Lessons

Lesson Info

Class Introduction

Thank you so much. First few things we gotta get out of the way before we start. One is if you're tuning in we greatly appreciate your time. The audience here are test subjects and torturees were greatly appreciated. What's great is that none of these guys have families or jobs or real expectations at home so being here represents an enormous time commitment on their part and your part. But it's a part of a big experiment. And before I introduce myself, we just need to talk about a few things to get a few things straight. One is that Creative Live represents, I would say, the greatest social experiment maybe I've been part of. We think, and as I was thinking about how to kind of program this or talk about this, it came to me when some of the producers asked me to create a reading list. And as I was doing this reading list for my wife, she was like, "There's a lot of Sci-Fi on this reading list." and I was like, "Well it's really what people should read "if they're going to understand m...

y kinetic brain." And so one of the concepts here is that we're living in an epoch, it's a renaissance. For the first time in the history of the world, we have disparate unsiloed access to so many different cross disciplines. We have a gymnast like Carl Paoli who's gonna be on, talking to the world's best power lifters, like Mark Bell and Jesse Burdick, talking to elite coaches in rowing, talking to super athletes, talking to yogis, talking to genius physicians. For the first time, I feel like we have a chance of getting this right. And look, let's be clear about what's going on here. For thousands of years, we're not any smarter than the people before us, right, maybe we are, maybe we're a little bit more integrated and best practices, but people have been really taking crack at this, about improving the human condition for a long time. And as an example, you know, I'm pretty sure that about 2000 years ago in some of the early yoga texts they were talking about how to get your shoulders organized. Yes, right, and maybe when you put your arms over your head you were aligning the chakras, maybe, or maybe you were just organizing your shoulder into a stable position. Ah, it's maybe that we'd figured this out, but that these kind of pockets of embodied knowledge have gone away, why? Because we didn't have the YouTubes, we didn't have the internets, we didn't have this technology to be able to share and sort of reconcile all of these brilliant, incredible bastions of knowledge and experience. 350 years ago, Musashi was this Japanese swordsman who wrote the Book of the Five Rings. Have you guys heard of this book? It's a pretty important book. Excellent, plus one for you, one extra supple point. And what happened was he said hey, 350 years ago, he's like hey where your short sword goes, your belly needs to be firm. Obviously he's talking about your core, get your core tight. Which is weird because that translates strangely into feudal Japanese as like hara or something, right. But he figured it out, like you need to have your belly tight, and he's like from your knees to your feet, you need to create tension. Well what was that about? We know what that was about, it's about talking about creating torque and stabilizing the back. More importantly, he said make your combat stance your everyday stance. And one of the things is if this guy 350 years ago was just writing about his experience being a Japanese swordsman that the universal truths of how to be organized as a human being have been laid out for us. But for the first time, we can sort of integrate all of these concepts, we can put all of the data together and all of the information together. And if we don't get it right this time, we've blown it. It's up to us. And so what's amazing about Creative Live, and this is where this comes from, is when they asked me to create a book list, one of the books on there that I didn't list but should list is called Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Now I have two daughters, some of you guys know this, and what I'm always working on with them is sort of this concept that came out of the book, and the book is happens, it's a post-modern kind of industrial society where technology has really taken these advances forward, and what's happened is that the castes that own the technology have really sort of gone and become what they call neo-Victorian, and the idea was that in reaction to our easy, modern ways, here with advertising and tight-fitting jeans, right, skinny jeans, that, not skinny jeans, the idea is that they kind of created this formal society. What they found was that the kids coming through the process of this formal society, their schooling, were perfect product of the system. And the gentleman who was in charge of this kind of society's caste realized that what he needed to do was create kids who were perfect products of the system, yet could highly disrupt the system. And so he created this thing called the Primer for Girls. And so personally for me, I'm trying to always raise my daughters to say, hey this is what the system is, you have to get straight As, you have to be polite, at the same time you need to be working to sort of undercut the system, undermine, find the corners. How can we have disruptive technology, how can we practice the limits of our understanding so that we can evolve and continue to kinda press forward? For me as a parent, I mean it's a very crazy concept. I'm like hey, you need to be a perfect student, and you need to try to undermine the authority of your teacher all the time, so that you can create a life that you can live that has meaning for you. Let's take that concept, this primer concept, and when Creative Live said, "Hey Kelly, are you interested in doing a course for us?" I was like, hell yes, and the reason is what we think we can do in the next two days is create a primer for basic human movement. This is what happens and how much you should know, and all of the integrated concepts in one piece. Imagine you have the most extraordinary set of software, the brain, on top of the most extraordinary set of hardware ever created. In two and a half million years you've been evolving. In the last 10,000 years you really haven't changed that much, you know. Your femur is a little bit longer, you're a little fatter, it's true, but otherwise you're the same human being. So who taught you to sit? Who taught you to stand? Who taught you to run? Sort of the things that we take for granted, and what's been happening is that we've been sort of been spending our genetic inheritance regularly. What we've been doing, and we'll talk about adaptation in a second, is we've been sort of just saying, well it's working, we're good to go. And those of you in the audience can recognize that what we're seeing is that you're designed to be 110 years old, that is how extraordinary the physiology of the human being is, and very robust. But guess what, the resting state of the human being is pain-free. So let me ask you this question. How many of you guys in the audience are pain free? Raise your hands. I'm sorry, you guys didn't understand the question, raise your hand if you're pain-free. So what's going on there, right? So we have this concept that if you have the right lifestyle you know how to eat, you know how to sleep, you're getting enough, you're not totally stressed, you know you're not eating great military food on a deployed, stressful deployment on a ship, right, comma, you move correctly. And what we see is that your body has an almost miraculous capacity to spontaneously and continuously heal itself. And I'm not talking about miracle cures. I'm talking about that you're a pretty remarkable self-repairing person. If you get a cut when you're 90 your skin still heals. And so what's going on? How come we're making these basic adaptation errors? How come we're making these kind of basic mistakes in our understanding about how we organize and how we move? And so here's the first task we're gonna do. You're playing along in the internet land, and for all time, in this primer, right, we're gonna turn this into a drinking game for you at home, is that any time you guys see these guys slouch, you have to do a shot. Does that seem fair? A shot of wheatgrass, a shot of goat blood, (laughs) of something, right, it can be totally paleo, whatever you need to do. But the concept here is we need to be able to connect the dots and make our combat stance our everyday stance. Really what's problem is, is that we think, ah it's the exercise, and what's happening, or the training that I'm doing, it's the fighting, it's the engagement, what's happening is we don't have a basic schema and template about how to get organized, about how to put my body into a better position, about how to be able to perform basic maintenance on myself. This is a human right. These are the things that we should be teaching in our schools. This is what we should be, as our embodied inheritance, when you have knee pain and you go see your doctor, right, and the doctor's like, hey you've worn a hole in your knee. And you're like, what? And the doctor, very reasonably, is like, hey look, that bone, in her head, she's like, that bone is designed to be 110 years old, and you're 22 and there's a hole in your kneecap, maybe you should stop running. And you're like, you can't keep my down, I'm a runner, I express myself through running, right. And people freak out about this, right, 'cause the physician's saying very something reasonable, "Hey I'm not sure you're moving very well. "I've noticed that you've worn a hole in a system "that's designed to be there for your whole life. "What's going on?" Well what's going on is that is the poorest, worst use of a physician services of all time is that you've basically have caused an immense amount of damage because you don't understand how to move, and you don't understand how to identify how to protect yourself. So on my reading list is this first book is called Dune. And raise your hands if you've read Dune. Oh, little marks in the back. Some of you, we're gonna have to do some remedial catch up tonight, okay. But there's a scene where the young Paul Atreides who was the chosen one is being tested by the Bene Gesserit witch, and she's like, she's gonna find out if he is a human being or not, right, 'cause this is what we're really deciding about. Am I responsible enough to take care of this machine so that I can lead an extraordinary pain-free life and can I take on the mantle, the onus, the responsibility of being able to do this basic maintenance on this self? So she says, "Put your hand in this box." He's like, "What's in the box?" And she says, "Pain," this really creepy voice, right. And he sticks his hand in the box, he's gonna be tested. And she holds this needle to his neck called the Gom Jabbar, right and she's like, "If you take your hand out of the box, "I will kill you," which is a very reasonable thing to say. So she starts to melt his hand with her brain, and it's a David Lynch movie so you can understand what's going on, and the flesh is burning off his hand and he's freaking out, but he's got to keep the hand in the box so that he doesn't choose to die. And at the end she's like, "I can't take it!" and he pulls his hand out. She's like, "Take your hand out of the box," and it's just his hand, right. And she's like, "Pull your hand from the box human," and she's like, "The test is crisis. "The test is can you decide and choose to be a human being? "Can you decide to not be an animal and just pull your hand "out of the box because you had this noxious stimuli, "but can you consciously make a better decision?" And that's what this is really about today. Is that this conscious, for the next two days we're gonna try to have people change their consciousness about how they're moving, how they're eating a little bit, and what to do about these things when we're finding problems in the system, because you should have a basic template for that. Because it's your decision not to just be run your machine into the ground until it fails. We know that these are problems that have been plaguing human beings forever. If we look at the data on back pain in America, it's a billion dollar problem. The World Health Organization has phenomenal statistics on this. We look at the Army, the Army has a million orthopedic injury uses a year that are non-combat related. I have some friends from the School of Infantry, Marine Force Recon, 85% of those tactical athletes retire on disability, 85%. So what we're seeing is that in the universities we have 18 to 22 year old kids, super jocks coming in, don't worry when you're 22 there's another kid coming behind you to take your place. And what we've done is we've sort of built this concept and notion on, hey, don't worry, we can spend your genetics long enough, and then when you're broken, someone else will come and take your place. But, what we're finding is that this is really not a conversation about performance or maintenance and being pain free, what we find, and this is an important concept, is that I have a clinical doctorate in physical therapy and there's never a compromise between being in the safest position and being in the best position and having the best joint congruency and the best tissue loading and tissue health and going the fastest. And what we want to do here today is sort of link all of those dots that who I am I the world manifests itself all the time, how I'm standing, how I'm organized, how I sit, how I pick up my kid out of the crib, how I hold my babies, right, all of these things sort of aggregate into what happens then when I express myself as a human being, which is movement, sport, dance, sitting, I'm a creative person and I'm holding my camera. How do we do that? And what we're gonna need to do is that this is a two day course, the first day is gonna be all about movement, because what we find is that people are making basic movement errors all day long. What I hope to happen is that once you have seen this course going on a little bit, it's gonna be like taking a handful of the blue pills in the Matrix, I think it's the blue pills and you're gonna wake up, the sleeper must awaken, and you're gonna have a choice about either seeing the world as half broken, which is a really difficult way to operate, or half unbroken. And what you're gonna see is how poorly people move around you, and how we just sort of take that for granted. How you're sitting, how you're standing, how you pick things up, how you run. What we tend to do is make these basic assumptions that if I said to you guys, "Get tight, ready get tight!" What does that mean? Flex your core? Fire your cobra hood? Like you know, flex your beach muscles? And I just saw 10 different iterations out there, you were like, gotta get tight, gotta squeeze my butt, what do I do? And what we need to do is that this stuff needs to be observable, measurable, and repeatable phenomenon. We need a precise schema for getting the best physiology of the human being. Now I own a CrossFit gym, it's called San Francisco CrossFit. I'm an early adopter. We look at our gym as the laboratory. That the idea is that since we've been open, we imagine we've had, estimate we've had 80,000 athletes, athlete sessions in our gym which is an immense amount of pattern recognition. If we can pull out all of the little problems and what we found was that we were seeing all of the lies, all the tight hips, all of the baby holding, all the sprained ankles, all of the, we found it all, right, it was this great diagnostic tool. And what also I found was that people didn't have a basic template for how to do maintenance or understanding what was going on. And I was having to undo all of this stuff during the course of basic training. And so what's happened now is that some of these ideas as a working physio, as owning a gym with a lab, of going around the world and teaching, is that if we can create this two day body of knowledge of the basics about day to day life, then we can really create a template for athletes and tactical athletes to go through training, for kids to be in sports, for people to be able to compete, for people to be able to train well, and then suddenly we can advance the conversation. Like that Streets song, Let's Push Things Forward, that's what this is really gonna be about today. So the first day is about movement, and we've got an extraordinary day. We're gonna talk about some theory. We're gonna get organized a little bit about in terms of having a cogent schema about what we're gonna fix. We'll work our way through this, and then we'll do some actual movements so we can see it where the rubber hits the road, because to talk of bulls is not the same things as to be in the bull ring, is it. And so we'll get into that, and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna have Jill Miller as our first guest. And Jill Miller is, if I could have a twin, and she was cute and smart, (light laughs) cuter and smarter, and a woman version of myself, it would be Jill Miller, right, she is like my soul sister. And she is a brilliant thinker in the space of fascia, and the space of connective tissue, and kind of self care and self embodiment. You know, if you talk to her, she's like, why don't you have your loci of control organized? She's about empowerment, right, you should be able to do this yourself, And then she's also a brilliant yoga teacher which is also a formalized system of movement. And what's nice about the way we're gonna talk today is that if you start to understand these principles, if you know how to organize your spine and understand these basic kind of schema and model, then suddenly you can apply that to any situation, how to pick up my kid, how to drive in my car, how to survive the helicopter, how to be on the boat and not get crushed, and that's what's great about this. Suddenly you don't become an expert in one field, you become an expert in every field. And I should tell this quick story, because when I was in Australia with my wife a year ago, just about my relationship with yoga, when I was 20 years old I may or may not have lived in Kathmandu a little bit and done some yoga, but we were in Australia about a year ago, we were staying in a nice spa, and Juliet was like, "Hey you should go take this yoga class, "it'll be entertaining for you and entertaining for them." So I showed up at the appropriate time and there's like 15 people in their yoga costumes, right, women who look like they're doing yoga, you know, and the instructor's not what I would call the embodiment of fitness, right, she looks a little puffy to me, she's not really strong, but she looks at me, and of course I am her worst nightmare. I walk in at the appropriate time but I am basically late, and she's like, F, like you know, and you can see her just deflate, like, ah I had these women and they know what they're doing and I have this fat football guy in the background. In this condescending voice, she's like, "Well have you ever done yoga before?" And I was like, oh it's on, have I done yoga, and I was like, "A little, I'll just be in the back." And not that yoga is a competitive sport, but (exclaims) I was like bringin' the heat and trying to school those girls. So what ends up happening is that about 10, 20 minutes in, she's like, "Good job in the back, whoa in the back. "What are you doing, that's amazing?" And obviously she can't, she's having some cognitive dissonance. Right after the class, and I know these women are turning around and they're like what's going on in the back, and what's going on in the back is I'm winning. (laughs) At the end of the class she runs up to me and she's like, "Look, I'm sorry I got it wrong. "Obviously you have a yoga practice and I misjudged you." And I was like, "It's okay, it's okay," I'm an endurance athlete, I get it. And she looks at me and she's like, "So do you practice yoga? "Where do you practice?" And I was like, "Oh, I don't practice yoga, ever." She's like, "Well what do you do?" I said, "I lift heavy weights, have a nice day." And the idea is that if you understand the basic schema, then you understand what Buckminster Fuller called this concept of mutual accommodation, that all correct systems are integrated, that you don't have to discard one piece, and that there have been movement systems from the dawn of time, people have worked out the details for us. And what's nice is that when you start to understand the underlying principles, because the shoulder is the shoulder, however it's being applied across any sport or movement platform, the back is the back, and suddenly you become an expert in everything. And so when we start thinking about that, it's fun to jump into a yoga class because I understand the principles of yoga, and I understand what's trying to go on. I've got to maintain a stable shoulder and a stable spine, and boy that looks a lot like snatching to me, and that looks a lot like efficient running mechanics, and so there's not an integration or disintegration. What we have is this idea of this primer, so we're gonna bring Jill Miller on, and we're gonna talk about some of the biggest errors we see in the human body this morning, and that's this breathing mechanic as it relates to your spine and global stabilization. Because when people are making movement errors they don't breathe very well and this causes a host of problems. In fact in the real world right now there's a lot of talk looking on about this kind of breathing capacity, breathing mechanics, in the strength and conditioning world, so we're finding out that athletes have huge lungs and they don't use very much of their lungs, and we're gonna show you why. And it also turns out that this diaphragm also is strangely connected to and related to the diaphragm in your pelvic floor, and those are weird diaphragms related in the same system, and if one is not working, chance the other one doesn't work, and suddenly we have a model for working on pelvic floor dysfunction, we have a model for women who have carried babies, or men who've had back pain and aren't getting their pelvic floor on, all right, it's not just an issue of Kegeling or Kegeling more, it's an issue of you need to be in a good position, so we're gonna be able to work on that. We're gonna get into lunch, and then after some movement, and then this afternoon we have Carl Paoli coming today. Carl Paoli is one of the foremost experts in freestyle movement, in athletic movement on the planet. He's one of my best friends, and he is pretty and popular and I hate him for it, right. And he's really a brilliant coach and thinker, and what's nice is that we use the same set of language so what you're gonna see is we're gonna start to apply the set of movement principles as we spin up in some of the basic movements of getting up off the ground, picking things up. How do we apply that to little bit more freestyle movement? Not the sort of the formality of squatting and moving. Tomorrow we'll get into the mobility aspect of it. How do you fix it? What's it look like? 'Cause if you don't know what to fix, then you're already sort of playing this game of press 'n guess all the time. And that press 'n guess model is tired, it just doesn't work. So what we need to do is understand what we're gonna fix first and then tomorrow is dedicated to working through, making sure we're fixing diet and nutrition with Jim Kean in the morning, he's the founder of WellnessFX. Turns out that I'm deeply, deeply enamored with this concept of observable, measurable, repeatable phenomenon. You need to be able to measure it and quantify, right. That doesn't mean you need to count how many steps you take every single day of every single moment, but if you can't prove that it's working, for me, this is sort of a problem, right. And one of the assumptions that we make about lifestyle is that, hey I'm eating right, whoo, I only had bacon and no carbs this morning, right, bacon and coffee. Well how do we know that works? Well we take a look at your blood chemistry, and blood chemistry is how we measure lifestyle and nutrition because you can tell a whole bunch of lies to yourself but when we bore down on the real stuff, it turns out that if you got less than six hours of sleep, raise your hand. Did you get less than six hours of sleep? Oh that's just most of you, no big deal, you're 30% immune compromised today, whup-dee-doo, and you're pre-diabetic for the next 24 hours, so it doesn't matter how you're eating 'cause your blood sugar is raised, and then when you have that glass of wine and a cookie, because this is the things that make me go on in life, there are certain times when I probably shouldn't do that like when I've been traveling. All right so how do I manage that? And for our tactical athletes coming back from austere environment, not getting a lot of water, sleeping in bad positions, right, underneath enormous stress, I think the nutrition, the MRE is really a paradigm of how you should eat as human being, is that correct, that meal ready to eat, that bag of processed food, right you might get one MRE for the next two days, or next 24 hours, it's 3000 calories. So what we see is that we're making these basic errors in how the human should be moving and we need to talk about that. We'll bring Jill back out and then this afternoon, for tomorrow, and then the afternoon to wrap us up we have Brian MacKenzie who is the creator and founder of CrossFit Endurance, and Brian is a premier, one of the most technical running coaches, understanding about running and moving in the environment. He's a brilliant strength coach, but when we talk about how to run, and I'll tell a little story tomorrow about my revelation about the fact that I was one of the best athletes I knew, but ran very, very poorly, and when Brian brought that to light, I became a believer. And so we can start to integrate these things into, again the fundamental ideas, this is what human being should be able to do. So we have two days, and I'm already behind, I'm freaking out a little bit because we have so much to talk about, and we want to make sure that we've got you guys on tap so that we can talk and answer the questions, because the questions you have are the questions everyone else have. Our moderators in the back are like, Virgil, was Virgil leading Dante through the levels of Hell, right so Virgils, I have two Virgils because I'm so lost, so hopefully you guys can be our interface between the inter-webs and what's going on, and we want to really turn this into an open laboratory school environment.