Dr. Kelly Starrett (TW/IG: @MOBILITYWOD, MOBILITYWOD.COM) is one of my favorite performance coaches. He has trained CrossFit athletes for more than 150,000 hours and 11 years at San Francisco CrossFit, which he founded with his wife in 2005. It is one of the first 50 CrossFit affiliates, out of a current 10,000+, in the world. Kelly’s clients include Olympic gold medalists, Tour de France cyclists, world record holders in Olympic lifting and powerlifting, CrossFit Games medalists, professional ballet dancers, and elite military personnel. He is a treasure trove of one-liners and the author of the New York Times bestseller Becoming a Supple Leopard.
Spirit animal: Lion with three lotuses
“Men, if you wake up and you don’t have a boner, there’s a problem. Yes or no? One or zero? Boner, no boner?”
TF: “Quantified self” tracking doesn’t need to be complicated. It’s easy to miss the flashing red signal in front of your face while chasing the cutting edge of blood testing, genomics, etc. For men, the “boner or no boner” test is a simple but excellent indicator of sleep quality, hormonal health (GH, FSH, testosterone), circadian rhythm timing, and more.
“If you can’t squat all the way down to the ground with your feet and knees together, then you are missing full hip and ankle range of motion. This is the mechanism causing your hip impingement, plantar fasciitis, torn Achilles, pulled calf, etc. That is the fucking problem, and you should be obsessing about [fixing] this.”
“The most dangerous sport to middle-aged men is a track workout [because the body is working with high force production at unfamiliar (end) ranges of motion].”
“[Greg] Glassman [the founder of CrossFit] valued it as one of the most important capacities. In fact, one of the earliest, best CrossFit workouts—I think it’s called ‘Nancy’—is run 400 meters, and then overhead squat 95 pounds 15 times. So innocuous, right? Then [repeat that sequence] 5 times. What you’re going to see really quickly is, everyone can fake it for 3. But then, as you start to fatigue, or your positions aren’t robust, you bounce off the tent. You no longer have access to compensation. The world gets really small, and then you really start suffering….
“All we’re doing when we say ‘overhead squat’ is I’m saying: ‘Show me you can squat with your torso upright.’ And that looks a lot like sport, doesn’t it? If you have to lean forward really far to do that, then it says you have incomplete hip and ankle function and you don’t know how to create stability in your trunk.”
TF: Doing light-weight overhead squats with a narrow stance, in combination with Cossack squats (here), for 3 months is what helped me get 99% toward passing the “campfire test” above. My left ankle is still sadly bone on bone.
In other words, if you can’t breathe in a given position, you haven’t mastered it.
“Here are a few things you should probably do every day:
All of these things have to be normal.”
Kelly currently likes SKINS brand.
Dark means DARK. “They’ve done studies where they shine a laser on the back of someone’s knee, and people pick it up. It’s light. You cannot have your phone in your room. You cannot have a TV in your room. It needs to be black, black as night.”
Soft is the solution for bedding. “Today’s modern human needs to sleep on a soft mattress. Ideally, you would be sleeping in a hammock. You should be waking up in the morning feeling amazing without having to loosen up your lower back. Most athletes and people are extension-sensitive because of excessive sitting and extension-biased training (e.g., running, jumping, squatting). Sleeping on a hard bed actually puts you into extension, which is the exact opposite of what you want if you’re extension-sensitive. Yes, you’d ideally be able to sleep on the floor and wake up feeling great, but we are not those people anymore due to excess sitting and inactivity.
Kelly uses Restwise software alongside pulse oximeters (for measuring blood oxygen saturation) in the morning to determine whether his athletes should exercise or not. Their technology answers the question (and provides the clever tagline) “Am I training too hard or not hard enough?” The company claims 62 world championships won by athletes using the system. There are many subtleties to the system, but here a basic observation: If your pulse ox reading is 1 to 2 points lower than normal, it can indicate lung inflammation and the onset of a cold. It’s best to postpone training in such cases.
The whole-food based Nutriforce WODPak (Nutriforce Sports).
“Movement and pain get mapped. If you experience pain during a given movement for a month, for instance, it’s a chronic pain condition. Your brain starts to map the pain pathway with the movement motor pathway and those become conjoined. The brain starts to remember the movement that created pain (got you injured), and even if there is no trauma, every time you move that particular way, you still get the pain sensation. So, one of the ways that we’re able to help people get out of chronic pain is to give them a new motor program (e.g., don’t squat with your knees in).”
Get your kids (and yourself) flat “zero drop” shoes, where the toes and heel are an equal distance from the ground. I wear Vans for this reason, my favorite model being Vans Classic Slip-On skate shoe (unisex, gum sole) in black. These can be used for hiking in a pinch, or worn to a business meeting when traveling light. Kelly elaborates on the rationale of zero drop: “Don’t systematically shorten your kids’ heel cords (Achilles) with bad shoes. It results in crappy ankle range of motion in the future. Get your kids Vans, Chuck Taylors, or similar shoes. Have them in flat shoes or barefoot as much as possible.”