever kind of feel like man?

why did I choose this, first of all, athletic performance realm, then take that into gen pop. And how do you go about saying, you know, this is what I'm using to change the world and this is why I think it's so important. Well, I really appreciate the sort of the dissonance that you feel there because, know, at some point I'm like, wow, let me just, you know, at San Francisco, did I just help some upper middle class person PR on their triathlon? Is that enough? And what I'll say is, first and foremost, is that I love

physical culture, I love play, this is who we are as human beings. So, you know, why do we have a nervous system? So we can move through the environments, can sense change and play and environmental play is really the best way that the body, which is a complex system, self-tunes itself, which becomes more robust. So at a cellular level, we have this notion of mechano-transduction, which means that if I want my Achilles to express its Achilles self,

at a cellular level, I have to load it. Okay, well, what does that mean? Granularly means I have to have mechanical input into the Achilles and foot in order for those cells to express collagen in a healthy normal way so that I have a system that's anti fragile. And when we say anti fragile, what we're saying is a system that not only can handle stress, but actually gets better because of stress, right? That's an anti fragile system. We're not just interested in, can you withstand the stress? We're interested in the body is

Beau Beard (09:34.764)

as an agent where it can handle these things, but for these things, actually become better, better organized. So, you know, I, for whatever reason, adore exercising, adore training, adore sports, but you cannot be in that space or in this field and not talk about sleep and stress and nutrition and what you suddenly, you know, it was not my dream to lecture adults about their crappy posture.

Right? That's, that's a dead end conversation that doesn't inspire anyone that, you know, there's no research to support posture cause like, what are we talking about? What we're talking about is human beings are in doubt. I mean, if we take a step back and look at, and this is a book from Adam Rutherford, who wrote a book called, a brief history of everyone who ever lived. And it's really a modern snapshot of all the genetics and genomics and epigenetics out there. Like what's real.

What is fantasy around genetics? Your genetics do not tell you what kind of white wine you should drink. That's a bad use of genetics, Ancestry DNA tells you where some of your people lived temporarily. That's all it tells you. It reminds us that a thousand years ago, if you're a white person in America, we have a common ancestor a thousand years ago. If you're on the planet, we have a common ancestor 3,000 years ago. So the genetic piece is interesting, but

What he says in that book is the human brain is the most sophisticated structure in known universe. Just let that sink in for a second. And it's attached to the most complex, psychosocial, emotional animal the world has ever seen. So you have the human being, which is the most complicated, sophisticated structure and complex theory ever. And you think that taking a turmeric shot and biohacking, it's not, it doesn't work that way.

It's just the body is too complex. And what we then have to come down to are what are first principles? What are the pieces that allow people to have access to their native and birthright function in their capacities? So to your conversation, hey, I don't have to be lecturing people in, you know, who are food insecure about what shampoo they're using, but that is a

Beau Beard (12:00.492)

part of this conversation of saying, look, what's best for the human? Well, subjecting yourself to really crazy dyes and perfumes in your, in your shampoo and in your dishwasher on your laundry detergent. Maybe we could do without that because you're putting that up against the biggest organ in the body, the skin all day long for hours and hours and hours. No, why aren't you walking at all during the day? Why, know, what are the things that make us human? You know, we,

my wife is much more into nutrition than I am. but I am you know, you have to speak this conversation. And because we can't talk about your health, you know, the research indicates that we used to probably eat 60 to 80 kinds of vegetables in a year, right? We just had a lot of diversity and everyone knows that eat the rainbow. That's not that's, you know, that's old school as it gets. The average

human being probably eats, you if you're a ninja, you probably eat 20 vegetables in a year. And if you're a typical person, eat three kinds of vegetables, you know? And what we're seeing is that a lot of the things that we took for granted have just been suddenly changed underneath us, right? Sun exposure. I mean, let me give you an example. My kid was born, she was a preemie and you know, she was born at UCSF, pretty good hospital, born like six weeks early. And they're like, okay, we're discharging you.

but you need to give her these vitamins. And I was like, my kid drinks mother's milk. Like she doesn't need vitamins. And they're like, no, no, no, she has to these vitamins. And I was like, look at me in the eye and tell me that mother's milk is incomplete neonatal nutrition. And they were like, it's not, it is. And I was like, what's the problem? And they were like, well, white people in San Francisco don't go in the sun. That's the problem. And I was like, there's no vitamin D in the mother's milk.

So if I expose my kid to some vitamin D, that's enough and they're like, yes, but people don't do that. So could you please take these vitamins? And I was like, no. So what we're seeing is we want to keep coming up with complex technical solutions for systems and environments that really could be streamlined so we can give people their life back. We could streamline and make it easier. You should walk a little bit. you got to sleep.

Beau Beard (14:19.47)

You know, do you drink any water? Yes or no. you know, how do you, when you're a super stress case, what do you do? And what we find right now is, you know, people are self-medicating at a real, an alarming rate, you know, and at our highest levels of sports and performance, we see it. It's Adderall and Ambien. I can't sleep. I take an Ambien. I wake up. Can't wake up. Take an Adderall. And if you're thinking to yourself, Ambien and Adderall, that's crazy. Well, welcome to the major league baseball, to football, all of this. And at the same time,

What I'll say is if that doesn't feel crazy or that still feels crazy to you, do you drink wine and do you drink coffee? Because that's the same thing. And what we're seeing right now is that people are really struggling to turn off, to feel good and awake, to feel tired. And so we're really seeing a mismatch. then because the human is so tolerant, it's difficult for us to appreciate the outcomes because we live in the now and maybe out in the future in front of us is a month.

But really we're talking about what this looks like in 10 years and 20 years, 30 years and 40 years. And it's really difficult for us to, to manage those things the best we can. Right. So we need to do a better job of, of integrating these practices because we understand them to give us access to our physiology today and protect our physiology for tomorrow. And that's still difficult because it's difficult to do research on the most complex structure in the human, in the, in the known universe, which is the human body.

with a multitude of variables. Yeah. So when we talk about, like what you said about like, it's almost the Joel Salatin of the human body, right? Let the Achilles be the Achilles, the Achilles-ness and then you got to talk about humanness. Like what does that mean? And that is changing and that gets tough because what you said of this kind of looking back with a soft glow on, know, know, Pleistocene and whatever we want to say of, you know, the we lived before.

But what we have to realize is like we are one of the reason we've been successful is our adaptability and we're kind of trying to adapt. And that's what are your opinions? Like obviously environmental mismatches are a huge player in this. But instead of thinking our environment needs to shift back to this, I live in a log cabin, I'm going to go throw and I'm going to just stare at a pond or you know, whatever it is. Like how do we get people to realize like it's not that it's.

Beau Beard (16:44.366)

Like you said, we're trying to streamline. We're trying to make sure that you don't have to add 10 things. You may take away 10 things, you know? So what do you find yourself telling people more often than not of, hey, these are the biggest five things we need to do. This is how you're going to manipulate your environment better. One that we may have actually made an infographic on our site called the 24 hour adaptation cycle. And really what the idea was, you know, we think in this 24 hour cycle, that's how we're wired. We always evolve that way. I mean, so

It's our physiology, it's our chemistry. And what we saw in there was, hey, you know, I'm not, was just having a conversation with someone where I was like, you know what, human beings are awesome. And it's really nice that I'm not gonna die of a tooth abscess. Like I really appreciate that, right? I don't wanna go back 100 years. That's not, know, people forget that the Spanish flu in World War I, right around World War I, killed more people than World War I. Just like 100 million people, right? That was less than, like, that's 100 years ago.

the flu wiped out a huge chunk of the population of the world. So that was yesterday. And I like today. I like my phone. like, but we have to understand that I, just think we're in a time where we're trying to create equilibrium again with this, you know, and the example is I have two daughters and I'll tell you that, you know, I have to protect them against things like Snapchat, you know, and that, you know, these are powerful, incredible technologies, but I would have abused them too, you know,

I mean, and my grandma was like, you whippersnappers and your HDTV. I was like, grandma, like you would use that HDTV. You would love to have six channels, but you didn't have a channel. you know, so the idea here is, we need to help people understand that this is not a finite game they can win. And there's a wonderful book and a blank on the name, but it's called finite and infinite games. And it's about

using some kind of the aspects of game theory to think about complex problems. And a finite game is a game like soccer. You know, everyone's declared a winner and a loser. You know what the rules are, has a start and stop, right? And the goal is to win. And you're very clear about what the rules are. Well, an infinite game can't be won. In fact, the only way you can win an infinite game is to try to play better and to try to keep everyone else in play. And what we're starting to see now is that

Beau Beard (19:08.746)

some of these drains on our ability as humans and health care in America is a good example. So let's make it granular so we're not talking in sort of big terms here. When you and I went to high school, the chances of us being diabetic were one in 4,000. That's the current research straight up. Chances of being diabetic now if you're a child are one in four, right? One in four.

If you're a Latina or Latinx woman, male, excuse me, then your chances Latino or Latinx, your chances of being diabetic are three out of four. And if you're an African-American woman, it's three out of four. So we're not talking about anything, obesity. We're not talking about, we're talking about straight up just insulin sensitivity, environmentally driven changes in your neuroendocrine system that makes you insulin sensitive. Right. And that is a gigantic.

issue that we're going to have to face at some point because it's going to cost us more. We're going to lose a bunch of people's quality of life. They're not going to manage this well. you know, that's for me, some of the things we're talking about really are about social justice. know, Greg Glassman of CrossFit, for whatever reason, however he got there, realized that soda is a gigantic problem. And we're going to have to really

wrestle with our relationship with Big Food and Big Pharma, if we are going to take a view that the role of society is to make society better for those people who want to come play. Otherwise, we're still on the hook. So, you know, for us, it really means, you know, like, if you're an adult, and you're and you never knew that drinking a gallon of sugar juice every day is bad for you, like, well, now you know, and now you can make a choice. But for our kids,

A lot of the conversations that we've gravitated towards are, some of the kids don't have agency and they're products of a system of food insecurity, of food quality insecurity, of stress, of sleep. No one's protecting these things, right? What we have is a mismatch. Excuse me one second.

Beau Beard (21:26.944)

And sorry about that. You're good. Just my wife and our office manager having a party. And the idea is, you know, we're at some point, the right and moral thing to do is to think structurally at a population health level about what does that mean? And what that means is you don't have vending machines in the school, right? What that means is you just don't offer donuts at the swim meet. It means that you just make a simple situation simpler.

by constraining the environment so that's not one more choice because I'm wired for sugar, I'm wired for alcohol, I'm wired for pleasure, I'm wired for it, And I wanna make it so I don't ever have to choose those things. if, know, there's a great, did you see the documentary? I think it's called The Magic Bullet, is that what it was? Right, and it was about using a ketogenic diet intervention with sick people. And there was a girl who was highly autistic, couldn't speak.

right? She she she's eating chicken McNuggets and yeah, and goldfish, right? And after she doesn't eat for three days. And her parents are like, my gosh. And we always tell our all our parents friends were like, Hey, we've never seen a child dark die of starvation of hunger. Right? They might have starvation in certain countries, but here they're gonna eat eventually and after three days, this girl just started shoveling down the broccoli and fish and meat and chicken and right and

That's really the model for what I'm advocating for. It's like, and I figured this out a long time ago, if I don't want to eat cookies, I don't buy cookies and keep them in the house. Otherwise I'll eat the cookies. So for me, it's really just about, you know, we see adults and you can relate to this, you go to Starbucks and your choice is, well, I can have a 2000 calorie Frappuccino with caramel for breakfast. you know, that's fine once a month. You what mean? Like you don't eat

birthday cake every day, shouldn't drink a bottle of wine every day. And I think what we're realizing is we have to start earlier and we have to because by the time patterns and behaviors are set, and I'm conditioned to my environment, it's really hard to back that out. It's hard to make those changes. And we make those changes by being additive. We streamline people's environments, make it easier for them to make the right choice. And we do things like, hey, instead of not eating that,

Beau Beard (23:52.046)

why don't you, one of my friends, Eva Klairsinkowski, her concept is the 800 gram challenge and optimize nutrition. And she's like, hey look, just do me a favor. Eat 800 grams of fruits and vegetables today. That's it. And then whatever you want on top of that. But I don't know the last time you ate 1.746 pounds of food, but that's a lot of fruits and veggies. And you do not feel underfed on that diet. And she's like, oh you wanna eat?

almost two kilos of apples today, knock yourself out. No, people do not become diabetic because they eat too many apples. That is not the problem. And she's like, and besides tomorrow, you get sick of eating apples and you start eating carrots, and then you're get sick of eating carrots and you're like, Oh, what else is out there? So when we try to make it easier for people to conceive this, and we do things like a walking school bus for our kids, what do we do in the morning? How do we get to school? We walked 1.2 miles one direction or 1.2 miles the other direction.

And suddenly it's not a thing that I have to program or do. It's just how we got to school. So what we really want people to be able to do is say, Hey, where do I put invest practices into a life that really is stressed and really is compressed so that people don't, they don't feel crazy and that they feel like to have the opportunity to make choices. The choice isn't accidentally made for them. So something that hits home with me there is I was watching a

we have the TV on in the office in here and a commercial came out for yet another drug for diabetes. And it just, you know, again, same thing, like if they stopped making more drugs for diabetes, people would be forced to rely on diet and exercise, which has been proven time and time again to reverse type two diabetes. But what instead you tend to see in particular, we're in good old Alabama is somebody is going to double up on their medication or their insulin and go ahead and have that piece of cake or that whole rack of cookies. And it's,

It's almost as if we've shut off some evolutionary triggers, right? That is a complete threat to your health and wellbeing and possible life. But we're willing to completely try to gain the system to just continue to live the life we want. But if a lion was chasing us down, we wouldn't just put on shades that block it out and say, I think it's just gonna run on by. But that's what we do every day.

Beau Beard (26:13.3)

Yeah, and that's cultural shift, right? That's really what you're suggesting is that how do we change our culture? the really the only salute look, if you're in, well, my father's position, my grandfather's position, I'm a psychologist, I'm a physio. Behavior change is the most difficult thing we do. is man that is show me how to change behaviors and I'll show you that we can, you know, change the world, right? you know, changing patterns and changing behaviors is

is the crux and it's so difficult that I have seen sat in on heart surgeries where people are who know better who are smart, talented people are getting five stents put in, right? And having, you know, cabbages and they have all the resources, five family members are there, they're loved, but it's that difficult to change your behavior even though you know you're going to die. Even though you know that this is going to because the behavior is set that sugar

and the way that our brains work and porn and alcohol and addiction. mean, we're wired to this. And so we, at some level, we're like, dude, this is a biochemical issue. Let's think about it in those terms. Like unwiring someone's dependence on sugar is really, really difficult because man, get a kick. That was a survival instinct. So again, I would point out that, hey, let's start earlier. And when we're thinking about sort of the complexity of this,

You know, it's easy to make a mistake. And let me give you an example. have a cat, right? We have a used cat from our pounds and we just fed him high quality cat food. And then one day we noticed he was drinking a lot of water from the fountain. And what we said was, one of our cats diabetic. took him in and he was diabetic. And I said to myself, what do cats eat? They eat meat. They're obligate carnivores. What was I feeding my cat? Not meat, cat food. And subsequently we ended up with this cat who was diabetic and we had to give our cat shots.

And what I did was we went out and bought meat cat food that's designed for cats, not full of, and we were doing grain free. We were buying all the, the Shishi stuff. And in three months, my cat is no longer diabetic. I know better. And I still made my cat diabetic through his diet. Does that make sense? Like I am like, wow. I, don't know anything about anything. If I did that. And I think that's, that's how we're, know,

Beau Beard (28:36.172)

We're showing love to our families. That's how our moms love to show us. We reward people with cookies, you know, all of that. So, you what I'm saying is, look, we're gonna miss some people in this boat, because I agree with you. Like, we're not gonna catch everyone. But we can certainly catch some of the young kids. And that means that we need to get involved with our school activities. We need to get involved with schools. We have to talk about lunch programs. We have to talk about, you know,

and eventually we'll catch everyone. Because I really do think people are smart enough. The phone already is so we're starting to see a change in the consciousness around phone usage, right? Already there's like, we're gonna lose again, we're gonna have a generation of crazy people, but we're also gonna have the second generation be like, well, I don't want to be like that. You know, gotta put my phone down. So these are comp, you know, what's the the Makin

quote, it's like for every complex problem, there's a solution that's simple, straightforward, easy to understand and wrong. And the goal for us is to say, what, what can I control? And then let's start there. And, that means it's not at a governmental level. It's not at a state level. It's maybe not even a community level. Let's start first and first with my family. Then I'll go ahead and work with my and talk with my friends. And that's

this grassroots change that we're gonna change. And there is, I mean, I live in Marin, California. I can go in a steamed raw goat milk latte at my farmers market. That's pretty crazy. Delicious. But there are also 17 kinds of kombucha at the gas station now. Like something has changed, right? So I think if human beings can get to the moon, we can solve this problem too. And we're gonna have to because it's going to be such a drain on life.

that people are going to be so sad and miserable that we're going to have to, we're going to have to think structurally about how we manage. Otherwise it's going to ruin people's lives. And this is our shot. And like most things that has to get to a tipping point, which is sad, but you know, and maybe we've passed. I don't know. I don't really think we have in all areas and it is obviously it's not one health is not one thing. It's multifaceted for sure, but let's kind of dive into, we're talking about starting much younger, like

Beau Beard (31:00.546)

you know, my dad, diabetic, has been for numerous years and asked me, you know, like, man, I'm just, I, know, it sucks to have to sit down because you're out of energy. Like I used to just be able to go and he goes, well, how would I combat that? And I was like, you know, XYZ, but it would have been nice to work on that machine 10 years ago. So you didn't get to where you are right now. And that's where it gets tough because you don't want to just say, that's too late. But when we work with kids, let's, let's go from saving the world to the flip side.

So when we're working with kids, it's very important to talk about, you know, nutrition and sleep habits and technology habits. But then the flip side of the childhood culture now is this almost professional athlete mentality that we equate with health. So if a kid is not on his phone or maybe crushing things that are healthy, Gatorade and, you know, protein bars and whatever, then that kid is.

not having an off season, we're seeing overuse injuries, we're seeing things we would never see in a kid, even autoimmune issues that are just wacky and 20 years ahead of their time. How do you tackle that when you're like, we can't have kids sitting on a couch. We also can't have kids that never have a complete off season or getting just beat to hell. So how do we get parents to realize like, that isn't health, this isn't health, it lies somewhere in the middle there.

Well, you know, the first thing is that, um, if you want to make a system obsolete, you have to propose a better model, right? And you don't have to be this message. You know, I have a lot of smart friends like you who are working on your side of the country and at your population. I'll be on my side of a copulation of, uh, the country, not copulation population in country. get a country full. That's right.

I'll meet you in the middle. And you know, what I, what I think is, you know, the role of community, the role of the business, the role of school. Now these are the places where we can make the biggest change. And that might've been the church in the past. might've been YMCA and youth organizations, but we have to sort of reconceptualize where people are spending most of their time and then begin to have the conversation. You know, because if, if you don't know better, then you don't know better, but

Beau Beard (33:24.27)

once you start to see it and it sticks around, how many times you have to offer a kid a vegetable before they accept it? 20 times, 30 times with my daughter, Caroline, 150 times, you know, so, um, you know, the idea here is that it's not a game we're going to win. We don't have to win it because people are really, really tolerant and it, because the body is self-tuning and self-correcting when it begins to get inputs that are more in line with its needs.

we do see self correction and people do lose weight. They do become more insulin sensitive. The thing is that we have sort of all of a sudden radically changed a lot of the moving pieces. you you don't, it's not, it's not an either or because all of a sudden, you know, our kids are playing sports or not playing sports or they're, not active, but they're only play competitive soccer.

We're seeing real conversations. One of my favorites, if you listen to this, is called Change the Game Project or Changing the Game Project. And it's really this reasonable group of people who are talking about the reformation of youth sports. And we shouldn't be surprised at youth sports. Like your dad, for example, is a perfect product of the system. He's a normal expression of the complex system. It's just, it's a person and it's personal. So you can't think of it that way, but you know,

And frankly, I blame all the baby boomers. This is my favorite kind of current cop. I'm like, oh, it's the baby boomers, it's their fault. And, um, but what we, what we want to say is if we fetishize professional sports, we shouldn't be surprised then that we fetishize collegiate sports and see the professionalization of collegiate sports. And by, by consequence, the professionalization of high school sports and middle school sports. And, you know, it's a normal expression of the system. So, you know,

Where do you begin to tug the string? Tug anywhere. mean, if you've ever flown, mean, Virgin America, God rest its beautiful little dead airline soul cells. But on the touch screen, it said touch anywhere to begin. And I think that's really what's important. You can begin this conversation anywhere. And instead of saying, I'm overwhelmed by this, choose one thing. know, hey, I'm just going to make sure that my kid has access to a vegetable once a day. That's amazing.

Beau Beard (35:47.15)

You know, one of my friends is a guy named John Berardi and his company is Precision Nutrition. And John was doing some really complicated work with a very, very sick person, morbidly obese. And what John said is, Hey, I need you to get a dog. And that's your first order of business. And the guy got a dog and was like, what do I do with this dog? And he's like, just take care of your dog. And let's touch base a couple of weeks. And the guy's like, man, I've been walking. I have to go out twice a day and walk my dog. And I was like, really? That's so weird.

And then he's like, okay, what next? He's like, all right, I want you drinking a glass of water today. When you get up and then he's like, he's like, do that for a week. And all the guy had to do is start walking his dog and he started drinking a glass of water. He lost 50 pounds in like a month. And so when we look at these complex, socially driven issues around food structure, learning around food, all of that, what we can begin to do is just control one piece. Here's the simple thing. If you have kids in the room,

We have a simple rule at our house. There's no technology allowed in bedrooms. All the phones are out in the kitchen. And every once in while, my 14 year old daughter will violate the rule. She's just a kid and that phone is heroin. We don't blame her, right? And what ends up happening then is that we have a lock box with a timer on it. And when she loses her phone, my phone goes in there, my mom's phone goes in there, her phone goes in there. And it doesn't unlock until 7.30 the next day. And the only way in there,

is to break open the thing. so what we do, yeah, you can't, you have to break it. You can't take the battery out. I'm just picturing a kid with a crowbar at like midnight, like trying to get into that thing. You can only break it. I think what we're realizing is that, hey, you know, we see that these systems are complex, but the first thing we're gonna do is try to protect our kids' sleep. And how do we do that? Will we remove the choices that would disrupt their sleep?

Right? You know, we tell adults who are always talking about sleep deprivation. I'm like, Hey, look, if you got into bed 30 minutes earlier a day, then even say go to sleep, just get into 30 minutes earlier, just go to bed at 10 being about nine 30, go to bed 11, get in bed at 1030. In two weeks, you will have slept an additional day. Can you imagine what the performance advantage is, or your life or the quality of your skin or your sleep habits? If you slept one extra day every two weeks, that's pretty remarkable. And that's what you're getting.

Beau Beard (38:11.02)

with these small changes. who is it? Is it Eric Cressy who says, you know, small hinges swing big doors. And that's really the idea is that where are the easy touch points before we say, Hey, look, you've got to change how you're, you know, what, what perfume you're wearing and you're, know, we've got to give people options and we've got to show them that there are small changes they can make that will make radical impacts. And when people do feel better, they make better decisions. And

That is what we've been actually predicated our business on for the last decade is that people are so smart and that it's our failure as people to think of people as smart that they can't make the right decision that they need their children. that is just the patriarchy at its worst. So I know that we can do better and let's give adults choices to make and give them better information. Then they can make better decisions.

Absolutely. And I think speaking about the future of health, I think you're going to see, you know, whether that's PT, Cairo, MD, whatever it is, your clever clinicians are going to realize that these catalyzing agents, right? What's the, maybe it's a dog, but whatever the biggest thing is to work on for you may be the simplest thing. And then that's a cascading effect where I knocked out 20 things versus our reductionist approach that has been held in place for the last century that got us

pretty much where we are right now. So I think you're already seeing that rewritten. I mean, that's this whole conversation, right? Is rethinking how we go about it and not saying you need to do 100 things for your health. You need to do the biggest things for your health that just take care of all the rest. But when you get into the marketplace too, you're gonna see the opposite. You're gonna see every supplement, everything you need for your health. And that's just, it's another facet of the same old thing.

Well, I think to your point, no, can't, you know, you can't market sleeping better or, or go into bed or sleeping in a dark room. There's not a lot of profit there. So, you know, we're not, if we can't sell it, you know, we don't, we don't prioritize it, which is why we just have to begin to have these conversations much earlier. And I think that thing's locked. So, then when it opens, pop the door shut. What we're seeing then is, you know, let's, let's make these small changes.

Beau Beard (40:35.662)

and then the rest of it will work out. we have time. I don't think people realize how long a decade is, how long 20 years is, 30 years. And so what does this look like when you make one degree of change on the horizon? Just let that thing run for a while. And remember, you have tomorrow. You'll get the rest of it tomorrow. So what's great is that this infinite game that we're playing resets every day where you can make another decision, you know? And I...

That is the heart and soul of the matter is that you have time and small changes will go a long way. let's do first things first because arguing about what squad is the best squad or which, who's kung fu hard style is the best. Right now on the Twitter, physical therapists are not very good to each other on Twitter right now. They're really nasty.

And there is this notion that, you know, people are too dumb to decide what works and what is placebo. And that really is shocking to me. And I saw just a physio who's really trying to change the conversation around chronic pain, understanding chronic pain and telling people and changing the message that we are really resilient and fragile people. I appreciate that. But, you know, I saw that person equivocating.

They're like, well, you know, yeah, there's some research on myofascial release, but it doesn't really make long-term changes. And I was like, so you're against people making themselves feel better as opposed to what the long-term changes of OxyContin or Percocet or ibuprofen or splints or inactivity. Like what, what are we talking about? You know what mean? Like what I want to do is give people all the choices and show them how they can make themselves feel better.

and then we can have the next conversation. again, at some point, let's start somewhere and wherever that's important to you, do it. When I think a lot of that comes from we are on a new horizon of how we think about health and in that new horizon frontier, everybody's fighting for real estate, just like when they broke open the Western Plateau and said, go grab your land. Everybody's trying to do that in the digital world. And it comes down to that of I'm right, you're wrong. We're planning our flags and what we got to realize, it's all land. It's all health. It's all the same quit.

Beau Beard (42:56.408)

Like you said, it's fodder for intellectual real estate, but other than that, it really doesn't have any value, you know, and you're going to find that out, you know, we mobility is a word that's very popular right now. And we coined it. mean, we obviously didn't make up the word mobility, but there was no mobility. Everything was stretching beforehand. And we purposely use the, I purposely use the word mobility because it was a word that was only used by people who were trying to mobilize the joints, mobilize tissue. And now you can see that.

there is mobility everything, right? And people, someone asked me recently, how do you feel about that? I was like, that was the point. It changed the conversation to get people to care about their tissue health and to care about their range of motion and be able to have a set of tools to make themselves feel better and to be able to remove any professional person who had any financial vested interest in them doing that for themselves, right? And that's what we're doing. So to your point, you know,

this is not my dance space, this is your dance space. It's the dance space. we, until we have changed all the conversation, we need to invite people to the, to the table. And that means you're going to have to occupy a, in in an aggressive market, you know, and you're to have to show people that you're, you're better. And that's, that's, that's what this is about. Now let's, let's get to the two wrap up questions that I always ask. And this can go wherever you want. The first one is,

What is something that you long held true that you've completely pivoted on that you completely had to change your mind whether that was based on evidence, experience, or a little bit of both?

So, you know, I think the first and foremost is that I have become much more moderate in my approach to what people need to do to feel better. Like, you before I'd be like, you better have a movement practice and you better eat a vegetable, some collagen, and you better, right? And now I'm like, did you walk today? Did you get a hug from someone you love? Did you get some sleep? Great, you're killing it, you know, like.

Beau Beard (45:00.47)

I've had to reset sort of my expectation around first principles first. I would say that certainly about, where are we going to begin this conversation? secondarily is that I don't, you know, we have long benefited from the modern age of having access to the best gymnasts, physios, doctors, Kairos, power, and the synthesis of information has been profound. And

we missed how important breathing was in this conversation of being able to affect how my mind works, my ability to pressurize before an Olympic lifting national titles for my aerobic athletes and really seeing the profound changes that taking, we just, we were stumbling around and kept tripping over these bars of gold and we're like, these bars of gold are so annoying. They're always laying on the

We started picking them up and we were like, my gosh, you know, people have been thinking critically about these things for a long time. And it was a big untapped resource. I went back to my notes and of course I taught 10 years ago and I talked about breathing as parasympathetic and down-regulation, how we integrate with PNF practices. And I stopped there and I didn't realize how much I was missing until the last probably three or four years. So talking about maybe, like you said,

instead of bombarding people with all the things of health and getting down to kind of brass tacks. Do you think that's a natural evolution of your practice or do you think it's because you're getting a little patina and we're getting a little more mature in our life and realizing that it's, I'm not going after it as a professional athlete anymore. And that those are the things that I see the most, you know, bang for my buck in my daily life. And now it's like, Hey, I was doing this. Cause I think a lot of us take what we're doing.

and practicing because you know, think the best in the field, at least the health field live what they're doing. Right. If I go to an orthopedic surgeon, that's 200 pounds of a weight and doesn't run and tells me to stop running. I'm not listening to him. If I go to you and you're like, Hey, just walk, or you tell me you need to be heavy deadlift in twice a week and crud. I think either way I'm more apt to listen to you. So do you think that's natural? Like I've just been in the game so long. I realized this or Hey,

Beau Beard (47:23.47)

as I've been in the game so long, I'm hitting a little bit of my senior hood here as a human and I'm starting to realize, man, I didn't need to crush it that hard all the time. I think that's valid. I think that that's a reasonable way to approach or kind of think about the evolution. We're all maturing. It takes a long time to integrate and synthesize and to understand. We're seeking to understand. I also say that

you know, at the heart of this, I think, you, you come back to keep coming back to first principles and you know, when, when you see the truth of something, you know, you've got to figure it out, you know, how does this reconcile? And, you know, I'll put the Wim Hof at the center of this revolution and breathing right now. mean, Lauren Chai, Leon Chaitau.

at all, been taught, wrote an incredible book, you know, but Wim said, Hey, I think we're missing something here. And he was really doing this on holotropic breath. Let's get high. Let's feel better. Let's change our brains a little bit. And I think, you know, at the heart of our model with my friends is that I'm part of a community of tests, retest, share. And what we're really trying to do is come up with an integrated model.

of functionally of how human beings work. And when someone raises their hand and says, Hey, I think this is a way we can improve performance. And then when we start to play with that test, retest and share, think it was, we were all blown away at how much better we could do, how much more untapped potentially have. So one of the things that we've, we've always tried to do is say, look, let's not do a set of behaviors because it may prevent a problem.

That's a poor way to sell anything, right? What we've always said is, hey, let's engage in these behaviors because it gives us better, more rich life. It gives us better capacity. You can lift more, you can go faster, you can feel more engaged with your children, you can sleep better. What's important to you? Right, that first conversation. So when someone comes in with a new piece of data, you know, we always are saying, hey, is this explanatory? Is it predictive?

Beau Beard (49:48.558)

producible? How does this fit in our schema? Because if someone brings us something and it creates interference in our understanding pattern, then that's a hole in someone's thinking. And we've got to reconcile, either change our model or change their model, because those things should integrate. Even if we're using different languages or different tools, ultimately it has to reconcile. I think at some point, we have become more mature because

you know, we've singing practice and practicing, you know, I've been, we've been doing this for a long time. And I think what we should see is a normal maturation of the model, but it keeps keeps coming back. So, you know, I'm fortunately, I'm not a lonely man on an island, I am surrounded by the most talented cabal of people who show me all their work, who are like, look at my notes, what do you think, you know, and I do the same thing. And I think that is how we're really going to change the world. And that's and that's, you know,

If you see someone on the internet shouting down at someone else, you should have alarm bells going off. All of the masters talk about what they're doing and why they're doing it. And they're like, come see anyone else who says to you, that system is broken. You got to do my system. That person has some holes in their thinking is really insecure because what they're selling is bullsh. So let's take the flip side question. So what is something you

Almost would guarantee to be true. You know to be true either again from experience personally with Athletes patience what it might be that just hasn't been proven. There's not empirical data. It's not in the research and you may be doing it you're looking at implementing it into your own life or you know athletes lives Well, you know we have poor support for

our physical interventions ourselves. What we can say is this set of behaviors makes people really strong, right? But, or this set of behaviors makes people better on the bike. But can you show me the research supports George St. Pierre and his training and it's becoming the greatest fighter of all time? Or can you show me the empirical data that makes, you know, that helps us understand Usain Bolt? Well, it doesn't really exist.

Beau Beard (52:15.83)

I think what we have to do is we have to move out of this. need evidence-based practice is really important and practice-based evidence is important. And what we always are going to have to do is go back and some subjective research where we look at what our best practices and try to derive, know, sort of first principles out of there. you know, that's if Sir Francis Bacon was alive today, he was the father of the scientific method.

That's what he would say. Let's look at big data sets and let's try to derive the patterns underneath that. Let's engage a little bit more clinical reasoning. So it's difficult for a movement practice. It's difficult to show that yoga makes better people. Like there's no proof that yoga works, right? And that's like trying to prove that human beings should run. know, like, well, okay. mean, where's the science to support that? Where's, know,

And so I think sometimes we try to apply our scientific method and we fail to forget that for two and a half million years, human beings have been super clever. And what we can do then is go in and try to understand at a higher level of, hey, what's the commonalities between the way all human societies eat? What is that? Turns out that a lot of societies eat offal. They eat connective tissue and collagen and organ meats. There's a variety of vegetables in there.

You know, you know, we should look at why martial arts and gymnastics make good people, right? Why, you know, what, what's the science to support the gymnastics makes a better, more organized person when they're 80. And the problem is that we can't run this data because the human being has too many inputs and outputs, too complex. can't control for these things. So it's a poor, you know, as a physician, they say, you know, as a surgeon, if you want good outcomes, choose good patients, right?

And if you want good research, choose good subjects. Well, turns out human beings are really crappy subjects. And you know, like there's not in a piece of research to support that one eating strategy is better than the others, not a single one. But what you know, and equivocally is you can't eat like a jerk forever. Right? You can't. And so, you know, where do we go then if we can't point to a piece of research and say, that's it? You know, if someone has an intervention that makes them feel better, or they have an interaction with a person,

Beau Beard (54:43.372)

and they get some non-conditional positive regard with their clinician and they feel empowered. Is that placebo? Is that the fact that human beings are tribal animals and that's, that's a first principle. So, you know, lots of ways into this, but I think first and foremost, you know, that the idea is induction is looking at big patterns and trying to understand through clinical reasoning, what are better practices? And it doesn't mean it's the only practice. It just means maybe this is one way that works better. So,

I think in our field we'd like to have definitive research, if we look at the sports medicine research, for example, most of it's not done on women. Why not? Well, women, can't control for women's periods and menstrual cycles, so we throw women out. So lot of the research that people are supporting is done on men who are 18 to 24 and college age, and there's no women there. So what are we really studying? Small group samples? So we need to keep applying rational clinical reasoning and pattern recognition to

complex systems and and Fortunately, I think we're gonna have big data to back us up I think this is gonna be the future of really trying to understand what's going on is through big data And what a better way to wrap up the future of health and I'm forward to that Again, I cannot thank you enough. You are like I said a change agent within the field You know our field PT Cairo, but also just health overall keep doing what you're doing Whatever keeps you inspired

keep hitting that every day and I know we'll put info on how people can a hold of you if they don't know how but at MobilityWOD, MobilityWOD.com, we'll put up links to all that fun stuff. All your work's been great, I'll put up links to your books. Anything you wanna leave us with? Is there any stage advice you got for us besides the last hour of everything that just is like a ton of bricks here? Come join the revolution. We are humanists.

We believe in the power like people are extraordinary and and we think that there's really untapped potential we you know, we we think we want people to eat this way and sleep this way and move this way because You can actually get more more work done. You can feel better at end of the day You can look better naked like what's important to you? Like it's all there and it's it's more simple than you think Absolutely. Thanks. Kelly enjoyed it man. My pleasure. Thank you, man