Why Most People Are Breathing Wrong (And How to Fix It) | Dr. Kelly Starrett | Align Podcast #530
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Welcome back to the Latin Podcast. My name is Aaron Alexander. Today's conversation is with the great and powerful Dr. Kelly Starrett. Kelly is a doctor of physical therapy, is the author of one of the most best-selling books in the space of movement and exercise and training and such, referred to as Becoming a Simple Leopard. He's also the author of many more, including Ready to Run, Built to Move. If this episode had a name, it would probably be called Ready to Breathe.

We go, it's pretty nerdy. If you guys want to buckle up, put your nerd hats on. We go into some of the specific mechanics around the diaphragm and the pelvic floor and hip function and also just fun banter. I think you guys are going to enjoy this conversation. If you are interested in going deeper into the realm of breath, I invite you over to take the Breathing Archetype

This goes through a few subjective questions around mood and personality, and then asks you two questions around your breathing. So you do two specific breathing tests. And from there, we provide you a category of what type of breather you are.

And I find it really interesting. I find it very informative and it's very fascinating to see the bridge between the way that we breathe impacting the way that we feel. So you can find that at alignpodcast.com slash quiz. We're also launching the Align Breathing Program. The first week of that is completely free. If you like this conversation, you will absolutely love the Align Breathing Program. You can find the free trial to that at

online podcast.com slash brief. All right, that's it. That's all. I hope you guys enjoyed this conversation with the great and powerful Dr. Kelly Starrett. Dr. Kelly Starrett, thank you for making time to do this. You have been, well, you already know this. I've already blown a tremendous amount of smoke up here.

your posterior side for many years, but you've been a mentor from afar and up close on occasion for a long time. So I really appreciate you. Nice to see you again, my friend. It's great to nerd out with you. I want to, so there's a lot of things I want to talk about and you have a lot of things coming up that I want to touch on. And the first direction I would be enamored to hear your perspective on where are people going wrong in the realm of weightlifting and training with their breath? What are people missing, missing out on with what do you see? Oh boy.

missing deficits in the breathing space. Yeah. First of all,

um you know there's been sort of a recapture of grako vetsky's amazing book the spinal engine i don't think anyone's actually read the spinal engine i've read the i've read the good parts i've read the sections anytime it's like a little snake you know or a bird like a bird snake looking thing i'm like i get involved okay yeah lots of boxes around the spine and salamanders side bending um

But, you know, the idea here, I think, first and foremost, is the first movement of the spine, which everyone's like this, you know, look, I'm like, look, we've been we've been defining functional movement from the start, even through Greg Glassman as working in a weight contraction.

From trunk to periphery, from core to sleeve, from axillary skeleton to peripheral skeleton. That is the definition of movement. So, hello, we're not doing anything new here. We've been defining this for over 20 years this way. But the first movement is not rotation or side bend or flexion extension. It's breathing.

That's the first movement of the spine. And so if we're really going to honor the idea that good movement, wave of contraction, organizing function, we better look at how well that system pressurizes, how well it ventilates, how well it scrubs CO2, how the brain interprets what's going on, how people are solving these problems under different loads.

Breathing ends up being the through line, the first through line through everything I do, whether we're teaching desensitization or down regulation or up regulation or we call it mechanical ventilation efficiency. Like how expensive is that breath you're taking?

And more importantly, how are you being rate limited by just your crappy shallow breathing, your poor mechanics and your lost breathing potential? And I think that's a really great place to start. So I see it as the lowest fruit and it's something we need to practice and be conscious of every day.

And it's something that, you know, owning a commercial gym for 18 years, right? That we talked about pressurizing when to breathe, how to breathe, how to get organized and why that stiff upper back or that into your pelvic tilts or any of the things that you're messing with may not be about pain, no pain, right? That's the, where the physios have lost their minds. It's always been about performance. How do I get you to be able to handle larger, larger,

ventilation volumes, bigger pressures. And as soon as we got on this through Wim Hof, Brian McKenzie, Laird Hamilton,

Right. We suddenly discovered, you know, who Draco breathing. We suddenly were like, oh, Patrick McEwen has been talking about this for a minute. But what our unique stank on it was, wow, let's focus on the mechanics and let's see if we can improve the mechanics, not just get hot. I think Wim Hof got us all high, which was super cool.

Brian McKenzie started saying, hey, let's really make sure we're focused on CO2 tolerance. And then that suddenly we were like, oh, we can do that together. And then we started just running at that with World's Strongest Man, with Olympics and Olympic weightlifting, with my professional cyclists. And what we found was that, wow, there's a lot of low hanging capacity to be garnered when we practice the breath a little bit. And then it became...

Frankly, the central, the first thing I do, if you come to me with neck pain or back pain, I'm going to look at your breathing and I'm going to get you doing one of three things every day as part of our program. You're going to do the breath spin up.

The hips spin up or the shoulders spin up. In the morning, it's kind of like I'm going to whip out some components of like a modern sun salutation. And with the breath, I want to see it. If you can do it every day, great. But every third day for our regular people, it'll be fine because I want you to be able to do something else. But I'm thinking about my breathing prep and spin up.

every single day I train and I'm always aware of, can I shut my mouth? Can I make this more tolerable? Can I do a breath hold during my warmup? So it's always the breath spin up. Can you share what that is? It looks basically like a Wim Hof style breathing practice where we do two or three, two or three minutes,

20 to 30 maximal breaths, but instead of just working on getting high, right, and luminous or holotropic breathing, we really focus on mechanics. And one of the things I see is, especially in my athletic populations, I'm trying to solve performance issues. And I see your ability to exchange gas effectively at a low mechanical cost as a rate limiter to your performance. So

I work with Cal Berkeley and all their athletes. I'm a physical therapist there, but I spend a lot of time with the women's water polo team. We were second in the nation last year, played for a national title, and we'll begin every...

game session in my formal warmup with 10 minutes of this breath spin up because we get the diaphragm moving. We remind the brain it's okay to deal with CO2 tolerance. We get the upper back to be less stiff and it really just centers everyone. And it's like, we're walking through a portal of,

of preparation and then we start preparing what are the most common mechanical deficiencies you see with people i.e like in the pri world there's like the zone of apposition you know like the orientation of the diaphragm or maybe some pelvic stuff or some shoulder stuff you know

Like what do you see in someone's structure and their posture that could be limiting themselves from accessing their respiratory mechanical efficiency or however you ordered that? I like that. That's what makes me sound really smart. I think you said it wrong. So it doesn't make me sound smart, but it's a nice one. I like that. I think it's a respiration potential, which I really liked. I think one of the things we'll look at is

You know, are only only measuring breath and looking at breath when you're sitting in a yoga position or laying on your back. And I'm like, great, great place to teach the basics or to spin up or spin down. Super cool. Like I take all the loads out. Really, I'm interested in what happens to your breathing when I put you on a bike and you're in the middle of the World Cup.

What happens to your breathing when you're about to clean and jerk the American record or snatch the American record? How do you pressure on? So for me, I end up divorcing a lot of, hey, let me read your body and understand what the limitations are. Let's make sure that we're always doing first things first, which is working on skill.

Right. If someone has a wonky squat, I don't just mobilize or do a bunch of squat like things. I'm going to see if I can improve your squat by telling you how to feel differently or how to put your awareness into it. So the first order of business is to make sure that we're having exposure and that we're we're addressing what can be addressed through queuing. Right. And that might mean, for example.

I see this all the time with failures of coaches. They're interested in the breathing stuff. And we suddenly will practice breathing where everyone's good. Everyone's like, got it. This is so amazing. I'm like, get into a plank. And we immediately just stop. We start breath holding again. And I'm like, okay.

What are we doing? I'm like, you're just going to go from breath hold to breath hold. And then I'm like, okay, breathe. And everyone's like, ah, and they let their bellies go. They lose all the tension, right? Philip Beach writes that great book, Muscles and Meridians. Love that book. It's functional embryology, you nerds. You're listening. It's definitely a good read. And it would have made my two semesters of embryology much better in grad school.

But he talks about looking at the bodies as contractile fields, which is a really nice way of thinking about how systems work together. And let me give you an example of a contractile field. Your hip flexors are a contractile field. Iliacus, psoas, rectus femoris, gluteus.

If you're in extension, those are your adductors, all of that, your abs, all of that is working on bringing your knee to your chest. That's a contractual field. And so what that does is it sort of separates out some of the anatomy the way we teach it, legs, trunk, and it starts to look at how the system works. Well, one of the most important aspects of that kind of thinking is we look at the trunk as a radial contractual field, which is his term.

Which means this thing expands in 360 and it shrink wraps in 360, especially around what it's supposed to do. Ventilate, handle CO2, oxygenate, and...

create huge intra-abdominal pressure to maintain the integrity of the tube of the spine. So suddenly, if I have functions like my rib cage doesn't expand laterally when I breathe, like it doesn't pump with my upper, I'm only using my neck. If my rib cage doesn't even expand when I get you in a plank and put my hands on your ribs, I want to see those ribs expand and contract.

But suddenly, functionally, I put you under some extension load, which is what a plank is. It's an anti-extension exercise. But you then use your entire strategy is now to breath hold, right, to hold that anti-extension strategy. Guess what's going to happen when you run? Guess what's going to happen when you – like suddenly we can see how skilled this plank is.

And what we can start to understand is, boy, when I introduce some of these loads through the trunk, through the hips, right? Now, what's my strategy to stiffen and ventilate at the same time? So very much, we have to teach people how to control. That means I better be talking about your butt.

Can you squeeze your butt to maintain that position? Do you understand how your shoulders interact with your upper body? If you don't, well, you're going to have a real hard time figuring out how to create stable frames off of which you can effectively ventilate. And, you know, I started working on this when Georgia was like 12.

My oldest now is a sophomore in Michigan, everyone. But I was working with her middle school volleyball team in like the seventh grade, right? In sixth grade, seventh grade. And what we started to see was I could get those girls to hold a plank for two minutes.

Right. Long lever, short lever, didn't matter on your elbows or hands. And they could ventilate for two minutes. And what I was really looking for is could I teach these girls how to be stiff and have the movement control instead of just surviving overextending? I mean, the strategy, if you want to see what I'm talking about, is go look at world record for plank and look at the position that person's in like that.

like they're just hanging on all of the tissues. There's no active positions going on there. It's like, who's got the strongest like tissues that support the scapula as it relates to the body. I mean, that position is saggy and awful and you can barely ventilate. I'm like, that doesn't transfer very well. So we started working on ventilation efficiency and

as it relates to mechanics, again, you know, even from children all the way up to, um, some of our athletes who, you know, took second in the world's strongest man, uh, strongest woman in this situation. How could we get her preventilating Kristen Newman, getting her preventilating effectively already breathing like she's under huge metabolic demand in this two minute lift or one minute lift where she's going to time out. But instead of

waiting for her system to catch up and that the ventilation catch up, we're already breathing at the rate where she is, you know, working. And so suddenly the brain doesn't ever have to exceed sort of or go through this window of, oh my God, I'm so lactic, CO2 so high, oxygen is low, right? Whatever it's perceiving because we're already ventilating effectively before the lactate surge hits. So

Again, I want to look at it and honor it through all of these things. Plus, you know, last year, I really introduced this to our women at Cal when we were in training camp in Greece. And we had a bunch of women who had real anxiety issues. They would, CO2 would start to get high and they would start to get twitchy and sometimes have to get out of the pool and feel emotional. And what we said was, that's not our intention here. Our intention here is to improve your mechanical efficiency, but

it may bring up some things for you that are really like you might feel unsafe. And let's not back away from that. Let's say it. Let's pause. Let's go to it. And by the end of the season where we habitually and ritualistically did this breathing mechanics, CO2 tolerance are women who felt anxious, felt less anxious, and were able to perform because their CO2 wasn't hijacking their anxiety. So again,

through range, the whole thing. But if your back is stiff, your shoulder aren't going to work, bro. What's the easiest way to get your back moving? Breathing. So suddenly you see how it's a through narrative for everything that we do.

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the mechanics around breathing or being able to access full. So let's define what we mean, right? Oftentimes, if I'm going to be pressing overhead, I need to be in a globally extended spinal position. So I'm going to be moving from my ribcage is anchored down and I'm a rigid Pilates master, right? Into, hey, I'm pressing this awkward ass thing over my head, a log where I have to lean back a little bit.

What you see, and let me define rib flare for me, and you can define it for you, is that I have some sections of my back that move really well and some sections of my spine that are stiffer. So in our athletic populations, what we tend to see, again, this is just me talking as clinician and coach, we tend to see that athletic people have really stiff mid-backs. Their rib cage tends to be stiff and stiff.

Most of them end up using their lumbar spines as additional hips. So they use those big joints down below as solving hip limitation problems by cranking the pelvis over, by reversing early, whatever. Yeah, this is not a conversation about will you get injured because you flex. I don't want to stop that. We're not having that conversation.

But when we see rib flare, what I'm seeing is that junction between your thoracic spine and your lumbar spine is one of those places where it's easy to pick up motion and solve a movement problem. So oftentimes when people breathe, they default to the strategy that they use, which is instead of expanding through the trunk,

They tip the rib cage back because they get some access to the diaphragm there. But now we have a localized hinge, what we call a local extension or local flexion moment in one or two segments at that T-L junction.

And that is not the idea of the spine, which is let's transfer as much energy through as many segments as we can. Instead, what we get is a hinge right in the middle of a really stiff system. And then we're now through that stiffness and we can solve this problem again. And the reason that matters is not because your little back is going to ache or you get that pinch. It's because that's a shitty breathing plan.

And you're going to now start to see that you're going to pay a price in decreased physiologic function because you're using that strategy. You'll suddenly not be able to access your diaphragm as effectively. We know from Chai Tao's incredible book that when you start to see deficiencies in diaphragm function,

You start to run the risk of signaling to your brain that you are not breathing well enough and ventilating well enough. Remember that diaphragm, what, takes up 30% of your oxygen in aerobic fitness? 30% is feeding the machine, not your muscles, not your brain. It's feeding the diaphragm. And your brain perceives that diaphragm function as being really insufficient, starts to shut down force production to your legs. Isn't that weird?

So if you tilt that thing forward to solve a breathing problem, you now are not breathing as effectively and you're going to rate limit. Plus, we start to see that pelvis starts to go with it. No one just flares the rib cage. We flare the rib cage and the pelvis dumps forward. Subsequently, I've just lost intra-abdominal pressure. Subsequently, I put your abs into a position where they're not as effective at creating tension.

tension, power, control, pressure. And at the top and bottom of that thing, there's a diaphragm at your diaphragm. And then there's a diaphragm in your pelvic floor. So let me tell you why you're peeing yourself in double unders. Look at what's happening to your rib flare. Your rib cage is hinging. And now your pelvic floor is being inhibited. And I just call this positional inhibition. It's not permanent, but in that shape, hard to access your full physiology. And again, I want to just be clear.

Because I think a lot of the physios sometimes miss this. At low loads and low speeds, it probably doesn't matter.

At high loads and high speeds, which is where I get paid and where I work and how I live, it matters. So don't come at me and be like, man, you're just making a thing out of nothing. I'm like, bro, this is how we win Olympic medals, world championships, right? And I'll see you on the field. Oh, I don't see you on the field. I see you in your house talking with people who sit at their desks.

It doesn't mean that that's not important. It just means that we look at things through a performance lens and that guides our conversations and our vision about how we scale and work on these things, not pain, no pain. Hey, you're a middle-aged man trying to, you know,

Goblet squat for the first time this it's important, but it's less I think I know I'm I don't even know if I'm technically a rolfer anymore But I went to the rolfing Institute and do manual therapy and such and that's that with Ida Rolf her originally the 10 series started off starting with the feet and Then she bumped feet to session two and she made she made breathing be the first session of the 10 series and I don't even do 10 series anymore, but I

I think it's an interesting thing that now, you know, 16 years later, I'm now coming back to breathing being like the only thing that I see in a person, at least it's like the foundation. And it's like prioritizing the axial skeleton first is, you know, what your, your nervous system is doing because it literally is your central nervous system. And if that feels compromised, then your whole body feels unsafe to be able to produce power. Rightfully so. And it all comes back.

To that cylinder right in the middle of you, you know, called your, you know, your diaphragm and your, your, your, your, your torso, but that relationship of your, your pelvic girdle with your respiratory diaphragm. And I don't, I don't think it's talked about enough. What I like what you're saying is how do we give people the most access to their incredible physiology? That's what it's about.

I don't want you walking around at 70% of what you're capable of. You're only going to use 50% of it. That's cool. You like the Peloton. That's cool. But let's go ahead and just talk about what you can do to have access to 100% just in case you want to go hard one day, just in case you want to try something new one day. You know, think about we had a...

I had an Olympic swimmer from South Africa who was in his last Olympiad, and he's a sprinter and gold medalist and world champion and superstar. But he was finding that halfway through his 50, he'd lose a little power. He'd be like, what's happening? I was like, that's when you start breathing or not breathing. But what's happening is you're losing this default. You're overextending.

And because you're overextending for either solving a hip flexion problem or a shoulder flexion problem, right? Can't extend the hip, can't flex the shoulder all the way. And subsequently put a kink in the middle of that chain going a hundred miles an hour in the pool. And he immediately just felt like he would lose compression. What do we do? We work on how do we organize and systematize this so that you can do what you want to do. And you don't have to think about what your rib cage is doing when you're

What could a person do from home to start to realign or reorient their respiratory diaphragm in relation to their pelvic floor slash, you know, all the parts, their central nervous system? That's a good question. Yeah. The first thing I would do is I would point to, you know, we started flipping on our backs and we were laying on kettlebells and we were putting kettlebells on our trunk system and

And then Jill Miller came along and was like, have you seen this gorgeous ball? And I was like, this ball is way too squishy. But that ball sneaks right up underneath your rib cage. And it's squishy and creates a ton of shear. And one of the things that I think when we sort of talk about it will start to make sense for you. So...

I'm just gonna pretend like you're one of my typical average athletes, you know, which you're not, you're a mutant, but.

your quads are stiff. They hurt from a brutal run squat workout. What do you do? Well, it might be a couch stretch. I do a little mobilization and do some isometrics. I try to get the system going again and whatever tricks you like. Right. And then you're super fancy and you did all those things that you jumped in the Norma tech boots, maybe use them, the H wave to decongest all night. So you can show up and go hard the next day. Like a lot of things. You looked at your nutrition, you looked at your hydration, your sleep, you looked at moving quality. Okay.

Let's apply the same level of rigor to your trunk. When is the last time, if you're listening to this, you treated your abdominals, your core musculature, your quadratus, your obliques. When is the last time you took them to a romantic dinner and you're like, you know what?

I know you just did 10,000 toast a bar. You just did Pilates. You did Pilates daily 100. You're like super sore. You've been throwing the medicine ball. What did you do for your abs? And the answer is, and pardon me, everyone, sweet fuck all is what you did for your abs. You did nothing. What you were stoked was is that your abs were sore. The next day, you're like, yeah, I worked my abs. They're sore. Maybe I'll have a six pack. Let's eat some ice cream. That's all you did. You did not.

Think about restoring how they function or slide or how that impacts your diaphragm or the stiffness of your rib cage. You do not treat your trunk the same way you treat your calves. Like I know it because I work with people. And so one of the easiest things you could do is go to Amazon, buy a gorgeous ball,

Or you could go to Walgreens and get one of those crappy princess balls that are in that basket like at Walmart. You know what I'm talking about, right? There's a basket full of balls. You can get a kickball for like nothing. You can deflate a volleyball. But I want you to get on squishy ball and I want you to spend 10 minutes and I want you to go from your pubic bone to...

over to your pelvic bowl. I want you to go up underneath your rib cage. And I just want you to take some gigantic breaths. And what you're going to do is you're laying on your stomach there, trying not to puke and pass out, is that you're going to recognize, you're like, holy moly, that's uncomfortable. I'm afraid to breathe all the way out. You'll adopt this little shallow breath where you're keeping your trunk volume slightly inflated so you don't actually access or look at full range of motion of those tissues. And what we find is

Lo and behold, is that the easiest way in is to get someone on their stomach started to breathe and they stand up and they're like, wow, I can take a bigger breath. I can stand up and my rib cage works better. I stand up and boy, I can squeeze my abs harder. I'm like, yeah, welcome to the game. Right. And we pick up a lot of strange things. You know, there's this thing called endopelvic fascia. It's basically the connective tissue from your hips goes up into your pelvis, right?

So if you want to improve hip function, we work on your pelvic bowl and your abdominal fascia. If you have bladder dysfunction or erectile dysfunction, that's where we start. So what's fun about all of this is that because it is literally like a dark guest room that no one goes into, you throw your extra bikes and shit in there and you shut the door.

We're going to open that door. We're going to get some air in there. And you're going to pick up another room in your house that was dark and neglected. And it's so easy. Start with 10 minutes. Get on your stomach. Be cool. Take some breathing. And be prepared to get angry at your mother and your father and feel sad and access all your diaphragmatic functions.

you know, tension, but more importantly, you will ventilate more. We'll improve your VO2 max. How important is it to be able to breathe in a 360 way? I find it's very easy if you're introducing, teaching someone, you know, how to create intra-abdominal pressure or something of the sort. It seems like finding that in the front, being able to create that pressure in the front is manageable. If you encourage someone to be able to have any type of proprioceptive awareness of breathing into like the back floating rib,

area, it's very challenging. And something that I find makes that very improved would be laying on a ball or something of the sort, or just allowing the ribs to tuck down towards the pelvis a little bit and take yourself out of extension. Suddenly you bring your hands back there like, oh, wow, I can suddenly turn the lights on back in that space and fill that posterior space with air. But it's very rare culturally. And I think it's like a massive missing link in culture. And we're

We're doing a lot of different things to solve problems that I think are actually symptoms stemming from. You need more kettlebell swings. That's right. You need to, we do not need to brace the core or be stiffer in the trunk like that. That was, should have solved all the rib page. Look, if, if you and I are having a romantic dinner and I bring my elbow to my face, I

And my elbow stops at 90 degrees, right? And I have to use a really long fork to eat because my elbow is stuck at 90. You know what you would say? Bro, what's wrong with your elbow? And I'd be like, nothing. It doesn't hurt.

And so what you'd say is, well, hey, I wonder if being able to flex and extend your elbow might improve your power. Everyone would be like, yeah, obviously. I mean, hard to bench press with a stuck-bed elbow. Hard to do anything. Do a pull-up with a stuck-bed elbow, right? Can't get your chest to the bar. You can't row. You can't do anything with a stuck-bed elbow.

I'm like, well, why is your back stuck rigid? Why are the tissues that are designed to move? If you jump into Pilates, you're going to go, oh my God, Joseph is a maniac. He's making me do all this flexion, all this extension, all this rotation. And then you're like, okay, I'm not a Pilates guy.

I'm going to go to yoga. And you're like, holy crap. Why am I doing all this flexion, extension, rotation? Right? Why am I tying this rotation to my hip function? Why am I doing sun salutation and up or down, dog and downward? Because we're trying to make sure that those segments move.

And just like any other thing, it's move it or lose it. And so one of the things that happens for a lot of us because we're sitting down, those areas just become a little bit shut down. We don't have a lot of proprioception in there. One of the benefits of having people roll around on a ball is that you remind them that they have a back. And then suddenly they're like, oh, I can feel my back again. Right. And then ultimately what we should be asking is what's the point of training? Why are we training?

We're training to maintain our positions and to be able to manage positional competency across as many different domains as possible. Low load, low speed, low cardiorespiratory demand, low metabolic demand, low skill, high skill. But suddenly what I'm saying is the person who has the best control of their trunk, limbs, musculature, breathing,

across as many different domains as I can come up with, that person probably is going to be very capable of picking up new skills, of transferring power, of being more effective at what they do, and likely having less discomfort.

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How can a person quickly, what is the quickest cues to teach a person to be able to create intra-abdominal pressure to be able to stabilize a lift? You know, I think people do that intuitively. One of the things that we look at is if you're, someone walks past you and you have your swimsuit off and you stuck in the gut,

Again, can you breathe in that position? And so what we want to do is recognize that one of the reasons just getting people to breathe in their diaphragms is an incomplete practice by itself. If I just lay on your back and I'm like, stick your belly out, I'm like, okay, now hold this hundred pound sandbag and let me see that strategy.

And suddenly you're like, well, if I let my belly go, lumbar spine sort of explodes. It doesn't feel very good. I'm like, oh, so you have to be stiffer at your lumbar spine while you're holding this 200-pound sandbag. Okay, that makes sense. So you've got your abs contracting to try to maintain the integrity of your trunk.

Where are you going to breathe? Well, you better be able to breathe in your upper back. You better be able to breathe in your ribs. You better be able to breathe in your neck. We've got to pick up these accessory breathing apparatuses. Diaphragm, yeah, soft belly, get the most air. That's why we do that on our backs. As soon as we impose real low demand, we start to see that we better have alternatives breathing strategies. And one of the things that matters there, as you say, is if I have you take a big breath,

Get organized. You squeeze your butt and you shrink wrap. Then you can, then you're stiff in the trunk.

And this is how we end up teaching it what matters. If you hinge over and your belly bulges out. So if you do a plank and your belly bulges out, that's a herniation of the abdominal wall. Let me be clear. That's not like a disc herniation, but we have this hot dog and you've got a blister on the hot dog. That's what your belly sticking out is. So if your only strategy to get stiff is to stick your belly out into your belt, you're

guess what? You're creating a larger space to pressurize. You're creating more volume in the abdominal cavity and you're using your musculature to try to stiffen instead of using the musculature to try to organize, control, stabilize, and then using the diaphragm to pressurize. So one of the things we do is, you know, we squat down and if you watch our best Olympic lifters, you can go right onto the internet. When they're doing that first pull,

second pole, their bellies do not bulge out. And one of the reasons I'm such a fan of, I'm going to say Olympic style weightlifting, and I can Olympic lift with a dumbbell, everyone. I can Olympic lift with a sandbag. It doesn't have to be formal Olympic lifting. But that style is that the speed tells me a lot about the effectiveness of your positions. And often it protects us from less effective positions.

If I teach you to deadlift, I can get you to grind in the gnarliest, least transferable positions possible. Stick your belly out, crank your head back, your knees can come in. This doesn't matter because you're going slow, right? It's low load, low speed, low force movement, big strength movement. Same thing with squatting. But that's why when suddenly we started adding speed, we start to see what Franz Bosch, the Dutch super coach says,

There's more variation in waltzing than there is in sprinting. Why is that? The sprinting, we start to see that the body is going to naturally have to start to behave in a way that allows us to handle high forces. And suddenly it doesn't matter if you're Jamaican, if you're Dutch, if you're Italian, everyone's organizing principles are pretty much the same within just a few degrees of

But you're going to start to see that what we don't have is huge distended bellies. So what we have to do is we at some point we start low and flow. Good. We've got that. And then we're going to challenge that. And what we find is that it may take more than a single session and lots of practice. So one of the reasons I love squatting sandbags, having people hold a sandbag really allows them to feel what it's like to create high tension.

intra-abdominal tension without just sticking the belly out to solve a problem. Almost probably because we're in a little bit of flexion, we don't just default to global extension.

Do you think belly breathing has done more good or bad to people's mechanics? The concept of like breathe into your belly. Cause I feel like the idea of breathing in your belly oftentimes can lead to just distending your belly with the appearance of a diaphragmatic breath. But in fact, you're just extending your belly. Yeah. I like that. I appreciate that. That is certainly one of the traps that can happen. I think it's better for us to say, Hey, I'm going to, I need you. If I asked you to get stiff, I still see your diaphragm move.

So my trick is get as stiff as you can, take five breaths there, right? And what you'll see is that, oh, breathing is shut down dramatically when I'm at peak stiffness.

But I still can breathe. And if I ask you to get really stiff and the only place you can breathe is your neck, I'm like, oh, you don't understand that your diaphragm still drives this system. It's just driving into an abdominal musculature that's set in stone and is trying to resist huge motion. So I think it's one of those cues like elbows up or knees out that drives a specific purpose. But –

can be taken to an extreme. Yeah. I want to talk about, so you have, is it a program coming up for younger people, 12 to 18? Yeah. We're deep in a book project for sports performance for 12 to 18 years. Cause we're seeing that a lot of kids are not getting any of the things they need to survive high school sports effectively, middle school and high school sports. It's like we're,

where we have a completely separate system. As soon as you get to college, you have a nutritionist and a strength and conditioning coach and practice and you have to do all these things. And in high school,

all you do is just play your sport year round and yeah yeah we i did a i did a i did a podcast yesterday or two days ago with stephen porges the polybagel theory guy one of the things that he he said in the conversation was that the modern world that we live in is inherently abusive i don't know if he said exactly that but there's a lot of abuse happening that you wouldn't necessarily perceive because it's like oh you're just

you know, slouching over in your chair all day, closing up all your lymphatic glands and staring into your phone. You're like, this is a good life. It's like, no, you're, this is actually another angle on this is actually you're, you're kind of imprisoning yourself and you're, you're starting to create bondage that you eventually, if you want to live a fully expressed life, you're going to have to, you know, untie yourself from what you did from, from high school. But I think that people, adult people, 12 through 18, they're kind of doing the same, same type of things. And my original question was,

which now it's kind of becoming very roundabout. But original question was, I think there's a shadow space around the pelvic floor when people talk about like pelvic floor health or the pelvic, you know, diaphragm, like what does that mean? What are we doing to maybe cause maladaptive patterns with the pelvic floor?

Uh, and how can we start to gain or what are strategies we can start to, uh, utilize to regain relationship with the pelvic floor? And is that happening from a young age at the, you know, you know, starting grade school? Oh, for sure. We, um, let me, let me go a step further. We wrote, uh, a little, you know, New York times bestseller called, uh, uh, ready to run. And, um,

We noticed that in kindergarten, all the kids run like Usain Bolt. They're beautiful runners. And in the beginning of the first grade, they all run the same. And then halfway through the first grade, we observed that the cohort splits in half. And some kids are still maintaining their beautiful running. And then some kids start to heel strike. And imagine how crazy it is that you would alter a primary movement pattern

And you would switch like halfway through the first grade, we switched from riding with our right hands to riding with our left hands. That's the equivalent of what we're doing. And the question is, as soon as you take shoes off and you make kids sprint again, you know, they self-correct because they're slamming your heel into the ground, into the concrete or not. But more importantly, what the hell happened that those kids started to change their movement pattern? Guess what it rhymes with?

All the things you described, we're sitting in chairs more, we're not getting as much recess, right? And we're starting to adapt to the environment. So if you look at the human being, it's just a adaptation machine. We're just adapting. So what are you adapting to? And your body is, you know, a really great thing to think about. I think this is Dan Garner's, why does the body think that's a good idea? And then I'll go a step further and say, what problem is the body trying to solve?

And I think when you sort of come at all of these things with this curiosity, we start to say, well, yeah, we're going to see adaptation to the environment. And if you're sitting 12 hours a day and you never extend your hip, it's a drinking game at the ready state.

We don't drink, but it's a drinking game at the ready state where if I have to talk about hip extension, everyone's like, here we go again. Because hip extension and restoring the ability to get your knee behind your butt. It's super cool that everyone adopted knees over toes. Ben is great. He got people bending their knees. It's so great. But really the magic of knees over toes is what's going on with that trailing leg. And I need that leg to be able to get well behind your axis of rotation of your hip.

And then, you know, we can start to ask, well, why isn't your pelvic floor working? Well, you sit in this position, you don't have access to your, you know, your rotation of your pelvis or rotation of your hips. They don't rotate very well. You don't have any hip extension. And you're absolutely right. We start to see real shut down, you know, tissue systems that don't have any input. You know, I don't think, you know, I think if you're sitting on the ground a lot, you

That's one of the ways to combat this. I think, you know, a Philip Beach idea again is, you know, sitting on the ground or sitting is highly restorative to the body because for two and a half million stinking years, we sat on the ground and really it's only been a recent revelation that we start sitting in chairs. It's very, very modern. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. That was, I mean, that was like, if there was like a, a main premise of the align method book, I did like 60, you did the forward for it. It was just be like, get on the ground more. If you just get on the ground, you naturally, and this is like a la Phillip beach, you, you, you naturally tune yourself and we've removed ourselves and that's Phillip beach language on mine. Um, but we've removed ourselves from these natural tuning mechanisms and we've kind of, uh, like I would, I don't know if in prison might be too poetic or wanky or, or, or too much. Um,

Yeah. But that's the thing is we've maladapted. It's not dysfunctional. That's something that I got from Perry Nicholson. It's like, this isn't dysfunctional. It's highly functional.

It's just functional in a maladaptive environment. So you're adapting perfectly. You're just maladaptive to health and longevity and wellness. Yeah, and things you care about, like not peeing yourself in a jump rope or having to do the boner in the morning. I mean, choose something you give a crap about. And I think what's amazing then is really –

it allows us to say, well, what are we doing when we exercise? Are we just worshipping physiology? We're just saying bigger VO2 max and stronger quads. I think that's one of my beefs with this longevity movement is that it's so sort of clinical in its application. I do my four by four Norwegian VO2 max protocol.

But it says nothing about how well the system moves, about how you move and solve problems. We're just saying bigger VO2 max and more muscle and you're going to be 100 years old. I'm like, bro, you're not going to get up and down off the ground. Your balance sucks. You're stiff. You're in pain. But your VO2 max is huge and you have big quads. So let's just give everyone hypoxic training.

And then we'll give everyone steroids and like, you know, BFR and we'll have big quads and we'll solve the problem. Oh, that didn't solve the problem. And so suddenly we're back into why does yoga look like yoga? Why, you know, what are our movement practices? Why are martial arts practices doing these things? Why do...

We see that, you know, when we're training people for the Olympics, why does that look so different than what we see at the Globo Gym? Because what we've done is said, hey, we're fine to maladapt, right? As long as you look good naked.

and your body composition is skinny and you have abs, you're good to go. I mean, that's literally people define health as, you know, I look good naked. You know, I'm proud to take my shirt off. What is that book, that movie with Glenn Powell? Like he's swimming and getting out of breath. And she's like, oh my God, you're hot girl fit. He's like, I don't do cardio. I just do like abs, you know? And I think that's how we've defined fitness.

And what I want, or health, and what I want to say is best athlete is the kid who can pick up the new skill the fastest, right? Who has the most access to her available physiology at speed and load for as long as we can. That is the definition of a body that you can do whatever you want with. How can a person start to implement strategies that naturally tune the body? I'm speaking in a very wanky, pedantic way. I think I'm nervous talking to you probably. I said it.

Well, the first thing you can do is move more. So recent research came out that just said, hey, the most important thing is all movement, like total movement, not even strength, not even VO2 max, but total movement. And you can certainly dial those things up and improve the quality of your life, but just you need to move more. So the first order of magnitude I would say is easy is let's get you walking again.

and legitimately walking. And if you want to really, because you're like an elite person, put a backpack on with some weight while you walk around. But hit your minimums. I think one of the things that Juliette and I have really started to feel like, and we've started to stitch these essential behaviors into what we call base camp. Because everyone's sort of talking about them, but we're like, hey, number one,

You're a system of systems. So if some aspect of the system isn't working, you're going to see degradation of the whole system. But more importantly, you don't have to always nail 100% of the things every single day because it's a system and it's robust. But one of the things that I feel really strongly about is you need to walk more.

And what we learned from the research, right, is that, you know, 8,000 steps a day gets you the lion's share of the benefits. And a busy person can walk 8,000 steps a day. That's really a reasonable number of steps. 51% decrease in all-cause mortality, 21% decrease in morbidity. So it really makes a difference in your health. And if you walk 10,000 or 12,000 steps, I think it goes up to like 65%. But I'll take the 50% because I'm a busy person and I like to exercise and do other things.

The second thing I would say is see how we have a benchmark there. So now if I'm under 8,000, I'm like, oh, let's get up to 8,000 today. You know, I haven't moved very much because I've been traveling and I'm in all these meetings. Fine. Okay. I get to come back to that.

And I'd say, you know, the second thing I would put in for a busy working person is let's make sure that you are sleeping. Right. And that for us, we want you laying in bed for eight hours without looking at your phone. That's what our definition is. Because if I know you're, you're so unusual and you only get to sleep six hours, that's all you need. That's a lie. But I know that you're different. You're different than every other human being on the planet because you're such a special snowflake. But it turns out,

if we can get people resting at least for more than seven hours, we're gonna do better. And, um,

So we want you to lay in bed for eight hours without looking at your phone. And you can just lay there, close your eye mask and just rest. If you wake up, don't panic, just rest. That's the next best thing. And the second thing, third thing I'm going to say is I want you to sit on the floor for 20 to 30 minutes a night. That's it. And fidget, lean up against Twitch. And if you started doing that as your three sort of essential practices, you will see that your body will adapt.

Hey y'all, wanna take a moment and share about something I'm incredibly excited about? It is the release of the Align Breathing program. What makes the Align Breathing program different is it actually teaches you how to breathe. Most of the programs and practices and modalities that I see within the breathing space or even yoga or weightlifting or anything that pertains to breath

is there's not much, if any, education on how to breathe, the structure and the mechanics and the function of breathing. If you'd like to learn more about your own breath, I wanna invite you guys to take the breathing archetype quiz, where we ask you a few subjective questions and also go through a couple of breathing exercises for you to have a better understanding of how you breathe and how you can breathe better.

The breathing quiz is at alignpodcast.com slash quiz. That's A-L-I-G-N podcast.com slash quiz. I look forward to seeing you guys over there. How does the flexion and extension of the hip tie into the function of your respiration? Well, first of all, I want to be very clear that the function of your hips should be independent of your ability to ventilate. What you're seeing is,

I think you should be able to take a pretty maximal breath in a deep squat. And if I have you put your arms over your head in a deep squat and you can't take a breath, I'm like, what's wrong with you? You know what I mean? Like, why is it your crappy ankle range of motion is,

is affecting your breathing and you're affecting your ability to create intravenous pressure. And it's because you can't achieve a position that doesn't ask your spine to start pitching in to solve a movement problem. And thank goodness we have those strategies, right? That's what I want to tell everyone is that

Again, your body is there for you. And if you're having to dump all your pelvis over into a big flex position to, you know, sit in a squad and you're rounding your upper back, thank goodness we can do that because that lets us move through the environment, hunt, reproduce, find resources, dance. But you have just greatly diminished your capacity to do a lot of work in those positions. And so, again,

Same thing is true with hip extension. Being able to get your knee behind your back in a big lunge, oftentimes if you don't have access to that hip flexor complex, if it doesn't extend, right, then what you're going to do is you're going to drag your pelvis with your femur into that hip.

into your pelvic tilt overextension position, which immediately downregulates your pelvic floor function, downregulates your breathing function. Then you're going to have to solve that some other place. And you might have to solve it by becoming 2X fit or whatever. I mean, let me tell you how this works. Working with some physios at Arsenal, right? Decent soccer club.

And sorry, footy club. And they have an athlete who has bilateral Achilles tendinopathies. And again, this is just a funny case, right? So if you were a young physical therapy student, we would say we present you with this athlete who has bilateral Achilles tendinopathies. And it turns out

It's not his range of motion. It's not his ankles. It's not his tissue health. What's going on? They run it through. And what I say is watch him breathe while he runs. And what turns out is that this athlete was holding his breath while running. He would go from breath hold to breath hold, which caused huge neural tension. And that neural tension showed up as tension in the musculature trying to protect the nervous system.

And so what they did was got him to get what it's called. I think it's called breathing while running, which is usually easier. Yeah, that's the technical term breathing while running. And they got him to breathe while running. Guess what happened?

Right. Those tenonopathies just went away because they were functions of the body trying to protect the nervous system, which was under huge tensions at high speed and it didn't work very well. So that's an example of what I'm talking about in terms of we're trying to separate out your ventilation efficiency from the ability to move your arms. If you put your arms over your head and it decreases your ventilation, you have an opportunity to get better.

That's why we do downward dog. And that's why we breathe and stink in our dog. What do you think we're doing a downward dog? Like we're not wasting our time. We're saying, can you have your arms over your head in this closed torque position with some hip flexion? You might thought about hamstrings, but really watch people's upper backs in the downward dog and they suck. Yeah. That's like playing the piano. It's not about the keys that you hit as much as about all the keys that you're not hitting. You're only hitting a couple of keys, but every time you hit another one, that's when it creates like you go out of rhythm.

You know, there's like the Stu McGill, I think he came up with, coined the concept of the double pulse. Or at least, I mean, the body coined the concept, but I think he like put the language around it. So when you throw a punch or when you're running or anything of the sort, you stiffen, you turn into stone in order to like stabilize to launch the cannon. And then you launch and you turn into water. And then upon contact, you turn to stone again and then you repeat again.

And that is going to be an athletic person. That's going to be a person that can perform a figure skater, a boxer, a kickboxer, any of that. If they're able to fluently go through that double pulse rhythmically, but if you're stuck in stiffness or stuck in flaccidity or excessive lax, then you're not going to be performing very well.

So restoring that double pulse. That's right. And I think it's a beautiful way to talk about, I'm looking at the skill of, can you organize and create high stiffness and then relax very quickly? You know, one of the things I think that has come back around is, I love when people are discussing jumping on high boxes or Olympic lifting as triple flexion.

Can you go from really immediately extending the hip to reversing hip? And Greg Glassman talked about that, even just with, you know, the medicine ball clean, which we all poo-pooed. But now we're like, oh, maybe that was a good beginner drill to teach someone how to generate force and then change direction and end up in a triple flex position, you know? And so you're exactly right. And what I'm going to tell you is that if you only have one strategy to get stiff, man, you're going to be slow and you're going to get your ass beat.

I have boys on our water polo team, this cat who's very interested in hanging out with us, who are, you know, these are swimmers playing for a national team that's won three out of four national championships. And they, you know, they're 250, 260 pounds and six sticks. And these are water polo players. So if you can't move quickly and adapt and be violent and then fluid and aerobic,

you're gonna get your ass kicked by these guys. Yeah. Is there any way to restore a nervous system's ability to go from stiffness to laxity without performing like sport or like jumping rope? Or, you know, can you do like calisthenics to get yourself into those positions? Or you kind of just need to bob around and like learn that, start throwing some punches. I think you have to move. I think you have to be in a physical practice.

Right. And something, again, you hinted at something beautiful, like jump roping. Can I go from, you know, really stiff to really relaxed? Can I change direction? Can I, you know, create that pressure? I think jumping is a really nice, uh, diagnostic tool to really understand what's happening. Um, you mentioned, so, so you have the, the, the, um,

12 to 18, that's a book, but that's not going to be out for a little bit. And then you have a program coming up as well. Is that correct? Yeah. We just launched the Starrett system, which is our first kind of take at how do we integrate all of these lifestyle behaviors into a busy person's life? What's essential?

from nutrition to sleep to sitting on the ground, daily mobilizing. And then we have finally answered the call where people are like, can you do some programming for me? What would a good strength and conditioning program look like for someone who's in their mid-30s to 50s who wants to check the boxes on all the conditioning? Like right now, for example, everyone is – this is called the Startup System. You go to StartupSystem.com. But right now, we're seeing that in this –

longevity space, we're gonna call it space, it makes me sick to sing longevity space, but whatever. People are obsessed with longevity, it's all about lifting weights. And I want to point out that yeah, lifting weights and having muscle confers a lot of health benefits. But being well conditioned and metabolically efficient is

That doubles that effect. And so if you want to compound the interest of being strong, you better make sure you are well conditioned. And one of the things that we do is we program sprints. People are not sprinting anymore. And I have you doing max wattage efforts on the bike with repeats and you're going to die. You've never worked this hard. So we want to solve how do I expose myself to all the positions and shapes that we're talking about.

How do I have the sort of in 40 minutes, 45 minutes, how can I put those things together quickly, four days a week? We program, wait for it, play. In order to be successful in the program, you got to go out on the weekends and actually do a sport. And that sport could be walking and hiking, playing pickleball, throwing a Frisbee, messing around, learning a skill. It doesn't matter, but quit playing.

hoarding your fitness and pretending like the more pull-ups you have the better person you are the reason we're doing pull-ups is that we've gone to the world and go kick some butt and we're trying to remind people that we need to go outside and walk and move so that's what we're trying to do in this program it seems like a lot of like the longevity conversation is like you need to do resistance training because you need to accrue muscle but we're treating muscle as like a commodity as opposed to like an integrated part of part of life yes like just get the muscle

Get the muscle. Like you get a pair of fake tits. You just need tissue on your body. It's like, well, hopefully that's a symptom of the shit that you do. You're missing it, baby. I think you're exactly right. And again, if we just need to get your heart rate up and give you some muscles, it's cocaine and steroids. Let's just give everyone cocaine and steroids. Your heart rate will spike all the time. You'll be jacked. There may be some downstream negative consequences of the cocaine and steroids. And that's actually...

a power lifting bodybuilding strategy from the eighties. I just want to be clear. I didn't invent that. That was actually a strategy and guys got real, real strong and they lifted a lot of weights, but they were real skinny and grinded their teeth and went to jail. So, you know, I'm just saying it's not a super long strategy, but to your point, what we're looking at is how it's not about just muscle. It's, you know, again, I think our obsession with skinny bodies is,

Right. That is our obsession. I'm just looking at Ozempik. We just were talking to one of our good friends who is a coaches women and the, her friends, this, this, this athlete of this coach, her friends were like, you don't need to work out. Just take Ozempik. And what we're seeing is, you know,

People in our neighborhood who habitually love to walk long distances and even jog are starting to have symptoms of osteoporosis, osteopenia. They're pre-diabetics. They don't have enough muscle. And they've been like – they look good in clothes and jeans, but they are not thriving. And that's because they're not going real, real hard. They're not sleeping.

They're not lifting weights and, you know, they're not playing sports and moving. We see, for example, the greatest test out there about your fitness in the world right now is pickleball. If you go play pickleball and get injured, I can tell you that your program sucks.

And it's because you're doing a whole bunch of things your program didn't expose you to. So I think pickleball will save America. I really feel like that. I feel like paddle is going to be even better. But pickleball gets you cutting and moving. And if you tweak yourself playing pickleball, it's because...

your elite program of tempo, goblet squats and single leg deadlifts with a dumbbell. You start putting yourself into a corner. You get so strong in specific positions that you kind of like create a chasm between athleticism. You're like, I'm like a gym, I'm a gym athlete. Yeah, I think gym athlete, you know, physical culture is,

came about if we put Ido Portal at the top of that coining the term was really a reaction to gym science which is you look at what people are doing in the gym it's very sophisticated it's highly decorative we

We have to do all of these things. We're going to meet all of your needs, all your metabolic demands. We forgot that the reason we used to train was that it made us better at our sports. That's why we were training. And then training became the recursive holy grail. I do more pull-ups, so I do more pull-ups, so I do more pull-ups. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you can swim fast or jump. And suddenly you get back to someone like George Hebert of the original movement natural system saying,

And man, it's running and swimming and jumping and climbing and a really useful body. In fact, that's how he defines it. If there's a fire, are you going to be helpful with the people in the building? Yes or no? So, and look, it's okay to be pretty and it's okay to be handsome and jacked. I'm not saying those are mutually exclusive, but I think we're still at a phase in a time where, um,

We're confusing training for exercise amusement. And exercise amusement is still better than hanging out at the bar. But don't confuse that with that's enough to live a thousand years, et cetera, et cetera.

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Yeah. Can I ask you one more simple, basic question? You got to run right now. I feel like we're probably over overtime.

What do you think of the future of bionics and such? Do you think that humans are going to merge with AI? Or do you think that there's going to be something sexy about being organic biology? I think we're always going to love organic biology because we're human beings. I do think so. I mean, I think you can have sex with a robot now, but it's probably not as good. You know, is it... You know,

Is it better to smoke actual flour or to have a techno vape? You know what I mean? I would argue that like tobacco is probably better than, you know. Dude, that's my theory. Poor analogy. I think it's going to come back. Hold on. I've said this exact same thing. I think the whole like going into like the zins and the nicotine patches and the vapes and all that stuff. I think probably I predict in 2020,

two to seven years, you're going to start seeing an article in the New York Times or whatever that like, oh, actually organic tobacco wasn't as bad as we thought. It's more just if you become like dependent on it and you're doing it all the time.

And, you know, the direction that we went actually created a lot more issues. And just the organic thing that comes from nature was, you know, not nearly as bad as what we've done with vaporizers is my prediction. So we'll see how this, how this. Yeah. I suspect even if it's just about dose control, like, uh, like a hand rolled tobacco cigarette, it's this big. How much are we seeing kids hit their, their Nick vapes? I'm like, Oh my God, that was a whole pack of cigarettes and two hits. Like, you know,

Again, I think AI is like – if you're not into AI, it's like saying you're not into graphing calculators. Of course you're into graphing calculators. So you do calculus now. But I do think we're all – because we're humans, we're always going to value –

what it means to be human. You're already even seeing that with, um, social media people, you know, um, sort of getting off social media, recognizing that being in community really is important. And, um, you know, I, I am a humanist, which means that I believe in the innate power of humans to solve human based problems. Um, there's a lot of competing effects with that. And we go through cycles and all, you know, um,

But I do think this body is designed to last 100 years, no problem, and to kick butt. And we'll start to get to a place where we actually value that. And I'm not being political right now, but I want to make sure that we don't lose the narrative about...

seed oils or certain dyes because we still have kids who don't eat food in elementary school. And we still have kids who don't exercise or move their bodies. So if we're really serious about making America healthy again, and I think there's a consciousness about change right now, then let's actually...

do the things that we know. Let's institute walking programs at schools. Let's make sure kids are getting sunlight. Let's get them moving more. Let's actually solve some of the systemic problems that we have. Everyone can have access to raw milk. Fine. Is there raw milk? Is it safe? Are we going to put it in elementary schools? No. So again, I don't think that our lack of raw milk is why we're so sick.

I don't think even putting sugar back into Coke is going to solve an obesity problem if we still sell Cokes at schools. So again, let's put the functional unit of change where it always has been in our households, in the people we love, and let's commit to getting that inner circle of 10 people that we see all the time playing more, feeling more loved, going outside and using our bodies and eating food together. That's the recipe for a transformed society.

Awesome. Thank you so much, man. I really enjoy our conversations. And like I said, appreciate you all the education from afar and occasionally up close over the years. I really appreciate you a lot.

Likewise. And I, let me just say, I always appreciate being able to just deep fucking nerd with you. I mean, it's really, I just, everyone, when I talk to Aaron, I I'm using the language that I use with my coach nerd friends. So if you're like, what is that? Is he just, is this just word salad? It's not, these are the languages that we speak in and coach in all the time. Yeah. Well, I appreciate it. Uh,

So the best place for people to go from here, if they want to go deeper into your stuff, that's a good place to point people. For a lifestyle place, you're sort of imagine that you're a ninja and you want to bring in your aunties and uncles or neighbors or your provider and you want to get people the next thing and you can't solve this problem in your clinic.

Built to Move is our last book, and it's a really great template off of which you could then hang any exercise program, any movement program, any breathing program. It'd be a really great place to start. It would up-level everyone. And then we just relaunched our app, Mobility Coach, which is going to help you kind of get out of pain. But there's a lot of resources here from you on that. And, of course, I'm very, very proud of our most recent project, the Startup System. Awesome.

Thank you, brother.

I hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. If you'd like to go deeper into transforming the way that you feel via the way that you breathe, you can visit the first free week trial of the Align Breathing Program found at alignpodcast.com slash breathe. Also, if you want to learn what your breathing archetype is, there are three categories of breathers that we outline in there. You can take the quiz at alignpodcast.com slash quiz. Alright,

All right. Appreciate you guys. I'll see you next week.