There are some of us in the natural movement world who say that it's not about the where it's about the form and where it can help you adjust your form to something more natural. Then there are people who are well known in the industry researching Beno Nigg, for example, who says you don't want to alter your form because if you do that, you're going to get injured. So what's the truth behind that? What's going on in this whole thing about form and altering it and what's appropriate and what's not?
We're going to investigate that. Today on the episode of the movement movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body usually starting feet first because you know those things are your foundation. And you probably know if you've listened to us before, we're breaking down the mythology, the property and sometimes the outright lies that people have told you about what it takes to be like, do cross-fit yoga, whatever it is you like to do and to do that enjoyably and efficiently and effectively. Did I say enjoyably?
I know I did. It's a trick question. Because look, if you're not having fun, do something different so you are. You don't want to keep it up if you're not having a good time anyway.
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Richard Diaz, it is a pleasure to have you here. Do me a favor. Tell humans who you are and what you do. Wow.
You know, that's interesting because when I have dinner with some people that I've just met and they ask me what I do, I have to pause because I'm not sure how to explain it. I like to think that I'm kind of a human mechanic. You know, you bring your body. Wait, a mechanic of humans or just a human type mechanic?
A mechanic for humans. How's that? Okay, I like it. And so the reason I would suggest that is because there's nothing that I would refer to as a niche, but I am, people want to put me in a box often.
Yeah. They want to refer to me as the running guy, you know, the running coach. And I almost take exception to that because there's a lot of things that I do that are not exclusive to running. But I do a lot of work in the running industry.
I travel around the country doing clinics. As a matter of fact, I'm doing a clinic in Connecticut next week. I just did a clinic in Jacksonville, Florida last month. I'm going to do another one here in Tennessee in July.
So I'll spend about, oh, about eight or 10 trips around the country during the year and then a lot of clinics I'll do locally. And the clinics are really geared for people that are frustrated with the way they're training. And so because I work in the space with a lot of runners and more specifically these days with obstacle course racing athletes and they're very bullish, meaning that they take on things very aggressively, sometimes in over their head and end up getting injured. And so I think the largest audience of people that I deal with are frustrated.
They're just tired of hurting themselves. And I actually have a podcast that I put together is probably about nine years ago now, which is the natural running network. And you know, I need, there's so many things that come to mind right now because I've never met with you. Yeah.
I saw your shoes. Okay. Can I just get right into it? Let's do it, baby.
I saw your shoes. And when people come to see me, it always comes out. So as a matter of fact, they might bring me four or five pairs of shoes they have. And they're saying, well, which pair of shoes should I wear?
Because I'm doing a B O two max test and gated analysis, things like this. And I'm going to teach people what I believe is the proper way to run. And they're already, they're all people that'll take exception to that concept. Yes, they will.
Now, there are people who will also say, I know how to run. I'm a human being. I have legs. You don't need to teach me how to run.
Right. Well, until they hurt themselves. Right. Well, then they still often still think it.
They often still think I know how, but somehow I got hurt. Yeah. Right. Well, again, this is, this is my day job.
I've been in the past, it's been over 10 years now that I've put clinics on around the country. And I've met so many people and my am always I'll show up. It's a weekend thing. I've never met these people before.
And in the course of that weekend, I have to impart all this information. And it's always interesting for me waiting for the person that's going to have a problem with what I say. And whether I'm going to get some rejection or some pushback based on the concepts that I show with people. And what I try to tell people and I believe is to be true is evidence based guy.
I need to believe it. And I need to, I personally, I need to believe in what I speak of. And I need to, I need to be able to go into a room with conviction, not because someone told me that this is the way to do something, but evidence has shown me over time in years and years that there's a way to do things and there are many, many ways not to do things. So getting back to your shoes and the question people will post to me about what type of shoe should I wear.
And I'm very reluctant to point to a brand. And so here's where you come in. Okay. I recall some of the first shoes that came about that were even the term zero, zero drop shoes.
And the concept of a broader toe box of those toes can splay and all of these little accruigements that check the boxes for me. And then I think somewhere along the way, the board members, the shareholders get together and they see a competitive brand that's just their stock is skyrocketing because they came out with a new, a new gimmick that's really working cushions. Well, really, I put air quotes around working selling. Let's say selling.
Well, that's what I mean. Yeah. So they're selling a lot of problem. Yeah.
And I can almost imagine being in the room and the pressure coming regardless of what your theories are about what you should wear and why we know we're in the business to sell shoes. And if we're not selling shoes, then what are we doing here, right? I can almost hear the conversation and they're saying, well, look, let's add to our quiver a shoe with a stack height that's double, triple what we used to. We're going to still hang on the same concept of a zero drop, but we're going to put the cushion under there to placate the people that feel like they need to have a lot of cushion in order to be safe or because they've been injuring themselves.
They want to land on something softer. And this is something that does not work with me because I know that cushioning is not the solution. I know that improper running mechanics can very many times be at fault. And just changing it.
I'm familiar with being on it and I've paid attention to a lot of his work. And the thing that being on it had said is he's never seen any alteration in a shoe that would make a difference as a result of injuries. I'll interrupt you on that one. So there's a group of us who we've gotten together and call ourselves the healthy field lines.
So we're trying to basically create a kind of umbrella slash lobbying arm for people who are who believe in that for movement. And we had him on a call. Well, I got it back up. I was on a panel discussion of American College of Sports Medicine a couple of years ago.
Me, Tony Close from Topo, athletic formaly from five fingers he was the CEO there. And then I got from Brooks and I got from Adidas. And the Brooks and Audi guys both quoted Ben as saying, everyone has a unique movement pattern that is basically impossible to change. And so the first thing that I said to him was, is that accurate?
Are you actually telling me that if someone is wearing those shoes and they switch to zero shoes, their gate isn't going to change? He goes, no, no, that's no, absolutely. What I'm saying is it's almost impossible for something for you to change. I'm saying two things.
It's very difficult for you to change something when you're switching to basically the same shoe and all those shoes are the same. And more importantly, you don't want to make an arbitrary change to your gate because that's going to lead to an injury. And where that theory came from was his N equals one sample of himself. And so we chose not to get into an argument about that, but he will concede that if you're going from like a quote traditional and so only a 50 year old idea, traditional running shoe to something truly minimalist or bare feet, undeniably things change.
But that's not how his research and what he said has been taken and bastardized by the companies making big, big, padded, much more or more shoes. Well, so my take and what I've learned. And again, I said already, I'm an evidence based guy. I watch the cause and effect relationship with people that make change.
And the changes could be change the type of shoe to wearing, change the volume of running that they're doing, and or change the gate pattern. And the biggest problem that I've seen is where someone that for example, maybe putting in 50 miles a week alters their gate, but doesn't alter their volume and or makes a massive change in the style of shoe they're wearing. And doesn't change the volume. It doesn't change the volume.
And so as a heel striker, if you carry that gate pattern into a zero drop minimal shoe, you're asking for trouble. Even worse, the one that I saw and this is the thing that's so interesting, the way the whole quote barefoot movement evolved was in large part when the five figures came out and people literally did think all I needed to do is switch these shoes and I'll be fine. And I said, and I said to Tony Post, this was 11 years ago, I said, you know, you're dropping the ball on the education necessary to have people transition effectively. And his response was something along the lines of, yeah, it's because things are moving so fast, we just can't get people to tell the story correctly.
They tried to mitigate that with a transition program that was much too aggressive and too, you know, kind of cut and paste instead of individually based. And so that was sort of the number one thing. But the other one that happened at that same time was people got the idea, oh, you're supposed to land on the ball of your foot. And so what they would do, and the first time I saw this, I literally, I was running with someone trying to show her how to run in the sandals where you make it back then.
And I saw her do something that I had to stop because I was so stunned and she was still over striding, still reaching out with her foot way too far in front of her and then just pointed her toes to land on the ball of her foot. And in fact, at the University of Colorado, they were, they did studies trying to prove that barefoot is bullshit. They had a picture of in a magazine from the Colorado Alumni Magazine or something, showing a runner doing that same thing, over striding, pointing their toes. So that misunderstanding about where you're supposed to land on your foot also led to those same kind of injuries because even if they weren't heels striking, if they're just landing, you know, on the ball of their foot way out in front of their body, that's not what feet are designed to do.
So you're keeping the volume and just making the switch or making that one to your point gate change based on erroneous information about what you're supposed to be doing was the other one that I saw over and over and over. And so if you change the dynamic, you change the stress patterns from the posture change to the anterior chain. Yeah. And so you start having a metaparcial stress syndrome.
I see a lot of that. Yeah. Morn's the Roma. All that stress because I call it toe diving, coming into the path too sharply.
Yeah. Those problems. So you were talking about 11 years ago in post with Topo. I first got introduced to the concept of shoe that was designed to be forefoot with Newton.
So I'm going to have to have you there too. So here's the joke about that. Actually, it's so funny. I met with, I can't mention a name.
I met with someone who was, let's just say one of the first ten employees of Newton. And because I'm in Boulder or right outside of Boulder, I know all those guys. The idea with the Newton shoe originally was can we create something that has greater energy return, which is a made up term of course as well. There's no such thing as energy return, anything that's cushioning sucks energy and a story.
And then they came up with this little trampoline idea to put these little trampolines in the ball of your foot, which there's some interesting things about that too. But the thing that was so funny with that product was while they're pitching the idea of let's call it natural form running for the fun of it. And then they're claiming that that shoe led people to do it or engendered that back to your point about being evidence based, there was zero evidence for that whatsoever. And all you had to do is watch people running in that shoe.
And no one changed their date in that shoe if they were. What I was going to share with you is I was in Boulder with Danny Dryer. You don't drop a name. I'll drop it for you.
Danny's an old friend. Yeah. And Danny Dryer from She Running. You mean Danny Dryer?
Danny Abshire from Newton. Danny Abshire. I know the way they were both there the same. They were the same weekend.
Money. And what's the other fellow's name? Whether it was the whole panel of people that were gathered together to discuss the nuances of natural running and they were trying to cause this revolution or they called the re-evolution running. Yeah.
And it was part of that for the early days. And Danny had, Abshire actually came out and done some work with me in California. And this is just in the birth of doing the clinics that I started doing. Danny was kind of there with me on this.
And what I learned, again, the evidence was that people that would buy these shoes with a promise of becoming a natural runner and still running on their heels and never really touching the little piano keys in the front of the shoe, they were still heel striking. Right. And I used to tell people if you really want to pair those shoes, get the second hand pair from the white shoes shop because they're selling them for 25 bucks. And they were the returns.
They were had massive returns because people were hurting themselves. Yeah. And I would see people saw and almost saw and off the heel of the shoe and never actually getting onto the bridge that was designed to let you know that you're in the right spot, basically what's with the result. Well, even with that, I mean, speaking as a sprinter, so when they had their first public event here in Boulder, I put the shoes on and just ran up Broadway and back down Broadway.
And the thing with those little trampoline piano key pods in the forefoot is like anything that's supposed to be springy, it's all, and people, I keep saying people just need to understand physics better. And so, I went to a particular weight and speed. If you're not that weight and running at that speed, it's going to get in the way. And what I felt when I ran it, it was just too squishy.
It was like, you know, I'd land and I was just, it was slowing down my ground contact time. I felt like I was just having to bounce to be able to run. And it just was not tuned for the way someone who was a natural forefoot landing sprinter ran. And they were really confused by that.
I remember. It was interesting conversations. We had I had Mark Hookus, who was there. I mean, Davis was there.
Yeah. It was all sarcastic. Jada. Jerry was there.
Yeah. So, you know, getting in the mix with these guys and listening to what they had to say about your traditional running patterns and, you know, the mistakes we made with shoe design. And I kind of got entrenched in all that. And I started to develop my own theories about how you might approach change in the way you're going to run.
And so you dropped the ball. You said when you dropped the bomb, I should say, you said people don't understand physics. And it really comes to be a function of where are you putting a load? How stable are you when you make contact with the earth?
How much effort feedback you're going to get so that you can find stability quicker? And all these little nuances that people aren't thinking about, they're just trying to, and or they want to admire their work by overstrying to see them factor on the front of their foot. Right. Right.
Which case they're causing new problems. And so what I went into, and this is, you know, you have to forgive me because I'm an old guy. And if it comes to my brain, it comes out my mouth. Hold on.
Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.
I'll be 70 this year. Oh, nice. I'm turning 60 in a couple months. So, so all right.
And FYI, I have that same neurological problem where once it's in my brain, it comes out of my face. So we're in good company. Okay. So here's the thing.
The shoe that you're producing. Yeah. Check my boxes prior to you sending those shoes to me. I'd never wore the shoe.
I have a couple of clients that were wearing and incidentally, these are older women. And she never ran until she was 66. Oh, I love it. Okay.
And she's wearing your shoe. And then I have another girl that the trans with her older woman. She's probably, I got to say, she's got to be getting close to 60 yourself. And I, she's quickly obese.
So how much she weighs does that factor into? I mean, it sure factors into this, but she runs well, which allows her to run in your shoe. Right. And as a matter of fact, she prefers to run in that shoe because all of the things that I've taught are coming to fruition.
She's, I've taken her to, you have to appreciate this woman. If you can visualize this, she's about four foot nine. And I think she weighs about 170 pounds and Asian and used to complain a lot about soreness. My quads are sore.
My this or the, and I used to say, take it off, take it off. And then one day I said, you know what, just for fun, let's go the other way. We've been, you know, backing off. Let's, let's accelerate.
I said, I want you to run a hundred miles next week. Okay. She laughed about it. We were running together and I said, well, here's how you're going to do it.
And we started talking about how we're going to get the volume over the course of the week. So she was at about 25 miles that week. The very next week, she did 66 miles. The week after that, she ran 115 months.
And it was no worse for wear. So the soreness that she normally would complain about in her legs or whatever, that didn't go away, but it didn't get worse. And she didn't run into any of the issues because she put on that massive volume quickly because she learned to put her weight on the ground properly and she was able to take the way. So those two women wearing these shoes prompted me to consider looking at your shoe.
And so when people ask me, well, what kind of shoes should I buy Richard? I don't want to give him a brand because I can't trust the brands. Most of the brands that, you know, you know, we won't talk, you already mentioned Topo, we're talking about ultra. These guys early days were making a decent shoe.
Right. And so the comments I would make to people is, I want you to find a shoe that's going to protect your foot, but it's not going to get in the way. It's not going to impede natural functionality. So we want to limit that influence from the shoe and we want to protect ourselves.
That's it. Do you remember what Phil Mathetone used to say for advice about buying shoes? Yes. Go to Walmart.
Go to Walmart. Get the cheaper shoe you can find. It's funny you bring him up because Phil Mathetone and I did a clinic together in Las Vegas. It's probably been about 25, 30 years ago now.
Again, I told you I'm an old man. But we did, we did a clinic for, I was there on the behest of a poverty monitor manufacturing and Phil was there because he was friends with the owner of this chain of health clubs. Matt, by Las Vegas athletic clubs, they had like four clubs and there must be 400,000 members. There's a huge, huge business.
I think the cookie cutter club is 90,000 square feet on average. Wow. Yeah. So we were supposed to do a thing for all the person trainers and I think they had, but collectively they probably had about 50 person trainers that worked for the company.
And so I never met Phil and he came in and he was kind of a featured guest, you know, and he was going on and on about a lot of different things. And he was ranting and I was literally trying to fall asleep, trying to appreciate that this is 30 years ago. And my, my interest in him was all the things that he had to say about heart rate. Right.
And the whole 180 minus your age that he was all about. And you know, I'm a clinician. I've been doing VO2 Max tests on athletes for 25 years. And so my curiosity was to see whether his, you know, his predictions were accurate.
And I literally did the VO2 Max test with him standing next to me on all the people that he, you know, he was chatting with. And I said, you got one, missed it, got one, missed it. And coming away from it, I said, you know what, I think the guy's a lunatic. And I just, he was talking about these very minimalistic shoes and had some old woman that he brought out that she was going to run a marathon in this, you know, I forgot what kind of a shoe it was, but you know, it was a year's ago.
So it wasn't anything that this of the new standards, I should say, but very, very minimalistic. And I looked at him. I said, this guy's going to kill this one. And it's funny because I reached out to him and did a podcast with them, I don't know, 20 years later.
So it's probably did this well. It was doing podcast. I did this podcast with him and I got him on and I said, the reason I brought you on was to apologize to you. I said, because I said, so much bad shit about you over the years.
And I said, it turns out that a lot of the things you were talking about turned out to be true. And I was wrong. And I said, I'm literally in calling you out to apologize to you. We had a good laugh about it.
My first conversation with Phil, I said, I think I got one of your books, you know, in 1980 something or other. And I'm curious if, and this, I think we had this conversation, you know, probably 10 years ago, I said, I'm curious if you feel vindicated or if you feel mad that it took so long for people to catch up because that one. So look, I have to tell you, I don't agree with a lot of the things he says. And given that I've been doing the O2 Max test on athletes for 25 years.
I got to clarify that. I wasn't talking about the V2 Max part because as a sprinter, I don't get a shit about V2 Max. It was really just on the foot we're in gate part. But I was the.
Yeah. And I have to tell you that I we were, that's pretty much what I apologize. But the concept and you even shared that of being able to ultimately run faster by running slower, I don't buy because his claim to fame was mark out. And the work he did with Mark Allen is suggesting that having him slow down is would turn him into this five minute molar.
And I have to be honest with you, I've been coaching athletes for all this time. And I do believe developing the aerobic system is important. Yeah. But I also believe developing the aerobic system is equally important.
Well, I was going to say this is the difference between what Phil is doing and what Arthur Lydiard did. And so Lydiard, and I'm friends with a couple of his athletes, Lorraine Mueller who lives here in Boulder who is just a total sweetheart who, you know, and their thing is, yeah, it's doing the slow stuff just to build a aerobic kind of aerobic base. And then Arthur had people doing lots of anaerobic stuff. They did a lot of hill running.
They did a lot of speed work. I mean, because, and they had to because he was coaching everyone basically the same from 800 meter runners to marathoners. And the only way you can do that is by, you know, kind of hitting the whole gamut of training. Yeah.
So if you can read my book, I look forward to it. I read my book because I talk about Lydiard and I talk about the concepts of building a base. Yeah. And I come to a place with what I've learned over the years that I take exception to it.
So well, because the way the body develops, okay, muscle structure function, you spend a lot of time developing your aerobic conditioning, your soliciting to slow twitch fibers almost exclusively for a great length of time. And, you know, it was a literate that said the brother of the bass, the higher the peak. It was one of those things. And so the problem with that thinking is that when you shift away and they make a departure from the base training once they've completed it, right, they go into the higher intensity stuff, you start to shift away from those slow twitch fibers that you're working and you start trading off the structure and the metabolic properties of the muscle.
So when I firmly come to believe it, and by the way, I just wrote this book, I released it last year. It took me almost five years to write it because I was having such a hard time because here's what happens with guys like us, okay, we're influenced by those that preceded us. And we tend to if we're going to move forward with theory or concepts, it's generally borrowed. It's something we learn from other people, right?
And that's what education is. We learn from other people. And what I didn't want to do was I've done that. My first book, I wrote, I did that, right?
I talked about periodization. I talked about phases of training and, you know, get the base work and then, you know, the whole thing, 80, 20, I went through the whole thing. And I didn't want to do that again because I said, why am I, why am I doing this when I have probably more research and metabolic testing than anybody that I've ever met? I've tested thousands.
Hear me when I say this. I've literally tested thousands of athletes from all walks of life. And so what I did is I got my printer and I just started printing reports and I got this big compilation of case study and started looking at the cause and effect relationships with people's thresholds relative to age, relative to their level of fitness at the time and started looking at some interesting stuff. And I thought, well, I've seen guys listen to this now, I've seen guys that are doing ultra marathons that they have the worst threshold in the world.
They have no aerobic capacity whatsoever. And so they go anaerobic after 120 beats per minute and they're going to race for six hours and 160 beats per minute. How could this be true? Right.
What has been left off the table for the longest time is the ability to develop the anaerobic pathway and reconstitute that lactate into a usable fuel and get them what I call an energy rebate. And so I'm not saying don't do aerobic conditioning. I'm just saying that you could do all variations of intensity in a given week in a given workout and end up in the same place. So for example, if you're periodizing your work and you say, I'm going to dedicate 70% of my training to aerobic conditioning because my game is I want to go long.
Right. Well, you can do, you can go out for an hour workout and dedicate 60% of that workout to aerobic conditioning and then develop a high intensity training within that same workout in a flow pattern. So rather than just looking at your heart rate monitor, use some intuition, use some perception, start paying attention to the way your body is responding to the work. And this is where people get lost.
They're either completely following their, their id or they're relying exclusively on what the monitor is telling them. And so my athletes when they're racing, I do not want them to wear a rock heart rate monitor. It's a witch hunt. Use the monitor for education while you're trained, but take from what you've learned and put that together instinctively in your race.
Start to trust the way your body responds. Well, this is the thing that I find really, there are a couple things I find interesting. First of all, I will take issue with you saying guys like us because, because my natural inclination is when I hear from some expert is to try and prove them wrong as quickly as I can, not because I'm trying to be a dick about it, but because I want to, what I really do is I look for counterfactuals. When someone's saying A leads to B, I'm really curious, how often does A lead to C, how often does D lead to B.
I just want to see, I just want to see the whole picture because typically people who are teaching something, they've codified it, they've ossified it. So they have a thing to teach. And I'm just really, really curious. So like when I started working with sprinting coaches and they said, well, you have to do, you know, the following drill, I would say why, what's it doing for me?
And in fact, one of my best friends is a world champion cross country runner. And we became best friends from two events. One is we were working with the same coach. He's a distance runner.
I'm a spinner. And we were both, I noticed sitting out of certain warm up drills that the coach was telling us to do. And I came up to him while we were not doing one of those drills. And I said, why aren't you doing this drill?
And he goes, oh, because it's bullshit. And I said, oh my God, I love you. Because I thought the same thing. The second one was that he came to the track one day and said a personal best.
And at the end of the, of doing that, he said, you know, it's so funny. I wasn't going to come out today because I felt like crap. I said, how often have you set personal best when you felt like crap and how often have you felt great and, you know, and barely been able to run? He goes, oh, both of those happen all the time.
And I've asked many, many Olympians the same question and they always have the same answer. Sometimes I had a hundred and five degree fever and I won the race. Sometimes I felt great and I barely made it out of the starting blocks. I said, well, then we just debunked sports psychology.
And then the other one was training with this one spring coach. He did something that I adored with this first coach I had. We always did our whatever we were doing for the workouts and we did this big cool down. And so then I worked with this other sprinter who at the end of the workout just gotten his car.
And I said, so no cool down. He goes, what are you talking about? Your muscles are done. You're going to cool down when you drive home.
You don't need to do some magic thing. So I'm just always looking. So like with the VO2 Max thing, what's interesting to me is if VO2 Max was the Holy Grail, then we'd line people up at the beginning of a race, check their VO2 Max and give out awards. And the last part of my little rant here is that no one people don't want to consider the individual differences in the genetic propensities for any of these things.
So there's a lot of data that there are 11 genetic SNPs, 11 bits in your genome that correlate very highly to whether you are VO2 Max training responsive or not, whether doing this long, slow stuff will improve your VO2 Max or not. I know from my own experience that I'm a non responder. I can do long slow shit all day long and nothing changes. And I know other people like Benji Durden, former Olympic, well, almost Olympian, Benji, you know, to this day at almost 80, Benji's VO2 Max is higher than almost any human being on the planet.
He was just born that way. And people don't like to consider the genetic part, which is so ironic because when it comes to sprinting, it's Ralph Mann who got the silver in the 400 meter hurdles in Munich says there's eight things that make a sprinter, seven of them are genetic and the eighth is how well you maximize your genetics. And people just don't like to think that that's true. I had a conversation with Michael Johnson.
Oh, yeah. And if you recall when he held world records in 100, 200, 300, 400 for 12 years. And if you've ever watched it run, he looks like a door going through space. And, you know, again, being me, I bossed him.
I said, I said, so Michael, I said, I said, you run like shit to him. You know what he told me? No. He goes, I haven't lost the race since I was six.
Yeah, this is the thing. Like, Otto Bolton, when he was the world champion in the 100, you know, his right foot was turned out like 90 degrees. And people would say, imagine what you could do if your right foot was turned in. He goes, yeah, I wouldn't run as fast.
Yeah. Well, you know, who knows? Who knows? Yeah.
And I have this conversation often with athletes I work with is the what if question because they're so they want to leave well enough along. They're so so bent on trying to leave well enough alone. In some cases, I agree. Some cases I think that you just don't want to mess with it because there may be anatomical issues that are just not going to be correct.
Right. But then if in a perfect world, and we don't live in a perfect world, but in a perfect world by putting your posture in the right space, allowing your body to do and have a marriage with your body, your body to do. And so if you're going to see a lot of things, you're going to see some astounding performances. Yeah.
So what I would say, what I typically will find with the people I work with that I've changed and I've changed many, many people. We will get that from being horrific heels, writers to running on their forefoot and having great success. Maybe they're not a lot faster, but the capability of putting in more work. They're healthier.
They've got a longer career. Not only not tripling up, they're volume, we're not injury. We had a guy working for us early on our first customer service, I'd say manager, but he was at the time, he lived in Denver. We were in Boulder.
He ran in our sandals, which was at that point, you know, four millimeters of rubber strapped your foot. He ran two and a half miles to the bus, took the bus to Boulder, ran two and a half miles to the office, then went back home. So there's 10. Then he took the dog out for five, 10 miles.
And then on the weekends, he did his heavy, low-end distance work training. So he was doing 120 to 140 miles a week. 65 years old. Never had a problem.
He had perfect form. It was gorgeous to watch. Yeah. So you got, you know, again, I'll get people that want to argue with me and say, well, your body's just going to do what your body does.
There's no sense of trying to influence that. And I take exception to that. I think that let's just say I can't make you a perfect runner. Yeah.
But if I can improve the way you move by 20%, if I can reduce the injuries by 20%, and you can increase the volume by 20%, that's huge. I got a theory about this. I want to bounce by you because I've rarely been able to talk to someone about this. But first actually, quick, Michael Johnson story.
One of my friends and coach last training partner was a four by four hundred meter world champion. And he's racing Michael and he's coming around the second turn in the 400 and he's shoulder to shoulder with Michael and he kind of looks at Michael and, you know, kind of indicates that, hey, we're right next to each other. And Michael says, see you. He puts on another gear.
My friend, James, like, what just happened? So that was that. Anyway, here's my thing. There are a couple things.
We learned, we learned to move for a couple of different reasons. One is to kind of fit in with our tribe, our parents, our friends, our family. We adopt movement patterns. Those movement patterns get ingrained in our brain stem.
And sometimes we get those movement patterns just from wearing certain products. I mean, like I watch little kids who have impeccable form and then they put on shoes and a year later, you know, same old shit as everybody else. And once those patterns are wired, I say there's four different kinds of people. Some people, and it's all about neuroplasticity.
Some people just can't feel anything. They're not getting any feedback no matter what they do. And so it's really, really, really hard for them to lay down, do neuropathways to learn new movement patterns. Some people, they can feel things.
They can tell us something hurts or something feels good, but they don't have great proprioceptive skills. These are the people who tell me they're not heel striking and they send me a video of them heel striking and they literally don't know that they're doing it. And, you know, they need that video feedback to go, oh crap. And I remember as a young gymnast, we had a thing in the compulsory floor extra routine where you had to put your arms parallel to the ground.
It took us weeks to learn what parallel the ground felt like because it didn't look the way you thought it would. It looked wrong when it was right. Third group of people. They can tell it hurts or feels good.
They have decent proprioceptive skills. They just need some cues to shorten the learning process. And then the fourth group of people, they're natural and the problem they have because they're really adept at learning new things, the problem they have is you teach them something new and it's really good. They really enjoy it.
They'll do too much too soon and then get tired and revert back to one of those previous levels and then have something happen and they just don't realize, you know, what the glitch was. That's my current working theory. Right. So what I want to do a lot and in my book, I actually make the comment that you can't learn to run by reading something.
You can't learn to watch a video. Right. You can't watch. I mean, you've got a YouTube education and watch all these professionals profess and how you're supposed to run.
And one of them, I'm out there. And, you know, I've got video that's got half a million hits on how to run. But I will be the first one to tell you that you're not going to learn to run by watching the video. Right.
What I've done that I think is probably the most genius thing that I've ever learned was, aside from explaining to people while I have them on a treadmill and trying to alter their gates, get them to change the way they're approaching work, is to let them see it. So I put a video on them. Right. And then you can see they're looking at their side view while they're running forward.
I'll put an iPad up in front of them on a stand while they're running. And they can see because they know what they're trying to achieve. Right. That's not rocket science.
I know I'm supposed to be on my forefoot. I know I'm not supposed to be over striding. And I know what my arm's supposed to look like. And I know how my posture is supposed to be.
But the perception of what they're doing is skewed. So they're out there running around thinking they're doing it right. It still hurts. And so they want to know, well, this is bullshit.
Why am I still in pain when I'm doing it right? Well, when I alter the perception, when I get them to identify what they were doing wrong and see that in fact, if it doesn't feel weird, you're probably doing it wrong. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, do you know what Ralph Mandid? Have you seen his system? No.
So Ralph, who after he stopped competing became, I think, a biomechanical engineer. And he looked at, I think, 600 sprinters, which for him is anything up to 400 to 400 hurdles and identified what he thinks of as the common factors for successful sprinting. And he made a stick figure that's a perfect sprinter. So what he then does with his software, which he made way long ago and really, you know, if he had an Xbox connect that would have done it almost immediately and better, I think.
But he makes a, he measures your limbs and makes a perfect stick figure out of you. And then he films you, but he can only film for a short little window, like you're running across for 10 meters, maybe. And he fills you and then overlays the stick figure, showing what you should be doing versus what you are doing. Now, when I talked to Ralph years ago, I said, he said, we know what we need to get them to do.
We don't know how to get them to do it. And I want to talk to you about that because I have a theory about how to get them to do it. But part of what you're doing is just exactly that is getting people to see that what they're, what they think they're doing and what they are doing isn't the same. The other part is like, I do two things.
One is I'll try to get them to exaggerate doing it wrong and then exaggerate doing the right version because then you can find that sort of middle ground. I've done a thing where I've worked with runners where I stand in front of them and have them lean into my hands and I run backwards while they run forwards just to get them into some position that they could never get to on their own to feel what it feels like to not be over striding. And the phenomenon of getting that the feedback that you need to make those changes and then realizing exactly what you said, if it doesn't feel wrong, you're doing something wrong because, and this is another thing I say other than people need to know physics is they need to remember that learning a new move and pattern feels quote frustrating because that's the experience of laying down new neuro pathways. I mean, what's so interesting about this and talking about it is we just don't have a movement educational system that gets people to understand the sort of the basics of how you learn to move how you learn to do these things in a way where people don't feel like there's a problem in the learning process that the learning that what they're experiencing during the learning process is the learning process, not the indication that you can't do it.
It's wrong, etc. Yeah, so the other epiphany that I had recently and recently being in the past five years, is that it doesn't make a difference how much you know or what you believe you should be doing if your body is not going to wreck with us. So if you start noticing it in, you know, I was his name a great, great cook, you're familiar with great cook. No, great good.
It's called movement. Okay. Physical therapists. And he was very eloquent in the way he laid it down.
It's like, you have to you have to run well and then from running well, run more often. But beyond that, he started looking at the thing that I wanted to say and I just did my story for a moment from content. There's this whole concept of the win last mechanism. Yeah.
So you need to make. I'm familiar for people who are listening to me if they ever explain with less mechanism. You know, it's a function of it's a mechanical function of you put stress here. It causes tension.
Well, wait a minute. You got to pretend people aren't watching you. So you got to describe. So let's imagine that we have rope on a bench.
You're trying to pull your car out of a ditch with a witch Okay, is that wheel turns and puts the attention on that on the, the corridor or cable that you have tied to whatever. Right. That tensioning effect is something that occurs underneath your foot. So the fascia, the connective tissue, the tendons and ligaments that are attached to first to your great toe when you have flexion in your great toe.
So you create tension on that the, the fascia structure beneath your foot and the result is your, your, your midfoot becomes stable. So you have mobility at the great toe that causes stability at the mid foot and the midfoot stability promotes mobility at the ankle and the mobility at the ankle promotes stability at the next joint up, which would be your knee. And then the mobility that comes from that and the hip and so on and so forth. So there's this alternating effect of mobility stability.
So if you look at the two concepts of heels for liking it, is it okay or not? Four foot running is a problem. If you bypass the physics of causing this engagement and the structural engagement to occur in the sequence that it's supposed to, then you're never going to be able to be effectively stable. Right.
And so, so the concept of getting on your forefoot is critical. If you really want to develop good force production because force production is going to come from stability. And the stability is going to come from putting your foot in the proper position on the ground. And so someone may argue that, oh, well, you know, you'll start inside, you land in your calcaneus.
There's nothing to protect. It's a ball. It's unstable. Just the fact that there's, there's no structural engagement.
There's nothing that's going to cause this con commitment engagement of the structure up into your pelvic floor. It's not going to happen because, you know, what I'll see people are heels right, you know, hip problems. They're collapsing at the joint at the knee. But if you start looking at the structure, let's just say that you have no mobility in the ankle, that everything's north of that's going to be problematic.
Right. If you have issues with the first rate, the big toe doesn't have much mobility, then you start to run into issues with failure in the structure in the middle of your foot. So I've got to do a place where I can really, really close attention to all the little niggles and circumstance and what's supposed to happen first, what proceeds the next movement pattern. And I started looking at the structure as a whole and saying, all right, well, here's what you're trying to do.
Here's what you're doing wrong. Here's what we want to correct. Now, some people will never get their ankle to allow them to have good range, and which means they're going to get their foot off the ground too early. And so they're never going to get a chance to get stable and make ground contact.
So I'm looking at all of that. I mean, in my lab, what I'll do is I'll people come in. I've got an amazing treadmill. It'll go 28 miles an hour in two directions with a 28% grade.
And I'll hook up cameras. And I've learned from years of doing this that I cannot judge you with a naked eye. No, in fact, I was in Bill Sands lab when he was out at what's now at Calvara Mesa University. His line was, you can't learn anything under 500 frames a second.
Yeah, I agree with it. Yeah. Because I'll look at something with a naked eye and seven. It's pretty good.
And that reveal was really occurring when I slow it down and glad that I know my big mouth and said, I looks good because, you know, in fact, it was terrible. But, you know, I mean, this is, this is my jam. This is what I do day to day. People come to me from, you know, I had a fellow here, a couple of, you know, I've been to struggle because all my stuff has been in flux.
I finally got my treadmill up. I showed up. I had the treadmill up a day before he got there. And he drove up where I'm in the middle of Tennessee.
He drove up in Florida to see me, right? And we spent three hours together and he turned around and went home. And I have this happen often. I have people travel from, I almost feel guilty when they go through that much trouble just to see me, you know, but I've been very successful in creating solutions for people.
I'm no physician. I'm not a PT. I'm not, I'm just a guy that's been spending a lot of time studying and getting evidence, learning from people that come to see me. And I've come to this position that there is a way to do this.
And I don't want to, I cannot endorse a shoe that will not allow you to have an even playing field. You know, you need to, you need to have an opportunity to function. Now, what I was going to say about your shoe that I have a problem with is that on paper, the boxes are all checked, but the body that's trying to get into the shoe is not prepared. And so I'll have people jump into a minimal shoe and really hurt themselves.
And it could be, as we discussed earlier, it could be a function of trying to do too much too early. Yeah. It could be that their structures are just defunct. They're just not, they're not able to engage the ground properly, not take advantage of the potential of that effort and information coming to the body well.
I've got a client in Georgia right now that he's, he's had a plan of a site is for a year. He's coming up to see me probably in two weeks. He's going to, and he's in the medical profession. He's a radiologist.
And he can't find, so don't you know somebody in the medical, that can help you. You know, and he's just been frustrated as hell. And he's been changing shoes and, you know, I've been, I've been a staunch follower of all the rock tape stuff for these guys. Oh, come on.
They got some amazing, amazing people that work for them. I don't disagree with that. I think, I think there's a, I think that there's just a lot of placebo stuff going on there. I'm not saying it doesn't work.
I'm saying that for the situations where it does work, they're fewer than the situations for which is a placebo. I don't know. I've got to give you an example. Well, this is my N equals one is all the people who take the crap out of me where it made absolutely no difference whatsoever.
And then when I look at, when I look at some of the things that they're trying to do where at high speed in particular, there's no way you're getting any sensory feedback that's going to alter. By mechanics in any way with, you know, some tiny bit of skin stretching that's occurring from the tape. But that's, yeah, and I agree with you. That's not, that's not the go to move for me.
Yeah. But so what I've learned and I've gone through all the courses that have been supported me for over a decade. I know these guys very well, and they have some tremendous minds that are doing education with those guys. And I've been around the block of the times and I know when I'm in the right room and I believe.
Okay. And I've never been disappointed when I've gone and done education. Look, I am like you more than happy to be proven wrong with something that's useful. So, so, so let me give an example.
They're like rock pots. Yeah. Okay. And anybody that's gone to massage parlor and had them cut, you know, they're talking about pulling the bad blood out.
I thought these people are insane. There's no value in this, but I got the course for free. So I'm going to go and just, you know, because I want to do it. I want to check it out.
And I went in with absolute apprehension. And what I've learned, and I mean, again, evidence based, cupping, dynamically cupping someone's posture chain, the calf down to the Achilles, put them on a treadmill, and they were like on a pain scale one to 10 before I cut them incapable of right. Right. Right.
10 being, oh my God, I'm dying. This is really painful. One being zero. I don't feel a thing.
Be a 10, put the cups on and put them on the treadmill for five minutes. Pull the cups off, put it back on the treadmill. Zero pain. So what do you think's causing that?
Well, what it's doing is it's causing a decrease in inflammation between the spacial layers, allowing the facial layers to slide, encouraging more hyaluronic acid to go in between the facial layers. So it's like the WD 40 between these. So you're just basically causing things to be more agreeable. It's more congruent.
I mean, there's a lot of situations where inducing a particular kind of stress can have beneficial effects. So like that, prolotherapy, which I'm a big fan of, because that saved my life and I've seen that before. Here's one of my bring goes on that. I'm not going to disagree with what you're describing at all.
I'm going to start wondering, are there other explanations just out of sheer curiosity? Like, could it be just a neurological thing where the cupping which feels weird as shit, you know, where it's maybe shutting off some nervous impulse that was telling the central government of your brain, oh, stop it. And now you're okay. I mean, for all I know, you're completely right.
And I'm totally cool with that. I'm also going to be the first one to look for. Okay. Ten years ago, when I first met these guys, they introduced me to the concept of tape.
And it absolutely is a neurological influence that's going off. There's more nerve endings in your fashion than there is anywhere else. Absolutely. And now they're concluding that there's actually contractile properties in the fashion, which people did not know.
That's interesting. It's months ago, nobody found this up, right? And so they're actually seeing. You mean, like literally contractile or sort of like, or reactively?
No, there's actually contractile properties within the fashion. Oh, fascinating. You know, used to be that you go to an anatomy class and they strip the fascia away from the cadaver so that they could see the muscles. They only discount potential of the devalue being in that fashion, depending on the white stuff off the orange so that they can get to the pulp, right?
This is the way it's been. No, this is kind of funny because five years ago, nobody thought about this, right? The people that are looking into this, they just released recently scientific evidence last year that they just identified that fashion has more nerve endings than, you used to be, they say skin, right? Skin has more nerve endings, they're working on your body.
Now they're identified. Well, no, it's not. It's the fashion is more important. So how much influence you can create these fashion layers has very big repercussions.
Now, I'm not going to discount the idea that there's a placebo value. I put hands on somebody and they feel better, right? And it could be that I've done nothing, but it just made them feel better. But what I'll do, again, I'll do a clinic and I teach taping, I teach a blading, I teach cupping, I teach, I teach all the different things that they do.
So a guy comes to me hurt and I'll take them. What's the repercussions for that? I find out that the guy runs a marathon, he was able to run the marathon pain free, right? Okay, that's interesting.
Then it happens again. And then it happens again. And then it happens again. So now it's starting to be compelling.
When I start noticing, I start getting intentions driven when I start seeing that time and time and time again, there's result. Here's the question that I that comes up from me the way I think about it is all the my original question about what do you think is happening from the cupping, for example, and you described a number of biochemical processes. Some of those are very easily testable, some of them not. And that's the part that I'm really curious about, because, because, you know, if that theory or if what you're describing as the mechanism for action is legit, then we can see some of that.
And I'll also throw in it may be that that happens for that that's the causal phenomenon for some people and not for others. So I mean, there's a bunch of things in here. Again, I'm just really curious because I'm always looking to find the thing that's going to work now happily. I haven't had an injury for any import for 12 years since I got out of regular shoes.
So it's not something that concerns me any longer. The way it did in my first couple years of sprinting where I went from injury to injury to injury, and people tried every modality known to man and none of them worked, because fundamentally the problem was that I had a form issue that no matter what they did to make things go away, it was going to get activated again next time I ran. Sure. And that's what's still happening these days, by the way, right, right, people can hurt and they identify that.
Oh, it's time to take a week off. Yeah, they take a week off. They go out and run again. So there's a limiting factor could be 20 miles a week, 30 miles a week.
There's, and I tell people all the time it's a matter of strength away ratio. How strong you are, how resistant you are to pain or injury because your structure is better than somebody's sentence. So you can get 40, but you're stuck at 40. And you know that the Holy Grail is at 60 in order for you to perform at the level that you want to perform, you need to get up to that volume that you're not able to achieve.
And I take people out of that 40 and put them at 60 all day long. And then all of a sudden because they're just doing more work and they're attempting to do it better. Maybe they're only doing it better for 40% of the running, but 40% better is better. Right.
So they're able to do more and I have athletes I work with that are doing 24 events, you know, they're trying to run for 24 hours. Yeah. And so we'll get up in that 100 mile a week stress here. And they prior to changing the way they move getting into a more agreeable shoe and just approaching the work.
By the way, this is not just slogging along, you know, this is with intensity. They're able to get in that 100 mile a week minus injury, you know, hired sore, of course, but we're not talking about my Achilles is railing on me my IT bands going off my back's bothering me. But I think the more fractures it might be, none of that's happening and they're working in a shoe that might be 50% of what they were wearing before. Right.
Yeah. I'll tell you what I hate when I see what I feel like I failed someone where they came to see me. And then later I see a picture of them on social media or something and they were in a hoka. It blows my mind.
I mean, you know, when the hookers came out, I said to people you're gonna feel better for a little while you'll get more miles in and in two years you won't be able to run again. And because you can't feel it, but what you're doing is you're sending your spreading the pressure out so your foot's not feeling it, but the force is going straight into your joints. And I was screwed. And they all told me I was crazy and I don't know one of them who isn't, you know, who's still running.