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. You go to Wushisor.
You find someone who looks like they know what you mean. You ask them for advice on the shoe that you should be wearing, and they will do some sort of evaluation and give you a recommendation. Should you trust it? Let's find out on today's episode of The Movement Movement, the podcast for people who want the truth about having strong, healthy, happy bodies and letting bodies do what they are made to do, and that is move.
We're going to be exploring the truth, the lies, the mythology, the propaganda, everything involved, and what it's going to take to be able to let you move more enjoyably, the walk, the hike, the swim, to do whatever you enjoy doing better and more efficiently. I'm Stephen Sashin, CEO at zeroshoes.com. That's X-E-R-O-Shoes.com. And as I mentioned in this episode, we're going to be talking about what I like to call lies your shoe floor tells you.
But before we do there, you want to move, do something. Now, I want to do something unusual. Sometimes I'll have you stand up or spin around or do unusual things. Let's do a mental movement instead of a physical movement.
Think of, let's see, oh, here's a crazy one. I've got one. Literally, I just thought of this. I try this.
And what I mean by mental movement is, see, our brains are wired to come up with beliefs and ideas and then stick to them because it's not energy efficient to try to reevaluate everything we experience all the time. One of the things that we have in our brain is a map of our body. So I want you to try something. You may be able to do this, and maybe you want.
That's okay. But I want you to think about your feet right now. Now, when I ask you to do that, you may have suddenly become aware of sensations. You may be aware that you're wearing shoes or maybe you're barefoot.
You can feel your sensations and notice the quality of that thought about your feet. It probably has a direction to it and a distance that's a vector, which means that a direction and a distance. In other words, when you think about your feet, you think kind of down there somewhere. You probably don't think way over there somewhere.
There's just a kinesthetic component to that thought is more of a physical thing than just, you know, when you think about like seeing a movie tomorrow. There's a feeling component, a bodily component, a kinesthetic component. And you might have also got an image. You might actually have in your mind the image of your feet and probably or not necessarily the image of your feet in the position they are right now, but just an image of your feet.
So let's play with this, especially the image and the vector, the location and the distance. Just pretend in your mind, take that image of your feet. It's, you know, some distance away and it does sound weird. See if you can just move that image so your feet are closer to you as if they're like, instead of way down the end of your body, they're like right up kind of in your chest.
Just take the image and move the image. Is that do anything weird for you? Okay. Or if you really want like, take the image and stick up behind you and then see what happens when you think about your feet.
Or now, see what happens if you think about your feet and don't use the image. Maybe there's still some sensation. Maybe there's still a vector. Maybe the vector is in any different location that you just move it to.
What happens if you get rid of the image entirely? What is that thinking about your feet change? Or how does it change the way you're thinking about your feet? So the relationship we have with our body is sometimes not what we think it is.
We're going to be exploring that too in the movement movement. Okay. Well, again, give me the feedback on what that dinner didn't do for you. Play with that.
See what it does. But let's have a chat about lies your shoes for tells you. And I'm only going to talk about two. This will be a relatively quick episode.
I hope the first is that you're going to go into a shoe store and you're going to ask for it for maybe three points extra hours. You're going to go in and you're going to ask for advice from someone who works there. Now, you've got to wonder where did they learn what they learned? It's an interesting question to ask.
You can literally even ask them. How did you learn? Whatever you're about to tell me. Sometimes it's their own personal experience.
Okay, that's good. That's not so good. This from their own personal experience. Then the question is, well, where did you run it?
Did you experiment with like every different kind of shoe that's out there? Are you a professional runner? If you are, that might be worse. If you're talking to a professional runner, they might have a completely different idea about what you should or should do.
It's totally irrelevant for you. Because I always love it when people say, especially shoe companies, they'll bring out some Olympic athlete and they'll know he's wearing those shoes. And I like to point out to other people, you might not be 105 pound, 5 foot 2 inch Kenyan guy. So what that guy is doing to try and win a race may not be relevant for what you are doing if you're just going out for a weekend stroll or a casually competitive 5k 10k.
You gotta be careful about using people who are nothing like you to compare to you to see what you need. So again, where did they learn what they're about to tell you? Is it from their personal experience? See what kind of person they are?
And also what kind of resources they had. Maybe they're just like you, but they didn't have the resources to try every kind of shoe that ever existed or currently. So maybe they're not old enough to even remember that prior to the early 70s, most run shoes were actually kind of like this zero shoe. Really thin, so really, really flexible, really lightweight.
Maybe the only shoe they know is a highly padded motion-controlled art supporting shoe with big flamethall, big heel, stiff, heavy, etc. So something like this, don't just take their advice at face value. Maybe they learned whatever they're about to tell you from a running shoe company. Which one?
Because the story you're in probably doesn't have shoes from every company that makes run shoes, there are a lot of companies making run shoes. So not surprisingly, the companies that are selling shoes are going to teach people how to sell their shoes. They're going to tell you things that are relevant or they're going to tell the people who are going to tell you things that are relevant for selling their shoes. Maybe that's okay.
Maybe that's not. But at the very least, good to know. I will warn you, thanks on that one, that if they learn what they are telling you from a running shoe company, probably not true. And I say that for once the reason.
Running shoe companies for the last 50 years have been saying that, hey, they're big, heavily padded, motion-controlled, etc. Shoes, things that don't let your feet bend and move in flex naturally. They reduce injury and improve performance. They're good for you.
There's no evidence for that. Ask them for the proof. I've done it. I mentioned this in a lot of episodes and podcasts.
If you go to zeroshoes.com slash ACSM, that's Apple, Charlie, Sam, right? Ashley's American College of Sports and S. Zero shoes, XCRSues.com slash ACSM. You'll see a panel discussion that I was on, including the guy from Books and the Guy from Deus.
And they were asked that question. Where's the proof for what you do? And they said, we don't have it. Oh, you know, what?
They said, well, you know, be really expensive and really tight because a lot of time-bounding factors. I almost jumped out of my chair. It's like, you've had 50 years and billions of dollars. In fact, if you had a shoe that was demonstrably better than other shoes, that could be worth billions of dollars to you.
There's a lot of incentive to do that. Why? How about you? Anyway, point being that if you ask them for their advice, you want to know where that advice is coming from.
Don't just take their word for it. Kind of dive in or don't because you don't really have to. And here's why. There's been some research about custom shoe recommendations, whether it's just coming from someone, telling you what they think, or putting you on a treadmill and analyzing your running.
So should I talk about that part first? Yeah. Okay. I'll tell you what the result of this stuff here was, is in just a second, but first let me talk about the treadmill.
Then because that's the second thing they might do to analyze and figure out what shoe that you should go in is put you on a treadmill. Now, should I mention this money? Yeah, I'm going to do it. Books, the running shoe company, has a brilliant, brilliant thing that they have trained people to do, which is they put you on a treadmill.
First, actually, they have to put some little dots on your knee around your knees and have you squat. And then they watch how you squat. And then they put you on a treadmill and pair of socks. This is really deliberate.
They don't say run barefoot on the treadmill. They want to do the socks. Now, that may be because of getting a bacteria and other dirty things. But I think it may also be because they don't want you to have the idea that it's possible for you to run barefoot, especially because in the research that I saw in Bill Sands's lab that most people when they take their shoes and run barefoot, their form almost instantly improves, but let's ignore that term for a bunch.
So they have you run in socks. And then they do some sort of analysis to find your quote, run the signature between the way your body moves when you're running out of the treadmill and how you squat. And they use that to determine what shoe you're in. Okay.
Whether you're doing something like the Brooks Run Signature technique or just getting advice from someone, the evidence is really clear that a quote, custom recommendation for a particular shoe based on you does not change your likelihood of getting injured or improving your performance. I'll say it again, it sounds crazy. But there's a reason why. If someone says you recommend this shoe rather than this shoe, either from their own personal experience or the education they've received or from testing you or from the air quotes or not testing you, testing you by looking at you in a treadmill, the recommendation they give you is no better or worse than you just walking in and picking a shoe you kind of like.
Why? The answer is really easy. If you go take a look at most shoes, most of them look basically exactly the same. Most of them aren't basically exactly the same.
They have pointed toe boxes that squeeze your toes together, they elevate your heel, they've got a bunch of padding, they don't let you feel the ground, they're not flexible. It's the same basic shoe, just variations on the theme, different kind of cushioning, different material for the cushioning, a little bit more cushioning, a little bit less cushioning, but enough cushioning that your brain can't get the feedback that it needs from your feet for efficient, effective, natural motion. So I want to be clear, I'm being a little dramatic when I say, lies your shoes foretells you, I'm not trying to bad mouth or be smurched shoe stores or the people that work in them. Everyone's doing the best they can.
I've literally never met anyone in a shoe store that isn't trying to be helpful. And being genuinely helpful often requires more information than many of us have at our disposal. Many people who are working shoe stores aren't reading all of the research or for example, they're not selling a shoe, let's say like zero shoes where they would need to know more about truly minimalist footwear compared to quote minimalist footwear or what Irene Davis and Harvard calls partial minimalist footwear. It's the shoes that many of the major companies sell that they call a minimalist that are minimalist in name only, they don't provide benefits to a truly mental shoe.
So again, I don't want to say that I was in bed then what I'm actually doing hopefully in this podcast is encourage people who are working shoe stores to again, let's do that mental flexibility thing. Take a look at the ideas that we have about why we're making the recommendations that we're making and see if maybe there is some other information that might inform you a little bit differently. Maybe it'll help you. Now I will have more people in advance.
The way human minds tend to work, again, we get a belief and we lock into it because it's easier to keep believing something than to reevaluate and learn something new. So it's not uncommon that if we believe something, we'll take information that completely contradicts what we believe and somehow use that to believe what we currently believe even harder. So that's a problem with the way minds work but so be it. I'm still optimistic enough that we can find a way to encourage people to explore this idea of natural movement of letting your body do what it's made to do, letting your feet bend and move and flex and feel, letting your natural spring like mechanism, the muscles and ligaments and tendons that you have and your particularly feet, ankles, legs, hip and back work to let you run easily, enjoy when you're paying for your running run, walk, hike, stand all day, anything you want.
Your body is made to do what you would like it to do and often footwear can get into the way of doing that if it's not encouraging that natural movement. So again, part of my goal for the movement movement podcast is to encourage not only critical thinking but conversation. Let's discuss this. See what you think.
Tell me what you think about the idea of going into getting advice from people in shoe stores and if you're in a shoe store, what you learn, how you learn it, what happens when you get that advice, whether you follow up or not, let's just have the conversation. So find us online, go to jointhemovementmovement.com. You can participate in the conversation there without a point either the various social media channels where you can engage with us on Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube, etc. etc.
And if you have any questions or comments or you want to tell me about someone who should be on the podcast, drop me an email, send it to movemov.com. Our goal in creating the movement movement movement is to have you be part of this community. It's encouraging the whole world really to understand that natural movement is the better obvious healthy choice the way that natural food currently is. So if you want to be part of our movement movement tribe, please subscribe.
See you next time.