Welcome to the Movement Movement, the podcast for people who want the truth about having a healthy, happy, strong body. Remember, your body was meant to move. Now here's your host, Stephen Sashin. Welcome to the Movement Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about having a healthy, happy, strong body and doing what bodies are meant to do, move.
We're going to be breaking through the mythology, the confusion, the propaganda, sometimes the outright lies about what it takes to effectively and naturally walk, run, hike, lift, do yoga, crossfit, paddleboard, whatever it is that your body wants to do. We're here to help you do that, do that better and have more fun. So if that sounds remotely interesting, we're provocative, then join us, subscribe and share and like and follow whatever it takes. You can come over to our website, jointhemovementmovement.com and that'll point you to everywhere that you can engage with us on Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube, etc., etc., etc., happy to have you.
I'm Stephen Sashin, the co-founder and CEO of Zero Shoes. I will be your guide in the Movement Movement. And why don't we just start with something obvious? Moving.
Do whatever you can, wherever you can. If you're sitting down somewhere that you can stand up, then do some, some share swaths. Literally, just stand up, sit down. Do that five times.
Just get the body movement. If you're in a car, just do some shoulder strikes. Lift up your shoulders as high as you can. And let go.
Do it again, tighten, tighten, tighten. And let go. Do it again. Let go.
Do it one more time, tighten, tighten. And let go. Take a breath. If you're sitting somewhere where you can do some foot exercises, here's a really easy one, push your first toe, your big toe into the ground and try and relax.
Your other toes, so you're just pushing your first toe and you're actually engaging your entire arch. In fact, if your arch starts to cramp a little, you can get a mix stronger, which will be better for you. Pull back a little bit. You'll want to go too hard.
Just kind of tighten, relax, tighten and relax. And then take a big breath. You'll better. You should because that's what moving does.
moving does. Oh, and speaking of moving things, I'm going to show you something towards the end of this inaugural podcast that my wife and I do. We call it the getting unstuck dance, something that's also about moving mentally because that's part of what we're doing too. Brains are designed not to really move as much as we think they are.
So in the movement you're going to learn about what it takes to be psychologically nimble as well as physically nimble as well. So since this is the inaugural podcast, let me say a bit about why we're here. Let's do it this way. Remember when we were little kids and we would just go out and play in the summer?
We would go out as soon as we could. We'd kick off our shoes if we had them on. We'd run around. We'd feel the grass underneath our feet or the sand or wherever we were sometimes even rocks.
It didn't even matter a lot of times. And we would just play. We would have fun. We would stay out until it was getting so dark.
You couldn't see the ball. You were trying to kick or the stick that you were throwing or oh my gosh, if someone had just gotten a new refrigerator and you could get the box, you know, new fort and we would stay in there as long as we could tell our parents would drag us home. We would spin and skip and dance and oh, if there was a sprinkler to jump through, that was hours of fun and running. If you had never watched a little kid, a tiny little kid run, it's amazing.
First of all, they had perfect form. They had just incredible form. Secondly, they had this look on their face that you rarely see on adults when they're running. I think it's called smiling or laughing.
They just do it because it's fun. They do it for as long as they want. There's a track meet that happens in the summer here in Boulder, Colorado. It's this first and third Thursday of the month for June, July, August.
And there are times where people bring out their tiny little kids to run the 100 meters. And this is the cutest thing you ever seen. The only thing that would make it cuter is if they replace the kids with puppies and kitties. These kids are so excited.
The gun goes off and they don't even know what that means. Sometimes they just stand up and look around. Or sometimes they start running for no reason. They can't stay in their lane to save their life.
You have to put up like those bowling gutter protectors for them to stay in their lane. They kind of lead with their head and then the body kind of tries to follow. If they get tired in the middle of the race, 100 meters, they will sit down on the track and then when they're ready to go, they'll get back up and they'll finish the race. And when they finish, they are ecstatic.
They don't know if they want or they lost. They just know that they cross the line and people are going crazy. We don't know because we are feeling that joy with them. We're getting it vicariously and we're remembering what it was like to have that freedom, that joy, that much fun when we were just moving.
And then something happens. I don't know why. I don't know what, but at a certain point we start to care if we win or we lose. It matters if we get picked first or last for kickball.
And sometimes those thoughts that we generate then will stay with us for the rest of our lives. I don't know why, but this is when little girls seem to learn that to be pretty, they have to be uncomfortable. They start wearing high heels and shoes that don't fit their feet. They always learn that they need to identify with some sports team or some genetic free sports figure by wearing shoes with, you know, that person's name on it.
And the shoe is, this is something that I find amazing. If you look at the shoes that we start wearing at this time, they are the opposite of that kind of fun and freedom. They squeeze your toes together, they elevate your heel, which messes with your posture, they have all this padding so you can't feel the ground, they're stiff enough so you can't use your feet naturally. I mean, they're frankly just straight out uncomfortable and not good for you.
And we learn that that's what we're supposed to wear. Why do we learn that? Because multi-billion dollar shoe companies tell us that's what we're supposed to wear. We go to a shoe store and someone who's getting paid to, well, who's learned it from the big company tells you, well, you know, you're pronating, oh, you're this and oh, yeah, you need this kind of shoe.
And that's what we start wearing, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, if you look 50% of all runners and 80% of marathoners get injured every year and this has not changed in the 50 years since we've had these kinds of shoes that these multi-billion dollar shoe companies are selling us. We've actually been listening to their story about what we need despite the lack of evidence that is helpful for so long two generations that they don't even need to tell us anymore. We just tell everyone else.
We tell our kids, oh, you need our support. Oh, you need motion control. Oh, you need padding. Oh, you need filling the blank for whatever they've been telling us all this time.
Now, my wife and I realized this and we had an experience about natural movement. We got out of our shoes and started wearing just the bare spinest thing we could have underneath our feet as we walk around and ran and did all those things that kids do. And it was such a profound change that we uttered the five dangerous entrepreneurial words, how hard could this be? And we started a business in the most competitive industry in the world or one of them next footwear.
We're up against hundreds of billions of dollars of people telling us that what we're doing, the natural thing, is wrong. I mean, if you look at it for the last 10,000 years, the human beings have been making footwear for the first 9,950 of them, those shoes look like, well, what we do here is zero shoes. I'm not going to try and sell you on my shoes. That's not why I'm here.
In fact, I'd rather use a go out and run around barefoot. In fact, if you had never on a hot summer day, gone into a grocery store barefoot and stood in the produce section while the mystery is going off, this is like the adult version of jumping through a sprinkler. And if people look at you like you're weird for doing this, you are on the right track. That's what normal people do when other people are having fun.
They try to make it look like something strange and you shouldn't do it. In fact, if you're doing this and kids pointing at you and saying, Bobby, what's that man doing? You know you are really on the right track. So we are trying to make natural movement the obvious choice, the same way that natural food currently is.
That's why we say we've created a movement movement and we want you to be part of it. Now, this is more than just shoes and what you wear on your feet. Although look, that's what we're going to be starting with. We're going to be spending the next couple of episodes talking about feet because this is your foundation.
Feet are your foundation. And because you've been in things that don't let your feet move naturally, the rest of your body can't either. So we'll spend a couple of episodes really getting into how you can start having fun feet first or like we say, live life, feet first. And then we're going to move on beyond that.
We're going to be talking obviously again about things beyond your feet and walking and running. We're going to be bringing on some guests who support this idea of natural movement in various ways. And we're also going to bring on some guests who think that what I'm saying is completely full of crap. But more importantly, I want to tell you actually there's one other piece that I left out of the story of why we're doing what we're doing.
If you don't let your body move naturally, it's a serious case of use if you lose it and losing it is a really big deal. My dad is one of these perfect examples of what happens. He was in big, big, padded shoes all his life. And by the time he was 80, he was you know, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.
That's how he walked. And one day he fell down, tripped, fell down, broke his hip and was dead two weeks later. Balance issues in the elderly, one of the biggest problems that we have because things like what happened to my dad happened to millions of people. And it's incredible.
When you look and see what the doctors recommend for these people, they recommend, Oh, hey, get thicker and more padded shoes and start using a walker. How, how, anyway, we'll get into that in another episode, but it is mind-blowing what we hear. So there are a couple of principles that are going to be part of the Join the Movement Movement podcast, or the Movement Movement podcast. And one of them is simply the truth.
And you probably hear all manner of confusing conflicting things like, you know, barefoot running is great for you. Or if you're run barefoot, you're going to die somehow. My goal is not only cut through the crap so that you can know what's legit and what isn't, but I want you to learn this as well. I want you to be able to separate shit from China.
One and yes, there are bonus points of, you know, which I know it is. So, you know, and also look, if I say something that is not in the China, like that is in the shit camp, let me know. Tell me about it. I want to hear I'm more committed to the truth than I am to my own stories.
Not what I think is true. And look, if you tell me what you think is wrong with what I'm saying, I may not agree with you and I might not be able to get you to agree with me, but that's okay. What I want to do is have the conversation. So we know what it's like to investigate, to dive into these issues and discover what actually is authentic and true.
Oh, so why me? But I've in fact, I've been in the natural movement space now for over nine years with zero shoes. I have a whole history with movement as an undergrad at Duke University. I did primary research on cognitive aspects of motor scale acquisition, but that wasn't where it began.
I had an interesting movement for as long as I can remember. I was a diver when I was a little kid. I was an all American gymnast. I'm now a master's all American sprinter.
I've taught everything from gymnastics to Zen archery to Tai Chi to yoga to running tap dancing. Almost anything that I've found within a very long period of time, I'm a sign I've put teaching. I just got a knack for understanding movement patterns. So that's one of my things that's really interesting to me.
So again, the structure of what we're going to do, we're going to start to be first, then if you have a sense talking about that, how you're supposed to move, how they're supposed to move, how they will support you for your entire life and the mythology and propaganda machine that's trying to keep you from what's natural from letting your body do what it wants to do. In fact, if you can't wait, if you want to kind of get a taste of the shi and shine all the presentation, oh yeah, by the way, there will be syllables that I use in a particular order that some people might not like. My apologies. That's kind of the way.
That's going to be. But if you want to find out more about this whole debate about natural movement, there's an amazing place to go. Go to zero shoes.com. That's X-E-R-O shoes.com slash A-C-S-M.
That stands for American College of Sports Medicine. So zero shoes.com X-E-R-O shoes.com slash A-C-S-M. And the reason I'm sending you there is that's a recording, bad quality recording of a panel discussion that I was involved in by the American College of Sports Medicine with a guy from Brooks and a guy from Dina So My Friend Tony Post from Topo Athletic where we talk about footwear and natural movement. I'm not going to give away the punchline.
In fact, we'll talk about that whole episode and another podcast episode with that whole event and another podcast episode. But you will no doubt be amazed and entertained. I will confess it. There's some good lads in there as well.
Okay. So, once we get the ball rolling, as I said, we're going to bring in some other people. We're going to have a whole bunch of fun. And the biggest thing is this is about really expanding our community.
Expanding the people who want to discover what natural movement really is and how it can make you stronger, fitter, healthier, happier to break through the corporate propaganda and mythology and listen to your body and do what is natural. Now, before we wrap this up and get ready for an episode, I told you I was going to teach you about the Get Unstuck dance. And the background for the Get Unstuck dance, I think maybe there's this Einstein quote you can't solve a problem at the same level of thinking created it. Now, I don't believe for a second that Einstein said that.
And he may have, but it has a ring of urban mythology. Oh, that's another thing. I seem to have developed over the years a kind of radar for urban mythology and folklore and things that are simply not true. Now, saying that I get it right every time, but I can kind of spot someone from a mile away.
And this one is right on the edge. He may have said this, but it seems it's a little too pat either way. I kind of agree with the whole idea behind it. So one of the things that happens when we get mentally stuck is our body gets stuck as well.
And similarly, when our body gets a little stuck, sometimes our mind gets a little stuck as well. So, Lane and I have discovered that if we're having a stuck period where things are not as clear as we want or it's just been a stressful day or whatever it is, we do the Get Unstuck dance. Now, I can't actually demo it for you perfectly here because I need to stand up and I can't move the camera to do that. But look at the hand.
The idea is that if you're on your own, just stand up. And if you're with a partner, you have to stand up and lightly hug each other and then you do something that looks like, see if I can do something that looks like this. I just broke things behind me. Okay.
Now, I know that seems ridiculous and it's supposed to because that's what it takes sometimes to get unstuck. So, play with the Get Unstuck dance and I want to hear what your experience is doing that. More importantly, I want to thank you for joining me on the inaugural movement movement podcast. We have a whole bunch of fun things coming up, including things like our running shoes as bad for you as cigarettes, how you can get stronger by lifting lighter weights, whether barefoot running is good for you or whether it's bad for you.
In fact, I'll even do a podcast on the five reasons you do not ever want to run barefoot. I'm not sure I know what they are yet. I don't think it flies. And a whole lot more.
So once again, if you want to follow us, go to jointhemovementmovement.com and that'll point you to all the places where you can engage with us. Please like, share, subscribe, hit the little bell if you're on YouTube. Give us a review. Do whatever you can.
If you have any suggestions or questions or comments, then you can send them to move at jointhemovementmovement.com. I want you to become part of the movement movement. Join our tribe and click subscribe. Take care.
You've been listening to the movement movement podcast with host Stephen Satchan. Remember to join the tribe and subscribe at jointhemovementmovement.com.