Runners who only run are hurt a lot, and it's usually due to emotion imbalance. So I always do this test to show them whether your butt muscles are strong enough to keep your pelvis straight, and whether you're strong enough to keep your knee from falling into this position. How are you doing this with your heels off? Dr.
Vonda Wright is a leading orthopedic surgeon and longevity expert, leveraging her expertise with elite athletes to revolutionize the way we move, eat, and train, to live longer, stronger, and better. I'm on a rampage to make bone sexy again, because in the United States, at least 50% of women will get osteoporosis along with 2 million men. Now osteoporosis is low bone density. Instead of show that people with low bone density have higher cognitive decline, it increases your risk of fracture.
If you break your hip, 50% of the time, whether you're a man or a woman, you will not return to pre-haul function, and 30% of the time, you will die. And there's a lot that causes bone fragility, such as aging, not building enough bone in our youth, it's our sedentary lifestyles, the myth that women have to be teeny tiny, and even things like a woman breastfeeding will lose 20% of her bone density in the first six months, but it's not inevitable. And I will lay out a lifestyle that I call unbreakable with about muscle, bone, nutrition, but the most important part is mindset. I'm very, very excited.
But just to pause there, is there a link between menopause and bone density? Yes, and it's because of the plummeting of estrogen, which is critical for muscle, bone, tendon, looking at that, and without it, it can help you out your face. So, you need to know the following. I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button, or the subscribe button, wherever you're listening to this.
I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand production, bringing all the guests you want to see, and continue to do this thing we love.
If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time. Back to this episode.
Dr. Vonda Wright. Yes. For anyone that's unaware of what you do and who you do it for, what do you do and who do you do it for?
So, you know, as a sports doctor over the years, we've learned how to take really high performing athletes, you know, those who are winning all the time, who need to continually get better and better and better at their craft. And over the 30 years of my career, we've gone from really focusing on how they train, the periodization of their training, to the last time I was at the University of Pittsburgh, I was the medical director of the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex, which is where the Pittsburgh Penguins are housed, and had gotten so scientific. They had a full-time chef. Every meal from breakfast, lunch, dinner, every meal on the plains, we're prepared because when it comes down to split-second agility, top-of-brain thinking, every little bit counts.
And so in the 30 years of my medical career, it's gone from just learning more about performance science of how to train, to how to feed people, to how to recover people. So instead of doing, for instance, I think Vera Torres was talking about her Olympic runs in her 40s, right? She trained much differently when she was 24, and in her 40s, after she had had a child, it was much more about recovery, not as much hours in a pool. So I take all those things that we've learned over this course of my career, and now apply them not only to athletes, but to people like you and me, who were in high-performance jobs.
I need to be tip-top in every sphere of my life, as you do, and how do we eat better, recover better, take the principles of performance that we've learned from athletes into high performers and even mere mortal athletes like me. I love my work involves cognitive performance, making sure my brain is sharp when it needs to be. How much of your work crosses over into the cognitive realm? You know, I am not a brain scientist myself, but I am fortunate to be surrounded by people who are expert in that.
So from my own perspective, I've come to appreciate, at a much deeper level personally, as well as professionally, the role of sleep. In fact, we've talked about my previous books from the early 2000s before, and when I wrote those books, mobility was king. I wrote only about mobility. And then as I progressed in my career, I got deeper, deeper, deeper into nutrition.
And then I would say, okay, nutrition is number one, and mobility is second. But at this phase of evolution of sleep science and knowing how restoring the brain and providing adequate time and nutrients, I put sleep first, sleep and recovery first, because you can't do any of these other things without a well-recovered brain. In fact, somebody asked me the other day about timing of working out, and is it always necessary to do it in the morning? Like, that's the mantra.
Get up. Go do your workout. And my answer to that was, you have to know how your brain works. For instance, my brain is best between 5 a.m.
and 2 p.m. That is when I'm going to get all my deep work done. I'm going to be creative. I'm going to stink.
After 2 p.m., I could build you a house. I can continue operating. But if I'm going to write a book, it's going to be early. So I do not work out in the morning, because I'm not going to waste that brain energy on physical activity when I need it for this deep work.
So that's the way I apply brain science. But I'm so lucky to be surrounded in the place I am now with people who put EEGs on your head and map your brain and tell you which brain pathways you're too stressful on.