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The chemistry of wellness with Jim Keane

Lesson 9 from: Maintain Your Body for Long Lasting Health & Mobility

Kelly Starrett, Jill Miller

The chemistry of wellness with Jim Keane

Lesson 9 from: Maintain Your Body for Long Lasting Health & Mobility

Kelly Starrett, Jill Miller

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Lesson Info

9. The chemistry of wellness with Jim Keane

Lesson Info

The chemistry of wellness with Jim Keane

So we want to tie all of these concepts together all at once, and one of the things that we've talked about in physio school, it's we live and die by this mantra of test and retest. How do you know you made change? Because you test it. You change something, you test the variable, you change, and that sort of seems very, a pedestrian concept. How do we know what we're doing is effective? Because I can test it. My founder, my head coach, Greg Glassman, hammered down my throat. This phenomenon needs to be observable, measurable, and repeatable. Can we categorize and quantify what is we're doing? And our call to eating well sounds like fitness in a hundred words or less, and the call in CrossFit about eating well is lean proteins, vegetables, nuts and seeds, a little fruit, some starch, no sugar. This is the basics. Well, when one of the first things that we need to make sure is where, before we kind of dive in the, deep dive in the minutia, it was where people want to kind of spin out, it...

's like are you moving correctly, yes, no? Let's fix that. All right, now you are, now we can have a conversation that's a little bit more technical. Do you have a maintenance practice? The skills transfer exercises. One of the things that we're gonna hammer on today is that positions are really a skill. This is a skill acquisition. When I'm working on a squat, I'm not changing my biomechanics, I'm working on acquiring a new skill, which is a position. So I better have a set of techniques and tools that are skill transfer exercises to improve my positioning. Great, got a practice there, fantastic. Third, are you eating correctly? 'Cause remember our initial concept was if I move correctly, and now this is what we're talking about, plus I have correct lifestyle, I'm not under tons of stress, I drink enough water, I'm doing all of the, kind of other elements, I'm not having these adaptation errors of which we spoke yesterday, then I certainly have this extraordinary human body that's set up to go the distance. Well, let's take this category. Are you now eating correctly like a human being should? And it turns out, I mean I love myself an almond pastry once in a while, but yesterday, I had, my vice is a chocolate chip cookie. I'll never turn down chocolate cookie. I left here, had a chocolate chip cookie, and felt horrible. I was rushing and queasy, and was like, oh no, I'm allergic to my vice, and I finished the cookie because I was already rushing and queasy, but that's nearly the same, right? But the issue here is how do we know and how can we measure lifestyle nutrition? And that's really one of the the key points. Now that we know that, hey, you're trying to sleep enough, you're charging enough, well, you're trying to eat right, how do we quantify that, and it's really important, and part of the language of my early doctor training was, hey, we need to verify what is we're doing so we can prove that it's working, and part of my early training as a coach, specifically, in CrossFit is that, hey, we need to be, once you've got the basic pieces in there, how do we know? And this is what this comes down to. The invisible inside, and it looks great on the outside, you're looking great, you're you're feeling great, you've got little abs, your energy is up, but is that enough? A car is going straight down the road 100 miles an hour, but do you have oil in the engine? Are you stuck in second gear? And that's really this next level. Lauryn Hill may have been talking about this all along when she was like, how you gonna win if you ain't right within? I'm just trying to bring it, make it real here, and what's happened, you can see what's, obviously, what she was talking about is measuring nutrition, and this morning, I want to talk about, we're gonna bring on Jim Kean, founder of WellnessFX, and I need to stay and talk about this personally. When my second daughter was born, we had, we 'cause I'm a very sensitive, New Age man, my wife and I, who was doing all of the work, me, had a really difficult second pregnancy, and our daughter was born a little bit early, and the experience was that Juliet had a lot of blood transfusions, like six, and we can basically say that our second daughter dissolved my wife from the inside out, and we, this is a woman, and let me set this up for you, Juliet is a two-time world champion athlete, she's a great athlete, she's a better athlete than I am, she's an attorney, brilliant, smart human being, and a phenomenal worker-outer and phenomenal eater. She does all of these things, and yet, things weren't right, she didn't feel right, and so here we had what we thought were all the pieces in place, and then guess what, we started to take a look on the inside, and when we met Jim Kean, we had this revelation, oh, how are we measuring lifestyle nutrition seriously, so when I travel to the East Coast, it turns out that I end up being very sleep-deprived when I come back, and guess what, I did a blood draw after a trip, and my fasting blood glucose was high. In fact, it said it was about a hundred because I hadn't slept for kind of a couple days, a couple days in a row of really bad sleep, getting up at 3:00 in the morning, teaching, and a fasting blood glucose of 99 to is what we sort of call pre-diabetic. Do I look pre-diabetic to you? Do I function like a pre-diabetic? I can squat all this, I can run all this, do these things but inside, I couldn't buffer that lifestyle piece, and what that really meant was I could not drink a glass of wine and be a human being or eat those cookies like that, and I really had to be squeaky clean and understand that this was playing impact on my mechanics, on my position, on the quality of my tissue health, and it was something that I couldn't resolve right away. In fact, it took me a few days to sort of resolve that, and when for example, when we took apart my cholesterol, my total cholesterol was very low. People like high-fiving me and then Jim was like, "Hey, let's hit the expand button on this," and it turned out that when my cortisol was high because I wasn't sleeping and I was a little bit stressed out from this not sleep, messed with my liver function, and I had all of these particles that weren't optimal, so I was able to kind of bear down on that. We put up this infographic because what we're seeing right now is people are starting to be able to get into this quantified self-movement. We're starting to kind of have this measurable, personal biology, which is this great language. How do we know what we know? And some of the ideas of hey, you can make this, this has come out of University of Cambridge, and they were able to kind of create these quantifiable metric units of impacts of doing certain things. Smoking six cigarettes, minus three micro-lives. Interesting. Sitting two hours, minus one, wait a minute, what, sitting two hours is one? So if I for six hours, sit for what, what? If I sit for six hours, that's the equivalent of smoking six cigarettes in terms of micro-lives. This is crushing. Well, how do we know about these things? First alcoholic drink, 10th alcoholic drink, even if it's a paleo margarita, it's probably not as good for me, but it turns out, I know you're gonna have to resolve that dissonance, but it turns out that once we start measuring these things, we can take action, and what my call to arms for you guys is how do you know what you know? The first thing I want you to do is make sure that you're starting to organize your food. There's plenty of great resources in the world about this. Even Tim Ferriss talked about getting organized in terms of your nutrition, make some fundamental changes, and then when you're ready to have a enlightened conversation because you've done the heavy lifting, then we can start looking at what's going on in blood chemistry, and 70% of the data needed for accurate diagnosis and health management is contained in your blood chemistry. This is what physicians do, this is what all the complementary care physicians do, is that they're looking on this kind of roadmap of what's happening inside, so it is my great pleasure to introduce Jim Kean and my wife Juliet Starrett. (audience applauding) Now, I'm just gonna call it out 'cause someone's gonna call it out. Yesterday, one of my good friends, Rory from CrossFit, was like, "Hey, Kelly, your butt looks big," and I was like, "Thank you, that's awesome." My other friend said that, he said I looked svelte, which bummed me out 'cause the camera's supposed to add 10 pounds, and so now today, I'm just gonna it take off the table like Eminem did when he just called out the rap. I know Juliet and I are wearing the same color shirt, but we just wanted to show that we're awesome, and obviously related somehow, so Jim Kean, Juliet, and what we'd love to do is talk where you'll give a real quick case report, case study about the experience we're having when we've dialed in all of these other pieces and we're still missing some of the big chunks, because this relates to the quality of my life and health, the quality of my happiness, and ultimately, the quality my tissues and how long and how successfully I can live on the planet, so Jim, Juliet? You bet. So Juliet and Kelly were one of my first case studies about a year and a half ago, and so my background is I was the founder of the consumer side of WebMD in the 90s, and then last decade, I know a lot of scientists and so I went and talked to them, I said, "Are there a lot of biomarkers that I'm not getting measured "in my annual physical that I should be measuring "so I can bend my aging curve and be more functional?" What do you mean, bend my aging curve? What do you mean by that? So right now, we have this experience in life, you start having health decline functionality about your 40s, and we all look at-- Isn't that normal? I mean I turn 40, and that's your 40 this year, and isn't everything just over now? It is actually, you're half dead. Right. Two times 40, right? 80. Doesn't have to be that way, actually. You can jump swim lanes and you can do something called rectangularizing your aging curve. What's that mean? Means that as you get older, you don't have to drop in functionality, and I have a couple slides about this, but when they measure both of these, Kelly referred to some of his markers, well, Juliet actually had profound changes, so what I'm gonna do is show you a couple slides about why there's a golden opportunity right now. You are now in the best time ever in the world's history to measure yourself, and then based on what your results are, all of you are different, change your biology, and bend your aging curve, which means that when you're 80, you can still do you know 100 burpees in seven minutes, hopefully. That's right and I need to be clear about this. Sometimes it's bad news. So it turns out I have a genotype that doesn't, I don't need as much saturated fat as the other person, so what that means, whether we're real terms, is that I don't have to eat bacon every day. You see how I've reconciled that? I don't have to eat bacon every day. I don't get to eat bacon every day. I just don't eat as much bacon as the next guy, and I've come to grips with that. He's an example of lean paleo actually. So, and I should just point out that Jim is a user, and that this isn't theoretical, is that Jim was an athlete with us for years, was talking about this. It was actually laying on our table, working through a problem, when he's like yeah, and this idea and I was like, uh, do it yesterday. This is an incredible idea and I know will impact. It has impacted nearly every single person who's run through this program in my immediate life, so please carry on. Great, so I'm gonna bring up some slides, take you through that. It kind of gives you a framework to think about this, and when you depart, you'll go, okay, wow, that what can't be measured, can't be changed. Inside and out. Wait, wait. In fact, Peter Drucker, who's like the management guru, said, "What gets measured gets managed." Isn't that interesting? Yeah. I think what's really cool right now is we can pull out all these concepts from these other, the engineering, the management, but what we know is that if you can measure and observe it, then we can change it and measure that, the impact of that change, and that's really important. Exactly, so I'm gonna show you this framework, and then we're gonna dive right into Juliet's biology. So we'll bring up her graphs and everything, look at biomarkers, and you're actually gonna see really complex things and go wow, this is actually quite manageable. Every one of you can do this. Let's go. So I said I founded a number of digital health companies, and what got me going on this is completing a story, so I had my list of 150 biomarkers. So what do you get in an annual physical? Who kind of, who's had one of those recently? You're like five, don't you? You get five, if they're really rocking it, they'll give you 12, and most of them are kind of nonspecific. We all have the experience you look at. If they release your diagnostics to you, walk away and go, this looks like Ruby on Rails computer code. I don't understand anything, but a lot of times, they won't even release it to you. And when you mean biomark, you mean I'm looking my triglycerides, my cholesterol-- Triglycerides, cholesterol, even things like glucose, HbA1c. Another biomarker, waist size, belly fat, blood pressure, all these things add up, and actually, Greg Glassman speaks to this in his curve that I'll show later. So I got these markers, and I feel like I'm a pretty astute healthcare consumer. I went to my doctor and I said, "Hey, I want to buy these, "and I understand I have to pay for it "because my plan doesn't pay for anything beyond the top 15, "but I'm happy to pay for it, just order them for me," 'cause here's one thing, it's illegal in every state in the United States for consumers to directly order diagnostics, so you can't look at your own biology unless you go ask a doctor to order that, so my doctor says, "I'm not gonna order these for you," and I said, "Why not?" And he said, "Well, I don't think you need "to see this information, first of all, and secondly, "I don't remember most of these. "I only look at these top 12 in my normal practice. "I'd been out of medical school for 20 years." I literally had to doc shop three different docs. Found a guy, and I just said, "Just order these for me. "I'll let you look at it," and he said, "I'm kind of curious," so he did that, and ordered them, got my results in. I had a geneticist, a doctor, a nutritionist all look at it. All had different insights, and actually working together as a team, I got a fantastic result. Out of 150 markers, 60 were red, and I thought how can that be? I work out like crazy. I'm super healthy and this and that. Well you can, your body's a really poor feedback mechanism, so one thing to remember, but most of these things, you can move in positive directions, so we designed a nutrition plan for myself, corrected a couple things, and next time I got tested, I was down to less than 10 red biomarkers, and they're all pretty minor, so all of you can do this. No problem, you're doing right, you're looking good. I mean how old are you, Jimmy, like 20? 51. Got my AARP card last year. I can get-- Bam, that's what's up! Half price off at buffets. (people laughing) So i'll tell you a little bit about my company. So our technology, we wrote up a platform that lays on top of the two largest lab systems in the United States. LabCorp right now, soon to be the other large one, which i can't mention but will give us 6,000 draw sites across the United States. The way it works, you walk in, you order what you want, you're automatically assigned a doctor in the background, so you don't have to go beg somebody to order this for you. You walk into a LabCorp, five minutes, you're in. They recognize your code, they draw you. Three days later, your account comes up, populated, you can look at your iPhone, desktop, whatever, You see your results, you'll see how they look 'cause I'm gonna show you Juliet's, and you can buy doctor time, nutritionist time, sports medicine time in 15-minute increments, and do that from your desktop. You share the screen, so no brain damage going across town, taking a half a day off for your physical. We add time back to your day. So that's the only commercial pitch you'll hear about us. So 20th century is gonna be known as the century of reductionism. In fact, the most famous and successful field of science, arguably, was chemistry. Chemistry, what's that? A bunch of atoms, everything, all of us, this floor, you could reduce it down to certain combinations of atoms, and if you figured that out, this is concrete, this must have this composition of atoms. This applied to everything, so cars. Cars are parts. Fix the car if you find the broken part. There's no contemplation of system though, even fitness, right? Guys working out their biceps to the detriment of their entire muscular chain. CrossFit changed that. 21st century is gonna be known as the century of system biology. So this is how everything works. So the middle, you have three things. DNA, think of DNA is the house plans for you. RNA are the subcontractor or the general contractor, takes the plans from the architect, creates your proteins, does that every single day, every second, something's going on where the RNA is taking the plans, turn them into instructions, creating proteins. So on the left, you're a profoundly sensitive system. Anything you do every second of the day will create something either good or bad, so it could be exercise, you could be happy, you could be sad, you could live next to a dry cleaner, all these things impact you. The other thing is you aren't who you were seven years ago. The oldest cell in your body is a bone cell. You rotate those every seven years. Rotate your blood cells every hundred days, so that's why blood's a great thing to measure. You can measure where you are, 100 days later, come back, if you do a change like up your B vitamins, or change your vitamin D, you'll see changes, so you're enormously plastic, you can reverse damage. The chart that Kelly showed a few minutes ago, completely accurate. Over here, the way you measure it are the chemical fingerprints of all your body's processes. Tens of thousands of things that can be measured, so that's how the system works. How does that apply to us? Well, Health Continuum. Very famous level one CrossFitter, right? Here's Greg Glassman's chart. So conventional society is the continuum between sickness and wellness, and here's where you see the biomarkers. Blood pressure, body fat, triglycerides, everything that can be measured about you that tells you about how you're functioning is a biomarker. But we, as CrossFitters, and also people seeking to optimize our health, the middle, that's average. We need to go for optimization, so let's take blood pressure. 200 over 190 is probably a pretty bad blood pressure reading. Conventionally, 120 over 70, it's considered well, but you should actually be looking for 105 over 60, so all these markers you can find a sickness, wellness, and then fitness continuum. So let me say I'm not one of those guys gets up and says, "Oh, Western medicine is terrible. "It's gonna kill you," and this and that. It has its place. If I'm in a car accident or I have cancer or something super serious, it's kind of like I need a firefighter. That's what Western medicine is good for. It's not good for showing you lab results in a way you understand or helping you think about, okay, if I do this now, in 20 years, what am I gonna look like? That's not the function of Western medicine. And golden age of measurement right now, maybe five years ago, there was 50 biomarkers that were discovered understood. There's literally thousands being discovered, and what's being discovered is how to move them, so right now, if you can measure yourself, find the right people to talk to you, you can profoundly change how your outcomes are in the future. Just to give you an example, everybody knows total cholesterol. That was considered the cutting edge number that you knew in the 90s. Last decade was it's good and bad cholesterol, country and western. Now we know that you-- Those are different by the way, country and western, just so we're clear. Blues Brothers. Obviously, Pandora has taught me that. Advanced fractions. You can take your HDL, your good cholesterol, and LDL, bad cholesterol, blow them up. They, as Kelly said, there's probably eight or 10 fractions per each, so you could have a really low cholesterol number, or bad cholesterol, you can have a time-bomb in there. In fact, couple things to note. These are just some factoids. 50% of people who walk into an emergency room with a heart attack actually have a really clean bill of health on a conventional lipid panel or cholesterol panel. Well, why is that? Well, they could have one of their fractions within their bad cholesterol is out of whack, and they haven't been measuring that. In fact, most health plans will not measure your fractions until after you've had a heart attack and survived, because then they want to track that. Seems a little bit perverse. One in 10 people have undiagnosed thyroid disease. 30 to 45% of female athletes are iron-deficient, so you start stacking these up, and these are just four that I pulled out. I can give you dozens more. Wait a sec, can you just talk about this vitamin D? I mean we're in Seattle, and I didn't wanna bring this up, but outside, it's like our own equivalent of Stalingrad out there, like in the winter. I mean it's oppressive and what we see regularly is that we talked about bone health, I mean this is subclinical rickets here. I mean I'm, what did you do last night? I ate five vitamin D gummy bears. Wow! Juliet's like, "I haven't been in the sun "in at least six hours, vitamin D gummy bears." Just saying. Yeah, so this is huge. If your vitamin D is too low, it actually causes your metabolism to get out of whack. Your hormones become unbalanced, calcium storage, whole range of things that's actually seen as a super hormone. That's 75%. That's, oh, seven out of 10 of you guys, it's no big deal. Yeah, from right about there over. And it's because we're not in the sun as much as we used to be. We're all, a lot of us are cube dwellers. Except for CrossFit Miami, I see you, I see you, what's up? Yeah, yeah. (people laughing) It's the mojitos (mumbles). So we're into the end here, and then we're gonna go in and show you how one of these works but let's think about it differently. All right, right now, conventional health is we're not gonna get alarmed until you hit the red, but you can see that trend developed a long time ago, so let's think about something really amazing. Why not recognize the trend, you're in the green, but getting worse. Arrest it before it hits yellow and stay in the green zone. So that's kind of philosophically how we think about this. And this fits with our schema of what we're doing, talking about yesterday. Am I moving correctly? Yes, no. Oh, I'm starting to identify, now I can fix these things before they become full-scale problems. The set of lagging indicators of pain and swelling dysfunction is really the same set of lagging indicators of when my body has broken biologically. Having a serious health event is a lagging indicator about the lifestyle and the nutrition that I've been undergoing, and all we're saying is, hey, look this is not a quantum leap in your thinking. It's exactly the same idea, let's get ahead of this stuff, it's easy. Yeah and so this is the, I think this is the most important graph in the world. So right there, this show at this minute. Why is that? This is developed by Dr. James Fries in the 80s. He was a leading thinker on anti-aging, and he said our human experience has been, in the past, that we kind of get, and so left hand is zero to for health and then age, so when we're in our 30s, we begin to kind of decline a bit, and when you hit that bottom one, obviously, you die, so let's keep jumping swim lanes, and let's make these little tweaks right now that will help us achieve long life, but also my goal is to get to right here and then just drop off the cliff, so have a complete system failure the last week in my life and just die from overuse. And Juliet and I actually have had a lot of conscious conversations about this. The two of us are gonna be right here. We're gonna get, steal a Corvette, get in a horrible car chase, and then drive off the cliff. That's it, we figured it out. This is the week, we're 120, all right, let's go. So I'm just saying it factors into our dialogue around the dinner table. I'm starting to redline, I can do nothing about it, so I'll go do something that's irretrievable. That's right, Corvette. All right, so here's our guest star. Let me just back up for a second. Before, you see all of these things. I want you let in her own words describe how she was feeling. Can you you do that for us? I was feeling tired all the time. I was having a weird mix of health problems that I was going into see my regular doctor for, like I got a headache that lasted for six weeks and I had the flu one winter that literally lasted for three months and I kept going in to the doctor, and they just said, "Oh, you must be getting a virus "on top of a virus," and I was like, "But I'm so healthy, I exercise and I eat well, "and someone like me shouldn't have the flu "for three months," and but the biggest thing I felt was just super tired and I was seriously drinking like 10 cups of coffee a day. That was my fix, so that's how I felt. Which is okay, 10 cups of coffee. And what your health professionals tell you? They really told me nothing, they-- They kind of say, "Hey, you should expect that. "You're super busy, CEO, busy mom." Yeah, they said, "You're busy, you've got two kids, "you're exposed to a lot of viruses "because you have two kids, you're in your 30s, "you're getting older, you're really busy, "you work a lot, you exercise really intensely, "so no wonder, you should be tired." Well, and let me frame this. I mean I always wanna be clear. My father's a physician. We're not physician-bashing. My grandfather's a physician. I'm in love with our physician. Dr. Major is my personal physician and he's the man. So but the issue is what tools are available to me to take control of it and the problem right now is that Juliet had given her loci of control away, and couldn't take any actual steps, and that's where we're trying to shift. We're gonna put the burden of this back onto you where it belongs. It's your body and your health, and when things go horribly wrong, we have those safety nets in place, comma, things are not going horribly wrong yet, but it's how do we know what we know, and that's really where the shift comes. Yeah, and really, it's like owning a house, and then saying, "I'm an owner for 30 years, "and the only maintenance I'm gonna do is drive by "and eyeball it once a year, "and if it looks like there's no flames shooting out "of the roof, everything's great." Well, that's not how you take care of things. So I'd like to show the browser where I can show Juliet's account, there we go. So give me a minute here, I'm gonna sign in. You have our secret password in there (mumbles). I love it. As Jim is working on this for a second, I'm just gonna say that we, sometimes we do some home mobilizations. We'll talk about later on where we have a safe word. Sometimes when you're working on someone, it's very painful, and very real discomfort, we discovered yesterday, and as I was working on Juliet, she was shouting the word biscuit, and she was shouting biscuit a little bit more intensely, biscuit, and it turns out that our safe word universally is brisket, and so that's the international safe word for hey this is really painful, back off a little bit, and Julie was shouting biscuit, and I thought this is some kind of naughty new game that we were playing. I'm so excited about this, and then she was like, "Wait a minute," she's like, "I forgot the safe word," very serious, and I was like, "I wouldn't make the safe word a carb," like what you doing? This is ridiculous. We back on? Great. So brisket would be a good, but it's actually capital brisket one, obviously, or I love brisket. It's not, you can try it, it's not. (people laughing) And key here is don't be shocked because you're literally gonna look inside Juliet's today, and then later on, you're gonna look inside further in a human being. We're gonna make you transparent. Making the invisible visible is one of our key concepts here. All right. I had to sign a lot of forms so you guys could all look at this information. We actually had to create a separate standalone account because of federal and state rules on privacy, and just governing all the status, super sensitive. We care about you, so you're known. So one thing that's really important right off the bat is remember that report that you saw with the poor sick guy looking at the board? Hard to read those diagnostics. Well, how hard is this? All right, so Juliet started out, 2011, 160 total cholesterol. You can see that it went up a bit and then went down. Now this isn't my favorite marker. I mean we all have favorite markers, right? Oh you don't? But this really illustrates one thing. Single data points are useless, so at any given point of time, if you get measured, you can have a lot going on. Maybe you just were super sick and so your inflammation is really high, or you've just gone through a glycemic binge in the last month, and so your glucose is off, travel, all kinds of things. And how do you know you're making progress in the gym? We measure this, we keep a journal. I mean these are just fundamental ideas that we're just gonna try to transpose on some other thinking. You gotta track it. So let's look at relevant markers for Juliet. So first one I want to look at is... Here's what Kelly's talking about, blowing up your cholesterol. So Juliet has a fantastic top level panel here. It's all green. This is what all of us normally get. If you look over here, though, she does have a couple fractions. Maybe she'd be a little bit concerned, but she also has really good good cholesterol, and we measured her particles as well. All these are great. They completely counteract that, so a couple good things going on, and as you can see, this dashboard, you're having a trained voice of a professional in your ear who actually gets to know your biology really well, and it's just like having a coach at a CrossFit box, and your movement when, just telling you how to keep your markers in play. So now we'll code to a couple things that relate it to the story here. So one thing we noted, when we first measured Juliet, homocysteine is an incredibly important systemic inflammation marker, and she had the highest homocysteine we'd ever seen in our system, by-- She's number one. Not by like a point. It was probably double the next person down in our database, and we almost put her on exhibit and toured around, but she literally had high inflammation, so when you start seeing inflammation, you think, all right, we got to figure out what's going on in there. So we then went and started questioning, and actually, Dr. Major is also my doctor, he's excellent. How many of you guys have ever heard of homocysteine? Have you heard of that before? Yeah you're like, oh, yeah, back in 'Nam, they taught it in third, I mean when did you hear that? So what's nice is that is we're developing a language about our biology and our chemistry, and even a biology about our movement or mechanics, this is part of the language and now I tell everyone who's ever gone through this training with us or is talking about their nutrition now, this is one of those markers we kind of talk about, and it's about this sort of this education process, You just can't be one and done, that constantly evolving, and I remember our concept is the second you understand a little bit more about yourself, it's now your responsibility to embody that, so if you know you should be standing with your feet straight and you aren't, that's minus one karma point. If you start to understand these homocysteine levels, you're not trying to pay attention to it, then it's a big deal. Second thing-- Can I just add too, what's also cool for me when I went through this as a user, is you can click on all of these, and there's always a description of what it is in terms that anyone can totally understand, so I did go through it with a physician, but I was actually able to sit there by myself, and anything that I had read on, I could actually read and understand what it was and why it was an issue. Right, and literally, when you know this stuff, you walk away. You actually say, "All right, these are my five biomarkers. "My project right now. "Everything else is good so I'm gonna fix these, "and on my next cycle, four or five months, "I'll know my blood cells have turned over. "I'll be able to see results. "I'll move on to my next problematic marker." Now Jim, I own this material, right? I can log in anytime I want, right? Yeah, no, you can-- I can show my friends, right? You own your data. It's almost like a weird social networking site. You can actually give privileges to your nutritionist, your trainer, your doctor. Which is amazing, 'cause I literally called up some of my ninja friends and I was like, "What do you think about this?" And we were able to talk about in real time, just like you would send me a video of your squat, and we can talk about what's going on, or we can talk about your pain. Now we're talking about how we measure that lifestyle nutrition. It's, for me, it was a revelation. So this is a detective story. You can see a lot of green here too, so we're not saying there's a complete disaster happening here. She has pretty good glucose and another measure of glucose, HbA1c, that's good too. So a lot of good stuff going on here with Juliet, but it's just amazing, a couple markers off, and it's kind of a train wreck. So we're gonna go down and I'm gonna show you kind of the smoking gun for us. Not these smoking guns, hey. Hey. So on minerals, as far as ferritin, Juliet, and for some reason, this marker dropped off, but in the past, she came up with a six, and we corrected her to 32. Six again was the lowest ferritin we'd ever seen in anybody, in fact, we were convinced that it wasn't possible. But this is 10 to 201. Yes. And Juliet was a six? She was a six, so right there, high inflammation, low ferritin. Was a really simple fix at that point, so take us from there. You got all the info, you got a plan, what happened? I want to add too that I was competing in the CrossFit Games that year with a ferritin of six, and I was like, "Why am I so tired? "I'm getting old, I'm too old for this." I'm a big wuss. Well you can see I went downhill, but I got on a plan where I was taking a massive amount of iron, 10 huge iron pills a day, and then the other marker that we aren't seeing yet, but my B12, which I didn't know anything about B vitamins or B until I did this, but my B12 was, I believe it was 85, and from what I read, if your B12 gets down that low, you can actually start having legitimate neurological problems, it's like a serious thing, so it's not just, oh, I'm a little bit vitamin-deficient. It can actually cause serious problems. Actually, right here-- Oh I had crushing headaches for four months. So I had this six-week long headache, and they gave me a CAT scan, and no one thought that it could be something relatively simple, which is a vitamin deficiency. Yeah, look at this. So, and let's bear in mind again, some couple hundred markers, she had a ton of green. So you only need one or two to be out of whack, and it throws your whole biology out, yeah. And these are two markers that make you feel terrible and affect your athletic performance, so for me, at that time, when I was trying to be competitive, it was a huge deal on so many levels, that I was that depleted. And remember, yesterday, we kinda these four markers of dysfunction. We said, "Hey, you're always kind of running "this background check with you and yourself "and your family." Is this pathological? Is there something going on? Okay, here's what we've done. Juliet's eating correctly, she's exercising correctly. We know she's trying to sleep right, and things aren't correcting. Now we can start asking the right question, and that's what's happening about you, sort of being in control of your own health and wellness, is that now you have the intelligence because you've been able to sort of start to rule stuff out, and that's fantastic. So we remeasured certain markers for Juliet two weeks ago because we knew we were gonna be on here. We're gonna see where she was and they opened a new gym, got super busy again, life caught up, and so it's been a year, and so we actually noticed her old friend, iron, so~ now you've gotten caught up, what's your thoughts about this and what's your plan? Well I think what I learned by this third test is how important the trending part of this is. You learn a ton of information from the first one, but what I think is so cool is exactly what Jim was talking about is starting to see my biomarkers over time, and really realize I was like, "Yay, my ferritin's up to 32, so I can kind of slack off, "and I don't need to take 10 iron pills. "Maybe I'll just take one and if I forget, "it's not that big of a deal," and life gets busy, and this was a real lesson to me, that this is obviously gonna be an ongoing issue for me for my whole life, and I really have to manage it, and I need to manage it more often than once a year. I need to really stay on this because this really is a huge part of, this really affects how I feel every day. And I should just say about, when we saw the impact on my family, Juliet is one of the best athletes I've met. She literally has a phenomenal engine. She was a rower at Cal. Huge engine, she can suffer, and you guys should know this. You get your mitochondrial DNA from your mama, so your mitochondria is the engine inside your cells. That's really kind of your capacity to suffer, and your kind of athletic, metabolic self, so my daughters have this genetic inheritance of someone who can suffer, and when I would compete against Juliet, I would just win easily, and when she started to fix this stuff, winning stopped happening, and so I hid the iron pills. The victories do not come easy. And I was like, "Where's the vitamin B?" I don't know. And I hate to say it, we busted Kelly, look at this. So no, but this is a good point too of remember that chart I had up there? The basically that the green, yellow, red? How conventional medicine only gets excited when you hit the red. Well if she walked in right now, they say, "Wow, you're green, good job." Well, this isn't acceptable. She needs to be, this is a zero, this is a 10 to 200 range, so she needs to get super aggressive, move this up and that's what she's working on with her doctor. Well I think the other thing for me too is what I learned is that your regular doctor either gives you a sick or a well. It's either you're in the green or you're in the red, and I don't know, I'm sure you guys feel this way, but I want to feel awesome. I don't just want to feel okay, I want to feel good, and I think that's the real difference. With a ferritin of 13, I'm technically not sick in the eyes of my physician, but I'm also don't feel awesome and my health is not optimal. It's kind of suboptimal, so that's been a really interesting lesson for me is-- You also slacked off on your fish oil. Yeah, I did, yeah. Yes, so you can tell that here 'cause her omega-3s aren't doing that well, so. We had a question in the back from (mumbles). So a number of people, a number of our audience members are outside the US or outside where they can access you and WellnessFX. Do you have any recommendations for those people or if there's a way for them to be able to get their doctors to order biomarkers with people from the UK, Canada, East Coast, Norway. Suggestions for them. So it, first of all, diagnostics and people telling you how they work is completely driven by jurisdiction, so think of the United States, every state's a different country, and so we have to, even though we're an Internet company, believe it or not, 20th century medicine, we have to go apply with each state to do this, and secondly, a, for example, California doctor cannot talk to a North Carolina person 'cause obviously, people in North Carolina have different biology and the California doctor wasn't trained in you guys. So that's kind of what we're overcoming here, but we will be in all 50 states by the end of this quarter, so we're expanding out of California. Our goal is to make this as cheap and easy and affordable and accessible as possible, so that's our company mission. Outside of the country, our plans, we've been asked to go to England, and we'll probably do England and Mexico next, and possibly, Australia. And the issue is that there are a lot of good resources in the Internet about your blood chemistry, and so if you, something if you're aware of it, you can start to educate yourself and you can ask your physician because your physician is a long-term relationship. I mean this person, you should know for years and years and years, and when you walk in there and say, "Hey, I'm learning, I'm trying to take better responsibility "for my nutrition," and explain the context of this, physicians always get on board. They're excited too. They're like, "Whoa, I have a patient "who wants to be healthy, this is fantastic." Well, but if you do find a doctor who won't order these for you, I mean these are all things you should know, and clearly, the annual physical is inadequate, you need to go doc shop and find somebody who will order these for you because then you'll have somebody who can interpret them. There's plenty of resources there, so that's the big thing. Unfortunately, the other thing is, if you go to a doctor and get him to order that, we have a nationwide contract with LabCorp, but if you do it outside of that and you're not in your plan, it can be almost four times as expensive as to what they call the walk-up rate, so we're trying to resolve that, but it's a system that developed over a hundred years, so we're not gonna chainsaw out the thicket in two, but we're working on it. And let me tell you, one of the reasons I'm impressed and love what Jim is doing so much is he's trying to democratize this process. It fits in with this schema of saying, "Hey, what Carl's doing on the Internet, "what Brian's doing on the Internet," Brian Mackenzie, what Jill is putting out there, what we do with MobilityWOD is that this is your responsibility and your bounty and birthright as a human being to own this stuff, and CreativeLive is even trying to democratize these concepts, and suddenly, we're trying to take this system and put it back into the context. I think we've got time for one more question. Hit it. Just wanted ask real quick. I saw some of the ranges are pretty wide, so was wondering, as you get more customers or your range is changing, like for the markers, and also do they take into account synergistic properties of some of the different markers? Yeah, so two questions there. The first one, excellent question. We, these cut-offs for all these different markers are kind of in the high risk, medium risk, low risk. We actually think a new range needs to be developed. We joke inside, it's called deep green or optimization, so we would superimpose a fourth one. So Juliet's green for ferritin of 13 is too close to the red for us so we want another range in there for optimization, and so right, now de-facto that people get trained in our system, outside doctors, whatnot, when we credential them, actually train them to do an optimization overlay because that's kind of something fairly novel. I forgot the second question. It was about if the synergistic properties of some of these markers are taken into account. It's really interesting, I noticed this on myself, is when I hit my worst offenders, because I had 60 red ones. I was for in excess of Juliet. I hit my top five, it had this knock-on cascade that really started adjusting all the other ones, so they're pretty interrelated, so for example, if you can get your glucose and other markers for metabolism like HbA1c in line or even optimized, you'll actually notice your lipids change. I just add one thing to that, Jim. I think if you saw on mine, I think the reason that my homocysteine, that inflammatory marker was so high was because my body was under so much stress from being so B12 and iron-deficient, so all I had to do was fix my B12 and iron deficiency, and that's what caused my homocysteine to go back into the green. Perfect example. So you see, it is, it's like a cascade and I saw it with my own results. So when talking to the doctor, once this comes in, they might say, "Okay, Juliet, knock off these in order, "so that these will--" Absolutely. Even now, okay, got it. And this is that idea of oh now we have a coach who can go in and take a look what's happening. Hey guys, I think we have to wrap up. Jim Kean, Juliet Sarrett. Thank you. (audience applauding)

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Anterior Compartment Smash
Ball Tack and Floss
Banded Heel Cord Anterior Bias
Banded Heel Cord Posterior Bias
Banded Hip
Couch Stretch
External Rotation Shoulder Smash
Hip Capsule External Rotation
Mobility Rx Rules
Overhead Rib Mobilization
Plantar Surface Mobilization
Posterior Chain Floss
Sink Mobilization
T-Spine Smash
Jill Miller Eccentric Diaphragm Stretch
KStar Revised Reading List
MobilityWOD Principles

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Excellent working manual for the body, taught in a clear manner with plenty of hands on exercises. You will feel better after taking this course. I'd like to suggest that a "recommended equipment" pack/list be set up, as that would let people get the most benefit out of it from the first time they see it. Great work, I'd like to see more.

a Creativelive Student
 

Excellent working manual for the body, taught in a clear manner with plenty of hands on exercises. You will feel better after taking this course. I'd like to suggest that a "recommended equipment" pack/list be set up, as that would let people get the most benefit out of it from the first time they see it. Great work, I'd like to see more.

Darlene Peckham
 

Wow. Mr. Starrett is quite brilliant. I so wish I had seen this and lived this when it came out a decade ago. Brilliant.

Student Work

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