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, Steven Sashan. Imagine an industry that makes a product that they know is bad for you.
They hide the fact that they know it's bad for you. They even hide information that other people create about the fact that their product is bad for you and what's actually good for you. They make a product that is consistently and reliably creating health problems and yet they just keep making it over and over and over and over, convincing us that it's actually good for you. Think of the industry that we're talking about?
Well, if you look at the title of this podcast, you might have it, but if not, maybe it'll be a surprise and let's come back to that in just a moment. Welcome to the Movement Movement, the podcast for people who want the truth about having a healthy, happy, strong body and enjoying what bodies are made to do and that is move. In the Movement Movement podcast and in our movement, we are cutting through the mythology, the confusion, the propaganda and sometimes the outright lies about what it takes to walk, to run, to hike, to jump, to do everything the bodies love to do. We do that enjoyably, do it better and have more fun.
If that sounds like something you want to be part of or something that may be a little bit more, then join us. Subscribe, follow, share, come to jointhemovementmovement.com and that'll point you to all the places that you can engage with us when we are looking forward to having you be part of our movement. I'm Stephen Sash and CEO of Zero Shoes and I'm not going to be trying to sell you Zero Shoes even though they're actually wonderful and you can find those at zeroshoes at xeroshoes.com. I'm just here to help you with Movement Things and being part of our movement movement.
So let's back up to what I said at the intro. You know what the industry is? Did you guess? It's not right of science to figure it out because of the title of the podcast, it's Run & Shoes.
And if that sounds hyperbolic and overly dramatic to you, it's only because running shoes don't kill people. I mean cigarettes became a big deal because they're giving people lung cancer. Running shoes, they don't kill people. So hey, what's the big deal?
You know, so what? Well, I'll tell you this, so what? First, 50% of runners and 80% of marathoners get injured every year. This statistic hasn't changed since the advent of the modern running shoe.
Why not? I mean, these companies, these multi-billion dollar companies, about 50 years to do what they say they're doing. They say that they're making products that improve performance and reduce injury. Where's the evidence?
In fact, Dr. Irene Davis, who said, Harvard, we were a panel discussion of the American College of Sports Medicine on footwear biomechanics and she asked the panel which included some people from a couple of multi-billion dollar companies. She said, in the 60s, we ran in a super thin soul running shoes. Now, people played basketball and Chuck Taylor's, Conversal Stars, they were just, you know, thin bits of rubber.
And we weren't seeing the amount of injuries, the type of injuries, the severity of injuries that we see right now. And her question was, what problem were you trying to solve and why isn't it working? And the multi-billion dollar guys didn't have a good answer for that. In fact, if you want to see that recording of that panel discussion, go to zero shoes, xeroshoes.com slash ACSM, that stands for American College of Sports Medicine.
So zero shoes.com slash ACSM. And we'll break that whole panel discussion down in another podcast, but just a little quickie if you want to go there, you can experience it. So in fact, if you look at the last 10,000 years, the human footwear, that's about as far back as we can go where we see shoes that people have been making, started out of sandals that were made out of, like hemp and things like that, you'll see that for the first 9,950 of those years footwear was really, really simple. And it's only the intervention is not what we're doing with natural and movement or middle is footwear.
The intervention is the modern running shoe. And what most people don't know is why it is the way it is. We've been wearing these same shoes and hearing from these big companies now for so long, that it's become common knowledge, quote, common knowledge that that's just the way shoes are. And if we're having problems with our shoes, if we're getting injured, it's because of something about us, not something that the shoe may be making us do.
So let me start with the where this current design came from. And this might surprise you and wake you up out of a bit of a trance. So back in the early 60s or 70s, Nike, for example, was making footwear and Bill Barriman. Oh, by the way, this is definitely a hearsay because the story I'm about to tell you, came to me from someone who worked at Nike for quite a long time and asked Bill Barriman about the design of their run shoes.
And this is what he told me that Bill Barriman told him. So I'm admitting it's hearsay, but it also comes from very reliable sources. Do with that what you will. So the Nike offices were the same building as some orthopedic surgeons.
And Barriman said that these orthopedic surgeons, and again, I might be getting some of the exact details wrong. They might have been orthopedic podiatrists, regardless of you'll get what it's going. Said, I'm getting these runners who are coming to the track to run with us and they're getting Achilles tendonitis. What do you recommend?
And the surgeon said, well, clearly, they've been wearing higher heel shoes and their Achilles tendons have shortened. And so that's causing a problem. So what they really need is higher heel running shoes to put less strength on their Achilles. So what Nike did is they made higher heel running shoes.
They put a bunch of foam in the shoe with a elevated heel. Now let's ignore for the sake of argument that when you elevate your heel, that messes with your posture, it moves your pelvis out of line and all that padding makes it so your feet can't do part of their job, which is feel that ground underneath you and know how to move. That's not the important point. The important point is that this was this design that Nike developed from this recommendation, and it started selling really well.
And the footwear industry, I can tell you now that I've been in it for over nine years, is a bunch of copycats. If you look around, it's not too hard to see. You'll discover that someone comes up with some shoe design and then it sells really well and the other companies start to all do it. So we'll talk about this in another podcast about the evolution of the minimalist footwear, the barefoot shoe movement, and then the maximalist movement, the highly cushioned shoe movement, and what happened there.
The end of the story is that these orthopedic surgeons or podiatrists, whatever, were with this guy that I know, and tracked me, and he said, you know, you know that this design that elevated padded motion control shoe is something that really came from you guys, and has become the ubiquitous design that all shoe companies are using for athletic footwear. What do you think? And the answer was, it's the biggest mistake we ever made. Think about that.
We've been living with something that, again, demonstrably does not provide value. I'll give you the spoiler from that American College of Sports Medicine panel discussion. At one point, everyone will say this. Well, I just kept asking this one question kind of over and over, which was, where's the proof that your shoes improve performance and reduce injury?
And there was no really good answer. But at the very beginning, one of the presenters from one of the big companies said, you know, look, we don't have that proof because doing that kind of research to prove that these are better for you, to prove that they improve performance and reduce injury. That would take a long time, cost a lot of money. And it was all I could do, not to jump out of my chair and yell, you've had 50 years and billions of dollars to use to come up with a study.
I don't know why you don't have it, because if you actually look for the research on minimalist footwear done by people like Dr. Irene Davis and Sarah Ridge at BYU and Isabel Sacco in Brazil and many, many others, you'll find there's tons of research showing this crazy, crazy thing that if you actually let your feet move naturally, it's good for you. What a shock. If you actually use your feet, they can get stronger.
If you put them in something that doesn't let them move, they get weaker. So suffice it to say, let me talk about the specific things going on in modern footwear that are problematic and what you can do instead. And all you have to do is look at a shoe. Everything I'm going to say is going to be so obvious when you just look at a shoe and match it to one really simple thing about your feet, the foundation of your body.
And that is this, one quarter of the bones and joints of your entire body are in your feet and angles. If you're nerve endings in your soles, then anywhere in your body, except your lips and your fingertips, maybe there's one other that's kind of close to the other. But suffice it to say, what that means is your feet are made to bend, to move, to flex and to feel the world. Your brain needs to get feedback from your feet to know how to balance and control everything in between.
And if you don't let it get that information and have that flexibility of motion, then that's not good. If you're designed to bend and flex and move, and if you don't let them, that function tries to move up to your ankle, your knee, your hip, your back, those joints are not designed for that function. Let your feet go back to natural, you can take the string off those other joints. I'm not saying that the anecdotal data we have is the same as scientific data, but if you look on our website, it'll reviews for all of our shoes, which are all about letting your feet move naturally, then you'll see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people saying, oh my gosh, once I start using these, the changes are, well, I'm not legally allowed to say that if you wear zero shoes, you'll have changes in your healthful improve and injuries and those that will go away, all I can say is, which makes more sense to you, letting your feet do what they're designed to do or not.
Take it from there and we're trying to make shoes that let your feet do to be as natural as humanly possible. And again, not here to try and sell you on zero shoes, frankly, the best thing you can do, take off your shoes, walk around barefoot as much as you can. You don't have to do it all the time. You don't have to do what I do.
I was walking into the office one day and I catch my reflection in the window. I'm wearing, actually, I think this t-shirt, I'm wearing a pair of baggy short pants on barefoot. My hair was particularly large that day and I just look at my reflection and I went, oh, I'm that guy. I did not know I was that guy.
So anyway, but I am saying that if you're not going to do what I do and walk around barefoot, almost everywhere all the time, at least take off your shoes as often as you can as much as you can and let your feet feel the world. So back to feet plus footwear. Your feet are meant to bend and move and flex and feel. Take a look at your average athletic shoe.
Back to top, just think about your average athlete. Think about your average shoe in general. If you come home at the end of the day and kick off your shoes and you feel better, you are wearing the wrong shoes. If you have not accidentally fallen asleep while still wearing your shoes because you forgot you're wearing them, you're passing out your arm, you've been wearing the wrong shoes.
If your shoes feel better when they're off your feet, you're wearing the wrong shoes. And again, it's not your fault. You have that choice. Almost all shoes are designed in the way I'm about to describe because it's a bunch of copycats in the industry.
So let's look at those shoes. Typically, the toes, the toe of the shoe is pointy. Take a look at your foot. Not pointy.
There's a number of different foot shapes but guaranteed unless you've been shoving your foot into a shoe and changing the shape of it because of the shoe, it is not that shape. And number two, the heel is typically elevated. In other words, padding that is in a flex shoe is just elevated to your heels in dress shoes. That changes your posture in a way that puts strain on your lower back and arguably the rest of your joints as well.
Not all of your joints but your ankle, your knee, your hip and your back. Look at the stiffness of the shoe. See if you can roll it into a ball or... See if you want to jump in your...
See if you can... Stop, stop, stop, stop. Stop, stop, stop. See if you can take a shoe and roll it into a ball like this or twist it like this or you can roll it the other way.
If your shoe is way less flexible than your foot, you're putting your foot in a cast and you know if you've ever broken a bone, you put in a cast, it doesn't come out stronger. In fact, after it's been in a cast, you have two choices. You can keep supporting it and never use it again or you can just do some strengthening and soon it'll be back to new maybe even better than it was before. Same thing with your feet.
Don't let them move. They get weaker. It's like having them in a cast. And as I mentioned in our first podcast, my dad is one of those guys who was in those shoes his whole life and when he was 80, he was a walker who just shuffled around and one day he tripped, fell down, broke his hip and died two weeks later.
Not saying if you wear shoes, you're going to die from falling, tripping, and breaking hip, but it's simply a case of use of or lose it. When you watch older people shuffling in these big thick pad of shoes, just something is not right. There's actually some research from someone locally showing how for elderly people they can regain their balance and that getting out of big thick pad of shoes is better for them. We'll say more about that later.
It's not Ed Shem Stone. The research hasn't been reviewed. But again, part of the reason for this podcast is just think logically. Use your mind instead of listening to the propaganda coming from multi-billion dollar companies, which makes more sense, letting your feet do what they're made to do or not.
Okay. Back to shoes like. So, suffice it to say, that's a phrase that I'm going to be using a lot. Cushing is, what's called it misleading.
In fact, what the research shows is at the very least, more cushioning does not reduce the amount of force you're putting through the body and often increases the amount of force you put through your body because your brain is trying to get that information about what's happening in your feet. And if the padding doesn't let you get it naturally, your brain basically has your body to land harder to try and get that information. So put all that together. It's not surprising to hear, oh, wait, let's add one more.
The whole shoe is elevated. Your higher off the ground. This is not good for balancing agility. Take a look at what happens to basketball players like the number one injury is ankle sprains.
Actually, I don't know if it's number one. It's a very hot, hot injury. By the way, feel free to correct me if I say something too correct. I will sometimes get caught in the moment and say something that I don't have the data right in front of me.
So that was one. I don't know that ankle sprains are the number one injury, but holy smokes. If you just look at ankle sprains basketball on YouTube, you were going to see some things that are terrifying. And the higher you put something between you and the ground, the harder it is to balance.
When you have an edge that you can catch. If you have a big, thick shoe with an edge way down here, then when you catch it, it makes your whole body look skin over that edge which accelerates ankle sprains. In fact, that's another designer from Modern Footwear is the motion control part. These flared soles.
So what the research actually does show is that the flared sole, and we'll get into all the physics, but if you know physics, it increases the moment on from where your foot makes contact with the ground to where you become fully loaded on your foot. What it basically means is that your foot hits the ground in a place that isn't natural and accelerates how your foot then lands on the ground. Not a good thing. In fact, let's back up a giant step.
Once Nike started putting padding in the shoe, in the heel of the shoe, it became almost impossible to not land on your heel when you land. If you think about it, if you were landing, say on the ball of your foot, you don't land with your heel way up the air. You land with all the ball of your foot, but your heel may be a half an inch, an inch off the ground and it'll probably come down and touch the ground. But if you put an inch, an inch and a half of padding underneath your heel, then your heel is going to hit first.
You can avoid it. You can try and land in that same midfoot landing position, but the heel is going to hit first because you put something in the way and so you're going to hit that padded thing in your inner heel. Your heel is a ball. A ball is not stable.
So once they put that padding in the heel, then suddenly people were having stability issues. They were pronating or supinating. Now pronating or supinating are inherently problematic. That's just part of the natural gait cycle, but if you do it too fast, that's a problem.
And so suddenly there's motion control issues. So now they start building out flared soles, which ironically can make both of those even worse. And even more, when you land in your heel, you're landing with your foot fully outstretched by the time it hits the ground. Think about doing a bicep curl.
We just when your arm is fully extended, your strongest when your arm is somewhere on the halfway point, actually a little half to halfway point. Same thing with your foot, same thing with your planter fascia. When you land with a fully extended foot, instead of using the arch the way it's designed to, and we'll talk about that in a future podcast, you're putting extra strain on your planter fascia. And not surprisingly, that can lead to planter fascitis, very serious foot and heel pain.
So the very design of the shoe can be causing the very things that the footwear companies are telling you. They are making shoes to solve those problems, not solving them, possibly causing them. And have you noticed that every year or two, they'll come up with some brand new idea, some new kind of panning, some new kind of cushioning, some new kind of design to improve performance or boost injury? How come it's never worked?
In 50 years, it's never worked. And yet we still keep buying the shoes. We still keep hearing this propaganda saying that it's going to be helpful with no evidence that it is. The question I keep asking to these billion dollar companies, where's your proof for what you say?
I just haven't seen it. I'll talk later about the footwear studies and what the problems are with some of those and what's right with some of the others. But I just haven't seen it. So this just amazes me because what really floors me is not only are they continuing to tell us the same story over and over and over with no evidence behind it.
And we just keep believing it. But you never heard them apologize. You never heard them say, hey, here's our brand new magic cushioning technology in our shoe. And by the way, the stuff that we saw in the last five years, my apologies, it was completely bullshit.
You never hear them say that. And yet that's kind of inherent in that, hey, here's this new improved, is that, hey, the last one probably wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing. So I'm not again saying that running shoes are going to kill you. If you're having a great time in running shoes, continue to have a great time.
I just want you to encourage you to think about what's natural versus what you're getting in a modern running shoe. And tell me if you think that maybe there's some value in exploring natural. I can say switching all the way right away. I just kind of contemplate what it might be like and wonder if maybe there's actually, wait, I'm going to leave you with this last thought.
I've said something for years that I only recently heard and again, this is hearsay. I heard from someone who heard it from someone. It's someone they heard it from, CEOs of billion dollar plus footwear brands. The friend of mine asked them, so are you ever going to do anything with minimalist footwear with barefoot shoes, things like zero shoes?
And the response was, yeah, we can't do that. Because if we did, it would be admitting that what we've been doing for the last 50 years doesn't work. I've been saying that that's what they've been thinking, but I actually heard it from someone who deliberately specifically asked one of the CEOs from a couple of big companies. Again, these aren't killing people, but it's that same kind of secret, that same kind of information is what made the cigarette companies toggle.
Because that can happen with footwear brands, I don't know. Frankly, I would rather they just start doing things that work naturally, that work the way feet are supposed to work. We're not trying to win a war here. We're trying to encourage the idea of natural movement.
Again, we're creating a movement movement. We want people to understand that natural movement is as important and beneficial and valuable and honest and true as natural food is. That's what people think of natural food right now. That's what we want to do with natural movement.
And that's why you're here. I hope you want to join our movement movement. So here's how you can do that. If you want to be part of the movement movement, just, you know, subscribe, like, share, click the little bell if you're watching this on YouTube, leave reviews.
If you have any questions, send them to us here at just email move at join the movement movement movement. You can visit us online at join the movement movement movement. We're happy to have you be part of that and to spread the movement movement. If you want to join our tribe, please subscribe.
See you next time. You've been listening to the movement movement podcast with host Stephen Satchan. Remember to join the tribe and subscribe at jointhemovementmovement.com. You've been listening to the movement movement podcast with host Stephen Satchan.
Remember to join the tribe and subscribe at jointhemovementmovement.com.