Mobility pioneers Kelly and Juliet Starrett have had successful careers spreading the wellness message that everyone, at any age, can be “built to move”. Yet just when you think today’s wellness trends — from tech to, yes, even TikTok influencers — should have made spreading the movement message more accessible to more than just the hardcore masses. and brawny, the Starretts ditched the app (sort of) and went old-school and hardcover, creating the aptly titled book. “Built to move.”
The book was written to address the long-term and often overlooked problems caused by sedentary lifestyles, which research shows affect more than a third of the world’s population aged 15 and over, despite the explosion of the nearly trillion dollar fitness industry. Those affected by this range range from average Joes to grandparents who want and need to continue to spend quality time with their grandchildren.
The book is less tech-savvy; instead of scrolling up, flipping through 200 pages will provide a much-needed rediscovery of health and wellness with common-sense insights behind the long-term importance of gaining mobility and your range of motion in your shoulders, knees, ankles – and not just for weight warriors or gym athletes, but for those hoping to extend a productive lifestyle into their 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond. Not everyone got the message as the couple saw a downward trend developing as more people avoided downward dog and instead spent far more time on the sofa than necessary. .
When Kelly, a renowned physiotherapisthelped professional athletes, corporate CEOs and military bigwigs regain their range of motion to continue maximizing their performance, the couple hoped to generate the same successful results for everyday people when they opened a physical therapy office in their San Francisco-based CrossFit studio. in 2007.
However, the opposite happened: more people were coming in, but spending hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars out of pocket on everyday issues such as neck stiffness and pain that could be treated at home with a few moments of stretching. Instead of performance-related issues, treatable wear-and-tear pains, mostly caused by lack of activity, became the norm. The message did not go through as expected.
“I think Kelly started to realize that if he could find a way to take these manual techniques that he learned in physiotherapy school and help people do them, he could create this whole universe. mobilizations that people could do on their own. living room floor,” says Juliette, triple world rafting champion.
The long-term effects are far greater than a stiff back; a 2020 study showed that a third of the world’s population over the age of 15 lacks sufficient physical activity, which increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes and even cancer. “Built to Move” provides 10 benchmarks to test your mobility, or lack thereof, that almost anyone can do at home for almost zero cost and minimal equipment (think a lacrosse ball, broomstick , a foam roller). The first step to regaining mobility, according to Kelly and Juliet, is to start simply by getting off the ground. Can you do it effortlessly? Cheer. if you’re like most of us and have to put a hand or a knee on the floor or support yourself with a wall or even lose your balance, each problem becomes an indicator of the work needed to regain mobility in your hips and other areas.
From there, testing focuses on recognizing your breathing patterns, as well as testing shoulder mobility (yes, you’re supposed to lift your shoulders above your head without pain) and reintroducing you to the simple art of the squat. Of course, no 21st century training manual, book or app comes without a 21-day challenge – including one or two daily movement tests, practices and mobilization work that can be done at home – which the couple offers. in his book, making it an active reading experience.
“Part of this wellness revolution happened when we started to recognize that people weren’t stepping up to improve or restore positions to have better biomotor performance, so they could lift more weight and go faster,” said Kelly, who also founded the Ready State Website, said.
The couple, who are now approaching their 50s, are contemplating their own future, hoping to live out their golden years as they do in their prime – more skiing, more hiking and of course more deadlift PR. The couple’s winning strategy for not only this, but helping others to maximize aging, is not only to show that we don’t have to live with pain, but by starting now and setting body movement goals. attainable, we can fix ourselves to lead a physically productive life for as long as possible.
“We’re trying to give people more of these objective measures in their lives to create a more durable and resilient body,” says Kelly.
You can get Kelly and Juliet Starrett “Built to Move” on Amazon.
Pain doesn’t have to be permanent
JS: As a health and fitness or physiotherapy community, we have failed to tell people that pain isn’t always a medical issue – pain doesn’t always mean you’re hurt and that the resting state of a human being is meant to be painless. If people started with this basic knowledge and then added that there are easy-to-do tools on their living room floor or on the gym floor that could relieve some of that pain, that would be revolutionary. Part of what we’re trying to do with this book is to say there’s a lot you can do here to feel better.
There is a subset of people who love fitness, but the vast majority of people want to feel good and be able to move their body – these are very different goals. For those people, and, you know, for people who just want to feel good and move their bodies. I don’t think we gave them the message that there are some things they can do on their own without having to spend tons of money on professionals to feel better and move better.
KS: Because Juliette and I worked in high-performance environments, we got to see all the dirty laundry. Here we used pain as a diagnostic tool. If an athlete came along and suffered a loss of power on a bike, we’d be like, what’s going on? Is it [a problem] with hip range of motion? Sleep? Nutrition? We would use this loss of power as an indicator of an aspect of the system that we might be looking to improve.
Most people should fall into this same category. “My knee hurts after a big run.” Well, why is this and what can we do about it? And the simplest thing we know is to just restore someone’s range of motion around that.
If, for example, your shoulder hurts all the time for no reason, it may be a medical emergency, and you should be under a doctor’s care for it. But if you’re thinking, “My shoulder only hurts when I’m doing push-ups,” that’s a specific position tied to your shoulder that gives us clues as to whether there’s a full range of motion there. -down, and we can try to do that. But then we can also say, Hey, do you know that there are behaviors or things you can do in your life that make your brain interpret what’s happening to your shoulder as less threatening? Because if you’re sleep deprived, stressed, and eating like a spoiled teenager, I guarantee your brain is going to be a little more nervous about what’s going on.
You have the ability to fix yourself
KS: The problem is twofold. The first is that we’ve never really shown people where to have a set of cues in their own lives around certain movement and lifestyle behaviors. And so I don’t think people realize what a normative range of motion for my head or what your shoulders are capable of. Typically, we’ve told people to train really hard to be as lean as possible, and when something hurts, we deal with it instead of realizing that range of motion and its components are really the thorn back of the ability to move. movement.
Also, people have been given information that can be very confusing – static stretching, it’s bad for you to do yoga, here’s a percussion gun – and people are getting confused and not knowing where to start feel better about managing their body. As an industry, we have necessarily advocated for taking very good care of our bodies.
JS: In our industry, people who gravitate towards health and fitness think they know mobility, but I don’t think it’s been clearly defined. It can be difficult to distinguish between mobility, flexibility, stretching, yoga, and it becomes kind of a confusing situation. Maybe we haven’t done the best job in our way of telling people why they should care. Usually people start to care when they hurt themselves – like a real catastrophic injury, like a torn ACL or chronic low back pain – but haven’t yet made the connection that certain aches and pains can be relieved with really basic mobility work.
We haven’t done our best to explain to people that if you bring information to your body in the form of, you know, engaging basic isometries by doing things like sitting on the floor, you can actually move you to a pain-free state. more often.
Take a hardcover approach to a social media situation
JS: Fitness is a nearly trillion dollar industry. And it doesn’t seem like we know we’ve done a good job of solving society’s aches and pains. It clearly doesn’t work, especially if you look at all the data points like obesity, diabetes, depression, injuries like ACL tears, etc. From a health perspective, it gets worse as a species.
There’s a billion books on how to train with weights if you go to social media you can find out, if you’re not an expert you don’t know if you should intermittent fast, and what supplement you should take and what diet you should be on and what you should lift and how much and how often. And so I think overall people are confused by this tip. doesn’t
So what we saw was, OK, if we continue to be on this downward trajectory as a group, in terms of our overall health, and yet simultaneously there’s more and more information available, so it doesn’t wasn’t working. And so we kind of wanted to create this unified place where people who care about their health – kind of like a health 401k – and have this objective set of 10 benchmarks that they can keep an eye on for their entire life, you will start over time to feel less pain, become more durable, and feel better for as long as you are alive.
We’re big fans of the word “sustainable” – we prefer that to using the term longevity. Nobody cares to live to be 105 if the last 20 years of our life we are stuck in bed and our life [and health] sucks. We know we can’t speak for everyone, but for Kelly and I, we still want to be able to ski and mountain bike, travel, hike and deadlift. No one has ever really asked anyone about their [long-term] movement goals. We believe this is a manual for becoming a sustainable human. And literally, if people did these 10 things and kept tabs on these 10 benchmarks, it would turn the tide of health in general.
Focus on your body cues
JS: We understand that people’s lives are busy and crazy, but this, you know, there will probably be four or five things that everyone should keep an eye on. And they now have a reference for it. It’s like your blood pressure as you know what your blood pressure is. And you know, if your blood pressure baseline has gotten too high, and once that happens, it’s something you monitor. So we want all these practices to be a reference that people keep an eye on.
KS: You are truly durable and designed to be durable and you are probably going to be 100 years old. So let’s start pretending like the person you’re going to be tomorrow isn’t the most willpower or the most motivated person. That’s how we tend to think. Instead, what we need to do is just start with the basics today. Every day is a whole new opportunity to improve a little, to move a little more and to make slightly different choices, like going to bed half an hour earlier for example. And if you ever explode, don’t worry, you’re human, the toughest animal on the planet. You have the option to get back on track the next day. And if you have the ability to do a little more exercise on top of that, then you kill it.
In short, we just want to remind people that their bodies are truly amazing and built for the long haul.
Plan now, enjoy later
KS: We need to give people better tools. And we’ve spent the better part of those two decades trying to find a more effective way to integrate these essential behaviors into their daily hectic work lives. So we really spent a lot of time thinking about behavior change and sort of mechanical behavior change, how do we create new habits? How do we know how we lower the barrier to entry, how do we lower the resistance? And when we apply those two things, let’s show people that they don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater that they can live a better life within the context of the life that they lead, and all that what they have to do is influence to improve or empower the people around them. It’s a really powerful recipe for change.
JS: We don’t always want to point the finger at the negative, but when it comes to using your body to do the things you want to do, there’s a lot of truth to use or lose. We were on a podcast recently, and the host had a young child and needed two sets of grandparents to help out, and one of the grandmas was unable to sit on the floor and play with it. her own grandchild, and she’s only 67! Moving it or losing it is a real thing when it comes to your body, and just like saving for retirement, we can’t enjoy that money now. You may not see massive changes or establish gigantic public relations, but making a contribution to your body now will pay long-term dividends in terms of physical success and well-being.
