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. We all know the story of the boy who cried wolf, and at the end of the story, the villagers stopped running to find the nonexistent wolf, which didn't end up very well for the boy.
Well, what if there was an industry that's been effectively and essentially crying wolf? The difference here is that every time they say wolf, we keep running and we pull out our wallets and give them money to get the wolf. It isn't there. Well, that's what we're going to be talking about on today's episode of the Movement Movement.
The podcast for people who want to know the truth about how to have a healthy, happy, strong body by doing what bodies are made to do, and that is move. I'm Stephen Sashin. I'm the CEO of Zero Shoes. That's X-E-R-O-Shoes.com.
And I'm here to help you do whatever it is you like to do. Run, walk, hike, do yoga, do crossfit, paddleboard. Ooh, do something that I haven't done in 40 years till last week, and that's archery, really fun because it's all about intermittent reinforcement, whatever it is that you like to do. I'm here to help you do that more enjoyably, more efficiently, more effectively, by again letting your body do what it naturally does and just supporting that.
So if you want to be part of our Movement, please join our tribe and subscribe. Click, like, click, share, click, you know, rate us, review us all the relevant things that you know how to do based on how you're interacting with the Movement Movement. And if you don't know how to find us on social media, you can just go to jointhemovementmovement.com and you'll see links to all the places where you can find us and interact if you have any questions, if you have any comments, you can email moveatjointhemovementmovement.com. So let's jump in and move first, and then we'll talk about the industry that cried wolf.
Okay, this is a really fun one. What I want you to do is turn your head as far as you can, don't strain. Turn your head naturally as far as you can to the left. And just see where your nose is pointing.
Don't look further than where your head is going. Just find a spot on the wall or wherever you can spot. It's looking straight ahead. And then turn your head to the right and do the same thing as see how far you're going.
And I'm sure there's going to be a comment somewhere that this is easy for me because I have a big nose and I can use to guide myself there. Guess what? It's not a surprise that I have a big nose. So, alright, now here's where the fun comes in.
I want you to close your eyes and turn your head back to the left and see if as you turn your head to the left you can look to the right. And if you can't do that at the same speed where you're turning looking, that's cool. Just once you get your head all the way to the left, look as far as you can to the right. And you might make a goofy face while you do this.
It's hard not to. Turn your head as far as you can to the left while looking to the right. Now slowly move your head as far as you can to the right while looking to the left. With your eyes closed still.
If you're in a car, don't do this, but that's going to be obvious. I hope. Look to the left while turning to the right. And then do it one more time.
I did it before. That was looking to the right while. No, you got it. Looking to the left.
I'm making the weird face. And then again, head to the right while looking to the left. And now let your eyes just stay naturally pointing the same direction as your nose and turn your head back to the left as far as it comfortably goes. And then open your eyes and see where your nose is pointing compared to where it was before.
Then close your eyes and turn your head all the way to the right as far as you can comfortably. And look and see where your nose is pointing now. I'm betting that for most of you, you ended up having more range of motion. Your head had turned further in either direction.
Maybe one a little better than the other. But check that out. You just got more range of motion, more flexibility just by moving your eyes in a weird way as you turned your head. Hmm.
Well, we're going to explore that more in a later episode. But it should give you something to think about about how bodies work and how quickly they can change to move naturally. So let's jump in to the industry that cried wolf. I don't think it's going to be much of a surprise.
When I tell you that that industry is the footwear industry, more specifically or more overtly the performance footwear industry, people who make running shoes, predominantly. And what I mean when I say that they're trying wolf, like I said in the intro, every couple of years, you notice that at least one of the companies comes out with some magic new technology, some new foam, some new insults, some new rubber, some new flair, some new heel cup, whatever it is that they say is going to allow you to run better, healthier, more enjoyable, maybe enjoyably for the first time, injury free, whatever the promises are. Just take a gander. If you've been in the running world for a while, you might have had this experience where every time you hear about some new thing, you go try it and you don't necessarily get the benefits that were promised.
In fact, if you want to hear something fun, there was a panel discussion at the American College of Sports and Medicines National Conference that I was on the panel. It was about footwear and footwear biomechanics. There were some guys from Brooks, the guy from Adidas, my friend Tony Post from Topo Athletic and me and Dr. Irene Davis from Harvard, I think got in the last word.
She asked the question, in the 60s, she said, we were running in thin soil running shoes. We were playing basketball in Chuck Taylor's. We worked then seeing the number of injuries or the severity of injuries that we're currently seeing with all these new technologies. So she asked, what was the problem you were trying to solve and why isn't it working?
And if you want to see the non-answer to that question, go to zeroshoes.com, exeonroshoes.com slash ACSM for American College of Sports Medicine. And you can see the whole panel discussion. I'll warn you in advance. The video and audio quality, not great.
I was hoping that it would be, I think it was just someone doing it with their phone. But you're going to find a very interesting answer or again, non-answer to that question. The statistics on running injuries is that they haven't really changed since the advent of the modern running shoe. 50% of runners get injured every year, roughly 80% of marathoners get injured every year despite all these incredible new technologies.
So why aren't they working? Why do we keep going? The thing that's amazing to me is that because they've been telling us the same basic story over and over and over and we keep going and going and going, it's created this other phenomenon where we really believe that the product is or should be the solution, that you don't need to do anything different, you don't need to be any different, you can just stay exactly as you are and just put on that shoe and it's going to be completely magic. Now, some of you listening to this might say, hey, wait, Sachin, don't you say the same thing about zero shoes?
And the answer to that is no. We actually don't. But there's a whole different thing. There's a lot of people who've had that experience.
But the difference with what we're doing is we don't have some magic new technology. Everything is zero shoes, wait, can't we pull it out? Everything that we're doing is zero shoes is thousands of years old. If you look at footwear from 10,000 years ago, it looks a lot like ours, just enough to protect your foot and that's it.
We don't have any magic technology if you're able to see what I'm showing now. I'm showing the profile of one of our shoes where all we have is a little bit of rubber, thin, doesn't elevate your heel, doesn't elevate your toes either. It's basically a flat piece of rubber with an upper on top of it. Our sandals don't even have the upper on top of it.
There's barely anything in there for protection, just enough so that you're not worried about what you're stepping on or stepping in. But this is designed to let your foot bend and flex and move naturally, getting out of the way as much as possible. There's not some magic vibrating insole or some foam that's made out of, oh man, I was going to say something that's really rude. All right, I'll say it anyway, tampons.
Oh man, that is way too far, but oh, well too late. I tried. I swear, I tried not to say that. Okay, I'm not going to go any further.
I could, but I won't. So, fice it to say there's all this technology that keeps getting added, but it's all the same basic technology, some form of cushioning, some form of motion control. And ironically, the whole reason for the motion control is because of the cushioning. When people added cushioning to the heel of the shoe, that made runners land on the heel.
The reason that I'll explain into more detail in a different episode of the podcast, but when you land on your heel, your heel is a ball. It's unstable. So now you need motion control. And if you land on your heel, by the time your foot comes down, it becomes it's flat.
It's in a weak position. It's the strongest with your arm at about a 90 degree angle, weak when it's fully extended. Same thing with your foot. Your strongest when your arch is engaged, your weakest when your arch is already flat.
And if your foot lands and it's flattened out when it lands, your arch isn't strong. That's going to put extra stress on there. And that's when they started adding arch support. So all these things heel lift, cushioning, flared soles for motion control, all of these interventions haven't really helped.
And yet we keep running to the next one. You can remember how this happened. In fact, the way Zero she started was at the beginning of one of these where the idea of running barefoot became popular, started to become popular again. Because, you know, people have been doing that for millennia without any problem.
People in third world countries still run barefoot or in something like some of our sandals, but then piece of rubber underneath their foot for protection. That's all you need. A BBB killer won the 1960 Olympic marathon running barefoot. Zola Bud ran barefoot.
Ron Hill, I think ran the 10k Mexico City barefoot because he said it was the lightest shoe he could find. We're sort of non-technology and it's kind of fun for us as our office is an advanced technology park with a whole bunch of other office buildings and we're kind of the anti-technology company. But it amazes me that again, we just keep falling for the same story over and over and over. What amazes me even more is that every time the companies come out with a new technology, they never say, hey, by the way, our apologies for that crap we were selling you before.
We just found out that it was completely bogus and had no effect. And that's why we invented this new one. They just tell the exact same story when they come out with the magic new technology. And again, one of the biggest magic new technologies is cushioning.
It's the foam or whatever the reason to replace foam. Adidas is now saying they're going to be doing 3D printed mid-sals to replace the foam. But it's the same basic idea. It's still some form of cushioning.
Now, cushioning is a really interesting thing because for one, and we're going to make a note about something I want to say, research, I will come back to this. For one, one thing we know about running fast and if you're not a runner, you still might find this interesting. I hope you do. We know what it takes for people to run fast.
They need to apply more mass specific force into the ground at the right angle. What that means is you're applying more energy into the ground than you are applying another... Wait, it's not another note. Spring.
Okay. I'm going to come back to that one too. All right. So, mass specific force.
The more force you can apply to the ground based on your mass, your weight and how you're accelerating through the force of gravity, the faster you can run. Now, we're not really good at helping people learn to apply more mass specific force. But there's one thing that reliably lets you apply less mass specific force. And the way you apply less mass specific force is by either spreading it out over a larger surface area or having it apply more slowly.
And the one thing that reliably does both is cushioning, is padding, is foam. It's not over biggest surface area, longer period of time to apply the force. So hmm. If the companies just keep coming up with new versions of that same idea that doesn't really work to help you anyway, hmm.
Now, I got hit to this when I first heard about, there was one company that was showing how well a one pound steel ball bounced off their new magic foam. Okay. Well, you're not a one pound steel ball who's just falling at the speed of gravity. And that's a perfect spring practically because it's a hard steel ball.
So it doesn't collapse in any way. What difference does it make? When I first saw that, my immediate thought was, wait a minute. I'm a former all-American gymnast.
This is like talking about being on a trampoline. You know, the way you get energy into a trampoline is because you're applying that energy with your legs. So what the trampoline does is helps you maximize the value of that energy. But it's all coming out of you, which is why you can't bounce on a trampoline indefinitely.
You get tired. It's the same thing when you have cushioning in your shoes. Your body eventually gets tired because it's having to deal with the foam that's absorbing that energy. So here's the thing that you can try at home, not really at home when you're out and about, to see how this whole spring thing works.
Wait, I'll talk about the research thing first and the spring thing? Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna do that. Here's the other thing that amazes me.
Sorry for the tangent. The magic new technology every time it comes out. If you look in the scientific literature, if you look at the research, it almost invariably disproves the technology. When the whole maximalist shoe thing came out where after people were going, hey, maybe we can run barefoot, then suddenly there was big, thick shoes with tons and tons of padding.
The research was coming out showing that those do not reduce impact forces. Same amount of force or sometimes even more force in the ground, but not mass specific force. Just force that goes into your body and gets absorbed by your body, not something that makes you run faster. More cushioning was equally more force.
Now, there's a lot of theories about this, but one of them is particularly fascinating to contemplate. You have more nerve endings in the soul of your feet than anywhere but your fingertips and your mind to feel the world. If you have all this cushioning, all this stuff between you and the ground, you don't get any feeling. You don't get the feedback that your brain needs to know how to control your whole body.
In fact, you don't even get the feedback that your body needs to control your body. What I mean by that is you don't need to have all that information coming from your soles to go all the way up to your brain and then back down to tell you how to move your body better. There's a reflex arc where that information from the soul of your foot just goes to the base of your spine and right back down because if you step on something sharp, you step on a B or a sharp rock, you need to pull your foot up more quickly than it would take for the message to go all the way up to your brain and all the appropriate muscles to get your foot off the ground. And we have built-in mechanisms that are even faster in fractions and fractions of a second just work with your body that way.
So what was my point of saying? Oh, the research. You have a whole bunch of padding. It doesn't actually do the job of making you have a more cushion run.
Or if it does, yeah, yeah, is cushioning really the best thing? This is an interesting question to ask. You know, if you want to jump up and down on a temperate bed or a trampoline, you can only do that for so long. If you just jump up and down on the ground like jumping rope, you can do that for way, way longer.
This is our own experience. We've seen it. We've done it. We've had it happen over.
And yet when a shoe company says they cry wolf and here's some new cushioning, we go, oh, it must be better because they told us so. Ask them for the research. This is something that I do that does not make me popular at all with the people who run major footwear brands. Whenever they talk about their technology for getting you in the right shoe or for or just for the shoe in general, I just ask this crazy question.
I say, where's the proof? Show me the evidence that this improves performance or reduces injuries. And it just doesn't really happen. There are some studies that you might find about a particular shoe that I won't mention by name that says that it improves your VO2 max or people running it have a basically their processing oxygen better.
But the study A says at the end of it, but we don't know that's going to correlate to performance in the real world for real people. And the study was done by a lab that is sponsored by the company that makes the product. Not saying that definitely changes things. I'm saying that we know in the pharmaceutical world, if the pharmaceutical company pays for the research, the results reliably come out more in favor of the pharmaceutical than independent studies.
Again, I don't know that that's the case here, but there's only one lab that's on that research. And even they say, we don't know that what's happening in the lab is going to apply to you in the real world. So, but ask them, you know, where's the research that's what you're doing? Now when people say to us the same thing, well, where's your research?
I go, first of all, we're not the intervention for the first out of the 10,000 years that we know people have been making shoes because we actually have evidence of one where they look at shoes, just something thin to protect your feet and something to hold it on your foot. In that 10,000 years, the first 9,950 of those years, we're really look like ours. The intervention is the modern running shoe. So again, the question is where's the evidence for them?
But if you want to look up evidence for us, oh boy, you can do that. Go to PubMed, PUBMD.com, I think. If you just search for PubMed, you'll find it. And search for minimalist shoes and see what you find.
I'll tell you that you're going to find things like research from Irene Davis that shows, and from Sarah Ridge at BYU, Sarah's research, she showed that doing a foot strengthening exercise program, you get the same benefits from just walking in a minimalist shoe, very interesting thing, Isabel Sacco from Brazil showed that women wearing a minimalist shoe had reduced knee pain and reduced knee osteoarthritis. Irene Davis has shown that there's minimalist shoes and what she calls partial minimalist shoes, what I call fake minimalist shoes. These are the quote minimalist shoes sold by the major brands where she showed that those are arguably worse for you than a regular shoe. And the reason is they still have enough cushioning, you don't get enough feedback from the ground, so you don't change your running form because it's not about the footwear, it's about the form, and that could be problematic.
She's not a bunch of other amazing research too. If you just look up Irene Davis and look for her research, you'll find something great there. So here's the thing that you can do at home to test out this whole spring thing. So let's actually back up to a simple question, to the natural question, which do you think is going to be a better spring and shock absorber and something that returns more energy into your body, foam that's again tuned to a particular weight and frequency that you're probably not, or this infinitely adjusting, or almost infinitely adjusting, that's not really infinite, this massively adjusting and almost instantly adjusting spring mechanism that you have kind of from your nipples down really.
I mean, it's really your legs, the muscles, ligaments, and tendons in your legs, this incredible, incredible spring you have called your Achilles tendon that you can't activate fully if you have a higher heel running shoe. And so, you know, again, foam versus the ligaments, tendons and muscles that you have that are designed to be an incredible shock absorber and spring mechanism. I know where I'm going to put my bet, and it's just been my experience and the experience of hundreds of thousands of people who've gotten into natural movement by wearing zero shoes or other truly minimalist footwear or gone barefoot. But you can also test out the spring theory for yourself in a really fun way.
Next time you go for a run or even a walk, tense your abs as if to someone's about to throw a medicine ball right at your navel and you've got to bounce it off your belly. And if you can, tense your abs so you also kind of push out, so like you want to tense your abs and then push down and out so you get your obliques involved as well. So it's sort of like you're building a muscular corset around you and then see what it's like to run a little bit or walk a little bit where you have tense abs. Now I will warn you, it's hard to breathe this way.
I'm not suggesting you do this all the time. But once you get used to actually engaging your core, you might find a radical difference in the way your body moves in that spring like mechanism that starts from your nipples and goes all the way down. I'll tell you Glenn Mills, who's Usain Bolt's coach, said that in the year before Bolt came out as one of the fastest men in the world in 100 meters, they spent a year working on his core strength because he was a little springy, a little slinky like in his core. And that's how most of us run.
We try to be super relaxed in the places where what that does is it absorbs energy and doesn't let you apply more mass specific force in the ground, which will let you walk or run or do almost anything better when you find just the right amount of tension to get that spring working properly to let the rest of your body do its job naturally as well. So that's my story about the industry, the companies that have tried. Wolf, I want to hear what your experience is about this. I want to hear your comments, your questions, your criticisms.
I'm open to all this. Again, this is all about the truth about natural movement. And if someone shows me that I'm patently wrong, I am more than happy to come out and show that evidence and talk about that as well. So join the movement movement.
In fact, go to jointhemovementmovement.com where you'll find links to all of our social media channels. You can send a message to move at jointhemovementmovement.com. If you have some suggestions, some advice, someone you think who should be on the show, questions will do a Q&A episode of the podcast at some point. Whatever you want to do to participate and be part of this, we're trying to create a movement movement.
And what that means is we're trying to make the idea of natural movement, the obvious, better, healthy choice, the way that natural food currently is. And we can't do that alone. We need your help. We want you to be part of the community.
If you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. Can't wait to see you on the next episode of the Movement Movement podcast. Until then, live life-free first. You've been listening to the Movement Movement podcast with host Stephen Sashan.
Remember to join the tribe and subscribe at jointhemovementmovement.com.