Welcome to the Movement Movement, the podcast where 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. Good, getting a blister on your foot would be the most important, valuable thing that happens to you as a runner.
Crazy as that sounds. We're going to be taking a look today on today's episode of the Movement Movement Podcast. The podcast where people who want to know the truth about having a happy, healthy, strong body, we're going to be breaking through the mythology, the confusion, sometimes the propaganda and outright lies about what it takes to walk, run, hike, do yoga, paddleboard, lift, anything you can think of and to do that more enjoyably. I am here, Stephen Sashin, your host for the Movement Movement Podcast and we call it the Movement Movement because we are creating a movement, making natural movement the obvious better, healthy choice, the way natural food currently is and if that sounds like something that you're interested in or could be provocative, then subscribe, follow, share, do all those things you know how to do, just find us online at www.jointhemovementmovement.com.
That'll point you to everywhere. You can engage with us Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, iTunes, etc. So let's jump in. I'm going to tell the story to start of my important blister and it goes kind of like this.
So back in 19, I don't know what year that was, I can do years. Let's just say it was 11 years ago because that's true, about 11 years ago. I got back into sprinting after a 30 year break and I was getting injured pretty much constantly and one day a friend of mine who's a world champion cross country runner suggested that I try running barefoot to see what I would learn from doing that. Just happened that that weekend there was a workshop being put on by a guy named Michael Sandler about barefoot running and I joined the workshop and took my first barefoot run.
Now I'm a sprinter. I run the 100 meters. I do not take turns on the track. I don't know what the other side of the track looks like.
My friends tease me, they say that I have a phobia of the other side of the track but that's ridiculous because how can you be afraid of something that doesn't exist? So suffice it to say I run very short distance in a very straight line, very fast. That's it. I had never run and definitely not of my own volition was maybe a mile and a half.
That was when I was working with this one particular coach and man, I did not like any bit of that. So I got from my first barefoot run on this workshop and we were running on grass and on pavement and on sidewalks and on trails and over wooden bridges, everything you could think of and it undeniably wasn't fast but it was really fascinating. I was transfixed by the experience of just seeing what would happen if I move my body differently. If I moved my legs faster or slower without changing my speed, if I changed my speed without moving my legs faster or slower, if I landed on different parts of my feet, if I tried to push off the ground, if I tried to land on the ground, if I bent my knees more, if I bent my knees less, all these different things.
I was just so, so fascinated by what it felt like having my bare feet, getting all that information, transmitting that to my brain and my brain, giving me ideas of what to do with my body to see what would happen. So at the end of this run, I turned to a woman who had a GPS watch on and said, how far was that? And she said, that was a little over 5k. I was like, what?
I could not believe it. I could have kept going, frankly. It's just that we finished the run. But I was having a blast.
Anyway, a couple minutes later, I'm getting in my car and I noticed that I have a giant blister on the ball of my left foot, not on the ball of my right foot, just the ball of my left foot. Now, here's the first interesting thing for me. Many people that I bump into in this situation will say things like, oh, well, this is clearly horrible for you because I got a blister. I had the exact opposite response.
My thought was, this is interesting. My right foot is fine. What was my right leg doing that my left leg wasn't? How was my right leg better than my left leg?
And it wasn't lost on me that my left leg was the one that got injured more often. And again, this first couple years of running when I got back to the sprinting, I was just getting injured all the time. So this was interesting to me. A week later, we go out for our second barefoot run.
And I think to myself, all right, if I can find a way to run where I'm not causing pain on the gaping hole that's still on the ball of my foot, then I'm probably not doing the thing that caused that problem to begin with. So I'll give it 10 minutes. We'll see what happens. If it doesn't get any better, I'll stop and I'll wait for a week or two until everything heals, and we'll try again.
So nine minutes and 30 seconds of excruciating pain later, I was just about to call it in. And then something changed literally within one step. The pain went away. My running felt easier.
My body felt better. I was breathing more easily. Just everything changed. And I'll tell you what happened in a second.
All I know is in that moment, it was just an epiphany. It was just this incredible experience where suddenly everything felt different. And so I spent the next couple of weeks practicing that same thing, getting that feeling in my body of whatever it was that I had done differently and just sticking with it, just getting used to that. Well, my injuries went away.
My running got better and faster. I became a master's All-American sprinter. What that means is for men at that time, over 45, I guess now over 55, I'm one of the fastest 100 meter guys in the country. And technically for men over 55, you could be looking at or listening to the fastest Jew in the world.
I'm not a lot of competition with that one. I'll concede. Anyway, so this blister was massively important. It taught me how to run better.
And this is a thing that I want to communicate first is that when you have certain kinds of problems and I'll get more specific in a moment, they can be your best coaches, your best teachers, your best lessons. If you think of them that way, if you look at it with a kind of curious mindset of, all right, so what just happened? Why did it happen? And now what to do about it?
So let me tell you what happened. And then I'll tell you what to do about it. Yeah, that sounds good. So the simple thing is a lot of people think, especially when it comes to barefoot running, that blisters and calluses are just par for the course.
That's what you do. You need to toughen up your feet. You're gonna get blisters and you're gonna get calluses and you're gonna be tough and then you can run. Let me just say, right off that is 100% complete bullshit.
So blisters are optional. All calluses are definitely proof that you need to change something about your form. And the simple reason why is that both of those blisters versus then calluses are caused by applying too much friction, applying too much horizontal force. If you just think about lifting your foot off the ground and putting it down on the ground, just lifting it straight up and straight down, you could pretty much do that all day long and you wouldn't get blisters or calluses.
But once you start applying force, that's when you can get the abrasion and the friction that's gonna cause those two effects on your skin. Now, where that force can come from is one of two places. Either one, if you're landing with your foot too far in front of your body, especially if you're landing on the ball of your foot, as you've been told that you're supposed to land on the ball of your foot, but you still reach out. So your foot is landing in front of your body.
You're essentially putting the brakes on. You're causing your momentum to slow down and your foot is the thing that's taking the brunt of that. That typically results in calluses around the ball of your foot. The other place you often can find, not often, but you'll sometimes find people getting calluses is on the pads of their toes.
And that comes from the backside. That comes as you're lifting your foot off the ground by kind of flexing your feet down, flexing your toes down or trying to push off or toe off rather than thinking about lifting your foot by initiating that at the hip, by flexing your hip. Here's a good image to use. If you stepped on a B in your bare feet, you wouldn't push down further to embed that stinger in your foot.
If you're sitting foot off the ground with a reflexive action that starts with your hip, you want to have that same kind of feeling when you're running as well. The other thing that's related to this is just where your body is, how your body is aligned. So if you're loose in your core, if your butt is sticking back, then that's going to make it a little more difficult to land properly and get your foot on and off the ground properly as well. So you want to have your core engaged and what that means, a good way of playing with this is think about them as you're running or walking.
Imagine that you have to brace yourself for somebody hitting you in the stomach. So you tighten everything up, you make a nice tight spring. Now you don't want to do that forever because you can't breathe very well that way. But just to kind of get that feeling of what it means to engage those muscles around your core to make yourself a nice tight spring, get your hips over your feet, your shoulders over your hips.
Those two things will make it harder for you to over stride or to push off on the back as well. That's what I spontaneously did in that 9 minute and 30 second mark is suddenly I don't know why. I think it was because basically I was in so much pain, my brain started trying to find a way to get out of it. And that was the thing that it spontaneously and unconsciously found was get my hips over my feet, get my shoulders over my hips, nice tight core.
And that's what I remember it feeling like, which is it actually became a better spring. Now when I say spring, I don't mean that you bounce up and down a lot because that's not good. But just that you're actually absorbing some of that shock with your muscles, ligaments, and tendons that you have in your legs, hips, feet, etc. But a nice tight spring is just one that reacts well and quickly rather than being slinky like and slow to respond, you know, just compressing and extending with every step.
So that's the gist of what causes blisters. I'm sorry. We said that slightly differently. So that excess of horizontal force, that excess of friction, that'll cause blisters, that'll eventually lead to calluses.
That's not a good sign. So the whole idea is that you can use these things as a teacher. When you're running or walking, you want the feedback that you get to inform how you move. And here's the best part about my blister.
It happened on one foot. I love unilateral injuries. I love them. And I just like unilateral phenomenon.
I say it that way because like I said, most people will think, oh, what happened wrong on the foot that is hurting? And I was thinking what happened right on the foot that was doing well. And in fact, when I was doing that second run, what I was paying attention to was not does this hurt, but I was paying attention to why doesn't this right foot hurt? And that's what I'm going to recommend to you as well.
If you have something going on that's unilateral, think about paying attention to experiment with the good side. And when you do that, the quote, bad side will often come along for the ride and figure out what to do differently. Some of you might know there's a bodywork method called Feldencrais. And that's one of the principles in Feldencrais is work on the good side and figure out how that feels, how that moves.
And then the bad side can come along for the ride. And I wasn't doing that consciously, but that's just what happened because I was so curious. Why is this good side good? And then the bad side suddenly became good as well.
So oh, you know, we didn't do a movement at the beginning. I was about to say, so I want to encourage you to ponder what your body is doing, use that information as the appropriate feedback, pay attention to the good side. And if there's not a good side, just experiment. Just try something different.
And you know, one thing you might want to try, try to make it worse, try to do things where whatever problem you're having is exacerbated. Thank you, SAT prep school testing process back when I was 17. I love the word exacerbated. I think actually if I used exacerbated and ameliorated in the same paper in English, I got an automatic A.
I think Sam Miller taught me that one. Thank you, Sam Miller, got me in English. One of the classes I didn't like very much, but we found a way to get around it. Anyway, point being, see what you can do to make things worse, exaggerate the problem because that'll actually help you figure out what really is going on.
And that might allow you to make the changes that could be the kind of things that lead to a solution. So before we go, we normally start the movement, movement, podcast with a movement. And I totally forgot to do that. So I want to do one now.
And this is one you can do in your car. You can do walking, standing, running, running, what doesn't matter because it's an internal movement. It's just a lot of motion. And it's just a subtle little thing.
So what I want you to do right now is check in your body and see if you can find anywhere that feels stressed, that feels tight, that feels unpleasant in some way. It could be in the pit of your stomach, it could be in your chest, it could be in your throat, it could be in your head somewhere. To see if you can feel that and then see if you can sense in some way how the reason that you can feel that is because there's something holding. It's almost like there's something encasing that feeling, that tension, that stress.
And see if you can subtly just feel like you're the one holding that in place somehow. It doesn't matter why. And I'm not suggesting there's a problem with this. But see if you can feel it in the same way that you would be having to contract your hand around a ball if you were holding a ball in the air.
In fact, you can actually do that with your hand, you can make a fist or you can hold it in the claw position as if you were holding onto something. And to see if you can feel how that stress is being held in your body in the same way that your hand would have to hold that ball and keep it from doing what it naturally wants to do just to come to gravity and drop to the ground. And when you can feel that, at a certain point it might feel like it's just a waste of energy and a waste of time to keep holding on. It might be tiring to hold on like that.
And in the same way you could just drop a ball from your hand, just let go of whatever's holding that stress, that tension in place, and then rest in whatever shows up in place of that. Maybe you'll get tense again and you can just let go again. Maybe you'll just feel spacious and you can just enjoy that spaciousness. Maybe it will seemingly move.
And I say seemingly because just because if you feel something in a different spot, that doesn't mean it's the same thing that move. You're just now you're feeling something in a different spot. And you might want to play with this for the next few minutes. Just keep finding those little bits of tension and to see how you may be holding that in place for some reason, who cares why.
And then just like dropping a ball from your hand, a brick from your hand, just let it go and enjoy the rest that happens after that. That's our movement for the day. I want to thank you for being part of this episode of Movement Movement Podcast. Again, if you want to follow us and share and join and be part of creating natural movement as a movement, making natural movement the obvious, healthy, better choice, the way natural food currently is, join us over at jointhemovementmovement.com.
That's where you can find all the links to all the various places that we do what we do. And you can like and subscribe and share and friend and follow and hit the bell on YouTube, all those different things. If you have any questions or any suggestions or anybody you think should be on the Movement Movement Podcast, then you can just drop us an email at move at jointhemovementmovement.com. Until then, thank you so much and live life, feet first.
You've been listening to the Movement Movement Podcast with Host Steven Sashan. Remember to join the tribe and subscribe at jointhemovementmovementmovement.com.