Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy Earle
Hey, it's Andy from talking to teens, it would mean the world to us. If you could leave us a five star review. reviews on Apple and Spotify help other parents find the show. And that helps us keep the lights on. Thanks for being a listener. And here's the show.

You're listening to talking to teens where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers. I'm your host, Andy Earle Haye, we're here today with Kelly Starrett and Juliet Starrett talking about movement. And it turns out that we all could use a little more movement all all throughout our day that our bodies are really built to move. And these two have uncovered a lot of research about how movement affects the body and how we can incorporate small movement practices throughout our day that can have a big impact in our mental functioning, or the chances that we'll die in the coming years and all aspects of health and well being Kelly is the co author of The New York Times bestsellers, becoming a supple leopard and ready to run. He's also the co founder of the ready state and the co founder of San Francisco CrossFit. Juliette is an entrepreneur, attorney, author and podcaster. She's the co founder and CEO of the ready state and the co founder and former CEO of San Francisco CrossFit. She was also a professional whitewater paddler winning three World Championships and five national titles together, Kelly and Juliet are the authors of the new book built to move the 10 essential habits to help you move freely. And live fully Kelly and Juliet, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Juliet Starrett
Our background is we were both professional athletes ourselves. And then we have been working in the health fitness wellbeing while the space for the last 20 years. But primarily working with high performers, trying to figure out how we can make athletes and coaches a tee and and the people who are trying to athletically perform at their best like what little levers can we pull to help them be faster, stronger, who are better at their sport? How can we support coaches and teams in creating a better culture and athletes who are more durable. And that was our interest for the vast majority of our professional list. But there were a couple things sort of layered into that which I think are particularly relevant for this audience is that there'll be bid in a suburban town north of San Francisco, auto raising our two kids there. We happen to be friends with a lot of the parents of our kids, friends who are in our neighborhood. And all of those people share something in common which is they care about being healthy, but they are not nerds about it the way Kellyanne, Kellyanne, I want to sit around with her the other table I chose yet I have regular jobs and they're busy trying to raise their kids and work and just survive being parents and working people. And but at the same time, they do care about being healthy, they just don't want to talk about and health and wellness at the dinner table the way Kelly and I what we found in our community is that we became what we call the node that of all things health, wellness and fitness even though certain in certain areas, we would consider ourselves experts. But what I like to say is on any given day in our neighborhood souls knocking on our they have their calling in because they have a little back pain and they're not sure what to do. So we pass a walking in the street, they want to know whether they should be doing intermittent fasting or the keto diet or paleo diet or maybe Mediterranean diet, but they know they should exercise they're not quite sure how much for how long what type of exercise is a strength training is a cardio is that it makes the boat and basically what I'm telling you is that what we saw was that there was a massive amount of confusion amongst a group of people who have more access to information than ever. But despite all that access to information, people are confused, and they're not sure what message does meant what messages to follow, which ones to disregard, will be felt like is that what was out there in the world coming from our space really wasn't serving people and was it accessible to both

Kelly Starrett
BCD diabetes, substance abuse, injury, social isolation, choose something and then just do the same as your third party validation. How's it working? So?

Juliet Starrett
Yeah, like we're doing our industry currently. And I give us like a D or an F. We're not doing a great job. Yeah, we're doing a lot of talking and we're making ourselves better and more optimized but we have not stepped out of our overt will to try to bring more people into this conversation in In a relatable way, and one of the big things is that I think one of the challenges for normal people is that they see all these people in the health and wellness and fitness industry, many of whom are actually doing this. And that is they're spending 24 hours a day, optimizing their health,

Andy Earle
for a normal person, how to

Juliet Starrett
get your kids ready for school and make dinner and do homework at night. And you see, these people are like, What do you mean is this so this book was our crack at trying to say, hey, a lot of the behaviors that we actually recommend our highest performers do can work as well for everyday people. And here's what here's what we think are the most important ones. And here's how to fit them these habits and behaviors into being really busy tied to punch line. So that was that was one of the Genesis, there were some others. But what I've discussed, I

Kelly Starrett
think we need to remind people that our intention is to take the highest levels, sports more Formula One and take that and transmute those experiences working in these crazy high pressure, gnarly buyers of psychologic, pressure, mental pressure, deadline pressure, physical pressure. And so what can we learn? And more importantly, how do we turn this into a living laboratory, so that sports performance and and even to work in C suites isn't just a circus, what we can say is, hey, it's not just entertainment, but actually inform how we might live our lives. But we've been really trying to take those lessons. And that's really been the heart of our work for last 20 years to say, how do we come to understand what we understand. And then we go back to a laboratory to test it, and that that laboratory might be from a rugby premier soccer, they had to sell the military, when we really do Juliet, I get a lot we get around, you see a lot of dirty laundry. And then we should apply those lessons to families because the question isn't just about hey, how we're treading we're really obsessed with playing offense. And offense means how can we build capacity so that when you are could bring up the deadline when your child is in finals and playing in the championships and take an LSAT and applying for school? That first principles were there so that we don't see a step on the familiar rates over and over again. And one of the things I really appreciate about this podcast, particularly is that we talk to people all the time about their own health and wellness, and it was so reasonable totally,

I'm like, great.

Let's go ahead and just ask, did your children eat any fruit today? Did your children sleep the minimum route, because they're under real pressures, but it's growing, right? It's growing your body's healing about exploring new skills, what we see is that there's a real dichotomy between what parents say they should be doing for themselves, and the behaviors and the strategies and the tactics they employ with their own children. And that is where we ought to stop. So what we're hoping for is that we continue to make the household the center of change, we see this not the institution, the high school, or the local coach is here to save us. It's up to the parent and the child together, working this out in a really strategic and more importantly, sustainable, long term bone crushing consistently.

Andy Earle
I've been thinking a lot about this book. Yeah, I've been doing a lot of these stretches that you recommend in this book, the last couple of weeks. And yeah, it's gotten me thinking a lot, just kind of going through this and we're going to test you recommend reflecting on my life. But one of the really the big ideas from the book, it's called bill to move and kind of really just this idea of how much of our life we're not moving and how much of our day we spend sitting in our hips are spent bent at this 90 degree angle. And I guess that was something you guys really hammered on a lot in the book and really got me thinking about I wonder if we could talk a little about that. Now why why is that matter? Why is it so bad? Or I mean, what so we spent some time sitting but then we also like are active we go to practice after school. So what if we spent six hours in a desk or something? I mean, why is that so bad? What

Kelly Starrett
we can be thinking about? First and foremost, is what we've done is try to create benchmarks for people. So this everyone is pretty comfortable, the vital sign what's good blood pressure went 20 over 80 Now that's just a vital sign. This lets me know that my blood pressure is okay. It's not great. Certainly not acid blood pressure, but it's also not like hypertensive smoker. Oh god it was the bar blood pressure. Suddenly what we when we give people benchmarks, they can start to identify that hey, maybe I need to focus on this in my life. And one of the things we've done by creating these sort of expanding the concept vibe Simon, is that half the book is really geared towards what are the essential behaviors this works our physiology and won't be and that sleep and nutrition and movement, the other half to end up being range of motion buzz, because Juliet what are these little podcasts, you will get physical you won't actually get physical. They maybe do some blood they listen to vital signs, but there's nothing physical of I don't actually watch how you move there. You're getting sort of downstream. lagging in Yeah. That's right. Like, hey, I noticed that you've been living a square and today your blood pressure's high, or your cholesterol is out of whack. I didn't tell you. But what you're doing or I'm doing, it tells you what's a tablet. So by creating a sense, a set of bioscience, we can start to use third party validation to understand our inputs, and the outputs that we're able to express ourselves. So by giving people these ranges, one of the things that we've seen is that there's the sheet or we read reconceptualize this, the body is in constant adaptation shape, you are practicing and adapting to your environment. That's why you have a nervous system to such change and into adapt accordingly. So if we're practicing being inactive, for practicing sitting in certain positions, for marathon baths, remember that all of the data and all the research in here is an art data search. It's the experts, we might be experts in movement, we might be experts in coaching. But Harvard defines sedentary lifestyle, and all of the accompanying sort of follow along problems of sedentary physiology have a change in in how you metabolize fats and sugars and in how your brain functions. That is to find a sitting more than six hours a day tool. So you might want to be able to play a game, play a sport be active, but what we're seeing is that it's not it's not taking into consideration that for the vast majority of your day are actually engaged in real centered behavior. And that is the problem. And then in those kids who aren't active every day, we still see as the one behavior, the sixth round is doing a lot of city. So this is about sitting is bad, standings. Good. This is about hey, in order for our bodies to work, and to be loaded, and to adapt, we need to think differently about how we exist our environment. And let me give you an example. We have a friend who has a company called Nature quant and I recommend anyone listening to this to go check this app up nature quantum, it tells you how much time you spend outside. Does anyone on this podcast, not sick? Kids should go outside? Like you have to make it look me in the eye and say no, no kids belong inside? Well, the research that's coming out of this, and this is national researches, were you

Juliet Starrett
interested in a replica that is based on people's cell phone data, so you can't lie about it, you're falling in the nose, whether your dog knows whether you're inside or outside, and this app is collecting that data and reporting on it. And Kelly

Kelly Starrett
told you that teenagers, on average are spending 4840 minutes outside Well, suddenly, we can talk about which secret squat program what food we how does these type one foundational errors in the way our us as humans are interacting, how we feel ourselves how we care for our bottoms have moved. And what we've added is additional complexity instead of saying, hey, let's make sure we're getting First things first. And that's what we've tried to do. So sitting is our work.

Juliet Starrett
And how just a couple of things that we wanted to try to do. And I think we're most proud of in this book is is not present a bunch of individual habits that people should care about independent of one at one another, or we're trying to say to show people is how tightly coupled all of these behaviors are with one another. Let me give you another example. And I think anybody who has kids knows this when they think back to when their kids were fogged. But what we see in adults is a lot of adults, even if they have exercise for one hour a day, chances are sitting for most of the rest of their day, and in many cases have not developed enough sleep pressure in the form of getting enough movement in their day to match. So it's not in the form of non exercise activity to actually be able to go to sleep and sleep well and have a normal sleep cycle. So as on have probably discussed on this podcast, insomnia and sleep issues are rampant, and especially in our parent communities. And one of the things people have thought about is that when you have a toddler, all you want to do is like destroy them during the day physically so they fall into their bed. Well turns out that that basic principle actually is true for adults too. So there's a lot of there's a there's a many ways that people could combat insomnia ins and cold room and whatever. But one of the things that no one has been talking about until we started talking about this book is Amen, you got to you've got to start thinking in the morning about making sure you get enough physical non exercise the selectivity of your day outside of your formal exercise to make sure that you develop enough sleep pressure to be able to go to sleep when you're ready and sleep well and sleep long enough and at night. I think that's one of the things that we're really focused on is, is again, it's not just this independent sitting is bad, I need to stand or move more. What we're saying is human beings are designed to move and need to move a lot throughout their day. And it's not just about it. There's 1000 reasons why people need to move and work and we can get into those but I don't know that people are making the connection that they're not moving enough. They are not sleeping well.

Andy Earle
I think that number is shocking 40 minutes a day to have outdoor activity and it would be hard to find anybody who would think that's enough. Yeah.

Kelly Starrett
One there certainly make the case that, hey, youth sports may be the only time where we can get kids outside. Right. So we better take advantage of some of these formalized systems and meet their immediate meeting separately. Second, emotional needs development needs, right, all of the reasons that we do sports a play car, maybe the only time our children are actually engaged in such a

Juliet Starrett
way. And one other similar example, as we just saw this, this piece of data come out about kids be gassed, how they need vegetables they know last week and vegetables and fruits, and our kids are recording having eaten only one vegetable in the prior seven days, and like two pieces of fruit and a prior seven days. So what we're seeing in kids is that they are eating like 70% or 80% of their diet as Ultra processed foods. And again, we go back to this when we're like it for us, it seems there. And I don't want to oversimplify mental health, for example, but we're having an extreme mental health epidemic and teenagers. And what we see is teenagers aren't sleeping enough. They're not eating whole foods, they're not eating fruits and vegetables, they're getting the vast majority of their calories from ultra processed foods and they're not moving and they're not going outside all which are well validated in Charlotte to improve mental health. So sometimes Kellyanne are like what are we talking about? Like those should be the first order of business and, and I don't think families can rely on mental health professions. This is something that has to occur in the home of sleep, eating whole foods, making sure kids are going outside and moving in. And these are the basics. And and then if your kid is struggling above and beyond that, of course, like it's great that we have d six D stigmatize mental wellness in this country that there's a lot more support for kids. I'm a fan of that. But man, you gotta start working out some of these basic physical behaviors in the home. It's

Kelly Starrett
also we need to we've done have gone much better in this country or top yard. And certainly our suicide and youth depression is or hormone rates. And I think it's really great that we are talking about exciting research that's top down the road, giving kids strategies to manage stress getting kids, we just live in a different environment. I think anybody here to lead on and try to exercise and we're on you know, during those were super tough look at a lot of trauma. We're seeing in our age group, the highest amount of dopamine checking and THC use of all time ever. So I'm like, Well, how was your your Gen X childhood, everybody turns out it was pretty traumatic. So on the other side is that we want to make sure that we all have a bottom up approach simultaneously that we're talking to Burberry Mehta. We're not just like what our feelings are excited at the table, and swelling with food or whatever dysfunction, but that we are engaged in the Spurs principles. And those first principles are how he went championships, those first principles or how he developed your ability and tolerance and system. One of the things that if you're listening this to parent, this book applies to you as much as applies to your kids. So you can have additional resources. When your family needs we see a lot of talk to a lot of parents who are really pushing the limits of their abilities to cope and manage one of our friends had a love handle to discover to this pool that diabetic. And she said had I really missed out on the first module and I set out to dissipate all spice, which is a common terrible sleep. Well, what was that about? Well, I'm very stressed. She's the primary breadwinner in this family. She has a very high functioning C suite job, VP. And we said, Well, how do you manage that? How do you how do you come back? So you trip to Basel, I'm never going to suddenly what we see in this job that pointed out, he told me understand the ecosystem and how these things fit together, we're not going to get her to stop using two bottles of wine until we get for stratagems to feel less stressed, right? We're not going to improve sleep until we get stuck into balls. One we're not going to do blood pail until cetera, et cetera stressors to how so it's important that we recognize and this we have minute body's very tolerant. But again, what we're waiting to say is, hey, we want to bring families in on all of this that we learn from our world champions, we work with World Champion athletes who have blind spots to do well. In fact, we gave this book to a lot of will check ins were like how's it going? Are you 10 out of 10 and they were seven out of 10 didn't eat fiber, don't eat fruits and vegetables didn't locked in decongest holy moly, my seat was terrible, but I would elite meetings but it doesn't take a matter for the last two seasons or World Cup of battling injuries. And it turns out that sleep was related to fueling after sport. And when we start to start to see this is a cogent packaged whole the old distinction Yes is

Juliet Starrett
the right word

Kelly Starrett
will honorable whole we start to see that there's more tolerance in the system so that you can show up for your parents and your kids. It's yourself in a more realistic way, the your parents are getting sick, someone's gonna get injured, some deadlines gonna happen, something's gonna happen that's coming that's going to add additional stress. If I asked you now, how prepared are you to handle this additional load? What we often find is that people are at the breaking point.

Juliet Starrett
Yeah, he's allowed me to sort of operating on the precipice of the club and a death in the finger later sickness or stressful work deadline, the they kind of fall either just operating at the very limits already. Or what we're trying to do here is say, hey, these addicts in this book can actually expand your limit so that you're operating a mile away from the edge of that cliff. But when these stressful events do happen in your life, you've got some room, you still have some room to be able to actually take something else on because one of the things I'll add just to contextualize this is everybody's hot to trot about the whole idea of longevity right now. And that's cool. But the longevity is actually not a word that we relate to our care for it that much on we prefer the word durability, because we don't really and I think another word people use often is healthspan. But the idea is that Kelly and I want to feel good in our bodies until like, we literally do turn it and like die in our sleep. That's our right, we want to work trying to avoid this sort of long slow rock theory of aging. But But what we want is to have a durable body because what we know from our own personal experience in life is that is that hard things happen to humans, every single human I mean, we've listed a bunch of these things death disease, injuries, stressful times at work, stressful time to your kids in general Carol Channing. I mean, you name it, experiencing stress and difficult times is part of the human condition. We want to know that's coming. And we want to have a durable body that's prepared to manage that stress as best as we can.

Kelly Starrett
Let me let me just build a tap on that. Because, again, we're playing offense without playing defense, you see that people aren't doing the basics. And simultaneously, we're interested member in doing something we call reducing session costs. So a lot of our understanding of how pressure works, and how all these interactions because we work with the world's greatest athletes and teams. And we're interested in seeing who can work for artists because universally, but what works the hardest wins. But what we've done basically is create a model where we worship and celebrate working hard until we crash or we get injured or we run out of steam, or we burn out or we write and then you can turn around. It's like plausible deniability. Like, look, I wore underwear, look how much I supported my family. It's not my fault that I'm depressed now or crashing, or I've developed this coping strategy. But it's very helpful when we get our athletes to do the same things, it turns out, they can work harder, and they can recover and adapt to the stress of more effectively. So all the stress ends up adding acting like an adaptation response machine. But if you're not sleeping, we really have a hard time changing your body composition, getting out of chronic pain, learning a new skill, growing a body, doing anything that sort of matters. And when we get people to clear line, that, hey, we want to use seven hours of sleep as that vital sign metric that hey, our goal is the minimum set. That means you need to be at better seven and a half or eight hours. So you'd seven but if you want to perform, boy, it really is closer to at half and filth. You cannot gaslight researchers on it. unequivocal, that is seven to eight is our minimum threshold. And if you're performing and trying to do on the other side, then you really have to start to think differently about getting more than that. Because again, what's our goal here about to survive?

Andy Earle
We're here today with Kelly and Juliet started talking about movement and how parents of teenagers can incorporate more of it into their families. And we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.

Kelly Starrett
We may be viewing it as our Hydra drive to fidgeting as a neurologic problem when it's actually a genetic coded for I need to move more per year ago kids they're squirmy on purpose. So how these haven't stayed, haven't work. Think about how you might shape the environment to account for that squirming. We know that we could give everyone in our family a pill that would reduce all cause mortality and morbidity by 50%. You would never know that pill 50% decrease and that's called Walking 1000 steps a day. It's not the flip flop well we can start to says what's the flip supposed to do the best shoe and put on a kid is no shame. The second best shoe is the shoe that disrupts the foot the least when you put a subplot on you fundamentally change how that slip works in order to keep flip flop on when you walk, you clench your front toe down, toe becomes rigid. So that's like essentially walking in ski boots all the time. So if you've turned your foot into a ski boot, you create a lot of stiffness. alter how the foot creates stability, and how you've been told it works.

Juliet Starrett
Most of us are spending the vast majority of our time with our shoulders forward looking on a laptop or computer at work looking at our phones, we're spending many hours of the day doing that. And the look, we're not Linux, we're on our computers and our phones all day to just like everybody else. So we're not saying those things in the trash and move into a year at all. But what we're saying is, except if you want to have full function of your shoulders, if you have to do things like let's think of put your suitcase in the overhead bin, you have certain medical over here all the way maybe avoid having neck upper back pain appeared on the floor you need you need to have your shoulders functioning and doing all the things that shoulder can do which is if we gave your feet to shoulders also this miraculous joint in our body that does a lot of different things. And if you only practice doing one of the many things the shoulder supposed to be which is having your background and your for your to shoulder sport and and having your body up from the side like here to see shape. Well that is that's how your body's going to adapt.

Andy Earle
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